Steve Wozniak - Steve-O's Wild Ride! Ep #96

hey everybody and welcome to a significant wild ride with stevo i'll be gosh dang darned if this week's guest isn't the single most culturally significant person alive today i mean it's steve wozniak he invented the personal computer that smartphone in your pocket is because of this man and i am proud and honored to call steve wozniak a personal friend of mine not only was this episode significant it was a lot of fun and it came out smooth just like my shave and how do i get such a clean smooth shave i get it from harry's yeah and harry's believes you should have the best most comfortable closest shave and not have to pay a ton of money for it so yeah they make blades that stay sharp longer than the competition and for a far more reasonable price plus first time customers get this best deal from the wild ride podcast and here it is okay you're gonna get a weighted ergonomic handle a five blade razor you're gonna get a travel case to keep that razor safe in your bag and you're gonna get foaming shave gel that's a 13 value and the wild ride listeners get their best offer which is you get all that starter kit for just three bucks jump on this man because you need this product so it's harrys.com stevo for that starter kit with everything i mentioned of a 13 value for just three bucks get to harrys.com stevo and enjoy being smooth like me and this podcast liquid death i saw you advertise that on the show yeah they are they're mad at plastic and and uh instead that's the idea is it's death to plastic oh oh this is so exciting i'm very very excited about this ladies and gentlemen steve wozniak yeah so good to see you bro great to see you again yeah always yeah always great to see you and i think that a lot of people would consider uh us to be an unlikely uh friendship not not people who know me right anybody anybody and i love right i love you i i love you so much and uh we met in 2009 when we were on dancing with the stars i don't even remember years i don't do years i don't do years sometime in the past okay steve does years days months he remembers days oh i have friends that can remember you know every event at apple for example right to the exact week and the day of what we did this on wednesday i don't know how they do it and some people remember names and faces but i have a disease called prosopagnosia 150 people have it and i can't recognize faces oh wow yeah what do you recognize voices voices i can recognize stories things we did i remember all that and uh just every face is kind of the same even janet's i make mistake both directions wow wow i remember the time i was in saudi arabia and they had this mess on you could only see the eyes but i could tell it was janet's eyes so i squeezed her butt and it wasn't janet that's great just a joke just did you yeah every comedian you know has to kind of the rules rules don't matter that much guys i love it i i love it and um steve has a co-host blindness where he doesn't introduce me or paul sometimes well i mean you've met scott randolph and and this is the gorgeous paul briskey it's a pleasure to meet you steve yeah yeah great yeah great to be here i wish we could do this more often man and i watched your show and said oh gosh i want to be there place to tell you know interesting stories a little out of the normal yeah absolutely and um what an honor to be able to do this with you i just learned that the reason why you were on dancing with the stars where we met was because of mark cuban no oh no no um deena katz okay and her husband was in the technology and suggested me and she was one of the producers i remember dina county she brought me on and to this day when she asked me to go on certain shows or events i do it because it's her i like her very much yeah and she was the one now mark cuban during dancing with the stars i had so many injuries from moving my body in ways you've never moved it before i had a broken toe i couldn't feel for weeks and then finally got it they did an x-ray it was broken but everything hurt every single toe all the way up to your hips aren't that much trying this for so long and uh mark human at one point um the the paparazzi got on to i was wearing a cast on my foot for a while and he got onto and he phoned and said he had a doctor who would help me out with advice i don't know what to do what not to do yeah i love him that was really nice i've met him a couple times yeah i think he's great he is great man i wish he were president but yeah um and and i think that one of the greatest moments of dancing with this star's history is you doing the worm don't ask me we were in rehearsal and somebody said oh you could do the worm what's the worm so one of one of the technical guys filmers he tried to emulate it okay and then i didn't practice it at all i did not no idea how to do it maybe i practice it one one or two times you know like for ten years it was it was and i said will i do it on the show it couldn't have been better it could not have been more a more entertaining moment thank god i'm so proud to be known for that i don't care if they gave us a 10 total score you know but um oh no that was uh yeah memorable moments i'd love to be a part of them and then you guys struck up a friendship on dancing with stars like very much did how did that kind of grow and start i don't remember steve might have come to talk to me and just say anybody who talks to me as a friend i'm really shy i don't meet many friends but no i um i don't know if you ever got i went out for every one of the the celebrities and professional dancers and i made little bags of gifts little gift bags and i i'll tell you when you're rehearsing you don't have any spare time drove around to to bookstore after bookstore after bookstore always look for books that had little like factoid type books different different ones not every bag was i remember and then i then i put in a sheet of two dollar bills strange to have them on sheets put in for everybody and i put in my metal business cards i have these with me and uh put them in there and then i i typed a letter on a computer about what a great experiences was and i put it in every bag for 27 others but then for each of the 27 yourself included i hand wrote in cursive a note as to why they were good people wow every single one of them and the next season i told donny osmond about he said he was going to do it but he never had the time yeah i mean that's why that was uh that was but i was figured i'm going to get kicked off real soon and i better get this done because everybody gives gifts and i'm going to be out of the loop and that's why that's why i was rushing to do it wow i think that's a dying art now dancing with the stars yeah you were one of the greatest discoveries in dancing with the stars you know of course all the people and how the show was made but uh man we were we had to go i ride my segway to the show oh yeah and i and i passed by this wood ranch barbecue they won't have them up in northern california that is still my favorite place janet and i will drive down south just to go to a wood ranch um just i'm addicted to their i don't know their barbecue sauce wow nice yeah and then that was i associate that with dancing with the stars i don't remember too much of the actual dancing right yeah the wood ranch that's what we got yeah i mean it's a story i've told so many times but i'll never forget how i i got i too got injured my back was was hurt on dancing with the stars and i told you on the set that i was thinking about getting a macbook air so that my backpack would be lighter because it was hurting my back and when you heard that right away you said oh cool i'll go with you to the apple store yeah and you can use my 10 employee discount yeah and i just thought that was so fantastically hilarious i said there is no way i'm going to turn down an opportunity to go to the apple store with waz and uses 10 discounts i helped a couple other dancers that wanted to get new phones or something but i really saved the life of jonathan roberts or somebody um he was one of the professional dancers his phone went bad that day and he ran down to the um uh sherman oaks uh mall and he knocked on the apple door we don't open for an hour we don't open till 11. he says i've got to get to the show uh see wozniak is on they opened the door and got him wow yeah that's glad for that and and uh and he got you the discount when you went to he did yeah and it was the craziest experience because this apple employee steve called it called him over and he said hey my my friend here is going to buy this computer and use my discount and this guy somehow didn't recognize steve oh that said you know what 40 years ago i was 30. he looked at him and he said but are you an apple employee and steve cheerfully said yeah i have an apple employee number it's one i didn't say it that way but he said what's your what's your employee number and i said one you get a little shocked no what's your number one yeah i go through that a lot of times for service uh and it remains number one on your card i still have an active card it's an app i'm an employee i get a little i'm the only person that's had a salary every day since we started the company and speaking of the 10 discount any employee of apple for any friend relative whatever could always get a 10 discount on product back then and i'll tell you a story that's not really known i got a call one day in later days and it was from steve jobs job's sister the one that i knew that he grew up with you know nuts and she worked at a local community college and her computer was going bad it'd been too many years and she had asked steve her brother for a 10 discount and he wouldn't give just a discount he wouldn't give it to her and so i bought her computer of course but that was just um shocking wow yeah some things that how does a person ever do these things and some people can do anything i i heard something that was really shocking i was watching pawn stars and somebody brought in a computer the pawn stars to pawn and it was the like uh the version two or the original one from the 80s and they're telling the story and they said that you would go around to in palo alto and fix people's you'd do house calls and fix people's actual computers and i just thought that was i mean in earlier days much earlier days oh my gosh anybody called me had a problem i would go down help them out but that was when you could actually fix them you actually knew every bit of code in there you knew what was wrong how to find it nowadays it's just too much of a mess for a human to do very much you know how would you even find if your computer has malware millions of bytes of code you can't find it you know even an expert can't really find and determine necessarily that you've got something's hurting you so that's how it is today is that just because of that's how technology has progressed or is that sort of by design that it's not progressed because we could always i don't know it moore's law we were you know when we started apple you only put about 2 000 transistors neurons on a chip and now you can put 60 billion on one chip for 25 cents manufacturing cost maybe made with inflation's up to 50 cents yeah but um yeah it's gotten way too complicated i long all the time janet would tell you all the time for the the old school the old school ways and the old days uh you know when you actually own stuff too but now now you can just rent it especially look at a car like a like a like a tesla they'll just totally take your world that you know and totally change it you can't find things and you can't operate them and if one little button you need to be able to get to something with your voice isn't working you can't get to that feature at all until they take over it's been two months or something trying to get a button replaced one button on the steering wheel this is on the worst service of our lives man we would never buy another tesla wow but we have an electric car in order but it's it's a newer one 520 miles range tesla canceled their caller car that was going to be like that and um 20 and it charges at 350 kilowatt speed tests our tesla only charges at 140 max so it'll be much