WHOOP Podcast - Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab Founder, on his role in creating much of the technology we use today, predictions for the future, and his long-time friendship with Steve Jobs.

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab Founder, author of Being Digital, and one of the very first users of the internet discusses the many accurate predictions he made in his book two decades ago (6:07), future technology like learning by taking a pill (19:38), virtual reality in 1967 (21:07), the birth of the internet (26:05), his friendship with Steve Jobs, (37:26) including literally the first iPhone (42:30), plus the Apple CEO's failures too (39:27), artificial intelligence (55:46), cryptocurrency (1:08:00), clean energy (1:10:32), space travel (1:12:26) and the immense value he sees in WHOOP outside of athletics (57:38).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance. But no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. At WOOP, we measure the body 24-7 and provide analytics to our members to help improve performance. This includes strain, recovery, and sleep. Our clients range for the best professional athletes in the world,

to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? We're launching a podcast today. deeper. We'll interview experts and industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop podcast. One of the first people to really embrace it, Hookline and Sinker, and I

I think it's, I think I taught him not most, but certainly a lot of what he knew was Steve Jobs. He was somebody who had a natural affection for both computation and design. My guest today is Nicholas Negroponte. Nicholas is the founder of the MIT Media Lab where he helped drive the birth to the computer industry, the internet, and so much of the technology that we see and use in our daily life. lives. Nicholas, funny enough, was a user of the internet when he literally knew every single person on the internet. Nicholas also founded one laptop per child. He was the first investor in Wired Magazine. He wrote the book Being Digital, which predicted many of the technological

changes that we've seen over the last 20 years. We go deep everything technology. We talk about many of his accurate predictions that he made in the 90s, what's happened on the pace that he expected and what could have happened faster. We talk about virtual reality and augmented reality. The idea of digital butlers and how voice communication will make everything around you much easier to use. We talk about cryptocurrency and his friendship with Steve Jobs over the last three decades and when Jobs showed him the iPhone before it was publicly announced. Nicholas is a completely fascinating person. He's been a phenomenal board member and an investor in Whoop,

and I've really enjoyed getting to know him over the last six years. Without further ado, here's Nicholas. Nicholas, thanks for doing this. Look forward to it. So there's so much to cover with you about technology and everything that you've done in your career, but I thought I would just start by asking you, if you were at a dinner party and remarkably the person sitting next to you didn't know who you were,

and they said, Nicholas, what do you do? how would you respond to that? Well, I answer very quickly saying I've been a professor at MIT all my life, and that usually turns them off because they don't dare ask anymore, or they say, oh, what did you do? And then I ask them if they've heard about the Media Lab. If they have, then it's easy. Just say I was the founder.

If they haven't, I go into a little song and dance about most of the things that they use, like their iPhone and their laptops, sort of, came from us 40 years ago. Sure. And how did you get inspired to start the Media Lab, the MIT Lab? Well, I had already been at MIT for almost 15 years and had been a student and joined the faculty and started a small lab that was very much at the intersection of design and technology. And as our little lab grew, it grew more and more into the huge.

computer interface problems. For example, we more or less invented touch screens, which people thought were very stupid at the time that nobody would ever want to touch a screen because the finger was very low resolution, that it would sort of block what you were trying to touch. You couldn't see it. And people even wrote articles about how this would never, ever work. And one of the funniest that I ran into was that it wouldn't work because it would would get the screen dirty. So that's the sort of thing we did, but we did hundreds of them. And this is in 1985.

You're launching the MIT Media Lab. We launched the Media Lab actually, it opened in 85, so we launched it in 80, but most of the predecessor groups were born and grew to some critical mass in the 70s. So the body of work that became representative, of what the Media Lab did was done really between 1970 and, let's say, 82, 83. And the research that you guys were doing out of the MIT Media Lab in the 80s and early 90s kind of feels like it was about 10 years ahead of its time in terms of predicting the cycle of the Internet and the whole computer industry.

Would you say that was fair? Like you guys were doing touch interface in the 80s, right? We're doing it in the 70s, actually, even the late 60s. Right. By the time the media lot opened, there was no more question about whether it was sort of how to do it. I hope it was 10 years ahead of itself. That's our job. Well, I reread your book being digital, which came out, and ironically I read it on my Kindle, which I thought you'd appreciate.

So the whole book's about how bits are going to replace atoms. So effectively, what used to be a book is going to be something that's now on a Kindle, And, of course, it's ironic because I read your book on a Kindle. And, in fact, we invented the Kindle display. So there's a double, the E-ink display. Yeah, so there's some magic to that. I want to talk about some of the predictions that you made in that book because a lot of them would go on to become true.

And, of course, some of them took longer to actually come to fruition. How does that book age in your mind? Well, first of all, they weren't really predictions. And this is why they could come out so well. well, they were extrapolations. Everything in the book was something we were doing. And I have an old friend, Alvin Toffler, who did the opposite. He predicted by reading and sort of thinking and then imagining what might happen. We didn't do that. We read very little, and we weren't trying to sort of guess. We were working on something, let me take flat panel displays. We had the first

flat panel displays that were in the, if you will, non-intelligence. community back in the early 1970s. It was a piece of glass six inches by six inches with 64 by 64 pixels in black and white and about 35 percent of them didn't work. So as you held up this piece of glass and told somebody that you know in the future you're going to have very large full color displays made of sheets of glass, they would laugh at you. They would say you're joking. But when you're working on that six-inch piece of glass, it's much easier to extrapolate than to be just thinking in a vacuum about will displays be flat panels or not. So the whole book had that. Every single quote prediction was actually an extrapolation. And most of them have served well

because so much time, and it's 20 years old. So whether it takes 15 years or 20 years doesn't really matter when you look back. So some happened sooner, some happened later. Well, I'd encourage people to reread it in your point about extrapolations. It's quite interesting. And as a thought process and thinking about the things today that we see and how as a result of things we see today, you can predict the next 10 or 20 years. I want to walk through a couple of these predictions and whether you feel they occurred on an appropriate timeline or they took too long. So the first is just the whole notion of digital books and news, content of any kind. Do you feel like that has proliferated as fast as it should have? Well, what affects the timing is usually not the technology. The technology

very real is the gating factor. So you have people's business models that are kind of upset, or you have a culture that is hesitant for one reason or another, or it's consistent. It's considered inappropriate, again, for one reason or another. So in the world, let's say, of newspapers, people really had an industrial model where they manufactured something and they shipped it and stored it and had a very complex system of distribution that the people who did well at that did well in the newspaper business. So it wasn't just being good at the news, whatever that means. It was being good at the manufacture and distribution of the paper.

And it's interesting because English is one of the few languages where the word paper is in the word newspaper. And so it's kind of really embedded that we think of it as a paper. And it's not. It's really it's the distribution of bits. And once there are bits, again, you know all the properties of bits. It's a totally different business. And to go from, in that case, the Adams to the Bits business, was the big transition for the news and the publishers and all the rest.

How about voice communication? Because in the book, you write about this idea of everyone having digital butlers. And what was interesting for me in thinking about voice communication is actually how little I use it in my life. And I remember when I was like 10 or 11 years old, I was one of the slowest typers in my computer class and I convinced my parents to buy me this voice recorder it was like the first voice recorder on the market

where you could speak into the voice recorder and then it would then transcribe everything that you said and I thought in the back of my mind this is going to be a great trick to beat all of my classmates who I can't type as fast as. Now we're roughly 20 years later and that actually still isn't that still isn't the use case for how I write things

Does it surprise you as well that we don't speak to write books, so to speak? Well, some people do. Winston Churchill did, for example. He dictated all of his books, but he had humans doing the transcription. I find myself dictating most of my text messages and even some of my email, which I, this is only in the past year or so. Now, you'll send it as a voice message or you'll send it as text. Yeah, okay. It's very important that it's as text.

Now, there are two parts to voice input. One is to get the transcription from the acoustic to the print correctly. And that's telling the difference between kissing her and Kissinger. Hard problem. And when you say those, you know, you and I can figure out what you mean because kissing her is not probably in or Kissinger. or it's not one or the other isn't really in the context of the sentence. The computer can't do that, so it has to get it from the acoustic signal and understand that there's a sound and there's a pause and there's no, which is a hard problem.

It's possible, but it's hard. Then once you get it into text, there's a second layer, and in fact a much harder layer, and that is going from the text to understanding what the text means. As soon as you get any metaphor, the computer's stuck. So metaphors are hard because they work for humans because you know the meaning of the other thing and you can take the likeness and apply it to that sentence. That's a very hard problem and, you know, there are people who work on it, but it's difficult. And then also going from text to the meaning, you get proper names where you can.

could have a name where Mr. Green is a person and green is also a color and understanding whether you mean green the person or green the color is sort of a version of the kissing her Kissinger issue. So the two layers have to be separated. If you want to dictate a book or email or something, getting the first one right, which it doesn't do perfectly and humans don't do perfectly is a good start for many, many people. I've had lectures that I have given and I think I speak relatively clearly I don't, especially in foreign countries where you're trying to get people to understand who maybe don't speak perfect English. You learn to speak slowly, not slur your words together. You know, you try to be almost childish in the way you speak. And yet when they do

a transcription, it's filled with errors. Right. And it's not because it's just that the human tried as hard as he or she could and doesn't get it because can't get the metaphors or the Mr. Green as a person not a color. So why didn't speech go that fast? Well, one of the reasons to use speech is what you mentioned, and that is to not have to type, but that wasn't important enough. There were a few people who didn't want to type, and, you know, you can see it as an application. But when it became really important was when the devices were so small that you didn't have really another good way to do it. And as something gets small, like a wristwatch, you want to kind of talk to it. You don't want to try with your fat fingers to hit buttons and touch things on it. So speech becomes a channel of communication, a very good one, with small things.

And that's kind of what threw it over the edge, because cell phones were a good start, plus the cell phone wasn't limited to doing it in the cell phone. It could go back to the network and try and get much bigger computers in the background, physically bigger as well as computationally bigger, do the processing so that when you spoke, it could do the transcription at least and maybe someday the meaning it's really interesting and how do you think that then applies to language translation so that's another thing I've thought about for a while it's like it feels like we should be approaching a point in time where I could just speak in a foreign country and the words that come out of my mouth are in the language that they need to be well that has been you know the dream for many people for a long time and I was just given two earbuds where you wear one and the person you want to talk to, where's the other, and you put an iPhone in between that has a translation software that maps from, you know, in the acoustic domain to the text, back to the other acoustic.

It does reasonably well. Really? Okay. It does well enough that you could go to any country and certainly order lunch and dinner and ask instructions if you get lost. So I was surprised. somebody gave it to me as a gift, and this is not an expensive item. Do you remember what it's called? I don't. I'm sorry.

I can go home and find out. Put it in the notes. But one of the problems is, and I have friends who are professional simultaneous translators, is it's very hard, especially for a simultaneous translator, to deal with not just the meaning and the metaphors, but also with the fact that in certain languages, the sentence is backloaded. For example, the verbs at the end and all this other stuff's at the beginning, and then you really have to get the whole sentence to then restructure it.

So from a real-time standpoint? Real-time is hard for humans. Much harder. It is much harder. And then the emphasis, for example, in some languages, you might have 14 words for the word boat. Right. And, you know, there's a word for a big boat.

It's a word for a little boat that's a boat that you own versus a boat that you rent. There are many versions of boat. And then somebody says, boat in English, you've got to know which one of those in the other language. And so it's a challenge. It'll be done well by computers eventually. But it's a hard one. Well, do you envision in, I don't know, 10 or 20 years that there's some kind of interface that's translating everything if you're in a different country? Like, how would you envision the interface working for that?

Well, let me answer the question working backwards. If you flash forward, let's say, 100 to 500 years from now, assuming people are still on the planet, that there is a likelihood that everybody might speak one language. Right. Or, worst case, everybody would speak their language, whatever that means, plus a common language, which at the moment looks pretty likely to be English or some version of English, or Chinglish is a way people talk about it in the field.

Why that? Because Chinese and English mixed because of the populations. Though more people in China are learning English than people in the rest of the world know it. So, I mean, you've got such big numbers occurring in a place like China. So you're telling me, I'm asking you the wrong question. No, I'm just backing up from that now and saying, will people be as interested in having a common language if there was some way of basically doing the translation automatically?

And you could imagine implants in your ear that would do the translation. So in terms of listening, speaking's a little harder. I'm not sure I can imagine ways where you could have your body produce, you know, the speech forms and so on. And your tongue automatically wiggle for you. And, you know, your body, right now my mind is telling me how to talk. Could that be intercepted and suddenly I'm speaking some foreign language? or could I learn a language very quickly by taking a pill? I know that this afternoon I have to use Italian,

and so I swallow my Italian pill an hour before, and I speak fluent Italian for the next four hours, and that's plausible, actually. Now, is that concept of taking a pill somewhat abstract in that it may not literally be the type of pill that you and I know today, but perhaps we're already somewhat connected to a computer, and what you're effectively doing is downloading some, level of software to play the analogy out that then updates your body.

Yeah, it is, yes. But the pill is more than just a cute metaphor for something like aspirin or whatever. It's the fact that if you can get into the bloodstream, what you can do in the bloodstream is access neurons right, you know, you can get right up there. So if you imagine nanorobots in the bloodstream, one way to get to the brain is for them to go that way. So the pill is just an inefficient way of getting into the bloodstream. Now, could you be intravenously connected or could you go from the outside in, as some people are doing right now, what you are effectively doing is interacting directly with the brain?

Yes. Well, fascinating. I want to go back for a second and talk about a couple of these other topics from the book and how you think they've advanced. You talk a good bit about the concept to virtual reality. And from the sounds of it, it's from the work you did at the MIT Media Lab, it sounds like you guys were pretty well on your way, even in the 80s and 90s, of prototyping pretty much would exist today. And I would argue that VR, in some ways, is lagged behind our imaginations. What do you think?

Well, the first VR set that I wore that was really a pair of glasses, and as you moved, the objects and it moved in accordance to your head and it looked like you were moving them and you were walking around them was in 1967 and these were round cathode ray tubes which most people don't even know what those are today but you know there's about eight inches long with a little sort of circular display that was about two inches in diameter and you were physically connected to the machine it was pretty weird setup But then it took 50 years for that to move to what we know today in terms of various levels of virtual reality. And that isn't because people were slow on the uptake.

It's because you needed to have the advances, which occurred for other reasons, take place. For instance, just display technology itself, the resolution, the so-called pitch, and be able to drive small, high-resolution displays, you know, it took a long time. There were many reasons to do it. People did it for different reasons and different contexts. And as an industry, it just moved forward relatively naturally. So I don't look at it and say, why didn't that happen sooner? Because one of the reasons it didn't happen sooner is that early versions you would

get dizzy because the response time was too slow. Or you would see the jagged lines and so that was distracting and as something tilted it got more jaggies and then the jaggies would move and so there was no imperative because it was such

it was so bad and then as it got better then people found that you know that this could be used not just to train airline pilots and simulators but you could use it as consumer product and that's pushed it even faster because the numbers are so big.

Now, do you think that augmented reality will sort of jump ahead fast enough such that virtual reality never fully has that mass adoption moment? And maybe explain for audience. Yeah, the use of the word virtual reality means that you are looking at only that which is computed and you are completely engulfed by the, computed scene so I can take you through airports and places you've never been that don't exist. Augmented reality just means that you're overlaying part of the real world synchronously, at least spatially synchronously, so that when you look out, you have the real world with

a overlay on top of it. And there are many applications for that where you would want to visualize things, whether they're medical or design or others. I was just yesterday, with somebody who was using virtual reality to help psychotic patients, to help people who had real mental blocks. Yeah, that's really interesting. And you're able with virtual reality to put them in situations that would be impossible in the real world or they would be terrified, and you can do a certain kind of learning that just doesn't happen in the real world.

And that's the same with flight simulation, whether it's a headset or a larger screen. You train pilots under conditions that they can't experience in a real plane, or at least you don't want the real 747 to crash because some junior pilot is learning how to fly, but they're welcome to crash in the flight simulator. And also you can put them in situations that you would never want to put them in on a real plane, which is why people who have gone. on to flight school and only have learned on simulators can get on board of commercial airlines and fly real passengers without flying the real plane because they've actually learned a lot more

in the simulator. And on some level, that was true as far back as the 90s, right? It was certainly true in military aircraft because they were using them. And to be fair, right, DARPA and these other initiatives actually get a great deal of credit for pushing along some things within the broadly speaking computer industry. Would you agree with that? Oh, my goodness. DARPA laid the groundwork for most of the industry.

Just in case your audience doesn't know, when Sputnik was launched in 50, whatever it was, 7, something like that, the United States became somewhat terrified that it had fallen way behind. And it had actually fallen a little bit behind. And one of the acts of Congress, or maybe it was an executive order, I don't know which, but it happened very quickly, was to create an agency that would do very advanced research, which was called the Advanced Research which was called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, without a D. And then it was in the Defense Department. And for the first five years, it had no D, then it had a D, then it had a D. D, then it lost the D, then I got the D back again.

But it was always doing advanced research, and the whole field of AI came out of that, the Internet came out of that. This is TCIP IP, right? Well, TCIP IP is a protocol that came about five to seven years after the Internet was conceived, and actually the first machines were on the so-called net. And then two people, Vince Cerf and Bob Kahn, came up with TCIP, terrible name, that was the protocol that some people argue was the beginning of the Internet. This is the transmission control protocol and Internet protocol. Yes, which most people don't know, that that's what TCPIP stands for. I don't think that.

I think the Internet really was started in 1968 by Larry Robert. and he was at that time a program director at DARPA and the three institutions that were contracted to develop what became the Internet were MIT, Bolt-Berannick and Newman here in Boston, and ISI, which is a research institute in Los Angeles. And did that immediately catch your attention as something to be watching? Well, I was there. I was there. I was in the mix. I was in the mix. Well, I was more at that time, because this was 68,

I was involved because my professors were also the professors of Larry Roberts. Right, right. And Ivan Sutherland, who were sort of the heroes of the early 60s. And so I was a user. I was a user at a time when I knew everybody on the Internet, because there were only three machines. Which is a fascinating concept. And describe what using the Internet was,

It was alphanumeric. You had a keyboard and you, you know, machines had addresses, but there are only three machines. It wasn't hard to move one to the other. And so you'd send a message to Roberts at the other? Oh, sending messages to other people. That, yes, that was. Like, what would you use the Internet for at that moment? Computation. You'd write programs and basically it was a way of, let me say, sharing time sharing.

Time sharing was invented in the early 60s. and brought to light sort of commonly used in the mid-60s where multiple people connected by phone lines dispersed widely could use a single computer because computers were the sizes of buildings and you would only need a small amount of it. So it was really an Englishman who invented a way to share computationally amongst relatively large numbers of people.

And there were companies like General Electives, had a time-sharing service back in the 60s. And there's some character in the greater Boston area who claims to invent an email and even ran for Senate. I forget his name. But what rubbish. I mean, email was, email existed by that name. You know, in the early 60s, people were doing it.

I was certainly using email in 64, 65. You just didn't have too many people you could communicate with. Right. You already knew all their phone numbers. So then in roughly 1990, right, you've got, what's the gentleman's name? I'm looking for, the guy who's famously, Tim Berners-Lee, right? He invented the World Wide Web. Yes.

And would you say that was the leap forwards that from a consumer adoption standpoint was needed? Well, first of all, I want to go back a little before him because once TCIPIP became the standard, something else happened in the 80s that was in fact invented by a student of mine and so I feel warmly toward it he will not get too much recognition in history but this happened in the early 80s is that he created the domain name server so the idea that you could have whoop.com right that's that those are domain names which didn't exist before and so that was a big step forward so having domain names was a push forward in the 1980s until I'm going to say 87 plus or minus a year it was actually illegal for companies to use the internet

no companies were on the internet it's not extraordinary and that's that's relatively they just had no access to it no it's not illegal in the sense you weren't put into prison but you couldn't you how would you on. Right. Okay. Yeah, you can't. Even though dot com had been envisaged, they weren't, unless they were funding research at a place like the Media Lab, they really didn't have access to the internet. And it was only in the late 1980s that it became common that companies would have internet servers and access and so on. So when we talk about, you know, the breakthrough for consumers, you've got to realize the first breakthrough was to get even just companies on it. Right.

And that didn't happen. The B-to-B element of it. And so that happened in the late 80s. Then Tim, who was working at CERN, which is a physics lab based in Geneva, but whose linear accelerator is so large, it goes under France and touches Italy in Geneva. So if you go underground, it's a big circle. is steps outside of Switzerland. But the actual offices are in general.

Sorry, what's the point of the big circle? So a linear accelerator in order to get these things to move at the speeds they want have to be very long or else round, but, you know, like two, three miles in diameter, four miles in diameter, to fire up, smash atoms and get them to move at speeds

that allow them to do these experiments. Stanford had a linear accelerator that was relatively short. I mean, it might have been a mile long or something like that. But that's sort of incidental, Tim's group, which had several Media Lab, alums in it, were developing what then became the World Wide Web, which did indeed change very much how it was used.

But probably not as much as some... Yes, you wanted to... He does seem to get the most credit for... He gets a lot of credit as he should, but I met somebody who said, I'm going to write a book about the birth of the Internet. And I said, well, that's interesting. You know, if I can help, let me know. And he said, yeah, it all starts with Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web.

Well, that's not true. Right. That's like 40 years before. Well, 20 years. It was 20 years after the birth of the Internet. Yeah, sure. Well, one of the ways that you and I got to know each other so well was over this concept of design being core to technology. And when you brought that up, I think, early on in your

career, it was actually more of a novel concept. I think it was part of what made the MIT Media Lab so important. What got you, you know, interested in design in the first place? And how did you realize you were good at it? Well, now you've got to go back to childhood. But do remember that the Media Lab was in the School of Architecture and Planning. And my professional... That's a good point, right. My professional training was as an architect. So I have two degrees on architecture, and when I started architecture, I thought I was actually a design buildings and do that sort of thing. And as I went through my architecture curriculum, and as I was doing it and doing all the things you can imagine that one does in architecture school, I fell in love with computers.

And it became clear that sort of the calling, if you want to call it, that I had was about computation but from a design perspective. So bringing that to computation was easy and nobody else was doing. But it was considered sissy computer science. It was not considered the real stuff. And it was cute. It was photogenic. It got a lot of attention. I mean, all we need to do is have a color display with some text on it.

And back in the 70s, people would ooh and ah because the idea that you could do that, my colleagues in computer science just thought that this was sizzle but not steak and that the sizzle was getting a disproportionate amount of attention. And only after about five or six years, and this included the birth of the Media Lab, did people realize this is actually the stake, not just sizzle, this was the real stuff. And one of the first people to really embrace it, hookline and sinker, and I think I taught him not most, but certainly a lot of what he knew, was Steve Jobs. And when Steve came to MIT or when he spent time with me in other places, he was somebody who had a natural kinship, if you will, of, you know, or let me say an affection for both computation and design, which then became emblematic of his career.

Right. And then thanks to Steve, people started to look at it and say, well, maybe this is. is why they are doing better or they're more interesting than Microsoft. And there was a real contrast between both the persona and the interests of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It wasn't just that, you know, their balance sheets or their strategy. It was just their point of view. And the two points of view were, you know, almost orthogonal. And it's not that one was bad and one was good, but they were just so different.

And clearly I was more on the sort of the point of view that Steve had, which was heavy in design. Now, the fact that they're doing such a bad job today, their products are getting worse. Their design is, in my opinion, getting worse, is just because anybody's been at the top so long has no place to go but down. Right. Now, I mean, a lot's been written about Steve Jobs, especially in the past five years. To you, what do you remember the most about him? There's certain things when you think about him that come to mind. Oh, we knew each other extremely well, but in the 80s.

We spent a lot of time together. What I remember, which I'd seen quite well documented in places, is that he would blow hot and cold to such extremes that he'd be in a meeting crying at one moment and then laughing at the next and then yelling a moment later and then telling you that you were the stupidest person he had ever seen, and the next morning telling you were the most intelligent. So it was a little hard to deal with somebody who blew so hot and cold,

and it exasperated people, and frankly, not much fun, and people weren't having a good time in those meetings. And you could argue that they respected the creative, and then in hindsight, most of them do. But at the moment, most people were pretty annoyed and was not necessarily getting the best work out of people. It's interesting that he was able to push forward such, I mean, amazing products. It almost seems like in spite of his personality in some ways,

the way it's been described, at least the way you just described it. Yeah, but he also had a pretty long list of failures. At Apple, Lisa was a failure. It shouldn't have been. It was then when he was kicked out of Apple and he went and did Next computers, Next was a failure. And so he's had his share of failures. But if you looked at Next, which I certainly did very, very carefully, and was a minor part of it, it was beautifully designed. The computer was beautiful.

The interface was beautiful. but it was a product that died on the vine. And it, you know, was picked up, at least the software. When they brought Steve back, they kind of out of, you know, they were sort of humoring him, if you will, and they brought the software, which they didn't need next because they could have gotten that from a number of places. But it did have, and you could perhaps be more generous

than I am being right now, and point out that some of the developments at Next got incorporated into Apple and helped it move forward. And that's an interesting moment in time when Jobs comes back to Apple, right? That was right after John Scully was the CEO, is that correct? Sure. I happened to be in Scully's office the day Jobs was fired, and I had a meeting with John Scully at something like 9, 30 or 10 in the morning, and I, again, knew him so well. He said, you know, if I'm a little late, I just use my office.

And he came into the office a little later. And he shut the door and leaned on the door. And he said, I never wanted this. We just fired Steve. And, you know, I had to hear that drama. And I'd heard it a little bit from Steve the week before. So I knew something was cooking, but I was not in any way involved. I always kept a close friendship with both of them and worked with both of them with Steve at Next and with John at Apple.

And then John got fired. And there were a series of interim CEOs that came along. I should remember their names. And I probably could if I tried hard enough. But none of them lasted more than six months or a year. and finally, I think it was under a CEO named Gil Amelio, who they brought Steve back first as a consultant and then as a, and they brought him back

and he integrated himself and eventually took over. And that's well documented as one of the best runs of public traded companies ever been on. You had told me a great story once about Steve Jobs showing you the first iPhone before anyone else had seen it. describe that moment in time? Because you were also on the board, I think, of Motorola. Yes, I was on the board of Motorola for about 15 years, which is the period Motorola went from a market share of, global market share of 45% to a global market share of 4%.

Wow. So it was a tough run. And Apple was doing joint ventures with Motorola and some joint phones. I had stepped down from being the director of the Media Lab and started something called one laptop per child, which was, amongst other things, a physical laptop designed by Eve Behar, who had previously done some work for Apple, and Steve wanted to see it. And I brought it to see about 12 years ago to Steve. I remember it was a Thursday after. Thursday morning for a couple of hours. And we were just in one of these windowless conference rooms, the two of us. And as I was showing him in the laptop, I could see that he was fidgeting with something in his pocket.

And it was known. The iPhone had been announced, and there, I believe, had been pictures of it. Okay. But I didn't know anybody who had seen one or touched one. And after I show him the laptop, he says, I'd like to show you. what I consider my life's work and he pulled it out and he was he was holding it he was he was sort of holding it the way you would hold a fine piece of jewelry where you're sort of feeling it at the same time and he was the way he was holding it wasn't as if he had just

grabbed it with two fingers or just stuck it in the palm of his hand and he said would you like to touch it and so he and it's a little bit like passing a hamster or something you know crawls off your hand. And it was kind of, it's, you know, when it's presented that way, you feel a bit sensuous about it. And he said, let me show you how it works. And he showed me and he was obviously very good at doing it and touching. And I reminded him that I was on the Motorola board. And I said, do you mind if I tell my fellow board members what I've seen?

And he said, no, you can tell them, but, you know, don't tell the press. told them and, you know, just didn't have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but, you know, just be discreet. And the reason I know it's a Thursday, because I flew back to the East Coast and the motor old board meeting started the Sunday night of that weekend. And when I went to the board meeting, I said, can I have five minutes at the board for this to just tell you what I saw at Apple? And, of course, they gave me my five minutes. And I did. And I did. And I just, describe what I had seen. And rather than be impressed, the board was very unimpressed.

They said, you know, we make 250 million handsets per year, and we'll be doing 300 million next year. And this is a niche market, and he's not going to have more than a million users in the first year. And they were almost right because not the next board meeting, but they happened quarterly. The one after that, so that was six months later, the topic was raised again and said, you see, he's only got 500,000 users or whatever. Right. Or less, what they thought was insignificant number. And I said, you're kind of missing the point.

This is not, so maybe the acceleration is a little bit, but this really is. the future, not these sort of inert's handsets that we're making. And it took about a year, maybe even a year and a half for not just Motorola, but Nokia, everybody else, to catch on that this was a very trend-setting approach to handsets. Well, you'd certainly be well positioned to appreciate it because you wrote at such great length about how much you hated the mouse and how powerful you thought the finger was in relation to the stylus, which I think was largely, I mean, from a consumer reflection, that felt like the biggest, you know, transition in smartphones.

Because up to that point, the BlackBerry was really considered the smartphone of fashion because you could type so well with it. And, you know, BlackBerry people said, well, I'll never be able to type as well with a touchscreen. And it took a lot of, I think, vision to believe that ultimately, you would be able to. Or the other things you can do at it are worth it to make a more photographic-based. Right, that's the other way to look at it.

Yeah. Because in the handsets to put a camera on a phone took a certain, you know, amount of time. And Kodak and some of the others who had done joint ventures because the CEO, I should say the president, the COO and president of Motorola went to Kodak to be the CEO. EEO of Kodak and so Kodak and Motorola had a very natural sort of affinity and the two of them again just didn't think of it the way Steve did it was it was a handset that happened to have a lens and when you clicked it sent the photograph guess where to Kodak and that's so ridiculous you know

in fact it was it was beyond contempt that that and then the people at Kodak said it will make albums and we'll let you buy stuff and we'll organize your data for you. And it was sort of a very weak beginning of cameras and cell phones. And what are signs to you today that Apple's lost its design shops? Oh, I think that some of the things they're doing now are going to catch up with them. They've basically exited the laptop business. So the new models, are not better than the old ones. In fact, I've noticed that. Yeah, the keyboards are worse.

You know, it's, they've just, they released an update that you can't even control whether you can get it or just automatically gets downloaded, or at least, unless you're watching Carefly and the latest release eliminates half the public websites. You can't log into them anymore because there's a bug in their software. Well, these things are unforgivable. and some of the things they've chosen to take out that were there before are just, for example, the latest iPhone, which uses face recognition, it's got to be the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Face recognition, come on. First of all, by taking the thumb thing away, you don't know what's up and down anymore. You pull out your phone, you don't know if it's upside down or right side up until you fumble with it.

then the next thing that happens is your face I'm trying to quietly under the table send a text message to somebody okay and I've got to turn on the phone by either typing this this six digit number or showing my face or I'm typing the phone sitting there and I want to turn it on but my face isn't there so I've got to move my face over or tilt the phone it's absurd it's such a bad idea but it's cute and so people think oh isn't this nice and you know not a good idea

and they're just things like that they took the little light out of the plug for your charger when you charge your oh yeah that was bothering me too yeah yeah and that light's gone now why is that light gone that was great the light

yeah it was wonderful you knew when it was charged it was charged you knew it was connected yeah okay so they make it and now they're focusing on I'm putting rounded corners on the display of the iPad. Huh? Why are you doing that? You know, that nice, crisp, rectangular edge as at most frames and art and most pages and books.

There's nothing wrong with that. You're throwing design effort either gratuitously or in some cases negatively. And a keyboard is a real important interface, and to mess up the keyboard is just, just a sign of either people churning through the system and there's no corporate history or that they've just lost interest and, you know, they're clipping coupons. So I don't, unless Apple makes a car, I don't think they have much long-term. You know, I don't think it's going to be around that long. As a global leader or just the whole company is eventually going to fall?

Well, again, the whole company isn't going to fall. fold but it'll break up it's as i said exited the laptop business you know will it become a wristwatch company no probably not um will the phone survive well you know it could but you know it's it's not clear that the dominance is going to continue because look there's some really big companies that were very prominent that are gone Motorola being one of them right you know yeah you've now seen this happen enough times to not think it's a crazy idea that a global leader disappears. Even IBM. IBM was the reference for everybody. IBM's gone. IBM sold their laptop business so consumers don't see the name. Now one common threat amongst the companies that you're

saying is that they first and foremost have built hardware, right? I'm curious what you think is the likelihood of a company like Facebook disappearing. for example, which is now connected, I don't know, two and a half billion people, despite getting written up in the New York Times every day for all these sorts of privacy issues. It feels to me quite hard for a company like that to disappear without there being a massive shift in a distribution, so to speak, like where you're spending your time. What depends how sticky it is, how hard it is to exit, and what you lose by doing it. It's very hard to leave the Apple operating system because you buy software that runs on it, your stars, it's all sorts of things.

So to move off it is hard. So you tolerate for a very long time before you move off it. Facebook, particularly in the developing world, this is their on-ramp. Yeah, it's just getting going. It's just, it is for many people, the Internet for them. They don't, they don't know it in another way. And so for them, it's a different issue than for the United States. Most kids that I know, funny to call them kids, but let's say from 25 to 35, have exited Facebook.

They might keep a light sort of interact because sometimes. parties and other things their events are done that way relatively well but as a means of communication it seems to be declining although it's a little bit I think like so for example I'm actually in that age group and I'm pretty familiar with people's take take on Facebook specifically the platform and I think you're right like a lot of people are exiting from it but if you think about the Facebook, the company, we've got Instagram, WhatsApp, all these other forms of communication as well. And those don't seem to be slowing down at all. If anything, they're accelerating. Right. But remember, they're late entries too. So the fact that they have come in

and in some sense superseded, the fact that Facebook had both wherewithal and imagination to buy them is separate, but they became. very popular very fast and so that's proof that you can move your allegiance pretty quickly if it's especially if it's such a single you know single application it's a little it's a little harder to imagine let's say a Facebook disappearing than it is to have an Apple disappear sure yeah I agree that but they both will change and yeah a little bit more may or may not survive what's your opinion on artificial intelligence today? Do you feel like it's catching up to what you envisioned they would be able to do? Well, one of my dearest friends and one of the founders of the Media Lab

was the founder of the field of artificial intelligence. And five people went on a retreat in 1957, Dartmouth, Summer, and came back with, call it a manifesto, with the word artificial intelligence celebrated in it. The term had been used by Alan Turing in the 30s and 40s, but it wasn't really, it was a term in a sentence. It wasn't proposed as a field or an approach. And a man named John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in around, I'm going to say 63, 64, that period, with ARPA leader called DARPA funding. Now, the part of AI that's happening today, which is outside of what Marvin and his colleagues were thinking about, is that the interesting AI of today is the collective intelligence, not what's just in your head or my head

and what we can do as humans and the jokes we can make and the music we can appreciate, but the fact that you can have many people collaborating and get some form of super-intelligence by having multiple little intelligences working together. Well, one phenomenon that you and I, I, I mean, bonded over was this idea that before robots replaced humans in a lot of different fields, sensors or, you know, various forms of computers are going to make humans a lot more effective. And in a lot of ways, that's what we're doing at WOOP in terms of using sensors to optimize performance. Now, when I first met you six years ago at the MIT Media Lab,

I was pitching you on this concept of optimizing performance around athletes. And as someone who has spent very little time in the sports realm, Nicholas, how did we get you enthusiastic about WOOP? and how do you think about it going forwards? Well, I was totally disinterested in whoop and even less interested in athletes and increasing their performance. But I had been involved in the early stage funding

of about 50-50-0 companies up to that time either through a startup fund that I had been part of as well as, you know, doing some on my own. And most of them didn't turn out, by the way, so it's not as if I'm some great investor and I'm another, you know, Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It was a hobby, and the few times that it did work, you realized that it was the people, not the idea, that you could almost invest in two people to do anything, and they would be a success. And when you and John came to my office, I realized that you were that kind of person, so I didn't

give a damn what you were doing. You could have started a garage. And in fact, I thought it was a pretty crowded space to be moving into. And it was the hardest one I've ever participated in because I didn't see the space as one that would really grow into what it's grown. I just had this confidence that you could almost do anything if the two of you set your minds to it. And then And as I started to realize that by going after the high-end professional athlete, you had carved out this unique area for yourselves, which allowed you to do things the others couldn't do. And that became self-evident. And now, more lately, as you know, I'm rather interested in the industrial applications

because when you think of it, no school bus driver should be allowed to drive. your kids, unless they're wearing a whoop strap. I mean, it's just, if you start thinking of it in that sense, you realize, my God, we put our hands in our lives, rather, in the hands of people who may have had such a bad night's sleep that their likelihood of crashing is pretty high. And maybe in an airplane, we might try, we'll worry about it sooner than a school bus, but it's just as a general, you know, application. You really do want to know people are alert and, you know, fit to do things that really mean a lot. Yeah, it's been fascinating for me this concept of recovery or readiness that WOpso accurately has measured for athletes

and how it's applied now to all these different industries that we have sort of gotten pulled, into, really, just by the strength of the demand of larger markets. And, you know, we're still very focused today on performance of athletes and executives and sort of this higher end of the market. But to your point, we are doing a lot of research now in the industrial space where you look at how can you make a construction site safer and more effective, right? And construction sites are wonderful examples because we know that accidents, happen when people are tired. Exactly. Carpenters cut off

their fingers, steel workers forget to put on something, people fall off buildings. I mean, it used to be the construction sites had a large number of deaths per day. You had it, Brasilia. I remember we used to know the numbers

of how many people died each day in the construction of Brazil. Now, admittedly, that was in the middle 60s, but still it's dangerous. And clearly more tired you are the more at risk you are and so it's such a simple equation

and you know a lot of the hardware side that you and I bonded over was effectively designing loop and making it something that people would be willing to wear I think we both agreed early on that wearable technology should either be cool or invisible and we've checked the box on the cool side and that you can dress this sensor up in all sorts of different ways

part of me wonders how far over time we'll be able to push this concept of invisible. And the first phase is this idea that you'll be able to wear it in different areas of your body and it'll be smaller and smaller. I wonder, you know, we're doing some preliminary research in this area, how soon it can actually be inside you. And I've wondered, you know, what your point of view is on that. well there's inside and there's inside you could embed it

you know the way we put little ID tags and dogs and for their vaccinations you can do it for humans and many more people than you think would be willing to do that it's not I agree with that

and I think that's a very simple first step swallowing it is an inefficient way to get into the bloodstream but it's nonetheless one way to do it. But you have to keep swallowing. You've got to keep swallowing. Which is a pain.

Which is indeed a pain. It allows you to do other things, though, in parallel, and you can check other things. But I think embedding it's perfectly fine. What about battery life? I mean, if there's anything that we've been let down by, or at least I feel betrayed by, the advances in battery life.

There's some new work at the Media Lab of parasitic power, Parasitic power just means that you're getting the power from something else like motion or movement of the body or heart rate or beating or atmospheric pressure or whatever and if you're using very little power the body generates enough for you to tap off the body and if you look at some, it's a new faculty member is doing this work you will see some embedded

even on people's wrists Oh, really? Of generating the power. And what you could do is find out what is the power and then reverse engineer something to have that little power to do as much as you can with it. It makes sense. I mean, I hope initially when we were even launching the first whoopstrap

that you'd be able to just power it with movement. But it's amazing actually how ineffective that is as a process. Well, it's not ineffective. It worked for charging watches, But it's very, very little. I guess relative to how much power requires to send all this data and things like that, you almost need more advances to take place there. Well, storing the power is part of the problem because you generate power in bursts

unless you're just, you can settle for, you know, just the pulse and the power that is generated basically by the heart and tap off that because while you're sleeping, you know, that's about the only power source. Do you think that the concept of an annual checkup and a doctor's office and all that will eventually sort of evaporate as sensors get more intelligent and this idea of computing and intelligence as a layer over your health data gets more intelligent. Well, the intelligence is separate from your body being online and having all of the bodily functions recorded and available. What we know about our body is so limited. And it's kind of crazy when you think of it. You go to the doctor and at best you're using a recollection. You're saying,

I didn't feel well last night. And so the doctor says, well, where? And I say, well, you know, in my chest. But, of course, you don't read. It was it your chest? Was it your arm? And then says, well, the pain on a scale of 1 to 10. And all these are things are recollections that you, the person then says,

well, you need a heart transplant. You say, oh, my God, how did we go from such a tiny piece of information to, you know, the vagaries and the, it's really a blind, I mean, you're, you've got so little data at the moment. Well, I did my first annual checkup in three years about a week ago, and it reminded me why I'm probably not going to go for another three years. And there was this funny moment where the woman asked me what my, or put the thing on my finger to take my heart rate, my resting heart rate. I said, you know, I can give you an average for the last six years or the last six hours or you tell me what you want, but this is not going to be an effective reading of my resting heart rate. It's just, I don't know, it seems silly. I'm going to ask you a couple questions on tech, and then I'll let you get out of here.

What's your take on the movement in cryptocurrency? decentralization through that lens. Is it the Web 3.0, as people like to call it? Well, blockchain's a big deal. You know, Bitcoin has disappointed a lot of people, but it's an example that should be taken very seriously. But the whole idea that you could have the kind of benefits of central control without central control is evident in the internet. There's nobody running the internet and there's no central organization managing it. There's, it happens in many countries and, you know, it's an example of itself, but it hasn't, it hasn't happened very much in other areas.

Bitcoin was a wonderful, you know, especially a few years ago as it was being, people were obsessed over it, of showing that you could have some of the properties of a centralized system without it being centralized, certainly has some of the elements of whatever 3.0 means, but yes. So you think this will continue to be a phenomenon? Using the blockchain to create decentralized networks, as a short answer. It's not that Dubai and Abu Dhabi are necessarily models of the future. There is, first of all, a minister of AI in the UAE, the first of his kind in the world.

And the government is putting 100% of government affairs on blockchain. really cool so that tells you something that maybe they didn't get it right but it's still it's it's slight signal i've also met so many smart engineers and people working in the space that that alone also seems like some predictor of something and what's an example of something within technology where 25% of the smart engineers were working on it but it ultimately turned out to be not worth anything is there a good example of that Maybe you could say things around clean energy, but that'll eventually come through. Well, clean energy, we're just working on the wrong thing.

You know, people think of clean energy and renewables as solar and wind, whereas the real solution is neither. And, in fact, solar and wind are crapping up the environment a little bit, and that if we had really buckled down and done nuclear fusion sooner rather than... Totally agree with that. You know, nuclear is the future, it is the green future, it is everything, and yet there are people who still, first of all, they don't know the difference between fission and fusion, and then they think of nuclear reactor accidents that happened most recently in Fukushima or, you know, or Chernobyl way, way back, Three Mile Island, and they say, oh, these are examples of why nuclear

isn't going to work. Well, that's rubbish. I mean, that's like an airplane crashing and somebody saying, well, there's no industry here. So it's there, the issue isn't that you've got a lot of brilliant scientists, you know, working on nuclear and they're not working hard enough. It's just that as a society, we're not pushing it hard enough. And when I ask people, like our own senator, Ed Markey, whom I've known for 35, 40 years, and who's been very much on these various commissions, and I say, Ed, what do you think about nuclear?

And he says, well, I haven't thought about it that much, you know. Which is a bizarre answer. Well, but it's an honest answer. He's not dismissing. It just doesn't appear. People don't come into his office. Right, right. Because the people who advocate nuclear are people who are selling power plants.

Right. And so, and they're selling pretty old-fashioned power plants. Do you think space travel is something that we're going to see more of? I think it's, space travel is a little bit of a side show, but the, you know, the derivatives of it are going to be very important. Yeah, that's a smart way to think about it. And so if you want to work on space travel, you know, I want a toilet. that doesn't flush in the sense it's a poopless toilet. It doesn't need a sewer.

And it has a little nuclear incendiary, whatever you call it. It'll burn up and do things. And that's what they use in outer space. Right. So that'll have to be really good technology in order for space travel to exist. It already is. When they go and they launch people into space or on space stations, These people have little boxes that are smaller in a toaster

that you can pee in one end and drink out the other. So why can't we have that in slums? Why can't we have that? That's interesting. Why can't we use that in very simple ways? And one of the projects I'm doing right now is exactly that to build cities without infrastructure. That's fascinating.

Cities without roads, without sewers, without it. And the reason that's important is, you can redevelop slums and redevelop slums without bulldozing them. Oh, wow. But the technology comes to space travel, and they have nuclear in satellites, by the way. It's a little bit different because once the satellite is out there with nuclear power on it, you're not putting people at risk. It's not going to, you know, it's not, it's different, just like the nuclear submarine's a bit different.

But there's still technology. and a nuclear submarine, which isn't that much bigger than a home or 10 homes or some can have a nuclear power plant, my goodness, those have been around for 30, 40 years. Are you a fan of Elon Musk? Well, I think Elon gets credit. Quick answer is no, I'm not, but he has to get credit for doing many different things. And pushing the ball for us. And pushing. None of them does he know that much about or do. who, you know, he's more into Elon Musk and his own. He's not an Alan Turing, and he's not a Steve Jobs.

He's a self-promoter who does things in the case of the electric car, which he did not start. He was not the founder of Tesla, but he's pushed it and advocated it so that all the others who were a little bit asleep at the wheel, so to speak, by intended, you know, then leapt forward so the volvos and the general motors are now doing things that they might not have done had Elon Musk not started Tesla but you know Tesla just can't be in the long run the right thing to do it's a little bit like the early spreadsheets uh we're not you know lotus one two three is gone and its predecessor is gone and you know the early browsers are gone And so Tesla is probably like an early browser, escape.

Because you think the other companies will copy. And do better, much better. And why did you say you're not a fan of him? Oh, I'm not a fan of him because my respect for prima donnas comes from their academic excellence. That's why I love the Marvin Minsky's and the Seymour Paperts and the Allen Turing's. Self-promotion is a little bit different, you know, you worry about being in the news, and every camera you see is an opportunity, every microphone's an opportunity, you know, that I'm a little bit less of a fan for that.

I can tolerate it. People argued that I was, that I was promoting the Media Lab, and, you know, and I did. But you also, you know, I'm not going to be remembered in the same way that Marvin Minsky and Seymour Pap. now on touring, I'll be remembered as some person who had the, you know, the idea and wherewithal to create the place for those people to do their work. To which you deserve a lot of credit. So, well, Nicholas, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. Thank you to Nicholas for coming on the WOOP podcast. I'm certainly left with a lot of things

to think about for the future, and I'm sure you are as well. If you're not already a member, you can join the whoop community now for as low as $18 a month. We'll provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, and more. The membership comes with a free whoop strap 2.0. And for listening to this podcast, folks, if you enter the code, Will Ahmed, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D at checkout, we'll give you 30 bucks off.

Thank you for listening. Put 30 bucks on my tab. get that free month and hopefully you enjoy whoop for our European customers the code is will Ahmed e you just tack EU on the end of my name and that'll get you 30 euros off when you join check out whoop.com slash the locker for show notes and more including links to relevant topics from our conversation you can subscribe rate and review the whoop podcast on iTunes Google Spotify or wherever you've found this podcast we'd love to hear your feedback you can find me online at Will Ahmed and follow at Whoop on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

You can also email The Locker at Whoop.com with any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions. For our current members, we've got a lot of new gear in the Whoop store. I suggest you check that out. It includes 612 and 18 month gift cards, help you save over time. We've got new bands, new colors, new textures. Visit whoop.com for more. Thank you again for listening to The Whoop. podcast. We'll see you next week.