The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: On Wearables, Quantified Self, and Biohacking
Episode Date: May 1, 2017It’s the end of the beginning — not the beginning of the end — for wearables, argue the guests in this episode of the a16z Podcast. Especially as we move from the first, to the next, generation ...of wearable devices: not just activity trackers and watches but VR/AR gear, “hearables”, continuous glucose monitors, and more. The quantified self movement then takes these empirical tracking- and data-gathering tools to better reason about what works and doesn’t work in our bodies to help us solve problems and live better lives. Yet the act of gathering data isn’t the hard part… it’s linking them to insights and outcomes. Because we really do have very little data about what works at a collective let alone an individual level. With a new age of biohacking upon us — where people can apply engineering principles to manipulate what we take into our bodies (inputs) to tune how we perform (outputs) — can we finally embrace these tools? What will it take to make something that’s mainly a niche activity/community (quantified self was formally started a decade ago!) into something more mainstream for all? (Hint: it involves cookie recipes.) And finally, what are the societal implications of all this, from avoiding data dystopias to embracing the consumerization of government projects too? Joining us to explore these questions and more (in conversation with Sonal Chokshi), we have: neuroscientist and data scientist Rachel Kalmar, currently a fellow at The Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; co-founder of The Quantified Self blog and community Gary Wolf; and Geoffrey Woo, co-founder and CEO at Nootrobox (an a16z company). Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today we have a really interesting topic, which is all about wearables, quantified self, biohacking, and all three of those are actually related concepts. And joining us to have this conversation, we have Rachel Kalmar, and she is currently at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. And I actually met Rachel a few years ago when she was at Misfit and I was at Wired and Misfit was a wearables company. And the thing that struck me most, Rachel, was that you had like six watches on each hand.
or like some number.
I think my peak was 38 devices that I wore every day.
I'm down to like seven now.
Which is a very reasonable amount.
And then we have Jeffrey Wu, who's a co-founder and CEO of NeutroBox.
Last but not least, we have Gary Wolfe, the founder of the quantified self movement.
Welcome, guys.
I think the first thing is, like, why do you guys care about this topic, I guess?
Yeah, I care because our humanity, our system is the most important.
important asset that we have. And by system, you mean a body? Our body. Yeah. I think we all want to live
longer. I mean, I think this is a very human instinct, Cortez, finding the fountain of youth. And I think
what's interesting with quantified self, measuring biometrics, biohacking is that we finally now have
the tools and the sensors that actually quantify and measure the inputs and outputs of the human
system. So let's apply engineering perspective to the human biology. That's an interesting way of
framing it. And Gary, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. You're the one who coined
the phrase quantified self. How did you think of it? Now in daily life, we can apply some techniques
that used to be really professional techniques that engineers and scientists would use, but were
very difficult for most people to use. These have been packaged into software. Even just storing
the data is a lot easier. So much easier to track what's going on. So all of this empirical toolkit
is now available to us when we want to think about something.
And yet we actually don't know very much about what works and what doesn't work,
even in improving the daily aspects of our lives,
never mind kind of the impossible dreams that are in front of us.
And so by daily aspect, you mean something as concrete as how we sleep?
Right.
Exactly, exactly.
How we sleep, how we feel.
Go to any bookstore and you'll see shelf after shelf of ideas about things.
that are supposed to dramatically improve our lives. Most of these ideas are tried without any
attempt to carefully measure whether they work for us or not. And you may think that that sort of
failure to follow up and failure to reason carefully about our actions typifies just new age
stuff or self-help stuff. But let me tell you, even in the world of professional science,
the drugs that we take, there's really a lack of ability to carefully think about how these affect us
as individuals. Even if we have good evidence at the group level, often what we care about most
is, did it work for me and also what price did I pay in terms of, say, side effects? And all of these
areas are now sort of dramatically accessible to us in a way that they never have been
before. Right. So I'm hearing this theme of being able to link inputs to outputs and for the first time, because of all the
information and tools we have, that we have this ability to do this. Rachel, you haven't shared your
framing yet for how you think about this world and arrive to it, because when I think of censification,
wearables are a big part of that, and you're a leader in thinking about wearables. You got your PhD at
Stanford neuroscience. Yeah, I spent 12 years looking at noisy signals from the brain and trying to understand
how the brain produces behavior.
The thing about neuroscience is that most of it is done in a lab environment right now.
