The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Mon, 11 Nov 2024
Join us for an engaging conversation with John Coogan, Entrepreneur in Residence at Founders Fund, as we explore a wide range of moonshot ideas from Cybersecurity to moon Colonization to humanoid military robotsEpisode Timestamps: 00:00 Intro01:57 Startup Idea 1: Cybersecurity for AI companies11:37 Startup Idea 2: Moon-focused space startup21:33 Startup Idea 3: Kid-friendly smartphone alternative 36:02 Startup Idea 4: Humanoid military robots 1) Cybersecurity for AI companies • AI models = new high-value digital assets• Estimated $500M to train GPT-4• Potential for theft/espionage• Opportunity: Build Fort Knox-level security for AI weights• Think Chainalysis, but for AI2) Moon-focused space startup • SpaceX focused on Mars, opportunity on the Moon• Easier access, always visible from Earth• Ideas: Moon tourism, mining, asset placement• Leverage SpaceX's falling launch costs• Be the "Varda" or "Planet Labs" of the Moon3) Kid-friendly smartphone alternative • Parents want device control, kids need connectivity• Opportunity: Build ruggedized, fun, limited-feature phone• No addictive apps, basic communication + learning tools• Counter-position against Apple's sleek designs• Target millennial parents via Instagram ads\4) Humanoid military robots • Combine trends: AI, robotics, defense tech• Controversial but attention-grabbing• Potential uses: Tele-operated missions, security• Ethical concerns, but tech seems inevitable• Opportunity to lead in emerging fieldWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideasWork with me and my team: LCA — world’s best product design firm to build apps, websites and brands people love. https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co/Stop Building Websites That Look Good But Don’t Sell: https://www.designscientist.com/design-store?b=https://www.designscientist.com/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND JOHN ON SOCIALJohn’s Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=7TdH3TuJQWmsTt53e9s7Rg&nd=1&dlsi=ab2bcd252c4847ccX/Twitter: https://x.com/johncooganLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacoogan/
this episode was crazy it was with john coogan and he had some of the biggest ideas i've heard all year these moonshot companies like it's either going to be like a billion dollar business or you're going to have literally lit a billion dollars of other people with money on fire it just seems like the bar to colonizing the moon is like orders of magnitude lower than than Mars.
And so the question is like, who's going to build this? Like, I think that there will be a startup that will take one of these humanoid robots, give it an AR-15, like a machine gun or a rifle. And I said, oh, and then they're going to raise like a $500 million seed round
This isn't your normal Startup Ideas podcast episode. This isn't going to be about how you can create a startup that makes a million dollars next year. It's all about big ideas. I think it's going to expand your mind. I think you're going to enjoy it. You will enjoy it. Enjoy the episode. John Coogan on the pod. Mr. Big Ideas, that's what I'm going to call you.
Not that big of ideas, but there's a fine line between big idea and just hot take shit post. And I think today we're going to hit some of them that are complete meme companies. Some of them that maybe could be good. It's going to be on the listener and the viewer to decide which of these ideas are actually good and which are purely viral fodder for the media.
All right. So where do we start?
Let's start with cybersecurity for artificial intelligence companies. So if you have been following AI, there's been this interesting development. Obviously, a lot of people right now are thinking about how can I use AI to build a new app or a new company. And the obvious thing would be putting AI in your cybersecurity layer. So there's an incident report that goes out.
Hey, we got this user alert that someone is trying to log in like 10,000 times with different passwords. We should probably block them. Now, obviously, you could have an AI intermediate that interaction such that that's handled automatically instead of pinging your poor software developer at 2 a.m. He has to get up, check his pager, and say, oh, yeah, we should block that person.
We're getting DDoSed by Russia. Let's turn them off. Let's block that IP address. Obviously, a lot of people have thought about implementing artificial intelligence in part of the cybersecurity stack in order to beef up the existing cybersecurity solutions for all sorts of companies. Everything from Bank of America to Boeing to United Airlines, they all need cybersecurity.
every cyber security company knows ai can make their job easier so they're implementing this what i'm talking about is doing the flip side building a cyber security firm that's specifically designed to secure the now highest value digital assets in the world maybe next to crypto and bitcoin like if there's a whole bunch of bitcoin that's really valuable but other than that the next most valuable digital asset has to be the weights to these large language models and so
So OpenAI, it's rumored that they spent around $500 million training GPT-4. Now, all of those weights, once the GPUs go off and train the model, it all gets boiled down into these weights. It's just numbers in a file, essentially. It's in a very large database, but you could steal this. And there's a lot of...
fear-mongering and conspiracy theories in Silicon Valley right now to the effect that, oh, China has already stolen the weights to GPT-4. Maybe they already have stolen the weights to GPT-5. Who knows if it's real? I actually think most of these labs are pretty secure. But it goes without saying that these are going to be increasingly valuable targets for hackers to break into and steal. And so...
figuring out how to protect a digital asset like it's fort knox seems like something that's going to be a new and ongoing challenge for the artificial intelligence industry broadly now this is different from in past in past generations of tech because if you stole the code base to facebook and you were like okay i have all the code to facebook i'm gonna launch Facebook2.com.
Well, you don't have any of the users. People aren't going to your website. It's not valuable. But with the large language model weights, once you get the model, you can run that anywhere. You can stick that anywhere. You can wrap that into your own product. And all of a sudden, you're not paying OpenAI or Anthropic if you're able to steal the weights. And so...
These firms are going to need top-tier cybersecurity. They already do. A lot of these guys, they go to DEF CON. They talk to all the hackers. They have huge, huge resources allocated to this. But it's just going to become an ongoing problem.
And I think that there might be a new opportunity to figure out, to build a new company around securing these extremely, extremely valuable digital assets, which are the AI models. I think that there's a, in many ways, this is, you know, it's not an entirely novel problem. But if you look at what happened in crypto for a long time, there were kind of two things that were really valuable.
There was like Bitcoin, which was kind of like sticking around forever. And then there's this company called Chainalysis. Did you ever see this? So Chainalysis was a company that they didn't have a token. It wasn't a crypto company. They did the analysis to find like the fraudsters and they were like super downstream of the actual like cryptocurrency.
But that company, even when you talk to the most diehard crypto hater, they'd be like, oh, well, yeah, Chainalysis is probably like a good company because their cash flow is like independent of the underlying token prices because they're just getting paid to hunt down the criminals. And so Chainalysis
i think there's something there's something interesting and uncorrelated about doing cyber security for artificial intelligence companies where you could be indexed to the growth of artificial intelligence without directly needing you know some next benchmark to hit and and and you're not going to be in a situation where oh all of a sudden you know oh you got obsoleted by you know a uh like a current company um so anyway that's my first take
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The cybersecurity for AI companies. Greg, what do you think about it?
So I like the idea. But where my mind goes to is, what does an insurance company for AI look like? I actually never thought about the insurance business until I was watching Warren Buffett at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. He said something that stuck with me, which is, insurance is a great business. Someone's like, why?
He goes, you get paid today for something that might not happen tomorrow. I thought that was a really good way of putting it. I wonder, using the Fort Knox analogy of gold, if I'm trying to MVP this, maybe an MVP is you just get in the insurance business and then eventually evolve into what you're talking about.
Yeah, you know, this is somewhat related, but with the generative AI that's kind of dominating the performance ad market right now, AI-generated ads, ads generally across
Facebook are already being optimized and chosen through artificial intelligence, but increasingly the text will be generated on the fly per user and a brand will just kind of show up with like, hey, here's my product, do your best to portray it in the great light. And Facebook is going to wind up generating video, imagery, everything for your brand ultimately.
Generative AI is really going to transform digital advertising. But a lot of the big companies and big brands are super nervous about turning their brand over to a generative AI model that is known to have flaws and get things wrong occasionally.
And so for those folks, like the small and medium businesses, the SMBs, they will just go for it because it doesn't matter if their brand gets misconstrued in some AI hallucination because they just need performance. They just need to grow the top line. But for a really established brand, they don't want to take that risk.
So maybe you could wedge in somewhere there, like sell to the CMO of Coca-Cola and say, hey, we know that you're going to be using generative AI tools. If there is some sort of backlash to a generative AI campaign that you run, we will foot the bill to do all the brand correction to get you back on track. That could be interesting because those big brands are going to be like the last ones.
They're going to be the laggards in terms of adopting this. technology.
100 percent. Yeah. You know, when I hear an idea like you have here, it's like this to me is I'm almost certain that this will exist and there'll be a big company. But I'm just I always just think about like, OK, what is what are the wedges? What are the hundred wedges? And starting to write that down on a list.
And then how do you prioritize the wedge such that me or whoever's listening is best suited to do that wedge? And also it's easy-ish to build that wedge.
Yeah, I mean, with this particular idea, obviously you need rock-solid cybersecurity chops in terms of the actual technical skill of your team, and then you also need insane B2B connections to be able to go and sell this. So it's not for everyone. This is not something some college dropout kid's going to build in their free time. Maybe they will. Maybe they'll be able to put it together.
But I would assume that this is going to be something that comes out of the current industry, somebody that... somebody that already has a lot of rapport and and connections and can uh really like know exactly what product to build immediately 100 you've got a few ideas so we've got a lot to talk about yeah let's do number two what was number two oh number two was the moonshot so
I have thought for a long time, I mean, I want to go to the moon. I think most people want to go to the moon. My son certainly wants to go to the moon. Like every kid wants to go to the moon. But there's always a question of like, how do we actually get there? We've been there, 1969. You know, that's a long time ago at this point. And we're going back.
So SpaceX is going to have the capacity to go to the moon and put humans there. But Elon has never been really focused on the moon. He's super focused on getting to Mars. He wants to make humanity interplanetary. And the problem with Mars is that there's only a small window of time when you can actually launch a mission from Earth to Mars.
Because the planets, if they're on the opposite side of the solar system, it would just take forever to get there. So you need to wait for them to kind of line up next to each other. And that only happens every two and a half, maybe three years. And so there's going to be this very slow iteration where when the next transfer window comes up,
spacex is going to definitely try and launch a rocket to get there but it'll probably just be like robots and then the next one they're going to launch like 10 rockets during that window because they're going to have like three years so it's not like going to low earth orbit where they can just launch a new rocket every single day like they're doing now for the starlink satellites um so it's going to be it's going to be a longer process but i really think that just if we're going to get to mars humanity needs to start getting their reps in on the moon and the beauty of the moon is that a it's really close
you can always get to it and you can always get back from it because if you plant an emergency escape pod on the moon, as long as you're on the earth facing side, the moon is locked in orbit so it always faces earth. So it's never the situation that you're like, oh, my escape pod is pointing at the sun and it's not pointing at earth. Like it's always pointing at earth.
So worst case scenario, you know, like this is kind of silly, but like sci-fi scenario, like there's a crack in my spacesuit helmet. You could literally just dive into your escape pod, smash the big red button and it shoots you back to earth and you're back in the Pacific ocean in like, you know, a couple hours or I don't know how long it takes, but like, you know, not long guaranteed to be there.
Now, worst case scenario, like you landed North Korea or something, but for the most part, like at least you're back on earth. Um, and maybe there's a little bit of steering that can try and get you to somewhere that's a little bit friendlier, but it just seems like the bar to colonizing the moon is like orders of magnitude lower than, um, than, than Mars.
And so the question is like, who's going to build this? Like 20-ish, 10, 10 to 20 years ago, there was a guy named Barney Pell who was, made a lot of money in the dot-com boom and started a company called Moon Express that was kind of targeting this idea of like, let's go do stuff on the moon. And I think he was just a little bit too early.
He was really well-funded, really talented guy, obviously, but he couldn't get it done. But now there's this interesting period where SpaceX will have the capacity and we will know the price. And there's been a number of companies that have gotten up and running on the basis of SpaceX's falling launch costs to low Earth orbit. So there's two examples that I think of. One is Varda.
They do drug manufacturing in space. So In low Earth orbit, there's no gravity. And so if you're trying to make a drug and it's crystallizing, if you can turn off the gravity, that can produce higher yields and better drugs, essentially. So it's a pharmaceutical play, but leveraging SpaceX. And it'd be impossible without SpaceX. And the same thing goes for
uh impulse impulse space by tom mueller the first employee at spacex he is building a company that boosts creating a boost vehicle that gets uh gets material from low earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit and so um That is another company that wouldn't exist without SpaceX. And so I think there will be a series of these companies.
And for the really, really big opportunities, it's totally possible that SpaceX takes it for themselves. SpaceX launches a lot of internet satellites. But when the really big opportunity of Starlink came about, which is low Earth orbit satellites in this mesh, it was obviously going to be just way better performance. You can now...
do zoom calls or podcasts like on planes it's crazy uh and really anywhere uh they kind of took that for themselves so i wouldn't i wouldn't want to compete with spacex on that um but if i think about you know moon tourism or some sort of like moon mining operation or even just some you know contracting uh organization that that puts assets on the moon for some other reason getting like
what if your business is like, we're just going to get food assets or air or water to the moon. And we're just going to build that up so that if SpaceX wants to buy some of it, we have it on the moon or NASA wants some of it, we have it on the moon. And that's what our business is. And we're just really good at understanding the economics of, of SpaceX's current cost to get a kilo to the moon.
And we are really good at just taking like, if it costs a hundred thousand dollars a kilo or a million dollars a kilo, or it doesn't matter, we have figured out what the right thing is to do right now. And I don't know the sequence of events. It might be, you want to put a nuclear reactor there first or something, or solar panel, or I don't know, robot, who knows.
But figuring that out and then just being the company that just does that again and again and again, just puts you in a really cool place. And I just think like we might be, it might be the right time. We like, we might be, it sounds crazy and it sounds early, But at the same time, the Artemis mission is happening. Humans are going to be on the moon.
And I think when that happens and we see... We're going to see HD video of humans walking on the moon in a couple of years. And that's going to be crazy because all we have is the really grainy footage from the 60s that no one believes anymore and everyone thinks it's a conspiracy theory. And it's going to happen again.
And it's going to be undeniable because it's going to be live streamed and there's going to be people on the moon. I'm sure people will be like, it's fake. It's not real. But...
it will be real and most people will like wake up and then i think the financial community will wake up engineers will wake up everyone will wake up and say like i want to be doing stuff on the moon just like you know five six years ago people or even ten years ago people were like well the spacex thing is working now like i want to do something in low earth orbit and whether that's a satellite or imagery planet labs planet labs just takes photos of the earth constantly and then they can sell that data to all sorts of different resources like hedge funds or weather companies there's a whole bunch of things that are valuable there
The question is, what is the Planet Labs of the moon? What is the Varda of the moon? I think that that becomes a really, really interesting question. I don't really have a firm conception, but I just think now is the time to start thinking.
This is why I brought you on. When we do this show, we have a lot of ideas around $1 million a year, $10 million, $100 million a year. Moonshots, talking about the moon, isn't in our normal repertoire.
Um, and it's just reminds me of like, it's important to have people like you in, in, in, it's important to have people listen to people like you because, um, if you listen to the, like the, here's an idea to build like a quick AI app to make you a million dollars, you get sucked into that world. And that might be thinking too small. It might be.
It just depends on like who you are and what you want to be doing with your life. Like there's, there's, it's totally valid to be like, I want to build a lifestyle business or I want to build a big business or I want to build something really slow or, you know, I want to have full control and not raise like all these things are valid. I just think like,
For the right person out there, there's probably someone who's like, yeah, you know what? I have been obsessed with the moon when I was five years old and I have some skills that are relevant here. Why don't I just go after this? And then I can always build a million dollar business later. But yeah, these moonshot companies, it's either going to be a billion dollar business or you're going to have
literally lit a billion dollars of other people with money on fire and and it's gonna be a disaster hopefully it's not like a fraud and you actually just spent it on important things and it just like didn't go well which happens all the time and that's fine everyone signs up for that but uh but yeah i mean um i do think that there are lots of people who who are who like they lose a little bit of that you know childlike wonder and if your childhood
was all about you know doing something really ambitious or like at least give it a shot you know like why not try and get the first thing done build the pitch deck raise the money go hire some people figure out the next thing i mean a lot of people are doing this like post liquidity like there's there's the the robin hood the co-founder of robin hood the trading app became very, very wealthy.
I mean, that's a multi-billion dollar business. And he's always obsessed with space. And so he's doing solar panels in space and then capturing the energy and then beaming it down to earth with a laser. Now, I haven't looked into the numbers. I have no idea if this will work. It sounds crazy to me. Who knows? But like, it's super cool.
And I'm glad he's doing that instead of just like buying another yacht or something, you know, like go for it, like do something cool. Why not?
that's why I wanted to bring you on. Like I brought you on because some people are going to be listening to this and be like, this guy is crazy. And some people are going to be like, I need more people like John in my life, either, you know, just like listening to you or getting to know you.
Because I think, um, it helps people kind of figure out what they want and how they want to spend their time. Um, and it's good to have diverse sort of, um, people to, you know, yeah.
Yeah.
Diverse from a thinking perspective.
Yeah, I get you. Well, the next one is a little bit more tactical and a little bit less of a moonshot. I think that this could be, it'd be hard to make this next one a true lifestyle business because it is pretty capital intensive. But I do think that there's a way to make, to de-risk this to the point where you're pretty much guaranteed to make money. Yeah.
And so I'll walk through it and then I'll give some examples of other companies that I think kind of fit into this narrative. So one common problem that I was actually just talking to a kid who's younger who said like his parents really didn't want him to become an iPad kid. And so they got him this locked down Kindle Fire that was just for reading eBooks.
But then he learned how to code and learned how to hack it so that he could play Clash of Clans on it. And it was just a very funny story. And it actually taught him how to code. And now he's like a software developer and a founder. And it was like a great experience instead of just having the dopamine fed straight into him. But I think that it's a very common thing
theme that everyone feels addicted to their phones. But adults really can't go back to the dumb phone. It's just too much of a shift. And so a lot of the like dumb phone companies haven't done all that well. But I think that there's a bigger opportunity to go after the kid's phone.
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And so I was kind of jokingly called this like, you know, the iPhone, what comes after I? Well, it's J and then it's K. K phone, maybe it's the kid's phone, but then you could, you know, broaden it out. But when I heard the reviews of a lot of these AI hardware companies like
the humane ai pin or or the rabbit r1 a lot of the reviews kept coming back to the fact that these you know there were a lot of problems like they weren't as full featured for like a power user who wants like the right answer every single time but for as a cute little device for a kid to carry around i love the idea of a rabbit r1
going into a six-year-old's hands and it's like, what does it need to do? Well, it needs to take a picture of a flower and tell the kid what flower that is. And if it gets it wrong, it's not that big of a deal because they still learned about some flower or some animal. And then it needs to be able to make an emergency call to family and Let the family know where the kid is.
But it doesn't need to be able to install Clash of Clans or Fortnite or Minecraft or any of this stuff. It just needs to do a few basic things. Maybe it could be a watch form factor. Maybe it's a tablet thing. Maybe it's another device. But you're just deliberately...
curtailing the dopamine fueled infinite scroll apps and not allowing those onto the platform and i think parents would buy this earlier i think parents will eventually be beaten down by teenagers and just wind up buying iphones but for the middle schoolers i think a lot of parents would be happy to buy something that's like
you know decent quality kind of ruggedized kind of fun cool style doesn't look like an apple product doesn't look like a status symbol couple hundred bucks basic features and it's something that can maybe help the kid with homework or questions or learn about the world keep them connected a little bit but not overwhelm them with the dopamine fueled apps and i think that
for these hardware companies, they always run into this problem where, I mean, this was a case study with Humane where it's ex-Apple people. And so all their investors are like, you have to beat Apple. And it's like, Apple's a multi-trillion dollar company. You have to full send it at that point. And so they made a lot of decisions that only make sense if you are fundamentally prepared
rejecting the idea that Apple just has a monopoly on a lot of things in the mobile device world. And so the Humane AI pin, it had a separate phone number. It wouldn't interact with your phone because they were like, oh, well, we don't want to link into the phone because then Apple will have control over us. We want to make the new platform.
And you see this a lot with like the Oculus device that Zuck's been working on. Like it's always kind of clunky because it's like, wait, why doesn't this just pair with my iPhone? Because like my iPhone's great, but it's like, yeah, we can't because he needs to go to war with Apple. Like he does not want to lose. And so, but for this, it wouldn't really matter if it like,
was set up through the the parents phone or whatever because you're you're not trying to do this crazy thing where like you need to get the 30 app store fee and you need to own the the relationship forever and you also need the the device metrics and you need the tracking in the ads network and you need all these things like because maybe with this one you're not immediately targeting a trillion dollar business you're just thinking like okay i'm gonna put this on instagram
advertise it to parents and every time that there's like a new school year right at summer and maybe christmas i'm doing a big push and yeah i'm gonna sell like a hundred thousand units for a hundred bucks each or something that's 10 million dollars like this is a pretty sizable business but it's not going to be hyper scale and then and then over time maybe you do iterations maybe you add features and maybe this does turn out to be a way to attack apple and really take part of their market share because
Maybe eventually people do get sick of the crazy phones with all the addictive apps and stuff. But I don't think you need to have that happen in order to be successful. So you don't need to raise quite as much money. You don't need to go quite as crazy.
And I think you can constantly be counter positioned against Apple with like really quirky designs, just stuff that completely breaks their design language, where if they tried to launch something like what you're making, it would be very weird and antithetical to their brand. They've done this before with...
with the Tile app, which was a little tracker, a little Bluetooth tracker that you put on your keys. That business was doing phenomenally because everyone, no one wants to lose their keys. But the problem was, is that then Apple saw it and they were like, oh, we want that money. And so they launched the AirTag and the Tile is like the square white, it looks like an Apple product.
And so the AirTag is circular and white. It looks like an Apple product. And so all the Tile customers just moved over immediately. The same thing happened with the Pebble watch. It was designed with an Apple brand language, so it was very easy to just be like, well, I'll just get an Apple Watch.
But if you design something that is explicitly anti-Apple from the ground up, they're going to have a harder time being like, well, actually, the Apple brand is sleek. titanium and it's also like quirky pink plastic with a bunch of ruggedized stuff on it. Like it'll be a little bit harder for them to make that pitch.
And then they're also never going to be in a situation where they, where Apple says, Hey, we're launching a device and we deliberately nerfed it so it doesn't have an app store. and you can't install TikTok or Roblox. They're just never going to do that.
And so you have this kind of counter-positioned value prop where, sure, you might not be able to ever get that big and win over the business guy who's going to buy the latest iPhone every year, but you're not in a category where Apple's going to come and just destroy your business one year.
Um, so I think that there's something there that's like an interesting tidy business where you could just create like a lot of delight and you have a lot of room to play and experiment. And look, if, if some of the features are a little rough around the edges or a little wonky, as long as they're safe and they're not putting the kid in harm's way and
it's really not that big of a deal if it's miscategorizing a dog and a cat or something. But as long as it's not showing them something offensive. So I think that's a really fun place to play. And I think it's underexplored. And I think that increasingly, there are more and more millennials who are tech consumers. Some of them are prosumers.
Like, you know, you and I, we have like professional cameras and professional microphones and stuff. Like we know how to buy like, you know, electronics at a higher tier. And a lot of millennials have kids now. And so they're thinking about the same thing. It's not the boomer generation where you need to really do all this education. It's pretty easy to sell a millennial on that.
The problem is that if you sell it and the millennials, the end user, they're going to be really, really rigorous and be like, are there any problems? It's very similar to starting a company that targets animal owners. So like dog food companies have been one of the few categories in direct-to-consumer that have done fantastically.
And the reason is because your dog doesn't tell you if they're sick of their food. Like, if you start a human food company, the human will be like, you know what? I'm sick of that particular brand of beef jerky. I'm trying something new. But the dog will eat the same dog food for 10 years. And so the churn is just super low.
And the kids, you know, the kids will say, oh, you know, I don't like this or whatever. But it's a lower bar. And so I think there's just more room to play more room to experiment. It's fun. I, I, I miss, I fundamentally miss the era of gadgetry.
I remember when I was a kid, there's a sharper image and every year there was like a new gadget and it was just like, they're like, Oh, this is like a vacuum cleaner that plays music. Or there's a Bluetooth stereo that goes in your shower. You're like just random stuff. And all of that's just been completely cannibalized by Apple. And don't get me wrong. I love Apple products. They're fantastic.
There's a reason why we all buy them. But I love this. I love this idea of getting back to an era where a small company can tinker and create something that's novel and new, but tactile and something you can unbox. It's so hard to buy presents for people at Christmas because I used to get people DVDs and books and music albums. All that's digital. What am I going to do? Hey, you should...
like just download this on Spotify and watch that on Netflix. Like, no, I want to get you a physical thing. But then if I start getting you like a kitchen gadget, like a, you know, a Cuisinart or an air fryer, it's like, well then pretty soon your, your whole kitchen's filled with all this junk. It's ridiculous.
So we need to get back to like the cool gadgets, the unique things, the opinionated hardware. And I think this is a really, really fun and interesting place to play. But what's your reaction?
Dude, so good. This is probably my favorite one. I also think this particular idea, once you show traction via the internet, you do Instagram ads, you start selling it, you can go to a Verizon and they're looking for products like this. They want to sell.
You can even sell this in the Apple store. It's not that crazy.
Totally. These retail shops are looking for products like this. To me, this is a no-brainer.
Yeah. I really hope that, I mean, I don't exactly know what the funding arrangements are in a lot of these new generation hardware AI companies is, but I would love to see one of them like discover this and pivot into it and be really successful. I mean, I want the them all to be successful. But it just feels like a lot of those launches, they came out, MKBHD kind of trashed them.
No one really bought it. Return rates were kind of high. But it was because the pitch was, this is going to be on par with your iPhone. And that's just too tall of an order. And I think just making it fun and niche and unique. I love the fact that I have Obviously, the phone on the camera is great, but I love getting camera gear still.
I like a Sony camera that's opinionated around this one little thing. It only does this one thing really well. And I love that. But those niches are getting slimmer and slimmer as the phone just does more and more. So I'd love to see some more stuff break through.
Yeah, and I think just one quick takeaway from that is people are thirsty for fun products. And I think it's keyword fun. I love Apple too, but Apple has become minimalistic and just clean and modern. And for your day-to-day stuff, I think that's what you want. But when you're in gift-giving mode, you want fun. And when you...
When you receive a gift, it's more fun to get a fun gift with a fun opinion than something that's just clean and modern.
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think back to the old Max that had the colored clear plastic on the back. What a crazy design. It's so cool. I think that's kind of making a comeback. Zuck announced some glasses that were clear, which is really cool that you can see the internals. And I think Palmer Luckey's new company, Mod Retro, has a clear Game Boy design that's really cool. But yeah, it's...
It's tricky. It feels like we're on the cusp of something breaking through, but it is tricky.
Yeah, so whatever it is you're building, if it's this idea or not, inject fun because it's what people want.
Yeah. And it just is differentiated. Like it's, it's going to be hard to compete with apple on just like the clean, perfect industrial design. And people are going to nitpick that they're going to say, Oh, the tolerances aren't that good. Well, it's like, yeah, because like you didn't have the resources to like mill a unibody, like aluminum thing.
Like it's like insane or like however they made this out of titanium. Like that's insane. Like have some fun with it, do something weird. And even if it's like bigger or sort of, you know, sacrifices on some sort of vector, like battery life or durability or whatever, like just be upfront about that. And I think, I think consumers will embrace it.
We have a few minutes for one last one. I want you to talk about the tweet that you just did.
Okay, yeah. So last night, as we're recording this, we're recording this on Friday. Last night, Elon Musk presented a Tesla update called WeRobot, where he announced the CyberCab, which is their unsupervised, full self-driving rideshare network and some new vehicles. And There he also had a number of humanoid robots on display. I think the working name is Optimus.
And there's been a number of these humanoid robotics companies. There's a bit of a boom now. I think everyone's expecting that a lot of the work that was done in large language models and ChatGPT to kind of flow downward towards humanoid robots, where you could just talk to a humanoid robot and tell it to go do your laundry and it'll just do it. Now, at this moment,
No one's really broken through with a fully autonomous robot. A lot of them are tele-operated, meaning that there's literally a human in a suit kind of like doing the same action remotely and then the robot's just mirroring them. But that works for plenty of things.
I mean, this has been used for a long time, tele-operation in medicine and then also in like, you know, if there's a nuclear reactor, you don't want to go in there, but it's fine to have a remote tech, you know, walk in and, you know, act as the robot or whatever. SWAT teams and bomb defusal. This is the classic tele-operation robot.
um but there's separately from the ai and humanoid robotics trend there's also been a huge trend in defense technology uh driven mostly by anderle and palantir before that but there's just this trend that like defense tech is cool the government and the military is cool again uh the end of history isn't happening and there's you know, potentially great power competition is back on the menu.
I mean, we see this with Ukraine and Russia, and there are very serious conflicts happening. And so people are coming to the conclusion that, yes, we do need, you know, a serious revamp and efficiency gains within our military.
so there's been a lot of companies that have started with uh you know drones uh famously uh y combinator just had their first defense tech company it's a cruise missile company uh which is kind of crazy when you think about what yc has done historically been a lot of consumer apps you know airbnb a lot of b2b sas uh you know gusto and rippling and stripe came through here um but then now they're doing cruise missiles and a lot of people think that's funny and interesting i i think it's great i think they should be doing anything that's valuable um but
My point was that I was predicting that within the next six months, I think that there will be a startup that will take one of these humanoid robots, even if it's teleoperated, give it an AR-15, like a machine gun or a rifle, and just do a demo of what this would look like for just basically the Terminator. Basically a Terminator scenario. Yeah. And go massively viral, be extremely controversial.
People will say, is this bad? The robots are going to kill us. And I said, oh, and then they're going to raise a $500 million seed round. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not. That's kind of a joke. But the idea is that we've seen so many of these humanoid robots and AI startups. We've seen a lot of people doing cruise missiles and things that would have been controversial 10 years ago.
And now all the planets are aligning to create basically the Terminator company, which would be, you know, completely controversial and like a lightning rod, which could be very good for getting attention and breaking through if you're a new startup. Now there's the question about like, do we actually need this? Is this the right thing for a lot of companies?
use cases like no you don't want a humanoid robot you want a tank or you want a plane or something um but uh but for some maybe the teleoperation makes sense you know like we like why put a human at risk in you know like when we went in to get osama bin laden we sent in navy seals they got in a helicopter it was a very dangerous mission and if they could have been running that mission
remotely from a warehouse and just doing teleoperation, but doing everything that they did, but it's just robots. So even if they got shot, nothing would happen. Basically you die and you just immediately respawn like Call of Duty. That sounds like an improvement. It sounds dystopian and scary in many ways, but at the same time, The progress arrow of the future might just move in this direction.
And it seems like something that if you really think deeply about what will the world look like in 50 years, clearly the technology, it will be possible to build a humanoid robot that holds a gun. And so why wouldn't it happen? What are the forces that would stop that from happening?
And if you can't think of any good reasons why it wouldn't happen, then, well, maybe we're on the path to it happening, and maybe we ought to grapple with that. And interestingly, Boston Dynamics has actually somewhat explored this
uh years ago so boston dynamics is the company that does those incredible viral videos with the the spot robot it looks like a dog and then the atlas robot that can do parkour and they've been working on this for decades and the company has changed hands a few times google owned it at one point i think hyundai bought it for a while and it's moved around but it's always been a company that wasn't particularly focused on government contracting and defense contracting um but
Back in 2013 or 2012, 2013, I was living with this hacker guy who went on their website and figured out how to scrape all the files from their website, even the ones that weren't necessarily like fully public. Like they were public, but they just weren't like actually shown to people on the website. They were just like hosted there.
And one of them was a sketch artist of their humanoid robot holding a gun. And so it was very clear that they had at least someone in their organization at least like pitched it to the government and said like, Hey, like we could maybe do this. And then I think someone was like, we're not doing that. But, but they have this one humanoid robot called Petman.
And it was designed, you got to pull up a video or image of this because it's crazy. Because the stated mission of Petman was to test the mobility of equipment to prevent like gas attacks. So imagine you need to wear like essentially a space suit on the battlefield to avoid like some terrible biological attack or some gas. So it's a gas mask, but it's also a body suit.
and you make the suit and then you need to put it through its paces. So you literally like paces, like you need to have it be like, yes, we put this on a human and the human ran for a hundred miles. And so we know it's not gonna break after a hundred miles of usage.
could do stuff just like putting in a washing machine just beat it up and see if it holds its like it doesn't break or get leaks but putting it on a humanoid robot and just having the robot walk there for you know 10 miles or 100 miles is a pretty good way to test this stuff and so that's what they were using that for but there was no reason i mean you see this thing it's just super militarized and you just think like okay like this is where this going and every time that there's a boston dynamics video that drops everyone always says like these things are gonna have guns on them eventually
And some people have put guns on them and the corridor crew, this wonderful YouTube channel has actually done like a CGI version where they had the Boston, they call it boss town dynamics. And they, and they had a whole version of like training them with guns. But basically all of the, all of the clues are pointing to this, this happening.
And it just feels like someone's going to put the pieces together that the tech exists and And this would be massively viral and controversial and get me a ton of attention, which could be good. It could be bad, but I could at least harness it. And so I think someone's going to do it. Maybe they're listening right now.
So I got a lot of thoughts on this one. One is not only do I think that could this be used in the military, Navy SEALs type things, but it could also be used for security, right? Like I was driving on my way here to and it's a Jewish holiday, I think, today, or tomorrow, actually. And people were, I noticed that I was just passing by a bunch of synagogues, and they all had armed guards with guns.
I'm here in Florida. And so I would imagine that there's probably thousands of these people places of worships, mosques, synagogues, churches, that unfortunately have to hire security. Now, hiring a guy with a rifle or a girl with a rifle, that's probably expensive. I'd much rather hire a security robot with an AR-15.
I think this is, again, one of those ideas that it's not an if, when, and it's also one of those things where it's like, do I want to start this company? No. But someone will.
Yeah, it is interesting. Will it be an arm of Tesla? Elon is already a defense contractor with SpaceX, but he hasn't built ICBMs, even though he builds rockets. Or Anduril has a lot of capabilities, and they build autonomous weapon systems now, and so they could build something like this. But my original take on Twitter was more just like,
the vibes are coalescing around the idea that this will be something that people will talk about if it happens and all the pieces are there for the demo at least and yeah maybe it's tele-operated maybe it's a very niche use case and honestly like yeah giving it a gun is probably not even the most valuable thing i mean still search and rescue just going into the nuclear reactor when it's melting down or you know going into the burning building
Like, you know, teleoperation for, you know, the firefighter gets out of the truck and is like, okay, I'm going to virtually, I'm going to put on my VR headset and the robot's going to walk in and rescue the kitten. Like, that makes a ton of sense. And maybe that's the first thing. But yeah, I mean, we are...
coming to the era of like it is believable that there will be a robot with a gun somewhere in the world in the next couple decades and somebody's going to be building that and that's just interesting to think about you know is it good is it bad there's a lot of things you could you could work through um there will be a lot of regulations a lot of rules and you know what does the geneva convention say about it and i'm sure we'll have a big debate and there'll be lots of you know editorial pieces and op-eds but uh
The tech is here.
The future is now. John, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for getting my creative juices flowing. Where could people get to know you a little bit better?
Well, I just started a new podcast called Technology Brothers. It's a weekly chat show with me and a friend. We just talk about the news of the week. Very casual, but very cinematic. We're having a lot of fun with it. And then I do have a YouTube channel, just my name, John Coogan. And I put up video essays and documentaries about tech and business and politics and all sorts of stuff.
So check that out. And you can also follow me on X at John Coogan.
Beautiful. All right, my man. I'll catch you later.
I'll talk to you later. Bye. Bye.