Welcome to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. That is me. And today we're doing something a little different. I am not going to interview anyone about the media business. Instead, I'm going to play you an episode of the other podcast I've been working on for several months now, Land of the Giants. This is our Recode series where we look at the most powerful companies in tech, and we ask they are doing with that power. So far we've covered Amazon and Google and Netflix. You might remember my colleague Ronnie Mullen. I did that one last year. And right now I'm covering Apple. We're four episodes into a six episode series and I think some of you may have heard this before. And if you have, thank you. But I wanted to give the rest of you guys an opportunity to hear this as well.

And if you like it, great. There's a separate feed you can find for this season and all the rest of them. And by the way, there is an episode dedicated to Apple and the media business coming up next week. You'll like that one. This episode you're going to hear now does some compare and contrast between

Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, different men leading the company in very different ways in different

areas. This one includes the rarest of Apple gets. There's an on-the-record conversation with an Apple

employee that we talked to without Apple's permission, which that alone, I think, tells you a little

bit about how Apple works

under Tim Cook these days. Please enjoy, and I'll be back next week with more interviews. See you then. Steve Jobs had been sick for years.

Now he was dying from pancreatic cancer.

It has been an eventful evening to say the least, but the real drama has yet to unfold.

The world is waiting to see what happens next in Cupertino.

Apple has spent years refusing to acknowledge that Jobs was in decline, even though

you could see him wasting away rail thin at onstage events. Silicon Valley whispered about

Jobs' health all the time. If he talked about it out loud, though, you'd get shushed. But by August

2011, when Jobs said he wasn't going to run his company anymore because he could, quote,

no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple CEO,

everyone knew what that meant.

What they didn't know was, well, much of anything about Tim Cook,

the guy Jobs had picked to replace him, except one thing.

He's known as a solid leader, but everyone seems to suggest he doesn't have that innovative

spark that Steve Jobs had.

Brilliant as he is, just about every analyst on the planet will tell you he's no Steve Jobs.

You just can't replace someone like that.

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