You know, when I was very young I excelled in mathematics, and that leads to an awful lot of other things. So I would get master boards in my schools. And my father was an electrical engineer, so I started learning electronics at a very early age, like nine years old. I was building incredible science fair projects with hundreds of parts, and I knew all the formulas for the old electronics, the old days before digital. And my father never put his values on me, like 'This is what you have to do in life, this is what you have to study.' I admired what he did, so I wanted to be an engineer like him. But you can express social and political different spectrums, and he never said you should be one way or another; always let us choose our own education. I was very thankful for that. So when I had my own children, I raised them the same way. I did not put my values on them; I let them find them among friends and all like that. Now, around fourth grade, they tested our IQ and mine was over 200, but my parents never told me, and I'm so thankful they never told me. I just wanted to be normal, in the middle like other kids. I didn't want to skip grades in school. I became very shy at a certain age, and the shyness is probably why I'm here today. When you're shy, you don't like to deal with other people; you don't like to get into conflicts, arguments, or anything. You just want to be quiet and in your own time. I don't study the things everyone else studies, because then you learn the same things a million people learn. I decided to try to go off and find things nobody else is doing. Back in those days, computers were farther out than rocket scientists. There were no books on how to make a computer or what made them. I found a little journal here and there and learned about ones and zeros and binary, learned about other storage mechanisms. I started playing on paper with a pencil, designing computers and computer-like things in my spare time, largely for science fairs. Not the school project. I had no friends that joined me, no parents, no teachers doing this with me. I would just go in my bedroom and work on it with a pencil and paper, trying to teach myself how to design a computer out of the limited number of the simple chips that existed back then. By 10 years old, I got a ham radio license. Back in those old days, if there was a disaster in the world like a hurricane or tornado, normal communication might get shut down, and the only communication would be ham radio operators sending messages, both by speech and by Morse code teletype keys. I read a book about the heroes of ham radio operators, and I said, 'Oh my gosh, you can't get a driver's license at 10 years old, but you can get a ham radio license.' So I studied a lot of stuff, lots of mathematical formulas, a lot of rules and regulations, and got my ham radio license at 10 years old. I was proud of that. My parents bought me the parts—it must have cost a thousand dollars or more—and instructions on how to hook them together with soldering irons and tools and pliers and winding coils, and I made my own ham radio. So I was a builder. That was very, very important. Not just learning to be an engineer is one thing, but when you're a builder also, you make complete finished solutions. That was so important in my life, much more than I realized it. But nobody else had it. I can't believe, when I look back at how young and small I was, the huge complexity of some science fair projects I built with the parts that did the job. So I was both an old analog engineer. Looking back when I was starting, if I had a piece of advice to myself: rob a bank. I could have had a few other little choices with a little extra money to move things faster. But starting a business today, I look at technology. Whatever you're good at already, it's ‘goity’, and your passion to learn more and be better at it. Whether it might be creating aspects like social webs that aren't owned by anybody, uncontrolled, not controlled by any entity, just all the different people running their software, working out all the details and friendships, working just as well as Facebook. That's probably where I might go, because that helps undo something I spoke about earlier: the companies control you. You buy a car, maybe, it's all set up working nicely, then they have an update, everything moves, your hands don't know where to go—even on a phone, your hands don't know where to go in the update. Why did they change it so much? It was fun. And maybe I want to find a way around that, back to some of the old principles: you buy something, you set it up, nobody changes it on you. Even to this day, I want to own my own things. Every time I hear songs that I want to get—I love to go to concerts, but when I hear a song I love, I will still go online and purchase it for money, and I can share that song with my family or my wife. I don't like to just stream and say, 'Oh, I'm on a streaming service.' No, I have my song I bought because I like it, I know what they are. But open source is just the ability to go back and prove things, take somebody else's knowledge and move on, find a bug in it, fix things. Why keep it hidden trying to keep a hidden advantage? So if you're lucky enough to be in the key position like a big company, then other people can't intrude. I don't know, I just believe in the right to repair, and I've stood up for it publicly many times. Politics are very different than the skills for technology companies; they have success. So in general, I don't know, does it make sense to run a government like a business? But I don't see that happening in the case of people who want it. Yeah, I mean when you run a business, you look around and you look for a consensus and a sharing. If half your employees feel one way and half the other way, you negotiate, you compromise, you take one bit at a time, maybe we can manufacture differently or get a different market somewhere else. But you don't just say everything's out and start fresh. So I don't like what's going on in that regard, and all the big tech companies are just so big, it's like they own our lives. Back when I came up with, when we started Apple, we had a computer; you bought a computer, you ran some software on it, and you set it up and ran your company or whatever with all this stuff, and it always worked fine. Year after year, whatever setup you made would work. Eventually the internet came, then after the internet they came social, but then came high bandwidth, and nowadays you have to subscribe, subscribe, subscribe to everything. And then once you've subscribed, you don't own it; you're depending on somebody on the cloud. Cloud is a problem. It's not like the old days where you got something, you owned it yourself, you protected it yourself, you kept it working yourself. Nowadays you have to trust it on every upgrade. I almost think, 'Oh my God,' sometimes so often they're downward; it seems something that used to be easy is now hard, of course. So I just did the Breakout for Atari. I love these games. I was the designer, with no sleep for four days and nights. No sleep. I thought, wouldn't it be great someday... and I started calling around with the old analog method of color with $5,000 worth of parts and long design with all feedback loops and differential calculus. And for some reason my head said, 'Wait, what if I took a digital number, ones and zeros from my computer memory, and put it on the wire into the TV?' And I realized every TV would think it was color. And I don't mind violating the rules, going outside the box. There were no rules in all the mathematics of color TV that said it should have worked. That's the reason that the color Apple logo was six colors. But that was so—I was following this step and getting closer and closer to the computers. The Atari came along. Today we have the internet. I know I can go back to the Apple II computer. The Apple II computer was really a big start for Apple. It was so far ahead of anything else because it was the first time ever arcade games were software-based. That means that a nine-year-old kid in a language like BASIC could make blue and green dots move on screen and create a game in one night. Before that, it was 100 chips with a thousand wires, an engineer working for maybe a man-year to get together on a new game. This was a huge change in gaming as well as computing. And that one computer was so advanced it helped us get raised. We had an investor who believed in us, like Mark Markkula, who donated the money and he was the adult. Steve and I were in our young 20s, we had no money in the bank, we had no business. Mark told the school you have to hire what positions and what the responsibilities were to have. So anyway, he invested in this. I turned it down at first because I had told everyone in my life I would be an engineer, and you look at life, I never would move up the work chart. Because when I was younger during my hippie days, I decided not going to be political, never going to vote. And when you move up at work, it gets kind of political. Not going to ask other people to do things my way; I want great engineering hardware and software and show it all. And that was the reason I built this computer. I finally accepted the money to start Apple because I realized to start Apple, I didn't have to run the company. I could just be an engineer. That's what I am. AI safety. Well, everybody knows to say I have certain problems. So you should at least be aware of it. Everybody says, 'Hey, it should be regulated,' but they just throw it out as a word because they're making an AI. I've said for years now, how exactly should it be regulated? You should know if you're reading something that came directly from AI, not from a human that interpreted and put in their own words from AI. You should be told which AI, how was it trained, what sources on the internet was it trained on, and you should have citations like scientific articles. Scientific journals always have citations, so you can look at a part of their article and click a number and find out, 'Oh, here's the research or here's the article that they took that from.' As they build their case, those are citations. And that means on AI, I'd really like if I got something from AI, let me click on one phrase or one sentence and see where on the internet or wherever some other source it came from. That would help me judge a little better whether it's accurate or not. It said the right thing? If you read something, we humans have more of an emotional feeling. If we're expressing an idea, we know that it feels good or bad, we know how other humans can take it. One of the things about that is you get an AI report, it can be very complete and well written and in proper grammar, but it's not necessarily the same thing that different people would say. Three people, a lot of people, there's a lot of subjectivity. People are different, and trying to go down saying there's only one answer, only one type of code—I don't like that. I like more of sharing, everybody putting their own ideas into things. So that's a problem to be aware of. Now, one of the things is if you just pass AI results on as your own, you lose the ability to think for yourself and to decide things yourself, and it just becomes an easy crutch. Just like, look, I used to be able to have numbers in my head, and now I have to go, 'Okay, what is 5 plus 7?' So you know, you get used to it. Get used to it. AI is going to be very helpful. 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing some good work. AI can give me a lot of ideas to think in certain directions or where I might want to go.' But I, the human, have to receive it, interpret it, and then be able to put it into my own substance. For example, the world moves forward, especially the world of technology moves forward with creativity, with innovation—new things that didn't exist before. AI is a real good reporter of things that are already in existence being said. Maybe someday AI will be able to think for itself and be innovative; maybe someday it might even have a little emotional feeling. You know, maybe a person rescues an animal, and I cry when I read stories like that. And I don't think AI cries. So understand, I believe in AI, I just don't believe in it so much. All my life I was paying attention to the abilities of the brain that were much more capable than the speed of a computer. All my life. When I went back to college—I worked at, I started Apple with three years of college—and when I went back to college I had to use a fake name because my name is well known. So my Berkeley diploma says 'Roy Raccoon Cloak'; that's who I was. But I was a psychology major as much as anything, and I was studying the brain. I found out we don't know how the brain's wired like we do electronic circuits, and we don't even know that our memories are stored in the brain. We have good reason to suspect, but we can never find them. The strongest correlation I found 40 years ago: you lose two things between the ages of 6 and 10 years old—you lose your childhood autobiographical memories, things that happen, and you lose your teeth in those years. And everybody knows memories are teeth. So I was just pointing out that the books of memory are not even to this day complete about memory. All this AI, we want to duplicate a brain, we want to take a brain and figure out a way—a trillion instances in software that equals a real human brain, not just what we call it. I once said a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain takes nine months. What is the competition like? Well, in place that marketing, it's great for engineering. You better have the engineering from the start, and don't just hold out and say, 'We'll hire the engineers.' The engineers are the smart ones. The idea people include the engineers from the start. You've got to have those three categories: marketing, engineering... they could be in one person, it could be in two people, it could be in three people, whatever it takes. And then respect the other disciplines. Let's say you're an engineer, right? You create some program on your own, some software. Don't think you are the whole key to what happens; respect the marketing, respect the engineer, respect the legal, respect the accountants, respect operations, respect all the other categories. They're all part of a huge company. I felt that very much at Apple. And when Apple had this huge success that I never saw, I just wanted other engineers to respect my mind and my thinking. When Apple was successful, three of us had infinite money, and I didn't feel good about it because I never went after that.
