Deployed: Where Physical AI Gets Real

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...

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 helpe...

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 o...

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...

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 Americ...

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...

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 be...

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, i...

Deployed Episode One Drops 3/24 9AM PST.