The AR Show: David King Lassman (GigXR) on Building the Platform for Healthcare Training

11:51PM Nov 28, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

David King Lassman

Keywords:

mixed reality

device

business

company

xr

great

build

technology

students

content

thought

experience

platform

vr

uk

started

world

deliver

chariot

drive

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 David King Lassman. David is the founder of GigXR, a global provider of immersive 3d training solutions to transform collaborative learning with an initial focus on healthcare. David is a serial entrepreneur who grew up with a passion for music and has since started six companies. his company's has spanned education, technology, advertising technology, online content and social media. He has also raised an investment fund and operated as a VC. Now with GigXR David is reimagining training for healthcare workers using mixed reality devices. In this conversation, we dig into GigXR, the impacts of xr training on healthcare education and how it differs from VR. David also shares their strategy for growth and how we've used the current investment appetite for XR companies,

I think we've got a much clearer line of sight on to where mixed reality in particular mixed reality as opposed to virtual reality, might be able to really deliver some value. And I know that just from our point of view, talking to the investor community, we're getting a very different type of response today than we were getting six months ago or 12 months ago. I think there's a lot of enthusiasm for mixed reality from risk taking investors who know that this isn't a fad, this isn't something that's going to be a blip is going to disappear. And I think over the course of the next year or two, when companies like ours become part of the fabric of the way things get done, I think there's going to be a lot more energy, a lot more enthusiasm about this space, and we're going to see a lot more money flying. There.

We'll start with some stories of his musical and entrepreneurial journey and has some sage advice to pass along. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website V ar show.com. And please support the podcast@patreon.com slash the AR show. Let's dive in. David, you shared with me just the briefest hint of a story and you put two words together that are very rarely hear in the same sentence. operatic disaster, what was going on in your early life in which you had an opera and a disaster happening together at the same time.

So just for context, I came out of the womb and musician I was one of those unusual kids that expressed an interest in music at a profoundly young age. I think I did my first violin performance at the age of three. I discovered I could sing when I was 10. And I was performing in a version of Handel's Messiah in a local church over Christmas one time and scout from English National Opera, heard me sing and thought, Wow, this this kid isn't like most boys surprise who come from church, choral choirs, he could actually he's got some lungs, he can actually crank out a tune. And that was quickly recruited into the ranks of English National Opera, which is one of the UK's most prestigious opera companies. And I was given all of the parts that were the best singing parts for young boys, some of which actually had been sung by women traditionally, because boys didn't have the chops to do them. One of those famous moments was performing magic flute did selber flutter by by Mozart, and it was an English National Opera on the London Coliseum stage. It's the largest stage in Europe. I think the stage is something like 70 feet. And I make this grand entrance in this chariot that descends from the flies of the stage. And it's held up by four steel wires and the music queues. Some guy off in the wings starts cranking a lever, and I descend from 80 feet up onto the stage to belt out my area. And one of the cables on this chariot snaps. And the chariot falls at a rate of knots and lands, thank goodness on this palm tree that's evoking you know, Ancient Egypt and perilously kind of dangling in this chariot, you know, wondering whether this thing is gonna go all the way, which would have been awful. No one stage knows what to do and the music. You know, the conductor stops conducting the orchestra quietens down, and you can hear the gasp from the audience and the curtain falls and they rush out with stepladders and can they reach an instant? Finally we get rescued and brought down to the stage and the director of the opera comes on and said, Okay, guys, we got to do the scene. So instead of coming down from the stage, we're going to run on stage and you just got to deliver it. Meanwhile, in good British tradition, somebody rushes up with a cup of tea because cups of tea solve, you know, no end of problems and I take a sip of tea and try to calm down. The curtain goes back up and the orchestra strikes up And I walk out on stage and I deliver that the scene to rapturous applause. And really, you know, the shock of what had happened didn't really set in until afterwards when I thought, oh, crikey, you know, I could have been awful I could have could have died. What was funny was that that moment was enshrined in a book called The World's Greatest operatic disasters, and of which we are one.

That is pretty incredible. And you were at what age 11 years old at this point?

I think I was 12. When that happened. 12 years old.

Do you remember at all what was happening in your mind as you were dangling at the top of this palm tree from this chariot?

I think the funniest thing is that we were strapped in with a crude seatbelt. And I was kind of clinging on to the frame of this chariot. What must have been absolutely hilarious was me trying to sing while this was going on, the show must go on, you know that mentality. And it wasn't till the curtain dropped that I thought, okay, I could probably shut up now. And I don't think in the moment I understood how dangerous that moment was, and how the outcome could have been far, far worse. And there was something about, you know, just this instinct that I knew I just had to do it. I couldn't think about the fact that my hands were shaking, and my parents were in the audience. Oh, my God, what must they be thinking? I wanted to shout out, I'm okay. I'm okay. But we just went on and did the scene. By the way, there were two other moments later on in the opera where you're supposed to descend again from the chariot. And, of course, we had to, you know, re choreograph those moments in a hurry to make sure that it sort of worked and, and I do remember at the end, when we took our final bow, we got a standing ovation. This is myself and two other boys that were singing alongside me. And then lots of write ups in the press the next day for this tremendous moment in London opera.

Incredible. The show must go on. Right, operatic disasters notwithstanding. That's pretty amazing. So you have this this early passions, early gift from music? How did that play out? You end up going to school to study music more formally as you continue to age?

Yeah. So it was I had a very interesting upbringing. So music was absolutely my passion. I went to an all boys school in London, where you were either highly academic, or you were you were a jock, you were an athlete, and I sort of fell in this weird space. You know, I certainly wasn't embraced by the athletes in the school. And I was a good student. But you know, I wasn't the best. I wasn't stellar by any stretch of the imagination. And but I had this very flourishing career, I was playing violin in great orchestras. I was singing opera on stages across Europe, I was on TV, I did recordings. And I was always an only ever going to be a classical musician. And I figured I would probably be a singer. During puberty, when I saw boys around me starting to date girls, you know, suddenly singing opera and playing violin wasn't, wasn't very sexy. And a buddy of mine said, Dude, you should pick up a guitar. You know, if you can, if you can crank out Eric Clapton's wonderful tonight, on a Saturday night at a party in town, then you're gonna get some suitors. And so at the age of 15, when my voice broke, I started getting into guitar and jazz and came to that very easily. And then I thought, wow, this is great. And maybe I'll be a rock star, now formed a band as a lot of kids did back then. And we played we toured a little bit, we did gigs, it was it was an absolute hoot. And I just always knew I wanted to be connected to music in some capacity. So after school, I traveled for a bit, I studied abroad, and I came back to London and went to music school. And the idea was, I would study voice, I studied bass, Jazz Bass composition. I was in one of those schools that was rather like, you know, the fame school. We were multiple multidisciplinary. So I did a bit of dancing, a bit of acting, but mostly music. And having to go to a music school on a student budget wasn't hugely appealing. And I started a little business to supplement my income.

