[S6E2] Steve Jobs in Exile with Geoffrey Cain

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple. In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple after a dramatic corporate power struggle. He immediately founded NeXT, another computer company that built revolutionary technology but struggled to find a market and was consistently barely surviving. 12 years later, in true Shakespearean fashion, Apple, on the brink of bankruptcy itself, would purchase NeXT, and the prodigal son would return, leading Apple to eventually become the most valuable company in the world. The renaissance of Apple would be built on the incredible technologies developed at NeXT and the hard-won leadership lessons that had transformed Jobs along the way. Renowned journalist and author Geoffrey Cain has written the definitive book on NeXT and the transformation of Steve Jobs as a businessman during those difficult 12 years. We are privileged to be joined by Geoffrey to discuss Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary. Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Great to be here, David.

So Jeffrey, let's start at the beginning of this project for you. So tell us about the genesis. What got you interested in writing about NeXT? What got you interested in writing about this period in Steve Jobs' life?

I was originally a tech journalist and I was covering Apple. So I was specifically covering the Samsung versus Apple court case. And for listeners who might not remember that, that it was about 15 years ago. It was around the time that Steve Jobs had died and Apple brought a lawsuit against Samsung for patent infringement for copying the iPhone. This was back when the iPhone was just first getting big. And so I was on that story. I was covering both companies, Samsung and Apple. And, you know, because Steve Jobs had passed, it was 2011, there was an outpouring of memories about him. And when I was interviewing or hanging around, you know, the older generation of Apple executives. So people who had been there through the '80s, the '90s, the early 2000s, one of the things that they would frequently say is, we know Steve Jobs today as, you know, he was the CEO of Apple who he returned, he turned the company around and built the iPhone and made it the company that we all know. That's like the Steve Jobs who is now the imprint in our minds. But they would always tell me, you know, like people have been glossing over the story that led up to that. We tend to assume that Steve Jobs was always brilliant and always a genius, that he was always somebody who just had the, you know, the greatest ideas would come out and he would change the world. And that was that. And anybody who didn't understand him just wasn't, you know, brilliant enough to understand him. That was sort of the narrative that was forming. But what these executives would tell me is that that's a storyline being written after the fact. It's a narrative problem, as they would say in my field, that You know, there are, there are stories that we write when the story is finished, when somebody dies and has made their legacy. And then there are stories that unfold as they are happening. And to truly understand what's happening, you have to go back in time and put yourself in the position of living before the success, you know, living before the legacy was built, and to try to look at history unfolding from somebody who doesn't know what's going to happen. And in this particular case, You know, we remember Steve Jobs as famous and successful, but if you were winding the clock back, he died in 2011, but let's go back 20 years before he died. If you were sitting there in a room with Steve Jobs and taking his orders and building his machines, you would not know that Steve Jobs was going to be a success. And in fact, there's a good chance you would think that he is going to end up a failure because At this time in the late '80s and '90s, he was failing. Almost everything he touched in this period was a failure at his company called NeXT Computer because he had a vision. He was pushed out of Apple originally in 1985, and he had a vision that he was going to get revenge on Apple and he was going to build an even better computer, a more cutting-edge computer, and he was going to use it to revolutionize science research. You know, the World Wide Web was created on this thing, but it was created so early that nobody knew what it was all about. And so if you were looking at this at the time in the year, say 1990, you would've said Steve Jobs is out of his mind because this is going to be an absolute failure. There's no chance this guy is going to succeed. And even the media said it. I found old reports in the news and even Fortune Magazine at one point asked the question, is Steve Jobs a snake oil salesman? Is this all fake and he's just going to be forgotten? So I wanted to go back in time to the story before the story. I wanted to find that story of, you know, what does it mean to be the most historically remembered entrepreneur in recent history? But what is it like to be that person before you become that person? And it's never easy. It's always a long winding road of struggle and failure, and it's ultimately the failures that teach you what it takes to succeed.

One of my friends asked me to summarize your book as we were reading it. I had mentioned we were reading it and I said, it's Steve Jobs without the plot armor. And it's basically how Steve Jobs got the plot armor in some ways. It's the hero's journey and super enjoyed it.

Thanks. Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, but that's exactly how it unfolded as I was writing it. So when I wrote the book, I didn't go in thinking like, I'm going to write the hero's journey. That would be an act of manipulation. I mean, that would be me sort of imposing a story where it might not exist. But as I got deeper and as I talked to the people closest to him, including Ed Catmull, who was the co-founder of Pixar, worked very closely with Steve Jobs at Pixar during these years. They said exactly that. They would say Steve was going through the hero's journey. And these guys, I mean, they were deep in the art of storytelling. They created Toy Story and they could see it. They said, we've read Joseph Campbell, who created the hero's journey structure. We've seen the great cinema of the past. We've read great mythology and studied the lives of great leaders. So, you know, people like Winston Churchill kind of went through a similar story of being ousted into the wilderness, the middle chapter, and then returning to lead his nation. You see a lot of this in history and literature and mythology. And a lot of the people who were closest to Steve Jobs told me exactly that, that it was a hero's journey. And, you know, that's not something that you, the writer, have to impose on it. It's not you making up a structure around his life. he was going through this stage in the wilderness and he was being tested and having to overcome these struggles that would eventually form him into the great businessman who he became.

So just to dive a little deeper there, you decide to start the book at the beginning of NeXT, and you don't really go much into the history of Steve at Apple before that and the successes that they've had there. So was that a narrative choice that you made? Was that Uh, something that, you know, there's, there's a bunch of other books that have been written about this. You wanted to, you know, to, I, I think like this is something that's, that's relatively uncovered in, in the literature. Uh, I guess like, who, who are you trying to like sort of write this for and, and how much knowledge should our readers, you know, have about Steve Jobs coming into this book?

