Two nerds bullshitting about an augmented reality baseball cap.
Pablos: With AR, I think we got it wrong.
Everybody’s been trying to put dragons in the room or have a whale in the room or whatever. And they’re going for this super realistic, photorealistic, immersive experience. And I think the only thing that really matters is dashboards. And even if you get an Apple Vision Pro and it’s an extraordinary image quality, what you mainly find yourself using it for is dashboards.
You just put stuff around. It’s like here’s my messages, let me know if I got some, here’s a clock. Here’s a browser window, all this is 2D stuff, but it’s just giving me dashboard, dials and meters and alerts and info and stuff in my life.
Ash: You’re basically talking about the Terminator view, right?
Pablos: Yeah. You want terminator view.
Ash: You need terminated view.
Pablos: You want to be able to see. So all these goggles are overbuilt. I just want my glasses to put your name on your forehead.
Ash: Yeah.
Pablos: That’s all I really need.
Ash: Credit score.
Pablos: When I look at people and just put their name on their forehead, so I know who the hell they are. And then you would want dashboards for things like, tell me when to turn left, tell me where the nearest Starbucks is, stuff like that.
And my idea for this years ago was to create this shoe horn version of AR called the Killer Cap and the Killer Cap is literally baseball cap with 140 character display and all it would do initially is show you tweets from whatever sports ball team had their logo on the cap.
And so this is like a $99 product you could sell to Middle Americans. Nobody would think it was weird because it just looks like a normal baseball cap. And in the bill you have plenty of room. You could bury a battery in a cell data modem and then you could have a 140 character monochromatic display.
And then in version two, the Killer Cap has one button on the bill where that sticker usually is, for “Buy now”. So it’s like during the day you would see alerts or little tweets from the team. Like, “Hey, want to buy the, Seahawks edition of Coors Light?” Boom. Buy now.
And it would just show up on your doorstep. You know, want season tickets? Boom. Buy now.
Ash: Just on the hat.
Pablos: Yeah. It’s all in the hat.
Ash: You see what, you just see it underneath,
Pablos: Yeah, you just look up.
Ash: Just look wear it up, and underneath,
Pablos: Mm hmm. You can pretend to be listening to your wife and you can look up at the sports ball game score.
Ash: It’s actually pretty interesting, the funny thing is today you could just put a thin film like flex film little OLED.
Pablos: Yeah, so easy to build. It’s so easy to build this thing. You could make money selling them for 99 bucks. And people pay 99 bucks for a baseball cap now anyway. It’s crazy.
Ash: Yeah, I mean, could literally put it right in there. And by the way, you don’t have to do anything, it’s just Bluetooth the damn thing, right? It doesn’t need…
Pablos: I wanted to do it using the old SPOT watch network because that was like a networking system, a low bandwidth networking built into AM radio. It’s got nationwide coverage, no one uses it for anything before I buy it for a dollar and then use that to broadcast the tweets to the hats.
But now cell data modems are in everything, that’s cheap enough, you could just do it that way. Anyway, somebody should build the Killer Cap. And then the , other point I would make about it is like everybody’s trying to make glasses and it’s very difficult to integrate imagers into glasses and have it be low power enough and light enough and small enough and all that.
And it’s all very high tech, whereas the Killer Cap you could do with like probably if you spent a weekend in Shenzhen, you could design and build this thing.
Ash: By the way, you know what I’m only partially laughing about this, I’m starting to think to myself literally a heads up display.
Pablos: Yeah, it is.
Ash: It’s a budget HUD, it’s a hat mount display. So, if you misspell it well enough.
Pablos: Hat mounted display.
The spelling acronyms
Ash: It’s actually funny because what you could do is, you could have the display and you could honestly put a tiny camera in there and that’s it. Now that’s your recognition, and it’ll just have a little thing that says, Pablos.
Pablos: I think that’s where it’s going, it’s weird, cause when Google glass came out, it was universally panned as being privacy invading, nerdware, even though it was a shockingly well designed product and so they shitcanned it and then a few years later, Snapchat makes glasses with the most controversial, no screen at all, no display at all, but the most controversial part of Google Glass, which is just the camera.
And that was targeted at younger audience and it completely sold out like that thing ended up being a hit because they sold them in vending machines and it sold really well and no one ever complained about the privacy issue because it’s Snapchat audience, not the mainstream, San Francisco tech journalist audience.
There’s a lot to be learned from that kind of thing. And then now, of course, Meta is making their own glasses with Ray Ban. I haven’t been impressed by them yet, but it’s just a camera, no display. And so, if they get that going and get it to the point where you could have it do face recognition and, that’s basically solved. Just integrate it, put it in the hat.
Ash: Yeah, I’m with you. I’m all about how this could play out. I think the fun part here is we don’t have to go ultra high tech on the device, we just have to make sure that there’s augmented information and it goes back to context, as long as you know where you are, it knows where you are.
It goes back to the same theory. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. It’s the bandwidth between device and us is so low, we need stuff processed, organized, and just digested and give us some tiny bits to help with, right? I don’t need, ultra resolution to look at you so that like you said you could have a dinosaur on your head.
What I care about is who is this I’m speaking to again? I know I met him somewhere, I completely forgot his name. No, is it his birthday? Is there something I should know? To even make it happen, right. Is it like anything you can tell me that would help me? And now you don’t look like an idiot with the hat, or you could, like you said, the dashboard, you could just have it be like, all right, listen, I need the scores right now.
Pablos: Yeah. It’s basically an Apple watch built into a hat and I think it would be useful.
Ash: Well, well, I think what’s better is it’s not right. It’s less.
Your less is more theory. Yeah. It’s way less. I mean, and
Pablos: any patents
That’s true, Apple
Ash: any patents
Pablos: Except
Ash: there
Pablos: Except for maybe one in mind from a while ago.
I might have a patent or two on that, but if somebody wants to build it, I’m sure they can just license the patent.
New Senses for Humans – David Eagleman
Apr 05, 2024
Show notes
If you ever get the chance to hang out with David Eagleman, first of all do it. The first thing you’re going to notice is that he’s extremely nice, fun, outgoing and very friendly. He’s lit up in the brain and he’s prolific, he’s doing a zillion different things and he’s still somehow nice enough to hang out and listen and chat.
Davis is a neuroscientist teaching at Stanford. He’s got an amazing TED talk you have to watch. He’s an author of – I don’t know how many books – fiction and nonfiction. The newest one’s called “Incognito: the secret lives of the brain,” which you should read, if you want to learn about the brain.
He’s also written novels, like the award-winning titled “Sum: forty Tales from the Afterlives.” and even has a podcast where David is working his ass off, writing these deep lectures about humans, their brains and their physiology. It’s called “Inner Cosmos.” It’s a work of art. You need to listen to that. On top of that, he’s the founder of a company called Neosensory, which is doing sensory substitution.
David Eagleman by Dan Winter
We talk about that a bunch in this episode, an incredible ability that they’ve learned in research for human brains to rewire themselves. To take input from different senses and map them on to other ones.
Recorded in Ojai, California on Sunday, March 24th of 2024.
David Eagleman is an American neuroscientist, author, and science communicator. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO and co-founder of Neosensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. He also directs the non-profit Center for Science and Law, which seeks to align the legal system with modern neuroscience and is Chief Science Officer and co-founder of BrainCheck, a digital cognitive health platform used in medical practices and health systems. He is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a New York Times-bestselling author published in 32 languages. He is the writer and presenter of the international television series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the host of the podcast “Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman.” As of early 2024, Inner Cosmos was nominated for the best science podcast of the year at the iHeart Podcast Awards at SXSW.
Brain Music made with Neuroscience — John Vitale
Mar 21, 2024
Show notes
Music producer & sound engineer John Vitale is creating music to help people optimize brain states. After co- founding Focus@Will, where he designed music and soundscape channels for flow state he moved on to found Brain Music Labs Where he’s crafting new ways to use entrainment based music and media for reducing stress, anxiety, and cravings with partners like Total Brain and Felix. John is a great guy and I’m thrilled to be able to share this conversation about the importance and potential for audio as a technology frontier. Also, John created the intro you hear at the beginning of every Deep Future podcast and I’m super grateful to him for taking that on. Pablos:I’ve been playing with this 3D spatial audio lounge online. John: Which one? High Fidelity. John: I know Philip. I’m trying to think of the best use case for that and I was trying to get them out. In fact, Philip presented at Metal. Pablos: I didn’t go to that one. I heard him calling for them. I’ve been playing with High Fidelity a bunch. John: I’d love to get your take on, where do you see as a great use case for High Fidelity? Pablos: Where Philip is coming from is about trying to develop these tools to improve virtual reality experiences with a vision towards something like second life, but in VR, where you can just walk around and hang out with people. The audio substrate is a big deal. That’s a big part of it. I’m not telling you the things you know. The neurological cues around audio are a big deal. The way I think about it for all of human history, all of our conversations were zero-latency until the last century, face-to-face. One hundred percent spatially positioned. The sound was coming from where the speaker was sitting every time. That is not true on phones, on Zoom and on anything that’s mediated online. High Fidelity tries to use that to make you feel like the connection is more real. They’re busy trying to go further with this and develop it for VR. It’s going to be exciting to see where they get to. With the High Fidelity tool, as we know it now, we can wander around on a map and chat with people. It’s super compelling in ways. I’ve made friends in there, which I can’t say I’ve ever done on Zoom. It feels like hanging out. If you go to High Fidelity with headphones on and you close your eyes, and you’re there with a half dozen people, it’s like we’re at a dinner table. They’re all spatially positioned in the same spot. When they speak, you can hear them as if they were there. It’s a special experience I much prefer to Zoom. John: I like your dinner table view. You should have a dinner table there because they have different maps. What I liked is you could go there and go, “We’re going to all go see the DJ event.” You can go walk 100 feet from DJ like you’re at Burning Man and go, “That’s cool, but let’s go talk in the corner.” You and your friends go over there. That’s the magic of what’s going on. Pablos: That is one of the experiences that I love about it. In my view, there are a lot of places you could go with it and there’s a bunch of potentials. One important thing that came out of playing with it was understanding how much better audio can be online and how much we’ve given up because of the history of audio online maps to Telecom. They have a massive network and they’re trying to reduce bandwidth consumption because they’re trying to get more users on the same amount of spectrum. We don’t have those problems a lot of times. What we have is a problem where all the compression, bandpass filtering, and latency adds up to make you feel like you’re not fucking real when I’m talking to you on the phone. That’s not cool. My brain thinks you’re fake when I’m talking on Zoom. It’s eroding our relationships, not substantiating them. One of the metrics Philip Rosedale told me that they found was that the average Verizon call in America is 350 milliseconds of latency. Your brain can handle about 180 before you start to not feel real. We’re talking over each other and there’s a mismatch. Your brain is cycling on like, “Am I getting through?” I’m trying to have a conversation here and your brain is stuck going, “How do I connect with this person?” I’d be better off with tin cans and string. We’ve got fucking cell phone companies that have got us down into six kilobits for audio or something stupid. John: It takes a lot of nuance, which is important for us to have that connection and experience rather than data across like, “I can give you some information.” Pablos: “Tell me the information.” It’s like, “I can’t get a credit card number across.” On your expiration day, “How am I supposed to get across the fact that I fucking love you guys? Before you die, I want you to know I love you.” “What’s that again? Hold on. You’re breaking up.” It’s quite sad. High Fidelity is cool because it does give people a chance to hang out again online, especially in COVID. I’ve gotten to have some cool experiences there. John: I checked it out a few times. I got my little URL code with my little server. I got a bunch of people to show up and we’re all running around. I felt like, “It’s cool because now you can bombard any event with your friends and know that you can go disappear with them and have that conversation,” like you would end up having. I love your dinner table idea like that because we do Zoom dinners and everybody is cute into having to have the visual, but maybe just sitting around and having dinner with your friend so you can all chat in that audio spectrum is going to make you feel like you’re there. Pablos: The cool thing about High Fidelity to me is, of course, the audio substrate they’ve built. The wandering around the map thing, I’m a little less sold on. There are probably other user interfaces that we can hook up to the audio that would be more compelling. Even if it was just a dinner party. You drop in and it automatically places you in a seat around the table or in the audio space. You don’t even need anything on the screen. Just close your eyes. It’s freeing. John: You can be hanging out like, “I could have dinner, or I could be making dinner and be part of a dinner conversation. I don’t have to worry about how I look on Zoom and all that stuff.” Pablos: That’s what’s working. If you look at the Clubhouse, people are hanging out. It’s freeing to not have to worry about the video aspect of it because it’s not buying you anything. It’s making things worse. Something Philip was adamant about when I talked to him was that the video detracts from the experience and just being audio. I’ve used beta versions of High Fidelity and stuff that have a video in it, and I agree. Now I have the video back and it’s making it worse. I’d rather be on audio and have it be good. If you think about it with your headphones and in High Fidelity with your eyes closed, it’s roughly equivalent if we were hanging out at the dinner table with lights off. It’s damn close to that. That’s a real experience that we could have and have had. I don’t know how often you have dinner with lights off but I do all the time. John: There’s an easier connection point and people know. When you do conference calls versus Zoom calls, everybody will pop in for the conference call but in Zoom call, “I’ve got to make sure I’m there. I’m going to have to be present. Who’s going to be watching me?” There are 2 different things, 2 different flavors, and 2 different purposes. Pablos: Zoom and video conferencing, as we know it, sucks enough that a lot of times, making things worse. On the subconscious level, I can be here saying, “Cool. Awesome. Let’s do it,” but your brain is telling you, “This guy is a fucking cartoon character made up by the evil Disney corporation.” Your brain is not telling you the same thing as the person. I have a teleprompter. I have a DSLR aimed right behind your face, so when I’m talking to you on Zoom, I’m staring right in your eyes. I’m trying hard to connect. John: I have a couple of friends that have done that and it’s a big difference because if I see you coming through your teleprompter and DSLR lens, I am getting a much better 3D representation in everything, the right aperture, and depth of field. Pablos: I’ve got all that going. I look amazing on Zoom. If you don’t have it, your gaze is not into my eyes. John: It’s usually off-center because everyone is over here and you’re looking at the people but the camera is here. Pablos: Zoom won’t let you move ahead around. Ideally, you should be able to move your head under the camera. Zoom won’t let you do that. No tool lets you do that. John: You’ve got your prompter right here. I’ve got a couple of friends who have done the same thing. You’re looking right into that camera. Do you have it right above? Pablos: No, I have a lot of screens and shit, so I have a prompter here. When I use it, I’m looking right at it and then ignoring all the stuff. John: It makes a huge difference. Pablos: There are ways you could embed these cameras into displays. John: Those cameras that you clip on top, it talks about a whole in the market. A mini prompter that has those $160 cameras sit right on top of it, that’s a goldmine on Amazon. As soon as people see the difference of like, “This is how I come off as a projection when I’m not doing that.” It’s like, “I’m talking to you and I’m looking over here.” Pablos: Teams does it, but also FaceTime now has a feature, which will use deepfakes technology to shift your eyes. On a FaceTime call, it knows because Apple knows the geometry of the phone and everything. If you look in your iPhone settings under FaceTime, there’s a feature called eye contact. It’s established natural eye contact while on FaceTime. John: I never even saw it before. Pablos: People don’t even know it’s there. It’s on by default. FaceTime calls, and this is going back to those neurological cues, without even realizing it, they are better than Zoom. John: Apple is hip to connection. That’s why their photo programs and the videos they make for you are all about the human experience and connecting with your friends. They know those nuance differences that helped. Pablos: Let’s get on to some actual topics because that’s interesting stuff that we could talk about for seven hours. It would be super cool because I’m unlikely to have a conversation with anyone else who’s had the career you’ve had. How would you describe it? Is it audio engineering or producing music? I know music must be the unifying theme. John: As a producer and engineer, it started out with the love of music, and then everyone said, “You can’t do that. You’ve got to go to school and get a technical degree.” I went to school and got an Electrical Engineering, Computer Science degree. In it, I was like, “It’s technical. I want to go back to music.” I ended up in the film and music lab at school. I got a double major, then I got out and I opened a recording studio because MIDI and everything was happening. My trajectory is this recording engineer, then I realized it wasn’t an engineer. Engineers are in the weeds making the audio sound good, but a producer is teaming up with the engineer and composers. Other people may have something like, “I’m probably going to be better in the producer’s spot.” I learned the engineering part to get to producing because there’s an integration theme in this too. Pablos: Being an engineer, I always think of not necessarily music, but in anything, understanding the tools that help you to invent and create at the bounds of what’s possible. John: At that time, MIDI was bubbling. Is that in the ‘80s? John: Yes. I remember I went to this electronic music expo and hybrid arts in the first Digidesign product. It was called Sound Tools. I was looking at some waves on the screen and they needed somebody to figure out how to put a wave on the screen. Until then, we’re cutting 2-inch tape with razor blades. DATS came out and you couldn’t edit a DAT yet. This was the program edit a DAT with Sound Tools that now became Pro Tools in about 1.5 years. I was mind blown. I was like, “Good thing I went to tech school because I can understand what’s going on under the hood. Now I see where all these tools are going.” I want to make records more than ever because I can see that this is going to be an integration between humans and machines in the mid-‘80s, late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Pablos: I always thought if I had another concurrent life to live, music would be the coolest thing to work on for the reasons you’re talking about, not because I have anything to bring to music, but because this is one case where we got it right with computers early on. Partly because of MIDI. Everything can talk to everything. All these devices can talk to each other. Even though the analog gear got that corner in front of Jack or an XLR, you could plug anything into anything. I had a weird experience that I’ll never forget. It was 1983 with the first CDs. CDs, in those days, were 520 MHz. It blew our minds because my floppy disk could hold 128,000. The first 3 to 25-inch floppy disk could hold about 400,000. Having 500 MHz blew our minds on a disk. We had Walkmans with tapes in them, but the idea that the music could be digital that lived on a CD and it could hold so much. There was no compression. The computers were too slow, hot and expensive, so you couldn’t have any compression. Uncompressed audio on a CD and you probably remember this, the first ones were glass. That was a selling point for CDs. It was like, “The last forever.” I quickly figured it out. I can make it out of plastic and you have to buy new ones. At that time, I remember seeing like, “The music can be encoded digitally. A whole album can fit on a CD uncompressed.” We didn’t even have a notion of compression at that time because compression was too expensive. Computer chips couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t thinking of compression at all, but I was thinking, “Now I’ve got a metric. I know that a track uncompressed on a Duran Duran album is 50 MHz. I had a sense of a computer chip that could hold 128,000, about 0.5 cubic inches.” I started adding them up. I’m like, “Eventually, I’ll be able to put the track on a chip.” I added up that one album. At that time, it was going to take about a cubic foot of chips. We didn’t have the transistor density yet, so I’m like, “With a cubic foot of chips, I can hold one album.” Moore’s law had been described, but it certainly hadn’t penetrated my mind yet. I had some visceral sense of it by now. I knew that the 128,000 chip, last year was only 16,000, the same size. I have one friend in the entire town who knew enough about computers to appreciate the idea, but I said, “Someday, we’ll be able to have a song on a chip and you’ll be able to plug all the songs together that you want. That’ll be your Walkman with no moving parts.” I didn’t envision this thing, but it didn’t have compression in my head, so it could have been better. We would go even further now, of course. John: You can have a whole bandolier. Pablos: That’s exactly what I was imagining. John: All your favorite songs, you can queue it up, plug it in, and play it. Pablos: You just get the song that you want. You plug them in back to back because chips are like that anyway. It’s like Lego bricks. You’d have this solid-state music thing. It blew his mind and nobody else could have hung in there long enough to even comprehend. I was twelve years old envisioning the future of music and portable music. All I was trying to say is you’ve got to live out like one of my fantasy careers in life, which is you get to create with all these tools and plug all this stuff together. It seems like you hit it at the right time. The synthesizer had become a thing. The sampler had become possible in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s. Music was changing from a thing that was done with instruments to a thing that was done with studios. How did you see that play out? Did you play instruments before that? Yeah.…
Hacking the Brain – Moran Cerf
Mar 14, 2024
Show notes
A true polymath, Moran started out in the Israeli military, in one of their elite intelligence units. Then ended up working as a hacker in computer security. And to this day is still in demand for that, but he had a weird experience when Francis Crick told him to junk hacking and get into working on neuroscience, and he did.
And so Moran’s had this amazing career some of the research that underpins things like Neuralink. These days, he’s a professor in the business school at Columbia, where we recorded this conversation. I can’t tell you how delightful Moran is. Super smart. Very insightful. Incredibly curious. He is difficult to pin down whenever I’m with him.
He is somehow so good at asking questions and picking my brain that I hardly ever get to pick his brain. So the podcast was a perfect excuse to put him on the spot and I’m really thrilled that we get to share this with you guys. You’ll notice that Moran still has a bit of an Israeli accent and he talks faster than anybody I’ve ever met. So most of you guys are used to putting podcasts on 2X. This one you might want to put on 0.5X.
Internet Random Mail Reader ＆ Nipple Detection – ØF
Mar 11, 2024
Show notes
Two nerds bullshitting about stunts on the internet.
Another idea I had a long time ago. That, unfortunately never deployed widely. I prototyped in the late nineties, it was called the Internet Random Mail Reader. For people who don’t know the way networks work is like your computer is just broadcasting all the packets out on the network and all the other computers on the network just ignore the ones that aren’t addressed to them.
This is how networks worked. And so you can just sit and listen to everybody else’s packets. And this is, network, packet sniffing. In the early days of the internet, there was no encryption at all. If you were on the same network as somebody, you could just collect everything.
And if you were the ISP, you could really collect everything. You could just see everything people were doing, every webpage they loaded, every email they sent. Instant messenger wasn’t invented yet, but you could see those too. We would write these scripts to just sit there.
The most famous ones now, they just sit there and sniff for passwords. They know how to parse everything going on in the network and just throw out stuff that’s not passwords. So we have these tools that just collect passwords off the network. That’s how hackers in the nineties and early two thousands would just collect passwords and eventually encryption caught on and made it a little harder and a little harder over time to get passwords as easily.
Most encryption was poorly implemented, so then we’d have to crack the crypto to do it. But anyway, internet random mail reader was just like this screensaver. The idea was just a screensaver where you sit there and random emails that other people sent to other people and you just, and it would just strip off the headers…
Autopsy of a Failed 3D Printer Company – Riley Knox
Mar 07, 2024
Show notes
Riley Knox is an entrepreneur that I met when I was hanging out in Austin, Texas, and I was just truly impressed with him, his energy, his outlook, his technical approach to building these companies that are hard. He had this company called Accelerate3D that he built to advance 3D printing for manufacturing, make it fast enough and cheap enough that it will be compelling, which has been one of the big challenges in 3D printing. Accelerate3D had some real trouble, unfortunately getting the support it needed to go all the way.
Riley was kind enough to sit down, open up and let me interrogate him about his company’s demise. And so this is kind of a post-mortem on Accelerate3D. It is going to be very useful to people who are interested in 3D printing, trying to advance 3D printing. You can learn from some of his experience what not to do. I think this is always very precious when entrepreneurs are willing to share their story. Especially the hard story. It’s not a tear jerker, but you’ll learn something from it and Riley is off doing the next thing, which we can’t tell you about yet, but I’m really excited about that too.
Riley also has been helping out with the Founder Institute program in Austin, Texas. He talks a little bit about that and Techstars and about how both of those helped him out as an entrepreneur as well. Hang out with us, learn something and don’t make the same mistakes twice.
Recorded in Austin, Texas on February 12, 2024 with Pablos and Riley Knox
Riley describes himself as a “mechanical engineer by education, mad scientist inventor by practice., entrepreneur by heart,” building the future of on-demand production though local high speed 3D printing.
Knox was the CEO and Co-Founder of Accelerate3D. He´s currently the CEO of “Stealth mode aerospace startup”, bringing a much needed third option to transporting freight across oceans, offering a middle option with short travel times but at a fraction of the cost and CO2 emissions of air freight.
Also, he is a Director at Founder Institute in Austin. He attended Texas Tech University.
Lashbot5000 ＆ Miyagibot – ØF
Mar 04, 2024
Show notes
Two nerds bullshitting about possible robots.
The Lashbot5000 is a concept for adapting a surgical robot to install lash extensions. Apparently this has now been accomplished by LUUM in Oakland. You can see their robot in action here:
Then we eventually get around to describing the totally genius but as of yet unbuilt Miyagibot which can find flies and grab them with chopsticks!
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