Steve Jobs, a charismatic yet manipulative figure, leveraged con artist tactics to secure Mike Markula's $100,000 investment and a $250,000 bank line of credit by promising Steve Wozniak a lucrative exit from HP. While Wozniak provided genuine engineering genius, Jobs exploited his loyalty through gaslighting and emotional blackmail, notably during the Commodore acquisition rejection. The narrative exposes Jobs' volatile temper, poor hygiene, and denial of paternity regarding Lisa Brennan-Jobs, whom he abandoned until a 1980 court order mandated $500 monthly support after an Apple IPO made him nearly a quarter-billionaire. Ultimately, despite his unethical treatment of employees and family, Jobs' strategic vision for streamlined products laid the foundation for Apple's future dominance, even as it eroded consumer freedom and ethical business standards. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:29
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
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As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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Call Zone Media.
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 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.
The Mirror Image of Jobs00:15:39
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?
I'm not Elizabeth Holmes.
A lot of people ask me this.
I am not Elizabeth Holmes.
How do you feel about Turtlenecks?
Yeah.
Not for me.
It makes me look weird.
Makes me look fatter than I usually am.
Okay.
Okay.
Sophie, let's try to get back on the phone with Elizabeth Holmes, though.
I do want to greenlight her podcast still.
I wish.
I wish I could have her on better offline.
Yeah.
Lizzie, reach out.
I'd love to talk to her.
Hello.
Yes.
It's me, Elizabeth Holmes.
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 Wozniak, 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 that's also happening at this time, 1975, that's kind of most noteworthy in the computer world, is that Altair has released the 8800 microcomputer.
Now, the Altair 8800, 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 noteworthy about it is that it's basically the first product that you can buy and 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 8800, assemble it, and have a computer that you don't have to be super rich or working for 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 8800, and this causes him to drop out of Harvard and start Microsoft, right?
Which initially codes software for the Altair.
Wozniak has a different reaction to seeing this product advertised because, unlike Bill Gates, Wozniak 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 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 smile.
He's smelling up the place, too.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, smelling so bad.
Now, Jobs and Wozniak both would sometimes attend meetings of a group called the Homebrew Computer Club.
Jobs is a lot less technical, right?
And he's not really interested in exploring what this new tech can do, which is why Wozniak is into it, right?
But he does see the club as a potential test market.
And he and Woz work out a plan to sell circuit boards that people can make into microcomputers.
This works pretty well.
This gets them enough money that Jobs decides 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?
There's a little debate.
Do you consider like the chipset basically that Wozniak puts together first, the first person computer or this device?
But either way, it's not really a thing that people can buy at this point, right?
Wozniak is going to have to make this.
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 Wozniak to figure out how to do it, right?
And to at the same time, convince wealthier and more experienced people to get on board 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 Wozniak does not really have the device figured out yet, you know?
And that is, he is kind of doing a con here, right?
It's one that's going to work out.
What would otherwise be known today as just startup funding?
Yeah, 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 Wozniak, 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 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 expert on this stuff, but they sure it's a blood guy.
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, Wozniak is going to make the thing that he's promising everybody Wozniak is going to make.
And there's an interesting quote in Isaacson's book from Noah Bushnell, who's Jobs' 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 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 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 in the air.
But also, I think, but that's the thing.
I think Jobs is big difference and the reason that puppeting him is so stupid is he seemed to actually like, I think he thought Woz could do it.
Yes.
Yes.
And he was right.
Yeah.
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 Woz could do this.
And his idea was at least somewhat modest compared to all sorts of, like there's the startup that claims it can beam energy between products.
The one that's just been completely fake forever.
That one's still going somehow.
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 Wozniak is trying to do, we're 80% of the way there, right?
That 20% is a significant gap still, but it's not nearly the kind of gap that Holmes had to clear with Theranos, right?
Nothing even a little bit like the device Theramos was promising just chemistry.
Yes, yes.
So it was not nearly as much of a jump.
It is, again, that 20% is not trivial, which is why people consider Wozniak 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, Jobs still does have to convince Wozniak, who has, again, is the only person who's going to make this possible, to devote hours of his time to doing this.
And Woz just got married.
He has this career that he's just starting and he's broke all the time.
Steve Wozniak 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 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 Wozniak.
Here's how Isaacson describes their conversation.
He didn't argue that they were sure to make money, but instead that they would have a fun adventure.
Even if we lose our money, we'll have a company, said Jobs as they were driving in his Volkswagen bus.
For once in our lives, we'll have a company.
