Short opinion piece about these helium airships and the need to preserve helium. I think they're cool. But there's a real problem with trying to make a lot of hydrogen next to actual humans and somehow imagine that it's going to be safe. So since then, people have played around with things like blimps and things that don't have passengers and stuff like that. But these things don't, aren't very popular. I have seen a little bit of news lately about this group called Lighter Than Air Research, which is trying to create air ships today. These are in part probably safer because they don't fill them with hydrogen, they fill them with helium. So this is a massive craft. They call Pathfinder one. I'm going to link to an article in IEEE Spectrum about this and I'm just going to give you, the highlights. Pathfinder 1 is 120 meters, long, 20 meters in diameter. I think biggest Goodyear blimp right now is 75 meters. So this is like the biggest air ship ever made. I think. The idea is to carry about four tons of cargo. It sounds like a lot, but if you're not familiar with a ton, four tons is about one Humvee. Or, maybe four tons might be a good size Amazon delivery van fully loaded. That's four tons of cargo. There's still, also a crew, there's what's called water ballast, which is, water you carry for weight. So if you have a problem, descending too fast, you could drop the water and it would slow your descent to make it safe. And then fuel, cause you still need fuel in order to propel the thing. The idea is this thing would go 65 knots. So that's about 120 kilometers an hour, which I think about 70 miles an hour. That's about as fast as these things seem to ever really be able to go, but the, average cruising speed probably maxes out at more like two-thirds of that. This is a modern Airship probably worth revisiting it to see if it can be done better. The old ones were built with, a lot of wood. They were built with a lot of aluminum which is, good strength to weight ratio, but incendiary. In the sense that it melts at a low temperature. Modern crafts could be built with carbon fiber and titanium and all these modern materials that we can coat to make them less inflammatory, So that's the frame and then you also have this covering and the coverings gonna be made of not cotton the way we used to do it, but we're going to make that out of some modern polyvinyl from DuPont called Tedlar. So obviously those materials have advanced a lot in our lifetime. If you sense a little bit of a dubiousness in my voice, I'm going to tell you why that is in a little bit here. 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. The world has unlimited hydrogen on earth, more or less. We have a lot. We can make more. Hydrogen's awesome. What the world does not have on earth is very much helium. We have very little helium. We have very little helium left. We've been able to find a few new helium mines in the last decade, but there's just not much of it. And that is a super valuable element that we really need for lots of different things. We need it for making computer chips. We need it for figuring out how to make fusion reactors and things like that. We're just running out of helium and I'm pretty disappointed in any plan that involves using a lot of helium as it's lighter than air substance. Because of that, I'm really having a hard time getting excited about these modern airships that want to use helium. Helium is not flammable, so it won't burn up the way that hydrogen does. If you remember your periodic table, if you look at the very beginning, the reason you've probably heard of hydrogen and helium is they're numbers one and two. They are the lowest weight elements in the world. And hydrogen is a lot lighter than helium, but it also, combined with oxygen just fucking blows up, which is great, amazing amount of energy in hydrogen. We have a lot of use for that. But what's happening with helium is, we're just letting it go. We're giving it away in party balloons which is a terrible disaster. It makes me practically cry when I see helium balloons, which is sad. I grew up with them. I love them. I want my kid to have them. They're fun, but that's a waste of good helium. We just don't have enough and we don't have a way of making more. And that's the really important thing to understand. Until we get real good control of fusion reactors, and have extra ones to deploy at the job, we don't even have any way of making helium. When you do have a fusion reactor, it makes a little bit of helium, but not much. Maybe someday fusion reactors will be able to be designed to put out a lot of helium for balloons, but right now they don't. They don't do anything right now, but they don't do that. So the point is. We should be really careful about how we deplete the helium that we do have here on earth. Maybe someday we'll get a highway to the moon and we'll be able to go get a lot more helium. But right now this is this is a really important resource that I think we should be careful about. I don't want to see it used on airships, which require a lot. Okay. Second thing. I tried playing with helium before, and we do use a lot of helium for weather balloons and things like that. Please use hydrogen. It's okay if a weather balloon burns. A helium balloon that's big, it's just a really hard to manage. Putting a lot of lighter than air gas into a balloon to get it off the ground and float it up into the atmosphere. It's just unwieldy. I only have a little bit of experience with this early days at Blue Origin, we tried to make some giant helium balloons just to see what potential might be in that. It's hard cause, you gotta make the balloon out of something light and not too structural. The airships have a frame. We didn't have frames. We just had big balloons that we made. We made them really light. But, you've got to bring tanks and tanks of helium to go, then fill that up to launch it wherever you are. The process of filling it up, it wants to float away while you're filling it, and you think you could just keep loading gas into it the way that you would with a party balloon, but in practice, the more you load into it, the harder it is to tether the thing and keep the wind from blowing it away. And maybe you could do that indoors and then have a ceiling the launches, it's pretty impractical to do. And, with travel, you want to be able to go a lot of different places, obviously with an Airship, you'd try to fill it once and then use your electric motors to move that thing around, up and down and maybe. I give up as little helium as possible, but that's the other thing about helium. It's really hard to contain. It leaks through almost everything. It is a very small molecule. I'm putting this out there just to let you guys know how I feel about it. From what I understand to date. I have not met or talked to the folks that are working on this at Lighter Than Air Research. If you know them, please introduce me and I'm sure that they can tell me how they think about it. I'm sure they have some other perspective and if I get that in my head, I'll let you know if I change my mind.

Sleep is the most natural process that you can do other than breathing. Like breathing, we don't need technology to help us sleep. The reason many people don't sleep is because of what's between their ears – their mental stability, anguish, or stress. Do you fall asleep easily or does the slightest noise wake you up? Dr. Michael Breus, gives me a full brain dump as I try to learn everything I can about sleep in one session. He takes on taboo ideas like polyphasic sleep and the role of nutrition and the microbiome in having a good night’s rest, how melatonin, CBD, and some pharmaceutical interventions such as Zolpidem affect the sleep process, how much sleep we should have, and more. Pablos: The thing I'm trying to go after is that at least my way of seeing the world is through all these problems that we have. This is a pile of problems that are possibly growing. We also have this other pile, which is tools and technologies, and it's also growing because of what I mentioned. The job for us is to figure out how we sit in the middle and connect to those things. If we have some optimism that it's possible and we can demystify the problems so people understand what the real problems are, we can demystify the technology so they're not terrifying and complicated. People then can build that sense of optimism about how we could make the future better. That's how I think about things a lot. Not only the idea here is to give people some insight into how we think about things and our experiences. One of the things I'm curious about is that years ago, there was no such thing as a sleep doctor. Maybe there were some researchers or whatever, but it wasn't a legitimate career track. How did you end up being a sleep doctor? What does that mean? Michael: What's interesting about the field of sleep medicine in general is it's an incredibly small new field. The very first sleep lab in 1945, Walla Walla, Washington, built demand on narcolepsy. It wasn't even about sleep apnea. When you look at medicine and you think about Hippocrates. Thousands of years of innovations in medicine, we're literally at the sperm and egg stage of sleep medicine. That's where it was. I fell into it by accident. I was doing my residency. I was getting my PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Georgia and I was interested in Sports Psychology. I had no interest in sleep at all. I wanted to tell athletes how to get the mental game of sports and run faster into all this cool shit with psychology. I went to the University of Georgia, the top twenty programs. The best internship residency program, believe it or not, is the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. They had an eating disorders and athletes program that I was fascinated with. This was going to be an interesting area for me to get into and understand more about, but I couldn't get into the program. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, they all got in the program. I went to Georgia's top twenty programs, but to be fair, it wasn't Harvard. It wasn't even top seventeen. I'm sitting there, I'm looking through the application and they have like a specialty track for sleep medicine and a specialty track for neuropsychological testing. I didn't know anything about sleep medicine in Jackson. You figured out, “I can't get on a program I want, but I can at least go to Jackson.” I had an ulterior motive because when I saw this thing, I had worked my way through graduate school in the Electrophysiology department. I'm the kid who used to take the old rotary phones apart, put them back together, there would be 4 or 5 pieces on the side, and this thing would work like a gem. I took the phone apart for different reasons and did not get it back together.   I like to tinker with stuff. I like to measure stuff. I have that kind of a brain. When I saw that there was a sleep track that used those machines, I said, “I'm going to sell myself as a sleep guy. I'm going to transfer as soon as I get there. Just because you didn't let me in the fucking place, that doesn't mean I'm not going to get in.” I get in on the sleep side. I get there and they say, “You have to start on the sleep side. If you want to transfer, you can do it later.” By the third day, I fell in love. You haven't gotten around to transferring back. You gave up on that and sticking with sleep. This was many years ago. Tell me what research was going on there.   Back in those days, the field of sleep medicine is an interesting one because it was taken over. There are two sides, research and clinical. What's difficult about the clinical is it pretty much only treats sleep apnea. In the world of sleep medicine, we've figured out how to treat sleep apnea. That's primarily what is going on. When you say clinical, that means we've got actual patients, we're trying to help them. On the research side, we've got people with problems and we're trying to understand them. We may or may not be able to help them. That might be a way of describing the difference.   When you look at clinical sleep medicine, we've identified 88 different sleep disorders. You can fuck up your sleep, which is amazing when you think about it. We were starting to design protocols for each one of the diagnostics to be able to start to lower the symptomatology. That's the basics of medicine. Meaning, you are down with each of those 88 things you have.   The assessment narrows it down. What I'm talking about is the treatment side of things. You are good at figuring out which of the 88 things you have.   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. We've got pros who can do that, but the things that don't fit into that rubric. Are you talking about the 89th thing? To be fair, I don't think it's a diagnosis. It has to do with lifestyle. It has to do with intensity. I don't have an actual physical problem that maps to my diet, but it could be better. You could have more energy or better results if you improve your diet, but I don’t necessarily have a clinical problem.   That's how I look at sleep in certain ways. I'm a high-performance sleep coach. I used to be a sleep doctor, apnea, narcolepsy, insomnia. Now, people come to me and they're like, “I know that I need eight hours to get good sleep, but I only have six. Can you do that?” The answer is, “Yes, you can.” What science has shown us is that there are certain scheduling swim lanes for your sleep schedule. This is based on something called your chronotype. Chronotype might not be a term that people are familiar with being called an early bird or a night owl. Those are chronotypes. It turns out those are genetic. There's a variation on the PER3 gene. There's a particular snip that is altered and that can make your entire body schedule go early or make your entire body schedule go late. If I have 23andme, I can look it up and explain why I'm a night person. That's the cool part of science, but what the fuck do you do with it? That's where I come in. I love that science and I was tinkering around with it. I was doing it all myself. I said, “What happens if I only sleep during my chronotypical sleeping hours?” I'm a night owl. That meant I had to go to bed at midnight. I decided not to have an alarm because I was going to check if my body wakes up naturally and see what happens. The first month I started this experiment, I went to bed at midnight and woke up at 7:30. Within 40 days or so, all of a sudden, I was waking up at 7:15 on my own. I am still going to bed at midnight. All of a sudden, it was 7:00, and then it was 6:45. I get up at 6:13 every single morning now with no alarm. I could close my eyes at midnight. That midnight I wake up at 6:13 AM. The punchline is it won't go lower. At age 52, in my shape, my body only needs 6 hours and 13 minutes of high-quality sleep because I'm sleeping in that swim lane. Here's what happens, when I stay up until 1:00 in the morning, I still get up at 6:30. That's what I experienced. I'm tuned for the wake-up time.   That's what you're supposed to be because that's the circadian anchor. When the sun hits the melanopsin cells in your eyeballs and turns off the melatonin faucet in your brain, there's a whole circadian side of things that has to agree with that. When it doesn't, you got involved. I should tune my wake-up time to maybe the sun, although that moves around all year. Maybe I could do it to a grow light or whatever so I have a consistent wake-up time. I don't seem to be able to change that one as much. That one stays the same. I can go to bed whenever I want. For fifteen years, I was dancing salsa, probably at least every other night. The better you get at salsa, the later you go. On a Tuesday night, I would show up at midnight until 2:00 in the morning. It didn't matter. If I danced, I'd go to bed at 2:00, I would get up at 8:00. If I didn't dance, I go to bed at 11:00 or 12:00 and get up at 8:00. I felt like what was happening was, “If I dance, I need less sleep,” but you wouldn't diagnose it that way. Here's what I would tell you is if you dance, you'd get higher quality sleep. One of the biggest things we now know is movement. Sleep is recovery. You have to have something to recover from. On the nights when you were salsa-ing, what I would do is I'd love to put a tracker on you on the nights when you're dancing and the nights when you're not. I would like to look at the different stages of sleep because we probably see a much bigger increase in stage 3 or 4 sleep, which is your physical restoration because of the salsa dancing. We then might see less mental restoration on the REM sleep side of things, but we can change those at will. If I could do anything I wanted having no sleep problem, pretend I have no constraints on when I sleep pretty much, whatever, what do you think would be the optimal thing for a guy to do? I'm not trying to solve any problems. I’ve got no issues, but I am going to get older at some point. Should I do something like you described? No alarm, see what happens, go to bed at a consistent time every day, and see where I land over the course of six months? It was less than six months. It slowly happened at first and all of a sudden, it was quick. What ended up happening was it took a grand total of 90 days. All of a sudden, my entire sleep schedule had shrunk and it was improved in quality. One thing to tell every reader is about the consistency of your wake up time. At first, you might have to set an alarm to wake up at a particular time, but then when you start waking up before the alarm, and then it starts to scoot further behind, we're in the money here. That's where we want to be. It all has to do with this chronotypical swim lane of a schedule that you follow. As we get older, the swim lane changes. Our circadian rhythms dial back because our body's ability to produce melatonin begins to decline. We have two options at this point. We can rotate our schedule backwards or we can use supplemental melatonin to help us on the front end and try to keep that schedule. There are two schools of thought about how you want to do that. To be fair, if I want to wake somebody up in the mornings, I can use a blue light. They're commercially available out there. It is easy to get your hands on to basically turn off my melatonin faucet in the morning. You can lower blue light by wearing things like blue light blocking glasses and have the red light and things like that. There's a lot of biohackingness that can be done within the sleep universe. I like those Wi-Fi smart lights and stuff that they'll do blue. I could have that to be my alarm instead of be obnoxious.   What a lot of people have found is those sunrise alarm clocks are cool. What you can do is put on a timer with a dimmer in it. What about this? My girlfriend needs to wake up earlier than me. Is there a product that seems like I need a vibrating watch on each person or something? There are pillow vibrating alarms. There are these little disks and you slide them in your pillow. It's got an alarm on it and it will just vibrate. It doesn't wake up your neighbor. Also, there's a new product by Bose. They're called Sleepbuds. They're earbuds that you wear all night long. They have a private sound library. I'm helping them with it, and then there's an alarm that only you hear in your ear. Is that available now? It's commercially available now. You'll love them. I have got a couple of lines of inquiry here. Go back to the phone when you were a kid. I remember disassembling rotary phones for a variety of reasons. One, I wanted to be able to make that bell go and harass people. I wanted to make it sound like I had a phone ringing in my car, which at that time didn't exist. I mounted a rotary phone to the dash in my car in 1985, something like that. There were bag phones or car phones at that point, but they were $7,000. They were huge, but I just had a rotary phone with a windy cord on it. The thing is we had learned to trick the phone network a little bit. There were things you could accomplish by taking the phone apart and getting control of the switch hook and something like that. What I think about now is my daughter is raised in a world where you take the screws out of something and there's nothing observable. It's a pile of computer chips. For you and I, taking the rotary phone apart, you could see how it worked.   You can see the coils wrapped around the magnet. You could see the bells. I remember it distinctly. You could see the rotors and when they finally came out with push buttons. All these wires were coming out and you're like, “That connects to that, and that goes to this.” It was 40 hours to assemble a touch-tone phone. I think of that as being a gift because all these devices were observable. I could take them apart, play with them, fuck with them, and then put them back together. I learned a lot from that and I feel like in the world our kids are growing up in, why would you bother to take an iPad apart? You are going to find more computer chips. It's the same, everything is computers. Even computers, when I was a kid, the code was all observable. You learn by looking at the ones and zeros literally. That’s also obfuscated behind a pretty cartoon interface and stuff. If that's what you described, you learned about this taking phones apart and stuff, and then that attracted you to the machines being used, can you talk about what were those machines?   The machines were things that took vital signs. I was particularly curious about how a signal could come from your body and be then translated into this idea. When I started, it was all paper. It wasn't digital. There were pens on the paper. You had these inkwells. You would have to pump the inkwells to get the pressure to go through and then they would be squiggling along. I remember the first night I worked in the sleep lab on my residency. I went in and my dad or my mom had bought me this beautiful new white doctor's coat. I was excited. I was on my internship. People are going to call me doctor and I go up to the thing. I'm working in and then what happened was the patient turned and the pens went fucking crazy and ink went flying. I had ink all down my thing and everybody was laughing because they knew the joke. It was fun. Back at that time, when I was learning about sleep, we would have a paper record. It would be a thousand pages long of one night, 30 seconds per page. There was an art to it. It was called throwing paper. You knew how to grab one sheet and you created the scroll yourself manually. I'm throwing paper and I'm watching EEG go by and I'm like, “Apnea.” You learned to flip a thousand pages in a couple of minutes and spot the apnea. Those machines were machines that were telling me something that wasn't a machine and that was interesting to me. You were monitoring an analog device for humans. This is something super fascinating and snuck upon us. You're talking about essentially a primitive monitoring device compared to now standards. In the last couple of years, I see an extraordinary explosion in sensor development. A lot of it came from MEMS because that's where we got our IMUs with the accelerometers and the gyros delivered chips before a MEMS-based accelerometer. That was a $15,000 thing that weighed 80 pounds and was on a bench or in a cruise missile. Now, we have them in phones almost speculatively. When the first accelerometers were on the iPhone, we didn't have an application for it. It was just there because it was cheap to do it, and might as well try it.   Now, they're in everything which is cool. Beyond that, for almost every day, we get new sensors and there's almost nothing we can't measure with extreme precision. We have networks to bring that data back to giant supercomputers to analyze it. I feel like maybe one of the things that makes this particular point in time, the inflection point for a sleep study, is that now we have the tools to do it better. We have those sensors. We have those data science, which is a thing now too. In a way, that's different than what it was before, many years ago. My prediction is that sleep laboratories will go away to a certain degree. Is it because we'll learn so much? No. It is because technology is advancing quickly. When you go into a sleep laboratory, we put 27 electrodes. At first, we had to glue them onto your body with something called collodion. When we had to pull them up, it rips up hair, skin, and all that. It was terrible many years ago. Now, there's a home study. You send it if they have a nasal cannula, they have something on their finger and they have a box on their chest, and we're almost done. The technology advancing in the assessment is great. Unfortunately, technology in the treatment has not gone well. That's the order of operations. When we look at technology and we look at the influx of technology into the idea of sleep, here's part of the problem. Technology is great for sleep disorders but not great for disordered sleep. Why is that? 