Ken Goldberg (roboticist)

Speaker 1 Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert.
My friend is here today,

Speaker 1 Ken Goldberg. You'll hear our origin story, but I met him somewhere.
I was judgmental of him. Then, of course, I fell in love with him, and now I'm just smitten with this gentleman.

Speaker 1 Ken Goldberg is the Williams S. Floyd Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley and an award-winning roboticist, filmmaker, artist, and public speaker on AI and robotics.

Speaker 1 Now, really quick, I've read a couple comments that people are over AI. I get it.

Speaker 1 People feel a little inundated. And I get it.
It's the topic of the day. A, this isn't very heavy in AI talk.
And then B, this is a million times more playful than you could ever imagine

Speaker 1 robotics could be. I'll also add that he has an art exhibit that is going until March.
Don't wait till then. Go now.
At Skurball, if you live in LA or visiting, Skirball Cultural Center in LA.

Speaker 1 And it's called Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, Trees, Time, and Technology. Very, very cool

Speaker 1 art project with these tree rings that are gorgeous and very creative.

Speaker 1 Ken Goldberg, I love you. I think y'all will love them too.
Please enjoy.

Speaker 1 We get support from AG1.

Speaker 1 I'm always looking for ways to simplify my wellness routine without cutting corners. That's why I've been drinking AG1 every morning for years.
I love the taste. I love the simplicity.

Speaker 1 I love how I feel after I have my glass of AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that's basically replaced my entire supplement cabinet.
75 plus vitamins, minerals, and whole food ingredients in one scoop.

Speaker 1 It supports gut health, gives me steady energy without crashes, and supports my immune health. Huge when I'm constantly around people for interviews.

Speaker 1 Less than three bucks a day doing the work of multiple supplements. With travel and holiday chaos, those antioxidants and functional mushrooms help my body stay resilient.

Speaker 1 You know, we had back-to-back Halloween, then I traveled to Palm Springs, hosted a birthday party, came back, and my first thought was like, oh, I got to totally recharge. Went straight to the AG1.

Speaker 1 Head to drinkag1.com/slash stacks to get a free welcome kit with an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 when you first subscribe. That's drinkag1.com slash stacks.

Speaker 1 We are supported by all state. You know what's smart? Checking all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds on car insurance.
You know what's not smart?

Speaker 1 Not checking your phone's volume before blasting your morning pump-up playlist in the office break room. Or not checking that your laptop camera's off before joining the meeting in your robe.

Speaker 1 Or something I'm a little too familiar with, not checking your grocery list before heading to the store and realizing you bought everything except except what you needed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, checking first is smart. So check All State First for a quote that could save you hundreds.
You're in good hands with Allstate.

Speaker 1 Potential savings vary, subject to terms, condition, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Co.
and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.

Speaker 1 Ken Digacy. It comes from the bottom.
I prepped Monica by saying, you're going to really like my friend Ken. If Fred Armison was a roboticist,

Speaker 1 this would be Ken. Okay.
And I think maybe am I unique in that comparison, or have you ever heard that before? I remember you saying that. I don't hear it a lot, but I take it as a compliment.

Speaker 1 You should. He's one of our favorites.
We love him. Really? Oh, yeah.
Very unicorn-y, like you. Unicorn-y, though, is that that me well not corny rule out the corny okay

Speaker 1 focus on the unicorn part of it it is mixed messages because he calls people unicorns he likes but then he also says he doesn't like unicorn so it is tricky there's confusion you're right understandably okay all right because i don't know if you meant rare as a human being but special rare and special okay i'll take that that's yeah rare unique special colorful vibrant

Speaker 1 playful oh our favorite word love it good i think we should start with how we met because i would love to hear your perspective i have a very specific perspective.

Speaker 1 And I don't even know if I let you in on the full details. Well, I'm curious now.
So you and I were at a conference, and it's the kind of conference I would have never imagined getting invited to.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of people there, like yourself, professors and stuff, and I'm a.

Speaker 2 Smarty pants.

Speaker 1 Smarty pants, billionaires.

Speaker 1 A fun group, actually.

Speaker 1 And we're walking into this event, and they are very militant about everyone wearing name tags, as they should be, because everyone there thinks everyone knows their name, but people don't know each other's names.

Speaker 1 names so i see this guy with crazy hair and he doesn't have a name tag on fucking the system i'm like this which is funny because i should immediately love that i should go yeah fuck these name tags that's my essence but for some reason because i've complied yeah who does this guy think he's so famous he's the only one here that doesn't need a name tag so i'm immediately a little triggered and i say to chris i'm like who's this guy with the wild hair doesn't have a name tag on and then by luck somehow i hear your name ken goldberg and then i immediately go into the bathroom.

Speaker 1 Okay. I go into the bathroom before the little event starts.
You don't know any of this. What?

Speaker 1 Don't worry. You're not being led in a bad direction.
Okay. I go into the bathroom and I Google you and I see robot professor at Berkeley.
And I immediately am like, that's a cool job.

Speaker 1 Okay, so he's not a billionaire who thinks he doesn't need to wear a name tag. This guy's just kind of an absent-minded genius, maybe.
Yeah, because I didn't know about their name tags.

Speaker 2 That says so much more about Dax than it does about you.

Speaker 1 These are all my shortcomings and character defects, but they work out beautifully because then 20 minutes later, and most of the things we were sitting through the seminars were very AI heavy.

Speaker 1 And I have a chip on my shoulder about AI. So then now I'm standing next to you randomly.

Speaker 1 And this is probably where I would enter your life story because I just lean over to you and I say, you're a robotics professor, yeah?

Speaker 1 And you go, yeah, these robots are like so far away from doing our laundry and working on our car for us or doing anything really. It's like they keep saying, A is going to take over everything.

Speaker 1 You're going to be a leisure class. You know, what are we going to do with all this? And I'm like, where are the fucking robots? And you go, oh, I'm so delighted.
This is your question. All right.

Speaker 1 So I should tell you my side of this because. Well, I'll just wrap it up by saying within 30 seconds of talking to you, I'm like, oh, there's my favorite guy here by a long shot.

Speaker 1 I hope I'm at every dinner with him. And then we since developed a friendship.
Yes. Okay.
I remember that I was in this place, also a little intimidated because there's a lot of A-list people.

Speaker 1 And I was sitting there, and I forget who it was. He was on the stage.
And you raised a comment and said something about he looked really sharp. Pharrell.
Pharrell. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think I said like he was really dowsy. Exactly.
Yeah. And I just love the way you said that.
I thought it was such an unusual thing to say.

Speaker 1 It was spot on, but it was just the kind of thing that nobody would normally say.

Speaker 2 Yeah, unicorny.

Speaker 1 Very unicorny.

Speaker 1 And so I think it was after the lunch or something. I saw you standing over there and I just went over and I said, hey, I love that comment you made.

Speaker 1 And then we started talking. That's how I remember it.
I didn't know anything about you. You must have known Kristen.
No. We were just having this fun conversation and you guys were so charming.

Speaker 1 And then Tiffany came over. Your wife.
My wife. Also Dazzling and Unicorny.
Yes. We walked away and she said, you don't know who they were.
And I was like, no, of course not.

Speaker 1 I hear about important stuff.

Speaker 1 And then we had several great conversations at that thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it was really, really comforting to hear you say that as someone who is an authority in the space, because I've heard many people lecture on AI and I'm hearing all of the, what are you peeking at?

Speaker 1 Is there underwear on the floor?

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Okay, I got to

Speaker 1 walk this. So sorry, Ken.
But obviously this needs to be addressed.

Speaker 1 That took me a second. Okay, so here's what happened.
I just put the pieces together. There's an explanation.
There is. Monica and I did a commercial yesterday, as I told you.
You told me that.

Speaker 1 When I arrived, I changed my clothes and I put them in a bag and I brought a bag of extra shoes and pants they asked me to bring. And then I threw this sweater in there.

Speaker 1 And then that underwear was in there. And then I just threw on my sweater just now.
And

Speaker 1 clearly, my panties were attached. And now they've fallen off.
Wow. So for the viewer, I would be so angry if I didn't get this.

Speaker 1 You have to, if you were watching, and you're like, everyone's seen these panties and I'm not. When you throw your computer out the car, I love it.
Full disclosure.

Speaker 1 Okay, so these are the offensive panties.

Speaker 1 They have an elephant spant.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 2 That's Meandy's, a former sponsor. Are you being polite?

Speaker 1 That was quite nice. Or do I now have a Christmas idea for you? Well, actually, yeah, I'm going to buy a pair of that.
I like to. Meandy's is a great brand.
Really? It's a brand of the elephant.

Speaker 1 Okay, I'm always looking for good. Very comfortable, very playful.

Speaker 2 It's almost as if if they were a current sponsor, we planned all that.

Speaker 1 No, that would be great.

Speaker 1 Payola.

Speaker 2 Sorry, I just had to call that out.

Speaker 1 Yes. The look on your face, I thought there was maybe a squirrel under my chair.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a very panicked look on her face. Well, it was a little surprising.
I'm kind of thinking, like, what else was going on? Right. Yeah, yeah, there's some implications.

Speaker 2 This is video, so I know people can see that there's something on the floor, so I had to say it.

Speaker 1 Glad you did, because if you had just not said it, it would have been sort of like this lingering presence.

Speaker 2 An elephant in the room, if you will.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. Did you know? he was really planned? Oh, my God.
That is pretty. The elephant panties in the right place.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 1 We're not going to top that in the episode. We should wrap it up.
Okay, so back to AI.

Speaker 1 Everyone's quite scared, and I think there's a lot of reasons to be scared, but also I think maybe we're a little more panicked than we need to be. I just found you to be a kind of a comforting force

Speaker 1 in that. So we became friends, and you've been over, and we love you and your wife, and you're also artists, so you're impossibly interesting.

Speaker 1 Let's start, though, with, of course, you would be born in Nigeria.

Speaker 1 Is that where you were born? I was. Of course.
Of course.

Speaker 2 How did that happen?

Speaker 1 So my parents were idealists during the 60s, and they were at Penn in Philadelphia, and they were going on civil rights marches and things like that.

Speaker 1 So they wanted to continue that idea of doing things for civil rights. So when they were graduating, they wrote to various people in Africa, and they said, we'd love to help.

Speaker 1 And so one person who ran a school there and he's actually quite famous in Nigeria, Tai Shalarim, he invited them to come to his school and work for two years.

Speaker 1 So they basically got over there and there was no running water and no electricity when they got there. So it was very rough and they lived kind of under these circumstances.

Speaker 1 My dad taught physics and my mom taught English. They were graduate students at Penn or undergrad? Undergrads.
They just finished their undergrad.

Speaker 1 Also they were ahead of the curve because you were born in 61. Yeah.
So the civil rights movement in its full velocity is later. Yes, good point.
It was starting.

Speaker 1 Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, has a lot of integration, great history there. And so they were starting there.
But that was also around the time of Nigerian independence.

Speaker 1 There was a real movement across Africa. I was very proud of them.
I'm still proud of them for doing that. Were you delivered out of hospital? Yeah.
So

Speaker 1 I always thought it must have been an accident because, like, why would you do that?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so I never asked because it was like that elephant in the room. I just didn't want to know.

Speaker 1 But a couple of years ago, my mom said, we wanted to have a baby because we had all this time together and we knew it would be a time to focus on you.

Speaker 1 So I was born in a hospital nearby called Abaddon, which is about an hour from this village. But I have a really big vaccination mark

Speaker 1 from that. My father had that one, right? Is it the size of like a quarter? Yes.
And indented? Yes. Yeah.
And it's a specific vaccine. vaccine that would do that, I think.
I think you're right.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it is, but yes, exactly. I would gaze at it on my father's father's shoulder all the time.
Look like someone put a cigar out in his. Yes.
That's it. That's a great way to put it.

Speaker 1 That's exactly what it is. Oh, my God.
What if that was the vaccine? The doctor just put up the cigars.

Speaker 1 How long were you there as a baby? Just six months. And did you get any kind of citizenship out of that deal? No, I looked into that too because I thought it'd be nice to have a dual citizenship.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you get into hot water up there. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Need to flee the country.

Speaker 1 No, but apparently you can't have both. They don't allow it.
They're like, fuck you. We're not a side dish.
You can't have both. Yeah.
We're the entree. Right.

Speaker 1 So then you do grow up in, I guess, would it be a suburb of Philadelphia? Yeah, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Steel Town. Right, Bethlehem Steel.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So my parents come back there because my dad was a metallurgist. Well, this is fascinating.

Speaker 2 In addition to being a physics teacher?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, physics was what he could teach as a, he was an engineering undergrad. So then he went back and he actually got his PhD at Ohio State.
And then we moved to Bethlehem.

Speaker 1 Bethlehem was known for where the time and motion studies were done. There's a whole history of scientific management.
You know about this, Frederick Taylor?

Speaker 1 No, but is this to increase productivity through the scientific method or something? Yes. Oh, okay.
Tell us. All right, so this is fascinating.

Speaker 1 You've heard of time and motion studies, you know, where they have the stopwatch and they would time people doing their work. I hadn't heard of that.

Speaker 2 Oh, efficiency for productivity?

Speaker 1 Yeah, efficiency experts.

Speaker 1 So this was very big in the early part of this 20th century. Data.

Speaker 1 Yes, making work scientific by quantifying it.

Speaker 1 So what they would do is they had all these things, mostly stopwatches back then, but they would time how long it took you to, say, carry a shovel of ore from one end of this lot to another.

Speaker 1 And then they would clock people and then they would try and get them to increase their speeds. And so this guy wrote this book called The Scientific Management, something like that.

Speaker 1 And it was very influential on Stalin. Oh, apparently.

Speaker 1 Really? Yes. But workers hated it.
Sure. For obvious reasons.
It's very good. It's crushing.
You're getting enough efficiency out of me. Exactly.

Speaker 1 And that was this whole thing was that you could increase the productivity of the average worker by a factor of two or more if you followed these methods, but it would squeeze the workers to the breaking point.

Speaker 1 So they didn't like it, but it became popular until unions came and pushed back.

Speaker 1 But this whole wave was still around in the form of industrial engineering, which is actually the department I'm in at Berkeley, which used to do these kind of studies where it was sort of how do you arrange your office to be the most efficient

Speaker 1 or the assembly line to be most efficient for workers and now machines.

Speaker 1 Well, and by the way, and we'll just earmark this, among the AI accomplishments that I find most fascinating is their ability to make things more efficient.

Speaker 1 I know there was a server farm they let AI loose on, and it had been studied forever. And within hours, it figured out how to make it like 30% more efficient or something crazy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so energy efficient. So they could lower the amount of electricity it used, which is really undeniably a good thing.
That's good for the environment and everything else. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you're growing up in Bethlehem. Yeah.
Our mom and dad didn't teach in your childhood? No, he was working at the research lab. Actually, she did.
She taught at the elementary school.

Speaker 1 We were very close. She was a great mom.
I was lucky. It was a good town to grow up in, but a little rough and tumble because you had to fight.
Okay, great.

Speaker 1 So here's my guess because I'm from Detroit. And so you have this enormous working class.
Many of the folks had migrated up from Kentucky to fulfill these roles. So you have this culture of pride.

Speaker 1 And yeah, violence was on the table at all times. Yes.
So it's interesting. You say the pride thing.
I didn't know about that, but the pecking order was all about fighting.

Speaker 1 And kids would call you out and and say, I'll see you after school. And you had to do it.
Everyone would go watch.

Speaker 1 And there'd be a few additional fights for the people who got excited watching the first fight. Exactly.

Speaker 1 The most dangerous thing was watching one of those fights because afterwards, there was going to be a few more. Another fight would break out.
I mean, I had both my front teeth knocked out. You did?

Speaker 1 In what grade? Like 10th grade. In school? Okay, so the story is that I was at a party, and a girl asked me to take her home because she was having a fight with her boyfriend.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 And I was being a nice guy, I thought.

Speaker 1 And I drove her, and then I didn't even know who her boyfriend, but she said it was Eddie, who was a very tough guy. Perfect name for him.
Exactly. And I was like, oh, no, that's not good.

