[bright music] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein.

Welcome to "Side by Side."

My guest today has been described as the Santa Claus of technology.

He built his first computer when he was only 13 years old.

He's an engineer, a philanthropist, an inventor, and an electronics genius.

His invention changed the way we work, and the company he co-founded changed the way we live.

That company is Apple Computer.

Today we'll meet a man known to many as Woz.

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We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

[bright music] - Steve Wozniak, welcome to "Side by Side."

You have by yourself changed the world.

I can't put my computer on, I can't look at my iPhone without thinking about Steve Wozniak, and it all started somewhere.

We thought it started in a garage, but you say otherwise.

- Yeah, actually it started really all my life.

I wanted a computer of my own because I understood it and other people understood it, started talking like professors from Stanford and Berkeley, talking at a Homebrew Computer Club about how it was gonna change society and how the geek was gonna be important and all that stuff and that motivated me and motivation's more important than skills, but I had extreme skills.

I mean, I had been so far ahead of the world in these computers and I wanted to help make that happen.

I was antisocial.

I was a geek.

I was shy.

I couldn't talk to people, but I could build my equipment, show it off, and then I could communicate and answer questions to people and I just did it, not so much that I said, "This is an industry I wanna start."

Yeah, I did.

I wanted the industry to happen.

Or this is a company I wanna start, didn't think that way.

I thought I want other engineers to look at some magic that was pouring out of my brain, like Bob Dylan songs, the words to them, and that was really my motivation.

Other engineers would say, "How did he ever come up with these ideas and think."

I was so different and strange and nothing, it was like almost, I did things that were illegal.

I put color on an American television by all the illegal mathematical rules if you read the books.

- Yes.

- But it was a scheme that worked and it cost $0 instead of 5,000.

- But it started not in a garage, as it has been reported, you and Steve Jobs, right?

- Oh no, it started, Steve was way out of town.

I would keep designing little projects for people on my own.

I'd always charge- - At home.

- Yeah, and I would charge 'em 5 cents.

And late at night at my cubicle at Hewlett Packard, where I worked designing the hottest products at the time, but I had always wanted a computer.

I had told my dad in high school, "I am gonna someday have a 4K computer."

And he said, "It costs as much as a house."

I said, "I'll live in an apartment."

So I wanted the computer.

Now I watched the prices, parts and different technologies you could use like a television for output, saves all the money in the world 'cause everyone has a television, you don't have to buy it and to make it affordable, and I just wanted it for myself.

I was gonna build that machine that year.

The fact is, it turned out to be a valuable technology, but it started out all my own.

Steve Jobs wasn't even around, didn't know I'd built this first computer.

It eventually became called the Apple 1.

He didn't know it existed and he came into town and there's a movie that shows him coming down to a basement and I'm on this little computer and he hauls me to a club to show it off.

I'd been at the club every day since it started.

Steve had never been there once, so the movie twisted it backwards.

- I see.

- But no, no, no, I brought him down and showed him the excitement.

- How did you and Steve Jobs meet?

- We met a friend, introduced us.

We went to the same high school.

We didn't have the same teachers and I was in all the high-level classes, so I just assumed that Steve was probably in the lower-level ones, and we started talking.

He was interested in the counterculture things of the day, philosophies of the world and what kind of religions to study and Eastern religions and peace and he would eat seeds out of a bag and walk around barefoot, so he was more a complete hippie and I admired the counterculture, but I was not a part of it.

- I see.

- I would never like use drugs or anything.

- Tell me about school.

You went to elementary school and high school and did teachers identify you as this genius of a guy?

- Oh yeah.

- You said you were antisocial and all that.

- In elementary school in fourth grade they tested you for IQ and they told, I never was told by my parents or the school, but they told my parents I was over 200 IQ, but I didn't know it, I wanted to be normal.

I wanted to be natural.

I didn't wanna skip grades or anything.

And then I was the math star in all my schools, so they would give me the math award for middle school and the math award for high school and so I was really one of, you know, really brilliant that way, but I stumbled into electronics by accident.

So I was great at electronics because the old style electronics, before the digital world we have now where logical things make sense, no, it was heavy mathematics, differential calculus to design your circuits, but I went through that first and then I discovered digital when I was about 10 years old and I had a ham radio license.

I'd sit with a telegraph key and send messages on a big transmitter that I built every piece of, a big receiver I built every piece of, and I'd transmit messages to other people I'd meet on radio, so electronics was just my whole life, my whole growing up.

