Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Steve Jobs: I had a scan at seven thirty in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for “prepare to die.” It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your good-byes.

  Mike Slade: He goes, “I’ve got pancreatic cancer, I’m going to die” and started crying. And I’m like, What the fuck? And I’m freaking out and so he’s like, “They’re not 100 percent sure,” but he’s such a disaster and so I interact with him the rest of the day and it’s kind of weird.

  Larry Brilliant: The phone rang and you could always tell when it was Steve because the caller ID would always just say “Apple,” and so I picked it up and he said, “Do you still believe in Neem Karoli Baba? Do you still believe in Maharaj-ji? Do you still believe in God? Do you still believe?” I said, “Hi, Steve, how are you?” And we talked, and he said, “I want to know if you still believe in Maharaj-ji.” And I said, “Yes, sure. Why?” He said, “Because I’ve been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.”

  Steve Jobs: I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy. They stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

  Mike Slade: And then the next morning Steve takes me aside and he goes, “It’s not pancreatic cancer, it’s an islet cell tumor, so it’s not as serious as I thought it was. It’s still serious but I’m going to be fine…” And I’m like, “Whoa!”

  Ron Johnson: Steve’s strength throughout his life was his ability to think differently and to trust his intuition and to follow his convictions. He did that at work, and he did that in his personal life. And that’s how he tackled his illness.

  Mike Slade: He chose not to have surgery right away and did acupuncture, which was ultimately a fatal decision, although it took seven or eight years.

  John Couch: Steve overcame so many obstacles that people said were insurmountable obstacles that he probably felt that he could beat his illness on his own as well.

  Mike Slade: Steve was a hippie—and I don’t mean that in a negative way. He was a pure vegan and he believed in alternative medicine, as demonstrated by not having the islet cell tumor surgery right away.

  Tom Suiter: In 2005 I, like everybody else, saw the commencement speech at Stanford and kind of figured, Great! He dodged the bullet. Thank God.

  Jon Rubinstein: He told everyone he was cured, right? So everyone went “Okay, he’s cured: back to work.” So there’d be stressful moments when it was first announced and everything, but after that everyone just got back to work.

  Andy Hertzfeld: The cancer diagnosis was just after the iPod started up on that hockey-stick adoption curve—but before the iPhone. And it’s very interesting to think about all that. Boy, did he accomplish a lot in a short time.

  Wayne Goodrich: At the iPhone introduction in 2007 his stamina and his outlook was still very Steve—he was very adamant that it was business as usual.

  Ron Johnson: There was never any bitterness about the challenges he faced. He didn’t complain about it. I think he battled very gracefully.

  Mike Slade: I visited him after he had his liver transplant in 2009 and a couple other times, and he always told me that he was okay. Knowing what I know now, he never actually told me the whole truth at any point in time, even though we were really close friends.

  Mona Simpson: I remember my brother learning to walk again with a chair. After his liver transplant, once a day he would get up on legs that seemed too thin to bear him, arms pitched to the chair back. He’d push that chair down the Memphis hospital corridor toward the nursing station and then he’d sit down on the chair, rest, turn around, and walk back again. He counted his steps and each day pressed a little farther.

  John Markoff: I remember him coming back from one of his sabbaticals and seeing him at the Stanford Apple Store. He was much thinner, but he looked pretty healthy.

  Ron Johnson: He just became a lot leaner, physically. His body was wearing down, but his mind was sharp as ever when I saw him. His spirit was as strong as ever or even strengthening—which is not uncommon near the end. It becomes this unique moment where people start to truly understand better how to think about life and the really important things in life.

  Andy Hertzfeld: The cancer definitely changed his approach to life. He got a little nicer or more straightforward. He had much more of a desire to explain himself. Before, he always was very kind of imperious: “No! We’re not doing that!” But then after he got sick he started articulating his thinking behind things.

  John Markoff: He came back to Apple for the last time in the spring of 2011 and we knew he was in bad shape. I just sent him a note that said, “Hey! Steve Levy and I would like to come visit.” And we had a really nice two-hour visit with him in May of 2011. He was drinking ginger ale the whole time, so I knew he was on some kind of cancer drug or something like that, but he didn’t talk about his health, and we didn’t ask about his health. He told us at one point that he wished he had a little more energy and that he wanted to take on the car industry. He really wanted to design a car! It was a really nice conversation. And that was the last time I saw him. He took his final leave from Apple two or three months later.

  Mike Slade: Bill Gates goes, “Will you help me? I want to see Steve. I know he’s really sick: I want to go see him,” and I go, “Just e-mail the guy,” and he goes, “Well, I did” and then it turned out that when Bill left Microsoft he changed his e-mail address, and so it didn’t get through to Steve. Bill thought Steve was ignoring him, whatever. So Bill said, “Will you facilitate me meeting him?” And I’m thinking to myself, Why do I have to do this? You guys introduced me to each other! It’s like your parents asking you to arrange dinner or something. So anyway, I set it up for May of 2011.

  Bill Gates: I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed.

  Mike Slade: A phone call comes in and it was Steve, and I go, “Hi, Steve,” and he was pretty sick and he goes, “I’m supposed to meet with Bill in like an hour,” and I go, “I know, I set it up—remember?” And he goes, “What does he want?” Because he thought Bill wanted to give him the whole big giving-pledge thing and Steve didn’t want to do that shit, and I’m like, “No, he just wants to hang out with you, really!” And he goes like, “Bill Gates wants to hang out?” Because Bill is not a hang-out kind of a guy. And I go, “Yes, he really does!” And he goes, “We’re scheduled for ninety minutes—that’s not enough time to hang out.” And I go, “Just go with it. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Give him a Diet Coke and he’ll be on his way! You should do this, you know?” And he goes, “Okay. Talk to you later. Bye.” I think Bill stayed for three or four hours. It was a long time, and he was really happy he did it, let’s put it that way. They talked about their kids and everything, and it’s kind of like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio talking to each other. They’re not pissed. It was sweet.

  Bill Gates: We laughed about how fortunate it was that he met Laurene, and she’s kept him semisane, and I met Melinda, and she’s kept me semisane. We also discussed how it’s challenging to be one of our children, and how do we mitigate that? It was pretty personal.

  In August, Steve Jobs formally gives up the reins at Apple and retreats to his home in Palo Alto.

  Larry Brilliant: One of the greatest pleasures I had in forty years of friendship with Ste
ve was going for walks, frequently from his house to the frozen yogurt place, or the smoothie place.

  Larry Ellison: We would always go for walks. And the walks just kept on getting shorter, until near the end we’d kind of walk around the block, and you would just watch him getting weaker.

  Alan Kay: I told Steve before he died, I said, “Steve, you know the best thing you ever did was hanging on to Pixar for ten years.” I hope he goes to heaven for just that alone.

  Ron Johnson: I saw Steve the Sunday before he passed. The door was always open, so you could just kind of wander in and walk back and say, “Hi.” He was in bed. And I sat next to his bed for quite a while. I had maybe two hours with Steve, just chatting. I wouldn’t put myself in his inner circle, but I was in the next ring, and we had an incredible relationship and had many intimate, deep conversations about spiritual issues.

  Steve Wozniak: Near the end of his life he seemed very changed and he really, he was going back in his mind thinking about those early times, before Apple even.

  John Markoff: Jobs would get sentimental. Somehow that led into a discussion of how significant an event taking LSD had been for him. He said it was one of the two or three most significant things he’d done in his life.

  Larry Brilliant: I think what’s interesting is what Maharaj-ji said about it. He said, “LSD is yogi medicine.” It’s medicine for yogis, for people who are trying to become enlightened.

  Dan Kottke: In the winter of 1972 we were reading all this stuff: We had read Be Here Now, we had read Autobiography of a Yogi, we had read Ramakrishna and His Disciples—that’s all about enlightenment.

  Larry Brilliant: But LSD only allows you into the presence of God, or the presence of Christ, for a minute. You can bow down and say, “Hello,” but then you’ve got to get out of there when it wears off. So you can take LSD, and come into the presence for a minute, then you’ve got to get out of there like a thief in the night. It’s better to earn your way in, and then you can stay forever.

  John Markoff: What I found most striking was that he said that it was something that his wife didn’t share with him and it was something that set him apart from the industry, because most of the CEOs of the companies he dealt with hadn’t taken acid. And unless you’ve taken acid, you don’t understand what that means. It is sort of a profoundly intellectually and psychologically disruptive thing. The world doesn’t look the same after you’ve done it.

  Larry Brilliant: In the ashram it was very, very rare for anyone to take psychedelics. It was already a place of such heightened feelings. But I never would have gone to India or found Maharaj-ji if I hadn’t taken psychedelics, and I’m sure that’s true for Steve as well. I have known him longer than anybody, I think. I met him in 1974, and we shared this experience of this ashram, and our conversations were about spiritual progress, and illness, and the meaning of life, and the end of life, and all those things.

  Ron Johnson: The mood was reflective, unhurried: remembering a lot of things that we had done together. I just remember at the end saying, “Thank you.” And he said the same thing. And I give him one last big hug. I had to climb into his bed to do it.

  Larry Ellison: This is the strongest, most willful person I have ever met, and after seven years the cancer just wore him out. He was just tired of fighting, tired of the pain. And he decided—shocked Laurene, shocked everybody—that the medication was going to stop. He just pulled off the meds on Saturday or Sunday.

  Mona Simpson: Tuesday morning, he called me to ask me to hurry up to Palo Alto. His tone was affectionate, dear, loving, but like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey, even as he was sorry—truly, deeply sorry—to be leaving us. So sorry we wouldn’t be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

  Dan Kottke: One of the books that we really liked was Way of the White Clouds, which is about Tibetan reincarnation. We just found that fascinating.

  Larry Brilliant: Steve was in and out of the spiritual practice business, but he was a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba and had pictures of Maharaj-ji everywhere, until the day he died.

  Mike Slade: He died on Wednesday, October 5, 2011. I was blown away when he died; I didn’t expect it at all. I was shocked that he died. He told me he had a year. And then he was dead.

  Mona Simpson: Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times: “Oh, Wow! Oh, Wow! Oh, Wow!”

  Dan Kottke: It gives support for the idea that he was tripping at the moment of death. Aldous Huxley famously had himself injected with LSD when he was close to death, and Steve knew about that. But I doubt Steve did that. He would have wanted to be lucid. But DMT is endogenous, it is produced by the body.

  Erik Davis: DMT is also known as the spirit molecule—it’s a naturally occurring psychedelic compound widely found in nature.

  Dan Kottke: And there is a theory that the pineal gland releases DMT at the moment of death, which is kind of interesting from a neuropharmacological point of view… that’s my take on it.

  Ron Jonson: Bill Campbell was in many ways Steve’s best friend. He visited every day, took him for walks, spent time with him. Bill was coaching an eighth-grade football team over at Sacred Heart that day. He showed up at practice and brought his kids together into a huddle and said, “Guys, I want you to know that my best friend just died.” And then a double rainbow appeared right over the field. Some people think those things happen by accident. Others think there is something deeper going on. It was an extraordinary moment.

  Mike Slade: The next day I get an e-mail from Laurene’s office saying, “We’re having a small ceremony for fifty people, will you come?” So I went to it. It was a really hot, weird, Silicon Valley day. It was so close to when he died that everybody was still raw. It wasn’t like one of those things where everybody really has their shit together. It was a really small, very eclectic group: Bob Iger was there, he spoke; Lee Clow read “The Crazy Ones”; Steve’s biological sister Mona Simpson was there; all his children were there; Laurene was there; the only Apple people I recall were Jony Ives, Eddy Cue, and Tim Cook. George Riley was kind of running the show. Larry Brilliant was there.

  Larry Brilliant: We read something from the Bhagavad Gita, but we’re not going to talk about that.

  Mike Slade: It was in the cemetery and his coffin was right there. We all formed a semicircle around the casket and then anybody who wanted to speak could speak. It was beautiful, and very visceral. It wasn’t a religious funeral: There was no reverend telling you what to do. It was kind of cool that way. We all went to John Doerr’s house in Woodside afterward and just sort of drank wine and shot the shit. I got to spend a bunch of time talking to Laurene’s brothers, who are really funny guys from Jersey, talking about pranks they played on Steve and stuff like that. I’m really glad I went, but it was hard. It wasn’t like the thing a week later at Stanford, which was sort of fun in a funny way.

  Wayne Goodrich: For me the Stanford memorial was the moment that it all really, really became real.

  Ron Johnson: Stanford was such a fitting choice for Steve. For years he admired the design. He loved the layout. He loved the stone. He told me that the quad—which was built in the late 1800s—was the single best piece of architecture in California. And it’s in his backyard.

  Andy Hertzfeld: It’s walking distance. A long walk.

  John Markoff: What I remember in walking up with Steven Levy was that the security was so intense that it felt like a presidential event. It wasn’t just private security. It was governmental security: the Secret Service. We were certain that Obama was coming, but he didn’t. Rahm Emanuel came, but no Obama.

  Jon Rubinstein: Clinton was there—lots of billionaires, lots of famous people.

  John Markoff: Joan Baez and George Lucas and Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and John Warnock, and, and, and…

  John Couch: Everyone was there! There were competitors there. People that Steve ha
d butted heads with. They were there.

  Dan Kottke: I was not invited.

  Alvy Ray Smith: I wasn’t invited.

  Steve Wozniak: I did not go.

  John Markoff: The crowd was really kind of stunning. It was sort of an affair of state, a Silicon Valley affair of state.

  Wayne Goodrich: Everything was just heightened. Everything was so introspective. Every moment you’d see something that brought back a flood of story and remembrance.

  Ron Johnson: It’s a majestic place. As you approach the quad there’s this large, perfectly proportioned oval with the most beautiful green grass and some flowers in the center, and that leads you to the quad which was the original Stanford campus. And it’s laid out such that you walk up these steps and then you enter the quad, and just right on center is among the most beautiful churches that you will ever see.

  Mike Slade: It’s like something out of the Renaissance.

  Tom Suiter: It’s just awesome. It’s gorgeous. It looks like it was just dropped in from Rome.

  Ron Johnson: And as you walk into that, the sunset is right behind the cathedral. It was just a beautiful evening.

  Wayne Goodrich: Just walking through the last arch and into the actual quad, looking at the Memorial Church, and seeing so many people and faces of people that I had known.

  Ron Johnson: Friends of Steve from Apple, friends of Steve from the Valley, people that you just knew because of their position in the world.

  John Couch: It was almost like a physical rapture, everybody who is anybody walking silently toward the Stanford chapel.

  Ron Johnson: People are in a very reflective frame of mind.

  Tom Suiter: It was somber. It was like, We’re all part of this thing. This is a drag. This sucks.

  John Couch: There was this incredible, quiet respect and a sense of mortality for all of us.

  Mike Slade: So anyway, we get escorted into the church: five hundred, seven hundred people?