BattleBots: Greg Munson and Trey Roski

24:22And 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 impounds, you have to do all this crazy stuff. Digital technology slowly started to take 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 hex bugs. And so we have we had an in with them.

24:58So 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 the deal ourselves and the rest is history in terms of what you can buy it target. So tell me why did Comedy Central, I mean, I understand shows get dropped all the time where the number is not good. Comedy Central was sold. That was the biggest reason. So they were sold to MTV and MTV had a deal with robot wars. So that was part of. So robot wars were still going on in the UK based on the deal that you guys set up.

25:35Yeah, 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? 99. 99 exactly. 99 and Comedy Central for five years. No, five seasons. It was really over two and a half years. We did two big seasons per year. I see. And Trays, right, 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.

26:14I see. And there was was Comedy Central to write home for robot war for for bottle box. 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 knocked in every door. They all laughed at us. Of course. Comedy Central laughed and said, hey, maybe we can make a funny show out of this.

26:43So it was a starting point. If not 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 sat, 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.

27:23Right. They partnered on rebooting battle bots for we interdiscovered each other. That show got greenlit in the room, but quickly became a budgetary insane, you know, 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 going to cost a lot of money. And it's not going to make good TV. And I think the part of the beauty of this is the 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?

28:00We'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. And then the deals weren't right either. We could have given it away. We weren't going to do that. We weren't going to let them take advantage of the contestants, which was a robot wars issue. You know, the robot wars took advantage of the contestants and robot wars. If you saw any of the old robot wars, it was the house robots were what they made, right? The house robots are always one.

28:31The 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. So that's great. But we're friends with the Mythbustric eyes, Jamie and Adam, right? And they start doing this podcast called Tested.

29:01And that is manager owned by a company called Well 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 Burnett are going to, and they wanted to change their name, which really pissed me off. They would change it to RoboGadden. And we had spent years building a battlebots brand and they want to change it. So right then, I thought, oh, this is probably not going to happen. But anyway, Jamie says, you got to hook up with this company and 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.

29:38But Chris was super smart, really great. And it 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 sports fan. 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, he's the huge EP from ABC, who launched Lost and Desperate Housewives and Crazy Anatomy. I mean, they're huge shows. We walked in the room and pretty much got a green light almost instantly.

30:17And train, I were like, we never thought we'd make broadcast. It's wild. We're not, we're cable, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we got ABC wasn't great. Good cable. Yeah. 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? They, you know, they were, 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.

30:52And 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 Nick Rigg execs, but they just want to see the number be consistent for the advertising. Yeah. And it's, 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 answer, the reasons and everything else.

31:29So technically, they weren't really our right home for us. But we discovered some cool is that yeah, ABC is probably primarily a female demographic these days, because the show is like the bachelor and all this stuff back then it was, right? But we learned that our family numbers, what they call it co viewing, was really, really good. So that meant families really like the show, which is a valuable, which could be a valuable thing for another network. But anyway, we got lucky because ABC is trying to make a return on their investment into the show, and they start selling it, which is what they do.

32:03They 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.

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33:44And 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.

34:24And 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 is difficult. We're going to 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 championship 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 opportunity. Our deals with discovery are year by year.

35:02Yeah. 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 an old school. You know, I change how 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, do you dive into Netflix before you find it? Or, you know, how much do they promote it? I'm also asking because I've had personally the opposite experience which I was looking for battle bots.

35:36I'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 and it's behind the paywall. 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. Right. And I don't want to see anything on the discovery channel of Ivan Battlebots. Am I going to subscribe to the discovery channel for battle bots? I don't know. Exactly. I don't know. So, in my case, it might have been, I'm an active viewer and I might not be willing to go there. Welcome to the world of television, right, you know, ownership.

36:10It's so confusing. And our international are 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 it and never won. Tell me the story of when when did was the arena originally conceived of and built? So back in the robot worst days, we had a wood, you know, piece of plywood that stood about that high and that was it.

