Geoffrey Cain

He always wanted to make his mark on history.

Like all that was in there somewhere.

One of the reasons why he created the Macintosh was exactly that.

He was trying to stick it to IBM, the competitor.

He wanted to build a computer that he would call it a computer for the rest of us.

And the idea was that by democratizing technology, by making it smaller and simpler, he could shape history in a direction.

I think that if he had set his mind to any of these other activities he wanted to do, if he wanted to run for politics, if he wanted to do whatever, become an artist even, he would have succeeded at all of them.

He had a lot of choices open, but he self-sabotaged like crazy.

Well, that's the contradiction of Steve Jobs and that's everybody I interviewed for this book brought that up.

He had this thing called the hero shithead rollercoaster where he would lift you up one day and praise you as the greatest person in the world and then he would tear you down the next day and say your ideas are terrible and you're stupid.

Um, and you know, it was a contradiction that everybody who worked with him had to grapple with.

Uh, you know, it was, it was like BC jobs contradiction in a nutshell.

And so, you know, where, where, how do I think this played out?

Like, how do I think this sort of affected things?

Um,

Earlier in his life, he didn't know how to harness and channel this talent he had for finding good people.

He had an eye for great design, for great technology, but also for hiring the right executives and the right employees who could come in and could really do brilliant things.

He instilled loyalty in them.

And one of the things he did is he would play them off against each other.

So he really valued intellectual combat and he wanted people to go into a room with him