The Shawn Ryan Show
The Shawn Ryan Show

#292 Brett Adcock - Shawn Ryan Meets a Humanoid Robot

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Brett Adcock is a technology entrepreneur focused on building companies in robotics, artificial intelligence, and aerospace. Born and raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, he develope...

Transcript

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I'm Theresa and my experience in all entrepreneurs starts a shopping trip.

It's the custom of those tests of Shopify. Point D.E. Bright Eggcock. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. The robotics guy. Yeah. Let me give you an intro here real quick before we get started. The bread adcock. A serial entrepreneur and founder in CEO of Figure AI, building general purpose humanoid robots for labor automation.

Founded Vettery in AI driven talent marketplace, which was acquired for approximately $100 million. Co-founder of Archer Aviation, developing electric vertical takeoff and landing EVTOL aircraft. Found cover in AI security company using NASA jet propulsion laboratory technology to detect concealed weapons in K through 12 schools. That's amazing. In late 2025, you launched Hark, a new AI lab self funded with a hundred million to build what you call human centric AI. You've raised billions in venture capital and time named you one of the 200 most influential people in AI in 2024 married and a father of three children.

And before we get too far into it, we always start off with a gift.

Thank you. He didn't give you any tips on that, did he? Wow, we're going to hit one.

β€œHmm. What do you think? Great. You can leave this guy here if you want to. This guy's staying. That is the coolest thing I've ever seen as far as given somebody a gift on the show.”

That was awesome. Yeah. Oh, awesome. I got you another gift. Oh. Some love gifts.

See here, put on the shows. Thank you. Yeah. That is awesome. Thank you.

Yeah, no problem. Very cool.

Well, Brett, we got a lot to talk about here.

So, band. How many companies are you running now? I'm not sleeping. I got too many. Yeah. That thing is amazing.

Never sleep anymore. I'll bet. Yeah, what do you think of the robot? I think it's incredible. I can't wait to talk more about it.

Yeah. So, a couple of things. Just one more thing to knock out here before we get into it. I got a Patreon account. It's a subscription account.

β€œAnd it's quite the community. They're honestly the reason that I get to sit here with you today.”

So, they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from Stephen Casey. In today's marketplace, we find that AI platforms can sometimes invent answers rather than emitting to a lack of information. Combining this in the physical realm of robotic action seems to multiply the downside effects

exponentially. What safeguards are in place that we can put our trust in to prevent the potential for downstream harm to humans as a result of bad programming or computing errors? Yeah. Yeah, we don't want to terminate our popping out here when we...

Definitely not this work, right? I mean, I think like we're chatting about this outside.

β€œI think one thing to say, like four years ago when I started the company,”

there was no path for humanoid robots to make into people's homes in the next 10 years. There was no good story. There was a big hydraulic humanoids out there. They were all hand-coded to do certain tasks.

What you really need is like a cheaper electric humanoid that you basically can use neural nets.

I used basically an AI for strategy with. There was just none of that existed. I think we're thankful now, looking back like that we like... It feels like we somehow pulled like 10 years of the future forward. We have like electric humanoids that are reasonably priced.

That can do like a useful human work with neural nets.

And it's just like...

I think it's just an incredible...

It's an incredible place to be in, getting those questions, which is like how do we make this work now, scale in a safe way, because that's the spot we want to be in. Trying to make this work for 20 years. Yeah.

So I think it's a very tough problem. We have to get the product cheap enough. We have to make enough of them. We have to make it like... But the performance work in like very complicated things.

Like walk around a house and like do dishes like laundry. Like very complex things like small kids can do this. Like it takes adults to kind of do this like this level of work. And we need that all done in a mechanical system that doesn't have any humans around.

Or maybe most of this that does it autonomously and not makes any mistakes.

And then like like your fan mentioned like we have to do it safely over time. It's just man. It's just like incredibly complex problem.

β€œI think for us like we have a safety strategy both in transitory.”

We want the robot hardware and the robots around humans. It just be safe all times. And separately we have a there's a bunch of like semantic safety and other things that we need. Like there were we have either put in place or put in a place now to make the robot. Just like work safe in the environment like you have a candle at home.

You don't want the robot to accidentally knock it over. It's like a intelligence thing in a lot of ways. Or there's a boiling pot of water like making sure we're like very safe around it. And then there's like then transit safety of like making sure like this mechanical thing in your house is like safe around it. Everybody here around it.

I think the directors are still a lot of wood chop. I'm getting this play the getting this thing to a point where it's like we trust it to be autonomous next to my kids all day long in my house. That's the kind of in your house. We've had we've had many robots now throughout my house in testing for last like a year or so.

And I've had like you know kind of near my kids and some aspects but we're always like we're always like monitoring it.

What do you kids think? Man they like it's just like kind of normal for them now. Did they try to talk to them or like yeah talk to it yeah they want to like they want to go they want to go like jump on it and touch it. And you know when you kids things you know what I mean like they want to go touch it and talk to it and be around it. And we're still in that stage yet where I feel comfortable enough to like let loose and say here you know here's a robot or my kids are there and I feel okay and we're not there yet.

β€œI think we will be in the next several years what what's the longest they've been around anyone particular robot.”

We've had a robot in my house for like maybe a couple months doing work kind of on and off. You know daily sometimes every other day and you know the kids are kind of at school or sometimes at home. So now they're always around whenever the robot's running but a lot of times and you know that was just like our home robot. Do they get attached to them? Motion on the touch names for the robot and yeah they love it. And it's actually a question where I've seen an office of like give a robot in the home and it's like.

It's got some like character to a little wear and tear. Do you like want to keep that robot or do you want like a new one? That's where I'm wondering. Yeah what's the emotional attachment. I think kids are like the perfect my kids.

My kids wanted it. They wanted it there. We're not getting rid of this guy. Yeah. It's got a little sipping up a little bit here and there and says a tear here and they're just like the loved it.

That is that's wild man. Yeah that is wild.

β€œHonestly in our lifetime we will be fortunate enough for every human to I think have a humanoid.”

Like almost like a phoning car. Wow. Yeah we were talking. I mean just some of the stuff that you just mentioned. I mean the complexity of the problem that you're solving here.

I mean all these little problems that are even like knocking over a boiling pot of water. I never would have like. It's just like just thinking about something that happens every day and then you think about all the things that happen every day. And just a regular household and it's like problem city man. It's like a fun house of problems.

There's just problems everywhere. It's like hardware problems. AI problems problem scaling and commercializing and getting the system reliable. Manufacturing problems. Like we we have a problem fund house.

If you want to come by campus here. I'll bet and check it out. I'll bet you do. I'll bet you do. Well some people say I.

Some people say I is that isn't an economic bubble. And as of this recording, polymarket says there's going to be an 18% chance that the AI bubble will burst by December 31st, 2026. What do you think about that? Is AI in a bubble? Absolutely not.

Like the I think. I think you'll see some of the most transformative events and technology happen over the next like 36 months we've ever seen in. I don't know. I don't feel like we're at a bubble here. We're a very scraper.

I'm watching AI in a human body. Do human work. Early it's early.

We don't have you know we don't we at some point here this year will have tho...

We have like you know we have hundreds now like like we need like millions of robots to make an impact. That's just going to take some time and it's going to be crazy cool. So we're just we're at the start line of that happening which is like how do we get AI out into the physical world at scale. That that that'll for sure work and it'll go really far in our lifetimes and then separately. We have AI now that can use computers like humans and can think we're showing you a little bit of that here before we show.

And you know that that that will manifest in a point where like you know both in the physical and digital world you basically have these little many humans that can do human like work

and then can think and use computers and use machines. And I mean that's going to lead to such a productivity like we measure like GDP per capita like per human. But if you're able to make like as many synthetic humans like you know millions, millions, tens of billions of synthetic humans. In the case of the digital world maybe trillions.

β€œThat'll lead to like I mean I think the greatest increase in productivity we've ever seen in our lifetime in ultimately like reduce goods and service processes to unprecedented levels.”

I can like a true age of abundance. Wow. Wow. I mean I'm just curious. What do you think?

What will humans be doing? I mean I hope I don't have to like I woke up today. I was like I'm in the dishwasher getting my kids breakfast like just like busy work that I like my kids are sitting there. I'm like doing work, you know what I mean? I wish I was just like yeah I didn't wish I wasn't doing that stuff.

And then I'm like I'll throw up my day I'm like trying to call you know call the car service and then trying to get on my flight and you know coming here and it's like order and lunch like all the stuff I'm doing all of that. And I don't want to do any of that. I don't really like fully free. I get it. I get it.

No I totally.

β€œAnd I just want to be like clear headed and I want like my AI to run a little bread adcock operating system and run my life.”

And all these things I have in my head about what the order and pay us tax bill and like do this meeting and I have to go back and do an engineering stand up. I want to all that stuff to be in my like operating system and like a human in a box.

So you're basically saying.

The way this is going to turn out is your brain. I'm going to butcher this. You're basically exporting your brain and all the tasks that are going on in your brain. You're you're you're intimidating it to. To robots and they're all get all this out.

That's. That's like we'll do that in like 24 months like we'll have. All the stuff so good that you're like you won't like go order food anymore like book stuff like do a lot of work behind a computer. You like physical stuff in the world of like doing laundry and dishes and just the bullshit like work. Yeah, I don't like no is anyone do that like I don't want to do it.

I don't. Yeah, so like yeah, you clear all that from my life like I got spend time on my kids like enjoy life like kind of like like I guess like clear headed. To stuff I really love like I love working but I don't like doing all this busy work. Yeah, it's just like not it's just like manual like just like labor. I'm doing behind computers or like in the physical world and just like I want to delegate that out to my eye to do.

And fully automate out.

That's I don't know why I've never thought about that.

I've never thought about it like I've always looked at it as fear. I've always been like oh shit they're going to take everything over. It's a compression algorithm like we're basically running a large scale compression.

β€œSo like I think you know my my my my my way I look at it now is.”

We basically have built like synthetic human intelligence that can use computers and machines. So like I'm going to delegate out all this busy work on both my digital life and physical life to like to robots. I'll just do all of it. But it's it's good. I mean like there's like we have AI systems now. And our lab at heart that can use computers like a human can. It can talk to you. It can like I just I made a phone call to ours before we started and talked about my schedule and how to ask for things and ask it for things and how to do things.

Yeah, and a chicken has chicken salad ordered to deliver deer's office. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, but no like nothing besides a single like hey make this order. And you can spin up computers to do that virtually and and then physically like I'll I'll have all this work done by my by robotics. Both in you have in the commercial workforce in the billions like manufacturing and healthcare and construction and in every human at some point we'll have a human way just to do all that busy work for you.

And not only that but like something to come home to that you can talk to you that will like we'll know you. Wild. Yeah, it's like the yeah, it's going to happen now, which is like really going to be fun. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited to introduce to you the newest member of my family. We call them Stanley. We got Stanley this past Christmas and pretty quickly my focus became making sure he was safe while still giving him the freedom to actually be a dog.

I went looking for the top rated GPS fence the number one and that's how I fo...

Where's their Nova collar with spot on I set up a GPS fence for Stanley right on my phone no physical fence no leash.

β€œI just walked my property line or draw it on the map and that's the boundary the collar recognizes.”

I can create multiple fences save them and adjust them whenever I need to so whether we're at home or traveling Stanley always knows where his boundaries are.

Another thing that's set out to me is these colors are designed right here in the USA and assembled a new Hampshire by a team that's been working with high precision GPS technology for years and you can tell a lot of attention one end of making this thing reliable. Another color uses a dual band GPS system connected to more than 150 satellites along with an antenna that's over five times larger than typical GPS fence collars that keeps the boundary accurate even around trees terrain and changing conditions spot on's true location technology has been independently tested in delivers 99.3% containment which matters when you're trusting something with your dog safety.

It's incredibly durable and on top of that I can check his location in real time send voice commands directly to the collar and track his activity through the day. I use spot on so Stanley gets the freedom to run and explore and I get the piece of mind knowing he's safe. Let your dog roam with spot on go to spot on fence dot com slash srs and use code srs for fifty dollars off the Nova color that spot on fence dot com slash srs and use code srs for fifty dollars off.

β€œWell I would like to do a little bit of a life story on you if that's that's how good to you. Where'd you grow up central Illinois central Illinois yeah small town like 700 people 700 people.”

That's even smaller than where I grew up where'd you grow up and small town chillic on the Missouri health small about eight thousand people time yeah yeah we didn't have a we didn't have anything 700 people. We'll be into. Yeah so us like you know kid sports computers like I got into computers really early. Did a bunch of sports.

You know we I grew up in a farm so the corn and soybeans my my my family was third generation of this so yeah.

β€œYeah so there's generation of three generations of farmers the generation agriculture farming and then we switch over to.”

Yeah yeah we're doing like humanoid robots now and AI systems but yeah now I got like a really interesting computers like really young. Start a bunch of like startups and like in like you know in high school and college but it's kind of startups you know at first just like mostly things on the web like selling things. I did a bunch of like different types of like products I was selling on the internet for like throughout like high school and college. Small like drop shipping retail electronics like all kinds of all kinds of things Legion marketing and just fun stuff.

I was like nothing serious you know just like planning on the internet trying to make some money just I didn't grow up with money so it's like internet was a way to like like you know maybe make some money like it was really fine. You know I loved like the ability to go out and create things and kind of control my destiny so it's just something I I attached to really early on right on yeah brothers and sisters I have a brother yeah.

What is he a farmer Colby no he actually runs an AI defense company called Scout no they're doing yeah basically building autonomy and like AI models for defense and military.

Both got in the AI we both got in the AI we live like a block away from each other today like areas yeah we grew up together really close with the same with same college. We're like different ages a couple years apart and then and then we were in New York for about 15 years together and then he just moved out to California we live literally block away. I see him almost every weekend he had to start up like basically ten minutes away from from mine up you know where I'm at now and he's doing great. I mean what do your parents think when you're coming home with with what you guys are involved in and what you're what you're creating.

My dad is like you know ran his own business like you kind of have to go out ...

So early on is like listen if you want to control your destiny and you know if you want to make money and you know like be able to actually. Do what you really want life you need to like run your own business and that was like beat into our heads like growing up like you know some point you need to you know you need to get public it out of here get out far away and it's not doing well and you need to start something around. And so just kind of just like by default I was like okay this is what I'm going to go do since other kid.

β€œThat you got a some proud parents map yeah parents are great wow yeah they're like what the hell's going on here what are you doing but I've been doing pretty crazy stuff for a while now so I think it's like it's gotten to play where it's like.”

You know I even are children like 6,000 pound electric aircraft and before that doing you know internet startup stuff but it's kind of been you know working on crazy or stuff now for a little over a decade were you rebuilding stuff as a kid to. Yeah constantly building stuff will kind of stuff stuff on the farm building stuff on like in software and internet just like I just love building stuff all day I'm like very like. Biggest science and mathematics like you know I'm like I'm like a more of a visual learner to like I like.

Building stuff and seeing it and touching things and even like honestly doing internet for like I did like I was like I did work in the internet software for like 10 years.

I just like always sat there every day like wishing I was working on hardware stuff like I like touch my hands.

So stuff like when growing up was like you know filled I was like rebuilding computers or just like on the farm and building stuff. I always like envy things that you can go touch and build. Wow basically like atoms. Man so where do you go where do you go to school I went to University of Florida University of Florida. Yep where do you go from there.

So after school I moved to New York and I started working on software startups. And during college I was working on basically a bunch of like side small like internet things.

And and then kind of like shortly after college I started a company called Veteri and the goal was to basically build like a.

I got really kind of going through college is like you gotta look for a job yet I go find something full time and got caught up in like the whole interviewing process of like looking for job.

β€œAnd this I was so broken like applying for jobs and like never hearing back and like you have to go through headhunters and then it basically became like a.”

Some out of this like you know boys club but like trying to figure out where do you with the school then like certain people knew other folks like how to get in and there's just like. It wasn't very much a meritocracy and I just thought the whole process was extremely broken. And so it's sort of better is we were missing AI recruiting marketplace so the goal was like if we can get all the worlds talent and hiring on one platform. And you're seeing their knees really well can we make matches at scale like without like any humans involved.

