Chapter 10 Robert Friedland

At one point, in order to raise some cash, Jobs decided to sell his IBM electric typewriter.He walked into the dormitory of the student he promised to buy, and found that the other party was having sex with his girlfriend.Jobs was about to leave, but the student asked him to sit down and wait for them to finish. "I thought: 'This is outrageous,'" Jobs later recalled.His friendship with Robert Friedland also began.Robert was one of the few people in Jobs' life who could seduce him with his own charm.Jobs absorbed some of Robert's charismatic qualities, even considering him his mentor for a few years—until later seeing him as a master braggart.

Friedland was four years older than Jobs, but still an undergraduate.His father was an Auschwitz survivor who went on to become a successful architect in Chicago.Friedland originally attended Bowdoin College of Arts and Sciences in Maine.But during his sophomore year, he was arrested for carrying 24,000 LSD pills worth $125,000.Local newspapers snapped pictures of him as he was being led away: blond with wavy shoulders, smiling at photographers.He was sentenced to two years in a federal prison in Virginia and was paroled in 1972.He arrived at Reed that fall and immediately ran for student body president, declaring that he needed to clear himself of the “denial of justice” that had been imposed on him.He won the election.

Friedland once heard a speech in Boston by the author of "Here and Now" Ram Dass, and he was as deeply fascinated by the oriental spirit as Jobs and Kottke. In the summer of 1973, Friedland went to India to visit Ram Dass' Hindu teacher, Master Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-Ji to the believers. ji).By the time Friedland returned from India that fall, he had already adopted a religious name, and went everywhere in a pair of sandals and a flowing Indian robe.He rented a room off campus, atop a garage, where Jobs would visit him many afternoons.Friedland's conviction that states of self-enlightenment do exist and can be achieved through effort fascinated Jobs. "He brought me to a whole new level of awareness," Jobs said.

Friedland also found Jobs attractive. "He was always walking around with bare feet," he later recalled, "and what struck me was his passion. If he was interested in anything, he would take that interest to irrational extremes." ’” Jobs mastered the art of using stares and silence to win people over. "One of his tricks is to stare at the person he's talking to. He'll keep looking them in the eye, and then ask a question and ask the person to answer without looking away." According to Kottke, some of Jobs' personality traits—including some that accompanied his career—were borrowed from Friedland. "Friedland taught Steve the reality distortion field," Kottke said. "He was charismatic, he could be deceptive, he could bend situations to his super will. He was witty and confident. , and a little bit of an authoritarian one. Steve admired that, and after spending time with Robert, he became like that."

Jobs also learned from Friedland how to make himself the center of attention. "Robert was a very gregarious and very charming guy, a real salesman," Kottke recalls. "When I first met Steve, he was shy and unassuming, very reserved. I think Robert taught him how to sell a product, how to relate to people, how to express himself, how to control a situation.” Friedland has a strong aura. “He walks into a room and people notice him right away. It was the opposite when Steve first came to Reed. After he spent time with Robert, his shyness began to fade.” On Sunday nights, Jobs and Friedland would go to the Hare Krishna Temple west of Portland, usually with Kottke and Holmes.They will sing and dance with all their might. "We'd let ourselves go into a kind of frenzy," Holmes recalls, "and Robert would go crazy and dance like crazy. Steve would be so much calmer that it would seem embarrassing for him to let go." Then it would They were served paper plates piled high with vegetarian food.

Friedland oversees a 220-acre apple orchard 40 miles southwest of Portland owned by his eccentric Swiss millionaire uncle named Marcel Milller. He made his fortune by monopolizing the market for metric threaded components in Rhodesia at the time.After Friedland became infatuated with Eastern religions, he transformed the orchard into a commune called All One Farm, where Jobs, Kottke, Holmes, and others seeking spiritual enlightenment would gather spend the weekend there.The farm consisted of a main building, a large warehouse and a garden shed where Kottke and Holmes slept.Jobs and fellow commune member Greg Calhoun pruned the Gravenstein apple trees. “Steve ran the apple orchard,” Friedland said. “We were in the organic apple juice business. Steve’s job was to lead a bunch of weirdos who pruned the trees and cleaned the orchard.”

Monks and devotees of the Hare Krishna temple also visit the farm, helping to prepare a vegetarian feast filled with the scents of dill, coriander and turmeric. "Steve would come in always hungry, and he'd eat a lot," Holmes recalls, "and then he'd throw up. For years I thought he had bulimia. It bothered us a lot. , because we worked so hard to get a meal together, and he couldn't keep the food." Jobs was starting to get a little impatient with Friedland's religious leader-like style. "Maybe he saw too much of Friedland's essence," Kottke said.Although the commune was originally intended to be a refuge from materialism, Friedland began to run the commune as if it were a business.His disciples were required to chop and sell firewood, produce apple juicers and wood-burning stoves, and participate in various businesses without payment.Jobs slept under the kitchen table one night and was amused to watch people come and go, stealing food from the refrigerator.He didn't like the communal economy. "Things started to get very materialistic," Jobs recalled. "Everyone realized they were working hard on Robert's farm, and one by one they left. It all made me sick."

Years later, Friedland was a billionaire managing copper and gold mines—in Vancouver, Singapore, and Mongolia—and I met him for drinks in New York.I emailed Jobs that night and mentioned the encounter.Within an hour, he called me from California to warn me not to listen to Friedland.He said Friedland, who had gotten into trouble with environmental damage at several of his mines, had called him to ask him to intervene with Bill Clinton, but Jobs had not responded. "Robert always billed himself as a spiritual man, but he crossed the line from charisma to deceit," Jobs said. It's a really weird thing."

----------------------------------------- Notes: