Tony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, Nest, Steve Jobs, Design, and Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #294

it wasn't just a one-on-one it could be steve against the team going we need glass instead of plastic on the front face of the iphone and we're going to do this and we're like god

you know and so we did it and he pushed us because he didn't know all the details but he could see in our minds that we're like yeah we could probably yeah we could probably but man it's really putting us

in risk and we we laid out the risks for him and he's like i'm willing to take those risks the following is a conversation with tony fidel engineer and designer

co-creator of the ipod the iphone and the nest thermostat and he's the author of the new book build an unorthodox guide to making things worth making

more than almost any human ever he knows what it takes to create technology ideas designs products and companies that revolutionize life for huge numbers of

people in the world so it truly is an honor and pleasure to sit down with tony for a time and look back at one heck of an amazing life

this is the lex treatment podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's tony fidel

when did you first fall in love with computers or let's say computer engineering and design i first fell in love with

computers and programming was it a summer school class in fifth grade in gross point farms michigan it was a simple basic programming class

but the basic programming class was not like you might think it was it was bubble cards so literally it was you know uh the cards the stack of cards and you would

use a number two pencil and you would put in your program line by line and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked and no errors and what have you and you'd take that set of cards and

you'd put it on this reader and it was and it would go off to an ibm microcomputer somewhere in the back then the cloud and then

you would sit on a texas instruments paper terminal and it would just literally i was just i could write things and it would i could program this machine to do stuff and it was you know

it was nowhere near sex there was no graphics right oregon trail was all in text right the cards were so cumbersome that if you got one thing wrong or out of order it

or a disaster or you dropped one card it would all fall apart so um just doing that you know print f or was it i can't even remember what there was it was uh you know

what the what the basic commands were but also when you say basic you mean basic programming programming language okay basic programming you're you're writing basic programming language

on paper on paper and you're calling it programming though it's called programming yeah you're programming this computer and you know in a remote location and it came back so it was

truly cloud computing in a way so it was really terminal based computing uh and the input and the program are separate so the input to the program or they

could go together like um or is there no input to the program it just runs and it gives you output yeah you it goes in and says it says ready and then you can say run yeah and then it would run but to

program it it you didn't type it because it was a printer terminal you would make the stack of cards and that would get it into the the computer's memory okay so where was the magic the magic was that you could

create you had a language and you could create what you wanted to create right you could create a world or or what have you and have this interaction and you could compute things you could you know do numbers you could i was playing oregon

trail right so you're less like you can play video games well video that's right you could play text games and then imagine them in your

brain right oregon trail there's a this meme i saw recently if you want to feel bad about yourself as a programmer

realize that one person wrote railroad tycoon i think that's the name of the game it's this cool little builder game one person wrote it in assembly

[Laughter] so for like from scratch and for people who don't know it kind of looks like a sim city type game it's a city builder but obviously centered on railroads and

there's a nice graphics the three dimension all that kind of stuff all the things all the rich colorful things you would imagine for for a three-dimensional video game all written in assembly

meaning the lowest level code next to binary yeah which is uh fascinating and that's the you had to notice the magic at that low level at that time you didn't have all the graphics you didn't

have all the like apis and all the sample codes no stack overflow no internet none of that you just had you had to know registers you know had to know the op codes and

you had to imagine the world in your brain of the memory structures and everything else there's no visualization you visualized it all yourself right and so that was magic but then the next part of the magic of where i got hooked even

further was like i'm doing these little things and then electronic arts came out for the apple ii so i got an apple ii and electronic arts came out and i was programming and doing basic and making my own games

but then there were two games that really blew my mind one was pinball construction set and the other one was music construction set and these were

both places where i could create pinball games and i could create musical scores because i loved music and i could then play them right and so when you had that you were like oh there's something very

different so i could create myself but then there was others that create tools so you could create at a visual level and then you would read the back stories because electronics arts back in

the day it was one programmer who would program those things you know each of those things and you could read their backstories it was literally like like a musician or someone else like you could read rick rubin's like here's a thing

they tell you all that stuff and there was one guy who wrote music construction set he wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old wow and i went and i was probably 12 or 13

at the time and i went oh my if he was able to do this and had published right and this amazing tool was created i'm like what can i do and

so then it it it just kept building off of that but really it was those seminal things first the introduction and then the you know the power through programming and turning these things into what you wanted to turn it into and

you didn't have to be 40 50 years old and have you know phds and then i was like okay this is really cool i wish we did that with programmers where we treated them

like artists we would know the backstory these days today or not just programmers engineers engineers designers yeah like all the things about a product that i

think we love are the little details and there's probably a human being behind each of those details that had their little inkling of genius that they put in and i wish we knew

those stories that's always sad to me when i because i obviously i love engineering and i interact with companies and they you know autonomous vehicles something i'm really interested about and i see

that companies generally and will probably talk about this but they they seem to want to hide their engineers like engineers hold the secrets like the great secret we did not speak

of the greatest great but then the result of that is you don't you don't get to hear their stories the the passion that is there behind the engineers

like and also the genius the little there's a difference between the stuff that's patented like the kernel of the idea right and and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea and i wish

companies revealed the beautiful side effects a little bit more but yeah so sorry for the distraction so what uh you mentioned apple ii what was the first computer you fell in love with

like the the product the thing before you that was a personal computer it was the apple ii so the apple ii was something i was just

lusting over you know it was i think it was at the time it was the um you know the person of the year maybe it was that year i don't remember what but well apple ii was the person the person of the year yeah for my time magazine

back and i don't remember when but it was around that same time i was so young but i had there was the apple too and i didn't know what it was but i knew about tools because my grandfather taught me all about tools and

creating things right and i saw this thing and and i had that you know that that ibm experience that terminal experience and i'm like oh i could have that at home right and so i need to have that at home and the only

thing that was really talked about in in our circles was the apple ii and i was just like that's it so i went jumped up and down it was very expensive i have to have this my parents

like what you know it was twenty five twenty five hundred dollars back then yeah in the 1981 was like crazy right so i was like i'm gonna make as much money as i can this summer and my

grandfather said because he he helped me learn all about tools and build things together i will match whatever you make so you can get this computer so i worked very

very hard as a caddy golf caddy catting actually for the you know that the families in you know at the country clubs in the in the town um where we lived

and uh did whatever i could and that end of that summer we got my apple too and now you couldn't tear it away from me it was my my friend it was everything from a product perspective what do you

remember that was brilliant um the design choices the ideas behind it or is it just that it exists or the very idea of a personal computer is the brilliant design choice

yeah it was that i could actually have this kind of tool in my house and i could use it anytime i wanted i could program it anyways there was no you know there was no internet connection there was no it was all just you you either

loaded software that you got from someone right um or you created yourself and then there was a whole other thing which was started happening which we were doing and this was kind of like mp3s and stuff

we were sharing software right so you built this community of sharing stuff you would you you would go in pirate that was what called pirate all this software you'd never use it all but it was just that fun thing of like i'm gonna get all this other stuff and then

tear it apart and do disassembly on it and see behind the scenes so you really had a sense that this was your world and you owned it right and you could like literally go into every register we didn't have all those security layers

like we do not like you could really touch bits and you could poke bits and you can make this light turn on and you know and the geek assignment just lit up now you can there's it's so abstract you know people don't

even understand like usually you know some programs don't even understand memory they just think it's unlimited right yeah and security it's like now there's all this security you should have but it's like the adults all showed

up to to the party and now you can't have all the fun right it's like no no you know this was the thing where if you if if the power went out yeah you lost your whole program you might have worked a

whole day on it and if you didn't press save at every other line and you were saved save save and it would like grow the word the disk drive or the tape drive like

every single step was contemplated because if you didn't you lost maybe a ton of work so a lot of the magic was in the software the fact that you could have software the fact that you could share software

the in the community around the software it wasn't necessarily the hardware well that was the first step the second step around the hardware was i got things like the mockingboard which the

mockingboard paired with the music instruction set you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes and it was a synthesizer in the apple ii so you would plug in this card and go oh my god look at this and it would you know you

could start generating cool sounds you're like like it was a moog you know like a moog in a way early moog what year are we talking about this is 82 i think

81.82 and i bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds that are very cool in the 80s yeah yeah eight bit you know chip tunes right and then um and then you know when you

wanted to add a joystick you had to pull a chip out and you had to like plug in a dip socket to put in a joystick and and then i was like oh and then i had to get more memory how do we do that and i

wanted to speed up products so so then that turned into a company actually from that but it was in a hardware software at that um but it was all about you know modifying this thing in every

way first was software and then you started gaining confidence and then i got a little bit more money and stuff and then you could get into the hardware and you know wire things and then the apple ii came with all the schematics

right so in the back in the early apple twos you could open up and all the schematics were there you purchased the apple ii and the schematics come with it yeah it came with it

that's an interesting choice that's an interesting choice from from a company perspective right so it's like a real maker kind of thing right i wonder what they

so that was intentional like this is absolutely intentional this is the work this is for the cutting edge folks too or especially if it was only the cutting edge it was geeks for geeks yeah so we were like oh how did they make it and

then we got to learn through that apple one did the same thing right it just apple ii became more packaged up and had you know a little bit better software right came with basic and then you know

so so it was really it was it was what we might think of as a raspberry pi today or something like that but not with so much software it was literally and all the chips were out there so you could inspect the buses and the right

because everything was just broken out so i guess that's the idea behind stable big projects in open source like on github

that you have the schematics there and it's it's kind of a product but i wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing like we're going to release this

to a small set of people self-selected perhaps that are kind of the makers the cutting edge folks the builders

the at-home engineers like in some way what uh tesla is doing with the beta for the full self driving it's kind of like that it's like selecting a group of people

but that has to do more with you how safe of a driver you are versus how much of a tank carrier you are because you don't get to tinker i wonder is that is that a crazy idea to to do for really

cutting-edge technologies especially you're interested in like hardware stuff is that is that crazy why don't more companies do that kind of thing you think

i i think back then it was about a community and serving that community of builders and now this is about people who want to take get the experience and want it really simple and easy and

they're like and so it is there's the the audience or they believe the audience is small who would value those other things that we're just talking about but if we look at things like raspberry pi and all of these other

little boards right there's a whole world more than any that i've seen like it's amazing what you can do now with these little kits um and and and the software that's created and and

and so there's a whole nother i think another batch of makers and builders that are coming up through the ranks and if you we look at youtube channels and stuff right they take these little boards they hack them then they print out

you know parts on their 3d printer assemble them and they create robots and what have you so i think it's happening um it's just not as you know as it's just not as i guess

raw as it used to be um but it's there and it's really expanding around the world and that's really nice to see because you know it's a whole new generation uh who can who are empowered i think there's a

semi-dormant genius amongst millions so like raspberry pi is revealing that a little bit it's probably i wouldn't be surprised if it's several million raspberry pies that have been

sold i think it should and it's kind of this quiet storm of genius brewing of engineers we don't get to hear it because they're not organized i mean we get to hear their

inklings here and there like i said youtube there's little communities that are local and so on but if they were organized [Laughter]

if a leader would emerge no okay so when did you first start to dream about building your own things designing your own products

designing your own systems and software and hardware well in high school there was a company that um a friend of mine founded and i was the

second employee was called quality computers and it was a male mail order mail order because there's no e-commerce then there was no internet again yeah you either mailed in your little coupon and you said this is what

i wanted to order or you wrote in to get a catalog and deliver to you you know turn around time and this stuff was like from the time you wanted the time you bought it was maybe eight to twelve weeks that was just the normal way of

getting things so quality computers was a mail order for apple ii and it was software and and all kinds of accessories so hardware accessories so hardware plug-in

cards joysticks all this stuff and what um we noticed was um there were accelerator cutters or memory cards

and to be able to use those cards you had to actually go and change the software you used to access this new memory so you literally have to go and you took the program that you had let's say was appleworks which was like an

early microsoft office or something like that and you had to literally change the code and you would install all these patches to then take advantage of the hardware

so what we started creating was software on top of it to do the automatic installation of all of these patches so we made it much easier to take new hardware and then and and the existing

software you have and expand it into this new world so it was creating tools and that really great customer support and we we started getting a lot of orders because we had the software make it easier to install to give them the

superpower and at the same time um uh you know they they would be able to change their software and and have a new world that wasn't existing from the companies that were creating the initial

products and so it was more of that and then that happened with uh hard drives so i wrote a hard drive optimizer for the apple ii to like read

because you could get really fragmented so i wrote that piece of software and we sold that through the company along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties so

that all happened in 12th grade uh freshman year of college you're a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade you know yeah between 12th and freshman

year what programming language do you remember is it assemblies it was there were certain inner loops were assembly and other loops actually there were

really early pascal no c um um see see uh compilers what was the motivation behind these is it to make people's lives easier is it to create a thing experience that is

simpler and simpler and simpler thereby more accessible to large your number of people like what or did you just like like to tinker no no it was two things really because one we wanted to sell more hardware and software right

