Reimagining reading with VR featuring Sol Reader CEO Ben Chelf | E1772

0:00Even from the first time I put the first prototype, which was essentially toilet paper rolls and like, you know, just a baseball cap full of like electronics. And I realized this, that's when I realized these two worlds came together. One, like the comfort aspect of lying in bed reading. And then two, you know, this nicotine gum idea of like, well, where are we going to go with personal computing devices? And I really do think that this is better for humanity if we figure out how to provide other options besides just my iPhone for personal computing. And that's what, that's what drew me back in.

0:30This Week in Startups is brought to you by.techdomains has a new program called Startups.tech, where you can get your startup featured on This Week in Startups. Go to startups.tech slash Jason to find out how. Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world. And Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. and Issue is the all-in-one platform for creating and distributing beautiful digital content. Get started with Issue today for free or sign up for an annual premium account and get 50 % off when you go to issue.com slash podcast and use promo code twist.

1:17That's I-S-S-U-U.com slash podcast and use promo code twist. Hey everybody, welcome back to the program. I was on the Twitter. And I saw a really creative idea go by and I said, get me this person for the podcast. And that idea was a pair of glasses that are essentially a Kindle in sunglasses format. And the company's name is Sol, S-O-L. And the founder's name is Ben Chelf? That's right. I got it right. Okay, great. You got it right. First time. C-H-E-L-F. And I see my friend, Gary Chan, shout out to Posterous, led the$5 million seed round, I assume, when he was out initialized back in the day.

2:01Correct. Yep. Before he went to what Combinator? And he tweeted it and said that it was a really cool idea. So tell me, welcome to the program. Thank you, Jason, for having me. What you're building and why we need an e-reader in the form of glasses. Yeah. Well, as you said, we are building the world's first wearable e-reader. it provides you a completely immersive reading experience and the two pillars for that reading experience to be immersive it has to be really comfortable and it has to be distraction free so the you know i'd say the entry level uh you know obvious pitch use case is you don't have to hold the book you lie in bed completely comfortable you're on the couch you're on the beach whatever you don't have to hold the book you have a little remote in your hand to turn the page much like you would turn the page with a big button on a presentation clicker and it's a really comfortable way to read.

2:54The other aspect of this, the distraction-free aspect of this has to do with the bigger narrative that we think is happening in tech and specifically in personal devices. And namely the fact that we're distracted a lot. You know, you pull out your iPhone all the time, your smartphone all the time, you've got a bunch of notifications, maybe some of it's work, maybe some of it's social. It's just a cacophony of noise in our heads. And reading is essentially the act of reading requires a different kind of focus. So when we try to engage in a deeper activity like reading, it's really hard to do that on our phones.

3:25And we argue it's even hard to do that on traditional e-readers because the phone is still right there in your pocket. You're tempted to pull it out if there's a break in the action in the book. I'm sure you've experienced that. I'm sure your listeners have experienced this. When you go to the movies and the movie theater, the director's like, you know what I would love to do is give you an incredibly beautiful shot uh that you know cost a million dollars to make and you're like oh uh you're not talking and nothing's blowing up let me check my twitter feed and of course or my i message or signal or whatever you're on um so i guess you know a demo is worth a billion words sure i'd love for you to demo this for us and i don't know if you have a prototype there where you could show people the profile of it yeah of course well i i can hold up a i can hold up the one i read on every night which is uh my unit is is working yeah prototype it's an actual product it's a product it's coming this fall and uh but what i'll do and just show us um yeah of course a little bit it looks for people who are watching looking at it it's uh looks like a chunky pair of sunglasses the stems or what do you call the things that go over your ear yeah temples temples okay so those are a little bit thicker i assume it has batteries in there or something correct yep okay on each side great and then the instead of just having um glass there they look a little bit more like goggles or binoculars even so what what is that component i guess and then also there looks like there's buttons on the side is that left and right or something turn the page no no buttons on the device but i'll describe a little bit of the features and so you asked about the lenses the lenses are what's called a pancake lens it provides a lot of magnification in a very short you know z-axis throw which is why we can get them to be thinner than you know say a full uh headset or or big thing that you would have to put a strap behind your head for um the nose bridge is adjustable so that you can you know kind of mold it like gumby style to your nose and then what you see here on the top is adjustment for what's called the interpupillary distance or the distance between the pupils of your eyes to you know ensure maximum comfort now you also mentioned binoculars they do have the functionality to turn each lens similar to a binoculars oh wow for diopter adjustment so that you know if you're if you have a prescription that you need to adjust for you don't have to wear your glasses or contacts or most people don't have to wear glasses or contacts while they're while they're beautiful 500 bucks or something 350 oh okay wow that's a pretty low so you don't make any money on the hardware or barely well we at scale we will make money on the hardware actually and and some of that has to do with the technical decisions we we made to get really long battery life you know really light form factor it's much more uh we call it it's closer to an iot type device than it is a full computer on your face like others are building got it so because you're using an e-reader technology it's not going to be playing a movie ever you don't need to have some crazy oled device right and that would burn your battery out you don't need to have a sick processor what kind of processor you run this off of get this dual core 240 megahertz processor straight out of the late 90s wow i was about to say like uh can you still buy those yeah well and in fact yes because of the you know iot they're just tiny tiny little packages uh that are you know seven millimeters by seven millimeters and so yeah the whole the whole thing's built around long battery life and really lightweight and what would you get in terms of battery life here in terms of reading 25 hours continuous reading in low light conditions so much more like a traditional e-reader wow so if you were trying to read uh you know a really long stephen king book you might even be able to do it with this that's right reader uh all right so uh you were going to demo a little bit when i saw uh i looked at your web page before i invited john as a guest it looked like the text was a little bit pixelated and i wasn't sure if that was a like a stylistic choice or something but what does it look like when you're looking at it am i looking at a giant page am i looking at a sentence is it wrapping with four words or 10 yeah i'm curious about how sure that would visually look yeah would you like me to share that previous let's do that yeah great um so we we talked about the glasses already so i'll go straight to this navigation video and what you know for those who are just listening this is a video that's zooming in on the text it shows a bit of the navigation between the various books that might be on your device and then goes in and shows you a page of text at a time.

7:51And yeah, to your question, this is a render. It is very accurate in terms of dimensionally and number of pixels. But what you don't get here is you don't get what E-Ink actually looks and feels like, which because it is not precise pixels, each capsule is what they call it. Each capsule essentially kind of has a little bleed to it. So where you see sharper pixelated edges here, those are a lot softer when you're looking at the text of the device. I had a feeling it was the emulator or whatever you're using. That makes it look a little old school. Right, right. What's really interesting is you have a...

8:28Am I correct though when you went to the articles that you're pulling up... You plan to pull up RSS feeds or something? Yeah, so we're working on integrations right now with those types of stuff. Right now we can use... Part of my goal is to get people out of their inbox for a lot of these things that should be consumed in a different type of format. And so, you know, set up filters, auto forward your daily news drips, whether it would come from Substack or specific publications. Yeah. Thinking about how do you connect with other news feeds. And so you could forward to an email address like you can do with your Kindle, like they'll give you a secret email address to send a PDF.

9:02So you could forward your favorite Substack or Axios or Inside Newsletter or whatever. Basically what I do every day now. Yep. Oh, wow. And then you have to, of course, figure out the formatting because you just need plain text and things are always coming in HTML now. So that's a little bit of a technical challenge. You'd think, but guess what's happened in the last, oh, nine months that makes that extremely easy for us? Apple's new product? Nope. It's all LLM processed. It's like this. The LLM just takes everything and just does the right work. In fact, we get a couple of other great features from the LLM.

9:37For example, if you got, say, 30 minutes a day of your normal news drips, but you don't have 30 minutes, we also give you the five-minute summary that just summarizes all of it. So you can say, hey, send me Casey Newton's thousand words, but give me a hundred-word version of it. Exactly. Or say you're a few days away from the most recent reading session in your novel, and you've kind of forgot where you were, it just gives you the summary of your last reading session. Wow. The LLMs are so great for a reading tech company like us because, yeah, it's all text and processing. That's a killer feature, a catch-me-up feature.

10:07yeah i forgot where i was at give me a little summary of what i've already read but let me ask you a question about that and about just generally ebooks so you can get ebooks that are not protected i guess there's like a easy what is it e-pub or something is the file format is a typical yeah but a lot of these are owned by the kindle and amazon so if i got a whole library on my kindle and they drm it up i believe so it's got all this digital rights management i'm screwed so you're going to have another bookstore and you have to do all these deals with all the publishers all over again to get these to my device yeah we're working on the content partnerships now now of course we're what is it 16 17 years into the e-reader world so these that it is not as complicated as it was 20 years ago to kind of aggregate and build your own marketplace and a lot of you know amazon has their own drm but then you know there's an adobe drm that is kind of more generally used by a lot of different providers so once you plug into that adobe drm system so yeah we're working through all those details but we anticipate a marketplace very similar with some existing bookstore in the world and yeah get it all done yeah okay so that's not announced yet i take it you're working on that correct got it okay uh well i mean that'd be amazing if amazon would just let you uh send my kindle stuff over um of course that would be up to them well and they also could be sharp elbowed about it because they could see this as competition um and i think you know this is why the justice department not to make this a political thing or whatever the justice department is looking at big tech and saying like interoperability and this is one of the reasons i was critical of lena khan um our new head uh over there because she wants to stop you know facebook from buying you know some you know uh vr app of uh when really interoperability and forcing facebook or forcing apple to allow a third-party app store or forcing amazon to allow other devices to get kindle books that's a much better use of her time and i think it's like very ineffective what she's doing um in terms of blocking acquisitions i think it's like a it's futile and it's like skating to where the puck has already been so the puck's not there anymore but um well i'm sure you could appreciate it as a startup we're not quite to the scale of having our lobbyists angle for us in the right direction.

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13:52that's startups plural dot t-e-c-h slash jason what a great domain don't wait and go now to startups.tech slash jason today running a hardware startup is brutally hard explain to people exactly how hard it is to run one of these companies and why and how you've mitigated against just the brutality of hardware startups sure sure yeah so hardware is definitely startup on hard mode and then some and a lot of it has to do with one there's you know obviously a business model you have to you have to build a physical thing yet that has a certain cost to it you don't necessarily get the same kind of margins as you would by you know doing enterprise sass etc so you know there is just some business model stuff that you have to think about and and really be conscious of what is going to be my overall bomb from day one right and so we're thinking about materials yes thank you thank you the build of materials the total cost of every little piece in part whether it be electronic or plastic or optics or whatnot that goes into the final product yeah and um so so that's that's one business model challenge then there's just the practical challenge of of coordinating and and examining the trade-offs between every software decision you make every mechanical decision you make in our case every optical decision you make in terms of lens technology every electrical decision you decision you make around the different chips that you pick and the different you know and everyone has a trade-off in terms of speed performance otherwise size, battery consumption, power consumption, weight, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

15:25So it is a challenge. It is hard. Part of the reason I enjoy it, and this is my first hardware startup, but part of the reason I enjoy it is it's like the best min-max optimization problem ever, right? Because you have all these different challenges coming at you and you get to sort through that. Now, in terms of how you navigate it, my CT and I, we talk a lot about this. this is starting at this type of startup is not something you probably want a bunch of people who are right out of college to do. You know, this is my third startup. I was an investor for a while in between there. My CTO has been at a number of startups, our head of hardware, you know, he's been in his career for 30 years.

16:02Our head of manufacturing has been in her career for 30 years. So you assemble a team that has just stood up, you know, physical things many, many times. So in terms of having the relationships with the contract manufacturers who are making various aspects of the parts, figuring out, you know, how do you, how do you go from prototype to manufacturing? I think, you know, Elon Musk in the recent investor meeting talked about how hard or how easy it is to build a prototype, how hard it is to, you know, actually build a scale and then how impossible it is to build a scale profitably. Right. And so, you know, we're, we're, we rely on that expertise of our team to be able to go from the prototype phase into this, you know scaling phase as we're doing now yeah and there's something about like whatever component is the least reliable or the least available the furthest behind in delivery that defines when you ship that's exactly right yeah it's so brutal yep um which is why elon i've met i've had many conversations with him about it so much of the model y model three he makes himself now and so If you look at Mercedes, they were talking about their software issues, and GM's talked about this before.

17:14Every single component in their car has its own software, whether it's the seats, the heating and the HVAC, the entertainment, the navigation system. And then they have to figure out how to get all those things to talk to each other. Whereas in a Tesla, it's one set, and then they even make their HVAC now. if you bought the original model s it was the steering column from mercedes i believe and the shifter so if you were in a mercedes and then you got a test you're like wait a second this shifter looks exactly the same and it was right and mercedes was an original investor and so you there i think he and now the screen from the model three is the same screen in the model s and the model x they move that screen over so they have one screen for all cars right instead of uh two or three is there a subscription to this thing um because that's the other problem is it's a one-time purchase and the better job you do in making it um reliable and making it um sturdy and maybe having good specs the longer people can use it which is great for them but it's bad for you yeah right right so we decided we we debated this in the early days of you know what is the what is the right model for getting in the market we thought about maybe even just a lease model for the hardware itself.

18:29We decided for V1, we're just going to go with kind of what's what people are used to, which is I buy the thing, I own the thing. And so that's what we're doing for V1. And we were able, because we were able to get that cost of goods down to what we felt was a reasonable place to charge people$350 for it. You know, that's, we felt comfortable doing that. You know, it's still an open question as to what we end up doing on the, you know, overall content side of things in year one, year two, year three, is that a purchase by purchase? Is there some subscription for connection to various news outlets or some aggregation or additional features like some of these LLM features that I'm talking about?

19:07Maybe there are ways to kind of add on from there. But honestly, as a startup, our first focus is how do we get this reading experience to be really, really great? And that has to do with the hardware and the form factor, but then also the software and then making it work. And we do that right. And people love reading on the thing and then we'll have a lot of options from there be amazing for the new york times uh which is doing just gangbusters with their subscription business they decided hey we're going to get rid of advertising not get rid of it but we're gonna at the peak of their advertising powers they said you know what we should do is build a foundation here of subscriptions and now they're a subscription juggernaut and consumers are pretty good with it imagine if you bought a three-year subscription to the new york times in advance you got one of these so you know what does the new york times cost like 200 a year or something if they said to you you know hey uh give us 500 bucks we'll throw in one of these and then you just cut some deal with them and then you had the whole new york times on there what a great deal so i think there's some option here for this to be very powerful or one of the book publishers you know your harper harper business uh they have a great label of business books and they said hey we'll give you 10 books a year uh for three years you get 30 books of 30 of our books and this for 500 bucks i'd buy that you know yep yep um one thing that the kindle has added uh which will be your number one competitor or they'll see you as a competitor i guess because if you use this you're not going to use your kindle if you succeed um and you're only going to bring one with you when you go to italy this summer um if you succeed um they have something called whisper sync i think no not whisper sing there's something that connects the audiobook to the right yeah to the words and so i have dyslexia i found out later in life and so reading pretty hard for me listening to audiobooks really easy but if i buy the book twice which i've done like a dozen times now yeah where i buy the audiobook and i buy the other books i pay 30 bucks 15 each time whatever um i don't know if that whisper sync is how you deliver it but it will highlight the word and speak it to you have you considered uh adding audio here because it is over your ear and i have a pair of the bose headsets which i love and the bose uh headsets highly recommend them will um let you listen to music or an audiobook but your ear is not covered so i would love to have it you know do that uh syncing for me yeah so not a v1 feature but like top of the request list from most people that have tried it have used it yeah we hear that one And it's almost the first thing that comes to people's mind is I'd love to be able to read and listen simultaneously.

21:46And, you know, the good news for us is, yes, speakers are small. They're low power consumption. Audio is low power consumption. So in terms of kind of meeting what we think are the core constraints that we want to hold throughout the life of this product line, it is something that we'll absolutely be prototyping for V2. And one of the things that we're even putting in V1 is an autopilot mode where you don't even have to manually turn the page. it can essentially walk your eyes through the the text line at a time and so we anticipate that you know that combined with audio in a future version would be just a ticket right it is called whisper sync it's called whisper sync for voice it's got its own uh yeah and they call that immersive reading what i found is when you do that you really increase your um you really increase your retention yeah another possibility is hey you put this on and you listen to this week in startups or all in whatever your favorite pod is and then it transcribes it and you see the text of what everybody's saying in front of you that could be quite powerful too have you considered that no we haven't really thought about like the pod you know going into the transcription realm but i like that idea that's definitely something that we should put on list and again llms are probably pretty helpful you know i would maybe in terms of you have a table of contents you could summarize the episode or yep and then it doesn't have a microphone in it yet no right correct okay so Yeah, I mean, a 1.0, just reading, but you can imagine the 2.0, if it had a microphone in that, you could have voice commands.

23:08Pretty amazing. And now you're taking pre-orders for$350 right now. Mm-hmm. Yep. There's a lot of demand. So right now we're taking wait lists. Oh, really? When you do something like this, how big of a first batch do you do? And how does that work as a hardware startup? How do you optimize that? Do you try to order 100 ,000 or just 1 ,000 because there could be mistakes and you don't want to put a bad product out there? How do you think about that? That's right. You know, we're being very measured in our approach. We understand there's going to be a lot of demand for this, but we want to keep a really high quality bar.

23:42So, the initial runs are in the thousands, tens of thousands. While we, you know, ensure that everything from a manufacturing standpoint is spot on. As our head of manufacturing constantly reminds me, like you don't want to make a mistake at scale a million. You want to make it at a scale 100 or 1 ,000 first. And so that's what this year has been all about. You know, we're shipping out our kind of final beta units to our, you know, beta folks in the next few weeks. Thank you for putting me on the list. I appreciate that. We'll do what we can, Jason. Well, you always want to have an influencer with 700 ,000.

24:13If I've got more followers than Gary Tan, he's an investor. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. He doesn't have the two top podcasts in tech. Just saying, Gary's great. So, yeah, that's coming out pretty soon. And again, assuming, you know, we, you know, that that's been a great learning experience to dial in a lot of that manufacturing process. And then we roll right in from that into, you know, production later this fall and start to fulfill that wait list and pre-orders. You were, you said you were a VC before this for a little bit. Yeah. How long did you spend in venture capital? And then why'd you quit VC to go back to startups?

24:44Yeah. It was about six years. Did one, basically one fund cycle. Right. Which, which I loved. I'd done a couple of startups before that. I loved the variety. I loved the, you know, just you get to interact with so many brilliant people with brilliant ideas and a lot of passion for it. And truly, I didn't know if I would do another startup. But one of the things that I had been thinking about pretty much that entire time is what our relationship with devices is. And read a lot of books like, you know, Sherry Turkle's Alone Together in terms of what our devices are doing to us. And, you know, the kind of traditional stuff, Cal Newport, Deep Work, like really thinking about how our brains have been rewired by these devices.

25:22How have they been rewired? Well, yeah, I think our attentions are shorter. I think it's harder for us to concentrate on long form. And I'm an optimist. I think there is a path through, obviously. But I think one of the things that happens when I pick up a device is my brain is wired to kind of be in this multitasking mode of what's the next input? What's the next dopamine hit? and and so um it was so i was just wondering what what is the path through that with respect to our relationship with personal computing if this isn't the best thing for our minds and and a lot of the if you will state-of-the-art thinking on that is essentially just well be more disciplined take a digital detox put your phone somewhere else yeah and and i don't taking heroin here's how you can not be a junkie stop taking heroin and you're like that's right but i love heroin yeah i love I love Twitter.

26:13I love my group chats. That's right. I love TikTok and YouTube videos. One of the things we talk about is we think that there is broccoli on the internet. There are really good things in Twitter, but then it's kind of also a wash and a lot of stuff is just not the best. And you don't necessarily want to be doom scrolling before bed or whatnot. And so we do think of ourselves a little bit as the nicotine gum for the digital age. all right we all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity what does it mean product velocity fancy term right here you got your product and your velocity speed the speed in which your product improves so can you ship updates can you release new features can you do bug fixes can you iterate on the interface can you solve problems for your customers and can you do it quickly because you're not alone you have competitors and your customers have choices.

27:06They may solve their problems by writing their own custom code, or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about. How fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, yeah, we want to go faster, but you got to go faster intelligently. And Crowdbotics is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service. Basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible. You'll have access to an on-demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development.

27:39Crowdbotics can work with your in-house dev team, or you can just have them work independently. And you own all the IP. You own all the source code. Let the folks at Crowdbotics supercharge your product velocity today. No more waiting. Get a free build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's a$4.99 value just for the Twist listeners. You get that for free. That's C-R-O-W-D-B-O-T-I-C-S.com slash twist for a free build plan. So since I had been thinking about this problem for quite some time, this idea of building a wearable e-reader, kind of the origin story there wasn't my idea. It was one of my co-founder's ideas in conversation with Palmer Luckey, who's the Oculus founder.

28:22Yeah, good friend of mine. Yeah, right. good one good one okay yeah but i'll be here for three more nights try the deal there you go there you go so it kind of just discussing the state of arvr and and realizing that if if you wanted a really satisfying form factor it would have to be more specific purpose more single purpose less general less trying to render 3d worlds or put an iphone on your face and and and that's where we got this idea of wow it would be really great to read um with a with a headset if we could make it light enough and whatnot and and from the and you know before i dove all the way into to start the business i did some prototyping i did the tinkering in the garage if you will with some with some friends and even from the first time i put the first prototype which was essentially toilet paper rolls and like you know just a baseball cap full of like electronics and i and i realized this that's when i realized these two worlds came together one like the comfort aspect of lying in bed reading and then two you know this this nicotine gum idea of like well where are we going to go with personal computing devices and i really do think that this is better for humanity if we figure out how to provide other options besides just my iphone for um for personal computing and that's what that's what drew me back in i mean if you think and uh sherry turgle talks about this in her book but just the need for downtime the need for solitude or reflection it's kind of gone and we're so addicted to these devices that um you don't have boredom kick in and if you think about children you know sometimes what happens when you get immersed in a book is you kind of get into that world you you get transported and you get to live in that environment for a little while i mean when i would read michael crichton's novels i had that experience of just being lost in them right um or if you were to read charles dickens you can just be transformed into you know tell it to cities or something like that they don't get to have that experience and it's a lost experience and then you also don't have to you don't get to have oh it's a it's august there's nothing to do and then your mind's like here's something we could do uh hopefully it's not you know i grew up in brooklyn we did some bad things but hopefully you come up with something really creative um but maybe you could talk a little bit about since we're going there what you hope to achieve in terms of maybe you know those aspects that we're losing and maybe even talk i don't know jeff kids yeah i do and it was a big part of me thinking about starting something like this was watching them when you see your kids and they're just like give me my heroin i'm sorry ipad and like you know you take the ipad away from them and they just literally act like a junkie who has been locked up and for 48 hours like it's amazing these kids like will i mean a temper tantrum like you've never seen if they lose advice for two days yep yeah so a couple things come to mind here one you know when my six-year-old is six and four of my kids right when my six-year-old says hey dad i'm bored i'm like good just sit there be bored right here and you know what he does it's you know within a few minutes he's he's making up worlds or building something new it's like like you know that you just let them be bored i mean maybe this is maybe a little bit beyond the scope of what we're talking about today but i'm with you let the kids be bored sometimes and one of the touchstones we talk about at the company is trying to get people who you know didn't grow up with the ipads and whatnot get get back to that kid under a blanket with a flashlight kind of reading you know where you get lost in that that's that is one of our touchstones is like getting helping people get lost in a book again a really good book and and so it's into your point about the uh the you know the device and whatnot i like to talk about you know steve jobs in the early 80s he took out this spread in scientific american talking about the personal computer as the bicycle for the mind right and And that was his vision for what this type of technology should do.

32:13And it was reported after he died, it was reported that before he died, he said, we don't allow the iPad in the house because we're afraid of what it's going to do to the kids. So in these 30 years, we went from this beautiful vision of what personal computing devices can do for us to I don't want my kids to touch it. And so, I do think that for me, there's, you know, and we'll see where we go beyond just reading in the years, assuming we're successful with this, you know, first product. But tapping back into that beautiful vision of the bicycle for the mind, or we sometimes say the peloton for the mind in the modern era, so that people can do what's right for themselves mentally.

32:54And again, to the discipline point, you're not going to get people to give up the heroin unless you give them something else and something better. and so that's why we're it's a replacement strategy it's like make a new habit with the soul reader what's that and that will get you to read more and and that'll be better for your mental health what's the thing they give people that little like little thing they can sip and drink i had to get them off heroin i forgot what it's called oh yeah yeah i know what you're coming to us in a second yeah that's right that's right so yeah i know yeah it's method yeah you give them a little method that's right and i put it so i put on my nightstand instead of my iphone and yeah you know for example when i first oh i like that it's oh it's on your nightstand instead of your iphone because if you put this on correct me if i'm wrong the e-ink technology that you're using i think it's e-ink they call it yes that's right e-ink or e-paper e-paper it's not as stimulating correct um right now we have to because we're putting it in the glasses we do light it but um the lighting itself is much more like what your phone is on when you put it in night mode and it's in that very reduced blue light mode so that's you know we we all get drowsy while we're reading with the device on it is that same yeah it is a it's a very warm kind of light that is pleasing to the eyes kind of you know the right right for night and an interesting thing happened when i did that switch you know i you know sometimes i check my screen time when i'm you know feeling a little masochistic god it's so embarrassing right it's like shameful but this is we we should force adults and the entire family should be forced to publish their screen time in the kitchen and like just as a group we we have a collective number of minutes we can do as a group or something right right yeah no i think this would be good but here's the interesting thing that happened to me is i was i was in the like five to six hour a day territory before i started reading with soul reader yeah you know not not amazing but not so bad embarrassing but not tragic That's right.

34:45But I'm willing to mention it on a podcast. That means he's really at seven or eight. But yeah, could be, could be. I'm at like four or five now. I'm like, just, just, you know, I'm doing a little bit better than you. There you go. We're both at 10. Here's what happened though. Here's what happened. I got the iPhone off the nightstand, um, a little bit less, you know, doom scrolling on Twitter, a little bit less binge watching. And, and I read, I would average probably reading about 30 to 60 minutes a day. And kind of depending on how interesting the novel was, I was reading the news of the day or whatnot.

35:14So you think, oh, okay, well, screen time must have gone down one hour because you were reading an hour a day, right? Swap it out. No. Screen time went down two and a half hours a day. Oh, wow. Why is that? Why is that, Jason? Because you went to bed quicker. I went to bed sooner. I didn't kind of get stuck in that thing. So I kind of magically found either I got to sleep a little bit longer or better, or I kind of found an extra hour, hour and a half a day that I wasn't like this, staring at my phone in my hand. Here's the thing with getting rid of screen time. I find with my kids. so when we're uh at the ski house and we're you know having ski days i say listen screens happen uh after dinner uh and if you if you're out on the mountain you get in a little bit early we'll make an exception and you go to the movie there and watch a movie or you can use your devices a little bit but basically what i find is like if no device then activities but then an interesting thing happens as well my theory on why these kids are getting so weird and adults let's face it we've all got friends who are getting weird they can't make eye contact anymore they get socially awkward they don't know how to communicate then you have incels and just weird kids credit to sherry turkle on this but there's just like thought that like hey because we're connecting with so many people all day long whether it's on social networks and email and slack that we're like hyper connected but you're not getting face-to-face time with people you're not hearing their voice and so the social connections are not real but we feel like we're being socially connected in fact we feel like we're overly socially connected yep what happens in boredom my theory is that you become more introspective you're in your own mind you start thinking about yourself and you also become more interested um and inquisitive like that um ted lasso speech when he plays darts you ever see that speech when you know what i'm talking about or not have you heard this speech he gives a speech it's a really great speech where the guy challenges him to darts and uh um he basically just the guy was never interested enough in him to ask him if he'd ever played darts before and then if he had been a little bit more inquisitive or interesting um he would have known that his dad would take him to the bar every sunday afternoon to play darts since he was like 12 years old um and then he hits like three bullseyes in a row and it's just like epic but you weren't interested enough you aren't inquisitive enough and you will become more interested in other people when you're in person you will become more interested when your device is put in thing that's why i love a game i play with my friends when we go to dinner which is stack the phones stack the phones yep and then whoever picks it up first have you played this game has to no dinner but i you stack your phones at dinner i try this at your next dinner everybody and you can reach for it anytime i assume right you're allowed to go for it whoever goes for it first pace for dinner it's brilliant that's great and then the other good thing is i you know got some famous friends and go to parties where they collect the phones on the way in no phone parties where they put your phone in a bag also amazing uh so if you ever have a party ask everybody to put their phones at the front hey listen if you're a parent and you need to check on your kid just go out to the driveway yep and you do this so a lot of the parties i've been going to um where there might be celebrities at it or other high profile people they might just be like hey collect the phones and i think i think this is like really great that you're taking your time to do this whether it succeeds or fails we'll see in the market i think it's guaranteed to have a level of success with bookworms but i think you want to go a little further than that so okay listen if you're running a sales team you got a design agency you got a media business you know the hassle of one pagers right they never format correctly on mobile you can't track them properly.

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39:33Are they watching it on their iPad, their phone? It also works seamlessly with tools like Canva, Dropbox, MailChimp, and InDesign. Having a trackable magazine, if you want to level up your marketing needs, you need to use Issue. So get started for free or get 50 % off an annual premium plan at issue.com slash podcast and use the promo code TWIST. That's I-S-S-U-U dot com slash podcast and use that promo code twist so they know I sent you for your free starter account or 50 % off an annual premium plan. How's the beta testing going? What's the feedback been to people who've read a book or two on it, right?

40:11So how many people have read two or three books on it? A few dozen at this point. And what are they? I mean, you must have done some. Do you do listening labs with them or how do you get information from them? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of calls and, and whatnot. The two, two anecdotes come to mind that are, well, maybe I'll do three. The first one is people are surprised at how well it works and how quickly it works with respect to this mindset shift. And they're like, Oh, I didn't, like it's, it's hard to imagine what it's like to put on a wearable e-reader because it's a new category. So yeah, there's a bit of that surprise and then kind of, Oh, right.

40:48Okay. It actually works and that's that's the first helpful piece of feedback is like we're on the right track with the new category another one is one one person put it on and they reported back they said i i woke up early the first morning i had it i put it on i didn't think about the clock and i read for two and a half hours and i can't remember the last time i read for two and a half hours straight wow and so to me like this point about being immersed in something is the duration matters yeah you know they just they kind of got lost in what they were reading and and even just a because this person was reading in bed and their reflection was oh if i had picked up a book i might have i might have shifted around a little bit as you do when you're reading in bed exactly arm strain whatever arm strain and yeah yeah it's all that stuff no back problems no neck problems when reading this way um and then the other the other big piece of feedback that we got um from a person a couple of days after they started is he was he literally said i think this is a 10x improvement on reading for me and for him and he's like i felt i felt the loss of optionality meaning i you know it yes got rid of my options i felt the loss of optionality almost instantly within a few minutes and and so yeah those are those are kind of what what we're keying into on on whatnot and you know then there's there's all the kind of normal user feedback in terms of oh okay we got the mobile app we think of the the sole reader as your nightstand you're going to have a few books on there you're going to have today's articles your mobile your mobile device your computer that's your full library that's how you're going to you know curate content and decide what you're going to read next and all that so a lot of the usual user feedback on how those interactions should work and you know how how easy it is to sync the content all that stuff but but those are some of the highlights of the feedback i think you know uh my friend doug roshkoff who is a media author i don't know if you've ever read any of his books but he um had this theory with mtv and the internet and video games that there was a adhd exists in his mind um people debate that because when i think you're gen x too um like a lot of people didn't have it and then now everybody's got it i think there's situational adhd which is you have to defend yourself against the onslaught of incoming uh you know notifications as we call it now but it could have been mtv when we were kids which was it just moved quicker right you watch a three minute video and the video had so many cut scenes in it now you look at tiktok it's you adhd is like a defense mechanism right you throw it up um but then it has all these like downstream effects so there's something that could be very healthy about this in terms of just giving your mind a break um and uh i think it's really amazing what you've what you've set out to do so i'm glad you're doing it i'm gonna buy it great um are you hiring right now or are just in sales mode you got a full complement team or if you're hiring i'd love to give a shout out if you've got any open positions for people who might want to apply to work on such a noble mission yeah well appreciate that you know like a startup we're always hiring the best people we can find um but also we're still a small young team so we're very much looking for startup generalists technically competent people who can cross over a lot of different a lot of different stuff so so yeah i'm gonna appreciate a shout out that that um you're willing to give the uh website is soulreader.com soulreader soulreader.com and it'll ask you to put your phone number and interestingly not email yes so phone number I like that choice for growth early tip we got you know it does communicate a little bit more seriousness which we like but also we don't have to worry about the spam bots as much it's really tough to get a you know email into somebody you lose a lot of waitlist traffic that's something we learned from some of our advisors and mentors pretty early on on the consumer hardware thing so name and phone number get yourself on the wait list get on the wait list and thank you for including me in the beta test that's