Tony Fadell AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez Tony Fadell was a creator of the iPod and is founder of Nest, the technology company recently acquired by Google for $3.2 billion. His new mission? Giving us thermostats and smoke alarms for the smartphone generation.

He spoke at the Hay Festival about Apple, driverless cars and what he has learned about the world of technology.

It really started from when I was about three or four.

My grandfather was an educator, a superintendent of a school district in Detroit. He taught different trades to the youth of the time. He took me and my brother under his wing when I was very small and trained us how to build bird houses and repair lawnmowers and bicycles and all these things. And he taught us that a human made these things, and a human can make them better. Don't be defeated. Go and try it for yourself.

It was very interesting working with Steve Jobs.

When we'd finished the first iPod and we had shown the world, literally hours after it was shown to the world we were back in the lab talking about what was not right, what we needed to do to fix the next version. Literally, hours later. We always said, celebrate for microseconds and let's move on and continue our work of perfection. And that happened time and again.

With the iPod, I went and did all of the research over six to eight weeks.

I pulled together the storage, the batteries, the schematics and the pricing, put it together in a package, made a Styrofoam model, weighted it with my grandfather's fishing weights and then made two other models because with Steve you always had to make three – two that were really s---. Then after six weeks of doing that day and night, I brought them in and presented them to Steve.

I made some buttons.

And [Apple executive] Phil Schiller, who is still at the company today, he brought in a wheel from a product and he was like, 'We need to have this on it'. I said, I know how that works. Ok, we'll roll that out as well. About seven months later we shipped the first iPod.

During the whole time of the development we were so stressed and Apple was really hurting at the time.

We were just so hopeful that this was going to take off. It was a huge risk. We were just in the computer business. And then when the iPod first came out people said, 'Wait, Apple in the music business? This makes no sense. It's horrible, it's too expensive, it's too big, it's all these things. It's going to fail.'

There is an Apple DNA.

Many of the employees were still there during the darkest times before Steve came back, and what happened is that when Steve came back he re-energized that culture. So that striving for perfection came out and that's when you saw the iMac.

Back in 2006 I started designing a house for my family.

I wanted it to be the most energy-efficient, greenest home. We were working on the iPhone at the time, and when I had the iPhone in my hand I thought, wait a second, this is going to be the interface to the world. Not today but maybe in 10 years.

Thermostats are mostly unloved.

They haven't changed since the Seventies or Eighties. And why haven't they been loved? Nobody has tried to strive for perfection. Usually the installers just say this is what you need. You don't shop for them like you do for smartphones. We wanted to make sure people are aware of these options and go where the smartphone shopper shops. And it should be as cherished as that smartphone. Now we're looking at all kinds of different unloved products in the home.

I've tested Google's "driverless" car. I'm from Detroit. I like to drive cars. But when you're in it, it's amazing.

We talk about the love of driving and we love driving on that Sunday afternoon, but there's a lot of mundane, everyday driving and most people in those situations when they should be paying attention, they're usually texting and they're setting themselves up for a real accident. So there has to be a natural blend of how we can have technology work on our behalf when we're in these non-humanistic traffic situations. I find it fascinating that people hear about driving and want to have control, but if you go back to when driving first started it was about carriages and someone else drove you, and you wanted to be in the back of the Rolls-Royce or the Bentley and have someone drive you. So I think we're going to have a full circle where it's not just a human but a human plus a computer working in tandem to drive.

When I read books, I read physical books because screens are in front of me all of the time. I want to get away from it.

It's a place I can go. And it's a full, visceral experience: you can smell the book, you can touch it. Even if we read on [smartphones] some notes pop up, your friend's here, there's a notification – it takes you away and doesn't allow your mind to get very deep into the experience of translating those words into images. And so for me, I really do feel the nostalgia. But there's also the convenience that comes with the electronic forms. I think we need to balance those.

When we got the telephone we didn't stop talking to each other face to face, it just happened to be more convenient. We have to make sure we're not losing our humanity with all this technology.

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