But what we really care about is behavior in the real world.
And up until the last five, ten years, it was really difficult to get data about behavior
in the real world.
And now all of the tools that have been coming online provide us a way to be able to
actually collect data about our daily patterns and what we do. And that not only will it be helpful
for understanding how the brain works, but it is really important for medicine as well. We can take
this data that right now is more in the health and fitness space, look at it in a longitudinal sense,
and tie it together with clinically relevant outcomes. That's going to allow us to have better
predictive models of health and disease. Imagine that we're driving costs.
and we only let ourselves open our eyes every minute.
And that's essentially like the snapshot of information we get when we go to the doctor.
Right.
We get our panels and then the doctor's like, hey, course correct with this XYZ.
Right.
That's like us, you know, jerking the steering wheel.
I heard another podcast about a health feedback loop for humanity.
We have more signals that we use to recommend movies to us than we do for how to take care of our bodies.
Exactly.
A lot of these continuous measuring allows us to be constantly correcting.
We should be manipulating our health and wellness on a continuous basis.
It's not a snapshot basis.
That's what I think about with neutropics and biohacking.
We have interventions entering as inputs into the human system.
And, you know, we have sort of noisy signal coming out, whether that's working or not.
Well, to really solve and answer these questions on a rigorous level, we have to actually close a loop here.
Finally, with concepts from quantified self, with wearables, with sensors, we can actually finally close.
close the loop. You talk about we, but it's really, in this podcast, so three of you guys,
how do you think about this as moving beyond early adopters? What do you think the obstacles and
challenges are to actually making it more mainstream? I mean, Gary, the quantified self aspect of this
like 20 years ago. And Rachel, you've been studying this like 12 years, I think, including your time
at Stanford. What are your thoughts for making it not just something that like really motivated people
do? I think about this as like cell phones or cell phone cameras, as they became cheaper and more and more
of people have them. And cell phone cameras also used to be pretty poor quality photos. But at the
end of the day, the best camera is the one that you have. And so people kept using their cell phone
cameras and they got better and better. And now most of us don't own regular cameras. We just
use our cell phone. The devices that we wear are on a similar trajectory where right now we're
in the poor quality photo phase. Over time, they're going to be better,
resolution and they're going to be used by more people. But I also think in passive ways that
don't necessarily require engagement, a lot of the tracking will be invisible, which is different
from the quantified self. There will always be room for people who want to be engaged and people
who will have this data collection happening in the background. That's actually a really great
analogy. Even more of an original analogy, Homebrew Computing Club computer hackers, right? These were
garage tinkers and now everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket. So echoing racial, I think a lot of
these schemes will become a lot more passive. I've been wearing continuous glucose monitors
designed for diabetics. Are you diabetic? I don't mean. I'm not diabetic. Okay. But I use it to
understand my blood glucose levels and how it responds to fasting, how it responds to ketogenic diets
versus, you know, a more carb-heavy meal. Because I think we all intuitively understand,
hey, certain routine or regimen, or sometimes you feel better or worse. And I think reflecting why we
care about collecting the same in the first place, let's actually get quantified to all the possible
inputs that could contribute to a mental state of productivity or slat. I mean, it's like high
resolution. Right now I eat something heavy for lunch and I'm like, oh crap, I'm very tired.
It's intuitive. We understand that. Right. But I don't know specifically in what, yeah,
exactly. But Gary, you've got the longest vantage point of us in terms of what worked then and now.
Like, do you see much difference in the community genuinely for the community that you engage with?
I do. I'm interested in quantified self as a cultural phenomenon. And cultural change has a certain
time scale that seems fast in retrospect, but slow if you, for instance, have to deliver returns
to your investors, you know, in a few years. And I think quantified self has two meanings. On the one hand,
it's used as shorthand for a market, and the market is, you know, wearables and fitness devices.
On the other hand, the quantified self is an actual community of people doing real things and
interacting with each other, developing methods and sharing knowledge. The market is much
bigger, and Fitbit alone, you know, has well over 20 million active users. So this is a lot of
people. It's not, you know, just a very small, you know, group of advanced users. However,
quantified self as a community is much, much smaller than that. And that makes sense to me,
because to be motivated to use these tools to make a new discovery, you have to have a question
that is really driving you. And fortunately, we're not compelled to really, really think hard
about something that's really, really bothering us all the time, right? That would be no good if that
were the general condition that humans lived in. But none of us get away with a whole life without
having something that we have to think about in which the off-the-shelf solutions aren't working.
You know, we might have tried one or two things that seemed kind of obvious, but something
didn't work and we have questions in our mind. So we use our brain and we use our tools that
are available to us to observe and to make changes. In that dimension,
the dimension of how do we reason about ourselves and make discoveries about the things that are really important to us,
even if you imagine, just for the sake of a kind of quick little heuristic,
that only a tenth of a percent of the people who are actively using some wearable technology
are engaged in a process that you might describe as a quantified self-process of reasoning with their data,
that's still tens of thousands of people even today, growing ultimately into hundreds of thousands
of people.
Yeah.
And for cultural change, think about something like Wikipedia or other novel forms, new forms
of knowledge making, that one-tenth of a percent at any given time is generating material
that's really useful to many other people.
Yeah, sort of a multiplicative effect.
Yeah.
I think seeing this cultural dynamic is really, really, you know,
what's important in understanding how quantified self will change the general culture over time.
Well, that's actually really interesting because didn't Neutropic sort of spawn on Reddit as a
community? That is sort of the equivalent of sort of this very engaged base as creating knowledge for
people in public. But I have a pushback, which is I buy the argument that things that are
early trends, they start small and they grow big. I buy the argument that a highly engaged group
of people can help drive that. I also think people are very lazy fundamentally and very
resistant to change. And sometimes change does happen upon them passively to quote a word used earlier,
but people wear wearable. And they don't do anything with that data because it's very easy to optimize
for one half of this. And you kind of treat the act of doing it as the act itself. It's as if you've already
done it. So I think that that's completely right. And that's why we're seeing kind of a tapering in
the wearables area. Like it's not the beginning of the end of wearables right now. I think that we're
at the end of the beginning. So the way that I like,
like to think about this is I like to compare all of these devices to mills that are turning
into flour. And instead of flour, they're producing data. And some people say, hey, I love to bake.
I have data. Like now I know exactly how I'm going to answer these questions about myself.
This is great. Most people say, okay, I have flour, but I don't bake. I want a cookie. Where's my
cookie? And the challenge is that there aren't cookies yet. And that's not the,
fault of any one company, it's just a reflection of where the field is. We're still in the early
days. We have the crappy cell phone cameras of the early 2000s. The quantified cell community,
people are swapping recipes and figuring out how to make cookies, but we haven't figured out
kind of the mass cookie recipe that works for everybody. I think that what a cookie will look like
will be apps and services built on top of this data that don't require people to look at the
data. Predictive models like, hey, you're at risk for a heart attack because we've seen in all of the
the populations like you that preceding heart attacks, this is what data looked like. That will be
one path when we can tie these things to clinically relevant outcomes. And I think another path will be
closing feedback loops automatically. So without the person in the loop, the mootering that would
monitor how much exposure I've had to light. And instead of going through the seasonal,
effective disorder, kind of a funk where you wonder what's wrong with you, you could just have
this mood ring, talk to the lighting in your house. They could automatically compensate and you
wouldn't have to go through that cycle every fall. You're talking about closing the feedback loop
and that's one of the cookies with predictive models and other cookie. What about design? I mean,
design plays across all of this. Do you guys have any thoughts on the
design aspect. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot is that wearables are interesting,
but could the sensors be in the environment around you? So, for example, could you imagine,
you know, a futuristic clinic gym where, you know, instead of going to the urinal and you're peeing
away all this data, you're collecting all your, you know, your feces, your urine, you're having
your microbiome sequence then and there. A biofund, which is a distinct fund from this conversation.
One of the things that they said was that they think the bathroom is actually the ultimate diagnostic of the future.
We're extruding out this data.
Yeah, exactly.
That it's the ultimate input output, you know, literally.
Vehicle.
Just speaking of vehicles, the vehicle, like your car is another great place for monitoring.
You're a captive audience.
You can have sensors in a steering wheel.
You can have cameras that are pointed towards your face because you're facing in the same direction.
There are a number of car manufacturers who,
are adding these kinds of sensors in the car, whether for use in driving, looking at drowsiness,
et cetera, I guess in the same way as the bathroom is piggybacking on something that you already
do. Sitting in a car is something that you already do.
Well, there's a best practice in design, which is to get deeply involved with the users
of the products, there are often some really unexpected discoveries that you make
when you bring yourself close to that situation,
a range of questions that isn't very well described
by the optimization culture of Silicon Valley.
And so I would say that it would be a useful exercise
to stand a little bit closer to the reality of many, many, many other people
and listen to how they describe the questions that are really on their minds.
And just to give you an example of that, many people are deeply involved in caring for other people.
And in doing that caregiving and caretaking, they often deprioritize some things like how much time they spend at the gym and how closely they monitor what they eat.
And yet they take those values, family values and community values, to actually be superior.
So in their minds, they make a choice that is a conscious choice and a justified choice.
and a justified choice in which their physical health is sometimes sacrificed.
In terms of designing products or designing services, I do think it's important to start
pretty far upstream with an attitude of kind of open-mindedness and respect to the variety
of circumstances in which users of those products may find themselves.
I come from the world of ethnography and ethnographic methods are critical because you're not
relying on user studies of what people say they want or do, but you're actually observing them
and their natural behaviors and their natural habitat.
And then then designing for the individual as part of this larger ecosystem, to your point,
are they a caregiver, are they a caretaker, mother, father, aging parents?
It could be any, you know, permutation.
Thinking about technology and context is pretty critical for adoption.
I mean, that's how the GUI came about, that you're really embedded in this perspective
of how people are actually using it.
Jeffrey, you referenced the Homebrew Club earlier.
But the reality is it's only when people started thinking about,
okay, how do we make this, like for kids to be able to use computers?
I think it has to be super passive for 90% of people to use it.
So things like continuous glucose monitoring, you don't need to worry about it.
You pull dead off naturally.
Or to Rachel's point earlier, building it on existing things, like grafting it onto cars, grafting it onto the bathrooms, gyms, right, exactly.
And then the only thing you can make active, you have to make it feel good at the end of the day.
You have to have some sort of close reward loop.
A lot of people that like exercising, it feels good to do that 15-minute run or when you're fasting.
it feels good to, you know, get into ketosis, make sure that they actually have some sort of like gamified
Yeah, gamification mechanic, right. Sometimes feeling good is its own reward, but it doesn't hurt to have, like my favorite thing is a to-do list and being able to check it off. It's like the most satisfying thing in the world. It's a very minor thing, but it's a perfect example of how you can design for. And I make one quick comment. If you think about your idea about censorifying the environment, not just like the wearables, the first thing that went through my head is what is a baby monitor in a baby's room, but that it's literally putting visual sensors. It's actually a way of demystifying this like scary idea, this augmented vision into a child's room.
Yeah.
As a parent.
No, I think it's a good example.
This is a good moment to just do a quick terminology check.
Gary, you define quantified self in terms of the market and the community, but like what
is quantified self itself?
Well, one of the ways to think about quantified self is as a variation on the words personal
computing.
Quantified really is a synonym for computing.
By quantified, we don't just mean it has a numeral.
but we mean that its observations are structured in such a way that you can use some of the techniques of science and technology to work with them.
So that's quantified.
And then the self is a synonym for personal.
It's a usefully ambiguous word that concentrates all of the most important and often implicit things that we care about.
But the difference between personal computing and quantified self is that personal computing is a capital computing is a capital.
category of computing. Computing is the noun and personal is the adjective. Quantified self is really a way
of thinking about the self. And the computing or the technology that's in the term is a way of thinking
that's connected to lots of other ways people have thought about themselves throughout history.
That's so interesting because it's the inversion of personal computing, but much more than that.
Jeffrey, you referenced some other quick keywords? Sure. So neutropics are compounds that have
cognitive enhancing aspects. In colloquial use, neutropics or anything that enhances cognitive performance.
That's not like a pharmaceutical drug. Well, I think neutropics is orthogonal to legality.
There are, you know, scheduled drugs, supplements, and then drugs, prescribed drugs. Think of
them as orthogonal pieces. Okay, so that's neutropics. You said ketones a few times.
So our bodies produce energy, ATP, using either glucose through a process called glycolysis or what's
specifically sort of a backup turbocharged state, which is using ketosis, which develops ketones.
So ketones are compounds that are broken down from fat, and our cells can use that to create ATP.
And it's very interesting because a lot of emerging data around ketones being more efficient
for mitochondria to produce energy, you actually get more power per unit carbon using ketones
as opposed to glucose. So that's been very interesting from a biohacking perspective of how to use
ketones potentially as a more efficient fuel for various performance.
And how do you define biohacking?
Biohacking to me is approaching the human system from an engineer's perspective.
So being very thoughtful or algorithmic about inputs to maximize certain outputs.
Rachel, how would you define wearables?
I'd say that generally they're electronics that you wear, although I have an antique
Tiffany pedometer from the late 1800s, which is completely,
mechanical.
So I'd say that wearables are anything that you wear that can help track or interact with
the world.
We have fitness trackers and activity trackers as one category of wearables.
Another category that's becoming more popular now are curables.
Use our headphones that often have sensors in them.
I recently got a Kickstarter pair of hearables.
It's called B-I.
They do a lot of the biosensing that is done on your wrist elsewhere, and they also have
an AI coach.
And so the goal of hearables is to move towards, like, augmented reality for your auditory
system.
So, like in the movie, her.
So hearables is another category of wearables.
And then headsets, like emotive and things like that, where does that fit in?
The mess of wearable, obviously, but, like, is that just like its own category?
So I think anything that you wear on your body.
that collects data about you or allows you to interact with other devices could be a wearable.
It's interesting to see the different categories of wearables. It's not just activity trackers.
Obviously, virtual and augmented reality is another category of wearable. Google Glass paved
the way for wearing wearables on your face. I have the new Snap Spectacles, and I just collected
a lot of interesting eye-level videos on my recent crypto.
Yeah.
I mean, I wear a ringly.
I wear a ringly, which full disclosure is an A6 and Z company,
but I actually knew her before,
which is basically a ring that does notifications.
They also have bracelets with a now a fitness tracker built in.
But my number one thing is that I care fundamentally about the fashion.
It's wearing a piece of jewelry to me.
And that to me is what makes a wearable more ubiquitous,
which is why I love that you mentioned and referenced snap,
because we don't have to think about these big, clunky, ugly device.
Also the 1800 Tiffany Padammer.
That's cool.
I know.
I want to see that.
I know.
In this podcast, I'm wearing a ring that's an antique watch.
We should actually share photos right after.
People wear things for all sorts of reasons.
But if we wore things just for utility, you know, we'd probably be walking around wearing
like our workout clothes and our running shoes all of the time.
And so this goes back to what we're saying before of like understanding your users is really important.
If you can't get somebody to wear,
the device that you build
none of the
sophisticated algorithms
that you have matter at all.
I totally agree. I mean, it's the broader theme
of this conversation too, which is about changing
culture. People have been wearing totemic objects for ages
that have no function except
maybe signaling for how many carry shells you have
on your necklace. I think just like
I think reflecting back to maybe
why it's a slow adoption.
I think Gary's point is spot on.
Culture takes a long time to shift.
I think one interesting
notion is that we're probably the sickest cohort of humans in the history of humanity.
If you look at obesity, Alzheimer's diabetes, I think one of the latest statistics, up to
75% of Americans are predicted to be obese by 2050, which is insane.
Yeah.
So you're saying a majority of our country will be extremely, will be overweight in just like a few
years.
Yeah.
And I think that from a historical perspective, going to the gym is only a recent phenomenon
in the last 20, 30 years.
physical labor was just a part of our livelihoods for most of human civilization.
And now we have to make an intervention of exercise back into...
Well, we're contriving because of change and, you know, the way we work and live today.
Like the fact that we have standing desks.
Right.
And I think if we constantly eat, maybe, you know, intermittent fasting is interesting.
Share intervention.
We're all going to be tracking our blood glucose or insulin responses.
I think that could be something that brings quantified self from more of a niche activity
to be a standard protocol for people to live by.
It's a natural evolution of etiquette and culture as innovation happened.
Rachel, you mentioned noisy signals.
We want to do a quick short definition on that?
If you knew the ground truth of, say, how many steps you've actually walked today,
that would be great, but that's not possible.
And so all of your different devices have different algorithms that they're running.
And so you have multiple noisy views of some underlying round truth.
And so one way I like to think about this, especially
with respect to health care,
I like to think of going to a doctor's visit
as going to have a studio portrait taken,
like a professional portrait,
where the lighting is right,
and they know how to pose you.
And a lot of the digital health tools that we have
are much more like selfies taken on an old cell phone,
which are not really great quality photos,
but they can take in together with the studio,
quality portraits, they add more information. And if you take all of the noisy snapshots of
your life, it will give you a better picture of what your life is actually like than if you only
have high-quality studio portraits. You have the best analogies. Are there any parting thoughts on
what's next or what you want listeners to like leave with after hearing your viewpoint on this podcast?
Well, I would just say that if you have something that's bothering you, a question that's hard to answer,
you could try some empirical approaches.
What are the most interesting things that you're tracking now?
Like, what's most actionable for you?
The thing I'm most excited about is I did just get a freestyle Libre Pro arrived in the mail,
and so I'm looking forward to learning about my glucose levels.
What is that?
Is that a continuous glucose monitor?
Oh, CGM, I'm right, continuous glucose.
Okay, gotcha.
Very cool.
Yeah, I think that continuous biometric data is going to be inevitable.
Data can be used for good or for bad.
there's dystopic versions of how to use this data, but the status quo as is is pretty
dystopic where everyone's obese. So I'm just excited or at least hopeful, optimistic that the more
data that we have, the better decisions we can make to improve not just ourselves, but the society
around us. The interesting thing around the social dynamics around biohacking and eutrophics
that there's always been two veins of groups, one you have the community base and these are people
doing n-1 self-experiments.
And then you have academia that's being funded by Department of Defense or DARPA to create
super soldiers or just more enhanced humans.
And I think where this interesting point where these two different groups are really converging
to one.
So we can start seeing some of these military, you know, research, you know, blue sky ideas being
productized and something that can be in consumer hands.
That's actually the inevitable progression of technology too, right?
Because like you have like things like the home brew club, which sort of
took like this DARPA-based like centralized notion of computing. And then you also have like
the communities of personal computing, you know, PC enthusiasts and the mainstream. And we are an
interesting point, I think, with technology in general, where we're seeing a lot of this,
where there are certain things that are being developed at a government level and like people
at a consumer level are plugging into that in different ways, which I think is really relevant.
Yeah.
One of the things that we have to figure out as a society is how do we think about some of the questions
about what happens when our entire lives are monitored,
not just by our wearables, but by our home,
by our bathrooms, by our cars.
Wearables are changing and evolving,
but they're not going to go away.
What kinds of systems do we want to have set up
such that we were protected further down the line?
So we have Gina, the Genomic Information Non-Discrimination Act,
which prevents your genomic information from being used against you in certain ways.
But all of this data that we're collecting now,
I like to think about it the same way that in the 1950s and 60s X-rays were used in shoe stores,
you could go in and have an x-ray taken of your foot to see if the shoe fit well and it was this novelty.
but over time we realized that there were actually very dangerous side effects to x-rays.
And it didn't mean that the x-rays shouldn't be used or should be outlawed completely,
but that there were particular circumstances in which we should use x-rays,
but we also needed to exercise caution.
And I think that we're going to realize that data is a lot like x-rays
in that there are very many positive benefits that we will be.
be able to get out of having this data.
But it's also important to exercise some amount of caution because data has become permanent.
And once it exists about us, it's there.
And there are going to be a lot of potentially dystopian kinds of futures that might come up
that.
And so I'd say that for even if you think that you're not collecting data about yourself,
it's being collected anyway.
And so it's important to think about some of the longer term implications of that.
You can avoid it.
So how do we think about moving forward positively?
I'm so glad you brought that up because, you know,
one of the things that I don't like is when we preemptively decide things before
there's sort of this permissionless innovation and creativity that can happen.
But to your point, we absolutely have to be more thoughtful about those consequences.
I mean, one great example at a very evolutionary scale of this conversation.
We had Yuval Harari on this podcast, and he's the author of Sapiens and Homo Deos.
And one of the big things that he pointed out is, like, as we enter a world where we may be able to augment ourselves with technology, it could actually entrench inequalities because a certain class of people might be able to afford a certain class of devices or augmentation that other people might not.
And in fact, what was previously, you know, an inequality of, you know, societal, cultural level becomes a technological one then.
And then one that actually really affects outcomes.
You have escape velocity.
Yeah.
The richer, you get rich and smart on everything.
Exactly.
So to your point, there's responsibility to data.
There's this broader question of things connected to surveillance and privacy.
And then, of course, a larger consideration around inclusion so that making sure that a certain elite class isn't the only one benefiting from such technologies.
Okay.
Well, thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast.
Thanks, Mel.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
