The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Battery-Free Tech Revolution: WePower Technologies Magnet-Powered Innovations at CES Show 2025

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

Battery-Free Tech Revolution: WePower Technologies Magnet-Powered Innovations at CES Show 2025 Gemns.com About the Guest(s): Larry Richenstein is the founder and CEO of WePower Technologies. With a career spanning decades in wireless consumer technologies, Larry has demonstrated a penchant for innovation, notably founding or co-founding four tech companies, including Lone Star Technologies, Long Haul Technologies, and Unwired Technology. His expertise is further solidified by his extensive involvement with the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) over 30 years, where he served in various leadership roles, including Chairman of the Automotive Electronics Division and a member of the CTA Board of Industry. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss engages with Larry Richenstein, CEO of WePower Technologies, discussing the groundbreaking work being done in the field of energy harvesting technology, highlighted during the CES 2025 event. Larry dives into how his company aims to revolutionize consumer electronics by eliminating batteries, thereby reducing environmental impact and enhancing product longevity. The episode provides an intriguing glimpse into the ingenuity behind WePower Technologies' developments, underpinned by Larry's extensive experience in the wireless tech industry. Throughout the episode, several themes emerge, including sustainability, innovation in energy harvesting, and the potential applications of battery-free technology. Larry Richenstein details the company's flagship technology, G-E-M-N-S, and its application in creating products like the innovative water sensor and wireless light controllers. Furthermore, Larry highlights the significant interest generated at CES 2025, emphasizing his commitment to introducing eco-friendly solutions in the consumer tech space. Engaging discussions around the challenges and opportunities that come with replacing traditional battery systems capture the listener's imagination, making this episode an insightful journey into the future of technology. Key Takeaways: WePower Technologies is pioneering battery-free technology, focusing on environmental sustainability and product durability. Their innovative water sensor can operate for decades without a battery, signaling a significant advancement in consumer electronics. The company focuses on licensing its technology to other manufacturers, offering an inviting proposition for those looking to innovate in IoT. Innovations in energy harvesting by utilizing magnets can substantially enhance performance and signal transmission in various devices. The episode highlights an increased interest from major companies in adopting eco-friendly technology showcased at CES 2025. Notable Quotes: "Our idea is how do we get rid of batteries? 'Cause batteries are not a good thing. They're a bad thing." "The magnets just sit there on the ground and it's as powerful 30 years from now as it is right this second." "We're just looking for good opportunities to eliminate batteries as much as possible and as many products as possible." "I feel now we're getting to the point where people understand it." "When you talk to people today, I mean, yes, it's old technology, but it's also so new and different with the way we're approaching it."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey, folks. I'm Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, the Iron Lady sings and that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, we're bringing you the Chris Voss Show for over 16 years.

The CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, Pulitzer Prize winners, all the smartest people with the smartest stories, sharing their journeys of life and how you can improve yours, and inspiring you to do more, especially if you're like an entrepreneur in this case. We're going to be talking with a wonderful young man today about our continuing coverage that we've been doing of CES the ces show 2025 anyway we're going to be talking with larry richenstein and we're talking about his company called we power technologies and some of the things they did they're at a ces show and everything they're offering over there larry is the founder and ceo

of we power technologies he's spent nearly his entire career in wireless consumer technologies. He really hates wires. No, I'm just kidding. Larry got his start in the industry working for his father's consumer electronics company and has since then gone on to found or co-found four technology companies of his own, including Lone Star Technologies, Long Haul Technologies, and Unwire Technology. He's been involved with the Consumer Technology Association, CTA, for over 30 years having served as a number of leadership roles including Chairman of the Automotive Electronics Division, Chairman of the CTA Foundation, and a member of the CTA Board of Industry. Welcome to the show Larry, how are you? I'm good, thank you Chris.

We had Gary Shapiro on, the head of CTA, you i'm good thank you chris we had gary shapir on the head of cta and now we've got you on and we're just eventually going to have on the whole staff at this pace it's a big staff at cta it is holy crap and i guess there's a president now larry's been moved or not larry yeah gary's been moved back to the cto and chairman i think or ceo and chairman yeah i'm brain farting yeah he's not president anymore i think is that no kinsey fabrizio is the news president i'm having a i think i'm having a brain seizure during the show here larry so work with me so larry give us your dot g. Where can people find you on the interwebs? The company is WePower Technology, but the technology is called GEMNS, G-E-M-N-S. And so it's www.GEMNS.com, GEMNS.com.

So give us a 30,000 overview of what you guys do there. We are an energy harvesting technology company. And basically what that means is we can find ways to harvest energy to eliminate batteries in a whole host of products, starting with the water sensor that we showed at CES, but going into lighting controllers, remote control devices. And then there's thousands of applications beyond that. You think of anything today that has a battery in it, and our idea is how do we get rid of it? Because batteries are not a good thing. They're a bad thing. They're not great for the environment, and they're wasteful and we can actually power microprocessors and sensors and transmitters and send transmissions of readings from these various sensors without

the use of any battery whatsoever wow and so there's no batteries no batteries so if you look at water sensors today and then this is the good example and that's why we chose to do this as a reference product. Typically, if you have a water sensor, and I live in the Northeast, so I'm used to wet basements. And typically what happens in the mechanical room, you get a wire coming down from one of the junction boxes, and you get a little blue pad, which is a water sensor. And that's a wired unit. It's wired into your house. And it works fine in the mechanical room, but there's a lot of other places where water can occur. And what people have done over the years is they've been buying these little inexpensive battery-operated beepers that when they get wet, they go beep, beep, beep.

And hopefully, you hear it and go downstairs and realize you got a basement leak. So, the problem is, of course, with those devices is if you're not home, you're not going to hear the beeping. You might be sleeping, you wouldn't hear the beeping. And of course, the reality is that chances are the batteries die by the time the flood occurs, and you didn't remember to change the batteries and the thing is dead and you're not getting any signal whatsoever. So our device is not only able to lay on the ground for a year, 20 years, 30 years, and be completely ready to send a signal. So in order to explain it the best way,

you ever take two magnets and put them in your hand, what happens? They attract and you've got to pull them apart. But if you flip them around and you put them together, you feel them pushing away from each other. They're repelling. And we use that magnetic power, that magnetic energy, and we store it. And we have a piece of paper, and actually I have a sample here. I can actually take one out and show a, this is a prototype, but it'll show you what we're doing.

I'm sorry. Let me get it out first. But what you can see here is the device has a piece of paper around it. And this plunger has a spring, and it's pushing constantly against the paper. Oh, wow. The first time that paper gets wet, it weakens, and the spring pushes up. are now able to move and they send a signal through the piece the printed circuit board on your z-wave hub and it says you have a leak in the basement or you have a leak under your washing machine or under the dishwasher wherever you decide to put this device so they they're

wireless batteryless they can lay on your ground for a month or 20 years or 30 years and still have the energy stored, ready to pop as soon as the first time it hits the water. That is wild. Batteries. Not batteries, but magnets. Right. So this is probably much more, you know, one of the problems we have with batteries is the disposal. You know, I mean, these Tesla batteries for these cars. I mean, have you ever seen them trying to put one out with water and stuff when they burn?

Yeah. The leaching, all the stuff that comes from these batteries. And, of course, what it takes to make the batteries as well, the mining that we have to do. It's a very dirty, filthy business. I'm not shaving it. I'm just saying it's a dirty business. You've got to dig. Yeah, you're right.

With magnets, I mean, you're not going to have that. We're not filling landfills with magnets. No, they last forever. Wow. You know, almost. And the situation is that, you know, this device, I mean, wow, how many times do you think you would use this if you bought it? If you had a leak every year and you had the house for 50 years, it would activate 50 times. We've tested the unit inside here to over a quarter of a million pushes or activations. And it doesn't degrade at all. There's no degradation whatsoever. It can sit there on

the ground and it'll be as powerful 30 years from now as it is right this second. And it powers the communication that would go to, like, Bluetooth or Z-Wave and other things. You know, we've used water sensors that were sent to me to review, and they do run on a battery charge, which i don't know how long it lasts somehow they made it so they last a long time but not not in the anywhere near the length you're talking about but yeah if they go back the battery goes dead you know you're like hey how could we got water on the floor and didn't go off right the other issue is also as you know batteries when they're in a difficult environment like you know maybe

higher humidity they start to corrode pretty quickly i mean everyone's opened up a battery compartment and said oh my gosh what's inside here you know and that acid is accumulates and sometimes it just ruins the product completely so you know that's another issue that doesn't occur when you're using energy harvesting. Wow. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it really does. And it's much more cleaner, safer for the environment probably overall.

Magnets. Just the simple thing about magnets. And it says here 40 times more power? Yes. There's a company that's been out about 25 years, 24 years, I recall, and they've been in energy harvesting and their devices are the same size as ours. They have only one. I mean, we the amount of energy or less that we put out. So it's a situation where when you think of more energy, what does that get you? It gets you a stronger signal going a longer distance with more packets, with more data being transmitted. So they can only send one or two packets.

And what happens is in a wireless signal you want redundancy because sometimes the receiver won't pick it up the first time and the odds are you know say it's a 70 chance that they're going to receive it you need to have more than two or three signals if you want to be really certain that that signal is going to be received. We can send 25 or 30 beacons or messages out of a single activation, whereas the competition is getting two messages. So it's not even a comparison. That is wild. That is wild.

And you're looking to license these products. You're not making products for the retail consumer. You're looking for companies that want to license them with you, license their technology and utilize their products. That's right. We've been trying to do that for a while. And what we found was that maybe we have more of an imagination than the prospective licensees we're going after. So that's when we decided to go after a couple of reference products to show people how this technology can be utilized and the water sensor which we've shown in a very early form previously but at this show we're we're

in pre-production we're like a pre-production product right now it'll be in production by may of this year as a z-wave product and and now we've got, like I said, we've got nine major brands that have committed to the product and they will license it from us. And at the same time, buy from a contract manufacturer that we're in discussions with right now. We're talking to a few contract manufacturers who will build it. But in the future, other products that we're talking to, I mean, we had so many different companies coming into the booth at CES talking about different applications that they wouldn't want to use it for, you know, use our technology for that.

You know, I feel now we're getting to the point where people understand it. So the water sensor was one device. And the other one that we decided as a reference product to do is a wireless battery-free light controller light switch but but they get more sophisticated today where you can add a rotary dial for for dimming or you can have a switch for different scenes where the lights are completely set up differently you know that's all part of modern lighting today and we had such a great response to that product especially because in europe they've just outlawed batteries and light switches

starting in august 27 so the battery so the light switches companies yeah it's great i tell some people jokingly well that was our lobbying program in europe and they say really you have a lobby i said we're a startup how am i supposed to have a lobbyist you know it's called luck you know that's all yeah that's all sometimes you know we've and i'm looking at the product there's a cutaway on your website of some of the product and there's technology that's inside it so i don't mean to dumb that down but i imagine you know we've gotten products that you know we we reviewed a lot of products over the years before covid and we would get products where there was some sort of electronics issue usually sometimes the battery was just dead like

we would get these we get a lot of these battery backups you know you'd use it for your phone or something it just wouldn't work and they're like ah the battery's probably fucked up or something it just wouldn't work and they're like ah the battery's probably up or something with this thing i i like i said i don't want to minimize it but the magnet parts of it is pretty low tech technically right i mean it's oh yeah absolutely this is not this is not a new technology faraday's law which if i had taken physics in high school i would have learned but i chose not to i took the easier route. But yeah, the concept has been around a long time. Our patents are fresh because that inventor who was a little bit difficult to work with when I first started with this business, really, you know, he made some mistakes, but he made some great discoveries also. And so we have something here that I think is so unique and at the same

time, really robust. I mean, this is not going to fail. And when you talk to people today, I mean, yes, it's old technology, but it's also so new and different with the way we're approaching it. So I kind of like that aspect. And with the water sensor, the idea of a paper breaking and allowing this thing to transmit, it's really a beautiful combination to me of like old and new coming together to make what I think is a perfect product. Yeah, very simple. It's hard to sense water. It really is. Yeah. It's hard.

I think some of the things that we've gotten for sensors on water, I'm not sure how they rely on it, but I think there's two different sensors they have. And if both get contact, then they mark it. But they get a lot of false alarms for us. Sometimes, like you said, moisture. Sometimes they get bumped and they'll set off. And so they've been kind of here and there. But I like the the paper the magnets i mean it's really low tech it's like old world simple stuff put it together yeah maybe we

can do that with cars and stuff because you know you look at the technology and the battery systems of cars and there's some there's some tiktok shows that i watch where these guys take and they refurbish tech batteries because i guess tesla doesn't do it or maybe it's cheaper i don't know but they basically take old tesla batteries and they go through and refurbish them they find out which cells are bad i mean really all they are is a giant pack of batteries when you look at them and but yeah the work and the throwout and the waste and the limited range, of course. You can drive an electric car for a few years and then you've got to replace the whole battery system or whatever. It's definitely a thing people are looking at, the costs and ways.

What are some other things we haven't discussed that you guys were marketing at CS and all that good stuff? Well, we have a bunch of different ways to harvest energy. So one of the things, another product we were showing that we know we have some real interest in is a door monitor, where every time the door opens and closes, we can generate energy to either send a signal saying the door has been opened or closed, and we can actually tell which one it was whether it was being opened or closed and also because of that energy coming out and that we have so much we could also take a picture of the person opening or closing the door and we actually talk about perimeters again this is more in the whole smart home space but we also because

our devices don't have batteries we don't need a battery compartment. So it's much easier for product designers to design products to be dust-free and water-resistant when there's no battery compartment. we can actually be outside and anytime the gate opens or closes, it could send a signal to the home's hub saying that someone's opened the gate or not, you know, for example. And I mean, this would also, of course, apply in businesses, you know, smart buildings beyond smart home. So there's quite a few applications for this, you know, and then, you know, we're talking to people. I mean, we talk to people about shock. We can harvest shock as an energy source too. So for example, if you have a half a million dollar machine that's very sophisticated and you're sending it across to Europe and you want to make sure it's okay, you could put a shock detector from us in there and know if the package has hit a shock and what we could do is when that shock occurs, we can harvest the energy

from that shock, read a GPS signal and a timestamp and be able to put that non-volatile memory, which will basically hold it there to whenever someone gets it. So when the machine lands in Europe and someone says, well, let's see, has this thing taken any hits? They would be able to go to the device and say, oh, yeah, wait a minute. When it was being loaded just before the ship took off, this thing took a really hard shock. And therefore, we're going to have to look it over and make sure everything is okay. You know, as an example. It's amazing these things that the average person doesn't think about. So you guys are solving a lot of these challenges and stuff for people.

So how did the show go overall for you guys to see a show 2025? It was a great show for us. This is our third show. We were in the North Hall again in the IoT area, which is kind of a hodgepodge of a lot of different things. It wasn't all IoT. But, yeah, we had all the big customers that we were hoping to get in. The only one issue I would say that we had was that some of the smart home products or most of the smart home products were in another hall. And it was hard to get some of them to our booth because, as you know, CES isn't the easiest place to move around. So if you have a meeting at the Venetian Conference Center or the convention center there in the Venetian,

and you want to come see us in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, well, between the walk and the drive and getting a car i mean it could take an hour you know i was joking with gary shapiro who's on the show the if i haven't mentioned it before during the broadcast this is the ceo of cta i think i did at the beginning i'm having a brain hemorrhage yeah we did yeah the you know the brains the brain's feeling it's the old age kicking in so we were joking because i i joke every year about how i'm going to see all of ces like i'm gonna i'm gonna hit every freaking booth and every floor and i'm gonna see it all and i i never get over to you know the newer parts of ces that they have to a camera the aura and the oh

yeah yeah yeah cosmopolitan and stuff i never get over that way and i usually collapse somewhere somewhere my legs just go fuck you we're not doing this with you so i was joking with i was joking with gary i'm like you know i'm thinking i was joking with a friend of mine that that i might get one of them scooters and that way i can just i just blast through cs and he goes he goes you know if you think about it he quoted me like how many booths they had and he goes and then how much time you have over four days and he goes

it's just you'd have to like spend like.3 seconds at each booth that's funny you got a good point I don't think anyone can see the whole show in one week in the four days of the show.

Yeah. I don't even know how Gary does it. Like I asked him, I'm like, I mean, what, what coffee are you drinking over there, Gary?

Cause I needed, I need some of that just to get through my day. Well, I, I ran into Gary one morning at the hotel and I was very fortunate. I felt honored. He offered me a ride to the show. I had my whole team down there.

It was very nice. We had a whole team ready to go downstairs. So I had to meet with my team. But he says, where's your booth? I said, I'm in North Hall. And he says, oh, I haven't been over there yet. I said, okay, well, if you're there, you know, stop by. He says, I will.

But I never saw him. So I think he probably never got to North Hall, maybe. He probably gets pulled so many directions with he gets of course i mean he's got and he's got all kinds of commitments during the day speeches interviews intros yes i i i just i'm just so amazed he has so much energy to do all that but he does i just want to know it's like when i look at my husky i'm like how do we extract some of this energy and put it into me? So give us your final thoughts as we go out. Tell people if they're interested, how they can reach out to you guys on board, see if it's a fit, et cetera, et cetera.

Sure. We're at www.gems.com. And certainly feel free to contact me. I'm at lar at gems.com. And, you know, any information you want, we're here to give it to you. And, you know, again, we're just looking for good opportunities to eliminate batteries as much as possible

and as many products as possible. Yeah, most definitely. And it'll be exciting to see these things happen because I think, you know, I watch these Tesla cars burn or these electronic cars burn. I've seen that. And, like, sometimes they have to throw them in water, like a pool, for, like, a few days. Just to try to make sure the thing's out.

And you just look at it and you're just, like, crazy. And you're just, like, I can't imagine what this thing leaches in when you take them to. I think that's why they're trying to recycle them more. I can't imagine what this thing leeches in when you take them to i think that's why they're trying to recycle them more i can't imagine when this thing leeches when you put it in a landfill yeah i well batteries do you know and and again i mean we're certainly not looking to replace car batteries that that's that's gonna i i don't know if we'll ever be able to do that but you know in in a lot of the remote control, IOT device and other things, I mean, you know, today smart locks are using batteries. Every hotel you go to today, when you use one of those cards to read, they have batteries in that thing.

And they wear out quickly. So we're actually talking to some of the battery companies to extend the life of those batteries by recharging them more often. It'd be great if you could figure out a way to do it with phones. I don't know how you do it, but... Yeah, it's going to be a while, too. We'll work on it, though. Yeah, it's time and technology. AI will solve all of our problems, so maybe that'll help.

Well, thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, man. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate your time and the talk. Thanks so much. Thanks, Larry. Thanks to Mattis for tuning in. Be sure to see all of our CES 2025 coverage.

You can Google it on the Chris Voss Show, and it will come up. Just put in CES 2025 or CES Show 2025. Either one will get you the search on there. Take a look at some of the technologies and further interviews we'll be having throughout the year. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.