The death of Steve Jobs has set off a global outpouring of tributes rarely seen for a business figure. What made him so special?

John Markoff and Steve Lohr, two veteran reporters, covered him for many years, and both knew him well. In the new Weekend Business podcast, they describe him as singularly passionate and focused, a leader who demanded dedication from those around him and would not tolerate mediocrity. He thought of himself as a “technology leader,” says Mr. Markoff, who wrote Mr. Jobs’s obituary for The Times. While Mr. Jobs was not a computer programmer or a designer in the formal sense, he was superb in guiding others and in imagining and shaping projects, Mr. Lohr says, elaborating on arguments he makes in a column in Sunday Business.

The unemployment rate remained at 9.1 percent in September, according to the Labor Department report on Friday, with too few jobs produced to budge that rate, as Motoko Rich says in a separate conversation in the podcast. The Economic Cycle Research Institute is forecasting a new recession, the focus of my Strategies column in Sunday Business, but Ms. Rich says that the latest jobs report suggests that while the economy is weak, it’s not contracting at the moment.

Richard Thaler, the University of Chicago economist, says fear and anxiety have caused many corporations and individuals to hold back on spending. He advocates “self-interested patriotism,” that is, carefully planned spending on labor-intensive projects by businesses and people who can afford to do so. Mr. Thaler elaborates on this approach in the Economic View column in Sunday Business.

And David Gillen and David Segal discuss the filming of food commercials, the subject of Mr. Segal’s cover article in Sunday Business.

You can find specific segments of the podcast at these junctures: Steve Lohr and John Markoff on Steve Jobs (31:12); news headlines and Motoko Rich on unemployment (20:57); David Segal on food commercials (14:57); Richard Thaler (6:54); the week ahead (1:20).

You can download the program by subscribing from The New York Times’s podcast page or directly from iTunes.

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