And I did, as I said, I wanted to have a computer of my own someday and eventually I built it and showed it off and showed it to others and it was so different than everything else.

It was like five years ahead and that's when Steve Jobs saw it said, "We should start a company."

That's what you do because company's the way you can get it to people.

At first I said, "No, I'm gonna be an engineer at Hewlett Packard for the rest of my life.

I will never go up the org chart.

I do not like politics.

I don't like the politics of people who run companies.

I'll never run a company and I won't leave Hewlett Packard."

And finally I went to the Hewlett Packard people and I told 'em what a personal computer would cost and how you could build it and what it would do and they turned me down for the first of five- - They turned you down.

- Five times.

- Really?

- Yeah, five times.

The big computer companies didn't think it was ever gonna be worth any money, this new little startups, just a little hobby thing.

- Did you ever meet some of those people much later in life, those people who turned you down?

- I admired Hewlett and Packard so much my entire life before I even worked there, and I met Hewlett later in life and I told him I had really wanted Hewlett Packard to build the personal computer and he just said, "Well, you win some, you lose some."

- That's all.

- That's all.

That's what he said.

Well, I was hard, I had trouble talking to him.

Sometimes you're around a god and you can't even approach them.

I've been around Springsteen and Dylan and I can't even approach them.

They're just too much a god to me.

- Maybe they feel the same way about you.

- But, yeah, but some people might, but this was Hewlett and it was so hard to squeak out a few little words to him even.

- He was a big guy and- - He was so important.

- You were an engineer.

- Important in my life.

No, he had started an industry in Silicon Valley.

- Tell me how you, and I've known you for a long time, Woz, and I've read stories about you and watched the movie and all of that and you and I have been on many programs together.

You and Steve Jobs are dramatically different personality-wise, inclination-wise.

Tell us about that.

How are you different?

- Well, in the first place, I was incredibly shy and I couldn't talk to people and I've had very few friends.

To this day, I'll only make one friend, like yourself, a year at the most, and so I was just nice to everybody, just wanted everyone to like me and I would go along with anybody.

They don't have to be the same, they'd be different.

But Steve and I agreed on some things and boy, we really, the first day I met him, I took him to my house and showed him all the Dylan albums and the liner notes and the lyrics to the songs and that became a big thing in our life.

We would drive long distances to pick up some Dylan memorabilia, go to concerts, so we had some things in common.

I drove him to up to college the first time he went up in Portland.

I don't know, we just hit it off, but I would be friends with anybody who could listen, understand my worth and he knew my computer design skills.

He valued that and valued- - He was a marketing guy, wasn't he?

- It turned into that and here's part of the reason.

He really wanted to have a company and make money and be important.

That's how you can be important and move the world forward.

That was how he saw it.

He had good motives, but and you have to have a company, but I was so advanced in computer design and all that and he really didn't understand computer hardware and software deeply, deeply enough to really make products, so that was what was left was, well, he can't do any engineering when we got funded with big money, so he went on, yeah, I'm gonna tackle with everybody who runs business things and be around them and make decisions and socialize with them and I'm gonna go into marketing, and these little fine aspects of marketing are what make more sense and he was really good at what he did, though.

I mean, generally you'd be in a meeting and people might have a whole bunch of proposals and his idea was always just tiny, tiny bit better.

It's like our first logo had six colors in it, an apple with six colors, but they were in rainbow order from blue to red.

He took it home and he reversed the colors a little, had darker ones towards the bottom and a light green stem.

What he did was so good and everybody say it doesn't matter what the order is.

- But it works in the marketplace.

- But I appreciated that, yes.

- But you and Steve Jobs had some differences somewhere along the way, right?

You were focused on some things, he was focused on others.

- Almost nothing.

I was gonna do engineering and not step on other people's toes, and Steve wanted to run the company and make the new products and take the position of being the person who, the brain that was behind computers and I was quiet and shy, so we both got what we wanted.

I got engineering, I'm recognized for it to this day for great engineering.

The IEEE, the Institute of Electrical Engineers gave me, made me a fellow.

That means other engineers respected what I did.

- Yes.

- That's what I'd sought my whole life.

And Steve got his notoriety and did incredible things for the world, eventually, but not in computers.

See we changed the name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc because he was understood people and he really, his first product that really did anything for the company and boosted the stock, the iPod, a little music device that you carried like a Walkman, the most beautiful music device that had ever been created.

That was his Apple too, and then he turned, moved from that into an iPhone and he made sure the iPhone worked for a normal person like himself and the world didn't know what was coming and I just admire, you know, the things that he brought into my own life, even.

I told him that before he died.

- I heard you say once that artificial intelligence that we're all talking about today may be a good thing, but there will never be artificial wisdom.

Tell me how, when you see how the world of technology has evolved, what, everybody now has an iPhone, has it disconnected us as a society in a human way, in an emotional way?

You go to a restaurant and see married people sitting there, every one of 'em is on their own iPhone.

You see college kids, high school kids, five or six of 'em sitting there, instead of conversing, they're all on their iPhones.

I'm interested to know from you what you believe technology has contributed measurably to the world, and in your opinion, are there some downsides that we have now struggled with, suffered because of such technology?

- Everyone loves their technology.

A lot of 'em even look up to me as one of the heroes in that way, although I was a hero for a lot of other reasons than the technology I created and the company and I feel very negatively a lot of times.

I could try to do something and wait a minute, they moved it, they changed it.

I don't own my own products anymore.

I have a car and I might set a nice setting on it and oh my gosh, they just keep changing it.

They took control 'cause they think they know better and that's sort of like they think artificial intelligence is really thinking and that difference of it not wisdom, what artificial intelligence, they'll have us sit back and say, "What should I do next?

What's a good project to do?"

And we're only using them to create better things for humans, so it's just the high end of computer technology now.

Yeah, you can make a computer that plays a trillion games of chess and now it can beat the world's best chess player.

That's, well, is that intelligence?

We don't know how the brain's wired.

When I went back to school to get my degree under a fake name, my Berkeley diploma says Rocky Raccoon Clark.

- That's because you went back much later to get your degree.

- Yes, and my name is well known, so I used a fake name.

- Right.

- And I got a real degree, but I was a psychology major when I went back.

I wanted to study more the brain compared to computers and we don't know how the brain's wired, we don't even know that our memories are stored in the brain.

You won't find a single book on memories that has any strong statement, correlation, here's how we could detect a memory.

We just assume, oh, it must be how the neurons connect to themselves.

And I made a stronger statement than in any book 40 some years ago when I was in that class.

I said, "You lose two things between the ages of six and 10, your childhood memories and your teeth."

I was making a joke.

I was just saying this is stronger correlation than it's in any book on memories and yet we know that can't be true.

Of course today if you googled memory and teeth, you'll be shocked what you find, and if you use a search engine, I don't wanna say Google.

[laughs] - Yes.

- All the time.

And also you'll find the tests for Alzheimer's are in saliva and the gums.

I don't know, but I was just trying to make a joke that this is a stronger statement, but it's more accurate than in any book.

- How do you think technology, as we know it today, is advancing dramatically?

What influence might it have on our society as you look forward, you were interested in psychology.

What does that do for, let's say a kindergarten kid today who's being introduced to technology.

They all have iPads, all playing games, they're all much more enlightened.

Is that gonna be somewhat destructive to our human relationships, to our communication skills, to our sense of connectivity?

- I believe yes, extremely, but look why Steve Jobs and I started the company.

We wanted to make the life for blind people more equivalent to the life for sighted people, and after all this time, look how much we've achieved.

Everywhere you go, look on the sidewalk and everybody's kind of walking around blind.

[laughs] - Exactly.

- It's a joke.

- Yeah, exactly.

- But no, the reliance on technology and getting your answers and being able to communicate with others and it's taken over.

Things aren't the way they used to be, if you're old enough.

I'm 72.

72 is a palindrome, the same forwards and backwards.

- What does that mean?

- Three times eight times three is the same forwards and backwards.

- I see.

- Or two times three times two times three times two, same forwards and backwards, or two to the third power times three to the second power.

It's the same backwards and forwards.

- You do realize my IQ is not 200.

You realize that, right?

- But it's fun.

- Only with these calculations.

- It's still a fun.

- Yes.

- If you were looking for a certain number 'cause you're playing a game and the number's 454, it's a palindrome, same backwards and forwards.

That's just a game.

- I see.

- It's simple stuff.

- So Steve, tell me this, we all call you Woz, of course, but tell me this, what is it today that you feel about your life accomplishments?

