Going Direct Conversations
00:37:43 · Jordan Wolfe, Michael Cho
[00:37:43] S2: He's pulling in the entertainment plug. Give it to us. [00:37:46] S1: No, no, for real, for real. Like Jordan, I absolutely believe in it. Like, you know, if you look at, Unitree is going to start shipping the R1, which is a humanoid plastic key. Yeah, sorry. I mean, Chris, you saw it too, right? In Korea. So $6,000, $7,000, something like that. So at that price point, I imagine every bar, every disco in the country is going to have a few of these. Yeah. so that patrons can, you know, every bar is going to have their own. It's like having a karaoke system, maybe cheaper than a karaoke system, let's say. You know, like, you know, all these bars in Texas, they have all this, like, you know, the pool thing, the mechanical pool. It's like that, you know, so people are going to have that. And so, and so that's, honestly, this is how I think we'll get to the first 100,000 huminoid. It's just bars, entertainment venue, buying a bunch of these, and then... And then that will get some of this supply chain, you know, more honed up, you know, you're talking about the actuators, the batteries and all that. And once you get to that run, you know, you get a lot more instances of how these things may fail, right? You know, a lot of these actuators may fail, especially on the shoulder. So you just can't really know all this until you apply in the real world. And I think honestly, like the entertainment, everything is the first use case. 100,000 units at least. Not the application that most people are thinking about, but I do think that's realistic.
00:39:18 · Jordan Wolfe
[00:39:18] S2: Well, you know, I think what I like about the perspective, I actually have thought a lot about this because I just started seeing some of these robots showing up at conferences and events and trade shows and not like robotics trade shows, just like generalized, right? And you have like the Pepsi branded humanoid and whatever it might be. I think that that kind of perspective is nice because it's kind of like you take kind of the seriousness out of it and it's kind of like playful and it's playful and fun versus like trying to be so overly, I don't know, just like intense about like... We need to solve general labor and we need to do this and this. It's just like, you know.
00:39:53 · Michael Cho
[00:39:53] S1: Well, it's good for fundraising. I mean, because that's it. Multiple trillions of dollars of impact. Of course, of course. And humanity should solve it. I mean, we need good researchers like Chris to keep going at it. They shouldn't be distracted by human affecting. But in the meantime, I mean, that's one way to get a lot of robots out there, especially humans. It's to just say this is a fun thing. It doesn't matter if it breaks, it's just for fun. And so, and that could be, I mean, that's how actually, honestly, I believe in it because I started off again with a sidewalk robot. I didn't pitch it as something that delivers food for you. I just say this is Pokemon Go in the real world. Go out with it. It's a couple hundred dollars. Even if it breaks, no one care. It's just a toy. And it turns out, guess what? The data collected are now used by all the top researchers that do this stuff, right? And so you can't do it in all robotic cases, but I think where possible, you should try to find an application that is fun for robotics. Maybe some of the things, the data that can be used could be, I don't know. Or let's say even the humanoid, let's say they can't be boxing 24-7. When they're not boxing, maybe some researchers can use those to do real-world events for the serious research stuff. Because the researchers are all desperate for more robots like Chris say. So if there's a business model like entertainment that can fund and justify the manufacturing costs and deployment costs, but they are not going to be used for fun things 24-7, then maybe we can tap those for research purposes. sure data collection let's let's move over to for a few minutes to robo papers so as i mentioned at the beginning of the pod you're you're you you're going to very kind of deeply technical conversations with with robot researchers and so chris just kind of walk us through kind of the genesis of why you guys wanted to do it
00:41:44 · Jordan Wolfe, Chris Paxton
[00:41:44] S2: and what's your goal of of um of doing the the weekly pod [00:41:50] S0: So this is actually Michael's idea, for what it's worth. So he was the genesis of it all. So I think he's the person to ask. But I think the idea is. Yeah, go ahead.
00:42:01 · Michael Cho
[00:42:01] S1: Well, I mean, there's a very selfish reason because I would love to talk to all these researchers and ask them questions that I don't understand. I still don't understand. The more I get into the podcast, the more I realize I don't understand. But I think it's a good thing, right? That's the only way to learn, like get really uncomfortable, but then just ask them. And I think it's just a great privilege for, you know, both of us to be able to talk to these researchers, ask them all these questions. And also that there's nothing like it, like, you know, I think, uh, There's really nothing like it even now. It's a very small audience because it's very technical. But those people who care about this technicality, they will listen. I think it's a decent couple. I don't know, Chris, how you think about it. The way I think about it is Chris obviously is a real expert. I'm like the guy who is trying to, who knows enough to ask, but then I'm like, I feel that I can be that bridge to maybe bring it down to earth a little bit, you know, and talk like a, because I'm really not a researcher. So I think that's a decent combo, but it's still quite technical to be honest. And we want to keep it that way. Because if you want to order like, you know, the big industry application, there's so many like VC podcast that I think that the market has plenty of that. But for something for this particular niche, I think there's literally no podcast like that, like long conversation with the technical expert doing very, very specific research and just get them you know, to talk about their work. And usually they're very willing to share and tell you very frankly, what is the capabilities and more importantly, what are the limitations? And sometimes you can't really just get that by reading the paper is you get a lot more to try them talking. Yeah.
00:43:41 · Jordan Wolfe, Chris Paxton, Michael Cho
[00:43:41] S2: Yeah, absolutely. Is there an area of research This is Chris for you. Is there an area of research that the more folks that you're speaking to at RoboPapers that's getting you really excited about maybe some kind of breakthroughs coming through around robotic training or anything else related to the field? I think the thing that has been most exciting lately has been reinforcement learning. [00:44:06] S0: There's a lot of interesting stuff going on. A lot of people are looking into how to do reasoning models for robotics and how to do long horizon reasoning for robots. Like I said, that's stuff that I've always found very fascinating. I don't know. There's so much exciting stuff happening, though. I think there's lots of separate little things which are really cool going on. [00:44:27] S1: Chris, I kind of feel that maybe you have changed your mind a little bit about like eco-centric video as we do more podcasts around research around that. I don't know why Chris has his doubts. [00:44:44] S0: Yeah, definitely. I definitely have my doubts. I still have plenty of doubts, but that's, yeah. [00:44:51] S2: I'm coming around about it. I'm definitely coming around about it. Why do you say that? First of all, you say ego or ecocentric? [00:44:58] S1: Ego. Ego. Ego-centric videos. [00:45:00] S2: Oh, ego. Ego, like first person. So tell me why you said that, because that's interesting to me. What's changed?