John Rush

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?

You can even sell this in the Apple store. It's not that crazy.

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, 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. 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.

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.