By Adrian Apollo The Fresno Bee March 10, 2007, p. B9 Online version posted: September 30, 2014 PDF version
“Pi Day” is a wonderful new, seriously light-hearted holiday, which is celebrated every year in many Fresno-area math classrooms.
The Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco is the intellectual epicenter of this new, socio-academic phenomenon, which occurs annually on March 14, simply because of the similarity of that date (3/14) and the value of pi, which begins with the digits 3.14.
Larry Shaw, a long-time staff member of the Exploratorium, created Pi Day in 1988 as a way to make the mathematical concept “pi” into a more tangible experience for the museum’s young visitors.
Every year the sensory-motor adventure begins at exactly 1:59 p.m. (symbolizing the fourth, fifth, and sixth digits of pi) with Shaw leading a procession of museum visitors to the Pi Shrine, a round brass plaque fixed to the floor on the upper level of the museum. Participants are led to circumambulate the shrine pi number of times, whereupon “Happy Birthday” is sung in honor of Albert Einstein, whose birthday coincidentally falls on March 14.
During last year’s Pi Day celebration, a third-grade student from Fresno’s Fancher Creek Elementary School was selected out of the crowd, along with her classmate and friend, to try her hand at spinning and throwing pizza dough into the air.
The third-grader didn’t yet understand that pi is a special ratio that gives us the number of times a circle’s diameter goes around its circumference. But in the meantime, perhaps she has already had an “aha” experience and realized the significance of the circular-shaped apple, cherry and pizza pies that were given out at the festivities.
It was a wild scene, with one adult visitor nearly having his eyeglasses knocked off his face by flying pizza dough, but the two students were exultant during their moment in the pi vortex of fun.
Huge cable
The Golden Gate Bridge is a wonderful place to contemplate the beauty of pi. After the festivities at the museum, I hopped on my bike and made a Pi Day pilgrimage to its center.
Upon arriving, I reached and pushed up against the huge suspension cable that swoops down over the walkway on the east side. I thought about how movement in the cable causes the towers to sway in response, and how calculating such fluctuations involves pi.
The beautiful panorama that surrounded me brought to mind instances of pi in so many places — in the lengths of the hilly roads of the city, in the pulleys that opened and closed the cell doors on Alcatraz, in the wheels and engines of the hundreds of cars whizzing by behind me.
I saw the shadow of the Bridge’s cables 200 feet below me on the water and thought about how I might use pi in predicting the location of those shadows, given the position of the Bridge relative to the Sun.
What better place west of the Mississippi River could there be for contemplating life, art, romance, and how the number pi seems to weave a mysterious and benevolent thread through the warp and woof of our hearts and souls?
Later, on my way home, driving through Los Banos, a luminous peach-colored moon peeked out from behind some dark-blue clouds. It looked strangely near, as if it were hanging low over the town just down the way. With memories of the Sun, the Bridge and its shadow still in mind from the afternoon, I couldn’t help but think about the integrated nature of the universe and how all things are related.
I thought about Leonhard Euler, who, back in the 1700s, discovered the deeply rich nature of the tapestry of some of mathematics’ most abstract methods — ideas profound enough to cause tears to well up in the eyes of a math major with a romantic view of the world. The Babylonians might have first discovered pi, but it was Euler who truly found pi’s place in mathematics’ overall scheme.
Then I laughed at myself for having memorized 46 digits of pi when I was 14 years old, “just in case” I got stranded somewhere in the universe and needed to be able to find my way home. And yes, I still remember those digits.
For some of us, celebrating the joy of pi brings back the wispy and fond memories of first making its acquaintance, a fondness that can only be conveyed in the sparkle of a gleam in the eye.
Q: Were there any other famous mathematicians or scientists born on March 14th, other than Einstein?
Answer: Yes. The Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński was born on March 14, 1882, which happened to be a year of major importance for research on the mathematical constant pi and also for the field of geometry. In that year, the mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that pi is a “transcendental” number. (Hat tip to Simon Plouffe.)
Q: Would it make more sense to celebrate a “Tau Day” on June 28th, instead of Pi Day on March 14th?
Answer: No, not really. The fact that people in some countries express the 14th day of the third month of the year as “3/14” (instead of “14/3”) is an issue of convention (not to mention the fact that our base-10 numbering system is also based on convention, as well as the division of the calendar into 12 months, etc.). The premise behind the attempt to create “tau” as a mathematical constant to replace pi is that “tau” is supposedly more sensible to use without regard to convention (more natural, more practical, etc.), but then to turn around and say that because of those arguments that it somehow makes more sense to celebrate June 28th instead of March 14th is to fall into the trap of undercutting one’s own argument, because the month/day order in the expression “6/28” is itself an issue of convention (not to mention the fact that there is nothing natural about associating a mathematical constant with a date on the calendar).
Q: Would it be more natural and more practical to use “tau” instead of pi?
Answer: The question presupposes a false choice. It’s not really an either-or question, because each “way” is natural in some respects, but not in other respects. Pi is more natural if you’re talking about a circle that has already been created (or disk, technically) and you are comparing its diameter with its circumference. Tau would be more natural if you’re talking about a circle that you’re in the process of creating (by using a radius and swinging one end of the radius all the way around while keeping the other end stationary) and you then compare the length of the radius with that circle’s circumference. The diameter goes around the circle pi times (3.14… times), while the radius goes around the circle “tau” times, or 2pi number of times (6.28… times). If you’re dealing with a circular object that already exists, then it would take an extra step to find the length of the radius (you would have to cut the diameter into two equal parts), and so it’s more “natural” or practical to use pi in that situation to measure the circumference. If you are starting with a long, straight object (such as a popsicle stick, a ruler or a meter stick) that you use to trace out a circle (by fastening one end to the ground or table and swinging the other end around), then it would take an extra step to figure out the length of the diameter, but since you already have the radius at hand, it would be more “natural” or practical to use “tau” in that situation to measure the circumference. So since the question presupposes a false choice, it’s not really a valid question.
Answer: Yes, if your definition of “practicality” is expanded to include the (very important) issues of language, culture and communication, then pi is much more “practical” to use than tau, because pi has already been established in the language of mathematics and in the culture of mathematicians. Even if it made more sense to use tau in terms of overall considerations of naturalness (which is something that hasn’t been demonstrated), insisting that tau be used instead of pi would be something akin to claiming that everyone should learn Esperanto. It represents a philosophically naïve approach that doesn’t properly take into account the more fundamental issues. The fact that “2π” appears in many equations is hardly reason enough to claim that tau should be used in the place of that expression, since mathematicians can easily treat “2π” as a single linguistic entity when needed, cognitively. That in itself is a non-issue. So there really is no compelling reason to switch over to using tau instead of pi.
Answer: No, not at all, and this is not even a close call. The fact that we humans see and interact with the world from the perspective of “bilateral symmetry” (due to the human body being structured that way) means that it is more effective, pedagogically, for students to learn the rectangular coordinate system (i.e., the Cartesian coordinate system) before they learn the polar coordinate system. This means that it is easier to deal with arcs instead of full circles, because (small and medium-sized) arcs can be described as functions within the rectangular coordinate system. Additionally, the length of the most basic form of an arc that can be described as a function in the rectangular system is pi units, not tau units (as I pointed out in my Pi Day article, above, when I mentioned the part about looking from “horizon to horizon”). So the claim made by tauists that it would be easier, pedagogically, for students to use tau and fractions of tau to handle radians, instead of using pi and fractions of pi, falls flat. In fact, using fractions of pi works nicely when we think of the unit-semicircle as being more basic than the full circle in the context of the rectangular coordinate system. (An angle of measure π/2 radians is one-half the size of an angle of π radians, an angle of measure π/3 radians is one-third the size of an angle of π radians, an angle of measure π/4 radians is one-fourth the size of an angle of π radians, an angle of measure 3π/2 radians is one-and-a-half times the size of an angle of π radians, etc.)
Answer: If humans had only one eye, one arm, one leg and the musculature of the human body made bodily rotation a more basic maneuver than moving forward and backward and left and right, then in that case the polar coordinate system would be easier for humans to use and it would make more sense pedagogically to teach students to use polar coordinates first before teaching the rectangular coordinate system. For those types of intelligent organisms (if they exist somewhere in the universe, whose bodies are structured with rotational symmetry, which is technically called “radial symmetry” in biology), then perhaps it might make more sense for them to express the number of radians being referred to by using tau (along with fractional multipliers) instead of pi, since it would be easier for them to think of the full circle as being more basic in the context of polar coordinates than the semicircle, and perhaps make more sense for them to be taught the concept of “tau” first, instead of pi.
Q: So you don’t think that it’s better to use τ-radians instead of π-radians?
Answer: There’s no such thing as “τ-radians” or “π-radians”. That’s a misnomer. The number of radians being referred to remains the same regardless of how that number is expressed. One radian is still one radian and two radians is still two radians, regardless of whether or not we choose to divide the unit circle into fractions of π or fractions of τ. A “radian” is a unit of angular measurement. The number of radians being talked about in a situation is something else. To confuse the two different notions would be like confusing the “three” in the expression “three cookies” with “cookies” in that expression.
Q: So are you saying that you don’t believe that tau is a good concept to use at all in the classroom?
Answer: If the kids bring up the topic themselves, I would be reluctant to curb their enthusiasm. In this case it becomes an issue of psychology in terms of fostering motivation among your students. Or if you as a teacher honestly think it’s a good topic for a lesson plan, then I wouldn’t want to throw a wet blanket on your prerogative to teach as you see fit. However, if it’s debate you’re looking for, I think it would be more interesting and better for the kids in the long run to have a forensic competition on the topic of “pi vs. e”, or something similar.
Q: What is the reason for Pi Day’s success? How did it become so popular?
Answer: Its popularity grew organically, because of the fortuitous confluence of social forces that existed in the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco where it was created in 1988. First came the fun idea of associating the date with the number and having a reason for an annual celebration. The camaraderie existing among the staff members helped to “jump start” the new tradition. The context of the science museum being a teaching institution gave the holiday a serious rationale to underlie its light-hearted aspects, which probably accounted for its growth in popularity as the idea spread around to schools when math teachers who happened to visit the Exploratorium on Pi Day learned about it and began celebrating it with their students.
Q: I have a great idea for a new math holiday. How can I get it started?
Answer: Be patient. You need to find a social context where you can attract enthusiastic supporters who will want to return to celebrate it again the next year. Merely spreading the idea around on the Internet is not enough, as the lack of success of the idea of an “E Day” shows (for the natural number e, annually on February 7th in the US or the 2nd of July in other countries). Personally, I love the idea of “E Day,” and hope it eventually catches on, but so far no socially organic situation has presented itself that would cause it to actually be “born.”
