od, you know, because I'm quarantined at the moment in anticipation of some surgery upcoming. And so if I didn't have my phone, I could barely do what I do. I mean, the smartphones, I think you would agree, have transformed civilization, but not as much as 5G. And here's why. 5G is going to give you an augmented reality world. It won't be long before my glasses are connected to my phone and my phone has 5G. That's pretty much guaranteed. There's no way that won't happen, because it's just too obvious that that's going to be a thing.

Once you have enough people who have the types of glasses—or they don't really need them, they could just hold up their phone and see an augmented reality through the camera—those people will be living in a much improved world. Because with your glasses on, you won't just see the things that are there. You'll see a menu for everything there. There's a television across the room. I would see a remote control pop up and I could control my TV in the air, because in the air I would see an actual remote control. So I could get directions on anything. I could find out, you know, really I would have this whole enhanced reality such that when I took my glasses off at night, it would start to feel the way you feel when you accidentally leave home without your phone. Have you had that experience? Ever get in your car and you're driving someplace, you're going to be gone for a while, and you look for your phone and it's not there and you think, oh God, what if I get a problem? It's not the end of the world, but it definitely bothers you, right?

Now imagine if you had an enhanced reality world, an augmented reality, where you're seeing things floating that don't exist. You can call up a screen that floats in front of you to watch a movie that floats in the air that only you can see, you know, because you've got your earbuds in. So you're walking around watching a movie. You meet somebody, their social media profile appears above their head. Try to live without that. It will be so addictive and useful. It'll be like if you didn't have a smartphone. So I think that the world will start to bifurcate into people who are essentially cyborgs. Because once you get to the point where you're living in an enhanced reality with labels and messages and instructions and more detail and all that, you're basically a cyborg.

Now I've argued for a long time, and Elon Musk said something similar recently, that the smartphones already made us cyborgs. So the fact that you can leave it at home and drive away is sort of trivial because you'll wish you hadn't, right? But as soon as you've got the Neuralink, which is also one of Elon Musk's companies, they're going to embed a little sensor in your brain so maybe you could control things just by thinking it. Now imagine if you could see through your glasses an enhanced reality with augmented stuff and you can just think them to change. So you could just look around, you could see a TV and you could just blink at it and it would come on because your brain knew that you wanted it to be on. So put those things together and we are fully into the cyborg era.

But here's the problem. What if everybody doesn't become a cyborg? Will there be a human organic movement of people who don't have any technology? Probably. I just don't know how big it will be. Will it be Amish-country small or will it be a third of the country doesn't want to be a cyborg? Now if you ask me, oh, I can't wait, make me a cyborg as quickly as you can. But anyway, people don't realize what a big deal that is.

But here's the funny part of my story. There's nothing more amusing—well, there probably is, but it's amusing—when you're on social media and people don't know what your background is and they challenge you on a point that you might be the one person in the world who knows more about it than anybody. So it's sort of like that Woody Allen movie, I think it was Annie Hall, where he's standing in line for a show and they're arguing about some public figure, Marshall McLuhan, an author. And Marshall McLuhan ends up in this movie scene. The actual Marshall McLuhan is standing in line right behind him and gets into the conversation and corrects something. And that movie scene always stuck with me because you see that playing out in real life. And it happened here.

So somebody said to me on social media that 5G hasn't been tested because the big companies that are going to roll it out, they would have no interest in testing it to find out that it's dangerous and therefore it's not been tested. Sort of logically you say to yourself, well, logically they don't want to hear that it's bad for you. They want to make a trillion dollars, the phone companies mostly, and the phone makers. So nobody would have studied it. Now that's what somebody said to me on social media. And here was my answer. I used to work for the phone company, and part of my job was doing the economic projections of whether we should do more wireless stuff. I actually personally worked on that. And part of my economic decision was informed by my co-worker, who I often sat right next to, whose job it was to study all the health studies of the cell phones. So that was prior to 5G technology. That was probably a 3G kind of a technology. And we studied it because that's part of the economics.

I wasn't going to give management an economic analysis that says looks like we'll make a billion dollars on this and ignore the fact that it might kill people. I'm not going to leave that out. That's pretty important to the economics of a project. If you leave out the part where it kills 100 million people, I don't think you've done your work right. So this person was arguing with me that a phone company would ignore this part of the economic impact, you know, the health part, which also has an economic impact. And she was talking to somebody who literally was the guy who did it. I actually worked at a phone company. I actually did those economics and I sat next to the guy who did look in detail at the health studies and then summarized them for management so management was comfortable that it wouldn't be killing people.

Now years have passed. Has anybody died from their cell phone? Can we say that my economic analysis was accurate, that I didn't need to include it? Can we say that my co-worker who studied it got it right? Now if you're telling me that Apple—think about this—you're telling me that Apple is going to bet a trillion dollars, because it'll be something like that eventually, you're telling me Apple is going to bet a trillion dollars on the business plan without looking at the most obvious biggest thing that you should look at? I think they looked at it. Now you can make the argument that whoever's looked at it has looked at the wrong stuff. You could make the argument that the studies weren't good enough. There are lots of things you could argue that I wouldn't argue back. There are plenty of bad studies. But here's what I will not allow anybody to tell me without pushing back. Don't tell me they haven't looked into it. Are you kidding? Don't tell me that they haven't looked into it.

And if any of those things were credible, from the brain cancer to it gives you coronavirus or makes it worse to stunt your growth, if any of that was backed by science, companies like Apple are not going to wade into it with that kind of a risk. That's a company-destroying risk. You just don't take that risk. It's just not a thing. But that's different from saying—let me be very clear, I'm not a doctor. I don't know what causes risk and what doesn't. But I'm telling you they looked into it. That's all I'm going to tell you.

There's some evidence, based on—we don't have much information on it yet. It comes from a tweet from somebody who seems to know a lot of stuff that the Houston consulate that was closed, the Chinese consulate that had evidence apparently of spying on American comp