You know, there's been a lot written about Steve Jobs and, you know, the one definitive biography is the one by Walter Isaacson called Steve Jobs. I mean, that's, that's the go-to. You know, the Access biography, Steve gave a lot of interviews to Walter Isaacson for that one, and he told the story of what happened at Apple when Steve founded it with Steve Wozniak in the '70s and '80s. So, you know, that's a story we all have that image in our head. We all know that Steve Jobs created the Macintosh, that he co-founded Apple. You know, we all know that he had these early successes, you know, and that he was shaping the future of computing at the time. Like there's, There's really no question about that. And any reader or viewer can turn on Netflix and they can watch that there are 2 Steve Jobs films that cover that period in great depth. So it's a story that's been well covered. We know who he was at that time. We know his flaws. We know that he was inspired, for example, by Zen Buddhism and that influenced his design decisions. We know that he abandoned his daughter Lisa, who was born with his girlfriend at the time, and didn't treat his ex-girlfriend well, the mother of Lisa. And yet he named the computer the Lisa, same name as his daughter. These are stories that have joined the lore of the history of business and technology. Everybody knows it. And I wanted to do something different. I had to make careful decisions because You know, a book has to have a clear start and end. And if I had simply told the story of how Steve Jobs founded Apple, you know, people are going to look at that and say, well, wait, can't I just buy any of the other zillion books? So I decided instead to begin the story at the high point as Steve is releasing the Macintosh and to recast the story and to remind readers that the first Macintosh computer Certainly was a leap forward in terms of innovation and the simplicity of technology. You have to remember that technology at the time, a computer would fill the room and a Macintosh, you know, brought that processing power and, you know, put it on a desk and anybody could use it. But despite that innovative success, the Macintosh was not a market success by any means. It was, it did not sell much. It sold somewhat in the first 100 days of sales, but Ultimately, what people were buying were not Steve's computer. They were buying the Apple II computer, which was the high-volume, lower-priced version. The Macintosh was like $8,000 at the time, you know, in current money. It was just too expensive. And so I wanted to start this story by showing the release of the Macintosh and how that led to a lot of problems for Steve and Apple. It was not the victory that we remember it as. It was in fact the ignition of the eventual downfall of Apple as budgets spun out of control, as, you know, computers could not be sold, inventories piled up. By the year 1985, one year after the Macintosh was released, Apple was in its first-ever crisis and had its first-ever layoffs. And the company's future was so unclear that Steve Jobs, something we don't remember now, but Steve Jobs himself with his CEO, John Sculley, they put up Apple for sale. General Electric was actually looking at buying Apple. So, you know, that shows you how bad things are getting. And it was because of this succession of problems that the company decided that Steve Jobs was actually the problem. He was not well-liked at the time. He was not the celebrity who we know at the time. You know, we know the celebrity nowadays, but at the time he was not a well-liked leader. He was divisive. He would have outbursts. He was immature. And ultimately Apple decided to send him off and they said, you know, we're going to strip you of your duties. We're going to put you in an office across the street and you can just essentially do nothing and just please leave us alone. And that's why he decided to leave and to start NeXT Computer, which was his attempt to show Apple what he was really made of. It was a revenge, a revenge project ultimately.

So a lot of our listeners know that I like cinematic and movie comparisons and comparisons from literature. And it was very almost like Homeric. the way that your book was structured because they have the Macintosh release. They have Jobs, you know, sort of has a Pyrrhic victory with the Macintosh release, and now, you know, he's getting ready to sail out on his own. But before they can even launch the ships to NeXT, litigation is pending, right? Apple is, you know, making sure that NeXT starts in legal limbo. So the team, which was composed largely of those ex-Apple employees, particularly Daniel Lewin, who they put through a lot of legal hell there, they're immediately sued by Apple. You kind of phrase it or put it as it's almost a company being over before it started. Why was Apple so threatened by NeXT? You know, they're the ones that actually pushed Steve Jobs out and said, oh, maybe we can work together again when he talked about making his own company. But why were they so threatened by NeXT? And how did the experience of starting off, you know, under that cloud of legal jeopardy affect NeXT in the long term?

Apple's response is kind of irrational when you look back on it because, you know, they were the ones who originally told Steve, sayonara, like, get out of here. We don't like you anymore. The Macintosh was not a major success. And yet when Steve told them he's going to go off and found NeXT Computer, they panicked because, you know, Steve Jobs, despite being controversial at the time, he was still the heart and soul of Apple. You have to remember, and Steve knew that. I mean, he had no life outside of Apple and without Steve Jobs, there's essentially no Apple. You just can't separate the two. And so once Steve Jobs left, he had his followers at Apple and he was taking Dan Lewin, who you mentioned. So Dan Lewin would become his head of marketing at NeXT Computer. He took a number of top software and hardware engineers who went on to build stellar careers in the Valley. I mean, they're some of the most revered people. They They went with Steve to NeXT Computer. Rich Page is one of them, hardware. Bud Tribble is a famous software engineer, did a lot of work later on at Apple too with the iTunes and the iPhone and so forth. These people are, you know, they went on to become luminaries and Apple knew that they were extremely talented. So once Steve said, okay, you don't like me here anymore, I'm going to go and start my own company with my own people, suddenly the reaction changed. It's almost a kind of, in the business world, there's the term, a kind of not invented You know, Steve Jobs is a part of Apple and inventing things for Apple, so that should be Apple's. But once Steve leaves, there's a kind of psychological dissonance that happens, a kind of irrational response. And it's like, well, wait a second. Yeah, so we did push out Steve, but he's still a part of Apple, heart and soul, right? And anything he creates outside of Apple, that's a threat to us because, you know, that, that's like our beating heart. making something for somebody else that's not ours. So the company had a truly over-the-top and irrational reaction and decided to sue Steve personally. So they didn't sue the company NeXT, they sued Steve Jobs and they sued Rich Page, his hardware engineer, on a personal level. And then they dragged everybody else, his 5 co-founders at NeXT, they got dragged through the legal process with the depositions and all that. So an extremely stressful time. These were very young people. They were all in their 20s and 30s. They recounted to me that, you know, they had mortgages to pay off, they had young kids at home. They were, you know, leaving, abandoning one of the most successful companies in Silicon Valley to that point. Even though Apple had had hard times, it was still a billion-dollar company at the time, which was a lot in the '80s. And, you know, once they left and once they were under that pressure, they weren't sure if they made the right choice. So, One of the most interesting things I found when writing this book is that there were so many events, so many turning points like this, where if anything else had gone slightly differently, all of the history of technology afterwards would've turned out differently. Like Apple, if this lawsuit had succeeded, NeXT would've closed, Steve Jobs would've never returned to Apple, and then Apple later, which was close to bankruptcy, probably would've gone out of business. You know, that's just one example and I can give a lot of them, but it's really incredible how, you know, Apple, this lawsuit failed. Apple decided it was too expensive and they couldn't make progress. So they told Steve, okay, fine, we'll give you a settlement and you can make your computer, but just don't compete with us.

Jeffrey, Steve Jobs is somebody who's kind of famous for setting very aggressive deadlines and they start NeXT and he immediately is setting a very aggressive deadline for how long it's going to take them to develop the first version of the NeXT computer. And it seemed to me reading the book that he was setting them up for failure, setting such an aggressive deadline because it seemed they're effectively starting from scratch. They're developing a completely new operating system. They're developing workstation-level hardware. There's this whole concept of the, the 1M, if I remember right, 1 MIPS, 1 million pixels.

Yeah.

And so do you think that that timeline was ridiculously aggressive at the beginning? And was he— what was the thinking in Steve's mind, knowing the amount of work that was ahead of that team to set such an aggressive deadline?

Well, he was thinking, I did it at Apple, so I can, I can do it at NeXT. Whatever. He was trying to relive those moments, the moments of glory at Apple when he was on the stage and he was the star of the show. And he thought, so, you know, I've been pushed out. I'm going to start over now with this new startup. You know, and originally he said, I have 3 years to get this computer out. And if I miss that deadline, then we're going to be in trouble. Because the problem with when you're making hardware and making technology, if you miss one deadline, the entire technological curve moves forward a generation and then you're stuck with old tech and then you have to spend the next year updating it to release it on time. So missing a deadline like that is deadly for any small business. What Steve was trying to do in reliving these old glory days at Apple, he was trying to push out his computer on an extremely fast timeline because he wanted to show the world what he was made of. He didn't want to be forgotten. He wanted to be in that spotlight again, and he didn't want to fade into obscurity. One of the things that Steve always told people throughout his entire life, I mean, everybody recounts this, that He saw his position on Earth as somebody whose mission was to kind of contribute to the arc of history. He wasn't just releasing any old computer that sits on your desk. He wanted to be in the lineage of Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, past scientists and technologists who leapt society forward. And so that's why he was so ambitious, but everybody around him could see that it was going to fail. I mean, you know, his ambitions, he was building a computer that was, you know, at the very minimum, maybe 8 years ahead of its time. Those were some internal estimates they had. They were building this computer in 1986 and they were writing projections. I saw the projections, like I saw the internal documents. They were thinking 10 years out to 1995, this computer is going to change the world. by 1995, and everybody's going to be using a NeXT computer in their dorm room, and they're going to be curing cancer with it. That's a great idea. It's brilliant. But that's not something that you want to set your deadlines on. Curing cancer on a computer, it crosses the realm into pure fantasy. And that's where Steve went wrong here. He was living his fantasy. He was confusing his great vision that people really saw in him. He He crossed that line into fantasy and he couldn't see the difference between those two. And that's what led him to these problems. Yeah.

And even though, you know, I think the deadlines are fantasy and it was just shocking to read in your book, just, you know, about how much setting inappropriate deadlines can really screw you, right? Because then you're, you have a too expensive product with last year's technology and processing speed. But even though there was the fantasy of the deadlines, It did seem like what NeXT was doing was indeed quite revolutionary, the hardware and the software, the power of those things. I wanted to include a shout out here. My wife's family's Armenian, and I love the story of Avi Tivanian and the microkernel, but there was revolutionary stuff going on there. And can you tell us a little bit about why was NeXT, why was the hardware, why was the software so revolutionary in its own right?

Well, it was revolutionary. It was so far ahead of the market. And it was so revolutionary that it was simply not marketable at the time. That's how far ahead of his time he was. So this is a great example of the vision of Steve Jobs. It's one of his greatest strengths, but this is a great example of how the strengths of any person are also their weaknesses. It just depends on the circumstances that they're in. And this became his weakness because, yeah, Great computer. So he was building a perfect cube, uh, so a magnesium cube that was painted in this perfect, uh, black. Magnesium, an extremely exotic alloy, uh, metal, something that, you know, looked really nice as a museum piece that held up well. It's also, you know, making a cube out of like a computer that's a cube, that, that is a design and engineering feat. It's, it's extremely costly to manufacture because it requires you know, these entirely new manufacturing lines. And then on top of that, Steve wanted to, you know, not only build the computer, but make it all in-house at his personal factory in Fremont, California.

And that was fully automated as well, right? It was a fully automated factory.

Fully automated manufacturing plant in Fremont. And because it was a cube and because it had this special black paint that you can't find in many places, you know, it had all kinds of special quirks and installations. And, you know, these robot arms would put it together and, you know, he planned it down to the, you know, classic Steve Jobs, like the motherboard had to be laid out a certain way and he would keep moving around parts on the motherboard and that would just delay it more. Like he wanted to, he wanted the motherboard to look beautiful and artful, but then from an engineering standpoint, it was just slowing everything down. So the project would blow up, it would get pushed back. So anyway, so this is why, um, it's quite revolutionary. Um, because he was ahead of his time in terms of how he was pushing the limits. And then to add to that, the software, uh, was the truly revolutionary part because, uh, he was developing something called object-oriented programming. You have to remember that in the '80s, so for the audience who can remember this, maybe they were involved at the time in computing. It was always, uh, you know, programming software on any computer at the time was a nightmare. You had to go do all the code by hand and then something would break. And then you had to go back and redo all the code again and find that bug. And it just got so exhausting that companies will put out buggy software because they just got tired of the whole process. It just had to be good enough. It didn't have to be perfect. But what Steve found, and Avi Tavanyan, his, uh, his later became his software chief, they discovered that, you know, you could treat software as you do, uh, making a film or you know, shaping clay, you have this thing called objects. And so, you know, you look at the iPhone today, look at your MacBook if you have one, there's like the drag and drop element. There's the, you know, if you develop apps, like you don't have to go in and code all the time. You sort of, you put an object there, you put a form, fill in form there, you put an icon here and there. All of this comes from object-oriented programming. This is the dominant model on Apple today. And this is what Steve was developing. in the mid-1980s. So truly incredible when you think about it. But at the time, you know, so far ahead of its time that like people just couldn't figure out yet what to do with it. So great revolution, great vision, but the execution was far too early and that's what caused NeXT to start to fail.

Well, one, you just got a good glimpse of my New York accent there when I said Avi Tavanian, Avi Tavanian. So thank you for that. And 2, I just, I loved how you started it with that because I think the story of this book is how Steve Jobs goes from self-obsession to customer obsession, right? And the self-obsession is in the beginning when he just sets that vision and they almost over-manufacture, over-innovate, and they're in search of a customer. Whereas by the end of the book, he is starting with the customer. And I, you know, I think you just kind of summed up that early part there.

Right, right. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And one of the things that I've found, you know, there's this Quote that's often attributed to Steve, that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Yeah, I mean, there's truth in that quote, but I think that it's taken out of context and, you know, miss kind of miss— it's a quote that's often kind of overused and attributed to him as like some kind of, you know, mantra that we should all follow. When you actually look at the life of Steve Jobs and how he made decisions, He was not making decisions on that mantra. He was not saying, you know, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. He discovered as time went on that you start with the customer and move backwards. Think about, you know, it's not just business, it's, you know, it's art. It's, you know, any, any, anyone who creates anything, you know, you can have your vision and that's great, but if your vision is not reaching anybody, if it doesn't connect to people, then it's gonna land flat and it ends with you. That's not, you know, you don't want to be the artist, the precious artist who says like, nobody understands my art. And, you know, if they, if they don't get it, they're just too stupid. That's sort of how Steve Jobs was when he was young. And he discovered over time that once you start with thinking about what people need from you, what does the world want from you? That's where you can tap into your true power. And when you find the fusion of your vision, you know, your inner creativity with what the world needs, That's the sweet spot and that's where, you know, you can really do great things.

He literally had a Greek chorus style steering committee of academics following him around saying, don't you dare charge more than $5,000 for this. And then he over-innovated and put out a machine that cost $6,500. Right. So it's, it's just really funny.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was the Steve Jobs syndrome in action. You know, they told him what it has to be, what they need. Universities have set budgets. They cannot change the budget. It's a big bureaucracy. And Steve got carried away and he said, well, you know, screw you. I'm going to make an awesome computer and you're going to have to buy it because it's brilliant, but they didn't buy it. And, you know, that was his failure.

So taking us in a slightly different direction, you go pretty deep in the investors on NeXT. And frankly, they're, they're to some degree more strategic partners than, than, than just investors. So Ross Perot makes very significant investments at the beginning and gets deeply involved in the company. And then Canon kind of steps up as the, as the big strategic investor, you know, over time, uh, later on. How, how did the investors affect the company and, and why did they make such big bets on NeXT?

It was the glamour and the wonder of being close to Steve Jobs, uh, who is, you know, the, the wunderkind of, uh, technology who people say is going to change the world. Uh, he has left Apple after Apple treated him badly and sued him. And now he is setting out to make a mysterious machine that is going to revolutionize science and revolutionize technology. It was pixie dust. That's what they were investing in. It was smoke and mirrors. We look at the technology landscape today and, you know, you hear these stories of companies scamming their investors, you know, places like Theranos and with Elizabeth Holmes, and, you know, they claim they can prick your finger and find cancer and all this stuff based on that. It turns out to be fake and a scam, and she's in jail and all this. It's kind of a similar role, I think, that investors played in NeXT Computer early on. They were giving it credibility and legitimacy, even though the computer he was building was just so unfathomably not workable that it just wasn't going to get very far. So, you know, I'm not saying NeXT Computer, like it wasn't a scam. It wasn't like an outright, you know, I'm scamming the investors. He truly believed in what he was building. But once he was able to get these key investors on board, so there's Ross Perot who ran for president twice, major figure who, you know, ran his own technology company. He was going to bring federal government contracts to NeXT. You know, there was Canon, major Japanese corporate empire known for cameras and printers today, but, you know, major company in Japan. You know, there was many others. So, you know, there was a man named Pat Chrisine who got Carnegie Mellon involved. They were an investor. Stanford University got involved. All these names, you know, coming together around this mysterious startup by Steve Jobs just gave it the aura of, wow, there's truly something great going on here. You know, nobody was allowed to actually look at the computer they were developing. It was all kept under wraps and secret. I mean, no, even Steve said this in meetings. He said, this is going to be a very secretive company. And the reason he did that was to create that mystery. But once you have supporters, you know, once you have people giving you $100 million checks for a product that doesn't exist, suddenly the company starts to look a bit more legitimate. And that's what kept this failure continuing for years and years without the bankruptcy coming. It was like a delayed bankruptcy and a delayed failure, and it really taught him a hard lesson.

So we see that they seem to really have some very strong opportunities that Steve just kind of openly chooses to reject. So the IBM deals seem to be materializing very significantly. There's the government contracts that Ross Perot is bringing in, and it just seems like Steve will go like very deep into these processes and then just decide, you know, This, this isn't who we are or whatever. This isn't the style. This isn't what I want this company to be. Um, can we just go through those a little bit? I think, I think both of those stories are probably like useful and interesting to hear. And frankly, things I really had no idea about, like, you know, coming in from this book. So it was really, you know, interesting to, to learn about it. So could we go into the IBM relationship a little bit? Uh, and, and frankly, it's just a crazy story at the end where he just, you know, refuses to get on the plane because the slides aren't available to be on, you know, both sides of the room or whatever. So yeah. Would love to hear your thoughts on the IBM piece and then maybe we'll turn to the government piece after that.

Right. So what's so incredible about NeXT Computer was that Steve Jobs had everything lined up and ready to go if he wanted to rake in a billion dollars at some point. Like, he could have done that. He could have made NeXT a success because the buyers, it turned out, were not regular people like you and me. Nobody, you know, this, this cube, which, you know, added up to $12,000 if you wanted a functioning cube computer, you know, with all the added features, $12,000 for a computer, that's about the price of college tuition in the year 1988. And I mean, nobody in their right mind is going to buy it, but who, who does have a budget for that? Well, guess what? Intelligence agencies, you know, military institutions, the Pentagon, you know, reconnaissance units that need advanced satellite imagery. This was before the days of Google Maps. And it just so turned out that NeXT computers were well-suited for satellite reconnaissance and that sort of thing. It also had just a little quirk. It had this removable optical disc, not a CD-ROM, but like a little disc that Canon was developing. And Steve wanted to put that there without a hard drive. So it would literally just run on this little optical disc. Well, the CIA loved that because they could take that thing out. If there was no hard drive, there's no fingerprints that anybody could find. They just take out that disc at the end and destroy it and, you know, toss it out and, and get rid of it. And there's no record of anything you've done. So the intelligence agencies were really interested. Those were lined up by Ross Perot, you know, major investor and confidant in Steve. He blew that up because Steve decided that, you know, he wanted to sell to regular people like you and me. He didn't want to sell to intelligence agencies because he wasn't really a corporate guy. Steve Steve envisioned himself as the rebel, the rebel of technology changing history. So IBM, as you mentioned, same thing, a deal lined up by a very talented marketer named Dan Lewin, who had known Steve since almost the beginning of Apple. They met, you know, very soon after Apple was founded, and Dan, you know, placed his trust and confidence in Steve and followed him to NeXT Computer. and was able to get IBM interested in NeXT. IBM was the giant of the time. I mean, we don't see a lot of IBM today. It's just not as big. But, you know, back in the day it was, you know, there were, there were these IBM workstations coming out and Microsoft was developing the early software for Windows and they were starting to put these on IBM computers. And so the ecosystem was forming. It's like, you know, do you want to get a PC with Windows on it, and that's usually IBM, or do you want to get an Apple with the Apple OS on it? And, you know, there are these like 2 distinct choices. You can't do both. So IBM knocked on Steve's door and said, we are so impressed with your operating system called NeXTSTEP, which is the object-oriented programming that I had mentioned earlier. And they said, we're going to pre-install this on IBM computers. We will write you a giant check. It was, you know, all the checks that IBM wrote added up to like the hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, insane for a small startup like NeXT. And it was like, it was a done deal. I mean, it was like, you know, heaven had landed for Steve Jobs. And, you know, if he just signed the contract and shook their hands and went along with it, then, you know, Steve Jobs would have become the operating system mogul of the era. You know, like today, all of history would be changed. We would all be using you know, like either computers that have NeXTSTEP, the OS, there would be no Apple OS because Apple would probably have disappeared by now. And then Windows. So Windows versus NeXTSTEP. Steve blew it up because he said, I don't want to work with IBM, this big corporate juggernaut. That's not me. I sell to regular people and I'm an artist. I don't work with, you know, the corporate shills. That's how he saw it. So big mistake, big lesson. This is the taming of Steve Jobs because he learned that you know, to make it in the world, you do have to compromise. You know, as Benjamin Franklin used to say, you have to reach your hand out, you have to shake hands, and you have to make deals where you don't have total control over what's going to happen. And giving up control is one of the keys to success. And that's what Steve learned.

You know, and Jeffrey, you mentioned Canon, and I also, I love how Canon makes some cameo appearances throughout the story and You know, whether it's, you know, Apple having $1 billion of Canon hardware printers in their warehouse and Steve Jobs shuts it down, or Canon coming in and saving NeXT at different points by upping their investment. One, I just found that funny, but two, you also mentioned Dan Lewin and the IBM deal, and that is just emblematic of Steve Jobs and some of his interactions with some of the co-founders of NeXT with him. In fact, it was that IBM deal, I believe, that led him from going to vice president of sales at NeXT to vice president at Go. But NeXT actually had 5 co-founders, including Dan'l, and you mentioned Rich Page as well, but every founder ended up leaving except Steve. Tell us a little bit about why they found him so hard to work with. And, you know, other than it just being his money, what kept Steve at NeXT? You know, and why did he decide to stay? Why was he the one founder, co-founder that didn't leave?

Well, uh, Steve actually talked about this in a meeting, uh, with his co-founders. So all 5 co-founders left by 1993. So that was, um, about 8 years into the company. Uh, they had had it. I mean, Steve was, you know, he had these abusive tirades and he would tear people down. He had, there was this thing, this thing he did called the hero shithead roller coaster. He would, you know, hold you up as a hero the one day and then tear you down the next and, you know, do it in front of everybody. So he would embarrass and humiliate you. Nobody wanted to work with that Steve Jobs because he was just unbearable. And then to add to it, he simply was not successful. By 1993, NeXT Computer was effectively bankrupt. It was about a weekend away from running out of money. And Steve and his NeXT team, they called Canon, their only Their only serious remaining investor and told them like, we need $20 million by Monday or we're closing the doors, we're going out of business, and that's that. And so Canon, you know, had this, they had invested something like $100 million already. And of course they said, well, you know, sunk cost fallacy, we can't lose all our money. Let's just put this money in. But it was devastating for Steve. I mean, Canon after this would not talk to him. They felt deceived and cheated. you know, his co-founders had left and, you know, he would, he would do this thing. He would bash them in the press after they left. He would, you know, accuse them of being bad, bad co-founders. And it was just, it was not a good time. But, you know, Steve, he told his co-founders in meetings, he said, look, you know, everybody here can leave, but not me. Steve was, chained to NeXT Computer and also to Pixar, his other company. And the reason was because he was investing his own money. These were not public companies, no IPO at the time. These were his own private firms that he was trying to build up. When he hit rock bottom in '93, the people who were closest to him told me that he had about 1 to 2 years of runway left. So, you know, max 2 years, if he had continued on that path, he would've run out of money. So we're talking personal bankruptcy, not a company bankruptcy. There's no easy exit when you're in that position. What do you do? I mean, NeXT Computer is rock bottom, failing, bankrupt. You can't just write off your debts and head off. You can't just quit the job. There's no corporation or institution behind you. It's literally built around you. And That's one more thing that Steve Jobs learned during this time, that the businesses he had built in the first half of his life were far too centered around one founder. And that's dangerous because if one founder makes a mistake or that one founder goes down, the company goes down with them. And, you know, vice versa, you know, if the company goes down, the founder goes down. That was a big lesson for Steve as he hit rock bottom. And it's interesting that later in life, as he did return to Apple, he decentered power away from himself, from himself. And he learned to delegate, learned to assign roles, assign people to lead teams and to trust them. He didn't have to control everything anymore. And that's what allowed the company Apple to flourish later because everybody knew what they were supposed to do. And they didn't feel like they were, you know, they were just in, you know, like, like it was not, let's bow down to Steve Jobs. It was, let's make Apple a great company again.

Yeah.

And that was one of the more emotional parts of the book for me. You know, I mentioned Dan Ahluwain and you were talking about him as well. He actually writes the foreword to your book as former CEO of the Computer History Museum and as a co-founder. And at the end of the book, you talk about the kind of very emotionally conflicted get-togethers of, it was called X Next, right? Like the forums for the X Next employees. And you even said that this was Steve Jobs at his cruelest, and you could almost understand why these co-founders sort of deserted him. And then the complicated feelings they have because they're mourning a friend and a visionary, but they also remember some of that trauma that he generated. So I could imagine it was a very tough time, and this kind of hero's journey did have, you know, some of those really tragic hiccups in the middle.

Right, right. It was a very tragic time. And, um, this was a recurring theme in all my interviews. I interviewed, uh, 111 people from NeXT Computer. Almost all of them said 2 things. They said that NeXT was the most magical place they worked, uh, in terms of the creativity, the talent. It was a true incubator of talent where it's just like, I mean, it blew away anything else they did afterwards. paled in comparison to the sheer force of creativity that Steve Jobs unleashed at NeXT Computer. That's his strength. But then on the flip side, a lot of them said, you know, I carried so much anger inside me. You know, I was bullied, I was embarrassed and harangued in front of my colleagues by Steve. You know, he behaved poorly. I mean, he was just not a good guy to work for. And a lot of them said, you know, I carried that with me for, Almost the rest of my life. I was older and I heard that Steve had died in 2011. And once he died, it changed their outlook. They released that anger and they forgave him because they realized how much he had changed and they realized that his character in his youth, that was not his destiny. We all have agency. We all have the ability to change and to rechannel who we truly are. And this is a story not about simply Steve Jobs succeeding at Apple and building the iPhone. This is a story about how Steve became who he needed to be, which is a much deeper and more profound path to be on. Once the people around Steve realized that he had become who he really was instead of that young brat trying to bully everybody, they were able to show grace and forgiveness because they realized that, you know, the path that he had been on too was so deeply painful and so full of struggle. And look at what he did with it. Look at what he did and how he changed the world.

Jeffrey, I teach classes sometimes that are connected to computer history, and we talk a lot about Xerox PARC and the Xerox Alto and the Xerox Star. And your book really tells the story of how some of the innovations there were commercialize. And Steve Jobs was famous for that, that there's this interview, which I'm sure you've seen in the mid-'90s, he did with, I think, Robert X. Cringely. I know it's a pseudonym and Triumph of the Nerds, something like that was the— and he says there were 3 things we saw at Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface, object-oriented programming, and network computing. And that he says when they developed the Macintosh, they were just doing the graphical user interface. And then later on it was at NeXT, of course, as you talked earlier about. where object-oriented programming, and then we could also talk about network computing, came to the forefront. But they didn't have success with the hardware. They transitioned to being a software company. I'm wondering why, even as a software company with technology that was so far ahead, they didn't quite reach a level of success that you would've expected given how far ahead the software was. We know that today, the software that Underlied NeXTSTEP is still what beats in our Macs and our iPhones today. So how come, even though they had— okay, they shed maybe the very expensive hardware, they have the software, and you recount in the book how it's being ported to HP systems, to Sun systems, even to Intel-based systems, but people still aren't buying it. So why can't they find success as a software company selling NeXTSTEP?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think part of the answer to that is that Apple has passed its history differently. Apple, you know, NeXT Computer. So once, let me start in the year 1996. So Apple acquired NeXT Computer for just over $400 million, which was a lot at the time, especially for a small company like NeXT, which was not profitable. Um, brought Steve Jobs back and then Steve ported NeXTSTEP, his operating system, to Apple. And this is what, uh, allowed for the Apple Renaissance to take place. Once that software was in place, it was so powerful and so customizable. And it had such a great team behind it, Bud Tribble, Avi Tavania, and all these people we've talked about. They built the Apple Renaissance, um, but they built it on top of, uh, NeXT technology. Over the years, the NeXT contributions were forgotten and Apple Uh, went out of its way to kind of rewrite the history, kind of write out the history because, you know, Apple, it's a, it's a very controlling company. You know, it's a company that, you know, wants to control its own narratives. And so whatever Apple did, you know, the reasoning goes, it must've been because of something that Apple did earlier. So the official history is if you go look at like, you know, the way Apple tells it, uh, and I saw this in the archives that there's an Apple archive at Stanford where they have all these, all these old documents. Their story was that there was technology called the Newton, which was developed by Apple, a technology called ARM, you know, A-R-M, which is a hardware technology. And there's a direct line. So like when Apple created this, that's what allowed for the successes later on when Steve Jobs returned. The way it's written is that the NeXT computer team, when they returned to Apple, they were more like side characters helping out Apple as opposed to the core people brought by Steve, it's a matter of, you know, the way that history is written. There's that old saying that history is written by the winners. And, you know, Apple was the winner. I mean, Apple was the one that released the iPhone. So when they go and tell their story, you know, they're not going to say NeXT Computer contributed to this. They're going to say, yeah, this was Steve Jobs. And of course, Steve Jobs was the CEO of Apple. That's just how it is.

You had that blurb though, where, you know, if you still look at the— this is my non-tech you know, expert talking, but if you look at the source code of Mac OS back then, you could still see NS in some of the lines of code for NeXTSTEP, right?

Yep.

And Avi Tavanian's DNA kind of runs through everything from that microkernel idea as well.

Right, right.

Yep.

It's still there. And, you know, I've had private conversations with top Apple executives and, you know, they'll say privately, that all Apple software essentially comes from NeXT, you know, with some exceptions. But they won't say that publicly because that counteracts the official narrative of Apple.

But going even back before Apple buys NeXT and NeXT, it's like a reverse merger, right? And they come over and kind of take over. But in the period from 1993 up to 1996, They're trying to make it as a software company and they're building these partnerships, as you recount in the book so well, with every large workstation manufacturer that will work with them. And I bet people might today not remember Sun Microsystems, but having a deal with Sun Microsystems was a big deal then. Why aren't these deals more successful, even if the operating system is better than the alternatives at the time? If the operating system is better than Windows NT or better than Solaris that Sun is selling. And now you have OpenStep, so you can run the NeXTSTEP software on the same machine that you could have run Solaris on, but people don't see the advantage. Is there, is there a marketing issue? Is it just that the platform, it's already so many years of failure and there's kind of this stigma associated with it? Or is there, is there more of a business or technical reason?

So this is one of the hardest lessons that Steve learned during these years, 1993 to '96, as you said, and it's a matter of timing. So had Steve accepted the IBM deal, had he gone with those federal government and military contracts, NextStep would've been everywhere. It would've been a massive success. But because he put that off, he destroyed those deals. And then later on, he warmed up to them more when he realized he didn't have any other choices. So he told his software engineers, you know, NeXTSTEP itself is, it's failing on NeXT hardware, but we can port it to other people's systems like Sun Microsystems, as you mentioned, uh, HP, Compaq, you know, the, the many Windows NT, these are all hardware and software makers of the day. Um, and he said, well, You know, why don't we just port NeXTSTEP on top of it? And that became another project called OpenSTEP, this, this API, as it's called in, in technology terms. But it was too little, too late, because if you look at the history of software, the mid-1990s was when we were all witnessing the operating system wars, as it's called. There was a race by every major company, you know, Apple, IBM, You know, Sun, which had an OS called Solaris. All these companies were trying to develop, they were trying to develop the operating system of the future. And the one that blew them all away in the end was Windows 95. When Microsoft in 1995 released that Windows, that was the game changer. And that was when Microsoft was effectively a monopoly and they controlled, I mean, I mean, look at like, if you can remember those days, It's like there was no contest. Like nobody used Apple. Everybody used Windows on a PC. And that was that. Apple had like a 2% market share. In that, in that environment, there's no room for NeXTSTEP. And so companies like, you know, Microsoft with, with NT or Sun, they, they said, okay, we'll port NeXTSTEP. But by then it was such a niche product and such a narrow product line that really just appeared to software developers. It was just a side thing for them. It was like, it wasn't even, it didn't factor into any sort of market play. So it's, it's just, it's a question of scale. It's like if NeXT had built that scale, they would have market power, they would have positioning power, but Steve missed that boat. And so he was stuck with this middling software that almost no one used.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But then towards the end of that era, they, they do start to have some success with WebObjects. Can you tell us a little bit about that story? Because it seems like If NeXT hadn't ended up combining with Apple, there might have been another pathway for the company.

So the web, the World Wide Web was naturally at home on NeXT. And the reason is because the web was invented on a NeXT computer. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was at a laboratory in Europe, he got a NeXT computer and he loved this object-oriented programming. It was so perfect. And He created the first ever web on one computer that the computer, you know, sat in his office and he had, he had a piece of, uh, like a, a little, um, you know, like a, a Post-it note on it that said, don't, like, if you turn off this computer, you're turning off the entire World Wide Web. So please, you know, don't, don't shut down this computer by accident. Um, that's how small the web was at the time. So WebObjects came later, 6 years after the web itself was invented. And it was a breakthrough because it solved the problem that Steve was facing at NeXT. The problem was, what is NeXT really all about? What are we built for? What is our home turf? The operating system was not succeeding yet. The hardware had failed. The hardware division was closed and sold off to Canon. So like, what can NeXT actually do that will break through? And it turned out that web, the software that they developed just kind of by accident called WebObjects, This was a solution to the static internet of the time. So, you know, back in the day in the '90s, like I used to fool around on GeoCities and, you know, these, you know, Yahoo, these like old '90s, you could develop your homepage.

Oh, and AngelFire. That was my favorite.

Oh yeah. AngelFire. That AngelFire. There was Excite, the search engine. Amazon was still in its infancy. But the problem with all these websites is that like, if you wanted to search for something on Yahoo, Like, a human actually had to set up the directories. So like, every time you searched for cat pictures, it's like, okay, you get 10 results that show cat pictures in a directory, but it's like somebody's, somebody's going back in there and constantly updating that based on what's on the internet. But web objects solve that problem because they realize that you can make the web dynamic. So when the user queries something, The system can create a website in an instant. So you go on, you know, we take this for granted today. This is like what we all do. But look, you want to buy a car, you go to ford.com, you push, you know, I want a red car, you know, I want the 2026 model. And then it shows you that and it gives you a price and you put it in your cart and buy that. Like, you don't have to interact with a human once. So that was massive and that was a revolution because that's what laid the foundation for the web as we now know it, all of e-commerce stems from that. So that was the breakthrough because it was suddenly like, oh, okay, so now we know what we're built for. Like, this is a web company. This is not just any old software company. And so NeXT went from being this backwater, this failure in Silicon Valley to suddenly we're at the cutting edge. The web is new and we're going to seize on this revolution.

Well, I feel like if there was anything that could have kept Steve Jobs's attention, because at this point, Just before the Apple merger, he almost seemed to be getting bored and disillusioned with what NeXT had become, that it was going to be another company serving like boring entrepreneurial folks. I remember the vignette you had about CyberSlice joining for a discussion about WebObjects, and that finally really excited Steve Jobs, it seemed. And he was sending, you know, NeXT employees there to help coach them and engineers there so that he could have a slice of pizza delivered to him on stage. And it almost seems like WebObjects could have kind of kept his interest, you know, but even with that, you know, the Apple merger happened and, um, WebObjects became sort of the backbone of the iTunes Store basically. Right, right, right.

So yeah, the company, you know, there were 2 big software products. There was NeXTSTEP, which was the operating system. And then there was WebObjects, which, uh, when Steve returned to Apple, that ultimately the way that that was ported, that became the foundation for the iTunes Store, which itself was a revolution in, you know, the way that we purchase music. And that's what allowed for the Apple Renaissance to happen. I mean, that's what, you know, that's why the iPod got so popular. You know, anybody could buy music, 99 cents a song back in the day, solves piracy. You put it on your iPod and you walk around campus, you know, looking cool with this, these, these white headphones. Steve was able to take all this NeXT technology and, you know, Apple being a failure at the time, he was able to divert it to first music, you know, and then to this phone that was like the next step up from music, the iPhone. And then, you know, from there he went into these more powerful laptops and, you know, the MacBook Pros and so forth. So it really was a roundabout story as to how he went from NeXT and returned to Apple and made this thing a success. Like, there was no straight line. It was not Steve Jobs returns and saves Apple. It was, you know, it was What, 12 years at NeXT Computer? And then it was another, you know, 8 years at least returning to Apple and building it. I mean, that's 20 years of his life and the life of his closest people sacrificed to make Apple what it truly was.

That's why I called it the Odyssey before, right? I saw Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and I was like, oh, this is very much like Steve Jobs in exile.

Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, I wish I had the storytelling talents of a guy like Christopher Nolan, but I guess this is my attempt to cast him in that light.

Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit as we get to the end of our interview here about the whole narrative around NeXT in the media around Apple. So when I was 13 years old, I read the book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. This was like the year 2000. And that author, I remember, right, Alan Deutschman, he made the narrative very much that NeXT was an example of Steve's megalomania. And then there's been more recent books like Becoming Steve Jobs came out a bit after the official biography, and there was a more tempered look at the NeXT years. And then your book is the first, like, really deep dive on the NeXT years and really explains why the company was important in the history of computing. And why it was an evolution for Steve Jobs and why it really made him the person that he became. So why has there been this change in narrative and why did some of the earlier books get it wrong? There's so many things in your book that, that are so clear with the deep research that you did that it seems like earlier books on Apple and Steve Jobs either just exclude or they, they actively kind of painted from the wrong angle. So why were they missing these important elements that you were able to capture?

So everybody has their own contribution to make, and depending on the piece of history that you pick off and try to focus on, that changes. It's like when you look at a painting from different angles, sometimes that painting, the nature of it changes. You notice different things, you see different details and colors. I think it's very much that case for Steve Jobs. I also think that one of the problems that a lot of biographers have had, and this is not just Steve Jobs, this is biography in general, there's the biographer's problem, and it's that the more in the moment you are, the less enlightenment, the less illumination you're going to see on the subject you're writing about because You know, a lot of people, when Steve Jobs was alive, a lot of people didn't want to really talk about him. You know, they worked for him, they had Apple contracts. It actually wasn't until Walter Isaacson, you know, wrote his biography that Steve Jobs sat down with a biographer. I mean, that was like the first time he truly sat down with somebody and told his entire life story start to finish. But now that, you know, we've, we're now 15 years out of Steve Jobs's death. You know, he died in 2011. It's 2026. There's been a lot of time now for people who were around him to, you know, to go back into their attic and to look at the old memos and emails they had stored away, things they forgot about. You know, they have old CD-ROMs sitting around, you know, that contain all kinds of, you know, the old videos they took of Steve Jobs giving talks at the company. There's been a lot of time to allow his legacy to gestate and to, you know, get digested. And, you know, we've had time now to understand what the true meaning of his life was. So, you know, if I had written this book in the year, like, 2005, I don't think it would've been clear at all what the significance of NeXT Computer was. The iPhone hadn't even been released. and the story would be incomplete. But now that we see, you know, this confluence of legacies, we see the software legacy, you know, the code, the NeXTSTEP operating system, WebObjects, you know, spreading far and wide across the world. Apple is this massive company now. You know, we see the people at NeXT, how they returned to Apple, and then they spread across the Valley too, and they all became luminaries in technology. We see friends and family of Steve Jobs who were more constrained back in the day. They couldn't really go into detail about him because there were just too many sensitivities. I mean, he was not a nice guy and you don't want to speak ill of your boss, the guy who writes your paycheck. So you see this in all biography. It's biographies of FDR, of Abraham Lincoln. The further you get away from the period of that person's life, the sharper the resolution becomes, and you can dive in and see in more detail what was really going on.

You know, and piggybacking on Kopech's question and actually, and what you said as well, Jeffrey, about how it was 12 years at NeXT, and then it was almost like 8 years sort of landing in Apple and developing Apple. I thought that it was a big sign of his maturity when you emphasized when he was returning to Apple, there was almost this welcoming ceremony where he was going to land in a helicopter and there was going to be everyone holding lights or candles or something. And he sort of rejected that, right? He said like, no, I'm coming on as an advisor. Even when he was CEO, he was iCEO first. And, you know, I thought it was interesting the way that your book handles this versus David Pogue, who we had for Apple at 50. And, you know, David Pogue was, I believe, still at Macworld in '97 for the Boston Macworld Expo. He would've been in the seats, right, covering this. And the way that he presents beaming in Bill Gates's visage, almost like the original 1984 ad, is almost a moment of ignominy and disgust, and the fans sort of turning their backs on it. You describe it a bit more even-handed, and you make it almost like the culmination of Steve Jobs's transformation and his maturing. And I thought that was really, really interesting because other Jobs bios really focus on the pushback from the fans over that. You really come back and say, you stand back and say, wow, what a big moment for Steve's evolution, which I really liked. And Bill Gates was a factor in this book, but not so much as other Apple books that we've read as well. And I thought that was a great take too. But before we kind of move on to closing out the interview, any thoughts on on the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs's relationship. And you picture, you know, you have Steve— Bill Gates at Steve Jobs's funeral, the private funeral that they did. And, you know, Bill Gates didn't seem as much the villain in this book as others is basically what I'm saying. Any thoughts though on that relationship?

I think that that relationship was one of the more insightful relationships in the life of Steve Jobs because they were never completely enemies, but they were never completely friends either. They were They were rivals and they, you know, they would hug and fight. It was that sort of relationship. What was so fascinating about their relationship was how they both came from vastly different traditions. Microsoft, Bill Gates was, you know, was the open box. It was the customizable, you know, you can put your software in any computer and you can do what you want with it. Whereas, you know, Apple and Steve Jobs was all about the tight control, the closed box, you know, I'm not going to give you any extra ports. You know, you're going to use the software as I intended. And the user experience for Steve was what was, you know, the beautiful part. Bill didn't really care as much about that part, but the significance of the relationship is so important because, you know, you talk to diehard Apple fans and they'll say, yes, of course, Steve Jobs's approach was superior because it was, you know, beautiful UI. It was simple. It was easy. It was humanized. You know, the computer. smiled as you turned it on. You got that little Apple smiley face. It was truly technology ascending to the level of beautiful art. And then you talk to people who used PCs and Microsoft Windows, and they say, that's not the key thing. What matters is, do you have a powerful enough operating system with plenty of software that has plenty of developers? Because they like having that flexibility. to develop what they want. You know, a Microsoft Windows developer back in the '90s could make a word processor and it would, it could land on every single PC in the world. Whereas, you know, Apple controlled such a little market share that nobody wanted to develop software for Apple. They'd be trapped in this beautiful but small ecosystem. So you ask both sides, you know, it's like crossing a moat and there are 2 fortresses and they both look at each other and say, you know, oh, those guys, you know, we're superior and those guys are just barbarians over there. But that's not the truth at all. And especially in retrospect, we can now see that one philosophy is not better than the other. It depends on the time and the circumstances and the context that they're operating in. The Apple ecosystem was only possible ironically because Steve was willing to make concessions earlier at NeXT. Once he failed, He did those handshakes and he said, okay, you know, I will, I will be more flexible in my software. But the goal in the end was to build enough market share, a user base and a developer base that you have power in the market. And so that's why, you know, Steve was able to walk in with that iPhone and dictate terms to carriers and, you know, dictate how the design is going to be done and dictate to developers how they're going to have to make their software. They could only go along with that because his company was growing and successful and massive. Bill Gates, you know, he did what he did and Microsoft is still extremely successful. I mean, it's one of the 4 or 5 biggest companies. You know, I think it's a trillion-dollar company now or more. I haven't checked recently, but you can see like, you know, there's no victor here. It's not like Apple wins and Microsoft loses. I mean, they're both highly, highly successful. So that's the lesson that I take away from that relationship. It's a yin and yang. You need both forces and they both have things to learn and to adopt from each other.

Yeah.

And ultimately it wasn't a surrender to Bill Gates in any way. It wasn't Steve Jobs becoming a corporate cog. It was finally Steve Jobs realizes, I want to align with the customer. The customer wants Microsoft Office and Microsoft Word, and this is a way for us to achieve that and deliver that for the customer and keep the company successful. and keep the company growing so that he could then have the full control over the ecosystem, like you mentioned.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah, that's exactly it. It's, you know, you got to make concessions. You have to be strategic and you have to plan ahead.

Well, Jeffrey, it's really a fantastic book. I've read almost every book on Apple and Steve Jobs, and you added something new. You did the deep research that really enlightened this period in a way that nobody else ever has. Is there anything else about the book that we didn't talk about that you want to tell our audience, or do you feel like we got a good coverage here?

I think that covers a great deal. The one thing I would add is that, you know, as I got deeper and deeper into this, I realized just how universal this story is, this wilderness, this middle chapter. And I think there's something that we can all learn from it because a lot of us, you know, have to go through the wilderness at some point in life. And you go back to ancient literature, the, you know, the Epic of Gilgamesh with the ancient Babylonians, You know, Judaic and Christian texts with the story of Moses in the desert. You know, you go forward in time, you know, you can even go recently to Star Wars, literally the 3-act structure. The middle chapter is, you know, the hard part where the hero has to struggle and learn and is outcast, where these lessons must happen. So you see it, it's quite universal, both, you know, in the West and outside the West. I was a foreign correspondent for many years. I studied a lot of languages and cultures, and I've seen these stories in other places too. So, you know, there's a human element here that goes deeper than Steve Jobs. It's a question of, you know, when you run into that wall, when you get hit with that brick, you know, in the face, you know, are you going to retreat and give up, or are you going to find a way to get out of this predicament, a way to get out of this wilderness and get to the other side stronger and more confident and ready to make your mark.

And I love how you say, don't aspire to be Steve Jobs in the endgame. Aspire to have that journey like Steve Jobs had that will make you a better leader, a better professional, a better innovator. And I think that's a great takeaway for our audience and I love how you mentioned bardo as well, the Buddhist term for the space between death and rebirth. And who was it? Andrew, I'm zoning on his last name, who had mentioned that.

Yeah.

Andrew Stowe.

Yeah. And just so very cool. And I thought it was great instruction for our mid-career and our early career professionals who listen to our podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a beautiful story. So thanks for having me, guys.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Jeffrey. Of course, we'll put links to the book and to your social media in the show notes. And I know I speak for all 3 of us when I say it was a complete honor having you on the show.

Well, thanks for having me. It was an honor to be here and great to chat.

Well, that was so amazing to hear from Geoffrey. Kevin, tell us about what we're going to be reading for our next episode.

Rockefellers, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. We've read about some of the greatest entrepreneurs in modern history, and next month we're going to read about one of the first. For our next episode, we'll be reading The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by TJ Stiles. We're breaking down how the Commodore went from captaining a single ferry in New York Harbor and Staten Island to dominating American steamships, consolidating the nation's railroads, and creating the playbook for the modern American corporation. We're really looking forward to this one. We'll hope you join us.

Thanks for that, Kevin. Okay, David, Kevin, is there anything you want to plug and how can our listeners get in touch with you?

You can follow me on X @DavidGSchort.

You can follow me on X at Hudaks Basement, H-U-D-A-K-S Basement.

And you can follow me on X. I'm at Dave Kopak, D-A-V-E-K-O-P-E-C. I want to mention that David Short is becoming a little bit of a cooking influencer on X. It's growing. I mean, it's starting out right now. It's growing. Every post he makes, it's getting dozens of likes. So it's going to happen. Very nice work, David. Don't forget to subscribe to us on your podcast player of choice. Business Books and Company comes out with new episodes approximately on a monthly schedule, and we need you to like us, to subscribe to us, to follow us. And we also have links to our YouTube channel in the show notes. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next month.

And if any of our listeners and subscribers want to go in on a side of beef with Short and I, make sure to let us know. And we're happy to do that, right, Short?

No, but I am hoping to pursue this meatfluencing.

I love how— is that a real thing or did you coin that term meatfluencing?

I just made it up. I'm sure someone else has made it up before though.

Ah, I love it. All right.