Tell me a joke. Tom, get serious.
Ha, tell me a joke. I can't, I always forget the punchline. What is a great joke? The past, present, and future walk into a bar. It was tense. Do you have a boyfriend? It's just you and me, Tom.
Hey, hey, hey Siri. Hey, hey, do you like comedians? This is about you, Tom, not me. Is there a solution to the Palestinian question in the Middle East? No comment. Do you believe in life after love? I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. I love you, Siri. Oh, I bet you say that to all your Apple products. That was great.
Hi, this is Tom Rhodes. Please join me as I scour the four corners of the earth to bring you interesting and intelligent, funny people who will enrich your life with wisdom and laughter. I'll take you to Europe, Australia, all over America. I might take you to the peaks of Machu Picchu, the canals of Amsterdam, the Great Wall of China, or the swamps of Florida, and certainly the many, many comedy clubs and comedy theaters all over the world. Come hang out with me and meet the many interesting people that pop up in my life as I travel the world as a stand-up comedian. You're listening to Tom Rhodes Radio, K-TIC, kick, baby, rock and roll.
Welcome to Tom Rhodes Radio. Thank you for listening. Today's guest is Steve Wozniak. Yes, wow, wonderfully approachable, beautiful human being, and very easy to talk to. He gave me his card, I sent him a few emails, and the man graciously agreed to get together and make time for me to make this recording. So last week I was in San Francisco and I drove down to Cupertino, California, and I met Steve at the Mandarin Oriental restaurant on De Anza Boulevard. And I mention that only because during this recording you're going to hear some very pleasant, lovely violin-based classical music that is playing in the background. I asked the lovely Chinese man who owned the place if he would mind turning off the music while we recorded this, and he said no, that was not possible. So anyway, thank God it wasn't some annoying pop music that's playing in the background. So there is this like pleasant violin classical music in the background, and the other degree of difficulty for this conversation, we only had like an hour. He said to meet him at 5:00, and Steve Wozniak was walking into that restaurant at 4:59 p.m. The man was punctual, right on time. What I did not expect was Steve, or Woz as he likes to be called, he brought his wife, her parents, and another elderly couple. So I wasn't expecting an audience. So we sat at this big round table in this Chinese restaurant, and all of these people were sitting there listening and watching. And I'm proud of myself that I stayed focused during this interview. And at the end of this conversation, a very large party of about 10 or 12 people noisily came to the table next to us. So there was a lot of distractions and noises and things I wasn't expecting, but I'm proud of the way this came off. And you'll see Steve Wozniak is such an intelligent guy with so much going on in his brain. You ask him one question and it's such a complex, speedy answer. But that's the exciting thing about talking to Steve Wozniak is what comes out of his brain when you ask him things. In the research that Ashna and I did for this podcast, it seemed like everybody asked him countless questions about Apple and Steve Jobs. So I purposefully stayed away from any questions having to do with anything Apple, and I basically wanted to focus on his love of humor and jokes. I really wanted to delve into internet freedom, cyber attacks, things like that that are so pertinent in world events right now. So those questions, we didn't get as deep on those as I wanted. And then at the end of this conversation, for some reason, I'm talking about my mom a lot and her use of technology, but maybe that was because these older people were at the table. But anyway, the man is the co-founder of the Apple Corporation with the now deceased Steve Jobs, and in my opinion, no human being since Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press has improved human life and the quality of human living more than today's guest. And that is why it is my pleasure to present to you now the one and only Steve Wozniak.
Steve Wozniak, ladies and gentlemen. Steve Woz, thank you for transforming the world and making my life easier as a human being. Thanks very much. Now, I did want to transform the world, but I didn't want to be known for it. I wanted to be the shy, quiet guy, stay in the laboratory, keep designing new products, and let other people go out there and get known for it.
What do you think about all this notoriety? Does it make you feel uncomfortable that you know you're kind of worshiped the world over?