Are you thrilled with the way things have evolved?

Are you concerned about how things have evolved and what do you see in the future?

Give me some examples of what my grandkids might experience five years from now, 10 years from now, vis-a-vis technological advancements?

- I'm very proud of my role in this huge change in lifestyle, but then we got up to the point that we had the internet, we had this huge bandwidth, it just started taking over the things that you used to do.

You sort of felt, I own something, I buy it, I own it.

It'll work the same in 40 years if I protect it in a closet.

Those days are gone.

It's like somebody else owns me and makes the decisions and everything has to go up to the cloud and they own it and I do not like that a bit.

Unfortunately, you can't ever stop technology.

New technology brings us things and people say, "Oh my God, maybe it's time to stop it."

Especially technology that might get dangerous and make decisions about taking lethal action, that kind of stuff.

No, I think the young people don't even realize what was there before.

Just I grew up and this is the status quo.

It must be the best it can be.

My gosh, I even remember pulling out newspaper and the way things were highlighted and emphasized and whatever.

It was easy to spot the way you wanted to get through it.

And I read a lot of news online now and it's just not the ease, but how do you explain it to somebody new who didn't live in the before?

And I do worry about the future, but since I explained I was 72 years old, good, I won't have to live in it 50 years from now.

- We don't know that, you might, you might.

I hope you do.

Tell me this, what are you working on these days?

What excites you about what you're doing now?

- Wow, I thought back to my development days when I sat down with an idea and wrote a program, and oh my gosh, I've been out of it for 30 years following Apple products and what they do and all that and I still like to follow everything going on in technology that I can, being a part of it, getting into the electric cars and all that.

Self-driving bothers me horribly.

What we think AI, we call it artificial intelligence, I believe in the A.

- It worries you.

Why does it worry you?

- Because the decisions are so lacking, so much less than a real human.

I mean, all the time I'm in my car and it makes a dumb decision.

A car's gonna merge in, you're gonna back off a little and it just waits until you're right next to it and squeals on the brake.

It makes decisions that are really much worse than the dumbest or drunkest driver there could be.

[laughs] I'll say dumbest, not drunkest.

- You hope this will improve, right?

You hope that with time, technology will make it more precise.

- Yeah, but you see so many examples that couldn't have been predicted in advance.

And almost everywhere we have AI, it's good and helpful, but when it can't solve something, it doesn't know something, it's horrible.

It leaves you in a worse situation, so always expect humans to have to be in control of those sort of things.

- So you don't think that computers could ever outdo the human potential.

- In specific areas.

You can program a computer to try to be very, very good at one specific thing and another, but they don't combine it all.

Just think of the tasks of coming into my house to make a cup of coffee.

You would have to sort of know that you knock on doors already and you'd have to kinda walk in, go over, stumble over things and look around, find rooms and that looks like a kitchen, and oh my gosh, that looks like a coffee maker maybe, but open drawers.

How does it work?

Where are the cups?

Where are the filters or whatever, the beans?

You'd have so many decisions to make and we'll make a computer very good at one thing, you know, knowing how to make a coffee with a known machine, one known machine, and I don't see us getting very close to being truly helpful.

Yes, I have personal assistants and I love them.

I have Apple's Siri and I have Amazon's Alexa and oh my gosh, yeah, little commands, turn on a light, look at the weather, check the news.

What's the score of a game?

Very nice, I like that.

I get to deal with a human voice so it's much more human, but then they track you, everything you do.

I had one car and it was all run by Amazon Alexa.

So Amazon knows every single thing I'm telling the car to do and decisions and every door I open and I don't think that's right.

I think I should own my life, not other people.

- That worries a lot of people what you just said, that our life is tracked, that someone is watching all the time.

- Yes, if I were actually out there and a real good strong developer and young and brain working really good, I would wanna build these systems that could be kinda like, imagine a Facebook that's just people to people and there's no company, just kinda like Bitcoin is, and set it up so that all the software's there and everybody communicates the way they want to and has their friend groups, but they don't have somebody tracking and knowing everything they do just to taper advertising to them.

- Are you involved in companies today that are inventing things?

- I'm involved with a few startups, yes, and none of 'em have really taken off to any noticeable extent yet, but I'm very proud of them.

And one is Woz U, I was two things in my life, a technologist and an educator for eight years of my life.

I taught full-time with no press allowed so nobody knows about it, but I taught elementary and middle school kids how to use computers and- - Why not college kids?

Why not high school kids?

- Well, you know what, they kept saying that, and I said, I really want all my life, I had a dream.

I told my dad I would be an engineer first when I was in sixth grade, and second, I wanna be a fifth grade teacher, like Miss Scrat, so I had this dream to be a fifth grade teacher, reaching young people was so important to me and so I taught fifth to ninth graders, but you know, sometimes they ask, "Why didn't you teach college?"

I had offers and, you know, I go back and I think I could've done some great things there too, but, you know, you don't have to ever be sad about something you missed.

- What is it about education today in the American system that you're proud of, and what is it that you are concerned about?

- All my life, people have had the same concerns.

Education isn't really working well.

It doesn't teach you so much to think for yourself as to just, you know, memorize procedures to get the right answers, and we don't organize our schools that way.

My classes were thankfully out of school and I was able to make so fun and motivate the kids and know each one of them with where they were at and deal with them, but it would've been too, but a school wouldn't have spent twice the money to have that kind of quality education so society doesn't wanna put that in and it's, you know, it's like, does a teacher teach like the own kids, the own parents feel about their own kids?

The teacher doesn't have that relationship and so I don't think we've made any progress, we're gonna get anywhere.

Part of the problem is due to you could always solve things if you had more money, but money for schools comes from, we're in a democracy.

It comes from a slice of the government pie with votes.

The number of votes there are for more money for schools, but we have a problem.

It's like taxation without representation, students don't get to vote, they don't get to determine the money.

A family of five that wants better schools doesn't get any more votes than a family of two that doesn't wanna pay for the other people's students and we had votes in California.

We were the 50th in the nation, class size and everything, when I taught.

It goes back to one proposition, Proposition 13.

- 50th as in worst?

- Worst.

- Yes.

- Worst.

In teachers per student, we were 47th, in dollars per student, 43rd, in computers per student, way down and there was a reason for it.

It was a proposition, but you could have a vote in your city and Cupertino, where Apple is, has always been recognized as a top national school district, so I paid to send postcards to everybody in Cupertino, we had a vote and we got 64% of the vote for a little higher property tax rate and it failed.

The proposition said you had to have a two-thirds super majority and that's when I started thinking, oh my gosh, students didn't get a vote, we'd have more votes.

And I did the same thing the next year and Cupertino failed.

I did it in my town, Los Gatos, and we passed it and Cupertino passed it.

So for 30 some years, two districts in the entire San Francisco Bay Area had a little more money for schools, and it's hard to tell, did it come out in smarter students or did it come out in better stadiums?

But you know, I even like a school that puts in better stadiums and better buildings and renews things because the ideas of cleanliness where you go to school and the ideas of everything being immaculate and taken care of, carry over to your own personality in your life.

- Yes, indeed.

Well, how do you study now?

Do you read books?

Do you watch stuff online?

What is it that you do to nurture your heart, to nourish your mind?

- I don't often study, of course, I did a lot of studying during them.

I decided I'd pick up Raspberry Pi, a little project for kids in schools and I won't tell people, see Wozniak's doing this stuff and go in the book and the reason for that project was the same as I had with my Apple 2 computer.

It's to educate people that are young and let them learn what computers are.

And I started learning this new operating system Linux and writing commands and finding things online and ugh, I'd follow 30 steps and they all would fail, every one.

I'd go to bed every night upset they would fail because they were done by a college student two years before when the version of Linux was different, the operating system was different.

And finally I'd get 'em done and I was so happy and I said, "This is Steve Wozniak, this is who I am."

I wanna go through late nights, hard, solving problems, and then finally get through, ah, and I got it done and feel so super about it.

- That's gotta feel good.

Still, Steve Wozniak, I'm so glad that you are with me on "Side by Side."

Your life has been absolutely amazing.

You've made incredible contributions to society, nationally, internationally.

Thank you for being here and best wishes to you always.

- Honored to be with you.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Side By Side" with Nido Qubein is made possible by.

- [Announcer] We started small, just 30 people in a small town in Wisconsin.

75 years later, we employ more Americans than any other furniture brand, but none of that would've been possible without you.

Ashley, this is home.

- [Announcer] For 60 years, The Budd Group has been a company of excellence, providing facility services to customers, opportunities for employees, and support to our communities.

The Budd Group, great people, smart service.

- Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

[upbeat music ends]