so it was like oh make it easier for the user and then the other thing was because i was also manning the customer support line people would call and go this doesn't work and i'm like oh i gotta go fix the hardware and software right or i gotta

fix the software to make the hardware and the installation process better so my whole world was out of box experience from when i was in high school because i had to man the customer

support line pack the boxes and write some of the code while we were doing well joe joe gleason who was the founder of quality computers he was off doing the mark the ads placing the ads for the

mail order making sure we were running the credit cards right yeah it was two of us and then it turned into a third and then we hired another person from high school to like pack boxes so i could stay on the customer support line

or doing the software right and it was all in his parents basement yeah right as you were scaling exponentially scaling right yeah exactly bootstrapping so we'll jump around a little bit but

what were the you said you loved music what were the ideas that gave birth to the ipod if we jump forward uh and how far back do those

ideas stretch you know if you look at the history of technology there's i mean not just the product but the idea

is is truly revolutionary maybe its time has come but just if you look at the arc of history

instead of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity right and to be able to put that in your pocket make it truly portable is

fascinating in in a way that's truly portable so it's digital as opposed to sort of uh like a walkman or something like that so what were the ideas that gave birth to

the ipod you know i've i was in love with music since i was a kid just loved music from i think second grade when i got my first albums and stuff like that what kind of music are

we talking about so this was um this was led zeppelin this was the stones hendricks uh aerosmith

uh uh cheap trick sticks ted nugent you know just the real you know the real american and so and british rock and roll right there's a

bunch of people listening right now who ten who's who who's that zeppelin what is that [Laughter] um it drove my parents crazy yeah yeah

just blasted loud loud just right and this was second third grade fourth guy i just i fell in love and then uh we um we moved back to detroit and i loved listening to the radio

station because there was all kinds of crazy music because you'd have a amalgam of rock and then funk and r b and i loved to listen at night so i had a clock radio

but if i had the clock radio on everyone like the parents go go to sleep stop that turn that stuff off so i hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it nice

right so i said oh they're wow okay and then and then i could listen to it all night and no one could hear me right and i could just sit there and you know just huddling around the radio groove

out just listening to zeppelin stairway to heaven what would you say is the greatest uh rock classic rock song of all time greatest classic rock song of all time

well it pops into mine well no you know what i mean this has to be that's just really hard dude this is nice dude this is a serious journalistic interview you're not going to back down from these

kinds of questions oh my god no i don't know challenge yeah it's hard it's hard to pick but i i to me stairway to heaven is a safe fault it's like it's so often considered

to be one of the greatest songs of all time that you almost don't want to pick it right exactly but you've returned to it time and time again and it's like yeah this is this is something pretty special

this is a rock opera of sorts well the rock opera that really blew me away and still continues to blow me away is all of dark side of the moon like that

i love that yeah i love zeppelin i i can't say which one's better but dark side of the moon for me was it was a you know audio experience right the whole thing from soup to nuts plus all

the synthesizers all of those things okay so back back to the ipod so that's you from the early age you loved music loved it absolutely loved it and you know always was just around it and

always i just it was always playing you know um i played it so loud that i actually hurt the earring in my right ear and i still suffer from that today

um and then no regrets no regrets whatsoever going to concerts in downtown detroit and all that crazy stuff so moving forward um

so i in college i was a dj so i would dj and hang out and play all the tunes i love and whatever for the for the crowd and then i continue to do

that in silicon valley when when i moved right after school and so i was be lugging all of these cds around with me a thousand cds to right and

and at the same time um and so those were heavy and at the same time i was doing the philips nino and velo those are window ce based

mobile computing products the nino was the first device to actually put audible books on tape so we i worked with audible we met in a conference and they were like we

don't want to do hardware we just want to do content i was like well we have this device let's get it together and we got audible on that and this was in 96 or seven

first audible books and it you know as i was oh my god that's audio well what if we put music on it right and so i i go and the memory was very small at the time right there was

almost there was almost no flash it was all dram when you did audible you started in dram right which was okay probably because uh how much

books do you need is the idea by the way brilliant i mean just putting books i know it's probably not the sexiest of things but putting books on

on a mobile device is a brilliant step i i don't know sometimes can't measure how much human progress occurred because of an invention like there's the sexy

big products but you never know like maybe like wikipedia is one of those things that doesn't get enough i think credit for the transformational effects it has it's not seen as the

sexiest of products but maybe it is when you look at human history wikipedia arguably is one of the big things that that basically

unlocked human knowledge human knowledge okay and human editing and human you know just the human human nature of building something together yeah so it's it's fascinating sometimes you can't measure those things

maybe until many many decades later anyway sorry so that was that was the nino that was so that was there and then there was audible you put books why not put music music and i'm carrying around

the music for the dj gigs and you're like wait a second uh two and two together right like get let's get rid of this and so and then mp3 show up the the actual like encoder performance

the format mp3 showed up around 97.98 so mp3 is is compressed so you can have uh like the storage is reduced significantly right so you could go from

a um you know a large full full uh losses lossless um you know digital track into something that can be stored in four to eight megabytes something like

that for the audio now you know that's a reduced quality but you could get it down there and you're like oh okay and now if we have enough flash or dram we can put 10 15 what have you all

in in that same memory and it starts to replicate a cd and then ultimately if you put it on a hard drive you could start to put you know thousands of songs yeah that's that's also another brilliant invention like people don't

realize i think i think people would be surprised how big in terms of storage raw audio is and the fact that you can compress it like uh

i don't know what the compression is but it's like 10x it's very significant compression and still it sounds almost lossless much of the chagrin of neil young who yeah who does not like that

but even even neil young even the stuff he talks about is still tiny files relative to the raw right so he he wants us to increase it just a little bit more a little bit more but

it's still that's an invention that's a thing that unlocks your ability to carry around a device like nino and listen to music because without that there's no way you can carry on a gigantic hard drive

right exactly and so so then that so it was mp3s the nino and my you know my my hatred of carrying around all this heavy stuff that then spawned you know um

fused and then ultimately you know became a lot of that the ideas and things of that nature were and and my passions were born into then the ipod you know it was too

apple needed something and i wanted to fix something and it it all kind of you know came together at this right right place right time plus the right technology came at this it was just like the stars aligned so how did it come to

life the details of the stars aligning but the actual design the actual engineering of getting a device to be small

the uh the storage of the you know the interface how it looks sure the storage the details of the software all that kind of stuff what what are

some interesting memories from that design process what are some wisdoms you you can part okay from that process well you know how long do you want to go

because i have i can go deep uh so uh let's go at least 20 hours let's go okay yeah that's one of those lengthy documentaries we're gonna turn it into

episodic uh yeah binge game of thrones so let's just start with uh you know after i was asked to be a consultant to put this thing together so i had already had knowledge of you

know the the space and the technology and all that stuff but i had to very quickly and and a lot of the suppliers because of what i was doing at fuse trying to create that thing so

at at as a contractor i was like okay what is the first thing you need to do so so after i showed a you know different architectures and what three

different products could be to steve about options for storage options battery options form factor options there was three options

and as i was was i told given very good advice give to the the two options you really do not like but their options and give the best option last because steve will shut you know shoot all those down and give the

the best option last and then you could talk about that and so that was the one um that had a 1.8 inch hard drive and a small screen

uh like with the screen you you you know it uh i am not on the original ipod classic ipod and uh and then i had enough of the idea of the three or three or four different

uh cpus and processor suppliers and kind of systems that were out there that i had gone and found and put together on power supplies you know uh disk drive

interfaces firewire interface all that stuff so i put together all of those those schematics or you know block diagrams they weren't schematics yet because it was just me and coming up with a bill of materials

coming up with what it could look like what would be the input output how we could uh make a better headphone jack um that was also on there screen suppliers

tearing apart calculators so got all calculators and all kinds of electronics to get the the right size um different sizes of small lcds so i got all kinds of different battery

types i got different types of uh you know in different battery sizes double a's aaa's working through all the different and there was lithium ion nickel metal hydride so i took all the battery types

i took all of the um memory types processing types lcd types and um and and connectivity and all that stuff not wireless but wired

and laid out these things as lego blocks so literally i had all of these things as just and so i i made them so i could like you know put them together and

figure out what the compact fact form factor would be oh like how do we shove them together what's the smallest possible box you can get so the the questions without the storage so the

hard drive batteries double a triple a you're right screens so screen size and then for that you're tearing apart calculators calculators

digital cameras whatever and getting little things right so so you can make it physical right if you can make the intangible tangible like and so i can say look we can make this and i could i brought this whole bag of goods and it

was like right like here's this here's this this is why double a's won't work and because it makes it too fat and everything so just educate everybody through here's the parts that we can use you should not

sheet a paper it's physical you're playing in the physical space well i would go back and forth so truth be told because there weren't a good enough graphical tools on on a

on the mac i was using a pc with vizio and some 3d tools and i was doing 3d design at the same time i was taking all these physical parts and going okay what feels right because you have to go from

you know the details and then the rough and you go back and forth and you iterate right and so it was just a lot of fun and then i ultimately ended up with a styrofoam model and printouts

that came from vizio that i glued together and put my grandfather's fishing weights in because i also modeled the weights right so i i said oh this is this many ounces this is this many ounces in grams

and then i went and got all that and made the weighted these styrofoam models to then match that so when you picked it up it felt more or less form factor right and it also you felt

how much you know was it going to be dense enough is it going to feel solid and rigid in your hand right why does need to feel rigid because it has to feel substantial it

has to feel like i have like a like a bar of gold in my hand right you know maybe you know this when you open and close a car door you know that thunk and you go bam and you go that feels solid

that feels real and then you get this tinny car that's like ding and you're like does this feel safe does this feel like a value and so you when you have a device like that and you you want to make sure that there's not too much air

in it that you've distributed the density of the masses in the right way so it feels like it's the right thing so you have to model battery life costs

uh you know mass sizes of different things and then you have to also think about what the ui is going to look like right so you have all of these constraints your work variables

you're working with and you have to kind of you know you can't get the perfect of everything what's the best you know local maximum of all of these components that come together to provide an

experience local max it's always trade-offs what about buttons buttons well there was also the buttons too right oh by the way a lot of these battles fought inside your mind or is it with other people is it uh is it with

steve is it lower like what this was all independent this was me before being able to present to see because i had to feel really confident that if i was going to put this in front of

him that it could be made right so i had to convince myself and go work through all the details through the like the very very rough mechanical design electrical design software things because i didn't want to present

something that was going to be fictional right my credibility would be like trashed right so you mentioned convince yourself you're painting this beautiful picture

of of a driven engineer designer uh futurist how much doubt were you played by through that like this this is even

doable because it's not obvious that this is even doable like to do this at scale to do this kind of thing to make it sexy to uh [Music]

shovel the screen the batteries the storage to make the interface the hardware and the software interface work all of that i mean i don't know i would be overwhelmed by the doubt of that because

so many things have to work plus the supply chain like at that point i wasn't getting into any of those details or anything you know there's there's the basic stuff that you have to put together and then you have to you know

through my learnings at general magic and my learnings at philips and delivering you know multiple you know large-scale programs in manufacturing you kind of get a rule of thumb and you know what to focus on at the beginning

and what not to worry about over time like when i was early in my career i worried about everything on the engineering details so much so that you know i would be a nervous wreck sooner or later you learn how to filter out and

figure out what to prioritize and so 10 years later you know i was able to much do a much better job of filtering out the things of like we'll get to that in you know in weeks to come but right now

we got to like solve you know the very important things which is is could this actually be something real and that you could deliver you know enough battery

life right enough of an interface um of the right cost right in the right right uh right price point so you already you were sitting on on a track record of successes and

failures in your own mind where you had sort of already a confidence a calm a calmness uh but still was there a doubt that you can get this done always

always how hard is it to achieve a sort of a confidence to a level where you could present it to steve and actually believe that this is doable like what what do you remember one yeah

that moment yeah i think it was after i triple checked i couldn't i couldn't bring anyone in right i couldn't let anyone in on this so it was just me are they going to trample on it that kind of thing why no

no because i couldn't bring any what i mean bring anyone in on this one it was a highly confidential program inside of apple there was like four people who knew about it right and so i couldn't bring anyone from apple because i was a contractor i

couldn't bring anyone else from the outside world i'm working for apple and i'm under this crazy nda right in this contract so it was just it was so i'm i'm i'm doing this oh and at the same time

i'm also buying every competitive product mp3 player and tearing them all apart yeah right tore them all apart and looking at them and trying to learn from those as well so it was all of this

stuff in six weeks so i didn't sleep right yeah yeah but i i was like because i was trying to make this from i was i was envisioning this since the nino

right and i was like oh my god right but there was another doubt that i had and it wasn't just could you make the product but could actu apple actually have the um

the balls to make it because apple was not the same company that you know it today in 2001 really it was cautious conservative careful

it was barely break even it was a four or five billion dollar company oh so the guts required there is not necessarily in the innovation it's like this is going to cost a lot of money and we're going to potentially lose all of it

because it'll be a flop well there's not just that but there was only the mac yeah and the mac wasn't doing very well yeah there was less it was about a one percent only in the us market share for

the mac right the company was in debt bill gates had to give him a loan right michael dell at the time was saying shut down the company and give

the money back to the shareholders so this is not the company that you know that people oh my god the iphone came out it's a very different level of confidence and financial

situation that the company was in versus the ipod so given that what was the conversation when you finally presented to steve what was that conversation like

the conversation was well we went we went through it the presentation and all all that stuff happened and he he was just like and you know he never he would flip through it

real quick throw the presentation aside and said okay let's talk about this right and so we went through it all and um

one was a big conversation about sony and sony was the number one in all audio categories home portable what in the world okay

i had been already gone through 10 years of failure and i was like wait a second how are we going to compete with sony and i was always worried that sony was going to come out with whatever it was they were going to come out with their

mp3 player and that was it game over right and so i was like steve and and this is why it took me four weeks to finally sign on to join

apple after he greenlighted the ipod program in that meeting was because i had built other things in the past at philips the nino and velo but they didn't know how to sell it or market it

they didn't know how to retail it right so i was like we could build this and i was like steve i'm pretty sure i can build this i've done this before but how are we going to sell it you have all your marketing dollars on

the mac and he looked at me and he goes you build this with you know a team and our team and apple open business and me right and

i dedicate that we will make sure that at least two quarters of all marketing dollars will only go to this product and nothing else wow

right that was mac was the lifeblood of all revenue of the company so steve saw something special here exactly and he said i'm going to commit all the marketing dollars if you can deliver the

experience that we're all talking about if we can do that and that was jeff robin as well because i ipod would have never happened without itunes you know people don't understand that was a bundle you couldn't do one without the

other and vice versa so jeff and i were you know if jeff and you can present and bring that um bring that experience to life i will put all the marketing dollars

behind it when did the marriage of ipod and itunes sort of uh what was that a birth of ideas that made up itunes

itunes existed before the ipod okay and so jeff robin had his company oh man i can't remember her name but it was bought he was making a mp3 player app

for the mac steve saw it because there was mp3 player apps like winamp and other things that were on the pc real player and steve saw that going on and saw that

jeff and his small team had this this i can't remember sound something anyways he bought that and that became the basis of itunes and then jeff ran all of itunes and so what happened specifically there

was they were starting to hook up to all these third-party mp3 players because there's a lot of korean the mp man like walkman but empty man all these and they were trying to hook them up and

they were like these are horrible experiences and through that and they said itunes was something that was going to help grow the mac base because we were trying to get more and people

on the mac so this program would be a great new thing you could add to the mac and there was also internet connectivity at the time for the imac and so they did that and then they're trying to do these these hookups they

weren't going well and that's when they said we need to build our own or steve said we need to build our own since these are such horrible experiences people don't want to just burn cds from

itunes we need to get that music on the go but in an apple fashion that's when i was called to come in to do that the ipod thing

after the six weeks then he already envisioned i'm sure he had envisioned because they were trying to do this thing okay now that's it itunes what you know it wasn't called

ipod yet you know what would become the ipod that is going to be the thing that then propels apple into this new thing because you bring all these music lovers in that are going to need their their

next generation or sony walkman version 2.0 so when you look at again apologies to linger on ipod but it's one

of the great inventions uh in in tech history what wisdom do you draw from that whole process about

spotting an idea this is something you talk about in your book build how do you know that an idea is brilliant at which stage when did you

know it was a good idea [Laughter] and maybe is there like some phase shifts first your complete doubt then maybe hmm

and then maybe it becomes more than and becomes like a little more confidence that kind of stuff and also wisdom about who to talk to right uh so they don't trample the idea

in the early stages that kind of stuff and your thoughts about this we could go on again how long do you want to go this is a netflix series i told you multi-season

so a lot of lessons learned over those years of failure and success but the first thing it starts with um there's a whole chapter called great

ideas chase you and so it kind of goes into in build and you can go and it goes through kind of chapter and verse about all of those how nest became into being

but let's talk about it specifically for ipod right so for me i always had pain the pain of carrying these cds everywhere right and i had the joy of music

right if you could say all of a sudden i could get the music i love all the time in a portable package and i can have all the music i love all the time i was

solving a pain which was for me it was thousands of these other people might be 10 or 15 cds right and then i can have the joy of all this music uninterrupted

that was that was taking the pain making a painkiller for it and then at the end was a superpower an emotional superpower that said oh my

this is something different so when you can actually focus on a pain not of not and and get a painkiller for it not a vitamin so the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin is very clear

one you need i got to get rid of this pain a vitamin maybe it works maybe it doesn't maybe somebody needs it maybe not it's all marketing story right so you start with the pain give them a

painkiller and hopefully if you can do it in the right way you give them a superpower an emotional superpower that is always and that's the way to to to know that you're hitting on something

that's really powerful the pain and the joy exactly um are you always aware of the pain so it seems like a lot of great products

it's like we do a lot of painful things and we just kind of assume that's the way it's supposed to be like with much autonomous vehicles we'll all assume we're supposed to be driving

right like and it doesn't you don't think of it as a pain right well you've you've habituated it away yeah you've habituated way for me you

know when i go uh to other places living in bali or living in paris or whatever and i'm not driving i'm walking or reusing a scooter or what have you different thing and you go oh

my god when you left that environment because everyone else is driving all the time you're like that's what you do and you find out there's other ways of living and there's freedom when you get rid of that you're like oh my god i

didn't know that this was so much better so there's there's something in the book that's called i i deemed it the virus of doubt and what the virus of doubt is is when

there's pain and it's been habituated away you use the right marketing messages to to bring people back to that initial experience they had or the initial

experience that they had of that pain do you remember when the first time you did blah and it felt like this right and then you reawaken

that habituated pain and people it becomes visceral and then they're like oh yes i hate that and then you go now i have the

painkiller and the joy for you yes that's when it all comes together and it goes let me on this on the pain and the joy that's brilliantly put

you mentioned um selling and marketing right marketing dollars um i have a love hate relationship with marketing

like with a lot of things that require artistic genius to me the best marketing i suppose is the product itself and then word of mouth

so like create a thing that people love oh absolutely that's fundamental yeah but so any other marketing requires genius to be any extra thing because every

to me i don't it's yeah uh maybe you can uh by way of question because i'm just speaking off the top of my head

as a consumer uh what is great marketing what does it take to to to reveal the the pain and the joy of a thing okay it all starts at the beginning

and let me give you i'm going to give you a couple of different ways of looking at it okay and again we're going to might go a little long here so um just stay tuned in yeah so the first

thing is the beginning let's start at the beginning in the early part of my career you know like general magic and phillips and what have you i and especially when i was you know a

teenager when i was like doing making my own chips and stuff like that i really worried about just putting cool things together i'm like that when i put those two cool things together as an engineer you go

that's cool and then i would talk to the other friends who might be geeks too and they go yeah that's cool because we knew the bits so we put them together and that's a new

way of doing it you're like wow that's all what it's not why why are you doing this we know what we're doing but we don't know why we're doing it because we're not articulating

for ourselves because it's just something we're like putting it together like yeah that's cool because because we think we're solving some problem we have but we're not really articulating it so what normally happens

and this happens because we invest in so many companies around the world you have these brilliant engineers designers scientists researchers they put together these these whats

and then they develop it develop it develop it and then at the end they call in marketing and say now tell a story about this and let's get it out to the world okay

what happens then is marketing is like well why do why do people need this tell us why people need it and so they create a story around this product but the product was born out of what's

not wise and so they start telling marketing starts telling a story and it turns out to be a fictional story usually they say oh this is going to do these things

the product comes in is delivered and it falls flat on its face because the marketing doesn't match the product because they weren't both created at the beginning together

right there are what's when you create a product but there's a lot more y's and the y's help inform the whats and the whys also inform the marketing so at the

that's what you mean deeply at we should start at the beginning so the designer should be also the marketer the engineer should be the marketer exactly stop impressing the geek next to

you what is the super power you're bringing or the pain you're killing for the you're you're the end customer right now let's give let's contrast that

think about a movie a movie starts with a treatment it has an audience that says the audience here's the characters here's the storyline the plot here's the here's the here's the arc of the story right it

pulls that all out then there's a script that's written and that script is then produced and then you add all the flourishes and what have you music and graphics and what

have you right and then it comes out and then there's the marketing of the movie and that story was created at the beginning what you need to do if you're going to do a great product is create that treatment for your product and i call

that the press release do the press release like the treatment who's the audience what what features do you have what pains are you solving for people have

the virus of doubt there to remind them what pains they have and why you're solving them the price all of those things and you use that as the bar the measuring stick for what you do

during development because what happens that along the route you know this oh we're not going to be able to get that feature done on time throw that one overboard we got to hit the we have to hit the date

oh we're not sure this product's right yet add another feature add another fee feature creep right if you don't have that story you know you're going to tell at the beginning you don't have that bar

right and then at the end you don't know when you're done if you don't have that story so you can actually look at that press release you know you might mod you know you you change it over time um that draft

but then when you're done you know the whats and the whys you have all the things of the audience and everything and then you can give that to marketing and say well marketing's been along the way let's be clear but then everybody's in

sync and that's when you can tell a cohesive non-fictional story about and the product delivers on that story or hopefully over delivers on that story so

in the drafting from the beginning to the end of the press release what does a successful team look like who is part of the draft is it engineers designers

what what's the purpose of a marketing department in a company small let's say a small company but more than two people okay so

from where does the why come from should it always come from the designer or should there be a marketing person that yeah steps in and asks the question so i'll just keep asking random questions i

know these are great questions okay so it's because you're just like i'm like i can't wait to tell you the answer yeah um so it's in the book as well but you have to separate out the various

functions of marketing when that's what i thought i was like marketing's marketing you know when i was and and it's really not there's so many disciplines just like in engineering mechanical electrical

software and even software it's you know use cloud services firmware applications marketing has that much diversity as well okay and you have to honor that

and so there is marketing communications like pr press press there is um social marketing there is a marketing

creative right there's marketing activation but there's another thing that also comes out and people uh confuse it with marketing which is

called product marketing or product management and product management or product marketing is the voice of the customer they're the person who sits there and listens to what's

going on and the competition in the marketplace understanding the needs and those pains of the customer and they're representing them in every single meeting so things don't get off track

right so that um and they're creating the messages not the marketing what happens is there's messages that product marketing creates like those are the deep messages like

we need to save 20 of energy let's say right and then marketing turns that into something that's with creative and everything and brings that message across maybe it doesn't say that but it

comes maybe visually or some other way so product management does that and and and holds that press release along the route and making sure that

we're tracking and then also marketing is tracking with that press release to make sure they're not telling a fictional story right because they could also add extra adjectives or something and then the product can't deliver that

it's like no no no no no keeps everybody's going to be grounded to the press release to the raw right to the customer needs yeah right because they're always representing the customer so you have to have a product manager

typically that's the founder right in the beginning and then over time you hire a product management team to then really you know watch over this the whole way

and they are talking to customer support they're talking to engineering they're talking to design they're talking to sales and marketing and they are always in the mix and it's the hardest thing to

hire for oh yeah so it's they have this a very important job of developing maintaining the why exactly why is it the hardest to hire for because you have to understand you

first nobody reports to you right you're allowed so you're alone and you have to build great ties with all of these different these different functions yes you have to understand

what they do have be empathetic with what they do and you have to get have to project the customer's empathy or empathy for the customer to them and tell them why

and why this customer needs us why this doesn't work and so that they learn more they're not just doing but they learn about the customer's point of view and sit in there and stand in their shoes to

be able to then make better decisions on the engineering details or the operational details customer support details so they understand the ev if they're not the customer that

it's intended for they start to live through and through their eyes and see through their eyes of that customer so they make better decisions and there's probably fascinating beautiful

tensions between that and sort of the the the engineers oh that's cool sort of the you know developing the what uh exactly

and which makes it an extra hard job i'm sure exactly can i ask a sort of a little bit of a personal question one subfield of marketing mentioned comms in pr

how do i ask that i i can hear your struggle in your in your thigh why or do the

comms and pr folks sometimes kill the heart and soul of of a of the magic that makes a company or is that is that wrong to say

give me an example i will say the spirit of the example which is uh it feels like often the jobs of of communications

is to provide caution it almost it almost works together with legal to say yeah we should probably should not say this we're probably let's be careful

let's be careful now that makes sense except in this modern world authenticity uh

is extremely valuable and revealing the beauty that is in the engineering the beauty of the the ideas the chaos of the ideas i think

requires throwing caution to the wind to some degree i agree and i just find that

boy i mean it's a really so to to push back on myself i think it's an extremely difficult job because people hold you responsible if you're doing communications

when you take risks right um and especially when they fail so like the it's a difficult job so i understand why people become cautious but to me

communications is about taking big risks and throwing caution into the wind at its best because your job is to communicate

in the long term communicate the genius the the joy the the the genius of the products right

and that sometimes is a tension with caution sorry so i i uh because i've gotten a chance to meet a lot of very interesting people and interesting engineering teams and so on

i look at what they're doing and i look at what's being communicated and it's just there's a mismatch because the communication is a lot more boring it's like there's something very

like just straight up boring about the way they're communicating because of caution okay and you have just teed me up for another

diatribe okay i'm gonna get on my i'm gonna get on my podium here yes please uh it all comes out of the leader if the leader doesn't know how to

storytell or the leader doesn't know how to do bold storytelling then you get even more con conservatism from the pr and communications folks

because they're always so if you have a not a bowl leader they they're always going to be a filter right they're always going to try to smooth things out and take off the rough edges and try so they're going to be

even more if you have a conservative messaging leader you're going to have even a more conservative communications department why because they want to keep their jobs

okay it's really simple yes they got to keep their jobs if they say one wrong thing it could be the end of it so if you have very conservative leader they're going to be even more conservative if you have

a bold leader there will be oh they'll always take a a little more conservative bent but you're still going to have bold communications yeah that's brilliant

okay so it starts with the leader now that said when you you you think about the messages and the joy

and revealing things right many of these leaders don't tell great stories so what we do at future shape our investment firm

is we take those scientists all and the great minds and everything and what do we surround them with marketing and communication people and storytellers to give them the confidence

to tell a much broader story about the impacts of what they're creating and how big the global change can be with those technologies because usually they don't those leaders who

created those technologies they don't really know how to communicate really well and they don't feel very comfortable in how they speak yeah so it's interesting because stories and i'm a huge fan of stories

have you ever read the book story no by robert mckee you should read this and this is what i read when it's 26.