incredibly generous i think you only had 30 40 spots to include me i'm not even an investor what a great gift no i'm excited uh i signed up and uh like i will be one of the first to buy it and uh go just go take a look at it if you listen to the audio comes with a couple different colors uh i like the goal myself uh and uh i can't wait to see these in the wild they're good looking uh whoa just as i let you go what did you uh think of the apple uh product ah yeah so first impressions you haven't used it yet i assume no i have not i haven't had the chance um first impressions is uh we love we love kind of what they have validated because it's been part of our message for years now which is general you know face tech they call it spatial computing i'll just say general face tech arvr whatever general face tech it's really hard it's hard computationally it's hard from a weight perspective it's hard from a battery life perspective yes and you know the the most resourced tech company in the world in terms of who could go after this just showed us exactly what it takes it's still it's big goggles it's tethered there's an external battery pack yeah by the way it costs 3500 dollars right and zero to the soul reader add a 10x 10x right and yet we're still we're still left with the question do i want an iphone on my face yes i don't know if i don't i do i'll tell you what i want i want to be in a hotel or in a plane or in a cafe and have my full desktop while not feeling like somebody's going to murder me and i don't see them coming sure sure sure i just i want to be safe and i want to see that virtual desktop but yeah i i think we're what do you think three generations you think or be three revisions like maybe three cycles of 18 months before it gets down to under a thousand or a thousand where you can you know and the battery is smaller or you think it's longer it's i it's a really it's a really hard problem because you know what's the hardest problem well it depends on what you want if you want the existing form factor with the tether and the battery yeah probably a few generations and they get that to a thousand bucks if you want it to look like this and i'm holding my glasses for you listeners if you want it to look like this we're still really far away from that so so yeah you put it at 20 10 something between those two 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus yeah yeah and so we we think that like this kind of uh if we constrain on the weight and the battery life first and you know kind of add a lot of value there and you you mentioned it we're going to get avid readers to like this but we're also going after aspirational readers everybody who at the end of the year says you know next year i want to read more books yeah you know this is the perfect thing for them and and that will help us you know carve our own way to this more you know maybe general purpose but focus purpose tech um this is why amazon needs to do a deal with you because i think you could sell this with 10 books um i think people will buy this for 700 with 10 books included or new york times subscription the bundling because i buy yeah um the platinum audible which i think is 20 credits or 25 credits and i spend 200 a year and i've had it for 10 years so i've spent 2 000 on audiobooks and i like because i think one audiobook if i get one idea out of one audiobook on a business basis it's going to be worth hundreds of thousands maybe millions of dollars sure 10 years 200 audiobooks is two thousand dollars like are you kidding me it's the greatest deal in the world and that's i think when you pitch these like pitching what if you get that knowledge that one nugget of knowledge that then as an entrepreneur but i love your approach that means uh like gym memberships december jan january is going to be your big new year's resolution i love it are you a previous marketer you seem to have a good marketer head no but i've been thinking about it a lot and my first startup i well i was in tech and then moved quickly over to sales and marketing because i just found a love for the storytelling aspect of building businesses right yeah so it is great i can tell that you have the storyteller thing because when you go to the website it feels like an apple product and it and the way you speak about it is just like you really understand your customer just the tagline on your website just to you know like rate my landing page experience the next evolution in reading the fact that it's an experience and that it's an evolution and it's only reading right like this whoever wrote this copy somebody suffered over that sentence i can tell and it's probably you and and some of our great team team but the fact that reading could evolve is a very evocative statement that makes you say how is it evolving and i want the answer to that and immediately under that you get to click learn more that's right you know it's like a very well done so shout out to the soul reader marketing team really well done all right listen loved meeting you i hope you sell a million of these things well done thank you jason really appreciate it we hope so too uh i listen all you got to do is sell 10 000 of these and you're still in business right that's i think the mark is if you sell 10 000 of these years at 350 if you make a buck 50 off of them you'll be fine as a company you'll you'll survive and that's you know in the hardware business surviving those first couple of years as you figure it out is the most important So I wish you continued success and we'll see you all next time on this week.

49:43And start up. Bye. Bye.