Start a little business on the side. So you're still in college at the time and you need a little extra spending money. So you started a business and what was the inspiration for this business

became a kind of accidental entrepreneur. So I, I was the youngest of five in a North London family, my eldest sister, she was the big academic in the family. She'd been to Oxford, high achiever. And she actually devoted her life to education in the earliest part of her professional career was teaching. And I was watching her at home, I was still living at home with my family and she was preparing a test for her students the following day, and she had a big stack of old exam papers, and she was photocopying questions from paper. wasn't cutting them up and using one of those glue sticks to stick them onto a fresh piece of paper and what are you doing? She said, Oh, I've got to do a test tomorrow on sedimentary rocks for my geography students or whatever it might have been. And I watched her spend maybe a couple of hours preparing this 30 minute test for students using past exam papers and then referencing Mark schemes and examiner's reports to see how she would go about answering these questions. And I said, Surely there's that information is available digitally. Now I'm dating myself, this is 1988 87, something like that? Oh, no, earlier, forgive me earlier. And there wasn't, there wasn't anything digital. So I said, it shouldn't be that difficult to be able to compile all this information digitally, build a database, cross reference everything stick a nice little front end on that allows the teacher to build a test paper from the digital content pretty easily. And she said, Well, you want to build it. Go ahead. So we approached the smallest examination board in the UK. It's quite a competitive market for selling examination questions into school markets. In the UK, there were five or six players back in the day. And I approached one that was based in Northern Ireland said, Hey, can I get access to all of your past papers, and your examiner reports and your mark schemes, they duly obliged. We captured it digitally, we built a nice database behind it, we build a front end. And we distributed a piece of software to schools on a five and a quarter inch floppy disk. And I think I was probably 18 months into my studies, getting home from college, working in a back room of my parents house cranking out this software, that we realized we were onto something. And we started to sell this in big numbers into UK schools K through 12. And then we had the other examination boards in the UK got rid of what we were doing and said, Hey, can we put our stuff on your system. And before we knew it, we had pretty much all of the boards, Cambridge, Oxford, London, providing their data. And we had a system that allowed teachers do something that they had to do that was traditionally taking them hours and hours to do. And if you ask any teacher, what's your greatest cost in teaching, and they say it's the things take time, you know, time is out how gold, we gave them something that allowed them to do a task in moments that have previously taken them hours. And when you do that, in education, when you give a teacher something that makes the task that they have to do easier, they will bite your hand off for it. And so what I did with my big sister, and some friends and family that gathered in my parents back room for a number of years working on this project, was we accidentally built an edtech SAS business. Because each year we updated the materials with the latest examination papers, and we re referenced it against the latest national curriculum changes or the latest examiner's reports or whatever it might have been. And the tools we supply to the schools in the United Kingdom became an integral part of the way teachers did their jobs. And you do that in ed tech. You've won.

That is incredible. So here you are college student studying a variety of musical subjects, dance voice, instruments. And on at night, you're going home and you're building this edtech empire that is now ultimately utilized by the entire UK fundamentally K through 12. That's right, and what was the internal reflection that you had, as you're going through this and you had your day job of learning about music, furthering your skills, and your night job of being a tech pioneer? How did you decide which one was more important to you as you kind of came to the end of your education?

That's a great question. So first of all, let me just say I had my college experiences unusual in that. First of all, I was living with the woman who would become my wife and the mother to two of my children. And we were living in a pool central London apartment. And I wasn't going to college parties. I wasn't doing the stuff that most students would do. I'd be rushing home from college, which was on the other side of town, by the way. And, you know, working through the night very often and every weekend, building the business. But what happened was that the business was affording me things that a lot of students wouldn't necessarily have not least Of course, you know, a paycheck, right? And so, you get used to that pretty quickly. And when I graduated college, and I was faced with a, you know, a very clear binary choice. I have a talent, I have a skill. I now have a degree. I have a good command To have this, this, this art, this craft was pretty good singer could handle a guitar pretty well, I was writing songs, I can do that. And I can, you know struggle like most musicians struggle, and maybe I'll make a success of it, maybe I won't, or, Hey, I'll carry on doing this business thing for a little bit. And so I chose the ladder. And I always thought, I'll do the business thing for a bit, and then I'll come back to music. And I've been thinking that for 40 years.

Gonna come back to it's still you still have time still have time to come back to that music. Oh, yeah. So now you choose to continue on this entrepreneurial journey? Can you work a little bit longer at the at the business thing? From an entrepreneurial perspective? What was the key learning or two that you had from that experience that you that you were able to take forward into your next next experience? All right.

Well, I think, as I've already hinted, the key takeaway here was that if you can use technology to make something that people do in their job, make it easier for them to do that task, the technology will prevail. I think that that's a much easier premise for building a tech business than saying, let me start with a big whiteboard, and invent something that's all together the same that can't be done, of course, that can be done. But if you can find something that is part of the everyday life of a professional in a certain environment, and say, Hey, how would you like it, if I gave you this thing that's easy to use, and it's gonna make your life easier, better, save you time, drive outcomes, whatever it might be. I think that's a very good premise from which to build a piece of technological innovation. The other thing that I learned from that first experience, that actually I was quite ambitious, and I guess a, you know, my sister might listen to this podcast. So you know, one of the I'm going to say this cautiously, but one of things I will say is probably best don't go into business with family, it can be incredibly complicated, it gets complicated when your vision for the business starts to diverge, right? So at the time that I left, believe it or not, we were still running the business from my parents house. And she liked that, you know, she didn't want it to be anything other than what she perceived us as a nice cottage business at that time. Whereas I, you know, I had delusions of world domination and saying, Hey, we've got this fantastic model, we've built this, you know, well documented driving value in the UK. But this can lend itself to any environment where teachers are testing students. Oh, and by the way, you know, if you look at some examination boards in the UK, that curriculum has been taught right across the Commonwealth, in nations outside of the Commonwealth, you know, it's the gold standard. And so we should be selling this internationally, we need to move into some swanky office in central London, we need to possibly take some investment, put some real fuel under this ship. And she didn't want to do that. So I didn't want to struggle with that conflict. And I thought I can take what I've learned here and apply it to something new. And I definitely caught the entrepreneurial bug I loved, loved loved this notion of trying to think about a piece of technology that could deliver value, and build something. It's my favorite part in the evolution of a business. It's those, you know, those early days, the division building, the strategizing, that passion that goes into something that you believe is going to be transformative, whether on a fairly niche or small scale or, you know, globally,

many entrepreneurs develop a deep understanding of a specific problem space. Over time, they might go and work in, for example, Ed Tech, right? You experienced ed tech within the UK, you knew some of the problems that existed there. And some entrepreneurs become experts in the problem. And they keep identifying variations on solutions to different nearby problems. But you took that same sort of mindset of this, this desire to identify a pain point and build a technology solution around it. And yet of applying it to a broad number of industries, not just ed tech, but ad tech and, and others as well. How is it that you kind of found that next problem space that excited you with enough interest and passion to devote your time to it?

That's a great question. Well, actually, let me talk about the second business that I started, which I think also had a very interesting narrative arc. So this was in the mid to late 90s. Web 1.0 was in full swing, suddenly had this thing called the internet. We had a dial up connections and the Internet was coming into our world in a profound way. And I was looking at this and thinking, wow, I can see how we're accessing information. Question, but a lot of information isn't especially useful. And how could I augment the experience this passive experience of calling a webpage and seeing some content, but then finding information that somehow makes that experience richer, deeper, broader, perhaps. And I built with a buddy of mine who was a great engineer, client side piece of software, that when you call a webpage on a server, we pulled the web page at the same time, analyzed it, and then pushed a piece of information through a little, a little window that sat on your desktop that was somehow relevant to what you were looking at. So it was it was kind of the first forays into contextual marketing, I hadn't seen anything like it. We thought about delivering that in the form of a sticky note on a web page, we ended up putting it in a client side application that sat on the side of your desktop that pulled information from trusted sources, so new sources, travel sites, ecommerce sites, and so on, that somehow provided context. And then Google came along. And Google actually, we believed infringed 14 of the patents that we held in that business at the time, I remember writing a letter to Google's counsel saying, you know, you're infringing these patterns, listing them out. And we got a terse reply back saying I don't mean service. And this was when I learned another, I think, important lesson. First of all, I had no intention of taking Google on, they were already massive at this point. And we had a client side piece of software, and they were doing this in the browser, right, we couldn't compete. But what we had developed Was this some great algorithms that was able to understand the context of something you were viewing, and push real time information that augmented it. And this was at a time when the online betting industry was starting to become incredibly mainstream, particularly in Europe, much less than in the States. And it was still a long way behind over here. But in the UK, in Europe, in Asia, betting companies were realizing that people weren't going into high street bookies anymore sports betting shops, they were doing it online. And then we had companies like bid 365, which were doing peer to peer betting, taking the bookies out of the game altogether. You know, I'm offering odds on this event that's happening right now. I'm offering odds on this guy scoring the next goal in this game, anybody want to take take my odds. And this was disrupting the betting industry in a very profound way. And the bedding industry was growing at that time, on a model of very aggressive marketing. So they were advertising on TV, they're advertising on radio, they were advertising heavily online. But their adverts were very generic, you know, come to this company, we'll give you 10 pounds for your when you open an account to put on bets. We said what if you could actually target your advertising in a contextually more relevant way, but in a more timely way, too. So we bought a whole load of other site advertising on use sites and information sites and somebody might go to their site and look at their favorite soccer team Manchester United, right. And we would run a banner ad that would say, bid one pound on David Beckham scoring the first goal on in Saturday's game, win 20 pounds. And we started running these adverts with betting partners. And the click throughs. were astonishing. absolutely astonishing. And the click through astonishing but more importantly, the click to acquisition was hitting unprecedented levels. So what the betting industry was saying was, wow, two things are happening here. One is I'm able to offer real time information in my advertising. And I'm making contextually relevant, and it's driving traffic. And then what the betting industry said to us was, hey, look, that context stuff is kind of cool, right? But actually, what's much more interesting, is being able to deliver real time information in recite adverts. And so we built an advertising platform, a system that we're able to deploy to our customers, our customers being bookmakers, who through a dashboard would be able to say, hey, there's game going on here. I cannot push an advert that's going to drive betting for an outcome that's going to happen within the next 30 minutes. And context. They didn't give a hoot about they didn't care. They didn't care about the context. They cared about pushing live content through their recite ads. And we cleaned up it So this company that started as, hey, wouldn't it be cool to have a nice cute client side piece of software that just displays little bits of content that relates to what you're looking at morphed into an advertising management system that allows our users to deploy real time messaging in their advertising. And we sold that company in 2004.

And so here, here's an example of you really listening very carefully to what the market wanted. And tuning this offering to offer the most amount of value we could offer, right to solve his very specific pain that your customers were saying, we really want this.

Yeah, I think that's right. And by the way, let me just say a couple of points on this. One is, one of the things I had to fight within myself was when I started that business, I had very, very passionate about this idea of providing contextually relevant information. That was what really drove my vision. And sometimes as entrepreneur, it's very hard to say, hey, that vision that I had, isn't right. But no longer works. Or it's being done better by someone else, being able to let go of your baby. And the vision is a baby in a way. That was very challenging for me. The other thing that happened in that business was I had some really good people working alongside me. And listening to people around you, I think is also really important. There was one guy in particular who he was the one that came in, while they said, We need to pivot into the bookmaking into the sports betting space. Because it's an emerging market, they're throwing money at stuff. And our technology works now saying, Ah, I hate gambling, I don't really want to be associated with it. And I wanted to take us kind of high road on that. And he persisted, he persisted. And I said to him, Look, go to a proof of concept. Go find a customer that you think's willing to pay for this. And let's see where we go. And it became apparent very quickly that there was a really big opportunity here. So I think, as an entrepreneur, you need to do two things. One is you need to let the baby out with the bathwater from time to time. But you need to listen. And not just to the market, but to people around you to the industry to what's happening. Right. And that takes, and I'm not saying so I think that takes a certain amount of humility. I think some entrepreneurs may never have that maybe that's a good thing, because some entrepreneurs thrive on their self belief and their arrogance and their determination. Steve Jobs, right. But for me, being able to say, you know, it was a good idea, but it wasn't going to work. It was hard for me to do initially put our question myself all the time now,

didn't take Steve Jobs, two attempts at Apple before that hard nosed determination was the right thing at the right time for that company, at least in terms of getting to the global scale and massive impact of company that is today. This is you know, it was just was just entrepreneurial experience. Number two. And I think all together, you've had six now counting the most recent with gig XR including you went to online content, there was a social media video sharing platform that you created in there as well. And now most recently, gig XR. Can you talk a bit about what was what were you seeing in the world? That motivated gig XR?

Yeah, I mean, it's quite funny actually. It's not unlike my first business in that there was a an element of being quite accidental. So the genesis of this was, I was running a small venture capital fund in Southern California. And I put myself on the other side of the table, which is another story all of it all on its own, not what I loved, I have to say, you know, as a as a VC, I wanted to fund everyone, which clearly wasn't practical. And then I wanted to roll my sleeves up and get stuck in of course, which also wasn't very practical. But, you know, I got to know a lot of people in the Southern California community. And I was approached by a small group that were looking to acquire the assets of an immersive learning group that had been fired up Pearson, Pearson being one of the world's leading educational publishers, headquartered in London, England. And because of my background, they said, hey, you know, could you take a look at this and give us your thoughts and maybe fly to London and meet the team and see what's going on and see what they see what they're doing. And I headed over to the UK, I met this team of about 10 or 11 of them out of this office in London. Pearson had been approached by Microsoft in around 2015 2016, who said, Hey, you were shining Utah equal the HoloLens that's going to be launching in 2018. And it's mixed reality and unlike virtual reality, it has a clear visor and we think it lends itself really well to educational purposes. And it's an enterprise device. It's not a consumer device. And if we put some NRA dollars into your company, you know, would you maybe think about building some content so that when we launched the hololens.be applications that will be of value. Between Pearson and Microsoft, they invested a chunk of money, they did some market research. And they build a few apps, and had this team that at the time, you know, one of the leading teams anywhere on building mixed reality applications, right, because this was new, nascent technology. But Pearson, were going through a major transformation. And they were divesting of pretty much all of their entities that weren't core to their business of providing textbooks to schools, which is how they made their wealth. And this company was looking to buy these assets. For one reason or another. That deal didn't work out. And maybe a year later, I got a call from the good folks at Pearson, UK, and said, Hey, are you interested in taking these assets? And I gave it a lot of thought. And I caught up a guy I knew who was a fantastic entrepreneur in the Southern California space, he built some very successful SAS businesses. And I said, Hey, what do you think of this opportunity. And I remember his response was, you know, sometimes it feels like the heavens open up and something falls out of the sky and lands in your lap, that feels too good to be true. I think this is one of those moments. And he and I spent some months diving into the space, looking at the market, thinking about mixed reality as a medium, and the impact that it might have across education. And what emerged was a very clear picture of this could be transformative. But this could really be transformative in healthcare training. And we brought the assets out of Pearson. And in 2019, we incorporated gig XR, we did precisely what Pearson didn't Pearson, they're a content company. And they were looking to build content, we said, Let's build a platform. And let's build a platform that provides higher education institutions, medical schools, teaching hospitals, nursing schools, with a single point of entry onto all of their extended reality applications. And let's build a catalog of applications a constellation of apps and modules that touch every point of healthcare training, whether it's undergraduate doctors or nurses or interdisciplinary training among healthcare professionals. And let's work with fantastic subject matter experts from some of the greatest institutions in the world to help deliver these applications. Oh, you know what, let's make that platform open to third party developers to publish apps to it. So that we can quickly expand what we offer our end users. And let's do what we did in the very first business that I started, which was take some of the most challenging aspects of the teaching curriculum for healthcare professionals and provide them with a toolset and technologies that make it easier to address those challenges. And hopefully, within a short period of time, we'll be we'll be able to demonstrate that we're driving real value here, whether it's increasing knowledge retention in what is a very knowledge heavy sector, let's increase the speed with which a student could become proficient at a procedure. For instance, let's heighten a student's ability to use their clinical thinking that clinical reasoning so that they can be better practitioners when they are exposed to clinical experience. And all the evidence is suggesting that we are achieving all of those things in space. So that was sort of the genesis of the company. And I have to say that in the short time that we've been up and running. What's been extremely pleasing is that that thesis has been validated by the partners that have come to the project. I'm talking about Cambridge University Hospitals, or the University of Michigan School of Medicine. Yeah, great, great institutions who say, the future of healthcare training is extended reality.

You mentioned that there is an increasing body of evidence that this is making a difference in the lives of the learners and presumably those learners being the doctors and nurses, etc. Presumably also in the lives of the patients behind them. What what is that evidence that shows that this is working?

Yeah, so there's there's a great deal of anecdotal evidence and you rely heavily on anecdotal evidence in the early days of a nascent technology like this because Getting that empirical data takes time. And, you know, I could point you to, for example, videos that have been created by customers of the gig XR platform that use it as a marketing tool to help recruit students to their institutions. And they say things like, you know, the interview students who say, it was so exciting to work within this medium, I found that I was able to empathize much more effectively with patients, I found that my clinical thinking was enhanced through this. But what we're seeing now are actual, well run research projects by I can point to one being done by Imperial College London, for instance, Imperial College is one of the UK's leading medical schools, I think it ranks number four in the world in terms of research, they used one of our applications, hollow patient, which is a an app that presents standardized patients using volumetric video. So we film actors presenting certain pathologies, it's incredible high fidelity, we can place these patients in a room, you can access that content, either through a head mounted display or using your mobile device as a conduit onto that content. Now, this is to, in some instances, replace the process of actually hiring actors to come onto campus, which in a post COVID world is incredibly challenging, you know, lots of schools are still teaching remotely. So how can you access an actor or even how can you access a patient, if you're not there in the room of this is a viable and very capable alternative. So Imperial ran a study across a section of students, they took one traditional bevers, and they taught one using cholera patient, and the data was overwhelming in the value this is bringing. So we're seeing studies like that happening. More and more, we're actually working very closely with our partners in undertaking short, medium and long term research that will, over time, we think, and all the evidence so far suggests that it will point to the fact that mixed reality will have a very viable and effective place in the tool sets that are used to train doctors and nurses. And of course, if you think about how important simulation is, how heavily the industry relies on simulation, to prepare healthcare professionals for clinical practice, and I'm talking about whether it's cadaveric dissection, or, you know, high fidelity mannequins, that we access in simulation centers, or standardized patients, I'm, as I mentioned, not only be able to recreate that in mixed reality, incredibly effectively, what we're also doing is democratizing that methodology methodology of teaching, because we're making it available to pretty much anyone, anyone that has a mobile phone, they can pull out of their back pocket, and hold up to access that content. And that becomes really exciting when you think about how we can help raise status, not just at home, but in rural communities, and in developing and emerging communities on a global basis.

past guests here on the show was Justin broad is the co founder of Oso. VR. And so yeah, so VR is a company that focuses on training surgeons using simulation using high quality simulation within a VR device within virtual reality device. And you're promoting here augmented reality, or mixed reality, or something that is preferable to better than or complementary to virtual reality. How do you why focus on I guess the mixed reality side of it rather than than VR?

First of all, let me say, you know, hats off to us. I think they're a fantastic company. They're doing great work, and they're doing important work. There is a place for virtual reality, for sure. There are some wonderful companies building extraordinary, extraordinary applications and some great content that's without question, helping to drive standards and outcomes in in medicine, but, and other verticals, too. I think where there's a one to one experience, if I'm a surgeon, and I want to practice the procedure, keeping it within VR makes absolute sense. We think about the way that we learn the dynamic of learning. We think about the classroom. Traditionally, you have an instructor, you have a cohort of students, we're engaging together. It's very difficult to recreate that dynamic in a fully virtual world. In mixed reality, I can see my teacher, I can see my students, I can see the way that my fellow students might interact with some holographic hardware or with the patient. So my learning is being augmented because I'm part of a shared experience. I'm part of a connected experience. You can really only do that with mixed reality. Yes, you know, If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg and hear what his vision is, the metaverse is no, he's saying, we have avatars. And we can come together in this fully virtual world and, and maybe there's a time and a place for that, where that works well, and that works effectively. I don't think it works well. In getting the best out of training our healthcare professionals, I think the dynamic of being around your fellow healthcare professionals and seeing how they interact is going to heighten your empathy for what they have to do. Plus the fact that in healthcare uniquely, I think we rely very heavily on interdisciplinary interaction. So let's take a code blue example. In a hospital these happen all the time. And even seasoned professionals trained and retrained in that environment, an alarm goes off, a patient has flatlined, a team of healthcare professionals descend on a situation. And they need to perform this perfectly choreographed dance to help revive a patient, and you will have nurses and you will have physicians, and maybe you have a nice artists. And they're all doing their thing. And if one person fails, the consequences can be extreme. So for a nurse to as their training to be a nurse to be able to see how does a physician deal with this experience, or indeed for a physician to see the challenges that a nurse faces, creates an environment where the group as a whole can benefit. Now, I think that mixed reality works really, really well to deliver that type of training, even if those professionals are not in the same room as each other. Right? Because through a platform like ours, they see the same content. They're seeing it from the perspective of which they're viewing it where they happen to be standing around a gurney, for instance. And they see a representation of all the people that are there around them, and the way that they're interacting with the patient and the hardware to perform this task. So VR, fantastic technologies, fantastic products, fantastic content, absolutely complimentary to what we're doing at click XR. And I think there's plenty of space for both mediums to do really, really well in this vertical.

You hinted at this notion that Mark Zuckerberg and his vision part of his vision includes this ability to do video pass through those cameras on the outside of this whatever calling now, Mehta quest pro device does a pretty decent job of bringing in some representation of the outside world. And it seems to be you know, Pico, and others are doing the same sort of thing. And there is some sense of of the real world beyond the virtual overlay. Is that better? Or is that not better? Or doesn't matter whether it's that sort of device with this video, pass through versus a see through device like the HoloLens, we actually see the real world and and then having the digital and related?

Yeah, what first of all, I think it's really interesting that on this device, they felt the need to do that. I think that speaks volumes. I think to to an extent, it depends on things like latency, right? So how good are the posture cameras? How well represented is the physical world that exists beyond this visor in front of my eyes? And is there any lag? What's the processing in the device that makes this immediate? So that if I'm looking at the world, and I place a needle into a holographic body, do I see that happening in real time? As long as that's the case, I think it's a wonderful, wonderful development, because what that's going to mean is that end users are going to have wider access to more devices. Yes, the new device remettre is a $1,500 device. But that's significantly cheaper than a Microsoft HoloLens or a magically to, which will make it more accessible. I absolutely applaud what Mehta has done. With that, I don't know if you've had the chance to look at the Vario headset, it's, I think, is one of the most expensive out there, it's passed through capabilities are absolutely extraordinary. You put this device on, you fire up those cameras, and it's like you don't even know you've got a headset on your head. It's like you're there in the real world. The more the merrier, as far as I'm concerned. And I love the fact that this new device from metta can operate as a full virtual reality device that you know, my kids will love to use for their gaming but their medical professionals would like to use so that they can access some of the mixed reality technologies that are available to companies like us.

So you you ultimately don't care that much. Whether it's video pass through versus see through.

No, I think not. I think that if the pass through device reproduces the real world in a way that makes it theory feel real allows me to see my fellow student So my fellow doctors and nurses to see the content then not only do I not mind, but I applaud it because what we want to do is we want to, we want to think about our business as being media agnostic. We want to provide the best possible solution to our end users. And I think part of that means that we need to give them as much choice as possible. So it might be the school, for whatever reason, has purchased a dozen quest two devices. And it would be a shame if they couldn't use them with our technology. So I absolutely welcome that. I even welcome the ability to be able to experience mixed reality through mobile devices, it's not ideal because you have to, unfortunately, still hold the device in your hands. So it becomes a much more passive experience. You're watching a scene unfold rather than interacting with it. But no, I think the more the merrier. And we're already seeing companies really beginning to take mixed reality much, much more seriously.

Why in this kind of classical, classical, bring them quotes, still very new, classical see, through augmented reality sort of version of mixed reality that that was represented by the HoloLens really, primarily in our minds. What Why, why do you think HoloLens itself is winning in that part of the market?

Well, I think HoloLens had a massive advantage of being really the first play. In this market, the only real competitor of note historically was Magic Leap. And I think their issues fairly well documented. I don't think Microsoft are going to have that advantage much longer, I think it's going to be very interesting to see the extent to which they take advantage of their dominance in the market over the coming months, maybe the next year or so. I think there'll be pushed much more aggressively by some of the players that are coming to market, I've actually had the good fortune to see magic leaps, new device, it's absolutely terrific. The field view is phenomenal. It has this wonderful feature where it kind of allows you to dim the physical world to really augment the holographic content, which I think would be incredibly impactful for for the kind of work that we do. So I think there's going to be a number of players in this space, that should, you should be able to get fairly good market share and markets grip, that Microsoft grip on the market, I think will will loosen over time, that said, you know, we're very close to the folks at Microsoft and, and they're thinking very deeply about this space, this space is important to them. And they're investing heavily in mixed reality and some of the supporting technologies that drive it. I think with the advent of 5g and edge surfing, I think mixed reality is going to become increasingly important in the way that we deliver and consume content, particularly at the enterprise level,

staying on this theme of hardware for just a moment longer. What is what's your take on simpler devices. So you know, you talked about the HoloLens, it's a really capable device with lots of sensors and does a really good job of understanding the world to allow that overlay of digital to be pretty darn good. And magically measurably to do a good job that stuff as well. But there are simpler devices out there like the Lenovo think reality three or the the end real light, that are a bit more like a wearable display. These types of devices have enough functionality to deliver the sort of benefits that your subscribers your students need.

Yeah. And that's, that's a great question. Unfortunately, I can't talk from personal experience to some of those devices, because I haven't used them. I know that some of those devices rely heavily on the processing power of either a mobile device, or some of them a tethered. That's right. And I don't have an issue with that as long as they perform in the way that they need to perform in order to be able to deliver this type of content. So if we think about, what do I want this device that I'm wearing to do? I want it to be able to, first and foremost, allow me to see holographic content that superimposed into the physical world. I need it to be good enough to be able to put that content where it needs to be placed. So for instance, one of the one of the applications we're developing currently, a allows us to overlay a high fidelity holographic patient on top of a physical mannequin. So I don't know how familiar you are Jason with mannequin simulation, but mannequins tend to be representing a 30 to 40 year old white male, they're plastic, they're inanimate, they don't respond to better ones have plastic tubes that can bleed. Some of them you can open up and See things underneath. But generally, they're just pieces of plastic. And when you're running a simulation class, and you're telling your students that this patient is suffering from cardiac arrest or is in excruciating pain, because they've been shot in the shoulder, you're faced with this lump of plastic that doesn't react or respond to you, the stakes suddenly lower in that simulation. So we've developed an application where you can superimpose a mannequin on top of a sorry, superimpose a hologram on top of a mannequin. So I need my device to be able to render that hologram, in the right coordinates over the mannequin, and so on. Right, so as long as that device does that, we're happy. And even if there's, you know, plus or minus a little bit of airy, you know, we still might be happy because the outcome may be better than anything that's available to the student. Today, currently. Interestingly, with a Magic Leap to their devices tethered to compute power is in a pack that you wrap around your shoulder tangles by your waist, I actually found it very easy to use, it was very comfortable, it didn't get in the way, I have worked with some other devices that are impractical. If I have to plug my device into a laptop or a computer, for instance, that's going to restrict my movement, it's going to restrict how I can pivot and spin. And also, you know, one of the things that we look to, you know, we talk about VR is VR, you need to be in a very safe environment, you need to you don't want to fall over cables or chairs, or bumping into walls. So similarly, in mixed reality, it's going to be kind of counterintuitive, if you actually can't move around the space where this content is being displayed. I have colleagues that have looked at these products, and we're assessing each one to determine its suitability, and whether it's something that we want to engineer for. And, you know, what we do know is that being able to port out platform onto these devices is not a massive overhead, you know, where we are back end disunity. So it's obviously devices support Unity, we should be good to go.

So really this kind of jump back to this notion of the breadth of the platform that you're creating, you are describing something that is really meant to be agnostic in terms of the source of the content, could be something that you directly create, or could be some sort of third party, and you're trying to be as agnostic as possible to the hardware itself, upon which that content rides as long as it's able to deliver on the sort of educational experience you're trying to deliver. That's, that's relevant. Is that fair?

That's entirely fair. And also what we're keeping a close eye on, in terms of the hardware is, you know, which devices are getting good market share, you know, what, what are the customers telling us? You know, do they want to spend money on the best devices, or are they constrained by budget, and therefore will tolerate some of the disadvantages of having a cheaper device. And if they say, you know, we're very happy to spend $1,500 on Metis new device, but we're less inclined to spend three and a half 1000 on Microsoft's, we need to listen to that, we need to make sure that we respond accordingly. But I think whether you're talking about the platform, the software, or the hardware, there is a common driver that we think about deeply at kick XR, and that is making sure that we provide our end users with the maximum amount of value. And that's why we made the decision, for instance, to open up our platform to third parties to be able to develop content for it. So exposing our SDK, we know that there are lots of institutions that have built good VR apps that deliver very specific value to driving some of the challenges they face in their curriculum, it makes sense to us to be able to allow them to very easily put those across to a mixed reality environment and expose them to our market, put them in the hands of our global sales force so that we can start selling those applications. Because at the end of the day, what we want to give our users is breadth and depth of content, so that they can drive outcomes right across the spectrum of healthcare training delivery.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. To jump back on this this one comment you'd made that you listen very carefully to your customers regarding what's the right sort of device that makes sense for them. And making sense for them. It's partially about the sort of experience that can be delivered with that device. Making sense to them is also about the budget they have to spend on the device in order to also previously that in some cases, the content is viewable through a handheld device, a tablet or phone. It's not the same experience, but you get something better than what you'd have otherwise. Have you seen cost sensitivity in your market? Have you seen that this desire to go after something that's much more affordable than a $3,500 device? Right?

So certainly, I'm not directly answering that question initially, I think during the pandemic, actually, when the pandemic hit, we didn't have a mobile layer at the platform that allowed participants in instructor led tuition to be able to access the content with their mobile devices. We entered did that very quickly. Because we knew that our customers were now dispersed universities weren't in session, their cohort students were studying in their parents basements, their bedrooms, wherever they were. So the mobile they have was always on our roadmap, we just accelerated accelerated that development because of the pandemic. And that was very helpful for us as a business. But it was very helpful for our customers, because they were able to continue to offer simulation. And in some instance, particularly in nursing, you need to do so many simulation hours in order to qualify, and we helped a number of institutions with that. I think that I'm very delighted by what I'm seeing and hearing from the market, in terms of the benefits that remote and mobile access affords. And I talked earlier on about this, I think I did about the democratization of this type of learning. And certainly, by offering access to this type of learning experience, using your mobile phones, as conduits onto the content, goes a long way to helping to take something that was once the confines of the largest and wealthiest schools and making it available to all comers. What we're also seeing and I, I had a wonderful experience in in the UK, listening to some good friends of ours at Health Education England, describing what it was like to work with student doctors in Uganda, interacting with great consultants in the UK, you know, how amazing that we're now at a point in time where technology like this conscious help drive standards at home, particularly in schools that are well resourced in, you know, wealthy nations like North America, in the united states and schools that have no limit to the resources that they can hire upon their student base, but they can help bring that know how, and expertise into areas much less blessed with those resources. What we also know is that we're in a digital age where people come into the world with a mobile phone tethered to their body now. And particularly as well, you know, a student body, they come to school in the United States expecting to be taught using cutting edge digital technologies, they have tremendous command of digital technologies, whether it's mobile devices, or, or virtual reality headsets and so on. They expected, you know, they adapt to it very, very easily the learning curve, now being able to use technologies like ours, or also as VR technology, it's just, it's almost immediate, right. And similarly, we're seeing that even in provincial areas, and in developing areas, because they can access these kinds of technologies through their mobile devices, I think it's really, really important feature, not just of our platform, but of what we need to continue to do as an industry to make sure that everyone benefits from the great work that's being done in education.

Yeah, that's an excellent point that this kind of notion of democratization includes utilizing all of the devices that can contribute to this this type of education, including the phone that's already in their pocket, when you look at the health of the company, the growth of the company, over the last, you know, since you started coming in 2019, as you project ahead over the next year or two, what are some of the or the key driver maybe for growth? Is it the size of the content library? Is it a pervasiveness of the sort of hardware, although you noted that there's this great opportunity for anybody who just has a smartphone in their pocket? Is it you know, what is it out there? That is the key driver of growth for you?

I think there are a number of things, a number of things that are going to contribute to growth for us, certainly, continuing to expand our catalog of applications is key. We want this platform to be, you know, would be great if we could make it the de facto mixed reality platform in healthcare training. In order to do that, we need to offer value in right across the board of healthcare training, and whether it's procedural training, scenario based trading, nurse training, whatever it might be, we need to have an app for that. And I like very much the strategy that we've adopted where we kind of stand on the shoulders of giants in the space. Again, this sounds a little crass in a way but you know, leveraging their brand and by saying, Hey look, if you want to learn how to do scenario based training the way that Cambridge University Hospitals does it, then you need this application. And we're very happy for our our brand to be sort of in the background there, right. So we will continue aggressively to build those relationships with industry partners. And there are many, many in the wings that will be announced shortly. And many more apps that will be coming to the platform over the course of the next 12 to 24 months and thereafter, in perpetuity. I think with the nascent technology, a nascent medium like this, I think data points are really important. So being able to prove that this type of trading drives outcomes in these empirical ways, is going to be vital to seeing growth, not just for a company like ours, but for mixed reality, right across the industry. And I know that the industry is taking that very, very seriously. And there are a lot of studies that have been conducted now. And there are a lot of studies that have been fired up, many of which we are involved in, that I hope over the course of the coming months will produce some data that really validates some of the assumptions that are being made. Now you could talk to the head of education at Cambridge University, who will say, I believe that I think that extended reality will transform the way that we train our doctors and nurses, I'm pretty sure that will be the case. But when that person says, and here's the data to prove it, you have a very, very different story. So I think the uptake will be seem to be fairly gentle. I mean, we're doing incredibly well, now we have our platform deployed in over 70 institutions globally, we're growing at a really encouraging rate, you know, I think next year, we're gonna see that number, massively advance, our pipe is looking great people already saying that, it's really interesting looking at the sales process in the early days, it's like, you've got to go better down the doors. And now we get inbound leads every day saying, we've heard about what you're doing. We've seen what you're doing. We've heard from a school across town that's using technology and loves it, what do we need to do to get on the program. So that's really, really encouraging for us. And I also think, of course, that the advent of new technology devices, will be very helpful in helping to drive adoption. And in particular, let's say it out loud, you know, when Apple comes out with their mixed reality device, I'm pretty sure it's going to be transformative, that the world is really going to sit up and pay attention.

