Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick

Jeff Frick
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Turn the Lens is about exploring the people, topics, and pieces of media that help shape my perspective on the world. The concept behind 'turn the lens' is to look beyond the foreground, beyond the obvious, to see things in a different context, to see things that you might have missed before. Let's get past our own bias and point of view to try and look from a broader point of view, to expand our learning beyond the obvious.

  1. 1D AGO

    Evan Wineland: Deploying is the Point. Affordable Robots that Work | Turn the Lens Ep51

    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. I caught Evan at Humanoids Summit 2025 at the Computer History Museum, then headed up to Sea Breeze Laundromat on Castro Street to see one of Weave's robots actually working. Not a demo. Not a controlled environment. A real robot doing real work for a paying customer, with no safety barriers, while kids walk past and people do their laundry. Evan's background at Apple—robotics R&D and on-device intelligence—taught him that deployment velocity matters more than technological sophistication. The learning that comes from real-world operation is irreplaceable. You can't predict in the lab what reveals itself in the field. The Vertical Integration Bet Weave's counterintuitive strategy: build everything in-house. While the industry talks modular approaches and off-the-shelf components, Evan explains why vertical integration actually accelerates deployment. Yes, there's upfront cost. But the payoff is iteration speed—the ability to modify, adapt, and improve based on real-world feedback without waiting on suppliers or fighting integration hell. The strategy has driven costs down so dramatically that Weave's robots work economically for both large enterprises and small mom-and-pop operations. The laundromat on Castro Street isn't a high-margin Fortune 500 customer—it's a small business where the robot has to pencil out. That constraint forces discipline. Radical Simplification Evan's design philosophy: distill form factors to their simplest possible expression. Remove anything non-essential to doing the job. This shows up in how Weave designed their arms, chose and designed their gripper in-house, and stripped parts from the base of their stationary workhorse units. It's the opposite of feature creep. It's disciplined subtraction. The result: robots that ship now rather than perfect prototypes that ship never. Safety Through Specificity One of the most striking elements at Sea Breeze: there's no cage, no barrier, no safety theater. Kids walk past it. Customers interact with staff nearby. The robot pauses when people enter its workspace, then resumes work. Evan explains that safety isn't just about motor selection and software monitoring—though both matter. It's also about deployment specificity. By narrowing the task set and being deliberate about workspace design, Weave can ensure safer operation than a robot trying to be all things in all environments. And critically: real-world deployment is how you learn about safety challenges you couldn't predict in advance. Picking Your Beachhead Weave chose laundry as their first vertical. Not because laundry is the future of robotics. Because it's a task that matters to people, where a robot can deliver real value, and where the deployment environment is constrained enough to ship quickly. The plan isn't to stay in laundry forever. It's to use laundry as the foundation for expanding to hospitality, manufacturing, and eventually home deployments in 2026. Build the capability in a specific context, then expand. What We Cover: Why "deploying is the point" became Weave's founding mission The timeline from incorporation to paid deployments in under a year Vertical integration vs. modular approaches—the tradeoffs nobody talks about How radical simplification accelerates shipping Safety by design: motors, software, and workspace specificity The laundromat deployment: economics, operations, and customer experience Why some tasks matter more than others for early robotics companies The 2026 roadmap: from businesses to homes What you learn from deployment that you can't learn in the lab The Apple influence: consumer product thinking meets robotics Why This Matters: The robotics industry talks endlessly about the future. Evan's building the present. While competitors chase perfect general-purpose humanoids, Weave is putting imperfect but useful robots into businesses and collecting the data, feedback, and revenue that funds the next iteration. This is the conversation for anyone frustrated by robotics vaporware, curious about what practical deployment actually looks like, or interested in how speed-to-market creates competitive advantage in hardware. Guest Bio: Evan Wineland is co-founder of Weave Robotics, which builds general-purpose robots for homes and businesses. Prior to Weave, Evan worked at Apple in robotics R&D and on-device intelligence/Apple Intelligence. Weave incorporated in late 2024 and shipped paid customer deployments by late 2025. Links: Weave Robotics: https://www.weaverobotics.com/  Humanoids Summit: www.humanoidssummit.com Connect with Jeff Frick:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jefrick  Turn the Lens website: https://www.turnthelenspodcast.com/episodes Work 20XX: https://www.work20xx.com/episodes This interview is a collaboration between Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit, and was conducted at the Humanoids Summit SV, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, December 12, 2024. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures. Learn more about Humanoids Summit at www.humanoidssummit.com #Robotics #Humanoids #GeneralPurposeRobots #WeaveRobotics #Deployment #VerticalIntegration #SanFrancisco #StartupSpeed #PracticalRobotics #AIandRobotics

    19 min

  2. FEB 5

    Jeremy Fishel: Nature's Best Manipulator, Man's Best Controller: Hands | Turn the Lens Ep50

    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 surprising control paradox: humans struggle to master simple machines like excavators (4 degrees of freedom) yet effortlessly control the complexity of our hands and arms (50+ degrees of freedom). The answer lies in millions of years of evolutionary optimization—and this creates a unique opportunity for robotics. In this conversation, Jeremy explains: Why tactile sensing involves more complex physics than vision—it's active interaction, not passive observation The multiple sensing modalities in hands: force, texture, slip detection, thermal sensing, contact geometry Why manipulation is fundamentally about slipping and sliding, not static grasping The durability paradox: creating soft, compliant surfaces that survive years of real-world use Why Sanctuary AI chose hydraulic actuation for their dexterous hands How teleoperation allows robots to learn human manipulation intelligence without evolutionary timescales The three reasons people cite for human-like hands (and which one actually matters most) Sanctuary AI's upcoming next-generation dexterous hand announcement Recorded at Humanoids Summit 2025, December 11-12, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This interview is part of our ongoing collaboration with Humanoids Summit, organized by ALM Ventures. Jeremy previously founded Tangible Research (acquired by Sanctuary AI in 2023) and co-founded SynTouch, developing the groundbreaking BioTac tactile sensor. His research has been cited over 2,000 times and includes pioneering work on Bayesian exploration for tactile object identification. Host: Jeff Frick Production: Turn the Lens / Work 20XX Event Partner: Humanoids Summit, ALM Ventures Show Notes, References, Links and resources: https://www.turnthelenspodcast.com/episodes   YouTube - https://youtu.be/vpk-QgPO6X4

    16 min

  3. JAN 30

    Jeff Burnstein: Robotics Imperative, Standards, National Strategy | Turn the Lens Ep49

    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 created sustained leadership while China dominates today, and how A3 is reframing "robotics" as "embodied AI" to gain traction in Washington D.C. Key Topics: • Why national robotics strategies drive competitive advantage • Safety standards: from 1986 industrial robots to 2025 humanoids • Cultural barriers: Hollywood's Terminator vs. Japan's friendly robots • Hospital robotics: the under-recognized opportunity beyond manufacturing • Historical lessons: hype cycles, dark periods, and realistic timelines • Data privacy and AI training data issues for home robots About Jeff Burnstein: Jeff is President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), leading the organization's standards development, industry advocacy, and policy work including the push for a National Robotics Strategy. A3 developed the first American national robot safety standard in 1986, which became the basis for international ISO standards. With four decades in the robotics industry, Jeff witnessed the first industrial robot revolution and brings essential perspective on adoption cycles and commercialization barriers. Resources: Association for Advancing Automation (A3): https://www.automate.org  World Robot Conference (Beijing): https://www.worldrobotconference.com This interview is co-released by Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures. Recorded at the Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. For more on Humanoids Summit, including May 2026 in Tokyo visit https://humanoidssummit.com/ For more from Humanoids Summit SV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRz7mBlytVs&list=PLJCOPK6OJb1CLbLLXmBCS9sQPTj3kyE-F Jeff Burnstein: Robotics Imperative, Standards, National Strategy | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep49 Disclaimer and Disclosure All products, product names, companies, logos, names, brands, service names, technologies, trademarks, registered trademarks, and registered trademarks (collectively, *identifiers) are the property of their respective owners. All *identifiers used are for identification and illustrative purposes only. Use of these *identifiers does not imply endorsement. Other trademarks are trade names that may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and/or names of their products and are the property of their respective owners. We disclaim proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. No representation is made or warranty given as to their content. The user assumes all risks of use. © Copyright 2026 Menlo Creek Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved

    14 min

  4. JAN 29

    Ed Colgate: Soft Hands, Dexterous Robots | Turn the Lens Ep48

    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 artificial muscles might solve the chronic overheating problem. Key Topics: • Why large soft contact areas matter more than finger articulation • How softness enables sensing and control, not just collision safety • The HAND ERC: 5 universities, 33 faculty tackling robotics' hardest problem • AI-enhanced prosthetics bridging the brain-machine interface bandwidth gap • Artificial muscles using thermal, light, and electrical stimulation • The "beautiful negotiation" of dexterity between humans and environment • Why motion smoothness dramatically affects human acceptance of robots About Ed Colgate: Ed is a Professor at Northwestern University and Director of the HAND ERC (Human AugmentatioN via Dexterity Engineering Research Center), a major NSF-funded initiative bringing together MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Florida A&M, and Texas A&M. The center focuses on advanced hardware, AI control systems, and human-robot interfaces with a decade-long mission to develop dexterous robots that help people be more productive. Recorded at Humanoids Summit 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California Links & Resources: • HAND ERC: [URL] • Northwestern University Robotics: [URL] • Ed Colgate Faculty Page: [URL] • Humanoids Summit: https://humanoidssummit.com • Full show notes: [your website URL/episode] • Video version: https://youtu.be/rO_miJL--n4 What surprised you most about the role of softness in robotic hands? Share your thoughts on our website or social media. About This Series: Part of our comprehensive coverage from Humanoids Summit 2025, featuring 10+ conversations with leaders in embodied AI and robotics. More Humanoids Summit Interviews: • Carolina Parada (Google DeepMind) • Pete Florence (Physical Intelligence) • Jeff Burnstein (A3 - Association for Advancing Automation) This interview is co-released by Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures. Recorded at the Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.  Subscribe for more interviews on the future of work, AI adoption, robotics, and organizational change.

    12 min

  5. JAN 26

    Nic Radford: Declining Labor, Generalizable Skills, Ready Market | Turn the Lens Ep47

    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, distance, and harsh conditions. This time, he's focused squarely on commercial viability from the start. His framework for finding the right market is brilliant: look beyond the traditional "3Ds" (dirty, dull, dangerous) to the fourth D—declining labor supply. But not just any shortage. Radford specifically targets industries where workers are well-compensated, the labor pool is shrinking, and companies are open to innovation. That intersection led him to shipbuilding and the skilled trade of welding. The technical insight? Focus on generalizable skills, not general-purpose robots. Welding represents tool manipulation within defined rules—a capability that extends to painting, grinding, and other skilled trades requiring precision with tools. But the conversation goes beyond technology. Radford addresses the non-technical barriers that can kill adoption: insurance, liability, ethics, and regulatory frameworks. He reveals that Persona's first advisory board hire was an ethics committee chair. Drawing parallels to autonomous vehicles, he explains why insurance companies struggle with accidents "at the hands of a machine," even when overall fatality rates drop dramatically. After three robotics ventures, Radford finally has the convergence he needs: capable AI, willing investors, and most importantly, customer partnerships embedded from day one. He's tired, but he couldn't stay away from the opportunity. This interview is co-released by Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures. Recorded at the Humanoids Summit SV 2025, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. Transcript and Extensive Show Notes YouTube For more on Humanoids Summit, including May 2026 Summit in Tokyo visit  https://humanoidssummit.com/ For more from Humanoids Summit SV  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mbbeOzRPQk&list=PLJCOPK6OJb1CLbLLXmBCS9sQPTj3kyE-F

    19 min

  6. JAN 24

    Pete Florence: Generalist, Scaling Laws, Train One Improve All | Turn the Lens Ep46

    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 language models. At 7 billion parameters, models cross an "intelligence threshold" where more data predictably equals more intelligence. No more hitting walls. No more plateaus. Just continuous improvement. But the real magic is cross-task generalization: when you train on one skill, the robot gets better at all skills. It's not just learning faster—it's learning universally. Pete explains why Generalist is betting on generalist robots (yes, the double meaning is intentional) when specialists have dominated for decades, how smaller models experience "ossification" and literally stop learning, and why reaching a "data-rich regime" of 270,000+ hours of real-world interaction data changed everything. He also introduces fascinating concepts like "physical hallucinations" (when robots confidently do the wrong thing) and why teaching robots epistemic humility—the ability to say "I don't know"—might be more critical than any task-specific training. From his award-winning work on Dense Object Nets at MIT to pioneering RT-2 and PaLM-E at Google DeepMind, Pete has been at the cutting edge of embodied AI. Now with GEN-0, he's proving that foundation models can work in the physical world—with all the scaling properties that made LLMs so powerful. Key Topics: The 7B parameter intelligence threshold breakthrough Why training one task improves all tasks (cross-skill learning) GEN-0: First embodied foundation model with proven scaling laws Generalist vs specialist: Why Pete's betting against conventional wisdom Ossification: When models give up and stop learning Physical hallucinations in robotics 270,000+ hours of real-world data and why it matters The data-rich regime that enables scaling Teaching robots to know their limits Comparing robotics timelines to autonomous vehicles Guest Bio: Pete Florence is Co-founder & CEO of Generalist, an embodied AI company building foundation models for physical robots. Previously a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, Pete led groundbreaking research on RT-2 (vision-language-action models) and PaLM-E (embodied multimodal language models). He earned his PhD in Computer Science from MIT under Russ Tedrake, winning multiple Best Paper awards including CoRL 2018 for Dense Object Nets and the IEEE RA-L Best Paper Award 2020. His work has been cited over 20,000 times and featured in the New York Times, WIRED, and CNN. About the Event: Recorded at Humanoids Summit 2025 (December 11-12) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The Summit brought together 2,000+ attendees from 400+ companies and 40 countries, featuring leaders from Google DeepMind, Boston Dynamics, Physical Intelligence, and dozens of humanoid robotics startups. Links: Pete Florence: https://www.peteflorence.com Generalist AI: https://generalistai.com GEN-0 Blog: https://generalistai.com/blog/nov-04-2025-GEN-0 RT-2 Research: https://robotics-transformer2.github.io Humanoids Summit: https://humanoidssummit.com Host: Jeff Frick, Turn the Lens / Work 20XX Episode: 46 Series: Humanoids Summit 2025 Interviews Listen to our full series from Humanoids Summit, including interviews with Carolina Parada (Google DeepMind), Jeff Burnstein (A3), and other robotics leaders.

    24 min

  7. JAN 22

    Stop the Slop: Five AI Fundamentals, Smarter Prompts, Real Results | Turn the Lens Ep45

    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. Stop the Slop: Five AI Fundamentals, Smarter Prompts, Real Results | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep 45 YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOMin0E1BoA&list=PLZURvMqWbYjk4hbmcR46tNDdXQlrVZgEn Transcript and Show Notes

    6 min

  8. JAN 19

    Carolina Parada: Embodied AI, Gemini Robotics, Delightful Surprise | Turn the Lens Ep44

    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 experienced in training? Embodied AI. AI with arms and legs and the ability to interact with the real world. Gemini Robotics is designed to generalize across platforms, so it works for robots that walk, roll, fly, and swim, with any end-effector, be it a hand, gripper, pincher, or suction cup. Gemini Robotics is designed to generalize across tasks and skills to respond to just about any request that the robot receives. I sat down with Carolina to explore Google DeepMind's approach to embodied AI at the Humanoids Summit 2025, hosted and organized by ALM Ventures at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Carolina has been working on teaching machines to recognize and respond to the environment in more human-centric ways, starting with speech and voice, then computer vision, and now robotics. At the heart of her work is Gemini Robotics, a foundation model that takes the multimodal reasoning capabilities of Gemini and extends them into the physical world. It's a VLA, vision-language-action, model. Going beyond "how many cars are in this image?" to "dunk the ball" when playing with a basketball toy. Embodiment-agnostic, it can adapt to control any robot: manipulators, mobile platforms, and the quickly developing humanoids. Data, Constitutional AI, teleoperation, video training, good candidates for the top concepts covered. But what impressed me more was her description of bringing new people in to experience the robots, inevitably asking the robots to do things they've never heard before, or interacting in Japanese or another language, only to have the robot respond appropriately, creating 'delight, surprise, and joy.' That is a robot future I can get excited about. Please join me in welcoming Carolina Parada to Turn the Lens, in collaboration with Humanoids Summit and ALM Ventures. This interview is a collaboration between Turn the Lens and Humanoids Summit, and was conducted at the Humanoids Summit SV, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, December 12, 2025. Humanoids Summit is organized and hosted by ALM Ventures  Carolina Parada: Embodied AI, Gemini Robotics, Delightful Surprise | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep 44 Learn more about Humanoids Summit at http://www.humanoidssummit.com YouTube https://youtu.be/BUH1CysZX6A Trancripit and Show Notes

    20 min
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Ratings & Reviews

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About

Turn the Lens is about exploring the people, topics, and pieces of media that help shape my perspective on the world. The concept behind 'turn the lens' is to look beyond the foreground, beyond the obvious, to see things in a different context, to see things that you might have missed before. Let's get past our own bias and point of view to try and look from a broader point of view, to expand our learning beyond the obvious.

Information

  • Creator
    Jeff Frick
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Menlo Creek Media, 2020 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick