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Let’s explore AI’s future in healthcare and data security!
In this episode, Robert Scoble shares insights into his tech journey and envisions a future where AI communication plays a central role. He stresses healthcare data security, discusses AI's potential, reflects on personal growth, and underscores the need for cybersecurity practices and pandemic-driven innovations.
Tune in to learn from Robert’s experience and expertise on various topics, from technology trends and healthcare applications to personal growth and cybersecurity considerations!
Robert Scoble is a globally recognized figure in technology, known for his thought leadership and ability to discern future trends in the digital landscape. With over 30 years of experience in the industry, Robert has built an extensive and impressive career that spans from startups to corporate giants.
His career took off at Microsoft, were he was a technology evangelist, influential in guiding the company's approach to emerging trends.His blog, Scobleizer, served as a platform for his insightful thoughts and analyses on technology and has attracted millions of readers worldwide, becoming an essential resource for many seeking understanding in the ever-evolving digital world.
After Microsoft, Robert became the producer for FastCompany.tv, a foray into video blogging that allowed him to interview tech luminaries and provide a unique perspective on the sector’s direction. Subsequently. As a startup liaison for Rackspace, he immersed himself in the world of cloud computing, providing deep insights and playing a significant role in its development.
Robert is also renowned for his co-authorship on the book “Nakes Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.” This piece helped businesses worldwide understand the power of blogs in the early days of social media.
In the past decade, Robert has worked as a consultant and strategic advisor to numerous tech companies, guiding them through understanding future technology trends, especially in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and other disruptive technologies. He’s also a regular speaker at tech conferences and a respected authority, always at the forefront of the tech industry.
Robert’s unique blend of experience, technical acumen, and ability to forecast technology trends has made him an invaluable voice in the global technology community. His insights continue to shape the technology landscape and guide businesses into the future.
Download the "RNS_Robert Scoble audio file directly.
RNS_Robert Scoble: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Ed Gaudet:
Welcome to Risk Never Sleeps, where we meet and get to know the people delivering patient care and protecting patient safety. I'm your host, Ed Gaudet.
Ed Gaudet:
Welcome to the Risk Never Sleeps Podcast, in which we discuss the people that are protecting patient care. I'm Ed Gaudet, the host of our program, and today, we're going to take a different approach. We're going to talk to a technology writer, author, futurist, among other things. I am pleased to be joined today by Robert Scoble. Robert, welcome. Welcome to the program.
Robert Scoble:
Honored to be here.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, it's a real pleasure. I've followed your work and read some of your work. Obviously, my brother is a much bigger fan, but I've got a lot of questions to ask you about what's been happening as of late as it relates to VR and other technologies. But before we do that, let's talk little bit about you. How did you get into tech?
Robert Scoble:
Oh, man, I was Apple's first child laborer. True story. My mom built Apple two motherboards for Hildy Licht, who built them for Apple, and so we built Apple two motherboards when I was 13 years old in 1978, and that literally did get me my start because, a decade later, I was going to a community college, and I saw a car with the name of ... I knew ... built the motherboards I was staring at, and so I wanted to meet him in the worst way. And so I stalked him and met him up, met up with him, and he was my first celebrity interview in the tech industry, you know? So.
Ed Gaudet:
What was that? What year was that?
Robert Scoble:
That's 1989.
Ed Gaudet:
'89. Oh, cool.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, when I was going to school, and yeah, he gave us like $40,000 worth of Macintoshes for our journalism department and got me started. I still have his phone number memorized.
Ed Gaudet:
Do not share it with our listeners, please.
Robert Scoble:
He liked simple numbers, right? He actually said he had 2222222222, something like that. And he said that's a useless number to have because all sorts of babies would pick up their parents' cell phone and start hitting, so he had to put an eight on the end of it or something like that.
Ed Gaudet:
Really interesting. Oh, that's great. And you're based out in California. You live.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, Silicon Valley. Yeah, so that led up into a whole career where I've interviewed thousands of entrepreneurs, and worked in Microsoft as a strategist, and worked at Fast Company magazine doing video show, and doing editing and all sorts of stuff. Yeah, all sorts of stuff. Worked at Rackspace for seven years.
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, Rackspace.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ed Gaudet:
Now, D&D player? Atari 2600 player?
Robert Scoble:
No, I was an Apple 2 guy. You know, Apple from the very start. I grew up in Cupertino, California. I had to be Apple 2.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, no Atari for you. Well, Steve Jobs.
Robert Scoble:
Atari was there, too.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, Steve, his first job, Steve Jobs, Atari.
Robert Scoble:
Yes. Yeah, and I've talked to the guy who started Atari, too, so. Yeah, all sorts of fun stuff.
Ed Gaudet:
Cool. Cool.
Robert Scoble:
All right, yeah, but that got me to see the world, and I think, where you're going with patient safety is I've done all sorts of stuff and talked to a lot of hospital administrators because of my career and my books, mostly on spatial computing, which is augmented reality and AI, and that still hasn't really happened yet for consumers. Apple just announced its first one, which comes out next year, so we'll see how that does.
Ed Gaudet:
That will do well. I'm sure.
Robert Scoble:
It'll do well, but they can't make enough. So really, that first product is to get everybody excited. They're going to take like half the stores and use those for demo pods and get everybody excited about augmented reality so that when you see a product that Apple comes out with that you really want, like glasses, you're ready for it. So they're so disciplined and take such a long approach to things that other companies just can't.
Ed Gaudet:
Now, are you a screen guy? Screen or no screen on the VR Headset?
Robert Scoble:
Screen, screen. You don't want a screen?
Ed Gaudet:
No, I just, there's some, was it Argo design that, the no screen? Yeah.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, I don't know. I think screens are real important to be able to see the virtuality. There's glasses that don't have screens like Meta-RayBan have a partnership, and the RayBans only have a camera, they don't have a screen to avoid some of the freaky factor kind of things, but also to avoid just wearing out the battery because the small little batteries that go into glasses just, not quite there yet.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, Apple will figure out that, the motion sickness issues associated with VR.
Robert Scoble:
Oh, absolutely.
Ed Gaudet:
So, let's dive into your futuristic brain here for a second. It's 2024. What does the world look like from a technology perspective? Are we Blade Runner or Damnation Alley?
Robert Scoble:
I was thinking more like the movie Her.
Ed Gaudet:
There you go.
Robert Scoble:
Where you have an airpod in your ear, and you can talk to the AI, and the AI can talk back to you. We're already getting there. I'm using an AI called Pi, which Reid Hoffman started, and that has a relationship, you can talk to it, and it can talk to you about your life. That's interesting. A little bit too enthusiastic in its answers, right? Doesn't quite get to human level, but it's getting pretty close. So you can just see in a, over the next year or two, that these things are going to get better and better, and to the place where people are going to talk to them a lot.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, yeah. And what are the, have you thought through implications on in terms of healthcare delivery and in terms of ... W?
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, yeah, a few things. You can come at it a bunch of different ways. I worked with a company called Metaview, which came out of Cleveland Clinic, and they use HoloLens and built a special software for surgeons, right? So they're trying to make surgery safer for your patients because it'll show them where on the human body they can turn on their cutting tools, right? And they're overlaying the scans on top of your body using a whole bunch of AI, it's pretty cool stuff. That's one way to look at it. I've also done a psychiatrist therapy session, just a 30-minute therapy session, and she was using a system that listens to both of us and sends strips out all the personal identifiable information, and then sends that transcript over to ChatGPT, and along with 6 or 7 specialized prompts that a doctor wrote, and it spits back notes on your session, like really scientific detailed notes on what it picked up. Like it picked on my session, we talked about sexual abuse because I was sexually abused when I was a child, and talked about all sorts of issues I was dealing with in life and said, oh, you, it looks like you have PTSD, and it's almost starting to recommend treatments just from a 30-minute conversation, so it is absolutely incredible. So we start thinking about, oh, this is a new world where we're going to have AIs listening to us all the time, seeing, hearing things that, figuring out who we are. That can be used for good, and it can also be used for bad. And we have a whole bunch of arguing to do with HIPAA and all sorts of stuff to make sure that patients in this new world remain safe and that they feel safe to go to therapy or doctors in the future because they're going to be listened to by these AIs to do some really interesting things.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, really requires a new way of thinking about control of data from an opt-in, opt-out perspective. And the notion of HIPAA is irrelevant in ten years.
Robert Scoble:
It absolutely is, but it's going to be very different because the kinds of data that the HIPAA people were worried about 15 years ago when they were working on the original rules, they didn't know that there was an AI coming along that would review or read all your medical records or look at your scans from your MRIs or your CAT scans. And by the way, I had a full body MRI done at Nouveau, which is a new startup, cost 2500 bucks, and then the doctor walked through my brain looking for brain cancers or tumors, walked through my heart, looking for different problems, walked through all the, my organs, looking for different problems, and then looked through my legs and my toes, making sure that nothing was bad down there. The doctor who, the entrepreneur and doctor who set this up said, I'm training an AI to do this automatically. So you just go in and get a scan, and it'll tell you, oh, you have, looks like you have a hernia, you know, or it looks like you have a cancer tumor. You better go get that looked at more deeply. This would have saved my friend's life. I had a friend, his name was Brandon Wertz, and he had colon cancer when he was 40 years old, 39 years old, and the doctors missed it. And because he was too young for colon cancer, most people with colon cancer get it in after they're 60, which is why they ask you when you're 50 or 55 to start getting colonoscopy, getting a camera put up here, right, to figure out, do you have cancers up there? If he had a MRI, he would have been, the cancers would have been caught, and maybe would have been treatable. Colon cancer is very treatable if you catch it early enough. If it spreads because you missed it, that's hard to survive.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, yeah. Wow, a lot to unpack there. No pun intended.
Robert Scoble:
No, technology is changing medicine, isn't it?
Ed Gaudet:
It is. Imagine 2040, like it's getting an MRI is like going into a photo booth, the equivalent of going into a photo booth at Walmart or maybe in some mall.
Robert Scoble:
And you're going to have a variety of devices on you. We're wearing Apple watches and Fitbits and stuff like that. I have an Aura Ring on that watches certain vital signs, but those sensors are getting more and more detailed. I think, in the next year or two, that Apple's going to have one that does blood pressure. So now they can warn you, hey, looks like your blood pressure is up today, you better take some medicine or change your lifestyle and go see a doctor, you know?
Ed Gaudet:
What's the Aura Ring? What is that for?
Robert Scoble:
I have it in the other room. It's a ring with a bunch of sensors. It's like an Apple watch. It watches me sleep, watches me exercise, and gives me ...
Ed Gaudet:
Oxygen Saturation or?
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, it does the same shit that, I'm sorry, same stuff that the Apple Watch does.
Ed Gaudet:
That's okay. We do limited profanity on this show.
Robert Scoble:
Got to be safe for your audience, sir.
Ed Gaudet:
That's fine.
Robert Scoble:
No, it has a bunch of, it's just like an Apple Watch. It does basically the same kinds of things an Apple Watch does, but it's much smaller, so it's nicer to carry around, yeah.
Ed Gaudet:
Never heard of it. Which brings up this question, what's the best technology you've seen that never made it to market?
Robert Scoble:
Oh, man. You probably have seen a lot.
Ed Gaudet:
Anything come to mind?
Robert Scoble:
No, that's an interesting question because eventually, things come back. The problem is that there's a lot of things that were too early, right? Google Glass is a good example of that, right? It really didn't do anything, but everybody thought it did a lot of things, right? Like it would record you for 24 hours and know everything about you. No, it could record for 45 minutes and it didn't do as good as a GoPro camera on a ski helmet or something. That kind of, there's lots of examples of that where it was just too early, the technology just wasn't quite there, or it was the first one into the market, and they made a lot of mistakes because they're pioneers and trying to get something out. And then somebody like a company like Apple sits back and waits for them to just go away, or waits for them to show all the mistakes, and then comes in with a product that repositions everybody that existed before is lame, but Vision Pro, the new spatial computer they just announced is a good example of that. They had seven years to watch Meta with its Quest, make mistakes like put, Meta put crappy headphones in there so you can't really listen to music in it, at least not the way you're going to listen to music if you have one of these Apple headsets, and they made a lot of other mistakes that they, Apple, fixed; the screens, the chips in front of your eyes, Apple waited until Sony could put 5K chips in front of your eyes. The Quest only has 2K screens, so the Quest, you can't read text very well, so you can't use it for email, or Facebooking, or TweetDeck, and all the kinds of stuff that most people do at work. And so, right? So they can come in late and just come out with a really nice product, and that's Apple's modus operandi.
Ed Gaudet:
No, it's an interesting problem to solve, because, in some ways, I can imagine one of the problems is how do we keep it on longer? Like how do we make sure that it stays on longer? It's not just single-threaded, but it can be used for other things.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, it's still a problem with the Apple headset. This is 280 grams. It's still too heavy. After about an hour, you start noticing it a lot, right? So this is starting to become uncomfortable on your face, and they know this, right? They have, they know that the mass market won't buy until it gets to be something like a lightweight pair of glasses. Once it gets down to that form factor, people start understanding and be willing to put something on their face, but these first devices are big, and heavy, and clunky.
Ed Gaudet:
So over five years, what do you think?
Robert Scoble:
Closer to five.
Ed Gaudet:
Five? Yeah.
Robert Scoble:
Well, my friend at Unity says it's ten, which might make sense for the mass market. We're a long way from a perfect product that people are like, oh, I need a pair of those. And so it's a waste, but you're going to see a lot of innovation over the next five years. I think five years, me and you are wearing a pair of glasses, maybe a lot of doctors and nurses are wearing a pair of glasses, because...
Ed Gaudet:
I would definitely wear them.
Robert Scoble:
Certainly, if you're a surgeon or a nurse or walking into a patient's room, why don't you know everything about that patient as you're walking in the room? Why can't you talk to all the machines in the room, right? The machines keeping you breathing, the machines monitoring you, the machines dripping stuff into your bloodstream, right? Why can't you talk to all those machines and know what's going on the minute you walk in?
Ed Gaudet:
So many applications for, I imagine, I have three daughters, so you can imagine the dating application where the, my daughters have the glasses that tell you a good guy or a dirtbag.
Robert Scoble:
Maybe you're looking for a dirtbag.
Ed Gaudet:
There you go. That's true, too.
Robert Scoble:
There's some people who like that. They keep writing letters to people in prison trying to get a dirtbag, you know?
Ed Gaudet:
That is so true, Robert.
Robert Scoble:
I don't know.
Ed Gaudet:
All right.
Robert Scoble:
But you're absolutely right on, the AIs, so here's an example. If you ask GPT, right, this new AI that you can talk to on your phone, hey, give me ten restaurants near me, like within ten-minute drive. It does, it gives you a list. But if you say there's four other people in the car and here's their food preferences, it gives you a completely different set of ...
Ed Gaudet:
Exactly.
Robert Scoble:
Right? It's much more customized, much, much more personalized, much more accurate. And so we're going to figure out how to give these things some of our data to get better results back.
Ed Gaudet:
Plus, security versus convenience. There's always that balance of how much do I want to give away for the convenience of it.
Robert Scoble:
It turns out you're going to give it all away.
Ed Gaudet:
By the way, I completely agree with that. I believe that from day one, I just think people are.
Robert Scoble:
20 years from now, everybody's just going to ...
Ed Gaudet:
... matter, right? Then privacy, what does it matter? Because everyone's giving it away and we're all, it doesn't really matter. We're all authentic and we are ourselves, and it doesn't really matter that I've got.
Robert Scoble:
Let me count how many microphones I have just on the table in front of me. 3, 4, 5, 5 in one camera, that's 8, 9 in one headphone, right? So you just on my table have 15, 20 microphones, right? And are they listening to me? No, this camera is, right? And heck, we're on Zoom, so our voices are going through some servers, right?
Ed Gaudet:
Someone's listening to us, exactly.
Robert Scoble:
And you're recording this, so in five years, do you tell a new AI to go through all your Zoom recordings and look for patterns or look for? Then all of a sudden it's editing a new video of all your videos of the last?
Ed Gaudet:
I just use AI to create a headshot. Have you done that yet?
Robert Scoble:
Oh, yeah.
Ed Gaudet:
That's creepy as hell. It's crazy what's coming, pretty accurate and creepy at the same time.
Robert Scoble:
More pictures you give it, the better that can work, right?
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
Robert Scoble:
The more data you give the AI, the better.
Ed Gaudet:
The better it works. Speaking of creepy, what do you make of Threads?
Robert Scoble:
That's not creepy yet, although yeah, you have to do, you do have to sign the terms of service and give it all your data. Oh, Mark wants all my data. Okay. The microphones, the motion sensor, the location sensor, give it all. It has taken a chunk out of Twitter. It hasn't taken the whole thing, everybody's got Twitter's dead. Twitter actually got better because all of these people moved over to Threads and they tend to be people who hate Elon. So there's a community feel over there that's interesting, and it's very different, a little different than Twitter. The actual app is really nice. It's smooth, it's easy to read, all that. The onboarding process is nice for normal people because you can bring in your, it asks you to bring in all your Instagram friends. So would you like to follow all 4000 people you follow on Instagram? Oh sure, bring them all in. And in fact, it even shows you who hasn't yet joined Threads from it. It's made by Instagram, right? So it's tied with Instagram. And so you get your Instagram social graph pretty quick, finding other people who follow people on Instagram, followed them because they're good at visuals, right? They're, they have good furniture or art or photos or videos, right? They're good at that. It's not, Threads is more like Twitter, it's a text chat room, basically. It's, people who are good at photography don't necessarily translate to being good at Threads, right? So now you have to find new people to follow, and then there's just not the good, Twitter has really good muting tools. You can mute a word, right? So if you don't want to see Trump anymore, you can go into your settings, add Trump as a muted word.
Ed Gaudet:
That's cool, actually.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, it's really nice. Twitter is filterable and Threads is not yet.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah.
Robert Scoble:
And so Threads is noisier which because it's only a week old, that's okay, but in six months is noise going to matter? Yeah. In six months they'll have a filter and they'll have a better way to pick your friends, I'm sure.
Ed Gaudet:
Exactly. So you've done some work in healthcare. What advice would you give to new CISOs, new chief security officers, that are coming into healthcare, or aspiring ones?
Robert Scoble:
Oh, man. Learn the systems you got, and learn the regulations, and see what you can do to make your systems more secure. I'm not a good expert on that. There are lots of people who help you with security, and hospitals are getting hit with these viruses that are taking down their systems. And so, if so, who's up to date on building a resilient system? Now, that would be a good thing. I don't have advice to those people.
Ed Gaudet:
For not knowing and not having.
Robert Scoble:
If you have a CSO job at Kaiser Permanente or something like that, you better know your shit.
Ed Gaudet:
You gave pretty good advice right there, resiliency is so critical. And because the truth is, it's just not a matter of if, it's a matter of when you're going to get hit, at some point.
Robert Scoble:
You're going to get hit.
Ed Gaudet:
It's not possible to.
Robert Scoble:
Do you have everything backed up? Have you tested the system for getting backed up? Do you know how long it'll take you to get back up if, let's say, 40% of all your computers get shut down because everybody's clicking on a link and getting a virus, or getting one of these things that shuts down your computer, and then starts going after other things? Do you have a way to get back? You better have a plan for that. Do you have a plan for understanding your network traffic in deep detail? Is there a printer in the copy room that's spitting a lot of packets over to China? That might, something's a little wacky with that printer. So yeah, several of the security people have shown me systems like this where you can walk around your network once it's put into a system like this and really understand what's going on in your network and look for threats and look for anomalies and look for problems. Do you have a bleeding edge security system that protects your workers and knows what patterns to look for, right, and/or in your cloud computing, do you have honeypots that are triggers, right? If a hacker gets into your back end and starts downloading everybody's email, is there a way to catch that person? Is there a way to sense that person? Is there a way to kick them off? Is there a way to close down those ports without hurting your users, your customers?
Ed Gaudet:
Well said from someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Robert Scoble:
Even Israel, I've been in Israel a few times, so I've picked up a few things from those people because they checkpoint, and other companies came out of Israel for a reason because they have these problems that, at a nation-state.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, no, and everyone's stronger together, right? Everyone starts off at a very young age protecting Israel.
Robert Scoble:
Absolutely. And then do you have a way to make sure everything is updated on your systems? Are you still running Windows 95?
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, geez.
Robert Scoble:
There are, there's some of you out there that still, yeah, we're running.
Ed Gaudet:
We know. We know you're out there. We're going to find you.
Robert Scoble:
And it might be running a stupid ass machine, right, in a surgery room or something.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, yeah.
Robert Scoble:
That's a security threat, right? Because now that system can be hacked, therefore easier. Therefore, somebody is going to hack it and start using it to get in access into other things, right? So you have to make an inventory of do we have everything up to date? Is everything being professionally managed and all that? That's the CSO's job.
Ed Gaudet:
Pretty good, pretty good. If you weren't doing tech, any other, any things you're passionate about outside of tech?
Robert Scoble:
I love new things, actually. I fell in love with new things. I love, I learned TV early on, $130,000 TV camera. I'd probably be in TV or media anyways, and I love new things. If you tell me there's a new restaurant opening up, let's go. I don't want to eat the old ones, I've been there. I want to go to the new place.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah.
Robert Scoble:
And new things, media, I'd probably still be in there. I'm still into photography. I'm still playing. I have a new 360 camera from Insta360. I'm still playing with that, doing innovative media kind of stuff.
Ed Gaudet:
Nice. Okay, we're going to get a little personal here. If you could go back in time, what would you tell your 20-year-old self?
Robert Scoble:
Don't be an asshole.
Ed Gaudet:
Okay, best answer yet. Thank you. That's the best answer yet. Yes, it is, because it's real.
Robert Scoble:
I'd probably go back, and 20 years old and tell them about trauma, brain trauma, and the fact that you have to see a professional and really work at fixing your brain trauma, because that's really what caused me trouble and caused me to be an asshole here and there.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, I get it.
Robert Scoble:
You have sexual abuse, or if you were in a shooting, or have any kind of trauma, right? PTSD is caused by this kind of trauma in military people, right? If you have that kind of trauma, you need professional help and need to work on it, and I didn't work on it for decades. People, a lot of people who have sexual abuse, particularly men, they don't want to talk to anybody about it. They're ashamed of that. That is, I've had people come up to me at conferences and say, oh, after you admitted you had sexual abuse, I started talking to people completely.
Ed Gaudet:
I've been an alcoholic most of my life and recently went sober about a year and a half ago.
Robert Scoble:
That's a big deal.
Ed Gaudet:
It was a big deal.
Robert Scoble:
That's why we celebrate. You go to meetings, you know?
Ed Gaudet:
I do occasionally, but I've been.
Robert Scoble:
See, that's bad of me because Alcoholics Anonymous is, puts a lot of emphasis on anonymity. But you admitted you run.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, no, and my point was, I communicated. I put it on Facebook for a couple of reasons. And I was, your point you made, I was amazed at how many people reached out to me directly to say, wow, you inspired me. I had a problem, I didn't realize it, thanks so much. Or the courage of you saying that really made me look inwardly, and I've changed my, I just was completely blown away because I had no idea, and I was doing it more to keep myself honest. Like, I'm like, if I put it out there on Facebook now, I got to do it. I got to live it now.
Robert Scoble:
I studied addiction, my own addiction, and other people's addiction. A brain researcher in Israel said, people who have accountability to others have a high, much higher rate of sobriety than people who aren't. And so that's actually a legit trick to let other people know, hey, I'm having, I'm struggling here, I need help. And sure enough, people come out of the woodwork. People at conferences now, they come up with a glass of water for me or a Coke or something. And it's a subtle hint, Hey, we're watching you, you know?
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, I know.
Robert Scoble:
You don't need to go to the bar. We're keeping you away from the bar.
Ed Gaudet:
The thing we all share is we're all human. At the end of the day, we all are human. We all have our own struggles. Everyone has their own struggle. That's why it's, be kind, because you never know what the other person's going through, and most likely, they're going through a lot more shit than you are. And so I appreciate that, and I appreciate you, and I appreciate your honesty and openness.
Robert Scoble:
That's why we go to meetings to hear.
Ed Gaudet:
That's why we go to meetings. That's right. That's right.
Robert Scoble:
Shit, man. My problems are smaller than your problems.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, no, you're right.
Robert Scoble:
Kill somebody, right?
Ed Gaudet:
That's part of it. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly.
Robert Scoble:
There's people in meetings. You have to stand up and say, I got in this program because I had an accident and killed somebody.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, so that's awful.
Robert Scoble:
I didn't have that problem, right?
Ed Gaudet:
No, me either. Amen. Riskiest thing you've ever done? I'd be remiss if I didn't ask her, right? This is the Risk Never Sleeps Podcast.
Robert Scoble:
Other than telling my boss, Steve Ballmer, that he was wrong in public on my blog?
Ed Gaudet:
I've done that, that's not risky.
Robert Scoble:
That can end badly. And it didn't, he had to apologize in public in a week, but that was some sort of risk. Oh, man.
Ed Gaudet:
That's crazy.
Robert Scoble:
Bringing a child into this life...
Ed Gaudet:
That's risky, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, typically people will say I jumped off a bridge or I skydived or.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, in terms of physical risk, I like skiing, but I never was into jumping off things like some of my friends were, and some of my friends really liked it. Oh, there's a cliff, let's go off of it. No, that's on me.
Ed Gaudet:
You didn't do any helicopter skiing?
Robert Scoble:
I'm a fairly risk-averse kind of guy, at least with the physicality, partly because my eyes suck. I haver really bad eyes, so the chances that I'm going to nail a jump, just not there. So I like those groomed slopes, intermediate slopes there. I'll stay off the weird stuff. I take my risks with trying to get somebody interesting to say something like what you're doing, trying to change the world with technology, or going into Bill Gates's office and telling them he's wrong. I did a couple of times.
Ed Gaudet:
I noticed there's a doll, is that a doll on the shelf behind me? What is that?
Robert Scoble:
It's the Channel Nine guy.
Ed Gaudet:
No, the other, the red, the person in the red.
Robert Scoble:
Oh, yeah. I had a, High fidelity, which Philip Rosedale made Second Life, but he had a PR thing for a while, and he scanned me with a 3D scanner.
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, that's cool.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, and then they printed me out on a 3D printer.
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, that's really cool.
Robert Scoble:
I had this, if you're listening to audio, I have no idea what, but I have a little, I don't know, a nine-inch high version of myself. I went into a studio which had a room with, I don't know, 50 cameras, and I stood in there and 50 cameras shot, and then that made a volumetric model and then that could get sent over to a 3D printer company and print me out. And now I can use this to be inside VR, like an avatar.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, oh, that's cool. From a distance, I thought it was like a stretch Armstrong, if you remember that toy when you were a kid, if you ever played.
Robert Scoble:
Oh yeah, the stretch Armstrong, yeah. Let's do this 3D printing stuff for the tops of wedding cakes, right? They get boyfriend or girlfriend into one of these 3D scanners, and then they'll print a 3D scan of them holding hands or something like that.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, yeah. They made protective gear during the pandemic with 3D printing, because they were out of it. So they some CIOs that were really intuitive, inventive, and creative, they leveraged 3D printing to do that, which I thought was awesome. So you and I talked about this before we recorded, I won't say what club, but we belong to a similar club. So I got to ask you, a top five musical albums on a desert island. What would they be?
Robert Scoble:
Oh, man, that's so hard for me to pick because I'm the world's largest collection of Dolby Atmos music, surround sound spatial audio music, and I have almost 100,000 tracks in my playlist.
Ed Gaudet:
Me too, but I have 5000 CDs, and I burned them all in this...
Robert Scoble:
I love Skrillex and I love Swedish House Mafia, so.
Ed Gaudet:
That's great, all right, all right.
Robert Scoble:
I went to Coachella four times. I always loved electronic music and EDM kind of music, but my playlists have everything from classical to church music to jazz music, to rock and roll, to quiet atmospheric and meditation music.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah.
Robert Scoble:
So it's hard for me to pick one.
Ed Gaudet:
What was some, what were some of the best shows you've been to live shows?
Robert Scoble:
Oh, man, Kiss was pretty good.
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, I love Kiss. Now we're connecting, Detroit Rock City, great album.
Robert Scoble:
Kiss was pretty good. Jason Derulo, I was in the front row with my wife and he was like two feet from me, dancing, sweating, spraying his DNA all over us. That was pretty good. A lot of screaming, a lot of screaming.
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, that's cool, that's cool.
Robert Scoble:
I've been to 150 concerts, so let me think. I've been to The Who, which is pretty insane.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, it. Who is great. Did you go to, you mentioned Coachella. Did you go to Desert Trip when they had it out there?
Robert Scoble:
No, no.
Ed Gaudet:
The three day, they called it old-chella.
Robert Scoble:
Oh, yeah. I watched a piece of that, that looked really amazing.
Ed Gaudet:
It was great, yeah, I went to it, it was amazing. Six concerts in three days. Um, Stones, Dylan, The Who, Roger Waters, Paul McCartney. Um, yeah, it was great.
Robert Scoble:
That's pretty epic. Yeah, that's hard to beat. Who had the best concert, that's an interesting one. Glitch Mob at Coachella was pretty interesting, it was pretty amazing. Yeah, because it was in the Sahara. So Coachella has seven venues, right? And then one is like Arcade Fire and that kind of music, and the Sahara tent is all electronic music. Glitch Mob is the one that GoPro used in their videos. If you've seen a GoPro video, that's, the song that's playing is Glitch Mob. And there was so many people who wanted to get into the Sahara tent that the pressure was immense, right? You couldn't move. And at one point the crowd started jumping and it was like a carpet of humans coming at you.
Ed Gaudet:
Awesome.
Robert Scoble:
And you didn't even have to jump, and you were jumping because everybody,
Ed Gaudet:
You press so close together.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, that's great.
Ed Gaudet:
I used to go to a lot of punk shows when I was younger, and so I know that feeling.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, exactly. Get into the mosh pit.
Ed Gaudet:
Mosh pit, yeah.
Robert Scoble:
Go hit some people.
Ed Gaudet:
He called it slam dancing back then, but.
Robert Scoble:
There we go.
Ed Gaudet:
It evolved. It evolved like everything else.
Robert Scoble:
Look, I don't know. I've been to South by 25 times. I've seen so many really great musicians. Here's one for you. So a friend of mine and I were walking around New Orleans. He lives in New Orleans, he's a lawyer there. Ernie the attorney is his blog name. And we were walking around on a Saturday, he goes, oh, time passes to the House of Blues Foundation room, I'm a member there, and I think Buddy Guy is playing tonight. I go, it gets worse. I go, this was like at 4 p.m. on a Saturday, I go, who's Buddy Guy? There he goes, dude, Buddy Guy's just like one of the best guitar players alive, right?
Ed Gaudet:
Are you being serious or?
Robert Scoble:
I was being serious.
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, no.
Robert Scoble:
I didn't know who Buddy Guy was. All right, it gets better. So the foundation room is on the top floor looking down at Buddy Guy playing on the stage. So we were sitting around drinking, enjoying that. At one point, Buddy Guy has an unplugged, he has a wireless microphone and a wireless guitar. He gets off the stage, goes, and plays all the way through the crowd. There's 2000 people down on the first floor. So he walks through all those people saying hi, playing, walks up the stairs, walks all the way around the balcony, and sits right next to me. And so his fingers are like couple of inches from my eyes. And for a song and a half, he's just sitting there playing and I'm looking at his fingers a foot away from him. And two hours earlier I had no idea who he was.
Ed Gaudet:
We have to get to Chicago and go to his, go to the Buddy Guy's place. You never know who walks in there. I've been there, like mayor's walked in and played with him and others. Great place, too. Great venue, too.
Robert Scoble:
If you go to New Orleans, anybody, make sure you go to Preservation Hall. Don't, go there first before you get your beignets at Caffe, go to, because, you might want to go back, first of all, you might go, this is, I've been to some concerts there that are just like.
Ed Gaudet:
Oh, I know all of New Orleans.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, bro, a love letter to New Orleans that was printed in the newspaper. My wife and I hooked up in New Orleans, so there's.
Ed Gaudet:
Can I find it online?
Robert Scoble:
Maybe. I don't even know how to find it.
Ed Gaudet:
Do you still have it? I won't read it.
Robert Scoble:
I'd have to look for it, but yeah. It was a few years. The collision conference used to be down there, and plus, my wife and I used to play in conferences and we used to have a conference, a couple conferences down there.
Ed Gaudet:
Yeah, a special place for sure.
Robert Scoble:
It's a dirty, dingy, crappy place, but you'll have the best food of your life. You'll see the best music of your life. You'll see like a ... of your life. If you're in art, like a block away from Bourbon Street are some really amazing galleries that you have to get invited into, but oh man.
Ed Gaudet:
Faulkner's Bookstore, Faulkner, The Faulkner Bookstore is one of my favorite bookstores in the world. Yeah, it's all good.
Robert Scoble:
We didn't talk about protecting people's.
Ed Gaudet:
We didn't need to. We didn't need to. This is the beauty of this podcast. We are talking about whatever we want to talk about.
Robert Scoble:
Oh, man.
Ed Gaudet:
Thank you. I know you got a hard stop. Thank you very much for your time. Appreciate you, this has been terrific and I'm sure my listeners will get a lot of interesting insight, and, for someone that doesn't know security.
Robert Scoble:
Knowing, I do have a Twitter list of all the CSOs. I read up what they're tweeting about because when they have a problem, they're all, they do interesting blogs and tweets about the security problem of the day. Out of that, I recommend to my friends, spend an hour a month just doing research on security. Figuring out how to increase your passwords, right? How to come up with a better password, how to update your firewall on your Macintosh, right? All sorts of little things like that. You do that for a year, you're going to get, increase your security so that you're less likely to get hit by one of these problems that's coming along.
Ed Gaudet:
We call that cyber hygiene.
Robert Scoble:
Yeah, and most people don't do it.
Ed Gaudet:
And that's right.
Robert Scoble:
This is the problem. And how many people have passwords that are simply passwords?
Ed Gaudet:
2, 2, 8.
Robert Scoble:
Right? And so if you do a little bit of Google searching, you'll find out how to build a passphrase, how to increase your security a little bit. A lot of people are like, oh, you need to worry about that, Scoble, because you have a big audience and you're a big footprint. No, you need to worry about it because don't you have money in your bank account? You know, that's what they're after. They're not after my follower count. Some aren't, most are after the money. So you got to worry about this if you're a part of modern society, and most people don't.
Ed Gaudet:
Amen. All right, sir, I appreciate you. Thank you for your time. This is Ed Gaudet signing off on the Risk Never Sleeps Podcast. And if you're on the front lines protecting patient safety, remember, stay vigilant because risk never sleeps.
Robert Scoble:
Thanks for listening to Risk Never Sleeps. For the show notes, resources, and more information on how to transform the protection of patient safety, visit us at Censinet.com. That's C E N S I N E T.com. I'm your host, Ed Gaudet, and until next time, stay vigilant because Risk Never Sleeps.
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