Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
up the files on a figure who is so central to
the world we live in, yet often feels like he's
standing just slightly at our focus in the history
books. We all know the standard mythology of
Apple, right? We know the black turtleneck, the
round glasses, the reality distortion field and
the sheer marketing genius of Steve Jobs. It's
the narrative that has dominated, I mean, the
last 40 years of tech history. It's the visionary
CEO, the great man theory applied to silicon
and plastic. Exactly. But today we are shifting
the lens entirely. We're looking at the other
Steve. Right. The technical soul of the personal
computer revolution. The man who actually built
the things that the other Steve sold. We are
talking about the Wizard of Wes, Steve Wozniak.
And honestly, looking at the stack of source
material we have today, the biographies, patent
filings, old interviews from the 70s, calling
him the other Steve feels like a massive disservice.
Oh, completely. Because when you really dig into
the engineering, you realize that without Wozniak's
specific type of engineering purity, Silicon
Valley as we know it simply wouldn't exist. It's
a bold claim, but the sources seem to back it
up. We've got a massive amount of material here,
ranging from his early days as a freaker hacking
phone lines with a whistle, to the patent for
the Apple II controller, all the way to his recent
and frankly surprising views on artificial intelligence
and the future of humanity. It is a fascinating
trajectory. It's not just a business story. It's
a story about a specific philosophy of technology.
So our mission today is to unpack the life of
the man they call was. We're going to look at
the prankster who accidentally started a revolution,
the traumatic plane crash that literally reset
his brain, and why, despite being worth millions,
he ended up teaching fifth graders in a local
school. And I think what stands out immediately,
just looking at the overview of his life, is
the contrast. You have Jobs, who is all about
the package, the deal, the control, the closed
system. The aesthetic. The aesthetic, exactly.
And then you have Wozniak, who seems driven by
this almost childlike joy of discovery. He's
the archetype of the happy hacker. The prankster
genius. Precisely. And that's where we have to
start. Because before there was Apple, before
there were billions of dollars, there was just
a guy named Berkeley Blue. I love this alias,
Berkeley Blue. It sounds like a jazz musician,
maybe a character from a noir novel. Right. But
it was his handle in the underground world of
phone freaking. Right. We have to contextualize
this for you, the listener. This is the early
1970s. The Internet does not exist. The most
complex machine on the planet is the global telephone
network owned by AT &T. A monolith. A total monolith.
And freaking was essentially the precursor to
computer hacking. But instead of hacking servers
with code, they were exploring the telephone
network with sound. With sound. That's the part
that's so wild to me. And the source material
highlights this specific article in Esquire magazine
from 1971 titled Secrets of the Little Blue Box
by Ron Rosenbaum. And Wes reads this article
and it's like a lightning bolt hits him. It was
the ultimate aha moment. The article described
how the entire phone system was controlled by
specific audio frequencies. Basically, the phone
company used tones to control the network, to
tell the switches to open a line, close a line,
or route a call. Okay, so it was like a secret
language. It was a secret language, and the system
just assumed that only the phone company had
the equipment to generate those tones. They relied
on security through obscurity. Exactly. And the
key to the kingdom, the master key, was a frequency
of 2 ,600 hertz. 2 ,600 hertz, why that specific
pitch? That was the idle signal for a trunk line.
So if you could whistle or generate 2 ,600 hertz
into a phone receiver, the switch at the other
end would think the call had ended and the line
was free. So it resets? It would reset, but you're
still in the line. So once the switch reset,
you could dial a new number. Anywhere in the
world. And the system wouldn't charge you because
it thought it was just processing an internal
routing command. You can make free long distance
calls. Anywhere. You could navigate the entire
globe from a payphone. It was like having a backstage
pass to the world's nervous system. And Wozniak,
being Wozniak, didn't just want to read about
it. He wanted to build it. Of course. He had
to. He built what was called a blue box of a
handheld digital device that generated these
specific tones. And this is where the dynamic
between the two Steves is established, like right
out of the gate. Immediately. Wozniak builds
this incredible piece of hardware because he
thinks it's cool. He wants to see if he can solve
the puzzle. Right. And most freakers at the time
were using analog circuits that were, you know,
unstable. The piece would drift. It wouldn't
work reliably. Wozniak, obsessed with perfection.
Built the first digital blue box. The first one
ever. The first one. It was precise. It never
drifted. It was an engineering marvel disguised
as a prank tool. He actually tried to call the
Pope with it, didn't he? He did. This is one
of the best stories. He dialed the Vatican and
he identified himself as Henry Kissinger. As
Henry Kissinger. Yes. And he asked to speak to
the pontiff. He actually navigated through several
layers of the Vatican hierarchy. They were apparently
waking up bishops in the middle of the night
to take the call. No way. He eventually got stopped
because it was something like 4 .0 a .m. in Washington,
D .C., and someone at the Vatican finally realized
Kissinger probably wouldn't be calling from a
phone booth in California at that hour. That
is just the audacity, but also the sheer fun
of it. But the key here is what Jobs did. Was
built the box for the fun of it. Jobs looked
at it and said, we can sell this. That is the
template for their entire relationship, isn't
it? It's the whole story in a nutshell. Was creates
the magic. Jobs packages it. They went dorm to
dorm at Berkeley, selling these illegal hacking
devices for $150 a pop. Which was real money
in 1971. That's like $1 ,000 today. It was. And
they sold a whole bunch of them. But there's
a quote from Jobs later in life that I think
is essential to understanding this deep dive.
He said, if it had not been for Wozniak's blue
boxes, there wouldn't have been an apple. Wow.
So it wasn't just a college prank. It was the
proof of concept for their entire partnership.
It proved two things. One, they could create
technology that was superior to what was commercially
available. And two, they could monetize it. And
it also bound them together. I mean, they were
committing felonies together. That creates a
bond of trust, for sure. Speaking of creations
and bonds, we have to talk about the cream soda
computer. This was even before the Appalachian,
right? Yes, this was 1971, even before the blue
boxes really took off. Wozniak and a friend,
Bill Fernandez. Who was the guy who actually
introduced Woz to jobs? The very same guy. So
Woz and Bill decide to build a computer in a
garage. Now, you have to remember, this is before
microprocessors were really a thing you could
just go buy at the store. So what did they build
it with? The sources say they built it with punch
cards and spare chips. They used about 20 TTL
chips, transistor logic, that were donated by
an acquaintance. They didn't have a screen. They
had a panel of lights. And they called it the
cream soda computer. Because they were just drinking
tons of cream soda while building it. Liters
and liters of Kragmont cream soda. And the fate
of this computer is just... It's slapstick comedy.
It is. A local reporter came to see this garage
computer, this marvel of homebrew engineering.
He comes in, he's taking notes, and he steps
on the power supply cable. No! Yes. Caused a
short circuit, and the whole thing just blew
up. Gone in a puff of smoke. But Wozniak wasn't
devastated. He said it was a good prelude. It
taught him how to think about logic design five
years before the Appalachian Sea. See, that right
there shows you what drove him. He was doing
this for the intrinsic reward of learning, not
necessarily for the end product. It really establishes
that Woz was doing this stuff for the love of
it. He wasn't trying to build a company yet.
He was just trying to make electrons do what
he wanted. But there is a story in the records
that I think serves as a darker counterpoint
to this fun cream soda era, the Atari breakout
incident. Ah, yes. If the Blue Box established
their partnership, The breakout incident established
their personality differences. This is often
cited as the moment the innocence of the relationship
died, even if Was didn't know it at the time.
So lay this out for us. Jobs is working at Atari,
right? Right. It's roughly 1974. Jobs is working
the night shift at Atari. He was actually moved
to the night shift because, well, his hygiene
was poor and he was difficult to work with. So
they just wanted him there when no one else was
around? Pretty much. Classic early Jobs. And
Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, wants a
single -player version of Pong, which became
the game Breakout. Right. But arcade cabinets
were expensive to manufacture. Every single chip
on the circuit board cost money. So Bushnell
offers a challenge. For every chip eliminated
from the standard design, he would pay a cash
bonus. It was an efficiency challenge. Make it
cheaper to build. Exactly. The deal was a bonus
for every chip removed. Now, Jobs wasn't a circuit
designer. He couldn't do this. He didn't have
the engineering chops. So he goes to Woz. He
recruits Wozniak. He tells Woz, help me do this
and we'll split the money 50 -50. Wozniak, being
the genius he is, accepts. And he stays up for,
what, four nights in a row? Four nights straight.
