AI that can be your second brain with Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri of Humane

**Guy Raz** (0:01)
Hey, it's Guy here. And before we start the show, I want to tell you about a super exciting thing. We are launching on How I Built This. So if you own your own business or trying to get one off the ground, we might put you on the show. Yes, on the show. And when you come on, you won't just be joining me, but you'll be speaking with some of our favorite former guests who also happen to be some of the greatest entrepreneurs on earth. And together, we'll answer your most pressing questions about launching and growing your business.
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**Imran Chaudhri** (1:20)
The show.

**Guy Raz** (1:31)
Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So wherever you are right now, chances are there is a screen within arm's reach. Maybe it's a phone or a tablet or a smartwatch. And over the past decade, we've come to depend on these screens to conduct most of the business in our lives. Transportation, communication, scheduling, entertainment.
We now do all of this pretty much on our screens. But what if you could do all of these things without the distraction of a screen?
Well, that's the idea behind the Humane AI Pin. It's a little square device that can do many of the same things as our screen devices. Think of it a little like an AI assistant. The difference is the Humane Pin is controlled by the sound of your voice. The pin has a touchpad, a camera, a built-in projector, and it's made to pin right to your clothes with a little magnet.
The AI Pin was created by Humane co-founders Imran Chaudhri and his wife, Bethany Bongiorno. Before they got into the world of artificial intelligence, the two of them worked at Apple, leading the design of some of the very screens I was just talking about. Imran started there first in the late 1990s when working for Apple meant kind of being the underdog.

**Imran Chaudhri** (2:48)
Our team started by redefining what a Mac was, by building Mac OS X that just really had an eye towards, how do you actually build a new type of computer that was easier to use, that wouldn't crash. And Macs used to crash all the time back then. But that was our boot camp.
And then we got to work on things like Multi-Touch, which went on to propel things like iPhone and iPad and watch, all stuff that my team and I worked on.

**Guy Raz** (3:24)
I mean, of course, there's the famous presentation that Steve Jobs gives and says, stylist, who needs a stylist, right? When you've got five digits on each hand and that's something that you worked on, you worked on that touchscreen, the technology that enabled that.

**Imran Chaudhri** (3:38)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that was the fundamental unlock for making the transition from remote interactions from a keyboard and mouse to really allowing people to do what we call direct manipulation. And that's literally just being able to touch the screen and have a far more intimate relationship with the things that you're really using on a day-to-day basis.

**Guy Raz** (4:05)
Yeah. I mean, both of you were at Apple at just such an incredibly historic time. Bethany, you joined about 10 years after Imran started. But still, I mean, right after the iPhone kind of shipped is when you joined, and soon, I guess, you were kind of put in charge as a project manager involved with the iPad.

**Bethany Bongiorno** (4:30)
Yeah. I joined Apple in 2008, and I was a BlackBerry user. I was a PC user. I didn't have an iPhone, but I had a lot of admiration for what they were doing. And a couple months after I joined the iPhone team, which was pretty small at the time still, and still treated like a startup within the company and had a lot of secrecy around what that team was up to, a lot of locked doors where the teams were meeting and doing our work. But a couple months after I joined, they asked me if I would take on a new project. And at the time, they told me that they couldn't tell me what the project was, but that it would require that for the next year and a half to two years of my life, I would have to work many, many hours and it would be really challenging and really difficult. And it was this new project that Steve wanted to do.