TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Mr. Wozniak's official site
• BBC News article on Mr. Wozniak
• Q & A with Mr. Wozniak

E-mail a friend

Tavis: So thirty years ago, Steve Wozniak came up with an idea that must have seemed like a hair-brained idea at the time. Take a regular typewriter keyboard and combine it with computer circuitry and a video monitor. Of course, that silly idea turned into the personal computer, perhaps the single most important invention of the entire twentieth century.

Steve Wozniak is now a committed philanthropist and president of a company called Wheels of Zeus. His new memoir is called "iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple and Had Fun Doing It." Well, I guess so, Steve Wozniak. Nice to meet you.

Steve Wozniak: Well, thanks for the introduction. I got to say that actually that company is gone. There's another company, a newer company now, but I don't pay attention to things like getting names of things correct. It's more important what we're doing.

Tavis: Well, let's talk about that in just a second. First of all, speaking of names, "iWoz." A creative name for a book by you.

Wozniak: (Laughter) Thanks. Actually, I disliked the name of "I, Woz." Oh, I didn't want that on a book, but when they came up with it this way looking like iPod or there was a Steve Johnson book, "Icon," and it sort of like, yeah, it fit right into where it should be. You know when things are right.

Tavis: Yeah, exactly. Speaking of Steve, I guess I had seen this before reading articles about you in the past, but it kind of hit me. I guess you had to have a name Steve to be on this team, huh? Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. If you weren't Steve, you couldn't be a part of this team initially?

Wozniak: No, but it's really nice, when I run into people named Steve, I can always say, "I like your name." Good name, okay. It might go places.

Tavis: (Laughter) Steve Wozniak, Steve Johnson.

Wozniak: I changed a lot of names. In the book, I actually have three pseudo names. I did a Dial-A-Joke and I was Stanley Zebranewskanitski. I went back to get my college degree under the fake name of Rocky Raccoon Clark and that's what it says on my diploma.

Tavis: And why is that? Why Rocky Raccoon Clark?

Wozniak: I had to go back under a fake name because Apple had already been a big huge success and I was taking classes in engineering. I didn't want to be recognized. I wasn't going to be getting A-pluses (laughter). My dog was named Rocky Raccoon because he was a Husky and he looked like a raccoon a bit and my wife's maiden name was Clark, so it had a reason.

Tavis: Rocky Raccoon Clark. That's actually a great story. We went right past it. You talked about that in the book. But tell the story of how Apple becomes a huge success, to your point now, and you decided you still wanted to go back to college and get your degree.

Wozniak: Yeah, actually Apple was a huge enough success and, in the early days, it needed me. I was going to be an engineer and not run a company and, because of that, I was doing the critical engineering projects in the early days. But then it got to the point where we grew and we grew and we were selling computers by the gazillions. We were going public and making all this money and I had so many engineers and so much money that I wasn't critical to the success of the company. You know, I would have liked to maybe find a way to get away, but I could never say I'm leaving Apple.

I had a plane crash. Five weeks later, I came out of amnesia and, oh, I haven't been at work for five weeks. The idea popped in my head that I've got to get that college degree. I would have gotten the college degree if Apple would never have happened.

I didn't want things that were big and powerful and had a lot of money and influence to say this is where you have to go in life. Now you have to be a businessman. Now you have to direct businesses. No, I wanted to be the person I was and I instantly said I've got to go back to college and get that degree now. I'll never have another chance.

Tavis: I love this, but you're running past these seminal moments as if they weren't in fact life-changing. You mention a plane crash. Hold the phone. I know this, of course, but tell the audience about the plane crash.

Wozniak: Yes. I was piloting a plane and somehow we failed on takeoff. I have no memories of it. For five weeks, I was going around acting weird and people thought I was weird, but they didn't know I had one of those memory problems like you see in the movie, "Memento," where you talk to somebody and, ten minutes later, you don't know you've seen the person before.

The memory just isn't forming. It's associated with car crashes and airplane crashes where you have lesions near the hippocampus and somehow the doctors didn't recognize it. My parents didn't know that I had this. So when I came out of amnesia one night by basically and logically talking my brain into a step of "Did I have a plane crash or not?"

The way I finally figured it out, when you can't remember if you even pushed the throttle or not, you can remember everything up to reaching for the throttle, but did I push it? You just can't remember if you had a plane crash. How can you verify it? Then I remembered that I would have remembered if I had landed in Santa Catalina. Since I had no memory of that, I knew I'd had a plane crash.

My head was for a while in two states of mind. All of a sudden, it was forming memories and yet I had the left brain that wasn't forming memories in me. It was such a strange night in my life. I woke up and found hundreds of cards wishing me well in the hospital right by the bed that I didn't even know were there a minute before. So the head started working again and I was so interested in memory that I went back and studied that a lot too.

Tavis: (Laughter) Wow.

Wozniak: I wish I knew where memory was in the body, but -

Tavis: - too much, and we're not out of chapter one yet. Tell me how you have navigated a life on the other side of a plane crash. You mentioned, of course, that while you didn't know where you were basically for five weeks, you came out of that and you said, "You know what? I've been away from work for five weeks. Clearly this place can survive without me. I'm going to go back now and get my degree." Obviously, you picked up that lesson out of that.

Wozniak: I was proud of my parents talking about the colleges they went to. I wanted to be able to tell my kids that I went to college. I never dropped out. I had three years of college. All I needed was one more year. I took a year off to earn the money for a fourth year of college. It's in the book. Twice I had to take time off to earn money for college. The trouble is, my career went up and up and up and up and I wasn't able to get back for ten years. But I did it and I got my diploma and I'm so proud of it.

Tavis: As you should be. There's so much in here and I wanted to get to some other stuff in the book in just a second here. There's a question hanging here that I got to get to know. Why now? I mean, everybody knows Steve Jobs and you were there to help create this thing and help make this company, Apple, what it is today. But you've been under the radar all these years. For whatever reason, you decide to go public with this story, your story. Very powerful story, but why now, Steve?

Wozniak: Tavis, there have been so many good, important, imaginative, great things going on for me my whole life that I haven't really had time to sit down and finish a book. There were a couple times I started and never got to page one. I said I don't have the time and I gave the money back.

This time, my co-writer really invited me. It was really having the co-writer inviting me and I said I would do it with her that guaranteed we'd have the discipline to meet regularly, to speak into the microphone, get the book related to, and I couldn't let her down and not finish it.

Tavis: You could - if you decided to - still be at Apple helping to run things these days. Why did you decide to make that transition?

Wozniak: I think after this much time, although I'm still at Apple as kind of a low-level employee just out of loyalty and honor, I don't think I could be running things at Apple. I don't have enough currency in those businesses technically, engineering-wise. I'm on a lot of Boards of companies. I could do something like that. I'd welcome that. I wouldn't mind that at all as a part-timer. But I have my own interest in technology and my own companies going.

Well, currently I got a company. We just announced that we're acquiring a southern California chip maker called Jazz. Everything starts with chips. The newest types of chips that have certain characteristics lead into good engineers designing products with them that change our lives.

Tavis: Talk to me about two things. One, what you make now of the phenomenal growth of this thing that you helped create called Apple. I mean, you've talked about this in the book to some degree, but when you look back at those days of getting this thing started, this idea you had - I mean, you had no idea. You couldn't have - would become this revolutionary?

Wozniak: Now you talk about computers as being so magnificent and everywhere. You have to imagine that, in 1975, we're meeting in a club and everybody was talking about the social ramifications and the revolution that we were starting, that everybody someday was going to have a computer and they could actually solve problems by writing programs and all this stuff.

Nobody believed it back then. Nobody thought there could be a market. The big companies said this is nothing to spend our time on. It's a waste. I even got turned down five times by Hewlett-Packard. Yet these were going to be the most exciting things in the world to those of us who understood technology and knew what you can do with a computer.

To come up with the ideas then that everyone is going to have computers, they were going to be sharing messages, and hundreds of people could read what you wrote instantly, and reorganize social marches and that sort of thing, that was the revolutionary time. That was what inspired us. We got to make these great products. We got to make this thing happen for the world.

Tavis: Take me back thirty years and help me understand what allowed you, propelled you, gave you reason to believe that this idea that you had could in fact do something revolutionary and be significant?

Wozniak: Number one, early goals that you have in life. I mean, I had goals that I wanted to make products that were consumer products that the Average Joe would have in the average home, and these products were the ones that were going to define the state of art of technology and not what the military needed and could afford to buy.

I also had goals to have my own computer someday. Suddenly, I saw the ways to build it by designing it and building it myself. Chips had finally gotten low enough in cost. Microprocessors and rams could build an entire computer at a price somebody could afford that could actually solve programs, run games, run my simulations at Hewlett-Packard, whatever. I knew what the end of the goal was and now I saw that it was possible, and that was having all of the education and skills to be able to design computers well.

I had designed tons of computers way back in high school seven years before. I built one computer five years before and it was really time to move on and do a really great computer, a whole different style. I don't like things that are ugly. I don't like things that are complicated, wasteful, have messy parts, that look like airplane cockpits that no human could understand.

I worked at Hewlett-Packard and we built calculators that everybody could understand what every single button did. I kind of followed that paradigm and said let's make a computer with a human keyboard and uses your own television so you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on an output device.

Tavis: It seems so simple now (laughter).

Wozniak: I'll tell you, I could not have done it if I had money. I mean, absolutely no money. It absolutely forces you to make some very good decisions and not having done things before, but being very skilled, very well educated, lets you design things, build things, better than if you knew how it was done before.

You're going to use the absolute best parts, the best lumber of the day to build a house, the absolute newest components. You're going to put them together in the absolute perfect way and then judge yourself if you're really good. Judge yourself and sometimes you're so much better than the rest of the world just doing the standard old way that computers have been built before, for example.

Tavis: So the moral of the story is that, if I give away what little money I do have and I start over again with no money, I might make something of myself? Is that what you're trying to tell me? You said having no money is the key.

Wozniak: (Laughter) You know what? To invent things that are very, very different and haven't been done before, it sure helps to start with no money. In every case, I had to think of how do you make things small that almost cost nothing? That's the way to get to a computer that's useful, but affordable.

Tavis: I'm being silly with that comment, but that is one of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard to people who don't have. We live in a world where we think that, if you don't have, that you can't have. If you don't have, then you can't produce. Everybody says you can't make something out of nothing and you're advice is the exact opposite.

Wozniak: Although one thing is, you can have money and not be affected by it as some other people, not have to chase more money and still go back and be a purist, an artist, and have to go down there and use the same methodologies you used before and don't pretend that you have all the money and can just buy the solution.

Tavis: Let me flip it right quick, if I can. With all the good that you have helped to create, with all the good that the world has been exposed to because of your creation, because of your invention, with everything, there's a good side and a bad side. Good news and bad news to every story. Be honest with me. What's the down side to what you helped create?

Wozniak: The down side is I loved the person I was back then. I loved doing that for life and I can't really do it anymore. I have so much tension. I had philosophies about being accessible, listed phone numbers, all that stuff. The internet is here and I'm just hounded by just basically paying a lot of attention to fans, to the public, this and that. A lot of my time is eaten up and I can't be twenty hours a day thinking on engineering problems and doing the exact design work.

Some people I just met in a show in Mountain View, California, they all went into a class and they bought these things called Apple 1 replicas and they put chips in the boards. They went in the class, soldered them in. They made their own Apple 1s and I thought, God, I would have loved to be in that class. I just wish I even had the time for it. That's the sort of thing I want to do in life. It's going through and thinking up these new machines. I'm putting together some parts and building things that never existed before that was such a great time in life.

Tavis: That's the bad news for you personally.

Wozniak: Yeah, the bane, the bane.

Tavis: Be honest one more time and tell me what the bad news for the rest of us is for what you gave us.

Wozniak: (Laughter) The bad news? Well, I guess there's good with any technology. It brings a lot of social changes. People can say that now, with the greater communication, it's easier for predators to lurk and some bad things, some kinds of crime to happen. I mean, they always happened before. Hackers can somehow get a key, but usually they're an insider that know the keys to a certain system and there were always insiders that had a key to the drawer to steal money and whatever.

The bad side is, I think computers are so unreliable. When I was young, everything my parents bought, I was sure was going to last fifty years. Everything was good and solid and built with atoms. Now you buy anything, it's not going to last very long and it may not even work very long. When it goes bad, it's hard to get answers. The technology world is not very satisfactory for people who want reliability.

Tavis: Tell me where we're headed technologically.

Wozniak: (Laughter) Where we're headed? If I could guess, that would be great. I'd be way ahead of everyone else. The trouble is, you can't really see. Even when I was at Apple and you could estimate, chips are going to get denser and denser and denser year by year by year and we're going to make more and more and more. In a computer, what does that mean? You can come up with a few answers, but they're projected because the world tends to go in different directions that you need to think of.

When you're designing something, you can tell what the world is going to be a year from now. But if you're designing something and you guess two years out, the world always found new programs to do the job differently or new hardware that did it and hardware instead of software. You know, it's really hard to predict the future. We haven't yet given in to this idea that out on the internet we're going to store. We're going to let the internet have the computers that run our programs.

We keep thinking the computer is so inexpensive and it runs all the programs right here for me, but you know, the hassle that you have to do to maintain it, to keep it fixed, to fix viruses, when it goes bad to recover your data. All those hassles just go away if it's out on the internet someday and you just log on with a browser and run your word processor, your spreadsheets. That day hasn't come yet.

Tavis: Finally, tell me about your philanthropic work because you are very much the philanthropist.

Wozniak: I grew up not even wanting to start Apple. Clearly it's in the book in a couple of places. I just didn't want to start running a company. I just wanted to design products. One of the things is, I didn't like having all that money. I've never believed it was a good thing to do. So much more than you could ever use in life to live comfortably forever.

One of the things I did was I found good people that had good ideas to start museums with projects that would teach children mentality about the aspects of the world, you know, and cultures and how they worked. So I founded the Children's Discovery Museum and then the tech of Silicon Valley was going to, you know, sponsor a lot of the tech that had come out of our area, and the ballet, the arts in San Jose.

That's the city I was born in. It was so important to me to sponsor a whole lot of, you know, these community things there. I am so lucky. One of the greatest honors of my life is that I have a street named after me. Woz Way in San Jose. It's a good street.

Tavis: Woz Way (laughter).

Wozniak: Yeah. Then we started to give away computers because they were starting to come into schools. I thought, you know what? Giving away money when you have an excess of it isn't really where your head should be if your heart's there. You have to show it by giving your time, so that led me into teaching young fifth graders, something I'd decided I was going to do back in sixth grade, teaching young fifth graders and then older students and then finally teachers. I wound up teaching seven days a week for about seven or eight years.

Tavis: I haven't scratched the surface yet of this book, "iWoz." Speaking of Woz Way, we can all do it the Woz way. The book is called "iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple and Had Fun Doing It" by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith. He's still having fun and what fun this conversation was. Steve, nice to meet you.

Wozniak: Nice to meet you, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you on the program. Up next, Richard Pryor's daughter, Rain Pryor. Stay with us.