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

It wasn't just a one on one, but 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, 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 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 Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tony Fadell. 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 in a summer school class in 5th grade in Grosse Pointe 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, 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 take that set of cards and you'd put it on this reader and it would go off to an IBM microcomputer somewhere in the back, then the cloud. And then you would sit on a table, 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 just doing that, you know, print f or what was it? I can only remember what it was. It was, you know, what the what the basic commands were. But.

Oh, so 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 in, you know, in a remote location and it came back. So it was truly cloud computing in a way. It was really terminal based computing.

Computing. And the input and the program are separate. So the input to the program or they go together like. Or is. No, there's no input to the program. It just runs and it gives you output.

Yeah, it goes in and says, it says ready? And then you can say run. Yeah, and then it would run. But to program 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 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.

So you can play video games.

Wow. Video. That's right. You could play text games and then imagine them in your brain. Right.

Oregon Trail. There's 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. So like from scratch. And for people who don't know it, 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, it's three dimensional, all that kind of stuff. All the things, all the rich, colorful things you would imagine for a three dimensional video game, all written in assembly, meaning the lowest level code next to binary, which is fascinating. And 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 opcodes and you had to imagine the world in your brain of the memory structures and everything. 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 love 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 backstories. 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 the 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 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 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, 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. I wish we knew those stories. That's always sad to me when I. Because 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 we'll 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 great secret. 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 sorry for the distraction. So 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, you know, the person of the year. Maybe it was that year. I don't remember what. But.

Well, Apple II was a person. The person of the year.

Yeah. For 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 app and I didn't know what it was, but I knew about tools because my grandfather taught me about tools and creating things. Right. And I saw this thing and, and I had the, 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 $22,500 back then in the 1981. It was like crazy, right? So I was like, I'm going to 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 caddie, golf caddy, caddying actually for the, you know that the families in, you know, at the country clubs in the, in the town where we lived and did whatever I could. And that end of that summer was. Got my Apple ii and 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? 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. Or you created yourself. And then there was the whole other thing which was. Started happening, which we were doing. And this was kind of like MP3 and stuff. We were sharing software. Right. So you built this community of sharing software. You, you, you would go and pirate. That was what it called, pirate all this software. You never use it all, but it was just that fun thing of like, I'm going to get all this other stuff and then tear it apart and do disassem it and see behind the scenes. So you really had a sense 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 inside me just lit up. Now you, 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 that 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 grand grind 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 mocking board, which the mocking board 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 you 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. The eight bit, you know, chip tunes. Right. And then, 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 process. So. So then that turned into a company actually from that. But it was. And a hardware software. No one at that. But it was all about, you know, modifying this thing in every way. First with 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 iis 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.

Absolutely intentional.

This is the, this is for the cutting edge folks too. Or especially for the.

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 and open source like on GitHub that you have the schematics there and 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 Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self driving is 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 tinkerer 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 think back then it was about a community and serving that community of builders. 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 there's the, 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 than I've seen. Like, it's amazing what you can do now with these little kits and, 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, 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. It's just not as, you know, there's.

Little communities that are local and so on, but if they were organized.

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 a friend of mine founded and I was the second employee. It was called Quality Computers and it was a mail order mailer because there's no E Commerce. Then there was no Internet again. 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 delivered, delivered to you. You know, turnaround time. And this stuff was like from the time you wanted, the time you bought it was maybe eight to 12 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 we noticed was there were accelerate 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 Apple Works, 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 the existing software you have and expand it into this new world. So it was creating tools and the really great customer support, and 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, you know, they. They would be able to change their software 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 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, freshman year of college.

You wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade for the.

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 C 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 a larger number of people? Like what? Or did you just like to tinker?

No, 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 in and go, this doesn't work. And I'm like, oh, I got to go fix the hardware and software, right? Or I got to fix the software to make the hardware and the inst. 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. While 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. 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 do it. The software. Right. And it was all in his parents basement. Yeah, right.

As you were scaling. Exponentially scaling.

Right, exactly. Bootstrapping.