We definitely have lots of enthusiasm around that device. And yeah, you know, that can only help ultimately the sort of offering that that you're trying to make, you've noticed that there's a couple of things in there about this, the market of augmented reality devices and mixed reality devices is looking for the sort of proof points that you're helping to establish to the work that you're doing proof points that that these devices aren't just a novelty, but after offer real, real value proven value, that it really makes a huge difference. And those sort of proof points will help the overall adoption, continued adoption of these sorts of devices, of course, so availability of the next great thing from from an apple. And I think that on the backside of that this notion of investor enthusiasm also seems to be ebbing and flowing, rising and falling with the you know, the level of enthusiasm of investment that major the major the major players are making in the market, or the the sort of progress that they're seeing from companies like yours, are the effects of the pandemic itself, right. And we saw a nice uptick in utilization of these sorts of technologies. How do you think about or what has been your experience at gig XR around the sort of investor enthusiasm? Whether it be flowing or ebbing?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I've had some interesting experiences with with venture around this space. One of the things that's, you know, I've been perplexed by is listening to VC saying, Yeah, we kind of we think it's going to be cool. But we'd like to wait and see. I think there's enough evidence out there to point to real value that's being driven in companies across across the board at an enterprise level. I think the level of investment that's being made by industry is really validating that point. It was interesting with VR, it was oh, yeah, it's great. It's going to be the next big thing. And then, well, you know, it's great for gaming, but is it good for anything else? And we've seen that sort of that there's peaks and troughs and enthusiasm for VR, particularly in investor level, but now, VR is here, and it's the mainstream, it's not going anywhere, and there's significant investment around it. I think things have changed over the past six months or so. And I wonder if I don't know the extent to which the pandemic had something to do with that. It's This notion that actually, it isn't such a bad thing to be remote, it isn't actually such a negative thing for productivity to have your workforce displaced. And I think we've got a much clearer line of sight on to where mixed reality in particular mixed reality, as opposed to virtual reality, might be able to really deliver some value. And I know that just from our point of view, talking to the investor community, we're getting a very different type of response today than we were getting six months ago or 12 months ago, I think there's a lot of enthusiasm for mixed reality from risk taking investors who know that this isn't a fad, this isn't something that's going to be a blip, it's going to disappear. And I think over the course of the next year or two, when companies like ours become part of the fabric of the way things get done, I think there's going to be a lot more energy, a lot more enthusiasm about this space, and we're going to see a lot more money flying.

I love that phrase becoming part of the fabric of how things get done. And so beautifully said, when you look out right? This this notion of investor enthusiasm is one of the things that can affect the success or the growth rate of a company like yours, like whether or not they're willing to continue to fund and fuel the growth prospects that you're seeing and, you know, have at your fingertips is there is it the investment? Is it the the pace of the device innovation? Is it the proof points, what who or what in this industry is causing you the most concern right now, for the next 12 months or so,

certainly investment would help. In a company like ours, we're full of ambition, we've got a very clear idea of what needs to be done. We know where we need to get to. And my gosh, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could just throw a ton of resources at just accelerating all of that and make it happen next month, rather than next year? Unfortunate. That's not how the world works. Right. So we think we're handling that, that pretty well. I think that this is still emerging this technology space. And I think that that it can't exist in isolation, there are things that are happening around it, that are going to help determine its usage, its success, its impact. And we've already talked about 5g Edge surfing, you know, thinking about how can I deliver a training experience, for example, if I'm in the military, and I've got some teams on a frontline on the other side of the world need some real time help from experts back in DC? Right? So I've got the mixed reality piece. Now I need five GPS now you know, I need this piece. Or maybe I need a haptic element to it. It's one of things I love watching in this space is that we're all talking to each other. Yeah, industry is talking to industry interesting. How can we work together to help drive success as a whole. And we're using words like complimentary rather than competitive. And we're telling people about what we're doing. And we're opening up the hood. I think that's really exciting. And I think that the investment community is taking a look at that. And I know that there is a huge amount of investment coming into this at a federal level. Right. So we've already as a company, we've won a number of several awards. That's the Small Business Innovation Research grants, with deep, deep deep into processes, the process of other two other very substantial awards that we're going for, at a federal level. The government is not shy here. They're chucking money at this because they believe that mixed reality, this type of technology is really going to drive outcomes in a positive way. And we've seen traditionally over time, you know, institutions like the VA, the veterans administration's right, being absolutely a forefront of technical innovation. For instance, did you know that they develop the nicotine patch, because so many of their vets came back from the frontlines with nicotine issues. And so they invested a huge amount of money trying to solve that problem. And they did announce this all over the world. I love what organizations like the VA and the way it's funded by central government is doing to help drive the status to take care of their veterans. And the trickle down effect of that is that we will become beneficiaries. So there is investment, there's big investment, I just see it getting more and more profound. It really in the short term, but certainly the medium term to

let's switch hats, you'd noted that prior to gig XR, maybe even still part of your life, you had spent time as an early stage investor, and advisor. And you've noticed one of the things you wanted to do was just to encourage and support these entrepreneurs and you want to support them all you know financially and with your time. Roll up your sleeves. As you as you had gone through that set of experiences working with other entrepreneurs, is there a common piece of advice that you find yourself sharing over and over again with These early, aspiring early founders,

one of things that was really interesting when we were we literally had a parade of young entrepreneurs come through our Venice office when we when we had our fund. And one of the things that I always recall from it was when somebody came in and said, We're going to be the Uber for, or we're going to be a billion dollar company in 10 days. And I just thought, no, no, no, no, you're you're not. And that's not what you should be saying. So I always like to encourage entrepreneurs to think practically think clearly, set out your vision, have a strong roadmap to how you think you can deliver success. What is your route to market, and be really, really, really honest with yourself, the first dollar that you earn is going to be the most challenging dollar. But if you can earn $1, you can earn another dollar. Right? So tell me how you're gonna get that first dollar, don't tell me about what you're going to sell your company for. I don't believe you. The other thing that I would say to an entrepreneur is, there is nothing quite like the relationship that you have with this thing that you've just made it, it is your baby, we call it the baby for a reason. It didn't exist, you gave it life. But sometimes your baby grows up to be an absolute pig. And what you need to do is, when that moment comes, recognize it and make a change. I have one of my businesses you referenced earlier on it was it was the best best business I had, by a mile until this one that never got away was a fantastic video technology company that absolutely should have been used by every single person in the world, and the world would be better for it. Right. And I was convinced when we conceived it that it would I just knew it would be successful. I so cared about that business that I kept going and kept going and kept going, I couldn't let go. And a guy once said to me, a guy who I came to respect, who was a great mentor and friend said to me, sometimes your business becomes this huge boulder that You and You alone are pulling up a very, very steep hill. And the sense of liberation and relief you get when you cut that rope and let the boulder fall down into the valley behind you. So that you can climb over that hill and walk down the other side is the greatest blessing you will ever know and asking No, no, no, I gotta carry on, I gotta carry on. And eventually I cut the rope. And he was right. In my business that became the sports betting business, I'd been doing the same thing. I've been pulling that boulder up a hill. And instead of cutting the rope, what I said was, we need to spend the business, we need to do something completely different from what we originally conceived. We got really lucky. In that instance, I think we got really lucky. Sometimes you got to let go. And there's always going to be the next one.

Oh, wow, that's a hard one. That's a hard one to stomach for an entrepreneur who really believes in their baby. And having that sort of humility and introspection necessary to reflect and to make that sort of decision is hard. But what you noted, sometimes that's exactly the best thing to do. Let's wrap up a couple of lightning round questions here. What commonly held belief about AR or VR mixed reality Do you disagree with?

Well, I've already said it. But I disagree with the idea that it's a fad. I think it is anything but I think it's going to be ubiquitous, it's going to be everywhere. It's going to be in everything we do. We're going to be wearing devices, we're going to be making decisions, informed by information and content that's going to be displayed and had to us in real time. And we are going to be all the better for it. With that, I think comes a huge amount of responsibility. I do worry sometimes about things like privacy and data and what we do with it. I think it's very, very important that companies like ours take that incredibly seriously. And treat it with the respect and the nurture and the care it absolutely deserves. But this ain't no fad.

Yeah, like that. Besides the one you're building what tool or service do you wish existed in the AR or Mr. Market?

Oh, that's easy. I can't wait for really great haptic technologies to be mainstream. There's a great company called the haptics, H. AP TX just recently launched the latest iteration their glove, it's still quite a clunky thing. But you know, this ability to be able to interact with something holographic, but have a real sensory perception of resistance and touch. And can you imagine? So if I'm thinking about, you know, I want to learn how to do a medical procedure, and I take a holographic needle, and I put it into a holographic body and I feel that resistance, I feel the difference of what it's like when I put it into a thigh muscle versus a butt cheek? I don't know, is there a difference? I think that's a technology. I just can't come soon enough, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, well, yeah. Especially for the sort of experiences you're trying to create. Where it is very much about the feel of the most definitely, yeah, application of the of the education. Last one for you here. If you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self? What advice would you share with 25? year old David?

Go back to music? Probably? No, maybe that's a little glib. Do you know what I think I would actually say and that I might be giving a little bit too much away about myself. Never doubt, never doubt yourself. Don't be afraid to be tough. And don't be afraid, from time to time, maybe even to be a little mean, one of my early investors in in my second company, who after we sold our business and he did okay. He did very okay. This guy's a billionaire property developer, one of the most well known property developers in the UK, he took me out for lunch. And he said, I don't get you. And I said, Go on. He said, I've watched you with this business and much of what you've done, you've been led by your heart, not your head. And I never really believed that businessman can be successful if they follow their heart, not their head. And he said, You've proved me wrong. And he said, I don't get it. And I can't process it. And it's tough. And while I think that, again, I'm saying this very humbly, I'm a nice guy, I listen, I like people, sometimes I'm nice to fault, I think I should have learned by now to be a little bit tougher. So I think what I would say to my 25 year old self is, it's okay to be a bit of a dick from time to time. Just as long as you believe in what you're doing. And you continue to drive yourself to be the best you can be.

I have had many a conversation around this this general topic that there was a it was with a female executive. And we're talking about executive coaching and some experiences she and I have had and and she was relaying the some commentary that her executive coach had shared around this kind of stereotypical bucketing or classification of some of her clients. And that the the women and the nice guys tend to fit in a bucket. And then there's the other type of entrepreneur that you're talking about, who is very much head driven very much my way or the highway and doesn't at all act with their heart, at least not in the sort of business decisions that others see around them. And anyway, the nice guys and women had similar set of problems in this, the challenge of, of overcoming the fear of rejection, that goes along with stating something that we perceive is not desirable, by the other side, right to say something that is less than great, less than encouraging less than what they want to hear. And the the effect maybe that that many of these leaders have and kind of relaying the story from this particular executive sketch. The challenge I have is to is to recognize that sometimes the saying no, is liberating, and allows a better expression of the sort of things you feel in your heart. And the economy that both saying now when disappointing somebody is the right thing to do is really difficult for a lot of people the process, but I think that I as I became a parent, this became a lot more clear to me that this notion that disappoints the child to say no to the child is potentially you know, frustrating, infuriating for the child in that moment. But I believe deep in my heart, that is the right thing for that child to hear in that moment. Because it is from my love for that child that I'm making that choice for them. Because I believe it'll be in their best long term interest. Anyway, this notion of of being a jerk in the moment or just simply saying no, and doing what you believe to be right. It's so hard. It's so hard to do. I still really struggle with it on a on a daily basis as an executive and leader. Anyway, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

No, I think we covered quite a lot with I was great. And certainly listen, thank you. It's been a real pleasure. As somebody who actually does podcasts, I've learned a lot from this. And I love your process. Jason, it's been it's been a real joy to be part of this. Thank you so much.

I appreciate that very much. Where can people go to learn more about you gig EXR and the other things you're working on.

So of course, our website, gig xr.com. I live in LA. So if anybody is local, and they think they want to grab a coffee, feel free to email me drop me a line. I'm very open. And I'm very, very passionate about this space. And anything I can do to help drive success in this industry. Consider me in. So I don't know Jason, if you could do feel free to share my email address. This has been great. Thank you so much,

David. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. In it I speak with Chen Zhang and Matt Udvari. Chen and Matt are cofounders of Aquifer, a company that has created a SaaS platform to enable creators and teams to create studio level animated video without the studios. We talked about 3d animation, creative storytelling, building great customer experiences, and a snowstorm in Texas. I think you really enjoyed the conversation, and please consider contributing to this podcast at patreon.com/theARshow. Thanks for listening.