SPECIAL: Steve Jobs (Part 2)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Sam Parr** (0:45)
All right, we've got a special episode here. This is from Ben Wilson. Ben Wilson's a producer for My First Million, but on the side, he's got a podcast called How to Take Over the World, and I love it. It was actually in my top Spotify wrap-up podcast, named with Sean, and so we air some of his episodes on our feed because we think it's amazing. And so this episode is with Steve Jobs. There's actually a two-part series. So this is, well, you could be listening to one or two right now, but it's a two-part series.
And give it a listen. He does a really good job of saying the background of who Steve was and what motivated him, but he also does a really good job of explaining what you can learn from him in the world of business. So incredibly fascinating.
Check it out, How to Take Over the World, it's the name of the podcast, and here is Steve Jobs.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:28)
I'm going to show you how great I am.

**Ben Wilson** (1:50)
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. I'm your host, Ben Wilson. This is part two of two about Steve Jobs. If you haven't listened to part one yet, you'll probably want to go back and do that, and you can find that in this feed. That's just the podcast previous.
As a quick reminder of where we're at, Steve has been kicked out of Apple. His next ventures, Pixar Next, are floundering, and he's nearly broke. This time period is the early to mid-90s. 1995 is the year when things really start to turn around for Steve Jobs. For the past 10 years, he's basically had a string of one failure after another, and now he's about to have an unparalleled 15-year streak of success after success. And how does he pull this off? How does he have such a titanic shift in fortune? What was it that finally turned things around for him? Well, it started with a cartoon.
Steve bought Pixar as a computer company, and as a computer company, its performance was dismal. The hardware they produced was a financial catastrophe, and the software was only ever mildly successful, and never really even came close to making them profitable. But he didn't give up on them. He kept pumping money into the company to keep them afloat.
The original Pixar executives always wanted to produce a full-length 3D animated movie.
They built this company to do that, and everything else they did, building the computers, creating the software, and all that, was in their minds just a step, a way to make enough money to keep the lights on, keep things going, so they could make their movie. That was their great passion.
And with that in mind, they had hired a very gifted animator from Disney by the name of John Lasseter. And he was in charge of making little animations to help sell their technology.
At first, the executives of Pixar had to hide this hire from Steve Jobs. They gave John Lasseter a bogus title that made him sound like a technical employee rather than an animator.
But once Steve Jobs saw the animations that John Lasseter had produced, he becomes supportive of his hiring and of having him around. And he continued to fund the animation part of Pixar, even as he was forced to make cuts and slash budgets in other parts of the company. Well, as I said, the executives at Pixar really believed that a 3D animated film could be successful. But they weren't in the animation studio and they didn't have the human resources or the money to pull this off. So they're just chugging along being a software company and waiting for their opportunity. Well, John Lasseter, this animator that they have hired, makes a short film to show off their technology and it wins an Academy Award for best short film. Disney sees that this guy that they let go is really talented and they try to hire him back. But he thinks that Pixar is the only place for him. He loved the culture there and he loved being there. So he says no to Disney. And so Steve Jobs comes in and helps negotiate a deal with Disney that they will help Pixar make a 3D animated movie. And they're going to do this by lending some of their employees to Pixar, helping to make the movie. And also a large part of it is funding and distributing the film because Pixar, like I said, was not profitable. They did not have the money to make a full length feature film, a movie. And what they're going to make is the world's very first 3D animated film. Everything before this was 2D and mostly hand drawn.