Exactly. This is the Rex Club monthly reunion call on Wednesday, October 12, 2022. Hey, Mika. Like the goatee. Hey, it's actually a scruff. I'm going for the one and a half millimeter scruff look. Scruff. Okay, it works. It looks good. Looks good. I would do the same. But my wife has ultimate authority on these matters. Oh, it's nice to me. That's exactly what I'm. You need a, you need a baguette in your other hand. I'm sure that's a different filter. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but you can do this too. Let's see. So I kind of, I kind of surprised April with the beard because we were apart for a month. And in that time I started doing this. And then I showed up in Madrid. I caught up with her there because she was still in Portugal in Spain because her Portuguese and Spanish book versions launched. Oh, nice Kelly. It's subtle. It's subtle. And it maps to your face perfectly. Like, it's no it's not very aggressive and slightly alarming. It happens very quickly. You look like Dr. Marks all of a sudden. Kevin. Nice to see you. Kind of amazing that zoom hasn't really done more with with these effects. And also, there should be an effect where the host or somebody can press a button and you get like a golden buzzer and confetti drops from the ceiling. I mean, seriously, why would you not have a golden buzzer effect in zoom? Yeah, right. Friend of ours go to work for zoom on on third party plug-ins. Yes, Ross may feel. And I tried to contact him and he never didn't write me back. So I'll try again.  There's got to be. And also, like, you should be able to be in a space helmet. Like, it's true. Certainly. Certainly, that one's here somewhere, right? Got to be. The space helmet would be useful. Yeah, I agree. Kelly is looking like meta versus new metaverse future, where we're not going to see anybody's faces, because we're going to be like face map. That the the meta helmet, OK, that maybe Ross is developing at Google, you know. Yeah. Thank you, Jimmy. Well, as the host, you can also put us into they have some custom views. I've never used them. Go to the top right corner. Oh, yeah, view. Speaker gallery immersive, right? Immersive, hit immersive. Yeah. Oh, OK, let's go to the board room. OK, we just went into. Wow. Wait, I'm going to push the button and Jame is going to disappear into the fire pit. I think there's a classroom setting and you can move people. Change immersive view. Here's a classroom. Seats 25. And then. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I think you. Yeah, you can move like Jame. He's in the back now because he's a troublemaker. Right. Oh, this is kind of cool. I've never. Hey, hey, stop that. I've never used this. Change immersive view. There's one with learning pots that seats 24. So here I can you can set people into different learning pots. Yeah, this is a little bit like the Vulcan circles area for learning. This is the metaverse. The verse. Very nice. It's odd that it takes away your mirrored. I'm always mirrored on zoom and it immediately made that not happen. So I keep trying to. Oh, I shouldn't be able to high five you this way. And then there's the, I don't know. I don't know what this is going to do.  That's a really weird one. I don't know why someone would want to do that. And then here's the kitchen table view. Oh, this is like a. Fishbowl kind of thing where you have somebody in, somebody in the middle and then everybody else's in here. Right. You're going to show us how to cook an omelet. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, got to break a couple of legs. That'll be, that'd be pretty funny to hand the hand things to each other. Exactly. How do I stop? How do I stop the immersive view? If you go back to your gallery settings. Good point. I just pick. Gallery view again. And there we go. We're back out of a torture mode. The torture. The exchange of torture mode. Yeah. Torture motorcycle. Don't hurt me. Yeah. Mika midterms coming up. Like. Imminently. How's your life? I'm surprised you're doing that. Yeah. There's a lot going on. There is a lot going on, but you, you know, I, the, the serenity prayer is helpful.  I think we. Let me try for the optimistic view. I'm a leaf on the wind. Exactly. Yes. I think of that. I think of that. I think of that. I think of that. I think of that. I think of that. I think of that. I think of that. I think of the mystic view. I'm a leaf on the wind. Exactly. Yes. I think of that line. Exactly. And that's right after the. The bit of space. Whatever has impaled him, right? Isn't that when he says that. The one. Wild card to me. Which is exemplified most recently by. Republican first lady of Nebraska who just announced that she is supporting. The Democratic woman running for the first. Nebraska house seat, the one that's around Omaha. Which is. As close to a swing seat in that state as you get. And she just came out and endorsed her. And I think. The, the, so the women factor is the X factor in this X, X factor in this election. And the intensity was clearly there. At the beginning of the summer. And. I'm hoping that we're underestimating. What it is now. And I actually was hoping. To collect some data on this, I've not been able to do this. But. Tens of millions of women use period tracking apps. And. And in general, if you have a uterus, you get a monthly reminder. About your situation. And so the. The removal of abortion rights is really. Visually different, I think. And this came to me as I was listening to a podcast of a bunch of Republican. Women swing voters in places like Georgia and. Pennsylvania and Arizona. And one of the women was talking, they all were upset. This is from a month ago. They were all upset about. And. But one woman said that her college age daughter was telling her about how she and all her friends. We're deleting their period tracking apps. And so what I was curious to see is, is there a way to get the data on, on the apps. In terms of, you know, numbers going down and so on. And so that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's really, really interesting. And does it convert into votes, et cetera. Who knows. But that's my only silver lining. Is that somehow in the polling, we're getting an undercount. From women and people who know women. And care about them. Who will. You know, turn out and swing. You know, It's not usually suburban Republican women. But you don't see it in. The way we did in 2018 when there were huge numbers of people showing up to canvas or foam bank, whatever. Those folks are showing up, but they're not as. Just not as much. So, yeah. No. It seems to me that that there should be like a fury in the air that I'm not detecting enough of. And I was thinking like sex strike, there should be like, in any state that has repressive abortion laws, the women should just say hey, until you fix this there's not going to be no nookie until you like get this trade. I don't know Jerry there's something good on Netflix tonight. I mean, you, you overestimate how politically active Americans really are most of the time, which is we're just entertained by so many other things we're stressed by so many other things, getting that organized requires prior organization.  Now I have a comment. Responding to what you said, maybe there should be more fury or more energy behind this. A parallel observation is. We're now, you know, not since my childhood, raising the specter again of nuclear war. Yeah, and people don't feel it. Right. So I sense that there's a general kind of burnishing off of our ability to raise more fury because we've been the amygdala has been provoked so many times that the threshold for activation is now much higher. Right. That's an observation. Now I would disagree that people aren't feeling it they aren't expressing it, because people anyone I actually mentioned the possibility of nuclear, you know, nuclear use with an exchange just an exchange. It's just an exchange. Well, not even have to be an exchange it would be the term within within the industry within the field is, is nuclear next use. Okay, so there is the immediate reaction is, oh my God, I designed this completely freaking out about it but they aren't expressing that externally and I think you're absolutely right about the, you know, we've we've pushed the fear button. Too many times we were wire heading ourselves and push the fear button too many times and just it takes too much to stimulate it now. So it's to express. I'm sorry, we're at a Peter and the wolf moment. So I just about the war. Peter and the wolf or he cried wolf and the boy who cried wolf, the boy was okay. Peter and the wolf different story, different story. Sorry. I'm on that topic though and I've written about this problem and Timothy Snyder, who I highly recommend if you're not already a subscriber to his sub stack. I'm going to put the link in but I don't know if this is just for paid subscribers or not. He made a really interesting argument that what Putin wants with the nuclear saber rattling is to paralyze the West. And that he actually benefits from us scaring the hell out of each other by talking about it the way we just did, which I'm absolutely guilty of doing to him. And he argues that he thinks that the cycle has begun to turn in the other way, and that the that Putin is going to need to call troops loyal to him back to Moscow to defend him. Yeah, that that some of the other warlords or potential warlords are themselves holding their own high quality forces back like Kadyrov. Yeah. And so it was a really, really interesting interpretation of how quickly Putin, how all this could collapse on Putin.  So we clearly haven't asked me the likelihood. Yeah, we haven't provoked the level of discourse. You know when I was a kid eons ago right in college I went to it. There was a guy who sat next to me and choir I studied voice is one of the things and it was Billy Saul Hargis Jr. Okay, the preacher. Okay, and so I went to his dad's, you know, to service one time, and he was right from the pulpit saying we should nuke the commies. Okay, and was advocating in a use of nuclear weapons from the pulpit. And I don't see any that we have provoked, you know, the, the Christian right into, you know, saying, Oh, well, yeah, we should use nuclear weapons to right we're not back up to that threshold right now. The Christian right is supporting people so. No, no, I understand I'm just saying well, somebody okay some sector right.  Let's do it too. Right. We're, we're clearly not there. What years what years are you in college, Kevin. It would have been 1975 through 1978. I graduated early so I was in college, 83 through 88. I did a five year double major. But that was basically Reagan years. So I was in college for, you know, ladies and gentlemen I'm pleased to announce that we've I've just signed legislation to outlaw the Soviet Union forever the bombing begins in five or six minutes. Right, right, right. Remember that.  Okay, when I was in grades and the same here. So, although it's kind of mixed with earthquake drill. Yeah, exactly. Well, it was, it was mixed with tornado drills in Oklahoma and Kansas right. So, Iran, at the time, right and Libya, we're still gardens.  Right, it was to have those people on campus because we had a big petroleum engineering school there. It was, it was really strange. We had the Shah's police as students. Perpetuals. Yeah, we had these perpetual students that never graduated. Yeah, that were actually the minders for the students right for the Shah of Iran at the time. It was a weird, but they were really good at volleyball. Anyway, so, so to take this full circle, you know that that rage or the fury. The only people who have expressed, you know, visceral concern about the fragility of democracy have been people who have experienced something else from someplace else on the planet and they say you don't understand. Okay, let me tell you what it's like if you don't have the kind of society that I live in now, immigrating here, right, there's no contrast effect. Part of the problem, I don't know what skills to give us at all. But one of the, one of the things that's popped up in my head a lot as I've watched the far right kind of take over here is that the people on the far right are building community behind the curtain in the far right on a Chan and wherever. And they're giving each other high fives and like taking virtual trophies home because they had the meme that won the day etc etc.   You gain, gain attention, etc, etc. And I'm wondering how to undermine that in the same way that I'm wondering how to undermine Q and on if it actually isn't a RG. So Adrian Hans famous piece about is Q and on an alternate reality game, I think is right on the money. And it got me started like, Hey, could you pretend to be the key master. Could you come in and scoop in and basically reroute the belief system in the story by creating some other outlandish, hopefully not a GI Jimmy like seriously. High of mind, maybe that is the ultimate like manifestation of the hive mind it's really Q and on, maybe Q and on means hive mind in. I generally I find the notion of manipulating people to something that's better for them feels really manipulative.  I feel like everybody who studied cults says that you don't, the cult doesn't die because you know the prophecy fails. Right, they just keep going. It's more that the people who know people in the cult have to sort of slowly through personal one on one interaction, offer them another path out. And you can help you can sort of interrupt a little bit of cultic thinking by showing people how not directly but indirectly you give them other examples of manipulation, you know that and then they on their own have to come to the realization that Oh, I've been manipulated. I can't make them see that. There's also, there's also social pressure plays a huge role here. There's false consensus effect or consensus bias. There were some famous experiments where everybody in the experiment room was in on the experiment is only one subject. And everybody agrees on a lie on something that's obviously not true. And the question the question is will the subject agree with them because everybody else seems to be saying that this is the taller person but I can see that there's like another person who's taller or whatever. Yeah, right, I think there's a lot of that going on. And so much of this is, you're, you're, you're, how did everybody drink Kool-aid at Jonestown. Surely there was a queue, and surely there were people dying of cyanide poisoning on the ground as everybody went up to drink their cup. Yeah. Right. Like how did, how did you manage to get all these folks. That's a mass delusion. Louie, something surprising I was coming back from a meeting last night. And at the night as you know, when it turns nighttime you can get long range AM signal so I went to, you know, WCBS back in New York, right. And there was an ad for a law firm in South Carolina that was saying, are you suffering from Instagram addiction. If you're suffering from Instagram addiction, call us. Right. We were going to, you know, we were suing. Okay, for people who have suffered from Instagram addiction. I said, Okay, this is the, you know, this is the family intervention, right, with a legal recourse. Right. Beginning to manifest. Right. The thing that has, you know, caused some of the lying to stop. Right.  Okay.  Right. And so it's the legal system is saying, Oh, this is going to cost you billions of dollars. Okay, for, you know, lying about a process that's takes forever like the Dominion law. I know, I know, I'm just saying that and Alex Jones also like Alex Jones is about to be deprived of his livelihood we hope we hope, but he's busy still pumping the pedals because he knows that pimping his products and in the court sells more products it's an insane amount of money that runs through. But, but the whole system that supports the cult stuff that we were talking about. Yeah, that is reinforced by social media. If you start to sue them. All right, because you say, Hey, you know what, you know, my mom's addicted, you know, to this, right. And she didn't think and write anymore. Okay. I'm curious how anybody's going to sue Instagram under 30. I'm just saying that it's an interesting observation. That's all. Yeah, I don't know what they're going to make any money in South Carolina this time. Yeah. So much faster approach would be insurance insurance is actually faster and at least as powerful as lawsuits in terms of forcing change. The biggest triggers to get police departments around the country to change behavior and training has been insurance companies pulling out. Yeah, and saying we will not ensure you unless you implement XYZ reforms. And since in many cases they are legally required to carry insurance for a variety of issues. They have, they have to change. And there is an interesting article in I think probably the post a few weeks ago about it, but it was yeah insurance companies have the fastest and heaviest hammer right now for introducing unwanted changes or changes that organization So that makes sense but I'm thinking of the gun lobby. And how hard it is to win. I mean I guess the lawsuit against Remington would be the first one right where the gun manufacturers being held partially responsible for something. But then the actuarial change tables just changed because the odds have changed right so the casinos different. But they were betting that well you know they're invulnerable so it's a low risk, right, as the insurer, the minute you start to get judgments right the actuarial change tables change so you may may have, you know there may be more leverage that. So, has anybody here read Ryan uses book about his years selling guns and then ultimately deciding to leave the industry. I've heard about it. My battle against the industry that radicalized America. Yeah, it's really interesting because, and I still haven't quite gotten my head around this but he describes how the NRA has successfully policed the gun industry. And when there was there was a moment in the late 90s where the Clinton administration managed to ink a deal with Smith and Wesson, I think it was. This is after Columbine where Smith, the executives, who was running Smith and Wesson who was a German guy, not an American agreed that they would, you know, stop. They didn't have the detail stop selling assault weapons, but also start developing smart guns. Right. And one or two other you know install required safety features it was just a few things that would make it harder for you know mass killings. And the NRA managed to stampede the rest of the industry into boycotting Smith and Wesson, and Smith and Wesson capitulated. Wow. And they bloom and fall and Cuomo and I forget who the third guy was couple of state AGs looked into an antitrust case. And, and ultimately dropped it. But it's the, I can't think of another interest group that controls its industry. There's no, there really are no major gun manufacturers making