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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.
00:00:00
Jason: They should partner with Doritos, and they should launch each new chip. This one’s the Cool Ranch.
00:00:06
Raju: [laugh].
00:00:06
Will: [laugh].
00:00:06
Jason: This one’s the Habanero.
00:00:15
Will: Welcome to RRE POV—
00:00:17
Raju: —a show in which we record the conversations we’re already having amongst ourselves—
00:00:21
Jason: —our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Jason: These are, kind of, hilarious to start because we don’t have a planned intro. But Raju went to CES. That’s the intro.
00:00:34
Raju: Yeah, I did. This is my—I don’t know, I’ve been many years in a row. And you went with me one time. You know what’s funny, Jason? When I got to CES, one of the first thing that happened and popped up on my Google Photos and my Apple Photos was a memory of you and I, going to CES.
00:00:52
Jason: Sweet.
00:00:53
Raju: And your hair was totally different.
00:00:56
Will: [laugh].
00:00:57
Jason: [laugh].
00:00:57
Raju: You know, it was funny. It was, like, dramatically different, now that your hair is white. Before, your hair was dark black and matted down.
00:01:05
Jason: Oh, yeah.
00:01:06
Raju: It was like literally slicked down versus, like, the, you know, depth of hair that you have now. It’s like—
00:01:13
Jason: I got it re-dyed. That’s the key.
00:01:16
Raju: Yeah.
00:01:16
Jason: I’m going to be, like, half-and-half pretty soon. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. I think, you know, that was also my first time to CES. It’s an important conference. I think, this time, more so than ever, I’ve be—or I shouldn’t say ever. It was really like the 2011 era, right?
IPhone was definitely a thing, we were, like, four years in, they were actually getting good, cameras were there, they finally launched copy and paste, App Store’s bumping, and people are, like, downloading apps. And there were all sorts of new phones and stuff. Like, Mobile World Congress was, like, this huge thing. I mean, it’s still huge; all these conferences, like, are still absolutely massive. But there was, kind of, a period of time, you know, in the, kind of, late aughts, early tens, that there was just a general excitement about, like, gadgetry and, like, consumer electronics.
And I feel like we’re back there. Like, I haven’t bought as much new gadgets and downloaded new apps as I have since… [laugh] like, this past year, basically, and frankly, today, with the launch of Apple Vision Pro. But it’s just such a fun time, and I’m really curious to, like, hear your thoughts, and like, main themes that you saw at CES this year.
00:02:31
Raju: I think there’s, like, five big themes that I saw. And I’ll just highlight the five up front, and then we can go into, sort of, each one and, kind of, what the weird, [chillier 00:02:40], you know, gadgets that we saw—that I saw, and then ultimately, kind of, what the implications are for our industry and the world. The first was, you know—and this is always big at CES—[unintelligible 00:02:53] the next wave of televisions. Really slick, and some value there, but not infinite value, which I’ll talk about. Then the second was, I guess, they’re calling an XR now to cover augmented, mixed, and virtual reality. A bunch of products, capabilities in that space.
The third was electric and autonomous vehicles. And I think that big difference from years past is there was some innovation around consumer-oriented vehicles, but the big innovation was really around things who are used for business purposes, whether it’s construction or crop harvesting, things like that, which—and I know we just did a podcast with Clearpath Robotics, which we sold to Rockwell, but things like that are beginning to take off. The fourth category, which, you know, probably not as innovative as years past, was health products. And the last was, sort of, productivity gadgets, which, you know, we’re all geeks on this podcast [laugh].
00:03:51
All: [laugh].
Jason: I feel like I’m going to be Inspector Gadget pretty soon.
00:03:54
Raju: Oh man, it was so cool.
00:03:56
Jason: I’m going to have, like, a little Rabbit R1 up my sleeve—
00:03:59
Raju: Yeah.
00:04:00
Jason: —you know? I’m like talking into my sleeve. Like I’m James Bond or something.
00:04:03
Raju: You know what it reminded—I mean, not to jump in, but you remember the Tamagotchis?
00:04:07
Jason: What, you’re talking about the Rabbit R1, for the benefit of the listeners?
00:04:11
Raju: Yeah. The Rabbit R1. It just had this feel of a Tamagotchi, for, like, adults. It was so cool.
00:04:18
Jason: Yeah. It was like those—yeah, it’s designed by Teenage Engineering, which, you know, aside from Apple, they’re pretty much on the same level of, like, quality of design, and materials, and fit and finish. They’re far lesser known. They became famous for, like, the OP-1. They make a bunch of other stuff. Actually, the mic that I’m using right now is from Teenage Engineering.
But yeah, they do such a great design, and very minimalist and thoughtful of, like, what does this gadget actually need? But it totally does remind me of, there was this—I was a Sega guy, and we had the original Sega Genesis. And then eventually there was the Dreamcast, and I had to make a big decision, and I eventually regretted it because Pokémon never launched on the Dreamcast. But I had a Sega Dreamcast, and their thing was, like, you could hold the controller kind of like an Xbox controller, but that they had a little slot in the middle, and the idea was that you were going to put a memory card where you could save all the games and stuff—
00:05:15
Raju: Oh jeez.
00:05:15
Jason: —into the memory card and—
00:05:16
Raju: I had one too.
00:05:17
Jason: Carry it around with you.
00:05:17
Will: Even I remember that, yeah.
00:05:19
Jason: But then it also had a little screen on it, so you could have, like, little characters that would, like, live in this little memory slot. Which at the time was super cool, but you couldn’t [laugh] really do much with it.
00:05:29
Raju: Jason, you know—
00:05:30
Jason: It was fantastic.
00:05:31
Raju: —I’ve moved a few times. I’m an old guy.
00:05:33
Jason: Yeah.
00:05:33
Raju: I’d move—I threw away a bunch of stuff; the one thing I didn’t throw away is my old video game systems, which included the Sega Genesis, and the handheld, and Ecco the Dolphin, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and [unintelligible 00:05:49]—
00:05:50
Jason: Oh, Ecco the Dolphin. Wow.
00:05:52
Will: [laugh] Ecco the Dolphin is a rarity.
00:05:52
Raju: What a throwback. That was the Sega… what was the handheld device called?
00:05:56
Jason: I think it was Game Ca—no, it wasn’t Gamecast. Uh—
00:06:00
Raju: I don’t remember, frankly.
00:06:01
Jason: —it was Game something. Anyway.
00:06:02
Raju: But not only to have that, but I have Final Fantasy. I wasted a colossal amount of time on Final Fantasy on Sega Genesis.
00:06:10
Jason: Is entertainment wastes of time, though, you know?
00:06:13
Raju: Yeah, it’s—
00:06:14
Jason: Like, there’s a reason why we have the NBA, and it’s like, not bad that Snapchat is a valuable company. You know, entertainment is entertainment, man.
00:06:21
Raju: Yeah, I didn’t waste time, I guess. I did finish it, and at the time, finishing it was an astronomical feat [laugh] because you had to, you know, just, like, grind through many, many different, you know, sort of, arcs of the game plot. But I loved it anyway.
00:06:42
Will: [laugh] So Raju, I’d love to flip back through some of those themes and just hear more about what you saw on the ground. I mean, starting with the next thing in smart TVs, you know, there aren’t a lot of places, necessarily, for our companies to play in that world. I’m curious, though, if you’re seeing any progress towards more open architectures, better improvements on integration, and usability. I mean, we’re all still living—we’re living with better and better imaging, image quality, but interface challenges and connectivity continue to be really challenging in the TV space.
00:07:19
Raju: Yeah, I don’t think I saw as much open architecture in the TV space. And I think, you know, we’ve kind o—I don’t think we’ve hit a resolution cap, but we’re nearing it, right? Just like, how much more, you know, sort of, real does an image need to look like, and can they record enough footage in that space, 8k, you know, 16k, whatever you want to call it? The real innovation space was these—they evolved from last year—they had, like, these rollable TVs, and now they have foldable TVs, and then now they have transparent televisions where, you know, sort of, the circuitry, you know, you can, kind of, see through and then when you want to turn it on as a real TV, it shows you, you know, the various things. And the question I always ask myself is, like, what’s the value? And the rollable TVs, I actually can see value in them.
00:08:11
Jason: Yeah, it’s space. I mean, that’s why the Frame TV from Samsung is so popular. People [don’t just 00:08:15] want to have, like, a black rectangle in their, like, [laugh] in their living space the entire time. Like they’d rather just have it roll up into their—
00:08:25
Raju: Exactly.
00:08:25
Jason: —you know, credenza, obviously.
00:08:27
Raju: Well, and there’s plenty of, you know, sort of, apartments where wall space, and real estate is, you know, sort of, precious. And so, if you could take this rollable TV—the transparent television kind of got me for a little while, and then I was talking to some folks, and they said, you know, there’s plenty of pockets in rooms where you have two rooms, and you’ve got, sort of, like a space in between the two rooms, and it looks like a pane of glass. I mean, literally, I’m telling you, it was psychotically cool to see this because you’re looking at a pane of glass that you can see people on the other side very clearly, and then all of a sudden, you know, footage starts rolling in and it’s a TV.
00:09:06
Jason: That’s such a hyper specific market, though. Like, I just see that as, like—that’s, like, for giant displays or stadiums or—I mean, it’s all, like, enterprise stuff, you know? It has, kind of, remind me of, like, in the 1960s, the home appliance advertisements, in all of tho—I mean, it’s actually amazing looking back at the, like, refrigerator concepts people were coming up with that, like, had all these little whiz-bang mechanisms to, like, make your life even easier [laugh], and very few of those have come to fruition. The cool thing is, it’s going to be able to tell you, like, what’s in your fridge and how to make a recipe using language models and computer vision.
00:09:46
Will: Well, we should pause for a moment and be glad the fridge makers have, kind of, toned it down—
00:09:50
Jason: [laugh] Yeah, that’s true.
00:09:51
Will: —because there was a period of time where the fridge makers wanted to be making televisions for us, right? They wanted that front of the unit to basically be a display. Maybe just don’t settle for integration with on the recipe side.
00:10:04
Jason: That’s true. And I’m glad I don’t have to subscribe to my refrigerator. I think it’s—it is ridiculous, I mean, the number of things. Like, so I bought the Eight Sleep. I love the Eight Sleep. It’s a liquid cooling mattress. You can get it as a cover, or you can get it with the mattress, and zips directly on.
And I got it before they launched a subscription. There’s all sorts of things that will tell me my, like, heart rate, heart rate variability, all this stuff. Like, I already have those things. I literally just want this thing to heat and cool me. But they launched all these features, and now it’s like, “Hey, we’re going to start charging you, like, a monthly fee to, like, heat and cool your bed.”
And it’s like, that’s what I bought the whole thing for. I’m like, I don’t need any of the data. My watch is going to tell me how I slept. Anyways, but it does feel like just m—like, every little thing. There’s cars now that have subscriptions, and maybe that’s a good, like, transition to your, like, automotive thing. At a certain point, you know, you got to say, [bosta 00:11:03].
00:11:03
Raju: I agree on this subscription thing. I actually bought a Comfort360 bed from Sleep Number, and it’s expensive enough upfront that they give you the subscription stuff for free [laugh], but you’re basically building it into the upfront cost of this thing. It’s an awesome bed.
00:11:21
Jason: But is that, like, an enterprise contract where you’re, like, okay, so we’ll give you the first two years for free, but there’s no way that you’re actually ripping this out in ten years, so the back eight [laugh] eight years you’ll be on it?
00:11:33
Raju: The thing cost a pretty penny. But you know, it does a bunch of stuff. It, like, has, like, an automated, you know, sort of, elevation for your feet, and your head, and you know, and it detects when you go to sleep and it, kind of, decompresses the bed based upon how you’re sleeping, you’re sleeping on your side or back. There’s a lot of great features on it, so I love it, but—
00:11:55
Jason: There’s only so many things I want my bed to know about me.
00:11:58
Raju: Uh-huh.
00:11:59
Jason: Yeah.
00:11:59
Will: [laugh] Well, I mean, if there’s a theme here, it just seems like the fight for our consumer health information is only ever expanding, in terms of—
00:12:08
Jason: Yeah.
00:12:08
Raju: Yeah.
00:12:08
Will: You know, who wants a piece of your heart rate data, respiration data, sleep data, et cetera.
00:12:14
Jason: And don’t get me wrong, like, for an expensive—I mean, the Eight Sleep isn’t the cheapest, kind of, bed you can buy, so I get that you would want—you would expect more from that. And it is—I’m not discouraging them from, like, the health stuff, but if a user doesn’t want it, like, I think it’s discouraging people from actually jumping in on the device.
00:12:36
Will: So, you weren’t actually mattress shopping at CES were you, Raju?
00:12:39
Raju: No. I didn’t actually see any mattresses there. I, kind of, avoided them because they’d already made the value judgment.
00:12:44
Jason: Bed that can make itself, that’s… that would be… that’s the next thing in beds.
00:12:49
Will: Absolutely.
00:12:50
Raju: Yeah. Yeah.
00:12:51
Will: Well, Raju, what about the XR space? I mean, there’s a lot of headset activity coming. We’re recording this as Vision Pro is launching. You know, we all know that Meta is pumping money into Quest, and there’s a lot of headset activity. What did you see there that inspired you, in the VR [crosstalk 00:13:12]—
00:13:11
Raju: It was a massive theme. It was a massive theme, Will, and I’m glad you asked. I mean, [unintelligible 00:13:16], I mean, Apple wasn’t there. They rarely go to CES, so you know, I’m not surprised. But they did make a bunch of announcements.
You know, I know a bunch of us have ordered these headsets. We’ll probably do a separate podcast on this; I’m sure we will because we’ll just be comparing ideas and notes and stuff like that, but there was a whole bunch of other companies that spent time in this space. You know, Sony introduced a new device targeting business users, you know, 3D content collaboration, and 4K OLED, you know, they have specialization in the chips. The big thing I saw was Qualcomm announcing a new chip. You know, it’s called Snapdragon XR2+, gen two.
00:13:55
Jason: I’m going to make my Dorito joke [laugh] which I made in the pre-pod, which is, they should partner with Doritos, and they should launch a new chip. This one’s the Cool Ranch.
00:14:07
Raju: [laugh].
00:14:07
Will: [laugh].
00:14:07
Jason: This one’s the Habanero. This one’s the [unintelligible 00:14:10] Doritos [in 00:14:11] forever. I mean, they could just partner—and frankly, what is that? Who makes, like, those chips? Like, Kraft Foods? You could just get a Kraft Foods [thing 00:14:18]. Eventually it’s Lay’s. Eventually you’re getting, you know, the Flaming Hot Cheetos. I think it would be a hoot.
00:14:24
Raju: I agree. I mean, listen, you know, there’s—if they don’t do it, there’s other chip manufacturers that will get in there.
00:14:31
Jason: Just get right in there.
00:14:32
Raju: Yeah. And there’s a whole article about double-dipping and whether it’s acceptable or not, now, you know?
00:14:38
Jason: Social norms are a-changing.
00:14:42
Raju: They are a-changing. So, Qualcomm’s chip, man, this is pretty cool. It’s aimed specifically at the XR market. 4300 pixels per eye. Support for 12 concurrent cameras, 12 millisecond latency, full color pass-throughing. I mean, that’s what you need—
00:15:00
Jason: Wait, wait, it’s a chip? Or is it—you sai—oh, so it can power—
00:15:03
Raju: Yeah.
00:15:04
Jason: —a display? That’s what—those are the specs—
00:15:06
Raju: Characteristics.
00:15:06
Jason: —for the display.
00:15:07
Raju: Yeah.
00:15:07
Jason: Okay.
00:15:08
Raju: I mean, just think about that, right? Like, you want this—you know, everybody’s, kind of, been waiting for augmented reality, virtual reality, XR, spatial computing devices, what are Apple wants to call it, but I think the problem is you need, sort of, the ubiquity of chipsets and the underlying foundation for this stuff to work. And I think Qualcomm’s announcement is pretty, pretty significant because it’ll allow a whole generation of this stuff to come to pass. And there’s still a lot to be figured out, though, and I’d love your guys' opinions on it just as you know, consumers and having played with this stuff before.
I mean, I’ve had—I have everything. I’ve got the Meta, you know, I’m going to get the Apple Vision product, you know, I’ve got the Ray-Ban glasses, and I’ve had the HTC device, you know, for years, right, which is more of a virtual reality. The problem with these devices is how long you can wear them, you know? You got, sort of, 30 minutes to a couple of hours worth of not just battery life, but just, you know, ability to keep this thing on your head, as opposed to a mobile phone, which you carry around with you everywhere. And so, you know, I think, for this stuff to become, you know, sort of, ubiquitous, yeah, it’s got to get a little cheaper and [B 00:16:19], it’s got to be able to go with you. But I’d love your guys’ opinions on this.
00:16:24
Jason: I mean, you’re—sorry, I’m jumping in immediately, Will. You [laugh] probably have great thoughts on it. You’re really the person on this call that has the most gadgetry. And has used them for your own, like, personal use as well, so I’ll just preface it with that because I’d be curious to hear what you thought. You know, Ben Thompson always talked about VR as being a destination, right?
Like, a smartphone is mobile, it’s wherever you are. I mean, you can stand there or sit at your desk and do it, but you can also do it on the phone holding a co—or, like, you know—sorry, use your phone, holding a coffee, walking around. And AR is obviously mobile, but they’re so chunky, you know, where you can overlay an interface, but it’s not something that you would naturally wear. And so, you know, I think XR encompassing, kind of, the whole umbrella is an interesting space to play. I think we’re just going to slowly inching our way into it, though, right? I think there’s going to be devices that y—like, the Ray-Bans are—this recent release were, like, just close enough for me to be really interested in it, particularly because of the multimodal language model integration where you can just, if you’re wearing them, you can ask, what is this thing or what is that bird, or—
00:17:43
Raju: I have set. I’ve got to be honest with you. It’s actually good.
00:17:46
Will: [laugh].
00:17:47
Raju: It’s actually good. Because I use them as sunglasses. No—
00:17:51
Will: [laugh].
00:17:51
Jason: Yeah.
00:17:52
Raju: —I’m serious. And so, they go with me, you know what I mean? It’s like—
00:17:55
Jason: And they’re headphones.
00:17:56
Will: Right.
00:17:57
Jason: And they have a camera. I mean, it’s like, you know, when you start twisting my arm here, like, all right, fine. I will buy them. You know, they’re also, like, priced—
00:18:04
Raju: Well, Jason, you should because you can get them in prescription, right, and they are a nice pair of sunglasses that you wear. And all of a sudden, you’re like, “I want to capture this, I want information about this, I want to listen to some music,” and it’s relatively seamless. Actually, it’s the first consumer AR device that I sit there and say, “Yeah, it’s usable.”
00:18:27
Jason: It’s usable. It’s like, actually usable and useful. Like—
00:18:30
Raju: Exactly.
00:18:30
Jason: —you’re like, “Yeah, I’m glad I wore it.” Like, I was going to—I was trying to get a pair… I thought, last minute, I should wear this to one of my friend’s weddings, you know? Because then I don’t have to, like, take my phone out and do all this stuff. I can get, like, first person, like, video and photos, camera is good enough, I’ve seen the pictures in the video. Wasn’t able to get a pair, like, in time. This was a very last minute thought; I should have planned ahead a little bit there.
But no, and that’s only going to get—this is the worst pair. Like, that’s the amazing thing about technology. Like, the worst technology we have is, like, the technology we have today. So, I think the AR side is going to get, like, really pretty good, and the price point there, I forget exactly what it is, but it’s somewhere between 300 and 400 which obviously isn’t, like, a you know, oh, I’ll just pick up a pair on my, you know, way to work amount of money, but like, that should also be going down while feature sets go up. And so, I think it’s more on, like, the social norm stuff and, like, making that video or photo, like, more useful.
Should it be vertical, should it be horizontal? Where does that content live? What are the social norms? I know they have, like, the little dot, but I think we’re going to get more and more used to that. Let me pause once I, once I—because I know you guys have thoughts.
On the flip side I think VR, like, will very quickly become for pure immersive experiences where you will be in for hours at a time—which is kind of what it is today, video games, et cetera—but it will get, like, cannibalized by great XR that had pass-through, which is what the Apple Vision Pro is all about. And we already see this happening. Like, arguably AirPods are also augmented reality where it is augmenting your audio surrounding, and you can, like, ask it questions, there’s intelligence in it. They’ve been working on, like, medical sensors that go in there.
And people more and more—particularly with the AirPods Max that are over-the-ear—the transparency mode is indistinguishable from not having headphones on. And I think that the, like, sneaky feature that we don’t realize today, but it’s super important for the Apple Vision Pro is the pass-through video, not just because it, like, oh, okay, cool. I can, like, navigate in the environment, but I think more and more, we’re going to just be able to phase in between two fields seamlessly. So anyways, I’m really excited about that.
00:20:56
Will: I think that’s an essential part of the message, Jason. I mean, I think you said so many important things there in your overview. But yeah, that, kind of, pass-through, that idea that the screen that you have access to at any time is just part of your constant reality, and that what people see—because a huge amount of people’s reaction to wearing a headset is how they see themselves being seen, right? And this takes us right back to the fact that the iPhone was a desirable accessory even before people knew what to do with it because it made them look cool. So, now we’re finally starting to make headgear that really looks cool, and that people are going to be more comfortable wearing publicly.
I think your comment about we’re inching towards it on the consumer side is absolutely true. Certainly, we see a lot of new experiences being unlocked in VR; we have a portfolio company, WaveXR where the experience of live virtual concerts with major artists gets better and better and better. And on platforms like Meta Quest 3, or on Vision Pro, you will be able to go to great concerts and be in the front row with all of your friends, and there’ll be standing next to you, and you’ll be interacting. Like, those experiences are just starting to be unlocked in 2024. But I think we also have to pause for a moment and think about the applications of these tools in, sort of, industrial settings, public safety settings. You put a pair of smart glasses on somebody who needs to monitor what’s going on in a plant, who needs to monitor a crowded—monitor a crowd, and suddenly, you have the potential to arm them with a lot more input data to make decisions. And it’s putting power in the hands of people.
00:22:54
Raju: We’re going to do a whole podcast on this momentarily, which I think we should dive into the applications at that point because I think this is a big enough topic, we should spend cycles on it. You know, consumer, business apps, you know, after we play around with the Apple Vision Pro, let’s get into the apps. But let me talk about a few other themes if that’s okay, so that we, kind of, get through stuff.
So, electric and autonomous vehicles. Obviously, you know, the world is still moving forward on that. On the consumer side of things, you know, listen, I saw amazing concept cars: Hyundai, Honda, and Daimler. Like, Honda ha—[laugh] [unintelligible 00:23:31] this space hub, you know, thing. You should just check it out on YouTube. I mean, it was mind-blowingly cool. It’s just, you know, let’s see when we get there on this stuff. The coolest thing I saw, though, was really industrial and business application for autonomous vehicles. Mobinn, which was a spinoff from a Hyundai, had a robot that can navigate stairs. I think that’s going to be really important in the grand scheme of things. Like, you know—
00:23:59
Jason: Is it a bipedal robot? Or a rolling robot?
00:24:02
Raju: No, it’s a rolling robot, but it can figure out how to go up stairs and down stairs. I think that’s going to have a big functional change in how things work. John Deere had autonomous crop harvesting. Hyundai had what I think was the coolest thing I saw at CER by far, which was an autonomous excavator.
00:24:24
Jason: CER? You went to a whole different conference.
00:24:27
Raju: CES. Or s—
00:24:27
Jason: You said CER.
00:24:28
Will: You said CER.
00:24:29
Raju: Oh, I said CER. So, sorry. No, CES. It was a different—I felt like it must—might have been different, but like, this thing was crazy. It was—I mean, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get out there, but just an excavator on private property, fully autonomous. Caterpillar had electric everything with onsite power generators. Because power is going to be a big stuff with electric, so you need to be able to generate power on site with renewable fuels and energy storage solutions. I think this is going to be a big theme. You know, folks are really considering how we can do this in a more sustainable way. Big push made. I loved it. You know, I know, Jason, we had a podcast just recently with the folks at Clearpath, you know, and they’re doing autonomous vehicles for warehouses, forklifts, you know, sort of, pallet-movers and things like that. This is just, sort of, the next level of that, and I thought that was pretty powerful.
00:25:28
Jason: Yeah. No, I think it’s—I mean, it’s a huge industry. I was just looking up, $1.84 trillion dollars in 2021, the mining market size globally. Not small.
00:25:40
Will: Raju, did you get the sense that market is moving to something like the way the drone market operates, in the sense that we’re moving away from the, sort of, dedicated human operator to either a mostly autonomous vehicle or a human-assisted, semi-autonomous vehicle with a, kind of, master operator situation?
00:26:00
Raju: A hundred percent?
00:26:02
Jason: I’ll also take that. I mean, Clearpath—
00:26:04
Will: Yeah.
00:26:04
Jason: The Clearpath, the yellow robot side, they’ve been working with mining companies for years on autonomous. I mean, a lot of these, like, autonomous things start with, like, data gathering, before you’re actually manipulating the actual excavators or tools themselves, but there’s still just a lot of grunt work that needs to be done in these mines, so it absolutely is. They’ve been thinking about it for quite some time. It can be transformative. I think one of the interesting, you know, aspects on the EV part, right—because this is also in the EV section—was it an electric vehicle as well?
00:26:38
Raju: Yeah. Yeah.
00:26:39
Jason: Okay.
00:26:39
Raju: Electric—
00:26:40
Jason: Battery density.
00:26:41
Raju: The problem with some of these things is they’re just too heavy to be fully electric.
00:26:45
Jason: That’s what I’m saying.
00:26:46
Raju: But they are driving towards, you know, sort of, fuel cells and, you know, sort of, different kinds of energy profiles.
00:26:52
Jason: Yeah. And same thing with flight. You know, we got new eVTOL companies and electric planes, and we’re starting to move into heavy machinery. It’s a new challenge, but one that, you know, is arguably a greater contributor to climate change, and the solutions that we desperately need in short order, as well. So—
00:27:14
Raju: Yeah. You know, and I’m going to say this because I just have to do my dad joke, but like, the harvesting industry is ripe for innovation here in autonomous—
00:27:24
Jason: [crosstalk 00:27:23].
00:27:24
Raju: —vehicles. Just absolutely ripe for it.
00:27:26
Will: [laugh].
00:27:27
Jason: There’s a bumper crop.
00:27:31
Will: [laugh].
00:27:32
Raju: Crop harvesting.
00:27:32
Will: [unintelligible 00:27:34].
00:27:33
Raju: [crosstalk 00:27:35]—
00:27:34
Jason: That’s super exciting. I mean, that’s where, like, a ton of money gets spent. And you know, I guess, like, my final question before we move to the next topic is, how are they solving the battery density issue, right? Are they swapping these massive batteries in and out? Is there a giant wall plug?
00:27:51
Raju: I don’t think they’re going completely electric. Renewable Fuel cells, you know? A bunch of energy storage solution so that you can, sort of, pump juice into this thing on site; huge capacitors. I think they’re going to go with fuel cells as a predominant value proposition as opposed to, sort of, batteries, more efficient hydrogen stuff. Because the reality is, how do you get electricity out to a remote farm with enough, you know, sort of, capacity? If you think about farming in general, like, just, like, rural environments—
00:28:25
Jason: Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, yeah.
00:28:27
Will: [laugh].
00:28:27
Raju: Yeah, your hometown.
00:28:28
Jason: My hometown.
00:28:29
Raju: Yeah. You got to be able to do something different. And the reality is, you know, we need produce, we need, you know, food, we need all of this stuff. There’s a lot of tech that’s going to innovate on it to, you know, monitor soil, figure out when to harvest, do this stuff, you know, autonomously, so that—you know, we’re not producing a whole lot of farmers in this country, you know? We just know what’s happening; we just got to become more efficient at it. You know, the reality is there’s good tech there.
00:29:00
Jason: And as a planet. I think the other—you know, this will naturally transition to another topic, but it feels like more so than ever, each one of these, like, technologies is also being propelled by a pretty massive, like, driving force, whether that be the transformers and the demand for chips and faster chips, and there’s so much demand that it’s just spilling over into new chip architectures, whereas before you would wait for the die. You know, you had the [TikTok 00:29:33] and the classic Moore’s Law, and we’re just, like, starting to—there’s just spillover. And same thing with, like, batteries. You’ve got batteries for quite some time—potato battery; I mean, they’ve been around since Ireland invented them—
00:29:46
Will: [laugh].
00:29:47
Jason: —[laugh] And so, you know, but now we desperately need batteries, not just for our cars, and even for our mining equipment, but for the grid system itself. Like, we need to industrial scale… batteries, and we need solutions to global warming. I don’t know that we need XR, but we really want it [laugh].
00:30:09
Raju: Well, so, yeah, I agree with that. But like, you know, just that segment right there, Jason, is really profound. Like, if you think about autonomous farming as a category, think about what you need: you need satellite communication, right—and, Will, you know, you talked about this in the space podcast, right, we’ve got this network out there that, you know, allows internet to go pretty much anywhere on the planet—you need battery and/or next generation fuel cell technology; you need, you know, sort of, autonomous driving tools; you need better weather prediction, you know, capabilities to figure out when to, you know, harvest; you need AI. There’s a lot of computing because these devices need to do a lot of their computing locally, right? So, all of this stuff we’re talking about, you know, the chipsets, the satellite networks, electric vehicles, you know, the autonomous driving capabilities, all of these foundational technologies need to be put in place to allow this to work.
00:31:14
Jason: What’s interesting—it just occurred to me while you were saying that—there’s, like, always this, like, kind of, happy byproduct industry that just benefits from another industry pioneering, and Will might not have explicitly mentioned it on the space thing, but a lot of the chips and architectures and sensors that were going up, were driven by the rise of smartphones and how insatiable the appetite was as we were, like, blanketing the planet with iPhones. And that just drove so much miniaturization, specializa—like, so much technical progress, it almost seems like it’s, kind of, inverted. Like, we’ve reached a point, you don’t have to charge your phone, like, midday, the camera is, like, bumping up against the physics. It’s not like a dramatic shift each year, but there are other industries now, like, pushing even further, and, you know, like for… you know, you can, kind of like, back into it a little bit. But it’s, kind of, awesome how the entire industry just benefits. Like, as long as one of us is winning, we can, kind of, like, attach ourself to that because we’re all built on what you just said is kind of this shared infrastructure. We need internet, we need sensors, we need processing power, we need batteries.
00:32:36
Will: You’re completely right. Jason, I mean, progress in one industry in a component that’s relevant across so many other industries benefits everybody. I think the picture you’ve painted coming out of CES is incredibly hopeful, Raju, and part of what I’m so excited about is to hear the number of large-scale companies that are embracing innovation and bringing it to market under their own brand names around stuff that we’ve seen in the startup community, and in innovative companies, smaller companies for over the last 10 to 15 years. I mean, when you have John Deere bringing autonomous farming technology to market, that’s a successor moment to a whole lot of startups in the AgTech sector over the last—
00:33:19
Raju: Yeah.
00:33:20
Jason: —10 to 15 years.
00:33:20
Raju: It’s kind of why I love going. I mean, I know this stuff is always a few years out, right, and sometimes even longer, and sometimes it doesn’t materialize, but, you know, you get to see—in our industry, we’re playing around with the genesis technology, the early, early stuff, and then you see it, kind of, rollout to, sort of, [do 00:33:38] industrial levels or, you know, wide-scale consumer levels, and it’s kind of fun. I do want to touch on these productivity gadgets because we’re all geeks, man. Like, I’m like a super geek.
00:33:51
Jason: I love your moniker for it: “Productivity gadgets.”
00:33:54
Will: [laugh].
00:33:54
Raju: Yeah. Well, it’s just… for me, that’s what they are.
00:33:58
Jason: [laugh] Okay.
00:33:58
Raju: I’m gonna just talk about a couple of them. Like—
00:34:00
Jason: So rad.
00:34:00
Raju: —the first one, I’ll go very quickly.
00:34:02
Jason: Yeah?
00:34:02
Raju: It was just one of my things. There was a Nespresso machine that allowed—it looked like a little tiny robot, and its base was the water. And you could take two Nespresso capsules and put it in there, and it would perfectly combine them.
00:34:18
Jason: Oh, that’s cute.
00:34:18
Raju: So, if you wanted, like, a half-caff, you could get a half-caff.
00:34:20
Jason: Nice. Did you have to—
00:34:20
Raju: If you wanted, like hazelnut—
00:34:20
Jason: Kind of like, whisper to it like you are?
00:34:25
Raju: [whisper] yeah [unintelligible 00:34:26].
00:34:26
Jason: Like, “Hey, little robot”—
00:34:27
Raju: It was like, it was so cute.
00:34:28
Jason: —“Would you mind mixing these for me?”
00:34:29
Raju: It was so cute. And so, I love that.
00:34:32
Jason: Okay.
00:34:33
Raju: But let’s just put that aside. The two I want to talk about—because both of you guys will love this one—the first one was this Clicks keyboard. So, I don’t know if you had a BlackBerry, Jason. I had a BlackBerry.
00:34:43
Will: Oh yeah.
00:34:45
Jason: I did. I did. I had the BlackBerry Pearl.
00:34:48
Will: I heard about this.
00:34:49
Jason: That was my only BlackBerry.
00:34:50
Will: Did you get your hands on one?
00:34:50
Raju: I got my hands on one. I ordered one. It’s called Clicks. It’s a UK company, and it’s basically, you know, it’s a case for your iPhone, and it plugs into the USB-C port, and then it gives you this full-on keyboard. It’s sexy-looking, it provides a case. I don’t know how many, you know, sort of, Gen X’ers are going to grok this because they’re just, like, “What the hell are you talking about? Like, the keyboard that I use, the virtual one, is absolutely fine.” And they can type, you know, a thousand words a second [laugh] on it.
I loved my BlackBerry. And, Will, I’m going to point to you specifically here because you invested in a company called Peak Mobile way back in the day. When iPhones were coming out, it was—you know, look, the success—it wasn’t a success story, but nonetheless, thematically it was correct, right? Like people, you know, of a certain generation, certain demographic, just love that keyboard, that you know, like, hard press. And man, I ordered one. I’m going to try it out. I don’t know if I’ll keep it, and use it forever, but like, it is, like, it was just sort of this retro moment in my life, and I was just, like, if I could get that BlackBerry deal back, I would just love it.
00:36:06
Will: [laugh] Raju, that’s pretty—that’s a pretty nice admission on your part. I don’t know if you remember the phones with the really big buttons when we were kids—
00:36:13
Raju: Oh yeah.
00:36:14
Will: —we could [crosstalk 00:36:13]. Yeah. I think some of us need a version of that to take us back through the Wayback Machine to the tactile value of the old BlackBerry keyboard. It sounds very cool.
00:36:27
Raju: Yeah, I’m going to try it and see how it is. Because it does extend the phone size.
00:36:32
Jason: Yeah.
00:36:33
Raju: And you know what, Jason, I know you’ve had trouble with your wrist a little bit. I don’t know if this is something that might help you.
00:36:38
Jason: Um, it’s… I mean, I have tendonitis, which is something slightly different. Um… the—I don’t need to go into, like, the medical detail. It’s just more like actually pressing in on stuff isn’t particularly great. Being able to just tap very lightly on a screen is fantastic. But it’s funny that it just feels like JNCO jeans—or like, you know, JNCO jeans or Disco [laugh] and disco jeans that are just, kind of, coming back, bell-bottoms, right, are the jeans style. It’s like, it’s come back in. We’re back to keyboards. Back in style.
00:37:15
Raju: So anyway, that was cool. And then this thing that’s taken the internet by storm—I know you ordered one, Jason; I ordered one; mine’s on backorder because you probably got to before I did—this Rabbit, which is this square AI voice assistant that couples to your phone. And I don’t know how to best describe this. It makes your phone more useful. It provides a layer of functionality that your—you don’t have to actually command applications. You, kind of, work with it, it launches applications. It can do things like, you know—
00:37:50
Jason: Language action model—
00:37:50
Raju: Yeah. It, like—
00:37:52
Jason: —is the [LAM 00:37:53].
00:37:54
Raju: —understand your intent, and then, you know, pop open, you know, apps that mimic those actions. It’s very Tamagotchi-like. And you know, one of the things that they showed was, you know, it can look into a fridge, identify ingredients, suggest a recipe. It is slick-looking. Got a control wheel, camera, microphone, speakers, AI. And you ordered one without going to CES, Jason, so you know, why don’t you tell me why you—
00:38:23
Jason: Well, I texted you about, “You should go to this launch; it looks pretty cool,” just before I knew they were partnering with Teenage Engineering. I just think their objects look beautiful, like, even if it just becomes a paperweight. It’s pretty, pretty elegant. And I’m a total tech nerd, so like, that’s what I do want to have [laugh], like, on display in my office or whatever.
But no, I’m really excited. I think, like, you know, in comparison to the Humane Pin, which I—pl—has been dunked on a zillion times, and I’m not trying to dunk. Like, I encourage people to experiment with hardware, particularly at this moment where we don’t know exactly—we have a brand-new user interface which is language and voice, and you know, still images, eventually video, but we don’t know what the, like, kind of, optimal form factor is for that, and interaction model, which is slightly different than the UI, and people are just trying stuff out. And so, you know, this is—I was, kind of, shocked a little bit at the price point. That is, kind of, you know, if you want to treat yourself, and it’s like $199 bucks, no subscription, pick it up, looks cool, you know, that’s the price of, like, going to a football game or something like that, right?
And it’s just, it kind of hit some sweet spot. And I’m actually a little bit skeptical of the ability. The idea is that you can, kind of, train it, right? You can log in into all of your services, have it basically record as you’re doing an action, and what it’s not doing is tracking exactly where your cursor goes and just hitting that exact same x-y point on the grid; what it is doing is, you know, understanding the type of thing that you are doing at each thing. Because if the interface changes, this thing shouldn’t break.
I’m a little bit skeptical that users are actually going to build their own recipes. I’m hoping there’s actually a really active, you know, open template and library, which I could see being really useful. But I’m really excited about it. I mean, it can look, again, listen, it has a very simple interface, and they’re going to be powered by Perplexity, which is, by far, one of my favorite large language model apps because they just—it’s succinct answers. And you’re just getting answers back. You’re not—there’s no reading a webpage or anything like that. I think the interaction model is as simple as it should be.
00:40:56
Raju: I agree, Jason. And you know, like, if you think about it thematically, I know, we talked about five, sort of, categories, but like, usability and user interface, and that, you know, kind of, really came out. If you think about XR, right—augmented reality, virtual reality—it’s just a new way of interacting. I mean, it’s obviously more profound than just that. But even, like, the Clicks keyboard, right, it’s just, the phone isn’t perfect, right? The iPhone is just not perfect.
It’s a great evolution from where we were ten years ago, and ten years before that, there was, you know, a big evolution. And ten years before that, there was a big evolution. But we’re still looking for more, right? Like, Rabbit is a new way of interacting, you know, the Clicks keyboard is a new way of interacting, XR—augmented reality—is a new way of interacting. And my feeling is that there’s just going to be—you know, I’m going to—I’m writing a blog post on this, and you guys will see it, but, like, the rate of innovation is accelerating in our life [laugh] from back in the day when, you know, age of mankind lasted several hundred years, like, and now is shrinking to, like, a dozen years or five years, this whole human compute device interaction play is moving really quickly. Really quickly.
00:42:24
Jason: Yeah. Definitely agree on that. We also go in fits and starts. We’re definitely in a start. Or actually, I don’t know which one—they both seem—we’re in a fit and a start. I don’t know. It goes in fits and starts.
I will just, kind of, circle back because our partner [Jim Fore 00:42:39] had mentioned, like, “I don’t think the phone is going to be here anymore in ten years.” You know, the Mac has been around for 40 or 50 years, I think? You know, John Gruber had this amazing piece, they wrote about, like, I think a couple of weeks after the iPad. And I think we’re going to enter a new phase—if we do have extra gadgets, which is debatable, right—the Rabbit R1 doesn’t have anything that a smartphone does. It’s just, like, a single integrated device.
And, you know, we already see Samsung integrating AI deeply. They’re not even the owners. Google Pixel, they have their TPU; they’re going to be running language models on-device. Apple is slated to launch their own stuff this year. I think, like, you have to carve out a very specific use case that is perpetual so that you’re actually carrying a device on your person all the time, and that’s, like, a really, really high bar to meet, we’ll see if the Rabbit R1 is able to do that.
But you could just compete with, like, an app on a phone. But this is kind of interesting. I’ll just read the quote from one of his pieces. “The central conceit of the iPad is that it’s a portable computer that does less—and because it does less, what it does do, it does better, more simply, and more elegantly. Apple can only begin phasing out the Mac if and when iOS expands to allow us to do everything we can do on the Mac. It’s the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light. When I say that iOS has no baggage, that’s not because there is no baggage. It’s because the Mac is there to carry it. Long term—say, ten years out—well, all good things must come to an end. But in the short term, Mac OS X has an essential role in an iOS world: serving as the platform for complex, resource-intensive tasks.”
Now that we’re in the era of maybe new devices, I feel like that same kind of analogy applies to the iPhone. It’s like, until we have something—you know, the Humane Pin doesn’t cut it because it just doesn’t do everything that a phone does. And until we have something that can replace this computer that’s, to date, the most perfect personal computer—in the truest sense of personal computer—that we’ve ever created. And that’s why they’re so popular and so widespread. But we could be at the [dock 00:45:00]. We could—you know, is it an auxiliary device, or is it a brand new one that, kind of, takes over?
00:45:07
Raju: It’s a great question. It’s a great question. I, you know, just—I mean, I love being in this time horizon. It’s so fun. I mean, holy shit. Like, I cannot tell you how excited I get when I see stuff like this because it’s not gadgetry. I’m not going to put it aside for five minute. I really immersed myself in it. And, you know, like, 20 years ago, immersing yourself in it was learning how to code in a programming language that was so esoteric, and difficult, and writing scripts manually, with no collaboration because you were by yourself, and there was no such thing as an internet [laugh], you know?
00:45:44
Jason: Yeah.
00:45:44
Raju: And now, you know, you’re collaborating, the toolkits are getting easier, it’s faster to start things. I mean, it’s just—it’s pretty profound.
00:45:54
Jason: And just even beyond the gadgetry, I just feel like, we’ve, kind of, been reactivated. I know that people are always working on research, but there’s a time and a place when research becomes reality, and a lot of those, like, breakthroughs that happen in a lab are, kind of, pulled into the market, they’re rarely [pushed 00:46:11] into the market. [And around 00:46:13], you know, everything, I have got a list [laugh] of these awesome topics, like, revisiting, you know, optical computing, super efficient, super energy efficient, has a lot of amazing characteristics, you know, all of the language model stuff that’s helping us basically leap over the traditional way of doing things so that they have—you know, for protein folding, which is important for biotech, and pharmaceuticals, drug development, all these, you know, designing new organisms and stuff like that, really important to be able to fold these proteins. We used to simulate the protein in 3D space, right? That was like the way to do it.
Now, with enough pattern recognition through the power of transformers, that [LLM 00:47:01] never even needs to see the 3D structure. We’re breaking through. I mean, you know, the other day, the MIT research—I think… was at MIT, or it was one of the [unintelligible 00:47:11]—it was DeepMind, Google 100 million novel materials created. I mean, we’re reaching this, kind of, scale of potentiality where we’re not only able to validate what somebody who spent a ton of time towards in a lab to come up with, like, five ideas, now we have a hundred-million ideas, but also allows us to take those hundred-million ideas and rapidly scale down to the few that are going to be most useful.
00:47:41
Raju: Yeah.
00:47:41
Jason: And it’s incredible—
00:47:42
Raju: Well, we should some topic on materials because, you know, listen, I spent seven years of my life [laugh] in college on materials. And I was working on novel new materials, and at the time, you know, there was something like—when you allow material to get created, it takes on a crystalline structure. If you rapidly heat it and rapidly cool it, you can create amorphous materials which don’t have crystalline structures. And, you know, if you take physics out of the equation [laugh], like, normal physics out of the equation—
00:48:15
Jason: [laugh] Yeah, is that what they taught you at MIT?
00:48:17
Raju: Yeah.
00:48:17
Jason: Don’t worry about the physics here, Raju.
00:48:18
Raju: Yeah [laugh]. Well like, just traditional physics, right?
00:48:23
Jason: Sure. Okay.
00:48:24
Raju: Like, just, you know, properties and materials. Like, you can change properties and materials if you create them in space where there’s no gravity. You can change properties and materials, if you can rapidly cool and rapidly heat materials, and freeze them effectively. When DeepMind gets into that stuff and says, what if we did this same material creation in space? What would be the impact on it? What if we did this same material creation with, like, a frozen stream of, you know, ice hitting it so that it cools so rapidly that it doesn’t—you know, that defies normal crystallinity, you know, effects? We’re going to be able to do shit that’s just mind-blowing, right?
00:49:08
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s an exciting time to be alive. [laugh] We’re probably way over time here.
00:49:14
Raju: We are way over time. So, you know, the thing is, should we divide this podcast into two? Because I think—
00:49:19
Jason: Yeah—
00:49:20
Raju: —it may be—
00:49:20
Jason: —let’s do a CES two-parter. They’ll probably leave this audio in, too, because we’re [laugh], kind of, wrapping up. But yeah, let’s do a CES part one, part two. We could probably launch them one week… one one week, and one the next. And we’ll get it out.
But to those who are still listening, made it through the whole [laugh] pod, we covered a lot of ground, meandered in some really interesting areas. But I think, like, the takeaway from my end is, like, never been more excited generally about all of the advancements that are being properly pulled into the market, and kind of rekindled my love for gadgetry, and tech, and apps, and stuff. Like, there’s just so much new stuff coming out right now that’s… it’s just fun.
00:50:03
Raju: I couldn’t say it any better, Jason. That was perfect.
00:50:06
Jason: Well, thanks for walking us through your trip to CES.
00:50:10
Will: Thank you for listening to RRE POV.
00:50:13
Raju: You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on Twitter—or shall I say X—
00:50:19
Jason: —or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts—
00:50:24
Raju: —or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.