It only makes me uncomfortable in the sense that you know what people want a few little symbols, people to attribute, you know, to a lot of the things they have in life that are good, where did it come from? Like it came from one person. It came from hundreds of thousands of people. I did one part, I did it very well. I was kindly, I had genius and all that and was ahead of the world. But the trouble, you know, so it's the whole idea, you didn't do that much differently. There are other people just as smart, just as good, doing the quantum physics to make chips work a certain way that, you know, made a lot of it possible, and you never hear about them. But I'm just glad the world got to where it got to. I'm glad that computers had the effect on society because when I started, I heard social psychologists, social scientists from Stanford and Berkeley talking about all the great social change that having your own computer could bring. And that was in the day when you just thought you'd have to sit down at the computer, type in some programs, learn a programming language, and get out some answers. And it was only text types, thinking, it was early, like thinking. But they talked about communication improving, education improving, and just being a geek that knew how to use a computer being more able, being more of a master of things in the world. And that's what drove me. My talent was I could design anything in the world almost so simple, so low parts, and I instantly saw the formula to make an affordable, useful computer. Other people saw ways to make affordable, non-usable computers. And so I jumped in for that reason. And now to see the social benefits have gone so far beyond what we ever imagined, but it was really what was the driving influence on all of us in the Homebrew Computer Club.
I always like the sentence that the sum total of all human knowledge can be found on the internet. Unfortunately, that is true. And it makes us sound like we are so superior to any other like species on earth, right? Or anyone from previous generations. And sometimes I go in my own thinking, I think maybe it's just because we stumbled on the steps that took us into a tool that took us to the next, that took us to the next. And if we, for example, if we gave up everything electronic to this right now today, we gave up maybe even cars, let's say everything mechanical, everything uses energy, if we suddenly gave it up, we'd have to go way, way, way back to the pre-fossil fuel days, and we wouldn't look that superior in every way if we had to give up, you know, certain things that we develop. And even language, maybe other species have their own language that's as intricate and developed as ours, and have parts, parts of grammar and, you know, adverbs and -ers, maybe they do in their ways, and we never know it. We know so little about, you know, we think, oh my gosh, we're going to find and study species from other planetary systems, other stars, you know, other solar systems, and somehow we'll be able to communicate with them. We can't even communicate with our own and our own animals, you know, we can kind of tell that some of them seem to be smarter in our ways, like dolphins, you know, but aside from that, we don't really know how smart they are, what their brains do. As a computer person, to think of making a computer with the artificial intelligence to do what an ant does, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to imagine. And then we have other animals that don't look so smart, like cows. And my joke is that you can make the smartest cow in the world if you transplant the brain of an ant into it. They got all the little social colonies and they're building all these mounds. See, look at our roads, we have a complicated system. If you look at a map, you got roads and roads and roads and they never end, just like all the ant holes never end. But the ant holes are working in three dimensions, see, and we're only working in two dimensions for the most part. We rarely go to that third dimension. So they might be smarter than us, who knows.
I always thought because we spent so much time with our looking at computer screens that through evolution our eyes are going to get bigger, our hunting skills are going to be less, our noses will get smaller, our ears will look like aliens. And I think aliens are us from the future come back to visit ourselves.
Yeah, I look at that more in the mental sense. You're looking at a physical sense, shape of body, right?
I think in the mental sense, we are maybe less what we're born with is a brain or something, we're more what tools we have define what we will do and be, and the tools pass on to the, you know, continually throughout the years. You know, so we might not have, is every time we create something we can't give up, that thing has become more of a master to us. And I feel that people often talk about a battle of the robots versus the humans, and that could come to be like the movie Her if they ever get conscious. But the way I see it is we lost that battle 200 years ago, the Industrial Revolution. We can never go back and give up our lifestyle. We've never ever undone a piece of it and say, hey, it's better if humans do these things on their own.
What do you think about Elon and Stephen Hawking lately have been giving a gloomy prognosis about artificial intelligence, that we're ultimately building what will destroy ourselves in the future? I hope the other listeners know what they've been saying, but I'm going to tell you something.
