Tony Fadell Unfiltered on Apple, OpenAI & the Next Big Device

Apple has never done marketing bullshit before. And I saw that was complete bullshit. I mean, do you think opening eye goes bankrupt? Look, if they're asking for $50 billion now, like how fast you're gonna burn through that? Is that what you would focus on if you were Apple CEO? (laughing) I have many things that I would do if I was an agent. - Well, I guess some of them. Is the next big tech device, a pin, a pen, your headphones? Or the device that you've already got in your pocket? Today's guest is Tony Fidel. Godfather of hardware design who brought some of the most important consumer electronics to life at Apple. And then at Google with Nest, I sat with him and got his thoughts on how Apple and the rest of the big technology companies are looking, even as he's rumored to be a contender for Apple's next CEO. We talked about what he would do if he ever got that top job. We talked about why he thinks open AI is building a strategy of being too big to fail. And all those unfiltered thoughts without the constraints of a corporate PR department. This is the newcomer podcast. (upbeat music) Tony Fidel, great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining me. - It's great to be here. Great to be here. We're in an insane moment for the future of devices. So I'm super excited to talk to you. It's pins, pens, like what do we want? So I really want to get direct into it. I mean, there are rumors. I think this week that Apple is thinking about a pin in the wake of Humane working on a pin. There's, I have friends and I think there's been some reporting now that maybe Johnny I have an open AI are thinking about a pen. I'll try and press you on what you think about the particulars, but like from first principles, what do you think is most likely to be the AI native device format? - AI can be applied to many things. - No. - And AI is great for certain applications with certain hardware components around it. - Okay. - So there's AI with a screen and there's AI without a screen. In all cases, it needs to have audio, right? But what AI needs mostly is it needs context. - Okay. - Okay, so you have to look at the input side and you have to look at the output side. So first let's talk about the inputs. - Okay. - The more context you give, any kind of LLM, and I'm not saying they're the panacea, there's gonna be lots of models beyond LLM. So I wanna make sure I'm very clear. - Oh, we can do that. - And I'm not the LLM. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're gonna get AGI with it. It's all fucking bullshit. It's all my concern. - Okay, great. - So you first start with the input. And if we know everything and you've been hearing about over the year, two years, so fast here now, it's like we've been hearing about context windows. And context windows getting longer and longer and longer. And then now we're racking all your data and Gemini just announced yesterday that you can bring in all of your Gmail and all your Google photos and G drive. - I feel like I'm being reckless. I've connected everything to Anthropic already. It's like, yeah, search through my email, go for it. - Right, exactly. And so the more context, the better. So there's one which is context about what you've done. - Right. - Okay, and that's, you know, and that makes it better. But then there's the context of what you're doing. - Right. - And knowing that really, really clearly. And so what you want and what your smartphone has is you wanna know your, and just like advertising and all the other websites and social wanted before, it's no different. They wanted your location. They wanna, they would love your audio all the time. They want your camera at the time. They want what you're typing. Who you're nearby, what Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth things are there. And what other devices around you. And even what time of day, what's the lighting, you know, what's the weather? Are you indoors, outdoors? Why is that? The more context you have in the moment, combined with what it knows about you and what's around you in the moment, you don't have to ask it when you make a query, whether that's a voice query or a text query or whatever the query might be. It knows it's like, oh, you're at this place, at this time around these people, with these resources, with this kind of weather. But, and you, when you ask a short question, it's like, think as opposed to back in the Siri days and the Alexa days, you had to tell it everything 'cause it had no context. - Right. - So in this case, the better the interface becomes, the more historical context, as well as real time context that has to be able to, so it's like, we know what we're doing right now. I can briefly say two words to you and you probably understand, like, oh, look at that, plan over there. You know what I mean? Something like that. That's what it needs to know to be able to give you much quicker answers. - Right. - Like it's in the room. - But do you buy it? Like do you think most humans will ultimately want some AI to have access to their current audio? Like do you think that is something that needs to be? - I think there's obviously use cases for that. And also for video, I don't see, and all the other sensor suites for sensor fusion out there to make it work. So in certain contexts and certain applications, you'll wanna do that. Certain people be in no way. You know, people put the tape over their laptop and everything else. So it's just, it's gonna be an individual preference on what it is. You know, I remember the glass whole days of Google Glass. - Right. - You're not recording me and now we're running with Meta Glasses. So it's all a social context awareness thing where it's not just about when the technology's ready. It's about when a particular segment of society is ready to adopt it. I remember this from my general magic days when we were making the iPhone 15 years too early. You know, nobody knew the problems we were solving 'cause they didn't have those problems, right? - But the idea of like a pin type device. Is that mostly, would you buy is there a pin type device? - Sure. - There's a pin type device. - There's also a pin type device now. It's called Plod. But is that right? - You know, - You know, - You solve the social problem of saying I'm recording. Like why can't the phone just do the recording? We already have it with us. - Okay. So first we were talking about the input. I wanted to talk about the output, right? And then there's the form. - Okay. - Okay. So let's talk about input. Now we'll talk about the output. - Okay. - Then we'll talk about forms. - Okay. - I know you wanna talk about pins. But let's talk about output. - Sure. - Yeah. So there's really great times when you have, and this is what, you know, I really experienced when I was working with Google Glass and these kinds of things. The output is really important in very contextual ways. So if you're on the move, you're going. I see people out here walking in the, you know, in New York, walking in the poles and stuff because they're sitting here looking at their thing or they're on their bike, you know, doing it or driving worst case. So, and they're all distracted from that. And a lot of times you just want audio and you wanna have a much better audio interface versus a display. But the best way to represent visual information is visually. - Right. - You know, we've heard people trying to communicate, you know, I'm changing this schematic or whatever and they say, I'm gonna change this and this and like, oh, and you just sent them a drawing and they're like, oh, now I get it. Right, so you have to understand the context you're in and what's the best way to represent that output. - Okay. - Is it visually, is it audio, it could be like vibrations, it could be many different ways. And so, when you start to break down the applications, you start to end the, and the environment you're in. Like, are you in your office? Are you in your home? Are you walking? Are you in a bus? Are you in a train? Are you in a plane, whatever. And then you start to understand the applications and the ways of representing that output that makes sense in that given situation. - For output, I understand like, AirPods or earphones as an output device for AI. I don't, I guess, part of why I was limited in the thing is like, the pin and the pen format, I don't see what the output is. Like, to me, they mostly exist as input devices. - And you hit a nail on head. You absolutely, and that's my, that was my next point, which is the form. - Okay. - And so what's going on with a pen, with a pin, with whatever. In the case of, let's say it's a pen at OpenAI 'cause that's, I've heard the same thing. And I still know some people working on things like that there. - And did you get your pen? - You think it's a pen? - So, and I also worked with Johnny a long time, or a decade, right? So I think I understand it, and I probably think it's something like a pen, but it can also be glasses and other things. But given Johnny's predisposition for how he has to do something very different. So he's got to do that because he'll have some story around. It's got to be a pen. And maybe it'll be like the notepen. Do you remember the notepen? The notepen actually had a pad of paper, and you could just, it was like a digital pen, you'd just write on paper, and the notepen would keep all of the things, and it would then create a PDF of that thing that you could then do text-to-speech. - And then you could tell us stories and stuff like that. - How AI is bringing us back to our humanity. - Of course, it's gonna be this whole big flower. Oh my God, we're getting away from the phone and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that diarrhea. So what really happens though, is that the reason why it has, it's a pen for a story, okay? But it doesn't have output. Because at the end of the day, the best form of output is the thing you already have with you, which is your smartphone, okay? It does the best visual output. You're not gonna carry yet another screen. You might have a couple of LEDs, or a very, very tiny thing on whatever this other thing is for status or whatever. but it's not going to replace the phone. It can't replace it. That's the bullshit thing of humane. We're gonna kill the phone. It was like, that was the stupidest marketing message I've ever heard. 'Cause you're not gonna kill it. So you have to be a companion to it. Just like AirPods, just like Apple watches. It's a companion to a phone. Right. So the reason why it's in this form factor is because they need all the sensor suites. Why do they need the sensor suites? Because Apple's not gonna give them access to that phone. Exactly. So they just don't wanna be disintermediated by Apple. They don't have the phone. They're saying you have to get the device because they need to get all the context to get all the real time input. So they can feed it back to the servers to give you the, because all the security of Bluetooth security, video security, the dots, all the GPS coordinates. When they, when you have to ask Apple for permission and the user permission for all that things to go, oh my God, they're hyper tracking us. As opposed to, it's one network link, whether it's a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi thing, you know, it's most likely Bluetooth to your device that then goes back to the network. It's one thing, yeah, I'm just connecting like my headphones. But it's got GPS, everything else in it. So it's just sucking up all your context and throwing away and getting rid of all those privacy concerns. Do you see? So it makes it real simple and people go, oh yeah, it just does it. And you don't understand. It's sucking everything it possibly can suck. To get back to open AI, to get around all the Apple restrictions. If you're an AI true believer, you want all the con, you too sort of want it to have all the context you have. If you're, if we start to have a relationship with our own chatbot where it's like, I really depend on you. I want you to know what I'm doing. You don't feel this impulse that it's sort of, the deficit is in its lack of context on what I'm doing and then it would be, you don't feel that way. You're a really adopter. Right. Most of the world, most of the world isn't. Most of the world is like, what the fuck are you doing with my data? Right. So am I, I am a late early adopter. Okay. I have learned how these products are made. I've watched this stuff. Right. I didn't adopt I humane. I knew how bad it was because when I had the first meeting when there were four people, I was like, this thing's going nowhere. The same thing happened with various other devices. I'm like, I don't have time for this crap. I'm like, same thing happened with the rabbit. I was like, what is this thing? Jeff met with Jesse. I'm like, nah. So the issue is, you want to be late enough early adopter. Not so crazy that you're just wasting your time. So I'm on that side. So and then I also look at all the data stuff because I'm also pretty wise and I know how this, this data stuff is used and I'm in between. Yeah. You know, you just said you have a, or your first child is the author. Yeah. Yes, your first child. Yes. Three and a half months. Congratulations. I remember a market way difference in the way I thought about the world before I had kids and after I had kids. And most of these founders, that was including Larry and Sergey and Mark Zuckerberg, all those guys, think about the world before they had kids, before they were married in a very different way. I want everything all the time. I'll give away all my privacy. I don't care what happens with all this data. As soon as you have kids and you start hearing about defects and you start hearing about social engineering and you start hearing about all this other stuff, you start changing your view on how much data you want sucked up. Right. Okay. And how you're being protected. And there's a very, and I know for a fact because I worked with these guys, some of these founders, that they think about the world differently and they wish they would have made a some different moves and different decisions early on. Yeah. And would like to go back but they can't. So I'm just saying, you know, going back on your data thing, it's very different. I'm still in the journey. You know, it's for my daughter, we have tiny beans, which is like a private, so you know, app just for our family. So I can see just where you start using products differently. In terms, okay, so if the pen is really an end run around the control of the iPhone, why would Apple need a pen? Like they have the iPhone. How does that story go? Oh, because you might be on the device using it. It might be also a lot of times you don't want to have the device there in the middle, because you say, "Oh, I'm in it." Like