Steve Jobs in Exile: How the NeXT Years Turned a Stubborn Founder into a Different Leader
EO Korea
Journalist and biographer Geoffrey Cain argues that the familiar Steve Jobs, the man in the black turtleneck unveiling the iPhone on stage, is only half the story. In this interview about Cain's book Steve Jobs in Exile (published in Korean as Next Steve Jobs), Cain explains why the years Jobs spent at NeXT Computer after being pushed out of Apple were the real source of his later success. Cain's view is that NeXT was where Jobs failed most badly, and where he learned the business maturity, trust in others, and self-awareness that shaped his second period at Apple.
Why Write Another Book About Steve Jobs
Cain introduced himself as a former foreign correspondent who lived in South Korea for five years and wrote for The Economist and Time, covering K-pop, Samsung, and North Korea. Cain's first book was Samsung Rising, and Steve Jobs in Exile is Cain's third.
The interviewer asked the obvious question: books, videos, and material about Jobs are everywhere, so why write another? Cain said their own reporting kept suggesting the story had only been half told. The recognizable, successful Jobs is one half. The other half comes from the middle of his career at NeXT, which he founded after being removed from Apple. In Cain's telling, this was where Jobs faced his greatest failures and "the greatest tests of his life," and where he learned how to survive in the wilderness. Everything that led to his later success at Apple and with the iPhone, Cain argues, came out of that period.
The Young Jobs: A Founder, Not a CEO
To explain the change, Cain first described the young Jobs. People now think of him as a genius and visionary. But Cain says that early on he didn't know how to run a company, manage people, or lead them. He was a founder by temperament, not a CEO. Cain points out that Jobs was not CEO of Apple in that first period at all. He headed the Macintosh division, and his job was crafting what Cain calls his "baby angel of a computer."
Cain credits the Macintosh with real historical importance. Computing in the 1960s and 1970s meant machines that filled a room. Jobs found a way to shrink that power so that a student, a teacher, or an ordinary professional could sit down and use a computer anywhere. Cain calls this a revolutionary idea and says Jobs was the one who made it happen.
The 1985 Ouster and an Existential Crisis
The interviewer noted that despite his vision, Jobs created conflict inside Apple. Cain agreed firmly. Jobs was not easy to work with and was damaging the company, which is why the board decided he had to be removed as head of the Macintosh division. Cain describes this as a deeply personal blow. Jobs later spoke about that summer of 1985: he would look up at the stars and realize he had no life outside Apple. The company had been his whole life and everything he had done. Caught in this existential crisis, he had to figure out what to do next. His answer was NeXT Computer, the second chapter of his life.
The NeXT Cube and a Darker Motive
According to Cain, Jobs founded NeXT to build a computer at the cutting edge of its time, the next big machine after the Macintosh. The result was the NeXT Cube, named for its shape. It was meant for advanced applications: artificial intelligence, scientific experiments, advanced mathematics, and simulations of the real world. Cain stresses that this was 1986, and Jobs was already looking ahead to an AI revolution that "just can't happen at the time."
Cain says great technology was not the whole story, though. Jobs's reasons were "a lot darker." He wanted revenge on Apple. He wanted to show Apple that he was still successful, that he could build an even better computer, and that he didn't need them anymore. Cain's judgment is blunt: "that's not a good reason to start a company."
The Factory Fantasy
The interviewer said the book is full of Jobs's bad decisions, and singled out one that surprised her: Jobs building a factory when NeXT had very little money. Cain explained it as part of Jobs's grandiose vision. Jobs didn't see himself as merely building a computer; he thought he was building the future.
Cain used Ferrari as the comparison. Ferrari buyers can fly to Italy, watch their car being assembled, and take in the experience. Jobs imagined the same for NeXT: users who valued the art, design, and craftsmanship of the machine would fly out, watch it come off the assembly line, and carry it home. Cain calls this a fantasy that rational consumers wouldn't bother with. It might work for Ferrari, with its huge following, brand, and quality, but people won't do it for a computer. Cain says Jobs kept tripping himself up because he believed his vision was so smart and beautiful that everyone else would see the beauty and agree. That isn't what happened.
Hardware as Art, and the Advice He Refused
Cain says Jobs loved hardware because, to him, hardware could become art. Cain holds up the NeXT Cube as a genuine work of beauty. Designed about 40 years ago, it is still held in museums around the world, collected by private collectors, regarded as a fundamental object of industrial design, and studied in universities and design schools.
The problem, as Cain describes it, was stubbornness. Jobs's executives told him the age of hardware was ending quickly and the age of software was rising. Apple and IBM already dominated hardware, so there was no room for a new hardware company. NeXT should focus on software, and its real competitor would be Microsoft and Windows, not hardware makers. Jobs would not listen. The hardware kept failing, and Cain names this refusal as one of the reasons NeXT slid toward failure.
The Reality Distortion Field Turned Inward
Asked why Jobs kept pushing bad decisions, Cain said Jobs wanted to prove to the world that he could still be Steve Jobs and would still be part of history. When building computers, he asked whether they would change the course of history, not whether they would make a functioning business. Cain treats these as two separate questions.
Cain linked this to Jobs's famous "reality distortion field," his ability to convince people of almost anything, which made him an excellent salesman. At NeXT, Cain argues, the distortion reversed and affected Jobs himself. He convinced himself his ideas were the greatest and that NeXT would therefore succeed, and he overlooked business fundamentals: distribution networks, the sales force, pricing, and usability for ordinary people.
Losing the Hardware Business
The interviewer suggested it must have been brutal for Jobs to shut down hardware and focus only on software. Cain called it a cruel moment and explained why. Jobs wanted to sell to consumers. Cain quotes him: "I want to build a computer that anybody can use in their dorm room to cure cancer." In Jobs's mind, hardware was what made computers interesting to ordinary people.
Once NeXT sold only software, its customers were large companies, governments, and financial institutions doing high-speed trading, which was new then. According to Cain, NeXT also sold software to the military, the CIA, and the NSA, who wanted it for satellite reconnaissance. Cain says this was not who Jobs wanted to be. He wore a gray Armani suit to win sales from IBM and the US government, but that wasn't his real self.
Cain also points to a missed opportunity. Jobs had a deal lined up with IBM to put NeXT's software on every IBM workstation. Had it happened, Cain says, NeXT software might have become what Microsoft Windows is today, and there would be no Apple iOS. It took Jobs a while to realize the true power of his software, but once he did, in Cain's words, "things started turning around."
The "Hero-Shithead Roller Coaster"
Comparing Jobs's leadership across periods, Cain described a trait people at NeXT called the "hero-shithead roller coaster." One day you were a hero for doing something brilliant. The next day you were terrible and he wanted you fired. There was nothing in between, and you never knew where you stood.
Cain's example involves sound. In 1988, Jobs wanted the NeXT computer to have a sound system so good it would resemble a symphony. The sound engineers couldn't make it work: the software was buggy, nothing functioned, and it was a disaster. Jobs yelled that they were terrible and told one engineer, "If you do not fix this tonight, you will not have descendants." Cain says he literally said that. The team turned it around, the sound was a success when Jobs presented it, and that night he called them to say "Good job." They were heroes again.
A Steadier Leader Back at Apple
The interviewer asked whether Jobs became softer after his exile. Cain said that when Jobs returned to Apple he was a much more stable leader, giving more objective and mature feedback instead of simply praising people or cutting them down. Cain attributes this partly to Jobs learning to trust people. When you hire people to do a job, you must trust them to do it, and trusting them means treating them well. If you cut them down, they leave. You have to inspire employees, not hurt them.
Cain gave a concrete example. When Jobs became CEO and reshaped Apple's board, the only two people he removed were the ones who agreed with him too much. Those who disagreed with him stayed. Cain says Jobs chose his best people the same way: he wanted those willing to stand up to him and fight back, believing they would make Apple succeed. Cain credits this approach with eight years of executive stability at Apple, something Cain says they have never seen at any other company they have covered as a journalist.
Two Steve Jobses, and the Fusion of Art and Business
The interviewer cited a line from the end of the book, attributed to a Pixar founder: becoming a whole new person is almost impossible, but Steve Jobs really did change. Cain agreed and described two Steve Jobses, the one at "Apple number one" and the one at "Apple number two." They had much in common, but Cain says that if you met them side by side, you might remark that their personalities were so different they could be different people. That change came from NeXT, where Cain says Jobs learned maturity as a business leader, not just vision.
Cain sees the essence of Jobs as the fusion of beauty and business. Before, at the original Apple, the work was art for him, not business; Cain notes the Macintosh was not commercially successful. The return to Apple was "the ultimate victory" of the two coming together: taking the artistic mastery of great modernist designers and turning it into a world-changing consumer business that anyone could use without being a programmer or designer.
Cain argues nobody else has this combination. Bill Gates is a businessman who doesn't care about design. Jeff Bezos is not an artist like Jobs. Even Elon Musk, Cain says, is no Steve Jobs, because Musk is spread across many interests while Jobs was a highly focused artist. Most people are one or the other. Cain suggests Jobs may be "a once-in-a-lifetime gift to humanity" and that it could be centuries before another appears, which is why his life is worth studying.
Questions from Founders: Vision vs. Stubbornness
The interviewer then read questions gathered from active startup founders who admire, even worship, Jobs. The first: many founders treat Jobs-style stubbornness as a success formula, but could it have worked only because he was Steve Jobs, making it risky for others to copy?
Cain drew a line between vision and stubbornness. If you have a vision, you should know how to convince people of it and sell it. If you are too stubborn and cling too tightly to your vision, people get tired quickly, and the most talented people have many other options. Cain cited Jobs himself, who said in an interview that a CEO is not at the top of the pyramid but at the bottom, because the job is to find the best people and keep them. In that sense, Cain says, even the boss is a servant, because a business that can't keep its best people will ultimately fail.
The interviewer added that in South Korea there is a negative term, "Jobs syndrome," for executives who treat stubbornness as the core of Jobs's leadership and imitate it, to the worry of partners and employees. Cain answered that you do need to stick to your vision, but even Jobs's stubbornness nearly cost him his career; it is why NeXT almost went bankrupt, because he wouldn't let go of it or listen to those around him. Cain frames the book as the opposite of the usual Jobs syndrome story: it shows how Jobs cured the syndrome, and how back at Apple he listened to people around him. Cain's advice is to ask why you are building a business. Is it to contribute to society, or for yourself, to show people how smart or hardworking you are? If it is for yourself, Cain says, that is the source of stubbornness in business, and that is where you need to let it go and keep your ego from becoming narcissistic.
Jobs and the AI Era
Asked how Jobs would approach today's AI boom, Cain said he would be very focused on AI but would differ from leaders like Sam Altman, whom Cain describes as "AI first." Cain believes Jobs would integrate AI into existing Apple products so that users wouldn't even realize they were using it. In Cain's reading of Jobs's product philosophy, something invisible, simple, and easy to use is the sign of success: you open your MacBook and use an AI agent without anything telling you it's an agent.
On whether Jobs would build entirely new hardware for the AI shift, Cain offered a different guess, explicitly labeled as speculation: a post-Apple Jobs might have gone into the environment or organic food. Cain notes he was something of an environmentalist who grew his own vegetables, and that his wife Laurene shared similar interests. Cain thinks he would be tired of the smartphone and Apple's product lines by now, because he was the kind of person who wanted a revolution every so often and was always asking what comes next, after the iPhone and after AI.
The Shadow of a Strong Will
The interviewer noted that organic food and the environment were part of Jobs's philosophy. Cain said that, unfortunately, this philosophy shortened his life. When diagnosed with cancer, Jobs tried to treat it with a fully vegan diet, refused medical treatment, and drank a lot of carrot juice, believing it would help. It could not fight the cancer.
Cain connected this to something Cain says they always find as a biographer: the traits that make people successful also cause their failures. Cain referred to the psychological idea of the "shadow": when light falls on our good traits, a shadow is cast behind them, showing how something good can also be bad. For Jobs, a strong will was the core of his personality, and its shadow was refusing medical treatment. Cain says his strong will killed him in the end, and that he could have lived much longer with early treatment.
Closing Advice
Asked for a final message, Cain said that anyone going through hard times should remember that what is happening now does not last forever; it is a testing ground. Once Jobs could break out of his own mind, see the world more objectively, and trust other people, Cain says, he was able to break out of his own story, remake himself, and become Apple's CEO.
Steve Jobs in exile. Steve Jobs, the Steve Jobs that 1976. Macintosh. Steve Jobs. Apple. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Macintosh. Steve Jobs. Macintosh, running software. Steve Jobs.
Leader of the Steve Jobs. John Sculley, CEO. John Sculley, John Sculley. Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. John Sculley. 1985. Steve Jobs, Apple. Apple. John, Steve Jobs. Apple. Apple. NeXT startup. Computer.
Thank you for being with us today.
It's great to be here, Jiyoon.
First of all, could you briefly introduce yourself to our subscribers?
Sure. So, my name is Geoffrey Cain and I am a former foreign correspondent, a journalist, and a biographer. I actually used to live in South Korea for 5 years and I wrote for The Economist and Time magazine. I covered everything from K-pop to Samsung, North Korea, and Kim Jong-un. And my first book was actually called Samsung Rising. But this is now my third book and I just published my most recent book as a technology writer called Steve Jobs in Exile, which is about the wilderness years of Steve Jobs.
Everywhere we can find Steve Jobs' book, Steve Jobs' video. We can find every stuff or materials really easily. What inspired you to write about Steve Jobs and also what narrative were you hoping to uncover?
Well, yes, you're right. There's a lot that's been written about Steve Jobs. In this particular case, I had been finding in my own reporting and my own work that the story was only half told. Steve Jobs who we see is only one half of the actual Steve Jobs. And that half of his personality is the one that is releasing the iPhone, giving the presentation on the stage, and he always wore the black turtleneck. That's the very recognizable Steve Jobs and he's also the successful Steve Jobs.
In this case, I looked at his period in the middle of his career at a company called NeXT Computer, which he created after he was removed from Apple. And this is where he went into his greatest failures. Everything that led up to his success later at Apple or with the iPhone came from this period at NeXT Computer when he was learning how to survive in the wilderness, so how to survive the greatest tests of his life and how to get through failure.
To understand this transformation, maybe we have to understand the transformation of his leadership through the NeXT era.
Today, we think of Steve Jobs as a genius and a visionary, but back when he was young, he didn't know how to run a company and he didn't know how to manage and lead people. He was a founder. That was his personality. He was not a CEO. He was actually not the CEO of Apple at all in that first period. He was actually the head of the Macintosh division.
So, his job was crafting his baby angel of a computer, which was the Macintosh, and that was the computer that really made history at the time. It was a major innovation because it took the computing power of the 1970s and the 1960s. So, these were massive computers that would fill a room, and he figured out how to find a way to shrink it. So anybody, whether you're a student or a teacher or a regular professional, you could sit down and use your computer anywhere. This was a revolutionary idea, and Steve Jobs was the one who made it happen.
Even though he was really visionary, he made many changes, shifted in the computer history. In Apple's view, he made conflicts in the organization, right?
Absolutely. He was not easy to work with, and he was damaging Apple. That's why the board decided that he had to be removed as the head of the Macintosh division. It was a very personal blow and a personal attack on him. He was so hurt and so devastated. He later would talk about that summer of 1985. He would look up at the stars and he realized that he had no life outside of Apple. That his whole company was Steve Jobs. It was his life. It was everything he had ever done. And so he was caught in an existential crisis where he had to figure out what he wanted to do next. So he started his next company, which was called NeXT Computer, and that started the second chapter of his life.
So let's go deep into the history about NeXT and Steve Jobs. What was exactly happening in the organization of NeXT?
Steve Jobs founded NeXT Computer because he wanted to create a computer that would be the cutting edge of the time. He wanted to make the next big computer after Apple. Apple made the Macintosh and he wanted to make what was called the NeXT Cube. It was called the Cube because it was shaped like a cube, and the idea was to use advanced applications. So artificial intelligence. Remember that this is the year of 1986 and Steve Jobs was already looking ahead and seeing the AI revolution coming. So he wanted this computer to be able to handle AI, science experiments, advanced mathematics, simulations of the real world. It just can't happen at the time.
The reason he chose this computer to build was not because he wanted to create great technology. That wasn't the entire story. His reasons were actually a lot darker, and it's that he wanted to get revenge on Apple. He wanted to show Apple that he was still successful, that he could make an even better computer. He doesn't need Apple anymore. But that's not a good reason to start a company.
You pictured so many bad decisions of Steve Jobs in the book. It was really interesting. So we can explore his bad decisions and mistakes.
He really did make a lot of errors in this period of his life, and that's what he had to learn from.
While reading your book, I was really surprised when Steve Jobs decided to build a factory while they had almost a little money. How can he decide to build a factory while wasting the money?
Yeah, well, this is his grandiose vision. Steve Jobs, he didn't just see himself as building a computer, but he thought he was building the future. People who buy Ferraris, these really nice cars, they can fly to Italy and watch the car be assembled on the manufacturing line. That's like an experience that you get if you really love Ferrari. And so, he had the same vision for NeXT Computer. He thought that computer users, if they really value the art and design and craftsmanship of this beautiful computer, they'll fly out and they'll watch the assembly line assemble this computer and it comes out at the end, and then you can just take it home right there.
It's a fantasy. It's not something that most rational consumers are going to bother with. Maybe that works with a Ferrari because a Ferrari has such a massive following, and the brand name and the quality of the car, but people are not going to do that for a computer. And Steve Jobs kept getting confused and tripped up because he thought that because his vision was so smart and so beautiful, everybody else would see the beauty and they would agree with him, but that's not what happened.
He was really obsessed with hardware, computers, right?
He loved hardware because to him hardware could become art. If you look at the NeXT Cube, this computer, it's a work of beauty. It was designed 40 years ago, but it's still held in museums around the world. And private collectors collect them, and they have private museums and private art collections. And the Cube is actually still seen as one of the fundamental objects of industrial design. It's studied in universities too, design schools. So, it truly was elite forward, but the problem is he was so stubborn and he was refusing to accept this advice from his executives.
His executives told him that the age of hardware is quickly ending and the age of software is quickly rising. There's no more room to build a new hardware company because Apple and IBM already command so much of that space. So, we need to focus on software, and the company that we need to fight against is going to be Microsoft, which creates Windows, not hardware companies. But Steve Jobs would not listen, and the hardware kept failing. He kept refusing the advice, and this is one of the reasons why NeXT was sliding into failure.
But why did he keep pushing his bad decisions?
He wanted to show the world that he could still be Steve Jobs, that the real Steve Jobs had not disappeared and Steve Jobs was going to be a part of history. That's what he saw when he was building computers. He was thinking about, will this change the course of history? He wasn't thinking about, will this be a functioning business, which are two separate questions.
People would often talk about, when they worked with Steve Jobs, he had something called the reality distortion field. He could convince you of anything, which is why he was such a good salesman. But the problem is that reality distortion started reversing and affected him too. It wasn't just for other people. He convinced himself that his ideas were the greatest, therefore NeXT is going to succeed, but he overlooked business fundamentals: the distribution network, the sales force, price, usability by regular people. There's just so much that we could go into.
It must have been really brutal for Steve Jobs to shut down the hardware business part and only focus on the software part.
Once he lost the hardware division at NeXT, that was a very cruel moment for him. And you know why that was so hard for him? Because he wanted to sell to consumers. He wanted to build a computer that regular people could use. And he even said it, his quote: "I want to build a computer that anybody can use in their dorm room to cure cancer."
When he was making software, he was making it for big companies and governments, financial institutions to do high-speed trading, which was new at the time. Software that intelligence agencies can use. So, he would sell to the military, CIA, and the NSA. They wanted to use this for satellite reconnaissance. Because the hardware, in his mind, is what made the computer interesting for regular consumers. Once it was only software, he was only selling to other businesses and government institutions. And that's not what he wanted to be.
I mean, he was wearing the Armani suit. He always had a gray suit. He would dress like that because he was trying to get sales from IBM and the US government. But that's not who he really was. He could have made a lot of money. He had a deal lined up with IBM, and they were going to put his software at NeXT Computer on every IBM workstation at the time. So, if that had happened, then his NeXT software would have become like Microsoft Windows today. There would be no Apple iOS. It took a while for him to realize the true power of his software, but once he got there, then things started turning around.
Yeah, we can compare the leadership of Steve Jobs between the early stage of Apple and the NeXT era. Can you give any episodes or examples of the two sides of Steve Jobs' style?
So, Steve Jobs had a personality trait that people called the hero-shithead roller coaster that came out in so many of the experiences at NeXT. What it meant is that one day he treated you as a hero, and the next day... You were the hero of the world because you did something brilliant. The next day you are horrible and terrible and he wants you fired, and there was no spectrum between them. And you never knew where you stood. He would swing radically.
So just to give one example, Steve really wanted to have the best sound system on the NeXT computer. So beautiful that it would sound similar to a symphony. So remember, this is 1988 and this is still very new, and the sound engineers couldn't make it happen. There were bugs in the software. Nothing was working. The whole thing was a disaster. Steve Jobs was yelling, "You guys are terrible." And then he told one of them, "If you do not fix this tonight, you will not have descendants." Literally said that. But they managed to turn it around. In the end, it was a success when Steve Jobs gave the presentation and showed off the sound. And so he called them that night and he said, "Good job." They were now heroes and everything was great.
And he became softer after his transformation during his exile, right?
Yeah, when he returned to Apple, he was much more stable as a leader. He could go into the room and he would give much more objective and mature feedback to his employees. He would not simply praise them or cut them down. And part of that was because he learned to trust people. He realized that when you're working with people, when you hire people, you hire them to do a job and you have to trust them to do that job. And trusting them means treating them well. If you cut them down, they're going to leave. And you have to inspire your employees. You don't hurt them.
So once he returned to Apple, he removed the board. He got a new board at Apple when he was CEO. And the only two people who he removed from the board were the ones who agreed with him too much. The people who disagreed with him, he actually kept them on the board. And that's how he selected the best employees. The people who he saw who were willing to stand up to him and to fight back, he wanted to hire them. They were the ones who were going to make this a success. And he was right.
Because of this approach, he had 8 years of executive stability at Apple, which is unheard of in any company, anywhere in the world. I've covered a lot of companies as a journalist, and I've never come across a company that has 8 years of the same executive leadership team. But he got that at Apple because he was such a tough and visionary leader.
At the end of the book, the founder of Pixar wrote, "Becoming a whole new person is almost impossible, but Steve Jobs really did change."
So, this period at NeXT Computer is where Steve Jobs had to learn to not be the old Steve Jobs. There are two Steve Jobses. There is Steve Jobs at Apple number one, and then there's Steve Jobs at Apple number two. They both have a lot in common, but they changed so much that if you had met both of them, say you had met them side by side and just started having a conversation, you would probably remark that their personalities are quite different, and maybe they're not even the same person. So, they changed, and it came from NeXT Computer, and NeXT Computer was where he learned maturity as a business leader, not just vision.
The essence of Steve Jobs is the fusion of beauty and business. What Steve Jobs learned at NeXT was how to fuse business and art. You put those two sides together, and that's a powerful position to be in. It's being able to take the artistic mastery of the great modernist designers and artists and turn it into a world-changing consumer business. Anybody can pick it up and use it, and you don't have to be a programmer, you don't have to be a designer. Only Steve Jobs could fuse those because he was so brilliant at both.
But before, with Apple 1.0, the original Apple, that was art for him. That was not business. His Macintosh was not commercially successful. When he returned to Apple later, that was the ultimate victory of business and art coming together, business being art.
There is nobody out there like Steve Jobs. Bill Gates, not the guy who does art. Bill Gates is a businessman. He doesn't care about design. Jeff Bezos, definitely not an artist like Steve. But even Elon Musk is no Steve Jobs. Elon Musk is very spread out. He has lots of interests. Steve Jobs is the opposite because he's an artist who's highly focused. He combines art and business, and not many people can do that. Most people are one or the other.
And he might be a once-in-a-lifetime gift to humanity. It might be centuries before we see another Steve Jobs. These lessons, his life, is worth studying and it's worth understanding, because it will be so rare that we see anything like this again.
With that in mind, we gathered some questions from active startup founders. They really like or even worship Steve Jobs. They have some troubles. I will read the question to you. A lot of founders talk about this Steve Jobs-style stubbornness as if it is a success formula. But isn't it possible this only worked because it was Steve Jobs, and that for other founders,
following this same advice could actually be risky?
There's a difference between vision and stubbornness. If you have a vision, you should know how to convince people of your vision. You should know how to sell it. And if you're too stubborn and if you stick too close to your vision, people get tired quickly. You have to remember that the most talented people in the world have a lot of options where they work.
Even Steve Jobs in an interview reflected on this. He said that the job of the CEO is that you're not at the top of the pyramid. You're actually at the bottom of the pyramid because your job is to make sure that you can find the best people and that you can keep them around. Even if you're the boss, in some sense you're actually a servant because if you can't keep your best employees around, then the business will ultimately fail.
Also, in South Korea, there is a term called Jobs. It means Jobs syndrome in a negative way. I found their thing that stubbornness is the core value of Steve Jobs' leadership and they tried to mimic it, and the executives and other partners or employees are really worried about it.
Yes, you do need to stick to your vision. But even Steve Jobs, when he was too stubborn, that nearly cost him his entire career. That's why NeXT Computer almost went bankrupt, because he would not let go of his stubbornness and he would not listen to the people around him.
So, this story is the opposite of the usual Steve Jobs syndrome that we hear about. This is how Steve Jobs treated the syndrome, cured the syndrome, and it shows how when he returned to Apple, he was not behaving with Steve Jobs syndrome. He was listening to the people around him.
Ask the question, why are you building a business? Is it because you want to make a contribution to society or is it something you're doing for yourself? Is it because you want to show people how smart you are, how hard working you are? You don't want your ego to become a narcissistic ego. If you're doing it for yourself, then that's where you need to get rid of your stubbornness, because that's the source of the stubbornness in business.
Maybe this can be the last question. If Steve Jobs were alive, he must be really enjoying this AI era. It's a crazy AI era.
I think he would be very focused on AI, but I think he would approach it differently from other technology leaders. Other leaders like Sam Altman, they're AI forward, AI comes first. Steve Jobs would want to find ways to integrate AI into existing Apple products.
And the idea would be that you use an Apple product and you don't even realize you're using AI. The way that he thinks about products, he thinks that if something is invisible, you don't notice it and it's simple and easy to use, that's the sign of a successful product. You open your MacBook, you use the AI agent, but you don't even realize. There's nothing there that says it's an agent.
Will he try to build new hardware besides computers? Some people are saying that we need totally new hardware to make that huge, massive shift in the IT era.
In a post-Apple Steve Jobs, I think he would have gone into the environment or organic foods, because he was always something of an environmentalist in his life. He always planted his own vegetables. He would eat what he grew from his own garden. His wife Laurene had similar interests.
These things, you know, this smartphone, I think he would have been tired of it by now. I just have to clarify, this is only speculation. I can't say for sure. I think he would have been tired of the Apple product lines because he's the type of personality who wants to see the revolution every so often. What comes after the iPhone? What comes after the AI? He's always going to be thinking ahead.
You said organic food and the environment are also part of his philosophy.
Yes. And unfortunately, that philosophy shortened his life, because when he was diagnosed with cancer, he tried to treat it with a fully vegan diet. He refused medical treatment and he drank carrot juice a lot. He thought that by eating all that it would help him, but it could not fight cancer, sadly.
As a biographer, this is something that I always learn when I'm studying. The things that make them successful are also the things that have caused them to fail. So, some psychologists talk about this idea of the shadow. It's the idea that within all of us we have traits and personalities that do good in the world. These are the good sides of us, but the things that we can't see: when you shine a light on the good traits, there's always a shadow that's cast behind them. The negative parts of these personality traits, the things that show why something good can also be bad.
And in Steve Jobs' case, his strong will was the core of his personality, but the shadow of that is that he would refuse medical treatment. His strong will killed him in the end. He could have lived a lot longer if he had gotten treatment early for that cancer.
And lastly, would you leave any messages or advice for our viewers?
If you're going through hard times, just remember that what is happening now is not what happens forever. That's the testing ground. Once Steve Jobs was able to break out of his mind and see the world more objectively and trust other people, he was able to break out of his own story, and that's how he was able to remake himself and become the Apple CEO.
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