Answer: Physicist/astronomer Larry Shaw, a technical curator at the Exploratorium Science museum in San Francisco, came up with the basic framework for Pi Day in 1988 while on a staff retreat at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, after discussing the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with two other staff members (who did contribute some elements to the initial, expanded version of Pi Day, but choose to keep a low profile). A prior conversation that he had with a musician/mathematician friend, Jim Horton, in 1983 provided the initial inspiration. As shown by his contemporaneous notes, the first Pi Day was held as a public event at the Exploratorium at its prior location near Chrissy Field on Monday, March 14, 1988. At the time of the second Pi Day celebration in 1989, Larry’s youngest daughter Sara (now a veterinarian), noticed that Albert Einstein’s birthday fell on Pi Day, and the tradition of singing happy birthday to Einstein on Pi Day was added on. Known widely as the “Prince of Pi” — a kind of an ex-flower-child-turned-cool-intellectual-Santa figure — Shaw follows in the footsteps of other colorful characters and celebrities in San Francisco’s history, and contributes to local lore by leading the Pi Procession and mingling freely with the public during the annual Pi Day festivities.
Answer: It’s true that Morse developed a unique mathematical notation that was difficult for some people to learn. There was a standing joke among his students that they were having to learn “Morse code,” but they understood the intention of his research. His notation was experimental in the sense that its main purpose was to create a system of expression that would help to tease out new explanations (conceptual integrations) and techniques to be used with previously posed problems and perhaps provide the conceptual machinery that could take things to a new level in some instances. He titled his magnum opus: A Theory of Sets. He didn’t call it “The Theory of Sets”. His purpose was not to go around telling people that they were doing it all wrong and that everyone should convert to using his special notational system. Morse did a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study for two years where he could have had discussions with von Neumann, Gödel or even Einstein on issues in the philosophy of mathematics. When you operate on the cutting edge at such a high level, your “discourse community” shrinks down to a very small size and all bets are off as to predicting what type of conceptual tools might provide what is needed to achieve a major breakthrough. Considerations of exactly how one’s work might eventually be interpreted and communicated to wider and wider social-scientific networks are important but are secondary in such a scenario, and that type of work is often carried out by other people (such as, for example, what Minkowski did for Einstein). This is a completely different situation than the “pi vs. tau” (pseudo-)controversy, which involves areas of mathematics that are intended to be understood by the layperson and used in everyday life.
Answer: Her video titled “How I Feel About Logarithms” is brilliant. She didn’t include a discussion of why a negative times a negative is a positive in it, in fundamental terms, but that wasn’t really the main purpose of that video. The brilliance of her logarithm video more than makes up for the misguidedness of her pi/tau video. Her explanation of multiplication (and exponentiation) is very correct, and she’s even got Keith Devlin beat on that one. Bravo. I sincerely hope that her math videos don’t veer off in the wrong direction, philosophically, as her career progresses. I’m not sure how she feels about her famous pi/tau video today, but I for one am familiar with the sense of chagrin that results after having released something that I’ve done an about-face on in the meantime and strongly disagree with now. In her other pi video where she claims that “Pi is a number, not a process” — that is incorrect. It’s another example of a claim that presupposes a false choice. Pi is actually a number and a process. The topic of how mathematicians use the term “number” is a deep one that requires some pretty extensive grounding in the philosophy of math to understand.
Q: What do you think of Michael Hartl’s tau advocacy?
Answer: It’s a sign of societal health when dissenting views are seen making the rounds within a “free marketplace of ideas.” In his lecture that is posted on YouTube, he mentioned that it was Google’s Pi Day doodle in 2010 that propelled him into his tau advocacy. That seems to indicate a fairly severe misreading on his part as to the true meaning of Pi Day. Pi Day has nothing at all to do with pi fetishization. The part of Pi Day that might seem like fetishization on the surface is actually due to Pi Day’s origins as a light-hearted gag. The point of the joke is to have fun and set aside a little time to think about what is really important, which is pi’s relationship to other mathematical constants and the place of pi and those other constants within mathematics as a whole. This is an important issue that Larry himself stressed when I interviewed him in 2007. Shortly after I interviewed him, the Exploratorium had a special event in honor of the 300th anniversary of Leonhard Euler’s birth, which illustrates this point. (See also: this webpage, or also: this article.)
The only actual fetishization that seems to be going on is the tau fetishization of the tauists. The tau fetishization seems to be indicated by their use (i.e., misappropriation) of the yin-yang symbol. Tau advocacy might make a little more sense if perhaps the tauists fancied themselves as being instigators of an upcoming paradigm shift within mathematics (which is what Hartl seems to be aiming for when he says his tau advocacy is intended as a “social hack”), but if they thought such a paradigm shift were needed, then the pi/tau pseudo-controversy is not going to take them there. In that sense, the proposal to replace pi with tau is really “dead on arrival.” It’s kind of fun to think about it a little bit, as way of sharpening one’s analytical skills in dissecting a misguided idea, but that’s about all. Hartl's comment, made to one journalist, that he perceives himself as being someone who is “skewering a sacred cow,” lends support to my interpretation that he is completely misreading the intent of Pi Day and what it’s all about. Hartl now identifies himself as having a commercial motive, which in itself is not a deal-breaker for amateur math or science enthusiasts who are evaluating his claims, but it does show that he may have a vested interest in his attempt to create a new holiday. That kind of thing doesn’t go over too well with the American public. In any event, the spectacular success of the new Pi Day/Einstein celebrations in Princeton, New Jersey pretty much proves that Pi Day is “where it’s at,” so to speak, and that Hartl’s Tau Day proposal has pretty much flopped.
Answer: “Fetishizing” in this context means: placing undue stress or importance on something. In other words, π and 2π and 3π, etc., are all equally important. In fact, staff members at the Exploratorium have already been celebrating June 28th every year (calling it “2pi Day,” not to mention the fact that Larry Shaw’s online nickname is “Larry2pi”), and joke about wanting to celebrate “3pi Day” on “September 42nd.” If you want to give 2π a special name and call it “τ”, then please go ahead if you think that would be helpful in some way. But if you’re going to say that one way of writing an equation is “right” and an alternate way is “wrong,” then it is incumbent upon you to articulate a clear standard as to why the concepts of “right” and “wrong” would apply. This is exactly what the tauists have not done, their protestations to the contrary. They seem to be wanting to hang their hat, ultimately, on the idea of compactness of expression, but the way that this might prove important is if there was some kind of domino effect to where switching 2π to a single symbol would engender a chain reaction in form on multiple layers of expression, or demonstrate some equally potent effect of some similar kind. As one mathematician told The Telegraph of Calcutta, India: “The only benefit I see is that you could write one symbol (tau) instead of two symbols (2pi) and save on ink — nothing more than that.”
Q: But I just saw an article about Tau Day posted in the “Science Now” section of the LATimes.com website. Doesn't that lend credibility to the idea of Tau Day?
Answer: No, not really. The LA Times has been steadily losing its credibility since 2007, when it was taken over by Sam Zell.
Q: What about Bob Palais’ 2001 article titled “Pi Is Wrong!”?
Answer: It’s not a research article. Bob Palais doesn’t list it as a research article in his online CV, but rather lists it as a “publication.” It’s actually an opinion piece (not a research article), and is clearly labeled as such in the publication in which it appeared. A disclaimer was included by the publisher that states: “The Opinion column offers mathematicians the opportunity to write about any issue of interest to the international mathematical community. Disagreement and controversy are welcome. The views and opinions expressed here, however, are exclusively those of the author, and neither the publisher nor the editor-in-chief endorses or accepts responsibility for them.” Bob Palais, of the University of Utah (who wrote the “Pi Is Wrong!” opinion piece) is not to be confused with Richard S. Palais, who did his Ph.D. at Harvard and did a postdoc and was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Those are two different people. (Richard S. Palais is the father of Robert “Bob” A. Palais.) Bob Palais lists his doctoral degree in the following way on his CV: “Ph. D. in Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, 1985-6” — but he graduated with his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, not Princeton.
Q:In case my students ask, can you give me an easy explanation as to why the tau proposal is misguided?
Answer: Yes, just show them an illustration of a circle with radius r inscribed inside a square with a side length of 2r and draw two lines that each cut the square in half, vertically and horizontally. (See also: this article and this worksheet.) Point out how the area of the large square is the same as the area of the four smaller squares whose sides match the radius in length. Show them how if we set the radius equal to one, then the area of the circle is pi and the area of the square is 4 and point out how they can visibly see the relationship between pi (3.14...) and the area of the square (4). This shows that, contrary to the tau proponents’ claims, there is indeed a direct relationship between the radius of a circle and pi: Pi is equal to the number of times that a square whose side is the length of a circle’s radius can fit inside the circle. This is, in fact, how my math teacher in junior high explained it to me. This is quite simple and quite clear, yet the idea of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the length of its diameter is even simpler, so that’s probably why pi was defined that way rather than this way. The idea of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the length of its radius (“tau”) is actually not simpler, because you need to count six times around, instead of three.
Q: Did you have any thoughts about your flight on the space shuttle with Steve Robinson and him becoming a university professor?
JOHN GLENN: I think it’s great he’s doing that and using his background, his experience, his education to help pass it on to other people who I hope will be inspired by his like. Steve is really an outstanding person. I tell you, UC Davis’ gain is NASA’s loss, because he’s truly one of the outstanding astronauts. I didn’t know where he was going to go after his astronaut days, but UC Davis is fortunate in getting him. Steve is really top-notch material.
Q: He plans to set up a new research center to study the interaction between humans and vehicles, and it could be any vehicles in hazardous environments. It could be space vehicles. It could be underwater vehicles, or whatever kind, and he calls this “extending the human presence in hazardous [environments].”
GLENN: Yeah, I know about that. I’ve talked to him a little bit about that, not a whole lot, but a little bit.
Q: Do you have any thoughts on that kind of research?
GLENN: I think it’s excellent research. We’re getting so dependent on machines and computers, and yet the human element of this, I think, and how you integrate this and what the relationship is and what you can depend on computers to do and what you have to still depend on people to do is a great field to be studying. There has not been as much work done in that area as there should be and that’s what Steve will be looking into, as I understand it... The astronauts are very highly selected, obviously and there’s competition to get a slot, and Steve was selected, of course, after stiff competition. But then within the astronaut group, there’s some just regular—I won’t say “run-of-the-mill astronauts,” because that’s an understatement, but some of them are outstanding within the group, once they’ve been in NASA for a while and have flown and had some experience, and Steve was in that group that really excelled within the astronaut group in NASA. So he’s an outstanding person and very well qualified to look into this area and I’m sure he’ll be a great benefit to UC Davis.
Q: Did you have any particular memories of your 1998 space shuttle flight with Steve or the other astronauts?
GLENN: Oh, lots of ‘em. We had seven people on that flight and that was something very different to me, since the other flight I was on was the first orbital flight back in 1962. And that was one in which I was alone on that flight, of course, so it was very different to fly with a total of seven people on board on Discovery 95. Steve was one of the more outstanding crew members and supervised all the research that we were doing on that mission, and I was involved with some of that research. So I worked very closely with Steve. He’s a good friend.
Q: Is there anything you would have done differently on that flight, if you had a chance to do it again?
GLENN: Oh... No, I don’t know that there is. Each one of us had our assigned duties on that flight on a timeline that covered the whole flight all nine days, and we had the experiments put up so that each one—We had 83 different research experiments on that one flight, and so it was a very busy time and each one of the seven crew members had a number of things that each one of us was doing in the research area we were assigned to. Doing it differently? I suppose there might be something different. I don’t remember anything I would in particular do different. But I’m sure there were—You make a mistake once in a while, so I wouldn’t say that it was a hundred percent perfect, but I don’t think of anything offhand that I would have done any differently, no.
Q: I forgot to mention on the paper that UC Davis has another, what we call, alumni astronaut. His name is Robert Phillips and he received his PhD in physiology and nutrition. You might have heard of him, because he had a role as Chief Scientist in NASA, in preparations for the space station for a few years in designing the International Space Station.
GLENN: Yeah, I know the name. I don’t know him personally.
Q: He almost got to go up in space. He was trained as a payload specialist, but then we had the 1986 Challenger disaster and they put off his flight and then the next time he had some kind of heart palpitations, so they grounded him, so he didn’t get to go up, but he’s an expert on studying things like the human aging process in space, so I was going to call him after I call you and maybe see if I could quote him in the article, too.
GLENN: Yeah. The aging in space—that’s the reason I was up on that second flight. That’s what I was studying. In fact, I was on that flight because when I was in the Senate in Washington, one year when we were preparing for debate on the Senate floor about the NASA budget, I was looking at some of the things that had been discovered in space about the human body, and NASA had charted some 52 changes in the human body that occurred during long term space flights, and a number of them are very similar to things that occur in the natural process of aging right here on earth. When I went up on that second flight I was 77. Now, here on Earth your body’s immune system changes somewhat when you get older and you become less resistant to disease and infection. The same thing happens to younger astronauts in space over a period of time. Another one is, as you get older, your body’s ability to replace protein in the muscles becomes less, and the same thing happens to younger astronauts during long-term space flight. There are several other things like that. But what I was looking into, since I was 77, what I proposed was that we look into some of these things and see if we could find out what within the human body turns these systems on and off. In other words, if we could do something that enhances the body’s immune system here on Earth, it would be a tremendous step forward in the fight against disease and possibly even cancer and other things. So that’s what my purpose in being up there was, to make measurements and do research on me at the age of 77 to see if we could find out by comparing the results on me in space with the younger people and maybe get answers to some of those things on the immune system or protein turnover or vestibular functions and other things—heart changes. So that’s the reason I was up there was to do research on aging and that has not been followed through on. I wish there was—That would be—I was the only person of that age who’s been in space, and I’ve always thought that if NASA'd done enough, getting some other people up there in that age bracket so that we have a base of half-a-dozen people or so, then it starts meaning something scientifically. So far in that age bracket I’m the only one that old that’s been up there. So we need more examples of that, and I hope that that kind of research on aging is continued one of these days.
Q: That kind of echoes what Robert Phillips told me. He said that it’s difficult to draw a lot of conclusions from one person on one flight like that.
GLENN: That’s exactly right. My comparison with the younger people came out pretty good. We didn’t make any big breakthrough discoveries, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there to be made, and I still think we need to do more. I talked to the people in NASA about the possibility of putting some older folks on board and maybe even one of these days when we get our own means of transportation back and forth to the Space Station again—putting some of the older people up there for a longer period of time and see what the response is. They’re interested in doing that. They just haven’t been able to do it so far.
Q: I was reading up on some of the things that were written starting in 1974, I guess, it became a popular topic—colonizing space—putting space stations up. What’s your take on humans colonizing space?
GLENN: Well, I think it’s good to do research first. I think we’re a long ways from really putting colonies of people out there that would live their whole lives out there in space. I don’t see that happening for quite some time. I think that it’s good for us to be able to travel in space and do research in space, and I emphasize the research, because space travel to me is far more than just seeing how far we can go. Exploration, of course, is going to new places, but I don’t think we go to new places just solely to say: “Well, we’ve been there,” and come back, interesting though it may be. To me, each time we go farther into space we should use that to do basic research—basic research that can’t be done before you go there. That’s the reason I think the Space Station is so important right now. I think there’s a lot of research to be done there that we have not even touched yet, largely because we’ve been very limited with the cut of the shuttle system—the ending of the shuttle system that President Bush decreed. That has left us without a way of getting back and forth to do some of the research we would like to have done. But I think no matter where we go in space, to me the important thing is not only getting there and getting back, but it’s also doing research, because that opens up as a possibility with that new distance of travel in space. As far as actually setting up colonies of people that would live their whole lives in space, I think we’re a long ways from doing that yet, and I think we have many, many decades before we could be able to even consider something like that.
Q: I think President Obama mentioned a goal of sending a human being or human beings to Mars in the 2030s?
GLENN: Well, I think the flight to Mars has been talked about many times, and some planning has gone on. And of course, a precursor to people going is to do the robotic research that we’re doing right now with the new robot that we have on Mars right now and it will be sending back a lot of information. I think sometime we will go to Mars and I think we’ll explore it with humans sometime, but I think it’s really wise to do all the robotic exploration ahead of time and learn as much as possible. Once we have learned as much as possible with the robots, then that’s the time to send people, and let them then continue the research that the robots have started.
Q: How about the topic of research itself? One of my questions, number five, do you have an idea what the next—I think you mentioned it already, studying the topic of ageing, the ageing process—is to study more people?
GLENN: Yes, I would like to see us have more people in the age bracket I was in, between 75 and 80, when many of these changes that occurred in the human body on Earth have already started, or have been progressive, and then you go into space and compare that with younger people, and maybe we get some clues for things like turning the body’s immune system on and off—What can enhance that?—Or enhancing protein return to the muscle, “PTO” as it’s called, protein turnover. Things like that are things that I think are what we should be looking into right now particularly on the Station. That’s the reason we built the International Space Station and spent over $100 billion on getting it up there, and it’s too bad we don’t have our own means of traveling back and forth. I think President Bush’s decision to cancel the shuttle was just flat wrong. I just disagree with that, and I think that limited the research we can do, but we’re getting back to it as much as we can, and we’re in the process of developing new means of—where we will have our own means of transportation back and forth to the Space Station. Right now, of course, we have no means of getting to our own Space Station. We have to pay the Russians to put our people up there to send them into space—rendezvous with the Station and bring them back at the end of their stay, and that to me is just wrong. We’re supposed to be the world’s greatest space-faring nation, and to cancel our own means of getting there I thought was a mistake, even though it would save some money, but President Bush made the decision that we’re—he re-directed NASA toward going back to a base on the moon, but with no budget to get there, and said it had to be done on the existing NASA budget. That budget then—What they had to do, or what he had to do, what he did was say we’ll end the Space Shuttle, because it is expensive. It’s about $400 million per launch. And they’re going to cancel the Space Shuttle and use that money to plan a mission to the Moon, and in the meantime we have to depend on the Russians to put our people into space and bring them back, and I just don’t think that was a very bright decision, or a right decision, so anyway that’s behind us now and we’re developing new means of getting to the Station, and I hope those come along as fast as possible.
Q: Do you think private industry can pick up the slack and produce launch vehicles?
GLENN: Well, I’m sure they can, but you know it’s called “the commercialization of space,” which I thought was a misnomer, because we’ve always depended on private industry to do the building of our space equipment anyway, under NASA direction, and that was fine, and that’s basically what we’re still doing now, except the manufacturers are putting a little bit of their own money into it compared to the government money, and we have three different basic competitor groups: SpaceX—They’re the one that sent up the Dragon spacecraft a short time ago; then we have the Sierra Nevada Corporation in Colorado—They’re working on a different idea for transportation back and forth; and then Boeing is also involved. So I’m sure that one of those companies will come up with what will be selected as a primary transportation system back and forth to our Space Station.
Q: You remember President Kennedy’s famous speech when he said we should go to the Moon. Do you think that a president should say something similar to that today or somebody should say something—set a goal like that?
GLENN: I’m sure we’ll get back to something like that. I see this in a little bigger context, perhaps. It’s not just a stunt. I think if you go back and look at the philosophy of the United States since our founding days, there are two things that have probably been more important in moving us ahead than any other things that we could have done. Number one, this nation had an emphasis on the individual and so education became available for everyone, and that was number one. That was important. The second element was that we did more research. We put more money into research, into the new and the unknown than any nation in history, and the same thing with education, and those two things led us into a worldwide preeminence in a very short period of time. I think those two things are just as applicable today, in our competitive position around the world, than they have ever been in the past. We need the best education system in the world. We have it in higher education. We do not have it in general education for all of our people—the K-12 education. Other nations are far, far outdoing the United States in that area. We still have the lead in research, but once again, other nations are pouring more into research also. We still have a lead, but to me it’s just very, very important that we keep that lead in basic research, and that’s where this idea of the Station and what Steve Robinson’s going to be doing there at UC Davis, things like that, that expand our knowledge and continue research in keeping us in the lead in research in the world. We’re in a newly competitive position around the world, and unless we keep our lead in education for all of our people and do the research along with that, other nations will start outdoing us and they will be leaders in the world, and so I see this as being very, very important—the kinds of things that we’re doing, and the kinds of things that Steve will be doing there at UC Davis, also.
Q: How about after Sputnik? I wasn’t alive, so I don’t remember, but there was a big emphasis on education after Sputnik. Do you think we need something like that again?
GLENN: Absolutely. On K-12 education this country has gone down, down, down compared to the other nations. It doesn’t mean that we have gotten dumber. It just means that we have not advanced as fast in those areas as other nations have done, and we’re way down right now. I headed up—some years ago, though. It’s been over 10 years ago, now.—I headed a national commission sponsored by the Department of Education to look into that very area of K-12 education, because we had some studies, international studies, of 41 nations around the world over a three-year period that showed that other nations were beginning to outdo us in K-12 education and that our kids up to about the fourth grade have a good concept of science and technology. By the time they get out of high school they rank way, way down. We’re one of the last of the 41 nations by the time our kids get out of high school, compared to other nations, in math and science and technology. Now in higher education we’re still the envy of the rest of the world. But for all of our people we need to upgrade that educational level and get more emphasis on it, and so local, state or federal cuts in education, I think, are a big mistake, and I think we have to get back to being the best educated general citizenry in the world and make sure we do not lose our lead in research, if we are to remain the number one—if we’re to have a leadership position in the world.
Q: ...Do you have any ideas what might be causing our K-12 problems?... Is it perhaps because of a lack of funding or a lack of focus?
GLENN: The teaching level—we found that at that time, if it’s not gotten better in the last 10 years, but at that time the math teachers in high school, for instance, twenty-five percent of the math teachers never had any training in teaching math. They were graduates of teacher schools, but they did not have any special training in teaching math as a subject. Twenty percent of the science teachers were in the same category, and even more importantly, there was in both categories in math and in science, about thirty percent of the teachers left the profession within three years and fifty percent were gone to other things and to other locations within five years. So there is not a stable teaching cadre there. In other words, if a math teacher is good, or a science teacher is good, a fair percentage of them will be hired out of that profession to work for AOL or Apple or one of the technical companies. We have not had the same stability that some other nations in the world have had with their teachers. Another big difference, too, was that most of our competitor nations around the world have a national education system and we’re the only major nation in the world that operates off of local school boards... They receive very little direction from state boards of education or from the nation. So local school boards direct basically what happens and too often they’re not willing to track or to do the supervision of the education system that will make it world competitive. In other nations they have nationwide education systems where the money is put out more equitably across all of these different areas of the country. In this country, just for example, at the time of our study back ten years ago, the number of school boards in the United States was at 14,700. I think it’s a few less than that now. But at that time, that means that we had 14,700 different school board entities setting largely the curriculum and the money and the local taxation that determine how the education system went in their particular area. And so I think that’s a big holdback for progress in that area also. So those are just some things that I think our study ten years ago showed, and if anything has become worse today. Before we finish let me just put a word—I think UC Davis is very fortunate to have gotten somebody like Steve Robinson. He’s highly interested in it. He’s looking forward to it very much. I talked to him not long ago, just a short time ago. He’s really looking forward to getting going out there and helping establish this new area, and I say it’s a loss to NASA to lose somebody like Steve, but UC’s gain.
Key names/terms: John Herschel Glenn, Jr., Stephen Robinson, Robert W. Phillips, Tracy Caldwell Dyson, STS-95, Curtis L. Brown, Jr., Steven W. Lindsey, Pedro Duque, Scott E. Parazynski, Stephen K. Robinson, Chiaki Mukai, John H. Glenn, Jr.
ADRIAN APOLLO: Do you have any particular topic that you wanted to bring up when you get to UC Davis for the October 29th event?
STEVE WOZNIAK: I don’t know how it’s structured. I have to look. Sometimes the event’s structured, so I don’t have that much choice on the topic and sometimes I do, so I couldn’t tell you. I mean, I’d probably just bring up a lot of topics relating to – I don’t know – creativity, innovation, how we’re often kind of dissuading people. How we define intelligence almost as being non-creative in ways. I might bring that subject up or I might get into issues of the Internet, the Cloud, what it means, some right and wrongs, some problems that are coming in the future. Maybe evolution of devices as I see them. You know, how they’re going to be more and more relating to humans, like on a human level, then all of our personal traits, you know, our history of computers in my lifetime, it’s almost always a move in input-output directions toward working better with humans and then working more like a human. So it could be a lot of different things that I like to talk about, but I’d have to look at what the specific topics of the day are.
Q: Could you expand upon what you just mentioned about creativity?
WOZ: Well, that gets more into the educational system, but it also involves home, it involves the culture of the country, but basically intelligence is very much defined as having a lot of right answers on a test, and the right answers tend to be the same answers as everyone else, especially in the younger years where it matters the most, because by third grade kids decide whether school’s important or not. You know a whole bunch of them have kind of just dropped out, not trying to be as great as they could. It’s just the nature of the competitive system. But we try to teach everybody that’s the right answer, there’s one answer, same as everyone else, and it’s not your answer. It’s out of some book. It’s a lot of memorized information and the person who has the most handle on the memorized information is the most intelligent, rather than the one that sticks his hand up and says: “Why isn’t it something else?” or “What about this?” Or, I know how to calculate how when two canoes meet in our river, but no river’s going to go the perfect speed, or even, am I ever going to be disliked or called “disruptive.” So education you get for personal reasons and (from) other places is often a lot more important as far as how the mind works in ways that get you through life. You really don’t learn those in class.
So there’s different techniques – So our intelligence of intelligence is just basically faulty and wrong and it’s just made up the only way we can think of doing it.
Q: How would you recommend that elementary, grade school teachers teach differently or not teach?
WOZ: It always boils down to money. One teacher, one student does not fail. If the teacher cares, whatever problems the student has they go back, they get the understanding all the way along. You’re not allowed to pass through, sort of half understanding some stuff, then everything’s going to be built on the last thing and that’s going to build on the next thing, and if you miss out on some steps, it doesn’t show up and you have trouble from then on and you’re just called: “Oh, you’re having difficulty learning.” Well, you missed some of the earlier steps, but a one-on-one teacher never fails at that, and in a class of 30 you can’t go back for each kid having 30 different problems and go back and try to fix the one little problem. It’s just efficiency. Efficiency boils down to money.
For one thing schools don’t have as much money as nature would have given them, because money for schools – Education’s considered a right. It’s been considered a right for hundreds of years and that means that not just the kings and the wealthy get it, but anyone gets it. Because of defining it as a right, it has to come from governments. Only governments can supply it to everybody, you know, and handle that equality and fairness thing? And when money comes from a government, it only comes in accordance in our system and all the hundreds of countries that have democracy. It just comes from votes. If you have more votes in a certain direction, you’re going to get more money in that direction, and the votes for schools are deprived, because children don’t get to vote. A family of five that wants good schools gets no more voting power than a family of two that doesn’t want to pay for schools, and so we got a problem right there.
Secondly, I do – I hope to God that someday my work contributes to having one real humanlike teacher, a computer that’s really humanlike that is really your best friend that knows your soul and your inside thinking better than any person does and knows how to back up and how to say things to you differently than to other people. Once we have that, one low cost computer, one low cost teacher per student, maybe we can have the students all going at different paces. There are a few good school projects, but they’re very rare as you go around the world. You see some schools that have these kind of mixed curricula where different kids at the same age are going in different directions on different subjects at different paces, and I want to see a system where everybody comes out with the equivalent of straight A’s. You go to school, you come out as educated as everyone else, and it might have taken you longer, or you might have gone in a different directions. Not only that, I’d like to give the kids the chance to say – You know what? If you want to get through this course, you could take 100 hours of instruction online on this little computer, or you could sit down over a couple weekends and whack out the whole course in one month and go take vacation and have free time to move on to something else. Think of how many people would love to just dig in when they’re young and work really hard just to get done sooner – if they’re fast. So I see a lot of different things that I bring up in that whole area that really it’s going to boil down to, you have one teacher per student, you’ll never fail with making them very educated and thinking, too. You know, that’s a problem. You can’t really give people a chance to think independently in a class, because you have 30 different directions to handle every minute of the day. And if your kids in class – By the way, if your kids in class don’t understand something, a teacher doesn’t have the freedom to go back and redo it. They’re responsible to the administration. The teachers are being judged on what page of the book they’re on – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. They don’t have a chance to go back and make up for something that maybe the kids were excited about something one day – a field trip – and didn’t really pay attention as well as they should have. No, teachers can’t go back at all. And secondly, right now we got teachers’ unions, and they’d rather teach 30 kids poorly than 20 kids well, because they get paid more money.
Some cities have ways to pass tax overrides – property tax overrides in California, which is the worst in the county in class size – 50th in the nation. Mississippi at 49th is way behind, 47th in money per student, 43rd in computers for students – Those sort of numbers. California’s way behind. You can have tax overrides for cities like Cupertino and Los Gatos that believe in good schools, but you need two-thirds of the vote and only one-third of the people have kids in school, and it’s very difficult to pass those things. There are other kinds of elections that pass bonds to get more money for school districts, but those bonds never go into better education. They go into nicer buildings, better buildings, stadiums in the school, nice indoor track-and-field things. It goes into all those areas. Those aren’t education, really.
Q: Do you think we should fund the school districts equally over the whole state or allow them to be funded locally?
WOZ: I think that individual treatment involves looking at individual situations and deciding where the most need is. People in a city can always vote to pay more money. So, if there’s a wealthy community or a community that believes in schools a lot, Cupertino and Los Gatos have done this for 20 years now, and a few other cities, throwing in with the property (tax), but it’s so hard to pass it. You need 67 percent of the vote and you don’t have 60 percent of the people with kids in school. It’s tough to find the communities where people think that education is deprived, meaning should have more money, should be better than it is now.
And besides this, we’re in a real bad situation to determine how to run education anyway. It’s always a matter of money and we just take a side. We’re a side-taking community. Nobody does a calculation that says: Here is the percentage of the GNP that should go to education. Nobody does that. They just say: “I’m for schools” or “I’m against schools.” “I’m against the wasteful amount of spending,” or “I’m for kids’ learning,” and they take one side or the other without saying: Is the number that’s being spent on schools above or below the number that I would calculate as being the right number?
So we don’t take the intelligent approach of saying: What is the right number? Are we over or under it now? That’s too much thinking. I’m sorry, people are not going to think. They just wanna quickly take a side because that’s a lot easier. It’s just like a football game, and that’s what we’re taught in schools: My school right or wrong. My team right or wrong. That’s drilled into us from the time we’re in school and you’ll always support your school without ever questioning who’s better. You know: What’s really good?-even if it’s sports. It’s just sort of a bad thing. Go to any professional sports game, everybody boos the referees when they call a foul against their team, and it’s just which side you’re taking. It’s not that you really, really logically see things that way. So we’re just a community that doesn’t want to think, just wants to take sides and that really just goes with our two-party election system.
Q: So what you just said about K through 12, a lot of that also you would apply to the higher education level, public universities, too?
WOZ: Yes, but less. Less of it. You still have to get through a (inaudible) and follow the maze carefully, and there are differences in people by that age. There’s a lot more room for independent, free thinking. To me, I really see that the free thinking comes more on your own time. Take the class. You know what? School is a wonderful place to be in, it’s like, oh my gosh, you’re the family pet. You’re being taken care of, your expenses are paid. Well, a lot of people have school debt, but you can work, you can work and pay for your school as you go, and then on your own you have your own little things that interest you in life. Personal things are going to motivate you so much more than a grade from a school. That grade from a school doesn’t mean anything compared to – oh my gosh, achieving maybe just getting a certain speed on a crossword puzzle and that’s my thing in life, and my pastimes, my hobbies, the things I do on my own time. Those are the things I really love. Well, you have a lot of time to do that in school, I mean, you got bookstores that are full of books on some subjects that you might think you’re interested in, even if it doesn’t pertain to your major, even if you’re not taking the course. Especially in the university, if you don’t want to go out and party all the time with everybody, you’ve got a lot of time for doing some great learning of whatever you wanted.
Q: Are you glad that you went back to finish your bachelor’s degree?
WOZ: I’m quite proud of it. As a matter of fact the proudest day of my life was actually getting that degree, because it was the most important work I’ve done in my life, but see I didn’t really drop out of school, saying school’s worthless or something. I had three good years, and I was so skilled at the engineering work that I did that I could get hired anywhere, so unfortunately my career took off and I didn’t have a chance to get back for a long time. So I was just going back to finish something I long started and worked many years on already. So in that sense, by then I did not have to go back. My résumé was the work I had done for Apple and things like that, so I didn’t need a degree, but then I did think in my head. My parents talk about their colleges and somehow it meant something to me when I was young, and I wanted to be able to talk about my college to my kids.
Q: Did you want to comment on the funding crisis in public universities today?
WOZ: I don’t know what it is in public universities. It’s sort of like everything is squeezed these days and everything that can be seen as, hmm, skippable, as not essential is going to be pained, I think, for a long time. I don’t know – So I don't know what it is in public education. I know I see a lot of articles about (how) students are protesting the raise in tuition and whatnot. It is what it is. You know, state colleges, when you’re in your own State of California, the tuition is so subsidized already by the citizens of California – the voters of California. I went my first year of college out of state. I paid out-of-state tuition. It was an ungodly amount. I couldn’t even translate it to today’s dollars. You’d probably jump with a little heart (pumping). So in-state was so much less expensive.
And, you know, you have a lot of options. You also have a lot of options (in state). Go to a community college for two years and live at home for two more years. Yeah, you miss out on the greatest time in your life, getting out with other people all on your own, but you’re gonna get there by your third year anyway. I don’t recommend it, but money-wise there are good trade-offs.
Q: Trade-offs to what?
WOZ: Trade-offs to going right to a four-year college. I think going right to a four-year college is the best time you’ll ever have in a life – the best four years, the most important four years, and you’ll want to be around people who think like you. Which school you choose matters very, very little. You’ll get the academic material one way or the other, the same levels at any school. But you wanna be around that and you wanna have that fun time in life. You want to have that growing time. You want to find out what your values are, your ideals, your ethics, what’s right, what’s wrong, and that’s around the time that it’s solidifying – your whole personality, and you’re going to be that way forever. That’s an important time in life. My first recommendation is try to get to a four-year school, and it’s expensive, and go away from home. It’s expensive and not everyone can afford it. That’s just one of the aspects of life. Probably always will be.
Q: I read that when you and Steve Jobs went to K through 12 in California we had a better system and people attribute a lot of California’s – your success, California’s success to that better system then, and also today to higher education – public higher education, today that’s helping people succeed in Silicon Valley.
WOZ: I don’t know how to judge today compared with then in higher education. I do have a feeling – And this is just something you sort of remember in life – I have a feeling that the school programs are very limited today. A lot of the ones that I remember that were really great, and even elementary school all the way through high school were so important a part of my life and so good and they just sort of get thrown out for, you know, you gotta teach the same standard basic things that have been taught for 200 years, and everybody’s gotta be taught the exact same things, and there isn’t that much room for all these little extra programs in the schools that there used to be, and I really strongly feel that whenever I visit schools and look at them and talk to teachers. There’s a little bit in optional programs, and there’s still some arts and music gets in, but not to the extent that we had when I was young. It just seems like things did change. Maybe it’s economically based.
As far as universities, I think there’s an awful lot of courses now in universities for entrepreneurship. And Steve Jobs, really, was very much against the schools even when he grew up. He just basically thought oh, the teachers are dumb, and didn’t really – He cared about, like all of us, one or two teachers are important in our life, and that never goes away. Teachers are very important and should be liked and much more supported than they are. There’s categories in life – I blame it – a good teacher does as much as any doctor or lawyer and the pay doesn’t reflect it.
Q: How about current UC Davis students like myself. I’m a graduate student, but undergrads, too. We’re trying to figure out ways to be more creative and be more successful in our education? Do you have any advice?
WOZ: One thing is to try to come up with personal projects for yourself. And at first in your life, the little projects you come up with, you know, it might be just to learn a certain thing. It might be to get good at a certain game. They have no money value. They couldn’t start a company. You shouldn’t start thinking at the top right away. It’s like: Well, for a while I’ll get a job, even if I’m kind of good at something on my own and I’ll just work on it until I’ve really developed what I think will go. Getting taught that, oh, you come right out, you’ve got the tools to make presentations and put things on paper, defining a little business for yourself – entrepreneurship. I don’t – I don’t believe in that strongly, because it often leaves out knowing a few sharp technical guys that can do something other people couldn’t do that will come up with ideas that are more outrageous than anyone else. You gotta kind of scout the creative people. You know, by the time you’re out of college, the level of creativity in people varies and you can tend to spot it. And that doesn’t mean, you know, you need good managers, too. You need people that are non-creative along with the creative types, but you’ve really got to trust a lot of the creative types for ideas and visions and the willingness to believe that something’s possible even when the normal thing for what you’ve learned in school says this probably isn’t possible.
Q: Could there be – I don’t want to focus necessarily on Apple, but just to use it as an example – Could there be such a thing as Apple being too big of a corporation, such that it stifles creativity?
WOZ: You know that’s always been the case, and it’s always been said, and just because we’ve heard it doesn’t make it a reality, but I see – There are companies (that are) very huge, like Google, that actually approach kind of sharing with the world a little bit more than Apple does. Apple says anything that’ll run on our product will have to be sold through our stores, have to be, you know, built on – like they want tight control, and that’s sort of like the old Communist thinking that we were brought up with being told was really bad, the people who control all your thoughts and your options and your pricing and all that. You want to have the room as a young – See, I was a young scientific-technical guy when I was in college. I could think of ideas and I could write programs and run them on any computer, and now, now I really can’t write a program. I couldn’t sell it to anybody on a computer. I could write it and run it on an iPhone if I get a developer license, which isn’t too bad, but it’s like, I don’t like the world closed off to me as to what I can think of and do just because the big company wants to hold onto that territory for their own profit reasons. Yeah, you know, I feel bad. I’m always for the little guy. I’m always for the little entrepreneur over any of the big ones, but, you know, it’s not just Apple, it’s every big, established company.
Q: So wouldn’t you say that, just like HP turned you down when you proposed the micro-computer, that’s a drawback of big corporations, right?
WOZ: Yes and no. HP didn’t turn it down for big-corporation reasons. HP was a company that had a company culture. Every company does, and it’s very hard to move outside of your company culture. HP’s company culture back in those days was not what it is now. It was: We make some products that engineers use. We make tools that engineers use. We understood engineers very well. So an engineer at HP at the bottom of your chart could be the chief marketing guy, too, because he knew the market. He was an engineer. He was part of the market. Now, HP would have built the Apple ][ computer not as a fun, nice, colorful machine for the home. They would have built it as a boring, you know, black and white, lousy keyboard, professional tape drives, machine for engineers with a much higher cost and much lower features. They would have built the wrong machine. And they couldn’t really – and the machine I was describing didn’t fit their culture enough, and they turned it down for some pretty good HP reasons, and looking back I’m always glad that they did. I wanted them to do it so badly at the time. I wanted to be kind of like a hero within HP then. I loved that company, but if the machine had come out so different that it didn’t inspire the whole world of personal computers, then I would have felt bad.
Q: Do you think we might have to revamp our general political system in California and the US to improve some of these things that you’re talking about? Like funding for –
WOZ: I don’t see any way to revamp it, so saying “we should” – It’s not just a matter of we make a decision. I think if you ask people: “Would you want the political system to be really revamped, and here's a few categories and ways,” I bet you could get 90 percent of the people to say yeah, they want (that), but it’s just not gonna happen. I mean, the powers that control what can happen – You can’t move – People actually, believe it or not, as much as they say they want change, they don’t like the way it is, they don’t want very much change at all, ever. They prefer the status quo, the trusted guidelines of life and how it works and what we have and how decisions are made and what we do in life. They really are pretty scared. They don’t want to admit it, but it’s part of that not being as smart as we think we are...
WOZ: We’ve got a lot of flaws in our system. We just – We talk like: “We have freedom and democracy.” What a joke. What a joke that is... This country was never founded on equality and freedom. We’re just taught that in school. We’re not the only democracy in the world. There’s tons of other democracies and most of them are more democratic. We’ve got so much, you know, control over our lives in this country – So, we believe all these lies, and then we stick with it, because it’s “my country right or wrong”...
A company says: Here’s something we can do for our company, our employees and for the world, and here’s how much it’s going to cost, and here’s the benefits. Ooo, this one’s not worth doing. Here’s one where the benefits way outweigh the costs. Let’s go and – Let’s go after it. Well, a country never works that way. It’s just infinite money, nobody, you know, politics, make decisions, look good, and never ask how much does a war really cost people. You just, no, “You have to go do it,” because it’s one of the things we do. You know we got a – We have a – It’s a big joke and we just fool ourselves. Freedom? Our country wasn’t formed as an equal country. We had slavery to have cheap labor. Like we have in China now (that) we complain about? We had cheap slave labor and that made our country really big. Now, none of the countries in Europe had that. Mexico didn’t have slaves. That’s why Texas broke away from Mexico. That was one of the reasons, and became a country of its own for a while.
Q: So are you saying there’s a lack of authentic democracy?
WOZ: Exactly. It’s very easy to play with us and we don’t have an awful lot of choice, and as far as this part of, “We stand for the good of the world,” I just – I’m sorry, I don’t buy it.
Q: So what’s the –
WOZ: You get to the top and you have corruption. It comes with money and it comes with power. And you have corruption, you’ll just try and get more and more and we have the greed. We have way too unfavorable a distribution of resources in this country compared to countries like Australia, New Zealand. Canada is so much more even-distributed, as far as education and income and things like that. So we have all these inequalities. And we’ll always think, “Oh my gosh, we’re the most fair and equal of all” – It’s just a lie.
Q: So it seems like you’re in tune with some of the themes of the current Occupy Movement?
WOZ: I understand them as – they’re – where it’s all coming from, and yes and I would agree philosophically and logically that they are right, yes. When I was young, I was taught that if we learn and we go out and create new things as engineers, we’re going to make all these devices that do things for us and make life easier so we don’t have to work as hard. And my dad, I remember him telling me when I was young: “And so someday we’ll get to have more entertainment and more movies and we’ll have maybe a four-day work week.” Well, you know what happened in Silicon Valley? Now it takes two people working full time, stressfully, just to have a house in Silicon Valley. That’s not a four-day work week. That’s both people having to work now and it’s very – It’s much more difficult and it doesn’t seem like: “Oh my gosh, like it’s a whole new – the whole world is ours. Life is easy and everybody’s kind of taken care of.” No, it seems that we’ve gone way backwards. And yet we’re successful. We’ve created this incredible wealth. But where did it go, because it didn’t go into our own entertainment and our own lifestyle and make things easier for us and give us a four-day work week. Where did that money go? The wealth? It all went to the top. You know, yeah, that’s wrong.
Q: And so how can we remedy that?
WOZ: Well, we can’t. I don’t see any way to remedy it, because the powers of money really control all the workings of the government, and we can’t change how our government works about that. They’re never, ever gonna get taxed the same as us. You know, nobody – In my life, I’ve never heard one politician propose – what do you call it, a “flat tax rate”? Never once. They propose flat taxes on earned income. But never once do they propose that capital gains – another method of gaining – the greater method of gaining wealth for the 1 percent – capital gains should be taxed the same as ordinary income. Why, why are all these tax laws gonna favor, 1 – you know, the rich people? Is that right? No, I don’t believe it’s right. So, but there’s no way to overturn it, because we don’t have the money and the power.
Q: How about the new – the coming Information Age and the kind of democratization of information sharing and open source collaboration and open research. Could that make a difference?
WOZ: As far as open source, open collaboration – hard for me to comment on it. Just, it’s such an open area. There are so many aspects to it. As far as the Internet and the Information Age – the Internet came about in my lifetime; I was right on top of it from the early days – and at first it was a source of democratization. Everybody had an equal access to it. Everybody could publish. Everybody could send things to anyone anywhere in the world, and now all the barriers are popping up as to what you can and can’t send on electrons and who you can send them to, and the fact that it’s all monitored. There were laws against mail, in my life, being monitored without court orders and all. All the Internet stuff is, I just assume, is (inaudible). So it’s really gone the opposite of the way that it seemed it was going to go at first.
Q: It sounds almost like you’re saying we need a drastic change.
WOZ: I would be for a drastic change, but I just – See, the trouble is, change only comes from the people, and if you run around and poll all the people in this country – phht – that I don’t think a lot of them really feel the way I do. I really think the masses just want things the way they are. They want tight control. We gotta protect against “terrorism” and things like that. You know, they’ll call any terrorist act a war and – phht – There’s so few people that really want to sit down and say: How can we really, really – What is the right system, and how can we get there? We’re never gonna get there. It’s in our culture.
You go to countries like New Zealand, you’re going to find a whole different world of the way people just talk and think and, you know, the freedoms of life.
Q: Would you consider sponsoring some big concerts again like you did before in the ’80s?
WOZ: (laughing) Probably not sponsor them, because I did my fair share of sponsoring them, but we almost put on another US Festival in 2009 and 2010, but the guy involved who was really behind it and financing it, died of pancreatic cancer, so, bummer.
Q: Do you think perhaps something like that could excite people and get people –
WOZ: Yes, yeah. I actually think that concerts appeal to an awful lot of young people and thinking people who get messages about life in words of songs, and music affects their feelings and their thinking. I think that it can reach an awful lot of people, and if you combine that, like what I did, with a technology fair, or fairs with speakers speaking out about, you know, maybe younger, different types of movement. You’d have a chance. You’d get a large number of young people behind it. It’s only going to start from the university-aged people, just like it did in the Viet Nam days.
Q: If Apple came to you and said: “We’d like to hire you to be CEO,” would you accept?
WOZ: I would question it very deeply. I’d only accept if I felt that in the end it would be good for Apple and I could really help Apple. Because I love the company, just like Steve Jobs, but you know, then again, not being a – not being a, I don’t know – Not wanting to do a lot of things that leaders have to do. I don’t ever want to be a lie. I don’t want to go out and say these statements that mislead people and just say the good words and phrase things. I don’t like to work with press people writing what I’m saying. It’s just a question of honesty, so that would be an – one issue I’d have personally, but also, would my being there be better for Apple than the people who are there? And it’s only going to be measured by the people that own Apple, the shareholders. They want the stock to go up. That’s just the modern world, you know, that’s the most important thing. As far as great products, if I thought that, oh yes, my thinking – I’ve got a lot of different ideas than Apple about products and the direction they should go, and yeah, I would love to put that in place, so I would consider it.
WOZ: I followed it, and I was abhorred by the – what was shown in the press. Then I saw like a full video, and the full video to me looked pretty much like, you know, you have to have normal control. It’s your property. You know, if you try to go into my house, I can prevent you from it. And it was like there was so much, you know, the way it was set up, you know, the students versus the police and then the police giving them a lot of warning. That was never shown to the major public, and I’m thinking, why wasn’t the whole story shown? Let everybody judge based on the real whole story, rather than just seeing the incident.
WOZ: I will tell you, you know. I’ll tell you, I went back. I took my share of tear gas at Berkeley, you know, in the Vietnam War days, and I actually am – I’m for peaceful protests. The question of can it turn violent, I don’t know.
Q: What did you think about the Free Speech Movement in 1964, Mario Savio and all that?
WOZ: Well, of course. Free speech and the – See, I was brought up by my dad. He was so much into our Bill of Rights and what they meant, and that’s what it stood for. But then in later years I went back. I have to be honest. I went back and I read the story, and it wasn’t one of free speech. Mario Savio could take a microphone on the streets, in public, in parks, anywhere, and get permits for marches even, but to come onto private property, even a campus at Berkeley in the middle of where people are studying, and to just say: I’m going to just be disruptive and take it over with my speech. That was the issue. It was trespassing. It wasn’t whether free speech was allowed or not. It was trespassing. You can’t come into my house and bring in twenty of your friends and have a big free speech (event) and say: “We’re just speakin’ our thoughts.” No, my house is my house. People that own things, they own things, and there are enough public areas and ways to express your views and your thoughts and you should do them. In the Viet Nam War days we had a lot of totally authorized, you know, peaceful protests.
Q: I think one of the main issues (as it was stated) in that day was that the University did not allow political advocacy on campus, even though they allowed free speech, and he wanted them to allow political advocacy.
WOZ: I don’t think that’s what it was, but it’s hard – You’d have to go back and study real closely the people who were right there. Did the University have a right to that? Well, if it was disruptive, yeah. I mean, you could go just a little bit off campus. I mean, I’m sure that you could pass around leaflets and you wouldn’t be disturbing the campus. You could post leaflets. There were always leaflets posted about the Vietnam War and things like that at Berkeley. It was just wide open to any kind of political protest and activism, and there were speeches on campus, but they were the ones that were approved, you know, a certain amount of time in a certain space with a certain amount of microphone. And I saw many of those and attended many of those, and even ones promoting boycotts of classes and stuff. So Berkeley wasn’t – didn’t seem shut off from that. Of course, I went in a later year. But I really don’t think that was the issue. I think it was you’re not allowed to do a certain thing on campus, you gotta do it somewhere else. It’s not your property.
Q: Um –
WOZ: And there are people who are being disruptive. In other words, I don’t believe in a right that, you know, you got free speech and you gotta speak out your mind, but you have the right to harass somebody by getting thousands of your friends to send them emails about something they’re doing. I don’t believe in harassment. I don’t believe in bullying. That sort of bullying: you gotta go along or we’re going to be, you know, yelling at you. No, there’s like good, easy, peaceful ways to do these things that I believe in a lot more.
Q: Do you think that’s –
WOZ: And I changed my view on Mario Savio, because I didn’t really know the real issues when I was young. Just, like on free speech, he wanted to speak some negative thoughts, and I believe you should always be allowed to speak anything negative you want about the government, about the president, about any of these things, and nowadays you might be put in jail and called a “terrorist” on occasion and that frightens me more than anything. But you don’t have to trespass to have your – to speak. It’s what you’re allowed to speak about nowadays that’s gotten a lot worse. But Mario Savio could have said everything he wanted to, like to a newspaper, out in some other public park with the proper permit, at the right times on the Berkeley campus even. But, you know, then there still is a limit to free speech, too. You know, you can’t really say everything. You can’t say things that are gonna get, you know, people incited to attack somebody. You know, killing an abortion doctor is not free speech.
Q: What about Anonymous? Do you support some of the apparent goals of Anonymous?
WOZ: I didn’t actually pay good enough attention to tell you for sure. I guess they were going after greedy, bad, corporate culprits – Am I right? – to expose some of their secrets. So I think we’re talking about websites.
Q: A lot of it has to do with retaliating against abuses of police power.
WOZ: In what way?
Q: Well, if the police are abusing the law and going beyond their lawful duties and prerogatives–
WOZ: Oh, yeah. Oh my God. I’ll never ever trust a policeman in my life with the truth, and that’s all the time. They shoot so many people that are unarmed that they didn’t have to shoot, over and over, city after city after city you read about it. Um, uh, uh, no. The police are no friend of mine. And there are some good police, and maybe even most of them are good, and I’ve known some good ones, but no, I’d never ever trust it when I read these stories about police abuse and all that. So I’m against that, and I would join in with Anonymous. I don’t know what they’re doing, if they’re destroying websites and stuff like that, you know, ah, I could smile on it. I don’t think they – it really hurts somebody, like financially. But, like I said, you know, bullying and trying to get, you know, harassing somebody to death is not really maybe the right approach. But then again, like I said, I don’t really know what Anonymous is.
Q: How about Wikileaks?