No sleep. Working at Hewlett Packard during the
day, then going to Atari at night. The sources
say he actually got mononucleosis during this
sprint. He was that exhausted. But he did it.
He reduced the chip count by 50. 50 chips, which
is an insane number. It's just, it's unheard
of. It was a design so compact, so minimalist,
that Atari's own engineers couldn't figure out
how to manufacture it later. It was too tight.
is a masterpiece of minimalism. So was does the
impossible. He saves Atari a fortune. And here
comes the betrayal. Right. Jobs goes to was and
tells him that the bonus was seven hundred dollars.
Seven hundred. So he gives was his half three
hundred and fifty dollars. But the actual bonus
was five thousand dollars. No man. Jobs pocketed
the difference. Forty six hundred fifty dollars.
That is, I mean, that's ruthless. That's your
best friend, the guy who just gave himself mono
for you. It is. It's calculating. And what's
just heartbreaking is Wozniak's reaction. He
didn't find out the truth for 10 years. 10 years?
How did he find out? He read about it in a book
on the history of Atari. And when he did, he
didn't get angry. He didn't sue. He said, and
I'm quoting the source here, if Jobs had told
him about it and said he needed the money, Wozniak
would have given it to him. That right there.
That sums up Steve Wozniak in one sentence. It's
not about the money for him. It's about the friendship
and the work. And frankly, it shows that Wozniak
was perhaps a bit naive while Jobs was already
playing a zero -sum game. But strangely, they
needed each other. Woz would have designed that
board for free just for the puzzle. He absolutely
would have. And Jobs ensured they got paid, even
if he took the lion's share. It's a complicated,
symbiotic relationship. So let's move to the
garage, the mythology. The Apple I was is working
at Hewlett -Packard at this time, designing calculators.
Which was a prestigious job. HP was the Google
of its day. If you were an engineer at HP, you
had made it. It was a stable, respected, high
-paying job. But Was was moonlighting. He was
part of the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto.
Right. This was a group of hobbyists who were
obsessed with this new idea of microcomputers.
They would meet, trade parts, show off their
projects. It was the primordial soup of the PC
revolution. And the Apple Eye was originally
designed just to show off to these guys. Completely.
He wasn't trying to disrupt an industry. He just
wanted to stand up at the club and say, look,
I typed a letter on a keyboard and it appeared
in a TV screen. That was the breakthrough, wasn't
it? The screen. It was massive. Before the Apple
Eye, hobbyist computers like the Altair 8800
were basically boxes with blinking lights and
toggle switches. You had to program them in binary.
Which is just... It was unbelievably tedious.
Wozniak combined a microprocessor, the MOS6502,
which was a cheaper and, in his opinion, better
chip than the Intel 8080 used in the Altair,
with a standard typewriter keyboard and a standard
television set. He turned the computer from a
piece of industrial machinery into something
that felt like a typewriter that could think.
Exactly. He humanized the interface. And he did
it because he wanted to write code more easily
for himself. Yeah. He was solving his own problem.
And Jobs, again, sees the commercial potential.
He sees Wiz's demo at the club and says, we have
to sell this. But they needed capital. And the
sources mention the sacrifices they made to get
that first batch of boards printed. This is the
classic startup lore, but it really emphasizes
their commitment. Wozniak sold his HP scientific
calculator. Which was his most prized possession.
An HP -65. It was like an extension of his brain,
and it was worth about $500 back then. And Jobs
sold his Volkswagen bus. Right. They literally
stripped themselves of their most valuable assets
to fund this idea. They went all in. And they
launched it on April 1st, 1976, April Fool's
Day. Which feels so appropriate given Woods'
personality. It really does. But we have to talk
about the price. $666 .66. You can't make this
up. Today, a PR team would tackle you before
you could announce that price. Was Was trying
to signal something sinister? No, absolutely
not. The sources are very clear on this. Wasniak
simply liked repeating digits. He liked the symmetry
of typing 6666. So it was a mathematical thing.