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. That gets you back to that psychology and the same interventions people are using for anxiety in general. They need to improve their sleep with all the stuff around meditation and breathing and those things that people are taking on.   They have to be tweaked because when you do traditional meditation and traditional breathing, it doesn't make you sleepy. It brings you to the present. It makes you relaxed. Being present, being relaxed, and being unconscious are three separate states. Does being present, relaxed, and unconscious show up differently on your monitoring devices? It does. If I have that device on when I'm meditating and it makes me feel present, that's not getting me ready to sleep.   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. It's literally that simple sometimes. When you've got people who've got high blood pressure, stressed, and got anxiety. What's the thing that is up? Their heart rate. Heart rate variability becomes an interesting issue. When you start to look at heart rate, you want it to go down and get to 60 because when it's at 60, you slip the car into third gear and the brain clicks on. That's when things like growth hormone are emitted during a phase 3 sleep or 4 sleep, which is all that physical restoration. During REM sleep, that's when you start to move information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. That's where it gets interesting. People come to me sometimes and they're like, “I'm not as concerned about the physical. Do I have Alzheimer's, Michael? What's going on? My memory is shot. I'm 40 years old.” I'm like, “How much do you sleep?” They say, “I sleep 5.5 to 6 hours.” I'm like, “There's your problem. Can we extend your sleep a little bit? Give it three months and let's see how your memory does.” What people don't realize is REM happens in the last half of the night. If you only started the first half and you wake up after six hours, you're missing that last two hours of REM sleep. That's where the problem comes in. I have a couple of questions here. I have low blood pressure. I have a low heart rate. You should be sleeping all time. I sleep all the time. I lay down flat and I'm asleep. It is easy. I don't feel like I need as much sleep as I get, but I'd take it because I can. It seems like it's not hurting anything. There's not a lot to do now. It might be easier for me because my heart rate and blood pressure are low in general. I don't have a lot of anxiety or problems and things that keep me freaking out. It's going smoothly. Michael, I want to up my quality. What would I do? We would get you again in your chronotypical swim lane. We'd start to look at what's going on in your body. I'd look at your vitamin D, magnesium, iron, and melatonin levels. Let's make sure that you're not deficient. I think it's something 80% of the US is deficient in magnesium and vitamin D. We've got to get you back up to par levels and see if your unit is functioning right. If you've got low energy, vitamin D would be a good thing for you to have every morning. I’ve been doing it, but I didn't necessarily know to do it in the morning.   I prefer mine in the morning. It's a fat-soluble vitamin so you have to have a little bit of food with it. If you're an intermittent faster, that may or may not work for you. I don't eat anything for sixteen hours. I only eat lunch and dinner. I'm the same way and my body is used to it. I would try it out with you and see. Most people take 5,000 international units every single morning. I could do that maybe with lunch.   I take it in the morning without food. You're supposed to take it with food for absorption, but you can get higher absorbing stuff. What about magnesium? I started taking magnesium because I figured it will be good for my muscles. It will be good for your muscles, but you're deficient in it because most people are. Unfortunately, our soil has been over tilled. Magnesium doesn't appear to be coming up through the roots and getting into the stocks for our fruits, vegetables, and things like that. I do supplemental magnesium. I had a cardiac event years ago. We think that the reason that I had it was because of low magnesium in my cardiac muscle. When you have marathoners who dropped dead in the middle of a marathon and you autopsy them, it turns out that they have low magnesium in their cardiac. We wanted to avoid that. I take 250 milligrams of magnesium with vitamin B12. That helps catalyze it in. It helps absorption, but it also helps with the rapidity of metabolism. It speeds up overall metabolism, which is interesting. I take them together in the mornings and it's been highly effective for me. Once I've checked you out and decided what's going on with you, and you're at par level, then you say to me, “Michael, now I want to up my game,” I'm going to look at your alcohol and caffeine and try to understand where do those play a role in your 24-hour cycle. I never had a drink. What about caffeine? I have caffeine every afternoon. What time? Between 1:00 and 2:00, after lunch.   Do you feel like you need caffeine in the mornings? No. I feel like if I don't take it by 2:00 or 3:00, I'm going to have a headache. I'm feeling like I need a nap. Do you get a headache from not having caffeine? How much do you take at night or in the afternoon? Probably 250. You are at 2.5 cups of coffee. I never had a cup of coffee, but I drink either Red Bull or an energy shot or something.   There are two things I would do with that. It's not a bad practice if that's what helps you get there, but I'd rather find more natural sources of caffeine for you than a Red Bull because you get a ton of sugar. No, I take the sugar out. I'm on a sugar-free energy shot.   That's better, but there are some better like green coffee, green tea extracts if that's what your goal was, I'd rather see you taking that long-term. When we look at caffeine, here's the thing to remember. Depending upon how quick of a metabolizer you are, caffeine has a half-life between 6 and 8 hours for half of it to be out of your system. When we're talking about refining our sleep, caffeine is a stimulant. It doesn't matter how you slice it. I’ve got lots of people who say to me, “Fuck, Michael. I can have a cup of coffee at 8:00 at night and still fall right to sleep. Caffeine doesn't affect me.” Let's be clear, caffeine is a stimulant and affects everybody. People have different sensitivities and amounts and metabolism is which changes the variability of the effect. Somebody who's lean like you and takes 250 milligrams of caffeine, you're at the upper dose of what a human should have in a day. I would look at the timing of that. If I could, I might start to dial it back a little bit. Maybe you don't need 250. Maybe we'd start with 200 and see how you feel. Maybe we go to 150. The goal then is to start to look at how much what's called alpha intrusion that we see into your EEG. What caffeine does is it makes your brain waves go a little fast. When we're sleeping, we want our brainwaves to go slow. What happens is it's hard to get that. Sometimes the fast brainwaves lay over the slow brain waves, or they push out the slow brainwaves and all we have is fast brainwaves. When all we have is fast brainwaves, we don't get stage 3 or 4 sleep, which means we don't get that physical restoration. We then wake up in the morning and feel like shit, and we want to drink more caffeine. Caffeine is a way to speed up the brainwaves. Is melatonin a way to slow them down? Can you think of them as the opposite of caffeine in some sense? Is that what you use to slow down your brain waves? With melatonin, it's a circadian pacemaker. Melatonin has an effect on certain neurotransmitters that cause a cascade of reactions to start the sleep process. Melatonin is the key that starts the engine for sleep. You still have to have oil and all these other things when you have an electric car, maybe not. It does seem mild, but remember it's a hormone. It's not supposed to act like a sleeping pill. It's not a drug. It's supposed to act like a hormone. It is supposed to be subtle and be able to have an overarching and reaching effect across the body. The biggest thing about melatonin is understanding when you take it. The moment of ingestion, it begins to be absorbed, it's going to be sending signals to different parts of your brain to say, “We're going to change that internal schedule.” Caffeine is the opposite. What I would say the opposing from caffeine is something called adenosine. As you go throughout your day, your brain accumulates adenosine. When a cell eats a piece of glucose, something comes out of the backend. One of those things is adenosine. It works its way through the system. It goes to a specific area in your brain. As it accumulates, you get sleepier. If I was looking for the opposite of caffeine, it would be that. Why don't people take that? When you look at the molecular structure of adenosine and caffeine, it dropped by one molecule. Caffeine fits right into the adenosine receptor sites. That's why caffeine blocks sleep. That's biology, which is interesting. I haven't ever seen anybody make. You've explained to me before with melatonin, people are doing it wrong. They're taking a bunch when they're tired or when they want to go to sleep. You've said that they should start earlier in the night to take it. It's like 90 minutes beforehand. It takes about 90 minutes for the plasma concentration levels. If you're taking it in a pill form, you're looking at 90 minutes for you to reach plasma concentration. If you're taking it in a tincture or liquid form that you put under your tongue or sublingual, it would be 30 to 40 minutes for better absorption. I've never done melatonin, but you've said that 1.5 hours before taking one pill and an hour before taking another and a half hour before you want to be asleep. Is that right? No, take it one time an hour and a half before. I misunderstood. What are the other things that are meaningfully effective for people if they want to take a pill to affect their sleep and what's up with Ambien? There are a lot of different ways we can walk down that path. There's a pharmaceutical intervention. When we look at something like Ambien or what's called zolpidem, it's a particular compound that was built to affect the benzodiazepine, alpha 1 and alpha 2 receptor sites. The compound has a molecule that can fit into that receptor site and turn it on. By turning that benzodiazepine receptor site on, it lowers anxiety. In this specific 1 and 2, it increases the possibility of sleep. When you look at benzodiazepine receptors as a whole, it's an anti-anxiety thing. The first sleeping pills were anti-anxiety drugs. What happens if people get so chill that they fall asleep and then people are like, “Maybe there's a second use for that. Let's do sleeping pills.” That was what was all the benzodiazepine universe. Now we get an Ambien called a non-benzodiazepine hypnotic. The difference between the old benzos and the new non-benzos is the addictive potential. It's better technology. It is cleaner. It's the right receptors that move through. The next question becomes, when are we going to get to the drugs that improve sleep, not just put us to sleep? I call those the Frankenstein drugs. Why? I'm not convinced that our brain isn't the best regulator of how much sleep we should have. Do you think your brain could do the job? It just needs a little training sometimes. My concern is, what if you're not supposed to have more stage 3 or 4 sleep than your body has? You're not supposed to have REM sleep than your body has. Mother Nature is good at shit. When I look at those types of structures, I want to go forward but with mild, healthy trepidation and concern. One of the things that happen is when you start to improve on a natural process, you end up with a supernatural result. Sometimes supernatural results are positive and sometimes they are not. That's when we have real problems. When you say you're less optimistic about technology helping with the sleep issues that you're attacking, which are less clinical problems and more life habits and patterns that people have established, resolving anxiety and things like that. Maybe it's true that you would not look to pharmaceutical innovations necessarily.   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. There's a sleep researcher, Dr. Eric Nofsinger, who has been doing this for many years. His main interest was what we call ruminative thought. “I can't turn off my brain before I go to bed.” It's the number one complaint I ever hear in my office. We call that ruminative thought. It was like, “My brain is going. I can't slow it down. I can't get to sleep.” We know what that’s doing is it's causing a lot of autonomic arousals. That sympathetic nervous system is kicking into gear because you're in bed. Nobody is talking to you. Nobody is asking you to do anything. Thoughts come flooding out like, “What am I going to do with this problem?” It's anxious. We want that blood. He did MRIs on these people while they're trying to fall asleep. He discovered massive blood flow in the frontal cortex. He said, “I used to work in the ER and they had this thing called the neuroprotective effect of cold. What happens if I cool their head?” He did and it worked. They fall asleep with their head freezing. 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. This is a product now. I don't just need an ice pack on my forehead. That wouldn't even work. Why? It is because you have to have a particular temperature and it changes throughout the night based on your circadian rhythm. There's real science. What's that product called? It's called Ebb therapeutics. They came to me and they're like, “Michael, we want you to test our device.” I said, “I don't have ruminative thought.” They said, “We just want you to wear it and tell us what your experience is.” I put this thing on and to be fair, it looks damn goofy. It's like 2 inches off my forehead, a big black thing. It's got a cord, it's battery operated and I have to click the button, but it's not as bad as the first one was. I'm like, “This is going to be ridiculous. How am I going to sleep with this thing on my head all night long? My wife is looking at me like I'm crazy,” because I test out all this shit all the time. I put it on, I turned it on, and I closed my eyes. When I opened my eyes, it was 6:13. It's a luck. People are going to love that thing.   I said, “I'm not going to wear it the next night.” The next night didn't work the same. I woke up multiple times, and that stuff. I tried it again. You put it on people with bigger problems than you? Yep. It takes about three weeks. We discovered that over the course of time, it helps keep people's foreheads cool. Does it train them to do a better job on their own or do they need to keep with it as a habit?   What's great about this product is there's counseling that comes along with it. You use the product and use the counseling, and then eventually you come off the product. It sounds harmless to do. It’s super harmless. It has no side effects. Most people seem to have their brains have frozen already. They found out it's working well for migraines and they started using it for menopausal women. They're reducing hot flashes in the middle of the night. This is incredible.   It was cold, but that's it. I love the technology aspect that I think is interesting for sleep. We're going to come up with better drugs. By the way, I think we should, because most people think insomnia has just one flavor. There are like 30 flavors of insomnia. If we can dial in, if there's insomnia associated with pain, if we had a special pharmaceutical that could break that cycle, then we can teach people how to deal with their pain and get them off that drug. That would be a fucking miracle. Why can't we have more sleep drugs that are more personalized to people's problems? That's great in the pharmaceutical universe, but that's fifteen years and $15 billion to get down that path. I'm also interested in some of these more holistic things like cold, breathwork, meditation, circadian timing, things like that. What are the quack things that you see people are trying? 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.” Have you seen it have an effect on people if there's no THC content? I have. I'll tell you where I've seen it the best is in pain patients because it helps lower inflammation. A lot of people in pain got three problems when it comes to sleep. Number one, they're anxious that they're not going to be able to get comfortable. Number two, they're anxious that they're going to have a painful event in the middle of the night, which is going to wake them up and there's a lot of anxiety associated with that. The third aspect that's for sleep with them, usually has to do with what a pain medication that they're taking that can have a side effect or an effect on their abilities. We're always trying to look for things, and CBD might not be a bad idea but have the right dose, and they don't need a pillow to get it. 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?   One of my favorites is when people tell me that they need to eat a turkey sandwich or drink more milk before bed. Those are based on the idea that there's a trip to bed in each one of these. I calculated it out. You'd have to eat a 42-pound turkey to get enough trip to bed in your system. What about milk? One gallon and a half of milk to drink to get enough trip to bed. It's freeing because I grew up in Alaska, where we were the highest per capita consumers of ice cream. We drink a lot of milk. It was normal. I would drink milk as a beverage. One day someone told me, “The lactose in milk makes you tired.” From that day on, whenever I drink milk or eat ice cream, I feel tired. It fucking programmed me and I stopped. I have this impressionable psychosomatic response or something from people telling me that milk makes me tired. I stopped drinking it, which is probably fine, but it also keeps me from eating ice cream when I want to because I don’t want to get tired. To be fair, you can eat as much ice cream. My brain will accept that and believe you and I'll be fine now.   When we look at foods before bed, it's interesting. I worked with this company called Nightfood and we create snacks prior to bed, which is sleep-friendly. We don't want people to go to bed hungry because if you had an empty stomach, you're going to be thinking about your stomach going to sleep. There are also some data to suggest that we want to keep the microbiome happy as we're going to bed as well. I worked with this company, we had bars, but your favorite thing is about to happen. We have an ice cream. What’s different about your ice cream? It's not like melatonin flavored ice cream. It's got an ingredient profile that's very pro sleep. I mean that it's about 75% carbohydrate and 25% protein. You keep the calorie profile down to about 150 calories for the pint use. Most people seem to like the pint, but what's interesting is carbohydrates make you sleepy. The reason that they do is that they promote serotonin. What's interesting is when you're sleep-deprived, what do you crave? I don't know. I'm high calorie, like donut, muffin, that kind of stuff. Deep-fried stuff. What your brain is doing is sleep deprive. For whatever reason, you're sleep-deprived, which has caused your cortisol levels to jack up. The cortisol levels stay high and your brain doesn't like how a lot of cortisol is all in it for long periods of time. That's when you get things like adrenal fatigue and real long-term stress, acute stress disorders and things like that. It wants to calm it down. Your brain tells you to eat a Snickers bar because when you eat that Snickers bar, it causes serotonin to be produced, which quells cortisol. The reason that when you're tired, that you want to reach for a Snickers is because of cortisol. You're not going to get energy from that. You're going to get sleepier from that. You get a small sugar boost and then you crash. It's terrible. If you get sleepy in the middle of the day, you’re better off walking outside, getting fresh air and sunshine because between 1:00 and 2:00 in the afternoon, your core body temperature has a bi-modal distribution. At 10:30 at night, your core body temperature drops. That's a signal for the brain to release melatonin. There's a secondary drop between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon, but it's smaller. That's why everybody gets tired because it is 1:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Don't go and eat a bucket of muffin. Go outside and get some sunlight, reduce that melatonin production and you're good to go. I bet you could try that and reduce your caffeine. What about modafinil?   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. Here's the thing. Narcolepsy only makes about 50% of the population. It's tiny. There are more Provigil prescriptions out there. There are north of 5% of the population, ten times in the US. The question is, why? People use it as a performance-enhancing drug or nootropic. What's interesting about it from an nootropic standpoint is all it's designed to do is focus on the sleep centers and be able to calm them down, make it so that you're not sleeping. It turns out over the course of time, we realized that narcolepsy isn't that problem. Narcolepsy turns out to be a nighttime problem, not a daytime. Narcoleptics get shitty sleep at night. We now give narcoleptics sleeping pills, which seems completely counterintuitive. We give them sleeping aids to make them sleep deeper, and then they're not as tired during the day. We use the Provigil to maybe stave off a little residual daytime sleepiness. What's nice about Provigil is it's not a full-on stimulant. If you took Adderall, caffeine or cocaine, it's going to jack and there are side effects and problems. Provigil has less of that, generally speaking. My understanding is there's not a lot of negative side effects.   I've taken it personally before to try it out. It's a clarity that seems to come with it and the level of alertness, but it's not like you're jittery. I learned about it from fighter pilots who were using it when they got up flying for sixteen hours.   The military has these things called the go pills and no go pills. Go pills are Provigil, no-go pills are Ambien. That's how it works. I've seen people using it in the early introduction to Provigil. It was like, “At midnight, when you normally go to sleep, take one of these and you'll get another four hours.” That worked. After that, you could have another one and get another four hours. We could do it all week long and not sleep. That's a bad idea, why? We can't replace the natural process of sleep. There are consequences. For example, if you continue to take Provigil, what occurs over the course of time is that it isn't changing that adenosine buildup that's still going on inside your brain. The body will eventually crash. The good news here is nobody has ever died of sleep deprivation. The longest person that's ever been awake is a guy named Rudy Gardner, 11 days and 25 minutes. He used tons of caffeine and he was playing pinball. It was in the ‘70s. He played pinball for a week or some crazy shit like that. He had some significant side effects and consequences for it. By day 5 or 6, he was hallucinating badly. When you look at deprivation, it's going to take a toll. I tell people all the time, “You can't fool Mother Nature. She's a bitch.” If you take sleep out of the equation, she's going to put it back and it's going to hurt. 