Conversations with the people building Physical AI, recorded where the work happens
The Core Matter podcast is live. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch on YouTube. This post is the home for all interview content; it will be updated as episodes ship.
What is Core Matter Podcast?
Core Matter is built to be the research publication for Physical AI. The long-form reports run on primary sources: filings, datasheets, factory-floor sourcing. Some of the most insightful primary sources are the people building in the space. Founders and operators building the Physical AI stack knows things that never make it into a prospectus.
The interview series captures the gap between what the demo videos show and what engineers will say out loud. Through specific questions, we get to the real numbers and go deeper than the demo.
Episodes are filmed with operators globally, in Shenzhen, Tokyo, Pisa, San Francisco and beyond.
Apple | Spotify | YouTube
Ep 1. Eric Pan, founder of Seeed Studio
Eric Pan founded Seeed Studio in 2008 and has spent nearly two decades as one of the more important nodes in Shenzhen’s open hardware ecosystem, sitting between global developers and the local supply chain. Today Seeed is the company behind Reachy Mini’s production, an NVIDIA robotics partner, and the reason a $1,000 open-source robot arm exists. Before Shenzhen, he worked on chipset quality at Intel, so he has seen hardware from both sides: US corporate process and the workshop of the world.
We recorded at Seeed’s Shenzhen offices, and the episode works as a ground-level primer on two levels. For founders: how business actually gets done in Shenzhen, why supplier trust rather than budget is the binding constraint, the distinct mistakes hardware veterans and software founders make, and why Eric now tells most teams not to build hardware at all. For investors and operators: what actually sits underneath Shenzhen’s cost advantage, the quality-cost-lead-time triangle, and what reshoring capital can and cannot replicate. We also cover how Seeed absorbed Pollen Robotics’ five-fold demand spike, why the majority of robots won’t be humanoids, and where Shenzhen sits in the Physical AI story twenty years out.