And like the head of the industry is like hundreds of millions of dollars a year. I won't even I won't use it. No like I know I just hear I keep hearing everybody gets ripped off but it's so expensive like pay like fifty thousand dollars a hire it's like insane. And then the then they'll coax the guy out that they just brought to you and have go to nothing.

β€œSo veteran veterans connector yeah connector.”

We'll funny enough we ended up selling to the world's largest recruiting company that does staffing but like let's leave that for a minute.

But we basically started in 2012 and.

And the goal was like how do we put like a lot of job seekers and a lot of employers on a platform understand their preferences and match them at scale like just like how to use algorithms. At the time we were like let's use AI but it was basically like how to use a lot of algorithms to figure out like what people once and then make matches. So you just a push of a button connect the right folks and then make placements and then we ended up charging most of our revenue came from subscriptions from big companies like big banks or start ups or tech companies basically looking for talent.

We started just in tech in the US so. At one point we had about like think about a little under 20 or so cities globally that we were operating in but most of it was tech. Talent tech spaces you know at that point. So that was us. Certain 2012 and then in of selling the business in 2017 or 2018.

So about five years six years right on yeah then more to we go. Okay so that better was like a really tough. I was like basically with like I didn't have much money went like fully all in the business. When did that at one point in 2015 the business was having a tough time and then. When up selling and up things end up going doing really well the business like completely hockey stick and growth.

When we got all the things figured out and just like. Battery better it was and then end up getting approached by the world's largest recruiting company the same groups you like you're not. Like it's the same groups we're trying to think of business. And then we were like. And then we want to quite require the you know the quiet the company and at the time we were like I was like completely dead broke and put everything on the business was like I think it's almost seven years in.

And you know they you know we were excited about it acquisition a year before...

One of the big tech companies and they came in at 110 million.

β€œAnd and it was a it was a good time for me.”

I felt like the business was doing well I learned a lot and I was kind of ready for my next chapter. So in selling that business to the deco groups like the world's largest recruiting company. And but you you you didn't even have a for sale. They just approached you. We didn't hire bank or anything. Listen at the time we're doing like I don't know 20 30 thousand interview requests like a week. Like so that was like no humans involves like think about how many humans would take to do like 20 or 30 thousand interview requests.

It's like you know to mean in the manage all that processes so we were like it would the growth was just unbelievable. And and there's like there's something better to like a human jam and you enrolls right like it's just like you need like and then to extend you can get you know all the worlds.

Like talent there and all the worlds companies looking you can really create an amazing environment where you can get people to like the right jobs.

And right now it's not like that it's like a really black box like trying it both finding talent and looking for a job which is a terrible experience. And that clicked the world's largest recruiting company came in and said we got to buy this thing and y'all bet they did. Yeah, I want to I sold the business and and it was great it was a good time for me. I really at the point was a point of my life I really wanted to do something much bigger. And so I took about I basically took about a year and so it took about a year but time I got the term she to sell to when we actually sold and closed.

β€œIt's a long process you have to go through like tons of docs and then you announce the down to the deal then you actually close the deal and then it went into escrow then it finally hit my count it's kind of like one of those processes.”

And I want to go over on something really important hard and a couple industries that I've I've been interested in robotics and aviation and some areas of security for like basically since college and I basically spend a lot of time trying to figure out if I was either going to work on. At the times school shootings like basically 10x and I was like man there's got to be something to do here and we can you know and and secondly I really wanted to work on like flying cars. Kind of watch a lot of sci-fi as a kid is like man like I really want to go I there's like there's a there's a near term problem of like we got to go help.

A security in schools K through 12 mostly in the US and then and then how do we I want to work on flying cars and I ended up making the decision to work on flying cars at the time so in 2018. I really have to say all of veterans sort of archer aviation and basically like the story here is you can build like an electric aircraft that can take off like a helicopter if you take off like a helicopter you don't need a place the airports outside of cities you can place them inside of cities like a thing about like a normal hell like a helicopter can take off from a.

Building or a helicopter or an air and so you take off if you take off vertically you can basically nestle the aircraft inside of cities half the world lives in cities today. Well it's it's you know by the like you middle of the century like 70% of the world and you just like can't get around like it's just gridlocked everywhere and major cities it's just like socks to go like 20 30 miles it takes like an hour in most cases.

β€œSo basically you can build design aircraft that can take off vertically and then fly like an airplane so you can get like a lot of distance and you can basically then rearchitect the whole aircraft to be fully electric.”

The reason you want to do that is is for costs and safety you basically can make it like like a lot like less expensive you can put a lot less parts in the aircraft that are also good for safety. So basically you can build like an electric flying car that you can move around and so instead of like calling it Uber driving that might to you in an hour in LA or SF or New York you basically can fly there in 10 minutes. And if we if we can pull everybody together like in a kind of like a Uber pool style business model you can do it for us cheap as an Uber.

But the problem was like I didn't know I didn't know anything about how to build electric aircraft.

But where do you yeah I'm just I know you just sold your business for $110 million but where do you get the confidence to.

Where do you get the confidence to go I'm going to build vertical take off in landing flying cars now. I mean listen I didn't wake up to this world like learning how to build software so like I learned how to how to how to do that and run engineering and run run the company and. There was like a lot of through trial and error and. I just felt like I learned it I started. In industrial and system engineering at University of Florida so.

And then you know ran engineering and ran the company at battery. So I basically just hit the books. I tried to learn as much as possible about three subject areas first was like electrification which a lot like you know at the time like electric vehicles were like really doing well. And even drones vertical take off in landing like vertical lift which is like traditional like rotor craft or helicopter.

The third is like winged aircraft like airplanes.

You really need wings like so you okay so you basically have to learn about those three subjects.

β€œSo I started I basically bought my my my basement down stairs at home or like every possible book on these subjects you could match in.”

And sort of reading as much as I possibly could. This is during the year transition as I was transitioning like out of out of battery into our trials reading every possible thing. And then I found a small community of folks that were like hosting on site. Like either half week or week long courses for this. And so I would go to these sometimes are sponsored by NASA or by colleges or whatever would be on like basically rotor craft or electric propulsion.

Or winged aircraft aerodynamics and I would basically like try to like like learn as much as possible. It got to the point where I was like completely obsessed with this algorithm I was building on electric aircraft sizing. Like how how do you actually like how would you actually build a electric aircraft.

So electric aircraft which interesting is like in rotor craft like you basically want to make to create the most efficient lifting device possible.

β€œYou need as much of like as the rotor disc area like in terms of surface areas you possibly can it's why the helicopter rotors are so large.”

And we want that to be really large that'll reduce power and get you off the ground. And electric aircraft the problem you're starting with is you have like one 30th of the energy is as you do in caracene in a battery pack. So you just like you're off the bat of one 30th less range or let one 30th less energy. And so I power becomes like the dominating factor of like of how to basically build electric aircraft like how do you get power down as much as possible. You really want a lot of disc area.

A lot of disc area is one one it could be good for power, but it's also bad because you have like no like no redundancy in the system you like one rotor blade if it didn't go doesn't go well you go down. With a lot of electrification you can basically build much smaller. Like basically rotors and they'll fully electric and the reason you can do that with a like traditional kind of like turbo fans or engines is it gets too inefficient to these sizes. You can't build 12 like propellers on a helicopter the efficiency just drops like to nothing.

β€œSo with electrification you can you can size electric motors to small sizes and they're still 90% efficient.”

So like small electric motor on the table or big one size of your chair, same efficiency. When you do that you create a lot of redundancy cost of systems you can build like an aircraft of 12 electric motors. So this is the rotors are underneath. Like the problem here is you can design it however you want you could put a bunch of rotors along the wings you can put them like laterally across the fuselage you can make a one big one you can make 30 small ones like so how do you design it that's the problem I hit in 2018 was how do you actually do this.

And so basically was like a crazy man trying to design this algorithm to like what is the ideal aircraft design and then how do I go build it. It was actually at a I was at a high at Regency hotel in Atlanta in 2018. I was on a electric propulsion week long design course and like aerodynamic scores for wing aircraft. And I met a guy there that that was basically in the engineering department at University of Florida. He was doing his PhD in aerospace and as someone who's doing there and to come from University of Florida I was like oh I went to school there as well.

And he's like I'm like what what are you doing here you say oh I want to go like do a career in EV tele aircraft. And it's called electric vertical take off a landing. So you know a helicopter is a V-tall and it will be put a little e-in France over electric now he's asking me what I'm doing here. So I'm starting to company and to do this and I need to figure out how to go build these things. And he's like well listen my professor runs a small drone lab he's got a full building he's got 12 PhDs.

Why don't you come down like meet him and see if you can start building aircraft with him. So I flew down that weekend to go meet his professor runs all of basically mechanical engineering aerospace. And a long story short is I ended up taking over as like his lab and and me and him and his team started building aircraft in 2018 and 2019 down in University of Florida. And I temporarily moved down there with my my daughter at the time in my wife living in Gainesville, Florida. Like and and it was great like we ended up building I ended up funding a lab.

Raid off of an archer road a new lab because we needed more space. I mean it called the business archer aviation is the main road down of University of Florida. And I spent the next like year year and a half. Basically like modeling and building electric EV tele aircraft.

Holy yeah and it was um it was a it was a great time in my life and like the problem is there was no intersection of folks at new electric.

New rotor craft or new airplanes there was no wind diagram of overlap. Gotcha. So there was nobody in the world that understood how to this all stuff that works. So I had to go from scratch like learn it from first principles and and then ended up moving the company out to California.

Basically a few years into the business and then you know things took off fro...

I took the company public within three years of starting it we're six billion to our publicly traded company today.

β€œAnd yeah designed basically like four five generations of aircraft at archer and it was hard.”

You know it really set me up well for like you know doing figure and cover and the rest of stuff. I was talking about later but like it was um it was it was hard even going public was like probably like one of the hardest experiences of my life it was really. Why is that? We we went public through a back process so you know backs of time like four or five years ago like all the rage. Okay.

And I was a special purpose acquisition company so it was basically companies that were like going public through a merger like reverse merger.

And it was hard because in 2018, 2019 coming off the software I had never done hardware before so it was like a hard to raise capital and.

And be there was nobody funding like deep tech.

β€œElectric vertical take off a landing like companies like you know I mean the big these venture capital groups were not funding space acts or.”

Tesla or Rivian like no these were going to be funded by traditional investors they were raising money from the named investors we all know about now. Oh shit are they always behind like that. They they the mandate for most of these VCs in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley and stuff are not to do hardware. Yeah. They don't really and if they do hardware they do they don't do deep tech they don't do like rockets and autonomous vehicles and I don't think there's a single.

You know top VC in the US it's investing in a humanoid company. You know shit me and as of last six months ago now nothing like this don't this is they just don't do this stuff and so like I end up I end up going all so I you know like.

You know made just made 110 million dollars and are just sold the company of 110 million dollars made a lot of money like personally.

And I'm going all in on archer through the IPO like through going public I put like all all the money I basically I bought a house and the rest of money went all into it. And and it was a stressful period so we went with we went public through this back and the reason was stuff is we end up getting to point where we just couldn't raise enough money privately. Like it was it was either like raise you know 100 million dollars privately at like. You know some dilation three four five hundred million dollars or is like go public and raise like a billion dollars.

Wow and we end up going public and raising a billion dollars. Wow you've got a huge appetite for risk and we got sued during it. Really yeah like we got sued by basically like Boeing and a big big startup that was founded by Larry Page Google founder. And that's got to be intimidating. Yeah it was woke up to like a front page in New York Times article about.

Oh yeah it was it was crazy I mean the backstory is I am the I took so Larry Page started a company and. And the bury about ten years ago called Kitty Hawk and they were the like they did a great work over like ten years in electric like the taller craft. And I end up taking at end up taking basically the core like the core 10 to 15 folks that were there all came over to our chair. Like within the first two years wow and they retaliated by just like trying to harass us while we're going public. And so yeah just a crazy story a getting public in a getting public you know billion dollars on the balance sheet and we just started building like aircraft and.

Started building the service like thinking about the app and how you're going to check in and how you're going to build places like real estate to fly into. And yeah and then like the engineering work we had to do around there designing you know it's basically a it's basically a flying robot you have like battery systems electric motors sensors. And then it's just a lot of sensors embedded software and control systems. And basically like the robot you saw this morning like very you know that's like it's a flying it's a 6,000 pound four passenger piloted robot and it has 24 degrees of freedom on the system like wing wing flaps.

We like we have we tilt the front like the leading edge six motors 90 degrees for basically take off vertically and then go into forward flight and then all the propellers fan blades on have variable pitch propellers. So it's like a highly overactuated system that needs like a really good software I know human can like fly it basically without really good control software.

β€œWhat what altitude is it fly about a few thousand feet so about two to three thousand feet above ground level and that's what it would normally be.”

Yeah, like traditional helicopters fly at this levels. I mean what would. I think about I think a lot about Tesla and all the EV vehicles that are coming out and you know it. The government just seems so far behind on AI you know and you just brought up gridlock and all the cities.

I'm always wondering why aren't one are we going to go full EV.

I know there's a lot of pushback about that you know for for for for for an over each standpoint but if you if you just think about the traffic in the cities and if you have the AI you know processing all this. That even even without air vehicles I feel like a lot of that would go away because the the the AI will route you the quickest. I think all the traffic patterns into account and it would just flow a lot easier. Yeah, but there's all this government regulation.

I think it's also hard because like if you look at the number of installed cars in the world like doing half or so installed cars we make like 80 million or so cars a year and the world.

It takes you like you know on order of like 20 years to replace all the cars so all the cars were electric and autonomous today and autonomous cars have like autonomous hardware and it's not like you can just go out and. Retrofit all the cars in the world right now like it's a it's a hard problem. I mean if you look at Tesla for example I mean it can self drive right it can come get you.

β€œBut when you're driving if you take your eyes off the road it wakes you up you have to come back I mean it seems it's it's it's inviting more error and to the road by by doing that in mind in my opinion.”

Yeah. It might be more dangerous. We're just in this transitory state right now where in like five years like everything will be like fully autonomous and trusted and fine and you won't have to do that and we're just in this transitory. We're in this chapter in the in the book for the technology roadmap here where we're living through it and it's like a little messy and it's not quite like straightforward and we don't quite know where it's headed next. But where it's headed is at some point in like five whatever years where you know and our kids grow up like they're never going to have to think about this it's just going to be autonomous will start it's going to be like you know by default native.

And it'll be trusted and easy and safe. We're just like living through this period right now which is like a weird thing but like because rise long enough. You'll have this autonomy and electrification everywhere. How long do you think it'll be? I mean so I live in the Bay Area like you can take way modes now like I can take way modes everywhere and it's unbelievable. They're everywhere yeah they're in my I'm in South Bay but they're in the city for a while now they're in you know another Palo Alto, Milo Park like San Jose, all of the place they're really great.

I take it's like a my wife and I would go to dinner and stuff on the weekends we take way modes like it's so fun it's like no shit. It sounds so like like it sounds so basic like you take away modes fine it's it's it's awesome man like it's it's great you have like. It's the car drives so human like and it's such a great experience like not having a human there to be frank like I love you know I go to it's like so many like whatever ubers and stuff and calm and the car smells or it's dirty or whatever else and it's just like you know this is it's just easy.

It's really cool so like technology is like in like the early chapters but it's all here like we're going to have autonomy as scale like everywhere and just going to take some time to roll that out. So it's the time it takes to get the technology mature enough where they can run enough cities and up places and then it's the time it takes to get the install base of autonomous hardware and software and all these places that's going to take some time to we just can't snap our fingers we just don't have enough.

Install base of autonomous vehicles in the world the thing like Tesla's got like 10 million cars in the road and like.

β€œLike maybe there's thousands or so of like waymo's you have like over a billion cars in the planet so you need to like like like you know make a large fraction of that autonomous.”

So you're looking at like a. This isn't going to happen any year or two it's going to take some time one of what we're going to see your vehicles. They are craft. We have them now we fly every week in California. The challenging part with archers that we are governed by the federal airspace so to fly passengers and charge money. We have to have like basically a type certification from the FAA.

That process moves the speed of like the post office and the FAA is not incentivized to put anything in the air unless they know for sure it's going to be really safe the safety standard for us. That we want to certify to is one time's 10 to the minus nine in terms of hours of reliability before a kind of traffic event.

So that's one in a billion hours.

Yeah. You can't. The be able to that is like that's the that's the centers when we fly it's like one of the safest form of transportation we take. And it's because of those standards like governed by the FAA which is great.

β€œI'm like you know we're like that's that's that's the bar you need to be at and that's the bar you need to hit.”

Especially taking passengers over cities with aircraft over head. You need to be at those levels. So that's like the that's the long pull and the tent for us and that's wherever you go. If you go to you know you're up it's it's Yasa or you know CA and China wherever you're going to go. There's like there's federal mandates to get busy in aircraft to take passengers.

So we're in the middle of FAA certification now.

We hope to be certified in the coming you know as soon as possible basically.

But it's like it's not something you can like there's not like a date on the calendar but you'll be certified here.

β€œYou have to work through a very like very long and slow process with FAA to get through this.”

And then we're also dual tracking out against a couple different entities globally now to make sure we can get certified and get in there. But it'll it'll happen man the aircraft. It just again it were like this chapter we're like flying cars electric you know aircraft or just like it's early. It's early it's earlier than like AVs or EVs or EVs Thomas vehicles, much of vehicles. And I've been it'll happen it'll happen in our lifetime.

We'll be taking these things around. What do you envision when let's let's fast forward 20 30 years. Yeah, what do you what do you envision what does it look like do we have roads? Do those get ripped up? Is what does a sky look like?

Yeah, what does every day life look like? Yeah, the really important thing to hear about the airspace is it's three-dimensional and the roads are not. They're 2D and we built cities now in houses and restaurants all around these places. You can't like there's nowhere to go. There's like no more roads to build in these cities.

So you have left with no choice if you and then humanity are moving to cities.

β€œWe have this like secular trend where we all want to live in cities right now.”

It's like how the world lives in cities it'll be like 70% by 2050. So we're like all move in the cities the roads can't grow anymore. And we're like we're constantly moving around going to work going restaurants.

And it's like it's like it's like this it's it's it's getting it's basically getting worse.

It's like this the arteries are hard to name here and around the around this and it's getting worse and worse. And it's just like it's some of the worst time to spend on a road in traffic. It's like so soul sucking. Yeah. It's just like it's just like it's just like like time to lose. So the good news about the air is just three dimensional.

You can stack like basically an infinite amount of like say roads in the air. Different altitude. Yes, a different altitude and even laterally. So like so you can basically build like little tunnels in the sky and you can basically stack them. And you basically can you basically can put like orders and magnets with more things in the air than you can in the road.

It's the same for a below ground with tunnels. So the future of travel in cities is below ground in tunnels and above ground in the sky. And the green company. Yeah, exactly like just like dig tunnels and it's great. The only problem with tunnels.

With with with with with the with the node system. Uh, on on on on the ground are sorry and the on the on the ground with with with like say we call them verteports.

But basically like real estate for flying cars.

As you can we'll say you had like you know 10 different. Um, or even like you know five. You say 10 different verteports inside of a city. Like places to like take off and land from. You can travel between any one of those routes.

Uh, so it opens up like you know basically exponentially more places to go to. I can go to like any node on the system at any time. So you go on on. So you you're you're saying in order to take off and land. You'll have to go to specific locations.

You will build a dealer from your home. Um, yeah, you're not going to take off and land from your home. Oh, okay. Uh, just because like a coup sticks in the neighborhood is going to be too loud. Uh, you need like a decent amount of infrastructure for that for charging and for passengers

and cleaning and like checking in and stuff like that. They'll be like they'll be like in your neighborhood. And you'll like you'll like you'll like way more there or walk or take a bike. And then uh, and then you'll get on these and they will go to any node on the network. You can't do that with tunnels tunnels have to go to A to B.

You can't like you go from like you can't jump to another tunnel. Uh, downstream like you know I want to jump to another tunnel like a hundred meters down. Like it doesn't happen in tunnels. You can do that with a sky.

You can basically jump to any node on the network.

It's exponentially more routes. You can basically do it with like less real estate. And then you can basically stack as like you know orders of magnitude more traffic and humans in the sky. So my ambition is that like you're going to be for most most trips that you know that you're traveling over 20 minutes all that will move to the sky.

And not only that, but you will you will have like cities being like um, being transition to a point where you can live well outside of cities and get to cities really fast. Reason we live in cities is because we're like we're working there and we have friends there. And we have like it's yeah it's like I want to be like I want to go to dinner with somebody. I want to see my buddies over here.

And uh, we want to go to work over here or like go to the mall over here. It's like everything is there.

β€œAnd that's what we want to be or social creatures.”

We want to be there next to other humans or some of us are. And so uh, yeah so anyways uh, but like you know now that you can fly this 150 miles an hour in the air with no traffic, point to point like no stop signs, no construction, no things jumping out in front of you. You don't have to like travel different distances. You're going straight from A to B in most cases.

So you're like you're removing 10 or 20% of the top like basically the distance just by going point to point. And then you have nothing stopping you going 150 miles an hour most of the way there. Now you can live like far outside of cities and get down to city center in under 30 minutes.

Uh, so these me personally owned or will this be this will be like an Uber se...

It'll be like an Uber service.

Okay.

β€œTo get cost down, you'll basically just like pay per trip.”

You'll pull up an app and you'll go like I want to go downtown. To whatever it's 40 bucks and I'll be there in under 30 minutes. And you'll you'll you'll say great. I want to be there at that time. You'll hit a button. It'll be on demand. You'll ride your bike over a walk.

You'll get in one and it'll even seven minutes and then you're basically flying right down the town. Holy shit. And you're saying this will this will be an every neighbor. This will be very accessible to everybody. Yeah.

That's you're designing the whole uh electrification allows you to reduce the cost and uh the safety burden of all this. Wow.

β€œWe have like um like um a normal helicopter could have like”

100 to 100 like safety critical components that any component gives out.

The helicopter can go down and electric aircraft has none of it none. Uh you can lose a motor. You can lose a battery pack on onboard and still fly safe without having this. And um and so like uh it just like from a safety from a park count from a cost from like a acoustic signature. It's not like helicopters are loud and very noisy and um it's it's just a much better technology for this.

If you've been ammonia um we I haven't flown uh inside of and inside of RGA. I've also been inside of our aircraft um and uh we basically have professional uh basically pilots uh at the company. Has pilots. Yeah, test pilots and they do their career test pilots and they're unbelievable. I'll bet um you know a lot from the lot from the military a lot from the big aerospace groups and they're they're just professionals. What do they think? I love it man. This is the future of aviation.

Uh everything's going electric and uh it's so crazy. Yeah it's crazy it works like it's uh it's crazy it works and crazy we're in the right time period to make this happen. Um yeah and you know the good thing about you know archer now is we like we've demonstrated the hard part is like being in the wrong like the hard part is like making sure you're in the right decade.

No one like go do this and you find out it's like oh it's like a 2040 event. You can't go down. It's just like a it's just like a waste of time. And um so the good news you know for archers we like we're we're going to sweet spot here where uh this is going to happen aircraft now work uh we're certified now with the you know government bodies like the FAA to make it happen. We have a good balance sheet

with it with cash um it teams great and so it's just like uh you know get certified and get this going damn that is some you're really changing the world. Well we'll start with the start of it but yeah hopefully we'll make this thing work where we go next um human noise let's yes let's do it yeah um how did this idea start yeah so um yeah it's been like five or six years working on like a pretty crazy robotics

work at archer and um like the ultimate like meta problem and robotics spaces can you can you build like a general purpose machine to do everything in the world like much of what say humans came in the world. And I just big belief that you know we like we have like weird biological species like we look we're like you know we have these weird hands and arms and legs and

certain height and um sensors and then we ended up building this world around us so we can interact with it um meaning if we get dropped in a mars today we're going to build like coffee cups that we can hold and stairs and doors and we're going to build this stuff again and it's like the it's like the human operating system we're building things we can like use in operate in um that makes like easy for our lives and uh we built it around the form factor

that we are meaning if we look differently the world will look different our expressive machine would be like different looking we might not even like express our coffee in this case um so we build this whole world around us the holy grail for robotics is can you

basically build a general purpose machine that can do what humans can

which for me is like a humanoid robot and a humanoid robot's just a robot that has like a human form so as legs so it can walk up stairs and walk over like you know uneven terrain or say

β€œthings on the ground and uh bend down which are important for um or reach up uh has like arms”

in hands so we can manipulate objects and do things like you know grab a stuff open open this these gummies and um you know fold laundry and do do real work um and we have the right sensor so we can like see the world and understand what to go do and use a you know our biological neural net to kind of figure out how to reason from and um you know having worked unlike you know kind of like aircraft or you know now five or six years I I thought it was a pretty possible

to go build um an electric humanoid robot and electric's important for cost and it's important for

Safety and it's important uh because the performance will be much greater and...

when the best humanoid robots that then was probably like the boss dynamics atlas it had like a

hydraulic system it was really heavy and big and high torque and very leaky like the oils everywhere

β€œand also didn't run very like maybe ran for 20 minutes on a single charge so you need to kind of”

radically transform the hardware and then you need to figure out a way to build like um an AI brain the humanoid is so complex it has um has like let's let's let's call like like 40 degrees of freedom and degrees of freedom is like a joint so like an elbow is a degrees of freedom you know shoulders got three a ball and socket has three like a pitch on roll and our robot has about let's call it 40 degrees of freedom in it each degree of freedom is a motor that can spin 360 degrees so if you want to look at

how many positions the body could be in at any given time like this is a position this position and keep moving amount of states it's uh the mathematically it's 360 degrees the power of 40 actuators so there are more states in the robot than atoms in the universe there's more positions the body can be in no shit by far it's much greater number um done the math a few times very confident this even though it sounds ridiculous um so you just can't code your way out of this

problem like how do you supposed to write code like how's a human supposed to like like you know c++ or code to tell the robot at any given time stamp what to go do like if I want to grab this like I need to move like my whole upper body maybe lean over and I'm moving my fingertips and my hand like my you know my hand my wrist and hand can position to grab this like it's uh it's an intractable problem for code so um I beg you were saying earlier like I'm going to butcher

this but it's updating the foot 200 times a second yeah our controller's running or balance

our whole controller so we have a main computer is processing um what to tell all the joints to do 200 like a little maybe more than 200 times a second to make sure we can just balance and then we can like do we'll do the task it could be reaching over and grabbing this or balancing if we run that too slow we just like don't have enough feedback and we just follow over just like uh yeah we have to fully balance you know it's dynamic so it's uh if you if generally if you powered off

mid run it's gonna fall down it's not like a four-legged dog or quadruped robot or like any given

β€œpoint she's a statically stable so it makes it very difficult because you have to be able to”

even move your hand I'm moving my pelvis and like whole bite my torso's moving my head's moving like uh all of it becomes very complicated now it's not just like moving my hand it's like moving my

whole body to get my hand in the right spot so every joint all those 40 joints have basically

position in coders so we know exactly what position the the motors at or even the case of the knee or this and we have force for sensing torque sensing on board we have the ability to detect all the forces that that knee is seen it could be really high when it's walking or it could be like you know it could be like it could be powered off and have no forces on the leg all of that feedback and is as being sent in the main computer and then we're telling all the joints with the

do uh over 200 times a second some of the other feedback is happening at like five or six kilohertz so before speedbacks happening in six five six thousand times a second to the motor control on board and we do the motor control the brain for all the motors has done it locally at the motor level because it needs to happen so fast that's being fed back to a main computer that runs a control software that tells the rest of the whole body what they go do at every time

to keep balance starting something new isn't just hard it's terrifying before I launch the Sean Ryan show those what ifs were loud what if nobody listens what if this fails walking away from what's familiar to build your own thing takes real faith but it ended up being one of the best decisions I've ever made whether you're starting a podcast or launching a store it helps to have a partner like Shopify on your side to help ease those worries with their expertise

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with Shopify today sign up for your $1 per month trial it shopify.com/saurus go to shopify.com/saurus that shopify.com/saurus so getting back to original thing is my bet you know we're like three and a half years old or something like that at figure my bet three and a half years ago in 2022 and I started the company was that this was possible now and my my view is like it was I don't over some 10 or 20 years this will work

and so I basically started on the endeavor to go basically build rebuild from the ground up

humanoid robots in AI software to try to see if you could make this work at the time there was there was no good precedent there was no precedent for showing that there was no AI that had ever worked on a human robot in history and there was no human electric humanoid hardware that was remotely okay to show it would work and there was no hands or none of this stuff wow so I actually had a lot of trouble even I so I had a lot of trouble early on even like any people

excited about this because they're like what the hell are you doing and so I ended up having to like basically self-fund a lot of it and the first the first year I self-funded all of it no kidding yeah

and it was a lot I mean we got the business to a million a month of burn and month four and

but it was like I knew what to do we built a 40 percent team in like as fast as possible

β€œand I knew how to spin up hardware and software again you know the key characteristics of robotics like”

electric motors battery systems you know control software embedded systems and sensors and then you know within like electric motors we build actuators they have like a rotor and stator and a gearbox and sensors electronics and wiring and connectors and multiple sensors inside of there and then firmware it lives on the the like I say the micro controller lives inside the on the motor control side and then we have like thermal characteristics hot and then you

got to make that work at very like high speeds and high torques meaning motors don't like working when they're not moving motors hate not moving motors want to run on highway speeds okay they love that like whether it's a like a generator like something you know an appliance in your home or like electric car they want to like run at like highway speeds they're designed to run at full RPMs that's when they're the most efficient okay when motors are stuck in not moving but holding

power and holding forces they're they're all it's a really bad point of the Torx speed curve so they're not they're not built well for this so humorous is all it's high like we're like when we're standing we're like not moving but holding forces when we're like holding something out and like like giving me the gummies like it's not moving now but holding forces it's just a really hard engineering problem just that one little aspect which is like

hardware umbrella just like just just motors and so we have whole teams in those areas just in that one little area here doing like rotor design um electromagnetic design seter design gear box design sensor design motor control design like all of this inside of teams it's it was a enormous lift to just get the team members there to do it so we spent up a team to go

β€œoperate that really quick and then you know now like looking back I think we raised you know”

you know two billion or so like now it's a much different story we have you know

we we ended up building figure one once our first generation robot and had that walking in under 12 months so from when we went from inception to wow yeah from when we we had basically incorporated the company in 2022 or goals like can we get a robot walking by itself these dynamics in under 12 months and we did it we we did it with like two days left in the year um and at the time I think it was the fastest time in history for anybody to do this

and you know and and then from there continue to build the capabilities we built built generation two figure two which is that guy right there is our second generation robot

And I think one thing we did before we kind of moved even to gin while design...

um I think it's probably like 2023 the time we we did a demonstration where

β€œwe basically wanted to put this cake hot cake up inside this cure I can run it and it's just”

on a very pretty simple like not nothing crazy but we had to you know cure machine coffee cup in a cake up and we had to go grab the cake up open you know open the cure put it in close it run it and then you know make coffee and you know it sounds simple but like for a humanoid robot to do that is extremely hard and then we wanted to do all of that with just neural networks it sounds simple but I mean simple task for give it to a four year old yeah exactly I mean the

dexterity on the hands of that thing is just a hand you the back of gummy bears yeah yeah yeah then can you do a neural net on board it's crazy you not code your way out of it can you have a can you take in camera pixels and then output trajectories for the motors through a neural network no code and um we did that 2023 on figure one and it was like probably the probably the most significant demonstration we've done in four years now almost four years where we were like

internally we were like you know how do we get neural nets thrown on a humanoid and I I don't

β€œI don't know I think it's probably one of the first examples in the world to ever have shown that”

and and you know this was like game on this is like we have let's go build a really good human on hardware so make it cheap and really reliable let's make sure you do it humans can from a hardware perspective meaning you want to look at like a phone green you just add new apps to it like the uh do laundry and the hardware doesn't need to change and the same exact hardware like human is only like new album like new hardware uh to be able to go off and like learn how to

do new skill now in the physical world so you want to build the humanoid hardware so it's like uh

can do everything basically a human can or is most of possible and then you want to go all

in a neural networks because you just can't code your way out of this problem and that was the first moment in 2023 where like the hot damn this is gonna this is gonna really work this is gonna be

