0:00

Brad, do you know what your SV ID is set at? Are

0:03

you saying this in this ominous touch? Look, man. You sound

0:05

like it's 10 PM. Do you know where

0:07

your SV ID is? Rowdy

0:09

motherboards are over-volting processors

0:11

in your neighborhood. You

0:14

saw, we talked about this on the PC World Podcast a

0:16

lot over the last few weeks. And

0:18

there was a Gamer's Nexus video this week. There's been

0:20

a bunch of other stuff that's come out. But

0:23

this morning,

0:25

videocards.com with a Z. No

0:28

space, also. Sinonically correct

0:30

pronunciate spelling. Posted a story

0:33

that ASUS has released some motherboards for its

0:35

Z970 motherboards, the 13th and 14th gen motherboards.

0:40

Has a new setting

0:43

called Intel baseline profile,

0:46

which purportedly doesn't overclock anything. You might

0:48

think that the setting such as that

0:51

would exist out of the box on

0:53

a motherboard. And they might make it

0:55

easy to just say, hey, you know what? Run this

0:57

thing at stock. Look, I've spent a fair amount of

0:59

time with the last few weeks benchmarking

1:01

janky 13th and 14th generation

1:03

processors. And I'm

1:05

going to go ahead and tell you, this

1:08

is a welcome change. Some issues there. You

1:10

were really ahead of the curve because. I

1:13

was a thought leader here. You were reporting issues a

1:16

year ago, I think, almost or more

1:18

even on this exact subject way before

1:20

it became what is now

1:22

a pretty hot story, I think, in the PC

1:25

World. So yeah, I RMA'd my first 3900K about

1:27

this time last year, like

1:31

March probably. And I

1:33

was having, we've talked about the

1:35

podcast before, so I won't get into super big details,

1:38

but I was having crashes in Fortnite and

1:42

got permabanned from Fortnite for alleged

1:44

cheating. I wasn't cheating. But

1:47

something was corrupting my memory and changing my

1:49

memory, the contents of my

1:51

memory in a way that their anti-cheat flagged

1:53

presumably. Intel, Epic never told me,

1:55

Intel never told me. This

1:57

is talking to some friends who've worked on EAC games in the past.

2:00

and they were like, here's what I think

2:02

is probably happening, which

2:04

is that the memory controller or the

2:06

memory was rewriting

2:10

parts of the memory that Easy Anti-Cheat

2:12

didn't think should be changed, and

2:15

thus that was triggering as me doing some

2:17

nonsense to Jack with the game.

2:19

So yeah, the whole world's come around. Until

2:22

maybe not immune to the issues

2:24

that AMD was having last year

2:26

with fiery CPUs.

2:28

I mean, nothing's catching on fire

2:31

here, to be clear, but both

2:33

excess voltage issues in

2:35

each case really just seems like a

2:37

result of the race to the top on desktop

2:40

PC performance, because that's all anybody seems to be

2:42

able to do these days, just to pump more

2:44

juice in there, try to make it go faster.

2:46

So Gordon, the Cinebench numbers have gone down like

2:48

12% with the Intel baseline profile on

2:52

your BIOS, which to be clear, though,

2:54

that is from the maximal overclocking profile

2:56

that the board ships with, right? We're

2:58

shaving 12% off of what

3:01

was a potentially dangerous group

3:03

of settings to run your CPU at. So

3:05

some would say that the stock motherboard settings

3:07

should not be potentially dangerous. Yeah, I would

3:09

say that. I'm going to say that the

3:11

people who bought these processors and got used

3:13

to this level of performance and then are

3:15

seeing a 12% or 13% performance set when

3:17

they use the ones that won't let their

3:19

light their shot on fire over a period

3:21

of months, probably are going to be upset.

3:24

As Gordon says, and it's important to say, Gordon

3:26

Maung, my old friend and colleague

3:28

at PC World, says,

3:31

there's a lot of smoke here. We don't

3:34

know where the fire is yet. The fact

3:36

that ASUS has launched a motherboard update that

3:38

sets baseline settings after. So

3:40

this came after Falcon Northwest

3:42

System Integrator did a, hey,

3:45

here's the safe settings that

3:47

we found post last

3:50

week. We tried it on my busted

3:52

13, my second busted 3900K

3:54

and it wasn't able to be recovered. It's one of

3:56

the ones he mentions in his post. It's

3:58

like, yeah, we had a couple of this. didn't help on, but

4:00

it did help on one of the other processors that we were

4:02

having some issues. And

4:04

there was some concern. There's been

4:07

conversations about SVID, the Intel

4:09

fail safe SVID profile, which a lot

4:11

of people are saying is putting too

4:13

much voltage into these processors. From

4:16

what we've seen, and this isn't... We're

4:18

not at a point where we're done testing.

4:21

There were some other settings in the ASUS

4:23

BIOS that were turned on that were causing

4:25

those fail safes to go above what they

4:28

were. When you turn those settings off, we

4:30

were seeing them back at what the recommended

4:32

ASUS profiles are. So I mean

4:34

what the recommended Intel profiles are. So

4:37

it's a little bit of a weird situation. But

4:40

on that note, I have an announcement for what I'm running

4:43

at home now. Oh, I've

4:45

switched to an AMD machine. You're

4:48

not serious. Ryzen 5800X3D is in there right now. I'm

4:52

testing out to see if I can live with only eight cores. You're not

4:54

serious. Are you actually serious? Really? It's

4:57

in a full circle. It's not expected.

4:59

Why reveal on the pie only from

5:01

YA5800X3D? Well, so one is I wanted

5:03

to... Adam

5:08

and I were talking about it. We were like, let's do the

5:10

low power. What's the lowest power thing?

5:12

Let's see what this does for you and

5:15

see how it hits the multi-thread workload

5:17

so you use and see what happens.

5:20

It's a little... I'm able to spike the

5:22

cores pretty good on some of the stuff that I do.

5:24

But it's not... It's definitely not slow. It's

5:27

a really, really nice processor for what I'm

5:29

doing. And the fans. I have

5:31

a 360 AIO on it. And

5:35

that thing, I'm going to tell you, never spins.

5:38

If it hits 30% fan speed, I'm really

5:40

doing something serious. So

5:43

it's nice having something that doesn't immediately spike

5:45

to 90 or 95 degrees Celsius the moment

5:47

you put the cores under load.

5:49

I'm still sitting here waiting for you to tell me this is all a

5:51

joke. No. I'm

5:53

going to try a 5950 I think. Sorry,

5:56

not 5800, 7800. Oh,

5:59

you're on a 7800. About a 7800 not a

6:01

5800. Okay. Yeah, that's what I

6:03

was wondering. That's the current chin. Yeah, I am five

6:05

Sorry, yeah, I'm not they am for yes Um, yes

6:07

the 7800 and then then the next step will be

6:10

a 79 Try 79 50

6:12

for a few days and see what I think about that regular

6:14

79 50. I probably 3d Which

6:17

I know is wait. Yeah, what?

6:19

Yeah, hi This

6:22

can't be happening Yeah Because this is

6:24

where you started right I went from there to

6:26

where you were and now you were going from

6:28

where you were to Where I was we come

6:31

full circle Brad. It's a circle of life I'm

7:02

Welcome to Brad and Will made a

7:04

check pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Hello 90

7:07

hours a week in loving it Brad. That's where we're at living

7:10

that tech pod life I can't believe I can't believe

7:12

they've reproduced that shirt perfectly. I think we should buy

7:14

those I think maybe we should make those shirts. We

7:16

should just knock them off and tell them you think

7:18

they'd come after us I thought it no definitely not

7:21

I looked at that and I thought about that I

7:23

was like maybe making that would be like fun merch

7:25

opportunity or something But then again glorifying that kind of

7:27

overworked. It's not really something I want to be a

7:29

part of yeah So this week if you haven't been

7:31

paying attention lately or haven't listened to the very

7:34

end of the show We are we watched Pirates

7:36

of Silicon Valley after

7:39

What roughly a month I think of promoting that

7:41

we were going to do this Hopefully that gave

7:43

everybody a chance to watch it, but yeah, I

7:45

don't watch it yet The link will be in

7:47

the show notes on archive that'll work you can

7:49

go watch it now and then come back and

7:51

listen It's it's very watchable It features Noah Wiley

7:53

of ER fame and Anthony Michael Hall of 80s

7:56

fame. Yes with the breakfast club As.

8:00

L C. Jobs and Bill

8:02

Gates respectively Guess. I'm

8:04

I've gotta say, Ah,

8:08

John. Dimaggio, As.

8:11

Far as D bomber. Yes,

8:13

It is mired cancer inspired.

8:15

I had There Are Bending

8:17

Rodriguez. Weight. Of that

8:20

wonderful name that spender bending or yeah has

8:22

spent his full name hundred are not a

8:24

big rom a washer. Let's get it from

8:26

Reagan's. I. Mean I I think John

8:28

Dimaggio more as percuss Phoenix and anybody who

8:30

really we comes down to it but that

8:33

was something I had forgotten. And

8:35

then was reminded of and then shows. Keeps close to

8:37

the best as we thought about this most. Wanted

8:40

people to discover for themselves.

8:42

John Dimaggio see Vollmer is

8:44

a delight. Oh. Yea as it

8:46

is it's so good and and I think.

8:50

I. Wanna say. And.

8:52

Maybe not. I thought I thought of the guy

8:54

who plays Dan. Cocky. Or Marcus

8:57

Giamatti. Is. Related to algae money

8:59

but I don't think they are is. The

9:01

thing that I always forget is that Joey

9:03

Slotnick always looks like to be like like

9:05

Paul Giamatti little kid brother is Juri like

9:07

they that as a botnet played was guess

9:09

and I'd definitely which didn't show Islamic is

9:11

where those people who you look at him

9:13

and girl though that guy uniform character actor

9:15

annulment where else I know him from he

9:17

was Italy of their own he was really

9:20

good in the league of their own a

9:22

protester like a lot of late early nineties

9:24

been nineties. Movies are great as was in

9:26

this. Yeah. Good was I'm

9:28

so so this movie or for people

9:30

who don't know this was a made

9:32

for tv movie which is a thing

9:34

that they used to do. It is

9:36

all your bills as com a be.

9:38

They also would do like. Three.

9:41

Made for T mood Tv movies and shows like one night

9:43

after the other. now be called a mini series of being

9:45

an hour to half each night. With. A

9:47

bunch of commercials and as the mini series so

9:49

much I miss the made for tv movie for

9:51

that matter own boots. It's weird to the mini

9:54

series like the blanks in a mini series and

9:56

a limited. Blake streaming

9:58

series. It's a. So long basically

10:00

the same Now shifted the streaming cereal bar

10:03

be an hour to have each episode. The

10:05

mini series would have been like six hours

10:07

total problem well as something different about other

10:09

women like streaming service series come out every

10:11

single day. Now I see the Tv movie

10:13

or the mini series was an event will

10:15

get It was definitely the kind of thing

10:17

that late. When. The first episode

10:19

would hit. Every. Be talking about at

10:22

school the next day and then you'd have to

10:24

go up and try to figure out what the

10:26

hell happened on the first episode. Sometimes it would

10:28

even show like first episode on Tuesday. First.

10:30

And second episode on Wednesday.

10:33

And. Then you'd get the third episode

10:35

on on Thursday. Sure, I'm. Orange.

10:38

Alert on or in the post tivo days.

10:40

They just showed again at like one o'clock

10:42

in the morning. Because. That

10:44

the machines for the machines in didn't

10:46

read watching. Anyway, as it prepares the

10:48

Silicon Valley was was based on a

10:50

bus com fire the Valley by Michael

10:52

sign and Paul Briber. Now I'm would

10:54

ship them out quite early. I guess

10:56

I'm nineteen Eighty. The year was Nineteen

10:58

Eighty Four Yes this this this movie

11:00

is based on a book both of

11:03

them are about of you're basically personal

11:05

computer revolution starting I billie from about

11:07

Nineteen Seventy One up through and undies.

11:09

Well the book originally came out and

11:11

we covered up to Nineteen Eighty Four

11:13

with wanted the Macintosh. Yeah if it

11:15

covered laughter that have been a real like

11:17

real of masterwork. Yes On has gotten a

11:19

couple of revisions is actually the Books has

11:21

the most recent revision from Twenty Fourteen which

11:24

covers all the way of what they refer

11:26

to as the post Pc era. With the

11:28

death of Steve Jobs on the rise of

11:30

smartphones and cloud computing and etc still makes

11:32

me sad to think about sex. Desktop computer

11:35

era is not really a thing anymore, but

11:37

an adult or up com mom. So okay

11:39

first off, To write a second

11:41

book. Man, don't she battled it's you're

11:43

not George Lucas. Okay, now we don't

11:46

need that. Yeah, at any rate, the

11:48

the movie The movie came out ninety

11:50

nine on Tnt, so for a little

11:52

bit of context it was posts Steve

11:54

Jobs as triumphant return to Apple. And

11:57

free the launch of the I pod but post

11:59

the launch of. The colored Imax. yeah I

12:01

guess the jewelry Imax. Yeah so the the

12:03

kind of jobs revitalization had begun that this

12:05

point yeah but not would definitely not in

12:07

full swing like five doesn't mean like that

12:09

though. The candy colored I for a super

12:12

popular but their soldiers desktop computers right? unless

12:14

it was lot of all the ipod came

12:16

out and became with a culture defining success.

12:18

I mean that it was like that it

12:20

was like oh Apple is becoming a different

12:22

company now and also like one of the

12:24

big companies in hold. they were really wasn't

12:27

until the I phone is really was imminent.

12:29

Not even the. I phone lines but place three

12:31

or four years after that. The I phone for was

12:33

I kind of the first one that was a. While.

12:35

Though. But then it became clear

12:37

that they were going to become the biggest com, one

12:39

of the biggest companies in the world trade. Even even

12:42

the ipod was a phenomenal it was. It was a

12:44

successful product and it broke open a new category in

12:46

a way that like a bunch of other companies A

12:48

tried and hadn't had, never had the same level of

12:50

success and. But. It was. it. was.

12:53

A. Premium luxury good. Whereas I

12:55

phone very quickly became a of

12:57

this move your smartphone. Very.

12:59

Quickly became I'm a necessity for participating

13:02

in the modern world like. Like

13:04

this, There's there's aspects of living in the

13:06

world today that are cut off from you

13:08

feed on on a smartphone app. Is there

13:10

anywhere else? The point is it was unclear

13:13

when this movie was made that Apple was

13:15

gonna go on to become the biggest company

13:17

in the world. guys. the movie in that

13:19

kind of exciting but but yeah way charm

13:21

uncertain moment I guess is the word. For.

13:24

Wherever was at If you got to this

13:26

point, And if you got to that

13:28

point, you're I got Yen. Like eight years. Nine

13:30

years. Apple's gonna ship a billion of anything. you

13:32

would have last? Yes, absolutely yeah. the I had

13:34

some. The time period is roughly is basically the

13:36

early seventies kind of the formative years of of

13:38

Jobs and Gates and the people around them all

13:40

the way up. Through. The want

13:43

a Macintosh jobs Being ejected from Apple Warm and

13:45

kind of. Cuts. Out the mid

13:47

eighties through the late nineties. And.

13:49

Jumps way forward to the moments. Ah,

13:52

that's jobs as brought back and

13:54

also the historic investments. By.

13:56

Microsoft and Apple. The spoilers mans

13:58

the hundred. well. the movie. We should talk

14:01

about the framing because I think the way this movie

14:03

frames all these events is super interesting and they lead

14:05

with that. Yeah, it's so

14:08

the Pirates of Silicon Valley is the name

14:10

of the movie, but it's also the theme,

14:12

right? It's there. All everybody's stealing from everybody.

14:14

And these guys are are

14:17

it's it's really about this conflict between Bill

14:19

Gates and Steve Jobs, which is I think

14:21

you wrote in the notes. It's

14:23

remarkable that it makes Bill Gates seem

14:25

like a sympathetic character or it's a

14:27

true feat that this movie makes you

14:29

root for Bill Gates. Although it's

14:32

less, at least in my case, it's

14:34

less that you're rooting for Bill Gates in this

14:36

movie and more you're rooting against Steve Jobs because

14:38

Jobs is portrayed as an absolute

14:41

monster. Um, yeah, monsters.

14:43

I think that's fair. It's like a just

14:45

a full on sociopath in this movie, awful

14:47

human being, but not unfairly based on all

14:49

accounts of him and his life. Yeah.

14:51

So, but, but I mean the, so where the,

14:54

where the, where the Walter Isaacson, the, the,

14:56

the Steve Jobs movie that Danny Boyle

14:59

directed and, and Aaron Sorkin and Walter

15:01

Isaacson wrote based on the Isaac, Isaacson

15:03

biography is centered around three

15:05

product lunches. You know, it's centered around the Mac,

15:07

it's centered around the next cube. It's centered around

15:10

the I Mac. Um, this

15:12

is centered around these meetings between Bill Gates and

15:14

Steve Jobs. Those are the pivots that this movie

15:16

turns on. And it starts, it

15:19

starts in the beginning with

15:22

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen sitting

15:24

in a dorm room, being

15:26

college kids and doofuses and,

15:29

and Wozniak and Jobs running, running

15:31

through a war protest on the

15:33

Berkeley campus with phone freaking shit

15:35

in their bags. Yes. Captain Crunch

15:37

makes an appearance. Captain

15:39

Crunch does make an appearance, part of the

15:41

Northern California computing scene in the, in the

15:43

late sixties, early seventies. Um,

15:47

and, uh, and yeah, and, and then there's

15:49

this series of meetings between these two, between

15:51

these two characters, these two, two fig Titan,

15:53

I guess is what we should call them.

15:56

Um, the interesting thing to me is that

15:58

the stories told the The POV characters

16:00

are Balmer and Wozniak, the two Steve's. Kind of

16:02

the narrators, the two people who are kind of

16:04

taken out of the movie and speak directly to

16:07

the camera. I think it is a

16:09

really fun way to frame this. Yeah,

16:11

I mean in one case they actually have Balmer

16:13

framed and he gets pulled out through the magic

16:15

of green screen with some really stunning special effects

16:17

and what I assume is TriCaster work maybe. I

16:19

don't know man, it was a trip. Video toaster

16:21

or something, I don't know. Yeah. That's a great

16:23

effect, we should touch on that when we get

16:25

there as we go through the movie. Real

16:28

quick before we get into the actual movie, there was a

16:30

couple aspects of the way this thing came about that I

16:32

wanted to touch on. Oh yeah. The director

16:35

is a guy named Martin Burke, who I'm

16:37

not familiar with. It looks like he has not done a ton of

16:39

work, it was mostly in TV. He's

16:41

not directed many things, he wrote a few things, but

16:43

there's a quote from him on the Wikipedia page about

16:45

when he was first... I don't even

16:47

know who wrote the first draft of the screenplay, but it was

16:50

based on Fire in the Valley as we said. And when he

16:52

was handed that first draft he says, It was

16:54

all about how the 286 computer became the 386

16:57

and so on, I was bored by it.

16:59

And he says, Further, I'm a

17:01

great believer in Shakespeare and what we

17:03

had was a modern equivalent of Hamlet. Featuring

17:07

two young princes, Bill Gates and Steve

17:09

Jobs. The more I read

17:11

about Steve in particular, the more I saw

17:13

in him those Shakespearean terms. He was brilliant,

17:15

volcanic, obsessive, suspicious, even vicious in

17:18

a business sense. He was

17:20

about conquest, always conquest. I

17:22

said, that's the sort of movie I want to make. So

17:24

I agree with all of that?

17:27

Sure, yeah, okay. But did not

17:29

expect coming into this podcast to

17:31

find somebody comparing Steve Jobs and

17:33

Bill Gates to Hamlet. Now, I'm

17:36

gonna say you missed the most

17:38

important omission from Martin Burke's oeuvre. Yeah.

17:42

He was the last credited writer on the 1984

17:44

Val Kilmer banger. Top

17:47

secret. Huh, okay. Featuring the

17:49

cow that wears shoes. The cow

17:51

that wears shoes. You ever see Top Secret? I have not

17:54

seen Top Secret. Oh man, you should watch this on, you

17:56

have a movie podcast over at Nextlander, right? You should watch

17:58

that over there. True. Just that Alex

18:00

might have a blowout. It's a fantastic movie though.

18:03

People do a Val Kilmer month like that

18:05

You could watch that you could watch the real

18:07

genius Watch

18:10

yeah, there's a there's a it's Batman and Robin.

18:12

Yes Good stuff

18:15

There's one more one more thing from him real quick before we

18:17

get in here And then I think we'll maybe touch on at

18:19

the end of this what some of the principal players in this

18:21

in real life had To say about it. I think

18:23

it's a good good approach But but

18:25

up top just just you kind of speak to the

18:28

veracity of this movie because it is a bunch of

18:30

dramatizations of supposedly real events The

18:34

director Burke said I did not want to do an

18:36

authorized biography on either Microsoft or Apple So we made

18:38

the decision going in that we would not talk to

18:40

or meet with them With

18:43

the team of Harvard researchers I embarked on a

18:45

seven-month research project that encompassed virtually everything we could

18:47

find on the history of both companies including old

18:49

technical magazines from the 70s I Intended

18:52

every scene to be based on actual events Including

18:54

such seemingly fantastic moments as Bill Gates's boulders or

18:56

races in the middle of the night and

18:59

Steve Jobs bare feet going up on The border

19:01

and table during an African job interview. I

19:04

have two or more sources that verify each scene So

19:07

so the funny thing about this is when this when

19:09

this came out a lot of

19:11

this seemed kind of fantastic and far school And

19:13

then almost everything that's in this movie has been

19:17

Has been in every other biography or book

19:19

about this time That

19:21

was kind of the experience I had watching this

19:23

last night I should say I loved this movie

19:25

when it came out I taped it on VHS off

19:27

TNT and watched it repeatedly So

19:29

I did but I didn't I didn't remember in

19:31

retrospect until I watched it again last night how

19:34

much of it feels kind of over the top

19:36

and cheesy and over dramatized and ridiculous in a

19:38

way that I figured like Half

19:40

of this has to be kind of creative

19:43

invention rights or dramatic license But

19:45

then yeah, you go read these quotes You

19:47

look at things like the Isaacson biography and

19:49

like just about everything that's in this movie

19:52

is described very similarly in like three

19:54

other sources It's it's come

19:56

up multiple other places and and some

19:58

of it like Gates has admitted

20:00

to some of the bad behavior in this,

20:02

like in interviews and stuff like that in

20:04

the past. Like, did he really unapologetically wreck

20:06

a bulldozer into Paul Allen's new car and

20:09

then not give a shit about it? I

20:11

don't know about the bulldozer races, but he

20:13

said he did some things that he regretted

20:15

in retrospect in this timeframe. Right.

20:17

The famous mugshot of him from

20:19

around this time. I think that was for speeding tickets, right?

20:21

Yes. Yeah, well, he's depicted

20:23

driving very quickly in this. This

20:25

says the bulldozer races were real. I

20:28

don't. It doesn't surprise me. Yeah.

20:30

Anyway, like some of the dialogue in this is

20:32

extremely on the nose. You know, like they're practically

20:34

saying the themes out loud or like, you

20:37

know, Jobs uses the phrase insanely great in

20:39

conversation. You know, stuff like that is just

20:41

a little bit cheesy. There's a

20:43

lot of, there's a lot of like, hey, we're going

20:45

to say things that are really obvious in 1999, but

20:47

we're going to put them in the character's mouth. Like,

20:50

yeah, you know, the profits

20:52

are in the computers themselves, not the software

20:54

stuff. That was an IBM guy quote, I

20:56

think. Yeah. But like broadly,

20:58

though, I think you can look at this

21:00

as a fairly accurate depiction of what happened.

21:03

I don't think it's it's definitely not a

21:05

hagiography. And I think it's so I haven't

21:07

watched the Ashton Kutcher, the directed

21:10

by Joshua Michael Stern and written

21:12

by Matt Whiteley, Jobs movie. But

21:15

I did watch Steve. I watched the

21:17

first two thirds of the Steve Jobs,

21:19

Danny Boyle, Pass Bender, Aaron Sorkin movie

21:22

based on the Isaacson book. And I

21:24

fell asleep in the back half back, back third of that

21:26

one. But I don't

21:28

I don't think this is I mean, a lot of this

21:31

stuff happened in the room with two people in it.

21:33

So we never know what really happened. Right. But

21:35

a lot of it reads. Yes, for sure. And

21:37

I think what we can say is that some

21:40

of the quotes from this movie that stand out

21:42

are also represented in things like the Isaacson biography,

21:44

whether people who communicated those quotes were being fully

21:46

truthful or not. We can't say. Yeah.

21:50

But but that that is the recorded history. There's

21:52

a lot of the thing that makes this difficult

21:54

is especially jobs, but even Gates, there's

21:56

a lot of like built up mythology around

21:58

both of these people. To

22:00

the point that there's a whole...

22:03

I want to say there's almost

22:05

an economy of stories about pitching

22:07

something to Bill or to Steve

22:10

that you hear from old timers and people who

22:12

were in the room where these things happened. And

22:15

they get... Like all great

22:18

mythologies, they

22:21

get built up and built down and

22:23

changed over time and the stories get

22:25

better. And at some point, people

22:29

don't remember what the real version is and

22:31

what actually happened. But anyway, I thought this

22:33

reads really well. Noah Wiley, especially, his performance

22:36

is really remarkable as Jobs, I think. It

22:38

really is. And you see quotes from people

22:40

who... Like people on the Macintosh team, for

22:42

example, who said they were like flabbergasted at

22:45

how well he embodied that character and the

22:47

persona that they had worked with.

22:49

And it's a hard portrayal. It's

22:51

pretty awful. He does not paint

22:54

a kind picture of Jobs'

22:56

disbehavior. And we'll talk about a lot

22:58

of that. No. In fact, the movie is not kind

23:00

to many of the principles in

23:03

this outside of Woz, who... Maybe Woz, yeah.

23:05

Woz is always delightful. It's kind of hard

23:07

to knock Woz for much of anything. But

23:11

Jobs, Gates, and some of the

23:13

people around Gates, like Paul Allen

23:15

gets a pretty... Paul

23:18

Allen is the Woz side of that relationship.

23:21

Yeah, to an extent. He just figures less

23:23

in the story. They don't give him nearly

23:25

as much screen time. But kind of

23:27

like you said, though, there's a lot of mythologizing

23:30

in this movie, but there's no deification. Nobody is...

23:33

Neither of the two principle characters

23:35

are depicted in a particularly flattering

23:37

light, let's say. Yeah, not a

23:40

hagiography for sure. So, should we

23:42

just start at the beginning? Yeah, yeah. Because like I

23:44

said, I really like this framing where they come in.

23:47

They come in in the middle of the

23:49

shooting of the Ridley Scott 1984 Super Bowl

23:51

Macintosh big brother commercial. Yeah. It's funny because

23:53

Ridley Scott now is pictured, I think, in

23:55

two of these movies, at least, because he's

23:57

in the Isaacson movie as well. Great. Um,

24:00

but the point is it starts

24:03

with this high point for Apple, like Apple

24:05

on top of the world. And then

24:07

it immediately flashes back and it shows him, I mean,

24:10

he's being an asshole, but kind of, kind of low

24:12

key at this point. Uh, and then

24:14

it flashes back to, um, the sixties

24:17

almost immediately. Right. 71,

24:20

I believe. Oh, 71. Okay. Well,

24:22

Vietnam war protests. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah.

24:29

commercial being filmed and then immediate cut to

24:31

97 with Gates up on screen, making the

24:33

huge investment, basically buying a chunk of Apple, you know,

24:35

and it's just like, you know,

24:38

how fortunes rise and fall in about 30 seconds.

24:40

And then, yeah, now we're, now we're back into

24:42

history back to like

24:44

a very clear dichotomy

24:46

here between, between the

24:48

Apple people and the Microsoft people, which I feel like

24:50

this movie does very well all the way through. Yeah.

24:53

It's, they didn't go as far as like shooting

24:56

the Apple and the Microsoft people in a different

24:58

way, which is like, that would, if this

25:00

was made in the mid mid to late

25:02

2000s or early 2010s, there'd be like, it'd

25:04

be like yellow color shifted on the Microsoft

25:06

guys and blue on the Apple guys or

25:08

something. Yes. This is, this is

25:10

all kind of mostly pre David Fincher, although Fincher was actually

25:12

getting big at this time. But anyway,

25:15

but like, I mean more in the way that the Microsoft

25:17

and Apple camps are, are characterized

25:19

in this movie as characters. Like

25:22

the Apple people are almost all shown

25:24

as like dreamers and revolutionaries and kind

25:26

of off the artistic types. The

25:29

Microsoft people are basically all a

25:31

bunch of crass opportunists and oaths

25:34

with no interest in good taste. Well, PC

25:36

cockroaches is how I kind of, is the

25:38

thing I wrote down in my notes, I

25:40

think. Cause, cause they're like, they're

25:42

just coming in and scuttling over whatever is

25:45

leftover from IBM and the PC people. So,

25:48

so this movie starts with both of them in

25:50

the same place. So they're both starting from scratch.

25:52

Jobs is living at home. He's going to college.

25:54

He's building computers. Woz is building computers. Yeah, it's

25:56

more Woz is building computers. Like in fact, they

25:58

do go either way. briefly, not

26:01

super often, but they do kind of make it clear

26:03

Woz is the guy building all the stuff and Jobs

26:05

is the businessman, but Jobs very much wants to be

26:07

seen as the guy. Yeah. Oh,

26:10

that is definitely not made explicit in

26:12

the way that I would have realized

26:14

at the time probably, but it's pretty

26:16

clear now. Yeah. Although, I

26:18

think Jobs did have some technical skill. He

26:20

worked at Atari with Woz. They both worked

26:22

on arcade circuit design and stuff. Yeah.

26:25

Yeah. So he was not completely

26:27

without skill in the engineering realm, I don't think,

26:29

but I think Woz clearly was the guy doing

26:31

all the actual product building. Well, yeah, Woz was

26:33

the man. And

26:36

the way Microsoft is depicted, they

26:38

start in the dorm room where

26:40

Paul Allen is clearly kind of presented

26:42

as the brain guy. Gates,

26:45

I guess, also is the brain guy. They don't ever... Anthony

26:48

Michael Hall's depiction of Gates is really weird because

26:50

somehow he's weevier than he is in real life.

26:53

I guess I can see that. He's

26:55

really playing it up, yeah. Like I

26:57

went back and watched the Mac world

26:59

where Jobs gets up on stage and

27:01

says, hey, Microsoft's coming to save the

27:03

company basically, and then has to stand

27:05

in front of the little tiny Steve

27:07

Jobs on the big stage in

27:09

front of the enormous Bill Gates 1984

27:11

commercial style. And

27:15

Bill Gates didn't look like an enormous nerd

27:17

in that picture in the same

27:19

way that Anthony... He was portrayed by Anthony Michael

27:21

Hall in the movie. He's still look like a nerd, but not like...

27:24

Like he had bad skin all the way through this movie

27:26

in a way that is... Like Bill Gates... Say what you

27:28

want about Bill Gates. Once Bill

27:30

Gates was the richest man in the world, he stopped having

27:33

skin problems. I don't know how that happened. Hall

27:35

really puts on an extra nasally kind

27:37

of delivery to his voice. He's depicted

27:39

as a slob who never bathes kind

27:41

of in this. They

27:44

go really hard on

27:46

the nerdy loser

27:48

slob archetype. And also

27:50

the uncultured bit. You hit this before, but like

27:53

there's a... And they really hammered this over

27:55

the head because at one point

27:58

Jobs quotes Picasso. So

28:00

his favorite, you know, great artists, what

28:02

is it? Great artists copy, good artists tomorrow,

28:04

great artists steal. Yeah, yeah, that one. And

28:08

then Gates steals the same quote on the

28:10

way into a meeting with Apple, but he

28:12

attributes it to Rembrandt or another

28:14

artist. I didn't write down the

28:16

quote, but yeah, it doesn't matter

28:19

is what he says, which is indicative of

28:21

their entire kind of depiction of

28:24

him as a kind of nebbish oaf all

28:26

the way through. So

28:30

then for the first third of

28:32

the movie, Gates is

28:34

presented as like this scrappy upstart

28:36

underdog who doesn't really know what

28:38

they're doing. They see the Altair, which is one of the

28:41

first personal computers. Yeah,

28:44

there's like a surprising amount, not a lot

28:46

of time, but a little bit of time

28:49

spent on like Microsoft's early, their early time

28:51

trying to make money

28:53

by making stuff for the Altair like that Truffle

28:55

data simulator that we've talked about before. They actually

28:57

say the word Truffle data in

28:59

this thing, but it's mostly for their

29:01

part, it's mostly about trying to sell

29:04

and license basic to

29:06

the company that makes Altair. MITS is

29:08

the name of that company. Yeah, they're

29:10

called Albuquerque, I think, right? Yes,

29:13

well, they were, they're certainly long gone.

29:15

Micro instrumentation and telemetry systems, which I

29:17

feel like it's the kind of computer

29:19

company name you haven't gotten for about

29:21

50 years. That seems

29:23

right, but there's a thing about that where they

29:26

realize that there's a thing there and they realize

29:28

that there's going to need to be software for

29:30

this. And they show the

29:32

invention of the software license in a couple of different

29:34

ways. When Gates and Paul

29:37

Allen roll into Albuquerque to negotiate

29:39

with the Altair guy, and he

29:41

says, hey, I don't want to

29:43

sell you my software, I want to just give

29:45

you a per machine license, that's

29:51

the dawn of a whole new business model for

29:53

computers. In a lot of ways, it's the

29:55

thing that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world at the end of the

29:57

90s. is

30:00

what drove a massive amount

30:02

of PC innovation forward is that, hey,

30:04

this is made this sustainable,

30:06

making software for these things made this a

30:09

sustainable business. There's another quote later on,

30:11

I called it out earlier, but I'm

30:13

gonna say it again because it's important.

30:15

That the money's in when they're

30:17

meeting with the IBM guys, the

30:19

IBM guy, when they ask for the

30:21

same deal with the IBM guys, the Altair guys, like, I

30:23

don't know about that. The IBM guys are like, yeah, that's

30:25

fine, whatever. The money's in the hardware. We don't give a

30:28

shit about software. It's just software

30:30

stuff doesn't make any difference because they're mainframe

30:32

people and they've been selling hardware for decades

30:34

at this point. Painfully, his

30:36

historic mistake there. Another

30:39

aspect, we'll get back to the Apple stuff in a

30:41

minute, but because they do run concurrently. They

30:43

do a pretty good job, I think, in this, of swapping

30:46

back and forth between the two, having their fortunes

30:48

rise at the same time. Having

30:51

the Balmer and Woz characters there to explain things

30:53

helps a ton. Yes, but the

30:55

other theme of the early Microsoft dealmaking that you

30:57

see here is Gates, and I assume this is

31:00

true to life. Gates constantly writing

31:02

checks. He has no ability to cash. For

31:05

what extent? Jobs did the

31:07

exact same thing. Yeah, well, yes,

31:09

yes, but he had Woz in his

31:11

back pocket who actually could deliver on

31:13

everything he was promising. Whereas when

31:16

they go meet with Ed Roberts, the guy who does the Altair

31:18

stuff in New Mexico, and by the way, I love whoever

31:21

that actor is portraying Ed Roberts because

31:23

he looks like a shop

31:26

fool, like a foreman, like on

31:28

a warehouse floor or something. They

31:30

literally are in a warehouse full of Altairs, and he's

31:32

just got this like southwestern twang

31:34

which Gates is pressuring

31:36

him for like a signing bonus. He's

31:39

like, let me tell you something, boy, this ain't the way I do business,

31:41

you know, just

31:43

like almost cigar-chomping old-school computer guy.

31:47

That's Gaylord Sartain. And

31:50

he played all of our

31:53

hardy in The New Adventures of Laurel and Hardy.

31:56

He was in The Mummy, I think. Ali

32:01

and a bunch of other stuff. He's been a character

32:03

on Brazilian things. Yeah, he's

32:05

fun in this for the short time he's on screen.

32:07

But when Gaze is wheeling and dealing with him, he's

32:10

trying to get that signing bonus and he's like, what

32:12

are you talking about? What do you mean signing bonus?

32:15

Gates very clearly, he's like, yeah, all of

32:17

our other contracts, we always get a signing

32:19

bonus, very clearly from the

32:21

delivery. They don't have any other contracts. He's

32:24

just bluffing his way through all of this deal making and

32:26

he does the same thing with IBM again later. Oh

32:30

yeah, it's, well, and I think that's probably not

32:32

far from the truth, right? It comes up again when they go to

32:34

buy PC DOS or

32:37

x86 DOS I guess is what it's called. Yeah,

32:39

because what happens and as depicted in the movie,

32:42

IBM is rolling out the personal computer. They

32:44

are there to try to license an operating system to IBM

32:46

knowing that they'll make a trillion dollars.

32:50

They don't have an operating system. Like that's

32:52

the unspoken thing in the background is they're

32:54

selling IBM something they don't have. So

32:57

then yes, they go out to

32:59

this little Seattle outfit and basically buy 86 DOS

33:01

from them to turn into the

33:03

thing they would license IBM for a pretty small amount

33:05

of money. It's like 50 grand. 50 grand

33:07

at the time. But

33:10

that feels like one of the more tragic moments

33:12

in the movie on the Microsoft side, especially for

33:14

the guy who's sitting there selling the operating system.

33:17

Because the second the word $50,000 come out of, 50,000

33:21

comes out of Paul Allen's mouth and he's like, dollars? Yeah.

33:25

Oh, you poor bastard. I know, it's just, it's sad.

33:27

I looked it up. That

33:30

guy later went to work for Microsoft and then

33:33

later he founded a computer company that he then

33:35

sold to Microsoft. So he probably did okay. He's

33:37

probably fine. Yeah. What were

33:39

you saying? So meanwhile on

33:41

the other side of town, Jobs

33:44

and Wozniak go from selling phone freaker

33:46

stuff like Captain Crunch whistles and dialers

33:48

and stuff like that. They let you

33:51

get free phone calls and

33:53

let them call the Pope who was

33:56

building a computer out of spare parts,

33:58

basically stuff they had laying. around. This

34:00

is how it's presented, which becomes the Apple one

34:02

is what it is. What it has in the

34:05

movie. Yeah, that's what they're showing. You

34:07

know, they depict the famous mythology of them

34:09

showing up to the homebrew computer club with

34:12

their Apple one prototype and you know, you see

34:14

them in here unloading it out of a box.

34:16

It's in a wooden case and everything that's, that's

34:18

kind of the, that's the accepted

34:21

history, right? Yeah.

34:23

The guys with the alt-airs all kind of gather around

34:25

to see what's on the screen to see, see how,

34:27

how they're getting stuff out onto the screen. Cause with

34:30

all terror, people don't know is lights and switches

34:32

and punch cards and or tapes, I guess, with

34:34

all terror, but yeah, I'll type baby. Yeah. Tell

34:36

it type. If you're, if you're lucky. Um,

34:39

whereas the Apple one had a, had a

34:41

four inch, I think CRT, uh, uh, that

34:43

you could put text, text

34:45

and numbers on. It was amazing.

34:47

Revolutionary. Um, they

34:49

threw this whole, this whole era in

34:52

the storytelling. They do a pretty good job of starting

34:54

to distinguish who was is versus who jobs is. Cause

34:56

was like, they showed the joke

34:58

line he ran. He built a machine where

35:00

that was hooked up to a phone line where anybody could

35:03

just call in and get a prerecorded joke that he had

35:05

read into the machine. Like he's just a, he's

35:07

just a fun goofball who is really good at engineering

35:09

things that are fun and goofy. And

35:11

then you have jobs. Well,

35:14

and, and it's, it's, um, the early, the

35:16

early stuff, the one thing that I thought

35:18

was interesting is they, they show assembling

35:21

Apple ones, I guess, it may have been

35:23

the early Apple two prototypes, but I think

35:25

it's Apple ones in jobs

35:27

as parents garage and in, in Northern

35:29

California. And,

35:32

um, it's

35:34

depicted as like six or seven people

35:36

kind of packed in the garage and really soldering. I don't

35:38

think that's actually the case. I think that was actually one,

35:41

one or maybe two people with was like showing up every

35:43

once in a while with new stuff for them to keep,

35:45

keep manufacturing. And it

35:47

was basically like a tiny sweatshop in

35:49

jobs as parents house while

35:52

they were cranking those out. 50 of those, I think

35:54

is what they ended up selling the Apple ones, some

35:56

small, really small number. Yeah. I think that that's a

35:58

good example of how the. He takes creative

36:01

license in like minor ways without actually

36:03

rewriting history You know like it's just a

36:05

good visual to have like six or eight people

36:08

milling around buzzing around in a garage to

36:10

say There's

36:13

a company on the come up. You know like this

36:15

is it's small but growing Exactly

36:17

exactly um okay So then

36:19

I missed where they were taking the

36:22

Apple twos where they took the first Apple two

36:24

prototype to show off It's like a same. It's

36:26

like the San Jose Convention Center It's the first

36:28

place that gates and jobs meet this is this

36:30

is a key moment in the film and I

36:32

think it's I think It's some

36:34

computer sales thing. It's not it's too big for homebrew computer

36:36

Club I think at that point But it's

36:39

like it does yellow ballroom with pipe and drape

36:41

and they have a 10 by 10 foot booth

36:43

and there's a whole bunch of all-terra machines on

36:45

the other side of the aisle and then there's

36:48

Bill and and Steve

36:50

Steve and Steve Steven was and a couple

36:52

other people in this room and it's when

36:54

Steve comes out with his mustache and beard

36:56

completely shaved off Where a suit and was

36:58

like what the fuck Steve wearing a suit

37:00

They do that they do that multiple times

37:02

like the metamorphosis of Steve jobs from acid

37:04

dropping hippie vision quest

37:07

guy Beard

37:09

neck beard guy right to like becoming the

37:11

suit that he despises is depicted

37:13

multiple times where he like you know He's

37:16

long hair and beard and mustache and at one point he

37:18

cuts the hair somewhat shorter and shades of the beard so

37:20

he can Get a bank loan, and then

37:22

there's this where he literally just comes out clean shaven

37:24

in the suit. I don't think they say what's Conference

37:27

this is I don't see any kind of

37:29

signage anywhere, okay? I

37:31

wasn't sure if I missed it or if it just wasn't there

37:34

before we got to this I thought you were talking about the

37:36

point where they have to go we have to mention this it's

37:39

prior to this where they were working

37:41

on these prototypes, I think it's for the Apple two and Was

37:44

breaks it to jobs because he works

37:46

for Hewlett-Packard occasionally Oh, he's

37:48

probably signed an employment agreement that gives them

37:50

first right of refusal to anything he invents

37:53

So this is this is they took the Apple one in though

37:55

right the wooden the wooden box one Yes, that was the Apple

37:57

one before we get to this conference that you're talking about now

37:59

and they had to give Hewlett Packard a shot

38:02

at this personal computer he's developed and they

38:04

basically just laugh it off and quite

38:07

literally say, it's literally

38:09

like, so you say it's a computer for ordinary

38:11

people? What on earth would ordinary people

38:13

want with computers? Great

38:15

line, but yes, you're right, it cuts to this later.

38:19

It's a pretty scrappy looking little computing

38:21

conference, but yes, you get the

38:23

visual of the doors opening and everybody runs in.

38:25

I've seen this at E3, I've seen the doors

38:27

opening and people running for the Nintendo booth. Oh

38:29

yeah, I've been in that crowd before, yeah. It's

38:32

literally this, it's literally everybody runs as soon as

38:34

the doors open to the Apple booth and floods

38:36

it and it's like, that's

38:38

your visual shorthand for, okay, Apple's about to be huge

38:40

and they cut immediately to Apple being huge from there.

38:42

Okay, but wait, before we get to that stuff, there's

38:45

an important thing that happens at what was, I think,

38:47

supposed to be the West Coast Computer Fair in 1977. That

38:50

is that Bill Gates and Balmer

38:52

and Paul Allen come there trying to get a

38:54

meeting with these Apple II guys because they saw

38:56

what they were doing. They were like, hey, we

38:59

need to be making software for this thing and

39:02

Bill Gates walks up and introduces himself to Jobs

39:04

and says, hey, I'm Bill Gates, the chairman of

39:06

Microsoft and Jobs

39:09

gives him the complete blow off,

39:11

right? Oh yeah, great to meet you,

39:13

yeah, yeah, yeah, and then turns back to who he was talking

39:15

to before and Gates

39:19

walks back and you see a look of enmity

39:21

in his eyes, like this is the

39:23

TV bullshit. He looks at me

39:25

and he's like, an enemy is born today and

39:29

Balmer's like, maybe he didn't hear you and he's like, no,

39:32

he heard me. I'll

39:34

destroy him for this. You were

39:36

absolutely right, that absolutely read to

39:38

me as the most overdramatized or

39:40

null dramatic cheesy TV moment in

39:42

this entire thing. I mean, on

39:44

the other hand, you hear stories about Gates

39:46

making people cry because they did a bad pitch or didn't know

39:49

the answer of a question when

39:51

they were demoing products. So maybe this is how

39:53

it actually happened. Maybe

39:55

he really did Take

39:57

it that personally and make it his life's mission. Destroy

40:00

Apple Idleness. The movie doesn't actually go

40:02

in that direction from here. Like.

40:05

For the most part, like I said, they just

40:07

they just portray the Microsoft people as being very

40:09

ambitious and wanting to rule the world and is

40:11

not like it's not like only because Gates was

40:14

spawned by Jobs of this thing to they launched

40:16

in two competing with them. Oh, I think I

40:18

think that there's definitely an undercurrent of that to

40:20

the whole thing. Like there's definitely like there's a

40:22

see later on when when they're standing ah, stage

40:25

when Vollmer and Gates are sending off stage and

40:27

jobs during a presentation. And. Bomb

40:29

and gay and and Jobs is about to buy

40:31

that about windows and slip out. That.

40:34

That it's very clear that. The. Yo

40:36

Job Gates who is depicted as

40:38

a as a master poker player.

40:40

Says sometimes you sometimes you fold and sometimes you

40:42

deal down and down. the time you deal down

40:45

there was enough kind of all the at the

40:47

ceiling look in his eye. The other guy I

40:49

think I think that was I think I think

40:51

it's hey these guys fucking hate each other was

40:53

a big part of the with they sold this

40:55

movie at the time. If you think about the

40:57

culture of the late nineties, wouldn't when it comes

40:59

to computers. Microsoft.

41:01

Vs. Reverses when

41:04

apple. Was was like it

41:06

was decay. It was with the thing that.

41:09

Knuckle heads on the internet argued about. Before.

41:11

We had council and we had Console Wars, but

41:13

it wasn't quite the same. And to the point

41:15

that lake in the Wikipedia article for this movie

41:17

there's a quote. From. The somebody other productions

41:19

he was like. Added people in the production team broke

41:22

up and I'm Windows vs Max people at the end

41:24

of this by the end of this and so and

41:26

so started as a windows person between mack person any

41:28

go here we are they now have a Windows guy

41:30

guess yeah the I mean like this was this was.

41:33

Firmly. In the area over the era

41:35

of Microsoft with a dollar sign in

41:37

or those my long before the i'm

41:39

A Mac, I'm A Pc Ads Who's

41:41

both. Just before the the the Internet

41:43

Explorer Justice Department lawsuit news like that

41:45

was cranking up. Now they have so

41:47

so yeah. Like it was. It was.

41:50

I'm It Was Microsoft. Was that monolithic

41:52

evil. Company and and like he

41:54

was. He was definitely. For. for

41:56

them whatever you say about the depiction

41:58

of day of of jobs an absolute

42:00

asshole, Gates is definitely

42:03

not presented as a kind

42:05

benevolent overlord here. Not necessarily

42:07

a sympathetic figure for him,

42:09

but this is kind of,

42:11

it's not the midpoint in terms of running

42:13

time of the movie, but it's absolutely the

42:16

point where things change from these are a

42:18

bunch of scrappy, like barely out of college

42:20

dropout kids trying to make computer companies happen,

42:23

to literal hard cut, to giant

42:25

Apple logo being lowered into the ground at

42:27

the newly constructed headquarters. They

42:31

move very quickly into this second

42:33

phase where it's like, okay, now these

42:35

are becoming gigantic, very, very successful companies.

42:37

For Apple, yeah, for Microsoft, they still

42:39

feel like the scrappy underdog at this

42:41

point. You're right, you're right. It

42:43

is a little bit longer. It's not too

42:45

much longer in the movie. They can still go

42:48

through the IBM deal making here, or they've done

42:50

the similar language licensing

42:52

with Altair. Now they're doing it

42:54

with IBM here. But then even there, you

42:57

go from the IBM meeting, sorry,

43:00

the licensing meeting with IBM to like ...

43:03

Something like they have an office, right? Literal

43:05

like roller rink party with this big banner up

43:08

saying like, Microsoft, we're on the way, you know?

43:11

Yeah, and the

43:13

Balmer narration is just like suddenly money, more

43:15

money than you could possibly imagine just started

43:18

pouring in from every direction. Yeah.

43:22

This is kind of the turning point for

43:25

jobs in a lot of way. We see

43:27

... This is when we start seeing his

43:29

depiction, his personal life being depicted, right? Yeah,

43:32

we've kind of glossed over that a little bit. I

43:34

think just I'll say broadly, the second half

43:36

of the movie is more fun or more

43:38

interesting to me from the standpoint of these

43:40

giant businesses kind of butting heads. But I

43:42

think the first part of the movie that

43:45

shows more of their earlier lives is also

43:47

pretty effective. Yeah, there is some

43:49

amount of jobs being a real

43:51

shit to his girlfriend who is now pregnant that

43:53

we have glossed over that becomes

43:55

more of a thing here. And

43:58

just to be clear, this is like ... Like

44:01

denying paternity despite having paternity tests

44:03

is a thing that happened, right?

44:07

Like he came

44:10

up to see his newborn daughter just

44:13

so that he could presumably convince his

44:18

estranged ex-girlfriend to name his daughter

44:20

after the computer he's working on

44:22

or maybe the daughter

44:25

like it's unclear. The

44:27

timing on that is unclear because it's presented in different ways

44:29

and different sources. But

44:34

then by all reports he disappears for a period of

44:36

months or years, right? Yeah. I

44:38

mean it's repeated stuff. You know, it's like you

44:40

said, it's him denying his paternity even though it's

44:42

very obvious. It's him refusing to pay

44:44

any child support even after he's become an unbelievably

44:47

rich multimillionaire. Yeah. Even when she only

44:49

asked for $20,000. I'd feel

44:51

flat just to be clear. Yes.

44:55

So what if the movie wants you to think that

44:57

he is naming the computer after the child and not

44:59

the other way around? I mean I think that's the

45:01

official story. I think that the way it's presented in

45:03

the Isaacson book is a little bit different. I might

45:05

be one of the other ones. And just to be clear, people

45:08

dispute this as well.

45:10

Like this is all, there's two

45:12

people that know how this went, how these conversations

45:14

went. Yeah. It's

45:17

not a particularly glowing... No.

45:20

I can't imagine, there's a scene later on in the

45:22

movie that he rolls up on what

45:25

is probably in 2024 a $3 million house in Sunnyvale. But

45:31

it's a 600

45:34

square foot cinder block looking squalor.

45:38

The ex-girlfriend and the daughter

45:40

are living in a really rough

45:43

way. And

45:45

this is presumably when he's not given them any money and

45:47

he's rolling in at $120,000 Mercedes

45:50

in 1985. So

45:53

it feels bad. We're also getting into,

45:55

we're kind of transitioning from the Apple II

45:57

era to the Macintosh to the GUI. era

46:00

or they're starting to set that stuff up.

46:02

Well, just to be clear, it's still the

46:04

Apple II era in terms of what's selling.

46:06

Oh yeah, for sure. Absolutely. I think the

46:08

Apple II sold through like 1989 or something

46:10

insane, like 90 even, I think. Yeah,

46:14

they sold Apple IIs for like 12, 13, 14 years, something

46:16

ridiculous. Yeah,

46:18

maybe more than that even. But

46:20

keeping with the theme of jobs being shit, both

46:22

in his personal life and also increasingly

46:25

in the workplace here, you get

46:27

the visit to Xerox PARC, Palo

46:29

Alto Research Center. Yeah,

46:31

which is presented, I think, kind of

46:33

accurately as a place where

46:36

people are doing things with the computers that

46:38

the corporate overlords at Xerox don't really understand

46:40

and don't know what to do with. So they

46:42

kind of put them off to the side and

46:44

then don't do anything with them, which, yes, seems

46:48

accurate given what I know about PARC.

46:50

I mean, I doubt

46:52

that there was a conversation with executives in a board room

46:54

where somebody held up a mouse and was like, you want

46:56

Xerox to sell a mouse? But

47:00

the rest of it seems, reads. Yeah. And

47:03

I'm sure a lot of people listening know this, but

47:05

the Xerox PARC is like really insane just when you

47:07

look at the list of things that came out of

47:09

there that are fundamental to modern

47:11

computing. I mean, the GUI and the

47:14

GraphQL user interface, the mouse ethernet, laser

47:17

printers, computer

47:20

generated bitmap graphics, it's

47:22

a lot of stuff, object oriented programming.

47:27

And yeah, like they really depict the

47:29

Apple people as just coming in and

47:31

like kind of corporate raiders almost. Pirates.

47:33

Pirates of Brad. Pirates coming in and

47:35

just thieving all of the developments

47:38

that PARC has generated, although in the movie,

47:41

they make it really seem like Apple is

47:43

just straight up robbing Xerox blind and that

47:45

the PARC people are not happy about it.

47:48

But then I think we both went and looked at the

47:50

actual history and it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

47:52

Yeah. I mean, my understanding is

47:55

that in exchange for access to the

47:57

stuff that the lab came up with,

47:59

the Xerox got to

48:01

buy pre IPO Apple stock, which

48:03

was worked out well for them. I'm just I'm sure

48:05

it did So yeah, it was it was much more

48:07

transactional than the movie Depicts because

48:09

the fact that the movie really doesn't

48:11

justify why Xerox is letting this happen

48:13

at all. Yeah I understand why

48:15

you wouldn't I mean So the movie

48:18

presents it as Steve Jobs was such a force of

48:20

will that he could get in and do whatever he

48:23

wanted anywhere he wanted to be yeah, and I

48:27

Think the reality would have been harder to explain to

48:29

a 1999 TV audience Probably

48:32

you're on probably on the TNT the home

48:34

of inside the NBA. Yes. Yes indeed But

48:36

you know We're straight off to the races

48:38

in the Macintosh development once they have access

48:40

to that and you get another greats just

48:43

like just like The Balmer camera pulling out

48:45

with Balmer walking out of the picture frame

48:47

the boardroom meeting You

48:49

get a great 90s blue screen moment of

48:51

Wozniak Hopping around with

48:54

impish glee inside of the Macintosh Graphical

48:57

interface desktop so you can click here and

48:59

then be in this menu here be here

49:01

and it's it's really easy It's

49:04

great stuff There's

49:06

a there's a moment around

49:08

this time in the movie when it's

49:11

another one of those gates jobs meetings

49:13

and it's it's when Jobs

49:17

set gates a memo and said

49:19

hey you got to get down here tonight Right

49:22

like I demand your presence

49:25

here this evening. Yeah, and

49:27

he does so gates shows up

49:29

and Jobs

49:31

yells at him Apparently jobs was the

49:33

only person who yelled at Kate's is

49:36

the thing that's presented multiple the idea that's presented

49:38

I can't remember if it's whether Balmer said that

49:40

in the movie or whether it's something I read

49:42

afterwards actually It's Balmer. I think isn't it the

49:44

other way around isn't it? The jobs is the

49:46

only person that gates doesn't yell at jobs The

49:48

only person that gates will just take it from

49:50

and just sit there and calmly explain to him.

49:52

That's right That's why he's wrong and turn it

49:54

around on him and the thing him. Yeah and

49:56

lull him into believing What

49:59

he's trying to sell him Well, this is coming about

50:01

because we're in the middle of Lisa and then

50:03

the Macintosh development. So that's it. Apple is in

50:05

fact, I think what happens is Lisa comes out,

50:07

Gates gets his hands on it and flips out

50:09

and was like, I want this. We need to

50:11

make this. And then

50:13

Apple is on into the Macintosh at this

50:15

point. Yeah, because the Lisa for folks who

50:18

don't know, really, really expensive is huge failure

50:20

for Apple and early failure for Apple. I

50:23

mean, it rolled a bunch of

50:25

early stuff out that ended up coming out

50:27

of the Macintosh production becoming part of the core

50:29

computing infrastructure. But it was also like $13,000 or

50:31

something insane in 1983, whenever it came out. It's

50:36

funny if you read about the history of

50:38

Next later and how much the price of

50:41

Next machines ballooned because jobs could

50:43

not stop demanding more and more cool stuff in

50:45

there. Perfect shaped cubes, stuff like

50:47

that. Like made out of specific alloys of metal

50:49

and circuit boards had to fit together in certain

50:51

way. And they finally delivered it to

50:53

market like three times more expensive than what they promised.

50:56

Anyway, Lisa sounds a lot like that, where anytime

50:59

Jobs really gets control of that project, it

51:01

just goes completely off the rails in terms

51:03

of features and cost. Well, so this conversation

51:06

with Gates and Jobs at

51:08

this Macintosh timeframe ends with

51:14

Gates saying something that Jobs takes one

51:16

way and Gates definitely does not mean

51:18

that way, which is, you

51:21

know, if I was buying a computer for my mom, I'd

51:23

get her a Macintosh. Right. So, you know,

51:25

that's what he told the newspaper. He's like, he's like, if I

51:27

was buying my mom a computer, Macintosh is the only thing I'd

51:29

buy for. Yeah. And

51:31

and and Josh, Steve Jobs, the ego is

51:33

is assuaged. So

51:36

enormous, so enormous that this this

51:38

this this backhanded praise,

51:42

clearly backhanded praise from the right.

51:45

But again, this is the meeting where

51:47

Jobs demanded the gates fly down to

51:49

California and started by screaming at him

51:51

about stealing their stuff about because he's

51:53

gotten wind of Microsoft's

51:56

first stabs at graphical user

51:58

interface development. There's

52:01

some more good character

52:03

building in here in the development of the Macintosh. There's

52:06

more examples of jobs being awful, the

52:08

well-documented harassment and abuse of the

52:10

Macintosh team, people being

52:12

up from two days straight, having

52:15

him just come in and berate people out of nowhere the

52:18

whole 90 hours a week and loving a

52:20

t-shirt. The whole

52:22

idea that everyone else at Apple is bad

52:25

except for the Macintosh team and they're an

52:27

island unto themselves inside an entity that's trying

52:29

to destroy them. This is

52:31

also around the time that they brought in... Oh,

52:36

God, I'm blanking. What's his name from Pepsi? Oh, John

52:38

Scully. John Scully, thank you. This is

52:40

from the famous, do you want to sell sugared

52:42

water for the rest of your life? Yeah. Yeah,

52:45

Scully comes in as CEO. I don't

52:47

know if all these encounters inside the

52:50

Macintosh development pit are truly

52:52

authentic, but the one where one of the engineers loses

52:55

his shit and gets up and fucking slams

52:57

jobs against the wall and throttles him, I

53:00

have definitely read about having occurred. That

53:04

one, the 52 hours, the guy who doesn't

53:06

want to be... Was

53:08

the guy who gets something to the wall, the guy who

53:10

says he doesn't want to defend a product? Yes.

53:13

He's not finished. Yeah, he's like, Steve, I can't defend another

53:15

unfinished design. And then jobs

53:17

is just like, because there's nothing to defend. I mean,

53:19

just awful, awful treatment of human beings. The

53:22

90 hours a week and loving it shirt was a real

53:24

thing for sure. It

53:26

was by all reports, if

53:29

you read the Isaacson biography, many

53:32

of the relationships that he'd maintained from the start

53:35

of Apple through this, the people who were the

53:37

most in Jobs' corner, he burned

53:39

those bridges and the development of the Macintosh

53:41

was the takeaway from that shirt.

53:46

Sure. And then the other

53:49

shot is, this is also the

53:51

time when the

53:53

interview with the bare feet comes in. Oh

53:55

gosh, we skipped over that. I mean, there's so many

53:58

instances of John. Jobs

54:00

are being awful to people in this movie that it's hard to keep

54:02

track of them all. But yeah, that job interview with

54:04

an applicant from, he's like a mainframe guy, is

54:06

kind of hard to watch, actually. He's

54:09

a typical short sleeves, white

54:11

shirt, pocket protector, prototypical 80s

54:14

computer engineer, and

54:16

jobs barges into the conference

54:18

room during what is clearly a one-on-one job

54:20

interview. With Mike Martula, who was

54:23

the angel investor that pumped a bunch of money

54:25

into Apple, I looked up some more about

54:27

him. He's like a fairly minor, I

54:29

mean prominent minor character in this movie, but he

54:31

owned as much of Apple as Jobs and Woz

54:33

did. Yeah. Oh

54:35

yeah. And Martula is interviewing this engineer guy. Jobs

54:38

bursts in. Also, Jobs is frequently depicted as just like

54:40

going and abusing people after something bad has happened to

54:43

him and he just needs to blow off steam. Yeah.

54:46

I think he's coming from one of those instances. He

54:51

barges into the conference room and cut

54:53

off barefoot and cut

54:55

off jean shorts and t-shirts, goes

54:58

in, props his bare feet up on the conference

55:00

table and just berates this guy endlessly and like

55:02

humiliates him. I asked him

55:05

if he's a virgin, gets into like

55:07

weirdly personal details. Yeah, it's just kind

55:09

of horrific. Just gross

55:11

behavior. And

55:15

that scene is also interesting because it's Woz, Martula,

55:17

and Jobs, who I think at the time were

55:19

the three biggest shareholders in Apple unless Jobs had

55:21

already started selling off his shares by that point.

55:23

They all, from what I read around the time

55:25

the company went public, they all owned 26% all

55:28

three of them. Yeah. So

55:31

yeah, it's weird that these three major

55:33

stakeholders are in an interview with what

55:35

looks like a mid-tier engineer just

55:38

so that Steve can humiliate this guy. Yeah,

55:41

for sure. You're also getting Woz

55:43

kind of like losing faith in the company

55:45

around this time. Maybe

55:47

largely because of Jobs' behavior, but also like to hear

55:50

him tell it he also just didn't like how big

55:52

the company got and didn't like dealing

55:54

with that kind of money and wanted to work in

55:56

small scale stuff again. He wanted to do stuff that

55:58

was fun. Right. Yes. This

56:01

is also the time that Jobs

56:05

and Woz to a lesser

56:07

extent start being portrayed as rock

56:09

stars. They start like Jobs starts

56:11

wearing a leather jacket and like, you know,

56:15

walking around looking very cool and

56:17

making big proclamations with

56:19

nothing to back them and no way

56:21

of getting them done. Yeah. It's

56:24

when Woz buys a plane and then crashes

56:26

the plane and whacks himself on the head

56:28

pretty good and becomes a

56:31

computer programmer with memory problems. Yeah.

56:36

It's a hard... It's

56:39

yet another cautionary tale. Having

56:41

just come off the Romero book a few months ago

56:43

to this, you're like, oh

56:45

right, every time people start behaving like this, it

56:47

ends up badly for them, it turns out. Yes.

56:51

Meanwhile, at the height of Microsoft's

56:53

success, Gates is still shown

56:55

as being ushered into a PR photography

56:59

session, completely disheveled and

57:01

unready for the camera to the point that

57:03

they feel like the photographer

57:05

is exasperated about his sweat stains on

57:07

his underarm, on his shirt. They

57:10

have to replace his shirt and stuff, like just

57:12

like such different depictions of success here between the

57:14

two camps. Yeah. It's

57:18

funny because like looking at it now, you think, oh, this

57:21

is a depiction of somebody who only cares about one thing

57:23

and is obsessed about that one thing and doesn't give a

57:25

shit about it, literally anything else when we're talking about Gates.

57:28

But also when we talk about

57:30

Jobs, right, they're both obsessed with...

57:33

Jobs is just obsessed with being seen

57:35

as an artist and a creator and Gates

57:38

is interested in taking

57:40

over the world with software. Yeah. Gates

57:43

just wants to win. I think... Which,

57:45

like you mentioned this earlier, the more I think about it, the more

57:48

Gates' introduction as a very competent or like

57:50

a very skilled poker player really is the

57:52

entire characterization in this because he really does

57:55

just want to wheel and deal and win

57:57

constantly and that's it. goes

58:00

so far as to say in one of

58:02

the sides to camera, hey, this is the

58:04

biggest money making, like this is the moment

58:06

that you should be on the wall. And

58:09

it's talking about the IBM deal. He

58:12

says this is a moment that should be taught in schools, it should

58:14

be on the wall of the National Gallery or something because this is

58:16

the greatest money making moment in the 20th

58:18

century, right? Billions

58:21

are made, fortunes are made. Yeah, that line read

58:23

a little differently at the time than it does

58:26

now because Bill Gates was the most, he

58:28

was the richest man in the world when this came out and was

58:30

for a very long time after. That's no longer the

58:32

case. So it's a little different in hindsight. But at

58:35

the time, at the time what he's,

58:37

he literally says like this moment was the beginning

58:39

of the greatest fortune in human history kind of

58:41

thing. Yeah. Also,

58:46

one last thing about those

58:48

Mac desks, they all had

58:51

the Cobra phone from

58:53

Ericsson. Go on. Who

58:56

is this thing that kind of sticks

58:59

up like a striking Cobra? That's exactly

59:01

it. So there's a lot of

59:03

set decoration costuming stuff that's really interesting about this

59:06

because it's

59:08

all kind of like even the 70s stuff and

59:10

the 80s stuff is still filtered through like a

59:12

90s very gap friendly lens. Sure.

59:15

I mean, you're sure the lapels are big, the ties

59:18

are a little bit wider than they would have been

59:20

in the 90s, but everybody in the 80s is dressed

59:22

like everybody in the 90s would have been pretty much.

59:26

And the one exception that stands

59:28

out to me are these

59:30

phones that are on all the programmers' desks. And I

59:32

went to look up and I couldn't find out if

59:34

this is actually something they did because I had one

59:36

of these when I was a kid. It was an

59:38

incredibly impractical phone. It's called the Ericsson-Erico-Phone

59:41

Cobra. And it is.

59:44

It's like a big flat base with a

59:47

post that comes up. It looks kind of like a

59:49

butt plug. Sorry, kids. Now

59:53

when you pick it up, the thing that

59:55

hangs it up is on the bottom and

59:57

there's either buttons or a rotor on the bottom of

59:59

the... the phone. So it's

1:00:01

like a comfortable phone to hold. There's

1:00:04

no base, there's no handle. It was

1:00:06

real designy for the late 70s, early

1:00:08

80s. But the

1:00:10

problem with it was if you bumped it at all,

1:00:13

because the thing that hung it up was

1:00:15

on the bottom, if it wasn't perfectly

1:00:17

flat, it wouldn't be hung up. So it would keep all the phones

1:00:19

in the house busy. It would have been a real

1:00:21

pain in the ass to have for a work environment

1:00:23

is all I'm saying. Sure. Couldn't find

1:00:25

out if they actually put those on everybody's desks at Apple

1:00:27

in the old days. But

1:00:29

that reads to me as

1:00:31

a pretentious design focused place. Yes,

1:00:34

I would believe that. So

1:00:37

this has pretty much taken us almost up to the

1:00:39

climax of the movie at this point. One

1:00:41

more detail we've kind of glossed over a little bit.

1:00:43

You're starting to get some kind

1:00:45

of ominous hints about Steve Jobs' future here, especially if

1:00:48

you know what's coming. Like there's

1:00:50

two or three instances of Mike Martula and John

1:00:52

Scully kind of like standing off

1:00:55

to the side and muttering to each other about

1:00:57

Jobs' behavior as he's specifically,

1:01:00

especially as he's leaning into this like, we're the

1:01:02

Macintosh team. We're the only real artists

1:01:04

at Apple. Everybody else

1:01:07

is worthless. Well, and

1:01:09

this is just to be clear, this is after

1:01:11

the lease came out and failed. The Macintosh

1:01:14

was trending toward a really

1:01:16

weak launch. And the Apple II was still

1:01:18

selling into every ... There was an Apple

1:01:20

II in every school in the country and

1:01:22

they were selling a bazillion Apple IIs still

1:01:24

every single year. Yeah, I didn't follow up

1:01:26

on this and I would have to do

1:01:28

some more reading to really comment on it.

1:01:30

But it's just on the side I read

1:01:33

somewhere was that Jobs incepted

1:01:35

and like ran the lease a project, but he did

1:01:37

not begin the Macintosh project. That was Jeff Raskin. Yeah,

1:01:39

then he took it over when the lease failed. That's

1:01:42

exactly the implication. Like I said, I would like to read

1:01:44

more. Well, that's absolutely what happened. Is that Jobs

1:01:46

literally, his baby failed so he then went

1:01:48

and commandeered somebody else's project to take over.

1:01:50

Yeah, but at the same time, it was

1:01:53

really weird that they were doing multiple ...

1:01:55

It was a weird time and companies ...

1:02:00

are run much more much differently now than they were

1:02:02

then. I don't understand why they

1:02:04

were running multiple competing projects that both

1:02:06

shipped. That's the thing that like in

1:02:08

the modern context, if

1:02:10

Apple has three iPad like they did

1:02:12

this, they had multiple iPad type devices

1:02:15

in development and then they only shipped

1:02:17

the one that was good, right?

1:02:21

Presumably they could have done the same thing here except for

1:02:23

nobody thought, oh, we can't we if we

1:02:25

work on something for two or three years, we

1:02:27

got to show something we got to sell something.

1:02:29

So, yeah, well, it was also just so early

1:02:31

in the dawn of personal computing that like who

1:02:33

knew what actually was going to work, you know,

1:02:35

I can kind of see there's a little more

1:02:37

cause for just fleeing stuff at the wall. I

1:02:39

guess that's that's one of the other things that

1:02:41

struck me about this movie because it covers that

1:02:43

time where people in personal computers went from buying

1:02:46

50 machine like there

1:02:48

were 50 there was a market for 50 of these machines

1:02:50

when they launched the Apple one. The Alteres

1:02:53

were selling but they were selling tens of

1:02:55

thousands not millions, right? Yeah,

1:02:57

the introduction of the Apple two had a mob

1:02:59

of 50 people around them and it was and

1:03:02

that was shocking to everyone at that event,

1:03:04

right? To the end of

1:03:07

this computers are on every work desk in

1:03:09

the world but it still wasn't

1:03:11

necessarily that there was a computer at every house

1:03:13

when this movie came out, right? Like a lot

1:03:16

of people had computers, a lot of people had the

1:03:18

internet but a lot of people still didn't and wouldn't

1:03:20

for quite a few years after this point. So

1:03:24

yeah, it's not I mean, there were there were a billion

1:03:26

computers shipped by the end of this by the time this

1:03:28

movie would have would have finished but it

1:03:30

wasn't it wasn't every

1:03:32

house in America has one or more

1:03:34

computers in it. Right.

1:03:38

So we're basically we're basically at the climax here. Yeah,

1:03:40

this is kind of directly you know,

1:03:42

we've got a little out of order here toward the end of the

1:03:44

movie but this is directly after the jobs

1:03:46

has gotten Gates down to California to yell at

1:03:48

him for stealing their gooey straight

1:03:51

into I don't know what this event is but

1:03:53

jobs is on stage kind of promoting a

1:03:56

partnership with Microsoft. This is in like the 84 ish

1:03:59

timeframe. This is probably when

1:04:01

they announced that Microsoft spreadsheet and that

1:04:03

stuff was coming to the Mac. Yes,

1:04:06

because they did. That deal is depicted

1:04:08

in this. I doubt

1:04:10

it played out exactly this way. Supposedly this

1:04:12

exchange took place between the two of them.

1:04:15

I doubt that it was as dramatized as

1:04:17

it is here, where this

1:04:20

Macintosh guy is literally

1:04:22

pointing at Gates from

1:04:24

offstage as Jobs is presenting. Jobs

1:04:28

gets the message that Gates is the actual enemy. It's

1:04:30

played up in a very dramatic fashion.

1:04:32

Jobs is showing the 1984 commercial to the

1:04:34

Mac world audience. That's what

1:04:36

it is. That's what it is. This other Mac guy,

1:04:38

I'm not sure who that is. The Mac guy

1:04:42

is literally pointing at the Big Brother commercial up on

1:04:44

the screen and then pointing at Gates. If

1:04:46

you think about it though, that

1:04:48

1984 commercial frames the whole movie because

1:04:50

it starts with Ridley Scott and then it ends with

1:04:52

Bill Gates on the big screen in the 1984. In

1:04:55

the George Orwell spot for the 1984 commercial,

1:04:58

which is the entire thing. I'm trying to think

1:05:01

who... I

1:05:04

don't know who that guy is. I think it's maybe

1:05:07

supposed to be... Is

1:05:09

it Dan Cocky maybe? That might be who that

1:05:11

is. That's kind of who this actor looks like.

1:05:13

I don't know him as a well-known early Macintosh

1:05:15

person. I don't know who...

1:05:18

He's one of the Macintosh team people, is my recollection, but

1:05:21

I don't remember for sure. He

1:05:23

was friends with Jobs in college and was one of

1:05:25

the first employees of Apple actually, so he is very

1:05:27

core to this whole thing. I believe he's one of

1:05:29

the people that Jobs pissed off

1:05:31

during the making of the Macintosh, but I could be wrong.

