Citation Needed - Steve Jobs

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Hello and welcome to the citation needed the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnik, and I'll be the brilliant genius and the heart and soul of this company. But I'll need some people to do the work. First up, two men who missed when the only games their phone played were Snake and not texting people back, Tom and Heath. Snake is still the only game my phone plays, thank you. And I...

Am leaving you unheard. There it is, yeah. And also joining us tonight, two guys who are still just excited that the phone is cordless Cecil and Noah well yeah but phone calls sounded warmer on vinyl right right absolutely yeah and that was also a tremendous upgrade to my pager when they went cordless thank you very much pager yeah amazing course I have you could beat me in a 9-1-1 call me back before we begin, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Our patrons give us as little as a dollar a show in exchange for bonus episodes, pre-episodes, shenanigans, and access to our Topic Suggestion box as well as our undying love.

If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around till the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon or event will we be talking about today? Today we're going to be talking about one time Atari employee Steve Jobs. I did some other less interesting stuff too, I guess. There's a lot of essay here. And Tom, Christians have their devil and you have your Steve Jobs.

Are you ready to tell us where the problems began? Yeah, so not long after man first harnessed fire and all hope for the future was lost. Yeah, right. So tell us Tom, who was Steve Jobs? We'll get there, we'll get there. Listeners to this show may be surprised to learn that I am a man who for almost 20 years

has lived his life tethered to a smartphone. In fact, I have very often been an early adopter for technology. I own my own PC. It was a 486 Packard Bell, which I painstakingly saved for and purchased from Montgomery Ward's Electric Avenue sometime before 1992. Good for you. Went to crazy eddies. They were slashing prices. It was insane. I bought that computer myself when I was still in middle school. I had cell phones long before they were... You had to get like six years of CompuServe to get it though.

I had cell phones long before they were generally accessible for my age back. I used a Palm Pilot before a Blackberry back when those didn't yet have even color screens. My first true smartphone, an upgrade from the BlackBerry, was purchased sometime around 2008. Because of my work, I am never away from my phone, instinctively, and after years of conditioning, I carry it around from room to room for even the most minor and transient tasks, rarely leaving up more than a foot from my person at any time, day or night. Despite being one of many corporate pawns in the personal computer and smartphone revolution, I only recently switched to the iPhone,

a switch that has made me reflect on the man who is often thought of as responsible for our collective social transition into these digitally tethered lifestyles. A man who, you'll be likely unsurprised to learn, turns out to be a giant piece of shit. A man who died as he lived obnoxiously overconfident and wretchedly smelly a man we all know as

Steve Jobs an anti Apple episode to Noah pay to write this essay Tom You have to tell us or its entrapment I thought about writing an essay on the vision Pro just so that we could be the third thing that comes up when you Google it No, I had to pay double for the same favor cuz was about Apple now since it is the conceit of our show I am using Wikipedia here for the general timeline but the wiki has clearly been scrubbed of some of the most juicy details of Steve's actual shittiness so I'm using lots of other sources here as well. And if some of this veers off a touch in the timeline,

either forgive me or just listen to a better research show. Steve was born in 1955 to Joanne Scheibel and Abdul Fattah Jandali. Jandali was an unbelievably wealthy Syrian Muslim who met and fell in love with Carol, a Catholic girl from Green Bay, Wisconsin, whose parents owned a mink farm. A humble mink farm everybody.

That relationship was doomed from the start because of the cultural differences and when Carol fell pregnant, they knew they had to ditch the kiddo or risk upsetting both of their families. Fell pregnant? What's happening? Are you a ladies magazine from the 1800s? What's... What's going on?

What's going on? What's going on? All right, so this dude came from a billionaire landlord and a family that murdered ferrets for a living to feel the joy of their skin. What hope did he have of not sucking? I was thinking the same thing. So Carol traveled to San Francisco to give birth

and set up a closed adoption. Her stipulations for the adoption were that she wanted her child adopted by college graduates. The first couple she picked ended up taking a pass on old Steve because they wanted a girl and when you're adopting you can shop for exactly the genitals you're looking for on your baby. Steve was eventually adopted out by the agency to Paul Reinhold and Clara Jobs. Neither Paul nor Clara had college degrees and when Carol found out she initially demanded the adoption be revoked but Paul and Clara begged to

keep the baby and after signing a pledge that they would pay for Steve's college education, Carol agreed to allow the adoption to go through. I was gonna say that at least they weren't saddled with student loan debt, but it's 1955. You got a free college education with three cereal box tops. Things did not go great. According to Clara, she was so traumatized by adopting and then almost losing baby Steve that for the first six months of their time together, she was too afraid of losing him to allow herself to bond with the baby. Then baby Steve turned out to be a huge pain in the ass kid and so for the first

couple of years of their life together Clara was miserable and felt like they had made a huge mistake. That's pretty much how everyone feels when they're a parent. I mean come on, that's pretty much all parental experiences. She wanted to actually return him, though by all accounts, they became eventually not just loving, but doting and indulgent parents. For all of his many faults,

and we will get into them in some detail, Steve too felt this way about his adoptive parents. All right, so yeah, like Cecil says, most of our parents regretted us at some point or another, but it's weird that his parents are on record about it. Right? That indulgence, it would turn out to be too much of a good thing. Steve learned to read as a toddler, taught to him by his mother, a skill that lots of parents get real excited

about if achieved early, in which it turns out doesn't mean much of anything in the long run, but parents still brag about it, so it's in his stupid Wikipedia. I was actually an early shrimp eater. Thank you! Which is a big deal, that's why I'm all yoked and swole. That's what we say about you. Keto. In school, Steve did not fit in.

He didn't have many friends, he was a bit of a loner, and he was a real, well, shithead to boot. He misbehaved in school, he did not fit in. He didn't have any friends. He was a bit of a loner and he was a real, well, shithead to boot. He misbehaved in school. He was frequently suspended. And here's a quote from old Steve-O on this, quote, "'Pretty bored in school and turned into a little terror. "'You should have seen us in the third grade.

"'We basically destroyed the teacher.'" You might hear that and be thinking, oh, yeah, probably whoopee cushions and tacks on the chair, that sort of thing. But Steve, well, Steve thought bigger, even from the beginning. Land mines and swords on the chair. You solder a phone that breaks on purpose every two years.

I installed iTunes on her chair. She went insane. It's a YouTube album that you didn't want want Steve handed out flyers and posters advertising a bring your pet to school day, which resulted in kids from all over the school, bringing cats and dogs and resulted in chaos and pandemonium in the building dogs and cats together. They convinced some students, Steve and his friend, to give up combinations of their bike locks. And then they swapped the locks on all the bikes that they could, creating a giant rat's

nest of tangled bikes and locks and just a bunch of little kids that had no way to get their bikes and go home. Oh, and they also set off quote, a small explosive under the teacher's chair and quote gleefully, he recalls this gave the teacher's chair." And quote, gleefully he recalls, this gave the teacher a nervous twitch thereafter. Yeah. And wherever I went, a little dotted line followed me so you'd know what I'd been up to. So I feel like a lot of perfectly good people exploded things in classrooms and did psychological damage to their teachers time. I don't, I just, I'm saying maybe we don't have to be judgy about all these things all the time.

If you were a responsible and decent parent, you would of course not allow your child to behave like a complete psychopath. But Steve's father insisted that rather than blaming Steve, the school itself was to blame for boring Steve and not challenging his mighty intellect. Yeah, just like the Unabomber and all the people he exploded are Harvard's fault, right? Same as Oppenheimer and Henry Kissinger. Okay, never mind, I see what you're saying. I want to pause here again just to note that this narrative that kids act out because they are intellectually understimulated is nonsense. One only has to take a moment to reflect back on the many, many assholes that we've all

met who acted out in school and would be intellectually stimulated trying to fasten their Velcro shoes together to realize this is bullshit that people say to avoid parental and family accountability. Okay, I don't think that follows. You just named a second type of pain in the ass kid. Also, no, I wasn't. I was not. What a judgment this week. Because dad is just like, I'm sorry.

This is the son of a mink heiress. So there's no way he can be at fault. Thank you very much. Now, Steve tells a story about his fourth grade, which is mostly boring, which I'm going to relate anyway, because I think he's so tragically unself-aware that even with the sober reflection of his fourth grade, which is mostly boring, which I'm going to relate anyway, because I think he's so tragically unself aware that even with the sober reflection of his adult years, he misunderstands what lesson he himself took from the occasion quote.

She taught an advanced fourth grade class and it took her about a month to get hip to my situation. She bribed me into learning. She would say, I really want you to finish this workbook. I'll give you five bucks to finish it. And that really kindled a passion in me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned in any other year in school." For Steve, this is related as the story of a teacher who kindled a passion for learning in him.

But really what this story relays is that what it was kindled was Steve's understanding that money was the only real motivator that mattered and all else be damned. Oh, I'm sorry, Tom, did you start working in real estate reinsurance because of your sense of wonder? Nonetheless, it is indisputable that Steve was academically well off and he was recommended to skip two grades. Those folks only allowed him to advance one additional level rather than two. As you might expect from a kid whose social skills

involved tormenting people for fun and extorting his teachers in order to put in any effort, Steve was a socially ostracized loner who was frequently bullied. By middle school, he demanded that his parents move their family to a wealthier neighborhood with better schools, declaring that if they would not, he would drop out of school. Ever the doormats, his working class parents used all of their savings, morgues themselves

to the hilt, and in 1967 moved to a much better school district in Cupertino, California. Oh, they also each took on second jobs to make this happen rather than tell their shitty entitled son, no. Yeah, that's the weirdest thing about being a teenager, right? So one time where you can successfully hold yourself hostage. What bullshit is that? Steve attended Homestead High School, a school which has deep ties to engineering and Silicon Valley. And it was at Homestead that Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak, the actual

technical genius behind Apple. Woz. It was also there that he met Chrisann Brennan, his first girlfriend, but a big, toxic, mean-spirited pin in that one for a little while later. In high school, Steve discovered drugs, which he immediately decided changed his life and opened up his thinking. They didn't. He was an asshole before the drugs and he was an asshole after, but Steve never let the truth get in the way of his grip on reality. You have dragon arms. Sorry. Sorry. I lashed out. I'm not sorry. He does have dragon arms.

Right. Nonetheless, Steve grew his hair out, read some basic bitch literature and entry level philosophy. And he tricked people into thinking he was profound. Okay. Okay. I have a buzz cut. Totally different. Thank you.

Lots of attacks. Not on me though. Just now. Meanwhile, Wozniak who was actually a fucking genius went to Berkeley and his artsy girlfriend hadn't yet figured out what a huge piece of shit Jobs was. Wow. He grew his hair out, read some basic literature and entry level philosophy. Did he wear concert t-shirts too?

Tommy sounds like he had a unique experience in high school that no one else had. No, none of us. By his senior year in high school. I actually bought it at the concert. I didn't go to Lycra's desk and buy it. Well from a guy outside the venue, but it's just as good. I was there, I could hear the music-ish. Did they misspell Metallica? What is that? Metallica?

What the fuck is that? It makes it worth more. It's a misprint. Megadeth. That's a misprint. Megadeath, that's a great thing, yeah. By his senior year in high school, and despite the mind-expanding wisdom of LSD, Jobs still couldn't figure out how to be a person. He was isolated. Wozniak was a year older and had already gone off to college.

Jobs didn't fit in with the hippie crowd or the brain crowd or the artsy crowd of his girlfriend. He needed something to do, something to focus on. School just wasn't it. Thus began his real first tech product. And despite the sound advice, all the people telling him to go fuck himself, it was not a smart deal though. How do people get that idea?

Sad. With the technical help of Steve Wozniak, Jobs and Woz built an inexpensive digital blue box. Back in the 70s making calls, especially long distance calls, was expensive and phones at the time operated by accepting information via a series of tones. Beep bop boop the right tones at your landline at the right time and you could trick the phone company into allowing you to make free calls. So Wozniak really built these things but Jobs sold them going literally door-to-door on college campuses selling these cheater boxes to college kids who were tired of ponying

up their Dota Ma Bell. The pair made thousands of dollars selling these and never got caught though Jobs did eventually get robbed at gunpoint and he immediately quit the blue box business. So you were a hacker with computers? No, with a Boson whistle. I used a Boson whistle. Right, no, it's worth noting the same technological marvel was achieved by a plastic whistle in a Captain Crunch box.

Exactly. Phone freaks back. In 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, mostly because Timothy Leary and other psychedelic pseudo-mystics were constantly in and out of the place. Steve's working class parents could ill afford the expensive school, but since Jobs dropped out and taking second jobs and using up all of their savings to help Steve get ahead academically were tragically wasted. Instead he audited a calligraphy class and then stupidly declared later that quote, if I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

Never? Close one, close one. And we'd never have Firewire if it weren't for that seminar on lying. That's what you thought it was. I thought it was. In 1974, Jobs moved back home with his folks to look for work and to take the credit for Wozniak's work.

Steve Wozniak had built his own version of the classic video game Pong, which he gave to his best friend, Steve Jobs. Jobs then took the electronics board to Atari and passed it off as his own and was hired as a computer technician, and pretty much immediately set himself apart from his peers as being completely insufferable. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell quote, he was very often the smartest guy in the room and he would let people know that. Yeah.

He was the smartest guy in the room that got a smarter guy to do his work for him. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No one wants to do the editing. You guys are jerks. Okay. He wants it.

He likes it. It's a little office. From his whopping one semester at Reed College, Jobs decided that he was really actually totally into Eastern mysticism. And so in mid-1974, Jobs fucked off to India to try to meet with and learn from Neem Karoli Baba, an Indian guru who Steve didn't know had already died before Jobs landed in India. So that when it got to the Guru's ashram they found there was no one there and they'd walk around looking

for a substitute guru who they found in Haidekan, Babajabi or whatever. Yeah, it turns out that guy was down, down, right, right and punch. His name looks like Hadouken everybody. If you see that now it looks a lot more like hadouken than to the word times I I did the broke ass version of this and I ended up with a commune in Kentucky I'm just what I'm saying Steve jobs could have been even more in Steve stayed in the ashram of Babaji for seven months and left India Aji for seven months and left India dressed in traditional Indian clothes and with a shaved head and a new friend, fellow American and future Apple employee, Daniel Kotkin. Once home, Jobs did more psychedelics, again, praising them for being profound, life-altering experiences, and not just

something fun to do when you're young and without responsibilities. And he stayed for a time at a commune in Oregon, becoming a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. In fact, Jobs studied meditation and Buddhist philosophy so much that of course led him to follow the inevitable route of Buddhism to its natural intellectual confluence with brutal capitalism. A sentence which makes no sense

because Jobs was full of shit. Okay. Well I did all that in Hawaii instead of India and mostly failed at capitalism not full of shit Guys if Tom's about to tell us that Steve Jobs auditioned for a Broadway musical and doesn't get it you hold his arms I'm a bite him And then we'll get him I'm going to fight my way into his heart and then we'll get him. In 1975, Jobs returned to Atari, which they only allowed him to do because Atari knew he would cheat off Wozniak's homework, which he did right away. He was assigned a project to reduce the amount of chips needed to run the game

breakout to the fewest number possible. Wozniak genuinely excited to have a fun project to work on with his best friend. He took up the challenge working on the project at night project to work on with his best friend took up the challenge working on the project at night after he was done with his own job at HP. Atari offered Jobs $100 for each chip he could eliminate from the circuit board. Jobs took that offer to the Woz and agreed to split the profit if Wozniak did all of the work of figuring out the test answers. In four days, Wozniak reduced the number of chips from

100 to 45, which should have netted both Steve's a tidy sum, except that Jobs lied to his very best friend and told him that Atari only paid $750 for the whole project rather than the actual five grand. So Wozniak got all of 375 bucks for doing jobs job, while our hero here pocketed 4,625 bucks, an equivalent today of around $27,000. Okay, and apparently some other guy got $500 because Steve doesn't count very well. I went to Keith for modest needs. Jesus Christ. So fun fact, Steve Wozniak only found out about that years later when Jobs bragged about it in an interview while they were still best friends. And Steve Wozniak cried about it. He did. When he found out,

he cried about it because he was so hurt and mad. In March of 1976, Steve Wozniak had something very special to share with his BFF, Jobs. Wozniak had completed the basic design of the Apple One computer. Jobs' contribution was pretty much to immediately suggest that they sell the shit out of it. The pair, out of Jobs' parents' house, launched Apple Computer Company, named after the time Jobs spent at an Apple orchard at a hippie commune that Jobs pretended mattered to him out of Jobs' parents' house, launched Apple Computer Company, named after the time Jobs spent at an apple orchard at a hippie commune that Jobs pretended mattered to him before fully owning his egomaniacal, robber baron image. Alright, well, an egomaniac who doesn't know how to work hard is taking all the credit

for what his nerd friends do. So while I take Tom aside for a quick reminder to be cool, man, take a quick break for some Apropos of Nothing. Knock knock. Steve. Hey buddy. How we doing? Do you hear that knock knock thing I did? I invented that. Oh, I'm pretty sure I've heard that. Yeah. A lot of people are picking up on it now that I invented it. Anyway, how we doing on that chip chip. Oh, I know the chip project. Oh, really? Good. I've managed to reduce the chip use from 100 to 45. Oh, and the chip project. Oh, really? Good. I've managed to reduce the chip use from 100 to 45. Oh, well, that's too bad, buddy. No, no, that was the point of the project.

Oh, you know, that's great. Awesome. You got 65% of awesome. That's 55. Sure. Yeah. So so look, where do I grab the thing? I got to show the bosses. I mean, you know, look, I'll do my best, you know. You'll do your best? Doing what?

Well selling it. You know, they were hoping you'd be able to get it down to like five chips. But I told them, I said, hey, you know, my buddy Steve, he's a genius. If he can only get it down to 55, well, that's the best that can happen. It's actually 45 I got it down to. Sure, man. It's a lot of numbers. Point is, I'm going to go to bat for you.

Thanks, Steve. And hey, Steve? What's up, buddy? You're my best friend. You know that? I do know that. Sure do. What's up, buddy? You're my best friend. You know that? I do know that. Sure do.

And we're back. When we left off, Steve Jobs was the adorable heart of the podcast who contributed a lot of intangibles that Tom is overlooking. Tom doesn't love one of his kids. What happened next? Jesus Christ. I don't want to spend too much time on this essay. Too late, Tom. All right. Digging into the history of the various tech products that Jobs was involved

in, but you can't tell the story of a man we only know about because of these products without at least some technological context. If you're not familiar with this already, when I say that they invented the Apple One, you might be forgiven for imagining a computer that looks in some or really any way like the computers you've likely grown up using. You would be wrong. The idea at this time of a personal computer was a bonkers notion computers are most of these huge mainframes with boxes of punch cards and shit the Apple one was pretty much a bare printed circuit board that was really only useful for

Butting computer hobbyists and ultimately only a couple hundred of them were ever sold You you had to build your own case for the Apple one and the ones on Wikipedia are made of wood and there's also an old briefcase one. Yeah. All they need is a few more toggles and blinking lights and it could be a 1980s Dr. Who prop and it would fit 100% in there. Jobs' involvement here mostly consisted of being the salesman, but he was also a filthy hippie kid.

A derogatory term that is in this case just accurate. Steve Jobs fucking stank. When Steve was at the Apple Orchard at his commune, he became very heavily influenced by some really fucking stupid woo bullshit. The result was that Steve believed that body odor and illness was caused by the production of mucuses and that a diet of only fruit and later fruits and vegetables stopped the production of these mucuses or maybe muci, I don't know, which would protect Steve from illness and odor and that there was no need for Steve to shower or bathe.

And so he just didn't. Okay. Good rule of thumb. If you learn that something is a magical cure and the place you learn that is a literal orchard of that magical thing, it might be a lie. Since body odor, by the way,

has nothing to do with like stink mucuses leaking out of your skin. And since eating only pineapple doesn't make your cum sweet or your pits not reek, Steve Jobs, whose role was to sell shit, fucking stank constantly for pretty much his entire adult life, always to the point where people refused to work with him and he had to be cajoled into basic human hygiene before big investor meetings because Steve Jobs was a goddamn jackass. I don't know man, when I think of odors, I think yellow bile, not phlegm.

Like of the four humors. Yeah, when he worked for Atari, they told him they needed him for the overnight shift, but like it was an office, right? There's no overnight shift. It's just that Steve Jobs was so smelly. Nobody wanted to be like in the same building with him. It's also the, it's also the time they knew would be easiest for him to sneak Wozniak and to do all this work.

So here's how Apple worked in the beginning. Woz worked all day at his day job, Then went over to Steve's house and worked all night pretty much every single technical thing that mattered was his idea and all of his Efforts then jobs would greet potential customers and investors with like little Pigpen stink lines floating off of him and his underwear hanging out and shit And he would bring people to his garage and he would show them a cigar box with a circuit board in it, connected to a cassette deck and an old TV set, and then they would laugh at him and walk away. Okay, that's like 99% of drug transactions right there.

No, that's insane. That makes sense. But like, they didn't all walk away because Woz, he was legitimately a genius, and even an unkempt stink pig like jobs could with enough determination, sell genius. And the pair received a substantial infusion of capital, $60,000 from Arthur Rock after seeing the Apple one at a homebrew computer show that capital

comes with power and eventually rock got his man. And I love this Michael Scott named as the first president and CEO of Apple in 1977, much to the chagrin of Steve Jobs. Dude, we said you could be CEO if you took a shower and you slammed a box you brought with you shut and yelled no deal. I don't know what to do. I'm telling you.

It was around this same time, 1977, that the Apple II was introduced. The Apple II was the first consumer product of Apple and was again the brainchild of Wozniak, not Jobs. The primary contribution here from Jobs was he wanted to actually limit the functionality of the machine. Wozniak wanted the machine to have eight expansion slots so you could connect a bunch of stuff to the computer.

Jobs wanted only 2, the bare minimum for a monitor and keyboard so they could sell more shit to the consumer. Wosniak prevailed by basically telling Jobs that maybe he should try actually building something himself if he didn't like it. And Jobs, recognizing he didn't actually know how to do anything, caved. The machine went out with eight slots and became a massive success, and this is why so many of us died of dysentery

on the Oregon Trail as middle schoolers. Dying of dysentery is exactly how Steve smelled too. Oh, interesting. And sure, yes, it cost the equivalent of six grand in today's money, but you got like fucking four whole K of Ram. Wow. So it was an absolute steal at that price. That was the base model.

You could upgrade it, I think, like 64. You could play half a game of snake. Yeah, it's crazy. You could play snap. We'd have to take a moment to circle back to Jobs' love life. If you recall, in high school, Jobs had a girlfriend, Chris Ann Brennan. Brennan was also into the Indian mysticism scene and had gone on her own guru hunt, and by 1977 had returned and she and Jobs' romance was rekindled.

So naturally they figured that adding working together to their romance would be a great idea. Brennan began working for Apple in the shipping department, but as Jobs and Apple grew more prominent, their relationship with Brennan began to fall apart and she was considering breaking things off with Stink Jobs when she discovered that she was pregnant with Jobs' child. Afraid of his response, she waited a few days to tell him and when she did, his face, quote, turned ugly, end quote, and he refused to discuss the pregnancy with her except to

say cruel and dehumanizing shit. Jobs backed her into a terrible corner with the pregnancy. He barely spoke to her at all but when he did he told her that if she gave the baby up for adoption she would be sorry, a threat the more powerful Jobs was increasingly able to make good on if he were crossed. He then told her that he was never going to help you and began to spread rumors to slut shame her in order to cast doubt on his paternity, even going so far as to broadcast to others that he was infertile and that therefore the baby couldn't possibly be his.

Yeah. I haven't been erect in years as an Elon Musk level own. You can really see the blueprints being drawn there. It's really coming together. Chris and Brennan gave birth to their daughter, Lisa Brennan, on May 17th, 1978, at the All One Farm commune that both she and Steve had spent time at years before. A few days before the birth, Job showed up and became a huge gaslighting mixed message machine,

one of the only machines he was actually responsible for. The pair sat together on the farm discussing names before both settling on Lisa. While at the same time, Jobs continued to cast doubt on his paternity in every public forum he had available to him. Crazily, Jobs named the next computer they would build after his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge publicly was his daughter. Yeah, and he refused to acknowledge the real parent of the new computer too. It was Xerox, not him at all.

Yeah, right, yep. The Apple Lisa was clearly a namesake, but after he chose the name, Jobs then tasked a team to create a bullshit acronym that just so happened to spell out Lisa, just so he could claim that it was all a coincidence. Okay, who wrote literally I stole Apple? Get the fuck out.

I tasked a team of you for that. Jobs then later admitted to biographers that actually, of course the computer was named after his daughter that he was publicly disavowing. What a stupid lie. Lisa Brennan actually wrote a whole, it is, it's insane. He's insane. Lisa Brennan actually wrote a whole book about what a piece of shit Jobs was as a father. When Jobs had told Chrisanne that he would do nothing to help her,

he meant it. Even as Jobs racked up financial success after financial success, he did nothing to voluntarily help or care for his daughter. At one point, the mother and daughter were in such dire financial straits that they were forced to live in a shelter. Eventually, the state of California intervened and sued Jobs on Brennan's behalf for child support. Jobs fought the case and even when a paternity test revealed with 94% certainty, the best certainty available from the testing at the time that Jobs was the father, he still insisted that there were millions of men other than him who could technically still be the father. The courts were not moved by his slut-shaming and deadbeat dadding.

And even after it was adjudicated that he had responsibility for his daughter, Jobs fought the support negotiations until suddenly, suddenly he didn't. Moving quickly to secure an agreement to pay only $500 a month for the care of his daughter, he signed the support agreement less than a week before taking Apple public and becoming vastly more wealthy overnight. Well, I mean, $500 might not seem like much today, but back then, I mean, you could buy almost 40% of an Apple IIe for that. It's like 1.75K for that kind of money.

And on the rare occasions that Jobs did interact with his daughter, he was a complete asshole. Jobs, as I mentioned before, eschewed the eating of meat, which is fine, but he was an unbearable dick about it to anyone that he came into contact with that didn't share this view, including his elementary school-aged daughter. While sharing a meal, Lisa ordered a hamburger, which triggered

in Jobs a furious tirade at his eight year old daughter, yelling and belittling the youngster in public and insisting that she quote, get her act together. What? End quote. On another occasion when she was seven and riding in Steve's Porsche, Lisa commented that she'd like to have this car someday to which Jobs coldly replied to his own flesh and blood quote You'll never get anything from me end quote. Yeah, I guarantee you he said it just like that He said Porsche like fucking Nietzsche and Calatay Glad he died of cancer

Oh, that's not true dad. I'm gonna sell this story and tell everyone an asshole you were see thanks dad Yeah, I'm gonna buy this story and tell everyone an asshole you were see. Thanks dad I'm gonna buy a Porsche with that. You're a time bestseller Porsche For the next few years the company grows and nothing interesting happens Except that a spoiled little stink ship begins to grow increasingly wealthy off the brain power and labor of his best friend he continued to exploit. Not always a bad thing. When Wozniak was injured in a plane crash, he had to take a step back from working on

the Macintosh and that gave Jobs a chance to swoop in on that project as well. And it was around this time that the now famous Super Bowl ad, 1984 was aired. An ad that featured a mass of bald men and women clearly enthralled to tech overlords being freed by Apple, who would go on as a tech overlord to enthrall billions around the globe. Oh, and to get enough people in the ad with shaved heads,

the company hired skinheads as extras. Or as they called them, bad apples. Bad, bad apples. Bad, bad apples. Sorry. Cheers. The McIntosh wasn't really a hit out of the gate and a boring corporate pissing match over the future of Apple ensued, which caused Wozniak to take his stock options and quit. Jobs wanted

to supplant IBM with the Macintosh, but they were failing. Everyone liked their commercial full of skinheads and all, but the machine itself just wasn't selling because it wasn't all that good. To this point, in the mid-1980s, it was still the Apple II that was and had made the company and its founders rich. Okay, but to be fair, being all that good wasn't in the cards for personal computers for another dozen fucking years. That's very fair. The board was growing weary of Stink Jobs' failures, and here in 1985,

Jobs was under pressure from the board. He resigned from Apple and began a new company called Next, which is the word next spelled like if you were an asshole. Jobs, it's not embezzled Xerox technology. Not that jobs, take $7 million of his own money into the project. But a year later he was out of money and there was still no product investors for some reason, believing the myth of Steve Jobs is something other than an impediment to success, shat tons of venture capital at Next, which you've never heard of.

You've never heard of Next because it was a $10,000 workstation designed for the education sector that was so cost prohibitive that pretty much no one bought them. Okay, when he started Next, Jobs poached one key engineer from like every single division of Apple And Apple was like, okay, you're really just gonna copy our shit. That's been your whole thing the whole time You're fired and he was like already quit too slow He spent the next three years just being like little black box in obnoxious in like little black box in obnoxious, thinky inflections while actual computer people did all the work and they put it in a little black box.

The magnesium cube. Yeah. And that's still why the desktops are made super inefficiently today is because they want to keep the idea of the little box alive. It's all these engineers were like, that's dumb. We could just any other formation is better. And he's like, little black. Jesus Christ. And every video on every video editor on earth is like, stupid little gray box.

So expensive. By 1990, the next iteration of next was out and this time it contained a whole slew of technological innovations, but still the company only sold 50,000 of them, and the profit line by 1994 was only $1 million. Credit where it's due though, Jobs did have a strong eye for the aesthetic experience of using a computer.

And when the company transitioned away from building hardware, that aesthetic view led to Next eventually becoming the framework for software that Apple eventually acquired, and which the Apple Store and iTunes eventually ran on. The acquisition by Apple of Next was fantastically profitable for jobs, and brought an even more emboldened Steve back to Apple. He really doesn't fall that far from the tree, you know?

Steve is getting pulled out of the pool by the lifeguard. And they, I drowned better than anyone you ever saw before. Was that like the best drowning you ever saw? So an emboldened Steve was a cruel Steve. Now, and keep in mind, this is as opposed to the one who bragged to his daughter about owning a Porsche, right? The great citation needed to divide. as opposed to the one who bragged to his daughter about owning a Porsche, right? Porsche. Psh. Psh.

Psh. The great citation needed to divide. Psh. Now back at Apple, Steve said about axing projects he didn't like or felt wouldn't sell, sometimes firing people as he rode the elevator with them. Ooh. Employees became afraid of jobs going out of their way

to avoid him lest he berate, ridicule, or summarily fire them. On one famous occasion, he reduced an entire team to tears in a single meeting. Major projects at Apple were quashed in a matter of months upon Steve's return to Apple, and the teams that had been diligently working on those projects abruptly found themselves without work. Maybe we should have spent a little less time saying, learn to code and a lot more time saying, learn to unionize, huh? You guys know if that's relevant to today, anything? You guys know?

How's it going over there in the tech sector? And that wasn't the only insane thing Steve Jobs was known for around the workplace. Sometimes, sometimes when Steve was stressed out, he liked to cool his heels a little. Literally. And the way he did this was by going into the bathrooms in the office and putting his bare feet in the toilets to relax. What? No, no.

Also, he also just walked around barefoot. Now with his nasty toilet feet spreading poo germs around that he of course never washed off. Excuse me Tom, what the fuck did you just say? Wait, just keep in mind like he's rich, he was the boss. He could just have a fucking porcelain bowl with non-shit water in the fucking office if he wanted that. Okay, if we know somehow that he was definitely doing that,

he was clearly putting his face in there too. And he never got caught. Yeah, for sure. For sure. He was turdberglin for sure. Like he was just like looking around and penis. Oh, Steve noted himself a swirly having weird sexual reaction to it. swirly having weird sexual reaction to it. You know this was all happening. Steve noted that the easy and inexpensive licensing of Windows meant that IBM had lost control of the hardware side of their business. IBM clones had appeared everywhere and Steve was not going to allow the same to happen

to Macintosh. So he swiftly updated and locked down the licensing program for Macintosh making it too costly for manufacturers to clone their machines and run their software. This effectively walled off the Mac and created a company that had complete control of both the software and hardware. And a bunch of boring tech stuff happened, but by 2000 Steve Jobs, once ousted from Apple, was now their CEO. And Steve was not one to forget past slights. As Apple's stock value rose, he recalled his war of words with Michael Dell from back in

1987. At the time, Steve mocked Dell for making quote, unimaginative beige boxes, end quote. And Michael, when asked what he would do to improve the then struggling Apple corporation, he replied, I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders. When in 2006, nearly 20 years after their spat, 20 years, Apple's valuation rose above Dell's, Steve email blasted his entire company to gloat about it. Okay, destroying his enemies, I like him again.

I think I like him. Okay, all right, he's poop feet. I fixed it. You're welcome. Yeah, yeah, we found it again. I think I like him. All right, he's poop feet. I fixed it. Yeah, we found it again. Poop feet. If Steve Jobs was good at anything, and I think we have to acknowledge that he was, it was in creating what has been described

as the quote, reality distortion field, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Jobs, through force of will or charisma or charm or hyperbole or manipulation, lies, delusion, or as a combination of all of these, he was frequently able to convince those around him of his own genius and his infallibility and technological prescience. People really ate up the myth of Steve Jobs as a force of nature and a brand unto himself. His stupid uniform of a black mock turtleneck, jeans and New Balance sneakers, reinforce the image of a man who was too brilliant, too busy for pedestrian affairs, like picking out a new shirt.

The man had become synonymous with the brand itself. I always thought he cribbed his style from the heavens gate cult. Those hail, I thought he was just like, wait, who's the TA in your class with the worst ideas about sexual consent? Cause I want to look like that. Right? I love reality distortion field bullshit. Tech guys had to come up with a term for us being dumb, right?

Steve jobs didn't have a super power. Y'all are just not as good at thinking as you tell yourself you are, Silicon Valley. Everyone knows the tech stuff that happened next. And this story isn't that story. So I'm skipping the parts now where a rich guy gets richer and richer and people buy more and more pocket sized music players and smartphones.

You know all that stuff already and none of it matters. In 2003, Jobs announced to his employees that he had pancreatic cancer, which is not one of the better cancers to get, though Steve had a fairly rare and much less aggressive than normal version. Doctors recommended that Steve treat the cancer because that's what you do

if you have a form of cancer that might actually be survivable. And the odds were actually really pretty good. Steve had an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which if caught early has based on my Google MDI awarded myself about a 70% chance of survival. Man, I bet cancer felt terrible. had Steve Jobs. I mean just awesome. At least I take care of my daughter you asshole. I don't have poop feet. Stupid. I remember though that Steve, Steve Jobs was a woo believing dipshit who stunk all the time because he thought apples cured sweating. So rather than undergoing treatment, for nine months, Steve instead relied on his vegan diet, acupuncture, herbs and spices, a psychic, and whatever random shit he found online.

He tried juice fasts and bowel cleanses, but eventually he realized that uncontrolled cellular growth is not caused by like celery deficiencies. And as his health predictably declined, he finally conceded that, you know, all of that is nothing and he had surgery to remove the tumor, a surgery which was initially successful. Yeah, and then he wrote in his book about

how much he believes in science. It's fucking nuts. He was eating ants on a log to try to cure cancer. Get the fuck out of here. In 2006, however, the cancer returned. I knew it could do it. Cancer, cancer. Do a USA chant with me, dammit.

Cancer, cancer. Ugh. I get no yes-ants from you people. Wait, do we full-on hate him? Because like I feel like there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, but like all these innovations, whatever, he did some good stuff. I based on this, I just full-on hate him. Are we supposed to full-on hate him? Yeah, I think we're allowed to full-on hate him at the Trollership Paragraph. Get like Obama at his funeral, I'm just saying. Obama was nice to a lot of people. So did Kissinger.

I mean, what the fuck? Point match. This is a good point. Exodus last week, Kissinger this week. I'm just saying I'm noticing a pattern Cecil Cicerello. I hid his cancer from nearly everyone. At the August 2006 keynote, he was noticeably gaunt and listless, and he had farmed out a significant portion of his presentation to

others, something the attention-hungry Jobs had never done before. Rumors of his ill health swirled such that Apple put out a statement of lies indicating that Steve wasn't sick at all, and he probably just looked like a walking corpse because he hadn't eaten enough parsnips or whatever. Okay, yeah, there was a big shareholders meeting and people were like, seriously though, is he dying? You actually do have to tell us we have like billions of dollars in this and Tim Cook was like parsnips. No, but you really par have to tell us snare. I have to tell a snare. I wasn't meeting that. And a couple of years later in 2008 at the WWDC conference, it was again apparent that Jobs

was not doing well. So much that Apple had to make some bullshit up about how he looked, you know, cryptkeeper-y from a common bug, but he was taking antibiotics and not to worry. Guys, don't be alarmed. He got sick taking his piggies to market in the toilet, okay? That's what he was doing. That's why he's sick The problem though is that the man and the company had merged into one and so a sickness and one triggered fears and Stockholders that the future of the company itself might be at risk if someone didn't feed Steve Oh some oranges stat company itself might be at risk if someone didn't feed Steve-O some oranges stat. Following an interview with the New York Times, it was reported that Jobs was indeed sicker

than just having a common bug, but that there was nothing to worry about. Sometimes people just, you know, noticeably visually decline over the course of years into shadows of their former selves because of how healthy and robust they really are. It's like when Toby from the AwevVess lost a bunch of weight for two seasons, but they kept him in the same costumes, so he looks like a child in an adult Halloween costume. You can't find anything about it anywhere online. There's like three Reddit threads where people are like, it looks like Toby got really sick at one point.

And everyone's like, leave him alone, he deserves to have some privacy. Put a new costume on him if you don't want me to ask. Is it just me? I believe they call it a wardrobe, not a costume. In the school play, we called them costumes. And that's all I was ever allowed to do. The sophisticated puppet of Toby, they had to change it. By January of 2009, however, Jobs was forced to concede to his employees that his quote health related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

Yeah. Which is not actually saying much since he originally thought his health issues could be cured by a psychic. Yeah, right. It turns out my health issues exist. He then took a six month leave of absence from washing his feet in the shitter at work to focus on his health. Presumably then washing his feet and the privacy of his own toilet.

In April of that same year, a perfectly fine liver was wasted when it was transplanted into Steve jobs. And doctors assured everyone that his prognosis was excellent. And he would be back to slut shaming his ex-girlfriend and neglecting his daughter with the same Vim and vigor he brought to his merciless elevator firings. Wow, he got really lucky with that liver list. I bet that was totally random. Totally random that he got to the top of that liver list.

Yeah, right. Several months later, Jobs did in fact return to work for a brief stint, though by January of 2011 he was back on medical leave and resigned in August of that same year just six weeks before he ultimately died. Barry Keseleff, the chief of integrative medicine at Sloan Kettering noted that ultimately quote, Job's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life. He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable. He essentially committed suicide." End quote.

Yeah, he totally cribbed his style from Heaven's Gates. He's a little funny. Yeah, it's all coming together. Ah! A brief postscript here. Steve married and he had some kids, but honestly, who fucking cares? He was an asshole,

and that's what we should remember about him. The majority of his vast wealth went to his wife after his passing, as you might expect. Lisa Brennan. The daughter that Jobs tried so hard to ignore and to deny, attended and graduated from Harvard, and works as a writer with publications and many very estimable publications that wouldn't even read a submission from anyone that I know. She's married with a son she doesn't try to pretend isn't hers, and she inherited millions from her deadbeat father. Nice, that's like a really happy ending that you switched away from. Thank you. Thank you. I like it.

And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence Tom, what would it be? If your hero holds a press conference, you've picked the wrong pony. And are you ready for the quiz? Absolutely. Alright Tom, what's my favorite extra fun fact about Steve Jobs? A, a few months after his like, crypt-keeper-y speech in 2008, Bloomberg News accidentally published a 2,500 word obituary for Steve Jobs. B, Bloomberg was just getting it ready because, you know, he looked like he was dying of shitheel cancer and like free-basing ozembic, but some idiot just pressed the wrong button and that

got posted. C. Despite having a blank space for his cause of death and age of death, a bunch of other news outlets ran with that before Bloomberg could fix it. D. When he did a keynote a month later, he said, the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated, which seems like the only endearing moment of his life. E. No, it wasn't. He stole that too. It was from Mark Twain. It was from Mark Twain. It's all of those I happen to know, but the worst and best part is me. Correct. All right, Tom.

What should you not Google? Uh-oh. A, toilet, foot, jobs. Oh, no. That's it. Doing it right now, Cecil. Patrons, buy Cecil a new computer. We need a new computer for Cecil.

He stamped his with the sword. Okay, genuinely, the first thing I got was Reddit being like, did he really put his feet in the toilet water? It's seriously, Cora and Reddit, Steve Jobs questions. Of course, two results. I have one for you, Tom. You crafted the entire first half of your essay using only insults to Heath, Eli, and myself personally.

Why? A. You're jealous of our awesome pajama parties. I am a little jealous. B. It's been too long since we did a Bulgaria for Charity segment and the insults are just backing up now. They gotta come out somehow See you fucking hate us. Well, that's not D It is almost impossible to make fun of a privileged white guy without making Heath Eli and myself collateral damage

Damage you guessed it. It's D. Yeah. No, it is no see you actually Think that all right Seems like I would know that well Cannon now I don't remember the parts that were supposed to be jokes about me, but I'm sure no I'll explain them In the meantime, I guess no is the winner of this week's episode Say cuz Heath won't be mean to me. That's right All right. Well for Noah Cecil Heath and Tom, I'm Eli Bocic. Thanking you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week and by then, Heath will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to the podcast Tom and I take credit for wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to help keep the show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can And if you'd like to get in touch with us check out past episodes connect with us on social media or check the show notes Be sure to check out citation pod calm

Steve Steve I got bad news, buddy, they only gave us 500 bucks. Aw man again, those stinkers! Wait this is 498 dollars. Well no, I got a soda on the way over. What? I said I was so mad on the way over here. I bet you were.

I bet you were.