Steve Jobs Was a Tech Badass

Why I liked Steve Jobs?

As I reported on Know Your Cell, Steve Jobs was the badass rebel of tech. He was the Rolling Stones to Bill Gates' Beatles; Picasso with a circuit board; Muhammad Ali with a silicon chip of a knockout punch.

Jobs brought the counterculture into the tech world. Long before Apple, he traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment -- returning with a shaved head and clad in a traditional Indian robe. He experimented with psychedelics. Jobs said that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he'd ever done -- leading to the computer revolution.

He stated there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics -- even people who knew him well -- could never understand. Jobs felt unless they shared his countercultural roots, they could not fully relate to his thinking. Though his thinking, Jobs conceived some of the most important devices in our lives. Next time you swipe your iPhone, just remember: LSD played an inspirational role in its inception. (The irony here: people are more addicted to their iPhones than they are to psychedelics.) Jobs was the guy who was against "The Man" (IBM) and worked on becoming "The Man" (Apple) -- on his own terms.