The Soft Revolution: Inside 1X’s Surprising Breakthrough in Humanoid Robots

**Chris** (0:01)
I want to give a robot update. Can I do that, Dave?

**Dave** (0:03)
Oh yes, you were just traveling and visiting new robots that you've never met before in California.

**Chris** (0:09)
Yes, so I visited four new robot companies, new to me. I mean, not new to me, but it was the first time that I actually have gone out and spent time with these four different robot companies that are all building humanoids, various degrees of progress. Some of them are very early stage, and some of them are really late stage. I won't talk about any of the early stage companies that I met with, but I did meet with one late stage. I've always kind of considered them a top four company in the space, and I don't think I've ever really given them the amount of credit that I think they now deserve, because I thought they were weird. I didn't buy into the unconventional architecture of their humanoid platform. There are a handful of systemic issues that one would believe about having a platform that's built the way that theirs is, that most people in the robotics world think are unsolvable.
I spent nearly half a day with the founder CEO, Burt, at 1X. This was yesterday, and I was not a believer for those reasons. You know what? A couple of takeaways.
One, well, I have a shared Norwegian heritage with Burt and 1X. There's a small part of me that would like to see them be one of the winners. You have a Norwegian heritage?

**Dave** (1:57)
Did you know that yesterday was Leaf Ericsson Day? You were visiting?

**Chris** (2:01)
Was it?

**Jordan** (2:02)
I thought you were Italian, Chris.

**Chris** (2:04)
Three-quarters, one-quarter Norwegian.

**Dave** (2:07)
Go Vikings.

**Chris** (2:09)
Yes.

**Dave** (2:11)
I'm Swedish.

**Chris** (2:13)
Are you? Yeah. Well, you should have went with me. You would have been invited then.

**Dave** (2:19)
I would have been let in. This is the robot that we're talking about, right?

**Chris** (2:25)
Yeah. It's the robot. Historically, a lot of us have laughed at. We're like, is it a guy in a suit? Is this thing for real? No. The real issue with 1X historically is that it's a tendon-driven system. And what that means is rather than having a normal exoskeleton or endoskeleton that's like a hard shell, which is every other humanoid robot in the world, this is a humanoid with a very... I can't get into details because I'm obviously under NDA, but it's a soft shell, very soft shell system that is extremely lightweight. Okay.

**Jordan** (3:01)
So it looks like it's just fabric over a hard shell. That's not the case?

**Chris** (3:05)
No, that is not the case.

**Jordan** (3:06)
Okay.

**Chris** (3:06)
That is not the case. The entire robot, believe it or not, operates off a tendon drive. So think like lots and lots of like strings or wires, like a pulley system that operates everything, the legs, the feet, the arms, the elbows, the hands. It is, has always been thought of as an, it's like the perpetual motion machine of robot.

**Jordan** (3:30)
Is it like a marionette? Yes, that's exactly right. Like an internal marionette system?

**Dave** (3:35)
It's like a human and that we have tendons that when you want to move your finger, it's actually a muscle down here that's doing it.

**Chris** (3:41)
The issue with that, Dave, is that a human's tendons are always breaking down. Every single time that you use a tendon, it's fraying a little bit and breaking down, but they're inside of a fluid that because we have organic material allows our tendons to rebuild themselves and repair themselves over and over again. Now, what we're seeing in robotics is that there's a massive movement right now towards tendon-based hands, okay? So a lot of the next-gen bot platforms are going to be using tendon-based hands.

**Jordan** (4:16)
Yeah, that makes sense because it seems like it would be really hard to develop actuators that are that small, you know, for all the digits.

**Chris** (4:24)
Jordan, it's extremely difficult to get the actuation in the hand itself, and by moving the actuation into the forearm, it gives you the ability to move a lot of that weight closer to the body of the robot, which is better for numerous reasons, right? That's how we operate, like our tendons go through to the hands, right? But the industry believes that they've solved enough of those problems to do it with the hand. 1X, who's been working on this problem for 10 years, he's the mad scientist of tendon research for robotics.
He believes that he has solved the problem to such a degree that they could have a viable, commercially scalable bot based on a full tendon system. Why that would be important is that it enables them to build a bot that is meaningfully lighter and meaningfully safer to be around humans, not in five years, but right now. So if you believe that this company, 1X has actually achieved what they're saying they have achieved, then they will be the first robot company to actually push a lot of bots out into the world, primarily homes probably at first, because it is safe to be around humans. Now, I'll just say this.