safe guns. Okay, so there is another industry at the original diesel in engine was designed to run on vegetable oil. And the petroleum industry said, Oh no, no, no, we have a distillate that will make that run. All right, so they co opted right what we're doing now century ago. There's an individualized market the people who sell guns. They're like mom and pop. There's a bigger, there's a bigger conspiracy theory behind what Kevin just said which is that Rockefeller and the oil trust basically ran the prohibition because all these people had stills. Seriously, you could, you could make your own alcohol and you could make an engine and you could make your own gasoline so so the energy needed for these new internal combustion engines was in fact producible at any place and so one argument for prohibition was it got rid of the competition for the oil companies. That's a really interesting I hadn't heard that before. Yeah, me too. Because I live in still house bottom and the right down the bottom of the bill here. That's an example of a very powerful industry defeating a weaker industry. I'm doing a non industry, defeating a non industry right nothing it. In this case it's the NRA which is a interest group. Figuring out how to how to corral the entire industry. Now the gun lobby, the gun industry profits from fear profits from whenever a mass shooting happens there's a spike in people buying guns because for a long time they thought.  We better get some, you know, get our guns, because soon we won't be able to get them. Those spikes in gun buying don't happen anymore because the public has learned that actually, there will be no crack down. The, the idea that there isn't competition in the gun industry and a gun manufacturer who's like we're the responsible ones will sell you smarter safer guns the NRA would kill them. I just don't know of another example of it where the interest group runs the industry so tightly agreed. What's really important is the legislation I just put in the chat that basically renders all smart, all web all weapon manufacturers immune from prosecution for crimes committed with the weapons. Right. Yeah. I might want to go back to the insurance thing for just a second so I'm me to the the reinsurers have had scenarios for a long time. All right, about issues so I'm wondering. How long it's going to be, and it could be immediate. All right. That they said we're not issuing policies anymore for Centabel Island, right, because, you know that that that is too risky a place for human beings to exist now. All right, and the primary insurers are going to get the signal from the reinsurance company saying, we're not going to back you up anymore guys no more backstop from us you've just, you know, the stakes are too high. What do we think about that.  Exactly. It turns out that their contracts are renewed annually so so higher risk equals higher premiums their business model is a perverse incentive that completely screws this up. I mean, I wrote down in the thought here please someone fact check me on this, but that's the closest I've come to an answer to why reinsurance companies aren't actually being socially responsible in any way at all. And I hate this fact. Yeah, I think that there's one other. And I haven't spent a lot of time here but there is evidently one organization above the reinsurance companies that is their backstop. Right. And yeah, there, there, there is some mysterious thing that is above the reinsurance companies and I forgot what it is but that's cool. Oh turtles. It's below them. Oh, I mean, it's, it's, it's one step away from, you know, making the risk public, right and the government having to step in. There's another coordination. With the reinsurance companies. If you discover what that is, I'll let us know. I'll, I'm super interested. Look at it in a second. And I want to go back. There has been some. There have been some efforts on the part of insurance companies to stop underwriting policies for people who live in dangerous zone while that while an interface zone so basically wildfire risk or flood risk. And in some, in some cases in the US, there are the insurance companies have to have to either, they are forced by the state to do the policies or they have to leave the state entirely. Right. And so there are sometimes there are legal requirements that twist the arms of the insurance companies that they, if they don't want to leave the state and lose all of the money for the easy stuff. They have to continue to do the expensive stuff. So in the interest of continuing the insurance conversation, I created this little website. I don't know if I mentioned that here. Penis insurance. I did this right after Dobbs. And if you want to go to the site, basically, hey, this is, we should have gun insurance for me, forcing make creating mandatory gun insurance is one of the capitalist ways to maybe actually solve a piece of the problem in the US. But guess what, gentlemen who own a penis, your weapon might go off at any time as well and it will have a whole series of implications for the lives of the person who bears a uterus.  We would like to sell you that. Very interesting. I don't want to publicize this much at all, but I don't know. The definition that I came up with, and I'll try to dig into this more I'll send you guys link is reinsurers may also buy reinsurance protection which is called retro session. And this is done to reduce any further spread of risk and the impact of catastrophic loss events. So, I think that there is, I'll have to find the name of the association but they have a pool that they have created a retro session pool. Right. Amongst the reinsurers, you know it's kind of like their NRA. Right, it's. They have a point of view, and they may be backstopping each other. Yeah, a little bit of cross cross ensuring in some sense. I think there's a. So, so many, you started with a lovely statement about, I guess it was law enforcement and insurance being a way of doing it that caused me to create a new thought in my brain, which is insurance as a lever for positive change which I did not have before I did have a thought called why aren't insurance companies all over climate change, but it had not occurred to me. You know, until your sentence that insurance could be a lever for positive change. All resources in that direction welcome and would you want to riff on that some more because I think that that's a huge thing.  And really, they're they're a part of the problem here. They're not a part of the solution. And, and if capitalism is going to help it all. This is a really terrific lever. Well, insurance companies are ready for the money. So, you know, so if they're a mandatory insurance that's a lot of dough. That's a lot of dough would come in right. And potentially. Yeah, so I, I can't tell you why the insurance company is it more activist other than the fact that they're part of the larger financial services industry and there's a strong culture of not being politically activist to being entirely focused on the bottom line. In that world. Every time I've had a conversation with someone at an insurance company or reinsurance company because I actually did a project for Swiss Reeve 15 years ago. And done some projects for a couple of insurance companies with FGF more recently. It's always been the, yeah, we really, we really should do that. But absolutely no traction on making it happen. It is too political. And, you know, until unless and until their bottom line is so overwhelmed with costs that they have to step me and step into a political arena.  And even then there's there's always wrong reluctance to do so. Yeah, you got to make it worth their while. And more than just, we can make some money doing this that needs to be, we will lose a whole bunch of money if we don't. Yeah, that's right. Agreed. I think it's clearly in the risk avoidance business and, you know, to the degree that they are like you said, if you go in and do an audit of warehouse and you say well look you don't have enough fire extinguishers over here and you don't have enough of a you know, they're going to try to lower the risk of that environment. And the same is true when there are human beings involved, they say look at what you're doing. Look at how you're behaving that's risky stop it. So, so I want to question what you just said Kevin because I used to think that that the financial world, all the finance industries and investors and all that wanted financial stability and predictability. And then at one point it was pointed out that IBM had like a fabulous brilliant CFO and their earnings were like super predictable and rock solid and their stock price was going no place it was terrible. And then there was another global financial crisis where everybody piled their money on to the little, you know, merry go round of CDOs and CDs, which they shouldn't have done but they had to do, because they're because everybody else was doing it and they were extraordinary returns. And then I realized that smart financial people really want volatility they must have beta without beta, you make no money without beta markets are boring, you don't get high returns. And for insurance companies what I just said maybe cynical but the more the more money flows through insurance risks, the more money you make so I'm unclear that they're in the risk avoidance business. I think they're in the making money from risk business which might mean some risks you want to delegate. I'm not going to disagree with that. I'm not going to disagree with that but if they, if they run the numbers and they can lower having to pay the claim, because they have done a behavioral intervention and done risk avoidance then that's in their best interest. Education in that space pays big dividends for them it's a low cost, high return activity. So why aren't insurance companies more in the education business why am I not saturated with insurance insurers trying to educate me about anything. So, again, there are typologies of insurance, I would, you know, say to you that I am inundated by that by my health insurers. They're doing a lot of things to try to, you know, get ahead of me having the need for medical services and interventions. And I would agree. treating me the same way. So is it likely to spread. Okay. I don't know. I mean I don't get a lot of longevity advice from my life insurer. Okay, yeah, so that they can delay paying out a claim, right. It's like health insurers, probably. Right. Yeah, your health insurer kind of doesn't want you to outlive your morbidity morbidity table.  My disability. All right, I outlived my disability policy. Okay, for a period of time I had one for a long time because I saw what happened to people who became disabled. Yeah, early in my career so I took out a supplemental disability policy. Now I outlived it. And I'm glad I outlived it right. They're the winner on that table. On the other hand, I'm the winner because I'm still here. One of the projects I did with the insurance company with IFTF was around life insurance and the dilemma of people living longer of how to get, how to get people to better plan for living longer. Right. And so, you know, you're actually right. They don't they really don't want you to be outliving their, their tables because it ends up being a real problem. I mean, I have an insurance policy that is hard to get now, I have a long term care insurance policy, long term care insurance policies are difficult and expensive to get right. Oh yeah. And I have them, you know, I've had a long term care in insurance policy for me and my spouse. It's very inexpensive, right premium. But I've had it for 35 years. The company is still in business when you need it to. That is, I mean, it's, you know, it's John Hancock, right. And it's IBM, right. It's a it's a big company. Yeah. But the fact is that they don't sell the John Hancock doesn't sell those policies anymore because they ran the numbers that people are living too long stop it. Right. So long term, we, we, it's not just that they're living too long, it's that you live long enough to actually need the long term care. Yeah, that too. Well, yeah, I almost triggered Heidi's policy earlier this year because she was in decline. And we hospitalized her and she got some additional things done and prescribed that have put her back into a much higher quality of life as an advanced COPD patient, which I'm, you know, we're delighted.  I'm a good caregiver but I'm not, you know, I'm not fully functional that way. And we didn't have to do it. So I'm just glad it's there. It's a great backstop. All right. But it's not available to a lot of people anymore. There was also a moment some years ago, I don't know if this was Medicare Part D or what it was I forgetting, but there was some kind of insurance where you had to, you had to pick ahead of time between five or six different insurance models that varied by whether you had a slow debilitating disease or a catastrophic disorder or whatever like that. And there was just no way as an ordinary human to know which of these things would play out in your life but you had to make a choice for the plans that were weighted for one way or the other. I don't remember. I wish I remembered what it was. And I just, I just leafed through it I sort of scrolled through it incredulous that anybody would force this on anyone, anyone like like there's no way a human can make a wise decision on this. And if you have a pre existing condition because you're either genetically predisposed or something has already kicked in, then they were going to deny it because it was before Obamacare right before. That's why Jerry in the work that we're doing over in choice flows is if you can ingest that a lot of the same data that the actuaries are using to come up with the premiums, and you put that over on your side and create a decision support system, and they have and you have access to a DSS, where you can put in what you do know about yourself and your conditions that moves you into a space where you can make a more informed, you know, decision, as opposed to trying to just find it out of the air. Right, we did that for COVID, and we're trying to do it for other health and economic development decisions, right, and you gamify the data. Right. Because the mistake that people make is that they think that they're hearing something and it's generalizable to them. No, not not necessarily the case. I'm hearing all this doom and gloom about the economy. Well, guess what, that right now doesn't apply to where I live. This place is red hot. Okay, in terms of economic, you know, development, it's going to run counter right to, you know, what's what's happening Yes, the insurance rate but, you know, the amount of investment and jobs and everything else. It's, it's crazy where I live. Is everybody going to watch the J6 hearing tomorrow. Yeah, I'm going to tape it to tomorrow at 10 Pacific is when it starts I think. I mean, it's, it's just a one episode. It could be the last one. It's a one episode season. I mean, I don't know why they didn't get renewed but I don't either. Well, it doesn't mean that they won't have other episodes when they have more stuff. Right. But I think that they want to go into a dark period before the election. Well, I think they actually right. Yeah. I mean, they would have wanted to go into a dark period, much earlier but hurricane. Right. Right. Yeah, the postpone for the hurricane. Yeah, well we'll go into a dark period after the election too so especially if Republicans getting control. There's a lot of dynamics right. It's a dark period. Yeah, well, I know, I know. We're on that part of the river where, you know, the rapids are just over there. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Quite know how steep they're going to be. And all the people who've been in on this commission could in fact be the recipients of overwhelming, annoying and impactful lawsuits and trouble and investigations themselves if the house switches. Yeah, that's I mean, absolutely. But, you know, if they get tossed out or, you know, move someplace else, every one of them as an author. Every one of them has, you know, a potential different platform, right, because But there's like tons of books about all of this out right now, including some new ones coming out all, you know, all the time. Our books, the books carry the way they once did. It's not a matter of the book. All right, book just shows that you've done the homework and so you get to be a talking head. So that's where the so that's our so that's the future of all these people they become commentators on CNN and MSNBC or something. They become a humanity from that from what we just said.  Yeah. I just caught a clip of Jen Pasaki on CNN, I guess, or something like that as a commentator I'm like, she was so much better in the White House.  And when when Shep Smith left Fox and went over to CNBC, he is operating a peak capacity right now he is knocking it out of the park in their job. I just watched Cuomo right on News Nation, and he's not good in that role. Right. It's not a good product. Right. He was better. Right. With the constraints at CNN. He was terrible there too. Well, I'm just saying that he was better than I didn't say he was great. I'm just saying that he was better with the constraints, you know, with a better producer he was basically given a hand. Oh, whatever you want to do. And Chris Cuomo casual. Right, is kind of sloppy. Yeah. Yeah.  Right. You know that he's producing that thing single-handedly. Right. And, you know, the format even when he's not in the chair. The other people are following, you know, his format. It's really, you know, it's a nice piece of evening. That's what I tape and that's what I watch regularly. It's really it's really good. Cool. Yeah.  Yeah, the one key point I think to make is to remember that six, nine months ago, the conventional wisdom was it would have no impact. Why are we even bothering what we do know is that viewership went up. As those hearings went on that and pump more important than viewership that the public said that they were paying attention. And whatever that number is 60% who say, you know, January 6 was serious, and there need to be consequences and people need to be held accountable. That's been a pretty consistent plateau. I don't think we can get higher than 60%. But I'll take 60. I think we also learned that if you get a disciplined way of presenting the narrative. Yes, it works better than a standard, you know, community coverage. Well, but if the if the Republicans get it, you're going to get Roger Ailes, like production of their narrative. They only get to do that if Democrats refuse to serve on the committee. Technically, the only reason that we got these hearings is the Republicans said we're taking our marbles and going home. I know, right, right.  So a couple articles recently, fully half of the Republicans running in this election cycle, believe in the steel, fully half are on board and part of their an integral part of their campaign is stop the steel. That seems to me like the insurrection caucus or the sedition caucus and it seems to me that seditionists have not been brought to heal fast enough. And we are about to elect a whole bunch of people who are in safe districts who now will shred the Overton window. And this this has become normalized. And, and this is a really bad moment for that to happen. And I wish that sedition prosecutions had been faster because I guess the oathkeepers are confessing to are pleading guilty to sedition to sedition or something like that. Yes. So it's happening. It's just, it's just not. Gary, Gary. Saying that you believe the election was stolen is not a crime. And so you, you can run for office saying you believe that and if you're running in a very red district. I don't want to say it because that's what lots of grassroots Republicans in very red districts think. Well, worse, worse, that's the litmus test for whether your party can back you or not. Right. Right. That that is absolutely a problem. But, you know, it's the same with dogs, you know, you get minority, a minority ceases power, and you and bends it to particular ends and then it becomes unpopular. And that's what the rest of us do with the fact that it's very unpopular. Right. That's the hard problem. My big, my big complaint about the our side in all of this is that we haven't come up with enough ways for ordinary people to show that, you know, we're fighting for this fantasy and we're, you know, fighting against it.  There's a very little at the grassroots level that shows that people are alarmed and have something useful that they can do. You know, I wrote about this little effort in one town in Pennsylvania that had a march during Band Book Week to elevate their favorite band books. Right. What I liked about it was, unlike the New York Public Library having a famous author giving a talk about, you know, the need for freedom of expression, it was something you could do in your hometown it was fun it was in people's faces. It was a prompt to a conversation. There, there's a reason why organizing like that is so vital because it a it invites people in to do something.  You know you were saying how do you fight Q and on. Well, we got to give people something else to do. That's fun. I think going to Trump rallies is a lot of fun.  You know they're like groupies who go from event to event because they're having a great time. What's our version of that. It's got dead heads. Yes. Well, guess, guess what. We just saw one version of that in the Los Angeles City Council. No, our version of that is not. Well, that's a terrible. Well, I'm just saying that you want to see people rallying right in a negative way right and being pissed off. Right. We just shot another October surprise, you know, it is that Democrats, you know, have it's like, see, they're, they've got problems too. Right. Kind of do a lot of our elected officials are in office for too long and stay for the wrong reasons. Yeah, and that's what this thing just exposed. We're like the police bureau we have these octogenarians in office that won't leave it's just. Power is the aphrodisiac Jerry they don't feel 80 years old.  Do you really want to go there. No, no, not at all. Not at all. It's a Viagra for fundraising. All right, still get on the phone and raise that money guys. All right. Money is an aphrodisiac to. Yeah, I mean the what was the percentage is that they spend 60% of their time.  All right, is the primary job of any legislator. Kissinger is still alive. He just wrote a book with Bill Gates. Am I right about that. I think I just right. Yeah, sounds right. I just saw him interviewed on a short clip from an interview with him just last week. Yeah, we do live in the strangest timeline I was thinking about, you know, the idea that Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin had a call. Two of the world's richest men. I love the suggestion that nukes I mean then you'll not be able to enjoy your yachts anymore.  That'll really teach him. Would you like the Twitter account? Would you like a Twitter account sir. He doesn't use Twitter.  So is anybody if Elon actually winds up in power over Twitter is anybody planning on leaving Twitter. Good question. What's the utility out of Twitter right now. For me it's central for me it's like the artery of interesting stuff as an early warning system. It's a better early warning system than any other site. I'm on. Yeah, I mean, it's a new service for me for the most part, but it's in terms of it being a conversation, not much of a conversational engine. It's one way. Jerry if we if we had something else that that could do that for you you would, that would well there's there's mastered on and a couple of open source distributed lookalikes but they don't they're not really popular not they're not taken off. Right but just for argument sake. Yeah, if the thing you get from Twitter is the ability to follow.  There's, it would seem like well. You know why not create that in some other way what's what why rely on Twitter for that. Like for me, I'll give you the reason why I would stay. In addition to that though I'd love to replace that. You know it's a distribution platform. Some of what I produce. You know, I'm, I'm valued because I have 16,000 followers on Twitter. And, you know, I wouldn't want to just throw that away without having something to replace it with. Yeah, right. I'm going to wait and see what he does. If he actually concludes this and sticks with it. Because I think those are not, those are not finally answered questions yet. There are still things that can happen that would that could make it not finish up with him owning it. There are things where he could basically, he's bored with it now. He could just get it and then pass it off to somebody else. Basically, what is he going to do? What does he do with it? Is it just inviting Trump back while I survived on the on Twitter with Trump around for for years. You know, I can deal with him being there because I really don't see his stuff. And I'm very, you know, I have a rapid finger with blocking his supporters if on the occasional times I get messages from the responses from them. I would say that I'm in the same camp, you know, I didn't subscribe to Trump. I didn't see his feed. Right. Didn't see his supporters feed. But if he gets back on Twitter, it's to what degree does the media become reflexively covering everything that he says. Right.  And if they fall back into the trap, then, you know, that's a, that's problematic. Yeah. And I agree that must could make it better. Okay. I don't know what he's going to do. Right. I have a theory. I have a theory on watching him, which is this is going to be interesting. Just from that, just from that preamble, go for it. Record again, double record Jerry. That's right. Record some more. The positive, dangerous view is that he turns Twitter into a form of direct democracy. And he starts holding referenda on Twitter. That's how he often uses his account now. Apart from trolling the lives and so on. And it's one thing for him to do it when he's just one person with a big following saying, do you think this should be passed into law or not and 2 million people vote. It's another thing when 200 million people vote. And proxy voting is a really interesting, like a very, very interesting thing. And I were interested in that Jerry, this is not that this is the dangerous version of that. Bring go, bring go. Anybody who says to his engineering team. I want everybody on Twitter to see this. Right. I want a box in the top right corner on every account. That's today's vote. And he has suddenly got a laser beam, like the eye of Sauron, that he can use to burn all kinds of people. Right.  He talked about we chat as his model the problem with the idea for we chat is you already have it. We got all the apps, you know, they're just, they have different colored buttons. No, no. One app to do it all. Why would anybody use that one app to rule them all of course no in China you can live your entire life inside we chat where the government has its nose under the tent but but you can do everything. You can you can you're highly encouraged to do so. You can take a dog groomer you can take pictures of the dog. You can other people can you can share it out in socials you can pay your taxes you can pay your dentist the whole thing. And Elon sees that and he's like, we want to be that and I think that Zuckerberg is insanely frustrated that Facebook is not that. But we already in this strategy right now. Yeah, I just think the way the internet developed in China is different than the way it developed here. So that we chat could in effect colonize all of these functional, you know, social functions is I think what Zuckerberg calls them. Right. Whereas here, various other players filled out you know, he's up bought some of them. Yeah, yeah. You know, you'd have to buy if you want Twitter to become we chat you have to shut down all the other things that currently. You just have to knock them out. I think that it's about how. How did Friendster died did you think Friendster was just going to go crazy replaced by something better that did the same thing. This is that user base and basically offered an instant migration. Yeah, yeah, right. I use we chat right now, but because I know how we check functions under the hood. I have a separate phone that only has we chat installed on it. And it's a Samsung, you know, low end phone, so I can have conversations with people I need to have conversations with in Asia. But I read recognize that it sucks all the stuff off of it. So it doesn't have anything else on it. It is the we chat device. Right. And if Twitter starts to go in that direction, I'll have a Twitter device. Okay.  If that's what it evolves into right is it's a must have. And it's like, but it'll be a single purpose, you know, for me. I'm not saying, I'm not saying that turning Twitter into we chat is going to be a successful strategy. I'm saying it's a really good ambition. Somebody who wants to take over wants to take over Twitter to do something different with it because, you know, in the US nobody sort of tried to do that. And I don't think it's impossible to do. I think it's the Swiss Army knife problem which is if you give people too many things to do they won't know what to do. So, I look, I think he's, he's really, he's scary because of how much power and what a large following he's developed. And he does seem to be really poorly informed, but surrounded by enablers. And, yeah, not good. And bringing Trump back is just only one bad thing he'll do. I wanted to bounce quickly over to Trump and the document fiasco. Yeah, is this is this the place where he gets stuck in the tar and actually gets sucked under properly. Yeah, he may be indicted by the Justice Department. Yeah. Yeah. And that happens then to me gets to see just how brittle we are. Well, I don't know if I said this here last month or whether I just been thinking it or whatever over the past over the past month but the, you know, there are three outcomes. We get indicted and convicted. Right. We get get violence, violence up front, but it's better for the for democracy in the long term. Right. Not indicted, not convicted. No, little violence upfront, awful for democracy in the long run. Right indicted and using this finger intentionally indicted but not convicted is the worst possible option. Yeah. Well, even worse than that because this is, yeah, you can you can make the claim that impeachment is a political process blah, blah, blah. This is the, this is a court ruling him innocent, which is not but that's not the point. He eats. That's what he would claim. He would basically it would be all the evidence he needs to be able to demonstrate that he was unfairly attacked because this is all it was it was a witch hunt it was a.   So that would have all of the upfront violence of the indictment, right, and have all the damage and plus to democracy system. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and I think that that is a recognized that the people in the Justice Department recognize that. Yeah, Garland recognizes that. And so I am not 100% convinced that he will be indicted, no matter how guilty he appears no matter how much evidence and if they cannot be absolutely certain, absolutely beyond a doubt certain of getting a conviction. And Frank is for indictment with no conviction is so dangerous. Yeah, Franklin for just posted a thing saying that indictment was inevitable. I didn't have a chance to read the whole thing but I'll post the post the link in the chat. Yeah, I'm planning to read that too. Yep. Garland Island's an institutionalist who will say at the end of the day, I have to indict because I think he broke the law and we have a case. There's no way but through. Yep. Ugly.  Ugly. Hey, it's the next couple of weeks in Brazil. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But Bolsonaro scored much higher than the polls that he would so. And you have the election at the end of the month or the second round election in the end of the month, and you already have early signs of big violence, especially if Bolsonaro doesn't come out on top. A question that arose yesterday in conversation around Iran and the veil protests. Why aren't America's famous women all over that and backing Iran's women and girls like Oprah and Hillary and Kamala and other other powerful women why are they not like, why, why haven't they jumped in. You think they need compensation for it. It's class, it's class of lesions. I mean, more in common with the long that she does with it with the his accusers. I would say the answer is, because it hasn't become popular to do that and none of the people you just named your leaders, their followers. They don't take risks. So, and at the base level of why aren't more of us doing more because of exhaustion and fragmentation.  There is, you know, maybe in elections, protests that happened in. And I can't remember what year anymore, you know, when everybody was turning their avatar green in solidarity with them happen to come during a bit of a news vacuum and extra bonus points of anyone can name the event that snuffed out Western support for the democracy protests in Iran, the last time. Iran. Big global event that completely caused people to stop paying attention. Not 911. Nope. Global very traumatic event for a lot of people. All right, I'll tell you, it was the death of Michael Jackson.  Well, I'm also, I wish there was a way to Ethan Zuckerman tried to do this to measure the how much attention and for how long a topic gets. And he was he he said he was suggesting that we even come up with a unit of measure called the Kardashian Kardashian. Yeah. I think you mentioned this a while ago and I think I mentioned that I had a polytometrics class at Irvine. Yeah, my term paper was measuring column inches around airplane hijackings to Cuba. And, and I noticed that over time, the curve plummeted like the earliest hijackings had a long tail there was lots of coverage. And then as we kind of got accustomed to hijackings the coverage would would just drop. And that's when like the prop said you should use multiple aggression on this and I said multiple what? Yeah, I might observe that the, you know, for the women in Iran is that Oprah's irrelevant. Okay, it's how long do they want to sustain. All right, this right. If Oprah, you know, went on and say, Hey, you're Ayatollah you're not doing the right thing. All right. Who cares. So, but I think solidarity with Iran's women and girls from a figure as famous and broad as Oprah would help I don't think the Ayatollahs are going to do beans, you know, based on what I'm saying that it's the sustainability inside the society of we're fed up. Look, the most important thing that happened in that arena in the last 48 hours is that the men at the oil refinery walked off the job. Yes. Okay. Well, you're basically hitting them in the pocket books and saying, we stand in solidarity with, you know, our women. That's a that's a big deal. I hate to break it to you Jerry but here. Damn it. Are you going to trouble me with inconvenient facts. Another inconvenient truth. So Oprah is speaking out on behalf of the women Jerry. Oh, really? Yeah. Yep. Okay, that just that just got me into a total loop. My browser is going crazy. I'm gonna have to find it some other way. I guess I haven't logged into Instagram for a while. No, I'm not. Right over to it. Yeah. So the jury was, it didn't break through to Jerry's consciousness until you pointed it out. So, right, which means it wasn't real until you pointed it out. Yeah, I mean, it's going convenient. Was it in the prime minister's talking points right over in the UK. Right. Does she care. Yeah. Oh, it's the mini budget. That's derailing her world. So interesting. So I get a this message is not available. You're being blocked by Oprah. No, you may have to have to be logged into Instagram. I think that's it. No, no, I'm literally I clicked. I did a one click popped up in Safari, not logged in and went right to her page. Now I do have ad blockers. Let me block in your Jerry. I knew I shouldn't have said those bad things about Oprah. Never write this the Oprah. Not if you know what's good for you. Who else did you want to be speaking out on this? Let's see. Hillary name, name some famous here we go. So it is showing I just opened Firefox and there it is. Gloria Stein, I'm still around. She is. She is. Two weeks ago, Hillary slammed the horrific Iran regime. They're only in power because they oppress women. That'll really help. Yeah. Thank you. The women of America are at the moment focusing on domestic concerns. Dobbs. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the thing where we're beleaguered. I mean, my friends are the feeling of exhaustion, beleagueredness. You know, there's also been a lot of turnover at the top of many of the leading women's and feminist organizations in the last year or two. So you have people who are funding their footing. It's, it's not good. It's not, it's not like superheroes or running. We know what we're doing, you know, to get weapons to support Ukraine. What do you smuggle into Iran to support the women? I don't know. Better internet service. I think that was the best idea anybody had. Yeah. Okay. And still that's, that's, you know, we can comparison to send them high Mars. Yeah. Remember when the State Department was trying to develop a sort of internet in the box in a box. I should do. Yeah, whatever happened to that. The thing that, the thing that's particularly depressing is that we're trying to prevent a handmade stale future for the US. Yeah, we're busy trying to prevent Sharia Christian Sharia law from becoming the ruler of the land. And that the people who've had that as their plan have been working on that for 50 years and have done a very good job. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a lot of teleban, I think, right? Yeah. Teleban jacals. Yes. Teleban jacals sounds like a body part that dangles from the body. Have you had your teleban jacal removed yet? No, no, it's still, it's still dangling. Y'all Kada. Yeah.   Kecha Pecha talks or whatever that that's called there, you know, 20 slides in five minutes. Pecha kucha. That's a kucha. Yeah. Teleban jacal. Teleban jacals. What was George Carlin when you need him? Dead, unfortunately, because he was really awesome. Yeah, it was. I'll send you the, I'll send you the humometer under development, Jerry, a humor scale, right, so that you can tell people what mood you're in. I had one at IBM, right, so that people could know what mood I was in before they walked in my office, right now I've worked with Jim to productize it so you'll, I'll give it, I'll send it to you. Thank you. Some kind of display. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I have it on this computer but yeah. Let me look. Is it your avatar chuckling or crying? No, no, no. No, no, no. Let me see here. Long ago when I worked for Esther, I liked headset phones because I was on the phone a lot. And I had to train people when they walked into my office to look down at a little triangular thing I put in front of me that I would rotate with like on the air like the end do not disturb. Come on in. And I don't remember what the third one was but I had to train I had to sort of like, because people would just like I'm running and talking because I didn't look like I was on the phone. I had a friend who wore a hat with that kind of indicator on it. Good idea. Yeah, why isn't that caught on. I have to tell you what pronouns I'm using but that hasn't come on. Code on. Yeah, the. Okay, let me see. Here it is. So it would have a, you know, dry erase marker with it so that you could annotate it and kind of circle where you are I used to have a post it that was an arrow. Yeah, it would move up and down. But these aren't moods these are types of humor. Yeah, I know that they're describing from, you know, the, you know, hilarious which is probably the, you know, at least from my reckoning, you know, a really high as down all the way down to satire and sarcasm and mockery, right as the darker forms. Right. But it's relative. This was my, you know, way of, you know, I would say I'm in a, I'm in a droll mood today guys. Right. I see. Come in and amuse me. Okay. I think it should be a circle, not a, not a line. Okay. Like I said, it's a prototype. So I welcome your when you say a circle, you think circle. Yeah. Yeah. In other words, at the bottom where satire is, is should circle back around up to hilarity. Okay. All right. Where are puns. Good. Whitty. Huns. Look, are you feeling, are you feeling punny today? Yeah. That's every day. Every day. All right, so enough. Thanks for sharing that. That's great. Thank you.  Absolutely. Conversations. How was Sri Lanka. It went really well. Yeah. Yeah, so it was a two part thing. The first part was a, a webinar that lasted for about an hour of me, you know, actually a little bit more than that. They wanted you to give like a three hour speech, right? They wanted something really massive. So they went for an hour and a half webinar. And then they asked for a recorded keynote that they could play. So I give them a 11 minute talk. And they were, it was very, I actually watched the beginning of the, of the symposium, they had, because they had all the invited officials throughout the webinar and all of the interactions I'd had with the folks leading up to the symposium they were very casual. Dress the way you often see people dressed in South Asia. At the beginning of the symposium, so everyone was in a suit and tie. Everyone was the most formal, formally dressed they could be. They had a good five minute thinking all the, they started with a five minute thinking of all of the people who were involved in getting this going. And then they had some kind of ritual. I don't recall exactly what they were doing, but we were reading something in the local language, and they had two people, one person who was drumming. And another person who was playing a different, a different stringed instrument. They were both dressed in what I assume are native or native garb. Like, it was a really strappy leather thing but with the kind of cap you would see on like an Oxford graduate. Like a bowler or a top like a pie, a pie hat. Yeah. So that was interesting to watch. I think they were very pleased with what I provided because actually rather than just doing a 11 minute talk I actually used my movie and inserted images and text overlays and all that kind of fun stuff to make it look semi professional. If you look at my Twitter feed, I've actually posted a link to that talk a couple days ago. Okay, you can actually it's basically what they asked me to do is. I mean, the current situation and Sri Lanka through the lens of banny. And since I, you know, so what I talked about that last month Bo actually sent me some really useful stuff. Looking through that looking through the stuff that they sent. And then trying to squeeze that through this particular language of interpretation was actually kind of an interesting challenge. So it works for me to say okay what do you do with this banny tool other than say hey look brittle. What can you do with it well, if you see if you watch the talk what I eventually say is here what you need. Banny is not going to give you the answers is not going to give you the solution, however, it's really useful for pointing out where to look to help you avoid this in the future. And sort of going run down each of the four categories and say there's the kinds of things that you could have been looking out for that you should be looking out for. That would be indicative of an increasingly brutal situation increasingly anxiety inducing situations one of the kinds of things that you should have been that you could be paying attention to. And so it was a nice experience to get a chance to exercise this tool. And it was just, I'm still not entirely believing that there was a full on academic symposium entitled the banny world that was a two day symposium with people from the Sri Lanka but India and Malaysia I think. Cool. And so yeah, thank you, Jerry. Yeah, that's great. I need to go and take Heidi to a an appointment it was a pleasure to be with you for the full time. Same here. All of your gathered intelligence is very refreshing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It would be a very interesting call next month. Oh my God, I know. We'll be here. Yeah, you bet. Cheers. All right. Take care. Bye.


Mikaela mentioned a number of types of AR solutions and categories. One other way of categorizing it is the type of display that you're using, because it very much affects your experience. And what you saw in that presentation was mostly video-based. We used a camera to capture something around the environment. The computer superimpose graphics on that, and then presents you with a video image with that composition. And I'm going to show you one example that is more optical, where it all coexists and you understand when I get to that. So my passion for AR and user interfaces come from about a decade of work in different research labs where I focused on a new type of interaction technology and interaction techniques where it starts with looking at how to develop new display systems and display components, various forms of sensing, mobile devices, and physical objects in the surroundings, and then use that new technology to build new forms of interaction techniques and user experiences around that. So today I'm going to talk about one example that has a specific use case, and I want to start with a question. The question is, what if you had and you were able to go to the store right now and buy a thin piece of glass that is completely transparent that you could put really anywhere of your choice in your workplace or at home or really wherever. And this piece of glass would be able to interpret what's behind it. So you're looking through this glass and it would actually understand what's happening on the other side and be able to overlay and superimpose information in real stereoscopic 3D that would help you understand or explain things to you that you cannot see or you could not understand just with your naked eye. So think about that for a second. And the important thing here when I'm starting out with this question is it very much focuses on the user experience. It's not about the technology. It's not my flashy phone or my flashy tablet. It's really what do I want to solve or what do I want to achieve or experience. And it doesn't matter whether that's a handheld device or, like in this case, some projectors that are installed. But we took this vision and maybe a little bit less sexy use case. So this is a big lathe in the Department of Production Engineering at KTH in Stockholm. It's a two-ton machine that's very complex. Not everyone has this in their homes and probably won't for a long time. So a lathe also known as Svarv in Swedish consists of some basic components. You have a tool that can move in 3D inside this workspace or a work piece that spins very fast and this tool hits this work piece that cuts into this material and is able to make it different shapes. I think some people might have in their high school made like little light stands. That's kind of a typical thing. So for lathe, there's an industrial lathe, there's always a control computer that you can load with a program that controls how fast things are moving, where they're going and basically a set of instructions to sort of carve out this material. And this control computer not only steers what's happening but also reads out a lot of information. So rotation speed, pressure, temperature, a lot of information that is essential and sort of adjusts what's going on. And the third component here is the human, the operator. And the operator is very interested in what's going on inside this machinery and wants to get all this information from the process to the left. But at the same time, wants to see how things are moving. For instance, if you're cutting too fast with too much pressure, the tool might break, for instance. So this is a classical AR dilemma, sometimes referred to as schizo-vision. You have to look into place at the same time, very hard, at least with normal vision. So what if we could take this process information and really fuse that with the workspace so that this operator would just have an augmented experience that did not have any conflicting scenario. And our Aster system that was developed with KTH is based on a piece of technology that allows us to do justice. And this is based on a holographic optical element created by Jon and Gustav Son, which was my colleague back then. And he spent many, many years of research into the optics of this. And this holographic optical element is very interesting because it has a number of properties that really allows it to be used for very, very diverse use cases. So essentially, this sheet of glass with a very thin film on top of it that has been optically programmed to bend and shape light that hits it. And we can program this sheet. It's a one-time process. We can program this sheet to reflect light such that we can create the illusion of 3D inside. So the first thing that we can do down here is to separate how the light from multiple projectors that illuminate this sheet, how it comes back towards you as a user. So the first thing is that it allows us to use two projectors shining at the same place, but the left eye will only see the light from one projector and the right eye will only see the light from the other projectors so you can create the illusion of depth with a stereoscopic vision to create two imagines. Another thing that's critical for AR is that you have this transparency. So this element has been made to be wavelength dependent, so it reflects red light very brightly, as you see here. But the rest of the screen is completely optically transparent, just like you used to in the real world. And at the same time, it also provides full resolution. So you might have seen some of these autoscopic displays that are on sale right now. Actually, the more views you have, so if you have one person, you actually have half the resolution for each eye because you're competing for the same pixels, whereas in this case, it's taking care of optically, so you have full resolution for one eye. And the last property is that it can also be controlled in terms of viewing angles. So unlike a mirror or any other material where you shine light and the incident light comes out at the same angle, this can be controlled such that you have a pretty steep projection angle, but you have a very comfortable viewing angle straight on. So we took this optical component and mounted it integrated with the safety glass of this lathe. And then we built a system that interfaces with the lathe without all the real-time information, feed that to the projectors that illuminate this HUE and create a complete fused experience. I'm going to show you a video of that in action. So what you're seeing here is all the red graphics is from our display. And what you just saw is the tool moving in 3D. And here you have the actual workpiece that we're cutting into. And what we're seeing overlaid is the three components and the resultant of the forces that are actually measured in real-time on the tip of the tool. So as we're cutting, we get a direct feedback on what's going on. And here we have the feed that controls how much the tool is pushing into the workpiece. So the more pressure we're pushing it into, the bigger the forces are and vice versa. And there's, of course, other information that we can superimpose in 2D, like the program running the various parameters and so on. And one thing that is also not evident from the video, of course, is that it's really stereoscopic. So you get the real depth experience where the forces are really following the tip of the tool in the 3D space. And this is actually interesting because if you're imagining that you're cutting inside or behind something, you still have that stereoscopic cue with the graphics you see where that is a way of getting extra vision with this. Another aspect of this system, and it comes back to the properties of how it's designed, is that it really was made to not interfere or alter the way that this operator works with his machinery today. As you see, it sits on top of the safety glass. It's fully transparent. If you do not want this experience, you just step out of the viewing zone and you have, again, your direct, clear view. Or you turn off the projectors and, again, nothing interferes. I think that's one of the key components that we forget sometimes with AR that we're sometimes just altering our experience, getting augmented reality through a small mobile viewport down through the resolution of the camera and through the capabilities of the camera when we have a very rich environment around us. But not everyone has the possibility to install something like this. Other things that we are and have been exploring in this concept of this astro-display is to add ways to interact with the content. So we've integrated touch overlays so you can also interact through the glass, through the cameras to sense gestures. This is a system that predated Microsoft Connect, a company that Microsoft actually bought. And eye-tracking to get motion parallax as you're moving in front of this display. This one we're using very nice from Swedish company, Tobi. And we use these devices to explore interaction with, in the top right, we see 3D scan from sculptures that were found on the Vossa battleship that are being scanned for preservation. So what if you could still visualize and interact with them without having to expose the real artifacts or you wanted to see them in multiple museums at the same time. And in the bottom picture we have a surface reconstruction from a medical CT scan. So how could we interact with that without having to touch anything in a sterile medical environment? So this is one example of a hybrid user interface where we have a number of things that we're combining to achieve a transparent or invisible interface as a user experience. So the first thing is bringing in novel display technology that allows us to think a little bit differently about what we can do and what we can experience. The other thing is to push out the sensing into the environment. I don't want to wear necessarily something on my body. This is very intrusive right now. It's kind of odd to have this little thing hanging in front of me. Really, in 2011, Kent, we have a system that can listen to me and track me and amplify me to the room and to the internet without this little boom. It's kind of weird. So what if we could put all the sensing in the environment and then take these sensors, these displays and the interaction to have this combined transparent experience. And actually, a lot of this work has been ongoing in the research community for about 25 years. So in a lot of the pioneering work in augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, tangible user interfaces, spatial warehouse, people have already explored this. But I think that now is the time where we actually have off-the-shelf components, things that we can pretty easily integrate and build on. And also, we have this infrastructure and connectivity that was really not available back then. So it's very exciting from that point of view. And in our work, we're continuing to explore these hybrid user interfaces. Some use cases are to enhance interaction with existing displays. So like here, we have a mobile phone that's tracked on a rear-projected display that has limited capabilities. But a mobile device actually has a better screen, high-resolution screen in its density so we can sort of have a movable viewport to amplify our experience there. At MIT, we just launched this project where we're tracking a mobile device through a novel sensing capability. We were looking a lot at sensing and augmenting objects on tabletops. And of course, for collaboration. So how could we really amplify the collaboration and communication between users across distances with different devices and so on? For instance, in tele-radiology, having surgeons giving second opinions from hospitals that are distributed all over. So coming back to this question, what would you do with this transparent piece of glass that I could understand and interpret and visualize things for you? I'm sure you have lots of ideas. This was just one example that I showed you with the industrial machine. And I would really love to hear from next two days if you have ideas or questions or comments around this that you would like to share. So I thank a lot of collaborators and funding agencies, of course. And you can find a lot of my videos at olval.com. And thank you so much.