John Coogan (TBPN) gives you $1B BIG startup ideas

0:00this episode was crazy it was with John cougan and he had some of the biggest ideas I've heard all year the these moonshot companies like it's either going to be like a billion dollar business or you're gonna 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 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

0:41I 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 [Music] episode John cougan on the Pod Mr Big Ideas that's what I'm gonna call you H not that big of ideas but uh there's a there's a you know fine line between big idea and just hot take post and I and I think today we're gonna hit some

1:29of them that are you know 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 cyber security for artificial intelligence companies so if you have been following AI there's been this interesting development obviously a lot 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 cyber security layer so there's an incident

2:12report that goes out hey uh we we we got this uh user alert that someone is trying to log in like 10,000 times with different passwords uh we should probably block them now obviously you could you could have an AI you know intermediate that intermediate that interaction such that that's handled automatically instead of pinging your so your poor software developer at 2 am. he has to get up check his pager and say oh yeah we should block that person we're getting we're getting dosed by Russia let's 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

2:49cyber security stack in order to beef up the existing cyber security solutions for all sorts of companies everything from Bank of America to Boeing to you know United Airlines they all need cyber security and 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 secur 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

3:29large language models and so so open AI it's rumored that they spent around $500 million training gp4 now all of those weights like 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 know you could steal this and there's a lot of fearmongering and conspiracy theories in Silicon Valley right now to the effect that oh China has already stolen the weights to gp4 maybe they already have stolen the weights to GPT 5 who knows if it's real I actually think most of these labs are

4:06pretty 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 its 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 codebase to Facebook and you were like okay I have all the code to Facebook I'm gonna launch Facebook to.com well you don't have any of the users people aren't going to your website it's not valuable but with the

4:47large 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 open AI or anthropic if you're able to steal the weights and so these firms are going to need top tier cybercity they already do a lot of these guys they they go to Defcon they talk to all the hackers they have huge huge uh you know 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 um a new

5:20company around securing these extremely extremely valuable digital assets which are the the the AI models and so um I think that there's a in 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 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 was 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

6:03were 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 CH analysis 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 I think there's something there's something interesting and and uncorrelated about doing cyber security for artificial intelligence companies where you could be index 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

6:42of a sudden you know oh you got obsolet by you know a uh like like a current company um so anyway that's my first take shh don't tell anyone but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free these aren't just random guesses they're validated Concepts from entrepreneurs who built $ hundred million plus businesses I've compiled them into a one simple database compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast but the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor some cost nothing to start I'm pretty much handing you a cheat cheat the idea bank is your

7:31startup shortcut just click below to get access your next cash flowing business is waiting for you the cyber security 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 right um I I actually never thought about the insurance business until I was watching Warren Buffett at the Berkshire hathway annual meeting and he said something that stuck with me which is insurance is a great business and someone's like why and he goes you get paid today for something that might not happen tomorrow that's great yeah I thought

8:15that was a really good way of putting it so I wonder you know using the Fort Knox analogy of gold um like if I'm trying to like MVP this maybe an MVP is um you just get in the insurance business for for and and and then eventually you sort of evolve into what you're talking about yeah you know with the this is this is somewhat related but with the generative AI that's kind of dominating the performance ad market right now um you know AI generated ads ads generally across Facebook are already being optimized and chosen through artificial intelligence but increasingly the the text will be uh generated on the Fly per

8:59user 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 um it's 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 they if their brand gets you know

9:37misconstrued 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 cocacola and say hey we know that you're going to be using generative AI tools if there is some sort of backlash to a a generative AI campaign that you run we will foot the bill to do all the brand correction to get you back on track um that that could be interesting because those those big brands are going to be like the last

10:10ones they're going to be the laggards in terms of adopting this technology 100 per. 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 okay what is the what are the what are the wedges like what are the hundred wedges and like starting to write that down on a list and then how do you prioritize the wedge such that who you know me or whoever's listening is best suited to do that wedge um and also it's easy easyish to to to build that wedge

10:49yeah I mean with with this particular idea like obviously you need you know like Rock Solid cyber security 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 like you know some College Dropout kids going to build in their free time maybe they will maybe they'll be able to put it together but you know I I would assume that this is going to be something that comes out of like the current industry somebody that uh somebody that already has a lot of

11:16Rapport and and connections and can uh really like know exactly what product to build immediately 100% you've got a few ideas so we 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

11:50this 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 is has never been really focused on the moon he's super focused on getting to Mars he wants to make humanity interplanetary and the 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 the planets if they're on the opposite side of the of the solar system like it would just take forever to get there so you need to wait for them to kind of line up like next to

12:20each other and and that only happens every like two and a half maybe three years and 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 gonna 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 Starling satellites um so it's gonna be it's going to be a longer

12:48process but I really think that just if we're g 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 like 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 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

13:24pointing at Earth so worst case scenario you know like uh this is kind of silly but like sci-fi scenario like there's a crack in my spacit 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 land in 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

13:52get 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 than than Mars and so the question is like who's going to build this like 20ish 10 10 to 20 years ago there was a guy named bar Barney pel who was made a lot of money in the doom 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

14:25but 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 cost to to low earth orbit so there's two examples that I think of one is vaarda um they do drug Manufacturing in space so uh in low earth orbit there's no gravity and so if you're trying to make a drug and it's crystalizing if you can turn off the gravity that can produce higher yields and better drugs essentially so it's a pharmaceutical play but leveraging space SpaceX and it would be impossible

15:04without SpaceX and the same thing goes for uh impulse impulse Space by Tom Mueller the first employee at SpaceX He is building a 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 like takes it for their for themselves like SpaceX launches a lot of Internet satellites um but when the really big opportunity of starlink came about which is low earth orbit satellites and this mesh it was

15:43obviously going to be just way better performance you know 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 ju 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

16:19that 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 $100,000 a kilo or 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

16:50solar 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 uh 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 it sounds crazy and it sounds early but at the same time like The emis mission's Happening humans are gonna be on the moon and I think when that happens and we see like we're gonna see like HD video of humans walking on the moon in like a couple years and that's gonna be

17:17crazy because like all we have is the really grainy footage from the 60s that like No One Believes anymore and everyone thinks it's a conspiracy theory and like it's going to happen again and it's going to be undeniable because it's gonna be like live streamed and there and there's going to be people on the moon I'm sure people will be like it's fake uh it's not 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

17:43like you know five six years ago people or even 10 years ago people were like well the SpaceX thing is working now like I want to do something in lowth 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 um the question is like what is the planet Labs of the moon what is the vaa of the Moon uh I think that that becomes a really really interesting question and so I I don't really have a

18:12firm conception but I just think like now is the time to start thinking God this is like this is why I brought you on you know when when we do this show we have a lot of ideas around you know $1 million a year 10 million $100 million a year moonshots talking about the Moon isn't you know in our normal repertoire um and it 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 like the here's an idea to build like a quick AI app to make you a million dollars you

18:52get 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 rais like all these things are valid I just think like you know 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

19:23have some skills that are relevant here like why don't I just go after this and then I can always build a million business later uh you know but yeah I mean 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 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

19:51think that there are lots of people who who are who like they lose a little bit of that you know childlike wonder and if you're childhood was all about you know doing something really ambitious or like at least give it a shot you know like why 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 and

20:21he's always obsessed with space and so he's doing solar panels in space and then uh 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 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 totally and 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

20:51and 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 to how they want to spend their time um and it's good to have diverse sort of um people to you know what yeah yeah diers from a thinking perspective you know yeah yeah yeah no I get you uh 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

21:31lifestyle business uh because it is pretty Capital intensive but I do think that there's a way to make to drisk this to the point where you're pretty much guaranteed to make money um and so so I'll I'll walk through it and then I'll give some examples of other companies that I think kind of fit into this this narrative um so one common problem that um I was actually just talking to a kid uh 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

22:08how 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 um instead of just having the the dopamine fed straight into him but I think that it's a very common theme that everyone feels addicted to their phones um 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

22:37well but I think that there's a bigger opportunity to go after uh the kids phone quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on

23:15ads to drive customers to my businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com and so I was I was kind of jokingly call 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 kids phone but then you could uh you know broaden it out but when I when I heard the reviews of a lot

23:49of these AI Hardware companies like the Humane AI pin or or the rabbit R1 um 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 you know a six-year-old's hands and it's like what does it need to do well it needs to like take a picture of a flower and tell the kid what flower that is and if it gets

24:22it wrong like it's not that big of a deal because like they still learned about some flower or some animal and and then it needs to be able to like you know make an emergency call to to to family 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 uh it just needs to do like 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

24:54allowing 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

25:36that for these Hardware companies they they always run into this problem where I mean this was case study with Humane where it's X 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 like 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 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 it wouldn't interact with your phone because they were like oh well we

26:14don'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 been working on like it's always kind of clunky because it's like wait wh why doesn't this just pair with my iPhone because like my iPhone's great but it's like yeah he can't because he needs to go to war with apple like he does not want to lose and so but but for this it wouldn't really matter if it like was set up through the the the parents phone or whatever because you're you're not trying to do

26:42this crazy thing where like you need to get the 30% App Store fee and you need to own the the the relationship forever and you also need the 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 going to 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 100,000 units for a hundred bucks each or something that's

27:12$10 million like this is a pretty sizable business but it's not going to be hyperscale 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 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 counterposed

27:43against 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 a 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 air tag and the tile is like this Square white it looks

28:17like an Apple product and so the air tag 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 it was designed with like an Apple brand language so it's very easy to just like be like well I'll just get an Apple watch um but if you if you design something that is is explicitly like anti-apple from the ground up they're going to have a harder time being like well actually the Apple brand is like Sleek titanium and it's also like quirky pink plastic with a bunch of

28:49rugged eyes 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 device and we deliberately nerfed it so it doesn't have an app store and you can't install Tik Tok or Roblox like they're just never going to do that and so you have this like kind of counterposition value prop where where sure you might not be able to ever get that big and win over you know the the business guy who's going to buy the latest iPhone every year but you but you don't you're not in

29:18a category where Apple's gonna 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 it's really not that big of a deal if you know it's it's misc Mis categorizing a dog and a cat or something but as long as it's not showing them something

29:49offensive so I think that's I I think that's like a really fun place to play and I think it's underexplored and I think that increasingly you know 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

30:21that the problem is that if you sell it and the millennial is the end user they're going to be really really rigorous and be like are there any problems very similar to uh to starting a company that targets uh animal owners so like dog food companies have been one of the few categories in direct 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 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

30:53for 10 years and so the churn is just super low and and kids you know the kids will say oh you know I don't like this or whatever but there 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 was uh Sharper Image and every year there was like a new Gadget and it was just like they were like oh this is like a vacuum cleaner that plays music or there's a Bluetooth stereo that goes in your shower like just random

31:23stuff and all of that's just been completely cannibalized by Apple and don't get me wrong 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 there's so 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

31:58physical thing but then if I start getting you like a kitchen gadget like a you know a quard or an air fryer it's like well then pretty soon you're you're called 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 just a really really fun and interesting place to play but what's your reaction dude so good this I this this is probably my favorite one I also think this particular idea like once you show traction via the Internet you do Instagram ads you start selling it you

32:30can go to a Verizon and they're looking for products like this yeah they want to sell you even sell this in the Apple Store like it's not that crazy totally so these retail uh these retail shops are looking for products like this um to me this is a no-brainer yeah I I really hope that I mean I I don't exactly know what the the funding arrangements are a lot of these uh New Generation Hardware AI compan is but I I would love to see one of them like discover this and pivot into it and be really successful I mean I want them all to be successful but it just feels

33:05like a lot of those launches you know they 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 you know this is going to be on par with your iPhone and that's just that's just too tall of an order and I I think uh just just making it fun and Niche and unique like I love the fact that I have obviously the the phone on the camera is great but I I love getting camera gear still I like I like a Sony camera that's opinionated around this one little thing it only

33:40does this one thing really well uh and and I love that but but those niches are getting Slimmer and Slimmer as the phone just does more and more so uh I'd love to see some more stuff break through yeah and I think uh just one quick takeaway from that is people are thirsty for fun products and I think it's key word fun you know when app you know I love Apple too but Apple has become like minimalistic and just clean and modern and you know for your day-to-day stuff that that's what you want yep but when you're when you're in gift giving mode like you want fun and

34:21when you when you receive when you receive a gift like it's more fun to get a fun gift with with a fun opinion than something's just clean and modern yeah totally yeah I mean I think back to like the old the old Max that had the the colored clear PL plastic on the back what a crazy design that's so cool I I think that's kind of making a comeback Zuck announced uh some some glasses that were clear which is really cool that you could see the internals and I think Palmer luy's new company mod retro has a has a clear Game Boy design that's really cool um but yeah it's uh It's

35:01Tricky I I I it feels like we're on the cusp of of something breaking through but 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's just it's 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 what however they made this out of

35:33titanium like that's insane like have some fun with it do something weird and even if it's like bigger or or you know uh 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 night as as we're recording this we're recording this on Friday last night Elon Musk uh presented a uh a Tesla update called we robot where he announced the Cyber cab which is their

36:10uh unsupervised full self-driving uh ride share 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 uh 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 chat GPT 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

36:50teleoperated meaning that there's literally a human in a suit kind of like doing the same action remotely and then the robots just ing them um but that works for plenty of things I mean this has been used for a long time teleoperation in 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 uh SWAT teams and bomb defusal this is the classic teleoperation robot um but there's separately from the AI and humanoid robotics Trend there's also been a huge

37:22Trend in defense technology uh driven mostly by anderol and paler 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 and uh and Russia and there there are very serious conflicts happening and so people are coming to the conclusion that yes we do need uh you know a serious revamp and and uh efficiency gains within our military and so there's been a lot of companies that have started with uh you know drones uh

37:55famously uh why 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 uh I was predicting that within the next six months I think that there will be startup that will take one of these

38:30humanoid robots even if it's teleoperated give it an AR-15 like a machine gun or a rifle and and just do a demo of like what this would look like for just basically the Terminator basically a Terminator scenario and go massively viral be extremely controversial people will say is this bad they're the robots are going to kill us um but you know and and I said oh and then they're going to raise like a $500 million seed round uh maybe that's true maybe that's not that's kind of you know a joke but the idea is that is that we've seen so many of these like humanoid robots and AI startups uh we've

39:09seen a lot of people doing cruise missiles and like things that would have been controversial like 10 years ago and now uh all the planets are aligning to create basically the Terminator company um 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 stter um now there's a question about like do we actually need this is this the right thing for a lot of 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

39:40teleoperation 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 you know a a warehouse and just doing T operation 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

40:15the like the the the progress Arrow of of the future might just move in this direction and it seems something seems like something that that you know if you really think deeply about like 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 like what are the forces that would stop that from happening and if you can't think of any any good reasons why it wouldn't happen then well maybe we're on the path to it happening and maybe we got to Grapple with that and interestingly uh Boston

40:48Dynamics 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

41:24figured out how to scrape all the files from their website even the ones that weren't necessarily like fully public um 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 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 had 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 um but they have this one uh

41:54humanoid robot called Petman and it was designed you got you got to pull up a video or image of this because it's crazy uh because they they the the the stated mission of pet man was to test the mobility of uh 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 bodysuit and 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

42:33this on a human and the human ran for a 100 miles and so we know it's not going to break after a 100 miles of usage and you could do stuff just like putting it 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 and it's just super

42:56militarized 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 going to 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 Bost they call it boss Town Dynamics and they and they had a whole version of like training them with guns but um 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

43:27together that the tech exists and this would be massively viral and controversial and get me a ton of attention which could be good or could be bad but I could at least harness it and so I think someone's gonna 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 to here um and it's a Jewish holiday I think today um or tomorrow actually and uh people were I noticed that I was just

44:09passing by a bunch of synagogues and they all had armed guards with guns I'm here in Florida yeah and so I would imagine that there's probably thousands of these places of worships you know mosques synagogues churches that unfortunately are you know have to hire security now hiring you know a guy with a a rifle or a girl with a rifle um that's probably expensive um I'd much rather hire a security robot y you know with an AR-15 so um I think uh I think this is this is another again one of those ideas is that it's not an if when and it's also one of those

45:00things where it's like who you know do I want to start this company no but like I hope you know someone will yeah it is interesting like like will it be an arm of Tesla like you know Elon is already the defense contractor with SpaceX but he hasn't he hasn't built like you know icbms even though he builds Rockets um or andal has a lot of capabilities and they build autonomous weapon systems now and so they could build something like this um but uh my my my feel was more my original take on Twitter was more just like The Vibes are coalescing around the idea that this will be something that

45:39people will talk about if it happens and all the pieces are there for the demo at least and yeah maybe it's teleoperated 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 for you know the the the firefighter gets out of the truck and is like okay I'm gonna virtually I'm gonna put on my VR headset and the and the and the robots gonna walk in and

46:14rescue the kitten like that makes a ton of sense and maybe that's the first thing but yeah I mean it's we we 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 like 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 and 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

46:44there'll be lots of you know editorial pieces and op EDS but uh the tech is here the future now the future is now yep John this has been an absolute pleasure thanks for getting my creative juices flowing where could uh 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 uh but very cinematic we're having a lot of fun with it and then I do have a YouTube channel just my name John kugan um and I put up video essays

47:19and documentaries about tech and business and uh and politics and all sorts of stuff so uh check that out and you can also follow me on X johnan beautiful all right my man I'll catch you later awesome I'll talk to you later bye bye [Music]