In a recent post I said that Steve Jobs seemed to live in a very limited intellectual world. I gave his Stanford graduation speech as an example. Someone asked me to explain. Here is my explanation.

The speech shows no sign of having read a book. It shows no sign of any intellectual interest outside his job.

It makes the insanely self-centered point that “if I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

It shows no sign of learning from anyone else (except his calligraphy teacher, which hardly counts). It shows no sign of even having noticed anyone else — it is all Steve all the time. It mentions Stewart Brand, but only to comment about the Whole Earth Catalog.

It makes the banal point what seemed like bad news was actually good news (“it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me”).

It ends with a long string of banalities about death: “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” A high school student could have said that — at a funeral, perhaps.

This is from someone at the center of an enormous on-going revolution. I tried to find praise for it but all I found was that someone in the Ukrainian government had plagiarized it.