Steve Jobs, dubbed "the man who ruined the world," is dissected through his traumatic adoption by Paul and Clara Jobs, early criminal blue box sales, and a betrayal of Wozniak involving a stolen $5,000 to $7,000 bonus. His spiritual wanderings in India and adoption of extreme diets shaped his "reality distortion field," while calligraphy classes at Reed College directly influenced Macintosh typography. Ultimately, the narrative frames Jobs' genius as inextricably linked to his moral failures, suggesting his legacy rests on a foundation of exploitation and deception rather than pure innovation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The phrase, this man ruined the world, gets used a lot, particularly by me on the show Behind the Bastards, which is the podcast you're listening to.
But today, folks, friends, Romans, countrymen, actually, people in Rome are not allowed to listen to this podcast based on a recent ruling by the Italian Supreme Court.
But the guy we're talking about today is the man who ruined the world, and his name is Steve Jobs.
Now, is that a hyperbolic statement?
Am I just lying to you in order to get people to listen to try to oversell this podcast?
Of course, because I'm a hack and a fraud.
But you know who's not a hack and a fraud is our guest today, Ed Zittron.
Hello.
And I am not a hack or a fraud.
That's true.
That's right.
You are, however, the host of a podcast called Better Offline.
Also true.
That's part of this very cool zone media network.
This very network.
I'm one of you now.
Yeah.
Better offline.
You train your gimlet eye towards the tech industry, which dominates to a significant extent both the U.S. economy and all of our lives and provide, I think, a necessarily jaundiced look at what's going on there.
And when you were talking about why is the tech industry the way that it is?
Why are tech founders the way that they are?
The most influential person to answer that question is Steve Jobs, right?
Like there's really no competition for that title.
He is the er founder in a lot of ways.
And I want to get into him today.
How much do you know about Steve Jobs?
Like, what is your actual information on him as a human being and not just as like a CEO, a founder?
As a human being, I know very, I've not seen the movies.
I've not read the book because the idea of Walter Isaacson telling me anything is kind of annoying as a preface.
Yes.
I do know that he was a deadbeat dad.
He is a deadbeat dad.
We'll be talking a lot about that.
There are two big movies about him.
There's the Aston Kutcher one, which is not very good.
What did you just, how did you just pronounce that, man?
Ashton Aston.
I hate him.
I hate him, Sophie.
I hate him.
Did you not hear about the fashion social network that he invested in?
Yes, I do.
Yes, I do.
He also on him.
Yeah, he also wrote a letter on behalf of his rapist that 70% of the world.
Yeah, Danny Masterson.
Terrible man.
How disgusting.
And I'll say this: he's a bad Steve Jobs.
He's not good in the movie.
It's not a good movie.
No.
Now, the worst sin is not him as Steve Jobs.
It's Josh Gadd, who I do not like very much as Steve Wozniak.
No.
You can't have Josh Gadd as Woz.
No.
And it's a cis of Woz.
There is a much better movie, and Seth Rogan plays Wozniak.
And Rogan is great casting for Wozniak.
He is a really good Woz.
And that is the better movie.
Neither of them is accurate, though.
Neither of them is very accurate to the man's life.
We're going to try to do better here.
One of my sources for this episode is the book Becoming Steve Jobs by journalist Brent Schlinder.
It is, I don't love it.
It's slightly less dick righty than Walter Isaacson's biography, but it's still a lot more dick righty than it ought to be, which is why my favorite source on at least the early life of Jobs and the founding of Apple is the book Infinite Loop, which I think is a far better work of journalism than either of those.
We also will talk a little bit about the Moritz book.
The book by Schlinder, Becoming Steve Jobs, has a foreword or a preface.
It has both a foreword and a preface, which I find frustrating.
But it's the foreword or whatever is written by Mark Andreessen, right?
Today, Andreessen is the CEO, massive venture capital guy, one of the big hype men and investors behind the AI revolution.
And in addition to believing that AI will literally become a god, he writes this: quote, if you polled the thousands of founders, you'd find that 99.9% of them never met Steve.
You'd also find that a fairly large number of them entered the tech industry after Steve passed away.
But overwhelmingly, if you ask them who their hero is, who they have tried to learn the most from about how to build a company and how to have an impact on the world, Steve is number one on that list by a very wide margin.
I see Steve's influence in everything they do.
It's in their behavior, in the polish and flair of their pitches.
It's in the design of their slides.
It's in the use of the word beautiful.
Before Steve, no startup ever used the word beautiful.
Now everything has to be beautiful.
Every product needs to be fantastic out of the gate.
Every product has to live up to its promise and bring delight to the lives of its users.
So he just fucking lied about everything he's ever invested in?
One of the things that Mark Andreessen is responsible for is the churn investment in startups, pumping them with money to provide as much service as necessary to capture market shares so that they can destroy incumbents.
That doesn't mean perfect.
Christ, this man invested in Facebook.
A lot of what he's saying is nonsense.
They're like, I would say close to 0% of tech products instantly delight users upon release.
And in fact, the norm is for them to be fucked up and for like customers to be beta testers, right?
Like that is mostly how the industry works.
But what Andreessen is right about there, where there is a legitimate insight there, is in his statement about Jobs' influence on how founders see themselves, right?
Yes.
The men and women who run the tech industry today do not just admire Jobs.
They want to be him.
And that's a problem because he was a terrible person.
So the story of Steve Jobs starts with his biological parents.
And I'm going to use some very clinical terms for them for reasons that I think are appropriate.
The man who is effectively his sperm donor is Abdul Fattah Jandali, who generally went by John.
Jandali was a Syrian man whose family were outrageously wealthy.
How wealthy?
Isaacson notes that his father, Steve's grandfather, pretty much controlled the price of wheat in Syria.
So John becomes a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin and he falls in love with Joanne Schliebel, in whose womb the clump of cells that would become Steve Jobs gestated.
Joanne's family were German immigrants and her father was a rich entrepreneur who was also kind of a piece of shit.
He forbade his adult daughter from marrying anyone who was not Catholic.
He threatened to cut Joanne off, which caused a problem because she was already pregnant with Steve.
Now, Joanne's father was dying, but not fast enough, and she wasn't willing to risk being cut out of the will.
So in 55, she travels to San Francisco and she spends time with a doctor whose specialty was women who wanted to have babies, but not raise them, right?
They're going to give the baby up for adoption, you know?
And Joanne's requirement, because she's able to list some pretty strict requirements for who's going to adopt her kid.
And one of the things she says is she wants them to be Catholics and they have to be college graduates.
Now, the first couple that was going to take Steve, they drop out, right?
Like they agree to take him and then they back out.
They give him up, basically, right?
I don't think we know why, but the doctor kind of has to find a family at the last minute who's going to take Steve.
And he goes with a family that Joanne is not happy with because they are not college graduate Catholics.
And in fact, the guy who's going to become Steve Jobs' father is a high school dropout blue collar mechanic.
And the guy who's going to be his mother is a high school graduate bookkeeper.
Their names are Paul and Clara Jobs.
Isaacson writes of them, when Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not even graduated high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers.
The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled into the Jobs household.
Eventually, Joanne relented with the stipulation that the couple promise, indeed, sign a pledge to fund a savings account to pay for the boy's college education.
And this is a messy situation.
I've heard it said that like his adoptive mother says like she wouldn't let herself love him for the first like six months or whatever that she had him.
I think she's being a little facetious there, but just because she doesn't know if she's going to have to give him up, right?
And to be again, perfectly clear, I've never heard any allegation, including from Steve.
Everyone seems to agree his adoptive parents are deeply loving parents who dote on him, right?
He has, he is the best case scenario for a child who is adopted, right?
Wherein and he is taken in very early by parents who devote themselves to him.
But there's going to be a long debate over like how the fact that he is given up, both by his birth parents and by this first couple that's going to adopt him, how that influences him, right?
And it's kind of complicated by the fact that I think Isaacson is more sympathetic of his birth mother and father than I am.
He'll point out that like his birth mother, she's hoping to take Steve back after her dad dies and she and Jen Dolly marry, which is like, I think that's worse, right?
Like that you're not even committing to adopting.
You're trying to give it up for a little while and then rip it away from the family that's living in.
For babies, that's like, that's bad, right?
That's pretty bad.
And like, you have choice here.
This isn't a situation in which she had no agency.
She could have chose to like defy her father for her child and she didn't.
And I think that's like a mark that's bad, I would say, you know?
Yes.
That's, that's where I land on this.
I will say, as a result, I think this kind of works out better for Steve because Paul and Clara are devoted and stable parents.
And Joanne and John Gandali are not, right?
They have one more kid together, but then they divorce.
So I don't know.
I feel like it's one of those situations where like the people who wind up raising him are the people who are willing to commit to making him their priority.
And so, you know, as a parent should do.
As a parent should do.
There's an interesting aside here, which is that Steve's biological sister, who he's going to meet like as a mature adult much later in life, winds up being the author, Mona Simpson, which is interesting.
Like she's like a fairly prominent author.
And when I read this, that like novelist Mona Simpson was his biological sister, I was like, oh, that's the name of Homer Simpson's mom.
And I was just going to bring this up as a weird coincidence because I'm a Simpsons fan.
But it turns out Mona Simpson was married to the Simpson writer who created the character that's Homer Simpson's mom, and the character is literally named after her.
So there you go.
Yeah, that's kind of weird, right?
These are the real conspiracy theories.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is the actual shit that should be on Above Top Secret.
Yeah.
And there's, this is a weird aside.
There's a bizarre number of people with names that are famous for other reasons now in the Steve Jobs story that we'll be getting into.
It doesn't mean anything, but it's peculiar.
And this is the first case.
This is behind the boss.
That's promise.
Yeah, exactly.
So Steve is born February 24th, 1955.
And when he is adopted, he is eventually named Stephen Paul Jobs by his adopted parents.
Paul and Clara are kind of lower middle class.
I think probably by the time he's in his late teens, they're like solidly middle class.
His dad is initially like a repo man for a finance company.
And the family lives in a suburb of Mountain View because it's a lot more affordable than nearby Palo Alto, right?
To make additional money, Paul, who is a very gifted mechanic, right?
He's not a tech guy.
He's not an electronics guy, but he's great with cars.
And one of the things he commits to do, because they promised to start a college fund for Steve, he, as a side gig, spends most of Steve's like childhood buying old cars, fixing them up and selling them for a profit to like fund Steve's college fund, right?
He also builds.
This is what entrepreneurism actually used to be.
Yeah, yeah.
He seems pretty cool.
Yeah.
And he is, he is very much, he tries to inculcate in Steve a love for mechanical work, and it doesn't fully get over.
Steve's going to be reasonably competent with electronics, which his dad doesn't like.
Steve like learns how to fix cars and stuff, but he never falls in love with it.
But he does like spending time with his dad and his dad's workshop while his dad builds things.
Lessons from Rolling Over Parents00:15:44
And what does get transferred from Paul to Steve is the fact that Paul isn't just someone who's good at fixing stuff.
He has an appreciation for the aesthetics of how things are built.
And Steve would later recall that like his dad builds most of the family furniture.
And he's the kind of guy who, when he's making a bookcase, he doesn't just put like a thin sheet of like board, like basically like particle board at the back of the bookcase.
He uses like real wood for that too, even though you're not really going to see it.
Because he's one of those guys where he's like, what it matters how the whole thing is constructed, you know?
And he's going to, one of the kind of the earliest lessons Steve is going to learn is he's going to walk him through like how cars are designed the way they are and like what stuff he appreciates about the industrial design of cars.
And Steve is going to be primarily an aesthetics guy.
When we talk about the stuff that Steve Jobs was actually a genius at, it's understanding what people want to hold in their hand, you know?
Like that's a thing that he was legitimately probably the best at in the industry is like knowing people, this is what people tactile, in a tactile sense, want.
And he gets that from his adopted father.
Paul would note that he wasn't really interested in getting his hands dirty, but yeah, the two get a lot of bonding time in.
It's pretty important to note the extent to which Paul gives Steve kind of the skill that is going to be like one of his primary assets when he's when he gets into business.
So it's a pretty good childhood.
That said, he still deals with, you know, this, the fact that he is adopted, the fact that he was given up is to some extent kind of this cross he has to bear.
When Steve is six or seven, a girl on his street finds out that he had been adopted and asks him, so does that mean your real parents didn't want you?
Which is the kind of like casually horrible thing children say to each other.
Right.
Yeah.
And Steve would later recall, quote, lightning bolts went off in my head.
I remember running into the house crying.
And my parents said, no, you have to understand.
They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye.
They said, we specifically picked you out.
Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly to me.
And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.
And this is like, there's a lot of argument.
A lot of people who were friends with him and knew him will say that like the fact that he was given up causes this deep insecurity in him.
And it's kind of the root of a lot of the unpleasantness in his personality.
A lot of like the cruel stuff that he'll do is this damage he suffers as a result of being given up.
Steve never really admits that himself.
He doesn't seem to feel that was the case.
And while he's not the most reliable source on himself, I do think that like it's kind of worth noting his attitude is that like, I never felt abandoned.
I felt chosen.
Right.
Also, I would not be surprised if for the rest of his life, he thought of that girl who said it, knows her name, her social security number, her address, and she can't use iCloud.
Yes.
Yeah.
I think it's, it's probable that like both of those things are factors, right?
That he is both because of how other people treat him as a result of this, like he grows up with a chip on his shoulder, and also he grows up feeling special because unlike most kids, his parents like specifically picked him as an individual, like didn't just decide to have a kid, but like saw him before he was their kid and chose him.
And that has an impact on how he feels about himself.
Right.
That said, you're going to get a lot of different accounts on this.
One of his old friends told Isaacson, I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth.
He wants to control his environment and he sees the product as an extension of himself.
Isaacson quotes another friend who claims this made Jobs independent because he was, quote, in a different world than he was born into.
I don't know how much you want to take all of that seriously.
Yeah, that feels like fantasy football shit.
Like you're just kind of guessing because you'll never get, you would have never got the truth out of Jobs.
You're certainly not going to get so many people have been both scorned and made rich by him.
It's almost impossible to gauge.
It is.
And it's like, yes, he is a control freak, but most control freaks were not adopted, right?
So I don't know that we need to assume that's why, right?
He could just as easily get it from the fact that his parents, one thing you can criticize them for is they're too doting on him, right?
Like that could just as easily be responsible for this kind of controlling nature is the fact that he always has as a child near total control of his environment because his parents basically don't say no to the kid, right?
You know, a couple of ways this could have gone.
One of the things that's a big influence on him is that growing up where he did in California, most of his neighbors are tech guys, right?
This is the tech industry of the 60s, the 70s, where the bulk of it is centered around aerospace and defense.
And several of these guys take a shine to Steve and he'll go and visit them as they're tinkering in their workshops.
And they're tinkering, unlike his dad, who's like messing around with cars and furniture.
They're tinkering with like speakers, with electronics, right?
So he learns a lot of lessons from them.
And at kind of one crucial point, when he's a young kid, he's talking to his dad about one of the projects these guys have showed him.
And his dad says, well, that's not the way speakers work.
And he like corrects his father because he knows more about that stuff than he does.
And he kind of has this blinding realization, which I do think maybe edges towards a little bit of narcissism.
He comes to this like blinding realization, oh my God, I'm smarter than my father, right?
Which I don't know that he really is, but what an insane thing to think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It gets to this, the way tech guys think about intelligence, which is it is entirely based around how good you are at like knowing how to do the two things they care about, as opposed to like, well, but you can't do all this other stuff, right?
Is the fact that you're good at coding make you smarter than a guy who's a heart surgeon or a guy who's a really good automotive mechanic?
Well, no, those are different things and they're all intelligences, you know?
But Steve is going to be like, well, because I understood electronics better than my dad did, even though there was a lot of shit he knew better than me, I realized I'm smarter than him, right?
Right.
Because he knew speakers.
Yeah, because he knows speakers now.
And he describes, he feels like shame for thinking this.
And I'm sure these two things war for themselves in his young mind, but it does kind of say a lot about him.
And that's how he interprets this.
One gets the feeling that Steve does understand at a pretty early age, his mom and dad are kind of willing to roll over for him, you know?
And he is able to push them consciously for things that he wants to get.
He later recalls that they, quote, sensed I was special and were willing to defer to my needs.
And this feeling that he is special and that the world and people around him will naturally bend the need of his wishes.
This is more critical, I think, than anything in creating Steve's conception of himself.
Now, while his parents coddled him, the rest of the world is harsher to him.
And the gap between those two realities, the way his parents treat him and the way the world is, makes Steve into kind of a crybaby.
And I'm going to quote now from the book Infinite Loop by Michael Malone.
Steve was also a whiner.
When he took swim classes at the Mountain View Dolphins Swim Club, one of his classmates, Mark Wozniak, yet more evidence that Silicon Valley has always been a very large small town, would recall, he was pretty much a crybaby.
He'd lose a race and go off and cry.
He didn't quite fit in with everybody else.
He wasn't one of the guys.
In fact, he was one of the boys found in every class who get the stuffing knocked out of them on a regular basis.
And tears are a constant thing in Jobs' relation with others.
When you read stories about him in the early days of Apple, every like four pages, he's weeping in a meeting because somebody challenges him on something.
He cries openly in business meetings constantly.
Anytime there's a fight and someone's like, Steve, you're wrong.
He'll start fucking crying.
That is actually the best thing I've ever heard.
Steve Jobs just the weeping, the weepy weep way.
You've got two kinds of like big tech executives.
You've got Steve Jobs crying because someone disagreed with him and then like going behind their back to get them fired.
And then you've got Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, throwing chairs at people in staff meetings.
I don't want to skip ahead too much, but like, how long did he cry for?
Did he cry throughout his whole career or was it just the beginning?
I think it's just his first period of time at Apple, right?
Because he's there for a while.
He helps found it.
He again gets forced out.
Then he starts a couple of companies and we'll talk about all this later.
I don't think he's as much of a tears guy when he comes back to lead Apple.
That's a huge shame because I would have really loved it if he was just constantly crying.
Steve is well into his 30s, that guy.
So we can say that.
Now, his early memories, it's also worth noting, involve a fair amount of financial precarity, right?
Which has a significant impact on him.
Paul, when he's a young kid, takes night classes to get a real estate license in the hope of improving the family financial situation.
And then the bottom falls out of the market.
And the Jobs family spends a year or so kind of barely scraping by.
His mom has to take on another job.
His family has to take out a second mortgage.
There's a moment when his fourth grade teacher asks him, what is it you don't understand about the universe?
And his response is, I don't understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke.
And I identify with that.
I had a similar, my dad took training to become like an Oracle database administrator and like got a new job in tech right as the tech industry collapsed in the first dot-com crash.
And it like ruined our family for a while.
My mom had to take on extra, like that's a traumatic thing for a kid, right?
Realizing that your parents are just scrambling to get by.
And that's going to have an impact on how he treats money, which is, by the way, like a dick.
He is like weirdly stingy, especially to like his own child, but we'll get to that.
This combination of financial distress, of feeling like he's smarter than everyone, and of being bullied leads to a kid who kind of compulsively acts out.
And as an adult, Jobs tells his biographer Isaacson, quote, I had a good friend named Rick Ferentino, and we'd get into all kinds of sorts of trouble.
We made little posters announcing bring your pet to school day.
It was crazy with dogs chasing cats all over and the teachers were beside themselves.
Another time, they convinced some kids to tell them the accommodation numbers for their bike locks.
Then we went outside and switched all of the locks and nobody could get their bikes.
It took them until late that night to straighten things out.
When he was in third grade, the pranks became a bit more dangerous.
One time we set off an explosive under the chair of our teacher, Miss Thurman.
We gave her a nervous twitch.
What the Steve Jobs, the Joker?
Yeah, you would go to prison for that today.
The school resource officer would shoot you.
Yeah.
What the fuck?
Horrible little man.
It's the, my dad would tell me stories of like, yeah, we used to all have, everyone had a pocket knife in school.
And like, you know, I, my family who grew up more in Oklahoma when in like the 70s was like, yeah, kids would take their rifles to school, like and they keep them in their cars and shit during deer season.
Yeah.
You don't, people just don't do that anymore.
You'll get a protection.
Dude, yeah, dude, awoke.
So this is all pretty, I mean, I think that is a little extreme even for the time, but neither Paul or Clara ever disciplined Steve for this behavior.
Paul even tells his teachers, if you can't keep him interested, it's your fault.
Basically, if he's not challenged enough at school, it's because you guys are doing a bad job as teachers and whatever he does is justified, which is maybe not the best lesson to teach him.
This is straight up what they told me with my Bengal cats.
Yeah.
If they're too big, like if they're meowing all the time, it's because you're not entertaining them.
That's right.
Jesus.
If only someone had given Steve one of those like balls of yarn that you like hang from the roof so he can do that.
Yeah.
It's a wheel that he could spin around.
That's all he needed.
Even when Steve, he gets kicked out of the first grade at one point and he's still not punished for it.
And so again, he grows up and I'm mixed about this.
I think we generally kids are punished more often than they ought to be for shit that they probably shouldn't be punished for.
But also at a certain point, if you're putting explosives under your teacher's chair, you probably should be punished.
Yeah, I feel like Palo Alto Kaida needs to be put down.
Like, Jesus fucking.
So there were signs early then.
Yes, yes, yes, that he was, he was, he does not really care about how his actions harm other people, right?
Pretty early thing that we can see happening here.
And, you know, part of what he's going to grow up believing is that when he behaves badly, it's someone else's fault.
You know, it's the school's fault for making him memorize stupid stuff rather than stimulating him.
Right.
One teacher does eventually figure jobs out, right?
And she's able to turn him into an excellent student.
And the way she does this, I've never heard of a teacher doing this.
She pays him when he does his homework.
She gives him money to do his homework.
Right.
Yeah, which is, and eventually she transitions to like giving him little gifts, these like mechanical toys that he has to build.
And this works.
It turns him into a good student.
I don't know that that's necessarily the lesson you want to teach a kid, but Steve would later claim that without her, he thinks he would have gone to jail.
And I think there's, this is actually something I think Steve has some insight into himself about.
Steve Jobs very well could have become a criminal, right?
He has all of the things that a criminal needs.
He doesn't quite go that way, but like he's willing to break the law.
He's willing to hurt and cheat people.
And maybe he's right that like this teacher, because she teaches him that like following within the lines leads to money, that's kind of the path he goes on the rest of his life.
So maybe she did stop him from being a criminal and turn him into something that maybe did more harm in the long run, but I don't know.
That's debatable.
Isaacson talked to this teacher decades later when he was writing his book about jobs.
And her favorite memory of Steve was at the school's annual Hawaii Day, where everyone in the class got to wear a Hawaiian shirt.
Steve showed up without one, but in pictures from the day, he's wearing one because he convinces another kid to give him the shirt off of his back, which tells you the degree which he's already learning how to manipulate people quite well.
So his teachers eventually advised his parents that he should be skipped ahead two grades.
Now, they only move him ahead one grade.
I think his parents are like, two is too far.
That's going to make him, which is probably, you know, a responsible call.
This seems to have contributed to his parents viewing him as something of a marvel.
And it certainly adds to the bullying.
Right before eighth grade starts, in fact, the bullying is so bad that he's like, I refuse to go to school, right?
You know, fall comes around and they're about to start and he's like, I'm not going to go to school.
Like, I will drop out.
I will refuse to attend unless you move us to a more expensive neighborhood and enroll me in a better school, right?
And I'm going to quote from Michael Malone describing the threat he makes to his parents over this.
When Steve Jobs made his ultimatum, the most amazing thing happened.
His parents agreed.
His family moved to a safer and more expensive neighborhood in Sunnyvale, despite the fact that they were working extra jobs just to stay solvent, despite the fact that it meant an even longer commute for his father and pulled his sister out of elementary school.
This was power, and Stephen Jobs learned its lesson.
Great.
Yep.
Maybe not a great lesson to teach this kid.
Yep.
Ultimatums That Changed Everything00:02:12
But by using threats, he can manipulate reality.
None of this, and I've been in the tech industry about 15 years.
None of this has ever come up with people, including people like Om Malik or Walt Mossberg, who've talked about Steve Jobs so much their eyes bleed.
No one ever talks about the fact that he is some combination of like Dennis the Menace and the Joker.
He has did it.
Yeah, Dennis the Menace mixed with the fucking Joker.
It's this is why I like, I use, because Isaacson talks.
One thing Isaacson is good at is getting access.
So he does, you have to use his biography because there's a lot of stories you get from people who grew up with Steve that you only get in Isaacson's book, right?
But Malone's book, Infinite Loop, because Malone hasn't bought the Kool-Aid and also Infinite Loop is written before Jobs.
It's kind of published like a year or two after he comes back to Apple, but it's before he's turned Apple into the wealthiest and most powerful company in the world, right?
So the story of Steve Jobs is different when Malone writes Infinite Loop.
It's the story of a man who founds a company, makes a lot of money, makes a series of horrible decisions, and almost drives the company into bankruptcy, right?
And so as a result, it's a much more cynical look at Jobs.
And so you get, I think, a more tempered view of who he is as a person.
It's not nearly as popular a book as Isaacson's, but I think it's a better one.
So anyway, we use a lot of books for these episodes, but you know who hates books and reading in general.
Robert.
What?
Who are you referring to?
The sponsors of our podcast, Sophie.
I hope.
I hope it's an ad for public libraries and how great they are.
Listen, folks, you don't need to learn how to read.
All you need to know how to do is type your credit card information into the websites of our sponsors.
Did you see that public libraries in New York are closed on the weekends, but they had funding for the NYPD dance troupe?
Yeah, they were terrible.
They weren't, it was, it was, they weren't even in time.
Everyone's read Moby Dick.
What we haven't seen is cops fail at dancing.
Why We Hate Reading Books00:02:50
Then someone just throws an icon onto the stage and they just unload the thousands die.
Entire audience dies.
Good stuff.
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Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
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July 2003.
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Justice Served in Arizona00:09:24
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And we're back.
So, you know, Steve is coming up.
He's in school around the same time Gates is, you know, around the same time that whole first gen of tech founders is.
And they all have a similar experience, which is they all encounter computers early on and before most people in the country, including most adults, have any first-hand experience with computers.
Bill Gates, it's because his parents sent him to a fancy private school and they buy a computer for the school.
In Steve's case, it's because he joins the Explorers Club, which is like, you know, Hewlett Packard, the company.
Hewlett Packard is like the chief sexy tech company of the day, right?
Now it's kind of a boring brand, but Hewlett Packard is like innovative.
They are like the smartest motherfuckers in the state, right?
Like that's how people think about HP.
And HP has this thing that's like the, it's like HP's Boy Scouts, right?
It's like a tech-focused Boy Scouts where kids get, you know, you can go into the HP offices and these kids can get access to a computer and like code on it, put in, and at this point, people don't have individual computers.
Computers are things that are like owned by large institutions.
You don't just like have one in your house, right?
It's not really feasible, you know?
And so the fact that Steve gets first-hand experience with a computer here is really noteworthy and he falls in love with it.
He's like fascinated with this thing.
And one of these things that Steve has from an early age is he has incredible intuition about certain things, right?
He understands what people want in technology and he understands what's going to be big in technology.
And as soon as he gets his hands on a computer, he's like, this is the future.
And he also, from an early age, is really good at getting what he wants out of people.
He's working on a project for the Explorers Club at one point, and he needs some like hard-to-find parts that HP makes.
And they're not in any like catalogs.
So he, he finds the CEO of HP's home phone number and he calls him and is like, hey, I need these parts.
He like talks him into sending the parts over so that he can like finish this project.
And, you know, the guy he's talking to is Bill Hewitt.
You know, he's the CEO and he's one of the founders of the company.
And once he make, he doesn't just make this connection, get some parts out of him.
He starts, because Hewitt's kind of impressed with this kid and his gumption, he pushes until Hewitt gives him a summer job at HP as well.
And this is going to be Steve's first job.
So, you know, that's a pretty, that shows fairly few children are able to do something like that, right?
Have the wherewithal to do that.
Steve does, and that's noteworthy.
Now, probably the single most important moment of his childhood comes when he is 16.
And this is when he meets another kid, another Steve named Steve Wozniak.
The Woz, as he came to be known, is several years older than Steve.
And he is, he is the kind of guy all of these tech founders want to be Steve Jobs.
All of them also pretend to be Steve Wozniak because Wozniak is the thing that almost none of these guys are.
He is a legitimate technological genius.
And also a legitimately nice guy.
And a very nice, a very nice man.
I literally met him two weeks ago.
Oh, man.
We just talked about tech shit for like an hour.
And he was the sweetest guy, knew what he was talking about.
Like, and I've met a lot of founders that I've met Steve Jobs, obviously.
And they're usually very fucking weird.
He's just like a nice guy, like nice older man who's just like, loves tech.
Yeah.
It's a shame they're not more of them like him.
Yeah, it is a shame.
And it's, and he is one of these guys.
He is from a very early age, just an absolute genius at technology.
He and Steve go to the same high school.
He's like, I think four or five years older than Steve.
So he's graduated by the time that they meet, but he's, he's still, he's hanging out with some of lowerclim that he knew when he was still in school.
And one of these guys is a friend of Steve's.
And that's how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak meet.
Now, the Woz is the son of a Lockheed engineer.
And he's, he's one of these people who's always innately brilliant with circuits and machines.
One of the things he's famous for is he's able to, a big part of early computing is figuring out how to do things with fewer chips, basically.
And he is great at that, at efficiency, because the more efficient you make it, the more shit you can fit into a smaller package, effectively.
People who are real techs are going to yell at me for like summarizing it that way.
But he is like the best at optimizing shit to make it more efficient, right?
One of the first things he builds is a digital, it's called a blue box.
And it is at the time, the way the phone system works is phones send tones to each other in order to transmit commands, right?
And so if you can mimic the tone that a phone sends the central machine or whatever to say, like authorize a long distance call, then you can get free long distance calls.
And the box, they basically Wozniak finds this like guide to how the phone company is like shit works and he emulates all of these things.
So he makes this box that you can use to hack the phone system.
If you have one of these, you can make the phones do whatever you want for free, right?
You can get free calls.
And that's a big deal because that's a major expense at the time, right?
Jobs works on the project with Wozniak.
Wozniak's obviously the big technical mind, but it's like a thing that they do together.
And for the Wozniak, he wants this thing for himself because it's a nice gizmo to have and it's a fun technical challenge, but that's kind of the extent of his interest in making this thing.
Steve sees this differently.
He's like, we can sell this.
We can make some money with this invention of yours.
And so he convinces Wozniak to mass produce and sell his blue box.
This is a serious crime, right?
You are hacking the phone system here.
This is so fucking illegal what they're doing.
What Steve is saying is basically it is not any different from in a legal sense from saying we should sell heroin, right?
Like he is saying we need to get into business committing a series of crimes, right?
And the two kind of get into this a lot like other kids treat selling weed, right?
This is their like selling pot to make pocket money thing of like when Steve Jobs is in high school.
And he doesn't know anything about marketing yet, but he understands something about like what the customer base is.
And he knows that the people who are going to want this thing most and be able to afford it are college kids, right?
They have some amount of money, some amount of financial independence, and they also are frustrated by how expensive it is to make calls.
They can't make all the calls they want.
They can't run their social life the way they want because using your phone costs money.
So if we can sell them this device, this is the group that's going to be most interested in having it and willing to break the law to have it.
So they go door to door at college campuses, knocking on dorms and offering these very illegal products to whoever opens the door.
Wozniak relentlessly works to improve the device while Jobs kind of smooths out the business side of things.
One of his innovations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The crime part.
He writes out handwritten customer service guarantees.
He like basically writes a warranty.
An SLA for crime.
Yeah, he has a crime, a crime warranty.
It's beautiful.
Yeah, it's kind of, it's awesome.
Yeah.
I take everything back.
He's not a bastard.
He's a genius.
No.
No, he is, he is ahead of his time.
And it's, yeah, you could argue maybe a bad idea for an illegal product, but it's good business sense.
You know, it makes people comfortable in the product.
And he and Wozniak make about $6,000 selling these things, which is a lot of money at the time.
Like, that's good money.
It all kind of falls apart when one customer pulls a gun on them and steals a device.
Jobs is kind of like, well, that's all the appetite for risk I have.
And he decides to quit at that point.
Wozniak, maybe just because he's a little less wise about danger, continues selling these things for a while.
And Jobs just takes a cut, even though he's no longer part of the work.
What makes Wozniak stop is that like this elder phone freaker who'd helped him work out the blue box gets arrested by the feds and Wozniak is like, oh shit, maybe there are consequences for breaking federal laws.
I probably should stop.
Yeah.
Crime's illegal?
No.
Just one more thing.
It's a crime.
An insanely great crime.
So the summer Steve and other Steve sold their blue boxes was the last summer of Jobs' childhood.
And he was already quite independent.
College Friends and Early Apple00:05:36
He'd fallen for a girl at his high school, Chrisanne Brennan.
They had met at Homestead High School that same year, and she was about a year below him.
Their daughter, Lisa, described their meet cute this way.
On Wednesdays through the night, she animated a student film in the high school quad with a group of friends.
One of those nights, my father approached her in the spotlight where she stood waiting to move the claymation characters and handed her a page of Bob Dylan lyrics he'd typed out, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.
I want it back when you're done, he said.
And that weird anecdote would kind of symbolize the next 40 years of their relationship.
Him doing stuff that's like almost sweet and then also weirdly shitty.
He's an odd man in terms of the way he courts people.
But he is sweet at the start of things.
He like flirts with her by showing up because she's this thing she's animating is like kind of risque and the school doesn't really want them doing it.
So they have to kind of do it in secret.
And so he'll show up to sessions where she's animating these figures and he'll hold candles up while she works on them so that she can work in the dark, which is legitimately pretty romantic.
After he graduates, he asks her to move in with him in a cabin off in the countryside a little bit for the summer.
And his parents aren't happy that he's like moving with this chick he met into a cabin before starting college, but they can't really say no to their kids.
So he doesn't.
You should have thought about that before you trained him that he can do whatever he wants forever.
Yeah, yeah, this one's really on you guys.
Yeah.
So they have an idyllic summer together, funded by the illegal phone freaking boxes that Steve had been selling.
Now, he had already started smoking pot before they met, but she introduces him to LSD.
And he's later going to say this is like maybe the most significant intellectual moment of his life when he takes acid for the first time, which, you know, I don't feel all that different about me taking acid for the first time.
A lot of people have this experience.
And like most kids who have a profound experience taking acid in high school, he leaves after graduating to go to Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
And Reed is that kind of college, right?
It is the like kind of hippie starchild school.
That's like a big part of its reputation.
And Chris Ann kind of breaks up with him before he leaves for school.
We don't really know entirely why it happens.
I think it's partly a result that like neither of them are good at communicating.
So Steve doesn't say, hey, I want to make this thing more official.
And Chris Ann is kind of like, well, then, you know, I'm going to go move on with my life, right?
And she starts dating somebody else, but he's in love with her.
And so he's kind of devastated.
And at least in the account that Chris Ann gives, he never really forgives her for breaking up with him.
This is going to be relevant because the person he's going to take this out on primarily is the child they later have together.
But that has not happened yet.
Steve goes to Reed.
He's only in school for like six months.
And then he decides school is not for me because school is where people teach you things and I don't have anything to learn from other people.
Right.
So he doesn't fully drop out though, because Reed is this kind of school where they're like, look, we cater to weird people, right?
Like to folks who are off the beaten path intellectually.
The administrator there is like, well, if you're not in class and paying, you can still just show up to school classes that interest you, you know?
That's fine.
They call it auditing classes.
I don't think he's really auditing them, but he does kind of just bum around campus for like a year.
And the most influential part of this is he winds up taking a calligraphy class.
And he will later claim this is why when the Mac comes out, it allows multiple typefaces and is like the first, I think, the first personal computer where you can pick your font, basically.
And he would later tell Isaacson, since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them if he hadn't put them in the Mac.
And it's arguable that that's true.
He definitely like cares more about that shit than most of the people.
Sure, but you're telling me no one would think what if the world looked different in computing history.
I think we would have eventually stumbled on defonts, Steve.
He didn't invent design.
No, but he does have an impact on like why it's a priority for the Mac.
Right.
And I can buy that.
Yeah.
He makes some friends at Reed, including some folks who'd become early Apple employees, like Elizabeth Holmes, the girlfriend of his first, of his best friend in college.
This is what I was saying when like there's a weird number of people who whose names are later famous because of somebody else.
Elizabeth Holmes, I thought she was much younger than me.
Yeah.
This Elizabeth Holmes is a major part of the Steve Jobs story, which is funny.
Because the criminal Elizabeth Holmes patterns her entire image off of Steve Jobs.
Right.
Huh.
Yeah.
It's a weird little coinky dink.
Here's how Isaacson describes Elizabeth Holmes, this one, meeting Steve Jobs.
He insulted her at their first meeting by grilling her about how much money it would take to get her to have sex with another man.
What a charming fellow Steve Jobs is.
Wait.
What an insane conversation to have with anyone.
That's fucking nuts.
Yeah.
Hey, what's up?
Anyway, what would it take to get you to fuck that guy?
Yeah, not me, just another guy.
And it's, he's also in this being shitty to her boyfriend, because in front of him, too, he's like, I wonder how much it would cost to get you to fuck someone else, right?
But her boyfriend is a guy named Daniel Kotke.
And Dan is a Buddhist, right?
Insane Conversations About Secrets00:03:52
And he's a very mellow person.
He is kind of a, he's one of the big early influences on Steve's growing interest in Eastern spirituality, right?
And he and Dan become best friends for a while.
Steve's biggest influence is a book that they both love called Be Here Now, which is a guide to meditation and psychedelic drugs.
Steve becomes particularly enthralled with Zen Buddhism and particularly the importance that it places on intuition, which Steve has begun to believe matters more than formal knowledge.
Because again, he's never going to be a guy who has an impressive formal knowledge credential.
And if you're that kind of guy, it kind of behooves you to think that what matters most is this kind of ineffable and unprovable sense that my intuition is better than other people's.
Yeah, I don't need to be smart.
I need to be right, I think is how he feels.
Yes, very much.
And you know who else doesn't need to be smart, but is always right?
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
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10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Diet Fads and Lymphatic Damage00:15:20
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of the flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, college is also where, in addition to kind of getting into Zen Buddhism, it's where Steve's dietary preferences take a spin off the deep beaten path that will ultimately cause his death.
Steve had always been a picky eater as a kid, and he'd always kind of preferred fruit and vegetables to anything else.
He has this kind of natural aversion to, I think, particularly like red meats and also poultry, it seems like.
But in his freshman year, he reads a book called Diet for a Small Planet.
At the time, it's a fairly groundbreaking bestseller advocating for soy above meat as a protein source and condemning the meat industry for its environmental impact.
All of that is very good and perfectly fair, right?
None of that's wrong.
Steve, though, has this tendency to take things too far, right?
While Diet for a Small Planet, it spends a lot of time discussing necessary combinations of food to ensure optimal health.
If you're going to cut meat out of your diet, there are things you need to make sure to do so you don't have vitamin deficiencies, right?
I think the most obvious would be like an iron deficiency.
It's easier to get enough iron if you're eating red meat.
You don't have to eat red meat to have optimal health.
It's healthier not to, but you do need to take some care in the combinations of food you have to ensure that you get like enough iron, right?
Jobs doesn't really take that part of the book to heart, and he instead begins embarking on some extreme and experimental diets.
For example, sometimes he'll go weeks eating nothing but fruit, right?
At one point, he lives entirely off of carrots and almonds.
Friends claim that during these periods of eating basically nothing but carrots, he has this orange hue to his skin because of all the fucking carrots he's eating.
This is not good health, right?
This is a level of extremity that is maladaptive, right?
This is an eating disorder.
I think you could fairly characterize this.
Yeah.
And this bias towards the extreme leads him away from this first book, which is a pretty reasonable book.
I don't think I've ever heard any arguments that it's like wildly wrong about anything.
I think it's got some good information in it, but it leads him to a book that's significantly less well-grounded, which is called Mucusless Diet Healing System.
Now, you can tell from the title that there's going to be some nonsense in that book, right?
Yeah, that sounds like something you would get advertised to you on Twitter nowadays.
Yes.
Yes.
It sounds like the kind of thing Elon Musk would buy into and cause himself permanent like lymphatic damage or something.
It was written in the early 1900s by a German naturopath named Arnold Erett.
Arnold believed that white blood cells were not part of the immune system, but a byproduct of mucus-producing foods that poison the blood.
Erett introduced the concept of an all-fruit diet combined with regular fasting in order to rid the body of dangerous mucus.
In 1963, a congressional report described him as a cult leader whose followers, quote, believed that women who adhered to the diet program of Professor Arnold Erett could expect immaculate conception.
In other words, if you follow the diet, you will have a child without having sex, right?
Your body will spontaneously produce.
Which I imagine something that might be a problem of some of the followers.
Yes, yeah.
Seems like maybe he was covering up for something else.
Erett's followers also believed that all mental illness was caused by mucus decaying and causing gas pressure to build up in the brain.
Look, folks, I'm not a psychiatrist, but I feel confident saying that's not what causes mental illness.
That is not why we have mental illness.
I'm going to have to side with you on that one.
That doesn't sound right to me.
And I've never, because the tech press corps is not always doing all the work they ought to do.
I haven't ever run into anyone asking Steve Jobs, do you think all mental illness is caused by decaying brain mucus brought on by milk drinking?
But I love it so much.
Yeah, yo, why didn't you ask this, Mossberg?
Oh, yeah.
Did you do that?
No.
Yeah.
Believe this about a woman.
I don't think he asked them a challenging question.
No, it's very funny.
So physicians have noted that the fruitarian diet that Jobs embraces does not contain sufficient protein and that his fasting schedules could be extremely dangerous.
Steve Jobs based large portions of his life on this man's teachings.
And because he was now eating nearly only fruit, he stops bathing.
And his belief is that body odor only happens if you eat nasty mucus-causing foods.
So if he's not eating those foods, he has no need to bathe.
Now, everyone around him spends 20 years telling him, Steve, you smell like fucking dead ass.
Like, take a fucking smell crazy in there.
Yeah.
But he is, he is, it's this thing, because this is a religious belief of his, he's like, no, I can't smell bad, right?
Because I'm not eating the foods that make you smell bad.
So I will never bathe.
Like, it's such a weird asshole thing to do, the way that he insists on this.
But this is like, Steve Jobs will be the smelly guy for the next 20 years of his life, right?
That's insane.
20 years, so well into his career, Apple.
Yes, yes.
They are constantly telling him, Steve, you have to bathe before we have this meeting with this guy who's going to invest millions of dollars in the company.
Like, these are serious financial people.
Like, you can't, you smell like ass.
That's my religion.
I smell this way because I, no, it's more like I don't smell this way despite what all of you seem to think.
Jesus Christ.
It's such a weird, unhinged thing to insist on.
One of his closest friends while he's living in Oregon is Robert Friedland.
Now, today, Friedland is a billionaire mine owner, or at least he was.
I don't know, maybe he's dead now, but he becomes a billionaire mine owner, right?
But Friedland at this point is a rich hippie kid, right?
He's into all this Eastern spirituality that Jobs is.
And he's got this like land that he has access to because he's a rich kid, right?
And Friedland meets Steve Jobs when Steve is trying to sell him a typewriter and he walks in on Friedland having sex with his girlfriend, right?
So he like comes into Friedland's house because he's invited there to sell him this typewriter and Friedland's having sex and Jobs is like, oh shit, I'll come back later.
And Friedland is like, no, wait, sit here, let me finish.
And like makes Steve wait while he's having sex.
And Steve is impressed by this.
He's like, wow, that's a power move, right?
Damn, that guy has sex.
As a weird aside, Jobs is going to do this to people when he is an adult.
And the people he's going to do this with is much, much more fucked up than what Friedland is doing here.
But this becomes a weird part of Jobs' personality because Jobs is obsessed with Friedland for a while.
Isaacson describes Friedland as almost being Jobs' guru, right?
This is someone he patterns himself off of.
So Friedland gets this farm outside of Portland and he turns it into a commune that kind of, it's kind of a lowercase C cult, right?
People tended to listen to Friedland and do what he said.
And he has this gift for selling people on even pretty outlandish ideas.
Jobs' friend Dan Kotke later claims, Friedland taught Steve the reality distortion field.
He was charismatic and a bit of a con man and could bend situations to his very strong will.
He was mercurial, sure of himself, a little dictatorial.
Steve admired that, and he became more like that after spending time with Robert.
Now, Friedland introduced Jobs to the local Hari Krishnas, and they put him to work helping out on the farm, which gradually morphed from a communal living experiment into more of a business.
People start to leave at this point because Friedland becomes more of a tyrant, and Friedland eventually drops the hippie shit to acquire a series of gold and copper mines and become very wealthy.
In an interview with Isaacson, Jobs described his old friend and unwittingly himself.
Robert always portrayed himself as a spiritual person, but he crossed the line from being charismatic to being a con man.
It was a strange thing to have one of the spiritual people in your young life turn out to be symbolically and in reality, a gold miner.
And what's funny about that is like, that is Jobs, too.
All of this shit about being into Eastern mysticism and spirituality is an aesthetic choice he makes.
It is not a deeply held belief.
That's my contention, right?
And we'll build to that as we go on.
But it's kind of noteworthy that he takes a lot of this from Robert Friedland, who is the same kind of guy.
He enjoys the aesthetic of being enlightened of this kind of like Eastern non-material, material spirituality, rejecting the crude pursuit of wealth while pursuing wealth, you know, and power.
Yeah, it's all about the finessing the customer into believing they're participating in culture.
Yes, yes.
And Steve is going to be that kind of guy in the same way that Friedland is.
So Jobs returns to California after he gives up fully on college and he talks his way, again, in the way that he's good at, into a job working for Atari.
And the way the company founder describes it, Jobs comes in one day and is basically like, I'm not leaving until you give me a job.
And in the 70s, that kind of thing worked.
Steve got back together with Chris Ann in this period.
And, you know, they are doing well for a while.
They're kind of going to have this on again, off-again sort of thing for a period of several years.
He goes to India for an extended period of time, you know, kind of in the middle of this.
He takes a leave of absence basically from Atari and he goes to India to like find himself.
He's hoping to meet this guru he's a fan of named Maharaj G.
And this guy had been influential to several of his friends.
Kotki's a fan too, and he's traveling there with Kotki.
But the guru dies right before Jobs shows up, like a day or two before he arrives at this guy's like place.
He passes.
So instead, Jobs attends the Kum Mela.
And the Mela is, I've been to the Mela.
It's this event.
I think it's every four years in one of this rotating set of cities in India.
And every 12 years, they do a mela in Allahabad, which is like the holiest of the melas.
And every time they do this thing, every time they do a Kum Mela, it's the largest gathering of human beings for any purpose in the history of the human race.
When Jobs is there, it's like 10 million people, right?
The Mela that I attended in I think 2013 was like 110 million people.
There were about, and this is over the course of a month, but there were like 40 million people in tents when I, it was like three New York cities worth of people in tents when I was there.
This is an intense event to go to, right?
And it's one of those things that like you can't, you can't not be affected by it just sheerly because of the sheer mass of human beings.
Just the scale.
Yeah, it's it's there's nothing else that's ever been like it in the whole history of our species, right?
It's this totally unique event.
And it has an impact on Jobs.
He gets his head shaven, you know, while he's there.
He reads this book called Autobiography of a Yogi, which he's going to reread every year of his life.
It's like the only book on his iPad.
And one friend claimed that he even considers becoming a sadhu.
And sadhus are these kind of wandering, itinerant Hindu monks.
They're these very intense, like wandering religious wild men in a certain way.
They're kind of constantly smoking marijuana.
It's a big thing.
Like the sadhus get this kind of exemption to the Indian laws for that.
And, you know, a lot of them show up at the mela.
And Jobs claims that he like, or claims through a friend basically, that he was considering adopting this life for himself.
I don't think that's ever a serious thing to do.
Those two Steve Jobs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is very Steve Jobs in the multiverse that's like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a version of the future that's maybe better where he does this.
Jobs would later claim his time in India convinced him of the premium importance of intuition.
And he claims this in a very racist fashion.
Here's what he writes to Isaacson.
The people in the Indian countryside don't use their intellect like we do.
First mistake.
Everybody uses their intellect for the same things, which is reasoning things out.
But okay.
He says they use their intuition instead.
And their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world.
Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.
That's had a big impact on my work.
Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic.
It is learned and it is the great achievement of Western civilization.
In the villages of India, they never learned it.
Yes, they did.
They have science, Steve.
They build cities.
There's a tech industry in India.
They didn't never develop intellect.
Like, what is wrong with you?
Like, just to be clear, this man is insanely racist and wrong.
Yes.
In so many ways, but it is kind of interesting how he's running completely parallel to how people like Andreessen think, who are very much like, oh, logic is what logic is what's most important.
Logic is the thing.
Elon Musk, same deal.
All of these like rationalist freaks.
I think Steve Jobs is horrifying.
It's just interesting seeing that kind of juxtaposition.
And it is, he's wrong about like India, right?
Because India is completely, you know, if you've read anything of Indian history, it has a long history.
It's extremely developed, right?
Like, yes, it's a large organized country and it has been a large organized region of the world for a very long time.
The idea that like, yeah, they only have intuition over there is racist and nonsense.
I will say to the, because one of the things we'll be building towards in later episodes is Steve, unlike most of these guys, unlike Andreessen, has a legitimate kind of genius, right?
Maybe not in the way that he gets credit for, but he is really good at certain things.
And he's good at certain things that these other founders who are aping him are not good at.
And I think it is because they are all obsessed with being rational.
And he is more obsessed with stuff that he's never even going to try to justify as rational.
When Jobs is repeatedly turning back early iterations of the iPhone and saying, this isn't ready, this isn't ready.
It's not because of anything he can prove objectively.
It's because of this feeling that like, no, this is not yet what people want to put in their fucking pocket and have with them all the time, right?
And so there is, I think, an extent to which you do have to understand the kind of intuition that he has is crucial in his success.
It's nuts what he thinks about intuition and regards to India.
But like the fact that he is so focused on intuition is part of like why he's good at the things he's good at, right?
I think that is kind of important to understand.
Gaslighting Wozniak on Iterations00:04:04
Now, the contrast between the cold-hearted corporate Maven and the hippie kid baffles a lot of people in Jobs's orbit.
One former Apple executive related this to Brent Schlinder.
There was always the spiritual side, which didn't seem to fit with anything else he was doing.
And one thing that becomes clear when you study the man is that the Buddhism and the hippie philosophizing, these are all aesthetics to Jobs.
He likes the way they feel and look and the way that wrapping himself in them makes him feel.
But at his center, he is still driven by a terrible and very mundane ambition.
And so he leaves India.
He does not become a sadhu.
He gets his job back at Atari when he returns.
And he rekindles his friendship with Wozniak, who had started working for HP at the time.
Now, while this is going on, computers are still things that corporations purchase to handle specific limited tasks.
There is a computer hobbyist scene that is starting to build, but it's small.
And to be in it, you can't just buy a computer and be a guy who's into computers.
You're going to have to build it, right?
You're going to have to solder.
We're not even talking building it the way you build one now, where you buy a box and you buy pieces and you slot them and connect them.
You are like soldering chips together, right?
That's the only way to have a machine that functions in this period of time.
Personal computers are not a thing yet.
It's not a concept, really, in most people's heads.
In the book Becoming Steve Jobs, Schlinder notes that there was only one word processor on the market that a regular person might be able to afford.
Jobs had a keen enough sense of the future that he knew this was going to change.
He wanted to drive that change, but first he needed startup capital.
Steve's boss at Atari had asked him to create a prototype for a new version of Pong and had offered a sizable bonus if he could reduce the number of chips required.
This task was well beyond Steve, but not beyond Wozniak, who easily completed the job.
The two were paid $700, which they split evenly.
Then Jobs was given a bonus, either $5,000 or $7,000 for completing it, you know, the way that Wozniak completed it.
So they get this massive bonus because Wozniak is able to hit these kinds.
He's able to reduce the chips by a certain amount, right?
Steve doesn't tell Wozniak that they've been given a bonus.
He splits the 700 with him and he pockets $5,000 or $7,000 and lies about it to the guy who's supposed to be his best friend.
Steve is not, or Wozniak does not find out about this betrayal for more than a decade, right?
And in 2011, he gives an interview about this on a BBC podcast, which the IB Times summarizes this way.
When asked if he was bitter about the deal, Wozniak said no, but confessed, I cried.
I cried quite a bit when I read that in a book.
And yeah, it's really sad.
That's really sad.
That means he actually cared.
Yeah, he loved Jobs.
Like this is funny all the time.
Jobs cried.
Yes.
This was relevant.
Finding out you've been betrayed like this, yeah, is a reason for some tears.
And it's fucked up about this.
At the very end of his life, Isaacson is going to press Jobs on this.
And Jobs never admits to having robbed Wozniak.
He's like, he misremembered it, right?
Steve Wozniak has a plane crash after Apple's IPO, right?
And it does some brain damage to him.
Wozniak suffers some damage as a result of this.
And Jobs basically kind of tries to gaslight him and is like, he's misremembering it, right?
Jesus, you know, he doesn't remember it properly.
And Wozniak is like, no, I remember what I got.
And like, and they've talked to biographers have talked to the people at Atari who are like, no, yeah, we paid Jobs all this money.
And if Wozniak says he didn't get it, he probably didn't get it, right?
So that's, yeah, that's probably the first real fucked up thing Jobs has done.
And there's a lot more to- Other than the bombs at his school.
Other than the bombs at his school, right?
Other than bombing his teacher.
Yeah.
But we'll be getting into all of that and more in part due.
First Real Fucked Up Thing00:02:38
But first, do you have a podcast, Ed, where people can listen to your take?
I do.
I do.
I have a podcast called Better Offline, a weekly tech show, analyzing people like Steve Jobs, but the ones who are alive and doing stuff today.
Yeah.
And yeah, you can find it betteroffline.com.
You can find it on iHeartRadio or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Hell yeah, you can.
And you can find us on Thursday where we'll be continuing the Steve Jobs story.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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