Richard Robinson:

And we are back. Welcome, ladies and germs, boys and girls, to the Intercognitive Foundation Podcast. I am Rich Robinson, founding chair of the Intercognitive Foundation here in the warm embrace of Mother Ubud in Bali, Indonesia. And I am joined remotely from Silicon Valley — the inimitable, the indefatigable, the one and only — Mike Horton from GEODNET. Welcome, Mr. Horton.

Mike Horton:

Thanks for having me, Rich. It's great to get a chance to chat.

Richard Robinson:

Indeed, you know, I've always been a member and I would say perhaps even president of the Mike Horton fan club and GEODNET and what you've been building and I can't wait to share your origin story and the status and all the great anecdotes, your hero's journey around building GEODNET and your founding member story around Intercognitive and the future of the robot revolution. But let's get started. I know you're not afraid. You have an amazing background story. And I'd just love to hear your path to now as the co-founder and CEO of GEODNET, please.

Mike Horton:

Yeah, so I've been working on navigation, localization, and autonomy my whole career. Since being out of school, I was at UC Berkeley, started working on head tracking and hand tracking for virtual reality back in like 1995. Believe it or not. Yeah, people thought virtual reality was going to be a thing back then. There was actually a

Richard Robinson:

What? What?

People still do.

Mike Horton:

I know it's crazy, but that got me into the field of sensors and you know, luckily I realized there were a lot of other applications. So I built this thing, this crazy head tracking gadget that paired with display and did virtual reality. So my professor at the time, Richard Newton, the late Dean of engineering at UC Berkeley, he was a founder of Cadence Design Systems. So he was a CAD guy. So you had a vision, this world of being able to immerse yourself into, you know, an electronic circuit design or a semiconductor design. And see the gates and see the transistors and use that to visualize and simulate things that you would think of still being a little bit futuristic but that was his vision. So I got into virtual reality back when it was really, really early, early concept days, and found that while virtual reality was a long ways away, sort of using sensors for navigation, we could use that same type of thing to replace like mechanical gyros and aircraft sensors.

Started a company out of school called "Crossbow". It was a good success. We were the first company to get FAA approval for a solid-state replacement to mechanical gyros and aircraft. Sold that business, successfully started another company in mapping, started another company in optical gyros. So I've been in this field of kind of robotics and drones and automated equipment for a long time.

One of the big challenges in navigation is GPS, which is great for us finding the grocery store. It's not really accurate enough for automation for robotics and drones and control systems. It's three, five meters of accuracy in a lot of cases. Sometimes when things are really good, one meter. But also in the z-axis, it's always much worse. It can be in the height direction, you know, five or ten feet of error. So it's not good enough for a lot of things that you would want to do in a robotic world. But if you can correct GPS for these common errors that occur in GPS, which are due to the atmosphere and due to the orbits of the satellites and whatnot and timing issues, you can get centimeter precision. In fact, ultimately, you can even get sort of sub-centimeter precision out of it. To do that, you need these base stations like the one at your place in Bali.

Richard Robinson:

Really?

Mike Horton:

And the idea has been around for a long time to build up base stations, but no one's been able to, you need a lot of them. You really need one every like 20 kilometers. And so no one's been able to build up a global network of these things up until GEODNET. And GEODNET found the magic of sort of what Helium was doing with token incentives and applied it to this problem of positioning and has since built out the world's largest high-accuracy positioning network that's used.

Now, every day across a huge number of applications by 150-plus enterprise customers who need you know, high accuracy, high fidelity positioning for things like robotics and drones, as well as classical applications like civil survey and earthquake monitoring and precision agriculture. So it's been really a good journey. It's been a really great use case of tokenomics, a really great use case of blockchain that actually solves a problem that people have been trying to solve for a very long time. And you can use decentralization to do it very elegantly because we have people putting stations up all over the world. We have users all over the world that basically both the supply and the demand side for our network is quite decentralized. So people like yourself put up the base station. We've had now 20,000-plus, I think close to 21,000 stations installed, about four or five times larger than any other network ever constructed. as a foundation, it's a decentralized network. It doesn't go out and directly try to monetize the network. It sells the infrastructure to wholesalers and to resellers who then take it to the customer. So it's like a B2B2C. So in fact, the revenue generation is also quite decentralized because things that are important to surveyors in Romania are a little bit different than to say, you know, spray drone users in Brazil. It's a little bit different than say, traditional row crop farmers in Iowa, but they're all able to build on top of GEODNET and because there are strong standards in our space they're all able to use our infrastructure distributed out and then generate revenue for the network which in turn, you know, drives up kind of powerful loop in our tokenomics where revenue buys back and burns our token. So it's kind of a full-lifecycle Web3 thing and I don't think there are a lot of those out there. They're really kind of complete the whole loop and GEODNET has been able to really build on top of Web3 infrastructure to solve a global decentralized problem very elegantly.

Richard Robinson:

Amazing like what an incredible shining light in the whole system and I'm as you said not only a fan but a user and I have one here in my home in Bali. Can you, as a comparison, contrast, if there were previously a system built out what would those economics look like compared to this decentralized future?

I always thought that was fascinating to like how you really crack that code.

Mike Horton:

Yes.

Yeah, so the first thing that kind of got us going on this, so there are three founders of GEODNET. There's myself, Dr. Yi, our GNSS wizard, and David, our blockchain wizard. And you know, Dr. Yi and myself met before we met David, and he had that kind of vision. He had built a couple of RTK networks, big ones, Topcon's TopNet, he worked on, is maybe one of the very first ones that emerged. And he worked on a large one in Asia and he sort of realized that these are super useful but very hard to build and his thought was: "Hey, you know, the cost of the base station is really the issue because traditionally these base stations have cost about 20 grand, even up to 50 grand, and been heavy and big and whatnot." So our first sort of innovation was figuring out how to design one that had the same quality, the same, you know, signal tracking of all the satellite signals and all the properties that would be indistinguishable really from a $20,000 to $50,000 and get that down to a price point of like $700. And we figured that out and said, "We've got it, we figured it out." We built that first, and Yudan and I started to go out and talk to people like Public Storage, Crown Castle, which is a big cell tower operator, American Tower, and say, "Hey, can you put these things up for us? What will that cost?" And they were like, "Well, we need, you know, $5,000 per location. We need you to do city permit work. We need you to provide your own internet. And we need you to sign a three-year lease and this and that. And we calculated out how many we need in the United States." And we found out, "Oh sh*t! We need to raise like a billion dollars just for the United States." By the way, they wanted to take a long time. Like, "Well, this is going to take two to three years" because they're used to like working with telecom companies and planning out 4G and 5G infrastructure, which has been going on for over.

I don't know, a couple of decades and it's almost like state enterprise stuff and they're big public companies and all that. And we're like, "Well, there isn't nearly enough market." Even if we could raise the billion dollars, this was, three years ago before this whole robotics revolution was taking place. Robotics was not on everyone's mind three years ago. First of all, we're not going to be able to raise a billion dollars. And second of all, we can't pay for it even if we could, because there's not going to be enough revenue. We need these applications like self-driving and robotics to emerge. So that led us to say, "Sh*t! We can't get this done." And Yudan knew David, and he's in the blockchain community, he had been originally working on Bitcoin ASICs, and then he had set up some Ethereum validators. He built a chain very early on, did pretty well for a bit, and then kind of petered out. And we said, "David, what do you think of this idea?" And David's like, "Well, you know, I mine Helium." And he's like, "Helium has been really fun for me." He was making money, setting up. He had set up a station at his office and home and he had done well with Helium. He said, "Why don't we try the Helium concept?" So we said, "Okay, we'll take our low-cost hardware design, and we'll put tokenomics on top of it and see what the community thinks." So we took that before we took it to the Web3 community. We actually took it to the satellite navigation community and I presented a paper on it at the 2021.

Richard Robinson:

Hmm.

Mike Horton:

ION, which is an Institute of Navigation, GNSS meeting, which is a meeting of the kind of civilian experts in satellite navigation and crosses academia, industry, government, but really high end meeting like a lot of theory, you know, people working on their PhDs presenting very mathematical papers and whatnot. And I wasn't really sure like, "Hey, you know, you may hate this idea, guys, but let me present it anyway."

I think I put on there like high-risk idea at the bottom of all my slides. And lo and behold, I got best paper in the session that I was in, which was augmentation networks for GPS. And I could tell right away that people felt,

Richard Robinson:

Hmm.

Mike Horton:

"Wow, this was a risky idea to introduce a kind of crypto element, that it had a chance to solve a problem that hadn't been solved before." So with that encouragement of getting best paper, we started really trying to get David to code up a blockchain element for rewards. And we brought it out and the timing was good. We got a bunch of initial stations and we could see it was growing. We started getting interest and then the bear market hit and that slowed us down a little bit. But we still were able to deploy through and through. The market got a bit better and the network really started to grow quickly. Once we hit about 5,000 stations, we could say, "Hey, we're as big as any other network on the planet." Customers started to take us very seriously. That was only like a little over a year ago that we actually hit that, so the network has just blossomed. Yeah,

Richard Robinson:

And now you've quadrupled since then.

Mike Horton:

Quadrupled since then, and I think revenue is probably gone up a factor of 10 since then or more so once we started hitting critical mass more and more of the industry started to jump on because actually no one even competitors who'd set up networks before, it's really difficult, and they can see that we're a good infrastructure provider. The quality of the data is good and it's a more manageable, scalable way, being decentralized, lets things happen in parallel, lets things kind of self-heal, lets coverage adjust to the requirements in the marketplace by, you know, setting up things like higher incentive Hexes and things like that. And now we have a very good base business that's growing really well and starting to, I think, really lean in on the market areas that we think are the most exciting, which is, first and foremost, in drones, and I actually think of drones as a type of robotics, an aerial robot. But these two types of robots, both traditional robots and aerial robotics, I think are really poised for exponential growth over the next couple years and it's things like GEODNET's infrastructure as well as the things that Auki's doing with perception,

Richard Robinson:

Mmm.

Mike Horton:

and the raw hardware technology is there to just get all these things to come together. It's an iPhone-like moment, you know, you remember when the iPhone came out It was because people had tried it before but it wasn't ready. The screen wasn't good enough. The battery life wasn't long enough. The wireless networks weren't ready. The infrastructure wasn't there to make a good mobile internet, well when Steve Jobs came out with the iPhone the AT&T network was just there to have enough bandwidth to serve internet the screens were just good enough.

Everything came together at that moment to sort of start the mobile phone revolution. Well, we're at that same moment in time now in robotics where the sensors are there, the infrastructure is there, importantly, the AI and understanding of how to build large language models and do spatial AI and all this stuff is there, so that robotics now will have its moment. And the thing that's maybe a little different about robotics than say the mobile phone, the mobile phone was a big kind of productivity enhancer because you could work remotely and do things while you're waiting in line at the airport and things. But it also had some negatives too, like people played games and maybe spent more time on social media than we'd all like and whatnot. Robots are like all positive. I mean, these things just do. They don't really distract you. They just take care of things that you didn't really want to do.

Richard Robinson:

Mm-hmm.

Mike Horton:

So I think in that sense, this is like the glitch that Elon talks about. It is going to be pretty incredible. They just kind of take care of more and more things in the physical world and free us up to have more free time and think more, interact more, enjoy life And I'm really super excited.

Richard Robinson:

And fully, fully, fully agree.

I want to really go deep into that. But before I do, if you don't mind, you talk about how the dual-edged nature of phones. I think I want to, because I think it's still so extraordinary what you've built. It's really only been a year. Can we go from the user perspective? You talked about Hexes. So there's these hexagons that you have the entire world mapped around 20-kilometer radius, if I'm correct. talk about it from the user perspective.

Mike Horton:

All right.

Richard Robinson:

Let's say I'm a rice farmer here in Bali, and I have a big plot of land. There's a Hex that's empty in northern Bali, and I want to put a base station there. What does the economics look like for me as a user?

Mike Horton:

Yeah, it's really simple. You purchase a station from one of GEODNET station dealers.

Richard Robinson:

And how much is that now these days?

Mike Horton:

is $700 and you're able to set that up in a Hex and if it's not an incentivized Hex you're going to earn about a $1.20, $1.40 a day, something like that.

If you had gotten in earlier, you would have made a little bit easier ROI, but it's still about a year. Now, there are locations where we need coverage more. And I'm not sure Bali. I think we have very complete coverage now throughout sort of Jakarta and Bali. But there are other areas where we do need more coverage, and those will have some incentives in them to make the ROI go a little quicker. But once you get that in, you start earning GEOD. And the great thing about the GEOD thing is it's very passive.

Richard Robinson:

Hmm.

Mm.

Mike Horton:

You don't have to do anything you connect this station to the internet you install it on your roof. You start earning if your station is high quality and it's the first in the Hex it'll earn an NFT, which means you'll never be subject to any sort of, you know if another if your neighbor sets up a station, you're not going to lose any tokens, you kind of own that Hex. See your neighbor can certainly set up a station, he'll earn some, but he won't be able to, you know have that protection that our NFT provides that NFT also provides you governance rights,

Richard Robinson:

Hmm.

Mike Horton:

because our network is really governed by the station infrastructure and the long-term holders of GEOD in combination. So you just find an empty Hex and you get a station, deploy it, and we want those stations to be there for years. Customers call these things sometimes monuments, meaning that they want them, it's like, you know, this is a piece of infrastructure that that same farmer, if he's using a spray drone,

Richard Robinson:

Mmmmm!

Mike Horton:

or some kind of automated equipment that relies on high precision, he wants it to be there every time he goes out. He doesn't want that coverage to go away. And so our network is a very long-term network. You're going to be able to earn from that station from years and years to come. GEODNET's now baked into lots of geospatial infrastructure. So this is something that you can expect to be around for a long time.

Richard Robinson:

Beautiful, beautiful. So, you know, just for people in the West, the GDP per capita in Indonesia is 5K a year, but the average person in Bali makes about 200 bucks a month. So if you're a farmer, you might make 150 bucks a month. So this is a needle mover. It seems very inconsequential, you know, a buck and a half a day or something, but it actually really does justify putting this in there. And it really is something that is even a life changer for people. And then you also use the word 'self-healing,' which is beautiful. Like you've really reconfigured this entire industry. I met a guy named Alex Osterwalder, who wrote "The Business Model Canvas" as his PhD in Switzerland. And he talks about how just changing the business model can just fundamentally alter the business. And that's what you've done. Like you've actually just made some kind of minor tweaks in the scheme of things, but It has changed the economics so dramatically. And then you said in your talk that there was a risk, but yes, a lot of people look at crypto or blockchain as risky, but this is the most de-risked, least speculative, like most sexy use of blockchain. And I'm a blockchain fan. You're burning and you're buying back from the profits. Wow, I think I want to just pause here for a little bit and let people... really kind of digest how incredible it is.

Mike Horton:

Yeah, I don't know why there are not more projects that have sensible tokenomics, but we certainly are one that, you know, I've realized over time when I got into the Web3 aspect, I thought, you know, all these things must be good and well thought through. that's not the case. But ours is, you know, we have a

Richard Robinson:

No! Certainly not.

Mike Horton:

very rational emission schedule and then the tokens are repurchased. The foundation is just a connector between the users of

Richard Robinson:

Mm-hmm.

Mike Horton:

the network and the hosts that deploy the stations. And its role is to make people aware of the GEODNET option, help people integrate into their existing infrastructure. But a lot of the people that use GEODNET are, you know, totally unaware of the crypto aspect. But when they pay, they're buying back and burning tokens. And so the token is completely deflationary. We started off with a billion tokens and allocated between investors, teams, and the mining pool. There will never be more tokens issued. And every time, you know, a user uses the network, they're repurchasing tokens off the open market and burning them. So the tokens are, there's already been about three and a half percent contraction in the token supply just in the early phases of use.

Richard Robinson:

Hmm.

Mike Horton:

But they'll never be, you know, more GEOD minted. It's a deflationary protocol in its nature. And the more that is issued out to miners also halves. So every year, it really becomes more and more, dollars of revenue per token every day. So every single day, that revenue base, first of all, the revenue base is growing. But even if the revenue base wasn't growing,

Richard Robinson:

Beautiful.

Mike Horton:

through the burning mechanism, you're allocating more and more, you know, revenue for each token and the network every day, and then the revenue is growing. So it's a very powerful model that redistributes the earnings from the network and the utility from the network, backed directly, 80% of it, back to those that are operating the network. And the remaining 20% is just used to support the foundation's needs, in terms of marketing, some AWS infrastructure to glue things together and whatnot. So I think, I don't know why there are not more crypto projects like GEODNET. I really don't. It's a...

Richard Robinson:

Well, because there are so few bright lights, like besides Helium, you know, but this, you are a pioneer and you are going to inspire many, many more in the future. I think this is such a beautiful use case. And you think the 20 millionth Bitcoin was just mined and there's a million left and it'll take like 100 years to basically mint those out and to mine those. And that's, you know,

Mike Horton:

That's it.

Yeah.

Richard Robinson:

that's a terrific foundation, upon which to build things and you're just getting started. So on one hand, you have all of this amazing data. And at the very other end of the spectrum, there's drones, there's robots, and then there's literally, you know, and figuratively, all these moving parts in between to be able to glue together that data with the robots. And I think that's where this Intercognitive Foundation idea was spawned between you and Nils, and I'd love to hear that origin story and your thoughts around that.

Mike Horton:

Yeah, so there's a bigger picture with blockchain and robotics that we couldn't fully address and I don't think any one project can fully address but, Web3 really has many incredible use cases in robotics to solve I think really thorny problems that can't be solved other ways. So people always think of like, well really the primary use case for crypto is financial systems as a currency, as a trading platform, is a speculation platform. But I think of it as a way to decentralize things and have a fair and reasonable way to operate infrastructure. And so within robotics, I feel Web3 and crypto solve a lot of core problems. One is infrastructure, and that's the piece GEODNET certainly provides. And I think on a day-to-day basis, that's a lot of what Auki's trying to do with the Real World Web, is to help, you know, build up data sets and infrastructure to power robotics. And I think that's a great base business. I think there's more to it than that. Take a couple of cases where Web3 can help in robotics solve problems like, geofencing is great or control of the robot, responsibility of the robot. So You know, a robot, if it comes into a building, it's got all these sensors on it. Let's say it's a humanoid. It's walking around. It's got cameras. It's got LIDAR. It's got a microphone, and it can open doors and go in things. So, you know, something needs to be able to set policies for that robot that don't allow it to say, "You know, go in the girls restroom and take a bunch of videos in there." And nobody wants that. If it's in a government building, nobody wants it to go in rooms that might have secret data and start scanning, you know, pages in and sharing those on the internet.

want

Richard Robinson:

You don't want it to be like a porch pirate with Amazon, right? So yeah.

Mike Horton:

You don't want it to be a porch pirate. So there needs to be a way to have these controlled. And who's going to control that? Is it going to be a single company? Is it going to be a government? And how is that? Is it going to be transparent? And so something like blockchain can set up those policies through smart contracts that enforce what a robot can do here and there. And everyone can see that. And you could have a layered approach. So there's a very elegant implementation of that kind of infrastructure with robotics that I think is a use case that requires some standardization. It's something that I'm really excited that Intercognitive will look at. There is also like, this is a notion of blockchain being open source, and it being a capability that embraces open source so that you can have an open source financial systems for these robots to exchange value. So if they need to exchange any kind of data or value between the two of them, you can use this agentic economy to power that.

Richard Robinson:

Hmm.

Mike Horton:

And then there needs to be accountability. Occasionally the robot, you know, AI does make mistakes. It hallucinates. It does things it shouldn't do. And when you have something as physical, it might, you know, actually do something kind of wrong. And where we need to be able to trace that back in a way that is not dependent on a company, because companies like to cover things up. And a great example of that is

Richard Robinson:

Mm-hmm.

Mike Horton:

Cruise. Cruise Automation, which was GM's self-driving business in San Francisco trying to do a robotaxi along the lines of Waymo, they had an accident in San Francisco where they kind of quasi-ran over a homeless person. The homeless person was doing something very strange and they hadn't trained on that scenario before. They kind of dragged him around a bit. Now he didn't die. He was injured and it really wasn't that bad an accident. It's something to kind of be expected. I mean, this robot, the robotic car had never seen this condition before.

Richard Robinson:

Mm.

Mike Horton:

It didn't, you know.

Richard Robinson:

I like when I walk around San Francisco, I'm like, "What's that person going to do?"

I'm like, "I'm not really sure."

Mike Horton:

There's a Exactly. There's a lot of kind of unusual behavior cases in San Francisco and,

Richard Robinson:

Let's walk to the other side of the street or lock them up. Right?

Mike Horton:

you know, Yep.

Richard Robinson:

sure.

Mike Horton:

So the little hadn't trained on that yet. Didn't know how to respond to it. So I don't think it was such a bad incident. But what was bad is, you know, good old company behavior.

"Oh sh*t! This happened. We don't want to tell anyone about it. So let's cover it up."

Richard Robinson:

Hmm.

Mike Horton:

So they covered it up and they didn't do what they were contractually obligated to do with to get their self-driving permit. So when you get a self-driving permit to run vehicles, you make an agreement that says you're going to disclose, you know, autopilot disconnects and any incidents that you have. You're going to report those back to the authorities so that they can review if maybe they need to stop, you know, stop and regroup and because there's a safety issue. Well, they didn't want to do that because that would be, you know, bad. They'd miss their numbers or what have you. And so they covered it up. Of course, it came out. And then, you know, when it came out, the NTSB and whatnot, they actually pursued criminal charges and went after the company as a criminal actor for lying and covering things up. And so that, as they should, And so that caused Cruise,

Richard Robinson:

As they should, yeah.

Mike Horton:

to really have to pull all the vehicles off the roads, regroup. They actually exited the market out of San Francisco. I think they're continuing to work on it some back in Detroit, but it was a $1 billion plus write-off in like the next quarter for General Motors. All of this could have been solved had the sensor data and these types of things been reported on the blockchain because there would just be a record of it. It happened. This is encoded. It's replicated, validated,

Richard Robinson:

Mm-hmm.

Mike Horton:

you know, and there wouldn't be any debate. The company would see it. The government would see it. Everyone would see it just like a transaction like you see when two people make a

Richard Robinson:

And that should be shared. Like

Mike Horton:

that should be shared, right? Exactly.

Richard Robinson:

kind of stuff should be shared like Waymo and Tesla. They should, let's all get these edge cases and share them together."

Just kind of like if you're cheating in a casino and you show up to another casino and then they're like greet you at the door.

"Hello, Mr. Robinson. You're very welcome to gamble here but not to count cards with Blackjack." And you're like, "How do you know?" Because they share all that stuff together, right? And then it's immutable and on-chain. That's interesting. I hadn't even thought of that.

Mike Horton:

Yeah.

Yeah, So I think this is like, these are the cases that Intercognitive can really go after, that bring a ton of value because what we don't want, and this is where Nils's vision, I think is particularly incredible, is we don't want to repeat what's happened in Web2, where all your data is in these clouds and you don't know where it goes and you don't really have control over your life.

I mean, that's a very annoying thing. I feel sometimes very annoyed that I can't do anything without sort of a Gmail login or whatever it is. And I know all my data is being used and monetized and whatnot. But it's just kind of a nuisance level in, you know, Web2 and traditional AI. When you have physical AI and these things have power, physical mechanical power, they can open your door or they can drive your car. It becomes like centralized control, becomes really almost weaponized and you don't want, you know, geez, Tesla's decided that Optimuses should all figure out. I don't know what people, what they're doing in their, in their private lives.

Richard Robinson:

Hmm

Mike Horton:

And the robots all turn on at night and go open drawers. I mean, it really could happen. This isn't like sci-fi stuff. These things are capable machines. And we know how good AI is. I mean, who doesn't use AI to think through things, to write things, to code, all this stuff? It's powerful. It's very powerful. And they're going to be able to work together, which is another area for Intercognitive to really work on is interoperability. And we can talk about that in a second as well. You need some kind of accountability. You need a justice system. And I think the blockchain has the infrastructure to do that in a way that is fair and reasonable. And you're not just counting on, you know, a handful of big companies and the government.

Richard Robinson:

Yeah, are we afraid of intelligence or are we really afraid of genuine stupidity, which is people trying to cover up that Cruise incident or whatever else? And I think putting things on-chain and having smart contracts and immutable states within that is like, and also you talked about how your entire company rests on this decentralized business model, which was something that people thought was maybe sketchy or risky.

Mike Horton:

data.

Richard Robinson:

But it can be, it's neutral. It can be used really for good. Yes. So,

Mike Horton:

It's neutral and very reliable. And it's very scalable. Like if Mike Horton falls off the surface of the earth, GEODNET will keep on running just the way it is. I mean, this is what you want. This is what you want.

Richard Robinson:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. so with robotics or AI, a lot of people are worried about some sort of monolithic, Terminator-esque centralized AI. But if we're able to decentralize and to have control and put things immutably on-chain, and that can give us the ability to basically...

Mike Horton:

keep them in check. Yeah,

Richard Robinson:

keep them in check indeed. So

Mike Horton:

no, I think it's a good thing.

Richard Robinson:

We spoke about like you're actually with drones doing things in the wild with robots because of course drones are indeed robots that can magically unicorn like fly through the air. And we talked about, not theoretical but practical challenges you have with interoperability because people are starting to deploy these and then the switching costs or being able to integrate them. Can you talk about that challenges?

Mike Horton:

Yes, indeed. And I think that's super important aspect for Intercognitive to go after is interoperability between robotics platforms. When you get a robot or a drone, you end up investing quite a lot in setting it up for your use. So let's take the case of a robotic lawn mower. You need to go map your yard and you need to build that thing. Even a Roomba builds a map and you buy a new Roomba. It's got to redo that whole

Richard Robinson:

Oh,

Mike Horton:

So yeah,

Richard Robinson:

oh, interesting, even at that level.

Mike Horton:

at that level.

Richard Robinson:

Oh wow.

Mike Horton:

And you go buy a competitive machine. It's going to have a different way of doing things. It's not going to be able to exchange data. So that same problem that Nils is trying to solve of

Richard Robinson:

Mmm. Mmm.

Mike Horton:

you know, he's trying to solve it first within sort of an environment of a retail store, where a robot goes in and it knows where things are. But that's also the same kind of key underpinning of like robots being able to exchange data with each other, or being able to transfer data from one manufacturer's robot to another. So if I've set up my yard and it's all perfect, and I have a robotic lawnmower and it's mowing my yard, I probably invested if I have a bigger property, six, eight, 10 hours of time to get all that set up.

Machine breaks, I go to the store and you know instead of buying the Navimow one, I buy a Sunseeker, which are both brands that are RTK mowers out there. Now I've got to redo everything.

I got to go rebuild all that. Why can't we have

Richard Robinson:

Mmm, and what if you're a

Mike Horton:

Yeah.

Richard Robinson:

What if you're a university or some sort of resort? then it becomes yes

Mike Horton:

And you have a huge, it's a massive effort and now you're locked in, you're locked in while the manufacturers may think that that's all great, I actually don't think that that works out well for them at all because these systems all have certain deficiencies and gaps. And really that then just becomes, "Well, I can't do what I need to do and so it just slows my adoption down." So I think robots being able to share data formats, first of all, they can team together, swarm, do all those types of things, that's incredibly powerful. But also just basic things like we have all these standards. It used to be like you couldn't open a Microsoft Doc in Google Docs, but all that stuff sort of works now on the normal web. There's pretty decent interoperability and standards. This stuff is at ground zero in the world of robotics and nothing is really compatible. There's no shared standards, there's no notion of any of these things just because it's so new. So everything is very, very vendor- and manufacturer-specific. And I think people should see that you want a kind of independent group like Intercognitive helping to drive these things. And it's just very early still, but that's a direction I think we really need to go.

Richard Robinson:

Certainly, if you look at the Web3 space, it's really ridiculous that I need to be able to get Ethereum so that I can have gas fees to be able to do something else. Like, I want that all abstracted away. "Oh, you're clicking on this site, you're on an Amazon Web Services hosted site, and you're going to an Azure hosted site, and now you're going to a Google Cloud hosted site, you know, you're going to have to, yeah.

What? I don't know or care. I want all that in the background and I want some elegant Web2-like experience for my blockchain, Web3, and ultimately for my robotics." We talked yesterday, I did a podcast with Nils and we talked about this app store in the future to be able to like, "Hey Tank, I need to be able to fly a Blackhawk."

"Okay, let's go, right?" Or "I know Kung Fu."

Like it should all be completely shareable and interoperable. And that is the core mission of Intercognitive Foundation to make the physical world accessible for AI. Ding! And thank you for silver-pilling me in, you guys said take this blue pill and go back to your b*llsh*t Web2 life or take this silver pill and join us in the robot revolution and help, to make the physical world accessible for AI. And I took the whole jar of pills. I took a silver IV and I've been marinating in it and it's been absolutely delicious. I know that this is going to be the biggest industry in the history of mankind. And there's just so many more things that are going to happen just this year, but by 2030, it's going to be crazy. So let's talk a little bit about that. What you see in addition kind of like wax futuristic for us, if you don't mind, on this robot revolution in the not too distant future.

Mike Horton:

Yeah, so I think of the robot world in two big buckets, and they're both going to be incredibly successful and I think of it in the terms of utility robots and humanoid robots. So utility robots are things that are going to do things that I think are very repetitive tasks, sometimes dangerous tasks, things that you can kind of really define and you're going to specialize in. So drone delivery would be a utility robot. Robotic mowers would be, the original Roomba was sort of like the OG utility robot and I think those are going to continue to thrive and price points of these things just keep coming down and down to mass adoption and like you have four or five iPhone devices or more per family. You're going to have a whole lot of utility robots. So that's the first bucket and then the second bucket is the humanoids and the humanoids are a bit more like your car. You're not going to necessarily have a whole bunch of them maybe you have one or two. But these humanoids can do a much wider variety of tasks and really, you know, a big part of infrastructure in your life that they can go, you know, they can go grocery shopping for you, they can get into the car, your car will self-drive, I don't think the robot will drive your car in the near future, but the car will self-drive the grocery store, it'll get out, go get stuff, put it in the car and come back for you, it will, you know, do household tasks that a Roomba can't do. I do see occasionally these videos of the humanoid vacuuming. Like, I think the wide variety of robotic vacuums can solve that problem. But there's a whole lot of things, whether it's cooking a meal, whether it's keeping your kids busy, maybe it's playing with your dog. You know, there are a lot of household things that you're going to, you're going to want a humanoid for it to represent you. And then there's all kinds of work things that they're going to do too. So that's how I look at the world. I think they're both going to be incredibly successful. Obviously the utility robots are starting to come into their prime now and I think the humanoids still have a couple more years of R&D to go. But not far, I mean there are going to be a lot of deployments of humanoids this year even and Nils at Auki is leading the way and figuring out kind of real use cases that make a ton of sense that are maybe pre-consumer but ultimately, I think families are going to have just like they have a couple cars, you're going to have a couple of humanoids, and just like you have 10 iPhone devices or gadgets, Android devices, whatever you're going to have, you know, 10 or so utility robots doing stuff and that you're going to take a lot of the day-to-day burden out of our lives. A lot of the physical work out of our lives.

Richard Robinson:

You know, I grew up in a very working class neighborhood in greater Boston. You know, my dad was a baker, my mom was a secretary, and we saw Alice from The Brady Bunch on TV and we're like, "Wow! imagine you have like a maid that could like take care of you. That's incredible." We didn't even know anybody that knew anybody that had help. And here in Bali, we have a lot of help. We over-employ. We have a couple of people, it's their first job ever, and we overpay and give them plenty of breaks. I worked in service at my dad's restaurant, and I know it's a wonderful profession. So the point there is we have this kind of concierge lifestyle here in Bali. My wife and I, both work from home. We can do a lot of self-care. We can spend a lot of time with the family. We can really work our faces off, and we can contribute more. We do a lot more charitable stuff and also some sort of volunteering and teaching and I'm living that lifestyle that I think will be ubiquitous within ten years. We're going into this age of abundance. I truly believe that will free up people to be able to lean into things that are that are more important for them and to connect and collaborate and create more.

Mike Horton:

Absolutely.

Richard Robinson:

It's beautiful. Hey, Mike Horton, co-founder and CEO of GEODNET. Thank you so much. I am an even bigger fan if that's possible, hearing more about your hero's journey and what you're working on. And I am so filled with gratitude to be able to be founding chair of the Intercognitive Foundation. I just absolutely love learning and being the no false modesty, the dumbest guy in the room and just using my inner golden retriever to be able to create a space to connect people and to, you know, do this research and standard-setting and awareness-raising and collaboration. And I absolutely love it. And thank you very much. And I'm going to say it to all of you listening. If you're driving your car and you get your hands on the steering wheel, or if you're in like a public bathroom stall, I know some of you are, I don't care. Put your hands together. Even though it's weird and dangerous and maybe a little creepy.

Mike Horton:

No, no, no.

Mm-hmm.

Richard Robinson:

That's all right. Mike Horton, everybody. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Horton:

Thanks for having me, Rich. Great to catch up.

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