The 12 Years that Changed Steve Jobs

20:31Shane Parrish:I built an AI version of myself with HeyGen. Today I'll have a dig up an old prediction I made and we'll each grade it. Let's give it a shot. Hey Shane, you once predicted that long form would beat short form for anything that actually mattered. Grade that prediction today. Hey, I was directionally right, but I underestimated just how much short form would become the front door to long form content. I agree you were right, but for the wrong reason. You thought attention spans would recover. They didn't. People just got better at choosing when to go deep. Right call, lucky logic. Well, I got the right answer with the wrong math, but I'll take it.

21:09Shane Parrish:That's HeyGen. Record yourself for 15 seconds and get an AI avatar that delivers professional video on demand. Your first three videos are free at HeyGen.com slash TKP. That's H-E-Y-G-E-N dot com slash TKP. So leading up to this, sort of like the 1990, 1993, the software was getting really good. Like when it first came out, it was pretty buggy, but everybody loved their software. The hardware division is what's sort of like killing it, but IBM wanted to license just their software, didn't they? Right. Next Computer was revolutionary in its software. The hardware was the failure, and we look at the hardware and think, oh, this company failed.

21:52But the software is where the future actually lived. And this is where the vision and the future forward looking of Steve Jobs comes in. He was working on software in 1986 that by the year 2007 would be the foundation of the iPhone. That's how far ahead of his time he was. He had come upon a relatively novel technology called object-oriented programming. For anybody who wasn't an adult in the 1980s who doesn't remember what it was like using a computer, if you wanted to develop an app or basically do anything significant, it took a ton of code. You had to go through line by line of code, and it was inefficient.

22:36There would be one mistake in there, and then that one mistake would just crash the whole system, and then you had to go back through the whole thing. Programming a computer was miserable. Steve, from his visits to Xerox Park saw what was called object-oriented programming, which is the foundation for Apple products now. This is the drag and drop. So this is, you know, everything is an object. So you might have the button object, the click here object. You might have the image object. Object-oriented programming was automation for software.

23:11Shane Parrish:He was building software at the time using drag and drop and like all of Next was. But the problem is they had no install base and nobody else is building software for Next. So there's no reason to purchase Next because it's very niche market. Steve made that mistake early on because he wanted to once again control the hardware and the software together. Next Step was the name of his operating system. This is the operating system that tapped into the power of objects. But the problem was that it was confined to his Next hardware which no one wanted to buy because it was too expensive over time a lot of customers clients came into the office and said look steve the reason we're buying your beautiful cube computers is not because it's a beautiful cube nobody cares about that we're buying it because we want to use your powerful software for financial trades yeah ahead of its time like speedy financial trades back when this is a new thing we want to buy it for health care you know satellite imagery Satellite imagery, intelligence work.

24:16The CIA loved it. The NSA loved it. It had a removable optical disc, a new thing at the time that the CIA agents could destroy and toss out so nobody could find it. It really was a machine that was ahead of its time. The hardware was just so unworkable because it was so far into the future. But the software was where the real power was here.

24:36Shane Parrish:But he was playing on hard mode, right? Like he had opportunities in front of him. IBM came to him wanting to give him money and license software. The government was trying to buy a whole bunch of computers. Walk me through those two stories where he sort of self-sabotages. He totally self-sabotaged. And the whole world would look different today if this had gone in a different route. This is one of the stories that blows my mind about Steve Jobs. So Ross Perot is his investor. Ross Perot, for people who don't remember, he was a technology magnate from Texas, a billionaire. One of the greatest investors of his era.

25:13Also ran for president twice on an independent ticket. So, you know, this is who Steve Jobs brings on board. And everybody who worked with the two said it was a really funny pairing because Steve is, you know, Mr. Birkenstock's California mystic. And then Ross Perot, you know, the straight-laced Texas, you know, the military veteran who's going to run for president. These two guys were so far apart that it should have been obvious that it wasn't going to work out in the end. One of the handshake deals of this partnership is that Ross Perot promises to mobilize his sales force to sell next computers to the federal government, the military, and intelligence agencies.

