00:00:00 · S0, S1, S2, S3, Katie Prescott, S5, S6, S7, Danny Fortson
[00:00:00] S0: People are disappearing again just like before. [00:00:05] S1: Nocturne. Streaming on Apple TV on the October 30, Lief Schreiber. [00:00:11] S2: Walter has a way of getting to people. When he does, they don't come back. [00:00:14] S1: Steven Graham. The world [00:00:15] S3: is full of dark places. Zarcee Beats. [00:00:19] S4: How's he getting messages at? [00:00:20] S5: He's locked under six feet of concrete. [00:00:21] S1: She's still alive. [00:00:23] S6: I'm a fighter. [00:00:24] S1: Nocturne. Streaming on Apple TV on the October 30. Subscription required. [00:00:30] S7: This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get preapproved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. [00:01:01] S8: This episode of the Times Tech Podcast is sponsored by ServiceNow. [00:01:05] S4: Danny, one thing we keep hearing from business leaders right now is AI sounds great, but how do you actually make it work inside a company? [00:01:14] S8: Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech, and teams all doing things slightly differently.
00:01:14 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce
[00:01:14] S8: Exactly. Because most organizations aren't neat, shiny systems. They're layers of software, legacy tech, and teams all doing things slightly differently. [00:01:22] S4: ServiceNow sits across all that, acting as a control tower for making work move seamlessly through the organization. [00:01:29] S8: Connecting people, systems, data, and increasingly AI agents so that things don't happen in silos. [00:01:35] S4: Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. [00:01:41] S9: We've actually been able to, as an industry, piggyback on the work that's done by Google, Meta, these big hyperscalers. With these technologies, it actually unlocks the brain of the robot. So now the robot can finally know that a cup's there. You can say to it, where is the cup? And it can point to it. Getting a robot to actually know what it's doing. Before that, you would actually have 20 roboticists who would have to sit there for, like, three months and hard code every single line of code, like, do this, do that, do this, do that. Now with a mixture of using, like, ChatGPT or Claude, you can just tell it, like, this is what we want to do. [00:02:16] S8: Hello, and welcome to the interview from Times Tech. I am Danny Fortson. [00:02:21] S4: And I'm Katie Prescott. And today, we are talking about Danny's favorite subject, robots. And not just any robots either, humanoid robots, little robots with two arms and two legs. And Danny, why? [00:02:37] S8: Well, because it's the future, Katie. It's the future.
00:02:37 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:02:37] S8: Well, because it's the future, Katie. It's the future. [00:02:41] S4: That's what they will tell us. So I'm very excited to hear from our guest today, who is Bren Pierce, the CEO of a British humanoid robots company called Bear Robotics. We first came across them, didn't we, at our tech summit last year in London. And I think we can tell this story now because there's enough distance from it. But it was was very funny. The robots were there, Kinesi robots, to hand [00:03:08] S8: Which out like which is like... Kinesi is now part of Bear Robotics, we should say. [00:03:12] S4: Correct. To hand out drinks to guests. But there was a bit of a problem. We had to stop stop the robot after a while. [00:03:19] S8: Yeah. Because it was it was crushing the bottles and spilling water everywhere. It was just... It was it was too eager. [00:03:27] S4: Just alarming, but also incredibly funny. [00:03:31] S8: It reminds me of, like, growing up, we had a dog, Charlotte. May she rest in peace. And she would always... You'd take a tennis ball and throw, and she'd bring it back. And then she's like, she'd want you to throw it again, but she wouldn't let go. You know? So you're trying to, like, yank this ball out of Charlotte's mouth. So that was our experience last year, but we... I'm very excited, very excited to talk to Bren about all things robots, how long it's gonna take before we all have one in our house. And I know you, Katie, you, of [00:03:59] S4: all people [00:04:00] S8: are gonna be an early adopter.
00:04:00 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce
[00:04:00] S8: are gonna be an early adopter. [00:04:02] S4: I just don't believe in them. I think... Anyway, I am very excited to to hear from... Maybe for different reasons. Right. Well, let's welcome Bren Pierce, founder and CEO of Bear Robotics, and hear what he has to say. Look. Is there something about humanoid robot? I mean, is this why you got into it? Let's go back to the beginning. Did... Is this a sort of, like, little boy watching Hollywood movies, watching Star Wars? This is what I always say to Danny. It's about, you know, kind of just getting excited about robots that can walk and talk. [00:04:35] S9: Yes. Think that's [00:04:39] S4: what I wanna do. [00:04:40] S9: I think fundamentally, it is just something about it. Because I started as a software engineer, and it was quite cool. You write, you know, your code and you hit some buttons and somebody pierced on the screen. And then one day, was watching TV and I saw a geek character on TV building, like, a 40 centimeter high humanoid robot. I'm like, that is epically good. I want to build one. So then I spent the next three hours googling and thing, and you're just like, alright. You know, two days later, have like parcels turning up from Japan. And then twenty years later, I'm still doing it. [00:05:13] S4: Tell us about that little robot.
00:05:13 · Katie Prescott, Brennand Pierce
[00:05:13] S4: Tell us about that little robot. [00:05:14] S9: Yeah. So they've seen... It's interesting. Back in the day, they were like, what was called like Robo One in Japan. It was like 40¢ high fighting robots, and they were just made out of like survey motors you would find in a radio controlled car. We'd have to like modify them, make them actually do what you want and write all the software, make them balance and yeah, it was very, very cool and got me into it. And I spent, I think about two years, effectively on my own in forums, building it in in my my house in Bristol. Two years later, my house is now looking like a robotic lab, and I wanted bigger and bigger equipment. And quite coincidentally, at the same time, Bristol opened the first robotics lab, Bristol robotics lab, and actually did a master on like, alright, I am going to sell my first SAS company, and I'm gonna go and spend a year building robots at Bristol Robotics Lab. And it was a great year.
00:06:03 · Danny Fortson, Brennand Pierce
[00:06:03] S8: I'd love to get your take on what's happening right now because we talk about it all the time on the pod. I'm always like, if if ever there's a humanoid robot story or robot story, I'm always like, let's do that. And Katie always makes fun of me. You have all of the hype and all of the YouTube videos. Oh, here's a humanoid making a bed. Here it is cracking an egg. Here it is running faster than Usain Bolt, etcetera. What is actually happening, and how should we think about this moment, especially when you have, like, NVIDIA, Jensen Huang being like, yeah. We're putting a ton of money into robotics. We're trying to create a universal robot brain so that we can really hit the accelerator on this. Like, what is actually happening? [00:06:44] S9: I think it's obviously the next wave in technology. I was in Silicon Valley last week, and I I I got an Uber, Like, fifteen years ago, I went in my first autonomous car. You're like, this is the future. This is great. My friend founded the company, and you're in the back of the car driving around to Palo Alto. But it's taken fifteen years to go from that very early startup mentality to now I can order it with with an app, and it's quite mind blowing. And at the same time, and then my robotic... [00:07:12] S8: Are you talking about a Waymo?