Cix Liv challenges the Silicon Valley consensus that humanoid robots belong in the warehouse or the battlefield. By explicitly rejecting the “Terminator” military arbitrage and the “Jetsons” domestic servant model, REK validates a new thesis: entertainment is the only sector where the reliability is acceptable and economically viable.
The discussion dissects the unit economics of robot combat, the “context window” required for mainstream sport adoption, and why American “lawyer culture” is fundamentally losing the hardware war to Chinese “engineering culture” explored in Dan Wang’s Breakneck This is a forensic look at building “Real Steel” without government grants or safe software margins.
The Agenda:
- 00:00 - Beta Testing Robot Roadshows
- 05:06 - Defining the Real Steel Concept
- 07:14 - "Context Window" of Violence vs. eSports
- 16:59 - State of Bipedal Balance & Chinese Hardware
- 26:02 - Robot Soldier vs Real Steel Decision
- 33:01 - B2B SaaS Brain Drain
- 37:01 - Unit Economics: Reliability Arbitrage
- 45:04 - Tech Stack of Tele-Operation
- 52:07 - Dan Wang’s Breakneck Thesis: Engineer China vs Lawyer US
- 57:37 - Bringing Detroit to Texas
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Austin is building the new tech, cultural, and intellectual stack. The region is a living laboratory to answer a single question: How do you build a global innovation superpower?
Host Jason Scharf dissects innovation from the individual to the ecosystem. From the soundstage to the data center to the fab, we decode the mechanics of Austin's innovation ecosystem.
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