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I'm Guy Reyes. So, there are certain things you just have to see for yourself to get it.
And yes, I know this is an audio podcast, so just trust me on this one.
But a few weeks ago, I saw a demonstration of a new technology built by a company called Proto.
It was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
And it could have a huge impact on how we communicate.
Proto's device is a large box about the size of a telephone booth, and inside the box is a hyper-realistic, projected 3D image of a person, sort of like a hologram.
That person could be live streaming themselves, and you can talk to them in real time.
Think of it like having a zoom call or a FaceTime, but with a three-dimensional human in front of you.
But unlike those other video chats, the projection in the box is so realistic and so believable that you would swear the person is actually right in front of you.
Proto's founder, David Dustbaum, has a background in broadcast radio.
He worked for commercial stations in LA selling advertising, and later, he was also on the air.
But he started out on the journey that led him to launch Proto in the late 2000s, when he launched his own podcast with a friend.
My best friend growing up, Guy Obychinski, we had this podcast called Decently Funny with Nuzzy and the Guy, and I'm Nuzzy.
My friends growing up would always call me Nuzzy, and I'm a huge fan of morning radio, so I was like, what would sound like a morning radio show?
And we did about 300 and something episodes every Saturday for five years, and it was very difficult.
Because the work that I'm in right now is difficult because I'm the first in the world to sort of do what I'm doing now.
It was like that with podcasts, trying to get guests, trying to get people to understand what this was, and it was a lot of fun.
So for years, I mean, you literally would just interview, I think mainly a lot of comedians and comic writers on the show.
I love comedy. I love sitcoms.
I love comedic movies. Anything comedy related.
Saturday Night Live. I loved Mad TV.
Everything about comedy.
So my first guest was Sam Simon, the late grade Sam Simon co-creator of The Simpsons.
Oh, wow. He was the executive producer of Taxi.
He worked with Drew Carey on the Drew Carey show.
The guy is a legend, and it was great.
Having Sam Simon as your first guest on your podcast, no one can say no to you now.
You can say, hey, I have this podcast, and we do this long form interview show.
It's uncensored. Say anything you want, and if there's anything that you don't want in there after we're done, I'll take it out.
I'm curious. Tell me how you, because this is a super entrepreneurial venture, right?
You're going out and making a show and, you know, interviewing comics and hoping that, you know, this is still early days before the podcast boom happened.
It was hard to kind of get people to kind of discover it or to figure out how to use it.
How did you guys finance it?
How did you support it? Was it hard?
It was easy because my background was in selling advertising on the radio, so I had hundreds of clients and customers, you know, from blue chip advertisers like Ford and Pepsi, all the way down to some of the stuff that you are currently listening to on like satellite radio and internet radio.
It's everything and everyone, and they trusted me because I'd been selling them advertising for a decade plus.
They liked me, they trusted me, and they just funded the podcast.
And it was great because they got a great deal too.
And so you could read ads and basically cover the cost.
And was this your full-time work for that five-year period?
No, I was still working in radio.
I was, yeah, I was working at CBS Radio, and I was working at several other radio stations.
But eventually it did fund my life.
And I made the move from CBS and other broadcasting companies, and I just switched right over to podcasts.
Not only hosting my podcast, but I was producing dozens of podcasts out of my living room.
And I also had that advertising agency where I would then go to Mark Maron and all of the bigger podcasters at the time, and I would sell their ads for them.
Nobody had ever done that before.
But I reached out to Maron and I said, hey, this is what I do.
And he took me up on my offer.
All right. So you're running the podcast and sort of a podcast ad agency, and this is in the sort of early 2010s.
And meantime, I guess around 2012, I remember this, a lot of people remember this, there was this amazing concert.
It was Tupac Shakur at Coachella.
Of course, Tupac Shakur was no longer alive.
He died a long time ago. But he performed at Coachella, a hologram Tupac Shakur.
It was amazing to see it.
I remember seeing it. And that also really struck you when you saw it.
Ever since I was a kid, besides radio and the love of broadcasting, it's always been about science fiction.
And I loved things that just didn't feel real, but could be possible.
And when I saw Tupac, who had been gone about a decade, rise from the stage at Coachella in front of God knows how many 80,000 screaming people, not really understanding what the heck was going on.
It gave me tingles. It gave me chills because I like things that haven't ever happened, but were possible.
And now I was able to visualize the future.
I saw a person performing who wasn't physically there, who looked like he was there.
All right, so it wasn't just, but like most people who loved it or were amazed by it, you actually took it a step further.
You actually went to the company that created the technology and got in touch with them.
Why? Tell me about that.
On my podcast, I knew this guy named Johnny Frodo.
And Johnny Frodo, I only knew of him from the Howard Stern show.
Any Howard Stern listeners know who Johnny Frodo was.
And at the time I was working for an eccentric billionaire and we were creating these really cool live video podcasts for celebrities.
Johnny Frodo says to me, I know the guys who own the patent, which was used to put Tupac on stage at Coachella.
What if I introduced the patent holder to your eccentric billionaire boss and we kind of brokered this deal and created a business out of it?
The world's first holographic digital resurrection concert company.
Basically, this is what you got this guy that you worked for, this video production company, to buy the technology, I guess, or license it or something.
And you started to do this.
You started to put on concerts with like, I guess you did like Whitney Houston, Billie Holiday, Jackie Wilson.
Like you put on concerts with holograms of these people.
We would go to the estates of the late legends and we would make deals with them.
We did do Billie Holiday and Jackie Wilson and Whitney Houston.
But I mean, some of the names that we never got to, we had at one point, my old company had the rights to Bernie Mac, Judy Garland, Dean Martin, Red Fox, Andy Kaufman, Liberace.
I mean, imagine going to see Lady Gaga on stage performing with Liberace.
I like the idea of mashups of different genres, different times, things that could never have happened.
And so that was the idea for that company.
But I guess there was, I mean, I'm assuming there are enormous challenges in putting those shows on, in part because the cost is very high, right?
Why is the cost so high to create a holographic concert?
The technology was in its infancy.
We were using a technology, more of a technique, a magic trick, an illusion called Pepper's Ghost.
That is what was used to famously put Tupac on stage at Coachella.
It's what Universal Studios uses and Disney uses in their magic castle and in the Fast and the Furious, Supercharged rides.
And now, why is it so expensive?
The materials are very expensive.
It requires dozens of people.
People are not inexpensive.
It takes weeks of planning and set up time and it can't be moved from place to place.
So you have to cut it down when the show is over and you have to rebuild it all over.
I mean, it's a very expensive, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a single show, which is why you had to be Michael Jackson or Tupac or Elvis to be a hologram because you have to sell tickets to that because you need to fill a room.
And you'd be lucky to even break even on something like that.
All right. So after some time working on this, I guess the gears in yours are really, really expensive.
The gears in your head started to spin and you start thinking, maybe there's something like I could do with this.
Maybe not this exact technology because it's not what you do, but thinking about this holographic 3D imagery of a person and maybe doing something with it.
Tell me how you, the thought process in your mind because this is, I guess, around 2015, 2016 when you start to think about it.
Eventually, I was tired of doing these digital resurrection concerts, even though it was emotional for the fans and it was great money for the estates.
I wanted to do something as big as Tupac was for digital resurrection.
I wanted to do something like that for live beaming because for me as a broadcaster, I've really never liked digitally resurrecting the dead.
It's always been about connecting the living for me and I thought, what if I could beam somebody somewhere who physically couldn't be there for some very specific reasons?
And that's where Proto was born, formerly known as Portal because that was the idea of what we were trying to do.
When we come back after the break, how David took his Portal idea from the realm of science fiction into the real world.
Stay with us, I'm Guy Razz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
Back in the 90s, Pepsi and Coca-Cola were in a heated race to try and win loyal customers by any means necessary.
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I'm Misha Brown and I'm the host of WonderRee's podcast, The Big Flop.
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From WonderRee, the makers of Academy and Doctor Death, the last city stars actors Reyes Seahorn, Jeannie Tirado and Maury Sterling.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab.
I'm Guy Reyes. So in the mid-2010s, David Nussbaum was sketching out designs of something he called at first a single passenger hollow portation machine.
A device that would project a realistic 3D image of a live person from another location.
And the design he settled on was a large box, big enough to fit a person inside.
So how did you, I mean, you had this concept, right?
Like I know that we want a projected human in this box and let's say it'll be like a telephone booth.
Where do you go? Like where do you go to find people to build this for you?
It's not like you can go to Costco and just buy a radio shack and just buy off the shelf tools and start making it.
Where do you start? Well, because of my background, because I've been working in holograms and working in production and working in broadcasting, I knew other people who said, how can we help?
And a lot of people worked with me for me for free for a very long time.
I knew a couple of engineers.
I knew a bunch of producers and a guy that I was friendly with who is in the projection mapping business named Mike Backell.
He believed in my idea so much that he gave me a little bit of money, an angel investor, not a lot of money.
And I blew through that money in about five minutes.
Everything beyond the Mike Backell money, it was my own money.
It was everything that I'd saved and it was a lot of sleepless nights and it was a lot of having wonderful conversations with my wife about why I'm spending all of our money on the idea of beaming people places in these devices.
And I promised it's going to be a thing and she believed in me as well and said, spend our money.
You raised, I think, about $3 million in 2020 and then another $12 million in 2021.
Still small amounts of money for such a huge project.
But when were you able to finally put together a working prototype of the phone booth?
The working prototype happened before I got that $3 million.
I wasn't going to get a penny.
Until you showed what it could do.
Yes. So I made the prototype and I started schlepping that prototype to every convention and trade show that would let me through the door.
And I would negotiate terms with different booth sponsors.
I'd say, hey, let me put my hollow box, my hologram box in the back of your booth and it will bring in, it'll drive traffic into your booth.
And it started doing that.
We had the longest lines in every trade show.
And tell me, just explain visually how it worked.
You'd have the box there and then how could people see it working?
Okay. So the box is seven feet tall.
It's four feet wide and it's only about two feet deep.
It's light. It's thin. It doesn't take up a huge footprint and surrounding the box is metal.
So it looked like it was three sided and then a window into the box from the front.
It was a white box. It was a light box.
Versions of light boxes have been used over the years at trade shows to put things in, products in, and it would light it up and it would keep it nice.
And maybe there'd be some sort of a digital overlay using some kind of like an LCD cover.
I had discovered a way to use a type of light box after customizing it for quite a while and producing the content in such a way that it didn't look like there was anything on the screen.
And I was so surprised by how great it looked because I had gone through 10 or 15 prototypes of it looking terrible.
And somehow each prototype got worse and worse, which I was really running low on patience.
And then this box looked so real, I couldn't believe just how amazing the projections appeared.
And so when people would walk up to it, they would believe, because nobody had ever seen anything like this before, that there was a guy in the box.
And that was just an image that was being projected into the box.
Yeah, it was just pre-recorded video of a person playing the guitar.
Okay. And we also had a stand-up comedian and we did some entertainment and we drew a crowd.
And then I had a little sign up at Comic-Con 2019 in Los Angeles.
The sign just says, who wants to be a hologram?
Yeah. And there was a line a mile long wrapped around the convention cell.
And so how were you able to do that?
How are you able to make people holograms?
What did they do? We had a small studio capture kit set up.
It was a small regular off-the-shelf 4K camera in a locked off position.
I had a white cycle wall behind me.
The cycle was made out of a roll of paper.
Just like a wall that a photographer would use.
Photographer paper. It's a small little backdrop.
I used a light to cast a shadow, a plexiglass floor to create the effect of a reflection where my feet would appear on the floor inside of the portal box.
And that basically was it.
I hardwired that in. I used HDMI.
I just basically connected a camera, a light and a wall of white paper to our new light box.
And that could transmit anybody standing on that mini set right into the box next door.
And people could see themselves or other people could see that person projected.
But it seemed like they were really in the box.
They were only maybe 10 feet away, but they appeared in more than one place.
So I've seen it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year.
And it is really cool. I mean, I've seen it in action and it's amazing.
So you develop this, right?
And then you begin to raise money so you can start to produce these boxes.
Now they are available.
You can buy one. You can shop and you can buy one of these boxes.
You also have another model, a smaller one, which we'll talk about in a minute.
But these are very expensive.
These are about $60,000 plus each one.
Who are they designed for?
How are they designed to be used, at least in your mind?
The price is, we have several different SKUs and $60,000 is our more expensive version.
That was the one that I saw at CES.
That was the one that you saw at CES.
And who is using these? Hospitals, universities.
We're in about 30 colleges and universities right now.
Teachers are beaming into schools.
Doctors and professors, PhDs are beaming into medical schools, beaming into hospitals to train future healthcare providers.
It's being used to diagnose patients.
It's two-way. You can see when you are speaking and you are transmitted to the box, you can also see the audience that you're talking to.
Yes. So when you beam in and you're basically having a bit of a zoom on your side, so you're standing in front of a camera, you could even, at this point, you could even use your iPhone.
We've developed an app, so you don't need that big studio kit anymore.
And you could beam anywhere.
Right above your head, in the box, there are sensors, cameras, microphones.
Everything that you would need to hear, see, and interact with your audience or audiences because our technology, you can beam into thousands of locations at the same time.
For me, these are radio stations.
This all goes back to broadcasting.
I'm not broadcasting my voice.
I'm not broadcasting my face on a screen.
I'm now broadcasting my true presence, my real volumetric projection everywhere.
And you can see the audience that you're being beamed in front of.
And it's sent back to you for now as a 4K flat return feed projection in the form of a URL.
So you could open that up on any monitor or screen.
But essentially, I mean, and I think it's been used this way, you could wheel out the phone booth onto a stage and get somebody who may not be able to travel around the world, halfway around the world to speak, you know, to stand wherever they are in their home and to give a speech.
Actually, I saw a version of this at a TED conference, not this technology, but you've all known a Harari gave a speech as a hologram at a TED conference a few years ago.
But this is different. I mean, it's much more realistic than that was.
You could have somebody in there, they can see the audience, and then I guess afterwards, like people could come up to the box and take selfies and stuff with it.
And basically, is about as close as you're going to get to the real person being there.
When you were at CES and you saw us in the AARP age tech booth, did you stick around for my speech on stage where we beamed in Howie Mandel?
Unfortunately, I didn't.
But please tell me more.
This is great. So I mean, dream come true stuff.
Howie Mandel slid into my DMs about two years ago, and we were raising a bunch of money and we get a lot of attention whenever we beam anybody anywhere.
Howie says to me, help me beam places.
I want to go everywhere without going anywhere.
So we've started beaming him all over the world.
We beam him to corporate gigs.
We beamed him to the Just For Laugh comedy festival in Montreal.
We beamed him from LA in his office to Las Vegas where CES is, and he helped us close the keynote on stage in front of hundreds of people.
He was picking people out of the crowd.
He could see them. He was doing jokes.
He was being interactive.
And it was really great.
And right before we beamed Howie to CES, we beamed the man who made beaming people places famous, Mr.
William Shatner. Yeah.
He had a job to do. He had a keynote speech to give on stage in Sydney, Australia, 8,000 miles away from where he lives.
Days of travel. I mean, think about what this must be like for a 93-year-old guy.
And when you look at him, when you talk to him, you'd swear he was in his 50s.
I mean, the guy is super sharp and with it.
But he said, I have a speech to give.
I want to beam in. I want to give my speech.
I want to beam out. I could be home in time for breakfast and I won't have to waste time traveling and doing the whole thing.
It's not just traveling.
Saving time, saving money, saving the environment.
He's a big environmental guy.
He doesn't want to spread jet fuel over the earth unnecessarily.
He beamed in. He did Q&A with a moderator who was physically on stage.
Then he started talking to people in the audience to prove I'm alive.
I'm live right now. I'm interactive.
It was great. And the guy says, you're not a hologram company.
You're a time machine. You just saved me days of time.
When we come back after a quick break, David's vision to bring a miniature inexpensive holoportation box right into your living room.
Stay with us. I'm Guy Riz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.
Fifty high school senior girls descend on Mobile, Alabama every summer to compete for a massive cash prize.
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Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab.
I'm Guy Reyes. My guest today is David Nussbaum, the founder of Proto.
It's a technology company that makes a holographic communication device.
We're living at an interesting historical times where comedians and performers, if they're controversial or deemed controversial, can be at risk on stage.
People can throw things at them or rush the stage or something like that.
So you can imagine maybe some performers or comedians are going to say, you know what, I'm just going to go into the hologram box in my house and just go on tour that way.
You know how many emails I got the day after the Oscars?
Oh, the one where Will Smith punched Chris Rock, that one?
Yeah. I mean, it's the safest way to travel.
I talk to politicians all the time.
We're in an electioneer.
I could beam a politician into all 50 states at the exact same time.
It's very interactive.
It's great. You could still go on your campaign trail, but you can also branch off and be in 100 other locations simultaneously.
So now, okay, the expensive version of this is really for institutional use, right?
And for maybe, you know, for people who are going to use this to perform or whatever.
But how do you see consumers, you know, people who've got an iPhone, people who are, you know, not going to spend 60 grand on or even thousands of dollars on this technology?
How do you see them using it?
Right now, this cost of the large proto-epic is around $60,000.
In the next several months, I will be able to cut that price in half.
Just because of the scale?
Yes. We're scaling pretty quickly, and we've also discovered some new technologies that have a pretty effective projection.
As you raise money, as you develop, as your engineers continue to push the abilities of what we're able to do, things will get better.
What we do right now is the worst it's ever going to look, and it's still the best in the world right now.
The miniature tabletop device is around $6,000.
Okay, so we should mention this is a miniature version of it, and it's like what?
Like 12 inches tall or something?
It's 24 inches tall. It is my version of WonkaVision.
So it's the same thing as the big box.
Your person is three-dimensional.
Yes. It's just smaller, smaller, and you can put on, it's like a mini-me version.
Like you could have a, yeah, you could have a mini David or Guy or whatever on your table.
It's one-fifth scale. It is super cool.
It goes from portrait to landscape, just like you would be able to do with your iPhone or any tablet, except it looks like little guy is in the table.
Like you could be broadcasting from people's living rooms.
Now at $6,000, we don't have a lot of consumers.
It's still being put in malls and museums and airports and senior living facilities and retail locations.
But my plan, the goal with Proto is to have a consumer device under $1,000.
I believe this is how little Lucy and little Francis and little Theo, while they're doing their homework, I think this is how their teachers are educating them.
I think this is how they're getting their information, their entertainment.
This is how they're communicating.
Zoom and FaceTime are great, but there isn't the emotional or physical connection that Proto brings.
There is something very real about the technology in the hands of regular people.
You see this as a communication device, basically a way for people to just connect.
Now you've got the Facebook and Amazon and Google all make screen devices where you can just push a button.
The commercial is always a kid talking to the grandparents.
That exists, obviously FaceTime on our phones.
But this is basically a more sophisticated version of that, essentially.
That's how you envision it being used at home.
All of the other devices out in the market that I've seen are flat.
They're two-dimensional.
They're sending and receiving information, communication, absolutely all day long.
But if you want to truly connect with somebody, if you want to have a true connection, that is what Proto brings.
It's not just a communication device, it's a marketing device.
It is an advertising vehicle.
This is not VR. This is R.
It's real. You don't have to wear anything to see these volumetric projections before you.
It's a communal experience.
You can have 100 people in the room and they're all seeing the person in the device.
And it doesn't have to be a person.
It could be museum artwork and sculptures.
It could be products and services all coming to life without having to download anything, without having to wear anything.
And the magic isn't in the camera because any 4K camera will work.
It's in how it's projected.
Absolutely. When I was a kid and everybody was using home phones and the phones, kids, wired phones, they used to be stuck to our kitchen walls and you couldn't walk 5 or 10 feet away from it.
Well, if you had a long cord, you could.
Well, you must have grown up in a rich house.
We had a long cord. We spent $10 on that long cord, yes.
I remember though when car phones first came out, which came out before mobile phones, you were able to call a house phone from a car phone.
And then eventually you were able to call your house phone from a mobile phone.
So like the technology of the future and the technology of the current were able to communicate with each other.
So yes, you can beam into a proto right now using your iPhone or any smartphone.
You don't need to have a special camera.
You don't need a room full.
People see the projections and they're like, are you using 3D cameras and 360 cameras and do you have to go into a special place?
No, you could beam using the technology of today into the technology of tomorrow.
All right. So what you're saying is it's just a matter of time before you can even even for the big box could be something that, you know, might be a stretch for a lot of people, but could be in the thousands of dollars to have in your home.
And it may not be a box. The box is what we're using.
The box is what we're beaming our spatial compute projections into really shows off the technology.
But at the end of the day, we may partner up with a hardware provider.
There might be a hybrid device where you can watch your TV.
You could watch Netflix.
You could do your computing.
And then you can just swipe through to the proto.
We can just be an app on a device that creates the effect of a hologram.
And our technology offers software updates every four to six weeks.
And so when you have one of our devices, even 10 years from now, our devices will continue to upgrade with every software update.
The one that we just did a couple of weeks actually yesterday morning is bananas.
In which way? Well, like when we started proto, it was just for communication or it was just for advertising, either a pre recorded piece of content of a person or a thing, or beaming them in live for real time communication.
But now, as other technologies continue to evolve, we're either partnering up with or embedding other softwares and technologies into our device to become a ubiquitous display.
I can walk up to a device right now and I've got a proto GPT.
I've got dozens of avatars, different types of people, a doctor bot, a concierge bot.
I've got people that look like celebrities in their voices.
I can talk to them. They can talk back to me in any language.
Now, that kind of sets some alarm bells off for me because obviously it's just a matter of time.
It's already happening.
Taylor Swift, AI-generated nude photos that obviously are not real but are very apparently photo realistic.
This is going to happen more and more and it's going to get more and more sophisticated.
We've done a lot of conversations about AI generated by AI and how the technology is advancing so quickly that the people who make it don't even understand how quickly it's advancing.
What kinds of protections are you building into your technology to make sure that like an AI-generated Guy Raz hologram isn't just saying things that I wouldn't say?
Yes. Well, just like my background in dealing with estates of late legends, we proto.
We don't do anything without total consent over the whoever it is that we're working with.
All of our customers, partners are all involved in the manufacturing of whatever the projections are.
We do have dozens of engineers at proto.
Most of our engineers are software engineers.
Their job is to ensure safety, encryption, privacy, and control over the data set from end to end.
Of course, with AI, there are a lot of roblox in place.
I can't walk up to an AI and say, tell me how to build a gun.
There are protections already built into these platforms.
Our software takes other people's software, their technology, embeds it in ours.
What we do is we create a very lifelike version of either person or product.
All right. How, when does proto become in your view?
It sounds like the play here is to become a consumer product, really.
Is that fair to say? I think that's a play.
I still believe that we have a really great business with the enterprise.
I think we have a great business with retail and business to business companies.
I believe this is the future of when you walk into a mall, when you walk into a store, you will be approached by a holographic salesperson.
You will be able to see the product that you want and it'll come to life before you.
I think the ability to interact with products, people, services will never be easier.
I think that happens outside of the home.
Inside the home, yeah, I think this is the, every 15 or 20 years, something really big happens.
The internet, the smartphone, AI, proto, I believe is one of those great things that's going to change people's lives inside and out of the home.
Awesome. Dave Nespom, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me. Have me back.
Next time as a hologram.
That's David Nespom, founder and CEO of Proto.
And hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.
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This episode was produced by Casey Herman with editing by John Isabella and research help from Sam Paulson.
Our music was composed by Ramteen Ereblewe.
Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch.
Our production team at How I Built This also includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Chris Mussini, J.C.
Howard, Catherine Seifer, Keri Thompson, Malia Agudello and Neva Grant.
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