231: What on Earth Would Ordinary People Want With Computers?

00:00SPEAKERBrad, do you know what your SVID is set at?

00:02SPEAKER- Why are you saying this in this ominous touch?

00:04SPEAKER- Look, man.

00:05SPEAKER- You sound like it's 10 p.m.,

00:06SPEAKERdo you know where your SVID is?

00:08SPEAKER- Rowdy motherboards are over-volting processors

00:12SPEAKERin your neighborhood.

00:13SPEAKERYou saw, we talked about this on the PC World Podcast

00:16SPEAKERa lot over the last few weeks,

00:18SPEAKERand there was a Gamers Nexus video this week,

00:21SPEAKERthere's been a bunch of other stuff that's come out,

00:23SPEAKERbut this morning, videocards.com with a Z.

00:28SPEAKERNo space also, canonically correct pronunciation spelling,

00:32SPEAKERposted a story that ASUS has released some motherboards

00:35SPEAKERfor its Z90 motherboards, the 13th and 14th gen motherboards,

00:40SPEAKERhas a new setting called Intel Baseline Profile,

00:46SPEAKERwhich purportedly doesn't overclock anything.

00:49SPEAKER- You might think that a setting such as that

00:52SPEAKERwould exist out of the box on a motherboard,

00:54SPEAKERand they might make it easy to just say,

00:56SPEAKERhey, you know what, run this thing at stock.

00:58SPEAKER- Look, I've spent a fair amount of time

01:00SPEAKERover the last few weeks benchmarking

01:01SPEAKERjanky 13th and 14th generation processors,

01:05SPEAKERand I'm gonna go ahead and tell you,

01:08SPEAKERthis is a welcome change.

01:10SPEAKER- Some issues there.

01:11SPEAKERYou were really ahead of the curve, 'cause-

01:13SPEAKER- I was a thought leader here.

01:14SPEAKER- You were reporting issues a year ago, I think, almost,

01:18SPEAKERor more even on this exact subject,

01:20SPEAKERway before it became what is now like a pretty hot story,

01:23SPEAKERI think, in the PC World.

01:25SPEAKER- So yeah, I RMA'd my first 13900K

01:30SPEAKERabout this time last year, like March probably,

01:32SPEAKERand I was having, we've talked about it in the podcast before

01:36SPEAKERso I won't get into super big details,

01:37SPEAKERbut I was having crashes in Fortnite,

01:41SPEAKERand got perma-banned from Fortnite for alleged cheating.

01:45SPEAKERIt wasn't cheating, but something was corrupting my memory

01:48SPEAKERand changing my memory, the contents of my memory

01:51SPEAKERin a way that their anti-cheat flagged, presumably.

01:53SPEAKERThey never, Intel, look, Epic never told me,

01:56SPEAKERIntel never told me, this is talking to some friends

01:58SPEAKERwho've worked on EAC games in the past,

02:00SPEAKERand they were like, here's what I think

02:02SPEAKERis probably happening, which is that the memory controller

02:06SPEAKERor the memory was rewriting parts of the memory

02:10SPEAKERthat easy anti-cheat didn't think should be changed,

02:14SPEAKERand thus that was triggering as me doing some nonsense

02:17SPEAKERto jack with the game.

02:19SPEAKERSo yeah, the whole world's come around.

02:21SPEAKERIntel, maybe not immune to the issues that AMD

02:25SPEAKERwas having last year with fiery CPUs.

02:29SPEAKERI mean, nothing's catching on fire here to be clear,

02:31SPEAKERbut both excess voltage issues in each case

02:36SPEAKERreally just seems like a result of the race to the top

02:38SPEAKERon desktop PC performance,

02:40SPEAKERbecause that's all anybody seems to be able to do these days

02:43SPEAKERis just pump more juice in there,

02:44SPEAKERtry to make it go faster.

02:45SPEAKER- So Gordon, the Cinebench numbers have gone down like 12%

02:49SPEAKERwith the Intel baseline profile on your BIOS, which--

02:53SPEAKER- Yeah, to be clear though,

02:54SPEAKERthat is from the maximal overclocking profile

02:56SPEAKERthat the board ships with, right?

02:58SPEAKERLike we're shaving 12% off of what was a potentially

03:01SPEAKERdangerous group of settings to run your CPU at.

03:05SPEAKER- So some would say that the stock motherboard settings

03:07SPEAKERshould not be potentially dangerous.

03:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I would say that.

03:12SPEAKER- I'm gonna say that the people who bought these processors

03:14SPEAKERand got used to this level of performance,

03:16SPEAKERthen they're seeing a 12 or 13% performance

03:18SPEAKERthat when they use the ones that won't let their,

03:20SPEAKERlight their shit on fire over a period of months,

03:22SPEAKERprobably you're gonna be upset.

03:23SPEAKERAs Gordon says, and it's important to say,

03:25SPEAKERGordon Hmong, my old friend and colleague at PC World,

03:30SPEAKERsays there's a lot of smoke here.

03:32SPEAKERWe don't know where the fire is yet.

03:34SPEAKERThe fact that ASUS has launched a motherboard update

03:37SPEAKERthat sets baseline settings after,

03:40SPEAKERso this came after Falcon Northwest, a system integrator,

03:44SPEAKERdid a, hey, here's the safe settings

03:48SPEAKERthat we've found post last week.

03:50SPEAKERWe tried it on my busted 13, my second busted 13900K,

03:54SPEAKERand it wasn't able to be recovered.

03:55SPEAKERIt's one of the ones he mentions in his post.

03:58SPEAKERIt's like, yeah, we had a couple that this didn't help on,

04:00SPEAKERbut it did help on one of the other processors

04:02SPEAKERthat we were having some issues.

04:04SPEAKERAnd there was some concern, there's been conversations

04:06SPEAKERabout SVID, the Intel failsafe SVID profile,

04:11SPEAKERwhich a lot of people are saying

04:13SPEAKERis putting too much voltage into these processors.

04:15SPEAKERFrom what we've seen, and this isn't,

04:18SPEAKERwe're not at a point where we're done testing,

04:20SPEAKERthere were some other settings in the ASUS BIOS

04:23SPEAKERthat were turned on that were causing those failsafes

04:26SPEAKERto go above what they were.

04:27SPEAKERWhen you turn those settings off,

04:29SPEAKERwe were seeing them back at what the,

04:31SPEAKERwhat the recommended ASUS profiles are.

04:33SPEAKERSo, I mean, what the recommended Intel profiles are.

04:36SPEAKERSo it's a little bit of a weird situation.

04:40SPEAKERBut on that note, I have an announcement

04:42SPEAKERfor what I'm running at home now.

04:44SPEAKER- Oh.

04:45SPEAKER- I've switched to an AMD machine.

04:48SPEAKER- You're not serious.

04:49SPEAKER- Ryzen 5800X3D is in there right now.

04:51SPEAKERI'm testing it out to see if I can live with only eight cores.

04:53SPEAKER- You're not serious.

04:54SPEAKERAre you actually serious?

04:55SPEAKER- Dead serious.

04:56SPEAKER- Really?

04:57SPEAKER- It's got a full circle.

04:58SPEAKER- What?

04:58SPEAKER(laughing)

05:00SPEAKERLive reveal on the podcast, why a 5800X3D?

05:03SPEAKER- Well, so one is, I wanted to,

05:08SPEAKERAdam and I were talking about, we were like,

05:09SPEAKERlet's do the low power, like what's the lowest power thing?

05:12SPEAKERLet's see what this does for you

05:14SPEAKERand see how it hits the multi-threaded workloads that you use

05:18SPEAKERand see what happens.

05:19SPEAKERIt's a little, I'm able to spike the cores pretty good

05:23SPEAKERon some of the stuff that I do.

05:24SPEAKERBut it's not, it's definitely not slow.

05:26SPEAKERIt's a really, really nice processor for what I'm doing.

05:29SPEAKERAnd the fans, I have a 360 AIO on it.

05:35SPEAKERAnd that thing, I'm gonna tell you, never spins.

05:38SPEAKERIt's like, if it hits 30% fan speed,

05:40SPEAKERI'm really doing something serious.

05:42SPEAKERSo it's nice having something

05:43SPEAKERthat doesn't immediately spike to 90 or 95 degrees Celsius

05:46SPEAKERthe moment you put the cores under a load.

05:49SPEAKER- I'm still sitting here waiting for you to tell me

05:51SPEAKERthis is all a joke.

05:52SPEAKER- No, so I'm gonna try a 5950, I think.

05:56SPEAKEROh, sorry, sorry, not 5800, 7800.

05:59SPEAKER- Oh, you're on a 7800X3D?

05:59SPEAKER- I'm on a 7800, not a 5800.

06:02SPEAKER- Oh, okay, yeah, that's what I was wondering.

06:03SPEAKERThat's the current chin.

06:04SPEAKER- Yeah, I aim five, sorry, aim five, not the aim four.

06:07SPEAKER- Yes.

06:08SPEAKER- Yeah, so 7800, and then the next step will be a 7950,

06:11SPEAKERtry a 7950 for a few days and see what I think about that.

06:14SPEAKER- Regular 7950X?

06:15SPEAKER- Probably the X3D, which I know is--

06:17SPEAKER- Wait, what?

06:19SPEAKER- Yeah, hi.

06:21SPEAKER- This can't be happening.

06:23SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause this is where you started, right?

06:24SPEAKER- I went from there to where you were,

06:27SPEAKERand now you were going from where you were to where I was.

06:30SPEAKER- We've come full circle, Brad.

06:32SPEAKERIt's a circle of life.

06:33SPEAKER(upbeat music)

06:41SPEAKER(upbeat music)

07:02SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

07:04SPEAKERI'm Will.

07:05SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.

07:06SPEAKER- 90 hours a week and loving it, Brad.

07:08SPEAKERThat's where we're at.

07:09SPEAKERIt's living that tech pod life.

07:11SPEAKER- Can't believe they've reproduced that shirt perfectly.

07:14SPEAKER- I think we should buy those.

07:15SPEAKERI think maybe we should make those shirts.

07:16SPEAKERWe should just knock them off and tell them.

07:17SPEAKERYou think they'd come after us?

07:18SPEAKER- I thought it, no, definitely not.

07:20SPEAKERI looked at that and I thought about that.

07:22SPEAKERI was like, maybe making that would be like

07:24SPEAKERfun merch opportunity or something.

07:25SPEAKERBut then again, glorifying that kind of overwork.

07:28SPEAKERIt's not really something I want to be a part of.

07:30SPEAKER- Yeah, so this week,

07:30SPEAKERif you haven't been paying attention lately

07:32SPEAKERor haven't listened to the very end of the show,

07:34SPEAKERwe watched "Pirates of Silicon Valley."

07:38SPEAKER- After what, roughly a month, I think,

07:40SPEAKERof promoting that we were going to do this.

07:42SPEAKERHopefully that gave everybody a chance to watch it.

07:43SPEAKERBut if you haven't watched it yet,

07:45SPEAKERthe link will be in the show notes on archive.org.

07:48SPEAKERYou can go watch it now and then come back and listen.

07:50SPEAKER- It's very watchable.

07:51SPEAKERIt features Noah Wiley of ER fame

07:53SPEAKERand Anthony Michael Hall of the '80s fame.

07:56SPEAKER- Yes, the Breakfast Club.

07:58SPEAKER- As Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, respectively.

08:03SPEAKER- Yes.

08:05SPEAKER- I've got to say, John DiMaggio,

08:10SPEAKERas Steve Ballmer.

08:13SPEAKER- Yes, inspired casting.

08:15SPEAKER- Inspired.

08:16SPEAKERBender Bending Rodriguez.

08:19SPEAKER- Wait, is that Bender's full name?

08:20SPEAKER- That's Bender Bending Rodriguez.

08:21SPEAKERYeah, that's Bender's full name.

08:23SPEAKER- Not a big Futurama watcher, that's good to know.

08:25SPEAKER- Futurama's pretty good.

08:27SPEAKER- I mean, I think of John DiMaggio more

08:28SPEAKERas Marcus Fenix than anybody, really,

08:31SPEAKERwhen it comes down to it.

08:32SPEAKERBut that was something I had forgotten

08:35SPEAKERand then was reminded of and then chose

08:36SPEAKERto keep close to the vest as we have talked

08:38SPEAKERabout this movie, 'cause I wanted people

08:40SPEAKERto discover for themselves John DiMaggio

08:43SPEAKERas Steve Ballmer is a delight in this movie.

08:45SPEAKER- Oh yes, it's so good.

08:48SPEAKERAnd I think, I want to say, maybe not.

08:53SPEAKERI thought that the guy who plays Dan Kottke,

08:56SPEAKERMarcus Giamatti, is related to Paul Giamatti,

08:59SPEAKERbut I don't think they are.

09:00SPEAKER'Cause the thing that I always forget

09:01SPEAKERis that Joey Slotnick always looks like

09:03SPEAKERhe should be like Paul Giamatti's little kid brother.

09:07SPEAKER- Sure, I can see that.

09:08SPEAKER- Joey Slotnick played Woz.

09:09SPEAKER- Yes, and I'd definitely, like Joey Slotnick

09:13SPEAKERis one of those people who you look at him

09:14SPEAKERand go like, oh, that guy, full on character actor,

09:16SPEAKERI don't know where else I know him from.

09:18SPEAKER- He was in a league of their own.

09:19SPEAKERHe was really good in a league of their own, Ed Twister.

09:22SPEAKERLike a lot of early '90s, mid '90s movies.

09:25SPEAKER- Great as Woz in this.

09:27SPEAKER- Yeah, good Woz.

09:28SPEAKERSo this movie, for people who don't know,

09:31SPEAKERthis was a made for TV movie,

09:33SPEAKERwhich is a thing that they used to do

09:35SPEAKERin the days of cable.

09:36SPEAKER- Yes.

09:38SPEAKER- They also would do like three made for TV movies

09:42SPEAKERand show them like one night after the other,

09:43SPEAKERand that would be called a mini series.

09:44SPEAKERSo it'd be like an hour and a half each night

09:47SPEAKERwith a bunch of commercials.

09:48SPEAKER- I miss the mini series so much.

09:49SPEAKERI miss the made for TV movie for that matter.

09:52SPEAKER- Well, it's weird 'cause the mini series,

09:54SPEAKERlike the length of a mini series

09:56SPEAKERand a limited like streaming series

09:59SPEAKERthat's eight episodes long, basically the same now,

10:02SPEAKERexcept for the streaming series

10:03SPEAKERwill probably be an hour and a half each episode.

10:04SPEAKERThe mini series would have been like six hours total,

10:06SPEAKERprobably.

10:07SPEAKER- Yeah, there's something different about it though.

10:08SPEAKERI mean, like streaming series come out every single day now,

10:11SPEAKERlike the TV movie or the mini series was an event.

10:15SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and it was definitely the kind of thing

10:17SPEAKERthat like when the first episode would hit,

10:20SPEAKEReverybody would be talking about at school the next day,

10:22SPEAKERand then you'd have to go up and try to figure out

10:24SPEAKERwhat the hell happened on the first episode.

10:26SPEAKERSometimes they would even show like first episode on Tuesday,

10:30SPEAKERfirst and second episode on Wednesday,

10:33SPEAKERand then you'd get the third episode on Thursday.

10:36SPEAKER- Sure, it's a simpler time.

10:38SPEAKER- Or in the post TiVo days,

10:41SPEAKERthey'd just show it again at like one o'clock in the morning

10:44SPEAKERbecause then the machines, for the machines,

10:46SPEAKERand then we'd watch it.

10:47SPEAKERAnyway, "Pirates of Silicon Valley" was based on a book

10:51SPEAKERcalled "Fire in the Valley"

10:51SPEAKERby Michael Swain and Paul Freiberger.

10:54SPEAKER- Yeah, which came out quite early, I guess.

10:57SPEAKER- 1980, the year was 1984.

11:00SPEAKER- Yes, this movie is based on a book.

11:03SPEAKERBoth of them are about basically

11:05SPEAKERa personal computer revolution,

11:06SPEAKERstarting I believe from about 1971 up through '90s.

11:10SPEAKERWell, the book originally came out

11:11SPEAKERand only covered up to 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh.

11:14SPEAKER- Yeah, if it covered after that,

11:15SPEAKERit would have been a real like real masterwork.

11:18SPEAKER- Yes, and it's gotten a couple of revisions.

11:20SPEAKERIt actually, the book has the most recent revision from 2014,

11:23SPEAKERwhich covers all the way up to what they refer to

11:25SPEAKERas the post-PC era with the death of Steve Jobs

11:27SPEAKERand the rise of smartphones and cloud computing and et cetera.

11:31SPEAKERStill makes me sad to think about the fact

11:33SPEAKERthat the desktop computer era is not really a thing anymore,

11:36SPEAKERbut it is what we're at.

11:38SPEAKER- Well, so okay, first off, just write a second book, man.

11:41SPEAKERDon't keep adding, you're not George Lucas, okay?

11:45SPEAKER- Yeah.

11:45SPEAKER- We don't need that.

11:46SPEAKER- Yeah, at any rate, the movie came out in '99 on TNT.

11:51SPEAKER- So for a little bit of context,

11:53SPEAKERit was post Steve Jobs' triumphant return to Apple

11:57SPEAKERpre the launch of the iPod,

11:58SPEAKERbut post the launch of the colored iMacs, I guess,

12:01SPEAKERthe G3 iMacs.

12:02SPEAKER- Yeah, so the kind of Jobs revitalization

12:05SPEAKERhad begun at this point.

12:06SPEAKER- Yeah.

12:07SPEAKER- But definitely not in full swing.

12:09SPEAKER'Cause I mean, the candy-colored iMacs were super popular,

12:13SPEAKERbut they were still just desktop computers, right?

12:15SPEAKERI think it was not until the iPod came out

12:17SPEAKERand became a culture-defining success

12:20SPEAKERthat it was like, oh,

12:21SPEAKERApple is becoming a different company now

12:23SPEAKERand also one of the biggest companies in the world.

12:26SPEAKER- It really wasn't until the iPhone,

12:28SPEAKERit really wasn't even, not even the iPhone launch,

12:30SPEAKERbut three or four years after, the iPhone 4

12:33SPEAKERwas kind of the first one that it became clear

12:37SPEAKERthat they were gonna become one of the biggest companies

12:39SPEAKERin the world.

12:40SPEAKER- Sure, but even the iPod was a phenomenon, though.

12:42SPEAKER- It was a successful product,

12:44SPEAKERand it broke open a new category

12:46SPEAKERin a way that a bunch of other companies had tried

12:48SPEAKERand hadn't had the same level of success in.

12:51SPEAKERBut it was a premium luxury good,

12:55SPEAKERwhereas the iPhone very quickly became a,

12:58SPEAKERsmartphone very quickly became a necessity

13:01SPEAKERfor participating in the modern world.

13:03SPEAKERLike, there's aspects of living in the world today

13:07SPEAKERthat are cut off from you if you don't own a smartphone.

13:09SPEAKERThat was definitely not the case for the iPod.

13:11SPEAKERAnyway. - Yeah, yes.

13:12SPEAKER- The point is, it was unclear when this movie was made

13:14SPEAKERthat Apple was gonna go on to become

13:16SPEAKERthe biggest company in the world.

13:17SPEAKER- Yeah, this movie ends at kind of an exciting,

13:20SPEAKERbut yeah, like, uncertain moment, I guess is the word

13:24SPEAKERfor where Apple was at.

13:25SPEAKER- If you got to this point,

13:26SPEAKERand if you got to that point and you were like,

13:28SPEAKERoh yeah, in like eight years, nine years,

13:30SPEAKERApple's gonna ship a billion of anything,

13:32SPEAKERyou would have laughed.

13:33SPEAKER- Yes, absolutely.

13:34SPEAKER- Yeah.

13:35SPEAKER- Yeah, the time period is roughly,

13:37SPEAKERit's basically the early '70s,

13:38SPEAKERkind of the formative years of Jobs and Gates

13:40SPEAKERand the people around them all the way up

13:42SPEAKERthrough the launch of the Macintosh,

13:43SPEAKERJobs being ejected from Apple,

13:45SPEAKERand then kind of cuts out the mid-'80s

13:47SPEAKERthrough the late '90s and jumps way forward

13:50SPEAKERto the moments that Jobs has brought back,

13:54SPEAKERand also the historic investments by Microsoft and Apple,

13:58SPEAKER- Oh, spoilers, man.

13:59SPEAKER- The hundred, well, the movie,

14:00SPEAKERwe should talk about the framing,

14:01SPEAKER'cause I think the way this movie frames all these events

14:03SPEAKERis super interesting, and they lead with that.

14:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, so the Pirates of Silicon Valley

14:10SPEAKERis the name of the movie, but it's also the theme, right?

14:12SPEAKERIt's there, everybody's stealing from everybody,

14:14SPEAKERand these guys are, it's really about this conflict

14:19SPEAKERbetween Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,

14:20SPEAKERwhich is, I think you wrote in the notes,

14:23SPEAKERit's remarkable that it makes Bill Gates

14:25SPEAKERseem like a sympathetic character.

14:26SPEAKER- Yeah, or it's a true feat

14:28SPEAKERthat this movie makes you root for Bill Gates,

14:31SPEAKERalthough it's less, at least in my case,

14:33SPEAKERit's less that you're rooting for Bill Gates in this movie

14:35SPEAKERand more you're rooting against Steve Jobs

14:37SPEAKERbecause Jobs is portrayed as an absolute monster.

14:42SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, monsters, I think that's fair.

14:44SPEAKER- It's like just a full-on sociopath in this movie.

14:47SPEAKER- Awful human being.

14:48SPEAKER- But not unfairly, based on all accounts

14:50SPEAKERof him and his life.

14:51SPEAKER- Yeah, so, but I mean, so where the Walter Isaacson,

14:56SPEAKERor the Steve Jobs movie that Danny Boyle directed

14:59SPEAKERand Aaron Sorkin and old Walter Isaacson wrote

15:02SPEAKERbased on the Isaacson biography

15:04SPEAKERis centered around three product launches.

15:07SPEAKERYou know, it's centered around the Mac,

15:08SPEAKERit's centered around the Nextcube,

15:09SPEAKERit's centered around the iMac.

15:12SPEAKERThis is centered around these meetings

15:14SPEAKERbetween Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

15:15SPEAKERThose are the pivots that this movie turns on.

15:18SPEAKERAnd it starts in the beginning

15:21SPEAKERwith Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen

15:24SPEAKERsitting in a dorm room being college kids and doofuses,

15:28SPEAKERand Wozniak and Jobs running through a war protest

15:33SPEAKERon the Berkeley campus

15:35SPEAKERwith phone freaking shit in their bags.

15:37SPEAKER- Yes, Captain Crunch makes an appearance in this movie.

15:39SPEAKER- Yeah, Captain Crunch does make an appearance,

15:41SPEAKERpart of the Northern California computing scene

15:43SPEAKERin the late '60s, early '70s.

15:47SPEAKERAnd yeah, and then there's this series of meetings

15:50SPEAKERbetween these two characters, these two fake Titan, I guess,

15:55SPEAKERis what we should call them.

15:56SPEAKERThe interesting thing to me is that the stories told,

15:59SPEAKERthe POV characters are Ballmer and Wozniak, two Steves.

16:03SPEAKER- Kind of the narrators,

16:04SPEAKERthe two people who are kind of taken out of the movie

16:06SPEAKERand speak directly to the camera,

16:08SPEAKERI think is a really fun way to frame this.

16:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, in one case,

16:12SPEAKERthey actually have Ballmer framed

16:14SPEAKERand he gets pulled out through the magic of green screen

16:16SPEAKERwith some really stunning special effects

16:18SPEAKERand what I assume is TriCaster work, maybe.

16:20SPEAKER- I don't know, man, it was a trip.

16:22SPEAKER- Video toaster or something, I don't know.

16:23SPEAKER- Yeah.

16:24SPEAKER- That's a great effect.

16:25SPEAKERWe should touch on that when we get there

16:26SPEAKERas we go through the movie.

16:28SPEAKERReal quick, before we get into the actual movie,

16:30SPEAKERthere was a couple aspects of the way this thing came about

16:32SPEAKERthat I wanted to touch on.

16:33SPEAKER- Oh, yeah.

16:34SPEAKER- The director is a guy named Martin Burke,

16:36SPEAKERwho I'm not familiar with.

16:38SPEAKERIt looks like he has not done a ton of work.

16:39SPEAKERIt was mostly in TV.

16:41SPEAKERHe's not directed many things.

16:42SPEAKERHe wrote a few things,

16:43SPEAKERbut there's a quote from him on the Wikipedia page

16:45SPEAKERabout when he was first,

16:47SPEAKERI don't even know who wrote the first draft of the screenplay,

16:49SPEAKERbut it was based on Fire in the Valley, as we said.

16:51SPEAKERAnd when he was handed that first draft, he says,

16:53SPEAKER"It was all about how the 286 computer became the 386

16:57SPEAKERand so on.

16:58SPEAKERI was bored by it."

16:59SPEAKERAnd he says further, "I'm a great believer in Shakespeare

17:03SPEAKERand what we had was a modern equivalent of Hamlet

17:07SPEAKERfeaturing two young princes, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

17:10SPEAKERThe more I read about Steve in particular,

17:12SPEAKERthe more I saw in him those Shakespearean terms.

17:14SPEAKERHe was brilliant, volcanic, obsessive, suspicious,

17:17SPEAKEReven vicious in a business sense.

17:19SPEAKERHe was about conquest, always conquest.

17:22SPEAKERI said, that's the sort of movie I want to make."

17:24SPEAKER- So I agree with all of that?

17:27SPEAKER- Sure, yeah, okay.

17:28SPEAKERBut did not expect coming into this podcast

17:31SPEAKERto find somebody comparing Steve Jobs

17:33SPEAKERand Bill Gates to Hamlet.

17:35SPEAKER- Now I'm gonna say you missed the most important omission

17:39SPEAKERfrom Martin Burke's oeuvre.

17:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

17:42SPEAKER- He was the last credited writer

17:43SPEAKERon the 1984 Val Kilmer banger, Top Secret.

17:48SPEAKER- Huh, okay.

17:49SPEAKER- Featuring the cow that wears shoes.

17:51SPEAKER- The cow that wears shoes.

17:52SPEAKER- Do you ever see Top Secret?

17:53SPEAKERIt's really good. - I have not seen Top Secret.

17:54SPEAKER- Oh man, you should watch this on,

17:55SPEAKERyou have a movie podcast over at Nextlander, right?

17:58SPEAKERYou should watch that over there.

17:59SPEAKER- It's true.

17:59SPEAKER- You suggest that to Alex, he might have a blowout.

18:01SPEAKERIt's a fantastic movie though.

18:03SPEAKER- Maybe we'll do a Val Kilmer month.

18:04SPEAKER- Like that, you could watch that.

18:06SPEAKERYou could watch The Real Genius.

18:09SPEAKERWatch, yeah, there's Batman and Robin.

18:12SPEAKER- Yes, indeed. - All good stuff.

18:14SPEAKER- Indeed, there's one more thing from him real quick

18:16SPEAKERbefore we get in here.

18:17SPEAKERAnd then I think we'll maybe touch on at the end of this,

18:20SPEAKERwhat some of the principal players in this in real life

18:22SPEAKERhad to say about it.

18:23SPEAKER- I think it's a good approach.

18:25SPEAKER- But up top, just to kind of speak to the veracity

18:28SPEAKERof this movie, 'cause it is a bunch of dramatizations

18:30SPEAKERof supposedly real events.

18:33SPEAKERThe director Burke said, "I did not want to do

18:35SPEAKER"an authorized biography on either Microsoft or Apple,

18:38SPEAKER"so we made the decision going in

18:39SPEAKER"that we would not talk to or meet with them."

18:42SPEAKER"With a team of Harvard researchers,

18:44SPEAKER"I embarked on a seven month research project

18:45SPEAKER"that encompassed virtually everything we could find

18:48SPEAKER"on the history of both companies,

18:49SPEAKER"including old technical magazines from the '70s.

18:51SPEAKER"I intended every scene to be based on actual events,

18:54SPEAKER"including such seemingly fantastic moments

18:56SPEAKER"as Bill Gates' bulldozer races in the middle of the night

18:59SPEAKER"and Steve Jobs' bare feet going up on the boardroom table

19:01SPEAKER"during an applicant's job interview.

19:03SPEAKER"I have two or more sources that verify each scene."

19:06SPEAKER- So the funny thing about this is when this came out,

19:10SPEAKERa lot of this seemed kind of fantastic and farcical,

19:13SPEAKERand then almost everything that's in this movie

19:15SPEAKERhas been in every other biography or book about this time.

19:21SPEAKER- That was kind of the experience

19:22SPEAKERI had watching this last night.

19:23SPEAKERI should say I loved this movie when it came out.

19:25SPEAKERI taped it on VHS off of TNT and watched it repeatedly,

19:29SPEAKER'cause of course I did, but I didn't remember in retrospect

19:32SPEAKERuntil I watched it again last night

19:34SPEAKERhow much of it feels kind of over the top and cheesy

19:36SPEAKERand overdramatized and ridiculous in a way

19:38SPEAKERthat I figured half of this has to be

19:41SPEAKERkind of creative invention rights or dramatic license.

19:45SPEAKERBut then, yeah, you go read these quotes,

19:47SPEAKERyou look at things like the Isakson biography,

19:49SPEAKERand just about everything that's in this movie

19:52SPEAKERis described very similarly in three other sources.

19:55SPEAKER- It's come up multiple other places.

19:58SPEAKERAnd some of it,

20:00SPEAKERGates has admitted to some of the bad behavior in this,

20:02SPEAKERlike in interviews and stuff like that in the past.

20:05SPEAKERDid he really unapologetically wreck a bulldozer

20:08SPEAKERinto Paul Allen's new car and then not give a shit about it?

20:11SPEAKER- I don't know about the bulldozer races,

20:12SPEAKERbut he said he did some things that he regretted

20:14SPEAKERin retrospect in this timeframe.

20:16SPEAKER- Right, the famous mugshot of him from around this time.

20:20SPEAKER- I think that was for speeding tickets, right?

20:21SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, well, he's depicted driving very quickly

20:24SPEAKERin this, this says the bulldozer races were real.

20:27SPEAKER- I don't, it doesn't surprise me.

20:30SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, like some of the dialogue in this

20:32SPEAKERis extremely on the nose.

20:33SPEAKERYou know, like they're practically saying the themes out loud

20:36SPEAKERor like, you know, Jobs uses the phrase insanely great

20:39SPEAKERin conversation, you know, stuff like that

20:41SPEAKERis just a little bit cheesy.

20:42SPEAKER- There's a lot of, there's a lot of like,

20:45SPEAKERhey, we're gonna say things that are really obvious in 1999,

20:48SPEAKERbut we're gonna put them in the character's mouth.

20:49SPEAKERLike, you know, the profits are in the computers themselves,

20:53SPEAKERnot the software stuff.

20:54SPEAKERThat was an IBM guy quote, I think.

20:56SPEAKER- Yeah, but like broadly though,

20:58SPEAKERI think you can look at this as a fairly accurate depiction

21:01SPEAKERof what happened.

21:03SPEAKER- I don't think it's, it's definitely not a hagiography.

21:05SPEAKERAnd I think it's, so I haven't watched the Ashton Kutcher,

21:09SPEAKERthe directed by Joshua Michael Stern

21:11SPEAKERand written by Matt Whiteley, Jobs movie,

21:14SPEAKERbut I did watch Steve Jobs.

21:16SPEAKERI watched the first two thirds of the Steve Jobs,

21:18SPEAKERDanny Boyle, Fassbender, Aaron Sorkin movie

21:22SPEAKERbased on the Isaacson book.

21:24SPEAKERAnd I fell asleep in the back half,

21:25SPEAKERback third of that one.

21:27SPEAKERBut I don't, I don't think this is,

21:30SPEAKERI mean, a lot of this stuff happened in a room

21:31SPEAKERwith two people in it.

21:32SPEAKERSo we never know what really happened, right?

21:34SPEAKERBut a lot of it reads.

21:36SPEAKER- Yes, for sure.

21:37SPEAKERAnd what we can say is that some of the quotes

21:39SPEAKERfrom this movie that stand out are also represented

21:42SPEAKERin things like the Isaacson biography,

21:44SPEAKERwhether the people who communicated those quotes

21:46SPEAKERwere being fully truthful or not, we can't say.

21:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

21:49SPEAKER- But that is the recorded history.

21:52SPEAKER- There's a lot of, the thing that makes this difficult

21:54SPEAKERis especially Jobs, but even Gates,

21:56SPEAKERthere's a lot of like built up mythology

21:58SPEAKERaround both of these people.

22:00SPEAKER- Yeah.

22:00SPEAKER- And I think that like, there's a whole,

22:03SPEAKERI want to say there's a, almost like an economy of stories

22:06SPEAKERabout pitching something to Bill or to Steve

22:10SPEAKERthat you hear from old timers and people

22:12SPEAKERwho were in the room where these things happened.

22:14SPEAKERAnd you know, they get like, like all,

22:16SPEAKERlike all great mythologies, they,

22:20SPEAKERthey get built up and built down and changed over time

22:24SPEAKERand the stories get better.

22:25SPEAKERAnd at some point, you know, you'll,

22:29SPEAKERpeople don't remember what the real version is

22:30SPEAKERand what the, what actually happened.

22:32SPEAKERBut anyway, I thought this, this reads really well.

22:34SPEAKERNoah Wiley, especially his performance

22:36SPEAKERis really remarkable as Jobs, I think.

22:38SPEAKER- It really is.

22:39SPEAKERAnd you see quotes from people who like,

22:40SPEAKERpeople on the Macintosh team, for example,

22:42SPEAKERwho said they were like flabbergasted at how,

22:45SPEAKERhow well he embodied that kid, the character,

22:47SPEAKERthe character and the persona that they,

22:49SPEAKERthat they had worked with.

22:50SPEAKER- And it's a, it's a hard portrayal.

22:52SPEAKERLike it's a pretty awful, like he does not,

22:53SPEAKERhe does not paint a kind picture of Jobs' behavior.

22:57SPEAKERAnd we'll, and we'll talk about a lot of that.

22:58SPEAKER- Oh, in fact, the movie is not kind to many

23:02SPEAKERof the principles in this outside of Woz who-

23:04SPEAKER- Maybe Woz, yeah.

23:05SPEAKER- Woz is always delightful.

23:07SPEAKERIt's kind of hard to knock Woz for much of anything,

23:10SPEAKERbut Jobs, Gates, and some of the people around Gates, like-

23:15SPEAKER- Paul Allen gets a pretty, pretty like,

23:18SPEAKERI think Paul Allen is the Woz side of that,

23:20SPEAKERof that relationship.

23:21SPEAKER- Yeah, to an extent, he's just figures less in the story.

23:24SPEAKERThey don't give him nearly as much screen time.

23:26SPEAKER- That's true.

23:27SPEAKERKind of like you said, though, there's a lot

23:28SPEAKERof mythologizing in this movie, but there's no deification.

23:31SPEAKERLike nobody is, neither of the two principal characters

23:34SPEAKERare depicted in a particularly flattering light, let's say.

23:38SPEAKER- Yeah, not a, not a hagiography for sure.

23:40SPEAKERSo, should we just start at the beginning?

23:43SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, 'cause I, like I said,

23:44SPEAKERI really liked this framing where they, they come in,

23:47SPEAKERthey come in in the middle of the shooting

23:49SPEAKERof the Ridley Scott, 1984, Super Bowl,

23:51SPEAKERMcIntosh, Big Brother commercial.

23:53SPEAKER- Yeah, it's funny 'cause Ridley Scott now is pictured,

23:55SPEAKERI think, in two of these movies, at least,

23:57SPEAKER'cause he's in the Isaacson movie as well.

23:59SPEAKER- Great.

24:00SPEAKER- But the point is, it starts with this high point for Apple.

24:05SPEAKERLike Apple's on top of the world,

24:06SPEAKERand then it immediately flashes back,

24:08SPEAKERand it shows him, I mean, he's being an asshole,

24:11SPEAKERbut kind of, kind of low-key at this point.

24:14SPEAKERAnd then it flashes back to the '60s,

24:17SPEAKERalmost immediately, right?

24:19SPEAKER- It's '71, I believe.

24:20SPEAKER- Oh, '71, okay, well, Vietnam War protests, sorry.

24:23SPEAKERThose are all in the '60s,

24:24SPEAKEReven though I guess they probably weren't.

24:25SPEAKER- Yeah, long story short, they basically,

24:27SPEAKERthey framed the movie

24:28SPEAKERwith both the Super Bowl commercial being filmed

24:30SPEAKERand then immediate cut to '97 with Gates up on screen,

24:32SPEAKERmaking the huge investment,

24:34SPEAKERbasically buying a chunk of Apple, you know?

24:36SPEAKERAnd it's just like, you know,

24:38SPEAKERhow fortunes rise and fall in about 30 seconds.

24:41SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, now we're back into history,

24:43SPEAKERback to like a very clear dichotomy here

24:47SPEAKERbetween the Apple people and the Microsoft people,

24:50SPEAKERwhich I feel like this movie

24:51SPEAKERdoes very well all the way through.

24:52SPEAKER- Yeah, they didn't go as far as like shooting the Apple

24:55SPEAKERand the Microsoft people in a different way,

24:57SPEAKERwhich is like, if this was made in the mid to late 2000s

25:02SPEAKERor early 2010s, it'd be like yellow color shifted

25:06SPEAKERon the Microsoft guys and blue on the Apple guys

25:08SPEAKERor something.

25:09SPEAKER- Yes, this is all kind of mostly pre-David Fincher,

25:11SPEAKERalthough Fincher was actually getting big at this time.

25:13SPEAKERBut anyway, but like, I mean more in the way

25:16SPEAKERthat the Microsoft and Apple camps

25:18SPEAKERare characterized in this movie as characters.

25:21SPEAKERLike the Apple people are almost all shown

25:23SPEAKERas like dreamers and revolutionaries

25:26SPEAKERand kind of offbeat artistic types.

25:28SPEAKERThe Microsoft people are basically all a bunch

25:30SPEAKERof crass opportunists and oafs

25:34SPEAKERwith no interest in good taste.

25:36SPEAKER- Well, PC cockroaches is how I kind of,

25:39SPEAKERis the thing I wrote down in my notes, I think.

25:41SPEAKER'Cause they're like, they're just coming in

25:43SPEAKERand scuttling over whatever is left over from IBM

25:45SPEAKERand the PC people.

25:48SPEAKERSo this movie starts with both of them in the same place.

25:50SPEAKERSo they're both starting from scratch.

25:51SPEAKERJobs is living at home, he's going to college,

25:53SPEAKERhe's building computers, but Woz is building computers.

25:56SPEAKER- Yeah, it's more Woz is building computers.

25:57SPEAKERLike in fact, they do go out of their way briefly,

26:01SPEAKERnot super often, but they do kind of make it clear

26:03SPEAKERWoz is the guy building all the stuff

26:04SPEAKERand Jobs is the businessman,

26:05SPEAKERbut Jobs very much wants to be seen as the guy.

26:08SPEAKER- Yeah, oh, that is definitely not made explicit

26:12SPEAKERin the way that I would have realized it at the time,

26:14SPEAKERprobably, but it's pretty clear now.

26:16SPEAKER- Yeah, although I think Jobs did have some technical skill.

26:19SPEAKERLike he worked at Atari with Woz,

26:21SPEAKERlike they both worked on circuit design and stuff.

26:24SPEAKERYeah, so he was not completely without skill

26:27SPEAKERin the engineering realm, I don't think,

26:29SPEAKERbut like Woz clearly was the guy

26:30SPEAKERdoing all the actual product building.

26:32SPEAKER- Well, yeah, Woz was the man.

26:34SPEAKERAnd the way that Microsoft is depicted,

26:38SPEAKERyou know, they start in a dorm room

26:40SPEAKERwhere Paul Allen is clearly kind of presented

26:42SPEAKERas the brain guy.

26:45SPEAKERGates, I guess, also is the brain guy.

26:46SPEAKERThey don't ever, like Anthony Michael Hall's depiction

26:49SPEAKERof Gates is really weird 'cause somehow he's dweebier

26:51SPEAKERthan he is in real life.

26:53SPEAKER- I guess I could see that.

26:54SPEAKERHe's really playing it up, yeah.

26:55SPEAKER- Like I went back and watched the Mac world

26:58SPEAKERwhere Jobs gets up on stage and says,

27:00SPEAKER"Hey, Microsoft's coming to save the company," basically,

27:03SPEAKERand then has to stand in front of the little,

27:06SPEAKERtiny Steve Jobs on the big stage

27:09SPEAKERin front of the enormous Bill Gates 1984 commercial style.

27:13SPEAKERAnd Bill Gates didn't look like an enormous nerd

27:18SPEAKERin that picture in the same way that Anthony,

27:20SPEAKERhe was portrayed by Anthony Michael Hall in the movie.

27:22SPEAKERHe still looked like a nerd, but not like,

27:24SPEAKERlike he had bad skin all the way through this movie

27:26SPEAKERin a way that is, like, Bill Gates,

27:28SPEAKERsay what you will about Bill Gates.

27:30SPEAKEROnce Bill Gates was the richest man in the world,

27:31SPEAKERhe stopped having skin problems.

27:33SPEAKER- Sure. - I don't know

27:34SPEAKERhow that happened.

27:35SPEAKER- I think, like, Hall really puts on, like,

27:36SPEAKERan extra nasally kind of delivery to his voice.

27:39SPEAKERLike, he's depicted as a slob who never bathes,

27:41SPEAKERkind of, in this, like, they go really hard

27:45SPEAKERon the nerdy loser slob archetype.

27:49SPEAKER- Well, and also the uncultured bit.

27:51SPEAKERYou hit this before, but, like,

27:53SPEAKERthere's a, and they really hammered this over the head,

27:55SPEAKER'cause at one point, Jobs quotes Picasso's favorite,

28:00SPEAKERyou know, great artist, what is it, great artist copy?

28:04SPEAKER- Good artist borrow, great artist steals.

28:05SPEAKER- Steal, yeah, yeah, that one.

28:07SPEAKERAnd then Gates steals the same quote

28:10SPEAKERon the way into a meeting with Apple,

28:11SPEAKERbut he attributes it to Rembrandt or another artist.

28:15SPEAKEROkay, I didn't write down the quote, but.

28:16SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:18SPEAKER- Yeah, it doesn't matter, is what he says,

28:20SPEAKERwhich is indicative of their entire, kind of,

28:22SPEAKERdepiction of him as a, kind of,

28:24SPEAKERnebbish oaf all the way through.

28:27SPEAKERSo, so then, for the first third of the movie,

28:33SPEAKERGates is presented as, like, the scrappy upstart underdog

28:38SPEAKERwho doesn't really know what they're doing.

28:39SPEAKERThey see the Altair, which is one of the first,

28:41SPEAKERyou know, personal computers. - Yeah.

28:45SPEAKERThere's, like, a surprising amount, not a lot of time,

28:48SPEAKERbut a little bit of time spent on, like,

28:49SPEAKERMicrosoft's early, their early time trying to make money

28:53SPEAKERby making stuff for the Altair,

28:54SPEAKERlike that Traf-O-Data simulator

28:55SPEAKERthat we've talked about before.

28:56SPEAKERThey actually say the word Traf-O-Data.

28:59SPEAKER- Yeah. - In this thing.

29:00SPEAKERBut it's mostly, for their part,

29:02SPEAKERit's mostly about trying to sell and license Basic

29:06SPEAKERto the company that makes Altair.

29:08SPEAKERMITS is the name of that company.

29:10SPEAKER- Yeah, they're based in Albuquerque, I think, right?

29:12SPEAKER- Yes, well, they were.

29:14SPEAKERThey're certainly long gone.

29:15SPEAKERMicro-instrumentation and telemetry systems,

29:19SPEAKERwhich I feel like is the kind of computer company name

29:20SPEAKERyou haven't gotten for about 50 years.

29:23SPEAKER- That seems right.

29:24SPEAKERBut there's a thing about that where they realize

29:27SPEAKERthat there's a thing there,

29:28SPEAKERand they realize that there's gonna need

29:29SPEAKERto be software for this.

29:31SPEAKERAnd they show the invention of the software license

29:34SPEAKERin a couple of different ways.

29:35SPEAKERYou know, when Gates and Paul Allen roll into Albuquerque

29:39SPEAKERto negotiate with the Altair guy,

29:41SPEAKERand he says, "Hey, I don't wanna sell you my software,

29:45SPEAKER"I wanna just give you a per-machine license."

29:50SPEAKERThat's the dawn of a whole new business model

29:53SPEAKERfor computers, right?

29:54SPEAKERIn a lot of ways, it's the thing that made Bill Gates

29:56SPEAKERthe richest man in the world at the end of the '90s,

29:58SPEAKERand is what drove a massive amount of PC innovation forward

30:04SPEAKERis that, hey, this has made this a sustainable,

30:07SPEAKERmaking software for these things made this a sustainable

30:09SPEAKERbusiness, there's another quote later on,

30:11SPEAKERI called it out earlier, but I'm gonna say it again

30:13SPEAKER'cause it's important, that, you know,

30:16SPEAKERthe money's in, when they're meeting with the IBM guys,

30:19SPEAKERthe IBM guy, when they ask for the same deal

30:22SPEAKERwith the IBM guy, the Altair guy's like,

30:23SPEAKER"I don't know about that."

30:24SPEAKERThe IBM guys are like, "Yeah, that's fine, whatever,

30:26SPEAKER"the money's in the hardware,

30:27SPEAKER"we don't give a shit about software."

30:28SPEAKERNobody, you know, that's just,

30:29SPEAKERsoftware stuff doesn't make any difference.

30:31SPEAKER'Cause they're mainframe people, and they've been using,

30:33SPEAKERthey've been selling hardware for decades at this point.

30:36SPEAKERPainfully, his historic mistake there.

30:38SPEAKERAnother aspect, we'll get back to the Apple stuff

30:40SPEAKERin a minute, but, 'cause they do run concurrently,

30:43SPEAKERthey do a pretty good job, I think, in this,

30:45SPEAKERof swapping back and forth between the two,

30:48SPEAKERhaving their fortunes kinda rise at the same time, but--

30:50SPEAKER- Yeah, and having the Balmer and Woz characters there

30:53SPEAKERto kind of explain things helps a ton.

30:54SPEAKER- Yes, but the other theme of the early Microsoft deal-making

30:58SPEAKERthat you see here is Gates, and I assume this is true to life

31:01SPEAKERGates constantly writing checks, he has no ability to cash.

31:04SPEAKER- For what it's worth, Jobs did the exact same thing.

31:07SPEAKER- Yeah, well, yes, yes, but he had Woz in his back pocket

31:11SPEAKERwho actually could deliver on everything he was promising.

31:14SPEAKERWhereas like, when they go meet with Ed Roberts,

31:17SPEAKERthe guy who does the Altair stuff in New Mexico,

31:19SPEAKERand by the way, I love whoever that actor is

31:21SPEAKERportraying Ed Roberts, because he looks like a shop floor,

31:25SPEAKERlike a foreman, like on a warehouse floor or something.

31:30SPEAKERAnd they literally are in a warehouse full of Altairs,

31:32SPEAKERand he's just got this like Southwestern twang

31:35SPEAKERwhen Gates is pressuring him for like a signing bonus.

31:39SPEAKERHe's like, let me tell you something,

31:40SPEAKERboy, this ain't the way I do business, you know,

31:41SPEAKERjust like almost cigar chomping old school computer guy.

31:46SPEAKER- That's Gillard Sartain, and he played Oliver Hardy

31:53SPEAKERin "The New Adventures of Laurel and Hardy."

31:56SPEAKERHe was in "The Mummy," I think, he was in "Ali,"

32:01SPEAKERand a bunch of other stuff.

32:02SPEAKERHe's been a character actor in a bazillion things.

32:04SPEAKER- Yeah, he's fun in this for the short time he's on screen.

32:07SPEAKERBut when Gates is wheeling and dealing with him,

32:10SPEAKERhe's trying to get that signing bonus,

32:12SPEAKERand he's like, what are you talking about?

32:14SPEAKERWhat do you mean signing bonus?

32:15SPEAKERGates very clearly, he's like, yeah,

32:17SPEAKERwell, all of our other contracts,

32:18SPEAKERwe always get a signing bonus.

32:20SPEAKERLike very clearly from the delivery,

32:22SPEAKERthey don't have any other contracts, you know,

32:23SPEAKERlike he's just bluffing his way

32:25SPEAKERthrough all of this deal-making,

32:26SPEAKERand he does the same thing with IBM again later.

32:29SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it's, well, and I think

32:31SPEAKERthat's probably not far from the truth, right?

32:33SPEAKERIt comes up again when they go to buy PC DOS,

32:36SPEAKERor x86 DOS, I guess is what it's called.

32:38SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause what happens,

32:40SPEAKERand as depicted in the movie,

32:42SPEAKERIBM is rolling out the personal computer.

32:44SPEAKERThey are there to try to license an operating system to IBM,

32:47SPEAKERknowing that they'll make a jillion dollars.

32:50SPEAKERThey don't have an operating system.

32:51SPEAKERLike that's the unspoken thing in the background,

32:54SPEAKERis they're selling IBM something they don't have.

32:56SPEAKERSo then, yes, they go out to this little Seattle outfit

33:00SPEAKERand basically buy x86 DOS from them

33:02SPEAKERto turn into the thing they would license IBM

33:04SPEAKERfor a pretty small amount of money.

33:05SPEAKERIt's like- - It was 50 grand.

33:07SPEAKER- 50 grand at the time.

33:09SPEAKERBut that feels like one of the more tragic moments

33:12SPEAKERin the movie on the Microsoft side,

33:13SPEAKERespecially for the guy who's sitting there

33:15SPEAKERselling the operating system to them.

33:17SPEAKER'Cause the second the words $50,000 come out of,

33:20SPEAKERor 50,000 comes out of Paul Allen's mouth,

33:22SPEAKERand he's like, "Dollars?"

33:24SPEAKERAnd like- - Oh, you poor bastard.

33:26SPEAKER- I know, it's just, it's sad.

33:28SPEAKERI looked it up, that guy later went to work for Microsoft,

33:32SPEAKERand then later he founded a computer company

33:34SPEAKERthat he then sold to Microsoft, so he probably did okay.

33:37SPEAKER- He's probably fine.

33:38SPEAKER- Yeah.

33:39SPEAKER- That's what you're saying.

33:40SPEAKER- Yes.

33:40SPEAKER- Okay, so meanwhile, on the other side of town,

33:44SPEAKERJobs and Wozniak go from selling phone freaker stuff,

33:47SPEAKERlike Captain Crunch whistles and dialers

33:50SPEAKERand stuff like that, that let you get free phone calls

33:52SPEAKERand let them call the Pope,

33:54SPEAKERto Woz building a computer out of spare parts,

33:58SPEAKERbasically, stuff they had laying around,

34:00SPEAKERthis is how it's presented, which becomes the Apple I,

34:03SPEAKERis what Dragon has in the movie.

34:05SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what they're showing.

34:07SPEAKERYou know, they depict the famous mythology

34:09SPEAKERof them showing up to the Homebrew Computer Club

34:12SPEAKERwith their Apple I prototype,

34:13SPEAKERand you see them in here unloading it out of a box,

34:15SPEAKERit's in a wooden case and everything.

34:18SPEAKERThat's kind of the, that's the accepted history, right?

34:22SPEAKER- Yeah, the guys with the Altair's all kind of gather around

34:25SPEAKERto see what's on the screen,

34:26SPEAKERto see how they're getting stuff out onto the screen,

34:29SPEAKER'cause with Altair, if people don't know,

34:31SPEAKERis lights and switches and punch cards,

34:33SPEAKERor tapes, I guess, with Altair, but yeah.

34:35SPEAKER- Teletype, maybe.

34:36SPEAKER- Yeah, teletype, if you're lucky.

34:39SPEAKERWhereas the Apple I had a four-inch, I think, CRT,

34:42SPEAKERthat you could put text and numbers on, it was amazing.

34:47SPEAKER- Revolutionary.

34:49SPEAKER- Through this whole era in the storytelling,

34:52SPEAKERthey do a pretty good job of starting to distinguish

34:54SPEAKERwho Woz is versus who Jobs is,

34:56SPEAKER'cause Woz, they show the joke line he ran.

34:59SPEAKERHe built a machine that was hooked up to a phone line

35:02SPEAKERwhere anybody could just call in and get a prerecorded joke

35:04SPEAKERthat he had read into the machine.

35:06SPEAKERLike, he's just a fun goofball

35:08SPEAKERwho is really good at engineering things

35:09SPEAKERthat are fun and goofy, and then you have Jobs.

35:14SPEAKER- Well, and it's the early stuff.

35:17SPEAKERThe one thing that I thought was interesting

35:19SPEAKERis they show assembling Apple I's, I guess.

35:22SPEAKERIt may have been the early Apple II prototypes,

35:25SPEAKERbut I think it's Apple I's in Jobs' parents' garage

35:28SPEAKERin Northern California.

35:31SPEAKERAnd it's depicted as like six or seven people

35:36SPEAKERkind of packed in the garage, everybody soldering.

35:38SPEAKERI don't think that's actually the case.

35:39SPEAKERI think that was actually one or maybe two people

35:42SPEAKERwith Woz showing up every once in a while

35:44SPEAKERwith new stuff for them to keep manufacturing.

35:47SPEAKERAnd it was basically like a tiny sweatshop

35:49SPEAKERin Jobs' parents' house while they were cranking those out.

35:53SPEAKER50 of those, I think, is what they ended up selling.

35:55SPEAKERThe Apple I's, some really small number.

35:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's a good example

35:59SPEAKERof how the movie takes creative license in minor ways

36:02SPEAKERwithout actually rewriting history.

36:05SPEAKERIt's just a good visual to have six or eight people

36:07SPEAKERmilling around, buzzing around in a garage

36:11SPEAKERto say, "There's a company on the come up."

36:14SPEAKERLike, it's small but growing.

36:17SPEAKER- Exactly, exactly.

36:19SPEAKEROkay, so then I missed where they were taking the Apple IIs,

36:23SPEAKERwhere they took the first Apple II prototype to show off.

36:25SPEAKERIt's like the San Jose Convention Center.

36:28SPEAKERIt's the first place that Gates and Jobs meet.

36:30SPEAKERThis is a key moment in the film.

36:32SPEAKERAnd I think it's some computer sales thing.

36:35SPEAKERIt's too big for Homebrew Computer Club,

36:37SPEAKERI think, at that point.

36:38SPEAKERBut it's like there's yellow ballroom with pipe and drape,

36:42SPEAKERand they have a 10 by 10 foot booth,

36:44SPEAKERand there's a whole bunch of Altair machines

36:45SPEAKERon the other side of the aisle,

36:46SPEAKERand then there's Bill and Steve and Steve,

36:51SPEAKERStephen Was, and a couple other people in this room.

36:54SPEAKERAnd it's when Steve comes out with his mustache

36:56SPEAKERand beard completely shaved off, wearing a suit,

36:58SPEAKERand he's like, "What the fuck, Steve?

36:59SPEAKER"You're wearing a suit."

37:00SPEAKER- They do that multiple times,

37:02SPEAKERlike the metamorphosis of Steve Jobs

37:04SPEAKERfrom acid-dropping hippie vision quest guy to--

37:07SPEAKER- Yeah, beard quest, neck beard guy.

37:10SPEAKER- Right, to like becoming the suit that he despises

37:13SPEAKERis depicted multiple times where he like, you know,

37:15SPEAKERhe's long hair and beard and mustache,

37:17SPEAKERand at one point he cuts the hair somewhat shorter

37:19SPEAKERand shaves the beard so he can get a bank loan.

37:21SPEAKERAnd then there's this where he literally

37:23SPEAKERjust comes out clean-shaven in a suit.

37:25SPEAKERI don't think they say what conference this is.

37:28SPEAKERI don't see any kind of signage anywhere.

37:30SPEAKER- Okay, I wasn't sure if I missed it

37:32SPEAKERor if it just wasn't there.

37:34SPEAKER- Before we got to this,

37:34SPEAKERI thought you were talking about the point

37:36SPEAKERwhere they have to go, we have to mention this.

37:38SPEAKERIt's prior to this,

37:40SPEAKERwhere they were working on these prototypes,

37:41SPEAKERI think it's for the Apple II,

37:43SPEAKERand Woz breaks the two jobs because he works

37:46SPEAKERfor Hewlett Packard occasionally.

37:47SPEAKER- Oh.

37:48SPEAKER- He's probably signed an employment agreement

37:50SPEAKERthat gives them first right of refusal

37:51SPEAKERto anything he invents.

37:53SPEAKER- So this was, they took the Apple I in, though, right?

37:55SPEAKERThe wooden box one.

37:57SPEAKER- Yes, that was the Apple I

37:58SPEAKERbefore we get to this conference that you're talking about,

37:59SPEAKERand they had to give Hewlett Packard a shot

38:02SPEAKERat this personal computer he's developed,

38:04SPEAKERand they basically just laugh it off

38:06SPEAKERand quite literally say, it's literally like,

38:09SPEAKERso you say it's a computer for ordinary people?

38:12SPEAKERWhat on earth would ordinary people want with computers?

38:15SPEAKERGreat line, but yes, you're right, it cuts to this later.

38:19SPEAKERIt's a pretty scrappy looking little conference,

38:20SPEAKERcomputing conference, but yes,

38:21SPEAKERyou get the visual of the doors opening

38:24SPEAKERand everybody runs in.

38:25SPEAKERI've seen this at E3, I've seen the doors opening

38:28SPEAKERand people running for the Nintendo booth.

38:30SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I've been in that crowd before, yeah.

38:32SPEAKER- It's literally this, it's literally everybody runs

38:34SPEAKERas soon as the doors open to the Apple booth and floods it,

38:36SPEAKERand it's like, that's your visual shorthand

38:39SPEAKERfor okay, Apple's about to be huge,

38:40SPEAKERand they cut immediately to Apple being huge from there.

38:43SPEAKER- Okay, but wait, before we get to that stuff,

38:44SPEAKERthere's an important thing that happens

38:46SPEAKERat what was I think supposed to be

38:48SPEAKERthe West Coast Computer Fair in 1977.

38:50SPEAKERThat is that Bill Gates and Balmer and Paul Allen

38:54SPEAKERcome there trying to get a meeting with these Apple II guys

38:56SPEAKER'cause they saw what they were doing.

38:58SPEAKERThey were like, hey, we need to be making software

39:00SPEAKERfor this thing, and Bill Gates walks up

39:03SPEAKERand introduces himself to Jobs and says,

39:05SPEAKERhey, I'm Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft,

39:07SPEAKERand Jobs gives him the complete blow off, right?

39:12SPEAKERThe, oh, yeah, great to meet you, yeah, yeah, yeah,

39:14SPEAKERand then turns back to who he was talking to before,

39:17SPEAKERand Gates walks back and you see a look of enmity

39:21SPEAKERin his eyes, like this is the TV bullshit.

39:24SPEAKER- Yes.

39:25SPEAKER- He looks at him, he's like, an enemy is born today,

39:27SPEAKERand Balmer's like, maybe he didn't hear you,

39:31SPEAKERand he's like, no, he heard me.

39:33SPEAKERI'll destroy him for this.

39:35SPEAKER- You're absolutely right, this is probably,

39:37SPEAKERthat absolutely read to me as the most over dramatized

39:40SPEAKERor melodramatic cheesy TV moment in this entire thing.

39:44SPEAKER- I mean, on the other hand, you hear stories about,

39:46SPEAKERyou know, Gates making people cry

39:47SPEAKERbecause they did a bad pitch

39:48SPEAKERor didn't know the answer of a question

39:50SPEAKERwhen they were demoing products.

39:52SPEAKERSo maybe this is how it actually happened.

39:54SPEAKERWho am I to say?

39:55SPEAKER- Maybe he really did take it that personally

39:58SPEAKERand make it his life's mission to destroy Apple.

40:01SPEAKERI don't know, the movie doesn't actually go

40:03SPEAKERin that direction from here.

40:05SPEAKERLike for the most part, like I said,

40:06SPEAKERthey just portray the Microsoft people

40:08SPEAKERas being very ambitious and wanting to rule the world.

40:10SPEAKERAnd it's not like only because Gates was spurned by Jobs

40:14SPEAKERat this thing, did they launch into competing with them?

40:17SPEAKER- Oh, I think that there's definitely an undercurrent

40:19SPEAKERof that through the whole thing.

40:20SPEAKERLike there's definitely, like there's a scene later on

40:22SPEAKERwhen they're standing off stage,

40:24SPEAKERwhen Balmer and Gates are standing off stage

40:26SPEAKERand Jobs is doing a presentation

40:28SPEAKERand Jobs is about to find out about Windows and flip out,

40:33SPEAKERthat it's very clear that Gates,

40:37SPEAKERwho's depicted as a master poker player,

40:40SPEAKERsays sometimes you fold and sometimes you deal down

40:44SPEAKERand this is the time you deal down.

40:45SPEAKER- Yeah, this is not the time to fold.

40:47SPEAKER- Yeah, the steely look in his eye.

40:48SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.

40:50SPEAKER- I think that was, I think, hey,

40:52SPEAKERthese guys fucking hate each other was a big part

40:54SPEAKERof the way that they sold this movie at the time.

40:56SPEAKERAnd if you think about the culture of the late '90s

40:59SPEAKERwhen it comes to computers, Microsoft versus Apple was,

41:06SPEAKERit was the thing that knuckleheads on the internet

41:10SPEAKERargued about before we had console,

41:12SPEAKERI mean, we had console wars, but it wasn't quite the same.

41:15SPEAKERTo the point that in the Wikipedia article for this movie,

41:17SPEAKERthere's a quote from somebody on the production team

41:20SPEAKERwho's like, yeah, the people on the production team

41:21SPEAKERbroke up into Windows versus Mac people

41:24SPEAKERat the end of this, by the end of this.

41:25SPEAKERAnd so-and-so started as a Windows person,

41:27SPEAKERbecame a Mac person, and here we are today.

41:29SPEAKERNow I'm a Windows guy, I guess.

41:31SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I mean, this was firmly in the area,

41:34SPEAKERin the era of Microsoft with the dollar sign in it,

41:36SPEAKERthough it was not long before the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ads.

41:40SPEAKER- It was just before the Internet Explorer

41:43SPEAKERJustice Department lawsuit, that was cranking up now.

41:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

41:48SPEAKER- So yeah, it was, Microsoft was the monolithic evil company

41:53SPEAKERand he was definitely, for whatever you say

41:57SPEAKERabout the depiction of Jobs as an absolute asshole,

42:01SPEAKERGates is definitely not presented

42:03SPEAKERas a kind, benevolent overlord here.

42:06SPEAKER- Not necessarily a sympathetic figure either for him,

42:09SPEAKERbut this is kind of, it's not the midpoint

42:12SPEAKERin terms of running time of the movie,

42:13SPEAKERbut it's absolutely the point where things change from,

42:16SPEAKERthese are a bunch of scrappy, barely out of college,

42:19SPEAKERdropout kids trying to make computer companies happen

42:23SPEAKERto literal hard cut, to giant Apple logo being lowered

42:26SPEAKERinto the ground at the newly constructed headquarters.

42:29SPEAKERLike they cut, they move very quickly

42:32SPEAKERinto this second phase where it's like, okay,

42:34SPEAKERnow these are becoming gigantic,

42:36SPEAKERvery, very successful companies.

42:37SPEAKER- For Apple, yeah, for Microsoft,

42:39SPEAKERI still, they still feel like the scrappy underdog

42:41SPEAKERat this point, right?

42:42SPEAKER- You're right, you're right.

42:43SPEAKERIt is a little bit longer.

42:45SPEAKERThat's not too much longer in the movie.

42:46SPEAKERThey can still go through the IBM deal-making here

42:49SPEAKERwhere they've, you know, they've done the similar engine,

42:51SPEAKERor sorry, language licensing with Altair.

42:54SPEAKERNow they're doing it with IBM here.

42:55SPEAKERBut then even there, you go from the IBM meeting, sorry,

43:00SPEAKERthe licensing meeting with IBM to like-

43:03SPEAKER- Suddenly they have an office, right?

43:05SPEAKER- Literal like roller rink party with this big banner up

43:08SPEAKERsaying like, Microsoft, we're on the way, you know?

43:10SPEAKER- Yeah, and get, yeah.

43:13SPEAKER- And the Ballmer narration is just like suddenly money,

43:15SPEAKERmore money than you could possibly imagine

43:17SPEAKERjust started pouring in from every direction.

43:19SPEAKER- Yeah, and that's like, this is the,

43:22SPEAKERthis is kind of the turning point for jobs in a lot of ways.

43:26SPEAKERLike we see, this is when we start seeing his depiction,

43:29SPEAKERhis personal life being depicted, right?

43:31SPEAKER- Yeah, we've kind of glossed over that a little bit.

43:33SPEAKERI think just, I'll say broadly,

43:36SPEAKERthe second half of the movie is more fun

43:37SPEAKERor more interesting to me from the standpoint

43:40SPEAKERof these giant businesses kind of butting heads.

43:42SPEAKERBut I think the first part of the movie

43:44SPEAKERthat shows more of their earlier lives

43:46SPEAKERis also pretty effective.

43:47SPEAKERBut yeah, there is some amount of jobs being a real shit

43:51SPEAKERto his girlfriend who is now pregnant

43:53SPEAKERthat we have glossed over that becomes more of a thing here.

43:58SPEAKER- And just to be clear, this is like denying paternity

44:03SPEAKERdespite having paternity tests is a thing that happened,

44:05SPEAKERright?

44:06SPEAKER- Yeah, this is all true to life.

44:07SPEAKER- He came up to see his newborn daughter

44:13SPEAKERjust so that he could,

44:14SPEAKERpresumably so that he could convince his estranged

44:19SPEAKERex-girlfriend to name his daughter

44:21SPEAKERafter the computer he's working on.

44:23SPEAKEROr maybe the daughter, like it's unclear.

44:26SPEAKERThe timing on that is unclear

44:28SPEAKER'cause it's presented in different ways

44:29SPEAKERand different sources.

44:32SPEAKERBut then by all reports,

44:34SPEAKERhe disappears for a period of months or years, right?

44:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it's repeated stuff.

44:39SPEAKERIt's like you said, it's him denying his paternity

44:41SPEAKEReven though it's very obvious.

44:42SPEAKERIt's him refusing to pay any child support

44:45SPEAKEReven after he's become an unbelievably rich

44:48SPEAKERmultimillionaire even when she only asked for $20,000.

44:52SPEAKER- Flat, just to be clear.

44:54SPEAKER- I think the movie wants you to think

44:56SPEAKERthat he is naming the computer after the child

44:58SPEAKERand not the other way around.

44:59SPEAKER- I mean, I think that's the official story.

45:01SPEAKERI think that the way it's presented in the Isaacson book

45:03SPEAKERis a little bit different.

45:04SPEAKERIt might be one of the other ones.

45:06SPEAKERAnd just to be clear, people dispute this as well.

45:10SPEAKERThis is all, there's two people that know how this went,

45:13SPEAKERhow these conversations went.

45:17SPEAKERIt's not a particularly glowing...

45:20SPEAKERI can't imagine, there's a scene later on in the movie

45:23SPEAKERthat he rolls up on what is probably in 2024

45:26SPEAKERa $3 million house in Sunnyvale.

45:30SPEAKERBut it's a 600 square foot cinder block looking squalor.

45:38SPEAKERThe ex-girlfriend and the daughter

45:41SPEAKERare living in a really rough way.

45:44SPEAKERAnd this is presumably when he's not given them any money

45:47SPEAKERand he's rolling in a $120,000 Mercedes in 1985, right?

45:53SPEAKERSo it feels bad.

45:54SPEAKER- We're also getting into,

45:55SPEAKERwe're kind of transitioning from the Apple II era

45:57SPEAKERto the Macintosh to the GUI era,

46:00SPEAKERor they're starting to set that stuff up.

46:01SPEAKER- Well, just to be clear,

46:02SPEAKERit's still the Apple II era in terms of what's selling.

46:05SPEAKER- Oh yeah, for sure, absolutely.

46:08SPEAKERI think the Apple II sold through like 1989

46:11SPEAKERor something insane, like '90 even, I think.

46:14SPEAKER- Yeah, they sold Apple IIs for like 12, 13, 14 years,

46:17SPEAKERsomething ridiculous, maybe more than that even.

46:20SPEAKER- But keeping with the theme of Jobs being a shit

46:23SPEAKERboth in his personal life

46:24SPEAKERand also increasingly in the workplace here,

46:26SPEAKERyou get the visit to Xerox PARC,

46:28SPEAKERPalo Alto Research Center.

46:31SPEAKER- Yeah, which is presented, I think, kind of accurately

46:34SPEAKERas a place where people are doing things with the computers

46:37SPEAKERthat the corporate overlords at Xerox

46:39SPEAKERdon't really understand and don't know what to do with.

46:42SPEAKERSo they kind of put them off to the side

46:44SPEAKERand then don't do anything with them,

46:46SPEAKERwhich seems accurate given what I know about PARC.

46:50SPEAKERI mean, I don't know if the,

46:52SPEAKERI doubt that there was a conversation with executives

46:54SPEAKERin a boardroom where somebody held up a mouse

46:56SPEAKERand was like, "You want Xerox to sell a mouse?

46:57SPEAKER"Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh."

46:59SPEAKERBut the rest of it seems, reads.

47:02SPEAKER- Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of people listening know this,

47:04SPEAKERbut the Xerox PARC is like really insane

47:07SPEAKERjust when you look at the list of things

47:09SPEAKERthat came out of there that are fundamental

47:11SPEAKERto modern computing.

47:12SPEAKER- I mean, the GUI and the mouse.

47:13SPEAKER- The graphical user interface, the mouse ethernet.

47:16SPEAKER- Yeah.

47:17SPEAKER- Laser printers, computer-generated bitmap graphics.

47:22SPEAKERIt's a lot of stuff.

47:23SPEAKERObject-oriented programming.

47:27SPEAKERAnd yeah, they really depict the Apple people

47:29SPEAKERas just coming in as like kind of corporate raiders almost,

47:32SPEAKERjust coming in. - Pirates.

47:33SPEAKER- Pirates, coming in and just thieving

47:36SPEAKERall of the developments that PARC has generated.

47:40SPEAKERAlthough in the movie, they make it really seem

47:43SPEAKERlike Apple is just straight up robbing Xerox blind

47:45SPEAKERand that the PARC people are not happy about it.

47:48SPEAKERBut then I think we both went and looked

47:49SPEAKERat the actual history

47:50SPEAKERand it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

47:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, my understanding is that in exchange

47:56SPEAKERfor access to the stuff that the lab came up with,

47:59SPEAKERthe Xerox got to buy pre-IPO Apple stock,

48:03SPEAKERwhich worked out well for them, I'm sure.

48:04SPEAKER- Yes, I'm sure it did.

48:06SPEAKERSo yeah, it was much more transactional

48:07SPEAKERthan the movie depicts.

48:09SPEAKER'Cause in fact, the movie really doesn't justify

48:12SPEAKERwhy Xerox is letting this happen at all.

48:14SPEAKER- Yeah, I understand why you wouldn't.

48:17SPEAKERI mean, so the movie presents it as Steve Jobs

48:19SPEAKERwas such a force of will that he could get in

48:22SPEAKERand do whatever he wanted anywhere he wanted to be.

48:25SPEAKERAnd I think the reality would have been harder to explain

48:29SPEAKERto a 1999 TV audience probably.

48:32SPEAKER- You're probably right.

48:33SPEAKER- On the TNT, the home of inside the NBA.

48:37SPEAKER- Yes, yes, indeed.

48:38SPEAKERBut we're straight off to the raises

48:40SPEAKERin the Macintosh development once they have access to that

48:42SPEAKERand you get another great,

48:43SPEAKERjust like the Ballmer camera pulling out with Ballmer

48:46SPEAKERwalking out of the picture frame of the boardroom meeting.

48:49SPEAKERYou get a great '90s blue screen moment of Wozniak

48:52SPEAKERhopping around with impish glee inside

48:55SPEAKERof the Macintosh graphical interface desktop.

48:59SPEAKERIt's like, you can click here and then be in this menu.

49:01SPEAKERYou can click here and be here, and it's really easy.

49:04SPEAKER- It's great stuff.

49:06SPEAKER- There's a moment around this time in the movie

49:10SPEAKERwhen it's another one of those Gates-Jobs meetings,

49:13SPEAKERand it's when Jobs sent Gates a memo

49:19SPEAKERand said, "Hey, you gotta get down here tonight, right?

49:22SPEAKERLike, I demand your presence here this evening."

49:26SPEAKER- Yeah, and he does.

49:27SPEAKERSo Gates shows up and Jobs yells at him.

49:32SPEAKERApparently, Jobs was the only person who yelled at Gates,

49:35SPEAKERis the thing that's presented in multiple,

49:37SPEAKERthe idea that's presented.

49:39SPEAKERI can't remember if it's whether Ballmer said that

49:40SPEAKERin the movie or whether it's something

49:41SPEAKERI read afterwards, actually.

49:42SPEAKER- It's Ballmer.

49:43SPEAKERIsn't it the other way around?

49:44SPEAKERIsn't it that Jobs is the only person

49:45SPEAKERthat Gates doesn't yell at?

49:47SPEAKERJobs is the only person that Gates will just take it from

49:49SPEAKERand just sit there and calmly explain to him

49:52SPEAKERwhy he's wrong. - Oh, that's right.

49:53SPEAKERAnd turn it around on him is the thing.

49:55SPEAKERYeah, and lull him into believing

49:59SPEAKERwhat he's trying to sell him.

50:00SPEAKERAll this is coming about because we're in the middle

50:01SPEAKERof Lisa and then the Macintosh development, so.

50:04SPEAKER- That's it.

50:05SPEAKER- Apple is, in fact, I think what happens

50:07SPEAKERis Lisa comes out, Gates gets his hands on it

50:09SPEAKERand flips out and was like, "I want this.

50:11SPEAKERWe need to make this."

50:12SPEAKERAnd then Apple is on into the Macintosh at this point.

50:15SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause the Lisa, for folks who don't know,

50:18SPEAKERreally, really expensive, a huge failure for Apple,

50:21SPEAKERan early failure for Apple.

50:22SPEAKER- Predomin, I mean, it rolled a bunch of early stuff out

50:26SPEAKERthat ended up coming out in the Macintosh

50:27SPEAKERand becoming part of the core computing infrastructure,

50:30SPEAKERbut it was also like $13,000 or something insane

50:33SPEAKERin 1983, whenever it came out.

50:36SPEAKER- It's funny, if you read about the history of NeXT later

50:38SPEAKERand how much the price of NeXT machines ballooned

50:42SPEAKERbecause Jobs could not stop demanding more and more

50:44SPEAKERcool stuff in there.

50:45SPEAKER- You mean perfect-shaped cubes, stuff like that?

50:46SPEAKER- Yes, like made out of specific alloys of metal

50:49SPEAKERand circuit boards had to fit together in a certain way.

50:52SPEAKERAnd they finally delivered it to market

50:53SPEAKERlike three times more expensive than what they promised.

50:56SPEAKERSo anyway, the Lisa sounds a lot like that,

50:58SPEAKERwhere anytime Jobs really gets control of a pet project,

51:01SPEAKERit just goes completely off the rails

51:02SPEAKERin terms of features and cost.

51:04SPEAKER- Well, so this conversation with Gates and Jobs

51:07SPEAKERat this Macintosh timeframe

51:12SPEAKERends with Gates saying something that Jobs takes one way

51:17SPEAKERand Gates definitely does not mean that way,

51:19SPEAKERwhich is, if I was buying a computer for my mom,

51:22SPEAKERI'd get her a Macintosh.

51:24SPEAKER- Right, or he said, that's what he told the newspaper.

51:26SPEAKERHe's like, if I was buying my mom a computer,

51:28SPEAKERMacintosh is the only thing I'd buy for.

51:30SPEAKER- Yeah.

51:30SPEAKER- And Steve Jobs' ego is assuaged.

51:35SPEAKER- So enormous, so enormous that this backhanded praise,

51:41SPEAKERclearly backhanded praise from Gates.

51:44SPEAKER- Right, but again, this is the meeting

51:46SPEAKERwhere Jobs demanded the Gates fly down to California

51:48SPEAKERand started by screaming at him about--

51:52SPEAKER- For stealing their stuff.

51:53SPEAKER- About, because he's gotten wind

51:54SPEAKERof Microsoft's first stabs

51:58SPEAKERat graphical user interface development.

52:01SPEAKERThere's some more good character building in here

52:04SPEAKERin the development of the Macintosh.

52:05SPEAKERThere's more examples of Jobs being awful,

52:07SPEAKERthe well-documented harassment and abuse

52:10SPEAKERof the Macintosh team,

52:12SPEAKERpeople being up for two days straight,

52:14SPEAKERhaving him just come in and berate people out of nowhere.

52:17SPEAKERThe whole 90 hours a week and loving it T-shirt.

52:21SPEAKER- The whole idea that everyone else at Apple is bad,

52:24SPEAKERexcept for the Macintosh team,

52:25SPEAKERand they're an island unto themselves

52:27SPEAKERinside an entity that's trying to destroy them.

52:30SPEAKERThis is also around the time that they brought in,

52:36SPEAKERoh God, I'm blanking.

52:37SPEAKERWhat's his name from, from Pepsi?

52:39SPEAKER- Oh, John Scully.

52:40SPEAKER- John Scully, thank you.

52:41SPEAKER- The famous, do you want to sell sugared water

52:42SPEAKERfor the rest of your life?

52:44SPEAKER- Yeah.

52:45SPEAKER- Yeah, Scully comes in as CEO.

52:47SPEAKERI don't know, I don't know if all these encounters

52:49SPEAKERinside the kind of Macintosh development pit

52:50SPEAKERare truly authentic,

52:52SPEAKERbut the one where one of the engineers loses his shit

52:55SPEAKERand gets up and fucking slams Jobs against the wall

52:59SPEAKERand throttles him,

53:00SPEAKERI have definitely read about having occurred.

53:02SPEAKER- That one, the 52 hours, the guy who doesn't want to be,

53:07SPEAKERwas the guy who gets slammed into the wall,

53:09SPEAKERthe guy who says he doesn't want to defend a product

53:12SPEAKERthat's not finished?

53:13SPEAKER- Yeah, he's like, Steve,

53:14SPEAKERI can't defend another unfinished design.

53:16SPEAKER- Yeah, then- - And then Jobs is just like,

53:18SPEAKERbecause there's nothing to defend.

53:19SPEAKERI mean, just awful, awful treatment of human beings.

53:22SPEAKER- The 90 hours a week and loving it,

53:23SPEAKERsure, it was a real thing for sure.

53:25SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:26SPEAKER- It was, it was, by all reports,

53:29SPEAKERif you read the Isaacson biography,

53:32SPEAKERmany of the relationships that he'd maintained

53:34SPEAKERfrom the start of Apple through this,

53:35SPEAKERthe people who were the most in Jobs' corner,

53:39SPEAKERhe burned those bridges and the development of the Macintosh

53:41SPEAKERwas the takeaway from that, from that part.

53:44SPEAKER- Sure, sure.

53:45SPEAKERBut, but the upshot is,

53:49SPEAKERthis is also, this is also the time

53:52SPEAKERwhen the interview with the bare feet comes in.

53:55SPEAKER- Oh my gosh, we skipped over that one.

53:56SPEAKERI mean, there's, there's,

53:58SPEAKERthere's so many instances of Jobs being awful to people

54:01SPEAKERin this movie that it's hard to keep track of them all.

54:02SPEAKERBut yeah, that Job interview with an applicant

54:05SPEAKERfrom, he's like a mainframe guy,

54:06SPEAKERis like kind of hard to watch, actually.

54:08SPEAKER- He's a, he's a typical short sleeves, white shirt,

54:11SPEAKERpocket protector, prototypical '80s computer engineer,

54:15SPEAKERand Jobs barges into the conference room

54:18SPEAKERduring what is clearly a one-on-one job interview.

54:20SPEAKER- With, with Mike Markula, who is,

54:22SPEAKERwas the angel investor that pumped,

54:24SPEAKERpumped a bunch of money into Apple.

54:25SPEAKERI looked up some more about him.

54:27SPEAKERHe's like a fairly minor, I mean,

54:29SPEAKERprominent minor character in this movie,

54:31SPEAKERbut he owned as much of Apple as Jobs and Woz did.

54:34SPEAKER- Yeah, oh yeah.

54:35SPEAKER- And Markula is interviewing this engineer guy,

54:38SPEAKERJobs bursts in, also Jobs is frequently depicted

54:41SPEAKERas just like going and abusing people

54:42SPEAKERafter something bad has happened to him

54:44SPEAKERand he just needs to blow off steam.

54:46SPEAKER- Yeah, mercurial, I think is what you call that.

54:49SPEAKER- I think he's coming from one of those instances.

54:51SPEAKERHe barges into this conference room

54:53SPEAKERand cut off barefoot and cut off jean shorts and t-shirts.

54:58SPEAKERGoes in, props his bare feet up on the conference table

55:00SPEAKERand just berates this guy endlessly and like humiliates him.

55:04SPEAKER- Asks him if he's a virgin,

55:05SPEAKERgets into like, like weirdly personal details.

55:08SPEAKERIt's, it's pretty horrific. - Yeah, just kind of,

55:10SPEAKERjust gross behavior.

55:13SPEAKER- And, and it's, and that scene is also interesting

55:16SPEAKER'cause it's Woz, Markula and Jobs,

55:18SPEAKERwho I think at the time were the three biggest shareholders

55:20SPEAKERin Apple, unless Jobs had already started selling off

55:22SPEAKERhis shares by that point.

55:23SPEAKER- They, they all, from what I read,

55:25SPEAKERaround the time the company went public,

55:26SPEAKERthey all owned 26%, all three of them.

55:29SPEAKER- Yeah, so yeah, it's, it's weird

55:32SPEAKERthat these three major stakeholders are in an interview

55:35SPEAKERwith what looks like a mid-tier engineer.

55:38SPEAKERSo just so that Steve can humiliate this guy.

55:41SPEAKER- Yeah, for sure.

55:42SPEAKERYou're also getting, getting Woz kind of like losing faith

55:45SPEAKERin the company around this time,

55:47SPEAKERprobably largely because of Jobs' behavior,

55:49SPEAKERbut also like to hear him tell it.

55:50SPEAKERHe also just didn't like how big the company got

55:53SPEAKERand didn't like dealing with that kind of money

55:55SPEAKERand wanted to work in small scale stuff.

55:57SPEAKER- He said he wanted to do stuff that was fun, right?

55:59SPEAKER- Yes.

56:00SPEAKER- This is, this is also the time that Jobs and,

56:05SPEAKERand Woz to a lesser extent,

56:08SPEAKERstart being portrayed as rock stars.

56:09SPEAKERThey start like, Jobs starts wearing a leather jacket

56:12SPEAKERand like, you know, walking around looking very cool

56:17SPEAKERand making big proclamations with nothing to back,

56:20SPEAKERback them and, and no way of getting them done.

56:23SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:24SPEAKER- It's when Woz buys a plane and then crashes the plane

56:27SPEAKERand whacks himself on the head pretty good

56:29SPEAKERand becomes a computer programmer

56:31SPEAKERwith memory program, with memory problems.

56:33SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:35SPEAKER- It's, it's a hard, it's, it's a, it's a,

56:38SPEAKERit's yet another cautionary tale

56:40SPEAKERhaving, having just come off the Romero book

56:43SPEAKERa few months ago to this, you, you're like, oh, right.

56:46SPEAKEREvery time people start behaving like this,

56:48SPEAKERit ends up badly for them.

56:49SPEAKERIt turns out so.

56:50SPEAKER- Yes.

56:51SPEAKERMeanwhile, at the, you know,

56:52SPEAKERat the height of Microsoft's success,

56:54SPEAKERGates is still shown as being ushered

56:56SPEAKERinto a PR photography session,

57:00SPEAKERcompletely disheveled and unready for the camera

57:03SPEAKERto the point that they were like,

57:04SPEAKERoh, the, like the photographer is exasperated

57:06SPEAKERabout his sweat stains on his under, underarm on his shirt.

57:09SPEAKERThey have to replace his shirt and stuff.

57:10SPEAKERLike just like such different depictions

57:13SPEAKERof success here between the two camps.

57:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, it's, it's, well, it's funny

57:19SPEAKER'cause like looking at it now you think,

57:20SPEAKERoh, this is a depiction of somebody

57:22SPEAKERwho only cares about one thing

57:23SPEAKERand is obsessed about that one thing

57:24SPEAKERand doesn't give a shit about it,

57:25SPEAKERliterally anything else when we're talking about Gates.

57:28SPEAKERBut also when we talk about, about, about Jobs, right?

57:31SPEAKERThey're both obsessed with,

57:33SPEAKERJobs is just obsessed with being seen as an artist

57:36SPEAKERand a, and a creator and Gates is interested

57:40SPEAKERin taking over the world with software.

57:42SPEAKER- Gates just wants to win,

57:44SPEAKERwhich like the, you mentioned this earlier,

57:46SPEAKERthe more I think about it, the more,

57:48SPEAKERthe more Gates introduction as a very confident

57:50SPEAKERor like a very skilled poker player really is

57:52SPEAKERthe entire characterization in this

57:54SPEAKER'cause he really does just want to wheel and deal

57:56SPEAKERand win constantly and that's it.

57:58SPEAKER- Well, and, and Balmer even goes so far as to say,

58:01SPEAKERin one of the sides to camera,

58:04SPEAKERhey, this is the biggest money-making,

58:06SPEAKERlike this is the moment that you should,

58:07SPEAKERit should be on the wall and it's talking about the IBM deal.

58:11SPEAKER- Yeah.

58:11SPEAKER- He says this is a moment that should be taught in schools,

58:13SPEAKERit should be on the wall of the national gallery

58:15SPEAKERor something 'cause this is the greatest money-making moment

58:18SPEAKERin the, in the 20th century, right?

58:20SPEAKERThis is when billions are made, fortunes are made.

58:23SPEAKER- Yeah, that, that line read a little differently

58:25SPEAKERat the time than it does now because,

58:26SPEAKER'cause Bill Gates was the most,

58:28SPEAKERhe was the richest man in the world when this came out

58:30SPEAKERand was for a very long time after,

58:31SPEAKERthat's no longer the case, so it's, it's a little different

58:34SPEAKERin hindsight, but at the time, at the time,

58:36SPEAKERwhat he's, he literally says like this moment

58:39SPEAKERwas the beginning of the greatest fortune

58:40SPEAKERin human history kind of thing.

58:42SPEAKER- Yeah, so, also one last thing about those,

58:48SPEAKERthose, those Mac desks, they all had the Cobra phone

58:53SPEAKERfrom Ericsson, the, it's the-

58:56SPEAKER- Oh, is it this, this thing that's kind of sticks up

58:59SPEAKERlike a, like a striking Cobra?

59:01SPEAKER- That's exactly it, so, so there's a lot of set decoration

59:03SPEAKERcostuming stuff that's really interesting about this

59:06SPEAKERbecause it's all, it's all kind of like,

59:09SPEAKEReven the '70s stuff and the '80s stuff is still filtered

59:11SPEAKERthrough like a '90s very gap-friendly lens.

59:15SPEAKER- Sure.

59:16SPEAKER- Sure, the lapels are big, the ties are a little bit wider

59:19SPEAKERthan they would have been in the '90s,

59:20SPEAKERbut, but everybody in the '80s is dressed like everybody

59:22SPEAKERin the '90s would have been pretty much.

59:24SPEAKER- Sure.

59:26SPEAKER- And these, the, the one exception that stands out to me

59:28SPEAKERare these, are these phones that are on all

59:31SPEAKERthe programmers' desks, and I went to look up

59:33SPEAKERand I couldn't find out if this is actually something

59:35SPEAKERthey did, 'cause I had one of these when I was a kid,

59:37SPEAKERit was an incredibly impractical phone,

59:39SPEAKERit's called the Ericsson EricoPhone Cobra,

59:43SPEAKERand it is, it's like a big flat base

59:45SPEAKERwith a, with a post that comes up,

59:48SPEAKERit looks kind of like a butt plug, sorry kids,

59:53SPEAKERand on the, but when you pick it up,

59:54SPEAKERthe, the thing that hangs it up is on the bottom,

59:57SPEAKERand there's either buttons or a rotor

59:59SPEAKERon the bottom of the phone.

