Jon Krohn: 00:00:00
This is episode number 889 with Mary Spio, CEO and CTO of CEEK. Today’s episode is brought to you by Adverity, the conversational analytics platform and by the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA.
00:00:20
Welcome to the SuperDataScience Podcast, the most listened to podcast in the data science industry. Each week we bring you fun and inspiring people and ideas, exploring the cutting edge of machine learning, AI, and related technologies that are transforming our world for the better. I’m your host, Jon Krohn. Thanks for joining me today. And now let’s make the complex simple.
00:00:54
Welcome back to the SuperDataScience Podcast. Today, we’re super fortunate to have the incredible engineer and entrepreneur, Mary Spio, on the show. Mary is CEO and CTO of CEEK, a platform pioneering AI powered virtual reality experiences. She holds over 10 patents across AI, digital cinema, spatial audio, and extended reality technologies. She was a deep space engineer at Boeing and before ever even going to university was a satellite technician for the US Air Force.
00:01:23
Her innovations have been used by Xbox, Lucasfilm and Universal Music. She holds a master’s in electrical engineering, computer science and innovation management from Georgia Tech. Today’s episode is fascinating and relatively high level, and so should be of interest to any listener. In today’s episode, Mary details how a childhood in Ghana during a military coup led to a career as a deep space engineer and AI entrepreneur, the neuroscience of how VR training can create memories that are indistinguishable from reality in your brain, the shocking discovery about why VR headsets were making women violently ill and how Mary fixed it, how AI music is revolutionizing the industry and giving artists unexpected new powers and how blockchain verification might be our only defense against an impending tsunami of AI generated deep fakes. All right, you ready for this super episode? Let’s go.
00:02:22
Mary, welcome to the SuperDataScience Podcast. It’s an honor to have you on the show. You’re a big deal, so it’s great to be able to get you here. Thank you so much for joining us. Where are you calling in from today?
Mary Spio: 00:02:33
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m actually calling in from Miami this morning.
Jon Krohn: 00:02:38
Nice. From a New York perspective, I’m always super jealous of Miami in the winter, and I have this idea to somehow someday spend my winters in Miami.
Mary Spio: 00:02:50
Oh, that sounds like fun. I spent a good amount of time in Syracuse, New York, so I know all about the cold, cold weather and in New York as well. Being a native New Yorker myself, I really enjoy the Miami weather.
Jon Krohn: 00:03:05
Yeah, I bet. Do you like summers as well or is it too hot in the summer in Miami?
Mary Spio: 00:03:10
I love summers because I like the water, so I like being able to go in the water. I like that.
Jon Krohn: 00:03:15
Oh, so it’s actually in the winter, it is too cold in the water to go in, typically?
Mary Spio: 00:03:19
It’s not bad actually because in the winter we still have AC on, so it’s just the right temperature in the winter.
Jon Krohn: 00:03:29
Right, right, right. But in the summer it’s nice and refreshing and yeah, you don’t have to brace yourself or anything, I guess, at any point, which is nice.
Mary Spio: 00:03:36
Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:03:37
So Mary, you’re a deep space engineer, you’re a tech innovator, you are the CEO and CTO of a company called CEEK, which we’re going to be talking about mostly at the outset of this episode. And I’d love for you to explain to us what CEEK is because there’s lots of amazing things about it that I can kind of say. So it’s a platform for pioneering blockchain-powered virtual experiences, and it’s been trusted by people like Lady Gaga, Bon Jovi, Dwyane Wade, and is backed by huge important media players like Universal Music, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, what is it?
Mary Spio: 00:04:20
So in short, it’s like it’s a social platform that enables anyone to store the content that they create as digital assets on the blockchain backed by the CEEK token. So whether it’s your posts, videos, anything that you post on CEEK pretty much is stored on the blockchain as a digital asset. So it makes it easier for you to trade as well as for fans to collect it. And the big difference is the fact that on our platform, you can consume the content with or without a VR headset, so you can consume the content on Apple Vision Pro, Oculus, or the same way that you would consume any other media platform. So it’s just you get to keep your data so you own the rights to your data.
Jon Krohn: 00:05:11
Wow, that is cool. Can you give us an example of some recent, I don’t know, like concert or media asset that people have really been enjoying in the CEEK platform?
Mary Spio: 00:05:19
Yeah, absolutely. So the Lady Gaga experience is a great one that people truly enjoy and keep coming back to. We also have Dwyane Wade, he has a Celebrity Sports Academy with everyone from LeBron James coach to Derek Rose, Jimmy Butler that are really giving advice to future or would-be NBA players. This is the type of advice I say that can be Googled. So a lot of those deep insights that they’re able to give them and the fact that they can actually live coach them. So it could be even other athletes. I see other athletes come on there all the time asking questions, everything from technique to injuries and just really having the type of longevity that Derek and both Dwayne have had in their careers. But those are some of the content that are currently trending on the platform. But then we have a lot of AI artists, especially AI music. Marketplace, I think that probably the most purchased items are AI music that’s on there.
Jon Krohn: 00:06:26
Really?
Mary Spio: 00:06:27
Yes, yes.
Jon Krohn: 00:06:29
So what does that mean? So there’s an artist in the loop, or I don’t know, how much do you know about this AI music? What does it sound like?
Mary Spio: 00:06:38
So AI music, actually, I love it, right? I love it. I’ve been writing music for a very long time, and now AI has even allowed me to be able to really create the type of commercially viable music. So with a lot of the AI music, you have producers that are using AI to help them with maybe lyrics or vocals, or you have artists that are now using AI to supplement with the production. And then you have AI artists that are just purely generating the music also, but it’s good music and I find that the best type of AI music is really when you have humans in there finessing it. And so we have the full variety, but on our platform because you have film supervisors and other types of other labels too, looking for good music that they can purchase because our marketplace is a digital rights marketplace, so people are selling the rights to the music. It’s not just a download. You can stream, sell, or license your content.
Jon Krohn: 00:07:43
Oh, wow.
Mary Spio: 00:07:43
So it’s all the above, which is very different. And we’re only able to do that because with traditional music, you have so many different parties. I call it a team sport. You have your publisher, your songwriters and so on. But with AI music, most of the time you have solo creators that own the full gamut. So it’s much easier just to sell using smart contracts.
Jon Krohn: 00:08:06
Really cool. And you’re blending so many really popular technologies, AI, blockchain, extended reality, virtual reality experiences. That’s really cool. Tell us a bit about, you mentioned creating music there. I’m just curious, you personally, what’s your music background and what kind of music did you create historically? How is that different now with AI?
Mary Spio: 00:08:26
So my music background, I am a long-term fan. I have a Pink Floyd shirt on right now. I love all kinds of music, and so I’ve been a fan for a very long time. But I also write, I’ve been writing music, I’ve written songs for other artists for-
Jon Krohn: 00:08:43
No kidding.
Mary Spio: 00:08:44
Yes, yes. I even recently wrote a song for Jimmy Butler because he has an album coming out. What he’s not going to use the song, but I wrote one for him anyway, but I’ve been writing for the longest time. And so how I’m using AI now to create music is I am using AI to help with the production of the beats, right? Because I’m matching the lyrics, I’m also using AI to combine. If there are beats that are created, instrumentals that are created, then I am recording my vocals, enhancing those vocals with AI. It’s like auto-tuning on a whole different level. And then I’m combining the two. I actually have a song that’s coming out soon, so hopefully it’ll be out by the time this is out.
00:09:42
It’s having all these superpowers all of a sudden because it allows you to do so much that you’ve been wanting to do. That’s how I personally use AI in terms of music. What I find is that by using AI to train my voice, I’m also naturally improving my own voice, my natural voice. And the reason why I hadn’t put my music out and I was writing for other people is because I didn’t think that my voice was good enough and I didn’t have the confidence to put it out. But with the way AI is enhancing my own voice, now I’m able to put my music out with my own vocals.
Jon Krohn: 00:10:23
That is amazing. What kinds of styles of music, the new song that’s coming out, what kind of genre is that?
Mary Spio: 00:10:31
I think the first one that’s coming out is more of an adult contemporary vibe. It’s laid back, but a lot of my song is a fusion of EDM and Afrobeat, and it’s just me. It’s just over the place. And that’s the power of AI too is like I’m able to bend and mix genres to create the type of music that I love listening to that. My son is like a barometer for my music too. So if he likes it, then I know I can put it out. Even if he doesn’t like it, I’m still going to put it out. But it’s always a plus when he likes it because he’s 14 and he’s a huge music fan too, so it’s always great to do the type of music that he enjoys I enjoy and I hope other people will enjoy as well.
Jon Krohn: 00:11:25
So obviously your music will be available on the CEEK platform.
Mary Spio: 00:11:28
Yes, on the CEEK platform, Spotify. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:11:32
Nice. Very cool. So let’s talk about how the platform got… Actually, something that just popped into my head is that you were talking about how you feel more confident about your voice and how AI can fix it. Maybe finally, Lin-Manuel Miranda can have a professional sound voice. It’s so funny that he puts himself as a star in Hamilton, and there’s like, “If you don’t know that he’s the person who created,” you’re like, “Why did they let the lead in the show be the worst performer, the worst voice in the troupe?” And I’m sure he doesn’t have a bad voice sampled from, if he took a random sampling of the population, he’s great. But compared to Broadway performers, he’s not great.
Mary Spio: 00:12:21
Yeah, maybe he can use AI to train his voice and his natural voice will get even. And it really does help because it informs your brain of how you’re supposed to sound. And so when I record my vocals, it takes it and it auto-tunes it to the next range of where it’s really supposed to be to sound good, which is amazing.
Jon Krohn: 00:12:47
That is cool. And when it’s your own voice, you can match that probably much more easily than if someone else did it like I used to, when I was growing up, I had a female vocal coach.
Mary Spio: 00:12:59
Wow.
Jon Krohn: 00:12:59
And when she gives the example, it doesn’t really sound like me.
Mary Spio: 00:13:03
Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly it, because it sounds like you. So the training happens much faster. I’m really surprised at how quickly my voice is improving. It’s still not there yet, but I’m going to look back a few years from now and where I came from, where I started in terms of where my voice was and where it is today. And I’m excited to see where it goes from here. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:13:30
Amazing. On a personal note, so I’ve done a lot of music stuff myself in the past as well. I used to produce and star in musical theater productions, amateur ones. I had a rock band for five years in high school. I still do open mic nights.
Mary Spio: 00:13:46
Oh, wow. Nice.
Jon Krohn: 00:13:47
Guitar, piano, mostly vocals is my main instrument, but I use piano and rhythm guitar to accompany me. I have been aware, obviously, as the host of the SuperDataScience podcast and an AI entrepreneur myself in terms of building solutions for enterprises, I’m very much aware of the kinds of things that you’re saying on the show about how I could be leveraging AI to be creating the instruments for tracks that back my vocals. I could be improving my vocals, maybe I am kind of in the Lin-Manuel Miranda written quality, not bad, but I’m definitely not a Broadway star. So much opportunity there. And I’m dying to find a way to have the bandwidth to be taking advantage of all this tooling, I hope. Yeah. So it’s really cool to hear you talking about what you’re up to. And I guess I’ll have to be thinking about CEEK as a place to be getting my content out and licensing my content.
Mary Spio: 00:14:47
I would love to do a track with you for you to test out our AI voice tools. I think that would be great.
Jon Krohn: 00:14:56
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00:15:40
I’m writing that down, and you might regret making that off. Fantastic. That’s really cool. Wow. So in terms of how you got started with the CEEK platform, this is what I was going to start. I started asking this question, and then the Lin-Manuel and Miranda thing popped into my head and we ended up off on this really fun aside, but when you were creating it, you’ve said in the past that you had this realization, you had the inspiration for CEEK when you realized that 10 million people were competing for a hundred thousand concert tickets. So you had this a hundred to one ratio. That came out from our research and so I don’t understand the context on that story and taken out of context, I don’t even really understand it, how that relates to the platform that you ended up building. Can you elaborate on that origin story?
Mary Spio: 00:16:31
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I think that CEEK started from a very long time ago growing up. I grew up in Ghana. So even though I’m from New York, I grew up in Ghana, and I remember there were a lot of tough times. And during these times, we would always tend to TV. And I saw a documentary on space exploration. So I remember really being so fascinated, like, “Wow, these people, they’re walking on the moon. What would that feeling be to live inside of the television?” Because to me, that meant being able to walk on the moon. So fast-forward decades later, I’m at Facebook and I try on the Oculus, and I was literally on the moon walking on the moon. And I knew in that instant that I wanted to do something with that, that I wanted to be able to have other people feel what that feeling was, whatever their dreams were.
00:17:25
So to me, the idea for CEEK was to create a place where people could go to experience what’s possible for them, whether that’s swimming with the sharks, whether that’s a music concert, being up close and personal. I didn’t know then that we were going to be able to get the likes of Lady Gaga and Bon Jovi and Dwayne Wade and all those guys. But it was about creating a place where people could go to feel what’s possible. And during this time, I’ve always loved music. I’ve always loved movies. And so it was a story of, Adele had a concert at Madison Square Garden. She only had, I believe it was, at that time, 10,000 tickets. And it was like 110 million people try to buy those tickets, a hundred thousand tickets and 10 million people tried to get it. So I said, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great if people could actually attend an Adele concert from all over the world? So let’s bring this feeling, that energy of being in a life concert.”
00:18:29
So that’s how it started. And then today it’s really evolved. Now we’re more focused on people are looking for educational experiences. They want the tried and true. In the midst of all this AI, people want those trusted voices because there’s a lot of inaccuracies out there. But that’s how it all started with being able to create that energy of being there in person, being able to see what’s possible, walk on the moon. And we had a lot of those experiences early on, the moon experience and underwater experience, which was also a popular one for a very long time. We have a Tibet experience, which interestingly enough, it’s trending in Tibet. I’m like, “You’re there recently. Why are you experiencing where you are in VR?”
Jon Krohn: 00:19:17
Yeah, yeah. That’s funny. I guess maybe it’s easier. You don’t have to leave your home.
Mary Spio: 00:19:24
Right, right.
Jon Krohn: 00:19:24
Tibetans experiencing Tibet.
Mary Spio: 00:19:26
Yeah, maybe they want to see if it’s accurate, right? They’re like, “No, this is not Tibet.” Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:19:31
Yeah, yeah. That’s really cool. So I don’t actually usually go into people’s backgrounds. I usually just focus on what they’re doing now. And we will get back to CEEK in a second. But you mentioned there, growing up in Ghana, seeing, and I actually, from our research we dug up, that was you were watching a moon landing on black and white TV in Ghana, and that was during a military coup apparently as well, according to our research.
00:20:00
And so your journey is unusually interesting, I would say, among my guests. And so I’d love to insert that in here at this point in the episode as to how you started in Ghana during a coup. Then you end up, it seems like growing up in New York was a big part of your life. So how that happened. And then you did a bachelor’s degree, magna laude in electrical engineering at Syracuse University. You’re talking about at the beginning of this episode, how cold it is in Upstate New York. And then you did a master’s at Georgia Tech, also in electrical engineering and computer science, as well as global innovation management, which is a really nice kind of blend of management and technical background in electrical engineering and computer science, which you can see has come through now in everything you’ve accomplished as a deep space engineer and CEEK CEO, all the amazing things you’ve been doing. Can you just fill us in a bit more about that journey?
Mary Spio: 00:20:56
Yeah. How does all that come about.
Jon Krohn: 00:20:56
Yeah.
Mary Spio: 00:20:59
Yeah, absolutely. So my dad studied at Syracuse, and that’s how I was born. So I was born in New York while he was a student there. And so I’m a first generation American, but he went back to Ghana and he went back to Ghana, I think, when I was about four or five years old. So when I talk about the documentary that I saw on the moon landing, I didn’t see the actual moon landing.
Jon Krohn: 00:21:28
You don’t seem old enough.
Mary Spio: 00:21:30
I’m like, “I’m not that old.” Yeah, it was a documentary on the moon landing.
Jon Krohn: 00:21:36
You take real good care of yourself.
Mary Spio: 00:21:36
And so I grew up in Ghana, and at the time when I was watching the moon landing, the country was under a military coup. The country had been taken over by the military, so we couldn’t go outside. We had to be inside by six o’clock. There was chaos everywhere. Actually, there was a time where my dad was taken away. There were a lot of people that I knew whose parents were taken away.
Jon Krohn: 00:21:56
Oh my god.
Mary Spio: 00:21:58
Child killed. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was crazy.
Jon Krohn: 00:22:00
Did your dad end up being okay in the end?
Mary Spio: 00:22:02
Yeah, my dad ended up being okay, but it was a very tough time.
Jon Krohn: 00:22:05
I can only imagine. That’s insane.
Mary Spio: 00:22:08
Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. And that’s why TV was how we escaped. It was our magic box. You could see what was happening in other places. And so in watching the moon, for me, that documentary was so impactful because I was in the midst of all of this, but I could dream about this place where I’m like, “Wow, people are walking on the moon. They’re doing this,” and all these different things. So as soon as I was old enough, I said I want to go back to the US because I knew it would be better opportunity for me. I knew that it would be a much different life than what I was experiencing at that time. And so I came to the US, I came back at 16 on my own and that’s how it all started. I went in the military. In the military is where I actually started working on satellites and communication satellites, because I was a satellite technician.
00:23:09
So I gravitated towards space because that’s what had fascinated me. My journey to the US had started with that documentary and wanting to do these amazing things. And so that’s why for me, I believe that media is very, very powerful, the way it’s impacted my own life, the way it’s changed my own life. And so that’s what I wanted to do for other people with the VR, with CEEK. And that’s what we’re doing today is enabling people to really go after those dreams that they’re looking for and have people that they can talk to that have been there, have taken the path that they’re preparing or ready to take.
Jon Krohn: 00:23:49
Yeah. So am I correct in understanding from your history? The military thing is something that it’s not something that we had much come up about in our research on you, but I just did some quick real time research here as you’ve been speaking. And so it looks like you were working for the US Air Force as a satellite communications technician in Germany before you even did your undergrad at Syracuse.
Mary Spio: 00:24:13
Yes. Yeah, because right after college, I didn’t have the money for school. So I went in the Air Force. Actually, I got a job at McDonald’s. I worked at McDonald’s. I heard a commercial for the army, went down there to join the army. When I went, the army recruiter was taking a smoke break and the Air Force recruiter, this very handsome guy, tall guy, big muscles, everything. So I started talking to him, actually, he started talking to me, and long story short, I ended up in the Air Force. And so that’s how that all came about. But it started with me going in the army and then the Air Force and then pursuing satellite communications. And then after that, I won a scholarship for the US Air Forces to go back to school.
00:25:02
So I went to Syracuse, study electrical engineering, computer science. And then from there I went to Georgia Tech and I went to Georgia Tech because I used to read a lot on satellite communications. And Dr. Steffes at that time, they were working on who was one of my professors. I got an opportunity to work with him. He was working on the mission to Jupiter, and they were also working with NASA SETI and doing some really, really cool stuff. So I contacted him, the lab, and he said, “If you can get in, then you can work for me.” And so that’s exactly what I did. And I ended up working with Dr. Steffes on SETI, we were sending heat probes into space looking for intelligent live forms. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:25:46
The SETI program, that’s cool. S-E-T-I for people who don’t know it. I also realized I should probably spell CEEK for people who are listening and who are consuming this in an audio form.
Mary Spio: 00:25:58
C-E-E-K.
Jon Krohn: 00:26:01
Yes. C-E-E-K. And it’s C-E-E-K-V-R.com, right?
Mary Spio: 00:26:05
No, it’s just C-E-E-K.com. So we have a four letter domain. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:26:09
Nice. Sounds expensive.
Mary Spio: 00:26:12
I got it a long time ago, so yeah. C-E-E-K. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:26:18
Very cool. So yeah, thank you for giving us that background is fascinating. Also, it’s interesting to me that you ended up back at Syracuse. Is that a coincidence or was there kind of a bit of an inspiration there since your dad had gone there for university as well?
Mary Spio: 00:26:33
Because my dad went there was actually the only school I applied to.
Jon Krohn: 00:26:36
Oh, really? Well, it’s a great school for engineering.
Mary Spio: 00:26:40
Yeah, it’s a great school. But it was the only school I applied to because my dad went there. I felt that I wanted to do something that I know that he’d be proud of me.
Jon Krohn: 00:26:49
Oh, that’s really nice. So yeah. So let’s talk a bit more about CEEK, and we’ve actually, you talking about space, actually it ties into this a bit because you’ve created immersive experiences for NASA, for Lucasfilm, for children’s hospitals, it’s a wide range of different kinds of immersive experiences. So how does CEEK tailor these immersive extended reality solutions for both entertainment and deeply private contexts like education, healthcare space?
Mary Spio: 00:27:23
So in terms of the way I look at us, it’s really no different than being on Twitter or being on YouTube because NASA is on Twitter posting their content. And then you also have Baptist Health who we worked with for a nursing residency program, creating medically accurate sepsis diagnosis. And we were also working with them on mass casualty. This was even before all the craziness. So because it’s a social platform, you can consume it the regular way, and then if you come across content that is 360 or VR, you can just hit a VR button and put your headset on and consume it in that way.
00:28:01
And so we just want people to look at it that way. If I’m on YouTube and I’m watching content, I can watch that content in 360 as well. So it’s very, very similar to actually a YouTube or Patreon or any of those platforms, except that most of our content focuses on valuable content that people are willing to pay for. And then we also cater more to professionals because it’s super difficult to monetize this type of content on ad-based platforms that usually reward views. So I don’t think a lot of people are looking for sepsis diagnostic videos, but-
Jon Krohn: 00:28:44
I find sepsis diagnostics extremely entertaining, especially when I’m having a meal. That’s what I really like doing.
Mary Spio: 00:28:53
Right. Or even electric aviation, which is something that we’re focused on now because of all the displacement. Companies like Amazon have hired more than 750,000 robots. And so when you’re talking about delivery driving-
Jon Krohn: 00:29:10
I like how you just said hire.
Mary Spio: 00:29:14
Hired the robots.
Jon Krohn: 00:29:15
Yeah, exactly.
Mary Spio: 00:29:19
Have secured, acquired 750,000 robots. So this is not coming. It’s here. It’s happening. And so there’s such a large displacement of people, but those jobs are also transforming because now we have a huge demand from electric vehicle companies that want to retrain those delivery drivers as drone retrievers. The drones that have replaced them when they crash, somebody has to go and retrieve them. And so drone retrievers-
Jon Krohn: 00:29:50
That’s funny.
Mary Spio: 00:29:51
-they also are retraining them as electric vehicle pilots and these type of programs. So we are super focused on a place for professionals to create that type of content. And the scale of it is the fact that let’s say I get a thousand views on YouTube or I get a million views on YouTube with some kind of, if you’re tall training, the most I can get there is maybe 3,000 if there is an advertiser that’s interested in that content. But here you have a thousand people that are paying 5,000 each to come and be part of this immersive type training. So now they’re getting 5 million versus $3,000. So the skills are very different and we’re custom-built for this type of content. But because it’s a social platform, just like any other platform, it’s the same with concerts. You think about the BTS concert, BTS did a concert and within three days they generated 90 million not on CEEK. I wish it had been on CEEK, but it’s because all the content is targeted towards core fans and other audiences that are looking for the specific type of content.
Jon Krohn: 00:31:06
Yeah, BTS is K-pop?
Mary Spio: 00:31:08
K-pop, yeah. Yeah, they generated 90 million in three days from their concert because these are paid content, it’s not ad-based. And we find that a lot of the ad-based platforms are kind of struggling now with content in general because you have a billion assets that are being released today. So there’s that influx of content. So having this infinite amount of content with just a finite amount of ad inventory, it’s very, very difficult for that to go around for everybody.
Jon Krohn: 00:31:38
Yeah, it’s true. The fight for eyeballs continues.
Mary Spio: 00:31:42
Yes, yes.
Jon Krohn: 00:31:43
You mentioned an interesting acronym very casually. A few minutes ago you said eVTOL, which I actually only recently learned what that means, and it’s a really cool concept. So the VTOL is vertical takeoff and landing. So it’s a vehicle, you could think about it like a helicopter, but they’re not usually a helicopter. They also can drive I think sometimes.
Mary Spio: 00:32:04
Yeah, some of them are flying cars.
Jon Krohn: 00:32:07
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00:32:53
Yeah, like flying cars, it would be if you wanted capture in a colloquial way, a VTOL, vertical takeoff and landing, would be like a flying car. And then the E is electric, electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. So it is interesting, or at least there was prior to the current federal administration in the US, there was a lot of money, government money going into eVTOL research with both military as well as commercial applications. Really fascinating area. Anyway, we don’t really need to get into that. We can get back to CEEK. Another thing that’s really cool about CEEK is how it could potentially, I mean platforms like CEEK or VR in general, how it could help with education.
00:33:42
So in the US for example, there’s a shortage of 400,000 kindergarten to grade 12 teachers. So primary and secondary school teachers and post-secondary institutions, there will also be shortages coming because those workforces are unusually old. And so college and university faculty are going to be retiring. And so education is failing to attract and retain faculty and has equity failings a cascade into long-term disadvantages for students. And you’ve described previously how one professor can teach a hundred thousand students via CEEK. So where do you see VR CEEK potentially having a long-term impact on improving educational outcomes?
Mary Spio: 00:34:26
Right. Where we see it is in multiple ways, right? Because right now, like you said, the shortage, I saw a stat somewhere that was like, Europe needs this much US North America needs this much. It was like 4.6 million total. And then it says Africa needs a miracle because it’s like when you look at the rest of the world, the shortage is so dire. And so a platform like CEEK, we allow its single individual to be able to teach at scale so they can present their course virtually, and then people are also able to experience it. The reason why we’re getting interest from the likes of the eVTOLs of the world is because this is a brand new industry. So for example, you have the mass displacement of a lot of the current jobs as we know it, and they also have to train people for all these new autonomous vehicles, new, all these new industries that are coming out as a result of automation.
00:35:33
And you need, for example, a hundred thousand pilots, eVTOL pilots within the next few years, which means you have to train a million, you cannot put a million people in these very expensive aircraft. It’s also very dangerous. It’s a danger to the person, it’s a risk to the aircraft. But on CEEK, you can have a million people training at the same time with the VR headsets, and so that person is able to really scale themselves and have all these people train around the world. And that’s basically what we’re building today. And this isn’t just a sample scenario. We are working with the leading electric aircraft company and they’re exploding. They have a massive backlog because right now, when you look at fuel-based airplanes, helicopters that are being used for logistics and delivery and stuff like that, that costs about 4,000 an hour in fuel.
00:36:37
It’s costing about 300 an hour. So even beyond being good for the environment, it’s also good for business, which is why they have these massive backlogs and they have this need to train people at scale. And these are things that you just can’t do physically, which is why our platform is now in demand. And then the other aspect is the fact that in VR, the brain hasn’t developed the ability to differentiate between what you do in VR for the first time, we’re creating memories. So it’s almost as if you’re actually flying the aircraft. It’s almost as if you are actually moving the equipment and doing all these things. So you’re building memory, which means you’re building experience. So you can now show up day one, now able to train in that helicopter because you’ve gotten that a thousand hours or however many hours that you need before you can step inside the real deal.
00:37:40
And the same thing applies whether it’s elementary education, primary education. For the CPR, we built CPR for the children’s hospital for adult, infant and child CPR. The interesting thing is this was for new mothers because actually before I did the CPR program, I didn’t even know there was a difference between infant child and adult CPR. And a lot of new moms don’t either. And so by them putting on the headsets, they were able to learn and train, and they felt more confident than watching a video because they were actually holding the baby and they were doing all the different actions. And the clinicians and the EMT that we worked with also felt better equipped. The reason Baptist Health was looking at the nursing residency is because there’s such a huge gap between nurses. The average age of a nurse today is 50 years old. That’s how big the gap is because a lot of people are staying a year or two and then they’re leaving.
00:38:49
And the reason there’s such a high turnover is not because of competence, but rather confidence. A lot of nurses by nature are very caring, so a lot of them are afraid that they don’t want to hurt someone. So by now being able to learn and make the mistakes, they don’t want to make a mistake on a real person. Now they can make the mistake, they can practice, they can do all of these things in VR and feel more confident to be able to do it in real life. Then there are other areas that you just need to do in VR versus in person like intubation where they’re learning how to insert a tube into somebody’s throat, and a lot of times they’ll perforate the throat. Today, what some hospitals do to train is they hire low income people and pay them, and then they can test intubation on them.
Jon Krohn: 00:39:50
Oh my goodness.
Mary Spio: 00:39:51
Who wants to perforate their organs for $50? I mean, not me. I don’t want to do that. And unfortunately you have the homeless, the elderly. Some people also do the testing on the elderly with Alzheimer’s and to train the nurses how to do the intubation. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:40:14
Oh my goodness. That’s shocking. Yeah, VR definitely seems like a more humane way to be laying that. Oh my goodness.
Mary Spio: 00:40:23
And you could do that without the risk of perforating anybody’s organs. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:40:26
Wow. Something else related to inequalities that can potentially be resolved by VR. I’d love the kind of reskilling and education examples that you just gave, but there’s an interesting thing that we took up in our research, which is that VR headsets were causing nausea in women at unusually high rates. And so it looks like you made a discovery that allowed hardware VR headsets, which were probably predominantly designed by men to have the hardware actually change. So tell us about that.
Mary Spio: 00:41:05
Yeah. And so when I started creating a lot of these experiences, like we’ll go to trade shows and I would notice, or we even do demo, I remember doing a demo at Universal Music, and I’m not going to mention which headset we were using, but the minute some of the managers in there put it on, most of the women will run in the bathroom and just start throwing up. And I knew exactly why because I was feeling that same way. So I started researching why we were having these issues with a lot of the VR headsets. And what I discovered was that most of the VR headsets, of course, most of them were designed by men. So they weren’t experiencing this because there was no way for them to know. But there is a difference between the IPD, the interpupillary distance, for men and women.
00:41:59
Most of them, our upper limit, it’s not even on the range for men for their lower limit. So what was happening is most of these VR headsets were designed with a lower limit of men, which is the upper limit for women or sometimes outside the range of the upper limit. And so as you wore the headset, your eyeballs were being pulled apart and that strain was causing a lot of headaches. And then on top of it, there are different ways in which men and women process the world. So you have what’s called motion parallax, and then you also have shape by you have shaped by shading and women process differently than men. When you talk about motion parallax, size matters for men.
00:42:52
So you look at the size of an object and then that informs the brain how far or close you are to that object. Your sense of depth is determined by the size. Whereas for women, it’s the detail. So the way the content was being rendered itself were not very natural for us to consume. So there were a lot of different factors, but these were two of the main ones. And so I created a VR headset, which resolves all of that. And then also on our platform, we use predictive rendering and we ensure that we’re combining techniques to make sure that the content is rendering in a way that’s comfortable for everyone. And then there was also a lot of other factors that were going on. Yeah.
Jon Krohn: 00:43:37
Cool. Speaking of predictive rendering, I don’t know if this ties in exactly the same, but it sounds like it might be the same thing. So you hold to give a bit of context that I haven’t already given on the extraordinary things you’ve done, you hold over 10 patents across AI, digital cinema, spatial audio, extended reality technologies, and you invented the world’s first 360 degree 40 audio headphones. So it’s amazing, considering this kind of work that merges AI, blockchain, XR, and all these patents, how do you envision a future, and this is where I think the predictive thing comes in, where AI dynamically tailors immersive experiences, maybe even the narrative itself? So it sounded like the example you were just giving in your preceding answer was about adjusting things slightly to an individual type of user, but in the not too distant future, you could have whole immersive individualized things that feel like it would be like a movie, but also maybe like a video game where it unfolds based on your background and your maybe explicit preferences.
Mary Spio: 00:44:52
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s exactly the customization that we’re able to do now with AI. The fact that we can now customize content and experiences for people’s unique preferences and for their unique experiences, and that’s across the board even with education, being able to cater to different people’s learning styles, all powered by AI. So I’m super, super excited about, and that’s what we’ve been doing. I mean, we’ve been using AI. A lot of these things have been able to do thanks to AI because we’ve been using AI for quite some time now. And so just the capabilities, I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of how we’re going to be empowered individually and how we’re going to be able to even empower the rest of the world as well.
Jon Krohn: 00:45:46
It is really exciting, and I am an optimist. I always feel like we’re going to figure out how this is going to work in a way that benefits people mostly. But there is also, you mentioned earlier talking about with things like eVTOL training in VR, how people experience that is reality, and so you can manufacture memories. Take that comment plus this idea of dynamic AI experiences, there’s a lot of great ways that can be used for good, but could also be used to completely change people’s political preferences, especially. So we are already in an era of deepfake political environment, but when that’s experienced in this kind of virtual reality and it’s bespoke for you, it’s personalized to you and your preferences and the kind of stuff that’s going to impact you the most emotionally. And then you are in this VR where you brain can’t tell the difference between that being reality or not. It sounds like there’s obviously potential for misuse there. What do you think about that and how can we maybe mitigate the risks?
Mary Spio: 00:46:55
Yeah, absolutely. I think that the challenge right now is, for example, 1 billion assets all catering to people’s unique preferences and styles. So when you think of how many people are going to be displaced, right? There’s a quote from Elon. He says that, “Mass unemployment due to automation is not a possibility, it’s a certainty.” And that this was, I think, from the IMF, 40 to 60% of the workforce, the jobs that we know today are going to be impacted, where those people are going to go is really working with AI to curate those experiences.
00:47:35
And the blockchain is going to come in because we’re going to need validators for the types of content that are real and what is not real, because otherwise there’s really no way to tell between fact and fiction anymore. And the types of content that we are seeing today where people can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not. I remember during the campaigns, there were so many videos that were going around about different issues and you really can’t tell anymore. So I think that a technology like AI is going to be enforced or has to be monitored by things like the blockchain and having people that can actually validate or verify the quality or the accuracy of the content because it’s also very inaccurate.
00:48:30
And the challenge about AI also is the fact that the content is presented in such a way that you can’t even tell that it’s very plausible. So a lot of people are going to believe it. And that’s why we build a platform like CEEK, one, to verify a lot of this information, and we’re building masternodes with our blockchain masternodes and validators that can actually do nothing but go after these billions and billions of content so that when you use our content in certain platforms that you’re actually consuming content that’s been validated for accuracy. It’s not going to be a hundred percent, but it’s going to be better than not doing anything at all.
Jon Krohn: 00:49:15
Hey hey! This is your host, Jon Krohn. I’m excited to announce that this northern-hemisphere spring, I’m launching my own data science consultancy, a firm called “Y Carrot”. (If you’re an ML practitioner who’s familiar with “y hat”, you may get our name!). Regardless of who you are, if you’re looking for a team that combines decades of commercial experience in software development and machine learning with internationally-recognized expertise in all the cutting-edge approaches, including GenAI, multi-agent systems, and RAG, you’ve found us! We have rich experience across the entire project lifecycle, from problem scoping and proof-of-concept through to high-volume production deployments. If you’d like to be one of our first clients, head to ycarrot.com and click on “Partner with us” to tell us how we can help! Again, that’s Y Carrot, y-c-a-r-r-o-t-dot-com.
00:50:05
Right. Yeah, I guess the blockchain is a key part of that assurance. That’s often the response that I hear when I ask about deep fakes and being able to trust content. It is often a kind of verifiable blockchain interaction is the way to go. So that is cool. In this episode so far, we’ve leaned primarily on your technical expertise, but I’d like to ask you at least one question about your entrepreneurial expertise because you’ve had a huge amount of success as an entrepreneur, particularly with CEEK. And so I would love to hear your thoughts on how things like how you position your company and maybe product design back into architecture if it helped you to compete on value rather than scale. So for example, you previously described CEEK as a better mousetrap that won over Universal Music despite having less funding than your competitors.
Mary Spio: 00:51:02
Yeah, absolutely. We focused on value. We focus on value to the ecosystem, and I think a lot of times people come into a space without fully understanding all the parts, all the moving parts. For example, you won’t hear us talk about a platform like YouTube as being unfair because they’re built for promotion. That’s the value proposition. We promote you, we get to keep all the advertising dollars, we give you some, and we also get to keep all the data. Ad-based platforms were built back then to do exactly that. They were built for advertisers. They were not built for creators. So their priority is to creators. I mean, their priority is to advertisers and about the work store about maybe three to 5%. So for the other 95% that it doesn’t work for, that’s what we build a solution for.
00:52:03
So we look at the industry, for example, how we were able to get Meta to fund us is working in VR, there were things that we had successfully done, such as having thousands of people inside of the same environment and they wanted to do those type of things. And so bringing value to the industry and recognizing what others are doing well and what they’re not doing well, and finding ways to collaborate on that. And that has always been our position is how can we bring value to the ecosystem. For example, when we went to Universal Music, they had met with other VR companies that did not understand entitlement, didn’t understand any aspect of their business. We understood very well that they had massive libraries that they needed to port, and we had built in the ability for them to just drag and drop their log files and port all this content.
00:53:08
So now we were able to get a Katy Perry content and this one, and we were able to get massive multi-million library because we had built the solution for them to make it easy for them. And then also the fact that they could distribute content without having to build for Oculus and Apple Vision Pro and HTC VIVE and all these different platforms, they could focus on their business, which is making hit music. So it’s always about how can we bring value to the process.
Jon Krohn: 00:53:37
I love that. Thanks, Mary, for that insight. And I’ve got one last big question for you here on another achievement that we haven’t talked about yet of yours, which is that as a veteran as well as an aerospace engineer working on rockets, you wrote a clever book called It’s Not Rocket Science: 7 Game-Changing Traits for Uncommon Success. And so this book was designed to help others move beyond the comfort zones into mastery and empowerment. We’ve obviously heard a lot across entrepreneurship, tech, music, you’ve done so many things. Yeah. Can you fill us in on some of these game-changing traits on air? What are the traits that we could most take away from this podcast episode and achieve the kind of success that you have?
Mary Spio:
00:54:31
I think if I had to sum it up, it’s about living out of your imagination rather than your circumstance. Because here I was in Ghana at a terrible time, but I was dreaming about walking on the moon and doing some of these great things. I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I just knew that it was possible. So just thinking about if you can really envision what it is that you want to do, I think that you’re going to be able to achieve it. A lot of times people look at their circumstances and they think that they have to have everything in order to start, but really you just have to start and things are going to start to fall in place as you start the journey. So don’t wait until it’s perfect because there is no such thing as perfection.
Jon Krohn: 00:55:20
That actually reminds me of I planned that that was kind of my last big question for you, but what you just said there tied into something else that came out of our research that I thought was interesting, which is you bootstrapped CEEK with credit cards while facing enterprise sales cycles at a year or more. So I don’t know, do you want to tell us a bit more about that time? I mean, it seems to tie in exactly into this idea of imagining your circumstances as opposed to being where you are. And so how can founders act and take those kinds of risks in spite of the fear?
Mary Spio: 00:55:53
Yeah, it’s just belief and the fact that it’s all going to come together and then finding the right people. So for example, when I started pitching for funding, I went to Silicon Valley and I would get stared like, “Oh, you don’t look like an engineer.” And one guy actually even gave me a book like, “Hey, this is how an engineer is supposed to dress. You’re supposed to have the hoodie and this one and that one, and that.” I’m like, “Oh, great. You didn’t ask me anything about my technology or what it is that I’m doing.”
00:56:23
And so there were challenges that I was facing uniquely, and so I knew that I had to find the right people. So actually I did very well in New York. My first big investor was in New York, so it’s just about, and this quote about sometimes is not patience, that you need a change of perspective, and so I knew that maybe I’m not in the right place, so now let me try investors that are going to be excited about the types of revenue and other things that we’re getting. And that’s exactly what started to happen. Things started to fall in place. I was able to get investors in New York. I was able to get investors that matched the vision in terms of what I was creating and wasn’t wearing so much about whether I was wearing a hoodie or not.
Jon Krohn: 00:57:17
There were some things that came up in our research that are just shocking around experiences you’ve had with like you mentioned that how people should dress to be technologists like it’s irrelevant. And similarly, something that came out in our research that I thought was just shocking, and I don’t know how many times this has happened, maybe it was just one time, but it came out in our research that you had this experience with VCs where instead of saying anything about why this was or wasn’t the right investment based on revenue, product market fit, the technology, it was, “We don’t have a fund for people of color yet,” or something like that.
