The AR Show: Sly Lee (Emerge) on the Importance of Touch to Immersive Presence

4:31PM May 24, 2021

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Keywords:

experience

inner circles

building

touch

vr

space

haptics

create

emerge

metaverse

ar

hand

enable

technology

mississippi

connect

underwater

hardware

sense

device

Welcome to the AR show right 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 sly Lee sly is the co founder and CEO of emerge across reality presents company building a platform that aims to enable more meaningful, engaging and diverse interactions in xR to bring us closer to the people we care about through touch and emotion. Sly is an entrepreneur and scientist who's passionate about creating positive global impact. He was named to Forbes 30, under 30, and he is a member of the global future Council on virtual and augmented reality at the World Economic Forum. Earlier in his career, sly was the founder of the hydrus, an organization that assembled an international consortium to create and share 3d maps of underwater coral reefs. In this conversation, we explore the concept of human connectedness in the age of the metaverse and why the sense of touch has an important part to play.

So in my co founders, and I have a different opinion on the most people in in the AR VR industry is that we do not think that AR VR will be the next paradigm shift as it's currently manifested. We think that without the sense of touch, you lose a lot of that presence that the promise of VR VR has, and that you need the marriage in combination of all three of these to make the next stepwise function, increase in terms of how we can connect with one another. The intention around incorporating the sense of touch in this human connection use case was very much around and still is very much around sharing emotion, and truly is trying to understand the other person.

Slide goes on to describe the product he's creating, how it differs from haptic controllers, and the feedback he's getting from early users. We explore how touch is incorporated into social interaction within our inner circles, and what the trends and differences are internationally. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. Let's dive in. Slide tell us a little bit about your Tom Sawyer esque childhood.

I grew up as a child of Chinese immigrants in Mississippi in the deep south, my two younger brothers and myself. And my parents immigrated from Singapore, actually, in the 80s. So this was obviously before the internet. And it's a fascinating story. Because when I asked them, Why are we in Mississippi, when when I became old enough to ask the question, because I realized no one around me looked like we did. They said it was just pure happenstance and pure chance because without the benefit of the internet or information online, they just applied to universities that had a free application process. So they they were not the crazy rich, Asian, Singaporean, they're very much that poor Singaporean background, so I grew up in Mississippi looking like, you know, people in the movie menari hunting and fishing and, and skinning animals. And you know, running barefoot down rivers and streams and getting lost and I'm very much Huckleberry Finn childhood. And so it's actually fascinating to recount those memories, because now I'm in very much a high tech world that that I'm in our companies in, but often look back fondly at those those moments where I was just so connected with nature. And I think in many ways, even what I I strive to do personalities make that very grounded, authentic connection with nature, but also people. It's very in line with actually what we're building emerge.

When your parents made that trip to Mississippi. Why did they choose to stay there? rather than do the school and then move on to some larger city?

I also asked them the same question why why didn't we move anywhere else? San Francisco's great. New York's great, LA is great. Why did we stay in Mississippi? I think in many ways, it was just as many of us are influenced by who we know in our inner circles. They were also very strongly influenced by the friends that they made in Oxford, Mississippi, as soon as they immigrated. They were the first of both of their families. So they didn't know a single soul in the US, not even a friend of a friend. And so when they just landed in Mississippi, and then made friends through the church, you know, I have a grandmother that I'm going to visit next week, I'm very excited about who's a really cute white haired, old white lady. That is a fascinating, generous woman, one of the first female chemists in the state adopted my parents in the you know, because they went to the same church. I think they just formed that sense of community and then they just stayed there. They did eventually move to Australia. Funny enough, when I was two and took me with them, but then they came back to the US. I think this is sort of in between the lines of what they told me but I think they did not establish that same strong bond of family into family in Australia as they didn't Mississippi. So they came back to the same city actually in Mississippi. And that's where I was born raised.

The connection to places really, so the connection to other people. Yeah, I think so in the importance of establishing, establishing that community, you'd mentioned that part of your experience in Gregor Mississippi was kind of this Tom Sawyer experience where you're constantly out and about exploring the wilderness and, and being in touch with nature. And that ends up becoming a major part of your life. As you went through school and after school, how did you end up finding a way to creating 3d maps of underwater environments,

I've always had a fascination with oceans, I grew up in a landlocked city, and that's coast of Mississippi is tiny, we got, we got the worst of both sides, Louisiana takes up a lot of the section of the coastline. And then Alabama, also squeezed in between then Florida comes in and takes most of the shoreline there. But nevertheless, I just always was fascinated reading National Geographic and Zoo books, which was a big thing in the 90s. And I always thought that one day, I would love to do something in that field. The way I eventually ended up in that space was was also by serendipity. And by, by chance, and by taking those chances, I I grew up obviously a child of Asian parents. So I had the very strong inclination to be that in the medical profession, so I almost became a pharmacist Actually, that's what I went to school for and have a degree in. And then at the 11th hour, I switched to a professional degree in the Marine pharmacognosy space drug discovery from the oceans, which is sort of related to the pharmacy background, but I realized I didn't want to be stuck in a pharmacy all day dispensing dispensing pharmaceuticals. But I wanted to instead want to discover the next pharmaceutical compounds from the rain forest, or, as it turned out, at the time, was up and coming coral reefs. And so that's what I spent my graduate degree time studying and then ended up getting a professional degree in masters in that space. My first job was in Hawaii, fortunate for me, because it was very difficult in 2012, to get a job in general, but the world did not need more marine biologists. There's just not a high demand for that field. But nevertheless, I was fortunate to get to get a job in Hawaii, or part of my work was to monitor underwater assets, essentially, in coral reefs in the benthic ecosystem and fish and all the biodiversity down there was of interest to the federal government to track and monitor within the national park system, I very quickly realized that the methods that we were using to monitor those, those ecosystems was really antiquated. We were literally draping chain mail on the bottom of the ocean floor. And then measuring the distance the chain mail took up. And that was a measure of complexity, or called regressivity of the bottom of the ocean. I was always interested in photography growing up as well. So I started looking into the field at the time and learn that this new new term called photogrammetry, and then what it could do above water, and I was interested to see what it could do below waters while to solve this problem of mapping ecosystems, trying to understand the complexity of life underwater. And so I got into 3d mapping, because another opportunity came up within my work at Pearl Harbor, which is also another National Park. And they were embarking on this project to 3d map the entire underwater vessel, the the underwater ship, which was obviously the famous shipwreck, which brought us into World War Two after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. So it is a national monument of historical significance. But the only data that we had at the shipwreck was by hand drawn onto water architects, that they literally scuba dived, and he drew pieces of the ship in a two by two feet section and it took them two years to complete. And so now they're going back in the parks that just wanted to map the ship using a combination of technologies. I was lucky to get invited to be part of that project because they learned working in photography and that I had an interest in it. And that was already part of the Park Service in a scientific diver. And so in that project, this was the 2014 or so I got introduced to the concept of underwater LIDAR, and or sonar and underwater photogrammetry which is which was the most novel of the three technologies that had not been proven. But once we did it, we were able to 3d map the entire ship and very high resolution you can you can look it up online. I saw the potential to bring that back to my work and what I was really interested in at the time which is coral reefs, to try to see if we could use photogrammetry specifically because with photogrammetry you get you preserve the color and colors very important for quarries because they are indicators of health. You know, I spent I spent my life savings that I'd saved that with my meager federal job salary and spent it all on photogrammetry gear and just traveled around the world and on my off days and vacation times that I had accumulated trying to 3d map coral reefs around the world and try to figure out a method that could work because underwater yet you have a lot of challenges. With photogrammetry, because you have this thing called turbidity, you have the silt just constantly stirring, and things are mixing with water, you're moving in the water itself. So you don't have a stable platform to anchor yourself to unlike when you're on land. But over trial and error, I found the method that worked to where we were able to actually capture very high resolution images are 3d models, actually, of corals. And when I sent that to my, my friends in context at Autodesk is Autodesk was a project of that USS Arizona Project, they were amazed enough because a model of that fidelity had not been created with there at the time called recap software, and so called bass and the team actually funded my dad in Denver. And then I started a nonprofit called the hydrous, which is still running today. And for the next few years, expanded the program expanded, the methodology just gave it to a bunch of scientists. And my goal there was to empower citizen scientists to take charge of their own resources, and not have to rely on extremely expensive sensors. At the time, our competitor, quote, unquote, at the time was the Google streetview team, which had this $2 million underwater torpedo like setup where they would swim it along the reef, and they would scan the entire reef, but that's not very scalable. And my goal was to have this decentralized, and people with a very inexpensive camera, I think we got it down to a method that could work with it. 100 to $200, camera Kit 3d map their own environments underwater,

you talked about the importance of color, being able to capture the color of the reef as well as the 3d structure of it. You talked about the silt in the water or the movement of the water, what about the color filtration is the is the lightest passing through the water? How do you capture realistic color,

that is another challenge actually is is light source. Most corals exist, coincidentally, which is beneficial within a very narrow band actually underwater within around, you know, a few feet to 30 to 60 feet underwater. Below that you don't have a lot of coral life, there are many photographs that are like 300 feet down, but they're not very common. And so we did benefit from the light being readily available. But we also introduced other lights with underwater strobes. So I had this rig that was almost as big as like, you know, a motorcycle, that I would bring underwater, you know, when when trying a very high end system camera system that would introduce and flash the reef on with very bright lights.

So you noted that you left the federal government Central National Park Service, you got funding from Autodesk. And you created this project called the Hydras with the intention of democratizing the ability to go and capture all of this data. Where has all that data ended up? Is it under the domain of the the hydrous project? Or is it open source? Where's that today? Huh?

Yeah, that data is something that was very tricky, actually, many angles. Number one, what to do with at all. Number two, we were trying to figure out if there was way to find a business model around that data. As we know, a lot of the major companies are built upon data, you know, from Google and Facebook, and how to stick with our mission to make what we call open access oceans, and give the data readily to the people where we ended up was since we were incidents we still are the program is still his NGO, a 501 c three nonprofit, we ended up just giving the data away to people. So it's readily available in a few platforms like sketchfab. Or you can you can download 3d models of briefs and use it for educational purposes. It's in certain archives, like the Smithsonian, we partnered with them to digitize their choral specimen archive, and also some work that's being done with Stanford University now in Google.

Very nice. And how is it this experience led you to emerge

in 2015, that was right around the peak of the photogrammetry work under and with in partnership with Google. At this time, we expanded past the partnership with Autodesk but also Google and Lenovo. And I was traveling to different countries. I think it's one point I travelled to, like five to eight international countries and sites and scuba diving a year in capturing reefs. I also got accepted into a really fascinating program at the time, which I think is now been no longer running called Singularity University in the Bay Area funded at the time by NASA and Google. And it is there that I met my co founders of emerge. And that was the most profound program and experience that I've had to date, that really changed the path of my life. And that program, I think, it enabled a lot of growing for me very quickly, because I had not been exposed to Silicon Valley. I grew up in Mississippi, remember, and then I was working in a very remote section of Hawaii immediately after Mississippi. So not been exposed to the whole startup ecosystem. And so that was sort of a fast track for me, and learning what different technologies were up and coming in what what companies were being built, you know, with computer vision, Ai, you know, machine learning everything around the microbiome and DNA sequencing everything around next year. sensors and remote sensing. And there is where I met my co founders, Zach cattle and risio touren are from two different countries. We didn't know each other there. But the goal of the program was to bring people together that were passionate about having some positive global societal impact, but also very passionate around a future technologies. And with the marriage of two, how could you create a sustainable impact and benefit society? That that vision is often sort of even laughed out a little bit now within especially when people think about Silicon Valley, this whole utopian future? And you know, since then I have very much learned about the both the dangers of technology, if not designed? Well, I don't think that all you know, technology is used for good. And that learning, for me has been very foundational, after that program, even to what we're doing now at emerge. And what is it that you are tackling here at emerge, the vision of emerge was to create the next paradigms of human connection. What that means is, when we looked at what mattered the most to us, as individuals, as humans, it was family, and it's still his family. Funny enough, if you ask most people, they will say that as well. It's family, there's relationships, yet, we felt really limited in how we can connect with them and be present with them. When we weren't physically in the same space. You know, this was in 2015. This is before the the massive wave of fake news on social media. This is before the last, you know, President and all all of the confusion that happened in all the misinformation online, and how social media platforms were tearing us apart. Even in 2015, we felt that technology was not working to our benefit, and the social classes were not working to our benefit. And we thought that that was time to change, and that we wanted to create products that would, you know, enable those bonds to be strengthened, even though you weren't physically there, the vision that we still have is, imagine a future where distance and time don't stand in the way of feeling present. And so when we look at what is the current paradigm of human connection, what is the current standard, it's mobile, it's the iPhone 2007, I would argue that's the last big paradigm shift. And when we looked at the next paradigm shift that could happen, there was a few technologies that seemed interesting, you know, brain computer interfaces, ar VR, incorporating visuals, audio, and touch. And so ultimately, that last one is what we felt most compelled with, as in my co founders, and I have a different opinion on the most people in the in the AR VR industry is that we do not think that AR VR will be the next paradigm shift as it's currently manifested. We think that without the sense of touch, you lose a lot of that presence that the promise of AR VR has, and that you need the marriage in combination of all three of these to make the next stepwise function increase in terms of how we can connect with one another. I think people didn't really understand that when we pitched that in 2015, I think it's become very apparent now. In 2021, after a year in lockdown due to the covid 19 pandemic,

what does that mean it to incorporate the sense of touch to increase the sense of presence, you know, with within these other complimentary bits of technology?

What exactly is it that you're creating, the intention around, incorporating the sense of touch in this human connection use case was very much around and still is very much around sharing emotion, and truly is trying to understand the other person, this field called haptics, which has been around for decades, you know, 50 6070 years, has been trying to do the same. However, I think, because I'm not an insider in the field of haptics, very much an int into an outsider trying to approach it anyway. So my co founders, I think that the field of haptics has been trying to answer the wrong question for decades. And in the same way that the question really matters, in the same way of one my favorite novel of all time Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the Life, the Universe, everything is 42. And then the scientists said, what, this doesn't even make sense. And the computer said, Well, this is the answer to the question us, that will answer life, the universe and everything. And then they created another system to help ask the right question. And then, you know, hilarity ensues. But I think people have been asking the question, how do you replicate reality? When it comes to touch? I think people have been really obsessed for for whatever reason, from this one perspective of how we understand touching our current reality of hardness of items, texture, of things like clothes, or, or rock, feeling punched in the face, feeling a bullet. that's, to me, it's been a lot of work. A lot of the field has really focused in terms of advanced haptics. Then you also have haptics in terms of sort of what we, you one might consider kind of dumb haptics. A phone vibrates, for instance, and just gives you a very brief amount of information or very little amount of information, just to call your attention. Instead, what we've been focusing on is how to leverage sense of touch. Because I really hate the word haptics as it applies to emerge. I think there's plenty of companies doing good work in haptics, but but we're just not building the haptic solution. We've been really interested in applying the sense of touch to convey emotion and understand emotion. In some ways, we've been able to overcome this sort of uncanny valley, that many of people in the previous attempts have hit, because there are some technological constraints to replicating reality. And so by going about this route, a different way, I think we've been able to overcome some of those some of those challenges. And specifically, we think that our vision of creating this new boat duality of connection for consumers means that it had to be low friction. So another approach that we are also taking is that it's a non wearable form factor. So you do not have to put anything on to actually experience sense of touch.

You're not putting it on, it's really meant to enable you high fidelity, conveyance of emotion, to enable that sort of human connection. What does that look like? on my desk? It's not on my hand. What does that look like on my desk?

Yeah, so I was I was excited, you were able to come by my office and try that recently. So you know, but I know, listen, just might not, it might not be so clear. But we have a device that sits on a surface, it is about the size and footprint of a MacBook Pro. And it has very special elements that create sound energy at higher frequencies than humans can hear. And in the same way that you might go to a concert, and you feel the energy from the bass speaker, or when you used to go to come, we used to go concert, you feel the energy from that bass speaker on your chest, and very diffuse pressure, we can also leverage that property of sound as a mechanical wave to create pressure that you can feel, but just that much higher precision, and specifically layering it with visuals and audio. So this device sits on your desk, it emits this literally a force field, or above and around it as well. That's something else quite interesting about about our product is you can actually feel sensations even if you're not directly above the device itself. And within that area, you can actually feel content that is mapped on to a visual object.

How is this different or similar to what the I guess the ultra haptics, which I think was a Leap Motion ultra haptics I think merged another ultra leap or something like that. But they remember years ago trying their product as well. And one of these conferences, maybe some listeners have also experienced that particular product. Can you describe how what you're doing is related to that other work?

Yeah, from what I know, they are also leveraging the technology of ultrasound, which is sort of like saying, you know, various companies using an OLED screen or an LCD screen. But there, as far as I know, they're leveraging it for other use cases. And very much are the haptics companies I mentioned earlier, the formerly called ultra ultra haptics, but I can't comment too much on the comparison or differences. But I do know that they're very focused on certain use cases that are meant for more single player perhaps, or single user in public displays. And we're very interested in the social component. And as such, our development of the product has taken a path where we optimize for the social experience, multi user experience in real time, and also integrated into AR VR and also existing devices.

So is that a social chat experience? Or is that layered on top of other social experiences that we would have through VR rigor or other sort of screen interface,

we are building an experience now that that aims to have a very frictionless journey for for the user, I think when we talk about creating the next paradigm of human connection, that can really only happen if people number one adopt the technology, not only our technology, but these immersive technologies as well. But also if we provide a very frictionless user experience. On a side note, I think I'm really excited about where we are today, because the in the history of our company, two things had to happen for us to be successful, like major milestones. Number one was, we had to get the technology to work because no one had actually pushed the technology very far, people have been experimenting with the beamforming and ultrasound for many decades in universities and labs. But no one had actually pushed it as far as we wanted to take it. So number one, we, we had to get the technology working to where it could fulfill that sort of fidelity in real time using social use that we wanted to achieve. And we've now achieved that the number two thing that we needed to happen was for people to adopt immersive technologies, because that immersive 3d environment is the best experience for the user in combination with our technology. You can use our tech also with 2d screens or even without visuals, but the best experience really is in this immersive setting. So we're really excited that people have adopted that you know there, there are millions of people using it. Least VR today in the consumer markets, specifically, we've identified many millions that have identified VR today for social purposes. So they're seeking to connect with other people. But still that there is a gap in the market and what apps exist today to, to allow people to connect even with voice and visuals alone. And so the experience that we're building combines the voice, the visuals, and also the touch in a way to where when you even think of someone that you want to connect with, you can do it in as least steps as possible. And I think there's probably as much as I can share today on the experience. But we're excited about the initial testing that we've been doing with with users. And we're finding that our approach to this frictionless experience is quite unique, because we're concentrating on this concept of people that you care about your inner circles. A lot of what excites me about the metaverse also gives us the opportunity to build what we're building. So a lot of these companies in this sort of metaverse, arena of massive online worlds where you can connect with anyone instantly, I think comes also with the challenge of privacy. And also the user experience, being able to actually even matchmake with someone and connect with someone you actually do want to connect with. And talk with, by focusing on the people that you, you deeply have this connection with, we've been able to build an experience where you set your permissions with other people that you You let in your inner circle, or maybe have even multiple inner circles. And it reduces a lot of the friction and privacy concerns actually, that we would we would hit if we were trying to do this massive online, you know, multiplayer approach. And so I think we're fulfilling this need, that people have specifically the need of, of wanting to connect with someone that they're not physically present with from a

distance. And how does that connection change? When you have this type of solution, this sort of matchbook size device on the table that uses ultrasound to create this high fidelity, sense of touch? What's enabled in your mind there? What is there some sort of new type of interaction and language of interaction that ends up emerging through this?

