If that student is into skateboarding, teach him Pi. ?Here’s how a skate ramp works or electric guitar.? Whatever they’re into, you’re going to adapt Pi to be relevant to that. You’re going to make a YouTube video or write an essay or whatever it is that’s relevant to you or whatever medium you can express in. Do you want to write a song about Pi? Go for it. The job is to teach that discreet atomic lesson like in Khan Academy, it’s a five-minute thing. It’s one concept. You’re going to teach that in a way that’s interesting to that kid. His job is to teach it to somebody else. Now that he’s learned Pi, he might have to take what he learned in the context of electric guitar, and then go teach it to somebody else in the context of skateboarding.With anesthetics, you have more typical inhaling gas. When you do surgery, they’ll often intubate somebody. They’ll have an anesthesiologist that will control the levels of the gas and sometimes there?ll be a paralytic agent where their body is paralyzed. They’re not experiencing pain and they’re not conscious.What other ridiculous stuff? Maybe another way of thinking about it is, what old wives’ tales or urban myths do people have internalized about sleep that are counterproductive or not working?In some sense, it’s a way to circumvent the ethical questions about the work because we look at them and say, ?These people got less than the average human. There doesn’t seem to be any ethical concern about trying to close that gap for them.? That’s also a little bit presumptuous to say. I don’t know. Maybe somebody knows but if you have Down syndrome, who’s to say? They seem pretty happy a lot of the time. Maybe they don’t want to be like us. I don’t know. I’m just making that up.
It’s freaky, some people cannot operate outside of a script. You know what I mean? They have the canned questions and by the way, no matter what you ask them, they’ll only give you canned answer.
I grew to hate it because of the exact problem you’re talking about. You don’t know where you’re looking. It’s presented to you like it’s interactive but all you get is to control the camera angle. The rest of it, you’re this passive observer. The better solution is much more interactive. Let’s go back to the game engine. Now, instead of being the passive observer of this world, I am in the world. I am Harry Potter. Here’s the frame. Here’s the land that I can explore.? That’s the part they missed. If 1,000 years of entertainment was passive. You read a book, watch a movie, looking in on the world, the future for me is all interactive. In an industry as a game developer, what technology do you wish you had the most? If there was something that doesn’t exist that you wish would exist that could make your job better, make games better or your ability to make them better? If you had a magical wishlist, what’s the first thing on it or make things more awesome? The other interesting application besides therapeutic use is drug delivery systems. We’re able to take these nanoparticles and there are different techniques that you can load them with a pharmaceutical drug. Since they have this targeting effect in vivo, you can use the exosomes to target a specific disease state. For example, you want to get a drug across the blood-brain barrier that normally cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. It can cross within the exosomes and now you can deliver a certain substance to the brain that you could not previously.
It did but what it ended up doing at the scales we wanted to achieve was creating a lot of ongoing or zombie connections. It wasn’t even the routing that was complicated. It was keeping all the devices leashed together. The big problem for multi-party or multi-security domain mesh networks is that we give them to the police and the firemen. We want to keep the comms separate. The big problem is to track a firefighter who has moved through and past the end of the police area. We have to hop that firefighter?s connections through those policemen and back to where the other firefighters are. That is such a core conceptual model that your workgroup stays together as long as you exist and you’re connected to the mesh. You have this constant application layer concept of group communication or a group connection.
That’s the basic idea. There’s also a lot that’s advanced in weather prediction. There’s a lot that’s advanced in electric motors for propulsion. There’s a lot that’s advanced in autonomous flying and driving. And so we have lidars and we have things that can figure out how to make these things dramatically safer. I buy all that. Here’s what bothers me.
Your router, your fiber modem or terminal. They wanted to provide the carriers the capacity to deliver that gigabit fiber service all the way through even an extender to the far edge of the home. They acquired our company, Unium was the rename of CoCo. Unium like E Pluribus Unum. Unium, the element of connection. That?s where we wanted to take the brand eventually. We rebranded it and turned it around. Mike Chen from Linksys that we had met before had gone over to head up the digital home business unit there. He knew about us and came. He found our people and talked through them. Over about a six-month period, we worked our way to a partnership and that’s been going for a few years now.Cities have been completely overbooked on the streets, but demand keeps piling on, so what are we going to do? Many cities have been focusing on mass transit. For the past 100 years, we’ve seen subway systems pure around the world. They’re expensive, but they’re very effective. Many cities do not have the ability to put a subway system yeah together. Those who have them, can’t expand them as effectively. We’re seeing examples all throughout the world, but almost every developed city very slow expands the subways. Not only this, when you expand it, the city develops around the subway system in a way that it immediately creates new demand for transportation further in the peripheral. The subway system reaches a certain neighborhood then that neighborhood will be more integrated with the city.
You’re not going to like this one either. Years ago, I read this firsthand account by these girls who were in college and decided to try this alternative sleep schedule.We continuously monitor them. First of all, we tried to detect events. We call them events. We have five hierarchies of things that could happen. If you start from info, then we say, ?Where is it happening? Is it important? Could it become a safety list? Should we keep an eye on it? There then was a decision-making tree that can upgrade until code red. These are rare cases where we stop arrived. In between, the least and the most urgent is when most of the stuff is going on, where the assistant rebalances itself, thermo management or the system is able to attenuate, energy where we continuously monitor, for example, the integrity of commands and make sure we’re not asking for something reasonable. We have maps on the vehicle.
I’m not somebody who had any of those things that I needed acceptance of. I learned to be accepting of those things or at least slow to judge. I appreciate that. I remember that having a positive influence on me. I’m not trying to defend it. I certainly know, especially for women, this was a hostile environment in a lot of cases. This is not an accepting environment that was comfortable for women. I have a lot of female friends who were hackers that would come and they had put up with a lot to be there. They were brave. Some of them had to compromise themselves in ways to be there.
Triple Town was in Kindle. It wasn’t free-to-play then. It was free-to-play first on Facebook, back when Facebook games were a big thing. We moved into mobile and it did well there. That was because we had embraced free-to-play in a way that the vast majority of independent developers had not. There are opportunities.Set aside time and send them an email, so they answer you the next day or something and be clear, ?Here’s what I’m trying to figure out. Here’s the program as it sits now. Here’s the output. I’m supposed to make it look like this. What am I doing wrong? What’s the problem here?? There’s something about knowing that there’s someone who’s going to help you when you get stuck. That makes it a lot easier in my experience for younger people to accept frustration. Also, get yourself somebody somewhere. You?ve got to find some.
For me personally, I’m so enriched by the fact that I get to travel a lot and I get to go all over the world. I go all kinds of places and almost none of them are like, ?I wouldn’t want to live there. I wouldn’t want to live like that. I don’t know why these people are like this,? but you learn to appreciate it. It’s okay. That’s their thing. They’re doing fine. I don’t know it that way, but it can be that way and it’s fine. I feel like it gives me an appreciation for different cultures that I wouldn’t be able to get. You can’t get that online.
It?s because it?s our time to turn their own knobs and that’s how it should be. We’ve architected all that wrong. I believe that’s where we’ll end up in the future because none of these things are permanent, but that’s how it should be. In that way, if you want dynasty turning your knobs, you can do it. That’s democratic. That’s freedom and that’s the internet that we imagined. Right now, we have this problem where opportunists who want to build empires build huge walled gardens, start and want control. That’s true for governments and Facebook. I have an idea for how to get there, but it’s technical minutia. That’s where we want to end up. You can do it right now in a complicated way because the internet the hacker’s built has this thing called RSS.?Just take me out and put my head off the floor and kill me. I don’t ever want to do something where frustration goes away.? That’s what I was getting at earlier. The frustration is the water. Hackers are fish. If you’re out of the water, you die. You have to find your way back to the hard stuff. If you go into management, you need to learn how to be frustrated with people and be nice to them. You need to learn how to be frustrated with people and get them to perform. It’s interesting because if you think about what’s attractive to computer hackers, hacking is like this bottomless pit of puzzles. It’s that bottomless pit of intrigue where everything about the computer, it’s like, ?That’s funny. It wasn’t supposed to do that. What happened?? You dig. That’s what debugging code is like. It’s puzzles. Security problems, in particular, like puzzles, it?s like, ?You?re not supposed to be able to do that but I got it to do something it’s not supposed to do.? That’s mentally stimulating and interesting and a lot of it?s done in isolation. It?s done alone. That conversation isn’t happening with another person in the room. What’s interesting about those challenge parties is it bridged the gap to doing the thing that they like to do but doing it with other people. We’ve done testing a bunch of what are called truth sets, like golden datasets because one of the big challenges of knowing whether or not your stuff is good or not is how do you know what’s in there? There’s this one sample that has been sequenced a bazillion times with every single different sequencing technology out there. It’s run by this particular consortium out of NIST called the Genome in a Bottle Consortium. It’s very cutely named. They’ve done it with regular short-read sequencing, which is what we all described but they also have long read sequencing tech, which is much longer chunks like 10,000, 20,000 base for long chunks but it’s expensive, so nobody uses that at scale. Usually, it’s used for plant genomics, things like that.The other thing is if you inject me with stem cells in my cheek and it crawls up to my eye and creates a bone and that?s not what I intended, how are you supposed to be telling these stem cells what they’re supposed to transmogrify into? I want to dive into the problem with genetics. What happened to the woman who had the idea that you heard pitch it? Did you end up working on it with her? To me, that’s input and I want to know so that I can match them up. There’s probably a real sharp limit on how many things I’m going to affect but that’s part of why I like sharing these conversations on the podcasts because then other people can learn those things, too. I’m learning them but maybe somebody who’s going to be useful at advancing exosomes will listen to this and get excited about it. Probably, I won’t be that one but somebody else could be. A lot of people don’t get the chance to come and hang out with you and pick your brain.I love that because my scooter’s learning from all the other scooters. I think the public discourse around these devices is missing this key attribute with robots. These devices, they all learn from each other. When one of them gets thrown in the river and figures out and you figure out what to do about it, they all learn what to do next time. When a Tesla, most somebody down, walking in a dark alley where they’re not supposed to be crossing the street, all the other Tesla’s learn never to do that again. That’s a terrible situation, but that’s not true for human drivers when a human driver most somebody down, then no other human learns from that. You seem more bullish on human intelligence and decision-making than I am.
It’s an interesting compound. When you look at modafinil, which is also called Provigil, this was a medication it’s called. It was an orphan drug when it was first brought over. The idea was to bring it over to treat people with narcolepsy. I believe it’s an orexin agonist. I’m pretty sure what it does is it goes for these particular receptor sites that are your sleep center and it turns those off. We did this for narcoleptics because initially, we thought the narcolepsy was where the brain was switching on to sleep in the middle of the day. People were having nap attacks and sleep fits and all these different things. We’re like, ?Let’s stimulate the hell out of them and see what happens.? Later on, modafinil comes on board and says, ?We don’t have to stimulate the whole body. We can focus more on the brain and the sleep centers. Let’s go there first.? That’s what Provigil does. We call it a non-stimulating stimulant.In my mind, that’s the difference between trying to be smart and architect for a hypothetical future versus having your feet on the ground and testing and steering your way into what works.Amazon back then was a disaster to work with. They were awful in so many ways. I can’t say it was a good experience, but we made a game called Triple Town for that platform. It cost us $20,000, $30,000 to make. It made over $200,000. It was like an opportunity to learn that this game was a pretty good game. It had a perfect five-star rating for the longest time. We made a mobile version of it years later that reached 13 million, 14 million people or something. I can’t remember how many.On the vacation front, it’s good for me. It’s very important. Long periods of time not creating something, not building something, not having a team, team is important for me. If I didn’t have a great team. I don’t know if I would put up with all of the crap that I?ve dealt with. I totally have fantasies about like, ?Someday when I have achieved my mission, I?ll sell and then I?ll go and become a yoga teacher in Bali.? There?s nothing wrong with Bali, but I would get stir-crazy quickly. I don’t know what it is that I’m here to do. This is more life philosophy stuff but each one of us are here to contribute something, whatever that is. One of the things that I’m here to contribute is to create leadership and lead and inspire others to create great change in the world. That’s what I think I’m here to do.