1:00:01SPEAKERSo it's like a comfortable phone to hold,

1:00:03SPEAKERthere's no base, there's no handle,

1:00:05SPEAKERit was real design-y for the late '70s, early '80s,

1:00:10SPEAKERbut the problem with it was, if you bumped it at all,

1:00:13SPEAKERbecause the, the, the thing that hung it up

1:00:15SPEAKERwas on the bottom, if it wasn't perfectly flat,

1:00:17SPEAKERit wouldn't be hung up, so it would keep all the phones

1:00:19SPEAKERin the house busy, it would have been a real pain

1:00:21SPEAKERin the ass to have for a work environment,

1:00:23SPEAKERis all I'm saying. - Sure, sure.

1:00:24SPEAKER- Couldn't find out if they actually put those

1:00:26SPEAKERon everybody's desks at Apple in the old days,

1:00:28SPEAKERbut that reads to me as a,

1:00:31SPEAKERas a pretentious design-focused place.

1:00:34SPEAKER- Yes, I would believe that.

1:00:36SPEAKERSo this is pretty much taking us almost up

1:00:38SPEAKERto the climax of the movie at this point.

1:00:41SPEAKEROne, one more detail we've kind of glossed over a little bit,

1:00:43SPEAKERyou're starting to get some kind of ominous hints

1:00:46SPEAKERabout Steve Jobs' future here,

1:00:47SPEAKERespecially if you know what's coming,

1:00:49SPEAKERlike there's two or three instances of Mike Markula

1:00:52SPEAKERand John Sculley kind of like standing off to the side

1:00:55SPEAKERand muttering to each other about Jobs' behavior

1:00:57SPEAKERas he's specifically, especially as he's leaning

1:01:01SPEAKERinto this like, we're the Macintosh team,

1:01:03SPEAKERwe're the only real artists at Apple, you know,

1:01:05SPEAKERlike everybody else is worthless.

1:01:08SPEAKER- Well, and this is, just to be clear,

1:01:10SPEAKERthis is after the lease-off came out and failed,

1:01:13SPEAKERthe Macintosh was trending toward a really weak launch,

1:01:17SPEAKERand the Apple II was still selling into every,

1:01:19SPEAKERlike there was an Apple II in every school in the country,

1:01:22SPEAKERand they were selling a bazillion Apple IIs

1:01:25SPEAKERstill every single year.

1:01:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I didn't follow up on this,

1:01:28SPEAKERand I would have to do some more reading

1:01:29SPEAKERto really comment on it, but it's just an aside

1:01:32SPEAKERI read somewhere was that Jobs incepted

1:01:35SPEAKERand like ran the Lisa project,

1:01:36SPEAKERbut he did not begin the Macintosh project,

1:01:38SPEAKERthat was Jeff Raskin.

1:01:39SPEAKER- Yeah, then he took it over when the Lisa failed.

1:01:41SPEAKER- That's exactly the implication, like I said,

1:01:43SPEAKERI would like to read more.

1:01:44SPEAKER- Well, that's absolutely what happened.

1:01:45SPEAKER- Is that Jobs literally, his baby failed,

1:01:49SPEAKERso he then went and commandeered

1:01:50SPEAKERsomebody else's project to take over.

1:01:52SPEAKER- Yeah, but at the same time,

1:01:53SPEAKERit was really weird that they were doing

1:01:54SPEAKERmultiple, like it was a weird time,

1:01:59SPEAKERcompanies are run much differently now than they were then.

1:02:03SPEAKERI don't understand why they were running

1:02:04SPEAKERmultiple competing projects that both shipped.

1:02:07SPEAKERThat's the thing that, like in the modern context,

1:02:10SPEAKERif Apple has three iPad, like they did this,

1:02:13SPEAKERthey had multiple iPad type devices in development,

1:02:16SPEAKERand then they only shipped the one that was good, right?

1:02:20SPEAKERPresumably they could have done the same thing here,

1:02:22SPEAKERexcept for nobody thought, oh, well, we can't,

1:02:24SPEAKERif we work on something for two or three years,

1:02:27SPEAKERwe got to show something, we got to sell something,

1:02:28SPEAKERso they just put it down.

1:02:30SPEAKER- It was also just so early in the dawn of personal computing

1:02:32SPEAKERthat like who knew what actually was going to work,

1:02:34SPEAKERyou know, you can kind of see there's a little more cause

1:02:36SPEAKERfor just flinging stuff at the wall.

1:02:38SPEAKER- I guess that's one of the other things

1:02:40SPEAKERthat struck me about this movie,

1:02:41SPEAKER'cause it covers that time where people interested

1:02:44SPEAKERin personal computers went from buying 50 machines,

1:02:48SPEAKERlike there was a market for 50 of these machines

1:02:50SPEAKERwhen they launched the Apple One,

1:02:52SPEAKERthe Alteas were selling,

1:02:53SPEAKERbut they were selling tens of thousands, not millions, right?

1:02:57SPEAKERThe introduction of the Apple Two

1:02:59SPEAKERhad a mob of 50 people around them,

1:03:01SPEAKERand that was shocking to everyone at that event, right?

1:03:05SPEAKERTo the end of this, computers are on every work desk

1:03:08SPEAKERin the world, but it still wasn't necessarily

1:03:12SPEAKERthat there was a computer at every house

1:03:13SPEAKERwhen this movie came out, right?

1:03:15SPEAKERLike, a lot of people had computers,

1:03:17SPEAKERa lot of people had the internet,

1:03:17SPEAKERbut a lot of people still didn't,

1:03:19SPEAKERand wouldn't for quite a few years after this point.

1:03:23SPEAKERSo, yeah, it's not, I mean,

1:03:25SPEAKERthere were a billion computers shipped by the end of this,

1:03:27SPEAKERby the time this movie would have finished,

1:03:30SPEAKERbut it wasn't, every house in America

1:03:33SPEAKERhas one or more computers in it by this time.

1:03:36SPEAKER- Right, right, so we're basically at the climax here.

1:03:40SPEAKERThis is kind of directly,

1:03:42SPEAKERyou know, we've got a little lot of order here

1:03:43SPEAKERtoward the end of the movie,

1:03:44SPEAKERbut this is directly after the Jobs has gotten Gates

1:03:47SPEAKERdown to California to yell at him for stealing their GUI,

1:03:51SPEAKERstraight into, I don't know what this event is,

1:03:53SPEAKERbut Jobs is on stage kind of promoting

1:03:55SPEAKERa partnership with Microsoft.

1:03:57SPEAKERThis is in like the '84-ish timeframe.

1:04:00SPEAKER- This is probably when they announced

1:04:01SPEAKERthat Microsoft's spreadsheet and that stuff

1:04:04SPEAKERwas coming to the Mac.

1:04:06SPEAKER- Yes, 'cause they did, that deal is depicted in this.

1:04:10SPEAKERI doubt it played out exactly this way.

1:04:12SPEAKERSupposedly this exchange took place between the two of them.

1:04:15SPEAKERI doubt that it was as dramatized as it is here,

1:04:19SPEAKERwhere this Macintosh guy is literally pointing at Gates

1:04:24SPEAKERfrom offstage as Jobs is presenting,

1:04:26SPEAKERand Jobs kind of gets the message

1:04:29SPEAKERthat Gates is the actual enemy, you know,

1:04:30SPEAKERlike it's played up in a very dramatic fashion.

1:04:33SPEAKER- Jobs is showing the 1984 commercial

1:04:35SPEAKERto the Mac world audience, right?

1:04:36SPEAKER- Yes, that's what it is.

1:04:37SPEAKERThat's what it is, and this other Mac guy,

1:04:38SPEAKERand I'm not sure who that is,

1:04:42SPEAKERthe Mac guy is literally pointing

1:04:43SPEAKERat the Big Brother commercial up on the screen

1:04:44SPEAKERand then pointing at Gates.

1:04:46SPEAKER- Well, if you think about it, though,

1:04:48SPEAKERthat 1984 commercial frames the whole movie,

1:04:50SPEAKER'cause it starts with Ridley Scott,

1:04:52SPEAKERand then it ends with Bill Gates on the big screen

1:04:54SPEAKERin the 1984, in the George Orwell spot

1:04:56SPEAKERfor the 1984 commercial, which is the entire thing.

1:05:01SPEAKERI'm trying to think who, I don't know who that guy is.

1:05:05SPEAKERI think it's maybe supposed to be, is it Dan Cocky, maybe?

1:05:10SPEAKER- That might be who that is.

1:05:11SPEAKERThat's kind of who this actor looks like.

1:05:12SPEAKERI don't know him as a, is that a well-known

1:05:15SPEAKERearly Macintosh person?

1:05:17SPEAKER- I don't know who, he's one of the Macintosh team people

1:05:20SPEAKERis my recollection, but I don't remember for sure.

1:05:23SPEAKER- Looks like he was friends with Jobs in college

1:05:25SPEAKERand was one of the first employees of Apple, actually,

1:05:27SPEAKERso he is very core to this whole thing.

1:05:29SPEAKER- I believe he's one of the people that Jobs pissed off

1:05:32SPEAKERduring the making of the Macintosh, but I could be wrong.

1:05:35SPEAKER- I could see that.

1:05:36SPEAKERBut anyway, what I meant about probably not occurring

1:05:39SPEAKERin real life was this very convenient pointing at Gates

1:05:43SPEAKERas the commercial is running on stage,

1:05:45SPEAKERto reveal him as the villain.

1:05:47SPEAKER- Well, even better than that is the off-stage conversation

1:05:52SPEAKERthey have after that.

1:05:53SPEAKER- So that conversation is purported to have taken place

1:05:56SPEAKERalmost verbatim to what's shown in the movie,

1:05:59SPEAKERwhich is basically the final encounter in this movie.

1:06:02SPEAKER- Which is when Gates, when Jobs says they're arguing

1:06:06SPEAKERabout him making Windows, right?

1:06:08SPEAKER- Yeah, and I guess this was even true to life.

1:06:11SPEAKERI looked this up.

1:06:13SPEAKEREarly Windows, like Windows 1.0,

1:06:14SPEAKERwas shipping on computers in Japan.

1:06:17SPEAKER- Yeah, on NECs, I think, right?

1:06:19SPEAKER- So Apple had gotten ahold of these NEC computers

1:06:21SPEAKERfrom Japan that had Windows,

1:06:23SPEAKERthe first version of Windows installed on them

1:06:24SPEAKERand basically gotten a look at how Microsoft

1:06:26SPEAKERwas now trying to eat their lunch.

1:06:28SPEAKERAnd of course, Jobs doesn't like it,

1:06:30SPEAKERbut at this point in the movie,

1:06:32SPEAKERthis point in the movie,

1:06:33SPEAKERJobs has been built up as such an asshole

1:06:35SPEAKERthat you want to see him get some comeuppance,

1:06:37SPEAKERor at least I did.

1:06:38SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:39SPEAKER- Even if it's Bill Gates pulling it off.

1:06:43SPEAKERBut this is where you get the famous exchange,

1:06:45SPEAKERwhich supposedly happened,

1:06:46SPEAKERabout Jobs is like, "This is theft."

1:06:48SPEAKERAnd Gates is like, "No, what this is like

1:06:51SPEAKERis like we both had a rich neighbor named Xerox

1:06:55SPEAKERwho left his door open all the time,

1:06:57SPEAKERand you went over there to steal his TV set,

1:06:59SPEAKERbut then you found that I got there first."

1:07:03SPEAKER- I got the loose, Steve, and you're yelling?

1:07:04SPEAKERThat's not fair.

1:07:05SPEAKERI wanted to try to steal it first.

1:07:06SPEAKERYou're too late.

1:07:07SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:08SPEAKER- Pirates, Brad.

1:07:09SPEAKER- Yes, it's all a bit melodramatic,

1:07:12SPEAKERbut it's a good moment where after Balmer

1:07:14SPEAKERhas explicitly said, "Jobs is the one person

1:07:17SPEAKERGates doesn't yell at," now that Gates has won,

1:07:19SPEAKERhe's perfectly happy to yell at him

1:07:20SPEAKERand tell him to get fucked.

1:07:22SPEAKER- Well, the follow-up to that is Jobs walking away

1:07:26SPEAKERdisgustedly saying, "Doesn't matter, we're better.

1:07:28SPEAKERWe have better stuff. We're better than you."

1:07:30SPEAKERAnd Bill Gates says, "You don't get it, Steve.

1:07:31SPEAKERIt doesn't matter."

1:07:33SPEAKERWhich is like, that's the ultimate '90s Microsoft Coda.

1:07:37SPEAKER- Hey, it may crash, it may be shittier.

1:07:40SPEAKERThere's a James Bond villain who talks about shipping,

1:07:43SPEAKERwho's a software magnate,

1:07:44SPEAKERwho talks about shipping 30% more bugs

1:07:46SPEAKERin the next version of their operating system.

1:07:49SPEAKERThat's Bill Gates, doesn't matter.

1:07:51SPEAKER- Yes, it doesn't matter.

1:07:51SPEAKERAnd that's a pretty good callback to earlier in the movie

1:07:54SPEAKERwhere he's kind of laying out his philosophy of business,

1:07:56SPEAKERwhich is basically to be successful,

1:07:58SPEAKERyou have to have what people need.

1:08:00SPEAKERAnd he doesn't come out and say it,

1:08:02SPEAKERbut what matters is not that their stuff is better,

1:08:04SPEAKERit's that he has wormed his way in a position

1:08:07SPEAKERwhere he has what everybody needs.

1:08:09SPEAKER- They don't have a choice.

1:08:10SPEAKER- And they don't have a choice.

1:08:11SPEAKER- There's another line that lines up with that,

1:08:14SPEAKERthat is what he's talking to,

1:08:16SPEAKERI think the IBM people, I can't remember,

1:08:19SPEAKERor comes out of the IBM people.

1:08:20SPEAKERHe's like, "Success is a menace.

1:08:22SPEAKERIt fools smart people into thinking that they can't lose."

1:08:26SPEAKERWhich, you know, these all align.

1:08:28SPEAKER'Cause at the end of this movie,

1:08:30SPEAKERJobs is three weeks from getting fired from Apple, right?

1:08:34SPEAKERWell, I mean, at the end of the movie,

1:08:35SPEAKERI guess he's coming back.

1:08:35SPEAKERBut Sculley has to give,

1:08:39SPEAKERthere's this awful conversation

1:08:41SPEAKERat Jobs's 30th birthday party,

1:08:43SPEAKERwhere Sculley and Woz and Mike Markula, I think,

1:08:47SPEAKERare talking about who's gonna give the birthday toast,

1:08:50SPEAKERand nobody wants to do it.

1:08:51SPEAKER- Nobody wants to toast Jobs,

1:08:53SPEAKERbecause they all kind of either hate him

1:08:56SPEAKERor know they are scheming against him.

1:08:58SPEAKER- Well, and by this time the Mac has come out,

1:08:59SPEAKERit hasn't failed at the same level as the lease,

1:09:02SPEAKERand it eventually ended up being a successful product.

1:09:03SPEAKERBut it wasn't immediately,

1:09:06SPEAKERit wasn't an Apple II-level success,

1:09:07SPEAKERwhich is what they needed.

1:09:09SPEAKERAnd it cuts from the end of Sculley's toast,

1:09:13SPEAKER'cause Sculley ends up having to do the toast,

1:09:16SPEAKERto John Sculley firing Steve Jobs

1:09:20SPEAKERfrom Microsoft three weeks later.

1:09:21SPEAKER- Literally, as Sculley and Jobs are toasting

1:09:23SPEAKERat Jobs's 30th birthday party,

1:09:26SPEAKERit frees frames and texts overlay,

1:09:27SPEAKERthree months later, John Sculley fires Steve Jobs.

1:09:30SPEAKER- I love this '90s way of ending a movie

1:09:33SPEAKERwith like, where are they now, it's fantastic.

1:09:35SPEAKER- It's great, they cut to Woz talking about like,

1:09:39SPEAKERoh, maybe I'm just getting a little older.

1:09:41SPEAKERYou know, maybe as you age,

1:09:43SPEAKERthe things that are important start to change,

1:09:44SPEAKERand then he turns to teaching computers to school children.

1:09:48SPEAKER- And funding a ballet.

1:09:50SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:09:53SPEAKER- It didn't do that for Gates and Palmer, did it?

1:09:56SPEAKER- No, they do for Jobs though,

1:09:58SPEAKERthey just show Jobs with his other children

1:10:00SPEAKERthat he had later, and Lisa, his daughter,

1:10:03SPEAKERwho he neglected, is finally kind of back.

1:10:06SPEAKER- Was up and down with still a couple of times

1:10:07SPEAKERafter this movie came out, as I understand as well.

1:10:10SPEAKER- Yeah, but basically, they say he has reconciled.

1:10:15SPEAKER- And then the last thing is-

1:10:17SPEAKER- The last thing is the shot from Macworld

1:10:19SPEAKERof Gates being up on the screen,

1:10:20SPEAKERwhere Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.

1:10:25SPEAKER- This is '98, I think, Macworld.

1:10:29SPEAKERWasn't it '97?

1:10:30SPEAKEROr sorry, I think it was '97 Macworld

1:10:32SPEAKERis when this historic Gates up on screen.

1:10:34SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it is, it is 1997 Macworld, sorry.

1:10:37SPEAKER- And it's just, hi Steve,

1:10:39SPEAKERI think it's gonna be really interesting,

1:10:41SPEAKERyou and me together and Jobs kind of resigned.

1:10:43SPEAKERYeah, it is.

1:10:45SPEAKER- And yeah, Jobs is very much eating,

1:10:47SPEAKERlike if you watch the whole,

1:10:48SPEAKERI went back and watched the whole,

1:10:49SPEAKERthat whole section of that keynote afterwards.

1:10:51SPEAKER- I did too, yeah.

1:10:53SPEAKERHe's much more matter of fact.

1:10:54SPEAKERI mean, obviously, again, this was played up for the movie.

1:10:56SPEAKERJobs is very matter of fact in the real life version.

1:10:59SPEAKER- Well, but it's weird

1:11:00SPEAKER'cause he's preaching to the true believers

1:11:02SPEAKER'cause the people, kind of people

1:11:03SPEAKERwho'd go to Macworld in 1997 were like,

1:11:07SPEAKERit was a dark time for the Mac faithful that year.

1:11:12SPEAKER- It's repeated boos in this footage of,

1:11:15SPEAKERwe're partnering with Microsoft, boo.

1:11:18SPEAKERWe're making Internet Explorer

1:11:19SPEAKERthe default browser in Mac OS, boo.

1:11:22SPEAKERMicrosoft is buying $150 million worth of Apple stock.

1:11:27SPEAKERLike just not a good response at all.

1:11:29SPEAKERBut Jobs is like, say whatever else you will about him.

1:11:33SPEAKERLike he knew how to present to people

1:11:34SPEAKERand make them believe what he was saying.

1:11:36SPEAKERAnd he's not wrong.

1:11:38SPEAKERHe flat out says like, we gotta let go of some things

1:11:40SPEAKERif we're going to bring Apple back to health.

1:11:42SPEAKERAnd the first of those things is the belief

1:11:45SPEAKERthat for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.

1:11:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:11:49SPEAKER- Which is not wrong.

1:11:50SPEAKERLike obviously, he makes a really good point in there.

1:11:52SPEAKERLike Apple and Microsoft together

1:11:54SPEAKERwere 100% of the desktop market at this point.

1:11:57SPEAKERSo they had the potential together

1:11:59SPEAKERto drive standards forward, you know,

1:12:02SPEAKERto like really steer the conversation

1:12:05SPEAKERabout where the industry was going at the time anyway.

1:12:08SPEAKER- The striking thing to me though,

1:12:10SPEAKERand I assume that this was Steve Jobs is doing at the time,

1:12:14SPEAKERis how putting Bill Gates' giant head on the screen

1:12:20SPEAKERevokes the 1984 commercial.

1:12:23SPEAKERAnd like, it makes me,

1:12:26SPEAKERI can see a world where both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

1:12:29SPEAKERthink that they win here,

1:12:30SPEAKERbecause Bill Gates has got the emperor setting

1:12:33SPEAKERfor the hollow vision thing, towering over Jobs,

1:12:38SPEAKERwhich is definitely how it's presented in this film.

1:12:40SPEAKERBut at the same time, Jobs is depicting Gates

1:12:45SPEAKERas the villain that they,

1:12:47SPEAKERin the same way that they depicted the villain

1:12:49SPEAKERin the 1984 commercial.

1:12:51SPEAKERIt's a really, like, I don't know how to unpack it,

1:12:54SPEAKERhonestly, 'cause it's like, it goes, it works

1:12:56SPEAKERevery possible way.

1:12:58SPEAKERAnd like today, like for example,

1:13:01SPEAKERwhen Apple announced the iPod phone with Singular,

1:13:05SPEAKERwhich became AT&T, the CEO of Singular came up on the stage

1:13:10SPEAKERand was a normal human-sized person standing on the stage

1:13:12SPEAKERand the product was big, right?

1:13:14SPEAKERThere's no product here.

1:13:15SPEAKERSo, and Gates, it isn't worth Gates' time to fly to Boston

1:13:20SPEAKERto do this 150, mere $150 million deal,

1:13:23SPEAKERwhich just to be clear at the time,

1:13:25SPEAKERpretty big deal in 1997.

1:13:27SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - Right?

1:13:28SPEAKERLike we hadn't seen a lot of billion dollar deals

1:13:30SPEAKERat that point, so.

1:13:31SPEAKER- Yeah, but it's clear why that was not worth Gates' time

1:13:34SPEAKERbecause Apple was barely hanging on, you know?

1:13:37SPEAKER- Right. - Like months

1:13:38SPEAKERfrom bankruptcy, like it was not exactly a glamorous thing

1:13:42SPEAKERfor Microsoft to get out there.

1:13:42SPEAKERIt was obviously, it was everything to Apple,

1:13:44SPEAKERbut for Gates, it was just a Thursday.

1:13:47SPEAKER- Well, I mean, but to Microsoft's benefit,

1:13:49SPEAKERit showed them doing things that were not anti-competitive

1:13:52SPEAKERat a time when they're having anti-competitive problems.

1:13:54SPEAKER- Oh man, I can't believe I've never

1:13:56SPEAKERput that together before.

1:13:57SPEAKER- Yeah, so like--

1:13:59SPEAKER- I always think of the,

1:13:59SPEAKERI mean, 'cause I think the antitrust played out

1:14:01SPEAKERover so many years that by the time it concluded,

1:14:03SPEAKERit was like mid-2000s, I think.

1:14:05SPEAKER- But I mean, how the antitrust concluded depended greatly

1:14:08SPEAKERwhether Al Gore or George Bush won the election in 2000.

1:14:10SPEAKER- Sure, but what I mean is this early in the timeline,

1:14:13SPEAKERI don't think of the pressure from the Justice Department

1:14:15SPEAKERhaving really begun yet, but when you put it that way,

1:14:20SPEAKERinvesting in Apple does feel like it was just another,

1:14:23SPEAKERanother strategy for staving that off.

1:14:25SPEAKER- Yeah, in a world where Apple holds 10,

1:14:28SPEAKERhigh single digits of the PC share

1:14:30SPEAKERis best case for Microsoft,

1:14:31SPEAKER'cause it means they're not a monopoly,

1:14:33SPEAKERbut they don't have a real competitor.

1:14:35SPEAKER- But hey, Office is shipping on our competitor, so.

1:14:38SPEAKER- It's a parody, feature parody, release parody.

1:14:41SPEAKER- It's all new code, we're not even porting it.

1:14:43SPEAKER- And you can get IE, it's the default browser on the Mac.

1:14:47SPEAKERSo yeah, parts of Silicon Valley.

1:14:49SPEAKERIt's a fun movie, I enjoyed it,

1:14:51SPEAKERmaybe more than I expected to.

1:14:53SPEAKER- So there's two takeaways from this.

1:14:54SPEAKEROne is that I thought I'd watched this before

1:14:56SPEAKERand I think I'd watched "Triumph of the Nerds,"

1:14:58SPEAKERwhich is an actual documentary about the same,

1:15:01SPEAKERmostly about the early PC,

1:15:04SPEAKERlike the Humber Computer Club and stuff like that.

1:15:07SPEAKERIt doesn't go as much into the later stage Apple stuff.

1:15:09SPEAKER- Yeah, but that one is an actual documentary

1:15:11SPEAKERwhere they're talking to all of these real figures.

1:15:13SPEAKER- Yeah, we should watch that also, 'cause it's spectacular.

1:15:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I watched it back in the day also.

1:15:18SPEAKER- Noah Wylie's depiction of Gates, I think is really good.

1:15:23SPEAKERAs a coda, we should talk about this 'cause it's weird.

1:15:26SPEAKERJobs invited him on the stage at Macworld in '99, I think?

1:15:30SPEAKER- To play him, yes.

1:15:32SPEAKERSo yeah, we've got Jobs, Gates and Woz also

1:15:36SPEAKERare all kind of spoke to this movie a little bit

1:15:38SPEAKERafter it came out, this is from Wikipedia.

1:15:40SPEAKERAfter the movie had aired, Jobs contacted Noah Wylie

1:15:44SPEAKERand told him that while he quote,

1:15:45SPEAKER"Hated both the film and the screenplay,

1:15:48SPEAKERhe liked Wylie's performance," noting quote,

1:15:50SPEAKER"You do look like me."

1:15:51SPEAKER- You're a very attractive man.

1:15:53SPEAKER- Yes, and then, but then yeah, they brought Noah Wylie

1:15:57SPEAKERin character as Jobs onto the Macworld stage as Jobs

1:16:00SPEAKERand you can find that footage out there.

1:16:02SPEAKERIt's mostly lighthearted, but it's a little bit tense.

1:16:05SPEAKER- There's a, Noah Wylie asks him if he's a virgin.

1:16:09SPEAKER- Yeah, that was as a parting shot,

1:16:11SPEAKERwhich I was like, oh man, wow, it's ballsy.

1:16:14SPEAKER- You know, he got the guest spot on ER, so it works out.

1:16:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:16:19SPEAKER- It's worth, sorry, I apologize for going back.

1:16:22SPEAKERIt's worth remembering that that Microsoft investment

1:16:25SPEAKERcame before the iMac, so that was the first good news

1:16:27SPEAKERthat came out of Jobs' return to Apple.

1:16:30SPEAKERLike the $150 million, they just killed a bunch of products

1:16:34SPEAKERand getting Microsoft to commit to the platform

1:16:36SPEAKERand to put money into the company

1:16:38SPEAKERwas the first good thing.

1:16:41SPEAKER- Yeah, this is entirely from memory.

1:16:43SPEAKERI don't have it in front of me, but I think this is right,

1:16:45SPEAKERthat Apple bought Next in late '96, like tail end of '96,

1:16:49SPEAKERand then this is like six months after that.

1:16:50SPEAKERSo yeah, like almost nothing has happened

1:16:53SPEAKERat Apple at this point, right?

1:16:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I think the sale closed in early 20,

1:16:57SPEAKERearly 1997 it looks like.

1:16:59SPEAKER- Right, right, so like they've basically had time

1:17:01SPEAKERto do nothing product-wise at this point.

1:17:03SPEAKERSo yeah, getting this big influx of money

1:17:05SPEAKERwhen they're almost bankrupt was huge.

1:17:07SPEAKER- Well, and all he did was sack a whole bunch of people,

1:17:10SPEAKERor not sack a bunch of people,

1:17:11SPEAKERshut down a bunch of products, shut down the Newton

1:17:13SPEAKERand a bunch of like the bazillion Macs

1:17:16SPEAKERthat weren't selling.

1:17:17SPEAKER- The famous conception of what he did when he came back,

1:17:20SPEAKERI forget where I've seen this,

1:17:21SPEAKERbut I think I've literally saw him like draw this

1:17:24SPEAKERon a Mac world stage or something on a whiteboard

1:17:26SPEAKERwas basically like draw plus four quadrants

1:17:29SPEAKERand just say, hey, we make four products now.

1:17:32SPEAKERAnd I think those, what were those products?

1:17:33SPEAKERIt was like a laptop and a desktop,

1:17:36SPEAKERbusiness and personal, basically.

1:17:38SPEAKERIt's like we make two types of desktops

1:17:40SPEAKERfor business and personal people and two laptops,

1:17:42SPEAKERand that's it.

1:17:43SPEAKERThat's where we're resetting to.

1:17:46SPEAKER- Makes sense, it's a simpler product line.

1:17:48SPEAKERAnd now we have 35 products for every potential category.

1:17:53SPEAKERAnyway. - Yeah.

1:17:54SPEAKERReal quick, Gates described his depiction in the movie

1:17:57SPEAKERas quote, reasonably accurate.

1:18:00SPEAKER- The bulldozer race has happened, confirmed.

1:18:03SPEAKER- Yep, and then was on Wikipedia,

1:18:06SPEAKERI mean, these quotes were taken from wherever, of course,

1:18:08SPEAKERbut he spoke pretty effusively about this movie,

1:18:11SPEAKERabout its accuracy from his perspective.

1:18:13SPEAKER- Yeah, he, I mean, look,

1:18:15SPEAKERWoz got the best depiction in the movie too,

1:18:16SPEAKERwhich makes it easy for him to say, but.

1:18:18SPEAKER- Yes, but also not just about him, like about everything,

1:18:21SPEAKERlike basically all of the events.

1:18:23SPEAKEREvery one of those incidences occurred

1:18:26SPEAKERand it occurred with the meaning

1:18:27SPEAKERthat was shown in the film is what he said.

1:18:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have depicted this