I love what the phrase you just mentioned, the language in many ways, how the interaction changes. And why this could be a stepwise change in how we connect is because it enables a new language enables a new interaction, it enables a new habits and potentially new ritual. What we found when testing with users, some of which we expect is because it's been backed up by decades of science around the power of touching human connection, some surprise this, something that we expected was that just the initial interaction, when you see someone in the real world, you reach anyone you hug them, or your hi fi is that touch establishes this baseline empathy for you to then hang out together, have a conversation together. Now, I do want to pause and say that we're not trying to replicate reality. In many ways. I think that's a lot of the dangers of maybe frontier tech companies when they try to replicate reality. And that's their goal, but also sort of tone deaf right when people I think a lot of the what bothers me about the the metaverse and air VR, in general is this sort of escapism moreso in VR, and we're not trying to replicate reality, or replace those in person experience, but augment them when you're not to improve the experience when that's just not possible. And so coming back to what we expected, and what we did not expect in terms of what changes in the user experience, what we expected to happen was that initial touch moment would be very powerful. Specifically, if you think about people that you care about your inner circle, you know, these are your parents use your children, this is your significant other, these are your siblings, these might be your best friends, right? That initial touch moment we knew was very powerful. We expected that. And we saw that in users too. It was this sort of unreal realization that all of a sudden, they can communicate not only on visuals, and audio, but all of a sudden touch was now part of this repertoire that they could use to communicate with one another, even something as simple as giving someone a high five and throwing a ball back and forth in real time. We've seen users just spend like, a lot of time, and that space in a very simple experience. So we did, we did expect that something else that we expected was that it's not only about the initial hand to hand contact moment, but the sense of touch, it binds us to this reality. So the chair that I'm sitting in now the chair that you're sitting on the desk that you're leaning on, the sense of touch binds us to the space that we're in, and when you're in a shared space with someone in real life, that creates this sort of underlying awareness that that isn't spoken about, but you understand that you're present with one another. Touch is very, very essential to this concept of presence. And just imagine what it would be like, you know, without touching, you're in the same space with another you're sort of this floating blob and like in space and you don't really even know where to work, what to leverage off. So we expected that touch moments where you're not directly in are with one another but the same space and same content, that concept of once throwing a ball back and forth playing virtual chests or playing game together would be very powerful. And we're seeing that now, what we did not expect actually was how in that space, specifically in VR, because that's what we're working on now. Because there was just a pretty substantial user base of, of oculus quest users. Today, what we did not expect was that in that virtual space, the social contract and social norms would be so different. In the real world, if I was with my brothers, it would be weird if I kept constantly hugging them or high fiving. You know, this, we're done. That's done once the beginning of the conversation or at the end, we started finding was that with this new modality, people started interacting with each others directly, you know, in hand to hand interaction, like 10 times more. And we don't know yet if that's because, you know, we're just so lonely now sheltering at home, and we just want to make that experience happen. Or if, for some reason, in the virtual space, when you have this cartoonish avatar, and you have these games, and you sort of have this playfulness, if all of a sudden, the the what is normal is rewritten, and what is expected is rewritten, and you just have this more, you have less barriers to express yourself, and try to connect with one another. Maybe that's what we always want to do. But we don't do that, because it's seen as weird. But I think the sense of touch. There's a lot of science and historical articles about this. But the sense of touch aversion in the US specifically is going away. Now, I think that largely due to the pandemic, but also as we shift to virtual communities, it's changing already, we see that

the aversion to touch is going away. That's what the data shows right. Now, broadly, we're seeing

that more strongly other countries, there are many cultures, you know, one of my best international trips was to Egypt, one year before the Egyptian revolution, my best friend's Egyptian, he also grew up in Mississippi as a child of immigrants. So we together in a very interesting childhood. But in Egypt, and most Middle Eastern countries, touches very much welcomed specifically are around same sex is. So you know, it's very common to see friends, you know, male friends, when friends walk into the streets holding hands, or is in the US that might be seen as very non macho, to hold the hand of your best friend and walking down the street. But it was everywhere. You know, when we traveled the country over this 35 days, I think some social behavioral scientists have been studying that shifting mindset in the US. And the trends seem to point to where that is changing. I think that it's not going to be a major shift anytime soon, in terms of like walking on the street, holding your hand over, you know, my best friend. But I think with the constant of your inner circles, I think people are just more willing to express that emotion with people that you deeply care about. So that's exciting, because we're seeing that shift also replicate itself, but even faster in the virtual space. There's this trend that exists, is growing, increasingly in society, this willingness to touch and be touched. And you are also facilitating that through your device that you're creating the sort of interactions around the device you're creating, as well. And you've been really focused recently, as you noted on Oculus quest, and VR

as a device just because it is available, right. And people are adopting it and using it for other purposes. And and now in conjunction with, with the eMERGE platform, they can use emerge, as well, as you think about the other sort of immersive technologies, because when I was in your office, there was a light field sort of display that was there. There's AR that was there VR, is there. Do you intend or you expect the sort of interactions that are commonly done when wearing a different device? Whether it's AR device or lightfield sort of display? Are they gonna be different with your emerging technology? Or are they going to be similar across those different platforms,

we've always had the intention to create a cross platform or cross device solution, because we knew that the winners, quote unquote, of AR and VR would not be really determined for a while. And, and we also made the very conscious decision not to enter that space in terms of head mounted displays, because it would be very expensive, very difficult. We've seen a lot of companies now closed down. That attempted to in the past, what we did know is that the visuals be very important. We are more interested in augmented reality. So in that way, I think we share the same vision that you do, you know, for your show being called the the air show, because it it does not have this sort of escapism field that I mentioned or that it really bothers me. In many ways. I think that problems exist in society when we ignore our current realities, not coming from the environmental world and being doing work there professionally in the past. I saw firsthand a lot of the issues when we ignore our own Earth in our environment. So that's one issue. The other is that i i want to be present with my current reality. I my wife's here, our dog is here. I want to hang out with them but also my brothers And my grandma who were not here today. And so augmented reality enables that experience to happen, whereas virtuality does not really it very much is teleport you to this alternate world. But today we think there is a strong reason to exist in that modality because we can start building community today, we're very passionate about that sense of community, you want to visit our office, yes, that we also have something we're very passionate about light field displays and other technologies that could get us to that non wearable form factor, mostly because of friction. It's not that we have any specific bet or a passion of one technology over the other, inherently but but because it introduces or allows for a much less friction experience. And the best consumer adopted products, they we think, not we think, obviously have the least friction possible. I mean, a child can use an iPad. Now, this gesture, so just intuitive. And so we do see a future, we're also building that part of that future, where, you know, when you just think of someone, five years from now, you think of someone you deeply care about that they're not with you right now. But you just want to, you want to let them know that you're thinking about them, they will instantly appear in a holographic form in front of you. And when you reach out to hold their hand, you're gonna be able to feel that now in the farther future, maybe 15 year future, when you think about them, and you just want to express how you feel. And you want to understand how they're feeling that will just instantly happen, right? Probably brain, the brain without having to see a visual or feel anything because these are just senses. Our senses are just chemical signals that are sent to the brain. But we think that's gonna be a little while. So it's a little science fiction right now.

Yeah, one day brain computer interface, human human telepathy, facilitated by computers. Given what is available today, he noted that the emerge, the approach you're taking to create the sensation of feeling in touch is not haptics. But we have we have the notion of kind of simplistic vibration oriented haptics that are in our phone, as you noted there in our, in our VR controllers, how is what you're creating better?

I think that one, I'm obviously biased. But But two, I've what I've seen from our users that we've tested with is, the approach that we've taken specifically on the touch side, is more compelling for two reasons, or two main reasons. Number one, it's, you don't have to physically touching anything to have that experience. So that eliminates that friction controller, obviously, very constraining, because you have to pick it up, you have to charge the battery, and there's only so much sensation you can have when your hand is in one particular orientation, you know, grabbing this controller. And it's it can only replicate so many touch sensations. Well, I think controllers replicate swords very well. You know, beat saber being, you know, an example of that, I don't think we will ever replace the, in your hand sword experience that a controller can give. But that's okay, because of Reason number two, once you free yourself from the constraints of current UI expectations, controllers, I also put keyboards in this category as well. People, you know, ask this, still ask us, could you create a virtual keyboard? Yes, we can absolutely create a fantastic virtual keyboard. But we think that that would really hinder the potential of what we can create in terms of a new UX UI, in the virtual space that is more intuitive than a modality not the keyboard layout being, you know, one that was invented for inefficiencies, to not jam the typewriter. And so the second reason being, once you free yourself from the constraints of how we imagined and interface with the current devices, you can start to have some pretty interesting types of information that you can convey. Ultimately, I see these input devices, as you know, information that you're inputting, and you're also receiving keyboard being information you put in very much, obviously, tech space, vibrations being information receiving in terms of an impact of something. But now with our system that you don't have to feel physically hold or touch anything. And the fact that our system can also create very nuanced sensations, you can create and enable a layer of information that the user understands and shares across the distance that is a little bit more sophisticated. And that's why we really talk about emotion a lot. Because I think emotion is the most sophisticated type of information that we were not able to convey today, we're able to convey very nuanced topics and facts and opinions, but quite difficult to understand and convey emotion. I mean, you see this every day, right? Well, how a lot of arguments are started is because of miscommunication. And our ability to honestly even understand our own emotions. It's very difficult. Sometimes you have to be have this level of introspection to understand how you're feeling today. And then, once again, convey that to someone else. So that's how we've designed our product, and how we design even basic UI elements of our experience, all around this intuitive notion, in sense of how we use our But also with the goal of conveying something deeper than you could convey just with controllers.

That reminds me of something that I'm trying to teach my daughters or or learn with my daughters. On some school mornings will listen to the the waking up app, one by Sam Harris, he has this introductory course that spans like 28 lessons or so we've been slowly working our way through the lessons kind of listen the same one over and over again and slowly working our way through. But this this challenge of understanding how you feel right now, and being able to articulate it is a big one I which I'm still learning how to do myself effectively. But I realized that my children, when they're not in a great mind space, it's very difficult for them to articulate how they feel and why they feel like what is the source of that kind of go, go back in your mind, go back in time, and try to find the trigger? It turns out to be a ridiculously challenging exercise. You know,

I love that you bring that story up, because that that points to the challenge that we have to even understand our emotions and convey that someone else points to why and many of life's hardest moments, think of a funeral, I think are happiest moments, even think of a marriage, right between somebody care about, there are no words to express. But you reach out and you grab a shoulder, you give someone a hug, you rest their hand on their hand, there when there are no words touches, like our conduit in our channel to express how we're feeling. And so it's naturally there. We don't have to train any new behavior, which is why we're really excited. We're unlocking this behavior that we're trying, you know, these these things that we're trying to do, but we just don't have the tools yet. Yeah,

in touches the way in those moments that not just for you to express yourself, but for that person to receive. Yes, right to receive that sense of safety and comfort and love.

Yeah, absolutely. As David Eagleman says he's, he's a friend of mine from a distance that touches the only sense that you cannot conduct without experiencing yourself, you cannot touch without being touched. So it is very much a two way modality and this is why inherently we think it makes the most sense. When people talk about the killer use case, the killer use cases in a social setting,

communicate emotion, as you are making a product ultimately to ship and sell. Where Where are you on that path? What is this next major milestone for you?

Our next major milestone will be getting it in the hands of consumers, we're really excited that consumer behavior has shifted in this way to where I think the pandemic accelerated many behaviors, one of them being the willingness to adopt new technologies and new platforms to communicate with one another specifically, I don't have a timeline I can share specifically on you know, getting into the hands of consumers. But I will say that, you know, one of the reasons I'm here on your show, apart from being a fan of it, is that we're very passionate interested now and building community and engaging with our community, people that are really interested in having a new way, a deeper way to connect with people they care about. So if you're one of them, please go to our website@emerge.io and sign up for our newsletter to be part of our initial community get the latest updates. As you have been working through this, you'd notice there are a couple of things needed to come together for this to to make sense now. One of them was adoption of one of these immersive technologies in VR has been the one that's had some level of adoption in Oculus quest has been a huge part of that.

And the other was around was around kind of the the ultrasonic technology that you're using in creating the level of fidelity that you described. That's that's you've been able to push the technology to achieve. Are there other major hurdles that you've had to overcome to get this far?

I would definitely say those are the two big biggest hurdles we had to overcome just for this company to be successful. Those those are things that had to be true for our product to make sense. And we feel very fortunate that both of them have come true. I think another major hurdle was or two other very large hurdles have been attracting a team that could build this very ambitious project. We have never our microphones I have never built and shipped the hardware device. Yet what we're trying to build is very much a category creator if we're successful. I think that was pretty much a challenge. But we've been very fortunate. I think because we've been we just found people that align with our vision to build a stepwise change in how we how we do and conduct our lives and communicate rather than incremental change to where we have attracted a team and a very senior team as well and on the executive level, then it's shipped in built consumer devices. Some of the key members that we brought on over the last year two years have been the former SVP of engineering at peloton who built the ship boats and treadmill. Our VP of Marketing worked with the CMO of PlayStation to shift the PlayStation four and also psvr or Facebook for many years of console gaming ship the Nintendo Gameboy Advance GameCube and So we have this team that have built category, establishing consumer products in multiple different verticals. And what we're really excited about is leveraging that capability to then establish this new product and this new category. The second challenge has been around fundraising, it's not easy to fundraise in general, and then also fundraise for a product that has a hardware component like ours, we've been really fortunate on that angle to, to find investors that have that vision, that sort of game changing vision. I think a lot of investors say that say that they have it. But when you look at portfolio companies, not a lot have portfolio companies that are that are built like that most of them, you know, relatively safe and will be very successful in SAS based companies, FinTech companies, but we're really excited to partner with with our investors on this journey.

How do you approach that fundraising challenge? As you noted, hardware is hard and convincing investors to bet on an early stage hardware company, especially when, as you noted, you and your two co founders had never built and shipped a hardware product before your your the team you've assembled has been is done some category defining products, founding team, not so much not yet. Anyway. How do you tell that story? How what's your strategy, what has been your strategy to find the right sort of investors and, and overcome that particular fundraising challenge?

