John Remar - Executive Vice President & Referee at BattleBots

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to John, the Executive Vice President and Referee at BattleBots. And we discuss how BattleBots has grown from humble beginnings to television sensation, the impact BattleBots has had on introducing technology to the next generation, and the future of robotics. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. How do you even get involved with something like that? Like, how did you get involved with BattleBots?

(John at 00:00:42) Oh, it's actually just knowing the right people, being at the right place at the right time. I grew up with the CEO of BattleBots, Trey Roski. We're actually both dyslexics, and our moms ran into each other back in the late seventies when there wasn't a whole lot known about being dyslexic, and they were looking for a school for their kids. And so they met at this meeting. My mom told Trey Roski's mom about the school on the East Coast, so we ended up going to boarding school. And that's exactly how we met. And so he's the one that started BattleBots, and I guess I've been riding his coattails ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) Dude, that's super exciting. And my wife and I, we were watching it last night because I hadn't seen this in, I don't know, probably like ten years. You know, like, you know BattleBots exists if you're a nerd, right? Because you can't help but come across flame-throwing robots beating each other to death. But, you know, I hadn't seen this in so long. The robots are so advanced now. I purchased, I think it's just, was it Discovery Plus? Is that what you guys are on?

(John at 00:01:48) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) Purchased a Discovery Plus membership. We started skimming through the seasons and episodes, and I was like, it's just so much more intense than it was when I had seen it last, like ten, fifteen years ago.

(John at 00:02:01) Oh yeah. There's just the technology has grown so much. You know, just battery power alone has given us an opportunity to create some of the most amazing robots. And I say, wait, I'm obviously not one of the creators of the robots, but I get to watch them and I get to enjoy them. But yeah, they're pretty vicious, those robots. That's why we've built this incredible BattleBox to keep everybody safe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) They move so much faster now. That's like the big difference is their agility, their nimbleness, their quickness. But when was the first time you ever saw robots fight?

(John at 00:02:34) The first time was back in the late nineties. And my friend Trey, who is the CEO, entered this local competition in the Bay Area in Northern California. And he showed me some video, and it's quite an amazing story because they had different weight classes at that time. And they entered with one of the lower weight classes. And they kept winning and winning until they had beaten everybody in their weight class, and then they kept moving up and started to beat all the big boys. And, you know, it was exciting to know somebody in it and to see somebody succeed in it and to win in it. So that was the first time, late nineties.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:16) So he had entered that competition?

(John at 00:03:18) He did. He did, along with his cousin Greg. And his cousin, Greg, and Trey are both the creators of BattleBots. And so they took that energy, that excitement, and they built BattleBots, something that has never been done before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) So they entered this competition. They're like, this is great, and now we're gonna go make more of these competitions.

(John at 00:03:40) That's right. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:41) Then, like, come on, John. We need a referee.

(John at 00:03:45) Actually, the very first one was in Long Beach, California at the Pyramid. And Trey called me up. I had a production company at the time. I was producing commercials, and Trey said, "Hey, do you know anybody that can help us film this thing? We've never done this before." And I said, "Yeah, me." And so we produced this very first event. It was in front of a live audience as well as streamed live back on ZDNet TV, I believe is what it was called. And it was one of the largest streams of its time. And so I started off on the production side. And as things grew and as we started to talk with Comedy Central, I came in and stayed involved in the business end of things. And Trey asked me to be the referee, and I thought, you know, I would love to do that because it gives me a chance to do something I'd never done before, which is be in front of the camera. And it gave me the best seat in the house. And I'm not shy about saying that. I love that part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:46) That is so cool. Yeah. You could tell too. Like, I can see the energy that you have when you're doing it. Do you have any cool fun story? Like, have you ever actually really needed a ref? Like, people get upset at each other and...

(John at 00:05:00) We had our very first warning this season, and that was pretty minimal in terms of warnings. And so, yeah, they get upset. But typically, they get upset at each other every now and then. Something happens, and you just have to tell them to take it easy. But, you know, it's not like Major League Baseball where, you know, they're getting in each other's face or, you know, somebody's coming out to talk to an umpire and yelling and screaming at them, and we have to kick them out. We don't wanna kick anybody out. You know, when you kick somebody out, you lose an entire team. You're not just losing one player. So, yeah, it's not quite that dynamic, but there's a lot of emotion that's brought. Lot of emotion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:42) Yeah. I wanted to know, like, behind the scenes if anybody, like, ever just got in a straight-up brawl over their robots.

(John at 00:05:48) Nobody's brawled. I've been pushed once before. It was a little bit out of emotion and kind of "get out of my way. You're kind of in my way," and that was by one of our female contestants. I've been, "What the eff, ref." But, you know, most of the time, the guys and the people that are involved in BattleBots are pretty cool. In fact, a lot of times they're so nice to each other, you wonder, are we gonna be able to create a reality show and create some drama? But this season, they brought it. This season, they really did. There's a lot of really good drama this season and a lot more still to come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:27) Is it like a lot of the recurring teams that come? Because I flipped through a couple of the seasons just to try to watch the progression. So how does that work? Like, how do you guys get these teams to... Are they doing it because they love the robots? Is it helping promote their business? What's the drive for these people?

(John at 00:06:43) You know, I'd say the drive is different. It varies from team to team, but the commonality is they love it. They love to do it. They love to build. They're amazing, amazing thinkers. They come from some of the most amazing careers. They're engineers. And some of them are engineers by trade or by school, and others just pick up the craft by learning. And so, I think I've gotten lost in the weeds of your question. So if you wanna ask it again, I wouldn't mind trying to answer it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:18) Oh, no worries. I don't even remember what I asked. But I was, I think I was on Netflix or Amazon Prime, and I saw this movie. I thought it came out this year, right? Like, I thought it was a new movie, but I found out the other day in our production meeting, it's pretty old. It's called Real Steel with Hugh Jackman.

(John at 00:07:36) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:36) When the... It's like this robot fighting thing is penetrating culture. It's becoming like a... They fantasize that so far out. That was like BattleBots in 2100. Did they call you up when they were making that movie?

(John at 00:07:51) You know, the movie was a lot of fun to see because it involved what we do. Of course, it created a level of interest where people wanted to see robots fight like that. And we're just not quite there yet, but we're getting close. And this season, we introduced some walking type of robots, but what they created was all, of course, CG. And so we're real and real life. Everything you see is built.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:22) So cool. I was talking with David. He's like the Elon Musk of robotics over in Germany. He is such a cool guy, but he has a company called Neurorobotics, and they make these incredibly intelligent AI-type robots. I'm describing it horribly right now, but they're just really, really cool robots. I think they call them cobots because they work with humans. But I was thinking I was like, I wonder, could David enter? Do you guys have restrictions? Like, do you ever have really intelligent robotics companies come in with super advanced technology, or are there restrictions on that?

(John at 00:08:56) I don't think there are any restrictions on that. They would just need to come up with something cool and submit like everybody else does. We would love to have more and more companies like that come in and try to showcase their talents on our show. That would be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) Can we build an AI one, or does it have to be remote controlled?

(John at 00:09:15) Oh, no. You can definitely build an AI one. In fact, Chomp has had some AI components built into their robot. And so they have a giant hammer that comes down, and they use AI to help target that hammer. So the more technology evolves, the more we have evolved. So we would love to have more and more. And if you wanna do an introduction, I'd be happy to talk to them and see what their interest would be. That would be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) Yeah. I would love to see Neurorobotics do a BattleBot. That would be unbelievable. We, John, we are living in the future. Things are happening so fast right now. It's unbelievable.

(John at 00:09:54) It's true. It's true. I mean, it's all around us. I mean, the medical world is exploding. Industry is exploding with robotics. I mean, robotics and technology touch every part of our lives. I mean, I wake up to my Amazon Alexa and, you know, I go to bed to all kinds of technology around me that I'm relying on. Calendar invites. You know, I just bought a new dishwasher where when the cycle is done, it opens the door to let the steam out automatically. So it is quite amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) Yeah. I've built this entire business over doing Zoom interviews.

(John at 00:10:37) That's true. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:38) Yeah. It's... We're living in the future. I remember seeing this old video. I don't know if it was like the thirties or the fifties or... But it was this computing... This guy at a giant computing center. And he was talking about how in the future, people would be working from home and calling in and doing these video calls. And people mixed that video together with some awesome music and it cycled around the Internet. And it's like he just described it perfectly, but it was just back in the time, like, way back. So, man, I'm excited for the next twenty, thirty years. What about you?

(John at 00:11:14) Oh, definitely. You know, I have two young kids, and it's funny. I showed them a car key that you actually put into the car to turn it on, and I don't think that they'll drive cars. I think they'll just pull up their device, summon a vehicle. It'll come, pick them up, take them wherever they wanna go, and then the car will go off and help the next person. So there are a lot of things that... And they'll be completely entertained while they're in that car. Maybe it'll be, you know, augmented reality, 3D, something really unique and cool that we hadn't thought about before that we can do while we're in the car.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:51) Yeah. The thing you just described, if you own a Tesla and you've got the auto-driving beta, that is a complete reality.

(John at 00:11:59) Yes. And most of the people within our company have Teslas except for me, and I think that's in my future because it is such a neat car to have all that driving technology, and it's only gonna get better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:11) I know. I've got a bunch of people around me that have one, but I haven't gotten one yet. And I just keep seeing them, and they just year after year, they become... They're like these magical driving experiences. And I just look at the price tag. I'm like, oh, one day.

(John at 00:12:30) Yeah. One day, they'll all be, you know, autonomous. And, you know, who knows? Maybe that'll help us interact more instead of driving, right? We'll be able to communicate more with people inside our vehicles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:44) That is very true. I like some of the concept designs where the vehicles are completely rearranged where... Right. Like two couches facing each other, essentially interacting with people or doing work. And my wife and I were talking about it because we've got two young kids. Aria's age four and Lachlan's around two, but they... We were like, I don't think we'll buy them cars. I think we'll buy them a subscription service. Like, I think we'll subscribe. We'll have, like, a family share plan. We'll press a button, and a vehicle will come get us and take us where we wanna go because, I mean, they're, what, twelve, thirteen years away from that.

(John at 00:13:20) Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've got an eight-year-old and a six-year-old. So I'm in that same boat, and I'm excited about that. I think that's gonna be a really neat world to live in to be able to subscribe to a vehicle service, you know, much like you would to a... Not that I do, but the time-share flight services where you own a certain amount of flights on an airplane, and you can just... It comes to your house instead of you having to go to an airport.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:49) Right? Like the NetJets type stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(John at 00:13:52) Really. And then eventually, it will fly, right? The car will fly. We'll get there. The car will come. It'll land probably in a designated area or maybe right in your driveway, and it'll fly you away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:03) Well, I think Uber had those airport... Those hovercraft ports. I don't know. Did you see... Did they actually open up yet?

(John at 00:14:10) I don't think so. Obviously, there was no CES in person this year, but last year, I did get a chance to go visit the... I forget what they call that thing. But it's huge. I don't think it's something that you could land in my driveway, but it certainly can land on top of a building or in an open field. And I know it's just a prototype at this point, but maybe they've advanced it further than that. But it's coming. I know it's coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:37) So you got to go to CES? Like, have a lot of cool opportunities come up because of BattleBots for you?

(John at 00:14:44) Yeah. I would say so. You know, I don't really think about it in terms of cool opportunities. Life just kinda goes by, and I feel like I'm just on the ride with it. And I've just been very fortunate to be involved. The greatest thing, though, for me is the actual show is the event, is being there. You know, most of my life, I was a shy kid, and it wasn't until I became an adult that I wanted to break out of that shyness. And so being in... Or right there with the arena and the crowd and feeling the excitement and the energy and the noise, that is the most exciting part of my life. That is definitely the most exciting part of my life. I love that. The people involved are just so fun to be with, and it's... We're just like one big family. But, yeah, you know, I was on a segment with ESPN a few years back when we were on ABC, and that was a lot of fun to do. I've traveled to different parts of the world. I've met with many different people with different types of technology. You know, our CEO, Trey, has really done a lot of that from being involved with Elon Musk and others from the technology community.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:05) You guys record this? Do you is it like a stadium, a studio?

(John at 00:16:12) We record in Long Beach, California, which is funny because it's not too far from where we started out our roots back in the day at Cal State Long Beach. But right across the airport and literally right on the airport is an old Boeing hangar, and I think they made C-17 or components to the C-17. And it's a big giant open warehouse, and we convert it into our set for a couple of months. We shoot our show, and we can move wherever we need to. We just have to have certain size requirements. But that's where we've shot recently. I'd say the last four seasons we've shot there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:49) Do you guys have like a large fan base? How do you keep the fans together outside of the show?

(John at 00:16:55) Good question. Mostly through social media. We have a huge social media presence, you know, obviously Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And what's new to us is TikTok. TikTok is exploding. You know, we're in the, what, I think 50 million views with some of our videos on TikTok. So we have a great fan base. They really seem to love us. We have a very core fan base that goes back to the Comedy Central days, which I believe you saw some of those early shows on Comedy Central. And then we have a newer fan base, which is this younger crowd and this co-viewed crowd, which is families watching together. So you have moms and dads and kids all sitting around the TV and watching it together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:41) Yeah, that's what we were doing last night. My kids were like, whoa, look at the robots.

(John at 00:17:47) Do they have a favorite robot?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49) Well, we had high hopes for the, you know, I don't know their names, but the one that had the giant thing and it like flipped up.

(John at 00:17:59) Oh, you're talking about Bronco, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:02) Bronco.

(John at 00:18:03) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:03) There you go. Yes. Yeah. So we were watching the—I love how you structured the show too, because you'll do a bracket, but it'll be completed in like two episodes. So it keeps the attention going versus like a bracket taking a whole season, right?

(John at 00:18:16) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:16) So I thought that the pace was nice. I made a note of that last night. I was like, oh, this is really a really good pace. And I was actually surprised because I asked my wife, I was like, hey, you know, after dinner, I need to watch a couple of these episodes so that I understand, you know, the difference between BattleBots and BattleBots Bounty Hunters, right? And I haven't seen in a while. I was like, so can you like help with the kids? Because usually after dinner, I hang out with Omen. And then they all were like in the play area, and then they all just ended up migrating over and watching it and just being like, whoa, the whole time. They like the shark one. My daughter was like freaking out when the shark one came out. She was so excited. The spinning one—was it, it's not like Shredder.

(John at 00:19:01) I think—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:02) It was Shredder. Shredder. We were surprised because it looks like such an innocent bot, and it's like, I don't think that thing could do much damage. But then it's got like the physics of what it could do with the spin, and it just shreds them apart. And we were watching Shredder take on the shark or something like that. It was just—it's way more exciting now than it was in my memory. I'm actually going like, at first, no joke, I was like, I'll just subscribe to the trial and like cancel it after the week to just watch this. And then after like we watched like two or three hours of this last night, we're like, all right, we're just gonna stay on this because there was a bunch of other cool shows that were on the Discovery Plus. But we actually—I was surprised that it's like the one geeky thing that they'll watch they wanna watch with me. Like I'll watch my origin documentaries or something technological like that or Year Million or something. They don't really wanna watch that, but they wanna watch the bots.

(John at 00:19:59) That's cool. You know, we get all kinds of feedback from our fans, and a lot of parents write into us. And they say things like, thank you very much for inspiring my child to get off the couch and go build, wanna build something in the garage or start to use their brains in ways that they never thought about. And what's really cool about BattleBots is it not only attracts the geeky minded person, but it also attracts those that just are fascinated by the action, the entertainment, and then they discover, hey, you know what? I'm actually pretty good at this kind of thing too. So it's really fun to watch that. And it's great to see a family like yours get into it and, you know, young kids that just wanna sit there and enjoy the entertainment. And they don't even realize that there's so much going on that they're actually learning part of what the future is gonna look like for them. Because a lot of these things that these guys are building into these robots are technologies that are being implemented all across the board in many different sectors of the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:05) No, you're exactly right. If you take a kid and say, I want you to sit down in this electrical engineering class and go through these textbooks, they're like, no. But if you show them a flame throwing robot and they wanna make one and you just say, here's some resources you'll need to make it, go put it together. That drive to achieve that outcome will result in them learning a lot.

(John at 00:21:26) Yeah. And what's cool too is that there's no gender barrier with BattleBots. And so you get men and women competing at the same level, and it's all just about their brain and their ability to create something. And so what's really fun to see and almost magical is you get people that, especially young girls that wanna go talk to the female teams and find out what inspired them, and then all of a sudden, they get inspired. And so I know that historically there haven't been a lot of women involved in engineering. And so this really helps bring that out in people and wanna get involved. So we really like that aspect of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) Yeah. Last night, there was, I don't know if it was Chomp. It was the one that had like the legs that could spin 360, but it had like—

(John at 00:22:19) Yeah, I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:19) It had like a pregnant woman as like one of the people. Yeah. Zoe. And my wife, right when she saw her, she was like, oh, I'm on her team.

(John at 00:22:30) Yeah. You know, I talked to a lot of different companies. And one of the big technology companies out here in California, I had a nice conversation with them. And they said, you know, we're looking for more women to get into the field because we find that they're very good at being engineers. They're able to multitask, and there just isn't enough of them. And so whatever we can do to help encourage that, we love the fact that your show does that. But that was eye opening for me and, you know, something I really never thought about either way. But yeah, you know, we certainly live in a world where, hey, if you've got a talent, you can show it off just with your phone and, you know, your social media account, and you're gonna get attention. So I think that's another nice aspect of technology that we've seen is it's really helped people grow that maybe get left behind because they have no platform, and now they have platforms to demonstrate their abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:27) Yeah. And as a like a craftsman, you know, because so my background is software engineering. I did that for like seventeen years until the show got more popular, and I still have a team of software engineers, but I'm just not doing that full time. But to build something, right, and to see it and then to put that out in the world, the users have no concept of like who built it. More often than not, like right, like these lights in the studio, like I don't know who manufactured these or who engineered or designed them or came up with them. So it's really about like the—I think it's really cool that with BattleBots, it's just the robots fighting it. So whoever brings the best robot. And as I was sitting there, I was like thinking of ideas of how we could design a robot that could like dominate all of these robots. And—

(John at 00:24:13) What'd you come up with?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:17) I don't know exactly, but the idea is that it would somehow eat the other robots.

(John at 00:24:26) All right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:26) Because like everybody's doing these like spinny things or hammer things, and I'm like, if you create like, if you think of like a stapler, like, you know, like a square, and it just consumed the robot.

(John at 00:24:37) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:37) Yeah.

(John at 00:24:38) Like a paper shredder, but on a robot level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) Yeah. Like, have you ever seen those videos on—and this might be like a TikTok, I don't know, I'm not on TikTok—but I've seen them before where they're like these steel things that you can put like a, you could put like a dumpster in it, and it would just turn it like butter. Yeah. We just make one of those on wheels and just never walk towards it.

(John at 00:25:01) In an episode of The Walking Dead where they tried to get some of the walkers to fall into one of those, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) Nice. Nice. That would be a smart move. That's what I would do.

(John at 00:25:12) Yeah. Exactly. So and it was in like a junkyard. And so obviously this thing was used to shred, you know, large objects and metal and so forth to break it down to, you know, compact it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) Is that legal? Is that legal on that? Like if I built like a movable shredder that would just shred it, is that legal?

(John at 00:25:30) You know, we'd certainly wanna take a look at the design. There is a build rule, or an operation rule that you cannot have an entrapment device, and that may fall under the entrapment. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) Oh, it would be. It would definitely would.

(John at 00:25:47) Yeah. It's an entrapment device. We love to see people's ideas. Everything starts with an idea. Who knows? Maybe one of your—we don't wanna discourage ideas. And so anything is reviewable. It's just a matter of what we think is best for the show and if it fits well with our rules. And, you know, our rules are evolving just like they do in the NFL, NBA, NASCAR, any sport out there. You know, in order to make the sport better, the rules have to evolve. So we'll do the same thing, and we have done the same thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:17) Yeah. I was like, I'm assuming there's no projectiles.

(John at 00:26:20) There are. There are a few more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:22) Are projectiles. Yes. There's no ordinance. Like I can't like sticky grenade one of them.

(John at 00:26:31) You know, I'd have to go back and review the rules. By the time the robots get to the arena, the safety team and the team that literally just goes in depth and sees how the robot is made is all done before it gets to me. I don't know if that one would pass or not, but I do know that they've used magnetics to try to disable a robot. I know that flame is obviously used and projectiles are used. I don't know if you can use an explosive, though, if that's what you're thinking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05) Yeah. Can my robot be like sponsored by like the SWAT team and it do the reverse instead of disabling the ordinance. It goes and it places the ordinance onto the other bot and just C-4s it. Yeah. That would be fun. Have you ever had anyone do like a liquid nitrogen to spray it and then break it up?

(John at 00:27:30) I don't believe so. Well, that's interesting. Yeah. I don't know if that would pass either just based on our allowed chemical warfare type stuff. Yeah. I like all of these type of thinkings because that's what brings out the next great bot, and we're always looking for it. You did ask me a question. I remember that. You asked me a question earlier on about where these guys come from. Are they repeat? And I don't think I ever fully answered that. Some of these guys came from our original Comedy Central show, and they've either evolved their robot. They've given them new names. They've completely changed their designs. Some of them kept with similar designs. But we're always looking for new talent. The show is fun because you get to see the old teams come back and compete again that you cheered for last season, plus you get to see some new ones. So it's kind of the same with any sport where you get these veterans that you expect to perform really well at a high level, and then you get these rookies that come in. And, you know, you never know who's gonna surprise you. And we've had a lot of nice surprises this season with the rookies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:40) Have you guys ever done like a tour where you take it to different cities?

(John at 00:28:43) No. We've never done that. We've had some smaller collegiate type competitions that we did, oh, maybe about ten, fifteen years ago, but we'd like to. We'd certainly like to take BattleBots on the road. It comes with a certain set of challenges. The arena itself is so—it's 50 by 50 foot square. It's made of really solid steel, the floor alone, the walls, the ceiling, all the Lexan, you know, the clear glass. It's all bulletproof glass that protects us all. It's a monster to move, to set up, and to disassemble. So we've gotta figure out—we've gotta engineer a way to do that and find a place that has the space to do it, and then we can take it on the road and do that. But that is certainly in our plans. We would like to do that, and we talk to people quite often about that. And we get invitations from all over the world to bring it. So that's something that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:39) I think it would do great. Right? That's like, I mean, that's what Real Steel is. It's all these different arenas and fighting with the robots. I think that would be super, super cool, especially because of your popularity on like TikTok. And I mean, if you're getting 50 million views on videos, people will—I will pay—I would pay. That's how I, I use myself as like my guinea pig. Would I pay? I'd pay 50 to $75 on a Saturday night per ticket to go see some BattleBots fight. Cool. If it was more, I probably would still do it, but that's just off the top of my head.

(John at 00:30:17) When we're allowed to have an audience, we get people coming from all over the world. They pay, you know, they pay about that for a ticket, maybe a little bit less, but they pay, you know, their travel expense from coming from another country. You know, the flights, the hotels, the rental cars. I mean, it's a big investment. They use their vacation time to come watch the show, and they do it over and over again. It's not like they do it one time and they're done. We have some people that really love the show. So if we can bring it to them, how exciting would that be? And it just opens up the world to us when we're able to bring it to them versus people having to come to us. It's great that we have media like broadcasters all around the world, social media all around the world, but there's nothing like seeing BattleBots in person, feeling when two robots impact what that sounds like. Sometimes you can feel the heat of that flame. You can see the sparks unlike, you know, the camera that shows you that one angle. You can see a wider view. And then what's fun too is just to see how the audience reacts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:24) What's the craziest robot fight you've ever seen?

(John at 00:31:27) The craziest robot fight would probably be—I mean, we've had a lot of really crazy robot fights. Sometimes fights end where robots continue to spin, like Shredderator did this last week, and they just spin and spin and spin. And all these engineer minds try to figure out how to stop it, and we just say we're letting the batteries spin out because that's the safest thing to do. And that's what we do. We just sit there and wait.

(John at 00:31:53) But as far as fights go, I would say the most interesting fight, the most exciting fight was this season, and it was Witch Doctor and Hydra. And those two bots went at it back and forth, and you couldn't tell who was gonna win. Hydra has this incredible pneumatic flipper, and it just flips the heck out of its opponent. And Witch Doctor got flipped, I don't know how many times and how many feet. I mean, ten, fifteen feet into the air, and it would just come back.

(John at 00:32:22) And it's got this spinning grinding blade on the front of it, and it would go at Hydra and sparks were flying everywhere. And it was a controversial fight because I believe that one ended in decision and rightfully so because it was two great competitors going at it. So from an excitement level, I would say that was one of the most exciting fights that we've ever had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:46) Was that this most recent season?

(John at 00:32:48) Yeah. I think it was episode maybe two or three. So if you're able to go back on—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:56) I'm gonna go look at it. I'm gonna show them tonight. What were the—you said Witch Doctor?

(John at 00:33:02) Witch Doctor and Hydra. Yeah. Two great veterans. Hydra, they were involved, I believe, in some of the early Comedy Central years. They actually help out quite a few teams because they make a lot of components for BattleBot parts. And so they're seen behind the scenes in a lot of the BattleBots.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) Yeah. It's like a whole economy emerged from this?

(John at 00:33:28) Certainly within our world, you know, the whole robot economy. But, you know, these are engineers. So, you know, they're building for everyone, and then they utilize their skills that they've gained from BattleBots or from the things that they do in their real jobs, let's call them, and they bring them into BattleBots. So I think we're still just breaking the ice on this whole robot technology. I think we've got a long way to go. It's really exciting what we've seen so far. But what we're gonna see in the future—I can tell you for me personally, I would love a robot that would do the laundry and clean up the kitchen. You know? Wouldn't that be great? Just some simple things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:09) That's what I told NeuroRobotics. I was like, look. Give me a robotic where I could put on like a mesh suit and go through the motions and it could learn and I could train it on how to do my laundry and train it how to unload my dishwasher. And I'll just wear the suit the next 25 times I'm doing it. And then, you know, we should be able to use the AI to figure out how to replicate that. That's what I was pushing. I think one day, John, I think we're all gonna have these robots in our house that are gonna just help us with this stuff.

(John at 00:34:39) And I hope I'm around to see that because I think that's gonna be really cool. And I think we'll have to come up with some standards on how we use robots, but there's a lot of good that can be brought. And especially when you think about, you know, if you have a parent or a loved one that's ill or just towards the end of their life and they need a little bit of extra attention, and you can have a robot come in and help you there, you know, twenty-four hours a day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) Did you listen to the NeuroRobotics episode?

(John at 00:35:09) I didn't. I didn't listen to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:11) Like, one of his things. I told you, like, I call him the Elon Musk of robotics. But, yeah, that was one of David's—he literally mentions that specifically in his bio. He thinks that's going to be a huge area because they're low paying jobs. People don't really wanna do them, and there's a high volume of need for it. And it could really improve the quality of life for older people in these retirement homes or just old age because there's these simple tasks that these robots could be trained to do, and that would just be helpful. I think that's a really solid business model. The fact that you bring it up too, I think a lot of people are thinking about it then.

(John at 00:35:52) Yeah. Well, it was personal to me. I saw my dad. You know, he loved tennis. He played tennis into his seventies. The only reason he gave up tennis was because my mom, his wife, was starting to become ill and needed more assistance and help, and she was worried that he was gonna hurt himself. And then the two of them would be stuck. So he gave up playing tennis. And, you know, into his eighties, he developed brain cancer. And so he was in a wheelchair for a couple of years. He was in skilled nursing, assisted living. Watching him struggle so much and, you know, the cost of aides to come in, how many people it took to get him onto the—to get him into the restroom or a shower, you know, all those things. Through AI, we can learn how to best do that to make somebody as comfortable as possible. Plus, you eliminate the—I don't know if shame is the best word, but the feeling of not having your own privacy when you have to go to the bathroom and have somebody that has to help you. You know, if you have a robot do it, you know, it's just an appliance at that point. You know? It's like changing in front of the washing machine. Right? So you don't have that exposure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:13) Yeah. You know, when you say it, it definitely does feel like—when I was about 13, I got hit by a car, and I was in a wheelchair for almost two years. But I had to go through that process of, you know, not being able to walk and then having somebody help me, you know, go to the bathroom, shower, and things like that. And it is not a fun thing. If that could have been an appliance, that would have been like a thousand times better. It definitely humbled me a lot, but all I could say is, you know, it wasn't fun. And, yeah, I'm definitely for that.

(John at 00:37:53) Yeah. And if you back up, you know, even further to—you said a car accident?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:59) Yeah. Yeah.

(John at 00:37:59) Yeah. You know, technology in the future can prevent things like that. Right? So you don't have to be in that position in the first place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:06) I know. She was texting and driving. If we would've had autonomous cars with—I mean, this was I am 33, and this was 13. So this is twenty years ago. You know? And that's crazy to think about how you can remember twenty years ago today. But, yeah, autonomous vehicles or something—yeah. That would have made that not happen. But I am very, very grateful for technology and looking forward to all of the stuff. I wanna ask a couple more of my ideas on the robot. Can I—I haven't seen drones? Can I—is there any is there like a no flying rule?

(John at 00:38:46) You just need to see more episodes, my friend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:49) Oh, I haven't seen—oh, okay. I need to watch more episodes.

(John at 00:38:52) This season, we have one drone. In fact, if you go to last week's episode, you'll see it. So go to, I believe, the Discovery Plus. You can watch all the previously aired shows. Right? And watch last season. You'll see a drone. But, yeah, we've had drones. I think drones are fun to watch. They're really challenging. Number one, to be able to drive in such a small space is challenging. Plus, you've got walls, and you've got a ceiling, and you've got a floor below you. So air is constantly circulating around you, so you're fighting your own wind, so to speak. And those robots move so quick, and so, you know, drones kind of float a little bit. And so they're trying to keep up. But it's kinda fun because they can shoot flame down on top of a robot, and that just adds—you can't see what the flames do to the outside of the robot, but inside, it could cause some damage. It can cause wires to melt. It can cause some of the technology inside to not function properly. So, yeah, there's definitely a place for drones inside BattleBots. And I don't know if we've seen the most exciting way that they can be used yet, but I think it's coming.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:05) Yeah. I wanna like take a drone, do an air compressor with like a nail gun, and just like put stakes down into it. Or I wanna use a drone and plant an EMP device. Are we allowed to use EMPs? I mean, I could knock out the video equipment.

(John at 00:40:21) Yeah. You know, I'd have to go back. It's been a while since I've looked at the rules. I'm not on the build side, so forgive me on that. I'm on the more operational side of once you get in the arena, can you do certain things? But I don't think we can and I'll tell you why. You don't wanna start a fight by stopping a fight. Right? Because you get in there, shoot an electronic pulse, you've disabled the other team. You've won. You're excited about that, but everybody else, including the people that are watching, are going, that was boring. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:54) Because they're—or they're upset because their iPhones are fried.

(John at 00:40:58) Yeah. Exactly too. And all of our technology around the arena.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:02) That is true. That is true. So you want it to be a fun fight. Right? You want it to be a good fight, like an equal—do you get to know who you're fighting before you fight them?

(John at 00:41:11) Yes. Yes. Most of the time you do. And, you know, so we've got the pit area, which is in the building right next door, but the two buildings are combined. And so there's just a walkway between them. And we have feeds going into that building. So while you're working on your robot, you can see the current fight. And so what teams do is they are constantly looking at how the other team is driving, performing, how their bot is built. There was a great example of that Hydra, which is an exciting bot, causes a lot of damage by flipping its opponent up in the air, built a what they called a cow catcher, and it literally went on the front of their robot, and it kept the other robot away from them. And so they knew before they even got to BattleBots that there was a possibility that they were gonna fight them. But once they knew that they were gonna fight them, they put that special attachment on, and they were able to use that quite effectively.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:15) Have you had any bipedal robots, like, walking around?

(John at 00:42:18) Yeah. Chomp actually is our first walking robot and incredible technologies. So we built an amazing bot. I think it's gonna come back bigger and better. It looked like beetle legs underneath it. A lot of beefiness to that bot. And this was our first season of allowing walking robots. And with walking, we allowed up to 500 pounds. With non-walking, it's only 250. So you actually get a weight advantage, and that's a big deal because the 250 bots are literally shaving off pieces of metal to get their robot underweight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:58) So there's some weight limits, and I can read about the limits? I'm sure there are so many people listening to this that I'm sure are just scheming and thinking of ideas about how to make these robots. But on the website, I'm assuming there's a list of like ideas or things you can't do.

(John at 00:43:16) Yeah. The full rules, we've got design and build rules that are on there as well as tournament rules on the website, and they're all available to the public. Yeah. I encourage you, if you're interested in BattleBots, please go read them, ask questions. You can get on to our Facebook groups. People ask questions all the time. What type of steel do you use? What do you do for this? How do you design that? And it's a great community. And what's really nice is that these teams, most of them are open to sharing just about everything that they've done. But there's one aspect that you can't discount when it comes to competing in BattleBots. You can build the most amazing machine, but if you don't know how to drive it, then you're not gonna do very well most likely. And so what we've seen over the last seasons are really the teams that have really stepped up their driving ability or have demonstrated how well they can drive. And that makes a big difference because when you're going up against the spinner, you're gonna hear a lot of teams say, stay away from the wall. Stay away from the wall. Because when you get hit by that spinner, where are you going? You're going right into the wall. And, yeah, you may get hit by that spinner and damaged by colliding with that steel wall. So, yeah, learning how to drive is a key component. And that's hard to do because you can't take a 250 pound or 500 pound BattleBot out onto the streets and just compete it. So you gotta start small. Start with, you know, there's all kinds of local competitions where you can learn at a very small level, and you just slowly build yourself up and then make it to BattleBots and compete in the world championship. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:53) That is awesome. Of course. Because if you do the new BattleBots—what's that one called again?

(John at 00:44:59) BattleBots Bounty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:00) BattleBots Bounty. Yeah. You can win cash. Do you win cash in the other BattleBots?

(John at 00:45:05) Yeah. You win cash in the other BattleBots. The Bounty, though, is the newest and most exciting thing because it's really some of the greatest legacy robots that have been around the sport for a long time, and it gives people that really wanted to fight them a chance to go head to head with their favorite bot. And so it's like the all-star of BattleBots being able to compete against them. And there was one team I remember who said—and they were one of those all-stars who said, yeah. We gotta bring it because we gotta show that we still got it, that we're worthy of being here and that we don't wanna be an all-star that loses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:43) Yeah. And that's—it's really cool because that's like it's something that you can't do with humans. Like, we can't go fight like Muhammad Ali. Like, you know what I'm saying? You can't go fight the people of the past that inspired you to get there because the humans age and die. But like the robots, you can go do that. I think that's really smart. I think it's really cool.

(John at 00:46:03) Yeah. There's the whole element of having a sport where nobody gets hurt. And in football, we're worried about, you know, concussions and broken bones and car racing. You know? The worst can happen. Right? And in BattleBots, it's a safe environment. Anybody can compete. You could be pretty much any age, male, female. It doesn't matter. You just have to be able to bring your smarts to it, and nobody gets hurt. It's really, really a great sport in that regard, and it's exciting for the whole family. Everybody loves it. I remember back when we did ABC one, which was about six years ago, we were a completely different type of show. We're a completely different type of show in any entertainment world. But for ABC, we were so different. I don't think they really understood who we were, what we were. And in fairness to them, we had never been on their network before. And probably those people that brought us in weren't around when we did it on Comedy Central. And so I remember reaching out to various departments like PR, the lady in PR, telling her, you've gotta come to the show. That's the best way to understand BattleBots. And she's like, yeah. Really not my thing. And I said, I don't care if it's your thing or not. This is part of your network. You gotta come. And so she said, okay. I'll come. And she came. She called me up afterwards. She said, John, I lost my voice. I was screaming so loud. That was the most fun I've had in a really long time. Thank you for making me come to that. So as you can see, I love the show. It's fun to share with people. I'd love to have you down. Bring kids. It would be a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:49) Dude, we would definitely come. You just recorded it, though, because I saw in the most recent episodes, they have masks. Do you record them all at once? Like, are you recording right now? How does that work?

(John at 00:48:00) A lot of times we get questions, can we get tickets to next week's show? We shoot the whole season within two weeks. So all the fight footage that you see is shot within two weeks that we shot back in October, September, somewhere around there.

(John at 00:48:16) And typically we shoot in the spring around spring break. Obviously, the world has changed, so everything's kind of up in the air when we're going to do it again. But we're planning on it, and we're planning on having an audience back at some point. This was the first time we didn't have an audience, and part of that was really disappointing to not be able to share that. The other part was there were some good learnings that we took away from that because it was a closed set, and we were able to actually talk to each other and learn certain things.

(John at 00:48:49) So it'll just make the next time we have an audience even more exciting. But yeah, we shoot in Long Beach typically. An audience of about 2,000 people come, maybe 2,500, depending on how we set things up, and we love it when families come. That would be great. We love it when people from any walk of life come, but especially the technology world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:07) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, definitely. And we could do some promotion for it too. We could do some behind the scenes stuff and just really amp it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:15) And I won't be surprised if I get calls from people after this episode. Normally we do technology leadership. We try to flip it into three categories to educate, entertain, and elevate. That's our mission. So this falls under our entertain thing because we're all geeks and we love this stuff. And I was just so grateful that you were willing to come on and talk and share about it. Everything you guys do at BattleBots, is there anything that we left out or we didn't cover that we want to get out there?

(John at 00:49:48) Yeah. There's one thing that I work on that I think your audience would be interested in, and that's, you know, BattleBots loves to partner with technology. We love to partner with people that are in our space, whether you're an engineering company, whether it's on the hardware or software side, if you're building something, welding, you make steel, electronic components. We love to partner with companies. We have a company that we partnered with that has a franchise of remote controlled lawnmowers called Mobot.

(John at 00:50:26) And they got involved in sponsoring the show. They actually sponsored a bot, and they've seen their business grow quite a bit because of it. But we're pretty careful with what sponsors we bring in, first off. You don't see sponsors plastered all over the place, and that's by design. We don't want it to become a candy store of sponsors everywhere, and we want them to be relevant to our audience.

(John at 00:50:52) We want our audience to be able to relate to the product. And that only helps our sponsor because they know that our audience is a potential customer or can at least help their brand grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:03) No. And I noticed that last night too because that was a big thing when we did our show. I was like, we're never going to have pre-roll or mid-roll ads and any of that stuff. And we've stayed true to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:16) But one of the notes I made last night was the way you present the sponsors. It's cool because it's clean. I guess that's the best way to say it. It's clean. You'll show the sponsor or the robot, and it's got the different logos of who's sponsoring this, but it doesn't look like that NASCAR-y 1980s website plastered feel. It sits well within the brand, and I think that brings more value to the sponsors than it would if you just pasted logos everywhere. So I thought you guys did that in a really classy way.

(John at 00:51:48) Yeah. And you can sponsor a team, and you can sponsor a team in many ways. I mean, the best way is obviously to help them financially, but a lot of our teams do trade sponsorship. So they're able to get components and various parts through their sponsor. And then on the corporate side, at the BattleBots level, we're able to put you really right front and center inside the BattleBots arena and have your brand or logo appear during the fight, but we only have one during that fight.

(John at 00:52:18) We're not going to have multiple. And we do that just as you said, we don't want that eye candy everywhere of brands. We want you focused on the fight. That's what we want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:32) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.