iPhone Inventor Wants to Shape the Future

We're talking about Tony Fidel, the principle at Future Shape. He's the founder and former CEO of Nesta Labs. As Carol mentioned, he's got more than three patents to his name. He's also the author of a new book. It's called Build, an Unorthodox Guide to Making Things worth making. Tony joins us from Palo Alto. Tony, good to talk to you again. How are you great? Thanks Carol, Thanks to Tim for having me. Honest. Yeah, great to be here. It's good to have you with us. Hey, we gotta start with

the iPod because the end of an era this week. Tony, I know, you know, but Apple, after twenty years only discontinuing the iPod um. This is a this is a product that you are credited with helping invent. Uh talk to us about what it means for Apple to discontinue it and the impact that the iPod has had not just on Apple but on consumer technology. Well, you know, the iPod is it's bitter sweet, obviously if you see

your baby go. But you know, at the end of the day, the march of technology, the drumbeat of technology never stops, right, And I've been in this business long enough to know that you can't get to you know, two wedded to any one thing because you know, you might have to eat your own And that's exactly what the iPhone did. You know, the iPod um created the conditions that Apple to be able to make the iPhone. So without the iPod there would have been no iPhone.

So it feels really good to know that what we did in the iPod and brought Apple into where it is today. You know, it's yeah, it was last week, I guess, the most valuable company on the planet, and that was because of the iPods. What's really really wonderful to know. Well, and I talked to us about your journey because that's so much a part of this book, um build and and who you wanted to read this book and what lessons you hope are what you hope

people would take away from reading it? Well, I think you know. I stepped back and I thought about the mentors that I've had over the years. And that's the reason why I'm able to talk to you today is those people helped me. And if I didn't get that help back in the day, maybe I would not be here.

And so when I thought about those mentors, most of them had died, and I thought, oh, it's now my turn to be mentor, And so how can I do that at scale and take the journeys through companies like General Magic and Phillips and Apple and Nest and all the lessons learned on building transformative technology, and really the books about human nature, so which so I'm trying to really go for you know, what were you if you were in high school or if you're in college or

a new grad. What do you need to know? What you look behind the scenes of the product that you probably grew up with and and how those were developed, But not just like from a technical point of view, but from a human nature point of view. Building your career, building products, building teams, companies, businesses. So it's all about trying to give back to help those those those people with their careers um and and hopefully one day they'll change the world as well. Well. So how did Steve

Jobs help you? Well, uh, you know, I think for me, you know, he helped one by giving us an environment to actually thrive, to be able to create the iPod. That was the first thing. But the other one is really to learn about storytelling in detail. And what happens is is you really need to not just create technology for technology. Say that's what happened to General Magic, and that's what I learned so painfully up the disaster that

was that company. And so watching him massively tell a story, a non fictional story, through marketing and through the products that we created and all the customer touch points, you know, you get to see a master at work. And then we were able to then take those lessons and create a company like nest and and change the world there with a small, tiny team because we learned how to do it right. And uh, Steve really was a master

storyteller in with using technology. Tony Fidela's principle at Future shape also the founder and former CEO of Nest Labs. He led the teams that helped create the iPod, iPhone and the Nest Learning thermostat Tony. When when people hear an intro like that, they think of all the successes that you've had in your thirty plus career in hardware, But your book also goes into failure, specifically the first ten years of your career before you were on the

team at Apple that helped create the iPod. Um tell tell us a about that in the lesson that you learned in failing before succeeding well through failure. That's really the only way you learn, you know, in school, it's taught. You're taught that failure is failure um, and you need to learn and get in a right um. In life, it's exactly the opposite. When you fail and you keep

put pushing forward, you actually learned. And so the failure that was General Magic, which was creating the iPhone just fifteen years too soon, right, there's a whole movie about it. What I learned there was that we were making a product for other geeks. We were trying to impress each other. We weren't trying to to solve pain for customers that

were in the in the world at that time. Right, we didn't even know that there are such things that email and downloadable games and all that stuff until fifteen years later. So that was one big thing at at Phillips where we created the Phillips Vilo and Ninos were handheld products. I also learned about sales and marketing and how critical was that if you had a great story to tell it properly. Hey, Tony, hang on a second, We're gonna continue do a little bit more news, and

then we'll continue with you. Tony Fidel over at Future Shape. His new book is called Build. We're going to continue that conversation. You are listening and watching on YouTube Bloomberg Business Week, Carl Master, Tim Stanevic, This is Bloomberg Radio. I want to get right back to Tony Fidel, principle at Future Shape, as we talked about, you know, spent nine years in Apple, you know, credited with creating the iPod, building out the iPhone. He also founded the smart home

company Nasty. He's got a new book out. It's called Build, An Unorthodox Guide to making Things worth making. And Tony, what I wanted to ask you is what's worth making in today's environment? What what in terms of the environment just in general, like yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry, yeah, how do you how do you make things worth making? So I always start with the pain. I'd much rather go their customers have pain. I don't want to give them vitamins, customers who some of like vitamins, not everyone

needs them. When you have pain, you need to, you need to, you know, just squash that pain down. And it's even better if you if you give them a pain killer and a superpower at the same time, so they can do things with the product or service that they never thought possible before, and they feel like there's they have new new superpowers. And so you really have to focus on the pain and do it in a

way that people feel really amazing about it. Okay, so it's clear how you did that at Nest with the Nest Learning thermostat, a product that continues, I think to solve a pain point in many consumers lives. We both have them, Yeah, we both have them, and um, Tony, but but where's the pain? Where's the pain today? Because I look around and I see the innovation at a company like Meta Platforms, for example, and that's the metaverse, or do we feel pain in the real world and

need to be in the metaverse. I feel real pain from the climate crisis we have, in the health crisis we have, and our social crisis is we have that we're generated out of this intermediation between humans. It first started with text and video and photos, and now we're gonna say we're gonna go in the metaverse and we're gonna get connected and dance and have meetings. To me, that's toxic. We've seen what it's done in the past.

You're not going to get into the metaverse. People are not gonna want to go and live in there and dance in there and and connect. We need to have controls on that stuff before we ever. You know, we've been talking about controls on text and Twitter, all these other things, these social platforms. Why we want a new environment where disconnects us even more and allows more toxicity to grow. Let's fix the social problems we have on the with the technology we have, Let's not create even

more of them. So let's go and also let's fix the problems in the real world, the climate crisis that we have. There are so many things that we need to address right now and this, these these goals that we have are coming so quickly. If not, we could lose at all. It's it's, it's it's it's absolutely astonishing to me that we are diverting incredible, smart, brilliant brains and resources to things that are not solving the real

problems that we have today. So, you know, you talk about social um and the social universe, do you think Elon Musk is someone who can fix Twitter to some extent um and some of the downside of that social media platform. And I don't think I'm saying anything subjective. I think many would argue that it can do a lot of good, but it can also do a lot of harm like other social media. Absolutely, it's not just Twitter, there's so many things. But um could he could he

fix it? He could fix it if he wants to fix it in the right way. I think what we have to understand here is we can't just go putting people back onto the Twitter platform if we don't change the environment at which they come back onto it with. If we continue to drive you know, revenue based on amplify um, misinformation and and and these kinds of things, then we have not done anything to fix Twitter or fix these social networks, we have to divorce the amplification

mechanism from the revenue mechanism. If we don't do that, the toxicity will only grow. And we can't just let anyone on to say free speech, free speech in the in the town square was never amplified. Should not amplify that for revenue purposes? Do you think some of these big tech companies have just become too big and kind of too controlling in terms of the narrative? Uh, and

the trend of where technology is going. I think with great power comes great responsibility, and if they can't rain themselves in, then they're going to need to be reined in by the government or what have you. The inectuity is growing so dramatically and the concentration of powers growing so dramatically, not just then the people who use the products or are used by products, but who also the ecosystems they create, and they continue to extract so much

revenue from apps or what have you. It needs to be rebalanced. If not, we saw this in government. When there's an equity, there's revolution. They're going to have revolution against them if they do not ringing themselves in so I do see the power growing too strong, and they're going to have to modulate down otherwise they will be

they will be forced to do so. Tony. Last time you and I spoke was I believe back in and you were at that time pushing for controls on Apple products, specifically monitors monitoring how much we were using those products to give Apple customers an idea of just how much time they were spending on their phones. Apple has since done that. In each week I get a really depressing report that shows how much time I'm spending on Apple devices. Are Are you satisfied with with that type of disclosure

that you're seeing from Apple right now? And and what have you learned after taking on that project? Well, you know that was that was something that they implement and based on public reaction to you know this this social or the screen time addiction. Um, I think we're only of the way there. It was a good start, but there has been really no innovation and continuing to take

it to the next steps. So I think they still need not just Apple, but Google, all the different platforms, you know, PlayStation even, They need to go after and and start looking at this the what they can do for the screen time limitations and the information, so not just the tools and the control tools, but also the information by which we disclose what these apps can do

not just two kids, but also to adults. And if you look at it, you know we now they now added over since that they added privacy labels to tell you what are the privacy things that these apps do and don't do. Why don't we have um digital nutritional information about what these apps can do to kids or what have you when you do consume them? You know, do they have toxic ads inside these free to play games? You know, sure they might be might be get games

that kids can play. The ads that pop up. I've seen it with my dark it can be very toxic and my Dada comes to me, you know, screaming, going what is this daddy? So I think we need to be much more on what's going on and what we're consuming. Just like nutrition labels on the side of a on the side of a food product, we need to have that for our apps. For this kind of addictive um qualities of certain apps. We run out of time. I

wish we had more. Please come back because we would love to continue this and really pick your brain to about thoughts when it comes to health and climate and things that we could definitely do in a better way and really address some of those errors where there is pain in our society. Tony, Thank you so much Tony Fidell for principle at Future Shape his new book check it out, Build and Unorthodox Guide to Making Things worth

Thank you. Good stuff. Yeah yeah, very thought. Well, uh, and considering all that's going on in our world,