story by robert mckee and it's a book all about the waste due script writing the prototypical types of scripts drama comedy and how

it's been shown over you know millennia how these stories are done it's it's a fascinating thing and it gives you an insight to and it's it's written for you know obviously hollywood and and and movies

and things like that but it's incredibly useful for what we do um as designers and engineers and and technology piano leaders there's some aspect in this modern day where you know this podcast

and so on um what i love is the humans behind the story too so some part of the story is the human beings so humor

drama heartbreak hope emotions emotions that's not just about us a painting a

beautiful story that's flawless it's uh vulnerability yep it's uh you know being a dreamer like over promising and then uh

failing real life so changing your mind realizing sort of just the whole of it and then also being like uh depending of course where your personality is

um embracing the full richness and the complexity of the personality of the leader or the different people involved i mean that that's all part of it like you can't just present this

beautiful always pleasantville view of a product there has to be this um this humanity that's part of it the the full roller coaster of the

humanity which i i think is uh been very difficult for companies to embrace right not sure why i'm not maybe it's just an old school way of doing things like people think

you know that we present a facade and uh you know we generate the story and we tell the story as opposed to sort of um well we learn in especially in the

technical world we present the story as it's faster it's smaller it's longer battery life it's it's bits and numbers and you know and metrics

that that resonates sure with other geeks what resonates with the the the you know the planet it's all emotions right and if you can

bring a great emotional story but with a great rational story at the same time why you should do this and it's like oh my god you bring that superpower that joy

then it all hangs and there's personal drama too like the human right the here's the pain i had remember that thing and like i mean just i mean just you

know uh you're you're obviously this extremely well-known human being that's behind a lot of these uh great inventions of the technology

world but you're also just a human being you have a clearly uh like a distinct personality that comes through the like your eyes light up just the way you communicate is just you

um some people are more stoic some people are sure like uh elon is you know all over the place the chaos uh steve jobs

you know there's a very i mean it's hard to put into words i can be poetic and so on but there's a very distinct it comes on stage you know that personality right there that's not just the product that's

something else too correct and like you have to reveal that a little bit and allow people to reveal that a little bit and just let them be themselves well

look why why do i think your podcast is so amazing because you are yourself you talk about yourself you bring your emotions into it and you don't modulate it

you you're you right it comes through it's it's true it feels right you are you you that you you dress the way you want to dress you say this

is me and this is all of me and you and you become vulnerable right it's much easier to do a podcast like that than run a very large company correct where a lot of people would feel the pain if you

make if you say something stupid right if you so um there's a it's much more easy to be afraid right and be careful so

but nevertheless the same applies um authenticity and risk taking is is is the only way unfortunately to be successful in the long term uh let

me just because we're jumping all over the place uh i just linger on the ipod sure one of the great designs um broadly speaking in the word design of

all time what what does it take to design a great product if you look who can jump around we could look at nests we can look at ipod we can look at iphone and many of the great things uh you

design but just looking at that one transformational thing what can you say about what it takes

to do a great design or maybe what makes a great design well we talked about you know a painkiller and we talked about the

we talked about that you know joy that comes from it but then there's the behind the scenes there's the team there's everyone who brings it to life

brings that story to life if you have a great story and you know the why then you can communicate it to those people who are working on it and then they bring their own thing into

it right it becomes emotional for them too it's not just a job it's a mission and so many of the details that are born

out of these early prototypes these things that you still haven't given full form to there may be eighty percent done or maybe even sixty percent done but you can see

enough in there then you take those great ideas and you give the why's to the team and so that they feel it they can understand it then they bring

their best and their ideas to the table and then you can select from those and you can then start to um you know it could be just a pixel change it could

be a slight change on how you do the audio for the feedback or maybe a curve on the mechanics or something like that of how it feels because everybody brings themselves trying to you know feel this

thing they're not just doing something that someone told them to do if you can instill that mission and that why into that team it doesn't have to be big you get

i feel a 10x everyone comes together in a special way and um and the magic is created you put the love into it the customer feels the love on the other

side so the making the team like taking him in onto the vision onto the why now they feel the all the little details we think of

the original ipod and all the many generations after all those little details are in them is the emotion of the engineers

and the designers that it's their baby it's like a knight's struggling this isn't right like you said changing little pixels here and there

changing changing the shape of things changing the feel of things like uh the materials the i don't know just everything on the

software part of the packaging the words on the packaging just everything the words on the website and always jumping from the very specific detail problem to the big picture how the thing feels

the overall always jumping back and forth what does it look like to the customer how are we going to implement it in the most um you know efficient way because you know a lot of stuff you don't know is some of that stuff is

hacked in maybe hacked in at the end it might it it may not be the most beautiful architecture that a geek would look at and go oh my god that's so beautiful because we can look at and visualize

this incredible software stack or hardware stack some of it could just be hacked in you make it better over time but it was that brilliant thing and we got to get that in because that's the way you do it now and we'll make it more efficient

later maybe this is a good moment to draw a distinction between design and engineering and does such a distinction even exist

are these distinct disciplines or no i don't think they're just distinct i think they're different types of design i think there's you know there's always this you know this

idea of this oh on the mount designer and it all comes down and it all flows down like some magic it's not there are electrical designs

there's ai designers there is data scientist designers everybody has design and there's a chapter in the book all about that actually that it's not just

you go to the mount and it comes down and you're enlightened it's each person brings their their form of design and their craft because what if they're really good they're artists in their own

right they're not just engineers they're not just design they're artists they're empathetic they really want to bring their best a lot of the best engineers i have are not the technical or that i've worked with are not the technical

gotta get it exactly right they're the artists they came from music or they came from other things and they they see that right when you work with very rigid engineers

this is the way the only way those are not the engineers i want to work with they're all like a bit artists at heart right they they understand the practical

practicalness they don't have to have the rigidity of this is the way it's done like where if you're building something new

all new and revolutionary none of us are experts at it and if you come with that expert mindset just tell me and i can give you a story i should probably give you that story um

about that if you come with the expert and i'm the expert when you're doing something no one's ever done before i don't want you on the team because we all are learning about something that has never been

in existence before and we have to bring that level of vulnerability and openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things throughout the team

so you want people that are able to have like beginner's mind or whatever like don't don't come in as an expert what's the story okay you're not a story okay all right no i i can tell it's just all right so

so you know you asked what were these risks you know like on the early ipod and there's there was there's a few big risks like one and this this doesn't go in the story but like putting rotating

media in your pocket and it could drop at any time what happens there and like you can damage because the heads and the hard drive media are so close it smacks

it's dead right so that was one big one like is holy right so that was something we and we had to design special tests and everything and special software on that but then there was

another one which was at the early days the way the first generations of ipods i had to hack the i had to hack the ide interface to the hard drives so i was like okay what we're going to

use is we're going to use this chip for hard drive um hard drive to make a hard drive you had to have a chip that did firewire to a hard drive okay and then

that would become a portable hard drive well then we had up we had the mp3 player and and the user interface and everything so there was times when it was just this hard drive

and there was times when it was a mp3 player and i had to hot switch between what the hard drive thinks it was talking to yeah right so designed this thing tore it apart done all this stuff

and i was like you know maybe i'm going to screw up ide and there's something there's some holes i'm going to see so i go who's the expert at apple who understands ide and everything

so this person comes over the mass storage specialist comes over and i put on the whiteboard and said here's how we're going to do this thing and here's the commands and this is how it hot switches and everything he's like

that's never going to work yeah i was like what it was never going to work i said well let me go over here and show you this right here i haven't prototyped and it's been working for days i just wanted to see if you're going to have it find any holes in the

thing right didn't even get and he just stormed out of the room and never never even yeah right that's hilarious i've had a lot of experience like this with experts like for example this ridiculous

room um i had uh i had a person and many people like this that i showed them here's the situation

you know it's acoustics acoustics yeah they're like no no no no this is horrible this does not this is not gonna work the reflection

the the curtains are not gonna stop uh the reflex there's a bunch of terminology they're telling me um it's a similar kind of situation as the idea which i was like no i

listen i just need to see is there major issues and they're like a low-hanging fruit that are fixable and major holes i should be aware of not like that's 100

000 to upgrade to upgrade for what exact purpose what not why yeah exactly exactly the why the focusing on the on the story and

the content on the the why the why do i and that that actually i've experienced that unfortunately in the artistic realms too which is like photography and videography cinematography uh

it's interesting i talked to photographers that are quote-unquote experts and it's always about the so much of the focus is on the equipment

the equipment behind the sensors and the lighting and it's like all right all right but um

what about what about the feeling of the story you create visually the difference between a

a movie that's really well told and it doesn't have all the effects and everything versus maybe some of the superhero movies we see all the time which is good luck if there's a story but man there's a lot of action and and

cgi well that's that's right and that and there's also value to the to to those right cgi superhero can tell a better story but you have to have a good story to begin

with sure exactly but it it's if you're focused on the story i guess you need to start with a story you need to start the story and if you bring in experts

they can often be uh detrimental i guess to the why they're they're too good at doing the what well you can bring in experts for why there's lots of

experts for why too many times we get experts for what yes and then they only focus on the what and so you so they come with the specs and feeds and the the numbers and all

the other stuff but what you're really asking for is i need somebody about the why in understanding what we're trying to get done here and fitting the what's into that why

right that's why i i do think that i i one of the qualities that i really enjoy for people to work with is like humility for a particular problem when you approach it

basically i don't know how to solve this but we're going to figure it out as opposed to oh i've solved this thing many many times before i know exactly

what to do uh humility before the chaos sort of having having an open mind that this is going to require a totally new way of doing uh things it's a really

nice quality to see um you know you're one of the fascinating humans in the history of silicon valley steve is another one of those so those two humans came together for a time to

work together what was it like working with steve jobs what uh aspect of his behavior and personality

let's say brought out the best in you pushing you really pushing you relentless on the details challenging you for the right reasons

it wasn't bullying it wasn't demeaning he would critique the work not judge the person at least not in front of them or inside of a you know in front of a group or anything like that i know it

was really that attention to detail and he when he would make a decision you know there are when you make the first version of anything something revolutionary there are a lot of opinion-based decisions

and there's only one or two people three people who hold those opinion-based decisions and what they should be and when you have those opinions

and you're trying to work with the team to implement those decisions you have to really tell the why of those decisions just don't go do it but why

it's there so you can feel part of that um decision you can understand what were the trade-offs of the different other answers to that opinion right

and say this is the reason why we picked the what we picked because it's this for the customer or this for the overall story what have you so that you felt really good because a lot of times most people want

a data driven decision but with v1s you don't get data right maybe in a b2b you could a little bit because you can talk to customers but you can't do that with a consumer

property one version one b2b business the business versus what's the alternative uh business to consumer v okay which is defining centers

yes yes so and when you say data driven decisions versus what opinion-based decisions so like gut you have to use you don't have any um

you can't fall back on any data or any previous history to kind of inform you of what's going on right and so if you look at most

companies who are paralyzed and cannot make new innovations and new products it's because they're trying to turn and this is what i saw at philips they're trying to turn opinion-based decisions

into data-driven decisions so they don't lose their jobs so if you look at management consulting management consulting is all about taking those opinion-based decisions

giving them to someone else to turn into data that comes back to them and says they can blame the management consultants yeah when something goes wrong as opposed to it wasn't me

yeah right when you need to have to tell that story you have to understand that especially v1 you need to be able to um

articulate those those opinion-based decisions and you need to own them and if you fail with some of them you didn't get it right you you then own

them and fix them and move on right version one of the ipod wasn't perfect version one of the iphone wasn't perfect we got a lot of opinion-based decisions wrong but as you go through it because you got

more data because v2 you had data on those original opinions and then you were able to then modulate off of that right and you still have new opinions because those are differentiators that you that we call differentiators that

the things that you know move the move the product forward in its evolution but at the revolution stage opinions opinions opinions no data and so you have this discussion you and

steve and the whole in the stage and the whole team with opinions and there you have to be harsh i i wouldn't say harsh but you have to

be very determined right you know there there are two real opinion-based decisions that happen on the iphone one was the keyboard should we have a key hardboard keyboard

or should we have a virtual keyboard the blackberry was the number one productivity messaging device of its time it was called a crackberry for a reason because people loved it because it had

it was easy to type and you know they could get their work done but when you're saying we're going to move from that everyone's talking about that in the market and you say we're going to move to a virtual keyboard and

it's not going to work as well as the hardware keyboard that's an opinion-based decision right because the data is telling you yeah all the best sales are over here god that takes cuts

it takes guts but you have to look at it from a different point of view and this is how i learned to come to understand this because i had been building you know virtual keyboards before and i knew

you know the goodness and the badness in them right but he was like look those are productivity devices we're making it where ours is born out of an entertainment device and productivity right

we need to show full screen videos we are going to have apps here not apps but our apps the apple apps because there were no app store yet are going to take over the whole screen you want a full screen web browser you don't want one

that's like half of the device is just a keyboard maybe you don't need that keyboard in every instance so we want that part of the screen to change based on the tool you may need at the time and maybe it's just full view right so you

have to go and understand it's a different type of device just because that's that and it's successful for that reason the crackberry for the keyboard that's not the only thing you're going to do with this device because people only did messaging and maybe a few phone

calls right this was going to be so much more it was going to be an entertainment web browsing device so you wanted those tools to go away but it wouldn't be as good as the hardware keyboard so that's an opinion but let me give you another

opinion based decision that got turned around before it shipped steve said no sim plot i don't want any slots we're going to make it very pure

johnny was like of course no slots johnny and we all looked around and go that doesn't work you can't do that well why does variety and then he would always and this was

the magic of steve like when you said no that doesn't work you go well why does verizon not have any sim slots right they showed that you can do a mobile phone with those limits you're like

okay here we go and so a few days later we come back with you know and and so uh product marketing voice of the customer engineering we all come back with all the data showing how

many how many data networks and mobile networks required sim cards versus did not and what the trends were and we showed the data

and that killed the or excuse me brought back the sim slot on the original iphone because we're like because he was just like we're going to tell a t to not use a sim yeah right we're going to just tell them to do it

differently right but we were like if we want this thing to go anywhere around the world you want to put that friction in people are going to move from place to place you know they have different sims because of the prices and all that stuff

we had to show all of that data and then that opinion-based decision got turned into a data-driven decision and it and the sim slot obviously showed up so those are two ver at the very same time

yeah right opinion can hold and so can data over rule opinion when data does exist for a v1 but the at the end of the day you

don't know what the right answer is so doing no sim card slot may have been the right decision we won't know

because maybe if that was the decision then like many times throughout apple's history you basically changed the tide of how technology is done

yeah absolutely you know you never know apple started wi-fi people don't understand wi-fi came out of there there was no wi-fi in 2001 apple started wi-fi and then everyone else you know got onto

on board if you look at now where we're going we're going to phones without sim slots because we have e sims right and now the sim slot is becoming legacy legacy as a legacy port

that legacy port will probably be gone by six maybe ten years he'll be gone i'm pretty sure of that um because it's so much easier for carries they don't have to have physical things to go out and right

so right now it's just the early days but it will happen and it will go its way it'll fall away but it will take time you just couldn't do it back then so timing is essential here but at the

end of the day it's opinions and that's where the genius is sometimes the data tells you one thing but the data at the end of the day does represent the past exactly and the future may be different

than the past right uh sometimes there's wisdom in the in the past and sometimes it's actually representative of something that should be

uh overcome and uh progress looks like leaving that stuff behind like um right the headphone jack right i mean that when uh when different folks

were getting rid of the headphone jack boy that i would love to be a a fly in the wall of those oh discussions we had that oh

that was that was a discussion that happened almost every year yeah that was an every year should we get rid of headphone jacks on the ipod yeah right when are wireless headsets going to happen what it right and it

took years to build all the right protocols the chips all those things to make the experience that is the i airpods today right to say have the confidence because

bluetooth was good but it wasn't apple like so nat it's like we got to make our own chips we got to make our own software stacks now we have the confidence to remove the headphone jack and actually make you pay 200 more for

your iphone that you were just paying because it's a headphone jack now we've grown our revenue we've given a new experience to the user right and ta-da you know it's just it's magic and

now if the world's transformed to everyone you know moving to that right but it took years to understand the problem develop the technology to and not just rush it to market to get a half

experience but to get it right and refine it then ship it and only then after it was probably four or five years in development just like the m1 processor right

that was a work from 2008 right grinding away grinding away grinding away then saying okay now we have the confidence we're doing our own silicon

for all the iphones and ipods ipads and such now we're going to turn to the mac and make sure we have the best processor right not just that we have the best integrated design team and then

saying we're gonna you know and then besting everyone making sure the software's and the hardware is designed at the same time making sure the kernels all those things are

are gonna use the best efficiency and then popping it out and then it feels seamless it's magic there were no as far as i could tell unless you were

in real esoteric drivers or something like that it just worked it was magic like the transit it was not even a speed bump it was not even a crack in the road

so um perhaps famously steve had a bit of a temper steve jobs would would you say his particular personality in this aspect

was constructive or destructive in the process of shaping these opinion-based ideas

so in build i write a chapter called yes and you lay out beautifully the types of

and uh maybe you could speak to the constructive and the destructive types of okay so there's really two delineations that i

that i've found of you know real fundamental ones and that is again the why why do i feel this person is an

okay they might not be i feel this is a person who's an are they motivated by their ego or are they motivated by their mission

something they're trying to do that's and doing in service of something else right sometimes those lines can be blurry but it's usually pretty clear when it's when it's ego motivated

you're it's clear they're just trying to get up in the ranks push people down shove people aside i think we saw a president do that on a stage once um

you know i'm me and i'm the you know i'm the the the guy right and i'm gonna prove it by pushing everyone away and being nefarious or what have you either

passively aggressive or aggressively aggressive but they're doing about themselves there's another one which is someone who's so attentive to detail and

unrelenting that they're trying to get the right things for the customer or the in service of their mission and they want to make sure we fulfill those things right

and they really care they don't micromanage all the details but they micromanage the details where the customer it touches the customer in some way people who work with those types of

people who are unrelenting and push you and might make you upset a lot of times it's a knee-jerk reaction to go they are an get off my back you're

right and you're protecting your ego because what's happening is that person is usually pushing you beyond your boundaries they see something that we can do or you can do that you're

just either not wanting to do for whatever reason you're not confident in that you you're like i don't want to take the extra time and say no we need to get that done and pushing you

okay and so when we came to those areas it wasn't just a one-on-one it could be steve against the

team going we need glass instead of plastic on the front face of the iphone and we're going to do this and we're like god you know and so we did it

and he pushed us because he didn't know all the details but he could see in our minds that we're like yeah we could probably yeah we could probably but man it's really putting us in risk and we we laid out the risks for

him and he's like i'm willing to take those risks we'll do that we're like we might be three months late he's like this is so important we need to stay on time

you know but it would be all the time push push push i re it reminds me of like kids growing up and me as growing up you know when your parents push you to make you grow beyond your boundaries

your personal boundaries and you're like god damn it i'm sad you know but they do it for the right reasons now let's see it's not bullying it's not about bullying it's not about demeaning

it's about either pushing you to another part of the mission that needs to get done or it's about critiquing your work but not judging you yes well there's a lot to say there so one

uh it's fascinating it's it's really is fascinating and you laid out a very nice picture but it's it does feel like there's sometimes gray areas which is why it makes all this

very complicated so one question i have for you in terms of glass on the iphone um how important is it that like steven that case

is right because i could argue each side it seems like in one sense just having a strong vision and opinion

is already going to make everybody grow even if it turns out to be the wrong as long as you are sort of standing your ground um you know napoleon invading russia or

something in the winter like it's just not gonna be it's not that good right this is not a good idea but i'm gonna hold do that and then once you decide you go all in

and then from that even if the whole team knows it's the wrong decision just sticking by it powering through you will learn through the pain of it like everybody will learn so that's one side

the other is maybe um the the vision driven uh gets to be more and more of an if they have a track record

of through that process having built people up having made the correct decisions they can't they're not allowed to be an they're in rare air and no one

can challenge them right right steve was never that that's the great thing he was he was never unchallengeable you could challenge him now let's

now this the the plastic to glass story is a perfect example of this so at the beginning of the project well before we were going we had always had

these things about you know plastic front ipods these kinds of things these scratches and all that stuff so we said are we going to have a glass or a plastic display

a cover for the display because the display was glass underneath it we argued back and forth about glass versus plastic and then we all landed

together on plastic okay the original decision was plastic and the reasons were okay we don't want to make a mistake glass can break

you know people drop them all the time so we don't want to have a fragile device because you're going to be using even more than

a music player right and you're going to be holding your head and putting in your pocket and misses and all that stuff so we went down the road with plastic

when it was shown when the product was shown at mac world in 2007 the first time that was plastic we had just enough of them in the field

at the time we started to start seeing light scratches on the plastic reviewers who didn't have the device yet because it was behind glass if you if if

you remember 2007 the jesus phone comes up and no one could even touch them you could just look at it in this beautiful museum quality box like it came from the future or whatever the past it was like

oh and you just looked and that was all you got but then people said well what screen is what covers on that you know reviewers who knew better you know and they're like oh it's plastic and they

were like really and so there was enough of a doubt there and then when we started to do it and then steve changed the frame of reference of the question or of the

result of what the customer would think and he was like if we designed it with plastic and it's in their pocket all the time and it gets scratched by coins lightly scratched or by keys or something like

that that is a design problem we need to fix the that was our bad if they go off and drop it

or even slightly drop it and it cracks it's the customer's fault and they have much lower they have less likelihood to complain

yes they'll complain but they're part of that of that failure yes oh that's fascinating and then there's truth to that right

because then they were part of why it failed whereas the design they didn't do anything wrong it was just sitting in their pocket and it's you know it's scratching and that's normal use abnormal use has been dropped and we're

like oh now we get it and so we all moved to that mindset when you framed the problem and the solution in that way versus the

original framing where we all landed on plastic so and then he was unrelenting on that but we all had moved and we have moved mindset and we

understood the why and we marshaled together and then by the end of june and it was crazy the mechanical product design teams

sourcing all of us all the the partner corning pulled together to make that happen because it was the right reason right so this you know you look at these stories and

you hear just the top line rumors of the takeaways but that's not usually how it all happened of like one leader was that's not how steve was now i've seen leaders who were just

pounding you know and just had no real empathy for the team and understanding the why and it's just it is the way i want it right i am the supreme leader that wasn't like that

when he just had a very strong opinion a very strong opinion but it was challengeable it was challengeable and if you came with the right thing you know it was you could you could modulate that but you

had to come with a team it couldn't just be you and you had to become a team and data and to overcome because it was a very strong opinion and there's personal quirks of character like you said

days and good days bad days and good so there's also the three options you said you you notice that the third option is always going to be the one that's picked uh sure those kinds of idiosyncrasies

idiosyncrasies and that so that brings up another thing okay uh you said challenge the idea not the person you know

i'm somebody who has a you know i have a temper i've i use colorful language and so on when i'm on teams i work in my private life i'm much calmer and so on but i get when i get really passionate

with engineering teams and i've been called an i mean i am distinctly aware that you cross lines uh often um

there's like levels right sure you know you could it has to do with language and how language is heard so for example you could say a lot of stuff to me you could swear you could say

stuff that sounds pers like like i don't know lex sometimes i think you're the dumbest human on the face of the earth or something i don't know this sounds very personal right but i'm

not going to take that personally i understand what's being said and then i'm also noticed that there's other people that take stuff more personally this has to do with teams and figuring out like okay who's going to take

certain words personally or not and you have to know that's what takes makes a great coach a great leader a mentor you have to you have to like factor all that in but it just there's something about just being an

and um being passionate and really driven that sometimes you do cross lines and that's i don't know what to do with that

because it feels like it comes with the territory like you have it seems like you can't just have a perfectly optimized no no absolutely not that we're humans yeah

we're humans we don't have a program everyone's programmed the same way to react the same way to given stimulus right yeah so you know you said i don't know if this was a real example but you said oh

you're the dumbest human on earth or whatever i would never say that absolutely never and if someone said that to me or i saw someone else say that to another person on the team

absolutely not that is not allowed because that's judging someone you may be heated and you can get heated and you can say it in your intonation but to then try to put a label on it and put a label

on a person that is not allowed so if you let that kind of culture happen and it becomes somewhat you know sometimes it's in jest you know it has to be very much ingested

and those two people have to have a really good working relationship so but other than that i'm sorry it's going to be a lot more you could say a septic in that way that

you're not going to add that stuff in but you can do it with all other types of ways without saying that because then people who do react to that kind of language and don't have those shields because

they don't might not might not have that stream confidence level that you do and you can just brush it off you can that can be very cancerous in a team because people then meme that and then they see oh that's

the right way to be you got to snuff that out and you got to be that you got to be that change or that model that you want to show the team yes it's too even if it doesn't affect

me it's going to affect a a significant enough fraction of brilliant people where that shouldn't be part of the culture exactly and and other people see that happen and then oh

i guess that's acceptable right just like politics in the workplace is that's acceptable or not i call it out exactly when i see it in front of everyone right because

it's just another ego driven thing you have to set the tone as a leader for what you want your organization to be and how to it gets reflected in the world and you have to uphold that and you can sure you can

have an excursion outside of that but you have to go back and say i'm sorry yeah yeah you have to apologize heal and said i was not the person i wanted to be that

day i'm really sorry yeah this is and even in front of the team and have that humility and say we're all human here and just because i'm the leader doesn't mean i don't make

mistakes so have the self-awareness apologize exactly and that that's that's also part of the culture um oh yeah how are you different from

steve as a leader and designer so you you've spoken about sort of what made you stronger which is he was able to challenge he was able to push you to

bring out the best well i come from the technical angle right deep technology software hardware systems thinking you know implementation all that stuff so i so i have a

different ben he wanted to be an engineer started but really he was much better at all the other things the storytelling the interfacing and and being the voice of the customer and being that product

marketer in a way right that we talked about i grew into being the product marketing and marketing he came really out the other way right and never got really deep technically so that's two different mindsets no one's not better

or worse it's just that's how it is and it takes all kinds to to and and all kinds can do great designs did it manifest itself differently just the fact that you came from those diff

uh different places absolutely like what uh so like the discussion about glass on the iphone was probably had a different flavor to it sure when you started getting into the technical details

enough so you're getting the third order technical details and he can't argue with that anymore he's like okay you know at some point he's like i can't win this war like the and he learned

that very early on because he didn't like the way the look of the macintosh um board the pcb was laid out he wanted to be beautiful on the outside and on the inside he's like why are all

these wires running this way why doesn't it have all this symmetry and we have to make it beautiful on the inside and and the even the traces on the boards have to look a certain way so the teams made

the board they knew that would work and then they made the board that the way steve wanted it and that didn't work and then steve instantly figured out like at some point don't micromanage every single detail there's some things he

doesn't know enough about so he would get out of that but that was one of those instances where he pushed really hard and that's his opinion so they said okay we're going to make it a data-driven decision we're going to make

both i'm going to show you the results right and then from there he didn't get into those details so from that you could have a great challenge right because then you could get those data and say we can't do that and let me show

you why or we can do that and then steve would go you can't do that you're like oh we can do that let me show you right so there's certain times when you were like bringing something to reality that he didn't think could exist

right so it was that it was always that creative tension that interaction that was so successful right i think but there was one other fundamental thing that was different

and that it graded on the team and that i made sure and i learned from to not do and and i over maybe overdue now in the opposite direction which is

when there's a great idea that comes from the team acknowledge that person and go that is a great idea as the leader you know the opinion driven that's a great idea let's build on that let's see if that can do

that or it's a great idea but not for now put it aside but call out when people have great ideas because it's infectious and that means not ideas that come bubble up to the customer level but

inside the organization people like they get rewarded for their ideas and say that's a great one steve was always like you give an idea

and he would go hmm okay i don't know the next day 24 hours later it would come back with slight modifications i've had this genius idea

right and it's sooner or later we'd we'd look around the table and we'd like roll our eyes and go here we go again so it demotivates you from generating ideas a little bit yeah well you know we got

used to it but you know later on in the team yeah you know it was just not it it just it doesn't want to bring the best right because if you're always like er the reaction is never that's a genius

idea it was always like it was either negative or neutral right yeah then it doesn't it doesn't have that same emotional effect that you want you to bring your best yeah

sometimes it's fun when people get excited about it just yeah yeah yeah you kind of build on top excitement it could be but coupled with sort of harshness when the idea is bad and you call out the bad ideas too so it's the good and

the bad oh you could say you don't you don't have to say bad ideas like maybe not now let's table that for later let's discuss it or say that's a decent idea but did you think

about that idea this way not just no or yes but let's talk about why that might not be applicable in this case so that they can learn so the next time they bring the next idea they can modulate

and understand and start seeing through the opinion based decision makers or the databases to bring it and bring better formatted arguments or ideas so that you have better chance of success the next

time yeah right you gotta train through those moments you to teach those are teaching moments yeah moments i aspire to be that kind of person i'll usually say that that that

idea is that is the like the like and then you that i remember that that this brilliant person just gave that really shitty idea so i remember to make sure the next time

they give a good idea really compliment that good idea but i personally i mean it's emotion but i i call out the really shitty ideas but you should call

it the really great ones yeah if you let the pendulum swing both ways then everybody goes he's balanced yeah it's always one way why bring any idea i'm all about the

pendulum right you gotta have both the joy and the pain don't just give me pain all the time uh so you mentioned the glass and the

iphone so you're one of the not just the ipod not just nest you you were one of the key figures in the creation of the iphone what's the interesting aspects what what's the good the bad and the

ugly of the origin story of the iphone um again this is a netflix series that spans multiple seasons but what changed my flight please yeah what wisdom what's

interesting memories you have from the final so uh the the the pain and the joy that that was foundational to the uh

ipod uh the all the cds you had to lug around um what was the pain and the joy and the vision of the iphone in your mind in the mind of

the team and steve's mind and so on well you know there's multiple pains you have to also look there's not just customer pain but there's business pain

okay and it's about the so apple now is getting out of that place where it was in 2001. now people are starting to pay attention apple's starting to get in

the culture again it's becoming relevant cash is starting to flow ipod is 60 of that of the of the revenue total revenue of apple

doing on 85 market share you're starting to get a win at your back you got confidence like apple had been beaten down since probably the first time the mac was since the mac

it was a beaten company ever since the mac so we're talking 15 years at that point right this is the first time you're seeing likes and steve wood proudly came

in front of us and said today i can tell you all the employees we are now out of debt we paid off our debt it was a joyous moment for him

right and then ultimately for our team because no more debt it's wonderful right so now what you have is you have this successful thing changing the face of apple

and you hear these heavy stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry boom and it's the feature phones at that time they're adding cameras they're adding

color displays they're seeing the success of the ipod going that's just music we have some storage we can load music on our phones and we

can do what the ipod does plus more boom boom yeah right and you're like and how many mil hundreds of millions of them are being sold at that point it wasn't

billions yet but it was still you know 100 million 200 million a year ipod hadn't gotten there it was 4 20 40 50 million something like that so now you're like okay what are we

gonna do about this you know goliath who wants to take our lunch right the schoolyard bully and so well there was one let's partner with

them so itunes music store was there all of these phones are going to need music so they can come to the itunes music store

and get that music for those phones because it wasn't just about the hardware player at that point it was about the software that you need on the desktop and the content that you needed to download so now apple had multiple

legs of the stool as steve would always refer to it so now the mobile phone industry okay we're going to work with them they are going to make a red an ipod

shuffle basically inside of a phone can i have 99 songs total and they're going to come to our store and you're going to i was like okay great it's all gonna be well and

good and that became the motorola rocker project it was apple motorola getting together there's gonna be software on the on this smartphone or not smartphone but feature

phone to cook to itunes to get your music it wasn't even downloadable over a cloud or anything because that wasn't available yet there wasn't data networks yet um

it was a disaster from the beginning two different cultures two different types of leadership styles uh not necessarily the most competent engineers on on on on the other side

and it turned out to be an absolute horrible disaster i watched the pains because i luckily i didn't have to be part of it i watched the pains on jeff robin's face each time we would meet and he would be like

these guys are just you know like really do we have to do this steve and he's like we're contractually obligated and when it came out on stage and steve showed it it was maybe a one minute you

know steve loves those extended you know like drawn up it might have been a one minute two minute kind of thing and he literally threw that phone out of his hand as fast as he could yeah right because it was horrible so that so there

was the pain of we're not gonna partner so if we can't partner with these guys we have to become one of them to actually compete yeah to save the thing that is bringing apple from you

know that 15 years of malaise right so then from that we were made a prototype of an ipod plus phone a

classic with um well it was an ipod but had a phone inside with all the music and all the other stuff and you use your headset wired headset to do the audio right

there was another project at the same time because we were doing videos in the uh the itunes music store itunes video store for music videos and movies

and it would be a full screen ipod so instead of the the classic the way you know it um it would be full screen and it would have a virtual click wheel you'd have a virtual like single touch

touch screen that you could scroll right think of maybe an i an iphone like you knew it right and then there was a third project going on not in those two were going on in my team but the third

project going on was the multi-touch screen technology to drive a uh mac tablet and so that mac tablet that that touch

screen technology um there was just way too much you had to change on the software and everything to be able to use a tablet right we see this all the time like people like there's not enough tablet apps today

that are modified for tablet they're just phone apps that are grown up right so then they would just be mac touch stuff so you'd have to have a whole developer community that probably wasn't the best place to take that

technology first so you take that technology marry it with the full screen ipod and the phone stuff we were working because the ipod phone with a rotary dial was just like a rotary phone we

couldn't make that interface work well for data input um you put those three together and now is where those those three things that then created the form

or the technology and the form inside what would become the iphone married with a bunch of low-level software from the ipod and manufacturing software and drivers and communication

stuff combined with a very reduced frankenstein mac os and i mean that in the the mess the best

way it means it wasn't mac os just changed a little it was totally things were hacked out and changed and think new code was inserted and it really was a a whole set of things from all different

places to make that first iphone os and then there was another team working on the apps and then another team working on the design of how it looked overall between

all that stuff so all of those things came together to create what we know as the first generation iphone and those are all probably fascinating engineering

challenges correct and great teams like the creating frankenstein os that's fascinating because you're simplifying simplifying but then you're just pulling different stuff from and

you're basically inventing i mean they're probably not thinking of it that way but a new era of computing a new kind of computer it really is frankenstein right and you didn't have to run mac software

if you look at some of the other smartphones of the time like windows and stuff they were like we need to make sure it runs excel and it runs word or something like that in some reduced thing this was like no no no no

this was born out of entertainment so we didn't have to go and take all the same application you know uh all those other ones was about compatibility this was about a whole new way of being

what did you think about um the steve jobs presentation of the the iphone the the sort of the first iphone you know phone uh internet communicator

and the ipod in your pocket they're going to sort of present announcing three new products kind of thing and then saying that it's all in one just this is a good example

one of the sort of historic presentations of a product clearly there's like some showmanship that works some reason it works right it

doesn't always work it often doesn't work but it did in in this case it often did for steve what like how did that feel um what part of the actually

uh the design process was that presentation you know what i mean like from the early because you said for sure so consider the why the press release at the very exactly

steve was doing that the entire time he was working on that story from day one yeah he was pitching us this this this and then this and and then he would look at our faces because you wouldn't most

people wouldn't at least if you're working for him wouldn't tell him what you really thought of what he was saying but he would look at your faces yeah and then he would talk to a few real trusted confidence outside of the

uh outside of the organization and see what they thought right and they could give him feedback on it and they could really challenge him but they could he would also look at their faces and go and so when you see that

then he would modulate it and change it slightly and change so he was working during all of that time on the story and the storytelling right and the whys while we're working on that and helping

us refine it just like the switch from plastic to glass right all the time working on that so when he comes out on stage he does something that every marketer is told not to do

say these three things are now combined in one that is like the that they say that that is the laziest form of storytelling possible for marketing

right yeah right but it was the best one because it was all those pains it was like i want my ipod but i want my communications and i want my internet browsing because i want it on the go so

i can look up things because it was information and when you were on the road you had a laptop you had an ipod and you had a phone that and you had to carry all of these things with you at once

now we're going to solve that pain for you and put it all together so he was just showing you the pain and viewing that virus of doubt and going it's now in this one magical thing and he could come up and masterfully

tell that story because he told it almost every day to all of these people inside very quietly and then it was just right it was like a you know a tony

award-winning play that had been worked on for 10 years but also the human came through the timing it was all that it was a little bit and of course he was dramatic at certain points and he would

raise his voice and a wry smile or whatever it was all those touches he was an actor as well as a storyteller yeah and that but but it was the truth right

the truth came through it was a non-fiction story and then he added those personal flourishes on top of it for dramatic effect

it's amazing so there's a designer you mentioned johnny ave you both are brilliant designers great

human beings there were some battles fought in you in the distant past between the two of you uh looking back what is the positive characteristics of johnny that made you

a better person and designer having worked with him watching the process that the design team that johnny led

i don't know where because that was over years i didn't see all of those things but watching the design process of really because it was really a team that was about materials it was about form it

was about colors it was about these physical characteristics it it when we talked about this earlier was design what is design designs everywhere okay so what they were really

focused on was form how the feel was how it looked the aesthetics the physical aesthetics and watching going through that process

i learned so much in that process about how to do colors how to do materials how to think deeply about curves

right and shadows and how it would look not just in your hand but how it would look in the photograph you were going to take from marketing right so how it would look how it would

feel all of it it was it was all of those physical things around that and watching the process to get there

that was enlightening for me right it opened my mind to go oh okay just like there's a process for all these other things it wasn't just

magic and you say ah there it is it was really a process of refinement you know of opening the funnel at the beginning and refining

down over time to get to that final final and selecting and doing the selection and certain types you could certain times they were opinion-based design

details but a lot of data a lot of data-driven designs of what can we what can we deliver in volume what can we do different things so you always had these constraints that you had to work with

under and sometimes they uh and the team not just i would say we need this we're like we can't deliver that but maybe we were able to work together to find different design

characteristics and different implementation characteristics that could get to that point without what they were describing and instead of

yes yes yes no no no let's find some other way to solve the problem together yeah is and i've seen this um

and several companies have more closely interacted with like tesla as an example sometimes you know talking about curves sometimes it's very painful on the

engineering side to deliver a very specific kind of absolute thing and one question that comes up in my mind is like well how far should we go to try to

deliver a tiny adjustment in a curve in the curvature or in um like the whatever the form factor is in the color of the material

when the cost is like 10x to deliver not financially but just like you know yeah there are companies to do it how many problems still have to solve um i don't know i don't know if you can say

any wisdom to that because it because when you're thinking about curves you're designing in the space of ideas you're like platonic forms kind of thing uh not

always grounded to like how much this is uh how much pain is going to be involved in delivering this but that's as you should perhaps because then uh if you're always thinking about the

pain required to deliver this thing you you'll be too conservative you wouldn't do the wild ideas right exactly but you have to understand

again the why behind it and at nest when we had limited resources you know putting a screwdriver in the box a custom designed screwdriver in the box was born

out of those experiences i had at apple and seeing how you can create something that's emotional it's part of marketing and it's part of the product experience overall even though it it seems

extraneous i went back and made the design team uh and the mechanical team changed some curves on the nest protect the smoke and co detector we did at nest

after they had already tooled it and i said they're saying this cost more i said it doesn't look right there is a but they're like oh well we had i said no you're going to go back and you're going to make that change i told you you

want we needed to do it we had a better looking model that is going to get done i know it's going to be a terrible cost to you but we already had this discussion and that's the way it's gonna

have to be and i'm sorry but it is what it is um and you know because it's better for the customer and it looks better and the pictures and all the other stuff and then we did it and it was great and

everyone agreed it was great at the end but it was pain to get there um those are where those little details are where the magic comes out right and you know if you don't do

if you don't take those pains and put in the love the customer customer's going to feel it's going to they're either going to feel the pain or they're going to feel the love if you put it in right so it depends on you know

how much time and effort you want to put into something and what really matters to you and so how you communicate what you do we're human beings after all is there something you've learned from sort of

the the tensions that are natural or that happen in teams when they're passionate and they're trying to solve these problems is that the way of life

and there's the human drama is that just is that always going is that it is what it is is that make you better actually the the drama of the tension between

personalities and all that kind of stuff look a roller coaster ride without ups and downs is no fun it's the journey yeah it's the journey

that brings it brings out the best in everyone we're we're we're forged we're tempered by those experiences not all the ups but also the downs and that's when you get the

humanity in the connection and we can tell these stories till we're blue in the face and smile every time because we did something together that we each of us couldn't do a part but it when your

comes together that's where all the emotions happen yeah and that's where if it's born out of the right reasons and the right story in the right way that's where the magic happens not just for the

customer but for how it transforms each person who is working on it and they will never forget those experiences in their life positively and negatively that happened at the time but they look back and it's

only positive because they did something that mattered yet another brilliant idea that you brought to life is nest

nest thermostat and the big umbrella of nest again as part of this uh netflix series season three [Laughter] what was the most memorable the most painful

the most um insight-leading challenge you had to overcome to bring nest to life well the first thing for me

was making someone care about their thermostat right no one considers it they never had any customer choice they didn't install it they usually don't even use it because it's so

complicated or what have you they just like they just they at it they hide it in the corner and then they just pay the bill right of whatever it is right it's totally

unloved unconsidered right so how do you wake up like i said the virus of doubt how do you wake that up and get people going you know remember every day when you go in and it's like you're just frustrated and then you get the bill and you pay

the bill so you have to do that so that was one thing i think the other big one was not delivering you know it was all of it was hard right it was constrained we had only so much stuff we were bootstrapped we didn't have massive

funding we didn't get hundreds of millions of dollars it was but we did it for the right reasons but i think the other big part of it was not just building a disruptive product because a lot of the people on the team

had done that we knew what we were doing and and that was if we got the design right we could deliver it with the enough time

it was getting the disruptive go to market in other words how to take that product from the end of the production line and get it into the customer's hands because there was no

retail or customer choice in thermostats no one even it was never considered purchase they never thought they had choice some guy usually in suspenders and a butt crack

told them looked around looked at their house and said um this looks like somebody who's got is well to do this thermostat is now going to cost you 350 thank you very much

and you're like i'll take whatever you give me right and then and it goes into another house it's worth a hundred dollars was the same damn thing yeah right so there's no price transparency there was no choice you just got what

you were given so how do you go and and and this was an entrenched industry that's why there was no in it there was no innovation in it because it was doing just fine because every house needed them

the all the installers were programmed by the the product deliverers by you know bonuses and and and bonuses to say you're going

to only carry out product and if you sell this many you're going to get a free trip to hawaii right yeah and for these guys who install i get a free trip to hawaii that's dream for them right so

this whole channel was fully controlled by the product guys and it was almost monopolistic in a way so how do you go around that so creating a disruptive go to market

channel one was direct to consumer right and all the marketing that was necessary to get that message across another one was getting the installation

right no one was self-installing thermostats so how do we get enough people who are early adopters to be able to self-install them confidently

so they didn't still have to call the guy to come and install it because then he would say this is a crap product no i got the must better product right so you had to get rid of that friction and then ultimately how do you get the

people who were not just early adopters but people who needed to see it and touch it before they bought it how do you get that into retail when the large brands of the time of

thermostats and home depot and lowe's had contracts that they couldn't bring in any other brands they were owning the channel all the way to where there was an any sort of slight

customer choice and it was really contractor choice more than it was and consumer choice so all of that had to be innovated along with the product and so

to me that was a huge challenge and something i had never done most of us had never done and we had to to create that was as much as a project as actually delivering the the product

itself so it turned out to be a giant hit [Laughter] and it was acquired by google for 3.2

billion dollars as a founder and leader just out of curiosity in these cases of acquisition um is it always a good thing

is there any part of you and the team that considers saying no oh we considered saying no all the way along the process right we had all been in big companies

before um we knew what it was like and the politics and all the other stuff and what i came to learn especially from phillips because phillips was a

very it was 375 000 people was a big it was massive company right and tons of politics and i was like do we want to go back into the world because i had so

many negative experiences from that but then going to apple which was no not big but it was big enough that it could have all these dynamics but then when you saw a leader rise up and get rid of

those dynamics or not allow many of them to to flourish then you're like oh with the right leadership this can be a beautiful marriage right and so for four months we

were working together with them with google to make sure that we had the right leadership and we were going to be in the right environment that it felt right so that happened it absolutely happened we worked on all the details we didn't

even talk about price we were talking about how's the brand going to work who's the team going to work with how are we going to get ip how are we going to do exchanges how are we going to get budgets and all that stuff done so we worked through all of that before we

actually sealed any kind of deal because they were already an investor in the company so we already knew you know they knew relatively where their you know the end point was for the price so working through all those

prerequisites i knew that as a individual product company that was trying to create a platform no investors were going to invest in a

platform that could take three four years and many many hundreds of millions of dollars to build without all kinds of new products at the same time and products that we were having which were successes but they weren't even

break even yet right we were still developing them so how are we going to get more people to fund all of these things and this platform that i really want to create because my worry and i had seen this

many times in silicon valley is these small startups have bravado and they said i'm going to take on the big guys right with a platform but when those platform guys show up and

apple says they're going to get in the house at the time nobody cared they were they were curiously curious what's nest yeah yeah but apple wasn't in the market google wasn't in

the market yet amazon wasn't there microsoft samsung they were not they were all just that's curious right yeah and i had watched if you said i'm

going to go challenge them and i'm going to build a platform and then they all of a sudden one by one go oh well we're building a platform now we're building a player they flooded you to death fear uncertainty doubt and the

developers run away and you can't make that platform so i'm like before the landscape gets changed on us because we've attracted so much attention they announced something we need to change the landscape on them

[Music] let's go to the best place where we can build out the platform have the right leadership behind us to help us grow this thing into what the vision it should be and that's what we

believe we were doing with the the google acquisition is it possible to take on the platforms so you said there's a lot of startups with

bravado and all that kind of stuff right doesn't mean you know james joyce when he was 20 said i'm going to be the greatest writer of the 20th century

uh before he wrote anything of value um you know one of them might be actually right [Laughter] um yeah in this modern world when you so

first of all people should definitely uh get your book billed as just just uh this giant number of advice on this exact

question of how to build cool things how to build a startup how to all the different stages of that team and hiring and it's mostly human nature

it's not technical it's mostly human nature behind it and it turns out it's you know turtles all the way down that's human at the bottom uh yes so

is it possible to build startups that take on the big guys uh whatever that is of of the modern era so for now it's these platforms of uh

apple google twitter i don't even know meta i guess called now sure um is it possible to take them on absolutely but you don't take them on on their same turf

you take them on on the turf they're gonna want to have in the future right spotify is a platform it started as an application is now a platform yeah right

think of wechat think of all the super apps out there that are now wallets and delivery services and travel services and and transportation services all within an

app yeah they've innovated in a different level in a different space that the the platform companies weren't right or they you know google was an app it was an app company it was solving

search and then it became a platform company apple was solving personal computing and then it became our iphone was doing you know uh um solving internet browsing all that stuff

and then became a platform company when the app store was added if you look it up there's no such thing as building a platform company you build a great app first and then you can expand it and

have the right to become a platform your whole book is just uh a bunch of advice for young people but let me ask you i know other people

and old well everyone is young at heart if you're not you should be so what uh in terms of picking a career you have advice and this point what advice would you give to a person

on how to pick a career what is it you want to learn and who is it you want to learn from just like you pick a university you're like i want to go here for this

expertise i've heard about these programs especially graduate graduate studies you go for a certain program with a certain set of people why don't you do that when it comes to a

you know a job you just don't go or in a career you just don't go and say i just want to go work at google or i just want to work at apple you want to go to a certain team with a certain set of people and

work with them on something that you're really curious about and you want to learn about that's such i just wanted to comment that it's such a it's a subtle but a brilliant framing of

just ask the question what do i want to learn and then see what career path is going to maximize

that that's so interesting it's the first question i ask anyone who interviews with me when i say i'm going to bring somebody on the team first question is what do you want to learn

i don't want the expert like we talked about earlier says i'm the expert in this you're going to hire me as the expert we're doing something new you're not an expert because we're not an expert either what is it you want to

learn and uh on the topic of learning what is the best way to learn what

um starting you you go into this new place into this new world into maybe v1 you said you're building v1 i mean

the whole world is late it's full of v1s or v0s waiting for the v1 to come along zero to one zero to one

what uh what's the process of that look like what's the process of learning um how do you learn well let me put a framing and then we'll talk about that last piece

i have now looking back especially writing this book i have a version one of myself a version two a version three a version four i had a lot of opinions

about myself and what i wanted to do sometimes those opinions for certain people those opinions are formed and they get the data from their parents and they go do what their parents told them to do or their surroundings

my opinions was like i want to go and learn this i'm curious about that i made the zero to one move and then over time by doing i was refining those things and learning what i was really curious about and what

i was really good about because i was getting data and then i was like then i had another set of opinions to create version two of me and then i would go and do it it's always learning by doing

starting with the opinion you're not gonna get any facts you know most people like um where do i make the most money from my position they're trying to start with data

start with the why what's your curiosity what do you want to learn and then follow that i took the lowest job at the on the totem pole at you know at uh at general

magic because i wanted to get in there to work with the right team i didn't even know what they were doing right but i thought that it felt right right i i was barely living above the poverty

line working there working you know 80 hours a week because it was so amazing to learn just like a college student right that's what i was doing and then that set and then i learned more from that and then changed those

