Lead-Lag Live
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Lead-Lag Live
Matthew Chang on Robotics Revolution, AI Integration, and Future Workforce Dynamics
Are you ready to uncover the secrets of the future workforce? Join us as we engage with Matthew Chang, a pioneering engineer and founder of Chang Robotics, who sheds light on the critical shortage of trade skills in the U.S. due to offshoring and the burgeoning value of robotics expertise. We'll explore significant advancements in robotics technology that are revolutionizing industries, making automation not just feasible but also people-friendly. Discover how businesses are navigating the integration of these cutting-edge technologies amidst a tight labor market, and the potential opportunities this shift presents.
Matthew Chang takes us on an insightful journey through the world of AI-enabled robotics, starting from its safety and efficiency milestones achieved since 2017. Contrast the power of localized AI in robotics with the expansive capabilities of large language models like ChatGPT, and understand why China is rapidly adopting robotics to combat demographic and labor challenges. We'll discuss real-world examples such as autonomous mass transit systems and hospital robotics, illustrating how these innovations have upskilled workers and significantly impacted wages.
Finally, we examine the broader societal impact of robotics and AI across diverse sectors including law, healthcare, and education. Matthew explains how advanced language models are transforming legal research and reducing costs, while robots are gaining popularity among nurses for easing their workload. We also look at the shift in education towards trade skills over traditional degrees, the technological hurdles still faced by robotics in hands-on trades, and the evolving supply chain challenges. Plus, get a glimpse into the future with potential breakthroughs in organic energy storage and the role of robots in space colonization. This episode promises to equip you with a comprehensive understanding of where the future of work is headed and how to navigate it.
The content in this program is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any information or other material as investment, financial, tax, or other advice. The views expressed by the participants are solely their own. A participant may have taken or recommended any investment position discussed, but may close such position or alter its recommendation at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this program constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Please consult your own investment or financial advisor for advice related to all investment decisions.
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I think we probably make too many university degrees in this country and I think it's probably a symptom of offshoring in the last 30 or 40 years that we didn't create enough trade skills and avenues to real prosperity through trades With robotics. If you're a company that has adopted robotics, you have a forward-looking robotic strategy. The most valuable people in your company are going to be the folks that can run the robots, troubleshoot the robots, replace the robots, design the new robot, expansions, et cetera. So I think the trade skills are going to become more valuable over time.
Speaker 2:Some of you may know that on Axite, I will occasionally talk to those that follow me who, I notice, engage in a positive way, because, believe it or not, positive engagement is kind of a nice thing, right as a content producer. And I noticed that Matthew Chang was doing that, so I sent a call to him, and oftentimes when I set up these calls I have no agenda, it's just let's chat, appreciate positive engagement and see where things go. And it turns out that Matt's actually really, really interesting and involved in a part of the world which all of us are going to be involved with, like it or not, when it comes to robotics and the future of the workforce. So he's got a hell of a pedigree, a lot of interesting things we're going to talk about here. So I'm excited for this conversation. So, so, I'm excited for this conversation.
Speaker 2:So, with all that said, my name is Michael Guyot, publisher of the Lead Lagerport. Join me for roughly 40 minutes as Mr Matthew Chang. So, matt, you do the TED Talk. Some people are familiar with you. You should have more followers on X. We'll try and work on that. But for those who don't know your background, who are you?
Speaker 1:What have you done throughout your career? What do you do, girl? Thanks, michael, and great to be here. I do love your account, so a good follow there. I'm an engineer and I went to Georgia Tech, then went into a career of design build and I built primarily advanced manufacturing facilities all around the world, so it was kind of the global globalization boom. I ended up opening engineering offices in four different countries, getting dual license as an engineer in the United States and in China, and then in 2017, I decided to launch my own firm and that was called Chang Robotics. So a lot of the things that you see, you know my accomplishments have happened since I started my own company. It really took engineering in the direction that I thought it should go. It's highly automated, highly robot centric and it's all about enabling the workforce.
Speaker 2:All right, this may seem like a dumb question, but why? Why do you see such opportunity when it comes to robotics? I mean, I think a lot of people, when they think of robotics, they think about Terminator and Skynet. But why? Why focus on that from a business perspective?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's why focus on that from a business perspective. Yeah, I think there's been a couple of enabling factors. Number one is the globalization movement is cooling, so we're taking less and less of our things we want to produce or value add, manufacture, e-commerce those things are coming to the US. We do have a tight labor market here and a lot of big manufacturing employers and a lot of big employers like hospitals are struggling to find the right levels of qualified employees that stay engaged and want to build a career there. So there's a workforce challenge in America and that's driving automation. The second factor is enabling. Technology is just moving so fast right now. So what wasn't possible 10 years ago or even five years ago, it's possible now, and that means you can get robotic systems that are much more agile, much more safe and people-friendly, and you can integrate them into the workforce cheaper and easier than you ever could before.
Speaker 2:Okay. Now I think when people think about AI they're thinking purely obviously much more on the software side of things right and large language models. Let's talk about the fusion of AI with robotics because, again I go back to, it seems a little bit scary if you start implementing AI into something that's physical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. It's actually safer, in my opinion. We have been implementing AI-enabled robotics since 2017. So we're now seven, almost eight years into it and it's a different category of AI. For those AI geeks out there, you know there's a lot of different categories.
Speaker 1:The ones we think of right now are the large language models like a chat, gpt or its competitors, but really we've been putting localized AI on robotics for safety and for efficiency for about seven years, and what that does is it creates a much more safe set of automation. It also creates more efficient automation because we can enable our robots with set of automation. It also creates more efficient automation because we can enable our robots with degrees of freedom A mobile robot or driverless vehicle that we're installing we can say, hey, look, if there's something in the way we're going to give you so much degrees of freedom, to go try to self-navigate around that. And that has changed the paradigm quite a bit from, hey, linear automation, which has been around for 30 or 40 years, but if something blocks it, it gets stopped. Now the robots have some degree of collaboration and they can figure out their own best path once you set up those safety parameters.
Speaker 2:Is it fair to say that China is way ahead of that than the US in terms of some degree of public adoption or at least awareness In a way?
Speaker 1:So China, over the last five years, has been prolific in installing robotics across their economy, but that is due to their own workforce challenge. So I was residing in China from 2012, 2014. During the time I was there is when they passed their first major minimum wage hike and they set up baseline for employment. At the same time you've seen everyone talking about it they have a demographic cliff. They don't have young workers entering the workforce, certainly don't want to work in intense manufacturing jobs, which is what China is known for. So, because they have this higher cost of labor and they have fewer workers, they had to automate if they wanted to keep producing at the levels they had before.
Speaker 2:Some implications on us as workers. Take it to the logical extreme if, if you're gonna have robotics increasingly displace and replace, uh, actual labor from humans, I mean it, that sounds like it's somewhat untenable from the perspective of society. Um, and that's not me saying, even talking for the same part of like someone with a lot of any means. But let's talk through some of the positive and negative implications.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so well, I'll start with the negative. In our early days we weren't the best at integrating the technology to the workforce. As engineers, we like to sit at the design table, run our calculations, create designs and then just believe that everyone else is going to be as excited about it as we are because it's super cool or super high tech. What we learned was sometimes we didn't connect with the culture of the workforce and then we didn't have great launch on the technology and we're talking about very large systems here where we might go into a factory and do a total renovation, replacing a lot of manual processes with robotics. So if that doesn't go off perfectly, then the project really was a failure because the company is not getting the value and the workforce isn't bought in.
Speaker 1:We have obviously pivoted and we have gotten to a point where we are worker first in our designs. For the last five or so years. The workforce loves it every single time and that's because the first thing we look at is often ergonomics. So what is it that's intense in somebody's job? We look at enablement how can we upskill workers? So now they're trained on technology. They might have certificates in programming or robotic work. So we kind of keep moving up the ladder in terms of value to the workforce. If we start there, we're going to have high adoption.
Speaker 1:So we have a couple of use cases that will kind of highlight just how bought in the workforce is becoming. We have designed the largest mass transit system in the nation that is autonomous. So we're talking autonomous vehicles for mass transit. Our operators are union bus drivers and the union bus drivers love it. So if you can get a bus driver to buy into technology, then your design is probably good. Another use case is we've deployed the largest autonomous robot system for nursing in a hospital, and if you can get nurses to buy into your technology, you're probably doing something right.
Speaker 1:And so I think that's where people have to start is thinking about the worker. How does this make the worker better and does it take jobs? And then it also is a pain in the butt, right. A lot of times we get stuck. If you're calling a call center and you get caught on this forever loop and you can't talk to a human. Now you're frustrated by automation. We want to take that away. We want to make sure that workers feel empowered. They go home and they tell their kids how cool their job is. If that's what's happened, then we did a good job.
Speaker 2:I'm going to assume, though, that they didn't put downward pressure on wages in general.
Speaker 1:Quite the contrary. So what we have observed is when the workforce gets our technology set first off, we only sell cutting edge stuff. So it's like autonomous robots, co-bots, driverless vehicles, iot. So when the workforce gets that category of technology and they get certificates and training those are transferable job skills their pay goes up. The employers don't mind the pay going up because they're overall more productive and they have a lower cost of goods sold. So as long as we're driving down cost of goods sold, the employers have a lot of tolerance to increase wages for high-end technicians. And that's what we're taking is we're taking regular manual working people and we're turning them into high-end technicians.
Speaker 2:So my only hesitation there is in that process of becoming a high-end technician, some people will be more apt to be able to do that, and then maybe at some point, ai and robotics could then replace that. So isn't there some, some end point where robotics, machines, are basically taking over everything and there's no need for you, for me, for anybody else?
Speaker 1:It could be right. We don't know what the future holds, but I think I think if we look in the past, we have some good parallels. You know, did logistics increase or decrease? When cars became mechanical and replaced the horse and carriage and steamships? Right, logistics exploded. Did accounting increase or decrease? With the advent of computer software like spreadsheets and accounting software, accounting has exploded. It increases the need for accounting. So you have a lot of legacy industries that are now going through this technology enablement.
Speaker 1:I don't have the prediction capabilities to say who the winners and losers are, but if history is a guide, making something more abundant and lower costs, such as the ability to manufacture in America or the ability to create health care solutions for patients, you know it's only going to proliferate more, and so that's what we, that's what we hope to see is that we're empowering American companies. And you know I started off by talking about globalization, michael. Let's not forget that most of the things we consume are not made in America. So as we're going through this kind of reshoring process, we're trying to make in America. Again, the federal government's pushing it. You see a big movement on X talking about this. Where do those jobs come from? We already have very low unemployment. As we reshore and we bring capacity back to America, we have to be automated to be cost competitive with lower cost countries in Asia and the Middle.
Speaker 2:East. Take it to an industry specific level, because I'm going to assume that there are some industries where robotics it's easier to implement the robotics side than others. What industries, very long-term, do you think are most ripe for that disruption?
Speaker 1:Well, I definitely think the travel of goods and people. There's way too much manual touch in getting around, whether it's you driving to work. If anybody has ridden in a driverless car, then you get. The technology is very close. This year I made a trip to Phoenix so I could ride around in Waymo. They got to 15 or 16 trips in two days. The technology is really close, really close. So as Waymo becomes a bigger and bigger option, we will all probably use services like that more Tesla, despite the hate they get online Tesla. Tesla is a driverless car company. Already I rode from Jacksonville to Tampa driving through Orlando, which is a crazy highway scene, and I did it completely self-driving, with no hands on the wheel. When you look at how close technology is getting, we're right on the bubble of automating previously manual tasks, so the movement of goods and people is one. Amazon has obviously dominated e-commerce because of their adoption of robotics and being one of the best robotics companies on earth. I think that's here now and that's a huge amount of labor that can do something probably a little more productive in society.
Speaker 1:I also look at professions. Law is kind of an inefficient, clunky practice. Now you have these language models that can do deep research and create generally pretty good answers on the first try. How can law firms enable their customers to do more legal work at a lower cost, with less effort for the lawyers? That's another great area, and the one that people love talking about is healthcare.
Speaker 1:My mom was a nurse. She had three lost time, workers' compensation injuries during her hospital nursing career. Now we're adding robotics to hospitals that make the job easier for nurses and so far we have 100% adoption rate from nurses. And that is the timescale. There's 30 days. So from the days that we assign robots to nurses and say this is your pet robot, it's going to help you do your job. We train them how to do it. The time it takes them to get to 100% adoption, where they, every time they have a chance, they use the robot instead of manually performing a task, is 30 days. So if that continues across different sectors, it's hard for me to predict where you're going to see a pop up, but I know that it's going to continue to, and we just want to be the leading edge of making those solutions. So more forces are more empowered and workers are more empowered.
Speaker 2:I would think the real interesting thing there becomes the role of college then and universities for all of us, the education system. I would think it's totally upended, why even?
Speaker 1:bother getting a degree if, in 20 years, most things are managed by robots. Yeah, I'm probably a little bit of a university elitist in this regard. I sit on university boards and I'm a graduate of Georgia Tech. I have a master's degree. I think we probably make too many university degrees in this country and I think it's probably a symptom of offshoring in the last 30 or 40 years that we didn't create enough trade skills and avenues to real prosperity through trades With robotics.
Speaker 1:If you're a company that has adopted robotics, you have a forward-looking robotic strategy. The most valuable people in your company are going to be the folks that can run the robots, troubleshoot the robots, replace the robots, design the new robot, expansions, etc. So I think the trade skills are going to become more valuable over time and that will probably reduce the number of people going to college. It will force some small colleges that can't compete out of business and it will generally increase the quality of college across the board. I don't have an expansive view of the university system needing to increase. I think we're probably oversupplied there, but I think we're undersupplied on technical trade skills and that's why you see so much demand right now for companies that can do something simple like service your air conditioner at your house. We need technical, hands-on expertise to keep this high-tech world running this high tech world running.
Speaker 2:But again I go back to I mean, I would seem because I've heard that argument before and it makes sense to me right, the very kind of localized dynamics would not ever get replaced by AI. But if you could get some robot that could go to your house and still fix something right, then it seems like even the trade skill would be under attack.
Speaker 1:I guess my benefit, michael, is because I sit as an industry insider and I buy robots from a bunch of different countries. I integrate these crazy systems for replacing buses and helping nurses. I think the benefit I have is I see how far away the technology is and how much work we have to put into it just to make it work within a limited use case, this unconstrained use case of the traveling robot technician that can come to your house. At my house they would have to be able to open the gate, step over the kids' toys, take the air conditioner apart and you perform a troubleshooting kind of bit down in the corner where my AC units are and I have high-end computer-driven AC units at the house that is nearly impossible For the tools that we have today. We need fifth and sixth order unlocks on technology to get there.
Speaker 1:The combination of chat, gpt with a really high camera, which is where we're at right now, that is not going to cut it. We need dexterity, we need troubleshooting, we need robots that could get into a tight spot and do some lifting. I don't really see in our time horizon my lifespan, your lifespan, my children, who are all in elementary school and preschool. I don't see technology evolving that fast that it's going to threaten anyone's jobs within our lifespan.
Speaker 2:One thing I'm curious about is how the supply chain looks like when it comes to robotics. So I'm thinking in terms of rare earth commodities and rare earth minerals, things like that. Are there certain things that you know as robotics grows where there could be some real challenges in terms of just being able to get the materials? Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1:We are all competing for the same stuff. Our robots have onboard compute. You know people that mine, cryptocurrency need the same style of compute. So there are a limited set of resources, but what people always seem to forget is just how fast technology is turning over. I've been researching we buy a lot of lithium-ion batteries and really advanced high battery packs. I've been researching the cost of lithium-ion and it's come down somewhere between 7 and 9x since Tesla first started producing their first vehicles it's probably close to the bottom started producing their first vehicles. It's probably close to the bottom. We're probably close to the best price on lithium-enabled battery storage, as we're ever going to be. Just as we're reaching the bottom and EVs are hitting some level of proliferation in the marketplace, there's new technologies that are coming along that are probably three to five years out from commercial viability, that are going to be a step function enhancement to that. One promising avenue we see is there's a real chance within the next three to five years that we get to organic energy storage, so storing energy with organic materials and inert materials, not kind of rare and hazardous materials like lithium. So I see that happening pretty fast.
Speaker 1:There's a huge debate happening on X right now for vision systems. It has to do with Waymo versus Tesla. It's the LiDAR versus vision system. Five years ago the conventional wisdom was you had to have LiDAR, which is laser vision. You had to have LiDAR. It's expensive, it's kind of Pentagon level technology. That's why the Waymo vehicles right now are so expensive. And then Tesla's just driving around with vision systems. They just have cameras, they don't need laser sensors. What's going to happen is whether it is rare earth metals for energy storage or it's very expensive technology like laser vision for self-driving. Those are just going to begin to fade out and new technologies are going to come online. My job is just to stay ahead of it, and that's what I do for my customers is I just help them predict what's going to happen here and what's ready here and now, what's three to five years out and what's more of a 10 year horizon on the solution.
Speaker 2:I think it's interesting to think through the implications on how we interact with each other once we start interacting with robots. Any thoughts on sort of how psychology on a societal level might change over time. Well, I think for one.
Speaker 1:When you have your first robot in your house, michael, that doesn't just maybe back you in a circle, but when you have your first helper robot in your house, there's going to be this mix of you're going to love that robot, like if your shirt gets folded and you didn't do it, you're going to love that robot.
Speaker 1:You're also going to hate it, right. You're gonna be frustrated with it, you'll have a nickname and some dirty words for it because it's not always going to do what it's supposed to do. The best example I hold up is you know, is is apple and the iphone, right? I ask people that are worried about ai taking over. I'm like does siri do everything you want her to do? So that's one of the biggest tech companies on earth and their premier AI product, and it's still really far away from being useful and integrated.
Speaker 1:So I think, just like not being able to find a bank tell her when you want one, not being able to get through to talk to a human on customer service, there's definitely going to be some pain points with the adoption of technology. On the other hand, look at the things like the price of the television. Now TVs are. When you and I were young men, having a big flat screen was the ultimate flex and luxury, and the cost has come down. So I think the track we're going to have to run is we're going to see decreasing costs and more access to goods and services. At the same time, we're going to have more little frustrations in our daily lives, like when you go into a fast service restaurant and instead of talking to a human, you have to punch on the screen.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we just don't want to do that, but it is definitely a fact of life and we're going to have more of that digital interaction in our everyday lives. I assume a lot of your work is on the private side, but what about the public sector? End of things? I can't possibly imagine maybe I'm wrong that you'd have a bunch of government employees suddenly being replaced by robots, because there's a lot of inefficiency there and a lot of people that want that inefficiency to be in place.
Speaker 1:I did two years in civil service as the first automation employee for the city of Jacksonville, florida, launching our AV shuttle program. Some of my colleagues did civil service in places like Los Angeles and Chicago and San Francisco. We're sure government is a slow adopter and I think for good reason we want them to be. Where I would look for automation to begin to encroach in the government bureaucracy would be anytime there's a task that has to be done but the agency responsible doesn't have a full-time employee that can do that task. You're going to see that go to automation first and that is happening really fast right now.
Speaker 1:I know firsthand of about 20 city agencies that have begun to automate reporting. They know these elaborate reports to state governments and federal governments. Just think about the type of information that a FEMA or the Federal Highway Association wants on a periodic or annual basis. So they're moving to this data reporting and they're actually getting their first sets of real data and automated reporting to the federal government. Why? Because they didn't have a staffer to do that.
Speaker 1:I think that's the first ring you're going to see in government is anytime you don't have a full-time staffer to do something that's going to become automated and then slowly but surely, automation is going to become part of the culture of these agencies, and there'll be certain parts of it that they're actually pretty good at. So I think SEA is a net positive. I think citizens will get better information. You'll have more online services from government, which we probably all want. You'll have faster answers and more transparency, and then for agencies, on a year over year basis, they're going to get a tiny bit more efficient. And you're right, don't expect it to move at the same speed that private sector is moving, because that's not what government's built for so how robots could maybe help us get off of earth.
Speaker 2:Because, as I think through sort of a very sort of maybe you can argue fantastical future seems to me that that's how you colonize the moon, that's how you colonize mars. Get a whole bunch of robots to basically build stuff before humans are actually there, because they can withstand the environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, here's a funny thought experiment. So we're, we're live on Friday. What is it? September 13th? Yesterday we got to witness the first commercial spacewalk. That happened on SpaceX right, and I was talking with a friend of mine who's in holistic medicine.
Speaker 1:He's a doctor and our prediction was the first travel to the moon is going to be for therapy. It's going to be for people that have, of course, wealth and the means to go to the moon but that want to experience a low gravity therapy for their bodies, for rehabilitation, for health optimization and obviously just the cool factor of walking on the moon. When we think about going to the moon, I don't think the first people going to the moon are going to try to set up a colony and live there. I think it's going to be more industry based of what are the attractions that would be interesting for someone to take a vacation to the moon. I tell my kids all the time you guys will go to space, you probably will walk on the moon. I think that's, you know, in the realm of possibility for them.
Speaker 1:When we go to Mars you know I've been beginning to study that one it's a little bit longer of a journey, so it's not like you're taking a vacation. That's quite the commitment to go there and I also understand there's also only a couple of openings roughly every four years when you can actually get there. That's probably for colonization, right. If you follow the Elon Musk model. There's a bunch of intermediate steps, which is before we begin interplanetary travel. We got to have infrastructure in space and there are startups that are working on that right now power generation on space. We're going to have to have a stockpile of materials and fuel, air to breathe, food to eat so we're going to have to actually put industry in space and have infrastructure before we can start traveling around to different planets.
Speaker 2:I think those listening are probably as free as I am. The one thing that makes me nervous is the future of privacy. Right, because if these are all robotics that are coming from private companies and entities and you're not clicking through on in terms of service because it's a robot right, not some website or app that you're accessing it seems like that could be a nightmare scenario. Where there is no private, you can argue there's no privacy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean it's. It's a risk. So I do agree. I do feel like we're at the kind of no privacy point right now. It's hard to know what's listening to you and studying your online traffic. I think we can all safely assume you're being watched and recorded. You know, if you just start there, the barrier of where we go comes down a little bit.
Speaker 1:In terms of privacy, you're absolutely right. Think back to what happened with Google Maps, when I don't know how long ago that was, maybe 15 years ago they started driving around and recording everybody's house and the face of every building and then they found some privacy issues. Some people didn't want their house to be photographed and other people might've been photographed coming out of a store they shouldn't have been in. So it created some privacy issues and then over time it got dealt with and it got normalized. You're going to have the same thing with robotics. If you've got a bunch of vision enabled, camera enabled robots all around you, the surveillance capabilities have gone up quite a bit and the privacy has gone down. It's why one thing we try to take in very seriously is to consider regulations first. We design around things like HIPAA, so we bake those into our designs and we may either cause a system to not record. It might be using a camera for, say, depth sensing or object detection, but there is no recording of that video.
Speaker 1:And I think there's a big ethical dilemma. Headed for engineering, robot engineers are generally not licensed. I'm a licensed engineer, so I have to abide by a code of ethics, the same as a doctor or a lawyer or a CPA. A lot of people working in robotics are not licensed and haven't been trained on and are not abiding by regulated ethics. So I do think it's important that we as a society kind of think about what are the ethical considerations, and I think privacy is probably the best place to start.
Speaker 1:Let's not get personal information on people that we don't need it on, and in my company we have a no retention policy. We don't keep any information. I don't want to be responsible for it, I don't want to be named in a future lawsuit over privacy violation. We just don't keep it. And so for our customers that are the medical companies or the manufacturing companies, the transportation companies, we require them. If, hey, look, if you want this information, we're happy to pass it over to you, provided that it complies with laws and regulations, but we're not going to retain anything there. When you know in cyber, when is the breach? We don't know, we just know there will be a breach. So what I just tell my team is not on our watch, it will be us that leaks the information out.
Speaker 2:So, with some of the ways people can access this from an investment perspective, I'm going to assume that a lot of the real exciting things, like in robotics, are probably being done by private companies that have not yet gone public, potentially like yours, so those that see opportunity here. How do they even get involved? How do they want to work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a fantastic question and I'll catch you off guard with something you didn't know about before, which is because I've been answering that question for five or six years already and I tell people sorry, you can't invest with us, we're a private company, we're closed, we don't accept investment. We have actually launched something called the Chang Robotics Fund and the website for that is crfund. That's in its final stages of SEC approval, so you know much more about that process than I do. But as that goes live within the next 30 days, it's a chance for private investors to join alongside of us and participate in our projects with us. We're going to start off with 8 to 10 named startup companies that have transformational technology, that are basically at the seed stage, and then their engineering is going to be curated by Che Robotics. We know that's our core competencies Kind of our superpower is doing advanced engineering at systems, and so there you go. So we've already got the landing page up. So for anyone interested, there's a little email link there. You can click it and subscribe to be on the mailer. We'll let people know as soon as it's live, and then it's a good chance to get a front row seat.
Speaker 1:Now we're only going to pick in the offset about 10 companies. So that's a limited exposure. But the challenge most people have is how do you even find the companies? By the time you hear about it it's like a figure AI or a Tesla or a SpaceX really challenging to get in and you've already seen a huge valuation premium. So for our stuff it's all going to be ground floor and it's going to be related to environmental sustainability or workforce sustainability.
Speaker 1:We want to have a bias towards what are the technologies that are going to make the planet better for our kids, not for greed's sake, not just environmental for environmental sake, but good businesses that have great technology, that have a lot of runway in an ever-shifting market. One of the things I just posted on to my very small ex-following one of our goals is to take PFAS out of food. We want to get microplastics and forever plastics out of families' food. We have organic technology to do that. We think it's exciting. The shirt I'm wearing right now is about getting electrified vehicles into government sectors, serving places like ports and airports, military, where there's huge amounts of fossil fuel consumption, and then there's no market for electrifying those because it doesn't have that scalable kind of total addressable market like a consumer vehicle, but they're very needed applications. So we're going to be focusing on kind of definitely a level below Elon Musk, which is the mid market and how we can make dramatic changes in the mid market that have globally scalable applications.
Speaker 2:Matt, for those who want to try more of your thoughts, more of your work and just kind of stay up to date with you, it sounds like X is the primary place. Any other places people can connect with?
Speaker 1:Well, x, I'm learning and I'm horrible at it, compared to yourself, who's a master of the platform. I'm on LinkedIn all the time, you know, and that could be old fashioned. It's probably like the next Facebook, right? But we're on LinkedIn all the time. We keep our website really updated and so if anyone goes to our website you can follow along there. We drop at least two blog articles per week and then on LinkedIn we're probably about four posts per week and that keeps you in touch. I do a lot of public speaking at conferences and technical arenas, so it's also a great way to just see a recap. If I do a speech, that's 45 minutes, but you can get the TLDR in two minutes. We'll break it down for you.
Speaker 2:Appreciate everybody that watched. I have one more Lead Lag Live episode coming up shortly and appreciate you, matthew, and maybe the next time I have Lead Lag Live some robots will watch too. I mean, I got to expand the audience, so it kind of makes sense. Thank you, matt, appreciate it, michael. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend.
Speaker 1:All right.
