The AR Show: Robert Scoble on Remorse, Growth, and Steve Jobs' Last Device

7:17PM Jan 7, 2021

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Robert Scoble

Keywords:

apple

headphones

device

put

talk

tesla

world

people

companies

audio

ai

rackspace

social contract

understand

camera

vr

marching band

started

facebook

sensor

Welcome to the AR show where I dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. today's conversation is with Robert Scoble. Robert is a futurist strategist and the author of four books about technology. His latest book is the infinite retina co authored with arena Cronin, which explores the emerging era of spatial computing, including AR VR, robotics, autonomous vehicles and more. Robert has spent his career at the intersection of technology and media working as a journalist and evangelist and a futurist, most notably at Microsoft and Rackspace. During that time, he's interviewed more than 1000 people from research labs to startups to major tech companies, including the likes of Tony Shea, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. The interviews mixed with his own insights formed the basis for the four books on technology trends he's published in the last 14 years. But in 2017, he was accused of sexual harassment by several women, which became public during the metoo movement. What Robert did was wrong, and he admits as much in our conversation, he goes further to describe the necessity for better behavior and better more diverse company cultures throughout the tech industry. He seeks to counsel founders on the dangerous mindsets that lead to sexual harassment and the damage it causes to victims, their careers in the companies where they work. He also counsels founders on the risks of loneliness, mental illness, and addiction, which are all far more common than many of us realize, jump ahead in the episode to one hour, four minutes and 20 seconds. For this part of the discussion. We start our conversation talking about Roberts latest prediction about Apple and their plans to create the next great spatial computing device. This interview was recorded a few days before the recent Apple announcement about the air pod Max, a device that forms the basis of Roberts predictions. He describes something with immersive spatial sound and visuals that can create an entirely new type of experience. We also talk about Google Glass, and its violation of an implicit social contract we have with each other, as well as the role of Tesla in the broader definition of spatial computing. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show calm, let's dive in. Sorry, can you tell us the story behind the story of you coming out of the shower, or having the photo taken in the shower with Google Glass? What was happening there?

My wife and I were fooling around. No, I I wanted to see if they were water resistant, and so that I could take them out in the rain. And people would know that they would survive a little water, you know, and I was just like, hey, let's do a picture in the shower. You know, because I live in California. If I have to wait for a rainy day to prove that's why I'm gonna wait a long time. So people don't know this about journalists, when you get a new device, you're constantly trying to find something new to say about it. Because in that first week, everybody is written about, right, everybody knows about it. So I was trying to come up with something with a new, a new angle to chew on for a bit, you know, which is water resistance. And my wife took that picture and put it up on Facebook. And when we shot it, we had no clue what was going to be our number. It's been seen 10s of millions of times, right? it magically took that image and put it in their patent see. It's gonna be the only thing that survived 1000 years from my life, because the patent system that's gonna be kept around.

It'll be your legacy.

That'll be my legacy. He took a stupid shower photo with this weird thing on his face.

Did you already know the team at Google before he had gotten the glass or to get to know them more after?

The way I got it. I was in the front of Google's developer conference. And my friend, Vic Gundotra. You know, he was an executive who helped fund Android and help fund Google Glass. So yeah, they announced it and I ran and was one of the first ones in line to buy one for 1500 bucks. Right? And then the rest is history. Yeah, it's it's a real interesting device. I think about it a lot. And I think Apple learned a lot of lessons from it. And that's what they do. That's what Steve Jobs does. He He tells us TMZ on the pioneer, he gets shot in the back and then we take over his position in her position.

There we go. So what is it that Google got so wrong with the device?

They didn't understand the social contract that we have with each other? Right? when we're looking at each other, talking to each other? If you right now, if you pull out your phone and start looking at it, I would probably, you know, give you said I'd be like What, am I not worth talking to you you got something more important on your phone. Right. And that's the renegotiation of the social contract. It happens around dinner tables and stuff like that. But at least with the phone, I can see what you're looking at. And I can see what you're distracted by. Right? And there's no information at symmetry. So Google Glasses brought a bunch of new things to bear that it didn't know what to do. In short, they've launched it paddling, if they had launched it differently. Like if they said, this is gonna be a device just for, you know, construction crews that were or enterprise like, like, magically wants to, you know, say they aren't doing that. Nobody would have cared about it, right? Because the social problems don't happen in an enterprise. You know, if I'm wearing a device on my face to fly a plane, nobody's caring or running a factory, nobody cares, or doing a surgery, nobody cares, right? It's when I go out and hang out with normal people that these issues come up, right? That social contract issues. It also didn't do that much. And I fell in love with it real quick. I said this, this kind of device I'm never going to take off. And obviously I'm not wearing it right now. So I was wrong about that. But it did have some really interesting utility. It had a microphone close to your mouth. So you can always talk to it. Hey, Google, what's up? It had a camera on which got a lot of focus of attention, right. But the camera wasn't actually that good. And that's the downside of it. And site, had this thing failed, because it wasn't that good. It was early, and they were trying to put a lot of computers in a small, tiny space and do new things. Right. And it was early, I think the devices coming out in the next 24 months are gonna be completely quite different than that. So yeah, I went to Coachella one here. And it's to Google Glass guys behind me edit, you can see them at first. And to get right in front of me said I, one guy said to his friend, I have to get away from the Google Glass guys. And so I grabbed them, because I was like, what makes you nervous about this? Cuz this was even before all the all the glass holds, and all the people who got in fights at bars and stuff like that, right? And sort of turned the PR against it. But these two guys that could tell it and keep in mind, I'm in the middle of the Sahara tent with 10,000 people holding their phones,

are you wearing your Google Glass as well?

No, I wasn't even wearing it, then I didn't want to take on these social problems of having to explain what the things doing. Keep in mind, I've had people 100 deep lining up to try it. Right. I didn't want to deal with any of that. I want to go and enjoy music. I didn't want to go try to explain Google Glass 1000 people, you know, but a bit serious. These two guys behind me and two guys in front of me. And everybody's recording on their iPhone, or their phones, right? Their android phone or their iPad. Anyways, we're in the middle. Everybody's dancing and holding the phone recording everything everything's being recorded, everything's being recorded by them to right, they have professional TV cameras recording the audience as well. So there's no privacy in this way. It's like, it's like you're on TV, you're up on the screen. You know, everybody knows this, right? So I grabbed the two dads and go What, what? What is it that makes you nervous about this? Cuz that's really interesting. I'm a tech journalist. I want to know why you're all nervous. And he tried to blame it on the camera. And I'm like, dude, there's nothing wrong about the camera here. You're being recorded by 6000 other people's hands, you know. And in fact, they're better cameras on the iPhone. Now, seemingly today. They're way better cameras than they were, I think Google Glass. And they, they said I just thought and we unpacked on that. And that's how I learned about social contract. It's like, Oh, no, there's something going on here. That's that nobody can really explain to you, you know? I mean, who who talks about social contract? Yeah. And so that's why the camera got blamed, by the way, because people would have these uneasy feelings about it. And go, I don't know how to explain my uneasy feeling. So I'm going to blame what I can see, which is a camera aimed at me. Yeah, Apple's first device isn't going to have a screen.

Not gonna have a screen is gonna have a camera.

It might not have a camera. All right.

Tell me more about what you might have a LIDAR,

which to me and you is the same as a camera. But to the normal person. It's not a camera. Right? It's a 3d sensor. Right? Right. And most people don't know that. It's also a camera, you know, because 300,000 points a day that it can see around the world can see color and bring back a 3d image of your real house. Right. And in fact, I'm writing a post for Shortly before these things ship, or our Bible, let's put it this way. So probably next June, this thing's coming in March to do some time, from what I hear.

So tell me the whole story back up. And yeah, what is your perspective on what Apple is trying to accomplish maybe from a bigger perspective, given now that they've had seven years to study what Google has put out publicly, and of course, Google started before then delivering this thing. And we know that Apple has been working for years iterating internally on different versions of what some sort of headworn device would be many prototypes.

And this is what makes it really hard to figure out what Apple is actually doing. Because there's still a chance I'm wrong, right? There's still a chance that next next Christmas, they come out with a completely different device that I didn't see coming. Right. And you have plenty of prototypes to pull from. And they've been playing with this device for a long time. This is Steve Jobs last abuts. So maybe that should be the name of the show, Steve Jobs last night.

Just last device.

Yeah. Remember when he told Walter Isaacson in his book, his last book, I figured out TV, I figured out how to disrupt TV or change TV and improve TV. Right? This is the product. This is the product, you don't think it's a better Apple TV streaming service, you

think it's a fake one?

No, it's a place one, it's a headphone that's coming out next year, which has all the visual computers for augmented reality, and a 3d sensor collide. So it can see,

so describe the whole product that you think is coming. So it's a phase one device.

And over the ear headphones, like Mike dives and Sony, I should have brought them in here. So you can see the Sony, Sony over the ear headphones cost $450. They sound pretty good. You put them over yours, they sound better than these air pots right? In the band of the headphone. The first layer is a heat dissipator. And it's a metal that dissipates heat from the GPS and from the AI chip into the air. The second layer is and I'm one chip, which is made in a new manufacturing capability. That's a flexible motherboard. So that's pretty interesting new technology. The third layer from what I hear is a big ass battery that could last days. And so they solved all the problems of heat of speed, and of battery life by putting it in my head. And then a year later, they're gonna sell you a visor, that's gonna jack into the headphone with a bunch of magnets that are on the side, and a new optical connector that's going to light up to 4k Sony displays in front of you. But that's next year, that's 2022. So in 2021, we're gonna get the headphone first. And maybe we can look at visuals by holding up our phone, right? And see, you know, augmented reality world, the synthetic world and synthetic reality. Well, that output posit. Alright, so Apple is spending billions and billions 10s of billions of dollars on this product, right. So it's not just a pair of headphones, it's a major new product direction for Apple that they've been working on for 10 years, this new product direction is going to have a new search engine, it's going to have a new Siri, it's going to have a new 3d map of the world. And think about the map of the world. That's badass. I've been talking a lot of people about this. Apple is going to map out your house down to a millimeter, something like a millimeter resolution with its LIDAR. And it's don't know everything. I'm gonna stop right there. It's got to know everything about you. It's got to know where you left your keys, it's got to know what's in your drawer upstairs next to your bed. And you're going to be like what? Yeah, you're going to open every drawer when you're listening. And it's gonna do badass things, right? It's gonna, so I sold headphones for a long time. I, you know, I sold consumer electronics in the 80s. Right? I helped run a little family run store in Silicon Valley. And I sold audio equipment. I sold a lot of expensive speakers to people who wanted to hear separation between the instruments, right? So when you buy a $2,000 pair of speakers instead of a $500 one, that's the strings on the violin vibrating as somebody rubs it with about right, this new Hold on, you're going to put a band on your heart, and you're going to be able to walk between the members of the band and hear them right so think about walking, you know, having a mariachi band on your front lawn and you can walk between the guitar and the trumpet. And whatever else they're playing. You can grab the trumpet player and take him into the kitchen and drop them there and walk around him and he'll just stay in the kitchen forever until you move him somewhere else or or somewhere else, right? So that's just, that's just the Hello World app. Like, isn't this cool? Right. And so this has a lot of implications for the industry, that one, you have to understand the audio in a whole new way, right. And you have to nail an audio experience on the headphones to be in play for the visual experience that comes with the visor, months later, right. So it's, it's brilliant on Apple's behalf for a whole lot of reasons. This gives them the data to improve the LIDAR system, and remove noise from it. Because right now, it's noisy, right, when I scan my house, it has a lot of bumps and a lot of holes and a lot of blurry spots, right, that's noise. And we can see it right. People are scanning things all day long on Twitter, and sharing their 3d scanning to see it doesn't look perfect. Doesn't look nice. So Apple is gonna have 3d scanning your house for a year before they show it to you. And they're gonna be able to make that thing better and better and better and better over the year, they can just keep adding on to it and getting good scan new new things in your house. And they can overlay a range of new things on your house, once they have that 3d scan.

What sorts of things do you think they're gonna unlock with that understanding of the world?

Hey, Siri, I just won the lottery, and I want to redecorate my kitchen. What do you think? Oh, well, first, I get rid of the Berlin Wall. Like, what? What is it? Like, that's, how did you figure that out? But whatever, let's go for it. Right? And it's gonna know measurements in your room, it's gonna know, and minutes gonna say play your phone, and I'll show you what I would do with it. Right? It'll dress up your kitchen with all sorts of new stuff. New advertise this why search? That's not a feature, I'm

gonna buy it. I'm not gonna buy a pair of headphones, so I get better advertising. That's not my motivation.

Oh, really? Yeah,

that is not what I considering. So

I'm talking to Walmart about these headphones, you're gonna walk into Walmart, and it's gonna know what product you're holding in your hand what product you're looking at. And it's gonna be able to scan that and use the AI chip that's in in the headphone to recognize you're looking at a cookin. Right? And so now, with Siri, you're gonna be able to say, hey, Siri, how much is 20 of these on Amazon and see the comparison of the price? Right? Right there. Right? And you're gonna be able to say, should I buy this, this dress or this dress? That was gonna go? Well, your wife has a lot of purple pants that this one would go with? And she doesn't have anything that goes with this one here. You got me? How do you know my wife has purple pants. But it catalog everything in your house already. Right? It probably is not gonna deal with some of this right up front. Because it Apple is doing more human factor testing on this product than they've ever done before. Because a Google Glass. They know this freaks people out. They know this is a freaking technology. They know that giving a major corporation. Literally everything about you is scary, right? It's scary for me. And I'm and I'm sitting in a Tesla with a camera in my face. And another one aimed up my face broadcasting live on the internet, so. So this is going to be a scary product. And they're going to be very muted, and very controlling of who gets to touch the data, and what gets done with it, and what you can do with it. But Alright, so there's there's a whole bunch of things that I've seen in my career that are coming out. When I worked at Microsoft, a guy showed me an array microphone, and array array microphone, which was four microphones and a little bar, right. And if you have four microphones, even if you have only two, by the way, there's an array microphone in this Tesla car, there's an array microphone on the front of your iPhone, right? When you get two microphones, you can start focusing the attention of the microphones on things, if you know where they are. That's a big hit. Because right now, your iPhone doesn't know exactly where your mouth is, right? With with these new LIDAR devices, it's going to know down to the millimeter where your mouth is and where the sound is coming from. And it's going to be able to focus the microphones on the front of this eye here. There's up to nine microphones on this device. And it's going to be able to focus the audio on just your mouth. So let's say we're in a crowded bar, or a restaurant that's very, very noisy and we're having a conversation. It's gonna sound like this with our headphones on. You take the headphones off, you're gonna hear all the noise and all the dropping and dishes all that put them on. She had all I hear is you.

Right. And that's before the AI gets involved and starts figuring out what's the human voice and what's not and getting written. I'm using an app on that. I'm not on this zoom, but on my other zoom, called crisp, which listens to the audio stream with an AI and removes background noise like a vacuum cleaner right next to your computer, right? Because it knows that's not a human voice. So get rid of it. It's not interesting to zoom. Right? just destroys him, right, so get rid of the noise. So the headphone is going to do stuff like that. And it's going to be able to augment audio in your real world and bring a new noise cancelling. So there's some slides. My best friend is one of the 12 guys who built the iPhone for Steve Jobs. So we're starting to bet. And Brian Romell is actually the guy who explained this to me first, this strategy, he got a leak inside Apple, and then I confirmed it. So one of the slides is going to be something like seven dot one surround sound is great, infinite surround sound is better, right? Now, what do I mean by that? Apple is building a 3d model of your house, let's go scan your house, scan your front yard, if you go out in the front yard, if you take these things at a walk, it'll be it'll be scanning the world. And in fact, in my neighborhood, it doesn't even need to scan anything. Because Apple drove the mapping car down right street, and has the entire street in 3d already. And has the basics of this new database laid down already. So each millimeter in the world. So think about my tests, each millimeter around the world is going to have a virtualized microphone, a virtualized speaker, and a virtualized display, right. Because when we get the visor, we're gonna hear a coke cam talking to us, we're going to be able to move that cocaine around, and it'll still talk to us, right? It'll know where the pixel is on that cam. And it'll move it around and keep track of it. And it'll talk to us and it'll listen to us, it'll know where we're aiming our voice and our gestures, right? It's watching our hands. It's watching her eyes, watching her math. So, June of 2021, we're gonna see this headphone, I think we're gonna be able to buy it sometime before Christmas next year. And you're gonna know the visors coming.

They're gonna talk about the visor when they talk about the headphones, I think, I think so because they're gonna have to do, they're probably going to do this at WWDC next year,

right. And they have to talk to the developers on that the developers now, hey, here's a new emulator for the visor. Here's how to build software for it, here's how to use this new spatial audio capabilities, here's how to use the new noise canceling, here's how to use the new search engine, here's how to use Siri, in your apps, right? And so they're gonna have to explain how this all works to developers. And once you explain something developer, they're gonna find out all the secrets, right? They're gonna figure out, Okay, this product is bad. It's a lot a lot of new technology. So think about use cases that you might dream about building in this new world, a marching band, and put a marching band in front of your house walking down the street, and I'll hear it, like I hear a real marching band. And I'll be able to walk into the band and hang out with the tuba player. Right? I've done that it's fine. I used to be in a merchant imagining and audio experience like this, right? Where you can listen to upgrade in your street or something like that marching band down the street, the audio has to be recorded a little differently than it used to be maybe, right because there's an AI that can actually separate the trumpet player from the drum from the flute from the clarinet from the saxophone, right? each separate audio channel. And so so you're probably gonna get pretty good new spatial surround sound using AI. But I'm assuming it's better if you give it a really great source right from the start, right. And so, recording a marching band, you're going to have to record each instrument separately, put a microphone on each instrument, and you're going to have to put a microphone that only catches that instrument doesn't hear anything from a foot away. It's just recording that one instrument. And then you're going to bring those 50 or 100 audio tracks into an Apple product, and you're going to tell it what to look for and how to put each sound on with something. Right. So now think about a marching band on your spices, right you open up the drawer, you open up a cabinet where all you all your spices are your cayenne pepper or your salt, right and it can put a marching band member on each spice and blast you with And like, yeah, that's going, you could grab the pepper, and that's the stupid player. And you can put that on the coffee table and listen that you know, or just bring them all out and arrange them and have fun, right? And the glasses are gonna keep track of what sound is on each item. And you can reorganize or re remix an orchestra, right? or parent. So it's gonna be a lot of fun to think about, for startups or entrepreneurs. And then in 2022, we get the visor, and we're in full on into the new paradigm, that spatial computing paradigm, augmented reality paradigm. Right? Which, by the way, it's a pass through, it's a pass through device,

the visor is gonna be a pass through device.

Yeah. Yeah, just describe that. Okay. varjo, yesterday, announced a pass through VR headset with something that looks like 4k display, right? It's the middle of it's sharper than the outside. But, you know, your human mind thinks the whole thing is 4k display, it's pretty badass. The same thing is gonna be true in here. And by the way, the varjo is a VR device, if it's off. And when I say pass through, when it's off, when the battery dies, you can't see through the device, you're blind, the device goes black, and you have to flip it up to see. And by the way, this thing is going to have a way to flip up the visor into the headphone, the headphone protects the visor, and also lets you listen to audio in a shopping mall where the social contract problems can come true, right.

So in the band of the headphones, the the visor will be stored when it's out of use, and then I flip it down, yep, to engage, the experience is gonna be a video pass through. So my experience with the real world at that time is going to be all mediated through video camera, and the system in order to overlay You know, its interpretation of the real world plus whatever digital information on top of it.

Yes. So I tell people in this head done, you're not listening to real audio, and you're not seeing the real world. You're seeing Apple's world, you're seeing the map of the volumetric pixels around you, the 3d world around you, that Apple wants you to see. And it's gonna be pretty cool. Right? It's gonna do infinite things, right? SpongeBob on your family floor, you know, play a game with you. I don't know, whatever you can come up with either. It's right. But there's no, there's no end to what you can do visually, or with sound with this device, right? It's gonna be a music. But it's helpful to think that it's letting you see the apple world. It looks like the real world. But it's not the real world. It's the apple. Apple's building a digital twin of the real world, right? Or AR cloud, or whatever you could call this. I call it apple. Mirror, World Magazine called it mirror world. Kevin Kelly said it's a mirror. It's gonna be everything you see in the real world, but it's gonna be Apple's in the glasses. So that's it. That's something you're going to talk about with a lot of people over the next 18 months, right? Should we let Apple have this power? What does this mean for control people for knowing things about them? Yeah, let's talk about that probably don't even know about themselves, right? Hey, Siri, where did I leave my Phillips head screwdriver? Oh, it's in the garage on the third shelf? Right? How did it know that?

I think in many ways, it's all of our ambition to fully understand ourselves throughout the course of our lives and to and to come up with who that is, in reality. But when you think about you talk about this notion, me,

I'm an asshole.

We'll come back to that. But when you think about this, this challenge of data, we're talking about orders of magnitude more insight that an apple or whoever these sort of companies are going to be in this Facebook, then currently, Facebook has like Facebook already knows an absurd amount about those that use the social service. And there is not just your direct usage in your you know, what articles you click on and what you're viewing. They're collecting data and all sorts of interesting ways through your engagement with the social media stuff. Here. We're talking about an order of magnitude at least if not two orders of magnitude, more insight. Yes. How do we as an industry, we talk about social contract. This is part of that social contract? Yeah. How can we trust a company with this amount of data?

The answer I'm getting back from my research is, it's apple.

We can trust Apple because they have our best because they've done a good job with our data so far,

because I asked because I'm very honest with people. I'm going to write a post that says do not put these headphones on. You have one choice in New World, whether to put them around or not. If you put them on in three minutes, it's gonna know everything in your house. And I can explain how, and it's heroin, it's addictive, you're not gonna want to take it off. So your only choice is do you put it? Most people I talked to say, Oh, yeah, I'm putting it on. But don't care that just sucked up every literally everything in your life, it's gonna know what you're looking at, it's gonna know what you're eating, it's gonna know what you're holding in your hand, it's gonna know who you kissed, it's gonna know what you've touched, it's going to know where you leave things. Like, hey, Siri, where's my blue pair of Nikes? And they're in the hallway. But how do I know that? It knows everything. Let

me stop.

Let's just stop there. It's gonna know everything. And that is, to me, that's, that's a lot. My Apple Watch already knows my heart rate, which is a lot of data, right? There's a lot of data that we're going to be discovering in your heart rate, a decade from now. Right? And your oxygen mobile and your arm switches. Suddenly, if I'm breathing or not. Yeah, you wait, it's gonna know a lot more

is Apple, the only one then that can pull this off? When Facebook because Facebook is out there, they announced their own research platform in the headwaters device.

But Facebook does not have the trust, they don't trust anybody I talk to, we all use it. Most of us use it, you know, use messenger or Instagram or Facebook, or WhatsApp or one of their properties. We all use it. We don't love it, we don't trust it. And as we go into this new paradigm, right, which I wrote about with iryna, spatial computing, you're gonna want to choose things that you trust. Now, Facebook knows this. Facebook knows they don't have our trust, right? And they're trying to do things, you know, they talked with Kanye about privacy and right, and talk with you that they'll talk till the blue heads blue in the face. They know that they're not gonna win the apple customer away. Right? So really claiming, oh, there's a lot of people in the world that can't afford an Apple device, or don't even know about an Apple device, because they don't have Apple stores. And wherever they are, there's it. Right, which is really what Apple has Apple has stores and richest places in the world, right? 457 It's pretty cool. That'd be a big year, man. It's gonna be a big year,

Facebook plays the role of Android. Apple plays the role of apple in this next iteration.

