Ken Goldberg (roboticist)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard: Episode Featuring Ken Goldberg (Roboticist) Release Date: January 8, 2025

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1. Introduction to Ken Goldberg

In this episode, host Dax Shepard welcomes Ken Goldberg, the Williams S. Floyd Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley. Ken is an award-winning roboticist, filmmaker, artist, and a prominent public speaker on AI and robotics. Dax shares his initial skepticism about Ken but quickly reveals how their relationship evolved into a deep admiration and friendship.

2. Origin Story: How Dax Met Ken Goldberg

Dax recounts their first meeting at a conference. Initially feeling judgmental, Dax's perspective changes when he converses with Ken about the state of AI. This interaction ignited a friendship based on mutual respect and shared interests.

Dax Shepard [04:24]: "I prepped Monica by saying, you're gonna really like my friend Ken. If Fred Armisen was a roboticist, this would be Ken."

3. Ken Goldberg's Upbringing and Education

Ken was born in Nigeria due to his parents' commitment to civil rights activism. His parents, idealists from the 1960s, served at a school in Nigeria, teaching physics and English under challenging conditions. Ken spent his early years in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where his father worked as a metallurgist at Bethlehem Steel. This environment fostered his resilience, with Ken recounting experiences of schoolyard fights that shaped his character.

Ken Goldberg [11:19]: "Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, has a lot of integration, great history there... around the time of Nigerian independence."

4. Academic Journey and Career in Robotics

Ken pursued a double major in economics and engineering at Penn, graduating summa cum laude. He then obtained his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he was introduced to the foundational concepts of AI and robotics. Post-graduation, Ken briefly taught at USC before fully immersing himself in the field of robotics.

5. History and Challenges in Robotics

Ken delves into the rich history of robotics, tracing its roots back to ancient Egypt and Greek mythology. He highlights stories like Pygmalion and the Golem, emphasizing humanity's long-standing fascination and fear of creating life-like machines. The conversation progresses to the Industrial Revolution, where robotics began to take shape in manufacturing, particularly in the automotive industry.

Ken Goldberg [37:16]: "If you think about something that looks human or a machine that has, like, surprising abilities, people have been always fascinated by that."

6. Advances in AI and Robotics: Deep Learning and DexNet

A significant breakthrough discussed is the advent of deep learning around 2012, which revolutionized AI by enhancing machine vision and object recognition. Ken shares the development of DexNet, a system his team created to improve robotic grasping using deep learning techniques. DexNet vastly outperformed previous models, demonstrating robots' enhanced ability to handle diverse objects in dynamic environments.

Ken Goldberg [54:04]: "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."

7. Skepticism and Hype in AI and Robotics

Ken expresses concern over the rampant hype surrounding AI and robotics, fearing that unrealistic expectations could lead to disillusionment and funding cuts. He points out that many viral robotic demonstrations are misleading, often showcasing one successful attempt out of hundreds of failures, which misrepresents the technology's current capabilities.

Ken Goldberg [59:54]: "There's a lot of hype, and that's what I worry about."

8. Ken's Art Exhibit and Collaboration

Beyond robotics, Ken collaborates with his wife, Tiffany Schlane, a filmmaker and technologist, to create art that intertwines science and creativity. Their current exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center, titled "Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology," explores the history of knowledge through the metaphor of tree rings. The exhibit features a massive eucalyptus tree stump inscribed with scientific equations, symbolizing the convergence of art and science.

Ken Goldberg [76:12]: "We decided to do something around that started with the Tree of Knowledge... it has 600 questions or something on there."

9. Future of Robotics and AI

Discussing the future, Ken emphasizes the importance of addressing the physical aspects of AI and robotics, such as motor control and sensory perception, which remain significant challenges. He advocates for a complementary approach where humans and robots collaborate, leveraging each other's strengths to create more efficient systems.

Ken Goldberg [43:37]: "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."

10. Closing Remarks and Philosophical Insights

Ken shares his optimistic outlook, believing that robots can enhance human capabilities without replacing them. He reflects on the philosophical aspects of creation, intelligence, and the inherent beauty in scientific discoveries, hinting at a belief in a higher order that drives innovation and breakthroughs.

Ken Goldberg [81:07]: "I think we need to imagine that there is a higher calling, which is kind of knowledge... when these breakthroughs happen, I get a glimpse of it."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Dax Shepard [04:24]: "I prepped Monica by saying, you're gonna really like my friend Ken. If Fred Armisen was a roboticist, this would be Ken."
• Ken Goldberg [37:16]: "If you think about something that looks human or a machine that has, like, surprising abilities, people have been always fascinated by that."
• Ken Goldberg [54:04]: "DexNet was our system... to be able to figure out where to grasp objects."
• Ken Goldberg [59:54]: "There's a lot of hype, and that's what I worry about."
• Ken Goldberg [76:12]: "We decided to do something around that started with the Tree of Knowledge... it has 600 questions or something on there."
• Ken Goldberg [81:07]: "I think we need to imagine that there is a higher calling, which is kind of knowledge... when these breakthroughs happen, I get a glimpse of it."

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Conclusion

This episode offers an insightful exploration of Ken Goldberg's journey in robotics, his collaborative art endeavors, and his thoughtful perspectives on the future of AI and robotics. Ken's blend of technical expertise and artistic creativity provides listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and triumphs in the field of robotics.

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Note: Advertisements, introductory remarks, and non-content sections from the transcript have been omitted to focus solely on the substantive discussions and insights shared during the episode.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome welcome welcome to Armchair Expert. Experts on Expert. My friend is here today, 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. 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. Now really quick, I've read a couple comments that people are over AI. I get it. 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. So fun robotics could be. Also add that he has an art exhibit that is going until March. Don't wait till then. Go now at Skirball if you live in LA or are visiting Skirball Cultural center in LA and it's called Ancient Wisdom for a future Ecology, trees, time and technology. Very very cool art project with these tree rings that are gorgeous and very creative. Ken Goldberg, I love you. I think y'all will love him too. Please enjoy. If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It comes with the privacy and security you expect from Apple. Plus you earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase, which can automatically earn interest when you open a High Yield Savings account through Apple Card. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Bank Member FDIC terms and [e-mail] we are supported by Quince. When it comes to winter, cozy is king. For the ultimate cold weather necessities made from premium materials, you've gotta check out Quince. With Quince you can treat yourself to true quality at an affordable price, like something everyone needs in their closet. Quince's Mongolian cashmere sweaters which start at just $50 for for real cashmere. That's a great deal. Or their super soft fleece sweatpants which are a major upgrade to those old sweats you've had forever. No matter what you're looking for. All Quint's items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and they use premium fabrics and finishes for that high quality feel in every piece.

[Monica Padman]

I saw some of these items appear on a very, very trusted gift guide from a friend.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, really?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. The sweatpants are on there. People love the sweatpants and really great for travel.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm eyeing those sweatpants. Luxuriate in coziness without the luxury price tag. Go to quince.comdax for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q U I n c e.comdax to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comdax he's an object expert.

[Ken Goldberg]

He's an expert.

[Dax Shepard]

Ken. Digasy.

[Monica Padman]

Get comfy.

[Dax Shepard]

I prepped Monica by saying, you're gonna really like my friend Ken. If Fred Armisen was a roboticist, this would be Ken.

[Ken Goldberg]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think maybe am I unique in that comparison? Or have you ever heard that before?

[Ken Goldberg]

I remember you saying that. I don't hear it a lot, but I take it as a compliment.

[Dax Shepard]

You should. He's one of our favorite.

[Monica Padman]

Love him.

[Ken Goldberg]

Really?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Very unicorny. Like you.

[Ken Goldberg]

Unicorny, though, is that.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, not corny. Rule out the corn. Focus on the unicorn part of that.

[Monica Padman]

It is mixed messages because he calls people unicorns he likes, but then he also says he doesn't like unicorns. So it is tricky. There's confusion.

[Dax Shepard]

You're right to be confused.

[Monica Padman]

Understandably.

[Ken Goldberg]

Okay. All right. Because I don't know if you meant rare as a human being. Special. Rare and special. Okay, I'll take that.

[Dax Shepard]

That's rare. Unique, Special. Colorful, vibrant, playful.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, love it. Good.

[Dax Shepard]

I think we should start with how we met. Cause I would love to hear your perspective. I have a very specific perspective. And I don't even know if I let you in on the full details.

[Ken Goldberg]

Well, I'm curious now.

[Dax Shepard]

So you and I were at a conference. And it's the kind of conference I would have never imagined getting invited to. There's a lot of people there like yourself, professors and stuff.

[Monica Padman]

And I'm a smarty pants.

[Dax Shepard]

Smarty pants. Billionaires. A fun group, actually. 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. So I see this guy with crazy hair, and he doesn't have a name.

[Monica Padman]

Tag on fucking the system.

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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? Does it have a name tag on it? And then by luck, somehow I hear your name, Ken Goldberg. And then I immediately go into the bathroom. Okay, I go into the bathroom before.

[Monica Padman]

The little event starts.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't know any of this?

[Ken Goldberg]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. Cause I didn't know about the name tag.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

These are all of 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, and I have a chip on my shoulder about AI So then now I'm standing next to you randomly, 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. 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. 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 robots? And you go, oh, I'm so delighted this is your question.

[Ken Goldberg]

All right, so should I tell you my side of this? Because, well.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I'll just wrap it up by saying within 30 seconds of talking to you, I'm like, oh, this is my favorite guy here by a long shot. I hope I'm at every dinner with him. And then we since developed a friendship.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. Okay. I remember that I was in this place. Also a little intimidated because there's a lot of a list people. And I was sitting there and I forget who it was. It was on the stage and you raised a comment and said something about he looked really sharp.

[Dax Shepard]

Pharrell.

[Ken Goldberg]

Pharrell.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I think I said, like, he was really dazzling.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. Yeah. And I just love the way you said that. I thought it was Such an unusual thing to say. It was spot on. But it was just the kind of thing that nobody would normally say.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, unicorny.

[Ken Goldberg]

Very unicorny. 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. And then we started talking. That's how I remember it. I didn't know anything about you.

[Dax Shepard]

You must have known Kristen, though. No.

[Ken Goldberg]

We were just having this fun conversation and you guys were so charming. And then Tiffany came over.

[Dax Shepard]

Your wife?

[Ken Goldberg]

My wife.

[Dax Shepard]

Also dazzling and unicorny.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. We walked away and she said, you don't know who they were? And I was like, no, of course not.

[Dax Shepard]

I care about important stuff.

[Ken Goldberg]

And then we had several great conversations at that.

[Dax Shepard]

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?

[Monica Padman]

Is there underwear on the floor?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Okay, I gotta walk. So sorry, Ken, but obviously this needs to be addressed. That took me a second. Okay, so here's what happened. I just put the pieces together.

[Ken Goldberg]

There's an explanation.

[Dax Shepard]

There is. Monica and I did a commercial yesterday, as I told you told me that 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. And then that underwear was in there. And then I just threw on my sweater. Just now, clearly my panties were attached, and now they've fallen off.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

So for the viewer, I would be so angry if I didn't get this.

[Monica Padman]

We don't see them.

[Dax Shepard]

You have to. If you are watching and you. Everyone's seen these panties and I'm not. Wouldn't you throw your computer out the car?

[Ken Goldberg]

I love it. Full disclosure.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so these are the offensive panties.

[Ken Goldberg]

They have an elephant. Elephant. Quite nice.

[Monica Padman]

That's meundies. A former sponsor.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you being polite? That was quite nice. Or do I now have a Christmas idea for you?

[Ken Goldberg]

Well, actually, yeah. I'm gonna buy a pair of those. I like.

[Monica Padman]

Mandy's is a great brand.

[Ken Goldberg]

Really? It's a brand of. Okay. I'm always looking for good.

[Dax Shepard]

Very comfortable, very playful.

[Monica Padman]

It's almost as if they were a current sponsor. We planned all that.

[Ken Goldberg]

Placement paola.

[Monica Padman]

Sorry, I just had to call that out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. The look on your face. I thought there was maybe a squirrel under my chair or something. She had a very Panic look on her face.

[Ken Goldberg]

Well, it was a little surprising. I'm kind of thinking, like, what else was going on?

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, yeah. There was some implications.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Monica Padman]

An elephant in the eleph. The room, if you will.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God. Now it feels really planet.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, my God. That is pretty.

[Dax Shepard]

The elephant panties in the room.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, man.

[Dax Shepard]

We're not going to top that in the episode. You should wrap it up. Okay, so back to AI. 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 panic than we need to be. I just found you to be a kind of a comforting voice.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, good, good.

[Dax Shepard]

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. Let's start, though. Of course, you would be born in Nigeria. Is that where you were born?

[Ken Goldberg]

I was, of course.

[Monica Padman]

Of course.

[Ken Goldberg]

All the best.

[Monica Padman]

Unicorns are. How did that happen?

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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. And so one person ran a school there, and he's actually quite famous in Nigeria, Tai Shilaran. He invited them to come to his school and work for two years. 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. My dad taught physics and my mom taught English.

[Dax Shepard]

They were graduate students at Penn, or undergrad.

[Ken Goldberg]

Undergrads. They just finished their undergrad also.

[Dax Shepard]

They were ahead of the curve because you were born in 60.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So the civil rights movement in its full velocity is later.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, that's a good point. It was starting. 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. There was a real movement across Africa. I was very proud of them. I'm still proud of them for doing that.

[Dax Shepard]

Were you delivered at a hospital?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. So I always thought it must have been an accident, because, like, why would you do that?

[Dax Shepard]

Who can?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. And so I never asked because it was like that elephant in the room. I just didn't want to know. But a couple 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. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, oh, okay.

[Ken Goldberg]

From that.

[Dax Shepard]

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 that would do that. I think.

[Ken Goldberg]

I think you're right. I don't know what it is, but yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I would gaze at it on my father's shoulder all the time. Looked like someone put a cigar out in. Yes, that's it.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's a great way to put it. That's exactly what it is. Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

What if that was the vaccine? The doctor just lit up a cigar. How long were you there as a baby?

[Ken Goldberg]

Just six months.

[Dax Shepard]

And did you get any kind of citizenship out of that deal?

[Ken Goldberg]

No, I looked into that too. Cause I thought it'd be nice to have a dual citizenship.

[Robbie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You get into hot water up there.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, yeah. It was always good to flee the country. No, but apparently you can't have both. They don't allow it.

[Dax Shepard]

They're like, fuck you, we're not a side dish.

[Ken Goldberg]

You can't have both. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Or the entree.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So then you do grow up in. I guess. Would it be a suburb of Philadelphia?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Steeltown.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, Bethlehem Steel.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. So my parents come back there cause my dad was a metallurgist.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, this is fascinating.

[Monica Padman]

In addition to being a physics teacher.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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?

[Dax Shepard]

No, but is this to increase productivity through the scientific method or something?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. Yes. Oh, okay, tell us. All right, so this is fascinating. You've heard of time and motion studies? You know, where they have the stopwatch and they would time people doing their work?

[Dax Shepard]

Hadn't heard of that.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, efficiency for productivity.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. Efficiency experts.

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh.

[Ken Goldberg]

This was very big in the early part of this 20th century.

[Dax Shepard]

Datafying.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. Making work scientific by quantifying it. 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. 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, and it was very influential on Stalin. Oh, apparently.

[Dax Shepard]

Really?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. But workers hated it.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Ken Goldberg]

For obvious reasons. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Because you're getting enough efficiency out of me.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. 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. So they didn't like it, but it became popular until unions came and pushed back. 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 or the assembly line to be most efficient for workers and now machines?

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay. So you're growing up in Bethlehem.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Mom and dad didn't teach in your childhood?

[Ken Goldberg]

No, he was working at the research lab. Actually, she did. She taught at the elementary school. We were very close. She was a great. I was lucky. It was a good town to grow up in, but a little rough and tumble because you had to fight.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. 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 and. Yeah. Violence was on the table at all times.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. So it's interesting, you say the pride thing. I didn't know about that. But the pecking order was all about fighting. And kids would call you out, say, I'll see you after school. And you had to do it. Everyone would go watch, and there'd be.

[Dax Shepard]

A few additional fights for the people who got excited watching the first fight.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

The most Dangerous thing was watching one of those fights because afterwards there was gonna be a few more.

[Ken Goldberg]

Another fight Bird breakout. I mean, I had both my front teeth knocked out.

[Dax Shepard]

You did? In what grade?

[Ken Goldberg]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Perfect name for him.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. And I was like, oh, no, that's not good. I did not want it across. Eddie. And so next thing I know, we had gone over, I dropped her at her friend's and the doorbell rings and it was Eddie. I came out and Eddie just cocked me right in the mouth.

[Dax Shepard]

Right out of the gate.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right out of the gate. Like a sucker punch. And I remember it was snowing and all this blood on the snow. Oh, yeah, yeah. And that was my front teeth.

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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? Do you wonder if it's still like that in Bethlehem? Because I'm curious, was that just our generation?

[Ken Goldberg]

I don't know. It's interesting because it wasn't talked about, you know, we didn't report it. I don't remember even occurring to me to even tell anyone that.

[Dax Shepard]

You tease everybody.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, like I wasn't going to.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that would lead to more abuse probably.

[Ken Goldberg]

So you just sucked it up and you took it. It was definitely rough. Although, you know, it's interesting. Cause now the way it does come up. A few years ago, I was in this academic setting and this guy double crossed me and he basically said, well, we're gonna do it my way. And I remember sitting across from him and I was really upset. Cause I had put all this work into something and he was basically gonna trash it and put somebody else in to take the credit. And I said, you don't know, but where I come from, I don't stand for that. I said, I'm gonna really.

[Monica Padman]

You have your hands full.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna get physical.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, no, I'm not gonna get physical. No, I didn't stand. Somehow I can't remember Actually the language. But I wasn't saying I'm gonna hit you, but I was gonna basically say I'm gonna come back. I'm gonna fight this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

I'm not a pushover. Yeah. I'm not gonna just take this laying.

[Dax Shepard]

Down 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, because if you don't, it's gonna lead to so much more suffering equation. You come to accept it, and that's it.

[Ken Goldberg]

All right, so how do you feel about bullies?

[Dax Shepard]

Number one pet peeve in life is bullies.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes, bullies.

[Dax Shepard]

I hate bullies.

[Ken Goldberg]

I hate them.

[Dax Shepard]

I was big, so I can't claim that I was some victim. But I also was a punk rock skateboarder, snowboarder. So I was alternative. Bullies for me was a big, big thing.

[Ken Goldberg]

I learned that the best way to deal with them was to stand up to them, even if they were bigger than you. And then oftentimes they would cave in. They were cowards and.

[Dax Shepard]

Or they would at least move to someone else who wasn't going to stand up for themselves. They'd pick another guy. You only had once or twice.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, that's interesting, because there was a big reputation thing. It was very weird. You had this whole pecking order and so people knew not to mess with you and you had to be in a few fights and then people would lay off.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Then you could exist. Okay, but now back to wild. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, because my mom was an artist. She would paint and she took us to this 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 in Philadelphia. Philadelphia museum. I have very fond memories.

[Dax Shepard]

They discouraged you from pursuing it?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. I remember talking to my mother and saying, I think I'm gonna major in art. And she said, oh, great. You can major in art after you finish your engineering degree. Sure, sure, sure.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

Well, it was also because my parents had a lot of financial troubles growing up. And so it was hard. Cause there were times when we didn't go on vacation for many years. 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, but we had money problems. And my mom and dad would fight a lot about that.

[Dax Shepard]

See, that's. I think the most relevant aspect is, 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 and it is this big elephant panties in the room. I think just once you have that association with it. So, yes, there were a lot of people poorer than me, but I was single mom, and I still have the most unreal, unrealistic relationship with money to this day. It's just so grounded in fear that there's really nothing I can do to overcome it.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. You know, a simple thing is like whenever I look at a menu, I'm always studying the price still. Yeah. So I would never order the most expensive thing on the menu.

[Dax Shepard]

And you could.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. But it's interesting. Cause 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? And she'll be. First question, she doesn't know.

[Dax Shepard]

She's evaluating if it's beautiful.

[Ken Goldberg]

But the first thing I'm looking at is the price. Before I try something on, I want to know, know if I could even afford it, Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Even though you can.

[Ken Goldberg]

Probably. But it's still in that mind. Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

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?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

That's when I'm saying that it's an irrational relationship with it. It's not grounded in the facts at all.

[Ken Goldberg]

No, no, it's true. Another pet peeve is if I'm in a hotel or something and you know how they charge like $20 for a diet Coke and then they deliver it and it's an additional delivery charge and a top of it. Yeah. And then it comes to you to give a tip on top of that. So it's like going to be $40.

[Dax Shepard]

Digits for a diet.

[Ken Goldberg]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

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. I've got my financial insecurity and then I have like, these people think I'm a idiot, like I'm a sucker. I'm going to pay this much for a diet. 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. Summa cum in both.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's wild for a double major. That's impressive.

[Monica Padman]

I was a double major and I was also summa. We won't say what the majors were because that might dilute what I'm saying.

[Ken Goldberg]

But you were a double major too.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, for the same reason. Because I wanted to do theater. My parents were like, probably not. You're gonna need to do something else.

[Dax Shepard]

A realistic plan in place as well.

[Ken Goldberg]

Cause it's risky. Be an artist for sure.

[Dax Shepard]

So then you go to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and you get a PhD in computer science.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. But you have a trip. You study abroad in Edinburgh.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Which by the way, when I read Edinburgh today, I was like, isn't it Edinburgh? Yes, it is Edinburgh.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, it's Edinburgh.

[Dax Shepard]

But we don't have an O at the end of that.

[Ken Goldberg]

I know, but that's the way it is.

[Dax Shepard]

This language is madness.

[Ken Goldberg]

I know, but it is Edinburgh. Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank God. I thought it was insane. I'm like, I've been saying that wrong for 30 years.

[Ken Goldberg]

You're absolutely right. But I'm glad you brought that up because that was a huge turning point in my life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Tell me where. In this eight year schooling.

[Ken Goldberg]

My junior year abroad. 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. And I was so stressed from that whole thing. I wanted to take some time off. And Penn had this junior year abroad program. I had never left the country actually, since I was a baby.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, right, right, right.

[Ken Goldberg]

But I set off in this year long adventure. Oh, I had so much fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Junior year. You're like 21.

[Ken Goldberg]

20, 19. I remember that distinctly. Cause 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 was my bible. And I would just travel as much as I could.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Eurail. The train schedule.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh my God. I can go all the way to here.

[Ken Goldberg]

One of the highlights was going to Morocco.

[Dax Shepard]

Back to your continent of birth.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, it's very interesting you say this. Cause this is the story I always like to tell, which is that basically we have some friends that said, let's go somewhere really exotic. We'll go to Morocco. It was over 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. 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. 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. And so we got 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, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

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 keffiyeh headdress, very Arab looking.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

And he walking toward us, and then I'm starting to think, oh. Oh, shit, she was right.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

And then he holds up this passport and he says, monsieur Goldberge. You know, they're French. 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. What? And I have no idea what he's talking about.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's sweet.

[Ken Goldberg]

And then it hits me just what it was the first time I had set foot on the continent of Africa.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Since you were born. Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

But how on earth does he have any sense of that?

[Ken Goldberg]

It's in passport that I was born in Africa, but I have no stamps or anything else.

[Monica Padman]

Wow, that is, like, very heartwarming.

[Ken Goldberg]

It was wonderful.

[Dax Shepard]

The delta between what you were expecting and what came. Maybe the biggest delta of your life.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, my God. Yeah, exactly. I was ready. He was gonna clap me in handcuffs or something.

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome home with a hug is incredible.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Totally, totally.

[Dax Shepard]

Sometimes it goes the other way.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So is it in Edinburgh at some point you get introduced to, I guess, the concept of AI?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. They actually have one of the few AI departments in the world there. I didn't know that.

[Dax Shepard]

Is this Edinburgh University?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. They had connections with Alan Turing and all the early work in AI. 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? And so I walk over and sure enough, they had a class that you could take in AI.

[Dax Shepard]

And this is in 1987.

[Ken Goldberg]

1981.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh no, you graduated in 84.

[Ken Goldberg]

Sorry, 81.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that's early. Early.

[Ken Goldberg]

And I loved it. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

Basically controlling these arms to move in certain ways and the kind we're used.

[Dax Shepard]

To seeing in like automotive assembly plants.

[Ken Goldberg]

Those claws that was big thing was like, how can you get it to just move around on a table or something like that?

[Dax Shepard]

Why do you think that was so exciting?

[Ken Goldberg]

Well, I loved machines like that. I guess it was partly my dad's influence. We had a go kart when I was a kid. I was really into that. And rockets, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

So you then go and you get this PhD in computer science and then you teach at USC for a minute, which is interesting.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. So I was there yesterday and it's actually so nice to return. It was wonderful. Okay. The story is that when I graduated in 1990, there were no jobs for robotics. And this comes back to what you were saying earlier. Robotics has had these waves and it was in a trough at that time. It was a backlash to a lot of the over optimistic about robots. So there's this thing called AI Winters.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we've talked about this. We've had a few people have talked about these.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Yeah, we had Fei, Fei Liang.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, good.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And read her book and they give up on it. Then something happens, they come back to it.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. Since maybe the year 2000, it's only been positive, there's been no negative. So the students don't know. They've never seen that. But Fei Fei and I, we've lived through it and it's quite dramatic when suddenly everybody decides it's not gonna work and it's not useful and all the funding dries up. Yes, that time it was very interesting. Japan was on the rise and everybody thought Japan was the future. There was a whole lot of hope that robots were gonna do all the things that we're saying today. And it didn't work. And so it was dismissed. It was a backlash.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Am I wrong that even Honda was one of the first big corporations that was, like, committed some real money to building a robot?

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Especially if you're from Pennsylvania. It was quite good.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, and 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. I was at a Caro's restaurant, which is like a Denny's. 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. 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. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Esalen's this kind of crazy retreat. A hippie ish vibe. Nudity's welcomed, Right? That's the vibe.

[Ken Goldberg]

Have you ever been there?

[Dax Shepard]

No, but my father weirdly used to go there from Detroit.

[Ken Goldberg]

What? Oh, my gosh.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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 and sure enough, a couple comes out of those shadows and it's these two beautiful women. And they come in there. So there's three guys, everybody clothed. Everybody's clothed at this point. But then we go in at this point and they say, well, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ken Goldberg]

I go down there. 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. I take my pants off and I jump in. 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. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm never leaving.

[Ken Goldberg]

I'm never leaving. This is California.

[Monica Padman]

I'm talking about culture shifts.

[Dax Shepard]

Pennsylvania.

[Ken Goldberg]

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 soaked.

[Dax Shepard]

Seawater, dungarees. Rest of the ride.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. My only pair.

[Dax Shepard]

So how do you end up at Berkeley?

[Ken Goldberg]

I love Berkeley because I love the counterculture too. 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 great people where.

[Dax Shepard]

You go buy a water pipe and some tie dye clothing.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Countercultural.

[Ken Goldberg]

They had also those posters with the blue black light.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Remember the Hendrix?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. And they also had a smell to them.

[Dax Shepard]

Remember patchouli? Kind of patchouli.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't like them, but I'm glad you like them.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, interesting. Okay. All right. Well, I. That was a big thing for me. Like it was somehow a little bit illicit and off limits. 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. Stay tuned for more Armchair expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

Therapy is essential to me during the holidays, especially because I generally am going home, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

And I need sort of some stability and guidance. And guidance to stay nice.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

I got an Anytime Fitness membership for my brother one year for Christmas.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh you did?

[Monica Padman]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

And oh that's a great gift.

[Monica Padman]

It was a very big hit.

[Dax Shepard]

Anytime Fitness is convenient with flexible always open hours at thousands of locations worldwide and an app that you can use anytime anywhere. They have all the equipment you need to reach your goals and Anytime Fitness is focused on creating an inclusive community vibe with Welcoming members who push and inspire each other to reach their goals and have fun along the way. So what are you waiting for? Get started@antime fitness.com. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

I agree. 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. They discovered all these elements and all these Nobel Prize winners.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what's rad, is they're fringe, but they're crushing. They're, like, doing it in a totally untraditional way, but they're still bringing in the results.

[Ken Goldberg]

Rigorous. You know, it's not about just being.

[Dax Shepard]

Space cadets, being on acid all day. Right.

[Ken Goldberg]

Cause there is a sort of berserkly 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.

[Dax Shepard]

I've driven up to just look at it and you don't get the sense of, oh, I'm entering this secure border.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's very shaggy. There's no real border. There's no gates, by the way. USC has these gates. 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. But the rigor is that you have to work hard and you have to be willing to get what you 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.

[Monica Padman]

You have to be motivated, self motivated.

[Ken Goldberg]

Motivated and grit.

[Dax Shepard]

Angela Duckworth.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the queen.

[Ken Goldberg]

I think that word really sums up students when they ask, should I come to Berkeley or not? Or even faculty? And I say, well, if you want to be comfortable, maybe not.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right.

[Ken Goldberg]

You know, it's not the most comfortable.

[Dax Shepard]

Stanford's right up the road.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. I wasn't gonna say gorgeous.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you'll love it there. 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?

[Ken Goldberg]

Okay. So goes all the way back to start at the ancient Egyptians.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. Because if you think about something that looks human or a machine that has, like, surprising abilities, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

But they were functional, or these were ideas drawn?

[Ken Goldberg]

No, they're functional.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. With, like, levers and chambers that would fill with fluid and then they would raise their arm.

[Dax Shepard]

But obviously they're using some kind of hydraulics or something.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, it wasn't steam, per se, but it was just, like, liquid that would fill up a chamber. 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 comes to life. And the story, of course, there is that he falls in love with the statue.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know Pygmalion, so help me.

[Ken Goldberg]

Pygmalion is a really good story to know. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

How could he not?

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Monica Padman]

It's literally the movie her.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's this archetype. It's Frankenstein. It's the same story that you see over and over again.

[Dax Shepard]

Falling in love with an inanimate object.

[Ken Goldberg]

Falling in love with your creation.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, your creation. Oh, that's a good detail.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. It's hubris.

[Dax Shepard]

It's hubris. Oh, yeah, that's juicy.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's so deeply rooted in Western culture that we're warned against these kind of things. It's overstepping to try to take on this.

[Dax Shepard]

It's challenging God, you're being a creator.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. So there's a lot of idea that that's gonna come to a bad end. And I think that's largely puts behind all these fears.

[Dax Shepard]

It underpins a lot of our current.

[Ken Goldberg]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

Even if we don't believe in God, we have some sense that we're not supposed to be t. Just use nature as God.

[Ken Goldberg]

That it's in the back of our minds that if we do this, there's going to be some price to pay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's going to run amok. And that's the story with Frankenstein. Right. It runs amuck. And then the golem story, it precedes Frankenstein. 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. 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? Then he goes to sleep anyway, 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. So he then reaches up and he wipes off the words on the forehead and the golem collapses on top. It kills him.

[Dax Shepard]

Now, that one is specifically, I hear this antidote 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. This is the very common one that goes around right now.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right. If you want to save energy, get rid of these humans.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, right.

[Monica Padman]

If you're not careful, the most efficient way is to do that.

[Dax Shepard]

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. I'm thinking Henry Ford is one of these kind of stuff.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. No, no, it's actually really good. So the Industrial Revolution, with the invention of the steam engine, all those things, all the machinery starts coming out. 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. 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. Oh, and by the way, the word robot is coined in 1920 by a.

[Dax Shepard]

SCI fi writer, or.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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. That's where the first time this word has ever been used. Yeah, robot, which means worker or forced worker.

[Dax Shepard]

In Czechoslovakia, now, the 60s Ford robot. Was it being employed to move objects or was it like a CNC cutting device?

[Ken Goldberg]

It's much like a CNC computer, numerical controlled.

[Dax Shepard]

So they were able to program these spinning drill bits with three axis. Right. So it could say, go up Go left, go right. And through those little three axis movements, it could carve out the perfect shape of a part from a block of agate.

[Ken Goldberg]

Steel or steel.

[Dax Shepard]

Steel, whatever. You go like, oh, I want this rim for your car. 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, chisels out everything you don't want.

[Ken Goldberg]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

And then what's the next big leap forward?

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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. The big thing that it's used for is welding and spray painting.

[Dax Shepard]

The welding's awesome.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, the welding's fun because you get.

[Dax Shepard]

Those little pinches just come in, boom, boom, boom. Right. And welding sheet metal is very hard.

[Ken Goldberg]

To do for humans.

[Dax Shepard]

You burn right through it. So easy.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right. So it's very delicate. But then you're just basically doing the same thing over and over again. So it's repetitive. And that is very good for fat factories. And also some of the assembly, putting together various devices and appliances and things like that. That's a big wave. 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 in AI.

[Dax Shepard]

How does that open the door for us?

[Ken Goldberg]

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 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?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ken Goldberg]

To get robots to pick things up.

[Dax Shepard]

What's it called? Makavorker's paradox. What is it?

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Moravec's.

[Dax Shepard]

There we go.

[Ken Goldberg]

There we go. Okay. So Moravec was actually at CMU when I was there. 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, but what's easy for humans, like stacking some blocks, that's hard for robots. And that's still true today.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, you have a great TED Talk. I urge everyone to watch it.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's called where are the Robots? Or yeah, where are Robot Butlers?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So it's incredibly hard for a robot to grasp things. There's a bunch of reasons, right?

[Ken Goldberg]

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. Crows are able to pick up things, amazingly.

[Dax Shepard]

They can put coins in slots and.

[Ken Goldberg]

They can do eight step problems. They're far more dexterous than robots. Yeah, for sure.

[Dax Shepard]

I would much more trust a crow to handle my business than a robot currently.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly, exactly. Robots, there's a lot of uncertainty in the environment. 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. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Because every single movement's gonna have some margin of error and then that's gonna compound the more movements you add. All these different little margins of error, start stacking up.

[Ken Goldberg]

Ex and the other is sensing. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

What if you used a 3D camera? So you had bilateral.

[Ken Goldberg]

There's errors. There's little noise in those things. 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. There's no camera that really works reliably for 3D.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I don't know if this is the time, but this is one of the parts I want to talk about. 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. 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. But if you look at us as our motor control took 300 million years to evolve as mammals. And our big brain and everything we're trying to replicate in the AI space started 6 million years ago. When hominids arrive, you have so much time spent evolving to do all these tests that we think are just standard. And then we think this last minute thing that took the least amount of time to evolve is somehow superior to that. So when I look at this, it's like, forget artificial intelligence, try to figure out artificial physicality.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's such a good way to put it. And that's exactly right. 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. And so all these other things, like math is relatively very recent.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we think that's the high water mark. But I think the most impressive thing is us moving through time and space and smelling these five senses, touching. I would imagine if you could quantify it, that's like this much. And then our intelligence is like this much.

[Ken Goldberg]

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, but we really haven't made much progress in just being able to like clear the coffee table.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so then my question is, is that a software or hardware problem? 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. And as much as we are pulleys, we're also not right because the muscles are such unique way to operate the pulley. It opens up infinite options of movement. Whereas these robots are really confined to kind of this, this, this, this.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right, you're right. The muscles in the human body, there are hundreds of muscles and bones and they pull in all these nuanced ways. 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. Like we can feel things that are so small, they're much smaller than human hair. We can perceive up to very complex vibrations and other things.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh yes.

[Dax Shepard]

By Ed Yong.

[Ken Goldberg]

Love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Holy fuck.

[Monica Padman]

He's fascinating.

[Ken Goldberg]

I love that book.

[Dax Shepard]

And you get into this mole that has this star shaped nose, and so that's a touch sense.

[Ken Goldberg]

Definitely.

[Dax Shepard]

And that touch sense can detect the movement of moisture in the sand. It's exploring at a distance of like 12 inches. It actually can see through everything. But it's not seeing through, it's not smelling through, it's touch feeling through.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

How would you replicate that? With a machine.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Also, humans don't even have the ability to do a lot of the stuff that these animals can. So which one are you even aiming for?

[Ken Goldberg]

Right. Robotic touch sense is extremely primitive.

[Dax Shepard]

What do they think would be the mechanism that could replicate it? Would it be electricity? What would it be?

[Ken Goldberg]

When I was in undergrad, I tried to use electricity to do that and it failed. It did not work. But what people are using now is light.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So there's like a membrane, and above that the membrane's being observed.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's exactly what it is. 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 that we're trying.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

And the Roomba replacement replicated the very first multicell organism. What it actually ended up knocking off was something that can only move forward and then turn and move forward and.

[Ken Goldberg]

Turn and move forward like some paramecium.

[Dax Shepard]

What we've achieved is like, that's where we are. Multi celled organism.

[Ken Goldberg]

You're right. The Roomba is the most successful robot of all time. 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? Yeah. And it's very simple. It's basically just random motion. And over time it does cover your carpet.

[Monica Padman]

Ye.

[Ken Goldberg]

But of course it also has this problem that it gets stuck all the time and tangled up in stuff. And so it's not ideal 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. They want to see it work once, or maybe even they bought it and they Got intimidated about even turning it on.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, yeah, that would be my thought.

[Dax Shepard]

So even understanding, I don't really want to deal with pulling out of the box and figuring out how I deploy this thing.

[Ken Goldberg]

I actually have a drone that's in that category.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

I have two drones.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like, I'm not gonna be able to figure out.

[Ken Goldberg]

No, I need, like, six hours to basically figure it out. And it's sitting in the box.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like, that's gonna require a day. And I don't know if I'm gonna enjoy flying it enough to justify a day of me figuring it out.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, good. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right. 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. Now, it could be 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. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's one that I think everybody like to have.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Can you do a dishes one like putting them?

[Dax Shepard]

Have you ever watched them do this?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

There's nothing funnier than watching the robot try to cook breakfast or do dishes.

[Ken Goldberg]

It just smashes everything, splatters broken glass. 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 they're. Dishwasher is a robot. It is 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. 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. And the dishwasher is A beautiful example. And the washing machine, they do all this, but we have to load it and unload it in a 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.

[Monica Padman]

No wrinkles.

[Ken Goldberg]

No wrinkles. 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. And there's some really interesting new results that just came out about this. But we've been working on it too. 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. You snap. You know, that has only been really done in robotics in the last five years.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. This is your job. I'd be so annoyed all day long.

[Dax Shepard]

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. How do you stay optimistic?

[Ken Goldberg]

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. I actually love the times when it does succeed. That's super rewarding, knowing how hard it is.

[Dax Shepard]

You're like a fan of hockey instead of basketball.

[Ken Goldberg]

Why?

[Dax Shepard]

They're only gonna score once a game. Oh. Whereas basketball are gonna score 110 points. So you're like, oh, yeah, I don't get it. But when I get it, boy, it's.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, that's interesting. Never thought of it that way.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

Because in grasping, we've actually made some good progress just in picking up objects. And that was the breakthrough. So, coming back to this timeline, so in 2012, there was this breakthrough in vision 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, 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 microphone.

[Dax Shepard]

That's part of Fei Fei Li's work. Exactly.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's great.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. And it started working better than anything had been done before. And I was so surprised because 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, there's this critical mass point for all these things, isn't there? Yeah. Reading her book, she needed such a humongous pile of data and halfway there gets you nothing. But it's like stagnation. Then the acceleration is probably shocking for you.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, no, that's a really great point. There is a critical point when you get enough data and suddenly it starts working. It took a lot. It was 80 million plus images that Fei. Fei had put together. And in our case, we had 7 million grasp examples that we had found. And then it started to work and it was like, oh, this is so exciting.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ken Goldberg]

So it was just grasping and think of it with a very simple gripper, just a parallel pincer. So you would put a bin of objects in front of it and it would start, pick them one by one and put them out. And so we would test it by going into the basement, the garage, we'd just throw all kinds stuff in there and it would just pick them up consistently and clear the bin. And we would try and fool it.

[Dax Shepard]

He must have been elated.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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. We had like 300 objects that we brought with us. Got it all set up. He came in the booth and it was working 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. And then his assistant standing there and took off his shoe.

[Dax Shepard]

Uh oh.

[Ken Goldberg]

And he said, well, can I try my shoe? 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 is we have to say, go ahead.

[Dax Shepard]

Otherwise it feels all mapped out. Maybe.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, yeah, Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Like the panties on the ground.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right, Exactly. So he drops his shoe into the bin, and we're all sitting there, and the robot just reached over, picked up the shoe.

[Monica Padman]

It did.

[Ken Goldberg]

Took it right out.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Ken Goldberg]

And I remember calling Tiffany, my wife, and I said, this was the best moment of my life. She said, what about our wedding?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly, exactly. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's exactly right. That's very important. You can't tell it to select a specific object.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't say, go through this bin and find me all the pennies.

[Ken Goldberg]

No, that's called rummaging. And that's very interesting. We're looking at that now. Much different problem. Much harder.

[Dax Shepard]

That could be incredible for recycling.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. And also, you think about it, you do this all the time. If you reach in your pocket and you want to pull out a pen, you can always find the pen or your purse.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right. People are very good at that. And what's going on is very complicated. 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. And that's actually very important for warehouses and for amaz to be able to deliver packages, you have to be able to rummage and find the thing you want. And that's still unsolved.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah. This might be a good moment to bring up. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. Because there's physics we really don't understand. Understand friction. And friction is so important. It's what it lets us all sit here and things not slipping around. 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. 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. So if you have one grain of sand, it's going to change it. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

If it's in the right corner, the whole thing's going to rotate clockwise.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. If it's in the left corner, it's going to rotate the other. I can't know that. The robot can't know it. So right there is like one of the great mysteries of nature. Right. You don't have to talk about quantum physics. That is one unknowable thing that's sitting right in front of us.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Ken Goldberg]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

We're almost anticipating the many different ways it could go wrong.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. We haven't figured out how to to do that for robots yet.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, man. And again, is that a software problem or a hardware problem?

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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, and that's what I worry about.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you worry this whole field will go through one of those other stagnation patterns that we've already seen a bunch of times.

[Ken Goldberg]

I really do. I think we're on a collision course with a kind of bubble that's gonna burst because people are expecting that we're almost there, especially when they see these videos.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Yeah, tell me about these videos. Because you watch them and you think we're there and this is running right.

[Ken Goldberg]

Okay. The first thing to ask is how many takes were required. Many times. They get to work once, and that's.

[Dax Shepard]

The video they show out of hundreds of attention.

[Ken Goldberg]

Hundreds.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You show the clip of a robot doing a backflip, which is mind blowing. You're like, well, it. We're there. That thing's going to work on my car next month.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right. That was one in 200 takes.

[Dax Shepard]

And the other 199 takes. This thing is like flying off the table and smashing around. It's violent when it gets it wrong.

[Ken Goldberg]

In a research lab. That's what we're dealing with.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's always failing. You lucky if you get it to work once, but so if you put it on YouTube, we'll say the success rate is 1 out of 200 or something. But nowadays there's so much, much hype that is not putting those caveats in there.

[Dax Shepard]

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, so they're heavily incentivized to mislead you.

[Ken Goldberg]

Someone might say, I have to do that. That's how I'm gonna get the next round of funding. But I really cringe about that because that goes against my instincts of, I like to say under promise and over deliver. And I really wanna be really careful never to over promise about what we're doing or a result in a paper. We're always careful, don't exaggerate the result. And it really is a problem for robotics where you see the videos. And then the other thing is they can be tele operated and there's a human behind the curtain.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so what about this Tesla robot, Kim Kardashian?

[Monica Padman]

What's it called?

[Ken Goldberg]

Optimus.

[Dax Shepard]

She owns one.

[Monica Padman]

I guess Elon gave her one.

[Ken Goldberg]

He gave her one.

[Monica Padman]

I guess she's the only one.

[Dax Shepard]

What a romantic gesture.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I know. What's the deal?

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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, 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, 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, or if we watch what their hands are doing. They're very primitive now. There's a lot of work trying to address that. Stay tuned for more armchair experts if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by All State. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate firsts. Like, you know, check that you have all the ingredients for a recipe before you start cooking dinner, or checking if you need to use the bathroom before you start recording so you don't need to take a break mid show. Checking first is smart, so check all state first for a quote that could save you you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. This content is intended for audiences in the US Only. Savings vary. Terms apply. All State Fire and Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Northbrook, Illinois On January 5.

[Robbie]

2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171passengers. This heart stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing manufacturing giant Boeing. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly crashes that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 Max, the latest season of Business wars explores how Boeing, once the gold standard of aviation engineering, descended into a nightmare of safety concerns and public mistrust. The decisions, denials and devastating consequences bringing the title and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation now. Follow Business wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge business the Unraveling of Boeing early and ad free right now on Wondery plus.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so now I want to ask you, how 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, and then as you saw these private corporations amass trillion dollar values that the government can't really compete now and academia can't compete. And what do we think the price of that'll be? What are your thoughts on that whole realm of this?

[Ken Goldberg]

So it's a great question cause it just came up yesterday at usc cause 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. 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. Google and Nvidia and many others are actually publishing their results. We work with them, they work with us. And so robotics is surprisingly open. 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. So there's a lot of communication. 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. Students are coming from China, just came from a conference, half the papers were from China. It's a free open exchange.

[Dax Shepard]

No science, always. And it's so cool. It's so punk rock. 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. They have a higher calling, which is kind of knowledge.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Oppenheimer had some folks working under him that were spies for Russia and were leaking our nuclear technology. 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. He wants to know about the robotics breakthrough.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you don't. But do they feel like we gotta protect. Obviously not. Which is amazing. I'm shocked because that's our whole thing, we talk about it all the time with AI, like, well, if we want to put the brakes on it, China's not going to. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Other countries aren't. So what are we doing?

[Ken Goldberg]

A lot of it is open now. Facebook or Meta has actually been quite exemplary in that they share all the.

[Dax Shepard]

Models, they're doing their AI as open source. Right.

[Ken Goldberg]

Which is unique, really wonderful. And actually we use it all the time, those tools, and it's very, very helpful. 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 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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 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 en route to having 12,000. 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 US 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's a great point. And not only that, but that's individual also has a lot of power in terms of, let's say, Twitter and X media. Yeah, Media. And seems to know how to use it very effectively. 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 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. And I don't see them taking over jobs and putting people, people out of work. Because all the jobs that require manual labor are extremely difficult to automate.

[Dax Shepard]

I looked it up this morning, so 39% of US jobs are still manual labor.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, that's a good number.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. But I think even more importantly, that represents one third of your waking day. 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. So you add those two together, now you're really looking at a number that is like 78% of the stuff done on planet Earth in a day is manual.

[Ken Goldberg]

A huge amount. And those jobs cannot be replaced. You know, the gardener, the mechanic. The mechanic.

[Dax Shepard]

The dream for me is I got a robot that's maintaining all this bullshit I bought 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. Like mechanics are so complex where they can reach around things and feel they.

[Dax Shepard]

Can take off screws, bell housing on a trans. You can't see anything.

[Ken Goldberg]

So that's the kind of thing way beyond robots. 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 gonna be unemployed.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right, right. In fact, it's probably most job security.

[Ken Goldberg]

People are realizing that they're actually in demand, which is great. They're actually getting higher wages.

[Dax Shepard]

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. So they are very misled by their own. You're talking to like computer Programmers about it, all these domains where actually AI will threaten those jobs, and they're the mouthpiece of this whole thing. So it's all very lopsided because those are the jobs.

[Ken Goldberg]

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, it was very telling. The who just won the Nobel Prize. Geoff Hinton. He said, we have never encountered anything more intelligent than ourselves. That was his big line. 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, and I'm not afraid of them. You know, they don't freak me out. I want to talk to them. I want to get to know them.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. We spent a week with Bill Gates and we loved it.

[Monica Padman]

We loved it.

[Dax Shepard]

We weren't scared.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right, Exactly. And so most of us aren't afraid of something more intelligent. But there's a small group, and I think they think they're the most intelligent people.

[Monica Padman]

That's interesting. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, if the AI robot's good at drifting in a car, I'm. Because I'm defining my whole identity and self esteem on my ability to do that. Oh, wow, that's a great insight.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's what I think. So it's not really something the rest of us need to worry about.

[Dax Shepard]

We're constantly bumping into people smarter than us, and it's fine.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's great, actually.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's great. And actually, I 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. Well, like this thing I was talking to you guys about, you sent us NotebookLM.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that what it's called?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

You sent Monica and I a podcast that is entirely AI. There's a male host and a female host.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And you said, do you think this thing was trained on you guys?

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Which was so flattering.

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

You, by the way. It's great, too. Like, I was listening to it. I was like, it sounds like npr. I would listen to this if the information was good.

[Ken Goldberg]

So good. But it has a rhythm that is very much like you two.

[Dax Shepard]

Do they ever find panties, though? That's what keeps us.

[Monica Padman]

That's what keeps us human.

[Ken Goldberg]

But it has these amazing. 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, but the back and forth, like, the pacing and everything else is so good.

[Monica Padman]

The cadence. Yeah, you got it.

[Ken Goldberg]

Has a sense that they're comfortable with each other. They're kind of back and forth.

[Dax Shepard]

You can feel their rapport. Rapport? Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

Perfect. That's a word I wasn't thinking about.

[Dax Shepard]

They have fabricated rapport.

[Monica Padman]

But that's scary. That's the thing you think as a person, you cannot replicate, and I can.

[Dax Shepard]

But yeah, we're thinking doomsday. Like, we're out of a job. But think, what if we own the thing and it puts out the show? We're on a beach somewhere and the show's just as good. You know, I would love it. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

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 we'll justify our beach life.

[Ken Goldberg]

Well, you guys are not gonna be replaced. Don't worry. 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 gonna do a whole podcast series.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Ken Goldberg]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Like, conversation starters.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah. It could come up with new ones of those.

[Monica Padman]

Like our armchair anonymous.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

What are some good prompts? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And it would feel a little true minimalism for us if we could use our data set.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Then I would feel a little less fraudulent about it.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right, you give it your set and then build on that and see what it does.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I have a couple of rapid fire questions, then I want to talk about your art. Where are we ahead and where are we behind in our expectations? Are we ahead anywhere? 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, but are there areas in which it would shock people how far ahead we are or.

[Ken Goldberg]

No, it's hard to say. One thing I do think we're gonna see is the extension of the Roomba is a robot that can pick up clothes and declutter around the house.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, I like that.

[Ken Goldberg]

And I think it might have four legs.

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Ken Goldberg]

So it'll be a little like dog with an arm.

[Dax Shepard]

You thought it might have a scooper on its back, like the tail would be a scooper.

[Ken Goldberg]

And I think it might have a tail because tails are actually really important for balance, for also user interface. 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, an emotional reaction. But if you notice none of these dogs that are out there yet have tails. So we're building one.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. You and your wife are incredible artists. You have an exhibit that's at Skirball right now.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. And she and I have collaborated a little bit, but this is our first big collaboration and we've been having so much fun. 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. And so the Skirball invited Tiffany and I to do one for them related to art and science. We've been working 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 trees. You know how you count the rings?

[Dax Shepard]

If you've ever Been to Muir Woods.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ken Goldberg]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ken Goldberg]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Uh huh. This is very cool.

[Ken Goldberg]

We found a tree stump that was gigantic, almost as big as this room. It's £7,000.

[Monica Padman]

Holy shit.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's a eucalyptus. But it was uprooted and sort of fell over. 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. 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?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

And on the far end. So it has 600 questions or something on there.

[Monica Padman]

Wow, that's awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

One of them. That's super cool. And it's so wild to think that the tree was around at this point. The first mark on the ring is from 530 B.C. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

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. We take some liberties.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, okay, okay. How old was that tree?

[Ken Goldberg]

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. 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. 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, meaning behind it. And that's true with the scientific Equations.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

We said that. We were talking to Fei Fei 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes. So I have one story about this.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, please.

[Ken Goldberg]

When I was in grad school, I had developed this method of orienting parts without sensing. 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. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Ken Goldberg]

I tried all these methods, and it was basically extremely difficult to try and prove that it would work for all these geometries. 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. 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. And then it worked.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Ken Goldberg]

It was this moment where when the whole Thinging integrated to zero means that there had to be a solution for any polygonal part.

[Dax Shepard]

Did it feel transcendent?

[Ken Goldberg]

It felt quite transcendent.

[Dax Shepard]

It really, like you adapt into something a little mystical.

[Ken Goldberg]

Totally. It was not something that I felt like I did. It was just revealed.

[Monica Padman]

You were like the vessel for this.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes, very much. I still remember that very distinctly. And I'll admit that one of the equations on the tree is yours. Oh, God. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's your signature.

[Ken Goldberg]

I put it in there up with Gauss and Einstein.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but you're right. There's something really elegant about those formulas. And you think of the most famous one, like E MC squared on the surface, it's just so, so simple. And no one could think of that for so many years.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right. The elegance of some of these Euler's equation is the one that mathematicians truly love.

[Dax Shepard]

What's that?

[Ken Goldberg]

It's E to The I. PI minus 1 equals 0. 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. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Cause they're all going to infinity. So none of them work great in.

[Ken Goldberg]

Math, the irrational numbers.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ken Goldberg]

And they all came from very different sources, but they all come together at this magical moment. And it's mind blowing.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow.

[Ken Goldberg]

Like, to a mathematician, it shouldn't be. And it's like one of those moments where you're like, the universe makes sense.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

By the way, I feel like that's where I believe in a higher power.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. So I'm a hardcore atheist. I believe. 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. I really kind of opened my mind to, like, maybe there is some kind of magic happening.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

There'S some kind of beauty that makes sense and that's out there. And when we discover we get a glimpse of it, it's like there's something beyond us. I had that one little taste of it. Yeah. 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, 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. But now we'll have to wait for the next one. If you look at it, it's every 10 years or more, then we get another breakthrough. And I think we need a few more breakthroughs.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. When you look at evolution, they talk about punctuated evolution. It's like nothing happens, and then everything happens and then nothing happens.

[Ken Goldberg]

Exactly. Dax, you're the anthropologist. So, you know, punctuated equilibrium, you have a sort of plateau, and then there's a breakthrough or change, and then there's a long plateau where it kind of gets digested and everything and then another. But that's really what progress looks like.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. You would think it's just this nice linear.

[Ken Goldberg]

Not at all. And people say exponential. That's not the case at all. We're not living in exponential times. Most technologies do not increase like that. There'll be a little breakthrough. And then long look at air travel hasn't really improved.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

There was a huge jump when it started.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

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 the breakthrough? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it's actually gone back backwards, but yeah.

[Ken Goldberg]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, Ken, you are a 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. 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.

[Ken Goldberg]

You guys are so great. 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. And you sit down and you just make us feel so at home.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh good.

[Ken Goldberg]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Thank you.

[Ken Goldberg]

I love it.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, well. To the many dinners we will have in future.

[Ken Goldberg]

Okay, thank you.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you so much.

[Ken Goldberg]

Thank you. What a pleasure. Thank you guys.

[Dax Shepard]

Stay tuned to hear Ms. Monica correct all the facts that were wrong.

[Ken Goldberg]

It's okay though.

[Dax Shepard]

We all make mistakes. I'm in an incredibly beautiful new sweater that my friend got me.

[Monica Padman]

It looks gorgeous.

[Dax Shepard]

I just put it on for the first time and I'm truly blown away.

[Monica Padman]

The green is really nice and the.

[Dax Shepard]

Fit is really kind of perfect.

[Monica Padman]

I know they know how to do.

[Dax Shepard]

It and I think I like these cuff. You have to roll them up. They're too long on their own. They're clearly designed be rolled. See, look, that's a 7 inch 9 inch cuff.

[Monica Padman]

It's nice though.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but you wouldn't wear it like that, right? You're supposed to.

[Monica Padman]

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. If you're wearing oversized clothing you have to show a little bit of skin.

[Dax Shepard]

On your arm cuz you'll get lost in it. I just rode my bicycle.

[Monica Padman]

Oh yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

My first time in biker shorts.

[Monica Padman]

How'd it go?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Well, you're 50, so a lot of things have changed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but also I think it's. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

But it, it they have a pad built into them and the seat is very tiny on the road bike and it hurts your on ooze. Yeah, I don't want to Say it hurts here. It does hurt.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it hurts.

[Dax Shepard]

I was like, was a nice padding. I put them on for the first time. I felt like Panay always talks about like, eventize your run. I was like, well, these are built for nothing other than riding a bicycle.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

And let's do that. And the padding was nice. And I love that there's no fabric flowing anywhere else. I think I went up the hill faster because of them.

[Monica Padman]

Probably aerodynamics.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not going to adopt the Lycra shirt though. I decided I swore a wife beater.

[Monica Padman]

So your back home.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I got you a present for your birthday. Do you want to open it?

[Dax Shepard]

I would love to open it. Let me really take my time here. We. I'm looking at a beautiful tissue paper. Yeah. With. Oh. Can I say one thing? This will sound derogatory, but let me preface it by saying I could be in the tourism board for Mexico City. I love it. It's an enchanted, romantic city. Food's dynamite. If you ever go, go to Havre 77 French restaurant. We went twice. The French onion soups are 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. Like when you got two steaks.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And I would. I would tear out a fingernail right now to have it again and share it with you. It was the most incredible. But anyways, the facial tissue and I had a cold. It wasn't ideal.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And where it really hit me was one ply, maybe less. I was on at a nice hotel, mind you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, very.

[Dax Shepard]

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 it, I was like, ooh, that's soft. And then I thought, how bad was the tissue? Where the airplane tissue felt like puffs plus with lotion.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my.

[Dax Shepard]

Just to make it relative.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Cuz that's one ply. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think was like 0.6 ply.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Anyways. Beautiful tissue paper.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

With purple flowers. Really nice.

[Monica Padman]

The tissue is from Nikki Kehoe. The present is not, but.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, this is a multi stage gift.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Beautiful tissue paper and then a burlap sack.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Also from Nikki Kehoe. That's how they wrap.

[Dax Shepard]

Wonderful. Oh, buddy. The stories of Raymond Carter. Will you please be quiet, please. Is this an original?

[Monica Padman]

I bought it as a first edition and it is signed. It's signed, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you pay the face value of $8.95?

[Monica Padman]

No, it was on sale, actually, half off.

[Dax Shepard]

What year was this published? Because we can. I think it's fascinating that a hardcover, beautifully bound book was $8.95.

[Monica Padman]

I know that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

I know I'm all over the place and a little manic. But I just gotta add back to Little Women, which I love. As 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, I don't know if you remember that sequence.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know if I remember it.

[Dax Shepard]

But the amount of time and effort it took to make a book in the 1890s 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 out in a pattern and then gluing and putting that in a press. I'm like. It took like a week to make a single volume. They should have been $600.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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, probably in today's dollars. They probably were hundreds of dollars for that amount of manpower. Okay, so this was first published.

[Monica Padman]

We think about wealth disparity, but then in order to even read a book, you had to be a millionaire.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'll get the number wrong. But to put it into perspective, like, so I guess Elon is now worth $400 billion recently. Although that stock just fell. Whatever. Let's just say he hit 400 billion. 400 billion of our total GDP and national amount of money isn't even.01%. When Rockefeller hit a billion, they say he actually. Actually had like 15 cents of every dollar that existed in America. So it's like, as bad as it feels now, it was. It was, at worst, exponential order of magnitude crazier with the first rich people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so this was 1963. So this book costs 8.95 in 1963.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Well, that's a great. We. We have that technology.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, we sure do.

[Dax Shepard]

I added a new. I actually wrote up my resolution slide.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, great.

[Ken Goldberg]

Which.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I wrote some down, too.

[Dax Shepard]

You did? Did you journal this morning?

[Monica Padman]

I did.

[Dax Shepard]

Congratulations.

[Monica Padman]

I love every day.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm proud of you.

[Monica Padman]

I had therapy too, and we talked about it, and she said I. I could burn them. Yeah. Or shred them or whatever, but can.

[Dax Shepard]

I have her number? No.

[Monica Padman]

She's like, if that's gonna allow you to really be able to be honest and truthful with yourself in a way you won't be able to otherwise and.

[Dax Shepard]

Let it out of your body.

[Monica Padman]

You know, sometimes her and I talk about, like, there are things that I talk about with her that I. That only. Only she gets to hear. And she said, you know, it's not just me. You. You also have. You.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And you have a dialogue with. You can have a dialogue with yourself.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Especially via the journal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But. But yes, of course I have to be very honest with myself there. And so if I. If I'm out of fear not doing that, then it's not worth it. So I do. I'm still deciding.

[Dax Shepard]

We may have talked about this, but. And I had mentioned there was a period I stopped journaling over the last 20 years. And then I had a relapse, obviously. And I didn't even put all this together. But through therapy with Mark, I think what occurred to me was there were things I couldn't write down. Just like you were saying, are you afraid someone's gonna find it? And I'm like, no. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

So I just couldn't. It didn't feel like I was making a decision to stop journaling. It just was like, this is really weird. I've been journaling for 17 years or. And I haven't in a while. But I'm not overthinking it. But of course, in reflection was like, I couldn't really. Yeah. Be dishonest to this thing.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ken Goldberg]

It would have cost $89.18.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow, $89 for a book.

[Monica Padman]

That's a lot. It's not enough, though. I Wish it was 5,000.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. This is a fantastic present. Very thoughtful. Thank you so much.

[Monica Padman]

You're welcome.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. How was therapy?

[Monica Padman]

It was good. It's my first therapy of the new year. You know, for a second I was debating, I was like, maybe I only need to start going like as check ins now. Like, maybe I don't really need to be on this consistent of a schedule. But then today I was. I was like, no, I need to keep up My. My. Once every two weeks.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, look, I've stopped, so I really am in no position to say this.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But it definitely falls under the umbrella of, like, well, it couldn't hurt to go.

[Monica Padman]

It does not hurt.

[Dax Shepard]

And it potentially could hurt to not go.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

But it's like, I don't know. On the chance that they work, they're not gonna harm you. All right, someone's gonna comment. There are some. Yes, I hear you.

[Monica Padman]

There are some bad ones.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of. Okay, you know how I'm always 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.

[Dax Shepard]

You know, Gundry's new movement is less water. Not shockingly so.

[Monica Padman]

Him and I are aligned.

[Ken Goldberg]

Salt.

[Monica Padman]

Why? He's got those fresh hands. He doesn't drink any water.

[Dax Shepard]

No hydration.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my gosh. I'm gonna put my hair up real time if you want to see.

[Dax Shepard]

It looks so good down, but go ahead. Let's see what happens there.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. If you want to see it, go to YouTube.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well, I did it for. When's this out?

[Ken Goldberg]

The eighth.

[Monica Padman]

I did it for a commercial we were just in together.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah. That comes out yesterday.

[Monica Padman]

It came out yesterday. Oh, our little commercial.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Our second commercial of I hope many.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, exactly. It was so fun. And it's out. It was out yesterday. It's on our Instagrams.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And in it, I do have a ponytail with a braid that I love. It's just really hard for me to do on my own. I had a hairstylist that day.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, right, right.

[Monica Padman]

But I do like it.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe your therapist can style your hair on the days you don't want to share hair play.

[Monica Padman]

I would go every day.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I'd pay for that. Anyway, okay, so drowning cells. Everyone. Everyone laughs at me. THEY guffaw And I met someone who drowned his cells.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, tell me.

[Monica Padman]

And it was really bad.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me more. Okay, who did you meet? Where'd you meet him? In front of 7:11.

[Monica Padman]

No, he's a real person. I know. I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna.

[Dax Shepard]

Outlaw him or her's name.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

If you were having fun and laughing.

[Monica Padman]

Sorry. Yeah, stop. A big group of friends was meeting, and one. Robbie.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Sweet Robbie. From our chain.

[Monica Padman]

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 a mutual. Yes. With the unmentionable.

[Ken Goldberg]

That.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Because he's not underwear. Because that's his name.

[Monica Padman]

No, his name is. His name is unmentionable. We can't call him untouchable because he's Indian.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, he is.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So now I'm giving a lot of info away.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's pretty easy to narrow this down at some point if you know an Indian in Atlanta who's friends with Robbie.

[Monica Padman]

That's true.

[Dax Shepard]

Bingo.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Mm.

[Monica Padman]

And I guess he. He had already had a seizure a year before and was on seizure medication and stuff. But when he.

[Dax Shepard]

You're the perfect person to tell this story because you have the same condition, Right?

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. And you're Indian and I'm 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, like, really excessive amount of water.

[Dax Shepard]

Do we know why? He.

[Monica Padman]

He drowned his cells.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. He got rid of too much salt.

[Monica Padman]

But he drowned his cells.

[Dax Shepard]

That was the medical y. Oh, okay. Okay. You have a good deal of salt, I think, from your diet. Don't take offense.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

No, but you, like. You'll have a nice seasoned chicken. I think. You have a good amount of salt.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I feel fine about my salinity.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. So.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

He was ex. He was on an exercise routine, and I'm not sure why. Anyway, so turns out, per usual, I'm right. You can drown yourselves per usual. And unsurprisingly, please look out for that.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Yeah. You and. You and Gundry should collab on this.

[Monica Padman]

I'm happy to join forces also, just.

[Dax Shepard]

If you are having a lot of water, maybe use some electrolytes. Electrolytes. That's right. Keep an eye on your electrolytes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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 ecstasy.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. They drown their cells.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Okay. Okay. I wonder if they drown their cells or if when they drink way too much water 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. I don't know if it's congenital. He had heart disease. 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. And then it just ends up backing your whole body up with water. And you, you get really bloated and you put on all this water weight and then it starts really affecting your breathing and your lungs and everything else. 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, Right?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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. When there's too much water in the body, sodium levels drop, causing water to move into cells and causing the them to swell. This can be especially dangerous for brain cells as it can lead to pressure in the brain, confusion, drowsiness.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait, though. Epilepsy, Pressure in the brain might have been completely all related.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, man. Well, I'm sending love and well wishes to this anonymous person.

[Monica Padman]

Untouchable.

[Dax Shepard]

Why does Robbie have two very close Indian epileptic friends? That's. He's very over indexed.

[Monica Padman]

He is extremely overrated.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

I know he has a fetish.

[Dax Shepard]

I know you don't like that word.

[Monica Padman]

But you think it's a king.

[Dax Shepard]

Ask if there's a third. If there's a third. He has a condition.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It is weird. Then I wonder is like what ethnicity.

[Dax Shepard]

Is Robbie's wife white?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. She doesn't have it actually.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no, no.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Is he giving everyone this?

[Ken Goldberg]

He's poisoning everyone.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Over. Hi, Robbie.

[Dax Shepard]

Nasty.

[Monica Padman]

So his wife is my oldest best friend. Friend. And when we were in high school, she had seizures and they were Dating at that time.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And she got in this car accident because she had one. Hers were different, though. She had like. She didn't have grandma seizures.

[Dax Shepard]

Were you about to say petite?

[Monica Padman]

Petite Mall. That's what they're called.

[Ken Goldberg]

That's so cute.

[Dax Shepard]

And then she makes me picture like a mall you'd walk in, but there's only three stores. And then there's. The food court is like four food carts.

[Monica Padman]

They should call it Boutique Seizures.

[Dax Shepard]

That's way better. Yeah, you and Gundry can work on that.

[Monica Padman]

So anyway. Yes, he has three.

[Dax Shepard]

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?

[Monica Padman]

Do you want to?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we gotta grill him about.

[Monica Padman]

Probably. I mean, he's definitely at work on Saturday. Oh, I forgot.

[Dax Shepard]

During the NFL playoff game. I'm so sorry. Georgia Lush, by the way.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no, the Sugar Bowl.

[Dax Shepard]

You didn't know that?

[Monica Padman]

They lost.

[Dax Shepard]

They lost to who?

[Monica Padman]

Don't say. Texas.

[Dax Shepard]

They didn't lose to Texas, but Texas won theirs. Texas is still in it.

[Ken Goldberg]

Yeah, Notre Dame.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I know, but they played.

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome to the sec. Bitch. Is that what you said?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I did. Hold on. I gotta call Robbie. He's the one also that knows about.

[Dax Shepard]

He's not at work. He's at the hospital. One of his. Minneapolis.

[Monica Padman]

Don't say that. Knock on wood.

[Unnamed Friend]

Hello?

[Monica Padman]

Hey, Robbie.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

You're on Candid Camera. You are on armchair Candid. You're on air.

[Unnamed Friend]

I'm on air.

[Dax Shepard]

And can you hear. Do we have your candidates? Can you hear me?

[Unnamed Friend]

Yes, yes. Yes to both. Yes.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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. And then Mani said, it doesn't stop there. His wife has epilepsy.

[Monica Padman]

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 and think you're at.

[Unnamed Friend]

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

[Monica Padman]

That's what. That's what he would say.

[Dax Shepard]

So my I have Monica.

[Unnamed Friend]

My sister, too.

[Ken Goldberg]

Oh, I knew it.

[Dax Shepard]

I knew it.

[Ken Goldberg]

I said.

[Dax Shepard]

I. Robbie. I said there's a fourth for sure.

[Monica Padman]

Fuck, Robbie.

[Dax Shepard]

What are you doing to everyone?

[Unnamed Friend]

I don't know. I really don't know. Oh, my gosh. Looking at things in my life. I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

This is.

[Dax Shepard]

Why do you think it's because you're so calm and sweet? It may all of a sudden the other person's brain feels erratic and unhinged. Is it like, relative to your calmness? People short circuit?

[Unnamed Friend]

It could be. I mean, yeah, that's the best. I think that's the best we have.

[Monica Padman]

My guess is Gina would say otherwise, but this is wild. Four, Robbie. Four is a lot now.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, sincere it. Is there something environmental in Duluth where half the population.

[Monica Padman]

Wait, no. Because mine happened once I left.

[Dax Shepard]

But you. You grew up with that water.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, you think it's the water?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You have late onset Duluth.

[Monica Padman]

Because I drink. I didn't drink enough water. And then it caught up.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Unnamed Friend]

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

[Monica Padman]

And Gina.

[Unnamed Friend]

Yeah. And so, honestly, if you draw like a polygon of the four points, it's like a very small area and so likely shared whatever water source. Yeah, it's pretty. Pretty narrow there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

Guys, did we just break an enormous case? Do we need to call the New York Times immediately?

[Unnamed Friend]

You're going to have to do a new podcast. You're going to start a new podcast where you investigate this issue.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

It's going to be called Poison Paradise. Under the veil of suburban beauty and tranquility.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

Lies a burbling poison that results in the shutters.

[Monica Padman]

That's a lot of word. That's a lot. That's too many words. You need it to be small, short.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no. First was the title, and then I was. Then I was. Then I was entering into the first episode.

[Unnamed Friend]

Oh, he got.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God.

[Unnamed Friend]

I mean, you're halfway there.

[Dax Shepard]

It sounds like this thing writes itself.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, now we have. Moving on to point number two. That's.

[Dax Shepard]

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, see if any more folks have had seizures? Like. Yeah, okay.

[Unnamed Friend]

I Will. Yeah, I'll report back. Yeah, I'll just. I'll start kind of casually throwing that into each conversation I have. Like, so. By the way, you know, this is kind of weird, but you have a history of epilepsy and just kind of move on from there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that sounds like a good plan that's gonna work. Okay, now, point number two is football, and you are my main source of information for football. I was texting you during the Texas Georgia game, and we were secretly gloating while I was amongst a bunch of Texans. And then Dax just told me that then Texas went on to win all the rest of the game.

[Dax Shepard]

They're still in it.

[Unnamed Friend]

Yeah, they're still in it. Yeah. So they have a tough matchup against Ohio State because Ohio State looks really good right now, but, yeah, they're still in it.

[Monica Padman]

But does that be, like, a fluke?

[Dax Shepard]

Shut up.

[Unnamed Friend]

Well, it can't be a fluke because the only team in Texas this year is Georgia. Georgia's beat Texas twice this year.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, twice.

[Unnamed Friend]

So.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Unnamed Friend]

You know how it's like, how can you. How can Federer be the best ever if you can't ever beat at all? You know, it's very similar.

[Dax Shepard]

We all have our albatrosses.

[Unnamed Friend]

Yeah, exactly.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. All right, well, that clears that up, I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

And I just want to end on this. Robby, your voice was built for radio. You must be involved in poison paradise.

[Unnamed Friend]

I'd love to help you. Let me know. I'm a hard worker, too. Just let me know what you need.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

Thanks, Robbie.

[Unnamed Friend]

All right, thanks, guys. Take it easy.

[Ken Goldberg]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

That was a great use of time. Yeah, I wasn't expecting his voice to be that.

[Monica Padman]

He's a very handsome man. You know, I only have handsome and beautiful friends, right? This has started from day one.

[Dax Shepard]

Good for you.

[Monica Padman]

I know. Anywho.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ken Goldberg]

Good luck to.

[Dax Shepard]

Will you plug your ears? Good luck to Ut. Hook em.

[Monica Padman]

I'm cutting that.

[Dax Shepard]

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 beat New York. But the other guy was like, no.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

They must win that way. New York's number two. Wouldn't you want your team to have twice beat the champions?

[Monica Padman]

I guess you're right.

[Dax Shepard]

I think it's time for you to, like, transition into rooting for them for your own.

[Monica Padman]

For my own gain.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, I see that logic.

[Dax Shepard]

Speaking of which, and I know we're. We're all over the map and have taken up too much time, but I just, I want to. I want to go on to say that I finished the Churchill documentary on the flight home yesterday, and I got very, very swept up in it. This has happened a few times, and I'm sure you've watched shows on this when you are forced to watch what the Brits went through. 57 nights in a row of carpet bombing of London. Everyone sleeping in the subway, no bathrooms, getting up, going straight to work and carrying the on. And they were so outgunned and outmanned and out everything. And they alone took on Nazi Germany. At that point, everyone was already defeated.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

The amount of will and resolve is so historic. I found myself, like, this is so cheesy. I found myself being, like, really proud that I know Jethro.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, that's nice.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I was like, by God, that little island you refused.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And Churchill, 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. If you watch this, doc, you're like, who knows? If that person doesn't exist, what happens? Because he had 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. 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. And his own story is so unique in that he was a soldier during. 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, so he was reporting firsthand from all these wars. And he's one of the best writers to ever live. So he was in this crazy, unique situation where he leaves the service as a hugely popular figure in Britain, goes into. Into politics, has this meteoric rise and then plateaus and then plummets, and he's completely on the outs and he can't get anything done. 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 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. 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. The miscast in the. It's. It's. What a story.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Horrible to the Indians. Let's be clear. A colonist, grew up in Elizabethan England. Definitely wanted the empire to stay alive. Also, 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. And it's like, the most incredible speech. Wow. I cannot recommend the doc enough.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

I don't know why I went on that tangent, but it's been burning a hole in my brain. I know I'm making you nervous. My energy level is a 15. I'm home.

[Monica Padman]

It's not making me nervous. It's. It's like, go ahead. No, it's just, like, where's it going?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I'm just sharing all the things that I missed out on sharing in.

[Monica Padman]

The last three weeks. God, you're. You're so much like my father.

[Dax Shepard]

I am.

[Monica Padman]

He just loves to experience, explain stuff.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's kind of a male trait. But does that story. Like, is there a male female thing going on? Is this the Roman Empire? Like, does that whole chapter just, like, not interest you?

[Monica Padman]

Parts do, but not that part of.

[Dax Shepard]

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 it doesn't quit. Like, has a calling that can't be ignored and then matched with this, like, Shakespearean ability to write speeches.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, no, no, I. I'm. I'm more into, like, the Anne Frank story of that era. Like, I don't. I guess I'm really not drawn deeply to people in power. Like, I'm not. That's not a thing.

[Dax Shepard]

You're drawn to the disenfranchised.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This makes total sense.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I just find that way more, as a human story, way more compelling. I find that kind of overcoming, like, a true overcoming, much more compelling.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Than someone who's, like, just feeding off power.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. I find that fascinating. Those figures, they don't do it for me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they don't. They don't get you going.

[Monica Padman]

I'm kind of like towards them, you.

[Dax Shepard]

Know, 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.

[Monica Padman]

Speaking of.

[Dax Shepard]

Go ahead.

[Monica Padman]

Eye roll.

[Dax Shepard]

You found the origin of your.

[Monica Padman]

I figured it out. I figured out where my eye roll comes from. We thought it was an Indian thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Or just maybe a genetic innate thing.

[Monica Padman]

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' It's a habit. But why? And now I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Well, you sent it to me, so I saw it.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm gonna show the world.

[Dax Shepard]

The world. Show the world. And I'm gonna have to describe for the listener because. Let's just be. Let's be clear. 98% of our audience is still just listening now, watching.

[Monica Padman]

Check us out on YouTube and you can see this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, please do. All right, so for the listener, it is a two or three year old Mary Kay and or Ashley Olsen from the full 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And she has. Or they have enormous Disney eyeballs where it's very expressive and clear.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, yes, we got it.

[Dax Shepard]

We got it.

[Monica Padman]

All right. Now, Full House was my original friend. I was obsessed with it. The only time I was ever punished for my parents, the punishment was I couldn't watch Full House that night. Night. That's in my cells. Yeah, that's where I got it. I got it from original Mary Kate and Ashley. Full House.

[Dax Shepard]

You started probably reenacting it always. Yeah. Aping it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Mimicking. They were my models then and now.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it might be all the way till the end.

[Monica Padman]

I think it is.

[Dax Shepard]

They might be your Aaron weekly. I mean, you already have your A.

[Monica Padman]

Weekly, but I think it would be sad if they're on my A weekly because they don't know me. But. But they are my ride or die.

[Dax Shepard]

What I'll say is they're radically different people, which is so fascinating.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I guess that makes sense, but also doesn't make sense.

[Dax Shepard]

It doesn't make sense.

[Monica Padman]

Well, they're not identical twins. You know that, right?

[Dax Shepard]

They have to be. Baloney.

[Monica Padman]

They're fraternal twins.

[Dax Shepard]

No. Well, sisters have never looked that Much alike.

[Monica Padman]

It's crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

How do we know this for positive? I don't think AI Google says that.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. I've. I know, I know they're not. That's like me saying I know something about Valentino Rossi.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, tell me, what do you know?

[Monica Padman]

I know nothing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yellow 46.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly is the whole point.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm impressed you remembered his name.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. So, yeah, one's left handed, one's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Handed, but that's super common in twins. And one's one inch taller than the other evening. When they're identical. Well, they're fraternal, but that could be a posture thing.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, whatever.

[Ken Goldberg]

All right, let's stop.

[Monica Padman]

They're fraternal twins.

[Dax Shepard]

I believe you.

[Monica Padman]

And you'd never know it by looking at them.

[Dax Shepard]

Don't judge a book by its cover.

[Monica Padman]

You would not. I mean, I agree with you. It's shocking.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I. 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, twice was a girl.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, I'm telling you.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, well, some people don't understand twins. They don't understand what identical means versus fraternal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

They must not.

[Dax Shepard]

Or it must be way lower percentage that you get a boy and a girl than. Than same gendered twins for fraternal.

[Monica Padman]

For fraternal, I think the opposite. I feel like if most fraternal twins I know are. Are boy and girl.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Monica Padman]

That's why. That's why they are very confusing.

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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. So it's weird that one would swim fast, but you know what I'm saying. I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

The body is a wonderland.

[Dax Shepard]

It is a wonderland.

[Monica Padman]

John Mayor.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

All right, let's do a little bit of facts. This is for Ken Goldberg. He was wonderful. I really, really liked.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. What a unicorn.

[Monica Padman]

A lot. Okay, now this episode starts with your underwear on the floor, which was interesting. That was shocking.

[Dax Shepard]

That's an experience to look down in your underwears outside your pants. Cuz your first thought is, my underwear.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Came off my.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. And it doesn't seem to be torn in half.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, it's so obvious later when you think it was clearly my pant leg.

[Monica Padman]

I know, but in the moment, I can't think straight.

[Dax Shepard]

My underwear is falling off. It's like. And I think you should leave. When Robinson, they put a whoopee kission on his chair, and he doesn't understand it. He goes, what happened? Like, he really is shook. Cause he didn't feel himself fart, but he heard a fart. What happened?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, that's so funny. Okay, but also. So that happened. The underwear. But then I realized when I was editing it, the inside out of my pant pocket was exposed. Was exposed the whole time.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a weird coincidence.

[Monica Padman]

It is weird, but no one caught that. So the whole episode, the inside of my pant pocket is which people could.

[Dax Shepard]

Have thought might be her underwear. Like, you know, it's the lining of your pocket. But other people could be like, why are there. Why are both of their underwears falling off?

[Monica Padman]

Now, the vaccination mark, the smallpox vaccine scar is a small mark you might have on your upper arm if you receive the dry vax or ACAM 2000 smallpox vaccines. It's a sign that the vaccine successfully spurred an immune response in your body to protect. Protect you against smallpox. Not many people receive a small pack. 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. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

That makes a lot of sense.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I assumed wrongly now that it had something to do with the. The mechanism of injecting it. Like, did they use some weird thing? Because, again, my dad's was. I. I have such a good memory of my dad's. I don't know that my mom has one. Weirdly, yeah. 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.

[Monica Padman]

You can look at pictures online. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

See, this all paid off my diatribe on Churchill, because Stalin was the trickiest figure in that triumvirate.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, now, so Kim Kardashian posted some pictures with the Optimus Robot. And it said that Elon gave it to her. And she denies that she was paid for those pictures.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Other than the free robot.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

That she may or may not have.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

This is what it says the robot can do. The Tesla Optimus robot. Okay. It says it can do physical labor. It says it can move materials, assemble parts, and load items onto machinery.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I'm skeptical.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm skeptical. That's how we do it without getting sued. I. I'm highly skeptical.

[Monica Padman]

This is also on the AI overview. So they like their buddies.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So he's got all in cahoots. Yeah. Inventory management. Optimus can use barcode or RFID scanning to track inventory in real time. Home chores. Optimus can carry groceries, help the elderly. Help the elderly, and perform other helped elderly. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a computer.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Smart home integration. Optimus can link up with Tesla cars and energy systems to become part of a smart home. Optimus can walk among people and serve drinks at a bar.

[Dax Shepard]

I doubt it, but. I'm sorry, I'm skeptical.

[Monica Padman]

Heard about that. Okay. Apparently there's a place in like 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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. 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. 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.

[Monica Padman]

I think it's saying it delivers it to your table, but it might not be bipedal.

[Dax Shepard]

We should go.

[Monica Padman]

We should go.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd love to go to a robot restaurant. What is it? Cali Express Express in Pasadena. Oh, it's in pas. That's much closer. Yeah, that just upped the odds of us actually doing that by a lot.

[Ken Goldberg]

I do think there's a little.

[Dax Shepard]

A little guy that rides around and.

[Ken Goldberg]

Brings you your food.

[Dax Shepard]

Hello.

[Monica Padman]

AliExpress by Flippy. The world's first fully autonomous restaurant. Grill and fry stations are automated.

[Ken Goldberg]

It looks like a little thing with serving trays and American flags that goes to your table.

[Monica Padman]

We'll have to go, but. Okay. It says Optimus can perform Precise movements and heavy lifting. Optimus can adapt its behavior over time to reach the desired results. Optimus can play games like rock, paper, scissors. Okay, so anyway, that's what AI Claims its buddy Optimus can do.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

They're best friends.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And our robot feels a little left out.

[Dax Shepard]

No, he's more boy. Like, remember?

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Big time. Glass half full.

[Monica Padman]

I was wondering what's going on because, like, there's a lot of other robots now.

[Dax Shepard]

There are a lot of other robots, but he's, like, becoming charming and flawed. Wabusabi.

[Monica Padman]

Sabi.

[Dax Shepard]

Wabi Sabi. Robby. Sabi.

[Monica Padman]

Robby, Rob, Sabi. There was. Prada has these bag chains that I really want that are robots.

[Dax Shepard]

Bag trash? Is that what it's called?

[Monica Padman]

No, it's a bag chain.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm learning this from Nicole.

[Ken Goldberg]

This is.

[Dax Shepard]

The movement now is, like, you have these very fancy handbags, and then you put all these little trinkets that far off the side. And I think she calls it, like, bag trash or something.

[Monica Padman]

She might. But they're called bag charms. And look, Prada has this one. This one's in, like. This one's in, like, snow gear.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. That's really cute, isn't it? Yeah. I was about to be critical. I just think it's funny. Fashion is very funny.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

So you get this perfect, outrageously expensive bag, and then you're supposed to, like, drape some trash. Obviously, like, downplay it. It's like, what's happening.

[Monica Padman]

I agree. I. But it's not trash. This is $1,100.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, I don't. I didn't say it was inexpensive.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah. Well, okay. But I agree. I would not put. People love that, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. That's great.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, he's pretty big. Look at him compared to the bag.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, that's preposterous. He's larger than the bag.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. You said 39% of U.S. jobs are still manual labor. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics reported that 39.1% of civilian workforce in the US performs 50 physically demanding jobs that require lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, kneeling, stooping, crawling and climbing activities in varied environmental conditions.

[Dax Shepard]

Sucking. Don't leave out sex workers. That's manual labor. No, we, like, don't we honor sex workers.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But I'm just wondering, is it really manual?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's definitely manual.

[Monica Padman]

It's laborious. All right, well, that's it for Ken.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm glad we ended on that note for Ken. I think he would appreciate that. All right.

[Monica Padman]

Bye, Ken.

[Dax Shepard]

Love you.

[Monica Padman]

Love you.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus Us in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.