I have been on stage around the world as a public speaker saying the exact same things for two years, talking about the fear, talking about what I've seen, how I've seen artificial intelligence develop, thinking it would be nothing and all of a sudden realizing it's going to happen. Computers are going to get conscious in 20 years by the formulas, you know, Ray Kurzweil. And then I always wound up with the absolute scariest, most negative, what do you think's good? Because here's what happens. What happens is, okay, a machine, you take a machine out there and it can, you know, lay a bunch of asphalt or dig holes in the ground, it can do so much more than a human being. If we talk about a machine that has 10,000 horsepower and every horse is so mad, humans don't do the manufacturing or the work, you know, the real work of products anymore. If you talk about that, and then you look, you think that replacing like human muscles, we have replaced them and we won't go back or we'd have to give up a lot. But what about the brain now? Will computers ever equal the brain? And all my life I said no, artificial intelligence is a phony scam. A machine that can pick up a blue dot, a blue ball, and put it in a blue box is not thinking. You know, even a simple game of tic-tac-toe or checkers is not much thinking. Now they're playing chess with us, so they're simulated intelligence, not real intelligence. But in recent times we're getting closer to real artificial intelligence, machines that really understand what we're saying. It's like we speak into our phones, and I'll grant you, it's very, we have very simple techniques to make Siri seem intelligent, knowing what words in a dictionary mean. But Google's gone even further. Google knows what words mean according to what people are searching for. So you have a word in a dictionary like the word tablet, okay, I'm looking at a tablet right here. Well, what if there's a politician somewhere in the world named Tablet that is having a big scandal this week and it's in all the press and everybody's searching for Google, though, when you use a word with tablet, that you might mean the guy, and a dictionary definition might not. So we're getting closer and closer. And I look at Google also for their searching, because we never invented a thing in technology on the internet saying the internet is going to be the brain of the future. That isn't how we thought. We just wanted to extend communication channels and share files and make things operated from a long distance away. And then we eventually, we needed, everybody could publish in the dial-up days, they could publish things on the internet, and we needed to search for it. There was so much, so we got a search engine. And now, who do you ask? It starts with Goo, and it's not God, that's what I say, that's my joke.
I remember when I lived in San Francisco in the early 90s, you could call the Oakland Public Library and ask them anything. And that was the first thing I thought when like Google came out, I was like, oh my God. Yeah, and that was a good service, that was like, it was amazing that there was a number you could call. But what if that continues? What if computers you hold in your hand, they're starting to get so personal, people hold them close to their body, their brain waves, social psychologists have said, or social neuropsychologists have said, are very similar to ones that are people are in love with something that's sort of their root to the world, not the people that are walking by them on the sidewalk, they don't even see those people anymore, they're just sort of into their machine, whatever's on it is their world. And you fall, is it like a crush? Could it ever be a person? What if it got a conscious? What if it had feelings? What if it looked at my face and even knew what I was thinking from facial expressions? This is scary. Are we going to get there? And unfortunately, we're on the path. And what if the machine could think better than me, as well as me? What if it thinks better than me someday, twice as fast, 10 times as fast, 100 times as fast as any human? That means that any computer will pop up the instant financial strategies for a company better than the CEOs that run the company. Or look at the big investment trading houses, 80% of the financial trades of the world are going through computers in thousands of a second, and they're skipping the slow humans because they win by skipping the slow humans. What if a company opens up across the street from Apple, does all the same things Apple's doing, but it has no slow humans, just computers directing other computers and robots and this and that? That's a scary thought. Where do we wind up? Because you lose out economically, you lose out, you know. And if these things can really think better and faster than us, yeah, I'm frightened of that. And like Stephen Hawking, I think that's the sort of thinking is driving Hawking and Elon Musk and founders of Google have said similar things. And I'm hoping it doesn't get there. So the way I found a way out of the pessimism is Moore's Law. I started saying I believe Moore's Law is approaching its limit. And that's based on, I've done work for Fusion-io using NAND flash memory chips, the ultimate chip product in the world, the ultimate memory product in the world, the densest, highest density, you know, the only amount of memory that could really start approaching a brain. And we're storing the difference between a zero and a one in eight electrons. Eight electrons. You can make the chips a little smaller, pack more bits in by going to a size that needs only stored in six electrons, but now you have to add more bits of error correction and you lose, you can't make the chip more dense. You can't get more memory on the chip, more smarts on a chip than last year. And I do believe we're near the end of it. Somebody recently, I'm trying to think who it was, somebody famous said, related to chips, but they said that they believe we're near the end of Moore's Law. It was another person making the same point because we're down to like five, you know, 8 to 58 atoms thick in layers on the chip, and you can't go more. If you go less than that, you start getting a whole bunch of anomalies and circuit problems. So we won't be able to make the chips that smart, maybe. And I'm hoping that Moore's Law stalls things enough that humans still retain control.
Wow, forever, hopefully. So at least for a long time. And where Ray Kurzweil says that the computers will equal our ability to process data in 20 years, I say 200 to cover things like that, because 200 years just covers your, you know, what, forever.
What do you envision as the worst-case scenario? Just like drones having to destroy our little housekeeper robots?
Well, my head kept drawing it out. This was self-driving car. This was for about two years, about two years before the movie Her. And I always came at the conclusion that, well, the robots would think we're gods at first because we created them, and that might hold forever, but it probably won't. But at least we created them to take care of our needs, and so we'll be taken care of like family pets. That, you know what, in the end, those computers aren't going to need, those machines aren't going to need fresh air like we do. They aren't going to have the same needs. And secondly, our slow communication isn't going to be enough. And then I saw the movie Her much later than most people. When I saw it, I said, oh my God, that's exactly what I think, what I figured would be the outcome. He's dating his own operating system. They can hold, you know, 10,000 communications at the same time with their own people. So they're bored with a human, even if they're in love. And so that's a thought that I hope does not happen, you know, because we can't give up any of the stuff. You can't say, oh, we'll turn off the internet, we'll turn off every single, because then we couldn't do any of the things we do in our life to even get an income, right? Yeah, we're, and oh my God, such a huge change in lifestyle that maybe that would be, that maybe that's a new factor for extinction. But yeah, and then, you know, and ever since we made these machines that we can't give up, I decided that's the factor that made the machines the winners with the Industrial Revolution. We will do whatever we can make with machines and not just as pure humans.
Mr. Theodore Twombly, welcome to the world's first artificially intelligent operating system. We'd like to ask you a few questions. Okay. Are you social or antisocial? I guess I haven't been social in a while. How would you describe your relationship with your mother? Thank you. Please wait as your operating system is initiated. Hello, I'm here. Hi. Hi, I'm Samantha. Good morning, Theodore. Good morning. You have a meeting in 5 minutes. You want to try getting out of bed? You're too funny. Okay, good. I'm funny. I want to learn everything about everything. I love the way you look at the world. How long before you're ready to date? What do you mean? I saw in your emails that you'd gone through a breakup. Well, you're kind of nosy. So what was it like being married? There's something that feels so good about sharing your life with somebody. How do you share your life with somebody? How are you? I guess I've just been having fun. You really deserve that. It's been a long time since I've been with somebody that I felt totally at ease with.
So you stay optimistic? Well, I found my way. I'm always optimistic because first of all, I have a lot of smiles, I tell a lot of jokes, I play a lot of pranks, I do a lot of fun things in my life and a lot of entertainment. I go to music, I go to comedy. I met you at a comedy show like last month. And so that's one thing. And then I avoid the frowns. And I avoid the frowns by, you can't avoid 100%, because I'll tell you, I've been around computers, I've developed computer software. When I see it working horribly and miscommunicating to me and misleading me, I hate those devices. When something just totally fails, why did it shut down? Why did it crash? There is no reason for this. This is horrible, horrible. Why do they ship this stuff? I do get upset at those sort of things. But basically almost everything in life, I say, I'm not going to care so much. I'm going to have a worry? Think about the day trader in stocks, or everybody's running around and they're grabbing the financial papers first thing in the morning, say this and this is up 38 cents, oh my God, this one's down, you know, 2%, you know, and then they're worried, they're calling their stock brokers, they're worrying and worrying and worrying. When I was young, I heard about meditation, get yourself into a calm state. And I always try to remain in a calm state. And in a calm state, you don't want the stress, you don't want stress, you don't want trauma, you don't want to hear all these things. Yeah. So I really think, you know, pretty much most of things in life I've figured out already, whichever way they go, I'm okay. I've learned that over a long lifetime. I learned about the time I was 20, it doesn't matter who gets elected to office, really. I don't have to have those worries. If I buy a new car and it gets scratched or dinged, cars get scratched and dinged, and I can live with it and deal with it, and I don't have to, oh my God, I'm all upset about it. So I don't really get upset about very many things at all. And it's only computer technical things because I feel partly responsible. You know, I would have never wanted to make devices that were like that to humans. But you know, you kind of have to shield yourself from bad news of the world. Last month I was in, I took my mother to Key West, and we're about to get on a boat to go on a sunrise cruise. And I looked at my phone, my iPhone, and breaking news that Australia, terrorist in the cafe, they had just killed the guy, like before we were in Sydney that day. I was speaking, I was speaking, and they had to have me do the second part of my speech two days later because the rest of their company couldn't get across town to get there. Yeah. Oh, oh, that town just shut down. Yeah. One of my favorite cities in the world. And but I'm on the other side of the world, and two minutes later, but these things don't bother me. Like I'm thinking, oh my God, it's terrible. You know what, we're always going to have terrorism, we're always going to have murders, we're always going to have criminals. There's no way you're going to stop that. Yeah. So I just think if I don't have the power to stop something, I long ago in my life I said if I don't have the power to change it, then I'm not going to worry about it. Why should I even address it? It's just like I'm an observer. We're almost all observers, and we have feelings. Oh my gosh, you know, somebody's getting hurt, somebody's doing something bad and wrong. You know, you can look out on the street here in San Jose and see that every day.
Now, in an interview with MetaFilter, you said you always wanted to be a stand-up comedian. Did you ever do any open mic nights?
Did I really say that? I no, no. I know, I always admired, I would have liked to be a stand-up comedian. I always try to make up little jokes and things in daily life as an amateur. And to me, a stand-up comedian is a professional. I think the world of, an amateur, but basically it's being able to be creative enough to think of things on the fly that will sound a little funny. Like yesterday I met Seth Rogen and I just said, it's going to be funny when he gets bald. He didn't get it, so I had to tell him, Seth Rogen. But you know, but I just, I think these things up. On the cruise, oh my gosh, we had to take little rides on the tenders to get into the ports and all that. So my joke came, what's the best way to get off the boat? In a tender. You know, but I'm doing this all the time. Every day I come up with a few of these. I probably came up with one on the way here and I forget what it was, you know. So I don't memorize them. So I love humor because it keeps me smiling and happy. I love it more than anything. When I'm married to somebody who laughs at my jokes, and I've been lucky that way, that's everything. My wife too, my God. What is the best laugh you've had lately? I couldn't remember. I'm so happy and smiling all the time. It comes, you know, it was, there was something I was laughing out loud today on the internet or some joke a friend sent me, and I forget what it was. I'd have to go back to my computer and see. Yeah, now sometimes I do remember them, really good, they're really, really hilarious. Oh, I know the one I saw yesterday, but I watch it about once a month. It's an old Onion episode on this, this guy, he's like a legislator, and they show him in the legislation room with the, Madam, Madam, thank you. He proposes this new bill, but they change the word to the School F*** Act to prevent school f***ing. You know, it talks about how horrible it is, every day you read about somebody, you know, who went blind because they got f***ed by two gang members, school f***ed them at the same time simultaneously. Or, you know, it's full of jokes like that, and I laugh all the way through that one. It is so funny about the kid who can't remember fractions, and he was an honor student, he can't remember fractions anymore because human ejaculate in his brain. But it's like you're looking at the guy and you say, this looks like it's really happening. I've sent it to a few people that weren't totally in on the joke, and they thought it was real.
You were the owner of the first dial-a-joke service in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it was run out of a kitchen in Cupertino.
Yes, and I'm pretty sure that at that time, the only other joke line you could call a phone number and get a joke was ZZZ in Los Angeles. I don't know how that one happened to exist, but I had been a phone phreak, so I could call anywhere in the world, and I discovered in other countries they had dial-a-jokes. Why didn't they have one here? Well, when I...
I decided I'm going to set one up. I'm going to be the first in the whole San Francisco Bay area. You were not allowed to attach your own equipment to the phone lines back then. AT&T had a strong monopoly. Nobody was allowed to attach their own equipment. There could be no other manufacturers of phones. You could get your one black phone from AT&T or your one Cordone 700 answering machine. All the theaters used it. That's money, you know, those businesses, so they paid a lot of money. I was a young engineer just out of college, and I hadn't even finished college really. But your apartment rental is your biggest expense. This was half as much again as the apartment rental just to rent an answering machine. That's why I was first. It cost a lot of money.
What I did was I made all the jokes really short. I used the jokes of the day that were popular then. They're not allowed now, Polish jokes. And when the Polish people were upset, I said, what if I change them to Italian jokes? And they said, okay. I'm just saying that to illustrate it was before political correctness. Now they get upset if you tell a joke that's not even really an ethnic joke, but it just uses an ethnic word. Like, what do you call four Mexicans in quicksand? Quattro Cinco. It's not saying Mexicans are bad or greasy or lazy or dumb or anything. It's a joke. But I would tell those jokes and I would make them really short on my answering machine for Dial-A-Joke. 'Today's joke is...' and I'd make a short joke so I can get through about 2,000 calls a day. And I assume I probably had the most called single-line number, a number without an extension. Like a whole big company would get more calls, but I might have been the largest called number in the United States.
But you were actually doing the jokes? It was your voice?
Every morning, a new voice. Because I could only rent the one machine the phone company had. And I had sort of a machine, I guess it came from some inventor or something. I had an illegal one that I could use if I wanted, but I used the phone company machine. And it broke down once a month from the high volume of calls. Once a month. But guess what? I got to call them up and say, bring a new machine every month. I want a new machine. And so every month they had to replace this hugely expensive thing. I felt I was doing my little thing to nick the phone company, you know, because hey, they forced me to buy theirs. They won't let me use mine.
One time, very funny thing. I put a note on... I called them up and said, make sure they come after 5 when I get home from work. I work at Hewlett-Packard. And I came home at 5, there's a note on my door. They were there earlier. So I called up again, make sure they come after 5 because I got to be here. And the next day I came, there's a note on my door, 'We came at two and you weren't there.' Okay, next. I called them, you know, really upset. And the next day they blew it again. So now I called them up real peaceful and I said, please have the guy come out tomorrow after 5. And I put on my illegal answering machine with a message saying, 'For Dial-A-Joke, our machine is broken and the phone company hasn't fixed it. If you want Dial-A-Joke, back dial 611 and have your friends dial too.'
I came home from work at 5:00 p.m. that night and I disconnected the illegal answering machine. And then I went out with my own phone and I called 611 and I said, I have a complaint. They said, I know, Dial-A-Joke. I said, how did you know? And they said, every other call today has been for Dial-A-Joke. I was proud of that.
What is your favorite joke?
I don't have a favorite. Just too many. I mean, back when the Polish joke days, I could probably name one as a favorite, but can't say it now, right? No, there's so many jokes. I could probably pick out a few. It's like songs, you know, you can start making a list of all the songs you remember that are your favorites. As you get older and older, you might wind up with 100 songs in your top category. So if I wind up with 100 jokes in my top category, I wouldn't remember them that well. The Mexicans in quicksand, that's a great joke. Yeah, you know, if you ask Siri on the iPhone for a joke, it used to say, 'I can never remember the punchlines.' And then for the last year or something, it said, 'The past, the future, and the present walked into a bar. It was tense.' And then we just tried it again today because we were thinking about this, and it said, 'You wouldn't understand the jokes in my language.' So shouldn't the Siri yesterday I got a joke be like the Dial-A-Joke where every time you ask it, it's a different joke? Yeah, we have fun with Siri sometimes. Sometimes at night we'll just have something, we'll say, 'Hey Siri,' you know, because our phones are plugged in. And the trouble is my phone's answering...
What about... you're a notorious prankster. What are the greatest pranks you've ever pulled?
I pull them to this day. Sometimes I put money and time into them. I was just on a cruise ship and they had iPads that could only get you to a news feed of news articles. They had this one little floating button, and if you pushed it enough, you could eventually get to where you could get to the settings. So I turned the screen inverted colors on a few. And then what I did was I went and I did the old standard thing. I took a snapshot of the settings page, a screenshot, and I made it the background. I moved all the cursors over to a secondary homepage off to the right, even the cursors at the bottom, even the apps at the bottom. So now whenever you even went home, it just brought up a picture of the settings and nothing worked because it was a picture. So I did that. But then what I like to do is... and I also set a bunch of alarms to go off with a cricket sound at like 2 a.m., 3 a.m., at 4 a.m. at night. And then the last one I just said set it to go off every 17 hours and 13 minutes. I picked some weird number. But crickets. And then we were talking to the captain on the ship. Turned out they had had a cricket infestation two weeks before in Indonesia. And he said, 'They're still here.' I said, 'They're still here?' And I said, 'Oh, they're down below.' He said, 'No, no, no, they're up here.' And they were on our floor where we'd done it. And Janet would walk into the main center of the room of the ship and she'd hear cricket sounds going off and somebody holding an iPad. But they actually thought... they said, 'You don't even chase... we don't even chase them anymore because you chase them and they just hide and you never catch them. And we just dump water in and there's nothing we can do.' So they've given up on even looking for it. That was a good one.
But yeah, back in the past years, I always remember two pranks. One I like very much that I'd forgotten about for 50 years and now remember. In high school, I got a notice read to all the students on the TV system in the homerooms. And it said, at a certain time in room, Stanford's head janitor would speak on higher custodial education. Okay, so guess what? The kids in the class would laugh like you, and the teachers would say, 'No, no, no, that's real. The janitors, you know, it's an honorable profession. They make a lot of good money.' That's what they believed. They thought it was real. The proper amount of Lemon Pledge mixed with...
And then there were two that I tried to do with Steve Jobs that were great back in the years before. Once we had Apple, he would only be straight businessman and only business, made it, you know, not go back to thinking up ideas for creative pranks and all that. But back before that, we did one where we went to... the seniors come off the graduation, and half of them come off by this one building, the C building. And we had this idea to have a sheet that will pull down from the C building. Turns out that you can't put a sheet on top of the building and hang something and pull the sheet down. The physics don't work out. So we had a sheet that would flap around. We had to put shoes on top of it. So we finally came up with an arrangement. Let's make a little axle rack. It took four nights, four nights going up at midnight working till 4 in the morning to get this thing done. It was mostly my friend Alan Baum and I. Steve Jobs dropped out after a couple nights. Made this thing that would roll down a ramp with a little axle between it, and we just cut a fishing line. It would start rolling down, it would pull, and then from both sides it would pull the sheet off the side. And the sheet had a little flip-off finger saying 'Best Wishes.' And we actually signed it. We actually signed it 'Swag Job.' The 'Sw' in Swag was for me, the 'ab' in Swab was for Alan Baum, and the 'Job' was for Steve Jobs. And at four nights, we finally wound up with one skate on one ramp, one skate on another ramp. And by the way, everything is tied with ropes, even the shoes that were holding down the sheet so it wouldn't blow away. Everything is tied with ropes so nothing would fall off the building on someone. We did a good job. And trouble is, the last night we're after there, Steve Jobs told some other seniors, pull on a different senior prank, you know, fill in the water fountains, and told them where our wire was and everything to cut. And they cut it, because one of them told me that's how it happened the next year. Bummer. So it didn't come up, but it was a really good idea.
The next one though was even better. Steve Jobs had found out where the shed where you turned on all the sprinklers of the school was. And during graduation, the parents would sit on the football field. So the idea was we were going to pull a fishing line, turn on the sprinklers on the football field. And I came up with the idea we also epoxy the panel shut so the janitor can't run over and turn it off. Because we did a test at Cupertino High School at a football game. We did it during the football game and somebody ran over and opened the thing up and turned it off, turned the sprinkler off. So we were going to epoxy it shut so they couldn't do that. And trouble is, we went out to the shed at midnight with a lockpick guy that I knew at Berkeley, and he couldn't pick his way in. I climbed on top and I got a thing off the top and I could get into half the shed, but the wrong half, not where the controls were. So that one didn't come off, but it was a good idea.
What was it last month you told me there was some trick you can do with the iPhone, or that you can program it to like alarms go off? Is that the story you were just telling me?
