The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle From the New York Times' Tripp Mickle, the dramatic, untold story inside Apple after the passing of Steve Jobs by following his top lieutenants—Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer, and Tim Cook, the COO-turned-CEO—and how the fading of the former and the rise of the latter led to Apple losing its soul. Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator’s death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration. In many ways, Cook was Ive’s opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions. Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple’s valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world’s stock market into freefall with a single sentence. Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple’s history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve. His research shows the company’s success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive’s departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple’s shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.

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Today we have an amazing author and journalist on the show. He's the author of a new book that just came out May 3rd, 2022. The book is titled After Steve, How Apple Became a Trillion Dollar Company and Lost His Soul by Trip Mickel. He's going to be on the show talking to us about this today, and it's going to be pretty darn amazing. I'm excited already. He covers Google and its parent company, Alphabet, in ink for the Wall Street Journal. He previously served as the journal's reporter on Apple Inc., following a stint covering the alcohol and tobacco industries. Prior to joining the journal, Mr. Mickle worked as a sports writer at Sports Business Journal and Newsday. He's a graduate of Wake Forest University.

So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the book. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs, please. At Trip Mickle is the Twitter handle. That's the easiest place to find me. And that's two Ps. There you go. So what motivated you on to write this book?

You know, it was interesting. In 2017, shortly after I arrived in Silicon Valley from Atlanta, where I'd been covering alcohol and tobacco for the Wall Street Journal, I met with a longtime Silicon Valley reporter for a cup of coffee. And he said, you know, if I were going to look into one thing at Apple, I'd look into Johnny Ive and a place called The Battery, which is a private club in town. He didn't have any more insight or perspective than that. And it just piqued my curiosity. And as I began to ask questions about it, I learned that Johnny Ive had essentially decamped to the battery and begun working from there as opposed to going into the office. And I was curious about, well, why is that?

And the more questions I asked, the more I learned that Johnny Ive had gradually grown disillusioned or disenchanted with Apple as it got to be a bigger company and was essentially working part-time for the company. And soon he would exit. And so I just kept wondering, why would somebody who played such a critical role in turning this company around and bringing it from the brink of bankruptcy to the highest heights of the financial world, why would he decide to walk away from this place that he loved? And that was the real impetus for embarking on this project. That's true. That's true.

So he left in, what, 2019 officially? Summer of 19, yes. But he kind of left before that. Right, right. It's a departure in phases. And really, if you look at the way his exit occurred, I mean, it's a good lesson for all of us about how do you lead a company? What is the right way to do it?

But basically, he was pretty fatigued and pretty burned out after working on the Apple launch and also in dealing with the death of his close friend and longtime partner in developing products, Sleep Jobs, and came into Tim Cook and said, look, I need to take a break. I want to get out of here maybe. And they struck an agreement in 2015 for him to go part-time. And that was the beginning of these kind of stage exits that ultimately culminated with him

departing in 2019. Yeah. I don't know if the audio is starting to break just a bit. I don't know if it's a Bluetooth maybe thing? I can try to go with just straight speakers. That works. That's awesome. No problem at all.

That's what editing's for so um so give us the arcing overall arcing of the book if you would please yeah well the the arc of the book is really um well the book really follows the two uh the two lieutenants who steve jobs left behind to to make sure the company carried on after his death. And that's Tim Cook and Johnny Ive. The book literally goes chapter by chapter between the two of them and their respective stories, both from the moment of Steve Jobs' death and their early life to when they arrived at Apple and helped turn it around through the time after Steve Jobs' death when Johnny Ive is finding himself inside a company that's changing. He's struggling with that.

And Tim Cook simultaneously is working to define what Apple should be in a new era after Jobs. So it's kind of a two-part story. It's focused on two central figures and the roles they played, making sure Apple endured after Jobs' death. Yeah, and it's like they went from being a hardware company, which Steve was, of course, from his father being a carpenter, he was obsessed with building things and creating things and hardware. And after he died, it seemed like that was kind of a huge vacuous uh sucking sound that just there was no one really to i mean joni did most of the design work i think uh but you

know there really was no one to build you know the sort of the sort of mind that he had to design these things right i mean you know the first question that was asked after Jobs' death, in large part because Jobs had put himself front and center and made himself known for being central to the product development process. There was an understanding outside of Apple that, well, without him, they're not going to be able to create anything. So for those who were left behind, the top 10 or so leaders at Apple, the pressure was intense to prove the doubters wrong. And Johnny Ive took on and assumed a lot of the responsibility for doing that by pushing the Apple Watch project forward. And that's really to date the only product that they've introduced, the only new category that they've introduced since JobsDev.

Yeah. There was an interesting article you wrote in the New York Times. I believe this is your article. Yeah. How technocrats triumphed at Apple. And I think there's a comment here about how he felt like he, Joni left the uh company behind to the accountants right right there's a period of time after job's death about four years three or four years later where tim cook begins to to revamp the the apple board of directors um pretty common for a CEO to refashion a board and his own image. And Tim Cook began to do that as Mickey Drexler, who helped make Gap a household name and birth J. Crew. When he left the board, Tim Cook decided to replace him with the former CFO of Boeing. And Johnny Ive just was apoplectic about why you would replace somebody with marketing sensibilities with somebody who had financial or operational experience.

And it happened several times. But when this particular board member was put on the board, Johnny's reaction was, he's just another one of those expletive accountants. He was pretty dismissive of it. And that was reflective of this philosophy that Jobs had, that the operations people and the legal team and the accountants and the financiers at the company, that should be the caboose at Apple, and the engine should be the creative side of the company. It should be the engineers and the designers and the marketers. They were

the ones who were driving product forward. And over time, the caboose became the engine for Apple as it moved forward in the post-jobs era. Is my assessment correct then? It seems like after Steve died, there just really wasn't anybody who replaced him, especially when it came to hardware. And so what Apple and Tim Cook were stuck with was how do we squeeze the ever-living margin out of every little piece of hair thing that we can? I mean, you know, at one point they quit shipping power, the power plugs, you know, they quit shipping the little headphones. I mean, it seems like, I mean, I look at my Apple friends, and it seems like they're nickel and dime to death. Like, you add up what they pay for all the services that they buy,

and it's like, it's very expensive. They love it, but it seems like, you know, just everything they've done over the last, since Steve Jobs' passing, has just been able to squeeze out so many. And I think he, Tim Cook said at one point that they were now a services company and not a hardware company. Do I have that correct? They put the emphasis on services under Tim Cook.

I mean, to your point about jobs, he was just uniquely gifted. Very few people who don't have an education in engineering can walk in and guide an engineer on what to do. He just, he had the skill of a chief technologist and the skill of a chief marketing officer and the skill of an aesthetic eye of a chief designer. So you can't really replace somebody like that. In other words, like he was a unicorn and the unicorn, the unicorn died. And so they had to figure out how to function without him. And one of the things you see Tim Cook begin to do as pressure intensifies from Wall Street on you've got to deliver more growth

is that he looks around Apple's offerings and figures out that, well, we've essentially built a giant cable distribution network, perhaps the world's largest. It transcends borders. We have a billion iPhones around the world. What can we do to maximize the opportunity of that? And they lean into what he calls the services business, which is the sale of apps and iCloud and the development of Apple Music and the development of TV Plus. And these become a real driver for the way Wall Street begins to reconsider the value of Apple.

And it's part of the reason that they went from being a $1 trillion company to a $2 trillion company so quickly. And we're on the cusp of becoming a $3 trillion company earlier this year before the market really lost a lot of its energy. Yeah, I think they were the first to push through the trillion mark, weren't they? Yeah, yeah. They were the first trillion mark, first $2 trillion mark. I mean, they've set a lot of mile markers when it comes to valuation in the public sphere. Well, I mean, so in your book, you entitled it How the Company Lost Its Soul, basically. It's a two-part there, Chris.

I want to emphasize it's how they became a trillion-dollar company, which is the part we were just talking about, the Tim Cook part of the story. And then How the Company Lost Its Soul is the flip side of that subtitle. And that speaks to Johnny Ives' departure. Johnny, as you may know, was considered by Steve Jobs to be a spiritual partner, essentially a creative soulmate. He embodied some of the creative sensibilities. He was really the personification of the creative sensibilities of the company. And he ultimately decides to leave as the company's focus shifts and becomes more about services as opposed to hardware and product. Yeah. Do you get a chance to interview either Joni or Tim Cook?

You know, I can't get into the sourcing for the book. I can talk to you about courting the opinion and perspective of the people around Tim Cook and Johnny Ive. I think both of them talk to a lot of people that they work with regularly. So there are many ways that you can get their perspective and make sure that's reflected in the book. Yeah. It says here on Amazon you interviewed more than 200 current and former Apple executives as well. Yeah, yeah. It was a real labor of love and took a considerable amount of time to put together the book

and make sure that the narrative was something that would be compelling for readers to read. Was there ever any battles between, you know,oni and and cook over over did did joni put up a fight or did this thing just slowly go down the you know over time it just kind of drowned the frog drowned on its own in the boiling water i guess there's really an unspoken power struggle um there's not a direct confrontation between the two of them you have to remember remember, this is really like a family. Their relationship with Steve Jobs, their individual relationships with Steve Jobs were so strong and they have strong relationships with Lorraine Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow.

It's not a family that's prone to confrontation. So what you have is essentially a slow and steady drift apart. And the culmination or the result of that is what amounts to kind of a corporate divorce, if you will, where one leaves and the other stays at the house and one moves out. That's somewhat of what's happened here. Yeah. Did Steve, do you think Steve thought that maybe Joni would carry his mantle onward and creating new hardware and that they would be fine? Or do you think Steve envisioned this is what Apple would have become? What's your opinion on that? Steve tried to position Joni Ive to carry on his legacy, he, in speaking with Walter Isaacson before his death,

told his biographer, Isaacson, that Johnny was the second most powerful person at Apple after Steve Jobs himself. I mean, essentially made sure that the world knew how important Johnny Ive was to what Apple could do and should be in the future. I don't think Steve Jobs or anybody at Apple could have anticipated at the time of his death how large the company would become. At the time of his death, they were shipping about 20 million iPhones on an annual basis. They're now shipping 10 times that, 200 million a year. And in a way, you can kind of think of it, of the analogy of what happened at the company to being something like the story of an Olympic gymnast

who shows up at the Olympics at the age of 14 and is spry and naive about the world and just goes out on the floor and does a routine that nobody's ever seen before and wins every gold medal and does things that are otherworldly and then returns four years later and struggles with having grown a couple of inches and not being able to do all the same things still gold medal performer but you know the the artfulness that's behind some of that performance is lost and sacrificed just as a consequence of growth and age. And that's sort of what has happened at Apple itself.

Yeah. It's kind of like when Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. That one, I'm like, I'm trying to wrap my head around that one. You know, it was the gold medal analogy in the Olympics. You're mild. It was the gold medal thing.

I grew up with Wheaties and Bruce Jenner on the box of Wheaties. You know, 1976 Olympics, I think it was. I grew up, hey, this guy's cool, man. You know, it's cool what he wants to do, too. But I just attributed the gold medal thing there. So what are some things you think are going to surprise you or anything you want to tease out in the book? Maybe stories that people haven't heard of that you've, you've dug up.

I mean, these are real character studies of these two individuals. I think the things that surprised me most were, you know, on the, on the Johnny I front were learning that people around him really question whether or not he has x-ray vision or some superpower that that they don't have he has a way of seeing the world that's foreign to them there was this this this moment that a colleague of of his uh told me about where they were seated at a bar in uh in asia and it was like a long metal bar about 30 feet long and johnny and i was really weary after working on the factory floors for a long time and he just kind of looks down this bar and says i can see every seam in

this bar and the guy looks down the bar and he shakes his head because all he can see is like pure silver and he looks at johnny and says your life must be fucking miserable man you know and and like that's only one example there's another where like he in his studio in san francisco kept a glass table on four legs so it was suspended on four legs and he would walk in and notice when it began to bow uh in the middle like a centimeter or so and everybody else would walk in he'd say we need to replace the the glass it's it's beginning to bow And everybody else would walk in and he'd say, we need to replace the glass. It's beginning to bow. And everybody else would walk over and look at it. And they couldn't tell a lick of difference between the way it looked the first day it arrived and the way it looked that day. And they only had to trust his judgment and assessment that it was actually beginning to

change. So you get a real flavor for who he is as an individual. They used to joke that he could see dead people inside the company because he just saw defections in products that escaped the eyes of everyone else. Wait, I can see dead people too. Can't everybody see dead people? And then on the flip side, on Tim Cook, I'm from the southeast. I grew up in North Carolina. And so when I went to Alabama to visit his hometown of Robertsdale, I was really surprised. I expected the town to think of him as local boy done good, right?

I mean, here's this guy from a small town who now runs the world, for most of the past decade, has run the world's largest company. It's quite an achievement for somebody from a town like that. And I thought they would view him as a local boy done good. But instead, he's a bit of a pariah there. And he's a pariah in part because he talked publicly in 2013, 2014 about witnessing a cross burning in the town. And a lot of his, a lot of the, a lot of his neighbors and people who grew up with him question whether or not that actually happened and have real doubts about it and have challenged him on it. And Tim stood by his story,

but either because they don't believe it or because they, they don't like that it's, you it's put the town in a negative light. He's a bit of a pariah there, and that's just not something I expected. Wow, that's really interesting. You know, Tim has done good for Apple. I mean, Steve was – was it Walter Isaacson wrote? We all kind of found out what an asshole he was. And those of, you know, we talked earlier about some of my friends that worked at Apple and knew, you know, Steve wasn't the nicest huggy person in the world.

And, you know, and so Tim Cook was kind of the great politician after taking over from Steve. You know, he did so many great things and he was great at, you know, talking from everyone to presidents, working with the Chinese. And I think you detail a lot of that in your book, don't you? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we talked a little bit about Tim's efficiency and kind of identifying the services opportunity and building that out. But perhaps one of the things that may be his greatest achievement from a business perspective, and the book details this, is the six years that he spent working with China Mobile and Chinese bureaucrats to make sure that China Mobile would begin selling the iPhone. That started in 2014, and it opened the iPhone to a market of 700 million people. That's like double the population of the U.S., right?

And you can easily understand why all of a sudden Prana became a fifth of Apple's sales in the wake of that, because the iPhone just exploded there. This was around the time of the introduction of the iPhone 6. It was the first big iPhone. People were standing in line everywhere. They really wanted that phone. And Tim Cook made that possible, which is a real testament to his patience and persistence. Those are two skills that he's brought to Apple over the past decade that have served the company well.

Yeah, I think he would be like a great CEO of any company. I mean, he seems very well balanced being a CEO. I remember when I think it was in the first six months or a few months after Steve Jobs passed, and they gave the whole management team like massive bonuses and pay raises. And I remember looking at it just going, well, there's a sea change. Yeah, it wasn't a sea change.

It was actually something that Jobs had worked with the board to put in motion before his death. Oh, really? Yeah. He spoke to members of the management team directly. He encouraged them to stay and support Tim. He really believed that the key to Apple surviving after his death was stability in the leadership ranks. And so they did work with top leaders so that they would stay and make sure that Apple would carry on after Steve's death.

Well, that makes sense now. I just thought it was like, well, Steve's gone. Let's go ahead and pilfer the treasury. Let's go for fun. So I didn't know that. That's interesting to know. Yeah. I mean, he was very thoughtful about the transition and what would need to know. Yeah. I mean, you know, he was very thoughtful about the transition and what

would need to happen. In many ways, we think of Steve Jobs and Apple and the products that it has introduced that have changed our lives, like the iPhone. But in Steve Jobs' mind, the most important product he ever created was Apple itself. So he was very clear on trying to make sure it would carry on and look to some other companies like Walt Disney that struggled after the death of their founder for lessons to be avoided and really tried to make sure that was top of mind in the mind of Tim Cook and others

who were going to be leading the company on. Yeah. Didn't they struggle for like 20 years before Michael Eisner came along? Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of that was just paralysis around the idea of them saying to themselves often, like, well, what would Walt do here? And if you're trying to guess what somebody who's no longer there would have done, you're ultimately a bit doomed to fail because you can never fully think in the way they might have. And so one of the great things that Jobs did for Tim Cook was say, look, do not ask what I would do, just do what's right. And for Cook,

that was really liberating. It allowed him to look at the way the company was structured and say, you know what, I'm not going to get involved in product. That's not an area of the business that I truly understand or am well-versed in. I'm going to cede responsibility for that to other people who are more deeply entrenched in that arena and let them lead that forward. By the same token, in choosing to do that, that's created wrinkles for the company, right? Like that was how they had functioned for so long. And so there was a bit of a shakeout

as you had this group that was accustomed to getting direction from the CEO suddenly find themselves responsible for providing that direction through consensus. Yeah, I just read Robert Iger's book. suddenly find themselves responsible for providing that direction through consensus. Yeah. I just read Robert Iger's book, and it was a great read. And he was kind of brilliant in the same way Tim Cook is, where he looked at, okay, what are the assets? I forget.

There's something we posted the other day. But looking at a company, for instance, Viagra doesn't sell pills. They sell boners. They sell you really selling other than the product you sell? BMW doesn't sell cars. It sells an image. You want everybody to think, I don't know, you're a jerk. I've owned three BMWs, so I'll put that out there in my own self-effacing way because I am a jerk, but there's that. So this is kind of interesting how everything went down. Do you talk anything about the future or what you see is the future without Joni in the book? There's an epilogue that tries to assess what's happened over the past decade.

But really the book is, it's narrative nonfiction. So you're dealing with the history of the company over the past decade more so than predicting the future. I mean, if anything, Apple has shown that, you know, that's a fool's errand to try to predict the future around the company. There were so many people that predicted it would go belly up after Steve Jobs died

and look at it. Instead, it went through the biggest decade of financial growth that we've probably witnessed for a company in history. So I do believe that's a bit of a fool's errand. I kind of wonder how – I mean they have sliced and diced and particulated. Is that the right word? Particulated? It might be even like microscopic nuclear level that they have done where, I mean, just everything. They have taken it down to the nub of what they can squeeze out. I mean, I don't think they give you cables anymore when you buy the phone.

They give you cables, but they don't give you a power power a power connector right it's a yeah yeah it's incumbent on you to figure that out in fact somebody just sued them and i think one because they didn't provide the cable uh the uh and and just it's everything the lightning connector everything they did you know and i i saw this going on i tell my friends i see you see what they're doing they're nickel and and diming you. There's like, there's like Apple TV and then there's, you know, and, and some of it kind of overlaps and it's crazy, but people love the ecosystem of Apple. And like a lot of my friends, like, you know, you really should, you really should use an Android. It's a better phone. Like, but I love the ecosystem. You know, it's, it's very simple. It's very easy. There's no learning curve to it. And people love it. You know, they're like, hey, my email's on my phone, my email's on invest in it because it's not all that different from Coke and Pepsi, right? I mean, if you become a Coke drinker, like there's not a lot that somebody can do to persuade you to grab a Pepsi off the shelf when you walk into a gas station.

You're going to reach for the beverage that you prefer. And Apple's a bit like that. I mean, they've created a walled garden, to your point, where people just feel comfortable there. And so the cost of switching to another provider like Android, it's not worth the headache in the eyes of many people. Did you get a chance to talk to Waz? Did Waz offer anything for the book? I've talked to Waz before. There's a touch about Waz in the book in a chapter that begins at the Steve Jobs Theater when they were just opening that.

And Waz was standing in front of the theater and looking up and marveling at it and just noting that it was like exactly what Steve would have built. You know, he really admired the design sensibilities that were on display there. But again, this is really not the Woz story. This is the post-Woz story. So, yeah, he did not factor largely into what's at play in this book. I know sometimes he's kind of thrown some things. Not too nasty, but i think sometimes he's commented like i don't know about the way things are going but uh and he's made those public i think usually

yeah there was a moment like in that very in that very moment where he's standing in front of the steve jobs theater they were apple was on the cusp of introducing the the iphone 10 and this was going to be such a big moment for them they They were going to try to revitalize the iPhone franchise by introducing Face ID and everything else. And Woz was standing outside saying, you know, I just think the smartphone is boring now. It's a weird point. Like, he does provide a bit of a different view on Apple at times than what you would expect from somebody who was absolutely critical to its very existence. Well, I think this is cool showing the history of, you know, everyone's written a lot about Steve Jobs and the history of that. I mean,

that's almost been beaten to death. Of course, it'll probably, it's like John Kennedy. They'll be writing about that story forever. But I think this is great what you've covered because I don't think a lot of people really delved into this part of the history yet. Well, it's not only that. It's, you know, I mean, yes, it's the history of Apple and that's important over this past decade. But like Apple's a unique company. You're not, there are not many other companies out there where you've had a founder die who was beloved and, and, and detested at the same time, right? I mean, Jobs himself was fairly polarizing for the people who worked for him.

You know, he can be verbally abusive and terrifying and yet so inspiring and capable of pushing people to do work that they didn't think they could do, that people just love working there. And so the grief that swept across this campus, I think, is often overlooked and forgotten. And I try to be sure that that's reflected in the book. I mean, there are moments in the book that I described where Tim Cook had made sure that Job's office was just closed. They didn't clear out anything. They didn't change anything. His daughter's drawings

were still on the whiteboard. Papers were all left as they were. I mean, it's almost like a tomb on campus at Infinite Loop when they were still there. And Cook would occasionally walk in, close the door, and just stand there and say he just felt the need to feel jobs as presence, you know, as he was wrestling with big decisions. And, and so I wanted to be sure that that was a piece of the book as well, just what it was like to grieve and feel the pressure, the external pressure and expectations and try to find a way to push forward this company that so many people care so much about. You know, you bring a really good point that I never thought of. That company had such, I mean, a love for division, at least of Steve Jobs and Steve

Jobs a lot. But they did grieve as a company, huh? And Tim had to guide them through that and take the mantle up and go, okay, we're okay, folks. Here we go. I never really thought about the whole angle of that leadership. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it carried on for a while. I mean, there's a chapter in the book that recounts a moment where they were trying to build out a new brand campaign. This was about a year after Jobs' death. The company all of a sudden was big

enough where it was getting criticized by Greenpeace for not being environmentally conscious enough. It was facing criticism from, you know, from labor activists who were concerned about people at Foxconn factories in China committing suicide. All of a sudden, like people were talking about things unrelated to the iPhone itself. And it was going to do this brand campaign to try to recenter the company in the mind of customers. And the team from Media Arts Lab that does their campaigns came in and one of their ideas was to show a figure like Jobs walking through the hills above Silicon Valley, thinking in the morning and kind of thinking about what the company could be. And the commercial was so moving for the people who were sitting in the room who worked at Apple

that one of the staffers burst out in tears. And they just said, like, well, absolutely, we cannot show this commercial. Nobody who sees a commercial about a dead person is all of a sudden gonna like go out and buy products or you know have some affinity for the company but um but by the same token like it just touched such a nerve because there was just so much grief still there um it would take years to get past that yeah and i didn't i never think about how tim had to work through that. You know, you,

you look at Apple and it's such an extraordinary story. I'm friends with who is the Apple CEO. They had the falling out and Steve left. Yeah. John and I are friends on Facebook. And you know, you go through that whole arc of it and then he comes back. You know, Bill Gates bails him out with what I think was a $100 million loan that basically saved him from bankruptcy.

And you think, what if they'd filed bankruptcy? Like, what would the world be like? Because that iPhone changed the world. What Steve's vision was was he just changed the world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you almost have to start with the iPod, really. I mean, if you don't have the iPod, you don't – or the company doesn't feel inspired to disrupt itself and create the iPhone.

Yeah, and so many times they did disrupt themselves. They ate their own lunch. Like with the iPad, they knew that, like, this is going to kill Mac sales. Well, if we don't kill somebody else, well, it was brilliant and risky. So it was very interesting. Anything more you want to tease out in the book before we go? No, I mean, I'd encourage everyone to pick it up. I mean, I think ultimately you'll get a deeper appreciation for the company itself.

And one thing that I would say is I would encourage people not to fixate on the subtitle itself. There's a reason for that. And I think the book will help shed light on it. It's not my point of view. It's actually the point of view of the people who, some of the people who work there. Well, they definitely did a hell of a job. I mean, I mean, it's, it's just such a, an American story, I guess you can call it a Silicon Valley

type story where you come from the garage and you become a trillion dollar company. I know a lot of people look up to these guys still this day and every reason they should be. I mean, they're not evil people. They run businesses really well. You know, Joni Ive, I think a lot of designers probably look up to him and everything else. So give us your plugs so people can find you more on the interwebs. Yeah, sure.

My reporting is at the New York Times. I'm covering technology there and Apple for them, so you can find me there. And then at Tripp Mikkel is my Twitter handle, and you can keep track of my coverage and anything related to the book on Twitter. That's M-I-C-K-L-E and Tripp with two Ps. There you go. There you go. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Trip. We really appreciate it.

Very insightful. Great book. Yeah. And thanks for having me. I appreciate it. There you go. Thanks, Mons, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Forge has Chris Voss.

Go to youtube.com, Forge has Chris Voss. Order up the book, After Steve, How Apple Became a Trillion Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul. Sounds like that should be like a movie thing dollar company and lost its soul. That should be like a movie thing. And they lost their soul. May 3rd, 2022 it came out. You want to order it up today, wherever fine books are sold. Thanks so much for tuning in.

Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.