Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - BattleBots: Greg Munson and Trey Roski

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

BattleBots is an American television series, founded by executive producers Greg Munson and Trey Roski, that features remote-controlled machines weighing up to 250 lbs, fighting to the death in a bulletproof glass arena. The robots are designed and built by teams of engineer enthusiasts who compete in intense and destructive battles against each other for the championship title. Since the show first aired in 2000, it has gained a large following of dedicated fans of all ages, and BattleBots continues to inspire many people to become interested in robotics and engineering. BattleBots airs Thursday nights on Discovery. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Get a free box of Dry Roasted Namibian Sea Salt Macadamias + 20% off Your Order With Code TETRA Use code TETRA for 20% off at checkout ------- Leisure Craft Saunas  https://leisurecraft.com/

Tetragramatine. So okay, so how far back should we go? If you go to the beginning, first of all, before Battlebox, the history of robot fighting. Sure. So there's always these people out there, engineers, tankers, special effects people who get a thrill out of building something only to sort of destroy it spectacularly, right? So like our front train and my our friends and even ourselves, we would build models, you know, plastic models that you'd see back in the day at the five-in-dime store. And you build it,

you'd painstakingly paint it, put all the decals on really perfectly, and then you'd be like, okay, that was great. Let's go burn it up right in the backyard, right? Or blow it up with firecrackers. I mean, you'd find more and more spectacular ways of destroying it, which was almost as thrilling as building it, maybe even a little more thrilling. So that includes things like SD's rockets. Absolutely.

So it's like, you're not satisfied with the model, with the SD's rocket, Tre had Cox boat and the... Yeah, and the airplanes and the, yeah. I mean, our rocket, our SD rockets, we'd put multiple engines in, right? As many as you can, right? Until it didn't fly right or it'd be so heavy. Yeah, yeah. Where they ignite and you never see the thing.

Again, you never know where it went and kept going. Are you put cameras on it? You just try to hack it in some way or to get a more exciting experience than just what the company wants you to do. And this is happening in Northern California, correct? Yeah. Well, Tray was in a Toulucal Lake. We're cousins, first of all. So our two moms put us together as the boys. And we had a third cousin, Gar, who we were the terrible trio. And they'd always put us together. And so it was between Northern California, Marin County, Toulucal Lake, LA, and work gar lived, which was like Saratoga or something,

you know, anyway. But there's these, not just trainite, but there's all kinds of people like this, right? And, you know, as things develop, you, these little pockets of fighting happens. So in, you know, we heard about in Denver, there's this thing called the Criter Crunch where people smashed remote control cars together.

In Atlanta, there was this thing called robo battles where they would do robot type fighting, but more with remote control vehicles. They're in Japan, there was the Sumo robots where they built little teeny robots and they have a circle, and they smashed into them and tried to push them out of the circle, Sumo robots where they build little teeny robots and they have a minute in a Circle and they smash into them and try to push them out of the circle sumo basically Our group was sort of surrounding with special effects people Young kids who would eventually become special effects people for George Lucas guys like marks a track in and Peter Abrams

And and and we were just blowing stuff up and having a good time. We were inspired by, you know, dangerous toys on David Letterman. Did you guys ever see a survival research? We were totally inspired by Mark Pauline. It's a violent research. I really, really into Mark Pauline. As a matter of fact, I think we, at American, we even distributed some of his VHSs at one point. Again, just trying to spread the word because it was so cool. We would sneak into his, you know, his shows and they'd always get shot down by the police,

but those were fun. I've never been to one of his live shows. I met him and I've been to his place in San Francisco. I don't know, 30-some odd years ago. But tell me about the experience of going to see a survival research live show. It seemed really dangerous. It's scary dangerous. research lab shows seemed it seemed really dangerous. It's scary dangerous. It was dumb dangerous. It was people were probably leaving their death, you know, because they fire up a jet engine and then people are like, you can't hear, it would be so loud. He drive things around.

I mean, part of his thing is was, you know, scary and the crash. It was definitely confrontational. And it could, you know, people could have gotten hurt and a lot of the heat. I remember he did the explosion thing and all the pigeons. Yeah, there's there's he stacks up all these old upright pianos onto the pylon that's holding up the freeway in San Francisco. Right. And it's all it's literally almost nearly all the way up. There's probably like I'm not might be exaggerating, but it seemed to my vision at the time like 40 fricking pianos all the way up this thing, right? And then some bomb goes off.

I don't know what it was inside the piano. And like, there's flames. Pigeon after pigeon. On either side of the freeway, people driving down the freeway must have gotten paranoid because there's literally flames probably going up and around the over 40 feet. But that caused probably, you know, the pigeon population of San Francisco

that was living under that overpassed, just, I instantly, and fall down to the ground, and it was horrific and also kind of. I remember he also had the sonic cannons. Yes. That would just blast the audience. This was a settling, and it would boom, it would shoot that air wave at you. Yeah. And it came, it was pointed right write at me and I'm like, and you're trying to watch a show while having cannons of air blasted at you and, uh, and then there's this cornucopia full of probably just horrible stuff from the fish market. That this other robot would attack and at a certain point it's going to fall on the audience. It's just horrible smelly rotten fish. Probably, yes.

Yeah, so those were quite fun. Unbelievable. I remember he also had like real animal carcasses on the robots and it was just a wild bombastic show. He had like a old punk rock. A super punk rock and fantastic. But you take all that soup, right? And then the real spark is this guy named Mark Thorpe,

who worked for George Lucas, was an artist, did all the special effects stuff in the Star Wars era and also did licensing. And he comes up with this eye. He buys a tank, one of these giant remote control tanks that used to be in the thrifties or whatever, right, back in the day, just to build it for fun. And as the origin story goes, he has a tank, okay, great, I built it, it's remote control. It puts a vacuum cleaner on it. Okay, I can vacuum my house, that's cool. It's

boring. It puts a chainsaw on it. And the light bulb goes off and says, aha, I know what to do with this. I can start. I mean, almost like I can start a sport where my like-minded friends can build other cool stuff with weapons on them, remote control, and we can all fight each other. And I'm going to make a set of rules, and I'm going to tell Wired Magazine how cool this is, and I'm going to raise some money, and guess who he raised the money from? Steve Blotnicki. Wow. Amazing.

Yes. Amazing. And so that be got robot wars. So robot wars was the first iteration of a of a robot fighting a federation. Yeah, like a robot fighting league federation. But where the sport really really came to the sport. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. Uh-huh. That's where it came to be was was robot wars. Was Robo, was 1994 in San Francisco. 1994 in San Francisco. It's more sport than the video game playing and all that. For sure. It's more sport than probably quite a few things.

It's labeled sports out there. If you sport the brain. Yeah, yeah. It's what we kind of call it, but you're physically building it. You're you're getting hurt, cutting things, and you know, if, yeah. Kind of call it, but you're physically building it. You're getting hurt, cutting things, and you know, if not yourself. So yeah, it's sport. And okay, so now that's 1994, and now how does

battle bots come in to be? So Mark Thorpe invites Mark Strakian, who builds one of the first robots for a 1994 and builds the master. And there was 18 robots I think that year, something like 18 robots. And so Greg immediately gets called by Mark Streck and saying, Hey, you got to come check the satin detail, pushing my robot in and doing working on it and everything else. Greg goes to it and he calls me up afterwards, says, Hey, you got to come do this. We got to build a robot. So for 1995, we built a robot.

Our robot was called Lamachine. And we were pretty much undefeated for two years. Wow, cool. It was a stupid wedge robot, but it worked very well. It was fast. And you call it a wedge. Describe the different styles of robots in terms of the main styles of robots. The wedge is one of the main styles,

what are the other styles? They're spinners, hammers, you know, grapplers. It's really like nowadays, like a wedge is almost like the base. You build on top of the wedge. Yeah, yeah, almost everyone starts with a wedge nowadays. Back in the day, you didn't have to have, at old robot wars, you didn't have to have what's called an active weapon. And so you could just come with a wedge and plow into people and wedge them into the corners and win a fight by pinning them.

Mark Thorpe, and that's what Trana built, La Machine with the help of this great engineer named Gage Koshwa, who's a whole other story. And we won that thing, but Mark was terrified, because he's developing this budding sport, and he doesn't want it to get too boring, because a wedge can be kind of boring, just, you know. And so quickly this concept of active weapons

emerged where on top of the wedge, you gotta have something that does something, mechanical, right? It can't be, you can't electrocute the other robots, you can't do an EMP, you can't throw. That's interesting, though. Yeah, but that would be such a fast fight. I see.

The first time it would be great. Yeah. Second time you'd be like, oh, he just pushed a button. When did fire come into the picture? Oh, as soon as possible. As soon as the fire marshal would allow it. Because there is some of them have to. Some of them seem to spit fire.

It doesn't seem to have much effect on the other robots but it does add to the show it's a psychological game right so my robot spits fire your robot you just have a visceral reaction to fire primal right yeah crap and you might like lose a bit of control when you're using your control your robot proxy on the remote let's talk about that because that's a key when I've watched it. I don't really think so much about the controllers. I'm thinking about the robots. It's almost like the robots are alive and fighting, but somebody is controlling it. And I imagine the better you aren't controlling it, the better your robot's going to do. Well, so Tray is probably one of the best controllers out there because he's a helicopter pilot. So yeah, driving it is a part of the secret. So La machine, very first version of it, we had no speed controller. So it was light switches and we just took the car

battery up, gauges, car battery out of his Honda Civic, we'd pull out, stick it in the robot, drive it for five minutes and pull it back out out hopefully before it died and start the car and let that charge it didn't have a charger either. But we had light switches on off switches. So we'd send all that current from the 12 volt battery into these little starter motors and that's what drove the robot. It was very difficult to drive. However, you know, figured it out pretty well pretty quickly and got a few wins. Yeah. In the early days, were there rules of what you couldn't couldn't do? Like what are the rules?

What are you allowed to do? And how big can it be and how much can it weigh and has it changed? Yeah. In the robot wars early days, it was four weight classes from 30-ish. I forget the exact numbers all the way probably to the heavies were probably just under 100.

And then when we evolved the concept of battle bots, we first start up with lights, probably in the 60s, to super heavies, which got up to 350. And then at a certain point when we rebooted the show in 2015, we discovered, you know what, one-way class is the way to go for a TV show. Because it's one arc of one champion on the road to winning the Giant Nut instead of four. In the Comedy Central version of the show that was on in the 90s, there was four arcs, it was hard to follow, it was a bit like a three-wing circus.

So the ABC version of the show, we just went down to one, which is now 250 pounds, which seems to be a real sweet spot for size and girth and smacking into someone really hard and being awesome, but not too difficult for a team of five to six, seven people to field. Does the TV aspect of it follow the sport? In other words, does the sport come first and now it's on television or is it a TV show that has a sport attached to it? It depends on who you talk to. Well, I'm talking to you guys.

If you talk to us, it's absolutely sport first. First, yeah, 100%. We have rules, we enforce those rules, and the TV cameras are there to capture what happens in the tournament. Is there a little bit of TV fun, reality show fun? You're making TV? Absolutely.

But in the, something like the bachelor on a scale of 1 to 10 is a manipulation factor of nine. Yes. Battlebots is like two, if even that. I mean, what you're seeing on TV is something like, even something like American Ninja Warriors would be primarily a TV show. I don't know that that idea existed before the TV show or did it, do you know? I think that was a TV show. I don't know that that idea existed

before the TV show or did it, do you know? I think that was a Japanese competition. I don't know if it was a TV show in Japan first or just a competition, but that's very good at parallel to battlebots because those are real athletes who really wanna do that obstacle course and get to the next level, next level, next level. And our builders are real engineers.

They're not handpicked or casted or anything. That stuff is just like, it's the best, the best. Build the bot and the fights are real. You know, boxes, lock lights, drones, robot fight, and time go, you fight and we see who wins. There's no manipulation. People, we get such stuff from the audience because they're so used to reality shows.

And they're so used to politics, everything is. And they're so used to call it. Yeah, everything is fake. Yeah. And they think your judges are fake. Oh, yeah, but no, it's all 100%. That's great. Yeah. And did, we'll get into the specifics of it, but you mentioned there was a time that it was on Comedy Central years ago, and then it rebooted years later on ABC.

In that window, when there was was no TV was it still happening? Absolutely. Yeah. So the TV is a way to see it if you don't happen to be at the arena. Yeah. But the arena is rocking. It's always happening. We didn't, I didn't think that the TV was that important at the beginning, you know,

until we went off the air for a while and then I realized how important the TV was. You know, I equate it to a little league in Pro Baseball. You can't have little league unless you have Pro Baseball, but you can't have Pro Baseball unless you have little league. They need each other. So the TV allows enough people to see it that they get interested and want to participate. And it's like advertising essentially. And it makes heroes out of engineers.

Yeah, which is really interesting. Which we don't do today. What's the relationship between it's interesting at this started in Northern California? That's our tech hub. Do you see a relationship between this and the tech world in Northern California? Yes and no. I mean, a big majority of our teams come from California, but not so much the startup culture as it is the engineering

making culture and the special effects culture in Los Angeles. So we got a lot of teams from sort of the ILMs of the world and the, you know, whatever's going on, the myriad of companies in Southern California. And then we get a lot from Florida because that's where we didn't, you mentioned the off-season when we weren't on Comedy Central when you were in about to get on ABC. We started a nonprofit for kids to fight robots in the high schools in colleges. So cool. So that begat a lot of kids in Florida doing it, but it's all just sort of engineering students who think it's awesome.

And just that anybody's into that making culture, right? Yeah. So it's the same, what would have been the hobbyists who might have been into building a ham radio. Exactly. Or the people who would go to Radio Shack to buy parts to build some cool electronic something. Exactly, right.

Yeah. And there's a lot of those in California because that's where that sort of is one of those ground zeros, one of those episodes. Yes. Also, if you've seen what's it called, any given Sunday, like that was another, it's another tangents, the motorcycle version of it, but it's still like young people interested in, in that case, racing, putting together their own hot rod bikes, and it's another, like, do it yourself competitive culture. It's very much like hot rod culture, RC planes,

you know, those folks who go out in the weekends and fly all over the place and mod and therapy, you know. It's these weird subcultures. This one just happened to pop, because it's so strange. Like Tray mentioned that first 1994 robot wars, Mark, he pages me and says, you got to check this out. So I go, you go into the building and you're like, it smells different. And then there was this big wall of bleachers in front of me.

I couldn't see what was going on. And I walked around the corner and I finally see what's happening from all this cacophony of weird noises that are different than most of the noises you hear day to day. It sounds like a car accident, you know, going on again and again and again and again. And I see this wooden box fighting this phallic giant, you know, saw thing that which was the master. And it's an experience you've never experienced before. Even in the movies.

You know, the first time everyone sees Star Wars, they say like, oh, that was a singular experience, right? Seeing that robot wars was in 94 was just like that. And I think that's why people get into it and groove on it, and that's why the culture's starting to grow worldwide, and people are doing it. It seems like as the culture becomes more and more virtual, the idea of being able to physically see something, it's a very different experience, seeing something in person instead of seeing the virtual version of it. And it's a very different experience, building something where you get to see how gravity works and how all of the forces that play in the real world

affect it. And I imagine if you do get good at that, it would even benefit you in doing virtual design because you have a better understanding of the real forces at play. 100%. So that's why it's such a valuable thing to get into, especially as a kid, because by building it for real and breaking it for real, you understand how to... You have first of all have to be really resourceful to get it to work again, which is a great skill

to have. And you figure out how stuff... What forces, what the real forces are like, and how powerful they can be. And so we've had guys who built these sort of private rocket ships, like SpaceX kind of things. And they hire the Balabots people because they know how stuff breaks, which is pretty exciting.

Super cool. Yeah. And the violence of it is a hell of a hook. There's something in us that wants violence. Why else would people watch fake wrestling? Why else would people watch boxing to a certain extent? What's there?

What's in it for us? And I've... You think it's a hard, wired thing? I think it's a hard extent? What's there? What's in it for us? You think it's a hard, wired thing? I think it's a hard, wired thing. You think it's violence, or do you think it's just competition? I think it's violence. I think it's the destruction. It's not the competitions there, too.

But I think it comes from the hunt, is my guess. We had to hunt to survive. We had to get food to whatever. So somehow, I got a new puppy. And the puppy has never been around anything else. Its mom has never nested, and it starts nesting in the couch, starts digging, and it's trying to make a little hole to get it stuff.

And it's like, where did that come from? Oh, it came from some past instinct where they had to dig a hole to stay warm for the night. So yes, I think that's in us. We want that violence. However, why do people watch car races sometimes for the crash? But then you feel terrible. the crash happens, you almost feel guilty, like you wished for it. And then when the guy gets out, you go, oh, you know, it's okay.

I, you know, if he gets out or hopefully gets out, you know, that about seems to bring that violence to you without any guilt, which is really cool. And it's something everyone can enjoy. I watch pro wrestling and that's the reason I do. I like that there two people working together to put on the best show that they can and It's very difficult what they're doing right and they can get hurt for real But they're not trying to hurt each other. They're actually trying to protect each other Interesting and you get to see a story. So I like that better than boxing where it looks like

people actually trying to hurt each other and it just makes me less comfortable. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's so many sports where, you know, humans like football, getting concussions, all this stuff, but you can get the thrill that visceral, you know, whatever it is, thrill we get like Trace that I think that's that hunt feel from these robots, but it's completely guilt free. It's by proxy. So we can talk to Jason Blum who makes horror movies.

And he was saying he thinks it's the way to get that excitement without the actual threat. It's like from the comfort of your own home or sitting in a movie theater, you can feel like what these life and death situations are like. Exactly. Peter Gabriel said this. He wanted to make that amusement park back in the day he was talking about. You get these intense experiences, like almost dying or this and this and this and but you're safe in a safe situation. And that's just you come out of that experience

being more hopefully a better person. Would you say it's continually grown over the years? Yeah, for sure. Is it bigger now than it's ever been? There's no end to what people can think up and build. You know, there isn't end to how fast something can go maybe. You know, there's an end to how what you can, I mean, the cars are getting faster and all the stuff.

So there is, you know, they keep getting better, but there is some sort of limit at some point where these robots, there's no end to what people can think of, new ideas and perfecting existing ideas. I think it's at its beginning, to be honest with you. I think it's got a long way to go. Every year we get submissions from new robots that we look at the images and we go, oh, how's that going to work?

Well, we got to see. You know, tantrum was a robot that was new at three, four years ago. Brand new, we looked at this brand new design and we thought, you know, I was really going to work, you know, whatever we'll check it out. First year, he came, didn't do so so well. Came back the second year and kind of dialed it in, did a lot better, and then third year, he came, he won.

Wow. You know, that's... And it was the same robot with just... Tweaks. Perfected. Yeah. Yeah. Learning from the mistakes.

Learning from the mistakes and making it better. And there's little leagues popping up all over the place, all over, I mean, literally worldwide. Really? So, Battlebots is kind of like, think of it as the Super Bowl. Yeah. And as the major league. Yes.

With the 250 pound heavyweights. Yeah. But, you know, kids are building one pound fighting robots in much smaller arenas, and that's happening all over the planet. Is there a website or a place to see all those different? Go to robotcombatevents.com and you might find something in your backyard.

So cool. Yeah, because we get hit up all the time. How do I do it? How do I, my kid loves it. My kid can't stop watching your show. How does. Yeah. Because we get hit up all the time. How do I do it? How do I? My kid loves it. My kid can't stop watching your show. How does he hear she get into it?

That's the place to start is find a local event, build something really, really small, because it's a lot safer and a lot easier and a lot less expensive. And go and meet some of the people who are in the community who hopefully live next door to you. Go to one of those local events. And you'll, from there, it'll be the world when we'll take you up if you're really passionate about it. And you'll work your way up to the 30 pounds, the other pounds, and then maybe one day

get on the TV show. So cool. Yeah. It's so cool. It's funny, I have a six year old son and he's obsessed with battlebots. And I remember after we watched it the first time, maybe a year or so ago, we watched it, and he's very with battle bots. And I remember after we watched it the first time, maybe a year or so ago, we watched it.

And he's very addicted to it. He said, let's get the battle bot toys. And I said, I have a feeling there aren't going to be any battle bot toys. Like, this is really underground subculture. And he's like, no, I have a feeling if we go to Amazon, we're going to find battle bot toys. And we went to Amazon. And there were battle bot toys.

And they're great. Yeah. They're great. I just left the house. He was playing with were battle bot toys, and they're great. They're great. I just left the house, he was playing with his battle bot remote control toys right now. So we've been friends with the Hexbugs folks forever. When Train and I started the nonprofit after we got booted from Comedy Central after five seasons,

like TV shows always happen, right? And we started up the nonprofit. And the problem back then was everyone's on these radio frequencies, literal FM radio. And you can step on someone's frequency. And if my radio is controlling your robot's frequency, that's a serious deadly situation. So you have to do radio in pounds, you have to do all this crazy stuff. Digital technology slowly started to take hold. But in that middle phase, this company called

IFI created a system where you could be on independent frequencies and it was a lot safer. So we forced all the high school kids to use their system and those are the guys, two guys who started Hexbugs. And so we had an in with them. So when we got the deal, when we got the reboot happening with ABC, we said, ABC, you got to focus up with the toy deal, go do it, go do it. And they did.

And then eventually we got to deal ourselves and the rest is history in terms of what you can buy at Target. So tell me, why did Comedy Central, I understand shows get dropped all the time, where the number is not good. Comedy Central was sold. That was the biggest reason. I see.

So they were sold to MTV. I see. And MTV had a deal with robot wars. I see. So that was part of part of it. So robot wars were still going on in the UK, based on the deal that you guys set up. Yeah.

Amazing. And it still goes till today as well. No. It stopped. Yeah, it stopped. It had a reboot as well, but didn't catch hold like our reboot did unfortunately. Okay, so you start your company, what year do you guys start?

1999. 1999 exactly. 1999. And comedy central for five years. No, five seasons. It was really over two and a half years. I see. We did two big seasons per year.

I see. And Traysrite, it was a lot of that sort of behind the scenes stuff going on. But also we didn't, you know, I think our fault for getting canceled back then was we allowed the robots to get a little boring, our rules set allowed for it, I should say. And there was a comedy central to write home for robot work for, for, for bottom ups. We debated that back. Because that's another question. It's like, it wasn't the right show.

I mean, comedy in our show needs to be there I wish there was more today to be honest with you totally that element You know there was a little bit of fun making other contestants that was not the right way to do it They were the only network that took us, you know We went and went knocked in every door and they all laughed at us of course Comedy Central laughed and said hey, maybe we can make a funny show out of this So it was a starting point. Yeah, anything else, you can't knock it. And then after the Comedy Central deal ends, there was no takers after that for a period

of time? Well, so, you know, the robots maybe got a little too boring. So whatever, for whatever reason, then they moved to Sassat, you know, that classic story. Ratings go down, whether that was manipulated or not, who knows. We were on a hunt for about 12 years to find a new network. We hooked up with the guy who executive produced American Idol. We hooked up with Fox Television Studios. We even hooked up with Mark Burnett and James Cameron.

They partnered on rebooting Balabots for and we interdiscovered him to each other. They never met each other. That show got Greenlit in the room, but quickly became a budgetary and saying, you know, avalanche. There's a catch to it. Because it's got James Cameron attached to it, right?

He's talking about we can do flying robots with swarms and they can shoot flame balls at each other and trying to like, you could do that, but that's gonna cost a lot of money. And it's not gonna make good TV, you know, too. And I think the part of the beauty of this is they do it yourself. Right.

Home made aspect of the whole thing. Which is the beautiful thing. So, you know, we're kind of getting depressed, right? We're doing this nonprofit for kids. It's working out okay. But the show is not catching hold. And we're getting a lot of like yeah we'll do it and then it doesn't happen yeah we'll do it and it doesn't happen yeah and then the deals weren't right either yeah we could have given it away yeah that wasn't we weren't gonna do that we weren't gonna let

them take advantage of the contestants which was a robot wars issue you know the robot wars took advantage of the contestants the robot wars if you saw any of the old robot wars issue. You know, the robot wars took advantage of the contestants. The robot wars, if you saw any of the old robot wars, it was the house robots were what they made, right? The house robots always won. The house robots are what they made toys out of. It was never, they were never going to share anything. Part of our deals to share everything with the contestants. If we use them, or we, you know, they get a percentage

of the toy deals, they get part of everything. We started as contestants. Yeah. So we're going to always look at everything as a contestants point of view and make them as happy as, you know, what we would have wanted if we were on their side. That's great. That's great. But we're friends with the Mythbuster Guys, Jamie and Adam, right? And they start doing this podcast called Tested.

And that is manager owned by a company called Whale Rock. And Trace sees Jamie from Mythbusters at one of these press up fronts where we're going to announce that James Cameron and Mark Bernette are going to. And they wanted to change their name, which really pissed me off. They would change it to RoboGadon. And we had spent years building a Battlebots brand. And they want to change it. So right then, I thought, well, this is probably not going to happen. But anyway, Jamie says, you got to hook up with this company I'm with called Well Rock and we met with the head of TV there, Chris Cowan, who was probably, I mean, we love all these

network execs who tried to help us get the TV show, but Chris was super smart, really great and was on the same page as us. Like, we want to make this into a bonafide sport where the builders are the heroes we don't manipulate anything and he's a huge sportsman he just wants to take that model and apply it to robot fighting sports and we're like okay this guy's pretty cool let's do it and we hooked up a deal and because that production company because it was owned by what's that Lloyd Braun and he's the huge EP from ABC, who launched Lost and Desperate Housewives

and Grey's and Adamie. I mean, they're huge shows. We walked in the room and pretty much got a green light almost instantly. And train, I were like, we never thought we'd make broadcast. That's wild. We're cable, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And ABC wasn't the right hope. It was good cable, either. Good cable. Right. But so that we got ABC. But we only lasted basically two seasons there. Really a season and a half if you really think about it. And then what happened?

We got so screwed over by the Hillary Trump election because the show got preempted twice because of their acceptance speeches from the conventions. There was some mass shooting where Obama had to get on and preempt the show, which is horrible, obviously. And then the Olympics, which put us off air for whatever that was, three weeks. So we had viewership going up and down, up and down, up and down. And you can tell that story to Nekrigg execs, but they just want to see the number be consistent for the advertising. Yeah, but it's impossible. Yeah, so we're no win no win situation. We were there only show that was 50 50, you know They're a female network and they would get the male and the female demographic and they were very impressed with that

But the only air things once and for us, you know, the best is they are as many times as possible for all the Ancillary reasons and everything else so technically they weren't really our right home for us Well, we discovered some cool is that yeah, ABC is probably primarily a female demographic these days because it shows like the bachelor and all this stuff back then it was right but we learned that our Family numbers Coat what I call it co-viewing, was really, really good. So that meant families really like the show, which could be a valuable thing for another network. But anyway, we got lucky,

because ABC's trying to make a return on their investment into the show and they start selling it, which is what they do. They sold it to Discovery Science. Interesting. And they got the highest ratings they've ever gotten in three years. Wow. Yeah.

From a repeat of a bot show on another network. Wow. So we made a deal with Discovery Science, which turned into a deal with Discovery. Great. And here we've been there for five seasons now. Welcome to the House of Macadamia's. Five seasons now. A rare source of Omega-7 linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamias, art healthy and brain boosting fats. Macadamias, paleo-friendly, keto and plant-based. Macadamia's.

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And it sounds like of all the stories you've told, that sounds like the closest to a right home that you found thus far. It's roots are in science, they repeat it on a nice schedule. One of the things that's great about the really ship is they let us shoot a ton of episodes which allows us to really format the sport properly. So this season we did 54 hours in one season. Incredible. Like it used to be you did 100 hours, you were syndicated and you were, that was, you know, we did 50 hours in one season and we shoot it in 10 days.

What show can you do that? You go to any network and they're saying, we love your show, 10 episodes, guys. And to really format the sport properly for all the robots around the world that want to compete in it. And this is the best of the best. To do it in 10 episodes. In total.

We're gonna do 22 hour shows this season. Plus a summer special. Wow. And that's what we needed to do the, basically the madness of world championships, seven. Yeah, if there was no historical precedent for television, and if you were starting now, would this all just be on YouTube,

or would you still be looking for a TV deal? That's a good question, because there's, you know, there's an opportunity, our deals with discovery are year by year. Yeah. So I don't quite understand that game, to be honest with you, I don't watch Netflix or any of that stuff online, I'm not an emailer.

So I don't know how people find you that way. I change a channel and when you get to that, I'm still, I'm the old school. You know, I change a channel, you get to that channel, that looks interesting, you watch it. You know, how do you find that? You have to be on the homepage. How far do you dive into Netflix before you find it?

Or how much do they promote it? I'm also asking because I've had personally the opposite experience, which I was looking for BattleBots. I'm searching. It's hard for me to find. Finally, there's some information. It's on the Discovery Channel. And then I go to the Discovery Channel, it's behind-to-pay wall.

It's not a channel that I subscribe to. There's already a load of channels that I subscribe to that I don't watch. And I don't want to see anything on the Discovery Channel other than BattleBots. Am I going to subscribe to the Discovery Channel for BattleBots? I don't know. Exactly. I don't know. So, in my case, by the been, I I'm an active viewer and I might not be willing to go there. Welcome to the world of television, right? You know, ownership. It's so confusing. It's so confusing. And our international is even worse. Because you have to do the deal that works.

And I think we're maybe at the spot now where we could do like a YouTube, we could certainly do a Netflix or a Hulu or Apple TV or an Amazon because they have decent budgets. But it's not a cheap show to produce. The arena alone, maintenance on that and the restructuring out and the rebuilding of it, it gets pummeled every year and it's built such a way that a bomb could go off in and everyone would find. Tell me the story of when did the arena originally conceive Dove and built? So back in the robot worst days, we had a wood,

a piece of plywood that stood about that high and that was it, and then we put a little piece of lexan in the front and shit would go over the lexan or whatever, and it was very dangerous. It was a little mark, Paulinean. And part of my input on battlebots is making it safe. The whole goal is having nobody ever get hurt, you know, so contain these robots. How do you? And the robots get tougher and tougher every year. So I rebuilt

the arena again last year, two years ago, two seasons ago, I redid my floor and made it like I thought it was going to be bulletproof. And it was made it to that entire season with very little to any damage, which was great. And I go, finally, I fix the floor because you'll see people get stuck in the floor two seasons ago, you didn't. And they came back this year and they beat the crap out of my floor again. It's, you know, and I'm like, what has changed, you know, the motors are the same. We've had brushes motors two years ago. And that was the big gap that, you know, happened over.

And what they figured out was how to dial in their speed controllers to make the brushes motors that much more powerful and how to program them properly. And so they beat the crap out of my floor. And now I've got to go back. And the arena is my bot now, where I got to, that's how I try to contain it. When you come to the event and you see my bulletproof glass,

which the glass alone is over a million bucks in that arena. The thickness of the floor, all the way up. What's the size of it? 50 by 50 roughly. 50 by 50. About 25 feet tall. Yeah. Amazing.

Half the size of a basketball court. And it's also changed a lot in from the early days. It seemed like it was a lot of ground in pound action. And now there's a lot of stuff flying. It seems like the bots are strong enough to throw each other around. And it's dramatic. They're tossing people hit the roof this year. Yep. So a couple robots, a couple times, hit the roof. So you have a 250 pound object flying 25 feet in the air.

And yeah. And what goes up is it's serious. You see the dense in the arena. People go, oh my god, and the steel is major. It's like a shooting range. It's worse. It is worse. These robots could kill people in seconds without a question. The only place you can play is in the battle box. It's so great that you use the robots for good. It's, well, if anything were to have. So, was anyone needs any protection? Yeah, but Elon was, you know, Elon was talking about, you know, the Terminator,

you know, kind of scenario or, you know, an AI taking over the world. But that's what Battlebox will take care of every problem. Great. Good to know. We'll take out the other problem. Good to know. When ChatGVT7 takes over the planet. Right. Tell me more about the business model.

How do you find the creators and basically how to work? Do we have to have a business model? No, but I'm asking. No, no, no. The community is so strong now that they pretty much come to us. So, we have a website, registration.battlebots.com, which will soon probably be changed to book.battlebots.com. I forget what it, anyway, you can apply there and you upload your pictures, your CAD files, picture yourself, get a little resume going, and then we search through those, we weed through those,

and we search for the bots who we want on the TV. How many entries do you get? We've got probably more than 500 in there, but upon year, we probably get 100 extra per year. And there's always the usual suspects who have to come back, you know, that you got to have the hydras and the tombstones and all those folks come back again. And a couple teams might be put into um, relegation because they didn't do so hot last season. But then we go through the applications and we'll find probably 20 who are pretty damn good. And then we'll have this, we call it the chair throwing meeting, where Tray and I and our showrunner Aaron Catling and Chris Cowan will sit there and Tom Gutter,

who's also on the VP, we'll and Pete the bot whisper and we'll just like argue about our favorite robots and rally you know advocate for them right no we got to have that robot the orange one is the coolest and then we'll pick six of those or ten of those maybe out of the 20 to replace some of the bots who had to go into relegation and then there's always a series of alternates who will get in if someone drops out. And it's usually 50 to do the show and off we go. Leisure craft. Builders of handmade custom sonas, hot tubs and cold plunges.

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Hot or cold. You'll feel safe with leisure crafts, five-year warranty. An investment for generations to enjoy. Beautiful, timeless pieces. For better health and ultimate relaxation. Explore the entire collection at leisurecraft.com. Is there any way during the weekly shows that you do to be testing the bots for the... So that is a great segue, the proving grounds. So like I said a few seconds ago, nobody could play with these robots except in the battle

box and that's been part of the problem. So now we have a live show, Nightly Live Show in Vegas, where we're showing the audience a simulation of what you watch on TV is what it is. And we have opportunities for newbies to come perform and prove to us that they are capable and qualified to go into the television show. It also allows our past contestants, our pros,

to come practice. You know, no place can they take these and try new tires, try new speaker controllers, try new things, you know, well now they can come to the live show, compete in the live show in front of an audience and dial these things in, which is going to help our TV show. And the newbies, if Greg and I were choosing, like we do now, who's gonna come to the Battlebots event,

we would have never chose Lamachine to come to the event. We would have never. And Lamachine was one of the greatest robots, television-wise at that time, or, you know, for what it did. It made me- So sometimes just seeing it perform is more important than What you think it's gonna do you can only get so much across in a picture and a cad file and a video on They have submitted a video too. Whereas you see it really fight

You're like oh my god that thing's amazing there's art's funny or it's something that's worthy of it getting a spot There's always newbies that you know we let into the TV show that are like, I'm Newark for NASA and I can build this and I build these famous things for DARPA and I'm a great builder and we go, okay, and they submit a great design and they do crappy. Right, yeah. You know, they almost always, I or always,

I don't know if one's ever proven themselves to us, but you've got to come and compete a couple of times. You've got to come and see a show before you ever build anything and see how big and bad these robots really are and how really strong they are. They're not toys. They're not little. Some are six feet tall.

Some are five, six feet wide. If you look at mammoth, it stands way above you and way wider than you. But mammoths are great examples. We learned about mammoths from video at a local competition in Florida. So we got to see it. And we're like, oh my god, that thing is crazy.

That's gotta be on the show. Where if that was just an application on a website, we're like, no. That thing looks like a jungle gym. How it's gonna break in five seconds? Is what we would have thought. But by seeing it really fight, it actually knocks people out of the arena.

They're like, oh, that's cool. It's such a crazy world. It's so fun hearing about it. It's like, it's like a whole world. It is. It's a crazy, weird subculture. Yeah. And I feel like the people who are into it are obsessed with it. Be on. The people that are there are the best people in the world. Yeah. You know, it's like, and there's no other event. You can't go to a concert or anything and find these kind of people who can't, they just, they don't exist, but it battle bots. They come, they share, they help each other out.

You know, if your motor's broken, I'll give you one of my spares because if I'm going up against you, I don't want you saying that I lost because my motor was broken. I want you to say I beat youth fair and square. Amazing. And they all love each other.

They all get along terrific. Yeah. That's one part of the show that I have to say, anything's lacking in our show. It's not seeing enough of the pit. Because A, the comrader you that trade was just talking about is huge. It's amazing of them helping each other. But also the just the trials and tribulations of my whole robot just got destroyed. Literally like two pieces,

like the fight between Cobalt and Ghost Rapper, where I was split in half and it's like two pieces. Chuck rebuilt that whole robot in 48 hours and made his next fight. Unbelievable. That story is crazy, right? Unbelievable. How did he do it? Yeah, I mean, that's some engineering insanity.

Yeah, so that's another rule is that if you're damaged, you have to be in good enough shape for the next battle, otherwise you're out. Yeah, exactly. Even if you win. Before each fight, you have to weigh in, obviously, and you have to do a functional test. Meaning, your weapons got to work and you got to be able to drive, and you got to be able to fail safe, obviously, because we don't want radio problems. And if they can't do that, we'll postpone you as far as we can,

but if we reach our end of our shoot day, which happened to glitch last season, sorry, glitch, you can't make it. And that was a tournament fight, which was horrible for us, because we've never had a robot who couldn't make it. But typically robots will rally, and they'll find the most amazing solutions

for that problem to just get back in the ring. Would you say that there's a personality type amongst the builders that's a similarity in the people who are building these? Engineers are interesting people. They are definitely the weirdest people that you can you know hang out with. They don't communicate real well. They're not real people people to a certain extent. Most of them you can get that when you watch the TV show and some of them are interviewed. They're all smarter than, I mean, at the end of the world, these are the people you want to be with. These are the ones you want to, in your cave or whatever because they're survivors, they know how to make things work and how to figure things

out, but they're different. Yeah, when the zombie apocalypse happens, that's the, there'll be the ones to figure out the perfect compound and get the power back on and get the water flowing again. What are the, what are the logos on the bots? Because sometimes I'm watching and I don't know the name of the bot and I read a logo, but that's not the name of the bot.

Yeah, so we allow sponsorship. When Trey was talking before how we wanted to find the right TV deal for the builders as well as for us, it's all about getting the buyoff from the network to allow corporate sponsors on the bots themselves, just like a NASCAR would or a Formula One car would, because these things are expensive. And we have build stipends and other travel stipends

and hotels and shipping blah, blah, blah, that's covered in our budget, but it doesn't get you all the money that you would need to build some of these robots. And if you win, what do you win? So we've done something which I think is pretty cool with the prize money, is we do it. And the builders wanted to do it.

Is instead of giving jump some ginormous purse at the end, we just split it over every fight, win or lose. Great. So you just get money. Because you're damaged. When they're fighting, they see dollar signs. Oh my God, speed controller, $2,000. Oh shit, that was a motor.

That's another 800 bucks. And but they know at the end of the fight, when or lose, they got some cash. Cool. Yeah. I would say it's mostly a break-even deal for most of the teams. I would imagine.

From their sponsorship money, and maybe their time, they put in as a little bit, you know, a little bit more in most cases, some are making money doing it, not all. The sponsors are getting better. But if these people have time to do any other thing in their lives, or is this their full time? No.

Their full on got families and jobs. So there's always this dance we have to do. Like, okay, when are we going to shoot it? Schools, colleges got to get off. Other people have to take their two weeks from their job. And so there's always this sweet spot that we find in the middle of the year that coincides with when the network wants to hook us up, that coincides with when the building is available and all these other things that it's really a big, big production number.

It's a big orchestration, but then we make it happen. Mike, my guess is what you'll find with your son is that this will inspire him. And he will, you know, before he might have been playing video games, or sticking out of his iPad or iPhone, which is, you know, not going to take him anywhere. And he's going to say, Dad, help me do something. Help me build one of these. You know, I want to go compete. I want to go come watch first. Yeah. I want to go compete. He'll start small. And then he's going to go into engineering

when he gets into high school, college. The rest of it, the guy's going to become a math wizard. He's going to be working, you know, for the space program, like a lot of our contestants. Technically, you know, we back in 1994 with the robot where it's days and all the kids that have grown up with us have, you know, become something special, every single one of them.

So cool. And there's a whole supply chain culture forming around the sport now, battery suppliers, speed controller, and really on-demand parts. These companies that have a giant water jet machine, it's just this thing that you put a big piece of metal down on it and it cuts parts for you. And so those companies are booming right now because I don't know if they're booming, but they're doing pretty well because of not just our sport, but we're nice chunk of it. Well, we're making those things that people want to make now. Our contestants don't buy

a skateboard, you know, motorized skateboard, they don't make one. They make their own electric bike, you know, they make their own, whatever they want. That's a beautiful thing. Tell me more about the building, the arena, and how it's changed from the beginning to now. So you said it started. It was just a wooden platform to start with. And now it's this 50 by 50 thing.

How many seats are there in the place for viewers? 1,000. 1,000 seats. Wow. We'd like to fill it out. So far we haven't gotten that far. We're about 300 to 500. How long has it been where people could just come all the time and see about it? So we just just did our 25th show. 25th. So it's a brand new month. Yeah. Yeah. And it's nightly. It's nightly. So Battlebots to thawn is the nightly show. Think of it as a just a showcase version of the TV show. Yes. Real fights. There are no outcomes determined. It's you'll see your favorite

bots from the show. You see Hapershock which Doc draw that stuff. And you can only see this if you come live. Correct. And then we'll stop that now. That's something to think about also. Would that be a good thing to have on YouTube or Twitch or something? Oh hell yeah. Just to build the... When we get the proving ground part of it added to Destructathon, absolutely. We'll want to stream that on Twitch because that's people's opportunity, not just live in

Vegas, but around the world, to see the potential new bots to come to World Championship 8, which we'll try to do as soon as we can. But again, this orchestration between the builders and the network and all this stuff. And F1 is coming to Las Vegas, which is crazy. There are an extra neighbor, so that's going to be a real challenge. And a lot of fun. Yeah, they might even be crossover. Who knows?

For Stopin' and Hamilton, fight some robots. You know, it might help them fix some of those cars up a little faster too. How does what's happening in this world compare or relate to what's going on with like, as it's called, Boston Dynamics, the people who make the robots that you hear about, not the fighting robots? You know, Atlas, which was made by Boston Dynamics, was actually made by Scott LaValle, who was one of our buddies that we built robots with this little kids. So there's a crossover.

There's definitely crossover. We get flack from engineers all the time. They're not real robots. You can't use the term robot, because the term robot implies a certain amount of autonomy. So your dishwasher has more autonomy than a battlebot. And that's why we called them a battlebot because they're remote control. So the Boston dynamic stuff is the state of the art for AI controlled and bipedal inverse kinematic walking systems,

right? That can be used for all kinds of stuff. We are remote control attack vehicles to the thrill of you and entertain the crap out of your attack vehicles. But our contestant made the bomb, one of the bomb disposal robots, you know, which is similar. So it's the same principles, but a different application. Yeah, and there's a meta application, like I talked about before, is that if you know how it's going to break, you're going about before, is that if you know how it's going to break, you're going to be a better engineer on how to fix it, and you're going

to be able to build it better. So that's why a battle-bought engineer who's been through the trials and tribulations of the actual show shoot where you're fixing your robot again and again from total destruction to almost perfection five times over, you know, two weeks. That becomes the best engineer to help you build the next version of Atlas, because when Atlas falls down the stairs, well, I'm not gonna make it better. I've dealt with that with Ghost Raptor, whatever it is.

What you learn from a robot breaking is phenomenal. So we still crash cars, even though we could crash on a computer over and over and not have to physically crash it, we still physically crash cars, because we learned something from that. So what you learn from building these robots and building these axles and breaks and everything else that we put into them, these are the people you want building your car because they're going to make it so it will be safer. It will be strong. It seems like there's something about when you get your data virtually, you get something from it, but

you don't get everything from it. I know when it comes to recording studios, the old recording studios that were built before there were computers, the great one sound great. And now the way recording studios are designed, it's all computer rendering for sound. And when you're in them, they don't have the same life. You have the magic that these old studios have. And something gets lost in the translation. There's something that's incalculable that's different than just the stats that are measurable. 100%. And that's what I think we're going to discover with AI.

He's like, everyone's on the chat GPT bandwagon. But if you use it, spits out stuff that's a little bit generic. It's a little bit sanitized. I mean, of course, you can prompt it better and it's gonna get better and better at tricking us. But it'll never be able to write, like Shakespeare. Well, I heard an interesting thing from his last words.

About all of the different AI's, the competing AI's, is that if they all have the same data, if they're all starting with the same data set, which currently they are, that as they get better and better, the answer that you get from any of them will just be the same. You'll always get the same answer from all of them. Yeah, which makes you wonder, is like two years from now, are we going to have just sort of AI stagnation? You know, our AI homogenization, where it's just like, okay, the AI wrote that obviously.

Let's get some humans into train it better, or for us to take it as a base, and then we'll add the humanity on top of it. If you were to take a song and you give it to five different artists to perform it, you'll hear five very different versions of that song. If to take a song and you give it to five different artists to perform it. You'll hear five very different versions of that song. If you take a script and give it to five different directors, you'll get five very different movies. It sounds like with AI, you'll get the same one every time. And that doesn't sound so interesting.

No, exactly. Or it'll be this sort of, you really be able to sniff out. It's trying to be like Steven Spielberg. It got trained on Steven Spielberg movies, this AI movie, and you'll be able to sniff it out. I think we're going to get more and more sophisticated in our perceptions of that kind of stuff. So I don't think the human artistry is dead quite yet, hopefully. Tell me what are the rules of Battlebot's competition.

When we started, it was very simple. There's a few rules, common sense, you know, no gunpowder, you know. No, can't, are there any gas gasoline powered bots? Yeah, there are, yeah. Yeah, ice waves, one of them that's still around. Slam. Blendo was won by Jamie Adam,

Mythbusters guys was a gas powered, Mark's master was gas powered, the chain saw, there's been a few. So when we were in the Comedy Central Air in the 90s, we tried to figure out everything that we didn't want people to do, and it was too much. If a rule book was like 50 pages, you can't do this, you can't do this,

you can't do this, you can't do this. It stifles over the top. It's crazy to think too. And people would think of bots that we would have allowed, but the rules didn't allow them to So we kind of took that eventually out and threw it away and said, you know, look submit your robot idea We'll tell you what you can and can't do and that's kind of where we're at now There are some common sense rules, but it's there's a weight there's a weight rule

There's a weight rules and then you have to have an active weapon and you can't do a size any Door fit in the door. Yeah, but there are ones that have come in the door and then hopefully. Yeah, if he can't fit in the door. We can. Got to fit in the red square blue square. We had somebody show up the very first year and he says, okay, I'm here. You know, where's your robot? He says, it's in my car.

And they're like, well, go get it. He goes, well, it's part of the car. And they're like, well, you know, he had an EMP. He was going to knock the power out in San Francisco for about a mile around, right, through on this switch of the car. And we're like, well, he had an EMP, he was going to knock the power out in San Francisco for about a mile around, right, through on this switch of his car. I don't think it would have worked, but we're like, because it wasn't in the rules that you couldn't have an EMP. We had kids show up with the tape once.

One of the great stories was, you know, very fancy robot with virtual Audi goggles and cameras on it and a turret that went in and out and it would toss nets and all this stuff. I think they spent like $70,000 on this robot and these two kids build two wooden boxes with duct tape between them and carpet over them. Multi-bots. It starts as one breaks off, spreads out the tape and duct tapes up the $70,000 robot. It was great. The audience went crazy, but it didn't make good TV. It wouldn't have made good TV the second time. So that we can't allow tape at this point. People come up with ideas like dumping water, glue, we had a guy that was submitted something that he had this hot knife that he was going to cut

through steel with and I doubt he could have done it. I doubt he could have enough power. I mean electricity to even, electricity to even pull it off, but, you know, stuff like that, like how do we remove that, you know, how long does it take to cool down? How do we shoot the next, you know, so the only negatives from us are practicality, or just that's not a great fight, you know, throwing water on your opponent is the perfect example, Because the robot, it's not going to be spectacular and to a fight, it's just going to be dead. So that's a no-go. But if you keep the weapons mechanical and within the weight limit and can fit,

it's pretty good to go. We need to see it. So if you can't see it, it's not going to make it to me. So we don't want to allow people to show up with haylond to put out some of the gas motors and stuff. Hay lawn, there's an ETC oxygen that stops. It's like a fire extinguisher kind of thing. You know, that doesn't make good television.

You can't see it. Electrically shocking. The other robots and the other thing, you can't really see. There's ways to protect for that. Flame makes good television. It doesn't work real well, you know. But it makes good TV. Doesn't work real well, you know, but it makes good TVC to allow that. Train Eye still though.

We still have the animal house and the ending of animal house in our heads. And we do wanna have a robot that releases 10,000 marbles just to see what happens. That would be great. That would be so great. Clean up on aisle four, but let's do it. And we don't mind psychological warfare either.

Trey and I, one time we went against this guy named Carlo Bertucchini, who was the best guy. He'd show up with a screwdriver and a battery charger. And that's all he needed to fix his robot because it was so well engineered. It was a study and perfection. And oh my God, we have to fight Carlo. And so instead of stressing over how we're gonna be

the mechanically, we tried it psychologically. So we put a picture of his wife on top of the robot thinking he would not on our top of our robot, thinking he would never want to attack his own wife. I don't know if it was a good idea, but... There's a lot of mental games that go on for me, but tell me some of these. This is interesting. Psychological game. My favorite one was actually Jamie Heineman. This is early days away before they were met busters or anything, and he built Lendo. He's gone up against, I don't know what the other team was, but he goes over and talks to me,

says, hey, you know, cool looking robot. Oh, we're going up against you next. He's all nice and everything else. And then he turns and he walks away. And as he walks away, it pops a couple alka celsars in his mouth, and gets his blood up and he turns himself all red and he turns around and looks at the guy and he starts drooling out of his mouth

and the saliva and bubbles are dripping. He gets a man, the guy sitting over there just scared to death, starts shaking. He's going over against him next. Absolutely classic. People will take pool noodle. So robot edges are very sharp, so people have to cover them in the pit

because you don't want to scrape your knee as you walk past one. That's actually one of our biggest rules. But people will use pool noodles to cover up corners, but they'll also take them off, sneak over to the other guy's pit table and use them as measuring, they'll use them as yardsticks to measure how far they off the ground,

how big is that saw blade, how what's their clearance on their wheelbase, and then they'll go back and have all these little sharpie marks on their pool noodle and figure out a way to reconfigure their bot because they're gonna fight that guy next. Wow. So they can get underneath him or do whatever.

So there's all kinds of games. So they need to make sure that bot makers don't know who they're gonna fight in advance. They do now. In the old days, how long, how long in advance do they know? So in the old days up until the season, we basically told them the day before. And so they didn't know until that night before.

Good morning. You know, now we tell them the first four fights that they're gonna be in. You're gonna be in four fights. Here's the four people you're gonna go up against. And strategically you can decide which weapons you're gonna use, what, you know, you're gonna sacrifice. A lot them strategically. You can decide which weapons you're going to use, what you're going to sacrifice. A lot of people have different ideas,

attachments for what kind of robot they're going up against. They might not want to lose. They might only have one of those attachments. They want to save that for the nightmare fight or something. So you can have a different attachment. If you win a fight, and then in the next fight, your robot can change for that next fight. It's just what happens if someone has a second matching robot.

They can't. They're loved. You should have. Because there's so many fights you really should have. You should have a couple of these three. You have a double. Yeah. People usually have three now.

Of the same robot. Yeah. If you see hypershock, they are rolling deep with three hypers three hyper shock chassis and probably 40 spare parts. If their pit table is just an array of vendors and wheel guards and tires and everything they need to fix it a time. Because they'll fight probably, I mean, I'm getting this number wrong, but maybe if they do well in both championships, 12 times. Yeah.

It's crazy. Kids are unbelievable. When you walk into the venue. You see our arena and everything else, the 1000 seats. It's a big, big area. And you pit-tit is little, you know, it's much bigger than the arena side. And you see there's 2,000 people in there,

and there's all the pit tables and all the parts. Wow, so the pit section is bigger than the arena. It's massive. And the energy in there is unbelievable. So you've got to come for the live show, but you also got to come for the TV shooting. The TV shooting, it's tougher to watch because we're filming television.

So we've got a, you know, the announcer goes up or Farouk messes up, and we've got a Reed shoot and Re-Shoot, Re-Shoot, get the lighting right. I mean, the fights themselves, once they start, that's, you know, it goes to that part, but everything else is up and down. And we'll ask people to sit there for four hours. You know, the live show is an hour and a half,

and it's fast entertainment of just fight after fight after fight, and a little bit of, you know, video while we're sweeping the floor. And... When after a particularly gruesome battle, and if one of the robots gets trashed bad, how do you get it off the field? We go in there and sweep it up, put it in garbage bags and take it outside.

Trey has a crew called the crew bots, which are dudes who are super fast and safe at getting the bots on carts, rolling out, putting out the fires, dealing with all the issues that can happen inside the box. The whole box has this exhaust system that deals with the fires. Yeah, Trace Crew has gotten that really, really tight. Even in the TV show. Why do you think kids are so obsessed with it? That's a good question. I think it's so much fun. It's so, it's like Tray was saying earlier, it's this hunt, it's this thing that's ingrained in us

in our lower brain stem that is expressed in this really fun sci-fi kind of cool way, maybe, that you see these machines. And, you know, I don't wanna be too sexist about boys really love these things, right? And the machines and they dig it. And it's also fighting, which is also kind of fun and exciting.

So, something about that. We had to make a wish kid three nights ago. And at the end, after everybody left, I let him drive, which doctor was his favorite robot. So I said, come on over, I'm gonna let you drive, which doctor in the box, and he's driving it around or driving, he's driving great. You know, he's missing everything or anything like this finally he goes over and hits the wall as mom goes Don't hit the wall and I'm like no, no, it's okay hit the wall, you know

I think we're told not to break our toys. We're told to be careful. We do things so safe in the world There's a freedom in it. There's something about you know, it's okay to break your toy here You know, it's okay to let go. It's okay to do something. Again, you built it. You can always build it again. You know, that parts. What does everyone do with their sandcastle at the end? Jump on it. You jump on it. Are you let the waves take it down? What's the satisfaction? There's this, it's the yang yang of construction and deconstruction, right? It's like you build it, but you also want to see it kind of get, it's fun to see it get destroyed. And Battlebots gives you the ability to do it.

Well, it's like the Tibetan monks who do the sand mandalas and spend time making this intricate, intricate sand mandalas with different colors and it's magnificent. And as soon as it's done, they rip it away. Yeah, and that sort of like speaks to the... To see impermanence of everything. Yeah, right. Everything is a femoral eventually, right? And that's a good lesson for humans to know,

because that's it. Life is what it is. It's real. Yeah. When did the idea of traps in the arena become a thing? That was there from the robot wars days. So old time, there's always been. They had flippers and bumpers and nets.

But when the battle box was first built, the vision was to have it raised two feet off the ground. So you got stuff pop up from underneath, the first of which was the kill sauce. You know, and robots packed then were a little boring. So this was to make it a little more interesting. Plus, you know, partly through a fight, if you did have an active weapon,

it would maybe be broken. And this would make the fight a little bit more interesting. Now you can take them over to the polarizer, take them over the saws, push them there, make that also makes good television. What's also interesting about that is that those can be stronger than anything that you could put on a bot.

So it's a way to get heavy artillery involved. It is. Yeah. And we're one of our new ideas, which we'll mention here for the first time, is to allow the contestants. We have the pulverizers and now controlled by the contestants. So they control the hammers. The saws come up randomly.

I didn't know that. The little flipper things and a. The saws come up randomly. The little flipper things and a couple of things are all done randomly. Do you have like the the corkscrew thing? Yeah, those those just could turn on. But the one idea is we're gonna allow the contestants to put a weapon on the pulverizers. So they can attach they could pull the hammer off if they want put their own weapon on there and now they're controlling their own weapon in that corner. Which might add a new element to the show.

But wouldn't both sides get to use the same pulverizer? No, so they each get two pulverizers. So one's right in front of them, and one's directly kitty corner. I see. Yeah. I thought the pulverizers were just equally against everybody. That's why you'll see it sometimes where, why isn't the hammer hitting? Because that's my hammer, I don't want to hit my spot. I see.

There's a timing and a strategy. Yeah, so sometimes these are hammer. These are hammer's to color code. It is color code. It is, I've never known. It's probably not good for the audience. Yeah, it's on the floor. It's on the floor.

If you see a little diamond that's red underneath the hammer, that's the red side's hammer. I see. That's how you know. But the floor gets so beat up. It's only like the first fight of the day after the paint job at four o'clock in the morning, the previous night, that you really can see it. So we've probably come up with a better way for the audience to know. There'd be any benefit in putting like a red flag and a blue flag on the bots themselves

so that, because once, once they start, we don't know who's red. There's a lower third that shows you something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, does it matter? I don't know if it depends. It depends on details always matter. It starts to matter if you do what you just said, which is you putting a detachment onto the hammer, the red hammer versus the blue hammer.

Yeah. It'll be more exciting knowing, yeah, this, the blue bots about to go into the red hammer versus the blue hammer. Yeah. It'll be more exciting knowing, yeah, this, the blue bot's about to go into the red hammer. It's, yeah, point. It adds more drama. It's true. We've had some fun ideas for the arena that we just haven't done. We've had like tons of ideas. We wanted to have a bowling ball shooting machine that the red and blue side.

That's a great idea. So if you, your partner, like on your team, could have blue bowling balls, or red bowling balls, that they just pummel at like almost like a shotgun, that they shoot out at the other. That's a great idea. I want to see that. There's a lot of ideas. It's now trying to show you what it is.

We want to have the drivers in the middle of the arena on Cesar Lifts, and they could actually go up and down to at their will, to better see and control. Wow. And then it would be a perimeter protecting the Cesar Lifts, of course. That's an interesting idea. And they could actually go up and down to at their will, to better see and control. Wow. And then it would be a perimeter protecting the Scissor lips, of course.

That's an interesting idea. But it just becomes one of these money things. And we didn't want it to wind up being too much like a crazy sort of game show. Yeah. But maybe one day we'll add some cool stuff, extra stuff. Or even just the perch above, it's interesting. I guess in terms of steering,

they'll probably where they are is probably the best place for actual steering. Back to driving, driving is interesting. I guess in terms of steering, they'll probably where they are is probably the best place for actual steering. Back to driving, driving is difficult. It's difficult just to drive remote control anything away from you. When you turn it towards yourself, it changes everything's backwards. Yeah, all the way everything.

And when robots flip up, say down, now you're dealing with multiple factors. Then you've got all kinds of things. It's a wheel bent. Is it gripping? So now I can't drive straight because this is gripping. Is it tire slipping more? Is it tire gripping more? Is, you know, all these different factors, centrifugal motion, you know, all the weapons that spin. They cause an object to arrest, object to motion, centrifugal motion, all that. It makes it much more difficult.

You'll see robots flip up. You'll see things that you just physics happening in that box that affect your driving. So it makes it even harder. People like, why did he miss the robot? They looked like they were trying to hit each other. Well, that's because that's centrifugal weapons forcing him over here. And he's trying to counter and that will

slipped and the traction on that saw blade, Lexan is less than the actual floor, the paint's gone on that part of that section. So, I mean, there's so many reasons it makes it so difficult. It seems like the best spots when they get flipped over can write themselves, or can still continue upside down work, right? The old days we had a lot of robots that lost by getting flipped over. Nowadays, everybody's kind of figured that out.

You've got to make sure you can drive inverted, you better have a strategy. Or you flip flipped over. Nowadays everybody's kind of figured that out. You've got to make sure you can drive inverted better. You better have a strategy. Or you flip back over. Are there any general rules like low center gravity is good or are there any general good practices if you're building a robot? You want good grip because you got to drive, right? The audience complaints a lot about exposed tires. So builders go back and forth having non-exposed tires versus exposed tires. So builders go back and forth having ex non-exposed tires versus exposed tires. Some people don't care because I'm so fast you got to catch me and get the tire off. But the best practices are really probably in the electronics with the lithium polymer batteries, which have a lot of strength to weight ratio. Like,

so you get a ton of power out of those things. When did those first come into the game? Really in the early 2000s. So like Tray said earlier, back in the 90s, it was a car. We had a car battery. Yeah. And then people did NICADs, which were the stuff you'd see in the, you know, you'd shove in your super eight video camera back in the day, right? And now it's lithium batteries.

Your life batteries are like polymer batteries, and that's what's in your electric car. That's what allows the Tesla to go from zero to whatever, and you know, nothing. So you just get that strength, that power out of those. That's why we can see not only the drives go super fast, but the weapons spinning amazingly fast and powerful

and delivering blows like, I don't know, Muhammad Ali bought, you know, just crazy. Is there any downside to speed in a bot? I don't think so. Faster tends to be better. Yeah, we hate wedges, right? Being the first wedge, we hate wedges, right? However, everybody...

You don't have a sweet spot for the wedding. No, we have just the opposite. You know, and one of the ways to fix wedges is you make the floor uneven. You know, or you put bumps and change the floor, you put it in a different way, you go up and insh or whatever, and that would change it. But that also takes away from speed.

And speed is good. Speed makes great television, speed makes great action. You come to a live show, we pretty much have been ending the live show with the witch doctor, hypershawk fight. And the two of those robots are so fast, they're just jetting all over the arena and slamming into each other in the parks that are flying. It's spectacular.

But it's a balance, though, because we like to make the floor a little bit uneven, maybe an eighth of an inch, you know, between panels. And there's also little bumps on the floor, these little hellraisers pop up. And that prevents people from overplaying the ground game, which so many robots do nowadays. They'll have a razor-sharp front wedge just to get underneath you. And if we had a perfectly smooth floor, I think these smarter- Everybody would do the same thing. It would be how much nice.

That would be the whole game. Exactly. So you got to add that randomness to it. But the speed's fantastic as long as you can control it. So the season we have Claw Viper, which is a grappler box, which I think can go to across 40 feet and half a second, the length of the box.

It's insane. And it's got magnets that suck it to the battle box floor. And it does, it's, you know. What's the floor made out of for magnets to stick? Steel, a little pain on top, which might screw it up a little bit, depending on the thickness, but steel. Do the contestants know the details like, they'll know it has to work on a wood floor, for example.

I need to build a different bot for the conditions. Yeah, take more of this. We tried to, we put the shelf in without telling my contestants, we surprised when we saw the shelf in without telling my contestants. We surprised them. What's the shelf? The shelf is that new feature, that upper deck, which has the screws. The shelf. Yeah. They weren't real happy about that, but because there's kind of two entrapment spots now on the sides, they don't like it. But both sides have the same. Yes. Yeah. It's not like, why is this certain bot? Like a full body spinner or a horizontal spinner

has really spin up that weapon quickly and they better not get trapped in those short corners. Otherwise, without a full leaf up to speed weapon, otherwise they could be, they're super vulnerable back there. It's got a disadvantage. But we've, they bug us for, give me the specs of the saw blade slot. So I won't get stuck in them.

Give me the specs for, you know, this, this, this, and we give it to them so they can retool and re-engineer to not get as stuck as maybe they would have in a previous season. Do you guys have to remain impartial or do you root for certain robots at certain times? Inside, definitely rooting outside just have to remain impartial, yeah. Why would it matter if you were partial?

It doesn't matter. I mean, just because it's a TV show and there's the specter of like I said earlier, like, of people think just because we're so used to reality show and politics, people think there's shenanigans going on and everything. But I think Tranae both want at some point want a launcher to win the damn fight, the giant nut. Every time somebody wins with whatever style they have, it changes the playing field. You know, when an uppercutter wins, everybody builds it, everybody goes to a tombstone wins,

everybody builds a tombstone. And you know, this year, when you see who wins, I'm gonna be a lot of people coppin' that robot, you know, because that's what they do. So we've always loved flippers, flippers are great. They're great eye candy. They're great to see you when you're there live. And you see like, you know, when they were really small, they're so cool. Slamming hands. The walker are so cool watching live.

Yeah. That's what they can do. Just tell me about the mindset of going in. Let's say, let's say you were going to make a new bot. Tell me what do you, where, where does the thinking begin? You know, so long as she was our first bot, our second bot was Gensu. Gensu was the Sobelids for Wheels. Gensu could kill you in seconds. It not only would take your leg off, but it would, you know, you would be dead. It's one of those robots you look at and you are afraid of just because of what you see. It's basically a circular saw robot. Yeah. It's a circular saw that can chase you across the room.

And supergins some ways or this big. You know, they are massive. You know, you look at nightmare. That's a robot. You look at that, that could kill me. You know, within a second, and I would have no memory of it ever again, and no memory ever again. Those are robots that are interesting

because they come with a mindset where you look at, you know, tombstone. Yeah. Okay, maybe a cure or better one would be witch doctor. You know, witch doctor, you kind of. Looks kind of fun. It looks kind of fun and it tosses robots around and it's a very great robot against other robots,

but it's probably not going to kill me. It might, but it's probably not gonna kill me, it might, but it's probably not unless they got me in a certain spot, you know, or a certain way. So there's a mental part of it, you know, how can you build a robot that looks, you know, like if I was gonna throw a robot in to stop somebody from hurting me or take it to war, Gensu's the robot I take,

because you roll that out there, people are running, you know, where some of these other ones are, you know, although they make great fighting robots. So what would I make? I don't know. I think jumping has been under not, not even the general, not even the general, not bouncing. Yeah, no one's built a jumper yet. It'd be cool to see something jump hop, you know, and then something pops out of it. So you're not thinking in terms of,

this is what I think will win. You're thinking, this is something I'm curious to see. There's multiple mindsets. There's the mindset of, I want to win, and then you study everything that's won, and a lot of those people will wind up building a vertical spinner with four wheels, of which Dr. Hypershock bite force end game,

clone with a little bit of their own pizzazz thrown on top of it. Then there's the people who say, I wanna break the meta, I wanna do something totally different, and their mind goes into the creative mode. And then you get the huges, you get the mammoths, you get what else, you get even like a tantrum, which is a vertical spinner, but it punches.

And we always tell people, you know, we like the meta robots, the ones that do well, that's fine, but always try to come up with a new twist on the tried and true weapon systems that everyone's been using. So if you're gonna do a vertical spinner, do something different with it,

and tantrum did that for instance. Can you imagine someone coming up with a new robot that beats all of the past winners? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, that's possibly. When we look at some of the new ideas that we end up letting in the past winners. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When we look at some of the new ideas that we end up letting in the past, sometimes you

go, well, you know, that looks like it can do something. We just saw a new design the other day for potential season eight. That's really interesting, totally different than anything we ever seen before. So that might come to proving ground. Yes. So someone might come up with a breakthrough design that nobody thought of before. And it may work in a way in the practical world that's unexpected. 100%. What we're seeing, a lot of back in the day, we saw weapon types get invented. Right. So back in the day, you'd see, oh my god, someone did a horizontal spinner. Now they change it to a vertical spinner. Now they change it to a

drum. Now someone did a flipper. Now they did a hydraulic flipper. So there'd be these kind of weapons would be invented. Now we've kind of seen most of the weapons. There's probably still something that someone hasn't come up with yet. But now you see the refinement, right? You do the vertical spinner that's got the tooth on it. That's off center. And that punches them up and good, they go, you do the vertical spinner, that's off access, you do the vertical spinner with a flywheel, which is riparoney this season, right? You do those kind of refinements, so per se, more. Or is it like blip? You know, blip is a wedge, you know, with the flipping mechanism,

but how he made that mechanism work is where the technology is. I mean, came out totally. It just has so much more power than anything. So much more power. And the idea is from a Trevice. You know, so ancient technology moved in the future and just spectacular implementation of the entire idea. So cool. My wife wants to make the Bionic Bouncing Boob, which is basically a ball that, you know, with spikes on it that just bounces,

has an offset weight in it and drive it. There's gotta be some jumps. You know what's done jumping? We gotta have jumping. We allow flying and all that. See, you could make something that flies. We had a couple of bots that were, one was lighter and there had balloons on it.

That didn't work real well. We had a guy that showed up a couple years with the, you know, kind of robot never competed, but it was supposed to float above the ground or fly above the ground. Oh yeah. We've had, you know, people come with drugs and flight doors and that kind of thing that none of that seems all kind of one hit wonders This point flying is an interesting idea going up from it above and trying to do any use Treads like tank treads instead of yeah one of the bots in the live shows Diablo, which is a shredded bot

Yeah, and we'll probably see some dread bots next year. A Mosul fire in the new season is a dreaded bot. And it's interesting because sometimes treads is a fantastic way to outmaneuver your opponent. And other times it slips and slides. And you're screwed, you're stuck in one place, you're slipping and sliding. So that's the new game, right, with treads.

Like, okay now do I have to put nails in the treads to get more grip or what do I got to do? Right? People have figured it out with the wheels. Now they got to figure out what the treads. So there's always this what was the breakthrough with the wheels? The wheels has been people do everything from putting tennis balls inside of them. I've seen people put Coca-Cola on them. I've seen just getting the right tread like an all-weather tire you would have. People do it like HyperShock as an interesting tread profile.

But it's also obviously the motors and gearboxes attached to them to get the right torque on the tire itself from the get-go, all kinds of stuff. Our contestants have wheel fetishes. Yes. And I had no idea. When we had the contestants build these robots for our live show. We had which doctor build five witch doctors and stuff. And I you know said okay let's try to use as many of the same motors as we can.

So I don't need to stock all these different motors and this kind of stuff. And I never thought the wheels were going to be an issue. I thought oh we're just going to use all the same wheels or whatever everybody's got their own wheels. They want their own wheels and can't change the wheels because it's a look in their thing. And so I had no idea that there were so many kind of cool. Kind of cool. Yeah, kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah, hyper shockwil and blazing their tires

with their logo. Yeah. I mean, they're cool stuff. Yeah. Cool. Is there anything else that I should know about this sport that I don't know? I would say, you know, most important thing is come and see it.

Come and see the first hand. It's totally different than what you see on television. Yeah. Yeah, and you got to come to both. The live show is great. You know, that's entertainment. The TV shooting is phenomenal because of the energy it takes. What would it take to have a live show that could go on the road? So the box that we presently have is designed to be a portable box.

It has designed to be moved to set up and torn down and that's what it was done. That's how we did the event in the past. We go to Long Beach, set it up, hold the vent, take it down. So it's portable. The problem is now is the robots have gotten so tough that we really need to reinvent this box and make it more of a permanent box. But when we do that, we'll have our old box that'll be ready to go portable again. The biggest issue with going on the road is the cost of setting up the battle box. The battle box is it takes a while, takes time, takes a lot of manpower, so it's a very heavy, fits in 18 trucks. Is there any venue that would be safe where you wouldn't need the box?

Now with people around. No way, no way. I mean, we've had this dream of doing it out in the salt flats with the audience watching, but if you watch virtually, you know, it's not there, you gotta see it. When this stuff slams in the glass in front of you and you kinda just go, you know.

And we get this thing all the time like people when they come see it live, like, oh my God, I can't believe how big they are. Because TV shrinks everything. That's why you gotta come see the thing live because you'll smell it, you'll feel it in your bones, the arena will shake, the motors, you'll hear it, it's the full five senses, you know, on alert.

When you, you know, the hair's in the back, your neck, that's you only get that from the live experience. I can't wait. It's cool. It sounds great. Yeah. Battlebot.com slash tickets. I have to plug it.

I have some. Battlebot.com slash tickets. Yes, I'm great. Cool, man. Well, thank you guys so much for coming and doing it. Thank you for having us. We're fans. you