Oh, So, Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. So regular listeners will know that about a year ago I had Mike Slade on the pod and we talked

about Starwave and a bunch of early web stuff, but as you'll know if you listen to that episode

Mike was also a close confidant of Steve Jobs and Steve asked him to come on for about six years, starting in the late 90s, as Steve's personal

consigliere at Apple when Steve returned to Apple.

And in that episode we said that Mike needed to come back on the show

and talk about all that stuff.

And that's something that you guys have been strenuously requesting ever since that

episode dropped. So today here it, now that I've done enough research to do this conversation justice.

Today is Mike Slade telling the story of Steve Jobs's return to Apple.

Mike Slade, thanks for coming back on the Internet History Podcast.

My pleasure. So, right, we tease the last time that you needed to come back and tell some of your Apple stories, so that's what we're going to do today.

Let's just start with Steve asking you to join him back at Apple.

Were you still at Starwave when Apple bought next?

Yeah, what happened was Apple bought next in late 96 and I was still at Starway and running it and I had stayed in close touch with Steve after I stopped working at Next and we saw each other a bunch

and talking the phone a lot and I visited him a couple times in Palo Alto for various business

trips and then in early 97 this deal closed where Disney bought part of

Starwave and we became kind of a like we were like sort of like check as

Loyaki yet we were part of Disney but we were still independent. And so I was the chairman and CEO of Starwave and I spent about half my time working with people with Disney on stuff and half my time at Starwave. and so I took some time off and then that fall I was

on a big long vacation in Turkey and Steve had by that time kind of become sort of

of the de he gotten rid of Emilio and he called me up and wanted me to run

corporate marketing for Apple they already had Phil Schiller and he brought at marketing and they

wanted me to he wanted me to be all kind of his branding guy and I would have loved to do it but I couldn't really

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