Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Self Driving Groceries With The WSJ's Christopher Mims @mims

Episode Date: January 27, 2019

One of my favorite people to read is the Wall Street Journal tech columnist Chris Mims. We talked about his piece this week positing that email was back, baby! And I read a piece he did a while back about the new way of constructing super energy efficient homes, but when I did the email piece and remembered he did a piece recently about how I’m more likely to get a burrito delivered to me for lunch than to have my self-driving wager come in by commuting to work in a robot car, I knew it was time to hit up Chris to come on the pod. He’s a listener! This episode has a full transcript. The posts we discuss: The Hot New Channel for Reaching Real People: Email Why Your Ice Cream Will Ride in a Self-Driving Car Before You Do  Sponsors: Squarespace.com/listen Risk! Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another tech meme ride home bonus episode. I'm Brian McCullough. One of my favorite people to read every single week is the Wall Street Journal tech columnist Chris Mims. We talked about Chris's piece this week positing that email was back, baby. And I read a piece that he did a while back about the new way of constructing super energy efficient homes. But when I did the email piece this week and remembered that he did a piece recently about how I'm more likely to get a burrito delivered to me for lunch from a self-driving vehicle than to have my self-driving wager come true by commuting to work myself in a robot car, I knew it was time to hit Chris up to come on the

pod. And since he's a regular listener, he happily agreed. Now let's talk to the Wall Street Journal's Chris Mims. So excited to be here, long-time listener, first time. Subject. Well, look, having having said that, I hope you won't be offended if I start like this, but I want to start with your email piece from this week, which by the way, I think I even titled one of my episodes like emails back, baby. But forgive me for starting like this. Can we be sure that email is back and this isn't a false positive? I mean, because of what you and I do, you know, everyone that we know and their mother has started an email newsletter in the last 18 months or so so do you think that email is back for normal people too or are we just noticing it because of what we

do think that email is back in the sense that direct mail is back which by the way is literally true if you talk to mailchimp about it um where these channels never really go away and if you think about all of marketing as just reaching people whenever and wherever their attention is available unless there is a wholesale shift

away from a channel, people are always going to return to it and find a way to make money off of it. And I think that email is back in the sense that people on the editorial side, I mean, you know, axios, quartz, the skim,

and then years before, thrill list, discovered that if you create something that's thoughtful, that is reaching people directly, that they're seeking out in their inbox, that that's incredibly high value. I think it's, you know, radio is back in the avatar of podcasts. Right. And I think that's the sense in which it is back. If you look at the numbers, you know, the number of emails that get sent every year globally, like it keeps inching up, you know, how much of that is just, here's your receipt is not clear.

But, yeah, I mean, I'm definitely in such. the same bubble that you are. But, you know, when I see that somebody like Benedict Evidence of Andreessen Horowitz tweets once a week, you know, my newsletter is out, please join 110,000 other people in reading it. I think, huh, you know, he's an influential guy. And people are clearly consuming content in this format and enjoying it. Right.

And you mentioned what's it, Jet, how do you say his name Jed Legume, Legum, or what? whatever. Yeah, another successful newsletter guy. But, okay, so there were two things that I thought of when I was reading this. Like, number one, is this possible now because, number one, as we're talking about, like people are suddenly miraculously willing to pay for content and this whole subscription model and Patreon model, is it maybe, especially for the newsletter part of it, is it, Is it that? Is it that people finally have been cultureated or whatever to pay for stuff that they like and seek it out? I mean, a lot of these newsletters keep in mind are free, and a lot of the stuff that is being used for marketing purposes is, of course, no cost to anybody.

But in terms of the substack phenomenon, the subscription newsletter phenomenon, definitely people are willing to pay for it. You know, everybody talks about Ben Thompson and Stratakery. I mean, he makes between one and $10 million a year, he won't say, on an email newsletter. And the top paid email newsletter creator on substack makes north of $400,000 a year. I mean, that's unusual, right? Like, they're the head of this very long tail. But I do think with the Patreon phenomenon, I mean, I think I heard on your podcast, what is it? Patreon is going to hand out half a billion dollars next year?

And, you know, we're all used to subscribing to stuff. And yeah, I think that's a big part of it. We're ready to pay for content. And I think part of the reason we're ready to pay for content is the stuff that's free is not as good. Well, then the other thing that I thought that I didn't see in your piece is I wonder if this is only possible because spam is not as bad as it used to be. There in no way is spam solved. But the, you know, even 10 years ago, like going to your inbox was, you know, you know, just such a horrible experience.

And like, I wonder if, you know, because we're all sort of on Gmail-ish like things now and spam is sort of tamed a bit, I wonder if maybe as you're describing, going to your inbox is more pleasurable suddenly, fascinatingly, than going to other things like feeds. For sure, I saw somebody raving today about the, whatever, the AIR or the ML that they have put into Outlook,

which is getting better at not just sorting out spam, but just sorting out spammy PR pitches, for example. And obviously, Gmail is good and very trainable in terms of getting stuff into those different tabs. And I saw one study that said, you know, when that rolled out, that actually increased people's engagement with that stuff. Because now, oh, thank you for organizing it for me. And, you know, one click unsubscribe to all the junk.

And, you know, I'm only getting the stuff that I actually care about. I mean, email is this, you know, Taylor Lorenz's excellent piece about inbox and in the Atlantic notwithstanding, if you pay attention to and use email, and I think everybody who's a professional has to, unless your company is entirely slack, but then I don't see how you deal with vendors, the time that you put into email can make it a really, you know, exquisite tool. And I don't think we have that same power with, you know, social media being controlled by these algorithms. Like, you know, it just email gives you all the knobs. And if you care about communication, you will use your powers like an audio engineer to adjust all those switches

and make sure you're getting the stuff you want. Right. So those are the other two parts that obviously you touched on that totally rang true for me. So number one, it's almost like you have more control in email so you can almost, if you do a little bit of work, you can self-select for pleasure as opposed to just put your head under the deluge of crap on the feeds and the social media. But as you pointed out, it's also, again, going to the other side of the table. If, you know, we all were sold this bill of good about social media that it's all about amplifying your message and it's broadcasting your message or whatever. But the reality is, is that you're at the mercy of the algorithms that can throttle your reach or in the worst case scenario,

you know, shadow ban your message or something like that. So funny enough, good old email is actually still a tried and true way to reach people with your message completely unfettered? Yeah, I wouldn't say unfettered because definitely I heard from a lot of email marketers after writing this and they were like, well, it's the perennial debate, more email or better email. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and that said, like if you have your sort of dedicated readers, you can reach them directly and consistently. And I think most important is once you've built up that channel, that is not going to change. Whereas with Facebook, you know, you play by their rules and next week there's an

algorithm overhaul. And it's the same thing with SEO, which is just a constant game of cat and mouse. Every time you have that algorithm interceding, you can build, you know, a business on a particular channel and then just get smacked down when the channel changes. And that has happened to marketers, of course, who continue to adapt. But obviously, this is also why BuzzFeed just had to be. the layoff 15% of their staff. It's because of Facebook algorithm changes. It's why Upworthy went away before then. It's why Mashable imploded after its attempt to pivot to video.

Every single time that algorithm changes, you know, people are caught on their back foot and that just doesn't happen with email. Email is that it's a hard channel to build. It takes a long time. It's slow. But it's like compound interest. It just gets bigger and bigger and it's never going away. But then as coming, bringing back to the consumer side of the table,

as you pointed out, which was totally true and so obvious once you pointed it out to me, the unsubscribe link at the bottom of emails actually works. And again, you know, as compared to putting your face in front of the fire hose of a social media stream, if you, the unsubscribe link is a quiet hero because if there's annoying memes or messages or topics on social media, it's harder to funnel that stuff out and organize and things like that. you can get annoying stuff to shut up in your email inbox. Right. And it's not going to get offended that you unfollowed or muted it for sure.

Right. Yeah, it works. It works. I mean, there's no, it's funny. Somebody told me, oh, I thought that was an industry standard. And I was like, no, it's the market working for once where, you know, if enough of those emails get marked spam, the company sending them have problems with ISPs just automatically marking their, marketing or whatever emails a spam and then real or dedicated readers not getting it.

So there's this incredibly powerful incentive of staying on those white lists that drives what for 9 out of 10 emails is a very straightforward unsubscribe process. And for the 1 out of 10 where it's a hassle and it's like, hey, okay, well, you got to log in with a password that you don't remember. And it's going to take you five minutes just unscribed to this email. really the unsub-sung hero isn't the unsubscribe button. It's that little mark is spam button. Well, again, it's not solved, but the fact that your inbox is a lot more manageable than it used to be 10 years ago or so.

Okay, so while I've still got you, let me shift gears real quick to another piece that I don't think I talked about on the show, but it has been something that has gotten on my radar lately. Your piece was titled, Why Your Ice Cream Will Ride and a self-driving car before you do. and if a long time listener to show, you know my ongoing winter self-driving car is going to be real in my life sort of wager. But it's gotten on my radar that, okay, I'm going to get, I'm likely to get a burrito delivered to me for lunch sooner than I'll be able to commute to work in a self-driving car. We just had yesterday, Amazon, there was a headline that they're testing their Amazon Scout on Real Roads in Washington State. So in your piece, it's interesting. It's almost the reverse of like the self-driving car thing in the sense that it's simpler.

Like, you don't have to worry. Like who cares if your burrito gets a little must or whatever as opposed to someone being hurt? So you can do things like put safety on the outside as opposed to safety on the inside. I found that fascinating. Yeah. And there's a federal standard. And, you know, there are state standards. as well for low-speed vehicles, you know, anything that's 25 miles per hour and less,

you know, it can't go on roads generally where the speed limit is over 35 miles per hour. Those vehicles are not subject to the safety standards, which all automobiles are subject to. And that's, you know, people say, oh, cars just all look the same. Look, there's two reasons for that. One is fuel standards, demand that they be aerodynamic, roughly teardrop shaped. And then number two is safety standards demand that they have another totally contrary design constraint to make them better and stronger and everything. At the intersection of the two of those is every blob-shaped car ever. And this standard lets you evade that completely.

So you have a company like Nero, which creates this, you know, 25-mile-per-hour thing that can drive on roads. It only carries groceries. You know, it can sacrifice itself in the event of a crash. everybody you talk to who does autonomous on-road delivery talks about that possibility. The thing should just atomize if a butterfly lands on it because you want to save the pedestrian or the car. And then you have the on sidewalk delivery, right? Like you've got Starship. Like they're very popular in the UK in the in the like one town where they are. And they just rolled out on a university campus in the past week. And I think and then you talk about. And then you talk about

to Postmates, for example, and it's so fascinating because part of the reason that this all works is it's just an easier kind of autonomy. If a Postmates robots freezes up and stops in the middle of the sidewalk, nobody dies, and a remote monitor can, you know, kind of log on and help it navigate whatever situation it couldn't handle, whereas, you know, if you're trying to drive human beings on a road at 40 miles per hour, and there's construction, and it's a challenge even for a human to navigate that, what does your autonomous vehicle do? You know, that's why I think that, you know,

Waymo is the standard bear here, and they're kind of hinting at, well, you might never have, like, level four autonomy in our lifetime. The most you can get is, like, most of the way there, and then you've still got to have a human who can at least, you know, over a remote connection,

jump in in situations that are that are hairy or difficult. Like it's just so much easier to move a thing to the point that I think that the real barrier here is going to be that, you know, American cities, streets and sidewalks are just not that friendly to pedestrians, to cyclists, to people in wheelchairs. and, you know, that's what we need to make this delivery really work. Like, nothing is going to help Starship Robotics more than the Americans with Disabilities Act in terms of making cities accessible to those robots. Okay, so that's because you said something really interesting in the piece about that, too. So, you know, again, I'm imagining I'm here in Dumbo and, you know, it's cobblestone roads and terribly maintained sidewalks.

But then in your piece, you pointed out, which rings. true to me that like in suburban environments, I'm thinking of like, you know, I grew up in Florida, like sidewalks are super underutilized pieces of infrastructure. So again, it's the bias of where I live, you know, but maybe the infrastructure is already there in large swaths of the country, possibly, because sidewalks are built and then a lot of people don't drive or walk and run on them all the time. So maybe in suburbs, this can be real sooner than we think. I think that's possible. I think the challenge there, of course, is the lower, the density, the harder it is to make this really work and be profitable.

And, you know, we just won't know. And there's so much math that is going to go into making that work. And it's going to be so weirdly contingent on all kinds of other factors. Like how close is the nearest fully automated warehouse? Because don't forget that you have Kroger, America's largest grocery company still, you know, has an exclusive contract with Okato, which makes fully automated or nearly fully automated grocery warehouses. And, you know, I guarantee you that in the next two years you will see an integration between a fully or a partially automated warehouse company of some kind and, you know, some delivery service, whether it's Uber, or Postmates, you know,

at some fully or partially autonomous delivery service. And, you know, what efficiencies pop up there? And there's so many different models. So just the number of different network topographies is mind-boggling. Like, imagine if fully automated small local warehouses turn out to be viable. And then that gets everybody in Starship robotics range of, you know, an online-only grocery, what happened? Or like all the corner markets or gas stations become those sort of like node delivery warehouse sort of things.

Yeah. Right. So hybrid retail. So it's an actual store with this thing bolted on. Target is doing that. Walmart is doing that. Amazon is clearly trying to do that with Whole Foods. And then you have these sort of mixed modality delivery options.

So what Postmates is doing with their robot is they will actually get the good. from a dense urban area, like imagine Market Street in San Francisco where traffic is awful. And so they will utilize the sidewalk there to get goods onto Postmates robots, which will then all arrive at the same time at the vehicle of a human driver who's then going to take those deliveries to some far-flung suburban location. So don't forget that the robot itself doesn't have to make the entire trip. So when you just imagine all the potential combinations of business models and types of robots on-road, off-road, you know, eventually flying drone type delivery stuff, like it is truly, truly mind-boggling. Like, it is going to take us decades or centuries to explore that full parameter space and come up with a totally new model for e-commerce and delivery.

I'm just even imagining like so your usual, your UPS truck, as you see now, just rolls up to a location and boom, like 30 different little churricular. children run off to actually make the deliveries on their own and that sort of thing. Real quick, just give me a quick sketch of this. Is there a Waymo of this space, or is Waymo the Waymo of this space? Or are there people that are doing this exclusively, or is anybody that's in autonomy kind of dabbling in this as well? They're all dabbling. Obviously, everybody, you know, who has an autonomous vehicle is like,

Maybe it could be used for deliveries too. You know, the ones that are, I count at least a half dozen, what I would call full stack robot delivery companies. And I can't remember all, you know, it's like ones you've heard of like Starship and Nero and ones you haven't, like AutoX. So, you know, which one of this is going to be the waymo of this? I have no idea. I mean, definitely Starship has an early lead in terms of the on sidewalk stuff and Nero does it. well, but it's just, it's absolutely not clear, you know, if there, there could be some really fast moving second movers in this space, partly because I think the autonomous technology is just,

that's going to come down in price so fast. You're going to, you know, all these enabling technologies like solid state LIDAR and just, you know, all the stuff that NVIDIA is doing was shrinking and making more power-sipping their systems for doing autonomy. You could just, you know, see this, this Cambrian explosion of different companies trying to do it like you saw with scooters. Well, the funny thing is, every time I visualize this, like you just made me visualize the UPS truck and then there's, you know, these 30 little bots that go out instead of driving around to make all the deliveries, it always reminds me of the Death Star and the original Star Wars, those little box bots that are always running around, running into people's ankles and

things like that. It'll be hilarious. Like, if that actually, if that actually, Actually, so then, right, if five years from now there's a little, little Death Star like box bots running around on the sidewalks that you've got to worry about tripping over, like I'll find that hilarious. Yeah, well, you also keep in mind that there's the in-building component. So literally that is also happening and that could happen. If you think it's easier to navigate on a sidewalk than on the street, you know, as long as you can navigate an elevator and stuff like buildings are kind of optimal. So all your postmates deliveries I'll show up at the front desk and then it all gets distributed throughout your skyscraper by their little bot.

Well, and then you've got to start designing the skyscrapers to accommodate for that easier. Yeah. Okay. All right. Amazing. Before I let you go, you have an amazing podcast that I am a fan of

that I listen to every episode called Instant Message. So if no one's heard of Instant Message that's listening right now, please tell them about Instant Message and why they should listen. Incent Message is me and, David Pierce and Joanna Stern having fun for a third of it, telling you things that you can't get anywhere else because it's fascinating details from our respective reporting that never make it into print. And then there is another third that is David interviewing a reporter who has gone mind-numbingly deep on a topic and again is going to tell you something that you will

literally here nowhere else, even in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. So that's amazing. And then the last third, and I know this is 133 percent, is, you know, again, David interviewing somebody really fascinating who, you know, you may have heard somewhere else, but never interviewed by Mr. Pierce with his uniquely penetrating 16-minute style. He had a great interview with some. somebody at CES, one of those scooter people, the Segway guy I think that I was really jealous of because it got really deep into stuff that I had never thought about. But also, I'm going to say this. The reason I'm a fan is because it's fun and there are certain tech podcasts that I used to be a fan of years ago because they were fun and then they got less fun. You guys do have fun,

which is what makes it great.