The Research that became a Robotics Company

What happens when curiosity, biology, artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship collide?

In the first episode of Human Stories Behind the Robots, Dr John Oyekan sits down with Prof James Marshall, Director of the Centre for Machine Intelligence at the University of Sheffield and founder of Opteran. James shares the remarkable journey from studying insect brains to building neuromorphic software that could fundamentally change autonomous robotics.

The conversation explores career pivots, interdisciplinary thinking, academic entrepreneurship, leadership and why some of the biggest breakthroughs happen when different disciplines begin talking to each other.

Top Takeaways

1. Great ideas often emerge at the intersection of disciplines

James never planned to become a robotics entrepreneur. His journey crossed computer science, biology, neuroscience, AI, gaming, robotics and entrepreneurship.

Innovation often happens where disciplines overlap—not within traditional boundaries.

2. Research can become real-world impact

The Green Brain Project began as fundamental neuroscience research.

Years later, it evolved into Opteran—a company developing insect-inspired intelligence for autonomous machines.

The message is simple:

Basic research today can become tomorrow's technology.

3. Success isn't about doing everything yourself

One of James' strongest messages is finding people whose strengths complement your own.

His partnership with co-founder Alex Cope combined different skills into something much larger than either could have built alone.

"No one is good at everything."

The purpose of this podcast is to inspire students and early-career researchers, building our academic robotics community by sharing the human stories behind the robots. 

Email: ​​uk-ras@manchester.ac.uk for questions or topic suggestions you may have for future episodes.

This show is brought to you by the UK-RAS network, you can follow us on X and Linkedin or visit our website to find out more www.https://uk-ras.org.uk/ Produced and directed by Heather Pownall of Heather's Media Hub Ltd and award-winning producer.

The opinions of our host and guests are their own; The UK-RAS network does not endorse any individual viewpoints, given products or companies. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review and subscribe with the podcast provider of your choice.

Transcript

John 0:07

Hello and welcome to Human Stories Behind Robots, a podcast from the UK RAS network exploring the people behind robotics research and innovation. In this series, we'll be speaking with researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and innovators from across the robotics community to uncover the personal stories behind their careers. We will explore the moments that inspire them, the challenges they have overcome, the lessons they have learned, and the experiences that have shaped who they are today. Because behind every breakthrough, behind every innovation and every robot, there is a human story. I'm your host, Dr. John Oyecom. Let's get started. Good afternoon. Our

Introduction to James Marshall and his work

John 1:01

guest today is James Marshall, professor of theoretical and computational biology, director of the Center for Machine Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and founder of the company Optron. Optron is developing neuromorphic software for autonomous machines and is changing the way we develop robotics in the real world today. Hello, James. It's good to have you on our podcast, The Human Stories Behind the Robots. Thanks, John. Good to see you again. And good to see you also. James, you and I have known each other for the past 14 years, off and on. Turns out, yes. Yeah, and um I must confess you're you were the first to offer me my postdoc, uh my first academic post as a postdoc on your UKRI uh funded uh green brain project. And I have a feeling, James, that um um Opterran is actually a child project or a child um of um the green brain uh project and it's now having an impact on society. Could you tell us more about that?

The Evolution of the Green Brain Project

James 2:11

Absolutely. So as you know, um we first started a project to look at how insect brains, especially bee brains, function and try and uh draw lessons from that for robotics and autonomous systems, like you say, 14 years ago. And that was a smaller scale project, it was um universities of Sheffield and Sussex. And off the back of that, we realized that what we were doing there was competitive with the new field of deep learning that was arising. I mean, it's not really a new field, but you know, in 2012, the the arrival of data and compute meant that there were breakthroughs in image classification, first of all, and then obviously we all know where that went to over the last 13 years. So, you know, we realized that while we were doing this research project, the Green Brain project, uh, which was a partnership with NVIDIA, by the way. So uh we were in there very early with NVIDIA before they became the huge company that they are now. And it was kind of a reaction to um supercomputer-based brain simulation of big brains like prime primates and mammalian brains, which were being done by IBM at the time. So while we were doing that, the science turned into technological potential as well. And so we wrote a successor project which we called Brains on Board, which was a bigger project. Again, NVIDIA were involved. We would start using the uh edge, the kind of mobile GPU devices that were becoming available, so we could take the brain that was running on a server with telemetry and so forth, and put it instead on a drone, on a quadcopter, or something like that. And we actually wrote into that project proposal the the genesis of Opteran, the plan for for spinning Opteran out of the university. So, you know, Opteran's six years old now, and we we wrote that grant five years, uh well, let's say three or four years before that. So it's a kind of ten-year-old idea already.

John 4:06

But it's quite interesting, uh James, that journey you've just told us, because it's quite interesting when a technology leap coincides with, you know, an academic theoretical or hypothetical idea that you're trying to, you know, you may write that grant. You probably weren't thinking that deep learning was coming up, but then, you know, I've I've had a situation whereby you write a grant and then suddenly, you know, the the field changes and you're like, that's exactly what I was trying to write or trying to get. So how have you found that how have you found that marriage? I mean, or how have you found that overlap? How have you taken advantage of it to the point of now you're now a founder of a company?

Career Path and Unexpected Turns

James 4:48

Um, yeah, I mean I'd say that the there were two points at which the kind of technological context evolved that we could react to and and plug into. The first yeah was, as I say, the advent of deep learning, and then the second was the advent of mobile GPUs. I'd say the GreenBrain Project started as a science project, a neuroscience project with an intention to do some robotics to test the ideas, but it became, it rapidly became a kind of technologically focused project as well. And then, as I say, the arrival of mobile GPUs meant that the Successor Project, we could start targeting these new devices to run complex brain models that previously ran in like on a personal supercomputer in a tower on your desktop, you know, we could actually deploy those in a low weight, low power form factor running locally on a robot, even on a smallish drone. Now, you know, I guess it's kind of right place, right time, but I do believe that if you follow an interesting idea for research, then often the kind of context around it enables it to become more successful subsequently. I mean, there's obviously some survivorship bias there, there's some post hoc rationalization. I guess lots of projects don't work out that way, but I've been very lucky with with these projects that yeah, the the the technological context evolved to give more meaning to what we were trying to do.

John 6:11

Yeah, that's brilliant. Would you have thought that your career path will have looked like this? Because I guess at the beginning of your career, where you are now will be slightly different from what you thought, you know, will transpire?

Navigating Academia and Industry

James 6:25

Um yeah, I would say I didn't really have a career path in mind though when I started. So I started a PhD because I didn't want to work in industry, I felt, um, straight out of university. But then during my PhD, I actually went to work in industry for Sony PlayStation. Okay, way back when, which was a lot of fun, and doing AI for computer games, which I really enjoyed. Very old-fashioned kind of AI by today's standards, more symbolic AI, which is actually coming back into vogue now anyway, uh in hybrid with with with neural networks. Um so I had I had gone into industry and then I came back to academia because of, you know, at the turn of the millennium, the economic situation was actually quite bad. And lots of industry companies and banks and all those kind of places where I could have worked as a computer scientist were actually no longer hiring. Whereas in academia they were still hiring, so I went back into academia as a as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College. So I've kind of been through the revolving door a few times, I guess, PhD to industry, then back to postdoc, and now out into my own spin-out, um, which I guess makes it fairly familiar. Um, but I wouldn't say I had a plan for any of this, and uh um I think maybe many people would have to admit that it's very hard to have a plan from an early age and then just follow it through and deliver it because the world changes around you and and you change as well, and the opportunities that present themselves are variable.

John 7:55

So if I were to take you back to you know that time when you you did your PhD, you are just coming out and you add these changes happening globally. There aren't changes you can control. You know, the financial crash happened, but there's nothing you could have done about it. In in hindsight now, what would you have told your younger self then?

James 8:19

Well, I suppose one thing that I'm good at is uh adapting to circumstances. So I didn't particularly feel concerned. Um and in fact I took a big personal risk, so I took a career development loan to quit my job at Sony and finish my PhD off with no job in sight at the end of that. And you know, I had obligations, I had rent to pay and all this kind of stuff, so it was uh it was a bit of a leap into the dark, but I felt like it was uh an appropriate one to to take. Yeah, I and I feel I was in my early twenties, so I didn't really feel that I I I felt like I was still plastic in my career, in the person I was and the the the professional I would become, so I was pretty happy to try and switch switch tracks and go and do something different.

John 9:06

So you've been through the revolving doors of academia, industry, now it's startup. What would be the biggest uh differences? Shall we say the three career paths are sort of merged? Because you talked about PlayStations, you talked about working in PlayStation, you talked about um doing a PhD, going to Imperial, and then you worked with Nvidia. So you can see that there is a GPU or computing element somewhere there. So so how how did all those sort of merge together or interweave into who you are today?

The Intersection of Neuroscience and Robotics

James 9:42

Um yeah, I think it's a very interesting kind of accidental coincidence of uh of things. So, you know, I went I went to work at Sony PlayStation. It was the still the PlayStation 1 era, just turning into PlayStation 2. It was a very exciting place to work, you know, it was a real lifestyle brand. So working in central London for this amazing lifestyle brand was was really exciting and doing AI research and development basically. And and then the some of the very first PlayStation networking technology as well, as online gaming started to become a thing. That would that was very exciting. And I was much more of um I guess I was still a computer scientist and engineer, so I was able to do the low-level stuff. I remember even looking at like the the cache for the PlayStation 2 CPU and you know how you could break it and kind of briefing other engineers on things to watch out for because you'd have these huge performance hits if you misaligned memory and and and got bad bad memory hits. Um, but also looking at the AI end of things. Um and I guess that kind of synergy was quite powerful, I think, of being able to understand low-level engineering and constraints, but also think about the high-level behavior. Um I think now it's less important because people are more and more divorced from the hardware that they're deploying algorithms on, but maybe it's actually a trick that people need to be paying more attention to and probably are now with deploying deep learning, um, you know, where kind of marginal benefits of running the algorithms more efficiently can translate to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of efficiencies. Um and then I guess from that, the kind of AI interest led me back in my PhD, and you mentioned in the introduction the evolution of behavior. I was looking at a lot of evolutionary theory, actually, that's what I did my PhD on, supported with computer modeling. So I was trying to understand why behaviours evolve, but then that turned into actually looking at behaviours in insects collectively at first, and trying to understand how a swarm of bees, for example, could make a or or a colony of ants could make a good group decision together. But then I met a very um fascinating uh new academic colleague at Bristol when I was there as a lecturer, as a young lecturer, and he'd just joined the year before me, uh, called Raphael Bogac, who'd done a postdoc in Princeton with um Jonathan Cohen and Phil Holmes, who are very well known in computational neuroscience, looking at how brains make very simple decisions and looking at the optimality theory associated with that. And I saw these parallels with how the ant system that I was looking at at the time and bees as well, were making collective decisions. So you had this kind of analogue between groups of neurons being wired together to make a decision as a collective in a brain and groups of insects it communicating using some very similar patterns to make similar decisions. Um I found that very interesting. So then I got interested no longer just in the behavior at the like the purely behavioural level, but also how is the behavior generated by the brain? I started talking to insect neuroscientists, um, people like Lars Chikka, who's well known. He's really an animal behaviorist, but he understands the brain as well. He's in Queen Mary, uh, people like Martin Jerfer as as well in Toulouse, who were actually studying the brains of these insects and imaging them and doing all of this amazing stuff with tiny brains of fewer than a million neurons and figuring out how they could actually generate the kind of complex behavior we see. And that's where you and I ended up meeting because that turned into a research project. Uh you had you had a a job offer uh for that. And uh I guess it could have been a a very different um career path for for us both if if you if that decision had gone differently.

John 13:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well what I find fascinating about about what's what you are saying there is that I don't know whether you've seen this where you are working on low-level microcontrollers, but you're also working on low-level neurons in biological systems and low-level controllers on embedded systems, and there is an overlap there. And and and and that's quite interesting. And I I I guess that leads me to my next question because on one hand, you have the theoretical science, neuroscience that is taking place. On the other hand, you've got the practical implementation of you know of a theory on an embedded system, and you have to take into consideration the memory constraints and limitations. So, my question then becomes how did your academic skills how did it then transfer into your startup now that you're leading? Because you are in a very unique position. You're still a professor and an academic, but you also have another half of your brain is also a startup in industry. So how have you found that um dealing with that two worlds together day by

Building a Successful Startup

John 14:39

day?

James 14:39

Well, I think that's not something I would have done by myself. Um it's not something I'm well suited to. So I trained as a computer scientist, I didn't get control engineering in in my training, for example. I I I didn't I I really did minimal microelectronics control as well, like maybe one project with a microcontroller once or something like that during my undergraduate degree. So getting into robotics for me, you know, I I wasn't the hands-on kind of person with that. But um the same time that I met you for the first time around the Green Brain project was when I met Alex Cope, who is a physicist from Cambridge with for his undergraduate, but then a neuroscientist from the University of Sheffield looking at how the primate visual system works. Uh, and I met him the same time as you, and we started working together on this research project. And it turned out that he's not only a physicist and a physicist turns neuroscientist, but also has this really great ability to dive down all the way to the low-level microcontroller, to the control laws for a robot, to the kind of systems integration. He can really span everything from the very lowest level up to the very highest conceptual level, which I can I can't really do anymore. Um, and he still does that today within the company, amazingly. So we we co-founded Obteran. Uh, that's been going six years. We wouldn't if I hadn't met Alex through that project, then Obteran would not have existed. It's one of those kind of serendipitous combinations of skills where I had a particular vision and picture. Alex came in and complimented that vision. We have a whole load of complimentary skills that led to us both being able to do something pretty successful together.

Speaker 2 16:24

So teamwork and um should I say indeed your tribe? Yeah, I I don't know whether that's the right term to use, but you know, having looking for somebody that can complement you and working together to achieve a vision, yeah. I think that will that be the right summary from from what you've just said there.

James 16:44

Absolutely. I think no one's good at everything. And if you can recognise what you're good at and what other people are good at uh and work with the people who compliment you, that's very powerful.

John 16:53

Yeah, exactly. And and I I guess you you now know that um the I mean the government is now pushing, the UK government is now pushing for more trans um translational um you know research impact based on public-funded projects. So if you can give us two um advice for academics looking to follow your career path, what would be the first two things or the most important advice you would give?

Advice for Academics Transitioning to Industry

James 17:24

Um well, I mean, firstly, I'll just maybe say that I think it's really great that we're looking at more translational impact from publicly funded research. The reason I started all of this off in my own career was I wanted to make more of an impact, and I felt like uh I didn't really make too much impact in research, like a small number of people would be influenced by my papers, um, and that didn't translate to a bigger societal benefit. And also then I felt like maybe the other big place I could make an impact is educating the next generation of computer scientists, um, which is a slightly larger scale impact. But then I realized that maybe my research could have an even bigger impact. So I think the kind of the impact agenda, the translational agenda is is an important one for the country and you know, for for us as publicly funded researchers to show what we can bring. Um so to get back to your point, your your question on the advice I would give, um, I guess I would firstly say try it, or don't automatically imagine that you don't have any impact to generate, because quite often I think there's a tremendous amount of really novel I novel thinking and novel IP in universities that's just not seeing the broader light of day and not benefiting society. Um and second, just get yourself informed about how to do this. And when Alex and I started out, this was rather hard. It was pre-generative AI. So you're trying to learn, you know, every tribe, as you would say, has their own language, and industry and venture capital and all of this definitely has its own language. So and that was kind of impenetrable, like any tribe is for for an outsider starting out. So we were trying to inform ourselves on how all of this stuff worked and what's a cap table and what's a pitch deck and all this kind of stuff. And we couldn't, it was hard to look it up, um, or at least it was non-obvious. Um I think now it's actually pretty straightforward to do that. So we actually started working with a uh you know, a consultant to develop the business proposal, but now we're seeing in the University of Sheffield at least an awful lot of academic founders, whether they're uh lecturers, professors, or postdoctoral researchers or PhD graduates or even lab managers, all successfully navigating the transition and going out to become you know chief execs. So core founders and uh actually running their own spin-outs, because I think there's more expertise, access to expertise is available, and access to information is more available now as well to inform yourself about what are you doing.

John 19:55

Yeah, that that's that's quite interesting. And I think one of the one I mean linked to that question or linked to what you've said is we all know as academics, I I think there is this misconception from the outside looking in that academics are just teaching. And that is it.

James 20:11

Absolutely.

John 20:12

But actually we do much more than that. You know, we we we we teach, we do the research, we train next generation, we do pastoral support, where out there visiting companies, you know, seeing how our research could help them out. And sometimes we also go and sit in in the policy box, you know, speaking to politicians and trying to so it's is is and then we also have to think about how the society is developing and how we can you know make an impact. So how do and and this is quite a lot of of things, and uh uh and then you are are now also doing a startup. So how do you balance it? Uh how how what would be your advice of balancing you know the first eye pressure of academia, and then you're having now the eye pressure of startup coming there. How have you found balancing

Balancing Academia and Start-up Life

John 21:00

it?

James 21:01

Uh I think there's no easy answers. It is, it's always a juggle, but I think being an academic is a juggle anyway, and for lots of other people, life is a constant juggle. Um you know, uh the the the things you listed just then, so I haven't done teaching for quite a long time. Um I have been fortunate. I'm you know now in a leadership role and I've had fellowships and large grants, so I have not taught for quite a long time. Um, but then I'm doing some of the other things you're describing, alongside the research, the supervision of the PhD students, the running of research projects in the university. I'm also getting involved through my work in the Centre for Machine Intelligence with policy engagement. Exactly. So I'm on the um advisory board for the all-party parliamentary group in AI, for example. So now I get to go to Westminster every few weeks and sit down in committee room number one in the House of Lords alongside parliamentarians, and that's that's really fascinating to see how they're scrutinising the evidence they receive from experts on a variety of topics. And members of my center are doing things like engaging with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology through policy fellowships or with local government or with the public through public information campaigns. There's so much exciting stuff going on. And the fundamental challenge is to try and find the balance so that you don't burn out, right? Exactly. Because you should have a right to a family life if you have a family and all this kind of stuff as well.

John 22:27

Exactly.

James 22:28

I often tell younger c um colleagues that the most powerful word they can learn is no. Because if you if you accept every request, then you end up spreading yourself too thin, I think. You have to be quite you have to be a bit judicious about where you do spend your time.

John 22:43

Exactly. And I guess, you know, tied into that no, saying no is how do you know what the priorities are? Because I think one of the things that we need to get smarter at at is asking ourselves, you know, where do I want to get to or what's the vision, right? And will this task take me closer to it, or will it not?

James 23:06

Yeah.

John 23:07

So, you know, is is I mean, how do you decide a priority?

James 23:12

Well, I think that's a personal question, isn't it? Everyone has to judge their own priorities. But I would say I think the temptation is often to say yes to things because of a fear of missing out, right? Yeah. Fear of missing out is quite widely understood now, I think. I think academics particularly suffer from it. I was well when you're starting out, I guess it's harder to imagine what opportunities, like what an opportunity might turn into in the future. Um and I think the ex the experience that comes with time, you know, it takes time for that to allow you to determine what's likely to be useful and what's not likely to be so useful. Um so it it it is hard at the start. I guess fortunately, when you're earlier in your career, you hopefully have more energy. You probably you may you may not have the young family yet, etc. So you can you can run a bit harder at things while you find out what you're doing and what your priorities actually are. Um but um yeah.

John 24:10

So that's that's quite interesting there because I think what you're saying there is it's a journey. It's a journey of self-discovery, self-reflection, and you know finding out what you're good at, what you want to do. And I think also, you know, having your tribe or your mentors or you know, people senior to you know bounce ideas back and forth with is is also very good. Um so yeah, that that's that's quite um yeah, that's that's quite interesting. So but can I ask you, when did you experience a mental shift that changed the entire view of the world? It's like you know, you just threw out all the old philosophy and came up with a new philosophy. Yeah.

James 24:54

You mean in the research or just in personal philosophy?

John 24:56

Personal I think, yeah, personal and also how it relates your personal to the real world.

James 25:03

Um,

Personal Growth and Continuous Learning

James 25:04

I think it's I think everyone is a work in progress, actually. I think that's what's really um a privilege and so rewarding about the kind of job we have is like yes, there is a lot of demand for your time and to to compromise between things and manage the juggle. But also it's continually engaging, right? Because things are always changing. The the subject matter you're teaching may be changing continually, very rapidly now in the case of AI. So what the students uh you know, the experience of the students before they come to the university may be changing rapidly, their expectations around their careers may be changing rapidly, the field is changing rapidly, and at the same time you can change because you can learn a new discipline. You know, if you decide you want to, you know, it's useful for your um research to go and learn nonlinear dynamics, let's say, which I which I did, then you can go and spend time with people without expertise and start acquiring some of those skills. And um I think that's just a tremendous privilege to have this pretty much endless cap capacity for personal growth i i in the kind of job we do. So I would say you know, I I'm not the finished product yet.

John 26:14

Yeah, yeah.

James 26:15

I'll still be hopefully learning in 15 years' time.

John 26:18

Yeah. And I think that's that's one of the rewarding things about academia, being able to learn, transfer the skills from one discipline to another, acquire a new set of skills. And you know, by doing that, you see things in a different way. You might stumble on something that you know people in the other field have been trying for years to try to solve. And for you, you're like, what? You know, why haven't you solved this? You know, there's a tool in my field. And that opens up a new, you know, a new journey, basically. Yeah. And so, I mean, based upon that, what advice will you give, you know, to somebody at at a crossroad, you know?

Advice for Those at a Crossroads

James 27:01

Um, well, I think the advice I would give to everyone is just be aware of what's going on outside of your discipline niche. So when I started as a postdoc at Imperial, I made a lot of effort to go to um, you know, seminars in all the different departments. And then when I joined Sheffield, I made an effort to try and establish what I called an interdisciplinary seminars program, which was just a way of sharing the seminars that are happening in biology with engineers and computer scientists and vice versa. Um, and I think you know you're increasingly seeing the value of that play out now in in modern engineering and in AI, and you know, these things like using AI for materials discovery, you know, adapting something that was designed for natural language processing and using it to instead design molecules or alloys or something like that, right? Um and if you're y you won't become aware of those opportunities if you don't have any information about them. So just look outside of your discipline boundaries, is my my advice. Um I think modern research is really heavily interdisciplinary, but also at the same time the structures, you know, the silos that we sit in, the the schools and the faculties still tend to restrict communication between the disciplines. So try and personally break out of that or try and establish structures that enable colleagues and yourself to break out of it and just go and speak to other people working on different problems. And then you'll get something like Rafael Bogac and I, when he presented his results on how the brain makes decisions, and I looked at what I was doing with a honeybee swarm and realized that they were fundamentally doing the same thing in the same way.

John 28:37

Yeah. Yeah, that's that's quite interesting. Right.

Quickfire Questions and Closing Thoughts

John 28:41

We have this tradition on humans uh behind the robots podcast where we ask our guest quick fire bullet questions.

James 28:50

Okay. I wasn't I wasn't warned of this, but this is exciting.

John 28:54

Yep. Yep. No, that's wise quick fire bullet style questions. Okay. So a book you recommend outside your field?

James 29:01

Outside my field. Oh, uh The Chain by Bradley Wiggins.

John 29:06

Wow, brilliant.

James 29:07

So he's a professional cyclist who won the Tour de France, the first British male to win the Tour de France, but an amazing personal story behind that that may be unfamiliar to many people.

John 29:15

Check that out. Right. Most overrated academic habit.

James 29:20

Most overrated academic habit. Um drinking coffee.

John 29:28

Why is that? I can only answer, but I want to get it.

James 29:32

I think it's a displacement activity for me.

John 29:35

It's not to keep me out wick.

James 29:38

Maybe that too.

John 29:39

Alright, another one. Best poshes under 100 pounds.

James 29:43

Best purchase under 100 pounds. Oh wow. Uh it's probably. Can you get an air fryer for under 100 pounds?

John 29:54

Interesting.

James 29:55

I think it's that would probably be that'll probably be it, wouldn't it?

John 29:58

Why why air fryer?

James 30:00

Air fryers are amazing.

Speaker 2 30:02

Okay.

James 30:03

Just um kind of revolutionized cooking as far as I'm concerned.

John 30:07

Is that because it's it's more healthy, less oil and healthy and just also very versatile. Nice, nice. I haven't tried that, but that's something I'll have to I'll have to go try. Right. One one um no, two more last questions. Pastime that we that relieves stress and gets you back into the zone.

James 30:26

Uh a while ago it would have been cycling, hence the Bradley Wiggins uh book recommendation. But now I'm back to uh rock climbing because my son is my son is doing that and getting better than me. And climbing is perfect for clearing the mind because you can't think of anything else at all while you're doing it.

John 30:42

Yes, nice. Wow, rock climbing. I did try it out once.

James 30:46

I will Sheffield is the perfect place for it as well.

John 30:49

I know, I know, because you have the big district just around the bend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's brilliant. One last question. One small change that improved your productivity or well-being.

James 31:00

Hmm. Drinking more coffee.

John 31:05

Drinking more coffee. At this rate, you're gonna be awake all night.

James 31:10

I used to I used to be uh I used to find espresso very uh hard to metabolize, and now I'm completely obituated. So that was the the the first the first appliance we plugged in in the Optoran company offices was an espresso machine, an Italian espresso machine. And now I can drink about five doubles a day with no.

John 31:30

And still sleep. And still sleep. I have one and I can't sleep. So we have to practice. I know. I oh so practice. Okay, I will try, I I would try that. Thank you very much, James. It's been a pleasure having you on um the Human Stories Behind the Podcast. And um we look forward to having you again at one point. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 31:55

Thanks very much.

Speaker 2 31:56

Take care. Thanks. Thank you for listening to this episode of Human Stories Behind the Robots. If you have enjoyed this conversation, please follow and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss future episodes. You can also learn more about the UK RAS network, our events, activities, and opportunities by visiting our website. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, so please share it with your colleagues and friends. I've been Dr. John Oyeco, and this has been the Human Stories Behind the Robots. Until next time, thank you for listening.