YouSaid · the spoken record

Joi Ito

lines on the record: 80
first: 2019-06-26
most recent: 2019-06-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The name of her group is Janan's group, is conformable decoder. Conformable decoders. So these are things like pacemaker powered by something that goes around your heart or something. Your brain is actually really hard to implant things in. I mean, we've wanted to do it for a long time, but it's tricky. And then we have people who are working on how to power these things, how to get signal out of these things. And so a lot of the work is also around the interfaces between the human body and electronics.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that you can use it for doing things like finding Zika or trying to create mice that are resistant to ticks or things like that. But it also has a lot of risks because editing whole populations of genes, what could go wrong. And so a lot of his efforts have been in trying to figure out how to do community consent, building safety systems and things like that. And that's something, for instance, that couldn't really happen in a traditional genetics lab, because a lot of it is social. So he joined after I joined. We're doing conformable decoders is implantable. So instead of wearables, these are things that power themselves by the beating of the heart. So explain what that.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the really interesting stuff that I think we're going to do is stuff that we haven't really thought of yet. So I think I'll point that out. And let's see. So in the life sciences, for instance, Kevin Esfeldt, who is one of the inventors of CRISPR gene drive, which is the technology that allows edited gene to be inherited by all of the offspring.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, I'll say the key for the Media Lab is to always try to do the stuff that other people wouldn't do. And if other people start doing it, we stop it. So we were really into wearables in the 80s and that's less of it. And so when we do a search, we're always looking for, often for things that we haven't yet thought.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Identity of the Media Lab, not MIT. Whereas I came from the outside and I saw all these really wonderful people and resources inside of MIT. So I've been sort of pushing the Media Lab back closer to MIT, I think.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is the social consequences and bringing social sciences in, things like that? So that's one. I've grown it. So a lot of it was just blocking and tackling some of the issues around accounting and dealing with members. So it's doubled in size and things like that. But we also, you know, and this wasn't me. I mean, the previous director had started to go into life sciences, but I'd say a pretty healthy chunk, maybe 30 or more than that, maybe 40% of the projects have something to do with life sciences. And we've launched a space initiative. We've created a digital currency initiative. We've created a bunch of different things like that. And we've, I think, probably integrated it more into MIT than it was before. I think this is also personality because Nicholas came from MIT. So he sort of made the”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't want to take responsibility for the changes, really. I think that the Media Lab had wanted to do a lot of things and I have facilitated them. And I think one of them is really that it was created an explosion of techno-utopianism. And the students and a lot of the faculty, not all of them, have wanted the Media Lab to become more reflective and to think about”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was so confused. I didn't understand anything. And I said, I have to understand this part of the world. So I got a place and just started hanging out. So for me, and this is similar to the Media Lab, my sister's an academic until recently when I said something was academic, it was meant as a pejorative. And so when they asked if I was interested, my answer is just about anything like that is sure I'm interested. And so I went to visit. And when I visited, I realized this is really different from what I thought was as academia. And so it was through that first meeting that I realized that this was possibly a really interesting place for me to hang out.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a place in Dubai. I was still investing. I was running around the world investing. I was going around the world literally twice in Dubai. Yeah, an apartment in Dubai. So this is a good example. I went to Bahrain.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Creative Commons was created by Lawrence Lessig and a bunch of other really smart people before I joined. And it was this idea that with the internet, you had the ability to share content and build on the work of others. But because of a lot of the copyright restrictions that the big media companies in Hollywood were putting on, even though people wanted to share the technology was preventing it. So the idea of Creative Commons was to mark your work with the permissions you wanted to grant. So you can use this as much as you want as long as you provide attribution and to build that into the code so that people could”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I was concerned about certain things. I was very concerned about privacy. You'll be proud of me. I won the lifetime achievement award yesterday from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. I'm getting that age where now I'm getting lifetime awards. So I was concerned about things like privacy, but I was generally optimistic. And I remember in 2000 and I don't remember the year now, four or so, a bunch of us who were just talking on the blogs thought about this idea of, we called it emergent democracies. I wrote this paper together with a bunch of other people called emergent democracy. And this is sort of before Arab Spring. So we had this idea that Instead of just mainstream media and polling, we could have conversations online and that we could talk directly to government and that there would be a future public sphere and that democracy was going to change. We thought it was going to change for the better. And when Arab Spring started, we said, here it comes. And I remember going to Tunisia like a week after the revolution kind of as, and I was CEO of Creative Commons at the time, just sort of said.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to sort of shatter this Genesis story. You're like the founder of Bitcoin. We found you again. We're very disappointed. But you were investing. You were doing all kinds of things. And again, we're prominently talking about the concepts of what was happening. How did you look at the internet then? Because I want to sort of talk a little bit about how it's now and then what you're doing. Yes, I was, it was.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For people who needed to quit drinking, really. And then one of my friends created a website called We Quitrinking, which became sort of an online AA. And it was this whole community of people who were supporting each other, sort of pseudonymously sharing journals. And then the FAQ, it says, you know, this site, the origin of this site was this guy who quit drinking and wrote about it. We all found each other. And so I still to this day, although now with this podcast I'm outing it, I now occasionally drink, but I don't walk about it because I don't want to sort of shatter this Genesis story.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most investors. But also, it wasn't very crowded. All the carpet baggers were gone because they thought the party was over. And there were very few investors. Ev was there. A bunch of us were hanging out. You were there. And we just started blogging. I remember when I, it was the early days of Google too. So bloggers got the best search results. Like I remember writing a silly blog post saying, is Diet Coke bad for you? And when you search for Diet Coke, it was the first result. Or when I quit drinking for a while, I wrote a blog post that said, I quit drinking. And when you search for quit drinking, it was a first result. And what was funny was that in the comments, people started. Sharing all their things. And it became the comment section of my blog became a support group.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And when blogging came out, it was around when I started pivoting a little bit towards investing. So I invested in Flickr and later Twitter. And I was mostly interested in social media. I unfortunately passed on YouTube and didn't get into Facebook. But it was interesting because when blogging started, if you remember, a lot of it was that you had all these unemployed smart engineers who had a lot to say. And they just wrote their own software. Even the founders of Six Apart had been laid off and they said, well, we're going to do our own thing. And so right after the bubbles, it was like early 2000s, I had raised a fund and I started investing in Silicon Valley. So the Gadfly part of it was that there really weren't that in that you were an idea.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but anyway, these were two massive concepts of what was about to come. It was Facebook to Tinder to everything that was going to happen, but this was the idea of community and connection and using computers to do so And linking people by their groups and stuff like that. So that was the concept. In your early days, you were an investor, right? You went around. You were kind of a gadfly in a lot of ways.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Which One of them, or was it Mark Pinkins? No, no, no. Well, Reed and I invested, and Six Apart was in San Francisco, I can't remember the name of the company.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was around. Yeah, it had a lot of concepts of I am here, I want to have a beer in this part of Tokyo. Do you want to meet me? And it wasn't just friends, it was just anybody. So it was suspending belief that you could meet anybody just anywhere. There was a lot of trust to it. And then sixth part was that you could be linked to anybody, which was really interesting. That was in Cambridge. Amazon ended up buying it, which was interesting. I think it was Amazon. Or was it Mark Pinkis?”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am free. I have free time now. And I remember it blowing my mind. Like I remember thinking there were two, it was used to six apart and ima, ema. And they were, one was, I am here, which was it would locate people who you could hang out with, right? It was sort of...”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember when I met you, you were sort of had all kinds of ideas. You were the first person who really did talk about this idea of online communities. You introduced me. I remember when I was in Japan to a company called Imahima, if you remember. Which was I am here, right? That's what it means.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and in fact, you know, when I was in high school in Tokyo and I was 16, people didn't know I was a kid. And I remember when I was, I think, 15, I went to, this is before the internet, but this was the source and these online services. I went to a wedding. And, you know, we had people who had met for the first time showing up. The best man had met for the first time. And so I thought, you know, in the early days of online communities that this is going to change the world and if we could just connect everybody else, we'd have world peace or something like that.