36:48And then we put a piece of lexan in the front and shit would go over the lexander or whatever. And it was very dangerous. It was a little mark, Pauline and away. And part of my input on battle bots 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 through that entire season with very little to any damage, which was great.

37:23And 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 again. And now I've got to go back and my, the arena is my bot now, you know, where I got to, I'm, that's how I try to contain it.

37:58When you come to the event and you see my bulletproof glass, which the glass alone is over a million bucks. Wow. And that arena, the, you know, the thickness of the floor, the, all the, what's the size of it? 50 by 50 roughly. 50 by 50. Yeah. About 25 feet tall. Yeah. Amazing. It's half the size of a basketball court. And it's also changed a lot in, in from the early days. It seemed like it was a lot of ground and pound action. Yeah. 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, it's dramatic. They're tossing people hit the roof this year.

38:34Yeah. So a couple robots, a couple times hit the roof. So you have a 250 pound object. Yeah. Flying, flying 25 feet in the air. And, yeah. And what goes up must come down. It's serious. It's serious. It's serious. You see the dense in the arena. People go, oh my god. And the steel is, you know, it's major. Yeah. It's like a shooting range essentially. It's worse. Yeah. It is worse. These robots could kill people in seconds. You know, 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. Well, if anything were to have someone, it was anyone needs any protection.

39:17Yeah. 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. Well, that's what battle lots will take care of it. Great. We'll take out the other one. When chat GVT7 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 you. Well, Chris, they can, 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.

39:54I forget what it anyway. You can apply there and you upload your pictures, your CAD files, pictures 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 show. How many entries do you get? We've got probably more than 500 in there, but year 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 relegation because they didn't do so hot last season.

40:27But 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 Katling and Chris Cowan will sit there and Tom Gutteridge, who's also on the TV. And 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 10 of those maybe out of the 20 to replace some of the bots who had to go into relegation.

41:00And 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. Is there any way during the weekly shows that you do to be testing the bots for the so that is a great segue and the proving grounds. Yeah. So, you know, 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.

41:46It 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 going to come to the battle bots event, we would have never chose Lamachine to come to the event. Would have never. And Lamachine was one of the greatest robots, television -wise at that time, or, you know, for what it did.

42:24So sometimes just seeing it perform is more important than what you think it's going to 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. Are it arts 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.

42:56You 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, you know, before you ever build anything and see how big and bad these robots really are and how really strong they are. It, you know, they're not toys. They're not little. Some are six feet tall, some are, you know, five, six feet wide. If you look at mammoth, it stands way above you and way wider it and you and but mammoths are great examples because we learned about mammoths from video at a local competition in Florida.

43:29So we got to see it and we're like, oh my god, that thing is crazy. That's got to be on the show where if that was just an application on a website, you'd be like, no, that thing looks like a jungle gym. That's what's going to break in five seconds is what we would have thought. But by seeing it really fight, it actually knocks people out of the arena. I'm like, no, that's cool.

43:48It'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. You know, it's like and it's 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 to 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.

44:22I want you to say I beat you fair and square. Amazing. And they they all love each other. They all get a long terrific and 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 com rotter that Trey was just talking about is huge. It's amazing of them helping each other. But also the just the the trials and tribulations of my whole robot just got destroyed. Literally like two pieces like the fight between cobalt and ghost rapper was split in half and it's like two pieces. Yeah. Chuck rebuilt that whole robot in 48 hours and made his next fight.

44:57Unbelievable. That story is crazy, right? 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 which which happened to glitch last season, sorry, glitch, you can't make it.

45:32And 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 you know, 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 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 on some of their interviewed.

46:10They're all smarter than I mean, you know, at the end of the world, these are the people you want to be with. Yeah. You know, 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, they'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.

46:40Yeah. So we allow sponsorship. When Trey was talking before how we wanted, we wanted to find the right TV deal for the builders as well as for us. It's all about getting the buy off 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. 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.

47:24So you just get money because you're damaged not every they when they're fighting, they see dollar signs. Oh my god, speak controller $2 ,000. Oh, shit, that was a motor. That's another 800 bucks. And but they they know at the end of that fight winner lose. They got some cash. Cool. Yeah. I would say it's mostly a break even deal for most most of the teams. I would imagine from their sponsorship money and maybe their time they put in is a little bit, you know, a little bit more in most cases. Some are some are making money doing it. Not all the sponsors are getting better. But it's sure these people have time to do any other thing in their lives or is this their full time?

47:57No, they're 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 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 big orchestration. But then we make it happen. My guess is what you'll find with your son is that this will inspire him.

48:29And 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 that I don't 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're back in 1994 with the robot, where it's days and all the kids that have grown up with us.

49:03You know, become something special every single one of them. So cool. And there's a whole, like, sort of supply chain culture forming around the sport now. Batteries, players, 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.

49:36Our 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 in the place for for viewers? A thousand, a thousand. A thousand seats. Wow. That we'd like to fill it might way. So far we haven't gotten that far. We're about 300 to 500.

50:11How long has it been where people could just come all the time and see about it? So we just just did our 25th show. So 25th. So it's a brand new thing. Month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So and it's nightly. It's nightly. So battle bots to struck the thorn 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 how per shock which doctor all that stuff. And you can only see this if you come live. Correct. Okay. And then we'll stop that down. That's the thing to think about also.

50:42Would that be a good thing to have on YouTube or Twitch or something? Hell yeah. Just to build the when when we get the proving ground part of it added to destructive fun. 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 eight, 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. They're our next door neighbor. So that's going to be a real challenge.

51:14And a lot of fun. Yeah, they might even be crossover. Who knows for stopping and Hamilton fights robots. You 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 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 as little kids. There's a crossover. There's definitely crossover. Yeah. We get flack from engineers all the time.

51:54They'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 Dynamics stuff is the state of the art for AI controlled and bipedal inverse kinematic walking systems. That can be used for all kinds of stuff. We are remote control attack vehicles to the thrill of you and entertain the control of attack vehicles. But our contestant made the bomb one of the bomb disposal robots, you know, which is similar.

52:36So it's the same principles but a different application. Yeah. And I talked 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 battlebot 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 you know, when Atlas falls down the stairs, well, I'm not going to make it better.

53:12I've dealt with that with Ghost Raptor, whatever it is. Yeah. What you learn from a robot breaking is phenomenal. So we still crash cars. Even though we could crash them on a computer over and over and and not have to physically crash it, we still physically crash cars because we learn something from that. So what you learn from building these robots and building these axles and brakes 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 sure. 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.

53:47I know when it comes to recording studios, the old recording studios that were built before there were computers, the great one sound great. Right. 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. Yeah, the magic that these old studios have. And something gets lost in the translation. There's something that incalculable. Right. That's different than just the stats that are measurable. 100 % and that's what I think we're going to discover with AI is like everyone's on the chat GPT bandwagon. But if you use it spits out stuff that's a little bit generic.

54:28It's a little bit sanitized. I mean, of course, you can prompt it better and it's going to get better and better at tricking us. But it'll never be able to write like Shakespeare. Well, I heard an interesting thing about about all of the different AIs, the competing AIs, 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 or AI homogenization where it's just like, okay, the AI wrote that obviously.

55:13Let'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 that. 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 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.

55:50I 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? We started, it was very simple. There's a few rules, kind of sense. You know, no gunpowder. You know. 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 Mithbusters' guys. Was a gas powered arcs 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.

56:36And it was too much. A rulebook was like 50 pages. You can't do this. You can't do this. You can't do this. But you can't do this. It's stifles over the top. 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 weight rules. And then you have to have an active weapon. And you can't see.

57:01There are size any. Has to fit in the door. Fit in the door. Yeah. But there are ones that have come in the door and then hopefully. Yeah, if you can't fit in the door. We can't. Got to fit in the red square blue square. We had somebody show up the very first year. And, you know, he says, okay, I'm here. You know, where's your robot? He says to my car. And they're like, well, go get it. He goes, well, it's part of the car. And we'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? Throwing this switch of his car. I don't think it would have worked.

57:30But 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 and 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 starts as one breaks off, spreads out the tape and duct tapes up the $70 ,000 robot. And it was great. The audience went crazy. But it didn't make good TV.

58:09It wouldn't have made 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, you know, with. And I doubt he could have done it. I doubt he could have had enough power. I mean, you know, electricity to even pull that 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 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.

58:45It'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 a TV. So we don't want to allow we had people show up with hay lawn to put out some of the gas motors, you know, and stuff hay lawn, there's a, you know, eat sea 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.

59:21Flame makes good television. It doesn't work real well, you know, but it makes good TVC allow that. Tray and I still though, we still have the animal house and the ending of animal house in our heads. And we do want to have a robot that releases 10 ,000 marbles just to see what happened. That would be so great. Clean up on aisle four, but let's do it. And we don't mind psychological warfare either. Tray 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.

59:56It was a study and perfection. And oh my god, we have to fight Carlo. And so instead of stressing over how we're going to beat him mechanically, we tried it psychologically. So we put a picture of his wife on the 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. Tell me some of these. This is interesting psychological. My favorite one was actually Jamie Heinteman. So this is early days away before they were met busters or anything. And he built Lendo.

1:00:28And he's gone up against, I don't know what the other team was, but he goes over and talks to me. He 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 of alka celters in his mouth. And he gets his blood up and he turns himself all red and he turns right. It looks at the guy and he starts drooling out of his mouth and the saliva and bubbles are dripping. And he gets a man. The guy sitting over there just scared to death. He starts shaking. He's going up against him next.

1:01:00Absolutely 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 measure how far they have to 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 going to fight that guy next.

1:01:35So they can get underneath them or do whatever. So there's all kinds of games. They have this idea. So the bot makers don't know who they're going to 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. Right. And so they didn't know until that night before. Right. Morning. You know, now we tell them the first four fights that they're going to be in. You're going to be in four fights. Here's the four people you're going to go up against. And strategically, you can decide which weapons you're going to use.

1:02:04What, you know, 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, you know, the nightmare fight or something. So you can have a different attachment. If you win a fight, and then in your, in the next fight, your robot can change for that. It's just the, what happens if someone has a second matching robot? They can't. We love it. You should have. Because there's so many fights you really should have. You should have a couple of places.

1:02:34You'd be able to have a double. Yeah. People usually have three now. Of the same robot. Yeah. If you see hypershock, you see hypershock. They are rolling deep with three hypershock chases 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. And 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. Pits are unbelievable. When you walk into the venue, you see our arena and everything else. The thousand seats. It's a big, big area.

1:03:11And you pit tent is a little, much bigger than than the arena side. And you see there's 2 ,000 people in there and there's all the pit tables and the parts. Wow. So the pit section is bigger than the arena. It's massive. And the energy in there is unbelievable. So you 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 to, you know, the announcer goes up or Farouk messes up. But we got to read shoot and reshoot, reshoot, 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.

1:03:48And 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, 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 will, 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.

1:04:29The whole box has this exhaust system that, you know, deals with fires. Yeah, Trayscrew 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 just 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 want to 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.

1:05:09So, some 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 going to 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, everything 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.

1:05:41There'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 battle bots give you the ability to do it. Well, it's like the Tibetan monks who do these sand mandalas and spend time making this intricate, intricate sand mandalas with different colors and magnificent.

1:06:22And as soon as it's done, they rip it away. Yeah. And that sort of like speaks to the, um, to see impermanence of everything. Yeah. Right. Everything is a femoral eventually, right? Yeah. And, and that's a good lesson for humans to know because that's it. Life's real. It's 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, the vision was to have it raised two feet off the ground. So you have stuff pop up from underneath.

1:07:00The first of which was the kill sauce. You know, and robots back 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, 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, it's a way to get heavy artillery involved. It is.

1:07:30Yeah. 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, the polarizers are now controlled by the contestants. So they control the hammers. The saws come up randomly. The little flipper things and a couple of things are all done randomly. Do you have like the, the, the corkscrew thing? Yeah. Yeah. Those, those just good turned on. But the, one idea is we're going to allow the contestants to put a weapon on the polarizers. 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.

1:08:07Wow. 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 buy my bot. I see. There's a timing and a strategy. Yeah. So sometimes these are hammer's to color code. It is color code. It is. Well, it's probably not, not good for the audience. Yeah. It's on the floor.

1:08:37It's on the floor. If you see a little diamond that's red underneath the hammer, yeah. 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 should probably come up with a better way for the audience. Would there be any benefit in putting like a red flag and a blue flag on the bots themselves so that because once once they're once they start, we don't know who's red. There's a lower third that shows you something.

1:09:08Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Does it matter? I don't know if it depends. It depends on details. It's 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. 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 tons of ideas. We wanted to have a bowling ball shooting machine that the red and blue side. So if you your partner like on your team, you have blue bowling balls, our red bowling balls that they just pummel like almost like a shotgun that they shoot out at the right idea.

1:09:51I want to see that. There's a lot of ideas. It's now trying 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 and then it would be a perimeter protecting the Cesar lifts, 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 when a crazy sort of game show. Yeah. But maybe one day will add some cool stuff extra stuff. Or even just the perch above is interesting. I guess for in terms of steering, they'll probably where they are is probably the best place for actual steering.

1:10:27Back to driving driving is difficult. Right. Yeah. It's it's difficult just to drive remote control anything away from you. When you turn it towards yourself, it changes. Right. Everything's back. Yeah. Everything. And when robots flip up, say down, now you're dealing with multiple factors. Then you've got all kinds of things as a wheel bent, you know, 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 rest, object to motion, centrifugal motion, all that.

1:11:00It makes it much more difficult. You'll see robots flip up. You'll see things that you just physics happening in that box that, you know, affect your driving. So it makes it makes it even harder. People like, why did why did he miss the robot? They look like they were trying to hit each other. Well, that's because that centrifugal weapons force me over here and he's trying to counter and that will slip and attraction on that saw blade, Lexan is less than the actual floor. The paint's gone on that part of that section. So it doesn't 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?

1:11:38The 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 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 complains a lot about 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.

1:12:12But 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. 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 cars.

1:12:47That'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. Though we hate wedges, right? Being the first wedge, we hate wedges, right? However, everybody don't have a sweet spot for the wedge. 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 level, you go up and insure whatever and that would change it.

1:13:33But that also takes away from speed. And speed is good. Speed makes great television, speed makes great action. And you come to live show. We pretty much have been ending the live show with the witch doctor, hypershock 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 parts that are flying. It's spectacular. But it's a need speed. 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.

1:14:03And 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 smart 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 this season we have clawviper, which is a grappler box, which I think can go to across, you know, 40 feet and half a second, you know, the length of the box. Wow. It's insane. And it's got magnets that suck it to the battle box floor.

1:14:39And 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, we tried to, we put the shelf in without telling my contestants. We surprised. What's the shelf? The shelf is that new feature that upper deck, which has the screws pushed out. Yeah. 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.

1:15:17But both sides have the same. Yes. It's not like, and why is this certain bot like a full body spinner or a horizontal spinner has has that 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, they bug us for, give me the specs of the solvlae 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 reengineer to not get as stuck as maybe they would have in a previous season.

1:15:53Do you guys have to remain impartial or do you route 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 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 a upper cutter wins, everybody builds it, everybody goes to, you know, tombstone wins, everybody builds a tombstone.

1:16:34And you know, this year when you see who wins, I'm going to be a lot of people cop in that robot. You know, because that's what what they do. So we've always loved flippers. Flippers are great. They're great. I can't either. Great to see you when you're live and you see like, you know, when they were really small, you know, so cool. Slaming and small. Or so cool watching live. Yeah. That's what they can do. 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.

1:17:08Gensu was the saw blades for wheels. Gensu could kill you in seconds. It not only would take your leg off, but it would, you know, you would, you'd be dead. It's one of those robots you look at and you are afraid of just because of what you see. You see, it's basically a circular saw robot. Yeah. It's a, it's a circular saw that can chase you across the room. Yeah. And supergrain and come get you. And come get you. This big, you know, they are massive. You know, you look at nightmare. You know, that's a robot. You, you look at nothing that could kill me, you know, within a second, and I would have no memory of it ever again, you know, no memory ever again.

1:17:45Those are robots that are interesting because they come out the mindset where you look at, you know, tombstone. Yeah. Okay, maybe a, 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 unless he 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 going to 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.

1:18:28So what would I make? I don't know. I think jumping has been under not not even just utilized. Founcing. 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 one. 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.

1:19:07Then there's the people who say I want to break the meta. I want to 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 going to do a vertical spinner, do something different with it. And tantrum did that for instance.

1:19:35Can you imagine someone coming up with a new robot that beats all of the past winners? Maybe. 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. Yeah. 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.

1:20:17Right. 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 rip a rony this season, right?

1:20:50You do those kind of refinements. Or is it perfect? 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 up totally. It just has so much more power than anything. So much more power in the ideas from a trevice. You know, so ancient technology, moved in the future and just spectacular implementation of the entire idea. So, so. My wife wants to make the bionic bouncing boob, which is basically a ball that, you know, was spikes on it that just bounces as an offset weight in it and drive it. There's got to be some jumps.

1:21:26You know, one's done jumping. We got to have jumping. We allow flying and all that. See, you could make something that flies. We had a couple bots that were one was lighter, and they're 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 drones and flying throwers and that kind of thing, none of that seems to solve kind of one hit wonders. This point, flying is an interesting idea. Going from above and trying to do any use treads like tank treads instead of.

1:22:00Yeah. Yeah. One of the bots in the live shows Diablo, which is a treaded bot. And we'll probably see some treads bots next year. Yeah. A mollifier in the new season is a treaded bot. And it's interesting because sometimes treads fantastic way to outmaneuver your opponent. And other times it slips and slides and you're screwed. You're stuck in one place or slipping in sliding. So it's, 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.

1:22:32So 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. 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. There is, and I had no idea when we had the contestants build these robots for our live show, which Dr.

1:23:07build five, which doctors and stuff. And I 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 and their thing. And so I had no idea there were so many kind of cool fetages. Yeah. Kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. Hypershock will emblaze in their tires with their logo. Yeah. I mean, there's cool stuff.

1:23:36Yeah. 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's designed to be moved to set up and torn down and that's what it was done.

1:24:11That's how we did the event in the past. We go to Long Beach, set it up, hold the vent and 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. It's a very heavy, fits in 18 trucks. Is there any venue that would be safe where you wouldn't need the box?

1:24:46Now 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, it's not there. You've got to see it. When this stuff slams in the glass in front of you and you kind of 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 got to come see the thing live because you'll smell it. You'll feel it in your bones. The arena will shake. The motor is you'll hear it. It's the full five senses, you know, on alert.

1:25:22When 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. Battlebots .com slash tickets. I have to plug it. I have some all the time. Battlebots .com slash tickets. Yes. Great. Yeah. Cool, man. Well, thank you guys so much for coming and doing it. Thank you for having us. We're fans.