02:01:32 · Stacy Rasgon, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[02:01:32] S6: If I could. [02:01:32] S0: That makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming by. Yeah. You bet. The studio. This is lot of fun. [02:01:36] S1: To have you. [02:01:37] S6: Hey. You bet. [02:01:37] S0: Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. While he's hopping off, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product road maps. Speaking of turning things into podcasts, Christophe has some fake news here on the timeline. I love Christophe, coastal futurist. Christophe says, still crazy to me that Steve Jobs slash Apple invented the word podcast and that it's a mix of iPod and broadcast. And apparently, this isn't true. Apparently, a BBC journalist, Ben Hammersley, coined it in a 2004 Guardian article, but then it got ported back to Apple and the word and the term podcast was adopted. But it is it is funny that [02:02:26] S1: Podcasts. Podcast. It did it did come from It's always felt like a very boomer term. [02:02:31] S0: Yeah? [02:02:32] S1: And it makes sense. I I never Radio show? I never knew that it was it was a combination of [02:02:36] S0: Oh, didn't know. It was iPod plus broadcast. Yeah. Yeah. What else? [02:02:41] S1: What does that that make The [02:02:42] S0: cast casting is very, very popular. [02:02:46] S1: Anyway. What's this, article from
02:02:46 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:02:46] S1: Anyway. What's this, article from [02:02:49] S0: Evan Armstrong over at The Leverage published an article on who actually makes money when robots work, looking into some of the venture funding that's flowing into humanoid robotics. And he is trying to create a field guide for separating the real companies from the grifters. Talks about one x. The home robot costs $220,000 upfront or $4.99 a month. The website looks like every other VC funded d to c brand from 2015, millennial beige, sans serif, typography, the works buried in the fine print and tech cover tech coverage is the actual product for most chores. A human in a call center will drive the robot around your house via teleoperation while the system records training data for autonomy that doesn't exist yet. And so, there's a big question about how like, what will the actual margins be? And he was trying to dig into that. So, you can go read Evan's piece over on the leverage if you want. You get a seven day trial. [02:03:52] S1: Who actually makes money though when they work? Is it the call center operators?
02:03:52 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:03:52] S1: Who actually makes money though when they work? Is it the call center operators? [02:03:57] S0: I believe I mean, I I I would not bet against Elon on this. I believe that the the hardware manufacturer will ultimately be the one that makes money in the term. I think that the everything else is more commodity in the stack, but there is going to be a a compounding advantage to actually having the manufacturing capability to build the robots at scale. Now this is years away, but I'm I'm certainly AGI built in the sense that the the teleoperation will become will become less and less important. And and the Tesla model of having a a economically producible product will be very, important. So that would be my take. [02:04:41] S1: In other humanoid news, Brett Adcock was putting a company in the truth zone. [02:04:49] S0: What did say? [02:04:49] S1: Ensign based company, UB Tech, claims to have completed the world's first mass delivery of humanoid robots. And the Shenzhen based company has secured apparently over 112,000,000 in Walker s two orders this year. Brett Adcock says, look at the reflections on this bot and then compare them to the ones behind it. The bot in front is real. Everything behind it is fake. If you see a head unit reflecting a bunch of ceiling lights, that's a give that's a giveaway. It's CGI. So he's putting he's putting UB Tech in the truth zone, and then Christopher comes over the top and puts him in the and it says, such an embarrassing pose for a CEO at this level to make. So people don't necessarily believe that, the the CGI claims.
02:04:49 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Tyler
[02:04:49] S1: Ensign based company, UB Tech, claims to have completed the world's first mass delivery of humanoid robots. And the Shenzhen based company has secured apparently over 112,000,000 in Walker s two orders this year. Brett Adcock says, look at the reflections on this bot and then compare them to the ones behind it. The bot in front is real. Everything behind it is fake. If you see a head unit reflecting a bunch of ceiling lights, that's a give that's a giveaway. It's CGI. So he's putting he's putting UB Tech in the truth zone, and then Christopher comes over the top and puts him in the and it says, such an embarrassing pose for a CEO at this level to make. So people don't necessarily believe that, the the CGI claims. [02:05:41] S0: Did Ubitech actually deliver it? There's no community note on the original video. I I for something like this, I mean, we've seen iRobot. Like, you can actually just do flawless CGI that is indistinguishable. There's no way to tell. So I would I would I would be relying on some sort of, you know, on the ground reporting. Do you have an idea, Tyler, of whether or not this is real? We've seen demos of this robot before where it pulls the battery out of the back. [02:06:10] S2: Yeah. I don't know for for sure if it's real, but it is company. [02:06:15] S1: Yeah. Yeah. And so down 2%. Brett kind of needs this company to be totally fake because UB Tech is a public company. It's valued at around 7 and a half billion dollars. [02:06:28] S0: Okay. [02:06:29] S1: And they have they have real revenue.
02:06:29 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:06:29] S1: And they have they have real revenue. [02:06:32] S0: Okay. So Ubitech. Man, they're the the European market over in China is extremely competitive. You have Ubitech and then you then you have the the the what what's what's the other company I keep forgetting? Unitree. Unitree? They're they're two different companies. Right? But they're both publicly traded, both have revenue, both make humanoids. I wonder if there's, like I wonder what the CEOs of these two companies would actually say. Like, what is the differentiation between the two the two products at the, because, they look pretty identical. And we need to do a side by side. But I don't know. What, what what else here? He said Martin Scrawley said, best part of UB Tech is it's public with real revenue, so its valuation is naturally far below pre revenue robotics companies. Naturally. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. I Yeah. We'll see what I do think it's real, but I don't know. Like, it it's it's really hard to prove it one way or another. It's hard to prove any of these videos that that that come out with the humanoids because humanoids are just like it's the textbook, like, CGI product. Like, you can just if you're at all good at CGI, you can make a humanoid robot look great because it's all just polished steel, basically perfect reflections. It's much harder to make a human face look c g CGI real. And so we've had the ability to make, like, CGI Stormtroopers, CGI c three p o. Like Yeah. Like, that's been at perfect indistinguishable level for years. Yep. But getting to the actual human level.
02:08:03 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Tyler
[02:08:03] S1: Yeah. To to be honest, I care a lot less about about did they use c g CGI to, like, put a 100 of these robots in one room versus, like, what are the actual capabilities of the individual robot? [02:08:16] S0: Yeah. [02:08:16] S1: Right? [02:08:17] S0: Yeah. [02:08:17] S1: Yeah. So that's why I think one x, I think they're pretty straightforward about about it being teleoperated or that being kind of the value as you're buying a robot that can be teleoperated in your It [02:08:28] S0: really feels like these are think question is like United States like fame. [02:08:31] S1: Is why is Adcock like obsessing over a competitor? And then what what he what can he do in the next three to six months to justify his $40,000,000,000 valuation? Right? [02:08:44] S0: He probably needs to ship a bunch of these things. Like, just for any reason, just manufacture a lot of them, would imagine. Because with Unitree and this other company and, you know, one x is starting to ship and Elon's clearly getting serious, like, the the race is on to, to actually start manufacturing and shipping them. And it'll be it'll be interesting. With with the flying car thing, a lot of it's, like, regulatory. So you're it's harder to assess what the progress is like because you can always just kinda get hung up in in regulatory. I wonder in the humanoid space. Well, speaking of flying cars, what what's up, Tyler? [02:09:22] S2: I was just gonna say, I I think it's interesting. We we still haven't really seen any humanoid CEOs, like, talking about sanctions against China.