Steve Jobs Interview in 1981 [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
This is communication masterclass level, already back then. How the heck did he get to there, so early?
He knows he has to play that game too.
Also keep in mind, Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People was published in 1936 and was a very well-known book throughout Steve's life. There is a pretty good chance he ran across a few books like that which would have aided his advancement in manipulating impression, narrative or outcomes. He didn't have to entirely invent the wheel in that sense.
It is a "performance art", like a stand-up comic, an actor, a politician, a presentation, or a congressional hearing. Some people do not want to rehearse as they feel it "empties them". He was known to meticulously practice the delivery of keynotes so he could hit things on time, as if it were a play, if I recall correctly.
You can see that there's a good part of storytelling. If you watch Elon Musk videos, there often is repetition on the three things he focused on in college: the internet, multi-planetary life, and sustainable energy.
In more recent videos, the narrative has shifted to five things he focused on during college, and an addition of genetics and artificial intelligence made it to the list. This is a bit different, like a git history change, which goes unnoticed by most interviewers. However, people think about a lot of things and nobody would be able to list all their ideas or thoughts, let alone someone like him.
One of the best interviewers in the space is Sarah Lacy, in my opinion. She has enough raport with her guests in Pando Monthly videos (there are bout fifty of them, and I invite everyone to watch them), but she doesn't hesitate to invite her guests to better recall the events, timeline, or context... "Yes, but X had invested before and you had replaced so and so on the board at that time, so that must have been before Z". Way better interviews because she has the context, as opposed to someone just looking "just" for an interview. The interviews are really good and dive into decisions founders and VCs took and what had motivated them, etc.
Long videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7983B23CA8F80AFE
All, including short segments from these videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgHogDu1ewdkkWZjfKIuKXQ
One other interview is really good: "The lost interview" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDqQcmVqAm4
Here's an "internal" video for NEXT where he explains their strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
Here's a video of a NEXT brainstorming session in a retreat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kp9cSzbLFE
Interesting: He was never summoned by Congress. All the other technical directors have been: Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey, even Larry Ellison from Oracle. Maybe having the upper hand in being well-understood and well-spoken, goes as far as to have a smoother relationship with the general public?
Think back to 2008-9, when Jobs had to step back for health reasons. While Apple had made a solid turn-around and most of the pieces of its future were in place, it was far from the juggernaut it became. The iPhone was coming on like gangbusters, but Blackberry and Nokia were still a thing, Zunes were still a thing...
Yet iPods themselves were really just music players. A more sophisticated Walkman.
The iPhone combined the computing flexibility and utility of an Apple computer with the convenience and user friendliness of an iPod. But by 2009 they were still just getting started with it.
This is not a personal attack on Zuckerberg, but I think the haircut is damaging his image and makes him less trustworthy than he may be. Joel Kaplan, Myriah Jordan, and their teams may have prepped him well for these hearings (and the famous picture of the talking points left open accidentally-on-purpose is just funny), but he seems to provoke a visceral reaction in people that others do not.
Many see Gates, Dorsey, Ellison, etc as CEOs with certain traits, like nerdy, charming, well-spoken, funny/outspoken/brash, etc, but I don't think they assume they are evil.
I don't think people would see him and think evil on a video like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--APdD6vejI
Again, this is not an attack on physique or on the person, but an observation based on what a lot of comments on these hearings are about. They mostly are about him, not others, drawing comparisons to animals or robots, dehumanizing him, etc. This leads me to think it's a matter of perception and image and I'm wondering what impact the latter would have on the former.
I’m really from the other side of the world, then ;) Gates’ 1998 hearings made him look extremely bad; the modern Gates is charming, but so charming it’s made up (people are used to PR stunts, teenage now distinguish ads hiding as memes very quickly, same goes for any PR stunt); Dorsey is seen as quite evil for those who know him in my circles, rather like a Taliban in his last congressional hearing, reminding of Bin Laden: https://media-vanityfair-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/media.va...
I reckon beautiful hair can have a lot of impact on perception. Philosophers have long hair. I’ve also read somewhere that we intuitively estimate people’s intelligence to the size of the displayed forehead (Some Slavic haircuts with hair down, have negative prejudices associated), and maybe a part of your point about Zuckerberg’s haircut is doesn’t display a large enough forehead.
Superficial, but masses have collective behaviors.
Do you mean people who know of him, not know him personally? That's the only way that makes sense because if they knew him personally I don't see what his looks in the hearing have anything to do with it.
Personally I'm surprised Dorsey isn't received better. He's clearly the most social mission oriented. Gave away 28% of his Square equity, Twitter is barely profitable, and his SF lifestyle is fairly modest in comparison to these other super-CEO's. He just doesn't strike me as one who cares much about personal wealth. But I guess the distaste comes from his tweeting for leftist causes.
https://www.improbable.com/hair-club/
"When working on her doctoral dissertation in psychology, Robin Abrahams dreamed one night that she was asked to be the editor of a prestigious psychology journal with a singular editorial policy: all articles must mention Steven Pinker's luxuriant, flowing hair. ...She told Marc Abrahams about this dream and the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists was born.
The first member, chosen by acclamation, was psychologist Steven Pinker, whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study. From that lone, Pinkerian seed, there has grown a spreading chestnut, black, blond, and red-haired membership tree. ...
The public loves to see and applaud scientists who have luxuriant flowing hair, a luxuriant head of former hair, or luxuriant flowing facial hair. Therefore, all LFHCfS members who come to Improbable Research events are invited to take a bow, allowing the audience to shower them and their hair with applause."
Maybe check out their blog featuring new members, with their pics and them talking about their life and hair:
If you want a counter example to your Elon, take a look at Lebron James.
Anyways it's entirely possible Mark has looked into it and doing it what he can (and we're seeing the results of it), or simply he doesn't care as much and is okay with what he has, or I'm off base and he picked this haircut despite having an abundance of hair available to him.
Not expressing any opinion of my own, but I did think people assume Ellison is evil.
Well... maybe a little evil.
1) luck,
2) living in Silicon Valley.
“Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.“
Source: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
Woz at one point talks about how if you don't understand the undocumented instructions maybe they aren't for you. Anyway, kind of nice ambience to it as well.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/27/blue-box-circuit-...
Everyone still called it blue boxing when you were putting tones into the phone
Edit: Looks like it's from 6:00 to 6:40
I read the comment as Woz saying documentation isn’t for the faint of heart ... true
(Mind you, I love Apple’s docs now, and honestly prefer it compared to Stripe-y and Twilio-y documentation... to me S&T docs are a style that tries to smooth over the cluttered calls and returns. Are they APIs that makes sense to accomplish x style or job succinctly, or do I have to read the 8 million other things I don’t care about to do the one thing I need to do?)
Now I hear it and with hindsight and probably just being in the future decades later it seems so on point and such a simple explanation for what to me earlier (if I really thought about it) seemed like "Man for that to be there has to be... <brain seizes up>".
His explanations seem effortless.
in the suit
Funny to be reminded of that fact by someone from 1981.
Nothing of what I describe makes the UX better for anybody, not even the developers of the web browser.
Since then more interesting things are happening elsewhere like voice assistants. I can just say "play hound dog by elvis" while I'm driving and within seconds it's playing. Or "navigate home" and I get turn-by-turn directions. That's pretty remarkable.
If somebody figures AR out, that could be the next big UI/UX frontier.
The reality now is that e.g. Waze is not even able to recognize a broken, curvy road that is a bit shorter, but not really worth it, especially not at night and rain. It is not able to recognize a pattern of choosing the other road either. It can also not read house numbers in Czech properly, so it says not "house Nr. 42" or "house 42" but "house 42nd". Also, Google, Waze whatever often don't understand my and others English when giving commands and I was never told that people couldn't understand me. I do have an accent but I speak quite clearly as a singer.
There are many, many areas, where the computer doesn't support the user at all not speaking of adapting to the needs of the user automatically. People are instead constantly bothered by unimportant stuff, SPAM and settings where sane defaults would prevent 99,9% of the issues.
I guess, it is a matter of priority, focus and business model. If bothering people "engagement" is your business model you will not be motivated to "get out of the way". This is the same with ads. I don't mind good ads in a reasonable amount, good ads can be funny, interesting, educating. Nobody really thought about how to do really good ads on the web - it is mostly some trash I am not interested in in the slightest. Therefore people are using ad blockers, because too much is too much. Where is the UX there?
As far as ads go, I'm fine with them philosophically. I'll pay to remove them when I can but I have no moral objection to them. I do object to tracking though and that's why I use an ad blocker.
For example, I run a content-based website. Though it requires content updates, if I only work 5 hours a week, no one will really notice. I can and do work on the road.
He's framing Apple marketing as "it's so exciting that we can help people so much", but it's honest and actually true.
The best videos of Jobs are the rare internal ones.
Also, he's 25 in this video? wtf
I suppose I am not surprised by that — that's what marketing does.
The bicycle analogy looks particularly transparent though: there's a pseudo-intellectual aspect to it, even name-dropping "Scientific American" seems to be there to make the speaker appear well-read, a deep thinker.
