Behind the Bastards - Part Four: The Terrible Secret of Steve Jobs

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Ed and Robert conclude the epic story of Steve Jobs with a look at how his peculiarities determined the shape and horrible abusive nature of much of the modern consumer electronics industry.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Too many people have done that. So I'll just say Bono. I don't know. Sophie, how do you feel about the title I've got on this episode for us? Should I read it out to the audience? Should they know? I mean, I could go with or without.

Okay, well, Sophie has like shat on all of the titles. The original title for this series was Steve Jobs, the Hitler of computers. Sophie said was not appropriate. It's not that I said it was appropriate. I said it could very much be taken out of context, which could be damaging to not only- So I would like my name not to associate with the word Hitler. Yeah.

Yeah. To be safe for, you know, not just you, but also all the lovely people that we are able to employ. I've made peace that my name will always be tied to Hitler, so, you know, I'm like Germany in that regard, but for a very different reason. Mainly podcasts for me, Germany, with some other things. But I think my other title is problematic free, right?

I mean, it was just kind of... boring. Steve Jobs 4? Electric Boogalore? That's not bad. That was not the title I vetoed. I vetoed Steve Jobs sucks or something dumb. That was... Plumbing the depths of the human experience with that one.

Which I was like, you can do better than that. It was 1.30pm, I'd just gotten up, you know? I hadn't had coffee yet. The crack of noon. So we're gonna talk for a little bit before we get into the last great act of Steve Jobs. The stuff that everyone actually knows him from, right? Like obviously people in the 80s and 90s

knew him as the Apple guy. But when people talk about him now, very few of them are thinking of like the Apple II or even like the original Macintosh. They think about the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store, like everything Apple is today, right? So first I wanna get into before we talk about how he got to all that shit.

I wanna talk about part of why Apple fell to pieces after he left. We've talked a lot about his mistakes, his misjudgments, and it's important to note, he was not very good at guiding Apple. No one else was either. So in early 1991, not long after Steve left, the idea of a handheld personal digital assistant

was pitched to CEO John Scully on an airplane. He's on some private flight and some guy's like, hey, you see these like Palm Pilot things people are starting to carry? What if we made an Apple one, right? I don't even think Palm pilots are, sorry, it's 91. Yeah, so he's like, you know, these things that are kind of evolutions of the beeper

that people have started to carry that can like keep a calendar, maybe you can take some notes on it, but they're pretty primitive. Someone tells him like, hey, this could be, you know, what saves Apple. Jobs had been out of the company for like five years at that point. And I think it's one of those things, if this had been introduced when he'd still been there, I think he would have fought like hell against it. Because it was a bad idea. And it was obviously not where computing was

going. Right? People don't want like a personal digital assistant is it may seem like a smartphone, but the vision is kind of fundamentally limited. These are not connected devices, right? These are basically fancy calendars that people carry with them. And so it's really different from the kind of idea, it's seen as like an executive assistant effectively, more than it is like something that a hundred million people are going to keep in their pockets at all times.

Because it is kind of a tablet computer, there's a tendency for some people to see it as being ahead of its time. I don't really know how much I agree with that because it's dog shit. It does not work for fuck, right? As envisioned, the Newton would have let people take notes, right, like you're supposed to be able to write

with your handwriting and it was gonna translate it. And all of these devices for like 10 years, all of them promise this and none of them do it. They going to translate it. And all of these devices for like 10 years, all of them promised this and none of them do it. They could not do it. It was like by modern standards, dog shit, right? It took them a while too. It took them like 20 years.

Yeah, it takes them a bit. They improve the Newton. Some people will say they made it pretty good, but like, I don't know that it was ever good enough that people would want to use. And when the Newton came out, the fact that the handwriting feature is borked on it is like such a news story that Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury spends a full week making fun of it. He hadn't even like used a Newton, but he'd read bad reviews and he was just like,

I'm blown by the fucking Doonesbury guy. Yeah, Doonesbury man. Jesus. Oh, yeah. If you want to fight the Doonesbury guy in 1991, you'd best come correct. That was his apex. Jesus. So part of the failure came down to the fact that Scully was obsessed with the idea that this device should fit easily in his pocket.

And there were like behind the scenes, people are joking about like, should we just buy him shirts with bigger pockets? Like, he's doing the same thing. He took too much from jobs where he's like, I'm just going to lay down the aesthetics, but not really care about how possible or impossible that is. But that's not really why this fails.

It's just that PDAs are not something people wanted, right? They wanted a connected device, and that's key to what a smartphone was. But like a Palm Pilot type deal, you weren't playing your music on it. That might have gotten it to sell. They were kind of big. They were just like, they were toys for rich businessmen to impress less rich businessmen with, right?

That was the primary use category. So you can understand how a guy like John Scully could get sold on the idea, but it was a very bad idea. Yeah, people who don't do real work. Yes, yes. I get why you want this. idea. Yeah, people who don't do real work thought these things were amazing. These people had assistants as well, so the actual point of this thing was, well... Pointless. Yeah.

It was to brag. Yeah. Jobs himself took joy in insulting the Newton in public and his new rival John Scully, his old friend. When Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and he returned to the company in 1997, he expressed particular distaste for the stylus. Isaacson writes, "'God gave us 10 styluses,' he would say,

waving his fingers. "'Let's not invent another.'" And that is like, this is, you know, he's being a dick about it, but he's got a legitimate insight there. There's a lot of debate in this period. He does, but he found the biggest wanker way of saying it. He did, he did. To his new, the people who work at the company, right? That is kind of, you might want to be a little more artful than that. But styluses were bad ideas, right?

We can all agree on that. He is right. We want, like in order for this to be a universal device, it has to be something that you just fucking touch. So Scully would later argue that the Newton helped save Apple and this is kind of true, but like not in a way that matters for him. Basically to build the Newton, Apple had to help fund the design of the ARM processor and Apple was eventually able to sell their interest in ARM for like a billion dollars, right?

So that's kind of what saves Apple, which is like not really of what saves Apple. Which is like, not really the Newton saving Apple. You got lucky. This is like fucking Sam Bankman Fried investing in Anthropic and making a bunch of money after losing his shirt on everything else. It's like, yeah, technically everyone might get made whole, but you didn't know that was gonna happen, bro!

That is kind of funny that everything good that Apple managed to do seemed to be by accident. Or at least Steve Jobs. Yeah, up to, I mean, this one, that's a John Scully win. I'll give that one to him. But like, this is an example of them being similar people. Which probably really pissed off Steve Jobs. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, he hates Scully after this point, at least for a very long time. Maybe he made peace with him at the end there, I don't know. No. But in general, the instincts that Jobs had had up to this point in his life towards simplicity, restricting user control, curating the ecosystem, these are all the impulses that in the 21st century

would lead Apple to staggering success. The iPod, the Mac G3, which I actually think comes out in 99, and the iPhone all received criticism and still do because of how locked down they are, right? When the iMac comes out, you can see inside the guts of this thing, but you're not meant to fiddle with it like you do with the PC, right?

It's not like my dad opening up our box and throwing in some extra RAM. You're not really gonna be doing that with an iMac. Right. Yeah, unless you really know your shit, I guess. And Apple's gonna make it as hard as possible to do that even if you do know your shit. When Jobs first returns to the company,

he holds a meeting with the top designers and executives, and he tells them, "'The problem with Apple today "'is that none of our products have any sex. "'His solution bafflingly is the iMac.'" Which, I'm sorry, it comes out in 98. And I guess people do think it's sexy. I think it's more that it's cute

than it's something like your grandma. I could fuck an iMac. Yeah, you could fuck a fucking iMac. That's the Apple campaign we never saw. It's just like a bunch of dudes looking at iMacs being like, yeah, I'll fuck an iMac. I could. You're not gonna bring up the fucking dune popcorn bucket

here, Robert? No, but I mean, look, Sophie, you're well capable of more than one love in our life. Oh, okay. So the Mac was one of the most limited personal computers on the market, but it was friendly, and 800,000 sold in the first five months. So this is like, this does even like,

about as well as you'd actually hope the original Mac would do, right? And Apple turns its first profit since 1995. Now, one of the first things Jobs does when he gets back is he reaches back out to Lee Clow and like the team at Chayate Day who'd done that 1984 campaign. And Jobs is like, hey, please come back

and make a special pitch to the Apple board going against like your usual practices, right? Cause like Clow's a big enough name that he's like, I don't pitch to the Apple board going against like your usual practices, right? Cause like, Clow's a big enough name that he's like, I don't pitch to companies. If they want me, they come to me, right? But Clow agrees for Jobs to do this. And Jobs cries, like remembering this moment years later to Walter Isaacson, which is such an odd moment

to get choked up over given, you know, his daughter. I love my brand. Yeah, this chokes me up. stuff. I love my brand. Yeah. This chokes me up. This really chokes me up. It was so clear that Lee loved Apple so much. Here was the best guy in advertising and he hadn't pitched in 10 years,

yet here he was and he was pitching his heart out because he loved Apple as much as we did. He and his team had come up with this brilliant idea, think different, and it was 10 times better than anything the other agencies showed. It choked me up and it still makes me cry to think about it. Both the fact that Lee cared so much and how brilliant his think different idea was.

Every once in a while, this is where it gets really funny. Every once in a while, I find myself in the presence of purity, purity of spirit and love, and I always cry. It just reaches in and grabs me. That was one of those moments. There was a purity about it that I will never forget. I cried in my office as he was showing me the idea and I still cry when I think about it.

Again, this man pretended his daughter wasn't his daughter for years, but it's like I weep at the beauty of Lee Klaus. Think different campaign. I love my brands so much. I love brands. I feel nothing in the face of my own blood. But like, yeah, that campaign.

My God. What a fucking idiot. And it's, you know, I remember as a kid, I was like a snotty PC gamer, right? There used to be a, it's less of a thing now. There's a big PC Mac divide. And one of the things- Oh no, no. I used to work at a PC gaming magazine.

I know. Yeah. And one of the things people would no, no. I used to work at a PC gaming magazine. I know. Yeah. And one of the things people would bring up that was valid as a critique of Macs is that like, well, most games don't even fucking work on them, right? Because you have to like specifically make it to work on the kind of architecture they had, right? This is in part because Macs are so big now, like most really big companies that are making games for a PC are making like a Mac port now.

But like that was not really the case at the time. It's also a bit easier with, well it was with the Intel processors, but now you've got, anyway. Yeah, I'm not, anyway, it used to be much more of a thing. And I think a lot of people, I remember at the time seeing this campaign, I was like, well, how are you thinking differently if you can't even like modify your own machine?

But those of us who got snotty at the inconsistencies in the message of this campaign versus Apple's actual products were failing to see something important that was not lost on Steve Jobs. The future market for these machines, it was not people who like technology, right? The think different campaign was not based on selling people on like here's the hardware, here's what you can like, here's what games this will play, right? Here's how well you can like do this or that. It was based on the feeling of creativity, right?

And making people think of great creative minds from the past and kind of see themselves as, maybe I could be like that too if I have a creative enough machine, right? And jobs, this is a legitimate insight, right? We're not gonna dwell on processor speed. We're not gonna throw a bunch of stats out. We're going to relate these stories of great artists and geniuses from history, and

in order to embrace a vibe, that's how we're going to make our case for the iMac is the vibe. This is a vibe-based computing system. And that makes so much fucking money, it's crazy. That's a super, super good way to sell a computer, it turns out. But also there was a stinky vibe to computing. It was still even, it was a fringe nature. You either used one at work and maybe you looked at the internet.

So we're talking like the late 90s right now. It was still... Yeah, so you, I mean, I played EverQuest back then. I used PCMIA cards, Play Ultima Online before that. Yeah, gaming and PCs in general were very much work. There was personal computing, but it wasn't to the extent it is now by any measure. Yeah. And the iMac is definitely a sizeable movement in that direction, right?

And you know, some of this is that a lot of the success comes down to Jobs understanding both what the market actually does want and understanding when someone has a good idea for how to market it. Now, thankfully they didn't go with their entire original concept for the Think Different ad. It was initially set to the Seal song, Crazy, cause Jobs viewed him as one of our greatest living artists. The next version included a reading of a Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken.

Steve himself, this is the funniest part to me, Steve Jobs' suggestion for the Think Different Add is we should have all of the text be cut up pieces of speeches from Robin Williams' character in Dead Poets Society. He fell so hard for that movie! This guy is like, the average Instagram user. It is really, that's so basic! A very vile, paper thin kind of philosophy. Not even quoting like William Blake or some shit.

Not trying to be like, flowery with Shakespeare, now he's just like, I saw a movie once. The advertising guy made me cry. Cause it was beautiful how you think different. Yeah, he taught me how people should be encouraged to embrace their special gifts. I'm going to go scream at my daughter now. He taught me it was okay to be weird. Yeah. Time to go be really abusive to a bunch of engineers. I'm gonna go yell at a child now. I'm so inspired. So eventually Apple opted to write their own, or the ad team opted to write their own original

piece for the Think Different ad, which wound up being titled Here's to the Crazy Ones. And I don't want to read the text of all this. I will tell you, it ends on the lines, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. Steve wrote some of it, including a line about how, like, some people are the ones who push the human race forward.

And he clearly is thinking about himself here, right? Like, this is clearly, this affects him because he sees himself as one of these misfit, rebel troublemakers who saw things differently and moved the world forward. Definitely saw things differently, some things, and definitely moved the human race. Mason- Smell different. Jason- Yeah, I'll give him that.

Forward, well, some of that's debatable, I guess. It depends on how you feel about some of the stuff we're going to talk about later in this episode. Mason- It is really funny though, but everything you're saying about this guy is, he was actually very standard. He thought he was this big, daring... He clearly was able to notice trends and whatever. He had a couple of legitimate insights, and he was always very, very conventional in a

lot of ways. And I really think different in the sense that I try and sell something for a profit, and I also hire the fucking Pepsi marketing guy so we can do the thing that everyone else is doing. And my vibes come from movies. And Robert Frost. Yeah, he's the same as everyone else when it comes to like, yeah, let's lay off some people, a bunch of people when we don't need to, to boost the stock price.

Yeah, let's bring in a marketing guy to run things. Because obviously running a company is all about sales, you know? Like a lot of these kind of basic corporate things, he's the same as everybody else, and he's like to an extent the same as every other stingy rich guy in a lot of ways. He has this sense of aesthetics, right? Both in terms of how to market things and in terms of like,

what do people want a device to look at? That is like, that's his real, that's the thing that I think is responsible for a lot of his success. And unlike the 1984 ad, this here's to the crazy one ads, moves a shitload of computers, right? Isaacson's book gives an amusing description of the struggle to find a narrator for this.

Quote, in order to evoke the spirit of dead poet society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn't do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams' wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks at a fundraising dinner featuring Bill

Clinton that fall. Jobs pulled the president aside and asked to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfus." Oh god. I Richard Dreyfus I like Dreyfus but like but yeah step down though, it is funny that like Robin Williams his wife gets a call from Steve Jobs. She's like no do you not put this? Room with Steve Jobs. It's no one keep reading that love. That's love, right?

Yeah, that's someone who legitimately is looking out for your best interests It's no one. Keep reading that Aladdin script. That's love. That's love, right? Yeah. That's someone who legitimately is looking out for your best interests. And also, like Robin Williams had horrifying depression. I wouldn't put Steve Jobs anywhere near him. No, no. Manipulative cretin. I think Tom Hanks could have given him what for, but that's probably why Tom Hanks had no interest in working with him.

It would have been fun seeing him and Maya Angelou have a conversation though. My god. So speaking of Jobs' friendship with Bill Clinton, you probably will not be surprised to hear that our former president reached out to his buddy Steve, masterful manipulator of the media, for advice on a little problem he was having. Here's Business Insider. Quote, in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, President Bill Clinton called Steve Jobs

to ask him what he should do about it. Steve Jobs reportedly gave Clinton this advice. I don't know if you did it, but if so, you've got to tell the country. There was apparently a long silence on the other end of the line. Later, when Chelsea Clinton was attending Stanford, Steve Jobs loaned the Clintons a country house nearby

so he could spend time with her." What a fascinating relationship. I call you when I've cheated on my wife publicly in front of the entire country. You give me a house when I want to hang out with my daughter. Great. What a strange relationship. Not problematic. Nothing weird happening there.

I don't know how much, because this is, I think, comes from Jobs talking to Isaacson a lot of this, but I don't know how much. I guess I don't disbelieve that Bill Clinton would call Steve Jobs for advice on infidelity. I kind of don't believe Jobs' first response was, if you did it, you've got to tell the country. That doesn't seem like a Steve Jobs. Mason- Yeah, do the right thing. Also, good lord, the conspiracy theorists hearing this kind of stuff must be going nuts.

Steeve- Yeah, it is really funny. Mason- This is like the elite talking. Steeve- Yeah. Yeah, this is the elite. It's always framed as being so much more exciting than it is. They're definitely both they're definitely like both people who have done some damage, but their conversations are about like, shit, shit, everyone caught me cheating. What do I do? And him being him saying something else and then lying later that he said to tell the nation. Yeah. What Steve Jobs probably said was, well, you're fully justified. First of all, first

of all, you tried just like not talking to anyone about it? You're a beautiful soul. Yeah. Can you have her murdered? Yeah. You're the person. You could do that, right? No, no. No, Steve. It is interesting to me that Steve was willing to lend Bill and Hillary a house so they can see their daughter, where she's at Stanford. What a fucking weird thing. Lending people houses. He has a very different reaction to Lisa. She gets into, I think, Harvard. And Steve is angry at her because she wants to go to college

and she's kind of like, well, you're rich. I feel like you can pay for it, right? He's like, I'm a dropout. Why don't you become a dropout? Then he takes her to Hawaii on a trip with his family and repeatedly is like, hey, sure would be better to just have a vacation every year family and repeatedly is like, hey, sure would be better to just have a vacation every year than pay for your college, huh? Don't you just wanna go on vacation

every year instead of go to college? Like, he kinda tries to briber with trips to Hawaii if she'll drop out? ALICE How about we do both, you rich fuck? RILEY Yeah, come on man, you are Steve Jobs. ALICE I had to eat out of the trash as a child when you humiliated me in a Dave and Buster's. Like fucking... Like, I should go to Hawaii and go to college. It'd be one thing if he had a principal, I'm not gonna pay for you once you're an adult

or whatever, but what he does instead is he starts paying for her to go to college, and then in her second semester he cuts her out and she has to find out about it when the school calls her. The fuck? And he's, what tells you about this, so Steve has some neighbors, his mansion's neighbors, who were like some of his friends, but they meet Lisa and they see how he treats Lisa. And it kind of turns them off of Steve.

And when she just comes to them, because she doesn't know what else to do when he's like refusing to pay for her tuition. And they're like, well, you can just live with us outside of school and we'll pay for your tuition because we're all so rich and this isn't really that much money to us. My God. Which is like, yeah.

Everyone wipes Steve Jobs' ass for him. But the smell of it, he didn't do it for himself. A lot of ass wiping goes on for this man. Yeah. This guy would have been just a failure. Had these had like one person just like, no, no. Fuck it. Yeah. Fuck off, Steve. Yeah. So, yeah, a huge part of the new Apple is the industrial design genius of Johnny Ive. As chief design officer for Apple, Ive was largely responsible for the look and feel of the iMac, MacBook, Air, iPhone, and iPod.

Because the whole tablet and smartphone ecosystem today is made in the image of Apple products, it can be easy to forget what a sea change they were from what had come before. I was one of those weird nerds who had a friend of mine that gave me their, it was some sort of Microsoft running PDA, like a year or two before the iPhone came out.

And all I could really do with it was like take notes and I could play like a fucking eight bit version of Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which is all I had ever wanted from a computer up to that point in my life. And I was very happy with this thing. But people didn't like this stuff. It was like heavy, it couldn't communicate with anything.

It was just kind of a real pain in the ass. And they all, you all had to like use a stylist to input commands. You had to like learn a gesture language with the stylist. It wasn't like intuitive or whatever. And I've kind of one of the things that makes him important is he's got this like sense of what do people want to hold in their hand?

What feels good? Like what is the kind of thing that people will not just use, but adopt as part of their life and fucking line up outside of a store in order to get the latest model of, right? And Jobs falls in love with Johnny. He calls him his spiritual partner. And Jobs' wife would later tell Isaacson, most people in Steve's life are replaceable, but not Johnny.

Mason- Steve forgot an idea for a new watch. He must have just called him later, Steve got a new idea. Yeah, he's the only guy Steve would pick up the phone for. It's very funny to me that his wife is like, he could replace all of us, but this man, this man who makes a good phone. Steve Jobs' only real love. The man who was nice at making phones out of metal. Now the success of the new Apple also owed a lot to Jobs' only real love, the man who was nice at making phones out of metal. Now, the success of the new Apple also owed a lot to Jobs' gut.

His appreciation for the way I've designed products was part of it, but his dogged understanding of what people didn't want to hold in their pocket was part of it. A big part of the iPhone's initial success, Jobs, again, he's certainly, he was kind of beyond his technical capacity when Wozniak was building the Apple 2.

He is well beyond it for the iPhone. A lot of his job with the iPhone is looking at the different iterations of it before market and being like, it's not ready yet, it's not ready yet, it's not ready yet. And I don't know how to judge that in an objective lens other than that the iPhone sells like the iPhone, right? Clearly he was right, you know? Mason- But also, that's one thing that Jobs really did say is one thing he really had, which was he knew when something was ready. Vision Pro wouldn't have gone out under his watch.

Spence- I don't think so. Mason- No. Spence- No. Mason- And honestly, that is the big change upon Apple. They'll shove shit out the door. Spence- Yeah, and even they'll start... Apple, the news right now is they just cancelled their self-driving car. I don't think Jobs ever starts that program, because I think he might partner with an automotive company, sure, but like, get into the car business? Like no, man, I don't think that's really something he would've...

And if he would've got into it and then had to cancel it, he would've laid off the people in a much more literal sense. Yeah. I think we would have learned if he'd lived longer a lot about him, because he didn't live past the era of his competence, right? He understood smartphones and tablets and computers and what people wanted out of them, how they wanted to use them, what the future was of that. Once we move, because we're watching the industry scramble. It's why shit like AI and before that fucking NFTs

and before that, you know, self-driving tech and all this shit has these different like periods of like absolute obsessions because nobody really knows what the future, AI is the thing that feels most like it, right? Because it impressed people so much when they saw how far chat GPT was. So everyone is jumping on that bandwagon.

We would actually have learned a lot about Steve's actual level of brilliance if he'd gotten to this point, because I do wonder, would he have been like, no, NFTs, clearly bullshit, self-driving tech, it's not going to get there as fast as people want. You know? He wouldn't have liked crypto because he didn't own the ecosystem. I suspect he would not have fallen for crypto. He would not have touched anything where he did not control the entire end-to-end process. He would have been like, what the fuck?

People couldn't own part of a thing I built? I think there is maybe a version of him where he's kind of doing the Musk loop where he like follows Musk to try to make an electric car when he sees how well Tesla does. I don't know that that's the case. Maybe it's more likely it wouldn't have. But we don't, I mean, he doesn't get enough for us to know.

When he's finally passed his depth of understanding, would he have just scrambled like everyone else for bullshit? Or would he have been like, well, fuck, I don't know what to do. But I'm not gonna jump on every bad wagon. Yeah, he made the decision to, he did actually. Yeah, it was all his choices. Yeah, we are building to that thankfully.

So while the iMac was a successful product, it was the iPod that first made a massive impact on daily life outside of the world of computing for Apple. And you young listeners might not remember this, but back around at the turn of the century, there was this big kerfuffle over piracy and the recording industry. Most cool people like me were stealing all of their music

and occasionally the RIA would catch one of us and send us to fucking prison for the crime of sharing Matchbox 20 albums, right? For downloading Happy Birthday. Rob Thomas related prison sentences. Yeah, yeah. And people responded to this largely by pirating even harder.

Jobs, part of his conception of iTunes is I'm gonna put a stop to that, right? And he does to a significant extent. Like the iTunes is kind of what kills piracy as it had been as like this thing that all young people are doing. And it's because Jobs understands the people who've been arguing for piracy are right. The big thing piracy advocates would always say

is we're not stealing from artists, we're fucking up the recording industry, but they fuck over artists, and by, for free, spreading the music these people are making, we're overall benefiting them. Now, that's debatably true. There's a lot of ways in which artists have been heard, especially with the era of Spotify.

I'm not papering over that. But what was accurate about that, that Job saw, is that, well, they are right, that if people have been heard, especially with the era of Spotify. I'm not papering over that. But what was accurate about that, that Job saw, is that like, well, they are right. That if people have really easy, if they don't have to buy like a $30 album or whatever to get one song, people will buy more music overall. Right? And that was the other thing in England, at least albums were like 20 quid. Like I remember thinking about listening to Dark Side of the Moon, an album I'd never heard of. I went to HMV and it was 25 quid. Same album, like same size album, whatever. And it was just, I did not hear that album for years and years and years because I don't

know if I'm going to like any of this and nobody I knew owned it. And so being able to buy a song was actually pretty cool. And also CDs are big and annoying. And Jobs, the way, I mean, he has a big role in this, right? This isn't just a thing that happens by coincidence. He personally negotiates a deal with the record companies where he can offer songs for 99 cents a piece, which makes them for the first time, a song is cheap enough to impulse buy.

And this is what fucks up piracy, right? Is because piracy advocates had been kind of right. People would buy music if it was less of a fucking ripoff, right? And jobs kind of proves that because they do. Now this devastates a lot of the music industry and particularly because record companies or record companies, they don't lose their shirts,

but they do fuck over artists worse, right? I'm not saying we're at a worse period now or better, but like the ways in which artists get fucked over has certainly changed as a result of iTunes, right? And iTunes led directly to the era of Spotify and other music streaming services. And one of the things that's happened in that world is that musicians can basically

just make a living touring now, right? You don't make the kind of money from album sales or from people listening to you, because we don't even sell albums anymore. People just like you Spotify, and that doesn't bring nearly the same amount of money. And you can't blame Jobs For All. He was not orchestrating that whole process.

But there's a good article on the subject, on the impact his decisions have on the music industry by John Naughton, who writes, "'Music played an outsized role "'in the evolution of the internet. As Larry Lessig put it in Free Culture, file sharing music was the crack cocaine

of the internet's growth. It drove demand for access to the internet more powerfully than any other single application. Jobs became the first licensed dealer in that drug, and iTunes provided the saddle that enabled Apple to ride the tiger. And that's a very apt way of reading it, right? And that is more or less what happens with the iPod.