it can also be ambient all the time because your thing's going to be in your pocket. So there is, there are some, like the form of having this other thing that if you choose to want it to watch it, because we've watched these life recorders before, you know, 10 years ago, there's these life recorders. This is just another form of that. That's how it gets positioned. It's like, don't forget any moment. Yeah, you know, Plods doing that now with their voice wanting this one. I actually don't know that one. Plods out of the UK and it's, you know, granola. Yeah, yeah, of course. Basically granola, but as aware. Are you an investor or? In, in, no, I'm not. No, you just brought it up. So I didn't know. No, no, no, no, I'm not investor. Do you buy that Apple's working on a pin? I'm sure that, I hope to God, they're working on something. Right, you know, right. They need to be working on a little bit. But knowing their chip, their chip expertise, Johnny Sarujee and the team, they're incredibly awesome. Knowing the mechanicals, knowing that they've made the watch, right? Making, you know, the tracker or all the others stuff. They have the tracker, sorry. You know, the Apple airtack. Oh, yeah. They have airtags. They have all this really, really miniature custom silicon that, and all the air pod custom silicon. They can make one of these things really easy compared to anybody else because they have all the expertise to make. An incredible piece of hardware. They have to get the software right. But the hardware, the connectivity, they have their own network stack. They could make an awesome one because they have all the camera technology too. So it would, either it's going to be something you sit on the desk, when you wear and you sit on the desk or whatever it's like does. Or you build it into your, you know, into your AirPods Pro, like imagine cameras that coming out of your AirPods. You're using, could, or it's like, where, how, how much do you expect Apple to deliver? I guess. So, you know, you're talking to somebody. I'm deep in the Apple ecosystem, my laptop, AirPods, watch, phone, but then they, I think I bought the phone that was sold on AI and it's one of the most egregious misleads perhaps and ever market in a product ever. When I saw AI first laptop, AI first phone, I was ready to tweet something that was like really, really nasty. And I pulled back because I'm like, you know, it's, it's, Apple has never done marketing bullshit before. Right. You know, and I was like, I was holding back. So, you know, hopefully they're finding new religion and going back to the old real smart days, which is under promise and over deliver. What do you think they can do well right now and what do you think is holding them back? What can they do well right now? Oh, chips, low level software, devices, it's really, really, you know, you know, Apple Vision Pro is an abject failure, but it's an incredible technical marvel from a technology point of view. It can make great stuff. Right. It's, do they have the product chops like they used to to be able to create the full stack, create the incredible user experience and deliver all those pieces, the puzzle in the middle necessary to pull it all together. And that's the thing that, you know, has been really important for the reason why Apple is where it is today. So, what extent do you think just the underlying capability of AI is holding Apple back, right? For a great user experience, you want sort of the 100% case, right? A lot of people talk about some of the, you know, chatch, you be T capabilities. It's almost like the self-driving 90%. Like, you know, it can do most of what you want, but then the more you drill into a problem, the more you start hitting problems. And so if you're trying to set up these consumer loops where it's like every time I step into my house, you do this and the AI gets it right 90% of the time, can Apple be expected to deliver that consumer experience that people want? Well, the very first thing to understand is LLMs have fundamental problems. Right. They have fundamental problems and that's in the way they're created and that's why they hallucinate. And unless they're descopped and they're really trained on very, very contextually specific information like medical or legal or, you know, what are general consumer stuff. Instead of these incredibly huge models that can hallucinate because they don't know whether you're talking medical, legal, whatever. It tries to be a know-it-all. You would never hire a know-it-all in the real world. Right. You can't stand a know-it-all. That's what I was just saying. Right. I admit what I don't know. Right. And Josh, you've never seen all these give you an answer. And it doesn't know whether it's right or wrong. And so, you know, we're invested in various companies in the medical domain like Noble and other things that have very, very specific context and very, very specific guard rails for what they will do and what they will answer and they will not answer stuff. It's when you're trying to make these general purpose ones. It's when it's a problem. So, getting back to the LLM specifically, if Apple has very, very specific models for consumers in certain contexts, it can work really well. It's when you apply these very, very broad models and you don't know what's going to come out, then that is where the problem is. There's still models and other things beyond LLMs, even highly contextually constrained LLM, that are coming, that are going to get around a lot of those things. But right now everybody's, LLMs, AGI, bigger and bigger models. What do you think is coming? What's coming? Well, there's world models coming. So world models combined with LLMs. So that's understanding physics, understanding chemistry, all this stuff that we know because there are real rules, mathematics. around those things. Today, chat GPT can't even draw a face of a clock or understand what a clock says because it doesn't graphically think it's easy for us for a graphical clock, not a digital one. And so it's like, a world model would go, "Oh, that's a graphic. "I'm gonna use this model. "This is how it works. "You would build that stuff into those tools." - We'll give you these tools where it says, for this question, you go off to this software or this technique to solve some of these. - Yeah, absolutely. - And then the language model's good for what the language model is good for as opposed to trying to think it reasons about chemistry 'cause it doesn't have a real basic chemistry model. - When we started this conversation, I think you were saying audio and voice is sort of at the core of what AI wants to consume. Where, or maybe is that fair? Or I mean, clearly listening to everything we're doing is part of what these devices we've talked about, what we want. - Sure. - Yeah, where do you think about sort of the AirPods and earbuds in terms of the AI device story? - Well, you know, there's edge devices, which are AirPods and phones and these kinds of things. I think of the edge of the edge first. - Okay. - So the edge of the edge is the very, very fringe of like, are you speaking a word? How do I do noise cancellation? How do I do speaker focusing? Those kinds of things. - Okay. - There is AI that can do that stuff really well. Your ear does that, you do that, you turn your head, you focus in. So we can apply AI into each of these, at the edge of the edge devices, to do much better intelligence to help us be able to filter out noise from-- - Right, to do the device's core task. Oh, the very basic task of separating signal from noise. Whether that's visually, or auditory, or other things of that nature. So we need to get there. So that's the first level of AI applied. Then there's the AI above that, which is labeling interpretation, those kinds of things. And that can be done on device, in some cases, or be done with the companion, it's, which would most likely be your smartphone. So that's another set of AI. Then there's another one on top of that, which is like, okay, what's the reasoning? Let's make, let's get the context, and then figure out what's going on. So there's all these levels. - Yeah. - And break down the AI in levels, just like your brain has many different centers in your brain to do this, this, this, this, this. You're gonna start seeing AI becoming much more diverse, and not just one big thing. And we're seeing that with self-driving cars already. - Right. - I know we're all over the map there today. - No, I love it. So the AI wave creates this broken thinking, because you have companies that have, they want to justify valuations, so they need to sell something. - Right. - And they have the story, which is AI. And so in some ways, I'm complicit in what they're doing, which is like, think from the need for an AI device out, rather than like some human problem, and then sort of build the device. - Correct. - Up, and that's why this conversation ends up being chaotic, because we're shifting between. - Well, you're from the technology to the use. - Right. - Technology is like, we're in search of a, but don't you think there is this moment to sell the consumer on a new device? They've heard about this technology. They're sort of open to adopt a new sort of way of behaving, and so people are searching for what device can we deliver them in this moment? - See, to me, these devices, a pin, a pen, or whatever are enablers, they're not a solution. And where we were going was, I was saying that we need more context-specific LLM, this drug, so that consumers can get a reliable experience without hallucinations. What that means is you have to come up with the applications and constrain the application to better understand what it is you want. It's not just a know-it-all that's gonna go and try everything. So when you switch into certain applications, you want that, because why? At the end of the day, we're not where we wanna be. It's not, we're not at hurry yet. Everybody wants her, you know, the thing, but we don't have the technology yet, so we have to creep into it. Which means application, more application-specific, context-specific LLMs for given workflows. And not just it's a general anything, device. Okay? And so we're gonna see much, it's like kind of WebPoint 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0. We've had to make these leaps because we have to have the technology to move along with it. - We had Siri many years ago, we've had Alexa, that's right. - We think we're still far away from the sort of voice communicated personal assistant that people talk to and engage with a computer. - Yes, because why? What I see is you're gonna have your federation of your devices. That's gonna be everything for your laptop, your TV, your game machine, all the things you carry on you or watches whatever it is. You're gonna have that. Then you're gonna have a smart agent in the background, really understanding which device you're on, which users you're in, and all the data, and all the context, and then be able to switch how it's working based on those things. Today what we're saying is put everything on a device and it's gonna work, or put all the sensors here and put all of the smarts in the cloud, and everything else is just dumb and between. We're gonna build into this much more multiple AI world where Edge of the Edge, the Edge devices, the federation of Edge devices, and the cloud all work together to produce the her application we're here in, that we would love to have, but we're just not gonna get there today from what everyone's telling you. - Just because of the capability of LMS. - Yeah, because we're just not, we don't have the world models, we don't have the sensors. When you look at these humanoid robots, everyone's like, "Oh, they do flips and tricks and everything." Great, we can do that, but we don't have the necessary sensing and actuation necessary to be able to get the data, to be able to write, and they need world models to do, to do anything like a humanoid stuff with that people are hoping it'll do. Remember, self-driving cars came out in the late 2008. We're just there now. - Right, no it's great. - Right, and we've spent billions and billions, and we're now getting, and it's just getting rolled out, and they're still $300,000 cars with massive sensors, and compute, and those are massive Edge devices, plus a whole set of coordination in the cloud. So that's what we need to do, and we need to do it at a very cheap level, and battery-efficient level, and it's gonna take time to get there. What is the state of the smart home today? Or what? - Okay, I know. - You were talking the big device questions here. - Yeah. - It fits into this AI conversation, but what is your read on just the successor failure of building smart home devices? - I'm in a build, a remodel of a big new smart home thing for myself. - Okay. - So I'm tracking the latest, and now I'm not in it like I used to be. So is that include custom devices where you're just sourcing the best stuff that exists? - Well, I'd say that there's the best of what exists is from the device side, but then there's custom ways of putting it all together. It's like what we just talked about the self-driving car thing. You have to, and when I'm designing this thing, I have to think about the devices, the low level network, the application level network, what's in the server, what's in the cloud? And it's still very, very difficult. If you want to pull off what, again, the smart home, the jets and smart home, they will y'all think about it. - Is that what you're trying to get? - Yeah, and I just know better. Like I'm like, okay, I'm gonna wire everything and make sure I have thread border routers in the necessary places. - Right, what are the main things you want to know is to be able to do. - Oh, right now, just the simplest things. Like I have a, you know, in this case, I have a self-playing piano. - Okay. - Right? So I'm pumping MIDI into it. - Okay. - So I pump MIDI and I put songs from the netter, from locally, MIDI into it, to them, it's self-plays. And then it has, it's mic'd, and the mics are then a to deed into a Dante audio network. - Okay. - Which then distributes all the way through the entire house or whatever zones I want. - Right. - And then through Dante into all of these Dante amplified speakers around the house and the sonos can pump in. And so I can have a player piano. - Right. - Right. - The keys are pressing. So it's an analog piano getting digitally recorded and streamed all through the house. - And so it was pressing the key. - Is it like an old school player piano? - No, no, no, no. It's a modern regular grand piano. But it has actuators on it. - Okay. - And it plays the songs just as, 'cause they record it from a professional. So it's like you have a concert pianist with you. - Wow, interesting. - And then you're micking it, and then you're amplifying it and playing it throughout the house so you, it feels like you have a concert pianist in the house. - Have you all executed on that yet? Or is this still a dream? - Oh no, it's in the mix and it can work. It absolutely can work. - Okay. - But then there's all the switching to make the sonos from one thing to another and how do you, in which zones did the player piano go to? To the, and are you like a speakerhead? Like do you have this sort of fancy old school speakers? Or are you using like sonos? - Well, no, I'm using sonos ports to get the house to amplified speakers for certain either in ceiling speakers without you don't see the grills. You've seen some cases, I don't like them, but there's some cases in certain wet locations. You need the grills and other things where it's Elacoustic. like Dolby F-Rost, you know, whole thing. And you have to worry about all those levels of networks to make all that stuff work. You know, got AVC, you got AEC. There's so many different things. I have plus I also have full lighting. So there's DMX lighting control like you do on stages. There's also the MIDI over Ethernet. And everything runs over Ethernet. So it's MIDI over Ethernet. Lighting control over Ethernet, daunting over Ethernet. Lighting control over Ethernet. So it's a full on, you know, next generation system. Anything else, you're smart, whom? Well, it's going to have thread, of course, because we did-- What is the thread, sir? So thread, we had basically invented it. And now thread is the Bluetooth equivalent for mesh networking for entire house. So it mesh networks an entire house for low speed data and control, very, very low latency. So you can do light switches, light bulbs, you know, sensors, everything else. That can be battery operated for 10 years. That kind of thing. And it's very resilient. So do anything like mechanical-- I don't know. Here, there are meals being made in automated settings. There's mechanical lighting and TVs that pop out. Things that lights drop down, robo lights that move. Yeah, that's the most of the mechanical-- except mechanical locks and NFC-based door locks. What do you use for the actual voice communication with your house? That is to be determined. It's a bake off or-- Well, nothing's ready yet. Right. So you have to-- next generation Alexa is not there yet. So it's set up. That's the next layer on top of all of this infrastructure. The next layer is on top of that. And that's TBD at this point. What are you typing it? What's going to happen? You have to make a decision, right? No, I don't. Why? Because-- Well, you're going to have to talk to it. What are you going to use? When is this house supposed to be ready to go? You use buttons. Oh, yeah. Just cars are coming from screens and not using buttons. Right now you're not ready to use voice. No, it's because it's fucking bullshit. So you just have modules like on my wall. I don't feel like having everyone scream at me. And turn on the lights. You don't have any of that. Well, look, this is the other thing I learned from Smart Home. OK. Is that most people who designed the Smart Home designed it for themselves. It's like for single guys. I want one button that does this to one button. And then when you have-- You have people over there who don't-- When you have kids or you have friends over or you have a wife or partner with you. And they're like, I don't want that button. I want this button. Everyone has their own one button interface. So you have to design and understand just like anything. It's not just you. You have to design this whole world when it's a shared space versus your own AI, you know, her space. It's a very different thing. I mean, one of the things that's amazing about the devices you guys produced at Apple, obviously they were expensive. But they're fundamentally mass market. It feels like the billionaire phone is the phone that the middle class American is able to afford. I mean, the portrait you're painting is not that, where it's with the home. And that old school of electronics-- Oh, my sense. --really crazy. But you can make a much easier-- Right, but it's your first thing about getting the home to that piece. On some levels, what you want to, which is a device that's made that works that solves some of these problems without the-- I want less screens in my home. I don't want more screens. I hate screens. Frankly, I hate screens. I don't want them in the home. So why hasn't the home had that sort of mass market amazing electronic work yet? Oh, because we're still in the days of like-- remember, why if I didn't even exist until 2001, too? We just thought, even though it started in 2011, it's just now there. We're still building all the base layers and linking everything. And then we're now going to get the LLMs and voice, recognition, all that stuff. To then put it all together. But it's still on the verge. Just like the self-driving car was when that smart home like that is-- you've got to give it another-- I think five to six years for what we think of-- when you think smart home, you want it to be-- I think it's going to be there. Just set up your home to make sure it-- What company do you think is best position? I don't know why I did. I don't know why I did six years. No, because the thing that I learned at Nest was all these sensors and smart plugs and all that other stuff, there's no money in it. There's absolutely no money in that stuff. That's why you go online. And that's why there's-- Is people are only willing to buy 20% more expensive like all of our-- Yeah, because they have a switch in my wall. Why don't you have anything else? And any crazy guy like me doing this other thing, it's just-- It's not big enough market. It's not a big enough market. So nobody wants to play in that space. And so Ikea is finally to tell you the truth, because they're using thread and they're using matter and that kind of stuff. So Ikea is starting. Interesting. But it's just starting. It's all nascent. So I think that the ones that are going to be successful are the ones who are going to finally deliver the Nest Vision that we really had. But it's still-- If I would be rebuilding Nest right now, and because in three to four years, you can be there to get what we've been talking about, that we had the Vision for in 2010, '11. You're obviously investing right now. Do you still have the entrepreneur bug? Like do you think you have another great company in you? Oh, I have over 100 great companies in me right now. I invest directly in many, many things, and I invest indirectly in many things. So I have over 100 companies now, 100 and something companies, where I'm working with them every day. Today I was working with a company and helping them with Apple. I'm a shadow CEO with a couple of companies. I'm doing product design at companies. So I get to do this in many different domains. What's it mean to be a shadow CEO? So there's the CEO and then he's like, please help me. So I get to be behind him. But do you think about it this way? Operation, Red Count. How should we do funding? Product design. And so I have various roles like that where they please help. And so I do. And I go in and I get to-- A couple of companies are spending the most time on right now. I'm spending a lot of time with Orionis by sciences. They are doing AI drug discovery. And we have drugs in FDA phase two clinical, where they're actually working and helping with that. So I'm spending a lot of time. I'm not a shadow CEO there, but I'm on the board into helping out. I'm at Menlo Micro. Menlo Micro is a Mem switch. So we have transistors and we have relays. Mem switch sits in the middle. And it's an incredible new technology that we've been working on for 10 years. They've been working for almost 40 years. To power AI data centers and robots and all these other things, it's an absolutely phenomenal thing in helping with the business development, the product plans, the strategy, the financing, that kind of stuff. Let's see. What else am I working with? I'm doing, I was just doing some VR work this morning. Oh really? Yeah. Do you believe in a VR? I believe in, I believe, I fuck the metaverse. I believe in VR for episodic, B2B, and some gaming, but episodic. So you're not living in it. Some people are saying you're going to live in it. It's like no. But where it's collaborative, it's high value, and mostly B2B. Sure there's gaming and that's a fringe. It's big, but it's still a fringe from my perspective. But where you're doing design online, so we're in a company called Gravity Sketch. And Gravity Sketch is the number one. Think of it as a Figma in the VR world, where you're doing collaborative design in a 3D space, and you can do markups, you can create in it. And we're at all the biggest companies. We're at Stellantis, Nike, Ford. Everybody uses us to do car design, issue design, furniture design. So I believe in it for that. So they have teams of people wearing headsets, doing this for an hour or something, getting in it, coming out or reviewing cars or whatever. And I believe in VR for that for sure. But for most of the stuff that was pitched by meta and Apple, I don't believe in it at all, because I've been working on VR since 1988. And I've seen the issues with it. This is circling back to some of the big themes, some of the big themes of this conversation, like what company do you think is best positioned to produce like a new iPad-scale device? Like someone, like what if you had to make a prediction about a company producing a device that reaches our culture at that scale, who are you betting on? Hopefully Apple makes the iPad phone or the iPhone pad, which is basically a foldable iPhone. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, bring the benefits of the iPad to the iPhone. Just bring the foldable stuff. And it's been bandied about and stuff like that. But the operating system, I don't necessarily-- Is that a way to use a new device? I think it's a meaningful segment for Apple to continue to grow and to make sure that they don't lose market share to people with foldables. But I do think there's a lot of use cases where if you can carry with you everywhere and you can open it, especially in some cases with AI, that it can be pretty powerful. - Right. - Right, because in iPad, you just can't slip in your pocket. You want a pocketable, you know, kind of iPad experience where you can use voice so you don't need a keyboard all that stuff to interact with it. Could be pretty damn cool. - What, is that what you would focus on if you were Apple CEO? (laughing) I have many things that I would do if I was an Apple. - Well, to give you some of them. - Yeah. - Well, the first thing I think they really flubbed on was mobility. You know, there was the Apple car, and we all know that that was a real thing and they killed it, but there's other ways of doing that. - You think they should have kept going. - No, no, no, no. Apple is a company that redefines certain aspects of life, and redefined what it was to be desktop publishing, right? Or publishing in general, and redefined music, and redefined various things. So they should redefine mobility. Don't make a four wheel car that competes with everybody else in the Chinese. How would you change mobility in two, in three, and lightweight four wheel vehicles? How do you do that? That the kids are like, at 14 can use and go, "I wanna keep using it." - Right. - Don't, not a lucid blah, blah, blah for just, you know, you gotta think, you know, when Steve Jobs and I would walk around the Apple campus back in 2008, we talked about the Apple car, what would it be? And he was really like, we need to do, he thought it was revolutionary, it was the Volkswagen, right, the people's wagon, the people's car. And he was like, what's the people's car? What's the next generation people's car? What's gonna be used in the cities? And now you're seeing the Fiat Topolino, you see the twizzy, you see all these different things that go, "I live in Europe," right? So you see all this stuff running around, and they're selling out like crazy. And you're like, "That Apple," or two wheels Apple, or three wheels Apple. - And so you would say, keep working on that vehicle, work on this vehicle vision. - Oh, I think that's only one thing. - I think that's one. - I think mobility is something that should be addressed, and Apple could address it in a very different way than it, and it has all kinds of brands, something that has the technology all that stuff. This other thing is, I think it's a red herring, and it's more or less a me too good, I think. - Frankly, I think that their accessories lineup could go much, much, you could lean in much more into that. Lots of things to be done around that, obviously glasses. - Like more, you know, liners? - Or the aesthetic piece of it, or the other one? - No, no, no, no, no, aesthetics. - No, no, no, no, no, no, we're talking about new markets, new things that they could go after. - Like after Aura, directly? - Ah, sure. You know, like duh. - Are you bullish on Aura right now? - I got one on. - You know, to be told. - To be told. - The trail though. - No, no, no, to be truth be told, I was invested in the company before Aura. It was called Motif. - Okay. - We made the first smart ring. We had all of the patents, all the fundamentals and everything, and the team who was from Apple just wanted to do something other than a ring after they got the ring. I'm like, guys, focus on the business. And they're like, no, we want to make, you know, some other wearable, I'm like, focus on the business. So they lost it. And then what happened? Aura ended up buying all of our patents. - And another one. - So, to me, like, we were doing it four years before Aura did. And now my team from Nest is the marketing team at Aura, which I love those guys and they're doing great. I just wish we would have, Motif would have been it instead of Aura. - Is Apple supposed to be thinking about a ring right now? - If they're not, they'd be crazy if they weren't. And it's so easy for them to do. They have all the chip. Like, how's the lower end? - Or it doesn't have chip guys. They don't have all of it. They have everything they need to make an incredible ring. Like, and they have all the composites for, you know, the materials, everything. Like, it is a no brainer. It's just like the pin, no brainers to do. They have everything they need to, they just need to have the gumption to get it out and do it. It's really simple. - What are other accessories? - I think they're smarter ways of, you know, making a air pod that has an iPod in it. So I think they need to bring back the iPod. - Okay, I like this. - Because people don't want to have their phone with them all the time. - Well, there's two reasons. One is there's the nostalgic value of everybody who got into Apple. A lot of them got in because of the iPod. - Right. - Right. So people don't want that just, they would like the nostalgic version. - That was the very first Apple device. - Yeah, most people is because at the time of the iPod, 1% market share in the US only, not around the world. So most people, and there was no Apple retail. So most people's device, because they didn't have a Mac and they didn't buy a Mac. 'Cause they had a PC, so they had to get an Apple device and was most likely an iPod. So iPod from the nostalgic point of view, for all those people who's like, "Oh, I remember the iPod." But they don't want distractions anymore. - Right. - They don't want distraction in me. The third thing, sorry, sorry, Apple, who doesn't want distraction? - Well, a lot of people want that pure missile. - So the music lovers who want iPod. - I just bought a record player, so I'm deep in this. - Right. - Did you see what Sony did this week? - No. - Sony killed their TVs. - They sold it off to TCL. And they went back to the turntables. They just released two new turntables. They killed the TVs and they bring back turntables. You tell me. So is there a nostalgic element for the iPad? I think so. - That's right, is the iPod in this vision software, or it's a hardware device? You're saying, where does it exist? It's what format? - It's, I don't want to give away all my stuff. - But you're saving the, as anybody talked to you about it, you know, there was obviously reporting about, you know, the next CEO, and your name was, you know, "Being Needed Bout" has anyone that I don't need dealers? Or, you're like, I got a hold back for-- - I got a lot of incoming. I, let me, I wanted to say thank you to those, those ex-Apple employees and those current Apple employees who have reached out and have tried to canvas me and try to get me involved. You know, Apple will make the right decision when they need to about who the next CEO is. - I love the company. It's been in my blood since 1981, when I first Apple too, you know, it's been the thing since I was 11 to 11. If anyone calls, you know, from the board or for Tim calls, I'll be happy to pick up the phone. - Right, right. - And that's it. I'll help them anyway they think they would like to be helped. - Right. - The accessory str-- That's a great, I'm fascinated by that. - I'm interested in that. - There's a whole nother product category there, so-- - But we'll leave that for later. - Okay. We'll leave that for later. - What, I mean, the found the the the labs, the foundation model companies. What's your, what's your read on open AI and Thropic? - Oh my gosh. - I know they want to go there. - Yeah, of course. This is a big technology question of the day. Are they great businesses? I guess that's the first one. Are they good businesses? - They have to really target applications to be great business. - Okay. - Platforms are not businesses. Applications are great business. - Okay. - And that was proven. The last great platform business was Windows 95. You know, or Windows. There's been no platform business other than that. Okay. So you could call maybe AWS or Google whatever. But that's a B2B thing. It's not a, it's really about applications, not platforms. So when you look, you stack up open AI, Google and Thropic, you know, me straw, you can pick whoever it is. And then let's talk about the Chinese and even the Koreans and stuff like that. Look, there is a point. And Dario is doing a great job at Anthropic, turning it into a real business. - Right. - And coding because it's so language focused is an incredible application for an LLM. And we're seeing that, right? It's just crazy with now they're, you know, they're non-coding version of it of Clawed as well as the coding version. I'm using it now. I'm playing them like, oh my God. I'm still getting back into coding. I haven't done coding years. I'm not a coder, but I got the desktop version. It's a little, I feel like I don't have files. So I'm a little confused as a user that I have stuff on Google that I want them to use, which I think I need to use in their web browser stuff. I mean, these are, sorry, I must say, look, I must say that they have a whole set of application stuff and training because it still feels like it's a GIP hub model for Clawed. Like it's very giddy. And that's, and if you look at, if you look at that, it's a very small number of people. They have to come from a different way to get people involved. And it's still not approachable. Like I'm like still like confused when I'm using it or when I'm even installing it and trying to run it. What? Okay, terminal this. Like how many people do that? There's other ways of getting around that. And they're going, I'm sure they'll get there. There's just no way they're not. But again, they're doing a great job of really focusing and figuring out that stuff around coding, around that's a guard rails, all those things. And they're trying to get to profitability so that they're a real standing business. So I commend them for all that they're doing. They're, you know, they were ex-opening. I had people write and everything. And they really are targeting. So that's really great. Then we go to OpenAI. OpenAI right now is spray and pray. Right. Spray and pray. Look, this week it was rumored. And I'm sure it was a very strong rumor. They're trying to reach $50 billion. Right. $50 billion. Just a few months ago was $5 billion. And just before that it was $500 million. I don't think unless you've been in the market and understand, this is massive amounts of capital that even large fortune 500s can't get access to. And so what I, the game I believe Sam is playing and it's a really dangerous game is too big to fail. Right. every. single person to give that money, including large governments and everything else. Right. So they're too big to fail. Right. Well, this was the whole Sarah Fryer backstop. Get a get a back that backstop, which is like, no, no, they're back paddling. They've written stuff that's just. You don't think they're not having those discussions at OpenAI. And yeah, these governmental backstop is it's all right, because we're going to crash everything. Right. The semi conductor. Right. So, so I think it's a incredibly dangerous game. They're playing and with, especially with the circular deals and everything. Is there a there there? I believe there's a there there, but Google's going to win it. Right. Google has everything from the chips to the data centers to the all the way to the applications and tons of data, you know, for all this stuff. I wish they had a better devices team. It sucks there. Right. I'll go I, you know, whatever. But at the end of the day, they have all the things necessary, plus an ad business that can fund billions of dollars a quarter and distribution, you know, it's just it's everywhere. It's like it's funny. I feel like there's so many AI haters that, you know, they obviously Google things and so then they'll get the AI results from Google. And so I feel like there's, you know, Gemini is fundamentally delivering the results. So there's this weird world where people hate AI and still use it all the time via Google, which is just. Right. I hear what you're saying. You know, there's this. It's more like I hate what it's going to do to the world. I hate it, but it works for me. Right. You know, so I think there's a little difference there. But, but, you know, I have to credit Sundar, you know, and the team that they've had an existential crisis. And I think they cleaned up the culture enough. I'm sure it's not fully clean, but enough to say we have an existential crisis. We're going to get to work. We got to go back to the bottom of the mold. We got to go back to the top of the mold. And so, we got to go back to the top of the mold. So, you're going to see oddly enough, infrastructure and scale and application is where the, you capturing the customer or capturing the platform is going to be. And that's where I believe where we're headed. And opening a stuck here because they don't have any data. And there's been very clear they don't want it. But they're not here. And you already have Google up here at the apps. You have Claude or I have Thropic there. And maybe one day Apple up there. So, it's pretty good. Don't you think like general purpose assistant is an application? I mean, to defend OpenAI, they have all this context on me. You know, the longer I use it, the more-- Google has much more. Apple has much more. And I'm drifting. But they have much more. And that's why they want to device. That's why they need all, you know, these things to sort of have this small picture of-- They need the context. People are saying they should make a phone. But then they have, then there's an Android phone. Because they don't have enough, well, maybe they can find more money. And the other thing that people don't realize is, as they add more capacity, as they bring on more data centers, they're all-- each of those users is more negative money that they have to spend to keep those users. Right? So, as they scale up-- Right. And they don't have a revenue amount. They're losing more money per user because they're getting more users. Right. The old ride sharing days. So, we'll make it up in volume. Right. We're net-- Unit economics are negative. I mean, do you think opening AI goes bankrupt? I-- look, if they're asking for $50 billion now, like how fast are you going to burn through that? Right. We haven't talked about XAI. Do you have a view on them? Look, Elon plays a very, very different game. Yeah. You know, he started with-- He started with Tesla. Then it was Twitter that turned into action. Now Twitter or X is part of Tesla. And then he was doing data center stuff and now that's going to be part of Tesla. Now he wants to make-- And what I heard latest is, is, SpaceX is not going to go public. SpaceX is going to get bought by Tesla. Yeah. I think I made a prediction maybe on this podcast. Yeah, I think-- I mean, clearly so. But he's just rolling out. Right. And just becoming a conglomerate. What are you saying? No, it's sort of House of Cards always the next thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, I'm missing it's House of Cards. SpaceX is an incredible business. Incredible business. But Tesla would be much better off if Elon didn't do what Elon did a year ago. Right. So that was-- Which is like lose focus and go do do do do do. Well, no, be in politics and then piss off the world and everyone said I'm not buying that product. Right. Because he tainted the brand. Right. So the thing is it's like, okay, I need money to keep Tesla alive. Right. Okay, I'm going to put SpaceX in, raise a bunch of money off SpaceX. Right. And make-- Because the Tesla stock is going to come up. Right. And then we're going to have to go to Tesla. myself all the time. I'm like, how would Steve Jobs fare in this environment if he was here? Well, what do you do to the White House? I don't have an answer. Do you think you would be in the White House? You sort of have to. I have no idea. I think Gavin Newsom said something fairly charitable about Tim Cook, which is sort of, you know, yes to play the game. But it's hard to know if Steve Jobs would have been. Knowing what I know and working alongside him for a decade, I don't think he would have played. But I don't know how this played along, but I don't know. But so, really, I think that, you know, I think Dario's doing a great job. Got in front of Davos, saying, you know, this is BS, this is not right. This is not redemis got up and saying LLM's aren't the thing, you know, and there's more to come. So I think we need more leaders like that. Because we have too many, you know, people with questionable value systems running these things. And, you know, I wish they were there or they were more vocal. Because Tim's a great guy. Tim's got high values. You know, I mean, I agree with you. I mean, Dario, they just, anthropic just released a constitution for. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. Claude where it's like they're being extremely thoughtful. I tweeted saying it's like in a moment of anti-intellectualism. Here they are. It's like, let's have some philosophy, PhDs, academics, you know, think through, you know, within a real principled way. Like I really admire what they're doing. I think when a lot of investors and a lot of people get burned by this thing that's we're in right now, there's going to be like a lot of naval gays and going, oh, you know, what did we do? Right, what do we do wrong? There you're always going to have that wall street, a beautiful wall street mentality and everybody's playing, but I remember that in 98, 99, 99, 2 when it all fell out and then great companies like Google really came in to play, right? So we'll see what happens. I don't know. This has been a great conversation. Last one, last question. We've touched on a lot of devices. I mean, if you were, you know, I don't know, the smart engineer kid out of college, like, I want to make my name and devices. Like, where would you point him or her? Like, what is the sort of device area that said, okay, make a bet on this for the next two decades. Understand the application really really well and understand if you even need hardware. Okay. See, we have more than enough hardware in all kinds of different things. It's going to be a federation of things with a really smart software thing. Yeah. So don't think of just mechanical and devices. You got to think system and you got to think federated of devices to really get to the next level of what is going to happen. All this other stuff is all kind of features, not a product. I know that I said that was last question. I have to, like, I love my iPhone. I use it all the time. Sure great. But don't you get, we get sick of looking at it or it's like you're looking at the phone too much. You think in two decades, like we're still going to be using like a ear, we'll just put these in our ears and then and when we put the phone in our pocket, it'll know the context and it'll just start talking to us and then more listening less screen time. Yeah. You know, are there going to be different forms of these? These are open ear over the ear in ear, no, no, these things. Lations great. Okay, great. You're going to have the glasses. So we have enough of the forms. They need to be pulled together with smarter software and better things to get them to do what they need. You know, I'm not saying what headphones do. These are nothings. Oh, okay. These are nothing 3a's. I got the over the ear, the over the headphone ones. Yeah, and I'm also the the opens. I love them. Nice. Absolutely love them. Tony Fiddell, this is been awesome. Thanks so much for doing this with me. Yeah, great. Thanks. Thanks a lot Eric. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of the podcast. If you're new here, please like and subscribe. It really helps out the channel. Listen in for new episodes every week wherever you get your podcasts.