Tony Fadell is an engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat, and author of the new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:18 - Memories
8:14 - Apple II
16:52 - First business
20:56 - iPod
44:58 - Ideas
49:10 - Marketing
59:27 - PR and Comms
1:09:07 - Design
1:14:04 - Experts
1:20:06 - Steve Jobs
2:03:45 - Jony Ive
2:10:56 - Nest
2:21:14 - Advice for young people
2:25:31 - Startup
2:30:27 - Money
2:35:34 - Work-Life Balance
2:38:12 - Darkest moment
2:43:50 - Meaning of life

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It wasn't just a one-on-one, but could be Steve against the team going, we need glass instead of plastic on the front face of the iPhone, and we're going to do this.

And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details, but he could see in our minds that we're like, yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably, but man, it's really putting us in risk.

And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks.

The following is a conversation with Tony Fadell, engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, the iPhone, and the Nest thermostat.

And he's the author of the new book, Build, an unorthodox guide to making things worth making.

More than almost any human ever, he knows what it takes to create technology ideas, designs, products, and companies that revolutionize life for huge numbers of people in the world.

So it truly is an honor and pleasure to sit down with Tony for a time and look back at 1 heck of an amazing life.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, Here's Tony Fadell.

When did you first fall in love with computers, or let's say computer engineering and design?

I first fell in love with computers and programming was in a summer school class in fifth grade in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan.

It was a simple basic programming class, but the basic programming class was not like you might think it was.

So literally it was, you know, the cards, the stack of cards and you would use a number 2 pencil and you would put in your program line by line and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked and no errors and what have you.

And you'd take that set of cards and you'd put it on this reader and it was, and it would go off to an IBM microcomputer somewhere in the, back then the cloud.

And then you would sit on a Texas instruments, paper terminal, and it would just literally, I was just, I could write things and I could program this machine to do stuff.

And it was nowhere near sexy, there was no graphics, right?

The cards were so cumbersome that if you got 1 thing wrong or out of order, or a disaster, or you dropped 1 card, it would all fall apart.

It was, you know, what the basic commands were, but.

Oh, so when you say basic, you mean basic programming?

So you're writing basic programming language on paper.

And you're calling it programming, though.

Yeah, you're programming this computer in a remote location and it came back, so it was truly cloud computing in a way.

And the input and the program are separate, so the input to the program, or they go together.

Yeah, it goes in and it says ready, and then you can say run, and then it would run.

But to program it, you didn't type it because it was a printer terminal.

You would make the stack of cards and that would get it into the computer's memory.

The magic was that you could create, you had a language and you could create what you wanted to create, right?

You could create a world or what have you and have this interaction.

And you could compute things, you could do numbers.

So you realize like- So you can play video games.

You could play text games and then imagine them in your brain, right?

There's this meme I saw recently if you want to feel bad about yourself as a programmer.

Realize that 1 person wrote Railroad Tycoon.

So from scratch, and for people who don't know, it kind of looks like a SimCity type game.

It's a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads.

And there's a nice graphics, it's three-dimensional, all that kind of stuff.

All the things, all the rich, colorful things you would imagine for a three-dimensional video game all written in assembly, meaning the lowest level code next to binary, which is fascinating.

And you had to notice the magic at that low level at that time.

You didn't have all the graphics, you didn't have all the APIs and all the sample codes, no stack overflow, no internet, none of that.

You just had, you had to know registers, you had to know the op codes, and you had to imagine the world in your brain of the memory structures and everything.

There's no visualization, you visualized it all yourself, right?

And so that was magic, But then the next part of the magic of where I got hooked even further was like, I'm doing these little things.

And then electronic arts came out for the Apple II.

So I got an Apple II and electronic arts came out and I was programming and doing basic and making my own games.

But then there were 2 games that really blew my mind.

1 was pinball construction set, and the other 1 was music construction set.

And these were both places where I could create pinball games and I could create musical scores, because I love music, and I could then play them, right?

And so when you had that, you were like, oh, this is something very different.

So I could create myself, but then there was others that create tools so you could create at a visual level.

And then you would read the backstories, because electronics arts back in the day, it was 1 programmer who would program those things, you know, each of those things, and you could read their backstories.

It was literally like a musician or someone else, like you could read Rick Rubin's, like, here's the thing.

They tell you all that stuff, And there was 1 guy who wrote music construction set.

He wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old.

And I went, Oh my, if he was able to do this and had published, right, and this amazing tool was created, I'm like, what could I do?

And so then it just kept building off of that.

But really it was those seminal things, first the introduction and then the power through programming and turning these things into what you wanted to turn it into.

And you didn't have to be 40, 50 years old and have PhDs, and then I was like, okay,

I wish we did that with programmers, where we treated them like artists, we would know the backstory these days, today.

Or we'd, not just programmers, engineers.

Yeah, like all the things about a product that I think we love are the little details, and there's probably a human being behind each of those details that had their little inkling of genius that they put in.

That's always sad to me when I, because obviously I love engineering and I interact with companies and they, you know, autonomous vehicles, something I'm really interested about.

And I see that companies generally, and we'll probably talk about this, but they seem to want to hide their engineers.

Like engineers hold the secrets, like the great secrets.

But then the result of that is you don't get to hear their stories, the passion that is there behind the engineers, and also the genius.

There's a difference between the stuff that's patented, like the kernel of the idea, and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea.

And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects a little bit more.

What was the first computer you fell in love with?

Like the product, the thing before you that was a personal computer?

So the Apple II was something I was just lusting over.

You know, it was, I think it was at the time it was the person of the year, maybe it was that year, I don't remember what.

Well, Apple II was the person of the year?

Yeah, for My Magazine back in, I don't remember when, but it was around that same time, I was so young.

But there was the Apple II, and I didn't know what it was, but I knew about tools, because my grandfather taught me all about tools and creating things, right?

And I saw this thing, and I had that IBM experience, that terminal experience, and I'm like, oh, I could have that at home, right?

And the only thing that was really talked about in our circles was the Apple II.

So I was like, I'm gonna make as much money as I can this summer, and my grandfather said, because he helped me learn all about tools and build things together, I will match whatever you make so you can get this computer.

So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy.

Cadding actually for the families at the country clubs in the town where we lived.

And did whatever I could and that end of that summer we got my Apple II and I you couldn't tear it away from me It was my my friend.

The design choices the ideas behind it or is it just that it exists?

Or the very idea of a personal computer is the brilliant design choice?

Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool in my house and I could use it anytime I wanted.

You either loaded software that you got from someone, or you created it yourself.

And then there was the whole other thing which started happening, which we were doing, and this was kind of like MP3s and stuff, we were sharing software.

So you built this community of sharing software.

You'd never use it all, but it was just that fun thing of like, I'm gonna get all this other stuff and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it and see behind the scenes.

So you really had a sense this was your world and you owned it, right?

And you could like literally go into every register.

We didn't have all those security layers like we do now.

Like you could really touch bits and you could poke bits and you could make this light turn on and you know, and the geek assignment just lit up.

Now, it's so abstract, people don't even understand.

Like usually, some programs don't even understand memory.

It's like now there's all this security that you should have, but it's like the adults all showed up to the party and now you can't have all the fun.

You know, this was the thing where if the power went out, you lost your whole program.

You might've worked a whole day on it and if you didn't press save at every other line and you were to save, save, save.

And it would like, grr, grr, the word, the disk drive or the tape drive, grr, grr, grr.

Like every single step was contemplated because if you didn't, you lost maybe a ton of work.

So a lot of the magic was in the software.

The fact that you could have software, the fact that you could share software, the community around the software, it wasn't necessarily the hardware.

The second step around the hardware was I got things like the mocking board, which the mocking board paired with the music instruction set, you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes and it was a synthesizer in the Apple II.

So you would plug in this card and you'd go, oh my God, look at this, and it would, you know, you could start generating cool sounds.

You're like, it was a Moog, you know, like a Moog in a way, early Moog.

And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds that are very cool in the 80s.

Yeah, the 8-bit, you know, chiptunes, right?

And then, you know, when you wanted to add a joystick, you had to pull a chip out and you had to plug in a dip socket to put in a joystick.

And then I was like, oh, and then I had to get more memory.

So then that turned into a company, actually, from that, but it was, and a hardware software went at that.

But it was all about modifying this thing in every way.

First was software, and then you started gaining confidence, and then I got a little bit more money and stuff, and then you could get into the hardware and wire things.

And then the Apple II came with all the schematics.

Right, so in the back, in the early Apple IIs, you could open up and all the schematics were there.

So You purchased the Apple II and the schematics come with it.

That's an interesting choice from a company perspective.

Ah, I wonder what they, so that was intentional.

This is for the cutting edge folks too, or especially

only the cutting edge, it was geeks for geeks.

So we were like, oh, how did they make it?

It just, Apple II became more packaged up and had a little bit better software, right?

Came with basic and then, you know, so it was really, it was what we might think of as a raspberry pie today or something like that, but not with so much software.

It was literally, and all the chips were out there, so you could inspect the buses and the, right?

So I guess that's the idea behind stable, big projects in open source, like on GitHub, that you have the schematics there, and it's kind of a product, but I wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing.

Like, we're going to release this to a small set of people, self-selected perhaps, that are kind of the makers, the cutting edge folks, the builders, the at home engineers.

Like in some way, what Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self driving is kind of like that.

But that has to do more with you, how safe of a driver you are versus how much of a tinkerer you are because you don't get to tinker.

I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do for really cutting edge technologies?

Especially you're interested in hardware stuff.

Why don't more companies do that kind of thing, you think?

I think back then it was about a community and serving that community of builders.

Now this is about people who want to get the experience and want it really simple and easy.

And so there's the audience, or they believe the audience is small, who would value those other things that we're just talking about.

But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi and all of these other little boards, right, there's a whole world more than I've seen.

Like, it's amazing what you can do now with these little kits and the software that's created.

And so there's a whole nother, I think, another batch of makers and builders that are coming up through the ranks.

And if we look at YouTube channels and stuff, right?

They take these little boards, they hack them, then they print out parts on their 3D printer, assemble them, and they create robots and what have you.

It's just not as, you know, it's just not as, I guess, raw as it used to be.

But it's there, and it's really expanding around the world, and that's really nice to see, because, you know, it's a whole new generation who are empowered.

I think there's a semi-dormant genius amongst millions.

So like Raspberry Pi is revealing that a little bit.

It's probably, I wouldn't be surprised if it's several million Raspberry Pis that have been sold and shipped.

And it's kind of this quiet storm of genius, brewing of engineers.

We don't get to hear it because they're not organized.

I mean, we get to hear it through Inklings here and there.

Like I said, YouTube, there's little communities that are local and so on, but if they were organized, if a leader would emerge, no.

Okay, so when did you first start to dream about building your own things, designing your own products, designing your own systems and software and hardware?

Well, in high school, there was a company that a friend of mine founded, and I was the second employee, it was called Quality Computers.

And it was a mail order, mail order, because there's no e-commerce then, there's no internet again.

You either mailed in your little coupon and you said this is what I wanted to order or you wrote in to get a catalog and delivered to you.

Turnaround time in this stuff was like, from the time you wanted to the time you bought it was maybe 8 to 12 weeks.

That was just the normal way of getting things.

So Quality Computers was a mail order for Apple II and it was software and all kinds of accessories.

So hardware accessories, so hardware plug-in cards, joysticks, all this stuff.

And what we noticed was there were accelerators or memory cards.

And to be able to use those cards, you had to actually go and change the software you used to access this new memory.

So you literally have to go and you took the program that you had, let's say it was Apple Works, which was like an early Microsoft Office or something like that.

And you had to literally change the code and you would install these patches to then take advantage of the hardware.

So what we started creating was software on top of it to do the automatic installation of all of these patches.

So we made it much easier to take new hardware and the existing software you have and expand it into this new world.

So it was creating tools and the really great customer support.

And we started getting a lot of orders because we had the software make it easier to install to give them the superpower.

And at the same time, you know, they would be able to change their software and have a new world that wasn't existing from the companies that were creating the initial products.

And so it was more of that, and then that happened with hard drives.

So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple II to like read, because you could get really fragmented, so I wrote that piece of software and we sold that through the company along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties.

So that all happened in 12th grade, freshman year of college.

So you wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade for the laptop.

There were certain inner loops were assembly and other loops, actually there were really early Pascal, no, C compilers.

Is it to create a thing, experience that is simpler and simpler and simpler, thereby more accessible to a larger number of people?

Like what, or did you just like to tinker?

No, no, no, it was 2 things, really, because 1, we wanted to sell more hardware and software, right?

was like, oh, make it easier for the user, And then the other thing was, because I was also manning the customer support line, people would call and I'd go, this doesn't work.

And I'm like, oh, I gotta go fix the hardware and software.

Or I gotta fix the software to make the hardware and the installation process better.

So my whole world was out-of-box experience from when I was in high school.

Because I had to man the customer support line, pack the boxes, and write some of the code while we were doing, while Joe, Joe Gleason, who was the founder of Quality Computers, he was off doing the mark, the ads, placing the ads for the mail order, making sure we were running the credit cards, right?

It was 2 of us, and then it turned into a third, and then we hired another person from high school to like pack boxes so I could stay on the customer support line or doing the software, right?

So we'll jump around a little bit, but you said you love music.

What were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod if we jump forward?

You know, if you look at the history of technology, there's, I mean, not just the product, but the idea is truly revolutionary.

Maybe it's time has come, but just if you look at the arc of history, sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity.

to be able to put that in your pocket, make it truly portable is fascinating in a way that's truly portable.

So it's digital as opposed to sort of like a Walkman or something like that.

were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod?

You know, I was in love with music since I was a kid.

Just loved music from, I think, second grade when I got my first albums and stuff like that.

This was the Stones, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Stix, Ted Nugent, you know, just the real American, and British rock and roll, right?

There's a bunch of people listening right now.

And this was second, third grade, fourth grade.

And then we moved back to Detroit and I loved listening to the radio station because there was all kinds of crazy music because you'd have an amalgam of rock and then funk and R&B.

But if I had the clock radio on, parents would go, go to sleep, stop that, turn that stuff off.

So I hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it.

And then I could listen to it all night and no 1 could hear me, right?

And I could just sit there and, you know.

What would you say is the greatest rock, classic rock song of all time?

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Tony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, Nest, Steve Jobs, Design, and Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #294