Roomba

They were a sponsor of ours for a while and, iRobot recently went bankrupt, and another company has purchased them.

I believe they're a Chinese company, but it's nice to see that the Roomba looks like it's making a comeback.

So iRobot, the company... which I believe is a wholly owned subsidiary of another company now, has unveiled the Roomba Duo at FIA 2026, which is their first dual unit robot.

It's a vacuum and a mop.

Previously, you had to have the vacuum for the dry areas and the carpet and the rugs and the hardwood floors.

The main robot uses a top-mounted mechanical arm to carry, deploy, and retrieve the companion robot.

Okay.

The two robots work together through the Roomba Home app.

They're developing flying cars.

There's a robot that vacuums and cleans, kind of like the Roomba we have in our house, right? There's a lot of things that exist in the future that we don't think of when we just imagine what it could look like.

Yeah, I mean, everything's changing.

Like AI at first had told people to put glue on rocks and eat them.

How long did it take for these same media outlets to complain about Joe Biden's lack of press conferences or the clear lying of cringe Jean-Pierre when she was a White House press secretary? Joe Biden would go, I mean, weeks, if not months, without giving the media access to him.

And when he did, he would Roomba.

At the end of the press conference, he would every single time would walk away.

Well, and he had the remember he had the the name of the of the reporters on his little pad of paper.

That is just human nature at this point.

Remember the first time you walked into somebody's house and they had a Roomba vacuuming? I do.

I was like, what in the world is that? And how do I get one? So this is not about forcing visibility.

What happens the moment somebody stops and asks your client about that robotic

What do you think about the specialized robots? Do you think there's a place for the specialized robot? This relates to what I also want to talk about.

There's the Roomba.

The Roomba is the first example of a robot in the consumer market, but it just did one thing, which is just rolled around and did a vacuum cleaner.

What do you think about specialized versus generalized? And there's also a sort of a metaphor that can be done with the personal computer, which was the first general operating system for humans to be their personal computer versus the specialized.

And let me give an example of that.

So whether that's a refrigerator, whether that's your vacuum, whether that's a doorbell, those are concerning for a different reason in my mind.

If you go on Amazon and you just buy a no-name brand vacuum, you saved a couple bucks from the iRobot, the Roombas, whatever.

But...

How often those get software updates or patched is a crapshoot.

This is the airport and they've got a big robot.

It's like a big Roomba, but it's big.

It's kind of like the... you know, the, uh, was it Rosie Rosa, one of them from, uh, the Jetsons.

It's like that size.

I mean, did...

Don't you think maybe sometimes if you kind of got to look for racism to find it? I mean, do you think you have to look for that to find it? Do you think if somebody looked, if I showed that photo, if I walk around today and I showed this still photo to everybody in our building, everybody, from all the people at J.R.R., Roomba, XL 106.7, The Beat, over at Brandon and those guys, do you think one person would say, oh, yeah, it's that? And say what they say it is, what they think it is? Do you think anybody would even infer to that at all?

Saying it and also thinking it would be two different questions for me.

Well, that's fine.