Well, and Facebook is going to be competing with Google for Android, right? It's Google did Android and Google is working on these things? Do they bought pocos? by North and I know they're working on a variety of devices as well. Because here's, here's one slide, maybe not a slide. But this is something I'll write afterwards, after getting this series is still going to be dumb as a bag of rocks. But everybody's gonna think it's better than Google. Because all of a sudden, if I ask Siri or Google today, how big is this? Now you can see it's a coffee cup, right? made by a certain brand, right? And so you could probably figure out how big that is pretty quickly. By doing an internet search or two, and maybe looking at the 3d volume. Siri is going to know that I'm holding a coffee cup. So it's going to be able to answer that question. And it's going to know what that I'm looking at it, and that I'm holding it. Right. That's a lot of new data for search to make Siri look a lot smarter than she is.

She doesn't have better context based on these sensors.

Yeah, infinite context. She's gonna know you're in your, in your Tesla, right? I mean, as soon as you buy a 3d sensor in this car, it knows you're in a model three Tesla, right? Wasn't 3d shot, right? So a millisecond during the test. If you're in your kitchen is gonna figure out you're in your kitchen really quickly. As soon as you turn it on. You're in your kitchen because I can look around your kitchen and figure out your kitchen right? If you if you transport me into your kitchen, I probably can figure out pretty quickly that I'm in the kitchen. Right? There's an oven there's a refrigerator, there's a some freedom on the table. There's some cereal on the shelf, right stuff like that. Right? So I'll do a few things to look around for a few things. I know I'm in my kitchen versus my living room versus the bedroom or bathroom or closet versus outdoors. Right?

These If there's any chance that this this particular initial iteration of this product is headphone, all the compute in the in the band, the anticipation of having some sort of pass through video passengers that advisor system is meant initially and primarily as a video entertainment system for the living room. As opposed to an out and about everywhere sort of system.

When you when you get the visor 2020 Yeah, it kills off TV. You're not gonna watch TV anymore, or you're not gonna watch it the same way, right? Because let's say we walk into a restaurant together with this device on our neck. And we see a bunch of TVs playing a sport game. We don't care about the plane the Jets, because we're in New York, and I want to watch the foreigners. So we say hey, Siri, put all the TV supporting hours. Now you have a different team. You may like the dolphin. I'm a Broncos

bear. It's been rough.

Yeah, see? So you want to watch the Broncos game. So now we have three different games you can choose from right? You're watching the bronco game. I'm watching a very narrow game, I put the 14 I grabbed a virtualized TV and put it on my on our dinner table. And I can hear you just fine because the microphones are listening to you just understanding what audio to pass through to me. So I'm hearing you just fine. And I'm watching my favorite football game, and you're watching your favorite football game. And we're all having a fun time. Right? You're not gonna watch TV anymore. Not the same way. It's gonna be a virtualized TV, because you get a big screen in front of you, right? We're getting this with an Oculus quest you put on an Oculus quest. And you pull up big screen or one of these TVs or YouTube or whatever. And now you have a big virtualized screen. And it's great, right? That's why one reason I love VR is because it lets me virtualize my entire world, right? Then the virtual screens. Yeah, so this device is going to be the entertainment and services platform for Apple for a long time. So the visor comes out in 2022. Then in 2023, they come out with a lightweight pair of glasses that you can wear mountain biking or walking around a shopping mall or something like that. Playing with your kids,

that'll be more direct correlation to what we saw from Google Glass originally.

So the updated by Dec, I would say it's it's closer to a HoloLens but small, okay, right. So that's where we're going. Apple's not alone, Facebook is spending billions of dollars on doing the same thing and about the same timeframe. So there's gonna be competitor from Facebook, from Google, maybe from Amazon, maybe even from Tesla, right? I don't know what the future of Tesla is. But Tesla has a big future of disruption. Right? The data that this car is collecting is just like what I described with Apple, right? Tesla is building its own 3d map of the world.

Indeed, in the end, they are anticipating a future in which the car is driving itself, and they have you captive in this environment, and all sorts of opportunity to ride on,

we can talk about my favorite Tesla video last week, all right, took my hands off the car. And everybody was giving me shit and saying to get your hands back on the car. If a computer sees the 3d map of the world and knows this is the path through it, it's gonna do it exactly the same every time. And that's why I did it. Because I knew it wasn't gonna kill me. Right? And people are like, what if you blew a tire? What if I blew a tire this thing's gonna be faster reacting to the blown tire that I am. My wife almost spun our minivan when we got a car, right? It can react a lot faster than you can, it can react so fast. It knows the tires deflating and 20 milliseconds as it blows up, and can start adjusting the braking system before the tire even gets onto the pavement. We'll get on the pavement, right. And that's what people don't get. Soon, it will be more dangerous to put your hands on the car, then to let the car drive. I I believe we're already there. I believe I can, I can already tell the difference between a human driver and a computer driver. And the computer driver is almost always better than him.

One of the things that that Tesla is doing differently from a mindset perspective than many others is that they are not relying on a high definition map of the world. They're not relying on some preconceived notion of exactly how the car should move through the intersection. They're trying to build a system that is interpreting in the moment. Oh, I see. I see the lane right now I see the human walking across the street right now. I see the lights in this configuration right now. And I'm going to make the right decision based on this information. And it has some understanding of the physical space. But it's more about this real time interpretation.

You're right. If I'm running this version of the OS that I'm running, the people who are getting the full self driving data that's coming out in a week, the car it's going to start mapping out the world so it can see you know The entire like you said that the my car can see that there's a stop sign in front, right? And can see that 100 to 200 yards away, right? So if I'm going 50 miles an hour into a stop sign and goes out there step by step, right? The flaws in this system, and very few people understand this. And so the flaws are it will not hit somebody else who comes in your lane, it's pretty good at that. It can't see a new pothole really easily. And it can't see debris on the road. So if a ladder just got dropped by somebody on lane number one on the freeway, they can't see that. But the second I wrenched the wheel around it, imaged that and told everybody behind me, hey, there's a ladder in lane number one, that solid switch point number three, your cartilage, which automatically made three. And you won't know why. Right? Then just, you won't even be paying attention to people, you're gonna be looking at your phone or talk to somebody in the car while it's driving. Right. So Tesla has a lot of data to Tesla's watching right now. Right? That's a camera aimed at my pace. And there's an API and that camera API that already knows if I'm paying attention to the road knows if I'm touching the steering wheel. And it can it can see that from there. And can see, you know, am I touching something? Am I holding a phone in my hand? Right? And the car already contract?

In this book that you wrote with erina, Cronin called infinite retina, you got to bring these concepts together the stuff that Apple is working on the stuff that Tesla's working on all the AI kind of behind it all. Yeah. And collectively, kind of the industry has been calling this notion spatial computing. How How do you? I have because, because you're getting these arguments about what is VR, but is there what is, you know, you've seen them? Well, we had these arguments all day long

in the community about what to name these saying, What doesn't matter. Spatial computing to me is, anytime a human, a robot, including an autonomous car, like that's the robot that I'm sitting in, right, or a virtual being moves through the computing. And what we're talking about for the last hour is moving through a 3d world. And virtual beings gonna move that to that 3d world. Robots gonna move through that 3d world and where we go

and see things, hear things on the 3d. Like, like a band on our front lawn. Still, they're still there.

It's still there, it's gonna be there forever. I'm gonna walk my dog man 365 times in the first year before I get my visor, and I'm gonna hear it, I'm gonna walk around it and enjoy it. And then I'm gonna get the visor in 2022. And let's see, I'm gonna live with it. Today, I can pull the phone out and see it. I can see the band on the front lawn. Because augmented reality, volumetric band, right? I can hear it and sing I'm gonna live with the band, I'm gonna be like, they're actually part of my house. Think about that. What

is this the need to is inviting the mariachi band inside your home? Is that the kind of the motivating factor of what's the, the Genesis behind your level of enthusiasm?

I think that's all hello world. Philip Rosedale actually told me this one who you starting an audio company, right? He's pivoting toward an audio thing with high fidelity. So he's gonna put you in a backyard cocktail party. And all of a sudden, I'm talking to you. And you're over here. And Susan, Susie borders is over here. And we're having a conversation. It sounds like she's up here. And you're over here. Right? So he's building that. And that's the Hello World app. It's the simplest app that I can explain. It's like put a ban on your front lawn and walk around it right? There's gonna be a lot of complexity once you get into your house that is harder to explain, right? Sure, telling you that Siri is going to know the width of your walls, the dimensions of everything in your house. That's a little harder explain why you need

this notion of spatial computing in which is virtual beings as human beings, it's robots, including cars moving around 3d space. They're all these technologies are very closely related, converging. And and there's an expectation there's a lot of interoperability between them. And sometimes the interface might simply be an RGB camera, and some AI trying to interpret what that RGB camera says. In other cases, there might be a more electronic integration between them some sort of IoT device that's spouting information that can be interpreted by other devices in this thing. Are they all necessary? Do they all have to come forward at the same time in order for any one of them to be meaningful like do we do we need There's other stuff to happen in order for AR and VR to be ultimately successful in the way that we all come to be.

Alright, so let's go back eight years ago, I was at the Consumer Electronics Show, walking around the back suites, the suites in some of the hotels, for people who've never been in the Consumer Electronics Show, it's a big, it's a big show, right? It's hundreds of 1000s of people, millions of square foot display space, the biggest Conference Center in the world, right. And the cool shit that you and I would probably go see is in the suites back, you know, in some hotel somewhere on the strip, right? You got to get an invite to see something new. And, by the way, it's usually pretty easy to get an invite code, because the startup nobody pays attention started, right, they all want to see what the new TV is from LG or something. You know, paying attention to some company from Israel called prime since it makes 3d sensors, very few people paid attention to that. Because I was there I saw their PR, not many journalists were visiting this little company in the halls of CES.

And nobody knows about them now, because Apple acquired them.

Well, everybody knows about them, because the technology that they were talking about and showing off, it's now the iPhone, I'm holding, right. And it took eight, eight years, from the time I saw in the backlog. And the guy who was explaining it to me had worked on it for five years already. So the founder of prime sense, he has worked on for 13 years. So think about that as your career. You're working on something for 13 years before it ships. And everything he talked to me about is still ahead of us. He showed me how a 3d sensor can see how hard I'm touching things from three feet away. Because it can see your finger squeezing together. Sure, at such detail that it can see that you're pressing down on a surface. Right. And they showed me all sorts of new user interfaces, and new ways of thinking new ways of doing shopping. Right? They showed me a shopping a shelf with a bunch of cereal on it, and it could see that I touched the cereal, it could see that I held the cereal, right? And so all the stuff I'm telling you about I saw eight years ago and some damn sweet. And so that's why I'm not that smart. I'm not that innovator who spent five years in an r&d lab, trying to make a 3d sensor work that you think it is, I'm sorry, I gotta correct that notion. But I talked to these people at scale. And that's, that's what I do. That's why I see books, and why I see trends way before they happen and why. I mean, I live in a weird world. There's an apple spatial computing prototype, literally 10 feet from me. You want to go see it? Yeah. Yeah. Let's see if it's, if it's there, it usually is. You'll you'll you'll crack. This will be a cracker. So Alright, so I get out of my garage. And I go next door. And there's a Ford Explorer sitting there. And that's an apple prototype that does a bunch of sensors, facial computer. There's a 3d sensor in that thing. And they're putting sound on buttons in that thing. Well, we'll explain how spatial audio works in cars. So my neighbor works for the CarPlay team, apple, and my back fence guy, neighbor works for Google doing advertising optimization. And I'll get back in the Tesla. And that's so Kelly right? I live a block from Netflix. So yeah, so so get this, this thing's been sitting there for you. By the way, I figured it out because he has a different car, like literally every day, right? My neighbor does. And I'm like, I'm like, dude, how do you get a different car every day? What do you do? He's like, I'm not supposed to tell anybody. And I figured it out before he told me I figured out what was going on because I talked to Bobo, and I realized oh shit, he has a different car every day. He anyways, he builds chips for Apple got moved here by Apple from Paris. So that's the way the valley is you just meet people who are doing weird shit. They generally like to talk about it, right? That's why your show is so interesting.

So as you've you know, as you noted, you have an opportunity to very broadly interact with lots of innovators in this space and this latest book the infinite retina and and innovators elsewhere, and Yes, don't be geographically biased. In this case innovators everywhere,

nobody in music, I pitched Taylor Swift's music label and food and other things, movies, TV. Right? very broad. Remember, Netflix is here. So I have to, if I want to understand Netflix, I have to have a broader set of interests than just understanding that the technology that gets packets from their servers to your TV.

Sure. You've now kind of worked on several books. But the last three kind of had some similar threads across them, this notion that we have computers with us all the time, they have lots of sensors in them, they're paying attention to what's happening to the world that AI is an increasingly important element. The first, the first book was on social networking and social software. So I think it fits perfectly.

Right? That's not going away, right? You're gonna comment on things. Very true. Maybe give a 3d comment on a thing, but it'll still be a comment underneath the poster, or underneath that experience.

So over the arc of these several books and the thinking, the deep thinking that went in teach them, how has your perspective changed on personal computing on AI, and all these sorts of things?

Certainly, I am horrible at timing. I am Elon Musk's disease, or he has mine. And both of us can't figure out when the shifts really going to happen. Even even now that I have a pretty good idea of dates. Tim Cook could wake up next March and say I'm killing the whole project and switching gears. It's not passing. You know, the tests, its customers that we show it to don't like it. It gets too freaky. He didn't kill the whole thing,

right? timing is hard.

Timing is really hard. It's already slipped even. It was supposed to be released a month ago, right? And they took all the headphones off store shelves. And then they delayed the introduction because they realized that it wasn't that big step happens all the time, right. So I've been studying Apple since I was 13 years old, right? I grew up in Cupertino. My dad moved my dad was an engineering, he moved us to Cupertino in 1971. Apple started in 1976. So I got a tour of Apple when when I was 13, when I was like a couple buildings, if not on building. And I was in the first Computer Club high junior high. And so I've been watching Apple for a long time. What has changed in the last 10 years, I'm seeing a real shift in culture of companies. And part of that is we can talk about my past a little bit. I'm seeing that diversity is a lot more needed now because we're about to put a 3d map of the world that everybody's going to interact with, right. So the skill set a developer team needs today to play in that world is very different than the skill set that was needed to build something for units or Apple two or, or even the Macintosh right. And so I have evolved my thinking a lot on that. Most of when I'm talking with people who work at Volvo or unity or, or somebody you know who's on your show, that kind of thing. We talk about what, what this new world is going to be like and what is potentially going to be expressed in this world and what's not, and what are going to be the rules. And you know, if Apple is going to dominate this for a couple years, like they dominate with the iPhone, you know, what does that mean? What does it mean for Facebook? What does it mean for Google? Does it mean for Amazon Tesla? Snap? Right? And then all the other players magic magic? Microsoft, right?

Yeah. So there's definitely kind of this deeper appreciation.

Yeah, the biggest one. For me, I did not see the audio importance. I didn't get just how important that's going to be. And now that I'm talking to a lot of people about this, I see that audio is much more important than I really thought it through. And that it's brilliant for Apple to start with headphones. In fact, they've already started these, these air pod pros have spatial audio, which means you have a billion surround sound system in your $250 headphones, right? You can put music or sound all the way around, you can move it around, there's an app called spatial bliss that I recommend everybody get with these theropod pros because it really is key to understanding how Apple's ecosystem is going to evolve. You really I have to understand what spatial audio is. And most people in this industry understand it, because I was talking to somebody that you need to do today, because that's how unity works. That's how video games work. The Unity engine handles the spatial audio pretty much for you, right? So you don't have to think too much about it. But spending some time thinking about audio and increasing your skills right now. And making badass audio experiences like a marching band, for instance, is going to build a brand in audio, that's going to translate in 2022, when the visor comes, right. And so now all of a sudden, you put on this visor, and it's sounds badass, like a marching man, and it looks badass, I can see a badass merging. Right? So it's gonna be a lot of fun. For a lot of people, it's gonna be a lot of new companies built in the next 18 months.

Yeah, super, super exciting and fun time to be to be in this area. Yeah, if you don't mind, let's go back. I'd love to, you know, you were one of the very early users, proponents, somebody who really appreciated early on the potential impact of social media. At the time, I remember, I was in a startup and I was talking to somebody about blogs, and and the person says, What on earth are you talking? What the heck is a blog? What's a weblog? What is a weblog? What the concept is just so weird. At the time. Yeah. Very early into really appreciating 2000 2000.

started blogging in 2000. And Dave Winer was was one of my speakers along with Dory. They said, you should do a session on blogging in 1999. And why I pulled out Google, which is brand new. So there's only 200 blogs. Given the same answer your friends, what are you talking about? There's nothing here. But they talked me into starting one. And Dave, Dave on or took me to was the Super Bowl party, like, in 2001. he clicked, he linked over to me and sent me 3000 people. And I'm like, Whoa, well, there's a lot of people reading and saying that I didn't think about right. So. So I was like the other ways to be in the right place. Torrey Smith and Dave Winer, he got me into blogging.

And it just kind of took that with you to Microsoft, right? And Microsoft, you, you created a new connection between this concept of social media and blogging, and corporate personality, corporate kind of represented.

I broke a lot of rules in the five people I was I eventually joined up with Jeff sandquist. And then prior and three other guys who built the backend, Charles, a few others. And I was the video guy, I was like, oh, let's try to use this new video, internet video. YouTube had just was just starting. This was like, 15 years ago, right. And I've been playing with cc me, and netmeeting and video in early days and early days of Skype and stuff like that. And yeah, interviewed 600 people at Microsoft, from Bill Gates to the janitor with a $250 video camera. But the video is fun, online. When it did. When I say we broke a lot of rules we did on Channel Nine broke all sorts of corporate rules.

Channel Nine was the Microsoft TV, the video station,

it still it still exists. It's still a brand that, you know, we started and still does similar kinds of things. It's very different now. It's much, it's much more like the things we tried to kill actually. We were doing blurry videos on this stupid Sony camcorder, not in a studio, right? And I would just go into some of these office Oh, who are you? What are you doing? I'm doing the future of Visual Studio. Really. The thing that that give me an insight on is how the company works and how, how in hires out fires. How it works, right? I picked up a lawyer one time, because I talked about something that didn't have the patent completely written yet. And so the lawyers said, you're in trouble. Good, often in trouble in my life. And so you're in trouble. You got to sleep with a lawyer. I'm like, What? Yeah, we're gonna put a lawyer in your hotel room for the next week. And he's gonna tell you the facts. I'm like, Alright, that's an interesting punishment. I'll learn something, at least, you know. And they did they I spent a weekend with a lawyer at a conference room with him. And he told me everything about law that I could ever think of asking. Like, how does trade hardware. How does that work? Have? You know, they had 803 lords, by the way?

803 lawyers at Microsoft,

back in business 15 years ago, right. And Facebook at that time only had a few 100 employees. So we had more lawyers than Facebook had completely. Right. Right, which shows the market strength of these big companies, they can get away with shit that very few things can get away with, because they have so much ability to pay lawyers. You ever beat them? And I've met a few people one like billion dollar half billion dollar lawsuits against them. That's pretty hard to do. Right? Because you're up against 800 lawyers, you're up against the army of lawyers. So it's a lesson for people because we're going through that in our community, right? People are getting ripped off by Facebook and Apple all the all day long. Yeah. And you got to understand that's what these companies do. They're set up to do it and do it efficiently. At Microsoft, I was told not to look at patents like patently apple or something like that. Because if they can prove a Microsoft employee looked at a patent, that The damages went up three times

this notion that we have to be careful, right, because these large companies are so well armed with lawyers. So you kind of took this notion of changing the relationship, the dialogue between these kind of corporate entities and with the broader population, with you to Rackspace. And in there, you know, there was it was a younger company at the time, more in the weeds in many ways. People don't really appreciate what a Rackspace is. They understand what a Microsoft is because they use the product directly interact with the products that Microsoft creates. Rackspace is a leader behind why Rackspace, what, you know, what was the goal of going there?

That's a funny story. Actually. I had a producer, his name was Rocky. He actually died a couple of years ago. But back then we worked at Fast Company magazine. And in 2008, the economy blew, right 2009. And my sponsors went away, and I had to lay off Rocky. And he calls me later that day and goes, I just got a new job or like in a day, he said, he says, I just got a new job at Rackspace, they want me to hire you. And it turns out, Rackspace was started by a real estate developer named Graham Weston, he still owns the biggest buildings in San Antonio, Texas. And one of his floors was he rented out the startups. And one of the startups was two guys who've started Rackspace, and Rackspace back then was we would put, they would put servers into your data center, or into Rackspace and data center and rental. Right? So we would rent rack space, we would rent a piece of a data center team.

And

it was started down in Texas, down in San Antonio. And the guy was Graham's told me later, nobody would pay attention to him, because he was a boring infrastructure company in the middle of Texas, and nobody cared. And so he said, Well, I'll just buy one of those Silicon Valley bloggers. If they're not gonna pay attention to me, maybe they'll pay attention to me after I hire. And so that's what went down. He, he bought himself and Silicon Valley journalists, right, and got people to pay attention to this company made a lot of money after its IPO, and worked out, it worked for him. It worked. It got him into things that he wouldn't have gotten into otherwise, right, like r&d Labs and relationships with all sorts of people, including Tony Shea just died this last weekend.

That's right. You didn't get a chance to interview him as part of that,

interview them and hang out with him several times. And he took me to a barbecue in Lockhart, Texas on his RV. Yeah. So yeah. And he, he still was just a couple of weeks ago, he was talking to my former boss. We all built relationships with people over the years, you know, like that. So? Yeah, yeah.

It was also during kind of that period, where, you know, being a very public person, these past struggles, missteps also become very public. Yep. What have you done, to improve yourself to heal yourself to kind of, you know, work through improving those relationships.

You don't have to beat around the bush, there was an affair. I got it. I got blamed by several women for sexually harassing them or, or worse. And that was three years ago, more than four years ago that I got on the tube, right. So I was in the New York Times in a list of people who Got me today in the early days with Harvey Weinstein and all that. Ah, God. Um, and I'm, I was thinking about this show, because I don't want to talk about this very often. So I think this is an exclusive for you. And it's a respect I have for you, because you're my favorite podcaster in this space, I think you're way better than anybody else, in terms of boys in terms of understanding the industry. And I think it's worth to have this kind of conversation with you. and cover it, then we don't have to cover it too much anymore. But yeah, 11 years ago, I went to a party and got drunk and ended up grabbing somebody, Quinn, and shit went down. And I got blamed for a few years later, right. And I'm sorry about that. I made a lot of mistakes and hurt a lot of people blew up my career. And cause my family a lot of pain caused myself a lot of pain. So you start out with going to rehab. And hearing other people who will also cause a lot of people other pain, you know, some other people and we have killed people and drunk driving accident or something like that. And lots of people have a lot of losses, jobs, lost families lost people pissed off, stuff like

that. And, yeah, that gets you that gets you awake real fast, having the internet angry at you.

And continue to be angry. And doors get closed in your face and stuff like that. So there's been a lot of losses. But it's not about my losses. It's about what people like me caused, and still are crossing, I still see people doing it. And it's like, Guys, we got to, we got to be better. Because you're going to need a diverse team to work on this stuff. And you're going to need people who you don't agree with maybe, you know, on your team. And there's lots of companies that are dealing with that. I know, right coin basis, like, I can't write about politics at work. Well, that's crazy. Why do you hire people who are smart? You know, if you're not gonna let them have opinions, doesn't make sense to me. And because of my situation, I've heard so many stories of despicable behavior of men toward women and to each other, right? I've had guys grab my cock at South by Southwest parties to it's just guys don't talk about that. It just like, not not appropriate, but it happens to women a lot more than it happens to me. And I'm sorry for the role I played in. In looking back, you asked what what have I done? I mean, it comes up every day. So I think about it every day, every time I look at Twitter, and see somebody else going through it or, or see the damage that causes and people write about the damage that sexual harassment causes. So and I can detail that I can tell you how it hurt Uber, I would hurt upload, I would hurt me how it hurt women, how to get people out of this industry. And we need we need a much more inclusive industry. So we need to fix this and I can help. How can you help knock it off, man. You gotta you gotta change your attitude, mentally. Otherwise, you're gonna keep doing it. Because I know I changing myself is really a pain in the house. It's not easy.

Not easy at all. Yeah.

Now, nobody goes to a cuz it's a glorious day. I've never met him a member who said I joined a cuz when I won the lottery, I got a raise at work. My wife was crazy about me. And now that's not why you get a. But it's funny. Everybody who goes like this is the best club I've ever been a part of, right? Because you can actually be honest with people and tell them what a loser you are. And tell them what's actually going on. And that's very rare. How many people on Twitter tell you the truth? Not very many, very few. When it happens, it's notable right when an entrepreneur actually tells you what's going on behind the scenes. It's notable I don't know. I'm still working progress and still an asshole still a douchebag? Try not to be,

yeah. is you have an opportunity to engage with other startup CEOs, right? And you kind of share some of these lessons, what what message do you share with these executive teams are these early stage companies

that we don't focus on mental illness nearly enough in this industry, that we lose too many startups to suicide to other kinds of problems? Right. And all of these are mental loops that we picked up over the years, right? How did I become a massage in asystole? I've been taught by the best. Right? I mean, we, you know, getting taught by the best, this whole culture is that way, in some way. It's right. So it's a, it's a thing you have to fight against culturally. And the me to movement actually is doing a pretty good job there. I have nothing. Some other things, by the way, I do. I write a lot of gratitude lists I keep track of, whenever I start thinking about my losses, I start thinking about the games. My, my family is in a way better place today, my friends are stronger. I'm now taking care of the kids. And washing dishes, I didn't do that before doing the laundry. And being okay with you know, not running around the world speaking everywhere. You know, that's shut down for me for two reasons, maybe the COVID and make two for the most part. So I don't do that. I don't miss that too much. You know, consent is mentally a really tough career. People don't understand that, you know, Justin Bieber just sang a song about being lonely, even though he's on top of the world, right? You're in a hotel room, without anybody around you to support you. And there we go. shit goes down.

Yeah, there's a reason why there's that that stereotype of, you know, the rock star lifestyle. It's that lonely leaves,

rock stars, actually, the music industry has a whole charity to help people deal with addiction and mental illness, because it happens in that industry, a lot more than it does in ours. But we lose. Somebody told me a stat that entrepreneurs are seven times more likely to commit suicide than an average person. And you see some some of this happen. And you also don't see the downside of starting a company, which is like when things are going bad, you know, you're not able to pay your salaries next month, right? That puts a lot of stress on somebody, and they can't really talk about it with too many people. There's actually a good group of intrapreneurs that gets together and meets and talks about some of these issues. And does it in a fairly open and non non public way.

Are there other organizations or clubs, that people that that entrepreneurs can join the kind of focused on this sort of honest reflection expression of the challenges they're facing?

There is when you it's certainly something I would get a mentor on, or talk to other people. Generally, you know, it's sort of interesting that the first step in a is you got to ask for help, right? Which is really hard. It's really hard to say I'm in trouble, and I need some help. Right? It's my it's the first step. It's really hard to do. For a lot of people and a lot of people don't do it, they they die of alcoholism, or opioid addiction, or whatever is going on. Right. And my, my brother lives a gambler. And so you see, people blow up their lives in a variety of ways.

That's hard. Asking for help is a massive request. Because you admit, you have to admit, as part of asking for help, do you actually need it, you have to admit that there might be something less than perfect about yourself, which is true for everybody, and to share that with somebody else.

Now imagine you're Elan musk and you have to ask for help with the whole narrative. That's really hard for some people to get to get to the point where Hey, I need some help here. Right? And yeah, luckily, I had people like that in my life that pulled me out of this hole, but it's a tough one. Anyway, so yeah, talking to entrepreneurs find, find other people that you can really confide in, really let them know what's going on. I talked to an Israeli about it. A scientist who was studying addiction. He tells me that the likelihood of success is telling other people

Your likelihood of success goes way up the moment you tell somebody else.

Yeah. So, and this is sort of why you have to ask for help, right? Because now somebody else knows your problem. And you're honest about it. So now, you can work with that person and fix your problem, right? We call that in a sponsor, right? And there's, there's places you can go. Not so much on online, but you can sort of start watching. Like, I have a list of all the founders in the industry, right? Like 7000 people. So you can watch that for a while. And if something's honest and vulnerable, maybe write them up, say, Hey, no, I just saw you talking about this problem. Same thing, can I spend an hour with you and talk to you about it? Right. And that doesn't get a therapist, right, you can pay a guy to pay somebody to listen to give you drugs or, or tell you how to fix or help you mentally work through how to fix it. And there's a lot of the art, by the way, is really

amazing. A lot in this,

right. I interviewed skip Rizzo, who's doing all sorts of research with PTSD and dimension at USC. They have VR is really good at fixing a lot of brain problems, right? gonna cause a few to, which is something we should talk about. Yeah.

What's, what's next for you? How are you going to spend 2021 how I'm

getting these Apple headphones damaged, I'm not gonna buy anything until this the mania side, I, you know, my wife is like, You're, you're totally into the media right now. I'm, like, I just figured out. By the way, I don't know if you've noticed this very conversation. People are excited. There's like, nobody has shipped yet, really. But there's so much work being done. And people, the excitement levels getting there, that people are going, oh, we're excited about this industry outside, right. And it doesn't quite come through on Twitter, sometimes that that excitement, because people can't talk about what they're coming up with next year. But I think I think this industry is gonna read elements here, which is gonna be fun. But for me, I'm still trying to figure out what to do when I grow up. And there's a lot of doors that are closed to me a lot of people, you know, say no, I don't want to. And so thanks for having me on your show. Um, I'm playing with writing another book, but a fictional one, a science fiction kind of thing. And I'm also looking at, what is my role in this industry? If it's not a public role, you know, how can I help people privately, you know, some of this stuff or, or even just thinking through their strategy or whatever, I have a lot of skills there. So, yeah, but the next the next 24 months, you can see so much incredible change that part of it's just gonna be fun, trying out new things, again, you know, and having more of our friends join us in this revolution that's coming in this new paradigm. You know, because very few of my friends have VR yet. And very few of my real life friends in real life, family members have VR and understand it, and I'll try to put it on their own. But

there's, there's a lot to be said about the potential influence of a fiction author. For me, it was a Microsoft employee. Rajaratnam who wrote this trilogy that just blew me away. I loved his perspective on the Martian was written by an apple

employee, right? Yeah, you see the world and player one? Yeah. Ready. Player Two, is disappointing a lot of people because it, it actually, this, this problem, if you don't see that the future accurately, you're going to miss it. I wish some of the popular fiction shows more of the positive that's coming. Instead of just today. I can talk a lot about the negatives, right. I already did I this thing is going to know you at a level that is going to be very scary. Yeah. Right. It's scary for me. Because I know what's going on. Yeah, we're gonna have lots of discussions over the next 24 months, I think about just how much data do you want to give Facebook? You know, cuz you're gonna give it all. It's gonna know everything about you in a few minutes. By the way, do you know how it's gonna figure out everything about you and

how it's going to figure out everything about me in a few minutes.

It'll get you to open up your closets. It'll get you to look at underneath your beds. It'll get you to open up drawers.

Well, if they partnered with an insurance company, let's be inventory my house.

Now. When you put the headphones on the first time, this could happen. I'm not saying it. Well, Siri could announce herself to you and say, Hey, welcome to the Apple studio experience. And to start off, we've left a lot of fun things in your house. We want look underneath beds, open closet or pull out drawers and go around the world, either outside or inside doesn't matter.

We go scavenger hunt around the house, a little scavenger hunt.

And here's what's going to happen when you open up a closet door. For instance, nothing's gonna see the closet, go, that's a closet. It's in the bedroom because we walked here. And it's going to image everything in there, including the the walls of the closet. And it's going to put bats on the closet walls. Any bats, you stick your head in there, and you're gonna hear all these fluttering bats all around here, because it has infinite surround sound speakers. Not seven, it's infinite. It can put a virtualized speaker on any surface in your class. With a audio recording with some bat fluttering or noise. You can stick your head in there and it's gonna freak you out. Pull the head out, and you're gonna be like that was freaky. And then you don't put your head back in. Enjoy the freakiness, right and shit. Man, there's a bunch of bats in my closet is so sick and you go show everybody else in the house. And when you did that, you just scan your closet. Sure, right? Yeah, everything in it

step by step, it's

good Notes in Computer Vision, it's gonna segment every box that's in the closet, every toy, every thing, every clothing, and it's gonna start doing AI, look up some things. Now, it might not recognize everything right away, right may not recognize that you had an Gucci suit or whatever, Nike shoes. But it will pretty fast. When you look at the M one champion see a third of its own artwork, that shit is not being used. That's like a factory that's not used right on the chip that will be used in this world in 24 months. And it's going to know everything about you really, pretty quickly.

Trust is gonna be very important.

Gary,

let's wrap up with a few enlightenment questions. What commonly held belief about spatial computing? Do you disagree with

some one thing I do is I study how people buy things. And this went way back to the 1980s. When I understood what why people decided on VHS instead of beta VCRs. And I'm getting a lot of resistance about this whole range of VR AR things on your face, things that are going to scan, when I try to tell this to people, normal people and say your entire world is gonna be scanned in the next 24 months. And Apple is going to know everything and they look at me like what are you talking about? What part of that is because I have an autonomous car already. I know how good it is. And it's really good. The computer vision is getting outside, talked with people like Sebastian Thrun, who started the Google way, moe self driving team. And now it's doing a bunch of new companies, right. And he said he made a mistake going with LIDAR that cameras can do a lot. But LIDAR, he said the reason that he chose LIDAR, on the way mo car. So LIDAR in the self driving car world is a sensor that has 6480 lasers that are spinning, right? You see him on top of a Google way mo cards. Yeah, there's something spinning on the car. That's a LIDAR. And it sees the world in 3d. Right? So it's throwing out a laser light, measuring the time of flight, the time that the light takes to reflect off something and come back to the sensor and then it knows where that thing is. And also knows what's happening. That's my Tesla when it drives my garbage can. So that's America are if I drive by truck, it's truck or bicyclist. Oh, that's right. Yeah, it's really good at seeing patterns like that, and understanding. But when I talk to normal people, I get a lot of resistance on on all these. You saw it with Tesla. not touching my hands on the wheel. Yep. You know, it's my kids didn't give a shit about it. They they driven 10s of 1000s of miles with the car driving, and it's pretty damn good. They know it's pretty damn good, cuz they're still here. Right? People are scared of this future. But by 2030, we're all a lot of us still going to have experiences like this driving and self driving cars, right? And by 2030, we're gonna wear things on our faces, they're gonna augment the world and listen to us and watch us and see the world and make it better. But people are like, I don't want to wear glasses, I hate glasses, or that's just a segue. It's just your hype. Or it's just 3d TV all over again, right? You hear these common things, you know, or I don't want to wear something. Yeah. There's a lot of reasons. And there's a reason for that. You know, when when we went from the Macintosh to holding the phone in our hand, that was a real change. This is going to be a big Change the map, because literally everything around us now as a computing surface can be interacting with us so that coke can can talk to us, right? And we can talk to the coke, right? It's really crazy. So I, I hear a lot of those kinds of resistances. And they, and I take it with us with a grain of salt and smile, because every time I've gone through a paradigm shift, people have yelled at me and resisted. A million people protested Facebook's newsfeed, right, made Mark Zuckerberg billions and billions of dollars, but a million people protested it when it came out and said, I don't like this idea. I don't like this picture,

right? The value is high enough people will overcome that resistance,

the value is going to be huge. There's a reason that these companies are spending billions and billions and billions of dollars. I mean, Facebook alone is spending many billions, and probably it's going to spend more than 10. I think Apple spending more way more than that, when you bought up all the numbers of all the things that it bought, and also all the all the efforts that are going on, I mean, this, you know, showing you the CarPlay guy, you know, shows you the kind of investments. I mean, there's people all over the valley that are like him that work in that stuff, right?

So despite the resistance, it's going to happen. The value is too high. I'm

quite convinced it will. But it'll be messy for a while. There'll be people, like I said, don't put on the headphones, that's your choice. Don't put them on, you put them on and

that's it. You're in,

you're in. And everybody's gonna try him. I think everybody in the modern world, right? Cuz you're gonna go over somebody's house, they're gonna have the apple studio headphones on, they're gonna put them on because you're curious. And you didn't listen to me. And now you're addicted. And you've given it all you're once you're happy, right? You're gonna have experiences that you can't have.

If you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old Robert,

do more mushrooms? Which helps Pixie rain? Actually, it turns out, if I had a few minutes on my young self, it would be decades of work can be wiped out in somebody's mind in a second. And so I should have thought about other people a lot. Along the way, can't do it over again. All I can do is control right now. You can't take back what happened yesterday. As Tony Shane says, it doesn't matter what you did in your past, what matters is what you do in the future. Wise words. Yeah. I'll try to be better tomorrow.

Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

Think about culture of your companies understand why Tony Shea wouldn't hire me and understand how not to do it yourself. And understand how to build a new team. And where I'm going with this, I went to Stanford University and went to the AI lab there and met a woman. But she was a dancer. And she learned how to teach robots how to dance. And that sounds weird. But that's the new development team. You're gonna need to teach computers how to see things as humans see things, right?

How are better angels as humans see things, not maybe how our biased selves see things. Bingo, right.

And her name is kitty Kwan, Stanford, he has pictures in the book and everything. She builds AI systems for self driving cars for robots and augmented reality devices. Because the car is having to communicate with you about what it's doing. Right. And soon, we might have an augmented windshield. And soon buttons are going to be able to talk to us. And we're going to be able to talk to buttons on the car. So right. So think about, you know, the button here on my steering wheel, which is a multi switch button and you can push it left or right or roll up or down to scroll through things or tap it or double tap it. Right. And soon it's going to have a little microphone on it. A virtualized microphone, right and it's going to have a little virtualized display on it. Right, it can put any display. So now I can talk to the button and the button can do things both with audio and visual. Like if I touch it, it might scream. Every time you touch it, it might go like what and it might tell you stuff about it, how to use it better or what it does for you. entertaining you in some new way, right? That's the act of building a new kind of car, or a new kind of game, or a new kind of entertainment property or any kind of educational system is going to read require you to understand how humans can interact with machines. And there's a lot of cool people are working on. That's really interesting. You know, people understand the brain, deep level, people who are doing things to affect the brain to fix it, like Skipper is a real fighter. We read about a whole bunch of them in their books.

Now, where can people go to learn about what you're working on? Right now?

I spend most of my time on Twitter. I'm also on Facebook and LinkedIn and other places. But Twitter is where the community seems to absorb, for the most part that leads to people running companies and the press and the news, right. And so I've lots the lists of the industry, on Twitter, and I watch everybody on Twitter, and I'm on Twitter a lot. And I'm not doing anything like this.

Robert, thank you very much for this conversation. Thanks. Before you go, I want to tell you about the next episode. in it. I speak with Nathan petty john and Mike Lucy, who are both at Lenovo. Nathan is the commercial AR VR lead at Lenovo. He was also the founder and president of the VR AR Association. Mike is the hardware product manager for commercial AR VR at Lenovo. Previously, Mike spent nine years at odg which for a long time was the premier creator of AR glasses. As the VP of advanced products there he was behind the impressive AR seven or eight and AR nine glasses. In this conversation. Nathan Mike and I chat about Lenovo has role in delivering holistic end to end AR and VR solutions to companies. This includes software services and hardware. We talk about Lenovo is a six headset and the lessons they've learned in the two years since its release. We also talk about an exciting new announcement. Please subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time