25:56And so there are intelligence contractors and spies coming around during these years to the next headquarters. These guys would show up. I heard really funny stories. They would never carry a business card, and they would say, hey, my name is Sally. My name's Bob. They wouldn't ever say their real name. And Steve decided in the end that he doesn't want to sell to the federal government because that's not who Steve is. He's all about democratizing computers. He wanted to sell to schools, you know, to dorm room students. That's the sort of audience that he goes after. But Steve blew this up, and it was a disaster because he had millions, hundreds of millions, potentially, in government contracts being lined up for him.

26:42And then he said, I don't want to do this. I changed my mind. I don't want to sell to the feds. So, Ross, I'm not doing this. And this blew up their relationship. Ross quit. He was so frustrated, so angry with Steve. They were literally at the boardroom table with the contracts. They were literally at the table, ready to sign the contract. And Steve said, I'm not doing this.

27:03Shane Parrish:So I just want to give people context here. So we're 1993 at this point. The hardware division has just been bankrupt. He goes to Canon. It's like, I need$20 million by Monday or else we're shutting the doors to the whole company. He's refused to sell to government despite them trying to give him money, literally lining up to give him enough money to more than stay afloat. And his partnership with IBM had blown up. So Steve was alone. He was completely alone. He had driven out his co-founders. All five of them had left because they were so tired of working with Steve. He had alienated all of his investors.

27:42Canon, his only remaining investor, was no longer responding to his emails. His developers were all out. They said, I'm tired of this. I'm not going to develop software for a machine that no one's using, a machine that is now closed and failing. So this was Steve at rock bottom. And even Fortune magazine published this article and said, Steve Jobs might be a snake oil salesman. They use that exact phrase, snake oil salesman for Steve Jobs. When I was looking at Steve Jobs at rock bottom, I thought, oh my God, this is the Steve Jobs we never see. You never see Steve being accused of being a scammer.

28:22You never see Steve almost bankrupt. He was almost personally out of money. He was burning through about$50 million a year, according to the people who knew him. And he was investing his own money into these businesses because he didn't want to take them public. And so if the businesses went under, then Steve Jobs would go under. And he was very close to being completely forgotten and written out of history.

28:48Shane Parrish:Was he funding Pixar at the same time? When did Pixar come into the picture? Steve Jobs was personally funding two companies, Next Computer and Pixar, from 1985 to 1995. In late 1995, Pixar had its IPO because of Toy Story, which was a major success. And that's actually what saved Steve in the end financially. He became a billionaire as a result of that IPO that might have never happened. That's crazy. So he's funding both of these companies. He's running out of cash. Cannon comes in and funds him. What changes in that moment? Because that's the lowest point. That's where everything turns around in this whole story.

29:33Shane Parrish:And he starts to become the legend of Steve Jobs that we know and love. It's the realization that he's alone and almost a complete failure in business. It's also his marriage to Lorraine and having children with her that started to rehabilitate him. He started to realize that there are bigger and greater things out there when it comes to starting a family and having kids. These moments, it was these years, 1993 to 95, that were enormously transformative for him, both professionally and personally. And having Lorraine around really started to tame him, make him mature, also realizing that he had to back off.

30:21One of the reasons Pixar was successful was because Steve was not involved day-to-day. The deal that they had, Steve bought Pixar from George Lucas, and the deal, the agreement, was Steve stays out of creative decisions. That's going to make things easier for us. So Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, two luminaries at Pixar, they were the ones who actually made the creative stuff happen. Most people don't realize that Steve Jobs was credited as a producer of Toy Story, but the reason you don't realize that is because he wasn't really the face of the project anymore. It wasn't like the Apple where you saw Steve and Apple together.

31:00You can't separate the two. But with Pixar, once he backed off, things worked great. Steve did what he did best. He would give the presentations, convince people to invest. You know, he would eventually sell Pixar to Disney, a brilliant masterstroke of business. But the creative hands were left to do what they did best. And so Steve learned to finally trust people.

31:25Shane Parrish:He steps back a little bit from Next, is that? He stepped back not just a little bit. He stepped back by a wide, gaping margin. He realized just how damaging his actions had been, just how damaging his need for total control was. And so he allowed his executives at Next to take over. One of the things that Next executives quickly realized is that the only way to save the company, which was$400 million in debt. You know, remember, this is a small startup that hasn't even produced a successful product in nine years. It's literally been making a loss for nine years. The moment he hires some real financial professionals, there was a new CFO named Dominic Tremptaut, who is from Belgium and came in and looked at the situation and said, you know, this is pretty bad.

32:20I don't know if we can save this place, but we'll do what we can. And the moment that that team came in and looked at the books and told Steve what they need to do, that's when things changed. And now next, for the first time ever in the year 1994, posted a very small profit and finally came out of that nine years of endless unprofitability and finally was starting to look like a real business once, ironically, Steve Jobs was gone.

32:49Shane Parrish:Was he gone or was he just more hands off? He was gone in the sense that he went to Pixar more. Pixar became his baby. He loved Toy Story, which they were creating at the time. He really loved this idea of technology being used to... to create beautiful cultural items. So what Next Computer was doing, the only way that they could survive was by creating enterprise software. And he had no interest in that. He was like, I'm not doing that. Why would I do that? I'm gonna sell the next great computer to the next Nobel winning scientist. Like that's what the company is. But once his financial advisors said, look, I mean, if you don't change this, it's gonna go under your$400 million in debt.

33:31You have no choice. Steve backed off. He was not interested in enterprise computing. I mean, come on, Steve Jobs, you watch the events that he gave, the product launches during this time. And he does not look like Steve Jobs at all. He's not wearing that black turtleneck. He doesn't have the scruffy beard. He doesn't have the glasses. He's wearing an Armani suit with a white button-down shirt and a red tie. And at one point, he even gave an interview, and he said, the future of our company is going to be like IBM.

34:09Shane Parrish:This is like 93 to 95. This is 93 to 95. Wow. Steve Jobs, the corporate salesman, walking around the conference room floor with his conservative dapper suit and shaking hands and saying, hello, would you like to buy my enterprise software? Are you a financial firm on Wall Street? We can sell to you. Oh, my God. That's amazing. And so Pixar are IPOs, and that gives Steve a lot of financial freedom, really gives him leverage over the Apple transaction, which is coming. But at the time, Apple was struggling. So it's important to contextualize this, I think. Why are they struggling? What's going on at Apple?

34:50Apple grew into a big corporation. And like many successful startups that grow, it got featuritis, as they call it. It got the syndrome of bureaucracy, the syndromes of making too many products, of having too many people. by the time John Scully, the Apple CEO of the time, by the time he was pushed out of the company, the company had something like 70 product lines. No company can survive by making so many products, especially if they're not selling.

35:21Shane Parrish:So they couldn't say no to anything. Steve's sort of like not checked out, but not as involved at Next as he was. Apple's thinking of buying BOS as a means of saving themselves, I think is my recollection of this. But then a voicemail changes everything. This is one of the luckier stories in Silicon Valley history. If this story had gone any differently, the story of Apple would have not happened. Apple might have literally gone out of business. There would be no iPhone, no iPod. None of this would have happened. Apple was entering a crisis, and the crisis was on many fronts. They had released a product, a laptop that was exploding.

36:06The batteries would ignite on fire. They had to recall it. Apple was having failure after failure across the board. And one of the things that they had to upgrade was their operating system. And so I don't know if, Shane, you used Apple computers back in the 90s. If you remember what it was like, there would be crashes and freezes. and they had this thing called the spinning beach ball of death, a little beach ball thing that shows up and it just spins around and around and around. And it means that the computer was trying to load something, but it just can't load it, so it sits there for an hour.

36:43It really was a miserable experience trying to use an Apple computer in the year 1996. Gil Emilio was the CEO appointed to come in and turn around the company. He also brought in another executive named Ellen Hancock, who was the CTO. And they were both looking together at a new operating system. How can we stop this silly crashing operating system, this beach ball of death? Nothing works. How can we upgrade this? And the only way that we can do it is by acquiring another company. So they only had a number of months until bankruptcy. Apple was going to go bankrupt eventually. It was hemorrhaging cash.

37:28And so they had to do something quickly and they had to acquire an operating system.

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39:03Right. And that is run by none other than the greatest rival to Steve Jobs, Jean-Louis Gasset, the same man who tattled on him about trying to oust the CEO and got him pushed out of Apple in the end. This is a moment of revenge for Steve if he can find a way to get his OS back into Apple. Apple wasn't really looking at Next Computer. Nobody was really taking it that seriously. There was an employee, a manager named Garrett Rice, who was a middle-of-the - line manager at Next, he and his friends were watching all of this happen, and they knew that their technology was superior. And they were just so annoyed because they had spent years and years and years, all those long nights, creating this beautiful operating system.

39:53And meanwhile, Apple goes over to Gasset's company, BOS, and they say, hey, we want to acquire you guys. But they knew that Next technology was so much better. So Garrett picks up the phone just randomly and says, okay, I'm going to call Apple and just see what happens. He calls an executive, and remember, this is a middle manager. He gives him a pitch. He says, you've got to look at this because this is cutting edge. The executive calls back and says, I'm leaving Apple, but you should talk to our chief technology officer, Ellen Hancock. Here's her number. He calls her, leaves the voicemail, and to his surprise, she calls back and she says, okay, we want to take a look at this, this Next Step OS.

40:37And from there, that's where the story just turns around.

40:42Shane Parrish:And so Apple ends up buying Next Step. Does he go back and become CEO? What happens? It's not that simple. It's a winding road back. Steve actually did not want to return to Apple. Apple came to him. They said, we want your operating system. We think that this is going to be a major acquisition. And Steve was thinking, well, I just want to stick with Pixar because I really loved Toy Story. The IPO was great. Steve agreed finally, I will return to Apple, but only as a part-time advisor. And he said, I don't want a fancy title. I don't want a fancy office. I'm just going to be an advisor. I'll go around Apple.

41:23I'll meet with engineers. I'll give them feedback. But I'm not going to lead the company. if I decide I don't like this, I'm going to ditch Apple. I'm just going to go back to Pixar. When Steve returned, they wanted to set up a ceremony for him. He would arrive in a helicopter, and the Apple employees would all hold up little digital candles to recognize the return of their great saint, Steve Jobs, to this hallowed company.

41:50Shane Parrish:Because the Apple employees, from their perspective, it's like our heroes coming back to save us. Yes. They didn't know at the time that he was reluctant and unsure. So Steve comes back and he just sees disaster. It's a disaster zone. He talked about this. Just nothing worked at Apple. I mean, literally, you would try to get anything done and it would just get killed by bureaucracy, infighting, competition. Steve quickly realized that he had to put his people in Apple. Even if Steve was not the CEO, he wanted his hardware and his software chief at Next Computer to run hardware and software at Apple because those are the only two people who could turn around the company.

42:31And so his people, John Rubinstein, Avi Tavanian, two legends in the story of Apple, Steve put them in power, and finally, they were able to make good decisions.

42:42Shane Parrish:So how does he get sucked into running it? He was so reluctant. At one point, he sold almost all of his Apple shares out of frustration with leadership there. and a guy who wants to return and take over the company doesn't sell all of his shares and he even said later he said the reason i did it is because i was just i was in a fit of depression i didn't like apple what was happening here so he cashed out he said goodbye you know and he was thinking of going back to pixar interestingly the one person who tried to pull him back in was larry Ellison, a guy in the news a lot now. Larry Ellison was Steve's best friend in the sense that Steve, you know, Steve didn't have a lot of friends, but this was one of the few people that you could call a friend of Steve's.

43:29The pair were kind of similar in a lot of ways, strong personalities, force of will. And Larry wanted to set up a hostile takeover of Apple. He thought it would be such a thrilling experience, just a thrill to be able to go into Apple and force a board vote and get the shareholders behind you and just take over Apple from the current CEO and save it. That was his vision. But Steve differed from that because, you know, Steve, when he was younger, would have gone along with that, would have said, yeah, of course, Apple's mine. I'm going to go back in, fire the CEO, and put myself in as CEO. But the older Steve realized that the hostile strategy was not going to work because he was entering unfriendly ground.

44:17He was no longer going to be the saint of Apple. The angelic halo was going to disappear, and people were going to question him and say, well, why is Steve Jobs partaking in a hostile takeover of a company he co-founded. Steve decided that he wanted to be welcomed back if he was going to return, and he did return. He wanted to be wanted. He wanted to be wanted. He wanted to be seen. He wanted people to see his vision and his products. He did not want to go in there anymore and pointlessly yell at people. And don't get me wrong, he was still difficult, but having been through this crucible of Next computer, he realized that you do have to step back and you have to let events unfold as they need to, rather than you trying to seize control at every moment.