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. The polyphasic sleep schedule. They were doing what's called Uberman schedule. Uberman contacted me. Is there an organization? There's actually a person, I think. Uberman schedule is a twenty-minute nap every four hours of being awake, and you do that six times a day. There is no core sleep in Uberman. In Uberman, you do twenty-minutes, every four hours. You sleep six times a day. Your total sleep investment is two hours a day. That was the state of the art many years ago. Then a couple of years ago, people started to play with what they call Everyman's schedule, where you have a core sleep of usually three hours at night and then you take three twenty-minute naps during the day. I know a lot about this part. With Uberman, the problem people were having was the naps had to be precise. You had to take it every four hours. Skipping one of those naps was like skipping a full night for you and I. The schedule is wildly inflexible and these people were up 22 hours a day. I read a hundred firsthand accounts by people who did them at that time. The patterns I saw were transitioning to it was painful. Sleep deprivation is horrible for a couple of weeks. Once they got transitioned to it, if they could stick to the schedule, they loved it. These girls, they finished their degree. They worked three jobs. They partied more than anyone. They had a great time. What happened to almost everybody is the successful people who get into it and stick with it for a year or more rarely lasts longer than that. Almost always, the reason is their partner makes them quit because you can't make that schedule work with a real-life or any normal societal thing. You are awake 22 hours a day. I found YouTube videos of these people online because they're up in the middle of the night with nothing to do. They're talking to YouTube and they would tell you like, “It's 4:00 in the morning. Nobody is up. There's nothing to do. I wanted to share my ideas for ways to kill time.” They burned through their to-do list. The first two weeks, they’ve got nothing to do. They're up in the middle of the night trying to trade ideas for ways to kill time until the world wakes up. It was fascinating.   Not much has changed. We have the core of the three-hour night in Everyman. We've got these twenty-minute ones that are particular times you can cycle down to about 3 hours to 3.5 hours. Here's what happens in my experience. I've had multiple CEOs come to me and want to do the Everyman. Almost nobody wants to do the Uberman. It's too difficult to try to accomplish. There are three problems there. Number one, you're 100% correct. You didn't say the actual word that I was looking for you to say, but I'll tell you what I want. People get lonely and loneliness leads to a lot of major problems. When people start experimenting with things like drugs or alcohol, you have to be almost completely no drugs, no marijuana, none of that. That's one problem is people get lonely. Number two, what I've discovered and I've only had one person do it successfully is that by the third week, if you have any proclivity for depression, it pops and you end up with a major depressive episode. Some people are suicidal. For any single person that asks me about this, my first thing is, “Do you have any depression in your personal thoughts or do you have any in your family history? If you do, this is probably not a good idea.” You are right, there are certain fragilities out there that don't withstand this system. The final thing is there's loneliness, depression, and it's the sheer boredom of it. How many times can you watch Netflix? The other thing to screen is, do you have something to do? Some people do. If you want to write a book, then that might be good for you. I haven't looked into this for years now, but I remember at the time, sleep scientists didn't want to touch it. You're talking pure heresy. You’ve got to remember something, I'm a heretic. People don't like the stuff that I do because I look into the science and I want to push and innovate the science, but 99.9% of sleep specialists would never consider in a million years. They're not recommending your books. Maybe it was certainly true then, apparently still true now, but one of the theories of why Uberman worked is because there were people who got on it and did it for years and were fucking prolific. I remember reading, the theory at the time was that you've got these different sleep cycles. You've got your deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, and is there a fourth one? There are two phases of six, 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and then there's REM. The theory was, once you train yourself to take the twenty-minute nap, people under Uberman lay down and sleep for exactly eighteen minutes. They then wake up. I got the Zeo Headband. I was on their scientific advisory. The first sleep tracker company in history. I got the sleep tracker. I put it on my head and went to sleep and I watch in the morning. In the morning, you get a graph that shows you all your sleep cycles. I would get spread over 3 or 4 sessions in the night, about 1.5 hours of REM. What I think I saw if I remember correctly with the people on Uberman who used EEG or whatever to see their sleep cycles was they would lay down, get eighteen minutes of REM and wake up. They're still getting about 1.5 hours of REM in a day. They've trained themselves to do it specifically in those naps. The lay theory at the time was maybe the REM is an important part of sleep and this deep sleep is some evolutionary artifact that we can forgo, which I thought was an interesting way of interpreting that as like, “That's why the people on Uberman are fine.” They're getting all the REM. They're getting as much as me. I'm wasting a bunch of time in between my REM cycles in the middle of the night to get that 1.5 doing deep sleep. You are almost there. I would say yes for REM sleep, but you've left out arguably the most important component, which is stage 3 and 4. Why is that important? It's all physical restoration. The body isn't going to work without stage 3 and 4 sleep. If all you got was 1.5 hours of REM, your brain might be swimming, but you are not going to be able to move. It describes a lot of people. There's the opposite. Maybe a lot of other people are getting a lot at stage 3 or 4 with no REM. That's why their brains are useless.   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. That helps a lot. I've seen you work on and other people work on a variety of different kinds of dietary supplements, things that look to me like deluxe placebos. I'm curious about, what supplements might be meaningful to take and then, how do we substantiate that? What I see with this is not just sleep-related necessarily, but with a lot of these supplements is a shit ton of total bullshit like the CBD pillow. It looks like that to me. I can't seem to map their claims. We have two problems with the supplement. One is almost no clinical testing. That's what you're starting to talk about. We have a secondary problem that's bigger than the nonclinical testing. The secondary problem is whatever testing that's been done on a single ingredient, then people would use that to substantiate what I call kitchen sink products. They'll take twelve ingredients, mix it up. They'll take twelve different studies to say that this thing was effective. This one study and one ingredient profile, as opposed to what are the interaction effects and what was your population? There's no real research. What happens is people go out there and they say, “I've got a supplement. That's going to be good for sleep. It's got valerian in it, which has got a research study behind it.” They can say it's scientifically proven, but it's not. It's a big farce for everybody out there. My goal in the supplement world is to number one, not give anybody anything that they don't need. Step number one is what vitamins, minerals, nutrients are in your body, in a lower state, in a deficient state that we need to bring up to par levels. That's when we were having a discussion about PER3, magnesium, iron and melatonin. For all those, we need to do blood work. Although you can do saliva for melatonin, but remember for melatonin, you want to look at what time of day you take it. It's going to be different levels at different times of the day because it's circadian. Once we get past that, then there are two questions, “Do I want to give you an herb that helps you fall asleep or do I want to give you an herb that accentuates a particular aspect of your sleep?” Those are two different animals. I've been playing around with some mushrooms, not like psilocybin mushrooms, but general mushrooms, and starting to learn more. Lion's mane, it turns out, appears to help with REM sleep. I have heard that before. Do you know Paul Stamets? This guy has been doing mushroom research, like renegade shit for a long time. You’ve got to beat this guy. I don't know him. I've listened to some interviews with him and he was also a computer nerd way back. I knew that, but there are some good interviews online with him. I'll find him. That guy knows a shit ton about what's possible with mushrooms aspects of it. For me, I'm not trying to create something that's not in nature. All I want to do is I want to get you back to a functioning level. By the way, your generalized nutrition has a lot to do with it as well. There's a lot of data servicing about something called your microbiome. We now know that your microbiome is the nerve center and send signals all over your body to tell your body to do different things. A lot of people know what the microbiome is by now, but it's fascinating because it was not part of anyone's conversation many years ago. We're at the beginning of understanding it and the way I always describe it, you've got all these bacteria that live in your gut and what you eat, it feeds them. What they spit out feeds you. That layer of indirection is in everyone, but it's different for both of us and everyone else. Since we don't have a way to measure it, this is why a lot of these diet concepts that work for one person don't work for someone else.   We're starting to see more personalization in the diet side of things because what we can do is you can measure your microbiome and you can get stool samples and things like that. It's a little bit more sophisticated and you can get a nutrient profile of like, “What do you need? What do you not have?” What I'd be interested to learn is what your view is on how understanding the microbiome is going to play out? We now know that microbiome has an influence on our circadian rhythms and the microbiome itself has a circadian rhythm. If we tune up our microbiome, by understanding our nutrition, getting rid of things like high fructose corn syrup, lowering our processed sugar, things like that are generalized good recommendations in any way, what we will find is our microbiome, the biology of it will get better, which will allow our entire human unit to work better, which makes us sleep better. A recommendation like that is more true for some people than other people because of the makeup of the gut. It has a lot to do with your dietary lifestyle. I started to learn not that long ago, I love McDonald's French fries. They do not work well for me and that's something that I have to accept. There are food consequences. My doctor prescribed French fries because my blood pressure is low.   I would say salt it up, brother. You need more fried food, I don’t, but that brings to your point, the personalization of it all. My prediction is that we're going to see more personalized medicine, diet and sleep, moving into the future. I'm excited about the technology that’s starting to come out in pharma, in holistic, and what's coming out in lifestyle. I'm learning about things that I never would have thought about before like breathwork like, “I know how to breathe. Why would I need breathwork to help me sleep?” It helps you sleep. We need to be more exploratory in the sleep unit. These ideas, let's fucking go and try them out. Let's test them. Let's put it through a scientific methodology so we can see if it works and let's advance the field. That's what I want to do. Unfortunately, a lot of my colleagues are stuck in the clinical side of it. They just treat apnea. It's true outside of sleep science and a lot of areas in science. We have this problem where people are getting narrowly focused. A lot of the incentives are screwy to keep people from wanting to do these new things. What's the thing that you wish you had that could advance sleep science? 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 believe that cannabis has the ability to lower pre-sleep anxiety. In our conversation, we were talking about how 75% of insomnia is related to depression. If we can find the right constituents within cannabis, I am not talking about getting people stoned. I am talking about helping people to sleep. A lower level of THC can lower anxiety. Here is the most fascinating part and many people haven’t seen this research, the pathways of melatonin and THC are almost identical. They use similar neuro pathways. There is a mixing that’s going on there somewhere. It gets interesting. My goal is I want to be the tip of that sphere. I want to be the guy that’s right on their front and doing the research and saying, “Let’s fucking figure this out.” It is one of the oldest plants there is. People have been using this for thousands of years. We are now in the state at least here in the US. It’s where we could finally start to learn how it works and what works. Thirty-five states have proven it for medicinal use, it is 15% to 18% for recreational. The horses left the barn and let’s wrap some fucking science now. I see extraordinary results for people but not, unfortunately, the science we need to understand what is happening. Do you have any other cool things you are working on? Don’t you have at least a couple of books? Are they any good? I do. I like my books. I am working on my fourth book. It is going to be all about energy and humans. My first book is called Good Night. That is a do it yourself 30 days make yourself better. Is it obsolete now or is it still useful? It is useful all the time. My second book is The Sleep Doctor's Diet Plan, lose weight for better sleep. There is all about the relationship between the metabolic process and sleeping, how those two influence each other. I give an interesting recommendation of how to sleep better to help your body be prime to losing weight. My third book is called The Power of When. It is all about the chronotype and the circadian rhythmicity. I was looking at that aspect and starting to learn how my bodily hormones are on a particular schedule. If I can predict it, I can choose what time of day to do something when my hormone levels are going to help me. That was my third book which I thought is fucking awesome. My fourth book is moving into taking all of that and saying, “Why do we sleep? We sleep to live. We sleep to spend time with our family, for our career, to innovate, and all of these things. I want energy from sleep.” I am combining with an expert on movement. We have created a way to identify your chronotype and body type. We have a series of sleep aspects and movement aspects to give you energy throughout the day without having to use caffeine and stimulants. That’s going to be the next one. How long before that’s out? It will be out in December 2021. You were working on a couple of other products. I work in the supplement arena, non-cannabis supplement because a lot of people are interested in that. I am also learning a lot more about counseling and scaled counseling people. When you look at the mental health aspect, we are finally getting technology like texting, it is a form of therapy. Michael Phelps is working with the company where they’ve got a whole platform and people can text therapy sessions. We are starting to see that this is moving. I want to see it happen for sleep counseling because there are many people that need a little attention. They need to learn from a trusted source that they can get their hands on and they need to scale. That does not exist yet but you want to work on that. I do. Do you need help? What kind of help do you need? I need to better understand the landscape to see if I can build it or buy it. The state of the artists, we have chatbots that you can train by having them watch or read a zillion conversations. It could be audio or text these days, but it learns from reading a zillion other conversations. When someone is conversing with it, it knows what to ask next. It can train the chatbot to lead them to a logical progression. You can make a decision tree and a flowchart. You can program that ahead of time. That’s how these things work. There are a number of off the shelf framework for doing that. A lot of reuse for customer support. There are better ones that can be used for healthcare. You can specifically train them despite what you have read in the thousands of conversations that don’t even recommend CBD pillows so they can be used as a way of scaling and counseling. Some of those tools are accessible. You can spend your weekend playing with it and bake your own chatbot. People can do that. You can bake a rudimentary one. What would be cool is for somebody that spends a little time with you, make your first draft one so you have your head around that process. Using machine learning, if you’ve got data that shows what you want, for the progression you want a patient to go through, these days are trivial for the computer to learn from all that data how to take a new person through that in the conversation. Most of my stuff is protocolized. If that’s true then, computers fucking love that. What machine learning gets you is pass that part is like, “What do we do in the situation where we don’t have the decision tree?” The easy way to think is for our lives, computers have been able to do anything that you can define in a series of logical steps. What machine learning brings us is the ability to have computers do things when we don’t understand what the logical steps are. That’s the difference. That is why it powerful, fascinating, scary, and difficult to get your head around because it can do things that we don’t understand. That might be something for you to play with, but you could start the old school decision tree style chatbot systems because they are powerful. They need to be applied to a problem. If you know what direction to take somebody in, like the chatbot can take care of doing that, 24/7 on text whenever somebody wants. I don’t think it is going to be that hard for you to make something like that. Show me the flowchart and maybe they can reach out to you. 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? It’s like, “You are a morning person, she’s not. No chance.” There is a lot. By the time you are sleeping with somebody, it’s too late. I would like to create something that would be fun. That’s part of the screening process. Can you imagine how well that will be? I did have some experience in dating women that were not compatible in bed for sleeping. It is like, “You run too hot, if I can’t cuddle you, forget it. It is not going to work.” Somebody might want to cuddle, but there is this temperature. By the way, a chatbot or an app like that has a lot of utility, not just from a fun and interesting standpoint but it is going to catch people’s interest. They start to think about those things, and then I can teach them about body temperature, circadian rhythmicity, melatonin. Let’s figure this out in a scientific way. That’s the goal. You can use the chatbot for intakes screening like, “Chat with this bot for a while. If we have a good recommendation for you, we will let you know.” That’s a way to scale it. Are there any other products that people can get that you worked on? I made my own line of blue light blocking glasses, which I like quite a bit. Do you wear those at night? Wear that 90 minutes before going to bed to help lower the amount of blue light exposure if you have a problem sleeping. If you don’t have a problem sleeping, you don’t need one. Those are interesting products. Also, I worked with different companies to help them learn more about the science of their products. Part of what I am working on now, which is interesting, is the Mattress Universe. I believe that sleep is a performance activity. I am a runner. If I go running, I can run in my flip-flops, cut-offs, my torn t-shirt, and my Boombox. I think you should do it though. 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. Is that something you do or something that people can sign up for? There is a group online that helps you with it but they just give you the data. They don’t interpret it. What I do for my client is I get data and I will do a full-on interpretation. I’ll say, “These four snips are variations for obstructive sleep apnea. Let’s take a look at each one of these studies and see what identifies for you and let’s take a look at the data.” It is a little painstaking at first. I have to get it down a bit more refined. It is possible. That becomes a roadmap in walking that path. Are you available for people who need a sleep coach? One of the things I’m trying to do is scale because there is only one Michael. I have a small practice. I see 68 patients and I do see people like Paris Hilton. At the end of the day, I want the best in the world so I can focus on interesting problems and then take that information and spread it. For everybody else, they can read your books. Do you have a podcast? I have a podcast called Sleep Success with Dr. Michael Breus. In my website, I’ve got over 800 blogs on these topics. People can dig in there. Any question you have about sleep, I have written 1,000 to 15,000 words exposé, all reference and full documented on anything that you want to know. Do you have any questions for me? I don’t but I want you to know that I enjoy our friendship, our talks, and our time of innovation. You are the most innovative and interesting person I know. I enjoyed our time. Hopefully, we can come up with more good ideas. I think we will. Important Links: Michael BreusSleepbudsEbbNightfoodPaul StametsGood NightThe Sleep Doctor's Diet PlanThe Power of WhenMatch.comSleep Success About Michael J. Breus, Ph.D. 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. Dr. Breus is the author of The Power of When, (September 2016) a #1 at Amazon for Time Management and Happiness, #28 overall) a bio-hacking guide book proving that there is a perfect time to do everything, based on your genetic biological chronotype. Dr. Breus gives the reader the exact perfect time to have sex, run, a mile, eat a cheeseburger, ask your boss for a raise and much more. His second book The Sleep Doctor’s Diet Plan: Lose Weight Through Better Sleep,  discusses the science and relationship between quality sleep and metabolism.  His first book, GOOD NIGHT: The Sleep Doctor’s 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health (Dutton/Penguin), an Amazon Top 100 Best Seller, is a do-it-yourself guide to better sleep. Dr. Breus has supplied his expertise with both consulting and as a sleep educator (spokesperson) to brands such as Hastens Beds, Ebb Therapeutics (FDA approved insomnia treatment),  Princess Cruise lines, Six Senses Hotel and Spa, Lighting Science Group,  Advil PM, Breathe Rite, Crowne Plaza Hotels, Dong Energy (Denmark), Merck (Belsomra), iHome, and many more. Dr. Breus lectures all over the world for organizations such as YPO (Young Presidents Organization) 20+ times in 2018-19,  AT&T (10 times), on stage for Tony Robbins (Unleash the Power), hospitals, and medical centers, financial organizations, product companies and many more. For over 14 years Dr. Breus served as the Sleep Expert for WebMD. Dr. Breus also writes The Insomnia Blog and can be found regularly on Psychology Today, and Sharecare. Dr. Breus has been interviewed on CNN, Oprah, The View, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Ray, Fox and Friends, The Doctors, Joy Behar, The CBS Early Show, The Today Show, and Kelly and Michael. He is an expert resource for most major publications doing more than 250 interviews per year (WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, and more).

About two billion people that are going to move into cities by 2050 and with that growth, the demand for efficient transportation is going to increase dramatically. In an era where we’re already seeing inefficiencies in urban mobility having a massive impact on the economy, public health and environmental health, it’s hard to imagine a future of transportation that doesn’t border utter chaos. Cognizant of these projected problems, Assaf Biderman, is working on solutions that harness the power of artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies that are already within our reach. Assaf is founder and CEO of Superpedestrian, founder of the Senseable City Lab at MIT and an awesome guy to learn from. I'll admit, I have been dubious about the rentable scooter business, but Assaf has me convinced there's an important place for these things in our cities. If you have any interest in urban mobility, this conversation is important. You're still at MIT, but you don't have to go anymore because no one goes to work anymore. The whole lab has been removed since March. I'm still on the board of the lab. I spend most of my time at Superpedestrian. Is the Senseable City Lab still going? Yes. What are you guys trying to do? Senseable started in 2003, 2004, where the goal was to say, computers are becoming part of everything. They can emit data. They can act on data. You can embed them in your environment. That allows us to completely change the way we study design and impact cities. Some people call this field of smart cities and I don’t like that. It is because there's no such thing People are smart enough, but there is a lot that you can do. You can discover new things about how people organize themselves and about how it flows through the city, energy flows, waste, the things we consume, people, and communication. A lot of that can impact how you design them and how you manage them in real-time. It's got a lot of value. It's one of the largest lab fields. I've been doing work since 2004 in partnership with cities all over the world. Those are big city partners and a lot smaller. It was funded by corporate for the most part and more will survive by long-term brands, but most of the money came from corporate where cities volunteered themselves as a subject matter and tell us about what problems they care about. Probably they want to look at together with us. We use the bigger money from corporate, all thrown together into one pot. We basically manage the deployment of dollars into research areas that we care about and the cities care about and the consortium that the management cares about. Most of the time, technology surrounds machine learning, robotics, various types of analytics. 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? The impact areas that we care about are the stuff that makes cities function better or worse. We look at a lot of transportation, and probably half of those are transportation, whether it is dispatch algorithms to global taxis that we’ve been working on for many years. There's quite a bit of knowledge there that’s generated this whole micro vehicle angle, which is what Superpedestrian is spun into. How do you define micro vehicles? These are tiny vehicles that take vertical space. The key thing is you got to take much less space on the road than a car does, but the longer answer it depends on the occupants. We want to make sure that we are able to get a lot more people on the road. There are about 2 billion people that are going to move into cities by 2050. There is no way that these people are moving. Cities are already overbooked so 1.16 people in a car, which is what we do today, like Sedan don't cut it. Think of something else where the utilization is a lot higher, either a tiny vehicle for “1.16 people” or some way to decline transit with these other modes. It's classically called multimodality. Cities have done this for over a century with subways. You walked into the subway. Now we want to extend the reach of these systems or any new modes on either end. I have a zillion questions about this. That's one thing about transportation. We've got a lot of work on housing. I work on energy, waste production, and communication. How do communities lay themselves out in space, which touches on the essence of why we come together probably in cities, in the first place? It is to get access the diversity to human capital. There's increasingly work on the intersection between biology and cities because you can learn so much about how we are impacted by a built environment or how it should be better designed by studying, for example, the collective microbiome of communities. It's public health that provides that like the spread of pandemics. It is quite a bit of work on that in the last several years with robots that eat your shit and tell you something about the collective gut. It's been spun off. They started doing well when COVID came around. I've heard multiple pitches for companies that want to sample sewer systems to figure out where in the city there's COVID or whatever pandemic. There is this company called Biobot, which we spun of Senseable from the project we called Underworlds. I'm looking at it for a while at Eric Alm’s lab. Well trying to amply signals in the sewer that relate to that. You said you're on the board, but are you actively doing anything at the lab or you're pretty much busy with the startup? I am, but much less than intensive. A startup is something you want to put yourself into completely. Coming at it from a different perspective, at Intellectual Ventures Lab where I was working., we created a group called Institute for Disease Modeling. Essentially, what the team was doing was computational modeling on the spread of disease. Mostly third world stuff, but what happened was we created computational models on things primarily like malaria and big infectious diseases there. When the first Ebola outbreak happened, 12,000 lives were lost. When the second Ebola outbreak happened, twelve lives were lost. In between what happened among other things was we were able to do computational models to optimize the ring vaccination campaigns so that we could quickly contain those outbreaks. That's a two order of magnitude improvement on lives lost. With infectious disease, it could be a pandemic candidate. A lot of the gains came because we were able to use computers to help us make better decisions. I use that in my mind as an example of how computers with these modern tools, computational models, big data, machine learning, network models, being able to help humans make better decisions about what to do with large complicated problems. Things that our intuition would fail us. That's the rough thesis I have in my head about what's possible. What I imagine is that you have a lot more experience than me with the Senseable Lab going and figuring out for cities. Exactly that because in my mind, in the future, even the near future, we should be able to use these types of tools to help us make better decisions about city planning, transportation, infrastructure like sewer systems, water, power and all those things. We should be able to make use models to create thousands of possible futures and let us choose which one is the best from that. It seems like that's the work you've been doing for a long time, in some sense. What I want to do is figure out if you have examples from that work to help me substantiate this view, help people see the potential and how we make decisions for situations, where asking an expert isn't going to get you the best answer because we've tapped our tapped out on our potential with that type of decision-making process. There's plenty of examples. When we started this work, it was a few groups around the world looking at this and there was very little data to go by. We had to do a lot of data, to partner with companies that have data running through them for other purposes, cell phone companies. We worked with a lot of vehicle services and also the computational capabilities, the analysis, the science behind the analysis, the mathematics was it a difference. Some of this is being put to practice. It's in a very different state. I still think we're fairly early on. I'm not sure that the biggest value to be had from this cyber-physical city is in the ability to somehow centrally make decisions that are smarter. When it comes to pandemic, you definitely want that. That's the great rule, catch to spread, know how to cut the chain of contagion, what we've all learned to think of a split flattening the curve. All this stuff is perfect for centralized decision-making systems where theaters can be effective. However, if you think about a lot of the things that are happening in the city. People, the citizens, the actors themselves are the ultimate decision-makers, how something ends up behaving, how you navigate yourself through the city by what you throw away, where you work, and where you live. Almost all the decisions about the way a place functions played by the people who use the place, not the people who mattered. I think there is an important distinction that I want to put out there first. It becomes interesting when part of these computer models or computer analysis becomes open and information brings a citizen as an ultimate decision-maker, so that citizenship could become smarter. It's a good, amazing dream. There's little stuff that we're already doing, but there's a lot more that we can do. When you say that, what I imagined is like, Mumbai versus Seattle or where in Mumbai, citizens are making all the decisions. There's nothing central going on. That's affecting the city. As far as I can tell, Seattle, the city is making decisions, largely poor ones about everything. The citizens aren't making a lot of the decisions I don’t feel. Am I wrong about that? Do you see a spectrum there? Think of the things that you do from the moment you get up in the morning until you go to sleep, how much of that is being dictated by somebody else? There are very few. It's in your immediate environment that predicts how you move, where you eat, what'd you buy, how you consume, pollute, contribute what you work on, and all that stuff. Transportation, housing, and education are big pillars of cities. They are navigated by cities. At the end of the day, people are driving these pillars. Let's leave it at this abstract level for a second and try to focus on it. Let's talk specifically about transportation. Now, we make choices about transportation that are driven by where we were, where we live, and where we'll spend our time. We might choose where to live based on the availability of transportation, how bad is traffic. Is there a rail going to where I'm going to move to? At the end of the day, there is the impact of the decisions made by the Central Transportation Authority. It can be a mess. It is something we're planning for an alternative can be a mess. Let's think what's positive. We have a pretty good understanding of how demand has been shaping for transportation. It has been growing and growing. It hasn't had a flat year since 1984. Except for this one. 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. 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. You're looking at that so you get a pretty good understanding of demand, but at the end of the day, you can't change the supplier of transportation real-time. The cities are made of concrete. It takes a long time to change those big things like infrastructure. There is planning that happens as a result and the planning is quite long-term of the transit system. You do these demand surveys and the city ends up making decisions, 10 sometimes 20 years into the future in terms of massive investments or even management. Now, the question is we did an explosion in urbanization and the complete over-consumption of transportation, especially in the urban part, but also in four-doors in the Bay Area. It's congested throughout almost all week days. The same is true for our latest industry in London, Beijing, Jakarta and Bangkok. What do we do now? If historically, we learn how to plan transportations that have walked to the subway and then you'd walk again, we've learned how to do this. They are all planners who specialize in this. They work in City Halls and they can be using the latest and greatest data tools or the sources, but still, you walk to the subway. There were some ways systems evolved very slowly. We added the Bus Rapid Transit system. If you want to expand the regional systems, there need to be new modes of transit that can let you go farther than what you get than by walking. Think of the KickScooter that we're seeing a lot more around, shared e-scooters, shared e-bikes, and mopeds. One person covered vehicles like a tiny car electric. All these are going to become a part of a multimodal, very flexible transit system. That's most likely going to be part of mobility or urban mobility systems into the future. Do you think these scooters that we see for rent on the street are here to stay in cities? Are they improving things? In some ways, yes, but let's take a step backward. First of all, I think from a form factor perspective, what matters is that people like them. They find them useful. They have improved. They will improve a lot. That is what Superpedestrian is about, that technologies that make them safer and more manageable, but you'll see multiple forms. This one form factor addresses a certain type of user, which is those short 1 to 3-kilometer trips. They're not great for groceries or whatever. You can't hold stuff on them very easily. You don't want to go too far, but they're great if you're wearing a skirt, if you're wearing a suit, or if you want something non-committal and they're fun. Most importantly, people seem to like it. In 2019, there are 250 million trips made on those and it is growing. That means that there's something that people are willing to do instead of using other modes. The question is, what does it come at the expense of? Is it replacing walking? Is it replacing subway trips or other transit trips? Is it replacing a ride-hailing trips or private carts? There are more and more research that shows that at least a third of the hour on average is already thinking mode shift away from private car use or ride hailing what cities crave. Elected officials are being elected into office to do something about traffic problems, which wasn't the case, get cars off the street. If you have one mode, the scooters, which takes care of the short end of the trips, we'll see something else which takes care of the medium-range trips, electric bikes, for example, or even longer the moped. Perhaps a slightly different type of trip would be something where you have covered vehicles and you can carry your shopping or your child, all of this under the mandate of being small. It takes little space on the road and it is electric so that it doesn't pollute. The question is, can these things combined so that you now have an option for coming from the periphery of a city into a transit hub or the city center? By combining walking with a scooter with a car or whatever, any kind of combination thereof, that's multimodality. We know how to plan this. Now, we have the data system that can allow us to merge these new vehicles. From the academic perspective, the planning is pretty well figured out. The vehicles themselves have been lagging behind the engineering that the technology of businesspeople making them a possibility has been lagging behind planning of this. I'm glad to hear you say that because first of all, you said a quarter billion trips, but that's not much. Don’t quote me on the number, but compared to something on the order of 20 to 25 trillion passenger kilometers, driven by individuals in cities every year. We have a ways to go. That's a way of measuring ran from a mobility passenger, a trillion passenger-kilometers per cab. If I am not wrong, there are over 22 trillion passenger-kilometers around the world and the way you want to measure it is by passenger-kilometers per cab by a trillion passengers. You divide 22 trillion by global population. We're expecting 60 trillion to 70 trillion passengers-kilometers by the middle of the century. It's mind-blowing. The question is, how do you provide that in giant vehicle space? There's not going to be room to support that. If you don't supply this, it is not just about our life is going to be terrible or understanding traffic. It's other things. Eighty percent of the world's GDP is provided by the cities. If you don't keep supplying it with transportation, if you don't keep up with its growth, you get stuck to the GDP. Environmentally, there is an impact. In terms of anything from productivity to public health, the impact is major. Did you say 60 to 70 trillion on what timeline? By the middle of the century, by 2050. These are predictions by Arthur D. Little and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. There is another similar magnitude. The vehicle's been lagging behind It's an engineering problem and it's a business model. The business model problem is clear. My experience with multimodal is that the transitions are expensive, especially waiting for a bus, waiting for a subway, getting off the subway, looking around for a Lime scooter, or whatever. The transitions are expensive and it makes me not want to rely on it. If I can afford something else, I'll choose it and I can usually so I pick a car. Dependability is key. You need to be able to make a choice of transportation mode or modes. If you don't know that it's going to be there for you in the morning, you got to be late for work. Once or twice, and you're done. That's key. That's a lot of what we ended up focusing on Superpedestrian tend to do with the reliability of service and dependability. At the moment, it is still in juvenile stages, if you look at scooter services out there because the vehicles are wrong vehicles. The technology within them is not the right one. What's an example and how it could be better? They failed to offer. They come there and it's broken. It's driving me nuts. I get so mad trying to fire up a Bird scooter in Santa Monica and it's just pathetic. The battery's dead. I didn't park it in the right place. I got to drag it to some place where it's geo-fenced properly. The fact that the technologies behind them are not fit for the purposes, making it so that it's expensive for the operators to offer a service that they can't offer enough, in any way, that's economical. If we want to see success in cities, we need to see sometimes two orders of magnitude, more of these vehicles, which means they need to be a property. They can’t be just thrown everywhere. Technology is required there. How do you do a much better location? How can the vehicles autonomous needs enforce their own geofences in a much more precise way, which is something we have investing on? Manage the vehicles, but then economically, if your vehicles fail all the time and your cost of offering a service is driven by the amount of people you have to throw at the problem or keeping them up and running, replacing parts in them all the time, which is what scooter company does. That means that you're going to offer a very small fleet. Even if it's 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000, it's still small. A portion of them is never going to be worth it. If the unit economics don't work, it doesn't work. That means that you can't depend on the service. That's at the heart of the problem we're focusing on. I need to understand why this is worth pursuing in a city like Boston where it’s going to get some snow. Nobody's going to ride a scooter for some part of the year. It is the same for a lot of cities. In Seattle, we have scooters, it's not raining, but it's wet. I heard there's something about that, but I don't know anything. Back up and tell me about Superpedestrian and what the real point of this. 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. They cost a fortune to maintain. Companies cannot make sense of their business models. They're not safe enough. Cities can't manage them. It's a mess. In these micro vehicles, there is a world where if you addressed technological models, if you create vehicles that can ask themselves if they're safe to ride before arrive. Vehicles that can predict when something's about to break before it goes bad to prevent damage from occurring in the first place. Vehicles that can open their own repair tickets and say, “Here's what I need if they couldn't protect themselves.” That certainly does not exist, but if you could do that, you're changing completely the game for a small scale. It makes sense for fleets, but it doesn't make sense for auto manufacturers. There is no reason why it shouldn't work for auto manufacturers, other than the model of building a car now is very different they have a lot of Tier 1, 2, and 3 suppliers which bringing various black box or technology that you can’t control. It's a business model. I found it Superpedestrian in 2013, we focused on asking what are these technological bottlenecks that we can unlock, these fundamental technological problems we can solve in order to scale micro vehicles into the large scales that cities meet. We spent the first 4.5 years in R&D. One of the reasons why it's great to be in New England is you have people that come from the robotic industry specializing in the diagnosis and automated response systems. It is an embedded system control. We hired a whole bunch of smart and interesting people, top engineers from segway before they went bankrupt in the first incarnation who became Amazon Robotics moving the packages in the warehouse. The VP of engineering for my robot work is cool. A whole bunch of smart people came together to ask, “What is that platform that we can build that will be embedded in the vehicle that can make an affordable, super safe, electric vehicle that could provide the backbone for it.” We call that platform Vehicle Intelligence. We commercialize it in various ways. We have a product called the Copenhagen Wheel, which has a lot of it inside. Can you describe that real quick? The key thing we did was we developed a Powertrain. We designed our own motors, choose their own chemistry for battery lithium chemistry, and we build our own battery management system. That's basics, but that's not done in micro-mobility at all. For some reason, these are always procured efficient, much safer ways of providing power. We have encryption on the vehicle and User Access Management. We can track the performance of every smart component on the vehicle and also worry about it’s after a sales service in field service on the vehicle itself. If you know how well is my motor controller doing over, communicate that with, “I need to fix it.” I started to appreciate that. I've been obsessed with electric toys so I have been buying a ridiculous number of things I can with wheels and electronics. I never have a clear picture of what's going on in the controller. A lot of times, there's some weird incantation you've got to do to change a mode. I have an electric dirt bike that you pull the left brake and then the right brake three times then twist the throttle and then turn it off and on again. That's how to turn off the regen braking. There is all this stuff and I have no idea what's going on inside that thing. I don't know if my battery is wearing out over time or what the status of that. There is a lot I don't know. I'm expecting it to die at some moment. I don't have any diagnostics. Sometimes the throttle dies while I'm riding it. I got to restart the thing while moving. I have no way of knowing. I put on three different throttles and it still has this problem. I don't know what to do. I can see how even for a lot of these products, for them to evolve, that's maybe not buy another one for my girlfriend or my daughter because it's a little scary. I don't mind. I'm fine with things half working, but to be reliable in the way that you're describing, they don't even realize that the state-of-the-art isn't good enough for general use. The last piece we have on our vehicle platform is decision-making. You can observe it. What components on the vehicle they're doing and then say, “Can I attribute their performance to failures upstream?” What we realized early on is that the key to be able to do that is to completely swap out all the software of that vehicle. If you want to have full control of the software, not a third party IOT device, third party battery, a third-party motor controller, then you can start to have decision-making systems on your vehicle because you have access. Do we have information that can detect the thing that is about to fail? What fails in the scooter industry? Mostly electronics, otherwise the rest of it is the 1970s, technology mechanical engineering. It is pretty simple. The L-shape vehicle people abuse its fenders on them yet. The vehicle is very simple. It's all in the electronics. If you can have full control over the software, onboard the vehicle, now you're getting somewhere. Now you can respond in nanoseconds, milliseconds, and prevent fires from happening and from going out of equilibrium that if you move away from a thermal issue. If you don't manage your system thermally well enough for long enough, you're creating permanent damage to the vehicle. You can put the eventually the rider at risk. Can I break that down a second? One of the toys I got obsessed with is these electric unicycles, like a solo wheel. I started with the Onewheel, which looks like there's no way to look cool on a Segway. My daughter looks cool on a Segway, but I can't look cool on a Segway. I look like the mall cop. I got us one wheel, which is the one you stand on sideways, like a snowboard, and you can look cool and feel pretty cool. It is cool, except that is probably the most dangerous product I've ever gotten. I own the fucking lawn darts. That thing is actively trying to kill me. With the Onewheel, you can over torque the motor at full speed because you have so much torque with that deck that there's no warning. By the time that happens, there's no recourse. You're flat on your face at 26 miles an hour. It's a very powerful and amazing, but the wheel's not big enough. The diameter doesn't allow to have enough torque for my body weight. Everybody who has one of these has titanium pins in their elbows now. I'm not kidding. Everybody, if you look on the Facebook group for Onewheel, it's all photos of guys in a surgery going, “I can't wait to get back out on my Onewheel,” and their arms are pinned. It's insane. Fortunately, my Onewheel got stolen. I figured out that those electric unicycles where you have the big wheel between your feet, those things have bigger diameters so they can have higher torque on the motor. You don't have as much leverage on it. I started looking into it and they're dramatically safer. I don’t think they have a higher torque on motor. You have lower torque as a rider. Small wheels have more torque. The thing is that because the wheel is bigger, you're impacted a lot less by the surface of the road. It wasn't the road surface. Maybe you're right. It felt safer because it’s much bigger. It's clearly are safer. That being said, the electric unicycle community seems hell bent on making them less safe by making them faster. Now, you can buy these things that go 45 miles an hour. It's insane. Mine goes 31 and it's the first one that has full suspension. I feel safe on it. I specifically want it because Seattle's roads are shitty and there are a zillion potholes. I could go 30 miles an hour on it. I wear full gear. I have full motorcycle gear. I ride at 30 and it's got a full suspension. I can hit a speed bump at 20 to 25 and I won't fall. I wasn't trying, but I've tested that accidentally and I didn't die. I have not fallen off it yet, whereas when I had the smaller one that I learned on, I wear a full helmet, full motorcycle gear, boots, everything because I know I'm going to bite it at some point. The point I'm making is those things, the email list or the Facebook group or whatever. For those things is a lot of people saying, they're posting a video of the thing that went up in flames or they're posted a video about, “How do I get the settings right to do this or that?” There are weird Chinese devices and nobody has to make their own third party. They're making apps to try and mod the firmware. Nobody knows what's going on. Nobody even knows how to change the tire on one of these things. They're all swapping notes on how to maintain them. 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? The electric unicycle companies need to come to you guys and get their next-gen firmware. We don't sell the platform. You need to make an electric unicycle, “It's totally safe and goes 45 miles an hour.” It sounds like you're ready to do it. 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. That's helpful to understand. What's an example? A temperature and balance on battery. When I go to a Bird scooter, and it says the battery is dead, it's because something like that went wrong. 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. A scooter you'd think with two wheels, you couldn't have that many data points. 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. It knows where it is. Also, it knows what the city rules are by itself. The good thing about it, one of the biggest problems that have been is that pedestrians end up being penalized. If you want to see tens of thousands of vehicles like this, they can't be preventing the disabled person from crossing the road or somebody from getting out of their house. Managing them is important. What city has the most uptake on these things as far as for scooters? Is there a model city? Model, not really but Paris is doing a lot these days. What about bicycles? I know some European cities are big on bicycles. Is that part of what inspires you to think that we could have this many of these scooters like Copenhagen or Amsterdam? Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor is taking a major action upgrading the infrastructure of the city to be micro vehicle-friendly. They're investing a lot and they're taking away car lanes and they're putting in two wheels small vehicles lane. Seattle did that. We have them. During the pandemic, you should see the number of people on bikes and scooters because you didn't want to drag yourself into the subway. In Paris, traffic is always messy, even worse, and people don't want to get into a cab or Uber. They're using those lanes now. That’s interesting. During the entire country of the UK, speeding up scooter permitting processes this year. In 2021, just because of the pandemic, there have been places that have been the makers of cycling for a while, like Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Several other cities in Germany and the Northern Islands. In Copenhagen and Amsterdam, what's the uptake on like rentable scooters or whatever like? Amsterdam, it's not legal. There are no dockless scooters for rent. In Copenhagen, it is growing. It's pretty good. It's good, but forget about that, look at what's happening there with bikes, 50% of the trips, all the trips in the city center. They ride in the winter too. Will you describe it because it'll be interesting? What you described is it goes back to your early thesis of saying, “Computers are going everywhere. You guys have been leading the charge on computers that are going to go into scooters.” This is what's possible. They can be so much better than people even realize. We could be in the future where there's always a Bird scooter or whatever brand available. Don't you guys have a brand that you're working with? Our brand is LINK. We acquired the company in May an operator of Douglas. We operate in Salt Lake City, Utah, Columbus, Ohio, Knoxville, Tennessee, Fort Pierce, Florida, Rome, Italy, Arlington Virginia, and Provo, Utah. We won to Seattle RFP. You’ll soon have LINK Scooters in Seattle? We're launching LINK in Seattle. When LINK exists in Seattle, if I go up to a LINK scooter and it's going to work, instead of going up to a Lime scooter that doesn't. When we look at the data we've had scooters thrown into the river. I don't know why people do this, but we've had this in Provo and Columbus. We didn't even design for this. It turns out that this thing can detect that this is happening. We test for watering, but not for submarines. It turns out that these things had an 83% survival rate from deeping into the water. Not only are they recovered. What it does is it allows us to offer the service with the right number of students that cutting the place. Number two is you throw a lot fewer scooters into the environment. I think about it almost a million scooters were thrown into the trash talking about the apparel. Imagine maybe scooters and landfill. It is terrible. Lithium and Aluminum is polluting. We extend the life of these vehicles. We have equal to 2,500 rides and counting batteries that can go on 5 to 6 years. Vehicles since January 2 or 3 times a day are still at 15 cycle counts out of 500 because we have such an efficient powertrain in such a big battery, we can go 50 to 60 miles in a single charge. Your first product was the Copenhagen Wheel, is that right? Tell me about that. You might be sick of this, but I remember when you guys made the Copenhagen Wheel, I saw it on Weeds. You showed me the Copenhagen Wheel and then it showed up on TV. It is such a good show that was many years ago. For people who don't know, describe that one because it was pretty cool and pioneering at the time. We started that in 2008. The question was if you think biking is such a great solution for cities, but sometimes distances that you need to cover is longer, or you don't want to get to look sweaty. The use case for electric bikes. We started studying electric bikes and we realized that they're booming in Europe, but they're very expensive. The median price was around €3,000. They're expensive. If you're looking at anywhere mid-end and up, you can easily pay $35000 and they're okay. For that money we're like, “You'd expect a lot more. You can even buy a small car for that money,” especially if you want to see this scale into the millions, it can't be at that price point. We were asking a naive question, which is, “How can you increase their quality so that people can't resist writing them and make them more affordable.” At the same time, if you take the whole power, control mechanism and not sell it into the supply chain, if you look at the industry companies, the bike manufacturers buy a motor with a battery and a controller from a supplier, and then they build a bike for it. They sell it to a distributor, to shop, or to you. By the time you get it, you're paying 3 to 5X on the electronic parts. That's what drives the high price of electric bikes. We want it to smarter, what if we allowed people to buy direct tiny components? They have only one layer of margin on it. We cannot get a Ferrari for the price of a Toyota. We've built this thing. It is a Ferrari, it's an incredible machine. There's a culture around it. Many people say the best eBike ever built. It is learning how you move and respond faster than your body can sense under 10 milliseconds. Is it still the drop-in wheel replacement? How does that work? The only way to do it so that you can sell direct to power foreign factor was by making it a drop-in wheel. It's designed in order to be a way to convert your bike necessarily. We're happy when people do that. You could go to a store and buy any bike you want and make it electric. Is that happening now? What's the status of this? Being this is my first attempted business of tens of millions of dollars, we've developed something that's still an incredible ride. There is a whole cult around it and we make any of the United States. It turns out that if you don't have a distributor, shops or margin, you don’t have all these layers, you have very little help from the distribution. It means all the customer acquisitions and marketing is on you. With what we put up as fifteen-point margin, more or less, that's philanthropy. I learned a lot from that. It is an amazing vehicle. It's the basis of our technology and they are super reliable, more than 55% of the technical issues are addressed without human intervention. On the Copenhagen Wheel, the electrical issues, we know what's going on. We can detect issues and prevent them from causing further damage. We try to parallel. If you look at most of our work on what I call automated maintenance and self-protection, it's been done in 2014 and 2015. There is a lot of pens and sharing and did a lot of developing this platform. We tried to sell it initially to other operators and tried to sell it with the few large ride-hailing companies in 2016 and 2017, to the large bike-sharing operators in 2016 and 2015. There was very little desire to go electric. Basically, what I learned are two things. Number one is you don't want to take everything on you. Reinvent the marketing channel, the sales channel, and do all the technology and all the manufacturing and all the supply chain and all the purchasing. Everything is new. It almost no off-shelf part idea. On the other hand, what we did learn is that technology that we’ve made works and real. It's fundamental. This issue of detecting problems in real-time like water, temperature, balances, thermal management, and that has many applications. We're monetizing this now in the scooter world because I'm passionate about its mobility. Scooters, the first mode will be the other mode. We will be enabled in many ways by reliability, safety and scale. That's a way to completely drop the cost of offering a service is different using this technology. It's about 75% cheaper who offers scooter trip with this platform. It changes the game. That's an example of how you can start to embed. The intelligence could also be local in the thing. The users don't even know about it, to seize your scooter, you unlock it, ask yourself if it's safe before every ride it tells you this is safe, but otherwise, it should be a street bench on wheels. Be there when you need it. That's different from the high-level analysis or the centralized Oracle view that you were talking about back to the beginning of our conversation saying, “How to disrupt the contagion chain in the pandemic,” which is a different way to think about what computers aid us with. Think of it locally. It's an example where you've trained the device to know what it's optimal operating circumstances and what to do in response to different failure modes. Your knowledge keeps improving. Does the device itself keep improving? Is it connected? It's online so it can talk back to you. You can see the whole fleet. We started from an embedded system, but it's all online, the cloud. That is in conversation with embedded soft. 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. Didn't you teach me that analog visual hacking is easier than computer-based stuff? 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. Our platform now, the system is directly applicable to any vehicle under 12 kilowatt per hour, so the battery to motors. Is that anything DC? We were in a 52-volt DC system, but it's just a circumstance of the power rating of the different components, but if somebody wanted, they could put this in winter for detection or prediction of issues. That is a big deal. That's exciting. What do you guys need for Superpedestrian? What would be helpful for you? Do you guys need more scooter deployment partners? Do you need windmill companies or like what would be helpful to make you guys turbo boost the company? I didn't come with an ask but I will tell you where we are. We acquired a company in May and since COVID lockdown to remove, we expanded fast. We entered Europe and hired some great people. We have this special engineering team that's been built over seven years. That's great. We then acquired a company that's ten years old from Baxter. We acquired their fleet management business. We closed the gap and then some on operations on the ground. We have our own W-2. We have our own employees, but then we needed to close the gap on because of the government relations side of things. How do we directly the city? We hired some of the best people from across the industry and senior executives from other scooter operators. We are happy about that. We also fundraise some more. We're good on that front as well. What kind of help? Most interestingly, for us, is to get as many opportunities as possible to show cities our ways of offering safe, manageable micro mobilities. Cities are tenuous because they've had some mediocre operation come in, make a mess, end up with a lot of SKUs in a river. 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. The cities got burned. You want to be able to show them like, “We can do better. We can be 75% more efficient. We can come in and make these things safe and reliable.” We look forward to a less affluent community. It could be a lot more dependable because it's there. You need to manage it so that it doesn't ride in a park or next to a school. Our vehicle stopped within 0.83 seconds. We're at 99.91% success because the maps are on board, vehicles autonomously enforce the rules. It's very different. It's like half a minute without a vehicle. If there's no connectivity, sometimes it's never enforced. There are 250 cities around the world that didn't have scooter licenses. The number is growing to over 600 in 2021. There are more cities to deploy scooters. There is supply even throughout the world, irrespective of a lie. However, it's important to tell the story that technology and capabilities matter. Cities need to know that they don't want to go make the same mistake and end up getting burned in the same way. Otherwise, it is just a commodity. I remember seeing piles and piles of rental eBikes or something. In Beijing, companies tried to deploy right. Bikes for rent and that ended up failing somehow. There are stacks of them. That's an industry where the unit economics works. It baffles me how these things go. I want to let you get out of the wind here, but let me ask about one thing because this is interesting to me. One of the projects I remember you doing years ago which I guess must have been in the Senseable Lab was throwing away GPS trackers and the trash maybe all over America and then seeing where the trash goes around the world. This is an epic project that everyone should see even now. It a decade or more ago, but that was an amazing enlightening project where I could see for the first time what was invisible to me. It was so much more dramatic than what you would have guessed or what I would have expected. If you ask me at that time like, “What happens when you throw a can of Coke or a pair of sneakers in the trash,” I would have thought, “It gets picked up by the truck that goes to the transfer station where they send the recycling one direction and they send the trash another direction. The sneakers go to a landfill that's 30 miles away and the can goes to a recycling center somewhere in the state. It gets becomes aluminum that's melted down and turns into cans again.” That's what I would have guessed. That is not at all what you showed. Better than me trying to do a shitty job of summarizing, why don't you describe what that was about? The genesis was in 2008. We started seeing anecdotes about how waste moves. We wanted to try to verify this with a quantitative study. How do you do that? If you're a waste management operator, all you have is a statistical data. You don't get to know the pieces of trash flow through your system. We built these sensors that are IOT devices. They detect their own location and they communicate. We partnered with Qualcomm. They need to survive in the trash. That's quite an IOT device. I was talking 2008, 2009. Was it easy then? It wasn't too difficult, but we're not as good. We wanted to get six months of life of those. That required a lot of smarts and how you designed to power. The key thing there was we went to Seattle on purpose because it was their recycling time squad in the United States. Most investments, a lot of compliance on behalf of citizens. We wanted to see how it functions. We partnered with waste management, one of the biggest waste removal company, maybe the biggest back then, Qualcomm, Architectural League of New York and the City Hall in Seattle. We then invited 500 households. We gave them a list of average household goods that we want to track. We went to their home to help them tag their trash and told them, “Throw it away as if we were never there in the first place.” There are various other programs and that's when people brought it over to the library. Long story short, the first deployment was a few thousand pieces of trash that people put away. We started getting in real time because what we saw is that the things that we learned to recycle in the previous century, and been doing for a long time, metal, glass, and paper, have been getting to their end destination quite effectively. In three days, they get processed. We saw some anomalies, like some cheating, some recycling going into it, getting buried so you can catch some fraud. The interesting thing that we saw is that the newer thing to recycle, like electronic waste, nobody had a full bird's eye picture of it. Let's call it the removal version. We saw things going from Seattle to the East Coast and then back to the West Coast for processing. There's a tipping point where the emissions due to transportation, the advantages of recycling cell phones with the Florida printer cards went through Southern California. There are a whole bunch of things that we started observing. There was then a big flow to the Nikon Delta, which we did not yet understand. That led to a follow on project with an undercover operation that ended up exposing the flow of CRT (cathode-ray tubes) monitors to the Mekong Delta instead of being recycled in California. Governments would pay US companies to recycle CRTs because they are toxic. Because they contain cobalt? We need to dispose of them through particularly good control process and expenses. Instead of paying for that process, some of these companies took the money and ended up shipping them to be reinstalled in products or another life of these DVDs combined with a monitor repackaged into new cases. We put cameras as well as backers and these CRT monitors documented their road trip. Like GoPros in them or something like that and they're just recording. It is based on Android. There were multiple incarnations of the same product, which as you said, allowed us to take something that was fairly invisible before sprinkle a little bit of digital stuff on it, to bring it to light and learn several things I assume that I can find that stuff online still. The original product was called Trash | Track. I don't know if you've followed this, but in the last few years, we've been able to reflect on recycling. Some important studies have been showing that we probably shouldn't have done it. We've been doing recycling in the US for 40, 50 years. There are almost no cases where it's working at all even now, which is sad. Especially, living in Seattle where there's a lot of compliance. Everybody follows the rules, “We all separate our trash. We all do our part.” We all feel like we're solving a problem and we're not. I feel strongly that we're running out of time to do these feel-good things. We need to be focused on metrics and figuring out what's working and what’s the potential to work. With recycling it's, I think fundamentally, it's an energy issue. If you have cheap carbon-free energy, then you can recycle stuff. If you don't, then you're going to burn more coal to recycle stuff than not. I don’t know if you saw this. I have to look this up to show you, but there's a pretty damning analysis of recycling for plastic, less than 10% of the recycled plastics we get are significantly reused. They're trying to frame it as a case where the plastics industry tried to promote recycling as a way of making people feel like it was okay to use plastic. The whole premise of plastic to begin with is to do something indestructible. It's great for that. At least to last as long as I do and that's good enough. George Carlin used to say, “There is a reason why God made us the first place.” I never saw that. I got to find it. I haven't gotten to spend a lot of time on it yet, but what I think is probably the right thing to do now is go evaluate what cases we're recycling works has near-term potential, focus on those, probably get rid of and shut down the rest of them, and then focus on improving energy. If we can make abundant carbon-free energy, then we can get back to recycling. 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. There is exactly. In Seattle, everybody's going to follow the rules and do it. It's insanity. They wouldn't know either. They had nine links on the way from the person who drops off their trash until the final facility. Sometimes nine service providers, each handing a part off to one or another, None of them realizing the origin or the destination. “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. That's an awesome work. I'm excited about that project. It made an impression on me. Hopefully, other people got that. Hopefully, there's still some life in it and we can spread the word about it some too. We can wrap up and get out of the wind. We have some pretty interesting audience of people who are excited about technology. I think of them as a pretty high-value audience, so if there's anything you want to share, we can do that too. I shared so much. I'm excited now. There's a moment where robotics can take so many shapes. I focus on the robotics inside these rentable vehicles allows us to make them safer, more affordable, more ubiquitous. There have been like 30, 40 years of work since the late 60s about robotics. It's come to such a point where we can start to deploy that incredible technology in ways that make people live a better life, better with the environment, and make us be more healthy, productive, or having more fun. Transportation is my area, but I think it's an exciting moment because we've been talking about what to do about transportation problems since the 70s. It is the first time where we see something fundamentally new that people love and cities love as well. That works technologically that can be scaled. We're at the beginning of something. It's not the end of all the hype. We're scratching the surface. I had this experience a couple of years ago. I was in Brooklyn with a buddy of mine and I was going to hang out with him. He was at the City Advisory Council meeting, where I went to meet up with him. I sat in on a little of this meeting and the meeting was about what to do for the future of transportation in Brooklyn. I want to say years ago, I wasn't invited. I'm just sitting there. These guys gave a presentation about their vision for the future of transportation in Brooklyn. Their idea was to deploy streetcars in Brooklyn. Now, Brooklyn doesn't have streetcars, but it did a hundred years ago. They tore them out. You still see the tracks. In a hundred years, the idea has progressed from streetcars to streetcars. It drove me insane to hear them talk about this. They were talking about the economics of it. Apparently, it's like $5 million to build a streetcar. I literally grabbed a napkin, started writing down, “If a Tesla costs say $50,000, how many of them can I get for $5 million?” They're going to tear out road lanes and put in dedicated lanes for streetcars. I'm like, “How about if we make those dedicated Tesla lanes and we buy a zillion Teslas and we programmed them to drive around and pick people up and drop them off? They can do that now in Brooklyn. If they had their own lane, they could certainly do it. Doing it is a lot cheaper. You could do it cheaper. You don't even need a Tesla. You can create an electric bus. It's insanity to me that after a hundred years, the best idea Brooklyn can come up with is streetcars. I got kicked out of that meeting. I haven't been back to Brooklyn since. That's the thing is we're not doing a good job of asking ourselves, “If we were starting from scratch, what's the best that we could do?” Use that as our metric for the goal and say, “With no new breakthroughs, what's the best we could do if we were starting from scratch?” I know we got to knock that down a little bit because of tradition and regulatory issues and maybe some safety things we hadn't thought of and whatever people are used to. You're not shut down a little bit from optimal, but we could do so much better. People are not thinking that way and they set their sights to low. The thing is that there's so much understanding on what can be done before you have been introduced technological innovation to improve on urban mobility. Urban mobility starts from how you plan a city. If you live above an office, that's above a restaurant, you're going to drive a lot less. That's been well figured out since Jane Jacobs years ago. There's the world of planning, but cities changed slowly. It is not always under the ultimate control of the city because there are many pressures that the city has to deal with. Now, as an example, cities had to spend money on the virus. Some of the programs have to go out the window to find new ways of doing a thing. If you were going to describe urban mobility in 2030, how do you imagine a city? You could pick any city in the world and say, “Here's how good it could be knowing what we know now.” I think we can fantasize about it to get it. First of all, we know is that most likely cities are going to look pretty similar. There's a good reason. The lowest energy is required for us to move on the surface. Elevating us makes no sense. This whole idea of all that stuff to me is baloney. It can be done, but your question is, why would you ever want to do it if you're going to spend an order of magnitude more? It's so much energy, it's noisy and bulky. What's the point? Maybe for wealthy people to go from SFO to Palo Alto, that’s great, but that's not the killer app. The killer app is to raise venture money though. I respect that because maybe one day we'll become ubiquitous enough to replace aviation with something electric. It doesn't solve over urban mobility. Urban mobility is going to be a combination of mass transit from subways to buses to electric buses to call corralled electric vehicles. Whether on a predetermined route or on an agile flexible route mass media. You and I shared the same origin and the same destination along with many other people in combination with a multitude of other things. Other modes of walking, scooters, tiny little electric cars, like coats, and the combination of those, I think the common denominator is going to be slower and more individualized. I call them packetized. If you look back at internet architecture, we used to have this like hub and spoke thing where it's like the telephone of the 70s. Every wire from every house went to a central switchboard and you had to have a wire from there all the way out to every house. That got replaced with TCP IP, which is packet switch, where you got to get near something that’s online. The packets, can be routed to their destination. That's what I see is wrong with a lot of urban transport is that it's not packetized. You get on the bus where you at the bus stop, you get off at another bus stop, and instead of taking me like Uber does from where I'm at to where I'm going. It takes me all the way to where I'm going. That's got to be part of what makes it more successful because you reduce transitions and you make it. You increase convenience, reliability, safety, and all those things. Let me give you an example. We've looked at 45 cities around the world. The demand for transportation in them, this is through various publications at Senseable City Lab to do that at MIT over the better part of twelve years. Most of that data we got from cell phone service aggregated or anonymized, or a combination of those tell mode independent mobility, like walking included as well as cars must, as well as the subway. How do people move at large scale? You take that data and then you superimpose it on the city's transit system. You see exactly what's missing because you say, “I want to get from my origin to my destination.” You wouldn't care jumping on and off various things if they seamlessly connected with it. That’s going to be fine, especially if it's affordable and reliable. If you save an hour in the process, we overlaid that. We see, “First of all, which types of vehicles are missing?" You can see that there are some trips that are 1 to 2 miles, and then you got the 2 to 4 miles, and then the 3 to 7 miles. In the vehicle categories, you can see how many people shared routes, given time along same parts and/or you can decide if is it a 1, 2, 3-person vehicle that I need? Google Maps could tell you all these things now in real-time. Google maps, if you chunk it into trips, that's relatively simple logic. We had to deal with the same problem. We've done a lot of thinking about vehicle form factors. How big do they need to be? How many people did they need to take to be able to help you address as mobility demand as possible? We're starting with this tiny and basic thing. If those things existed, like the Uber app could ask you how many passengers and send you the right car or vehicle for the job. You can easily imagine it. There've been in this future that you get from your home. Let’s imagine you live in a suburb. You get from your home in a one-person car or on a moped or something like that. You dropped at a transit hub. An Uber could come by and drop a scooter off in front of your house if that's what you needed at the moment. The drone could deliver a scooter. Those things are becoming so affordable. You can also overcompensate for them with greater numbers so you wouldn't need to drop them off in somebody. It's a matter of lowering utilization. Thanks a ton for taking the time to do this with me. Important Links: SuperpedestrianMITUnderworldInstitute for Disease ModelingLINKCopenhagen WheelQualcommArchitectural League of New YorkTrash | Track About Assaf Biderman Assaf Biderman is an entrepreneur, author, and technology inventor. He is the founder and CEO of Superpedestrian, a robotics company that develops platforms of small electric vehicles for shared use. Together with the team at Superpedestrian, Assaf has developed fleets of scooters, e-bikes and other micro-vehicles with autonomous-maintenance capabilities and active-safety systems that enable much safer, cost-effective shared mobility services. Assaf is also the Associate Director and founding member of the MIT Senseable City Lab, a research group which develops technologies in big data, machine learning and robotics aimed at improving livability in cities. He has supervised research in areas of urban sensing, data fusion, and urban transportation, and also leads lab partnership initiatives with cities and the private sector. Assaf has a background in physics and design. He holds over 150 patents and publications, and has been honored with multiple international awards including the Red Dot Luminary, Time Magazine, Thomas Edison, and James Dyson awards.

Brent Bushnell is one of the most positive people I know. He's created Two Bit Circus to reimagine how the newest developments in computing technology can shape the future of entertainment, work, education and human interaction. Brent grew up in the house that built Atari and has been a lifelong hands-on maker that brings a prototyping mindset to everything he does. Listen in to this candid and eclectic conversation and learn about the mass of possibilities that we can bring into fruition with just a little stretch of our imagination. Pablos: We’re rolling. 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.” 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 almost like Machinima, people did with video games in order to be able to tell stories, but the AI side of that and the whole Deepfake thing has me excited from an entertainment perspective. I was ahead of that one because my view of the entertainment industry for the last decade or so has been that the camera would get replaced with this pile of sensors. You could have a human actor, but the point would be to capture what they do because we're going to render them anyway. We're going to render them at the point of consumption like a video game. The reason for that is you don't know when you're making the film, my native language dialect, the aspect ratio of my screen, my preference for how big the boobs are or whether it's Ferrari's or Lamborghini's and product placement. It's all going to get rendered at the point of consumption like a video game. The video game is oppression and showing the future of all entertainment and all media. It's interesting because a couple of things happened out of order. We've been making video game rendering better so that we could do real-time rendering equivalent to Pixar. We're getting pretty close to that, but then Deepfakes turbo-charged it because that gives you the ability to imagine making these high-quality renderings out of people who didn't even know. I saw somebody who's trying to make like a James Dean movie starring James Dean, “The legal parts were done with the estate of James Dean. He's going to star in a new movie.” The guy creating it won't ever leave his room and the rendering bay. You might still have a human actor because the toolkit for the guy in the room to make the virtual actor expressive is still limited. That's why we still use a human actor because they're a stand-in, but it could be your wife playing James Dean, get a real actor. They have to move and express themselves. There are certain times where the expression says that the actual mouth forming the syllabus matters less. If they were across the room, all of a sudden you could do synthetic audio and James Dean is pronouncing your names. 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 applications. 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 think it's better to get the audio right than their lips matching. I thought about this a long time for AR and VR. Everybody's fixated on those goggles, but the audio matters. The 360 is amazing. Some of these proximity audio games, you turn your head. I don't understand a lot about audio engineering, because one of the fundamental problems you probably run into a bunch that's been described to me in VR is it's been a difficult medium to try and use for narrative, for stories like movies. In a movie, the director controls where the camera is and controls what you see. In VR, you control the camera. The problem is if I'm trying to tell you a story and you're wearing goggles and you look away when I'm trying to, it's like, “There's an explosion. You missed the thing that you need to know. The clue was over here.” There's this problem that makes it difficult because the director in a movie can experience linearly exactly what's going to happen. You know that they controlled your perspectives. Here's how I have thought a lot about this because we did two-bit. We did a ton of 360 audio and video production. In the early days, in 2012, we built our own 360 cameras, a bunch of GoPros in a 3D printed rig because they weren't the greatest solution. We captured content for the NFL, Olympics and all kinds of stuff. I hate 360 VR. Is this for this reason or what? 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. What was described to me one time was that video game developers were getting clever because they have had this problem. They may have less narrative, but they still need you to get through the adventure. In video games, I remember hearing that like, “Valve would do these conniving things,” where like if you're on a street and there's a UFO coming down, you need to look up for the thing to happen. It's like waiting for you to look up, but to get you to look up, they would do these subtle things like all the streetlamps would bend and point up. You don't even see that happening, but it creates this feeling that like your eyes are drawn up, which should be out of the frame it initially. There are audio things that they're doing that I don't understand to get you to lookup. How do you make audio? I don't understand how anything could be above you in stereo, but somehow it feels that way. The one that I wanted for Two Bit was this ambisonics where you set up individually addressable speakers in a three-dimensional grid around the whole room so that you're in there, I'm in there and Ellis is in there. We're all getting exactly how the scene should unfold from our position in the room. I loved that. Who has that? It's like a tech stack that is mostly open-source. Can I set it up in my house? You can set it up in your house. There's some Linux version, but you need some special hardware. This became super relevant to me because in March 2020, all the events got shut down. All my jet-setting came to an end. All the things that would have been like speaking at a conference became Zoom calls. It sucked. I could play Pablo's character in front of a webcam, but it was not interactive. It was not very rewarding. I was not making new friends. It's broadcast. All the beautiful one-on-one personalization died. I instantly realized, “The whole point of these conferences wasn't to see me on stage after all. It was people hanging out together, having a shared experience, hanging out in the lobby, going to lunch, going to happy hour or going to the after-party.” You were the clickbait. I wanted to figure out how to replace that hanging out part. I played with a bunch of different technology. The one that has made the biggest impression on me was High Fidelity, which Philip Rosedale made. He was fixated earlier because he was doing this for virtual reality. Before COVID, he was trying to figure out how to do a great job of that 3G audio experience for VR. Since COVID, we started playing with that and some other technology trying to have events where you could have a better human connection. With High fidelity, I made friends with people. There's no video, just audio, you can wander around chat. You have a little avatar. Audio is high quality, no bandpass filtering, little to no compression, high bit rate. If you close your eyes in High Fidelity, it sounds like we're hanging out together here. People are spatially positioned around you. I talked to Phillip about some and he describes some of the neurological cues that are being sabotaged by Zoom and other video conferencing things. An example of that is like, for all of human history, every conversation we had was zero latency. It was face-to-face with no compression. Also, super high resolution. Your intonation, facial expressions and arm gestures, all of that is part of the resolution. 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.” It’s aware of about 50 milliseconds? For music, it's much lower, like musicians jamming together. In a conversation, 180 milliseconds is the max. After that, the conversation becomes, “No, you go ahead.” It's that shitty talking over each other. What latency are we looking at in something like Zoom? Zoom can be lower 180 bits, often more. He told me an average Verizon call in the US is 350 milliseconds latency. I started learning more about this and realized that it's almost as if Zoom is actively sabotaging the neurological cues that make me feel connected to you. It's because the eye contact isn't there, even if I'm desperately staring at my camera trying to make eye contact but I’m looking at your forehead. It's such a simple thing, but it's complex when you try to fix this. We are evolved with eye contact. You know how it is. I can be across the room and you’ll know if I'm making eye contact with you or if I'm looking at your ear. It’s Incredible. Even the idea that you could be looking at the screen, but looking at something else. The fact that they're, “I know right now you're not looking at a screen because we're here in person.” “I’m staring at your eyes the whole time.” We feel connected because at least we know that there's a mutual focus. Another one is that spatial positioning. People are scattered all over your screen, but their sound is as if they're in a pile. There's no way for these twenty people to be in a pile, but from an audio perspective, if you close your eyes, that's what it sounds like. They're all sitting in the same chair. It's weird for your brain. Your brain is telling you, “Pablos is fake. That's not a real person and you can't trust him.” That's the message that your subconscious has given you on Zoom. Twenty people in a pile don't even work physically. No human in history has ever experienced that. Phillip is doing a great job with High Fidelity pioneering that stuff. It bodes well for the future of VR. I'm interested in figuring out how I can come up with some of those types of technologies now to help improve the human experience online. There's real potential in it. We could do a little better. You were talking about that phones were great and Zoom has its problems. As we move along the immersion curve towards the best live experience, you're adding resolution. It's getting better. Who hasn't sent a text message that has been misunderstood because of the million aspects of context that were lost? I'm all in on live experiences and I love in-person, but once Two Bit is closed and we started to explore what virtual looked like, I started to realize that hybrid is going to be with us for a long time. As we've broken work, we shattered it opened so that now some of your colleagues are going to be remote. When it comes time for your HR person to throw a holiday party, doing it in person is not going to be enough anymore or worse some of your people are at risk which I think is going to need to be accommodation like ADA for a long time. All of a sudden, it's like an event has to be offered in both ways. The one that I'm super interested in is how do those connect? What are the connection points between the physical and the virtual? I don't know if you remember in Disneyland haunted house, in that huge room Madame Leota where she's projected on the crystal ball and it's her face. Behind the scenes, Imagineering is projecting on Styrofoam. You get the face in its early movement. It’s like fake projection mapping or analog projection mapping. Analog early is a bust, a head up. Imagine that I had a cocktail table at Two Bit with Futurama and you could come in and we can have a conversation, but a lot of the aspect ratio, the eye positioning, all of those things will be solved. The camera would be embedded right there in the forehead of the head in the jar. I'm able to look right at you. You're right-sized. You're at the right place on the table. My head moves more than madame whatever. You could imagine trying to solve for some of those things over time. Hybrid, I think has meant like we're going to have a physical event and then we're going to live stream it out to people who are stuck at home. We’ve got to be able to do better than that. There are voyeurs on it. I have become super aware of the role of the live audience in place. It’s a character in the show. Without them responding, comedy sucks. That's the one where the live audience matters the most and because of that, they've been the most damaged by not having live shows. It is shocking because you would imagine you and I as public speakers, it's the ultimate thing. A comedian being able to walk into a room and entertain 10,000 people where this lady arrives with ten semi-trucks and 100 people. A comedian is the ultimate low-fi and yet you would expect it to adapt perfectly to it, but without the audience, it breaks. I was thinking about comedy and that's one I want to play with because I think I know how to solve that. If you think about a comedian on stage needs that live audience, but the truth is when we're on stage, you can only see the front row. There are lights in your face. I'm looking at the front row to see if they're hanging in there. Are they getting it? Are they laughing? Am I my pissing them off? What is it? I think we could fix a comedy club because the truth is if I put a comedian on stage, I give you a front row sitting in every other seat to be distanced, it could be your family or the stage guys, they've all been COVID tested. I give you a front row, you've got half a dozen or a dozen people and you can get the theater for free. I put speakers in twenty other seats behind them and everything they do like if a guy in the front row laughs, then I render laughter from the rest of the audience. On stage, it sounds like I got 200 people laughing, but it’s only one guy. I'm getting those cues back as a performer. I'm seeing the front row, I'm hearing 200 people. You don't look behind you at 200 people, you hear them. I'm going to put the sound back there and then we filmed the whole thing and then it can still be a Netflix special. This is how to make a Netflix special for a comedian. Those people, they weren't interactive. They're at home on their couch laughing, but they're feeling the energy that was there in that live performance. The Geffen Playhouse is a great theater here in Los Angeles. When the second COVID hit, they launched The Geffen Stayhouse. Maggie and I watched one of their performances and it was a magician. When you bought your ticket, you could buy a regular or a VIP option. The VIP option had some random chance of being 1 of 25 of their live studio audience. Their live studio audience in COVID times meant a 5x5 grid of zoom people, but there were 6,000 people watching the Livestream. The camera would cut between the zoom of the magician, the 25 of the live studio audience zoom and back and forth. That addition as an audience member made a huge difference. Magicians are the best at figuring shit out. I got my magic puzzle company puzzles delivered, which is a puzzle company made by magicians and they deliver. It was a Kickstarter. They got funded supremely. It's a bunch of people from the Magic Castle. 