This was enticing to Wozniak, 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'd do it.
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 Wozniak to be an even partner in this, right?
He knows Wozniak is irreplaceable, and he will treat Wozniak better than most people because of that.
But he does not see this as two best friends embarking on an adventure together.
Steve sees this as this is my chance, right?
My chance.
It's so sad how their dueling narratives clearly went.
It's hard to say.
Steve Wozniak is like, I love my friend Steve.
I love doing computers with my friend Steve.
And Steve Jobs is sitting there going, I can't wait to take all the money from Steve Wozniak.
I'm going to fuck this guy and everybody else.
I can't wait to fuck over this idiot.
Just this, like, it's funny.
You see all the stuff with his children.
It's disgusting and how he acted to his staff, but it feels like he was somehow more evil before.
Yeah, he's worse to them than he is to Wozniak because he needs Wozniak 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 industrial designer who is kind of probably the single most important person in like how Apple products look and feel today?
That's Ive.
Ive is irreplaceable.
Wozniak was irreplaceable, 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 Woz believes his friend.
And for the next few weeks, he works at HP during the day.
And at night, he solders 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 and tries to run it.
Jesus.
Yes.
Like this is a whole different planet from what coders do today.
But also a level of genius that I don't think Woz actually gets credit for.
He is so fucking good at this.
It's nuts.
Jobs registers Apple as a California business partnership on April 1st, 1976.
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 him to be good at, he has certain kinds of humility.
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 don't usually see a guy like Jobs.
Yeah, weird for him to have that level of understanding of 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?
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?
Right.
It's an undeniably successful design.
And Jobs wants this like pretentious ass Isaac Newton design because he thinks it's smarter, right?
They do eventually jettison it before the company, you know, comes out with this.
This logo, by the way, the thing you're not describing is that it's got Apple computer code on it.
It looks like the label from an 1800s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like West Medicine, like someone's going to sell you medicinal hair.
It's like a snake oil logo.
It's all stippled as well, like Wall Street Journal style.
Yeah.
This is, this isn't just bad.
This is like dog shit.
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 as a stake in it that he like sells for, I think, like a thousand bucks or some shit.
Like, it's, 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 stressful.
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 hundreds of millions of dollars and is like, but I wouldn't have had to stay in a room with Steve Jobs.
Not worth it.
And the smell.
Not worth it.
Yeah, the smell alone is not worth that money.
Oh, boy.
So Woz succeeds, and the device he makes becomes the Apple I.
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.
And then you've got a computer you can use in your home.
The Apple I 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 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 500 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 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 and Wozniak rope in their friends.
Jobs' adopted sister works there.
They bring in their friends' girlfriends, right?
You know, Elizabeth Holmes is Dan Kotke's girlfriend.
He has them like soldering a bunch of boards together, right?
Kotke moves down from Oregon for the summer to help.
And this is the first time that people get exposed to Steve's temper.
Brent Schlinder 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 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.
Approaching a Cash Crunch00:03:17
Right?
People will work hard to avoid me screaming at them because it's such an unpleasant experience.
Cool.
That does say a lot about this guy.
So they come out with this thing, this legitimately revolutionary device, the Apple I, 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 25 devices hit the store right at the same time as a more established company puts out its first personal computer, the IMSAI 8080, which would become the first personal computer to sell more than a million dollars worth of product in a single month, right?
Unlike the Apple I, the IMSAI 8080 is a complete machine.
It's in a box, like an actual professional box, not some box that a dude found, right?
And it's not just a, so it's not just a circuit board with some kooky 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 get them to buy more, to try to like get them to change the prominence with which the Apple I is put up in their store, he's like, he hasn't showered.
He stinks to high heaven.
He looks at the wheels of the pig pen.
Right.
And yeah, they're all just like, why are we taking rude stinky loser?
Yes.
And these guys at these early stores that he's trying to get to buy his product are like, why would we take a risk on this dude?
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 like 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.
When they sell that first, those first 25 units, they make a good amount of money off of that, right?
Like that's a lot of money for them.
And it 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?
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 kid.
And when he yells at his employees, one where he screams at his abuses his girlfriend for not being as good at soldering as he wants her to be.
As soon as he becomes convinced, like I am the new Buddhist founder CEO, he orders production of 100 more Apple 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 Daniel Kotke, for the summer to help.
For the first time, and not the last, the company headed towards a disaster entirely architected by jobs.
Architected by Jobs Disaster00:03:32
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
Breaking News at Americopa County00:15:00
So, as Apple is careening towards the abyss, Jobs reaches out to Chris Ann, 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 20 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 part of his emotional support network, right?
She's someone he feels safe with when he's failing, and when he succeeds, he wants nothing from her.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, that sounds like Steve Jobs.
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, Coben Chino.
And she's like, hey, go talk to Coben and get some advice from him, right?
The following story comes from the excellent book Infinite Loop.
Wouldn't it be better, Jobs asked, and this is him talking to Coban, 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.
Or just the thing that he said based on absolutely nothing.
I think what the monk is saying, you will not notice a difference between being a monk in a monastery or running a company because it's still you.
You could have watched Bakaroo Bansai.
No matter where you go, there you are.
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, howdy, is that one of those dun, dun, dun 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 customer so far about the logo.
That the guy owning the shop has no choice in the logo, but he jobs screams at him, people think it's 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.
Do we want to find out what he was going to change it to?
I'm sure it's something pretentious, Buddhist Capitalism Inc. or some shit.
Galileo Productions.
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 I work, the Omen comes out.
You know, the movie, The Omen, right?
Yes.
I know what you're asking again.
What the fuck does that have to do with selling a good one?
I can't wait to find out.
Well, for reasons I've never heard a good explanation for, Jobs sells the Apple one for $666.66.
Come on, man.
I know.
That one's in the Bible.
Is that what's right in the Bible?
Yeah, I'm sure.
Now, oddly, though, it's not Christians that this pisses off.
It's a group of Sikhs who organize a campaign to like protest against Apple that like drowns the Jobs household, which is Apple's office, like his mom's running the phones, and they just get deluged in complaints about the fact that they're clearly selling a satanic product.
It's very weird the way this moral panic works out.
I guess it shows how different the times are.
Go figure.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
What a weird issue to have.
That one's not his fault.
Who could know?
Right?
I'm sorry.
Yes, it is his fault.
Why are you selling it for $666?
Yeah, it must have been on purpose, right?
Yeah, there's no reason.
Did he just leave his finger on a key?
Like, no, he was like, oh, yeah, this will be conversion of Elon Musk doing 420 jokes.
It's just, I didn't think about that, but he is that guy.
It is the same kind of dude, right?
Like, wouldn't this be funny?
That's amazing.
So eventually, Jobs is able to secure a few more months of funding by getting a loan from some friends of Wozniak.
Now, these guys, these people who are good friends of Steve Wozniak, they are not rich, right?
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 $5,000, 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 leader sort of thing.
He is really 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?
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.
Here's the thing, though: the stinky asshole who conned a lot of people, that's also the description of Rasputin, right?
Like oftentimes, human history turns on a smelly asshole who's really careful.
Some stinky man, some stinky man who's good at convincing people to act against their interests.
Look, I can't imagine Hitler smelled great, right?
You know, he's in the bastard 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.
You know, that's my head cannon 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 to Wozniak and say, the Apple I, groundbreaking as it is, is not selling.
We have to figure something else out.
And he has to hope that Wozniak can do magic again, right?
The Apple I is too weak.
It doesn't have a powerful enough processor.
It can't really compete.
It's technically the first, I think, but like the PCs that 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 Wozniak.
And Wozniak is not motivated by money.
He never is.
He is motivated, like all genius nerds, by impressing other nerds.
Specifically, he 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 containing 40 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, etc.
It was the perfect challenge for Woz.
Nobody alive could look at a chip design and simplify it by a factor of two or five or 10 in the way Woz could.
And now, having announced his intentions, he set out to do it.
And being Woz, 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 and wanting to play a video game in his house, right?
This series is kind of a tragedy.
Yes, it really is.
It's very sad.
This lovely, this lovely man who's like, doo doo doo, I love doing computers.
I love doing computers so much.
And this other guy who's just like a stinky goblin who wants to make more money than God.
And this is why I prefer the Fastbender Rogan movie is that like Fastbender comes across as like kind of sinister, which Job was.
And Seth Rogan is wholesome, right?
As Steve Wozniak.
And it captures, he's playing Woz largely during the period when like Woz is angry at Jobs, which is a thing that happens, right?
Because 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 Wozniak, who'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 to this point.
But Steve plays a critical role in why this works out, because the Woz 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 he's making into the market, right?
That is the thing that wouldn't have happened without Jobs, right?
Now, remarkably, Wozniak solves the remarkable engineering hurdle that 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 argued that this is the single innovation that most makes mass market personal computers possible.
It's quite literally the thing that makes them work.