Speaker 1 I did not want it across Eddie. And so next thing I know, we had gone over and I dropped her at her friend's, and the doorbell rings.

Speaker 1 And it was Eddie.

Speaker 1 I came out and Eddie just cocked me right in the mouth. Right out of the gate.
Right out of the gate. Like a sucker punch.
And I remember it was snowing and all this blood on the snow. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 And that was my front teeth. Now, do you have the same thing I have, which is we're both really lucky and we're running in circles that are mostly people that are college-bound and stuff.

Speaker 1 And I try to explain the level of violence that was kind of ever-present. I can tell there's no connection to what I'm saying.
And then I wonder, was it an era?

Speaker 1 Do you wonder if it's still like that in Bethlehem? Because I'm curious, was that just our generation? I don't know. It's interesting.
Because it wasn't talked about. You know, we didn't report it.

Speaker 1 I don't remember it even occurring to me to even tell anyone. Your teeth,

Speaker 1 yeah. Like, I wasn't gonna.
Well, that would lead to more abuse, probably. So, you just sucked it up and you took it.
It was definitely rough.

Speaker 1 Although, you know, it's interesting because now the way it does come up a few years ago, I was in this academic setting, and this guy double-crossed me.

Speaker 1 Oh, and he basically said, Well, we're gonna do it my way.

Speaker 1 And I remember sitting across from him, and I was really upset because I had put all this work into something, and he was basically gonna trash it and put somebody else in to take the credit.

Speaker 1 And I said, You don't know, but where I come from, I don't stand for that.

Speaker 1 I said, I'm going to really.

Speaker 1 Give your hands full. I'm going to get physical.
Oh, no, I'm not going to get physical.

Speaker 1 Somehow, I can't remember actually the language, but I wasn't saying I'm going to hit you, but I was going to basically say, I'm going to come back. I'm going to fight this.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm not pushing over. Yeah, I'm not going to just take this laying down.

Speaker 1 For better or worse, at least in my experience, you walk away with this weird paradigm, which is it's better to get beat up and stand up for yourself.

Speaker 1 Because if you don't, it's going to lead to so much more suffering. It's just an equation.
You come to accept it, and that's it. All right, so how do you feel about bullies?

Speaker 1 Number one pet peeve in life is bullies. Bullies.
I hate bullies. I hate them.
I was big, so I can't claim that I was some victim, but I also was a punk rock, skateboarder, snowboarder.

Speaker 1 So I was alternative. Bullies for me was a big, big thing.
I've learned that the best way to deal with them was to stand up to them, even if they were bigger than you.

Speaker 1 And then oftentimes they would cave in. They were cowards.
And or they would at least move to someone else who wasn't going to stand up for themselves. They'd pick another guy.

Speaker 1 You only had to kind of do it once or twice. Oh, that's interesting because there was a big reputation thing.
It was very weird. You had this whole pecking order.

Speaker 1 And so people knew not to mess with you. And you had to be in a few fights and then people would lay off.
Yeah, then you could exist. Okay, but now back to the wild.

Speaker 1 So you did engineering type stuff with dad. You were bonding with dad over that as a kid.
But then you decided you kind of... wanted to be an artist at some point.
Yeah, because my mom was an artist.

Speaker 1 She would paint and she took us to this art art school in the neighboring town. And I really loved that.
They were both into modern art and would take us to museums like in New York or Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 Philadelphia Museum, I have very fond memories.

Speaker 1 They discouraged you from pursuing artists. Yeah, I remember talking to my mother and saying, oh, I think I'm going to major in art.
And she said, oh, great.

Speaker 1 You can major in art after you finish your engineering degree. Sure, sure, sure.

Speaker 2 It's a very immigrant parent thing to do, actually. So that's funny.

Speaker 1 Well, it was also because my parents had a lot of financial troubles growing up. And so it was hard because there were times when we didn't go on vacation for many years.

Speaker 1 I want to be really careful because I don't want to sound like we were suffering, like there's real poverty out there and we weren't facing that.

Speaker 1 But we had money problems and my mom and dad would fight a lot about that.

Speaker 1 See, that's, I think, the most relevant aspect: was it this concept in your life that every time it was brought up, you saw fear on the faces of the adults, and it was the cause of fighting.

Speaker 1 And it is this big elephant

Speaker 1 panties in the room. I think just once you have that association with it.

Speaker 1 So yes, there were a lot of people poorer than me, but I was single mom and I still have the most unrealistic relationship with money to this day.

Speaker 1 It's just so grounded in fear that there's really nothing I can do to overcome it. Yeah.
You know, a simple thing is like whenever I look at a menu, I'm always studying the price. Still.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I will never order the most expensive thing on the menu. And you could.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's interesting because I'll contrast that with my wife and she'll say, what do you think about this dress and i'll come over and i'll be like what does it cost yeah

Speaker 1 i didn't you know she doesn't know yeah she's evaluating if it's beautiful but the first thing i'm looking at is the price before i try something on i want to know if i can even afford it right yeah even though you can probably but you're still in that mind totally well how about this without revealing your net worth Let's just say, if you had a billion dollars, don't you think you'd probably still be the same way?

Speaker 1 Yes. That's when I'm saying that it's an irrational relationship with it.
It's not grounded in the facts at all. No, no, it's true.

Speaker 1 Another pet peeve is if I'm in a hotel or something and they know how they charge like $20 for a Diet Coke. And then they deliver it and it's an additional delivery charge and a tip on top of it.

Speaker 1 And then it comes, you get to give a tip on top of that. So it's like going to be $40 digits for a diet.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That actually triggers a second issue I have, which is, and we had an expert on talking about this bias of being taken advantage of to be the sucker. So then I have two things going.

Speaker 1 I've got my financial insecurity and then I have like, these people think I'm a fucking idiot.

Speaker 1 Like I'm a sucker. I'm going to pay this much for a dice.
So it's a lot going on. So you do what they urge you to do and then you go to Penn and you double major in economics and in engineering.

Speaker 1 Summa cum laude in both. Wow.
Yeah. That's wild.
For a double major, that's impressive.

Speaker 2 I was a double major and I was also summa. We won't say what the majors were.

Speaker 2 That might dilute what I was thinking.

Speaker 1 You were a double major too?

Speaker 2 Yeah. For For the same reason, because I wanted to do theater.
My parents were like, probably not.

Speaker 2 You're going to need to do something else.

Speaker 1 Safety. Mack up.
A realistic plan in place as well. Because it's risky.
It's risky. To be an artist, for sure.

Speaker 1 So then you go to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, and you get a PhD in computer science. Yes.
Okay, but you have a trip, you study abroad in Edinburgh. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which, by the way, when I read Edinburgh today, I was like, isn't it Edinburgh? Yes. It is Edinburgh.
Oh, it's Edinburgh. But we don't have an O at the end of that.
I know, but that's the way it is.

Speaker 1 This language is madness. I know.

Speaker 1 But it is Edinburgh. Okay, thank God.
I thought it was insane. I'm like, I've been saying that wrong for 30 years.

Speaker 1 You're absolutely right. But I'm glad you brought that up because that was a huge turning point in my life.
Yeah, tell me, where in this eight-year schooling? My junior year abroad.

Speaker 1 And also, my dad was very sick. He had gotten leukemia because he had the plant that was a lot of toxic chemicals and stuff.
But then he got remission, so he was feeling better.

Speaker 1 And I was so stressed with that whole thing. I wanted to take some time off.

Speaker 1 and penn had this junior year abroad program i had never left the country actually since i was a baby oh right right right but i set off in this year-long adventure oh i had so much fun yeah junior year you're like 21 20 19.

Speaker 1 i remember that distinctly because i remember saying i'm 19 years old and i'm on my own and i had a backpack and the let's go europe this big volume that it was my bible and i would just travel as much as i could yeah url the train schedule yep oh my god I can go all the way to here.

Speaker 1 One of the highlights was going to Morocco. Back to your continent of birth.
Oh,

Speaker 1 it's very interesting you say this because this is the story I always like to tell, which is that basically with some friends that said, let's go somewhere really exotic. We'll go to Morocco.

Speaker 1 It was over at Christmas and we went to Spain, Madrid, and then we were taking the train down. And on the train, it was like all these soldiers, everybody was drunken, and it was really super fun.

Speaker 1 And we were having this blast going to the last stop, and it was packed. When we get there, we get on the ferry and we all have to turn in our passports for processing.

Speaker 1 And my mother had warned me, she said, you're going to Morocco, but you're Jewish. It's an Arab country and you should be careful.
But I was like, oh, that's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 And so we get off the ferry and all my friends, there were about three or four of us, they had gotten their passports. I didn't get mine.
So we're waiting.

Speaker 1 And then it got stretched into like 45 minutes. And I was like, listen, guys, I think there's going to be a problem.
Go ahead. I'll just go back.
But I was definitely queasy about what would happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Because you're already now on the side of.

Speaker 1 We were on the other side, but we're still on the ferry because we can't get off without the passports so then this door opens i'll never forget this i can see it like it was yesterday across the back of the ferry i see this guy walking over he's like in a full kefia headdress very arab looking yeah yeah yeah yeah and he walking toward us and then i'm starting to think uh oh she was right yeah and then he holds up this passport and he says monsieur goldbierge You know, they're French.

Speaker 1 And I stood forward. And then he looks at me.
He looks at the passport. He looks at me.
And then he throws open his arms. And with his big smile with gold teeth, I remember he says, welcome home.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 And I have no idea what he's talking about, right?

Speaker 1 Oh, that's and then it hits me. Just what you said.
It was the first time I had set foot on the continent of Africa.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. When on earth does he have any sense of that? It's in a passport that I was born in Africa, but I have no stamps or anything else.
Oh, wow. That is like very heartwarming.

Speaker 1 It was wonderful. The delta between what you were expecting and what came would be the biggest delta of your life.
Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly.
I was ready.

Speaker 1 He was going to clap me in handcuffs or something. Welcome home with a hug is incredible.

Speaker 2 Also, for people with backgrounds like the both of you, you're expecting the worst thing to happen. So it's really nice to have evidence that it could go a positive way.

Speaker 1 Totally, totally. Sometimes it goes the other way.
Yeah. So is it in Edinburgh? At some point, you get introduced to, I guess, the concept of AI.
Yes.

Speaker 1 They actually have one of the few AI departments in the world there. I didn't know that.
Is this Edinburgh University? Yeah. They had connections with Alan Turing and all the early work in AI.

Speaker 1 So they had this department. And I remember going into this fair.
All the departments had these little tables, geography, art history. And I saw this little table with AI.
And I was like, what?

Speaker 1 And so I walk over, and sure enough, they had a class that you could take in AI. And this is in 1987? 1981.
Oh, no, you graduated in 84, so 81. Yeah, that's early, early.
And I loved it.

Speaker 1 And it was a great course. We had a little bit of robotics, a little bit of natural language, and a little bit of computer vision, all these different aspects of AI.
And it was so much fun.

Speaker 1 So at that point in 1981, what was the robotics component of that? course?

Speaker 1 Basically controlling these arms to move in certain ways. And the kind we're used to seeing in like automotive assembly plants.
Those claws.

Speaker 1 That was a big thing was like, how can you get it to just move around on a table or something like that? Why do you think that was so exciting? Well, I loved machines like that.

Speaker 1 I guess it was partly my dad's influence. We had a go-kart when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 I was really into that. And rockets.

Speaker 1 Model rockets were a big thing. And also, of course, I watched those shows like Lost in Space and things, and I liked robots from that.

Speaker 1 So you then go and you get this PhD in computer science, and then you teach at USC for a minute, which is interesting. Yeah.
So I was there yesterday, and it's actually so nice to return.

Speaker 1 It was wonderful. Okay, the story is that when I graduated in 1990, there were no jobs jobs for robotics.
And this comes back to what you were saying earlier.

Speaker 1 Robotics has had these waves, and it was in a trough at that time. It was a backlash to a lot of the over-optimism about robots.
So there's this thing called AI Winters.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we know about this. We have a few people have talked about these.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we had Feifei Leon. Oh, good.
Yeah, and I read her book. And they give up on it, then something happens, they come back to it.
Yes. Since maybe the year 2000, it's only been positive.

Speaker 1 There's been no negative. So the students don't know.
They've never seen that.

Speaker 1 But Fei Fei and I, we've lived through it and it's quite dramatic when suddenly everybody decides it's not going to work and it's not useful and all the funding dries up. Yes.

Speaker 1 That time it was very interesting. Japan was on the rise and everybody thought Japan was the future.

Speaker 1 There was a whole lot of hope that robots were going to do all the things that we're saying today and it didn't work and so it was dismissed. It was a backlash.

Speaker 2 They were like, we tried it, but it didn't work.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Am I wrong? Even Honda was one of the first big corporations that was like committed some real money to building a robot.
That was later.

Speaker 1 But in 1990, I was looking at jobs in Japan and that was my only option. And then this job at USC came along.
I was so lucky. I was so happy that they hired me.

Speaker 1 I don't know how you teach here and then you leave at any point. This is a fly trap, LA.
The weather's just too good, especially if you're from Pennsylvania. Especially if you're from Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 I know. It was quite good.
Let's add. This is a sincere question.
The most shocking thing that occurred to me when I moved to California, I remember it so clearly.

Speaker 1 I was at a Caro's restaurant, which is like a Denny's.

Speaker 1 I'm at a booth by myself, and there's a guy at a booth by himself, and he stares right at me, and I stare at him, and I'm now waiting for what happens in Detroit.

Speaker 1 Like either he looks away, I look away, or I go, what's up? That whole exchange that's just unavoidable where I came from.

Speaker 1 And then he's just looking at me and I realize, this guy's just looking at me and I'm looking at him. We can do this here.
That's California. I couldn't believe you could just look at somebody.

Speaker 1 Okay, so my my version of this is that I was visiting California and we were driving from San Francisco down to LA. This was a couple years before.

Speaker 1 Someone had figured out that you could go to Esalen in the middle of the night and just go in and experience the hot tubs.

Speaker 1 Esalen's is kind of crazy retreat, a hippie-ish vibe, nudities welcomed, right? That's the moment. Have you ever been there? No, but my father weirdly used to go there from Detroit.
What? Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes. Well, it's been around for a long time, right? And it's on the coast.
I remember we go and it's dark and there's nobody there.

Speaker 1 And I remember thinking, they're not going to open up in the middle of the night what are you talking about so we were standing there and i was like let's go and then all of a sudden this mysterious figure comes and unlocks this gate we go in and sure enough a couple comes out of those shadows and it's these two beautiful women okay and they come in there with so there's three guys

Speaker 1 everybody's clothes at this point but then okay we go in this thing and they say well

Speaker 1 that's the thing because they say you can leave your clothes here and we'll walk down to the thing i'm sort of like i don't know what they mean by that so i take off everything but my jeans okay I go down there.

Speaker 1 As soon as I get down there, it's on the coast, like right on the cliffs. I realize everyone's naked.
Yeah. And so they all get in.
So I take my pants off and I jump in.

Speaker 1 And I'm sitting there at this moment with the stars above me and everything else and thinking, this is where I want to be.

Speaker 1 I'm never leaving. I'm never leaving.
This is California. I'm talking about culture shit.

Speaker 1 Pennsylvania. After being there for an hour or so, we get up to leave.
And I pick up my pants and I had put them down at a place where the water was rushing through. So they were completely stoked.

Speaker 1 Seawater dungarees. Rest of the road.
Exactly. My only pair.
So how do you end up at Berkeley? I loved Berkeley because I loved the counterculture part, too.

Speaker 1 When I was a kid, there was also a head shop in Bethlehem. So I got a little taste, like the Furry Freak Brothers, and I listened to Grateful Dead.
What a head shop is.

Speaker 1 That's where you go buy a water pipe and some tie-dye clothing. Yeah,

Speaker 1 countercultural. They had also those posters with the blue, black light.

Speaker 1 Hendrix. yeah, and they also had a smell to them, remember? Yeah, patchouli kind of patchouli, exactly.

Speaker 1 I don't like them, but I'm glad you like them. Oh, interesting.
Okay, all right. Well, that was a big thing for me.
Like, it was somehow a little bit illicit and off-limits.

Speaker 1 And I found it very interesting to see what was going on there. And I also loved the beat poets and all the rebels.
So, Berkeley was a big attraction.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert

Speaker 1 if you dare.

Speaker 1 we are supported by Quince.

Speaker 1 So I'm standing in my closet the other day, and I realize I'm reaching for the same three things over and over again.

Speaker 1 And they're all coming from Quince, which got me thinking, when did I become that guy who actually cares about where his clothes come from? Well, I'll tell you when, when I discovered Quince.

Speaker 2 Exactly. I was at a happy hour a couple of days ago with a very cool woman named Margo, very chic.
And I was like, ooh, I love your pants. I love your sweater.
And she said, Quince. Boom.

Speaker 2 And I I was like, I should have known.

Speaker 1 Should have known. Turns out Quince cracked the code on something I didn't even know was broken.
They partnered directly with these ethical factories, cut out the middlemen.

Speaker 1 So you get the same Mongolian cashmere that costs 200 bucks elsewhere, 450. Same quality, none of the markup.
Perfect timing too, because holiday shopping is coming.

Speaker 1 And I actually have good answers for once. Not just clothes either.
They've got home stuff, travel gear, all of it. Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince.

Speaker 1 Go to quince.com/slash slash DAX for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too.
That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash DAX. Free shipping and 365-day returns.

Speaker 1 Quince.com slash DAX.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Addy.

Speaker 2 I know about Addy, the little pink pill, right?

Speaker 1 Yes, that's right. Addy is the FDA-approved pink pill clinically proven to boost desire in certain premenopausal women who are bothered by a low libido.

Speaker 2 I love this. It's really nice that there's an option out there for women who are dealing with low desire.
And I like that Addy's non-hormonal and created by a woman for women.

Speaker 2 Addy is helping women feel like themselves again, and that's really important.

Speaker 1 It really is. So, Arm Cherries, if your libido could use a little jumpstart, Addy's got you covered.

Speaker 2 Learn more at Addy.com.

Speaker 1 That's A-D-D-Y-I.com. Use code DAX for a $10 telemed appointment at Addy.com.

Speaker 1 Addy, or flavanserin, is for premenopausal women with acquired, generalized, hypoactive sexual desire disorder, HSDD, who have not had problems with low sexual desire in the past, who have low sexual desire no matter the type of sexual activity, the situation, or the sexual partner.

Speaker 1 This low sexual desire is troubling to them and is not due to a medical or mental health problem, problems in the relationship, or medicine or other drug use.

Speaker 1 Addy is not for use in children, men, or to enhance sexual performance.

Speaker 1 Your risk of severe low blood pressure and fainting is increased if you drink one to two standard alcohol drinks close in time to your Addy dose.

Speaker 1 Wait at least two hours after drinking before taking Addy at bedtime.

Speaker 1 This risk increases if you take certain prescriptions, OTC, or herbal medications or have liver problems, and can happen when you take Addy without alcohol or other medicines.

Speaker 1 Do not take if you are allergic to any of Addy's ingredients. Allergic reactions may include hives, itching, or troubled breathing.
Sometimes serious sleepiness can occur.

Speaker 1 Common side effects include dizziness, nausea, tiredness, difficulty falling asleep, or staying asleep, and dry mouth. See full PIM medication guide, including box warning at addy.com/slash PI.
Addy.

Speaker 1 Use code DAX for a $10 telemed appointment at Addie.com. That's A-D-D-Y-I.com.

Speaker 1 This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So many of us are really impacted by the colder seasons when it gets dark so much earlier and the days feel shorter than ever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me, me, I'm the one. I feel horrible when it seasonal affective disorder.

Speaker 1 Yes, you do take a

Speaker 1 hit. I do.
When it gets dark. You know how it goes.
Life gets busy, but that's exactly why shorter days don't have to be so dismal.

Speaker 1 It's time to reach out and check in with those you care about and to remind ourselves that we're not alone. And you know what? Every time I finally do, I think, why didn't I do this sooner?

Speaker 1 Which is exactly what people say about starting therapy. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S.

Speaker 1 Just fill out a short questionnaire that'll help identify your needs and preferences and they'll match you with a therapist.

Speaker 1 Don't worry though, if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recs. This month, don't wait to reach out.

Speaker 1 Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step.

Speaker 1 Armchairries get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash DAX. That's betterhelph E-L-P dot com slash DAX.

Speaker 1 This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. The website for Armchair Expert, I was too afraid to try.

Speaker 1 I didn't want to build it. I didn't think I had had the skill set.
But Rob got on there. He made the most beautiful website for us.
And he said it was incredibly easy.

Speaker 1 You do not have to be tech savvy.

Speaker 2 They have a really cool feature. It's called the Blueprint AI feature.
And you basically tell it what you're trying to do.

Speaker 2 Like in our case, showcase the podcast, obviously, host our archive, that kind of thing. And it builds you a custom website that actually looks really legit.

Speaker 1 Well, the other thing that's been crucial for us is their SEO tools. Look, I don't even know what SEO meant when we started, but it's basically what helps people find you online.

Speaker 1 Squarespace handles all that technical stuff automatically, so you don't have to think about it.

Speaker 1 It's all pretty straightforward and it actually works, which is really all I care about at the end of the day. So head to squarespace.com/slash DAX for a free trial.

Speaker 1 And when you're ready to launch, use code DAX to save 10% on your first purchase of a website or domain.

Speaker 1 I like the physicist history there as well. There's so many cool historical elements to Berkeley that I think make it such a special place.
I agree.

Speaker 1 There was this idea that it's really about being a rebel at some level and being able to buck the status quo. And that I've always admired from Oppenheimer.

Speaker 1 They discovered all these elements and all these Nobel Prize winners. That's what's rad is they're fringe, but they're crushing.

Speaker 1 They're like doing it in a totally untraditional way, but they're still bringing in the results. Rigorous.
You know, it's not about just being space cadets. Being on acid all day.
Right.

Speaker 1 Because there is a sort of berserk-ly kind of idea, right? But it's not because you have to be grounded. Berkeley is not the easiest school to attend because it's big and it doesn't hold your hand.

Speaker 1 I've driven up to just look at it and you don't get the sense of, oh, I'm entering this secure border. It's very shaggy.
There's no real border. There's no gates.
By the way, USC has these gates.

Speaker 1 You have to have an ID and everything. Nothing like that at Berkeley.
A hippie vibe is still floating around. It's definitely got a lot of coffee shops, which I love that.

Speaker 1 But the rigor is that you have to work hard and you have to be willing to get what you want.

Speaker 1 Like you can't get into this class, but you go and you camp out in your sleeping bag next to the professor and talk your way in. You have to be motivated, self-motivated.
Motivated and grit.

Speaker 1 Angela Duckworth. That's right.
Yes, exactly. She's the queen.
I think that word really sums up. Students, when they ask, should I come to Berkeley or not?

Speaker 1 or even faculty, and I say, well, if you want to be comfortable, maybe not.

Speaker 1 Right, right. You know, it's not the most comfortable.
Stanford's right up the road. Exactly.
I wasn't going to say that. It's gorgeous.
I think you'll love it there.

Speaker 1 Okay, so could you walk us through kind of the history of robotics? When does automation arrive? What are kind of the pillars of progress in robotics?

Speaker 1 Okay, so it goes all the way back to start at the ancient Egyptians. Oh, really? Yeah, because if you think about something that looks human or a machine that has like surprising abilities.

Speaker 1 So people have been always fascinated by that. And they had these statues that use steam to sort of move their arms and stuff.
So that has a long history.

Speaker 1 Wait, they were functional or these were ideas drawn? No, they're functional. Wow.
Yeah, with like levers and chambers that would fill with fluid and then they would raise their arm.

Speaker 1 But obviously they're using some kind of hydraulics or something. Yeah.
It wasn't steam per se, but it was just like liquid that would fill up a chamber.

Speaker 1 But they had simple mechanisms that goes up through the Greeks. And then there's all these stories about Pygmalion coming to life, you know, the statue who comes to life.

Speaker 1 And the story, of course, there is that he falls in love with a statue. I don't know Pygmalion, so help me.
Pygmalion is a really good story to know.

Speaker 1 It's one of the Greek myths, and it's a sculptor who's renowned for being incredibly skilled. And he at one point sculpts this beautiful woman, and it's so lifelike that he falls in love with her.

Speaker 1 How could he not? How could he not? But then it has a tragic end because he won't eat and it never returns his affections.

Speaker 2 It's literally the movie Her.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's this archetype.
It's Frankenstein. It's the same story that you see over and over again.
Falling in love with an inanimate object. Falling in love with your creation.

Speaker 1 Oh, your creation. Oh, Oh, that's hubris.
It's hubris. Oh, yeah, that's juicy.
That's so deeply rooted in Western culture that we're warned against these kind of things.

Speaker 1 It's overstepping to try to take on this. It's challenging God because you're being a creator.
Exactly. So there's a lot of idea that that's going to come to a bad end.

Speaker 1 And I think that's largely what's behind all these fears. It underpins a lot of our current totally.
Even if we don't believe in God, we have some sense that we're not supposed to be tampering.

Speaker 1 Let's just use nature as God. That it's in the back of our minds that if we do this, there's going to be some price to pay.

Speaker 1 It's going to run amok. And that's the story with Frankenstein, right? It runs amok.
And then the Golem story, it precedes Frankenstein.

Speaker 1 In the 14th century, a rabbi, there was a lot of pogroms in this little village. So he makes a robot out of clay, just a being out of clay.
He puts these words on its forehead that bring it to life.

Speaker 1 And then it goes around and it basically defends against all the bad guys and it defends the community. But then when it's done, he's like, well, now why don't you go fetch some water for me?

Speaker 1 Then he goes to sleep. Anyway, he wakes up and he's drowning because the robot just keeps fetching water over and over again.
And he has to stop it, but he doesn't know how.

Speaker 1 So he then reaches up and he wipes off the words on the forehead and the golem collapses on top and kills him.

Speaker 1 Now, that one is specifically, I hear this anecdote all the time that you could deploy AI for this simple, innocuous task, but it could determine to execute that task, it would be best that we kill all the humans.

Speaker 1 This is the very common one that goes around right now. Right.
If you want to save energy, get rid of these humans.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. If you're not careful.

Speaker 2 The most efficient way is

Speaker 1 it has such a myopic command it's following. Right.
Oh, great. Okay, so then when do we get into something that is actually practically helping us? I'm an idiot.

Speaker 1 I'm thinking Henry Ford is one of these kind of stuff. No, no, it's actually really good.

Speaker 1 So the Industrial Revolution with the invention of the steam engine, all those things, all the machinery starts coming out.

Speaker 1 And so Henry Ford is definitely part of the assembly line and the car, but robots actually also start at Ford. There are some very early robots in the late 50s, early 60s.

Speaker 1 They're like a programmable machine. And so you can basically tell it to go from point A to point B.
And so it's very primitive, but they're in like the World's Fair and people start talking.

Speaker 1 Oh, and by the way, the word robot is coined in 1920. By a sci-fi writer?

Speaker 1 Yeah. By a sci-fi writer.
It's actually a playwright in Czechoslovakia. So interestingly, it's right around the time of the pandemic, the 1918 pandemic.

Speaker 1 And also, I think significantly, Sigmund Freud wrote this essay called The Uncanny in 1919. So a year later, this play comes out about essentially robots.

Speaker 1 That's where the first time this word has ever been used.

Speaker 1 Yeah, robot, which means worker or forced worker in Czechoslovakia. Now, the 60s Ford robot, was it being employed to move objects or was it like a CNC cutting device? It's much like a CNC.

Speaker 1 It's computer numerical controlled. So they were able to program these spinning drill bits with three axis, right? So it could say go up, go left, go right.

Speaker 1 And through those little three axis movements, it could carve out the perfect shape of a part from a block of agate. Steel or steel.
Whatever. So you go like, oh, I want this rim for your car.

Speaker 1 I start with this big block of aluminum. And this thing just with a drill, it can go through.
It has all these steps programmed in. And it just, like a sculptor, fizzles out everything you don't want.

Speaker 1 And it's programmable. So then you can make a whole bunch of them over and over again.
And that's still used, by the way, very heavily. And then what's the next big leap forward?

Speaker 1 There's a lot of fear around that time that robots are going to take over. In the newspaper, there's all these articles that they're going to do all the work, but that doesn't happen.

Speaker 1 And the first robotics conference is in 1984. Then there's a big research field that starts to grow around robotics.
But then it started really taking off in factories, especially automotive.

Speaker 1 The big thing that it's used for is welding and spray painting. The welding's awesome.
Yeah, the welding's fun because you get those. It's like little pinchers just come in, boom, boom, right?

Speaker 1 And welding sheet metal is very hard to do. For humans.
You burn right through it so easy. Right.
So it's very delicate, but then you're just basically doing the same thing over and over again.

Speaker 1 So it's repetitive. And that is very good for factories and also some of the assembly, putting together various devices and appliances and things like that.
That's a big wave.

Speaker 1 And that's also happening in Japan and other places. So that's growing, the industrial robotics.
And the biggest breakthrough is now in 2012 in the breakthrough of deep learning and AI.

Speaker 1 How does that open the door for us? Let me back up a little bit, which is that when I did my PhD, I was interested in this incredibly simple problem of just trying to pick up objects just to grasp.

Speaker 1 It's something everybody does. Babies do it.
I was actually clumsy as a kid. I later thought maybe that's why I wanted to study that, but it's still an open problem.
Really?

Speaker 1 You get robots to pick things up. What's it called? Macavarker's paradox.
What is it? Oh, yeah, yeah. Moravec.
There we go. There we go.
Okay. So Moravec was actually at CMU when I was there.

Speaker 1 He was this very eccentric guy. And he wrote this book.
And he was saying, it's a paradox that what's easy for robots, like lifting a heavy car, is hard for humans.

Speaker 1 But what's easy for humans, like stacking some blocks, that's hard for robots. And that's still true today.
Yes. You have a great TED Talk.
I urge everyone to watch it.

Speaker 1 It's called Where Are the Robots or is that? Yeah. Where are are robot butlers?

Speaker 1 That is not the title of it, but that is really close.

Speaker 1 I found it. Why don't we have better robots yet? That's the title of your TED Talk, and it's very, very good.
Yeah, so it's incredibly hard for a robot to grasp things.

Speaker 1 There's a bunch of reasons, right? Yeah, it's very counterintuitive because humans, it's so easy. But we've sort of evolved over millions of years, just like dogs and crows.

Speaker 1 Crows are able to pick up things amazingly. They can put coins in slots.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They're far more dexterous than robots. Yeah.
Sure. I would much more trust a crow to handle my business than a robot currently.
Exactly. Robots, there's a lot of uncertainty in the environment.

Speaker 1 And even if you tell a robot to go to one specific spot, because of the motors and levers and gears that are in it, it won't go to that exact spot.

Speaker 1 You want it to put its jaws or something at a specific point to grasp this cup, it'll be slightly off. And that will cause it to miss, drop the object.
Right.

Speaker 1 Because Because every single movement's going to have some margin of error. And then that's going to compound.

Speaker 1 The more movements you add, all these different little margins of errors start stacking up. Exactly.
And then the other is sensing.

Speaker 1 So we can take a high-resolution picture of an environment like this room, but there's no sensor that can give me the depth, the three-dimensional part of this room.

Speaker 1 What if you used a 3D camera? So you had bilateral. There's errors.
There's a little noise in those things.

Speaker 1 If you look at the result of that, there'll be a depth map, which is like a 3D camera image, but you'll see there'll be lots of noise and imprecision and mistakes in those. And those are inevitable.

Speaker 1 There's no camera that really works reliably for 3D. Okay, I don't know if this is the time, but this is one of the parts I want to talk about.

Speaker 1 As I've been frustrated with the exuberance of AI, one thing that has occurred to me is that our fascination with ourselves seems to be about our intelligence.

Speaker 1 And that, in fact, is what AI is trying to replicate and or surpass is our executive function, our problem solving, all these different things.

Speaker 1 But if you look at us as an animal, our motor control took 300 million years to evolve as mammals.

Speaker 1 And our big brain and everything we're trying to replicate in the AI space started six million years ago when hominids arrive.

Speaker 1 You have so much time spent evolving to do all these tests that we think are just standard.

Speaker 1 And then we think this last minute thing that took the least amount of time to evolve is somehow superior to that.

Speaker 1 So So, when I look at this, it's like, forget artificial intelligence, try to figure out artificial physicality. That's such a good way to put it.
And that's exactly right.

Speaker 1 And so, if you look at that history, hundreds of millions of years of evolution to see to mobility and being able to manipulate just the opposable thumb and all of those things.

Speaker 1 And so, all these other things, like math, is relatively very recent.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we think that's the high watermark, but I think the most impressive thing is us moving through time and space and smelling these five senses, touching.

Speaker 1 I would imagine if you could quantify it, that's like this much. And then our intelligence is like this much.

Speaker 1 That I think is helpful for people to understand why we've made all this progress in these quote hard problems like playing chess and go. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But we really haven't made much progress in just being able to like clear the coffee table. Okay, so then my question is.

Speaker 1 Is that a software or hardware problem?

Speaker 1 So one of the things I think about, it must be so hard when you're trying to design a robot is you're limited to all of these pulleys to operate a hand the way ours moves.

Speaker 1 And as much as we are pulleys, we're also not, right? Because the muscles are such a unique way to operate the pulley. It opens up infinite options of movement.

Speaker 1 Whereas these robots are really confined to kind of this, this, this, this, right? You're right.

Speaker 1 The muscles in the human body, there are hundreds of muscles and bones, and they pull in all these nuanced ways.

Speaker 1 And we have the skin that's very complex. What's amazing is how much we don't know about human biology.
We don't understand how touch works. Touch is incredibly complex.

Speaker 1 Like we can feel things that are so small, they're much smaller than a human hair. We can perceive up to very complex vibrations and other things.

Speaker 1 You add in temperature, we can feel you add in moisture. Have you ever read the book An Immense World?

Speaker 1 You have, oh, yes, by Ed Yong. I love it.
Holy

Speaker 1 fast. I love that book.
And you get into this mole that has this star-shaped nose. And so that's a touch sense.
Definitely.

Speaker 1 And that touch sense can detect the movement of moisture in the sand it's exploring at a distance of like 12 inches.

Speaker 1 It actually can see through everything, but it's not seeing through and it's not smelling through. It's touch-feeling through.
Yes. Oh, great.

Speaker 1 How would you replicate that with a machine? Exactly.

Speaker 2 Also, humans don't even have the ability to do a lot of the stuff that

Speaker 2 animals can do.

Speaker 2 So which one are you even aiming for?

Speaker 1 Right. Robotic touch sense is extremely primitive.
What do they think would be the mechanism that could replicate it? Would it be be electricity? What would it be?

Speaker 1 When I was in undergrad, I tried to use electricity to do that, and it failed.

Speaker 1 It did not work. But what people are using now is light.
Okay. And they transform the touch into light.

Speaker 1 And so imagine that you have a little camera in your fingertip is looking inside at a pad from the bottom. And so when the pad gets indented, you see the pattern of what it's touching.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So there's like a membrane, and above that, the membrane's being observed. That's exactly what it is.

Speaker 1 But what happens is the membrane gets rubbed off or over time those sensors get deformed and so it doesn't solve the problem. It's just the latest method.
Great. We're trying.

Speaker 2 And this is why the Roomba worked because it didn't have to use any digits or anything. It was just sort of at random moving.

Speaker 1 And the Roomba replicated the very first multi-cell organism. What it actually ended up knocking off was something that can only move forward and then turn and move forward and turn and move forward.

Speaker 1 Like some paramecia. What we've achieved is like, that's where we are.

Speaker 1 Multi-celled robotism. You're right.
The Roomba is the most successful robot of all time.

Speaker 1 So when they count robots out there, they count these Roombas where there's like 10 million of those, but that's the robot, right? And it's very simple. It's basically just random motion.

Speaker 1 And over time, it does cover your carpet. Yeah.
And it's pretty reliable. But of course, it also has this problem that it gets stuck all the time and tangled up in stuff.
Sure. And so it's not ideal.

Speaker 1 And it can't go upstairs. Also, a lot of people bought them as a novelty.
There's a lot of them sitting in the closet somewhere.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they want to see it work once or maybe even they bought it and they got intimidated about even turning it on. Yeah, yeah.
That would be my thought.

Speaker 1 So even understanding, I don't really want to deal with pulling out of the box and figuring out how I deploy this thing. I actually have a drone that's in that category.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah, I have two drones.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to be able to figure out.

Speaker 1 No, I need like six hours to basically figure it out. And it's sitting in the box.
Yeah. You're right.
I'm like, that's going to require a day.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if I'm going to enjoy flying it enough to justify a day of me figuring it out. Yeah.
Okay, good.

Speaker 1 So, I like that we're kind of agreeing that we're really underestimating how complicated our physical abilities are, and we're really overplaying our mental capabilities. Right.

Speaker 1 So, everybody's impressed. The analogy, if you say, okay, you can beat the best person in the world at chess, then that means you have a very powerful machine, artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1 Now, it can beat the best person at Go, and nobody can play Go or chess that well. So, you think this is smarter than everybody? Yeah.
That's the way people reason.

Speaker 1 But then it can't drive a car, it's a whole bunch of things it can't do. And anything physical is just picking up or opening this can that I just did that is impossible for a robot.

Speaker 1 Tell people about your folding project. I don't know what year you're into this, but one of your projects.
Is folding clothes? Folding clothes. That's one that I think everybody would like to have.

Speaker 1 If it just sat on your washing machine and you could dump it in a barrel and fuck. Yeah, that would be.

Speaker 2 Also, can you do a dishes one? Like putting them.

Speaker 1 Have you ever watched them do this?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 1 There's nothing funnier than watching the robot try to cook breakfast or do dishes. It just smashes everybody.

Speaker 1 Broken glass.

Speaker 1 But I agree, taking things in and out of the dishwasher would be great. Just unloading and loading the dishwasher, right? And some would say that the dishwasher is a robot.
It is.

Speaker 1 It's very successful. See, there's this idea that if you can use humans and robot together, that's very powerful.
So that's what I call complementarity.

Speaker 1 When if you figure out that you have a machine, you can use it, but you have the human do the parts that we're good at and then let it do the parts it's good at. Together, you have a great system.

Speaker 1 And the dishwasher is a beautiful example. And the washing machine, they do all this, but we have to load it and unload it.

Speaker 1 In the laundry aspect, it's also that you want your clothes to be folded at this precise time, right when they come out, because then they're at the perfect stage. No wrinkles.
No wrinkles.

Speaker 1 And if you do it too soon, they're kind of soggy. If they're too late, they get all wrinkled.
So having a machine to do that would be quite good.

Speaker 1 And there's some really interesting new results that just came out about this. But we've been working on it too.

Speaker 1 And one of the ideas is you fling the clothes up and you use air to help smooth them out. Like humans do that all the time, right?

Speaker 1 You snap, you know, that has only been really done in robotics in the last five years.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 2 This is your job. I'm just so annoyed all day long.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a perfect time for me to ask you. Like knowing your work will experience failure.
I don't know that there's one that would surpass it. Like it's just failure, failure, failure.

Speaker 1 How do you stay optimistic?

Speaker 1 So I'm super optimistic. I love working on this topic and I feel like we have a lot more work to do.
So that's also encouraging. I don't worry that it fails.

Speaker 1 I actually love the times when it does succeed. That's super rewarding knowing how hard it is.
You're like a fan of hockey instead of basketball. Why? They're only going to score once a game.
Oh.

Speaker 1 Whereas basketball, they're going to score 110 points. So you're like, oh yeah, I don't get it.
But when I get it, boy, it's... Oh, that's interesting.
I never thought of it that way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because in grasping, we've actually made some good progress just in picking up objects. And that was the breakthrough.

Speaker 1 So coming back to this timeline, so in 2012, there was this breakthrough in vision.

Speaker 1 And suddenly deep learning, this new way of building these very large networks, using lots of data and using GPUs, graphical processing units, it's basically a new kind of computer.

Speaker 1 It has this breakthrough where suddenly machines are able to recognize images and things in images. Like it'll say that's a book and that's a cup and that's a...
This is part of Fei Fei Li's work.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So Fei Fei Li is actually at the center of this.
She builds this data. So she plays a pivotal role.
When all that gets put together, suddenly it's a revolution.

Speaker 1 And that's a big moment in robotics and history. We apply it to robotics.
And so her system was called ImageNet. And so the system that we designed for grasping, we called DexNet as an homage to her.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's great. Yeah.
So DexNet was our system. We worked on it for five years.
And we basically applied deep learning techniques to be able to figure out where to grasp objects.

Speaker 1 And it started working better than anything had been done before.

Speaker 1 And I was so surprised I had been trying to work on this problem and then I suddenly was able to pick up almost everything we could put in front of it. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 Well, there's this critical mass point for all these things, isn't there? Reading her book, she needed such a humongous pile of data. And halfway there gets you nothing.

Speaker 1 But it's like stagnation, then the acceleration is probably shocking. for you.
Yeah, no, it's a really great point. There is a critical point when you get enough data and suddenly it starts working.

Speaker 1 It took a lot. It was 80 million plus images that FAFA had put together.
And in our case, we had 7 million grasp examples that we had found. And then it started to work.

Speaker 1 And it was like, oh, this is so exciting. And what could it do? You could put it in a new environment.
It could evaluate the environment, and then you could ask it to do something.

Speaker 1 So it was just grasping. And think of it with a very simple gripper, just a parallel pincer.

Speaker 1 So you would put a bin of objects in front of it, and it would start to pick them one by one and put them out. And so we would test it by going into the basement, the garage.

Speaker 1 We just throw all kinds of stuff in there. And it would just pick them up consistently and clear the bin.

Speaker 1 And we would try and fool it. He must have been elated.
It was so much fun. There's a story where we got invited to show this to Jeff Bezos and he invited us down to this event in Palm Springs.

Speaker 1 He said, bring the robot. I want to see this.
We had never left a lab before, so it was a big deal to put it on a truck. And we weren't sure it was going to work.

Speaker 1 We had like 300 objects that we brought with us, got it all set up. He came in the booth and it was working.

Speaker 1 And we were so relieved. And he was trying it with different things.
And it was just like it was in the lab. And everything was going great.

Speaker 1 And then his assistant was standing there and took off his shoe. Uh-oh.
And he said, well, can I try my shoe?

Speaker 1 And I remember my mouth goes dry because of all the things we've tried it with, we've never tried a shoe. So I have no idea.
But what can we do? We have to say, go ahead.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, it feels all mapped out maybe. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 Like the panties on the ground. Right, exactly.
So he drops his shoe into the bin and we're all sitting there and the robot just reached reached over, picked up the shoe. It did.
Took it right out.

Speaker 1 Wow. I remember calling Tiffany, my wife, and I said, this was the best moment of my life.

Speaker 1 And she said, what about our wedding? Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 2 But you can't tell it, like, it has the bin and it has all the objects. And you can't say, pick the shoe.

Speaker 1 That's exactly right. That's very important.
You can't tell it to select a specific object. Right.
You can't say, go through this bin and find me all the pennies. No, exactly.
That's called rummaging.

Speaker 1 Okay. That's very interesting.
We're looking at that now. Much different problem, much harder.
That could be incredible for recycling. Yes.
And also, you think about it, you do this all the time.

Speaker 1 If you reach in your pocket and you want to pull out a pen, you can always find the pen or your purse. Yes.
Right? People are very good at that. And what's going on is very complicated.

Speaker 1 Robot cannot do that at all. But pulling one thing out of the bin is really interesting because you have to kind of move things around a little bit, sort of see a little piece of it, then pick it up.

Speaker 1 And that's actually very important for warehouses and for Amazon to be able to deliver packages. You have to be be able to rummage and find the thing you want.
And that's still unsolved. Ah.

Speaker 1 This might be a good moment to bring up.

Speaker 1 So you say in that TED talk, which I think would shock people, is that we are much better at predicting the trajectory of an asteroid that's a million miles away than we are how a plastic bottle on a table will move if we poke it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because there's physics. We really don't understand friction.
And friction is so important. It's what it lets us all sit here and things not slipping around.

Speaker 1 Friction is so important, but it's a very, very complex process. We can approximate it and there's this model Coulomb friction, et cetera.
But to really get friction right is actually impossible.

Speaker 1 If I want to push something across the table, the way it's going to move and react to my pushing force is going to depend on what's underneath it.

Speaker 1 So if you have one grain of sand, it's going to change it. Yeah, if it's in the right corner, the whole thing's going to rotate clockwise.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 If it's in the left corner, it's going to rotate the other way. But I can't know that.
The robot can't know it. So right there is like one of the great mysteries of nature, right?

Speaker 1 You don't have to talk about quantum physics. That is one unknowable thing that's sitting right in front of us.
Oh my God. Wow.

Speaker 1 And we deal with it all the time. So you might say, what do we do? Well, we kind of compensate.
When we reach for a glass, we don't just reach our gripper right up to it. We scoop it up.

Speaker 1 We're almost anticipating the many different ways it could go wrong. Exactly.
We haven't figured out how to do that for robots yet. Oh, man.

Speaker 1 And again, is that a software problem or a hardware problem? It's both. It's largely software because we don't have the sensors, we don't have the control, we don't understand the models of physics.

Speaker 1 But I also think we need better grippers, too. But that's a whole other story.
But the bottom line is that we're far from anything approximating human-level performance. And there's been so much hype.

Speaker 1 And that's what I worry about. Do you worry this whole field will go through one of those other stagnation patterns that we've already seen a bunch of times? I really do.

Speaker 1 I think we're on a collision course with a kind of bubble that's going to burst because people are expecting that we're almost there, especially when they see these videos. Okay, great.

Speaker 1 Yeah, tell me about these videos because you watch them and you think we're there. And this is

Speaker 1 coming.

Speaker 1 Right. Okay, the first thing to ask is how many takes were required? Many times they get up to work once, and that's the video they show.
Out of hundreds of attempts. Hundreds.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you show the clip of a robot doing a backflip, which is mind bone. You're like, well, fuck it, we're there.
That thing's going to work on my car next month. Right.
That was one in 200 takes.

Speaker 1 And the other 199 takes, this thing is like flying off the table and smashing around. It's violent when it gets it wrong.
In a research lab, that's what we're dealing with. It's always failing.

Speaker 1 You're lucky if you get it to work once. But so if you put it on YouTube, we'll say the success rate is one out of 200 or something.

Speaker 1 But nowadays, there's so much hype that is not putting those caveats in there. Right.

Speaker 1 Well, because you're an academic, and this becomes one of my next questions, is a lot of these videos I am imagining are coming from startups that are trying to raise funding.

Speaker 1 So they're heavily incentivized to mislead you. Someone might say, I have to do that.
That's how I'm going to get the next round of funding.

Speaker 1 But I really cringe about that because that goes against my instincts of, I like to say, under promise and over-deliver.

Speaker 1 And I really want to be really careful, never over-promise about what we're doing or a result in a paper. We're always careful.
Don't exaggerate the result.

Speaker 1 And it really is a problem for robotics where you see the videos and then the other thing is they can be teleoperated. And there's a human behind the curtain.
Okay, so what about this Tesla robot?

Speaker 1 Kim Kardashian

Speaker 1 Optimus.

Speaker 2 She owns one? I guess Elon gave her one.

Speaker 1 He gave her one?

Speaker 2 I guess she's the only one.

Speaker 1 What a romantic gesture. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 What's the deal?

Speaker 1 Okay, so I know this is going to disappoint people when I tell you this, but it's far from being human-like in its abilities. In dexterity, it's very, very weak.

Speaker 1 It looks good, and they're beautiful designs. And they actually have made progress in the motors and the hardware.
So it can move more smoothly. And they're also getting very good at walking.

Speaker 1 so there's definitely something positive there but what can they do and see this triggers that old idea that we've had in the back of our mind which is we want these things we've been reading about them watching them on movies and TV we think they're gonna come and yet there's this huge gap so if you watch carefully at the demos they're being somewhat teleoperated That means that there's a human moving them around, essentially remote controlling them.

Speaker 1 Or if we watch what their hands are doing, they're very primitive. now there's a lot of work trying to address that

Speaker 1 stay tuned for more armchair expert

Speaker 1 if you dare

Speaker 1 we are supported by skims you know what monica i have to talk to you about these skims pajamas they sent us yes i was literally just thinking about how much i love mine i think i've worn them every night since we got them oh yeah i barely was able to get out of mine to come in today so i've always been that guy who just sleeps in whatever random t-shirt, you know, old shorts, these skims, jammies.

Speaker 1 First of all, they're in the pattern I love. They're in the checkered red and black.
Yes. And then the fabric is just snuggling me all night long.

Speaker 2 It's such a good product. And also for the women's ones, the one I have is so cute.
I like after my shower, my routine, to get into a cute pair of pajamas.

Speaker 2 And I feel like my sleep is improved when I'm wearing cute.

Speaker 1 Eventize it.

Speaker 2 You eventize it. That's right.

Speaker 1 And honestly, I feel more put together wearing matching pajamas instead of my usual mismatch situation.

Speaker 2 The timing couldn't be better either because it's holiday season. And honestly, these would make incredible gifts.
They have options for women, men, kids, and even pets. That's so cute.

Speaker 2 Who doesn't want to feel this comfortable sleeping?

Speaker 1 Shop the best pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you.
Select podcast in the survey and be sure to select our show in the drop-down menu that follows.

Speaker 1 And if you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims Holiday Shop is now open at skims.com.

Speaker 1 We are supported by Audible. You know, I spend a lot of time listening.
It's literally my job. But when I'm not recording the show, I'm constantly consuming audio content.

Speaker 1 And honestly, I can get pretty overwhelmed by all the choices out there. That's why I love when Audible drops their best of the year collection.

Speaker 1 Audible's most anticipated collection, the best of 2025, is here. And let me tell you, these editors know what they're doing.

Speaker 1 They've spent countless hours listening, having heated debates, probably way more heated than Monica and I get, although that's hard to imagine. And they have handpicked this year's must listens.

Speaker 1 What I really appreciate is that they don't just go for the obvious picks. They found hidden gems alongside the buzziest new releases.

Speaker 1 Whether you're into true crime like Monica, historical biographies like me, or something completely different, this collection has your back.

Speaker 1 I've already started diving into their selection and honestly, it's like having a really smart friend curate your entire listening experience. Want to finish the year with a sure thing?

Speaker 1 Check out Audible's best of 2025 and discover why there's more to imagine when you listen. Listen now.
Go to audible.com slash best of the year.

Speaker 1 We are supported by T-Mobile 5G home internet. Like everyone, home internet is our life, and there's nothing worse than when it slows down.

Speaker 2 Oh, I know, especially when you're doing something important, like editing this show.

Speaker 1 Well, actually, there's one worse thing, waiting around all day for the cable guy to show up to install it.

Speaker 2 I want those five hours back.

Speaker 1 Fortunately, T-Mobile's got home internet. They have fast speeds, and it sets up easily in 15 minutes with just one cord.
Anyone can do it.

Speaker 2 Even me.

Speaker 1 Hey, we were first in on T-Mobile's home internet. We were using it up in the attic.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 If you recall. It powers this very show.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's so reliable. And when you've got a podcast, podcast full of valuable insights about human nature and poop jokes, you need that.

Speaker 2 We all need that.

Speaker 1 Oh, and the low price is guaranteed for five years.

Speaker 2 Five years? Gotta respect the LTR.

Speaker 1 Guarantees monthly price of fixed wireless 5G internet data exclusions like taxes and fees applies. Service delivered via 5G network.
Speeds vary due to factor affecting cellular networks.

Speaker 1 Check availability and guarantee exclusions and details at t-mobile.com/slash home internet.

Speaker 1 Okay, so now I want to ask you, how

Speaker 1 impacted are you by this general paradigm shift where most technology for the 20th century was coming out of military government spending, DARPA, MIT, these great institutions, academia.

Speaker 1 And then as you saw these private corporations amass trillion-dollar values, the government can't really compete now and academia can't compete. And what do we think the price of that will be?

Speaker 1 What are your thoughts on that whole realm of this?

Speaker 1 So it's a great question because it just came up yesterday at USC because people were talking about there's not so much funding available from the government agencies, DARPA and others that used to fund a lot of this research because it was more esoteric.

Speaker 1 Now they're saying, well, the companies are doing it. And yet it's not necessarily being shared.
So it's closed and complicated. But fortunately, a lot of the companies are pretty open.

Speaker 1 Google and NVIDIA and many others are actually publishing results. We work with them.
They work with us. And so robotics is surprisingly open.

Speaker 1 The minute they get a result, they publish it and we all see it. You see it on Twitter or Archive, is this other thing? But so there's a lot of communication.

Speaker 1 And by the way, all this tension between China and the U.S., it's really interesting. It doesn't exist in academia.
We are freely exchanging information.

Speaker 1 Students are coming from China, just came from a conference. Half the papers were from China.
It's a free and open exchange. No, science always, and it's so cool.
It's so punk rock.

Speaker 1 They're always like, before I'm German or I'm Hungarian or I'm American, I'm a physicist. The collaboration and how everyone got along is something to be really modeled.

Speaker 1 They have a higher calling, which is kind of knowledge.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but wasn't that part of the whole thing with Oppenheimer? I mean, they were trying to keep it to America.

Speaker 1 Yes, Oppenheimer had some folks working under him that were spies for Russia and were leaking our nuclear technology.

Speaker 1 So yeah, I guess that's not to say it was devoid of any statecraft, but just in general, if a Chinese roboticist has a breakthrough, he doesn't give a fuck where this guy came from.

Speaker 1 He wants to know about the robotics breakthrough.

Speaker 2 Well, you don't, but do they feel like we got to protect? I mean, obviously not, which is amazing. I'm shocked.
Because that's our whole thing. We've talked about it all the time with AI.

Speaker 2 Like, well, if we want to... put the brakes on it.

Speaker 1 China's not going to, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Other countries aren't. So what are we doing?

Speaker 1 A lot of it is open now. Facebook or Meta has actually been quite exemplary in that they share all the models.
They're doing their AI as open source, right? Yeah. Which is unique.

Speaker 1 Really Really wonderful. And actually, we use it all the time, those tools, and it's very, very helpful.

Speaker 1 And then others like OpenAI, we use the tool, but we don't actually get access to the source code. So we don't know how it's doing it, right?

Speaker 1 Behind the scenes, but they let us access it and use it, which is doing some incredible things. But that idea of, I guess your question is about government versus private sector.

Speaker 1 Let's just take really quick a hard example. And I'm not an Elon Musk hater or lover.
I respect him as a modern day Edison. He is a once-in-a-generation kind of engineer, and I respect that.
I agree.

Speaker 1 His other stuff is questionable to me, but whatever. Even with that said, I can't say that I love that he has 5,000 satellites in orbit around the planet in route to having 12,000.

Speaker 1 That's just an interesting level of power to give one individual when I think I'd feel safer if University of Michigan had 8,000 satellites or the U.S.

Speaker 1 government may be further down that list, but still I'd prefer that. It's a dicey situation when someone has a monopoly on a technology that's hugely impactful.
It's a great point.

Speaker 1 And not only that, but that individual also has a lot of power in terms of... let's say Twitter and X.
Media, yeah. Media.
Yeah. And seems to know how to use it very effectively.

Speaker 1 So I think it's a concern. Coming back to the fear, the reason roboticists, and I'm not the only one, almost all of us are not fearful that robots are going to take over.

Speaker 1 And also that they're going to eliminate humans because it's just not that sophisticated by a long shot. And certainly the other fear is about jobs.

Speaker 1 And I don't see them taking over jobs and putting people out of work because all the jobs that require manual labor are extremely difficult to automate. I looked it up this morning.
So 39%

Speaker 1 of U.S. jobs are still manual labor.
Oh, that's a good number. But I think even more importantly, that represents one third of your waking day.

Speaker 1 You have another third of your waking day where you're still going to have to do your laundry, make dinner, right? So you have this whole sector too, that no matter who you are, is still manual.

Speaker 1 So you add those two together, and now you're really looking at a number that is like 78% of the stuff done on planet Earth in a day is manual. A huge amount, and those jobs cannot be replaced.

Speaker 1 You know, the gardener. The mechanic.
The mechanic. The dream for me is I got a robot that's maintaining all this bullshit I bought.

Speaker 1 Diagnose why the car is not running, fix it, get in there, how intricate working on an engine is. Forget it.
That's like 100 years away. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Like mechanics are so complex where they can reach around things and feel, they can take off screws. Bell housing on a transient.
you can't see anything. So that's the kind of thing way beyond robots.

Speaker 1 And I think that there's a shortage of workers. The trades because we're aging and we need more people to be doing all these jobs.
They're not going to be unemployed.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, right, right.
In fact, it's probably most job security. People are realizing that they're actually in demand, which is great.
They're actually getting higher wages.

Speaker 1 Okay, so my theory on this is that the people that are being interviewed for the media, where we're getting our information about AI, the people that are getting consulted and interviewed are the actual people whose jobs could be replaced.

Speaker 1 So they are very misled by their own.

Speaker 1 You're talking to like computer programmers about all these domains where actually AI will threaten those jobs and they're the mouthpiece of this whole thing.

Speaker 1 So it's all very lopsided because those are the jobs. Well, I have a theory about this.
I think some of the most vocal doomsayers who are saying we're on the verge of these things taking over.

Speaker 1 It was very telling the person who just won the Nobel Prize, Jeff Hinton, he said, we have never encountered anything more intelligent than ourselves. That was his big line.

Speaker 1 And I read that and I thought, wait, I encounter something more intelligent than myself every day. I mean, there's tons of people around that are more intelligent than me.

Speaker 1 And I'm not afraid of them.

Speaker 1 You know, they don't freak me out. I want to talk to them.
I want to get to know them. Yeah, we spent a week with Bill Gates and we loved it.
We loved it. And you weren't scared.
Right, exactly.

Speaker 1 And so most of us aren't afraid of something more intelligent than us, but there's a small group and I think they think they're the most intelligent people. That's interesting.

Speaker 2 For someone to be smarter than them, where they're at the most upper echelon, is scary to them. It's a threat to their identity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like if the AI robot's good at drifting in a car, I'm fucked. Because I'm defining my whole identity and self-esteem on my ability to do that.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. That's a great insight.
That's what I think. So it's not really something the rest of us need to worry about.
We're constantly bumping into people smarter than us, and it's fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's great, actually. It's great.
And I actually actually think this is something about AI is that it actually can be this interesting partner for us and can enhance our world and our abilities.

Speaker 1 Well, like this thing I was talking to you guys about. You sent us Notebook LM.
Is that what it's called? Yes.

Speaker 1 You sent Monica and I a podcast that is entirely AI. There's a male host and a female host.
Yes. And you said, do you think this thing was trained on you guys? Yes.

Speaker 2 Which was so flattering.

Speaker 1 Guys, do you not hear that? I mean, it sounds so much like you.

Speaker 1 By the way, it's great, too. Like, I was listening to it, and I was like, it sounds like NBR.
Like, I would listen to this if the information was good. It was so good.

Speaker 1 But it has a rhythm that is very much like you two. Do they ever find panties, though? That's what keeps us human.
That's what keeps us human.

Speaker 1 But it has these amazing insights. Like, it'll just come up with these analogies and things.
And they weren't in the document that you gave it. It just came up with these other things.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the back and forth, like the pacing and everything else is so good.

Speaker 2 The cadence. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It has a sense that they're comfortable with each other. They're kind of back and forth.
You can feel their rapport. Rapport.
Yeah. Perfect.
That's the word.

Speaker 1 That's a word I wasn't thinking. They have fabricated rapport.

Speaker 2 But that's scary. That's the thing you think as a person you cannot replicate.

Speaker 1 And I can.

Speaker 1 But yeah, we're thinking doomsday, like we're out of a job, but think about this. What if we own the thing and it puts out the show? We're on a beach somewhere and the show is just as good.

Speaker 1 I would love it.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like the Picasso story where it's like, yes, I drew this in five minutes, but it took me 40 years to learn how to do this. Exactly.

Speaker 1 So it's like, yes, we're not doing it anymore, but because we did so much of it, we've earned this. That's how it will justify our beach life.
Well, you guys are not going to be replaced. Don't worry.

Speaker 1 You have a very special. And also, by the way, if you listen to a couple of these and I have, it starts to become a little repetitive.
It's not like that's going to do a whole podcast series. Right.

Speaker 1 There's something that's not quite new and fresh about them. At first, it sounds really great, but after a while, it's not really satisfying.

Speaker 1 And do you think that the missing ingredient is that we cannot help but evolve and change? We're aging. Our bodies are morphing.
Our children get older.

Speaker 1 You know, all these elements that really funnel into this aren't existing there.

Speaker 1 So it's like what they can do is replicate very well and even create within that framework of it, but it's not going to evolve in the way we just can't help but evolve.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think unless we can figure out ways to sort of feed it and prompt it. And so we can use it as a tool to discover new things.

Speaker 1 And sometimes it's good at that, where you give it a paper and you say, come up with 10 extensions of this paper. And maybe one of them will be really interesting.

Speaker 1 Or you could do it for subjects for the show. You could say, well, what are some good brainstorming topics that would come up that we could have as our, what do you call it?

Speaker 1 Like conversation starters? Yeah. It could come up with new ones of those.
Like our Armchair Anonymous. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 What are some good prompts?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it would feel a little true.
Minimally for us, if we could use our data set,

Speaker 1 then I would feel a little less fraudulent about it. Right.
You give it your set and then build on that and see what it does. Okay, I have a couple of rapid-fire questions.

Speaker 1 Then I want to talk about your art. Where are we ahead and where are we behind in our expectations? Are we ahead anywhere?

Speaker 1 We have all these fantasies about what robotics are going to do, and clearly we're aware of all the ones we think we're behind on. We don't have Rosie, the robot, in our house.

Speaker 1 But are there areas in which it would shock people how far ahead we are? No? It's hard to say.

Speaker 1 One thing I do think we're going to see is the extension of the Roomba is a robot that can pick up clothes and declutter around the house.

Speaker 2 I like that.

Speaker 1 And I think it might have four legs. Oh.
So it'll be a little like dog with an arm. You thought it might have a scooper on its back, like the tail would be a scooper?

Speaker 1 And I think it might have a tail because tails are actually really important. For balance.
For also user interface.

Speaker 1 A dog's tail is very interesting, and that's very deeply rooted also in our psychology. We have a reaction when you see a dog with a tail wagging.

Speaker 2 An emotional reaction.

Speaker 1 But if you notice, none of these dogs that are out there yet have tails. So we're building one.
Okay. You and your wife are incredible artists.
You have an exhibit that's at Skirball right now.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, no, I'd love to tell you. So she's a filmmaker and has been involved in technology for a long time, Tiffany Schlane.

Speaker 1 And she and I have collaborated a little bit, but this is our first big collaboration. And we've been having so much fun.

Speaker 1 We got invited as part of the Getty is doing this citywide exhibition on art and science. It's going on for a whole year.
And so they have each of these different institutions do exhibits.

Speaker 1 And so the Skurball invited Tiffany and I to do one for them related to art and science.

Speaker 1 We've been working on on it for like three years, and we came up with this idea of talking about history more broadly, but also using trees and the science of tree ring dating.

Speaker 1 You know how you count the rings?

Speaker 1 If you've ever been to Mirror Woods. Exactly.
There's a great cross section of a redwood, and they put on the rings different events in history. This tree has been alive for.
It has Jesus on the ring.

Speaker 1 Right. And they're very Western patriarchal.
And so she had started actually over the pandemic doing a a feminist tree ring okay

Speaker 1 and then a couple of other ones she's been developing these sculptures and they're salvaged wood so we don't cut down trees to do this but there's a lot of these big redwoods and other forms out there so for this show we wanted to do something around that started with the tree of knowledge uh-huh this is very cool we found a tree stump that was gigantic almost as big as this room it's 7 000 pounds holy shit It's a eucalyptus, but it was uprooted and sort of fell over.

Speaker 1 And then one side is sanded down. And so when you walk into the gallery you see the back end of it so it's all this knotted gnarly roots

Speaker 1 and then around the other side we inscribed it with questions trying to talk about the history of knowledge and how it evolved from like what is fire and can i eat this which is thousands of years ago the kind of questions we asked but those evolved into will machines be intelligent yeah right and on the far end so it has 600 questions or something wow that's awesome one of them that's super cool and it's so wild to think the tree was around at that point.

Speaker 1 The first mark on the ring is from 530 BC, and it's Pythagorean's theorem. You see A squared plus B squared equals C squared.
And it goes all through these great breakthrough math equations.

Speaker 1 It's another piece actually that we call abstract expression, which is a redwood. Yes, it starts with Pythagoreas.
But remember, it's not literal because that tree wasn't 5,000 years old.

Speaker 1 We take some liberties. Okay, okay.
How old was that tree? I think like 400 years old, maybe 500, but that's the idea. It's like we're kind of playing off of that known concept.

Speaker 1 But this time we wanted to tell the history of science and do it through just equations. And we never say Pythagoras on there.
It just has the equation.

Speaker 1 But those equations are kind of beautiful in their own right. And they're kind of artistic because in a way, art takes an image and there's a lot of content and meaning behind it.

Speaker 1 And that's true with the scientific equations. Yeah.
Yes.

Speaker 2 We said that we were talking to Feife about that, like especially with physics, there's something mystical about it. There's something about releasing your firm hold on life and like giving it up.

Speaker 1 Yes. So I have one story about this.
Oh, please. When I was in grad school, I had developed this method of orienting parts without sensing.

Speaker 1 So just by pushing the part along in different directions, you could orient it. And I showed it to my advisor, and he was very excited about it.

Speaker 1 And he said, well, can you prove that that would work for any part? I worked on this problem for a year and a half. Wow.

Speaker 1 I tried all these methods and it was basically extremely difficult to try and prove that it would work for all these geometries.

Speaker 1 I was living at the end of this alley and it was down some stairs and so I was sitting on my porch all the time just like working on this.

Speaker 1 I have this moment where this pops into my head to use this step function and it looks like stairs. I remember writing down these equations and crossing off terms and everything turned into zero.

Speaker 1 And then it worked. Oh my god.
It was this moment where when the whole thing integrated to zero means that there had to be a solution for any polygonal part.

Speaker 1 Did it feel transcendent? It felt quite transcendent. It really was like you had tapped into something a little mystical.
Totally. It was not something that I felt like I did.
It was just revealed.

Speaker 2 You were like the vessel for this.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Very much. I still remember that very distinctly.
And I'll admit that one of the equations on the tree is yours.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's your signature. I put it in there.

Speaker 1 Up with Gauss and Einstein. Yeah.
But you're right. There's something really elegant about those formulas.
And you think of the most famous one, like E equals mc squared on the surface.

Speaker 1 It's just so simple. And no one could think of that for so many years.
Right. The elegance of some of these, Euler's equation is the one that mathematicians truly love.
What's that?

Speaker 1 It's e to the i pi minus one equals zero. It's amazing because you have these three quantities.
You have E, which is the natural logarithm, which is like this 2.78 blah blah blah.

Speaker 1 And then you have pi, 3.14159. And then you have I, which is for imaginary numbers.
And those three, there's no reason that those should all relate.

Speaker 1 Right, because they're all going to infinity, so none of them work great in math. The irrational numbers, yes.

Speaker 1 And they all came from very different sources, but they all come together at this magical moment. And it's mind-blowing.
Wow. Like, to a mathematician, it shouldn't be.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's like one of those moments where you're like, the universe makes sense. Yeah.
By the way, I feel like that's where I believe in a higher power. Yes.
So I'm a like hardcore atheist.

Speaker 1 I believe in nothing. I don't want to believe in nothing.
There's something happening with my kids that I feel like is something I can't articulate.

Speaker 1 I really kind of open my mind to like, maybe there is some kind of magic happening.

Speaker 2 There's symmetry at the very least. From where, I don't know.

Speaker 1 There's structure. There's some kind of beauty that makes sense, and that's out there.
And when we discover it, we get a glimpse of it, it's like there's something beyond us.

Speaker 1 I had that one little taste of it

Speaker 1 that I'll never forget. And that really influenced me.
I know it's out there. And I think that's when these breakthroughs happen.
In 2012, you had the one breakthrough with AI.

Speaker 1 And then in 2022, the second one was ChatGPT. And that has changed so much.
And so many people are in robotics, by the way. That's the new wave that everybody's excited about.

Speaker 1 But now we'll have to wait for the next next one. If you look at it, it's every 10 years or more when we get another breakthrough.
And I think we need a few more breakthroughs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 When you look at evolution, they talk about punctuated evolution. It's like nothing happens and then everything happens and then nothing happens.
Exactly, Dax. You're the anthropologist.
So you know.

Speaker 1 Punctuated equilibrium. You have a sort of plateau and then there's a breakthrough or a change.
And then there's a long plateau where it kind of gets digested and everything.

Speaker 1 And then another, but that's really what progress looks like. Right.
You would think it's just this nice linear. Not at all.
And people say exponential. That's not the case at all.

Speaker 1 We're not living in exponential times. Most technologies do not increase like that.
There'll be a little breakthrough and then a long, look at air travel. Hasn't really improved.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There was a huge jump when it started.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And we have had things like carbon fiber planes and there's definitely things that make it more energy efficient.
But in terms of comfort level, where's a breakthrough?

Speaker 1 I think it's actually going backwards.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right. Well, Ken, you are a blessing blessing on planet Earth.
I think you are so fun and interesting and encouraging. You're like a polymath kind of cosmopolitan.
You're an artist.

Speaker 1 You have all these interests. You're youthful beyond your years.
It's a pleasure to know you. I'm so glad you came in and talked to us about all those.
You guys are so great.

Speaker 1 I have to say, I get this real joy listening to you because you're so open and the way you bring out the best in people. Now I see how it works.
You sit down and you just make us feel so at home.

Speaker 1 Oh, good. But your real genuine rapport is so incredible.
And I think that's why you're so incredibly successful because people hear it. It's a pleasure and it's so genuine.
Thank you. I love it.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, to the many dinners we will have in the future. Okay, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 What a pleasure. Thank you guys.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned to hear Miss Monica correct all the facts that were wrong. It's okay, though.
We all make mistakes

Speaker 1 i'm in an incredibly beautiful new sweater that my friend got me looks gorgeous i just put it on for the first time and i'm truly blown away the green is really nice and the fit is really kind of perfect i know they know how to do it and i think i like these cuffs where you have to roll them up they're too long on their own they're clearly designed to be rolled see look that's a seven inch nine inch cuff it's nice though yeah but you wouldn't wear it like that right yourself well i'm not allowed because i'm short and they have a rule that if you're short you have to show a little bit of skin.

Speaker 2 If you're wearing oversized clothing, you have to show a little bit of skin on your arm.

Speaker 1 Because you'll get lost in it. I just rode my bicycle.
Oh. Yeah.

Speaker 1 My first time in biker shorts.

Speaker 2 How'd it go?

Speaker 1 Well, I just can't believe I'm a person that owns biker shorts and wears them now. I'm having a hard time.

Speaker 2 Well, you're 50.

Speaker 2 So a lot of things have changed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but also I think that's something that's best done much younger. Almost the 50 compounds it.
First, I never envisioned myself as being someone that would be in those biker shorts. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 they have a pad built into them. And the seat is very tiny on the road bike.
And it hurts your anus. Yeah.
I don't want to say it hurts your. It just hurt.
Yeah, it hurts.

Speaker 1 I was like, oh, this is nice padding. I put them on for the first time.
I felt like Panay always talks about like eventize your run.

Speaker 1 I was like, well, these are built for nothing other than riding a bicycle. Sure.
And let's do that. And the padding was nice.
And I love that there's no fabric flowing anywhere else.

Speaker 1 I think I went up the hill faster because of them.

Speaker 2 Probably aerodynamics.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to adopt the Lycra shirt, though. I decided.
I just wore a wife beater.

Speaker 2 So you're back home.

Speaker 1 I'm back home. I'm very, very, very happy to be back home.

Speaker 2 Hey, I got you a present for your birthday. Do you want to open it?

Speaker 1 I would love to open it.

Speaker 1 Let me really take my time here. I'm looking at a beautiful tissue paper.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 With, oh, can I say one thing? This will sound derogatory, but let me preface it by saying

Speaker 1 I could be in the tourism board for Mexico City. I love it.
It's an enchanted, I want to go, romantic city.

Speaker 1 Food's dynamite. If you ever go to Havre 77, French restaurant, we went twice.

Speaker 1 The French onion soup is the best I've ever had in my life. On the second trip on my birthday night, I got two bowls of it to start.

Speaker 2 Oh, wow. Like when you got two steaks.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And I would tear out a fingernail right now to have it again

Speaker 1 and share it with you. It was the most incredible.

Speaker 1 But anyways, the facial tissue and I had a cold. It wasn't ideal.

Speaker 1 ideal okay and where it really hit me was one ply maybe less i was on at a nice hotel mind you yeah there we got on the flight i went into the bathroom and i pulled the tissue out of the mirror that's in the lavatory of the airplane and the second i touched i was like oh that's soft and then i thought how bad was the tissue where the airplane tissue felt like puffs plus with lotion oh my just to make it relative yeah because that's one ply yeah i think it was like 0.6 ply.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. Anyways, beautiful tissue paper

Speaker 1 with purple flowers.

Speaker 2 Really nice. The tissue is from Nikki Kehoe.
The present is not.

Speaker 1 Oh, this is a multi-stage gift. Yeah.
Okay, beautiful tissue paper and then a burlap sack.

Speaker 2 Yeah, also from Nikki Kehoe.

Speaker 1 That's how they wrap. Wonderful.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 buddy, the stories of Raymond Carver. Will you please be quiet, please? Is this an original?

Speaker 2 I bought it as a first edition, and it is signed.

Speaker 1 It's signed? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Did you pay the face value of $8.95?

Speaker 2 No, it was on sale, actually.

Speaker 1 It's half off.

Speaker 1 What year was this published? Because we can, I think it's fascinating that a hardcover, beautifully bound book was $8.95. No, that's true.

Speaker 1 I know I'm all over the place in a little manic, but I just got to add

Speaker 1 back to Little Women,

Speaker 1 which I love. Yeah.
You know, Greta Gerwig's number one super fan now. At the end of that movie, they show them pressing and making her first book, the book, Little Women.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you remember that sequence. I don't know if I remember it.
But the amount of time and effort it took to make a book in the 1890s

Speaker 1 where they were pressing it all, they were cutting it with a saw, they were sewing the binding by hand, and then they were cutting leather leather out and in a pattern and then gluing and putting that in a press.

Speaker 1 I'm like, it took like a week to make a single volume. They should have been $600.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Well, that's why they're so rare.

Speaker 1 And it explains why, I think it was Carnegie who invented the library. There were no libraries.
Books were just too expensive. They were like,

Speaker 1 probably in today's dollars, they probably were hundreds of dollars with that amount of manpower. Okay.
So this was first published.

Speaker 2 We think about wealth disparity now,

Speaker 2 but then in order to even read a book, you had to be a millionaire.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll get the number wrong, but to put it into perspective, like,

Speaker 1 so I guess Elon is now worth $400 billion recently. Although that stock just fell, whatever, let's just say he hit $400 billion.

Speaker 1 $400 billion of our total GDP and national amount of money isn't even 0.01%.

Speaker 1 When Rockefeller hit a billion,

Speaker 1 they say he actually had like 15 cents of every dollar that existed in America. So it was like as bad as it feels now, it was

Speaker 2 worse.

Speaker 1 Exponential, order of magnitude, crazier with the first rich people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this was 1963.

Speaker 1 So this book costs $8.95 in 1963.

Speaker 2 How much do we think that is now? Rob, can you put it in?

Speaker 1 Well, that's a great, we have that technology.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we sure do.

Speaker 1 I added a new, I actually wrote up my resolutions last night.

Speaker 2 Oh, great.

Speaker 1 Which I don't know if I've ever written them down.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wrote some down too.

Speaker 1 You did? Did you journal this morning? I did. Congratulations.
You journaled every day. I'm proud of you.

Speaker 2 I had therapy, too, and we talked about it. And she said,

Speaker 2 I could.

Speaker 1 Burn them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or shred them or whatever.

Speaker 1 Can I have her number? No.

Speaker 2 She's like, if that's going to allow you.

Speaker 2 to really be able to be honest and truthful with yourself in a way you won't be able to otherwise.

Speaker 1 And let it out of of your body.

Speaker 2 You know, sometimes her and I talk about, like, there are things that I talk about with her that I, that only

Speaker 2 she gets to hear. And she said, you know, it's not just me.
You, you also have you. Yeah.
And you have a dialogue with, you can have a dialogue with yourself,

Speaker 2 especially via the journal. Yeah.
But, but, yes, of course, I have to be

Speaker 2 very honest with myself there. And so if I, if I'm out of fear not doing that,

Speaker 2 then it's not worth it. So I do, I'm still deciding.

Speaker 1 We may have talked about this,

Speaker 1 but, and I had mentioned there was a period I stopped journaling over the last 20 years.

Speaker 1 And then I had a relapse, obviously. And I didn't even put all this together.
But through therapy with Mark,

Speaker 1 I think what occurred to me was

Speaker 1 I.

Speaker 1 There were things I couldn't write down, just like you were saying, are you afraid someone's going to find it? And I'm like, no.

Speaker 1 But in truth, there was a moment, yes, I'd be afraid someone would find it. And I had this weird dedication to never lie to that journal.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Right. So I just couldn't, I didn't, it didn't feel like I was making a decision to stop journaling.
It just was like, this is really weird.

Speaker 1 I've been journaling for 17 years or whatever, and I haven't in a while, but I'm not overthinking it. But of course, in reflection, I was like, I couldn't really,

Speaker 1 yeah, be dishonest to this thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I love this. This is such a thoughtful, wonderful present.

Speaker 3 It would have cost $89.18.

Speaker 1 Wow. $89

Speaker 1 for a book. That's a lot.

Speaker 2 It's not enough, though. I wish it was

Speaker 2 $5,000.

Speaker 1 Okay, this is a fantastic present. Very thoughtful.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 You're welcome.

Speaker 1 Okay, how was therapy?

Speaker 2 It was good. It's my first therapy of the new year.

Speaker 2 You know, for a second, I was debating, I was like, maybe I only need to start going like as as check-ins now. Maybe I don't really need to be on this consistent of a schedule.

Speaker 2 But then today I was, I was like, no,

Speaker 2 I need to keep up my

Speaker 2 once every two weeks.

Speaker 1 Well, look, I've stopped, so I really am in no position to say this. Yeah.
But it definitely falls under the umbrella of like, well, it couldn't hurt to go.

Speaker 2 It does not hurt.

Speaker 1 And it potentially could hurt to not go. Yeah.
Yeah. It's kind of the vitamin debate.
It's like the scientific community is kind of split down the middle whether vitamins work or not. Yes.

Speaker 1 But it's like, I don't know,

Speaker 1 on the chance that they work,

Speaker 1 they're not going to harm you. All right.
Someone's going to comment.

Speaker 1 Yes, I hear it.

Speaker 2 There are some bad ones.

Speaker 1 Oh, I know. And you can have too much of certain things.
But just in general, if you're taking the, you know, not above the daily dose of any one thing, it's not going to harm you.

Speaker 2 Speaking of, okay, you know how I'm always...

Speaker 2 paranoid about drowning my cells in too much water yeah or people in general like drinking too much water and then drowning themselves and you you know gundry's new movement is less water.

Speaker 1 Not shockingly.

Speaker 1 So him and I are aligned.

Speaker 2 Soulmates. That's why he's got those fresh hands.
He doesn't drink any water.

Speaker 1 No hydration.

Speaker 2 Oh my gosh. I'm going to put my hair up real time.
If you want to see it.

Speaker 1 It looks so good now, but go ahead. Let's see what happens there.
Okay.

Speaker 2 If you want to see it, go to YouTube.

Speaker 1 Do you ever do an up and then a braid and back?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I did it for

Speaker 2 when's this out?

Speaker 1 The eighth. I did it for

Speaker 2 a commercial we were just in together.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah. That comes out

Speaker 1 yesterday.

Speaker 2 It came out yesterday.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 Our little commercial.

Speaker 1 Yes, our second commercial of I Hope Many.

Speaker 2 Yes, exactly. It was so fun.
And it's out. It was out yesterday.
It's on our Instagrams. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And in it, I do have a...

Speaker 2 Ponytail with a braid that I love. It's just really hard for me to do by myself on my own.
I had a hairstylist that day.

Speaker 1 Oh, right, right.

Speaker 2 But I do like it.

Speaker 1 Maybe a therapist can style your hair on the days you don't want to share. Oh, hair play?

Speaker 2 I would go every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'd pay for that. Anyway,

Speaker 2 okay, so drowning cells,

Speaker 2 everyone laughs at me. They guffaw.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 And I met someone who drowned his cells.

Speaker 1 Oh, tell me.

Speaker 2 And it was really bad.

Speaker 1 Tell me more. Okay.
Who did you meet? Where did you meet him in front of 7-Eleven?

Speaker 2 No, he's a real person I know. I'm not going to say I'm not going to outlaw him.

Speaker 1 Him or her's name. Right.

Speaker 2 He's a friend of a friend. This is a sad story.
I'm transitioning into a sad story. When I was

Speaker 1 having fun and laughing, stop.

Speaker 2 Yeah, stop. A big group of friends was meeting

Speaker 2 and one,

Speaker 2 Robbie,

Speaker 1 sweet Robbie from our chain.

Speaker 2 Yes, from the Connections chain, wasn't there. I was like, where's Robbie? And his wife said, oh, he's at the hospital with

Speaker 1 the mutual.

Speaker 2 Yes, with

Speaker 1 the unmentionable.

Speaker 1 No, because he's not underwear.

Speaker 3 Because that's his name.

Speaker 2 No, his name is unmentionable. We can't call him untouchable because he's Indian.
Oh, he is. Yeah, so now I'm giving a lot of info away.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's pretty easy to narrow this down at some point. If you know an Indian in Atlanta who's friends with Robbie, that's true.

Speaker 2 There is one. There is one.
Anyway, this is sad. This is sad.
He had a seizure.

Speaker 2 And I guess he

Speaker 2 had already had a seizure a year before

Speaker 2 and was on seizure medication and stuff but when he's the perfect person to tell this story because you have the same condition right exactly and you're in an indian when he went the first time after his seizure they checked his salinity levels and they were so low and he did drink in

Speaker 2 like really excessive excessive amount of water do we know why and he drowned his cells yeah he got rid of too much salt, but he drowned his cells.

Speaker 1 That was the medical. Yeah.
Oh, okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 You have a good deal of salt, I think, from your diet. Don't take offense.

Speaker 2 Are you referring to like the potatoes I made or something?

Speaker 1 No, but you like, you have a nice

Speaker 1 seasoned chicken.

Speaker 1 I think you have a good amount of salt.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I feel fine about my salinity.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 And I don't drink any water, so I'm good there.

Speaker 1 Do we know why he was drinking so much water? Was he on like an exercise routine?

Speaker 2 He was X, he was on an exercise routine, and

Speaker 2 I'm not sure why.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so turns out, per usual, I'm right. You can drown yourselves.

Speaker 1 Per usual.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 unsurprisingly, please look out for that.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.
You and Gundry should.

Speaker 1 You and Gundry should collab on this.

Speaker 2 I'm happy to join forces.

Speaker 1 Also, just if you are having a lot of water, maybe use some

Speaker 1 electrolytes.

Speaker 1 that's right keep an eye on your electrolytes yeah they're the case the only cases i've ever heard of is like no one's ever died from ecstasy but people have drank too much water on exactly they drown their cells yeah okay

Speaker 1 okay i wonder if they drown their cells or if when they drink way too much water it backs up like congenital heart failure basically like ends up filling up their body because you know My father, who had congenital heart failure, I don't know if it's congenital, he had heart disease.

Speaker 1 And what would regularly happen is his heart was too big on one side and normal on one side. And so it would pump in a lot, but it couldn't pump out a lot.

Speaker 1 And then it just ends up backing your whole body up with water. And you get really bloated and you put on all this waterway.

Speaker 1 And then it starts really affecting your breathing and your lungs and everything else.

Speaker 1 And so my dad would go into the hospital for like four days and all they he'd be on diuretics and he'd just be getting rid of gallons of water.

Speaker 2 Right. Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay. It says, yes, cells can drown in a condition called water intoxication or hyponatremia, which occurs when there's too much water in the body.

Speaker 2 When there's too much water in the body, sodium levels drop, causing water to move into cells and causing them to swell.

Speaker 2 This can be especially dangerous for brain cells as it can lead to pressure in the brain, confusion, drowsiness.

Speaker 1 Wait, though, epilepsy, pressure in the brain might have been completely all related. Exactly.
Oh, man. Well, I'm sending love and well wishes to this anonymous person.
Untouchable.

Speaker 1 Why does Robbie have two very close Indian epileptic friends? That's he's very over-indexed.

Speaker 2 He is extremely over-indexed.

Speaker 1 Because I consider myself kind of unique in America, low percentage where I have a best friend who's Indian and epileptic. And he's got now two.

Speaker 2 I know. He has a fetish.

Speaker 1 I know you don't like that word, but.

Speaker 2 You think it's a king?

Speaker 1 Ask Ask if there's a third. If there's a third, he has a condition.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it is weird. Then I wondered, is like

Speaker 1 what?

Speaker 1 White?

Speaker 2 Yeah. She doesn't have it.

Speaker 1 Actually. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 Is he giving everyone this?

Speaker 3 He's poisoning everyone.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. He's so sweet.
That would make sense. He's one of the sweetest people I've ever met.

Speaker 2 He is a dark side.

Speaker 1 Hi, Robbie. Nasty.

Speaker 2 So his wife is my oldest best friend.

Speaker 2 And when we were in high school,

Speaker 2 she had seizures. And they were dating at that time.
Okay.

Speaker 2 And she got in this car accident because she had one. Hers were different, though.
She had

Speaker 2 like, she didn't have grandma's seizures.

Speaker 1 Were you about to say petite? Petite mall. That's what they're called.
That's so cute. And then she had a second.
I usually picture like a mall. You'd walk in, but there's only three stores.

Speaker 1 And then the food court is like four food carts.

Speaker 2 They should call it boutique seizures.

Speaker 1 That's way better. Yeah.
Great reboot.

Speaker 1 You and Gundry can work on that.

Speaker 2 So anyway, yes. He has three.

Speaker 1 There's a fourth. I mean, I only know of three people in his life and all three of them have seizures.
So certainly there's more. Should we get Robbie on the phone? Do you want to? Yeah.

Speaker 1 We got to grill him about that.

Speaker 2 I mean, he's definitely at work.

Speaker 1 On Saturday.

Speaker 2 Oh, I forgot.

Speaker 1 During the NFL playoff game. I'm so sorry, Georgia lost, by the way.
Oh, no, the Sugar Bowl. You didn't know that.

Speaker 2 They lost.

Speaker 1 They lost.

Speaker 2 To who?

Speaker 2 Don't say Texas.

Speaker 1 They didn't lose to Texas, but Texas won theirs. Texas is still in it.
Yeah. Notre Dame.

Speaker 2 But they're still in it because... Oh, no.

Speaker 1 That game we saw was one of our only two losses. They ended up being really good.

Speaker 2 I know, but they played.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the SEC, bitch. Is that what you said?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I did. Hold on.
I got to call Robbie. He's the one also that knows about all of that.

Speaker 1 He's not at work. He's at the hospital in one of his Minneapolis.

Speaker 1 Don't say that. Knock on wood.

Speaker 1 Hello.

Speaker 2 Hey, Robbie. Yep.
You're on candid camera. You are on

Speaker 1 armchair, Candid. You're on air.
I'm on air. And can you hear, do we have your consent and can you hear me? Yes, yes, yes to both.
Yes. Okay, great.

Speaker 2 Well, we started to, we wanted to call you about some, one thing, but now we have two things to talk to you you about that are very important.

Speaker 1 And we did not name any names, but I'm just learning of the fact that you have a second Indian friend with epilepsy, which I find to be almost statistically impossible.

Speaker 1 And then Monty said, it doesn't stop there. His wife has epilepsy.

Speaker 2 Well, she doesn't have, okay, not specific epilepsy, but you do have three people in your life that have had seizures. And it's now we're starting to worry.

Speaker 1 And think you're at the.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I see where you're going. I honestly hadn't ever thought of this.

Speaker 1 that's what that's what he would say so my i have like a monica my sister too oh i knew it i knew it i said i

Speaker 1 robbie i said there's a fourth for sure

Speaker 1 robbie what are you doing to everyone i don't know i really don't know oh my gosh i just started looking at things in my life i don't know This is wild.

Speaker 1 Do you think it's because you're so calm and sweet,

Speaker 1 all of a sudden the other person's brain feels erratic and unhinged? Is it like relative to your calmness, people short circuit? It could be. I mean, yeah, that's the best.

Speaker 1 I think that's the best we have.

Speaker 2 My guess is Gina would say otherwise.

Speaker 1 Agreed.

Speaker 2 But this is wild for

Speaker 1 Robbie.

Speaker 2 Four is a lot.

Speaker 1 Now I'm being sincere.

Speaker 1 Is there something environmental in Duluth where half the population?

Speaker 2 Wait. No, because mine happened once I left.

Speaker 1 But you grew up with that water.

Speaker 2 Oh, you think it's the water?

Speaker 1 Yeah, you have late onset

Speaker 2 Duluth because I drank, I didn't drink enough water and then it caught up.

Speaker 1 I'm not, I'm not about the logic of that, but what I'm saying is there's something in the soil where you grew up where 70% of all people have seizures.

Speaker 1 There's got to be Monica's house was super close to mine. The other friend also lived like right down the road, too.
So

Speaker 2 And Gina.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so honestly,

Speaker 1 if you draw like a polygon of the four points, it's like a very small area. And so

Speaker 1 likely shared whatever water source. Yeah.
It's pretty narrow there. You're right.
Guys, did we just break an enormous case? Do we need to call the New York Times immediately? Fuck.

Speaker 1 You're going to have to do a new podcast. You're going to have to start a new podcast where you're investigating this issue.
Wow. It's going to be called Poison Paradise.

Speaker 1 Under the veil of suburban beauty and tranquility. Oh, my God.
Lies a burbling poison that results in the shutters.

Speaker 2 That's a lot of words. That's a lot.
That's too many words. You need it to be small.
Short.

Speaker 1 No, no. First was the title, and then

Speaker 1 I was entering into the first episode. Oh.

Speaker 1 He got going already. I mean, you're halfway there, it sounds like.
This thing writes itself.

Speaker 2 Okay, now we have moving on to point number two.

Speaker 1 That's well, no, I have one follow-up on that, Robbie. Okay.
In your free time, which I know you don't have much of, just can you sniff around and see if any more folks have had seizures?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.
I will. Yeah, I'll report back.
Yeah, I'll just start kind of casually throwing that into each conversation I have.

Speaker 1 Like, so by the way, you know, this is kind of weird, but do you have a history of epilepsy and just kind of move on from there? Yeah, that sounds like a good plan. That's going to work.

Speaker 2 Okay, now point number two is football.

Speaker 2 And you are my main source of information for football.

Speaker 2 I I was texting you during the Texas, Georgia game, and we were secretly gloating while I was amongst a bunch of Texans.

Speaker 2 And then Dax just told me that then Texas went on to win all the rest of the game.

Speaker 1 They're still in it, yeah. They're still in it, yeah.
So they have a tough matchup

Speaker 1 against Ohio State because Ohio State looks really good right now.

Speaker 1 But yeah, they're still in it.

Speaker 2 But does that be like a fluke?

Speaker 1 Shut up. Well, it can't be a fluke because the only team that beat Texas this year is Georgia.
Georgia's beat Texas twice this year.

Speaker 2 Oh, twice.

Speaker 2 So, but it's then it's kind of a fluke that we aren't, like, it doesn't make sense that we beat them twice and we're now out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know how it's like, how can you, how can Federer be the best ever if you can't ever beat it at all? You know, it's very similar. We all have our albatrosses.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah. All right.
Well, that clears that up, I guess.

Speaker 1 And I just want to end on this, Robbie, Robbie. Your voice was built for radio.

Speaker 1 You must be involved in Poison Paradise.

Speaker 1 Well, damn. I'd love to help you.
Let me know. I'm a hard worker, too.
So, yeah, you just let me know what you need.

Speaker 2 All right. All right.
Thanks, Robbie.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks, guys.
Take it easy.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert

Speaker 1 if you dare.

Speaker 4 What if your drive was fueled with more?

Speaker 4 More protection?

Speaker 1 more performance.

Speaker 4 Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline removes up to 100% of performance robbing deposits to rejuvenate your engine's performance. Fueling every drive with a fuel like no other.

Speaker 4 Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline. More performance with every drive.

Speaker 4 Compared to lower octane fuels in gasoline direct injection engine fuel injectors, actual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving style.

Speaker 1 Well, that was a great use of time. Yeah.
I wasn't expecting his voice to be that velocity.

Speaker 2 He's a very handsome man. You know, I only have handsome and beautiful friends.
Right. This has started from day one.

Speaker 1 Good for you. I know.
Anywho. Okay, good luck to.
Will you plug your ears?

Speaker 1 Good luck to UT. Hookum.

Speaker 1 I'm cutting that. This is the same as that story I told about the people flying to LA to watch the Red Sox play LA, hoping the Red Sox would lose because they had just beaten New York.

Speaker 1 But the other guy was like, no, they must win. That way, New York's number two.
Wouldn't you want your team to have twice beat the champions?

Speaker 2 I guess you're right.

Speaker 1 I think it's time for you to like transition into rooting for them for your own

Speaker 1 gain. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay. I see that logic.

Speaker 1 Speaking of which, and I know we're all over the map and I've taken up too much time, but I just, I wanna, I wanna go on to say that I finished the Churchill documentary on the flight home yesterday

Speaker 1 and I got very swept up in it. This has happened a few times, and I'm sure you've watched shows on this.
When you were forced to watch what the Brits went through,

Speaker 1 57 nights in a row of carpet bombing of London,

Speaker 1 everyone sleeping in the subway, no bathrooms, getting up, going straight to work, and carrying the fuck on. And they were so outgunned and outmanned and out everything.

Speaker 1 And they alone took on nazi germany at that point everyone was already defeated yeah

Speaker 1 the amount of

Speaker 1 will

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 resolve

Speaker 1 is so historic i found myself like this is so cheesy i found myself being like really proud that i know jethro oh that's nice yeah i was like By God, that little island, you motherfuckers refused.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And Churchill,

Speaker 1 he is a very flawed person. He was horrendous to India.
I'll acknowledge that. But truly, one man got those people to that state of mind.

Speaker 1 If you watch this doc, you're like, who knows if that person doesn't exist, what happens? Because he had

Speaker 1 two burdens. One is to be fighting off these Nazis who are just bombing every single night, trying to keep morale high.
And he has got to get America into the war or they're going to die.

Speaker 1 Everyone's going to die because they're not going to surrender. And so his skill at wooing FDR and developing this relationship and slowly getting us more and more involved is so impressive.

Speaker 1 And his own story is so unique in that he was a soldier during

Speaker 1 in his youth and he was an incredible soldier. Then he went into politics and he was a boy wonder because he was right.
The whole time he was in the war, he was also a reporter.

Speaker 1 So he was reporting firsthand from all these wars. And he's one of the best writers to ever live.

Speaker 1 So he was in this crazy, unique situation where he leaves the service as a hugely popular figure in Britain, goes into politics, has this meteoric rise, and then plateaus and then plummets.

Speaker 1 And he's completely on the outs, and he can't get anything done.

Speaker 1 And then World War I comes along, and he decides in his 40s or 50s to rejoin the army. He becomes a commander.
He wins all this glory, returns,

Speaker 1 and for four years is begging Britain to understand Hitler cannot be trusted and don't believe a thing he's saying, and we can't be signing these deals. And no one's listening.
No one's listening.

Speaker 1 He never relents. And finally, the Brits realize he has been right the whole time.
And overnight, he becomes prime minister. Like the story of the up and the down and the out and the

Speaker 1 miscast and the, it's, it's, what a story. Yeah.
Horrible to the Indians. Let's be clear.
A colonist, grew up in Elizabethan England, definitely wanted the empire to stay alive.

Speaker 1 Also,

Speaker 1 miraculous feat of will and resolve in the poetry with how he motivated people. He gave this speech to our Congress to help us embrace the fact that we were entering the war.

Speaker 1 And it's like the most incredible speech. It's an, I cannot recommend the doc enough.
Wow. I don't know why I went on that tangent, but it's been burning a hole in my brain.
brain.

Speaker 1 I know. I'm making you nervous.
My energy level is at 15.

Speaker 2 It's not making me nervous. It's, it's like, go ahead.

Speaker 1 No, it's just like, where's it going?

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm just sharing all the things that I missed out on sharing the last three weeks.

Speaker 1 God,

Speaker 2 you're so much like my father.

Speaker 1 I am.

Speaker 2 He just loves to explain stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's kind of a male trait

Speaker 1 But does that story like is there a male female thing going on? Is this the Roman Empire?

Speaker 1 Like does that whole chapter just like not interest you parts do but not that part of an individual story where someone's like completely discarded and publicly reviled, then finds their way back then becomes so valued and important then gets discarded again and then doesn't doesn't quit like has a calling

Speaker 1 that can't be ignored and then matched with this like shakespearean ability to write speeches yeah no

Speaker 2 i i'm i'm more into like the anne frank story of that era like i i don't

Speaker 2 i guess i'm i'm really not drawn deeply to

Speaker 2 people in power

Speaker 2 like I'm not, that's not a thing.

Speaker 1 You're drawn to the disenfranchised. Yeah.
This makes total sense.

Speaker 2 Well, I just find that way more,

Speaker 2 as a human story, way more compelling. I find that kind of overcoming, like a true overcoming, much more compelling.
Yeah. Than someone who's like just

Speaker 2 feeding off power.

Speaker 1 I think the thing that interests me about it is as big as this world is and as complex and dynamic as it is, single individuals radically change the face of the world.

Speaker 2 Yes. I find that fascinating.
Those figures, they don't do it for me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they don't get you going. I'm kind of like

Speaker 2 towards them, you know?

Speaker 1 For the listeners, she just kind of, it was an interesting one. It wasn't an eye roll.
It was a back and forth, side to side.

Speaker 2 Speaking of, go ahead.

Speaker 1 Eye roll. You found the origin of your

Speaker 2 figured it out. I figured out where my eye roll comes from.
We thought it was an Indian thing.

Speaker 1 Or just maybe a genetic innate thing.

Speaker 2 I thought it was maybe just a full resentment I have of everything and everyone. We didn't know, but I knew that's not right.
That's not it. It's a habit.
But why?

Speaker 2 And now I know. Right.

Speaker 1 Well, you sent it to me, so I saw it.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm going to show the world.

Speaker 1 The world. Show the world.
And I'm going to have to describe for the listener because let's just be, let's be clear, 98% of our audience is still just listening, not watching.

Speaker 2 Check us out on YouTube and you can see this.

Speaker 1 Yes, please do. All right, so for the listener, it is

Speaker 1 a two- or three-year-old Mary Kay and or Ashley Olson from the Full House program. It says duh across the screen.
She's shaking her head and she gives the most expressive eye roll you've ever seen.

Speaker 1 Yes. And she has, or they have

Speaker 1 enormous Disney eyeballs where it's very expressive and clear.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 We got it.

Speaker 2 We got it. All right.
Now, I, Full House was my original friends. Yeah.
I was obsessed with it.

Speaker 2 The only time I was ever punished for my parents, the punishment was I couldn't watch Full House that night. That's in my cells.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's where I got it. I got it from original Mary Kate and Ashley Full House.

Speaker 1 You started probably

Speaker 1 reenacting it.

Speaker 2 Always. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Aping it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, mimicking. They were my models then and now.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It might be all the way to the end.

Speaker 2 I think it is.

Speaker 1 They might be your Aaron Weekly. I mean, you already have your Aaron Weekly.

Speaker 2 I think it would be sad if they were my Aaron Weekly because they don't know me.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 they are my ride or die.

Speaker 1 What I'll say is they're radically different people, which is so fascinating. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I guess that makes sense, but also doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 It doesn't make sense. Well, they're not identical twins.

Speaker 2 You know that, right?

Speaker 1 They have to be.

Speaker 1 Bologna.

Speaker 2 They're fraternal twins.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Well, sisters have never looked that much alike.

Speaker 2 It's crazy.

Speaker 1 How do we know this for positive? Positive.

Speaker 1 I don't think AI Google says that. Thank you.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 1 They're not?

Speaker 2 That's like me saying I know something about Valentino Rossi.

Speaker 1 Ooh, tell me, what do you know?

Speaker 2 I know nothing.

Speaker 1 Yellow46?

Speaker 2 Exactly, is the whole point.

Speaker 1 I'm impressed you remembered his name.

Speaker 2 Thank you. So, yeah.

Speaker 1 One's left.

Speaker 3 One's left-handed, one's right-handed.

Speaker 1 But that's super common in twins.

Speaker 3 And one's one inch taller than the other.

Speaker 1 Even when they're identical.

Speaker 2 Well, they're fraternal.

Speaker 1 But that could be a posture thing. Okay, whatever.
All right, let's stop. They're fraternal twins.
I believe you.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 1 you'd never know it by looking at them. Don't judge a book by its cover.

Speaker 2 You would not. I mean, I agree with you.
It's shocking. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've met a lot of boy-girl twins, and they have all told, they have all had the experience where someone asked if their twin was identical even though they knew one was a boy one was a girl what yes i'm telling you okay well some people don't understand

Speaker 2 twins

Speaker 2 they don't understand what identical means versus fraternal yeah they must not or

Speaker 1 it must be way lower percentage that you get a boy and a girl than than same gendered twins For fraternal? For fraternal.

Speaker 2 I think the opposite.

Speaker 2 I feel like if most fraternal twins I know are boy and girl. Oh, really?

Speaker 2 That's why they are very confusing.

Speaker 1 We should have a twins expert on. Yes.
Because what that means is that there were two ova in the uterus and that one male sperm and one female sperm hit the two.

Speaker 1 And generally, you would think, well, either the males were making it because they swim slower and they're more robust or vice versa. And one swim fast.

Speaker 1 So it's weird that one would swim fast, but you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 I don't know. The body is a wonderland.
It is a wonderland. John Mayer.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right, let's do a little bit of facts. This is for Ken Goldberg.
He was wonderful. I really, really liked him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, what a unicorn. A lot.

Speaker 2 Okay, now

Speaker 2 this episode starts with your underwear on the floor.

Speaker 1 Which was interesting.

Speaker 2 That was shocking.

Speaker 1 That's an experience to look down in your underwears outside your pants because your first thought is, my underwear

Speaker 1 came off my body.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yes, and it doesn't seem to be torn in half.
Yeah. That's a real, like, where am I at in time and space that my underwear has made itself off of my body and onto the floor.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's so obvious later when you think it was clearly in my pant legs.

Speaker 2 I know, but in a moment,

Speaker 2 I can't think straight.

Speaker 1 My underwear has fallen off. It's like, and I think you should leave when Robinson, they put a whoopee kitchen on his chair and he doesn't understand it.
He goes, what happened?

Speaker 1 Like, he really shook because he didn't feel himself fart, but he heard a fart. What

Speaker 1 happened?

Speaker 2 Oh, my God, that's so funny.

Speaker 2 Okay, but also, so that happened, the underwear, but then I realized when I was editing it, the inside out of my pant pocket

Speaker 2 was exposed the whole time.

Speaker 1 That's a weird

Speaker 2 coincidence. It is weird,

Speaker 2 but no one caught that. So the whole episode, the inside of my pant pocket has happened.

Speaker 1 Which people could have thought might be her underwear. Like, you know, it's the lining of your pocket, but other people could be like, why are their, why are both of their underwears falling

Speaker 2 Now the vaccination mark. The smallpox vaccine scar is a small mark you might have on your upper arm if you receive the DryVax or ACAM 2000 smallpox vaccines.

Speaker 2 It's a sign that the vaccine successfully spurred an immune response in your body to protect you against smallpox. Not many people receive a smallpax.

Speaker 2 Not many people receive a smallpox vaccine today, so the scar is far less common than it used to be. The smallpox vaccine leaves a scar because it causes a minor infection in your skin.

Speaker 2 Your body fights off the infection, but this process leaves behind a small mark on your skin where the infection and related inflammation took place.

Speaker 1 That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
I assumed wrongly now that it had something to do with the

Speaker 1 mechanism of injecting it. Like, did they use some weird thing? Because again, my dad's was, I have such a good memory of my dad's.
I don't. I know that my mom has one, weirdly.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But my dad's is like seared in my brain. And I was like, it looked like, I think I said, a cigar.
Like they administered it with some cigars. You can look at pictures online.

Speaker 2 They have them. And they do look like that.
Okay. The book, the scientific management book that was influential on Stalin is called The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Taylor.

Speaker 1 See, this all paid off my diatribe on Churchill because Stalin was the trickiest figure in that triumvirate.

Speaker 2 Okay. Now.

Speaker 2 So Kim Kardashian posted some pictures with the Optimus robot, and then, and it said that Elon gave it to her and she denies that she was paid for those pictures okay

Speaker 1 other than the free robot right that she may or may not have right okay

Speaker 2 this is what it says the robot can do the Tesla Optimus robot

Speaker 2 okay it says it can do physical labor

Speaker 2 It says it can move materials, assemble parts, and load items onto machinery.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah, I'm skeptical of that.

Speaker 1 I'm skeptical. That's how we do it without getting sued.
I'm highly skeptical.

Speaker 2 This is also on the AI overview. So they like their buddies.

Speaker 1 Okay. So he's got.
They're all in cahoots.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Inventory management.
Optimists can use barcode or RFID scanning to track inventory in real time.

Speaker 2 Home chores. Optimists can carry groceries.
help the elderly

Speaker 2 and perform other home collections.

Speaker 2 I mean, that would be good. Data collection and research.
Optimus can be used in labs or remote monitoring environments to collect data. I mean, that's just like

Speaker 2 a brain. Yeah.
Smart home integration. Optimists can link up with Tesla cars and energy systems to become part of a smart home.

Speaker 2 Optimists can walk among people and serve drinks at a bar.

Speaker 1 I doubt it, but I'm sorry. I'm skeptical.
I've heard about that.

Speaker 2 Okay, apparently there's a place in like

Speaker 2 Culver City or something that is run by, it's like a burger place that is run by robots and the robots drop off your food.

Speaker 1 Okay, I think I've heard that, but also my assumption of what that was was like very simple mechanized arms, not bipedal robots walking it out.

Speaker 1 Like it can make it in the kitchen, then it goes on a conveyor belt, and then it's exactly lands in front of your thing.

Speaker 1 It doesn't necessarily mean that a bipedal robot carried it as much as there might be automation that gets it all the way to your.

Speaker 2 I think it's saying it delivers it to your table, but it might not be bipedal.

Speaker 1 We should go.

Speaker 1 We should go. I'd love to go to a robot restaurant.
What is it?

Speaker 3 CaliExpress in Pasadena.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's in Pasadena. That's much closer.
Yeah. That just upped the odds of us actually doing that by a lot.

Speaker 1 I do think there's

Speaker 3 a little guy that rides around and brings you your food.

Speaker 2 Hello, Fat. CaliExpress by Flippy,

Speaker 2 the world's first fully autonomous restaurant. Grill and fry stations are automated.

Speaker 3 It looks like a little thing with serving trays and American flags that goes to your table.

Speaker 2 We'll have to go. But okay, it says optimist can perform precise movements and heavy lifting.
Optimus can adapt its behavior over time to reach the desired results.

Speaker 2 Optimus can play games like rock, paper, scissors.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 anyway, that's what AI claims its buddy Optimus can do. Okay.
They're best friends.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 And our robot feels a little left out.

Speaker 1 No, he's more boy-like, remember? I know, bro. Big time glass half-foot.

Speaker 2 I'm wondering what's going on because, like, there's a lot of other robots now there are a lot of other robots

Speaker 1 but he's like becoming charming and flawed wabu sabi

Speaker 2 robbie savi robbie rob savi um there was uh

Speaker 2 prada has these bag chains that i really want that are robots um

Speaker 1 bag trash Is that what it's called? No.

Speaker 2 It's a bag chain.

Speaker 1 I'm learning this from Nicole.

Speaker 1 this is the movement now is like you have these very fancy handbags and then you put all these little trinkets that car off the side and i think she calls it like bag trash or something she might but they're called bag charms

Speaker 2 and look prada has this one this one's in like um

Speaker 2 this one's in like snow gear

Speaker 1 yeah That's really cute. Isn't it? Yeah, it's about to be critical.
I just think it's funny. Fashion is very funny.
Sure.

Speaker 1 So you get this perfect, outrageously expensive bag, and then you're supposed to like drape some trash obviously. It's like downplay it.
It's like, what's happening?

Speaker 2 I agree. But it's not trash.
This is $1,100.

Speaker 1 Well, I didn't say it was inexpensive. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, okay. But I agree.
I would not put

Speaker 2 people love bag trunks and I think that's great. And it's a way to like show your identity, but they're not for me on my bag.
But I want this little robot to just like sit in my house.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He's pretty big.
Look at him compared to the bag.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's preposterous. He's larger than the bag.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 You said 39% of U.S. jobs are still manual labor.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reported that 39.1% of the civilian workforce in the U.S.

Speaker 2 performs physically demanding jobs that require lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, kneeling, stooping, crawling, and climbing activities in varied environmental conditions.

Speaker 1 Sucking, fucking, don't leave out sex workers. That's manual labor.

Speaker 1 No, we like, don't we honor sex workers?

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I'm just wondering, is it really manual labor? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's definitely manual.

Speaker 2 It's laborious.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, that's it for Ken.

Speaker 1 I'm glad we ended on that note for Ken. I think he would appreciate that.

Speaker 2 All right. All right.
Bye, Ken.

Speaker 1 Love you. Love you.

Speaker 1 Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 1 Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondry.com slash survey.

Speaker 7 Mom and dad, mom and mom, dad and dad, whatever, parents, are you about to spend five hours in the car with your beloved kids this holiday season?

Speaker 6 Driving to old Granny's house. I'm setting the scene, I'm picturing screaming, fighting, back-to-back hours of the K-pop Demon Hunter soundtrack on repeat.

Speaker 7 Well, when your ears start to bleed, I have the perfect thing to keep you from rolling out of that moving vehicle.

Speaker 5 Something for the whole family. He's filled with laughs.

Speaker 6 He's filled with rage.

Speaker 1 The OG Green Gronk, give it up for me, James Austin Johnson, as the Grinch.

Speaker 6 And like any insufferable influencer these days, I'm bringing my crew of lesser talented friends along for the ride with A-list guests like Gronk, Mark Hamill, and the Jonas Brothers, whoever they are.

Speaker 6 There's a little bit of something for everyone.

Speaker 7 Listen to Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.