quicker charging on the road you can drive all the way to la in that car and no charge at all and usually your hotel has something to change what company is that the uh lucid lucid lucid new company they have a showroom that we went to we passed by the street and janet saw it on the side so we turned around and went in there and in the showroom in beverly hills and we were also buy one that we saw from the outside in um scottsdale fashion mall so they're they they're opening up their showrooms but it's gonna it's costly to bring a new car like that to the market it's yeah it's still a bit of an expensive car and they haven't made very many lucids yet he said uh if you want to do something with voice command and that is just it makes me so interested they turned off the user interface menu to do some things and the only way you can do it with is with voice but if the voice button's broken i've had a break on me once before and intake didn't take two months to get fixed but what made me curious is to ask would you ever use uh alexa or siri or you know like for fearless lectures built into our new lucid and we can use our it has carplay apple carplay and android auto so you can use your phone as your navigation and other things so so you're not concerned about them listening in and you know all of this uh well actually yeah sort of concerned but i also like alexa in my home and we have for example i'll pull out my phone sometimes when we're driving home and i'll i'll call x and i'll tap in and i'll drop into the the alexa in our kitchen i'll start talking to the dogs and they you hear me mommy and daddy are coming i i just remember there was it's at some point i think i might have bought bought some product and and then i was setting it up and and it asked me i was prompted we want to use alexa and it said like it it's gonna record when i see yeah kind of warnings you know yeah and the iphone is really good about telling you nowadays if something might get you into being observed watch shared and get known i go know as much as i can on that and i use oh i for what they call it that hides your ip address oh yeah yeah vpn no vpn's one thing i even built my own on a raspberry pi built my own um open vpn the best vpn there is in my home on a real ip address that i have real ipv54 so when i'm overseas i can even use my own vpn instead of others that are known their their server addresses are known and you know the countries you're in that don't like you doing everything can spot those addresses and block them you know vpn but vpn's one way but no apple i forget what they call it oh my gosh it's it's a little catchy two-word phrase kind of but it means you're going you're going with your ip address hidden from everything okay yeah apple's gotten a lot better with privacy and that's the stanford yeah they stand for it maybe it's just by accident that wound up where they were with what they had but i'm so glad for that i want to be uh you know what we share photos in our families on on on icloud cost two dollars a month right you share photos with albums and other friends of the family and can be in on it and and it's protected it's private nobody can take the data you know and find out everything you're doing so it's but but uh facebook says oh apple is so expensive they can do that two dollars a month why don't you do it no just let us pay for privacy on on facebook that's my biggest of all big tech facebook's number one that i don't like i mean you got to be in the social web but i don't so i i pretty much avoid all the social web i mean i had facebook i had facebook for a lot of years never used it and i wound up saying yes to everybody want to be a friend so i had 5 000 facebook friends all people i don't know and then then for three months i actually went and started looking at facebook because i kind of like little videos of dogs being dogs and big dogs being saved by people no this is true i spent an hour every night on tick tock just waiting for that nice to see that and um and and then i found that whenever i was at an airport i was flying a lot back then like 200 flights a year i'd just be find myself scrolling through and i said if i have solitaire i don't need this because it became so habit for me and after three months yeah and i don't like habits because that's addiction yeah that's addiction and i want to be i think for myself and choose what i'm going to do so i i totally we dropped facebook janet and i just dropped our accounts deactivated them didn't quite drop them so i'm still scared a bit too had to take facebook off my devices because i read how it can still grab data and facebook even when you're not using it right i i don't believe this is right because you should have it honest that every person who uses it knows what they're doing like steve would post something and i would click like you know i'm laughing i'd click like it's from me to steve wait a minute no it's not to steve he doesn't ever see it it's from me to 100 advertisers yeah learning things about me learning things about me and that is just shocking because that's not how we think of it we think like is a way that i can actually indicate what i like and not that it's being used to advertise to me and uh if you're a creative person as some of us are you don't want people to know what you're going to say next what you're going to do next where you're going to shop what you're going to buy when we should when we should give you this alert and all the time i notice that uh sometimes devices that sort of guess on me guess you know you'll want to do this now no today i've got something else going on you know or traffic is not this way today because it's it's a midweek holiday and and those algorithms just don't know what a dumbest human knows and driving a tesla will teach you that we drive we've driven the tesla for a long time lots of long road trips we've taken at least eight three thousand mile round trips to kansas and back and many to um yellowstone and back and we've gone up to canada we just love driving all the time during during 2020 co-vid restrictions stay at home we just got in our car it's an extension of our home and we drove to every corner california and back the same day you know way up 10 hours up to eureka and 10 hours back wow the mendocino forest oh redwood forest never ever forget it and we went to all the national parks in california and saw the biggest trees in the world and all that you know so that was that was really a great little escape but um the tesla when it's navigating it just makes if you ever put on turn on its features well anything actually just cruise control the number of times we've been on an interstate we drive 10 40 70 and 80 all the time and then we're on interstate and all of a sudden we're going 75 miles an hour and all of a sudden the car screeches the brakes the dogs get thrown forward and it slows down if there's nobody in the rearview mirror that we have to speed up for i let it go all the way down go down 25 miles an hour on an interstate a tesla with nothing around no cars around no nothing sometimes there is a car around you say that must have been it but sometimes with nothing around this is so dangerous it's happened to us 100 times at least because we drive so much and then if you turn on the steering where it's steering my gosh sometimes it kind of goes over the line a little and there's a truck right there or if a truck kind of moves towards you a little you should a human driver would just pull away a few inches and it doesn't do that remember recently just recently once it i'm driving along and all of a sudden there's a semi on my right the car lurched towards the semi and i had to quickly grab control wow i mean that would have been death this is just horrible horrible assuming that these algorithms can do what a dumbest human could do okay you're on a freeway and there's a big there's and there's there's a merger lane coming in well tesla starts driving it the lane gets wider where it is on the lines and it starts driving like a drunk person but the car coming up ahead as a smart human you would just see we're gonna call we're gonna be equal so i'll back off a little just easy to do tesla gets let you go right up next to it and it screeches the brake line to get out of the way you know because it has to by then this is just not the way human beings ever think and they used to make it sound like oh artificial intelligence will be like a human we have eyes the tesla has has cameras and it'll be able to do what a human does and trouble is we don't know how the brain's wired we do not know how the brain does that stuff um i know because i was a psychology major and we don't even know that our memories are in the brain memory of this medium here don't know that's in the brain i i took all the strongest subjects in memory and psychology and read every book i could and went walking on the streets of berkeley and buying more books from the older days and where's memory the best they had was it must be everywhere because you take any part of the brain out and no memory gets lost from the rat so it must be everywhere wow but now i came up with something 40 years ago i have to go back well 1981 whatever that was 40 years um i i came up with a statement to to make fun of the fact that the books don't know anything i said the strongest correlation you can come up with is that between the ages of 6 and 10 as we had learned you lose two things your childhood autobiographic memories things that you've done as a child and you lose your teeth right and that's the strongest best correlation now it's 2022 or something one of these years 2021 i don't know what it is i don't do years but you can look up you you can search for teeth memory you're gonna be shocked what you find today so you mentioned alzheimer's tests in the saliva and the gums you're saying maybe your childhood memories are in your teeth i was saying there's no way memories are stored in teeth okay that's what i'm saying but if i say never but i have a stronger more logical mathematical explanation of where memories could be then you'll find in any book i would make i was just trying to point out how weak the books were nobody listened to me of course i wrote it up for the professor but do you oh sorry steve i was just like it reminds me of uh the thing that i came up with with which is that uh my theory that the brain does not generate consciousness the brain is not a transmitter of consciousness but rather it's a receiver and and so i have this uh this metaphor and this analogy to to describe what i'm saying is that um we're like a radio kind of yeah a lot of people want to hear that and you know all the knowledge of the world is in waves but you know what i just i just disown anything that says we can have between people and you know some psychic connection through the air i always disown it all right telepathy yeah you don't think telepathy is possible correct like the men who stare at goats is all [ __ ] probably i don't know that one but i just i just think that uh you know like like you could take your your body like uh to kill the body but but you're not killing the consciousness you know like i don't buy that okay but then i accept you you have good you have a good thinking if you start with that as your assumption yes you can come up with yes there's something out there i can't disprove it right so you're just as good as you're thinking just as good as mine mine just always wanted you know mathematical scientific proofs you can hook a circuit together and see a like i love that too i love that too and you said that you you love dog videos and i got a message any animal really yeah of me too i got a message from you when i posted a dog video after i found wendy in the streets of peru i got a message from you that you loved the video that uh that i posted about finding wendy absolutely yeah i remember i was in a country once and this dog at the airport came up and i i treated it nicely i don't think i had any food anyone to follow me to the car and i felt it wanted me and so when i left that for a few days later from that trip i just wanted to go to the airport and find that dog again and somebody somebody in that