Tesla Competition Is Coming, Especially Humanoid Robots - Right?

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:01]Ryan White is best known for the fact that he travels and travels and travels and travels and we'll talk about Muskegan in a minute, but he has been traveling. He's been to China. He's been to, I don't know, some weird country in Southeast Asia or some place like that.

[00:00:15]I forget. Um, Nepal or something. I I don't know. And he's been traveling to all these shows around the country. And what does that mean? That means Brian, I think you've seen the competitive cars.

[00:00:29]You've seen the competitive trucks.

[00:00:32]You've even seen some of the competitive large trucks, the uh the uh eight, what do you call them? Uh >> class 8 >> class 8 trucks from other from other companies. You've seen the ADA systems and you've seen the robo taxis in a lot of these places that are the main competition for Tesla going forward. But you're still all in on Tesla stock.

[00:00:53]>> Why?

[00:00:53]>> Yeah. Um, so I had this sickness. Now I'll tell you what started it was in 2019. I saw something that the analysts didn't. I saw Fremont had ramped. They were through production hell. I saw Giga Shanghai being built. I watched it every week. I didn't have a channel yet, but I was already counting squares because I thought it was interesting and I thought, I wonder if I could predict when this will be done. Uh so when I started my channel that's how I started was by predicting with tremendous accuracy when giga Texas would be complete and uh I got a lot of criticism from people who said I was too optimistic or too pessimistic but it turns out neither was the case. So why did I go allin? Because I saw analysts very professional people like Lynette Lopez saying guys there's nothing there.

[00:01:49]It's mud. It's a boondoggle. They're just pushing dirt back and forth to make it look like they're working. And I thought, have you not seen the drone footage? The drone footage is published twice a week from two different channels. And I can watch the pro I mean, I can measure the progress. This is this is real. This is happening.

[00:02:07]Cybertruck hadn't been released. And my conviction was that over a 10-year horizon, Tesla would outperform the S&P 500. I don't know if you've checked, it has. Uh so and within what a year or two I was up 15 20x on my investment.

[00:02:27]>> Um so then why not sell it? And the answer is those same analysts are still saying they don't see something that you and I see. First it was mega packs. I interviewed Matt Smith years ago and said, "Why are none of the Wall Street analysts measuring mega pack and when will they?" And he said, "As soon as it makes a meaningful difference to the bottom line, it will." I said, "They're doing$und00 million orders." Doesn't matter. It's not does it's not meaningful to them. Sure enough, two three quarters later, uh, several firms announced, "We're initiating coverage of stationary storage." And I thought, boy, you you you just missed two years of this. And the same is true. We are seeing some who are starting to model robo taxi, but I would argue they're not giving it a whole lot of weight. We're seeing some who are arguing uh modeling a dojo, but they're arguing that it's it doesn't matter. It's too far out. It's not something to worry about. Uh what are you doing then? Because if you're assessing this as a car company, it's way overpriced.

[00:03:40]It's not a car company. It's something else. It's a transport company. And yes, I've seen the competition. I've seen the good cars that get to Europe, that get to Mexico and South America. I've seen uh all of those. I've uh but what I've seen is in China, the really good competition, the cars that they don't export, the cars that I think people wish they exported. Uh, and those are fantastic. Which would you rather have?

[00:04:07]A Model 3 for, you know, $50,000 that's fast and comfortable, I guess, or for half the price, something that's more comfortable, that's faster, that's uh got a real sharp styling about it, and a bunch of bells and whistles you didn't even know existed. Well, the answer is apparently the Tesla, because even though it's more expensive, it's just plain a better car. Will that last forever?

[00:04:35]Uh, unknown. Right now, it's definitely true. Whenever I review used cars, which I do quite a bit, that's how I get to see the other brands. I'll just tell you right now, there is no world in which Stalantis is going to invite me to an event to review their cars because I am quite famously honest. And if I'm being honest, the Jeep wagon ear was shockingly disappointing. Breathtakingly so. They're not going. So, if I want to drive a wagon ear, I have to go to a used car lot and do that.

[00:05:08]>> And when I make those reviews, I say, "If what you're looking for is just a car, this is just a car."

[00:05:15]>> Uh, no matter how good it is, it is still just a car. You see these moms, these soccer moms pulling up to drop off their kids in their $80,000 BMW and all I can think is you drive yourself.

[00:05:31]I can't imagine. You're you're so concerned with luxury and yet you're the chauffeur. Gross. So I don't know. Uh I don't see it any other way. Only 10 20% of the market understands that even well less than that. Only 10 to 20% of Tesla owners understand that, but that number is growing. Last quarter, we saw 170,000 new subscribers. This is now being added to other markets. Uh, it's going it's started to go wide in Europe, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and other countries lining up behind it. What was the third one? Spain.

[00:06:09]>> Well, Belgium is like almost there. I think Spain is talking about it.

[00:06:13]>> Spain wanted to be second, but they're going to be third. Uh this is every market this opens in becomes a new revenue stream that lasts in perpetuity.

[00:06:25]Not forever, but it doesn't have to last forever because we are still selling seeing more go out the door to new customers every day. It's happening.

[00:06:34]This is a money printing machine. And yes, uh Elon will be the first trillionaire. Uh and can you believe it? His companies haven't even brought in a trillion, right? That's cuz he's not paid out of the company's revenue. You dingdong.

[00:06:51]He's paid out of the shareholder value.

[00:06:54]>> He's paid by me. If you got a problem with how he's paid, take it up with the shareholders.

[00:06:59]>> If they have a problem with how he's paid, they're welcome to vote.

[00:07:03]>> Exit the stock.

[00:07:03]>> Yeah.

[00:07:04]>> Vote. Exit the stock. I mean, write a letter to the board. Uh publish an article. I mean, there are a lot of things you can do. You don't even have to exit the stock. Don't don't necessarily do that. You can voice your concern without >> vote vote against it. Uh so I don't know. Uh I'm the one who paid him.

[00:07:24]>> I don't love everything about him. I am net positive on Elon. Um but the deal we made when we bought the stock was if you can take this tiny sum of cash in my retirement and make it sufficient to pay off my house, you can pay yourself whatever you want. Right.

[00:07:43]Right.

[00:07:44]>> And he lived up to his end. So, here we are.

[00:07:48]>> So, on the on the FSD uh regulation front, you just mentioned that Europe is, you know, one country at a time. It seems ridiculous to me that they don't just take what the Netherlands did and what they already know, you know, Texas has done, etc., etc., and just go, "All right, let's just start doing this." But it is Europe. So, um, but the one that I'm still questioning is this one in China last week. I still don't know what the heck we got. So, from what I can tell, we can sell FSD in China. We can do subscribe. We can have people subscribe to FSD in China. Can they drive FSD in China everywhere? Or is that still waiting for the regulatory people to finally give us a decision? Or is it some of both and a hybrid? I don't know. Help me out. Do you know more than I do?

[00:08:36]>> I don't. I don't. I I guess I missed that story. Uh yeah. So I didn't didn't see that one. Uh we know the obstacle has been that uh when China was uh when China approved FSD we were under the impression me and most of my colleagues were under the impression that that just meant it was going wide maybe just for hardware for maybe for all cars and that was not the case. It was not wide at all. It was like an internal and very limited release. Um, which is unfortunate because we saw a lot of footage that led me to believe it was had gone wider than it had. When I was there recently, I did everything I could to reach out to Tesla Asia about getting to see it and uh they did not respond.

[00:09:18]But then again, they didn't respond when I asked to see the Y months earlier.

[00:09:22]They didn't ask last year when I asked to see the factory going to China over and over. Uh they I don't know. It's kind of weird. I wonder why that would be. But >> a PR department. That's why >> they have a PR department in China.

[00:09:36]>> Oh, in China. That's right.

[00:09:37]>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, I don't understand what the obstacle is. And uh there is an obstacle. They do not want me to see it for some reason. But uh I assume it's because it's not yet trained locally on the local data. And that is an obstacle.

[00:09:52]They are just now getting the servers spun up to do the local training. I'm confident it will normalize very quickly, but they have to do it. So, in terms of what they're actually selling, I don't know. The good news is Huawei does charge for one of their their most advanced ADAS system.

[00:10:13]Uh, nobody else does though. So, that's that's going to be an obstacle there. If you've got the system that is clearly better than all the rest, you will get some customers. But a lot of people can't tell the difference between a good system and a bad system. And especially not if you haven't driven both, if you haven't experienced lived both. Uh the salesman can tell you whatever tell you it's better. Mine's better. Ours is better. Just get ours. And there you go.

[00:10:44]So I have another wild theory. I know Brian, you've never heard any of my wild theories, but this is my latest wild theory. And that is that Tesla has lots of very smart people talking to regulators all around the world. They are taking them to lunch. They are buying them, you know, golf trips, whatever is allowed without becoming unethical because I don't think Elon would would allow that. Um, but whatever is allowed, they're doing it to try to get an arm around these regulators, including California, including New York, everywhere, including DC for the, you know, for the new the new uh, Department of Transportation there. And when you do that, I know this because I've been there and done it, these people become your friends. Uh, some of them might not. You might have some people you rub the wrong way and so maybe you send in a different person to do the selling. But however it works, Tesla, I'm sure, is ingratiating themselves with all these regulators around the world. In addition, all these regulators want what they're what's their what's their entire reason to twah?

[00:11:50]>> Well, safety.

[00:11:51]>> Safety.

[00:11:52]>> Yeah. Hopefully.

[00:11:54]>> And so you've got Tesla coming in. Who is the safest car? There's no nobody questioning that. All their own California and and Washington DC, etc., etc. We'll all tell you, we've done this. We've done the studies. It was safe. the safest car before we put on FSD and now they got all the studies to look at that what happens after FSD. So it would seem that everything's aligned.

[00:12:18]Hey, I'm your buddy. Hey, I want to make you look good. Hey, this is going to help save lives. Everything should be aligned. And yet we have these countries and we have Northern California in particular where the dime has not dropped. So here's my theory.

[00:12:33]Tesla doesn't want the dime to drop there yet.

[00:12:37]So they're kind of just like in in Texas, they're slow slowly rolling out because they're keep on running into this, running into that, whatever it is that they're running into. Otherwise, they would be ramping if they weren't running into something that is holding them back from going big. And so I think in Northern California where it's going to be a spotlight like crazy, they're just telling they're telling the regulators not yet. Not yet. So what do you what do you think of my crazy theory? So, I will agree with a bunch of parts of it. There are parts I don't have enough information to give you an opinion on. In terms of smoozing regulators, I don't I haven't seen reports of them taking them to lunch or dinner or golf clubs or anything like that, but golf trips. But what I what we have seen from Ireland is the Ireland said Tesla has reached out to us. They have provided the information we need.

[00:13:29]They've gotten in our face and said, "What do you need from us to understand this?" because regulators and politicians uh there's two flavors of them. There's the I only vote with my head. You've got their votes. The the they will ask for the numbers. They will review the numbers. They will approve it. And then there's the I only vote with my heart. And those people, you never know which way they're going to go. They can make very irrational, illogical, contrafactual uh decisions and goof up the whole thing. Those are the people you need to become friends with so they like you enough to do the right thing. Now, some of their constituents may argue that they're doing the wrong thing. How dare you? But in that case, you can just fall back to the numbers people and say numbers people are saying we would be criminally negligent to not make our roads safer.

[00:14:24]Uh I am sure that there were lawmakers who opposed airbags or opposed backup cameras or opposed any opposed the elimination of lead from gasoline. I am sure all of those things happen. Uh but hopefully the cooler heads will prevail.

[00:14:43]And the bottom line is if you are the last country in Europe that doesn't have it, you're going to have you're going to be voted out. you're just going to be voted out because there are people who who want that level of safety who demand it. And uh so I think on that in terms of California, I don't think they had to ask them to not approve it because Tesla's still running on a taxi license rather than an FSD license. You can legally, Randy, you can go be an Uber driver today and use FSD exclusively.

[00:15:15]>> That's totally legal in California.

[00:15:17]That's what Tesla's doing. that's the license they're operating under. They will not get approval until they change the license. So Tesla is the one holding back those floodgates uh rather than relying on the whims of California which could potentially open sooner than they're ready and then they've got some explaining to do. Uh but I'm confident that as we've discussed so many times that when we look back in five years or when history looks back, no one will remember which month of which year these things happened, they'll just know that that's how things are now.

[00:15:55]>> You touched on this earlier, but I want to go into more depth on it as our last story for today. Mark Andre yesterday, well yesterday, the day before was on Joe Rogan. Um, and he said that the US is far behind on robotics and seemed to mean specifically humanoids.

[00:16:14]>> He is a super close buddy with Elon. He was part of the of the PayPal mafia and they're still super close friends. He carries I'm thinking has a lot of Tesla stock. I'm not a positive that, but I think it's true.

[00:16:28]So, um, Elon should be carrying the fact that it's Elon should be carrying some weight in his head in terms of where we are on the humanoid, even if he hasn't seen the latest greatest. Um, Elon will be introducing that humanoid robot um, in a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, but soon, I think. Do you think there's a chance at all that it won't be eons ahead of what everybody else is showing?

[00:16:58]>> Oh, sure. Uh, so the first thing I would say about Andre's comment is that um the country is definitely behind on robotics. Having one dominant player, two or three catching up is uh miles behind China, which I guess would mean kilometers. Uh but uh in terms of what we're going to see is it going to be the best at what there is a spider graph of capabilities uh and is it going to be the fastest?

[00:17:30]No. I imagine there's a robot that's faster. Is it going to be the tallest or the shortest? No. Uh, but what I think it's going to win on, what I suspect it's going to win on is if it's not number one or two in brain power, in actual reasoning, I'll be surprised. And whoever's in the spot ahead of them or behind them, I don't think will be ready for commercial deployment. So, it doesn't matter if somebody's got one that's smarter if you can't buy it. Um, and I think it'll also be the hands-down winner on value. I know a lot of people have been say, "Oh, 25,000." No, Elon said it'd be the price of a car. And a car nowadays ultimately >> ultimately >> but that means the ultimate price would be 50.

[00:18:18]>> Uh, and the early adopter price of course uh you get custom floor mats with it. Uh, so that makes it 300 grand.

[00:18:25]know, I don't know what it would be, but more >> uh you get you get a custom color. I don't know. Uh but >> custom clothing. Custom clothing.

[00:18:35]Bespoke clothing. Yeah.

[00:18:37]>> No, no, that's too expensive. We're not going to do anything that fancy. Uh we're just going to give you a sticker that says launch edition and that's it.

[00:18:44]Uh but the first ones don't need to be the final price. I I've seen a lot of companies make that mistake where they'll say, "Well, we need it the first ones to be this price because we're not adding enough value for people to pay an early adopter tax and if it if you're losing money on every unit, you're going to be in trouble." Uh, and that's what we've seen with like Lucid and Rivian, unfortunately, is that in the early days, despite astronomical prices, it still wasn't covering the cost of goods sold. So, there's problems you could run into there. I don't think Tesla will. I think we are seeing the factory go up.

[00:19:22]We understand the scale of it. Uh and we know their unique ability to manufacture expensive things at a price lower than others. So uh yeah, will it be the best?

[00:19:36]Uh will it be by far the best?

[00:19:39]It's tough to say. It will not necessarily win in more than one or two categories. Uh, but you know, you can come in second in every race for the entire season and still be the overall winner by a lot.

[00:19:55]>> Yeah, I'm looking at usability as my main criteria. What can it do and how hard is it? How hard is it to train? And I think what Elon is shooting for is training would be either see and say, uh, see and do, whatever they whatever they call that thing that they teachers to teach, you know, do it and then >> show it.

[00:20:17]>> I don't know. Show me the money. I don't know.

[00:20:19]>> Show it and then I'll do it. Anyway, some physical uh act of the of the person who is doing the job and then the robot just does it. are potentially the human is wearing glasses of some kind that are the same as what uh is where the eyes are located for humanoids. And then the other one would be of course a video training um would be another possibility. Watching it on video and then getting it and then okay once I do that does it take five minutes? Can I do it immediately? Does it take an hour?

[00:20:51]Does it take a week? Does it take an engineer to sit there for a week? you know, all of that kind of stuff I think is going to determine the usability, what it what its real uh breadth of of capabilities are. That's why I think Elon is holding up on it. I think that he wants it to come out with massive capabilities.

[00:21:10]>> Mhm. And um he Yes. He wants a product that's as close to finished as possible.

[00:21:18]This isn't 2018. We don't need to rush the Model 3 to market or go bankrupt.

[00:21:24]Uh, Model Y was a much more refined car somehow, even though it was it came out real quick. Um, but Semi is a great example. By waiting, they've got something that's much more efficient.

[00:21:36]CyberCab as well. By waiting, they've got something that's much cheaper and much more capable and competent and hopefully can actually run unsupervised TBD. Uh, but we'll see on that. Now, this will be the Gen One will be a mature product. I would argue more mature than Apple's first iPhone, which was still groundbreaking, amazing, highly soughta, well adopted, coveted, but it in retrospect had a lot of serious limitations. And if you'd have just waited until the second or third one, it would have been a very different, much better product. I just bought all of them as soon as they came out. You know, the first the first three or four years. As soon as they came out, I bought one. Then I went to every two years. And now it's hurting Apple's business. I'm only doing it once every three years. Yeah.

[00:22:32]>> Yeah. Well, they got good. Yeah.

[00:22:34]>> Uh you're going to have to invent uh some something that the phones do that they can't currently do. Uh that, >> you know, requires that. And we've had that. We've had people who use it for games or people who use it for uh video editing on the phone, but uh I don't know what the next big thing is. And >> I'm still waiting for the 3D hologram in my living room.

[00:22:58]>> I've been promised that for how long?

[00:23:00]How come how come nobody's complaining about Apple not delivering the 3D hologram that they promised seven years ago or something?

[00:23:06]>> Did Apple promise that?

[00:23:08]>> Yeah, they had it all. Even told us how they were going to do it. They weren't using holograph. They weren't using laser holographics. It was going to use different angles or something. I forget the light. I Anyway, it's been too long since I w since I read the article.

[00:23:21]>> 3D TV was a real failure. I don't know, man. I saw the demos at Costco for years. Every time I'd put them on, I'd be I'd look at it and go, I don't see it. And apparently a lot of people couldn't see it.

[00:23:34]>> So, and then there was no programming for it. And yeah, this was a terrible idea.

[00:23:39]>> Brian, talk to us about Muskegan before we go. Moskegan June 5th and 6th summer meetup hosted by the Tesla owners of Michigan. It's going to be a whole lot of fun. There's great speakers. Me, Jordan Gizigy will be there. Bradford Ferguson and Matt Smith will be there.

[00:23:54]Uh David Moss, the FSD guru himself will be there. Dirty Tesla to set him straight. Got a whole bunch of people.

[00:24:00]Even Mark from the Tesla Life will be there as a panel moderator. Josh West 247, Justin the Bearded Tesla guy.

[00:24:07]Doctors Scott and know-it-all will both be there talking about robots. We've got an all-star lineup. And of course, Simon will be there hosting a live light show uh that was that he is confident is the best one he has ever made the night of June 5th. And there's tickets on sale.

[00:24:24]If you're going to uh if you wanted to go to the X Takeover, it is sold out for October, but for June, come on out and join us in Michigan because I'll be there and it'll be a lot of fun. And uh what's not to like? There's even meet and greet tickets for Friday night. Uh if you can't get enough, which you know some folks can't.

[00:24:43]>> All right, Brian, I encourage everybody to come see you at that particular event. Um so, uh I think that's it. I think that's the show. I don't think there's anything else to say. Yeah, >> let me just double check. It's teslamman.org is the link.

[00:24:58]>> Okay. All right. So, Brian, thank you as always for jumping on board and to all of you out there. It has been great talking to you.