It was a purely aesthetic choice for a mathematician
who loved patterns. He claimed he had no idea
about the Mark of the Beast connotation until
he started getting complaint letters. Only was.
only was would price his first computer at a
satanic number because it looked pretty. It's
perfect. So the Apple key puts him on the map,
but the Apple II, that's the revolution. That's
the machine that changed the world. The Apple
II is the big bang of the personal computer industry.
Before the Apple II, computers were for hobbyists
with soldering irons. The Apple II was a consumer
appliance. You could take it out of the box,
plug it into your TV, and it worked. And technically,
it was a marvel. A total marvel. The sources
highlight two specific things about the Apple
II that I want to drill down into. The first
is color graphics. This is a perfect example
of Wozniak's genius for elegant, minimalist design.
At the time, if you wanted color graphics, you
needed expensive hardware. You needed three separate
electron guns firing red, green, and blue. And
you needed a lot of memory chips to store the
color data for every single pixel. And memory
was expensive. Extremely expensive. It was the
most expensive part of a computer. Yeah. So Wozniak
figured out a way to trick the NTSC television
standard. Trick it how? He realized that the
NTSC standard, which is how American TVs received,
signals determine color based on the phase or
the timing of the wave. If the wave spun a little
bit one way, the TV saw red. Spun another way,
it saw blue. So it was all about timing. All
about timing. It was used a $1 chip, a simple
crystal oscillator, to slightly delay or advance
the signal coming out of the computer. So the
computer wasn't generating color in the traditional
sense. No. It was generating a very specific
high -resolution black -and -white pattern that,
when processed by the TV's sloppy analog circuitry,
would be interpreted as color. He was exploiting
a bug in the system. He called it simulating
colors. It was a hack in the truest sense of
the word. He exploited a quirk in the receiver
to save a ton of money on the transmitter. It
was brilliant. And the source says he admitted
he still doesn't fully know how it works on the
PL system. Right. In Europe, on the PLL system,
the trick worked differently and produced even
more colors. He said the colors happen by accident
when a dot occurs on a specific line. It's like
he was whispering to the machine, coaxing it,
rather than brute forcing it with expensive hardware.
That's poetic. But then we hit the friction point,
the great slot debate. This seems to be one of
the most critical arguments in Apple's history.
It determined the future of computing. This was
the clash of philosophies, was versus Jobs, in
its purest form. So what was the argument? Jobs
wanted the Apple II to be a sealed appliance.
He envisioned something beautiful and simple,
like a toaster. You plug it in, it works. You
don't look inside. He wanted maybe two expansion
slots. Just two. For what? One for a printer,
maybe one for a modem. That's it. He wanted control.
He wanted a curated experience where Apple decided
what you could and couldn't do with your machine.
He was already thinking about the walled garden.
He absolutely was. And was. Was wanted eight
slots. He wanted eight. He wanted the user to
be able to plug in anything. He wanted it to
be an open platform for other inventors to build
upon. To him, a computer was a tool for exploration.
If you sealed the case, you killed the spirit
of the machine. And this got heated. Extremely.
Jobs was adamant. He's the marketing guy. He
knew what consumers wanted. Simplicity. Wozniak
was the engineer, and he knew what a computer
needed. Expandability. So what happened? Wozniak
actually gave Jobs an ultimatum. He told Jobs
to go get himself another computer. Wow. He essentially
said, I designed this, it's my machine, and it's
going to have eight slots where I'm walking.
And thank goodness he did. Absolutely. Yeah.
Because those slots are what made the Apple II
a success. They allowed third -party companies
to build incredible add -ons. They allowed VisiCalc,
the first spreadsheet software, to run effectively,
which is what got the Apple II into businesses.
So VisiCalc wouldn't have worked without those
slots. Not as well. You needed a memory card,
a printer card. Those slots made it a flexible
platform. It allowed people to hook up scientific
instruments, music synthesizers, everything.