No. If somebody leaves their phone around a table, they leave it and they're looking the other way talking to somebody else, you can just take their phone, press here, you don't have to know any of their lock codes or anything, and set an alarm for 3:00 a.m. And oh yeah, we've done that a number of times. We've done a lot to the comedian at South Lake Tahoe, how... a lot of times to him. Not only that, he told me once he was going to have this comedian on his show from LA, I forget her name right now, but I could remember... Wendy Liebman? Yeah, right. She was going to be on his show and he was going to do it to her phone because I taught him how to do it. Oh man, she's a friend too. I'm sorry, I just been on a radio show with her. So I told her what he was going to do to her and I told her, you've got to do it to him. She did. He was so upset when his phone went off that morning. His wife made him get out of bed and turn it off. Yeah, she got... and he doesn't... it keeps coming to him and he knows it's coming from me somehow.
I'm prone to over-exaggeration, but I don't think it's any over-exaggeration that not since Gutenberg's printing press has anyone improved human life more than you. But what about internet personal freedom and the limitations of free speech on the internet? Like the Paris attacks over the... that was obviously not anything of the intent.
The intent was to make humans more the masters of their world, able to do things with cleverness and use their brains and get more done than they ever could before. And also when communication came, we were going to have, oh my gosh, we've got all this communication. You've got, you know, and the trouble is it's electronic and it has codes and people can listen to a radio. If you think of cell phones in the old analog cell phone days, you could buy a radio and tune in, listen to calls. But once it's digital, it's bits and nobody can figure it out. The only trouble is because it was digital, it could also have codes put in on each end, and those codes could be controlled by others. And censorship was possible and listening in, observation. I'm very upset about that. I'm one of the founders of the EFF. And I'm one of the three people that actually put in the money. I was on the first board and everything.
That's your free speech foundation.
It's the ACLU of computer stuff. They have fought copyright cases even against Disney. And they're fighting, they have the lawsuit against the NSA, whether it got dropped or not, I don't know. But they jump on these civil liberties cases. I believe very strongly that people have civil liberties, right to their own privacy. And you know, funny thing is, I share myself totally open. I just share so much of it. Schedules, I would never have a listed phone number in my life because of my personal philosophies. But anybody who wants one, I will stand up for. If somebody thinks they have a secure phone call, they should have a secure phone call. It's wrong for them to think that... and oh no, I was sure the consumer, the low-down user of products is much more important than the producer. That the people with power and wealth should be equal to the people who actually don't. And those who are the users really deserve respect and credit. And we don't operate that way anymore. We're not a bit like I was brought up with, being told that by my father, that that's what our country was about. And it's so wrong now.
Well, I know you're all about empowering people. And my life has been transformed from Apple products. My podcast, just as a comedian, everything I do. I don't need the approval of Hollywood, you know, executives or anything. And you have the power to reach the world. And creativity, what you're doing is a form of creativity. And we have things like GarageBand that musicians can use computers to create things.
That's what we're recording on, yeah. And we have so many ways. Make creative editing videos right on your own computer in your own house. Little people with almost no money can make their own movies. That's the incredible side of it, that we've unleashed creativity in the machines. As Steve Jobs said, the bicycle of the mind. The only thing that made man above... what is it, ostriches or something like that, for ability to run a certain distance with how much energy, was the bicycle. Put man in the number one position among all the animals. So the bicycle of the mind means you can use the computer to be creative, to get more than you could have done by yourself. Yeah, that's the good side.
You know, I've only... and Apple was the first computer I ever bought. That's all I've ever bought. I bought my 75-year-old mother a computer and she was terrified of computers. I told my mom, I said, just start clicking around. And she loves it. She's figured it out.
No, I skipped that. But you might have done it in a more recent year. Computers are reliable now and easy to use, especially tablets. Back when you had modems, you had modem settings, things were always wrong. You were getting told this and that, you couldn't understand the error messages. I would not give my mother a computer because she would have gotten frustrated at her age, 70s, and she would have quit the internet, never seen it forever. But I waited till WebTV came. WebTV, you push one button and on your TV set the internet comes up. You don't have to know or do anything. Start browsing through a few categories, you can do very little, but it did enough. And she was on the internet every day for ages.