45:05Shane Parrish:He's still difficult to work with, but why do so many talented people stay with him? He brought the best out of them. And they all said that. They said, working for him was the hardest experience of my life, but it was also the most beautiful. They said, yeah, you know, I had hard nights. I cried. I suffered. I didn't see my family for days sometimes. I was at the office sleeping on the sofa. But they said, yeah, it was the hardest time of my life. But Steve was special because he could reach into my soul and he could bring the best out of me. He looked at me. He looked through me, they would say.

45:48And he would reach right in and give me the level of creativity that I wanted, that I didn't realize I had inside me.

45:56Shane Parrish:I think that's fascinating. Because I just think about this, right? It's like a lot, he has reputation externally for being really tough on people. Then internally, he was really tough on people, but they stayed. I've been trying to think about this in my head. One of the ways that I've framed this is that he He had standards for himself and other people that they couldn't see. And because they couldn't see these standards, they were higher than they knew they were capable of. But by pushing people towards higher standards, he got the best out of them. Right. Steve had high standards for himself in the sense that he saw himself as somebody who was going to shape the future of the world.

46:47he was going to shape the arc of history. He always had these grandiose expectations. But at Next, what he learned was how to bring good expectations to the people around him, to lift them up rather than tear them down. Once he transitioned to that stage and realized that lifting others up, people who do great work, once you bring them into that pressure cooker of talent, you bring them in, you put them in a room together, you force them to defend their ideas, and you acknowledge them when they do great work. There's a famous interview that just resurfaced recently, and it shows Steve reflecting.

47:24It's the year 1996. After all this drama at Next and Pixar, he's finally coming out of the wilderness. And he's reflecting, and he's saying, you know, something interesting happens when you're the CEO leading great people. when you have talent around, the pyramid gets inverted. You're no longer the boss up top telling people what to do. You're the CEO at the bottom, and your job is to allow your talent to do their best and to keep them around because your talent, they can get another job in a minute. So you better do what you can to keep them around or else you're going to fail.

48:08Shane Parrish:So if you had to summarize the lessons he learned, What are the key lessons that he learned through this period at Next? The first is trusting your people. The second is the importance of bending your vision, knowing when to stick to your guns, and knowing when you need to back off and you need to work with the world around you. Steve originally thought that a great idea was what mattered. If you build the great computer, the world will find it, and they will buy it, and you will be a success. But that's not how the world works. He realized that you need to work with your rivals sometimes. You know, he called Microsoft, Bill Gates, the arch enemy.

48:57This is like the first thing he did when he returned to Apple as CEO, signed a deal with them. They were going to produce Word for Apple, and they were going to invest$150 million to save Apple. The younger Steve would have never done that because that would have been a cardinal sin against the Holy Church of Apple. I mean, the Apple fans already saw it as controversial.

49:17Shane Parrish:That saved Apple, that$150 million. It was the injection that kept them afloat, and it saved them. If that had not happened, they would have run out of money. This is Steve the pragmatist. This is Steve who's learned through repeat failures that you have to work with people. Even if you disagree with them, even if you think their taste sucks and, you know, you think that their products are terrible, if they have a pot of money and they can help you, you have to do the handshake. You have to find a way out because he learned that to achieve his hardware, software unity, to achieve that total control, you have to build scale first.

49:58And how do you build scale? You make deals with people. You get investors. You get distributors. But you have to make concessions. You can't do everything exactly as you start out planning to.

50:08Shane Parrish:Talk to me about the Gates-Jobs rivalry and what you learned about that and any cool stories you heard. That was a lot of fun covering the Bill Gates-Steve Jobs frenemy relationship. These two guys, they would take a crap on each other at any chance they could. They would get out in public and they would insult each other's ideas and say, this is stupid. So what was the disagreement that they were having? One of them, Bill Gates, believed that software should fundamentally be flexible and available to everybody. It should be on every computer regardless of the hardware. That's what Windows was.

50:46Windows was the operating system that loaded on almost every PC in the world, and that's why Bill Gates was so successful. But Steve Jobs was the polar opposite in almost every way. And he believed that beautiful technology has to be within the walled garden. You can make beautiful software, but it has to be on your beautiful hardware too. So this was a theme in this entire period. Steve and Bill sparring back and forth over whose idea was better and who's going to win in the end. And interestingly, if you were sitting around in 1995, this is the year that Windows 95 came out, major business success, you would have thought that the open system makes more sense.

51:31Bill Gates and Microsoft are the future. But if you're sitting around in 2026 and looking at all this, it looks more like the closed ecosystem, the Apple ecosystem is actually the success.

51:44Shane Parrish:Are there any fun moments in the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates rivalry where they prank each other or poke each other intentionally that come to mind? In 1988, Steve released the Cube computer, and this is Steve's big return. It's going to be like his moment where he's returning to that stage. It's been a few years since he was ousted from Apple, and now finally we get to see Steve Jobs, the prince of tech, in the flesh again, releasing this beautiful Cube computer. What's the first thing that Bill Gates does? He goes up in front of the press and he literally says, I'm not developing software for this.

52:24I'm going to piss on it. And he just, Bill Gates just goes on this tirade in public and says, you know, Steve Jobs doesn't know what he's doing. It's just a cube. It's painted black. He says, I could do that too. I could paint my cubes black. Why is that a special thing? One of the things I found in my research, it turns out this has never been published, but Bill Gates actually wrote an apology to Steve. But it was sort of like a non-apology apology. I read the letter and it was really hilarious because he's like, dear Steve, you saw the comments that I made in the media in which I called your product stupid and silly.

53:03I just want to apologize for that. But I also want to let you know that everything you've done is wrong here and all this tech is not going to work. and I think your idea is stupid, but I'm sorry anyway.

53:12Shane Parrish:It must have taken a lot for Jobs to go to get when he was turning around, when he was saving Apple. It took a lot, and it was extremely controversial even within Apple, because for the Apple faithful to turn to their greatest villain, Bill Gates, the man who is like the 1984 big brother to them, that's how they see him. It shows you how far he'd grown. It shows you the new Steve. How do we go from the transition between Steve's back, he's part-time, he's trying to stay out of things or not be involved, he's selling his Apple stock, to Steve running as interim CEO, which he never relinquished until.

53:57So the summer of 97 is a time of deep reflection for Steve because he doesn't want to be the CEO yet. He still loves Pixar. His wife, Lorraine, is also opposed, has been opposed to him returning to Apple in the first place. One of the things that executives told me at Apple this time is that one of them actually said this phrase, Apple kills you. Apple, it's such a stressful place that you're going to grow old, you're going to get sick, and you're going to die young. And an executive told me that's how bad Apple was in 1997. Everybody around Steve doesn't think that he's going to become the CEO.

54:32And finally, it was a phone call to Andy Grove, one of his very earliest mentors, CEO of Intel. He calls him at an odd hour and just says, Andy, I want to talk. So, you know, we've been interviewing these candidates, CEO of Apple. We don't really like any of them. And Andy Grove has a reputation for being a straight shooter. And he literally told Steve, Steve, I don't give a shit about Apple. and that that was that it hit steve really hard and steve told this story later he said that's when i realized that i do give a shit about apple he realized the contrast couldn't be starker he was jolted and he thought well wait i do care this is my love this is my company and so he said i will become the interim ceo and that's what happens Oh, that's crazy.

55:26It's October 1997. Steve Jobs is appointed the interim CEO of Apple and returns to enormous fanfare. And we all know how the story ends.

55:37Shane Parrish:And the rest is history. The rest is history. Hey, Chicago. Class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Croc store today. One of the first things he does when he takes over as CEO is kill 70 of these 80 projects. Right. He killed 70 % of Apple projects upon taking over as the interim CEO. He wasn't even the full CEO yet.

56:26And Steve decided he wanted to be called the iCEO. This is the first ever iMention in Apple, the predecessor to the iPod and the iPhone. And so Steve, as the iCEO, decides we're killing 70 % of projects that are just not working. He brings in his operating system from Next with its beautiful programming, the objects, the new technology, and he turns it into the foundation for everything that comes after. It becomes the software that's going to power Apple's renaissance. It goes on to lead to the building of the iPhone, the iPad. It percolates throughout Apple and it becomes the basis for anything that's made at Apple.

57:10You have to look at the next step software to understand where Apple is today. Just recently, I asked one of the very senior Apple software designers from the time who knew Steve, I asked him, how many products today at Apple really come from Next? And he looked at me and looked like he thought it was a funny question. And he said, all of them.

57:36Shane Parrish:That's crazy. One of the things that I don't think gets enough attention with Steve is the role that Lorraine played in his life. Talk to me about that. Lorraine was the woman who softened him. Steve, as a younger man, was always a bit aimless in his personal life. He knew that he wanted a family, that he wanted to settle down, but there was a hole in his soul, and he just couldn't find that. But Lorraine had a way with him. And everybody who was around the couple during these years recounted that. Just how Steve, by giving birth to their son together, Reed, by raising a family together and having that presence of Lorraine in his day-to-day life, he became less of a professional robot, somebody who goes to work every day, and somebody who started to treasure simple family moments.

58:33Shane Parrish:He had a child before Lorraine. And treated her horribly. When did that change? How did that change? Lisa was his first daughter and born with a different woman. But Steve denied paternity and refused to help her take care of her. Even said at one point that she would be disinherited. But after they met Lorraine, it was in the 1990s that she was brought back into the fold. And they started to repair their relationship. Lorraine clearly played an influence in that. or was it the birth of Reed? It was both. Lorraine created structure in his life, a structure outside of Apple. And I think that, you know, Steve, as he got older, was able to not just be an Apple guy anymore, but was able to descend through his life among family, among Next, among Pixar.

59:25He had different parts of his identity, so he wasn't going to suddenly crash if one part went wrong.

59:31Shane Parrish:Let's switch gears a little bit and do more like rapid fire answers. Talk to me about the shithead hero rollercoaster. You were either a hero one day or a shithead on another. Steve would walk into a room. If he liked your idea, you were a hero. But the next day he would change his mind and say, you're a shithead because suddenly he doesn't like it. How did he keep so many talented people working for him? He brought the best out of them. He inspired them and he pushed them to their very limit. How did he make decisions? He told people to talk back to him. talk back and disagree with me, and we'll find the answer through disagreement.

1:00:08Shane Parrish:Did he ever apologize to people? Yes, interestingly. He would throw them on the hero shithead rollercoaster, and then he would occasionally apologize a few days later for being so nasty to them. Would he do it in public or would he do it in private? He would write them a letter. Was he clear with apologies? Did you see any of these letters? What did they look like? So those specific letters, I didn't see those, but people recounted them to me. Steve apologized in writing, and he would be specific about the apology, but he also expected the conversation to be over. That was it. That was it. We're done.

1:00:42Shane Parrish:Did he have empathy for other people? Yes. That surprises me. He learned empathy. He lined up top-flight medical care for employees who were suffering. But not himself. But not himself. He learned empathy for others, but he wouldn't give empathy to himself. One thing that doesn't make sense to me there is it sounds like Steve learned to learn from feedback and people around him during these time at Next. And yet, when it came to his own medical treatment, he insisted on doing things his way, despite the advice of doctors, friends, loved ones, family. How do you reconcile that? Steve's hadn't changed completely.

1:01:23He was still the same person at his core. And he still had the reality distortion field. But that's the mindset that goes behind his decision not to get treatment. He consulted a psychic about his medical condition. He relied on holistic vegan foods to try to cure his cancer. But that's not how it works. But that is classic Steve. Steve learned the power of inspiring the people around him, but he never completely learned to be 100 % honest with himself.

1:01:53Shane Parrish:Reading your book, it struck me that he was naturally resilient, but he had to learn discipline. That's exactly right. He was resilient in the face of failure after failure. Once he learned discipline, his resilience became the foundation for his success. What can we learn from his resilience? How do you teach people to be that resilient? He persisted. He was so determined. If you're in hard times, you treat it as the foundation for what might come after. That's where the resilience comes from. If you're only focused in the current moment, then it's easy to give up. But failure can be the foundation for success later.

1:02:37Shane Parrish:What is success for you? Success is waking up in the morning and having the family and the friends around you who really make life great. It's walking into a coffee shop and being able to sit down and enjoy yourself and enjoy the moment. Enjoy the moment. Enjoy whatever it is that you're doing, whether you're writing a book or building a company or making a movie. it's being able to just sit down and to do that and to enjoy these moments as they come