So we'll jump around a little bit. But what were the. You said you love music. What were the ideas that gave birth to the ipod? If we jump forward 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 truly revolutionary. Maybe its time has come. But just if you look at the arc of history sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity. And to be able to put that in your pocket, make it truly portable is fascinating in a way. That's truly portable. So it's digital as opposed to sort of like a Walkman or something like that. So what were the ideas that gave birth to the ipod?

You know, 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 Led Zeppelin. This was the Stones, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick Sticks, Ted Nugent, you know, just the real, you know, the real American and British rock and roll. Right?

There's a bunch of people listening right now. Who, who's who?

Who's that?

Led Zeppelin. What is that?

Oh, yeah, it drove my parents crazy.

Yeah, yeah, you just blast it loud.

Loud. Just. And this was second, third grade, fourth grade. I just. It fell in love. And then we moved back to Detroit. And I love listening to the radio station because there was all kinds of crazy music because you'd have an amalgam of rock and then funk and R and B. And I loved to listen at night, so I had a clock radio. But if I had the clock radio on, everyone. Parents would 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, 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. Stairwood of Heaven. What would you say is the greatest rock classic rock song of all time?

Greatest classic rock song of all time.

What pops into mind? Oh, no. You know what I mean? This has to be hard.

Dude, this is.

Dude, this is. This is a serious journalistic inter. You're not going to back down from these kinds of questions?

Oh my God, no.

I don't know. Yeah, it's hard, it's hard to pick, but I, I, to me, Stairway to Heaven is a safe fall. 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. 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. I love Zeppelin. 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, I, I played it so loud that I actually hurt the earring in my right ear. And I still suffer from that today. And then no regrets, no regrets whatsoever. Going to concerts in downtown Detroit and all that crazy stuff. So moving forward. 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, 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 write and, and at the same time. And so those were heavy. And at the same time I was doing the Philips, Nino and Velo. Those are Windows CE based mobile computing products. 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 7 first audible books. And it, you know, I was, oh my God, that's audio. Well, what if we put music on it, right? And so, 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 stored it in dram, right?

Which is okay probably because 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 a mobile device is a brilliant step. 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. 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 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 that 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. Two and two together, right? Like get, let's get rid of this. And so, and then MP3 show up.

The, the actual, like encoding the format.

The format MP3 showed up around 97, 98.

So MP3 is compressed so you can have like, the storage is reduced significantly, right?

So you could go from a, you know, a large, full, full losses, lossless, 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 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, 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 to the chagrin of Neil Young, 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 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 a 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 hatred of carrying around all this heavy stuff that then spawned, you know, Fuse and then ultimately, you know, became a lot of that. The ideas and things of that nature were. 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 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. 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 are some interesting memories from that design process? What are some wisdoms? You. You can.

Yeah, well, art. Okay.

From that process.

Well, you know, how long do you want to go? Because I have. I can go deep.

So let's go at least 20 hours. Let's go.

Okay.

This is one of the lengthy documentaries.

We're going to turn it into episodic.

Yeah.

Binge.

Yeah. Game of Thrones.

So let's just start with, you know, after I was asked to be a consultant to put this thing together. So I already had knowledge of, you know, the space and the technology and all that stuff, but I had to very quickly and a lot of the suppliers because of what I was doing at Fuse trying to create that thing. So as a contractor, I was like, okay, what is the first things you need to do? 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, you know, shoot all those down and give the best option last and then you could talk about that. And so that was the one that had a 1.8-inch hard drive and a small screen. Like the screen, you know, it on the original ipod. Classic ipod. And then I had enough of the idea of the three or three or four different CPUs and processor suppliers and kind of systems that were out there that I had gone and found and put together power supplies, you know, 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 make a better headphone jack that was also on there. Screen suppliers tearing apart calculators. So got all calculators and all kinds of electronics to get the right size, different sizes of small LCDs. So I got all kinds of different battery types. I got different types of, you know, in different battery sizes, AA's, AAA's, working through all the different. And there was lithium ion, nickel, metal hydrate. So I took all the battery types, I took all of the memory types, processing types, LCD types, and connectivity and all that stuff. Not wireless, but wired and laid out these things as Lego blocks. So literally had all of these things is just. And so 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 was on storage. So the hard drive batteries, double A, triple A, right Koreans. 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. And I brought this whole bag of goods and it was like, right? And 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.

So not sheet of 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 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 the details and then the rough and you go back and forth and you iterate. And so it was just a lot of fun. And then it 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 the. How much, you know, is it going to be dense enough? Is it going to feel solid and rigid in your hand? Right.

Why does it 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 when you have a device like that and 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 right thing. So you have to model battery life costs, 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, you're working 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 maximum. It's always trade offs. What about buttons?

Buttons? Oh, 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, is it with Steve? Is it lower? Like what?

This was all independent. This was me before being able to present to Steve 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 a driven engineer, designer, futurist. How much doubt were you plagued 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 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 happened 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, the right cost. Right. And the right, right, 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. 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 when you.

Yeah, that moment. Yeah, I think it was after I triple check. 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 gonna trample on it? That kind of thing. Why?

No, no, no, no, because I couldn't bring any, when 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. And 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 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 was all of this stuff in six weeks. So I didn't sleep. Right. Yeah. But I was like. Because I was trying to make this. 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 Apple actually have 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 worth 4 or 5 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 1% 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 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 that we're going to come out with their MP3 player. And that was it. Game over. Right. And so I was like, Steve. 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 for. 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 me. Right. And I dedicate that we will make sure that at least 2/4 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 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, bring that experience to life, I will put all the marketing dollars behind it.

When did the marriage of ipod and itunes sort of. What was that 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 the 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 RealPlayer. And Steve saw that going on and saw that Jeff and his small team had 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 MP 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 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 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 it 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're bringing all these music lovers in that are going to need 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 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? And maybe is there like some phase shifts? First your complete doubt, then maybe. And then maybe it becomes more than a hmm. And becomes like a little more confidence, that kind of stuff. And also wisdom about who to talk to.

Right.

So they don't trample the idea in the early stages. That kind of stuff. Any 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, 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 CDs. 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 God, this is something different. So when you can actually focus on a pain 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 gotta 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.

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 autonomous vehicles, we're 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 for me, you know, when I go to other places, living in Bali or living in Paris or whatever, and I'm not driving, I'm walking or using 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 out, and 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, and 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 selling and marketing, right? Marketing dollars. 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. Yeah, maybe you can by way of question, because you're. I'm just speaking off the top of my head as a consumer. What is great marketing? What does it take to, to, to reveal 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 it again, we're gonna might go a little long here, so just stay tuned in.

Yeah.

So the first thing is start at 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. 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 ago, 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. And 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 it for ourselves. Because it's just something we're like putting it together. And 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 what's. 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's 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 and 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 whys, and the whys help inform the what's, and the whys also inform the marketing.

So at the. 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 superpower you're bringing or the pain you're killing for the end customer right now? Let's contrast that. Think about a movie. A movie starts with a treatment. It has an audience. This has the audience. Here's the characters, here's the storyline, the plot, 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 features do you have? What pains are you solving for people to 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 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 change it over time, that draft. But Then when you're done, you know the what's and the whys, you have all the things, 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's part of the draft? Is it engineers, designers? What's the purpose of a marketing department in a company? Small. Let's say 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 because you're just like. I'm like, I can't wait to tell you the answer. So it's in the book as well.

Yeah.

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 it's really not. There's so many disciplines, just like in engineering, mechanical, electrical, software and even software. It's, you know, are you 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, there is social marketing, there is a marketing creative. Right. There's marketing activation. But there's another thing that also comes out and people 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 in 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, 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, 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 needs 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.

Ooh, yeah. So it's. They have this very important job of developing and maintaining the. Why.

Exactly.

Why is it the hardest to hire for?

Because you have to understand first, nobody reports to you, so you're alone. And you have to build great ties with all of these different. These different functions. 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 this, why this doesn't work. And so that they learn more. They're not just doing, but they learn about what 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 that if they're not the customer that it's intended for, they start to live 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. 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, the one subfield of marketing you mentioned, comms and pr. How do I ask this?

I can hear your struggle in your. In your sigh. Why?

Or do the comms and PR folks sometimes kill the heart and soul of the magic that makes a company? Or is that wrong to say?

Give me an example.

I will say the spirit of the example, which is it feels like often the jobs of communications is to provide caution. It almost works together with legal to say shield. Yeah, we probably should not say this. Let's be careful. Let's be careful. Now that makes sense. Except in this modern world, authenticity 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 as you're doing communications when risks.

Right.

And especially when they fail. So like the. It's. It's a difficult job. So I understand why people become cautious. But to me, communications is about taking big risks and throwing caution to the wind at its best. Because your job is to communicate in the long term. Communicate the genius, the. The joy, the genius of the product. And that sometimes is attention with caution. Sorry. So. 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, 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.

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 conservatism from the PR and communications folks because they're always. So if you have a. Not a bold 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, they will be. Oh, they'll always take 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 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 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 by Robert McKee? You should read this. And this is what I read when I was 26, story by Robert McKee. And it's a book all about the ways to do script writing, the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy, and how it's been shown over millennia, how these stories are done. It's a fascinating thing and it gives you an insight to. And it's written for obviously Hollywood and movies and things like that. But it's incredibly useful for what we do as designers and engineers and technology leaders.

There's some aspect in this modern day where this podcast and so on. 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 painting a beautiful story. That's flawless. It's vulnerability. Yep. It's, you know, being a dreamer, like over promising and then failing realize. So changing your mind, realizing sort of just, just the whole of it and then also being like depending of course, where your personality is 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, this humanity that's part of it. The full roller coaster of the humanity, which I think has been very difficult for companies to embrace. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just an old school way of doing things that people think that we present a facade and we generate the story and we tell the story as opposed to sort of.

Well, we learn, especially in the technical world, we present the story as it's faster, it's smaller, it's longer battery life, it's bits and numbers and you know, and metrics that. That resonates. Sure. With other geeks what resonates with 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. That's the pain I had. Remember that thing?

And like, I mean, just, I mean, just, you know, you're. You're obviously this extremely well known human being that's behind a lot of these great inventions of the technology world. But you're also just a human being. You have a clearly, like a distinct personality that comes through the. Like your eyes light up. Just the way you communicate is you think some people are more stoic. Some people are sure. Like Elon is, you know, all over the place, the chaos. 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 comes on personality. No, 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. 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 there's a. It's much more easy to be afraid and be careful, so. But nevertheless, the same applies. Authenticity and risk taking is the only way, unfortunately, to be successful in the long term. Let me just. Because we're jumping all over the place. Just linger on. The ipod, one of the great designs, broadly speaking, in the word design of all time. What does it take to design a great product? If you look, who can jump around? We can look at Nest, we can look at ipod, we can look at iPhone and many of the great things 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 80% done or maybe even 60% done, but you can see enough in there. Then you take those great ideas and you give the whys 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, 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. 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 night 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 the materials, the. I don't know, just everything on the.

Shelf, 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, you know, efficient way? Because, you know, a lot of the stuff you don't know is some of that stuff is hacked in, maybe hacked in at the end. It might. 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 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 design, 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. La, la la. Those are not the engineers I want to work with.

They're all like a bit artists at heart, right?

They understand the 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 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, 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 allowed. Okay.

No, I can tell. 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 shit. 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 iPad 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. 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 a, we had the MP3 player 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. Right. So designed this thing, tore it apart, did all this stuff. And I was like, you know, maybe I'm going to screw up ide. 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 say, 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 goes never going to work? I said, well, let me go over here and show you this right here. I have it prototyped and it's been working for days. I just want to see if you're going to have it find any holes in the thing. Didn't even did. 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 I had. I had a person and there's many people like this that I, I showed them. Here's the situation, you know, acoustics. Yeah. They're like, no, no, no, no. This is horrible. This does not. This is not going to work. The reflection, the curtains are not going to stop. There's a bunch of terminology. They're telling me it's a similar kind of situation as the idea which I was like, no, 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 let'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. The why. And that. That. Actually I've experienced that unfortunately in the artistic realms too, which is like photography and videography. Cinematography. It's interesting. I talked to photographers that are quote unquote experts and it's always about that. 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 what about the feeling of the story?

You create visually the difference between 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 cgi.

That's right. And there's also value to those cgi.

Superhero can tell a better story, but you have to have a good story to begin with.

Sure, exactly. But 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 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, 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 and understanding what we're trying to get done here and fitting the what's into that why. Right.

That's why I do think that 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. Humility before the chaos, sort of having an open mind that this is going to require a totally new way of doing things is a really nice quality to see. 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 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. No, 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 a 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 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 robot 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 problem.

V1 version 1B2B business to business versus what's the alternative business to consumer V1 okay. Which is defining some terms.

Yes, you're 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.

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 when something goes wrong, as opposed to it wasn't me. When you need to have to tell that story, you have to understand that, especially V1, you need to be able to articulate 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 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 that, 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 we call differentiators, the things that 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 team in the stage and the whole team with opinions. And there you have to be harsh.

I wouldn't say harsh, but you have to be very determined, right? You know, there are two real opinion based decisions that happen on the iPhone. One was the keyboard. Should we have a 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 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 all the best sales are over here.

God, that takes guts.

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, 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. You're 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 slot, 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. He'd go well why does Verizon not have any sims like slots, right? They showed that you can do a mobile phone with no slim slots. And you're like okay, here we go. And so a few days later we come back with you know, and, and so product marketing, voice of the customer engineering. We all come back with all the data showing how many, how many data networks and, 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 he, because he was just like we're going to tell AT&T to not use a SIM. Yeah, right. We're going to just tell him 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 who 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 very. At the very same time. Right. Opinion can hold and so can data. Overrule opinion when data does exist for a V1.

But at the end of the day you don't know what the right answer is. So do we know? 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.

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 esims. Right. And now the SIM slot's becoming legacy. Legacy as a legacy port. That legacy port will probably be gone by six, maybe 10 years. It'll be gone. I'm pretty sure of that 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.

Sometimes there's wisdom in the past and sometimes it's actually representative of something that should be overcome and progress looks like leaving that stuff behind. Like the headphone jack.

Right.

I mean that when different folks were getting rid of the headphone jack. Boy that I would love to be a fly in the wall of those discussions we had.

That, that was a, that was a discussion that happened almost every year. Yeah, that was an. Every year. Should we get rid of headphone J on the ipod? Right. When are wireless headsets going to happen? 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 ad Buddhist. Now we've grown our revenue, we've given a new experience to the user, right? And ta da, you know, and it's just, it's magic. And now the world's transformed to everyone, you know, moving to that, right? But it took years to understand the problem, develop the technology, 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 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 going to, you know, and then besting everyone, making sure the software and the hardware is designed at the same time, making sure the kernels, all those things are going to 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, that it just worked. It was magic. Like the transition. It was not even a speed bump. It was not even a crack in the road.

So perhaps famously, Steve had a bit of a temper. Steve Jobs, 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 maybe you could speak to the constructive and the destructive types of.

Okay, so there's really two delineations that I, that I have found of real fundamental ones. And that is again the why. Why do I feel this person is an asshole? Okay, they might not be. I feel this is a person who's an asshole. 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, 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. You know, I'm me and I'm the, you know, I'm the, the, the guy, right? And I'm going to 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 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 an A. 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're like, I don't want to take the extra time and saying, 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 at risk. And we, 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, 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 say 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, it's fascinating. It 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 of this very complicated. So one question I have for you. In terms of glass on the iPhone, how important is it that like Steve in 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, you know, Napoleon invading Russia or something in the winter, like, it's just not going to be good.

Right.

It's not a good idea, but I'm going to hold to 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 the, the vision driven 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 it. Right? Right. Steve, Steve was never that. That's the great thing. 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, you know, scratches and all the other 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 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. And 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 then 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, 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 problem. 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, less likelihood to complain. Yes, they'll complain, but they're part of that. Of that failure.

Yes. Oh, that's fascinating.

And then that's true to that, right? Because then they were part of why it failed. Whereas the design, they didn't do anything wrong 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, 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 are 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.

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. It 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, bad days and good days.

Bad days and good. So there's also the three options. You said. You notice that the third option is always going to be the one that's picked those kinds of idiosyncrasies. Idiosyncrasies and that. So that brings up another thing. You said, challenge the idea, not the person. You know, I'm somebody who has a. You know, I have a temper. I use colorful language and so on. When 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, I've been called an asshole.

I mean, I am distinctly aware that you cross lines often. There's, like, levels, right?

Sure.

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 personal. 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 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 and not. And you have to know that's what 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 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. 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 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 say, 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 ingest and those two people have to have a really good working relationship. But other than that, I'm sorry, it's going to be a lot more. You could say aseptic in that way that you're not going to add that stuff in, but you could, you know, sometimes it's ingest, you know, it has to be very much ingest, and those two people have to have a really good working relationship. But, but other than that, I'm sorry, it's going to be a lot more. You could say aseptic 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 extreme 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, 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 gotta snuff that out and you gotta be that. You gotta 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 significant enough fraction of brilliant people where that shouldn't be part of the culture.

Exactly. And other people. That's the right way to be. You gotta snuff that out and you gotta be that. You gotta 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 significant enough fraction.

Of people see that happen and then oh, I guess that's acceptable. Right. Just like politics in the workplace. Is that acceptable or not? I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone. Right.

Because brilliant people where that shouldn't be part of the culture.

Exactly. And other people's. 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 see that happen and then oh, I guess that's acceptable. Right. Just like politics in the workplace. Is that 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 reflected in the world and you have to uphold that. And you can't. Sure you can have an excursion outside of that but you have to go back and say I'm sorry to set the tone as a leader for what you want your organization to be and how to it gets.

Yeah, yeah.

You have to go and apologize, heal and said I was not the person I wanted to be that day. I'm really sorry.

Yeah.

This is. And. And even in front of flected in the world and you have to uphold that and you can't. 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 go in a part 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.

Apologize, heal. And said I was not the person I wanted to be that day. I'm really sorry.

Yeah.

This is. And, and even in front. Oh yeah.

How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer? So you. You've spoken about sort of what 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.

Oh yeah.

How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer? 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.

So you've spoken about sort of what.

Hardware, systems, thinking, implementation, all that stuff. So I have a different bent. He wanted to be an engineer.

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, him started. But really he was much better at all the other things, the story, implementation, all that stuff. So I, So I have a different bent. He wanted to be an engineer. Storytelling, the interfacing 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 then marketing. He came really out the other way. Right. And never got really deep technically. So that's two different 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, the marketing. He came really out the other way. Right. And never got really deep technically. So that's two different mindsets. One's not better or worse. It's just. That's how it is. And it takes all kinds to, to. To. And. And all kinds can do great designs.

Did it manifest itself differently just the fact that you came from those design diff. Different places?

Absolutely.

Like what? So like the discussion about glass on the iPhone was probably had a different flavor to it.

Sure. Mindsets. One's not better or worse. It's just that's how it is. And it takes all kinds to, to. To. And. And all kinds can do great designs.

Did it manifest itself differently just the fact that you came from those diff different places?

Absolutely.

Like what? 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. Then with someone he's like, okay, you know, at some point he's like, I Can't win this war, like. And he learned that very early on because he didn't like the way the look of the Macintosh 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. Then with someone he's like, okay, you know, at some point he's like, I can't win this war, like. And he learned that very early on because he didn't like the way the look of the Macintosh 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 or the PCB was laid out. 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's 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. The team's weight, the board, they knew that would work and then the detail, there's some things he doesn't know enough about. And so he would get out of that. But that was one of those instant they made the board, that's 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. And 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 and we're going to make both.

Both.

I'm going to show you the results, right? And then from there he didn't get into those details. So where he pushed really hard and that's his opinion. So that from that you could have a great challenge, right? Because then you could get those data and say we can't. They said, okay, we're going to make it a data driven decision. We're going to make both. We're going to show you the results Right. And then from there he didn't get into those details. So do that and let me show you why. Or we can do that. And then from that you could have a great challenge, right? Because then you could get those data and say, we can't. He would go, you can't do that. And 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 to do that and let me show you why. Or we can do that. And then tension, that interaction that was so successful. Right. I think. But there was one other fundamental thing. He would go, you can't do that. And you're like, oh, we can do that. Let me show you.

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 overdo now in the opposite direction, which is when there's a great idea that comes from the. That was different and that it graded on the team and that I made sure and I learned from team, acknowledge that person and go, that is a great idea as the leader to not do and. And I over maybe overdo 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 maybe not ideas that come bubble up to the customer level, but inside of the opinion driven, that's a great idea. Let's build on that. Let's see if that can do that. Or to the organization, people like, they get rewarded for their ideas and say, that's a great one. Steve was always like, great idea, but not for now. Put it aside. But call out when people have great ideas because it's infectious. And that means maybe 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, okay, I don't know, to 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 you'd give an idea and he would go, okay. I don't know. We'd walk, we'd look around the table and we'd like, roll our eyes and go, here we go again.

So it demotivates you from 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, you know, it was just not. It. It just. It doesn't want to bring the best. Right. Because if you're always like, from generating.

Ideas a little bit.

Yeah. Well, the reaction is never. That's a genius idea. It was always like, it was either negative or, you know, we got used to it. But, you know, later on in the team, you know, it was just not. It just. It doesn't want to bring the best. Right. Because if you're always like, 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. Want you to bring your best.

Yeah. Sometimes it's fun when people get excited about it. Just. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of build on top excitement. It could be, but coupled with sort of harsh neutraling.

Right?

Yeah.

Then it doesn't. It doesn't have that same emotional effect that you want you to bring your best.

Yeah. Sometimes just when the idea is bad, you call out the bad ideas too. So it's the good and the bad.

Oh, you could say it's fun when.

People get excited about it. Just. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of build on top of top excitement. It could be, but coupled with sort of harshness. When the idea is bad, you call out the bad ideas too. So it's the good and the bad.

Oh, you could say you don't have. You don't have to say bad idea. You say, 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 hey, you don't have. You don't have to say bad idea. You say 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 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 to start seeing through the opinion based decision makers or the database and bring better formatted arguments or ideas they can learn. So the next time they bring the next idea they can modulate and understand to start seeing through the opinion based decision makers or the database 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 so that you have better chance of success the next time.

Yeah, right.

You gotta train through those moments. You gotta teach. Those are teaching moments.

Yeah, teaching for moments. I aspire to be that kind of person. I'll usually say that that that idea is shit. That is the like. And then you.

That you got to teach. Those are teaching moments.

Yeah, teaching for moments. I aspire to be that kind of person. I'll. I'll usually say that that that idea is. That is the like. And then you. That. I remember that that this brilliant person just gave that really shitty idea. I remember that that this brilliant person just gave that really shitty idea, so I remember to make sure next time they give a good idea. I really compliment that good idea. But I personally mean it's emotion. But I call out the really shitty.

Ideas but you should call it the really great ones. If you let the pendulum swing both ways, then everybody goes, he's balanced. It's always one way.

So I remember to make sure next time they give a good idea. I 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.

If it's always one way. That's right. Why bring any idea?

I'm all about the pendulum, right?

You gotta have both. I 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, Yang. So you mentioned the glass and the iPhone. So you're one of the not just the ipod, not just nest. You were one of the key figures in the creation of the iPhone. What's the interesting aspects, what's the good, the bad and the ugly of the origin story of the iPhone?

The joy and the pain. Don't just give me pain all the time.

Yang and the Yang. So you mentioned the glass and the iPhone. So you're one of the not just the ipod, not just nest. You were one of the key figures in the creation of the iPhone. What's the interesting aspects, what's the good, the bad and the ugly of the origin story of the iPhone? Again, this is a Netflix series that spans multiple seasons. Again, this is a Netflix series that spans multiple seasons.

But what Change my flight, please.

Yeah, what wisdom, what interesting memories you have from the fighting. So the pain and the joy that was foundational to the ipod.

But what changed my flight, please.

Yeah, what wisdom, what interesting memories you have from the findings. So the pain and the joy that was foundational to the ipod. All the CDs you had to lug around, what was the pain and the joy and the vision of the iPhone in your all the CDs you had to lug around, what was the mind and the mind of the team, 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?

Pain and the joy and the vision of the iPhone in your mind and the mind of the team Steve's mind and so on.

And it's about the. So Apple now is. 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 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 wind at your back. You got confidence like Apple had been beaten down since of the revenue. Total revenue of Apple, 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? 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 like. And Steve Wood proudly came in front of us and said, today, I can tell you, this is the first time you're seeing like. And Steve Wood proudly came in front of us and all of 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. Said today, I can tell you, all of 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. Wonderful, right? So now what you have is you have this successful thing changing the face of Apple. And you hear these wonderful, right? So now what you have is, you have this success. The stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry boom. And it's the feature phones at that time, they're adding this whole thing, changing the face of Apple. And you hear these heavy stomping footsteps of the cameras, they're adding color displays, they're seeing the success of the ipod and going, that's just music. We have some storable phone industry boom. And it's the feature phones at that time, they're adding cameras, they're adding color displays, they're seeing storage. We can load music on our phones and we can do what the ipod does, plus more boom, boom. Yeah, the success of the ipod and going, that's just music. We have some storage, we can load music on our phones. And you're like, like. And how many hundreds of millions of them 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 going to do about this? You know, go. 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, 4050 million, something like that. So now, Goliath, who wants to take our lunch, right, the schoolyard bull. 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 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 we and so there was one, let's partner with them. So itunes music store was there. All of these phones are going to 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 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 and the content that you needed to download. So now apple had multiple legs of the stool as Steve would always refer to as it. It. So now the mobile phone industry, okay, we're going to work with them. They are going to make a, an ipod shuffle basically inside of a phone can have 99 songs total. And they're going to come to our store and you're going to, it's like, okay, great. It's all going to be well and good. And that became the Motorola rocker project. It was Apple and Motorola getting together. There's going to 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 have duty data networks yet. It was a disaster from the beginning. Two different cultures, two different types of leadership styles. Not necessarily the most competent engineers on the other side. And it turned out to be an absolute horrible disaster. I watched the pains because luckily I didn't have to be a part of it. I watched the pains on Jeff Robbins 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 going to partner. So if we can't partner with these guys, we have to become one of them to actually compete 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 it was an ipod but it 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 itunes music store. Itunes video store for music videos and movies. And it would be a full screen ipod. So instead of the classic, the way you know would be full screen and it would have a virtual click wheel, you'd have a virtual like single touch touchscreen that you could scroll. Right. Think of maybe 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 refer to it. So now the mobile phone industry, okay, we're going to work with them, my team. But the third project going on was the multi touch screen technology to drive a Mac tablet. And so that Mac tablet, that, that touchscreen technology 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 are like there's not enough tablet apps today that are modified for tablet. They're just phone apps, 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. You put those three together and now is where those, those three things that then created the form or the technology in 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 best way. It wasn't macOS just, just changed a little. It was totally. Things were hacked out and changed and new code was inserted and it really was 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? Right.

And great teams like the. Creating the 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 MA Windows and stuff, they were like, 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, all those other ones was about compatibility. This was about a whole new way of being.

What did you think about the Steve Jobs presentation of the. The iPhone, the sort of. The first iPhone, you know, phone, Internet.

Communicator and ipod in your pocket.

Yeah. They're going to sort of present this, 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? What part of the. Actually the design process was that presentation? You know what I mean? Like from the early. Because you said so consider the. Why the press release at the very beginning.

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 and then he would talk to a few, real trusted confidence outside of the, 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 it. 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 gonna solve that pain for you and put it all together. So he was just showing you the pain and being 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.

It was all that.

It was all of it.

And of course, he was dramatic at certain points and he would raise his voice and a wry smile or whatever it was. It was all those touches. He was an actor as well as a storyteller.

Yeah, but it was the truth.

Right? The truth came through. It was a nonfiction story. And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it for dramatic effect. That's amazing.

So there's a designer you mentioned Johnny. I've. You both are brilliant designers, Great human beings. There were some battles fought in the distant past between the two of you. Looking back, what is the positive characteristics of Johnny that made you a better person and designer? Having worked with him, 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? Design's 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 for marketing, right?

So how it would look, how you would feel.

All of 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. 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, haha, 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 there.