From Zero to 150 Robots in Just 20 Months | Mike LeBlanc, Foundation Future Industries

Most humanoid robot companies are still running curated demos in replica environments. Foundation Future Industries is running 150 robots on real automotive production lines in Georgia, and heading to Ukraine this year to deploy on the battlefield. Mike LeBlanc, the co-founder of Foundation Future Industries - currently the only company supplying humanoid robots to the US Department of Defense, with contracts across the Army, Navy, and Air Force, joins Craig Smith to explain why the race is moving faster than almost anyone in the industry believes, and why the companies that are moving cautiously are about to be left behind. His frame is striking: he keeps a framed 1906 New York Times article on his office wall predicting that human flight would take between one million and ten million years. It was published three months before the Wright Brothers flew. He thinks humanoids are in exactly that moment right now. The conversation covers the full operational picture: how Foundation trains robots using video rather than simulation; why the fry-cook robot that couldn't open the bag of fries is a perfect metaphor for everything wrong with how most companies approach go-to-market in this space; why the human form factor isn't a philosophical preference but an empirical fact, humans are still doing every job in every factory that other robots can't, and that's the proof of concept; and why Mike LeBlanc isn't particularly worried about competing against Boston Dynamics backed by Google DeepMind, because they're still demoing in replica sites while Foundation is deploying on production lines. The episode ends with a bet: LeBlanc tells Craig that in twelve months, he'll be back to report 10,000 robots deployed in the world. Craig says he remains cautious. One of them is going to be right. Subscribe to Eye on A. I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Twenty months ago, we didn't have a robot. We had smiles on our faces and the idea of humanoid, right? And today, we have robots already deployed out in the world, working full shift. I think all of this is a lot closer than than anyone will think.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  I wrote something last year about humanoids and how the promise is way out ahead of the reality. And there are all these problems with power supply and the strength of actuators and the generalization of the models that control them.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  We're also trying to get the robots out. That's why I say on to on to the battlefield in Ukraine. To really hope to to actually start putting them out there and seeing how do how do the soldiers want to use them? How do they actually work in a fight? How do they? How do they go up against drones? How do they go up against explosions?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  I first interviewed Mike LeBlanc, co-founder of Foundation Robotics Lab back in January, when the company was making a public relations push claiming they were building humanoid robot soldiers. Mike was claiming they would produce 10,000 robots this year, when even Tesla fell far short of the 5,000 it had hoped to make in 2025. Mike is good company, smart, engaging, and by his own description, an optimist to the core. I, on the other hand, am a skeptic to the core. At the end of our podcast recording, I asked if I could tag along to Ukraine when he delivered robots there for testing.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  The trip happened in February. We got to Kiev, but the robots were stopped at the Polish border and never arrived. Nonetheless, Mike's public relations team managed to get a big spread in Time, the venerable media brand now owned by Mark Benioff, Salesforce's CEO. The article talks a lot about robotic warfare, but fudges the question of whether any Foundation robots ever made it to Ukraine. It said simply that in February, two Phantoms were sent to Ukraine, initially for frontline reconnaissance support. But that was enough for news aggregators to pick it up.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  And pretty soon I was seeing headlines like, Robots in Real War, Ukraine Battlefield Tests Phantom Mach 1, Ukraine Deploys Humanoid Robots in Battlefield Reconnaissance, and Robots Are Heading to War, Being Tested in Ukraine. When I visited Foundation's operations in San Francisco in April, my skepticism grew. Mike's claim that the company went from an idea to building a complete humanoid in under two years left out that he and his founders started by buying an existing humanoid robot company named Boardwalk.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  What's more, some of the military contracts he mentions were carried over from that earlier company. Foundation's shop felt like a research lab, not a factory. The robots on the floor were relatively lightweight machines, nothing that could withstand the recoil of a military weapon. An engineer giving me the tour gave one a shove and it stumbled onto its knees, held up by a harness. The operation was producing about one robot a day, which made 10,000 this year seem impossible. The whole time, I kept trying to square what I saw with the company's pitch,

• 3:39Speaker 01

  machines that would cross rough terrain in a war zone and carry weapons. I spoke to Mike recently, and he has several updates. A new, more robust model of the robot has been completed, six feet tall, 185 pounds, with arms that Mike claims can each lift 80 kilos, more than 170 pounds each. And the company is opening a new production facility in Texas. They've scaled back this year's production target to 6,000 robots instead of 10,000. Mike said that Foundation is building its own AI model to control the robot.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  But see my earlier episode with Sergey Levine, a renowned AI researcher, with his own startup, Physical Intelligence, where he talks about how difficult that is to do. Mike said Foundation is building its own actuators, the tiny motors that control the robot's joints and are the most critical part in any humanoid. That's ambitious. None of this means Foundation won't get there. I've been confidently skeptical about companies before and turned out to be wrong. As I told Mike, Foundation's PR is running far faster than its robots. Here's the conversation.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Why don't we start with having you introduce yourself and talk about your earlier startup? And then then we'll get into Foundation and what you guys are doing.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Great. Yeah, so I'm I'm Mike LeBlanc. I was born and raised in Ohio and then left home to go to Annapolis, Maryland, where I've studied the classics and saw the the books behind me, learned to translate ancient Greek out there and and it got deep into the classics. And as I did, that started to make me really look at war in a deep way, you know, looking at utilities and food trucks and around just these. And joined the Marine Corps, much to my family's dismay. I was Marine Corps for 12 years total. I did three tours to the Middle East during that time, and I was at the Pentagon. And it was at the Pentagon that I that I started looking at startups. And I was looking at electric tanks and starting to vet what, you know, pocket drones,

• 6:02Speaker 00

  how these things could actually come in, how they could be used. And so as as I did that, it started to make me really look at a lot of these companies. I was getting married at the same time. And and so got out of the Marine Corps, went to Harvard Business School. And then, as I was out of there, co-founded Cobalt Robotics, which was back to, you know, we did our seed through Bloomberg Beta, our our A through Skoya, our B through Co2. So, you know, ran ran that for a number of years, grew it into nine countries, four continents, having robots all over, and then sold it in 2024 and started Foundation Future Industries, which is now the sole provider of humanoids for the to the Department of Defense.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so we were talking last time we spoke about this humanoid craze that has kind of taken over in robotics. And I was saying that I it seems that there are many form factors that are are more practical than than the human form. And I was asking why, and maybe you can answer for listeners, why everyone is focused on humanoids now? And I know that the bad answer is the world is built for humans. And the easiest way for robots to navigate is in the human form.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  But there are all kinds of problems with the human form factors. You know, you balance and speed and and

• 7:40Speaker 01

  and battery life and all these different things that that frankly, it'd be easier with either a wheeled robot or or even a robot dog. We talked about the robot dog. So, yeah, give me your view on the human form factor.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  You know, I think that we're really, we're really a species of workarounds. In everything that we do, we have workarounds, we have shortcuts, we have ways that don't really fit the way that we're supposed to do things, but that's how they get done. That's, you know, part of becoming an adult is realizing that the org chart doesn't represent the full view of relationships. Right? And so as you look at all of these workarounds, you you do have all kinds of things that just need to be, you know, through a factory that need to be carried somewhere that you didn't think that they did. Things, parts that need to be discarded, things that, you know, they need to adapt. And as you really start looking at that, you need dexterity and locomotion to do it. And so there are a lot of a lot of things you can think about what what form factors that could fit.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  But the only form factor that we know fits all of these jobs is the human form factor because humans are doing it today. And so, you know, to everyone who wonders about the human form factor, and I always did, you know, I would turn them to the question of why do we still have so many humans in all of these factories? Right? I I walk into them and they're they're packed with robots, right? There are all kinds of ADB and Fanuc and industrial robots, but there are also human beings everywhere. And so that's that's always my first question when I walk in, as I say, what are all these people doing here? And and that's that's what we'll spend the next couple of hours as we tour and tour any facility talking about is why are they still humans?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and is it the form, the human form, or is it the the human judgment? I mean, is it the the the physicality or the mental capability that that humans provide?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Well, the the human hand is incredible. So that's that's a big portion of it. You know, I I think about that every time I'm balancing a mug of coffee as I carry in groceries and have a kid in my arm. Right? And I'm and I'm still able to to open the door. That the human form factor is pretty amazing for things like that. But but it also is, it's, you know, being bipedal and being able to to move around all these spaces, being able to sidestep, move forward and backwards, without without taking up a lot of room that, you know, that wheels might or that a base might. And then also the human judgment, right? When you when you put all of those things together, you you start to really get an appreciation of the the human design. Right? You start to learn a lot about the eyes when you're going into perception. You you start looking a lot at the at the mouth when you have the robot have speakers.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  You know, all of these things are actually designed very well.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, you mentioned the hand. I wasn't gonna go into the weeds right away, but I did a piece for somebody on the Woogie hand, this hand out of China.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  That's that uses it has the actuator, the motor, you know, instead of the most of the hands, human, the robot hands today, the form, human form factor hands,

• 10:58Speaker 01

  use a tendon system. So the motors are buried in the, what is the wrist, and then there are tendons that run up and work the fingers. But there are a lot of reasons why that's not ideal. And there's a company in China that makes tiny actuators. And they have a subsidiary named Woogie Tuck. And they have built a hand with the actuators actually at the joints. And it's incredible. If you haven't seen it, look it up. It's an amazing hand.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  How, how, what, how do you, so the form factor, meaning bipedal, I mean, there are two legs for locomotion, but how are you guys working on dexterity? I mean, what, what hands do you use?

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Well, there are two questions about, about the hands, I think. One is how dexterous are they? So how small of an object, how thin of an object can they pick up? Can they pick up a pin? Can they, you know, can they do electrical wires, things like that? The other is in strength. And so how much, how much can they lift? For how long can they lift it? You know, can, can they pull these things up? How much torque, torque can they produce? And so when you're, when you're really looking at dexterity and strength, I think that there are ways to have actuators in the hand that have lots of dexterity. And I think if that's the hand that I'm thinking of, it's, it's an incredible one. Watch it all over YouTube and immediately went to my hand team. And I said, why aren't we using this? And they, they wrote back strength.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a matter of fact, that's right. It's only got like 40% of the strength of a human hand. Yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so that's, that's where I think right now, as we're seeing that there are so many humanoid companies, it's a horse race for all of this. And you have to really think about where, where you want to land in that market. We are, we are fully dedicated to, you know, businesses and defense. That's, that's what we're making our robots for. Most other people are making it for the homes and business. But when you're making those, those kinds of design trade offs, and you're looking to fold a lot of clothes and do laundry, or you're looking to, you know, empty a dishwasher, all those things, they don't, they don't require that much strength. And so when you're looking at defense use cases, when you're looking at industrial use cases, you want as much strength as possible. And so I think for us, that's why we've, that's why we've still kept things in the forearm.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  But these, these are all the, the kind of choices we're out there with, with customers. We bring back all of their pieces. So if you walk into our office, you'll see parts from all of our customers. You'll see a lot of auto racks. You'll see a lot of, you know, big, big metal clamps that we're working for ports. You'll see all of these things because that's what we test on. That's, that's the standard that we need to get to.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you, you guys are building both the hardware and the software. Is that right?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, I think, I think most, most of the companies are there. There are a couple of breakouts. There's, there's physical intelligence, there's skilled, that are both, both really just working on, on the brain. I think all the ones that were just working hardware seem to be getting scooped up. But, but we'll see. I, I think that really, this is, this is one of those problems where the humanoid is a lot more figured out than, than I thought before I got into this. And, you know, as I've gone around and seen everybody else's robots and, you know, you go, you know, to Germany and DLR, they're kind of NASA over there and looked at their humanoid, you really start to see all of the parts are the same. Right? And it's, you have, you have a choice of what you're going to buy for, for each part.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  But it's, it's kind of, it's, you know, it's really dwindled down. The only one that really is the standout is agility, still has very different form factor. But for everybody else, the, the hardware isn't, you know, you, you kind of know how to place it together and everybody needs to solve hands. Everybody, you know, everybody's facing the same challenges right now.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And actually, that's interesting because that's one of the things that surprised me, that you were able to jump into this extremely technical market.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  I mean, you had robotics experience with Cobalt, but still it's, that's, that's a pretty brave leap. But is it?

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Well, wait, before I, before I take any credit on that, my co-founder, Son Kep, you know, he, he has all, you know, yeah, but between him and, and Patrick Bender Spock, our, our chief AI scientist, they've got so many papers all published all over and cited all over the place. And these, these guys are the, are the brains behind this.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, I understand that. And, but, but is it like the auto industry? That, you know, the different factories stamp different

• 16:01Speaker 01

  shapes of sheet metal, but, or, or whatever they're using now, fiberglass or plastic. But, but the, the actual parts, most of the parts are coming from suppliers who supply to all of the, the major car makers. And, and, you know, you, you have some customization, but

• 16:29Speaker 01

  you know, a car seat is a car seat and, and a steering wheel is a steering wheel. And, you know, the bearings and all that stuff. Is it like that? I mean, is there a world of suppliers to humanoid robotic makers? Or are, are these, are companies like yours building bespoke parts in-house?

