Behind the BastardsRobert Evans explains the rise of Apple, and how Steve Jobs tried to cheat the California Welfare system.
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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. 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, no, 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 a green light green light her podcast.
Still I wish, Yeah, I wish I could have offline.
Yeah, it's a great shack. I 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 Wosneyak, who's the guy who actually knows how to do the stuff that Steve is getting paid for, and he has some plans for that money. He's going to have some plans for that money. So the thing that's also happening at this time nineteen seventy five that's kind of most noteworthy in the computer world is that al Taire has released the eighty eight hundred micro computer, now the all Tear eighty eight hundred. You would not call it useful in terms that modern computers are useful for, right. It is not a thing that you're going to get a huge amount of productive work out of. But what's noteworthy about it is that it's basically the first product that you can buy a symbol that will give a regular individual. You still need a lot more knowledge about stuff like soldering and whatnot than like a normal person has, but a relatively normal person can buy the Altair eighty eight hundred a symbol it and have a computer that you don't have to be super rich or working for a large corporation to have access to right. So, even though this device is we would call this extremely limited in modern terms, it is a foundational moment for modern big tech. Bill Gates reads an ad for the Altair eighty eight hundred and this causes him to drop out of Harvard and start Microsoft Right, which initially codes software for the Altair. Wosniak has a different reaction to seeing this product advertised because, unlike Bill Gates, Wosniak is an actual genius, and his immediate reaction to hearing about this is like, well, fuck, I've built computers that are as good as this for fun at home, Like this isn't that impressive? I could make something better than this, right, And in fact he can. He's about to, you know. So he talks to Steve Jobs about this, because he does about everything. Steve is his best friend, and we can kind of imagine Steve Jobs like steepling his hands like the Grinch while his lips curl up into a big sea being up the place too. Oh absolutely yes, smelling so bad now, Jobs in Wosniak both would sometimes attend meetings of a group called the Homebrew Computer Club. Jobs is a lot less technical, right, and he's not really interested in exploring what this new tech can do, which is why Wosniak is into it, right. But he does see the club as a potential test market, and he and Waws work out a plan to sell circuit boards that people can make into micro computers. This works pretty well, This gets them enough money that Jobs decides the next step is to form a proper corporation and decide to get funding to put out a device of their own, which is going to be like the first true personal computer. Right, has a little bit debate, do you consider like the chipset basically that Wosniak puts together first the first person computer or this divi But either way, it's not really a thing that people can buy at this point, right, Wosniak is going to have to make this, and it's extremely unclear as to whether or not it's really possible to do this at a price point that people can afford, and whether they'd be able to produce such a device at all. Jobs ignores the fact that it's not really clear if this can be done. His role in this is to motivate Wosniak to figure out how to do it right and at the same time convince wealthier and more experienced people to get on board and help them figure out how to actually like, produce and sell a product. So at this stage his role here, he's effectively being a con man, right. He needs to get people to buy into a vision that is far from proven by basically telling them, oh, yeah, we already have this figured out, when Wosneiac does not really have the device figured out yet, you know, and that is 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 stought up funding.
Yes, startup funding. This is how it all works. Now, this is what Elizabeth Holmes does, Right, She doesn't know how to make a blood testing device. She finds a guy who is a genius that she thinks is her Wosniak, and she sees her job as if I've got to keep the lie going until he figures out how to make the product. Jobs is doing the same thing. He's 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 in a blood guy. But you can see what she is doing is pattern off of what Jobs did. But he is better at judging what kind of risks to take, right, because this is an achievable risk. And in fact, Wosniak is going to make the thing that he's promising. Everybody while is going to make. And there's an interesting quote in Isaacson's book from Noah Bushnell, who's jobs as old boss at Atari and something of a mentor to Jobs quote, There's something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve. He was interested not just in engineering but also in business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, pretend to be completely in control, and people will assume 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 h also, I think. But that's the thing. I think Jobs's big difference and the reason that puppeting him is so stupid is he seemed to actually, like, I think he thought was could do it.
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 was could do this, and his yah, his idea was at least somewhat modest, Yeah, compared to all sorts of like there's the startup that claims it could beam energy between products, the one that's just been completely faked forever, 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 Waznak is trying to do, we're eighty percent of the way there. Right. That twenty percent is a significant gap still, but it's not nearly the kind of gap that Holmes had to clear with Therahose. Right, nothing even a little bit like the device Theramost was promising.
He was just chemistry.
Yes, yes, so it was not nearly a much of a jump. It is again that twenty percent is not trivial, which is why people consider Wosniak one of the greatest engineers who ever lived. His accomplishment is significant, but it's not nearly as much of a jump that you have to make now. Job still does have to convince Wosniak, who has again is the only person who's going to make this possible to devote hours of his time to doing this, and was just got married. He has this career that he's just starting, and he's broke all the time. Steve Wosniak is one of the worst people with money who will ever live. As a spoiler, He's going to get crazy rich off of Apple and then burn a huge chunk of that money failing to run a series of concerts like he is horrible with his money, and so it's not a trivial challenge for Jobs to motivate him to put the kind of time in that it's going to take him to achieve this goal, and he's able to do that by lying to Wosniak. Here's how Isaacson describes their conversation. He didn't argue that they were sure to make money, said that they would have a fun adventure. Even if we lose our money, We'll have a company, said Jobs, as they were driving in his Volkswagen bus. For once in our lives, we'll have a company. This was enticing to Osniak, even more than any prospect of getting rich. He recalled, I was excited to think about us like that, to be two best friends starting a company. Wow. I knew right then that I do it. How could I not? And that's sad because like that is purely Jobs gaslighting him. Jobs does not think of him this way. Right, Jobs wants a company for himself. He doesn't consider Bosniak to be an even partner in this. Right he knows Wosniak is herreplaceable, and he will treat Wosniak better than most people because of that, but he 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 I'm said how the jeweling narratives clearly went and like I love my friend Steve, I love doing computers. It was with my friends Steve and Steve Jobs sitting there going, I can't wait to take all the money from Steve wasn act.
I'm gonna fuck this guy and everybody else.
I can't wait to fuck over this idiot, just like it's funny you see all the stuff with his children, disgusting and how he acted to his staff, but it feels like he was somehow more evil before.
Yeah, he's worse to them than he is to Washnak because he needs Wosniak and he's not dumb right, Jobs is not dumb. Jobs understands maybe the only person in his life until he meets Joni Ives Right, who's the big uh industrial designer who is kind of probably the single most important person in like how Apple products look and feel today. That's I've iv is irreplaceable. Wozniak was irreplaceable, right because these guys have a skill that no one else can come close to, So he can't be shitty to them in the same way he is to everybody else, but he's still deeply manipulative to Wozniak, right, like that is beyond argument. I think so the wah was believe his friend. And for the next few weeks he works at HP during the day and at night he solders 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.
Like so a level of genius the I don't think was actually guests no credit for he is so fucking good at this it's nuts.
Jobs registers Apple as a California business partnership on April first, nineteen seventy six. Their initial logo is drawn by the guy who is briefly the third founder of the company, Ronald Wayne. Wayne is an Atari engineer who they brought in to kind of be the adult in the room. Right, one thing Jobs is good at that you wouldn't expect me to be good at. He has certain kinds of humility. He understands for a long period of time, I want to be the CEO, but I'm not ready to do that job. Right. His first pick, he's going to pick a few people for this role. And he's bad at picking people for this role, by the way, but he does understand I'm not ready to do this, which is interesting to me. You usually see a guy like Jobs. Yeah, weird for him to have that level of understanding of 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. 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 within it logo.
By the way, the thing you're not describing is that it's got Apple computer co on it. It looks like the label from an eighteen hundreds.
Yeah. Yeah, like medicine, Like someone's kind of sell you medicine.
Stay coil logo. It's all stippled as well at Wall Street Journal style. Yeah, this is this isn't just bad. This is like dog shit.
It's dog shit. It's going to get replaced very quickly. Wayne is going to leave the company, and like he has like a third of the company, has a stake in it that he like sells for I think like a thousand bucks or some shit like. But what it says a lot about how shitty Steve Jobs is to work with that. Years later, when Wayne is interviewed about this, he's like, yeah, I just thought it would be too strong. I'm glad I quit the job because it wouldn't have been worth the stress. Like this man looks at the possibility of having one hundreds of millions of dollars. It is like, but I wouldn't have had to stay in a room with Steve Jobs. Not worth it. The smell not worth it. Yeah, the smell alone, it's not worth that money.
Oh boy.
So Wahs succeeds and the device he makes becomes the Apple One. It's basically just this is not what we would consider a full computer. It is a microprocessor, a CPU, a power supply, and some memory chips on a circuit board. Right. You put it in a box like you get a cigar box, and you stick this fucker in there, and you hook it up to a monitor and a keyboard, and then you've got a computer you can use in your home. The Apple One is not a big hit among the computer geeks at the homebrew club. They wanted to hack and cobble, and they liked sharing schematics and stuff for free. The fact that Jobs is trying to sell this idea to them for money rubs everyone the wrong way. But in this instance, Jobs understands the future better than they do. He knows that it lays in selling a computer regular people want to buy. So he finds a guy who owns a computer shop, and he works at a deal to sell a bunch of these boards for five hundred bucks a pop. He brings in a bunch of his friends from around California and elsewhere to help them make the boards, and he hires his mom to manage the phones. Elizabeth Holmes is one of Apple's first employees and does finance work for them. And this is where the legendary story of Apple being formed out of a family garage comes from. Jobs in Wozniak Rope in their friends jobs's adopted sister works there. They bring in their friends girlfriends. Right you know, Elizabeth Holmes is Dan Kottke's girlfriend. He has them like soldering a bunch of boards together. Right. Kotkey moves down from Oregon for the summer to help. And this is the first time that people get exposed to Steve's temper. Brince Schlender writes he prodded the team ceaselessly when things went wrong. He moved fast. After an old girlfriend failed to solder a few chips correctly, he made her the team's bookkeeper. His temper was short, and he never hesitated to belittle their work when something went wrong. As a child, Steve had rarely been given any reason to hold back his honest feelings. Now he began to learn one of his first management lessons, namely that his temper, properly targeted, could actually be a very effective motivational tool. Right, people will work hard to avoid me screaming at them because it's such an unpleasant experience. Ooh, that does say a lot about this guy. So they come out with this thing, this legitimately revolutionary device, the Apple one, and it kind of flops. Right. They sell, They make a good amount of money off the first batch of sales to the store, but the store can't move them. Right. Part of the problem is timing the first twenty five devices hit the store right at the same time as a more established company puts out its first personal computer, the IMSAI eighty eighty, which would become the first personal computer to sell more than a million dollars worth of product in a single month. Right. Un Like the Apple one, the IMSAI eighty eighty is a complete machine. It's in a box, like an actual professional box, not some box that a dude found, right. And it's not just so. It's not just a circuit board with some kookie branding. Right. It's something that's more recognizable to a normal person as a product, and particularly to like somebody buying a computer for their business, right because that is still the bulk of the of the of the market right now. Now. The other issue is employees at the one store that Apple's first product is in hate Jobs. Whenever he comes down to try to get them to buy more, to try to like get them to change the prominence with which the Apple one is put up in their store, He's like, he hasn't showered. He stinks to high heaven.
He looks at the ways of him the pig pen, right.
And yeah, they're all just like why are we why are we taking Yes, And they're these guys at these these early stores that he's trying to get to buy his product are like, why would we take a risk on this?
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 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 twenty five units, they make a good amount of money off of that, right, Like, that's a lot of money for them, and that makes them feel like we're on the cusp of success. And then they stop selling additional units. He had initially thought with the early success they had, jobs had convinced himself, I have hacked a new kind of enlightened Buddhist capitalism. Right. The fact that we're going to be a hit means that I have figured out a better, a more ethical, enlightened, spiritual way of being a caut his employees, one where he screams abuses his girlfriend for not being as good at soldering as he wants it to be. As soon as he becomes convinced like I am the new Buddhist founder CEO, he orders production of one hundred more Apple 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 Kottke for the summer to help. For the first time and not the last. The company headed towards a disaster entirely architected by Jobs. And speaking of disasters, your life will be a disaster if you don't invest in the products and services that support this podcast. Oh we're back. So, as Apple is careening towards the abyss, Jobs reaches out to Chris Anne, his old girlfriend, and again they're kind of on again, off again. Right, He'll come back into her life and this is going to be a thing for like twenty years. He gets more and more kind of close to her every time he fails. Right, he will never admit this, and he is constantly shitty to her, but she is for decades going to be a crucial 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 Cobin Chino, and she's like, hey, go talk to Cobin 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 n't talking to Cobin if he were to drop this capitalist deceit and head for a monastery in Japan. The monk laughed and told Jobs he would not find much difference between the two, a statement that showed the monk had incredible insight into either the nature of entrepreneurship or the personality of Steve Jobs.
Well, just the thing that he said still absolutely nothing.
I think what the monk is saying, you will not notice a difference between being a monk and a monastery or running a company, because it's still you.
You to watch Bakkaroo banside that 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, howdie is that one of those Dune moments. So by this point, Apple had switched to the now famous Apple logo from the pretentious one Jobs had loved. At one point, he flew into a rage with their only customers so far about the logo that the guy owning the shop has no choice in the logo, but Job screams at him, people that gets horseshit, We've got to change the name. And he actually gets talked out of that by the client. Right, Steve Jobs tries to jettison the name and logo for Apple Computers.
Do we have to find out what he was going to change it to?
But it was like, I'm sure it's something pretentious, Buddhist capitalism, anchor some shit. I don't know. Yeah, Now there are some additional weird issues that Apple has to confront early on this one. I did not see coming. The same summer they're trying to make this the Apple one work. The Omen comes out, you know the movie The Omen, Right, Yes, I know what you're asking. Again, what the fuck does that have to do? It's selling it. I can't wait to find out well, for reasons, I've never heard a good explanation for jobs sells the Apple one for six hundred and sixty six dollars and sixty six man owns the Bible, That one's right in the Bible. Yeah, I'm sure now. Well, Oddly though, it's not Christians that this pisses off. It's a group of Sikhs who organize a campaign to like protest against Apple that like drowns the job's household, which is Apple's office, like his mom's running the phones, and they just get deluged in complaints about like the fact that they're clearly selling a satanic product. It's very weird the way this moral panic works out. I guess it's it shows how different the times are. 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 full Why are you selling it for six hundred and sixty six dollars?
Yeah? It must have been on purpose, right.
Yeah, there's no real Did he just leave his finger on a key? Like no, he was like, oh yeah, this will be Yeah, this version of Elon Musk's doing four twenty jokes it is.
I didn't think about that, but he is that guy. It is the same kind of dude, right, wouldn't this be funny? That's amazing. Eventually Jobs is able to secure a few more months of funding by getting a loan from some friends of Wosniak. Now, these guys, these people who are good friends of Steve Wosneyak, they are not rich, right, And in fact, one of them is going through like dire financial straits at the moment. And when they're interviewed later, they're both like, I don't actually know why we gave Steve Jobs five thousand dollars, right, it doesn't make any sense that we would have made this investment. All one of them could later say is Steve had a silver tongue. He could talk anybody into anything. Right, Again, from the cult leaders sort of thing he is. He is really 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 Rasputen. Right. Often human history turns on a smelly asshole who's man, some stinky man who's good at convincing people to act against their interests. Look, I can't imagine Hitler smelled great? Right, you know they in the Boston smell zone. Yeah, what did these guys smell like? Not great? Now? You know, Saddam Hussein, there was a man who smelled good. I'm going to guarantee that guy always smelled incredible. He just has that vibe to him.
You know.
That's my head canon for Saddam and for Tito weirdly enough, but not Stalin. So Steve was of course lying, right, or at least he's at best he's getting by. He's convincing these people to throw down their last bit of cash on this investment, not based on his actual knowledge that they are going to turn shit around, because he has no ideas here, right, he basically has to go to Wosniak and say, the Apple one, groundbreaking as it is, is not selling. We have to figure something else out. And he has to hope that Wosniak can do magic again. Right, the Apple one is too weak that it doesn't have a powerful enough processor. It can't really compete. It's the technically the first I think, But like the PCs that succeed before it does, you know, they have more horsepower. Right, And so what initial buzz there had been around the Apple One, it fades because everything else that comes out immediately afterwards is a lot better. And so fixing this is going to come down to Wosniak. And Wosniak is not motivated by money. He never is. He is motivated, like all genius nerds, by impressing other nerds. Specifically, he 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 forty or more chips that would at least double the price of the computer, not to mention, create all sorts of new problems with reliability, power consumption, cooling, et cetera. It was the perfect challenge for wa was nobody alive could look at a chip design and simplify it by factor of two or five or ten in the way Was could, And now having announced his intentions, he set out to do it. And being Wase, he also had his own silly, eccentric reason for doing the impossible. He wanted to play the game he devised for Atari Breakout on his own computer and not just on an arcade player. So again, Jobs is entirely motivated by wanting to succeed, wanting to be influential, wanting to be rich and powerful. Wozniak is motivated by wanting to impress some other nerds and wanting to play a video game in his house. Right, Why this theory is kind of a tragedy, Yes, it really is. It's very sad.
This lovely, this lovely man who's lear I love doing computers. I love doing computer so much. And this other guy who's just like a Goplin he wants to make more money than God.
And this is this is why I prefer the Fastbender Rogan movie. Is that like Fastbender, it comes across as like kind of sinister which Job was and seth Rogan is wholesome right as Steve Wotsneyak, and it captures he's playing Waws largely during the period when like Waz is angry at Jobs, which is a thing that happens, right because Jep justifiably yes, anyway, that's the one I would recommend watching. So yeah, this does I think get to the heart of what makes Apple work. Right. In one corner you have Wohsniak. He's not interested in money or doing anything for the money, and without him, Apple would never have had a product. Now we've been making fun of Steve and it is an unequal partnership up this point, but Steve plays a critical role in why this works out because the Waws is never going to build a business, right He's probably, despite his genius, probably would not have been very influential without Jobs, because Jobs is going to force these brilliant things things he's making into the market, right, that is the thing that wouldn't have happened without Jobs. Right now, Remarkablyosniak solves the remarkable engineering hurdle that he had been set for him, and in doing so, he creates a device that integrates the display driver into the microprocessor. This is probably I think there's some debate about this, but I have heard it argue that this is the single innovation that most makes mass market personal computer's possi.
It's quite literally the thing that makes them work. Yeah.
Yeah, it's a huge, huge deal. But he's saying that he did it is just some guy. Yeah, some guy who wants to play Breakout, and it's because of his innovation. Nearly every part of a PC now is able to be put on a single board that can display in color and doesn't cost as much as a new fucking car. Right, this is still not quite enough. In Apple lore, the Apple two is usually described as Wasniac's brainchild. But the whole thing needs to fit and be shipped in a professional case, not a cigar box, which is what they'd been doing. And as a result of that, it needs a better power supply. And the Wahs doesn't know shit about power supplies, right, this is outside of his wheelhouse. Power supplies are analog devices. He is a digital guy, And there's a weird kind of pride divide between the dudes who are into the analog and the digital shit right. So jobs has to ask a friend of Atari, who do we bring in to figure out the power supply? And the name they get is a Marxist mad scientist named Frederick Holt. And this is a weird part of the story. And I'm going to quote from the book Return to the Little Kingdom here, which is the first history of Apple that gets published. As a youth, he had inherited the complete works of Lenin from his grandfather, a revolutionary socialist who ran for governor of the state of Maine on the Eugene Debs ticket. And though Lenin came to share his teenage bookshelf with the works of Darwin, Holt decided that the triumph of the proletariat was infinitely preferable to the survival of the fittest. He found graduate work in mathematics at Ohio State lonely it was like playing chess with yourself, edited a free speech newspaper and explored the private jealousies of radical left splinter groups. He became national treasurer for the student portion of the National Coalition Against the War in Vietnam, and was invited by a small New York publisher to write a book about the logic of Marxism, but he was diverted by the call of politics. And in nineteen sixty five, when John Lindsay ran from mayor of New York City, Holt managed the rival campaign of a black taxi driver who stood as a revolutionary socialist. The duo succeeded in drawing far more attention from the FBI than the New York electorate. This is the guy who's going to figure out the apples power supply, right, And it's funny. That's such an interesting backstory.
But also it's interesting how Steve Job seems to be surrounded by people with relatively strong moral beliefs yes, despite the fact he has none. No.
And he's good at manipulating them too. He manipulates these people. These people believe in things and he does not. Yes. And it's one thing that's funny. And the Ashton Kutcher movie all of this that like that paragraph I read, that's a fascinating backstory for a character, right, this like genius engineer who comes into engineering as like a Marxist academic. That's like, you can have a really interesting character. The because the Jobs movie is written by Dipshitz, all the only thing they can think of for him is like, we'll give him a leather jacket and have him ride a motorcycle. Like that's they make him. Then they make him the Fosters, They don't. They don't even make him a like they just don't know what to do with the character because it's it's it's written by scrubs. Holt is an interesting guy, though, and he doesn't want to work for Apple. Initially, he tells the company basically, you can't afford me, and Job says, no problem, we'll figure it out. Holt. I don't really know the exact details of the detail they work out. Holt would later just say he conned me into working. So there you go. The new and improved Apple one is a much better product, and it starts selling. It starts selling like hotcakes, but personally conflicts between Wosniak and Jobs nearly derail everything. Right. The cause was this this question of what are we going how many expansion slots are we going to put in the machine? Right? Wosniak wants eight, And these are the slots that allow you eventually are going to allow you to hook up like a printer in addition to like cooking up a keyboard and a mouse, right, Jobs is like, you need a keyboard and you need a monitor. Those are the only slots you need. We don't want to give people more because that makes it too big, so it's not streamlined, and we don't want customers to have control over the product. Right. This is he is obsessed with simplicity and cutting down the degree of access consumers have to modifying their own products. That is a hallmark of Apple Stuff today. This exists at the beginning.
Of genuinely fascinate as Yes, going back to the original devices, he had this world 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 wa. If he's gotten this way in the first the Apple and the Apple Too, the company would have failed. It would not have worked as a product. The fact that the Apple Too in particular is so modifiable and expandable is why it has The Apple Too is the top selling Apple product for like thirteen years, right because people can modify it, you know. But Jobs would have been disastrously wrong if he'd gotten his way in the short term. In the long run, I think it's bad for all of us that he's right about this, But he is right that this is the smartest way to make a profit in the tech industry is cutting down consumer access and cutting down simplifying doing shit like cutting out the headphone jack. Again, I'm angry at him for doing that, but it works. You can't deny it. It is profitable right to run your your tech.
But price sucks.
It sucks, ass. I don't like that it is, but you can't.
Argue that we all use on a deal. Yes, I love me Dongles.
I'm very frustrated by it. It is interesting to me that he Dongles pilled. He sees what of eventually will be the most profitable way to do things. He just he has no understanding of the fact that that won't work now, which is strange. I didn't expect that when I started looking into this. Wosneiak's parents and family hated Jobs, and this gives us some important outside context on the man I've mentioned before. Jobs is basically a con man who's con worked out right, and that is how Wosneak's dad sees him. This guy, he sees what Jobs is doing. He sees my boy is brilliant and sweet and naive, right, and this man is making him, convincing him to work long hours, to neglect his wife, to endanger his paying career at HP for a pipe dream that's never going to pay off. He's taking investments based on work my boy hasn't even done yet, right, And he's right about this. And then kind of at the height of this, Commodore, one of the computing giants of the day, offers to buy Apple Computer out. Basically, we will buy your company, we will buy your product. You will get one hundred thousand dollars to split up, plus each of you will get a healthy salary like thirty six grand a year at Commodore, right, which is a lot of money at the time. This is a good deal, right, This would make them both they're going to be crazy rich, but this would make them both very comfortable. You know, on paper, it's a solid deal. Now, Steve is going to fight against taking this deal. And he's actually right about this because Commodore, the people running it are shady as hell. They are going to run their company into the ground not too long from now. They probably would have fucked him in Wosniak on the deal. It's smart that he doesn't take this, but it doesn't seem like the smart call. And Steve Jobs does the fucking around here, right, yes, And this pisses off Wozniak's family. He was like, he is going to this is the entire reason they have a product to sell is our boy, and he's trying to screw him out of a payday, right And I'm going to quote again from Infinite Loop. It all came to a head one evening in September, as the Apple narrative shifted momentarily from the Jobs's house to the Wosney Acts. Jerry Wosniak confronted Steve Jobs. He had told his son Mark that he was going to make the little son of a bitch cry and that'd be the end, and that was what he did. He told Jobs, as Mark overheard, you don't deserve shit. You haven't produced anything, you haven't done anything. Jobs burst into tears. He told Jerry Wosniak that the veteran engineer didn't appreciate all that he Steve Jobs had done for the company. Then the tearful young man turned to his partner and said, was if we're not fifty to fifty. You can have the whole thing. Whether Steve Jobs cried out of betrayal, surprise, or calculation is impossible to know. But even though he cried, as Jerry Wosniak had predicted, it was not the end. Through the tears, he had called the bluff of this rather unusual pairing of a middle aged man fighting in place of his grown up son. And when it was over, Steve Jobs was still in charge, and he still killed the Commodore deal. Cool. And it's interesting to me that he has figured out how to use crying as part of a strategy of Like, it's not just belittling and screaming at people. He knows that he can cry to make himself seem sympathetic, and his friend Wozniak, who legitimately loves him, will that will turn him around even though we've been fighting.
What a fucking scumbag.
Yeah, it really is. He is always going to be good at playing to Watsdak's sense of loyalty to this friendship, which is going to be tested mightily in the years to come. Steve is although he is right about killing this deal right, it works out much better for them both that he does, and so you do have to give him credit for that he does not he doesn't see this right now, maybe you can say he didn't know that at the time. This is still him being a con artist, but it does show his instincts are pretty good about this sort of thing, right. And so after he kills this deal, he sets up meetings with a guy named Don Valentine who works at Sequoia Capital. Don is a serious business man, right, and Jobs is a smelly hippie. And so here's how Brent Schlinder describes the way Jobs shows up to this meeting. His jeans had holes, his hair was unbrushed, he wore no shoes, and he smelled. They only get the meeting because Jobs he'll massage his own bare in meetings.
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 Markola winds up both investing a bunch of money. He puts like one hundred grand of his own money into Apple, and he also he basically signs with them for a line of credit with Bank of America for like a quarter of a million dollars. And in exchange for putting this money in and for being the guaranter of this line of credit, he gets a third of the company, which is, by the way, Mike does very well off this deal, right, makes a couple dollars a third of Apple, quite a lot of money. His one condition is that Wosniak has to quit HP, right, And this is the this is a smart thing. Yeah, what Mike's like, If I'm gonna put this much money in Wozniak, you got to shit or get off the pot. You know.
This is the saying 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 and kind of he's ignoring his wife.
Niley fucking a podcast. Jesus Christ.
Yeah, I know, right, he is. He is very uh and they're young too, which which makes it easier to work out stuff like this.
That's definitely it.
And you know who's forever young. The sponsors of our podcast, none of them age, and you too will stop aging if you buy whatever it is they're selling. The Fountain of Youth is here advertising on our show. And we're back, having conquered aging. Let's continue the story of Steve Jobs. Our cameras are off today.
But just no, I did not enjoy that ad pivot.
Well I'm proud of it.
So yeah, this 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 offices, Like he is not good at this job. Incredible, It's very funny.
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 Coupertino 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 Kottkey. And this is where we get to an interesting discrepancy between the account Isaacson writes based on Steve's recollections, and the account Steve's daughter, Lisa Wrights, based on her mother Chrisan's recollections. And this is, by the way, my sources for this. There's the book Becoming Steve Jobs. There's Isaacson Steve's Jobs. There's the book Infinite Loop. There's Inside the Magic Kingdom by I think Moritz is his name. Those are like my business history book sources for the Steve Jobs story. The best book I read preparing for this series, and I read this thing cover to cover in about a day is Lisa Jobs. Is Lisa I forget exactly what her last name is it's like a hyphenated one. I think it's Brennan Jobs. She's a really good writer. It's something about like, you know, Steve's sister is a famous Mota Simpson is a great novelist. Steve thinks he could have been a poet. Maybe he could have been because like his daughter's actually like, this is not just interesting because of the insights. It hasn't a jo It's like legitimately an extremely well written and emotionally affecting book. Like her story of this, her relationship with this guy 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 Cooper, Tino, together with a man named Daniel, who, along with my parents, also worked at Apple. Isaacson's recollection of this makes it sound more like Jobs brought in Chris Ann as an afterthought, right. Chris San's recollection is we all moved in together and we were all close. The way Isaacson describes it, you know, we're hosting all sorts of crazy people, is the way that, like I think Daniel describes it, And that's kind of the quote Isaacson uses that, like they move in together, but it's not really that meaningful to Jobs, I feel like chris San's probably closer to the truth. But the relationship is tumultuous, and chris Anne claims she eventually decides to end it, right, She's going to quit Apple, break up with Steve, move out to go do something else. We don't know if that's true, right. This is you get different accounts of from different people about relationships, and to it a certain point, you can't really know. It does seem like it's one of those things where neither of them is able to actually finally break things off. Right. Maybe there's a little bit of codependency or something going on here. I don't know, But chris Anne says she is planning to leave, and before she can her IUD gets expelled without her knowledge and she gets pregnant. Right. This is how Lisa Brennan Jobs describes what came next, which is her conception right. She told my father the next day that she was pregnant when they were standing in the middle of a room off the kitchen. There was no furniture, just a rug. When she told him, he looked furious, clinched his jaw, and then ran out the front door and slammed it behind him. He drove off. She thought he must have 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 Anne for having the temerity to get pregnant. And I think that's important.
How does the sperm get this levee?
Where did the sperm come from? In this situation. It's important to note he doesn't seem to be specifically pissed that she chooses to go through with the pregnancy, right, and in fact, he may have supported the idea of her going through with the pregnancy. And this is something you will not find. First off, I'm going to continue. This is a quote from one of Jobs's friends, Greg Calhoun. This is what he tells Isaacson at the time about why Jobs is so weird about this. Steve was not just dealing with Chrisanner or the pregnancy. He could be very engaged with you in one moment, but then very disengaged. There was a side to him that was frighteningly cold, right, And this is the attitude of his friends. He's just this guy who compartmentalizes, so he just shuts off in his head the possibility that this kid is his and 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 act. We're building to that, though. He begins to tell his coworkers and friends, who all knew Chris Anne, that the baby is not his. Decades later, he even told Isaacson, I was pretty sure I wasn't the only one she was sleeping with, which the number of times he will basically say, well, if you weren't such a whore, this wouldn't have happened. That is what 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 there when you were saying that. I was like, is he blatantly like, oh.
He's going to tell Time that, and like he's going to tell Time magazine that we're building to this. His friend Daniel Kottkey describes this, and I think Daniel actually does have the measure of jobs here. He describes this as a case of jobs using his reality distortion field on himself, and Elizabeth Holmes said he considered the option of parenthood and considered the option of not being a parent, and he decided to believe the latter. He had other plans for his life. I think part of that is accurate. But this misses an important detail, and it's a detail I've only run into and Lisa Brennan Jobs's book, Right, you don't get this from Isaacson. You don't get this from from Schlender, you don't get this from Moritz, right, And this is very important. Right. So Jobs may have been on board with the potential of having a certain kind of child. Right. And this story is very ably told in the book Small Fry by Lisa Brennan Jobs. When it comes to the question of how did Chris Anne decide to keep the baby? Here is what Jobs told Isaacson. First. This is what Jobs says to Isaacson late in life when he is the great Steve Jobs about this. I was all in favor of her getting an abortion, but she didn't know what to do. She thought about it repeatedly and decided not to or I don't know that she ever really decided. I think time just decided for her. That is what Job says. I wanted. I thought she should she should get an abortion. She just kind of waited until that wasn't an option anymore.
