Part Three: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs

Robert and Ed reach a crucial crux in the Steve Jobs story: his years of failed product launches and near destruction of Apple. Also, Bono appears.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Anderson was found on the streets of the
Inland Empire about to get on the freeway, covered in
ticks and sleeze. And now she dresses nicer than everyone
I know, Yeah she does.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
She dresses nicer than me. I'm Robert Evans, host of
the podcast that Sophie is trying to ruin by attacking
my sense of fashion. You know whose sense of fashion
is unimpeachable Anderson our guest today, Ed Zetron. Oh yeah,
m hm.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
They love me. They love me, and they love my fashion.
They love how I talk.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, yeah, you are a classy man, Ed, And that's
why you're personally offended by Steve Jobs, a man who
was the opposite of classy in any given situation.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
It's almost like he chose the most classless action every
time look a remark, almost deliberately, but it's uncua. He
was just an awe hole and idioto both.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
I've had to you know, for me, I've had to
go back and forth on this because on paper, I
love the idea of someone going into meetings with all
of these like finance ghoules and like being just like
filthy and gross and like washing your feet at the
table because like, fuck you, like I know you want
you want in on this, and you'll give me the
money anyway. That would be that's kind of a cool

(01:23):
flex if you're just legitimately like a like a punk weirdo,
like like a gross man who's like, yeah, I don't
I just don't give a shit. The fact that Steve's
Steve always has to like dress it up with like, well,
I don't need to shower because I know the secret
of mucus and how to stop yourself from ever needing
to bathe, or like, well, you shouldn't have to wear

(01:44):
shoes because it blocks the energy waves.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
You know, Anderson has a better hygiene.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Ropes easily well, Sleeve Drops really has bad hygiene now
because he's dead.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
Wow, you had for that really fun bad.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
If he were sleep Drops, if he were like this,
if he were just coming in being like, look, man,
I woke up at like an hour before this meeting.
I haven't bathed in four days because I have been
doing nothing but like taking hallucinogens and mashing. And now
I'm going to sell you a computer that's more respectable
than like, actually, you don't understand I'm not gross. You

(02:20):
just have understand health wrong. Let me tell you what
my guru told me. One of those is more annoying
to me.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
This is the one charming thing about future Bosstard Sam
Bankman freed, though, I do kind of respect that he'd
go on meetings with Sequoia Capital or whoever and just
play League of Legends in the background, like I'm I
just gonna down and do this, Like yeah, sure, it's
a shame. He was just like a giant scam artist.
Yeah he was, But I do like it. It's more

(02:47):
respectable for him to just well, I don't know. He
kind of did dress it up though, too, because his
whole thing was like, at least the thing. It's hard
to tell how much of this is Sam and how
much of this is other writers just like looking for
an angle, but like the I can't not be playing
Legal Legends because my giant brain needs the distraction to focus.
Is kind of like the modern is doing to ADHD

(03:08):
what Steve Jobs did to Eastern mysticism, right where he
like built this this aura around himself.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Is this like I went to the East and I
learned the secrets of the Orient, and now I've brought
back my wisdom to incorporate into capitalism. Right, that's just
the back then version of like, well, my ADHD gives
me a super brain, but I can never actually pay
attention to anything Otherwise.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Me and my friends are the only people smart enough
to be nice properly. Yeah, that'll be a good future one.

Speaker 2 (03:37):
Yeah. Yeah, we've done some Sam Bankman Freed. We've done
a lot of Sam Bankmanent Freed. I haven't done a
dedicated one on the effect of altruists, but they are
all in like a continuum from jobs, right, he would
never He would be furious about and like disgusted in
the effective altruists in much the same way as I
think like people who grew up in the Internet using

(03:58):
something awful hate four Chan, Right, yes, but not neither
of them is better than the other. They're just in
a continuum. Right. Actually, I mean something off is a
little better than four Chan.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
But nice to high bar jobs with jobs, he would
have been very angry at how fake it was, and
possibly seen that as a challenge to make a real one.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
But to know, yeah, one of the great I can
talk myself either way into, Like Steve Jobs would have
been the biggest crypto guy or Steve Jobs would have
been a lone voice in the wilderness crying out for
people to stop doing this dumb shit. Yeah, I think
you could go either way, fifty to fifty. I think
it's entirely because he does. We don't really cover it
in these episodes. He does try briefly to get into

(04:38):
social media later and you know, after he's come back.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
To Apple iTunes pain Yeah right.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, yeah, I think that was it. It doesn't it's not
really worth talking about because it's just like, yeah, it
didn't work out, but it's not in a way that's
particularly compelling. What is compelling is how shitty Steve Jobs
was now and a lot of ink has been spilled
about Steve's hatred of meat, and it's to reiterate because like,
that's the kind of thing I think an ethical person,

(05:03):
even if you eat meat, can be like, well, yeah,
like being vegans obviously better as a general rule than
eating factory We can talk about like carbon and like, well,
if you're like hunting or whatever a meat is that
lower carbon costs than you know, or picking up roadkill,
that's all outside of it, but most people can agree, like, yeah,
it's it's reasonable to think that our attitudes towards red

(05:24):
meat as a culture's fucking nuts.

Speaker 5 (05:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Maybe this was the thing that Steve's Steve was right about,
because there is a lot of horrible stuff that goes
on in you know, the animal products industry. But it's
important to reiterate here Steve's hatred of meat does not
stem from any kind of real moral objection, right, Like
he'll make he'll signpost about that from time to time,
but he's pretty clear whenever you really get him talking

(05:48):
about it, that it stems centrally from his these weird
pseudoscientific beliefs he has about health and diet, and this
is a kin to a religion for him, which is
why he got really angry when people would like try
to make him sh right, because he's following he's on tech,
as the scientologists say, so he shouldn't stink, and there's
something wrong with you if you think he does.

Speaker 3 (06:08):
You're the one with the mucus problem, buddy.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, And it's you know, I think that, you know,
I definitely have known people who were who were vegetarianter
vegan who like if a friend you know, or a
family member they were if with ordered meat, they could
get kind of like snippy at that person. I think
I've ever met someone who is a vegetarianter vegan who
would be shitty to a small child for wanting to

(06:31):
order meat, right, And that's the kind of guy Steve
Jobs was. Right. Oh yeah. So when Steve's daughter Lisa
was in her early grade school years, her father came
back into her life and this meant a few awkward
visits at first, mostly centered around trips to like skating
and the like, but they did gradually overtime expand And
one thing I will say for Steve is that his

(06:53):
relationship with his daughter evolves, right, And that does show
he has some capacity for growth as a human being,
which I do think separates him from a lot of
the people who came after him. Like musk Rite, he
does have more ability to grow than some of these
people have. This is not a rapid or a smooth process, though.
One year, Lisa's cousin Sarah came to visit her and

(07:14):
her mother. Now this was back before like Steve had
re entered their lives, when they were still on welfare.
Her aunt Kelly had invited them in and kept a
roof over their head during this, Like really crucial period
of poverty. And so when you know Steve has a
chance to meet with like their daughter, you might think, well,
maybe he'd want to be extra nice to her because
like this family took care of his daughter when he

(07:35):
kind of abandoned her for a period of time. Right,
he seems to have been angry about this instead, and
not angry at himself or even angry at like Kathy,
Chrisanne's sister, which would have been wrong, but at least
more understandable than what he did, which was get incredibly
pissed at this small child, his daughter's cousin, who I
think is about seven. This everything that's happening, this is

(07:55):
he's doing this to like a first or a second
grade girl. So when he meets it's during this family
dinner he's having with Chrisanne and Lisa in Stanford, and
Lisa describes that as soon as she sees him, she's
immediately aware that her father doesn't want to be here,
and his mood was like black soot in the air. Right,
That's how she describes it in her book, which is

(08:16):
wonderfully evocative.

Speaker 6 (08:17):
That's what you want from you that yeah, yeah, So
it comes time to order dinner, and Chrisanne and Lisa
both avoid in a red meter poultry because they know Steve, right,
and they know that if we order red meter, if
we order poultry, he'll get like shitty at us.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Right, So they order like fish or something because I
think he does eat fish. But Sarah, who doesn't know
Steve at all, this seven year very young girl, orders
a hamburger right right. Lisa is immediately horrified. I wanted
to muffle her to protect her and to protect myself.
The trick I learned later was to give him less
surface area to knife, so he would stab someone else,

(08:51):
always someone if not me. Now that is such a
I live with an abuser thing to say abuse, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah, like that is changed my habits to make sure
I didn't get in trouble.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Yeah, and I'm always looking for who can be the
target of their ire other than me, right, like what
because this person is just so unpredicable child age? Yeah,
and here's another kid. So things get more and more tense,
you know, as they're they're waiting for the food to arrive.
And then the food arrives, Sarah gets this burger sat
down in front of her, and Steve gets angrier and

(09:24):
angrier at her quietly at first, until this occurs quote
after we'd taken a few bites, my father's face shifted
and tightened. What's wrong with you? He asked Sarah what
she said She was chewing on a bite of meat. No,
he said, really. At first, it seemed that he was
acting her to answer him. What was wrong with her?
Why did she miss social cues? Why did she have

(09:45):
such a biting, high voice at the top of the register,
always calling for attention as acute as a baby crying?
His voice became high pitched and piercing. You can't even talk,
he said. You can't even eat. You're eating shit. She
looked at him. I could tell she was trying not
to cry. Have you ever thought about how awful your
voice is? He continued, Please stop talking in that awful voice.
I couldn't believe it was happening, even as it was happening. Steve,

(10:08):
stop it right now, my mother said. I could see
him through Sarah's eyes, or I thought I could. If
having a father around was like this, it wasn't so great.
I wish I wasn't here with you, he said. I
don't want to spend another moment of my life with you.
Get yourself together, pull yourself together. He talked loud enough
so the people at other tables could hear him. Sarah
slouched in her chair and looked at the table and
began to cry. Steve, my mother said stop. You should

(10:31):
really consider what's wrong with yourself and try to fix it,
he said. At this point, he got up and went
for the bathroom, leaving a small child stopping behind him.
Like that is wildly hostile. He is worse than Elon Musk.
He is worse than all of them.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
Steve Drugs is the most evil tech guy. I am sorry,
what a fucking scumbag. Jesus is rare that I am
shocked by sheep, but Jesus, h fuck, oh my god.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Whatever, Like the are good people, but like, I don't
think Elon Musk would do that to a seven year old,
Like that's even such.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
He values all fifteen of his children. Yeah, yeah, god, it's.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Not like it'd be one thing if you were to
tell me, like, I can imagine any of these shitty
tech guys like yelling snapping at a kid. I can
imagine most parents snapping kids because everyone does it right.
It's not good. But it's universal. This is not snapping
at a kid. This is like specifically psychologically abusive, noticing
that she has kind of a speech impediment and like
laying into her for that right, mocking her voice, telling

(11:32):
her to get herself together.

Speaker 4 (11:34):
She's like, eight, this you fucking sposed to have together?

Speaker 3 (11:40):
What is she meant to get together?

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Yeah, that's such a wild thing to accuse a small
child of get your shit together.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
Can't get your shit together? What are you doing with
your life? Mm hmm yeah, I can't unshowered to spend
my time with you.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Yeah, Oh my god, what a what a weird asshole?
So it's it's cool, like this night ends with chris
An and Lisa having to explain to Sarah after dinner,
like why why Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple worth
a quarter of a billion dollars, was like there basically
had to be like, it's not your fault. He's just a.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
Dick terribly So your father's a fucking awshome.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Yeah. Yeah. So one of the frustrations I've had when
researching this book is that many of the other books
about Jobs by Isaacson and Moritz and Malone and stuff,
they'll describe him being verbally abusive to employees, and they'll
use those terms. They're not really like mincing words, but
they don't really give a lot of detail, right, They'll
usually just say, like, he was shitty to someone because

(12:40):
he yelled at them about this or whatever. What I
like about Lisa's book and why I think this is
such a useful addition to the guy the Jobs canon
is that this is not just somebody who like maybe
walked past as Steve was being shitty, or like heard
some stories from some other people just being like, oh, yeah,
you know, he could be a dick. This is like
somebody who had both at one point was traumatized by him,

(13:02):
but also has grown up enough that they are able
to contextualize and put in pretty unsparing detail how he
treated people around him. Right, It's not just sort of
like a recollection of a horrible thing he did. It's
somebody who knew him for a long time and has
enough distance from that from her childhood to like contextualize

(13:23):
his behavior. And I value it a lot for that.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
You know what, I remember when Steve Jobs died. I
remember the death. I remember reading these things like oh
Malek who ran a cycled Gigo home at the time,
these teary fucking things about this great man who died.
I just think the entire tech industry needs to have
a fucking referendum on this guy. This is monstrous.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
He's such a bad man.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
He's such a horrifying creep. It's one thing to it's
he screamed at the mobile me people. We know that one.
He's screamed he fired people in the elevators. And I'm
sure you've got so much worse to share, But this
is horrifying.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
This isn't just.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
This isn't just. It's one thing yelling at a grown
as man. It's another thing excoriating a child for their
lack of eloquence or at all h for anything, even
if they did something wrong. You don't yell at children.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, yeah, it like it'd be one thing if like
she had broken something and he'd flip. That's still really wrong.
But at least there was like there was like a
thing that was that you can say had caused a problem,
right as opposed to like, yes, a fucking eight year
old girl ordered a hamburger, Dude, you can't expect her
to have read the Weird Mucus book. You read had
come to all the same conclusions.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
Oh my god, keep going.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Sorry, I'm just yeah. So I think it's interesting. It's
useful to study this book because of what it says
about how Jobs treated people around him. Wosniak is again,
he's kind of the only guy who has a partial
immunity to any of this. And that's largely possible because
Jobs in Wosniak. After the company has its IPO, they're
gonna have relative little to do with each other, right

(15:01):
they are in Neither of them is running the company.
They are both founders. They both have a lot of stock,
and I think Steve is chairman of the of the board.
He's got like a significant position as a result of
how much stock that he owns. But they're just kind
of like managing different chunks of the company. Wosniac stays
with the Apple two. Right, that is the thing that

(15:23):
is sustaining Apple's growth. That's nearly all of Apple's money
up through the early nineties comes from the Apple too.
They don't stop selling this thing until nineteen ninety three,
so this is this is around forever. And they're not
just selling the same product, right, they're upgrading it. They're
adding you know, different expansions, they're adding chips, they're i
think at one point up Grady the processor. So they
are like continually improving the Apple too. This is like

(15:47):
a real important job. Wosniak is kind of for a
while at least the point man on a lot of
that stuff. And this continues to be why Apple has money. Right,
everything we're going to talk about with Steve has nothing
to do with the Apple too. From this point forward,
it's importantly that you understand what's actually funding everything Steve
is doing right now is Wosney Ax, not just his invention,

(16:08):
but his like continuing maintenance of that invention. But Jobs
hates the Apple too, and the reason for this is simple,
he didn't make the fucker right, and the fact that
the Apple everyone who knows, like everyone who knows anything,
Jobs had no like, didn't have enough control over reality.
When Apple is starting off, everyone knows it's Wosney as baby, right.

(16:29):
People I think generally respect Steve for his vision, him
being good at putting people together and all that kind
of stuff is that sort of thing. But the Waws
is the genius here. And it's also pretty well known that,
like the Apple, Too is successful in part because Wosniak
wins the argument over how many expansion slots to have,
and that's a thing that Steve was wrong about. So,

(16:50):
for the sake of his ego, Jobs is going to
spend the next decade and change throwing himself into every
project that is not the Apple Too Right. And the
first one of these projects is the creatively named Apple three.
It was set to be a groundbreaking computer capable of
displaying This shows you how primitive shit is. One of
the big selling points in the Apple three is it

(17:11):
can display both upper case and lower case letters like
we finally got it, guys, both council letters. Oh yeah, baby,
yeah it really. Uh, it's remarkable how much better these
things have gotten and how much worse a lot of
other stuff has. But I don't need to get all
but Larry and g hot on you. Although it's appropriate
now that that we're on Doune week as these episodes

(17:32):
are being recorded.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
So do the podcast.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah fine, find a thinking machine, kids, and uh, you know,
do it. Look up whatever they did on Dune and
then do that. I can't be held legally responsible if
I tell you to do it together. Dune to the
thinking machines. Yeah, Google, Google Dune. Someone's going to sue
us for reading all of the Dune books. And while

(17:56):
they do that, you guys go listen to these ads.
Oh my god, we're back, and I'm I'm just in
awe of that ad transition. It's the first Frank Herbert
themed one I've done, but I think I'm gonna try

(18:17):
it again. So yeah, we're at the Apple three. So
Wozniak is safely close to it away keeping the company profitable,
and Jobs is taking control of the Apple three project,
and he lays out a design one of the things
because this is his project, Like the Waws is not
in the room, so there's nobody who he has to

(18:37):
like take seriously, he can just sort of dictate. He's like,
we're going to design the case before we actually build
the computer. Like I want to design this perfect case
that like right, and then you build a computer around it.

Speaker 3 (18:50):
The thing that needs to be dictated by the actual stuff,
We'll design that first.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is a problem, right, because
Job does not really know how to design a computer,
and this says a lot about him. His attitude is
we can figure out the internals later because What matters
is how the fucking thing looks right on your tea
meaning someone else, we meaning this team of people. I'm
gonna scream at all day to no surprise. This does
not make a great computer. It is. They do eventually

(19:16):
do some updates to it that it does kind of
like grab find some niche uses, but it is not
immediately successful. Particularly next to the Apple Too Right, Isaacson
includes a lovely quote from an Apple engineer who struggled
against Jobs on the project. This is one of the
people he's like verbally abusing at elevators. Quote the Apple

(19:36):
three was kind of like a baby conceived during a
group orgy and later everybody had this bad headache and
there's this bastard child, and everyone says, it's not mine.
And I think the funniest thing about that is the lie, sorry,
it's not mine. And I that's, like, first off, an
extremely Silicon Valley way to describe a project. Like it's

(19:58):
funny to me because of like the way this guy
is describing Apple three is how Steve Jobs treated his
actual child, right conceiving her and then denying the g
entity responsibility for her. Jesus Christ, that's going to be
extra ironic here in a second, So right around the
time this is not that point, but it's coming right
around the time the Apple three fails. Steve Wozniak is

(20:19):
in this horrible plane accident. He makes the worst mistake
you can as a rich guy, and he gets into airplanes.
That always ends badly, Like folks take it for if
you suddenly make one hundred million dollars and you've always
wanted to fly a plane, that is going to be
how you'll die. Like you're not Harrison Ford. You're not
going to bounce back like a Jelloman.

Speaker 4 (20:39):
Avoid helicopter.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Avoid helicopters as well. Wosniak is not Harrison Ford. He
does not bounce back right away. It messes him up,
and he's he's basically out of the picture for five years.
And it's not coincidentally kind of when this character of
the company's founding bounces that the character of Apple is
also kind of undergoing a change. Wozniak being out of

(21:01):
the picture for a while isn't the only thing, but
it's kind of a sign of the times. Some of
this comes down to the fact that CEO Michael Scott
is like he's obsessed with trying to like be the
adult in the room and take the company like in
a more responsible direction. We needed these like hippie hacker
kids when we were getting off the door. But now
it's time to become like a traditional corporation. Jobs had

(21:22):
always patterned Apple off of HP and as someone who's
interested in tech in the modern day. It's so weird
that they used to be like the sexy hip tech company.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
Well, but they also made their money quite boringly. Yes,
and they have one of the old time loses, see
as Meg Whitman.

Speaker 2 (21:37):
Yeah, they have had an interesting journey since the time
where Jobs is like idolizing them, but he does in
this period of time. And so the fact that tech
is kind of made in the image of aerospace and
these early like you know, government contractors, means that like
they're not these guys are not being used to being
seen as disposable for the sake of a stock price. Right.

(21:58):
Their dads really hadn't been and most of their dads,
like Wosniak, come out of this this aerospace world. So
they're all very shocked when suddenly Apple starts acting like
companies are increasingly going to act in the eighties and
is like, hey, what if we lay off a bunch
of people in order to pump the stock price? Right?
This is particularly surprising because it happens just a couple

(22:18):
of months after the IPO and it comes to be
known in company law as black Wednesday. Now, this is
a Michael Scott production. Jobs is just a manager there,
but he is a major stockholder, and he chose not
to take any action to try to stop the layoffs,
and in fact he's signed off on them. When a
long time colleagues, here's what's happening, and like, tell Steve,
this is no way to run a company. Steve responds acidly,

(22:41):
how do you run a company? It's like, I don't know, man,
maybe not firing everybody immediately after they make you two
hundred and fifty million dollars.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
My coping mechanism here is thinking that it's Steve Jobs
dealing with actual Steve Carell from the office as Michael Scott,
and that helps that this.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
Helps, so for a while, he flits from idea Steve.
After the Apple three, he kind of flits from idea
to idea. At first, he thinks touch screens are the future, right,
which is that's interesting that like in nineteen eighty one. Yes,
I think, yeah, he really is, like he's ahead of
the curve on a lot of stuff. He has some legitimate,
like insight. The problem is that like I don't know

(23:20):
if you ever try to use a touch screen, mean
like nineteen ninety five, fourteen years after this, but shit, yeah,
that's like, yeah, they were horrible. It's because they were
I think, resistive instead of capacity. But they also just
like the tech was bad. And so he brings in
a bunch of Apple engineers and is like, tell me
about touch screens. I think this might be the future.
And it's immediately clear to him. I only he understands why,

(23:44):
but based on what they're saying, it's very clear that
like touchscreens are not a reasonable thing for us to
be trying to put into a consumer product right now.
And he the guys who are there like tell him,
we were like made to prepare all this info, and
he immediately checked out of the conversation and then just
started like yellow asked for bringing him in convenient information.
People on in the subreddit or there were a couple

(24:05):
of people who were like, well, I don't think it's
bad to like cry when you're sad, and I agree
with you on that's what's I think it's worth shit
talking Steve for is he's really mean to people just
by default. Whenever he is a disagreement, whenever they bring
him bad news, and then whenever anyone challenges him on
anything in a meeting, he starts crying. And that's like
it's manipulative. That is also kind of an abusive tactic, right,

(24:27):
And someone made.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
A good point where it's like there are neurodivergent people
who do cry, and like this is very much not that.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
No, it was not crying.

Speaker 3 (24:35):
Yeah, this is manipulative, very very different. And also if
he met a neurodivergent person, he would make them cry.
He would do so to prove they were weak. Like
that's who he was. He was not Steve Jobs, was
not someone who would ever show anyone else any kindness.
So no, and also he definitely didn't cry because he
was sad. He cried because he was annoyed and wanted

(24:57):
someone to do something.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, and he's he doesn't know how to deal with
being told no with any on anything, because I mean,
his life has been one long show of people telling
him yes. And in fact, Lisa's later going to kind
of theorize, I think that part of why he was
so angry about me for a while is that, like
I was this this single piece of evidence against his perfection, right,

(25:20):
that he had slipped up, and he just like couldn't
forgive her for.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
That, and that he couldn't tell her no.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, it's fucked up. So after kind of this like
soul searching moment, going through a bunch of technologies, Jobs
goes back and is like, you know what, we're just
going to make another personal computer, but this one's going
to be better. This one's not going to be like
the Apple three. This is going to be the next
Apple two. We finally cracked the code and we need
to throw all of our resources into this project. And

(25:45):
he names this project the Lisa. Now, the immediate question
one would have here is like did he name this
computer after his daughter? And the answer, which Job's ultimately
cop to, is obviously yes, right, obviously, yes he has
a daughter named Lisa. And then a few years later
he names a computer he's working on the Lisa.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
Of course like that, but he acknowledges this one.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
Well, not as yeah, he does acknowledge the computer or
at least for a while. It's not going to go well.
The lease is about as doomed as the Apple three.
I mean, maybe it's a little bit more successful, but
it's still not what Apple needs, right, And he does
eventually abandon this, like he abandons his daughter, and he
starts having like caught like conflicts within the Apple three

(26:29):
team basically, And so he finds another personal computer project
at Apple. And the fact that there are so many
of these projects going on is probably evidence that like
there's not enough good direction coming in that you've got
like multiple separate next generation PC teams that wind up
fighting each other for resources, right, And so he comes

(26:50):
into this this computer's what's being set as like this
is going to be a personal computer for the masses.
We're going to produce a cheap, simple PC that anyone
can use off the shelf. Right. That is the idea
behind what becomes known as the Macintosh. And the guy
who's like running this team is like a really well

(27:11):
respected major engineer at Apple, and Steve like forces him
off the team, and in order to take control of it,
he's kind of shitty to the guy. He basically like
burns his name a little bit to get him off
of this project. And then once he's off the Lisa
team and he's now heading the Macintosh team, he treats
it exactly like he had treated Chris Anne. Like he's

(27:32):
publicly insults it. He belittles his former these people who
just put on his team. He's like, yeah, the Lisa
team were all assholes. They're all like dipshits. They're wasting
all of our money. We should cut the project. Like
he immediately abandons and betrays his old team while like
now showering blessings on the new team. It's very much
the same as how he treats like the people in
his life. So I guess at least he's consistent.

Speaker 3 (27:54):
So this is very much against the whole mythos of
him being this master operator manager.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah, look, this is.

Speaker 3 (28:01):
This is actually early days startup bullshit. Yeah, just running
burning eight fires, killing things based on how upset you are.

Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, and lighting like he's part of why the Lisa
doesn't Like he costs the company a lot of money
by like specifically fucking over the Lisa team this way,
and the Macintosh is going to do a lot better
than the Lisa had, but it's still not nearly we'll
talk about this not nearly as successful as they had
planned on it being. And while he is lighting all
of this money on fire and these really petty squabbles

(28:32):
to like make a thing that finally is as good
as the Apple Too, the Apple Too is continuing to
sell like a motherfucker, right, Like all of Apple is
built on this machine that he hates and is angry at,
while he is like fighting wars with his co workers
in order to try to get to make it.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
No one give some credit for either. Now everyone knows
this was everyone.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Likes was yeah, yeah, exactly, And that is what establishes.
You have to understand here. You know, when I say Macintosh,
you could do the oh wow, this is the moment.
But like the Macintosh really ain't shit for a while.
It takes a spell for it to become like a
popular product. All of Apple's early reputation and all of
this like cultural weight that it accumulates prior to the era.

(29:17):
You know, when jobs comes back is due to the
Apple Too, Like that's the fucking thing, you know. But
Steve hates the Apple Too, and he also now hates
the Lisa. In the book Infinite Loop, Malone writes quote,
Steve Jobs no longer cared about the two. He publicly
derided it, saying the two group was the doll and
boring division, that it had shitty ideas, and calling its

(29:38):
engineers Clydesdale's because they were little more than dull draft horses.
Even worse. Jobs undermine sales by broadly hinting to the
world that once the MAC arrived on the scene, the
two would be obsolete. So he looks at this cash
cow that's still making them a fortune and is like, hey, everybody,
you're gonna want to stop buying this thing in a while.
This new thing coming up. These guys are all drug addicts.

Speaker 3 (30:00):
An idiot is morns.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
It is so. It is so that guy that like
everything you have is built on the back of this computer.
Steve don't treat it like and he and he and
Wosniak are gonna have like a conflict because at the
Apple two keeps getting left out at like these big
corporate events. He'll do when he'll talk to about the
other teams, and the Wosneak's like it makes all of
our money, as he should. Yeah, and the evening is

(30:25):
not just jobs too, because I think Wosney is gonna
leave over this in part, and like there are other
like it's the Jobs is not the only guy at
the company who has like I can't wait for the
next thing, not the thing that works brain right to
the extent that they damage the company. Right, obviously, you
always got to be looking for the next thing. But
to like jettison your cash cow over it is just

(30:48):
so Again it's evidence against like the idea that he
was always this like flawless business.

Speaker 3 (30:53):
Mind you exactly the thing to put his money in
that you a safe bat.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
No and a big non yeah. A big part of
like why he does the things he does later is
he causes a lot of failures through his arrogance. He
does learn from some of them, which again maybe makes
him puts a step beyond a number of these other guys,
but like, these are some pretty major mistakes. And Job
also continues to be fucking impossible to work with due

(31:19):
to his personal quirks, which put an unreasonable burden on
everyone around him. From Isaacson's book quote, there was also
the issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced against
all evidence, that his vegan diets meant he didn't need
to use deodorant or take regular showers. We would have
to literally put him out the door and tell him
to go take a shower, said Markola. At meetings we
had to look at his dirty feet. Sometimes to relieve stress,

(31:40):
he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice
that was not as soothing for his colleagues.

Speaker 7 (31:45):
What and where I'm back to like a logistically, Some
logistically is he's staying on top of it with his
fate in that h I think he's standing.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
He gets a shoe off and puts his foot in
the toilet. I don't know Spender does in one of
the movies. No, I think he would just dip it.
But I am basically off of Hollywood magic, because you
can get this day, you could get. I will say

(32:17):
the more I don't know. You know, I actually go
back and forth because I wanted to say. It'd be
one thing if he like had built a fancy like
spa footpath and just held meetings there. But you know what,
I don't think that's good. That's bougie, Sophie. This is respectable.
Sticking your foot in the toilet or using a twenty
dollars Amazon and trying to hide it on a recording

(32:42):
from Sophie.

Speaker 4 (32:43):
Both of those things.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
I'm just saying Steve and I are Mavericks baby that
just happened. Yeah, I'm gonna play that Jeep Renegade commercial
again and rock out. Wow.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, I think we broke and close fucking free. I'm
sorry he's still dealing with that, but he's so rich
as well.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
You don't have to use a toilet as a footback steak.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
There's a sink. There's a sink in the same room.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, I guess, I guess where I've come around to is.
I think that part's funny. Oh, it's very funny. It's
a nice break from mentally abusing a child.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
You wouldn't think it's funny. Foot massage podcast.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Or Yeah, I'm gonna get a massage chair Sophie and
I'm gonna start one of those as MR podcasts where
it's just the sound of the massage chair as I
get a massage. We're gonna make twelve million in the toilet?

Speaker 4 (33:45):
Yeah, yeah, what's that? Dan will just quit?

Speaker 2 (33:50):
Sorry. So The Lisa debuts to pretty disappointing sales about
a year before The MAC is scheduled to have its release,
and we'll Jobs threw himself into this project. He remained
only an occasional presence in the life of his daughter.
She recalls being utterly bold over when her mother told
her Jobs had launched a computer project named the Lisa.

(34:12):
She saw this as proof that her dad really loved her. Now,
Steve could not admit that he loved his daughter. He's
back in her life at this point, but that would
have been like, that would have been like acknowledging she
was his and that she deserved a place in his heart,
and that is just not a thing he was ready
to do at that point. So whenever she'd ask him,
he'd be like, no, sorry, it's not named after you.

(34:33):
Just a coincidence. I named a computer after my daughter.
Has nothing to do with you. Sorry, get big Simpson's head. Yeah.
And several times when he's asked at like he'll like
take her his daughter to a party. When he starts
acknowledging her more, He'll go to an event and people
will ask him like, oh, that's Lisa. Is that who
you name the computer after? And he'd be like, fuck, no,

(34:55):
absolutely not in front of this little girl. Regis McKenna,
who's an Apple employee, who works on the Lisa project
in the early days when Jobs is in charge of it,
tells Isaacson, we had to come up with an acronym
so that we could claim it was not named after
Lisa the child, and the eventual acronym they pick for
Lisa was Local Integrated Systems Architecture. This does not mean anything,

(35:17):
like this guy is like not only is he like
lying to his daughter and his friends, but like he
made us come up with an acronym for Lisa demeans.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
So that he was so dedicated to his kid.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, he has a team of men to help him
not be there for his kids.

Speaker 3 (35:33):
He's diverting company resources to help otaize his child.

Speaker 2 (35:40):
It's it's pretty funny. I mean, it would be devastating
to be that kid, but it's pretty funny now, I
guess or not. One of the two engineers on the
project would joke that Lisa stood for Lisa invented stupid acronym,
which is also a bad acronym because you're not supposed
to have the name of the acronym in the acronym.

(36:00):
But beggars can't be choosers here, right, Like.

Speaker 4 (36:03):
Shut the fuck up toilet feet, like.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
Stinky toilet free.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
Such a shitty thing to do. And we're gonna get
to the conclusion of this story, which, to everyone's surprise, includes,
well it includes Bono, but we're building to that. So
what became the Macintosh had started? Bono? Yeah, Bono's Bono's
gonna be in play later, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
Does this have to do with when they say not
another acronym?

Speaker 2 (36:29):
No better off? Not around around? I could make it work,
might agree.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
I'm mad when they violated all our phones by putting
that You two album on them without our consent?

Speaker 4 (36:45):
Does it have to do with that?

Speaker 3 (36:45):
It's so funny.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
I do think it would now be really funny if
some like powerful hacking group started putting copies of a
YouTube album in people's hard drives, Like if that was
just this mystery for a while, everyone woke up with
it and they all blame Apple. How did you get
this on my PC? You souns of bitches? I don't know.
Maybe maybe listen in Russia. That's how you can really
fuck with us through a U two CD on the

(37:10):
on the do od's hard drive.

Speaker 4 (37:12):
You're in rare form today.

Speaker 7 (37:13):
It's thank you, It's great.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
I'm really feeling. I'm feeling the power of the spirit
moves through the spirit of jobs. I also have only
nineteen minutes left on my memory cards. So we are
in gonna be a gonna be a baller baller run
through the rest of this episode here. So, the Macintosh
had started as the project of this former professor named
Jeff Raskin. Jeff wanted to create a computer for the masses,

(37:40):
and he saw it as like an appliance, like you'd
buy like any other appliance. Right, some mom would go
down to a store and just like you'd pick up
a fucking what is an appliance, sophie What.

Speaker 4 (37:51):
Is an appliant you're talking about?

Speaker 2 (37:52):
I have too miserable hammer and a gun, right, that's
all I need.

Speaker 4 (37:57):
A dishwasher, a dishwasher.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
It's like buying a dishwasher. That's what they want the
Macintosh to be, right. And the downside of this idea
is that, like, you can't make a sexy computer that's
like a dishwasher, right, because dishwashers are inherently not very
s not really, Sophiella, you can't make a dishwasher be sexy, right.

(38:23):
And Raskin's idea, which I think is probably, I mean,
obviously it's good. It's what all computing winds up being
based around.

Speaker 4 (38:28):
As somebody who likes things clean.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
Disagree, Sure, Sophie, to just break your dishes when you're
done with them. So Raskin is like, I think we
should have like a cheap, accessible machine anyone can use,
and Jobs is like, sure, but I want to throw
all this sexy bullshit in there. So he forces Raskin out.
And one of the harms this is going to do
for Apple is Raskin had been like one of Apple's

(38:51):
better engineers, and he like pushes him out in order
to steal the Macintosh project and then like fuck it up.
So that's really cool. Raskin's vision of what customers wanted
in a computer had been pretty astute, and Jobs mostly
rejected it. Right, He's going to understand elements of this
in the future, but he has a different idea about
like what he wants from this, and a lot of

(39:11):
it's based on this visit he takes to the labs
of Xerox, who have invested in Apple. Xerox engineers had
built the first graphical operating system, right, it has the
first what's called like a graphical user interface. That's what
everything has. We just call it a UY today, right,
because it's just the only way shit works pretty much.
But back then, it's like the Xerox skunk Works project

(39:32):
and Jobs falls in love with it and steals a
lot of it for what becomes the Mac. Hey, everyone,
Robert here, the Lisa was actually the first mass market
computer with a graphical user interface. Obviously, it's a little
muddled because Jobs is on the Lisa and then he
hops over halfway onto the Mac, which is also an
early guy computer. I just wouldn't make that clear. It's
also worth noting that, like Bill Gates sees basically the

(39:54):
same demo, and like they also take a lot from
Xerox in order to make what becomes Windows. Everybody's kind er. Yeah,
everywhere everyone copied Xerox. Yeah, that is funny. It's really
funny because it seems to be universally agreed that, like,
you could be pissed off at Bill and Steve for this,
but Xerox like absolutely, like fiercely rejected the idea that

(40:17):
they should do anything new or exciting, Like they had
this brilliant idea that defined the future of computing and
We're like, we are absolutely never going to funny people
never stop making copies. So Jobs, it is funny though
that Jobs is like livid at Gates for stealing from Xerox,
even though like it's like it's like being angry at

(40:38):
a bank robber who steals from the same bank, Like
you said, up a bit, I robbed them. Yeah. So
Jobs is very excited about what he thinks the mac
is going to mean for the future of computing. And
as he's like stacking all these new requirements on and
it makes the processor balloon. That makes it basically it
like triples in price. Effectively, it turns into a premium machine.

(41:01):
And some people are like, hey, maybe this is going
to be too expensive to sell a lot of these things.
The Apple too is like a common man's computer, and
what you're building is not. He kind of would like
paper over that with these like lavishing praise to the
Macintosh team about like you guys are building the future,
that we're the only force that can stop IBM. If
IBM takes over the personal computer market totally, you know

(41:25):
that it's going to like clamp down on all of
mankind's future. It's going to be a boot on the
human face, like you guys are freedom fighters making like
what becomes a twenty six hundred dollars machine something like that,
which is an insane that's like not cheap now, it's
like an insane amount of money at the time. And
obviously Jobs is also governing Apple in his heartless and

(41:46):
brutal a fashion, as like anyone at IBM does anything.
But he's good at selling this vision to the team, right,
He's even good at selling it to like some cutthroat
businessman who should have known better. And this is where
we get jobs at his cult leaderist, right, this is
where we really see his quality. It's not going to
work out as well now as it will in the future,
but his ability to people call it a reality distortion

(42:09):
field because he was legitimately around for the creation of
some great products that actually changed the world. But like
when anyone else does this, we just call them a
cult leader, Like, yeah, this man came in and sold
people a fanciful view of reality in order to get
stuff out of them. Well, that's a cult leader or
a con man, right, same diff up to a certain point, right,

(42:31):
And the best vision we get of how this process occurred,
how Jobs would kind of enrapture somebody in his personal
vision of himself in the future is the story of
John Scully. John is going to become the CEO of Apple.
He's head hunted at Steve Jobs's request. Jobs wanted a
and one of the reasons why Jobs goes after Scully

(42:52):
Scully is a marketer, right, he is the most famous
marketer of his day. He had come up through Pepsi
and he had gotten like this job. He basically been
put in charge of like sales in the in what
becomes the EU, I think at this point, and he
completely revitalizes the business. Right. Pepsi is like barely exists
in Europe, and he makes it popular there. Right, he increases,

(43:14):
He turns them from a vision that's losing a bunch
of money to the one that's making a bunch of money.
And because of this he gets like he basically becomes
chief marketer of the entire company. And he launches this
thing called the Pepsi Challenge. Some like the old people
in the audience are like screaming, now it's a pervert
strinth that tastes terrible. It is a pervert strink, which

(43:36):
is why I love it. I'm a doctor pepper Man.
Legally I have to be you. I like PEPSI. I
don't hate pepsi, Sophie. I like all poison. I f
I said, Look, I support other people doing methamphetamine too,
you know, I don't. I don't. You know, I don't

(43:56):
have a problem with anything cigarettes, you know, Rick and I.
And that's all good. Baby turpentine. Sure, why not drink
some turpentine. It's all a substance. Putting substances inside you
and see what happens.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
You know.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
That's that's my advice to the listener Personally, I think
you should get back to the script before you're before
you're at dcartist full Robert, Oh, yeah, we're we are
at twelve minutes forty four seconds. Maybe Daniel can throw
in like the twenty four ticking, you know, from that.

Speaker 8 (44:29):
Show John Scully.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
So this guy John Scully comes up with a pepsi
challenge and it causes like the soda wars are this thing.
People don't really talk about it now, but like this
was like the big corporate conflict of its day, and
this led to like Pepsi's largest continued period of like
dominance over Coca Cola or at least relative to like
the way things had been. And this is why Jobs

(45:03):
wants Scully right. For one thing, he looks at IBM
and Coca Cola as very similar and he wants to
dethrone IBM, which is the giant in his space. And
he sees Apple is a lot like Pepsi, right, which
says a lot again about that kind of like rebel
image he's trying to craft for Apple computers that like, well,
at the end of the day, you're not like some

(45:23):
rebel alliance, you're Pepsi, right, You're literally Pepsi. You even
brought the Pepsi guy in. But he also wants Scully
in there because Jobs think soon he'll be ready to
be the CEO, but he knows he's still not ready yet.
It's this weird little bit of like humility you get
from him, and he's like, I want a marketer because
I think I have more to learn from my marketer, right.

(45:45):
And one of the things this says is that like
Jobs is for all that he pretends to be this
like enlightened creative thinker, He is a guy who identifies
with the marketers and the finance dudes and a lot
of these like, but in terms of like what they're
actually doing, these are the people that he is a
lot more like when it comes to his actual behavior, right.

(46:06):
And it's also him being very conventional because this period.
A big thing that's happening to a lot of American
corporations in this period, like kind of the fad of
the day is marketers are being put in charge of
a lot of these massive companies because there's this increasing
belief that is the CEO is basically the chief salesman, right,
and pulling for Scully is jobs really buying into that

(46:28):
very conventional wisdom to a substantial extent. And it's a
terrible misjudgment. These are not the same industries, right. The
idea that you'd be like, well, coke and Pepsi, that's
like IBM and Apple. It doesn't really work because coke
and Pepsi were both very old companies, right, and from
the time that like soda became a universally consumed beverage
in American culture, the industry didn't shift. Right. If it

(46:51):
moved one percent in cocer Pepsi's favor, that's a huge
deal at the time. It's also very different from computers
because it's easy to sell people a so you can
buy a soda for pocket change. You can't purchase a
two or twenty five hundred dollars Macintosh computer on a whim. Right,
they're not the same kinds of like ass.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
And that was probably worth much more in the day, right.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
Yes, yes, a lot more. And it's also like most
clients are still corporate clients, So you're not just saying, like, hey,
why don't you try a pepsi today at lunch instead
of a coke? That's easy. You're saying, hey, why don't
you consend her spending millions of dollars to completely replace
your company's IT infrastructure with Apple? Right, they're very different asks, right,

(47:35):
But Jobs had sold himself on Scully and he wouldn't
take no for an answer. And Scully himself is not
sure he wants to do this. He's like, I don't
know tech, why am I getting?

Speaker 1 (47:44):
You know?

Speaker 2 (47:44):
Why would I take this risk? And Jobs just keeps
he love bombs him.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
Not only is he calling constantly, he like flies to
New York pretending to look for a real estate so
he can like spend more time with the guy. He's like, hey,
can you give me some advice buying an apartment. Yeah,
it could be in a different man. And I'm going
to quote from the book Infinite Loop here. It was
a Sunday afternoon, so the visit began at Scully's exquisite
modern home in Greenwich. Jobs toured the ground, met Leezy Scully,

(48:13):
which I guess is his wife, and the pair retired
to the library to talk. Why are you talking to me,
Scully asked, why don't you go talk to somebody at
IBM or Culett Packard. Why do you want somebody out
of the soft drink at drink industry. I don't know
anything about computers. A lot of people would ask the
same question in the years to come. In reply, Jobs said,
what we're doing is never been done before. We're trying
to build a totally different kind of company, and we

(48:35):
need really great people. My dream is that every person
in the world will have their own Apple computer. To
do that, we've got to be a great marketing company.
And it's this does show you a little bit of
the reality of distortion effect. Maybe that washed over you,
maybe it didn't, But he starts that by saying we're
going to be a completely different company, and the end
thought is by hiring a Marketer as our CEO, like everyone.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
Else, the thing that everyone is doing.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
Yeah, think that everybody's doing different. Yeah, but I think
it works on a guy like Scully, Right, it's going
to work on somebody who's maybe a little bit on
the way to being a narcissist like you often have
to be to succeed at that level in business. And
Jobs is telling him what he wants to hear, whateveryone
wants to hear, which is, you can change the world

(49:18):
for the better by doing exactly what you're doing right now. Right,
That's what everybody wants, and Jobs knows that. Right. It's
why people can be convinced that like just tweeting anger
at some dude or a lady or whoever is going
to like fix a major social problem.

Speaker 5 (49:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
It's the same impult. Like any cult leader understands why
humans are motivated by the things they are, we all
secretly want that, right. You have to fight against this
constantly if you do want to like be a better person.
There's always this desire to believe that however I'm being
is at least the best I can be. Right, and
Jobs not just understands that fundamental fact, but he understands

(49:55):
how to use that fact to create a script that
is going to take this guy, and it absolutely works.
Scully is charmed with Steve Jobs, bordering on obsessed. His wife, however,
doesn't buy this shtick. When he asked her what she
thought of him, her handswer was basically, I don't know, bro, Like, yeah,

(50:16):
stinky goblin. Yeah, listen to your wives about the sinky
goblin who tries to get you to take a job. Folks,
if you're ever in this situation, jobs, we are jobs. Yeah.
So back at Apple, Jobs's employees and colleagues are equally
unimpressed with Scully, who was boring and uncharismatic. But Jobs
forced the marriage into being, and he even convinced Scully

(50:37):
to take a forty percent pay cut to do it.
Part of how he did this was by leaning on
his star power, and this is from Infinite Loop again.
They met on another Sunday. They had lunch and then
went for a walk in Central Park. Scully would later
remember how chagrined he was by all the people recognizing Jobs.
It was hardly the anonymous meeting Scully had hoped for.
I want you to come and work with me, said, Jobs,
I can learn so much from you. They walked through

(50:58):
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As they walked, Schooly began
to imagine himself as the teacher of a brilliant student,
an Aristotle say to Alexander. He confessed that if he
hadn't been a businessman, he would have probably become an
artist Jobs and a remarkable coincidence, said that if he
hadn't become a technologist, he would have been a poet
in Paris.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Oh fuck, these people are stupid as hell.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
I do this is where and again none of the
Jobs movies show this guy. They all want to show
him like wooing crowds or like being you know, a technic.
None of them seemed to want to show him like
being a cult leader manipulating rich people to like do
whatever he wants them to do, like getting it. He
finds with each of these guys, he finds out like

(51:43):
what do you want? And he finds a way to pride.
He does the same thing, by the way, and it's
not funny when he does it to Was. But he
does this to Was. What does Wasniak want? He wants
to have an adventure with his best friend. So that's
how Jobs frames it. What a Scully want to change
the world by selling pepsi, right, and that's what he gives.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
Him, you know, by selling a computer.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Uh yeah, yeah, exactly, the pepsi of computers. So Jobs eventually,
like Scully, it goes kind of back and forth, and
it kind of it does culminate. You could film this
really well because there's this like dramatic confrontation on top
of a skyscraper they have and Jobs puts it all
on the line and is like, do you want to
spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or

(52:24):
do you want a chance to change the world? And
that breaks Scully's will. He takes the job. The Mac
launch was coming up in January of nineteen eighty four.
After the failure of the Lisa. The company desperately needed
some hype to carry it through. Right. The Apple two
was still selling strong, but it's starting to reach kind
of like it's starting to fall off, right. They can

(52:46):
see that, and they really do need something new. Now,
Steve throws all of his hopes and all of the
hopes of his company behind a new ad, this kind
of groundbreaking new strategy for advertising Apple products. Based on
some ideas that had been brought to them, the ad
from chaiat Day. They had written this ad. This is
the famous nineteen eighty four ad right where you've got

(53:06):
like these lines of people all up in front of
this screen where this like big brother, you know figure
is like preaching, you know, reading a bunch of like
political ideology tracks to them basically, and then this this
woman in athletic shorts with a mall runs up and
she throws the hammer through the screen. It's like, yeah,
the computer is going to stop nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 8 (53:26):
Bro.

Speaker 3 (53:29):
It's the kind of hilarious that like, looking back at that,
it is it is, I mean, because it was mocked
by like the Pepsi guy and this thinking you know.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
Yeah, the pepsi guy and the smelly weirdo. Yeah. So
the nineteen eighty four ad had actually been written before
chaiat Day contracted with Apple, but and this is what's
funny to be, they brought it to a bunch of
other companies because they were just trying to sell this
idea to anybody who wouldn't want to be nineteen eighty
four is coming up. Someone's going to have the nineteen
eighty four ad, and they also understand every company wants

(54:00):
to feel like they're the little guy, or at least
wants to make themselves look like the little guy fighting back.
You know. It's like how all these giant car companies
are like, you're just a humble rancher, like, and we're
just a humble tool provider for a humble rancher and
also worth the GDP of Japan or whatever. But yeah,
so this ad that they try to sell to everybody

(54:21):
like keeps getting turned down because it's it's like kind
of narcissistic and up its own asshole. So as soon
as job sees it, he's like, yes, we have this
is the best idea, bring it on. So they like
they they they filmed this thing. My favorite side detail
is that they have to bring it a bunch of
skinheads as extras. Right now, I don't know are these

(54:42):
because there's different kinds of skinheads. But I also feel
like the skinheads who are you're can most easily get
in an Apple commercial might not be the good kind.
I don't know.

Speaker 9 (54:51):
Yeah, yeah, Trouble said, it's it's a huge hit with
the fans, and I want to have I want to
have Sophie, play you a clip of like from the
end of this ad when it's I think this is
at Macworld when they play it for the first time,
because I want you to hear the audience here.

Speaker 5 (55:07):
Right on January twenty four, Apple Computer will introduce MacIntire
and you'll see why nineteen eighty four w the nineteen
eighty four.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
This ads like a huge hit with the listeners, but
Apple's executives are are kind of like furious about this, right,
Like when they see the ad for the first time,
they're all they all have the reaction of all the
people who turned it down. They're like, what the fuck
is this thing? Why are we trying to use this
like dark bleak apocalyptic ad sell Computers cancel a bunch

(55:52):
of our ad spots, and Scully has to tell chaiat
Day to sell off their Super Bowl airtime, and Jay
chaiat where at the company like basically fights back. They
had they had bought like a sixty second and a
thirty second slot, and Chai it sells the thirty second slot,
but then he's like, it's too late for us to
sell the longer ones. We might as well just run

(56:12):
the ad, right, And this it's interesting. I don't know
how you want to like qualify the level of success
or failure this ad has. Right, it's it's seen as
one of the greatest ads of all time. It is remembered, right,
it doesn't really sell any macs, So that is a problem. Yeah,
that is a problem. Like is it successful because it's

(56:34):
really well known and famous and parodied a bunch or
because like some snooty ad people think it was great,
or should you judge it based on like how it sells?
And the mac is not an immediate hit some of
why the Macintosh was kind of seen as a disaster.
It's not super fair because it does like make money.
They sell a couple hundred thousand in the first year,

(56:55):
which is good. It's like a decent product line. But
Jobs had expected to two million sales, and in fact,
like when he comes up with, like, we're gonna sell
two million of these in our first year, it gets
cut down to one million by the company, who's like,
that's an insane thing to tell shareholders that we're expecting
to sell. No one's ever sold anything close to that
many computers in a year. We certainly aren't with this

(57:17):
fucking thing. And that is still that the estimate the
company comes up with a million is still like more
than four times as many as actually sell. So this
is if if Jobs hadn't run his mouth, hadn't started
lying that this is going to sell like a million
or two million units, he could have just said, yeah,
we launched the Mac and it's making us a bunch
of money. Great, But for one thing, he's gotten everyone

(57:39):
to expect a million sales and they don't make that.
And for another thing, Apple has stocked up on a
bunch of materials they don't wind up actually needing because
of how many more of these they expect to sell.
So that's a real issue, and it makes the Mac
kind of come out looking like it was a bomb.
Steve bears a lot of the fault for this. Part
of why the back doesn't sell better is that he

(58:01):
had insisted that it not be compatible with IBM. Right.
Not only that, he's like, I don't want this to
be compatible with IBMS or with the Lisa right, this
other computer will making fuck it like my computers won't
talk to it.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
Once again, severing the connection with Lisa.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Yeah, he really is such a predictable man. This whole
ideology had infected a lot of Apple at this point.
Because Steve hates the rest of the company, he kinds
of builds this situation where every team is really siloed
from the other teams. You've got the Apple two, the
Apple three, the Lisa, and the Mac teams, and like
they avoid talking or communicating. They all have their separate

(58:39):
marketing and accounting firms, which is like it's wasting a
ton of money. So Scully gets in right before the
nineteen eighty four AD. He's there for these kind of
disappointing MAC sales and Jobs' reality distortion field starts to
fail right and Scully is like, well, we need to
make some changes. I don't care if how Steve wants it.
So he integrates all of these teams so we can

(59:01):
eliminate a bunch of these redundant positions. And this infuriates
Jobs because like now the Mac team has to like
share resources with other teams, and he thinks that that's vile.
Scully also makes himself head of the Apple two team,
which Jobs hates because he's like he hates the Apple too,
and Scully doesn't know enough to be the head of

(59:21):
the Apple two team. But this does at least show
that he what he's trying to do, I think is
just kind of signal to Wozniak and the others, like, hey,
the Apple too is important to us, the thing that
makes all our money. The other bad call that Jobs
had made around this time is that he was obsessed
with something called the Twiggy drive, which is Jobs thinks
floppy discs aren't the right technology. He's like, I've got

(59:44):
we've got this bespoke replacement for the floppy disc called
the Twiggy drive, and this is going to be the
future of memory, and it they never get it working
very well, right, Like, He's part of why the MA
gets delayed is he's obsessed with it having a Twiggy
drive and that has to be working rather than like
just putting it a disc drive using everyone uses yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:00:06):
and yeah. I want to quote from Infinite Loop here
because it really gets to like one of Jobs is
more significant technical fuck ups. Jobs in fact, had been
partly responsible for the problems with Twiggy. His rule, laid
down for esthetic reasons that Apple computers have not have
noisy cooling. Fans had made the creation of Twiggy nearly
impossible from the outset. Disk drives with their electric motors,

(01:00:26):
spinning platters and moving armatures produce a lot of heat
in the uncol heart of an Apple computer. A high
speed advance drive like a twiggy simply cooked, burning out
its own chips and melting or distorting the mylar diskette.
He's so angry about the concept of a fan that
he he shackles this thing to a melting a twiggy drive.

(01:00:46):
It's very funny, everyone, Robert here, Just to be very clear,
the mac does not launch with a twiggy drive because
they don't get that working. It launches with the flobby.
And actually it's only able to launch with the flabby
because they decide, like near the end, that they just
can't make it work. Thankfully, somebody on the team has
sort of secretly against jobs his orders worked on a
way to fit in a floppy drive with a Macintosh,

(01:01:08):
and so the day has saved no thanks to Steve Jobs.
But I just want to make that clear as well.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
He was so bad at this.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
Yeah, he really is at this point, so bad at
his job. That's important to understand is most of his
skill up to this point, most of his impact has
been in his ability to like manipulate money people and
marketing people, and he is to an extent good at marketing,
but he's like wrong about every technical call he makes
at this point in his.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
Life, seemingly every business decision too, Yeah, a.

Speaker 8 (01:01:37):
Lot of them.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
Now. Not long after this, Jobs would also intervene to
kill like the kind of the last Apple two the
two X, which would have had that we're going to
have both a more powerful processor in it and also
a second slot for another processor where you could plug
in an IBM chip, which would have made Apple products
IBM compatible for the first time. And Job Jobs like

(01:01:59):
personally he goes out of its way to strangle this thing,
and it's crazy, this thing must do less. Yeah yeah.
So Jobs also ensured that the Apple two team was
cut out of any credit or praise during the annual
Apple media events he headlined and again had This helps
to kind of push Wosniak to quit the company, and
you can see why, Like, you know, the WAZ comes
back and he gets right into Apple two stuff, and

(01:02:21):
he's kind of frustrated by how everyone else seems to
treat them like shit, except for Skully. It's not a
coincidence that he does this that he kind of like
bails on the company about a decade after Steve Jobs
stole that money from the Atari Job because while Jobs
doesn't like the Apple too and won't say anything nice
about him, but he knows Wosniak is a star, so

(01:02:42):
he pulls him out of Apple two work for a
while to do press for the Mac, and Wosniak, being
a good company man, does it. And while he's on
this media tour traveling around to like talk up Jobs
as Mac, he reads the first book about Apple and
reads this story about Jobs stealing five or seven thousand
dollars from him, and he like weeps openly about it,

(01:03:04):
like this is I think part of why he makes
the decision to leave. Things keep getting worse for Apple
from this point forward. The nineteen eighty four commercial had
not moved a lot of max, but its critical success
had convinced Jobs to do whatever the Chayat Day people said.
And they follow up the nineteen eighty four commercial with
the Lemmings commercial, which shows, like IBM customers, this Lemmings

(01:03:25):
marching suicidally off a cliff Like it's both kind of
disturbing and also like really pisses people off.

Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Hey, you fucking idiot, buy my diure or you'll die.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
And by this point sales have become dire enough, and
like he gets in trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
For this time, the game Lemmings came out as well.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
I think it would have predated that that was.

Speaker 8 (01:03:45):
Not the eighties.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
Let me yeah nice, my bad, my bad.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
Yeah yeah yeah, this is kind of the mid eighties.
And like right after that, he comes out at like
the Macworld event and he proposes a detent with IBM.
So it's this weird mix of like shit talking the company,
calling them the Evil Empire, and then suddenly coming out
on stage and being like, hey, we actually want to
work with you guys, when like none of your shit
sells as well as you thought it would and this

(01:04:08):
is all messy, right, this is hard to clean up.
It's bad for the stock price. And Scully's job evolves
into an even mix of like cleaning up Jobs as
messes and like apologizing for him and trying to occasionally
chart a path forward for the company. He is bad
at both of these tasks, and he and Jobs eventually
wind up in a conflict over control of the board
when Jobs tries to engineer a coup On the day

(01:04:31):
Scully is heading overseas to celebrate a major sale. Somebody
warns Scully and he shows it. He and Jobs like
fight it out in front of the board basically, and
Scully wins Jobs resigns from Apple. He is devastated by this,
but the one consequence of this failure is that he
starts spending time around his daughter and Chrisan. Again, the
way Lisa describes it, he seems to have lint on

(01:04:52):
them to the extent that he lint on anybody once
his world fell apart. But Jobs wasn't going to be
a failure for long, and this is where we get
to what actually made the man special. Throughout the early
part of this story, I've hit on a couple of
decisions that Jobs made that were wrong in the moment
but right in the long term. He wanted to fight
Wohsneyak on expansion slots for the Apple too, which is
dumb then, but in the long term that is where

(01:05:14):
technology trended, and trended there because of Jobs, but he
was able to sell it to people right, and his
desire for closed independent ecosystems that customers couldn't meddle with
is super profitable. Like, look at the iPod, look at
the iPad, look at the iPhone. All of them work
that way, and a lot of other companies have gone
in that direction. Likewise, his early flirtation with Touch Greens,
he correctly anticipated the future there, right. He has sometimes

(01:05:39):
a good eye for it, right, And so after he
has this kind of humbling experience of being forced out
an Apple, his next few years he's going to make
some really good bets throughout the nineties. He establishes this
new computer company Next, which, if you're looking to spell it,
it's spelled the way an asshole would spell it. Just
the X is capitalized. I think it's infuriating. And the

(01:06:01):
Next seems like a dumb computer on paper. They cost
like twelve grand each, and he means them for the
education market, right, like, it's this the most cost It's
kind of if you take him at face value, it's
an insane thing to try to do. The case is
also a perfect cube for whatever reason, nobody, which like
nobody wants right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
Nobody's buying case. It looks like an old safe.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
Yeah. They eventually repurposed that design for the Xbox uhuh so,
But again this is not like this seems like a
bad idea. But Apple buys Next because they like what
he's doing with the operating to how it looks so much.
They're so enthralled with like the vision he presents. He
cons these guys one more time, and that's how he
gets back in an Apple right. A few years later,

(01:06:47):
by like ninety seven, they buy Next and they bring
jobs back in to run the company. He also, during
this kind of like most of the nineties interregnum period
of his life or whatever, he founds Pixar, which you
know is Pixar. It works out pretty well, so he does.
This is kind of the start of the job's comeback story.
And one thing you have to give the man is
that both of these are evidence that he has more

(01:07:09):
personal growth than a lot of guys in his position. Right,
And in the similar manner, he makes some strides in
improving his relationship with his daughter over this period of time.
He also provides more support to Chrisanne. He eventually like
buys her a house. And I think Mona Simpson is
the large It seems like Mona kind of comes into
his life and sees how he's treating Lisa and Chris

(01:07:31):
Anne as like, man, you Steve Jobs, buy your fucking house,
buy your kids to new clothes. What the fuck are
you doing, Steve, stop this like you're being a dick
for no reason. Yeah, and he actually listens to her, right,
which you know, I guess you maybe says something that
said he is still Steve Jobs. And I am never
going to say in this period that he has a
great dad and he's always weirdly agro about his daughter,

(01:07:54):
like wanting anything from him, any kind of acknowledgment or
anything else. One moment she relates in her book is
that like when she's like, I think twelve or something,
He's driving her around in his brand new Porsche, right,
and she asks him like a little like a kid would, Hey,
when you're done with the Porsche, can I have it right?
Which I think I don't know many twelve year olds
who wouldn't want their dad's Porsche if they can't have it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
Right, especially when that that is filthy rich.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Yeah, and they grew up poor right there. These memories
are on well anything any Steve Jobs.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
This is directly as a result of Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
She grew up Paul. Yeah, yeah, This could be if
she's like thirty asking this question. This could be like,
you know, part of a character trait in a movie
that like, yeah, this is somebody who's like grown up,
you know, greedy or whatever. But she's a child, right,
this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Here's how
he responds. Before I made a move to get out,
he turned to face me. You're not getting anything, he said,

(01:08:47):
you understand nothing. You're getting nothing. And she's like, I
didn't know if he meant the car, and and haarent
it's like you're not getting any acknowledgment at all from me.
That like, I mean, like you're getting nothing from me. Period.
What a devastating thing to tell a little kid get out,
like a twelve year old at this point, Yeah, like
a twelve year old. It's one thing to say, Like

(01:09:08):
a reasonable thing to say is like, eh, you know,
if you need a car, you'll get like a nice
normal like a used car, something that works and is safe.
But like, I'm not giving a child a Porsche. Very
reasonable thing to say. That's real fucked up. Now. Throughout
this whole period in the late nineties, he slowly gets
better at kind of embracing her but it's always this
period of like he'll let her in and then he'll

(01:09:28):
recoil and say something really cruel. And one of the
things in like the dark moments in this relationship they have,
which are many, that Lisa comforts herself with, is the
knowledge that he had named the Lisa after her. Right,
she never believes him. She's just waiting for him to say, like, yes,
it was named after.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
You, Yeah, which would cost him nothing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:48):
And it would cost him literally nothing. And this is
what she writes about it. I like the idea that
I was connected to him in this way. Me and
I'd been chosen and had a place, despite the fact
that he was aloof or absent, and meant I was
fascina to the earth and its machines. He was famous,
he drove a Porsche. If the Lisa was named after me,
I was a part of all that. I see now.
We were at cross purposes for him. I was a

(01:10:10):
blot on a spectacular ascent. As our story did not
fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might
have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me,
it was the opposite, the closer I was to him
the less I would feel ashamed he was part of
the world. He would accelerate me into the light, stating
thing to think.

Speaker 3 (01:10:30):
Darkness this man has put inside. Even then, she was
still desperate by him.

Speaker 2 (01:10:38):
Jesus dead or he's her dead. Yeah, you don't.

Speaker 3 (01:10:40):
Choose your parents.

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):
No, oh God. So for years, even after he did
accept her as his daughter and brought her into his life,
Steve would continue to refuse acknowledging that he'd named the
Lisa after her. Eventually, when she's like a young adult,
I think he finally breaks down. I think she might
have been like late teens. But this is only when
she's put in a situation in which denying that the

(01:11:03):
Lisa was named after his daughter would have made him
look bad in front of his most famous friend. And
this is where Bono comes back into the store. Yes, yay.
So the following anecdote happens. Jobs goes on this like
yacht trip around the Mediterranean with like his new family.
He's like married again, he's got another kid and with Lisa.
He invites Lisa this is part of him like doing

(01:11:24):
a rapproch mall with her, and they stop off at
Bono's villa on like the Mediterranean Coast for dinner, and Bono,
who's kind of starstruck by Steve Job, starts asking about
the early days of Apple. Then Bono asked, so was
the Lisa computer named after her? And Bona's she's doing
this casually, right, He's not up on this lore. He
like knows Steve had a computer named the Lisa. He

(01:11:44):
meets Lisa, He's like, oh, he's named after her, right,
And my father hesitated, looks down at his plate for
a long moment, then back at Bono. Yeah it was,
he said. I sat up in my chair. I thought so.
Bono said, yep, my father said. I studied my father's face.
What it changed? Why had he admitted it now, after
all these years? Of course it was named after me?

(01:12:05):
I thought, Then his life seemed preposterous. Now I felt
a new power that pulled my chest up. That's the
first time he said yes. I told Bono, thank you
for asking. It was as if famous people needed other
famous people around to release their secrets.

Speaker 3 (01:12:21):
Oh God, this poor woman has had her life ruined.
She just randomly says one of hers og style things
because Steve Jobs blotted her soul.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
Now she's the first person because she does inherit millions
of dollars from him, and she's the first person I've
ever heard of inheriting millions of dollars where I'm like, yeah,
but you earned that, Like.

Speaker 3 (01:12:47):
Yeah, Like she should have there, she should have gone billions.
She should not have Oh my god, fuck out Bono.

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
That's the he's the good guy. He's not the bad guy.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
Something to make up for putting that album on.

Speaker 3 (01:13:09):
It's the first great thing he did. The second thing
was the Spider Man musical.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
The second was he Oh right, I'll give him. There
was one other great thing I got bought a.

Speaker 4 (01:13:18):
Paid bono podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
Intel Nochio flew me out to Dublin. Wants to report
on this operating system they were making called Migo. That
was like that was going to be their android. You
haven't heard of Migo because it was a flop, and
they're like they flew us all out there and like
it took us to the Guinness Brewery where there was
a Bono impersonator and a whole fake He was billed
as the best Bono impersonator in Ireland. Wow, which is

(01:13:46):
maybe a crowded field. I actually don't know. I will
say I could not have told you it wasn't real Bono.
You know, he did look the part, and it's you know,
I'll give him that. I'll give him that.

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
Plays an impersonator though.

Speaker 2 (01:14:04):
Yeah, maybe it was. That's his hobby. He's both getting
rich people to reveal their secrets pretending to be a
Bono impersonator. God Willing. All right, well ed? Is there
any where people can find you?

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
You can find me at exit Ron on Twitter, slash rate,
my newstop bezziest Guy dot Social fun me of course,
and my new podcast, Better Offline at better Offline dot com.
Click the podcast button you get all the stuff on
there and my newsletters on there too.

Speaker 1 (01:14:31):
Based Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.