Interview with the robot

Around 8 p.m. on July 3, I strolled alongside the Truckee River in downtown Reno, on my way to interview a local robot. The sun was just setting, the kind of dusk that photographers and filmmakers call “the magic hour,” because of the diffused, hazy, almost surreal light. It was warm, but not painfully hot now that the sun was out of the way. The sky was slightly overcast, and the air was unusually humid for Northern Nevada. It being nice weather and the night before a holiday, there were a lot of people out and about. A reggae band was playing at Wingfield Park, and the music drifted down the river alongside me as I headed east toward Reno City Plaza, the euphemistic name for the former site of the demolished Mapes Hotel.

When I got to the plaza, my interview subject, Hotshot Few Thousand, had yet to arrive. Teenage skateboarders rolled around and around. A man was playing saxophone, and three teenage Mormon missionaries were watching him intently. I sat down near “Portal of Evolution,” the large steel butterfly sculpture in the plaza, and started thumbing through my phone, enjoying the weather, and occasionally glancing around to see if I could see Hotshot.

And then I saw him rolling up Virginia Street, his glowing electronic eyes visible from more than a block away. He was preceded by a wave of laughter and people shouting to their friends, “Hey, look at the robot!”

“They’re supposed to remake Short Circuit—did they already start it?” said a teenage skater near me, with a tone of indeterminate sarcasm.

Standing over 6 feet tall, rolling on three wheels, with his bright, expressive eyes and a head like a motorcycle helmet, Hotshot always attracts a crowd.

As he approached the plaza, people from all around rushed toward him and immediately started taking photos with their phones. Some people seemed immediately attracted and excited by the robot, others seemed confused, and a few seemed terrified.

I saw one teen girl make a frightened face and say, “I don’t do robots.”

As Hotshot approached, I heard Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” a classic, catchy, upbeat jazz tune, emerging somewhere from his body. The sax player had stopped playing and, like everybody else, was staring at Hotshot. Hotshot’s face lit up—literally—when he saw the sax player.

“I’m going over to the saxophone player,” he said. His voice is a low, staccato monotone best described as robotic. Though, somewhat strangely, as a passerby pointed out later, he also sounds a bit like Cheech Marin.

There were probably 25 or 30 people around him—all ages, many of them grinning with delight. There’s something innately funny about seeing a robot roll around, acting vaguely human.

Hotshot made his way through the crowd to the sax player. “Know any Brubeck?”

The sax player smiled and starting playing some light melodic stuff—not Brubeck, at least not that I recognized—but pleasant enough. Hotshot started bobbing his head in time. The sax player played a few licks and then paused. Hotshot jumped right in: “Everybody tip the saxophone player bundles of money.”

The crowd erupted with laughter. Hotshot could say just about anything, and it would seem funny because he’s a robot, but he’s also genuinely quick-witted and—again, because he’s a robot—he’s able to say things that might otherwise seem inappropriate. He’s outgoing, boisterous and a notorious flirt.

“Nobody’s tipping the saxophone guy,” he said, taunting the crowd. “Somebody put some bread in his jar.”

The sax player started playing the sax riff from the Sandford and Sons theme song. Hotshot responded by playing the TV show version himself, much to the delight of the crowd. He kept demanding that somebody in the crowd tip the saxophone player. Finally, somebody tried giving some money to Hotshot, placing a bill in his right “hand”: a pincerlike claw. (His left appendage has a canister for carrying things.) Hotshot took the money and, with some effort, dropped it in the musician’s case.

Somebody in the crowd shouted to him, “Where did you come from?”

“The planet … Earth,” he responded, giving just enough of a pause after the word “planet” and a dramatic flair to the word “Earth” to maximize comic effect.

The day the Earth stood still

He’s had a lot of practice perfecting the response to that question, which he routinely gets asked everywhere he goes. During the 45 minutes or so of our interview, he was asked some version of that question by a passerby at least a half dozen times. Whenever people would ask that or follow-up questions like, “Who made you?” or “How do you work?” Hotshot would be vague or evasive.

He seems to enjoys hearing people argue about how he works, and admittedly part of the fun of interacting with him is exploring that mystery, or, even better, eavesdropping on the wild speculation of other people: Is he an autonomous being forming his own original thoughts? Is he like the iPhone’s Siri, interacting with preprogrammed responses? Is there a tiny person hidden somewhere in his narrow frame? Or is there a guy sitting in a van a mile away controlling him with a PlayStation controller?

Hotshot is as much an achievement of art as of science or engineering. And good art raises more questions than answers. Art is about possibilities, not actualities.

Watching Hotshot interact with the crowd and the sax player, I started wondering how I’d get his attention, when he suddenly turned to me, addressed me by name, and said, “Nice to see you again.”

I was glad he remembered me. We’d met a few times over the years. We’d met a couple of times outside bars around town—he sometimes shows up randomly at bars, museums or events. And we’d had a fairly long conversation one year at Burning Man. He’s a semi-regular Burner, though he’s missed the last few years. He made his public debut at the arts festival in 2004.

We walked together over to the plaza, chitchatting about the weather.

Seeing me talk to him, a girl ran up to me.

“Is that real?” she asked me.

“Do you think you’re imagining it?” I replied.

She rubbed her eyes. “Nope, I’m not.”

A rotating crowd of 25 or 30 people remained around Hotshot. Often somebody would dash up next to him and pose for a photo.

“Do you eat food?” I asked him.

“I do not require sustenance like you human beings,” he said. “But if I did eat, I would eat beef because I hate cows. … One of them looked at me wrong.”

“How’d you get here?” shouted a guy in the crowd. “Did you walk here?”

“No, I rolled here.”

A skater asked him if he wanted to borrow his board.

“I can’t get up on that thing, man.”

After a while, the conversation inevitably turned to music. Hotshot goes to a lot of festivals, including the Coachella music festival, which he attends every year. He mentioned Daft Punk, the French electronic music duo that dress in robot suits for their concerts.

“Are you Daft Punk fan?” I asked.

“Yeah, except for that new album,” he said. “Boy, they really blew it. … They’re poseurs big time, which is OK. It’s going good for them.”

Somebody in the crowd again asked him where he was from.

“I’m from the planet Earth,” he said. “It is blue.”

I asked about his travels.

“I’ve gone all over California,” he said. “New Orleans is pretty pimp. I’ve been to Burning Man a bunch of times. Holy crap, it’s crazy out there. I’ve been to Germany. They drink lots of beer. They get drunk. A smattering of other places.”

“But you live here in Reno, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I live pretty much everywhere,” he said. “But I’ve been chilling in Reno for a while.”

“You like Reno?”

“Reno’s great,” he said. “It could be a hundred degrees, and then five minutes later, it’s hailing, and frozen water is falling from the sky. Some kind of Biblical things going here in Reno. I dated a slot machine too.”

“How’d that go?”

“She took all my money, and all I got was a hand shake.”

Again the crowd erupted in laughter. A guy shouted, “Now you know why they call them ’slots’!”

“The loosest slots in town?” asked Hotshot.

“Yeah, they’re everywhere,” said the guy.

“Do you meet a lot of other robots?” I asked.

“No, I’m not doing so well with the robot scene.”

“What other robots have you met?”

“Is a parking meter considered a robot?”

Robots in disguise

Hotshot is massively entertaining one-on-one or in a small crowd. But, his feisty, sarcastic personality hasn’t been able to transfer well to larger stages—where the magic and novelty of conversation with a robot is less palpable. I asked him about his bids for national fame over the years.

“I was on American Idol,” he said. “I made it to the second round. But the executive producer hated me, so they cut me out of the show.”

“What song did you do?”

“I did ’Tainted Love’ by Soft Cell,” he said before launching into the song, singing in the some dry monotone he speaks with. “Sometimes I feel like I could uh uh get away. I’ve got to uh uh. They thought I was making fun of the show. I don’t know what their problem was. And then I went on America’s Got Talent in front of Howard Stern and Howie Mandel and that old bag what’s-her-name.”

“Sharon Osbourne?”

“Yeah, whatever.

… I got booed off the stage in like two seconds. They were mean to me.”

“Why were they mean?”

“Well, I was making fun of the judges, and I was making fun of San Francisco. I don’t know why they were mean.”

“What did you say about Sharon Osbourne?” asked a girl to Hotshot’s left. In a sudden motion, he turned to look at her.

“Sharon Osbourne?” he asked. “Why? Are you related to her? Are you Kelly Osbourne?”

The girl tried to protest that no she wasn’t Kelly Osbourne, but she was laughing too hard to get it out.

“So nice to meet you, Kelly,” said Hotshot. “Welcome to Reno. Let me know if you need anything, OK?”

During his many adventures, Hotshot has actually met a long list of celebrities. He had a somber conversation with Bill Murray at Hunter S. Thompson’s funeral. He’s posed for pictures with Paris Hilton, Emma Watson and Danny Devito. Actor Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad invited Hotshot to his wedding. He sang “Don’t Stop Believin’” to Steve Perry at a party in Los Angeles. He flirted heavily with Rose McGowan. The Flaming Lips invited him onstage at a show in New Orleans. He’s met Vanessa Hudgens, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard and many more.

Hotshot himself doesn’t talk much about his various celebrity encounters. He generally seems to act like he’s always the biggest celebrity in the room. But like any globe-trotting superstar, Hotshot has a human entourage of bodyguards, sycophants and groupies, like Chris Munz, Ben Ramirez and Darren Barnes, who were more forthcoming about Hotshot’s history and exploits.

But despite his many brushes with fame, Hotshot remains something of a cult figure. It might be because he’s kind of a counterculture personality. A few years ago, he briefly hosted a local public access show called Hotshot after Dusk, which was sometimes enthusiastically lowbrow. He smokes cigarettes and goes to art and music festivals, where he spends much of his time hitting on attractive humans. He has a 14-inch mechanical penis—which he refers to as a kickstand—that makes lightsaber sounds when it moves. His flirtatious attitude has occasionally gotten him roughed up by jealous boyfriends.

I wandered away from Hotshot to chat with RN&R photographer Allison Young, who had arrived during the interview to take photos. Hotshot continued to work the crowd, telling jokes, playing music, asking questions.

“Anybody going to eat Awful Awful tonight?” I heard him say. “Do it. Go for two of those things. It’s hard to finish the fries though.”

“I thought you said you didn’t eat!” I said.

“I’m just playing it to the crowd, man,” he said. Everybody laughed. “Anybody want to grab a beer?”

The crowd at this point was mostly teenagers.

“You know you’re talking to a bunch of kids?” I asked.

Hotshot seemed to recoil in surprise and looked around at the crowd again.

“Are you children?” he asked.

They all smiled and nodded, transfixed.

Seeing that I wasn’t afraid to talk to him, a teenage girl asked me, “I really want to know if he can sing. Can you ask him if he can sing?”

“He was singing earlier,” I said.

“Tell him to sing a song.”

I turned to Hotshot. “We’ve got a girl over here who wants you to sing.”

Mortified, the girl started to run away.

“She’s running away, but she wants you to sing. She’s running that way.”

Hotshot wheeled around and started rolling after her. “Where are you going?” he called out to her, but she was already on the other side of the plaza. Upon seeing Hotshot suddenly start to move, a guy nearby fell off his skateboard.

“You sound like Cheech …” said another passerby, struggling to remember the comedian’s last name.

“Cheech or Chong?” asked Hotshot. “Like Cheech had sex with Chong?”

“And had a robot baby?” I offered.

“It is quite the concept,” said Hotshot.

Another guy asked me if I built Hotshot.

“No,” I said.

“Who built it?”

“You should ask him.”

Rather than ask, the guy jumped to his own conclusion: “Robots are starting to build themselves!”

After accidentally chasing away the girl who wanted to hear him sing, Hotshot spent some time just rolling around the plaza among the skateboarders. He started giving people hugs, including the girl he’d mistakenly identified as Kelly Osbourne.

“You’re so sweet, Kelly,” he said to her.

I realized I got a certain thrill from watching Hotshot. I couldn’t help but laugh whenever I was talking with him, and just seeing him roll around in circles, playing music and making goofy noises put a smile on my face. It was like watching a big mechanical puppy.

“I kind of want a hug, too,” I said to him. “Is that weird?”

He gave me a hug, and before too long, he was on his way, rolling back down Virginia Street. After he had left, I noticed a few other people lingering in the plaza, with the same gleeful expressions on their faces that I felt on mine, including the three young missionaries that had been watching the sax player when I’d arrived to the plaza.

“What’d you guys think?” I asked them.

All three, in perfect, grinning unison said, “That was awesome.”

For more information about the robot Hotshot Few Thousand, visit www.hotshottherobot.com. To view videos of Hotshot, visit www.youtube.com/user/tsunami11.