Mike Boland Interviews Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

So much to talk about.

It's nice when aliens are coming out of you. Yeah, yeah.

Or when the aliens are asking questions that are different than the ones I'm actually asking.

Right.

So, so much to go into.

And.

And, you know, I think one way to do it might be to tackle some of the use cases you guys talk about in the book. Break it down vertically. But before we do that, one question I have for you is, what was the moment when you guys decided that this is the next book we're going to write? Because I think that right now, in retrospect, we're at this kind of heightened awareness and excitement, all of us, about immersive technologies. When you guys started the book, or even a year ago, and it was before that, you probably made that decision, it wasn't as obvious.

The quick answer is, we were in Australia, sitting in the lobby of a hotel that was nicer than the one I was staying in. He was staying in there. I was a little pissed about that. But the long story is that began in 2005. Robert and I were introduced to somebody who thought we should write a book about whatever. And we got an idea that we both believed strongly that social media was going to change the way businesses and customers and employees related to each other.

And that was naked Conversations, though you covered that.

That was naked Conversations. And that began a certain pattern. One is that we come together with some joy and a good deal of difficulty. The back flap, for those of you who have the book show. Robert punching me with a virtual glove. I'm glad it was virtual. Our first editor resigned after 30 days, telling us that we didn't need an editor, we needed a marriage counselor. But what I had to come to realize is Robert is always ahead of me in matters of technology. As you've seen. I went over there and I got busy doing the work of laying out books to sell. And Robert went over there and began, in a very amiable way, holding court, which is what Robert does. He talks to cool people. He came back to me after six years, and that became Age of Contacts. Then only two years later, when I was saying, enough already with the Scoville guy, he came back again and said he saw something that was bigger than anything we've ever done before, something that was really. I think he used the word transformative.

What are you picking up there? Yeah, so I'm in the lucky spot. I get to.

Do you need some technical assistance, Robert?

There's two interviews, so I'm in the lucky spot where I get to go around the world and interview tech executives and innovators and hang out with all of you who are building the world. And two interviews stood out for me. One was with the CTO of Matteo. I visited their headquarters in Germany.

Apple bought them, didn't they?

Eventually they did buy them after the interview. And that's the key thing that we should talk about. But he showed me monsters on the sides of skyscrapers in 2011, and that got me keyed in on the fact that augmented reality was going to be really interesting. And if you listen to that interview, it's up on YouTube. He lays out what's coming and certainly what his dream of what he wants to make happen is going to come along. And then four years ago at ces, I visited a small company called Prom Prime Sense, who, the founder there, showed me one of their sensors. They make 3D sensors. In fact, they made the. They licensed their technology to Microsoft, which became the Kinect sensor. And the Kinect team then became the HoloLens team. So there's a tie back to Prime Sense on the Microsoft side too. And the guy who invented the sensor had it sitting up here about this high and on the. Aimed at a table and it could see how hard I was pressing on the table from this far away. And if you think about how little motion that is, it's a mind blowing sensor. And that was four years ago. And now I'm hearing that there's 600 employees working for 600 engineers in Israel working for him building the sensor for the next iPhone, which we should talk about. But it's. That didn't turn into a book. I think the book really coalesced around the time that Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus, because that told me that the money was coming, you know, big money, like billions of money, right? And that's when we really started talking about what does this really mean? And I was seeing all these weird things, you know, sensors and optics and AI coming along and visiting all sorts of weird companies all over the world, doing all three. And Shel and I just started talking at one point about that.

That's the point. He comes to me and he's excited. He's always excited. And he's over here and he's over there and he's talking about things and he's talking about polygons and point clouds and I don't know what the hell he's talking about. But I sit there and say, but then I keep pushing back and I keep saying, no, what about this, what about that? And so I start looking at it from the business side, from the user side. And he keeps saying it's going to be great. And I keep saying prove it. But he keeps proving it and he starts seeing things that nobody else sees. And then we realize with every book we got to write faster because everybody's starting to see it faster. As this room shows, I went to an earlier vrar meaning and you become fruitful and multiplied and very fast. And the whole world is working very fast. I'm really afraid that he's going to show up one of these days and say, Shell, I got an idea. I see something. Because right now, enough already, enough money.

Yeah, this, this is a big wave. It's a multi hundred billion dollar wave, maybe even trillion dollar wave once it's all done. And I Shell and I probably won't be around to see the final product in this way, right? When I got my Apple II when I was 13 years old, who knew that the personal computer would continue improving for 40 or more years, right? And I feel that way about this. This feels like the Apple ii. And heck, it's the second wave that we're getting, right? The VR is another wave that's really in Portland big. And so it just came out of that. You know, we bet on it before this thing came out and we were right. It's good to be right.

And then he keeps going out doing all these cool things and I get locked in a room in my home office and I'm only allowed to eat food that can be passed under the door like pizza and flatfish.

So let's go.

And he comes there and said, this is really great. You really should have been there. And I said, shut up. I got edits in chapter three free.

Let's talk about that timeline. When you mentioned the wave, you guys kind of break out, you know, over the next 10 years. I think 2025 is the point where you guys say this is when it'll kind of fully culminate and be here. But you also map out kind of a timeline from now till then. Three waves being VR. Mr. And then more ubiquitous headsets. Walk us through that.

