Conversation – 31

Steve Jobs once walked barefoot through Atari’s halls, bathed in LSD, and considered becoming a monk.
Instead, he built the company that rewired how the world thinks, talks, listens, learns, and dreams.
He wasn’t born into brilliance. He was adopted, dropped out of college, and crashed on friends’ floors eating free meals at Hare Krishna temples. What he had was obsession — with elegance, with control, with making machines feel human. While most saw computers as sterile, Jobs wanted them to feel. Not just smart — beautiful.
In a dusty garage in 1976, he co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak. Woz built the tech. Jobs built the vision. Together they launched the Apple I, then the Macintosh — wrapped in beige plastic but infused with the idea that technology could be personal, almost soulful.
But by 1985, Jobs was pushed out of Apple — exiled from his own kingdom. Most would have burned out. He went deeper. He started NeXT. Bought Pixar. Changed animation forever with Toy Story. And when Apple begged him to return, he came back a changed man: leaner, colder, bolder.
Then came the iMac. The iPod. The iPhone. Devices so intuitive they changed human behavior. Jobs didn’t invent computers or phones — he made them irresistible extensions of self. But brilliance had a cost. He was notorious for emotional abuse, perfectionism, and a near-spiritual intolerance for mediocrity. “You’d show him something,” a colleague once said, “and he’d call it it. Then a week later, it would be his favorite idea.”
When he was diagnosed with cancer, he tried juice fasts and denial. Control was his religion. But death is the one product he couldn’t redesign.
He died in 2011 with no Twitter, no LinkedIn, no flashy send-off. Just a quiet room. An empire behind him. And a half-bitten apple that changed the world.
Steve Jobs didn’t just make tools. He made belief.
And he left behind a glowing screen — asking us what we’ll create next.