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. It was approximate for convenience. If you think about the definition of technology, for my daughter it means the new iPhone. There’s no actual new technology in the new iPhone. Technology refers to something for a stage of its life cycle, but eventually, we don't think of wheels as technology anymore. There's some curve to that. For people working on technology a lot of them are deep in it then. Their idea of what technology is and what the point is and stuff is technical. For scientists, a lot of times it's exploratory. It's like, “How does this work?” They mix it to the layperson, intimidating and confusing. They throw their hands up. You get people concerned about 5G. The technology can be complex and intimidating. That's one problem. That thing that’s interesting to me here is you and I are both guys who are somehow early on in our lives got dead set on applied technology, like using it to do things for people. Make it accessible, use it as an ingredient in magic. I've always tried to use computers to do things for people. You're using technology in trying to bring it in some sense to entertainment, performance, live experience and all these things that most nerds are never going to do. I think that's unique. 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?” It keeps getting better every day. We get new types of cameras, new types of sensors, faster networks and computers. I believe that we've gotten to this point in our lives that your dad didn't have where we're not computationally constrained. His whole career was computationally constrained wanting a faster and more powerful computer. We don't have that problem. Imagine this is supposed to be a star in space, just pretend. It’s one way to die. We have enough computational ability, put six of them on screen at once and we're flying. There was an interesting thing that happened as a result of that. The game had to be awesome. There was this weird thing happened with video games. People were willing to make that conceit of imagining as long as the game mechanic was compelling. There was this weird moment in video games where the rendering got so great that people were like, “It's got to be beautiful. Let's get it beautiful first and we'll fix the game later.” That part is hard and takes a long time. There were these dark days for video games for a while. They were pretty and shitty. That happened with movies for a little bit, too. Many years ago, the race was on to see who could render hair. There was like Japanese studios trying to render hair. Toy story had no hair, but then Monsters, Inc. came out and it was competing with Shrek and they were both like, “Who could they do the coolest hair?” Now hair is a solved problem and we've moved on to like, “You got the hair, but what about the translucency of skin,” and then there was this contest. My contention is that we're not computationally constrained, we're imagination constrained. 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. Computer vision used to be in the domain of tons of PhDs and if you want to do anything interesting, it was going to take you the whole year. There are kids in third world countries running circles around me making creative shit with the same tools that I have. I love where you've landed because I do feel like the imagination constraints, a creative constraint is going to be the driving thing for most roles in the future of work. It is who is able to come up with interesting novels, play and figure out what to build. It's fascinating to me because your vocabulary is different than mine because you say novelty, you say play, I'd never used those words because that's what you're trying to optimize for just like what you're trying to build. I'm trying to figure out how to solve problems and it's not that my problems are more important than yours. It's the same thing. I had an interesting inner exploration when COVID was happening because they were like, “These businesses are essential. These businesses are not. We were in the non-essential category.” I was like, “It’s just play I get it,” but play is important and as people were going nuts without social interaction, I realized that stuff is important. I was like, “Do we have one foot in like the mental health industry in bringing entertainment and levity to people when their lives are difficult for one reason or another?” It was an interesting deep dive. I've tried to contemplate that similarly because it's easy to measure death. It seems to be less easy to measure cases of COVID. We, more or less are pretty good at measuring how many people died. That's one number that’s gotten mucked with a bit here and there, but you don't know what they died of. That number is screwed up, but the number of how many people died, you can count. You can't count seemingly as well the number of jobs and businesses lost. The number of conditions that were accelerated because they didn't get treated. When you extend that to mental health, the suicide rate is extreme. The contemplation of suicide rate is skyrocketing. These things are sad and serious. When you say essential and non-essential without articulating your values, then it’s 100% completely wrong. This is one of the problems we have in technology is that we try to ascribe value to things before we've defined our values. We saw the rise and fall of Facebook and Twitter, “Arab Spring, this is amazing.” All of a sudden, “No, the dark side is really dark.” At that scale, how to get the values in there because you are talking about the entire diversity of humanity and whose values? The notion that we're going to somehow have a watered-down set of values that the whole planet ascribes to is wrong. That's one of the beautiful things that I feel I've been lucky to internalize a bit from traveling, meeting people all over the world, different countries, different industries and doing different things. People live completely differently than I do. I don't want to live like that, but it works and it's their choice, culture and way. What could be more judgmental than to say that they shouldn't be able to do that? I do think there's probably a set of human rights we should all acknowledge. I'm advancing that, but I don't think Facebook's going to be the one to do it. We can say healthcare is a human right to safety. With healthcare, you can't do that. You can't make healthcare a human right because a human right should be like what you get from birth without infringing on anyone else. Like access to clean water. It sounds good because I think the not infringing on anyone else part of it is important. The healthcare infringes on somebody else. Someone else has to do it. You can't make that a human right. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to give everyone healthcare, but you can't classify it as a right. Even something like clean water. Everyone should get a right to the clean water. If I'm fucking up the water so that you don't get it, I'm violating your rights but if I have to show up at work at 3:00 in the morning to give you a triple bypass because you have that human right while you're infringing on my rights to not show or choose what I want to do with my life. It's sad to see in America what we've done to doctors. They're the most abused humans I know, but in COVID, with healthcare workers, indentured servitude would have been better in what we're putting these people through right now. It's sickening. They have to show up while all I got to do is stay home and watch Netflix to get through COVID. They got to go. They have to deal with the absolute epicenter. That's an example. I don't think you can coerce people to do that. When I was going down this thread of like, “I hope that in a world, that we can have people,” just like you would like everybody to have ongoing education, which is the news. It may not be a human right, but a truth in your news. Lifelong access to news is seemingly a human right, but not lifelong access to education or learning. I don't know if that's true. This is something we also don't seem to acknowledge, which is that when you and I were kids, I had to go to the library, get a book that was published seven years ago and finally showed up at my library about computer mainframes or something. Now, kids can go to Wikipedia and YouTube and learn anything overnight. My problem is that if we're going to make sure that everybody's listening to you or you want to represent no bias in your news, you could represent the different scientists and uncle Joe crackpot in a van in the desert with a counter view, do they get equal weighting? 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. Isn't that ostensibly the like button? No, it's not discreet enough. They have some magical algorithm that I don't get access to determining what's going to keep my dopamine machine running. They're optimizing and that's why they don't want to give me control of the knobs because they want to control of the knobs. The truth is if they bury them in a setting somewhere, like all the other settings that no one can ever affect, then you could at least say, “It's not our fault. This is what the users chose.” I could sign up for people to turn my knobs for me. I could have the ACLU turn my knobs or I could have the New York Times. That's what those media organizations used to do. If you want CNN turning your knobs, fine. You could sign up to let them. That's what they should do. Facebook and Twitter could kick back and say, “It's not our fault.” You could sign up or whoever you wanted to inform. 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. That's what made blogs work, but Facebook killed off the blogs. This is not Facebook's fault. It's the user's fault. We chose Facebook over blogs. Blogs were open and distributed, democratic and egalitarian. Anybody could make a blog and post wherever you want. You don't have to subscribe. The blog was content and curation. You subscribed to the content and curation that you wanted to using RSS reader. It turns out that almost every website still supports RSS. It's just that no one uses it. I use RSS. I have a reader that subscribes to different websites, blogs and news. I've created my own knobs. I have filters that say, “If the word Donald Trump is in there, I don't read it.” I do not read news about elections. I don't read news about Donald Trump. I don't want to know. It's not reaching my life. I've got better things to do. The first time I set this up was many years ago. I didn't want to hear about Disney. I do not give a shit about Disney. Cory Doctorow loves Disney. I have minus Disney and everything else minus Donald Trump. That was my initial motivation to make these filters. I use RSS and I still get too much stuff so I have to constantly go back and add more filters to reduce and unsubscribe from things that send me too many things. That's why I would like a curation organization. I would like to be able to subscribe to it. It could be part of their API. You could choose different people. It's like, “I only want to read whatever Kanye is reading. I want the feed of what Kanye is feed. I want what he reads because Kanye is the most informed American and I would like to be up on his level.” I use a service called Inoreader, which allows me to do all the subscriptions and filters and things. You can set up things like search so you could have it search the internet for any time there's a new post about Two Bit Circus or whatever. Google Alerts do that thing for you. On the phone, I use an app called Reeder 4. In order to be able to do those alerts, does it have its own spidering? It's not as hard as it sounds. We used to think spidering was magical, now, it's not that hard. Thanks for waking me back up to RSS. It makes a feed customized for me. I pay $5 for Inoreader. 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. I see why people do it. One of the problems has been for publishers or any creators, the platforms are fucking them over. Facebook's charging me to send a post to my own followers. Instagram is the same thing. They're intermediating these creators from their own followers. The only thing that doesn't do that is email. Email is a different problem, which is that it's full of spam and shit. Now, for brands and things, Gmail, the dominant reader is moving all that stuff to the promotions tab and stuff. You still can't get to people with high reliability with email, and that's why everyone is switching to SMS. That's why every company is trying to give them your phone number. They don't care about your email address anymore. They want your phone number because email open rates are 6% to 20% and SMS is 98%. I see it with myself. My SMS looks so much more organized than my email. 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? As we go down the list of them, I feel like the calendar has had potential solutions. Upcoming.org and a few of those that centralized events for your community because sometimes I'm getting an email because they're trying to put something on my calendar. Frankly, I might want it on my calendar. I would love to get the email too. For a while, Facebook events were working great. Not in COVID, it died in COVID, but for the last many years, because you can load the events app on your phone without even loading Facebook. What it does is it's easy to invite friends. Facebook for better or worse is the social network that's mostly built out and most of your friends are there. If you're having an event, like I would do dinner parties, everybody I'm inviting is on Facebook. You add them and that one was good. The original architects of the internet did such an incredible job imagining RSS. RSS for news, great. Email for communication, great. The calendar is working pretty well with Google Calendar and it's standard spaced and it works. Most of that I think is working well. Can I subscribe to a feed of events? You subscribe to a calendar. Like my kid goes to her school and has a calendar for the lacrosse team. You subscribed to that. The user interface could be better, but I'm not sure that there's a major buy-in for this thing. Unfortunately, I have the sixth-grade lacrosse calendar from many years ago. It’s still in my Google calendar. I need to go and unsubscribed from that now because it's historic junk. That needs to be managed a little better. Probably what we need is like a way to put events in RSS. I would like to be able to review and say, “These are the things that are available.” I don't want to hear about the same thing ten times but, “Here's what my opportunities are tomorrow, tonight, next week, next month.” I was talking with a friend of mine, Adam Pingel years ago and he said, “The time between when he thinks about something and finds out it's already been done is shrinking as soon as you do that.” There's a thing that I loved that died that got acquired by Nokia a decade ago called Dopple. It was a cool website that would ingest all my travel plans and all my friend’s travel plans and tell you who is going to be around on your next trip?” You could plan to hang out with them. I love it and I can't believe it's been so long and no one's made anything like that. Pablos, I feel like that's the future of social interaction is that my AI would be out negotiating with your AI and the fact that you were passing through LA, neither of us would have had to do anything other than say yes. It would have been like, “Would you want to make sure that you guys get together?” That needs to happen. We got to get her because how many times. All I do is I'm like, “I'm going to LA, who do I know in LA?” Texting, “You're going to be around?” “Nope, we're in Austin.” I have run into my dad in Customs. This happened twice. On Christmas vacation for three years in a row, we ran into each other in airports. Maggie and I, during the trip we got engaged, she was on Facebook and realized some of our best friends were in Florence at the exact same time. We missed them by hours. That's the thing that easily solves for us. I want that personal AI in the cloud acting on it. I love that everybody's got Siri and Alexa and all the early interfaces into this, but what I'm looking for is something that is actively sitting out there all the time and advocating on it. This is one of the interesting problems is that when you look at things like Siri and Alexa, they need to know you. I want my computer to know everything about me because I can't remember everything about me. I’m using that to help me decide what my options are. Some decisions they can make for me. I don't even need to be involved. That's the dream. Some of these things are architecturally working against us. It's going to take a little while to get there and one of your dad's observations was that these things need volition. Alexa needs to be able to pipe up in the conversation when she has something useful to offer like a person would. That's one of the major things that's missing is Siri should be able to sit there and listen to our conversation. “You're double-booked that night. You should do it differently.” Also say, “Pablos, you're full of shit. There aren't that many cases of COVID in Australia or Berlin.” Recording a podcast wouldn't require a fact-check. Don't bother fact-checking this podcast. It’s built 100% accurate and not worth the waste of your time. That's the thing that if the robots had volition and could join up, then they could build better relationships with us. They could be more useful. There are some veering that way. The first that I've started seeing as some of these humans augmented by AI as a personal assistant. Their virtual assistants that are somewhere in there is a human that is puppeteering and it's highly leveraged across their distance. They start to know, but I think it's got a long way to go, but I have been impressed with some of that. They're building some dossier on you or at least the kinds of things that you do. A higher-level way of thinking about that is we want to turn these things into tools for humans. When you see technology like Deepfakes or GPT-3, these are technologies that exist. Machine learning has given us these abilities, but we don't have the toolkit to go steer them yet. For example, GPT-3 can write an unlimited amount of texts that sound legit, but it has no notion of story art or character development or things like that. What we would like is to turn those into tools that humans could use and say, “Write some Hemingway, but I want a character that's like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.” I want to incorporate a chess prodigy and I want to be able to start to steer it and say, “Make sure there's a scene that white castle.” All this stuff, I should be able to manage. I become a director with those tools and in the same thing true for my itinerary in my social events calendar, assuming I ever have one again. I love the promise of that because, at the end of the day, this was another dadaism. He's like, “Look at any of the problems that you have and any of those things is a business opportunity because ideally, you want each one of us to have that much better of life. Remove a little bit of pain and suffering. Every one of those is missing something.” I see it as like the Silicon Valley of the ‘80s mentality. It was paired with technology drivers. It's like every one of those business opportunities, you got to revisit every time you get new technology. Now, we have computer vision toolkits and open source or depth cams and those things. Every time you get a new technology like that, you get to ask yourself, “Does this change anything humans have ever done? Any of those business opportunities? Can I do it faster, cheaper and better?” That opportunity comes up every time we get something new. Whether your dad expressed it or not, that's what he was doing in a lot of cases. What you're doing in a lot of cases is taking the new technology to say, “Now, I can do such cool new stuff.” To your point, the next step is imagination because we are both taking that new tech. Imagine, as you look at all the different ways in the past of how we've done things, how can you imagine this new technology completely eroding those things? Innovation by its nature is going to be new, different and you're going to not necessarily recognize it when you see it. One of the things that I always think about is we don't stop to celebrate these advancements and these improvements. I remember I read an interview with Jay-Z talking about growing up in the projects and they would celebrate every small victory. “Somebody got a new pair of sneakers? Let's have a party.” The culture was oriented around celebrating whatever advancement they have. Where I grew up or at least how I ended up is like, “Those sneakers are cool. Click buy now. They'll be here tomorrow.” My daughter is like, “Did you get new shoes?” I’m like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “Why?” I'm like, “It’s not an event. It’s my birthday.” I think that this is a problem. The celebration is super important. Humans are social animals. I'm a big fan of that book, Bowling Alone, where he talks about Harvard sociologists looks at all the ways in which humans engage socially. Church going, union attendance, card-playing all over the ages. It was like attendance in everything was cratering in modern times. We don't do anything with it. What happens on average is you're home alone. In fact, depressed whether you know it or not. There was this other book, Lost Connections. He looked at all the different ways with people that tried to treat depression. The one that was the most, having friends, have freaking social relationships. The Bowling Alone guy concluded that tracking with not hanging out with people live and socially, their civic engagement is also greater alongside. This is an insidious problem because on the surface, “It's just my birthday.” It feels like nothing, but the pattern of not seeing people and unplugging from society is super dangerous. I didn't read that book, but I should. I had an experience when I was twenty where I felt depressed. I never was diagnosed and didn't have it nearly as bad as lots of people. For about 1.5-year, most of my interactions were like, “Did you know everything sucks? Let me tell you.” I managed to convince a lot of other people to be depressed too. It was terrible I don't claim to suffer the way other people have. At the time I was obsessed with rock climbing and my partner, the guy who I used to climb with started dating a single mom and they joined Amway and he wasn't allowed to climb more. I was stuck with no partner. Anybody I knew, I would say, “We're going climbing.” My friends would be like, “I don't do that.” I'd be like, “No problem. I'll teach you.” They’re like, “I don’t have any gear.” I’d be like, “No problem, I got a truckload of gear. Get in the car.” I needed someone to belay. I ran out of friends and I would stop at the mall, meet strangers and take them rock climbing. I ended up taking like 100 people rock climbing that summer who'd never gone before. Rock climbing is this amazing thing where you drive out to the woods, hike back a ways to a cliff, hike up the clave, set up an anchor, and you're hanging out in nature. It's all beautiful. Rock climbing's like this extraordinary experience for people, especially at the beginning. I realized after doing that I'm not depressed anymore. For me, the thing I pinned it on was like, “I have something to give again. I'm sharing this thing I have, which is climbing with people.” This is before rock gyms were invented. This is ancient history. It's a nature-oriented experience. I felt like I had something to share and that paid off for me. Fortunately, I've decided like, “If I ever get depressed again, I'm taking the drugs because that would sucked.” Luckily, I've never had that problem again. Maybe you're right, the social interaction was part of it, but having something to give was a huge part of it for me. It makes me wonder about the future of work because people feel great when they have meaning in their life. Meaning can be teaching like you were doing, providing some incredible service, being able to build with your hands. Where are we going to get millions of jobs? That meaning creation is an important part of human happiness. I'm not sure what that be. I was looking at it as I tend to do from a broad perspective. People had that meeting almost 100% of the time until the last couple hundred years because you had to get up at 5:00 in the morning and you had to get out on the farm and start working. You came home and went straight to bed. You're on the farm with your family, whoever's working with you, but you worked constantly. To keep everybody alive, you had to work. This is like crayon charts and graphs I'm making here. With the industrial revolution, we started to get efficient enough that not everybody had to work all the time. You started to get that first consistent free time. I’m not saying there was no free time, but regular, huge chunks of free time. Yuval Harari thinks that hunting and gathering was mostly leisure. I don't know about that. For modern humans, that consistent free time, that's what created the entertainment industry. That's entirely stuffed you do to fill your free time. If you were to make an asymptote graph over the last 100 years, the entertainment industry went on the whole millions of dollars a year. It was buskers and circuses. That all grew and became movies, TV, books, music, elections and video games. Elections are entertained and news too, unfortunately. I'm not saying it's right. I'm saying it's how it is. Free time grew to build that. The amount of time and attention devoted to work has plummeted. Depression goes up on a curve, similar to the entertainment industry growth curve. That sense of feeling needed, feeling part of something that you got from work that we get from work, not everybody gets out so much. It also came from religion. We used to get a lot out of religion. That was the social hub. That was the meaning in life hub. COVID is like a reset. Reset people's relationship with work, commute, all of that stuff and gone forever. I'm on with the CEO Newsletter and somebody posted like, “What are we going to do with go back to work protocols and best practices.” Everybody responded, “There is no go back. It's over. We got rid of our office. We're downsizing.” We might get on a cadence where we see each other live once a week in a facilitated session. If that's the case, there's a high onus on everybody to look at their patterns because we do need some structure. It becomes a habit when you start doing it at least once. What's going to be the way that we structure getting back together again live doing some of the community, give back live? Being an active member of your society at a time when the structures that used to do that. There’s been this progression with a lot of the important stuff you need was embodied in religions. We moved a lot of it to governments over the last few centuries and now we moved it to corporations and now they're failing us. My view of that is probably because of where I come from is that people need to take some personal responsibility for the recipe for their life and go figure out like, “How much Netflix is making my life better and how much is too much? How Instagram? How much exercise?” You got to build that recipe yourself. We're blaming Facebook for getting it wrong. It feels to me like a high, a lot to expect. It is but I think people need to step up. It would be nice if you could count on Facebook to give you a great life, but I think it's a lot to expect from Facebook. Back to our news curatorial CNN running my Facebook selection algorithm. Where's my suggested life habits from the people that I respect the structuring? What’s the new religion that has me engaged with a like-minded community? You can't have a like-minded community because that wouldn't be enough diversity. I want to make sure there's the diversity algorithm in there too. Expecting people to discover it all on their own is what we should all go find light ourselves. I don’t mean that. I said that only to be extreme. There are some best practices. A simple example is exercise in the morning. Neurologically your brain grows right after exercise. You are primed for learning in the hours after exercise. Exercise before you're going to do something. You don’t know how much I can learn when I'm sleeping. I'm a salsa dancer. I exercise and then go to bed and I wake up ready to go. The point is, we got to get away from this one size fits all recommendations in every race. You have Chinese people who want to get up and exercise with their coworkers before working in the factory dungeon to make my sweatshirts. That's great for them. That's their choice. I'm not going to do that. That's not my idea of exercise. It varies for different people and different people are optimizing for different things. We don't need everybody to exercise. I don't know if Stephen King exercises, but he's prolific at what he does. I don't need to love and respect him for his exercise routine. Where I'm trying to land is like smoking gets a lot of airplay. It's bad to do that inside. It's bad to do it around a kid. If we know that there's data that you are depressed if you don't have friends, why is that not have more airplay? Why are we not talking about the importance of spending time together in the social community? I'm looking for some guidance. What we want to be doing with our kids is say, “You're probably overdoing it on Netflix. You might want to get smoking and get some friends.” The patterns that we've seen play out show that too much smoking in Netflix doesn't give you the life that you're going to want down the road. Part of it is you were the least equipped to know that you need that when you're in the middle of it. It's like, if you only pick up the phone and call that friend of yours, they would talk you off the cliff or make you smile. It is our problem. You're getting to one of the winning strategies is to develop relationships with people. For me, it's been helpful having people at different stages of their lives. My daughter doesn't realize it, but I put amazing people in her life that she thinks of as friends who are adults. This is a weird thing that I did. Her friends from a young age are adults probably because I didn't want to hang out with other kids. I'm her dad. Nothing I do can be cool in her mind. For those people, she thinks they're awesome. For those people hanging out with her, a lot of value for them also. She's super creative, super interesting, seeing the world for the first time and all of that. Having multi-generational friends was great. I went to see some friends of mine for dinner at their house. I took her with me and right before we got to their door, I got a call that I took and I told her, “I'm going to do this call.” I expect her to wait for me to finish the call and then we'd go knock on the door. She's never met these people. She goes to knocks on the door. I finish the call ten minutes later, I show up and they're hanging out chatting. She made friends with, “How's it going?” She didn’t know whose house we were going. She's well socialized as well. If you give up on yourself and you don't try to create a recipe that works for you, then you're not going to be happy with the results. You might try to make a recipe and fail a bunch of times, but that's part of learning to cook. The difference of working on the business, working in the business, you apply that to yourself. You’re going about your day-to-day or thinking about your life. One of the things you've seen to try to fill the gap where religion dropped the ball is all the self-improvement mindfulness. If you go to a bookstore in any other country, there's no self-improvement section. Can you go into a bookstore in America? Not that we have them. Look in the airport, I do this if I'm traveling. If you're in the airport in America, self-help is a huge section. You go to an airport bookstore in Europe, Asia, Middle East, there's no self-help section. That's not what they do. They'll probably end up there. I'm not saying self-help is specifically working better than religion. I don't know. One nice thing I like about it is there are instances that go both ways. Some of them are looking for somebody to replace the religion that they can follow. That might be as good as it gets for some people. I'm not specifically trying to criticize that choice. You do want to be careful about who you choose, but maybe that's what works for people where we're built to follow, humans are. You want to be careful about who you choose to follow. What is cool in our lives is like a lot of freedom around exploration and trying different things. To figure out what works going forward, we have to try a lot of stuff and some of it is not going to work. You've got to give people a chance to try things. That hyper exposure is also the root of creativity. You expose yourself to lots of stuff and then you've got a big wealth to drawn. Some of these things are going to work. I saw some article about a family that had a garage sale, sold everything they had and got Bitcoin. At that time, it was worth like $900. They've been traveling the world ever since, the whole family, going everywhere they want, living off of Bitcoin. There's a lot there, but what I love is we have so much potential, the technologies are giving us new potential. You're taking all this in a direction that's underexplored. You seem to see nothing, but more things you could do if you only had time. That's a marker that more people should be trying not to bring you a competition you don’t want. Please bring it because I want to do more stuff. If you were going to use my vocabulary and describe problems that you want to solve or think need to be solved, what else do you see? Have you done any immersive theater? Rather than traditional theater, where you sit in a seat-facing a stage, the immersive theater is all around you. It's site-specific. You're in a huge building and the buildings got lots of great themes going around. The thing that's special about that is you have agency as an audience member. You're wandering around, you get to decide which way to go, what actor to follow. Now and again, the actor will grab you by the hand, pull you down a hallway, the door locks behind you and you are alone one-on-one with this actor. They are responding to you, Pablos, and the words that you said now. Even though you're in the middle of an entertainment theater experience, that personalization is magical. From an economic perspective, it’s super expensive to have a human one-on-one with you. 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. I want to be Michael Douglas in the game. I want that game to surround my life and dip into it. I don't need to be drugged and buried alive in Mexico, but he had all terrible stuff happened to them. The better stuff, the things that were super interesting. He had a global puzzle he was unraveling and all of his faculties were being called on. Could he run fast? Could he solve puzzles? Could he navigate the world on $1 a day? Each of those things was a real skill. The thing that I think would be got with it was beautiful in the end as he went from being a jerk to a nice guy. It was an educational experience. There is great data to show that you will work out harder in VR than you will in regular life. You would know that anecdotally. You'll play a game of soccer with a broken foot because your head's in the game and you will die on a treadmill because you're driving it nuts. These things that we discover, explore, prototype and get right in entertainment have so much application in learning, fitness, therapy and retraining. The future of those harder subjects is going to be so much driven by making a great personal life experience. I was on the board of a college. I didn't go to college, so it's not clear that I should have been on the board in the first place. I don't feel really optimistic about the future of colleges. I don’t either and it's accelerated by who made it. I finally managed to quit or they let me. It was great. I loved all the guys on that board, the people that were there. I learned so much from them, but I didn't feel like they needed me because I don't think that's where the action is. A lot of it is I see the future of education being in games. My kid, I remember 2nd or 3rd or 4th, she'd go to school for six hours having learned nothing. She comes home, plays 45 minutes of games on her iPad and learn a ton. I would even expand that to say the future of education in entertainment, games being one of the tools in the toolbox. Imagine we put her in an immersive theater experience that was all around Marie Curie and had entire chemistry. That would be freaking awesome. In education, as we know it now, nobody's taking responsibility for making it interesting. The only thing that brain wants to learn is what it's interested in. I learned a lot because I was interested in computers. I would spend an absurd amount of time and energy trying to learn more about the computer. When I look at my kid, I look for whatever she's interested in and add fuel to the fire. I don't care if she turns out like all the other kids, but when you look at a school, there are still schools that are architected to try and make all the kids turn out the same. It's a model that hasn't changed for many years and that is terrible because we've figured out solutions. A simple example of that is the flipped learning model. The idea that you go home and watch the videos of what was the lecture in the classroom, and then go into the classroom to do the homework because now the teacher can be an exception handler. The head of the class can be the cascading mentor to everybody else, so that you've much more efficiently distributed resources. It’s facilitated by technology but it requires imaginative thinking on behalf of the administration. What I found at least in college, I'm bottomless pit of ideas and it didn't matter. They're constrained by accreditation because the costs have gone up, the only way to go to college is to get student loans. The student loans are federally-backed, but they dictate that you can only use the loans at schools that are accredited. These accrediting bodies are outside the university or the school, their job is to make sure that you do everything exactly the same as the way they're used to see it. I don't even think you could do that in a college and get away with it with the most accrediting bodies. The whole system is there's so much bureaucracy that works against innovation that I think it's going to collapse. I agree with you. There's a lot of problems there and in K-12, we've also got it wrong. This is no fault of the teachers who are the hardest working most incredible people. I love them and I want them to be more empowered for their tools. As I think about your daughter's education, the scaffolding of the interest in the led learning approach. It's not okay to do nothing. You have to do something. You're going to be interest-led, and you're going to figure out the thing that you want to do now and the next week, but we know as a functioning member of society, we need you to get a couple of backbone of things. Basic finance, basic for a state that you should be able to read. What I can't wait to see is what's the scaffolded approach that says, “Take this video from Khan Academy.” Piecing these things together, did you ever read The Diamond Age? I love that book. We're finally there. We’ve got it. The iPad is ready to go. Neal Stephenson gets a lot of credit for Snow Crash. A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer was a master. For readers, Snow Crash was the first practical vision of virtual reality and underpins every virtual reality project since the book. A lot of people didn't read The Diamond Age which was the next book after that, that Neal wrote. Not only it's got a whole nanotechnology thing that was probably a little too early, but I don't think that's the important part. That's what people fix it on. The primer is the most important thing in education. The main character had this tablet device. The tablet device had a character in it that grew up with her. That character was puppeted on the backend by lots of different humans, but it was the same person to her. It was a personalized learning agent. It knew her intimately, knew what she knew and what she didn't know as she grew up with her and was bringing the right learning there at the right time. It was an amazing vision because I remember an example was the story when she first reads it, it's a story about a princess, the girl's name is Nell. The princess goes on these adventures and learns all the things that Nell needs to learn. The book is interactive. She's reading the same book for the first eighteen years of her life or something, but we have all the tech to do that now. It was unimagined. This book is from 1992. Now, we could build a primer and I believe that we should hold the primer. The reason is my daughter is already growing up with iPads. The things that are on it are Netflix. She's watching TV shows, playing video games, and watching YouTube stuff. It's okay, but here's what I was thinking. Here's how we solve it. Imagine that we need you to learn what Pi means. You could learn Pi any way you want, but you don't get any credit for it until you teach somebody else. Somebody else you can pick anyone on earth. Any student could be in China. It doesn't matter. You're going to teach Pi to somebody. The way you do it is you got to figure out how to make it interesting to them. 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. The point is, if you do this in a school every year in one class, you get 30 versions of Pi. Khan Academy has one. Solomon’s in Khan explaining Pi, which is fine if you're into English and your interests are on Pi, but if you're skateboarding, that's not cool. There should be 1,000 versions. You can’t afford to make 1,000 versions unless you have the kids creating the curriculum for future generations. We don't. Our kids, my kid learns Pi, write it on a piece of paper, looks how the teacher glances at it and watches it, go in the trash. What could be more motivating than that? It is frustrating to me that every kid grows up doing what they know is fake work. It has no relevance to them. Teaching somebody else is real work. You imparting knowledge to someone, that's a real task. Even if for no other reason, you're learning it so that you can know you can do a good job at teaching your little buddy. When I had thought about the million-job problem, caregivers were always the ones I kept coming back to because we don't do a good job of daycare. Teachers are overwhelmed and trying to broadcast to 30 students. Atomizing each of the lessons and decentralized for everybody. These are great solutions. No kid has to teach them all, no kid has to learn them all. We don't need all the kids to turn out the same anymore. We want great, unique and special snowflakes. The truth is, you're a little cocky. That's not just a million jobs. That’s a billion jobs. Through high school, I'm going to have to teach 50 things. That's a lot of jobs. One of the things is the value you get out of a job we're looking at a paycheck. That's one of them, but we're not looking at that mental health, the well-being needed in society. You get that from jobs too. You don't get it from watching Netflix. What's happening now is as we get more automation and efficiency, we are giving you more free time with this imperative question of what are you going to do with the free time? Watch more Netflix, or maybe you could help teach? My daughter's classes have 30 kids and one teacher in a public school all through elementary school and we're bitching and moaning about student-teacher ratios. Maybe we could get it down to 27 to 1? Maybe we could get it down to 26 to 1? We're never going to get it down to one-to-one and that's what we need. You don't even need to be a good teacher if you only have one student to pay attention to. Our teachers are amazing because they can do it with 27. We only need only one to do that. It’s like, “Do you understand that last second? How about the five seconds before that?” You know exactly when you lost them. I've been lucky because I could afford to get tutors for my kid. All I did at from preschool on, I got her tutors and not to do a drill for the Math test. I'm like, “Figure out what she's interested in and do it.” They turned my sauna into a camera obscura. They made stop motion movies with her iPad and her Barbies. She was four. She has all kinds of cool stuff. She doesn't even realize she's learning. She's having fun. They did dance routines. One cool side effect for parents who care, she learned to work with a tutor. That context is so comfortable to her that when it became time to a drill for a test to get into private school, she was on it. No problem. That one-on-one thing I believe in. The way to scale it is to turn the students themselves into teachers and get rid of this notion that teaching comes from on high. I've been looking for a context to do that. I got into this idea almost many years ago, because I was trying to start a private high school that would work this way. It ended up being way too much trouble to start up a private high school. I had no idea. The Two Bit Circus Foundation is doing a bunch of after school stuff. It's all creativity play basis. Why play-based learning? There are four core components. We train teachers, even as a History teacher, how to incorporate STEM and steam into their curriculum. Teacher’s professional development, we deploy makerspaces, physical tool deployment. We'll bring tool benches with all the gear, consumable materials. This is the clean waste we collect from companies. Extra cutout, fabric cutouts from the fashion company, extra packaging from UPS, extra bottle caps that didn't get used. All that stuff becomes the tools they use in the projects and event programs. Imagine a full replacement for the science fair where instead of building a baking soda, vinegar, volcano, kids are building their own game and throwing their own carnivals. It's a full-stack replacement for that. Is it working? It's working. It is not expensive. The way we've structured it is a little bit of a Robin Hood model. We sell the program to affluent schools so we can give it away to those at risk. More than half of our work is all in at-risk communities all over. Imagine like a version of Khan Academy where you watch Salman Khan video on Pi, then you make your own and that gets posted. We have some AI that when a new kid comes in, we're like, “Watch these three videos on Pi and your job is to make one better.” 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. I never had Physics. I had to learn by working with astrophysicists and trying to build spaceships. I had to learn Physics on the top, but I'm a good fake physicist now, but I didn't have that experience with Physics. imagine that every kid could have that teacher or one that could master them. That’s the best educator. He has done a great job because he has been elevated because his approach is so awesome. What are 1,000 more Salman Khans or 10,000 more so that all of a sudden, you're reaching everybody optimally? Imagine how fast could K-12 education happen? How fast could those minimum requirements be made so it's all interesting? Everything that you want is the thing that you're learning. Thanks, Brent. It's been amazing. This was fun. Thanks a lot, Pablos. I appreciate it. Important Links: High FidelityInoreaderReeder 4Upcoming.orgBowling AloneLost ConnectionsThe Diamond AgeSnow CrashTwo Bit Circus FoundationBrent Bushnell About Brent Bushnell Brent Bushnell is an entrepreneur, engineer and CEO/co-founder of Two Bit Circus, a Los Angeles-based experiential entertainment company. The interdisciplinary team strives to create immersive, social fun and is currently building a network of micro-amusement parks featuring free-roaming VR, robot bartenders, an interactive supper club and more. Previously they created STEAM Carnival, a traveling event to inspire kids about science, technology, engineering, art and math. Brent is on fire about using play and spectacle to inspire inventors. He is passionate about rebranding STEM learning to STEAM with the inclusion of art and creativity.  He is motivated by the power of group games and interactive media to bring people together in fun and meaningful ways. As a UCLA-trained engineer, he is a hands-on maker who uses rapid prototyping to turn vision into reality.  He's board president of Two Bit Circus Foundation, an LA-based 501c3 that deploys STEAM-based programs for middle and high school students. Previously, he was the on-camera inventor for the ABC TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. He was a founding member of Syyn Labs, a creative collective creating stunts for brands like Google and Disney and helped OK Go build the Rube Goldberg machine for their viral This Too Shall Pass music video that garnered 50+ million views on YouTube. In his spare time, Brent enjoys mentoring teens in entrepreneurship via programs such as NFTE. He's a supporter of Clowns Without Borders and publishes on Twitter at @brentbushnell.

Probably whatever you were doing with your life as a kid isn't as cool as building a Dyson swarm. 12 year old Levi Hurt has already decided to devote his life to doing so. Levi is a delightful kid. It will warm your heart to hear his curiosity and excitement about these ideas. Even with my antagonistic questioning, his sense of wonder is infectious.