country had said that they would harbor it harbor the dog and keep it for me quarantine it and get it shipped to me but never ran into that dog again i just fall in love with dogs so easily yeah yeah tell me about it you were talking earlier about uh steve jobs sister and you knew her from growing up so you and steve were like friends as you kind of disowned that whole family is it getting a little bit hot in here or is this story about to be totally intense now in other intense news i got to tell you we've been doing crazy numbers with our merchandise operation and if you aren't in the e-commerce game i dare say you are blowing it now what's the secret to our success with my merchandising it's called ship station all right what is ship station it's one easy to use interface which integrates every different selling platform amazon etsy your website you name it any way you're selling it you can sell it with shipstation and they're gonna give you the best rates on all of the carriers like ups post office the dhl come on i mean it's shipping time baby and if you want to get a free 60-day trial of no hassle easy to use shipping just go to shipstation.com in the top right hand corner there's a microphone just like this one you're gonna click that and then boom type in the promo code stevo and get off to the race is figuring out how easy shipping can be and i'm not kidding about shipping a lot of stuff like this insane boom box with the microphone it's a traveling pa system baby and we're shipping them with ship stations so one more time go to shipstation.com click the microphone in the top right hand corner use the promo code stevo and you are off to the races with 60 days of totally free hassle-free use of ship station it's time to come up in the world now let's get into this story as far as i could tell i mean they were nice family as far as i could tell just like any other family i didn't even know he was adopted oh so he was adopted but you guys grew up together i never knew he all the way up to starting apple and way late in apple when there were some reports about it he found his father that's when i learned oh wow his his natural father he wanted to prove he came from real brilliant brains or something you know but you know i don't know brain smartness school smartness i don't buy into that a lot like most people do dna smartness i think i think your experiences in life accidents you stumble into it every bit of walking around on the street is education sure everything you're doing your life's education you're learning to have good thoughts and think about it if you are allowed to be creative that's i really dislike the fact that uh doing things outside of the main ways you're supposed to do things that's why i talked about rules i just hate that because you go to school and a kid might want to know what's in a drawer no you can't there's 30 kids in the class you start learning learning that oh your parents your teachers won't let you go off and wander in your own little directions the best times of my life when i was young was doing you know pranks and playing around with my my friends and riding bikes and all that stuff and you know stuff without school and you know without parents it was the best times and i ran into a lot of the people that started these big tech companies or important people in apple and they always went back to all the pranks they played and the fun that they had as kids and i when you die i remember reading once i was in the hall closet one was about 20 years old i was doing the hallway in my house and i was reading some article i don't read any business articles especially that back then and it was about this guy sumner redstone who ran viacom and he was selling a 50 million dollar company but he had to catch an airplane real quick to some of the city to buy another one and he's doing all these huge amounts of money and that was a lot back then it's like 500 000 now and uh i thought would i want to be that guy when i die and i don't know i just done some prank with some friends and or would i rather be the one that's laughing over what we the fun we had in life and i decided right then and there life's about happiness not accomplishment how happy you are do the fun things in life and live a fun life and i have forever just like you and many like you for sure so so that's the formula for happiness well that's where i came up with it i said what is happiness what is happiness and i felt it from thinking about you know something we've done and laughing laughing that's a feeling so it's the emotions of happiness and so the good thing is smiles smiles is positive i said happiness equals smiles minus frowns frowns are when you get upset at things and i found out that you walk around if you get really entangled in believing something should be a certain way this is my way and not other other um you're unhappy so i said don't ever argue you can have differences opinion and be different in your thinking but you both have good minds that came to the conclusion from you from a perspective so you both have good minds and not and my father told me always be liked is the secret to going up in life and and i always wanted to be liked so i didn't want to argue with people i never did and but also other things that go wrong don't focus on the past what went wrong you know at first you're mad but then forget it what do we do now to fix it what's the next step that's positive constructive you know car gets done it don't try to blame somebody for debt in your car go get it fixed right was it hard not to argue when they're when you're starting a company there's creative differences i mean how did you learn because that must have been you had never in my life never i was extremely shy i really wouldn't talk to people i didn't want to talk to people i didn't want to have confrontation which is arguments and um no and we might have differences of opinion but i would never ever take a strong you're wrong never you're wrong almost never almost never i mean there's some extreme cases maybe yeah i heard something like you threatened to walk from apple something about the production of the apple two or three or four yeah they wanted to tell the story phony story came about yes we had a shareholders meeting the apple ii my apple ii was all mine was all of the income of apple for the first 10 years of the company what gave apple the springboard to become what it is now okay it was that product was important it was bringing in millions of dollars a month all the revenues of the company we had we had just introduced the macintosh we had a shareholders meeting all you heard macintosh mcintosh mackinac management they didn't mention the apple ii once okay and so after the shareholders meeting i went back to the apple 2 3 building nice triangle building on 280 and uh the the apple the great people that ran that division and the engineers on the apple ii side were just storming they were just so mad they were talking about ready to quit because they've been so insulted by like being treated like they were nothing that's how jobs treated it the macintosh is everything and apple ii they're bozos and and they were threatening to quit well they don't have a voice that i have so i called up john scully i kind of blamed him i don't know what's coming from jobs call up john scully and i just read him you know the book from my perspective these are good people and they're being forgotten and and that's just wrong john john said well we mentioned apple two twice i don't know where it was it must have been some little double digits yeah and i hung up on him he was our ceo i hung up on him but i just did it so he'd know how we were feeling the others in in my division and after and then the wall street journal called and they got wind of this this um disagreement or whatever and i said no i'm leaving to start a new startup company to build the first universal remote control for tvs vcrs laserdisc which nobody in america had hardly um there was only one hi-fi that had a remote control and i had it a bang olufsen and i had a satellite dish that built myself big huge there was no satellite subscriptions yet and so i had five controls how do you introduce them to one so i started a company and i went on blackboard and showed the apple engineers in my division what i was planning to do so they'd know that i wasn't undercutting apple or doing something apple would want to do brought me the nicest lever kept me on the payroll even kept me as an employee but the wall street journal called and they said you know i told them what i was upset about at the shareholders meeting and they they wrote that that was why i was leaving and i said no it's not why i'm leaving i'm leaving to do this new project a new startup and they wrote it the other way and steve jobs really believed that i was you know against the company and and but he didn't have enough the wherewithal to see that i was still an employee and it was really funny because after we were building that remote control we had the plastic pieces and well we went to frog design to make the plastics frog design was apple's big design people that steve jobs liked the lot and i said you do projects for other companies yeah so we had them designed some possible remote control shapes and then i heard the head of frog design talking to my partner joannis on the phone and the head of frog design told how steve jobs came by on his bicycle one day and and the head of frog design hermit eslinger or whatever his name was showed him showed him the remote control said look what we're doing for your partner steve wozniak and jobs threw it against the wall he said put it in a box and ship it to me i own everything you do or apple owns everything you do i listened and heard those words what human being what decent human being could ever ever do something that way you know i would never bring up a kid to be that way or encourage anyone else to to be that kind of a person wow that was that was that's you know you know you run into um i don't know narcissism i'm in control of everything was he always that way like because you knew him when you guys when did you guys first meet first of all the world knows about two steve jobs steve jobs one was ruthless a lot of people did a lot of nasty things but he was good to some people that were important to him good engineers and whatever he was actually good and never did something like that directly to me except a couple incidents i just described one and then he went away and he came back steve drops too and he was a little more refined and i don't even know if that's true because there were still some things going on that were very jobs just somebody walks in an elevator and just what they're wearing you're fired that still that would still happen so but i knew steve jobs zero for five years before apple we were friends he'd come into town every so often see my latest invention and turn it into money for both of us um so that was uh we had a good relationship we played pranks we played in the world we played pranks on each other um we joked around with um the day i met him he was 16 years old and had no albums okay so i brought in my house i had every bob dylan album and i let him read the liner notes and the interviews with bob dylan and then the lyrics to the songs desolation row and songs like that this became so important to us that his words had like life meaning and so we've we followed up people that had dylan memorabilia we would drive long distances to meet with them and and then we would go to concerts and everything dillon concerts that was a big part of our life so but this is before apple who you are in life gets formed it's called personality your personality isn't going to change ever neither is mine nate is yours when your your personality settles down between 18 and 23 years old college years and that's who you are going to be forever now steve jobs had always wanted a path to be somebody important in the world but he didn't have any academic background he's living on communities like with abs you know nothing finally had me was about it and uh and so he and he wanted the path to be someone and now all of a sudden with my apple ii big money