TWiST News: Underwater Drones, Robot Swarms, and Klarna's Going Public | E2043

0:00We don't focus too much on coming home after a long mission, to be honest. You know, it's anywhere from a few hours to potentially a day plus for the small vehicle. And then we're going to be announcing some bigger vehicles where you'll see much extended ranges. Also, the vehicles are fully modular. So you can kind of break it down and put it in a backpack right now. Oh, and kind of benefit of that is you can add like an extended battery pack and stuff like that, additional range. But wow. So the seals could have these in a backpack. They land in some gnarly area. They send this thing out. It gets them a bunch of data.

0:32then it helps enhance the mission or they could make something go boom. Yeah, it's a possible use case or you could be a researcher hiking some remote lake and throw it in there and... Find Loch Ness Monster. Yeah, exactly. It could be an incredible legacy for the company. Save Taiwan, find the Loch Ness Monster. I mean, either of these would be extraordinary accomplishments. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain.

1:09Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15 % off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. And Sprig, the product experience platform that generates AI-powered opportunities to continuously improve your product at scale. Visit sprig.com slash twist to book a demo and get a$75 gift card. Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. With me again, Alex Wilhelm. I'm Jason Calacanis. We're here to talk about technology and it seems like American dynamism and even Chinese dynamism is alive and well. People are building a lot of physical things in the real world and we're going to get into it today with a lot of robots and a lot of vehicles.

1:55It's coming fast and furious, huh, Alex? It's coming fast and furious. And I'm just very excited as a consumer because I feel like, you know, phones have become so relatively static over the years that I just want something new, exciting, a form factor that blows my mind. Something that kind of brings me that sense of joy that I had when I got my first smartphone back in like the original iPhone days. So I'm optimistic and that feels nice. All right. Well, before we get to surgery robots and robots running through the woods in a completely new format that i had never seen before from china these robots chasing you through the woods in a dystopian hellscape um let's talk about uh let's interview our first guest here uh and uh talk about what he's building yeah so today on the show we have nelson mills one of the co-founders of a company called vaten systems that's spelled v-a-t-n if you want to look it up they are a company based here in Rhode Island, very proud to say, and they are working on underwater drone technology that will have both defense and commercial applications.

3:00And the company was just in the news because it raised a$13 million seed round led Jason by DYNE or Dine Ventures. Nelson, hey. Nelson, how are you? Hey, guys. Great to meet you. Thanks for having me on. Maybe we could pull up a video and some images of what you're building and you can just walk us through it here for the audience show us what you've built and walk us yeah so right here you're seeing um our engineers out testing and and working through through the vehicles themselves so we're seeing here is a man portable vehicle being carried by our cto right there and now it's running through the water um but you know our first product we call the uh torsk on the commercial side or the scalmure s6 on the uh defense side and it's a six inch diameter really lightweight weighed in a fraction of the cost of existing options with the ultimate goal of really building them at scale, which we're going to start next year and making it easy for one person to deploy a whole bunch of these and really control a multitude.

4:01So these Torsks look like torpedoes, but these do not have explosives in them. They look like a little missile, but I noticed the person putting them into the ocean from a dinghy, they look like they were in a Zodiac, needed only pick up two handles and drop it in the water so they are apparently pretty lightweight they look like they're about six i don't know seven feet long yeah and uh tell us about what the mission is for the torsk t-o-r-s-k yeah so torsk is our uh our commercial variant um mainly carrying sensors so it could be anything from side scan sonar to passive acoustic to other forms of environmental monitoring.

4:43Even cameras go collect data on the seafloor, whether that's for, say, offshore wind, oil and gas. NOAA, go collect environmental data, researchers. But I'll be honest, 95 % of our focus right now is defense. And we're really working on the Skellmere S6, which can also carry a variety of payloads. Some of them are similar sensors, but we, at the end of the day, built the truck and it's up to the customer to decide what payloads they want to implement and deploy on the vehicle, right? Are there other defensive applications apart from just putting an explosive at the tip of it as you would in perhaps a traditional torpedo, Nelson?

5:23Like, are there, I don't know, can it like launch stuff on its own out of the water, like smaller drones? I'm curious what you can put into it. Yeah. I mean, it's really the bounds of your imagination. So we've done sensors, just go like, look for objects, clear beaches. We've put on various electronic warfare modules to make it look like a decoy, whether it's an underwater decoy or the pop-up on the surface and suddenly it looks like there's a ship there. There's a whole bunch of use cases where it still makes sense as an intrudable system, right? The military can send it out, it can go do a non-kinetic effect or collect some data, and then they don't have to worry about risking people's lives to get it back.

6:02And that's really kind of the big motivating factor here is that our underwater systems are way too expensive. Break that down for me, because I'm presuming that this is usually a defense contracting boondoggle. So what does the military variant of a Torsk cost? And how does that compare to an existing system that you might buy from an existing defense prime? Yeah, you know, our price point is around 75k. And, you know, for a defense prime, you'd be looking at 500 ,000 plus dollars for an equivalent system. Yeah. So are they just stealing our money? I think there's just like a ton of inefficiency built into the system and their approach to it.

6:41And, you know, the kind of whole cost plus contracting methodology, right? And this is really what, you know, defense tech is about. It's like upending kind of that methodology. And then also like all those underwater systems, like the underwater drone market is 10, 15 years behind other drone markets. And they're all come out of research. It's like a researcher built one of these, and now they're trying to build a few a month, but it's never been built for scale production. They haven't done the things necessary in order to get the cost down. And from day one, we're going to build thousands of these, and we're going to vertically integrate the key components that lets us significantly reduce our bomb in addition to just the sheer quantity.

7:22Jason, this company has some of the fastest product velocity I've ever seen. It's one of your favorite things. So a year ago, they were just deploying their first AUV and now they've already moved from prototypes to fully operational systems, which I thought was incredibly impressive speed. Yeah. And what a great price relative to what military contractors spend on similar devices. And this speaks to how conflicts are changing. You have people using drones in the field, quadcopters we've seen that in ukraine we're hearing about it in a possible conflict with china over taiwan so not having to recover the tusk is a main feature of this it can just be used to collect information if the enemy captures it if it sinks to the bottom of the ocean it's not as big of a deal as a i don't know 100 million dollar plane or 25 million dollar boat or whatever it happens to be yeah four billion dollar sub or a billion dollar sub right yeah and so these things could collect what a sub could collect how deep can it go what's the range like how is it powered yeah and i'll you know be up front it's it's not a direct equivalent for a sub but um you know what we're doing is focusing the top 300 meters of the water and really producing effects and collecting data on littoral and kind of the top top part of the ocean environment there's a lot of people go deep and that's another way we really save money and differentiate ourselves yeah that's that's kind of the the primary primary focus there and there's really yeah like a big opportunity and if you control just underwater you basically control the surface and that's generally like our philosophy giving the military the tools to spread kind of control i guess control or power underwater um and we really like you know we're building something like 100 drones a year maybe underwater drones a year in the US, right?

9:18Like in terms of actual military drones. Oh yeah. Yeah. Total. That's a pathetic number. That's like backyard numbers. But going back to the depth point, does it go only going to 300 meters? Does that allow you to go faster underwater? I'm not sure about the result of more water on top pressure. And if that slows down travel and also increases in efficiency in terms of drag, it doesn't necessarily limit the speed you can go, but it is another kind of our differentiating features is that we go a lot faster than a traditional UUV. We don't go as fast as a torpedo, but we live in that space between UUV and torpedo and can really conduct a variety of missions.

9:56We're not limiting ourselves to just one. Your typical UUV right now cruises at like three to five knots and some of our vehicles can approach 30. What is a UUV? Unmanned underwater vehicle. Unmanned underwater vehicle. So that's the category uuv you're making one that goes particularly fast so this would go faster than a ship would be able to go or a submarine if it was on the surface or similar it depends on the the ship and um you know there's there's we have we you know ships in the u.s military that go really fast and subs are are quite fast too we're not necessarily trying to go after that think of like the kind of effect of the, you know, the PRC is 10 ,000 maritime militia vessels, right?

10:41That are just like basically armed fishing vessels. Like what do we do about that? They're not fast. Squarespace is the place to build a beautiful website. You know, we're huge fans of Squarespace here at this week in startups because every startup means a gorgeous website. People will judge a book based on its cover, but you don't have a ton of time. You don't want to waste cycles on doing something repetitive like creating a website. Oh my Lord, your team is busy building your product or service. Why not use the best and most powerful website builder ever created? And that's Squarespace. And they have a new AI powered design intelligence tool that's going to help you build something great, unique, and fast.

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13:19So what is the solution? And part of that, the thing we can build fast enough or we'll be able to build fast quickly is drones of all sorts, surface, underwater, air, et cetera. But there's really no platform manufacturer of underwater drones in the US right now. And that's what we want to be and want to do, right? So where are you going to build them? Because I know you're based in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and I'm going to say Rhode Island as many times as I can on this episode just because I'm proud, but I'm curious if we have enough space and industrial capacity in our little state to actually support, you know, making thousands of these a year.

13:50So do you have to expand elsewhere in the U S? Yeah, we can, we can build thousands in, in Rhode Island and we're planning to like, we're already, we're already working on it. I think, you know, as you approach larger amounts, we probably will start to work with other States too, but you know, right. Rhode Island's an awesome place to be. There's great infrastructures here for, for manufacturing actually, and for defense. So yeah, we're excited about it. To explain that, we build submarines in Rhode Island. So we have a lot of the boat contracting world set up here. People don't know that. Now they do.

14:22Yeah. I'm very excited about that. And then my other question is about tonnage versus swarm. So you told Jason that the US Navy has more tonnage. I presume that's mostly held up in our aircraft carriers, which are enormous and nuclear powered and so forth. But just as a drone can take out a main battle tank, I presume that an underwater drone can undercut the power of a heavy traditional weapons system. So does the ability to build lots of these underwater drones obviate the concern that we have about American shipbuilding capacity compared to China? Because it seems like this is a better, cheaper, faster way and doesn't risk our sailors' lives.

14:57Yeah. I mean, it's part of the solution, right? I don't think we're getting rid of main warships anytime soon. And they have a significant place on the battlefield. But our goal is that we can take our warfighters farther away from the action with our vehicles. And we've seen how effective they can be in the Black Sea, right? Like that's been, you know, kind of a battle lab of maritime drones. And they've been mostly using surface vessels, which are, you know, a little bit more prone to interception. And they've still had great luck against these, you know, multi-hundred million dollar systems, you know, destroyers and et cetera.

15:33Can we set like a GoFundMe to buy stuff from Vaatan Systems so we can send them over to zelinski because you know i'm in i'm in for 50 bucks yeah i have to consult my lawyers on that one yeah so talk to us about raising money for defense tech because this seems to have been something 10 years ago the entire technology industry was maybe or the majority of the technology industry and venture capital industry wasn't going near this and then they start andro success and some other hardware successes spacex obviously uh being the tip of that spear and now all of a sudden venture capital is like hey there's something here it's not outrageous to give 13 million dollars to to a crazy team in rhode island to think that they compete with government contractors so maybe you can talk just a little bit about the climate around uh defense tech startups and your experience raising yeah no i mean there's no better time I think, to raise in defense.

16:33And I don't think it's going away anytime soon. It might reduce, there might be a little bit of a bubble. But I think the core of it is that defense is here to stay as a category in venture capital. But you're right. I would argue even less than 10 years ago, I can remember. I mean, I was an investor before this in 21, even... Yeah, like 21, I don't remember anyone talking about defense. I think the Ukraine conflict and seeing the impact technology can have there is really what threw on the kind of afterburners or whatever on this segment. I think Andrel did pave the way, but they were the lone voice in this space for a long time.

17:09Other people might have been doing defense contracts, but it was kind of something you didn't talk about, right? It's like, oh, we're doing this, but we don't want to tell our investors or anyone else, right? Or something like that. But yeah, that's completely... The switch has flipped and I think it's great. I mean, I think there's going to be a lot of companies and funds that fail in the space, but that's venture capital, right? There's going to be a lot of great success stories and there's going to be companies that fail through no fault of their own. There's going to be companies that fail through their fault in every which way.

17:40Well, I mean, it is, I think, if we're going to win the war, and I hate to wax poetic here about capitalism like I'm prone to do, but in an authoritarian government, a dictator can say, I'm going to just take these million people put them in a slave camp and tell them to build what i want them to build and that seems like a really amazing feature for their society to be able to use imminent domain and unlimited unchecked power to just accomplish goals and then you know you look at a democratic process which is quite messy because we've seen in the last week or i don't know last decade and so we can sit here and say like oh my god we're wasting time we're wasting time but freedom and capitalism democracy plus capitalism feels so messy and chaotic as you just described hey a bunch of these companies are going to die because they're incompetent but also through no fault of their own but a bunch of the smartest and brightest people who are given the job of capital allocation meeting with all these teams and saying hey which team do i want to back and why and then those teams trying to convince those people hey here's our strategy and here's what we've done here's why we're the best team to to bet on that basic competitive dare i say selfish uh approach that you believe you actually have the best solution and you believe you can bring the best team together and you can beat the other competitors on the playing field you know what that's very hard for a dictator to deal with because you can put a gun to people's head and say build but the motivation is going to be fear as opposed to a motivation which is opportunity and pride and competitiveness and that's just absolutely i know it's out of fashion to say this but competition and excellence is pretty awesome and i just want to applaud you for for doing this uh you could probably do something easier as a venture capitalist and start a company and you were in investing before this but i think that this could be you know what you're doing this entire movement this could be the difference between democracy increasing and democracy decreasing in terms of the number of people who are living in a system where they're allowed to vote and they're allowed to argue over their votes and did their votes count and how should their vote count we are so narcissistic and entitled that we have no idea how great it is that we can sit here and pick a leader and we can sit here and debate our voting.

20:15It's just a beautiful thing. I don't know if there's a question in there, but I just felt like I needed to get that off my chest. Yeah, I agree completely. I mean, part of the reason we beat the Soviet Union was because of the failure of their command economy, right? And our ability to innovate and grow and outspend. It's the same thing here. I always say that defense technology is necessarily about winning a war, it's about preventing the next war, right? It goes back to like a fundamental Sun Tzu quote of like, don't conduct a war until you know you can win. As long as we're innovating and putting the best technology on the field and can show that we will be a really tough opponent and they don't know if they can win, our adversaries don't know they can win, then there won't be a war, right?

21:02At least I don't think there will be. All right, founders, are you tired of doing all your own software development? Do you need help, but you can't afford all this time it takes to find great talent? Are you dreading the endless interviews and email chains just to find somebody great? It takes six months. It takes a year. Well, what you need is Lemon.io. Lemon.io has thousands. That's right. Thousands of on-demand developers who can help you. And they've done the work already to vet these developers, making sure that they're results-oriented and that they're super experienced. Of course, they got to have competitive rates, so they're going to take care of that as well.

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22:22That's right. And twist listeners get 15 % off the first four weeks. stop burning money, hire developers smarter and faster at lemon.io slash twist. On the war point, there's two things that I want to make sure we hit on before that you go, Nelson. One is autonomy. I know that you guys are building something called Instinct, which is going to be out in 2026, which is self-driving for underwater drones, I believe. And then also, we're talking a lot these days about swarming technologies, usually in the air, but also now in the water. And I presume that autonomy underwater is going to be clutch to actually having these drone swarms in the seas yeah so instinct is actually just our inertial navigation system and 2026 is it's released as an independent product but it'll be in our um yeah it'll be in our our vehicles much sooner than that or i mean it's already in our vehicles but we do we do our full stack of a you know our own autonomy and our own uh swarming software right um really single agent and multi-agent autonomy um and underwater is a space where it's autonomy first right like we have no way to control these vehicles like they're fully autonomous um once they go underwater you can't can't really communicate with them you can send like stop or like a new command or something like that but underwater comms are really limited so we saw that with that um tragedy with going to the titanic um most of the time when you send something into the deep water and you go a thousand feet deep or more you you can't communicate i guess unless there's a tether or there's some technology that you should send a text message underwater explain to the audience i mean we obviously understand there's a density of water it's hard to send signal over the air it's pretty easy but the density of water makes it near impossible so what's actually occurring there when you try to communicate with one of these things and it's a thousand feet down yeah so we use um kind of off the shelf acoustic communication technology It's just scaled to Acoms for short.

24:17And with that, you can send, like you said, text messages, like kilobytes per second. And you're typically range limited one to eight kilometers. Now there's some really cool technology and startups in this space. And I think that's going to improve quickly. But at the same time, like you run up to some barriers in physics, right? Like there's really cool, like light-based comms underwater, but you're talking about 100 to 200 meters. You can stream video, but you can't take it very far. Just the diffraction of light and water, you run into the barriers of physics. Honestly, I think it's good for us as a company because we can't pretend or we can't start with, oh, this is operated.

24:58From day one, we have to be autonomous. Yeah, you're going right to level five. There is no safety driver. there is no mission control specialist with a joystick who can take over for these things when they're at a certain depth but i assume they can talk to each other you know uh easier than talking to the services on the surface on some missions so that is kind of interesting that they could create some sort of a mesh network perhaps if you had 20 of these things and each were at different heights they could communicate with each other and then the final one could communicate in a a faster way with the surface, yeah?

25:34Yeah, exactly. You hit the nail on the head. One can be on the surface and act as that relay or an unmanned surface vessel or even a manned surface vessel can act as that relay to underwater and communicate with a swarm or a mesh of the vehicles. And the vehicles themselves can also act as a kind of an underwater comms relay that's really hard to jam. That's another kind of our use cases. Lots of interesting things you can do on that front. And, you know, we do use the ACOMs for the vehicles to coordinate among themselves too. And that's kind of one of our - How long of a mission can they last for?

26:07Because there was a sail drone company, I remember, I think Jamaf maybe had invested in it. It had solar. It was a surface-based vehicle. They could go all around the planet. I'm sure you've seen it and collect information. With yours, I'm assuming there's some sort of battery pack in here, but how long is this thing going to be able to go for? And then if they complete their mission, can they go to the surface, charge up with some solar and then come home eventually how does it work yeah um we don't focus too much on uh coming home after a long mission to be honest but um uh we you know it's anywhere from a few hours to potentially a day a day plus for the small vehicle and then we're going to be announcing some bigger vehicles where you'll see extended very much extended ranges also the vehicles are fully modular so you can kind of break it down and put in a backpack right now and the kind of benefit of that is you can add like an extended battery pack and stuff like that in an additional range but wow so the seals could have these in a backpack they land in some gnarly area they send this thing out it gets them a bunch of data then they can it helps enhance the mission or they could make something go boom yeah yeah it's a possible use case or you could be a researcher hiking some remote lake and throw it in there and find Loch Ness Monster yeah yeah exactly it'd be incredible legacy for the company all right but save taiwan find the lochus monster exactly i mean either of these would be extraordinary accomplishments yeah i want to do one more question nelson before we let you go because you just mentioned size and i'm very curious because what you're currently building is cool because you can carry it around it looks like a torpedo but how big will gen 2 and gen 3 be of what vaden builds because i'm curious if this get to like half sub size?

27:47Yeah, we're not going crazy big, but more will be released next year. You guys can have me back and I'll tell you all about it next year. I'll have you back when you debut it. Listen, continued success with this. It's super important. And I think just, you know, as Americans, it's just a great feeling to know that there are teams who believe in protecting the country and protecting democracy. I know some people are, you know, we're all for peace, but peace through strength is, i think what this is going to take and we all know full well nukes uh you know are one level of deterrent but man if we get into one of these serious conflicts and we have to we need to have a different type of equipment for the same theater but it's going to be a very different movie isn't it yeah exactly we've been living in uh pox americana since you know since world war ii and we need to keep that going yeah yeah peace through strength uh and uh we'll see you soon nelson thank you so much for coming on thank you for having me on yeah continuous success oh and are you hiring right now we are hiring a ton of people what's the difficult position because you know we always do a good job of helping people find elite talent yeah i mean if you're an amazing uh inertial nav engineer guidance navigation pull engineer you know come email me you know literally there is somebody listening who knows somebody works in guidance and uh who would love love to live in the Northeast, Rhode Island, incredible place.

29:10Awesome. We have a great GMC team and looking to add some awesome folks to it. Awesome. I'll talk to you soon. Well done. Talk soon. All right. You want to build products that users love. And we all know product market fit is how you know you've built something special. And if you're hunting for product market fit, you need to understand your users better, right? How else could you boost engagement and drive more conversions for your product? Well, product analytics alone is not going to get you there. So let me tell you about Sprig. Sprig is a product experience platform that generates AI-powered opportunities to continuously improve your product at scale.

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30:25How nice. Sprig, S-P-R-I-G.com slash twist. I just love this new format we're doing where we get these entrepreneurs on real quick, talk about what they're doing, and then get right to the news. This format of interview, then getting into the news, we get to be super efficient for those of you who listen three times a week, four times a week. Yeah. It's funny though, because it always forces me to learn a lot while we get these people on, prep them, go through the graphics, figure out the technology. And then I do all this work, Jason, to know good questions to ask, to help explain to the audience and then what i do is i go off script and i try to explain ocean physics in the middle of my question about drag and make a complete horse's ass of myself no you don't you don't i mean one of the great things we can do here i think is you know get people information efficiently and and i think the american dynamism movement and if you listen to this pod you're just going to understand the trends because that's what we do for a living is just try to understand where the puck is going and skate to that place what you're seeing here is hardware is hard how However, venture capitalists are starting to learn which hardware categories could build a sustainable business.

31:38Now, if you're in the consumer space and you build something that's a commodity, like a webcam, it's going to be very hard for you to compete against what will eventually happen, which is the same factory in Shenzhen that makes your Nest camera is going to make literally a$29 version of what you're selling for$2.99. and they're going to take the bottom half of the market and they don't care if they have a 5 % margin and you're trying to operate with a 50 % margin, 30 % margin, et cetera. But VCs also know that platform companies that have customers with deep pockets and complex problems, those are more sustainable.

32:13And so I brought up density. We had them on the show recently, Andrew, with a hockey puck called the waffle that does people counting. Well, they're building an entire platform. When you build an entire platform and you solve a really important problem which is like understanding the density of space and how space is used this is a lot at stake your company will survive but when they started that company density alex they were at phil's coffee in san francisco just counting the number of people coming in and out and the potential application was knowing how busy it was which by the way google does now by just tracking how many phones go into a location you know it's not spyware exactly but it's not exactly not spyware they know how busy a place is based on the number of google maps people who just entered it so your your data is being put to good use so you know i don't know if you've ever seen that i i have the little chart on uh yeah how crowded is the place that was original vision of density and it got solved by you know uh the android operating system having google maps ubiquitous putting all that aside it is hardware is hard but if you pick the right customer and you have the right vcs they can help you manage it and that's what we're seeing here only 13 million to start a defense contractor oh yeah it's pretty amazing but when you think about it how many people do you need and that's the second trend i wanted to build up you know hardware is hard but is one trend okay we all know hardware is hard but there's a caveat there when it's when it's possible the second piece is commodification of sensor technology you know the cost of the batteries he's putting in there are really cheap because of electric vehicles and tesla tesla's vehicles and electric batteries and they are very cheap because of iphone batteries hitting scale and iphone batteries are very cheap because uh previous to those laptop batteries got better and better so you can watch laptop batteries give way to electric vehicles give way to iphone and now give way to these he doesn't have to do anything in gps batteries and you know with 3d printing and a team you can and we have a company desktop metal we're investors in that lets you do 3d printing of metals and all kinds of different fabrication all that technology is now getting to the point where prototyping this stuff and even building commercially viable things can happen at much smaller scales with less investment yeah and i think the margin point is super critical because your webcam example is great there's very little margin left there desktop computer monitors dell has crushed that very little margin no point going after that but when he told us that these same technologies cost$500 ,000 from a major defense contractor and they're doing for 75.

34:50That's a hell of a lot of margin to go attack. And what did Jeff Bezos say about margins? Well, they're opportunities if you're attacking them. So yes, your margin is my opportunity was the quote. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited about this, but let's get the hardware theme going. Yeah, please. Jason, you have found a plethora of interesting bits of technology in the last couple of days. We have compiled them and we're going to start with my second favorite, which is LG's new stretchable screen. Now, if you're not familiar with stretchable screens, it turns out these have existed for a while, Jason, but they only had like 20 % stretchability.

35:25Now LG's can do 50 % stretching from 12 to 18 inches. I think this is super cool, but I wonder how expensive it is to make, but I think it's awesome. You know, the reason I shared this was because they're really starting to make progress on monitors and uh screens and if you look at a foldable phone movement that went from being like science fiction to you know every time i go to a meeting especially in the middle east by the way people had these because there's um android is loved in the middle east one and number two there is a status culture um these are incredibly high-end consumers who love to buy the latest gadget they're incredibly tech savvy they're very plugged in and i noticed so many people had the i think it's um samsung and then the pixel had the ones that open up but then also have like a third screen on the front yeah i looked at that and i demurred when i saw the price like these were like two grand yeah that's a lot to you know get like another screen that you know whatever anyway putting that aside i think the foldable stuff it's kind of gimmicky but it's getting close to being interesting what i like about this is i believe this is going to open up wearables in a major way so whenever they show these the thing i think that's going to really be interesting is when you have a jacket or a bangle you know like you know what a bangle is yeah you're aware of a bangle yeah it's like a thick bracelet yeah yeah you know how you look at your watch you get this little tiny screen but imagine if your whole forearm give you information or you held it.

37:07I'm holding my palm up now. And so you and I are in a conversation. I've got my hands in front of my face right now for those listening. And I'm looking down at my arms. You're going to have AirPods in to talk to you. You might have glasses on to interpret the world and you might on your jacket. Why couldn't Apple make a jacket? They're really into fashion now, right? They made these very fashionable wristbands. They made a jacket that had an iOS screen where you could get your just your notifications and just swipe them back and forth. this is coming and you know what if you if you want to look it up there's military uh applications for a long time discrete communication covert communication without breaking reality communication and this is happening in airpods right now i told you the story of these airpod 4s have a game-changing feature of all game-changing features it says notification from alex from slack production room read it and i go like this and i nod and when i'm on my hike around the ranch in the morning when you post the docket for today i'd not and i it gets read to me oh this is fascinating i don't have to take my phone out of my pocket and i'm getting informed and i'm still doing my hike i think this would be the application for these is going to be really curving these onto either furniture or clothing you can have like a really a lot of interesting applications are coming for this technology i think it's ready to cars there people are going to wrap their car in these flexible screens.