I, I almost wish Shell and I argue about dates endlessly. I mean, and, and he's probably right that it is that time frame for the kid in Mumbai who today has achieved.

I would like it to be noted that Robert Scoble just said Shell Israel is probably right. Never before.

But I think we were both too conservative on the dates in one way because Apple is coming in June. June with a series of products that's going to be mind blowing. And we just started catching wind of that toward the end of this process. And if we had started it, you know, if we had started the book in October instead of three years and two or three years ago, we would have probably written a much more Apple centric book than we are today, right? So here's what I know about Apple.

And.

Oh, where did I go? Tim Cook and Steve Jobs had a conversation seven years ago about the future of television. In 2011, Apple patented a phone with a 3D sensor that does augmented reality. And that looks clear. And a few people said, said, you know, the next iPhone is clear. And these are people that are high up in the consumer electronics industry. They don't lie to me.

So the dots are starting to connect.

They connected big time. And I, even then I didn't get my hand around, head around what is actually coming. And what is actually coming is more new technology from Apple in one hour or two hours than I believe they've shipped in their history. More new patents, more new cool things. They're coming out with a new iPad, three new iPhones, a new TV, a new watch, a new 3D map, a new Siri and a new pair of glasses and a new headquarters all in June, right? All based on mixed reality and this idea of future television, right? In the future you're not going to have to have screens like this, physical screens, because we can all wear glasses and have our screen be virtualized and you can grab it with your hand and make it bigger and put it wherever you want.

Well, it's a good thing because the screen's wrong, you guys are sitting in the wrong places. So we're gonna have to grab it and then switch it around.

I was gonna wear my writer T shirt tonight and it would have matched very well. But would you like Robert and I to change? We always have positioning issues to deal with.

I think that's an important point and I don't want to sidetrack you, but you know, just to set some context. Everyone's been wondering where the heck is Apple and all this.

But it's not.

There's a precedent where they're not the first all the time, they are second and better most of the time.

They're really the first. And before.

It'S interesting moment at their fall hardware event, I remember starting to get some skeptical myself even as an Apple lover and knowing that history that you know, watching where all of these other things are being announced at OC3 and all these, you know, Right around the same time, Apple's big unveiling was the 3D Touch Bar, which was gone.

You know, just very quickly because it is a little off. One off. They are very rarely the first with anything. There are two lines that Steve Jobs used in at least three major press conferences, very known for. Oh, one more thing I almost forgot. But he also, in three major press conferences, said, we looked at everything on the market and everything else is just crap. Two of those times he was right. The third time was the iPad, which if you like tablets, iPad, I think is far away, the best. But Surface is doing pretty good these days.

Yeah, if it was just Apple, I wouldn't have keyed in on it so strongly. I know Microsoft really well because I worked there for three years and my friends who are now working for Satya told me, you know, Satya is betting the whole company on HoloLens, the $250 billion market cap company is betting completely on this product. And if you think this product is going to survive for a few more months, no, they're coming out with version two, which is going to have. It's going to be lighter than 4 ounces and do a lot more than this thing. And Apple's glasses, I predict, are going to be two to three ounces and you're going to see a slew of products from Magic Leap or Google. Google and Magic Leap. Magic leap inside.

Meta2 is coming out soon, isn't it?

Meta2 is shipping. Meta's founder and I spoke at Stanford last night. We, we know that they're working on these lightweight glasses as well. In fact, let me show you a picture. One thing I do is go to the weird suites at CES and that lets me see all sorts of cool stuff. So let me find these pictures.

Well, Robert taught me about the weird suites. Once it's on the floor, Robert's almost not interested. He's interested in the stuff in the back room, the cool stuff that isn't ready to be shown to the consumers for the Consumer Electronics Show. He's interested in the stuff that the geeks are doing now that the investors haven't yet seen. And he's got an incredible eye for disruptive technology, for technology that is going to change things. And he, I guess that's one of our shared passions, is for the part of technology that changes the status quo.

So in one of those suites, I saw these new glasses. Now, on the right is Snapchat's glasses, and on the left, in the same thickness and same weight, is glasses made By Loomis, a little company out of Israel and they make optics. And these glasses have a 720p display in the glasses and they're basically right. They're basically the same size as Snapchat glass. Now they're not cool looking like the snap glasses but you know, you give Johnny I some time.

Kevin got to hack those glasses and made the. They're arguable how cool the Snapchat.

You don't think you have the snap glasses on.

He's customized his. You've made the personal spectacle. Yeah. Robert and I were known to make personal spectacles too. Technology was not involved. You never wrote naked conversations.

And one thing I do is I don't just focus on one area. Right. I visit companies who are building Internet of things, smart cities, all interrelated driving cars. I was the first one to have a video of the Google self driving car on YouTube. So I care a lot about a broad range of technologies and if I find a nerdy person in the room, I'll talk with them.

Right.

And this is my secret sauce. And one day I was, well, I got the first ride in the first Tesla with Elon Musk. Elon Musk gave me the first ride. Not his best friend. Think about that one.

Didn't Jason Calcanis get model number two? I'm not sure.

I think Jason is his best friend. And Jason and I had dinner and called up Elon and that's how I got the ride. Jason was driving his Corvette and Elon was driving his car. But where I'm going with this is self driving technology is very similar to the technology that's driving these computer vision. Well, it's not self driving. Cars can be broken up into three, three pieces. Three major pieces, right. The sensor that sees the road ahead, that's what's on the front of this hololens, the brain, that's that figures out what's going on. And, and I'll explain why this world is about to change radically. And a new kind of map. Because this thing sees the room you're in, right. I have a game called Fragments on this thing and it, you, you go around your room and that your room and then it puts a murder in the room. And because it knows all the surfaces on the floor, there's little virtual rats that run around and actually come up to your feet and run around your feet. It's really freaky. It gets people to go.

You know, I travel over much of the world with Robert and somehow or other I cannot get through a Talk with a virtual rat. I cannot figure this out.

It's a pretty good example of how you're going to make entertainment in the real world. That's going to be virtualized.

Right.

And it's pretty cool.

But back to autonomous vehicles, I think another interesting point there is that we're talking about something where there's going to be a lot of money pouring into that R and D. And this technology will benefit as a byproduct. Just like we saw the commercial Internet grow out of things like darkload and you know, that, that progression, that transfer.

And I'm seeing engineers flip back and forth between the two. In fact, Eonite was another suite that Shell and I visited at CES this year. Ionite is, comes out of Stanford and does inside out, inside VR, inside out VR tracking. And they do it with the slam map. Right. This new kind of map because it, it knows where everything is in the room. And therefore if it knows where a few pixels are around or voxels are around the room, it can figure out where the glass is. And now you don't need the stupid boxes that the HTC Vive has. And when Steve, if Steve Jobs was still alive, he would look at products like the HTC Vive and go, that's really interesting. But that really sucks because it's too nerdy, it's too expensive, it's too hard to set up and it just ain't gonna go mainstream. A kid in movies buy is never going to buy an HTC Vive. Right now I have an HTC Vibe. I love it. It's amazing product from an experienced side, but it sucks as a product.

Right?

We know this.

Yeah. But Steve Jobs also would have looked at it and said it's a star.

But he would have waited until he could do it.

Right. That's what Apple does and that's what's coming. Yeah.

The CTO from Eonite came from the Stanford Self Driving Car team. Yeah. So the people who are building these visual systems to recognize the world are flipping back and forth because the software is very, very similar. Right. In a car I'm driving down the street. And the new, the new way that's going to happen in our new Tesla Model 3 and you'll see a lot about this is there's a new sensor on the front of that car that focuses and is not spinning and is solid state and cheap to make. And the new brain from Deep scale is going to use that new Focusable Lidar along with the new 3D map from Luminar technologies, which is being developed up the street here. And the new map is so detailed, it knows every pothole, in fact, every rock in the space street, right? Every sign, everything. And if you have a map of the street that is that detailed, then when I come along with my glasses or my car, it will know exactly where it is in space, even if there's a lot of stuff. And the new, the new engine looks for new things. So a kid running across the street is a new thing. It wasn't there yesterday. And the sensor, the artificial intelligence that's behind this stuff knows this and focuses the lidar on that kid so that the whole system can see the kid faster. And if you're driving 100 miles an hour in 20 milliseconds, you get 1 yard. You go 1 yard in 20 milliseconds at 100 miles an hour. That according to Mercedes. So if you can see a few more yards, you have more time for the computers to figure out what that kid is going to do and what the car should do in reaction. And the same thing is going to go on with these glasses, right? I'm going to wear these into a space like this in a year and it's going to be all mapped because we're all going to wear these Apple glasses. How many people have an iPhone? How many people think they're going to buy a new iPhone this year? It's going to be clear glass, it's going to have a prime sense sensor on it and it's going to see Pokemon over there, right? Running around Pokemon hunting with our clear piece of glass. And how many people are going to buy a 500 glass on top of that? Come on. You know you're all going to buy it because it's going to be mind blowing, right? You're going to wear a two ounce pair of of glasses and you're gonna see Pokemons over there and it's gonna be walking around like a human. In fact, I've seen virtualized humans. I mean, Shell and I have been visiting all sorts of weird.

I saw Pokemon in 1968, but that's a whole other story.

Was that at Woodstock in the Met?

No, that was in the Grand Canyon.

Joshua Tree somewhere.

Like that was actually Elwood's diamond.

I went to Woodstock.

I inhaled.

The larger point is an important one where it's not just whether it is.

Just about the Internet.

It's not just don't tell my grandkids.

The larger point is an important one. It's not just the objects. It's not just the consumer experience, but it's the networking of all these devices and then the shared knowledge of that and then feeding into a larger mesh. And what that brings is the current crazy part.

Yeah.

And then the fun part at south.

By Southwest in a cup in a six weeks Mercedes, which and audience, whoever owns here Maps is going to announce a new kind of 3D map for the car. And in June, we're going to see Apple announce a new kind of 3D map for the glasses. Very similar map. And now that we have every surface in this room mapped with millions of little boxes, volumetric pixels all over. When I walk into this room, it's going to know exactly where it is and it's going to know that there's a space here to play some VR. Right.

So I want to signal the audience to ask some questions. We're actually out of time with the schedule, but we have the venue for another hour.

We're having so much fun.

No, no, exactly.

We have.

What I'm saying is we have a venue for another hour. We're going to still do some, some drinking and book signing and all this.

But do you guys mind if we.

You go and take some audience questions another time?

We haven't even started talking about the book.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look into the book event.

I've been meaning to talk to you about that, but I couldn't get a word in Robert.

So audience questions, please raise your hand. While that's happening, I'll bring the mic to you. You guys also mentioned that since the book a lot or while you're working on the book, so much has happened. It would have been more Apple centric perhaps if it came out later. And that's the moving target and the pace of this change, which is crazy. But, but what I wanted to ask you is since the book came out, you guys are probably seeing some stuff. I know you just went to Sundance. Talk about some of the cool things you saw there and raise your hand and as Robert's answer, and I'll bring you the mic.

My favorite thing was Chris Milk's life with us, where you start out as an egg on the screen and you're playing with somebody else. I was playing with Anne Greenberg, who starred Grace Note and she's in an HTC vibe over here. And I'm here and you start out as an egg and soon you become a tadpole and you're swimming around and you're exploring this new world that Chris Milk's mind brings us. And then the speed it starts picking up the pace, as that experience goes, it's like a 10 minute pace. And at some point you're getting thrown off of a cliff and now you're eagle and you're flying. And what's really interesting is instantly you pick up that character and you start flying your hands, right, because you figure out you can fly. You can actually play around and fly, you know, left and right. That's really fun. And. And so on and so forth. That, that was pretty mind blowing. Dear Angelica from On the Oculus got a lot of raves. I have to watch it still because I haven't had time to watch. It makes you cry. It makes you very emotional. Everybody says the next. Everybody says those were the two best things that you're going to be able to play soon. But what I was there for is to mark this year versus next year, because I believe next year everybody at Sundance is going to have glasses on and we're going to be able to see mixed reality. And there were a couple of mixed reality experiences there. Meta had one that's commercial, and then there was Heroes, which was a pair of dancers. So this experience, they start out in VR and you experience half of it in VR and then you switch to the Hololens and you see the two dancers in the room around you, and it's pretty cool. It's not the most mind. It's not as mind blowing as Fragments, by the way, but Sundance has rules about who they decide to portray, and Fragments didn't fit the rules for this year. And I saw a few other things. There were some movies that were 40 minutes long. My, I think was. Was that one where you were a little robot in a kid's room talking to kids. And it was pretty cool. What I'm seeing here is Hollywood is just starting to wake up and we haven't yet seen the mind blowing big budget blockbuster because there's no headsets. Now, what did Apple just announce today? They sold in one quarter, 78 million of these iPhones. Sevens. Right. In one quarter. And that's a piece of product. I mean, come on, it. It really doesn't have that much more.

Tens of millions of units as opposed to total smartphone penetration is like what, 4 billion compared to HMV unit sales? I think the last year were about 30 million. So just the sense of scale between the two.

And I think the HMB sales are even close to 10 million. How many?

4 million.

4 million. So in one quarter, Apple sold 78 million iPhones. And that's where the product that really isn't that is a lackluster product. Let's be honest. It's a good product, but it doesn't offer that much new over last year's product.

The 10 year anniversary, it's not that much different than the iPhone one.

It's iterative. Go back and look at the iPhone one.

I'm not the techy side but. But no.

There'S a lot of.

Did you remember when the iPhone came?

But here we go. We're going to get a. We're going to get an iPhone that is mind blowing this year. So how many iPhones in a quarter is it going to sell this year? I'm predicting 150 million because it's going to double the numbers that the iPhone 7 has. So in one quarter and I think really one weekend is we're all going to wake up early and buy this thing because if you don't, you're not going to get it. Because they can't make enough of this. We know there's going to be supply shortages because they can't make that many of these things. The screen. Right. Sharp and Samsung are both saying we can only make about 100 million screens right now. It's a component issue. And by the way, everything in this new series and products is new. The processors are new, the GPUs are new, the wireless is new. The wireless power is new. You're not going to see no cords. Tim Cook did something very smart by taking out the headphone jack and he took a little heat this year for doing that. But this year when he comes out with this suite of products, he's not going to be a jerk.

There's all kinds of people who would like to ask questions.

Yeah, sorry.

And then in an episode of Black Mirror, there is an episode where you can record and recollect your memories through contact lenses.

Do you see virtual.

Virtual and augmented reality making its way to contact lenses at one point?

How many years are you.

Can I do one? Yeah, actually.

Okay.

Let's say within 10 years.

No.

Okay.

What's your estimate?

15. Okay.

That is so far beyond what we can say. I would say that, I would say the way in this that it's an obvious want to. But the issues of battery connection, all the things that need to be in to something that's sitting on your. The lens of a human eye. I. I'm not so sure that's going to happen so easily. And I'm not so sure that even people who wear contact lenses today would feel real comfortable with that.

One of the ways Shel and I come up with these books is to look at the trend lines of what's coming out of R D labs, right? In 1980, something that looks like a WI fi radio was this bit. Today it's a little bit piece of your fingernail, right? In fact, a very small piece of your fingernail at this point. And so if you saw that trend line, you can sort of draw inferences to where things will go in the future. I just don't see it happening in the next 10. It might happen at 10, right? It might 10 years from now you might say, hey, St, you're a little wrong. But I, I don't see it happening in the next 10. And I see glasses having a form factor that's going to be much more human centric for a long time. I see, I see. If I had a time machine, I could go 40 years from now. I still see people wearing glasses of some kind because the form factor makes a lot of sense. Because I have glasses on, right? My eyes are bad. I have contacts, I hate wearing them. So even if he got me in contact, I wouldn't really be attracted to that.

I just couldn't stand putting the thing in my eye. I was squeamish about that.

If I remember correctly.

The black mirror never ends well. It's always the dark side, which, in other words, which in our book, we have a whole chapter of negative things that will happen. As a developer in the next year, what would be the right platform to develop for? Would you imagine the iPhone? This clear iPhone, or would you want.

It to be the launcher display?

I think you're all wearing glasses in here and I think you're wearing Apple glasses. Now, I might be wrong. You might be wearing a HoloLens glass, you might be wearing a Facebook glass, you might be wearing a Tesla glass that comes out of nowhere or an Amazon glass that comes out nowhere. I know both of those companies are working on this one, but I think a year from now we, most of us are going to wear after glasses. I believe after you get the glasses, you're going to be less likely to buy a physical screen, a physical laptop and a physical table desktop. You're going to get all those virtualized, right? When I play with my HoloLens at home now, I have five virtual screens right in front of me on my desk. They're there right now. They're stuck.

See, I want to point out one of the places where Robert looks and where I look is different. Frankly, I don't care whether it's Apple or Google or Facebook or what was the name of that company from Rochester, New York. We signed the yet in your house Fuse. It's really cool. What I like about it, yeah, it's about the point of it is the biggest technology companies in the world are putting billions of dollars on the best minds and the greatest focus into this stuff. What's important is the best entrepreneurs in the world are putting their hearts, minds and investment dollars not just in Republic devices, but in the fine points of them, the little pieces of the components. Then we can talk about software where the global center for software is moving toward Los Angeles because the most creative people are down there. So whether Robert's right about Apple or not, he obviously has more than a little passion. I really don't care what he's writing about, what he's right about. What he's right about is this is going to happen and who does what at what price point and how many polygons and frankly my worldwide, I don't give a damn. What I care about is we have transformative technology that is going to change the way people live, work, get educated, learn, shop, advertise, explain. Yeah, we can go on and on. Would you shut up? I haven't had to say that to you all season. He doesn't.

By the way.

The big picture doesn't matter who does what to whom. The big picture is we have two phenomenal changes going on to global society. One of them is centered Washington D.C. and it's very unpleasant to most of us. And the other one is centered in Silicon Valley but is already spread throughout the world and it is very promising for our future.

I agree.

That's all. That's it. I got my word in and now I'll sit here.

The platform you should bet on is Unity. For right now, 80% of the VR games I'm seeing are Unity. The software know how it does is Unity. And I bet that anything Apple does is going to at minimum import Unity and then you might have to learn Swift and whatever Apple's development system is. And certainly even if you're building in Unity, you're going to have some Apple components because you're going to want to sell virtual goods in your app applications and those are going to go through Apple pays. You have to have that capability to your app. So you build your apps in a way that you can add stuff from various manufacturers and tear pieces of your app out and rewrite them for different sensors and different capabilities. Keep in mind, we know there's technology coming that we haven't yet seen Eye sensors is a good one. Shel and I interviewed ifluence, which just got bought by Google. And I interviewed Itribe, which just got bought by Facebook. So I know Facebook is building.

Let me just talk a little. Ifluence is in the book. We wrote a whole chapter about it. We published the book and they got bought by Google. We don't know if it's connected that way.

We don't get any of that money yet.

But he may pick up the check when we have dinner with him next week. The point of ifluence is one of you can actually do you all know about eye tracking. Probably you've heard of eye tracking showcase. Okay, eye tracking is cool, but what they do is eye interaction, which means I can look at an object and do something with it. I can open a page that's hovering in an headset. I can write a book by looking at keys on a typewriter. I can whack moles faster in my headset than I by moving my eyes than I can by nodding. And I don't start feeling a little crazy after a while. Everything you do in the next evolution of interface will involve voice or eyes. These are going to be free to do all kinds of wonderful things, maybe read a book, etc. I just. I had one like. This is my tech part. The other thing that is further out but is happening in games as an experiment, but in medical applications coming from a few companies. The most prominent is Mind Maze, which is a Swiss company that's received over $1.1 billion billion dollars of investment. And they're using virtual reality operated by brainwaves to help patients with schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, stroke, recovery, spinal damage, trauma, and several other just about any really awful thing you can think of except Alzheimer's, which is beyond the range of what they can address. The thing looks silly right now. It's about out to here. You have a fishing head over your head with 32 sensors on it that's reading the brain. But like Steve Jobs said, it's just a star. So 10 years forward. I don't know about the contact lenses, but we're going to do a lot of things with voice, with our eyes moving around and with our brain waves. If that doesn't freak you out that I'm the old timer in the room.

By the way, there was somebody here who had a headset with some of these brain sensors on it. Is that guy still here? Yeah, yeah, right here. So you know this why I love San Francisco Valley, Because People are building this kind of future right now. You can see putting little sensors all the way around the headset.

And it's shock proof, isn't it?

Electrical impulse.

I was looking there.

So we have two people questions here.

And then this gentleman.

Then we have to wrap up questions so we have time for the signings and stuff like that.

So go Ben Morrow from Blippa and also formerly from Symmetry Labs.

We should tell Symmetry Labs is the lights, right?

Yes.

You guys did the lights for my birthday party. That's right. And why do you think I'm wearing LEDs?

I'm amazing. I'm amazing. You remember your birthday party from last year? Yeah.

Around the time the Steve Jobs killed Flash, which is in its final phases. As a Flash developer, I was very sad. And the one thing I remember thinking about flying, finding solace in at the time was this idea that industries are best where there's a combination of the open. Open source kind of development. And at the time that looked like kind of webm coming out of Mozilla kind of open video codecs. And it was very valuable that Apple had been working in the close of things like MP4 to sort of really invest and make the codec as good as possible. We still use MP4 a lot to. So how do you see the map in AR evolving given that there's a large amount of hardware activity and a lot of big players between open and closed? And do you see the emergence maybe of standards and standards committees and how do you think they're going to sort of operate? Hopefully in a way that's faster than it was for the web.

Let's talk about what you need for a map. Right. First of all, you need a data center that you can hold exabytes of data. That's a big data set, right? That's not. Because if I'm mapping out the world at let's say 1 millimeter per voxel resolution, how many bits is that? Because one voxel also has a ton of metadata on. Right. It's just mind blowing when you start thinking about the math.

How many people here know what the word voxel means?

Yeah, that's. Voxel is a volumetric pixel. So a camera like that is seeing us as pixels. Right. The volumetric cameras are coming from. These 3D sensors see the world as volumetric pixels. So think about wearing a glass or holding a Tango sensor like we heard about from Lenovo, and you go like this, around, around somebody. Well, now I've captured her as a millions, millions of boxes. Volumetric pixel Little cubes that then we can manipulate, right? We can change the color of her dress, we can change her twist stick or a spongebob or anything, right? Or get rid of her. It's true. Because the glass, those people behind her have mapped all the pixels behind her. So I can tell, tell her to go away and all of a sudden she's removed from my visual perception system, right? So all sorts of crazy stuff's gonna happen because we're gonna capture things that in volume, volumetric photography is going to come on the scene this year and we're starting to get taste of that. When you're in, in VR, I don't know where it's going.

I have no idea. I'm not the tech. I usually don't until we argue for a while. But you asked one part that I can address in the history of everything. I don't know. One time when closed ended up beating open. And I don't think it will. There are large and successful proprietary companies. But in the end, I remember when Microsoft was rolling on the floor laughing when they said these guys do an open source, they're not even big enough to sue. Who's laughing?

That's what I was going, well, you.

Don'T have to go there.

When I bought my Tesla, I was sitting in line with an Apple employee and I was telling him about all the stuff I've seen and he said, oh, wait until we see our cdn. And I'm like, oh, okay, so you're building the same thing. Google. Google has more fiber around the world than anybody, right? And when I visit the hangouts team up in Seattle, they drive. We can get a packet from Seattle to India faster than the phone company can because we have more fiber around the world than the phone company does. Right? That's a pretty mind blowing fact. But Apple has to build the same thing. Google has to build the same thing. Facebook has to build the same thing. Right? And if you look at what Facebook is doing, they're putting stuff around the earth in space. That's a backhaul, an Internet backhaul for sending packets around in space. Then they're building drones that are going to fly at 80,000, 100 something thousand feet that are going to spray wireless down to us, down to base stations and then the base stations are going to talk, right? To your glasses or your pack in your pocket, right? That's a huge amount of investment. Does it matter that it's open or closed? You're going to buy the Apple one? Are you going to buy The Google one. Are you going to buy the Facebook, right. Or the Snap one or that? And every. Everybody who wants to be confident in this world is going to have to do that kind of investment to get packets around the world because that's what it's going to take. Right. The infrastructure is huge. So Apple is going to going to show the world its version and I don't know that it really wins in the marketplace long term. We're going to see other competitive approaches like my friend Tim Shulwitz and 20th Century Fox. He's the futuristic 20th Century Fox. Just saw him a week ago and I said, how, how long has it been since you saw Magic Leap again? Because he told me, in fact, he's in our book, he told me about Magic Leap a couple years ago.

He called it the first triple, sorry, trillion dollar company. So let me pop in a question. Has he lowered his estimates?

No. And he said everybody has magically wrong. And he said when magically comes in the market, it's going to be a really important thing to pay attention to. So I have no idea how this is going to play out long term. And we are going to see some things in this ecosystem be open, like the map. I would expect to be open. Right. Because there's no competitive advantage in keeping people, the developers from touching that map and doing things with the map and building new ideas about the map. Right. So maybe Apple says that is is open source. You can mess with it all you want, you can take it and build your own map based on our technology. There's not much competitive advantage there. The data that's on top of the map is where all the magic is.

Right.

So when you start thinking about some of the things you're going to do with these glasses, you're going to go to a football game and it's going to show the stats on top of the players as they run down the field. Are you going to go to nascar? We talked to nascar. They're already building this kind of system for NASCAR where you can see Danica Patrick on the track at Sears Point and see all the stats coming off her car. Because they know that when you're sitting in the pits, by the way, they know the temperature of the tires on her car and that tells the pit crew how hard she's pushing the car. So they can give her advice. You're pushing the tires too hard, you're gonna lose. You're gonna, you know, you're pushing too tires too hard. So back up a little bit. Yeah.

Hi, my name is Natalie Mate. I'm a VR filmmaker and ex NASA AI scientist. My question is not about tech, it's about ethics. So I don't know if you have explored that in your books because, sorry, I didn't read it.

When you say ethics, what are you thinking?

So, yeah, let me. So for example, you know, people that we asking with those automated driving car, who's going to make the decision if there is like an emergency situation, they hit the kid or if they hit the grandma, you know, and there's a lot of, you know, a lot of studies with airplanes and automated pilots that human errors are due to automation because it's really hard to take over in an emergency situation from Japan and, and then you know, the throning and how harassment that has been going on on.

Social media, Mike is trying to get it to wrap up.

So, so my question basically is, you know, do we trust those tech companies to define the ethics or who is going to do that? Like groups of users, associations like, you know, ar, VR, like who. Who is really appropriate to be?

Okay, Robert and I. Where'd you go? I want to look at you when I answer. Robert and I are not exactly joined to hip on this, but we are fairly close. I share many concerns that I believe you feel by your question. Robert will start telling you how great it is and none of that stuff matters. What we write books to tell business and technologists and people in general what is going to happen. The longest chapter in our book is the one that sounds like we were thinking about politics at the time. We weren't. But the question was what could possibly go wrong? And then we wrote 8,000 words and we wrote very quickly. The truth of the matter is whether there are ethical problems, social problems, cultural problems, employment problems. It's going to happen. The human animal has only one continuum since the cave. We have gone beyond wherever we were. Whoever was in power didn't notice somebody in the corner saying, I can do better, I can make it better, I can rule better, I can govern better, I can invade better. But this is what we do. We look up at the stars and say, I can get there. And we do. And whatever we say about the human animal, we just keep going beyond where we are. So to me the question is not ethical. Bad things are going to happen. Autonomous cars. Something's going to happen. People will die. 1/2.

3.

Oh 3. It's tripled since I last read the news. The point of it is that bad things always happen. Planes crash. You know, I don't have to list the horrible things that are happening in the world, they are going to continue. We do not have. I wrote a book without Robert that concluded that Twitter was going to bring us world peace. Well, I may have overstated the case. The book did very well, thank you very much. But what I did believe at that time, and I still hope is that the technology that is bringing us together is making governments less important and corporations less important. Because we are a network. We argue on it, we play on it, we flirt on it, we do what we want. But this technology is empowering humans in ways that we have only begun to understand. And I hope somebody. I actually talked to John Markoff who just left the New York Times. He's busy, but I wanted him to write a book about the issues of how so the people of the world are going to be able to speak to each other universally because of technology provider. It goes on and on and on. When you look at it from that point of view, I'll start. When you look at it from that point of view, the ethical issue is dwarfed by the benefits issue.

I'm a sexual abuse victim, so I care deeply about this. And I've been talking to a lot of people in the VR industry, particularly in the social space. And last night at Stanford I had the founder of the on space VR which is one the of of the social VR systems where you can dance with other people, you can play cards with other people and do things with other people. And if you try to.

We're going to be do a show bridge, right?

We'll get to that. Let's talk about ethics first. If I try to touch somebody in, in an inappropriate way in all space VR, first of all, my hand bends back on myself, my virtual hand and I disappear to everybody in the room instantly. Right? And that's how he's approaching that particular problem. So ethics is going to be attacked on a number of different angles on a self driving car. I talked to the guys that are building these cars at Mercedes and they say that question is a bad question because if the car has to decide between killing people, killing two or killing five, or killing a kid and killing an adult, or any of these kinds of questions that are, they're fun intellectually to think about, right? But he says if the car has to decide that it's already made 30 mistakes before it even got to that point where it has to make that kind of decision, it should not have even been in a place where it has to make that kind of decision.

But look at airplanes. It's cascading mistakes that, that lead to accidents. It's not one mistake.

It's true. And the mistakes that AI are going to make is going to be an interesting kind of mistake. Here's an example. I saw the founder of Turi, which is another company, Apple Bot, give a keynote speech in June at the Data Science conference. And he said we trained our system on huskies and wolves, huskies and wolves, and it was really pretty accurate. But once in a while it would throw a weird error and that's unacceptable in the AI world. It should never give an error. It should always identify the thing accurately. And so they uncompressed how the AI worked and they found that it trained on snow in the picture instead of the face of the dog or the wolf. And they took the snow out of the picture picture and all of a sudden it was 100% accurate. So it, it wasn't an ethics problem, it was a training problem. It was trained improperly and it keyed in on something that was fairly accurate. Because huskies are usually seen in snow and wolves are usually seen on grass. Right. If you go to Yellowstone, figure that out pretty fast. But that's the kind of error that you're going to see AI make. So if Tesla kills somebody, and I talked to people about, you know, the guy who went underneath the truck and died in the Tesla, the sensors couldn't delineate the white truck between the white sky. And it's possible that the AI saw it as a bridge and not as a truck because it's just something not expected at 80 miles an hour in for you. Right. They would trans now. It'll never make that mistake again. So this is why self driving cars and why mixed reality and AI glasses are so interesting. Because it will make mistakes, it will kill people, but it will kill them at an exponentially fewer rate. The first Death happened at 1.3 million miles. Humans kill people every 900,000 miles. The next death will be more miles.

Right.

And the next step after that will be double the miles of that. So in 10 years, cars will only kill somebody every 10 or 20 or 30 million miles. And it will be way better than you are. And that's why I'm excited by this technology, because it'll save my kids lives. Right. And plus it never gets drunk, never gets annoyed, never gets distracted by a phone sitting on the dashboard. Oh, I have a quick click. That's not. Well, it's sort of on the topic. I had dinner with the guy who runs Google's R and D, Peter Norvig. And he told me, or he asked me, why do you think Google made the self driving cars in Mountain view, these little bubble cars that can only go 25 miles an hour. I said, why? He said, well, when we get the employees, the full blown Lexus with the spinning lidar and all the sensors, we had them sign a contract. And the contract said, you will be fired if you take your attention off of the road for more than some milliseconds. And by the way, they took you into the car and said, there's a camera right here aimed at you and we are watching. And the sensors on the steering wheel and on the, on all the surfaces that you're going to touch or the brake and the gas pedal. And he said every single employee broke the rule within three days because it's so good at driving today that we get bored and we want to look at our phone and look at Facebook or Twitter. We're doing that anyways when it's not even self driving. Wait until you get a self driving car. It's going to be so amazing. And Mercedes just at CES also drove me around the mountains. And no, no hands on the car. That is pretty cool.

Gentleman who has the mic.

Last question please.

Quick question, quick answers.

There's one here.

Anthony.

Good question. Just could you talk about Google Glass for a second?

Yeah.

What do you want to know about it? Why does failed.

What was the question?

Why did Google Glass fail? I wore it for an entire year. It failed because it sucked. A wonderful time. It failed. It sucked in a whole number of reasons and you have to segment them out. The reasons in the buckets. First bucket is it sucked. The battery lasts 45 minutes. The camera on it was blurry because it was compressing in software, not in hardware. It broke a lot. The mirror flaked off. It cost $1,500 for nothing. This thing is so much cooler than Google Glass and what's coming is mind blowing compared to Google Glass. That's one bucket. Second bucket is where you where most people go. And they blame the camera. It has nothing to do with the camera. And let me explain why. I was at Coachella, big music festival. I'm in the middle of the Sahara 10. Sahara 10 has 20,000 people all dancing and most of them are holding an iPhone in there or an Android phone in their hands recording. So it has nothing to do with the camera. But yet two guys in front of me said I need to get away from the Google Glass guys now. I wasn't wearing Google Glass at this time and I'm like, I'm not wearing Google. Oh, there's two guys right here who are wearing Google glasses, okay? They're. And they're starting to move away from this. These two guys, I grab them and I go, why is that pissing me off? And they couldn't explain it. They said, I don't know, something makes me nervous around it. And I digging in. It's a social contract problem. And we are going to have this same problem. In fact, I took the glass off when I started here, right? Because it's. There's a. There's something between us, and we don't. We don't know. We don't like it. We don't like it when there's something between us. And why don't we like it? Because we evolved over millions of years to look in each other's eyes to know whether you're trustworthy or whether you're paying attention. And if you're not paying attention, you're looking at your phone. We can renegotiate our social kind with each other. Why are you looking at your Facebook right now? Isn't running a panel more important than looking at your watch? And with Google Glass, we couldn't renegotiate because I couldn't see what you were looking at. And it bothered me that you were looking at something while we were talking.

Right.

And this is going to be true of the glasses as well. This is why it's real important to be able to fold these things up. In fact, this doesn't do it, but Snap does it. Right? The glasses fold up so I can put them away. I think Scott Jordan's going to make a lot of money with clothes that have lots of pockets on them to put the glasses away when it's not appropriate. It's not going to be appropriate to wear the Snap all the time. Right. If you're in a date night, probably not appropriate. Your girlfriend or boyfriend or something is going to slap you, right?

And you get a virtual girlfriend.

That's actually a joke.

That's next month. We're going to talk about sex robots and virtualized human beings.

That's a great place to end. Tell us about that.

I tell you that at the bar when the Internet's high.

Speaking of which, we're going to wrap now. We don't have a lot of time left, but I encourage you to go see some of the Lenovo demos. They've been working, waiting patiently back there. I have a lot of cool things to show you. We also have book signings. Please buy the book if you haven't yet.

Buy our books.

Buy our books.

Buy their books. Have some more drinks.

We should announce some things. Shel and I are starting a consulting business on this space. We are seeing a lot of brands coming. We believe every brand is going to need a virtualized component to its brand. Sephora is a leader here in our club, so think about that. See you at South By. We have lots of stuff happening in south by, so thanks.

Join me in thanking these gentlemen.