• 16:56Speaker 00

  We're, we're building a lot, a lot of bespoke parts in-house. So we, we have CNC machines, a lot of this, you, you know, especially for me, doing the second time around with lots of manufacturing in the past, you, you start to see, you think that your suppliers are these big vendors that make all of this great stuff and you can never, never touch their business. And then you go visit them and you find three guys in a storage unit somewhere. And you're like, you know, hooked up to a generator and you're going, is this is what I've been paid? No wonder I, no wonder I can't scale. Right? And so, so you kind of end up taking those things in-house. And we've, we've done a lot of that this time round of, of really saying, what, what is a part that we, that we can make? How can we get as close to just taking things from nature and turning it into this, into this robot?

• 17:40Speaker 00

  But, you know, with that, you, you are still going to have a steering wheel. You're still going to have tires. You're still going to have all the basic parts, right? But some people are going to be building Ferraris and some people are going to be building Honda Civics.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Although when you get to actuators, that is an industry in itself. And, and I, you know, there's no point in, in trying to build actuators from scratch when there are companies that have been doing it for decades. So.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  And we are built from scratch.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Are you really?

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Our actuators, yes. And our, our actuators are really our, our differentiator, I think. You know, because you, you do realize anybody that's, that's, you know, breaking down a humanoid robot, almost all the cost is in the actuators. That's, and, and that's where almost all of the speed comes from. That's where, that's where a lot of the problems are going to come from. So it's, it's, you know, it's one of these critical parts. Right? The hand needs to be, you need to get the hand right so that you can do all of the skills, but you need to get the actuators right so that it doesn't break down all the time. That it doesn't, that it can actually make economic sense, all of these things. So, so we are building those, those in-house. And we've been, you know, we've, we've been really excited about what we've been able to do on those. They're, they're extremely smooth and watching, watching the robot, you really, really can see the, the speed.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  And, you know, yeah, it's, it's, it's really amazing what our robot's able to do on that.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. Well, let's, let's pull back a little bit. I'm sorry. I got so into the weeds so quickly. So you're building humanoids for industrial use and the military.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  And when we spoke before, you were saying that you're building, at least for the military, you're focusing on, on specific. Tasks, I think you mentioned, you know, getting out of a Humvee or

• 19:39Speaker 01

  you know, being in a combat situation and having the robot go and place a charge on a door to to blow open a door, which is for obvious reasons, a very dangerous thing for a human being to do.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can you talk about the, the, how narrow the tasks are that you're training these robots for? And, and does you, do you have, are you developing a control model? I mean, an AI model that that controls a robot that is that generalizes enough that you can use different hands on the robot for different tasks and that sort of thing?

• 20:28Speaker 00

  So we'll, we'll keep, we'll keep all the same stuff on the robot for, for defense, for business. The robot, the robot will stay, stay as the same product. But yes, we are, we're building world action models that will be generalizable to all of these tasks. Right now, what it's looking like is about a hundred hours of video data that we, that we put into each of these tasks. And, and that, that seems to be giving us out what we need. And that's, that's how we've gotten our, our first robot, you know, working 24 hour shifts, five days a week on, on the assembly line was, was through getting about a hundred, a hundred hours and, you know, tweaking there. There are all kinds of little things that go into that, but, but that, that makes it fully autonomous.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  And so I think throughout defense, we, we're the, we're the only company that's selling to humanoids, selling humanoids to Department of Defense. And, and so you kind of, you kind of go where the case leads you, right? You have, you have some people that are looking at logistics, like motor transportation, fixing trucks, aviation, doing all of this maintenance, refueling, things like that to, to aircraft. But you also have people that are interested in, you know, kinetic side and, you know, really protecting soldiers. And that is just, just like you mentioned, putting, you know, putting a water charge on a door, being able to blow that up, being able to carry out dead bodies off of the battlefield is very, very dangerous task. A lot of people do being the point man in a patrol.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  So, so there are a lot of those that go into this, this real protector and shielding mode. And I think right now it's, it's really just take, take as many videos of all of those things as we can. And we, we start building the models. So we're, we're getting more specific about which ones we're going to automate. But we're, we're very much hoping to get these onto the battlefield this year.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  And you mentioned the model, the, the, the kind of model, these are your training, these are vision

• 22:24Speaker 01

  language, action models, is that right? Is that VLA's vision, language, action?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and specifically latent space variable analysis is what we're doing, which is ultimately you're, you're understanding the relationships between objects. You're understanding the physics of what's happening through these videos. So rather than having to mimic any, any direct movement or, you know, like, like teleopping would remember all of the different ways that I, you know, grasping a cup. This, this actually understands the relationships between all of these things and then can make decisions about how it should, how it should go about interacting in the world. And we've, we've had a lot of success of really automating that with a lot fewer hours than I, I think it takes on a lot of other things.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  It's like a world model, building a internal representation of, of the environment or of the world at large. Not a specific environment, but it generalizes so it understands laws of physics and that sort of thing. Is that, is that right? And then, and then you use the vision, language, action, a model to train it using a video. I'm guessing, I don't know.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, it's really interesting. So everybody, everybody saw ChatGPT and, you know, all, all of these companies got perplexity and open high and all these that, that are all using large language models. And those, those are all working. We just threw a ton of compute at it and we had all of this language already out there, right? So it's able to pull from all of this. It's huge corporate of language that we have on the internet. But we don't have all that kind of real world data. So, so there's big, there's big dearth and, you know, and actually just picking up, you know, cups and things like that. So we do have, we do have videos, but we don't know if they're, if they're close enough, if they're at the right angles. If there's a way to use, you know, I don't know if there's a way to use, you know, Seinfeld reruns and be able to train a robot, but we haven't figured that out yet.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  So instead, people have to turn to either doing this in simulation. So they, they just have to build a robot like a video game and try to kind of train it there and then see how that comes on there. That's, that's a very good way to do it, except that it's very tough to overcome the gap between the simulation and reality when the robot actually does it. The second would be teleopping. So that's where you always see these people with VR goggles on and the gloves. You know, and they're, and they're trying to, try to control these things. You can train it to just do that over and over again, and the robot will soon learn, okay, that's, that's how I go there. And the other way would be video. And so for us, it is video, it's first person video and third person video.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  So we'll have someone wear a GoPro, we'll have them where, you know, either chest cam or we've got two, two that go on a helmet. And then we've got other, other ones that are sitting on tripods outside of them to kind of show the, the larger action they're working with them. And, you know, I think, I think as I've, as I've gotten, you know, more involved with the, with the AI and looking at what our AI team does, it looks to me like these are all, it's, it's not really, you choose one. Everybody is using all of them, but it depends on the chef, how much they use of each ingredient. And so I, I think that's, we're, we're pretty heavy on, on videos and more we're putting into these. But what that ultimately creates is a robot that can understand and interact, you know, the, the world with the task that, that we're, we fed into it.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, generalization is the holy grail for all of these

• 25:54Speaker 01

  robot control models. And, but you were saying that you focus on specific tasks. Does that make the training easier and, and

• 26:08Speaker 01

  the, the, the robots' operation that much more exact or or not? I don't know.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  This is so ultimately, as we train all of these different robots to do these tasks, they'll, they'll all be out there collecting all of this different data that we will turn into a generalizable model. So I think this, this was true, you know, true six months ago. I think it's still true today. We're the only ones that are sort of taking the approach that Tesla took on cars. So, and, and that includes Tesla on Optimus. Tesla, I think, is brute forcing a lot of teleopping. But, you know, the way that they did it with cars was they just had people drive and the car would just collect all of that data of exactly what was happening in the camera and exactly what did the driver do? And by doing that enough, it was able to create a, a model that would, that would work, be able to navigate the world.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  And so I think for us, right now, we're picking very, very similar tasks to each other, but there are, there are lots of differences that come in, in the actual, in the, in the real world and pulling those things off. And so as we collect up all of that data, that will feed into a generalizable model.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, because even if you have a robot trained to do a fairly specific task, like placing a charge on a door, the minute it's on the ground, moving across the ground, all bets are off because there's all kinds of unexpected obstacles. How, and is, how do you deal with that? Or is that the, are you reaching that level of generality that, that the robot can handle?

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's, it's, it's been really interesting as we've broken down these tasks because in almost everything we've done, there, there's the base case and then there are contingencies. Contingencies have a very long tail, but don't pop up that often. And so there's some ability to use humans and training side by side to, to have humans, you know, handle whatever that situation is. Whenever a robot's out there, for example, it will be out there with Marines, right? They can, they can go and handle some of these situations. But that's again, where we're finding contingencies are, are long, but they're not, you know, the, the probability of them is not as infinite as you would think. But everybody knows the videos of, you know, Tesla that is, that driving, somebody's been, you know, sleeping in their, in their car.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  And there's a tree in the road and it crashed into that because that, that was just a tiny, tiny chance of that happening. Those things are going to happen. That's, that's largely going to be the case in these, in these early models that we deal with them. But it's amazing how many contingencies you can really plan for and how much video data you can collect to, to make up for them.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and where, how are you testing these? Do you have a because again, you, you need to train them in an environment somewhat similar to the environment that they're going to be operating in.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Well, as, as much as possible, we're, we're getting onto our customer sites and doing these. So that's, that's where we have all of our, you know, we already have robots that are working in auto manufacturing. And, and as I say, that's where we're the first humanoid company to do that for 24 hour shifts. A big reason for that is we, we plug the robots in right now. Those aren't, those aren't just on battery. But being able to take over 24 hour shifts, it teaches, teaches your robot a lot and it teaches your team a lot. Because our, all of our engineers, we have PhDs surrounding this thing at all times and they're hearing the loud noises. They're feeling how hot it is in there. They're, they're seeing how the press goes down and, and how they have to respond to all of these, all of these different actions.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  And so we've, we've been doing a lot of that. We're, we're also trying to get the robots out. That's why I say onto, onto the battlefield in Ukraine to really hope to, to actually start putting them out there and seeing how do, how do the soldiers want to use them? How do they actually work in a fight? How do they, how do they go up against drones? How do they go up against explosions? You know, what are all these things we need to build?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Well, that's interesting, because these robots aren't cheap, particularly at the scale you're at now. I mean, certainly, scale brings down unit costs, but

• 30:23Speaker 01

  going to Ukraine, how many robots can you afford to to lose?

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I'm headed there next month to really to really look at this up close. But from from what I understand right now, there's, you know, it's not it's not quite trenches that everyone is in, but they're they're sort of strongholds that they're in. And the huge danger is anytime you're out of one of those strongholds, if you have to go and get supplies from a truck, if you have to go and, you know, set set a landmine, if you have to, anything that you have to do outside of that stronghold, the drones are just coming for you. And and you are, you are really naked out there as soon as you do that. So the the thaw, and what we've been talking to some of the military units over there about is is instead of sending a human to do those tasks, send a robot.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  So, you know, will those robots get hit? They may, but they're they're certainly, you know, cheaper, and you'd rather be a robot than a human.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. And we talked about robotic dogs, which, to me, is just a much more stable platform than than a robot on on legs, on two legs.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Again, why? Why not put it on a, you know, put an arm or two arms on a robotic dog? Even you could even have, you know, a dog that's six feet off the ground, but it's just a much stabler platform. Is there a reason, you know?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I think we're going to see a lot of different form factors coming in land drones. Right? We have the skies are filled with them right now, but there are a lot of people competing in the sea and and on land now. The the dogs, what the dogs have added to to war, what they're what they're really gonna add is is really incredible. But I think I think, again, you're still gonna run into things like if you need to search a house, for example, if you need to go upstairs, if you need to drive a vehicle, if you need to, you know, use a crew-served weapon. There are there are just lots of examples that pop up that don't make a lot of sense for the dogs that, you know, again, it was kind of funny when we were developing this, because we started saying, do we need a head? Was one of the early questions, because we said we can do it right in the chest.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  And as we actually started doing it, because it's also ultimately two light industry alarms, right? And we thought we can just put a camera right in the center. It's much more helpful to have a camera that's up. And so all of these things kind of start to make you appreciate the human form factor of going, no, that really does make sense, and you you do like a neck to be able to crane and be able to look at things. You all of these things really go toward a purpose. And and yeah, for any of this, if you want to, if you want to be, you know, pulling out, pulling out bodies, if you want to have something that can detain people, if you want to have, you know, all of these different interactions, you could probably find a different form factor for each. But it'd be very hard to find a form factor that can do all unless it's a humanoid.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  So you're optimistic about about pedal robot walking through uneven terrain and carrying a heavy weapon or? Or, or, yeah.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  I I think the the uneven surfaces have been amazing, and and not just not just for us. You know, I see what the other what the other humanoid companies are doing. And it's, you know, it wasn't too long ago that that they were all kind of, you know, petering out there and that, you know, for for us, that was that was right during the during the election, and we all said, you know, our robot walks just like the president. You know, we were like, it has a presidential gate, because it walks like President Biden. You know, I think a lot of people had had that kind of shuffle going. But, you know, as we've moved forward, now you see you see robots that are running marathons. You see, you know, you see very, very agile robots. And we've already started hit all these uneven surfaces, be able to move through things. You know, we put objects in front of it, it knows which objects to walk around and which ones it can actually plow through.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  So, no, and this this is all in 20 months of work. So, yeah, I'm very optimistic about about what we're able to do on this.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fascinating. And so you talked about the deployment in Georgia, where the robots are are tailored to to the ceiling with electrical cables that feed power to them to so that they can operate 24/7 without people having to swap batteries and stuff. When you're on the battlefield, how do you handle power supply?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  We're we're doing that with battery. And this, again, really goes to the use case of how long do you need that robot to be running? So having a robot run 24/7 is what makes it make sense economically in a factory. If you're going to replace, you know, three, three shifts of workers that are each getting paid $60,000, you can make it make economic sense. On the battlefield, they don't need it to be working 24 hours. Right? So they they do have lots of loitering drones, and and they have more concerns about what what their airtime is. But for us, it really is these, you know, they would want to be able to turn on their robot, go pick up the supplies, the truck is here, we can, we can pull those all out. We need to get a better perspective on on a certain building, or we want to go look at

• 35:46Speaker 00

  the enemy's flank, send out some reconnaissance robots. So it's it's gonna be much more directed actions, I think.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so your battery, what is the battery like?

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Right now, four hours. You know, and we're hoping, we're hoping to extend that. And I I think that batteries are one of those interesting things that, again, you you kind of have all of these different startups, right? A hand, a robotic hand is a company all in itself. A battery is a company all itself, you know, you kind of have all of these different ones. But batteries are a place that I think that the the industry is making a lot of gains. And and that that makes it easier for us to start picking up and and getting much longer times.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so the idea would be a team would go out with

• 36:31Speaker 01

  a couple of these robots or one robot and a whole bunch of battery packs, and they just swap the battery packs. Yeah.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've we've had a lot of, you know, the the imagination goes runs wild when you have a human-shaped robot. And and so we've had, we've had a lot of different, different decision makers in the military thinking different things. But one, one that we've heard a lot of is attaching robots to trucks, figuring out some way to have robots kind of tucked up and on the sides of trucks that as they arrive, they can just pop these down and and have the robots, you know, first walk a perimeter around to make sure that there are no landmines, no IEDs, anything like that. Right? There there are all these kind of different use cases that people are coming up with. But a lot of them converge on that. And, you know, so you kind of have the truck as a central place that would have batteries. And and we will get to the point that, you know, our robots can change each other's batteries.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  So, you know, you will find this fully autonomous command center.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how how, I mean, this all sounds very futuristic, sounds possible, but it's still sounds like it's not. We're not there today. How how confident are you that you'll be able to deploy successfully on a battlefield in a certain timeframe? And what timeframe are you looking at?

• 37:56Speaker 00

  You know, I think I'm just as confident as I am that my kids are going to be able to drive cars, that they're gonna get married and buy houses. And, you know, a lot of this is, you you look at it in its infancy, and it is hard. It's it's hard. My kids are six, seven, and eight years old. It's hard to look at them and start thinking, oh, they're gonna do taxes, right? Because because they're not there today. But when you really look at how quickly they're growing, and when you really think, you know, when I think back to two years ago, how my kids were talking, how they were acting, how they thought, right, and where they are today. That's where that's where you start to go, yeah, we we have this very linear view of what growth and improvement looks like.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  But for robotics, especially, I think if you look, 20 months ago, we didn't have a robot. We had smiles on our faces and the idea of humanoids. Right? And today, we have robots already already deployed out in the world, working, working full shifts. We have, you know, we have robots that are are ready to walk uneven surfaces and go out into the battlefield. So, you know, that's all, that's all just in 20 months. So I think 20 months from now is is gonna be shocking to a lot of people. I think all of this is a lot closer than than anyone will think.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Let's talk about the Georgia deployment.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  What exactly are the robots doing?

• 39:16Speaker 00

  So it's almost all injection molded parts. So you know, all of these other Fannik robots and things all make all of these parts. They clip them together. They come out on a conveyor belt. And when we arrived there, it would be, you know, a human that's standing there, a person on an eight hour shift. The, the parts come out in different spaces on the conveyor belt, right? So there was, there was a little bit of adaptability that needs gone there. They, they would put a label on it. They would do a quality control check with a, with a camera. And then after they marked it good, they would put it into the packaging. If it was bad, they would, they would move it to a separate rack where it would get, get taken away. And, and so, you know, as we, as we looked at that, we, we thought we could probably handle something like this.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  And I think it was what April to November, never do math in public, but I don't know, six months in or so, uh, that we did a proof of concept on this. And, and we brought our first robot out. That robot was on wheels. When we did it, we didn't have the legs yet. And, and the robot was able to do all the parts. So we, we did that for hundreds of parts for all their executive team. And they now said, this, this looks like it's worth moving forward. Uh, and so we now, we have a contract for a hundred and fifty robots going and doing those tasks. Uh, and that's, that's what we're, we're deploying and we're, we're working to, to get all of those robots out. But they're, they're very, very similar tasks, different parts, but very similar.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. What kind of a factory? I mean, what's the product that they're assembling?

• 40:47Speaker 00

  It's a, it's an automotive OEM. So it's, they, they make the parts for, you know, they, they actually, they make a part for my, uh, uh, Land Rover. You know, so it's, it's funny as you go out there, it's a little plastic cladding part on the outside of the door. And I go, ah, you know, you can pop it off and see that's made in, that's made in Georgia.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  And the power, uh, presumably was that difficult to design the, the cabling so that these robots don't get tangled up?

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Not at all, oddly enough. Uh, you know, I, I thought that was going to be a real thing. It was the thing that we talked about a lot before, before we went out there. Uh, but really, so all, all hundred and fifty of these operate in a fifteen by fifteen cell or smaller, fifteen foot by fifteen foot. They, there's nobody that moves that much. And the first robots that we've deployed, they really only take a couple of steps. You know, at most they're probably taking five steps. And, and so it's interesting. We have, we'll have the robot move, uh, just move backward. Instead of, uh, instead of like turning, turning around and doing these things. And so the cable really just hangs there and can, you know, it's, it's like a, like, you know, my dog, when I put him on a, on a running leash. Out there, it, it just doesn't get tangled.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, that's interesting. Uh, the dog analogy, the, uh, uh, where, where do you, so you guys are twenty months in. I mean, it's incredible. Um, and maybe it's, it's the fearlessness that comes with someone coming in. Fresh? I don't know, because a lot of the researchers that I've talked to are so cautious about capabilities. You know, uh, and frankly, what I've seen until fairly recently with, uh, Optimus or.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  They don't blow me away. Uh, and, and they don't look very robust. Uh, but man, you know, you, you guys have, you know, made all this progress in twenty months. Uh, where, where do you see this going for you and for the industry?

• 43:05Speaker 00

  You know, to me, this, this really is one of those cases where, uh, the attitude and approach makes a huge difference in how the technology, uh, develops. And, you know, I think everybody saw, there was a viral video, I think it was out of Germany or Russia. I can't remember where it was out of, but the robot that walked on stage and fell. And yeah, and the guys run out to cover it like a car accident and they're very frantic about it. Uh, it is, it is not hard to find, uh, videos of our robot falling. Uh, but what you'll see when it falls, you know, is, Sanket and I will be standing next to it. It will fall. And we continue conducting the interview as we lift it back up and get the robot working.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  Because I, I, I think that we, coming into this, you know, we're, we're not shy about saying this is very new technology. All of the stuff that we're solving, you know, we're, we're very, very honest about where it's at. And, but as you do that throughout the whole team, and you don't have these, these kind of marketing lies that are built up and things that you're hiding behind and trying to make these highly curated videos. You have a team that is actually able to deal with the problem that's happening. And when you have very smart people that are directed toward those problems, you can get those problems solved. So I, I do think this is an interesting time where the, the experts in all of the specific tasks, uh, have kind of too much project fatigue.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  For them to really see how quickly this is going to move. And so I'm, I'm still shocked. I'll talk to other founders. And they'll be saying, you know, yeah, I think we're ten, ten to fifteen years out. And I go, you, you know, you better get ready because we're making ten thousand this year and I'm not going to keep those in a storage unit. Right? These things are getting out in the world.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's, uh, I think I told you, I, I wrote something last year, early last year, about a year ago. About humanoids and how the, the promise is, is way out ahead of the reality and. There are all these problems with power supply and, and the strength of actuators and the general. Generalization of the, of the models that control them. Particular, there was talk and there continues to be of household robots. Uh, that will, you know, be your, your housekeeper. Uh, and I would have been very.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Not skeptical that it won't happen someday, but that we're even within ten or fifteen years of that, that it's going to take a long time to get that level.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  This is, this is so funny because I have, you know, from, from your alma mater, well, I call it the New York Times, I have hanging on my wall. The New York Times, you can print any old copy of the newspaper, any page, right? And so I went through the archives and found in, I think it's nineteen oh six, I think it's October nineteen oh six. There is an article that says why there will never be heavier than air flight. And it says, so many people have been trying planes. And then the, the analogy that it uses, this is the math that it does. It says, uh, you know, if you look at how long it took birds to evolve, right? You would already have, you would already have almost a million years. And to do that with metal, which is even heavier, is going to be even harder.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  And so the, the writer says that it's going to be between one million and ten million years for human beings to, to achieve flight. And three months later, you had the Wright brothers, uh, that were, that were first in flight. And, you know, so I, so I have that hanging. I had that framed on my wall because I, I think that we are living in exactly that time. Where, where the humanoids are in their infancy. I think that a lot of people working on them, uh, don't believe in them. I think a lot of them, you know, still think, yeah, there's funding coming in, but these things aren't going to turn out. But as I look at this, we, we are the Wright brothers. These, these are going to be working far sooner than anybody thinks. And, and people are going to be shocked at, at the change that makes in the world.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Hyundai is famously, as they were featured on sixty minutes, using, or at least talking about deploying Boston Atlas, Boston Dynamics humanoid. Uh, when Boston Dynamics is tied up with DeepMind, Google DeepMind, who. It would be terrifying to me to have to compete with them. I mean, first of all, with Boston Dynamics, because they've been at this for such a long time. Uh, and the criticism of their robots used to be, yeah, but it's all teleoperated.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  There's no AI controlling the robot. But now they've got DeepMind and, and, and they've got a, a refined form factor. I mean, it's pretty impressive. Doing, uh, in the video I saw doing something similar to what you're talking about in Georgia, picking up. Parts, scanning it for defects and then moving it to where it needs to be.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  How do you see the competitive landscape? Is this a market that is going to be so large? That there will be many players or, uh, do you, do you feel pressure from people like Boston Dynamics and DeepBrain?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Oh, we, we feel a lot of pressure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, and that's, that's why we work, you know, six, six days. Some of our teams work six days a week. Some, some teams work seven days a week. Because this, this is a huge race against all of these. But, you know, when I, when I look at Boston Dynamics, I loved watching that sixty minutes. I watched it with my kids getting ready the other day, the other morning. They are doing almost exactly the same task. So if you look at what the parts they're using, I mean, they look almost identical to what they're doing. Some nuances in the video are, they're doing it in a replica site to the side of the factory. They're not doing it on the manufacturing line. They're not running anything close to, to twenty-four hours. And, uh, as you actually watch the tasks that they're doing, they're moving a lot of things from racks to tables.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Which is a capabilities demonstration, but it's not the actual task. I'm sure that's not, nobody needs parts taken from a rack and put on a table. And so when I look at that and I think about how long Boston Dynamics has been around and in space. And when I look at us and what we're doing today and how long we've been in space, uh, I don't feel that worried.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  So you can you can throw in lots of, you know, Google Deep Mind. I mean, going against Elon, what's what's more scary than going against Elon, right? But but as I look at those, I I think a lot of people are making these design choices that are going to be much more lightweight. They're going to be hoping to get into the home. And the ones that are focused on business like us, I don't see anybody that's moving anywhere as close to as fast as we are. So we'll we'll see how many how many winners there end up being in all these spaces. But as of right now, I think as long as we keep pushing on this as hard as we have been, we've we've got momentum and we're going to see these things really fly.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and do you think that then there's room for many players? Like, there will be someone specialized in military-grade robots? There will be some that specialize in, you know, household robots? Or do you think there'll be kind of an iPhone of robots that that can be applied or tweaked?

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I think that's going to look a lot more like cars. Right? And that's that's why we've been really focused. We always say we're we're building the pickup truck. Everybody else is building the Prius. I I think that you are going to have to have these lightweight, low-bomb-cost, you know, consumer robots. If you really want to get it out there to to lots of homes, it just doesn't make economic sense to make it very expensive. So you really need to hit, you know, even the 20,000, 30,000 that that Elon's talked about. That's that's still pretty expensive for what these what these robots are going to do. For us, working in working in businesses, when you're working on ports, when you're replacing specialized jobs that, you know, I just just looked at Ford,

• 51:13Speaker 00

  is is having trouble filling all of these positions for $180,000 a year. When when you're facing those kinds of things, you can make a much more robust robot. And so I I don't see that landscape changing anytime soon. And I think there there probably will be different models that are doing those things.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  And so there's room for for many companies. So if once it's solved,

• 51:36Speaker 01

  it's sort of an endless market, right?

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I think as varied as the cars you see on a road, right? So you see you'll see a motorcycle, right? There's going to be somebody with a tiny unitry. You know, those things are like three feet tall, but they'll have that for crawling and addicts. I don't know what they're going to have them for. But you'll see that all the way up to, you know, very heavy and much larger robots that are able to lift a lot more. And who knows? Who knows how big and robust those can get?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, you don't have to talk about this, but you're new and you're venture-funded. I guess you have a little bit of revenue coming in. But how long? When what's your window? I mean, at a certain point, a lot of these companies are going to run out of venture funding. And, you know, get gobbled up, I guess, by people like Boston Dynamics or Optimus.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, that no, the the thought of being bought by Boston Dynamics is is absurd to me. But, you know, they we we might buy them. You never know. They've they've got some good stuff. I'd really turn it into something. We've we've got very robust funding. And the the interesting thing is, this is this is not a hard thing for investors to see and to see the power of. You know, I think if you look, if you look across human history, we've we've really been subsidized by slavery for almost all of it. You know, when we finally finished slavery, it was with the help of the Industrial Revolution. And so robots were actually able to help us stop that. But then we just started new slavery under the name of globalization, and we just shifted off

• 53:19Speaker 00

  to China. And so, you know, I, again, I was a classic philosophy major. Aristotle says, "The only way that you'll ever truly get rid of slavery is with automatons, with things that are able to do their own tasks." And I think that is the age that we're living in. And so when you're dealing with such an existential question, everyone just understands that in their bones. And so as you can show them, you know, this is a very visual product. As they see what we're able to do autonomously, when people come, we bring investors to the factory to actually look at these robots. And it's it's not that glamorous, right? They're not that fast. They're moving. They're moving within the same same time that a person does. It's 60 seconds per part that they have on these. Some some of the work cells are 52

• 54:01Speaker 00

  seconds, or but they're all right around there. As they as they see it doing that, and they talk to our customers and they go, "You actually sent three people home because of this," right? You're actually recognizing ROI. I I think that is more surprising to them than seeing a machine that's able to walk like a human. The fact that we're actually able to deploy robots to save money. So I I think there's always lots more funding when you can when you're saving customers money. You you have very a lot of power to go scale. And when you have a lot of power to scale, you have a lot of power to raise capital.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I hate this question, but I I feel compelled to ask because it's such a part of the the discussion these days.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Because I'm a tech optimist, and I think that the labor market will figure itself out. But you could, you know, just that, you know, being able to replace workers with humanoid robots, does that concern you? Or how do you see that play?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  No, not not in the least. You know, I really, I look at these tasks. And you'll you'll watch these people. I'll I'll sit up. They have little ladders that you can climb up. And I'll I'll sit there and I'll watch them for hours. I'll be looking across the factory. And I'll be watching these people pick up a piece of plastic, hold it under camera, put on a label, put it in packaging. And I think all of these humans have stolen robot jobs. These were all stolen from robots, and we're taking them back. I think that is, nobody wants to go to work. We we hang with all these people. My, you know, my wife will come on site. She brings all these, you know, fancy Starbucks drinks for everybody. And we walk around, we talk, talk with everybody in there.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  I I don't know anybody in the plants that we're operating in that is upset that the robot has taken job. It's it's just the same as a phonic robot coming in and doing something. You know, our our most frequently asked question, I always say, is, can I take a selfie with it? Right? The people, people love to come up. They love to say we're working with humanoids. And and I think that, you know, overall, the best, the best example is really ATMs. Right? When the ATM came out, people said, "It's going to put bank tellers out of business." But sure enough, it actually just meant that we expanded the number of banks to the point that we have more bank tellers today than we ever did before the ATM. So, you know, with any technology, right now, we're replacing a lot of jobs. But then I think very quickly, people see that they can expand because they have this

• 56:24Speaker 00

  technology. So they go, "We can start a new plant." And then people start realizing they can do fully new tasks because they have this new capability. And so, you know, where where all of that goes, I'm I'm very optimistic about how many jobs that's going to create, how many human beings still need to be involved in those processes, and how cool the work is that they're that they're going to be doing. Because it's it's very fun working with robots.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you were saying that your offices, you have robots roaming around. Is it are these prototypes? Or or is that part of the testing?

• 56:57Speaker 00

  No, yeah. So these are all, you know, if if you walk in, you'll just see a lot of engineers focused on their computers and looking over at the robot, right? And God knows what they're looking at and what they're looking for. But that that is the job is really, we we run them on these replica sites. We build exactly replica sites of our of our customers, work cells. We do those both in our German German office and in our San Francisco office. And but these these robots are always walking around doing some kind of testing. Sometimes, you know, we had to have, we had a customer that wanted to see how long the robot could stand. They wanted to make sure that it could just stand there for 24 hours without moving and having to catch itself. So there was one day that we were just videotaping

• 57:38Speaker 00

  that. There are other days that for hours, the robots, we just test how they do, just walking back and forth, just a walk and a turn, just a runway walk. And we'll we'll run that for hours, just to see, see how it all goes. So it's, I always say, it's like Willy Wonka for adults. It it has this just really cool feel when you walk in there of and and you feel optimistic when you walk in there about what the future is going to look like.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And do you think that you're on par with the other players? Do you think you're ahead of them? And from what you've said, you're you're deploying more quickly? Or do you think there are others that are ahead of you? I mean, I, you know, I don't want you to rank your competitors, but but who do you watch? And and not necessarily worry about, but who do you see is is on the right track?

• 58:34Speaker 00

  I I think I think Figure and Optimus look really good.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  You know, I think the reason that we've been able to deploy more and on and on full contracts, not on not on pilots, and these these little tests, that really comes down more to solving the whole problem. You know, and I see this, this is in startups, I see this all the time, that they they kind of go in and they handle just some base case, but they can't make an economic case. There was a, there was a robot a couple of years ago that was dipping fries into a deep fryer and taking them out. And they were saying, "We're going to replace the fry cook," but they couldn't open the bag of fries, right? That that to me is that that just encapsulates everything that that people do wrong in their in their go-to-market strategy. And so it's interesting, you know, when you go back and look at Edison, you know, the most important part, I think, of what Edison did, there were

• 59:22Speaker 00

  already light bulbs around, right? He didn't, you know, and electricity's always been around. He didn't invent electricity, right? But he realized you needed to have a power plant. And he realized you're going to need to do that for all of the homes around. And so he he solved the whole product. He was able to put it out there and then made it made the innovations to make it cheap enough that it was worth people getting. It's it's those those kind of human and economic conditions that you really need to satisfy. And that's why I think that we've figured out a way to get these robots into action a lot sooner than anybody else has by really just looking at the whole product, putting ourselves in the customer's shoes and saying, "What am I paying today? How robust does this robot need to be for me to really trust that this robot can do my

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  part?" And and that's that's what we've that's been the real innovation that we've figured out to get these robots out faster.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  And what what is the pricing? Do you have a target price point? I mean, regardless of, obviously, it's, you know, there, you can't.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  You know, optimize costs when you're starting up, but you were saying 10,000. What did you say? How many robots this year?

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  These are, yeah, we'll, we'll make 10,000 robots this year.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  So right now, we're, we're only working with six customers. We're, we're keeping it very tight. Uh, and that's, that's because we have a hundred robot minimum at, at any customer. So the, the contract size we're working with are, you know, the, the largest contract that we're working with is 2,000 robots. Uh, but they all kind of need to be in that range. And yeah, and for, for these robots, for the initial users, it's all a hundred thousand per year per robot. Uh, it, it will go up from there as they become more robust, as they're able to take over harder jobs. Uh, the prices will go up, but for all of these initial customers, we have the same deal, a hundred thousand dollars per robot per year.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  And that's, uh, are you essentially renting the robot or are they, they buying them? Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Full lease that includes all, you know, us coming and fixing them. If they go down, it has all over the air, software updates. Uh, it, it even has, if the robot goes down, uh, we have built into our service level agreement that a human being on our side has to come and do the task while the robot is down. So there, there are all kinds of contingencies about how this, how it's built up. And a lot of those, we took the same structure from, from Cobalt, my last company, uh, where, where we did have, you know, hundreds, hundreds of these robots out there and, and had to really learn how, how do you fix a robot when it goes down in Singapore?

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Although I, I don't think you're going to be sending, uh, employees out to the battlefield to stand in for open robot.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Is that the same? Is the cost higher for the military grade?

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  Uh, for the military, we've been working different pricing in, in different use cases. Uh, and they, they have their budgets work differently. It's very hard for them to go on a subscription. So we're doing some, uh, outright buys, uh, and then they have, have some maintenance that they're able to buy on top of it. But yeah, there, there've been, we're, we're still, still evolving what those contracts are going to look like.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and you, you have contacts in the military having come from the Marines, but how did you penetrate? Uh, that's incredibly complex bureaucracy. I've spoken to a lot of startups that, uh, have, uh, products that are relevant for the military, but they don't want to touch it because it's such a time suck trying to get through. I, I think, did you say that you're, you're, you have a relationship with Andro?

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Well, so, so Andro, we've had, uh, you know, Palmer Lucky has spoken through our robot, uh, several times. So we actually dress it up in a, in a wine shirt and the, the shorts and a, and a mullet, mullet wig. So it's, it's been very cool to see, yeah. It's to see him, him talking through the robot and we'll continue to do that. Uh, whenever, whenever he can't make an event, a, a robot will be there. But no, really, really breaking into all of these things, I, I think that the military gets a bad rap for, for its ability to purchase things. Uh, I, you know, I've sold, I've sold to Amazon, General Motors, you know, Uber, DoorDash, Salesforce. You know, a lot of, a lot of big names, Citibank, you know, at, at Cobalt, they're all hard to break into.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  It's, it's hard to sell things to a business and, and the reason that, you know, there, there is a lot of red tape in, in a lot of these places. But the, the real problem is there aren't just full decision makers that can just simply say that's going there and nobody's going to say anything about it. It's every decision that they make is political. And so you have to build coalitions. You have to, you know, you have to get a large tent if, if you want to put these things out there. And, and I think the military is, is largely the same. So we, we've talked a lot with, with Congress about this. We've talked a lot with generals about this. We've talked a lot uh, with, with just soldiers on the line. Uh, and you, you really have to work all those different angles, just as going into a big enterprise deal, you have to talk with

• 1:04:21Speaker 00

  the workers, you have to talk to their supervisors, you have to talk to the CEO and, and the private equity company that owns them. You gotta, you, you've really got to understand all those different aspects. And so, so I think it's, you know, largely the same for us going into the military.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  And which service are you working with?

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Uh, so we, we have contracts with the Army, Navy and Air Force. Uh, and then we're just beginning with the Marine Corps and we hope to, hope to begin with, uh, Department of Homeland Security this year.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, and, and the, the point, uh, to get into those, do you approach each, or are you going through the joint? Jake, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center?

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  We go talking to everybody. And this is, you know, for, for me, I, I of course have, you have everybody in my peer group is Lieutenant Colonel. So I know a lot of battalion commanders. Uh, so there's just a large group of those in my phone that I can, can call at all these times. Uh, but there, there are also a lot of, a lot of generals that, uh, that I know through Harvard, a lot of marine generals go through Harvard. Uh, so, so I know them. There, there are just a lot of contacts that pop up and, you know, we, we were able to go to the White House, uh, last year. Um, we've, you know, we've, we've been in contact at the, the highest levels of government talking about this. Uh, and so I think a lot of it is putting it on everyone's radar, getting a lot of, a lot of people comfortable with us and, and with what we're doing. Uh, and we'll, we'll start to see some, some very big contracts come out of that.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you're, you're a, a very good communicator. Uh,

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  I, I, I have to say though, I remain, uh, cautious.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Well, you're, you're going to have to have me back on Craig. Well, we'll check back in in 12 months.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  And I'm going to go, I'm going to go, Craig, we're sitting here on January 8th, 2026, and it didn't seem like it was going to happen. We have 10,000 robots out today.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  You know?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  We'll see, we'll see where we're at.