Everything You Need to Know from CES 2025 with Jim Harris

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to keynote speaker and friend of the show, Jim Harris, about his biggest takeaways for tech leaders from CES 2025. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) So tell me about CES. What happened there? What was the takeaway?

(Jim Harris at 00:00:20) Well, there's so many takeaways, but let me just start with what some media have said. This is the biggest week in tech, according to ZDNet. The most significant annual tech event on the planet, USA Today. And this is the event that sets the stage for the rest of the year, Engadget. So, you know, it is huge. It is the most influential tech event in the world. 141,000 attendees this year, 2.5 million net square feet, 4,500 exhibitors, 60% of Fortune 500 companies were there, 6,000 global media, and then 300 conferences with 1,200 speakers.

(Jim Harris at 00:01:06) I was one of those. So it is one that you cannot see everything because there's just too many football fields of exhibit space to see. But one of the things that struck me, Joel, was before the event, Microsoft announced it is going to spend $80 billion this year, CapEx, on building new data centers, 50% of them in the U.S. I feel a Dr. Evil moment coming on. $80 billion.

(Jim Harris at 00:01:41) That's a staggering CapEx commitment. And what it's really saying is Microsoft is doubling down on AI. Not only do they own half of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, not only are they embedding AI in all of their Microsoft products as Copilot, they are doubling down on data centers. So to me, this says we're just at the start of this AI revolution, and that announcement came before the show even started. The second thing that happened before the show started is NVIDIA became the most valuable company in the world with a market valuation of $3 trillion.

(Jim Harris at 00:02:27) So the company that's really behind the infrastructure that's driving the AI revolution had this new high, you know, the highest valuation ever for NVIDIA. So those were two things that happened before the show even started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:48) That is, that's crazy. $80 billion.

(Jim Harris at 00:02:50) You know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) I saw a bunch of articles about them partnering with nuclear facilities, and I did a couple interviews with CEOs of nuclear companies that are building these reactors that are perfectly sized for a data center.

(Jim Harris at 00:03:04) So we're going to see energy as a strategic imperative. And me as an environmentalist, I come back to, and here's a trick question: What's the greatest source of new electricity in the U.S. since 1975? And remember, it's a trick question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:25) I have no idea.

(Jim Harris at 00:03:27) It is energy efficiency. Because if every device we have today, and there are 4 billion new devices produced every year, you know, consumer electronic devices, if every device had the same efficiency as 1975, we'd need two and a half times the energy. So we have to have an industrial scale, warlike effort on energy efficiency. Thankfully, there is so much low-hanging fruit.

(Jim Harris at 00:03:55) But if we're going to electrify the transportation system, if we're going to electrify all these new data centers, we need new sources of power. And the cheapest, the fastest to implement, the least permissions required is energy efficiency. So I think we have to get serious about energy efficiency. That's not something that was covered at CES, but I think it's something that needs to be on the agenda because the World Economic Forum is coming up this week. I'm going to Switzerland on Friday night. It starts on Monday.

(Jim Harris at 00:04:33) That should be one of the major topics for discussion there at Davos.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) I agree with you that we, you know, we could make things more efficient. I think that's a lot like, you know, convincing an overweight person to be healthy. I think nuclear is Ozempic, right?

(Jim Harris at 00:04:52) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:52) People are just like, yeah, we should, we should, we should, we should. But nuclear.

(Jim Harris at 00:04:57) I love that analogy. Nuclear is Ozempic. Yeah, I don't want to change my lifestyle. I don't want to implement energy efficiency.

(Jim Harris at 00:05:07) You know, just like, for instance, an LED light uses 80 to 90% less energy than a classic incandescent, and you don't have to change it. You know, it lasts for 10,000 hours, so your operating costs are lower. You don't have to have maintenance people out there changing lights on street lights, you know, and falling off of cherry pickers. So it's lower operating cost for maintenance as well as lower energy use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:38) Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, about twelve, fifteen years ago, I was doing technology for a company, and one of the things that they were doing was they were selling to car dealerships LEDs. And they would sell them at like 0%, no money down. They would have installers come out and do them, and then they would just make money off of the fact that they saved them money with their electric bill.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:01) So it was, the cost savings was so great that they were doing a dealership like every other day. It was ridiculous how fast people were moving on the LEDs.