It works though a lot better than his electric motor analogy that he lead off with. ;-)
Perhaps the training to prepare for these appearances made his moment at Macworld taking on the 'Mr. Jobs' question a thousand times easier, but still in that moment was a critical one - a public challenge - and Steve knew how to move that whole conversation back from himself to supporting his team, which was brilliant, because everyone wants to feel they have someone fighting for them... especially when the landscape/future is squishy and uncertain.
What was this? I've never heard of it.
This was a public performance for Jobs, of course he'd have thought through and rehearsed what he was going to say. His ability to weave together the rehearsed with the improvised - like when his remote broke on stage at WWDC - is one of the things that took him to the next level. Just like the comic who can handle a heckle and get back to their set in such a smooth way you can't even see the join.
Did someone somehow had a VHS type and discover we had this video and upload it? If not what the story behind the discovery of this video and interview?
And I sort of think Steve is still very much Steve even in his early 20s. His understanding of market, business, computing and user experience. Apple just isn't the same without him.
ABC and WGBH/PBS are some of the better ones you can find almost full digitized archives of online. Other broadcasters like NBC didn't save tapes until 1980 (multiple Late Night with Letterman episode masters being lost as an example). CNN is another somewhat bad one, they literally threw all the masters to their theme music in the dumpster, but an employee saved them all. They have an internal archive of tapes as well as the "CNN Collection" but it's spotty.
(Anyway, thanks for doing it!)
PBS/WGBH stores everything at https://americanarchive.org/ which for copyright reasons, some stuff can only be viewed at the LOC or WGBH. The physical only content includes a number of interesting items though like the few Mr. Rogers episodes not aired on Twitch, or around 2000 non-public but aired Sesame Street episodes.
I've got a bunch more raw ABC tapes uploaded like Frank Zappa talking about Larry Flynt, 2 hours of b-roll of E3 1995, and an Atari Car Chase simulator being demonstrated to police in Miami.
ARH!!! Upload them all I want to watch it. Thanks for doing it this got me really excited.
The level of discourse of the interview feels so much higher than a lot of the interviews I see today. I was just a kid back in the early 1980s, so I don't have a good frame of reference, but does anyone have any data to support that feeling?
You're seeing the raw footage. The final cut, after edits and splices, will be shorter and less detailed.
And there's plenty of great interviews today, and terrible interviews back then. Just pick your forum.
It's really interesting to see Apple leading the way toward "impersonal" computing devices like this, considering.
My experiences have also shown the same strategy to be effective. Just understanding a problem and its solution is not enough. One has to simplify its explanation so that everyone can grasp it.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/new-steve-jobs...
I wonder if this was always present in his mind and helped lead to the term "smart phone".
> That's exactly what we think we're doing here – we think we're basically fashioning a 21st century bicycle here, which can amplify an inherent intellectual ability that man has and really take care of a lot of drudgery to free people to do much more creative work.
My takeaway of this perspective really illuminates the value of augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR). The escapism of VR is fine for entertainment, but amplifying our understanding of the real-time real world with AR is very exciting as a species.
And even seemingly escapist things can be great for increasing intuition or our strengths in reasoning about things... witness Kerbal Space Program or Poly Bridge.
But in daily life – always on – I believe AR will be as common as putting on shoes to protect our soft feet.
There are also many more functional applications of VR than AR. Random examples to illustrate my point: * Can train on the "real thing" instead of watching videos, doing exercises/drills, or reading books (e.g. military, pilots, surgeons, construction workers). * You and your coworkers could all go to an "in office" meeting without being in the same hemisphere (i.e. it would look like you were all sitting in an office together) * Students wouldn't have to sit through another boring lecture to learn, they could go there and watch it unfold for themselves (even if the lecture content takes place over a large period of time!)
*by this I mean within the scope and context of whatever you're doing and not that the VR simulation would be created perfectly down to the last atom
I didn't include the footage but later on the computer behind him gets shown off by someone not Steve. The piece later goes to an arcade machine manufacturing plant. I'll have to review the footage again and get back on all that.
A good reason to listen might be, he has some useful insights, he has actually shown the overall approach and execution is desirable/ works.
We are also influenced greatly by Rich Hickey and Clojure/ ClojureScript that we use to write OrgPad. Thanks to mostly my colleague Pavel Klavík, we have some quite smart things in our code base. Some of those will go live in the next few days such as physical animations using differential equations calculated live in JS and written as CSS transform or SVG animate for greater efficiency. Everybody else either uses simulation and rewrites the position each frame (if they don't miss it) or just use linear animations that are frankly not very pretty. We are also writing our own collaborative rich text editor that should be ready to ship sometime at the end of summer. It will be similarly sophisticated as Google Writer/ Sheets where it makes sense and much simpler at that. We have the advantage, that OrgPad is much more about the content and connections between ideas and not at all about printing to paper or following established norms. Therefore, it is much more useful in the current digital world.