Lifestyle
I got a butt massage by an AI robot in L.A. Here’s how it went
My first meeting with Aescape, the AI-powered massage robot, was benign enough — if a bit eerie. As if HAL had gotten a job in the Valley. I stepped into the austere spa room at Pause, a wellness center in Studio City, and a sturdy massage table commanded the space. It was deep-sea blue and plush, glowing from LED lights that lined its base. Its enormous, sculpted robot arms promised a unique spa experience.
Yes, I was about to get a transformative butt massage by an AI-powered masseuse.
Aescape sparked a media frenzy when it debuted in New York in August at a handful of Equinox gyms. This week, it arrives in Los Angeles. Aescape will open its robotic arms for business Friday at Pause.
I got a sneak peek, however, the day before Thanksgiving. Upon arrival, I slipped into specialized compression wear that the Aescape company provided for optimal friction; no oil is required for this massage.
After lying on the table belly down, my face nestled into a padded cradle, I selected my playlist on a touch screen (beach house to start, then relaxing piano music). I quickly forgot about the overhead depth sensors and surrounding robotics and drifted into calm. And although I longed for the intimacy of a human masseuse, I found it to be a surprisingly decent session. Here’s how things went.
The Aescape massage table.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
First, four high-resolution infrared sensors took a 3D scan of my body from above, mapping 1.2 million data points — every curve and asymmetric point on my frame, much to my chagrin — so Aescape could pinpoint where I was on the table and better target my specific body parts. Then its hulking robot arms reached up and around my torso, before beginning to massage me.
Aescape has heated “hands,” which look like giant pads with touch points on their undersides. They’re modeled after the way a massage therapist uses their body parts as tools, kneading with the blade of the hand at one point, then pressing or rolling with the heel of the palm, the elbow or forearm. I’d selected gentle intensity, so Aescape kneaded slowly and deliberately around my scapula at first, then applied light rolling pressure along my spine, mid-back. It didn’t feel exactly like a human hand; but surprisingly, I wasn’t creeped out, either. Instead, the experience mirrored that of a sophisticated massage chair in horizontal — not as effective as an actual person but still providing much-needed relief in key areas.
The Aescape massage is totally customizable. You dictate the kind you want — I chose “total back and glutes,” but “upper and mid-back focus” and “lower back, glutes and hamstrings focus” were also offerings. You can also use the touch screen to control the intensity of your massage as it’s underway, increasing or decreasing the pressure, or pausing altogether.
Aescape is the brainchild of Eric Litman, a self-described serial entrepreneur who suffered from neck pain due to a bulging disc and needed daily massages, even while traveling internationally. That’s a headache to schedule, especially when there’s a shortage of massage therapists in the U.S., according to the International Spa Assn.
As a solution, Litman imagined a “fully automated, customizable massage experience,” with the goal of “bringing personalized wellness robotics to the masses,” as the Aescape company describes its mission. Litman founded the robotics company in 2017 and by November 2023, it had $85 million in funding from technology, wellness and hospitality backers.
The Aescape massage table’s padded face cradle and user touch screen.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“The intent was to build a product that addressed the needs of people like myself who struggled with getting the specific massages that their body needed — whether that’s because of a lack of therapist availability, a lack of consistency among therapists or just the desire for a very personalized experience,” Litman said in an interview. “So what we’ve built is something that caters remarkably well to all three of those needs. It’s accessible in many ways: It’s easily booked, it’s usable by people who wouldn’t otherwise be comfortable getting a massage [by a human] and it puts you in control, allowing you to get the specific massage you want at that moment in time.”
Then there’s this — for better or worse, AI masseuses don’t need breaks to rest their hands. They’re the ideal employees.
“It can operate 24 hours a day,” Litman said. “So it can be available at 11 at night, hours when you’re unlikely to find a masseuse available.”
The Aescape company plans to roll out tables at spas, hotels and fitness centers as well as at corporations, for office workers, nationwide. In addition to its New York and L.A. locations, Aescape tables are now operating in Miami, Baltimore, Nashville, Atlantic City, N.J., and Orlando, Fla. One will debut at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara in Santa Barbara on Dec. 16. Users can find nearby Aescape tables and book sessions on an app.
Software engineers offer frequent updates to the Aescape tables on the types of massages available or the music you can listen to. A holiday playlist was added just this week, for instance.
However, Aescape is not cheap: $60 for half an hour, $120 for an hour.
It’s also not as intelligent as I’d hoped. Aescape knows where your body parts are located in space, so as to target the areas you’ve selected for your massage. But the feature allowing it to intuit areas of tension that need massaging hasn’t been rolled out yet, Litman says. However, it is getting smarter, he adds.
Aerial sensors take a 3D scan of your body, mapping 1.2 million data points, so the massage robot knows where to target your aches and pains.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It will continue to learn from all the massages that we give, across all our tables,” Litman says, “and allow for people to get a much more customized, precise massage experience.”
Times reporter Deborah Vankin after her robot massage.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
As a massage junkie, I prefer the warmth and responsiveness of human touch.
Even so, Aescape gave me a pretty decent massage. I had run stairs the day before for exercise and my glutes were sore. The robot masseuse kneaded my butt in just the right spots and even relieved shoulder tightness from hours of typing at my desk.
And as a bonus, it didn’t interrupt my massage with chitchat.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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