SPEAKER_00: and i like you don't get me wrong but i think you're so misguided in this because if we went and asked 100 people this question i don't think you did this if you did you would get 100 people who would be so infuriated it would be such a violation of trust what you've described

SPEAKER_01: um that they would break up lifelong friendships over it this week in startups is brought to you by codecademy build the future you want to see with codecademy codecademy pro helps you learn everything you'll need to shape what comes next in the tech space try it free for 14 days at codecademy.com twist dot tech domains has a new program called startups dot tech where you can get your company featured on this week in startups go to startups dot tech slash jason to find out how and squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first

SPEAKER_02: purchase of a website or domain all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups we had a

SPEAKER_06: great episode episode 1745 back in may with a really interesting founder his name is dan sir ocher he is the ceo and co-founder of rewind ai you probably remember him because hey this is a really clever idea what does rewind ai do recorded everything on your screen uh in a given period of time then it creates a searchable index for you it seems like a great idea but as we talked about on that episode hey maybe there's some privacy issues here that we need to think through and some of those have actually uh come to pass in terms of zoom uh people are using things like gong and other

SPEAKER_09: services to record calls and now zoom even has built into it the ability to not just record phone calls calls like we're doing right now with the recording button flashing in red on the top left

SPEAKER_06: but also create ai summaries of the call and transcripts so the world's changing pretty quick

SPEAKER_09: and privacy is an issue right what if you're having your desktop recorded and somebody sends you a confidential message and now it's in your archive forever then legal issues discovery all of this

SPEAKER_05: led to a great episode really mind-blowing but dan wasn't done nope dan had to keep pushing the envelope so uh this week uh or maybe even last week he uh he released something called um the rewind pendant what is that it's a little um device you wear around your neck like a pendant it is what he said it is

SPEAKER_09: and the device is designed to record everything and do what he's doing on your desktop so i thought hey this is chaotic and insane uh i had some strong feelings on it maybe people took them a little bit too seriously um but we've seen this movie before um there have been a number of people who've tried recording pendant type things and obviously the police wear them and uh we we've gotten normalized to police having them because they're giant and they flash red but this one was a little different dan so welcome back to the program and let's uh let's hash it out here you got a you got a bold vision

SPEAKER_05: why did you choose to put this out in the world and just to be clear this isn't an april fool's joke

SPEAKER_12: in october it is not and thank you jason uh for having me on and uh yeah i it's definitely not

SPEAKER_14: an april fool's joke so the idea behind the pendant came out of the experience i actually had 10 years ago going deaf losing my sense of hearing and then gaining it back again when i tried a hearing aid was magical it felt like getting a superpower and ever since that moment i've been on a hunt for ways technology can augment human capabilities and give us superpowers okay led me to memory memory just like our hearing gets worse as we get older people actually forget about 90 of what they experience after a week and so the start of the company was trying to answer the question there's a hearing aid for hearing and glasses for vision what's the equivalent for memory we started on the mac because that's a great place to capture that you see what you hear and uh that has done tremendously well we've been very proud of that we launched on iphone and then we're uh gonna by the end of the year we'll actually be on on windows and when we built this product we built it with this vision in mind of capturing everything you see saying here in a privacy first way so if you recall the mac app stores it everything locally you know if we as a company get subpoenaed there's nothing we can hand over it's all stored locally it's all encrypted and we felt like the this technology this idea of a personalized ai was only going to work it had a privacy first approach and so as we think about what it means to be a personalized ai it means there's far more to life than just what happens on your mac or windows or iphone there's this world out there that's the real world and if we could capture that in a way that respected your privacy and i'm happy to talk at depth what we're doing for that then we could really deliver on this vision where you and i can meet and i can remember every conversation we've had it's living my life with perfect memory and that was the experience i had of going deaf and getting a hearing aid is not just getting the power back to hear but realizing how bad it had gotten and that's what we want to do for memory help people realize how bad their memory had gone and enable them to live life with perfect

SPEAKER_00: memory okay great noble mission check uh and i had the same experience when i started losing a little

SPEAKER_09: bit of my eyesight and started wearing glasses i didn't even realize that things were blurry until you put them on so i'm in alignment with you on that but now comes the expectation of privacy um and so great that it's encrypted but what about the other person who if you're recording my iphone or my desktop and i'm talking to them on something like signal and they think they're having a private disappearing message but you are overriding that by screen recording it now obviously there's third party tools to do that or i'm wearing this pendant in the real world and obviously people can have and have it's been the plot of many a thriller that somebody has a pen that records uh but here you know we've got a startup company that's trying to normalize this you're trying to make this mainstream that is the goal here that's how you're presenting it so what is your concern about a couple of examples i gave i think my signal uh conversation or whatever i use for encrypted um disappearing messages is no longer encrypted and not only is it not encrypted it's indexed and searchable so you've you've basically hacked my signal and you've covertly done that and then any other uh app that i'm using um or in the real world hey this pendant is tiny this is different than uh and it's tiny by design obviously it's the size it looks like of like a large pill or something uh um maybe the size of a quarter or two and so this to me feels very covert it's the opposite of wearing uh a police recorder so those are two examples but two examples i'll give uh so how do you think about those two examples yeah i loved how

SPEAKER_21: you started with the word normalize and i think this is where looking at history can really help us

SPEAKER_14: 150 years ago the telephone came about and you'd probably be surprised to realize that the most common complaint was the invasion of privacy and it wasn't because now we're just accepting the telephones are uh you know normal but it was because the first version of the telephone you had to go to the general store for and people could overhear your conversation even if you brought it to your home these eavesdropping switchboard operators could hear your conversation yeah and that's the stage we're at with personalized ai we need to build technology that overcomes the proverbial eavesdropping switchboard operator to make it so that you don't have a choice between convenience and privacy you get all of the benefits of personalized ai and your data is private so let me give you some concrete examples one of the ways the pendant can work is it allows you to actually do digital fingerprinting or voice fingerprinting of the speaker so if you were to speak and i were to speak it identifies us differently speaker diarization and only if somebody has verbally opted in to being recorded would it actually be persisted on the device so if i were running my every day i could wear it i could have conversations with myself i could if i did a great job of active listening maybe i echo back what you're saying but not a single word of what you say until you verbally opted in

SPEAKER_26: would be persisted all right everybody we all know technology is moving at a blistering pace we talk about it here every week especially ai and code academy's goal is to help you stay ahead and so if you've got some experience or you're brand new to coding code academy is going to offer you everything you need to build your tech career you want to build that tech stack you want to build your skill stack and you specifically want to gain skills in ai full stack engineering data science cyber security twist listeners can try code academy pro free for 14 days we all know the world's changed large percentage of people they don't think that college is the most important factor when hiring people they want to know about specific vertical skills so listen when you got to lose two weeks free to check out everything code academy has to offer this includes 400 courses covering everything from in-demand languages like python and javascript to new courses in generative ai large language models and more you're going to get step-to-step guidance on your career path learn how to do real world projects to build your portfolio they're even going to help you with interview prep so that you nail that really important interview and listen once you get the job you can work towards your next promotion which is really what you should be doing when you get that job you should be looking at hey who's my boss how do i get their job who's their boss how do i get their job well it's going to be experience and it's going to be skills code academy is going to help you with both of those start your free trial today visit codecademy.com twist to try codecademy pro free for 14 days that's codecademy.com twist

SPEAKER_31: but you think you should be able to covertly record half the conversation you want to live in that world

SPEAKER_33: i think that's okay i think being able to record myself in a conversation recording myself that's crazy

SPEAKER_31: dan why would it be crazy to record myself in a conversation to do it covertly would be incredibly

SPEAKER_00: rude and unethical uh if any of my you would never say you will lose all your friends if you did that do you have friends i don't have many friends okay well i mean i'm asking this in a joking way

SPEAKER_41: but i'm kind of serious if you covertly recorded me as a friend uh covertly recorded yourself in

SPEAKER_00: conversation with me you would no longer be my friend and if i asked 100 people if i asked 100 people your friend covertly recorded their half of the conversation and they have it for all time

SPEAKER_43: index and they've been doing it for a year you know what they would do they would never speak to

SPEAKER_45: you again and that would be 100 out of 100. the word covert is your word i didn't say we should

SPEAKER_00: covertly report people you said you just said you would absolutely have no problem recording your side of the conversation with and you you only said permission to record my side so maybe you're changing your position here would you feel you need to get permission for me to record your side

David Friedberg: and not my side well first of all i wouldn't hide the fact that i'm recording the conversation so

SPEAKER_48: just at the outset that's why it's a device that you wear it's not a device in hearing aid which is

SPEAKER_50: with this device work if it was under a t-shirt uh it would not no so and really you sure about

SPEAKER_31: that would it work if it was like because if you wear one of those recording pens just in like your jacket in your shirt pocket it works i mean it's designed to work that way so but i think you may

SPEAKER_14: be overblowing the risk here i think there are 1.5 billion you know smart recorders like this one being used and sold every year not a single you know not a single moment of outrage or as far as i can

SPEAKER_09: tell so that's because they're large and they have a recording flashing red light on them and the people who created them have thought this through and they're so large you have to press a button make a clicking sound and then start recording that's how they're designed they're not designed to be passively recording all the time like your device well okay i think that's first of all not

SPEAKER_59: true there's plenty that are much smaller than what we're thinking there are spy cameras yes and if you

SPEAKER_61: have a spy camera and you recorded something this is what we're smaller than we're thinking um but i don't

SPEAKER_31: know that model but there are spy cameras and if you did those and you did that with a friend they would never speak to you again and if you did it with certain people and they found out you would

SPEAKER_14: get your ass handed to you i guess what is it that you're saying that you're so worried would get

SPEAKER_00: captured in a conversation with a friend this is what insincere people who want to take away your privacy say what are you worried about what are you worried about if you're not committing a crime

SPEAKER_09: what are you worried about what if i tell a joke and the standards change or what if i had a couple drinks and i said something and it came out the wrong way and now you have that recording forever and now you use it uh as uh leverage over me in the future but to be clear this is why people don't want me recording myself how can i record myself and cancel you could have a conversation with me and then you could say hey jacal uh hey how do you feel about this person that person this person and then now you've got a whole transcript of all these questions you asked me and then you could say back to me oh so you don't like that person you don't like john or jane yeah i totally don't like them either and just by recording your side of it you would have an incredibly damaging transcript of you confirming to me facts and the person would then know by insinuation that i didn't object to them and then i would feel that you had covertly recorded me and this was a gross violation of my privacy and if i asked 100 people hey your friend's been recording their side of every conversation you've had with them not yours don't worry you have nothing to worry about i guarantee you 100 out of 100 people would not be friends with that person and they would be absolutely pissed off and this is why i worry and and when you tell me you don't have friends i don't know if you're saying that

SPEAKER_00: to be cheeky or if you um i'm saying that because i'm running a 20-person startup i have three young

SPEAKER_48: kids and you know i just don't know i was like i don't know if that's a joke or i don't think yeah

SPEAKER_59: it is a bit of a joke i don't think my friends would like it i definitely yeah i don't know i mean

SPEAKER_00: i have friends who have aspergers who might say like i really don't know how to relate to humans yeah um but this shows i think um and i like you don't get me wrong but i think you're so misguided in this because if we went and asked 100 people this question i don't think you did this if you did you would get 100 people who would be so infuriated it would be such a violation of trust what you've described um that they would break up lifelong friendships over it 100 guaranteed well

SPEAKER_69: i i'll say we didn't ask 100 people we actually asked a thousand people we asked a thousand people

SPEAKER_14: in the united states with a income over 100k about a product like the rewind pendant okay and we asked them a series of questions including how much they would pay for it uh and the that's partly how we priced the product is recognizing the the market opportunity there are 4 000 people who you know are deranged lunatics this is your phrase the people who might like this product who free ordered the product yes and and like i'm not trying to dismiss the privacy concern i just think there are times in technology when new technology comes about and it's easy to criticize the first version wrecking and by the way it's not out in public i'm not saying we're ready i'm not saying the product is something that i'm proud of i think the product that we ship and when we ship it it'll be a product that will check all of the boxes when it comes to privacy because the last thing we want to do is do what google lasted for wearables we want to do for ai personalized ai we think the only way to build a personalized ai that wins in this market is one that is privacy first the example i gave you

SPEAKER_71: of recording one side of the conversation just one of many another is just to summarize the

SPEAKER_16: conversation you don't seem to recognize my point and you're calling me a luddite basically so you're framing me as a luddite which is a great debate tactic but it will not work with me

SPEAKER_73: because i've been at this for a lot longer than you um you don't get to just frame me as a liddite uh because oh i'm against progress and oh operators no sorry dan you still haven't answered the question if a hundred people were told that their friend was recording their side of the conversation you glossed right over that and went to pricing so let's pause for a second have you actually answer

SPEAKER_16: that question would you be willing to ask a hundred people would they how would they feel if their

SPEAKER_74: friend covertly recorded just their side of the conversation would you be willing to do that with your survey data send the same thousand people happy to ask that question i don't want to build

SPEAKER_14: a product that does that my goal is not to build a product that covertly records your side of the conversation that was your that was your ask is would you would this product be able to covertly record the conversation and and just like this can covertly record a conversation and record your side of conversation which is worse than the product we're offering by the way

SPEAKER_00: um is not the product that i'm there are spy cameras yes and they're illegal in some states right and uh they're they're these are things that not are not these are kind of the underbelly uh in in the world of devices you're like a venture-backed startup like a major venture-backed startup this is why i think you're super misguided and you're using selectively the history of

SPEAKER_41: people being opposed to technology as opposed to being truly thoughtful about it no no no to be

SPEAKER_14: clear to be clear the example of the telephone i wasn't trying to call you a luddite i think people were right to be complaining about the privacy of the telephone okay the very first telephone wasn't private enough i think people make the mistake of thinking that privacy is at odds with convenience i think facebook did the world a big disservice by actually making that true but if you look at the telephone the only way it went mainstream and became normalized which is what you're asking about was once it realized how to build a telephone would you put a large red light on this

SPEAKER_73: dropping operator without an eavesdropping uh switchboard operator and that's a large red light whenever it's recording on the tip of the pendant if that's what it took to be privacy first

SPEAKER_14: we would and that's i'm not against it at all like and i'll tell you we're very very early in the pro in this project and part of the reason we're talking about it why did you rush it out we we rushed it out because the the it's right now the conversation is being had about wearable ai and i'm i'm worried that the other companies out there like humane aren't taking a privacy first approach i'm worried that they will tread the the the well-torn path of of uh scorched earth that google that google glass did and and i want to make sure that the conversations about privacy not about convenience and i don't want them to be pitted against each other so look am i for a big red button if that's what it's going to take to build a privacy first solution that normalizes personalized day as something ai is not at odds

David Friedberg: your privacy absolutely i'm not against that so you rushed it out because there's other competitors

SPEAKER_73: and you wanted to at least get a flagpole out there yes i would have loved it i didn't have

SPEAKER_77: that opportunity i couldn't have waited to announce it until that explains i think why i that explains

SPEAKER_73: why my reaction to it was this isn't thought thought out well enough if we were at a party you're wearing

SPEAKER_09: it next year uh and it's around your neck eight people at a dinner party do you think you have to hold it up to the other seven people and say everybody i'm planning on recording just my side of this conversation but if any of you would like to record at this dinner party you're part of the conversation so i could have a permanent record of this and a transcript and a summary um can you each say i consent to recording and your name do you think that should be the best practice i i think i

David Friedberg: wouldn't bring this to dinner party first of all so that's not the use case i'm focused on i certainly would you would advise people that this should not be in social situations well i don't

SPEAKER_66: think that's the where you get the most value i think for me i get the most so you would advise people do not wear this in a social situation no i would advise it wearing situations where it's

SPEAKER_14: going to be valuable to you for me conversations with my spouse are a perfect example i think she and i would have a much better connection and communication if i could go back to and remember the thing she's reminded me of this plenty of times if i could remember everything she said to me and certainly i think most for me most relationships how long you've been married

SPEAKER_48: long enough to know that it's important to remember what your wife has said okay i'm just gonna be

SPEAKER_93: really and this is gonna be like pulling up the transcript of your wife and yours previous fight you really want that to exist in your relationship i do three years ago did your wife want this to exist

SPEAKER_14: have you run this by her yeah in fact i was gonna tell you three years ago my first vision for this was this wearable device and i described this in detail to her and i was terrified because you know why i thought i would finally win an argument with her yeah and her response shocked me she loved the idea

SPEAKER_77: she thought that i could finally yeah and i would encourage you to ask your partners as well would they go through yeah and you'd i honestly i was surprised by the answer because i and this is the perfect example where having perfect memory can make communication make relationships better because

SPEAKER_14: it's not about you said like most conflict will come from a misunderstanding of our of the the premise of the facts i actually think and i don't have it yet i believe that our relationship will be better if we actually were able to communicate and remember what the other person said

SPEAKER_102: uh i certainly would wear this right now there's a lot of couples who are going to get in a big

SPEAKER_00: fight over the existence of this that's part of probably one of the most interesting replies you got back on social media was this whole back and forth about spouses getting in fights or arguments and hey let's pull the transcript because that is kind of like a standard joke i'm sure there's a saturday

SPEAKER_106: night live skit uh you know there's a dave chappelle from 10 years ago with this stenographer

SPEAKER_09: everywhere you go and yeah it's pretty hilarious um okay stop doing what you're doing right now i've got

SPEAKER_26: some great news for you dot tech domains is giving twist listeners a platform to show off their startups and that platform is this week in startups it's a new segment we're calling pitch it to jcal so go to startups.tech slash jason and you can apply the only rule is you have to have a dot tech domain name to get featured in this new segment so this week i received a great pitch from builtrix.tech which you can see if you're watching the video builtrix.tech has built an energy data platform which provides simple easy to understand energy information and it eliminates the need for spreadsheets and paperwork and builtrix smart alerts will notify customers about any abnormal energy usage how clever it's a game changer for sustainability consultants building managers and more so here's your call to action if you want to get featured like builtrix just did on this week in startups go to startups.tech slash jason and apply today and get your dot tech domain while you're there that's startups.tech

SPEAKER_112: slash jason and fill out the form to apply so let's talk about that social issue uh when google

SPEAKER_73: glass was worn in public uh it created cried a brouhaha are you old enough to remember that and

SPEAKER_48: the woman was getting punched in the face so yeah i was one of the first wearing it now i think i went

SPEAKER_14: to a conference in europe it was the first time there and um and i think google made a huge disservice like i said to the entire wearable category because they didn't think about privacy they put out the telephone before it actually had what should they have done differently yeah what should they have cameras no cameras from day one uh i also think i worked at google as a product manager to start my career i think google's biggest mistake when building products is they view the sophistication of the technology as the most important part not the problem it's trying to solve so google glass didn't solve a problem that was the first problem the second is as it tried to build a cool technology that they thought would just figure out what the problem would be over time they completely uh didn't realize the impact it would have on privacy and so i i'm here to tell you unequivocally i don't have all the answers for what the privacy first solution should look like i'm here to say with full earnestness that that is the key to making personalized ai possible and socially acceptable and so i'm all ears if you think a big red button is the right or big light i'm not ideologically against that in fact if that's the thing that you think will make the the socially normed i'm all for it but i do know this evolution of technology starts with the goal of making this

SPEAKER_125: something that is not a choice between privacy and convenience yeah it is interesting by the way

SPEAKER_00: that google wanted to build just basically a platform or see if they could get the technology to actually work as opposed to hey what problem are we solving here you know sometimes there's a valid case of doing that um that whole problem could have been solved where if it was recording it had a red light on it um uh and you know if it was scanning your face it was doing that but i think it was so early as well it didn't have those the flashing red light that people expect and when people hold their phone up it's so giant and so this the form factor does i think play a key role in here to take out your iphone 13 even the small one and it's got a giant camera array on the back and you hold that up trust me people try to take selfies with me all the time uh because i'm micro famous and you know i can tell when somebody at an airport is taking a picture of me and i just wave um and they feel very like it's really awkward when they put that up and most people don't do it most people are completely respectful etc it's a giant device the footprint of this device is tiny uh and you know google glass was on your face so it was it was unmistakable this thing is incredibly covert um the

SPEAKER_09: humane let's talk about this these are a bunch of apple folks it's it looks like a pendant um but not a tiny one yours looks like it's the size of a pill this one that humane one looks like it's the size of a credit card maybe and it's supposed to look like i think to star trek uh here oh here we have it so you can't miss it i mean if you're wearing it on your clothes it's big and it also has an led that projects out so it has lighting on it i don't know if it blinks when it's recording or if it's persistently recording what do you know about this device i saw it was at and we're showing here on the screen for the youtube folks um i mean it looks like a pretty large device it's the size of like

SPEAKER_41: maybe a giant saltine cracker or a pack of cigarettes almost that that size um looks like

SPEAKER_31: about two inches by two inches i've had to guess so what do you think that device is and then how are

SPEAKER_14: they dealing with these issues yeah i mean the the introduction of this device was one of the reasons we decided to announce the pendant and my biggest fear is it's another google glass i don't yet know what the the ai pendant problem solves so that was the thing that first thing is that there was no statement of this the problem this long the demo ted was interesting it showed some interesting use cases um it's interesting that the word ai was bolted on in the last few months so i i worry you know there's been leaked or you know early pitch decks i'm not i'm not an expert on this by far but my fear is that they will be as cavalier and in particular because several folks used to work at apple which also has some of this dna of like let's build a cool sophisticated technology having worn the vision pro and had eight cameras on it like the last thing i want is the device out there in the world that is freaking people out and because their device is 20 times bigger than yours yeah you gave me no no you gave me credit for them that's not quite true uh we are not nearly as good as they are in terms of hardware engineering our product is far further along i'm sorry far further behind

SPEAKER_48: so it even the earliest conceptions of this will be probably not nearly as small as you're giving us

SPEAKER_31: credit for so i just want you want yours to be single purpose and i just realized we didn't push yours on put yours on the screen so we'll pop yours on the screen right now for people watching

SPEAKER_41: um it's the size of the dimensions look like like i said like if you were i guess it's the size of

SPEAKER_45: half your thumb maybe looks like it's about the size of a double a battery so i mean that's what

SPEAKER_14: we're conceptioning here which is much larger than i think maybe you're giving us credit and by the way also this form factor might change part of the form factors design is to optimize for the microphones but it's not to be covert if i wanted to build a covert recording device it would be hearing

SPEAKER_77: it i've been wearing a hearing aid for 10 years i know how that feels uh bracelet and and we're bracelet and the goal here really isn't it's the opposite of what you're just talking about i don't

SPEAKER_00: yeah i don't doubt your intent i don't doubt your intent um but i do think you might be a little misguided on like having this transcript of everything and you know when i point out certain situations like the absolute ludicracy of bringing this to a social event i still don't think that you've kind of uh acknowledged how insane it would be for a human being in 20 in the in the roaring

SPEAKER_09: 2020s to take out a pendant and hold it up and say would you like to consent to being recorded i'm asking your permission for me to record you and make ai summaries for all time do you realize how deranged

SPEAKER_144: and sociopathic that would be to do at a dinner party dan yeah i don't think it's made me close

SPEAKER_77: to deranged i don't know about sociopathic and i and again that's not the use case that we're trying

SPEAKER_14: to okay so give me the ideal use case that you're talking about yeah personalized productivity being for me i meet with the same people most of the day the my co-workers i meet my my spouse it's the people i meet with over and over again that i want to i want to have a perfect memory of what they said i care enough about what they say that it's important for me to be able to meet my commitments if i tell somebody i'm going to make a commitment to an action item i want a personalized ai that's going to help me remember to do that so why not just say hey siri take a note well it part

SPEAKER_48: of it is um it pulling out your phone it's the inconvenience of that uh it's also you know the the

SPEAKER_14: the ability to actually do this across devices and sort of synchronize all of my digital experiences not just dependent in an isolation but every interaction that i have with somebody which is across the multiple it's across slack and text and zoom meetings and in-person meetings so it's that comprehensiveness that i think is also really critical to making it work and also the fact that you can do it without actively you know a siri take a note is far more friction than hey jason hey i'll follow up later i'll send you a summary of this podcast i'm saying it already the app and the device should be able to listen just like a perfect chief of staff would do it for you

SPEAKER_48: uh you know if they were in the room with you uh we think personalized a can ai can do the same and that's part of the use case we want to support as well yeah see i think this is one of the

SPEAKER_06: interesting things about technology just because you can technically do something doesn't mean you

SPEAKER_00: should right back to you know jurassic park uh like did we ever ask ourselves should we do this and i think that's where you know i feel the biggest disjoint about this um is who wants to live in a world where people are wearing these i think 99 out of 100 people would rather this doesn't exist and i and i i think the the juice ain't worth the squeeze um this is going to cause so much pain and suffering uh and so many have you ever been disposed in a legal uh uh disagreement uh yeah yeah i mean did you ever have your phone dumped in one and have people like ask for every bit of communication

SPEAKER_14: you've had i i think i think but you're you're understanding the value understating the value of perfect memory you're assuming that our lives are about as good as it's going to get and imagining a world where you could have perfect memory and meet every commitment and be more present in every conversation i think is a better world for some people who want it and it's not for everyone it's just like and i'm not calling you a lot to say that the telephone had these issues but to strike the right balance of giving you the benefit of perfect memory the same way you have perfect vision and perfect hearing i think that is worth trying to build a product that gets all the social norms right and takes a privacy first approach if your landing page is terrible i'm out

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SPEAKER_73: i believe that you have good intent and i believe you're taking it seriously and i appreciate you

SPEAKER_163: coming on the program to hash it out and talk about it i think that makes me feel a lot better about it

SPEAKER_73: you're you're open to criticism here and you're open to ideas so i give you a lot of uh credit for that uh just on the humane device that you're competing against it has camera sensors built-in speakers and i think there's like a some kind of projector that you can put your hand down and project stuff onto it and it's giant so it's maybe the size of four batteries um if you were to put them side by side so i think uh one of the great compromises here would be for these devices to be a certain size and to have a flashing light when it's recording um that would you know and if

SPEAKER_06: it was worn on the outside um you know just like if a cop walks up to you you expect because you see it and it's giant i don't know if there's flash but um they're cops and i think they're it's sort of like a the fact that they're in a uniform and they're walking up to you and this is giant thing bolted to their chest with a lens i mean they're giant um i think that is important and then you know there's going to be um state laws and these vary quite significantly i remember when i was in new york you needed two-party consent for all of these and then maybe california um or maybe new york was one party consent california was two and that's why a lot of journalists in new york could record phone calls or and people in california couldn't so have you started to look into those

SPEAKER_145: yet or you know because you haven't launched this thing and built the software yet you're you're

SPEAKER_85: you're just thinking it through no no we absolutely have and for our product on mac and and on iphone

SPEAKER_14: and windows those are all very important considerations so absolutely you know that is first and foremost we're focused on our bar is much higher than the legal bar like i you know the

SPEAKER_168: legal bar is one i think the moral social ethical uh anti-social pathical if that's even a word

SPEAKER_33: please please do not turn into american psycho it's a much higher bar and that's why i'm thrilled that you're we're having this conversation i'm thrilled you're putting my feet to the fire i think

SPEAKER_14: you're you're overstating the the public's general concern around this but i do think you're the exceptions you're describing are exactly the situations that whoever wins in this category need to get right and my fear is if by not asking these questions up front companies like humane and others put a product out there that has the same backlash that google glass has that sets back personalized ai by another decade yeah and you know there's a difference between personal ai and

SPEAKER_136: persistent recording so i would like to make that i don't have a problem with personal ai it's persistent

SPEAKER_41: recording of things that people do not know are being recorded or that are just socially um you know going to cause pain and suffering down the road you never answer my question does your software uh on desktop and phone record something like signal and where or does it block from recording on signal

SPEAKER_173: yeah so certain apps you can exclude uh you can exclude or your software excludes does your software

SPEAKER_41: allow me to do yeah it's an option for the user to why would you let the user record when you know

SPEAKER_14: signal is used for privacy um that that's a choice that we gave to users same thing for one password and

SPEAKER_41: why would you do that it's just the default choice that we set why you set the default you can't just say the default that's the default we give you can't just say this is where again i have a problem with some of your approach dan you need to make these decisions as the person putting the product out in the world so you dan have chosen to let users covertly record signal conversations why did dan

SPEAKER_31: the leader of this company choose to empower his audience to by default record covertly record signal

SPEAKER_106: conversations that it's it's a great question maybe we should change that default for example for

SPEAKER_48: private browsing if you open incognito window by default we we do exclude that so i think it's a very fair fair feedback it's actually the first time somebody's asked but i do think it's fair that we by default for conversations like signal and other end encrypted solutions i think it's a better user experience to default excluded by default so uh feedback there you go did it and and look i'm not

SPEAKER_102: change log set here we go but i'm not sure you're like your pesky customer it's like i think this should

SPEAKER_48: change as my wife has reminded me numerous times i'm not perfect uh it is certainly a great piece of feedback and that is if that is uh you know that's the kind of feedback i hope i'm getting to be able to

SPEAKER_77: make sure our product lives up to people's expectations on privacy your wait your wife told you you're not perfect as well i have i have a record we should go we should have dinner we should

SPEAKER_182: do a couple of things i promise if we have dinner i will not bring the pendant okay that's fine uh but

Chamath Palihapitiya: we could if you and i were to do an investment meeting we could totally have the pendant uh there

SPEAKER_09: as but one example um you know i um record our investment team meeting and why do i record the

SPEAKER_00: investment team meeting well i tell everybody when we pass on the next uber i want to be able to go back in time and i want to see my decision making and i want a record of that and so we'll record that and know that if you're here you know that that there's a chance that recording someday could be hacked or leaked and know that you should never ever make any jokes or say something uh about a founder let's say you know literally i was i learned a lesson early in my career uh was taught to me when i was in consulting somebody was in an elevator leaving a sales meeting and the sales person said something derogatory about the a person at the company i just met with not realizing that somebody else in the elevator worked at that company they let that company go through an entire sales pitch

SPEAKER_09: process for a multi-million dollar deal and then at the last minute said we were going to give you the deal but this person said that i smell like a monkey and therefore we're not giving you the deal and

SPEAKER_00: this was like they dragged him along for like three months is a true story um and it was legendary and that person obviously got fired it was a big controversy and so uh you know i had to just

SPEAKER_73: start explaining to people hey you got to change your behavior here i know some people might say something to blow off steam or there might i don't want to say locker room talk but there might be gallows humor or you might make a joke about somebody's startup not appropriate don't ever make

SPEAKER_09: a joke about somebody's startup that's their heart and soul uh and if that gets caught in you know now because we're recording it and that gets leaked that could be so damaging to you to a lesser extent our firm uh and uh yeah and if you get in an argument with somebody who cares you can get an argument but just keep it you know like you and i having a respectful argument here um i don't mind

SPEAKER_48: being on tape yeah this is definitely a lesson my last startup i grew about 450 people and at

SPEAKER_14: some point i realized every time i speak i should assume everything i say is going to be heard and or echoed and i should just operate under the assumption that i should never say a thing that i wouldn't want everyone to hear and that actually was very liberating to never have to for this feeling that i say one thing to another and you know there are people out there who you gaslight who say one thing to another like i think for them a device like the pendant would be pretty scary but i think for for the most part being able to actually capture these kind of conversations and your use case is a perfect example it's it's being able to remember that conversation so it's so critical for a firm to remember the times they pass on the last uber or the next uber uh and that's that's the value we want to create and i think we can create that value without freaking people out at the same time

SPEAKER_126: all right uh this has been another 35 minutes with dan the man uh rewind ai uh and i i wish you

SPEAKER_73: luck with it uh you got my notes product notes you take them you throw them away you keep them whatever doesn't matter to me uh but i i wish you luck with it and uh i thank you for engaging the conversation i think it's super productive and i wish more tech folks would be as candid and

SPEAKER_06: honest and open to feedback so you are a friend of the pod now with your second appearance thank you

SPEAKER_48: and thank you jason and i really appreciate you asking the tough questions i hope you ask it of me of everyone else uh the more you can be sure yeah the more i think about it i do think we should make signal excluded by default and and that was a piece of feedback i definitely appreciate uh but things like that are the kinds of things that will make us a better company and will make this category of

SPEAKER_73: software uh better for the world dan you're growing on me we may disagree about some things but uh you're growing on me i like the fact that you engage the conversation uh and we'll see you all next time

SPEAKER_06: when we continue the conversation on this week at startups