WOZ: Wikileaks? Yeah, I think society always kind of comes and sort of winds up, like Congresses and all, they always seem to support police, which I don’t like, and military, which I don’t like, and we have way too much abuse there. Wikileaks exposed a bunch of stuff from the government that wasn’t meant – the government didn’t mean to release it. Well, it got released. You know, who paid for that stuff? We taxpayers paid for it, and if we see something, we paid for it, here is the truth. Why is the truth hidden from us? – Why is the truth hidden from us for way, way, way too long, you know, a hundred years, forever, we’ll never see it. If it gets exposed, I don’t think that’s a bad crime at all. In some ways it’s almost honorable. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers changed my life quite a bit when I was young, attending Berkeley, and he went through the court system and was actually let off by the Supreme Court, not because he was in the right with free speech, but because the government wouldn’t turn over a bunch of documents. But still, still, I think that leakers should be protected, and yet they’re treated – you know this Wikileaks guy might be treated like some kind of terrorist criminal and thrown away and disappeared and executed, all these bad things we used to hear about Russia. That’s wrong. I’m so glad that Ecuador offered him asylum. I actually have an honorary degree from an Ecuador university.
Q: Great. How many honorary degrees do you have? Did you count them?
WOZ: I don’t know. It’s probably about nine. Some are foreign. But I’m very proud of the one from Ecuador, very nice people, good people over there and I like the way they think.
Q: How about the Stop Online Piracy Act?
WOZ: I didn’t study it closely enough. I hate to see the Internet shut off in any way to become less than perfectly free to the end users. The small people that use the Internet should be Number One, and not some people who have enough power to control it, either politically, or security-wise, or companies, or countries. And it’s so sad how it’s – everything’s been pretty much usurped from us the people. At first it was kind of like outer space. “Nobody owns outer space,” or “nobody owns the moon.” Well, that’s only because there’s nobody there able to own it. You know, as soon as somebody’s able to own something they want it, and control also turns into wealth, but it turns into power.
Q: So do you think –
WOZ: – everybody else – the internet everywhere, country to country to country. I like it. I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of Planet Earth. And you know what? I don’t look at myself as being superior, because I’m in California I’m superior to people in Utah or Oklahoma or New Hampshire. No, we all think of ourselves equally, right? Well, why don’t we think of every country that way? Why is it state to state is one thing, but oh, country to country we have to be, they’re not as good as us, we’re they’re enemies, we’re against them. I don’t think that way. I pretty much am like the Eastern religious-type thinking. We’re (inaudible) of the same world.
Q: Steve Jobs went to India, right?
WOZ: He went to India and he was around a bunch of people. He was living with no money, largely because he wanted to escape his family and he had no money, and part of that got him into people who talk about certain things, and he heard all these people that bathed in the Ganges River, and he went over there. He was trying to search – You know, when you’re young, a lot of people go out and they start traveling around by foot, hitchhiking, friends, get here to there, with no money, and they do it for a period in their life, and it’s a way of reaching the phase (where) you’re finally capable and you might end up being – a lot of them wind up being CEOs of companies, kind of like that book Into Thin Air, what that guy was really doing, by the conclusion of the author. So Steve didn’t really – He was talking about Eastern religious thoughts a lot, but I don’t think it really got into him that deeply.
Q: Do you have a nostalgic view of the political activism or the social movements of the ’60s and early ’70s?
WOZ: I have to think, because I was not an activist. I was not going to be an activist, but I would hang around and watch and see these groups of people, what they were doing, and of course, philosophically I agreed with their intent. I also agreed with their thinking, that they were right and the authorities, from the government on down were wrong, and “a”, wrong in terms of lying, and (“b”) just wrong in terms of misleading people’s thoughts on what was really going on. So I’m nostalgic sometimes. It’s just that I (inaudible) nostalgic, but it affected my life forever in how I would think about things, how I would visualize authority, you know, I’m very anti-authority. I visualize police, military, government, and I’m for the good when I see it, but I’m really opposed to the bad, and unfortunately the bad usually gets covered up with lies.
Q: Is it possible for activists to kind of get stuck in a philosophical rut?
WOZ: (Laughing) I’m not sure what a philosophical rut is. Yes, I think so. You should always be willing to look at new facts, just like I did with Mario Savio. Look at new facts and re-judge things. That doesn’t mean you change your values. Your personality and your values don’t change throughout life. It takes major, major events to cause a change after you’re twenty-some years old, young twenties. You’re gonna be pretty much that person forever, but you should be still open to even to changing your views. Maybe even as far as becoming (for example), instead of a liberal, a conservative, but studying and you should go with the truth as you see it. Not only that. You don’t have to prove anything to anybody. Just, if you believe it in your head, whatever you believe, that’s good and right and that’s going to make you happy, and happiness is the measure of life.
Q: So would you say that you’re not religious in the conventional sense?
WOZ: Exactly. However, I’m kind of spiritual inside. I have a lot of philosophies of how to be a good person, how to treat people, and I’ve worked them out, thinking over and over, reflecting inside my mind the way shy people do, and I was very shy, and coming up with my own little keys and rules for life, and they stayed with me, very, very deep core – [recording stops]
Q: Can we have morality without religion?
WOZ: I was never in a church. Actually, I’d never go to church. It actually came to play a great deal in my life, because I was in college and the VietNam War was going on and you had to prove you were a college student, so instead of filing form number 1049, or whatever, I filed my report cards. San Jose draft board votes 5 to 3 to make me “1A,” eligible for the draft for one year. Oh God, and to fight it, you know, I don’t mind being shot at, but I would never shoot at someone else. So I was a conscientious objector, but you weren’t allowed off unless you were in an official church. Well, to me going to an official church means saying the same words, singing the same song, saying everything the same time as everyone else. That’s following, that’s not leading. I wasn’t going to just go and be one more follower, you know, I want to be a thinker. So I didn’t have a church, and eventually the draft lottery came out and I got number 325 out of 365, so I was going to be safe for my year. The next week the draft board sends me a notice saying they’re granting my student deferment, and that meant they could make me “1A” in a later year. So I just lost all faith in the government being for the people at that point.
Q: Well, what would it take for you to regain faith in the government?
WOZ: Well, seeing a lot different things than I’ve seen my whole life (half-laugh). You could say oh, maybe I’m biased and saw it in certain ways, but no, I look for government going out to be helping people who need help. Starting with the poor, starting with the desperate, but not just giving them temporary money or something. Finding ways to really bring them up. Maybe you can’t bring the poor people up to where they will be working and be contributing to society like wealthier people today, but the young poor children, having ways that they come up, really getting full, as well educated as anyone else. If the government were doing that – and also when people have bad times. Somebody has a bad medical situation. The government helping those people that need the help. The government helping people who have car crashes, who lose their house, lose a job. I believe in all these things, and I think that a lot of people will say: “Oh my gosh, that’s socialism. Governments do things horribly. Governments are so horribly inefficient. The private sector does things well and uses money well.” Oh my God. Look at health care. Health care in this country. We’re the most privatized of all the modern nations. All the rest are more socialized with more things like universal health care than we have, and in our country it costs twice as much for half the benefits of all those other countries. We’re way off the list, off the line. So we’ve done horribly in the private sector. It’s not efficient for money.
Q: Do you have an opinion on economic theories, like Milton Friedman’s, or things like what is called “market fundamentalism,” or neoliberalism, or (concepts like) “corporatocracy.”
WOZ: I don’t – I never studied them, so I don’t have an opinion. I’d have to really do a lot of reading to be able to – I’ve just decided in my life, I didn’t want to become corrupted by money, so I never read financial papers. I don’t do buying and selling of stocks. I don’t want to be super-wealthy. I’m not super-wealthy. It’s just part of my life that I just want to rule out, because I don’t admire the people who get up to the top. They’re just thinking of becoming more and more wealthy, instead of helping other people at the bottom have good lives.
Q: Do you ever invest in start-ups? If students come to you with ideas for a start-up, would you possibly invest in it?
WOZ: In the past I did some of that. I don’t have that much money anymore. So I would do that all over the place in the past. I’d just give them, even if it’s maybe to go to college or give them computers. Even a college, I might give them a lab of Macintoshes. That’s just what I believed in. But now what I do is I give them my time. I talk to them. I give them any advice I can think of how they should proceed towards their goals, and I try to inspire them and share stories. So, sort of mentorship stuff, all the time, because I believe in young people, like Steve and I when we were in our college days, that’s what we were developing into doing the great things we were going to do, and when I see other people like that, doing that, that is so important to society as well as to those people themselves.
Q: How about the movie Facebook. Did you see that movie?
WOZ: The Social Network?
Q: Yeah, about Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg...
WOZ: Yes, right. The Social Network was, I think it won movie of the year. But you know what? Pirates of Silicon Valley, the TV series, was a lot more entertaining and interesting and it would have been movie of the year, but it was never a movie, and they’re going to make these movies about Jobs now, so they have the potential to get there, too. [Note (8/18/13): See the movie “Jobs,” starring Ashton Kutcher.] I saw that movie and kind of walked out very saddened by a picture of Mark Zuckerberg not being totally honest with some people. And to me, honesty is the apex of all good. You have to be honest, and if you’re doing something, and not quite telling these other financers that – You’re not working on their products and you’re going off and doing your own, you’re not – If you’re hiding stuff from them, that’s when you know that what you’re doing is wrong. When you believe in what you’re doing’s right, you talk about it. You don’t hide it. So I did feel a little bit of bad will when I walked out of the movie towards how Zuckerberg had left some people behind, but I think from what I read he made a – (inaudible) quite a bit in later years, because they got very wealthy from amounts of stock they got, or whatever.
Q: How about Ron Wayne? Are you still in touch with Ron Wayne?
WOZ: Yes, I am, now and then. Ron was a very honorable person and he always will be, and he’s very, like some people have very dedicated, absolute true to their core. I’m one of those people, and Ron is that way. He has no money. He’s kind of just living barely on some Social Security or something, but the sort of person he is, I admire. He just stuck to his goals all his life. They were very arch-right-wing conservative, you should only hold gold at home and a lot of these other principles, there should be no welfare, probably, but when I met him that absolutism talk sounded very intelligent to me. Here’s a guy that knows stuff and Steve and I are just young. Here’s a guy who could solve disputes. He knows how business works. But yeah, he sold out pretty cheaply. He might have made – on the average he might have made the right decision selling out, because it was a point where Steve and I had no money or savings accounts or relatives or friends that could loan us money, and we were getting thousands of thousands of dollars of parts – tens of thousands of dollars of parts, (inaudible) his credit, and then we had to build up computers real fast, sell the computers for cash to pay off the parts. You see the risk? If we didn’t get paid and we owed like let’s say twenty, thirty thousand dollars, they wouldn’t be able to get any from Steve or from me, and Ron Wayne, being an adult at the time, and he had his gold in his mattress, you know, or a safe, as he says. I mean, they’d get the money from him. So maybe that was one of the reasons that he just didn’t feel like he, you know. I don’t know. He had enough of the company. He had all hundred percent of the risk and (inaudible) percent ownership of the company, and it was only a partnership then. If (inaudible) had stayed, he would have accompanied us with that same percentage, as we moved our partnership into a corporation.