Mary Spio: 00:57:59
Yes. Yeah, and that’s something too that you get a lot like, “Oh, we don’t have a diversity fund yet”… I’m an engineer. But the way I look at that, I was working for Intelsat, it was then PanAmSat, when I was coming up with all these different techniques for distributing content over satellite. I remember at that time my boss, he wasn’t the most friendly, and I was recruited by Boeing, and so I went over to Boeing, I sold my patents to Boeing, and we created an industry change in technology that grossed them billions of dollars. We sold that for billion, so this is something that they lost, and actually, that whole department ended up being laid off. So later down the line, he was asking me for a position. And so when these things happen, you just have to take it with a grain of salt, just go where you’re valued instead of-
Jon Krohn: 00:58:58
Right.
Mary Spio: 00:58:58
Because it’s such a big world and there are people out there, but I truly believe that everybody has value that the world needs. You just have to find the right place to give that value to, and it’s an honor for you to do what you do and to be able to share it. It’s an honor for me to be on your podcast today. You’ve put so much into it and to allow me to be able to share my story and have this stage, I appreciate that. It’s the same thing. The value that I have, find the right place to give it, and that’s the advice that I give. And I believe that everybody’s got a different kind of struggle that they’re going through, and all of our struggles are unique, and so we just have to find a way either around it, over it, or through it.
Jon Krohn: 00:59:46
And thankfully, technologies are merging together like they are at CEEK with VR, AI, blockchain verification so that we can be encouraging and educating more people effectively than ever before around the planet, help them realize the power that they have to be making change. Something that is really wild to me is that you think about billions of brains on the planet, and if instead of being mired in scrolling through TikTok or just kind of distraction, billions of people were all like, “Okay, let’s figure out sustainable energy generation. Let’s figure out nutrition for everyone on the planet.” If you just switch on that light bulb for people that, “Hey, thanks to the internet, you have access to all this information, you can do anything, be anyone. You’ve just got to start walking the path.”
Mary Spio: 01:00:48
Yes, that’s exactly it. That’s what we want to be able to do, and I feel like my own life is an example of what the power of technology and applying your imagination to what’s possible, and that’s what I want to be able to be for other people that want to take that path, and that’s the place what we want CEEK to be where people can go, not just to scroll but to grow.
Jon Krohn: 01:01:12
I love that. Such a great quote and such a rich way to be ending the episode. Thanks, Mary. Before I let my guest go, I always ask for a book recommendation. Do you have one for us?
Mary Spio: 01:01:23
Actually, I do. I just picked up a book about, it’s a shame that I don’t know the exact title, but it talks about community like being the new product. I would try and find the exact title, but other than that, in my own book, It’s Not Rocket Science, I would shamefully plug it because I love it. I wrote it a while back. Every so often I have to go back through it and talk to my son or other people about it. So for not remembering the other book, which is a shame because it talks about community as a new product. That’s the book that I would recommend.
Jon Krohn: 01:02:05
Nice. Does it happened to be, I just tried to kind of Google it quickly, it is a book, Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy. I don’t know, maybe that’s not it. It’s more about product than marketing it sounds like.
Mary Spio: 01:02:17
In absence of that, I would just go with Make My Life Work, which is by Mark Mills, which is a great book as well. Make My Life Work.
Jon Krohn: 01:02:27
Nice. Love that. Thanks so much, Mary. For people who want to hear more of your thoughts after this episode, where should they follow you?
Mary Spio: 01:02:35
They can follow me on ceek.com/maryspio. So just go to ceek.com, C-E-E-K.com.
Jon Krohn: 01:02:42
Very nice. I like that. Great. Mary, thank you so much for taking the time with us. It’s been such an honor to have you on the show, and yeah, hope to catch up with you again in a few years and see how your journey is coming along.
Mary Spio: 01:02:57
Thank you. Thank you so much, and I really appreciate the invitation. Thank you.
Jon Krohn: 01:03:07
What an honor to have Mary Spio on the show. In today’s episode, she covered how her journey began watching a moon landing documentary during a military coup in Ghana, which inspired her to join the US Air Force, become a satellite technician, and eventually earn degrees in electrical engineering. She talked about how her VR platform, CEEK, is being used not only for entertainment, but also for immersive training in critical fields, facing worker shortages, including electric aircraft pilots, nursing and medical procedures with VR training, creating real neural pathways that simulate actual real-life experience. She talked about how she discovered that women were getting sick using VR headsets because the interpupillary distance, interpupillary distance, was designed for men’s measurements and created a solution that adjusts for these differences.
01:03:53
And Mary provided her philosophy for success, how it centers around living out of your imagination rather than your circumstance, and finding the right people who value your contributions. As always, you can get all the show notes, including the transcript for this episode of the video recording, any materials mentioned on the show, the URLs for Mary’s social media profiles, as well as my own at www.superdatascience.com/889. Thanks to everyone on the Super Data Science podcast team. We’ve got our podcast manager, Sonja Brajovic, media editor, Mario Pombo. We’ve got Nathan Daly and Natalie Ziajski on partnerships. Our researcher, Serg Masis, our writer, Dr. Zara Karschay. And how could we ever forget our founder and seriously still involved a ton behind the scenes, Kirill Eremenko.
01:04:40
Thanks to all of them for producing another super episode for us today. For enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you, we are so grateful to our sponsors. You can support this show by checking out our sponsors links, which are in the show notes. And if you’re interested yourself in sponsoring an episode, you can find out how you can do that at jonkrohn.com/podcast. Otherwise, share, review, subscribe, but most importantly, just keep on listening. I’m so grateful to have you listening and hope I can continue to make episodes you love for years and years to come. Until next time, keep on rocking it out there and I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the SuperDataScience Podcast with you very soon.
