Interview with Peter Sprague of Satellite Displays on New Inventions and Technology

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I host Conscious Design, and today's episode was put together a little bit differently. Hence, I'm here doing a little monologue about introing this rather than what I typically do with someone on, on screen, on voice with me. This is an episode I'm really excited about. I'm talking to Peter Sprague. He's been in the tech world for a long time. He's worked at Aston Martin. He was at the early days of Intel. He's now running a company called Satellite Displays. And that's how we actually got connected. But he has a wealth of knowledge. And the product that they've created, the Badger with Satellite Display, is a unique and a product that allows communication that is hard to get in places now, uh, and, and hoping to impact that area. And so I hope you enjoy this episode. Thanks for listening and watching.

All right, that's the real me.

Uh, very— how are you doing?

I'm doing fine. It, uh, I even brought along just for fun a badger. Talk to it.

Oh, awesome.

If you talk to me.

Those things are, those things are so cool.

I can also make it possible for you to talk in Chinese.

Amazing. We'll have to, we'll have to do that.

Yeah, well, we'll— I don't know. The, the nice thing is that, uh, I have yet to find a Chinese person that I can talk to to make sure that it's polite Chinese, but it's Google Translate, so we'd have to trust that it's probably okay. This book I read was called The Innovators, and it's really about the history of computers, and it got intensely into the development of the modern laptop computer. Which was conceived by a man named Vannevar Bush in 1945, was that it's going to weigh 4 pounds and you're going to be able to do all the things you can do today with an Apple. This was 1945. And in the '60s when this was boiling out, the people who were doing this sort of thing were a general oddball collection. It was, you know, people at Stanford Research, Stewart Brand who had the World Earth, you know, the Whole Earth Catalog, They spent a fair amount of time on LSD, which I once tried with Timothy Leary in Lugano. But in many ways, creativity— well, I was interviewing to play the role of Harry Holler in Steppenwolf, which is a movie I—

Okay.

He'd been by the Black Panthers and gotten to Lugano, and we spent a weekend together, and I took a magical trip. And it turns out that so practically so did everybody else in the '60s. So somehow in the '60s, I managed to get to be chairman of National Semiconductor. But I did this when I was 23 or 24, and I got to be chairman because nobody wanted to be. And when I got involved in the company, it was bankrupt. And I figured out how to take it public, which became rather critical because we then had shares to trade with. And we hired the first group out of Intel who were a guy named Bob Widler and Dave Talbert and Dave Talbert's girlfriend and I. I keep being reminded I have to go back and find her name. She cut the Rubylith, a big piece of plastic, with a single-edge razor blade, and you shine light through that on a semiconductor, and you then developed it like a photograph, and that became the way you got impurities into the surface. But Widler was a genius, and Talbert was the process guy, and we were the first group to leave Fairchild. And they wanted $500,000 in their bank account free and clear in 5 years of tax. So we figured that's $800,000, and we gave them 20,000 shares. The stock went to $40, and they got out in 5 years. But we had trading stock. And so the next group that left Fairchild was National Semiconductor. And it's quite fascinating because I'm actually going to go talk to Isaacson about it because The thing that we had was tradable securities. In other words, when we talked to these people, they were not joining Beckman Instruments, which is what financed the original Fairchild from Shockley Labs. There wasn't much venture capital, but we had a tradable stock. And so 7 people left, including Floyd Quammy, who became an executive VP at Apple. eventually. Pierre Lamonde and Don Valentine, who were Sequoia eventually. Charlie Spork, who was the leader of the group and ran production at Fairchild. I think Roger Small— Roger, he went on to form Linear Technologies. But we were the first group. The second group was Intel. And they were able to raise money by that time, partly because We were already public. We went from the pink sheets to the New York Stock Exchange in 3 years. And the third group was AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, which was Jerry Sanders, and they were marketing. So we had production, Intel had technology, and AMD had a focus on marketing. But it's fascinating when you read about how creativity happens. It's not totally logical. It rarely happens out of giant corporations because if you've got a new idea, it's obviously off the wall, risky, and probably shouldn't be supported.

The opposite of corporate strategy.

Yeah, and so it's surprising, but it's very, very hard to create creativity within a company. I mean, to me, the most amazing thing is that— and in addition, an awful lot of companies' original business plan doesn't make any sense in terms of what happened. I was going to form a company to sell books. I got a patent on being able to distribute, you know, 1,000 books on a CD and charge inside the computer for the books. I thought physical distribution of books was a crazy idea. It turns out they had the flexibility to change. So now you want an electronic book, you get it on Kindle.

Right.

But in some ways you could look at it, if it was a large company, they would say, this electronic distribution is going to destroy my business. A Barnes Noble would look at it and say, how the hell can I be— what's the future of a bookstore if everybody's getting their book? Out of the ether.

Right.

So it's fascinating, the— but I actually started one time, I own the URL of the Best Laid Plans because I then went out and collected the original business plan of Apple, which was written by a friend of mine, and Amazon, and half a dozen others. And I thought it would be very useful to venture capital community, you seem to stress what your plan is. Within— instead of stressing what the people are, because it works, because people make something work. Your plan, a great idea with bad, with mediocre people, isn't going anywhere, right?

Well, there's a—

there's a— great people actually may go somewhere because after a while they're going to decide that's a dumb idea, we're going to change, right?

Well, there's a— I forget who said it, and I don't think it's the original quote, but Out of the military, it's like the best laid plans never survive contact with the enemy. Like nothing— as soon as you write whatever plan you want, and as soon as you actually start to execute that plan, it's gonna change. It doesn't hold up. It's, it's a possible path that you're hoping to achieve, but life happens. People are not static. Ideas become bad. New ones pop up and, and you roll with it.

Yeah, it's just a, uh, and it's fascinating because VCs, before they talk to you, they want you to reduce your whole concept to one page.

I've written those. I've written those. Those are so watered down. There's, there's nobody—

They ask for a 5-year plan. I got a 6-month plan. Hopefully in the next 6 months, I'm going to be able to pay my bills. A 5-year plan? It's ridiculous. And so before they talk to you, you have to jump over a whole bunch of hoops because they look at 50 deals a week. That's 2,500 a year. And they do about 3 or 4 deals a year themselves. And then they do 4 to 6 deals with their friends.

Right.

The deals with them. So if you're part of the club, you have to trade with the other club members. So that's 4 deals out of 2,500 deals. So what is a VC really good at? Saying no. They say no 99.8% of the time.

Right.

If I were doing that, I'd start off by saying, that sounds like an interesting idea. Can we meet? And if in the result of that meeting I decide that is one of the nifty people, I'd like him as a friend. Okay, now let's talk about the business. But it starts with people. Sure as hell doesn't start with a one-pager.

Not unless you want to lose.

If I sound mildly irritated or pissed off at the VC community, I am in fact irritated because I've never actually— I've done about 20 companies, startups or turnarounds from bankruptcy. And I never actually managed to get a VC involved. I've gotten the principal involved, but generally the people you really want to invest are people who themselves have done a company. They understand the process.

They know not to ask for a 5-year business plan on, on day 2 of a business.

Apple was funded by Arthur Rock, who was very early direct investor who also invested in Intel. Bob Noyce, who was a genius and the co-inventor of the integrated circuit and at Intel. And then they decided that Jobs and Wozniak were a bit off the wall. They'd only had one job and that was working for Nolan Bushnell at Atari. Finding the Next Steve Jobs. Uh, Jobs, uh, had such a wild diet that he had body aroma that was so bad they put him on the night shift. It's in the book by Isaacson on Jobs.

His book is great. I, I like Isaacson's writing. He does a fantastic job.

Yeah, they brought in a guy named Mike Markkula who came from, uh, Intel to provide adult supervision. He was 31 or 32. But they were people who already had built businesses. So my show, people like Janet Baker, who created Dragon Systems, and Herman Hauser, who started Acorn Processor Company in Cambridge, England with £750, which recently sold for $35 billion. But you want people who've actually done it.

Right.

Because if you haven't done it, then don't tell me how to do it.

Okay?

I respect people who've been there. And I'm not— I'm often wrong, but I like criticism from somebody who actually has a clue. That seem unreasonable?

It's always a good idea to get feedback from someone who's actually been there.

Oh, and has this happened?

What was that?

I mean, you've been involved in startups of various kinds. Does this sound real to you?

Oh yeah, I've, I've only worked with a couple companies that managed to get VCs. The rest of the time it's all been they've gotten to know an angel investor really well that's personally— they connected and they put money in. They've They usually became an angel investor because they've started multiple companies or they, you know, they got cashed out, they grew a company, sold it, and now they're using that money to go invest in other companies. And those are— that's the typical investor I've seen that really is good. And they have a great input.

Angels. In fact, all the people I'm talking about would be angels. one of my shareholders who directly invested, but he wrote a book called Gust, and he started the New York Angels. And Gust actually does our legal work. They've simplified how you incorporate in Delaware and issue shares and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

It's very fun. And, uh, I— but I've known him for 40 or 50 years. I mean, the best kind of angel is somebody who's actually known you for 40 or 50 years with all your weaknesses. Now, guys who are 30 starting a business don't have the advantage I have because they haven't been around for 40 or 50 years.

Yeah, I haven't known anyone that long yet.

Oh yeah. Oh God, one of my investors was in kindergarten. He was a lead headhunter in Boston and he was in kindergarten with me. I kept in touch with 3 of the 6 of us. And we have a running feud as to who got the lowest grade in sandbox. I think I got an E in sandbox and he claims he got a D. And that started off our friendship. This guy named John Jay, he's related way back to the original John Jay of American political history.

Oh wow, that's awesome. Way to start a long friendship.

Yeah, I very much loved it. So it's hard to answer your question. I mean, I never knew what I quite wanted to do when I grew up, which has been a running problem. So I really wanted to go into politics and journalism. So my journalism career was 3 years long, but rather illustrious. I started with a newspaper when I was 17 called the Berkshire Eagle, which has won numerous awards. And somebody once said the only real newspapers were the Berkshire Eagle, Le Monde, and the New York Times. But whatever it is, the Berkshire Eagle is where Pearl started his career, the guy who was killed in Pakistan.

Hmm.

And I went from there into going to Budapest when I was 17, and I thought that was going to be the last interesting international story, so I had to be there. So I left school illegally and hitchhiked into Budapest. I was in school in Switzerland and I sold my pictures to UPI and Associated Press and got caught by the Russians and learned a little bit of Russian. In the summer of '59, I got a job in Moscow covering the kitchen debates for UPI. I set up a lab in the bureau chief's wife's closet. My job was to keep the White House photographer from getting lost, but taking backup pictures. every time he got lost, they used my pictures. So I decided that the number 2 thing was what I'd focus on, and he spent a lot of time lost and they used a lot of my pictures. They actually then made— the following year I was made the official White House photographer. This was when I was at Yale, to go with Eisenhower to Russia. My trip, it was Khrushchev and the kitchen debates, the first one, and then that got shot down by the U-2. So I sent a telegram to the Prime Minister of Mongolia where only 2 Americans had been since the war, Harrison Salisbury and Owen Lattimore, and damned if he didn't get up on the right side of the bed and sent me a visa. Cost me $5.70 to send a telegram. So my wife and I were the 3rd and 4th Americans. By this time I'm already married, well, my junior year at Yale. So that was the end of my journalism career, but I was just curious. And I think the first business I started was an agricultural business in Iran, and I won't give you the background, but it's too funny a story. But I'm probably the only American who started an entrepreneurial business in Iran that wasn't oil-related. 17 years later, we were the number 2 coal storage in the Middle East. We had 27,000 tons. Second only to the one in Jeddah, which is part of the Hajj, where as part of the religious ceremony of the Hajj, you have to kill a lamb. And according to the Quran, you have to give a third of the lamb to poor, poor people. And you can only eat about a third of the lamb. So the net result is you have to put the other third in the cold store. And they bring in about 2 million lambs from New Zealand and Australia. That's another side sheet. And then I'm in the semiconductor business. And then I ran for politics against Koch as a Republican. But before your viewers panic, I ran a full-page ad on the Post on the last day of the election in the morning saying it won't make any difference whether you vote for me or my opponent because neither of us will get anything done. So I can't exactly be accused of overpromising. If you read the small print, which of course nobody did, there wasn't a single chairman of a congressional committee who had over 50— a population of over 50,000 people from the town he came from.

Right.

Because these people who stayed in Congress forever until they got seniority. I thought that the problems in New York City were different than the problems in Georgia. So why not form an urban bloc that went after fixing things like the subway? So you might as well go find Democrats and Republicans who think about subways, and they don't come from towns of over 50,000 people.

Right.

None of which, to the best of my knowledge, have a subway. So it's a— so I tried a lot of different things, primarily because I got through university Yale and MIT and Columbia basically with one thing. And it wasn't necessarily an education. They left my curiosity intact.

Mm-hmm.

So in probably 20 years, let's see, I've got about 14-odd patents. And I went to MIT, but I went to MIT in political science. My scientific background consisted of a course called Rocks for Jocks, which got the football team through the science requirement without a whole lot of burden from information. But third, I read a book by Simon Winchester, and it turns out that tectonic plates, the way continents move apart, hadn't been discovered when I was taking rocks for chalks. That wasn't discovered until 1960.

Wow.

Somebody looked at the world, who played jigsaw puzzles, and said, Africa looks like it would fit into North America. So they dug up some rocks in Africa and matched it to corresponding rocks in the jigsaw puzzle from North America, and that's when they discovered we were all somewhat differently associated in those days.

Interesting.

So I recommend that if you can basically, you know, keep your, your curiosity intact Then you're going to have a fun life. Because the idea that you're going to go work for your daddy's company or General Electric and you're going to be there for 45 years and get a gold watch at the end— who the hell wants to live that way?

Well, those days seem pretty dead now anyway. Nobody promises you a gold watch after 45 years and a Well, they close, you know, maybe not General Electric, but giant companies certainly have closed. Right.

So, uh, but you've basically been involved in design and, and products, and, you know, design and marketing of creating products, if I'm correct?

Yes. Yes. Yeah, I spent my whole career doing that, and it's, it's been fun. A lot of, a lot of work. Well, there's a lot of creativity, which is, which is part of how I get work, is that companies figure out they need to hire somebody else to do some creative work, and then they have their new product, and then they go off and they corporatize the ideas that work. And that's—

How many times has it happened where they said, you know, Why don't you join us?

I've been, I've been offered jobs before several times. I've turned them all down. I don't— I've done that. I, I did my corporate time. I, I sat in a box in a cubicle designing the same product variants for, for years on end, and it's not for me.

Are there companies you'd be willing to mention?

Um, I worked at HP. I work— I've done some work for Nike. I worked at, um, A laser manufacturer called Enlight Photonics, and I worked at a speaker company called Barefoot Sound. Those were, those are the ones that I spent the longest time at.

Um, best idea I ever— systems, uh, because it— I was on a TED conference and I finally got Ricky Wurman to put me up for 5 minutes, uh, with the program, and I said, how many out of an audience of 500, how many of you have ever written a poem, created a piece of music, written a book, designed something, and been paid for it? 25% of the hands went up. How many of you ever bought anything like that? And as a customer, you know, you've used it? All the hands went up except for 3 or 4 in the back who were asleep. What we came up with was an ability at— with a guy named Bob Frankenberg, who ran computers before he went to Novell, and he signed a deal with me on a napkin in a sports bar in Palo Alto. And our scheme was that we put the finances in the computer and put the information out encrypted. So if you wrote a poem and you wanted to sell it for 10 cents, You clicked on it, it ran to the bank to see if you had 10 cents. If you did, it ran up and said decrypt it and give it to them. And then at the end of the month when you ran out of money, you had to call me up to get more money and I emptied the little memory of what you purchased, which would have changed the whole economic distribution. But the group at HP didn't want to do it after Frankenberg left. And, uh, Yes. hot stock and we ended up being a $2 to $3 billion dot-com. It went crazy. I raised $19.7 million on NASDAQ before we had sales or earnings. And then it went crazy. But we had to be inside the computer and there were only about 5 companies and Apple didn't want to talk to us and IBM didn't want to talk to us. We should have stopped at some point and said, okay, that didn't work. We've got $100 million in the bank. Why don't we rethink what we're doing? Yeah, try something else. And my youngest actually wrote us— we broadcast the Olympics about 12 years ago from Beijing with Lenovo as a sponsor in high definition.

I remember that.

Way back. And, uh, we should have done that. So an awful lot of this, you know, if I sound arrogant in any way, the one thing I would like to throw into the equation is luck.

Hmm.

Happens if you're at least in a situation where it might happen, which is why you do this sort of thing. But the luck of the draw is way up there, above 50%, as to why things work. Say, but you— we're actually quite parallel. I was involved in Advent, you were involved in speakers. And Advent was going bust, and they had a confused position because they were making projection televisions and speakers. We should have divided it. We made the first big bulky projection televisions, and I traded the 7th and the 11th Apple II with Steve Jobs for an Advent VideoBeam projector. And 4 years later, by 1979, I had 26 Apples in my children's school, and I'd say half of those kids ended up going into computers and computer science. Very similar to the Gates story, you know, where his father gave them computer time on timeshare. It's now called cloud. It used to be called time— people forgotten there used to be something called timeshare.

Yeah, nobody remembers that now.

You talk to a big computer. Yeah. About 40 or 50 years older than you are, so some of this history may not have occurred to you. But, uh, so after a while you said you'd break out and go do it yourself, and here you are.

Right. That's awesome.

Like the question to the man who jumped out of the 100-story building and passed the 30th floor, how's it going so far?

I remember that one.

Yeah. Anyway, it's a, uh, so what do you do with these podcasts?

Um, so we, we launch them out, we share them on social media, we put them in an email. Um, yeah, we're just getting going, so this is one of our first— well, the first one's going out in a couple weeks. So I'm just backlogging, so I'm recording as people are available and then they'll get put out.

So you found other guinea pigs?

Yes, yeah, you are number 13 actually.

Uh, that doesn't sound good.

Oh well, it's all good so far.

That's gonna be fascinating. There's so much of this out there, it's hard to find. I mean, it's, uh, How you— I belong to something called Big Boys Club, which is a fascinating gathering of eccentric characters organized by Bob Metcalfe, who invented the Ethernet and started, uh, oh God, I can't remember the company now, but whatever it is, he owns 40 acres of an island in Maine. And you get to be a big boy if he likes you, and then he pays all the You go up there and camp out, talk to each other. A lot of them are MIT PhDs from company backgrounds, but a few of them are more exotic. One of them sailed twice around the world in his 60s as a competitor in the Vendée Globe, and he has asthma. Single-handedly in a 60-foot boat, 80 days around the world.

Wow, that's impressive.

His name is Rich Wilson and there's another guy who's designed— designs underwater submarines, which is how I met Bob because we were both learning how to drive a submarine.

I would love to do that.

Graham Hawkes, he designed all the submarines that went into all the underwater stuff that was in James Bond.

Oh, okay.

Remember, there were all kinds of spooky things.

Right.

He was for a time married to a woman named Dr. Sylvia Earle, and he made a suit for her. She went on to run the National Ecology whatever, wonderful person. But he designed an articulated suit for her, and she went to 1,000 feet. I don't think anybody's done that since. You know, a pinhole fracture and you're dead.

Right.

So it's a bunch of fairly exotic characters, but what we've started doing— the only connection to a podcast is I've gotten to know these people much better because now once a month we gather for 2 hours, including this Wednesday. And instead of drinking too much and sitting around in the dark and talking to the person to the left and right of you— and if you're hard of hearing, you're stuck with the people to the left and right and across from you— All of a sudden I'm discovering some of these people, some of them I didn't even like, I now like because we're doing a podcast. It's called A Tiki Bar According to Bob Metcalfe, uh, Doctor Bob, what have you. And, uh, man, that's— I, I'm gonna miss that. In fact, I think we'll probably keep it going once a month between meeting up in person. And so that part of COVID is really— pieces of that are going to stick around. Podcasts will probably stick around in some form. Well, of course they will.

Well, they've grown. More and more people want to launch podcasts or sharing digitally. It's kind of It's, uh, through isolation we've been forced to connect online more, more than ever before. And now it's— I go, I've been to online networking events, and there just seems to be a lot more sharing online and people being willing to and wanting to connect with people not just in their local area, more, more global connection, which is great.

which is called Satellite Display, and it's like satellite display with no S at the end because we couldn't get satellitedisplays.com. And our engineers in the Pacific Northwest, 2 of them, one is a Vietnamese in Montreal and one is a brilliant guy named Gregory who happens to be located in the Ukraine. My CEO graduated from Monmouth. He's already done one startup successfully. The 32-year-old guy, and he's in New Jersey and I'm in New York and Western Massachusetts. We would have done it this way anyway.

Right.

We're in the one spot. Eventually, I believe having a group of people in one spot helps, and so eventually we will end up in New Jersey with people as outliers, but the thing I miss is getting 4 or 5 people in a room and a big whiteboard and picking a problem and arguing about it for hours on end.

And I do, I do miss those too. Those are always fun. Those design, design thinking sessions are always— the brainstorming that you can get from sitting in a room together With a whiteboard and paper and having, having that interaction is irreplaceable.

See if there's some marker that's moist enough to write.

Yes.

Sometimes you didn't have the red marker because it dried up, so what's wrong with the green marker? But the truth of the matter is that I don't think can be duplicated.

Uh, that I have a kind of system that does. And I've used Zoom. Zoom has a whiteboard feature, but it's not the same. It's just not the same. So my kind of model that now that things are wrapping up that I want to move to is not forcing everyone to be in one office all the time, but having more regular, you know, a conference room, renting it somewhere and having everybody show up for a week and do it. Yeah.

So the key thing, I mean, the, the reason I hold this up is if you have this around your neck and you're working on a whiteboard, I want to see your face. I want to see how serious you are, how— what the smile is, or you're making a joke. The whiteboard on Zoom is a static thing, right? I want to see the person doing it. I want to see how much confidence they have in their idea. I just, I gotta feel who the human beings are in the room.

Right.

You can't really do that without a 3-dimensional space.

Correct.

And you, you need folks to react to. You need to know when you're talking that if 3 people are reading their computer, you're probably not getting across to your 5 people in the audience looking like this.

Right.

I mean, you go to your doctor today and because of medical records you get a 15-minute appointment if you're really lucky. In the first 5 minutes he's looking at a computer. You could suddenly slump, drool a little blood out of the corner of your mouth, and the poor doctor is sitting there typing in his computer. It might be helpful if they looked at Ian's eyes or Ian's head where the drool— oh, we won't go there. But I mean, there's— we'll come up with a mix.

Right.

It's fascinating. The whole PC was described perfectly by a guy named Vannevar Bush, who ran the Manhattan Project, started Raytheon, was a complete genius. In 1945, he described a 4-pound machine that was augmented intelligence, meaning this would allow you— he described the Apple computer today. in '45. It's written down. And then it took a long time with people like Engelbart, who invented the mouse.

Right.

And which started at Stanford Research and went to Xerox PARC, and then they let Jobs into the place, which was a big mistake if they wanted— if Xerox, who always believed that there was a big market for copying machines but a much smaller market for computers, I could end that famous quote from the, uh, General Doriot who started DEC, and they said that— and he said it, I think, 1977— there was no possible use for the computer in the home.

Well, some people are wrong. Some people— sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong.

When the telegram was invented, the head of the British Post Office said, that's fine for Americans, but our post office is so good delivering messages, there's no possible need for it.

Wow.

And there's a whole bunch of these. And actually, even with Xerox in 1946 or '47, I think they hired Boston Consulting who decided there was a need to 26 Xerox machines. So the wisdom of people who are on top— oh, and the best one of all was when the movies came along. Sam made the wonderful comment, who the hell— when talkies came along, who the hell wants to hear actors talk? That's the Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Wow.

So it's fun to read the— I mean, remember, you know, memorize those things because when somebody tells you there's no possible need for what you're working on, probably there isn't if it's a new thing because the world has pretty much spun on its axis for millennia without it and probably will continue to without it.

Right.

But on the other hand, come up with some it Build it and find out. And, um, sorry, meeting you later in life. I mean, the guy who I helped do it— I mean, we've got a little thing here that you dangle it with. It's a magnet, but the key thing is the 2 holes. Oops, the little holes in the back, because once you do that, then the magnet won't slip. So those 2 holes turn out to be what makes this thing work. But you can also then put it on the inside of your shirt and put the magnet on the other side. So the guy— but it's not a real design problem because this is a thing called an e-ink display, and it reverts back to being the original badge. So if I turn it off or it runs out of batteries, it goes back. To being your original badge. So a doctor who's wearing this, if it ever closes down, he still wants to be able to get back in the hospital. So he has to get back in wearing the badge that he started with, or he's going to be stuck with 2 badges. So we wanted the dumb badge with an intelligent badge. Any ink you've got at home on your Kindle, that's the display.

Oh, you got it. We talked about that. It replaces— this was able to replace an actual badge, be a translator, provide written version of what you're speaking, and access, right? And access to everything, all, all in one little device.

Yeah, well, it has actually in it— it has a, uh, I'm sorry, I'm fumbling around trying to find the holes, but what it has in it is a, uh, When you write the patent, eventually everything— this talks to your iPhone.

Right.

But eventually it'll take the iPhone components and put it here. It won't be an iPhone, but those components will get so small and so cheap that this will just be a standalone item. So what you're really doing is taking a dumb item and making it intelligent. and giving it power and how people end up using it. We don't even need the cloud to make it work. The voice recognition is done with Microsoft Word, and you could use this on a hillside in Afghanistan and speak Pashto, Dari, or Urdu. So— or Farsi, not Urdu. And so it becomes a It's just another wearable device. But in— before COVID 207 million Americans went to a conference with a badge, except they didn't go with the badge. They got there and they stood in line and they waited for their badge. And then you got—

Okay.

Now you arrive and your GPS and this thing tells you you're near the building and it uploads the right badge. So when you walk in, it has RFID, near-field communications, and Bluetooth. You walk in and you've already registered and you paid your money and you don't wait in line. And then if you volunteer, the conference can track you. So not necessarily as Ian, you could just be number 387. But conferences right now doesn't— don't know that Ian spent most of his time in the lobby talking to people. Practically never know which lectures you went to. And if you were in France, you were in Switzerland at the World Economic Conference, they know that you probably went out and had a 2.5-hour lunch with your friends. So don't schedule people to talk at 1 o'clock.

Right, we talked about this. There's no, there's no mapping. Like, a conference happens right now and nobody knows how many people went into room X or listened to this speaker or went to this workshop. It's just, uh, well, 1,000 people showed up, there we go, that's it.

One of my shareholders, and he originally wrote for Fortune magazine, and he has a conference called Techonomy, which was in the good old days got 500 people at $6,000 a person. Half Moon Bay. Maybe they'll do it this year. But, uh, when I started on this, the medical application was one of 5. Right now it's the number one because they're mandated by the Act for Disabled Americans. They have to be able to talk to people who are deaf or speak a foreign language, provided it's possible.

Right.

Means hiring an Arabic speaker at 3 o'clock in the morning in a CVS in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is tough. Therefore, they can't get them doing it. But if they had this little $295 Badger, then they say, oh, you speak Arabic? Hmm, that's interesting. And I don't know, I, I don't want to fumble around with it, but I could show you Chinese or Spanish or French.

That's amazing.

You've seen it. Okay.

Not that I speak those. So as we said, it's—

Take voice commands. So the word Badger, which was invented by my partner, uh, if I say, you know, how are you, uh, how are you, you know, good morning, how are you, or hello, how are you, if you don't see that and I see you're French, I can say Badger French. And then I can say bonjour, comment ça va? I'll say hello, how are you? And it'll say bonjour, comment ça va? And if I say badger Russian, it'll say درасвите как вы बचаваете in Cyrillic. I don't know why somebody else didn't come up with this. So again, going back to the whole business of inventing something, you gotta have a problem one way or another. Gotta find something that says Yeah, I want to talk to Marlee Matlin. How the hell do I talk to a deaf person? Look them in the eye, smile, go over, and in the case of Marlee Matlin, I'm looking forward to a hug. So I'm arranging a CNN program to follow up with Sarah O'Brien, and we're going to get Marlee Matlin, and I'm going to say, you know something, you gave me this idea. Without this program and without your little text message saying I'd like to get it with the closed captions. I would never have thought that if I want to talk to her and give her a hug, I don't want to talk to her traveling American Sign Language person. I want to talk to Marlee Matlin, and I want to look her in the eye and see her smile. Which goes back to your whiteboard or any other gathering of people. It, uh, it's people.

Right.

So I could end the podcast by saying that Eventually I'm going to write a book called Strangers and Friends from Will Rogers, who made the comment, a stranger is a friend I haven't met. Because if you think of your life, the first stranger is your mother, and then you meet a whole bunch of strangers, and those people, you fall in love with them, start a company with them, get a bright idea with them, drink too much and fall off a bar stool. But they become your friends and the people who patterned your life, right? I bet you, you, and there are people you met who changed your life.

Absolutely. Many, many people have changed and will change everyone's life. It's kind of how the whole human interaction works. It usually does change your life in some, even a small way.

Well, it's— shyness doesn't help in this case. And unfortunately, some of the brightest people are shy, you know, particularly engineers. You know, they can—

Yep.

They have a bit of Asperger's or a bit of, you know, there's 3 or 4 of these things. Engineering schools are now looking for people with those so-called disabilities, because it turns out it crops up very often in very intelligent people who are engineers. None of those problems have been invented in my day. Attention deficit disorder is one of them. I fell under a lump called Bratz disease, boys resistant to adult teaching. Now they've got a lot of medical names for it. I was just a brat with C in the sandbox and maybe a D. It helps to have a little brat's disease.

I actually feel like all children, maybe like 95% of children, actually fall under that to some, to some level or another. So I feel it's a pretty broad, broad category.

Well, I have 4 sons. The one I'm most proud of. He drew my political poster that went on to— it was a picture of a big flower that said, help bring back the flowers, vote for Peter Sprague. It ended up in a book of 20th century propaganda art. He did this when he was 9, and he's done most of the graphics or art direction and set design for, uh, things like, uh, for the I'm forgetting the guy's name. It's the first one that's going through. Wes Anderson. He drew— he was at Royal Tenenbaums, but he drew the Grand Hotel Budapest. And he's made about 50 movies. If you go to spreg.com, my kids all turned out to be fairly creative, interesting people. I married somebody from Eastern Europe, which improves your genetics in my opinion. There's enough WASP in— I'm half Irish, just the loquaciousness and what have you. But anyway, she was born in Slovenia, went to Italy. By the time she got here, she went to a public school, and when she was 7, then she went to a private school, and then she was accepted at MIT. She was one of 17 women before they accepted women, and which wasn't bad when 17 years of getting out of World War II, surviving being bombed, what have you. So my kids ended up interesting because it brought a different strain into the family. She's very artistic and I'm not, so it's helpful.

A little, a little of both is good. You need some artist side and some not artist side. It helps you Talk to everyone.

What? Do you have any kids?

Oh yeah, we have, we have 5.

5?

Yep.

God, I hate being one-upped.

At this point, every— most people have, you know, 2 or 3, so 5, we're like really outside the norm now.

And how old are they?

Uh, 3 to 13.

So 5 in 10 years?

Yep.

You must have had a lot of time on your hands and you didn't travel much.

Well, I work from home, so I have, I have for a few years now.

But I always— I had a house in New York and I had a second floor was my office. I have actually never gone to work.

Oh, you're lucky.

About 3 months.

I was— I spent years in cubicles. I don't recommend them. Well, it was very funny.

National Semiconductor before, Gil Amelio, who's the only person I can think of that I still dislike, but he was at Apple International for 3 years and then he went over to Apple. He was described in Isaacson's book on Jobs as a bozo, but he was a big company executive. So Cali Spork, who was about 6'4, wander around and he had a cubicle. Emilio put in a $2 million office space at the end of the same room with the cubicles, which made it quite clear where his position was. But we were very anti-feminist without realizing it because our cubicles were 5 feet tall. You needed to be a 6-foot-tall guy to be able to look over the cubicle to find out if anybody was inside. So there was a certain sexism by the height of the cubicle because men tend to be taller than women. And how the hell do you manage an organization if you can't figure out whether your ants are stuck in their cubicles without looking over them? So actually, we're going to begin to, through design, recognize that that actually is sexist.

I'd never, I'd never thought about that. But that's true. That is very— I think all cubicles are right about 5 feet. Some of them are maybe like 5'6 too. I've seen some 5'6 ones.

Well, Charlie was the best guy I ever worked with, and he was 6'4.

Wow, he looked over all of them.

But it never— I had an edge in the, uh, by design. Our company was designed to be hard on women executives. So either lower the walls of the cubicles or you give people, you know, some kind of stick they can— 2 sticks they can stand on so they can wander around and look over the edge. The second is not a patentable idea.

People have been stilt walking for too long. I think that falls under common.

Where do you stand on the whole idea of intellectual property and patents and Have you thought much about that?

I think it's a good idea to give competitive advantage.

I think sometimes it's a little too full of lawyers for what it takes to get a patent done, but That's a whole other program, and it's, uh, I could argue equally forcefully both sides of the argument, um, which was always fun. I mean, if you went to the Oxford Debating Society, they flipped a coin as to which argument, which side of the argument you were going to be on. But it, uh—

That's a good thing though. That helps you understand all sides if you're, if you're debating against what maybe you think personally, you're kind of forced to actually think in a new perspective.

Whoever is representing the other side, whatever it is, is probably an idiot. And begin from there with a forceful argument. But the intellectual property thing has been fascinating. With the transistor, Bell Labs was Actually, he said they would license anybody for $25,000. Then it got much more complicated, but it, it, uh, if you really want to get something moving, uh, it helps have a more open universe.

Well, that's what, that's what Musk did with his charging, is the charging patents they had. He wanted to build out an ecosystem of chargers. And so he released some of those patents. And maybe there's something else behind his decision, but—

The laser business, you may not know this, but lasers were invented by a guy named Townes, who was a professor at Columbia who got a Nobel Prize, except he didn't invent it. There was a student came forward and said in his notebook and in a paper he wrote for Townes, he'd invented it. The argument went on for 17 years, and he got about $6 million worth of founding— financing. And in fact, the court overturned Towne's invention and gave it to the student. It's fascinating, but in the first 17 years of the laser, nobody figured out what to do with it. They didn't level fields, they didn't grind away metal, they didn't do optical surgery.

Hmm.

for people to figure out what the hell to do with the laser. And God knows we sure as hell figured that out since, but the patent law started all over again. So the people who backed him were able to go out and license everybody who used a laser for 5%. So it's a very twisty story because in the old days— it's not true now, today it's when you file, but in those days it was when you invented.

Yeah, and so prove— if you could prove invention through You know, whatever means.

Yeah, your engineering notebooks, preferably with a witness.

Or something.

But he wrote a paper on it, right? It's curious how long the laser took to take off, and you can see how ubiquitous it is now. All right, I'm going to end with one funny story. You can edit it out, but a friend of mine named Robbie Van Rooyen had a company called Control Laser that did machining. And they used him as a test case and they sued him. And they sued him for 5% and he thought that he was— and he lost. And he thought that, oh my God, they're going to take 5% of all my past sales. He was in the men's room at a country club in wherever Disneyland is in Orlando. And he was in the men's room doing what men do in the men's room.

Pee.

If— and all of a sudden, damn it, one of the jurors walked in and he said, why did you quit? He said, we knew you were innocent. We were just going to charge you 5% in the future and all your competitors. By this time, he'd given up control of his company.

Oh man.

There are times you don't want to be in the men's room of your country club. I'll end it on that. I'm sure you've got enough to hack away at editing this down. I had fun. Obviously I love to talk and I love to tell stories.

Oh, this is— this has been great. Um, last thing I want to ask is, I think you already mentioned it, but if anyone wants to see what you've done or, or get in touch, um, is it sprague.com. What's the best one?

I'm on LinkedIn under Peter Sprague. My phone number is there, my company's connection is there, which is satellitedisplay.com. Uh, I have one telephone number which I've actually got on my LinkedIn, which if anybody wants to write it down is 917-667-4773. And my email is pretty simple, peter@spreig.com. I got there early. I beat a guy named Peter Sprague who was much more creative than I am, who was a great jazz musician, guitar player in San Diego whose name is Peter Sprague. I've got him on my website, but he didn't get sprague.com as fast as I did.

Yeah, I found, uh, my last name is owned by some, some company that buys up last Name domains.

Yeah, I got very early.

You got it early.

I started something called the American Sailing Association, and we have asa.com. There's a real shortage of three-letter things, and those don't really exist. I got wave.com, and it turns out there are 2,600. 4-letter words in the English language. Not, I mean, real words.

Oh, right.

Wave is a good one. There are 4 or 5 4-letter words that you probably want to— well, I was going to say you don't want them as a .com, but on second thought, probably somebody's making a lot of money on 4-letter word .coms.

Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure somebody is.

Oh, that's tough. You, uh, just got there late.

Yeah, yeah, I found that out when I, I looked up peterman.com, and it's, uh, yeah, this company that just buys up last name domains. So—

Well, I could have done absolutely nothing since 1994 because I could have gotten food.com, sex.com, but believe it or not, I morally actually had a, a moral conclusion that that was against the open nature of the internet, and if I wasn't going to do anything with it, I should leave it to somebody who could. It's one of those regrets where you actually took the decent way down the path, look back and said, why the hell did I do that?

Yeah, that would have— could have been an investment on your part. Wait, wait 10 years and then sell a domain for—

Yeah, a bunch.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly.

And the rest of the time you're in a lounge chair in the beach someplace.

Yes. Well, we all run into those. We all, we all have those points where we look back and go, wow, well, if I would have chosen that option, uh, I would have been doing better right now. But you learn.

What?

But you learn.

I, I missed the question.

Oh, I was just saying that we all, we all have those points where we look back.

When you hit 82, you begin to think that you probably are not going to keep doing this. I mean, I recognize with this company that I will not be in this business 2 years from now, because if it's a global business, no little company is going to be able to market this in China and Japan and what have you. And if you block other people from doing it because you've got patents, which we do, they'll run through them. So you better find a large international company. Hey, Microsoft would do, who spent— their biggest acquisition was LinkedIn for $25 billion. Their second biggest acquisition was Nuance, which is the intellectual property that was developed by Janet Baker and Dragon Systems. And she sold her company for $600 million in 1989 to a public company in Belgium called Lernhout Housbee, with the aid of Goldman Sachs, who recommended she keep stock. 6 weeks later, they went bankrupt. She owned half of the $600 million, her employees owned $150 million, and Seagate owned $150 million, and the company dissolved. And her intellectual property was bought by Nuance, which was just sold for $19.7 billion. But she was the person who actually developed the original concept of voice recognition. She's a wonderful, brilliant person, teaches at MIT and Harvard and Babson and connected to Mass General and isn't bitter about it. But, uh, I've known her since 19— '82, and one of those friends, and she's a, uh, she's a spectacular human being. And, uh, but I, I realized that I could do this because the computer she was putting voice recognition on in 1989 was about 1/1,000th the power, if not 1/10,000th, of your smartphone. You just had to wait for Moore's Law to Have it double every year and a half, and all of a sudden the world keeps changing, right? Which it will and is as we speak, right? But my— I haven't had a project this much fun, um, because, well, what is it going to do for my ego? I'm going to be able to wear what I invented. What do you do? Oh, I just built this, right?

Here's this thing.

This is not Let me show it to you. So I'll overcome my shyness and engage in my Irish talkativeness and motor through, but we've got a ways to go. But we're, uh, we've got one customer in Denmark that makes, uh, is a leading hearing aid company. It's called Oticon. It's an $8 billion Danish company, do 42% of their sales in the United States. And they want to give this to all the audiologists they work with because the audiologists have people walk into the office, they're all deaf by definition or they wouldn't be there.

Right.

Oh, uh, give me your hearing aids. Yeah, right, now to begin with, so if you put the little badge not on your chest, you put it on the little edge of the table, Because the audiologist takes your hearing aids, turns 90 degrees so you can't read the badge, and starts fiddling with your hearing aids. So we sell this for $295. If you multiply that times 16,000 audiologists, it's not a bad opening sale for a startup.

Not at all. That's an opening many people would love.

Oh, but we're going to be out of this. I mean, somebody's going to buy us and, uh, Because if I took the normal 10 years, I'm 92 and I won't have any fun with it. I'm not likely to have a whole lot of fun with this. And my ambition is to not buy a larger yacht than all the other people who are buying large yachts in America these days. And I, uh, I want a small boat.

Perfect.

We'll have enough out of it to buy a small boat.

Perfect.

Well, it's been fun.

I don't—

I'm not— I, I just, uh, I did this without a glass of scotch, which would have probably made me feel better but maybe less coherent. So hopefully I was coherent. No, this is—

this has been awesome. I, I really appreciate your time, and I will, um, yeah, I'll let you know when the episode is going to be coming out and We'll give you links and everything so you can share it. And, uh, yeah, I'll probably— I'll just need to record an intro, um, and then we'll be— we'll be good.

I'll watch the other ones too, if it's okay.

What was that?

I said I'll watch the other ones as well. I'll have to go through 12 of them, but, uh—