1:05:35

I could see that. But anyway, what I

1:05:37

meant about probably not occurring in real life

1:05:39

was this very convenience, like pointing

1:05:42

at Gates as the commercial was running on

1:05:44

stage to reveal him as the villain. Even

1:05:48

better than that is the off-stage

1:05:51

conversation they have after that when... So

1:05:53

that conversation is purported to have taken

1:05:56

place almost verbatim to what's shown in

1:05:58

the movie, which is basically... the final

1:06:00

encounter in this movie. Which

1:06:02

is when Gates, when Jobs

1:06:05

says they're arguing about him

1:06:07

making Windows, right? And

1:06:10

I guess this was even true to life. I looked this up.

1:06:13

Early Windows, like Windows 1.0 was shipping

1:06:15

on computers in Japan. Yeah,

1:06:18

at NECs I think, right? So Apple had gotten

1:06:20

a hold of these NEC computers from Japan that

1:06:22

had Windows, the first version of Windows installed on

1:06:24

them and basically gotten a look at how Microsoft

1:06:26

was now trying to eat their lunch. And

1:06:29

of course Jobs doesn't like it, but at this point

1:06:31

in the movie, Jobs has been built up

1:06:34

as such an asshole that you want to see him get some come

1:06:36

up in Sir Elise I did. Yeah. Even

1:06:39

if it's Bill Gates pulling it off. But

1:06:43

this is where you get the famous exchange which supposedly

1:06:45

happened about Jobs as like

1:06:48

this is theft and Gates

1:06:50

is like, no, what this is like

1:06:52

is we both had a rich neighbor named Xerox

1:06:55

who left his door open all the time and you

1:06:57

went over there to steal his TV set but then

1:06:59

you found that I got there first. I

1:07:03

got the loose, Steve, and you're yelling? That's not fair.

1:07:06

I wanted to try to steal it first. You're too late.

1:07:08

Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's

1:07:10

all. Yes. It's all, it's all a

1:07:12

bit melodramatic, but it's a good moment where like

1:07:14

after Balmer has explicitly said Jobs

1:07:16

is the one person Gates doesn't yell at. Now the Gates

1:07:18

has won. He's perfectly happy to yell at them and tell

1:07:20

them to get fucked. Well

1:07:23

there's a follow up to that is

1:07:25

Gates, Jobs walking away disgustedly saying, doesn't

1:07:27

matter. We're better.

1:07:29

We have better stuff. We're better than you. Yeah.

1:07:32

And Bill Gates says, you don't get it, Steve. It doesn't matter. Yeah.

1:07:35

Which is like, that's the ultimate 90s cut micro

1:07:37

Microsoft Coda, right? Hey, it may crash. It

1:07:39

may be shittier. There's a James Bond villain

1:07:41

who talks about shipping, who's a software magnate

1:07:43

who talks about shipping 30% more

1:07:46

bugs in the next version of, of their

1:07:48

operating system. That's Bill Gates. Doesn't

1:07:50

matter. Yes, it doesn't matter. And that's,

1:07:52

that's a pretty good call back to earlier in the

1:07:54

movie where he's kind of laying out his philosophy of

1:07:56

business, which is basically to be successful, you have to

1:07:58

have what people need. And he

1:08:02

doesn't come out and say it, but what matters is not

1:08:04

that their stuff is better, it's that he has wormed his

1:08:06

way in a position where he has whatever

1:08:08

he needs. And they don't have a choice. And they don't have

1:08:10

a choice. There's another

1:08:12

line that lines up with that, that

1:08:15

is when he's talking to, I think

1:08:17

the IBM people, I can't remember, or

1:08:19

comes out of the IBM people. He's like, success

1:08:21

is a menace. It fools smart people into thinking

1:08:23

that they can't lose. Which,

1:08:27

he's all aligned. Because at the end of this

1:08:29

movie, Jobs is three weeks from

1:08:32

getting fired from Apple. Right? Well,

1:08:34

I mean, at the end of the movie, I guess he's coming back. But

1:08:38

Scully has to give... There's this

1:08:40

awful conversation at Jobs' 30th birthday

1:08:43

party where Scully and Woz and

1:08:45

Mike Mercoula, I think, are

1:08:47

talking about who's going to give the birthday toast.

1:08:50

And nobody wants to do it. Nobody

1:08:52

wants to toast Jobs because they all kind

1:08:54

of either hate him or

1:08:56

know they are scheming against him. Well, by this

1:08:58

time the Mac has come out, it hasn't failed

1:09:00

the same level as the Leason. It eventually ended

1:09:02

up being a successful product. But it

1:09:05

didn't immediately... It wasn't an Apple II level success,

1:09:07

which is what they needed. And

1:09:10

it cuts from the end

1:09:13

of Scully's toast, because Scully ends up having to do

1:09:15

the toast to John

1:09:18

Scully fired a message. He saved Jobs for

1:09:20

Microsoft three weeks later. Everybody asked

1:09:22

Scully and Jobs are toasting at Jobs' 30th birthday

1:09:24

party. It

1:09:26

frees frames and text overlay. Three months later, John

1:09:28

Scully fires the jobs. I

1:09:30

love this. I love this 90s way of

1:09:33

ending a movie with like, where are they now?

1:09:35

It's fantastic. It's great. You know, they

1:09:37

cut the Woz talking about like, maybe

1:09:39

I'm just getting a little older. Maybe

1:09:42

as you age, the things that are important start

1:09:44

to change. And then he turns to teaching computers

1:09:46

to school children. And

1:09:49

funding a ballet. Yeah. It

1:09:53

didn't do that for Gates and Palmer, did it? No,

1:09:57

they do for Jobs, though. They just show Jobs

1:09:59

with his other... children that he had later and

1:10:02

Lisa, his daughter who he neglected, is finally

1:10:04

kind of back was up and down with

1:10:06

still a couple of times after this movie came

1:10:08

out as I understand as well. Yeah.

1:10:11

But basically, you know, they say he

1:10:13

has reconciled. And

1:10:15

then the last thing

1:10:17

is the shot from Macworld of

1:10:19

Gates' makeup on the screen where it's,

1:10:22

you know, Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. This

1:10:26

is in 98, I think, Macworld. Uh,

1:10:29

wasn't it 97? Or sorry, I think it

1:10:31

was 97 Macworld is when this historic Gates

1:10:33

up on screen. Oh yeah, it is.

1:10:35

It is in 1997 Macworld. Sorry. And

1:10:37

it's just, I see

1:10:39

if I think it's going to be really interesting. You and me

1:10:42

together and Jobs kind of resigned. Yeah, it is. It

1:10:44

will. And yeah, Jobs is very much eating like

1:10:46

if you watch the whole, I went back and

1:10:49

watched the whole, that whole section of that keynote

1:10:51

afterwards. Yeah, I did too. Yeah. He's

1:10:53

much more matter of fact. I mean, obviously, again, this was

1:10:55

played up for the movie. Jobs is very matter of fact

1:10:57

in the real life version. Well, but

1:10:59

it's weird because he's preaching to the true believers that because

1:11:01

the people kind of people who'd go to Macworld in 1997

1:11:03

were, were like, it was a, it was

1:11:06

a dark time for

1:11:09

the, for the Mac faithful. Yeah. That's

1:11:12

that year. It's repeated booze in this footage

1:11:14

of, you know, we're partnering

1:11:16

with Microsoft boo. We're making

1:11:18

internet Explorer the default browser in Mac OS

1:11:20

boo. Yeah. Microsoft

1:11:23

is buying $150 million worth of

1:11:25

Apple stock. Boo. Like

1:11:27

just not, not a good response at all. But the jobs

1:11:29

is like, say

1:11:32

whatever else you will about him. Like he knew how to

1:11:34

present to people and make them believe what he was saying.

1:11:36

And he, you know, he's not wrong. He flat out says

1:11:38

like, we got to let go of some things

1:11:40

if we're going to bring Apple back to health. And

1:11:43

the first of those things is the belief

1:11:46

that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to

1:11:48

lose. Yeah. You know, which is not

1:11:50

wrong. And obviously, you know, he makes, he makes a really

1:11:52

good point in there. Like Apple and Microsoft together were a

1:11:54

hundred percent of the desktop market at this point. So

1:11:58

they had the potential together. drive

1:12:00

standards forward to really

1:12:04

steer the conversation about where the industry

1:12:06

was going at the time anyway. The

1:12:08

striking thing to me though, and I assume

1:12:11

that this was Steve Jobs' doing at

1:12:13

the time, is how

1:12:17

putting Bill Gates' giant head on the

1:12:19

screen evokes the 1984 commercial. I

1:12:27

can see a world where both Bill Gates and

1:12:29

Steve Jobs think that they win here because Bill

1:12:31

Gates has got the

1:12:33

emperor setting for the hollow vision

1:12:35

thing, towering over

1:12:37

Jobs, which is definitely how it's presented in

1:12:39

this film. But at the same time,

1:12:42

Jobs is depicting Gates

1:12:45

as the villain that they had, in the same

1:12:48

way that they depicted the villain in the 1984 commercial. It's

1:12:51

a really... I don't know

1:12:53

how to unpack it, honestly, because it works every possible way.

1:12:59

And today, for example, when

1:13:01

Apple announced the iPod phone with a

1:13:04

singular, which became AT&T, the

1:13:07

CEO of Singular came up on the stage

1:13:09

and was a normal human-sized person standing on

1:13:12

the stage, and the product was big. There's

1:13:14

no product here. And Gates,

1:13:17

it isn't worth Gates' time to fly to

1:13:19

Boston to do this mere $150 million

1:13:21

deal, which

1:13:24

just to be clear, at the time, pretty big deal in

1:13:26

1997. Oh, yeah. Right.

1:13:29

We hadn't seen a lot of billion-dollar deals at that point. So yeah.

1:13:32

But it's clear why that was not

1:13:34

worth Gates' time, because Apple was barely

1:13:36

hanging on. Like, a little like months

1:13:38

from bankruptcy. It was not

1:13:40

exactly a glamorous thing for Microsoft to get

1:13:42

out there. Obviously, it was everything to Apple,

1:13:44

but for Gates, it was just a Thursday.

1:13:46

Well, I mean, to

1:13:48

Microsoft's benefit, it showed them doing things that

1:13:51

were not anti-competitive at a time when they're

1:13:53

having anti-competitive problems. Oh, man. I

1:13:55

can't believe I've never put that together before. Yeah. So

1:13:58

I always think of the... because I think the

1:14:00

antitrust played out over so many years that by the time

1:14:02

it concluded it was like mid-2000s, I think. But

1:14:05

I mean, how the antitrust concluded depended greatly

1:14:07

whether Al Gore, George Bush, won the election

1:14:09

in 2000. Sure. I'm

1:14:12

sure. But what I mean is this

1:14:14

early in the timeline, I don't think of the pressure from

1:14:16

the Justice Department having really begun yet, but when you put

1:14:18

it that way, investing

1:14:20

in Apple does feel like maybe it

1:14:22

was just another strategy for staving that

1:14:24

off. Yeah, in a world where Apple

1:14:26

held ten high single digits of the

1:14:28

PC share is best case for Microsoft

1:14:30

because it means they're not a monopoly,

1:14:33

but they don't have a real competitor. But

1:14:36

hey, Office is shipping on our competitor. It's

1:14:39

Parity. Feature Parity, release Parity. All new

1:14:41

code. We're not even porting it. And

1:14:43

you can get IE. It's

1:14:45

the default browser on the Mac. So

1:14:48

yeah, Pirates of Silicon Valley. It's a fun movie.

1:14:50

I enjoyed it maybe more than I expected to.

1:14:52

So there's two takeaways from this. One is that

1:14:54

I thought I'd watched this before and I think

1:14:56

I'd watch Triumph of the Nerds, which

1:14:58

is an actual documentary about the

1:15:00

same, mostly about the early

1:15:03

PC, like the Home Group Computer

1:15:05

Club and stuff like that. It doesn't go as

1:15:07

much into the later stage Apple stuff. Yeah, but

1:15:09

that one is an actual documentary where they're talking

1:15:11

to all of these real figures. Yeah,

1:15:13

we should watch that also because it's spectacular.

1:15:15

Yeah, I watched it back in the day

1:15:17

also. Noah Wiley's present

1:15:20

depiction of Gates, I think, is really good.

1:15:23

As a coda, we should talk about this because it's

1:15:25

weird. Jobs invited him on

1:15:27

the stage at Macworld in 99, I think. To

1:15:30

play him, yes. So yeah, we've

1:15:32

got like, Jobs, Gates,

1:15:35

and Woz also are all kind of spoke to this

1:15:37

movie a little bit after it came out. This

1:15:39

is from Wikipedia. After

1:15:41

the movie had aired, Jobs contacted Noah

1:15:43

Wiley and told him that while he,

1:15:45

quote, hated both the film and the

1:15:48

screenplay, he liked Wiley's performance, noting, quote,

1:15:50

you do look like me. You're

1:15:52

a very attractive man, yes. But

1:15:55

then, yeah, they brought Noah Wiley

1:15:57

in character as Jobs onto the Macworld.

1:15:59

stage as jobs and you can find that footage out there.

1:16:02

It's mostly lighthearted, but it's a little bit tense.

1:16:06

There's a, Noah Wiley asks

1:16:08

him if he's a virgin. Yeah, that was as a

1:16:10

parting shot, which I was like, oh man, wow, spawly.

1:16:14

You know, he got the guest spot on

1:16:16

ER, so it works out. Yeah. It's

1:16:19

worth, sorry, I apologize for going

1:16:21

back. It's worth remembering that that

1:16:24

Microsoft investment came before the iMac. So that

1:16:26

was the first good news that came out

1:16:28

of jobs returned to Apple.

1:16:30

Like the $150 million, they'd just killed

1:16:32

a bunch of products and

1:16:34

getting Microsoft to commit to the platform and to

1:16:37

put money into the company was

1:16:39

the first good thing. Yeah,

1:16:42

this is entirely from memory. I don't have it in front

1:16:44

of me, but I think this is right. That Apple bought

1:16:46

next in late 96, like tail end of 96. And

1:16:49

then this is like six months after that. So yeah,

1:16:51

like almost nothing has happened that Apple at

1:16:54

this point, right? Yeah, I think the sale closed in early 20,

1:16:56

early 1997, right,

1:16:59

right. So like, like they've basically had time to

1:17:01

do nothing product wise at this point. So yeah,

1:17:03

getting this big influx of money when they're almost

1:17:05

bankrupt was huge. Well, and all he did was

1:17:08

sack a whole bunch of people, or

1:17:11

not sack a bunch of people, shut down a bunch

1:17:13

of products, shut down the Newton and a bunch of

1:17:15

like the bazillion Macs that weren't selling. The

1:17:18

famous conception of what he did when he came

1:17:20

back, I forget where I've seen this, but I

1:17:22

think I've literally saw him like draw this on

1:17:24

a Macworld stage or something on a whiteboard was

1:17:26

basically like draw plus, you know, four quadrants and

1:17:29

just say, hey, we make four products now. And I

1:17:31

think those, what were those products? It was like a

1:17:34

laptop and a desktop business

1:17:36

and personal. It's like

1:17:39

we make two types of desktops for business and

1:17:41

personal people and two laptops a method. Yeah,

1:17:43

that's where we're resetting to. Makes

1:17:47

sense. It's a similar product line. And now we have

1:17:49

35 products for

1:17:51

every potential category. Anyway. Yeah,

1:17:54

real quick Gates described his depiction

1:17:56

in the movie as quote reasonably

1:17:58

accurate. The

1:18:01

bulldozer races happen confirmed. Yep. And

1:18:04

then Woz on Wikipedia, I mean,

1:18:06

these quotes are taken from wherever, of course, but like

1:18:09

he spoke pretty effusively about this movie, about

1:18:11

its accuracy from his perspective. Yeah,

1:18:13

he, I mean, look, Woz got the best depiction

1:18:15

in the movie, too, which makes it easy for

1:18:18

him to say, but yes, but also not just

1:18:20

about him, like about everything, like, like, basically all

1:18:22

of the events, every one of

1:18:24

those incidences occurred, and it occurred with the meaning

1:18:26

that was shown in the film is what he

1:18:28

said. Yeah, I mean, a

1:18:31

lot of people have depicted this as a fairly

1:18:33

accurate representation, which, which again, coming out of it,

1:18:35

before I went and read all this about it,

1:18:37

I was kind of shocked, like I did not

1:18:39

think that I really thought large

1:18:41

swaths of this were kind of fabricated

1:18:44

for not not to change history, but just

1:18:46

dramatized. Yes, in a heavily dramatized fashion. And

1:18:49

it seems like it's not nearly as

1:18:51

much as I thought. Look, a lot of

1:18:53

made for TV movies were pretty heavily dramatized.

1:18:56

True. So, yeah, it's I thought

1:18:58

that was really interesting. And and the

1:19:01

fact that Woz was I think

1:19:05

I've met Woz once, maybe twice, I can't

1:19:07

remember, but not like not like like

1:19:09

I've been in the same room with him and have

1:19:12

shaken his shook

1:19:14

his hand and said, hey, and, you know, appreciate

1:19:16

your work. Yada, yada. He

1:19:18

was he's every both times he was really

1:19:20

incredibly affable and like super generous with his

1:19:22

time and clearly like loves fans. There was

1:19:24

a period of time in early Twitter days

1:19:27

when he was posting his like flight itinerary

1:19:29

live on Twitter and people would go up

1:19:31

and just talk to him at the airport.

1:19:33

He seemed to really enjoy that. He seemed like

1:19:35

he like you never heard bad things about Woz

1:19:37

after that. He is the purest among us. Yeah.

1:19:41

So there were a

1:19:43

couple of other people on the Macintosh team

1:19:45

who specifically said, yeah, the stuff that was

1:19:47

shown actually they had memories of

1:19:50

happening. Yeah. And like I said, in the

1:19:52

other in one of the other books, he

1:19:55

it's made pretty clear that everybody on

1:19:58

that Macintosh team almost. He

1:20:00

burned every bridge. Jobs burned every bridge

1:20:03

he had with the Macintosh team afterwards.

1:20:05

Yes. Real quick before we move on,

1:20:07

reading about this movie reminded me of

1:20:09

folklore.org, if you've never been there.

1:20:11

No, no. folklore.org, if I didn't

1:20:13

get that out clearly. Which

1:20:15

I don't know who runs this, but it's a

1:20:17

bunch of stories, like written stories from

1:20:20

people on the Macintosh team. Oh.

1:20:23

Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, like names you've heard of

1:20:25

in relation with the development of the Macintosh, just

1:20:28

dozens and dozens of little anecdotes

1:20:30

about creating the Macintosh that

1:20:33

are all sorted and rated by

1:20:36

fans and say, list

1:20:38

who the quote characters are. Obviously

1:20:40

they're real people, but the

1:20:42

story about the Macintosh's first game has

1:20:45

Steve Jobs, Steve Capps, Bruce Daniels, Joanna

1:20:47

Hoffman in it. It's like a

1:20:50

database of history of the Macintosh.

1:20:52

It's kind of cool. Is

1:20:55

this actually written by these people

1:20:57

or is this like, oh, this is part of the computer

1:20:59

history museum. Yes. Oh, cool. I

1:21:01

think as far as I can tell, they are all written

1:21:03

by the people in question,

1:21:05

people who were there. Yeah. I

1:21:07

am. A ton of stuff. That's where I found the picture of the 90

1:21:09

hours a week shirt. I

1:21:12

was going to say the thing that isn't made

1:21:15

clear in the movie is

1:21:17

that Jobs,

1:21:20

Macintosh versus Apple

1:21:23

II people culminating with food fights and

1:21:26

actual fist fights at like Apple corporate

1:21:28

retreats and stuff like that. Woz represented

1:21:30

the Apple II side because Woz

1:21:33

was an Apple II. He wanted

1:21:35

to build an Apple III. I

1:21:38

guess he eventually did make an Apple III, but

1:21:40

he thought the Apple II line should

1:21:42

continue and that was one of the

1:21:44

reasons he stepped back from Apple, at

1:21:47

least as depicted in some of the other books about that

1:21:49

time that I've read. They didn't

1:21:51

get into it here because it does paint Wozniak

1:21:53

a little bit of a less charmingly.

1:22:00

Uh, naive light.

1:22:02

Um, but yeah, it's, it's definitely,

1:22:04

uh, um, I think to

1:22:07

consider. So yes. Anyway, um,

1:22:09

I, I would, I think this is my favorite of the

1:22:11

Steve Jobs movies I've seen. Like I said, I've seen the

1:22:13

fast bender, the fast bender, Danny

1:22:15

Boyle directed, um, uh, Aaron

1:22:18

Sorkin and Walter Isaacson written one.

1:22:20

I fell asleep in that

1:22:22

kind of underwhelmed. Uh, I

1:22:24

have not watched the one with my Ashton Kutcher

1:22:26

and Josh Gad. That one

1:22:28

is just called jobs. I believe that was just called jobs.

1:22:32

It was people didn't like it very

1:22:34

much as my understanding. Um, I

1:22:36

don't know that I need to see another one after this. Like

1:22:38

I think I've, I think I'm good on Steve

1:22:41

Jobs, biopic kind of stuff. Yeah.

1:22:43

Like I, I, so it's, the thing that's

1:22:45

interesting to me about this is that it

1:22:47

does take place before, before,

1:22:50

like when they're on the,

1:22:53

when they're on the upswing, right? Like like the

1:22:55

things are starting to get improved, but it is

1:22:57

definitely not clear that they're going to gain

1:22:59

any significant ground against Microsoft at any point

1:23:02

in the future or

1:23:04

become the largest computer company in the

1:23:06

world. Um, and,

1:23:08

and like this depiction, like

1:23:11

I would love to see Noah Wiley come back

1:23:13

and do an old, old Steve Jobs the

1:23:16

next 10 years with the iPod and the

1:23:18

phone and the iPad and, and, and go

1:23:20

through those, you know, through the

1:23:22

iPhone four or whatever would be, would be

1:23:24

a delight. Yeah. Now, you know, now the

1:23:26

Isaacson, uh, by every fee exists.

1:23:28

So there is good material that you could base something like

1:23:30

that on. Yeah. Yeah. So

1:23:33

anyway, um, that's

1:23:35

it. That's the pirates in Silicon Valley. Yes. I, I

1:23:37

enjoyed it. I mean, I liked it a lot back

1:23:39

in the day, like I said, but I, I still

1:23:41

enjoyed it more than I expected this time around. I

1:23:43

wasn't sure how well it would have held up, but

1:23:45

I think it does. I liked it much more than

1:23:47

I expected to. I was pleasantly surprised. Um,

1:23:50

but, uh, I

1:23:52

guess this is the time when I remind everyone

1:23:55

that this is a listener supported show. It is

1:23:57

that time we have listeners, listeners like you. Join

1:24:00

our patreon and give us a couple bucks a

1:24:02

month in exchange for access to the discord and

1:24:04

the patron exclusive episodes I'll share air once a

1:24:07

month On those

1:24:09

episodes we talk about all sorts of stuff But

1:24:11

it's often like projects that we're working on that

1:24:13

maybe don't warrant a full episode or things that

1:24:15

we're curious about or things We're interested in their

1:24:17

fun conversations the real star of the

1:24:20

show though is the discord which is full of delightful

1:24:22

nerds who talk about Well,

1:24:24

you know all sorts of

1:24:26

stuff like everything from networking gear A

1:24:28

lot of talk about the the last

1:24:30

week's episode the XZ utils

1:24:33

backdoor this week Yeah, a lot

1:24:35

of talk about the 13th and 14th

1:24:38

gen Intel memory problems a lot

1:24:40

of talk about Food there's a

1:24:42

good food chat this week People

1:24:46

are all over the place for him. We have fascinating

1:24:48

conversations pretty much every day. It's a great resource Batteries

1:24:51

we talked about batteries again for a little bit

1:24:53

fun But yeah, so thanks

1:24:55

to everybody who supports the show we appreciate all of you if you

1:24:57

want to find out how you can join our thousands

1:25:00

of patrons you can go to patreon.com/tech pod

1:25:02

and like I said for five bucks a

1:25:04

month to get access to the show if

1:25:06

you would like to become an executive producer

1:25:08

to your patron and The

1:25:11

kiss shouted out every month you can do that

1:25:14

too over at patreon.com slash that fun And

1:25:16

we would like to thank all of our executive

1:25:19

producer to patrons including Andrew slosky

1:25:21

I don't think games makers of

1:25:23

fractured veil Jordan Libet buddy crimes

1:25:25

just wedge Joel Krauska twinkle Twinkie

1:25:27

David Allen James Kammick and Pantheon

1:25:30

makers of the HS 3 high-speed 3d

1:25:32

printer That'll do it for

1:25:34

us this week bread. That's right. Thanks for watching.

1:25:36

Thanks for listening. Yeah, thanks for listening. We'll see

1:25:38

you all last week