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- [00:03]
A
Hello and welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of web objects. I'm your friend David Pearce and today on the show we're talking about Steve Jobs and specifically a new book about the time between when Steve Jobs was essentially run out of Apple and the time he triumphantly rejoined and took off in one of the great runs in tech history. That middle period doesn't get talked a lot about, and it's pretty fascinating. But first, here's a look at everything else happening on the verge today. It's 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, June 9, 2026. It's the day after Apple's WWDC keynote, so of course we are deep in all of the OS 27 developer betas, but so far so good on these. The liquid glass changes seem to be good insane design choices. I love a good opacity slider and the fact that app Corners now work on a Mac huge win. A few people are starting to get access to the new Siri AI and seem to be saying mostly good things about it, even just as a convers tool. But we're still waiting for developers to integrate with Siri and the new Shortcuts and all of the other Apple intelligence stuff before this rolls out this fall. Meanwhile, Verge contributor Lawrence Ulrich got a ride in the Rivian R2 and seemed to have a pretty good time. The R2, of course, is the cheaper, smaller EV from Rivian, and it seems to be just as peppy and fun to drive as you would want it to be. It's just not quite as powerful and sort of road owning as the R1, but but I think for a lot of people that'll be a good thing. We got two great game announcements from this morning's Nintendo Direct. The first is the Legend of the Ocarina of Time is getting a remake for the Nintendo Switch 2. As a Switch 2 owner and an Ocarina of Time fan, this is huge news for me personally. Also, Kingdom Hearts 4, the first Kingdom Hearts game since 2019 is coming. We didn't get a release date, but we got a name. We got confirmation that it's real huge day for Disney Goths everyone. And finally, speaking of things, with no release dates, NASA announced the next phase of its plans for the Artemis 3 mission. Including the four crew members. All dudes. The plan for Artemis 3 is to stay in low earth orbit, science the you know what out of things and run some tests to see if we're able to land on the moon. You can read more about all of this@theverge.com that's it. That's 90 seconds on the verge for June 9th.
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- [03:26]
A
all right, now let's get to today's main story. So Jeff Kane recently wrote a book called Steve Jobs in Exile. And basically this book details the time in Steve Jobs life between about 1985 when he gets run out of Apple after the Macintosh, after a bunch of corporate shenanigans, after he essentially makes it impossible for Apple to continue to employ him all the way up until about 1997 when Steve Jobs triumphantly rejoins Apple, takes it over again and goes on just an absolute heater of a technology run in the middle. Jobs does a bunch of things. He co founds a company called Next, which he intends to use to build the next great computer. He has all these ideas even bigger than the ones he was putting into things like the Macintosh. And he thinks he can build the best computer and the best software and the best tech company of all time. He also spends $5 million to buy this company from George Lucas, renames it Pixar, and eventually, you know, runs Pixar. It's Pixar. It's a pretty cool version of the story. So Jeff's case for this period of time is that it winds up being really transformative for Jobs that the Jobs who left Apple in 1985 is very different from the Jobs who rejoins Apple 10 plus years later. And in fact, it's because of all of the things that happened at Next, which was frankly mostly a series of disasters and lawsuits and bad deals and bad choices about technology. And at Pixar, which became this incredible success story largely with him on the sidelines that changed who Jobs was and brought him into the future as the Steve Jobs we eventually came to know. I invited Jeff to come on and tell us a bit of that story, tell us what he learned. Let's get into it. So I want to. I want to start with a quote that I wrote down from the book, which I have. It comes from very early on in the story. Jobs has been forced out of Apple. He is off creating Next, and he's. He's sort of in this transition in his career. And there is a. I believe it's an Apple board member who calls him an immature agent of chaos. I love this phrase. And I actually, I. I'm curious just to start how useful and. And correct a description you think that is of Steve Jobs at the time. An immature agent of chaos. It's not a kind thing to call a person, David.
