The Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive: Jason Rugolo on iyO and the Future of Audio Wearables

In the eighth installment of the Moonshot Podcast Deep Dive series, Astro Teller discusses the future of audio wearables with iyO Founder Jason Rugolo. They discuss the many unexpected use cases for machine-mediated hearing, what it was like to build the world’s first audio computer and how to make audio wearables “cool.” For more on the origins of iyO and the next generation of audio wearable technology, tune into Episode 9 of the Moonshot Podcast, “Supersenses”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlpF2QJNL5Y 00:00 - Introduction 02:17 - The first company Jason started at age 14 04:02 - How Jason came to X 06:40 - Jason’s earliest “fail fast” moonshot ideas 09:54 - The importance of being “the right amount too early” 12:45 - Radical idea for digital humans 14:59 - Early explorations into tele-video 18:49 - The original pitch for what became iyO 22:24 - Why designing great wearables for the ear is so hard 24:52 - Design considerations for audio wearables 29:41 - Making audio wearables “cool” 31:32 - The limitations of current in-ear devices 32:33 - The “superpowers” we’d have with machine-mediated hearing 35:30 - Building the first audio computer 36:30 - What the team’s first audio wearable looked like 38:01 - How audio wearables could help with translation 40:55 - The potential for wearables to protect from hearing loss 41:57 - The future of “hearing enhancement” apps 44:45 - The unexpected value of voice-to-audio interaction 48:34 - Astro’s “holy s**t” moment with audio wearables 52:26 - Why audio wearables need to change sound sources so quickly 55:47 - iyO’s public debut 57:23 - Surprising agentic AI use cases 58:50 - Physics conversations with the Einstein app using iyO 01:00:58 - Musical conversations with the iyO DJ app using iyO 01:01:51 - Jason’s hard-won lessons from taking moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices