Founders - #214 Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

What I learned from rereading Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson. ----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----1. He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you.2. He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.3. Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.4. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.5. The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple.6. Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions.7. The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme.8. One of Jobs's talents was spotting markets that were filled with second-rate products.9. Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.10. His mind was never a captive of reality. He possessed an epic sense of possibility. He looked at things from the standpoint of perfection.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

The saga of Steve Jobs is a Silicon Valley creation myth writ large, launching a startup in his parents' garage and building it into the world's most valuable company. He didn't invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. Some leaders push innovation by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both relentlessly. Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right

next to Edison and Ford. Biographers are supposed to have the last word, but this is a biography of Steve Jobs. Even though he did not impose his legendary desire for control on this project, I suspect that I would not be conveying the right feel for him, the way he asserted himself in any situation, if I just shuffled him onto history's stage without letting him have some last words. Over the course of our conversations, there were many times when he reflected on what he hoped his legacy would be. Here are those thoughts in his own words. My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure,

it was great to make a profit because that's what allowed you to make great products, but the products, not the profits, were the motivation. Scully flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything. The people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings. Some people say give the customer what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, if I asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse. People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not

yet on the page. Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact, some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the 70s, computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science.

Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it's Apple and Google, and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time.

It's been around for a while, but it's still at the cutting edge of what's going on. It's easy to throw stones at Microsoft, and yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he's really not. He's a business person. Winning business was more important

than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it's never been my goal, and I wonder in the end if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built. It's impressive, and I enjoyed working with him. He's bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities

and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn't copy it well. They totally didn't get it. I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies. The company does a great job, innovates, and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field. And then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing great salesmen because they're the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don't matter so much and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Scully came in, which was my fault. Apple was lucky and it rebounded. I hate it when people

call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That is how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be. I don't think I run roughshod over people, but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It is my job to be honest. I know what I'm talking about,

and I usually turn out to be right. That's the culture I try to create. We are brutally honest with each other and anyone can tell me they think I'm full of shit and I can tell them the same. And we've had some rip-roaring arguments where we're yelling at each other and it's some of the best times I've ever had. I feel totally comfortable saying, Ron, that store looks like shit in front of everyone else. Or I might say, God, we really fucked up the engineering on this in front of the person that's responsible. That's the Annie for being in the room. You've got to be able to be super honest. Maybe there's a better way, a gentleman's club where we all wear ties and speak in soft language and velvet code words. But I don't know that way because I am middle class from California.

I was hard on people sometimes, probably harder than I needed to be. I remember the time when my son was six years old. Coming home, I had just fired somebody that day. And I imagine what it was like for that person to tell his family and his young son that he had lost his job. It was hard, but somebody's got to do it. I figured that it was always my job to make sure that the team was excellent. And if I didn't do it, nobody was going to do it. You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Bob Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn't. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he and do a set of acoustic guitar and the audience loved him. Then he would do an electric set and the audience booed. There was one point where he was about to sing like a Rolling Stone and someone from the audience yells, Judas! And Dylan says,

play it fucking loud. And they did. The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That is what I've always tried to do. Keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying. What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that's been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to that flow. It's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to that flow. It's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how.

We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That is what has driven me. That is an excerpt that appears in the last chapter called Legacy of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Steve Jobs. And it was written by Walter Isaacson. So I originally read this book for the first time four years ago. It is actually one of the first episodes of Founders. It's Founders number five. And if you're going to study the history of entrepreneurship, it's probably the first book I'd recommend reading because of this idea that you and I talk about all the time, that books are the original links.

They lead you to one idea or one person to the next. And because Steve Jobs peppers so much of his conversations and interviews and speeches with references to entrepreneurs that came before him, this book would introduce you to a dozen or more influential entrepreneurs that he learned from that you then can enter and study and learn from. So this book is almost 600 pages. It took me over 20 hours to reread. I have a lot of highlights. Let's jump right into it. And it's first we're going to go into the introduction where Walter Isaacson is talking about. He's really giving us a description of the why behind the book. Why is this important to pick up and to read and to study? This is a book about the rollercoaster life and searing intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for

perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries, personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. He was not a model boss or human being, tightly packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he would drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated. His tale, and this is the most important sentence in this section, his tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. And I think Isaacson nails it right there, the paradox of Steve Jobs, and really the paradox, I would say, of any individual, any human.

We're all imperfect human beings, and Steve Jobs has undoubtedly become one of my personal heroes. There's a lot of ideas and actions that he had that I definitely want to emulate. And at the same time, though, it's true that he was deeply flawed and his life teaches us lessons of things not to do. And here's one idea that I want to emulate, that I want to copy. It's the fact that Steve Jobs had the ability to learn from every single experience. And the lessons he would learn were not at all obvious that they could be applied to different domains. So let me give you some examples that have come across from multiple books that I've read on him. And I'm going to give you the first example where his dad, he learns the importance of craftsmanship on things unseen. So actually, let me read this to you first, and I'll tell you some other examples. So it says, Jobs remembered being

impressed by his father's focus on craftsmanship. He recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the back of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. He loved doing things right, Steve said. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see. So Steve is famous for taking that idea that his father is teaching about cabinets and fences and applying it to all of his devices, whether it's being a computer or phone, he did not want the customer to open them up. And even though you couldn't open them up or see them, the layout internally still had to be beautiful. It still had to be perfect. There's a story that appears in the book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs, which was written by Nolan

Bushnell, the founder of Atari. I covered this all the way back on Founders number 36, where Nolan, Steve is in his middle, like his mid-20s at the time. Nolan is about 10 to 12 years old or something like that. And they're taking a walk one day in Paris. And Steve was telling Nolan what he learned from the architecture of Paris and how he wanted to apply the simplicity and uniformity of Paris architecture to the Apple brand. Let me read this paragraph to you that comes from the book Finding the Next Steve Jobs, because this is an example of Steve having the ability to learn from every experience, even when that's not obvious. It says the city's architecture fascinated him as well. He saw simplicity and uniformity of design in the buildings. So many of them were seven or eight stories tall and made of similar yellow stone, exuding an elegance and consistency that instilled a sense of harmony in the brain. I was having a hard time

thinking of Paris as having such simplicity and uniformity, but Steve's point was that you could parachute anywhere into the city and realize you were nowhere but Paris. So the metaphor he's about to make is that what he what what Paris the architecture of Paris does he wants the design of Apple products to do for the brand of Apple. So he says there aren't many cities where you can do that he pointed out. The architecture here creates a unique signature for the entire city that Parisian simplicity was something he wanted Apple to emulate. And then another surprising example, which is talked about later in this book, but is referenced in multiple books that I've read on Steve Jobs,

is the fact that he learned the importance of constructing a team with the very highest levels of talent from J. Robert Oppenheimer and the talent Oppenheimer needed to successfully complete the Manhattan Project and develop the atomic bomb before anybody else in the world was able to. And I think those three examples always stick in my mind because they're non-obvious. Continuing, soaking up the history of your industry. This is so you can take advantage of the work done by others. So we're still in the introduction. He's talking about growing up in Silicon Valley, studying the history of the place and why it's important. Yes, there's good ideas to copy, bad ideas to avoid, but really it's the inspiration that he's talking about. He says he soaked up the history of the valley and developed a yearning to play his own role.

Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. Growing up, this is now a direct quote from Steve. Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place, Jobs said. That made me want to be a part of it. And I think that's important to point out because I think Steve's reputation or maybe the way he's known is, you know, very arrogant, maybe narcissistic, not willing to bend. But as we'll see, there's several examples throughout the book where that is just not true. That's just not accurate. When he comes across an intelligent, formidable person, he's all about learning from that person, which I think would be surprising to those just judging Steve off his reputation for, you know,

personal nastiness and maybe antisocial behavior, whatever term you want to put on it. Let's fast forward in Steve's life story to where he's in high school, or excuse me, in college. We're going to see a lot of his personality traits never really change even later in life. You know, there's a lot of people that try to mentor him, say, hey, you don't have to be so hard on people. He does. He is able to temper his like he's not the same person. He's in his 20s. So he talks to people as he is towards the end of his life. But he does say, like, this is who I am. And you get a sense of belief from his statements. You know, part of this is just hardwired into his personality.

So it says, Steve, this is his college girlfriend. And this is actually going to be, he's going to get her pregnant. And so this is going to be the mother of his first daughter. Steve was kind of crazy. That's why I was attracted to him. He learned to stare at people without blinking. And he perfected long silences punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking. This odd mix of intensity and aloofness, combined with his shoulder-length hair and scraggly beard, gave him the aura of a crazed shaman.

He oscillated between charismatic and creepy. He could be brutally cold and rude to her at times, but he was also entrancing and able to impose his will. And so that's something he's applying that to his personal relationships. That's a great description of how he also dealt with his professional relationships. He was an enlightened being who was cruel, she recalled. That's a strange combination. And then remember this one sentence for later, because there is some, when I tell you this highlight in the future, a little bit eerie. And it had to do with this premonition of an early death that he repeats throughout his young life. And so this says, patience was never one of his virtues. And another trait that I think is helpful in trying to understand

who Steve Jobs was as a person is the fact that he would combine seemingly conflicting traits. Like he had a deep interest in the latest technology. That's what he dedicated his entire life to. And then a deep interest in Zen Buddhism. And so it talks a little bit about that here. Jobs' engagement with Zen Buddhism was not some passing fancy. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his personality. Steve is very much Zen. You see in his whole approach of stark minimalist aesthetics, intense focus. But Jobs also became deeply influenced by the emphasis that Buddhism places on intuition. And so we're going to see a quote from Steve here. He's going to repeat a similar theme throughout his entire life.

Don't focus too much on being pragmatic. Logical thinking has its place, but really go on intuition and emotion. I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was far more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis, he said. His intensity, however, made it difficult for him to achieve inner peace. So this is another conflict because, yeah, he might be Zen, but not internal. Those are his, he would never achieve like a state of inner calm or peace. It's just not, even before he died, I was struck because

there's multiple medical leaves. His third and final one, he never comes back from, unfortunately. But even, you know, he has his liver, kidney? No, it's his liver. His liver replaced. He's in the hospital for multiple months. He's, you know, they thought he was going to die. He has no choice but to confront his own morality, mortality rather. And so people are like, oh, maybe he's going to come back to work. He winds up surviving. Well, you're going to come back to work a more mellow person. The first day he just, he goes buck he's yelling and screaming and you know doing those things that he is known to do and so this idea was just he never had an internal peace um so it says uh his intensity however made it difficult for him to achieve inner peace his zen awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm peace of mind mind, and interpersonal mellowness.

So at this point in the story, Jobs is still at Reed College. He hasn't yet dropped out. He's about to. He's going to meet somebody that was very influential in his life, this guy named Robert Friedland. I read a biography on Robert Friedland. I did it, and I did it because he pops up in this book and other books with Steve Jobs. It was Founders No. 131. It's called The Big Score. If you haven't listened to that, you might be interested, because we're going to see that Steve copies some personality traits

and some ideas from Robert Friedland. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about that right now, but really I want to bring this to your attention, because there's a personality trait with Steve. He was very interested in having an edge, and I don't mean the term edge like you and I normally use that, like an advantage over other products or companies or people, right? What I mean is that he liked being a bit of a bad boy. He liked to cause trouble.

He liked to do things that were unexpected. He wanted you to know that he was different. And I think part of this, the advantage is it made him a bit unpredictable. And it makes it extremely hard to compete with somebody if you can't predict what their next move is, right? So we're going to see an example of this. In order to raise some cash, one day Jobs decided to sell his IBM typewriter. He walked into the room of a student who had offered to buy it, only to discover that he was having sex with his girlfriend. Jobs started to leave, but the student invited him to take a seat and wait until they finished. I thought, now this is a, you know,

so this is what I mean about him wanting to, you know, be different. And this is not a reaction you would normally expect. Like I'd be running out of there, right? Like, and he says, I thought this is kind of far out. Jobs said he recalled, and thus has began his relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few people in Jobs' life who was able to mesmerize him. He adopted some of Friedland's charismatic traits and for a few years treated him almost like a guru until he began to see him as a charlatan. And so throughout their lives, they're going to be described similarly.

Jobs didn't have these traits before he met Friedland. They're like super, Bill Gates refers to Jobs as like a super salesman. Robert Friedland in that book, The Big Score, he winds up becoming a billionaire selling mining rights and essentially just off of sales. And his ability to manipulate and to kind of cast some kind of charismatic spell over other people.

And Friedland is also a troublemaker and somebody that's interested in not being a square, not living a conventional life, so much so that he winds as well go into prison. When he was a sophomore in college, Friedman was arrested for possession of 24,000 tablets of acid. He was sentenced to two years at federal prison. And so this is Friedman describing Jobs.

The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in, he would generally carry to an irrational extreme. I double underline that sentence. That is so important. Whatever he was interested in, he would generally carry to an irrational extreme. Now, why is that important? Because you can create a valuable business by taking a simple idea to an irrational extreme. That is something we learned from Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger has a great maxim where he's just like, find a simple idea and take it seriously. But this idea about going to extremes, let me go.

I'm going to read you a quote from this book, The Tao of Charlie Munger. And this is what Charlie Munger has to say about that. Remember, Friedland just said he would see jobs would take would generally he excuse me. He was whatever he was interested in. He would generally carry to an irrational extreme. Right. interested in, he would generally carry to an irrational extreme, right? Charlie Munger says, in business, we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing or minimizing one or a few variables. And the example he always gives is like the discount warehouses

of Costco. And I love that. I think it's a very powerful idea. It's just you take a simple, you find a simple idea and you take it extremely seriously. You don't have to make it complex. You can just go ridiculously far in maximizing or minimizing one or a few variables. So we see that a personality trait. This is now Steve's friend. We're still in the same time period. This is now Steve's friend talking about the relationship between Friedland and Jobs.

Friedland taught Steve the reality distortion field. He was charismatic and a bit of a con man and could bend situations to his very strong will. He was mercurial, sure of himself, and a little dictatorial. You can describe Steve that way too, right? Steve became more like that after spending time with Robert. So eventually Steve realizes, hey, I'm just going to drop out. Read college is extremely expensive. I'm not interested in the class I'm taking. My parents don't have a lot of money. And then he drops out, but then he goes to classes that he's actually interested in.

And so something I learned from something that's very common after reading over 200 of these biographies, you see a sentence or a thought that's like, they weren't very interested in school, but they loved reading. And another way to think about that is like they're not they're not interested in your formal education or following your track, but they all of the people that we study are dedicated to lifelong learning. So says Jobs refused to go to classes he was assigned instead went to the ones he wanted. I would I would never have refused to take the courses you were supposed to. You were supposed to. That's the difference in our personality, said his co-founder Steve Wozniak. And then this is Jobs telling us, like, this whole idea of follow your intuition. It's its own form of intelligence.

I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. And so the dean of students is talking about letting jobs take like elected classes as being a dropout. And the sentence he says, I think, is a very useful and smart operating system for life. He's describing Steve. He refused to accept automatically received truths and he wanted to examine everything himself. And this is another example of Steve wanting to be counterculture, wanting to be different, wanting to have an edge. Something he talks about over and over again, the night I left myself, is learning there's another side to the coin, because that's what he feels. He feels one of the most profound experiences he ever

had in his life was taking LSD, was taking acid. And it's something he'll talk about up until he dies. Even later in life, he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more enlightened. Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. And this is. Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. And this is why LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin.

And listen to his takeaway. Listen to the lesson, because this is something he's already repeated. I've already read you a few sentences like this. It reinforced my sense of what was important, creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream, which he referenced earlier as the flow, right? Putting things back into the stream which he referenced earlier is the flow right putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as i could so eventually he stops taking classes he's like i gotta make some money so he goes and tries to find a job this is before he's gonna wind up spending like seven months in india shave his head try to find enlightenment everything else but. But he's still in California at the time. And there's a handful of people that really, there's these relationships that we come across in life that become fundamental pillars for the

people that we become, right? And so one of those is going to be Nolan Bushnell, who's going to be Steve Jobs' boss when he's 19 years old, his mentor, Robert Friedland also, even though they had a falling out, was very important. People like Edwin Land, Andy Grove, Bob Noyce, all these people are going to play a role in creating who Steve Jobs becomes a person. So let's go to where he's going to meet Nolan Bush now. This is really interesting because, you know, we always talk about history doesn't repeat, human nature does. And the fact is, like, there's these booms and busts throughout history. And it's particularly interesting when they're tied to these rapid growths and technological change. So that's happening in the 1970s. So it says that this is when Steve Jobs is 19.

At peak times during the 1970s, the classified section, remember, he's in Silicon Valley, of the San Jose Mercury carried up to 60 pages of technology help wanted ads. One of those jobs, one of those caught Jobs' eyes. Have fun, make money, it said. And this is something he's going to do for the rest of his life. That day, Jobs walked into the lobby of the video game manufacturer Atari and told the personnel director, who was startled by his unkept hair and attire, that he wouldn't leave until they gave him a job. And so this trait of refusing to bet, realizing that one reality is a lot more malleable than we think it is, and refusing to

bend to the rules of others, thinking the rules don't apply to me, something Jobs keeps with his entire life. And this is something that actually Nolan encourages. And in case you don't know much about Nolan Bushnell, he was one of, he talks about this all the time. He had a bunch of other mentors in Silicon Valley, too. A lot of those mentors that were mentors to Nolan become mentors to Steve because Nolan was in his late. I think he was like 27 at the time. And it was very rare for at this point. And he talks about this in his book where it's like, you know, most of the time, if you're a young person starting a company, then they bring in adult managers because you've raised money. Or the case that they let me run my own company so that present fast forward to present day very very common so nolan was a trailblazer in that regard so says atari's founder

was a burly entrepreneur named nolan bushnell who's a charismatic visionary with a nice touch of showmanship who does that sound like in other words another role model waiting to be emulated after he became famous he he drove a rolls royce and occasionally held staff meetings in a hot tub while his staff smoked dope. As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force to cajole and intimidate and distort reality with the power of his personality. Jobs thus became one of his first 50 employees at Atari. So this idea of like his refusal to bend to other people he gets rewarded for he gets a job this is that positive reinforcement that just continues throughout his life so um they talk about the fact that at this point he wouldn't

he wouldn't bathe he was convinced if he only ate i think he's only eating apples or only eating vegetables you wouldn't have to bathe there's some funny stories i'm going to read tell you about that but uh they're trying to figure out like bushnell's meeting this guy he's only eating apples or only eating vegetables. You wouldn't have to bathe. There's some funny stories I'm going to tell you about that. But they're trying to figure out like Bushnell's meeting this guy. He's kind of a weirdo. But, you know, I like misfits, rebels and nonconformists. So he says the smell and behavior wasn't an issue with me, he said. Steve was prickly, but I kind of liked him.

So I asked him to go to the night shift. It was a way for it was a way for me to save him because people were like, hey, I don't want to work. This guy's an asshole. It's a direct quote from the book. And he smells. Like, I don't want to work for him or work with him. And so the manager's like, should we fire him? And Nolan's like, no, let's just put him into the night shift, see what he can do. The idea you can make products so simple that they don't need user manuals and that it's actually possible for a young person to start their own business.

So says he, Jobs intuitively appreciated the simplicity of Atari's games. They came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them out. The only instructions for Atari's Star Trek game were, number, were one, insert quarter, two, avoid Klingons. Jobs became fascinated with the idea that it was possible to start your own company. He had a burning desire to start his own business. So let's fast forward a little bit in the story. And I want to give you another example of his refusal to, to bend to the wills of others of others and really this is a quick story on the infectious nature of belief and confidence so his friend elizabeth holmes winds up joining a cult and this particular cult like most cults they encourage you to cut off like all ties with like your past life so jobs decides no i'm not going to listen to you and he's just going to show up at the cult one day and and basically grab Holmes and get out of there.

Jobs came to believe that he could impart that feeling of confidence to others. And then there's a reason behind this, because I think this sentence that she's about to say that he had the attitude that he could do anything and therefore so can you is very useful when you're when you're building a business and you need to enlist the help of other people to achieve your mission. Right. Jobs came to believe that he could impart that feeling of confidence to others and thus push them to do things they hadn't thought possible. Holmes had joined a religious cult in San Francisco that expected her to sever ties with all past friends. And so his response was just hilarious. But Jobs rejected that injunction. He arrived at the cult house one day and announced that he was driving up to Friedland's apple farm and she was to come. Even more brazenly, he said she would have to drive part of the way, even though she didn't know how to drive, how to use stick shift.

Once we got on the open road, he made me get behind the wheel and he shifted the car until we got up to 50 miles, 55 miles per hour. Then he puts on a tape of Dylan's blood on the tracks, lays his head in my lap and goes to sleep. He had the attitude that he could do anything and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do. So that sentence, as she says there, is repeated half a dozen times throughout the book by people that jobs work with. He made me do something I didn't think I could do. It was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion field. If you trust him, you can do things, Holmes said. If he decided that something should happen,

then he's just going to make it happen. And I think that's an extremely important lesson. We are all way more powerful than we think we are. And we can influence the reality around us. But the first step in doing that is believing you can do that. As we talked, as you and I've talked about in the past, self-doubt is dream killer. The person that doesn't believe they're capable of doing whatever they want to achieve will never do it. Steve Jobs is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. He thought through the power of his belief in his will, he could create entire new worlds in business, as we're going to see, wound up working out for him multiple times. When it comes to his health and the fact that he had the reality distortion field not only for his work, but also his health, that most likely contributed to his early death. So he's still at Atari at this point.

This is right before he's going to start Apple. And this is more lessons that he learned from Nolan Bushnell. The Atari experience helped shape Jobs' approach to business. That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person. Jobs also absorbed Bushnell's take-no-prisoners attitude. Nolan wouldn't take no for an answer and this was Steve's first impression of how things got done. Nolan was a mentor for Jobs.

Bushnell agreed. There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur. And I saw that in Steve, he said. He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught, and this is, oh my goodness, Steve takes this idea and runs with it. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are. So eventually Steve becomes friends with Steve Wozniak. Wozniak is a very, very gifted engineer, but has the complete opposite personality of Steve Jobs. And this is the humble beginnings.

The reason I'm bringing this to your attention is because I just, I'm always fascinated how everything that's large starts out small. And so this is a humble beginnings of Apple. And so this is Wozniak talking about this time. It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, let's hold them up in the air and sell a few. Jobs knew how to appeal to Wozniak. He didn't argue that they were sure to make money, but instead that they would have a fun adventure. Even if we lose our money, we'll have a company, said Jobs. Wozniak recalled, I was excited to think about us like that, to be two best friends starting a company.

Wow, I knew right then that I would do it. And this is what I mean about the humble beginnings of Apple. In order to raise the money they needed, Wozniak sold his HP65 calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus. They now had about $1,300 in working capital that designed for a product and a plan. They would start their own computer company. And so we see a description of Steve's personality at the very beginning. Remember what Nolan told him? If you just pretend to be in charge, people will assume that you are. Jobs was at times

seem to be driven by demons. Jobs had a bravado that helped him get things done, occasionally by manipulating people. He could be charismatic, even mesmerizing, but also cold and brutal. Jobs was awed by Wozniak's engineering wizardry and Wozniak was awed by Jobs' business drive. I never wanted to deal with people and step on toes. But Steve, this is such a crazy sentence, But Steve could call up people he didn't know and make them do things. So Apple's first product was these circuit boards that Wozniak was making. And the way they found their early customers is because they used to go to these home, they're called homebrew computer club meetings. A bunch of nerds and enthusiasts just like Wozniak who would get together and swap ideas, usually for free. Jobs and then Gates and all these other people are like, hey, no, you should be paying for this stuff. And so at one of these meetings is a guy named Paul Terrell, and he owns like a – I think he's got like two or three shops. They're called Byte Shops. They're like small technology shops.

And he goes to these meetings looking for potential products that he could sell. And so it says Jobs was thrilled to give him a private demo. Take a look at this, Jobs said. You're going to like what you see. Terrell was very impressed enough to hand Jobs his card. Keep in touch, he said. And so the reason I'm reading this next paragraph to you is because one of my favorite parts of the trivia of early Apple history is the fact that Apple's very first sale was made barefoot. And so it says, I'm keeping in touch, Jobs announced the next day when he walked barefoot into the bite shop. He made the sale. Terrell agreed to order 50 computers, but there was a condition. He didn't want just $50 printed circuit boards for which customers would then have to do the assembly.

That might appeal to a few hardcore hobbyists, but not to most customers. Instead, he wanted the boards to be fully assembled. For that, he was willing to pay $500 a piece. So not only is that a funny story, but that's also very important. Jobs derives a very important insight from what Paul Terrell said. Because remember, Paul is the one that has the direct connection with the customer, right? And so they're going to, this is going to lead to the Apple II, which is the most, in the early days of Apple, by far the most commercially successful product to ever make. And it happens, Wozniak and Jobs are at a computer festival. So it says, as they walked the floor at the personal computer festival, he came to the realization that Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop had been right.

Personal computers should come in a complete package. That is obvious to us today. That's not how it was at the beginning. The next Apple, he decided, needed to have a great case and a built-in keyboard and be integrated end-to-end from the power supply to the software. My vision, Steve says, was to create the first fully packaged computer. We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who like to assemble their own computers. And why? For everyone, and this is just really a way to think about this, is if you can make something easier, you can always expand the market, expand your potential market by just making it easier.

Steve says this explicitly here. For every one of them, meaning the hobbyists who would assemble together, there were a thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to run. So this is when they have to make the switch from being just in the garage, putting everything together to, they're going to, Wozniak is going to build the Apple II. The Apple II is going, I think there's a sentence in the book that says more than any other device or any other computer in history, it ushered in the personal computing age. So this is a breakthrough product that lays the very foundation for Apple that they can ride for many years. In fact, there's all this turmoil that I get to later in the book, but even going into the 80s, the Apple II would account for like – it's so funny because Jobs and all the management of Apple are fighting over the Macintosh and the Lisa and all these other products.

But the Apple II accounted for like 70% or 80% of all the revenue in Apple. It's unbelievable how successful this product that they're about to build becomes. So it says, this is when they're like, okay, now we need to get money and expertise because we don't know what the hell we're doing. Just to get this whole thing into production was going to be like $200,000. So Jobs went back to Nolan Bushnell. This is what Nolan said. He asked me if I'd put $50,000 in and he would give me a third of the company, said Bushnell. I was so smart, I said no. It's kind of fun to think about that when I'm not crying. So Bushnell is a huge,

just like I mentioned a bunch of people that are important to Steve Jobs, like who he became in his career. One person I left off the list, I omitted and I shouldn't, and I'll talk about to you in a minute, is this guy named Mike Markula. But Nolan was this gateway, this like the person that introduced Jobs to so many important people. So Nolan's like, listen, I'm not going to give you money, but why don't you call this guy named Don Valentine? And it says Bushnell suggested that Jobs try Don Valentine, a straight shooting founder of the straight shooting founder of Sequoia Capital. I should see if there's a I've read quite a bit of like articles and stuff online about don valentine i like the fact what he just said straight shooting i love people like that because that's that's what the the the impression i get from reading about him online i should see if there's a biography about him he

just passed away a few i think a few years ago if i'm not mistaken so this is what now we get quotes from don valentine steve was the embodiment of the counterculture he looked like ho chi minh valentine however did not become a preeminent silicon valley investor by relying on surface appearances so he tells jobs like listen you have something here but not enough if you wanted me to finance you valentine told him you need to have one person as a partner who understands marketing and distribution and this is where steve as long as you're an intelligent formidable person a clearly talented person steve he almost has like two different personalities right where he and we'll see this later with andy grove uh john lassiter the the gifted um animator and the

the person that's responsible for a lot of pixar success uh not that he's deferent deferential i forgot the word i'm looking for there, but he'd be open to listening. And so we see that here. Don's like, listen, if you want my money, you need to find a person, a partner who actually understands marketing and distribution. And so Jobs says, okay, send me three suggestions. He replied, Valentine did. He clicked with one of them, a man named Mike Markula, who would end up playing a critical role at Apple for the next two decades. And so before I go to the role Mike plays, I just want to tell you one of my favorite quotes that I saved about Don Valentine. And I think they're useful. So you might like this.

He says, there are two things in business that matters and you can learn them in two minutes. You don't have to go to business school for two years. High gross margins and cash flow. All companies that go out of business do so for the same reason. They run out of money. So high gross margins and cash flow. Highly recommend if you haven't studied Don Valentine, Google him. Trent Griffin's got this great post that says, it's like a dozen things I learned from Don Valentine, I think is the title. And I particularly am interested in Don's opinions on markets and how important the market drop rating is in relation to your overall success. And again, there's just not a lot of fluff on Don Valentine's ideas. So they run a

meeting up and Markula has grandiose visions just like Steve does. Markula's plan envisioned ways of getting beyond the hobbyist market, which we just talked about. He talked about introducing the computer to regular people in regular homes, doing things like keeping track of your favorite recipes or balancing your checkbook. This is all unheard of. We're still in the 1970s. Don't forget that. Markkula made a wild prediction. We're going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years, he said.

This is the start of an industry. He's right about that. It happens once in a decade. It would take Apple seven years to break into the Fortune 500. But the spirit of mark hula's prediction turned out to be true and so this is where jobs is talking about all the stuff he learned from mark hula mike really took me under his wing his values were much aligned with mine he emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last and And I like Mike's.

He's about to write this one-page paper. He calls it the Apple marketing philosophy. You'll see this spread online a lot. Just three points. He says the first point was empathy. We will truly understand the customer's needs better than any other company. The second, this is, I think, my favorite of the points. The second was focus. In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do,

we must eliminate all the unimportant opportunities. That is an idea that Steve Jobs repeats his entire life. And then third was impute. It emphasized, and this is another thing that Steve, again, Steve's taking these ideas right from Mike and he runs with them the whole rest of his life. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. People do judge a book by its cover, he wrote. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc. And if we present them in a shipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod. Sorry, I mispronounced that.

If we present them in a creative professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities. And before we get to how crazily successful the Apple II was, this just made me laugh. There was an issue. So Apple is being run. Remember, Steve Jobs is not he's not the CEO. He's not the president. Mike's there's this guy named Mike Scott that's hired to be the president. Mike Markkula is running the company together. Steve is supposed to be running product. Wozniak decides, hey, I just want to be an engineer. I don't want to have any kind of, I don't want to manage other people.

But he says there was also an issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced against all evidence that his vegan diet meant that he didn't need to use deodorant or take regular showers. This part made me laugh. At meetings, we had to look at his dirty feet. Sometimes to relieve stress, Steve would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues. So let's get into the details real quick, or real quick hit about Apple's first hit product. The Apple II would be marketed for the next 16 years with close to 6 million sold. More than any other machine, it launched the personal computer industry.

And so this is an example of the downside of his reality distortion field. Even though he was given up for adoption, his mom and dad were 23 when they had him. They gave him up for adoption. He's 23. He fathers a child. And this is where he mentions this. Remember, the unique part about this book is the fact that Jobs, one, askedacson to write the book he asked him when he knew he was dying and isaacson had multiple conversations so we we hear steve at the end of his life seeing the end is near and he's going

to tell us one what's the most important parts of his life but also the regrets and that's really you know by the time you get to that part there's nothing you can do about these regrets so if we can minimize them in present day like our older selves would be a lot happier and content and one of this is that he was just a scumbag dad and this is the the the the paradox or maybe the dichotomy you have to hold in your mind because Steve Jobs can become a personal hero to you but you also understand that he's a deeply flawed person years later Jobs was remorseful for the way he behaved. One of the few times in his life that he admitted as much. This is what Steve says. results showed she was my daughter i agreed to support her until she was 18 i found a house in palo alto and fix it up and let them live their rent free her mother found her great schools which i paid for i tried to do the right thing but if i could do it over i would do a better job so he's paying child support but i think the book says like he would show up like two times a year if that he's just not a you know he was a very absentee dad there they had a contentious

relationship even up to you know I think right before he died, they hadn't talked for about a year. Lisa is her name. She was in her 30s by then. And the behavior that he had in his early 20s, or I guess mid to late 20s too, something, a giant regret. Eventually, I think she lives with him for the four years of high school. But they never really had the greatest relationship. So moving on, Steve has this quote. I think he's quoting Picasso, where Picasso says, good artists copy, great artists steal. And then Steve Jobs adds to that, we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas and this is where they're gonna he's gonna steal the the idea of graphical user interface right which is all most of us have ever known for computing there's no command like we're not typing into the command line and he gets this idea it's really interesting

how he gets the idea too it's actually rather clever uh he gets this idea from xerox park which is the west coast xerox is on the east coast they're they're like uh r&d department is on the west coast just trying to're like uh r&d department is on the west coast just trying to develop the latest technology most of which they never commercialize and so steve's going to take their idea and he's going to commercialize it so it says xerox's venture capital division wanted to be part of the second round of apple's financing during the summer of 1979 jobs made an offer i'll let you invest a million dollars in apple if you open the kimono at park xerox accepted.

It agreed to show Apple its new technology. By the time Apple went public, so they put a million dollars in. Apple's going to go public the next year. They're going to get 17 million. So it's like, oh, wow, they got a good deal. Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues went to see Xerox Park's technology. The Apple folks were astonished.

Jobs was hopping around. Jobs kept saying he couldn't believe that Xerox had not commercialized the technology. You're sitting were astonished. Jobs was hopping around. Jobs kept saying he couldn't believe that Xerox had not commercialized the technology. You're sitting on a gold mine, he shouted. I cannot believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this. Jobs and his team were so amazed by the graphical interface. It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes, Jobs recalled. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be so a lot is happening in apple's at this point apple's history they're going to use the graphical user interface on both the lisa and the macintosh they're going to go public they're going to have the biggest ipo of

the year but we still steve this is steve jobs at 25 years old he's still not ready and this is what i was mentioning to you earlier about he's not running the company really and what we what we discover is even though they have a hit product, really nobody's running the company. And that becomes the biggest issue. Both Mike Scott and Mike Marcullo were intent on bringing some order to Apple, and it became increasingly concerned about Jobs' disruptive behavior. Terrible manager at this point in history. In September 1980, they secretly plotted a reorganization. Jobs lost control of the computer he had named after his daughter. That's Elisa. He was also stripped of his role as vice president of research and

development. He was made a non-executive chairman of the board. This position allowed him to remain Apple's public face, but it meant that he had no operating control. That hurt. I was upset and felt abandoned by Markula. He and Scotty felt that I wasn't up to running the Lisa division. I brooded a lot about it. And I think there's two lessons that jump out at you when you read books about Steve Jobs is one, there's a big difference between being able to create a great product and being able to build a great company. And the second thing that, and he, you know, he's always been gifted at building great products. It was, And the second thing ties into, I guess, the first point about I'm trying to make to you right here is he didn't learn how to build a great company and to run a successful organization until he went back to

Apple the second time. And if you think about that, how crazy that is, he was 42 before he actually demonstrates the ability to build and run a great organization. He was 20, 21 when he showed the ability to build a great product. It took him a long time to be able to learn how to run and actually build a great organization, which he said, like I said in the opening, when he was talking about his legacy, that was his passion. What drove him is to build a great organization that was capable of producing great products. So at this point in his life story, he's about 30 years old.

He's going to start working on the Macintosh. And this is all about his reality distortion field and really the way to think about Steve Jobs. And I guess this doesn't just apply to Steve. It applies to a lot of the people that you and I are reading biographies on, is the fact that he definitely played by his own set of rules. And I think that reminder that the world is malleable. And reality distortion field is one way to put it.

I think Marc Andreessen's quote is just the best. It's like the way I try to think about it is he says, the world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. So it says, the best way to describe, this is Steve Jobs right around 30. This is a description. These are his, the Macintosh team. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. He explains, Steve has a reality distortion field.

In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince you of practically anything. The phrase comes from an episode of Star Trek in which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force. He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution. It was dangerous to get caught in Steve's reality distortion field, but it was what it was what led him to actually be able to change reality. The reality distortion field was a confounding combination of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand, he said. And Wozniak had seen it way before even the Mac team did. And this is what Wozniak said. This is back when they were at

Atari, when Steve was 19. so it's about 11 years earlier his reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future such as telling me i could design the breakout game in just a few days you realize that it can't be true but somehow he makes it true it was a self-fulfilling distortion you did the impossible because you didn't realize it was impossible at the root of the reality distortion field was Jobs' belief that rules did not apply to him. Jobs had never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher's concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Uberman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote, the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.

And this is the Mac team talking about Jobs' management style, which is really interesting because I just came off reading two books about Michael Jordan. This is exactly like Jordan. What I'm about to read to you is a description of Steve Jobs, his teammates describing Jobs. It could easily be Jordan's teammates describing him. There were some upsides to Jobs' demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed end up being stronger. They did better work out of both fear and an eagerness to please. His behavior can be emotionally draining, but if you survive, it works.

If you were calmly confident, if Jobs sized you up and decided you knew what you were doing, he would respect you. In both his personal and his professional life over the years, Jobs' inner circle tended to include many more strong people than toadies. And Jobs' justification of his behavior sounds very much like Jordan's justification of his behavior, not only in the interviews, but also in that documentary, The Last Dance. I've learned over the years that when you have really good people you don't have to baby them Jobs later explained by expecting them to do great things you get them to do great things the original Mac team taught me that A plus players like to work together and they don't like if you tolerate B work ask any member

of the Mac team they will tell you that it was worth the pain. And there's some things that he does on the Mac team that shows that he really does understand human nature. There is some element of like, almost like his, his influence of like being a cult leader, his understanding that humans are deeply, deeply tribalistic. There's, there's a bunch of notes I've jotted down and just that it's going to take place over several pages of echoes of ideas that you and I have studied in the past, like this idea where Jeff Bezos repeats over and over again throughout his entire career that missionaries make the best products. Something else that Peter Thiel has repeated over and over again,

that the best startups are a lot like cults. And that one way to bind your team and your company together is through storytelling. So this is a really interesting choice. So the Macintosh is, you know, they went through hell creating the Macintosh. And at the very end, this is what Jobs does. And there's a bunch of ideas here. So this is the first one.

When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. Real artists signed their work, he said. He had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside. Then he toasted them with champagne.

With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art. Jobs had the ability to instill in his team and his spirit decor. He would find ways to make them feel that being part of the Macintosh project was an amazing mission. Now, here's the problem. I'm going to pause. I'm in the middle of this, but I'm going to pause here too. He does that.

It's like he fosters an us versus them mentality, which I think is extremely effective in organizing groups of humans. The problem is he did us versus them for the rest of his company it wasn't later on there'll be like no divisions uh talk about the difference between how like apple was organized and ran by jobs when he's in his 40s and 50s compared to other companies at the time it's like we have one pnl we have one mission and they felt they had an advantage over companies like sony hp and i can't remember the other one they named specifically where they had divisions competing with one another.

Well, that's funny that he made that realization when he was 20 years later, because 20 years earlier, that's exactly what he was doing. It was us versus them. He's like, no, you're... And again, it's because he's not running the whole company. But he did this at the detriment to the company he created. It's very odd behavior. Let's go back to this.

His favorite maxim was, the journey is the detriment to the company he created. It's very odd behavior. Let's go back to this. His favorite maxim was the journey is the reward. The Mac team he liked to emphasize was a special core with an exalted mission. Someday they would look back on their journey together and forgetting or laughing off the painful moments would regard it as a magical high point in their lives. And this is, remember, he's telling a story here. They were building a company that would invent the future as every day passes job said the work 50 people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe this goes back to cults religion uh groupings of people the the the the understanding of how important traditions and ceremonies are listen to what he does to a computer he pulled out a

bottle of mineral water and symbolically christened the prototype and then i just found a few quick sentences which i feel is a great description of how jobs viewed himself jobs is a strong-willed elitist artist who doesn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. It would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Bob Dylan song. Now we got to the part where I mentioned earlier I found eerie because there's several examples in the book where he does what he's about to do here. Jobs confided in Scully that he believed he would die young

and therefore he needed to accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on silicon valley history we all have a short period of time on this earth he told scully we probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and to do them well none of us has any idea how long we're going to be here nor do i but my feeling is i've got to accomplish a lot of these things while i'm young we see another way that how Steve Jobs views himself that my peer group is not my peer group. History's greatest minds are my peer group. On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research that he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing. Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market

research before he invented the telephone? So remember that idea where Steve stole the idea for the graphical user interface for Xerox? Well, in turn, Bill Gates stole that idea from Steve. And so they have this huge fight. Really, I'm reading this section to you because it's a reminder that products do not compete, but that companies do. But Bill Gates' response to Steve, when Steve's yelling at him, is just too fantastic not to tell you.

He says, well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it. And so one thing to learn from Bill Gates and Microsoft in general is the value of being persistent. This is about when they released Windows,

which Jobs feels that they stole that idea from him. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh interface. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it. Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made Windows better and then dominant. Jobs' dismay was understandable. Apple had been more innovative, imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. But even though Microsoft created a crudely copied series of products, it wound up

winning the war of operating systems. This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked. The best and most innovative products don't always win. And so the way to distill that down to its essence is products don't compete, companies do. And so this is where we see another premonition because, like I said before, he talked about, he foresaw an early death, didn't think he was going to be there for very long.

And so he's turning, well, first of all, let me read this. This is when he's 30 years old this interview i'm about to read some excerpts from i thought it was very interesting the uh the the invitation for his 30th birthday so i want to read that to you he says there's an old hindu saying that goes in the first 30 years of your life you make your habits for the last 30 years of your life your habits make you come help me celebrate mine. And before I read from this interview, let me give you some background. So they've released the Macintosh at this point. This is, you know, Jobs' heart and soul into this product. The Macintosh starts strong and then

sales plummet. It was like underpowered. There's some design decisions that don't wind up working out. And so I was thinking about that as I was reading the excerpts from this interview that are reprinted in this book. And so we see the premonition, just the idea of you think of yourself as the greatest product person. You're not able to run the company that you founded. There's a lot of conflict. You're beefing with Scully, you're beefing with Mercoula, all these people. What would that do to your mindset though? Like the one, okay, I can't run the company. I'm good at products. I make a great product and then it kind of fails in the marketplace. And so let's go to jobs. I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life,

I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back. If you want to live your life in a creative way, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times artists have to say, bye, I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here. And then they go hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they reemerge a little differently.

Now, that is a wild thing to say when he's 30, because he says maybe later on they reemerge a little differently. He does some crazy stuff when he comes back to apple and the end of the 90s including saying hey i'm eliminating the board the board that just hired me to come back and one of the people he has to eliminate that's still on the board is mike marcola who he felt you know um but betrayed him and abandoned him i think is the words that he uses but it's interesting he says maybe uh they have to go off and hibernate somewhere maybe later they re-emerge a little differently because mike's advice that he gives uh steve jobs to save apple which is good advice is like you have i'll read it later on i'm pretty sure i have a highlight on it but he's like you

have to think of like the caterpillar turning into a butterfly you have to reinvent the company you have to have this metamorphosis maybe and then steve is saying that let's see that would be 17 years no 12 years earlier maybe later on they re-emerge a little differently uh now isaacson's describing this for us with each of these statements jobs seem to have a premonition that his life would soon be changing perhaps it was time to say bye i have to go and then re-emerge later thinking differently and so this is what i meant about the macintosh not doing well uh momentum this is a note of myself momentum overcomes nearly everything a lack of it destroys so three months after this steve's going to be kicked out of his own company as the macintosh continued to disappoint sales in march 1985 were only 10

of the budget forecast that's crazy she's She's missing 90% of the sales they thought they were going to have. Jobs holed up in his office fuming, or he'd wander the halls berating everyone else for the problems. His mood swings became worse, and so did his abuse of those around him. So right before he gets kicked out, he tries to do a coup, doesn't realize that the board is lined up behind Scully. He has no power. You know, it's a devastating thing. He talks later on that commencement address he gives at Stanford, I think in 2005, that it was the best thing that ever happened to him at the time. He was deeply, deeply depressed, though. So I'm going to skip over, you know, there's a bunch of chapters usually covering, each chapter covers like a part of his life. So there's a chapter on his time at Next. I'm going

to skip over that part. I did an entire podcast on that chapter, or excuse me, on that chapter of Steve Jobs' life because Randall Strauss, the author, wrote this fantastic book that I think every entrepreneur should read.

It's called Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing. It is Founders No. 77 if you haven't listened to it. But the reason I think everybody should read it is because you have a gifted entrepreneur,

somebody that's going to go down as one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history, literally make every wrong decision. So that entire book serves as a cautionary tale. And I think reading the book and keeping that in your mind serves as a constant reminder that if Steve Jobs is capable of making these bad decisions, I am too. And keeping that in your mind hopefully makes you wary of uh going down that same path and there's just a ton of decisions he makes in that book that it just seems obvious this is not the right i guess it another tale i guess another lesson is that it's so easy to deceive yourself especially if he's coming on you know he invented he helped invent

the apple too it's a successful product of course i can again. So instead, I want to talk about something he did during his wilderness years, as it was called, those 12 years in between his two cents of Apple. And this is about Pixar, which I am unbelievably fascinated by. So there's a lot of highlights on this page. I have four notes for myself.

Number one, your network is important. Number two, why would George Lucas sell? Number three, a funny Steve Jobs story. And number four, what George Lucas Told Steve. When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a walk with Alan Kay. Kay knew that Jobs was interested in the intersection of creativity and technology. That's what I mean about your network being important.

So he suggested that he go see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of George Lucas' film studio. They rented a limo and rode up to Marin County, to Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, where Catmull and his little computer division were based. I was blown away, and I came back and tried to convince Scully to buy it for Apple, Jobs recalled, but the folks running at Apple weren't interested, and they were busy kicking me out anyway. Lucas, why would he sell, was embroiled in a contentious divorce and he needed to sell off the division. Jobs offered to pay Lucas $5 million plus invest another $5 million to capitalize the division of a standalone company. That was far less than Lucas had been asking, but the timing is right.

So he's paying $5 million in, so $10 million total. Disney's going to sell in the future, excuse me, in the future, Disney is going to buy that company for $7.4 or $7.6 billion. Not before Jobs wants to put another $50 million in and they have to pivot from doing hardware and software to actually being an animation studio. But he says, this is a funny Steve Jobs story. The chief financial officer at Lucasfilm found jobs arrogant and prickly. So when it came time to hold a meeting of all the players to discuss the negotiation for buying the business, right, he told Ed Catmull, we have to establish the right pecking order. The plan was to gather everyone in a room with Jobs,

and then the CFO would come in a few minutes late to establish that he was the person running the meeting. But the funny thing happened, Catmull recalled. Steve started the meeting on time without the CFO, and by the time the CFO walked in, Steve was already in control of the meeting. Jobs met only once with George Lucas, who warned him that the people in the division cared more about making animated movies, this was Ed Catmull's lifelong dream, than they did about making computers. So they were just making the technology to make the computer.

Jobs thought, hey, I could sell that computer, which wound up being wrong. OK, you know, these guys are hell bent on animation. Lucas told him. I did warn him that basically Ed and John, that's John Lasseter. That was their agenda. I think in his heart he bought the company because that was his agenda, too. And it might have been his agenda as well, one of steve jobs hero was walt disney a way to think about that there if there was not if it wasn't for walt disney and edwin land there'd be no pixar because from edwin land

uh jobs learns that the the magic that happens when you combine the liberal arts with technology and then the head animator the head storyteller john lassiter i'm about to say here was he idolized disney as their jobs so it says the digital anim and this is what's wild about pixar um it did yeah the making of these short animated films and this is before they make toy story they're just making a tiny you know maybe a minute long five long, eight minute long little stories. It was just a sideline. And that eventually turns into this entire business.

The digital animation business of Pixar, the group that made the little animated films, was originally just a sideline. Its main purpose being to show off the hardware and software for the company. It was run by John Lasseter, a man whose childlike face and demeanor masked an artistic perfectionism that rivaled that of Jobs. Born in Hollywood, Lasseter grew up loving Saturday morning cartoons. In ninth grade, he wrote a report on the history of Disney Studios. And he decided then

that that was how he wished to spend his life. When he graduated from high school, this is what I mean about there's no Pixar if it wasn't for Disney. When he graduated high school, Lasseter enrolled in the animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, which had been founded

by Walt Disney. And this is an example of Jobs coming across a strong, talented person and not treating them the same way he would treat other people. Lasseter was an artist, so Jobs treated him deferential. Deferential. I'm not pronouncing that right. You know what I mean. And Lasseter was an artist, so Jobs treated him deferential.

