Deployed: Where Physical AI Gets Real

Innovation Says Yes, Operations Says No: Erik Nieves on Where Pilots Die

Erik Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Plus One Robotics and a 25-year veteran of Yaskawa Motoman, one of the industry’s largest robot makers, where he ran the technology group. Since founding Plus One in 2016, he has focused on vision-guided robots doing real parcel work for the big couriers, a fleet that has now passed two billion picks. Erik joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about the distance between a robot demo and a real deployment, what it takes to sell automation to companies a thousand times your size, and why a human in the loop still keeps the robots working. The conversation ultimately points toward a future where progress comes less from how robots move than from how well hands and eyes work together, built by engineers who have lived with the problem on the operator’s side. Also, check out the live stream response to Figure's Demo! https://bit.ly/4czQ37G

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Don’t Automate What You Don’t Understand: From MIT to the Toyota Factory Floor with Russ Tedrake

Russ Tedrake is a renowned roboticist, MIT professor, and founder and CEO of Walden Robotics. After decades of advancing robot locomotion, manipulation, and AI—including influential work with humanoids and the DARPA Robotics Challenge—he is now focused on bringing intelligent robots into real manufacturing environments. Russ joins Brad Porter for a candid conversation about leaving the lab for the factory floor, the practical choices behind robots that can work today, and what the physical AI boom could mean for the future of manufacturing. The conversation ultimately points toward a future where robots don’t simply replace individual tasks, they help factory workers and production engineers improve entire systems faster than ever before. 0:00 Intro 2:00 Lessons from Atlas: deforming legs and broken hands 6:30 Kung-fu humanoids: entertainment vs. real-world value 8:20 The real world is the ultimate eval — and the Walden pitch 11:30 Humanoid or not? Wheeled base, grippers, and safety cases 15:30 Why floors matter: flatness, wear, and messy facilities 19:20 Generality and embodiment: how much does morphology matter? 22:50 What data is actually salient? Filtering and noisy data 26:50 Challenges as evals: the Amazon Picking Challenge and its alumni 29:00 Capital, bubbles, and whether this time is different 31:00 Reshoring, export rules, and the logistics engine 33:40 Tips for founders and Chesterton's fence 36:10 Factories are dynamic: co-evolving with robots 37:20 The metronome effect and compounding automation gains 41:15 Vibe coding the factory floor and the Toyota Production System 45:30 The vibe at MIT, and closing

The Founder Who Made the Web Human: Mike McCue on Netscape, Tellme & Flipboard

Mike McCue has spent 40 years building the tools that made the web more human, Paper Software, Netscape, Tellme Networks, and Flipboard. In this episode of Deployed, he sits down with Brad Porter, the founding engineer he once recruited at Tellme, to talk about what it actually takes to ship hard technology across the internet, mobile, and AI eras. They get into the first-principles call that saved Tellme (walking away from a company-defining AT&T check), how to build teams that compound, why he shipped voice AI two decades before the world was ready, and two unforgettable Steve Jobs stories, including the day Jobs picked up an iPad and explained Flipboard's purpose better than Mike could himself.

Teaching a Robot to Drive Itself: Aicha Evans on Intent, Instinct, and Real World Deployment

Brad Porter sits down with Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox and one of the few people who has actually put fully driverless robotaxis on public streets–no steering wheel, no safety driver, no one to take over. They get into what really happens when a robot car meets the real world. Aicha traces her path from a childhood between Senegal and Paris–hacking the phone to call home because the bill ran a thousand dollars a month–to Intel, to the Zoox factory floor at the start of production. She dismantles the debate consuming physical AI, arguing that the models will commoditize but hardware-software integration never will, and that the real moat is people who can sit at the same table with equal decision rights.

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The Deal That Invented Defense Tech: Teresa Carlson on Selling What Doesn’t Exist Yet

In 2013, Teresa Carlson led a team of four to bid against hundred-person squads for the CIA’s first commercial cloud contract. Competitors called to laugh, and she figured she’d either get promoted or fired. She won, delivered in record time, and accidentally created the playbook that made “gov tech” and “defense tech” real categories where none had existed. Before any of that she spent five years as a speech-language pathologist at the Nuremberg Hospital, transforming Romanian orphans through therapy, nutrition, and relentless contextual cueing. It is the same listening-first operating system she later used to sell Amazon, and then the US government, on ideas neither was sure it wanted. Teresa sits down with Brad to trace the line from a Kentucky clinic to the CIA’s server room to the General Catalyst Institute (recorded just before she was named Anthropic’s first Global Head of Public Sector), where she built the bridge between venture-backed startups and the world’s largest, most conservative buyer, and what “shovel-ready capability” means for companies like Cobot bringing physical AI to government today.

He Built Humanoids for DARPA: Sidd Srinivasa on Why They’re the Wrong Default Robot

Brad Porter sits down with Sidd Srinivasa, the roboticist he recruited to build Amazon’s Robotics AI org and now a professor at the University of Washington’s Allen School. They get into the gap between what robotics promised and what it actually delivered, why a robot that helps a paralyzed person eat is really a problem about dignity, why Sidd thinks the humanoid is the wrong default (“we humans are a local minimum in evolution”), why most robot demos are the easy 30 percent, and why moving the field forward takes uncommon sense: you have to be contrarian and correct.

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Liberating the Human Middleware: Pat Shanahan on Why AI Frees People Instead of Replacing Them

Pat Shanahan has deployed some of the most complex systems ever built. Thirty years at Boeing on the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey, the F-35, the 777, and the 787. Then Deputy and Acting Secretary of Defense under Secretary Mattis, leading a department of more than 3 million people. Then the turnaround of Spirit AeroSystems. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019, and he helped Brad and the team at Scale AI. In this episode of Deployed, Brad Porter and Pat Shanahan get into what it actually takes to put hard new technology into the hands of the people doing the work. Pat tells the story of betting the company on designing the 777 entirely on a computer, and the moment on the factory floor when everyone was sure it would fail. They cover his rule of "only three miracles at once," why every deployment is a people problem before it's a technology problem, the difference between AI "safety" and product integrity, and why a man who has shipped at the largest scale there is wishes he could go back 20 years in his career with these tools.

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The Demo Was Never the Hard Part: David Mindell on What It Takes to Deploy

Brad turns the tables on his former MIT professor, David Mindell. David is a historian, deep-ocean robotics pioneer, founder of Humatics, and now an investor in industrial transformation through his firm Unless. They trace the thread from James Watt’s steam engine to robots two miles deep in the ocean to the warehouse floor: why the demo is never the hard part, why industrial transformation runs on “human time” and takes about 30 years, why the real automation problem is too few robots rather than too many, and why — from Thinking Machines to OpenAI — there’s no technology story that isn’t a human story.

No Such Thing as a Purely Technical Decision: Scarlett Koller From MIT to Mars to Mithril

Brad reconnects with Scarlett Koller, who he first met as an MIT sophomore for Amazon’s original Prime Air intern cohort, back when drone delivery was a “60 Minutes” segment, not a product. She’s since delivered on SpaceX Crew Dragon, NASA Perseverance, and Amazon Kuiper, and now runs Mithril , a deep tech startup reshaping space sensing. They trade stories on why NASA’s shuttle veterans cared so much about a simple handle, why people are harder to engineer than radiation, and how an antenna the size of a volleyball court, controlled to the thickness of a sheet of paper, could keep us from losing low Earth orbit.

The Most Expensive Introduction Ever Made: Ross Fubini and Anduril's Origin Story

Brad reconnects with Ross Fubini, the two met as Netscape interns when being a nerd wasn't cool. Ross went on to accidentally make the most valuable introduction in Silicon Valley history, connecting Palantir's first employees, then built XYZ Venture Capital around the network that followed. They trade notes on what the browser wars actually teach us about the AI wars, why only 40 people in America know how to sell tech to the Pentagon, and whether OpenAI ends up like Netscape: world-changing, then gone.

The Global Software Market Is Just Too Small: Bilal Zuberi on Physical AI's Moment

Brad Porter sits down with Bilal Zuberi: MIT PhD, former Lux Capital GP, and the investor behind Applied Intuition, the most profitable physical AI company you've probably never heard of. They dig into why the smartest money is leaving mega-funds, what separates visionary founders from execution founders, and why the entire enterprise software market is smaller than most people think. Bilal makes the case that AI's real impact isn't in chatbots, it's in a physical world that's stayed dumb for decades.

Is The World Really Built for Humans? Unlocking AI’s Potential with Alfred Lin

Everyone says humanoid robots will win because the world was built for humans. But was it? Sequoia Capital partner Alfred Lin joins Cobot CEO Brad Porter for a conversation spanning their shared history, from the Zappos deal that almost convinced Amazon robots would never work, to why Alfred's father's journey from farmer to bank president is the best case for AI optimism. They dig into why the best robot form factor might not have hands at all, what the "ChatGPT moment" for robotics already is, and why every technology wave demands a combination of new hardware and software that we haven't yet seen on the consumer side for AI. Sign up for exclusive insights from leaders in Physical AI and Robotics: https://cobot-deployed.com/RSS2

Scale like Amazon: How Jeff Wilke is Rebuilding USA Manufacturing

Jeff Wilke scaled Amazon from a startup to the most sophisticated automation operation on earth. Now he's focused on rebuilding American manufacturing. Brad Porter and Wilke go deep on what enterprise AI looks like in practice, from warehouse automation and autonomous mobile robots, to the Physical AI deployment lessons that only come from running operations at massive scale. If you're building, investing in, or deploying robotics and automation, start here. Sign up for exclusive insights from leaders in Physical AI and Robotics: https://cobot-deployed.com/RSS1

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Deployed Trailer

Deployed Episode One Drops 3/24 9AM PST.