Q: I read about how you created that intercom system with the other teenagers in the neighborhood.
WOZ: Yep, great memories of life.
Q: What about teenagers today? Do you see anything like brand new on the horizon that teenagers today might be getting into?
WOZ: Oh, my God. Everything on the Internet from Facebook to other little things. Everything they discover and share with their friends and get on and send some messages and learn how to pull some little stunt here and there. Yeah, I think there’s an awful lot of room for playing around the way we did with our wires. It depends on how you make it, how you make your Facebook page look. You know, it’s one element of creativity that they’ve got access to. The amount of creativity is in your brain and it wants to find its way out, and it finds it out in the patterns of the day. In our day we did have a lot of electrical parts that we could connect together and get things to happen, and nowadays it’s just different ways.
Q: Do you have a sense of something brand new on the horizon that may be something that we can’t predict, maybe something like nanotechnology or something along those lines?
WOZ: The things that you can’t predict, because if you could predict it, a million people already would have already predicted it with all their financial resources and the big companies and their research, and they’re being paid to predict. So a lot of surprises like Apple and Facebook and Google, they come about without any expectations, and it’s usually young people, because young people aren’t hung up by the way things have been done in the past. Here’s something possible, and this one makes sense to me, even though it didn’t exist before. So – I forgot what the question was.
Q: Well, I mean, do you have a sense, you know, just a sense that there’s something new on the horizon?
WOZ: Yeah, I do. So you can’t know what it is, but there’s always – there’s so much new on the horizon. Think about all the things that are real major. That’s what you’re going to notice. There are little niches, like is there a new way to make a lampshade, but things that every single person does. They all have homes. They all have cars. They all have television. They all listen to – go to concerts. Any of these areas, somebody could think of ideas that would totally disrupt things, shut down the old businesses eventually, over time, and replace them with something new, you know, the way RIM and Nokia kind of are being shut down with all the smartphones. So there’s always something new possible, and there’s so many categories of life open. The mobile world really makes it possible, mobile electronics? Because in the old days you could think of: What could I do with a computer? But you only thought of what can I do with a computer in one location, and you never thought: What can I do with computers on everybody, all the time, everywhere they are? And we’re re-thinking out every little aspect of life, how we live it, because of that, and everything is coming out different, and at first, it’s just, how can the mobile app give access to all these big things in fixed locations? But eventually everything’s going to be much, much more mobile and the ideas of how to implement every little idea that has to do with buying things you want in life or real estate, having things, communicating with people. And on the Internet you can also combine a lot of things. If you’re Internet-based on these mobile devices, the mobile device is in contact with a server in a data center. The server is actually doing most of the information processing. It’s got all the storage of information, and the entire Internet is in the hugest storage ever. And it has the processing, and then it sends back the results that you would want to see. The biggest (inaudible) of all that’s real obvious is not to learn how to program an iPhone. Learn how to program the iPhone and create the website that is the other half of the formula, and then every company in the world wants to bring these mobile devices into how it operates its business. Every school, every university. A lot of universities now are passing out iPads and iPhones to every single student, just realizing that, if it’s a part of their life, this technology, they know how to live in it, we’d better become connected to it as well.
As far as other technology that nobody would expect, I would love to see chips, like we have chips today doing all our electronics work, chips that work on photons instead of electrons, but that’s been a 35-year goal of mine, and I just keep hoping that this research breaks through and it becomes possible. It’s hard to say, because making chips is such a huge operation that has evolved over decades. The number of steps to get a little more performance, a little more density of parts on a chip has gone on for so many, so many stages. It’s hard to say when you can apply that same thinking to a whole new technology like photon chips, but photon chips would be much faster and use much less power, and that’ll take us further in life.
Q: Do you think the time is ripe – Is the time ripe to create like another Apple ][ computer, like an open computer, but using modern components?
WOZ: It’s a little more difficult now, because I think you’ve gotta think out complete solutions, and there are, of course, a lot of hobbyist little computers, Raspberry Pi and Arduino that a lot of it, the do-it-yourself builder guys are going with? And that’s where it’s going to start, with those guys that build it themselves, but I think you gotta almost have a team of young people that, you know, come up with a new great operating system, and they’re based around visual displays, the sorts of things that are going to be common even in the future. Voice is so very, very important. So often, I’d much rather speak into – speak messages into my phone than type them out on a keyboard. I’m so inefficient at that. Voice operation and just saying things the natural human way, and I used to say, in the Siri I would speak: What are the five largest lakes in California? And I’d get the answer, but then after Apple bought Siri I would get all these lake-front properties, sales places and crap? Well, why doesn’t it see a phrase, like: What are the five largest. “Five largest” is a relationship. Wolfram Alpha is the search engine that deals with relationships. Why didn’t it know to go to Wolfram Alpha for the answer? Why did it go out there and try to do Google-ish type answers? So I think there’s a lot of room to just understanding natural text, and still, even just on a keyword level, the simple little keywords and phrases like “five largest” that very young programmers could sit out and, you know, write a large program on today’s modern, fast (inaudible) computers, that really understands sentences and what the person really wants for answers, better than is being done today. I think that’s a huge area to get into.
Q: Is that like the Semantic Web?
WOZ: It probably is. I don’t know what “Semantic Web” means (half-laugh). You know, I’ve heard the phrase so many times and I just don’t know. The Web – you gotta look at it – the Web is – the Internet really is – the number of nodes is roughly equivalent to the number of neurons in a brain, and the number of Internet connections – network connections, is roughly the number of synapses in a brain, so it’s no surprise that the first time we replace the brain was with the Internet. We’ve replaced part of the brain, where you used to ask difficult questions to a smart person. Now you ask them, difficult questions, to Google and you get tons more answers back, if it’s about things, and so the Internet sort of replaced part of the brain anyway.
Q: Do you think we’ll be having major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence?
WOZ: I absolutely do, because I think that’s very important and human beings want to speak naturally the way they speak to a human, and computers don’t understand it yet. Artificial intelligence hasn’t made but the smallest steps, looking for some keywords and I think there’s a lot of room to improve that. I think we’re gonna get there, and you know, Raymond Kurzweil predicts a singularity in 40 years, and I never want to go out thinking that far ahead, but I’m kind of, actually that’s one case where I’m kind of convinced he’s on the right track and in 40 years our computers are going to be conscious.
Q: What about the merging of man and machine, cybernetics, do you think there’s something we should be careful about, or jump into more quickly?
WOZ: Cybernetics?
Q: You know, like hooking a computer up to your brain and stuff like that.
WOZ: Oh, no (half-laugh), I’m not into that. Although, it’s probably going to happen when it’s an adaptable. But, you know, thank God I don’t have to worry about that. Like, could you put chips in your eye that can see better than any human? And I’d probably say: I’ll stick with my human (capability), I just want to be natural, but if all the kids in school are going to do it, your kid’s going to do it, too. So you know, there’re going to be some devices that make our bodies work better. Obviously we have certain medical devices that let us live longer now, and we have crutches that help us walk if we need them, so we’ll take any technology that helps us to be a little stronger, be a little more super-human. Somebody’s running in the Olympics with artificial legs. Someday they’ll win it. Are we going to transfer the content of our brain, our knowledge, into a machine? That one (half-laugh), that one I don’t want to even think about. I don’t think it’s going to ever be possible. I don’t think we’re actually going to want to be able to look at a brain and see the wired pattern and duplicate it, because it just doesn’t follow the rules of things that we can explore. In other words, our memories change over time, and our brain abilities change over time, so that means that you’re going to find some weak, weak, weak links and connections, and I don’t think we’re going to transfer our intelligence to a machine.
Q: Do you think we’ll make big breakthroughs in parallel processing?
WOZ: Yes, I do, although parallel processing even is one of those things that just grows incrementally... and it doesn’t scale out exponentially. So, new breakthroughs in programming, like everything? I think it might be, and it might come partly from thinking about: how do we build machines that are like the brain? And psychologists will be involved. They’ll say the brain does so much multitasking. We’ll have each little processor simultaneously doing different tasks, and that’s more like a real brain, a lot of different tasks going on at once add up to the total. But nobody knows the formula of the brain yet. That’s what we’ve got to solve and I think we’re going to stumble onto it by accident. Like the Internet was not designed to be part of the brain. It turned out to be part of the brain by giving answers to important questions, but it wasn’t ever designed to be that from the beginning. It was just an accidental outcome we got.
Q: In the mid-Eighties there was talk about Japan becoming a world leader in supercomputing, but it never turned out. They didn’t succeed. Do you know why?
WOZ: Well it was at a time when Japan was doing very well economically, because they owned the world economics due to the technology of the VCR. All the VCRs were designed and actually built in Japan and they kind of owned the world. This was before South Korea sort of took over those categories of things. And then the United States came back with personal computers and operating systems and we were the economic power of technology, so we had the biggest supercomputers, and now who knows where it’s going to go, but it’s probably going to wind up with China.
Q: Do you have a general opinion about the economy in China?
WOZ: That it’s growing very rapidly. It’s the healthiest economy in the world for growth, same – them and South Korea, and just in terms of the number of people, I expect them to be sort of setting the spotlight of even scientific research and things in the future.
Q: How about Steve Jobs? Do you think that if he would have had surgery that he would still be alive today?
WOZ: I don’t ever think about that. I don’t think about that. I don’t know what the odds are of the approach he took. I don’t know much about the approach he took. I don’t know of the odds of the surgery. It’s not something you want to go back and think about. He’s just as alive today in my mind as ever.
Q: Can you elaborate?
WOZ: Well, his – basically his principles and ways of running a company, Apple, and setting up a great company and what he stood for will be his legacy forever.
Q: How about the way he joined forces with Bill Gates when he came back?
WOZ: I knew a little more inside, but I don’t want to talk about that now.
[End interview]
Note: After the interview, Steve and Janet headed out for a Segway adventure in South Lake Tahoe, CA.
