Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick

Werner Kraus leads robotics research at Fraunhofer IPA, where 1,000 engineers work on production systems and the unglamorous infrastructure that makes humanoids commercially viable: standards. Not the headline-grabbing demos, but the 30-40 tests required before a robot can enter a semiconductor clean room. The certification processes that determine if particle emissions from gear grease will conta...

Chris Kudla, Co-Founder and CEO of Mind Children, explains why his company is building social humanoid robots instead of utility workers. While most humanoids focus on warehouse tasks and manufacturing, Mind Children is tackling the harder problem: creating robots for education, healthcare, hospitality, and elder care—applications where empathy and emotional connection matter most. In this convers...

Joe Michaels, SVP of Sales and Marketing at 1HMX, explains why haptic feedback and teleoperation are critical for training humanoid robots. While synthetic data and video help robots learn basics, the fine-tuning that makes them truly functional comes from human operators using advanced haptic gloves with 135 points of tactile feedback. In this conversation from Humanoids Summit 2025, Joe walks th...

Evan Wineland and his co-founder started Weave Robotics with a principle that cuts through the industry's typical timeline: "Deploying is the point. It is the strategy. It is the value." They incorporated in late 2024, had a proof of concept by mid-year, and were shipping paid deployments by late 2025. Just over a year from founding to working robots earning their keep in San Francisco laundromats...

Jeremy Fishel, Principal Scientist at Sanctuary AI, explores why human hands remain robotics' greatest challenge and most important breakthrough opportunity. With nearly two decades of research in tactile sensing, dexterity, and manipulation, Jeremy brings unique insights into why replicating the human hand is exponentially harder than achieving robot vision or locomotion. He discusses a surprisin...

Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), reveals why eight countries have national robotics strategies while America doesn't—and what four decades of industrial robot history teaches us about humanoid adoption. In this interview from Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Jeff explains the critical role of safety standards in commercialization, why Japan's 1960s strategy crea...

Ed Colgate, Northwestern University, and Director of the HAND ERC reveals why the secret to dexterous manipulation isn't precision engineering, but something surprisingly simple: softness and large contact areas. In this conversation from Humanoids Summit 2025, Ed explains the fundamental difference between human and robot manipulation, how AI finally enables control of complex hands, and why arti...

Nic Radford, Co-founder and CEO of Persona AI, sits down with Jeff Frick at Humanoids Summit 2025 (presented by ALM Ventures) to unpack a hard truth: robots aren't difficult to build—they're difficult to make useful. Radford's career arc reads like a tour of extreme environments: NASA space robotics, deep ocean exploration, and now shipbuilding automation. Each demanded solving communication, dist...

What if training a robot to do ONE thing automatically made it better at EVERYTHING? Pete Florence, Co-founder & CEO of Generalist and former Google DeepMind Senior Research Scientist, joins Jeff Frick at Humanoids Summit 2025 to reveal a breakthrough that fundamentally changes how we think about robot intelligence. The big discovery? Robotics has finally found its scaling laws—just like large lan...

Five game-changing AI tips from my training with Kyle "KMo" Moschetto. Discover the RGCOA framework for prompt engineering, why paying for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is essential for serious work, and how understanding tokens, context windows, and temperature settings can dramatically improve your results. Practical, tested insights you can apply immediately to get more from generative AI tools....

Carolina Parada and the team have delivered Gemini Robotics, Google DeepMind's vision-language-action (VLA) foundation model. Gemini Robotics provides the general-purpose 'understanding' enabling robots to go from pixel to action. How do you teach a machine to understand the physical world well enough to move through it, manipulate it, and help people in it, when every case is a corner case, never...

Welcome back.  The world has changed quite a bit since we launched Turn the Lens. And in 2025, my new episode frequency was not as high as I'd like. For a bunch of reasons, some in my control and some not, I haven't been as consistent as I want to be. And I know consistency matters. I appreciate it in the creators I follow, it matters to me, and it matters to you, our community.  My commitment for...

Andra Keay, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, has been at the forefront of robotics research, commercialization, and policy for decades. A self-described "techno-pragmatist," Andra has her pulse on the robotics industry, in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world. Importantly, she is conscious and intentional to try and get ahead of the big issues we face down the road with the...

Salvatore (Sal) Mercogliano (Sal), has a Ph. D. in Military and Naval History from the University of Alabama. He served in the Merchant Marine, has been an Adjunct Professor of History/Engineering at the US Merchant Marine Academy for over 17 years, and Chairs the Department of History, Criminal Justice, and Political Science for Campbell University for over 14 years. So when something happens wit...

Trump 2.0 starts tomorrow. 2025 started 19 days ago. Remember Project 2025? Might be a good time to study up on the subject, at least the basics.  Not ready to read the full 920 pages? Google NotebookLM can help. I encourage you to upload the PDF yourself, and start asking questions. Sharing mine to help get you started.  This is the Podcast Google NotbookLM created from the source material.  Proj...

Ray Kurzweil recently released his new book, *The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI*, a follow-up to his 2006 blockbuster, *The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology*. I had the chance to see him speak at our local bookstore as part of the launch event. A central theme of Ray's talks is the exponential growth of computing power—how we're constantly achieving more computatio...

2,500 pages. How can you quickly and easily digest 2,500 pages of material? More than just a summary or table of contents, what if you could dive into the core issues, pull up a timeline, or even create a study guide? That's exactly what you can do with Google NotebookLM, a powerful new free AI tool that requires no training, coding, or even RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) expertise to put th...

Dan Ariely, the renowned behavioral economist, prolific author, frequent TED speaker, and endowed professor at Duke University, has spent decades studying why people behave the way they do. And let's just say that logic and reasoning do not top the list.  I had the pleasure of seeing Dan speak in person in 2016, and almost a decade later, I was thrilled to host him for this conversation, where we...

Jason Sacks joined the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) 18 years ago, around the same time I began my youth sports journey with my oldest child as he entered kindergarten and joined AYSO, the American Youth Soccer Organization.   When done right, youth sports provide countless character-building opportunities in each practice, game, and activity. To quote NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young,...

George H.W. Bush signed the  Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law 34 years ago today, July 26, 1990. It literally changed our world, from cub cuts, and wide doors, to ramps and more. What is less reported is the secondary and 'law of unintended positive consequences' that come with inclusive design. More accessible for one is more accessible for all. Meryl Evans has been championing the...

Debate. There has been lots of talk lately about debates, winners, and losers. I didn't have any debate team friends in high school or college, and have not been to a real debate. If there are winners and losers, that would imply that there are rules, as victory in most competitions, from basketball to chess to Family Feud, is based on performance within the constraints, the rules, of the competit...

Waymo has been working on autonomous vehicles since it began as the Google Self Driving Car project at Google X in 2009. Spun out from it's parent, and renamed Waymo in 2016, the iterations have developed. So today, June 2024, 15 years later, Waymo opened up it's waitlist, and made it's autonomous ride-hailing service up to anyone in San Francisco. It just so happens that I cleared the waitlist an...

Welcome back for another episode of 'Turn the Lens' with our ongoing conversations with ChatGPT. We've been hitting the heavy topics of ethics and explainable AI. And I think there are some real challenges there that, that we have to overcome. But I want to do something a little bit more fun. So in this episode, we're going to do a different type of project, not so heavy and deep, but hopefully, h...

Eric Law went searching for robotics opportunities in the construction industry, where machines have been used for decades, starting with earth-moving steam shovels in the 19th century. Recently, drones have taken on some of the more difficult and dangerous tasks. Eric discovered numerous opportunities for robotics, but one stood out due to its size, scale, and ubiquity: wood waste from constructi...

(Trains are backing up, so had ChatGPT write this after ingesting the transcript, full disclosure, transparency) ChatGPT  Join us for an enlightening episode of the "Turn the Lens Podcast" with host Jeff Frick as we delve deep into the evolving world of artificial intelligence with our special focus on OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 v2. This episode, titled "OpenAI ChatGPT 4 v2: Explainable AI, Audit, Ethics,...