June 04, 2025

#390 Rare Steve Jobs Interview

40 minutes

I've read this interview probably 10 times. It's that good. Steve Jobs was 29 when this interview was published, and with remarkable clarity of thought Steve explains the upcoming technological revolution, why the personal computer is the greatest tool humans have ever invented, how the computer compares to past inventions, why software needs to be simplified (You shouldn't have to read a novel to write a novel!) why the future is always exciting and unpredictable, what soul in the game looks like and why his competitors don't have any, why slightly insane people are the ones who make great products, the importance of questioning things and how doing so produces novel insights, why it's dangerous to have layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work, the importance of hiring troublemakers, why more people should aspire to be like Edwin Land, and how if he every leaves Apple he will always come back.

Read the full interview here

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Highlights from this episode:

We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront.

A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have no idea how far it’s going to go

The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. That is what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry.

Ad campaigns are necessary for competition; IBM’s ads are everywhere. But good PR educates people; that’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.

We didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.

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