I think one thing that that really helped in in our fundraising journey was was understanding and then being able to convey the value that the hardware was providing, and that the hardware really wasn't an is a means to an end, it's a vehicle to deliver the experience. I think there was a wave, you know, this is maybe 2015 2016, when there were hardware products out there, where it was seen as a very much a good thing to have that hardware component and hardware for hardware sake, you know, but then there was a lot of failures in that space, such as the juicer house of the world, that very quickly, people realize what without the software layer without the experience, you know, this thing is just easily commoditized. And you serious cases really funny commoditize by, you know, a hammer, you squeeze the squeeze the juice back. So I think that that made it more challenging for us, to be honest, because a lot of the failures happen right when we were fundraising right before we were fundraising. And people weren't ready to go into another journey like that again. But I think once some of that sentiment died down a little bit, and we were able to understand and package our story that you had this new interaction modality, this could be a new paradigm of how we interact with one another from a distance and the hardware is needed just to get to that step, then then that became a lot easier. And I think, also, we had to lean into it. So in many ways, early on, we tried to hide the hardware and just like not even mentioned it just talking about things. But then, you know, to be honest, when we just said, Look, major shifts in in humanity have happened with hardware, you need the hardware to make, make the stepwise function, change, the Telegraph, the telephone, computers, laptops, the iPhone, you know, and now AR VR, those are hardware devices that enable a new experience, obviously, we have to be thoughtful on the experience itself. But without hardware you don't get you don't get to the moon, you don't get to Mars. And so I think once we just kind of leaned into that, and, and found investors and pitch that, you know, if you want to take a bold leap into reimagining the future and how we engage with one another that that involves reimagining the enabling systems and infrastructure, and at least in this case, consumer devices,

as you are bringing this to market, you're not ready to commit to a specific date yet, but what are the remaining big hurdles between where you are today and where you need to be when this is generally available?

One big hurdle we have to achieve that we have to overcome is for sure the user experience. So now we're, we're obsessed with with that experience. And we have, we're building that internally and testing that as well with small groups externally, even saying the word user feels off to me from a brand perspective, because you know, we're really like thinking about the concept of the inner circles. And the fact this is that this is your space that you can connect intimately with people that you care about this is yours. It's not, no, it's not Facebook's it's not, you know, this massive platform, that word order that we're going to control, it's really your space, you get to customize that customization that engagement and retention are all elements of gameplay that you know, gaming companies have to figure out. And we're also having to figure out as well. I think we have solved the wow factor in terms of when we test with people and they're very interested in surprised at what we can do with our technology now incorporating touch with sight and sound, what we're still working on is and the big hurdle that we have to overcome next is retention what is retention like over over time, or obviously optimistic about that, because the value proposition and the pain point that we solve are all very much addressed immediately. What I mean by that is the value proposition of human connection is just immediately if you You in this one other person has it. And often we talk with people that want to purchase this device, they often think about one person, for whoever they are maybe a sibling, a significant other, whatever, best friend that already has a VR headset and Oculus quest, and they want to just connect with. So the value proposition is there. Number two is that maximum utility is achieved in terms of the network effects almost instantly. Because this is not a use case and experience where you need a massive community for it to be valuable to you know, unlike, for instance, take a take A ROBLOX or take a LinkedIn where you need a massive community for the for the value of the network to be, you know, fulfilled. In our case, what we find focusing on a lot is this concept of network utility, personal personal utility network effects where it's literally a one to one. So as soon as my brother Dexter has an A Nick habit, my my value that I extract from the experience is 100%, I don't desire to actually connect with other people today. Now, what we do find very interesting is that this conscious of expanding circles, and that we do find that people that are interested in our device today want to solve a very, very strong pain point for their inner circles today, but also interested in, in meeting new people, and this concept of interlocking circles, and different circles, that you may have something in common with a friend and comment or a subject matter in common with that you want to meet and hang out with. So user experience is something that we still have to nail, I would, I would definitely see that as the next big hurdle.

This notion of the the inner circle is a powerful concept. I like the analogy, going back to the telegraph or the telephone, where it was really just as long as the most important or the set of most important people, you have the ability to connect with them. That's that's as large as the network needs to be. And maybe in some cases, the largest that your version of the network will ever be. But through these interconnecting inner circles, who end up with, you know, covering the whole population at some point over time. That's That's a powerful, powerful visual, if you kind of look back on your own experience through the Hydras, right, the underground 3d mapping of coral reefs, and the approaches and lessons approaches, you took the lessons you learned at leadership, you know, the fundraising, all that sort of stuff that you've gone through? How How do you map or how do you apply? What you take from that to what you're doing now, here at emerge?

are two big things that I think I did very poorly with the Hydras that I've now been able to take an implement and learn from with emerge. Number One was that timing is very important. And this is obviously not a new concept very well studied that startups largely succeed and fail based on timing, the market, when I think back on what we were doing in 2013, and 2014, in generating 3d models of corals underwater, it was very early time to be doing stuff like that, because we didn't even there were not even modelers that could handle the polygons are the meshes that were generally had billions of polygons. And so the time was just way too early for even a methodology like that, or use case like that to really exist. And we were pushing the boundaries a lot on, we even got custom software built for us, you know, with some of our partners, so the timing matters a lot. So really looking macro scale, and trying to envision the next five years and seeing this is are there supporting companies that are investing in this space that to where this is going to make sense in five years? And also, what does that mean I should be doing now. I think we've taken a much more mature approach. Within merge looking at that we never were caught up in the VR hype. We know of the hundreds of companies that were formed in 2015 on the backs of oculus quest launching DK one. during that timeframe. There were many companies, they call themselves, you know, blanket VR, whatever attached VR AR on the back, when you got funding, we never were attracted to that hype, because we knew that the timing was going to take a while. But we were going to build the picks and shovels, if you will, to the foundational technology to enable a next level interaction when the market was ready, both from an enabling tech space but also from a consumer mindset space, people were not ready to adopt this new modality that we've been talking about, of human connection and touch. They weren't ready for it in 2015. You know, when we would talk to people, some people would say, Why do I I don't understand the need for that at all. I'll just go drive next door and see them. I think the pandemics caused that shift in mindset to realize that, you know, number one, there is no going back to normal. People have found a way to work from home people found the benefits from it, people have realized that they can connect to a more limited degree virtually but and they still miss and once again, we don't replace the in person experience but when you're just not there, how can you have a more compelling experience than you currently have? My grandma and grandmas across the world adopted zoom when the pandemic happened and now I have a richer experience with her when I'm not physically with right now. It's not just an audio visual, not your call. You know that's that's something that that we find really interesting in terms of timing in terms of something else we learn from the Hydras applying to emerges the business No, I I'm trained as a scientist. So I didn't go to business school, I wasn't exposed to startups, as I mentioned, until I was in my mid 20s. But the business is really needed to achieve the vision, having a fantastic vision to democratize the world's oceans. And information is a grandiose one, but can't really be achieved without a business model. And so something that we're very excited about actually emerges, we've been thinking about that as well. And we view our business potential not from once again, going back to the hardware topic, not as just selling hardware units, and we're done. And that's how we scale but really the hardware, enabling the this deeper experience and richer experience and building a business model that makes sense for our users to because we care about authenticity, we care about privacy. In fact, not only do we care about it, I would argue it's needed today, or you cannot succeed, trust is very difficult to gain back again, once you've lost and we've seen that right with with a lot of these major companies, tech companies. So that's exciting for me on the business side, because I think we are thinking about, you know, just the potential of being a ritual in your home. Many products have attempted this, the Facebook portal device, the Google Home, nest speaker and screen combo, the Amazon, Alexa show, these, these are all products that are trying to be the portal into people's homes that you care about. But they haven't been really largely successful, I think, because they do too many things, check the weather, you listen to music, you ask it funny questions, but it's not a dedicated system to and people have not at least I haven't, in my own circles either established a ritual that is very low friction, where I can connect with someone like my inner circle. And we think that our device and our product can be that that ritual that you connect with someone who's very deeply. And we even have really interesting use cases and features where you can do that sort of seamlessly drifting in and out of VR and AR, and with current devices as well.

Looking forward to the evolution of what you're creating, yeah, loved it, and love to show it to you, you know, in your own personal journey, as you've gone through these experiences with, you know, whether it's graduate school, or the market immediately after school, or the work that you were doing on the Hydras. And now, at emerge, how have you evolved as an entrepreneur? What are some of the maybe the biggest challenges that you've personally faced as an entrepreneur, and how have you been addressing them?

I think my biggest challenge is, as an entrepreneur has has is one that many founders probably share, which is understanding and then evolving into the next phase that you have to be to get to the next level. By that I mean, my natural inclination is his action and speed. And I'm actually very good in chaos and a lot of my work in developing countries with the Hydras. And just because a lot of the best groups in the world are in very remote locations. You know, I've been in situations where I've almost got my hand cut off by a boat, you know, motor rotor having to untangle the, the anchor for crashing rocks, and then, you know, almost almost dying under under that boat, being in developing countries and being on this arrested by state police. Because I was flying a drone over, you know, trying to capture some aerial footage. I'm very good in moments of chaos and fast action, that helped a lot in the early days of building emerge in the Hydras. In just doing things yourselves, and being the Chief executer. And then the next phase of the evolution that entrepreneur must go through is then handing off then execution to people that you trust, and also elevating and spending time on where you need to be going directionally, you know, laying down the tracks of the railroad, you know, of the train this analogy I really like. And that's difficult, because there's no one day that it happens, it's not on the schedule, no investor will tell you, okay, now when you need to make the shift, and this is how your schedule should be. But it sort of naturally happens as you hire more and more people as you hire more senior people as well, that you hire them to tell you what to do and how you should do things. And being able to focus on the what, and not the hell, that's been a really key learning that I've been going through still and going through it. And I would encourage, you know, other other entrepreneurs to think about that phase for me really happens around fundraising, I would think, I think that a major one was like in between the season a, and then the series A and where we are now. So those are two really big inflection points that that entrepreneurs should be mindful of

the constant evolution of the entrepreneur. Let's wrap up with a few lightning round questions. All right, what commonly held belief about spatial computing? Do you disagree with

Oh, I've many of these. So I think it may was because I'm not an industry Insider. I'm just not afraid to think about things differently. Number one is AI and actually my co founders agree with this, this one point, disagree with the need for room scale VR if we talk about VR specifically, tied to that it is tied to the belief that I never thought LDS location based entertainment was going to be successful. And I think partially due to COVID. But partially, I think it's just not a modality that that makes sense in terms of consumer behavior, it makes a lot of senses is a marketing ploy to attract more people to Disneyland, for instance, but not in terms of mass scale, I didn't see it, and still don't as a business model. Maybe in other countries like China, or behavior is a little bit different, but but not in the US. But even in your own home, I don't think that you actually will need and I will, I think that there will be an increasing amount and then you'll see it invert of apps that leverage room scale VR, that flies in the face of current reality, where beat Sabre, you know, the number one downloaded app ever, which does require you to stand up and you know, have a good amount of space. But I just don't see it, I think it's more of a novelty. And that is still ongoing, because of how we currently behave. And just in terms of our own physiology is is humans, you know, we get tired easily, we spend our days, and last few 100 years we spent, we spent our time and energy interacting in very similar ways. So you would either go to a meeting in a space, you would sit down, you might stand up, but mostly you sit down in a space, you work and we work at a desk, we sit on a couch and watch TV, we had dinner at a table, right? You might go on walking meetings and things like that, but those in those situations, they're, they're less common. And often when you're your mobile, you're doing things that are less immersive. For instance, if you're walking and writing an email or something, it's a less immersive experience than sitting down. So that's one belief that I just don't, that I think, is against what most people in the industry might believe. The second is, is what I mentioned earlier, in terms of I don't think that VR AR is it's currently imagined will be the paradigm shift that everyone is waiting for. Just with audio and visual, I think without the sort of touching, you always be a ghost in the shell, you're just grasping through air, like a cat, trying to understand your own space and interact with the objects. And any UI that you're going to introduce to solve that will be very awkward. And we've seen that now, a lot of these UI mechanisms are kind of awkward. And now a lot of what we've seen, say take Microsoft, for instance, they're starting to adopt more natural gestures where you just grab the object. But then there's this disconnect in your brain that happens. I mean, they've studied this where the moment you try to grab the object in your hand goes through, there's like, there's, there's a does not compute error that happens in your brain. So I think without the touch, we're not going to have that that paradigm shift. Related to that. I really hate when people are referenced Ready Player One point to hear about hear about them or maybe hates a strong word I strongly dislike. And I do like the book in some parts of that kind of soldier from the 80s. I much prefer some crash isn't analogy. But I don't think that that future is ever going to happen. Maybe that flies in the face of more kind of mass perception rather than insider extreme views. But I just don't think haptic suits are ever going to be a thing. There's just too much friction,

too efficient to get them on and off and

on and off. And I'm not going to take all my clothes off and then put this haptic suit on. And it's just like, there's there's a lot of friction, or haptic gloves, I think outside of perhaps, you know, industrial use cases or, or military use cases, I don't think it'll go consumer. And even if the technology could get good enough, I think if you take a wider lens BCI brain computer interfaces would catch up and actually overtake that anyway. So even if we could get to wearable that was so fantastic. It would cause you to put on brain computer race would overtake that, you would just do that instead.

So not gonna be wearing haptic suits. In the future. We're not going to be doing walkabouts inside of our room while we're in VR. Walk them out yet even sounds silly, right? Walk up that really interesting point, I really thought about how we as humans tend to move we're either moving through a space more we're seated in the space. Although when I when I was younger, when I was in my 20s and spent too much time, well, I spent a lot of time in my entertainment time playing video games, I don't want to say it was too much, it was probably the right amount for me at the time. I would always stand I could not sit and play video games, I would stand with the controller in my hand in front of the TV. My roommates, of course, would say it's a little bit crazy. But for me, I had to be standing to play these very active, whether it was you know, whatever I was playing at the time ponder or something. Video games was first person shooter styles.

And that's not to say, cuz that's a great example. That's not to say that I believe the future is seated experience. But actually, I should rephrase it in terms of I think the future in terms of mersive is that constrained space experience. I don't think you need a 15 by 15 foot, you know, area, outside of you know, very limited applications, because you'll just get tired. And the use case that we're interested in are you know, a few hours a day type of interactions, and you just get exhausted. I mean, that's a workout at that point. So if you workout Yeah, they'll do those things, but the constrained space of you know, you playing video games, right? It's that that circle probably just a few feet by few feet, the constrained experience of a standing desk, for instance that I have right now, or watching TV or having a conversation. Yeah.

So as you think about what you Creating the vision you have for the future of these sort of immersive interactive experiences. What tool or service Do you wish existed beyond what you're creating?

Honestly, something that I wish would exist is just like a app that enables basic matchmaking that's very good and frictionless, surprising that we've had a very hard time finding that, specifically in VR, and Oculus quest, which we've been working with. Lately, I think there's a lot of apps that enable you to connect with someone random. But we found this matchmaking is quite difficult with people that you really care about, the closest app that we've come to that can do that well is is spatial. And I'm good friends with Gina over there. They're doing fantastic work. But that's more of an enterprise application. But I like how their approach on you know, creating these groups that you can just, you can just come pop into into the room that you you control, once again, from enterprise use case, but surprisingly, that hasn't really existed on the consumer side, I think people have been the reason being perhaps people are really alluded by the whole massive metaverse Multiplayer Online potential of having a bunch of users concurrently, and being able to interact with them or game with them. And people aren't really looking so deeply into that intimate spaces concept. I wouldn't say that's changing. Now, when I look at the news, and you're seeing like, what Facebook is trying to do with like inner circles with Facebook Messenger and some other smaller apps that I see popping up every now and then. But I wish that would really exist today.

What book Have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

Like I love books, audio books have been been my Savior. So far this year, a few books that I've read recently, in the last month that I found really compelling, insightful, how to change your mind on Michael Pollan. That was fascinating. That was so good, actually, that I read it back to back twice. I've never read a single book ever. And I read this one back to back twice. It's around the renaissance of psychedelics and exploring one's mind and and all the research that has been now reinvigorated. You know, a lot of the best universities in the US are now taking it to study once again for medical benefits. sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harare, it's an older, older book, but it's taken me a while to get to it. But fascinating journey of just like the how humans have evolved. And actually a lot of the preconceived notions that we thought to be true in terms of our evolution not being true, such as the agricultural revolution being a good thing for humanity. For humans, I think it's probably good for humanity, but terrible for the individual human day, they went from eating a very, very diet of berries and fruit and vegetables, and occasionally meat, and walking multiple times a day and spending I think, on average, six hours a day with their, their children and communities, to very few time with their communities and family. And, you know, if their crops burned down, or they were stolen, or if they were invaded by warring tribes, they die the whole community. So that was really interesting, that book. And then the last one more tactically from an entrepreneur standpoint is the advantage by Patrick lencioni. Around organizational health, that I love organizational health books and journals. That one's particularly very good.

I loved the advantage from from an entrepreneurial perspective, how do you build and run an effective executive team? It applies not only as a CEO, but wherever you happen to be in organization. I thought that book was extraordinary. You know, the very few books that I read back to back was never split the difference.

Oh, I love that book. Yeah, that was my favorite book of last year 2020. That was like my number one book. I contacted them and actually did a one hour coaching course with his team. And it was the most intimidating I've ever done it because and he was helping me with the situation. But seeing those methods applied, actually experienced the methods of like having the deep night late night DJ voice being applied to in a very convincing way. It's like, it's like shattering you feel like you are completely taken over like your mind's been taken over and find this person. It's It's extraordinary. hypnotic, con. It's hypnotic. And yeah, that was powerful. This guy it was it was not it was not the author himself, but his right hand man that had the coffee, but that was fascinating experience.

So you were receiving coaching because you had a specific negotiation that you needed to execute? Yeah. With our landlord. Specific and in did the technique help?

It did, it did help. And we got farther than I would have bought myself for sure. Nice, very nice.

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

I love this question. In general, I would probably have two pieces of advice. One is more philosophical one is more practical, but not my natural inclination is of action and speed specifically, and I think that helps a lot but also is probably my biggest weakness. Often one's greatest strength I find is they're all So the greatest weakness, and so I would advise my 25 year old self, that my patients will accomplish more than my force. And that the classic I think, maybe still saying as smooth as slow and slow as fast. So you don't sacrifice speed by slowing down sometimes and seeing the bigger picture and contemplating often will get you there fastest. And then then I would give my my 25 year old self, all of the secrets to fundraising a series seed in a which I now have

all the secrets of fundraising. Yes, that's that's a treasure trove right there.

It is. Because in our specific case, we got, you know, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. We got punched in the face many, many times. And so a lot of the learnings that we that we went through, weren't in the books weren't in the cell phone books weren't in that first run articles weren't in the yc articles weren't being talked about. Because we had such a unique approach to not only hardware, but building for a market that didn't exist and building for a use case that also wasn't very clear at the time that people needed. But we were just so convinced that it was needed. And so we're excited that that we've been able to get this far to be honest with the team and investors support that we have. Yeah,

any closing thoughts you want to share?

I think I just want to share that I am really stoked about this concept of the metaverse in general. It's evolving now. And I think it's been a great catch all category to really realize the combination of social and gaming, I don't think that the future of social will be based on media. It's actually kind of weird. I was thinking about the other weekend, the current standard of social social media, that we share media with each other. And that's what that's how we connect quote unquote with one another, it obviously if you just take a step back, no wonder it's not working, what a weird way to like connect with someone just sharing media assets with one another. I think it'll be very much based on play. And I think games are evolving is no longer a win or lose thing, often, at least the most more popular social games no longer when it loses its weight, this concept of play, and very heavy influence on community. And that's really exciting for me, especially as we look to allow people to connect with their inner circle and be present. So I encourage people to join our journey. If you're interested in go online and check out more. That's where we'll be announcing more things shortly.

And online, they can find you where

you can find us it emerge.io is our website.

And how about for you personally,

for me personally on Twitter, I'm sly jack Lee. my middle name is jack. We're very southern middleman.

Awesome. Thank you very much for this conversation. Thanks, Jason. Before we go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. In it I speak with Mark Greg it. Mark is the founder and CEO of new eyes, an AR hardware and software company that originally launched in 2016 to assist those with degenerative eye conditions. Recently, the company has expanded its product offerings into enterprise gaming and entertainment with the launch of the pro three and the pro three he and his conversation we touch on AR to improve the lives of those with low vision. We also talk about the demise of AR glasses maker odg and the resulting struggles and opportunities for Mark and the team at new eyes. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time