Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Prêt-à-Portable

Episode Date: March 24, 2014

 Technology consultant Sarah Slocum loves social media and her Google Glass, she wears them everywhere. But when she walked into Molotov’s, a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco, she discovered that not everyone shares her love for wearable gadgets. Also, your host makes his annual pilgrimage to SXSWi and ends up designing wearables at a surreal Hack Day. We also hear from Shingy, AOL’s Digital Prophet. He says wearables will allow us to have it both ways: we can be both digital and human.  **This episode features elements that were recorded binaurally. If you listen with a pair of headphones or a LiveAudio enabled JAMBOX, you will experience three dimensional sound – it will be like you are there.** *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. At Radiotopia, we now have a select group of amazing supporters that help us make all our shows possible. If you would like to have your company or product sponsor this podcast, then get in touch. Drop a line to sponsor at radiotopia.fm. Thanks. episode. Why is there something called influencer voice? What's the deal with the TikTok shop? What is posting disease and do you have it? Why can it be so scary and yet feel so great to block someone on social media? The Neverpost team wonders why the internet and the world because of the internet is the way it is. They talk to artists, lawyers, linguists, content creators, sociologists, historians, and more about our current tech and media moment. From PRX's Radiotopia, Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet.

Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This episode of The Theory of Everything features elements that were recorded binaurally. If you listen with a pair of headphones or a live audio-enabled device, you will experience three-dimensional sound. It will be like you are there. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Prêt à Portable. I have a company called I Love Social Media Inc. and I founded it because I just have always loved social media and I've loved using it and I love thinking about the possibilities of what is to come when I do use it.

Technology and innovation has contributed and made our daily lives... Are you there? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, my Google Glass just turned on. Oh, we're actually talking on the Google Glass. Yes, we are. Technology consultant Sarah Slocum loves her Google Glass. She wears them everywhere, to the office, the gym, the coffee house.

A couple of weeks ago, she took the train from San Mateo, where she lives, to the Mission in San Francisco for a pub crawl. But when she walked into Molotov's, a bar on Haight Street, Sarah discovered that not everyone shares her love for wearable tech. We were getting a drink, and all of a sudden there was two girls, and one of them just turned around out of the blue and flipped me off and said, Google Glass very vehemently at me and I was

completely taken back and shocked. I never thought that I would get any type of hatred for wearing Google Glass. I didn't understand what was going on and at point, I felt threatened and I decided, well, geez, if they're hating on me for wearing Google Glass, you know, one of the awesome features about it is that I can turn on video and start recording anybody at any time. So I decided to turn on and start recording them. This kind of made things worse. In the video, I don't know if you can tell, but I'm having to backtrack and get away from these crazy zombies. And all I could say was, I'm recording you.

And I repeated it three times to them because I still couldn't believe that they were behaving like this. I couldn't believe that they were behaving the way they were previous to me starting recording them, but I further couldn't believe that they were behaving like that when they knew that they were being recorded. If people really want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public place. I think the only thing that really got them to back off was me telling them, you know,

I'm only going to post it to a few thousand people online. And at that point, they were treated. And then this guy that you can originally see or that you first see in the first video that I took that was initially waving his hands around and trying to grab them off my face, about a minute later after that video that is up on the internet, he ripped them off my face and ran out of the bar with them. It was like he had stolen my egg that, you know, I was sitting on and hatching, you know,

and I didn't want him to break it. And he's waving it around and trying to run away. And so I run out of the bar with him trying to chase him and I'm holding on to him and I'm half yelling at him, half pleading with him. You know, I didn't let him go. He finally relinquished them, and then I ran back into the bar, and then I discovered that somebody else had stolen my purse and my cell phone and my wallet and my house keys and every other personable item that was in my purse. I have not gotten my purse back, and I do not expect to. The future of San Francisco will be determined by companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

You're killing the city! But Sarah, who was born and raised in the Bay Area, says it's wrong to blame technology for the city's growing pains. Obviously, I'm not killing the city in any way. And all I have to say is that I think it was more just based out of jealousy. I know there are people in the city, obviously, that are being forced out of their places or they can't really afford to live here anymore because rents are increasing. But that happens. And these people that were saying that to me

because I was wearing Google Glass, they are going to be wearing wearables within a year. This is the year that wearables are really starting to explode with, you know, Google Glass and Pebble Watch and smart shirts, smart shoes. Now there's fashionable wearables. I mean, if these people are, are jealous about technology and want to work in technology and want to be a part of it, then they should go to a hack school or work their way up within technology. You know, like their whole mentality, their thug bullying mentality of just trying to pick on somebody because they're wearing a certain name brand was criminal. You know, it was a hate crime on Hate Street. And it might not fit to the exact legal definition,

but the haters on Hate Street were hating on me for wearing Google Glass. So it's a H-A-I-G-H-T crime. A couple of weeks ago, I was laying on the bed with my laptop. I was laying on my side, and I had the laptop turned on its side as well. After a few hours of this, my arm began to ache, and I thought to myself how nice it would be to have a robot or personal assistant, someone who could hold the laptop for me so I could remain on my side surfing the internet. This is exactly the kind of service a man would get back in the day if he visited an opium den. If you examine old photographs of

opium dens, you will see that all of the smokers are resting on their sides, and each and every one of these addicts has someone, often a woman or a child, to hold the opium pipe for them. Perhaps this is the basis for a startup, that people who hold the laptops could even help the folks laying on their sides take selfies of themselves. Feel free to steal this idea. Right now, I'm too depressed about technology to do anything with it. I've been going to South by Southwest, the annual technology conference in Austin, for almost a decade now. But this year, I couldn't do it. I didn't register for the conference or get a press pass.

I'm just feeling so overwhelmed. But at the last minute, I booked a flight for two days so I could attend my friend's party. Because it's a mistake, I think, to turn down any opportunity to be in the same room with all of your favorite people. On Friday night, a bunch of us ended up at a bar on the east side. It was like a speakeasy underneath a bread store. Waiting in line for the bathroom, I struck up a conversation with a strange man named Michael. Michael was like me. Technology had pushed him over the edge. He wasn't attending any of the official South by Southwest events either. In fact, he had organized an unofficial event, a hack day.

He was determined, he told me, to find a way to use technology to use less technology. Isn't that like turning to cocaine to cure your heroin addiction, I asked. But he didn't laugh. Instead, he took out a piece of paper and wrote down an address. I think you should come to my hack day, he said. That night, I couldn't sleep. And in the morning, I took a taxi to the address.

Hello? Benjamin! Oh, you made it! Didn't expect you to show up. It's crazy. Besides Michael, there were only three people at this hack day. Let me introduce you to everyone. This is Lance. Hey, how's it going?

Courtney? Hi. Courtney. Hi. Hi, Courtney. Benjamin. Chrissy. Hi, Benjamin. Hi, Chrissy. But then, just as I was about to flee,

Shingy, AOL's digital prophet, walked into the room. You're actually quite famous on the internet. I've seen you on the internet. On the internet? Yeah, on the internet. I decided to stay. I would love for the chance to have some of these guys pitch you their ideas. It's such an honor.

Yeah, let's do it. Oh, Chrissy. Yeah, oh man. I've got this one. It's a wearable technology. It's earrings that you wear in your ear. And inside, it's got a little computer in there, and every person that you're talking to,

even if it's somebody you know or somebody you don't know, you meet them and it just Googles information for you and then whispers anecdotes about them to you. So you have more things to talk about with them. So if their favorite movie is Billy Madison, good. I've got a quote from that and it tells you and you can just live in the moment more and connect fully and connect with them quicker and faster without having to be so relied on search engines you know i think it's a

tremendously brilliant idea oh my god the challenge however is the stuggling, which is what you're talking about. Now we're talking about Googling stalking. It's taking it to another dimension. So I'm a little challenged by how that's going to make it feel authentic and how you're going to have better relationships. But everyone does that, though. When you meet someone, don't you Facebook stalk them once you meet them anyway?

No, I do. Do you really? I do. I used to do that with men that I was interested in. I would go and look at what their favorite movies were and then look up quotes so I could put it into conversation. But this would just save me the time. Well, I know Lance had an amazing idea that he wanted to pitch to you

as well. Yeah, yeah. It is called the Slow Filter, and it's a filter for Instagram. Slow Filter requires you to enter so much information about the picture that it's going to take you 15 to 20 to sometimes 45 minutes just to enter the information about the picture. So you're going to put more thought into the picture. If you take a picture of food, it's going to ask you about the ingredients. It's going to ask you what else you

ordered, what did other people at the table order? What would you have rather had? What kind of day is it outside? Is it cloudy? What was the waiter like? What are you wearing? That sort of thing. I'm looking to take the Insta out of Instagram. Lance, I'm intrigued. If I may ask you a couple of questions.

Sure. Let's say that I were to get the slow filter and I were to take a photo of, say, me and Chrissy here. Just a little selfie. What kind of questions would the slow filter slow filter ask yeah it's interesting you ask because immediately it's going to ask is this a selfie because it detects that and if you write yes it just deletes the picture no selfies no selfies selfies very interesting oh it doesn't just cut you out no with two people beside you no you have to get someone you have to hand your phone to somebody else if you want to picture yourself.

You know, I think it's actually surprisingly a good idea. Wow. And here's why. In the culture where people check their phones every six seconds, and we see something like 1,900 media messages per day, maybe it's not such a bad idea. I had a version of that that I was interested in. I live in New York, and it was Fashion Week a few few weeks ago and I saw, you know, some actual real photographers in action and, you know, with the big cameras,

the telephoto lenses. And, you know, I just I you know, there was one I was near Bryant Park and there was a guy like on his knee crouching down, like holding up the heavy camera, you know, the pose. And I just I realized how much I miss that pose. I never see that anymore. It's just, you know, we've got these lazy people with their arms just outstretched, clicking on their cell phones. And it just made me feel that we've lost something. And I'm intrigued, too, by your idea. That's interesting. I'd be willing to look into, like, putting a weight on your camera. I think what will be interesting about this whole environment you're talking about is

somebody will circumvent your hack and add a fast hack filter on top of your word filter, which will then go and make it much easier for me to bypass your word filter. So that's where I think you're going to be challenged with your new entrepreneurial startup. So someone will find a filter to fastify the slow filter. So I'll just come up with a slower version of the fast filter. So it'll be like a slow, fast, slow filter. I just wanted to introduce you to Courtney. She's actually an entrepreneur.

She's already had a very successful application that's kind of gone a little viral. That's right. That's right. Yeah, my main focus or where my expertise falls in is trying to get people rid of their Facebook addiction. So I created this sort of app to kind of rid me of mine, which is, you know, sometimes I'll be surfing the web on and I'll be, you know, well, my Facebook and then out of boredom, I'll just pick up my phone and just go right to Facebook and I'll have them open at the same time. And I'm like, oh, what are you doing? So I created an app that would link my devices to a separate bank account. And every time that I had Facebook open on more than one

device, it would take a dollar from my account and move it to this separate account. So I'd be losing money. Well, it kind of caught on and then it kind of went global. And now I just have so much money. I don't even know what to do with. So that's why I'm here to invest in these like amazing hacks. And I i gotta say where my heart lies right now is on uh the weights the weight adding the weight to the phone because i want that workout you know every time i lift my iphone i want to tone my arms and then the beauty about that also and where i think that's a really smart investment for you is clearly you know we've manufactured nostalgia so with the filtering the top of photographs and the filtering on top of words,

why not add weight to it so it feels like a 1984 cell phone again? Because I think that's actually a really smart idea. Yeah, I love it. And not only that, I could probably do with something that's heavier in the pocket of my jeans because it's clearly a challenge right now

to have these ultralight phones. So why not add extra weight? It's true. I'm on board. We're right here. After our brainstorming session, Shingy took off. I thought about hightailing it as well, but there was something about this group of people that made me want to stick around.

I was curious to see if their crazy hacks could be brought to life. Okay. hacks could be brought to life. Okay, so I've been designing these earrings and just like mashing them together, put them on a little hook. You wear them, and while you're talking to somebody, a little voice is going to come from this earring and start whispering into your ear just little anecdotes,

just little facts about the person you're talking to. So then you in turn can have a better conversation. So where is the voice coming from? So I went online and I just go to YouTube and I found this old Scottish man. And so I, I take just the sound from those clips and then I put it into this code and it breaks down all the words that he's using and all the syllables and the letters and the sounds. And it can then recreate any word that is coming through google or facebook that is fascinating that's really interesting could we hear a sample of it yeah yeah of course um and she's a dancer and a diver and swimmer just relax none of the men were around while i was taking out your appendix i don't understand how you're

hooking that up to the earrings i don't get it. It's just speech to text. It's like Siri. All right, well, Lance is working on something right here. That's the first part is in. This is the weight we were talking about earlier. A weight you attach to your phone so that it makes it more difficult to take a picture. It makes it more physical. So, Benjamin, if you were to use this, you would have to take that photo stance like you were talking about before.

I think this really captures what you're missing, you know, is that stance. Yeah, yeah. But it's all part of the slow filter package. What if you put the device in there that would actually charge your phone? So when you attach it... Yeah. It's like an extra battery but also a weight. Lance, I am loving device in there that would actually charge your phone so when you attach it, yeah, it's like an extra battery but also a weight. Lance, I am loving this workout idea that you have. This is not a workout idea. This is all part of the

slow filter package that goes on Instagram. Oh my gosh, Lance, I'm putting the gram back in Instagram. Yeah, alright. I'm going to take this off. I'm going to take the... Don't be so violent about it, Lance. You know, honestly, I thought I was coming here only to invest,

but while you guys were working on yours, I found this old box of Fitbits and, you know, Nike fuel bands, and I sewed them into the inside of this shirt and actually kind of just changed the circuits around. So I've made it to where it becomes kind of a taser. Why? Why? Why? Because, guys, what if we as a society never step away from technology?

What if we just can't rid ourselves of it? This shirt is going to keep us in line. So in a way, it kind of reminds me of the hair shirts that the monks would wear, like in the Middle Ages. Exactly. That's exactly what I was going for. You have to feel the pain in order to learn to step away. But they never did step away. Right. And I think that really says something about, you remember my two screens, one dollar is that people are gonna keep doing it.

And now we've got a shirt that's going to give us physical pain every time we use Wi-Fi. This seems a little dangerous, Courtney. A lot dangerous. Well, I'll adjust the voltage. Of course. This is just a prototype, guys. Let's get in my car and I'll show you my invention. But, wait, we're going somewhere? Yeah, well, it's South by Southwest. We always love to take our hacks and show them to the people on the streets. Bring it to the people. All right, guys, this is my hack. What I've done here is I've taken an everyday GPS system and I've tied it into a regular standard run-of-the-mill Apple IIc dot matrix printer from 1984.

I'm just going to type in the destination. Down town. And hit enter. And you can see that it is printing out the directions of where we want to go. Wait, wait, wait. You've got, like, it's two lines. I mean, this is going to take ten minutes to print out. Yeah, just the first direction.

Uh, you know, like, I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of hearing that nagging GPS voice in my head, like Tom Tom says go right. Shut up. This is going to give us the directions in real time. Okay, Mike, this first direction just says turn left. Uh-huh, yeah. But we just missed the turn.

Yeah, did we miss the turn? When were we supposed says turn left. Uh-huh, yeah. But we just missed the turn. Yeah, did we miss the turn? When were we supposed to turn left? We were supposed to turn left when the printer started engaging, so we were supposed to turn left a few streets. So immediately. Yeah, immediately, yeah. We were supposed to immediately turn left. So we missed it, so we need to turn around.

But, oh, wait, there's another direction coming out, and I'm just going to turn around while this printer is printing out the direction so we can get back on track. It says turn around. Turn around? Okay, now does that mean to turn around right now, or to turn around a few seconds ago? Well, you tell us.

You're going the wrong way down a one-way street right now. Mm-hmm, yeah. People are hogging. All right, let's just put in a gear here, turning around again, and we are back on track. This is so embarrassing. Seriously, let me out of the car, please. I can't. Can we please get out of the car, please. I can't.

Can we please get out of the car? I'm turning this off. Okay, well. Thank you. Okay, well, now we have no way of knowing how to get to the Driscoll. Oh, no, it's right in front of us. I can see it. We just drive straight forward.

You know, it's not about the destination. It's about the destination it's about the journey and you know what i think this hack accomplishes is that really helps us get in touch with that journey by disconnecting from the voices that are constantly telling us go go go we're giving ourselves the freedom to get lost and explore like the settlers of old i mean you know the people in the mayflower made a point to get lost and explore like the settlers of old. I mean, you know, the people in the Mayflower made a point to get lost because that opened up the door to discovery. Just drive a little forward, right in front of us. Just drive straight.

If you don't do it now, I'm going to get out. Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael. So good to see you again, man. I love it. Yeah, I think I may have seen you before, but not really sure. Cool, well, I brought some of my hacking crew here, and we've come up with some ideas that we want to pitch to you, because you've got to...

Come on, man. All right, cool. Yeah. Sure, sure. What if you could add weight to your phone? We're trying to take the Insta out of Instagram. Fitbits, right? Sew them onto the inside of clothes.

I think they're all absolutely terrible ideas. Just frankly, honestly, I just do not see any practical application for any of this at all. Not even the shirt? No, I mean, it's some weird clockwork orange, but, you know, it's really weird and bizarre. But what about the slow filter? Don't you think the slow filter? I think slow filters... No, I mean, it's so not the internet. I can't invest in stuff that's going to be laughed at in my portfolio.

There's no way that I can possibly... Well, I think we can demonstrate this one for you. Yeah, yeah. The Fitbit one. Benjamin, do you mind putting it on? Yeah, all right, so I'll just put it on. Yeah, great. And then let's go ahead and activate your Wi-Fi on your phone.

Yeah. And it should work. Ow! What did you just do to him? He's on the floor. He's not moving. Look, I will fix the voltage on the actual product, okay? This is a prototype, guys.

Do you smell burning hair? Oh, God. Security? Security? Hey, it was great teaming again, man. we'll catch up. You guys need to get out of here. I'll see you in uh... We're going! There's this thing called Pizzled, which is if I'm speaking to you and we're having this discussion right now and I pull out my phone and I literally interrupt this conversation by doing something, there's a visceral reaction that you'll get. It's a cross between pissed off and puzzled, and it's called Pizzled.

And it's interesting because I do believe that that's interesting. When I think about it, it really does, in a funny way, sum up the environment we're in today. We're distracted. And I think that's just come from the devices. So devices have created that, and then the platforms allow that to happen as well. Now, is it innate in our human culture to do that?

I actually don't know, to be fair. David Xing is AOL's digital prophet. Most people call him Xingy. I'm one of ten kids, and I'm from the country in Australia. And everybody in Australia tends to either extend or shorten somebody's name. So if you're a Smith, you're a Smithy. So everybody in the town I'm from would call us Shingy. So all of us got called Shingy. I'm just the one who held on to it.

Shingy is the most famous internet person I met at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival. A photo of him riding the mashable wrecking ball went super viral. It was great he made some time to sit down and talk to me, because Shingy thinks a lot about wearables. He's convinced that in the future, wearable technology will make it possible for us to have it both ways. Wearables, he says, will make us digital humans. You know, there's clearly a number of devices that we have, and those devices have extended from, you know, a television to desktops to laptops to tablets to mobiles.

And so that's kind of the scene that we have today. And what's happening with those is the way that we are consuming them are creating new habits, aren't they? And where it stops, who knows? But I do think there will be some calming that happens. And that calming will come from these other devices like wearables. I mean, the world of wearables, and it seems, by the way, quite easy to create a wearable. It's really hard to market one because the purpose of a wearable seems quite linear we have these wearables that are trying to do multiple dynamics like biometrics and atmospherics etc but we still don't know where that lands now when we are wearing

wearables to calm us down or monitor our day-to-day or even wearables in fabric of clothing that can hug us to tell us that we're we're tired and we should have a nap and i think i do fundamentally believe that's where that's headed and so as we see people experiment with these technologies it's kind of like the wright brothers it's the first time to fly and i think we're just scratching the surface on that it's so exciting because the development cycles are much much shorter and the acceptance cycles are much much quicker from us who are using them because that's the beauty of technology it speeds everything up but what this means for us as humans is that one we won't have pizzled anymore because we'll be walking around with something where we can literally just glance at to get the data that we want and hopefully it'll be a snippet piece of data that sort of reassures us that we're

okay and we can get back to conversations or we'll be having these lookup data or see-through i call it which is kind of you know the wearables that are on your face. That won't go away. But today in society, when somebody walks up to you wearing perhaps like a Google Glass, not all of us feel comfortable in that arena. So we still have a psyche that we need to move away from. So there's that challenge.

But where I do believe it is going to change is that I do think it's going to cyclic and it's going to calm down and we won't be so distracted because we will be using these devices to make us better humans. I hope that to be the case, man. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Prêt-à-Portable. This was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with Pike Malinowski. It featured Sarah Slocum, Shingy, Michael Jastrock, Lance Gilstrap, Chrissy Shackelford, Courtney Sevener, and a cameo from Michael Maness. The sound design is Bill Bowen.

And special thanks this week to Ethan Cheal and Jessica Agnesians. Some of this episode was recorded minorally. That means if you were listening with headphones or a live audio-enabled device like a Jambox, you got a different three-dimensional sound experience. Special thanks to Jawbone for providing the support to make this episode happen. They're the folks behind Jambox,

a live audio-enabled portable speaker. The Theory of Everything is one of the founding members of Radiotopia, which is like a record label for the best podcasts. You can find all of us at Radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX