Peter Rubin

Head of Publishing, Automattic · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

journalistauthor@provenself ↗ptrrbn.com ↗

Peter Rubin is a veteran technology and culture journalist who previously served as a senior editor and platforms editor at WIRED, where he wrote the magazine's landmark 2014 cover story on Oculus Rift. He is the author of the 2018 book Future Presence: How Virtual Reality Is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life.

8statements → 7claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.5/5average certainty → 2.12/5average debate potential →

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 3 assertions · 1 insight · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Peter argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Rubin: Magic Leap needs $500 million to build a consumer AR product
“What I understand from people who have experienced Magic Leap, and what they're working on there is, it's going to take half a billion dollars to make this real, to realize this”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:27 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

263 words/min while actually speaking · 19 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Peter Rubin: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,168 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Peter Rubin said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Rubin: Magic Leap needs $500 million to build a consumer AR product
“What I understand from people who have experienced Magic Leap, and what they're working on there is, it's going to take half a billion dollars to make this real, to realize this”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:27 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rubin: VR beat AR to market because core technical problems were solved
“VR is going to be, well, is first to market already. I mean, with the Samsung Gear VR that came out in December, we have a consumer product for sale. That is a big, that's a big leap, leap to make. And then certainly I think that more of the technical problems…”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:24 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next
Prediction Held up
Rubin: Future headsets will converge to support both VR and AR
“And I think that we're probably, and actually we're going to move to this point where one device is going to be able to handle both, whether that's fully contained VR Or switch, you know, on some continuum to an AR overlay.”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:41 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next
Insight
Rubin: First-person VR requires drastically slower movement or a fixed chassis
“Well, the game design question, I think that if it's going to be first person, it either has to be slowed drastically to what kind of fast switch games are, or you have to give the person a stable You have to give the player a stable environment like a car cha…”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:54 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rubin: VR motion intensity ratings will evolve to resemble film rating systems
“And that actually maybe is a clue to how we're going to see this evolve. Is there, maybe there's just going to be a scale of probably not one to 10, but I would imagine it's on a G through NC-seventeen type of hierarchy, right? Where only the most battle-harde…”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:20 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next
Prediction Held up
Rubin: Major publishers will not fund $100 million VR games initially
“So what I don't think we're going to see in the early years are very big. We're not going to see Destiny done for VR. We're not going to see EA buy-in at a hundred million dollar level.”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:52 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rubin: Live-action VR camera capture technology will remain proprietary across hardware makers
“And so there are a lot of people in the space, but I think the way it's looking right now is a lot of that is just going to stay proprietary. I don't think we're going to find a an all in one solution.”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 29:31 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Rubin: Nintendo historically takes years to adopt landscape-changing gaming technologies
“We've seen for well over a decade now, they take three or four years to move on a technology that's already changing the landscape.”
Peter Rubin Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:11 a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next Jan 2, 2019 18m
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