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Demystifying the conversations we're already here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous, Raju Rishi, and Jason Black will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health, to venture investing, and much more.
Will: So, the way I think about this is, I can imagine my. Not my grandchildren, but almost certainly my great-grandchildren will have a picture of my wife and me, and—like, we all have pictures of our ancestors going back a certain distance—but in parentheses below our names, it will say ‘natural’ [laugh].
Raju: [laugh].
Will: And when they talk about us, they’ll basically say, “Well, you know, this was before gene editing, so that’s why they look like that.”
Raju: I’m Raju Rishi.
Will: And I’m Will Porteous. Welcome to RRE POV, the show in which we record the conversations we’re already having among ourselves, our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Raju: Hello listeners. This is Will and Raju here today, and we’re going to have a casual conversation in this podcast about some near-term breakthrough technologies that may—or may not—have a meaningful impact on our lives in the short term. We’re going to keep it light, describe the technologies, talk about their potential impact and challenges. We’re obviously, in this short podcast, not going to discuss all of them [laugh]. I expect this to be a multi-part series for the foreseeable future, so just think of this as part one: breakthrough technologies. So, kicking it off, Will, where should we start with this? Where should we start?
Will: You know, uh, there’s so many interesting innovations that are really poised to fundamentally transform the way we live on this planet. I think we should start with energy, some of the energy technologies, and maybe with geothermal energy, and the way it’s poised to impact us because this is the one that I think is, sort of, sneaking up on people. I remember my very first trip to Iceland, which was probably 15 years ago. You know, Iceland is largely still volcanic, generates an enormous amount of its energy from geothermal, and the industries that have chosen to locate themselves there are kind of a representative of the vanguard of things you can do with geothermal. So, for instance, the biggest input in the production of aluminum is energy, and so you have enormous aluminum production facilities in Iceland, where energy is essentially free because it’s geothermal.
We have seen the emergence of geothermal solutions for residential, the growth of the heat pump market is sort of always, kind of, about to take off, but hasn’t quite taken off yet. We can talk about the reasons for that, but I think geothermal has just enormous potential to offset people’s monthly oil and gas bills, and to really make us much more efficient as a species.
Raju: I agree. I agree. It’s quite an interesting tech stack. And I remember going to Iceland as well, and I was kind of surprised at how many Teslas there were. And I didn’t know why when I first got there, and I asked, like, one of the Uber drivers that was picking us up, and, you know, she says to me, “Well, you know, like, electricity is free.” [laugh] and I was like, so recharging these Teslas is zero cost. And I was like, “Okay, I totally get it now.”
But yeah. So, I agree, Will. I think it’s kind of interesting. And so, having an abundant [carmetry 00:03:33] energy source is going to be incredibly vital for the future of our planet, and you know, whatever we want to do. And from what I know about this, you know the current currently, we do use it, but it requires permeable rocks, it needs water sources, or volcanic activity, and that’s only found in certain parts of the world. Like, you can find it in Iceland and you can find in New Zealand.
But the future is, you know, they’re working on some hydraulic fracturing techniques that can crack open these relatively solid rocks at depths that are much greater than existing geothermal wells, and you know, kind of inject water, and create steam, and just leverage that steam, you know, for turbines. And I think it’s pretty—you know, it could be staggeringly efficient, it could be staggeringly interesting, but there’s sort of two challenges, right, like, that I see in this. One is, you know, hydraulic fracturing has been known to create some seismic activity [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Raju: So, you know, I don’t know if, how many people are going to love that downstream, so we just kind of balance that out. And we kind of need these giant underground capacitors at some point because the steam doesn’t stop, right? It’s going to constantly come up. You’re going to burn these turbines, and you know, generate a lot of steam energy. So, let’s touch on that first sort of challenge a little bit in terms of fracturing. We’ve been fracking a little bit, you know, on this planet, and there’s a lot of, sort of, controversy around it. Any thoughts on whether you think that’s going to be a long-term—we’re going to be able to solve that long-term problem or short-term problem?
Will: Well, I think we’re going to continue with fracking activity, and I think we’re going to continue to push the boundaries of what’s happening at fault lines, and what we expect in terms of, sort of, the underlying geological stability. I think we’ve—it’s actually remarkable how much drilling activity goes on today with, frankly, not a lot of regard for the impact, in terms of fault lines and that sort of thing. I think that’s actually only going to continue, and it may have serious implications in terms of property rights and risks even to human safety. I think the quest will go on because the appetite for energy is boundless. And the appetite for geothermal energy, honestly, should be boundless because, as you say, tapped into properly, you’ve got a very reliable source of heat energy that can power turbines.
It does lead us naturally to an energy storage problem. It’s amazing how much you’re often brought back to an energy storage problem, storage and distribution. But I believe we could be moving into an era of geothermal hubs that power regions, you know, in a way that hydroelectric powers certain regions today. You think about Niagara Falls or other major hydro centers, and what they have done for the electrification. Now, your point about the Teslas in Iceland is a really interesting one because, you know, wouldn’t it be amazing to see that flow all the way down to the consumer, at the proverbial quote, “Gas pump,” in a way, if you think about the impact on the quality of the average person’s life in this country, and how much people pay attention to the cost of gas, how much it takes them to fill up the tank. I mean, geothermal, actually, with the right distribution infrastructure, could have a meaningful positive impact on quality of life.
Raju: I agree. I agree. It’d be great to, like, see in metropolitan—it doesn’t even be metropolitan hubs because, frankly, if you could, if you could find a well where you had a geothermal pocket, drill deep enough, inject the water as they’re intending, and create a steam turbine, and then just sort of either a set of or a large capacitor grid that could feed our grid, you could alleviate a lot of the energy needs. And I can see this happening. I literally can envision this happening over the period of next few years.
My personal belief, and I’d love to hear your opinion on this, I think we’re three to five years away from being able to do this in a, you know, sort of ecologically and safe mode where we’ve kind of cracked the code, if you will, no pun intended, of drilling through sort of that infrastructure and being able to reliably release steam without creating complications. What’s your thoughts? So, you think three to five years is the right time frame? You think it’s longer than that?
Will: I think three to five years is a very reasonable time frame for that. And I’d go a step further and say this is in the category of industrial transformation problems that is really mostly just a function of capital, right? So, you’re not going to—this is not a venture scale problem. This is a problem that needs real industrial-scale thinking to build out—to solve those both the fracturing problem that you alluded to, and the control issues associated with it, but to really do the infrastructure build-out that you talked about, the capacitors, the energy distribution. You kind of are calling for a new full-stack energy company, and I think that if you wanted to see this happen in three to five years, the only way to do it is with a greenfield full-stack energy company because the innovators dilemma is too great on the existing infrastructure that most energy companies own and are depreciating on a very predictable schedule.
Raju: I agree with that a hundred percent. This is good, a good topic. What’s next on there?
Will: There’s a good use of a couple billion dollars [laugh].
Raju: [laugh]. Yeah, yeah. We need a new energy company to focus on this, and I think we’ll get one in the next few years.
Will: I think we will. Yeah.
Raju: All right, what’s next on the horizon there, Dr. Porteous?
Will: Oh well, you know, I can’t go very far without talking about space and rockets and that sort of thing, so maybe we should talk about SpaceX Starship for a minute.
Raju: Fine, fine. Let’s talk about it. Tell our listeners, if you will, what—I mean, most people have heard of SpaceX. Not everyone knows what Starship is all about, so maybe just, you know, set the tone and tell folks what Starship is designed to do.
Will: So, Starship is the successor rocket to SpaceX’s workhorse, the Falcon 9. And Starship promises a payload envelope that is three times wider than the Falcon 9, and therefore, the largest payload envelope that’s ever been delivered to space. And the ramifications of this are enormous for anyone who’s trying to get anything in space. So, for decades now, NASA and any other entity that was putting things in space has essentially been designing for an envelope that was, call it, like, ten meters across in terms of the broadest width of the tube that is the rocket that you could put a payload into. SpaceX Starship improves that by 3x.
And so, already starting seven or eight years ago, when SpaceX Starship was on the drawing board, NASA and others were fundamentally changing the way they were designing things to go into space. So, Starship is unlocking this radical rethink of the scale of structures that we can put into space. But it’s also delivering that capacity at a fraction of the cost that even Falcon 9, which is the market-leading reasonably low-cost price to get things in space, they’re essentially undercutting their existing business.
I would argue that Falcon 9 today is already below the necessary cost of capital of most companies that are trying to get things into space. That is to say that the ticket to space is affordable. What you care about is the reliability and the destination. And Starship is going to unlock better pricing, frequent launch, which we gener—we have for the most part—and also a variety of interesting orbits. So, Starship is really a breakthrough in terms of man’s capacity to expand its presence in space and to create large-scale in-space manufacturing, to build really substantial space station infrastructure—and on an on—from there.
Raju: That’s awesome. I heard that it has the potential of carrying a hundred people into space?
Will: [laugh].
Raju: You know, long durations. You know, interplanetary, [laugh] you know, being able to go to Mars, development of a moon base, you know, all of that kind of stuff. When do you think it’s going to be ready to start doing some of the things that it’s, you know, touted to be able to do?
Will: So, the fascinating thing about SpaceX, from a launch standpoint, is that the company is on such a high launch cadence with the Falcon 9 today, in 2025 a Falcon 9 will launch about every day-and-a-half. So, we’re projecting basically about 200 Falcon 9 launches in 2025, which is absolutely staggering when you compare it to any other launch provider, ever, in history.
Raju: That’s crazy, actually. 250 a year. In a year.
Will: Yeah.
Raju: Wow.
Will: In a year, right? That’s the cadence, and that’s the benefit of reusability, and just the manufacturing scale of SpaceX. And so, Starship is really coming behind that, starting to hit first commercial launches, I think late ’25 definitely early ’26. But not on a high cadence because there’s only a few customers who’ve really been designing for this magnitude of an endeavor, and the workhorse Falcon 9 is going to be with us for the next couple of years. It’s the Falcon 9 that’s putting up racks of Starlink satellites. It’s the Falcon 9 that’s launching all of the small satellites like the companies that we’re involved with.
And Starship is almost about special-purpose missions for the next two years. Huge structures for NASA, huge telescopes to be put in space, pieces of the International Space Station, new space stations for countries. So, it’s going to be kind of a special-purpose rocket. It’s going to compete with the ULA assets, the super heavy boosters that were really only for the heaviest, largest satellites. There’ll be a bunch of classified missions, but I doubt it launches more than five times a year, even in 2026, and then kind of 10, 20s, 30s from there.
Raju: Okay. And what about the environmental impact? I may have heard each launch here is, like, equal to the emissions of, like, 850 carbon emission cars, you know? We got to be able to, like, kind of consider that a little here, and maybe be a little more judicious about what we’re using it for. Because everybody is going to want to use it, right, like, for like, a variety of different purposes. How do you address that? How do you kind of get over the, you know, impact of that?
Will: I think that’s a great question, and we don’t have a good framework for understanding the magnitude of these emissions moments that come from launch. I think people are waking up to the environmental impact, but we don’t have a framework for thinking about the amount of greenhouse gasses that are emitted in a major rocket launch. It’s enormous, just as the footprint from private aviation is enormous, just as the footprint from ordinary rocket launch is enormous today. And the planet needs a framework for understanding these things and for justifying them, eventually, but for the time being, they’re going to burn a lot of fuel. And… yeah.
Raju: Yeah. I mean, some of it’s like—listen, it’s pretty powerful, and sometimes you have to go through these iterations to get to some of these—the value long-term is going to, I believe, in my opinion, outweigh some of these challenges in the near term, but we have to get a framework for what the good use of this is, versus just testing.
Will: So, here’s a way to combine some of the things we’re talking about today. So, with a Starship envelope, you can deploy really, really, really large scale solar arrays, which you can use to do real, massive scale energy collection. And there’s a huge amount of work going on, on solar energy collection, storage and beaming it back down to earth. And how do we make that energy value chain work? To me, I think that’s another great unlock for quality of life on this planet.
Raju: Yeah, we’ll jump to solar in a second. But the other thing that I think could be super interesting is refilling those tanks in orbit. I mean, that kind of, hey, now you have a way of maybe doing a short-term transit to a bigger rocket that refuels itself in space, and it doesn’t necessarily need to come back into orbit every time—like, come down through the orbit every single time.
Will: Right.
Raju: Anyway, you want to jump to solar cells?
Will: Where do you want to go?
Raju: I think I’ll go to solar cells because we just talked about it, [laugh] so this is something near and dear to my heart. I graduated MIT with a couple of degrees in material science. I love materials [laugh]. Oddly enough, it wasn’t something that I could easily focus in on after graduation. There just wasn’t a lot of technology in the US that was focused on next generation materials, but I think we’re getting there now. I’m sort of out of the loop on sort of the top, top stuff.
But the challenge—the solar is around. Everybody kind of sees it, there’s discussions about it, there are solar panels on people’s roofs, there’s a lot of, you know, sort of, even you look at the side of the highway, you could see certain signs being powered by, you know, solar cells, and it doesn’t require a battery to sit adjacent to it. But in today’s world, you know, the efficiency of solar cells is relatively limited. Right now, we’re kind of at 30% efficiency, and the theoretical maximum, it turns out, for single-junction solar cells, is 33.7%, which, you know, we’re kind of near that. And it’s known as the Shockley–Queisser limit. There’s new tech coming out now that is around multi-junction solar cells. And then there’s new tech even beyond that, which involves, like, perovskite tandem solar cells.
Will: I can tell you’re excited [laugh].
Raju: I am excited. Our listeners can’t see this, but Will and I can see each other. Kind of excited by it. And using perovskite tandem solar cells, we’ve already kind of hit—you know, we’ve already got to 33%, which is the theoretical limit of a single-junction solar cell already, but if you take these multi-junction solar cells with an infinite number of layers, it has a theoretical maximum efficiency of, like, 69%.
Will: Whoa.
Raju: For normal sunlight and, like, 87% for concentrated sunlight.
Will: Wow.
Raju: And so, I’m kind of excited by it because I think, with the combination of multi-junction and new sets of materials, we’re going to start, within the next three to five years, seeing solar cells hit, you know, a 50% efficiency level. And that’s the point where you can start using these things for a lot of other purposes beyond—and it’s going to create an efficiency level that is going to make it very, very cost-effective to you know, not only manuf—not high degree of manufacturing on this stuff, but really, kind of, use this for a meaningful breakthrough in terms of energy storage. The challenges that exist, Will, are just manufacturability, right? How do you create these multi-junctions, kind of, technology, and how do you package them in a way that, you know, they don’t burn up or they’re available at room temperature and whatnot?
Will: Yeah, what are the hurdles to manufacturability? Does this require, like, a fab? Like, should I be thinking about this the way I think about semiconductor manufacturing, or—
Raju: Yes, it requires a fab, but it really it requires… a layering technology. And this is actually the same set of technology that we’ll talk about in another section today, which is chiplets, which I’m really excited about, which is also a materials issue. But being able to stack these things, being able to, like, insulate them, being able to, you know, allow them to operate at room temperature without burning up, so there’s a few more things that need to happen. I actually don’t think this is a venture-investable thesis either, I think because you require a fab, because you require a lot of money being put into this. But I think you know, super-efficient solar cells, alongside geothermal energy, have the ability to for us to actually become more efficient and create a wider array of energy, which we all know, you know, like, if you look at, you know, the sort of the GPU structure that NVIDIA is working on and artificial intelligence, energy is going to be needed.
Like, a higher, you know, more efficient use of energy is going to be required for us to, sort of, make massive breakthroughs in artificial intelligence in a cost-effective way. So, that’s kind of, you know where I’m sitting on this, I think this one also is kind of a three to five-year horizon, and I’m watching it pretty carefully because I think it can do some interesting things for us.
Will: Fascinating. Do you think that the technology itself is venture-investable, or do you think that the real breakthroughs are on the manufacturability, kind of, that stack where the billions are going to be needed?
Raju: I never think technology is actually venture investable [laugh]—
Will: Right [laugh].
Raju: Because what do—I mean your pat—you’re basically investing in patents that other people have to actually leverage to create value, and some other people, I always think of, you know, a great venture investment, from our standpoint, is sort of like the ability for us to create the end product and introduce it into the market because that’s where the giant amounts of revenue are created. I think being able to do that from—like, investing in the tech stack, yes, you could probably do it. You could probably get some leverage out of that and become arms merchants to a lot of people that are creating solar cells, but I think in this particular case, the real money is going to be made in the actual manufacturability, and the, you know-go-to-market, which I don’t feel is very venture investable. But I don’t know, you may have different thoughts on that.
Will: No, I’m curious because the certain problems, particularly manufacturing problems, are really the domain of those who can play at scale, and can tinker at scale with the manufacturability in any of that. So. But you alluded to chiplets earlier. So, that’s… chiplets are really good [laugh].
Raju: Yeah, no, no, no, let’s go there because I was… when I first heard the word chiplets, I was thinking about, you know, they have these Pringles cases—
Will: I know. I know. They call them chiplets.
Raju: They have new ones now. Like, little mini-Doritos, like chiplets that go inside the—it’s, like, fascinating.
Will: They’re going to be huge at the Super Bowl this year. People are going to be serving chiplets everywhere you go, at the halftime show.
Raju: I don’t know. I mean, I—you said the problem is, like—you would say, okay, like, it’s a little tiny potato chip, right? So probably, you know, it’s good for, like, weight loss, you know? You’re not going to—you know, you grab a chip at a time. But, like, I’ve bought these things.
I bought the little case of Pringles. My daughter loves them. You know, they have Doritos in them. They have, like, you know, they’re Cool Ranch Doritos, but you wind up going in there and getting, like, 12 of them. It’s like eating, like, three Doritos instead of one Dorito. And you’re, like, but it’s chiplet. You know what I mean? But it’s a chiplet.
Will: So, it seems like there’s a mental breakthrough. The Chiplet mostly represents, like, a mental head-fake, if you will.
Raju: It’s a mental head-fake.
Will: You thought you were not having a full Dorito, but it turned out you were having three that you didn’t know.
Raju: It’s deceptive.
Will: That’s chiplet technology in a chip [laugh].
Raju: Yeah, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yes. No. Let’s talk about what we really intend to talk about with chiplets, in terms of actual silicon wafers. So currently, you know, everyone knows, we work with silicon wafers, and the way you make more powerful chips is by shrinking the transistor size, and increasing the density of transistors on chips. Kind of hit a wall in Moore’s law, which everybody knows about, you know, doubling capacity—you know, doubling performance every 18 months, kind of thing.
And the new tech is around chiplets, which are really, like, smaller, more modular chips that are designed for very, very specific functions, such as, you know, storing data or processing signals, and they’re linked together to build a system. And I kind of love it because what does it solve, right? A smaller chip that has, you know, a specific purpose, and you kind of link them together with a bunch of other chips. So, the smaller chip has fewer defects, right? It’s likely to contain—you know, making manufacturing less expensive because we deal with something called—
Will: Ah, yeah.
Raju: —yeah. Like, yield is a big nomenclature in the manufacturing.
Will: So, this gets you away from monolithic chip architectures, monolithic systems on a chip, and allows you to decompose things, and to take advantage of cost efficiencies and yield efficiencies at smaller sizes in manufacturing.
Raju: Exactly.
Will: Got it.
Raju: So, that’s you hit the nail right on the head. You described it very well. You have these bigger and bigger chips, and there’s more and more—like, in today’s world, right, like, in today’s tech, bigger and bigger chips with more and more transistors on it, but if you have failure in even a small handful of them, yeah, throw the whole damn chip [unintelligible 00:26:20], right? So, if you have smaller chips called chiplets that are single-purpose, and you’re kind of tethering a bunch of them together, you have better yield in each of those chiplets. And, you know, you can create them for sort of, you know, specific purposes.
The challenge with all of this is the packaging, which how do you place them side-by-side, how do you stack them, how do you create high-bandwidth electrical connections between them, and how do you encase them in perceptive plastic? So, it’s a manufacturing challenge from that standpoint. And I believe if we do this where we basically conquer two birds with one stone. One bird is, hey, how do you get more density, you know? So, now I’m going to go vertical, I’m going to go lateral, and how do I get better yield?
The other is specific, more in, like, just highly specific function chips, just designed for AI, just designed for, you know, bitcoin mining, or just designed for XYZ. And so, I think you can do that. I think in order for this to work, though, you need to have a standard. Because if 30 companies are creating 30 different types of chiplets, how do you make them work together without, you know, kind of it breaking? Otherwise—
Will: Yeah, the biggest chiplet will eat the other little chiplets, and then, you know, they’d be one chiplet to rule them all. You’re back where you started.
Raju: You back where you started from. It’s like at Pepperidge Farm. You’ve see, like, the little goldfish eating the yellow fish?
Will: Yeah.
Raju: Yes, it’s exactly right. So, I think—
Will: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what we have to fear. I see what you mean.
Raju: I think we need, like, a universal chiplet, you know, standard. Which they’re working on, actually. It’s an open-source standard called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express. And I don’t know if that one takes off or another one takes off, but I think if we can get a standard that the world can abide by, or one that sort of becomes the de facto standard, which is how these things work, we’re going to get some really, really interesting things where smaller companies can create tens of thousands of XYZ chiplet that can interconnect with a company that’s creating millions of a different kind of chiplet. And all of a sudden you have these single-purpose chiplets that can interoperate with multi-purpose chiplets, and some that are just designed as a CPU or a GPU array can work with ones that are specialized for specific AI tasks or specific tasks around, sort of, edge computing. I’m kind of really excited about this. I just think you got to get through the hurdle, the biggest hurdle, which is that the big companies don’t necessarily want this to work, right?
Will: Right, yeah. Well, it poses really interesting questions about margin and product line defensibility. And once you’re into a world of innovation at the chiplet level, okay, suddenly I’m guessing that the scale of what it takes to produce something that’s innovative and valuable may be much smaller. It may actually move it back into the range of the venture investable because if you and I can focus in on the pure innovation at the chiplet level, taking advantage of other things that will already be in place, the base band, the radio, the physical connect, et cetera, and just focus on the innovation at the chiplet level, knowing that the architecture has the standards to support it, well… maybe then you see a rebirth in the semiconductor investing sector.
Raju: Super, super smart, Will.
Will: And the logic that—because we really haven’t seen chip companies that were venture investable for—
Raju: I love you, Will. I kind of love you.
Will: —10 or 15 years.
Raju: Yeah. This is why I have you as a partner. You think exactly the way I think. This is—no, not exactly. Like, we kind of [tandem 00:30:21] off of each other. It’s absolutely true. Now, look at what happened, right? We had so much good manufacturing of chips in the United States. We had Intel, we have AMD, all these—I mean, VLSI circuitry was built here. And then we started needing custom chips, and small-scale ones, and we started outsourcing a lot of that to other countries, and Taiwan, TSMC, you know, MediaTek, became companies where we outsource those custom chip fabs to, to the point now where we really are heavily reliant upon that in the United States. Like, I don’t think you can build a cell phone just from technologies that are in the US because there’s so many custom chips that are in that, that are from Taiwan and other places.
Will: That’s a really important statement, by the way, and so true, I’m [afraid 00:31:10]. Yeah.
Raju: Absolutely. So, think about, if we could create this open-source standard for chiplets, all of a sudden, you could actually bring some of that tech stack back into the US without having to rely upon the outsourced manufacturer because you had this connectivity grid for that. So, I’m particularly excited about it. I think chiplets are around now, but that standard kind of needs to evolve and get, you know, to become a de facto standard soon, whether it’s this one or another one, for this to really kind of take off. And then I agree with you a hundred percent, Will, this is a really interesting venture-investable space.
Will: Exciting. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, what else?
Raju: All right, let’s pick another topic. You pick another topic. Let’s—this is, like, a round robin. We’ll just pick one. And as I said, this will be an ongoing series.
Will: So, so let’s talk about, you know, one of the most profound changes in society in the last two years, which is the arrival of the weight loss drugs, and sort of suddenly, people have been given a tool to radically transform their relationship with their weight problem, in some cases, with their body, and kind of reshape their life and identity through that. It’s been an amazing unlock from people, all because of drugs that were originally about insulin management and diabetes. And we’ve both been witness to the profound impact this has on people that we know, and they are, frankly, reshaping society, but at enormous out-of-pocket cost. These drugs are really only available to the rich right now, at $1,400 a month for ozempic in the US, while the product sells for a fraction of that elsewhere in the world. These drugs are immensely powerful, and I feel like they’re kind of with us to stay, and so, you know, perhaps we’ve already seen this change manifest, but I’m curious how you think about it.
Raju: I agree with you. I think this is kind of a powerful—I think healthcare is a great sort of topic for us to reach on in a bunch of different veins here, but those weight-loss drugs are incredibly powerful. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen the study. I mean, not only do they suppress appetite, but they might actually even suppress addiction issues, and you might be able to use them for managing, you know, sort of drug addictions or alcohol addictions or other things. And I think we’re sort of—because they affect, sort of, the brain, [laugh] and how we, you know, process our desire for these things, whether it’s food or drugs or other things. So, I think they’re quite powerful.
And I think the challenge that I see in this arena—so, first of all, absolutely breakthrough, right? No question about whether they’re a breakthrough or not. I think the real challenge that I see in them is, do we want—we don’t know what the long-term ramifications of being on a GLP is for a lifetime. So, we don’t know—and it’s expensive, right? So, you can’t necessarily—and maybe the prices do come down somewhat over time, but even still.
So, I think there’s sort of two things that we got to think about, you know, one is the expense structure, and the second is, you know, do we want to be on a drug for life? Do we want to—how do we wean off of it? And so, I love it. And I want to talk about, you know, specific individuals, but I know an individual that started off taking a GLP-1, and then weaned off of it, off of a few months, and the lifestyle change that was made in this person’s life has basically continued for, like, a year-and-a-half now.
Will: Well, that’s great. That’s a really nice story.
Raju: It’s a fantastic story. So, I think the question is, you know, maybe these are, like, you know, in my mind, if you can create a solution stack—and one of our portfolios is working on this that you know of, it’s Noom—where you can get onto this GLP, but then you could, during that interval, make enough lifestyle changes and, you know, kind of change the relationship that you potentially have with food such that you could wean off of this and maintain that rhythm. I think there’s some power in that. So, I think the challenge is really, how do we, you know, use this as a tool to get started, but you know, lever—and sort of like, Judo or parlay this, or jujitsu this into a way that creates permanent lifestyle changes that maybe, you know, weans you off of this drug in the short term, but maintains that rhythm that you want to have in life.
Will: I think that’s an enormously compelling vision. At the core of what you’re saying is this really important societal question for the 21st century, which is, who am I when I’m on this drug, and who am I when I’m off this drug? I was with a good friend recently who has a very high profile job, very stressful, and he’s always had a problem with his weight. And he went on Mounjaro, and he basically found that he had very little appetite for the next year. He lost a ton of weight. He crushed it at work.
And he has now gone off the drug. And we had dinner the other night, and he ate everything in sight. And I think he’s discouraged because he hasn’t created compensating mechanisms, in terms of who he is, to be who he wants to be when he’s not on the drug. And this is where Noom can fill the gap. It’s not as hopeful a story as yours, and this is a guy with a lot of willpower who I think is trying to find out how to be the best version of himself, but not on the drug. And maybe that’s where tools like Noom can really come in and make a powerful difference in people’s lives going forward.
Raju: Yeah. I mean, just for listeners who don’t know what Noom is, I mean, Noom is a weight loss program that has been a weight management program that’s been around for a long time, and they kind of teach you tips and strategies on how to manage your relationship with food, and you know, basically teach you, like, you’ve been—your mom or your grandmother or somebody or your, you know, father or father-in-law has basically said to you, “Hey, finish everything on your plate because, you know, there’s hungry people in other countries,” or, you know, “What’s the matter? You know, like, my food? You’re not eating anything.” And when you’re sort of, like, ingrained with that kind of hard-hit, you know, sort of pressure, you wind up eating more than you should.
And you know, Noom is a tool by which you say, hey, don’t go to the supermarket while you’re hungry, like, because you’ll buy a lot of stuff that you shouldn’t eat. You know what I mean? Maybe go there after you’ve eaten your meal, and you’ll probably be more methodical about what you buy. And you know, those types of tips are really valuable. If you take that and you couple that with, “Hey, let me help people get started with the GLP,” but then create a psychology and a tool by which you manage, you know, your relationship with food. I think that’s quite powerful.
And I think that the problem is people just use this as a quick fix. When they’re on the drug, they’re suppressing their need, but when they’re off the drug, they’re not really—they don’t have any kind of tools that they can use to help them. And so, I think we need to marry those two together to have a successful treatment. Because I am worried, right? Like, if everybody’s on this thing for the rest of their lives, we don’t know what the implications are.
Like, you know, kind of, like, think about drugs that you and I take on a regular basis when we’re, you know like, imagine, you know, having aspirin. Aspirin is—we’ve had it 30, 40 years, I don’t know even how long. We don’t know what the implications of taking that every day for the rest of our lives are, you know? We don’t have studies. You know, nobody’s taken aspirin for 50 years, and then, you know, kind of—you know, we haven’t measured that. These drugs, if you’re taking them for 10, 15, 20 years, we don’t know what the implications are. So, I think having some sort of management structure adjacent to that is really quite powerful.
Will: Completely. Yeah, super powerful.
Raju: Let’s talk about something even more, further breakthroughs in the healthcare arena. And so, let’s talk a little bit about gene editing treatments, which are, you know, I think a major step forward in a lot of different, you know, structures. So, for our listeners that don’t know what gene editing is, a lot of it’s based on this technology called CRISPR. And what CRISPR effectively does is, you know, you can edit your DNA, and that’ll have massive ramifications in terms of lots of things in life. And so, one of the things that we’ve have successfully done is use CRISPR to address sickle cell anemia.
And sickle cell is caused by inheriting two bad copies of one of the genes that make hemoglobin. And you know, your symptoms are, you got bouts of intense pain, and the life expectancy if you have this disease is a little over 50 years. But using CRISPR, we found that we can make a simple DNA edit to cells from the bone marrow that basically turn back on your ability to make hemoglobin. So, it turns back on by using CRISPR, and it has worked, right? And there are folks that are dealing with this illness that have leveraged CRISPR to do this.
I expect we’ll see more and more of that over time for other illnesses where you can make a gene edit, and it can fix, you know, whatever you have in the body. So, I think it’s really, really profound that we can make these modifications. And the big challenge, Will, is the price tag. So, you know, the price tag for one gene-editing treatment is roughly 2 to $3 million, and… I just, you know, in order for us to do this on a more mainstream level, we’re going to have to get something that is more, you know, reasonable than that. But, you know, give me some of your thoughts on CRISPR, just at a… maybe take venture capital out of this and put your, like, philosophical head on.
Will: Yeah. I mean, you’re sort of opening up the slot machine that is, like, DNA recombination through reproduction. You’re essentially saying, okay, we can go inside the machine, and we can set some of the dials so you know you’re going to, you’re going to get the winning combination that you want a lot of the time. And I think that that’s—we don’t have a societal or regulatory framework for even judging the rightness or wrongness of that. Certainly, if you can take away the tragic consequences of a disease like sickle cell anemia, that’s justifiable, right?
By the way, not everyone would agree with that. Like, there are certain people who would assert that disease plays a role in society. But I’m on the side of, if we can eliminate the terrible suffering of people with sickle cell anemia, that’s great. It’s a wonderful starting point for beginning to get into things that are a lot more complex. If you want your children to be a certain height—
Raju: Oh, my God.
Will: —if you want them to have a certain eye color—
Raju: Gattaca. Did you see Gattaca?
Will: I saw Gattaca. Absolutely [laugh].
Raju: [laugh]. What a cool movie, though. What a cool movie. But yeah.
Will: You know, we’re not, we’re really not—we’re in this world now, I suppose, for those who have the money and the means, and yet it’s still pretty isolated. Costs are going to come down, access is going to go up, and what is the threshold for judging a, you know, a somewhat customized person? And I’ve deliberately stayed away from things like, you know, intelligence, or skin color, or others, where it’s a really, it’s a much more societally loaded topic.
Raju: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know what? I think, whether or not you and I believe it’s the right or wrong thing to do, or there needs to be constraints on it, it’s coming. I think you can go to other countries and probably get your CRISPR treatment without any, you know, sort of moral limitations that might exist there, or, you know, FDA or regulatory issues. I don’t know what to say.
I do agree with you a hundred percent though, if there’s something that is life-threatening, and it will have a massive ramification on your life and it can be solved, my belief is that we have a moral obligation as scientists and researchers to try to address that. Things that are, you know, more of a questionable nature, like, you know, height of your kid, or your height, or, you know—
Will: Right.
Raju: —sure, yeah, I’d like to be, like, five to six inches taller. I’d love that. Now—
Will: So, the way I think about this is, I can imagine my. Not my grandchildren, but almost certainly my great-grandchildren will have a picture of my wife and me, and—like, we all have pictures of our ancestors going back a certain distance—but in parentheses below our names, it will say natural [laugh].
Raju: [laugh].
Will: And when they talk about us, they’ll basically say, “Well, you know, this was before gene editing, so that’s why they look like that.”
Raju: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God.
Will: But before looks could be perfected, before personality and intelligence could be perfected, these were just natural-born people.
Raju: Yeah.
Will: Amazing, amazing—
Raju: What? A natural-born person?
Will: Yeah. These were—
Raju: Get out of here.
Will: —natural—these were totally unedited, natural-born people, and yet they still found each other, they were able to reproduce, they lived okay lives [laugh].
Raju: Oh yeah.
Will: That’s how they’re going to talk about it.
Raju: Yeah. Acceptable lives. Acceptable lives.
Will: Acceptable lives.
Raju: All right, I think we should move to the Gatling gun section. We will have more of these. We will have more of these, just where we’re talking about just different tech stacks out there, where Will and I can banter a bit, and just kind of give our thoughts. I really enjoyed this. But let’s move to the Gatling gun section. We’re already at, you know, enough of a time constraint, and we’ll talk about other things like quantum computing, and crazy other tech stacks down the road. So, just a few questions, Gatling gun, and I’ll try to answer this for you, too. So, in our lifetime, this—is more around the battery technology and/or energy tech—do you think we’ll ever have cell phones that never need to be recharged?
Will: Oh, boy, that is beautiful. I think in our lifetime, no. I actually don’t belie—if I’m in my early-50s and I think I have 30 years to go—plus—or maybe 40, I don’t think so, but I think we’ll have, we will see fundamental energy breakthroughs at device level scale that radically extend time.
Raju: Yeah, so I think we might actually have in our lifetime, but I think two years is good enough because Apple’s going to want you to buy a new phone at least every two years.
Will: [laugh]. Absolutely. The device and innovation cycle will continue to rule. Agree. Yep.
Raju: Exactly. Exactly. And I think definitely, we’ll have battery technologies that last a couple of years. So, if you can get a couple of years out of it, you’ll basically, you know, deposit the phone in a recycling center and get a new one—
Will: Totally.
Raju: —but never have to recharge it.
Will: Something else will break before, yeah.
Raju: Exactly. All right, here’s another one. The thesis is that within 20 years, tech will exist to allow you to live forever through gene editing—
Will: Well, then I’m definitely getting that phone. That’s great.
Raju: Okay, okay. Okay [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Raju: So, all right, that’s great. If you could live forever, would you?
Will: [pause]. Oh yeah, I think I would.
Raju: You would? Okay.
Will: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there’s so many things I want to do, and you just opened up a lot of possibilities. So, my list is long until I run out of possibilities, yeah.
Raju: Okay. You know, I’m not sure I would want to live forever. I’m not sure I would want to live forever. I mean, obviously there’s tragic ways of dying, like, that you can’t kind of deal with, but like, I think I would want to—if I had a game plan for how long I would want to live, I would want to live for that long, and not necessarily prolong it longer than that. That’s kind of like, it’s a little bit the same answer you have, but I would really want to have a plan, like these ten years, I’m going to do this, 20 years, I’ll do this ten years, I might, like, you know, hit the top of Mount Everest with the other 10,000 people that are on that list by then. But, yeah, okay.
So, you know, the implication, though, is really wacky, though because what do we do with Social Security, you know? And what do we do with the job market? Because the job market is designed to allow entry in with folks. But let’s say we did live forever, right—
Will: Right.
Raju: And some people love their job, they would never leave it. And why would you ever replace them because they have so much inherent knowledge about the business. So, I think you’d have to fix a few things to be able to do this.
Will: Right.
Raju: But, yeah, okay.
Will: Starting with our [GMP 00:48:49] agreements, right? So, you’re basically on the hook forever [laugh].
Raju: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re on the hook forever.
Will: You work for RRE, you work for RRE forever, from now on. Like, congratulations [laugh].
Raju: [laugh].
Will: So look, I think you’re making a really interesting point. It’s a great personal life question. My list is long, but it may be that quality of life for those who can live forever actually won’t be that great. And if you’ve spent any time with older people who have been through the pain of losing loved ones, losing friends, et cetera, you may not want to be the lonely person living forever in the end.
Raju: All right. Here’s an orthogonal question. Would you ever want yourself cloned?
Will: [laugh]. No, I don’t want myself cloned. I think that has spooky implications. And honestly, we live with this problem already in terms of identity theft. Like, the sheer implication of, like, cloning, like, we’ve seen the tip of the iceberg on this.
Raju: Yeah. Yeah. Did you see that movie Multiplicity with Michael Keaton?
Will: I did not see, no.
Raju: Oh, my God, it was so good. So, this a good movie. He clones himself—finds a way to clone himself—it turns out each clone is slightly—has slight aberrations. They’re not, like, perfect. And one of his clones gets the idea of cloning himself. And so, there’s a clone of a clone, and that creates real problems.
And so, there’s a bunch of Michael Keatons floating around that are clones of clones. A really hilarious movie, but yeah, you know, I’m not sure. I’m not sure I would want myself cloned, but I’m not sure I would mind it either. I actually think that there’s a lot to do with genetics, which is all about what cloning is, but then knowledge is built separately, and has just as much of an impact, and your experience, life experience, have just as much of an impact on who you are. All right, if it would be possible to get there, would you want to live on Mars?
Will: Yeah. Oh, I definitely would. I mean, I’m a space guy at some level. I think I love—the Martian is one of my favorite movies, not because of the drama so much as the exploration of the ordeal of actually living on Mars. And I think the Maslow’s hierarchy and the notion of basic human needs becomes really acute when you think about trying to live on another planet, and I think that we’re just starting to explore those questions. And since I’m going to live forever, I’ve got time to wait for Starship to become a really reliable, really energy efficient because of all the solar cells that are going to coat it, and take my gene-edited live-forever self to be a superhuman farmer on Mars. So.
Raju: Oh, see that—you’re just wrapping this all together in one last statement. I mean, I might be interested in doing it too. I would want to exhaust Earth before I decided to do that, to be honest with you, because I think there’s still a lot to do on Earth. I’d need Netflix, probably. I definitely want my dog, or cloned version of my dog there, and a very good tequila. I would need a great tequila, and maybe even my wife. Maybe half—75% of the time I’d want my wife there.
Will: Okay well, I’m serving tequila and chiplets at my farm on Mars, and you’re welcome to come anytime. Okay?
Raju: Cool Ranch? Cool Ranch.
Will: [laugh]. Cool Ranch.
Raju: I need the Cool Ranch ones. I love the cool Ranch.
Will: The Cool Ranch triplets. All right, this has been a lot of fun. To our listeners. Thank you for tuning into another episode of RRE POV. We’re grateful for your support. We have a lot of fun doing this. We hope it’s useful and meaningful for you, and we will have another episode out to you very soon. Thank you.
Raju: Thanks, all.
Thank you for listening to RRE POV. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on X or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.