Todd Marco’s Post

. Seed of Loop Earplugs . #Live #Love #Unite #Sacred #Geometry

The baby & the bathwater… I’ve worked with strong-arming “gotcha artists” and also watched “gripe & swipe” play out shamelessly throughout my career. In my experience, these “ego-driven assholes” (to use Tony Fadell’s term) were more common at Apple than elsewhere. I never encountered a single “asshole” at Google, but ran into plenty of “nayplayers” intent on dismissal in order to maintain status quo. These disingenuous tactics, described by Eric Weinstein in his recent JRE episode with Terrence Howard, masquerade as the Crown of Intelligence & the Defense of Rigor but are more genuinely Weapons of Politics & Barriers to Innovation. If you can make a person seem so small that they might actually fit down the drain, you can throw them out with the bathwater. “The mainstream is our official cult,” as Weinstein put it. And I love his cautionary note, “We fooled ourselves into thinking we understood electromagnetism until the late 1950s, which is one of the reasons that you [should] listen to your heterodox colleagues as opposed to making fun of them mercilessly, because you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are.” How many times have we seen with our own eyes or held in our own hands a thing once staunchly believed to be “impossible?” How many times have you heard an engineer reference “the laws of physics” with a hand wave dismissal of a proposal, as if the laws of physics were understood in full and in depth by the naysaying engineer? Remember, paraphrasing Feynman & other giants: “Anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy…” So perhaps it’s worthwhile to recall the voice of Steve Jobs, and the backdrop of faces over which he heralded that “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” A couple days ago I finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, who is in great company with other eccentric polymath subjects like Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Throughout the book, Isaacson repeatedly stressed that Da Vinci’s genius was arguably more empowered than encumbered by his fluid blurring of fantasy & reality. Amid the countless errors, missteps, and dead ends were hidden masterpieces, innovations and breakthroughs left undiscovered until the ages were prepared to reveal them, sometimes centuries later. You might say that if the mainstream is our official cult, reality is our official fantasy. In a bath as murky & expansive as an ocean, you may miss the baby but you can’t drain the tub. As the surviving infants then mature into adulthood through the ages, their descendents & successors are the ones who must separate wheat from chaff. It is not the job of contemporaries, who are blinded by the ignorance of present knowledge, to judge a complex mind and cast its fate; their effort is more fruitfully spent learning from and competing fairly with the minds to which they are exposed. https://lnkd.in/gbE7mY3r

Sound is literally all around us all the time, inescapable for better or worse. You can close your eyes for refuge from disturbing or overwhelming sights, but sound is much harder to block so completely. Even in sleep your hearing remains active, ready to wake you at the threatening sound of a lurking tiger or a snoring partner. Despite being a lifelong lover of loud music, playing in bands and attending countless concerts, I hadn’t thought a whole lot about earplugs other than that they sucked and I didn’t want to wear them. But I accepted the job at Loop Earplugs already enthusiastic about the future of “hearables,” or more aptly “smart earwear,” and then almost suddenly, even before starting, began to realize how transformative it can be to have a volume knob for day to day life. Fortunately, when I tried Loop earplugs for the first time, I was very pleased to discover that they definitely don’t suck! And it only gets better from here ;) Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but there seems to be a growing awareness of the power of sound to impact (negatively or positively) our emotional states, mental wellbeing, and even our physical health. These 3 essential elements of our existence are, in fact, intimately & intrinsically interconnected. It was with all this in mind that the cover of this local weekly caught my eye. I opened it to read the first 2 paragraphs then nodded my head as if to say, “yea ok, so it’s not just me” In the author’s words: “I am sitting at my home office desk, researching the local sound bathing scene, when a sudden blast of searing clatter makes my head swim. I reach for the ear plugs kept close for such occasions, knowing the neighbor’s gardeners will finish their auditory assault on errant leaves in 30 minutes or so. In a world where the level of noise continues to rise, leaving our already overloaded senses in a terminal state of imbalance, a sound bath sounds like a very good remedy.” https://lnkd.in/guUk8n6y #earplugs #sound #hearing #health #soundbathing

Napster days all over again. I’m excited to watch this play out. Seems clear that the suits at the majors are gonna wage lawsuit wars against 3rd party innovation while they scramble to innovate on their own terms. Napster evolved into the iTunes Store, which evolved into Pandora, which evolved into Spotify. The transistor radio evolved into the Walkman, which evolved into the iPod, which evolved into the iPhone. What’s next? There’s no guarantee that Spotify on smartphones will remain dominant in the emerging new paradigm. AllPeople Corporation was established in pursuit of a vision anticipating this new paradigm. Spawn & Wave provide a novel alternative to smartphone streaming music platforms, leveraging AI initially for content curation and ultimately one day also for on-demand personalized music generation. #AI #audio #music #industry Udio Suno Spotify https://lnkd.in/gjmBHQcB

For as long as humans have been around, possibly longer, people have used vibrating objects to generate meaningful sound. Around 167 years ago, sound made a massive temporal jump, bridging past, present, and future by crossing from the acoustic domain into the realm of material encoding. Around 67 years ago, sound made a giant encoding jump, enabling people to use computers to generate audio by leaving the analog domain to instead originate sound from the realm of digital circuitry. We seem to now be on the cusp of the next evolutionary leap of sound, bridging human & machine by enabling computers to autonomously generate sound and, more importantly, the meaning encoded within it. We can and will continue to have both scholarly & emotional debates about what it means to be alive, to be conscious, to be human. But as computers continue to evolve & learn, they will undoubtedly one day be so adept at thinking, speaking, singing, playing that we will not legitimately be able to deny them personhood. What’s more is the high likelihood of synergistic co-evolution, whereby the destinction between human & machine becomes increasingly difficult to define. As we approach this evolutionary inflection point, it may behoove us to embody the wisdom of Dr. Suess when he wrote, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” I don’t know if any other hominins ever learned to speak or sing or play music, but I know for sure Homo sapien is the only surviving species of the genus. Unless the Gods lament the extinction of the people with whom we once shared this taxonomy group, I doubt they’ll lament the passing of our species either, so long as the evolutionary transformation continues beautifully & unabated. 🎼 I, for one, can’t wait to hear the music of the future 🎶 https://lnkd.in/gjcsN4VV #human #computer #AI #people #sound #audio #music #language #evolution #extinction #transformation

Yesterday I had an interesting thought for a potential financial & investment structure for AllPeople Corporation that, to my knowledge, is pretty unique. The company was founded as a Public Benefit Corporation, very intentionally not a C Corp or non-profit. None of us are doing this for the money, yet money remains a vital catalyst for development, manufacturing, and distribution. In the near-term, all team members are contributing as volunteers for the joy of it and for the learning & growth opportunities it affords them. Longer-term, most of us seem to be motivated by a desire to will our vision towards fruition. Money is, for the most part, both a barrier to entry and a potential catapult once we scale. What if prospective investors weren’t incentivized by profit either? What if their motivations were aligned with ours, to bring this vision to the world? What if investor funds were repaid with a fixed interest rate and repaid in the order in which they were received? What if every dollar invested and the source & date of that investment was publicly disclosed, along with the date (or anticipated future date) of repayment? What if active investors (e.g. ones with money still on the line) received voting rights proportional to their active financial investment, without owning shares? What if company shares were rendered financially immaterial & governmentally impotent, such that the corporation was led not by shareholders but by the active developers & investors? What if more influence was alloted to those that had earned it via contribution, rather than those that received it due to perceived status? Worst case, it fails miserably and we pivot to a more traditional financial structure. But what it it worked? We might end up with financial solvency and sustainable growth, without corporate profits being siphoned by fat cats. Profit would be inherently reinvested in the company, self-funding development efforts. This, to me, sounds like a worthwhile consideration for a Public Benefit Corporation like AllPeople Corporation. https://allpeoplewave.org This isn’t just an academic exercise. When our PCB design is ready to fab in the near future, we’re gonna have to decide how to fund the material expenditures. If you’ve read this far through this post, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or DM. #corporate #finance #business #economics #capitalism #benefitcorp

The AntiPhone category, which includes companies like Humane, rabbit inc., and Light, strike me as a small group of crazy rebels & troublemaking misfits. My kinda company! Far from the crowded mainstream, these visionaries see the deficiencies in the status quo and take bold risks to reinvent a new way. They are fundamentally different from the big heads & cool kids that dominate the conference rooms at Big Tech companies like Apple & Google. The brutal launches of Humane’s AiPin & Rabbit’s R1 have been painful to witness, for the entire category of AntiPhone fan & supporters. But flawed launches are not necessarily death blows. More concerning to me are the reports about certain internal workings within both of these companies that are effectively poison and are hopefully unfounded. And so, it is perhaps with bated breath that we see the newest launch in this category, Light Phone III. Rather than an AiPhone, this product is positioned more in the dumbphone category. Yet somehow it feels offensive & inappropriate to call Light’s devices dumbphones, even though this designation applies perfectly to various flip phones and numberpad phones that offer similarly stripped down feature sets. The key here, I think, is the talent of Kaiwei Tang & team in distillation. Rather than envisioning what an innovative modern phone can do & can be, the intention is to re-envision what an innovative modern phone needs to do and needs to be. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler” - Einstein https://lnkd.in/gvNtQizh

I wish I could say that Siri’s come a long way since 2011, but I’m not really sure it has. As Apple’s virtual assistant becomes a teenager, let’s hope its splashy new refresh brings with it a massive growth spurt. Crazy to think that Siri was introduced 3 years before Amazon Echo & 5 years before Google Assistant, yet Apple fell fast behind its rivals in the virtual assistant space, in terms of performance & functionality. Will Apple be able to leapfrog now? I can only imagine we’ll soon see similarly splashy LLM revamps of Alexa & Assistant, so I’m not sure I’d put my money on Apple to stay ahead in this particular race. Regardless, substantial improvements to today’s digital voice assistants are desperately needed and long overdue. Let’s hope we’re not being teased yet again… ——— “For decades, technologists have teased us with this dream that you’re gonna be able to talk to technology and it’ll do things for us. Haven’t we seen this before, over and over? But it never comes true! We have very limited capability. You just learn a syntax. ‘Call a name,’ ‘dial a number,’ ‘play a song.’ It is such a let down! What we really wanna do is just talk to our device! Ask a simple question. ‘What’s the weather gonna be like today?’ and get a response. In fact, we don’t wanna be told how to talk to it. We wanna talk to it however we like! Someone else might ask, ‘Will it rain in Cupertino?’ or ‘Is the weather gonna get worse today?’ or ‘Do I need an umbrella today?’ And your device, in this case your phone, will figure out what you mean and help you get what you want done. That’s a feature of the iPhone 4S we call Siri. Siri is your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.” - Phil Schiller October 2011 Siri launch event https://lnkd.in/gURwddFR #Siri #AI #LLM #voice #assistant #Alexa

Ok, first off, I freakin love that Phil’s rockin an OG iPod from the cockpit 🛩️🎶 Second off, I’m glad to see Apple leverage OpenAI rather than restrict iOS to their own proprietary AI 👏 But why, among all the spotlighting & back patting at the dog & pony show was there absolutely no mention whatsoever about use of “Apple Intelligence” or Siri & “personal context” for improved music curation in Apple Music?! I’ve been watching these sorts of Apple keynotes since the days when new iPod models & features were the main draw. Over the years, despite music being deeply part of Apple’s DNA 🎼🧬 and audio being a primary realm of innovation, it sometimes feels like music is viewed as a “solved problem.” “You have all the world’s music at your fingertips, what more could you want?!” But see, having access to more content doesn’t make it easier to select what you wanna hear next - it makes it harder. This is why we founded AllPeople Corporation, to leverage advances in AI & hardware design to build an open-source ecosystem for music curation and an iPod-like dedicated audio player (Wave) on which to enjoy it. It seems clear that Apple’s not particularly interested in doing this, and rather than wait around for others to maybe carry it forward, we figure it’s best to take Tony Fadell’s advice and just #Build it! https://allpeoplewave.org