β€œhumanoid robots hardware gets good and then you're basically gonna be this is gonna be a data play”

the train neural networks to run on humanoid hardware and do what humans do and um and then we launched you know uh we launched figure 2 we did a lot basically more work we started in a feeling helix which is our neural network stack internally that we do here uh and uh now we've designed figure 3 which is our third generation robot you have here which is like the best humanoid hardware in the world by far and we're now running robots that do like I watched it you know

another day uh unloaded dishes and full laundry we had figure 2's at BMW last year that worked six months every single day every six months every single day worked a 10-hour shift

every day for six months and um we had uh it was just it was like the first time for us getting

robots up to the real world doing real stuff like you know it's fun doing like you know demos at the office and showing it can really work but the real like a level boss is like we get robots out and you clients fire us to the love it doesn't work and the goals we have for clients is hard because we have to do human work so we get like human KPIs in terms of speed and performance like humans like you know in the case of manufacturing they don't like you might mess up

every once in a while but you like refix it so you're like you're not messing up every single time you're pretty fast and most cases the humans are there not like you know quitting or not trying to work but sometimes that does happen um so it's like it's hard it's a hard bar to go hit and we have to wake up every day and be able to do that and so we had robots in the manufacturing line

they have uh they basically have a basic body shop that basically builds like x3 and x5s

and January of 2025 we started building our first uh bwx3s on the line and I bought the first four that did that they're at the oh my campus now once in my house and um and they uh they didn't build the episode the whole cars like there's like ton of parts but like we built uh we did a part of the whole process and um which bmw's feedback um they're great I mean the the bnw's like if you go into like a car manufacturing company they're like the best roboticist in the

world there's robots everywhere there's like these giant 12 foot kooka like manufacturing like uh like robot arms on the floor they're bolstered the ground they're massive these things are carrying car chassis around like their kids toys the cars are so big and so have you can't human can't hold it and pass it around so you basically have machines that are building the car and then moving the car so the whole body shop line is only automated in the end and it's like

Not in the end but like there's humans involved but like the car is being lik...

and then there's machines everywhere there's special end effectors on every machine they're switching

these things out basically in real time like grabbing a big like big uh end effector they

end effector something that is grabbing apart these end effectors are size of my so like my chair they're switching them out in seconds wow one or two seconds they're doing it really fast and then they're basically building a car with this was robots everywhere and um so like bnw like they're like it's it's been a privilege to see how like much automation is going into automotive it's unbelievable it's these things these machines like kind of make what we're doing

sometimes with like little toys okay uh we're doing some very complicated but the the car manufacturing is just like no joke it looks specifically where bigger figures doing yeah we had a there's a there's a there's a body shop line called uh this basically building the rear header it's like the back plate so the the body shop they basically build the car by putting basically sheet metal

together welding them onto the chassis and then they basically building the car around that

like ended up putting the seats in bolting them down put the car doors on wiring them up the harnessing and we were in the body shop line helping basically attach the rear head like basically putting the rear header on this fixture so we so today um we basically are you last year when we're there uh we basically take a piece of sheet metal and we basically put on this fixture and we do that over and over again and they do that you know to 10 hours full shift

and uh there's three different parts on those three parts go on this thing rotates and this big giant kuka machine like robot arm goes in spot welds it and switches it switches out to another factor and then grabs it and puts it down the line so like these these uh these facilities are being like fed these these parts into the machine and we were like we were a piece of that and um the goal was just like can we run robots every day you know we're gonna get our ass handed

β€œto us you know is it gonna be easy it's gonna be hard and uh I think it was in the middle I think”

we like um we got the robot to a great spot where brand everyday was great I think the biggest learning lesson we took away is we had we really I really cared about if can we do that and can we like clone it times a thousand times ten thousand would we have any issues scaling that was the part for me like was it just like you know just it completion at the bed and he's like we need to rework our plan and go back to the office just to do it incredibly

well and you can just copy past this thing to everywhere in the world like how how does it how did it work and the biggest learning lesson we got was that the robots the robot that

started the first day at the start of six months and the robot that ended the shift that day was

the same like even though we had multiple robots in operation every day we had the same robot that did the start in the finish wow and it was cool like you know like it was same robot ended six months later and this was the thing where you know the worry was that humanoid robots couldn't last a month to clone us a week in these kind of environments and you know we're in tears like it's running like a you know or need degrees of freedom motors every single day

β€œcan they operate really well I think from a hardware perspective it did a plus job”

think it was software perspective we did like a I think a B B job B plus we and that's mostly from like my perspective like the architecture decisions I made to scale we about half the stack we had like traditional like a code in heuristics and so like the controller to walk was done by a C plus controller it was done by code the walking he saw today we had back then was done in code okay the rest of this we had a bunch of other stuff and they were done by neural nets and like some

of the perception stacks I'm like you know some of the hardware parts around everything else and you know this was year and a half or so ago we were first launching and um and I was like man the the the biggest problems were having is the the coding parts get stuck the robot like either doesn't see like the right uh like see something right on the part and misses the the object detector doesn't really understand what's going on the controller

when it gets out of bounds of like what it's ever seen before like he have carpet in here now and

β€œit's like really squishy the robot was doing fine which is great but I think our old controller”

would not do well it's like he had like really shaggy carpet here and it's like yeah and so like uh and it's like not very it's like it's like you know it's harder for a robot to walk around and um so that that that was like we had a really difficult time uh seeing that even though I did well every day it's seen that scale to like lots of robots so we went back to the office this is about a year and a half ago and so we need to basically refactor everything into a neural network

and one of the big like and and I think we just announced helix two two or three months ago now I forget like in the last year and it's basically and I entirely done the stack including the controllers and a neural network it's uh there's there's like no code left really on the robot based on code in certain pieces but mostly just almost all of the things like a neural net at this point we're moving the need for like almost like over almost over a hundred thousand lines of code

at the when we launch he looks to and so what you saw today was just like a like uh a robot that

Can you know that we can we can put now back in to say the factory and these ...

all the neural net and I think I think we're running these robots right now we're getting ready for

β€œdeployment of customers and that they're running incredibly well we've we have robots running”

like basically now in 24/7 shifts without stopping without any faults for like days and days

we just we just went like over yeah we just we just had like record time this past week on the robot running until we saw like a faults like almost yeah basically a whole week and they basically like they they can run uh like four hours or so five hours and when you charge and then the robot knows that steps in steps behind the robot say it gets ready for work through about then backs off the robot swaps and spot like in the next like 10 seconds is doing

work again so we're gonna run that now in 24/7 shifts we're talking to each other all autonomous no humans or you can go to bed whatever and um they're running that shifts all day and all night and we do it across multiple use cases now at the office in 24/7 shifts and it's just like we're running hard we're kind of stuff that they don't know we do a few things we have a logistics use case that we run in 24/7 shifts constantly we really like it's done with the neural net it's moving

packages around and uh it's a really good use case we like we like it and we um we we want to like I want to run it from months and I have a failures and we still we still we see failures right now and it's most of it's in software we're about to get to some spot where feels unsafe doesn't know what to do and it'll stop for a little bit and then the you know the robots not on the line for a couple of minutes we we call it a failure and we're not happy with it um we have robots that are

greeders and visitor bots that walk around the office all day 24/7 so you're for the office you're getting lunch or walking around or interviewing with us you see robots everywhere and those run

in 24/7 shifts all day all night weekends Christmas day whatever we run them greeders yeah they basically

how do they greet you come talk to you they'll just come talk yeah welcome talk to you and like you'll you can go talk to it and ask it for things um we really wanted to go like um you know at you know the end state for us is like it's gonna replace like somebody like meeting the candidates that are interviewing there taking into the conference room get in water coffee like all of that end in in whole experience um yeah right now they we they're walking I mean they're

right now they're walking in the office like at night time they're walking in office everywhere and it's a good it's a good stress that's for us because these are neural nets that are running for navigation or planning or manipulation or whatever it would look like um and it's it's hard this is a new thing it's not like these things have been around for decades and we like understand

that they're really mature they're not so we really stress test them like crazy by running them all

time what what's the conversation you've had with the robot um we've been really working on like

β€œdeep memory because I think one thing I really don't like is like these conversational AIs you”

talk to you they don't know anything about you it's like it's not much to talk about it's like what's the weather like yes like things about Wikipedia or something it's like you know the way to work it's just um it's kind of nonsense I kind of feels really stupid to me uh so we're working a lot on like deep memory uh it's like it will actually get to know you oh yeah yeah and he's a know who you are like whom I talking to it's a Sean Brad and then based on Sean

like do you have their permissions to tell the robot to go do something or not uh like if you're visiting know I might be like get coffee or water but like you want to have it like go do something new I like won't do it um I have it I've not even thought of that either yeah like we won't even want to be able to command you so yeah what are the permissioning systems and authorifications the robots I mean like you know like robots in my house my kids are going to be like hey

give me ice cream every every every 10 minutes and we can't have the robot doing that right I'd like get home and work and the kids are just like you know through pines of ice cream and the robot's just getting whatever they need like it just be chaos yeah um so we're working

β€œwhat is a voice recognition yeah you have to do voice for something something's voices and enough”

where um like you if you like think about it like an extremely simple you wanted to go like order food or spend money or send a wire like voice recognition won't be enough you have to do a higher level of authentication how would you do that uh facial recognition okay and then if you have a perhaps even a fingerprint scanning um it's possible to but facial uh is what you really want to do got you um so those are not all those systems are not like robust enough right now we're

working through them and um like the goal is like to get it's like super robust but like you know we want to have conversations with the robot when it when it ask it to go do things like you really um you want to main modality to be speech with with robots you want to just like hey man go make me like go make me like uh go make me food or like when I'm gone today do the laundry after you like after you like I'll load the dishwasher like you know uh you can do laundry and like my kids

room today or something like that or or text it um so like language is like super important you I so we're like spend a lot of time on speech you can text it too yeah every robot we have is 5g by default on board we actually run 5g by default now so every robot off the line

Has 5g enabled um like we have like a t-mobile 5g uh t-mobile's on a best ser...

robot has an e-sim card for for t-mobile 5g so it comes up a line with these 5g for all the main

β€œnetwork so if you want to like um you know if our if our systems want to tell the robot what to do”

or consider your best do something we do it through 5g and um and so yeah you can like you can text it so you can be a work and say hey I want the pizza out of the freezer put it in the oven 425 degrees 15 minutes yeah maybe we can do that and right now but like that's the goal is like we got to get there like we got to get to a point where like that is certainly possible and um we want that to happen you want to be like uh yeah I'm at work uh when the groceries come

make sure you put them inside and uh put them in the fridge and do that do all this or they wouldn't even know that go check the mail have it on the counter when I'm sure like it all feed the dog yeah everything like watch the dog make sure dogs okay yeah holy shit so you know what it's it's uh nanny housekeeper gardener it's uh the jutsins all of it yeah it's gonna be all of it I mean you might want to garden you might want to do it all this physical

β€œlabor we do today I think we'll be optional in the future so you'll like you might like garden”

you know you might like mone lawn you just like mone lawn if you don't want mone lawn don't mone lawn like all this will be a choice holy shit yeah and you said it it's gonna it'll download apps for different you want to think about the software layer like you want to think about the

so for us like um what's so powerful about a humanoid is you you don't want to go out and change

hardware whenever we have a new like app on your phone you just like download it and connect do new things now okay it's got my bank account now can you bank account stuff or you got a download you got a calculator can you calculator stuff now you really want to treat the hardware like this where you basically similar to phone where you um you don't have to change the hardware for new capabilities uh you want it to learn how to do like you know complex towel folding or um like

unloading the dishwasher um making coffee on a curie like all this like walking the dog like these are like uh like almost like the matrix where you get like plugged into a system that um re-uploads like weights into the like neural networks and the robot

β€œwhere you can like learn new things so that's what we do now like if the robot like”

if we can't do package logistics well we get data for package logistics we train our helix neural net for a week and then we loaded the robot and it can like then the same robot that was like folding towels like the week before can now just sit there for 24/7 and do logistics work

and package work wow nothing changes where's this gonna go first

you'll ship in the businesses uh first it's um the engineering complexity that we have the ship is like proportional to the variability that we see on site so um the variability at homes is like extremely high it's like it's my home it's chaos like kids are just like dismantling the house it's like basically in real time uh and then there's just like food or their eating snacks toys like it's just like it's just chaos and then like you know if we go to your house in my house we

probably have like different appliances or different toasters and different microwaves all different everywhere we go so the home is just like this like um tons of entropy like uh tons of variability a wide distribution of tasks it's like the it's like the ultimate like challenge for robotics in the home it's like the hardest most variable thing we got we got going and um and the workforce it's like you have this like work sell that you're doing so like and if you're doing like

manufacturing logistics or you know a lot of tasks you have like this area you're doing work in

and you can basically kind of write down on a piece of paper like how to do every step and the home

you can't do that can't write out a piece of paper I can't write down a piece of paper like how can interact with your house I mean you've seen it yeah like the next assembly line or the next like conveyor system like it's like I kind of know what to do it's like I get the package a flip it down and I need to do it every three seconds like you kind of have like you know good understanding what to go do so um it just makes it easier it's like uh the analogy be like highway

driving for autonomous vehicles that's just happened sooner because the veritability's lower than in a city gotcha um so it'll happen first to scale and then the industrial thing has a good good thing where it's like you kind of have your own work area so the safety areas are not as high the hardest thing in the home will be uh once you figure out how to get performance there I mean it's capable of doing everything in the home like saying go near home and do everything

the longest pull from there is going to be safety like me and you feel safe like being like having this here with our kids and that is um that that's going to be the hardest challenge by far and um that's going to take some time it's very it's there's some trust that needs to build is a track record needs to be built there's like system safety engineering that needs to be done

Extremely well um so that just and then the home like you can charge like

10x you can charge like 10x more in the commercial market than you can the home home needs to be like 500 bucks a month your car lease and those will be you think those will be around

β€œ500 bucks a month yeah I think it'll be like that level like you know that like or like more at”

magnitude yeah um yeah so I think um and the commercial workforce you can charge like 10x more so like so it's just like the commercial and then the commercial market for human rights like you know

I mean half of gdp is human labor you know maybe a little under half so it's like 3 billion

humans in the workforce is a contributes to like 40 something percent of gdp wow so like you talk about the largest market in the world is sitting in the commercial workforce wow so you have like you have like that plus the variability slower plus you can charge 10x more it's like the like for investors or like dude why would you ever work why would you ever do homework yeah you know to me like why would you like spend time over here you can just go over here and build like a

20 trillion dollar company um in my answer for that is just like I just wanted I want robots in the home so don't really care you know like we got to make that work yeah I mean you say in 10 years

every home will have a humanoid enough every home in 10 years but we will have pretty close we will have

in 10 years you have like two long pulls you have like a long pull with manufacturing and a volumes for this and then you have a long pull where you can actually technically do the work fully in and my belief is that the hardest thing in the stack is not manufacturing it the hardest thing in the stack is sorry the hardest hill right now is can you put a robot into your home today and do the five hours of work you need without ever seeing your home before

β€œthe first group to do that I think will be like become like the largest company in the world”

and you can do that maybe a hundred robots no shit yeah I think you can solve a general

purpose humanoid I think you can solve general purpose robotics with maybe like hundreds or

low thousands of robots maybe a hundred also at this point the issue we have so we can go into my home today and we can do little pockets of work we can do like I can unload the full dishwasher I can once like laundry's in the basket I can take it walk it and fill up the the washer and run it and we can do pockets of work we can like take the laundry put on my my bed and we can fold it all and then so we're doing like little spots of it and it's pretty good and but there's

a lot more spots to go fill for like a long horizon work just that and we have to be like extremely robust to maybe different types of clothes or like different types of like I don't don't wash my jeans like that type of thing and all these different like varied ability you might look see and we haven't been able to we as of today that's like that's the hell we gotta go solve that hill looks really hard so how I mean how how let's say

it's fast forward ten years I'll get one of these guys yeah I put them in the home how does it I mean do I train it do I personally train it hey when you're emptying the dishwasher the cups go here the plates go here the silverware's go here the forks go here when you're doing the laundry I want these ones washed cold I want these ones washed hot yeah this is where they go this is where the the jeans drawer is is where hang my

sure yeah is that how it works is it's gonna you're gonna box it you're gonna robot in a box you open up robot get out it'll start talking to you it'll ask you to show you the house and you'll you'll you'll say like you know it'll say like you know can you walk me through your home and it'll fall you around and you'll tell it all that like you would let's let's say it you'll say it a friend staying for two weeks at your house that you know needed to like cook and use your

stuff like you know you want to wash clothes and stay in one of your rooms like you'd walk that person around and you'd be like hey man this is this is recycling here this is where trash is at like here's here's where you get water like the trash goes out every you know every Monday you know this is you know we do blankets on the couch but like we want them in the cabinet when they're done you know to me and like or we want these are folded and put it over here like

like all these things you have in your home they're like you know important and um and you

β€œlike just like you would like walking somebody a human around for the first time that's what you'll”

do and the robot will uh semantically under like we'll a have like we'll remember all of this

Uh and it will like it will learn based on what you want your preferences lik...

yeah it will be that so it's just like trying to use the thing this is like not this is not

β€œ10 years well well this is this is really soon uh like i think in the next like i mean i'm hoping”

this year we get like drop robot in your home and do a good amount of stuff uh it's just um we'll see I mean this is like this is like solving like the Holy Grail Robotics this is like solving for a good general purpose humanly robot um maybe we don't solve it this year maybe we solve it next year maybe we don't solve it next year was 2020 i don't know like we're close we feel like we're in the red zone with like we feel like we know the architecture we have the hardware we know

we know how to get the data we put the data in the robot does it we need to like now learn how to generalize we need to like like move deeper into pre-training for we we know the directions we need to go ahead we think to solve this and we're seeing a lot of both positive transfer and um a lot of just like uh we're seeing internally the we think the right direction to make this work when you were talking about you trust in the robot with your kids what what or i'm just curious what are

your concerns yeah our choices i've been thought about this my thing in art here was always like

the i will never like feel safe and i feel comfortable like recommending our like people fly in art here and letting people fly in art here and tell like i like would fly in art aircraft my kids um that's level of safety we need to get to it's a really high bar um that's

β€œwhat you want though right to take a kind of like that around um so i think the same thing for”

figure here is um we'll be we'll be safe when our in to me i will be safe when i feel comfortable putting the robot around my kids i have a one year old and yeah boy your old and seven you know me i have a young kids they had a kind of jump on everything and you know it's like they're like uh yeah the robot like you know the robot needs to be extremely safe there so um that's another hurdles like getting to general like solving general purpose nests getting safety work and then

making enough of those are kind of the equations from here um we listen we have a good plan only what to go do here but now it's like execution and we gotta go do it to show it works right on yeah don't you want to take a walk around this thing yeah let's do it perfect most people blame stress sleep or just getting older when the energy starts to fade the brain fog the slower recovery the feeling of running on empty by midday but underneath all

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slash discount slash srs again that's srs for 20% off it ronutrition dot com slash discount slash srs what more from the shon Ryan show join our patreon today for more clips in exclusive content you'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guest interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode plus unlock bonus content like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions our new srs on site specials and access to an

entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else in the best part patreon members can ask our guests questions directly your insights can help shape the show join us on patreon now support the mission and become part of the shon Ryan show story all right this is our figure three cumulative robot it's uh we actually have built it last year I got yeah about 130 pounds five foot six

and we've basically designed it to do most things like a lot of things humans do a 130 pounds and 35 pounds

It's a full laundry do dishes do manufacturing logistics you know i think a f...

like made improvements on this is our third time basically running through three generations robots

β€œwe've like we reduced reduce the weight and mass we made the robot skinnier but also seem to strengthen”

speeds we upgraded the sensors in the robot it basically sees who cameras um we have better our busiers fifth generation hands on board that have a camera uh tactile sensors um basically improved grip uh we also have uh on the robot like basically more compute on board for running our helix neural network um we also spend a lot of time on uh just basically making the robot more safe so they all have kind of the squishy layer of foam on it so yep go ahead so if you let's say somebody pushed it over

fell over i mean what's the durability of these i mean depends how hard you push it but like uh for the most part we we they we fall robot can get back up just continue to work uh it depends how you fall uh sometimes we break next sometimes it's fine um all right turn around

β€œi think two is like we uh we basically uh the robot almost always fully soft wrap one thing we can”

do here is we basically can make clothes for the robot which we do for both our customers and internally

the clothes can be put on by like a any person so we can basically unzip it um take clothes off put clothes back on we we don't need tools to do so and um can we see it can we see what's in there uh yeah basically it's the torso uh you can't see any of the internals there no they're all inside the structure uh so inside of here we have basically a battery uh GPUs computer uh power distribution um basically the brains and all the energy are in the torso wow um and then uh and

basically the robot is basically left with basically 40 uh 40 joints so uh all basically electric uh electric motors and the motors that have like basically tons of sensors on it for balancing and doing work all right turn around all right we can walk with it for a minute all right let's do it all this walking and all the robot movements are all done again through a neural net let's no code helping us do this oh my shit thank you gonna you want one what's that you want one

of these I want a couple of them you want a couple of them okay great dude whoa yeah let's go back this way let's turn around can it run let's see if that's and go we have run it we have I don't know what we're on the run your mode but let's go as fast as we can we do draw with the robots

β€œoutside really I can't just yeah I think it's also like looks cool right guys a high top”

sign looks awesome yeah and you said there's cameras in the hands yeah cameras in the pumps right here in the palm so we can see the fingertips when it's like grabbing objects and then every single finger tip

has a tactile sensor inside so we can basically touch like touch forces as we're grabbing objects

can it shake my hand uh I don't know uh maybe it squeeze my hand here you go there you go we'll crush my hand no it's not gonna crush your hand dude that's pretty stir that's like yeah I can't move we can pick up like 40 pound boxes off the floor and we can also fold the t-shirt so that is wild you know this is the power button yeah don't push that okay we had to we had somebody in the office today uh it was like I feel like I need to push this so

like it's literally gonna turn off if you push the button and how how long does it hold the charge it depends on what we do but we're from four and five hours how long does it take to charge it takes about an hour to charge so we can do about four or five hours on we can charge for an hour you know a human stick breaks during the day to eat and do other stuff and uh or or what we should do a lot of time office we'll step another robot in during the meantime wow yeah

we actually charge uh here inductively through the feet so the feet have like um basically have like uh charging pads we're about steps on to and we charge wirelessly and we can charge we can basically charge in one hour through that whole process only just by standing so in case the robot has a task where he's a stand-alight we can do a stand-alight on a mat we designed it in house iPhone charger it's like an iPhone charger yeah I can charge about a kilowatt per foot

it's about two kilowatts it can charge when is this gonna be available to the consumer market as soon as we like make it work really well I'm talking to my house and my kids will ask for ice cream every single day and yeah so we're working on really hard I think uh you know we've been

Testing and it's at my home uh for really recently and we'll be shipping thes...

commercial customers uh here really shortly can I ask who the commercial customers are yeah we have uh we could uh BMW we were going to one of the largest with just something in the world uh we could broke field they're like one of the largest real estate companies in the world they have a giant portfolio of companies uh and then we have like two more customers will be announcing the next

like 60 days yeah graduation yeah thanks that's amazing thanks so we're gonna try to ship as many

as possible we can assure wow we also make these uh on site next door at Baku it's our production manufacturing facility and we make about one every kind of like 90 like 90 minutes or so now you can make one of these in 90 minutes yeah we run the line um moving lines are running about every 90 minutes we make one and then that that'll greatly increase even on next like several months here wow yeah wow yeah what do you I mean it folk capacity like

uh our office our facility yeah our facility there can do uh maybe upwards of like 40 to 50 thousand a year like full capacity uh but we need to design for much higher uh like we want to

get to like a million units like a million units a year yeah for sure i mean you sell like

resell over like building a country it's not i mean like you sell like over a billion phones a year

β€œeasy so i think it's gonna be like a robot for every human so you'll need like a cell phone”

quite a style of manufacturing so i can push this oh yeah has push recovery give it a little push i mean little harder than that might be nice harder harder yeah what yeah yeah this is better balance and i do yeah same dude that's crazy yeah this is three and a half years we had we had this walking in three years so start of the company it was crazy you're like basically the week of year three we were walking this thing uh at the office this what like the thing

is this is like uh we're gonna go to like the whole iPhone lineup where it's uh you know iPhone 1 and iPhone 2 and iPhone 3 it just gets better and better yeah and i think humans will have things like more radical steps between those every every year we're roughly building new robot every year we'll just get like dramatically better from this damn yeah our step up from here even

β€œto the future robots will be i think perhaps the most dramatic step up we've ever made”

wild you want to take some pictures what does that do it dude that isn't sane that's awesome i won you want yeah let's get you on man wow like so that in the scent that you said the hands can sense three grams of pressure yeah

we basically have the fingers and we have tucked out sensors on every fingertip and they're really

sensitive um and we have a camera in the hand that can detect when the fingertips are in contact with some surface could be like something we're touching and then within there every joint can kind of also feel sensitive and track the position every like you know part of the hands the hands like they have really good uh honestly we're working on hands not for like close to four years it's it's probably one of the hardest engineering problems we have on the um the hard beside

this probably is hard and we have our next narration hand that we kind of tease the couple weeks ago

β€œthat has like basically full i think i think i think it's the full human level dexterity with”

this hand are you serious it's got as many joints on the hand as a human hand has um there's still a lot of work to go do but like it's now uh it's it's now a huge step up where we actually even curly are and the hand now can like full laundry and you know but we think it'll hit a point where it can outperform a human more dexterity in a hand than a human i don't know better balance faster stronger we already have better balance than a human the robot on one layer could balance

better than a human can i don't know about like uh there's a humans have a lot of degrees of freedom we have like like hundreds a few hundred degrees of freedom our hands are very dexterous i would say if we can do close to human dexterity in terms of like uh that that'd be a huge win we you 'd have robots everywhere uh and um you know and then we're going to still have a lot of trouble getting to a huge like full human range of motion like small things like you would reach inside of a

you know a washer and you kind of like move your head as you're like getting in or something will get on like you know uh get down to the ground and kind of get in the washer to grab some on the back or so we do a lot of crazy stuff yeah that is and um you know so it's like uh like

Even like a 12 year old can kind of do like most things in a house you know i...

up on countertops and all kinds of crazy stuff um uh humans be tough but like i think we can get

β€œvery soon we'll get to like pretty close to most of what humans can you had a pretty close relationship”

with open AI correct yeah they um they led my so uh Sam and open AI led my series b uh colored my series be with Microsoft uh that was a few years ago now so we raised about a little

under 700 million uh in our series be your second round of funding and uh they were they joined

my board and then we ended up spinning basically year with them working on um well let me I'll give you the background uh the goal was to like try to advance AI models for human robots together and um you know they're they have some great folks that have worked on like LMs and chatbots and things and um in the time we had like a we you know we still do but we had our middle full like AI team internally so we were basically working weekly a daily on like

basically how do we advance uh state of the art kind of like language models for robotics and um you know like uh yeah i ended up firing them i know i year a year later but uh

β€œand splitting ways but like listen they're great team i i like the senior leadership and”

everybody there same included like we're great interact with um the issue lied for us if like um there's nobody's ever put like advance like language models into these systems and made it we have to like produce like action output of the robot and it's like a very different thing than like uh next token prediction for like language models um we ended up finding that the team we had in place you know might my team lead the folks we have here all from google

deep mind or certain areas of like you know top AI programs and that they're really good the team now we have us over 50 or so on the AI are he looks team internally we just found that like that team we had internally uh we just we just found like kind of circles around them like every day we had a hard time getting like you know and robotics get like run the robot see how it does you know like like you have like it wouldn't run a new like AI experiment or

good simulations like and some evils you need like run the robot in the day and see how it see how it does like sim is one thing you can get certain for running simulations and looking at loss curves and stuff but we need at in a day like do we need to get like see how the robot does and we had it we just had a hard time getting him in the office we had a hard time

like basically like like like basically you know advancing stuff together as a team

ended up we like the strategy we had internally and the team we had was just like complete superstars they're the best robot learning folks in the planet that's at a figure and um they got to a point where uh you know I got to call one day it just like you know we were like also we do we like like showing them how we were doing all this work and I got to call one day saying like hey we're like you know we've been watching your progress

is unbelievable and you know we're thinking about doing robotics work internally and I was just like uh this is over like yeah I just get out of here like this is like we're we're like teaching you how to do like robot learning you're seeing our progress we had like a couple of you know Sam and a couple of co-founders on site at one point we were right before this and they saw and they were like wow this is like it was doing like this neural network on table

and they were just like Jesus this is amazing and uh I was like you know they were just

able to point where they continue to work together after this and I was like there's no way we're going to teach you how to do this stuff anymore and um it's also we just like got no value at a whole relationship or like a very little I mean let's say it was helpful having them lead the route coly the round it was like there was some there was like some good brand association there but like beyond like that there wasn't much so we ended up you know we're going to try to

own territory we're going to do the AI ourselves here it was also just became like a to be frank like it became like really hard to recruit we were like you know I I have just been a lot of my time hiring like like on the AI team and we bring candidates in and they'd be like oh you guys do the robot opening I just models and I'm like oh no not really now we like a whole AI team internally we do well development here ourselves you know like we're advancing ourselves and it just wasn't

the perception from outside it was just hard so that also was a helpful for us both hiring was not

β€œgreat and we were like you know there was like an information passing back that I think was”

really helpful for us long-term if we're going to be competitors so we decided to split ways I decided to split ways but they have the great team I think they're doing robotics now internally sounds like it yeah exactly yeah exactly yeah I was like I got a call saying like yeah like you know partly like uh the partly feedback I heard was like we've made so much progress at figure and they seen that that they were you know the opening I started out as a robotics program they were trying

To solve a GI theory a lot as a first three four years they were just like al...

if you google like open AI robotics it's like old 2016 2017 2018 2018 like you know maybe like

maybe like 2019 2020 so like that they ended up pivoting into like large language models made 2021

β€œso like this but they were in robotics from I think 2016 2017 for like many years maybe three or four”

years trying to solve like a GI theory robotics there's um you know there's this other we don't need to get into it but like it's you know it's unclear if you need an embodiment or not or you know at the time it was unclear are they need an embodiment or not to like truly get to like above a peak human intelligence um and um and they had a hard time in there but there was like part of their thesis is like get back into robotics at some point and I think we just we accelerated that here at

figure um and you know I think to be fair or like to be hum like somewhat humble it's like it's we made like I think we made like ten I don't know five to ten years of progress in like three years four years like we just like it just felt like a this should have taken ten even right now it feels like right now four years old yet four years old and end of May or something like that like like we like I couldn't believe when I started the company three and a half years ago

we'd be at a point where you can get a humanoid robot even here do the stuff that's doing here but like let alone like the real stuff it's doing now like 24/7 commercial work in the home like it's neural net driven like we can make them every 90 minutes that you know when our lines are up like it's just like it's crazy so yeah we started as part part besides part ways man I mean I don't think there's too many people in the world that can say they fire at the

biggest AI company in the honor I mean that's that's a balls of movement makes perfect sense and man again just congratulations on on everything I mean that is that's just crazy you know I've done I've done it it's just very surreal for me to to unveil some of them I don't know

when we didn't unveil this but it's the first podcast it's ever been good Sean I have not

taken a robot to like a podcast like I get asked every week to do this it's the first time and like love a show and weren't even here in Tennessee it's the first time bots been out here to something like this thank you yeah it's it's it's it's it's really cool to be able to do this like once in a lifetime opportunity type stuff thank you been a problem what about military application yeah we've we've we decided not to do military stuff today and not to say like the

β€œrobots will be good in military or helpful or like my my I believe right now is like it's just too”

difficult to to do both like the ship into the home ship to like you know top fortune 100 companies in the US and then also put like you know like militarized a robots I think it's just too hard in the one umbrella I think there's a huge opportunity like to save lives and help on the military side but I think it becomes like you know we we do have you know we do have like a very advanced system here the system can you know unlike a car if a car became sent yet like

you know you can like walk in your house walk upstairs going your room it's like not going to come jacia like a robot just walk right up your stairs and open your door the human I robot you know this is a very different technology going to be very careful with it so things because of some of that some other things we like we know we've drawn a line here to say like you know we want to stick with the you know consumer market commercial market and go just hard in the paint with that

β€œI think there are will be again credible opportunities for companies like to go into the military”

to be frank is these robots would be great there like they can just like they can you know like some of the most dangerous missions are like you know going to close quarters and houses and you know that stuff is like extremely dangerous human was to be great at that stuff like opening doors and just making sure the house is you know cleared like clear house you know I mean I could see it for a whole ton of stuff yeah not not even just going on target but

centuries yeah guards yeah I mean roving patrols I mean all of it totally just arm security dinner but I think it's it's wow you know I mean you kind of have some one of

a a treatable asset to you can basically I think you can make a melt to be cheap make a lot of them

just put about the work do you think you'll get into it in the future I don't know um as of now I don't know but like you know as a part of it that you'll as a part of the story here where you're like you could make this like obviously really safe for humans there there's a whole part of the story where it's like I think it just becomes like you know to be frank like the when we sell to commercial customers even homes like it's not like selling like a robot arm on a

Stand it's like these commercial customers need like CEO approval we can't ge...

without the CEO like these major companies like coming to see the robots insane we're gonna announce

this relationship with figure and we're gonna announce humanoid robots in our facilities and it's just

β€œlike a it's a very you know it's like a there's you know it's like if you want to say I'll have”

that announcement yeah I think it's fucking awesome but like I know just like it is like a you know it's and then that makes it that much harder than if we have like any military side of things why do you think there has a tip is it is a replacement of human jobs I mean Jack Dorsey just I mean he just let go what 10,000 people yeah like almost half of his half of his personnel because of AI yeah and it's stock won't up because I think you know I think

it's probably because the robot is human like and can do human like work so I think it's just scary for you know it's a scary thing that I like like do what humans can I think it's you know you've similar scaryness folks have around like digital AI and how that will like basically like you know manifest in the future so I think it's a real thing like I think the robots can do human like work and it will continue every year to do more and more human like work so but like that

you know we just gotta we just want to be very careful about how we position this and what we do and and also how we communicate it yeah yeah well what's next for the robots we want to solve general robotics I figure we want to we think of ourselves truly as like like at the at the frontier of like this robotics AI lab that needs to build common sense reasoning into the in a robot that

can put in every home how do we drop it into your home it's never been and you can just communicate

with it and get us started doing work that's the problem we want to solve here that's the problem if you solve it you can ship billions and millions of robots there's also a business where if you don't want to solve that you can definitely ship robots you can ship them in the commercial

β€œworkforce you should military as you mentioned there's like there is there is a path to go like build”

up business doing that but the biggest business in the world is if you solve like like general purpose robotics where just through speech and talking to the robot it'd be it'd feel like you had like a human in a body suit that can like understand you nod like go off and do things now after tasks like that's the problem we want to solve it figure that's like a large scale like it's it's like an AI lab problem at this point we like we we talk a lot about how we're trying to

like we're like we're trying to give AI a body here at figure and so we have this in body minute we need to put like really sophisticated AI into it to be able to command it and that's that's that's the biggest problem we're trying to solve if you're if you're with me in the office

every day I am working that down with no sleep basically is like as hard as I possibly can and

it's a very very difficult problem at this point it's it's largely constrained by getting the

β€œappropriate data into into the network that scale I think if we get snap our fingers”

and get a pile of data that we really needed into helix stack I think we would solve journal about it right now wow what should I be asking you that I haven't asked yet about figure or general about figure um I mean there's a lot of stuff going out with China and manufacturing a few other things but like I think you know I think maybe to summarize I think where we're at is I think if I had to like um if I was like watching this and I wasn't following

the story I think the one thing I would like to convey that you know is like we're so close to like making this happen now and it's only until you know people can come online to like watch our stuff we put out you know but when people come to the office and experience it and see the robots and you can talk to them and some of stuff you're doing here today it's just like a full like emotional experience that is like really hard to convey and it's just crazy to just

that it's it feels like we're living in the future it just feels like we're living here yeah just like well it's like uh it's crazy it works it's crazy it's working but we're like we're now in the we now have like line aside to make this happen and which is exciting from in my perspective uh super exciting and I think it's going to be super transformative for the world and uh I think what we're going to try to do with the next year or two is try to like get this out for the rest scale and get everybody

to feel this uh more and more like uh you feel when you come to our office you feel when you're next the robots but it's like hard for the we're such early innings about about this yet I for take off that it's hard for the whole world to really feel this yeah yeah if you've seen do the robots interact with each other yeah what does that look like right now they communicate with each other

When they need to like so we have like robots that are running these 24/7 shi...

when robot gets like down to like low state of charge let's say it's like 10% and it's a few

β€œpercentages away from we'll we'll dock it before it's like you know 1% or something like that”

at 10% the other robot will get ready like to sub in it like come walk walk over sit right behind it and then when the robot is ready and knows that this there it will then back away and the robot will go into do operations and do work now the robot will then go over and start charging if any of those robots have any problems throughout it could be hardware or software they will go

and like go to like I basically like the hospital in our office so they'll go to a certain place

when they when they get when they get when they know they're going to the hospital we have another robot coming in to the main docks to start sub in and getting ready to go all this communication is happening like robot robot and it's unbelievable and the robots are getting really robust we can like um a year or two ago we would like there would be like certain motors that you would lose communications with or other types of comms or could be hardware failures or software failures

whatever let's say it's a knee lose your knee like can't can't stand anymore you know what I mean like you fall today it doesn't happen we can lose a knee we can hold it's position like it would lose full full comms of the knee we can stiffen the joint and we can limp off last but hopefully yeah

actually I'll post some of the next week publicly about this i've never it's like holy shit so

we can lose like a lower body motor and it literally limps off stage like off like the you know the main like a line it's on it headed to the hospital it'll live all the way there well it's limp in there another group from like the healthy part of the hospital will then come in and it's resubbed in from on the dock while the another one unlocks while it just losses knee to go and do work all that's happening through robot communication levels you can be like literally a

sleep less is happening we run them 24/7 it can be at three in the morning and it will happen it's it's it's insane this is happening like I saw this in last like a few months this happening out right now this is not even like the future stuff future stuff is gonna be robots building robots

we're designing robots we will have robots building robots here and then they will go out and they

will just do autonomous work and they will like charge themselves they will go do work you'll speed to them sometimes you won't need to do and those do work and they'll just be like everywhere

β€œI say this again but I I think we'll walk out it'll happen first and probably the bay area”

we're based in the bay and a lot of companies are in there for robotics but I think you'll go into the bay area at some point and you'll see more human ways and humans in the next 10 years for sure that is that is I can't even imagine what that's gonna be like if you're weird do you think that they will bring do you think do you think manufacturing will come back to the US yeah we're gonna bring back because my view is that we

don't want to bring back manufacturing that's already overseas we don't want to like you know like make shoes make toys like things like I don't I don't think we want I don't think we have the will to do this I don't think we have to know how to to do this as well as like some of the Asian manufacturing groups when I'm I'm overseas so I've like walked a lot of like the high volume consumer electronics lines and stuff overseas some of the most impressive things I've ever seen

in my life there is like it's like it's like you walk these lines and they're just shipping electronics at crazy and they have every line they have like this box of automation inside of it like call a little tiny robot inside of there it's moving some like whatever a phone and closure or something like that and it's doing it with an automated way and moving around a little conveyor and it's moving to the next station maybe humans doing something and it's going down the line

it's going to the next station that's got a robotic system in there completely customized and different way to solve and they have lines and lines and and floors and floors of this and then buildings and buildings and you're like holy shit each one of those boxes is like a figure style complexity and they have like hundreds of them and they're been they need to run them at high rate it's just like it's unbelievable actually it's not trivial it's very complex

β€œand they've been doing it for several decades on these lines so I think one is like I don't”

think that stuff we want to move back I think we want to move back the the high end robotic stuff that's going to be like super transformative for us in the future all the future is to yeah we want to be back flying cars I want to bring back like like humanoid robots like the stuff it's like highly dynamic variant television systems like the next generation like manufacturing 2.0 stuff yeah sure so we're doing that right now in California on our campus we have a fairly large campus

and in the Bay Area and we manufacture right now like whenever 90 minutes or so and that will continue to spin that up and then we'll put you know we'll we'll talk about more about it but

We have like we'll put more investment here into US manufacturing for the fut...

so we're we're going to sign humanoids here so these are all these are all manufacturing

β€œmanufacturers in California right on man yeah man they walk like they walk off the lines they walk”

over it's like it's like you it's 90 days ago you come we're like making a little bit but now we make like there's like seven robots that are all doing like into flying checkout by themselves for like an hour and a half they do their own burdens all OEL checks so they're they're self-looking each other self-calibrating they're doing they're doing like burpees and other shit to make sure they like they're okay if they fail they go into a triage place we understand why to fail

like that shouldn't happen we should always fix that and it should not fail again like how

we fix the baby factory process so the next one doesn't come out and ever have that failure and now we've gotten that process really dialed I mean dialed in we still have issues but like it's fairly dialed in and so the robots come out do a couple of our check and then we're done this walk over and at some point we'd love to like for them and get inside their own box

β€œand another one like get it ready to go and put it on a pallet and we can start shipping them out”

so we'll get in its own box for sure and another one will throw it on the pallet and ship it out for sure yeah that's not hard things though like these are like uh uh that's not you know I mean yeah it's just interesting I feel like it comes off the line gets in its own box gets loaded on by another robot and then shipped off this scary thing for me is like this is like very like rigid body things like cardboard and like moving boxes and maybe using machines and stuff

but those are like the scary stuff a couple years ago was like laundry that like literally moves

it's like really never in the same spot it's like when you touch it it's like actually moving

or we do like these like packages on this manufacturing conveyor system that like you grab it it's literally moving white it's moving because they can bear this moving down and then the packages are squishing each other and then the package itself is moving because it's plastic when you're grabbing it those are the hard things that are compliant that are like really difficult for robotics because they're not like they're not like stationary when you touch them yeah

so those are things that were like man that's going to be really tough to fold laundry and for with code it's been impossible the reason you haven't seen like package of just six and stuff so many stuff automated is because like these bags are just like hard they're compliant they're just tough you can't model them yeah and now we have like we put it all in a neural net they basically instantly worked when we we're working with our we've a little

just discussing we're working with they was like soft packages and we signed them they're like we want you to move these packages on the scenario system and we've put videos out about it and stuff the first month we signed them Enga who runs you know accounts was like we need we need we need we need to do we need to do this for them or they're going to be really unhappy and I was like I was like Dan that's like a compliant material that is moving while you're touching some of them

touching there there's something hard inside some of them were squishy there there's tons of I'm going to move every three seconds we got to find the barcode put it down and put it in the middle of the conveyor every three seconds of package I was like a 50/50 shots works and it's it's got to be with a neural net and we got a bunch of data trained in policy and right away it worked and I was like holy shit this is like it worked really good and for some reason the neural nets do

extremely well under those like high variability environments that's like extremely diverse they can learn the representations extremely well across like a wider distribution and they just love it folding t-shirts, towels like packages like no problem wow stuff that would like you know you're replanting very fast as your move as these things are all moving is doing that in real time it's just like it just works the deep deep learning just works

I'm a humanoid hardware yeah crazy crazy stuff we've all seen it the Department of War

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crazy crazy stuff let's talk about your venture to save kids and schools you're ready to move on to that let's do it I love this color like yes yes can you give us the snapsis yeah so back when I sold battery I mean um yeah I mentioned I got to obsess about a few different areas of like working on you know it was when we're coming flying cars but uh like the the macro environment turned like extremely poor for like school shootings like I went from like you know

you know it's really hard to track but we're from like 30 to 40 events per year in the US like 300 and that was over like a span of 10 years and um it's also really hard to understand why it's like another thing that we could like spend time on but it's there's just like uh you know a 10x mostly in the US you didn't really see this like a lot internationally and um you know we

sort of looking at it looking at it uh I basically you started reading a bunch of like research reports

and other things and I found I stumbled upon this technology uh this like basically technology and kind of like tear hurts radar so basically like uh or someone's also called no longer way of technology where it's basically like um uh basically a high frequency like uh like uh it's basically like it's radio uh our aphids like radio frequencies but basically don't have like very high frequency and the two to three 400 gigahertz and um it's basically like similar to you know you're an airport

and you go in there and you like hold your hands up and like the LG system scan you they're a couple feet away they can see like anything anything you have like you know if you have naive gone they

β€œpen whatever um I read a research report that showed in my goals like if you want to put in”

the schools you you can't scare the kids you have to be able to so sorry back up my view in schools is if you want to solve it you have to solve it from a perception perspective meaning you have to see if people have you have to understand if people have guns on them or not you can like change like there's like a regulation side of some people chase which we're not chasing and then there's like a how do we actually like know if people have guns on them because if you know

a kid has a gun on them you can go like take it away and then majority of all school shootings are unplanned most of them like like almost all of them are some kid bringing a gun in habitually it's like their uncles gun and they bring in the school like every day for like three months they're going to fight or recess and they shoot something they shoot the gun sometimes shoot somebody something that's shoot it and that is majority of all thing all gun events the ones where you see like

a planned event that's like on like CNN where somebody's coming in with a machine gun or on that weapon is if it happens like one or two times a year it's on the front page of the news the majority of all the cases like 90 something percent is all happening from unplanned folks are bringing in guns all the time and then they're shooting it so you basically what you can do is you can stop all those the the plan ones are very difficult and maybe impossible to stop

β€œbut the 90 some percent of all other shootings you can actually I think you can avoid those”

meaning like you can prevent them by knowing if somebody has a gun on them you can do it the old fashioned way which is like metal detectors and all the stuff but like it's just like not it's not we don't want the kids to go into school like that that's just like not I want my kids going up yeah so basically the reason why I got obsessed with like tear hurts imaging is you could basically do this at like uh at a larger offset 10 20 30 meters away you can do it at a

high frame rate and you basically get back a point cloud you basically get back an image it's like it's like a three dimensional camera image almost but it's done in like a radio frequency um it's just like you can like look at it almost like an optical image and um the reason that's interesting is because like if it's like basically people bringing guns individually and you can

scan in my entrances you're always coming into a few doors at a school you're not going in anywhere

anymore and the schools also have all procedures now for this like for this stuff you basically can do like offset scanning at you know five or ten whatever meters away you can scan people as are walking in possibly like just like as like you know just walking in don't need to stop anybody and you can basically scan you know most guns that are brought in schools are either in your pocket waistband or backpack it's like most of all guns are being brought in there and you can

basically find them and if you know that you can basically like stop it will find it will find

It done in a backpack yeah no shit yeah so uh it's it's amazing it'll find a ...

anywhere there is like you know yes it's there's print and a bag yes you can find them in backpack

β€œyou can find them in waistbands and pockets so the story is so I found this research report”

done by a few of these guys um you know uh that were at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab I write these two guys and they said you know sure we'd love to have you over I get over there and they're like they told me the whole backstory they're like listen we we developed a technology for standoff distance detection for the Iraq and Afghanistan War it was funded by the US government we were trying to for ten years and when the war stopped like funding dropped

to zero and we like we were done we didn't work on anymore and I'm like oh sucks and then I'm like okay we'll just keep me posted if you know if this thing ever works out then uh there it turns into like oh you want to go see it like what do you mean see it they're like it's in the basement it's done we did it and this isn't twenty seventeen twenty eighteen so this is like I was like oh yeah

β€œlet's walk down walk down in the basement just like it's tarp over this uh machine took a tarp off”

they had a guy with a manic like a manic in this and they're with a gun underneath a shirt like I don't know three or four meters away it turned this machine on it was built like 10 years ago I had like a computer tower inside of it and and then it had like a little screen next to it so

started this machine and they basically moved out of the screen and the screen showed like a

clear as day like a photo of the you can see the exact gun you could see it in 3D you could see in 2D you could see in power there's a bunch of other ways we can look at the data but it's just like crystal clear wow and I was like what what happened here like we basically got to the end of this program and we don't have any more funding so it's done and I basically made the decision you know long story short I ended chasing archer the time I went and built archer

β€œand at the time I only had like you know this was a big endeavor for me like going from software”

and like you know deep tech hardware so basically decided to put cover on hold and you know chase chase archer and then about two years ago somebody came to my office one of my investors and was like hey I'm like looking at like trying to solve school shootings I was just back from L.A.

and I'm like trying to solve it with CCTVs like the security cameras he's like the problem is

like you can't you won't know until the gun goes off and you won't like branch of gun you won't pull the gun up until you're like trying to like shoot it so it's just like way too late and told the story about how I went down this path in here and he kind of like looked me done in the eyes he's like I have kids and you have kids like you you have a fiduciary duty to go build this and it was right when my daughter was also applying first grade and we were

worried about it at schools you know what I mean just looking at like the fan simply and just like kind of anybody can go in you know what it means so like how's like shit you know I gotta go do this I ended up spinning the technology out of Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech and I own it and sort of cover two years ago the OG team that built it is with is with me now no way we put a office in Pasadena that's the main office is in right next to JPL and we've been working on this now for two

years I've been self-funding the whole thing and we will have we have a prototype already works last year and we'll have a full-scale prototype out like I hope by summer like in our lab and then we hopefully if I was well by any year we're beta testing in school wow and we'll put in that figure campus first even wow this is an a this is like an optical play I can you see it this is an AI play saying can you detect it now um there's 130 thousand kth12 schools in the US there's like

60 or 80 million kth12 students it's a it's huge and but it's not just schools it's stadiums and

airports every bar cost also it's malls and even you can move it theaters I'm gonna ask baby year ago just like anybody can walk in the hospital it's just like just doesn't matter don't check yeah it's just like scary and so anyway um we're we're getting close here and um the technologies we designed are incredible actually we designed all of it like we designed the whole system that I saw we designed the whole system I saw seven years ago last year but it was just too expensive

the systems we were using were like certain parts on it were like fifty sixty thousand dollars so we moved all of that into it into a chip and we spent last year and a half doing that work those chips are in our office now and working those chips are like seven dollars instead of fifty thousand dollars yeah there's only a few groups in the world that could make them in design them we co-design and we worked on the design with them made um fabricatum and we have them now in our office they

work we didn't like a lot you know we used many different we used like a lot of chips but they're like

Really cheap and um that's important so we like you know kth12s will have lik...

and we need to be able to get the cost down to make it affordable for every school that's what I was

gonna ask I mean how are you gonna get this in school a lot of a lot of schools won't do it won't even hire a security guard yeah there are um there are big budgets both at the federal minutes below level like hunt like a lot of money to put that that are going into school like schools are getting uh subsidized for it I put in a lot of stuff good they're putting in uh CCTVs like cameras they're putting in uh like ballistic chalkboards all kinds of stuff in the

β€œschools uh there's a lot of cash there uh the schools also spend a decent up per student and I think”

we I think we get the cost down a reasonable amount per student that that both public and private schools kind of forward um but it's a rat we're like rat like we we could have already had

our systems beta testing in some schools by now if we didn't pivot a year and a half year ago

we've been last year trying to like 90% decrease like decrease the bill materials like the cost it's just like that's needed to go big it make this really work well it's almost over the Stoia, also the school flashback, just over the rat and then it's often that it's stymed. Paul, no, gar nicht, like Stoia is so my safe space. Hmm, do you mean that's all it's not? Yeah, genau, like Stoia is so the Stoia app

that they just understand, egalabstudium, job or unzug. Stymed, krass, feels like gar nicht, like Steuernan, Stoia an LED. Save? With like Stoia. From the developer, they look like Anzeigum Anzeig. That's nice, and there's a lot to it. Stop, ross, that's the recruiting spiral. With Steuernan all jobs, they all come to Anzeigum for a year

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β€œI think we'll, are you going to put anything else into it?”

You know, like here's an example. When I think of this, it would there be a way to maybe facial recognition. Yeah, you always enrolled here who's not. Just for example, like the shooter that happened up at Nashville a couple of years ago, the Covenant School. Yeah. Went to school there, but not at the time. Yeah. You know, and so if they would had some type of facial recognition on top of what you had, that's, that's, yeah. This person doesn't

go here. This person has a gun. This. Yep. 100%. We'll have cameras. I mean, even some audio like mics. Like cameras will be really huge. Like you can really do a lot with just RGB cameras. And understand what's really going on. You also get a lot of semantic understanding because guns are like they're hitting somewhere. They're concealed. People are not walking in with like handguns and shotguns like into school. They're like they're in, like in a waistband

and a pocket backpack. We can be really thoughtful about if somebody, you know, clearly doesn't have anything like anything in their pockets when they're walking in, but they have a backpack. We can be thoughtful about like we probably need to scan a backpack. So, and maybe we need to just been more time like getting higher frame rate on this area. And then, as you mentioned, like a lot of understanding about like, does this person belong here or not? Is this like,

is this a weird time for somebody to be like leaving and walking back into the school? So, there's just a lot of semantic grounding we can put in the models to really help like understand if there's threats or not. The schools are set up really well to do like random locker checks now and like, okay, this doesn't look okay or not. Like the schools are really well equipped for that. Just like we don't know what's happening. We actually think now that there's

probably like, like perhaps like tens of thousands of guns that are being brought into schools

β€œin the US across, you know, 130,000 schools every year. I think we're finding what we're finding”

now is a very, very small percentage of them are found that are brought in. And then from there, what we're also finding is actually a similar small percentage of actually being reported. Because if you report like a student that has a gun, they're going to, they're going to Juvie. So, we're also finding out we think a large percentage of guns are even found. And then of that, we think a large percentage are not even reported because like, you know,

I could like put, you know, in a man that could like wreck the skids life, which is, you know, unclear like what we should do here, you know, for that, that's terrible. But we think there's like, we think there's like maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of guns that are being brought in every year through the schools. Wow. We're finding reporting thousands and you're seeing hundreds of shootings. So our view is that we think it's actually happening,

you know, as a percentage is low, but as an absolute number, it's quite high. Yeah. So I'm excited about this. We, in some way, like, you know, I write this prediction every

End of every year for like what, you know, what happened in the spaces on man...

flying cars, robotics, like AI and weapon detection and stuff like that. And like I did a post

β€œin December, like here's what I think on these four areas and like overwhelmingly, like the most”

support I got, like, publicly was just for cover. It just like, um, I think I think it, you know, just, I think it hits in a really good way with a lot of folks, maybe, especially parents. So everybody's word. We're homeschooling. Yeah. Because of this shit. But it's a big reason why we're homeschooling. Yeah, I hear it. We're my wife and I want to think about where we're put our kids and stuff too, which is like something we talk about

every time too, and it's like, you know, and it's like, it's probably like a low occurrence, right? But if it did happen, it's just like, can't recover from that. I mean, it's just every school I go to. I'm like, man, like, you guys got it. Let's just happen down the road. I had a good buddy. Like, how does house breaking into? Is that family and stuff? There's like six months ago and he just told me, I was talking to him last. He's like,

the sense of security. We have now in our home. It's just like, we'll never get back. And I just,

like, I didn't know. I didn't know what that felt like. Like, feeling like we were secure before. We lost it now. And now we definitely see it in feelings. Like, we just never, we're never going to be able to get it back. Yeah. And I've had like, you know, I've had like some close people I know that have been involved around this stuff. And it's just like, it's terrible. And so, you know,

β€œmy agenda here is I think it can be prevented. I don't know if you're going to prevent all of them.”

I think you can prevent a lot of them. And then if, and then if you even have like, there's no real security there at all right now. But even if you have security, there's also like a sense of like, shit, I got to bring a gun in here now. There's like real sophisticated AI. It's in all these schools that can catch it. Yeah. I think it's another big thing. You have that like TSA, they're free-check. Yeah. It's a deterrent. So you have like that, but we can also find it. We can

see underneath through backpacks and stuff. It happens at specialized, like radio frequencies. It happens at like, you know, 200 to 300 gigahertz, then it happens to get at 600 gigahertz. And in between those bands, there's either FCC rules that prevent you from doing it. Or there's atmospheric attenuation. You need, sometimes there's enough moisture in the atmosphere at certain radio frequencies that like, the radio frequencies don't do well and perform well. They perform well

these certain radio frequencies for the imaging stuff we do. So they're actually quite a hard technical feat. I, one of the reasons I didn't do it and did archer is because I thought the cover stuff was actually harder than doing flying cars. And I actually think is still is, we still, like, it's hard to, it's like, it seems like pretty obvious, like it's like a way airports have it to 10 times higher. So it seems like, and you look at archer, like,

shit, man, that looks really complicated or like it figure. Cover is just like super niche area of folks that haven't, like, there's, like, the folks been in, like, in this space for like, they're doing, like, they're doing work in weather and space. They're not doing this for, like, shootings and, like, security and stuff. There's like, there's no industry for this. And luckily, we have, like, the world's best tear hurts experts at cover that are working

every day on this and they're really passionate. They're probably not getting paid enough and

β€œthey're just, like, super passionate about self in this problem. And so anyway, I think, um,”

I think the thru line for covers, I think it'll work. I think we'll be able to demonstrate it

hopefully by end of this year. Like, we'll be able to say, like, we'll have it at figure campus first.

And then we'll put it in, uh, in, like, schools, a COVID on the West Coast and maybe a, maybe one or two, and we'll see how it goes. There's, um, you know, there's a, how do we market this? Like, what do we tell the students? Like, teach, like, parents is like, you know, there's a lot of stuff here. We need to get right. But if it goes, like, goes well from there. And we're getting low false positives. Like, what we really want to do is make sure we don't freak the kids out.

We don't want to, you know, think it's a gun, but it's a crayon box. That'd be terrible. So, like, that's a really an AI problem. So, we basically want to make sure, like, uh, we have, like, low false positives around the whole system stack. And that's a really hard problem to solve, especially for us, where you can be, like, partially occluded on certain areas, uh, of the person or the weapon. And then we need, like, to know what we see. It's actually,

is it, is it, is it real or not? And so funny enough, if you come to our lab, we have, like, a just guns everywhere. And, um, they're all, they're all, they're all direct. You can't, like, they actually shoot them. But, um, but we, we, all, we all day, we try to figure out how to put guns on humans or mannequins. And we try to figure out how to detect them. So, how does it work? Is it, is it shooting frequency, and then, and then, it's like, detecting the response when it hits

something. Yeah. It's exactly what it's doing. It's like, um, it's basically shooting out a radio

frequency. It's like a electromagnetic, like, it's like a little wave, uh, format goes out, uh, that goes out. Uh, very similar to how your Wi-Fi works in your home, uh, or 5G. Same, like, same, uh, same type of concept. It should sound like a higher, like, different, different, like, uh, radio frequency level. But, think about your Wi-Fi, and, like, you want to, like, um, in order, like, 20X or so. Like, the radio frequency level, it's like operating a few

gigahertz, something like that. But, we operate it much higher frequencies, 300 gigahertz. Um,

You want to, like, whatever, call it 50, maybe it's 50, 100 times this.

basically, it shoots us out, uh, and this waveform comes back, and we, we review it. And we look

how long, uh, how long it took to come back. Um, and we use being forming a couple of other techniques to figure out, um, what happened. But you're basically, it's, it's, same as, like, traditional radar technology. Um, but we can shoot out, comes back. It's not an ionizing won't hurt you. Like, it's perfectly fine to be around your Wi-Fi. And we can basically get, uh, we can get both, um, a 2D image of what's happening in a 3D point cloud. The 3D point cloud

is what's really important. So, if you have, like, a weapon on you, like, in your, uh, pocket, for whatever, or say, like, I have one of them, like, my chest, for example, we will start getting back the, uh, the signals back from the top surface of the gun before we get your chest, it's chest, the back. And in the case of your chest, you have a lot of, like, water in your skin, and it'll, it'll somewhat at any weight in your chest. So then we'll get back an image

from this and we'll go, we can, we can structure it really fast. And we can reconstruct into, like, some of of a 3D dimensional point cloud that you do a camera. So you can give us a, like, almost, like, look, like, like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I showed you earlier today that the, the, the, the vision from this, it looks like a kind of a camera image is what you get back. And, um, so from there, you can kind of like visually see what's really happening. In the case of the gun, you can see

the gun, you can see the trigger in some cases. Yeah, and sometimes it might be just be like the handle or the, um, a side of the gun or different places of it, but you can see it through materials, like it could be backpacks, it could be clothing or jacket, um, but most guns are all in the waistband pockets or backpacks, which makes sense, right? You're not wearing it around your neck on

β€œa outside your shirt or, um, I think it's like this. So, uh, that's where, that's where, like, most weapons”

are inner-to-school. We've done a lot of, we have a, by one of the best data scientists in the world that is obsessed with school shooting, and he puts up the best school shooting in a Lodexie does it daily, he's on it for five years. He's, he's working with us through this, and we've done so much work on how people have, how students inner schools, how they exit emergency responses, what solutions are on campus now for this, uh, like, uh, where, what, what, what data, uh, we find

on, like, where guns are at, what type of guns and weapons are there? There's, um, I think it was like, 200 nice stabbies last year. 200, yeah, it's like, it's so high and so dangerous, like, we're trying to, like, we can to take nice, like, there's, um, you know, they pins, whatever, whatever, whatever, it's not a metallic thing, it's like, we can, it just doesn't matter what the object, it looks like, a different metallics will actually, like, um, uh, like, come back to the radar

system a little bit differently, so you can kind of maybe sometimes tell if it's like, like a gun, like a metallic signature knot coming from the material, but the technology's like really kind of straightforward in a sense of, like, it's a RF technology, like, right, if you're going to see technology, and you get back like an image. And we can use that image to, to build like a, a neural network to then look at it and say, like, what is this thing? What time of day is it? Who is this

human? Like, is this a dangerous threat or not? And we need to do a really good job of making sure we're accurate in those readings or not. Uh, for not, we're going to cause havoc, and we're

for right a lot of times, we could basically start saving lives. And that's, I mean, there's,

there's an on average of one shooting every, every single day, and they, like, more than that, like, is, you know, there's over 300 or more, so shootings roughly a year, if you look back less, a couple of years. So, like, every single day, I mean, there's less school days in a year than 300, 65, but, like, roughly every day is a school shooting in the US. Um, that's just that K through 12, not colleges, but that's about, that's, I look at the 130,000 K through 12 schools in the

β€œUS. I can't, would you need to take this would be out in a couple of years? Yeah, I think we'll get”

out a couple of years. We have a teamwork in day and night on this. We'll, you know, we'll probably, I'll probably increase funding into it this year, significantly, and we'll, uh, we'll take a bigger push and head count, uh, yeah. But like, right now, well, like, right now, all things are on, like,

can we get the first full system in a really stable spot that works? And, um, we've had to

do a lot to increase the field of view because, like, schools are, you know, several meters wide, multiple doors, sometimes double doors that get in, like we need to scan all of that all the way through. So, it's like a natural aperture that students are walking into, which is good. You're not walking inside of a building, you know, through a brick wall. You have to walk into a door entrance. And we're trying, um, yeah, basically we're trying to, uh, get that fully complete this year.

Man, that is solid work. Real solid work. Let's talk about arc. Let's do it. All right. Okay. So, I mean, I think my, I think my pitch here is like, I've been, I've been working on

β€œlike one of the hardest, I think, I think, I think humanoid, AI is like one of the hardest AI”

technologies in the planet. And just like an incredibly difficult problem that I've been, my team and I have been working through day and night for the last four years. So it's like, okay, we want to go like build like a crazy sci-fi future with like flying cars, AI humanoids, and then on my other half of my life, I'm like using like an AI chatbot. You know, like a frontier lab, like Jim and I are a touchy BT. And it's so stupid. It doesn't know me at all. It doesn't remember

Anything I'm saying.

internet, like really poorly. Can't even order me a sandwich if I need to wonder right now. And like, it doesn't feel very futuristic. It felt futuristic three years ago, but now anymore, it's just like, it's just not very good. It feels like I'm like in incognito window searching Google.

β€œThat's all I can do. Does it have access to my counts? Does it know any of this stuff?”

Meanwhile, I think like for me, like, I was just been sitting here for three years, singing like, we're going to get like Jarvis out of this from Iron Man. We're going to get something crazy out of AI. It's going to move to a point where it can like listen and speak. Now, actually, a human, it can see the world. It can do, it can use tools, like a browser and terminal. It can do real work for you and help you out. It'll know you really well. I know Sean,

I don't know everything you're ever doing, all your stuff and be really personal to you. We don't have anything like that now. I got like a stupid chatbot that doesn't remember the last thing I said to it. And so I decided to like, I said to like, there's two things here that are extremely broken. One on the AI side, we have like extreme, we have like a lot of gaps to get to like, like extremely personalized AI intelligence. There's a lot of, there's a lot

of like missed opportunity now, lots like a few years, and a lot of like, a lot of gaps there.

And the second thing is we're like interacting with these AI systems to like old pre AI computers.

If you're pre-nip your phone or your Mac or your computer, it's like they're all designed like 20 years ago. They're like the, it's like an really old interface. The chatbot's an old interface. It's the wrong interface to AI. You're not going to get the Jarvis with those. So we have to go rebuild all the hardware from scratch. Holy shit. Yeah. And I don't see anybody, I've been waiting, I've been sitting here for like a year

and a half, be like, somebody's going to do this really well, and I can't wait for it.

β€œAnd nobody's doing it. And I look at Apple, they're just like, what are they doing?”

Like, I, so I started a new lab last summer called Hark, and it's an AI lab, and we're going to basically design what comes after the iPhone for AI. And we're going to design new models that are extremely multimodal that can solve this. No shit. Yeah. And we have like the world, some of the, I think some of the world's best AI folks of all time. And we have, we have like, we have the lead designer from the iPhone, Aberdeur on the team. I mean, design iPhone 15, 16, 17.

So this is going to blind to be in a device. Is it going to be in a device? A family of devices. Yeah. And this will go really far. It'll replace your phone and computer.

You'll, you'll have like native AI systems that are always on, always thinking, always understanding,

always there to help, like doing stuff in the background, like, we'll have near perfect memory. We'll know everything about your life and what you're, what you like and don't like. And be able to even like act as a coach and say, like, hey, you said you do this over 90 days and you're not doing this over here. It'll just like, it'll just, it'll hold you accountable, hold you accountable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have, we've been, we have hardware in our lab, we have,

we're going to have models now, like stuff is crazy cool. And we're, yeah, we're going to,

β€œI think we'll probably come out of stealth by time this thing airs here between you and me. Holy. And”

we're, I'm self-funding it right now. You're still funding this one too. Yeah. I'm so fun right now. And yeah, the team's great, man. We're, I think, yeah, I think it's, I think it's going to be a massive opportunity. And I see the frontier labs heading in a really great place for the them, but a very different place than what we're headed. Yeah. What do you most excited about?

I just want to like wake up to like, I always like think about, I just want to wake up to a

world that's like that I'm like excited and inspired. I just like, um, you know, I love the stuff. I kind of retired like 10 years, 12 years ago, 15 years ago. So like, I think, um, I just want to work on cool crazy shit. And I'm just excited for a world of flying cars and human robots and helping prevent school shootings and Jarvis. I mean, how do you, how do you, how do

You keep it all together?

is just to not sleep and always work. Oh, I've got good at that. You know what I mean? You get me. Like,

β€œjust that's, that's how you do it. Super simple. Um, no, I mean, like listen, I, uh, I mean, to be honest,”

like, I've had to make some like tons of personal sacrifices. Like, you know, I think 10 years ago, I would have like a part of my life that would like be dedicated like golf trips and, you know, doing the annual like college trip with like my friends and stuff. Like, I don't do that anymore. I spend, I have like my family and I have my companies and that's all I do. And um, and I really, I do like a few podcasts a year or not a mod. I'm excited to come here because like, I'd love

or show and get the story out to you. You're great at it. And um, so I, you know, I just like

protect my time and just like, I go all in on these things. Like my, my, my kids and I my work kids,

you know what I mean? Like, and so like, uh, which are like, you know, these are my like, like, they're like, kind of like babies. Like I go, you know, make them, you know, constant care and attention. So I have like this family and I need to like, uh, I go all in on it. And I do everything else, less good. You know, I mean, I'm like a shitty college friend. If you like, you know, I mean, if I had seen you a little while, like just like not going to spend the half a day

with you on Saturday if you're in town. I haven't seen you in 10 years. So it's just unfortunate. I wish, but like, you know, I care about these things more. I care about doing this stuff really well. And I'm really happy at it. Uh, you know, I'm happy with family and happy with like, things are going to work. And you know, to be frank, I just, I, I was born and raised on a farm, man. And I get to do like work on this cool shit every day. And, um, and, you know, I, I got billions

behind it, make like going for it. Great teams that work like their assets off. Like teams that are, you know, here, it came with. And, uh, it's great. And I like, um, fired up to come every day and work to try to make this thing happen. And I hope these things all work. It's just, but like, uh,

I don't know, these are also hard businesses. So it's pretty incredible. I mean, a farm boy from

a town of 700 people now, right, building that thing, right, flying cars, keeping kids safe and hark. I mean, yeah. So it's, uh, Barrack and Dream is still very much alive. And well, you know, that's fucking cool to see. It's cool. I feel just internally grateful to, uh, had a shot to do this. I feel like, you know, young entrepreneur, Brett 20 years ago had been like, no fucking way you get a shot to go into this stuff. You know, it's, and it's great. I just, um, yeah, I just,

well, I'm taking, uh, I'm, I'm probably at, I feel like peak career and my, my team with me is like peak team, peak resources. This stuff I'm working on, I feel like is very important for the world, which is also great. I didn't, you know, doing better is like, there's a part of me saying, like, okay, is this like the, the thing I want to spend my whole life doing. And, uh, I had that here, which is great. These are like the things I want to spend all my time on for the next, like,

20, 30, 40 years. Um, so it's good. I'm just like, uh, I just don't want to, don't want to screw it up now, you know? Oh, yeah, it can work. We're doing a pretty damn good job,

β€œI think. All right, we're wrapping up the interview. I got a hot question to ask you. You ready?”

Let's do it. For decades, movies taught us to fear robots becoming self-aware and turning on people. But in the real world, we still don't have public evidence of conscious machines. What we do have are real cases of robots, harming people from Robert Williams being killed by a Ford industrial robot 1979 to the viral 2025. Unitory H1 malfunction that showed how violently a humanoid system can lose control. Plus, longstanding research warnings that robots and homes can

create privacy and security vulnerabilities in ongoing global debate over autonomous weapons. So as the bigger threat, not conscious machines at all, but obedient machines that can still malfunction, be hacked, surveilled through remotely controlled or turned into tools of intimidation and assassination or state power. I don't know how that person gets up and goes to

β€œget goes outside every day if you're scared. So I think like, uh,”

the future is this future, it can be molded and morphed and like it's what we want to do with our time. If we want a future full of robotic systems that can help us out and free us of our times and things like this, we're going to wheel our way to make that happen. I'm a pretty like optimistic person. I feel that having millions and then millions of humanoid robots in the planet is just going to be such an magical and important thing for the world. Um, oh, we're going to have

like, you know, bumps along the way, like, for sure. Uh, are they going to, you know, hurt somebody

At some point?

like, the, the, the, the, the spirit here for humanity to get this, to get this done. Uh, I think

β€œis here and I think it's going to be one of the most important technologies of our lifetime. Like,”

I think in some way, this AI stuff of like, we're, we're generating AI systems that can be embodied and can use computers. Like, it's going to be like one of the most transformative technologies we've ever been through. Like, we're building synthetic humans, that scale. And it's, it's, it's both scary, but also like very, um, I'm like very excited about that future. Um, so I think my view here is, um, yes, there's like a lot of, uh, like, really difficult things that could go wrong, that perhaps

could, maybe we'll go wrong. But I think, uh, we need this, uh, just like we need cars. And I think, uh, just like we need like, um, you know, uh, a lot of things in life. Um, airplanes and things, I think these are like important technologies that really move society foot, feet forward. Um, so anyway, I, uh, I happen to believe that this is like, extremely important, save lives and like, I think increased prosperity across like all of human civilization. And I think, uh,

I'm excited to be working on it, but I think there is a lot of truth to what, you know,

like I said, it's going to be a really hard road. Yeah. I mean, it's just a incredible advancement

that, and, you know, I know there's a lot of fear around AI. I have a lot of fear around AI. Well, we're going to go through a one way or another. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I do think things are going to be a lot better on the other side of that. You're not stopping it now. It's like the, the exact place. Um, it's, it's, it's like, it's go time. It's going to happen for sure. Um, I think it's be fine. Like, I think, you know, I use AI every day. It's like, it's fine. It's like,

nothing, you know, like, it's a chatbot. Like, I think, yeah, if, if, like, there's like different paths to go down, uh, from here, that could be good or bad. Um, I think my bets on high probability of

really great. Um, as obviously, it always pathically like, uh, not go well, but like being conscious of

that. And like, basically doing everything possible to steer it in the right direction is like, what we, like, what we have to do at this point. Like, this is not like something we can turn off. You know, turn off the internet. Yeah. You're going to stop people from trying to build like systems that make us more productive. And, yeah, do a work. I don't think that's, it's not happening. So like, um, all we can do is basically do it the right way. It has the best positive effect on the world.

Yeah, you know, another, another thing that comes to my mind is when we're talking about interacting with the humanoid. People, you know, and I've had this discussion on other podcasts too, but people are going to look at that for advice, you know, relationship advice. And I mean,

β€œI think there's a, you know, a lot of important things that are going to be talking to this thing”

to about advice, certain people. And I think that's a big fear of a lot of, a lot of folks to it's already happening with Chaci Bd and all these other clawed and all these other things anyways, but who are they getting for advice from before that problem? I mean, you know what I mean? It's, it's, I think it's the caliber of person. Yeah, I'm telling. But yeah, so he's been time with. Yeah, yeah. Last question. What advice do you have for future founders?

And a few things, I think, or I wish I could like maybe sit differently also like pass down like young Brett like 20 years ago. I think one is like, just go to start building. I feel like a lot of folks get too caught up in this thing that's like going to be hard in my network. And you can just like, it's just so easy to start a company these days. So many great tools

to go learn, I think there's never been a situation where I haven't like done something and then

learned a bunch and then have it reset from that feedback. So almost like, um, like little stairs on climbing over and over throughout time. And so if I just wouldn't have started and wouldn't have moved, like I wouldn't have learned this information. So it's like a lot of information coming in, recursively self-improvening and getting better over time. This could be simple things like hiring and doing accounting or running an engineering team or like trying to ship a product or getting feedback

from customers. Like, I'm just getting, I think I'm getting, it's like a, it's like a sports player.

β€œYou're getting better with more practice. And so I think the most important thing is just like just go.”

I also think, um, the thing I learned a lot in my lifetime is like what you work on is really a defining moment for like, for founders. And it could be founders of any, in any industry, tech, non-tech or whatever, you're generally going to go and just try to like have this like have

It's kid that needs a lot of attention.

this thing. And you got to keep like spending more time with it. And it needs a lot and it's like constantly working on the problems with it. So it's like not the fun things. You're working on all the hard things. It's like this problem funnel I have where we're working on a little hardest, most pernicious problems at the company. So you got to really love it. And it's not like you can be

β€œthere for a year or two. It's been for sometimes a little long time. You need to be in for a successful”

and even if you sell your company or whatever, go public, you're going to your stock locked up or your your investing out over a million periods of time. It's you're going to be in it for quite a while.

And I find that for me, the things I work on as like probably the most important things I could be

doing with my decision making. And that's happening at a micro level inside the company is what would ever come week to week, month to month. But it's happening at a macro level where like where do I spend my time? Like I'm 39 right now. Like where do I spend my time as 39 year old Brett? And where does like 20 year old Brett and 25 year old Brett spend my time as an entrepreneur? And I generally have this philosophy that harder things are easier. Like meaning there's like a non-linear

fact here for like starting companies that are like easier versus harder. Meaning starting something that could be like a hundred times higher outcome is generally not a hundred times harder. So like doing figures not a hundred times harder than doing another robot company. It's probably like three times harder, maybe five times harder. But the total responsible market and opportunities probably millions of times bigger than another robot that's like on a simply line moving back and forth.

β€œAnd so I think there's like this non-linear effect to like decision making here that is”

extremely important where harder things that have like larger outcomes are like usually easier to recruit the best talent in the world. That gives you a better lift to build a better product and a better team. That team and better product and maybe even a bigger industry because it's harder will give you like more capital coming out to you for disposal to be able to like make the right investments you need and to the right to equipment or people or personnel or whatever marketing

to basically make you more successful. And then you're generally worth like working inside of a bigger dressable markets like TAMS that you know potential choirs or public markets or other folks that really want to see and have like basically a disproportionate outcome. They want to they want to high risk reward. They want to you know investors and things and even people they want to go in and like if it works they want like a hundred X or a thousand X. They don't want

like a two X. And generally for venture like 95% of people fail. So if it works you really want

β€œto you want to hit a grand slam. So I think my philosophy is like spin like choose wisely”

like a young brat spin choose wisely what you work on and you're not entrepreneurs and and then I would try to be as ambitious as possible. There's capital for that and there's there's humans for that that want to work at really crazy shit. We have them at my companies and they're they're incredible. You're met some of them today. They're just like you know my design lead and a bunch of their folks here that are unbelievable. I want to do their best in the role

of what they do. But they want to come here and they want to try to do something like they've

never been done before. They don't want to go off and design the next car or do the next AI product

everybody else is doing. They want to be here designing something revolutionary. So I think that's like somebody else dressed enough and like the last thing is like there's no rulebook for this which is like really unfair. And there's there's a lot of people out there that will teach like here's what to do and they're generally coming from folks that haven't haven't done it before and the signal of noise out there is just so high or so low. Like I mean you get a lot of noise

out of like in the market it's very noisy about like what to do and what what successful means for building a team or hiring engineers or like uh excuse you know product it's very difficult. And very few people in the world know how to do it really well consistently and so I found over time it's been really hard for me to get the right advice and um so I think it's been a lonely path and for folks out there that are on that path it's lonely but I believe in you. You can do it

and I think that's um I've never had somebody for 20 years I could call and just like wish that I

do in this in a situation I never have had it and I wish I had uh there's no book there's nobody to call yeah and I think that makes it really hard but um but it's possible you can just like go do these things and it works so for the folks out there that really want it and it filters out like everybody who doesn't really want it and you can tell the folks out want it if I talk to people I say well this is hard that's hard I'm like you just don't want it you shouldn't be doing this you're

gonna get completely wiped out you are and it's like it's the great filter it's the folks out you know you with your butts like it's the great filter it's 95% of everybody will fail and you'll devote your life into it and time and maybe all your money and your brand and you'll be embarrassed and you'll fail most will fail and it's uh it's only for the folks that will like I will like you know

I will do whatever it takes to go make sure I make this happen there is no fa...

folks that do well here and you can bend the world and you can basically can mold the the future

to how you kind of want to if you try hard enough and the the gold the gold in the day is just the

β€œnot die if you don't quit you won't die so like uh anyway I think um I think it's uh listen”

been playing it's not for 20 years still playing it I feel like I'm in the early onions of my career now I want to go ship at scale these systems I haven't done that yet we're like in any we're bread

β€œany one wow and so like uh but for everybody out there it's in there I just think it's um I believe”

in you here you can do it it's great advice man cool we'll bread fascinating interview love everything

you're doing man like incredible stuff huge advancements Sean I'm a huge fan of you and just

β€œeverything you do so I mean having me here and I mean going through all this it's just uh it's been”

great uh thanks for having me thank you it's been a honor great cheers yeah no matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from if you get anything out of this at all anything please like comment and subscribe in most importantly share this everywhere you possibly can and if you're feeling extra generous that the apple podcast and Spotify and leave us a review I'm Teresa and my experience and all entrepreneurs started a choppy fight at full price

I want to talk about the first day and the platform makes me no problem I have a lot of problems but the platform is not

a step from I have the feeling that choppy fight is a platform can only be optimized everything is super simple, integrated and balanced and the time and the money that I can no longer invest in other I'm going to invest in the box. Now the cost is low test on choppy fight.de.

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