Deferential. I'm not pronouncing that right. You know what I mean. And Lasseter viewed Jobs correctly as a patron who could appreciate artistry and knew how it could be interwoven with technology and commerce. And Jobs loved the art that Lasseter made so much, he would allow them to continue doing it. This is after, I think, they ditched the hardware. He would allow them to continue doing it even though there was no commercial reason behind it. And so this is just a reminder. These little ideas, these little films

that Lasseter is nurturing are eventually what's going to build Pixar, which is the most successful animation studio since Disney Animation. Maybe there's only two. I think Giles makes the case that there's only ever been two, Pixar and Disney. you know the most successful animation studio since disney animation maybe the second maybe there's only two i think jobs makes the case that there's only ever been two pixar and disney anyways the note i left myself on this is a reminder that large oak trees start off as little acorns jobs became committed to making new animated shorts each year even though there was

not a business rationale for doing so and what's crazy to think about that is like these little animated shorts, like eventually they start doing feature length animated films. And then the success of those feature length animated films are outrageous. Like you could have one film, one animated film, much less, you know, they have dozens of hits by now. One that'll make over a billion dollars. If you founded a company and then it made a billion dollars in revenue or you sold it for a billion dollars, it'd be a wild success. They're doing that constantly with films.

It's really wild how it starts from just a small idea and then you have this universal appeal, this global human universal appeal for these stories that they're creating. It's wild. So the book goes into great detail about all the different pivots that Pixar is trying to do. Eventually they land on doing animation. They're not there yet, like full time. Ed Catmull's autobiography is the best description of this because that's what the entire book is about. I think it's like Founders 34 or something like that. Creativity Inc. if you're looking for an interesting book to read. But in the interim they're trying to work with all these other technology companies and they're doing software and and and not.

Well, I guess in this case, he tries to do consulting. It doesn't work. But the reason I'm bringing out this little story that's contained in this book is because it's a description, again, of what this idea that I'm trying to to to share with you that Steve really did respect strength. And so one of Andy Groff was one of Steve Jobs' mentor. And he's not a guy that you could mess with by any means. I covered, as I've told you before, I covered his autobiography, which only covers the first 21 years of his life. Fantastic memoir called Swimming Across. And so in this case, Steve Jobs tries to pull some BS and Andy checks them real fast. And what's fascinating, the reason I'm bringing this to your attention is because we see that Steve respects strength. And you'll see that in his response to being chastised by Andy Grove, when he's usually the one doing the chastising, right? Grove played a mentor when Jobs proposed that? Grove also played mentor when Jobs proposed that Pixar give Intel suggestions on how to

improve the capacity of its processors to render 3D graphics. When the engineers at Intel accepted the offer, Jobs sent an email back saying Pixar would need to be paid for its advice. Intel's chief engineer replied, we have not entered into any financial arrangement in exchange for good ideas for our microprocessors in the past, and we have no intention of doing so in the future. Jobs forwarded the answer to Grove, saying that he found the engineer's response to be extremely arrogant. Grove sent Jobs a blistering reply, saying that sharing ideas is what friendly companies and friends do for each other. Grove added that he had often freely shared ideas

with Jobs in the past and that Jobs should not be so mercenary. Jobs relented. This is the most important part. I have many faults, Jobs said, but one of them is not ingratitude. Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees. We will freely help.

Thank you for the clearer perspective. So at this point in pixar's history jobs they've had to do a bunch of layoffs jobs has already dumped in 50 million dollars and he is not i think he left apple with somewhere between like 70 and 100 million something that's substantial part of his fortune at this point in his life john comes to him though john laster comes to him and this is after you know he's done layoffs dumped in 50 million he's like listen i need another 300 grand because i have this idea idea for this short story that they're doing. It's called the tin toy.

And Jobs winds up making that commitment and backing him, which is, again, put in the context of he's already spent $50 million in a Pixar. With more losses. It's not like they're, oh, profits are on the corner. They have no idea. More losses on the horizon. So it says Jobs said he would provide the money. I believed in what John was doing, he said. It was art.

He cared and I cared. I always said yes. His only comment at the end of Lasseter's presentation was, all I ask you, John, is to make it great. The tin toy went on to win the 1988 Academy Award for animated short film, the first computer-gener generated film to do so. And so that that loyalty, this is really about the next. This is going to this story is going to go into another story where it's a reminder of the importance of relationships.

So the fact that Steve would always respect John would always back him. John had previously worked at Disney, got fired. Then he goes to work at Pixar, right? And now he's doing such great work that Michael Eisner, who's the CEO of Disney at this point, is trying to get him to come back. And he won't because he feels loyalty to Jobs. The new team at Disney, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg,

began a quest to get Lasseter to come back. They liked the tin toy and they thought that something more could be done with animated stories. But Lasseter, grateful for Jobs' faith in him, felt that Pixar was the only place where he could create a new world of computer-generated animation. He told Catmull, I can go to Disney and be a director or I can stay here and make history. And so why is that important? That leads Disney to say, okay, so Disney began talking about making a production deal with pixar this is going to lead to toy story which is then in turn going to lead to how jobs winds up becoming the single largest individual shareholder of disney when he sells the company many years later this is katzenberg

talking about this time i try to get i try to get lester to disney i tried so hard to get him to disney but he was loyal to steve and pixar so if you can't beat them join them we decided to look for ways we could join up with pixar and have them make a film about toys for us. So after Steve Jobs' mom dies, he considers his adopted parents his parents, right? He decides, hey, I want to find out more about my origin. And he winds up locating his birth mom. And, you know, she's crying and apologizing. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

And he's like, listen, it worked out fine. My childhood was fine. My parents are fine. Don't worry about it. But then she tells him something remarkable, that he has a sister. So they're 23 when they get pregnant. They give jobs up for adoption.

Then a few years later, they have another kid, and they wind up keeping that kid. And then when that daughter mona is five years old the dad dips out so they give one baby up for adoption the second baby the mom raises the whole time and the dad dips out when when when the daughter's five years old so then later on in life many like a few decades later steve jobs sister mona decides i want to know like i want to track down my father and she does and this is an unbelievable story about steve's biological father wait till you hear this jobs had no interest in meeting him he didn't treat me well i don't hold anything

against him i'm happy to be alive but what bothers me most is that he didn't treat mona well he abandoned her which is what and then isaac Isaacson makes the astute observation here. Jobs himself had abandoned his own daughter, Lisa, and was now trying to restore their relationship. But that complexity did not soften his feelings towards Jindali. Jindali is the last name of Jobs' biological father. So Mona goes to visit and to meet her father uh alone jobs asked mona not to mention him so she didn't but at one point her father casually remarked that he and her mother had another baby a boy before she had been born what happened to him she asked he replied we'll never see that baby again that baby's gone simpson recoiled uh that mona simpson that's her last name uh mona so mona recoiled that Mona Simpson, that's her last name, Mona recoiled but said nothing.

An even more astonishing revelation occurred when Jindali was describing the previous restaurants he had run. There had been some nice ones, he insisted. He told her that he wished she could have seen him when he was managing a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose. That was a wonderful place, he said. All of the successful technology people used to come in there, even Steve Jobs. Mona was stunned. Oh yeah, he used to come in and he was a sweet guy and a big tipper, her father added. Mona was able to refrain from blurting out, Steve Jobs is your son. When the visit was over, she called Jobs and arranged to meet him.

Jobs was understandably astonished when she mentioned the restaurant near San Jose. He could recall being there and even meeting the man who was his biological father. I had been to that restaurant a few times, Jobs said, and I remember meeting the owner. He was Syrian, balding. We shook hands. Unbelievable. There is a, when he's away, before he goes back to Apple,

he has this passionate love affair with his girlfriend Tina. He says there were two misfits that we belong together. They wound up not working out but this is really the reason i want to bring this to your attention because i'm always fascinated about thinking about alternate histories and there's just some great writing so they're in paris and tina's just telling them you know like just forget everything else back in the states let's just stay here and live a simple life and so he says let's just stay in france we'll settle

down tina was eager but jobs didn't want to and this was really fascinating he was burned he burned still he was burned but still ambitious listen what he says i am a reflection of what i do he told her 25 years later she sent him an email about this time where they contemplated this alternate future right and so this is her email I want to read to you. We were on a bridge in Paris in the summer of 1985. It was overcast. We leaned against a smooth stone rail and stared at the green water roiling on below. Your world had cleaved and then it paused,

waiting to rearrange itself around whatever you chose next. I wanted to run away from what had come before. I tried to convince you to begin a new life with me in Paris, to shed our former selves and let something else course through us. I wanted us to crawl through that black chasm of your broken world and emerge anonymous and new in simple lives where I could cook you simple dinners and we could get together every day and we could be together every day like children playing a sweet game with no purpose, save the game itself. I like to think you considered it before you laughed

and said, what could I do? I've made myself unemployable. I like to think that in that moment, that moment's hesitation, before our bold futures reclaimed us, we lived that simple life together, all the way into our peaceful old ages with a brood of grandchildren around us on a farm in the south of france quietly going about our days warm and complete like loaves of fresh bread our small world filled with the aroma of patience and familiarity and so there's a great amount of detail in the book about their just tumultuous multi multi-year love affair and her description of him i just this is a description of steve from the love from one of his loves of his life and he says this is the first woman he ever lived or excuse me

loved and had a five-year relationship and she was trying to analyze like what like what it was like to to have an intimate relationship with him and she realized that he's she thought he was a narcissist narcissistic narcissistic personality disorder uh she says she had read about a narcissistic narcissistic personality disorder and decided that jobs perfectly met the criteria it fits so well and explains so much of what he had what we had struggled with i realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see. One thing that is repeated by different people at different points of his life is the fact that Steve had this magical power of focus. I'm going to read my note to you first,

and then read the paragraph, and then I'll read this quote from this other book. So it says, or i guess this is what i wrote i don't think this is exactly the same idea but this made me think of alfred lee loomis and how he would focus on the single most important thing to do at the exclusion of everything else and how rare that is a trait for most people to have so this is from uh this steve jobs book it says jobs had a way of focusing on something with with insane intensity for a while and then abruptly turning away his gaze. At work, he would focus on what he wanted to do when he wanted to. And no other matters.

And on other matters, he would be unresponsive. No matter how hard people try to get him to engage, he had the power to focus like a laser beam. So I had read for episode number 143 this book called Tuxedo Park. It's about, it's a biography of this guy named Alfred Lee Loomis. He's like the world's most interesting man that no one's ever heard about. And I think Loomis came to a conclusion similar to Jobs. And I think it's a very profound and powerful idea. And it's extremely hard to apply. And so it says Loomis had one important characteristic, his ability to concentrate completely on a chief objective, even at the cost of neglecting matters that appear to other people to be of equal importance. Okay, so I want to go back to how Jobs, like his guidance of Pixar is very interesting.

He would defer, obviously, let Ed run the company, john run storytelling and the creative part he jobs but jobs is extremely first of all jobs controlled the money but he's also extremely good at the strategy part of it and so let's go into a little bit of the background in case you don't know the story about this is the unusual way the pixar disney partnership of films even begins and so before he's he's going to have a meeting with jeffrey katzenberg he's talking about what he like what he admires that jobs you know admired walt disney it was it's kind of fun to do the impossible walt disney once said that was the type of attitude that appealed to jobs he admired disney's obsession with detail and design and he felt that there

was a natural fit between pixar and the movie studio that disney had founded and so you're going to find a lot of examples of people respecting Walt Disney and being inspired, other entrepreneurs that came after him being inspired by not only what he was able to do when he was alive, but what happened to the company after he passed away. And, you know, five decades, seven decades later, he died, I think, in the 60s, if I'm not mistaken. And so for some reason, I'm reading this part of uh of this book what popped into my mind is this great uh highlight I saved from the book The Billionaire

and the Mechanic which is about Larry Ellison and in that book Larry's talking about like if you live through the original dot-com bubble like just how insane like it was like a form of mass psychosis and so there's an example that he gives in the book that I've never forgotten it's fantastic I want to read it to you now uh More recently in the dot-com heyday and shortly after the AOL time Warner merger, he got a call from Farzad Nassim, who used to work at Oracle and who is now a top executive at Yahoo. Nassim told Larry, Disney wants to merge with us. Why would we ever want to do something like that? What have they got? Larry answered, gee, let me think. They have the most valuable film library in the world, the most valuable TV channels in the world, and successful

theme parks everywhere. Disney makes tons of money, and they're probably the most beloved brand on the planet. Now, what have you got? A web page with news on it and free email. Has everyone gone crazy? And I just love that that i just think it's a fantastic example of the the mass psychosis that humanity's uh prone to engage in uh during times of like overt of euphoria uh so let's go back to this this this walk that steve and jeffrey are having uh they're visiting disney's film division and it says as the disney folks were showing him around jobs turned to cats and bill and asked is disney happy with pixar with great exuberance katzenberg said yes then jobs asked do you think pixar do you think we at pixar are happy with disney katzenberg said he assumed

so no we're not job said we want to do a film with you that would make us happy pixar was on the verge of bankruptcy and needed to deal with disney far more than disney needed to deal with pixar disney could afford to finance the whole enterprise and Pixar couldn't. And so they're starting out as a, think about like the beginning of their position, right? They are in a, they're not in a strong position. They're in a rather weak position. And then eventually through all the machinations that Steve does, he gets them into an extremely strong position where when Eisner gets fired and Bob Iger takes over as CEO, he calls the second person he calls. He calls his daughters first.

Then he calls Steve Jobs. He's like, we need Pixar. We're in deep trouble. It's amazing how this story plays out. So they wound up doing a deal. It says Disney would own the picture. This is the first three films. This is Toy Story.

This is going to be the first one. Disney would own the picture and its characters outright. They'd have creative control and pay Pixar 12 percent of the ticket revenues. It also had the option to to do Pixar's next two films and the right to make sequels using the characters in the film. Disney could also kill the film at any time with only a small penalty. And so Steve recognizes the weak, weaker position he's in. He says he did not like being a mere contractor. He liked being in control. That meant Pixar would have to bring its own funding to projects in the future,

and it would need a new deal with Disney. Well, they don't have enough money, so this is where he makes a big bet. And he's like, we're going to take Pixar public, and we're going to do the IPO a week after Toy Story. And he's like, Toy Story is going to be a hit. And the fact it's going to be a hit, it's going to be great for the IPO. Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, they were worried about this. What if it's a flop?

Basically, he's rolling the dice here. If Toy Story flops, it's not going to be good for the IPO. But this is the strategy he has that's going to wind up producing. It's what makes him a billionaire initially. He becomes a billionaire off Pixar before he does off Apple. And it's going to make him Disney's largest individual shareholder. It's just insane. Jobs decided that the release of Toy Story that November would be an occasion

to take Pixar public. Even the usually eager investment. So he says, even the usually eager investment bankers were dubious and said it couldn't happen. Pixar had spent five years hemorrhaging money, but jobs was determined. I was nervous and argued that we should wait until after our second movie.

Lester called Steve overruled me and said we needed the cat. we could put up half the money for our films and renegotiate the Disney deal. He's never going to have financial strength if he's getting 12.5% or 12% of the profits. He's going to do a deal. He's like, okay, now the IPO gave us money. We're putting up half. We get half the profits. So now you have these movies that are making $500 million, $400 million, $600 million. Pixar's going to get half of that. And this is one of the greatest examples of really the genius that Steve was at things like this outside of Apple. Apple's obviously, when he comes back, does the iPod, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone.

That becomes obvious. But we see that he's also able to apply his skills to a completely different industry, which makes him just unbelievably unique for an entrepreneur, right? Toy Story opened to blockbuster commercial and critical success. It recouped the cost.

This is, and what's amazing is the profit margins on these things. It's just bananas. It recouped the cost the first weekend with a domestic opening of 30 million dollars and went on to become the top grossing film of the year so they makes it costs 30 million right to make a little less than that and it makes 362 million dollars and so what do you think's going to happen he opens up it's it's a it smashes uh the box office the first week. Then next

week, he has the IPO scheduled. The public offering occurred exactly one week after Toy Story's opening. Jobs had gambled that the movie would be successful, and the risky bet paid off. It exceeded Netscape as the biggest IPO of the year. By the end of the day, the shares he had retained, he owns 80% of the company, were worth an astonishing $1.2 billion. That puts into context here. That was about five times what he made when Apple went public in 1980. And let's go back into, let's go more into Steve's thinking about this, which is just really, really genius. The successful IPO meant that Pixar would no longer have to be dependent on Disney to finance its movies. This was just the leverage Jobs wanted because we could now fund half the cost of our movies, I could demand half the profits. But more

important, I wanted co-branding. These were to be Pixar as well as Disney movies. Jobs flew down to have lunch with Eisner, who was stunned at his audacity. They had a three-picture deal, and Pixar had made only one. Katzenberg had left Disney at this time to co-found DreamWorks with Geffen and Steven Spielberg. If Eisner didn't agree to a new deal with Pixar, Jobs said, then Pixar would go to another studio such as Katzenberg's. That's a hell of a—now he's maneuvering himself into an extremely strong position. Okay? We made a movie for you. It's a hit. Now we're public. We made a movie for you. It's a hit.

Now we're public. We have a ton of money. And that's fine. You don't want to renegotiate our deal. I'm doing these two movies, and I'm bouncing over to your lieutenant's new company. He knew Eisner was not going to like that, right? So they hammered out a new arrangement.

Eisner agreed to let Pixar put up half the money for future films, and in return take half the profits. Now this is Jobs talking about Eisner's perspective on this. Eisner didn't think we could have so many hits, so he thought he was saving himself some money. Ultimately, that was great for us because Pixar would have 10 blockbusters in a row. And he's eventually, even after this, Jobs is going to have a falling out with Eisner. In a letter to Pixar shareholders, Jobs explained that winning the right to have equal branding with Disney on all the movies, as well as advertising and toys, was the most important aspect of the deal. Remember when we studied George Lucas on Founders Number 35?

George Lucas, he negotiated when he was doing Star Wars, he negotiated, like, I want rights for sequels and I want rights for merchandise and toys. And they're like, yeah, okay, fine. They didn't think it was that big a deal. George Lucas winds up making three times on selling toys and merchandise. And Star Wars was the highest grossing film ever at the time. And even though that even it was the highest grossing film ever, he's George Lucas made three times as much on merchandise and toys that he did on the films. So Jobs is learning from that. So he's like, I want the branding and I want to have the opportunity to make money on toys.

Jobs was known during his career for creating great products, but just as significant was his ability to create great companies with valuable brands. And he created two of the best of his era, Apple and Pixar. And so let me just tie this up. I'm going to focus now on his return to Apple. But what happens is Eisner runs up getting pushed pushed out eiger comes through and eiger was working with eisner to go to hong kong uh the new opening of hong kong disney and they're watching the parade and eisner's convinced oh we don't you know we don't need pixar whatever like he's trying to play hardball with jobs so jobs announces publicly that they're not going to resign with disney um and eiger's watching the

parade with eisner and he's like every single new character that's in the parade that people are paying to see came from pixar and he's like he goes to the board and he tells them i think he says this after uh yeah after eisner's fired but he's like animation is the core of everything we do because from these new stories these new characters come we sell toys we sell merchandise we sell more animated sequels we we get people into our theme parks and in 10 years that Eisner's been in charge of the first 10 years Eisner was there he had a bunch of hits of Disney animation that's the next 10 years he had none and he's like if that dries up all of our business dries up we have to buy Pixar and the board's like okay go buy Pixar.

Okay, so let's go to where he goes back to Apple because this is where he does the best work. But what really was fascinating is that the idea to return to Apple was a long time coming. And Jobs changed his mind a lot about it. Like, oh, I want to do it. No, I don't want to do it. So we're in 1995 now. He's best friends with Larry Ellison. They're in Hawaii.

They went to Hawaii with their families for Christmas every year. And so they're talking about this. So they're on 1995 now. He's best friends with Larry Ellison. They're in Hawaii. They went to Hawaii with their families for Christmas every year. And so they're talking about this. So they're on a walk. His jobs was when walking along the beach with his friend, Larry Ellison. They discussed making a takeover bid for Apple and restoring jobs as his head. Ellison said he could line up the $3 billion in financing. That was, think about it. Apple's what?

A trillion, $2 trillion? I don't even know. Over a trillion dollar company now. At this point, they could have bought the company for three billion dollars i will buy apple you will get 25 of it right away for being ceo and we can restore it to its past glory but jobs demurred i decided i'm not a hostile takeover kind of guy so next year so that's the christmas 95 by thanksgiving 96 and apple in the interim had gone through a bunch of different CEOs. Guys, we don't remember.

The last one before Jobs is this guy named Gil Amelio. He needs to – they need help. He's like, okay, I'll buy next from Steve Jobs because we want their operating system. Like it's faster to buy one than for us to create our own. And we get this – the book goes into a lot of detail about the manipulation that young Steve Jobs pulled on John Scully when he was invited to run Apple.

And the same, he does this exact, he runs the same playbook when he, the manipulation he does for Gil Emilio. And he, Jobs will constantly lie. He has no problem lying and manipulating you.

And so we see that he does this to Emilio to get what he wants. So this is by Thanksgiving, 1986, the two companies had become mid-level talks and jobs picked up the phone to call Emilio directly. I'm on my way to Japan, but I'll be back in a week and I'd like to see you as soon as I return. Don't make any decisions until we can get together.

Emilio was thrilled to hear from him and entranced by the possibility of working with him. For me, the phone call with Steve was like inhaling the flavors of a great bottle of vintage wine, he recalled. This guy's in trouble. On December 2nd, 1996, Steve Jobs set foot on Apple's Cupertino campus for the first time since his ouster 11 years earlier. So Steve, again, he respects strength. He doesn't respect, if you're a mark, an easy mark, he's going to manipulate you. He's going to take advantage of you. He's going to roll over you. He's going to, he has no, there's no remorse at all. You know, that's why his, his, his girlfriend, the love, one of his loves said that he was narcissistic. He had no, there was just no,

not capable of empathy in that regard. And so now we're back in Hawaii a few weeks after this. He's back there with Larry and he's talking to Larry about this. And this part was just hilarious. You know, Larry, because it's the two differing personalities of Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs in one conversation. You know, Larry, I think I found a way for me to get back into Apple and get control of it without you having to buy it, Jobs said. Ellison recalled, he explained his strategy, which was getting Apple to buy next,

and then he would go on the board and then be just one step away from being CEO. Ellison thought that Jobs was missing a key point. But Steve, there's one thing I don't understand. If we don't buy the company, how can we make any money? It was a reminder of how different their desires were. Jobs put his hand on Ellison's left shoulder, pulled him close, so close that their noses almost touched, and said, Larry, this is why it's really important that I'm your friend. You don't need any more money. Allison said, well, I may not need the money, but why should we let some fund manager at Fidelity get all the money? Why should someone else get it? Why shouldn't it

be us? If I went back to Apple and I didn't own any of Apple, and you didn't own any of Apple, I'd have the moral high ground, Jobs replied. Steve, that's really expensive real estate, this moral high ground. And so it says, although Jobs later said that he was not plotting to take over Apple at the time, Ellison thought it was inevitable. Anyone who spent more than a half hour, this is what I meant about Steve understanding, like seeking out weakness and just understanding who he could manipulate and who he could exploit and who he couldn't. He couldn't pull this from Andy Grove, but he damn sure can with Emilio, right? Anyone who spent more than a half hour with Emilio would realize that he couldn't do anything but self-destruct. And there's a bunch of sentences that talk about the charisma and manipulation that Chops pulled on him.

He says, like, this iselio talking about this like so many others i was caught in steve jobs force field i was hooked in by steve's energy and enthusiasm he made me feel like a lifelong friend he doesn't give a shit about you he's not your lifelong friend i mean you got to be somewhat of a sucker to fall for that now this was fascinating because this same point when they realized what gates is seeing what's happening. And this is a really good point by Bill Gates. If you really think about this, this Steve's 42. At this point in time, Steve had no track record as a great CEO. That's, it's hard for us to remember that because we see what's going to happen next, you know, 20 something years after Jobs comes back where he actually learns and then can point to a great track record as ceo but gates like well this is weird why are you doing this gates knew that the deal was destined to bring jobs back to power what they ended up buying was a guy who most people would not have predicted would be a great ceo because he didn't have much experience at it

but he was a brilliant guy so then there's a really great writing by isaacson and there's two things i think this paragraph serves as a reminder for you and i and it's asking like what drives you what will actually bring you fulfillment and sometimes it's not the things that you think will and so it says jobs had neither ellison's conspicuous consumption needs nor gates philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead, his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, actually. Building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the Pantheon with, and indeed a notch above,

people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all of this was to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom. I want to go back to, again, this is a weird thing saying, you know, Steve Jobs is a personal hero, but he's also a liar. And what does it say? There's a bunch of thoughts I had that are not like you read the section I'm about to read to you. And then just all these other thoughts come to mind. And one of them is just what does it say about humanity that deceitful behavior is so effective?

I always go back to Will and Ariel Durant. Spent, what, 50 years of their life studying history, dedicated their entire lives to it, analyzed human nature maybe on levels that very few people that have ever existed have. And they say something in that little book. They wrote Lessons of History. It's one of the bonus episodes in the archive if you haven't heard it. But you can read it in like a weekend maybe probably less than you probably read in one sitting um and so they're they're distilling like you know it's an absurd proposition which they admit to like you know how can i distill everything i've learned during my entire

life to 100 pages but they say in every age men have been dishonest and governments corrupt and i was just struck by their their writings really amazing but this propensity for human beings to use lying as a tool and unfortunately an extremely effective tool and so this is what these are the things that pop to my mind when i'm reading this section jobs could seduce and charm people at will and he liked to do so people such as emilio and skull and Skully allowed themselves to believe because Jobs was charming them it meant that he liked and respected him he did not it was an impression that he sometimes fostered by dishing out insincere flattery to those hungry for it in other words lying but Jobs could be charming to people he hated just as easy as he could be insulting to people he liked Emilio didn't see this because

like Skully he was so eager for Jobs' affection. Jobs sometimes avoided the truth. So there's this author that once said of Henry Kissinger, he lies not because it's in his interest. He lies because it's in his nature. So that person's describing Henry Kissinger. Isaac is clearly drawing the parallel to steve jobs it was in jobs nature to mislead or to be so secretive when he felt it was warranted he also indulged in being brutally honest at times this is what makes it so confusing telling the truth that most of us sugarcoat or suppress both the disassembling and the truth telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn't apply to him. So I read, I don't know if you've ever read, it was named one of the

100 greatest books of all time. It's The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which is a biography about Robert Moses. And so a couple of people have asked me am i ever going to do that that book for the podcast i may it's a gigantic book a really detailed story i don't even know if i'd be good enough to make a podcast i i mean it's really the the material is fascinating so that is one of the reasons i would want to do it just unbelievable but anyways the same author robert carl has done this multiple uh volume biography on lyon B. Johnson. And so I haven't read the actual books, but I have the audiobooks. And I've been listening to the first book in that four-part series.

And what I'm struck by is they talk about Lyndon B. Johnson, which is very similar to Kissinger, very similar to Jobs, just lied with impunity. His nickname, I think they call him Bull, short for like bullshit or bullcrap. And he lied all the time about everything, and he used it as a tool. And I thought that when I heard that, when I think about Kissinger, when I think about Jobs, it's the same thing. He lies not because it's in his interest, but because it's in his nature. What do you do with information like that?

And why is it so effective? I don't know the answer. It's something worth thinking about. I don't even know if we'll ever figure out the answer. In moving ahead in the book, though, there is something that's interesting where Steve is talking about wrestling with the decision to come back or not come back, right? To be a full-time CEO and actually run Apple. And he's going to say something here that's fascinating. I'm going to read the paragraph and then I'm going to summarize that because I think it's a good framework. It's the Steve, if you really think about it, it's a Steve Jobs framework for deciding what to work on. We'd just taken Pixar public and I was happy being CEO there. I never knew of anyone who served as CEO of two public companies and I wasn't sure if it

was legal. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was enjoying spending more time with my family. I was torn. I knew Apple was a mess. So I wondered, do I want to give up the nice lifestyle I have? What are all the Pixar shareholders going to think? I talked to people I respected. I called Andy Grove at about eight one Saturday morning. I gave him the pros and cons. And in the middle, he stopped me and said, Steve, I don't give a shit about Apple. I was stunned. It was then I realized I do give a shit about Apple. I started it and it's a good thing to have in the world. That's when I decided to go back on a temporary basis to help them hire a CEO. And so if you think about what he's saying there, it's like he just developed a good framework that will help you and I decide what we should be working on. Number one,

it's a two-step framework. Number one, do you give a shit about it? Number two, is it a good thing to have in the world? If you answered yes twice, then you have to do it even if it's risky. So he's coming back as interim CEO and with the guys that they're going to have, like they're still looking for a new CEO. So I'm going to fast forward because this is just wild that again, it goes back to the same thing as Steve, just not, you know, just not refusing to bend to other people's will. And so he doesn't like the fact that the board even dares questions him instead of declaring victory and thanking the board jobs, continued to see that having to answer to a board, he doesn't like the fact that the board even dares questions him. Instead of declaring victory and thanking the board, Jobs continued to see that having to answer to a board he didn't respect. Stop this train. This isn't going to work.

He's telling the board here. This company is in shambles and I don't have time to wet nurse the board. So I need all of you to resign or else I'm going to resign and not come back on Monday. Most members of the board were aghast. Jobs was still refusing to commit himself to come back full time or being anything more than than an advisor also he wasn't even ico yet not interim ceo so just an advisor which makes it even crazier uh before anything more than advisor yet he felt he had the power to force them to leave and he did that's the crazy part they the hard truth however was that he did have the power over them they could not afford for him to starve off in a fury nor was the prospect of remaining on

the an apple board member very enticing by them. Remember, they're very close to bankruptcy. They're leaderless. Their product lineups, they're in a disarray. Among those being asked to resign was Mike Marcula, who in 1976 as a young venture capitalist had visited the Jobs Garage, fallen in love with the nascent computer on the workbench, guaranteed a $250,000 line of credit, and became the third partner and one-third owner of the new company. Over the subsequent two decades, he was the one constant. So when the time came to ask him to resign from the Apple board, Jobs drove to his house to do it personally. And this is just fantastic parting advice. They spent the rest of the time talking about where Apple should focus in the future. Jobs' ambition was to build a company that would endure.

And he asked Markkula what the formula for that would be. Markkula replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Markkula told him, you've got to reinvent the company. You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis. So eventually Jobs realizes, I'm coming back full time. He stacks the board. He invites Bill Campbell, Larry Ellison.

People are basically going to rubber stamp whatever he wants to do. And so what was fascinating to me, as I told you earlier, when Bob Iger took over Disney, his first call was to his daughters, then to Steve Jobs, right? Steve's first call is to Bill Gates. Jobs recalled, I called up Bill and

said, I'm going to turn this thing around. I need help. Microsoft was walking all over Apple's patents. And I said, if we keep up our lawsuits, a few years from now, we could win a billion dollar patent suit. You know it and I know it. But Apple's not going to survive that long if we're at war. I know that. So let's figure out how to sell this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple. So it has a stake in our success. Remember, he needs money right now. And so it says, well, when I recounted to him what Jobs said, Gates agreed it was accurate. This was fantastic because I just love simple deals. And so does I mean, everybody likes that. Even Gates. Gates recalled that he had been negotiating with Emilio for six months,

and the proposals kept getting longer and more complicated. So Steve comes in and says, hey, that deal's too complicated. What I want is a simple deal. I want the commitment, and I want an investment. We put that together in just a few weeks. So this is the part of the story where he starts to learn how to build a great company, not just great products. An idea that he said one time that stuck in my mind, I love because, you know, it's we can love

building a great product. But if you don't become a great marketing person, a great marketing team, great marketing company, and that product's not going to reach as many people as possible. And Steve said, I want every person on the planet to have an Apple device and to be able to do that, Apple has to become a great marketing company. So he actions express priority, right? So he makes this a priority. Starting with the Think Different campaign and continuing through the rest of his years at Apple, Jobs held a three-hour meeting every Wednesday afternoon with his top agency, Marketing and Communications People, to kick around messaging strategy. There's not a CEO on the planet who deals with marketing the way Steve does, says Cloud. This is the guy that ran the ad agency. Every Wednesday, he approves each new commercial, print ad, and billboard.

So this book goes into a lot of detail of what he actually does. He has to lay off a bunch of people to get rid of like 70% of the products. Focuses on just just four i did an entire podcast on this that goes in more detail that the biography of jonathan ive that's founders number 178 that one goes into great detail because jonathan was there the entire time he he started there before when steve jobs was gone and he winds up coming back and being steve's i think he calls him his spiritual like a spiritual partner i'm about to get into that right now so i'm if you want to know more about that detail you can obviously read the book but listen to that podcast because he's just got

great ideas and really just comes down to focusing and a lot of big companies have become an autopilot you can you can turn off autopilot by constantly asking yourself why am i doing what i'm doing and he discovered that no one in apple said why are we making printers why are we making 16 different versions of the macintosh which one should i test and he asked like simple questions like okay there's a fort there's a macintosh 1400 goes all the way up to like 8400 some nonsense like that he goes which one should i tell my friend to buy that's a very simple question no one can answer the question so he knew he's in big trouble this is more about steve's relationship though i want to get into this point because again he respects talent he respects just like

he respected lassiter grove all these other people most people in steve's life are replaceable but not johnny jobs described to me his respect for ive the difference that johnny has made not only at apple but in the world is huge he is a wickedly intelligent person in all ways. He picks up stuff like that. He picks up stuff and it just clicks. He understands what we do at our core better than anyone. If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it's him. He and I think most of the products together and then pull others in and say, hey, what do you think about this? He gets the picture as well as the most as the most infinitesimal details about each product and he understands that apple is a product company he's not just a designer that's why he works directly for me he has more operational power than anyone else else

at apple except me there's no one who can tell him what to do or to butt out that is the way i set it up and so we're still in the part where he's learning how to build a great company. Part of that is getting lieutenants, people like Johnny in design. He's about to hire and promote Tim Cook, getting the talented lieutenants that actually help him run the company. And remember this for later, because this is advice he gives to other entrepreneurs right before he dies as well. At this point in his career, he became a manager. His management mantra was focus.

He eliminated excess product lines and cut extraneous features in the new operating system software. He also let go of his control freak desire to manufacture products in his own factories. That's why I said read that next book because he literally thought. He's like, you know, same way if you want to buy amw you can fly over to their factory and watch it being made he's like people are going to buy next computers are going to fly to my factory in california and watch it being made no they're not no they're not he let go of his control freak desire to manufacture products in his own factories instead outsourced them uh the making of everything from circuit boards to the finished computers and he enforced on apple apple suppliers a rigorous discipline. This is like the unsexy,

but very important details of actually making a great company, right? Under Steve Jobs, there was zero tolerance for not performing. He winds up putting so much pressure on the head of operations, this guy's going to quit. After three months, Apple's head of operation decided he couldn't handle the pressure and he quit. For most of the year, Jobs ran operations himself until he meets Tim Cook. in 1998 he met tim cook who was 37 years old and he was working as a supply chain manager at compact uh tim cook would grow into an indispensable backstage partner in running apple as jobs are called i realized that he and i saw things exactly the same way so the way he's describing his relationship with cook on operations

is very similar to how he described his relationship with with jonathan on design and product creation before i try um it wasn't long before i trusted him to know exactly what to do he had the same vision i did and we could interact at a high strategic level and i could just forget about a lot of things unless he came and pinged me so the fundamental level the fundamental thought rather of him becoming a great manager is the same thing as building a great product. But understanding to do this, you need high quality people in all areas of your company. So it's the quality of people above all. And Ed Catmull has a really simple way to think about this. He's like, ideas come from people, therefore people are more important than ideas.

He's like, listen, if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they're going to screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they'll rethink it and they'll come up with something better. And so this is Steve talking about how important it is making sure he's got the best people around him. For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who's 50 times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that. A players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that's what I decided to try and do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire

somebody, even if they're going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do. So every chapter for the rest of the book centers around a product that they made, right? So you have the iMac, you have the iPod, you have the iPhone, you have the Apple stores. There's something he says about the Apple stores is fascinating because when he proposed to opening a store, it's at the same time that Dell is having huge success without stores and Gateway is closing their stores. Gateway would put their stores, they'd optimize for cheap rent. And as a result, you'd be way out far and you'd have like 200 people coming into the store on a weekly basis. This just wasn't enough. And Steve's point was like, no, you should go to where your customers are. And so he says there was no tech stores in the mall. The conventional wisdom was that a consumer when making a major and infrequent purchase, such as a computer, would be willing to drive to a less convenient location where the rent would be cheaper. Jobs disagreed. Apple stores should be

in high traffic areas, no matter how expensive. We may not be able to get them to drive 10 miles to check out our products, but we can get them to walk 10 feet if they're passing by they will drop in out of curiosity and then if we make it inviting enough once uh and once we get a chance to show them what we have we will win i want to bring to your attention this really unique idea uh that he does and they wind up dominating i think i don't even know what it was it was like 80 or 90% of the music player market went to being iPods. It went to accounting, I think, for like half of Apple's revenue before the iPhone.

It's just bananas. But what was fascinating to me is that Steve always believed in tight product integration, right? And he believed that for multiple decades. He couldn't have predicted when he had that idea when he was in his 20s, that when he was in his 50s, that it would help destroy other music players.

Check what he did here. It was fascinating realized that they're well let me just read to you jobs realized that there was yet another advantage to the fact that apple had an integrated system of computer software and device it meant that sales of ipods would drive sales of the imac okay that makes sense this is really fascinating this is a fascinating part that in turn meant that he could take money that Apple was spending on iMac advertising and shift it into spending on iPod ads. This is what he says. I had this crazy idea that we could sell just as many Macs by advertising the iPod. So I moved $75 million of advertising money to the iPod, even though the category didn't justify one hundredth of that. That meant we completely dominated the market for

music players we outspent everybody by a factor of a hundred so while he comes out with the ipod he winds up creating the itunes store does all these deals with the the record companies nobody could hammer out and this is just hilarious because this is when itunes was only available on the mac before it's released on Windows. And so we get this email, this email from Bill Gates after the iTunes store was released. And it's funny because I love – they're so different, but I like studying both of them, like their early versions of them. And so throughout this book, we have this ongoing commentary that happens constantly popping up. Bill Gates just giving us this commentary on the history of Apple and what Steve's doing. It's just, I find this hilarious.

I don't know why, but he says Bill Gates himself weighed in at 10 46 PM that night. His subject line, Apple's jobs again, indicated his frustration. Steve Jobs' ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things he said he expressed surprise that jobs had been able to convince the music companies to go along with his store this is very strange to me he said the music company's own operations offer a service that is truly unfriendly to the user they were all trying to build their own version of this transition to digital some some of them had like subscription services that are very popular now. Others had the ability to like buy a digital download, right? But they were terrible products. Somehow they decided to give Apple the ability to

do something pretty good. Now that Jobs has done it, we need to move fast to get something where the user interface and rights are as good, even though Jobs has us a bit flat footed again. We can move quick and both match and do stuff better it was an astonishing private admission microsoft had again been caught flat-footed and it would again try to catch up by copying apple and so they released their own ipod like version of the ipod and their store and jobs response to this was very i a very astute observation about the importance of your motivation. Like, why are you doing what you're doing? If you truly love what you do, it's going to show.

Microsoft was able to finally release its own answer to the iPod. It was called the Zune, and it looked like an iPod but clunkier. Jobs was brutal about the cause of the Zune's uninspired design and market weakness. I think it winds up taking like 5% of the market. It says, the older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zoom was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves.

And when you're doing something for yourself or your best friend or your family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much. So like I mentioned earlier, what makes this book unique is the fact that Isaacson and Jobs work so closely together. There's a lot of talks and they're having these talks when Jobs knows he's going to die. This is a few months before he dies. And Steve and Walter are at Steve's house listening to music and reflecting on life. And I think he said he's talking here about what musician he likes the best. But I really think it talks about trying to build a product or a company that no one else could.

At the end of this listening session, I asked him a well-worn question. The Beatles or the Stones? If the vault was on fire and I could grab only one set of tapes, I would grab the Beatles, he answered. The hard one would be between the Beatles and Dylan. Somebody, and this is the main point where I'm reading this to you, somebody else could have replicated the Stones. No one could have been Dylan or the Beatles. And so this is another example. This is Jobs and what he learned about the creative process from the Beatles. So he has this bootleg CD that contains a dozen or so tape lessons, sessions, excuse me, of the Beatles revising the song Strawberry Fields Forever, I think, or maybe the album.

It became the musical score to his philosophy on how to perfect a product that this is another example of like i don't think it's obvious that jobs just takes lessons from everything thinks about the principles behind them not the not the what but the how right and applies them to apple so he's going to take this bootleg cd of the beatles creative process and realize hey it's the same thing as what i'm doing this is fascinating so he says he put it on while describing what it had taught him. And so it's playing in the background when we're having this conversation. It's a complex song and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take

and makes the band go back and revise a chord. Did you hear that little detour they took? It didn't work. so they went back and started from where they were. It's so raw in this version. It actually makes them sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they didn't just stop. Or yet they just didn't stop. They were such perfectionists that they kept going and going. This made a big impression on me when I As he listens to the third take, he points out how the instrumentation had gotten more complex. The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we make of a new notebook or iPod.

We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design or the buttons or how the function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end, it just gets better. And soon it's like, wow, how did they do that? Where are the screws? so let's go into where the reality distortion field what i mentioned earlier is just does it's not helpful and this is in 2003 remember he dies in 2011 they first discover tumor in the pancreas in 2003 to the horror of his friends and his wife jobs decided not to have surgery to remove the tumor which was

the only accepted medical approach. I really didn't want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work, he told me. Years later, with a hint of regret, he kept to a strict vegan diet with large quantities of fresh carrot and fresh juices. To that regimen, he added acupuncture, a variety of herbal remedies, and occasionally a few other treatments he found on the internet. Are you kidding me? Or by consulting people around the country, including a psychic. His friends repeatedly urged him to have surgery and chemotherapy. Steve talked to me when he was trying to cure himself by eating horse shit.

And horse shit roots. And I told him he was crazy, Andy Grove recalled. Jobs' obstinacy lasted for nine months after his diagnosis. Part of it was the product of the dark side of his reality distortion field. In June 2004, so now nine months later, a CAT scan showed that the tumor had grown and possibly spread. It forced him to face reality, Jobs underwent surgery. They think it's in remission. He'll be okay. 2005, he gives that commencement address. And this is some of the best advice he ever gave. I'm just going to read it to you. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the

most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you're going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. And unfortunately, that diagnosis, thinking that he was in remission, that he was going to be fine because when he was giving that speech, he says, you know, I wound up being okay, was not accurate. So 2003, discovery. 2004, surgery. 2005, healed. 2008, spread. And not only did he die young, I think it was 56, but when you hear about the way his last three years of his

life were, it's not that he got 56 healthy years. He was in pain. And I'm going to read this to you now. By the beginning of 2008, it was clear to Jobs and his doctors that the cancer was spreading. He was also being treated for pain, usually with morphine. He was having eating problems and losing weight, partly because he had lost so much of his pancreas. The cancer and morphine reduced his appetite. Since his early teens, he had indulged his weird obsession with extremely restrictive diets and fast. In early 2008, Jobs' eating disorder got worse. It was stressful for his family as they watched him lose 40 pounds

during the spring of 2008. This is going to lead to a second medical leave, the third one he doesn't return from. Jobs' tumor had metastasized into his liver and was wreaking havoc in effect his body was devouring itself this stuff's hard to read he was in personal denial about this he was very sick at this point and he was in excruciating pain he became very emotional both running and crying at times and he starts thinking about the fact that he's not going to see his kids grow up and so in 2009 he almost dies from liver failure he was declining rapidly by his first week by the first week in march and the waiting time for a liver transplant was projected to be 21 days it

was dreadful his wife said it didn't look like we'd make it in time. Every day became more excruciating. Eventually, 21 days later, on March 29th, or 21st, we wound up getting a liver. The transplant was a success, but not reassuring. When the doctors took out his liver, they found spots on the thin membrane that surrounded his internal organs.

In addition, there were tumors throughout the liver which meant it was likely that the cancer had migrated elsewhere as well he's in the hospital this part is just he's like on death's door and he's still taking visitors from apple jobs mood was boyd boyd risen whatever when he when he was able to have visitors from apple Tim Cook would come down regularly and fill him in on the progress of new products you could see him brighten up every time the talk turned to Apple what's wild they're going over like product they're talking about products and everything in the hospital room if you remember the biography I did in Walt

Disney Walt Disney was reviewing plans he was dying of lung cancer he's in the hospital he's reviewing plans for Disney World in his hospital room right before he dies. You see the same thing playing out. I mean, in this case, Jobs survives for like another year and a half, I think two years from this point. We see the same thing playing out with the same idea playing out with Steve Jobs. And after this, he goes back and he has one. He's working on the iPad before he has to go on medical leave for the final time. And it's just, I'm not going to keep reading this because it's, you know, if you know anybody that's died of cancer, if you have a loved one, you know the process.

What they just said, the body eats itself. I think it's a description that I just read. I think it's probably, it's the worst way to die. And Jobs had to go through that and everybody had to see that. This is how him and his wife celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. And this is, I think, a year before he dies. He says he found the photographs of the wedding and had large prints made on thick paper boards and placed it in an elegant box. He found the note and then he included a note in the box.

And so he's reading this, what he wrote to his wife. He says, We didn't know much about each other 20 years ago. We were guided by our intuition. You swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married in Yosemite. Years passed.

Kids came. Good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect had endured and grown. We've been through so much together, and here we we are right back to where we started 20 years ago, older and wiser, with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life's joys, sufferings, secrets, and wonders, and we're still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground. By the end, he's reading this to Walter, to Isaacson, to the author. By the end of this, he was crying uncontrollably.

When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made sets of the pictures for each of his kids. I thought they might like to see that I was young once. And so his wife is also talking to Walter and making sure he knows what to put in the book because this is the end. This is the last few months of his life. She wanted to make sure, she said, that both sides of his personality were reflected in the book and put into context. Like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he's not extraordinary in every realm. He finally has to resign for the last time from Apple. And it's just amazing that the author was there to ask him this question.

And when I asked how it really felt to be relinquishing control of the company he had built, his tone turned wistful and he shifted into the past tense. I've had a very lucky career, a very lucky life. I've done all that I can do. And then there's a lot of detail about how weak and sick, he can't get out of bed, can barely talk.

And they're still having meetings. And so this just tore me up man because uh he's talking about like why why he's doing the book after two hours he grew quiet so i got off the bed and started to leave wait he said as he waved to me to sit back down it took a minute or two for him to regain energy to talk. I've had a lot of trepidation about this project, he finally said, referring to his decision to cooperate with this book. I was really worried. Why did you do it? I asked. I wanted my kids to know me, he said. I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn't always there for them and I wanted them to know why and to understand

what I did. In 2011, when the situation seemed so dire, his daughter Lisa got back in touch after more than a year. The visit went well. Jobs was in a mood to mend fences and express his affection for those around him. I'm very glad she came. It helped settle a lot of things in me, he said. Jobs had another visit that month from someone who wanted to repair fences. Google's co-founder Larry Page, who lived less than three blocks away, had just announced plans to retake the reins

of his company from Eric Schmidt. He knew how to flatter Jobs. He asked if he could come by and get tips on how to be a good CEO. Jobs was still furious at Google. My first thought was, fuck you, he recounted. But then I thought about it, and I realized that everybody helped me when I was young, from Bill Hewlett to the guy down the block who worked at HP. So I called him back and said, sure. Page came over, sat in Jobs' living room, and listened to his ideas on building great products and durable companies.

Jobs recalled, We talked a lot about focus and choosing people, how to know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up.

It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest because they're dragging you down. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. I tried to be as helpful as I could. I will continue to do that. That's how I'm going to spend part of the time I have left. I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here

and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay. And he's still doing that. He's still helping teach the next generation more than a decade after he died. And unfortunately, he can't do that in person. But because of books like this, we have the ability to have a one-sided conversation with him, to know about how he lived his life, to know the ideas that he learned and the lessons he wanted to pass on. Highly recommend reading the book. If you're going to buy the book,

use the link that's in the show notes and you're supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 214 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.