(Jim Harris at 00:06:10) So this is just one example, and there are so many examples. As we electrify transportation, if I have a Tesla in my garage, do you know the average person in North America only uses their car 4% of the time? 96% of the time, it's sitting idle. Now that's not true for Uber and Lyft drivers, but for average people. So imagine my Tesla downloads electricity at night when it's cheap and the utility actually has too much.

(Jim Harris at 00:06:46) In fact, some utilities, they will pay you to consume electricity because they can't cycle down the big power plants. So imagine I'm being paid to suck up electricity into my big battery of a Tesla, and then I'm away on holiday. And so I've programmed my system to engage in arbitrage and sell back that electricity to the grid when it needs it at peak. So I'm being paid to suck it all up at night when they have excess, and I'm being paid to put it back into the grid when they really need it. So we're going to see that kind of energy arbitrage.

(Jim Harris at 00:07:22) Again, this was not a topic at CES, but I think given these data center conversations, we should talk about it for a minute.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:32) We should. And I'll add one thing, and then we can get back to CES. So since we've last talked, we started a Bitcoin mining project. So it's a $25 million mine in Tennessee. We've raised seven out of the 25 already. We started in November. But the reason why I bring this up is because my business partners were in oil and gas, and they saw them flaring these ethane flares. They're like, why are you flaring it? And they're like, well, the cost to bottle it, ship it, rail it about breaks even. So it's not worth the hassle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:01) We just burn it and don't do all that work and break even. So we said, well, what if we hook up a generator to it and then bring a Bitcoin, like a shipping container full of Bitcoin, and put it on the property? And they're like, yeah, okay, cool. And so we ran the numbers, and I was like, oh my gosh, it was such a good investment that I told Michael, who was the CEO, I was like, Michael, can I join this company? And so I actually invested into the company because it just makes so much sense. And there's all of, that's just like the first ethane flare that we found. There's a lot of them out there, and they're just, they can make money, we can make money. And that's just, we tell people all the time, like, well, what about Bitcoin? Bitcoin. So it's energy arbitrage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:41) It doesn't matter what you're doing. Like, if natural gas producers figured this out, they would sell less natural gas to the gas companies and start using the natural gas to mine Bitcoin.

(Jim Harris at 00:08:56) Well, this is a great example. With flaring, you're just wasting this energy, just burning it off into the atmosphere. Why not get some actual value out of it? This is a great example of low-hanging fruit that's really simple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) I want to talk about CES. Did you see the robot girlfriend? That's my biggest question for you today.

(Jim Harris at 00:09:18) So I didn't see her, but many of my colleagues did, and they posted video about it. So it's basically a lifelike-looking, a pseudo-lifelike-looking robot companion that is programmed or oriented for conversation and companionship. So, yeah, there she is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) Look, I think it looks a little demented.

(Jim Harris at 00:09:45) Yeah, it does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:48) And I hate that she has the same name as my daughter.

(Jim Harris at 00:09:51) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) No, but yeah. Like, I've seen some of them, like some of the robots and stuff that maybe Disney's made or some other indie hackers make, and those look more realistic.

(Jim Harris at 00:10:08) That's why I said pseudo-realistic. Yeah, it doesn't look realistic to me. But this got a lot of attention at the show, a lot of social posts about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:22) Oh, I'm sure it did.

(Jim Harris at 00:10:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:24) What was your favorite tech that you saw?

(Jim Harris at 00:10:27) Well, my mother had dementia, and apparently, soft, fuzzy pets, you know, help you. They soothe you. Music soothes you. So I saw some fake puppy dogs that sit on your lap, and when you pet them, they wag their tail. And unlike a real dog, they don't have to go out to go to the bathroom.

(Jim Harris at 00:11:00) And so it's just comforting to somebody with dementia. That's just because of my own personal background. Mom isn't alive anymore, but I think about that. We actually bought her a real dog that was super fluffy and cute called Daisy. But I saw that and I thought, well, that's really going to help.

(Jim Harris at 00:11:22) As our population ages, this is important. Yeah, there we go. That's great. So it wags its tail and it looks at you, and it's just a lap dog. I saw about three or four of these. So this is to help people with dementia and Alzheimer's.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:44) So I would love to see a video of the Alzheimer's person realizing it's a robot, like, five times a day.

(Jim Harris at 00:11:51) Yeah. Oh my God. Well, that was the thing. People with Alzheimer's remember things from a long time ago, but nothing that happened four minutes ago. So I was in the car with my mom one time, and she says, oh, Jim, look at the sunset. It's so beautiful. And everyone in the car goes, oh yes, yes, it's very beautiful. Oh yes, yes. And then you do a one, two, three count. Then she goes, oh, look at the sunset. It's so beautiful. Like, this is over and over again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:24) Oh, I get it. She's living a good life, though.

(Jim Harris at 00:12:26) Oh yeah, yeah. She was appreciative of the moment, which was a great thing. So the biggest trending topic for CES was AI, and number two was GenAI. And if I had to pick number three, it was Agentic AI. So we've all heard about AI and GenAI, and what's Agentic AI? Well, these are AIs that actually have a defined task and a set of parameters. So my agentic AI knows that I want to fly back to Toronto, so it goes out and says, okay, what are all the flights Jim could get on, and what are the prices?

(Jim Harris at 00:13:12) And we know where he likes to sit and we know what his schedule is, so here's the one. And you can either have it come back to you with the top recommendation, or over time, you begin to trust it and you say, go ahead and book it without ever showing me what you're doing. So we're in a time where we're seeing the rise of Agentic AI. It's what in Q4 of 2024, this was one of the very hot topics that CEOs were talking about in their earnings call reports. So this was on people's lips at CES.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:42) Well, because people don't, in the corporate world, one of the reasons why I like to get to talk to you is because you don't work at a mega corporation, but they hate to address the fact that agentic AI is human knowledge workers.

(Jim Harris at 00:13:57) Yes. And this is, you've hit on a very important point here, Joel. Two to one, pretty much, employees in the U.S. fear AI because they fear job loss. 63% of American workers fear job loss. This is from Ipsos, a poll of thousands of people, 23,000 people around the world. So it's 36% are excited, and more than 60% fear it. So why would I go and implement AI if I feel you're just going to fire me? And some of the big tech companies in Silicon Valley have actually done this, so these fears are founded because this is what, like, try and get customer support at Google. Impossible.

(Jim Harris at 00:14:46) So what they've done is laid off thousands of people. And Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan just last week saying by mid-2025, we are going to have AIs that can program at the same level as a mid-level engineer who does programming for Meta.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) Now his, I would argue we're there today. I would argue that we're there today, but I think it's just we're just not there in an autonomous fashion. I think what he meant is it working independently without being coached by a human.

(Jim Harris at 00:15:22) Yes. Yeah. So this fear, when you hear statements like that, is what is fueling this fear in American workers. So I think the fears are legitimate, but I believe that companies that are really smart about this will create what I call psychological safety in their workplace. They're going to say nobody's going to be laid off.

(Jim Harris at 00:15:48) What this is going to allow us to do is to be far more productive. We're going to have twice the output for every human engineer because it'll be a human with the AI that's coding, and we're going to be able to develop features faster and better and be more productive. That's the real angle. And if you have a team of 60 programmers, well, if you need to go on maternity leave or paternity leave or you want to take a two-year sabbatical to get your MBA, you're going to be able to, and our team's going to be able to cope. So it's going to give you more flexibility.

(Jim Harris at 00:16:30) Or if you really, instead of five days a week, you want to take it a little bit easier and you only want to work two days a week, we'll let you do that. So I think companies need to create psychological safety and create a flexibility envelope around this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:48) I fully agree with you. That would be a smart move as a giant organization because if you have people all worried, they're not actually going to be productive at all.

(Jim Harris at 00:16:58) And they're not going to be implementing it. Yeah. So there's a saying from a guy called William Gibson, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So Waymo had a Level 4 autonomous car at CES, and I've been in autonomous cars. It's basically a driverless taxi. And people think, oh, that'll never happen. Well, there's been 100 million miles globally of driverless taxi rides. Now here's the kicker. 19 cities in China have them operating, but in the U.S., it's only Phoenix, Austin, and San Fran.

(Jim Harris at 00:17:42) So people go, oh, it'll never happen. Well, 100 million miles of driverless taxi rides, it is happening. It's just not happening here, wherever here is, whether it's Tennessee or whether it's Alberta. So people think, oh, the future is already here. It's just not in my city yet. So we are getting to this time, which is why, and this stat blows me away, Joel. In December, at around December 29th, Tesla was worth more than every other car company in the world added together. Tesla was worth more than every car company in the world added together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:30) And my Tesla stock's up like 80% the past year. So if that was last year, it must be just going crazy. Everyone's pricing in Optimus. They're pricing in Optimus because you would have to, for the valuation to make sense.

(Jim Harris at 00:18:44) So one of the things that's interesting about Tesla and the kind of constellation of companies around it is you can use the AI that's developed for the car for Optimus. You can use it for the energy business, which is backing up grid-scale utility electricity for energy arbitrage. So AI is going to be a central theme for everything that Tesla does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:17) Do you have a Tesla?

(Jim Harris at 00:19:18) I don't. But the next car I get, I want it to be a Tesla. How about you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) So I just got one. Like, I got the Model Y.

(Jim Harris at 00:19:26) What did you get?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:27) I got the Model Y. Leased it. It was like 300 a month USD. I was like, are you kidding me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:35) Yes.

(Jim Harris at 00:19:36) Fantastic. In 2023, it became the best-selling car in the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:43) Jim, I've retired from driving. I don't drive anymore. I get in my car, I press FSD, the full self-driving, and it just takes me from my driveway to wherever I'm going, and that's it.

(Jim Harris at 00:19:57) What people don't realize is that 94% of accidents are due to driver error. There are 45,000 deaths every single year in the U.S. due to driver error, and then 5.2 million people are maimed and have to go to the hospital. Think about the huge tragedy of people being either killed or maimed, and what is your family worth to you? These, statistically, are exponentially more safe than your traditional gas car. So autonomy in cars goes hand in hand with electric vehicles. Basically, they're computers on wheels.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:43) It honestly feels like I'm driving a MacBook. I get in, I'm just like, "Alright, let's go," and it just takes me. And the self-driving is so much better than I imagined it could be. I had this idea of what it would be like because a few years ago, a couple of my friends and business partners had the Teslas, and so I would be in the car and they would be doing it. I did a demo drive maybe seven years ago with an X and just did the assistive cruise control thing. But where full self-driving is today is absurd. Honestly, here's where I'm at, Jim: they watch you with a camera to make sure that you're not doing other stuff, and I'm like, "Man, I have to take it off full self-driving so I can look at my phone." Like, this is so stupid. It's safer to just let it keep driving on autopilot so I can do something on my phone real quick, like text my wife or pull up a call or something. And I'm like, "This is so lame." I was listening to some Dropbox files for some course I was taking, and I have to manually open up Dropbox to switch it. Takes a second, it's whatever. But I'm just like, let full self-driving come out of beta, if Elon's listening. Let it come out of beta. Let it just exist. We already have full self-driving cars operating in cities anyways. Why is the Tesla restricted?

(Jim Harris at 00:22:09) Well, the news is it's getting better and better every year. The chips are getting more powerful. That's one of the other exciting things at CES. Jensen in his keynote released an AI supercomputer in a tiny little box for your desk. You can get one. They're stackable, so you want two supercomputers for your desk?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:35) Please.

(Jim Harris at 00:22:35) You just put them on top of each other. And their high-end AI systems that are huge, like 1.5-ton installations with thousands of chips in them—the bandwidth and the throughput just for one of these is equal to the entire Internet's throughput in real time. So we are exponentially improving in terms of our compute power. And I haven't verified this next thing I'm going to say, so do your own verification, but Jensen, I believe, said somewhere that it has broken Moore's Law. In fact, many people predicted Moore's Law would end—the doubling of processor power every two years, every 24 months, while staying at the same price point. But these exponential advances in technology that NVIDIA is bringing out means they're accelerating Moore's Law. So we're living in this very interesting time. I'll just give you one example. There's a technology I saw that takes a super high-res picture of your face for a doctor, and it can tell your age, it can tell your blood pressure, it can tell whether you're a smoker. It can diagnose a whole bunch of things for your doctor. So one doctor decides whether he can do surgery on elderly people based on this FaceAge technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:27) My brother hates that.

(Jim Harris at 00:24:28) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:29) I'm kidding. My brother and mom are physicians, and so every time there's an article that's like, "We tested 80 doctors and GPT beat them by 10x," or whatever it is, I just screenshot and send it to him, and he's like, "No." I was like, "It's a controlled study." They did a study, Jim, and it was doctors alone, doctors with AI, and AI alone. They took known cases like how they do in medical school. They took a known case, and they only give you all the information upfront, and then you have to figure out what the diagnosis is, and they know what it was. So they know the answer before they go in, before they do the experiment. Anyways, the doctors with AI scored about the same, slightly worse than the doctors without AI, meaning the AI still gave them the same recommendation. So what that showed you is when doctors are using AI, they don't trust it. But the one that beat them by so much was just the AI alone.

(Jim Harris at 00:25:30) So here's the thing: we have oncology boards. If you have cancer, the doctor thinks you have cancer, you do a whole bunch of tests, and these test results go to an oncology board. So think about five to 10 doctors, very high-priced doctors all sitting around the table looking at your test results and, "Yes, does Jim have cancer or no? Or what should we do about it?" The AI can predict exactly just as well as the doctors. So why don't we liberate those doctors to do more compassionate bedside work or research or something that's higher value if the AI can predict just as well? In fact, it can even see, based on these test results, things that humans don't identify. We think potentially you might get cancer based on these markers. So why not let the AI? I want my doctor to be an AI-assisted doctor and to be open to it because my doctor didn't read the 7,000 peer-reviewed articles that came out in medical journals online this morning. So I want the best knowledge, cutting-edge knowledge, blended with a doctor who's AI-centric.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:47) Yeah. I call it a biological delay. So we have the technology, it could be implemented, but there's just this human nature of whether it's habits or just slow to change, just this natural resistance that makes it so we can't implement stuff overnight. That's why when I see shock headlines like, "Half the jobs are going to be..." Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm sure it is. I'm sure that will shake out to be what happens, but it's not going to happen tomorrow.

(Jim Harris at 00:27:17) So the other thing, Joel, is McKinsey Global Institute has looked at the number of jobs created and lost due to AI between now and 2030, and they basically said there's going to be 555 million to 900 million jobs created globally, and there're going to be 400 to 800 million lost. So people have a binary choice: Do I want to be on the growing side or the contracting side? And if you have the term "clerk" in your job description, you're on the hit list for jobs that are going to disappear. So you're going to have to focus on upskilling and reskilling. We just have to do this. And there was a great clip that I use in my presentations of Jeff Bezos just two months ago being interviewed by the New York Times, and they asked him, "What are you doing these days?" And he said, "95% of my work is on AI because we are literally working on a thousand apps within Amazon." Because—these are his words—"It's an enabling horizontal layer," meaning it can go across every department: HR, shipping, logistics, ERP, customer service, prediction of what people are going to order so we can have it in stock. Literally, every aspect of a company can be made better with AI. So these are Jeff's words, not mine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:04) Oh my goodness. Well, that's good news on the job front from McKinsey.

(Jim Harris at 00:29:08) Yeah. So for me, I think about this. This is really a story about change and organizational change. The technology is way ahead of the people part. So companies, you know, if you're a CIO, if you're a CTO, the real challenge is the people-enabling factor. So in health care, for instance, there are almost 2 million job openings right now. So people shouldn't be freaked out about job loss. We can't even find 2 million people we need in the health care system in the U.S. So, you know, the fact that there's so much duplication, redundancy, waste, and inefficiency in the health care system—AI is a huge way of saving $300 billion a year in health care costs. There's another Doctor Evil moment: $300 billion a year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:06) Well, I mean, look, you're right. There's so many people that don't have access to health care. I mean, look, every time in the States here, I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to go to the doctor. Why can't I just ask GPT?" You know? Teladoc—all Teladoc's doing is plugging it into their data system, which is going to help them diagnose. That's ultimately, at the end of the day, Jim, that's the reality we can't avoid. Everything that the doctors know is tabled information that they have put into their brain and condensed and memorized, and they can have gut instinct on it. They can act on it, and they can operate on it very similar to how an AI ingests information. But we can just do that now, and we're just waiting on the human. I trick the GPTs into helping me with medical advice.

(Jim Harris at 00:30:55) Well, that's great. But I'll give you a personal example. I come back from being on the road, and I'm not feeling well. It takes me three weeks to get an appointment with my doctor. And then on the day of the appointment, my symptoms may have disappeared by then. So am I fixed or, you know, do I need to do something? It takes a half day of my time because I have to drive down, wait in the waiting room with other people who are coughing, sneezing, and itching. Who wants to do that? And then I see her and then I go home. But why couldn't I just—I love telemedicine because I can get an appointment on the same day for 15 minutes with a doc by Zoom or Zoom equivalent. They ask a bunch of questions. They say, "Okay, I'm sending you requisition for this test." I go to the pharmacy, I get the test, I do it. The results come back in two days. They look at them with me online. Two days later, they say, "Oh, well, here, take this." And I go back to the pharmacy. And I've solved my whole problem in a three-day window, not adding to wait three weeks to even see the doctor the first time, before then I do a test, and then I wait a week and get results, and then I get to dealing with the underlying problem.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:12) Oh, yeah. I found a new life hack at 37. Here it is: I now, when I think I have something, I will ask myself the question, "Would it hurt me to take the expected remedy?" So if you think you have this specific flu or disease or whatever, it's like, "Okay, well, what's the remedy? And if I take that and I don't have this thing, does it hurt me?" And if the answer is no, I just take the remedy. I don't bother going to the doctor, I don't bother getting a test. I just take the end result. And it's been working pretty well.

(Jim Harris at 00:32:46) Well, if you cut yourself with a rusty object, I can tell you they're going to give you a tetanus shot if you haven't had a tetanus shot in 10 years. I don't need to go see the doctor for that. Why can't I just go to the pharmacy and say, "I cut myself with a rusty thing on the farm. Give me a tetanus because I can't remember the last time I had one."

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:05) Yeah. And sometimes they'll do it, I'm sure. I don't know. The pharmacists have different rules in different places, but I get spoiled because of my parents and brother being doctors. They just get me stuff all the time. But yeah, that's actually a huge benefit to me. How many doctor visits I save by just texting my parents for a prescription.

(Jim Harris at 00:33:25) Fantastic. Yeah. Now one last thing I want to talk about, because this blew me away, is China in 2023 became the largest exporter of cars globally. And if you look at the graph, the New York Times did a great graph—I posted it on Twitter—you look at China in 2020, it was number six in the world at the very bottom of the graph, and then you just see it growing and blowing by Japan, which for 40 years has been the largest exporter of cars in the world on an annual basis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:04) Is that adjusted per capita or just straight-up number of cars?

(Jim Harris at 00:34:07) Straight-up number of cars. And why is China dominating exports? Because 76% of all electric vehicles globally are produced in China, and the EVs are the huge growth market. So there's been a lot of discussion about tariffs with Trump's election. Tariffs were one of the top three things CEOs were talking about in earnings calls in Q4 2024. Tariffs are on everyone's lips, but I listened to the guy who was behind the Nissan LEAF, which you could argue was the first mass market produced EV. The Nissan LEAF, great car. And he basically says, "Tariffs make a domestic industry lazy." So the U.S. has put 100% tariffs on Chinese-imported electric vehicles and cars. But Australia has no domestic auto industry to protect, so they're not going to get any tariffs. They don't care. What they're going to get is cars that are half the price of the traditional gas cars that foreign companies import or export from their country to Australia. So Australians—so what the Chinese exporters are going to do is just focus on countries that don't have domestic auto industries where protectionism and tariffs aren't something that's discussed, and slowly the major car companies are going to lose market share. And I predict that half of the current names that you know of major car companies are going to disappear over the next 10 years. In fact, one of the things that happened before CES is Honda announced it was going to merge with Nissan and Mitsubishi. So here are three car companies. They're being crushed. Honda's the strongest of the three, but they are being crushed, and they're going to all merge. Nissan has a billion dollars' worth of bonds that are due for payment in 2026, and they can't pay it out of their current cash flow. So this merger has to happen, otherwise they don't live. But here, my prediction's already beginning to take place, because what was three distinct car companies now becomes one. So when I'm saying half the current car companies you know of will cease to exist within 10 years, they'll either be bankrupt, they'll have merged, or they'll just have faded away into irrelevance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:00) Yeah. Well, I mean, Tesla's a superior product. A superior product entered the marketplace with a superior buying experience. I mean, Jim, I was in and out of Tesla within 15 minutes, and I had a new car. There was no negotiation. I asked him, "Was there a sale?" And they're like, "We don't do sales. You just pick up the car. You download the app. You do five questions in the app or five steps in the app. You get the car. We hand you the key, and you sign one piece of paper that was for the DMV for our license plate." And I was like, "That's it?" And they're like, "That's it. We're going to charge the car for you for three hours. You can go have dinner and come back." And, man, I spent no time in there at all.

(Jim Harris at 00:37:40) The other thing is that their production model is in real time. So you say, "I want these kind of wheels. I want this interior, black or white. What are all the features that you want?" And then it's made custom for you as opposed to the traditional car models. Somebody in Germany at VW, Mercedes-Benz, they make a car, they ship it to Canada, and now they try and sell you this thing. But I want a different color of seats internally. Too bad. You know, the whole model is oriented towards the customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:20) Right. Yeah. And then I think the dealership model is a bad business model. Direct-to-consumer is where things are going. Even, I think Buick just announced they're going to be the first legacy car company to let you order online, and they're going to close the Buick locations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) And they're following suit with how Tesla's rolling it out.

(Jim Harris at 00:38:38) What is driving this exponential growth of electrification? If you go back ten years, the biggest price of electric vehicle was the battery. But the battery costs, lithium ion, have fallen by more than 90% since 2010. And now there's new chemistries. There's LFP, which is lithium ion phosphate.

(Jim Harris at 00:39:10) So LFP batteries are cheaper. They don't have quite as high energy density, but because they're so much cheaper, we're seeing the cost to produce LFP batteries in China is about half what it is in the rest of the world, which is why these Chinese cars are coming in so inexpensively and disrupting the traditional market. We now have a situation where electric vehicles are cheaper than gas cars to purchase on CapEx. So on OpEx, like if you charge at home compared to gas, depending on your state, you're getting 70 to 80% less cost for your fuel than oil, fossil fuel. And because EVs have so many fewer parts, the drive train of a classic gas car has 2,000 moving parts, but the drive train of a Tesla has 20.

(Jim Harris at 00:40:12) So Joel, tell me which one is gonna break down more frequently. Which one's gonna happen to you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) The more parts, more breakdown.

(Jim Harris at 00:40:21) Exactly. Yeah. So you have dramatically lower maintenance costs for an EV, 70 to 80% less.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) Those are all great stats when you read them on the sticker and everything. Here's my actual, since I've had the car for like a month or two. Total amount in electricity, which it hooked up to my electric bill, $56. Gas equivalent would have been $204. That's on par.

(Jim Harris at 00:40:47) Yeah. That's four times difference. So you're basically 75% less cost for fuel. Now if you were an Uber or Lyft driver and you were driving 50,000 miles every single year or a 100,000 miles, you multiply those savings because the average American drives about 15,000, Canadians 15,000 kilometers. So let's say 12,000 miles.

(Jim Harris at 00:41:16) 12,000 miles a year, but if you're an Uber and Lyft driver driving seven days a week, you can do 100,000, 120,000 miles a year. Just multiply your savings by 10x.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:30) Yeah. It's honestly, I just like not having, I'm like a germaphobe. I don't like to touch the gas station pumps.

(Jim Harris at 00:41:38) Well, I had this, I interviewed two years ago, I interviewed my Uber driver who was driving a Tesla. Her name was Mary Elena. It was just a short little sixty second clip. And I said to her, how much are you saving a month? And she said, I'm actually saving more than my car lease payments, which means I have extra money at the end of the month. And I did the math on it, and according to her, she was saving $35,000 a year. Now the Tesla haters piled in on this, and I actually, some of them did have a point. I think Mary Elena wasn't really sharp on math because I've never met a Tesla or an Uber or Lyft driver with an EV saving $35,000 a year.

(Jim Harris at 00:42:31) I've met many saving $20,000 a year. So maybe she was including her maintenance cost as well. I don't know. But this video had 2,200,000 views over a day or two during CES two years ago. I mean, part of it is that controversy drives the algorithm, so all the haters were actually helping drive the viewsomeness because the algorithm says, oh, this is really hot topic. We gotta let everybody know about it. So you never know what's gonna trend on social media these days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:07) Oh, yeah. No. This is great. I wanna make sure that we watch the time here. We've got about five minutes left. What else do we wanna get out there to the world?

(Jim Harris at 00:43:19) Well, CES is such an exciting show. It's really 20 or 30, it's actually 35 different shows all kind of roped in together. I saw, for instance, something called Think Academy, which has a little tablet, and then on top of it, it's for kids. On top of the tablet is a camera. So if you have actually a paper with written problems, it'll OCR recognize it. And if the kid's having problems solving this math problem, the AI will give them personalized tutoring. So it has an AI. It's called Think Academy, and it has an AI built right into it. So it's like buying a Chromebook, but it's got all this AI for kids from kindergarten to 12.

(Jim Harris at 00:44:13) Now I know you homeschool your own kids, Joel, so you might not be interested in it. But if parents...

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:19) Oh, we use all the tech.

(Jim Harris at 00:44:21) Oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:21) We use all the tech. Like, we pay for stuff and buy applications. Every time I see something real good, I'm like, oh, let's order that and then have them do a couple weeks of it because there's the requirements for homeschool, but then you're really just teaching the kids what you wanna teach them.

(Jim Harris at 00:44:37) Exactly. And what I find interesting is our old school model of education was we're gonna put 35 kids in a classroom with one teacher, and what they're getting is the same thing, all of them. But this one doesn't need any help in math, they need help in art. And this one needs help in math, but is brilliant at art. Having an AI system that customizes lessons to each individual student, I think, is brilliant.

(Jim Harris at 00:45:09) So and they've gamified it. Right? So, you know, you get like coins or, you know, things go bing, bing, bing, bing when you get it right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:19) This one isn't Elon's school that he did with that, like, Syntha something or whatever. Is that what we're talking about?

(Jim Harris at 00:45:26) No. No. This one's called Think Academy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:28) Think Academy.

(Jim Harris at 00:45:29) Their AI, they've called it Thinky. So that's just an example of AI getting embedded into products. Here's another one I kinda liked, and I put up something on YouTube about this. Not YouTube, but X, Twitter. It's just a bird feeder that has a camera in it. And just like I can have a camera doorbell on the front door of my house so I can see when a UPS or FedEx courier person or my neighbor comes to my door. So this is a camera built into the bird feeder that's motion activated. So I can see, oh, look at this cardinal coming and eating food, and there's one for hummingbirds too. So bird watching is a huge thing.

(Jim Harris at 00:46:17) It's called ornithology in the US. There are millions of ornithologists. So again, here's something. So it's camera, Wi-Fi, and motion activated and delivering to you on your smartphone what bird right now is at your bird feeder. So you don't have to sit there for hours with binoculars waiting for a bird.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:39) What do you get?

(Jim Harris at 00:46:41) Oh, in our home, we haven't installed this yet, but we get...

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) Oh, okay.

(Jim Harris at 00:46:46) Blue jays every once in a while. We get cardinals. We get robins. Robins don't want bird feed. They want worms, so they're popping around on your lawn eating worms. But I'm not a birder, but, you know, we love birds. But some people are really into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:07) Political position to take. Just to clarify, we love birds here at the Harris household.

(Jim Harris at 00:47:14) There's nothing wrong with liking birds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:18) Oh, man. Jim, it's always great to see you. It really is.

(Jim Harris at 00:47:22) So fun to be on the show, Joel. I really love it. And I was so excited when Josh called me and said, hey, we wanna do a show about CES. I'm off to Davos for the World Economic Forum on Friday. It starts on Monday. And then in March, I'm going to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, which is the preeminent smartphone and telco networking conference globally. So a couple more exciting things coming up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:52) Amazing. Well, then, let's not wait a whole year. When you get back from the Mobile World Congress, we can do a conversation about Davos and mobile while it's fresh. And any excuse to see Jim, I'm happy. Thank you so much for listening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.