- [05:49]
C
Yeah, that's actually the accurate thing to say about Steve Jobs in his younger years. I mean, one of the. One of the things I found writing this book is that, you know, we have this memory of Steve Jobs as being this brilliant genius who showed up at Apple and, you know, he co founded it in the garage with Steve Wozniak. He went on, he created the Macintosh. We tend to remember him as this. This, you know, the great man who, who came and who. Who saved everybody and brought great technology to the world. But when you actually go back and dig into the history, talk to the people, you know, look at the old archives, the memos that people were sending back and forth, that's not true at all. I mean, Steve Jobs was always smart. He was always a visionary, but he was extremely difficult to manage at apple in the 1980s. I mean, he would go in there, he would, you know, you have to remember, he was the head of the Macintosh division. So he was only tasked with building the Macintosh. He was not the CEO of Apple. Something that. That's often kind of overlooked. And he would go in there and he would, you know, throw tantrums and yell at people. He would overstep his authority. At one point, you know, he told an executive, I am the board. He would, you know, I mean, they were working on all kinds of projects at Apple. There were other computers, too. And, you know, he would go in there and he would just tell people to do, you know, do things differently. So Steve was impossible to work with in those early years. He was so convinced of his brilliance that he wanted people to admire him and respect him. But this ultimately became his downfall. And this is where he had to learn the hardest lessons of his life.
- [07:17]
A
I think the reason that phrase stuck out to me is, I think the part of this book that most kind of rewired my own brain is the part that took Steve Jobs, who, like you said, we think of as this sort of tyrannical genius, right? Like Steve Jobs was. Was famously an asshole. No one would say otherwise. I think he was fine with saying that, but it was his. This belief was that it was in service of being this, like, great man of history. But reading the book, there's this incredibly long phase of Steve Jobs career where he is just like, pathologically unsavvy. He cannot. He doesn't know how to do a good job in a meeting. He doesn't know when to be nice to people because it's useful. He can't get out of his own. Over and over and over, this man makes his own life harder and gets away from all the things he's trying to do because he is just bad at interpersonal skills. I mean, it's. It's. Was this as surprising to you in the research as it was to me in the reading that this man was so write about so many technological things and so fundamentally unsavvy a business person and frankly, a person for so long in his career?
- [08:28]
C
Well, it was surprising in the research because, yes, you're right. You know, I. I knew he was an asshole. Everybody knew that Steve Jobs was an asshole, especially in his younger years. But, you know, there was always this assumption that he was doing it in the service of these greater ideas, that we could forgive him because he was going to change the world. He was going to alter history with his new devices. But when I went in there and I saw the level of dysfunction at Apple and those in those early years, it just blew my mind because I always assumed that, you know, Steve was building something great. You know, the Macintosh. We tend to remember it as this massive success, but even the Macintosh was not a major commercial success. I mean, it did not sell that many units. It had first adopters. But you got to remember this was an old PC released in 1984. It could draw and it could type, and that was about it. And it cost about $8,000 in today's dollars. So, you know, not also started doing
- [09:21]
A
well after they got rid of Steve and then made all the changes he had refused to make. Like he was the problem with the Macintosh in so many ways, which I think is just a perfect example of so many things here.
- [09:30]
C
Steve left in 1985, went off to Apple. You know, the CEO John Scully, John Scully was right in many ways. He knew how to build an adult company. He wasn't building a startup anymore, but Steve wanted to keep that startup ethos. And the board had to decide, is it going to be John Scully, who's a mature adult, or is it going to be Steve Jobs, the agent of chaos, who's just going to destroy this company?
- [09:51]
A
Yeah, going back to that era, and obviously this is. This is an impossible counterfactual to figure out, but I found myself wondering, could Jobs and Scully have worked this out right? I think so much of your story is the journey that Jobs goes on afterwards. And I think part of it is a phase of life. Part of it is who he becomes as a person. Part of it is all the stuff he goes through as a businessman. But you just wonder if somebody had just grabbed Steve Jobs by the lapels and been like, buddy, you are blowing this. What is wrong with you? Be nice for 10 minutes and this can all be okay. If. If maybe there's a version where he doesn't have to go through this incredible walk in the wilderness to then become the person he became.
- [10:32]
C
You know, I've wondered that. It is a counterfactual, and it's hard to speculate, but I. I've wondered about that, and I don't think that it would have played out that way because Steve had this thing called the reality distortion field. This is what he was famous for. He could convince anybody of anything. But he. The downside of this is that he could convince himself of anything. So he was living in his own world. His colleagues called it the World According to Steve. And that's one of the reasons he thought he could run around Apple and boss people around and bully them and, you know, fulfill his vision that way. So this is, you know, this is Steve the tyrant, the tyrannical side of him. He. He would not have been able to, to run Apple to make Apple a success unless he had gone off in this wilderness. It was absolutely necessary for him because he needed taming. He needed to learn what the world needed from him as opposed to what he had to show the world. And he had a series of lessons during this time in his life when he really actually was, to my surprise, he was humbled. We don't think of Steve Jobs as a guy who's humbled. But the rock bottom got bad enough. I mean, it was really bad in these years that he had no choice but to firm up and get his act together or he was going to be written out of history. And for Steve Jobs, that is a nightmare. He always wanted to make his mark on history.
- [11:46]
A
Yeah, I don't think I realized that actually, that Jobs had such ambitions to be a great man of history. You, you talk about him wanting to run for politics and the company he wanted to keep. I think again we sort of bookend the Steve Jobs story with technical innovator who is barefoot and not sort of guy in a suit, glad handing politicians. But he, he, he wanted all those things, right? Like all that was in there somewhere.
- [12:11]
C
One of the reasons why he created the Macintosh was exactly that. He was trying to stick it to IBM, the competitor. He wanted to build a computer that he would, he would call it a computer for the rest of us. And the idea was that by democratizing technology, by making it smaller and simpler and he could shape history in a direction. I think that if he had set his mind to any of these other activities he wanted to do, if he, if he wanted to run for politics, if he wanted to, you know, do whatever, become an artist even, he would have succeeded at all of them. He had a lot of choices open, but he just, he self sabotage like crazy.
- [12:47]
A
Yeah, I'm curious about the tension in the leader bit of it because I think one thing that comes up over and over throughout the whole story is that Steve Jobs is very good at hiring. He has, he has this pretty strong sense of who is great and seems to be very convincing when he puts his mind to wanting to go get somebody. It leads him astray a couple of times in the book, but not very often. But then putting that next to. He seems like just a truly terrible person to work for. And a lot of these people found him to be a terrible person to work for. How do you sort out the two sides of that coin here? That there is something in him that even inspired this kind of fierce loyalty and devotion. And people believed in him and loved him and also just hated his guts every single day at work. How did those things coexist in your head?
- [13:36]
C
Well, that's the contradiction of Steve Jobs. And that's everybody I interviewed for this book brought that up. He had this thing called the Hero Shithead roller coaster where he would lift you up one day and praise you as the greatest person in the world. And then he would tear you down the next day and say your ideas are terrible and you're stupid. And it was a contradiction that everybody who worked with him had to grapple with. It was like B.C. jobs, contradiction in a nutshell. And so how do I think this played out? How do I think this sort of affected things earlier in his life. He didn't know how to harness and channel this talent he had for finding good people. He had an eye for great design, for great technology, but also for hiring the right executives and the right employees who could come in and could really do brilliant things. He instilled loyalty in them. And one of the things he did is he would play them off against each other. So he, he really valued intellectual combat and he wanted people to go into a room with him and fight for the. For their ideas and push back and make it the best they could be. It's like the diamond, you know, the diamond in the rough that's put together by pressure, that becomes this beautiful diamond in the end. That was his vision for his technology. But that does not work if you know you as Steve Jobs simply can't trust anybody to make a decision. And this is where he went awry during these early years. He was building a monument to his genius. He was thinking, how can Steve Jobs make something that will make people respect Steve Jobs? He was vengeful. He wanted to get back at Apple for pushing him out. This was about his ego, and it was about showing the world what he was made of.
- [15:13]
A
Yeah, the. The next story, I think, is relatively, in short order, kind of the entire Steve Jobs story, right? Because he comes in, he has this amazing idea for what computer he wants to make. He has, as far as I can tell, like a brand new idea about it, like every 45 minutes to. To the absolute insanity of everyone that he works with. He demands all kinds of new technology. He seems to, at one point, completely lose the plot on what this thing is going to be. This is, this is one of the things that I felt like, I kept noticing kind of over and over throughout this book is at the very beginning, they do this very sort of good and structured look at what their market is, right? They decide, we want to build a computer for education, sort of as broadly defined. But like people who are using these for academic purposes, we want to, we want to build that. And they go to people and they say, okay, here's what we need. Here's what it needs to cost. Here are the features that we need to have. And then Steve Jobs just systematically loses every single one of those in service of, like, making the thing cooler looking. And I just had this moment of sort of looking back at everything that Apple eventually accomplishes. You can look at it as this guy running this playbook is able to be massively successful when he has all of the Money and all of the resources and all of the cachet in the universe, then you look like a genius because you're the one who pushed everybody to do it because you could afford to. But when you actually have nothing and you have to build something from nothing, that thing he was trying to do became the problem. Like, he, of course he made a computer nobody wanted. They told him what they wanted, and he built them something completely different for twice the price. And it's just like I just kept finding myself wondering, like, how is no one else at this company raising their hand being like, steve, what are we doing? But then it seems like actually people do that all the time.
- [17:00]
C
Yeah, yeah. And I think you just hit the nail on the head. It was, this was Steve's lowest moment in his, in his entire career. And the problem that he ran into was getting carried away with his vision. One of the big lessons he learned during this time was that vision is not enough. The idea is not enough. It's the execution that's really everything. And you can go around with a great idea and you could add on all this fancy technology. In this particular case, Steve started out with a very straightforward advanced computer for university research labs, intelligence agencies, the most advanced of its time. And he got carried away. He decided, you know, going back to what he said about being the great man of history, altering the future. He wanted to build not just a computer for education, but a computer that was going to change the world, that was literally just going to upend technology as we know it. But the problem was that it was unrealistic because the window to, to start a new computer hardware company was closing very quickly. There were two platforms. There was the Apple and there was the IBM, which was adopting Windows. And that's like what we use today. Now, Steve thought that he could go in and he could create the third platform that was going to just upend, make this new world changing earthquake in technology. And that's not what happened. He added this optical drive that was the most advanced for its time. It didn't work. He added all kinds of gizmos and gadgets trying to make this thing beautiful. He chose paint. The paint was super high end. And so the paint itself actually caused the price to go up. Like one paint job was $50 for a cube. And like that's what they planned for making the entire computer itself, like about a $50 cost. There was so much where he went wrong. And it's just a great example of getting carried away with your vision, but not thinking about what the customer needs from you.
- [18:50]
B
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- [23:42]
A
This moment at the beginning of Next, when Jobs becomes obsessed with things like the font for the phone number on the sign and the thickness of the paper for the business card. And I, I think there is a version of the Steve Jobs legacy that says, oh gosh, he, that's what incredible attention to detail. You know, he's the, he's the paint both sides of the fence guy. Like, this is, this is what made Steve Jobs Steve Jobs. And then there's a real part of it that's like this guy had bigger fish to fry and probably should not have spent any of his time worrying about the thickness of the business cards. That actually what this man had was like a complete inability to understand what mattered and what he needed to actually be working on. And to me, it's just like how, however you want to look at that story, I think, is how you look at Steve Jobs, right? Where either, either that is a sign of his genius or a sign of his complete inability to actually solve the problems in front of him at this time.
- [24:37]
C
Right. Well, it's double edged. It's that two sided coin. I think that's what you just said. It was the perfectionist Steve, who knew how to make every business card with the perfect paper and the right color. And he would throw tantrums if like the yellow was not the exact shade of yellow he wanted. It showed his high standards. But the flip side of that is that Steve Jobs could not focus and could not set priorities. Another major lesson he had to learn. It's just, you know, this is what really blew me away. We always think of Steve Jobs as a guy who was intensively focused. It's like one of the Steve Jobs cliches. You learn focus by studying Apple and their products. But that this is the opposite. During this time at Next Computer, he got so carried away with different aspects of his vision that he just wanted everything to be perfect. So like one example, the night before the product launch, he was arguing with his staff about the color green, the shade of green that was going to be behind him when he revealed this new Next computer. Meanwhile, the operating system was breaking down, it was crashing. Somebody had made last minute changes to the software that was just causing bugs. The, the audio system, which was going to be top of the line, you know, like top in the world at the time, did. It didn't even work. I mean, they had to salvage it really quickly. And there's Steve Jobs like, okay, so what color green are we using? Intense focus. Yes. A very careful focus on design and color and art. That's classic Steve. But you can't do that at the expense of the technology itself. And he had to learn that, look, you know, your typical customer doesn't care about the shade of green. What your customer cares about is, do they have a working machine? Can they like push a button and it turns on and it's simple and easy to use. And this is where you fail. This is like the opposite of the iPhone. This is like the computer that didn't work and people would turn it on and complain like crazy because he made all these wild promises. And meanwhile the machine like breaks down all the time. So and they pay, you know, more than $10,000 for it, which is a lot in 1988. So, you know, this is, this is the seed that we never see.
- [26:41]
A
Yeah, yeah. He seems to have, over time, sort of flipped the hierarchy of needs in his mind. Right. Because it's like, it's well and good to worry about the green once you've solved all of the problems underneath it. Right? Like, once the computer works, you get to worry about what color it is. You don't get to worry about what color it is until the computer works. And it seems like he had that exactly backwards for a big, long chunk of his career.
- [27:05]
C
Right.
- [27:06]
A
The next to all of this. Next to next, you also have the Pixar story, which kind of comes and goes throughout the job story as you tell it. And in part, it seems like it comes and goes because Pixar is like a remarkably stable success story for Steve Jobs as a manager. Can you explain how that happened? It seems like that set itself up to succeed and really did.
- [27:31]
C
It did. Pixar is one of Steve's greatest successes. That's one that we forget about. Steve was not that wealthy before Pixar, and he was actually about two to three years away from running out of money. That's what his closest friends told me during this time. Pixar was the success that put Steve Jobs on the map after all these failures. And part of the reason for the success is ironically, that Steve stepped away from that. You know, Steve Jobs was not there in the creative meetings and he was not directing every color and shade and pixel and not trying to, you know, not trying to write Toy Story or trying to change the storyline or whatever it was the rule. So what happened is that Steve acquired Pixar from George Lucas. It was a part of Lucasfilm in the 1980s. And the two co founders of Pixar who were going to work with Steve, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, they set a rule with him. They said, steve, as a condition of you taking over this company, you cannot come into our creative meetings. You are going to stay on the business side. You are the executive. In Toy Story, he was credited as the executive producer. And that's where Steve did really well. He was the wheeler and dealer. He could walk into a negotiation and he could, you know, put on a theatrical show and convince people of things. And he could. He could get the other party to sign the deal which favored Pixar. That's where he shined. But it was not in the actual creative work, which is so unlike Steve Jobs, because we always assume, like, Steve is a creative genius. Right? But this is a great example of, you know, not controlling things too much. Steve learned that there was an inversion to the hierarchy of Pixar. He actually talked about this in an interview that just recently resurfaced, that there's, you know, there's a reverse pyramid and the CEO of a place like Pixar, highly talented place, is at the bottom of the pyramid and their job is to keep talent on board. That's what he learned there. And that's why Pixar succeeded in the end.
- [29:28]
A
You kind of make the argument that Next was. Was right about a lot of things and mostly sort of a timing mistake that, that this was Jobs being too early to a bunch of things. I'm not totally sure I agree. And I think, I think there's. There's a. Again, a counterfactual I kept thinking about is like, if Next was not run by Steve Jobs at a time when Apple desperately needed some kind of leader, right? This is. The company is flailing. It's falling apart in a bunch of ways. It needs somebody to come in with some cachet and change the company. And who better than the founder Steve Jobs, that. I sort of wonder if there's anything in it for Apple other than to basically hire Steve Jobs back who comes in, you know, sort of stages a mini coup and off and running and changes the course of technology forever. But next to me is like, over and over, this company just cannot figure out what it's doing and sort of stone every good idea it has. It seems to find kind of by accident, like they, they build a thing to make it easier for them to build software, which turns out to actually be a thing that other people want to use to build their own software. And it takes this company forever to be like, oh, other people want to build software, let's give them the software to build software. And it's just like, Jobs just can't let go of this thing where I have to build beautiful cubes that belong in design museums for so long that it's almost like he was just relentlessly trying to kill Next. And only by virtue of the fact that he was Steve Jobs did he get this sort of beautiful exit out back into Apple. I don't know. Part of me wonders if you, if you just give some other CEO like make. Make Jean Louis Gasset the CEO of Next and make Steve Jobs the CEO of some other company. Next just falls apart and we never hear about it again, right?
- [31:23]
C
Well, Steve didn't want to return to Apple originally. He had entertained it. His friend Larry Ellison was trying to do a hostile takeover. And we now know from the record that's come out since then that Steve did not want to return to Apple. Every everybody posted him says that he talked about it in private. His wife Lorraine was also opposed to him returning to Apple. It was a pressure cooker. It was failing. It was just not going to be good. He wanted to stay at Pixar. So I think that you raise an interesting point about all the counterfactuals that could happen here. Even John Louis Gasse remarked later on that Steve Jobs was the right choice to return to Apple. So I don't think Gasse knew that, didn't know what was going to happen at the time, obviously. But I think looking back on it, Gasse realized, oh, look, well, you know, maybe I wasn't the right choice after all. Maybe I would not have saved Apple. You know, one of the interesting things about writing this book is that I found that there were so many touch points, so many forks in the road where I could see that, you know, if anybody involved in this story had made any decision that were just slightly different, the entire world of Apple technology today would look vastly different. I, I mean, it's, it's like, you know, it's like if you shoot an arrow, they say that, you know, you shoot it at like 0.5 degrees differently, but when it lands at that angle far away, if it can fly off in any direction. And I saw that repeatedly in this book. I mean, I could give all kinds of examples, but give me one.
- [32:48]
A
What's one that sticks out off the top of your head?
- [32:51]
C
Well, the most obvious one is the deal with IBM. That next computer was lining up. So Steve's second in command during this time, Daniel Lewin, who went on to a fabulous career, he lined up a deal with IBM for Steve Jobs. And he said, what we're going to do is we're going to port Next Step, our operating system to IBM machines. And remember that IBM was the giant of the time. And so it was going to be all over America, all over the world, just ported onto these machines. And people would use this beautiful software kind of in a way comparable to Windows today, loaded on every PC. This was a pivotal moment. This would have just done wonders. I mean, we would. If this deal had gone through, we might all be using NextStep, the operating system today. I mean, literally, like, Steve would not have returned to Apple. Apple would have probably gone out of business or maybe been acquired. Apple would not be a player anymore. And there would be all these computers. And it might be like, you know, you choose a Windows computer or you choose a Next Step computer Computer. That's not an exaggeration. And that's what I mean. I spoke to a lot of people who were involved in these talks, and they said, like, yeah, that was where it was headed. And it was such a frustration to them because they saw Steve destroy it. I mean, Steve, who is, you know, Mr. Rebellious Self, identifies as a hippie and doesn't like big corporations. He decided that, oh, by the way, I don't like IBM. After they had, like, lined up this deal. And so he just ditched a major meeting. He was at the airport, he went home, he went into the office and like, he didn't show up to this major meeting. And the IBM people said, okay, so what the heck is this? We've signed a, like, tens of millions of dollars a deal to make NextStep, like the operating system for so many IBM machines. And Steve just doesn't show up because he doesn't like it. So it imploded. It never went through. And that was one of the major missed opportunities that Steve learned from. And Steve reflected on this later. He said that he was overplaying his hand. He learned that you can't overplay your hand like that when you go up against a big corporation. You have to be ready to negotiate. And he, he, he regretted that. I mean, later on he looked back on that and he said, that was a big mistake.
- [35:03]
A
I saw that same moment as kind of the, like, that's where the thing turns for him, where he looks at it and goes, oh, we're failing. And it's actually directly my fault.
- [35:11]
C
Like, I.
- [35:12]
A
No one else but me blew that. And there is a. There's a real sort of looking in the mirror thing that happens kind of from then on through the rest of the story. But I'm. I'm curious. There's one other bit of the. The transition that you talk about with Steve Jobs a lot, where he becomes a much more sort of professional businessman. Right? When he comes back to Apple, they make a big deal with Microsoft that I think kind of mirrors the deal that he had tried to kill with IBM. Like previous, Steve would have just tried to take a knife to Bill Gates and not take this deal that actually becomes essential to keeping Apple alive. He's much smarter about the products. He's a much savvier operator internally to get what he wants. And I just kept finding myself wondering that, like, say what you will about Steve Jobs, at the beginning of his career, he was nothing if not true to his principles and beliefs, again, to a fault, over and over and over. Again, but the one thing it seems you could not accused Steve Jobs of was not trying hard enough or believing enough in the things that they were doing. And all throughout the whole story, Steve Jobs is an incredibly good salesman who is able to say the right thing to the right people most of the time, whether he believes it or not. Right? There were real reading. This book's sort of mirrors for me of all the stuff that we've been talking about with Sam Altman recently, where this is a person who is incredibly good in the room at telling you what you want to hear. Whether he believes it or not, it's actually not important whether he believes it, as long as he can make you believe it. And he's very good at it. And what I wonder is, for, for all of the success in the second run of Steve Jobs at Apple and kind of the second half of his career there, was he still the same man of, like, uncompromising principle and belief and values, or did he just get good at selling that? On top of he became a much savvier businessman.
- [37:06]
C
He was still the same person. So don't get me wrong, it's not like he walked. He did go through a transformation during these wilderness years, but the transformation was not him coming out with a new vision and a new personality. It was him learning the practical steps about what it takes to realize his vision. What he realized is that, you know, you can't go. You can. You cannot go into a room and yell at people and, you know, alienate them and alienate your partners and expect that the world is still going to beat down a door to you. He learned the pragmatic side of this. So just to give one example, the vision of the unified software and hardware ecosystem, that was always his dream. That goes back to the Original Macintosh of 1984. He did not want, you know, software being ported to other machines. And he only made that decision out of the need for survival when Next Computer had hit rock bottom. But it was through this period that he realized just how winding the road is to achieve that vision. It's not as simple as you have a great idea, you're a brilliant visionary, you show up, you're a bit of a jerk, and people fall in line. It took 30 to 40 years for Steve Jobs to build the software and the hardware that allowed him to eventually get to the iPhone. It would have been about 20 to 30 years. That's how long that road is. And so what he learned during these years is that, you know, there's lots of infrastructure, there's lots of enterprise software that you have to build different layers of the software, a lot of which is still in use today. If you look at Apple code, there's a little marker in there that says ns, which means next step. That was his operating system. So a lot of the stuff that we now use in Apple goes directly back to this time. And it was only through building excellent software, then returning to Apple, which already had the hardware. You know, a combination of the tech catching up of the tech becoming cheaper for regular consumers. When everything came together, he was able to build this walled garden, but it was not something that happened easily at all.
- [39:08]
A
I was thinking a lot about this quote he gave. I don't remember the exact specifics, but he's. He's in a classroom and somebody asked him a question and he thinks about it a long time of basically like, you know, what have you learned in your career? And he sort of thinks. And then he goes, I've learned to take a longer view of people. And he talks about basically the way he manages and that rather than try to do everything himself, he's learned to bet on people and give them the tools that they need and let them fail and let them learn. And that actually that's his job as the leader. A, do you think that is sort of the journey that he went on, learning how to do that? And then B, also, is it possible that what he learned over the course of 12 years out of Apple was how to take a longer view of himself?
- [39:54]
C
I think it's exactly that. I think that he learned to take a longer view of both himself and the projects that he was working on. When he went into Next Computer, he was planning on a computer that was going to come out in about two to three years and was going to change the world by then. And then he predicted by the 1990s he would be riding this new wave of technology and he would be at the head of it. But he came to realize just how long the long view actually is. He even talked about this. He would give presentations and say, I've realized that it takes about one year to hire somebody talented if you want to pull them away from their current job. You know, it takes so much time. I mean, next step. The operating system went through so many different iterations before it was actually ready for the public, for software developers. And so I think that he took a longer view, both of his products, but also himself. And I think that the longer view of himself, you can see it in the things he also said during this time, you know, he actually toned down his rhetoric at one point and he said that he realized that technology does not change the world, but it can certainly solve some specific problems. And you know, he would talk about the web, for example, and he said, well, the web will solve one specific problem and it's selling things, you know, and that's what led to Amazon. It's a great place to sell products. You can update websites instantly with new prices and new products. It's much more efficient than the old way of selling, of sending out catalogs of people. And I think those kinds of statements, they signify that long view. And you know, it signifies just, you know, what it takes to arrive at the long view, how it's, it's not like there's the big bang of the new device that comes out. It's all these little problems that are being solved. And yes, that was reflected in his personal life to his marriage to Lorraine. He had kids with her. He also reconciled somewhat with his, with his first daughter who was estranged for a while. And you know, having family around, this is the more personal side of Steve Jobs did tame him and did show him just how, you know, how winding this road is and how, you know, having a group of people around you who support you is so important.
- [42:04]
A
Your story kind of ends with Jobs retaking the throne at Apple, which, which is complicated and weirder than I realized because like you said, he was conflicted about coming back and didn't want to be CEO, but also sort of staged a mutiny from inside and put all of his people in charge. But I'm curious, as you look at the beginning of that story, right where he, he comes back and goes on this just absolute unbelievable run of 10 plus years of technology that I think is what really cements his legacy. Um, you, you describe all these changes he's gone through. He becomes a very different person, a very different kind of leader. Is there an early moment in that second run at Apple that you, you either found or were talking to people about that? It was like, okay, this is, this is the new Steve. This is where he put all the pieces together. And this is the man sort of at the new peak of New Powers.
- [42:57]
C
The new peak of New Powers. I love that phrase. Cause that, that's what it is. And there were several moments, but one that really stuck out to me that people pointed out was the mentorship of Andy Grove, the Intel co founder. Andy had always been close to Steve, had advised him, and he was not particularly, you know, he went, he wasn't known for his empathetic style. I mean, this was a guy who would just be very terse and tell you, you know, similar to Steve, just tell you you're an idiot, and this is stupid. So it's not surprising that we all
- [43:25]
A
need a mentor like that in our lives.
- [43:26]
C
Yeah, we need somebody to set us straight, get us out of our reality distortion field. And, you know, Steve would ignore Andy's advice. You know, Andy was one of the greats of Silicon Valley. And one of the reasons Steve failed at next is just because he wouldn't do what Andy told him to do. And so. So there was finally a moment where, you know, Steve was sure that he didn't want to return to Apple because he did not want to be the person overseeing somebody else's disaster. You got to remember that Apple was about a quarter, maybe two, away from bankruptcy. And here's Steve Jobs coming back, and people wanted him to become CEO, but he did not want the job. And it was Andy who was on a phone call with him, and Andy said something funny. He said, steve, I don't give a shit about Apple. And that caused a little light bulb to go off in Steve's head. He recounted it and he said, wait a second. So I just realized, I do give a shit about Apple. You know, that's my baby. And so he decided that he was going to become the interim CEO. So this is the first, you know, we have the iPhone, the ipod. He was the ice. And this is the first time that he used that I prefix on something. It was about him. He didn't want to become the full CEO yet because he wanted to have this test option on the job, see what he could do. But once Steve was back in, his pull was magnetic and it was clear, you know, a mixture of his vision that he always had, but also the lessons he had learned during this period, this wilderness where he was really suffering. He had learned to temper his instincts and to redirect them in the right direction so he was no longer destructive. It was very constructive, and he had the right team. It was a very long period of executive stability. One of the things that we forget, he got the right board. He had people who would push back on him. These were not psychophants who would just do whatever he says because they were scared of him. He really did a great job of putting together a team that is still studied today in business schools and that went on to create the greatest business comeback in recent history.
- [45:23]
A
Yeah, the longevity of that team is pretty astounding. Like the set of people who showed up around that time, for all intents and purposes, still run Apple. It's pretty incredible.
- [45:34]
C
It really is incredible what Steve pulled off and whether we call him a jerk or a genius or whatever it is that we might think of him, he really learned during these years and he really brought a lot of great tech and a lot of great people. People who have shaped Silicon Valley in ways that are still here.
- [45:52]
A
Yeah, indeed. All right, Jeff, congrats on the book. Thank you again for coming on. This was really fun.
- [45:56]
C
Great to be here, David.
- [45:57]
A
All right, that's it for the Vergecast. Thank you to Jeff for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. We love hearing from you. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, ideas about who Steve Jobs really was at this time, I would love to hear from you. 866verge11 is the Vergecast hotline. Vergecastheverge.com is the email address. Keep all of your thoughts and questions always come in all the time. We love hearing them. Also, if you want to get all of our podcasts, including this one, ad free, the best thing you can do is subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe you get all of our podcasts, all of our newsletters, all of our coverage, absolutely everything. Subscribe to the Verge. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kefer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron Locasio. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [47:07]
C
of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent
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A
to $15 per month required. Intro rate first 3 months only, then
- [47:11]
C
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