Part Two: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs

Robert Evans explains the rise of Apple, and how Steve Jobs tried to cheat the California Welfare system.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Oh boy, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
about Steve Jobs. You know, the founder, co founder of
Apple and in a lot of ways, the founder of
a lot of the most irritating parts of our modern world.
The guy Sam Altman pretends to be when he looks

(00:27):
in the mirror in the morning. The guy Elizabeth Holmes
pretended to be when she was executing one of the
most infamous cons in corporate history. For someone who's not
a con artist or Elizabeth Holmes, last time I checked Exitron, Hello,
and is it true that you are not, in fact
Elizabeth Holmes.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
I'm not Elizabeth Holmes. A lot of people ask me this.
I am not Elizabeth Holmes. How do you feel about turtlenecks. Yeah, no,
not for me. It makes me look weird, makes me
look fatter than I usually am.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Okay, okay, Sophie, let's try to get back on the
phone with Elizabeth Holmes. Though I do want a green
light green light her podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Still I wish, Yeah, I wish I could have offline.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah, it's a great shack. I love to talk to her.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
Hello. Yes, it's me Elizabeth Holmes.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
It's time to give her another chance. So when we
last left off right, Steve has gone and come back
from India. He's stolen a bunch of money from his
best friend, Steve Wosneyak, who's the guy who actually knows
how to do the stuff that Steve is getting paid for,
and he has some plans for that money. He's going
to have some plans for that money. So the thing

(01:35):
that's also happening at this time nineteen seventy five that's
kind of most noteworthy in the computer world is that
al Taire has released the eighty eight hundred micro computer,
now the all Tear eighty eight hundred. You would not
call it useful in terms that modern computers are useful for, right.
It is not a thing that you're going to get
a huge amount of productive work out of. But what's

(01:56):
noteworthy about it is that it's basically the first product
that you can buy a symbol that will give a
regular individual. You still need a lot more knowledge about
stuff like soldering and whatnot than like a normal person has,
but a relatively normal person can buy the Altair eighty
eight hundred a symbol it and have a computer that
you don't have to be super rich or working for

(02:17):
a large corporation to have access to right. So, even
though this device is we would call this extremely limited
in modern terms, it is a foundational moment for modern
big tech. Bill Gates reads an ad for the Altair
eighty eight hundred and this causes him to drop out
of Harvard and start Microsoft Right, which initially codes software
for the Altair. Wosniak has a different reaction to seeing

(02:41):
this product advertised because, unlike Bill Gates, Wosniak is an
actual genius, and his immediate reaction to hearing about this
is like, well, fuck, I've built computers that are as
good as this for fun at home, Like this isn't
that impressive? I could make something better than this, right,
And in fact he can. He's about to, you know.
So he talks to Steve Jobs about this, because he

(03:02):
does about everything. Steve is his best friend, and we
can kind of imagine Steve Jobs like steepling his hands
like the Grinch while his lips curl up into a
big sea being up the place too. Oh absolutely yes,
smelling so bad now, Jobs in Wosniak both would sometimes
attend meetings of a group called the Homebrew Computer Club.

(03:22):
Jobs is a lot less technical, right, and he's not
really interested in exploring what this new tech can do,
which is why Wosniak is into it, right. But he
does see the club as a potential test market, and
he and Waws work out a plan to sell circuit
boards that people can make into micro computers. This works
pretty well, This gets them enough money that Jobs decides

(03:43):
the next step is to form a proper corporation and
decide to get funding to put out a device of
their own, which is going to be like the first
true personal computer. Right, has a little bit debate, do
you consider like the chipset basically that Wosniak puts together
first the first person computer or this divi But either way,
it's not really a thing that people can buy at
this point, right, Wosniak is going to have to make this,

(04:07):
and it's extremely unclear as to whether or not it's
really possible to do this at a price point that
people can afford, and whether they'd be able to produce
such a device at all. Jobs ignores the fact that
it's not really clear if this can be done. His
role in this is to motivate Wosniak to figure out
how to do it right and at the same time
convince wealthier and more experienced people to get on board

(04:29):
and help them figure out how to actually like, produce
and sell a product. So at this stage his role here,
he's effectively being a con man, right. He needs to
get people to buy into a vision that is far
from proven by basically telling them, oh, yeah, we already
have this figured out, when Wosneiac does not really have
the device figured out yet, you know, and that is

(04:50):
he is kind of doing a con here, right, It's
one that's going to work out.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
What would otherwise be known today as just stought up funding.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yes, startup funding. This is how it all works. Now,
this is what Elizabeth Holmes does, Right, She doesn't know
how to make a blood testing device. She finds a
guy who is a genius that she thinks is her Wosniak,
and she sees her job as if I've got to
keep the lie going until he figures out how to
make the product. Jobs is doing the same thing. He's

(05:19):
just doing it with a much more modest kind of development. Right.
They're a lot closer to the personal computer when he
starts making these promises than we were to a blood
testing device like the one Holmes was promising, which may
never be possible to be fair like, that may not
be a thing we ever do, just because of some
certain limitations in the way Blood is. I'm not an

(05:42):
expert on this stuff, but they sure in a blood guy.
But you can see what she is doing is pattern
off of what Jobs did. But he is better at
judging what kind of risks to take, right, because this
is an achievable risk. And in fact, Wosniak is going
to make the thing that he's promising. Everybody while is
going to make. And there's an interesting quote in Isaacson's

(06:04):
book from Noah Bushnell, who's jobs as old boss at
Atari and something of a mentor to Jobs quote, There's
something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve.
He was interested not just in engineering but also in
business aspects. I taught him that if you act like
you can do something, then it will work. I told him,
pretend to be completely in control, and people will assume

(06:25):
that you are. And that is how all of these
people are. That is what Steve is going to do. Atari,
by the way, is going to go tits up not
long after this, in part because of some of the
decisions Bushnell makes. But this is the attitude that Jobs embraces,
and the attitude that everyone who follows him is going

(06:45):
to take on right, like move fast and break things,
make promises that you don't know if you can keep.
You know, what matters is keeping balls.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
In the h also, I think. But that's the thing.
I think Jobs's big difference and the reason that puppeting
him is so stupid is he seemed to actually, like,
I think he thought was could do it.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yes, yes, and he was right. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
Less so that he was right. I think he's still
doing the thing that most founders do where they're just like,
I think this is possible. But he at least knew
that was could do this, and his yah, his idea
was at least somewhat modest, Yeah, compared to all sorts
of like there's the startup that claims it could beam
energy between products, the one that's just been completely faked forever,

(07:30):
that one's still going somehow.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah. Well, I think it's also, as you were, kind
of like intimating Jobs knows everyone knows. Everyone who knows
anything about computers knows that what Waznak is trying to do,
we're eighty percent of the way there. Right. That twenty
percent is a significant gap still, but it's not nearly
the kind of gap that Holmes had to clear with Therahose. Right,

(07:51):
nothing even a little bit like the device Theramost was promising.

Speaker 3 (07:54):
He was just chemistry.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yes, yes, so it was not nearly a much of
a jump. It is again that twenty percent is not trivial,
which is why people consider Wosniak one of the greatest
engineers who ever lived. His accomplishment is significant, but it's
not nearly as much of a jump that you have
to make now. Job still does have to convince Wosniak,

(08:17):
who has again is the only person who's going to
make this possible to devote hours of his time to
doing this, and was just got married. He has this
career that he's just starting, and he's broke all the time.
Steve Wosniak is one of the worst people with money
who will ever live. As a spoiler, He's going to
get crazy rich off of Apple and then burn a
huge chunk of that money failing to run a series

(08:39):
of concerts like he is horrible with his money, and
so it's not a trivial challenge for Jobs to motivate
him to put the kind of time in that it's
going to take him to achieve this goal, and he's
able to do that by lying to Wosniak. Here's how
Isaacson describes their conversation. He didn't argue that they were
sure to make money, said that they would have a

(09:00):
fun adventure. Even if we lose our money, We'll have
a company, said Jobs, as they were driving in his
Volkswagen bus. For once in our lives, we'll have a company.
This was enticing to Osniak, even more than any prospect
of getting rich. He recalled, I was excited to think
about us like that, to be two best friends starting
a company. Wow. I knew right then that I do it.

(09:21):
How could I not? And that's sad because like that
is purely Jobs gaslighting him. Jobs does not think of
him this way. Right, Jobs wants a company for himself.
He doesn't consider Bosniak to be an even partner in this.
Right he knows Wosniak is herreplaceable, and he will treat
Wosniak better than most people because of that, but he

(09:44):
does not see this as two best friends embarking on
an adventure together. Steve sees this as this is my chance, right,
my chance.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
It's I'm said how the jeweling narratives clearly went and
like I love my friend Steve, I love doing computers.
It was with my friends Steve and Steve Jobs sitting
there going, I can't wait to take all the money
from Steve wasn act.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
I'm gonna fuck this guy and everybody else.

Speaker 4 (10:07):
I can't wait to fuck over this idiot, just like
it's funny you see all the stuff with his children,
disgusting and how he acted to his staff, but it
feels like he was somehow more evil before.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
Yeah, he's worse to them than he is to Washnak
because he needs Wosniak and he's not dumb right, Jobs
is not dumb. Jobs understands maybe the only person in
his life until he meets Joni Ives Right, who's the
big uh industrial designer who is kind of probably the
single most important person in like how Apple products look
and feel today. That's I've iv is irreplaceable. Wozniak was irreplaceable,

(10:44):
right because these guys have a skill that no one
else can come close to, So he can't be shitty
to them in the same way he is to everybody else,
but he's still deeply manipulative to Wozniak, right, like that
is beyond argument. I think so the wah was believe
his friend. And for the next few weeks he works
at HP during the day and at night he solders

(11:05):
and codes software by hand because he doesn't have direct
access to a machine, right, he can't. This is to
understand the degree of his achievement. He doesn't have a
computer that he can code this computer in He is
sitting up with paper and writing code by hand. And
the first time he knows when it works is when
he puts all of this together and builds the device

(11:25):
and tries to run it. Jesus yes, Like this is
a whole different planet from what coders do today.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Like so a level of genius the I don't think
was actually guests no credit for he is so fucking
good at this it's nuts.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
Jobs registers Apple as a California business partnership on April first,
nineteen seventy six. Their initial logo is drawn by the
guy who is briefly the third founder of the company,
Ronald Wayne. Wayne is an Atari engineer who they brought
in to kind of be the adult in the room. Right,
one thing Jobs is good at that you wouldn't expect
me to be good at. He has certain kinds of humility.

(12:08):
He understands for a long period of time, I want
to be the CEO, but I'm not ready to do
that job. Right. His first pick, he's going to pick
a few people for this role. And he's bad at
picking people for this role, by the way, but he
does understand I'm not ready to do this, which is
interesting to me. You usually see a guy like Jobs. Yeah,
weird for him to have that level of understanding of

(12:29):
at least one of his limitations. Now, Wayne makes the
first logo for Apple, which Steve Jobs loves. And this
first logo is an etching of Isaac Newton beneath an
apple tree. It's very pretentious. Jobs loves it because he
is pretentious. But like I will guarantee you Apple would
not have worked out had that been their logo. Right.

(12:49):
The Apple logo today is maybe the most valuable logo
on the planet. There is a reason why it is
so front and center in like the back of every device. Right,
it's what you see when people you know someone's using
an Apple. Right. It's an undeniably successful design, and Jobs
wants this like pretentious ass Isaac Newton design because he

(13:10):
thinks it's smarter. Right. They do eventually jettison it before
the company, you know, comes out within it logo.

Speaker 3 (13:17):
By the way, the thing you're not describing is that
it's got Apple computer co on it. It looks like
the label from an eighteen hundreds.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah. Yeah, like medicine, Like someone's kind of sell you medicine.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
Stay coil logo. It's all stippled as well at Wall
Street Journal style. Yeah, this is this isn't just bad.
This is like dog shit.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
It's dog shit. It's going to get replaced very quickly.
Wayne is going to leave the company, and like he
has like a third of the company, has a stake
in it that he like sells for I think like
a thousand bucks or some shit like. But what it
says a lot about how shitty Steve Jobs is to
work with that. Years later, when Wayne is interviewed about this,
he's like, yeah, I just thought it would be too strong.

(14:00):
I'm glad I quit the job because it wouldn't have
been worth the stress. Like this man looks at the
possibility of having one hundreds of millions of dollars. It
is like, but I wouldn't have had to stay in
a room with Steve Jobs. Not worth it. The smell
not worth it. Yeah, the smell alone, it's not worth
that money.

Speaker 3 (14:16):
Oh boy.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
So Wahs succeeds and the device he makes becomes the
Apple One. It's basically just this is not what we
would consider a full computer. It is a microprocessor, a CPU,
a power supply, and some memory chips on a circuit board. Right.
You put it in a box like you get a
cigar box, and you stick this fucker in there, and
you hook it up to a monitor and a keyboard,

(14:39):
and then you've got a computer you can use in
your home. The Apple One is not a big hit
among the computer geeks at the homebrew club. They wanted
to hack and cobble, and they liked sharing schematics and
stuff for free. The fact that Jobs is trying to
sell this idea to them for money rubs everyone the
wrong way. But in this instance, Jobs understands the future

(15:00):
better than they do. He knows that it lays in
selling a computer regular people want to buy. So he
finds a guy who owns a computer shop, and he
works at a deal to sell a bunch of these
boards for five hundred bucks a pop. He brings in
a bunch of his friends from around California and elsewhere
to help them make the boards, and he hires his
mom to manage the phones. Elizabeth Holmes is one of

(15:21):
Apple's first employees and does finance work for them. And
this is where the legendary story of Apple being formed
out of a family garage comes from. Jobs in Wozniak
Rope in their friends jobs's adopted sister works there. They
bring in their friends girlfriends. Right you know, Elizabeth Holmes
is Dan Kottke's girlfriend. He has them like soldering a
bunch of boards together. Right. Kotkey moves down from Oregon

(15:43):
for the summer to help. And this is the first
time that people get exposed to Steve's temper. Brince Schlender
writes he prodded the team ceaselessly when things went wrong.
He moved fast. After an old girlfriend failed to solder
a few chips correctly, he made her the team's bookkeeper.
His temper was short, and he never hesitated to belittle
their work when something went wrong. As a child, Steve

(16:03):
had rarely been given any reason to hold back his
honest feelings. Now he began to learn one of his
first management lessons, namely that his temper, properly targeted, could
actually be a very effective motivational tool. Right, people will
work hard to avoid me screaming at them because it's
such an unpleasant experience. Ooh, that does say a lot
about this guy. So they come out with this thing,

(16:26):
this legitimately revolutionary device, the Apple one, and it kind
of flops. Right. They sell, They make a good amount
of money off the first batch of sales to the store,
but the store can't move them. Right. Part of the
problem is timing the first twenty five devices hit the
store right at the same time as a more established

(16:46):
company puts out its first personal computer, the IMSAI eighty eighty,
which would become the first personal computer to sell more
than a million dollars worth of product in a single month. Right.
Un Like the Apple one, the IMSAI eighty eighty is
a complete machine. It's in a box, like an actual
professional box, not some box that a dude found, right.

(17:10):
And it's not just so. It's not just a circuit
board with some kookie branding. Right. It's something that's more
recognizable to a normal person as a product, and particularly
to like somebody buying a computer for their business, right
because that is still the bulk of the of the
of the market right now. Now. The other issue is
employees at the one store that Apple's first product is
in hate Jobs. Whenever he comes down to try to

(17:33):
get them to buy more, to try to like get
them to change the prominence with which the Apple one
is put up in their store, He's like, he hasn't showered.
He stinks to high heaven.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
He looks at the ways of him the pig pen, right.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
And yeah, they're all just like why are we why
are we taking Yes, And they're these guys at these
these early stores that he's trying to get to buy
his product are like, why would we take a risk
on this?

Speaker 4 (17:57):
Dude?

Speaker 2 (17:58):
He doesn't look serious. This is not a guy who
can run a real company. Right. So the fact that
this fails, the fact that Jobs is not able to
make this product move, and that it starts to become
really clear that the company's approaching a serious cash crunch.
This causes Jobs to have something of a personal crisis.

(18:20):
When they sell that first those first twenty five units,
they make a good amount of money off of that, right, Like,
that's a lot of money for them, and that makes
them feel like we're on the cusp of success. And
then they stop selling additional units. He had initially thought
with the early success they had, jobs had convinced himself,
I have hacked a new kind of enlightened Buddhist capitalism. Right.

(18:41):
The fact that we're going to be a hit means
that I have figured out a better, a more ethical, enlightened,
spiritual way of being a caut his employees, one where
he screams abuses his girlfriend for not being as good
at soldering as he wants it to be. As soon
as he becomes convinced like I am the new Buddhist
founder CEO, he orders production of one hundred more Apple

(19:01):
Ones that they can't sell, and so he burns the
money they've made in this first sale on this disastrous
second push of products that people don't want to buy,
and so the company finds itself in an existential cash crunch.
They cannot move the units that they're making, and they're
running out of money to pay his friends, some of
whom have quit other work and moved to California, like

(19:23):
Daniel Kottke for the summer to help. For the first
time and not the last. The company headed towards a
disaster entirely architected by Jobs. And speaking of disasters, your
life will be a disaster if you don't invest in
the products and services that support this podcast. Oh we're back. So,

(19:51):
as Apple is careening towards the abyss, Jobs reaches out
to Chris Anne, his old girlfriend, and again they're kind
of on again, off again. Right, He'll come back into
her life and this is going to be a thing
for like twenty years. He gets more and more kind
of close to her every time he fails. Right, he
will never admit this, and he is constantly shitty to her,
but she is for decades going to be a crucial

(20:13):
part of his emotional support network.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Right.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
She's someone he feels safe with when he's failing, and
when he succeeds, he wants nothing from her. Does that
make sense?

Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah, that sounds like Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
That sounds like the Steve Jobs I know. Yeah. So
he's like he bears his soul to her and she
advises her because she is into the same kind of
Eastern religion that he is. There's this local Zen Buddhist
monk that they're both kind of friends with Cobin Chino,
and she's like, hey, go talk to Cobin and get
some advice from him. Right. The following story comes from

(20:44):
the excellent book Infinite Loop. Wouldn't it be better? Jobs asked,
and this is n't talking to Cobin if he were
to drop this capitalist deceit and head for a monastery
in Japan. The monk laughed and told Jobs he would
not find much difference between the two, a statement that
showed the monk had incredible insight into either the nature
of entrepreneurship or the personality of Steve Jobs.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
Well, just the thing that he said still absolutely nothing.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
I think what the monk is saying, you will not
notice a difference between being a monk and a monastery
or running a company, because it's still you.

Speaker 3 (21:18):
You to watch Bakkaroo banside that where you go there
you are.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, exactly exactly. You will be like if you want to.
If you feel like you're doing something wrong, it's because
of who you are and how you treat things, not
because of what you're doing right, which I think is
a legitimate insight. That quote continues. Afterward, Jobs confided to
his old girlfriend that he was afraid Apple would turn
him into a monster, and boy, howdie is that one

(21:44):
of those Dune moments. So by this point, Apple had
switched to the now famous Apple logo from the pretentious
one Jobs had loved. At one point, he flew into
a rage with their only customers so far about the
logo that the guy owning the shop has no choice
in the logo, but Job screams at him, people that

(22:06):
gets horseshit, We've got to change the name. And he
actually gets talked out of that by the client. Right,
Steve Jobs tries to jettison the name and logo for
Apple Computers.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Do we have to find out what he was going
to change it to?

Speaker 2 (22:19):
But it was like, I'm sure it's something pretentious, Buddhist capitalism,
anchor some shit. I don't know. Yeah, Now there are
some additional weird issues that Apple has to confront early
on this one. I did not see coming. The same
summer they're trying to make this the Apple one work.
The Omen comes out, you know the movie The Omen, Right, Yes,

(22:41):
I know what you're asking. Again, what the fuck does
that have to do? It's selling it. I can't wait
to find out well, for reasons, I've never heard a
good explanation for jobs sells the Apple one for six
hundred and sixty six dollars and sixty six man owns
the Bible, That one's right in the Bible. Yeah, I'm
sure now. Well, Oddly though, it's not Christians that this

(23:01):
pisses off. It's a group of Sikhs who organize a
campaign to like protest against Apple that like drowns the
job's household, which is Apple's office, like his mom's running
the phones, and they just get deluged in complaints about
like the fact that they're clearly selling a satanic product.
It's very weird the way this moral panic works out.
I guess it's it shows how different the times are.

(23:23):
Go figure Jesus Christ. Yeah, what a weird issue to have.
That one's not his fault. Who could know?

Speaker 3 (23:30):
Right, I'm sorry, Yes, it is his full Why are
you selling it for six hundred and sixty six dollars?

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah? It must have been on purpose, right.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Yeah, there's no real Did he just leave his finger
on a key? Like no, he was like, oh yeah,
this will be Yeah, this version of Elon Musk's doing
four twenty jokes it is.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
I didn't think about that, but he is that guy.
It is the same kind of dude, right, wouldn't this
be funny? That's amazing. Eventually Jobs is able to secure
a few more months of funding by getting a loan
from some friends of Wosniak. Now, these guys, these people
who are good friends of Steve Wosneyak, they are not rich, right,

(24:10):
And in fact, one of them is going through like
dire financial straits at the moment. And when they're interviewed later,
they're both like, I don't actually know why we gave
Steve Jobs five thousand dollars, right, it doesn't make any
sense that we would have made this investment. All one
of them could later say is Steve had a silver tongue.
He could talk anybody into anything. Right, Again, from the
cult leaders sort of thing he is. He is really

(24:32):
good at convincing people to do what he wants them
to do, to a point where they're like baffled by
why they do it themselves. Right.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
I think he was convincing but also very annoying and
smelled And I keep mentioning the smell. But it's insane
to me that this just like stinky asshole was able
to con so many people.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
Here's the thing, though, the stinky asshole who conned a
lot of people. That's also the description of Rasputen. Right.
Often human history turns on a smelly asshole who's man,
some stinky man who's good at convincing people to act
against their interests. Look, I can't imagine Hitler smelled great? Right,

(25:12):
you know they in the Boston smell zone. Yeah, what
did these guys smell like? Not great? Now? You know,
Saddam Hussein, there was a man who smelled good. I'm
going to guarantee that guy always smelled incredible. He just
has that vibe to him.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
You know.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
That's my head canon for Saddam and for Tito weirdly enough,
but not Stalin. So Steve was of course lying, right,
or at least he's at best he's getting by. He's
convincing these people to throw down their last bit of
cash on this investment, not based on his actual knowledge
that they are going to turn shit around, because he
has no ideas here, right, he basically has to go

(25:49):
to Wosniak and say, the Apple one, groundbreaking as it is,
is not selling. We have to figure something else out.
And he has to hope that Wosniak can do magic again. Right,
the Apple one is too weak that it doesn't have
a powerful enough processor. It can't really compete. It's the
technically the first I think, But like the PCs that

(26:10):
succeed before it does, you know, they have more horsepower. Right,
And so what initial buzz there had been around the
Apple One, it fades because everything else that comes out
immediately afterwards is a lot better. And so fixing this
is going to come down to Wosniak. And Wosniak is
not motivated by money. He never is. He is motivated,
like all genius nerds, by impressing other nerds. Specifically, he

(26:34):
wants to impress the guys at the home Brew club
who were not that impressed by his first creation. So
he decides to do the impossible, make an affordable PC
that's color TV compatible. And I'm going to quote again
from Infinite Loop here. The only problem was that most
designers figured out that to put color on a home
computer would require another board equal in size to the motherboard,

(26:55):
containing forty or more chips that would at least double
the price of the computer, not to mention, create all
sorts of new problems with reliability, power consumption, cooling, et cetera.
It was the perfect challenge for wa was nobody alive
could look at a chip design and simplify it by
factor of two or five or ten in the way
Was could, And now having announced his intentions, he set

(27:17):
out to do it. And being Wase, he also had
his own silly, eccentric reason for doing the impossible. He
wanted to play the game he devised for Atari Breakout
on his own computer and not just on an arcade player.
So again, Jobs is entirely motivated by wanting to succeed,
wanting to be influential, wanting to be rich and powerful.
Wozniak is motivated by wanting to impress some other nerds

(27:39):
and wanting to play a video game in his house. Right,
Why this theory is kind of a tragedy, Yes, it
really is. It's very sad.

Speaker 3 (27:49):
This lovely, this lovely man who's lear I love doing computers.
I love doing computer so much. And this other guy
who's just like a Goplin he wants to make more
money than God.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
And this is this is why I prefer the Fastbender
Rogan movie. Is that like Fastbender, it comes across as
like kind of sinister which Job was and seth Rogan
is wholesome right as Steve Wotsneyak, and it captures he's
playing Waws largely during the period when like Waz is
angry at Jobs, which is a thing that happens, right

(28:24):
because Jep justifiably yes, anyway, that's the one I would
recommend watching. So yeah, this does I think get to
the heart of what makes Apple work. Right. In one
corner you have Wohsniak. He's not interested in money or
doing anything for the money, and without him, Apple would
never have had a product. Now we've been making fun
of Steve and it is an unequal partnership up this point,

(28:45):
but Steve plays a critical role in why this works
out because the Waws is never going to build a business,
right He's probably, despite his genius, probably would not have
been very influential without Jobs, because Jobs is going to
force these brilliant things things he's making into the market, right,
that is the thing that wouldn't have happened without Jobs.

(29:07):
Right now, Remarkablyosniak solves the remarkable engineering hurdle that he
had been set for him, and in doing so, he
creates a device that integrates the display driver into the microprocessor.
This is probably I think there's some debate about this,
but I have heard it argue that this is the
single innovation that most makes mass market personal computer's possi.

Speaker 3 (29:28):
It's quite literally the thing that makes them work. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah, it's a huge, huge deal. But he's saying that
he did it is just some guy. Yeah, some guy
who wants to play Breakout, and it's because of his innovation.
Nearly every part of a PC now is able to
be put on a single board that can display in
color and doesn't cost as much as a new fucking car. Right,
this is still not quite enough. In Apple lore, the

(29:51):
Apple two is usually described as Wasniac's brainchild. But the
whole thing needs to fit and be shipped in a
professional case, not a cigar box, which is what they'd
been doing. And as a result of that, it needs
a better power supply. And the Wahs doesn't know shit
about power supplies, right, this is outside of his wheelhouse.
Power supplies are analog devices. He is a digital guy,

(30:15):
And there's a weird kind of pride divide between the
dudes who are into the analog and the digital shit right.
So jobs has to ask a friend of Atari, who
do we bring in to figure out the power supply?
And the name they get is a Marxist mad scientist
named Frederick Holt. And this is a weird part of
the story. And I'm going to quote from the book
Return to the Little Kingdom here, which is the first

(30:37):
history of Apple that gets published. As a youth, he
had inherited the complete works of Lenin from his grandfather,
a revolutionary socialist who ran for governor of the state
of Maine on the Eugene Debs ticket. And though Lenin
came to share his teenage bookshelf with the works of Darwin,
Holt decided that the triumph of the proletariat was infinitely
preferable to the survival of the fittest. He found graduate

(30:57):
work in mathematics at Ohio State lonely it was like
playing chess with yourself, edited a free speech newspaper and
explored the private jealousies of radical left splinter groups. He
became national treasurer for the student portion of the National
Coalition Against the War in Vietnam, and was invited by
a small New York publisher to write a book about
the logic of Marxism, but he was diverted by the
call of politics. And in nineteen sixty five, when John

(31:20):
Lindsay ran from mayor of New York City, Holt managed
the rival campaign of a black taxi driver who stood
as a revolutionary socialist. The duo succeeded in drawing far
more attention from the FBI than the New York electorate.
This is the guy who's going to figure out the
apples power supply, right, And it's funny. That's such an
interesting backstory.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
But also it's interesting how Steve Job seems to be
surrounded by people with relatively strong moral beliefs yes, despite
the fact he has none. No.

Speaker 2 (31:50):
And he's good at manipulating them too. He manipulates these people.
These people believe in things and he does not. Yes.
And it's one thing that's funny. And the Ashton Kutcher
movie all of this that like that paragraph I read,
that's a fascinating backstory for a character, right, this like
genius engineer who comes into engineering as like a Marxist academic.

(32:11):
That's like, you can have a really interesting character. The
because the Jobs movie is written by Dipshitz, all the
only thing they can think of for him is like,
we'll give him a leather jacket and have him ride
a motorcycle. Like that's they make him. Then they make
him the Fosters, They don't. They don't even make him
a like they just don't know what to do with
the character because it's it's it's written by scrubs. Holt

(32:34):
is an interesting guy, though, and he doesn't want to
work for Apple. Initially, he tells the company basically, you
can't afford me, and Job says, no problem, we'll figure
it out. Holt. I don't really know the exact details
of the detail they work out. Holt would later just
say he conned me into working. So there you go.
The new and improved Apple one is a much better product,

(32:56):
and it starts selling. It starts selling like hotcakes, but
personally conflicts between Wosniak and Jobs nearly derail everything. Right.
The cause was this this question of what are we
going how many expansion slots are we going to put
in the machine? Right? Wosniak wants eight, And these are
the slots that allow you eventually are going to allow
you to hook up like a printer in addition to

(33:17):
like cooking up a keyboard and a mouse, right, Jobs
is like, you need a keyboard and you need a monitor.
Those are the only slots you need. We don't want
to give people more because that makes it too big,
so it's not streamlined, and we don't want customers to
have control over the product. Right. This is he is
obsessed with simplicity and cutting down the degree of access
consumers have to modifying their own products. That is a

(33:39):
hallmark of Apple Stuff today. This exists at the beginning.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
Of genuinely fascinate as Yes, going back to the original devices,
he had this world garden philosophy.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yes, this is from this. He has always believed in this.
And what's fascinating about this to me? If he had
gotten his way because he loses this argument with wa.
If he's gotten this way in the first the Apple
and the Apple Too, the company would have failed. It
would not have worked as a product. The fact that
the Apple Too in particular is so modifiable and expandable
is why it has The Apple Too is the top

(34:11):
selling Apple product for like thirteen years, right because people
can modify it, you know. But Jobs would have been
disastrously wrong if he'd gotten his way in the short term.
In the long run, I think it's bad for all
of us that he's right about this, But he is
right that this is the smartest way to make a
profit in the tech industry is cutting down consumer access

(34:32):
and cutting down simplifying doing shit like cutting out the
headphone jack. Again, I'm angry at him for doing that,
but it works. You can't deny it. It is profitable
right to run your your tech.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
But price sucks.

Speaker 2 (34:45):
It sucks, ass. I don't like that it is, but
you can't.

Speaker 3 (34:48):
Argue that we all use on a deal. Yes, I
love me Dongles.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
I'm very frustrated by it. It is interesting to me
that he Dongles pilled. He sees what of eventually will
be the most profitable way to do things. He just
he has no understanding of the fact that that won't
work now, which is strange. I didn't expect that when
I started looking into this. Wosneiak's parents and family hated Jobs,

(35:15):
and this gives us some important outside context on the
man I've mentioned before. Jobs is basically a con man
who's con worked out right, and that is how Wosneak's
dad sees him. This guy, he sees what Jobs is doing.
He sees my boy is brilliant and sweet and naive, right,
and this man is making him, convincing him to work
long hours, to neglect his wife, to endanger his paying

(35:37):
career at HP for a pipe dream that's never going
to pay off. He's taking investments based on work my
boy hasn't even done yet, right, And he's right about this.
And then kind of at the height of this, Commodore,
one of the computing giants of the day, offers to
buy Apple Computer out. Basically, we will buy your company,
we will buy your product. You will get one hundred

(35:59):
thousand dollars to split up, plus each of you will
get a healthy salary like thirty six grand a year
at Commodore, right, which is a lot of money at
the time. This is a good deal, right, This would
make them both they're going to be crazy rich, but
this would make them both very comfortable. You know, on paper,
it's a solid deal. Now, Steve is going to fight
against taking this deal. And he's actually right about this

(36:21):
because Commodore, the people running it are shady as hell.
They are going to run their company into the ground
not too long from now. They probably would have fucked
him in Wosniak on the deal. It's smart that he
doesn't take this, but it doesn't seem like the smart call.
And Steve Jobs does the fucking around here, right, yes,
And this pisses off Wozniak's family. He was like, he
is going to this is the entire reason they have

(36:43):
a product to sell is our boy, and he's trying
to screw him out of a payday, right And I'm
going to quote again from Infinite Loop. It all came
to a head one evening in September, as the Apple
narrative shifted momentarily from the Jobs's house to the Wosney Acts.
Jerry Wosniak confronted Steve Jobs. He had told his son
Mark that he was going to make the little son
of a bitch cry and that'd be the end, and

(37:05):
that was what he did. He told Jobs, as Mark overheard,
you don't deserve shit. You haven't produced anything, you haven't
done anything. Jobs burst into tears. He told Jerry Wosniak
that the veteran engineer didn't appreciate all that he Steve
Jobs had done for the company. Then the tearful young
man turned to his partner and said, was if we're
not fifty to fifty. You can have the whole thing.

(37:25):
Whether Steve Jobs cried out of betrayal, surprise, or calculation
is impossible to know. But even though he cried, as
Jerry Wosniak had predicted, it was not the end. Through
the tears, he had called the bluff of this rather
unusual pairing of a middle aged man fighting in place
of his grown up son. And when it was over,
Steve Jobs was still in charge, and he still killed
the Commodore deal. Cool. And it's interesting to me that

(37:48):
he has figured out how to use crying as part
of a strategy of Like, it's not just belittling and
screaming at people. He knows that he can cry to
make himself seem sympathetic, and his friend Wozniak, who legitimately
loves him, will that will turn him around even though
we've been fighting.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
What a fucking scumbag.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah, it really is. He is always going to be
good at playing to Watsdak's sense of loyalty to this friendship,
which is going to be tested mightily in the years
to come. Steve is although he is right about killing
this deal right, it works out much better for them
both that he does, and so you do have to
give him credit for that he does not he doesn't
see this right now, maybe you can say he didn't
know that at the time. This is still him being

(38:28):
a con artist, but it does show his instincts are
pretty good about this sort of thing, right. And so
after he kills this deal, he sets up meetings with
a guy named Don Valentine who works at Sequoia Capital.
Don is a serious business man, right, and Jobs is
a smelly hippie. And so here's how Brent Schlinder describes
the way Jobs shows up to this meeting. His jeans

(38:50):
had holes, his hair was unbrushed, he wore no shoes,
and he smelled. They only get the meeting because Jobs
he'll massage his own bare in meetings.

Speaker 3 (39:01):
Like he's so off putting the people's the disgusting goblin.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
They only get this meeting because Jobs talks a marketer,
Regis McKenna into setting it up. Right, And after this meeting,
Valentine asks McKenna, why did you send me these renegades
from the human race? But he says this, he's still
impressed enough by what they're saying that he connects them
to an investor, a guy named Mike Markula and Markola

(39:27):
winds up both investing a bunch of money. He puts
like one hundred grand of his own money into Apple,
and he also he basically signs with them for a
line of credit with Bank of America for like a
quarter of a million dollars. And in exchange for putting
this money in and for being the guaranter of this
line of credit, he gets a third of the company,
which is, by the way, Mike does very well off

(39:49):
this deal, right, makes a couple dollars a third of Apple,
quite a lot of money. His one condition is that
Wosniak has to quit HP, right, And this is the
this is a smart thing. Yeah, what Mike's like, If
I'm gonna put this much money in Wozniak, you got
to shit or get off the pot. You know.

Speaker 3 (40:08):
This is the saying that Wozniak has done all of
the things you said without leaving his day job.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
No, No, he's doing this in like evenings when he
and kind of he's ignoring his wife.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
Niley fucking a podcast. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Yeah, I know, right, he is. He is very uh
and they're young too, which which makes it easier to
work out stuff like this.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
That's definitely it.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
And you know who's forever young. The sponsors of our podcast,
none of them age, and you too will stop aging
if you buy whatever it is they're selling. The Fountain
of Youth is here advertising on our show. And we're back,

(40:49):
having conquered aging. Let's continue the story of Steve Jobs.
Our cameras are off today.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
But just no, I did not enjoy that ad pivot.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Well I'm proud of it.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
So yeah, this we're fine.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
I'm proud that we have conquered the fountain of youth,
you know, like the conquistadors of old. So this is
the point at which Apple starts to turn into a
real company. They move out of that famous garage, they
get a real board of directors, and they get their
first professional CEO, who is coincidentally named Michael Scott. Again
the number of people with names that are prominent for

(41:21):
some other reason. That's the first Apple CEO is literally
Michael Scott, and he is I will say he is
as bad at this as the Michael Scott from the offices,
Like he is not good at this job. Incredible, It's
very funny.

Speaker 3 (41:37):
Your history is oh Yeah, I'm the guy who couldn't
run Apple.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
There's so many guys who have that job title, actually,
including Steve Jobs, including Steve Jobs for a spell. Yeah.
So Apple begins its rise to global prominence after this point.
Steve Jobs, now they're making money right, moves into a
ranch style house in Coupertino alongside his buddy Dan. Now
Chris Ann works at Apple in the packing department at

(42:01):
this point, and she's living with Jobs and with Dan Kottkey.
And this is where we get to an interesting discrepancy
between the account Isaacson writes based on Steve's recollections, and
the account Steve's daughter, Lisa Wrights, based on her mother
Chrisan's recollections. And this is, by the way, my sources
for this. There's the book Becoming Steve Jobs. There's Isaacson
Steve's Jobs. There's the book Infinite Loop. There's Inside the

(42:24):
Magic Kingdom by I think Moritz is his name. Those
are like my business history book sources for the Steve
Jobs story. The best book I read preparing for this series,
and I read this thing cover to cover in about
a day is Lisa Jobs. Is Lisa I forget exactly
what her last name is it's like a hyphenated one.
I think it's Brennan Jobs. She's a really good writer.

(42:46):
It's something about like, you know, Steve's sister is a
famous Mota Simpson is a great novelist. Steve thinks he
could have been a poet. Maybe he could have been
because like his daughter's actually like, this is not just
interesting because of the insights. It hasn't a jo It's
like legitimately an extremely well written and emotionally affecting book.
Like her story of this, her relationship with this guy

(43:09):
who is at times abusive and deeply neglective to her
is like really like moved me. I actually very much
recommend reading Lisa's book. It's quite good. And in that
book kind of recalling her mother's recollections of this time
because Lisa's obviously not around yet, Lisa writes, my parents
were a couple again, living in a dark brown ranch

(43:30):
style house in Cooper, Tino, together with a man named Daniel, who,
along with my parents, also worked at Apple. Isaacson's recollection
of this makes it sound more like Jobs brought in
Chris Ann as an afterthought, right. Chris San's recollection is
we all moved in together and we were all close.
The way Isaacson describes it, you know, we're hosting all
sorts of crazy people, is the way that, like I

(43:50):
think Daniel describes it, And that's kind of the quote
Isaacson uses that, like they move in together, but it's
not really that meaningful to Jobs, I feel like chris
San's probably closer to the truth. But the relationship is tumultuous,
and chris Anne claims she eventually decides to end it, right,
She's going to quit Apple, break up with Steve, move
out to go do something else. We don't know if

(44:12):
that's true, right. This is you get different accounts of
from different people about relationships, and to it a certain point,
you can't really know. It does seem like it's one
of those things where neither of them is able to
actually finally break things off. Right. Maybe there's a little
bit of codependency or something going on here. I don't know,
But chris Anne says she is planning to leave, and
before she can her IUD gets expelled without her knowledge

(44:36):
and she gets pregnant. Right. This is how Lisa Brennan
Jobs describes what came next, which is her conception right.
She told my father the next day that she was
pregnant when they were standing in the middle of a
room off the kitchen. There was no furniture, just a rug.
When she told him, he looked furious, clinched his jaw,
and then ran out the front door and slammed it
behind him. He drove off. She thought he must have

(44:57):
gone to talk with an attorney who told him not
to talk to her, because after that he wouldn't say
a word. She quit her job in the packing department
at Apple, too embarrassed to be pregnant with my father's
child and working at his company, and went to stay
at different friends' houses. She went on welfare. She had
no car, no income. She thought of having an abortion,
but decided not to after a recurring dream of a

(45:18):
blowtorch between her legs. And that is it's perfectly understandable
that being told that, like by surprise, you have gotten
someone pregnant, to have like an initial emotional reaction to it.
The fact that he never comes back, that he will
not talk to her about this, that he treats it
as entirely her fault, is deeply cruel and fucked up.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
Because I think he might actually be worse than Elon Musk. Yes,
what a fucking monster it is.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
It gets a lot worse. We're just starting here. So Jobs,
he is enraged at Chris Anne for having the temerity
to get pregnant. And I think that's important.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
How does the sperm get this levee?

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Where did the sperm come from? In this situation. It's
important to note he doesn't seem to be specifically pissed
that she chooses to go through with the pregnancy, right,
and in fact, he may have supported the idea of
her going through with the pregnancy. And this is something
you will not find. First off, I'm going to continue.
This is a quote from one of Jobs's friends, Greg Calhoun.

(46:20):
This is what he tells Isaacson at the time about
why Jobs is so weird about this. Steve was not
just dealing with Chrisanner or the pregnancy. He could be
very engaged with you in one moment, but then very disengaged.
There was a side to him that was frighteningly cold, right,
And this is the attitude of his friends. He's just
this guy who compartmentalizes, so he just shuts off in
his head the possibility that this kid is his and

(46:43):
that he has any responsibility to it, and he's he's
so good at doing that that he never revisits that,
you know, at least not for a very long time.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
A very convenient way to live one's life.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
I don't think that's act. We're building to that, though.
He begins to tell his coworkers and friends, who all
knew Chris Anne, that the baby is not his. Decades later,
he even told Isaacson, I was pretty sure I wasn't
the only one she was sleeping with, which the number
of times he will basically say, well, if you weren't
such a whore, this wouldn't have happened. That is what

(47:15):
he says, right, I'm not saying that about it like
that is what Steve says. He's very much blunt and
cruel about that to her.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
Yeah, I was there when you were saying that. I
was like, is he blatantly like, oh.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
He's going to tell Time that, and like he's going
to tell Time magazine that we're building to this. His
friend Daniel Kottkey describes this, and I think Daniel actually
does have the measure of jobs here. He describes this
as a case of jobs using his reality distortion field
on himself, and Elizabeth Holmes said he considered the option
of parenthood and considered the option of not being a parent,

(47:49):
and he decided to believe the latter. He had other
plans for his life. I think part of that is accurate.
But this misses an important detail, and it's a detail
I've only run into and Lisa Brennan Jobs's book, Right,
you don't get this from Isaacson. You don't get this
from from Schlender, you don't get this from Moritz, right,
And this is very important. Right. So Jobs may have

(48:12):
been on board with the potential of having a certain
kind of child. Right. And this story is very ably
told in the book Small Fry by Lisa Brennan Jobs.
When it comes to the question of how did Chris
Anne decide to keep the baby? Here is what Jobs
told Isaacson. First. This is what Jobs says to Isaacson
late in life when he is the great Steve Jobs

(48:33):
about this. I was all in favor of her getting
an abortion, but she didn't know what to do. She
thought about it repeatedly and decided not to or I
don't know that she ever really decided. I think time
just decided for her. That is what Job says. I wanted.
I thought she should she should get an abortion. She
just kind of waited until that wasn't an option anymore.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
Except he didn't talk to us.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
How would he except how would he know? Right? This
is not what chris Anne says. Chris Anne tells Lisa
that to make the decision about whether or not to
keep this embryo, she consults with a Buddhist monk. Her
parents knew. Come, come on right, this paragraph you will
not catch in any of these more popular biographies of jobs,

(49:13):
quote have the child. Cobun had advised, if you need help,
I'll help you, but in the intervening years he had
not offered any help. No one had promised as much
as Kobun or had seemed to my mother at the
time as trustworthy. At the time, my young father had
also trusted Cobun, who told him that if I turned
out to be a boy, I would be part of
a spiritual patrimony, and in that case my father should

(49:35):
claim me and support me when it turned out I
was a girl. My mother later found out from others
in the community. Cobun had told my father he had
no obligation to care for my mother and me. Oh,
that is a very different story than Jobs gets.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
I think Steve Job says why he thought it was
too kind?

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Yeah, yeah, it was not a very good person.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
That is. Yes, I realized the title of this show.
But yeh fucking christ.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
Yeah, it's so much worse than you get in the
other versions of this story. And you know, I can't
say who is totally right, you know, but but Lisa
Brennan Jobs' book rings truer to me.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
I would be shocked if the answer was the nice story.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
And this is consistent with the stories Jobs tells about
all of the other times that he was He based
his life on these kind of decisions based in his
spiritual beliefs, right, it is very consistent with that. So
chris Anne has the baby. She has it on their
friend Robert's farm up in Oregon, and Steve arrives a
couple of days after the birth, at which point he

(50:42):
proceeds to tell all their old friends he is there
to see his child, and he tells all of his
old friends on the farm, it's not my kid. And
again Robert Friedland, who owns the farm, not a great man.
This man becomes a mining billionaire. But Robert's like, dude,
what are you talking about? She looks just like you, Like,
come on, man, like we've all seen you two together.

(51:03):
She looks exactly like you. This is obviously your kid.
Stop fucking being bullshitting around about this.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
You know that this is like not the guy you
want to be the moral power gone age.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yes, no, And it does seem everyone who is friends
with Jobs who knows him, and Chris Anne immediately is like, well, yeah,
this is obviously his kid, right, you just don't take
one look at her. Yeah exactly. And credit to Schwarzenegger,
He's made a lot of morally compromised decisions in his life.
He immediately was like, yeah, I mean this is my kid.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
That's mine.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
This is my kid, and I'm never going to yeah exactly.
The Apple Too had been released not long before Lisa's birth,
again based on Wosneiak's original design, and it very quickly
becomes the most successful piece of its day. It's going
to spell sell more than six million units over the
course of a decade and a half on the market

(51:57):
in varying forms, and the rocket like success of The
Apple Too prompts a run of investments in Apple, and
the company goes public in nineteen eighty, and in that
whole time period from the Apple twos release, which roughly
coincides with Chrisanne's pregnancy, to the IPO, Steve pretends the
daughter he'd named was not his. He repeatedly denies her

(52:18):
and denies he as any responsibility to this kid, Chris Sanne.
For the first three years or so, Lisa's alive is
barely getting by. She baby sits at a daycare, She
lives off welfare and odd waitressing jobs. At one point,
she has to move into a group home for women
who are considering adoption right because she just cannot support
herself and Steve Jobs's kid otherwise.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
As she watches the kid's father just get insanely.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Well, yeah, he about to. He hasn't gone public yet.
This is criticism way this time's out. It is about to,
and he's doing quite well. He's certainly doing well enough
to help her not be in poverty.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
Right to pay in any way.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
Jobs is forced to take responsibility for Lisa in nineteen
eight because the state of California finds out that the
mother of Steve Jobs's child is on welfare and it's
basically like, why is the state of California paying for
this kid when you're Steve Jobs? And so the District
Attorney of San Mateo County sues him for child support.

(53:17):
Fuck yeah, California's attitude is like, yeah, we shouldn't be
paying for this right, Jobs deny his paternity. He's like, well,
I'm sterile, it couldn't be my kid, And so the
State's like, well, then let's have you take a fucking
DNA test. Why is he lying when science exists?

Speaker 3 (53:33):
Why is he lying? It's why this is the Guru
told him he wouldn't have any responsibility, and he's a
huge asshole, and most people based on this history have
never just gone prove it, Steve you.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Fuck you fucking asshole, asshole.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
But he's also like dumb.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Well this is I'll say, not in defense of him,
but this is basically the first moment at which he
could be made to take a DNA test. They have
just that's just become a thing. And in fact, the
maximum that a DNA test can like say that a
kid is likely your kid is like a ninety four
percent something like that rate of confidence, Right, that's as

(54:14):
high as it will go at the time, and that's
how highly confident the test is that this is his kid, right,
Like he's like, it's not mine. The States like take
a DNA test, and the DNA test says like, this
is definitely his fucking child. And as a fucked up aside,
Lisa is so small when they do this that they
have to like try several times to draw blood from her.

(54:34):
They have to keep poking her because she's she's so
tiny that it's hard for them to get a vein.
So he puts her through this too, his child. The
test does prove that she's his, and so the court
requires him to pay them back for past welfare payments
made to Chris Ann, and it authorizes child support payments
of five hundred dollars a month, plus it requires him

(54:55):
to provide medical insurance for the child. The case is
finalized in December of nineteen, right before Apple's IPO, and
it's kind of surprising to Chris Anne at first that, like,
after literally months of delaying this case, suddenly his lawyers
are like, yes, let's sign, let's lock this down right now.
And the reason why they suddenly change is that four

(55:16):
days after they sign the papers, Apple goes public and
overnight Steve Jobs is worth nearly a quarter of a
billion dollars. They needed to settle this before that happened,
so he didn't have to pay more money to support
his child. Hm. Cool guy, great, great dude. So before

(55:41):
the IPO hits, he actually has to inform members of
the Apple board that he's fighting this child support case,
right and even at this late moment, months before he
will accept paternity for this child, board member Arthur Rock
recalls he kept insisting that there was a large probability
that he wasn't the father. He was delusional. So Apple

(56:01):
goes public and it's it's huge news. Number one, they're
selling computers faster than anyone ever has. They make personal
computing like a massive industry, right. And number two, the
Apple going public, Like three hundred people become millionaires overnight,
This has never happened before. All of the way that
all startups are obsessed with this IPO, with like everyone

(56:23):
getting rich overnight. You know, all the reasons open Ai
is making decisions it's making so it can get that
eighty billion dollar whatever evaluation, and all of the early
employees who have who have stock right now will get rich.
All of like that whole part of Silicon Valley culture
starts as a result of the mythic role of this
Apple IPO is going to have in everybody's mind. Right,

(56:44):
this is such a crucial moment for how the tech
industry winds up being what it is today. Right, And
so because this is such a huge story, Jobs is
a celebrity after the IPO, and Michael Moritz, who is
going to write the first book about Apple, writes an
article about him for Time magazine and it's it's funny.
Jobs hates Moritz because of how this works out, because

(57:04):
he is convinced that he was promised he was going
to be Times Man of the Year, and Time winds
up making the Personal Computer Man of the Year and
just writes a very fawning story about Jobs. Jobs is
convinced it's because Daniel Kottkey, basically says, tells part of
the story of the fact that he has this kid
and is pretending it's not his right. He says that

(57:25):
in his interview effectively, and Job is convinced that's why
Time didn't make me, so he never won. He never
forgives kott Key forgure this, and he blacklists Morris Moritz for.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
All the time. I like that it's not because he
did the thing. It's that he told someone. Yes, like
it's yes, it's not that time was like, hey, that
sounds morally reprehensible.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
Yeah, it's that they knew at all. Yeah. And it's
in this time interview because Moritz brings up you know,
I've heard about this kid and that you're deny paternity.
Jobs says to Moritz for this time article, that's going
to be like everywhere in the United States, twenty eight
percent of the male population in the United States could

(58:05):
be the father. He does this like tortured math based
on the DNA test to be like, well, the tests
aren't very good and technically a quarter is what he's says. Hun,
That's what he is trying to say, is like the
test is so inaccurate, a bunch of people could be
the father. It's not conclusive. What people interpret it is
the way you interpret it and the way Chris Anne

(58:27):
interprets it, which is that he's saying she's a slut, right,
And that is how Lisa in her book relates her
mom reading this article and it just destroys her for days,
for weeks, she is like depressed like it is that
it goes this article in Lisa's childhood is like a bomb,

(58:48):
and like, how does how does your mom explain to
you that your dad is staying saying stuff like that
about you? You know, like that is beyond cruel, Like
it's such an evil, evil way to treat not just
the mother of your child, but a child. You know,
it's it's pretty vile shit. So I'm going to quote

(59:10):
again from Liz's book, and this is her describing not
long after this, you know, right after the IPO and
after the case gets finalized, her first meeting with her father.
Just after the court case was finalized, my father came
to visit me once at our house in Menlo Park,
where we had rented a detached studio. It was the
first time I'd seen him since I'd been a newborn
in Oregon. You know who I am, he asked, He

(59:32):
flipped his hair out of his eyes. I was three
years old. I didn't I'm your father like he was
Darth Vader, my mother said later when she told me
the story, I'm one of the most important people you
will ever know.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
He's sorry here, I know, you fucking asshole. What a
fucking asshole, piece of shit moon where to dump to
your diary daughter for the first time. Fucking hell, the
most precious gift you could ever have, and treating it
this way just outrageous. So this is not the end

(01:00:06):
of the Steve Jobs being an asshole. Around nineteen eighty story,
several other people get fucked over in the Apple IPO.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Again. This is like the foundational myth of Silicon Valley.
Basically all of startup and VC culture revolves around the
resonance of this moment. But not everyone who had built
Apple got rich. Steve had brought in a lot of
brilliant people to do crucial work as contractors. He had
pushed them all to told them the work we're doing,
we are changing the world, this is crucial work. And

(01:00:34):
then when they finished their task, He's like, why would
I cut any of these guys in on stock? I
don't like fuck them, you know they already did the
thing I need from them. One of these people was
Daniel Kottke, his former best friend and roommate. Kotkey had
been like a couple of times, been like, hey, am
I going to get any stock, and Jobs was like,
it'll be fine, don't worry about it, and he was like,
I trusted him, so I didn't push for anything. In reality,

(01:00:59):
Jobs ensured was cut out entirely right. And when Isaacson
interviewed some of Jobs's friends who worked at Apple about this,
one of them said that Jobs is quote anti loyal.
He has to abandon the people that he's close to, and.

Speaker 3 (01:01:12):
The fuck does that mean?

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
What the fuck?

Speaker 3 (01:01:15):
Just Eve an asshole. He's a selfish piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
He is a differently He's not the kind of asshole
everyone else at Apple is. Right, And for an example
of how singular a piece of shit he is, Rod Holt,
the Marxist who built the power supply. He gets a
lot of options, right, He's going to be very rich
as a result of this. And he goes to Jobs
and he's like, look, man, how about I'm going to
give Cockkey some of my options. It's not right to
cut him out. He's been with us since the beginning.

(01:01:40):
I'm going to give him some of mine if you'll
match them, right, if you'll equal the number of options
I'm going to give him. And Job says, okay, I'll
give him zero. Now. The savior of the day here
is Steve Wozniak before the IPO, even before Kotkey gets
cut out, Wozniak realizes that a lot of like these,
a lot of these contractors are getting fucked and he

(01:02:02):
has a bunch of these like founder's stock options, and
so he he takes two thousands of these options and
he gives sells them for basically pennies to forty mid
level employees who he thought had gotten screwed, and most
of them wind up with enough money to buy a house. Right.
They don't get rich, but they they get something as
a result of this because of Wosniac. And when Wosniak

(01:02:22):
finds out that cot Key has been fucked out, he
straight up gives Kotkey a bunch of his options. He
does this to several people that job screws out, right
like Wosnik. There's like jokes at Apple that Wosniak's going
to go broke himself because he gives so many of
his options to people that jobs cut out of the
of the IPO, which says a lot about Wosniak and

(01:02:43):
his attitudes as much as the Angels above the Angels
the Steve Wosniac story, right, yeah, and it says a
lot obviously about Jobs too. But yeah, that's uh, that's
part two. How you feel it ed.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
I feel bad. I feel bad about Steve Jobs because
I already knew he was a deadbeat dad. I knew
he was a horror show of a person, an abusive
manager who used to He famously screamed at the mobile
Me team, and there were people the first version of
iCloud effectively screamed at them, would fire people in elevators,
and I didn't think he would be so I knew

(01:03:18):
it'd be bad. I didn't know he was this. By comparison,
most of these Silicon Valley people who are aspiring to
be Steve Jobs are actually nailing the personality.

Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
Yeah, just not the execution.

Speaker 3 (01:03:31):
Yes, they don't see because I think that he from
what you've told me, he was quite an impressive orator,
and you could tell that from his presentations as well.
But also he knew when not to piss people off
and when to be nice. Yea, even if that was
quite rare, making him so much worse like Mark Andresen

(01:03:54):
by comparison. Actually, no, we don't know his past either,
Like we'll probably get a that proves him just as bad.
But all of these people right now, they're really like
micro jobs, is they don't They lacked his sociopathy.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
Yeah, they lacked the mix of sociopathy and actually understanding
human nature.

Speaker 3 (01:04:15):
Yes, And that's the thing. I think that that is
the real thing that while these people today have his
sociopathy or his narcissism or what have you, they lack
his actual ability to understand people and understand that He
could cry or yell.

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
Yeah, yeah, andreson cry. Yeah, that's all cool. Good, good shit.
Well ed, do you have a have anything you gotta
plug here?

Speaker 3 (01:04:42):
Well, I have a podcast on cool Zone Media called
Better Offline. It's a weekly tech show about some of
the Silicon Valley people that you might have heard us
discuss today and tech in general. And you can find
it on iHeartRadio on every other place where you can
find your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:04:57):
Hell yeah, well you can find us at this show.
We have a subreddit. If you google behind the Bastards
reddit you can find that there too. You can buy
a subscription if you don't want to have ads. At
cooler Zone Media, all of these things are possible.

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
So you just get things about Robert talking about the
eternal font of life.

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
Yeah, that's exactly it right and how can you too
can become immortal? So check all that out and most importantly,
go to Hell. I Love you.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast