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Food delivery runs on an expensive mismatch: a 5,000 lb car, a gig driver, and a markup on every order, all to move a three pound meal a few miles. Steve Burns spent 20 years building electric delivery vans at Workhorse for UPS and FedEx. Now his company NoTip is going after the part autonomy hasn't solved: the last 100 feet from the curb to your front door.

NoTip uses two vehicles working together. A 1,500 lb electric three-wheeler handles the road. A small robot named Noah rides inside, rolls down a ramp at the curb, and carries the order to the doorstep. Flat $6 delivery fee, no tip. It's live now in Mason, Ohio.

Guest: Steve Burns, Founder and Executive Chairman, NoTip

0:00 The real cost of food delivery
0:28 From Workhorse vans to autonomous delivery
1:19 Why delivery got so expensive
2:38 Are people ready for robot delivery?
4:05 The hidden complexity of the last 100 feet
7:35 Why sidewalk robots fail in the suburbs
9:08 The mothership: a two-vehicle delivery system
18:00 Designing a lighter, safer delivery vehicle
27:42 How Noah sees: shadows, snow and RTK positioning
38:31 Next cities and the road to full autonomy

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Anthony Vinci — the first CTO of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and a member of the team behind Project Maven — joins Chris Brandt to talk about how AI and China are rewriting the rules of espionage.

We get into why the most powerful manipulation isn't lies but facts, how "LLM grooming" poisons the AI you rely on, the shift from being in the loop to on the loop, and why Vinci argues every citizen now needs to think like an intelligence officer. Plus: his company Vico, which forecasts geopolitical and economic events to help people make better decisions.

Anthony's book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, is a Financial Times best book of the year — well worth a read: https://amzn.to/4fgJRD7

Guest links:
Vico: https://vico.io
Anthony Vinci: https://anthonyvinci.com
Book (The Fourth Intelligence Revolution): https://amzn.to/4fgJRD7

Referenced in this episode:
Zero Day Clock: https://zerodayclock.com/

00:00 — The best way to manipulate you is with facts
00:32 — Welcome & who is Anthony Vinci
01:20 — Why he wrote The Fourth Intelligence Revolution
03:51 — Why espionage is now in your living room
05:31 — 2016, Facebook, and hacking an election
09:00 — AI vs. Facebook: targeting you as an individual
09:40 — LLM grooming and the Pravda network
10:34 — Disinformation vs. misinformation
13:02 — Why AI manipulation is subtle
14:57 — We've been lying to each other forever
16:20 — Training everyone to think like a spy
18:51 — The cybersecurity parallel
22:41 — RSA, agentic attacks, and AI in security
24:57 — Mythos, zero-days, and weaponized exploits
30:00 — Should powerful models be released in stages?
32:20 — When one person has more power than a nation
36:54 — The morality question for AI founders
39:11 — Surveillance vs. thought control
40:34 — Could we ever elect an AI president?
41:16 — In the loop vs. on the loop
44:22 — Why competitive pressure removes humans from the loop
45:39 — What Vico does
48:39 — Intelligence as war prevention
51:14 — Where to find Anthony & Vico

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Your AI looks 80% done. In reality, it's 20% done, and the last mile is a cliff. Greg Whalen, CTO of Prove AI, breaks down why CTOs are getting blindsided by AI, why vibe coding creates a false sense of progress, and what most teams are missing when it comes to AI telemetry and observability.

Greg has led engineering at global scale as CTO of ZendIt, GM for Amazon WorkMail at AWS, and was an AI researcher at Columbia's NLP group. Now he's building Prove AI to help enterprises move from "mostly working" to production-grade AI systems.

We dig into: why AI isn't just another tool in the toolbox, the morning coffee debugging nightmare, how agents exploit other agents for restricted data, why thumbs up/down tells you nothing about outcomes, the vibe coder vs. super principal divide, why CTOs need to "get back in the ring," and why being a first mover beats waiting for convergence that isn't coming.

Prove AI → https://proveai.com

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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Tim Seward built a 65 MPH electric moped in his garage to one-up his buddies. People wouldn't stop asking where to buy it. So he started Onyx Motors, raised almost a million bucks on Indiegogo in 3 hours… then sold the company for $1. When his successor died unexpectedly, Tim came back to rebuild from scratch. This is that story.

The RCR 80V is a 91-volt electric motorbike that hits 65–75 MPH, goes 130 miles on a charge, runs Apple CarPlay, and costs about 75 cents to charge at home. It's built on a metal tube frame with swappable aluminum panels — designed from day one to be customized, modded, and made your own. Think less iPhone, more Lego kit.

Tim breaks down the moped gang culture that started it all, why Americans are 20 years behind the rest of the world on two-wheeled transport, what he learned designing scooters at Bird, and why Gen Z might never buy a car.

CHAPTERS
0:00 – Cold Open
0:00 – Intro: Who is Tim Seward?
0:01 – Why Build Something That Lasts?
0:03 – Moped Army & Moped Mondays
0:05 – Moped Culture: US vs. the World
0:07 – The Scooter Armageddon (Bird & South by Southwest)
0:09 – Working at Bird & the Wheelchair-Accessible Vehicle
0:11 – Red Lights & "It's Not For Sale"
0:13 – The Indiegogo Campaign ($920K in Hours)
0:15 – Selling Onyx for $1
0:18 – Losing James & Resurrecting the Brand
0:21 – Starting a Company Twice
0:22 – The RCR 80V: Size, Speed & Power
0:25 – Regulations & Licensing
0:26 – Metal vs. Plastic: Design Philosophy
0:28 – Built to Customize (Not Lock Down)
0:31 – CarPlay, Navigation & Built-In Tech
0:33 – Mounting Points, Mods & Steady Garage
0:36 – Swappable Panels & Custom Builds
0:40 – Favorite Mods: Back to the Future Build
0:43 – The $245B Electric Vehicle Market
0:46 – Gen Z Doesn't Want Cars
0:49 – Park It on the Sidewalk (or Your Desk)
0:52 – Speed Modes & Motorcycle Registration
0:54 – What's Next for Onyx Motors
0:56 – Where to Buy + Outro

LINKS
Onyx Motors → https://onyxmotors.com
Onyx on Instagram → https://instagram.com/onyxmotors
Steady Garage (aftermarket accessories) → https://steadygarage.com
Onyx Garage (custom builds gallery) → https://onyxmotors.com/pages/garage

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Most people see train tracks and think "obstacle." Kevin Damoa sees the ultimate highway hack. After six years in the Army doing rail operations and stints at SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, he's realizing something crazy: America has 140,000 miles of rail that's basically empty while our highways are parking lots.

So he's building a vehicle that doesn't care. Road congested? Jump on the rail. Train coming? Hop off and take the service road. Bad track ahead? The vehicle's sensors catch it, and you route around. It carries full shipping containers (60,000 pounds) and runs on whatever fuel you've got handy.

Here's the thing: moving freight by rail costs 70% less than trucking, but nobody uses it because you need cranes, multiple vehicles, and weeks of waiting. Damoa's vehicles are eliminating all of that. Drive straight from a ship to the rail, ride to your city, drive off to the warehouse. Done.

In this episode, the Glīd CEO breaks down why investors just oversubscribed his funding round, how this technology could transform shipping in developing nations, and why he calls logistics "special forces for regular people." Plus, the wild story of testing these beasts at an abandoned Kansas munitions depot.

More at https://FUTR.tv Audio version at https://futr.buzzsprout.com Learn about Glīd: https://glidrail.com/ Book mentioned: The Box by Marc Levinson: https://amzn.to/46u8Rm4

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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What happens when you feed an AI its own code and ask it to improve itself? It invents something better, writes a patent for it, and files it. In 8 minutes. Dr. Marcus Weller did exactly that with Deep Invent, and the result made him realize his life had just changed.

We're talking about an AI platform that analyzes patterns across all human innovation to create new inventions. Real ones. With actual patents. A 7-year-old used it to co-invent a system for removing microplastics from water. An Amazon robotics director quit his job after the system showed him an AR speed-reading invention he couldn't stop thinking about.

Marcus breaks down how Deep Invent works - scraping global scientific literature, patents, and market data in real-time to find the "white space" where innovation hasn't happened yet. Then it generates clusters of patentable inventions in those gaps.

We dig into the difference between AI hallucination and imagination, why cross-disciplinary insights matter, what "recursive evolutionary inference" means, and whether we're looking at steps toward superintelligence. Plus Marcus shares his grandmother's story about the resistance to electricity in homes - a reminder that every transformative technology faces the "this is too weird" phase.

Deep Invent: https://deepinvent.ai

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

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Exciting Updates: New Projects, Podcasts, and More | FUTR.tv

In this episode of FUTR.tv, I provide an update on my latest activities and projects. Due to a new day job and the launch of two new podcasts with mission.org, IT Visionaries and The Fleet, as well as "What the FUTR" for FUTRconnect, FUTR.tv episodes have been less frequent. Here are the exciting details about my work with mission.org and FUTRconnect. Stay tuned for new, upcoming FUTR.tv content.

Mission.org

IT Visionaries: https://www.youtube.com/@itvisionaries

The Fleet: https://mission.org/the-fleet/

FUTRconnect: https://futrconnect.io

FUTRconnect Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@futr_connect

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Today we have a very special guest on. He founded a company at the dawn of the internet age, and it is still going strong, celebrating its 25 anniversary. So we are going to talk with him about his journey, so stay tuned.

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR podcast.

I have with me Jake Nickell, he and Jacob DeHart started Threadless in 2000 in Jake's apartment as a T-shirt design competition that has now grown into an online community of artists where designs are created by and chosen by an online community. It was a 2006 Wired article about Threadless that coined the term crowdsourcing.

So we are going to talk with Jake about how Threadless has evolved and how the Internet has changed the world over the last 25 years.

Welcome Jake

Threadless: https://threadless.com/
Artist Shops: https://www.threadless.com/artist-shops/

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What sport attracts celebrities like Lebron James and Lil Wayne? Why that would be the fastest growing sport in America of course.

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR podcast.

Today we have with us Evan Floersch, Co-Owner and CEO of the Major League Pickleball team the Texas Ranchers. So we are going to get an inside look at a new and emerging sports league and see how you too could be a team owner, and find out what's in store for this exciting new sport!

Welcome Evan

https://ranchers.com/

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Today we are going to be focusing on technology that really makes life fun, so stay tuned.

Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt here with another FUTR podcast.

We have with us Colin Godby, CEO & Founder at Dust Moto. Dust Moto is building the electric dirt bike the industry wants, and needs. They are now taking limited pre-orders fir their Hightail, A lightweight, powerful, and effortlessly intuitive electric dirtbike built right here in the U.S.A.

So we are going to talk with Colin about what inspires him and what makes the Hightail so much fun.

Welcome Colin

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FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.