#420 The Lost Years of Steve Jobs

A long time, people have been asking me, can you make a podcast on failure? There is a brand new book called Steve Jobs in exile, the untold story of next and the remaking of an American visionary, and it was written by Jeffrey Kane. And that is what this episode is going to be about because the book is exclusively about. It chronicles that twelve year period of exile between when Steve Jobs gets kicked out of Apple and then he returns to Apple. It is probably the defining point of Steve Jobs' life because you will see one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs, maybe the greatest entrepreneur to ever live just make mistake after mistake after mistake. And the longer he's in exile, the more the pressure builds because he's burning through his entire fortune. And yet because we know what happens after he returns to Apple, this is somehow one of the most inspiring stories because of Steve's refusal to quit and then his ability to transform, to build himself into the kind of leader and entrepreneur that deserves to run Apple. And And before I jump into this book, I wanna read you a paragraph from another book because I want you to keep in mind these few sentences from this other book. This book is called the return to the little kingdom. That book was primarily about the first few years of the history of Apple, but there's an updated version where the author, Michael Moritz, writes this. Many are familiar with the reemergence of Apple. They may not be as familiar with the fact that it has few, if any, parallels. When did a founder ever return to the company from which he had been rudely rejected to engineer a turnaround as complete and spectacular as Apple's? While turnarounds are difficult in any circumstances, they are doubly difficult in a technology company. It is not too much of a stretch to say that Steve founded Apple not once, but twice. And the second time, he was alone. The book that you and I are gonna talk about right now, Steve Jobs in exile, tells in great detail the personal transformation that Steve Jobs had to go through to be able to refound Apple. I'm gonna get right into the book. It says every waking moment of his adult life had been spent building apple. Long days, longer nights. Now he had no real friends, no other life to turn to. Steve decided to disappear for a while, to step away from his old life and to think. Suddenly, he was gone and nobody knew where the hell he was, and they didn't know if he would come back. So Steve Jobs is going to officially get kicked out of Apple in September 1985. Before that, he stripped away of all his power. So he spends the summer in Paris trying to figure out what the hell he's gonna do next, and he talks about …