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”: 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

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