Decoding Wearables

On this episode of Digital Squared, Tom talks with Victoria Song, Senior Wearables Reviewer at The Verge. Together they discuss how cultural forces influence technology adoption, how to make data extracted from wearables palatable to the mass market, and what exciting wearables are on the horizon. 

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00:00
Welcome to Digital squared, a podcast that explores the implications of living in an increasingly digital world. We're on a mission to inspire our listeners to use technology and data for good. Your host Tom Andriola is the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Data and Chief Digital Officer at the University of California at Irvine. Join us as Tom and fellow leaders discussed the technological, cultural and societal trends that are shaping our world. 

00:30
On this episode, I'm talking with Victoria Song, senior wearables reviewer at The Verge. She has been a writer in a tech space for almost a decade with previous stints at Gizmodo, and PC Magazine. Together, we discuss how cultural forces influence technology adoption, how to make data extracted from wearables palatable for the mass market, and what exciting wearables are on the horizon. 

00:58
Victoria, thank you for joining us on the podcast. 

01:00
Thanks for having me. 

01:01
Awesome. So your background is super interesting. Can you take us through the story of how you landed into your role at The Verge and the interesting way that you've developed over the course of your career. 

01:11
So I did not take the straight path to journalism at all. I actually went to school in Tokyo, I wanted to work at the UN and be a diplomat of some kind. So that's what I went to school for in Japan. I actually then just had a mental breakdown after I graduated, just going with what I really like writing. So what do I do? That I ended up going into a publishing internship and I found my way working at the Yomiuri Shimbun, which is Japan's largest newspaper. And then when I moved back to the US from Japan, I ended up actually working at their New York City bureau. And funny story, I ended up working at the UN for a little bit as part of the press corps for that particular publication. And then just from there, I just started falling into tech and business coverage. And that led me to PC Magazine. And then that led me to Gizmodo. And that kind of led me to The Verge. And along the way, I just really started getting interested in like the relationships that people have with their devices. And because you know, the gadget is the gadget, and that's very cool. But most people could not care, like two hoots about what specs are or the the nitty gritty of those things. And I like those things, but not everyone can. So when you're trying to communicate these stories and why they matter. It's about the people. And there's no device more personal than a wearable, because you're wearing it on your body at every single point in time. So there's just like this natural progression towards, I guess, the personal side of these gadgets and the personal side of technology, I'm just really interested in how these advances impact your daily life, how you actually use them, because you listen to tech giants speak and they're gonna give you this whole elevator pitch about the big sweeping changes and what this means for society as a whole. But I think the average person is like, okay, but does it make my life easier. So that's been my focus. And within that, I just tend to focus on wearables just because they're on your body, they're some of the gadgets that most directly have a relationship with you and your body. Whereas the smartphone is full of hate thing. And it's a lot more productivity focused and social focused, but there's just like a relationship with your mind and body that you have with wearables that I find really fascinating. 

03:26
And I have to know Are you a gadget person by nature, in that you want to have that thing when it comes out? Because you want it or are you, I really wanted after the validity and the benefit is proven out. 

03:41
I'm a little bit of both So certain things. I'm just like, oh, wow, I really want to try that. Now. I'm interested in seeing what that's like. And then there's other things of just okay, yeah, I can wait two years for my phone to upgrade because that's expensive. So it just like really depends on the type of gadget I always just really want the latest smartwatch. I want the latest smart ring, but phones I can actually wait on for a little bit because especially since it's a mature gadget, they don't really change that much from phone to phone, year to year. So it just depends on the thing for a while I was really into headphones, because I don't know I just wanted to hear my music better. But it just really depends on the gadget type I think.

04:22
Yeah, I think when Pete When people know you're in tech, they assume that means that you want to be at the at the door when it opens buying the first one. And that's not necessarily the case when you really talk to people in tech. For some people. That's true for other people. It's more about like this is this is my profession. I touch these things because people expect me to have a point of view and early point of view on the board the potential of where this could take us. But I'm a little bit of a little bit of both I find with certain things when it has directly something that is like on that list of things. I'm trying to move the needle on, I'll go to the front end, but for a lot of tech I'm fighting to be pulled Part of the let's call it the latter part of the of the early majority on things, and I use the technology adoption curve and a lot of conversations. So where does this fit? Where are we? Where do we need our organization to be? So I always like to ask people, because everyone just assumes immediate first in line to get everything. And my experience is that's not the case. When I talk to people.

05:10
I actually have a friend who is talking about that the other like a while back, and he's I like to be at the end of the tip of the sphere of progress. So it's just I get what he's saying, because you still want to be in the first part. But you want to be the very first you don't want to be like the gen one, the person who says I'm going to deal with all the quirks because I think the idea is great. I want like the gen two that's taken that great idea and refined it. I really empathize with that. And I think for most things, I'm on that front too, because I want some of the stuff to be worked out. I don't like dealing necessarily with the quirks. But part of that is also just because of my job. I review gadgets. I've been on the first gen. Or it's just Oh god, I see the great idea here. But just in terms of my daily life, there's just a lot of friction. And that's really annoying, and that kind of dampen the excitement. So I think that's closer to where I am just personally in terms of preference. If a company's not sending me something and going, please, we want your thoughts. So yeah, yeah. 

06:19
Yeah, that point I could see being a lot of fun things just Oh, wow, that's really cool. Because not every first gen thing becomes the one that is the market, right? Sometimes, it's not what this is that I'm holding in my hand, it's what it could be, which might be the second generation or third generation investor, that actually gets it right. We've seen that time and time again, it's sometimes it's not just the idea, but the timing of the idea, that becomes the one that really moves the needle on societal use of something. So wearables is your space, what is the wearable movement look like and the impact that it's had, from your perspective, having been covering it?

 06:59
I think we're in an interesting point now, because for a lot of the first part of wearables, like we're talking around the eye, like I said, I should say, the first modern part of wearables, because if you really want to get into the history of it, we've been around for 30 years or so, like VR headsets, were very nascent, and people were thinking of that you had Steve Mann and I top they call him the father of wearables, because he was really the spirit of progress. He was at the very front of that. But if we want to talk modern wearables that starting around the 2014, 2015 era, like that was all smartwatches. And fitness trackers, right. And primarily the fitness trackers, the Fitbit, it used to not even used to it is currently a lot of people use Fitbit in lieu of saying fitness tracker, because that's just how ingrained in society it was. And it's what most people think about when they think of wearables, they're thinking of just the fitness tracker, the smartwatch, but we're starting to move past that, I think, especially this year, smart rings, I think I've heard about it earlier in January, because when I was at CES, I was walking the show floor, there were just a lot more smart rings than I had ever remembered there being in recent memory because the aura ring, for the longest time has been the smart ring in people's like consciousness, it had a big bump during COVID. Because a lot of researchers were using it, the NBA was using it for illness tracking. It's not officially what it does. But that was it was in the mix of like things that they were researching. So it got a lot of buzz around that. But now smart rings and sleep tracking those have got gained a lot of popularity over the last few years. And now we're in this smart ring space. On the one hand, the budget fitness tracker has disappeared. We're all just leaning towards smartwatches as the de facto wearable of choice. But there's a lot of really interesting things happening on the fringes. So smart rings are really interesting. Then at the end of last year, Meta came out with the oh gosh, the Ray Ban Meta smart glasses, the names of these products, sometimes I get them mixed up because anyway, so that came out 

09:04
and it's just a lot of them, right? I can't imagine how you keep track 

09:08
let's say 25% of my brain power is just dedicated to trying to remember the exact model number of specific garments. But the metal Ray Bans were just they were such a step up over the Ray Ban stories, which was their first iteration of the product. And it's truly just amazing where that product is as far as smart glasses are. And where we've come as a society since Google Glass was the thing. Google Glass is a key example of a product that came at the wrong time. Or it was just too far ahead of where society was at. But you know, the last 10 years since Google Glass was a thing. We have become a society that just films everything. Like you can't go out and public in a big city and not end up as an extra in somebody else's memories. Like they're you're just going to be in the background of their photos right So we've become used to this idea that public spaces are surveilled. And when people were snatching glasses, Google glasses off of people's faces. Part of that was because How dare you invade my privacy? Now you just expect everyone is filming something at any given point in time. There's less of that expectation, these new metal Ray Ban glasses, they can exist in public now. People are not necessarily as freaked out by them. My husband loves them. And they are they're just wearing them all the time. And people don't notice his sister, actually, this weekend over Easter was saying, Oh, I really like your glasses. Where are they from? And they're smart glasses. Oh, really, they just look like Ray Bans. And that kind of that kind of turning point. It is a turning point. And I'm just so curious to see where companies go with that going forward. Because I feel like the cultural barrier has been somewhat tackled. It's just like, we live in the age of influencers in such a way that we were not 10 years ago. So influencers in particular, they're not doubt by the idea of glasses that can livestream. They're just like, oh, this is great for my brand. This is great for live streaming content. It's a content creation tool. So it's just very, the smart rings. And the smart glasses are super interesting. And then we have the vision probe coming out right now. That's again, another example of a first gen product with a lot of quirks that I don't think the general populace is ready for. But it's super, it's a super intriguing and interesting product. So we're at like this cusp, I think of the different form factors beyond the smartwatch starting to take hold and the imagination are not at the point where everyone is going to be wearing six wearables everyday like I do. We're not at that point. But I think we're starting to see the beginnings of that of ecosystem starting to spring up around wearables, which tie you to your phone. I have a little mixed feelings about that. But I do think we're going to start seeing that a lot more. So yeah, it's a sprawling answer. But I guess I would say if there's been some new forward momentum in the last year, that's really interesting and exciting. And I'm not sure where we're going. But we're definitely going forward beyond the smartwatch.

12:17
Yeah, you mentioned Ray Bans, right. At CES, I also saw luxottica, which is the largest glasses company, they had a smart glass, but it was focused on basically the invisible hearing aid. But again, that's just the use case that they went for, you're talking about a company that owns you know, 80% of all glass frames that are distributed in the, let's say, in the developed world, they're gonna likely be in the space in some way, shape, or form in a big way, making it very invisible. Everything from just standard to luxury brands and what they do with the products that they sell today. So I thought that was tremendously interesting. So let's talk about the smart watch, you made some interesting comments. And I'll just tell you, I don't like watches from the time it has to do growing up as an athlete, and that if I had something on my wrist, it was going to get broken, for be falling or smashing into something. So I was never a watch person. Even when given a watch. It was one of those I'm just not going to wear. So when the smart rings came out, and I'm very into the the personal wellness movement. The watch didn't speak to me. So I was looking for something different. And I found rings. And I actually, I have had a word ring since 2020. I actually had a smart ring before aura, a company called motive that I don't even. But it's related rain that I had, I think I got down to 2018. But I've been in or I've been in work person since 2020. And you're right, the number of now similar products that have hit the marketplace seems to have exploded. Where do you see that particular market going? Is it going to be about more features within? Or is it going to be about other things, integrating some of these intelligence factors even beyond what for example, I still think or is leading the way on that.

14:07
Or it's definitely leading the way they've been the leader for we're gonna say the last 10 years or so in the smart ring space. And I also had a motive I was testing that out. They had interesting ideas like I think their second iteration of the ring, they had intended it to work as some sort of two factor authentication key of some sort and you're supposed to be able to monitor your gait. And then of course they went out of business right. And I think the thing about smart Rings was that it's definitely for people who aren't into watches like you say and there's a lot of people who are like that they're not interested in getting the notifications on their wrist. They're fine with just using their phone for that but they are interested in the health aspect particularly sleep. Sleep is the thing that I think the smart ring almost always will trump a smartwatch for because smartwatch a lot of people don't like Sleeping with smartwatches on especially if I, I were to at any given point in time and right now I have two kinds of bigger ones on I have the Apple Watch Ultra two and I have the OnePlus watch too. And these are bigger watches and I have very like petite wrists, then I'm used to sleeping with big watches on but a lot of people aren't, I have friends who will take their watch off in the middle of the night. So for them, that's not the best option for them. So a ring is a lot more discreet. You don't have a lot of the cultural hang ups with a ring that you might with a watch. I just wrote a piece on wearable etiquette in the modern world just because I saw the guy wearing a vision pro at his wedding. And the bride was just looking at him like are you kidding me? Sir, there is a script that we're writing with wearable etiquette in public right now. And the ring is fascinating. Because it is so discreet, no one will notice you're wearing a smart ring, right? I often these days, I'm testing a bunch, so I not today. But a lot of times I have too on and nobody noticed they just blend in with the rest of my ranks. So that's really cool about them. And then another thing is that they let you be a little more present, most of them have not figured out a way to do notifications and buzzing lights, yet the motive ring did have an LED light indicator, but for the most part, they found a way of the aura and in leaving that out. So it's a very passive tracker. It's something maybe you sync once a day or a couple of times a day to look at how your metrics are going. But it's just in the background. And I think that appeals to a lot of people. But the most interesting thing this year that's happening is Samsung is coming out with a galaxy ring. It looks a lot like the aura ring from what we've seen. But the potential there to me is super fascinating. Because Samsung has a galaxy watch. Samsung has Galaxy phones, I think it would be very easy for them to just bundle all of that together and go Hello, you have a one stop package and Samsung here, you're you're going to be sticky in our ecosystem, and you don't ever have to worry about the smartwatches battery life. Because battery life for these flagship smartwatches has always been a pain point with the Ultra. And I think the OnePlus watch too, as well. And maybe the biggest Samsung Galaxy watch five Pro, you can get multi day and multi day well, it's it's 48 hours, it's very technically multi day. Whereas with the fitness trackers of all you're getting a week, two weeks, three weeks, maybe a month if you have a Garmin, so those were fine for overnight sleep tracking, because you're not worried about it dying in the middle of the night. With smartwatches that you always have to be thinking of when you're going to charge the thing. Yeah, that's less of an issue with with the smart brain like you can go or it says a week. But I generally at around three to four days, because I've had mine for a while. So I got three to four days of continuous tracking, I don't think about it, it's just there. So I think that's going to appeal to a lot of people. But then I really do think you're gonna get a certain subset of users who have a smartwatch and a smart rank from the same company going forward, especially since Samsung is doing this. And then they just have true 24 hour tracking. It's like there's no gap in the data, you've taken the battery life out of the equation, because you always have one to cover for the other. So in some way, I do think the smart ring is going to be an accessory for the smartwatch, which is already an accessory for your smartphone. Right. So I think we're gonna have this daisy chaining of ecosystems going on. And I don't know how I feel about it. I feel like there might be some issue trust questions. Given the DOJ case that we've seen against Apple, they actually point to the Apple Watch as an example of monopoly behavior. So it's gonna be really interesting to just parse where companies go with that. 

18:35
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting forces in the universe effecting the world. And they all have something to do with technology or data. Let me tease this out for you look, for me, technology is a data generation mechanism, the value proposition is in the data. So I have my own kind of personal health routine, I capture roughly about 100 data points daily, with respect to health that covers everything from sleep, to activity, to nutrition, etc, biometrics. For me the value is in the data, I look at the devices that I'm using as a way of saying, Can you give me data that I don't have access to? Do you track at all not just about what the devices are doing about but like how people's uses of data are also expanding as part of kind of the trends. 

19:23
I think, for people like us who are into the data, it's interesting, but I think for the average general person, they're just like, Oh, my God, all these data points. And then they run away, because it's hard for them to understand and parse and tease the trends from that data. So what I see more as a trend is companies trying to contextualize what these various data points mean for people in an easy to digest format. So something that we've seen pop up in the last few years are like recovery scores, or we're seeing things like readiness scores, which is like the the flip side of the recovery score for athletes. And what so what those things are doing is that they're taking your daily sleep, they're taking your heart rate variability, they're taking maybe your SVO to just like some of these metrics that when you view them in isolation, you're like, okay, my base body temperature went up by point one degrees Fahrenheit, what does that mean? They're saying, Yeah, you can view that as a baseline and get contracts that way. Or we can bundle it all together in an algorithmic score for you. And that'll give you an insight. So you have a readiness score of 94, because you slept great last night, and your recovery in the last two weeks has been pretty solid. So we can say that you have a good readiness to go out and tackle your day, or your body temperature dropped at this point, and last night, when combined with your HRV, then that means that you are stressed physiologically, maybe you should think about that, I would say that the trend is going towards scores that make things easier to digest for people. And then on top of that, there are certain metrics that I think that these companies are going after, and is the next frontier of innovation. And the one that everyone is Oh, when are they going to get it is blood glucose monitoring, to which I say, don't hold your breath. That's gonna be a long while and when it comes out, it may not be the thing that you think of where it's, you know, that I think is the thing that they view as the holy grail because we've been trying to find non invasive blood glucose monitoring since 1975. It's been a long process. Everything that's super accurate, is invasive, that involves needles, it continuous glucose monitors, that sort of thing. But it would improve a lot of people's lives. If we could figure out a way to monitor blood glucose without needles. It's just the stakes are so high with that, right? What are what's a company like Apple going to do? They're working on it by and large, the rumors indicate that they are working on it, but what are they going to do with it? What does that data point mean? And I think, if you look at data points, and you understand what they mean, you can derive conclusions for yourself. But for the average person, the average consumer, I think the challenge and the trends that we're going to go towards is, why should you care about these data points? And how do we bundle them for you in ways that makes sense. With blood glucose, I do think you're probably going to get something like a, and you might have pre diabetes, or you are trending towards pre diabetes, you should go talk to your doctor, I do think that these are primarily going to be screening tools, not diagnostic tools, because no one wants to get the FDA involved. So that's that's where I think the long winded way of saying that's where I think the data is going. 

22:41
Yeah, no, I think it's, so I fall into that category. And when you get interested in something, then you find all the other people in the world who have who have that interest, right. So I call it the empowered health consumer. The analogy I use is I may have someone who helps me lay out my financial plan, right? So that good for retirement, like sending kids to college, that kind of thing. Why can't my primary care physician conversation be exactly the same relationship? And to me, we've turned it into that through the fact that the wearable movement is provided now 365 days of data points that we can sit down together, and I found a doctor who actually works through who actually is willing to look at that data, combining medicine with data science and saying, let's look at some of the trends here, right and look into patterns of sleep patterns of food and nutrition. Beyond just do you eat a lot of red meat. I'm one of those individuals who gives a really stark Angela, I can tell you exactly how many times I had a red meat this past few months. And I can tell you exactly how many ounces I had. So I think it's I think it can change for people. I think the big one of the big movements is how is this going to empower people to actually think about more healthy lives through the fact that they can get information presented to them. And I liked the way you put it right. I think it's the dashboard. It's the readiness score. It's the sleep score that you get through the aura ring, that let's just maybe I do need to just take it a little easier today, because I didn't get a lot of deep sleep. Right or Yeah, I have pushed myself my workouts pretty hard the last three or four days, maybe this is a low impact day for me. Let's talk about other wearable categories. Do you think that wearable clothing movement with some of these embedded sensors is going to become something more pervasive hasn't really taken off in the way that UnderArmour had hoped it would when they got into the space? 

24:26
I think clothing is just really tough. So the thing I'm gonna say about wearables and I harp on it and every one of my reviews is that comfort is king. And clothing is tough, and everyone's body is different. So you wear clothing in a way that suits your life and your lifestyle. I wear clothing in a way that suits my life and my lifestyle. There's a degree of expression involved with it. And mass production is the thing that really is challenging for wearables because everyone's body is a different size because everyone has different fashion sensibilities smart glasses I'm gonna use as an example, Google Glass. Part of the reason it didn't do well is because it looked too futuristic for an average person. The Ray Bans they do well, because they look like normal Ray Bans, Ray Bans are considered stylish. You have these things where you're wearing them on your face, and we're vain creatures, we want to look good. We want to be attractive when we walk down the street. What does it matter if you have a pair of smart glasses that tells you everything that you need to know? If you look like Steve Urkel? That's gonna it's not gonna fly, right? So that's the problem with wearable clothing in a certain sense, because, okay, say you got a t shirt that everyone gets to wear that has wearable technology in it. Is it a cool t shirt? Is it gonna fit women in the same way that it fits men? Is it going to take into consideration your wash cycles? Like how are you going to wash these things? Nobody likes laundry day. So if you're putting wearables in the laundry, is the sensor going to get messed up? Do you have to hand wash, that's a death knell, no one's going to hand wash anything. And in that sense, whoop is doing some interesting stuff. Because they have different types of like they have a bra for example. And there's a little pocket that you could stick the whoop sensor in so that you don't have to wear anything on your hands or on your body or your arm. And that I think is really cool. Because let's say you're weightlifting, and you wear something on your wrist that can create pressure that you may not like or let's say you're weightlifting, and you're wearing a smart ring. Everybody knows rings and weightlifting, not always comfortable thing. So in that sense, oh, I can just take my tracker and stick it in my bra. Great. That's freedom, right. So in that sense, there is, I think a need that's not being met, there is something that could be cool. But it's tough just because style matters. And to your point with Under Armour, bodies matter, because I used to run with Under Armour sneakers. And I was like, Oh, look at all the data I'm getting for my running form. This is great, until I got shin splints because they don't have a stability shoe that fits me with that data in it. So I need stability shoes, so that I don't get shin splints. So I'm not really using the Under Armour sneakers anymore. It was helpful for the time that I was, but I really value not being in pain and injured for several months at a time. So I think, to your point, clothing is really interesting. But it's such a logistical and supply chain nightmare to figure out how you're gonna get stuff that's universal enough to fit everybody but still personable enough to be customized to your individual body. So it's a huge challenge.

27:36
And if we're talking wearables, where do the headsets fit for you? Is that a wearable? Is that a different class of technology for you? How do you view that?

27:47
Technically, so like my stance is that a wearable is any piece of technology that you wear. So in my personal opinion, it's a wearable, because you are wearing a headset. And it's just like a different subset of wearables, in my opinion, it's AR or it's VR, it may be headphones, headphones, I think do fall within that category. It's just also audio. So it's a different use case. But I think we're getting to a point where even headphones are going to start having wearable context in them, like I have tested in the past. And I have seen some coming out where the earbuds have heartrate monitors in them, because your ear is actually a better place to get a heart rate data than your wrist because your wrist is full of tendons and noisy data, your your finger and your ear are actually going to give you more accurate signals for that if you get a good fit. That's always the the caveat if you get a good fit. And so that's the challenge of that. But we have over the year map over the air, but over the counter hearing aids now that's a thing. So I think the air pods and some of the Samsung Galaxy buds, they already had conversation boosting features. I think it's a very easy transition for them if they so want to head into the over the counter hearing aids category, which makes them hearables. Like that's a phrase that some people use. So yeah, if you wear it, it's a wearable. So that's, again, long winded answer as to whether I think headsets count in this category. What are some of 

29:19
the coolest things that you've seen? So ces for us? We're sitting here that was, what, three months ago, and there was some pretty cool stuff at CES but what some of the coolest things that you see coming to market in the next four months. So you mentioned the whole Samsung integrated play, but what are some of the other things that you think are going to be like wow moments for us? 

29:39
Ah, that's a great question. I think we're gonna start seeing some interesting smart glasses. I just called on a pair of smart glasses with Chatgpt in them. So AI glasses I think meta is also rolling out these AI features. And we can't get away from Ai at this point putting them in glasses that are so Super discreet, it just reminds me of James Bond, it reminds me of Kingsman that kind of super spy type of modality. I think that's going to be a really interesting thing, because it's something you could fit into your daily life. Now, obviously, the big tech companies are thinking pretty heavily about AR and VR and the vision Pro. It's interesting, it's a very interesting product, I'm still not quite sure what Apple was entirely thinking like, I don't think its intentions of what it wants from the vision Pro are entirely clear. A lot of people call it a software developer kit masquerading as a consumer product. And I think that's pretty on the money with it.

30:41
That's where our team is with it at the moment. 

30:45
There's some real interesting ideas in there, it feels like they're saying this is happening, the hold on to your butts, guys like we are going to see AR I'm really interested in seeing where that goes this year. But I think primarily, there are some other there's another smart rain coming out from Zep, which is a more of a budget brand from China. And they have some interesting ecosystem play with that as well. So I really, I think that is my number one thing that I'm looking forward to this year is the Galaxy ring. And just seeing what Samsung does with that, because Samsung is huge. It's one of the big tech companies, whatever it does, I guarantee you, other people are going to copy it if it's successful. So I'm a little worried for aura To be honest, because they don't have anything besides the ring. And they've been alone in that space for a while they have a head start with the data, and the partnerships. And they're in retail stores now. So I do think they have a little bit of a buffer zone. But they don't have a smartwatch. So I have Apple comes out with a fitness ring. Oh, I don't know, right? I don't know, I feel like or is going to be a little crunched there. And that makes me a little sad. But competition in the space is about to heat up. And I'm looking forward to seeing what it looks like.

32:01
There's a lot of talk. And I know that I've been spending some time, especially with the way that AI is going moving us and people talking about kind of the next computing paradigm. And certainly we're seeing that our ability to interface with technology is now moving towards being able to do more with our voices and interfacing with technologies. Right? So then you start thinking about conversational AI, it's more of these things, right? So you meant you mentioned the smart glasses. Right? So now I've got this augmented view, I have the ability to quote unquote, talk to someone else or talk to AI to put unquote, to automate the information that I get, in addition to what it's giving me visually. Do you see a major paradigm shift coming from the standpoint of looking at our phones, it has been the norm now for what 15 years, as in terms of where we've gone in an app based world, do you see that we're moving away from those phones are going to be let we're going to be less tied to putting our eyes on them and more tied to maybe having a conversation with technology to get some of these benefits that we're we're trying to integrate into our lives?

33:09
Maybe I think this so there's this argument about whether we want screens or whether we don't want screens, I think there's a lot of people who have been very vocal, especially in Silicon Valley about wanting to look at their phone less wanting to be more present. I don't know how true that is, with the average person. Like I go out, I see people on their phones all the time they're glued to their phone, if I if they leave their house without their phone, they're definitely going back to get it. So in some ways, I think it's that the phone is still what everybody is tethered to see of wearables still need your smartphone to use many of these wearables. There's no true standalone wearable yet. So everything for the moment still revolves around the smartphone. So until we solve that question, I wonder how successful these attempts to put AI in your glasses and then see, get away from that screen get away from the phone. There's a desire there. I do think it's really convenient to have a smartwatch and not need my phone, I could leave it in my office while I go down to get a drink because I'm not going to miss that notification. That's super helpful. But it's still tied to the phone. What that means is I think we're going to have to wait to see if your smart glasses can have its own computing power that's not dependent on your phone. It does that mean it has its own, like cellular plan. How is that going to work? And I think we're seeing a little bit of that with the humane pin. The Humane pin is really interesting, because it is trying to like replace your phone, right? It's supposed to have its own cell phone number. You hold out your hand, it has a little laser on your head and you're asking the AI questions and your phone's not in the picture in that. The How well is that going to work at this point in time? I don't know. But clearly people are working towards that. That seems to be at least a D Since the amount of people working together to reduce the screens that we're seeing, and changing our relationship and moving towards AI, so I do think we're going to explore that path. Whether it's successful, I'm not entirely sure, at least not for the short term, I think it might be more of a long term thing that we move toward, but we're gonna have to see how this humane pin works. Because latency is going to be an issue. There's a pretty hefty subscription to go along with that. And it's just not going to be as convenient as looking at your phone in a lot of circumstances. So yes, and no, yeah.

35:36
Yeah, I think it's going to be interesting, right? Because you do have these people working on disrupting the monopoly of the smartphone as the key interface and the key operating system. And as as the conversational technology gets more and more mature, and more and more ubiquitous, I could see. So I am not one of those who thinks my aura ring a couple times a day, I probably look at it a dozen times a day, that's like, where am I at with respect to whatever goals are there? So I have to open up the app. It'd be awesome if I could just say at any given time, and so I'm walking in between the two meetings to say, hey, aura, how close am I to my 400 calorie burn target, right, or my 10,000 Step target. And it just were to tell me that through either in a voice, the voice has got to come out of something either come out of the ring, through an earpiece, but you can see some things where the interface starts to change from looking at a screen to querying into the ether and getting an accurate response back, which is where some of these companies are trying to take us.

36:48
Yeah, that's good accessibility point. He it. Vision is a barrier to a lot of different things. And I think it's the biggest barrier to the AR future that tech is envisioning, like, you need to have working eyeballs with efficient Pro, like, one of my co workers has a wonky AI. And they did manage to adjust the eye tracking to make it work for them. But a lot of these headsets don't account for people with low vision or people who are blind. And so are we leaving them out of the metaverse? Are we leaving them out of this conversation? The answer to that is voice to to your point, it helps a lot of people, particularly the elderly, and other people who have those needs to have voice assistant capabilities that able bodied folks may not think of or would take for granted. So I do think we are exploring that modality for more reasons than one. And I think the accessibility avenue is like a really interesting one. And one of the we don't talk about quite as often as we should.

37:47
So clearly in your following of tech and wearable tech is how it affects our lifestyle, how it affects health in other industries that you see them in the work that you do. And this is going to have an impact on this aspect in our society. There are other aspects that you see through your work.

38:01
I think communication is a big one and just anxiety. One thing that I've noticed with wearables is that there's a certain type of person who's able to view the data neutrally, and not assign negative feelings to setbacks. I'm not one of those people, I tested these things. I test these things all the time, 24/7, they have to have this degree of accountability. But I think there is a type of anxiety that you have when your data is negative for a while, when you have an injury when you have a slump, and you're not as strong or fast or as thin as you used to be. And you're working back towards that. And you're being chased by the ghost of a better self that is in the past. I think that's a real question that we haven't figured out how to tackle with empathy and with forethought, because changing human behavior is incredibly difficult. There's a reason why people give up on New Year's resolutions by February 1, it's very difficult to make these changes in your life. And it's worthwhile. It's definitely worthwhile to but my Apple Watch sometimes tells me at 10pm on a day that I have COVID to get out there and get a 27 minute brisk walk and it's no I'm sick. What am I supposed to do there or there's just like fatigue, I was talking to one coworker who loves their Garmin and has for years, and it's just taken to not wearing it because they're able to go on a run and just be present in the moment and enjoy the run and not think about their pace, not think about their heart rate zone. And some of that so I think I think that aspect culturally of all of this tech the anxiety that it causes, the ways that it changes our behavior. I don't think we think about that as much as we ought to. I don't think we are accounting for the fact that negative things happen. Yes, positives I lost all this weight with this. That's amazing. That's great. I saved my life because the Apple Watch told me that my heart rate was out of pocket and I got to the place in time or Are there those are like the positives that we see. But we don't really talk about the whole mental health aspect of it. We don't talk about is it good to be so addicted to your streaks all the time, to the point where you're not really living your life the way that you would like to because it's 11:59pm. And you're doing 10 Jumping Jacks just to get the ring closed? I'm really interested in that question of it. And I'd be curious, I love to hear from people but their own stories about it, and how do they use it? Because I only have myself as that data point. So yeah, I do. I if there are any people in tech listening to this, I really do think that everywhere will should come with a rest day, a lower ring does it right, they have a rest mode. I really think that they all should have some sort of rest mode, but they don't. 

40:45
So I wish we could do a I wish we could do a poll right now. It's like how many people have done 20 Jumping Jacks just to close a ring before you went to bed? Guilty? I've done it. Yeah. Like just so close. I just just don't There's what affects the algorithm and the score that Oh, you'll wake up in the next morning? Yeah. How can you work, you see changes on the horizon, in sports and entertainment through some of this wearable tech that we've got going, whether it's through the headset that we wear or through some bit, because we can now hear things that maybe can carry with us anything like entertainment is something that I'm also involved in how some of these new tools that are rolling out, are really affecting, we just call it the future of storytelling. Is there anything that you're working in new wearable that you're tracking, and you're really curious to see how it plays out?

41:34
Curious to see how the Vision Pro works out as an entertainment device, because people have been just trying to figure out what the use case for that is. And for a lot of people, it's Oh, you're gonna have a 100 inch screen and watch everything and beautiful resolution and whatnot. But it is an inherently lonely experience. And that's like a thing that's gotten thrown out a bunch of Lauren good wrote this amazing story for Wired about crying in Division Pro, because we watch a sad movie and you're crying in a headset, and then all of a sudden, you're taken out of the experience, because you're just like, oh, no, I don't want my tears or my makeup, just like soiling this device. So on the one hand, yes, that immersion is great. Yes, if you go out into the world, and you could have like all these really cool interactive experiences and activations for movies, I don't know, Tony started flying out of a building in Manhattan one day, because it's an AR experience that would be cool. Pokemon Go was like an example of people getting out into the world and being entertained with an AR game. But at the same time, there's an element of loneliness and headsets. And I'm very curious to see how we address because my, called her colleague, Andy Robertson, wrote a really great piece about how the vision pros incredibly hard to share, in some ways, the PC, the shared family PC, you can have a shared meta quest three. But it's really hard to share the vision Pro, I think that's going to be an interesting question for entertainment. And then for sports, I'm really curious to see where wearables and professional sports intersection collide, they already do in a lot of different ways. But you do have a lot of major sports leagues have rules where you can't wear certain wearable devices during a game just because it gives you an unfair advantage to your coaches and that sort of thing. So I think, because that's the subset of people who would really love all this data. And they do love all this data. But fairness is is a question with wearables that I have. It's very interesting. There's a surfing league that uses the Apple Watch as their official wearable because it can help transmit wave conditions and weather conditions to the people in real time. I think that's super interesting. But I don't think there's a consensus in the professional sports field, as like the place of these devices yet. So I'm very curious to see how that, like, tension with fairness goes down the line. 

43:58
Yeah, yeah, technology can has this way of pushing the envelope on things and early adopters of figuring out how to use things figure out how to move the line. And then of course, just like in society, this policy also we have, your policy ultimately has to get set. But policy always lags. Let creative people push the boundaries on in any setting. Sports is really no different. Like my wife is a big tennis player and huge tennis fan, right, Djokovic number one player in the world right now. He is an incredibly measured person uses a lot of that to optimize his performance and optimize his training routines. I find some of the things I've read about on him. It's just fascinating. Again, just using the technology and the data of the day to not only maximize his peak performance, but speak consistently at peak performance and into the later years where some of the great players that he competed against for a couple of decades have reached the end. He's extending that out a little longer than they are and we'll put them up in those all time rankings because of it. Just fascinating. We're gonna wrap up here. Victoria, I want to say thank you again for coming out on the podcast with us for sharing some perspectives. This is an area that's incredibly interesting to me. So really also personally enjoyed the conversation and thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. 

45:17
Thank you for having me and letting me nerd out and be very rambley. (laughing).