[HN Gopher] Steve Jobs Interview in 1981 [video]
___________________________________________________________________
Steve Jobs Interview in 1981 [video]
Author : uniqueid
Score : 209 points
Date : 2021-03-25 12:35 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| Nelkins wrote:
| Incredible that he was only 25 when this was recorded...
| johbjo wrote:
| The bicycle quip appears in so many videos from around that time.
| Interpret Jobs videos as case studies in a type of marketing.
|
| He's framing Apple marketing as "it's so exciting that we can
| help people so much", but it's honest and actually true.
|
| The best videos of Jobs are the rare internal ones.
|
| Also, he's 25 in this video? wtf
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It bothers me a bit. Having heard it now in so many contexts it
| is clear it was not spontaneous ... in fact several other tells
| in this interview make it clear very little was spontaneous
| when Steve was facing the media.
|
| I suppose I am not surprised by that -- that's what marketing
| does.
|
| The bicycle analogy looks particularly transparent though:
| there's a pseudo-intellectual aspect to it, even name-dropping
| "Scientific American" seems to be there to make the speaker
| appear well-read, a deep thinker.
|
| It works though a lot better than his electric motor analogy
| that he lead off with. ;-)
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| This. Though I will say, he was still brilliant and quick
| outside of these settings.
|
| Perhaps the training to prepare for these appearances made
| his moment at Macworld taking on the 'Mr. Jobs' question a
| thousand times easier, but still in that moment was a
| critical one - a public challenge - and Steve knew how to
| move that whole conversation back from himself to supporting
| his team, which was brilliant, because everyone wants to feel
| they have someone fighting for them... especially when the
| landscape/future is squishy and uncertain.
| bonaldi wrote:
| I don't know why this bothers people so -- I suspect it's
| similar to some people's surprise at finding out that stand-
| up comedians rehearse their acts, even the spontaneous-
| seeming "I'm thinking this up as I stand in front of you"
| head-scratching pauses, to the nth degree.
|
| This was a public performance for Jobs, of course he'd have
| thought through and rehearsed what he was going to say. His
| ability to weave together the rehearsed with the improvised -
| like when his remote broke on stage at WWDC - is one of the
| things that took him to the next level. Just like the comic
| who can handle a heckle and get back to their set in such a
| smooth way you can't even see the join.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| "I know the privacy issue is very, very hot in the media these
| days" https://youtu.be/DbfejwP1d3c?t=613
|
| Funny to be reminded of that fact by someone from 1981.
| criddell wrote:
| About a minute after that he starts talking about how more and
| more of the computer's power will be used to adapt the computer
| to a more human-friendly way of working. A simpler UI requires
| a more sophisticated computer. Pretty insightful.
| [deleted]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| source of the interview or location??
| uniqueid wrote:
| I don't know who posted the clip on Youtube. I assume the
| location is Bandley 1. I don't know what the show was. It's
| around the same time as the ABC Nightline clip which has done
| the rounds on the internet for a few years, but probably
| unrelated since none of this footage is in the Nightline
| segment.
| RareSirMix wrote:
| This was done for ABC News on technology and computer gaming
| becoming more prevalent from what I remember. As for location
| other people probably have better guesses than me.
|
| I didn't include the footage but later on the computer behind
| him gets shown off by someone not Steve. The piece later goes
| to an arcade machine manufacturing plant. I'll have to review
| the footage again and get back on all that.
| duxup wrote:
| When I was younger I never quite got what Steve talked about
| sometimes / wasn't interested. I think I dismissed it as PR hype
| or whatever (don't listen to the man in the suit!).
|
| Now I hear it and with hindsight and probably just being in the
| future decades later it seems so on point and such a simple
| explanation for what to me earlier (if I really thought about it)
| seemed like "Man for that to be there has to be... <brain seizes
| up>".
|
| His explanations seem effortless.
| etempleton wrote:
| This is Steve's gift. He understands complex and abstracts
| concepts and is able to offer up a simple analogy or
| explanation that anyone can understand. It seems easy, but if
| you have spent time around enough highly intelligent and
| technical folks you will know it is not a common trait.
| uniqueid wrote:
| in the suit
|
| In the _tee shirt_! SJ may have worn a suit or a turtle-neck,
| but Apple culture back then was anti-IBM and tee shirts were
| part of that.
| duxup wrote:
| Me when I was younger "Don't fall for the lack of a suit,
| it's still there!"
| tpmx wrote:
| That moment 4m15s in when he realizes his answer is way too
| complicated, stops talking in the middle of a sentence (thereby
| making that recorded video unusable) and asks if he could have
| another shot at answering the question. The next iteration is
| dramatically simplified.
|
| This is communication masterclass level, already back then. How
| the heck did he get to there, so early?
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Here's another instance, refining the delivery of "a bicycle
| for the human mind": https://youtu.be/NKT5nbEPdfs?t=60.
|
| It is a "performance art", like a stand-up comic, an actor, a
| politician, a presentation, or a congressional hearing. Some
| people do not want to rehearse as they feel it "empties them".
| He was known to meticulously practice the delivery of keynotes
| so he could hit things on time, as if it were a play, if I
| recall correctly.
|
| You can see that there's a good part of storytelling. If you
| watch Elon Musk videos, there often is repetition on the three
| things he focused on in college: the internet, multi-planetary
| life, and sustainable energy.
|
| In more recent videos, the narrative has shifted to five things
| he focused on during college, and an addition of genetics and
| artificial intelligence made it to the list. This is a bit
| different, like a git history change, which goes unnoticed by
| most interviewers. However, people think about a lot of things
| and nobody would be able to list all their ideas or thoughts,
| let alone someone like him.
|
| One of the _best_ interviewers in the space is Sarah Lacy, in
| my opinion. She has enough raport with her guests in Pando
| Monthly videos (there are bout fifty of them, and I invite
| everyone to watch them), but she doesn 't hesitate to invite
| her guests to better recall the events, timeline, or context...
| "Yes, but X had invested before and you had replaced so and so
| on the board at that time, so that must have been _before_ Z ".
| Way better interviews because she has the context, as opposed
| to someone just looking "just" for an interview. The interviews
| are really good and dive into decisions founders and VCs took
| and what had motivated them, etc.
|
| Long videos:
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7983B23CA8F80AFE
|
| All, including short segments from these videos:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgHogDu1ewdkkWZjfKIuKXQ
|
| One other interview is really good: "The lost interview"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDqQcmVqAm4
|
| Here's an "internal" video for NEXT where he explains their
| strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU
|
| Here's a video of a NEXT brainstorming session in a retreat:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kp9cSzbLFE
| tpmx wrote:
| Seriously, what is this? GPT-3 output? How did you get from
| Steve Jobs via Musk to spending a very long paragraph on
| Sarah Lacy/Pando and then pushing their youtube videos?
|
| I'm sorry, but this smells like spam.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| > _Seriously, what is this? GPT-3 output? How did you get
| from Steve Jobs to spending a very long paragraph on Sarah
| Lacy /Pando and then pushing her youtube videos?_
|
| Here's how: not all interviews are equal. Some are very
| good because the interviewer dives deep, and the guest
| answers the questions and allows themselves to be taken
| there and open up.
|
| I have linked interviews of Steve Jobs and videos that I
| have considered of value, for example "The lost interview"
| where he dives in really interesting topics like building
| product, the ways he looked for venture capital, the
| differences between sales driven organizations and others,
| etc. That is someone very interesting sharing his thought
| process.
|
| This naturally lead me to link to other similar videos
| where guests who have built very interesting products and
| organizations share similar insights. This kind of videos
| is rare, as it takes a guest willing to go there, and an
| interviewer who helps them _get_ there. The Pando list
| contains a registry of these videos. Think hunter-gatherer
| vs. agriculture: going around gathering content in the
| wild, vs having a bunch of it in one place.
|
| > _I flagged this since I consider it spam._
|
| I understand.
|
| All the best,
| tpmx wrote:
| Well, you succeded in killing the relevant discussion in
| this sub-thread by means of your bloviation. Congrats.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| You succeeded in teaching me a new word, "bloviation"[0].
| Thank you.
|
| - [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloviation
| laurent92 wrote:
| > or a congressional hearing
|
| Interesting: He was never summoned by Congress. All the other
| technical directors have been: Zuckerberg, Gates, Dorsey,
| even Larry Ellison from Oracle. Maybe having the upper hand
| in being well-understood and well-spoken, goes as far as to
| have a smoother relationship with the general public?
| saalweachter wrote:
| Apple spent most of its existence as a well-known but not
| particularly dominant company in its fields, which goes a
| long way to explaining why Congress never took an interest
| in it.
|
| Think back to 2008-9, when Jobs had to step back for health
| reasons. While Apple had made a solid turn-around and most
| of the pieces of its future were in place, it was far from
| the juggernaut it became. The iPhone was coming on like
| gangbusters, but Blackberry and Nokia were still a thing,
| Zunes were still a thing...
| simonh wrote:
| It was an interesting time. The iPod was a phenomenal
| success, iPod launch events were media circuses and the
| cultural as well as commercial success was huge.
|
| Yet iPods themselves were really just music players. A
| more sophisticated Walkman.
|
| The iPhone combined the computing flexibility and utility
| of an Apple computer with the convenience and user
| friendliness of an iPod. But by 2009 they were still just
| getting started with it.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Tim Cook has been. On a related note, I am convinced that
| Zuckerberg would have an easier time with these matters
| with a different haircut..
|
| This is not a personal attack on Zuckerberg, but I think
| the haircut is damaging his image and makes him less
| trustworthy than he may be. Joel Kaplan, Myriah Jordan, and
| their teams may have prepped him well for these hearings
| (and the famous picture of the talking points left open
| accidentally-on-purpose is just funny), but he seems to
| provoke a visceral reaction in people that others do not.
|
| Many see Gates, Dorsey, Ellison, etc as CEOs with certain
| traits, like nerdy, charming, well-spoken,
| funny/outspoken/brash, etc, but I don't think they assume
| they are _evil_.
|
| I don't think people would see him and think _evil_ on a
| video like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--APdD6vejI
|
| Again, this is not an attack on physique or on the person,
| but an observation based on what a lot of comments on these
| hearings are about. They mostly are about him, not others,
| drawing comparisons to animals or robots, dehumanizing him,
| etc. This leads me to think it's a matter of perception and
| image and I'm wondering what impact the latter would have
| on the former.
| mynameishere wrote:
| I mean, he just flubbed it and asked for a retake. Happens all
| the time. By the way, he's dead. You can quit kissing his ass.
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, there is no ass-kissing going on here - on the
| contrary... I think he was brilliant at marketing and
| communication, but that's not what technology (primarily)
| should be about. I do think it's interesting to find out how
| he got so insanely good at marcom so early, though.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| It's a funny contrast considering his comment about lowest
| common denominator at the start ;)
|
| He knows he has to play that game too.
| adventured wrote:
| The skills we use at ~26 are being actively developed
| throughout childhood and our teen years, just typically not
| consciously. Most likely the device he's employing he had
| utilized frequently when he was growing up, perhaps as a means
| to convince other kids to do what he wanted or otherwise to get
| his way (whether with his peers, parents or other authority
| figures). It's Tom Sawyer's whitewashed fence. Jobs is trying
| to manipulate your mind and I don't mean that in a sinister
| way.
|
| Also keep in mind, Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and
| Influence People was published in 1936 and was a very well-
| known book throughout Steve's life. There is a pretty good
| chance he ran across a few books like that which would have
| aided his advancement in manipulating impression, narrative or
| outcomes. He didn't have to entirely invent the wheel in that
| sense.
| raymond_goo wrote:
| Anyone knows who that person in the framed picture is?
| bjornlouser wrote:
| Joan Baez?
| mwcremer wrote:
| Yes. They dated in the 80's.
| js2 wrote:
| No, that's not her. Also, they didn't meet till 1982.
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/new-steve-
| jobs...
| beforeolives wrote:
| It's interesting to see him at a point when he's still figuring
| out his style and way of speaking. Most of the answers that he
| gives sound like stuff that he's clearly said before in different
| context. As if he has a prepared list of analogies and references
| that he reaches for every time instead of genuinely answering the
| question. At the time of the video he's still learning how to do
| this and it seems very different from the sharp Jobs from later
| years.
| Tenal wrote:
| Jobs looked bored. I'm bored. This guy wasn't a God. This is just
| a rudimentary PR-enforced interview capture. The way people hang
| on every mundane word that comes out of certain people's mouths
| is tribalistic to a disturbing monkey degree.
| ksec wrote:
| We are in 2021 and there are still new ( old ) video and audio
| resources from Steve Jobs that we had never seen before.
|
| Did someone somehow had a VHS type and discover we had this video
| and upload it? If not what the story behind the discovery of this
| video and interview?
|
| And I sort of think Steve is still very much Steve even in his
| early 20s. His understanding of market, business, computing and
| user experience. Apple just isn't the same without him.
| tpmx wrote:
| Probably some broadcaster employee who saved some tapes from
| destruction a decade or two later. See also: r/DataHoarder.
| Aren't we all lucky?
| wiremine wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, this is great.
|
| The level of discourse of the interview feels so much higher than
| a lot of the interviews I see today. I was just a kid back in the
| early 1980s, so I don't have a good frame of reference, but does
| anyone have any data to support that feeling?
| khazhoux wrote:
| Nah.
|
| You're seeing the raw footage. The final cut, after edits and
| splices, will be shorter and less detailed.
|
| And there's plenty of great interviews today, and terrible
| interviews back then. Just pick your forum.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Another famous interview I remember from the 80s was Phil
| Donahue interviewing Ayn Rand. Regardless of what you think of
| either of them, the conversation is more like this video and
| way above the sadness that is a contemporary interview.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| Another interesting one from 1991:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_t-iKeWdRI&t.
| tdaltonc wrote:
| 40 years later and video games still make Apple very
| uncomfortable.
| rblatz wrote:
| The next Apple TV is rumored to be game focused.
| sneak wrote:
| If a personal computer is like a bicycle for your mind,
| augmenting and expanding your own intellect, what does that make
| a modern smartphone, where the what and how you use it is
| dictated by remote parties instead of your own needs and ideas?
|
| It's really interesting to see Apple leading the way toward
| "impersonal" computing devices like this, considering.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think a phone is a huge step forward in fulfilling the
| bicycle for the mind analogy. The phone makes it really easy to
| Google things, take notes, send messages, pictures, etc. If you
| don't like notifications you can reconfigure them.
| suyash wrote:
| Listen to what Steve said - just replace when he says "computer"
| with "ai" - it will totally make sense today!
| criddell wrote:
| In 1981 you could replace "computer" with "ai" and it would
| have made sense. I suspect that forty years from now it will
| still be true.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I found this audio recording of an Apple user's group meeting
| very fascinating from 1978.
| https://archive.org/details/camvchm_000069/camvchm_000069_t0...
|
| Woz at one point talks about how if you don't understand the
| undocumented instructions maybe they aren't for you. Anyway, kind
| of nice ambience to it as well.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Wow, Apple was two years old at that point!
| cronix wrote:
| Officially, but Jobs/Woz were making and selling illegal blue
| tone boxes 10 years before that around 1972. They allowed you
| to basically steal phone time from the phone companies by
| simulating the sounds that nickles/dimes/quarters made when
| inserting them into a payphone so you didn't have to pay to
| use the phone for local or long distance calls.
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/27/blue-box-
| circuit-...
| wittjeff wrote:
| A 'blue box' routed calls through the network.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box A red box simulated
| the tones made when coins were inserted into a pay phone.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| shrug
|
| Everyone still called it blue boxing when you were
| putting tones into the phone
| teddyh wrote:
| And people called HTML a programming language. Doesn't
| make it correct.
| Daho0n wrote:
| And people call cracking hacking and hacking cracking.
| How deep should we go?
| haddr wrote:
| and phreaking hacking
| julianh95 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. Do you have the timestamp for that
| particular bit?
|
| Edit: Looks like it's from 6:00 to 6:40
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Nice to know Apple is still Apple.
| tpmx wrote:
| How so? Woz is answering pretty much every single question in
| insane levels of detail. So much candor. That's the opposite
| of the Apple I know.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| I think we are saying the same thing; it's a cheeky remark
| that to read Apple's documentation is in it of itself, a
| learned skill, essential to being productive in Swift.
|
| I read the comment as Woz saying documentation isn't for
| the faint of heart ... true
|
| (Mind you, I love Apple's docs now, and honestly prefer it
| compared to Stripe-y and Twilio-y documentation... to me
| S&T docs are a style that tries to smooth over the
| cluttered calls and returns. Are they APIs that makes sense
| to accomplish x style or job succinctly, or do I have to
| read the 8 million other things I don't care about to do
| the one thing I need to do?)
| tpmx wrote:
| Ah, ok. No, we weren't saying the same thing, but I now
| understand what you meant, and I also happen to agree.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Who is in the portrait behind him?
| haydenlee wrote:
| Cool to see hear his 1984 analogy a few years before they made it
| into the famous 1984 super bowl ad.
| petercooper wrote:
| Nice little bit after the interview is over (at 18:30) where
| Steve says: "I haven't taken a vacation in a long time. That's
| how I measure whether I'm successful, is whether I can take off
| for three months. So far I'm not successful."
| matthoiland wrote:
| > _Man riding a bicycle was twice as [efficient] as the condor -
| way off the end of list [compared to all other animals]. And what
| it really illustrated was mans ability as a toolmaker, to fashion
| a tool that can amplify an inherent ability that he has._
|
| > _That 's exactly what we think we're doing here - we think
| we're basically fashioning a 21st century bicycle here, which can
| amplify an inherent intellectual ability that man has and really
| take care of a lot of drudgery to free people to do much more
| creative work._
|
| My takeaway of this perspective really illuminates the value of
| augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR). The escapism of
| VR is fine for entertainment, but amplifying our understanding of
| the real-time real world with AR is very exciting as a species.
| nkrebs13 wrote:
| I think VR will be much more important than AR in the long run.
| The technology isn't there yet, obviously, but in the long run.
| I think viewing VR as an escapism entertainment medium is far
| too close minded. Sufficiently advanced VR would be able to
| simulate your actual environment* and anything else AR could
| simulate.
|
| There are also many more functional applications of VR than AR.
| Random examples to illustrate my point: * Can train on the
| "real thing" instead of watching videos, doing
| exercises/drills, or reading books (e.g. military, pilots,
| surgeons, construction workers). * You and your coworkers could
| all go to an "in office" meeting without being in the same
| hemisphere (i.e. it would look like you were all sitting in an
| office together) * Students wouldn't have to sit through
| another boring lecture to learn, they could go there and watch
| it unfold for themselves (even if the lecture content takes
| place over a large period of time!)
|
| *by this I mean within the scope and context of whatever you're
| doing and not that the VR simulation would be created perfectly
| down to the last atom
| mlyle wrote:
| So much of our reasoning is abstract and removed from immediate
| physical reality, and VR alone may very well prove to be a
| powerful tool for understanding, reasoning, and conceptualizing
| these things. Even when I'm designing physical things there
| often isn't a real-world context to relate them to, yet. That
| is-- the jury is out on how much augmented reality is necessary
| to be "useful" versus immersion/"escapism".
|
| And even seemingly escapist things can be great for increasing
| intuition or our strengths in reasoning about things... witness
| Kerbal Space Program or Poly Bridge.
| matthoiland wrote:
| I really like your argument concerning reasoning - especially
| considering how we can experiment with the "shadows" of four
| dimensional shapes in VR. Science, research, reasoning - all
| very likely to be revolutionized with VR.
|
| But in daily life - always on - I believe AR will be as
| common as putting on shoes to protect our soft feet.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-25 23:01 UTC)