opinions into data and then i found other opinions and so it's the same thing but it was by doing right the way you find out what you want to do in life is by figuring out what you don't want to do

and the only way you find that out is by doing a bunch of doing a bunch of stuff and refining it that's hilarious yeah that's brilliant um so in terms of the

career path of leaping into the startup world and launching a startup what does it take to successfully found a startup to have a chance to succeed

and maybe how do you decide uh to take that leap is there sort of

having founded having been part of many v1s many of some of the most successful v1s ever uh what's what's it take to take that leap maybe leave your

job at a cushy job at a company right and do the startup what does it take it takes belief in yourself

that's the first thing belief that you can do it not but hopefully with mirrors or mentors around your coaches around you to make sure you know you're not crazy

it's a crazy smart idea but you're not crazy and you're just working on something as a like a a lone mad man or woman you know

you have a great idea and i like i said great ideas chase you you can in this world there are so many people who have more ideas than they have time to implement

i used to be like that i would like oh my god have this idea this idea and you do you try to do all of them but the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on and you you shut out all those other things and you bring

them other ideas into the thing you're trying to do so i try to run away from a great idea and then it stalks me yeah it hunts you down because you're like ah that's gonna

have this problem i'm gonna put it aside and then all of a sudden uh you know a few days later oh i think i know how to solve that problem or i talk to somebody and you're just always kind of

niggling around the edges of it and then at some point it's like it just becomes it becomes like this black hole that just sucks you and you're like i can't think about anything else but this it's almost like a relationship in in the

world right you know when you have it with a per you find your partner you know you're like hmm wait um something and then you're trying to like and then all of a sudden it just

it comes together right it's kind of like that ultimately achieve folk see i'm different i just dive right in i used to do that too i used to dive right in yeah but i learned that you need more

time to run away from it run away from it and so it chases you because it makes you think harder about that the story this is not dating advice we're talking about

but ultimately so you have achieved uh a focus on it uh but you also said so believe in yourself so it's not necessarily even the idea it's the human that

um believe in the human being you have to believe in you yourself and the idea that you have because if you don't have that belief then you can't project that to other people to say join the team

[Music] uh let me let me ask you on because you mentioned mentors and you've talked about having had incredible mentors in your life you're also a mentor to a very large

number of people what does it take to find a mentor how do you how do you find a great mentor usually they also find you is it like with the ideas

[Laughter] no what happens is you're in the right you have a community around you okay and because you've been building a network because you can't do it alone so you

have to create this network around you and of relationships that don't it's not transactions but relationships over time that you really cherish and people you talk to okay and you share

vulnerable or nascent ideas with or crazy opinions with and then you argue them through but you start to see resonate and it's not

about age it's just about this connection right i have mentors obviously when i was young all my mentors were older and as i get older i have mentors who are younger than me or

the same age right they're not all just older right and so it's about that connection it's about being on that same wavelength but they also they can

counterbalance you they complement you in some way like my best mentors had nothing to do with technology they didn't know anything about technology right the way we know it they were all

about human nature and they could reflect that and help me get more human focused and more empathetic because i was so detailed in the technology i needed to see from other perspectives but then

they wanted to learn more about the technology right or they thought that this idea was so great that it should exist now let's work together on that so it's really they have to find you and

you have to find them and that's by sharing you just don't go and look it up on you know on the internet and say who are the best mentors in the world it just doesn't work that way so form a network of people and see

where i mean it's like finding relationships finding love all that kind of human nature uh venture capitalists money

do vcs help or hurt a business in general so like in those early stages in the chase of developing a v1 just what's the constructive and destructive

power of money in the development of a berlin idea and the deployment of brilliant idea i have seen brilliant venture

capitalists i have seen horrible ones ones that care about their lps more than they care about the entrepreneurs of course everyone's in it you know at the end of the day especially venture

capital they have to give a return to their their limited partners the people who invest in money that they you know that they have to shepherd that money and make sure it's watched over properly

but when there's not a balance a push back in a venture capitals between what the lp needs and what the entrepreneur needs and that the entrepreneur might be

trying really hard but if they don't see the vc doesn't see the exit's going to happen in two years and then just leave them hanging when it's there's no the

value exchange is only money and not mentorship or ideas or other things when there's not a relationship but really a transaction that's when money is toxic

because you can get money everywhere maybe it's a little harder today you know over the last month but you can still find people with money who are on that who want to

enable your mission and can be mentors not always not all of them but some of them can be mentors but they they're on your side then it's incredibly powerful because not just one plus one equals two right

it's something bigger than that because then they can bring their networks of people and their networks of companies and other people they worked with that might want to join your your your mission right

that's the kind of venture capitalist and and smart money that's out there right but you have to build a relationship people go oh look at that valuation oh it's the brand name of the

vc that uh that's investing me no it boils down to who's that partner and how experienced are they don't just give me the brand give me the person because that's the person i'm going to be

interacting with i i have to there's a million questions i want to ask you bro well season season we're on season five already okay but let me let me ask you it's it seems like uh out of all the brilliant things you

write about it seems like not an important question but it's a fascinating one to me as lawyers you're right about this so uh does the company need lawyers uh and why

and what kind so you write about sort of the value of this game i guess right it's a game the legal game it's it's why do we need lawyers sound exasperated i don't have a good question i guess i

um well because why of lawyers the why of lawyers yes exactly okay the y of lawyers thank you you even do the question

we just have to put y in front of everything you ask and then we'll be there lawyers why why even mafiosos had lawyers okay

you know tony soprano uh you know uh scarface all of them had lawyers right why because there are things in this world that you don't always consider

in the government in laws in uh competitors because you're so focused on what you're doing they have to watch out for you right

now the best kind of lawyers are the ones who try to work with you to enable what you're doing um and see gray areas law is not black or white it's how it's

interpreted right and so they can help interpret things a certain way or help push on things a certain way to get change happen or allow change to happen because if you have lawyers who are always just like you were talking about pr people

if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything because their job is to really say no or maybe they'll never say yes and you also say their job was to say no

and bill you by the hour exactly exactly it's depressing right yeah if you don't want to know don't ask them because you're going to get a no maybe a man you'll get charged for it and you'll get charged for it anyways

right so so to have a partner to have them on your team to help you see maybe some of things you don't see some consequences

they help to rein that in or change your their language like are you going to get sued for this ad yeah just change this one word and it helps yeah right so you need to have a partner most of

the times especially engineers or designers they see lawyers as only stifling lawyers can actually if you do it right and you have the right type they can actually open up a whole new world for

you because of the interpretation and how we go about doing things so and they help you not get bogged down in the pain of stupid little mistakes that didn't mean anything exactly you shot yourself in the foot and you didn't

even know it you didn't even know you were carrying the gun uh just to jump around charles bukowski once wrote find what you love and let it kill you

so the question is about work-life balance that's like finding an idea let it chase you yes but a little more aggressive uh so

what is uh what does work-life balance look like that maximizes success and and or happiness is there such a thing as work-life

balance is um can you speak went to this your work is your life and i mean that in the positive sense when you're on a mission that really matters

and you know that you can really affect not just yourself but other people's lives and then that is very rewarding right that's not j that's not work that's like

i said a mission right you you adopt that but that said you still need to have boundaries yourself at general magic wonderful documentary if no one's seen it you got to see that it's amazing i

was physically and mentally unhealthy socially and healthy as well because i put every waking minute into this thing every ounce of me into it

and when it was a spectacular disaster we were making the iphone 15 years too early the bottom fell out i had nothing left i had to get

healthy socially emotionally physically after that that that trauma i let everything go i learned from that that you have to even though you might

put everything into your work you need to find balance outside of it now that doesn't mean you're always you know it's three days a week working and four days a week or whatever it was you're

still working as hard as ever but what you're doing is you're making sure when your thinking time is during work that you're not ruminating at three in the morning you use the tools that you

have to put those ideas into databases or on pages or somewhere else so you can go back and look at them so you're not always having to remember because what happens is most people don't write the stuff down so they just sit here and got to remember this i got

to remember this i got to remember this if you just put it into the tools and you can come back to it you can come back fresh yeah a lot of the time is about ruminating about what i need to get done and remembering everything

instead of doing the work that's fascinating see if you just put it down on paper you can you can actually escape it right escape it for a time to have peace for time you

mentioned um uh general magic let me ask you the russian question uh

what's the uh what's been the uh the darkest moments of your of your life what are some of the darkest places you've gone in your mind you've talked about you know if you're

doing these kinds of things with startups you're gonna have to face a crisis right absolutely if you're doing it right you're gonna face it so for you personally where were some of the tough

tougher moments in your life growing up i went to 12 schools in 15 years i was always the new kid put yourself in those shoes right

were you picked on well absolutely but even more so i was the geek with the computer remember the nerds in the 80s you you probably don't know this but believe me we were made fun of

what were these computers what were these things you're off in a cold they're all off partying or going whatever it was and i'm sitting there like they're like this guy is just this alien

right who's this new guy who just showed up and and then you know you would ask the smart questions and you couldn't be the smartest in the because then you get picked on too so

and you're the new kid so you're in this environment that's ever-changing you don't fit in and you are just asking questions because you think they're the right egg questions to answer but then they like you're making us look bad don't ask

these smart questions because you make us do more work so right there it's pretty tough and i'm moving cities right and i didn't have the internet to stay connected to people there was no internet

phone calls were two dollars a minute so it was lonely too it was lonely right right i was a latchkey kid right i had my brother but he was a

skateboarder and he had he had a different social way of working he he loved to do that stuff and be outside i loved the computer so even in the computer you were alone in the family with the computer yeah i was in my

family i was absolutely alone that was just me but then um then you could find the other geeks right but there were just a few of us and we made this little thing but then

when you moved away you know then then i had to use a bbs and a bulletin board system and a dial up modem and then then i started hacking the phone system to get free codes of

mci and sprint back in the day to get long distance to get free coats to call my friends the geeks on the other side right or to dial into a bbs cheaply that was in another part of the world

so this was this subculture and that was not accepted in any way and not the heroes that you see today that are on the you know on you know the richest people in the world and everything

so so that was the first set of trauma and then the next one really was general magic you know the end of that like i described before and pulling yourself out and going just because i got so

insular in that world of geeking out and and building stuff that i just tore all the social ties right because it was just it was a drug i was

hooked on that i was a junkie i had to get i had to get clean yeah and uh that made that made you who you are

tempered um so steve jobs is no longer with us one day you also will no longer be with us

that's the the the thing about this life it ends yeah um so no matter how many incredible things you brought to this world no matter how

many inventions you built you too shall perish do you think about this are you afraid of your death i am not afraid of my death

i am an atheist and i think about the soul because i do even though i'm an atheist i think about the soul and the soul is the thing that you

instill in others when you go that lives on it's not this thing that's magically in space it's the thing that you've imparted onto people that you worked with and those

relationships you've had and that soul lives on in the stories that they tell right and through build i'm hopeful that those stories stay relevant because they're

human nature they're not about who knows what the next iphone thing is or the next ipod thing is the stuff that i have been able the privilege to make and

work with people those are all ephemeral the ipod's gone now right this week it was announced ipod's dead and after it is that those human connections

it's that growth that you've helped someone just like they helped me just like bill campbell or steve jobs is gone but they made me be better that's the soul that i believe in

that's fascinating that you say that yeah so all many of these products i mean to push back a little bit so even though the ipod is an end of an era

using it every day you see i i think that i mean the number of people that impacted is it's just uh so i i suppose the soul is carried by

the people exactly sometimes the products you create as the sort of the transport mechanism it's the vessel and they felt the love and they felt that love and it transformed it even if

they don't have the vessel anymore yeah and that way the soul lives just like the body is the vessel that's beautifully put why do you think we're here what's the meaning of life tony

jesus we're going all around me of life why why because you said it's important to have a press release okay humanity if life on earth if if

this thing the consciousness the falling in love and building bridges and ipods and rockets and trying to extend out

into the cosmos why why do you think we're doing it is there anything we are naturally curious where we are naturally curious

individuals and we are always looking for meaning we're always trying to ascribe meaning to something or or understanding of

something right and through that it's just just like evolution right and darwinism it's just that thing that's baked into our being at the most fundamental level

driven by curiosity driven by curiosity and creating some pretty cool things along the way tony you you and speaking of cool things you've created some of the coolest things ever

and on top of that you're just an amazing human being it's a huge honor that you'll sit and talk to me today this is a fun lex this is this is great i did i didn't know where it was going and i'm

let's talk i've been looking for seats i would love seven eight nine six seven yes let's go hang out and and have dinner and just rap about all kinds of crates i'd love to continue this i would too thank you so much thank you

thanks for listening to this conversation with tony fidel to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words

from tony fidel himself the most wonderful part of building something together with a team is that you're walking side by side with other people you're all looking at your feet and

scanning the horizon at the same time some people will see things you can't and you will see things that are invisible to everyone else so don't think doing the work just means

locking yourself into a room a huge part of it is walking with your team the work is reaching your destination together or finding a new destination and

bringing the team with you thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you