That open architecture made the Apple II the
standard. And it carried the company financially
for years. For years. It was the cash cow that
paid for the development of the Lisa and the
Macintosh. The entire future of Apple was built
on those eight slots that Jobs didn't want. So
Woz wins the battle, the Apple II becomes a legend,
and they become millionaires. But Woz never loses
that prankster streak. Even at the height of
their success, he pulls the Zoltair prank. This
is one of my favorite stories in the file. Because
it shows he just didn't take himself or the industry
too seriously. It's 1977, the West Coast Computer
Fair. This is the big debut of the Apple II.
It's a huge, high -stress moment. This is their
big coming -out party. And what does Woes do?
He decides to print 20 ,000 fake brochures for
a non -existent computer called the Zoltair.
A parody of the Altair, which was their main
competitor. It was a biting parody. The brochure
advertised a basic language with... I made fun
of all the marketing hype of the industry. He
paid a guy to sneak these brochures into the
conference and just leave them on tables everywhere.
And he fooled Jobs. He did. Jobs picked one up
and started reading it, getting really serious
comparing the specs. He was saying, hey, the
Apple II stacks up pretty well against this salt
hair thing, but this looks like tough competition.
He had no idea. No clue. He didn't realize it
was a joke until years later. In 1985, when Woes
gave him a framed copy for his birthday. It just
shows that Woes was never a corporate guy. He
was always the hacker in the garage at heart.
Always. But then, everything changes. We hit
a hard stop in the timeline. February 7, 1981.
The crash. This is the moment that demarcates
the early Woes from the later Woes. It's a fundamental
shift in his entire life. Woes is piloting a
Beechcraft Bonanza. A plane he wasn't actually
qualified to fly. according to the NTSB report.
Oh, really? Yeah. He had a pilot's license, but
not the specific high -performance endorsement
needed for that particular aircraft, with its
complex retractable gear and variable pitch proc.
He takes off from Scotts Valley, stalls, and
crashes into an embankment. It was a horrific
accident. Yeah. Wozniak, his fiancée at the time,
Candy Clark, her brother, and his girlfriend
were all on board. The plane climbed too steeply,
stalled, the wing dipped, and they smashed into
the ground. Everyone survived, which is a miracle.
It is. But Wuz sustained severe face and head
injuries. He lost a tooth. The physical recovery
was brutal. But the most terrifying part is the
amnesia. Anterograde amnesia. He couldn't form
new memories. For five weeks, he was stuck in
a loop. A loop? What do you mean? He would wake
up in the hospital, not know where he was, not
remember the crash at all. His fiancée would
have to explain it to him. Over and over. He
would be shocked, maybe cry. Then he'd fall asleep,
wake up, and ask, where am I? All over again.
That's the stuff of nightmares. It's terrifying.
He couldn't hold on to the present. The source
describes his recovery as flipping a reset switch.
That's the crucial metaphor one uses, right?
It is. He says that when he finally came out
of that fog, when his memory started to stick
again, it was like his brain had rebooted to
an earlier state. He regained the mind of his
18 -year -old self. And suddenly the corporate
pressure, the management meetings, the Apple
politics. None of it mattered anymore. It was
like that part of his memory, that part of his
identity as a big shot executive was just gone.
He lost interest in engineering for a while.
And he recovered by playing Apple II games, ironically.
Yes, his wife would bring the computer to the
hospital and playing those games, he said, helped
him rebuild the pathways in his brain. But once
he healed, he didn't run back to the boardroom.
He decided to finish what he started before Apple.
He went back to college. Under the name Rocky
Raccoon Clark. Yes. He enrolled at UC Berkeley
to finish his electrical engineering and computer
science degree. But he couldn't use his real
name because he was world famous by then. So
Rocky Clark it was. Named after his dog and his
wife's last name. I just love that he cared enough
about the degree to go back. Even though he had
already invented the industry, the degree was
teaching. It speaks to his humility. He wanted
the knowledge, not just the accolade. He wanted
to complete the circuit, you know. And during
this reset period, he also pivots to music. We
have to talk about the U .S. festivals. This
is a wild chapter. This was Wozniak trying to
use his massive wealth to create social harmony.
It was his post -crash big idea project. He founded
a company called Anusin Unitas in Song. a very
70s name very much so he wanted to blend technology
music and people it was going to be the woodstock
of the 80s and he threw two massive festivals
in 82 and 83. the lineup was insane the police
talking heads van halen david bowie the clash
culturally they were landmarks he built a stage
the size of an aircraft carrier in the middle
of the desert He set up a satellite bridge with
the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold
War to show that people on both sides just wanted
to rock out. It was incredibly ambitious. And
financially. A complete and utter disaster. He
lost millions. He lost about $20 million of his
own money. But lies being woes, he basically
said, if I lose money, I lose money. His attitude
was so unique. He threatened to stop doing them
if the 83 event didn't profit, which it didn't,
so he stopped. But he viewed the money as fuel
to create a memory. He said he got to see his
favorite bands. If the money was burned up, but
the memory was created, the transaction was valid.
It's a very unbusinesslike way to view capital.
Completely. It's the polar opposite of the venture
capital mindset. So he eventually goes back to
Apple briefly, but the vibe has changed. The
Macintosh is the new golden child. Right. And
the Apple II, the machine that is actually paying
everyone's salary, is being disrespected. This
was painful for him. The Macintosh leadership.
which included jobs, looked down on the Apple
II. They thought it was a dinosaur. They were
actively trying to kill it off, even though it
was the only profitable part of the entire company.
And Wozniak felt that Apple was becoming too
corporate, too political. Yeah, he hated it.
He famously said he wanted to be an engineer,
not a manager. He wanted to be in the trenches,
soldering things, not sitting in meetings arguing
about budgets. So in 1985, he leaves. Or, well,
he leaves. He steps down from active duty. He
says Apple was hindering him from being who he
wanted to be. But here's a fascinating detail.
He never technically left the employee list.
Wait, really? He's still an employee. To this
day, he receives a stipend. The source estimates
it was about $120 ,000 a year back in 2006. More
recently, he joked it's about $50 a week after
taxes. $50 a week. But ceremonial or not, he
is still Apple employee number one. He kept the
badge. He represents the company. That is wild.
It's like he's the tenured professor emeritus
of Apple. That's a great way to put it. So he
steps away from the mothership. And this begins
what I call the serial inventor phase. Section
four of our outline. Because he didn't stop building.
Not at all. He founded a company called CL9 immediately
after leaving. And he invented something we all
take for granted today. The programmable universal
remote. The car -R. Yes. Before this, if you
had a VCR, a TV, and a stereo, you had three
remotes on your coffee table. Wozniak looked
at that clutter and saw inefficiency. He saw
a problem to be solved. So he built a device
that could learn the codes from other remotes.
It had an infrared receiver. You would point
your old remote at the CL9 core, press a button,
and the core would capture and store the waveform.
And it's the blue box all over again. It's the
exact same principle. Analyze signals and mimic
them. It was decades ahead of its time. The company
ultimately didn't succeed for various reasons,
but the product was brilliant. And true to form,
he didn't just stay in the lab. He went into
the classroom. This part of the story really
gets me. A guy who founded a billion -dollar
company deciding to teach fifth graders? It was
a lifelong goal of his. He always said he wanted
to be a teacher before he met Jobs. So for about
a decade, he taught computer classes to fifth
through ninth graders in the Los Gatos School
District. And this wasn't just a guest lecture
once a year. This was a real job. No, it was
a full -time commitment. He prepared lesson plans.
He taught them binary logic. He taught them how
to unhook phone lines. He taught them how to
freak. He did. He treated these kids like little
engineers. He didn't dumb it down. He gave them
the real stuff. I love that. Can you imagine
having Steve Wozniak as your fifth grade computer
teacher? It must have been incredible. Yeah.
The stories say he also fed them. He'd take the
whole class to McDonald's or a pizza place. It
shows his desire to nurture the next generation
of hackers, in the good sense of the word. And
then we have the Wheel of Zeus. Was. Very clever.
This was in the early 2000s. He was working on
wireless GPS technology. The idea was to create
tags for everyday objects, your dog, your luggage,
your keys, so you wouldn't lose them. He invented
air tags. Essentially air tags, but 20 years
too early. The technology wasn't quite there
yet. GPS was power hungry. Batteries were heavy.
The cell network wasn't robust enough. But the
vision was spot on. He sees the solution before
the infrastructure is ready to support it. He
also got involved with Fusion IO, F -Force, and
recently Privateer Space. What is Privateer Space?
It's a company focused on tracking space debris.
It's Wozniak looking up at the sky, realizing
that low Earth orbit is becoming a junkyard of
dead satellites and rocket parts and saying,
we need to build a map of this junk so we don't
crash into it. It's interesting how his ventures
shift from fun like remotes to infrastructure
like space junk. It's a maturing of his engineering
vision, I think. It leads us into his philosophy
because Woz isn't just a builder. He has a very
specific ethical code. It does. And it centers
on his relationship with wealth. Wozniak has
expressed a profound disdain for super wealth.
He believes extreme money corrupts values. He
thinks it separates you from normal people and
their problems. And there's a story about the
Apple IPO that proves he puts his money when
his mouth is. The Woz plan. This is a definitive
moment. When Apple went public in 1980, it was
the biggest IPO since Ford Motor Company. Instant
millionaires were made overnight. But Steve Jobs
refused to give stock options to some of the
early employees. Which ones? People who had been
there in the garage, soldering boards, packing
boxes, guys like Daniel Kotke. Jobs felt they
weren't essential engineers and didn't deserve
it. That is just so hard. It was brutal. Wozniak
couldn't stand it. He thought it was fundamentally
wrong. So he took his own stock, his own personal
wealth, and he sold it to those employees at
rock bottom prices. He just gave it to them.
He essentially gave away $10 million worth of
stock to ensure his friends were included in
the success. That is the anti -Jobs move. It
is. Jobs wanted to be the king, Woz wanted everyone
to come to the party. He deliberately lowered
his own net worth because he valued fairness
over accumulation. Now let's pivot to something
that Feels very current. Artificial intelligence.
Woz has had a bit of a rollercoaster relationship
with AI, hasn't he? It's been a fascinating evolution
to track in the sources. Originally, he was completely
dismissive. He didn't buy Ray Kurzweil's idea
of the singularity, the point where machines
would overtake us. He thought computers were
just tools, just fast calculators. But then he
got scared. Around 2015, he shifted hard. He
started agreeing with Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.
He gave interviews where he said the future is
scary and that robots would get rid of slow humans
just to be more efficient. Getting rid of slow
humans is a terrifying phrase coming from the
guy who helped build this world. It is. But then,
a few months later, he flips again. He decides,
you know what? Robots are going to be smarter
than us, so they'll realize they need us. We
are part of the ecosystem. So we'll be like their
family pets. Exactly. We go from exterminated
to golden retrievers. And he famously said he
started treating his own dog better, feeding
it filet steak on the principle of do unto others,
hoping that if he was nice to his dog, the future
robot overlords would be nice to him. That is
hilarious logic. It's like Pascal's wager, but
for AI overlords. It's so ways. It's a logical.
if absurd, conclusion. But he's shifted again
recently. He has. In 2023, he signed that open
letter calling for a pause on training AI systems
more powerful than GPT -4. But his concern now
seems to be less about Terminators and more about
scammers. Scams? Yeah. He worries that AI will
make it impossible to tell what is real. deepfakes,
voice cloning, hyper -realistic phishing emails.
He thinks bad actors will use AI to trick people
on a massive scale. Which, for a guy who started
his career freaking the phone system, basically
tricking a network, is a very grounded and personal
concern. Exactly. He knows the hacker mindset.
He knows how easy it is to manipulate a system
if you have the right tools. And he sees AI as
the ultimate tool for social engineering. That's
a great point. Another area where his philosophy
shines is the right to repair movement. This
brings us full circle to the Apple II slots.
Wozniak believes you should own what you buy.
You should be able to open it up Look at the
schematics and fix it yourself. Which is the
opposite of how Apple operates today. The polar
opposite. He even did a cameo video supporting
Luis Rossman, who is a huge right -to -repair
activist on YouTube, specifically fighting Apple's
policies. So he's actively campaigning against
his own company's practices? He credits Apple's
early success to that openness. He says if he
hadn't shared the schematics of the Apple II,
people wouldn't have built the software and hardware
that made it a hit. It's a direct critique of
modern Apple's walled garden approach, where
you can't even change your own battery without
their permission. It's ironic that the company
he founded is now the primary antagonist of the
philosophy he holds dear. It is the central tragedy
or perhaps just the complexity of his legacy.
He built the foundation, but the house built
on top of it has locked all the doors and glued
the windows shut. Before we wrap up, we have
to touch on the personal quirks section. Because
Woz is a character. We talked about Rocky Clark,
but did you know he's a Serbian citizen? Yes.
This is a recent development. Late 2023. He was
granted Serbian citizenship by exception. It
was a little controversial because it happened
right before an election there. And some people
thought it was a political stunt by the ruling
party. But Wozniak says he just wants to promote
the country and its growing tech scene. He's
also a Polish citizen. Through his parents. So
he collects citizenships like he collects gadgets.
It's a Segway polo. We cannot skip Segway polo.
Please explain this sport to me. I'm trying to
picture it. It is exactly what it sounds like.
It's the game of polo, but played on Segways
instead of horses. And Wozniak isn't just a player.
He's a world competitor. He plays for a team
called the Silicon Valley Aftershocks. The world
championships are called the Woz Challenge Cup.
Of course they are. I have this mental image
of Woz on a Segway, mallet in hand. fiercely
competing. It just fits him, doesn't it? It's
tech, it's nerdy, it's slightly absurd, but it's
communal. He loves it. And he was on Dancing
with the Stars. He was. He wasn't great. He did
the worm. He did the worm on national television.
He did. He got the lowest score of the evening.
But here's the wooze twist. He accused the judges
of lying about the vote count. He was convinced
the public loved him more than the judges said.
He later apologized, but it shows that competitive
streak. He hates losing, even in a dance contest.
And finally, the sources mention he has face
blindness. Prosopagnosia. Yeah. Yes. Which makes
his ability to navigate social situations and
be this public figure even more impressive. He
recognizes people by context or voice or their
clothing, but faces are a struggle for him to
remember. It adds another layer to his character.
The man who designed the interface for the world
struggles with the most basic human interface
of all. That's a profound way to put it. It might
explain why he finds such comfort and clarity
in the pure logic of circuits. Circuits never
change their expression. So let's try to synthesize
all of this. We have the blue box, the Apple
II, the plane crash, the universal remote, the
teaching, the Segway polo. What is the three
line? What is the tau of was? I think the three
line is engineering for joy. Say more about that.
Most people in Silicon Valley. engineer for profit
or for dominance or for efficiency. Wozniak engineers
because he delights in making a machine do something
clever, something it wasn't supposed to do, whether
that's making a TV show color when it shouldn't
or making a phone call for free or playing polo
on a motorized scooter. It's the hacker ethic
in its purest form. Exactly. The belief that
information should be free, that systems should
be open, and that computing could be a force
for liberation and fun, not just for commerce.
While Jobs built the company, Wozniak built the
computer. And not just the computer, he built
the standard. The expansion slots, the keyboard,
the screen, the built -in basic. The paradigm
of this is a machine you can interact with and
change comes from Woz. It's interesting to think
about his AI anxiety in that context. If the
man who birthed the personal computer is worried
about where the computer is going, that feels
significant. It brings up a provocative thought.
Wozniak's entire career was about empowering
the user. The Apple Sec gave you superpowers.
You could program it. You controlled it. His
fear about AI seems to be that we are moving
into an era where the computer controls us. Where
we are no longer the masters of the machine.
Where we move from partners to pets. That's the
chilling thought. Are we losing the was spirit
of technology, the user in control, the open
system, and moving toward a job spirit on steroids,
where the system is a beautiful, seamless black
box that we can't open, can't fix, and can't
truly understand? That is the question we all
have to grapple with. Wozniak handed us the keys
to the kingdom. It's up to us whether we keep
using them or if we just hand them over to the
algorithm and hope it feeds us filet steak. Well
put. Well, on that note, I want to encourage
everyone listening, find your own blue box. Find
something to build, not because it's going to
make you a billion dollars, but just for the
thrill of it, just to see if you can make it
work. Kick something apart. See what makes it
tick. Be a builder, not just a consumer. Exactly.
Thanks for diving deep with us. We'll see you
next time.