Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!
Welcome to the Essential Dynamics podcast. I'm Derek Hudson. Essential Dynamics is a framework I've been developing that helps us think through our trickiest opportunities. And in this podcast, we test the concepts of essential dynamics through deep conversations with interesting people. Last the last time we spoke to a really interesting person, Randy Marsden.
Derek:We're glad glad to have him back because he tells us he's not done Telling us about how he's made a dent in the world. So Randy, welcome back.
Randy:Yeah, so excited to be back and, more to talk about. Excited to be here.
Derek:So, so, just to recap our last episode, which is a must listen, Randy talked about how a university project to help a disabled friend turned into, actually being involved in the creation of an industry to use technology to help people with disabilities. And from that, more mainstream technologies developed that, Randy's participated in. But Randy's, I think you're gonna take us through some of the other things that spun out of that original work that, have, helped a lot of people, particularly in the last few years. So where should we start? Yeah, well, kind of where we left off, we, you know, I talked about this technology that tracked head movement and, had an on screen keyboard to help people who couldn't use their hands access a computer. And, one day we got an order from a dentist for that whole setup. And I was like, What? And so I emailed the dentist and said, Okay, this is for people who are paralyzed. Are you paralyzed? Because you're the first dentist I've ever met, who couldn't use their hands.
Derek:Who can't use their hands. My goodness.
Randy:Right. I was really curious, why are you buying our stuff? And he explained, Oh, no. I can use my hands, but I just bought a digital x-ray system and that brought a computer into the operatory and now I have to touch a keyboard and touch a mouse and I would rather be hands free. So exactly the same way we provided hands free access to the computer for people with disabilities, now dentists could access the computer just using their head movement.
Randy:And, in his case, he used a foot switch. And that meant they didn't have to disinfect or change their gloves every time they touch the keyboard and the mouse to look at digital x rays. And that was what you had to do normally. So we said, oh, great. We've got a new market and it's even people who have money.
Randy:So, let's sell our stuff to dentists. So, knew a few dentist friends there in Edmonton and, we pulled in about a half a dozen into this focus group. And we said, okay, this dentist bought our stuff, what do you think? You know, is this something everybody could use? And they all thought it was super cool but then the general feeling was, you know, I think only really cutting edge dentists are going to want to go that far.
Randy:Most of them are just covering their keyboard in Saran wrap or plastic, and then they're cleaning it that way. So didn't think that everybody would spend the money on this head controlled thing. So, it was sort of a disappointing meeting. We wrapped it up and everyone was leaving. And as they were walking out the door, I asked one of them, so people really wrap their keyboards in Saran wrap?
Randy:And he's like, oh yeah, it's ridiculous. You know, if you could solve that problem, then that's something every dentist could use. So, you know, as an entrepreneur and an engineer, you hear, if you could solve that problem, that's something everyone could use. That's a big one. And so we took that project on and said, how could we build a cleanable keyboard?
Randy:One that's easy to disinfect. So, this is all about infection control in a dental office. And of course with the pandemic and now we understand how important it is to do infection control. And so, we did this project where we're like, well, the the easiest thing to clean is glass. So could we make a glass keyboard and how would that work?
Randy:Well, we could use touch capacitance and, yeah, but you can't rest your fingers on it like you could on a normal keyboard. And so, how can we allow someone to rest their fingers and still type on a touch surface? So that was, you know, I remember the engineer saying, Randy, let me get this straight. You want us to make a touch sensitive surface that doesn't do anything when you touch it? And I was like, well, yeah, except when you mean to.
Randy:That's right. And it seemed like, you know, an impossible thing until I was thumping on my table one day thinking, you know, and I don't know if a thump on the microphone here. Yeah. You know, the little thumping noise you hear is a vibration that gets spread. And I was like, well, when you're typing on keys, it makes that vibration as opposed to just touching.
Randy:It doesn't. So could we combine those signals, the touch capacitance and the vibration, and tell when people are typing. Turned out we could. It's called sensor fusion. So you do, if you can't solve it with one sensor, you can possibly solve it with more than one sensor.
Randy:And we combine their signals. So we did, we got a patent on that. We built something called Clean Keys and we started selling those to dentists. And then we expanded that into hospitals and any medical facility that needed keyboards, but needed them to be, antiseptic and be able to clean them easily. If you go into a hospital, just take a look at their keyboards.
Randy:There's these rubber covers that they put on, which are intended to be washable and keep things clean. But more often than not, they don't get washed. And the gunk that normally would have fallen down between the keys
Derek:It's not on the keys.
Randy:On the keys. Yeah. It actually makes it worse. You know, the doctors wash their hands super thoroughly, they walk into the Operating Room like this and the first thing they do is log in on one of these keyboards that's covered with gunk on the rubber cover and it's a problem. And many studies have showed that keyboards were dirtier than toilet seats, you know, and that it was one of the most contaminated surfaces and cross contamination because keyboards would be shared between healthcare workers.
Randy:Right, more
Derek:than a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah.
Randy:So, we embarked on that and that was like part of the epic quest. What can we do to put a dent in the world? This one possibly could save lives. And if you take a look at, well, could it really save lives? Like, how many people actually die in hospitals from infections they catch?
Randy:It turns out it is a lot. It's like a hundred thousand people a year. It's the fourth largest cause of death in North America. You know, between cancer, strokes, and heart attacks, going to the hospital is the number four cause of death. This isn't like I go into the hospital with an infection and I die from it.
Randy:It's like you go in with a broken foot and you catch a hospital acquired infection and it kills you. So super important, and we did that for quite a while. And then tablet computers started coming out with keyboards on them, and you could actually put your hands on these keyboards. And I wanted to try to type, you know, I learned typing in high school, so I could touch type at 80 words a minute. I wanted to do that on tablet.
Randy:Of course, you can't you can't rest your fingers. Oh, wait. We figured out how to solve that problem. We we know what you can do to let you rest your fingers. And so we applied the clean keys technology to tablet computers.
Randy:And then on top of that, now we have a dynamic screen where the keyboard can move. So we split it down the middle for each hand, and then we would drift the keys according to where your hands were going because you can't fill the keys, of course, on a glass screen. So instead of making you put your fingers where the keys were, we moved the keys to your fingers and we called it drift because this could drift around and follow your finger movement. And we spun that out into its own company. That's what caused me to move from Alberta down to Silicon Valley.
Randy:Did a start up, Menlo Park, right next to Stanford. We went to TechCrunch Disrupt, which is the world series of startup competitions, they call it. You know, hundreds of companies apply, 30 get in. They narrow it down to five. You present again to judges, and, we got runner-up.
Randy:So we got second place in all of that with Drift.
Derek:Wow.
Randy:And, you know, the whole time I was an entrepreneur in Alberta for twenty five years, I always wondered, you know, I wonder how successful we'd be in Silicon Valley because, you know, it's that magical mystery place and we're just from Alberta. So, probably we wouldn't be successful because that's where, you know, all those big tech guys are. And then we came down to Silicon Valley and knocked it out of the park, you know, with the stuff we invented in Alberta, we got second place at the World Series of Startup Competitions. And by the way, the company that got first went out of business. And so I think that the Miss Universe rules apply.
Derek:Yeah. The second runner or the runner-up, if for any reason, you should
Randy:Exactly. Exactly. It's over. Yeah. I'm gonna say we won.
Randy:And by the way, Swipe, the other thing we spun out, got third place at TechCrunch Disrupt in in 02/2008. So this was our second time as a finalist. So, you know, things invented in Alberta can compete just fine in Silicon Valley. So much so that, Apple took took notice of us and really liked that technology of typing on a tablet because they're coming out with iPad, and they acquired our company nine months after that. And part of that acquisition was me going to Apple to run the text input team.
Randy:So that's how we ended up at Apple.
Derek:So I always like to personalize this, stuff maybe too much, but, so if you had a if you had a iPad today, and you're typing on the iPad, is
Randy:Did you trash it?
Derek:Is there is there I'm not
Randy:on my Apple.
Derek:Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Is there a drift technology in the iPad right now when you're typing?
Randy:Yes. We couldn't convince the human interface team to actually show the keys drifting. Right. They're like, that's gonna that's gonna freak people out. But, they actually do drift virtually.
Derek:In the sense that the sensors will accept the letter if you, if you miss it, if it was obvious that that's where you're aiming. Yeah. So my wife, is a fantastic typer on an iPad. Fantastic typist on an iPad. And, I can't do it at all.
Derek:And so when she's tapping away, I'm just gonna remind her that it was her second cousin that, made that so, so much easier. So, so you
Randy:secret things happening in the background you don't realize, but, yeah, it's doing its best to figure out where your fingers are coming down.
Derek:Oh, that's fantastic. So, then you're inside Apple?
Randy:Yeah. Next thing you know, I'm leading the text input team and in charge of AutoCorrect. And, gosh, I'd say my first month there, I get, an email from Tim Cook because someone reported in in the marketplace that if if you type Kim Kardashian, your iPhone will auto correct that to Lardas, Kim Lardas. And he's like, who did this? You know, we cannot have this, you know, that person needs to be fired.
Randy:And, you know, I went to my team, and of course, Kim Kardashian has a decent sized bum, and it just looked like somebody was playing a trick. And so we traced through what happened and card, k a r d, the l is right next to the k. Sure.
Derek:So they thought that was lard.
Randy:That's lard and asian, that's not in our dictionary, but as is and lard as goes together. And so it was autocorrect who did it. It was completely by accident and, easy to fix. We just added the word Kardashian to the dictionary and that ended that. That was my first fun experience, you know, at Apple.
Randy:There was lots of interesting stories like that with autocorrect. You know, whenever I said I'm in charge of autocorrect, immediately people got excited that now they knew who to blame. You know, it's like, I've always wanted to know who to yell at. Thank you, now I know. You know, and it's one of those technologies that when it's working, you don't notice, but when it screws up it's really frustrating.
Randy:And so, you know, work hard with a pretty talented group of engineers to improve that over a four year period at Apple.
Derek:That sounds important and it might get people, keep other people from getting fired, when they're texting their boss. But that isn't, that isn't the world scale stuff that you're after. So how did you get involved in more world scale stuff? Because I know you did.
Randy:Yeah. You know, the way I I justified it to myself is the iOS keyboard is the most touched piece of software every day in history. So every day, more people are touching that piece of software than any other software ever created. More than Windows, more than, you know. So I was like, that's pretty cool.
Randy:I'm working on the most used piece of software on the planet. And, you know, communication's important. And I always told my team, if we can just shave off ten seconds a day from people's typing, that's saving 85 people years a day. Cause we multiply that across
Derek:All the users.
Randy:Yeah. So I said, we're saving lives, you know, we're saving time. But of course, I'm thinking back saying, did I sell out? You know, I was helping people with disabilities. Now I'm doing this mainstream thing in a big company.
Randy:What about my epic quest? What about the thing I was set out to do, making a dent in the world for the better? And, I I started working on special projects at Apple. I I had a great job. It was basically work on whatever I thought was important.
Randy:And I had a small team, and passed keyboard text input off to, another team. And then the pandemic hit. And, you know, it's just COVID, and suddenly we can't go to work. The work I was doing was user studies. So we had to have people come in and take, you know, study them.
Randy:Well, you couldn't do that anymore. So my work was just halted. And so I'm like, well, what else could I do? Like, I don't like sitting back on this fight against COVID not doing anything. So with a few other folks at Apple thought of this idea that our phones could communicate proximity with with each other, do it anonymously, but warn you if you've been near somebody who later tests positive.
Randy:And I I had the note in my notebook. It was 03/23/2020. And eight weeks to the day later, we shipped the first API for exposure notifications. Eight weeks is unheard of for anything to ship out of Apple, But what makes that even more remarkable is we did it with Google. So the two largest competitors in the world got together and we shipped this API for Android and iPhones because, of course, you know, there's people out there that have both, and you need to know if you've been near someone.
Randy:And I led that project for two years. We deployed that worldwide. Different, different jurisdictions picked it up. There's some really interesting stories about Alberta and Canada and what went on there. It became very political.
Randy:A lot of people just thought this was Apple and Google tracking you. We went to great efforts to make sure that was not the case. It's completely anonymous, but it actually is saving lives. There's been studies showing that, where this is deployed, the number of infections have gone down and many anecdotal stories of people saying, Oh, I got an exposure notification, we are on our way to grandma's house at the senior home to visit her, and I found out I'd been exposed. I went and got a test, sure enough, I was positive, I would have taken that to the senior's home.
Randy:And, you know, the thing about COVID is you can be positive and not feel symptoms for a couple of days, but you're still contagious. So that's really what exposure notification, that's where it comes in, is it tries to race ahead of the virus and warn you, don't go give this to other people. And so, that was it.
Derek:So now that we're, kind of on the other side of this particular incident, this incident, I don't know, this, the pandemic, three years in, just like you do with everything else and all the other stories we've told, there's other applications for this technology, or this is going to help us better next time. What's your vision for the technology behind exposure notification?
Randy:I'll tell you, it's, a tough subject because that was the number one question we got from public health authorities is, this is great, could we use this for sexually transmitted diseases? Could we use this for the flu? Could we use this for any kind of communicable disease? And when Apple and Google got into doing this, they said, this is for COVID. Like, this is serious enough that we're gonna put this technology on phones for that purpose because people are dying.
Randy:It's, it can be, you know, there's a risk of it being misused. And so just using it willy nilly for everything was not something Apple and Google signed up for. They're basically saying, no, we're not gonna use it for everything because people, you know, have their privacy and we wanna respect it. For COVID, it's serious enough that, we're willing to do it. So for the next pandemic that happens, this technology could be used, but for all the little stuff in the middle, not so much.
Randy:Now having said that, we're three years later and last week I was about to get on a plane and guess what? I got an exposure notification on my phone. So this technology is still out there, it's still running. And that means somebody who I'd been around in the last day or so had contracted COVID and submitted into the system that they had tested positive. And then that warned everybody.
Randy:So I'm like, well, I'm about to get on a plane. So the first thing I did was get a test. You know. Now it's so easy to take out home tests. I was negative so I could get on the plane, but it's out there and still working.
Derek:That was fantastic. So Randy, I really appreciate you coming on and telling us about all the different ways that you've made a dent in the universe. What's driving you now into the future?
Randy:Well, I'm at Nike. I'm doing some pretty cool stuff there, and, you you know, a lot of people ask me, why would you leave Nike, Apple to go to Nike? And I believe that we're coming up on the twenty year anniversary of smartphones. There's usually about a twenty year cycle to these big world changing technologies. And I think that we're hitting that inflection point where there's gonna be other tech that will eventually replace the smartphone.
Randy:I use this picture of a grandma that is at a Johnny Depp red carpet event. And there's all these people lined up behind these stanchions that they came to see Johnny Depp, and every one of them are holding their smartphone up, they're straining to take a picture. They're looking at their phones. And at the very front of the stanchion is this little short grandma who has her arms folded and she's smiling and she's just looking on, and she's the only one actually looking at him. And I said, history is going to look back at this picture and go, look how stupid we were.
Randy:These people went there to see him, and all they were doing was looking at their phones. Why? So they could get a picture, yeah, on social media or something. You can get pictures of Johnny Depp that are much better than the ones you took, you know? And so the grandma had it right, and we've really lost some of that humanity where technology has taken us too far into it, and and it's now controlling us.
Randy:So I I think the right direction is to steer us out of that and make technology more our slave, it works for us and it should be more ambient. It shouldn't be requiring us to hold things. And I think ambient could be something, that's around us, and this is here already. You think about, Alexa, Amazon pods, or HomePods with Siri, you know, and you tell it to play music or ask it a question, that's an example of ambient computing. I believe some of that will be in what we wear.
Randy:We're gonna start integrating the tech into things we wear rather than what we carry around. And if it's something you wear, then that could be something that Nike has. I'm not saying that's what Nike's doing. That's what attracted me to Nike. And now I'm inside of the world's largest apparel manufacturer and really doing exciting experiments on how we can integrate technology into that.
Derek:Holy smokes. Wow, Randy. Blew my mind at the end there. So, Ambient Technology, Ambient Computing. My family was just in Orlando, and we did, Universal and Disney Parks.
Derek:And, there was one particular incident, I wasn't there, but some, a bunch of my kids were, and grandkids, where, it was the nighttime show, the fireworks and stuff like that, and somebody had to ask someone to put their phone down so the people behind could see. And the comment was made is if you want a video of this, go on YouTube, you can get one in four k that's better than the one you're ever gonna do. And you're never gonna look at that video anyway. Right.
Randy:Right.
Derek:And that's that's the world that we're in right now, and it is gonna change. And I'm totally with you on that. And I love the way you talk about putting technology in its place, getting that the personal interaction back up, and, still having the the great advantage and blessing of all of this technology, provides to us in so many ways every day, including giving access, if we go back to the beginning of our story here, giving access to almost everything in the world to people who can barely move a muscle. And you think of what they're capable of doing today compared to when you started out. So Randy, thanks so much for, being with us today.
Derek:People can find you on LinkedIn. Is that the best way to connect?
Randy:Yeah. Just under my name, Randy Marsden.
Derek:Randy Marsden, we'll put a link in our show notes. Essential Dynamics is brought to you by Unconstrained, my consultancy, and you can find us at Get Unconstrained. And encourage, encourage people to reach out if they're interested in continuing these conversations. So, Randy, thanks very much for your inspiring commentary about making a dent in the universe. Till next time everyone, consider your quest.