There’s a variety of different cells that do different things. All of them started out as stem cells which were basically blank cells. The thing got written into being whatever they’re going to become. You have some of those in an embryo. Over time, as your body is growing, these cells get programmed to be different things. Muscle tissue or brain cells, and then what happens is gamma rays come from space, bombard them, and you get these cell mutations. You end up with all kinds of variations and mutations, and then everybody ends up eventually getting cancer and dying. Is that pretty much the circle of life?
That means that everything between you and your computer is perfectible because you can change, grow, and learn and the computer can’t. It can’t participate in this. It can’t let you down and it can’t lift you up. It is just there. It is going to work and do the same thing every time. You have to first decide that you’re not going to let other people stop you from doing it and then you have to decide you’re not going to let yourself stop you from doing it.
I have an idea. I got my 150 base pair but if I have it overlap by 50 on each side and it’s only 50 in the middle, it’d be really good, but now I?ve reduced the efficiency of my shotgun approach by two-thirds but then I should get the order of stuff for free at the end. Why can’t we do that?It’s not a satisfying answer, but on average, you came out at the same time as 999 other games. You got lost in the noise. You could say you’re getting lost in the noise was your fault. That was your mistake. There are a lot of people who underestimate how difficult it is to rise above the noise. For example, a lot of people will think, ?If I make something beautiful and exciting enough, I’ll be able to send a video of it with an announcement to the top gaming sites like IGN and whatever. They’ll write an article about it. They’re getting those emails with those awesome looking videos.
When you’re talking about people who are spending $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 or $100 million or $200 million developing a game, they will oftentimes get the money from a publisher because it’s such a staggering amount of money. For us, if we’re making a game that’s going to cost $500,000, $1 million, $2 million, we are often capable of self-funding that. Then the question is, if you don’t need the publisher?s development funding, what else do you need from them? If you’re trying to go retail, all of that’s increasingly not needed. If you need help with marketing, that’s oftentimes one of the biggest things. A lot of independent developers have no capacity to do marketing themselves.
I was going to say one extra thing about the ideas I have about how to become a hacker. One of them is finding someone on the internet, in a college, in your church or wherever you go that’s trustworthy. Kids, talk to your parents first.
It’s true. There’s an opportunity here to see these technologies as being able to help us do a better job. You’re proving it in a sense because a scooter is like another place where a computer hadn’t gone, now it’s gone there and we can use it to make it a lot better. By extension, I’m sure you got the fundamentals of what you guys are building could be used for any electric vehicle, if not other electric stuff.
I value that. I need that. I want to be able to take an idea, shoot a bunch of holes in it and see if there’s something left standing at the end of the day. That has influenced my process as an inventor. That’s what we do. I don’t find that in other communities the same way. People are worried about social hierarchy. They’re worried about their status. They’re worried about offending others. They’re worried about all these things and it keeps them from having these honest conversations.Do you want the truth of it? I am working on it, cannabis. I think cannabis is where the revolution is going to start. Historically, unfortunately, something like insomnia has been what we call door handle diagnosis. When I am in the room with the patient and I am about to leave, I will have my hand on the door and they will say, ?By the way, doc, I am not sleeping well.? Here is what the doctors generally do. They reach in their pocket, they pull out the prescription pad, write the prescription for Ambien and say, ?Try this for 30 days and you should be fine.? Nothing can prove that true. When the person got hooked on this drug, they have to ask for this gamekeeper. If you are a drug addict for trying to go to sleep, it is not like I am saying, ?I?m smacking heroin here.? Ambien doesn?t even have a street value but we have to beg doctors to give us something to help us have a natural process. It?s like there is something wrong with that.
I’ve seen for the Joe Rogan podcast people who do that to his show. They’re like, ?Joe Rogan wants to eradicate Jews.? They clipped together two words snippets to make it sound like that’s what he said, but it’s such a popular show that people probably count it as clickbait.
It’s hurting a lot of women. It really is. And I will tell you that women, if they’re given access to the right choices, they will make them. They will. And that whole point and that women really are the center of these family units. Making, doing everything. And bringing in income as well, oftentimes.And so that’s, what’s so critical is that, so we’re really trying to really be the company. So our blind to science with a soul, and that’s not bullshit science where the soul, meaning that we really care It’s such a meaningful way that women recognize that we’re the kind of company that knows not only are they worth it, they deserve to be empowered with it on demand. So back your choice, I want to say this is that when you, just said, I loved about your statement is that we’re really just now coming into the age of real consent. So the idea that women should have pleasurable stuff. right? Oh my goodness. What a concept? My gosh.If you’re experiencing greater high levels of pain but then I expose you to high levels of visuals and I expose you to sound, there might be a physical component. Some people are adding in a sub-pack which is like a subwoofer vibrating vest. There are all different things. The more sensory stimuli that you’re putting in, especially if they’re watching something with some emotional component, your brain cannot process the pain, the visual, and the auditory.
Those theater productions can only be so big. They’re never going to be in the Staple Center. It’s hard to get that level of immersion at scale, except if you have conversational AI and all of the tech and words that you get to experience every day. You get incredible personalization for people so that their entertainment experience is made for them. There?s another way when you were talking about the cameras being tons of sensors so that it could be translated into lots of languages depending on who they were and whether it was Ferraris and Lamborghinis. From the audience perspective, imagine those characters, all of that stuff is responding to me, who I am now, what I’m interested in, the questions that I ask, and the path of the narrative that I have taken off.
It’s very much in the stages of infancy. It’s very early days. I like where it’s going and that the initial use cases are going to be for people with quadriplegia or people who have locked-in syndrome that cannot communicate outside, they have no method of communication whatsoever with the outside world. With BCI, they’re going to be able to have some life skills where they can communicate on a computer. They might be able to drive their wheelchairs around their house even though they’re completely paralyzed. They can have some basic living functions, which are really special.If we give a monkey some aspects of human consciousness, are they suffering? We don’t really know, but what if we’re able to grow this organelle, place it into a computer system. If we can use the computational power of a brain versus a computer, obviously, it’s two very different styles. If you look at the way that memory in the brain works, the millions of various neural connections between so many disparate areas of the brain and different memories and recall the way that we process things. When you’re heading in the direction of artificial general intelligence, I don’t think they’re ever going to replicate that purely in silico. The hybridization of human neural tissue like tissue on a chip or brain-computer interface with an actual neural brain, that?s the area I?m interested in.
There?s some lining and the cans. You’re seeing a lot of times, the ?BPA-free lining,” but it’s still the way that they’re manufactured. There’s still the joint where it’s sealed as a circular cylindrical piece and there are some metals that leach out. It’s in almost everything.
One of the things that’s missing in our vernacular is a way of describing the difference between entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurship because you could start a Taco Wagon or a festival earrings company or something that will be entrepreneurship but it’s something that’s been done before.That’s the interesting thing now is we aren’t quite at a place yet where we have full control. We inject into a site and we hope that it differentiates into what the neighboring cells are. The neighboring cells are releasing signaling molecules that will communicate and they know what they’re supposed to do. What they’re finding in research is that when people are getting these stem cell injections, initially, the mode of thinking was that, ?When you get these injections, these live stem cells are ingrafting into the human and transdifferentiating into whatever tissue and exerting whatever the effects are that you’re aiming for.? The tools are so awesome now. You can go so far. When Eric and I, my cofounder first started collaborating, we’re both nerds. The fact that computer vision was open source, depth-sensing cameras were easy to use and inexpensive, all of a sudden it was like, there were many ingredients. It was like, ?What do you want? How do you want to play?? Having done quite a bit of work at MIT on this issue of transportation, what can we do to meet this future transportation demand, which is not slowing down but blowing up? We saw two main avenues. Number one is increased utilization of the car. Instead of having 1.1 people in the car on weekdays, can we get to 4 or 5? We did a lot of work on vehicle dispatch algorithms. Number two changes the vehicles so that it’s smaller. At every point along your trip, you’re using the right scale of the vehicle. If you’re sharing an origin destination with many other people, be on a large view, train view, bus view, or something, but those ones which are small, they don’t exist.For example, when you think of the seventeen-year history or something, what are the things that stand out to you as examples of what that lab is doing so that I could understand?I got interested one time. I saw this video of Danny Hillis talking about proteomics. He made a company called Applied Proteomics b
ut his thesis was that cancer is a normal thing that your body does all the time. You got these cells mutating. Most of the time, nothing bad happens. They get flushed. Everybody is doing that. He is like, ?Cancer shouldn’t be a noun. It’s more a verb. You’re cancering all the time.?CBD. One of the biggest things that drive me crazy is I had a company come to me and they said, ?Michael, we want you to endorse this product. It’s a CBD pillow.? I said, ?What? I don’t get it.? They said, ?What we’ve done is we’ve soaked the pillow in CBD. When you turn it on your head, this break open, and then you breathe in the CBD.? I said, ?That is the biggest crap of shit I’ve ever heard. Tell me, how much CBD did you put in the whole pillow?? They said, ?You’re going to love it, 300 milligrams in the whole pillow.? I said, ?That’s a dose for one night.? They’re like, ?What?? I’m like, ?Did you read the literature? I haven’t seen CBD effects in sleep in anything less than 200 to 250 milligrams of CBD. That’s like a whole bottle.? It’s a very good point you’re making. There is another world which is the material world. When you blend materials together, sometimes, there is no amount of energy that will get them back apart, which could be crucial for recycling. Most part, with clean much cheaper energy, we’ll be doing a lot better. Your point is very important. We saw a similar thing with electronic waste. People would come with a laptop and pay $20 in 2008. In Seattle, they would pay $40 to get it recycled. They didn’t know that this thing would travel 6,000 miles. We’re good at that, but the problem is that I believe that there are sleep disorders and what I call disordered sleep. Sleep disorders are diagnosable apnea, narcolepsy and insomnia. Disordered sleep is I went to that room in the back of my house. I was there for 6, maybe 7 hours. My eyes were closed. I come out, I don’t feel great. Why? How do I fix that? That’s been my area of specialty for the last six years where I’m only focusing on how do I improve the quality of sleep. There are probably about 6,000 guys and gals out there who are board-certified sleep specialists. They treat apnea and narcolepsy. In some cases, insomnia.That?s a great story. It?s probably equivalent to the story for every other single individual in that room at the time. It was a community made of nothing.
It’s not solving all of the world’s problems they thought, but it was something that they could focus on, it was narrow. This was about a year after the dot-com crash, so they’d all been gotten used to investing in technology. They saw this problem and they decided to try to get somebody smart and they knew Mark Tucker, who was the CEO. Mark and Jeremy had worked together on a project before, so they brought Jeremy in and he took some initial ideas out of IEEE and what was available at the time and said, ?We’re going to build the stack of these existing technologies.?
If their heart rate goes up because they’re getting excited about the game and the game is getting more intense, the game purposely starts to obscure the screen so that it’s even harder than it already would have been to play. This is a feedback thing and your heart is getting up even faster. The obscuring of the screen is linked to your heart rate. At some point, you can’t even see the screen. You have to tap the thing and say, ?Stop.? It prompts you to use deep breathing exercises to lower your heart rate. Once you do, the screen obscurity stops and you can go back to playing it. I thought that was such a cool idea.What I think about it is that access to knowledge, we don’t have a distribution problem anymore, but we do have a curatorial problem. What’s happening is we have this societal discussion around how good of a job Facebook is doing at the curation or Twitter because you follow too many people. You don’t have time to read all their posts. Somehow it has to be prioritized. What’s happened is Facebook has said, ?Don’t worry about it. We have magical algorithms that will turn the knobs and prioritize for you.? The problem with that is I don’t get control of the knobs. You don’t get control of the knobs. I think this whole problem that we’re living with the social media platforms, it could be completely sidestepped if they gave us the knobs. Let me turn the knob and say, ?I want more or less Donald Trump in my feet.? If I had that knob, then they could be absolved of all responsibility.
Sleep is the most natural process that you can do other than breathing. We don’t need technology to help us breathe. The reason many people don’t sleep is because of what’s between their ears. It’s their mental stability. It’s their anguish. It’s their stress. Seventy-five percent of insomnia is either depression or anxiety. My goal is to try to help people figure out how to not just lower their anxiety in the acute state, but to help them figure out how to lower their anxiety in a chronic state, and that’s hard.
I’m excited to try it with Arian, which we haven’t had a chance to try it yet. It’s a perfect example. I don’t know if this will work. It’s based on research that came out of Harvard. It’s got sound research backing, but assuming that it works, imagine with a piece of relatively inexpensive hardware and a set of digital games that can be distributed for free to any iPad, all of a sudden you have a way to help millions upon millions of kids with emotional self-regulation. What’s that worth? It’s pretty cool.We can say about the Uberman system is it takes out a lot of the noise. That’s the goal. What I do with my high-performance people is I do the same thing, but I don’t have to use Uberman. I don’t have to use Everyman because if I put you in your chronotypical bedtime swim lane, it automatically shrinks. If I shrink you to six hours a night of super high-quality sleep versus four hours, and you have to do this crazy rotation desk schedule, what would you rather do? I’m doing the same idea but in a healthier and more genetic way. I’m looking at your genetics. I?m matching your schedule to your genetics as opposed to somebody saying, ?I’m going to do this Uberman schedule, and I’m going to arbitrarily pick this time to sleep.? I would argue that what I’m doing is a little bit safer. At first, it escalated a lot of hackers from script kiddies to exploit authors. At the same time, we saw the rise of a net exploit. We see all of these advances in counter defensive technologies and all these crazy exploit techniques. When I was winning Capture the Flag with the Ghetto Hackers, when we were there, no person I had met had that flexibility and capacity. Now, every DEF CON speaker has it. It burst the exploit author bubble and blew them up fast but that created intense pressure on all the other teams that maybe they did or they didn’t have a great exploit author. It created much more pressure on the defenders. That’s why we see Naval Warfare College. Chris Eagle?s team, the Naval Postgraduate School. We see these teams from military, from other countries. There’s a Chinese hacker team that comes to DEF CON. The next student arrives and all of a sudden, they get the perfect session. Show them the three videos, ?Which one did you like the best?? That metadata gets incorporated into that video so that now the kinesthetic learner is going to be getting the right Pi video. It gets perfect because I think about those educators that changed my life. Tom Wisdom, my Physics professor in high school, he was almost like Monty Python, a British guy that made it fun. It was incredible. I loved Physics. He was part of the reason I went into Engineering. Whatever his version of teaching stuff would be is going to resonate with certain people, kids like me, and a different version from a different Physics professor.The AI to do the synthetic audio are there. With twenty minutes of audio from you, we can make you say anything. We can make you read war and peace falsely and know the Brent Bushnell app
lications. That’s all solved. We’re not going to be aiming a camera at the actor’s lips for that because we’re going to render the actor in speaking whatever language the audience is watching. Get rid of the subtitles, overdubbing and stuff.I’m somewhat introverted but almost nobody knows it. If I’m around someone like you who I?ve known forever, it doesn’t cost me energy. This is fine. This conversation is easy for me. If I’m talking to someone I’ve never met before, it’s draining. There’s no question about it. That’s why someone who’s an extreme introvert might care about having a job in an office where they know everybody. It’s a place where they can go to be with other human beings, which is important to all of us. There’s nobody who wants to be alone all the time. It’s not draining for them because it’s people they’ve known for years and they see them every day. It’s a routine. It’s relaxing. As opposed to, ?Crap, I don’t have an office to go to anymore. I’m going to have to meet people now like total strangers. That’s terrible.? Introverts need social exposure like the rest of us.
It was this breakthrough moment, I said, ?I need $10,000. Let’s steal it from Western Union. Let’s get Western Union to give us fraud money.? They were like, ?We can’t do that.? I was like, ?Let’s decide whether we can do that once we make our plan.? All of a sudden, it turns into Ocean’s Twelve up in there. All of a sudden, everybody is a criminal. They’re like, ?Let’s analyze this. Is there a backdoor? Do we have pictures of the place? Where?s the wire? What protocol do they use? Is there encryption? What about the terminals? Can we dig?? Immediately, everyone jumped in and started throwing their passion at it.
They have a shorter lifespan but they’re also working on what I’ve seen as layoff-alized versions, where it’s essentially a freeze-dried version that’s reconstituted. I haven’t seen a lot of shelf-life data on that yet, so I don’t know.David Edery is a buddy of mine who I think you guys are really going to love. Dave is one of the co-founders he’s the CEO of Spry Fox, which is a unique game development studio here. They’re based here in Seattle, but they have people spread out. They made Alphabear, Steambirds, Triple Town, and Realm of the Mad God.
To be clear, the reason they would have to do it that way before is because the analog radio, a Faraday cage means all the radio communications are going to get blocked if you’re below the deck or whatever.If I?ve got my Asics on, my Dri-FIT wear, and my iTunes going, I can run. It is a performance. Sleep is the same way. If you?ve got the right equipment, you will sleep better. I will argue that between 20% to 25% of sleep is environment influence for someone. Especially for the people who have got insomnia, believe it or not, there is now a way to look at people’s sleep genetics even it has 23andMe. I?ve got a company that I work, I can run your genetic in 74 different sleep markers. I can look if you have genetics for poor sleep quality or for lower amount of sleep total time.
I have this trigger that happens in my brain when I’m using email for too much of something. That’s usually an indicative problem that there are some problems. I’m taking notes that way. It’s like, ?I should have a note-taking thing.? I’m getting all my news that way. I’ve got newsletter overload and duplicate articles across them.
If someone had come to me several years ago and said, ?Here’s the thing that does all of that for you and it’s good,? I would have been delighted. I’ve spent millions of dollars making it myself. Now they’re starting to be, there was a Seattle-based company called PlayFab that was acquired by Microsoft that does that. They do that stuff. There are a few other people. Amazon has a company they acquired that’s doing that stuff too. My guess is in a couple of years from now. I was still at Alexis Park which is the size of a Motel 6 or something. It?s a small hotel off the strip in Vegas that gets invaded by 1,000 hackers or so every summer, every August maybe. It’s 106 degrees, you’ve got 1,000 pasty white computer nerds in black t-shirts with witty slogans about internet protocols, Linux or something, laptops the size of VCRs, some of them with dual VCR decks in them. It’s a big one. I’m clear that I have a reasonable business acumen. There are a lot of other companies that I could start that would be easy by comparison like stuff that is not this complicated. I have fantasies about easy companies. The reality is that I get bored after running a festival earrings company or something like that. That’s an idea that has been sitting around for a long time.You want to know what else is awesome? This doesn’t have systemic side effects. It doesn’t matter what your weight is. It doesn’t matter what are concomitant medications you are on. So I talked to ER doctors and they said when somebody comes in and something happens, if there’s an event they have to give a woman contraception, they know if they give her this they don’t have to worry because there’s no hormone.
I’m always shocked by that one too, because basically the idea with the copper IUD is that you’re living with a wire inside of you that’s supposed to scrape the wall of the uterine lining. And it’s just seems so primitive.
I have to tell you, I love you for saying that. Because you gotta think about it this way, right? When you really evaluate, women are really the healthcare consumers for themselves, or their husbands, for their children, for their parents. When they get older. If you can get the right positive lever in a woman’s mind as a company, right? A woman trusts you and thinks you really care about innovation: 1) They are the consumers and 2) to your point, they’re half of the population, but 3) so little innovation is introduced to women. I have gotten a lot of investors will say to me, if it’s not immuno-oncology, diabetes is man and women, heart disease is man and women. This is just and women and we don’t know if we’re interested. And I say, listen, I want to remind you’re here because of a woman. And at the end of the day, when a woman’s quality of life is better because she feels better. She doesn’t feel a little crazy because she has a synthetic hormone in her body and when she doesn’t feel that she’s suffering every day. You know that whole adage, when mama’s happy, everybody’s happy? This product is so important because women now are more empowered than ever. And they’re saying to themselves: I need to care about my longevity. This isn’t just about having sex with my partner. I need to be around for my kids. Women really getting savvy on what are the silence sins that happen when I take something that I don’t even need everyday. Some girls start the pill when they’re 17 and they stop taking it when they’re 35.Brent: Have you heard that term from reality shows, frankenbiting where they have a conversation for eight hours, ?What do you think of Hitler? What do you think of all this stuff? What do you think of Pablos?? Later they cut those responses together and it is like, ?Pablos is the worst person I’ve ever heard about.?In the last 100 years, we’ve had phones. The phones at first were good. One of the metrics I remember Phillip told me is, ?Your brain can handle about 180 milliseconds latency.?
Farther into the periphery, you’ll have new developments where people will buy cars and end up driving into the city from there. Historically, how do you plan that? You ask a bunch of households where they go to and from and create what’s called origin-destination makers. Now, we can derive those matrices with much higher procedures, whether it is through cell phone data. There are quite a few other ways. Think of the data that flows through an Uber-like service, a lift-like service, a transit authority, a taxi service, a micro-mobility company, and a cell phone company. When you put those together, you get a pretty good understanding of what’s going on in the city from the demand perspective. The insurance companies are increasing.
Especially with investors, you have a real problem where because of the way that access to the public, because you have as a publicly traded company access to public markets. And we saw this with RobinHood and GameStop and all these kinds of things. You have a lot people in the market now who are trading. A lot of them are doing derivatives trading options. They don’t any comprehension whatsoever of you, your company, your product, anything at all. They’re just looking at technical data on the stock performance and trading on that. There’s a kind of abstract argument to be made that this is valuable for making sure that market stays efficient. But it’s not really something that is going to help your company at all. And the flack from those people, it needs to be ignored and not just by you, but by everyone.That would be good advice independent of games. That’s how you ended up going to follow along in a psych ward and in a hospital with doctors before deciding that wasn’t for you. It?s a good thing you did that. That’s pretty rare. Less than 1% of college kids did anything like that before choosing their major. If you look at something like Tylenol, which has a massive amount of overdoses, a massive amount of liver damage, all kinds of side effects. You have something like the exosomes, there are not many reports with the exception of a few unscrupulous labs that are selling contaminated products out of the warehouse, basement, or whatever. That’s why the FDA does need to step in and regulate a little bit better because those are the people that mess it up for everybody. At first, no. I would try to convince everybody that, ?This computer is going to be amazing someday,? and nobody believed me. I was in a small town in Alaska. It was lost because but I had a bottomless enthusiasm for it. That is part of what got me to trying to be able to explain things. I was trying to explain these complicated technical things to people who not only didn’t understand but di
dn’t care. I had to be able to simplify very complex concepts. In some sense, I’m still doing that. The key to this is the testing that you do. What level of purification you’re looking for before you put the things on the road? We’ve been engineering our control system for the scooters for years. It’s very mature. There are some things we just don’t touch and don’t fix it. There are some things that we need twelve months of regression testing and we’re good. The reason is that we know what our system can do. We also know what it can’t do. We feed some data regarding, for example, we can detect and in real-time, completely resolve more than 50% of issues that would break other scooters into one. I haven’t had an IV yet. It?s something possibly on the horizon. If I do get COVID, I want to get an exosome treatment because we’re seeing now there’s some IND, Investigational New Drug Applications, with the FDA. We’re seeing a lot of the detrimental symptoms of COVID is not so much from the virus itself but it’s from the immune system going hyperdrive. Your body is starting to attack its tissues in response to the viral infection.It’s a food grade ingredients. Why does this why can’t this be over the counter? How could it go wrong?What orifice could I shove this in to cause a real problem?A lot of promises were made by essence operations company but with engineering capability. There are a lot of problems, but many of them were not catched.And so his name’s Riley Eller and Riley’s sort of a famous in the hacker community because he used to run the most popular party for hackers called Caesar’s challenge. And we’d have this party once a year at DEF CON and only the league got in. Riley has done a great job over the years of figuring out how to get hackers partying, and get us all connecting to each other and making friends with each other.
And I say, look half of all women won’t use something that they can’t control. And if you take a moment to think about and counsel your patients and let them know that this is available you would be surprised. For example, even the simplest thing like breastfeeding women, they don’t want hormones in their breast milk. And women are spacing their pregnancies. They don’t want to put up a hormone in their body, that they then have to cleanse out of their body before they can get pregnant again. And I said there’s, by the way, there’s lots of young women between the ages of 18 to 25 that say, are you kidding? I don’t want my mother’s contraception. I don’t want something draconian. Why wouldn’t we just put this in our pocket and put this in our purse? But so the challenge has been to convince some providers who have old mindsets
I thought of one for a couple sleeping. I created this quiz that would be a chatbot thing that would have compatibility. Wouldn?t it be great if Match.com has it before you hit?I had a lot of friends because lots of my friends are nerds, especially when one of them leaves the company or sells their company or ends up with some free time, they dive into home automation and they try and install everything and they tell you all about it. It’s all amazing. They’re spending full-time integrating their home automation stuff. A year later, I?ll ask them about it. They?ll be like, ?I had to tear all that shit out.? You?re going to be a sysadmin for yourself for your home light switches.
That’s one of the things I think about a lot. We often are fixated on a lot of things with robots right now. Robots are amazing because you teach one robot something and they all learn for free. With humans, you got to start over from scratch with every single one of them. You teach them something, you’ve accomplished nothing that scales. You have to start from scratch and teach the next one. It is work every time.
It?s your wife who watches the kid and you get away. That’s the way to do it. Don’t be a mom, be a dad because that’s the winning strategy. Moms, I could never do that job. It totally consumes you because my daughter’s mom, her brain is fixated on the kid’s needs at all times. She knows when Sion has to pee about a month before Sion knows she has to pee. She’s focused on it. It’s an amazing and wonderful gift that she’s given up her entire life to be a mom. It’s intensive. I got a break for a few hours a day where I could go to work and get away. It’s insanity on a parent.
Ten years’ worth of research, they’ve had 12 or 15 publications in real journals, real science. Here’s what they discovered. It was almost like a headband that goes around your head. There was a string that came down and it came down here and there’s a unit here. It would throw liquid in this thing that goes around your head and it would make your head cooler throughout the night. It’s a little bulky, cumbersome, whatnot. They discovered that people who could turn off the brain, turned off the brain and went to sleep. What they’ve done is they’ve miniaturized it and they’ve got it into a traveler pack.
It’s regained a lot of interest over the years because it has a very fascinating efficacy rate for depression, especially suicidal ideation. It is far more statistically effective than typical SSRI antidepressants, especially for people that have suicidal ideation. People that are suicidal, within 45 minutes of infusion, are no longer suicidal.
But don’t sell it, just buy it. And then, I guess it might also be cool if some other strategic investors who maybe wanted to help you bring it to other markets or maybe expanded more quickly in the US market. And then assuming all that goes few years, then you could go build the next thing.
I wish we were at the office because you would see how we do development on each. We have our embedded software team and each person on their desk have three printed circuit boards, five armed processors. That’s the development. There’s no black box. We write code on. We have multiple modularized state machines that work constantly with one another. Your region is an app. Your geofence parking is an app. Your sidewalk detection is an app. Your safe stock, how do you save stock? How do you stop that vehicle if you need to, in a way safe as possible, better, and do its best?
No, more like ?98. I went back. Once the party got going, I said, ?Let’s try this other challenge. Let?s try this other thing.? Wallflowers turned into extroverts. As soon as the state of their brain could lock on to something that was a challenge, something they couldn’t get their whole mind around quickly. For the kinds of friends we have, for the hacker mind, putting something in their brain that they’re okay with and that they want to think about that’s fun, that is complex enough that it gets their creativity chewing, it occupies their critical voice. This is my hypothesis from watching this party happen. As soon as they get this thing in their brain to work on, all of the self-criticism and internal doubt finds no exit. They can’t start talking in their brain because this problem is talking to them. They lose that sense of self-consciousness that can be toxic.
There are holistic technologies that are coming up that are interesting to look at. I started working with this company and it was all of it. I’ve learned a lot. Let’s say you get into a car accident, your head cracks open, you go into the ER. One of the first things they do is they wrap your head nice. The reason they wrap your head nice is to slow down all of the blood flow and all of the fluid that’s going on because they?ve got to figure out what’s the problem. They?ve got to fix it up. That’s how that works. It’s called the neuroprotective effect of cold. It’s important.
The right answer though is shopping. Easier shopping instinct. Because you don’t need to invent a new thing. There’s thousands of things sitting with biotech entrepreneurs or founders don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And man it’s hard for them.We got team-building and leadership stuff all starts to kick in. What’s happening is we’ve homogenized on a few life patterns, let’s say. That’s what people are growing up looking forward to and expecting. Humans are only good at doing what they’ve seen done before. We’ve only seen a few things. We’ve seen them become an old maid cat lady. We’ve seen get married and have a kid and then get divorced and then fight. There’s that pattern. They’ll get married, grow old together, and have nothing in common and don’t get divorced because it would look bad to the kids. There are a few patterns. I’m being disingenuous but basically, we have a few patterns.
The harder job is how you take that toolkit that grows, is amazing and is also democratized in the sense. As you said an open-source code can do motion detection. It can do projection mapping. It can do depth sensing. It can do all this stuff. Kids in Argentina get that. Kids in Romania get that. They have the same tools as me. I’m not trying to make a case that it’s all totally fair. I’m saying like, people don’t stop to celebrate the fact that the most democratizing thing in the world has been this computer technology and it goes everywhere. It’s not locked up at giant corporations like IBM, the way it was when we were kids. Everybody’s got it.
Revenge of the Nerds. I don’t feel that so much anymore but that’s part of one of the things that’s amazing to me about dancing. Being a salsa dancer, you show up and I’m on the same level as the Mexican dishwasher. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, how smart you are or what you’ve done in the past. No one gives a shit. You’re there and you’re not cool. I’m very specifically not cool when I show up dancing. You get a little bit cooler over the years and as you get better and as you get shirts with buttons on them and shoes that are not dirty, stuff like that, you can get slightly cooler in the dance community.
Here’s what I want to understand. I have some softball questions for you. What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? My models show that it’s 41.98276417.
In 2 or 3 years, it’ll be full spam and you’ll need a spam filter for your SMS. It’s going to be the same bullshit, but all that is solvable too, but the problem is who’s incentivized to do it?
That’s cool though, as an internship, especially because you get to see pretty much every part of the company. If you go be an intern at Microsoft, you get to see one dime and you don’t get to see the whole operation.
A great person from our audience and one of our biggest investors sent me this quote that said: don’t let success go to your head, but don’t let criticism go to your heart. Don’t let it go to your heart. Just shake it off. You’re doing the right thing. Keep your head down and keep showing progress.
One of the biggest alterations that I made in my overall leadership, I say moderately early on, was finally being transparent about where we were from a financial perspective at any given moment. In the first few years, I thought that I had to have it all together and I needed to put up this strong front of like, ?Everything’s fine and it’s great.? What I realized is that it led to situations where people were caught off guard and surprised when shit was not fine and we were three weeks from running out of money. At this point, pretty much everybody in my company can ask me at any time how much money do we have left and how many months of runway and all of that stuff. A lot of people don’t do that.For sure, but we’ve turned to other types of tissue. With mass manufacturing, as the regenerative medicine industry is starting to, they’ve found a way to start to scale up to levels that are able to produce pharmaceutical quantities. In some of the tissues that they’re looking at now, they can isolate stem cells from bone marrow, from adipose, which is fat tissue, and then placenta, which is the mesenchymal stem cells that I’ve had the most knowledge about. They didn?t have pizza delivery when I was a kid. You go get the pizza or you stay home and make one. That rubbed off on me some and then also I?ve been at it long enough that I can see how other people’s life choices have played out. I can see the way people chose to play it safe. They chose that college. They chose that degree. They got that job. I became a dentist. The first day of your career as a dentist, there’s a spreadsheet that will tell you exactly how much you’re going to make over your entire career and how much to put into 401(k) and how much to put in a mutual fund, what to do. That plan is safe. That appeals to people. People are over-optimizing for safety. You get those predictable results and it’s not all that safe anyway. I would argue that there are certain meditations that you would do prior to bed and there might be ones that you do in the morning. I would say that there are breathing techniques that make more sense in the evening versus the morning. Sleep works in the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. There are two systems, sympathetic and parasympathetic. Sympathetic, I always think of as energy, and parasympathetic is relaxed. I always think of it as Sympathy for the Devil, that song from the Rolling Stones. That makes me think of going in dancing. When we’re looking at parasympathetic, that’s the relaxed situation, and relaxing is different than sleep. Relaxation primes the pump for the sleep process. It all comes down to some physiology, believe it or not. If you can get your heart rate below 60 for a period of time, the sleep process will institute.
Riley: Originally, we were doing a Business 2.0 article. Jeremy was explaining on the whiteboard in the Ghetto Hacker workspace how that all worked and I was trying to repeat it back to him to see if I understood his ideas, because it was difficult to grasp with what I knew at the time. There’s a photo of him and I talking over that particular moment right before the company was taking off. It was a pivotal moment in my life.
No, that’s the way to do it. People need to have real conversations. And I think some people never got to and some people forget what it’s like. So I’m just like, let’s have real conversations!But anyway, the global foot print matters. And I have to tell you that innovation, when we talk about innovation, why I cared so much about talking to you today, is that innovation in women’s healthcare is not only necessary, but it will positively impact. Think about how they care about global warming? Think about how they care about clean water. How they care about education. More bodies the planet by choice, not chance. Choice, not chance. Less bodies on the planet that are unwanted, unplanned, and unwanted pregnancies come on! I have to be candid, I am a huge proponent of contraception that women will use, right? Why not? This isn’t about population control. This is about choice, not chance. Sometimes, I’m unpopular at dinner party. And I’m never really invited. Not that I ever been to any dinner parties. But I say things like look at some of these countries where rape is a weapon of war. It’s not a matter of if it’s when and how often. Okay. That’s no joke. I don’t know that much about it but you start to learn, you’re like, ?I eat food that feeds a bunch of microbes in my gut and then they spit out what feeds me.? There’s a layer of indirection in there that there’s no measurement for. My microbiome is different than yours. It changes over time and none of us knows what we’re randomly shoving in our mouths. It?s crazy. The statistics are something like 1 in 6 Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their life. It’s a pretty prevalent thing at this point. It’s like a when, not an if, kind of thing. The game that we’re focused on now is how do you figure out what the rest of it means. That’s what our business is focused on now. As a juxtaposition, we started out with like, ?Let’s do a 23andMe-like thing.? What we do now is we make the software to compare large groups of whole human genomes. We’re going after the folks that are doing country genome sequencing projects, where they’re sequencing hundreds of thousands or millions of people and trying to sort out what’s going on in there. Michael J. Breus, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and both a Diplomat of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and a Fellow of The American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the world to have passed the Sleep Medical Speciality board without going to Medical School. Dr. Breus was recently named the Top Sleep Specialist in California by Reader?s Digest, and one of the 10 most influential people in sleep.
So the plan is this. So we actually got an investment from a group called Adjuvant Capital. So that investment was to lower the cost of goods. And that investment was to look at going into emerging markets. So we’re looking at three-five countries a year over a five-year period. So we’re literally working on that right now. We have a joint steering committee to say two things. Where are places where we access quickly? So can show success. And where are the places where it’s most needed? Which sometimes isn’t quickest. So not just quick wins, but a few quick wins so that we can get feedback to provide that feedback to some of the places to convince them you should help us get this approved.I was hoping that maybe I could get away with making them play my way, and they would get comfortable. I realize now that you said that it’s like trying to get my brother or my dad to come around, it?s never going to happen. They’re always going to not like it. I don’t know if you have answer to this. The need-based compensation, are there other strange utopian ideas you had about running a company that you tried that didn’t work?
?I shipped it to Florida. I shipped it to California. I just shipped it to Chicago. It’s the battery and it’s the plastics now. It turns out this whole thing travels all around the country.
It was not recharged, there is an issue internally that made its battery damaged, or there is an issue electrically that’s not bringing energy from the batteries. There could be a whole bunch of issues. I can show you the way out. We can log onto a scooter. You can see the log in the back end. There are tons of stuff. There are over 1,300 data points.You’re still doubting yourself and your capabilities enough at that stage that’s the exact opposite of what is helpful. There’s a real need to have some network or space where people can be around other people that are dealing with the same thing. That’s important not from a sanity perspective because entrepreneurs also deal with a lot of mental health issues and there’s lots of statistics to back that sucker up. People would be more successful if they had other people they were around. That’s part of the reason why you see things the YC effect because I went through Y Combinator.
