More recently relating to a conversation you and I had, maybe a few weeks ago. There was a story that the FAA is sort of reaching some conclusions from a legislative perspective about the rules that will govern the flying of drones, the licensing of flying them or you know all of the different particulars therein, which I thought was kind of timely and interesting given the conversations you and I have had.

Secondly, on the FAA as they are determining what the rules will be, it’s very interesting that the rules that they have in place now are actually very restrictive in terms of people actually needing pilot’s licenses in order to fly the drones, even though it doesn’t appear that they’re going to be flying them from a plane. These new rules that they’ve got in place are much less restrictive and sort of plays into that fear that you had that there are going to be all sorts of problems as they get these services up and running.

There are other things that like Ralph Lauren is working on for release this year. A sport shirt that will let you measure things like heart rate and stress. That seems a little bit more useful to me. The idea that we carry these smart phones in our pockets, maybe you’re going to end up with or someone will end up with the Apple watch. You’ve got your Fitbit, you’ve got all of these things that you can sort of put on or put in your pocket.

How much nicer would it be if some of that functionality is just integrated into the fabric of your clothing and it’s no longer such a separate object but is really part of your style, right? For me it would be wonderful if I just had a phone somehow embedded into my shirt or a hat or something and I didn’t have to quite root around in my pocket and pull out the phone and sort of fumble with it. That seems … I mean it would be very nice to get a little voice prompt, “Hey, Dirk is calling,” and I can say, “OK, accept the call,” and just talk to you through my hat or through my shirt. I love this idea of integration.

On the health side there’s some fascinating stuff with sensors being built into … I saw a project with … It’s being built into a cardigan sweater for older patients who need rehabilitation and it can … The sweater sort of measures their range of motion and sends that data over to a tablet device for the caregiver or the clinician. That’s just another great way that sensors could be used, sort of built into this everyday material and make it so much easier to measure things like that.

Dirk, what’s your take on the integration of wearables into fashion?

There are other issues that it raises, right? When I wear a button down shirt, I put collar stays in the collars. You know the collar stays the shirts come with are crappy, so I’ve bought some more expensive collar stays. They’re not outrageously expensive, but 10 bucks for stays is a lot more than the 2 cents that they normally cost. I frequently forget to take them out of the shirt, even though they’re expensive. I’ve no desire to buy another pair of $10 collar stays.

In the routine of getting changed and the routine of transitioning from my work mode to my home mode or whatever the context within which I’m getting undressed, it’s common that I don’t remember to take them out. Those shirts get dry cleaned so they’ll be in a pile. Sometimes later I’ll remember and I’ll go and fish them out. Most clothes that people wear go into a washing machine. Washing machines and digital electronics don’t work real well together.

There’s definitely that question of lifestyle of making the clothing and making the devices embedded in the clothing operating in a way either that they are going to be safe if they’re thrown in the washing machine or sent to the dry cleaner or whatever other context of cleaning there is or they are something that we are remembering with regularity to take out, to remove.

You talked about the health aspects of some of this stuff, I’ve been doing a lot of research into cyborgs actually in recent weeks and what I’ve learned is that the cyborg community is really … 99% of it is driven by people with disabilities. It’s driven by people who are missing an eye or are missing a leg or who in order to function in a way that approximates normalcy, they have to get these very radical augmentations. That is where the innovation and the really interesting things so far for the most part have come from.

In a embedded clothing perspective, I think similar holds true. If you need to be monitoring something or else you might die, I mean you’re going to really be aware of the device that’s doing that monitoring. If you’re just passively dumping a lot of data into a database that you could look at periodically and interact with, but frankly most of us just won’t have a reason to most of the time. Then annually or however frequently we go to the doctor, the doctor can have access to it. I mean that’s just not the kind of thing that is essential. It’s not the kind of thing that will be easy for us to integrate into our routine of what we’re doing every day.

Maybe it won’t prove as difficult as I think, but using my collar stays as an example, I mean I forget those things all the damn time and I’ve dealt with them long enough that it should have been a habit by now, it should be, “Hey, you take off the shirt, you take out those damn stays.” I already have to take off my cuff links. I always remember to take those off because without taking those off I can’t take the shirt off. Maybe there’s a lesson in there for the designers of the embed-able clothes.

I’ve meandered a little bit but the net is embedding clothing is better than strapping stuff to our body in the very crude ways we’ve done, but there are some challenges there still to be solved for it to be really useful and usable. Ultimately I think we’re headed down the embed-able path, meaning embedded into our bodies come hell or high water.

I like to run, so I have running headphones that get sort of incorporated into my … The shirts and the jackets that I use when I’m running. Inevitably, I find as I pull out the shirt that I was running with that I left the headphones in there because I was just … I got home and I’m like, “I’m getting out of this gear and I’m going to the shower.” I just throw it all in a pile and inevitably I end up washing my headphones. Now, luckily the headphones that I have are the athletic headphones that are meant for sweat and moisture so they actually survived in the washing machine. Don’t know about the dryer. I think that would really do them in.

The point is that the durability, it’s going to be important for these products and you’re going to find a lot of disappointed folks who initially get it because they think it’s sort of the latest thing. Then they’ll find out they spent a lot of money on something that … So now you have your Twitter dress that doesn’t tweet anymore, how very sad that will be for whoever buys that.

It seems to be a area that’s ripe for innovation in both the power source for the vehicle and the method for which it’s driven. I can see Apple wanting to be in that space. Oh boy, there are a lot more rules and regulations there and a much longer time to market than anything that Apple has sort of delved into before. They got in the telephony business with the iPhone and I imagine that this is going to be at least an order of magnitude more difficult, although they are sitting on that huge cash pile, so maybe that solves some of the complexity difficulties. What’s your take on the Apple mix and electric car rumor?

Apple, because they have so much cash, they need to, in trying to keep up with Google, be involved in that business. They need to be paying attention to it, they need to be making investments. They don’t have a choice, because if things fall in a certain way, and if they’re the ones on the outside looking in, it won’t be pretty for them. Now Apple has so much money, they’re in a position where in theory they could pass on it and things could move forward and they could be left behind and they could just go out and buy General Motors or some major automotive company and close the gap and get back in the game. They have that luxury.

The very fact that they’re the follower, the very fact that Google is the one kind of out there already. Apple’s not there, maybe they’re heading there. Maybe they’ll miss the boat and have to buy into it later is ominous, because Apple’s success over the last … I don’t know when the iPhone or the iPod rather was first released, but over the last 15 or 20 years it’s been about being ahead. It’s been about pioneering and opening and as we’ve talked about they’re falling behind. That brand is becoming less and less what Apple’s about.

The Apple of 2015 is more like Microsoft of 1995 in a lot of different ways. That’s not the Apple that we’ve come to know, and for many people love, from the 1970’s until the mid-2000’s. I don’t know what Apple’s going to do. I think that they probably should be dabbling at a minimum and thinking about the future. The future may be one where the top technology companies are also the primary transportation companies. There’s a lot of good reasons why that should be the case. I mean if I were Tim Cook, I would be investing intelligently in transportation.

Listeners, remember that while you’re listening to the show, you can follow along with the things that we’re mentioning here in real time. Just head over to the digitalife.com. That’s just one l in the digital life. Go to the page for this episode. We’ve included links to pretty much everything mentioned by everybody. It’s a rich information resource to take advantage of while you are listening or afterword if you’re trying to remember something that you liked.

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