Except he didn't talk to us.
How would he except how would he know? Right? This is not what chris Anne says. Chris Anne tells Lisa that to make the decision about whether or not to keep this embryo, she consults with a Buddhist monk. Her parents knew. Come, come on right, this paragraph you will not catch in any of these more popular biographies of jobs, quote have the child. Cobun had advised, if you need help, I'll help you, but in the intervening years he had not offered any help. No one had promised as much as Kobun or had seemed to my mother at the time as trustworthy. At the time, my young father had also trusted Cobun, who told him that if I turned out to be a boy, I would be part of a spiritual patrimony, and in that case my father should claim me and support me when it turned out I was a girl. My mother later found out from others in the community. Cobun had told my father he had no obligation to care for my mother and me. Oh, that is a very different story than Jobs gets.
I think Steve Job says why he thought it was too kind?
Yeah, yeah, it was not a very good person.
That is. Yes, I realized the title of this show. But yeh 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 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 kind of decisions based in his spiritual beliefs, right, it is very consistent with that. So chris Anne has the baby. She has it on their friend Robert's farm up in Oregon, and Steve arrives a couple of days after the birth, at which point he 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 power gone age.
Yes, no, And it does seem everyone who is friends with Jobs who knows him, and Chris Anne immediately is like, well, yeah, this is obviously his kid, right, you just don't take one look at her. Yeah exactly. And credit to Schwarzenegger, He's made a lot of morally compromised decisions in his life. He immediately was like, yeah, I mean this is my kid.
That's mine.
This is my kid, and I'm never going to yeah exactly. The Apple Too had been released not long before Lisa's birth, again based on Wosneiak's original design, and it very quickly becomes the most successful piece of its day. It's going to spell sell more than six million units over the course of a decade and a half on the market in varying forms, and the rocket like success of The Apple Too prompts a run of investments in Apple, and the company goes public in nineteen eighty, and in that whole time period from the Apple twos release, which roughly coincides with Chrisanne's pregnancy, to the IPO, Steve pretends the daughter he'd named was not his. He repeatedly denies her and denies he as any responsibility to this kid, Chris Sanne. For the first three years or so, Lisa's alive is barely getting by. She baby sits at a daycare, She lives off welfare and odd waitressing jobs. At one point, she has to move into a group home for women who are considering adoption right because she just cannot support herself and Steve Jobs's kid otherwise.
As she watches the kid's father just get insanely.
Well, yeah, he about to. He hasn't gone public yet. This is criticism way this time's out. It is about to, and he's doing quite well. He's certainly doing well enough to help her not be in poverty.
Right to pay in any way.
Jobs is forced to take responsibility for Lisa in nineteen eight because the state of California finds out that the mother of Steve Jobs's child is on welfare and it's basically like, why is the state of California paying for this kid when you're Steve Jobs? And so the District Attorney of San Mateo County sues him for child support. Fuck yeah, California's attitude is like, yeah, we shouldn't be paying for this right, Jobs deny his paternity. He's like, well, I'm sterile, it couldn't be my kid, And so the State's like, well, then let's have you take a fucking DNA test. Why is he lying when science exists?
Why is he lying? It's why this is the Guru told him he wouldn't have any responsibility, and he's a huge asshole, and most people based on this history have never just gone prove it, Steve you.
Fuck you fucking asshole, asshole.
But he's also like dumb.
Well this is I'll say, not in defense of him, but this is basically the first moment at which he could be made to take a DNA test. They have just that's just become a thing. And in fact, the maximum that a DNA test can like say that a kid is likely your kid is like a ninety four percent something like that rate of confidence, Right, that's as high as it will go at the time, and that's how highly confident the test is that this is his kid, right, Like he's like, it's not mine. The States like take a DNA test, and the DNA test says like, this is definitely his fucking child. And as a fucked up aside, Lisa is so small when they do this that they have to like try several times to draw blood from her. They have to keep poking her because she's she's so tiny that it's hard for them to get a vein. So he puts her through this too, his child. The test does prove that she's his, and so the court requires him to pay them back for past welfare payments made to Chris Ann, and it authorizes child support payments of five hundred dollars a month, plus it requires him to provide medical insurance for the child. The case is finalized in December of nineteen, right before Apple's IPO, and it's kind of surprising to Chris Anne at first that, like, after literally months of delaying this case, suddenly his lawyers are like, yes, let's sign, let's lock this down right now. And the reason why they suddenly change is that four days after they sign the papers, Apple goes public and overnight Steve Jobs is worth nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. They needed to settle this before that happened, so he didn't have to pay more money to support his child. Hm. Cool guy, great, great dude. So before 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 it's huge news. Number one, they're selling computers faster than anyone ever has. They make personal computing like a massive industry, right. And number two, the Apple going public, Like three hundred people become millionaires overnight, This has never happened before. All of the way that all startups are obsessed with this IPO, with like everyone getting rich overnight. You know, all the reasons open Ai is making decisions it's making so it can get that eighty billion dollar whatever evaluation, and all of the early employees who have who have stock right now will get rich. All of like that whole part of Silicon Valley culture starts as a result of the mythic role of this Apple IPO is going to have in everybody's mind. Right, this is such a crucial moment for how the tech industry winds up being what it is today. Right, And so because this is such a huge story, Jobs is a celebrity after the IPO, and Michael Moritz, who is going to write the first book about Apple, writes an article about him for Time magazine and it's it's funny. Jobs hates Moritz because of how this works out, because he is convinced that he was promised he was going to be Times Man of the Year, and Time winds up making the Personal Computer Man of the Year and just writes a very fawning story about Jobs. Jobs is convinced it's because Daniel Kottkey, basically says, tells part of the story of the fact that he has this kid and is pretending it's not his right. He says that in his interview effectively, and Job is convinced that's why Time didn't make me, so he never won. He never forgives kott Key forgure this, and he blacklists Morris Moritz for.
All the time. I like that it's not because he did the thing. It's that he told someone. Yes, like it's yes, it's not that time was like, hey, that sounds morally reprehensible.
Yeah, it's that they knew at all. Yeah. And it's in this time interview because Moritz brings up you know, I've heard about this kid and that you're deny paternity. Jobs says to Moritz for this time article, that's going to be like everywhere in the United States, twenty eight percent of the male population in the United States could be the father. He does this like tortured math based on the DNA test to be like, well, the tests aren't very good and technically a quarter is what he's says. Hun, That's what he is trying to say, is like the test is so inaccurate, a bunch of people could be the father. It's not conclusive. What people interpret it is the way you interpret it and the way Chris Anne interprets it, which is that he's saying she's a slut, right, And that is how Lisa in her book relates her mom reading this article and it just destroys her for days, for weeks, she is like depressed like it is that it goes this article in Lisa's childhood is like a bomb, and like, how does how does your mom explain to you that your dad is staying saying stuff like that about you? You know, like that is beyond cruel, Like it's such an evil, evil way to treat not just the mother of your child, but a child. You know, it's it's pretty vile shit. So I'm going to quote again from Liz's book, and this is her describing not long after this, you know, right after the IPO and after the case gets finalized, her first meeting with her father. Just after the court case was finalized, my father came to visit me once at our house in Menlo Park, where we had rented a detached studio. It was the first time I'd seen him since I'd been a newborn in Oregon. You know who I am, he asked, He 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.
He's sorry here, I know, you fucking asshole. What a fucking asshole, piece of shit moon where to dump to your diary daughter for the first time. Fucking hell, the most precious gift you could ever have, and treating it this way just outrageous. So this is not the end of the Steve Jobs being an asshole. Around nineteen eighty 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 to told them the work we're doing, we are changing the world, this is crucial work. And then when they finished their task, He's like, why would I cut any of these guys in on stock? I don't like fuck them, you know they already did the thing I need from them. One of these people was Daniel Kottke, his former best friend and roommate. Kotkey had been like a couple of times, been like, hey, am I going to get any stock, and Jobs was like, it'll be fine, don't worry about it, and he was like, I trusted him, so I didn't push for anything. In reality, Jobs ensured was cut out entirely right. And when Isaacson interviewed some of Jobs's friends who worked at Apple about this, one of them said that Jobs is quote anti loyal. He has to abandon the people that he's close to, and.
The fuck does that mean?
What the fuck?
Just Eve 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 Cockkey 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 Job says, okay, I'll give him zero. Now. The savior of the day here is Steve Wozniak before the IPO, even before Kotkey gets cut out, Wozniak realizes that a lot of like these, a lot of these contractors are getting fucked and he has a bunch of these like founder's stock options, and so he he takes two thousands of these options and he gives sells them for basically pennies to forty mid level employees who he thought had gotten screwed, and most of them wind up with enough money to buy a house. Right. They don't get rich, but they they get something as a result of this because of Wosniac. And when Wosniak finds out that cot Key has been fucked out, he straight up gives Kotkey a bunch of his options. He does this to several people that job screws out, right like Wosnik. There's like jokes at Apple that Wosniak's going to go broke himself because he gives so many of his options to people that jobs cut out of the of the IPO, which says a lot about Wosniak and his attitudes as much as the Angels above the Angels the Steve Wosniac story, right, yeah, and it says a lot obviously about Jobs too. But yeah, that's uh, that's part two. How you feel it ed.
I feel bad. I feel bad about Steve Jobs because I already knew he was a deadbeat dad. I knew he was a horror show of a person, an abusive manager who used to He famously screamed at the mobile Me team, and there were people the first version of iCloud effectively screamed at them, would fire people in elevators, and I didn't think he would be so I knew it'd be bad. I didn't know he was this. By comparison, most of these Silicon Valley people who are aspiring to be Steve Jobs are actually nailing the personality.
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. Yea, even if that was quite rare, making him so much worse like Mark Andresen by comparison. Actually, no, we don't know his past either, Like we'll probably get a that proves him just as bad. But all of these people right now, they're really like micro jobs, is they don't They lacked his sociopathy.
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, andreson cry. Yeah, that's all cool. Good, good shit. Well ed, do you have a have anything you gotta plug here?
Well, I have a podcast on cool Zone Media called Better Offline. It's a weekly tech show about some of the Silicon Valley people that you might have heard us discuss today and tech in general. And you can find it on iHeartRadio on every other place where you can find your podcasts.
Hell yeah, well you can find us at this show. We have a subreddit. If you google behind the Bastards reddit you can find that there too. You can buy a subscription if you don't want to have ads. At cooler Zone Media, all of these things are possible.
So you just get things about Robert talking about the eternal font of life.
Yeah, that's exactly it right and how can you too can become immortal? So check all that out and most importantly, go to Hell. I Love you.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast
