Are we all going to start using the new Apple Vision Pro headset?
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Welcome to the Most Innovative Companies podcast. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagne, joined by my producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Hey, Yas. So, summertime in New York City. Are you ready? Hell yeah. I'm so ready. I had my first ice cream this weekend.

Arnold Palmer's are back in coffee shops. Where'd you get your ice cream from? So I live in a neighborhood called Fort Green and there's a restaurant down the street called Evelina. They have an ice cream stand. Last summer, they like knew me pretty well, which I really didn't like. That's rad. No, that's cool. That's really cool. Well, it's not like I got any discounts. You know what I mean? They were just like, oh, you again at 3 p.m. Okay, maybe not as rad. Yeah.

What is your big summer activity? My big summer activity? I'm such a basic white guy. It's just hiking. It's just hiking. That's a good one, though. I thought you were going to say craft beer or something. I mean, I'm more of an Aperol Spritz guy. Nice.

Nice. I drink them all year round, not just the drink of the summer. Are you a Manhattanite? I live in, yeah, I live in Inwood. I actually just moved from Harlem to Inwood. So I'm moving further and further away from the center of the island. Still a Manhattanite. Remember the summer of Aperol Spritz? Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember fondly. I was drinking Aperol Spritz before. It was cool. Just want to say that. Of course. But nobody wants to hear about this. Yeah.

Right. So let's move on to some housekeeping. Do we have anything we got to mention before we get going? We got a couple things. One, I talked about this last week, but to remind everyone that the Fast Company Queer 50 list will be announced on June 13th. So stay tuned to FastCompany.com for that. And we'll see you next week.

And also, it's never too early to start planning for the Fast Company Annual Innovation Festival. I know we're already deep in planning here in the newsroom. Our co-worker Casey Afaini, I feel like, is already losing sleep over programming this festival.

Fantastic event. But it is September 18th through the 21st in NYC, and there is a super early rate for tickets available until June 23rd. So listeners should take advantage of that. And we'll be revealing more about what to expect at this year's Innovation Festival.

as we get closer on the show. I gotta say, it's really fun. And I don't just say this because I work for a vast company. Like, I would probably attend this if I wasn't here. Just in your own time? Yeah, me too. I mean, there's like great... Jamie Lee Curtis was there last year and had a fantastic panel. It was awesome. Okay, Jamie Lee Curtis, by the way, who I interviewed for the magazine, like, I stand her. She just endorsed Marianne Williamson for president. Well...

You know, everyone has blind spots. I'm still all about Jamie Lee Curtis, that notwithstanding. I immediately messaged you and Clint, who we had on the show last week. Yes, oh my god. Yeah, if you will listen to last week's episode, if not, go back. Fringe candidates are making their way on the podcast, including Marianne Williamson, and secured her that coveted Jamie Lee Curtis endorsement.

But that's all I have for housekeeping. All right. Sounds good. Well, later on in today's episode, I'll be talking about the latest biotech research in menopause with Fast Company senior writer Ainsley Harris. But first, what's happening with Apple these days? Here to tell us more is Fast Company senior writer Mark Sullivan. Hey, Mark. Hello there. So...

Look, I think we all saw some memes about the Apple Vision Pro yesterday. But, you know, beyond the fact that they look like ski goggles, can you tell me how it works and what this new device kind of tells us about the company? Yeah, good question. Well, this is a new device.

This is a pretty major platform shift for Apple. Of course, they gave us the iPhone, which pretty much reinvented smartphones. And this could potentially, or at least they believe that this could be something as big as that. And basically what you saw that looked like ski goggles is they want us to put our computers on our faces now and...

You know, it goes over your eyes and it has a couple of very advanced lenses in it. And through those lenses, it can show digital content and mix it with real content that you see through the goggles. Well, they called it spatial computing. What does that even mean? Right. Like, I'm just trying to picture, like, say I have the dorky goggles on. Like, what does spatial computing look like?