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've always been interested in parties and communities and just subcultures. And when I dropped out of the University of Chicago, I became a disc jockey in a nightclub. And the reason I dropped out was I realized that there was a kind of a monoculture.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Went online and chatted a sysadmin, they would, and you said you're some kid from Japan, they'd give you access to everything. And if you emailed professors, they would reply. And so I found that I could meet just about anybody I needed to meet on the internet. And I could sort of cludge together my own education. And in fact, there weren't very many classes about online communities and things like that. So I dropped out of college and I just started doing startups, internet startups. I started doing a lot of internet governance too. So I did things like ICANN and Creative Commons. And so I was really interested in the sort of nonprofit structure of how the internet and communities came together.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to college twice. I went to Tufts and I went to University of Chicago. And I was interested in computer networking. You grew up. I grew up, well, I was born in Japan, grew up in Michigan, went back to Japan for junior high, and then came to the United States for college. And this is sort of early 80s. So this is when computer networking was just started, when the internet just started. And I was interested in communities and in music and in networks. And there just weren't programs like that. And the other thing that was interesting is this is the early days of the internet. went to”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Joined a little over eight years ago, and this was when they were doing a search. Initially, Nicholas Negroponti, who was the founding director and actually Megan reached out to me and they were. And I was on a bus and she said, hey, would you want to be director of the Media Lab? And I said, yes. But then they looked at my resume, which says that I didn't even get an undergraduate degree. And they said, well, this probably isn't going to work. And so they went through a whole process. For months, and I guess they went through lots of candidates, but they didn't find one that worked. So they scraped the bottom of the barrel and picked up my resume and said, come in for some interviews.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sometimes we tell them things they don't want to hear. So in the early days of high definition in Japan, the Media Lab said you're doing it all wrong. It's going to be progressive digital. It's not going to be this analog thing. And they were very unhappy, but we turned out to be right. These days, I think a lot of times it's not even about technology. We have Hollywood companies that are members, but when they did the SOPA PIPA bill, which was this anti-copyright bill, we formally went against it. And these days, I think more and more, I mean, I think the media that was very techno-utopian when it first started, but I think there's a huge chunk of the media lab that's critical of technology these days. And so we're often criticizing the companies that support us. I think almost”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yeah, all of the students have to build the thing they're talking about. And because it's so interdisciplinary, we use the term antidisciplinary, the building of the thing is the way you sort of explain what it is you're doing because it's hard to explain it when you have three different disciplines trying to work together. And then also MIT was traditionally more of a government-funded institution and the Media Lab kind of pioneered this consortium model of corporate funding. We're corporate funded, but the other part about the Media Lab is we don't do what they tell us to do. Yeah, we're kind of a hedge against being wrong. So we often discover things that we do things that they wouldn't otherwise do.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seymour Peppert, who was an educator, was one of the founders, and he had this idea called constructionism, which is learning through doing. So we often say learning through construction rather than instruction. And so the reason we were able to get the lab and the academic program together is instructed in classes, we learn through doing projects. And so the projects are funded by a consortium of over 80 companies.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the Media Lab is a weird Of MIT because normally you have labs which do the research and you have academic programs that do the degrees and the tenure and things. And they're usually at tension like church and state. And the Media Lab is both an academic program. The program in Media Arts and Sciences, as well as a lab. And it was created over 30 years ago by the then president of MIT Jerry Wiesner, Nicholas Nigerponte, and a few founding faculty. And Jerry Wiesner sort of fondly called it the Department of None of the Above.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think the solution is not going to be to go into Silicon Valley and convince them through argument. I think it really is about coming up with a different narrative outside. I do think, though, that there is definitely a movement. So you see like the TechWomp Build It movement, which is the employees saying we don't want our companies doing this. You see consumers starting to say, you know, I like Lyft because of this. And so I think values will change. And so I think it's going to change kind of bottom up. And I think it's going to change from things like the Parkland kids who wake up and tell people what they think. To recode decode. Can I amend your introduction a little bit? Sure. Because it is part of MIT.”
2019-06-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT