I'm John Batchelor. I welcome my colleague Jim McTagg, former Washington editor of Barron's Magazine.

He's in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And Jim and I have begun a conversation about

androids, about robots, about artificial intelligence, put all three together. Are we

living in the anticipation of an Isaac Asimov iRobot world.

And to that point, I welcome my longtime colleague and informant of retail and wholesale matters,

business to business and business to retail, Chris Regal, the CEO of Scholar.com,

a global technology firm with business on all the occupied continents, especially when it comes to

digital information gathering, which is an aspect of robotics. Chris, a very good day to you. The news

in the Financial Times that most engaged me was Elon Musk looking at the future and saying, here's what I'm going to do

about it. The sales for Tesla were down for the first time ever, a small amount, but it's been

growing for many years. Offsetting that is the news that Mr. Musk is going to convert a California

factory that now produces the S model and the

X model, they're going to be discontinued. And instead, that factory will be the site of producing

what he calls his optimist robots, in other words, androids. And he's appealing to Wall Street by saying, I'm no longer a car company, I never have been.

For a while, he said he's a software company.

Now he's saying he's a robotics company, an Android company, going to take the skills of AI,

which is his grog, and put them together with the skills of Android makers and deliver to the retail,

to the business, to the trade, robotics. It's all quite breathtaking, unless you've read

science fiction, and then it seems ordinary. Is it, Chris, your measure? Is America ready to throw

itself into Elon Musk's salesmanship?

John, I think Mr. Musk has a tremendous understanding of opportunities.

And in the robotics use case, when you look at states like California that have placed really oppressive taxation on companies for having employees.

...