Now the birth of the smartphone era coincided almost perfectly with the start of the Obama years. And by the time Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, Android smartphones had started to creep out onto the market and the iPhone had rapidly gone from a thing rich people, you know, bought because who else can afford $500 for a phone, am I right, to the hottest tech product in history. And Steve had an odd relationship with Obama, right? The Obama years and the early smartphone years are very directly tied together.

And it's hard to remember now, but people were excited about smartphones at one point and people were also excited about Barack Obama, right? There was this belief that he was going to be this historically progressive candidate. And there was also this belief that he was a literal communist who was going to turn the world into communist China. I want you to guess, Ed, where was Jobs closer to on that? I guess he was more towards the capitalist side. He was in fact more towards the capitalist side.

Like a lot of boomers, he seems to have grown a bit more conservative as he aged. I don't fully get his, I think he was at least frustrated with Obama, but because of his perception, the president was like anti-business, which is a wild thing to accuse Barack Obama of being. Yeah.

Not at all accurate. In the fall of 2010, Steve's wife, who was a major donor to the Democratic Party, told him that the president was really psyched to meet with him. And then Obama had reached out to her, and he was like, we'd love to have Steve come by. And Jobs is like, look, if you invite me personally,

then I'll come by. But it's gotta be an invitation from the president for me to meet with him. From Barack Obama at whitehouse.gov. Yeah, yeah. And eventually Obama does it, right? That does show you somewhat of where his social position is at this point, that he is able to make that happen.

And when they finally did meet, he unleashed a rant at Obama that would not have sounded entirely out of place on the Rush Limbaugh show. He attacked the education system and claimed it was crippled by unions. Quote, until the teachers unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform, he said. And what did he mean by that?

Well, one proposal he made was that principals should be able to hire and fire teachers at will. Schools should be open until 6 p.m. for 11 months of the year. And it's like, it's always fun to me when people make proposals like this after bragging about how they dropped out of school early. I'm not saying there are other countries that keep kids in school longer.

Mason- How does he feel about principals being allowed to kick kids out who blew stuff up? St- Yeah, right, right. Should you be able to kick kids out for setting off explosives? But also like, it's such a fraud thing when you're the guy who's always like, no, why would you want to go to college? People don't need to go to school. You learn everything you need to know from the world and intuition to like, kids need to be locked in school 11 months out of the year. Never let them free! Mason- But also this guy who's full of mysticism and philosophical thoughts and all of these grandiose ideas turns out to just be

a very fucking boring conservative guy. This mystified technological figure, who everyone has given this godlike sense, and he's just a boring conservative man. He's kind of like Barack Obama, in that he appeared to be center left, fighting for the consumer, but really just working for the establishment. Geez. And lending the establishment a house. Yeah, we need to... Or wait, did the establishment lend him... Yeah, we need to... The guy who does the 1984 commercial is like, schools need to be more like factories. I could go into like a, there's a lot of debate over

what is good for schools. That's not this podcast. I just think it's funny how it's inconsistent with some of the shit Jobs was saying out in public. But you know what is consistent? The quality of the advertisers of this project. Product, podcast, whatever we call ourselves. Anyway, here's some ads.

I don't understand what the big fat ones are. You don't put those inside of you, do you? I mean, you do? Yes. This is a show about women. Okay, so I just reapplied my lip gloss after eating a delicious lunch. We are headed back now to the European Political Systems class at Baruch College. Woo!

Finally, a show about women that isn't just a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare. That's it. That's actually the name of the show. It's not hosted about women that isn't just a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare. That's it, that's actually the name of the show. It's not hosted, not narrated. We're just dropping into a woman's world. It's like reality TV on the radio. I found out when my dad was gay when I was 10, we were in a convertible on the 405 freeway listening to the B-52s.

And looking back, I should have said, this is gay. This is already all gay. Listen to finally a show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a

celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories Black Truths on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I am the ferryman. In the shadows of the afterlife, the ferrymen of souls guides America's most influential spirits to their eternal rest. You've been looking for me, yeah? Where are you taking me?

Are you death? This road is not on any map. How much for a ticket? All I ask for in payment is a tail. These are the tails that shaped the nation. I don't know who got to Kennedy first. The devastation those first bombs caused. Then I told them they were drinking cyanide.

Featuring the voices of Wes Studdick. At least 4,000 people died on the trail. Martin Starr. President Nixon called me the most dangerous man in America. Scott Hayes. Next thing I know I'm standing over the bodies of Baker Morton. My pistol smoking in my hand. And Tristan McWilds.

I've never been to hell, but I know intimately the hems of the damned. Starring Dan Fogler as the ferryman. This is The Passage. Listen to The Passage now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We're back. So when Steve is having this meeting with Barack Obama, the most pressing issue that

he presented to the president was the USA's troubling lack of skilled engineers. This he says is what has forced him to outsource Apple's manufacturing to China. He's like, look, the number of workers we need to make all these products, you got to have 30,000 engineers to support them. And the US simply cannot graduate that many people with engineering degrees. So that's why I have to make everything in China. That's a very funny thing to say. And this article quote from an article in the Huffington Post continues, you're headed for a one-term presidency,

he told Obama at the start of their meeting insisting that the administration needed to be more business friendly. As an example, jobs describe the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where regulations and unnecessary costs make it difficult to them.

So I wanna see, what does he mean by this? Because he's saying, I would love to make these things in America, but we don't have enough smart people and we're too tied down by regulations for me to have factories here. So let's talk about how Steve's ideal factory works. It is true that by 2011, Apple employed something like 700,000 people in China.

And because a workforce that large needed about 30,000 engineers, China was maybe the only place to produce Apple products. Isakson probably focuses a lot on this part of the claim and less on what was an equally large reason why it had to be China, which is that China does not enjoy the same safety and union and basic quality of life considerations that we have in the United States for this kind of work, right? The kind of minimal guarantees we have of worker quality of life are too much

for an Apple factory to meet and still have an affordable product. The reality is that a lot of modern consumer technology cannot function without cities worth of abused workers, right? This is not just an Apple thing. This is every tech product. We all know this.

This is our tied up child in a basement at Omalas, right? Although we don't live in Omalas because everything still sucks and we're doing this, but that's a separate question. Are we the bastards? Are we the bastards? Yeah, yes, always. But a big part of like why this is the way

the tech industry works, why you have so much churn in products, why products have to be produced at the rate that they are produced, is not organic entirely. It has to do with decisions made by Steve Jobs and made when he was kind of inventing the foundations of what we now call the consumer electronics industry,

which to a significant extent he did. A lot of what we just consider consumer tech today is shit that Apple started doing, right? Part of that is like the way products get released, how you have these like big showy releases and like you have to be able to sell a bunch of stuff at once, right? Right after, like so much of Apple's business gets formed

from the idea of every time we have a new product on the market, fans are going to line up at the door to get the new model. And we will get a bunch of free coverage from the news on that, a bunch of PR from that, we'll get a stock boost from that. When you do that, there's a cost to the workers to make that possible, right?

That was not inevitably the way that the company was going to be structured. It was structured this way because of things that jobs did. These consumer frenzies are a big part of like why what made Apple Apple and another big part of what made Apple Apple was planned obsolescence and this gets worked into the rest of the industry too. Certainly some people would have always done that but the fact that Apple does sets a precedent right? The Apple II and it's not a precedent that was in Apple's DNA. The Apple II had been anti-fragile.

This is a product that is considered good for 13 years. That's unimaginable for modern computing, right? With fairly minimal changes in terms of like the actual structure of the thing. And people can upgrade it themselves so that you can use it longer, right? It's a great product because you can make it what you need it to be and keep it relevant.

And Jobs hated that. He wanted disposable technology. And Apple embraced a policy allegedly, I say allegedly because there are lawsuits about this, around planned obsolescence. This blew up in a big way in 2017 when Apple was apparently caught throttling battery performance on older phones.

They claim this is to prevent shutdowns on aging phones. It's a safety, we have to do this basically, right? It's the only way to make it work. But it also happened to push people into buying new phones early. Not just because Apple's throttling the battery, perhaps they did have to do that to prevent a shutdown, but because they made it impossible

to swap in new batteries. If you could easily replace the battery, you can keep the iPhone going longer, but it makes it a lot uglier and grosser seeming to Steve, even though the amount of waste generated from swapping a battery is vastly less than swapping an entire phone. Apple has faced numerous lawsuits over planned obsolescence,

including in France and Italy over their process of serialization, which links spare parts to specific years of iPhones via serial numbers in such a way that it stops independent repairers from fixing them using generic parts. And when you bring this stuff up, it can just seem like, well, Apple is like a company like any other, and they all do some stuff that's fucked up.

It's important to note, I think when you cover him the way we have, all of this is Steve. This is very consistent with how he's always thought about these products. You shouldn't be in there. You shouldn't be meddling with them. You'll buy what we give you and you'll buy a new one when it gets old.

And you'll be thankful for the chance. Yeah, and you'll be thankful for the chance. That's a 20 something year plan for this man. This is not just something that evolved at a cost cutting because it made sense. This is part of his overall vision for how computing should work, right? And I don't think overall all of the whole body

of allegations and lawsuits and like, is this really planned obsolescence or is it something less severe? I don't think all of that's meaningful. So as you will understand basically what's happening here, what is worth laboring over are the consequences towards Apple's policy. The fact that these machines are largely disposable

and that they are kind of pushing you to upgrade regularly means you need a fuckload more of them being made. And it means that you need to be able to make a lot of them in a very quick span of time. And the only way to do that is by really hurting certain people. In 2010, 14 workers for Apple's biggest supplier, Foxconn, committed suicide at work. Several more employees attempted suicide by throwing themselves off of massive high-rise

dorm towers. These are places where they live that are factory towns built into the factory, right? Another 20 workers had to be talked down from committing suicide by management. Now, the fact that all of this happens within the span of a year creates a sensation in the news. And subsequent reporting detailed how Foxconn policy was to publicly humiliate workers for poor performance and forced hours of unplayed overtime.

I wanna read a quote from a Foxconn worker interviewed by Brian Merchant in 2016. Quote, Zoo and his friend were both walk-on recruits, though not necessarily willing ones. They call Foxconn a fox trap, he says, because it tricks a lot of people. He says Foxconn promised them free housing,

but then forced them to pay exorbitantly high bills for electricity and water. The current dorms sleep eight to a room, and he says they used to be 12 to a room. But Foxconn would shirk social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses and many workers signed contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their pay if they quit before a three-month introductory period. So this is like a vile situation. It's the only way to get as many people as you need to have for this, right, without paying too much for

the devices themselves that people would be willing to pay. Maybe then people ought to be paying, right? Apple, when there are all these suicides in 2010, it causes a ton of bad press for Apple, and Apple puts a lot of PR behind. They set out a list of standards for the humane treatment of their factory workers, and anyone who wants to make products for Apple has to abide by these rules, right?

And even move some of their production work. Now, they just shift it to other factories, mostly not all that far away. Are they better? Maybe a little bit. And who's gonna know? The Chinese media? Well, exactly.

And so the international media does start to investigate this stuff, right? That's where Brian Merchant's 2016 history of the iPhone one device comes in. Yeah, and it's a really interesting book, really good book. That's why we're gonna quote from it here. But Brian describes how Jobs personally responded

to the news hoopla over this rash of suicides and all of the human shrapnel from his dream. Quote, Steve Jobs for his part declared, "'We're all over that,' when asked about the spate of deaths "'and pointed out that the rate of suicides at Foxconn "'was within the national average. He actually, he like compares the factory to an American town and like is, one of our towns would probably have the same suicide rate. And it's like, one thing, man, we've got guns. People off themselves all the time. These people are flinging themselves off

buildings. Like, yeah. Oh my God. It's also, it's worth, he's saying, well, if you compare it to the national average, well, if you compare it to the average of an entire country with people of all age ranges living and working and having relationships in their regular lives, maybe it does, but this is a building full of extremely young gig workers who are mostly there planning to do a job for six months. I don't think their suicide rate is naturally as high as you've made it. ALICE I just also, would you trust those numbers? ZACH No, of course not! That's the other thing!

ALICE The liar has lied, and even then, he's basically saying you can have a little bit of suicide if you'd like. ZACH Yeah. ALICE It's not, it'd like. Just people kill themselves. Yeah. Some people are gonna kill themselves at our murder factories. Yeah. Yes.

It's one of those things. Foxconn has to put out anti-suicide nets and invest in massive surveillance to try to catch people before they do this. Which like, maybe you would have gotten a better response from just making work less miserable. Maybe that was the problem. No. But no, the nets sound good.

The nets sound good. Need more phone. More phone good now. You Americans need more phone, and we desperately want your money. Yes. Yeah, it's all good. It's great.

I love that this is behind every line outside of an Apple store, but also when I start to get up my own ass about that, this is behind whatever phone I have right now, right? Like one way or the other. Maybe to less of an extent with some companies, but not much. Yeah.

I think the problem here, there's always going to be some level of like, fuck-up-ed-ness somewhere in the line of a product, even one that you need, and we do need smartphones. They could have been from the beginning, easier to repair and modify in a way that reduced this cost. And that didn't happen to an extent because jobs didn't want it to happen.

Because even before the smartphone was a glimmer in anybody's eye, he wants devices you can't fiddle with. We've talked a lot about suicides at Foxconn factories, and I think that's important. I'm sure most of you were aware that this was happening. I wanna drill a little bit into how the work directly is involved with that. And some of it has to do with policies at Foxconn

that encourage the humiliation of workers who make mistakes. One employee interviewed by Merchant explained, when the boss comes down to expect the work, if they find any problems, they won't scold you then. They will scold you in front of everyone in a meeting later. It's insulting and humiliating to people all the time. Punish someone to make an example for everyone else.

It's systematic. And Brian continues, Zoo says there was another suicide a few months ago. He saw it himself. The man was a student who worked on the iPhone assembly line. Somebody I knew, somebody I saw around the cafeteria. After being publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel. Company officials called the police, though the worker hadn't been violent, just angry.

He took it very personally," Zhu says, and he couldn't get through it. Three days later, he jumped out of a ninth story window." And Jobs, I don't believe he instituted this policy. I'm certain he wasn't specifically aware of it, right? This is much lower on a level than I think he would have paid attention to. It is interesting though that this is exactly how he would run a factory. Yes. Because this is how he ran a factory, right?

He did this. But berating workers is kind of his MO. Yeah. Yeah, this is completely, I don't think he had any, other than like in making this business exist and in pushing for a company that would need to be this way to meet his quotas. I don't think he had a direct role in this, but it is consistent with how he treated people.

That Brian Merchant book is pretty fucking devastating. There's a bit in it after this where he's like, he's trying to answer the question of like, why didn't, you know, I heard about some of these suicides, why didn't I hear about this suicide that you just reported to me? Zoo and his friend look at each other in shrug. Here's someone dies,

one day later the whole thing doesn't exist. His friend says, you forget about it. Jesus Christ. Damn if that doesn't sum up the 21st century in a nutshell right there. Oh God. Yeah, you care the first time, then it keeps happening and you just kind of get used to it, you know?

That is how all these people have hacked our brains, as they realise that if we just push through with the evil and keep doing more evil, eventually we get tired and go home. Elon Musk is a reprehensible human, don't get me wrong, but Steve Jobs was behind some truly awful human rights things? Yeah! Yeah! Yeah, people are rightly angry at some conditions in the Tesla factories. They ought to be.

This is the same kind of thing. It's on a grander scale, because he's been much more successful. The guys killed themselves so often that you're kind of like, oh, I'm sorry, which suicide are you referring to? Yeah, exactly. Jobs, of course, saw nothing to be concerned with in the situation. He tells one reporter after a rash of suicides, Foxconn is not a sweatshop, it's a factory. But my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theaters.

He's like, look, it's nice, so it can't, it's not even a sweatshop. It's not a sweatshop, it's got air conditioning, you fucking idiot. And one of the things I love about Brian Merchant is he like basically breaks into a Foxconn factory while it's like in operation to look at it like just just like walk around and get a feel for honestly he Brian Merchant fucking rocks pretty cool against him. Yeah. At least based on God, every time I say I've got nothing against someone, someone's like, actually, did you know that dog in 1989? I don't know, man. Don't tell me if he did a bad thing up here.

He's a second names merchant. He proves of capitalism. There's too many bad people out there for me to get all that burnt out of shape about every one of them. I'm just gonna pretend everything's fine forever. Now, that same year, 150 were employees at Foxconn, got together on the roof of a factory

and threatened to commit mass suicide. This was a month or two after Tim Cook had visited Longhua to meet with suicide prevention experts about conditions in Apple factories. But workers argued that no changes had really been made. And they saw threatening mass suicide as the only leverage they had to force Apple to act. And these guys are, to be fair,

they're like, we don't blame Apple, we blame Foxconn, but we know that making a big public stink is the only way to make anything happen. Right. The more damning case to make against jobs in particular and Apple in general, because it's made in his image, is that his vision of mass consumer pocket computing necessitated factories like this

in a way that even other handheld device manufacturers did not. Some of this was due to Apple's quality control standards which were high, but others have to do with the fact that he was obsessed with secrecy, right? Part of why these factories can't just be normal factories, they need to be closed loops, right? Is that he is obsessed with nothing getting out about what's coming in the future, what the next Apple product is going to be. Jobs' whole vision was that the first time anyone knows what we're really making, I am announcing it on stage and it's ready to go.

There's no drip, drip of information. You get it all at once and then the fucker's on sale and you go stand out in front of a store to buy it, right? This strategy, this is a legitimate strategy. It works for Apple, but it necessitates kind of being crazy people about keeping what you're working on under wraps, and I found this write up from a former employee describing his experiences in Apple in the United States.

Having been at Apple and also at a large defense contractor where I would routinely walk by areas that said top secret clearance required. I can say that Apple simply put more effort into making secrecy part of the culture. A few things I noticed at Apple, code names for every product, no one referred to products any other way,

team members who were also on special teams don't tell their coworkers what they do, black windows and frosted curtains, trash bins were monitored. And you'll get stuff like that, apparently if you were on the iPhone at certain points, you're basically working in a black box in an air-gapped room. This is CIA shit, right? Mason- And I don't resent them for that.

Will- No, no, no. Mason- Are you going to get to the Jason Chen iPhone 4 situation? Will- Oh, God. Was that the guy who... Mason- Who found he got an iPhone 4 that someone left in a bar and yeah jobs had the police fucking Raid his house and he called him. He's like, give me the phone. Give me that. Yeah So this was like a huge article in early tech journalism Remember how jealous we all were and then yeah chin gets fucking raided by the police. So I basically ruined his life Yeah. Oh really? I wasn't actually aware of this. I should have dug into that more. They tore through him.

His life, there was legal consequences, but thankfully Gizmodo got cleared of. They treated it like he'd stolen Steve Jobs' kid, which we all know he would have treated with less seriousness than this. Yeah, than the iPhone. Great guy. And it's obviously, if you are being being paid what these Apple engineers are being paid and you know the job is crazy secrecy and compartmentalization, that's your choice.

You're not being abused, right? You can set that standard at your company. And I don't think that is unethical, but it does the fact, the way that this translates to, I want our shit to be made in places where the employees, we can lock them down and have control over them. That is part of why, again, Foxconn would have been doing some messed up shit without Apple, but Apple's need for secrecy has a big impact on how they treat their people,

right? And it's key to Jobs' vision. So he is an integral part of this really ugly system at its foundation. Now to understand why Jobs was so obsessed with secrecy, you have to understand that Jobs put a lot of effort into making Apple seem fundamentally different from the rest of consumer tech. Every one of their competitors,

we've done coverage of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, here at Cool Zone. I used to go to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Apple never went to that shit. These were like every at Lenovo, you know, fucking Microsoft. They still don't touch CES either. Yeah. Oh wait, no, you're right. Lenovo always, well, they did private meetings this year.

But most big tech companies, at least, especially during this period of time, would do their releases around one of these conferences. Apple never did and they did their own shows, they had like Macworld and shit. And that element of surprise is such a central part of how Apple operated under jobs and still does today that it has a name, Surprise and Delight.

In one internal 2015 presentation, someone at Apple wrote, "'Our Surprise and Delight business model requires a huge volume of labor for only a short period of time as we ramp products. In other words, because the goal is to surprise the consumers, to send them scrambling to line up outside of Apple stores to create the kind of unhinged buds that help them sell their products, they needed a highly restricted workforce that was available for limited periods of time.

In China, this necessitated the huge hiring of numbers of workers of what are called dispatch labor. These are production pinch hitters. These are guys who are shipped out to factories on short notice in order to deal with surges in demand. And because they're basically folks you're pulling in off the street or whatever to like help you meet a deadline,

they don't benefit from pay and worker protections like regular employees. This becomes such a problem in China because of Apple's need to hit these targets that in 2014, China enacts a new law to crack down on the process, which was seen as part of why these jobs are so miserable. You don't have nearly the kind of protections,

you're being lied to often, you're generally being stolen from, and it's known that you're only going to be there a couple of months, right? So they can fuck you over. So in 2014, China mandates that only 10% of a factory's workforce can be temps. And an internal memo, Apple notes that this is basically death for them. Our surprise and delight business model requires a huge volume of labor for only a short period of time. We are making it difficult for our suppliers to comply with this law as 10% dispatch is

simply not enough to cope with the spikes in labor demand we are putting during our ramps." So all of this, what I've just quoted, is after jobs pass, but this is all starting under him at his direction. It's all being continued by his protege, Tim Cook. Apple commissions a two-year study with Pegatron around this point, one of their manufacturers,

and it shows that regular employees have better working conditions and are like, you know, less likely to be suicidally miserable, and that if Apple keeps releasing products by this surprise and delight model, they're not gonna be able to meet China's legal requirements and they're going to have to immiserate more workers.

An article by Wayne Ma for the information sums up what happens next. Apple weighed the pros and cons of pushing suppliers to comply with the law. If Apple forced suppliers to cut dispatch labor, it would eliminate regulatory risk, but drain resources, create costs, and delay product launches. On the other hand, Apple could continue to do nothing as long as local authorities didn't enforce the law. Apple executives decided to push facilities to reduce their use of dispatch labor only if it became a problem with local authorities."

So they're just like, we just break the law and see if it's going to be a problem. And it wasn't! Isn't that great? Hey! Who does that remind you of? Elon Musk? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, at a certain point, you can't blame a shark if you throw a bunch of chum in the water, right?

Yeah, I mean You can because these are people Inhuman rights abuses though. You've got to give him that he helped a lot of people innovate human rights abuses in some ways That are beautiful and you know who else is innovative? Maybe in the same way, maybe not. I don't know who's gonna be the advertiser that comes on after this. I don't understand what the big fat ones are.

You don't put those inside of you, do you? I mean, you do? This is a show about women. OK, so I just reapplied my lip gloss after eating a delicious lunch. We are headed back now to the European Political Systems class at Baruch College. Woo!

Finally, a show about women that isn't just a thinly veiled aspirational nightmare. That's it, that's actually the name of the show. It's not hosted, not narrated, we're just dropping into a woman's world. It's like reality TV, on the radio. I found out when my dad was gay when I was 10, we were in a convertible on the 405 freeway listening to the B-52s. Looking back, I should have said, this is gay. This is already all gay. Listen to Finally a Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Everyone in our country has a voice. It's something that says not just where you come from, but who you are. Welcome to NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of podcasts and a celebration of the hosts in journalism who've always spoken truth to power. Our voices are as varied, nuanced, and dynamic as the Black experience, and stories should never be about us without us. Find NPR Black Stories, Black Truths on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I am the ferryman. In the shadows of the afterlife, the ferrymen of souls guides America's most influential spirits to their eternal rest. You've been looking for me, yeah? Where are you taking me? Are you Death? This road is not on any map. How much for a ticket?

All I ask for in payment is a tale. These are the tales that shaped the nation. I don't know who got to Kennedy first. The devastation those first bombs caused. Then I told them they were drinking cyanide. Featuring the voices of West's study. At least 4,000 people died on the trail. Martin Starr.

President Nixon called me the most dangerous man in America. Scott Hayes. Next thing I know, I'm standing over the bodies of Baker Morton, my pistol smoking in my hand. And Tristan McWilds. I've never been to hell, but I know intimately the bodies of Baker Morton, my pistol smoking in my hand, and Tristan MacWilds. I've never been to hell, but I know intimately the hems of the damned. Starring Dan Fogler as the ferryman. This is The Passage.

Listen to The Passage now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. listen to your favorite shows. We're back. Here's to the crazy ones. I want to see that recut to be about like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin show like a fucking barrel bomb hitting. Yeah.

Yeah. Like that rocket that's not actually a rocket. It's got knives in it. Hey, the knife missile. Yeah. Redo rocket that's not actually a rocket, it's got knives in it. Hey, the knife missile. Yeah. Redo the old Apple think different ad, but for the knife missile. Yeah.

Just as it's about to blow up, the knives come out. I mean, that is thinking differently. It's the first defense product that was like, what if we didn't kill everyone's kids all the time? But what if the people we killed, we really fucking killed them? Yeah, I want to see like some fucking weapon seller in like a Steve Jobs turtleneck being like showing pictures of like buses blowing up. Several knives.

What if we could kill fewer kids? But instead of exploding, there are seven knives. Everyone's clapping. Yeah. The other day I was stabbing Amanda Death out in front of my house and I felt, what if we did this for politics internationally? I had a man stabbed the other day and it really made me think about the way we do business. The Greeks knew that the knife was the most efficient shape in nature, and so I put seven

of them on the end of this rocket. But that's exactly like, it is. Oh boy. So yeah, I hope I've made the case about Steve Jobs is like the actual long term significant human consequences that he has. He's not the whole part of this, but he is Steve Jobs. He is a foundational person in like how consumer tech looks. So when we look at things that are now broad evils across all of consumer tech, it's important to note he has a big role in why those evils exist the way that they do.

I'm not gonna say that consumer tech would have ever been like a moral paragon, but that doesn't get him off the hook for his role in this, right? And I don't know, maybe you wanna say it's inevitable anyone else would have made similar decisions. I don't know that. Not out of the business of their heart. I don't know if the chokehold product strategy would have.

Yeah. Yeah, he was kind of, he had to fight a long time to get anyone to embrace his, the customer shouldn't be able to make any changes at all. And it should be a closed loop idea. That was the thing he got attacked for for a while before being right. And yeah, maybe if he hadn't fought for it,

there's some ugliness we could have avoided. We'll never know, but that doesn't remove his culpability here, right? So that's the long-term evil stuff. Obviously people are gonna note that we're leaving out some of his brilliant business decisions, the establishment of Apple stores, right, which was a hugely influential move. A lot of people argued that it wouldn't work. It did. The launch

of the iPad, the App Store, but this is not a podcast where we list the achievements of billionaires at length, right? What's worth saying is that the period where Jobs helmed Apple after he came back was historically a good run, not just for Apple, but for any company of any kind. And it was such a Titanic success that when his cancer diagnosis came out, a New York Times reporter fretted that Apple was jobs and jobs was Apple. Basically, this could tank a big chunk of the tech industry, right? And it didn't, by the way, Apple, they've made some bad calls, but have a lot of money at hand. They're doing all right.

You don't need to worry for them. And maybe the fact that they have been so relatively successful in the period after his death is probably, at least when it comes to evaluating him as a businessman, something you should keep in mind. I think it's probably fair to say he was the most successful tech CEO of his generation. Maybe absolutely. Yeah. Like it's kind of hard to argue with that, right?

And he also managed to turn journalists into just drooling idiots. He had a high effect on journalists. I just want to read you something from O'Malley that was published the day after the day that Steve Jobs died. It's going to read you a section because this whole thing fucking sucks. Mac, iPod, and iPhone. They are like Silicon Valley's Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, and ET. Magical, memorable, and life-changing.

And perhaps that is why I didn't want to meet him, interview him, or even talk to him. I had the opportunity on numerous occasions when I was attending Apple's events, but I decided not to. To me, just the idea of Steve was powerful enough. The idea of Steve led me to follow my heart, make tough choices, be brutally honest with myself and sometimes annoying people I love. And always remember that in the end, it's all about making your customers happy. There are simple ways to get along with everyone. There are easier ways to get things done. There are compromises. But to me, Steve Jobs meant try harder, damn it. Your customers, brackets, readers, expect better than that. Steve Jobs taught me to care about the little things,

because in the end, little things matter. Steve Jobs was my muse. Trust me, he is the secret muse to many of us in the Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Dave Morin, Jack Dorsey. We're all part of the tribe called jobs. There's a whole generation of entrepreneurs who ask themselves this one question. What will Steve do? Natch, what would have Steve done? This is meant to be someone who was a critic of the tech industry. Yeah. He is right that that is how all of these founder guys see it. But saying you feel that way too and pretending to be a journalist is so embarrassing. Also so funny to be like, I won't talk to him because I'm too scared.

Yeah. Yeah. That's just anti-actual journalism. Worm bullshit. Don't speak truth to power because then truth might think you're dumb. And you have a picture of truth up above your bed and you really wanna, I mean, I feel that way. I have someone who is my muse that I feel that way about

and it's Werner Herzog. But when I say that, purely because I wanna cut someone's leg off with a chainsaw, that's the only part of his legacy I want for myself is I would also like to remove someone's leg with a chainsaw. So, if you need a leg removed out there, listeners, hit me up. I got some inspiration. Yeah. Every day, I think, is now the time to cut somebody's leg off with a chainsaw.

And so far it hasn't been, but maybe that's what'll take us to the next level, Sophie. Sophie approves. Okay. I'm gonna start making some chainsaw purchases. SOPHIE I'm aggressively shaking my head off, Mike. MIGUEL So Sophie, I'm gonna expense one of those battery-powered ones. I've got a big husk varna right now, but it's a pain in the ass. I always let the gas stay in there for a long- ALICE It's just unwieldy. MIGUEL Yeah. Yeah.

We'll get something real convenient for taking off a leg. Imagine taking off a leg, but with a portable mechanism that allows you to enjoy the leg separation process. So speaking of medical procedures that are ill-advised, in 2003, doctors found a shadow on Steve Jobs' pancreas during a CT scan. This turned out to be pancreatic cancer. And I would never make fun of somebody for pancreatic cancer.

That's how my mom died. It's one of the worst ways I can imagine dying. It fucking sucks ass, right? And for most people who get that diagnosis, it is a guarantee of death. I had friends with two doctors and I called both of them right after my mom's diagnosis. And both of them, and I'm glad that they did,

said the same thing, which is like, for whatever reason, we've just never gotten a good handle on this shit, there's not really any hope. And that's how I went into it, right? And that's how most people have to go into having pancreatic cancer. For one thing, by the time it gets discovered, you're usually in like stage four, right?

Like it's terminal. Jobs gets really lucky. He gets crazy lucky. He has pancreatic cancer, but it's a form of pancreatic cancer that only 5% of pancreatic cancer sufferers have that's actually really easy to treat. Like he gets the fucking golden ticket pancreatic cancer. He gets really lucky. The kind that's totally, totally survivable if you just do what your doctors say right away, right? You do want to get in there quick, but it was found early. So there's almost a very good chance given the kind of doctors he could afford that he would have made a full recovery. But this is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs did not trust his doctors. So for nine months, he delays taking

any kind of real treatment and tries a quack diet to fight his cancer instead. He later told tells Isaacson, I didn't want my body to be opened. I didn't want to be violated in that way. And like, bro, I get it said that I've heard it said at least that like a lot of oncologists will often turn down chemo. Because if it's said that, I've heard it said at least, that like a lot of oncologists will often turn down chemo because if it's like a rough cancer or whatever, even if your chance is like, you know, okay, it might not, you might not consider it worth it. I don't know. I'm no one to tell people what they should or shouldn't do there.

But like, that's not what we, this is like one of those things where his doctors are like, look man, you can survive this thing. Nobody survives if we act right now. You will be fine. Like, no, I'm not comfortable with letting somebody cut into me. And he spins, he tries to like eat fruit and cure his fucking cancer for nine months. Isaacson puts this down to a fatal case of jobs as reality distortion field, right? He uses this ability to talk other people into fantasies on himself, and it works, and it kind of is what kills him. And that may in fact be what happened, right?

I think it's possible that that actually gives Jobs a little bit too much credit, that that is still viewing him as this almost super powerful figure. Because what we'd say for anyone else is, he read this fucking quack book by a fucking liar when he was a young man and he never got over it. And he was never able to objectively look at reality and recognize that nothing else he'd try to do as a result of this diet had worked.

He got caught up in a fucking, a little bit of a cultic belief system and he couldn't shake himself from it and that's what killed him. We would say that about anyone else who refused a very treatable cancer that they could easily afford to treat because they believed some shit

about eating fruit would cure it. For jobs were like, he used his reality distortion field on himself this time. I don't know. He was just a deep shit. Well, he was a, you know what? I'll even himself this time. I don't know. He was just- He was just a dipshit. Well, he was a, you know what? I'll even sell him credit.

This happens to perfectly decent people in a bunch of ways. He fell for a con. That's what it is. He fell for a con. You know? A con artist got conned. Yes, it happens. And by the time he decides to submit to surgery,

the cancer had spread to his liver. And I was just saying, I'm not gonna say falling for a con is a bad thing to do. What he does next is kind of evil. So he has liver cancer, his cancer has spread, his pancreatic cancer is no longer easily treatable. And the first thing he finds that's like going to kill him is that his liver is failing on him now.

Liver transplants are rare. People who need them usually have to wait a year or more. And only about a third of the people who get put on the liver transplant list actually receive a liver, right? It's a tough thing needing to get a liver. There's not enough in fucking circulation. And so if you get a liver, someone else is not getting one. Now, obviously, I don't think that's math.

Anyone who needs a transplant should generally be concerned with, right? Everyone's life is valuable. You should give it a, you should give it a go, give it a go. There's no way to make, but jobs. Number one is not normally a guy who would have gotten the transplant in this situation. He still has cancer spreading through his body. He has a low chance of surviving.

Right. This is a case where I think responsible. You'd be like, look, there are some people who could easily survive with this liver. You have let your cancer get so bad that there's really nothing we can do for you. But Jobs is rich and able to game the system. And the gist of what he does is that there are 127 centers in the US

that do liver transplants, right? And each has its own waiting list. And so the waiting list where he was was super long. It wasn't most places, but he was able to pay someone to find a center in Tennessee where there wasn't much of a waiting list where he was was super long. It wasn't most places, but he was able to pay someone to find a center in Tennessee where there wasn't much of a waiting list and he gets his transplant in three months. This is not illegal, though the rules, I think some rules have changed as a result

of what Jobs did, but it is unethical. For one thing, again, he would not have needed the liver if his doctor, if he had taken the treatment, his doctor and his wife and his sister and whatnot are all telling him from the beginning, get treated. Because he doesn't listen to them, he needs a liver. He winds up destroying his liver. And then he takes a liver

that might've saved someone else's life. And he dies anyway because his cancer had already gotten too advanced. And that is kind of killing another person. That's at least like negligent homicide. When it's directly there, not like getting a transplant, but when number one, your need for it is directly the result of your own irresponsibility.

Of like you specifically engineering a situation that was avoidable. This isn't even like, yeah, you had like a period of time where you were addicted and so your liver got fucked up later in life. Like I don't blame anyone for that. We all have, you know, people get second chances and shit. This is, you had a treatable cancer and you didn't. And

so now you need a liver and you stole one kind. And I think, like, thinking about it for a second, I think it isn't that he has a reality distortion field. I think he just cannot admit that he's not smart enough than some things. He tried to outsmart the California welfare system. He tried to outsmart cancer. And it did not work. And he very nearly did beat it, other than the fact that his body had been wrecked. Yeah. Yeah. By just the sheer, you know, the length of time he'd been fighting it. Yeah, it's rough. One thing I'll say for the Steve Jobs story, it's very rare in that you have a guy who is a bastard

and not only does he get his comeuppance, but he gets his comeuppance in a way that is, his fall is directly tied to his hubris, right? It would not be very funny if like, and then he just got a cancer that was untreatable and he died horribly, right? That's just like, well, a guy who sucked died in a horrible way, Okay. It's almost like

the universe gave him a chance to like- Yeah. Like, let's see how smart you are, motherfucker. Humble yourself a little to save your own life, and he doesn't. And he has to spend the remainder of his life knowing he'd fucked up. People who are around him, I have heard a number of times, were like, yeah, he was powerfully regretful of fucking up. Mason- He also looked like he was dying of a horrifying disease. No amount of money could stop that.

No amount of fame could stop that. The universe very much humbled and then killed him. Spence No amount of power or wealth or fame could have stopped that. Listening to his wife could have. Mason- Yes! Listening to another person. Listening to his wife could have. Yes. Listening to another person. Admitting someone else was right.

And that is kind of, we get this almost like fable-like moral lesson. Very dark moral lesson at the end of this. You were given one chance to avert your horrible fate and it was listen to the women in your life and you couldn't do it. No. And so maybe that's a little satisfying, right? More importantly, by the end of his life, it is kind of worth noting, he came to accept how awfully he treated Lisa in her childhood.

He expresses this to Isaacson, it's a lot. It's the only thing he repeatedly, he seems to have genuinely gone out of his way to be like, I was very wrong in what I did here. And she spent some time with him near the end of his life and he's very apologetic. And I wanna close this by quoting for you how she describes one of their final conversations when he is on his deathbed.

I wanna say something, you were not to blame. He started to cry. If only we'd had a manual, if only I'd been wiser, but you were not to blame. I want you to know you were not to blame for any of it. He'd waited to apologize until there was hardly anything left of him. This was what I'd been waiting to hear. It felt like cool water on a burn. I'm so sorry, Liz, he cried and shook his head side to side. He was sitting up, cradling his head in his hand, and because he had shrunk and lost fat, his hands looked disproportionately large, his neck too thin to hold his skull, like one of the Rodin sculptures on the burgers of Calais.

I wish I could go back, I wish I could change, but it's too late. What can I do now? It's just too late. He cried and his body shook, his breath caught on his sobs, and I wished he'd stop. After that he said again, I owe you one. Yeah. Sorry. I'm glad that woman got that closure. I'm glad she got that closure, and I'm glad he got that moment of knowledge of how bad

he was. But I also question whether he would have got there without this much pain. Oh yeah, I mean, I don't know that he would. I think if he had been healthy and lived to a grand old age, he would have probably been unapologetic to the fucking end. Yeah, maybe. And if I'm being presumptuous, I'm sorry, this guy's a piece of shit. We'll never know, but it is kind of satisfying to, of all of these guys, he got the ending you'd hope for all of them, where they are brought low in their hubris,

the universe forcibly shows them your wealth and your ingenuity have limits and you cannot confront or surmount them, right? If they had been shown, if they all would be shown that at the end and have a chance to really, really regret the cruel things they've done in their lives.

That's what we all want for them, is for them to have a blinding moment of awareness and horror and then go out, right? Yes. And Steve got more of that than most of them do. And that is not on a moral thing on his part. It's not like he spent the last 20 years of his life working to undo his horrible crimes or anything, but there's at least a little bit of a satisfying arc there.

So there you go, people. ALICE Still believe his suffering was not enough for the suffering he caused. But maybe it was. Maybe that is enough. Maybe that's what these people deserve. Because it wasn't just the pain caused and the suffering caused, but the fact that he really had to sit and suffer with it.

Thing of beauty. And I'm sorry if that sounds cruel, but I'm a father, and the idea of dressing down a child, the duty of a parent is to raise a child. You have a duty to them, they don't have one to you. And for a man with this much power and money to be this reprehensible to a child of any age, let alone a child of any age, let alone a fucking seven-year-old is just disgusting. Yeah. It's nice that he had that feeling, and you nailed it there, of being powerless.

Because so much of what made him him, of the way he treated people, was wanting them to feel powerless. Dressing down one employee in a room full of them, right? Fully, fully luxuriating in the fact that like, I am the founder, I am the CEO, I am your boss, and whatever I say to you, I can say to you. I can treat you like garbage. You are here at my pleasure and you mean nothing to me, right? That was clearly something that was very important to Steve

to feel and express in his moments of anger. And then the universe said that to him. Oh, you don't really matter all that much. You're done fucked up. Bye. And here's one chance, one chance to admit that you're fallible. One chance to give someone to be vulnerable and let the world dictate your path. He's like, no, I will eat my berries or whatever. It is such a faith. It's like a Greek myth, right? It is such a, it's such a narratively satisfying downfall that you really never get those. And for such a big piece of shit. But you know what?

The thing that really, I've not been in the tech industry since 2008 and kind of earlier because I was writing about video games. For this entire time, I thought Steve Jobs was kind of a bad guy, I had no idea the extent, and it makes me disgusted at the people who wrote so fondly of him at the time. I refuse to believe that these stories were new, that they just… I'm sure tons of these were going around, but also, even if they didn't know at the time, where is the fucking outcry now? Everyone should be so deeply ashamed of this man. This man is disgusting. The fact that this is the architect of modern technology is such a black mark on everyone.

Everyone who appreciated him, Walt Mossberg, should be ashamed of himself. The Wall Street Journal guy who so often talked about how great Charles was and used to get calls from him and go, Steve has given me a new thing he's doing. A willing and able press operative for Apple. Jason McHale Yeah, they all had to buy into this image that Jobs had of himself. And I guess the benefit is, they all did help to kill him in that, right? By like crafting that feeling of like almost prophetic infallibility in the man. It is like a black mark on the discipline

as a profession. But it did help take him the rest of the way over that line, I guess. So I don't know. Maybe if we all get really, agree to spend like three years really, really going hard for Elon Musk, to just absolutely drive him past the point of sanity, we can get him to, I don't know, try to turn his car into an actual spaceship and shoot himself into the sky. But I mean, if you think about it, this kind of fate might be what awaits you. I'm not talking about driving anyone to suicide, don't want to participate in such a thing. However, Mr. Musk is the kind of guy who'd be like, uh, actually the only correct way

to solve my cancer is to use a computer algorithm that I will make. And the algorithm is just like, take a bunch of ketamine. Yeah. Yeah. His AI tells him to treat his lymphoma with ketamine and- Grok is just like, oh boy, where do I begin? Take a bunch of ke- Oh. We're all really reliant on Grok to make the right decision there. I mean, I do hope a downfall like this for all of these moguls, right? Where they are brought low by their own these moguls, right? Where they are brought low by their own personal weaknesses. I think the worst thing about a guy like Bill Gates, right? Who's got his own share of bad things,

is that... Gates would never be this man. Bill Gates hires the best doctors in the world and then he listens to what they say, right? ALICE Yes. So he doesn't die. RILEY Yeah. Yeah. ALICE Definitely doesn't want to die. RILEY Because he doesn't want to die horribly. Yeah. It's just, it's gross. It really has made me deeply reflect on that time in the tech industry.

There were people posting about crying when Steve Jobs died. Multiple people. Yeah. I mean, I was reporting. I was bummed because like Apple was exciting to report about. We'd had a couple of really exciting years, and I was like, oh, that's a bummer. This guy who ran a company that I thought

was really interesting to write about is dead. But I didn't know much about him personally. I had started to, because I had read Infinite Loop by that point, which I think is the first really critical piece of big reporting on jobs. Yeah. I remember I was in the gym. I was living in Brooklyn at the time. I said, Oh fuck, Steve jobs died.

And none of the guys looked up. I actually went to the Apple store the day that he died because my fucking phone battery stopped working. Wow. I'm so surprised. And they had this like giant like shrine like photo of him on all the screens People at the genius bar were crying. Oh Sophie your phone died at the same time jobs did that means your new phone has his spirit in it

It's the spirit of jobs inside whatever a phone you had back So your phone just doesn't listen to you all the time, because you're a woman. Refuses to work. We're very incompatible, so that makes sense. Face ID just doesn't work. We're incompatible, but yet, I can rock a turtleneck. Speaking of turtlenecks, hopefully fucking Mitch McConnell dies next. Fingers crossed, everybody.

Alright, Ed, where can folks find you? You can find me at betteroffline.com, you can find my podcast on there, you can find my newsletter, you can find me on Twitter at Edzitron, zitron.beastguy.social on blue sky. And I'm technically on threads, but who gives a shit? Right. Yeah, exactly. Who gives a shit.

And who gives a shit about you? I do. I love you. I'm the only one who will ever love you. Please continue listening to podcasts. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

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