From Earth to Mars: SpaceX's Starship and Tesla's AI Ambitions

Keywords

Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, productivity, robotics, entrepreneurship, innovation, full self-driving, reusable rockets, industry trends

Summary

In this episode, Dalton Anderson discusses productivity through the lens of Elon Musk's approach, highlighting significant advancements in SpaceX and Tesla. The conversation covers SpaceX's reusable rocket technology, the recent WeRobot conference showcasing Tesla's full self-driving capabilities, and the unveiling of the Optimus robot. Dalton emphasizes the importance of innovation, the challenges faced by these companies, and the future of autonomous vehicles and robotics.

Takeaways

Asking yourself 'What did you get done this week?' can enhance productivity.
SpaceX aims to make humanity multi-planetary through innovative rocket technology.
Reusable rockets significantly reduce the cost of space travel.
The chopsticks mechanism for landing rockets is a groundbreaking engineering feat.
Tesla's full self-driving technology is still in beta but shows promising advancements.
The RoboTaxi and RoboVan could revolutionize transportation with low cost per mile.
Optimus 2 robot showcases advanced dexterity and human-like abilities.
There are concerns about the transparency of Tesla's robot demonstrations.
Wireless charging technology needs to improve for practical use in autonomous vehicles.
Live demonstrations are crucial for building trust in new technologies.

Takeaways

Asking yourself 'What did you get done this week?' can enhance productivity.
SpaceX aims to make humanity multi-planetary through innovative rocket technology.
Reusable rockets significantly reduce the cost of space travel.
The chopsticks mechanism for landing rockets is a groundbreaking engineering feat.
Tesla's full self-driving technology is still in beta but shows promising advancements.
The RoboTaxi and RoboVan could revolutionize transportation with low cost per mile.
Optimus 2 robot showcases advanced dexterity and human-like abilities.
There are concerns about the transparency of Tesla's robot demonstrations.
Wireless charging technology needs to improve for practical use in autonomous vehicles.
Live demonstrations are crucial for building trust in new technologies.

Sound Bites

"What did you get done this week?"
"SpaceX wants the human race multi-planetary."
"The chopsticks are used to catch the ship."

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Productivity and Elon Musk's Influence
02:16 SpaceX: Pushing the Boundaries of Aerospace Engineering
20:21 Tesla's Innovations: Full Self-Driving and Future Technologies
23:58 Tesla vs. Waymo: The Race for Full Self-Driving
28:14 RoboTaxi and RoboVan: The Future of Transportation
35:23 The Optimus Robot: Reality vs. Hype
44:54 Looking Ahead: Future Topics and Guest Insights

Creators & Guests

Host

Dalton Anderson

I like to explore and build stuff.

What is Venture Step?

Venture Step Podcast: Dive into the boundless journey of entrepreneurship and the richness of life with "Venture Step Podcast," where we unravel the essence of creating, innovating, and living freely. This show is your gateway to exploring the multifaceted world of entrepreneurship, not just as a career path but as a lifestyle that embraces life's full spectrum of experiences. Each episode of "Venture Step Podcast" invites you to explore new horizons, challenge conventional wisdom, and discover the unlimited potential within and around you.

Dalton Anderson (00:01.74)
Welcome to Venture Step Podcasts where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. I would like to start this episode off with a question. The question is, what did you get done this week? And it's a question you should frequently ask yourself when re-evaluating your productivity throughout the week. And it's also a question that Elon Musk asked Pragerow, who is the former CEO of Twitter. Pragerow reached out to

Elon Musk and asked him to reduce his frequency of discussing Twitter's downfall and the issues that Twitter has.

Also requesting for him to join the board and help lead the company back in the right direction. Elon Musk then replied, what did you get done this week? This is a waste of time. I'm not joining the board. We'll make an offer to take Twitter private. We all know who that went. Twitter is no longer Twitter. It's X and

Elon. It gets a lot of stuff done, and that's the whole point of this question. I think it's funny because it's a meme that has been resurfaced in the recent weeks because all the stuff that Elon has gotten done and that's what we're going to be discussing today. We're going to be discussing SpaceX and Tesla. SpaceX had a successful launch, their fifth test flight of their Starship, and then Tesla had their re-

We robot almost said I robot, which is the movie. think the whole event is based off of, but we robot had a rollout of the Robo bus rollout of the robo taxi. Optimus two was demoed ish. We'll discuss why I say ish later on in the episode. But before we dive in, I'm your host Dalton Anderson. My

Dalton Anderson (01:59.98)
Background is a bit of a mix of programming, data science, insurance, offline. You can find me building my side business or lost in a good book. You can listen to the podcast and both video or audio format on YouTube. If audio is more your thing, you could find the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Okay. So first on the list, we're going to discuss SpaceX. So SpaceX

is a company that has really pushed the boundaries of what engineering can be and what's possible. I think the first thing that SpaceX was known for was originally it was super expensive and it's still pretty expensive but nowhere near as expensive as it used to be launching rockets into space. So to launch a rocket into space originally before SpaceX it was taken

taxpayers like $200 million or something.

When Elon was trying to scale his company in the, the, think it's important to discuss first the goals of SpaceX. So SpaceX, and I think it's very clear to other people if you're not following or slightly follow the topic is that SpaceX wants to make the human race multi-planetary. And to do that, the first goal is to colonize Mars.

those feats need for them to be accomplished. There needs to be some optimization with price, technology, the price to ship people or things, a lot of technology that needs to be created or optimized. So there's a lot of things going on, but the first thing that SpaceX did was they, excuse me, I had a cough.

Dalton Anderson (03:58.122)
that they made rockets reusable. So SpaceX was the first company to make a reusable rocket that flies out of orbit and back down and lands. That hadn't been done before. And they did that with their Falcon 9 was I think the first rocket that does that. And with that being done, and it's only stage one, it's not fully reusable unless they change how it works. I'm pretty sure it's only.

stage one reusable. you could reuse, you could reuse, you know, part of the rocket, not the whole thing. And that saves about 30%. And then there's some other things that make things a lot cheaper, but SpaceX was substantially cheaper than other vendors to ship things to space. And that's also another issue in its own regard was

the U S government and other government agencies like NASA, which is part of the U S government, they had some issues before with not having enough diversification with their vendor selection. So if a vendor came out with something really slick, they made the mistake a couple of times with just ordering everything from that vendor. And basically these other vendors went out of business and what happened was when that happened, then the single

vendor was like, well, I'm the only one who makes this. So we're going to check up the price. You're the government. Pay me whatever you need to pay me. And. That's happened a couple of times where the US and NASA are like, OK, we're not going to do that again. We've learned our lesson. We're going to try to balance out the revenue for everyone. So I want to have a kind of an even split where everyone has, you know,

proper chance and enough revenue to stay alive. So that's what they're doing. But SpaceX is substantially cheaper than others to accomplish the same thing, especially with the reusability fact. And the other companies are working on that and they're striving to make things a little bit cheaper and compete. But I don't think that

Dalton Anderson (06:26.292)
Other companies are at the point of SpaceX. know Blue Origin, which still hasn't made much progress compared to SpaceX. Their rocket, they're saying, is reusable up to 25 missions. They want it to be reusable up to 100.

Well, we'll see. We'll see. mean, Little Oranges has been around for a while. SpaceX, same thing, but SpaceX has made like insane amount of progress. Anyways, so that's SpaceX. And I say all this because I wanted to lay the groundwork of, like SpaceX really pushes.

engineering and aerospace. And aerospace is already an innovative industry. It's not.

Dalton Anderson (07:24.84)
Yeah, I don't know how else to phrase it. mean, it's something that has to have the best technology, the best engineers in the world, all sorts of things like that. And they're still pushing the boundaries of what is possible, which I think is great. And so recently they had this chopstick or the the Maxilla is the thing that they use to catch the ship.

and it's also known as chopsticks, the chopsticks. And so what happened was the Starship had their fifth flight and that was going up, launching and then coming down, right? And instead of having a way to land the ship, the rocket ship, there was no legs on it because to build legs strong enough to

to build legs strong enough to withstand the weight of the ship, because the ship is very heavy, they have to be very strong, which adds mass to the rocket, which reduces the payload. Because if you have the engines, you can't take off the engines, you can't take off the shell, you can't take off the heat shield. So the only place that you can really reduce weight is

the payload and if you reduce the payload, then you reduce the revenue that you potentially get. Because they're banging you to bring these things up. So if you have less payload, then you have less revenue. makes sense. So with the Falcon 9, some customers were paying SpaceX to not have legs on.

The rocket.

Dalton Anderson (09:20.106)
So the rocket would essentially land, they'd try to like soft land it, I think in the ocean, which still damages the ship, the rocket ship. So there was that, legs are heavy. The Falcon 9 legs were heavy enough and reduced the payload that they could send. This Starship is way bigger than the Falcon 9.

And so the Starship's legs had to be a lot more beefier that thus decreases the revenue that SpaceX can get because the payload is less. I think that makes sense. So the next thing that is relevant regarding why the chopsticks were used was when you're landing the ship, it shoots out this.

I don't know, like superheated plasma out of the ship, like as fuel, right? So when you shoot out this superheated plasma, this is very hot. It melts steel, it makes concrete explode, it does all sorts of wonky stuff, especially if you're pointing it directly at the ground. It damages the ship. And so,

There's two main issues, right? One, the Starship's legs have collapsed before because the Starship's just so heavy. They had to increase the weight of the Starship, like thus making it stronger, increasing the weight, decreasing the payload, and then they had issues with landing when they thrusting out all this, or you know, when the...

When the ship is decreasing velocity by countering gravity by shooting out the plasma at the bottom of the ship, the superheated plasma

Dalton Anderson (11:33.004)
with supersonic plasma, melts, steel, concrete, those things. And so it causes damage to one, the ship potentially, it has happened before, it damages the landing pad.

Dalton Anderson (11:52.81)
it's overall just not a good thing that's going on. And then it also decreases the revenue. And it makes the turnaround time much longer because when you're landing, right, so you launch, then you land. Then when you get back to the ground, you have to disassemble the rocket. And the legs are a manual process.

And so you have to manually attach on the legs, put the rocket up. And then when you're trying to put the rocket away, you have to take the legs off, store them. Then you have to transport it. And so it's a feat in itself to take the legs on and off. So the legs took a long time and they want to get to the point where they're launching every day eventually.

So the legs overall just needed to go. There had to be a better way. So then that's when this Magzilla thing came about. And there's another issue is like when they launched, angled the rocket in a certain way where...

The plasma doesn't

doesn't actually shoot into the concrete of the landing pad, they angle it and they shoot it into this like steel and water contraption that they made to reduce the damage of the landing pad. So all of those issues combined into this thought brainchild of Megzilla. And the Megzilla is this large tower that's

Dalton Anderson (13:43.468)
has these arms on it. instead of landing the Starship,

on the ground with legs. They're like, you know what, we don't need the legs anymore. Let's just land it on these little arms.

It's craziest thing, like just so crazy how tight the margins are on that. I mean it's tight enough when you're flying an explosive object.

in the sky, to land it on the little pegs. What people, and I originally thought this too, until I did some more looking into it, was I originally thought that the chopsticks piece had a wider margin of error.

but actually they're like small little nubs that come out. They're not landing it on the wings, which would, that's what it looks like, but there's really like these small.

Dalton Anderson (14:55.656)
I don't know how big they are because obviously it doesn't show, but they look really small. mean, they're smaller than the width of the deathling of the arms and they have to be with smaller than the wings of the ship because if it sticks out, then it's going to mess up the aerodynamics. So these small little nubs is what was used to land. And so they had to have some calibration and talk together.

Megzilla and the Starship, why it's landing, it recalibrates, recalibrates, straightens out last second. But why it's why that's happening, the arms are closing at the same exact time.

It's just hard to understand how complicated that really is. I don't know, this is way, way, way cool. But also, I'm not sure how they did it. It's crazy, not only find the largest object.

in history. You're like, hold on, hold on. Let me land it on these little nubs.

Dalton Anderson (16:10.814)
why this thing is closing so we can launch faster. So they wanna have a faster launch. That's the main goal. I'm trying to see if I get a photo of the little nubs that I could share. And they land on the little nubs, which is absolute craziness.

And so they've overcome a big issue here. Let's see here.

Dalton Anderson (16:43.103)
I don't think you'd see it on this. Yeah, you can't see it. I you can. Okay, so I can share this. The little nubs, wow, they're so strong. The little nubs that could, you It's crazy, craziness. Let me share my screen, screen.

This one's Successful Rocket. Okay, so let's replay this real quick.

So you see these little like flap things at the end? That's what I thought they landed on, but really they land on these little nubs below them. So there's a little nub right there. And that's what they land on. And you could see it like really good right here.

It's So doesn't land on these little wings, it lands on little nubs.

crazy crazy crazy crazy. Okay, so they had the chapstick thing or the chopstick thing. It's chapstick. They had the chopstick. Stop sharing.

Dalton Anderson (17:48.716)
After that event.

There is some other events that will be going on shortly. So the reason why they're able to do this and it's not that uncommon in engineering, but definitely in some other industries, not common, which I wish it was more common, but fail fast, learn faster. And engineering is all about, testing, test something. Okay. That doesn't work. Test something else. All right. That's okay. Let me get a little bit better. And then you test.

then you optimize, then you automate. It's really what you want to do.

And so the next things that SpaceX is doing is they are working on their re-entry and landing, which was shown with the chopsticks. So that was kind of one of their, one of their key.

initiatives to move forward with reducing one, the cost of launching a rocket ship. Number two, making the turnaround time much faster.

Dalton Anderson (19:01.536)
The next things that they want to do to make longer, to make longer.

I would say longer missions to be able to execute those like to Mars or something like that. They need, and I think there's a couple of approaches to do this. What they're doing is they want to have orbital refueling and they want to have a way of

refueling the Starship.

with another starship.

Dalton Anderson (19:38.75)
And this Starship is going to refuel in space using this belly button technology that they design, which has its own little issues like how do you navigate these two types of, I mean, they're massive, massive rocket ships. And then how do you make sure that...

They have precise docking and they stay very stable and an instable environment, like space is really difficult, obviously. And so how do you have like the safe, secure connection? And then.

Dalton Anderson (20:20.684)
Like transferring these super cool liquids and these propellants in space is different than on the ground. I don't want to say obviously again, but. And so that's an issue in its own regard. They have tested on the ground, but how do you know how these fluids are going to interact in space?

using this belly button technology. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure they have simulations and they they've been using simulations to test these things to see what works, what doesn't work. Well, you really don't know. No, till you get down to it.

Dalton Anderson (21:08.054)
So as was saying, they were testing reentry and landing, which they've done successfully with these chopsticks methods. So the next thing that they're really working on is this orbital refueling. think that's the next big mission is they're gonna try to do an orbital refueling after a couple more test runs of the chopsticks. And then looking forward, they have the lunar landing, which they're...

They're working on a Ludo lander for NASA. obviously, I'm gonna say, obviously again, wow, that's crazy. I'm gonna stop doing that. Mid episode, we're gonna fix our behavior. The Mars colonization and they want to.

start increasing the frequency of launches substantially. And I think the goal is to manufacture a starship every 24 hours. And then they want to have multiple launches per day. They want to have the turnaround time to launch a new ship like the same one that just went to space.

can under a day, like 12 hours, like turn around, turn around times a couple hours for them instead of taking 20 days to take the rocket ship off, take the legs off, put it on the transporting device, bring it back, put the legs back on. Now you just land on the chopsticks, you refuel it, you put on another payload, you let it rip again.

So super cool, love the chopsticks. I got really caught up into the chopsticks and trying to find that video. Mid-episode, probably should have had that beforehand, but it's fine. I have all the Tesla stuff already pulled up, so it should be a little bit smoother, sorry about that. Okay, so the Tesla had the WeRobot conference recently, or show, or keynote, or product release, all these.

Dalton Anderson (23:18.432)
All these words, what do they mean? But really the event covered the...

new features and products that they're releasing. So the first thing that I think encapsulates the whole thing is full self-driving enters beta. So users are testing out full self-driving. Full self-driving has, they're calling it full self-driving, but it's not full self-driving currently, but the new release and update is going to have a threefold increase in capabilities. And then

an update that's gonna come out later next year, early next year, is going to have a sixfold, a sixfold.

increasing capabilities on top of the new update. So it should be three times as good as the previous one. And then the new version, once that's updated, is going to be six times better.

So I'm sure it's getting pretty close. I think the Uber CEO is pretty bullish on full self-driving from Tesla. I'm pretty excited. So full self-driving encapsulates this whole show really. And then these other products are released, or shown, not released, shown. RoboTaxi, RoboBus, I think of the iRobot bus. It's pretty cool. I like it. Some people don't like it. Some people think it's like a 60s toaster. I was thinking more art.

Dalton Anderson (24:54.732)
Deco or Art Neo, but I'll show you what that looks like later. Okay, so full self-driving enters beta. It's not finalized yet, right? And so it's gonna be in beta for a bit. I think that there's some issues, right? There's issues regarding, there's some accidents that are happening with full self-driving. There is regulatory questions on how are they gonna mandate and monitor full self-driving.

And they're, you know, obviously they're taking a cautious approach. I said obviously one more time. They're taking a cautious approach on their...

release. I think that if they had a choice, they would release things faster, but in a safe manner.

Dalton Anderson (25:48.372)
And I think the other question is what's going on because Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google, has been doing full self-driving ride sharing for a bit now in many major cities and they're rolling out continuously to new locations. So what's going on with Tesla? mean, Tesla was the first of the market. They have been talking about full self-driving for the longest.

Their approach is different. Tesla uses cameras which are substantially cheaper than LiDAR. So full self-driving is possible with LiDAR, but it hasn't been done with just cameras. And the difference between LiDAR and cameras is LiDAR is super expensive. The technology will improve and scale and get cheaper, but it's never gonna be as cheap as cameras, I think. And so there's two different approaches.

Waymo has a LIDAR approach, which is more expensive to outfit a car with LIDAR than it is with cameras. And then Tesla has a, like I guess, if Tesla's ambitions are to become a,

enterprise solution, a solution for cities, for people. Cameras are the cheaper route. And if you can figure out cameras, you can definitely do LiDAR if you want to.

If you do lighter, I don't necessarily think that you could just transfer all that information over to cameras. So Tesla has a different approach than Waymo, but Waymo is currently operating in many cities, full self-driving. Tesla has been talking about full self-driving for a long time. So I want to make sure that's clear. Like, hey, I like Tesla, I like what they're doing, but they have been talking about full self-driving for the longest, don't have a product to market.

Dalton Anderson (27:50.016)
There's still.

holding out this treat of full self-driving. And then on top of that, they're producing and planning out and showcasing the Robo taxi and the Robo bus, which aren't capable until, I don't know when. Like I don't know when this stuff's coming out. They're saying 2026, 2027 or something like that.

I confirm, robot.

Please date.

Dalton Anderson (28:32.14)
They're saying the robotaxi should be expected in 2026. I know it should cost, it should cost, it should cost $30,000. If that's true or not, I don't know. Same thing, one thing that I think is funny is like people, people are like, my gosh, there's no way they actually produce something like that. It looks so ugly. There's no way, it's impractical. It looks so different, blah, blah. And I'm like,

They made this cyber truck. I'm pretty sure that if they roll this stuff out, or if they showcased it, they're rolling it out. They're gonna produce these things. It's just funny that people were saying that on the internet. like, there's no way they ever make that. It's crazy, it's so ugly. It's so out of this world.

Dalton Anderson (29:28.14)
It's like Cyberchoke. Have you seen those? They're quite wild. Okay, so that's kind of my issue with Tesla is like, like how long are you gonna talk about full self-driving before you roll out full self-driving? But I do like the products that they showcase. So I do like the RoboTaxi and the Robovan.

There is some questions about the Robo van and Robo taxis cost per mile. What they're saying is the cost per mile for the Robo taxi is around 20 cents. And then the cost per mile for the Robo van. Is it Robo van? The Robo van is.

Dalton Anderson (30:15.084)
20, not 20 cents, sorry, that's the RoboTaxi. The RoboTaxi is 20 cents, the Robovan is five to 10 cents. And how crazy is that? Like how crazy are those numbers? Those numbers are insane when you consider, considers, or sorry, AAA estimates 65 cents a mile for a private vehicle.

Other estimates suggest 30 to 35, 50 cents. I'm not sure. Taxis are $2.50 to $4.00 mile. Uber and Lyft are $1.50 to $3.00 per mile. Buses $1 to $3.00 per mile.

per ride, sorry, per ride. And subway and light rail is 25 to 75 cents. Commuter rail is 50 to 100, not 100, $1.50. So you could see how, hey, if you're 20 cents per mile, and then you're also saying 10 to five cents a mile,

is crazy numbers. Like those are crazy numbers. I'm sure there's gonna be pushback on, hey, can you really do these things? I don't know. I'm not sure.

but they are insane. If they can get that down to those numbers that they're estimating and what they've released, that would be insane.

Dalton Anderson (32:11.646)
Okay, so let's just talk about the cyber van. So the cyber van has the ability to carry people or cargo and it has a modular inside where you can change the configuration of the seats. There's TVs and such and screens on the sides. Blue lighting, all sorts of stuff. It looks really nice. The Robo van can carry up to 20 people. I don't recall if they said anything about the max payload.

the RoboVan can accommodate. And as I said earlier, it of looks like a Jetson slash toaster from the 60s. I'll share my screen for a second and show you what that looks like. Screen. I wanna show that iRobot comparison first.

Dalton Anderson (33:10.796)
Okay, so I'm sharing my screen right here and this is the iRobot bus. You can see the resemblance is quite close. This is probably a better angle. The resemblance is really close to what the Tesla RoboVan looks like.

Pretty cool. I like the Robo van like the Robo van. think.

The Robo Van is pretty cool. It gives more of an Art Deco slash Art Neo vibe to me.

Dalton Anderson (33:50.792)
I think that it's got quite a nice design and fits 20 people. It looks nice. I think there are some questions on the clearance, like how much clearance it is. I don't think it might be enough clearance for like speed bumps or.

other items, but it's a prototype so they can make adjustments when things become.

serious and they're going to market and this is what the inside looks like.

And there's a couple of rows.

But yeah, that's the Robo Van. I think the Robo Van looks really cool. I like it. It's got lots of lighting and has a slick look. And I think if they can get this to 20, or not 20, five to 10 cents a mile, mean, I'm not sure. But this vehicle doesn't have a steering wheel and doesn't have a way to charge it via port. So there's a couple things that need to happen for

Dalton Anderson (34:52.192)
the robo van to roll out. One, they need to have full self-driving approved in that state. Two, they need to set up a wireless charging network.

that has enough infrastructure, one, to power all of these vans, which are large. What I'm trying to bring up is, hey, there's not infrastructure currently for full self-driving. There's no infrastructure for the RoboVan, the RoboVan's ability to charge. And one, there's gonna have to be some kind of increase to.

power in that area to charge everything. Because these are massive batteries. And so they have to set all this stuff up. If they were going to run this for the whole city, they would need to re-evaluate their power infrastructure, their battery charging infrastructure. And they would need to have the regulatory model to accommodate full self-driving. Who's going to do that?

overall not certain because we're far out from rolling this out. So that is the Robovan. The Robovan is an interesting...

interesting enough, I'm gonna share this tab. And now this is the cyber, not the cyber, it's almost like the Cybertruck vibes. This is the RoboTaxi, I'm sharing a photo of it on their website. The RoboTaxi is the next...

Dalton Anderson (36:34.998)
the next generation taxi. And it's supposed to cost 20 cents a mile, which is substantially cheaper than a taxi service. Once again, it doesn't come with a steering wheel. It doesn't come with any way to charge it via port. It only is able to charge its battery wirelessly. And wireless charging isn't as efficient currently as...

Plug-in charging, like when you charge your phone with wireless charging, your phone typically gets pretty hot because some of the energy that's being transferred is wasted and dispersed through heat. So as long as it can get the efficiency of wireless charging up, then it should work. But then again, you would have to make or invent a way to have wireless charging and have all the infrastructure.

and I guess where you park the cars and maybe have wireless charging on some of the roads too. And so there's certain spots where you're driving over these areas and kind of at the bus stop when you're waiting, the robo van's charging. So each stop they have a place, each train stop or bus stop they have, they're staying for a minute and half, two minutes. Or say they stay, I don't know. And then they have this wireless charging hitting the

hitting the van and charging it up. They could do that. I do think that they'll have to.

They'll have to have a parking lot obviously to, man I said obviously again, that's like so many times this episode. Really annoying. They'll have to have a parking lot to charge the batteries.

Dalton Anderson (38:27.818)
or station where they position all the vehicles when the fleet and maybe they have a huge fleet and they rotate the vehicles. Okay, like this one, this one's goes to charge or bringing back out the green bus and then the robo van, the green robo van leaves the station and goes on the route automatically. They just intertwine. They're all switching back and forth and with everything being electric,

and high tech, hopefully they could just switch the color of the bus on the fly. Maybe they have a green sign that they light up. Hey, I'm the green bus or I'm route whatever. And then when they're not on that route, they could turn off the sign and change the color or whatever on the wherever the, you know, they're displaying this information.

So the last item on this list is.

Dalton Anderson (39:29.45)
the Optimus robot. And I kinda have an issue with the Optimus robot because there's been reports that, hey, what they demoed, and if you're not familiar with the Optimus robot, let me share my screen of what this is. this time. So this is the Optimus robot right here. And so the Optimus robot has human-like.

Dalton Anderson (39:54.38)
abilities to where it can pick up fragile objects, has a lot of dexterity in its fingers, it can move everything individually. And so they modeled the way that the machine moves and is able to...

Dalton Anderson (40:12.052)
See

Its motor function and functionality of the robot is modeled after a human. And so the hands, I'll miss the robot hands. The hands have the ability to pick up eggs. It has the detection of touch. has sensors in its little fingers. And so it knows, I've grabbed the object. don't have to grab it that hard. It's potentially fragile. I, you,

barely picks it up, drops it, puts it in this little thing to make eggs. the hands on its own are crazy. They have little dexterity so that they're only two digit, not three, but that's enough. I mean, it's a robot. But the way that the hands move, it's very human-like. And the way that it walks is human-ish, I would say. It's not exactly human. Let's see, walking.

Dalton Anderson (41:23.52)
The optimus has many abilities. It walks like it needs to go to the bathroom, I would say. But the hands have crazy, the engineering on the hands is crazy. But when the optimus was being showcased in the Wii robot,

Dalton Anderson (41:54.836)
showcase.

Dalton Anderson (41:58.74)
I'm all over the place this morning. When the Tesla Optimus robot was being shown and demoed in the WeRobot.

Dalton Anderson (42:10.454)
think there's some confusion. Those robots were manually controlled. The people using

or actually controlling the robots were also speaking as the robot. So when people were interacting with the robot, they thought the robot was talking. It's really humans. And this hasn't been completely confirmed. I just want to make sure like there's some notable sources, several sources, including attendees, analysts noted that the Tesla robots changed their voice and a little bit of like their mannerisms throughout the event. So you talk to the same robot in the same section.

The voice is completely different. I don't know if it's at one point for a couple hours, it was a man and it was like, hey, how are you? And then what do you want tonight? Like some bartender? And then it changed to a woman and it's a completely different pitch and voice, like where it's substantial evidence. I don't know. I haven't seen a video of the two different voices.

I have seen a video of the robots interacting with attendees of the event and it did seem odd. Like that level of detail in the conversation, it just seemed weird. Like just it didn't seem right. And that the detail of the explanations and the responses, it seemed like it was another person.

Dalton Anderson (43:43.276)
And Elon, Norris, Tesla had any comment about this? And I think if they made it clear, like, hey, these robots have the capability to do these things, but since there's so many...

public and private attendees. When I say public, like public services. Like government officials are at this event. We wanna make sure that there's no issues and nothing potentially bad can happen. Not that saying it could, we just wanna triple, triple check ourselves, right? And if you just made that disclosure to people, I think I would be all right with it.

But when you demo like we are AI and we're full self-driving, we have robots, we're rolling out fleets of autonomous vehicles soon in 2026, we're gonna have these fleets of robo-taxes and robo-buses. Look at our robots now and look how advanced they are.

The Optimus 2 robot is advanced, it is really cool, and can do many functionality, like many things by itself, but when you roll it out in that manner, people are thinking, hey, this robot is itself right now, but really it's being tele-operated by a human in some place, and someone is speaking for the robot as well. I just think it's misleading and...

Once again, it hasn't been confirmed confirmed, but from notable sources, they all stated that something was weird and they noted that, the voice was changing for the section of the robot.

Dalton Anderson (45:36.5)
It didn't seem like it was a robot when I was having the conversations. And so I'm going to trust their word as companies recently in this tech space related to AI have been misleading in the last couple months, last eight months or so. So I'm sure that they have the capabilities, because I've seen videos and maybe those videos are fake. I don't know. mean,

It's difficult now when all these things have happened with related to AI. Like how do you trust these, these, these videos that these companies are rolling out if they're true or not? Like I don't, I don't really know for sure. It looks cool, but is it just a human controlling the robot remotely? Are these videos of the robot talking and being asked things, a human responding on the other end?

I'm not sure. And so the only really way to know is a live demo. And so I appreciated Google's live demo. I appreciated Metta's live demo and they, had mistakes like, cause it's life and there are a lot of things happen during live demos. Unfortunately, it just seems like you test it a thousand times and you do a live demo and then it just doesn't work anymore. When you're, especially when you're live with, with your bosses or some, some president or whoever at the company typically happens when you're with higher ups, you're like doing it.

doing a live demo and then just things just stop working. They're like, did it work? And I'm like, of course it worked, but it doesn't work during demos apparently. So it's, you know, the demo gods have their own own prerogative and missions. So sometimes it works out, it doesn't work out, but I do respect the company that does live demos. And if I ever did something like this in the future, I would only do live demos. It's the only thing I'll do. If you can't demo it live, then you can't roll it out.

You could talk about it, but you can't do this whole showcase thing. I just, yeah, if you can't do it live, then don't do it. So the Optimus robot is apparently was controlled by humans and it wasn't disclosed. And so I think it's overall misleading and I don't like it. I don't like when people do these things because when these videos are shared to social media and other places,

Dalton Anderson (48:04.65)
A lot of people don't see those things. just see, my gosh, look at Tesla. They have a robot that pours drinks and has conversations about life to people. They don't see the.

all the way down, deep down, like digging and doing some digging. Like, hey, like actually people were controlling these things remotely, remote operation. And they'd showcase that, hey, it is. It is.

We are robots. are AI.

So yeah, I just don't like it. I don't like it, but I'll digress. Last thing, I don't have the time to talk about it in this episode, but Grok AI is potentially going to be integrating with Tesla. See how that works out. I know that they've recently just finished their training center. I forgot the state, but it's somewhere cold. And it's like 100,000 GPUs from Nvidia. And Nvidia was talking about how

quickly that they turned that around. It was insane that it would have taken a different company a year as it took them only 19 days or something like that. From the idea at dinner with Jensen to purchasing, to shipping, to installation, to building the warehouse and all that other stuff, they did it like crazy quick. Crazy fast.

Dalton Anderson (49:38.826)
But today we discussed in rough fashion, is SpaceX Starship, the chopsticks, why they took the legs off and why they use the mech, the mechzilla. What SpaceX's goals are, what they're doing in the future. We also talked about Tesla's

WeRobot showcased which encapsulated RoboTaxi, Robovan, Optimus 2, and full self-driving. I brought up, the numbers that they're quoting for RoboTaxi in the Robovan are crazy. The RoboTaxi is about 20 cents a mile. The Robovan is five to 10 cents a mile. Optimus 2 Robot was showcased as a fully autonomous individual, like

individual robot. There are reports yet not confirmed that they had some form of teleoperation where there was a user behind the conversations. There was a user behind the things that it was doing at the event, which isn't disclosed or wasn't disclosed. Sorry.

Dalton Anderson (50:54.184)
I encourage everyone to share their thoughts. There's some smart people watching these videos and I'm surprised we will watch them anyways. But let alone these smart people in the comments saying these intriguing things. I appreciate these comments. I try to respond to them as fast as I can. And if you have any thoughts about SpaceX or Tesla, please let me know. I'm quite interested in the Robo taxi program. Hopefully they can.

can see that through. There's a lot of things that need to get done. And the future of vehicles, I would really appreciate it if we had autonomous vehicles. We'll see when that happens. I thought it was gonna happen earlier than later. When I told my car one time, was like, I just won't buy a car because we'll have autonomous vehicles and I don't need a

I was like, I'll just Uber until until until we get to the point where autonomous vehicles happen. And obviously it's taken longer than. I said, obviously, it's taken longer than. Anticipated both by companies and by myself. But next week, I think I'm going to be discussing some stuff regarding insurance. I work in insurance, but I really touched on insurance that much, so I kind of want to set up.

some meetings with other hosts related to insurance, some people that I met at ITC, some founders of startups. And I think it would be a good segue to talk about, you know, why is it difficult to get insurance? What's going on in the insurance market? Kind of give some base knowledge before some of these entrepreneurs come on here and discuss the solutions that they're providing the market. think if I set it up that way, it's meaningful, it is

insightful, right? Like I'll give you more information and background information about the situation and why what they're doing is important. And it kind of sets them up for and knock out the park where they just home run, home run the episode. And I really want the people that come on the show to be successful. I have been out of town for five and a half weeks. I just got back in town. So I'm going to set up some conversations with guests on the show.

Dalton Anderson (53:18.124)
I have had a couple of people reach out. So I'll be setting those things up more to come. So we're to get a lot more. We're going to get a lot more guests on the show is what I'm saying. I am at the point now where people are fortunately reaching out saying that they're interested and that they have value to provide the show. And I am also interacting with founders at these conferences and just different people.

are connecting me to talk with various groups, which is great. And I'm super excited about what's next. And overall, can't wait. I can't wait. But I would like to have a meaningful conversation before they come on the show, when it's a big topic like this, and then have the

interviews set up in a way where the following episode is the guests on the show. So I have to schedule it, see what their schedule is like, then I'll have to figure out the interview and then I'll have to figure out, before the interview, I need to put another episode together stating the problem. All right, and also it prepares me for the conversation as well. So basically the previous episode is me doing the research.

or combining or compiling my thoughts with other things like various resources. Myself and the internet combined to make the previous episode and give you the knowledge to have enough background on the situation where it's pretty meaningful to you. Sometimes, for important topics like the one that I want to talk about, I think it's good to have background knowledge. But of course, I appreciate listening today and...

I hope that you'll listen in next week. This episode was a little bit of all over the place and I've noticed recently when my life is all over the place at the moment. Like I just came home from being out of the country for five and a half weeks. My room's a mess. I'm all over the place trying to get my sleep schedule back together. So my episode's all over the place a little bit. Next week I'll be more organized in my approach and the words I use and how I speak.

Dalton Anderson (55:46.058)
and I'll be more settled. But anyways, wherever you are in this world, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

And goodbye. Have a great day. And I hope to hear from you or hope that you hear from me next week when you tune in. Okay. Goodbye.