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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Wow, wow, Wes. Hey, what's up? What's going on, everybody? I'm already fumbling over my fucking words. Dude, I suck. I'm here with Kevin Ashton. How you doing, man? I'm good. How are you? Pretty good. So how would you define yourself? Obviously, author. Yeah. Futurist.
Chapter 2: How does Kevin Ashton define himself as a futurist?
you think you're old now oh god yeah what 57 57 57 i'm not i'm not too far behind i'm 40 oh oh that's young 40 i i think 40 is kind of i still feel like a boy like there's never the switch has never occurred to where i'm like a little bit i feel like a man i go in the grocery store they're playing the music i danced to when i was a kid really that's that makes you feel old
Oh, when it's in the grocery store? Yeah, it's like the Muzak now. Yeah, yeah. So what was your music back in the day? What was your go-to? Oh, I was a jazz funk guy. Really? Yeah. Jazz funk. It's a British name for like R&B, basically. So like mid-80s, it was like Luther Vandross. Oh, you're smooth, brother. Oh, yeah. All the working class kids in London. There you go. Nice.
The posh kids like, you know, the punky stuff. So I got to ask you then, is it true? Because I have a friend who's from London and he loves soccer. Okay. And I, you know, naturally. And in America, soccer is looked at as a sport kind of for girls. You know what I mean? Not so much now, though. Yeah, not so much. I was trying to explain to him when I grew up, it was like, Everyone played football.
That's what we call American football, football. And I was like, you know, I was just kind of getting under his skin. I was like, it's kind of for like weak guys. And he was just like, nah. And I was like, because I played rugby. And he's like, rugby's for the posh boys. That's true. And so it's true. Yeah. Rugby's such a more brutal sport. It's such a more brutal sport.
Why is it for the posh boys? It's just the way the school system. I mean, I was like, it was suggested that I go to like the posh school in town. But they didn't play soccer. They played rugby. And there was just, I was like 11. There was no way. Really? I was going to a school that didn't play soccer. So it's kind of, okay.
So it's almost like over there, it's like if someone played water polo over here, that'd be very posh. Yeah. Or like lacrosse, maybe. Lacrosse isn't very, it's not posh. It's, yeah, I can see that. It is in New England, I feel like. Yeah, no, you're right. Lacrosse bros are, I would say, borderline posh boys as well. So cricket and rugby are like the posh. I feel ashamed I played the posh sport.
I thought I was flexing on him. He was like, ah, it's for posh boys. Yeah, but you could play soccer on the street corner. Yeah. You know, you just toss down your sweaters and you've got a ball and you're away. True. You can't quite do that with rugby, you know? Yeah, you'd have to play like touch. Yeah, it'd be like landing on that street. Yeah, well, shit, you're right.
I was hoping he would get overturned, but that's completely true. Yeah. Dang. Sorry. Thank you for coming to the podcast. So, okay. So, Futurist, how do you get the Futurist title? Oh, so that's like a thing. You can't study at school, right? There's no like major in futurism. I mean, it's not a word I use about myself so much, I guess. But yeah, I mean, I started a lab at MIT. Okay.
In the late 90s. That's why I came to the US. And... Like I had this idea that I called the Internet of Things. Yeah. And everybody thought, what the hell is that? It's crazy. And they were interested in like the dotcom boom and everything. But, you know, we got lucky and our research did well. And now the Internet of Things is everywhere.
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Chapter 3: What was the origin of the Internet of Things?
Yeah. You know, you didn't have graphics really or anything. So the idea of using the internet for like anything past like email was kind of on the wild side of things back then. Yeah. So yeah, but plugging the real world into the internet so you knew where stuff was.
So you could have things like self-driving cars that know where they are and are communicating with your phone and stuff like that. Yeah, and this was before Wi-Fi. Oh, dude, that must have sounded insane in 19... Oh, it did. Yeah, 1995.
yeah people thought it was it was like maybe 97 but like yeah yeah like what the hell this is why it called the internet of things true because like at least i could they wanted to pretend they knew what the internet was yeah okay so you just like write on that That's pretty cool.
So the whole idea was back in the day, you'd have these companies or advise them to attach basically just sensors to regular objects. So then those sensors could then gather data. And this was before the smartphone then? Oh, yeah. This was way before the smartphone. Yeah, this was like business systems.
We got a lot of money from the defense department because you go to war, you've got to have enough stuff. Yeah. Where the hell are my bombs? Yeah. Where the hell did I put those bombs? Bombs is one thing, but like, you know, soda cans, body bags, Bibles, you know, toothbrushes. All that stuff. You've got to know where it all is.
And so, you know, that was one of the first like obvious applications was just like logistics. Yeah. That's where all the money came from to fund it. But yeah, then a few years later, you've got the smartphone and it becomes easy to put it in everybody's pocket. Yeah. So how did that like, you know, were you kind of following the development of the smartphone?
Did that just come out and you're like, hey. Yeah. I mean, it was funny. I was, um, I guess I can say the name now. Like I was, I was on the board, the research board of Motorola. Okay. And we were trying to explain to them, this was like the flip phone. And one of the perks was they gave you their best phone every year. So I always had like the quote unquote best Motorola phone. It's terrible.
Like, do you like the razor, the flip razor? It was awful. I mean, the funny thing is, like, Motorola even had a partnership with Apple before the iPhone. Really? Yeah, it was called the Rocker, right? It was like an iPod in a Motorola flip phone. Okay, whoa. They fucked it up so badly that Steve Jobs was like, yeah, no. Oh, I don't want anything to do with it.
Yeah, we're going to do our own thing. We are trying to explain these, me and some other like futurists, we're trying to explain to them like, you know, touchscreens, graphic user interfaces, guys, sensors. Yeah. Have the phone like know when you pick it up. Like this is not expensive. It's not hard to do. And then the iPhone wasn't the first one.
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Chapter 4: What role do stories play in shaping our identity?
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So that's pretty crazy, man, to think about it that long ago where it was like... Because it's almost... There's like a super mystique around the iPhone where it was like... You know, people a lot of times are like Jobs was just like taking acid in the woods and was just like completely tapped in. So that had been a slow ongoing process.
He was a guy like, you know, like a really good DJ who like is just ahead of the trends, who like plays a tune you wouldn't have thought about. But then you realize it's actually, he was that guy for like tech. Like he really had a good eye for what was coming. And, you know, and so what happened with the iPhone, like, and this is kind of what we all saw, it wasn't really a phone.
phone was a thing you know if you think about your smartphone now like how often are you actually making a call yeah right it's just one of your apps there's always others to use it a camera use it as a video game use it as you know gps mapping whatever you use it for yeah and and that's what he saw you know so you got the ipod idea and the online video idea and the phone idea and the handheld video just all stick it into one thing
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How does storytelling influence our perception of reality?
And he really I get him because I had the droid first. And I, you know, I was like, and I will say there was something about when I would like, tap it or touch it that when it would buzz every time I did that there was I don't know why that like made me feel so happy. Every time I like respond back to me. I don't know.
I still like, you know, I had to turn off my phone because I just I do like those little noises like blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah. And if you watch the first like presentation on the iPhone, like way back when, like he swipes on the screen. I think he gets a standing ovation. We take it all for granted now.
But yeah, so it was it was fairly clear in the late 90s, early 2000s that something a bit like that was going to happen. Well, yeah, that was my whole thing. Apple, like when I had the Droid for a while, I'm like, this is cool. But Apple was like, it was like intuitive where I was like, oh, this is so easy. Like, I don't have to spend time figuring it out.
I was just kind of like, this makes, it's just so much easier to use. Yeah, because I mean, Jobs wasn't really a technical guy, you know, so he was kind of like our representative in the room. He's like, yeah, it's just too complicated. Yeah. Make it easier, make it easier. And then you end up with, you know, what we have today, which is great. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah.
So the, so here's, here's the thing. So, okay. Internet of things term you coined. And when you gave the meeting, were you like kind of aware that like, damn, I think I'm crushing it right now. Or like, this is a thing or do you have, you know what I mean? Like, Oh, man. It's a long time ago. So the CEO wanted to see the talk of Procter & Gamble. And I was in the UK.
I don't think they realized that. Like I got an email saying, yeah, come and see the CEO like the day after tomorrow or something. Procter & Gamble is based in Cincinnati. I'd never even been to the US, right? Fortunately, I had a passport. So like I got a ticket. First place I ever went to the United States was Cincinnati. That's pretty sick. I was fairly disappointed. Right to Ohio.
And I'm in this like walnut panel, like boardroom kind of place. And they all come in like this, you know, the CEO and all these other like really senior guys. And I do my thing. And basically we go around the room and like all the other, like the entourage guys are like, yeah, that sucks. That'll never work. I don't like it. I'm like, oh damn, you know? But then the CEO's like, well, I like it.
I think it's a good idea. And funnily enough, like it's like watching the dominoes go down. Like all these guys who I swear had just been shitting on my idea. Like, yeah, you're right. That's a really, yeah, what a good idea. So yeah, if it hadn't been for Dirk Jager, wherever you are, thank you. If it hadn't been for that guy who was CEO at Procter at the time,
I don't know what would have happened. But yeah, he got it. He said, yeah, we're going to pay for you to go to MIT and make this real. Whoa. So like, yeah, first time I went to the US was like Thanksgiving. Yeah. It was like Thanksgiving of 98. And then by September the 1st, 99, I was in the Smithsonian Institution announcing the Internet of Things to the world. And I lived in the US. Whoa.
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Chapter 6: How did the smartphone revolution impact technology?
No, especially if you go to a Target. Still, to this day, you go to a Target sometimes, and it's just crap everywhere. It's pretty bad. Oh, yeah. It's a mess. Yeah. Well, cool. So you came up with that idea and that kind of, I don't know, did you ever feel like kind of, since you weren't, you know, technically like a, you know, you were savvy with computers, I guess.
I guess if you used a computer regularly in the 90s, you were a tech guy. You know what I mean? Well, you know, I was kind of too stupid now, stupid I was really, but my experience had been like the first computer I got had 1K of memory.
and I saved up, we used to deliver newspapers, I saved up for months and bought a 16K, like K, not megabytes, gigabytes, kilobytes, memory expansion for that thing. Cost like a hundred bucks or whatever. And I felt like I had more memory than I would ever need, right? This is in the 80s. And by the 90s, you know, it's like, we're talking about like maybe megabytes.
And the stuff you can do was like a million times better than the stuff you could do in the 80s. So like in my dumb brain, it was like, well, Things just get cheaper. Things just get smaller. And that turned out to be true. I mean, I didn't know how it was true or why it was true, but like- You just figured it out. Yeah. I'd seen that happen for like 15 years at that point. Yeah. I saw a video.
So there's a video from you 11 years ago and you were doing, you had like three predictions. And the one was 15 years from now, and this is 11 years ago, 15 years from now, most cars won't have steering wheels, which I took as like automatic cars, basically. Yeah. Kind of nailed that. Because I don't know if you see, I mean, obviously you see all the Waymos here. I got here in a Waymo, finally.
I love the Waymo. I actually love the Waymos. Yeah. So you were kind of spot on with that. 15 years ago or 11 years ago, you were like, yeah, self-driving cars. I don't think people really, 11 years ago, they're like, no way. Oh, they were, no. And the thing is, what's happened is a lot of cars, like new cars, are more self-driving than people realize. It's called enhanced driver aids.
I've seen that, yeah. So it tells you if you're going out of your lane. It can tell you if you need to brake suddenly. There's a whole bunch of stuff they're like building in gradually. So like what used to just be like the automatic gearbox or like cruise control or something. It's like now getting more and more sophisticated. So you're getting closer and closer to like that self-driving car.
Yeah, the Wayne Assist. I like it. I took a Waymo and I actually kind of really enjoy it. I thought I'd be like, I don't know. It's pretty reliable. It drives like a regular speed. First few minutes is kind of weird and then it just gets old. Yeah, I find and I like I'm I enjoy talking to people in Uber. So I don't mind human interaction.
But there is something really peaceful about just like being there by yourself. Yeah, putting on a song and just kind of just chill. And I like really, really, I don't know, I feel I find it really relaxing. I still catch myself about to say something to the driver. Oh, yeah. Well, I'll say thank you. Yeah, it says hello and it says your name. And I always want to say hello back.
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