Yeah, it's a huge, huge deal.
But he's insane that he did it as just some guy.
Yeah, as 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 Apple II is usually described as Wozniak'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 Woz doesn't know shit about power supplies, right?
This is outside of his wheelhouse.
Power supplies are analog devices.
He is a digital guy, 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 at 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 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 Lennon 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 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 1965, when John Lindsay ran for 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 Apple's power supply, right?
And it's funny, that's such an interesting backstory.
But also, it's interesting how Steve Jobs seems to be surrounded by people with relatively strong moral beliefs.
Yes.
Despite the fact he has none.
No, 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 in the Ashton Kutscher movie, all of this, 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.
That's like, you can have a really interesting character.
Because the Jobs movie is written by dipshits, 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 the character they make him into.
Yeah, they make him the font.
They don't even make him a, like, they just don't know what to do with the character because it's written by scrubs.
Holt 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 Jobs 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 I is a much better product and it starts selling.
It starts selling like hot cakes.
But personality conflicts between Wozniak and Jobs nearly derail everything, right?
The cause was this question of what are we going, how many expansion slots are we going to put in the machine, right?
Wozniak 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 like hooking 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 hallmark of Apple stuff today.
This exists at the beginning.
This is genuinely fascinating.
Yes.
Going back to the original devices, he had this walled garden philosophy.
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 Woz, if he's gotten this way in the first the Apple I, the Apple II, the company would have failed.
It would not have worked as a product.
The fact that the Apple II in particular is so modifiable and expandable is why it has the Apple II is the top-selling Apple product for like 13 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 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 is profitable, right?
To run your tech enterprise.
It sucks ass.
It sucks ass.
I don't like that it is, but you can't argue.
Cutting Consumer Access00:05:36
Yes.
I love me dongles.
I'm very frustrated by it.
It is interesting to me that he sees what 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.
Wozniak's parents and family hated Jobs.
And this gives us some important outside context on the man.
I've mentioned before, Jobs is basically a con man whose con worked out, right?
And that is how Wozniak'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 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 $100,000 to split up.
Plus, each of you will get a healthy salary, like $36,000 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 not 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 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 and Wozniak 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 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 Wozniaks.
Jerry Wozniak 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 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 Wozniak 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, Woz, if we're not 50-50, you can have the whole thing.
Whether Steve Jobs cried out of betrayal, surprise, or calculation is impossible to know.
But even though he cried, as Jerry Wozniak 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 that's, it's interesting to me that 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, that will turn him around, even though he's been fighting.
What a fucking scumbag.
Yeah, it really is.
He is always going to be good at playing to Wozniak's sense of loyalty to this friendship, which is going to be tested mightily in the years to come.
Steve is, though, 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 could say he didn't know that at the time.
This is still him being 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 businessman, 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 had holes, his hair was unbrushed, he wore no shoes, and he smelled.
They only get the meeting because Jobs, he'll like, he'll massage his own bare feet in meetings.
Like he's so off, putting the people's the disgusting goblin.
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 Markula winds up both investing a bunch of money.
He puts like a 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 guarantor of this line of credit, he gets a third of the company, which is, by the way, Mike does very well off this deal, right?
Makes a couple thousand dollars.
Yeah.
A third of Apple, quite, quite a lot of money.
His one condition is that Wozniak has to quit HP, right?
And this is, this is a smart thing.
Yeah, Mike's like, if I'm going to put this much money in, Wozniak, you got to shit or get off the pot, you know?
This is.
It's insane that Wozniak has done all of the things you said without leaving his day job.
No, no, he's doing this in like evenings when he can, and kind of he's ignoring his wife, right?
Daily fucking do a podcast.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, I know, right?
He is, he is very, uh, I mean, they're young too, which makes it easier to work out stuff like this.
That's definitely it.
A Third of Apple's Money00:02:57
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
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The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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My next guest, you know, from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Codependency and Paternity Scandals00:15:10
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
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And we're back.
Having conquered aging, let's continue the story of Steve Jobs.
Our cameras are off today, but just know, I did not enjoy that ad pivot.
Well, I'm proud of it.
So we're fine.
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 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 office is.
Like he is not good at this job.
Incredible.
It's very funny that that's his name.
Your history is, oh, yeah, I'm the guy who couldn't run Apple.
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 Cupertino alongside his buddy Dan.
Now, Chris Ann works at Apple in the packing department at this point, and she's living with Jobs and with Dan Kotke.
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 writes based on her mother, Chris Ann'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 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's.
Lisa, I forget exactly what her last name is.
It's a hyphenated one.
I think it's Brennan Jobs.
She's a really good writer.
It's something about like, you know, Steve's sister is a famous, Mona Simpson is a great novelist.
Steve thinks he could have been a poet.
Maybe he could have been because like his daughter is actually like, this is not just interesting because of the insights it has into jobs.
It's like legitimately an extremely well-written and emotionally affecting book.
Like her story of this, her relationship with this guy 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-style house in Cupertino, 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 Ann'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 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 Ann's probably closer to the truth.
But the relationship is tumultuous.
And Chris Ann 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 that's true, right?
This is, you get different accounts from different people about relationships, and to 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 Ann says she is planning to leave.
And before she can, her IUD gets expelled without her knowledge 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, clenched his jaw, and then ran out the front door and slammed it behind him.
He drove off.
She thought he must have 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 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 because I think he might actually be worse than Elon Musk.
Yes.
What a fucking monster.
It is, it gets a lot worse.
We're just starting here.
So Jobs, he is enraged at Chris Ann for having the temerity to get pregnant.
And I think that's important.
How does the sperm get there, Steve?
Yeah.
Where did the sperm come from in this situation?
He does, 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, I'm going to continue.
This is a quote from one of Jobs' friends, Greg Calhoun.
This is what he tells Isaacson at the time about why Jobs is so weird about this.
Steve was not just dealing with Chris Ann 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 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.
A very convenient way to live one's life.
I don't think that's accurate.
We're building to that, though.
He begins to tell his co-workers and friends who all knew Chris Ann 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 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.
Yeah, I was when you were saying that, I was like, Is he blatantly like oh, he's gonna tell time that, he's going to tell Time magazine that we're building to this.
His friend Daniel Kotke 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, 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 in Lisa Brennan Jobs' book, right?
You don't get this from Isaacson, you don't get this from Schlinder, you don't get this from Moritz, right?
And this is very important, right?
So, Jobs may have 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 Ann 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 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 Jobs says.
I wanted, I thought she should get an abortion.
She just kind of waited until that wasn't an option anymore.
Except he didn't talk to us, so how would he know?
Except, how would he know, right?
This is not what Chris Ann says.
Chris Ann 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 on, right.
This paragraph you will not catch in any of these more popular biographies of Jobs.
Quote: Have the child, Kobun 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 Kobun, 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 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.
That is a very different story than Jobs gets.
I think Steve Jobs's way he died was too kind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Was not a very good person.
That's disgusting.
That is violent.
Like I realized the title of this show, but Jesus fucking Christ.
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 Lisa Brennan Jobs' book rings truer to me.
I would be shocked if the answer was the nice story.
And this is consistent with the stories Jobs tells about all of the other times that he was, he based his life on these kinds of decisions based in his spiritual beliefs, right?
It is very consistent with that.
So Chris Ann 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 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.
She looks exactly like you.
This is obviously your kid.
Stop fucking being bullshitting around about this.
You know that this is like not the guy you want to be the moral paragon either.
Yes.
No.
And it does seem everyone who is friends with Jobs, who knows him and Chris Ann, immediately is like, well, yeah, this is obviously his kid.
Right.
You just take one look at her.
She's plainly his daughter.
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.
That's mine.
This is my kid, and I'm never going to deny pinching a car.
Yeah, exactly.
The Apple II had been released not long before Lisa's birth, again, based on Wozniak's original design.
And it very quickly becomes the most successful PC of its day.
It's going to sell more than 6 million units over the course of a decade and a half on the market in varying forms.
And the rocket-like success of the Apple II prompts a run of investments in Apple, and the company goes public in 1980.
And in that whole time period, from the Apple II's release, which roughly coincides with Chris Ann's pregnancy to the IPO, Steve pretends the daughter he'd named was not his.
He repeatedly denies her and denies he has any responsibility to this kid.
Chris Anne, for the first three years or so, Lisa's alive, is barely getting by.
She babysits 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' kid otherwise.
As she watches the kid's father just get insanely wealthy.
Yeah, about to.
He hasn't gone public yet.
This is critical this time.
It is about to, and he's doing quite well.
He's certainly doing well enough to help her not be in poverty, right?
To pay in any way.
Jobs is forced to take responsibility for Lisa in 1980 because the state of California finds out that the mother of Steve Jobs' 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.
Fuck yeah.
California's attitude is like, yeah, we shouldn't be paying for this, right?
Jobs denies 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?
Why is he lying?
It's because 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 fuck with it.
You fucking asshole.
So he's an asshole, but he's also like dumb.
Well, this is, you know, how he died.
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 94%, something like that rate of confidence, right?
That's as high as it'll 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 state's 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.
They have to keep poking her because she's, she's so tiny that it's hard for them to get a vein.
Jesus Christ.
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 $500 a month.
Plus it requires him to provide medical insurance for the child.
The case is finalized in December of 1980, right before Apple's IPO.
And it's kind of surprising to Chris Ann 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 days after they sign the papers, Apple goes public.
Finalizing Child Support Before IPO00:08:47
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.
Hmm.
Cool guy.
Great, great dude.
So before 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 goes public and it's huge news.
Number one, they are selling computers faster than anyone ever has.
They make personal computing like a massive industry, right?
And number two, the Apple going public, like 300 people become millionaires overnight.
This has never happened before.
All of the way that all startups are obsessed with this IPO, with like everyone getting rich overnight, you know, all the reasons OpenAI is making decisions it's making so it can get that $80 billion whatever valuation 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?
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 funny, Jobs hates Moritz because of how this works out because he is convinced that he was promised he was going to be Time's 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 Kotke 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 in his interview effectively.
And Jobs is convinced that's why Time didn't make me.
So he, number one, he never forgives Kotke for this.
And he blacklists Moritz, Moritz for all the time.
I like that it's not because he did the thing.
It's that he told someone.
Yes.
Like it's not, it's not that time was like, hey, that sounds morally reprehensible.
Yeah.
It's that they knew it 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 denied paternity.
Jobs says to Moritz, for this time article that's going to be like everywhere in the United States, 28% of the male population in the United States could 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 of the time.
What he's saying for Timma the Hun.
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 Ann 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 the, it goes, this article in Lisa's childhood is like a bomb.
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, it's pretty vile shit.
So I'm going to quote 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 Minlo 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 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.
Out of here, Mark.
I know.
You fucking asshole.
What a fucking asshole piece of shit.
Moonman where to talk 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 of the Steve Jobs being an asshole around 1980 story.
Several other people get fucked over in the Apple IPO.
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 told them the work we're doing, we are changing the world.
This is crucial work.
And then when they finish 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 Kotke, his former best friend and roommate.
Kotke 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, Jobs ensured Kotke was cut out entirely, right?
And when Isaacson interviewed some of Jobs' 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 what the fuck does that mean?
What the fuck are you talking about?
Just, he's an asshole.
He's a selfish piece of shit.
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 Kotke some of my options?
It's not right to cut him out.
He's been with us since the beginning.
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 Jobs says, okay, I'll give him zero.
Now, the savior of the day here is Steve Wozniak.
Before the IPO, even before Kotke gets cut out, Wozniak realizes that a lot of like these, a lot of these contractors are getting fucked.
And he has a bunch of these like founders stock options.
And so he takes 2,000s of these options and he sells them for basically pennies to 40 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 get something as a result of this because of Wozniak.
And when Wozniak finds out that Kotke has been fucked out, he straight up gives Kotke a bunch of his options.
He does this to several people that Jobs screws out, right?
Like Wozniak, there's like jokes at Apple that Wozniak's going to go broke himself because he gives so many of his options to people that Jobs cut out of the IPO, which says a lot about Wozniak and his attitudes towards loyalty as much as it is.
Above the angels.
Above the Angels, the Steve Wastiak story, right?
Yeah.
And it says a lot, obviously, about jobs, too.
But yeah, that's part two.
How you feeling, Ed?
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.
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 he'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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just not the execution.
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.
Yeah.
Even if that was quite rare.
Yeah.
Making him so much worse.
Like Mark Andreessen, by comparison, actually, no, we don't know his past either.
Like we'll probably get a book that proves him just as bad.
But all of these people right now, they're really like micro jobs.
They don't, they lacked his sociopathy.
The Reality of Sociopathy00:03:32
Yeah.
They lacked the mix of sociopathy and actually understanding human nature.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's going to see Mark Andreessen cry.
Yeah.
That's all cool.
Good, good shit.
Well, Ed, do you have a have anything you got to plug here?
Well, I have a podcast on CoolZone 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 and on every other place where you can find your podcasts.
Hell yeah.
Well, you can find us at this show.
We had 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 CoolerZone Media.
All of these things are possible.
So you just get things about Robert talking about the eternal font of life.
Yeah, that's exactly it, right?
And how you too can become immortal.
So check all that out.
And most importantly, go to hell.
I love you.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
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