was willing to be put into it and steve jobs is now founder of a company he didn't have a title really just founder of a company that had big money this was how he was going to spring into the world you had to have a company you had to make a lot of money you had to become one of those important people and he started just talking like all computer intelligence came from him i just wanted to be an engineering away from other people i didn't want to be near press i just wanted to work on more designs i kept design after design after design of the design i did andy wanted to share all of the schematics and how everything not from apple this company when the money got put in we had to incorporate and i was forced to leave hewlett-packard where i had determined i would be an engineer for life engineers are good politicians aren't management is politicians striving for different job positions and and having to say bad things about people and i couldn't do that but i could do engineering so um um what were you saying well i just did because i i i learned this that you had the the apple ii was expandable with the eight slots oh okay coming on yes coming on for designing the products um they were all mine the apple one apple ii nobody helped i did all the hardware all the software when i look back to how much software i did i look back now my old designs and i say how could i ever have had the energy to do that and how could i have come up with things that were so far out of the books so far out of the books color our first logo was six colors you might wonder why and it's because the apple ii computer i design games for atari like breakout a game would be a hundred chips and a thousand wires and an engineer like me would have to keep track of every wire it might take six months to make a new game prototype the apple ii computer was the first time ever that arcade games it was um arcade games were being started by atari right here in los gatos california where we are today um and i could go down there and learn to play games earlier and steve jobs would be wiring up my design for breakout we delivered a working breakout but the apple ii computer was the first time ever that arcade games were color and the first time ever they were software a nine-year-old kid could write a good game for the day in one day one day in basic this was a change for gaming as much as for computers that was a machine and where it all came from was i was on the atari floor and i thought man it'll be neat if someday these games are in color it would be beautiful and then my head went back i was an analog engineer i was a television engineer too i went back to how color is a sine wave on a wire that goes at a certain the exact right speed and it shows up as red if it's a little later in time it's blue you know and that sort of thing and all of a sudden i know there's there's books and books on mathematics differential calculus to design these circuits how all these you know existential waves and mathematics created color tv their books on it and i just said what if you took a little number out of a computer that's ones and zeros right out of the computer memory and you put it on a wire into the tv if the ones and zeros got fed at the right rate i knew every color tv would think it was color never could any book have talked about that little simple simple approach just a pixel in a certain spot shows up as green and a pixel the next spot over shows up as red i mean um that was i mean that was that was kind of amazing but i just thought that way i don't know where these ideas came from one after another after another for about 10 years in my life and even before apple um right and you're starting with the blue box you're just laying in bed thinking about this like oh my god i have to put this in the oh no i didn't sleep for four days and nights doing breakout for atari this was not possible even for me to do in four days a day so your head but if you're not sleepy if you're if you're not getting to sleep your head drifts off in weird tangents you know in between standing up you might sleep a little bit whatever it's called and that's where this this color idea had popped in just i'm start thinking about it in my head and seeing the solution that wound up being uh you know a huge part of apple and when you come up with these ideas you want to share publicly with everybody like what the idea is and how to replicate it not exactly i was in a club of people stanford professors on down all sorts of people that weren't rich and wealthy but they're talking about if we ever had our own computers it's getting close to the price with a microprocessor we could afford our own computers and they were trying to build kits that weren't even useful computers they were something i built five years before the matter of fact right when i met steve jobs i was building a computer my own design and they were trying to do it the wrong way and i wanted things that were human keyboard a typewriter's human a keyboard and a display and i already learned that my tv could be a display for pong you know in games like that breakout but i'd also then gone and made my tv a terminal i made it so it could actually show letter words and connect over the over the phone line to a thing a new thing called the arpanet what is the arpanet today it's the internet yeah they were on that time there were only six computers on the arpanet started by the us government to put far away computers and i could dial a number in palo alto and then i could log onto the artbanet and then i could see a list of six computers and i could pick one at mit and go there and then it would say do you want to log in as a guest or as a as a user guest i didn't have accounts and then i'd get on i could read files and i could play games like chess and this was a terminal i'd built and that was one step closer to the computer now in the club i finally found out what a microprocessor was i hadn't looked at them since the early ones which are too weak for me i like computers and this microprocessor i took home a data sheet oh my gosh the microprocessor is like all of the computers i designed in high school one after another after another another another that's how i got so skilled and good at making them with few parts and i said oh my gosh i know how to i'm gonna have my own computer now problem is i couldn't afford 400 for an intel microprocessor and then i found i could get one from hewlett packard where i worked for 40 a motorola one so i designed my whole thing on the drafting table for the motorola processor and basically i was taking that terminal it could talk to a far away computer and it could type back to my tv from mit i just put my own computer the brains as the microprocessor and the memory had to be dynamic memory everybody else was copying intel data sheets on a data sheet with with lines on paper you can only show microprocessor has address one going to address one on a chip address two going to address two you're going to show straight wires that's static ram cost four times as much it was going to make getting a useful computer a 4k computer that could run a programming language out of the range of normal humans no i put in the dynamic rams one-fourth as many chips i always count things by chips and yes what's what is a dynamic ram compared to a static ram it forgets everything it knows every bit in the chip gets forgotten in two thousandth of a second so you have to get in and supply some extra signals to make sure it triggers basically every row or every column in the chip to make sure it it reads and rewrites its own data every two thousandth of a second and that takes some chips but one of the things it takes is a counter that goes this row and then that row and that row and that row counter i already had counters for horizontal and vertical on the tv i just reused them a second time i always did everything i could to be clever tricks today you'd call it hacking but um you know i anyway so anyway i had the right device and i took it down this was called um it didn't have a name there's no company steve jobs was out of town he didn't know it existed so i took it to the homebrew computer club and i passed out schematics to everyone in the club here's how you can build it here are the chips you use here's the code that i wrote for it and um everyone in the club i passed it out but everybody looking over my shoulders had seen computers of the past with all these switches and lights and the computer of the future was the the this became the apple one eventually and from that point on no computer was built without a keyboard and a video display that was a turning point in history but i didn't didn't own it i'd given it away public domain because i wanted to start the revolution these are the people that are going to start the revolution give him the give him the tools to do it and then steve came into town it's the opposite of what a movie shows yeah dude the waz is about to set the record straight about how history really happened and i'm gonna set the record straight about what's going to happen in my bedroom tonight with lux it's going to start out with me chewing up some delicious blue chew tablets two of them to be precise and it's going to end up about a half an hour later with me hard as a rock bringing lux to bone town does that sound like a good time you bet it does you know why because it is a good time and if you haven't tried this man i'm just saying you might want to because it is a lot of fun and what is the bluetooth tablet if you don't know it's a delicious chewable tablet with the same active ingredient as viagra and cialis except it costs just a fraction of the price and for the listeners of the wild ride podcast i can get you a entire month's supply absolutely for free if you go to bluechew.com and use the promo code stevo but wait do you need a prescription for these tablets you do but you don't have to go to an awkward in-person visit to the doctor nope you just go to bluechew.com and consult with one of their online medical providers couldn't be more quick and easy use the promo code stevo and boom your tablets are on the way an entire month's supply absolutely for free all you have to pay is five bucks for shipping i'm telling you it's gonna make you harder than a computer geek listening to the rest of this podcast yeah dude bluetooth baby get on it have fun and now let's get back to it there's a movie with ashton kutcher steve comes and finds me in a basement a big geek and he calls me to a club to show it off to real people what a farce he'd never been to the club i'd been there every day since it started i was a hero at the club i was like here at the club passing my stuff around showing it off and uh took him down to see the interest in it you know my tv and my board and keyboards and wiring and lots of stuff osha would not have liked transformers with bare wires exposed but took it down he saw the interest in that's when he said we should start a company and what he proposed was not a computer company it was a company to make something he had understood from something he'd done before in his life make a pc board for twenty dollars then people can get chips from their employers plug the chips in and it's all soldered it's all done they don't have to hook wire to wire to wire to wire that big mess instead of two weeks they build it in one day and we'll build the pc boards for twenty dollars we'll sell them for 40. when you have no money no bank accounts no rich relatives that's how you have to think yeah what can we do today with what we have and that was our start and um and it sprung and it went further and further now hewlett-packard i offered it to them first the personal computer i loved my company and i wanted them to build it but they turned me down five times five times for the personal computer they were just like we just don't see a future there wouldn't have been a future if they'd done it crazy the reason is is they wouldn't have built a fun machine that could play games they would have built back then hewlett-packard only built machines that engineers used you know with dials and switches and power supplies and cables only for engineers they would have built a boring dumb computer that engineers could have a little tiny black and white screen chiclets and they eventually started a program on my floor in the lab to do that and i just built a device with microprocessor that they were using with dynamic rams they were going to use they had five guys assigned to writing the basic language i'd written one all myself on mine and they wouldn't let me on the project even so they turned down the personal computer and you built the first personal computer the first really well the first really good the apple one was not you know very quickly was not going to be the substance of our of our life but we got a 50 000 order for pc boards with chips on them we didn't have 50 000 we had to borrow 5 000 from a friend and we got the parts on 30 days credit built the computers up delivered them and got paid cash in 10 days we had 30 days to pay for the parts and that's what you do when you have no money you just i mean steve jobs was a brilliant brilliant at finding the ways that we could do something and make a step and this but that was before that was apple one before we ever shipped the apple one we were secretly showing my apple ii to people that back in atlantic city they had a show called pc76 and we didn't want any of these other little startup companies to see what we had so we went down late at night when they were all gone and there was just one guy there with a projector i wanted to see if it works on a projection tv was that new is this is my color gonna my color output gonna work on a projection tv and we hooked it up with that guy and we did and that guy was seeing all the things that young people were trying to bring to the world as computers and he said this is the one i want you know we always do that too so we were and we were just showing off the apple one we hadn't shipped one yet so we knew the apple ii was our our future for a big company wow that was the one the app because the apple one wasn't designed as a wozniak computer it was a wasatch terminal for the arpanet modified into a computer a little but not really designed as a computer at this point when you're getting a fifty thousand dollar purchase order are you guys are you guys apple inc or i'm working for hewlett-packard my salary is 25 000. i got so scared i had hewlett packard sent a description of the personal computer to every one of their divisions and they all turned it down but i mean are you are you when somebody's writing a check to you and steve are they writing it to apple inc or that's not even a company yet they're just writing it to you guys that live in palo alto um we weren't inc this was a partnership for that apple one phase yeah and uh and people just loaned us money i think just to steve wozniak or something yeah good friend from high school um i i we did have a name apple apple computer as a partnership performed as a three-person partnership a partnership partner who had 10 percent sold out after a few weeks is it right that it's a mystery to everybody why it's called apple well steve jobs one time i picked him up the airport were driving down 101 or something and he said i got a great name for the company apple computer my first response was what about apple records well they're a record company we're a computer company i said that's all it takes he said yeah and uh it's funny because we lost hundreds of millions of dollars to the kingdom oh you got to see the beatles and then we got lost more huge money to the lawyers that we sued for losing the case um but um no but it was just such a great name who could ever turn that down those were the days you didn't need to have a technical name that said what your company does you could be anybody it was a fun fun loving time and on the last day of dancing with the stars the finale when we all came back long before before it was going to go on the air i was sitting up almost nobody was there and i'm sitting up on the balcony right next to a doctor who had treated my horrible wound which he didn't talk about my hamstring wound that cost me a week of practice and i sit next to him he said that his brother worked on that farm was up in oregon with steve and it was his brother that went up to steve and said i got a great name for your company wow that's the real far-off truth yeah i don't know if that's ever told and but you believe that story that's oh totally wow oh totally somebody no reason to make anything up and there weren't that many people on that farm oh yeah um scott said something that would never have occurred to me but he thought that the apple logo with the bite taken out of it represented uh eve biting the apple of the tree of knowledge after you have something you like you kind of say well what what are some things that we could say about it right so i'm sure it's been said but what happened was mike markle put in the big money to build a thousand computers for the apple ii yeah he put up the money he was a third equal partner we had three equal partners and he was the adult in the house he told us how you form a company who you hire what their responsibilities are he was the marketing guy at the time he was he was into marketing pushing marketing steve jobs could never consider doing any engineering he didn't really know engineering he couldn't design things he never knew what computer hardware software was really i could get into more stories about that but so steve followed in the wanted to go in the marketing direction and the business and the speaking and learning how everybody operates in a company but he didn't really have there wasn't a title that he could have yet before we started the company so mike markle put up the um that that money and we were able to build a thousand ample twos we had some obstacles on the way like steve had found a place that squeezes motorcycle seats you put some foam in you squeeze it under pressure and it forms a nice motorcycle seat and that they could make a plastic case for the uh for the apple ii computer and uh we could get a few a week and they were just so loud it wasn't like normal plastic quality we were we barely we had to survive for something like six months before we got real abs plastic from hong kong so somebody puts an order for a thousand apple twos you're putting them together one by one or at this time do you have a team well at that point in time it was so early that our pc boards were still being made by a local company and then they stuff the parts in and they wave solder it we don't plug the parts in then we drive down and pick them up same thing with the apple one we never really had a company in a garage all we did was we once once a week we'd pick up a bunch of pre-made apple one type boards we'd bring into the garage test them and see what worked i was the one who taught everyone here's how you test them and here's how to fix them and then they'd get driven to the store that paid cash but we never had desks in the garage we never had more than about one or two people in the garage uh rarely ever used the garage but it represents the humility of our start the humbleness we had nothing you've got to use your home when you're young if you look at the the 10 first people that contributed to the design of the apple ii computer some of them went to the same high school that's just how it is you go with your friends yeah when you made that first computer you knew right away like i just changed the world or was it kind of like this is fun for me no i knew it was so far ahead of what everyone else was trying yeah and it was going to show the world a whole new way i knew that i didn't want to take any credit for it i didn't want any money for it didn't want a company didn't want to start an industry necessarily just discreetly among the others and then the apple ii was really knew that would be a big company successful company the apple one was just quickly modified from a different product you know into into a computer but the apple ii was the big one like i said that was to all the revenues apple for the first 10 years of the company our only successful product we failed with the apple iii we failed with the lisa we failed with the macintosh and in that moment could you have ever predicted something like the iphone where like it's all that power in a in your pocket there were no cell phones yet of any type not even analog cell phones and the amount of memory that would hold a song cost close to a million dollars well you think we're thinking of you'll have a little device in your hand with a thousand songs or a chip that holds 500 movies no moore's law says you'll get there right but you don't know when moore's law is going to end and you don't know the path that it's going to get what's moore's law moore's law is is what makes silicon valley silicon valley they started out building the transistor it's the electronic neuron and and everything you own in your life that's electronic uses transistors everything digital uses transistors as i said now they make one chip for with 60 billion transistors on it for apple but they used to build one transistor at a time not 60 billion at a time and the inventor of the transistor moved to mountain view california started shockley labs hired a bunch of engineers taught them how transistor mathematics would work the physics behind the the parts silicon and little other atoms in there and then some of them left to start another transistor company called fairchild and the fairchild had spin-offs eventually and then somebody i went to a show once when i was eight years old and this guy held up a big a a big piece of cardboard with things like houses on it and streets connecting them and he said this is a chip we're gonna make that'll have six transistors on one chip might have been gordon moore you know or bob noyce this is the founders of intel and i'm i and i saw that oh my gosh i thought now i'm gonna have a better six transistor radio but new technologies cost too much for that for people to really take advantage of and um and silicon valley sort of grew because what led to the big economy boost of the world over the over some period of time decades was the rise in in technical equipment what it could do what it could do because every year moore's law said you'd have more transistors on a chip for the same price every year you'd have more than before and just rows and rows and rows we didn't know how far it would go but that's what got us here yeah is it that it would like double or more was the guy putting the transistors on the chip um he was a founder of intel and he came up with this law after observing sever many years of it growing at a certain rate how many transitions was like double the number of transistors every 18 months something like that yeah got it but where does it end for like even society it's still going on a little bit but it's slowed down a lot because you get to you get down to modifying one atom at a time you can't go any further we're down you know kind of close to that so we're not really um you know the only way to make chip chip with more transistors make a bigger chip now you can't do it in the same size as well we're just about at the the end and the end of what moore's law brings us but it's it's not really changing the sort of uh iphones we can make every year but is it the metaverse is next metaverse is is intriguing uh i hate i even i i'm not gonna go to um facebook's metaphors but there's meta verses and it's kind of like what they call it second world back when people could build their own properties and sell them for real cash and all that and that'll happen but i love um the idea of the of the real geeks the solid geeks that just want to live 24 7 inside their goggles and deal with people that way i mean ready player one ready player one that's what happens scott says this to me every single day he's like i don't get it i'm like ready player one it's not for everybody maybe but it's for deep geeks that i was i feel like oh go ahead are there going to be music festivals in the metaverse yes there are let me give you an example um for virtual reality you know and i get in that it's just oh my god so amazing it's like you are there emotions tell you what products will succeed but then i saw a live basketball game live you know and you the players go run in front of you and you'd be turning your head i saw a football game that way and you'd be under the basket and they dunk it right downtown oh the emotions and then i saw a coldplay at a at a concert in chicago on vr my gosh and the camera's moving right around on the stage you're you're seeing so much more than just a concert that i'm for that yeah and i think concerts will be real real plentiful in um in a metaverse here's a problem with the metaverse bandwidth how can we do it you can put on goggles and be in an artificial reality and it looks really good high resolution but a high resolution camera is kind of narrow you know focus you'd have to take 10 of those around your head and then you have to take 10 of them this way that's 100 times the resolution just to get the resolution you want okay so maybe only do a hemisphere 50 times we need a lot of resolution to make it look like it's a real world able to change that fast like it's real i've you know done i've done a few demos like that and it's very impressive so moore's law does have a little ways to go maybe it's still we're still finding tricks like instead of building transistors horizontally across this way we're building them vertically and yeah little tricks that pack them in tighter yeah i wanted to ask about music festivals in the metaverse because i wanted to hear you talk about your music festival yeah the us festival okay i had all this wealth from apple that i didn't ever want i didn't seek it and i could give enough away to museums that started up in san jose and in the street after me but i'm just thinking i um i had an airplane crash and after five weeks of amnesia where i wasn't forming memories i came out of it and realized oh my gosh i haven't been forming memories nobody around me had realized that so i called up steve jobs and said this is the last chance in my life 10 years after my third year of college my last chance to go back for a year college and finish it and so my name was famous so i went back to berkeley under a fake name my diploma says rocky raccoon clark because you know you should laugh everything in life should have a fun element i love it and but around that time i thought my gosh what could i do with all this wealth that you know would be interesting to me and what music festivals had meant to me as an attendee in my life some huge ones in the bay area and ones in the fillmore and uh and then there was the movie woodstock if i'd read the book barefoot in babylon about how they put woodstock together if i'd read it two weeks before i never would have invested yeah in doing a festival and i did the us festival and it was um three great days we planned that we took care of everything all the the parking we spent 10 million dollars just creating an amphitheater that could fit 500 000 people and it was successful from one point of view if everyone liked it i said you know whoever however many porta-potties is normal twice as much it was going to be a you know a come-off good for the attendees but lost a lot of money and then a big eight accounting firm said we lost money because of cheaters that were getting under fences so next year we we made sure that it was tighter security and this next year we would have photographs of the crowd to do count you know counting the number of people plus we'd have the ticket turn still counts and we'd have the ticket stubs we'd have three different how many were sold we'd match them all up and it turns out that the press was just wrong they were exaggerating how many people were really there but man it was so wonderful and it was really the format that showed there's a huge interest this was in the la area san bernardino a huge interest in uh three-day festivals you just got to do it right find the formula to make money so now we've got uh you know bonnaroo came around on wow when you had the plane crash would that have counted as a near-death experience no the plane crash we all we all survived i i'm the only one who didn't have a plane crash that was in the plane because i can remember everything that day from landing at um skyport airport or whatever was in um in scotts valley and i can remember going around and having it around an obstacle picking up two more passengers going for i can remember right up to reaching for the throttle and after that you press it and i had no memories of pressing the throttle and when i studied psychology and memory i found out that memories have to sit in your short-term memory for a little while to get made permanent and if you get hit hard in a crash airplane and car crashes that very often the memories that hadn't sat there for 30 seconds are lost they never get made so i have no memories of an actual plane crash and five weeks five weeks had gone by i wouldn't know it i don't know any time it passed by and and i met somebody macintosh somebody i guess my wife took me down to the macintosh group and my good friend andy herzfeld said something about a plane crash as soon as he said that i said i'm in the plane crash dream when you're in a dream you can turn around and walk the other way and i almost did it almost did i sat there and said i'll play by the rules of the dream i talked to him later that night i asked my fiancee did i have a plane crash or was it a dream and she said steve it was a dream because i joke so much you know i make up phony stories everybody i had to know i had a plane crash but i didn't wow and so she said it was it was a dream i felt my body in bed i couldn't feel anything disturbed i didn't feel where i was missing a tooth for five weeks i didn't know my dog was in a kennel for five weeks i would never ever have done that and then i woke up and all of a sudden half my brain was now forming memories and realized they had been stalked before that in the other half that got my interest quite a bit and then i found a hundred cards on the bed stand from all the closest people in my life that had sent me well wishing after a plane crash i didn't know they were there but i must have passed them every day and night getting in and out of bed they were there and i went looked at them over and contacted some of the people now that was a uh um so that was a big deal but i i'm glad for the plane crash in the end because it got me to do the music festival right i asked them because they're you hear stories about people who have near-death experiences and when they come out of it they uh their priorities are are sort of restructured and once in a while but um my personality didn't change right and not only that but they also talked about having seen their life go by before one of my psychology professors at berkeley um you know was talked about his experience in the ocean and he had gone under and saw his life experiences go by and somehow they saved them but so that's that so that's probably real but how would i remember it i might have gone through it and remember had all my life flashing before me but i can't remember it right so um right so that was uh plane crash i'm thankful it got me to berkeley it got me to my degree you know i have a real degree and i've been made a lie of the years the guy raccoon guy has a degree yeah rocky raccoon alumni of the year and they have like you know dozens of nobel prize winners on the staff there berkeley so that was really precious to me and i was engineering alumni once of the year so i love that do you have a favorite prank like the the coup de gras no so many pranks unbelievable and some of the best ones with steve jobs it didn't quite come off but we we did all the work to do them but they got disturbed did you ever think about adding a prank inside one of the computers like some kind of you know easter egg many times i played i even taught um computers to elementary middle school kids for eight years i taught them how to do pranks i taught them even how to crack passwords of a computer you know and it was a long process you know go down and you know set up a password on your computer and then go change your password and see what parts what bytes in memory change find those and then start changing a b c d here on the and figure out what the scheme is and the scheme was just not even encryption it was just a cipher you know an a became an n and a b became a cue it was that simple so they would go to school and get access just by looking at the code you can find where you find where it is and then you find how to how to read it and what it what it is or change it to something you want sure amazing but i mean a little bit a little bit of hacking but for good don't hurt anybody i have a question about like looking towards the future with technology because like to me with the metaverse it's fascinating it's exciting but it's sort of an extension of what we're already doing a little bit vr has existed it's kind of like it's video games it's entertainment but to me like do you have an opinion about like the neural link or things like this where like our brains would be connected uh like through technology like elon musk talks about it and stuff i haven't heard anything that's going to be important to people any of that kind of stuff neural links and and think certain thoughts and steer steer a car kind of so slow it can't really work into real life i i haven't bought into any of that um in the fut everything that bothers me these days i'm very negative pessimistic about technology because so many things that i think i have i don't own anymore and they change they change so drastically i can't even operate them our tesla out there is a good example and then oh it would i'd have a different way to it they changed the way to it by voice if the voice button on the steering wheel worked but i've been waiting two months for service no i just hate everything's called artificial intelligence it's artificial all right but it's not intelligence like a brain it's just figuring out a few little formulas okay if you usually go um buy some milk on wednesday it's wednesday we'll notify you to go buy some milk uh so many times when it's not what you want to do that wednesday you're in a different city you know they're just they're just interruptions in your life just like spam and i really and a lot of the old school ways i stick with old school email i don't do the the social web and um maybe it's because that's where i started but and when you give somebody your card it's your actual email yes email address i made a rule when i was young remember when i was 20 years old one of the rules in my life about being was that these executives hide out and they always say in articles we couldn't get a hold of so and so to ask them a question about it and i did not want to be um that i didn't want to be that person i said i'd always have a listed phone number always in my life and this is an extension of that that yeah if i'm going to give out some data it should be real truth is the highest to me so here i've got four cards for three cards for the three of you oh my gosh now these cards have have 911 history i don't know if you've heard it but after 9 11 you'd get on an airplane after 9 11 you'd get on an airplane and they would wouldn't give you a metal knife they'd give you a plastic knife and it would break off cutting steak you know which i liked so i made these cards and i'd go on the planes and i would just slice those steaks so clean and smooth and the flight attendants would say oh a metal business card it wasn't on a list like a knife right but it serves the purpose wow and it's so good thank you for this i can't believe it yeah that's true this is the third generation second generation was my favorite i should have brought you some of those but because i made a punched card like the old punch card days hollerith format it's called and i put my phone number on the punch card and it was really boring on the punch card because my phone number's too boring but um but but the trouble is nobody i didn't print it so nobody knew that's a phone number you know right i'd be anxious like when we had our dogs our dog letter in our house we had six were born and janet numbered each one of them with nail polish but she used the color of resistor color codes from the old electronic days okay so a one is brown and a two is red so when the mother licks it off a lot you sometimes can't read the letter but you can see the color yeah so we numbered our dogs because i wanted to know which one was born before the others because you see the movie clueless yes and where she says um what's her name i forget her the actress yes no but no the character but she says her partner cleo or something like that but she says okay asked her when she was born she said i was born a month earlier and as a you know more knowledgeable superior to you i wanted to be always safe what was the order because we had bought two dogs to start with and we don't know which was born first wow you know i mean life is those are the important things in life you know not the all the business solutions and right what you're uh the companies you're involved with now are isn't it like quite a few and and a lot of that is to use business solutions to really help real world issues it's not thought out that way business opportunities approach me maybe a dozen a day sometimes at least one every day will you join me we join our company will you be on our board of advisors whatever they want my name and i i'm only one person i don't have a staff i don't have i don't have money i gave that away a long time ago and i just have to it's bothers me the number of times i have to say no then they still come back again you have to say no more and hide from them a little um so that's i get hit a lot once in a while you know i used to meet people more often maybe once a week i'd go out to a lunch and hear what they're up and just say that's really sounds good you know i'm not a part of it i don't want to get into anything new i have a busy life and then one time i sat down and they started talking about solid state discs do you all know what solid state disks are they're they're chips and they're faster than the hard disks that were made of atoms spin around they use electrons in the solid state disks and everybody was starting to talk about it and this one company they had instead of building a solid-state disk that you connect where it disconnects they had a board that plugs right into the slots in the computer you're getting about the eight slots in the application plugs right into the slot in the computer and then has software that makes it perform like a disk and because of that you can write better software that makes it have more data and run faster than all these other approaches to disk drives that have to use a standard connector that goes at a certain standard speed and this company had designed things the way i thought as a designer when i designed stuff for apple and i was offered a chance to join them and i said yes that was fusion io they went big and successful as fast and important as apple when they did they changed the whole world they were just starting you know you're starting out in a you know a one gigabyte a solid state disk at first cost twenty thousand dollars you know we're up to terabytes now for hundreds of dollars in solid state disk one terabyte for 170 bucks today i mean um so that was a great company i was so glad to be a part of that because they were changing the world yeah yeah and i didn't really make a lot from it the founders made you know a couple hundred million each but then they each divorced their mormon wives of salt lake city and but i didn't think these mormons with their type families that i would have dinners with that would ever you know be in that divorce category so um that was fusion io now more recently there was a group that approached me and what they do is they look at ways you can make electricity costs more efficient go into a big company a big factory and change lights and change air conditioners and and do other things and make it use less electricity and then they would collect a portion of the savings but they would have to finance it themselves they'd have to go in do all the installations of the materials and they became they were making tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year for like six years this is an ongoing successful company that has a formula they're real people and crypto was starting up and i talked to them for two years it took them to talk me into joining them as i liked what they did but we what we what they made they made it really interesting we're going to have a crypto coin on an exchange they wound up naming it was x and it's on exchange in malta and a couple other places and then people can buy in and the blockchain tracks everything from turning on a light switch to all the costs involved in the savings and you get part of the savings right in the blockchain you is the investor in it and that's called force e-f-f-o-r-c-e and i really love what uh what it's what it's all about it's all about energy efficiency i was about that my whole life yeah and then we got the space company uh started by a really good friend of mine that he always has business thinking so far beyond me and thinking about all the sub markets and who you can approach for things and raising money uh has done incredible with his last company ripcord they're gonna go public next year probably you know for a couple of trillion i don't know i sold this ft at one point and people were getting mad at me they were barking at me about energy being wasted with nft so is this energy-saving solution well even bitcoin you know gold of all it's only mathematical no human can control bitcoin and the amounts of it and anything that's um it takes a lot of a lot of energy to mine it to create to keep bitcoin to keep these all the cyber currencies and nfts going um but it costs amount of energy for whatever anything is worth right because the costs the economy three e's the economy equals the energy used equals the emissions mean pollution okay and that's a formula never here anywhere else sounds as easy as as um equals mc squared for einstein right it's that easy the global economy gnp say equals the amount of energy that was used if you double one you double the other and that equals the amount of pollution that we get double the energy you'll double the pollution the only the only way to to really solve this uh climate problem is take our lives way way back down in economy take them way back down so i don't buy into a lot of you know people thinking let's do this one little step you know buy an electric car or get a solar panel that it actually makes any difference at all it can actually go the opposite way just like the bitcoin mining but you know everything we got in life um a house a car this rv is beautiful do you think the world's going towards crypto or you think we'll always stick with fiat it's hard to erase things that humans have learned and can put into books methods of doing it some countries have even disallowed crypto on blockchain technologies it can be used a lot i think it's being used a lot these days to rip people off i'll start a crypto i'll hire an engineer that knows how to create it and i'll get a celebrity to back it up you know and we'll put out the um the kim coin kim kardashian or something like that that's probably a bad example but um it's a great example it's a great example it is it's a really good one okay because i don't do social websites i don't really know how to know the names to use but we'll call and i see that happening all the time and then the founders that started it pull off some millions of dollars right away from investors that say i want to get in quick and early when it's young because it's gonna grow like bitcoin i'll make a billion out of out of pennies and they jump in and then it goes to zero that's the common story it's not the only story there's some others that are that made it for a while for some good reasons yeah so i'm kind of nfts fall into that category too the number of people getting ripped off on crypto and nfts is just just outrageous now bitcoin is safe because it's the big elephant on the block it's stable right like conservative conservative thinking you go for the big ones and they'll be around and um yeah bitcoin is uh this is you uh stable so i don't invest i don't i have never invested in stock in my life i've never used apple stock app on the iphone ever because why it goes to my happiness formula i found that my head gets to a peaceful spot where it's not worrying about everything being up and down up and down up and down like day traders i had traders around me and i watched what they went through and i just turned the other way i don't read any financial papers i don't want to be you know i don't want that to affect my life so i never invested in stocks um bitcoin i bought a bunch of bitcoin at the start to say how do you play with this new thing how do you buy something online and i conquered that and how do you buy things in other countries and how would you even pay for like a donut in another country how can you find an atm that works on your bitcoin and i want to experiment and learn it all and then bitcoin went way up well i got scared and i sold all my bitcoin except one bitcoin i had that's not my purpose is to have enough to play with and experiment with but not to make money on and two times it's gone way up and made money and just recently i think bitcoin is going to go to a hundred thousand i just you know i don't know where you get that feeling i can't put any uh mathematics to it i just really feel it from all of the interest the interesting crypto is so high and so i put a put a bunch of money into uh um into an online wallet account coinbase and pretty much it's sitting right where it was right now went way up it doubled and then it halved again and you know that's but that's not my way in life i'm just that's not important to me when you had a ton of money did your did you get less happy and then you gave it away and you got more happy or never i saw so many people i never changed the way i was i gave my money to so many good things they have a street named after me in san jose and then a friend another a hacker friend kevin mitnick okay his fame he's got some great books i write the four words for him and uh he was calling me like at two in the morning i'm in moscow russia he'd call me four in the morning i'm in in bogota colombia and all these places and i said that's kind of intriguing that you get to all these places speaking he was speaking so he had we had a dinner in san francisco with a speech agent from boston and she said she could get me speeches you know and i was ready to get a new new occupation oh you know rather than starting companies i could always get involved in company startups and i said yeah and that's where it started you know and and i went i've done it for 15 years and i've risen to the top i have risen to the top i got up to where i was doing 100 speeches a year most of them foreign okay that meant a lot of long airplane flights i don't get to choose a nice set of cities like a rock group we'll go all the cities along california from north no i don't get to do that it's where the speech offers come in and uh i've been to all the exotic countries almost all the exotic countries you know the saudi arabias and moscows and china and um all a lot of a lot of strange places some small places super cool that's my occupation and i've gotten so good at it i've been able to support my family two questions do you know how many countries you've been to no never counted we made a list sometimes for we were trying to get a um biocitizenship in grenada we got it took a year and a half of work figuring out what countries i've been in huh in your in ten years i don't remember how many it was like 80 countries maybe oh you got us maybe a hundred no we're both sitting around i think you reached out to me one time asking if i wanted to go to antarctica with you that was the best trip of our life we love we like to take places we like to take cruises cruises seabourn cruise ship will give us a cruise for a speech on board and we went to antarctica that was the drive to drive bombers it was like a project oh no the the the hammer one was um there's a guy that had project a couple times he took land rovers and did trips driving around the world it was called drive around the world dot com d-a-t-v we w and he went to all little countries i've never been to bhutan and places like that you can't really get into a risk getting caught or something right and so they wanted to do that and drive on this new road they built in antarctica that goes to the south pole drive it but getting all the support that you would need to you know be covered that they would come out and rescue if you needed um it never quite that one never came off right tried to get the science companies into it but i could have been there janet i got on a cruise to antarctica like it's best cruise in the world yeah the best thing you could ever do yeah you could have been good on that and buzz aldrin was on there right right we actually filmed some early scenes in modified hummers we're going to modify we got modified some yammers with huge type track wheels that can do just like this electric but you can't do that in antarctica where you're gonna get your electricity just like the apple store there's no way i would have turned down an opportunity to drive hummers through antarctica with steve wozniak okay i i i well i eventually i got less favorable towards it because it was taking so long and they just were ideas and ideas and i didn't want to be involved the promotion much and buzz aldrin also kind of dropped out of it so it's probably not ever going to come off but they did a lot of work a lot of work in preparation from their studies of driving gas cars you know around the world trips kind of huge huge driving man can you uh uh talk about the box oh yeah let me see thank you you came in with this box yeah yeah wait let's hold it right there just so i can pee i'm dying a piece does anybody have to take a bathroom break no we can't stop now sit down just kidding [Laughter] alrighty the box let's do the box [Music] okay lots of things in here i'll put that down for now first of all there's there's a printer in this town of los gatos that makes these pads for me pads of two dollar bills they really smell the ink yeah you can still smell like they're freshly printed they're not real are they well hold on he gets the supplies from a higher quality printer and they meet the specs of the us government these bills and because they meet the specs of the us government i've looked it up they are legal tender i've been spending them for like 30 years and um i mean i don't know if it's the right president they want to get ink on me but um no it's great and i sell a sheet of four two dollar bills for five dollars everywhere i go i sell lots of them and because it don't cost me eight dollars for a sheet and they're legal the secret service has approved them i've had police called on me a number of times the secret service approved these bills three times two of the times they actually saw the bills i don't know why it's only two times and one time they read me my miranda rights and when they read me my miranda rights i should have brought it with me i used um a fake id that i made from back when a personal computer could not print a photo could not print photo quality unless you owned a real expensive dye sublimation printer to make backstage passes and all so i have this i have this the id that i gave the secret service says department of defense but i respelled it defiant so i could say it's a joke not a not a fraud card and it says i'm a laser safety officer and i have an eye patch in the picture laser safety officer that's what i gave the secret service when they they knew these bills were good they tested them with the pen they'll pass the test so you'll probably want these i know steve has them but i'll leave a few sheets here oh my god oh look at that and if you look at the serial number of this top one here it ends you know two six five um but they're the legal tender the secret service is in charge of counterfeit money unreal who can i show this on camera wow of course you can smell it everything i said is true except the president i know it is the right president um it's amazing well yeah looks great all righty unreal my game boy my game boy now they never sold this model in the united states it's from the original original game boys with the original original tetris cartridge and this game boy lights up it actually lights up it was only sold in japan it was called game boy light and i still play tetris on it regularly to just pass time when i want to and one time i used to have always have the high score on game boy tetris and i'd send it into nintendo power magazine back when you had to take real photos and send them in the paper mail and they said oh we your name's always in there we want you we don't want to print it anymore we're not going to print your name anymore because we want new people to get on the list oh so i i did i took a picture of a high score and i spelled my name steve backwards is evans and wozniak backwards is kane zou evitz kanezow and then i thought if i put los gatos they'll get suspicious it's the same guy so i put saratoga california the next city over and i sent it in and then i forgot about it and i picked up this nintendo power magazine um one day and i flipped back to where they have the scores and it's in here but it prints that name everett's keynes out and i saw it i didn't know it was mine i'd forgotten i'd done it i said oh my god a foreigner and he said saratoga i got chilled he's nearby and then and then i remember doing it but so my name backwards is actually in that magazine so you're still ranked for your tetris score yes wow well it was it was the highest that was ever printed in nintendo power magazine i don't play it anymore there's people better than me i'm sure i don't know um the highest one i ever got i didn't send into the later years i think it was 30 6300 something like that my goal was 750 but never i'll never hit it now this is a great mask of course because everywhere i go this is the number one mask everyone says oh i like your mask i like your mask you know they never do that every single place you go so on airplanes i'd like to put this n95 over it and then i'll oh it's a little tight i'll call a flight attendant and i'll say i want to inform you that for the rest of this flight i'm going to take this mask off and and at first they're shocked and kind of accusing me you know and then they laugh so laughter laughter is really worth it you know now i used to go into janet and i for quite a while wore this type of face mask hang on it might be trapped this type of face mask with a hepa filter that you could wear you could wear on the lanyard that's great so you'd wear it you'd wear it and you can turn it on to three blowing levels okay so sometimes when we're going to the cigarette smoke or something jeff janet's asthmatic this is a nice way to get fresh air fresh air through a through a fan that's in here and when i go into the stores like the grocery store um i would tell people a normal mask isn't adequate for my condition and i said what's your condition i'd say geekiness this this mask i've worn a couple of times during the mask days with something under i love this mask wow it's also for geekiness now we've got another type of peppa mask hepa filter mask right here that just goes on you and it's also filtered yeah it's smaller and and you got buttons for like a bane from batman now during the the black lives matter protest i thought if i ever heard of a protest around here i might want to get in it so i actually bought a real gas mask too but i never used this in public to say this is my this is my mask but i could that takes care of my box wow that's so great yeah steve and i always joke about with the time we got dinner and they came over with the pepper and he said course and then when they were done he said fine i think about that once a week that's amazing because just last night we went out to dinner with i don't know uh oh a friend a friend from the masons i'm an honorary california freemason for life wow i'm a life member i'm not a mason as a person is there a secret handshake not but i went through a whole bunch of things because my wife at the time was an eastern star and then we could have more joint time together is there there are secret words you have to learn that i have no idea what i can know you can never remember them it's very difficult then you go up three levels you're a mason for life and everyone goes up to 33 levels not me i dropped out because we got divorced yeah and you probably played some tricks on them but we were we were at the restaurant yesterday the old spaghetti factory they brought up pepper and i did the whole the standard thing or maybe it was the night before somewhere and i said of course and then that's fine whoever it was it was actually at the grill on the alley steakhouse and they were they were actually kind of pleased with the joke fantastic and because i do like coarse pepper you know that's fine when i said of course of course she unscrewed it to make it coarse she realized she realized it was more than just saying yeah sure wow i gotta say that every time i've ever gotten together with you has just been the most fantastic experience i value our friendship beyond measure yes and i decide the same absolutely i'm a person that makes very very few friends in my life you know every few years i might make another one that'll be a long-term friend continually it's very rare yeah well you're in there you're the one i'm absolutely beyond grateful for you and uh and and this time like like always was very special and the fact that we were able to record it and share it with the world is even more so so thank you the key people in my life are creative people and also especially comedians magicians and the fact that you came to my bucket list show and and actually made it through to the end i i i oh no no i understand comedy i was not against that i was not disfavorable that's what you that's what you do that's your business oh no no i understood it i told julie that she said that you thought that somehow i was offended by it no no i was just scared that you were gonna see the things that i show at my bucket list oh you gave me some no we took out some really straight friends and i started describing exactly what you've done oh wow man i love you steve and uh thank you for this really looking forward to the next time is there anything that we can promote for you do you want to send any traffic anywhere i i never do i never try to promote myself for anything he's like world peace yeah world beast i probably did the rescue rescue a dog and what is that mask where's that face mask oh the selfie mask mask makes the best ones i don't get anything to a mask i like maska-like dolls don't make a mask that looks like your face that looks like your face you can also buy ones that look like dogs and stuff sure i have some of those i want a steve wozniak mask okay that's upside down oh well that would be a steve wozniak mask if it were right side up and i've ordered it i like dot com yeah i think a couple more are getting delivered to our house in a day or two i love it it's fantastic yeah it's fantastic and i've only been wearing it for like three weeks yeah at every every single place people say oh i like your mask yeah well you said it okay well bless you steve and thank thank you so much for this yeah everybody go to go get something that matters home now there you go and there it is folks can you even believe it dude i mean he said he makes a friend every few years and i'm one of his friends and dude he sat there and talked with us for like an hour and 20 minutes man he he came out to see my show on tour he watched me ejaculate as i fell out of an airplane butt naked with a dude strapped in my back and then he told me that he enjoyed it okay i i'm beside myself this dude really is the most he's had the single most impact on the future of the human race out of anybody who's lived god damn thank you for watching

Channel: Steve-O's Wild Ride! - Podcast

Views: 351,124

Keywords:

Id: CRi8r0XQFHU

Length: 96min 10sec (5770 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/GeorgiaKeeffe]

Já estive com Woz pessoalmente, incrível como ele tem uma cabeça muito à frente do nosso tempo. Assim como Jobs