#H2HChat The Fourth Transformation with Shel Israel & Robert Scoble

Hey, hey everybody, how are you doing? This is Bryan Kramer. We're back for another H2H Chat. Really excited to be here, uh, with a few guests that I've been friends with for a little while, and I'm looking forward to talking about their newest book, The Fourth Transformation. Um, we've got Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. How are you guys doing today?

Doing just great. Good to be here, Bryan.

I'm doing great.

Awesome, awesome. Well, you guys are, um, you guys are on working on your— is this your 8th book?

Well, it's my 7th book and my 3rd book with Robert Scoble, um, which are always the best received of the books I do.

See that? So there is something to, to you two as a team, and, um, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. But first and foremost, I want to make it proper introduction. Shel and Robert have been researching, writing, and speaking about technology's impact on the near-term future together and separately since 2005. They're best known for 2 critically acclaimed bestselling tech books, Naked Conversations. I don't think that you're naked when you have a conversation all the time, but it sounds like a good book that you must read, which is—

Robert is prone to take shower shots, which would explain the title.

It's true, it's true. And now he has virtual reality for that, for those naked shots.

And oh my God, I thought that was the amazing Ant-Man over there. Oh, you're talking about how great we are. I'll be quiet.

We are having some fun already, which is, um, basically the one of the best— the 2 best-selling books, Naked Conversations, which is credited with explaining the business opportunities in social media, and then The Age of Context that explained how the convergence of mobile, social media, IoT, data, and location technologies— see, so you can rest, Madison— would forever change the relationships between business customers and stakeholders. So we are going to be talking today about their 4th book, The 4th Transformation. Shel, why don't you tell us what got you excited about writing about this topic as the next topic for a book with Robert?

It always starts with Scoble. I stay home and knit and hang out and play Scrabble on the computer, and he goes all over the world talking to people, showing up at conferences. In fact, he seems to have access to the most forward-thinking technologists and business people in the community we cover. Every few years he comes to me and says, Shel, I got a great idea. There's something going on that's going to change the world and it's really terrific. And I go, no, it isn't. And he goes, yes, it is. It's wonderful and you'll love it. And we get into a process where twice previously and now 3 times he's convinced me that technology is about to happen will change the world. The first time we were ballsy enough to say that social media would have an impact on how business worked, and everybody thought it was for lonely teenagers, uh, talking about lunch, so they didn't pay attention. The second book, Age of Context, was Robert again seeing 5, uh, 5 technology trends, uh, data location, um, Social media. Um, Robert, help me with the other 2 if you can recall. Um, yeah,

tell me.

Well, there were 5 of them back then, but we're getting older, we don't remember so well. And now—

Pillars from Naked Conversation, from, uh, Age of Context.

Yeah.

Um, it was wearables, uh, social media, Sensors.

Yeah, you did it. You named the 2 I was missing, wearables and sensors. And now there's this new book, which is really, uh, to quote the '60s, altered perceptions of reality. Um, this is also the point where over the next few years, we move from people that are not quite standing upright like this to standing upright like this and having everything happening closer to our brain, closer to our eyes, which is the fastest moving part of our bodies. It changes. And I'm the one that's not prone to exaggeration, but what is coming changes everything. You, before we started, started talking about your children's behavior. Now, I don't think they're going to end up obsessed in this lonely, addictive world of VR, but I think it's going to change how they work, how they live, how they shop, how they communicate, just about every other— their health, and so on.

And Robert, how about yourself? What was the, uh, what was the, the, the moment then that you, uh, you knew this is the book, this— that you got to get into this, you got to do this and talk about this? And, and, and, and what the heck are you wearing?

I'm wearing a Microsoft HoloLens because this is part of the book. This is a mixed reality glass that puts virtual things on my walls and around me. We call them holograms, but it also puts stuff on the walls, which is really mind-blowing, actually. I don't know if there was one time when we totally figured out this book. There wasn't one event that hit me and convinced me that this was it. The interviews for this book started in 2011 when I interviewed the CTO of Metaio. But back then I had no clue I'd be doing a book on augmented reality. It was just me doing what I do, going around the world and talking to people who are building the future. Over the last few years, it became obvious that mixed reality and augmented reality were becoming much more important and we're about to become really important to the world.

Let's start talking about the transformation. There's a bunch of different items here that fit into the transformation. Yeah. The augmented reality, virtual reality, chatbots, artificial intelligence.

For me, the transformation was when we finally realized that we're getting a new user interface. Whenever user interfaces change, and this is the 4th real user interface of my life of the personal computing age. Because we started out with character mode on the Apple II and the PC, then we went to GUIs on the Macintosh and Windows, then we went to touch computing on smartphones, and now we're getting a user interface that's laid on top of the real world. VR to me is a precursor of this change. It almost predicts this change. In 3 years, I'm convinced that many of us are going to be wearing glasses and computing, like with this HoloLens product, all around us.

You broke your book down into 2 parts. Shel, can you explain the 2 sections?

I thought there were 3.

3 parts. Sorry, you're right. You would know.

Well, yeah, but let me grab my table of contents so I don't botch it.

Yeah, you got it.

Yeah. Did my shoulder look good on the stage there? Where is that TOC? I know I put it in here somewhere. Here we go. Okay, the first section were game changers, and that's actually where where we did the most writing. And that basically talked about things like HoloLens and Meta and Magic Leap and the technology that's happening and how it's changing how people are communicating, how business is going to happen, how marketing is going to change, how humans and business will interact. I said humans, right?

You did. You did say humans. I'm slacking on my job.

The second section was business changers. And that looked at brands such as Lowe's, such as the medical industry, where we've seen more change coming down the line in VR/AR than in the last 10 years combined. We looked at retail, we looked at enterprise, and we told business thinkers how other businesses are already using this technology. The third part was World Changes, which had only 2 paragraphs, 2 chapters in it. One was the dark side, which was the longest chapter in the whole book. And the last one was the incredible happy ending in which the world moves into the era of spatial computing. So now there's no mystery to it. You know how it ends.

So Robert, what is going to change? What changes can we expect?

Well, first of all, to get into this new world, you're going to have to put something on your face, a pair of glasses. I mean, you know, we have the Snap Spectacles, which aren't yet augmented reality, but they will be, all the way up to the HoloLens-style thing. Today they're too big and too dorky for consumers. That's why Microsoft hasn't made a big consumer push yet because this is simply too heavy to wear most of the day. In 2 or 3 years, that problem is going to be fixed and the viewing angle is going to be fixed. We should back up because mixed reality is 5 new technologies on a pair of glass. The most important one is the optics that put virtual stuff on top of the real world. When you look through the glass, you see a whale coming out of the out of the floor or something like that. In HoloLens, I have virtual screens in front of me when I'm working, and then I can play games where stuff is on all the walls. It senses where the walls are, and that's the second technology. We're putting 3D sensors now on these devices, including on our phones. Lenovo has a phone with a Tango sensor that when you walk into a mall, it shows you where products are in the mall and it knows where you are at a very very, very close detail. We're also going to get artificial intelligence, so it's going to know that you're looking at a table or a glass or a wall or a floor or a camera or a human, right? Hey, there's another human. And we're, we're Getting new kinds of wireless in the next 3 to 4 years. 5G is coming out in 2019 according to Qualcomm. And what else? There's a few other things. We're getting eye sensors that watch your eyes move around. So the new user interface that's coming along inside these glasses are gonna be controlled by your hands, by your voice, and by your eyes, and your motion as well. that'll expand, and we have a whole chapter on that. And we interviewed iFluence, which Google bought. And there's a few other things too. Audio is a big part of this, and we're seeing a revolution happening in audio.

What about smell?

I don't know. So, you know, all of this stuff is coming soon, and the next iPhone is going to do augmented reality. Tim Cook has already started preparing the market by talking about it a lot, um, and sort of signaling that a major new product is coming. But he's hardly alone. I know of 9 companies that are building glasses, and I'm sure there's a few that I don't even know about yet.

Let's talk about what's possible— what, not just what, what's here today, but what's going to be possible. Because I was talking to, um, uh, Courtney, my wife and business partner, who you guys both know. My better half, way better half. And, and we were talking about, um, about actually, you know, would it be possible to be inside of a movie and interact with— and interact with the characters and actually have, um, an experience unlike going to a movie theater? Yeah, just sitting and being one-way direction.

That's absolutely possible. I'll go, I'll go. Me, me. All right, we have an entire chapter on how First of all, what you're talking about when you say a movie is storytelling. We've been telling stories since somebody started smearing blood and berries on a cave wall. We have stories that are our national histories, our religions, and stories are really what will drive— have driven everything going forward. The difference is With theater, movies, television, we've always sat on one side of a screen and the stories unfolded behind the screen and we're just passive. Now we become immersed in the stories. Penrose is one of several companies that is a studio that's making immersive virtual reality movies where the characters in the movie are followed around or just watched or looked over the shoulders by attendees of theater and movies. He does— he's got one that won an award at Sundance called Allumette. Allumette is the Little Match Girl modernized. And it gives you the feeling that you're watching this story with these really adorable little virtual characters walking around inside a dollhouse. And you can go from one window to another and see the story. That's great. Whenever I think of how stories are going to be told, I think of the Nobel laureate, uh, Robert Dylan, who, uh, said, I'll let you be in my story if I can be in yours. And that's how stories are going to be told moving forward.

You mean the, uh, Bobby Zimmerman?

But no, his name was never Zimmerman. If you read volume 1 of his 3-part memoir, you'd know that.

According to a friend that I went to school with him, that's what his name was in high school.

Well, all I know is what Bobby told me for 1995.

We already are getting experiences like this, Bryan. On HoloLens, there's a game called— or not really a game, an experience called Fragments. you take your HoloLens and it asks you to map out your room, and then it puts a murder right in your room and you have to solve the murder. There's rats running on the floors and there's stuff on all the walls, and it's matched to your real room. The stuff is on your walls. There's another experience where aliens dig through your walls, Blow holes in them, and it looks like a hole. You walk around and you see through your wall now, and aliens come through the wall and you have to shoot them, you know, with your finger.

And, um, I would like to point out that this is— we've only had the book out now 10 days. We did an Australian tour, and every time we do an interview or presentation, it varies greatly. But Robert always manages to get those damn virtual rats into every presentation.

Hey, they're cool rodents,

you know,

makes the girls scream. Yes, it's entertaining.

So, so you open the book up with, um, chapter 1, What Zuck Saw. Did he— did he start the movement?

Now, um, first of all, we open the book up with an introduction that says, in the beginning there were mainframes, and the biblical references intended. And then we go through 4, um, 4 transformations that Robert listed earlier. What Zuck did in March of 2008— 2016. 2016. Was on slide 22 at F8, his developers conference. He showed a pair of glasses that are not, not unlike the ones you're wearing right there. And this was at a time when we were seeing this goofy or tethered big stuff being sold for high prices, and people like Scoble flipping out at how wonderful this stuff is. Try to stay awake,

Robert.

And Zuck basically said he had a vision for one day people will walk around with something that looks like what I'm wearing as well as you, and it will contain everything you need and will have virtual reality and augmented reality, what's starting to be called mixed reality. And whether there's something the size of a cell phone that you have in your pocket that has a GPU, a CPU, we don't know. But what he saw was a device that everyday people could wear in any situation and feel comfortable in it and have the advantages of AR and VR in very, very simple, fashionable, affordable fashion. And that's why we led with that, because what we were trying to do is all this goofy and freaky stuff right now is the beginning of a very rapid evolution. We're just barely climbing out of— crawling out of the slime in the evolutionary swamp, but we will soon be walking upright wearing devices such as you're moving around the screen rather than showing my face. And so that's why we started with What Zuck Saw.

Yeah, this is a picture from a Qualcomm presentation last week, and it's very similar to what Zuck showed off in his slide deck. And you can see what the industry is now saying is going to be on these kinds of glasses— tracking cameras, eye-tracking cameras, optics, you know, new kinds of microphones, etc., etc. And these are coming. It's just when are they coming, you know?

And so there's a— you mentioned the word freaky. I know you talked about freaky in your last book. But this takes freaky to a whole new level. In fact, the way that, Robert, you were just describing that experience, it's almost like an acid trip. But even Courtney just tweeted, but it's an acid trip you can get off anytime you want. It was a great quote on Twitter just now. What is the— there is a freaky line that goes pretty far here because we put this thing on our face and cross over into another land. where we start losing real human connection. Would you agree or disagree and why?

I'll disagree, but we're getting stuff where you're going to look through the glass to people and you're going to see stuff that's augmented. And it's really hard to explain this without showing what it does. Currently, which isn't all that high a resolution, but it's good enough to fool your eye into— into your mind into thinking robots or aliens are coming through the wall if you're playing that kind of game. Sephora that we visited is already putting augmented makeup on people with an iPhone. So you don't even need a 3D sensor to do this. Anybody who's on Snapchat knows that you can put cats or masks on top of your face. with Snapchat. That is augmented reality. That's changing your reality to make you more interesting on Snapchat. And Facebook has something similar on their platform coming. Sephora is already making it so that you can try on augmented makeup on your face. And soon I'm going to walk up to you and see that makeup on your face. with these glasses on, and that's where we're heading to. Does that increase the human connection or decrease it? Well, I think it increases it, but—

You said that word. Going back to Zuck, he said at the same conference that VR is the most social technology he's ever seen, which is interesting for the leading social network That isn't using VR. In the book, we have next week— this week, in 2 days, we're doing the first ever book launch party at Altspace VR in Redwood City, where we'll be talking with people all over the world about our book, and they'll be able to talk to us and see our avatars. Um, you know, it's—

and JS Gilbert just tweeted out a link to that for everybody who's watching. So make sure you go sign up for that.

Thank you, JS. We were being uncommercial, but we'll take it from you. Um, in the book we talk about countless cases, but at TED in January— I think it was January of 2016, 2 companies came out with their first products ever. in this category. One was Meta, the Meta 2, and, uh, the HoloLens came out from Microsoft. Both cases, they showed a conversation between people that were remotely located from each other, uh, who could see each other in the same room in their real life forms or something close to it, who could fist bump, hug, and shake hands and actually feel it with haptic technology. This is, you know, Picture what we're doing right here, right now would be like with the advantage of, in this case, an augmented reality platform so you could actually see us, but we would feel like we're in one room together. We would see objects together that are really— while we're really located many, many miles apart. I think this is the most social thing I've ever seen, and I think it takes what we wrote about in our first book and puts it on steroids way beyond what we pictured when we were talking about tweeting and blogging.

So, so where you— in the 3rd section, you talk about what could possibly go wrong. What could possibly go wrong?

Boy, you have no idea. Robert, you go first on this one.

Governments could use it to control you. Privacy could be further infringed. We're wearing a 3D sensor that is so detailed it can see your heart beating 3 feet away. It can see how hard I'm touching a table from 3 feet away. It can see the fabric in your shirt so it can know what brand shirt you're wearing, and on and on. Pokémon, which is not full-blown augmented reality, but it gives you a sense of where things are going. Gets 1,000 people to run across a park to collect a new Pokémon. So that's with a phone in your hand. You know, what happens when you wear glasses and it can make the whole world around you different than the real world? There's a lot of risks here.

Yeah. In fact, the way we conclude that chapter Is we don't know how humans will change as animals over time. You were faster on the trigger that time and, um, distracting as well. We don't really understand the long-term effects on social interaction between people. Um, we didn't know what the changes would be when social media came along. We didn't know what the changes would Would be when we move from the desktop to this thing, and not only could everyone use digital technology, we could use it everywhere. Now we're getting technology so close that the barrier of the screen is disappearing. Now we are being able to filter out anything that is unpleasant or ugliness in our life. And is this a good thing? If every time you see a homeless person, can you turn that person into a flower pot? Well, technically you could. But should you? Should you become unaware of that which is unpleasant? Um, you, you just— there's a line from, uh, Edward Albee in one of my favorite plays of the '60s, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where she looks at him and says, truth and illusion, George, you don't know the difference. And he answers, oh yeah, well, that's why I stick with you, baby. And is that the kind of relationships we want to have moving forward?

So let's jump into the positive side, the light, the lighter side. There's a point in the book, too, where you talk about education and how avatars for role models could become teachers of our kids and be able to help people pretty much limitless around the world. How can that work?

Want me to go, Robert?

Yeah.

Okay. First of all, I can think of no educational experience that could be— is not being improved by what's coming down the line. Case Western is teaching anatomy to future surgeons by instead of having them cut open cadavers, which of course is the reason we 3 didn't go to med school, you now do it with virtual reality. Instead of looking at dead organs, you look at live organs. You understand the pancreas's relationship to the kidney. Somebody else on the East Coast has an open-heart tour. His daughter has a congenital heart defect and it motivated him to use technology to allow doctors to tour a human heart and look at a model of a patient's heart and see where the flaws are and the problems are. In history, instead of knowing that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1086, you can actually go there and see the battle and understand and the blood and gore of when they used broadaxes and swords to settle issues. You can take tours of the White House and Buckingham Palace. In China, where they have this enormous problem, which is, as well as they're doing in controlling the expansion of their population, they're still getting more grammar school children than they can produce teachers. So the teacher-student ratio keeps getting worse as time goes on, and China is hell-bent to be the world leader in education. So they're starting to play with virtual teachers where students will wear glasses and they will customize their teachers. Somebody could like a young female instructor. I'm sure Robert would. Others would like an old white-haired instructor. And in so doing, they have somebody that they will pay attention to. This virtual instructor will see when the student gets bored and give them pop quizzes. So they're looking— and oh yeah, they're using NetDragon, which is one of the leading slash-and-hack game companies in China. They're using them to produce this new virtual instruction. So everywhere you look, whether you want adult training, learning how to fly a jet plane, whatever you think of, it is better in virtual reality. Oil rigs, they're teaching workers, field workers, how to respond to an emergency on an oil rig before they ever leave land. It's everywhere, and it's— this is why the enterprise is surprisingly way ahead of consumers at this point, although we're not sure that's going to last much longer.

Okay, I want to ask Question here for Robert. Before we jump into questions, I'm getting lots and lots of questions, so we're going to turn over to the questions here just in one second. If you have more questions, feel free to put them out on #H2HChat and just go ahead and ask your question there. I'll try to fit it in. We're going to start that in just a second. Before I do that, Robert, there's a lot of technology, a lot of different headsets and a lot of different spectacles and different augmented reality producers and creators. Will we find—

And VR.

And VR. So are we, are we going to find some semblance of, you know, kind of like Wi-Fi, like there's a standard to Wi-Fi that we all operate on so that we can, you know, we can, we can, we can jump onto Wi-Fi? Is there going to be a standard for any of this technology, or is everyone going to create—

There will be winners eventually, and that will define the standard, right? We're building a new 3D map of the world, and in fact, we're building several 3D maps of the world. Uber's building one, Google's building one, Apple's building one, Facebook's building one, and on. And there's, there's many others. And these 3D maps of the world are gonna run our robots, our drones, our self-driving cars, and these new mixed reality glasses. And we should have a standard, but that's not how the tech industry works. These companies are not talking to each other. They're competing with each other. They're trying to innovate and come up with something new. And so until we see it, you know, demoed by Apple and Facebook and Amazon, we're not going to see these companies get together at standards bodies and decide on a a way to share 3D maps of the world with each other. That's a competitive advantage right now, and the innovation is happening so fast that I just don't see that happening anytime soon. I might be wrong, but there certainly are groups of companies getting together, but it's mostly for marketing concerns, not for how do we join our voxel maps. In other words, volumetric pixel maps. together with everybody else in the world. That just— that kind of discussion is not happening. And the same thing is happening with optics. You know, Carl Zeiss is working with Apple on theirs, and ODG is working with Facebook on theirs, and, and, you know, 9 other groups around the world are working on optics. I mean, I, you know, um, and I don't see those companies getting together and deciding on a standard. Either. So I don't see a standard coming out of this anytime soon. I might be wrong, but I'm not hopeful there.

I, I see us again in this early crawling out of the slime of the evolutionary swamp period. In the past 3 transformations, hardware began the process of a transformation And culminated after we passed over a chasm and people and their relationship to digital technology changed. We're still in the, the new hardware phase, and that will shake out over time, just like the auto industry once had, I think, scores of car manufacturers, then 3, and then it changed again as it went global. Right now, the hardware needs a great deal of refinement. The price needs to come down. It needs to be untethered. It needs to have a whole lot of things resolved. And when it does, then I think there may be standardization. The differences between Android and Apple phones are still there, but they're less so than they were 10 years ago when the iPhone came out and was the first device that used software for keys rather than little tiny keys and a tiny little screen. So we need to hit a point where what we wear really doesn't matter so much as what we can do in terms of software and communications.

Fantastic. Okay, so I'm going to jump into the questions here. And as your questions come in, I will grab them. So go ahead and keep them coming. Jason Martin said, I get the entertainment value of AR, but what consumer pain point can be solved by marketers with AR? Give a universal example, please.

Well, everything is going to change because you're going to wear these things all day long and you're going to walk in a shopping mall and you're going to say, hey Siri, where's the blue jeans? and 4 blue jeans, virtual blue jeans are going to pop up in the air and you're going to say, yeah, I want the 501, you know, Levi's.

To whom should I send your message?

Siri is listening. And 501, 501, you know, you're going to click that jeans with your finger and then a blue line is going to appear on the floor taking you right to those jeans in the mall. And this is already being worked on. We visited the R&D labs. They already know where every product is in Valley Fair Mall and in the Westfield malls. The guys who are running the R&D labs at Westfield are working full-time right now on mixed reality. Same thing when you walk into a lobby of a hotel, same thing when you see a new car or want to buy a new car, same thing when you go to a sporting event. You're going to see stats on top of the players as they're running down the field with these glasses. So everything is going to change about the world that you're walking around in. And then at work, you're going to have multiple screens now, and you're going to be able to code in new ways or design things in new ways. I mean, if you play in VR, you can already play with Google Tilt Brush and see just how much— how different that is from painting on physical media. You can draw a line that sticks in the air. You know, you can't do that on physical media. And the line can pulse in reaction to sound in the room, right? And/or do other stuff. So you can create new things that are impossible to create on physical media, and it's cheaper, right? We visited Disneyland. I talked to the head of ride design at Disneyland, and he said, we already use VR to design the new theme park that opened in Shanghai. this year, right? And Ford has a whole room for designing cars in VR in its R&D lab in Silicon Valley. So we're going to work together on 3D objects, on buildings, on anything that's made, right? I mean, even something simple like this is made in 3D in a CAD program, then sent to a manufacturing line, right? And so we can design new things together this way. In a way that just was not possible with other, with, you know, 2D screens.

Marketing as we know it is a thing of the past. Robert mentioned the mapping of objects in the malls. This exists. A company called Aisle 411 has a partnership with what was called Google Tango and is now just Tango, so that you can go and say blue jeans, and you can go today and find out which one is right for you. The marketing comes in that the artificial intelligence will know who your favorite celebrities are, whether it's a football star or an actress, and that celebrity can talk to you and walk to you and show you the jeans they prefer. There are studios popping up near Hollywood or on the west end of Los Angeles and all over the country where creative people are creating VR marketing programs for forward-thinking brands. McDonald's showed off a forward-thinking— Tilt Brush is a way of painting in midair, and they used Tilt Brush to let kids spray paint butterflies while they're waiting for their Big Macs to arrive, which is an entirely new way of doing it. A company called Blipper will now let you buy when your phone sees a logo you like. If somebody's walking down the street and they have a Nike swoosh on their sneakers, you can focus on the sneakers and touch the screen and buy. And because your phone knows you, it'll use the right credit card and deliver it to your correct address. And this is just year one. This is just where the pioneers are. Lowe's is letting you use augmented reality to redesign your kitchen. They've created a virtual Holodeck in selected stores where you can decide whether you want the granite counters precisely to the scale of your own kitchen, or you want the stainless steel counters instead. Everywhere we looked, we saw marketing opportunities, and in our dark side, what I thought was the scariest thing was what happens when all marketers everywhere have the access to do all of this at once. There's— I'm forgetting his name, it's a Japanese name— designer, Robert, you might remember, who Has a series of dystopian visions of the future where wherever you go, whatever you do, sounds and visions and screens are popping up in front of your face. So if you want to make tea, suddenly a voice that sounds very much like Siri is telling you, first you must heat the water. Now, when you see steam coming out of the kettle, be careful not to touch the steam. And every object that you're going to use— how to flush the toilet, how to turn on the sink— could have this. And the, the thing about marketing is it ignores Isaac Newton. It confirms Isaac Newton's belief that once something is in motion, it will continue in motion until you stop. And I really hope we have a way of pushing a stop button that filters out excessive marketing moving forward.

You guys, there's a conversation going on on Twitter right now between Chris Voss and Ian Gertler and Courtney. As you guys know, Courtney just wrote a book, 21 Reasons Why Creativity Is Like Sex, and Ian and Chris are talking about that genre and even went to the specific example of Tinder. And now we've got virtual reality. So I'm gonna take the conversation there and say how— and ask you guys, how is this going to play out in the single space, in the dating space, and maybe even into the, you know, the porn industry? I mean, this is— that's what drove technology to begin with. The web grew based upon that technology. Are we gonna see that again?

See yourself again? Are we seeing what again? Sorry.

Are we gonna see that again? Are we gonna see technology being driven by things like the porn industry using virtual reality? I mean, that, that's what happened.

Porn industry is important, and it certainly is a driver for some people to get new technologies. I mean, it always has. I sold, you know, many a VCR back in the 1980s in my consumer electronics store to people who wanted that, right? And the same is true today. But I don't think that the adult industry really is pushing the technology industry. I mean, none of the stuff that I'm seeing on HoloLens is adult. So—

And last year at CES where it exploded, the adult industry wasn't part of it. What is true, Bryan, is there's not just the visual that everybody's talking about. There's haptic technology that lets you feel things. Robert, when he visited a virtual reality amusement park, felt a— saw Ghostbusters and felt the whoosh as a ghost went through his body.

Wow.

We've seen people do fist bumps on stages when one of the fists is 1,000 miles away from the other and they feel the collision. So what you could do with sex is clearly there. I asked the founder of Meta if a teen— a shy teenager could get a virtual girlfriend and end up having sex with her and end up preferring the virtual girlfriend to a real one. And he thought for about 10 seconds and said, yeah. And that kind of ended the conversation. I didn't have a follow-up that went beyond that. And whether this is something good as a tool of therapy, as a tool of entertainment, or a tool of self-satisfaction remains to be seen.

It's, it's gonna be, uh, it's gonna be interesting to see, uh, how that, that plays out, I'm sure. And Chris Voss is probably the most excited by it Yeah,

but for Courtney, it could sell a lot of books.

It really could. So let's see, Spicoti on Twitter just asked, how did— how do you get— at what point will they become more affordable for, for learning, memory, physical sensory enhancement disabilities? Neurodiversity, things like that?

That's a lot of questions there. And first of all, affordable depends what you mean. Um, for me, it's gonna, uh, sell tens of millions of, uh, uh, phones next year, right? The next iPhone is going to do full-on next-generation augmented reality with a 3D sensor that 600 engineers in Tel Aviv are working on right now. And that will be a standard iPhone price. So if you can afford an iPhone, you're gonna get virtual reality and augmented reality by the end of 2017 included in your iPhone. So if that's affordable to you, we're, we're in, in 2017. If you're talking about a kid in Mumbai, in a slum in Mumbai, they can only afford a $200 phone or less, right? Yeah. And they already have phones that are in that price category, but these phones are gonna be a few years before they get to that level, maybe 3, maybe 5 years before they come down to the $200, $300 phone level. And that's when we're gonna see them really go mainstream. And, you know, Shell and I argue about timing all the time. When I say we're— we are getting this next year, that's what I exactly what I mean. The normal high-end tech enthusiast is gonna get them.

Robert, I take issue with you right there. I have never classified you as normal, and I never will.

Tens of millions of people are gonna get it in 2017, if that's what you mean. Yeah, if you're, if you're talking about when is the kid in Mumbai gonna get it, yeah, we're gonna probably 5 years, maybe 5 to 10 years, somewhere in that range.

And guys, what Nancy Rubin said, what about things Things like other peripherals, like contact lenses. How will that— will that be possible with virtual or augmented?

That's way out into the future. Again, we're just crawling out of the swamp. I want you to go back to the previous question though. Moore's Law is still in play. The more adoption there is, the more powerful, useful, and less expensive objects become. Moore's Law seems to be accelerating right now when it comes to adoption to VR and AR devices and will continue to accelerate for a while. I have very little to disagree with Robert on technology. In fact, I wouldn't publicly dare to disagree with him on technology. I think what is going to slow it down a bit is human resistance to this. I didn't see that one coming. It got me. Uh, I've said people 3 times to avoid that, but, uh, anyway, it, it's for my generation. I'm, I'm, I know I'm still dashing and handsome, but I am 72, and most of my friends left me when the center of my world became Facebook. Uh, they have not come back. They don't like this, and they sit around and say, in my day, we just smoked dope and dropped acid and saw all these things you're talking about in these new times. I look to the future and I see the millennials, which we talk about a whole lot, and then, and the generation that comes after them, the second generation of digital natives We call them Minecrafters for some obvious reasons.

Mm-hmm.

And I look to them to be the rapid adopters that will transform the world. 10 years— in the book we talk about 10 years. Since then, Robert has said he feels that's too far out. But 10 years from now, the first millennials are going to start becoming grandparents. Aging boomers will have, for the most part, wandered off into the twilight and the sunset. And if we're Not yet food for worms, we soon will be. And a new generation will be taking our place and the world will have an expectation that we'll be using glasses, that we will be doing stuff by moving our eyes around and by 10 years out from now, brainwaves. This is going to transform— the technology is going to be the horse in front of the human social cultural car. And how fast that'll change, I don't know, but the price is not going to be the barrier.

I waited this time until after you're done.

I said it again. Oh no.

You did. Okay.

So you— Ewan.

Okay, so there's questions around— we haven't talked too much about artificial intelligence. It's kind of weaved into the conversation here, but there's a lot of questions coming in. Like, for instance, Nancy Rubin— I believe it was Nancy, may have been someone else, I apologize. Oh, Jason Martin. Can VR watch my kids on date night? And there's other questions on artificial intelligence, like surrounding that movie Her, and how far are we away from that kind of interaction where it's actually helpful? It's not just Siri doing on command, you know, half the time it's wrong or sassy and just doesn't work. How far are we away from it actually working?

Is your kid dating a robot by any chance?

He might be. I don't know. I have to ask him now. Now you just made me feel I gotta figure out if he's doing that.

It depends why— what you mean by not working, because with Siri, it has a lot of flaws, some of which are going to get fixed in the next 12 months. The, the huge flaw is you can ask it a question like, how many people have been checked— have checked in at the Half Moon Bay Ritz-Carlton, right? And on Foursquare even. And there is an answer on Foursquare on that, and there is an API, but it's not been hooked up to Siri. So Siri fails to Bing and gives you a stupid answer because it's not hooked up. And when you see the backend of Siri, there's 80 lines of code that Apple has to write to hook up, you know, your utterance to an API call. And that hasn't been done, obviously, so it fails. And in the future, that's going to be fixed at some level due to new artificial intelligence technology, but it's still not human. It's a long way from being to where it can have a human-like conversation to you that hasn't been programmed. Now, if you have a bot, like I saw, I visited Visa and saw their prototype bot, they've anticipated the kinds of questions you would ask a bot that has to do with your credit card. If you ask one of those questions, it seems human. But if you ask it a question that's not been programmed, it fails again. It's not human. Humans can make up a good answer to something that's new. We come up— And computers are, are not all that good at doing that. I, I say we're building a new god where the god knows everything but isn't very smart. And for most humans, they can't tell the difference between knowing everything or being an all-knowing thing and smartness, intelligence. To them, it seems like the same thing. And in fact, they would have an argument that a good deal of intelligence is having access to the data. that runs your world, right? So if you ask it, hey Siri, what nightclub should I go to tonight or right now? The glasses— and there it goes. Siri goes— Siri's listening, right?

Hey Siri, mute Robert's microphone.

Yeah, that doesn't work that way.

It's

not been hooked up. But it could show you 4 pictures or 5 pictures of nightclubs. It could show you the video coming off the nightclub, and it could show you how many people People are dancing because everybody's wearing these glasses on and therefore has sensors that are watching the world. And it could give you a quite good and accurate answer on a whole lot of ways. And, and that will look like some, some form of intelligence. But we're a long way from being really human-like interactions on, on these kinds of search engines.

There are, there are all these little human characteristics that efforts have been made, but not a whole lot's happened yet. Empathy, common sense.

Yeah.

It's the process of logic is not necessarily the way humans work.

Yeah.

And I know the two of you off camera pretty well, and I know myself. And there are things that I can describe about all 3 of us that were far from logical, that a robot would not do or say. And damn it, that, that's what we like about each other. There's a great deal of talk about how all this is going to lead to a loss of jobs and a loss of humanness. Well, jobs is an issue that is real, and we need realistic solutions to that. Robert's got some views on that. But the humanity, um, you know, I, I can hug a, a computer, or I can, you know, theoretically in the near future I can have a virtual lover. But why would I want one if I have a human? Why would I want something— Well, there is a shortened and banal answer to that, but overall Most of us really do want— please mute it for now— a human-to-human connection.

I'm just gonna give you guys one clap for all those humans. You just— but I'm pretty sure that you just shattered— Jay Baer, I believe, was the most word humans used in an HTH chat.

That's because he wants to hug every human.

And I'm now claiming you guys the winner of the most said humans of any HTH chat. In the last two and a half years, that was epic. How many humans you guys just said?

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Do we?

What do you win? Yeah, you win. You win my my my friendship for another week.

Money. Money is far more appropriate, Brian.

I know. I I would I would do something about that, but I'm not going to. So um so the the let's escalate this in just the last four minutes. We've got 4 minutes to close this out, and this is going to Courtney and Molly. Both brought up the topic of Westworld and how Westworld is kind of in line with what you were just saying about relationships with robots or with artificial intelligence. Now, obviously, we're not— we're very, very far away from Westworld, but the question is— How will— why can't we have a relationship with, soon, with an artificially intelligent being?

This is the first and only place I know where I'm ahead of Robert on technology. I'm up to episode 3 and he hasn't started yet. And I love the series, I really do. It's a fantasy, and I would point out that people just go there for a vacation. where they can either have sex or kill people. And so far it looks like they prefer killing to the sex part. But what is interesting there is the evolution of the robots into sentient things that have feelings. In episode 2, the prostitute rubs her finger along her lips, and that was not something she was programmed to do. She was starting to assume the role and think that she really was a human feeling woman of the night. Um, can this happen? Yes. How long would it take? Many, many, many years. Should it happen? Maybe it's the fact that I'm the old guy here, but I hope not. Um, Robert's ready to boogie, so take over.

I've already seen it. I saw it at a conference. A startup is creating an artificial human that you're going to talk to in augmented reality world. And it looks fairly compelling. But it's not going to be very human-like at first. It's still going to be taught by artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is really good at telling the difference between a Husky and a wolf, or a stop sign and a stoplight. That's why it works great on a self-driving car.

Right.

It'll be very good at telling that this is a coffee mug and there's a camera in front of me and there's a desk here. It's really good at that. It's not very good at understanding the empathy, how to be an empathetic human being. But we can have a lot of fun with a humanoid Assistant that follows you around or interacts with you. Certainly, if you know the kinds of things you're going to be asking this artificial thing are limited, like at a McDonald's, the McDonald's only knows that you're only going to ask about hamburgers or chicken sandwiches or sodas. You're not going to ask it for your bank balance. You're not going to ask it about Why your wife is mad at you today, or— Not yet. Not yet, but, you know, we can train an artificial human to do those kinds of things very, very efficiently. And then we'll get, uh, over the next, you know, a few decades, we'll get to, uh, expanding its repertoire. But it can be used for a lot of interesting things, and, and they are coming. And they are pretty interesting technologies that are going to present these virtualized humans or virtualized robots even. Because I believe at first you're going to talk to something that doesn't look human to signal to you that it isn't human and therefore you have to talk to it in a computer-style interaction.

So you guys are just— you guys are making me really happy here because in my book, Human to Human, I talk about humans having one competitive advantage, and that is being the most human you can in empathy, imperfection, and simplicity. And I do think that those pieces are going to carry on in the near future, you know, in the years to come.

I would like to point out that you just said human 3 times and there was silence

I just gave myself the clap. How's that? Okay, so—

That's gonna be in Courtney's book, isn't

it? It is. So, so you guys, we've just run out of time. I really appreciate you guys being on here today. We'll get some, get some links out about the books. I definitely recommend it. To everybody that's watching, thank you so much for your questions. You guys, congrats on an awesome, awesome book. Again, working together, you guys make a great team. As always, and really, really proud of you guys as my friends too. Thank you. And so you got it, you got it. And I promised everybody I would announce who my co-host was going to be next year. Glad Robert and Shel are here for me to announce this, to hear it. The new co-host for H2H Chat next year, which is going to have a slightly different title change, it's going to be around creativity, and humans and how humans will start to be then in a new creative way using things like what we just talked about. And what does creativity mean? And so my new co-host is going to be Courtney Smith, my wife and business partner. And so she's going to be joining me on all the HDA Chats this next year. So welcome to Courtney. And finally, thank you everybody because we trended number 28 on Twitter today. Shell and Robert, that's much thanks to you guys. We just trended nationally on 20— number 28. So congrats to you. Congrats to everybody out there. We will keep you up to date on the next H2H Chat, but otherwise we'll see you soon. Cheers, everybody.

Thank you. I hit a ball.