It means 3D, basically. So where you look at your computer screen and see sort of 2D graphics and things like that, these things are going to make you able to see 3D things sort of floating through the world in front of you. And that's kind of what this mixed reality concept means. And it's really expensive, right? Like how much does it retail for? It's $3,500. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I could tell you why. More than my monthly rent. That's like as much as LASIK. I've been looking into LASIK recently. Josh, that's like the nerdiest price comparison. No, I think there's nerdier. I could find more.

So, Mark, why is it so expensive? There's a lot of these VR goggles already on the market. You know, Meta has made a few of them and the MetaQuest you may have heard of. And the experience is just it's it's a little bit grainy and a little bit janky, you know. And I think what Apple did is they made a much more expensive headset. I believe what they did was just said, you know what, we're going to.

go all out and kind of splurge on the component parts no matter how much they cost so that we can deliver people something that really makes VR goggles look great. I replaced my iPhone last year and you know an iPhone is like a thousand dollars and I was like remember when that seemed so ludicrous to everyone? Yeah I certainly remember that. Oh I remember. Yeah.

I miss the days. I know, I'm like, bitch, I'll keep my razor. I don't want this. I was just going to say, just go back to a razor. Or we could all just go with burners on like Cricut Mobile or something like that if we want to avoid the cost. I'd do it. But does Cricut Mobile make AR, VR headsets? I think Cricut Mobile headsets are just ski goggles. It's just called, it's not AR or VR, it's just AR. Yeah. It's just reality.

Mark, I mean, I guess I'm curious, you know, obviously beyond your true heads, do you think people will actually want something that bulky over their eyes for a long period of time? Like, who is this aimed for? You know, it's a really polished, impressive experience. But, you know, that's a demo. When you get into real life, you know, after you've shelled out your $3,500 for these things, are you really going to want to

sit at your desk for, you know, six hours a day wearing these things. And it's non-social. It's anti-social. You imagine approaching someone with a headset like that on their head. It just seems like kind of a non-starter. So I really have my doubts. I may be revealing myself to be a psychopath, but I feel like if somebody, like if Josh walked up near me with those goggles, I just want to slap him. Yeah.

I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I saw these and all I saw was hate. I mean, obviously, I'm sure there's people that like really are into this sort of stuff. But like all I saw on Twitter yesterday and this morning was just people like dunking on this product looking like goggles and like who's actually gonna wear them. I'm not gonna lie. I kind of really want them.

I'm kind of really into it. I feel like I would use them for a couple months and then they would just sit on my shelf and never be used again. It didn't like maybe maybe more correct me if I'm wrong with this, but like with the kind of VR AR stuff, like is there like a goal for it to be more integrated into people's everyday lives? Like, isn't that what we're striving towards a little bit?

When Apple Watch came out, it was a very basic device, and it took a few years, but it got good, and people really started to buy them. What we'll probably have in a few years, Josh, is something that looks more like the glasses you and I are wearing, except you'll have all this functionality inside the glasses.

And, you know, you won't be quite so removed from the real world. It's kind of unfair to like, you know, totally rip on what we've just seen without really looking at what the vision for the product path is. And who could forget what a great product Google Glass was? You know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah.

All those upskirt photos people took with them. Jesus, yeah. Oh my God. That's a very good point. Unintended consequences. You know, it's become kind of more socially acceptable to have your smartphone, you know, within your reach. And I think what a lot of people think is there's also going to be a cultural shift around computers that you wear on your face, that it's going to become more and more accepted. And, you know, especially with Apple in the game.

Whether or not that's really going to happen, we'll see. Are there any, just off the bat with these glasses, are there any killer apps that you saw that, you know, you think people will just immediately want to use with those goggles? Based on what I heard from people who actually tried them on, the ability for them to shoot 3D images with the goggles and then, uh,

like say, your daughter's in front of you in the room, you can use the goggles to shoot this cool 3D video or still, and then you can come back a few weeks later and watch it in that same format. So it looks like your daughter's really standing in the room in front of you. That could really turn people on. But there are other things too. We never saw anything yesterday about the integration of Apple Pay with these goggles. So in some future format,

you know you may be able to like knocking your goggles to the payment thing you know what i mean like you know how you have to like tap your phone imagine like bending your head to do it you just see people it's just you have to just like dab to do it yeah exactly yeah

Oh, my God. Sorry. Sorry, Mark. You were talking about sort of how we didn't see any integration of Apple Pay. What are the things that could make it indispensable for people? I mean, you could be in a shop and just look at rest your eyes on a product and then, you know, just buy them, buy the thing with a look or look up at a menu board, you know, and rest your eyes on a menu item and buy it with the

you know a flick of your eyes or a or a gesture with your hand that's awesome is that the world you both want to live in yes maybe i don't know maybe not i mean maybe that's a little extreme but that's kind of cool just being like that and being able to point it and immediately fought it's really kind of cool to me i don't know why i like that so much but i mean

I'm into it. As someone who has a lot of trouble controlling her eyes, I think this invention is not for me. All this stuff just keeps arriving, being like, I need to stop looking at things. You mean you don't want to have some big tech company recording everything your eyeballs rest on and storing the information? They're going to be very disappointed and frustrated.

As Josh mentioned, it felt like everyone was kind of dunking on this thing on Twitter yesterday. What do you think was the reaction of developers when you spoke to them? There was a lot of oohing and aahing going on in Cupertino yesterday when they demoed this product. Developers are tech heads. You know, they're very into new types of hardware. They're very comfortable with this idea of integrating technology.

digital content into our real world experiences. So Apple is hoping that developers are going to be the ones that come up with the killer app for these. It's basically like, we'll see. Is that fair to say? Like, is that the vibe you're getting right now? Is that how you feel? Yeah, definitely. I haven't worn the things myself yet, but I really would go back to sort of the cultural thing.

There's a real question about how close that people want their technology to get to them. An iPhone is external. Then we have a watch on our wrist. Now we have something on our face. Is there some line that people don't want to cross?

And I think aside from all the technical stuff, we're going to get an answer to that when we see this, you know, product come out and there'll be new versions of it over the years. That makes a lot of sense. And honestly, if Elon Musk has his way, we'll have a chip in our brain soon. So that's the extreme end of the scale. And, you know, you can think of this Apple device as somewhere somewhere in the middle heading toward that.

Well, that's bleak, but thank you, Mark. We're going to take a quick break now, followed by my interview with Ainsley Harris, and we'll be back in a few.

Hey, Ainsley. Thanks for coming on the show. Hey, yeah. It's great to be here. We're going to talk about an article you wrote. And before we even talk about that, we did want to make a note to our listeners that when we talk about women, we're referring to women as people with ovaries. Ovaries and a vagina, if you want to get technical about it. Right. You know, no matter how many times I've heard the word, I still can't really say it out loud. Right.

Well, I got to say it out loud in lots of internal Fast Company meetings for this story. So it was very exciting. So today we're going to talk about aging in women and sort of there's a duality at play in your article, which is that in a lot of ad campaigns, there's kind of this idea of like, you should be proud of being a menopausal woman. Like,

you should be proud that you're aging. You should be proud that you're basically telling people like you're still a person. On the other end of the spectrum, there's a bunch of efforts and companies that are looking to kind of quote unquote fix aging or stop menopause altogether. Tell me about how you kind of thought about those two.

I would say the first part was what we really were aware of at the outset when we started reporting this story. As you mentioned, you know, there's been this whole wave of companies focused on menopause. There are lots of different sort of flavors of that. There are folks kind of, I would say, more in the kind of like wellness space. There are vitamins and gummies and many things that are sort of like doctor adjacent, I guess.

But there are also like telehealth companies and people focused on getting women medication that may have been unavailable to them before or that their traditional providers weren't comfortable prescribing. There's sort of a whole history to that. But a lot of this has to do, I think, with the fact that there's been this

you know, that women who are going through menopause today look a lot different than the women who went through menopause in decades prior, you know, many of them still working and in the workforce and their symptoms are in some cases affecting their work. They also, you know, are expected to live a lot longer than their mothers were expected to live. You know, and society has changed. You know, I think

really positive way. It's interesting to see celebrities like Naomi Watts, you know, leading a company that's menopause focused. You know, you didn't really have aging women in Hollywood 20 years ago. So, you know, you have this sort of tide of a generation kind of on the rise going through these symptoms and sort of questioning the status quo around how they are both treated medically, but also how society views them.

From the article, and I got to say, like, I'm a woman by the article's definition, but I really actually didn't totally know what menopause involved. And now I'm not looking forward to it. But it seems like it's a collection of symptoms that can vary really widely. So first of all, I'd love to kind of hear about your definition of what those symptoms are, hear a little bit about how different populations might be affected, and then also just talk

me about the universe of products that you saw at this conference. Menopause symptoms do vary widely and your neighbor could be going through different symptoms than you and some of that is just genetic, but there also seem to be some environmental factors and even cultural factors that affect menopause. And talking to women who have gone through menopause, I feel like I now, though I'm not

quite very myself, understand why it's very uncomfortable. And of course, always arrives exactly at the time when you'd rather it not arrive. And a lot of the symptoms, I think what's, you know, I think important to understand, there do seem to be some ties to environmental factors, stress factors, trauma factors, where you often see then that Black women and Hispanic women are suffering from the worst symptoms. At least that's what surveys are sort of suggesting here in the U.S.

for women who live in a place where there are stress factors or other things, and then to have to deal with these symptoms on top of that can be really debilitating. So overall, it's a real positive that we're seeing more options available for treatment. Some of these options are more scientifically based than others. A lot of these options can be really expensive depending on your symptoms and what you're

budget is, you could end up spending quite a lot. I think there's some real questions then about equity. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I know some of the products you mentioned in your piece were like vitamin gummies. There's also like face mists designed for menopausal women. And I'm like, isn't that just a face mist?

A cooling face mist designed to lower your body temperature in, I don't know, some sort of magical way. But, you know, one of the things you also mentioned is hormone therapy. Like I can remember when I was a kid, at least, was kind of seen as this like

weird, fringy thing that might cause cancer. I'm curious, like, how that's made a comeback and what that looks like now. Yeah, there's been a huge revisiting of the guidance around hormone therapy and hormones. And a lot of it ties back to this study that was funded with money from the National Institutes of Health that is now being discredited, I think,

many would say, if anything revisited for sure. It now seems that giving women estrogen or other sort of hormone combinations is much safer than we thought it was, at least particularly in terms of breast cancer risk. And that was the huge sort of trigger that many women flushed their pills down the toilet when this study came out. A lot of people...

people who are thinking about hormones should understand that they don't necessarily treat all symptoms. They're not going to help necessarily with brain fog. What are some of the specific solutions that they offer a solution for? Yeah, I believe the one that is hot flashes and night sweats and that sort of thing. I think those are among the ones that they are most likely to help you with. But yeah, there's a huge list of symptoms associated with menopause and they do...

do not treat all of those. And while they do seem to be providing wonderful help for a lot of women now that more people are adopting them again, they are sort of these, in many ways,

just like birth control, sort of old-fashioned technologies and these very sort of crude tools that we're using to treat. If you think about every woman's hormone levels are different, but we don't really take that into account, right? You're just sort of given the standard dosage or you're given sort of the standard thing as we've learned more about women's bodies. What does that

lead us to in terms of solutions that might actually be more tailored. And that's where we're seeing sort of this whole new host of companies and startups come along that are trying to say, hey, you know, if we really understand the inner mechanisms of women's biology in a deeper way, what can we do with that information to make their lives better?

Yeah, you know, actually bringing up birth control is a really useful analogy because I think many of us know that birth control is hell to navigate and sometimes hell to experience depending on the one you're on. But I want to talk a little bit about OVIVA. Tell me about the science behind ending menopause.

Yeah. So this anti-malarian hormone, it's part of what happens in the ovaries that sort of controls how eggs mature and are released. The idea would be that if you can kind of better control that process, which actually starts in the female body in the womb before you're born, and then you have this incredible sort of acceleration as you're approaching menopause and then at menopause. And then that, you

you know, is tied to this huge kind of cliff moment in hormones, which is what menopause symptoms tie back to. And so what Oliva and other people are sort of interested in doing, how do you essentially turn that cliff moment into a more gradual slope? By doing that, you would,

essentially turn women's reproductive aging into a pathway that looks a little bit more like men's. Men's reproductive aging is a sort of more gradual slope. I think that there's this weird current in a lot of the marketing, which is telling women they're still relevant. And it's like, when did we become irrelevant? Like, what does that even mean? And the other thing I noticed is like, now there's like Super Bowl ads about it. I'm curious,

When you thought the tone started to shift, how you see the tone shifting again, like what does marketing for all these startups look like? Yeah. I mean, I think essentially what happened was that the beauty industry realized that older women have a lot of money and they, some of them do anyway, and it'd be nice to capture some of that money. So, you know, I think there was this shift where there was sort of the anti-aging moment in marketing and

Pro-aging.

There are many more sort of, yeah, medical solutions. We saw this at the Super Bowl. There was for the first time a menopause-focused Super Bowl ad from a company called Estellas. They had been running that ad for a little while. They felt that the Super Bowl would be a really great way to sort of open up the conversation. And that's what they're trying to do is open up the conversation to sort of a broader audience of women. I'm interested to hear how you think the space is going to evolve, say, in the next 10 years.

You know, the menopause market doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists in this broader sort of wellness, medicine, beauty space where I think there are some real shifts in sort of expectations happening right now around manipulating your body essentially. And like, what is the sort of baseline expectation?

that society sort of expects of you. And so in some ways, it is really disappointing to sort of see that this sort of expectation of work, essentially, that you're putting into your body is sort of on the rise, at the same time that we're seeing this growing acceptance of sort of menopause as a life stage that women undergo. That has been, I think, hard to see. And it's definitely something I'm thinking about as I think about entering my 40s later this year, how to navigate that and

You know, I don't think that we're at the same place we were several decades ago when Susan Sontag wrote her wonderful essay. You know, the second you're kind of, you know, over the hill, like society just erases you. So I turned 30 a couple months ago and realized that I could no longer be a sugar baby if I wanted to.

I'm so sorry, guys. That was my fallback career. My deepest condolences. I mean, yes, I guess you'll just have to embrace, I don't know, the 30s and Tupperware and all the things that go with it. Back to me and Tupperware. Yeah, yeah. Well, this was great. Thank you, Ainsley, for being on the show. And early happy birthday, I guess. Happy 40th. Thank you. I still have another six months. Listeners, Ainsley just burst into tears.

No, no, no. I'm just I'm planning to party for, you know, at least six months. So I'll take it. All right. We are back with Mark and it's time to wrap up the show with a segment we're calling Keeping Tabs. This is where each of us shares a story, trend or company we're following right now. So, Mark, since you're our guest, we're going to start with you. What are you keeping tabs on? UFOs. UFOs are real.

Talk about cultural changes. Can't leave it hanging there. Oh my God. So I don't know if you guys remember, but there was a story, uh,

maybe like a year ago in the New York Times about how this footage was released by the Air Force of unidentified flying objects, like flying around air car carriers and things. And, you know, there were some congressional investigations following that. But now the same people who authored that story have found a whistleblower, an ex-Defense Department guy, saying that the U.S. has already found

alien crafts. Some of them which are in pieces and some of them which are complete. Mark!

Is this true? I swear to God, it's like it was... The story was in a thing called The Debrief. And I didn't really take it very seriously until I found out who the authors of the story was. But a lot of people are talking about this story. And it's this UFO situation. It's getting weirder and weirder. I do feel like... I do remember when that story came out a few years ago about the declassified report of UFOs from Air Force...

footage and i feel like it was met with like the most like humdrum response like i think it had like there was a few things that went on and and it was just like we're just we're just cool with this we're just moving on with our lives so i guess we all had more important things to worry about that's kind of how i feel like now it's like is there ufos that i feel like i should be more i'm like a perennial question i should be like i'm more worried about health care

Yeah. Josh, Josh, I can't imagine you have something weirder here. What are you? No, nothing weirder. Just something that's more depressing for the podcast industry as the whole more depressing than, than Robert F. Kennedy going on breaking points. Uh, Robert F. Kennedy jr. Rather. Cause that would be weirder.

And getting endorsed by Jack Dorsey. Yeah, that's real wild. I don't need to go back into that. But I do want to mourn the loss of Gimlet Media, Spotify. This is following up on an October cut in staff force across Gimlet Media and Podcast 2 podcasting companies, if you're not familiar.

Two podcasting companies that started a number of years ago, Gimlin in 2014. Gimlin especially really changed the face of the podcast industry and was acquired in 2019 by Spotify. And they really did so much to put the podcasting industry on the map.

Yeah, I mean, I am curious. Do you think that them kind of laying off employees was because of like a mistaken strategy? I mean, you know what I mean? Like, is this I mean, they want fewer shows like where they said their their stated reasoning is to, you know, they're pivoting more towards always on customers.

content with you know creator driven stuff which basically means like the weekly daily shows that are driven by big names essentially but I mean they're it's not like they're saving money on that sort of stuff they're paying Joe Rogan like a hundred million to some hundred I'm you know I could be getting this number wrong but it's a lot of money

for Joe Rogan to make something that I think is detrimental to society personally. Whereas, you know, Gimlet made stuff like Crime Town. I feel like Spotify is doing a disservice to the podcasting industry by making huge bets on people like Joe Rogan and not on the storytelling driven content that got...

this podcast market to where it was in the first place got it so i was trying to come up with something more light-hearted for this week i accidentally came up with three things but one of them is less light-hearted i figured i wanted to see how you responded to each of these things like a lightning round of keeping tabs yeah this is a lightning round have you heard of flocco the owl in central park that everyone loves

Oh, he's like a really like sick looking macho male owl. Oh, actually, no, I know what you're talking about now. Kind of exotic. Anyway, he's kind of back. Like more photos of him have come out and I'm just I'm glad my guy's doing well. I thought this was going to be the dark one. You're going to be like, well, he's dead. No, no, that's coming at the end. Number two, Kim Cattrall is returning to Sex and the City. I could not care less about this.

No, yeah, I didn't think that one would hit with either of you, but I'm kind of excited. And number three, which is the kind of dark one, is there is a documentary that I can't in good faith recommend because I don't think it was that well made, but...

It's about... It's called The Strange Case of Natalia Grace, who was a Ukrainian orphan adopted by an American family, and we don't know if she is 6, 12, or 32. What? Yes, I'm telling you. She... And, like...

She terrorized this family. That was in the news. But then I watched the documentary. It seems like maybe the mom from the family kind of terrorized her. And I thought that it would be easy to figure out, like, how old someone is. I thought humans were like trees. You know, you cut off, count the rings. But, like...

This documentary is nuts. I injured myself running on Sunday and then just I was like on the couch in a bad mood and watch the whole thing. And it's all I can talk or think about with. I'm not going to say I'm not going to watch this, but I also like you cannot recommend this to any of our listeners. Exactly.

So that's a documentary that I don't recommend, but that is very, very bingeable. All right. Well, I guess we'll end it there. That's it for most innovative companies. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Mark, for coming on the show. You're very welcome. Happy to be on. Our show is produced by Avery Miles, mixed and sound designed by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.