If you had to describe yourself, what would you say you are?
I just want to go build important things and win.
That's it. We're live with Brad Adcock.
I wanted to start off with something crisp.
You told me this story, and this is something that's fascinating about you, which is about your ability to learn.
So I think I don't want to butcher the story, but you said something like, I was reading old, I think research papers.
And you found that I think in the 70s, NASA came up with this amazing thing.
And you cold-called or cold-emaled NASA.
And you're like, can you actually show me this device?
Is that story right? Yeah, it's pretty close.
It's like the first time I've talked about this publicly.
So sorry for maybe from like, for context, I have been kind of following what's happening.
K through 12 schools in the US is the school shootings.
And if you look at the charts of how many shootings are actually happening to the schools, how many deaths are happening in schools, it's basically you have a school shooting, like basically once per day now in the US in K through 12.
That's true. Is that true?
That's insane. It's worth like, I think it was like 200 over 200 people last year, were like either shot or wounded or killed in the US at K through 12.
And the third of those are all in elementary.
And the chart, if you look like a line graph of the chart, it's just like exponential.
It's, we like 5x in 2018, kind of almost a year over year.
And then we like took another 3x moves.
We basically 10x the number of school shootings over the last like seven years or so decade.
And it's just getting worse and worse.
What I found is that most of all the school shootings are not what we're seeing on TV, where there's like an over assault, where somebody's bringing in like a machine gun, planted out, driving a truck into campus and shooting people out.
That's, that's, that's, that's, that happens a few times a year.
Ninety, 99, 98% of all other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day.
The school, they're getting a fight at some point to escalate the new shooting.
So they're just like, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a accessory.
It's like, like bringing a third man, they have a handgun in their back back.
And but from our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K through 12 every year in the, in the US and not found.
And then a small fraction of those that we see now in the statistics are, are basically getting in like bullied or getting a fight and they're shooting somebody on school campus.
All right, my friends, we're going to do a quick meditation break.
Take a deep breath in. Ffff.
Now slowly exhale. Ffff.
You feel that calm feeling in your body right now?
That's how I feel when I use HubSpot.
They're all on one customer platform takes all the chaos out of business and replaces it with one powerful platform for all of your teams.
Generate better leads for marketing, close more deals for sales, earn more five star reviews for service and take the chaos out of your life.
So don't hold your breath any longer.
Visit HubSpot.com. All right, the breathing session is over back to the chaos.
So one of my hobbies, I love reading like research papers and papers in general.
And the way I think you solve this is you need to be able to see the guns.
I think gun control is something I'm interested in and passionate about, but I think it's not going to fix all school shootings forever.
There was like last year's 70 nice stabbings in KT 12 schools.
So like, you know, even if you halted guns, there's still like nice stabbings happening here.
So we need to see the weapons.
So I was reading, I came across a research paper from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab where they were doing work, where they were trying to detect bomb vests and weapons underneath like garments and clothes and jackets for like Afghanistan and Iraq.
And they developed some really interesting like weapons imaging technology.
And I flew to JPL like NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.
And I was talking to the guy that ran it.
Did you just call, call the email or something?
Oh, yeah. Cold call them for sure.
Yeah. And what did you say?
Oh, I said, hey, I need to, I need to learn more about this.
I read your paper. Can we have a conversation?
You know, most people in general will get on a phone with you at this point.
Like, if you're passionate about some work they did for years and years that they're no longer doing, like somebody's going to take a phone call.
I think most people could not come at door and get that person to react.
Yeah, I don't think that's a hard thing to do.
I called them and I flew in.
And the high level was that they developed a high-frequency radar.
So similar like your Wi-Fi or phone.
Like, it's like, it lies in electromagnetic spectrum.
So like radio waves basically that were really high frequency.
So like, think about like your phone or Wi-Fi, but like really souped up to a much higher frequency level.
And they were able to start penetrating clothing and start like imaging, our building, our reconstructing images of what's happening inside of bags.
I mean, it's clothing and stuff.
And if you like read the research papers, you look at it.
It's like, it's like a AirPore security.
You can do it 50 meters away and you can do it like a camera.
And you can take like almost like camera frame rate images, which means you could just like point this at an interest of the school in this example.
And you can see every gun and knife and bomb.
And it doesn't need to be metallic.
It doesn't need metal. It could be plastic.
It could be any material.
Is it radio waves? It's radio waves.
Is that dangerous? If you have ionized, uh, electromagnetic waves, uh, like you would see like X-ray, yes, these are not ionizing rays, uh, like almost like your cell phone and Wi-Fi.
So these are not. Yeah. I mean, listen, we worked on it for like, for like years and years.
And I think at the end of the day was like 2013 or so.
So it was like, when I got there, I was like, we were talking and chatting.
And didn't even think to ask to see the machine.
And at the end of the conversation, you just like, you want to come see it.
And I'm like, of course, and we like walked down like four flights of stairs to the basement.
And he, uh, you know, takes the cover off.
It's dusty. It's like a huge like compact computer at the bottom and all this old stuff.
Like all electronics and all the systems and stuff are like very dated.
He turns it on and demos for me.
Uh, he, we have like a man who came with a gun underneath the shirt.
And he shows me it was like, it was unbelievable.
It was like, it was like, it was like a camera picture of the gun.
But then we also had like, you also with radio frequency, we get to, we get a 3D reconstruction.
So you're almost like a camera point cloud of the product.
Was this before you were going to do figure it where you're like, this is like my number one or number two or number three idea or something like that?
This was a wild go. And I've been mostly curious about the space.
And then what happened from like 2018 to now, we've seen like a 5X spike in the number of school shootings.
So like the charter school shootings is like looking like a, like a video stock price.
Well, we talk about an MFM.
We talk about one chart businesses where you like, you see some crazy chart and you're like, oh, well, there's like an opportunity.
And it's like, well, if you just, there's a tidal wave, if you just sort of catch that wave and you aren't even that good, like the market's like pulling it out of you, like everyone just wants this thing.
Yeah. So that was like your one, your kind of one chart, whereas like, oh, this is obvious.
So many came in to figure at one point in 2023.
It was an investor and he was looking at solutions for school shootings, like just coincidentally.
And they were basically at the time looking at a startup that was using like CC TVs, like basically the cameras that are as a school to find guns.
The problem is like all the guns are hidden.
So when you, like, brandish a weapon or pull it out and wave it around, you're at a point where like a second later you're shooting it.
So you can't stop the shootings.
You can just get more prepared about how to get there faster.
Maybe get to the right location.
Maybe stop, like, save some lives if the shooting lasts for a long period of time.
You're not like, you're not stopping weapons from getting in school.
You're not theoretically even stopping real shootings.
So I was telling him about my experience here.
And the guy like looked me dead in the face.
And he's like, listen, as somebody has kids, like, how are you not like trying this and seeing if you can make this really work?
And yeah, so at that time, I said, I got to figure out how to spend some time and money making this useful.
And so is that what you're going to do?
You're launching this as a startup.
Are you going to have someone else run it?
What are you going to do?
Yeah, so we haven't announced this yet.
But like it is, we have about 12 people on the project.
And we own all the initial property from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, licensed all of it.
And we will have our first system brought up to start imaging weapons in 30 days.
Are you going to run it? Who's going to run it?
We have a team from JPL that's running this system running there right now.
I don't think that business can be as big as figure, but I feel like that's a monster business.
Let's talk about this for a minute.
This is not a school thing.
This is stadiums, churches, anywhere.
It's like a lot of like hospitals, everything.
So my view of this is over a long enough period of time as longevity improves for humans.
The the the the severity to have an accident and dying is going to be higher and higher.
We need we're not going to want to do more riskier things as we live longer.
It's why in the movies, if somebody's immortal, they're like living in their home.
It'll leave because if you die, you're dead forever.
And if you don't die, you're like a life forever.
Right now we have like some finite period of time where we will we won't be alive anymore.
So humans take a lot of risks.
We drive cars that are extremely dangerous and motorcycles.
We do motorcycles. We do all this stupid stuff that has pretty high risk.
If you were to live forever, like you wouldn't be doing that stuff.
I would say over a long enough period of time, I don't think you'll really move through the world without imaging systems like this for safety.
You're really good at telling a story.
So you did this before when I hung out with you about humanoids and robots.
And you just like, you tell these stories that are so grand.
I just get bought into it.
And I'm like, well, that makes perfect sense.
But you do it at a much larger scale.
So you went with like the longevity angle, which is like, well, we're going to live much.
That's just such like a challenging way to think for a lot of people, myself included.
And it's just such an ease.
Like when I hear that pitch, I think, yeah, of course, that makes wonderful sense.
And it makes me, it makes me think, going big and having these grand visions is almost easier than not, than not, than doing the alternative of something smaller.
Do you know what I mean? It's 100% easier.
You could hire better people because they're more ambitious and they're interested in working out harder things.
They're generally larger, we could be larger outcomes.
We're talking about like, you know, building like new industries that maybe never haven't been built before with huge tams.
Investors want like very high risk reward trades where they can make, you know, 50, 100 times of their money, you know, most investments from BC's fails.
So they really need like the 100-bagger in their portfolio.
Big grand things offer that risk reward opportunity for investors.
Yeah, I have a philosophy.
I think harder things are easier.
And I think it really depends what industry and what market you're going to, but relatively speaking, I think there's some truth in that.
Yeah, because veterinary was, you sold veterinary for $100 million.
That's a big outcome. That's a big outcome for virtually everyone.
They're like, that's a life-changing thing.
But it doesn't have an inspirational angle to it, necessarily.
I mean, no, I think like, listen, I'll start a spending time with loved ones where it worked most of our lives as humans.
Most people, we are. Most people don't like where they work.
If you've ever looked for a job, it's like the worst process.
At least I have a bad like bad products.
Looking for a job is embarrassing.
It's like soul crushing.
So what we're trying to do at a veterinary is like, if we can get all the world's employers together with all the candidates in the world, we can use AI to make matches at scale and find the best opportunity for you with machine learning.
And if you can solve that, you could put people in much better places for employment, much happier places.
Like they can find jobs that really love.
Yeah, I mean, you just, I would have pitched it as a sick job board.
And you just totally like make it to be some really inspirational thing.
But that even as good as you are at pitching that, that pales in comparison to I think, like when you pitch this X-ray machine, whatever you're going to call it.
And so it's cool to see like this evolution, though, even though you're actually quite good at pitching something like veterinary.
And I again, buy into it.
What's the name of this thing going to be?
Yeah, the name is cover, COVER.
And what's your philosophy on names?
I think names. I mean, I think people, I think I have a certain philosophy towards it.
But I think I really like names that are at the very basic level are really easy to say and spell and pronounce.
And I think most company names like Biley, one of those first three rules.
Most names are just like too hard to spell and remember and pronounce in my mind.
And yeah, I really want something that over time we can build like a real iconic brand in the space.
And that just takes a lot of time, I would say there too.
But this, the brand, you know, around the name and the way you think about the, you know, the icon, the font.
Everything for me is like this like almost like when you build a house, you think a really good foundation and pour a lot of concrete.
It's that concrete, it's that foundation.
And you do it in the early days, hopefully you do it right.
You know, I've definitely done it wrong before, I've done name changes before.
And, you know, these names are all unique to my perspective of how I want my businesses to look and feel like whatever better your archer and figuring cover.
But like I think, yeah, we just, I just spend a decent amount of time taking through that in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand.
Are you adamant on a certain URL or domain name because cover.com is, it looks like an insurance company.
I assume that's a huge insurance company.
I don't know. But based off of the fact that they have that URL, I imagine they're quite large.
Do you care about the domain?
We own cover.ai and I own like obviously cover, our sort of figure.ai.
And I bought archer.com a month before going public.
So not really. So it was like flyarcher.com for a while.
That was like, you know, $9 and then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying archer.com, you know, a year later, two years later.
We bought figure.ai for 100 grand.
And then we bought cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars.
So I would own the.coms or.ai's in these cases.
It's possible. I know you don't care about money, but when you are pitching to investors, when you're thinking about how big cover is going to be, what's your pitch?
We're not pitching investors now.
I'm just funny. It's more like a passion project to be honest.
The pitches are going to be really unique because if we end up doing using capital outside, I don't know.
There might be a path where we never risk capital here.
There also path where the technology is very difficult.
So hopefully we can make it work.
The biggest market is not in school.
Schools is like the worst market to go into.
It's just a bad pitch. The schools have very low budgets.
They don't have systems like this exactly at the schools right now.
Sure, the severity of the size of the shootings, but the money-making opportunities relatively small, comparatively stadiums and concerts and hospitals and areas have big budgets.
Most big stadiums you go through now.
You go through some metal detector and stuff.
TSA pre-check the Homeland Security.
There's real security applications for this.
Outside of schools, I could pay a lot more.
The schools is like the worst pitch for fundraising.
For me, I don't give a shit.
I really want to solve the K-12 school problem.
I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for that.
We're going straight to schools to help solve.
I want to see if I can help prevent school shootings over time.
That's the only reason I'm working on this.
Funding this project, I'm trying to work on it.
If I had to bet, you're sort of like me where you have a document where you just jot down interesting ideas.
You probably aren't ever going to get to them.
Maybe you would. If you had an additional 24 hours in your day, some more time in your week, what would you be spending it on?
What ideas interest you?
A few things. There's areas like genetics.
I'm interested in a bit.
When I have time, I'm doing a lot of research.
I think there's areas of electric supersonic that are really interesting.
I'm really interested in supersonic travel.
I'm really interested in electric.
There's areas of my experience at building e-vitaire aircraft that I'm pretty excited about.
I have a couple ideas about how to design an aircraft that could work through these very divergent parts of the mission.
Very high altitudes and high speeds.
I really like the industry of synthetic foods.
There's been a lot of controversy recently.
Is a synthetic meat is that impossible?
Or is that the people who are literally growing a cow, they're growing meat that you can eat?
It's not, then, possible.
Those are all plant-based.
You're basically taking...
These are cultured cells.
You're growing real meats in a lab.
Why does that interest you?
Does that interest you?
Because you're an animal lover.
Does it interest you? Because cows create a lot of pollution.
Where does the interest come from?
It seems super unnecessary to raise animals and butcher them and eat them.
It just seems super... For many reasons.
If you could choose to eat a steak, and it was just as good as the steak you have today, and it is real-stake, real mussel tissue and fats.
And it wasn't come from a cow.
And it came from a lab, but it had all the same...
Same... Same chemical properties.
What would you say? Well, I think that I'm a little bit an early adopter on weird things.
And I would say, that sounds awesome.
I'm in. You understand how that's weird for your average person.
Dude, do you remember when we were kids?
Do you remember when Green Catch Up came out?
I remember eating Green Catch Up.
And I was like, I know this is the exact same thing, but for some reason it looks different.
I don't even want to touch it.
Yeah, but TV and radio and lights and electricity.
Those were all weird for folks at some point.
Those were all just like...
Yeah, it takes time. Cars were weird, right?
Everybody's like, why would you have a car and you have a horse?
All of these are just really radical in the moment.
Yeah. But if we think about the civilization, a thousand years from now.
We've been around for thousands of years.
If you like, 10,000 more years, and we're on Mars and the Moon, you're going to be having cows and bubbles on Mars.
And then butchering that.
I'm a room for that. Like, it just seems unrealistic.
I don't think you understand how unique some of the things you think are.
And I like to think that because of where I'm from, which oddly you are too, but I don't know if you like totally grasp it.
The way that you think is quite unique and a little bit larger than the average person.
And so, yeah, what you're saying makes sense.
But there's just a lot of emotional baggage that comes with that to overcome.
But I do agree with you. I think that that interest you, or that interest me as well.
And I would do it. If you had to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in one word, what would you say you are?
What word best describes your philosophy?
I don't know. I don't really reflect like that too often.
I just want to go build important things and win.
That's it. What percentage of your philosophy is based on winning versus the excitement of making stuff?
All of it's winning. I don't want to do something exciting in a lab that does it have the ability to have commercial applications and build a big business that has implications for the masses.
Like that's just, I'm not a research scientist.
Like I don't have passion for that.
I like thinking about how we've evolved as species, the last, even like several hundred years.
And how technology has been probably the biggest lever arm for our consciousness and understanding of the world.
And the only way to really do that is on a mass level, like, you know, like tristidine a lab that wasn't brought to all civilization is marginally helpful, marginally.
But the orders of magnitudes and improvements we've had and you may have come from like releasing that to the world as like an even big witness utility.
And for me, winning is the most important thing here because, you know, let's call it like we have a certain finite time to say I'm like to do this kind of stuff.
At some point, it will be just too old or incapable of doing it.
And it's on to the next generation.
So I think we have a certain amount of time to go wait and go do things useful with our time because I use just devastating to spend like 20, 30 years working on something that doesn't work.
It's like, that's the worst case scenario for an entrepreneur as you're devoting all your time away from friends and family or whatever you could be spending time on as an opportunity cost into this business.
Like, if it doesn't win, it's just like a terrible story.
Yeah, I think that when new, when I talk to people who are just starting stuff, it's often what I'll say is like, the biggest issue is that you spend 10 years on this and it's just a mediocre thing.
It's better just to, for just suck right away.
I agree. I actually do like a lot of these calls sometimes with like early entrepreneurs that are just getting going.
And I'm like so intense about like the idea and the direction and the wise.
And they're just like, yeah, yeah.
I like, whatever, how do we hire like the first engineer in here?
I need to raise a safe note.
Like, how do I do that? I was just like, dude, like if I had a reverse time, I would spend like a month on these questions.
And then like most early guys just don't want it, like don't want to hear it.
They don't want to get moving and get go build.
And I think, you know, we've talked about this here and I lost them as on MFM, like I kind of fell into veterinary and I kind of like I really built archer and figure with a lot of purpose and intense.
It's the one thing I would pass down to like the newer generation that's coming up building stuff.
Like, like we have a choice on what to go build.
What's your criteria that you tell them is your checklist for if something is worse my time?
Like you can't just get the one thing right.
Like you just can't get the idea right or the commercial plan right or the fundraising.
Like you can easily fundraise this because it's a hot topic and get that right.
I think it's like really about you have to build this, you know, I mean, you call it a business plan or something.
But like you have to come up with this idea of like how you're actually going to get this thing done and in the face of like 95% of all companies who go try to do this and start a plan failing.
And I would say it's not just about the idea and how you're going to execute it and how you're going to balance like moving fast and for slower and product quality.
And what you're going to build is feature sets first or later and who are going to be your first clients the enterprise or they like SMBs and how are you going to actually get distribution?
Is it, you know, is it organically?
Is it through social? Is it outbound or end-down sales?
Like I think he's like putting that whole thing together and having a good clear direction of where the ship's sailing is most important.
I have like a little chart.
I always draw people of like North, South, East, and West.
Like you want to go north, you want to get this cone going north right you want to be in this direction.
You're not going to be straight dead north.
But you want to be like not heading south for too long or you'll die.
And those are a factor of like all those kind of like, you know, curious as I talked about earlier which is like just commercialization plan.
I'm going to make money.
I got a fund, I got a fund to the business whether it's like organically or you're going to raise capital and team you're going to bring on the culture you go build and execution of the product.
Like all those have to be like very thoughtful and driven in the right direction.
And you know, we have this a figure right?
Like we're going to BMW.
We're going to these industrial settings.
But we want to be in the home.
Like if we could be in the home today, like Pong robots, we would do that.
We are using the commercialization and industrialization industry as a way to get us ready and more prepared for putting a robot in every home in the world.
Which is a common way of going about it.
You know, you think, I think Tesla did this where they started more expensive, even though he was like, you know, I would like it to be the model T where everyone could have one.
But I'm just going to start with high end because that won't give us more profits to fund more stuff.
Sure. But why then why has like Fisker failed twice in a row while Tesla has just been dominating?
What's the answer? What's your answer for that?
They didn't get the product in some of the other stuff right.
Same way Tesla did. They didn't get speed right in the product quality and the way they introduced in the world.
I all doubt was it balanced well enough?
And the companies I'll fail twice in a row.
All right. Look, the question that Sean and I get asked constantly is what skillset did we develop early on in our careers that kind of changed our business career?
And that's an easy answer.
It's copywriting. We've talked about copywriting and how it's changed our life constantly on this podcast.
And we give a ton of tips, a ton of techniques, a ton of frameworks and throughout all the podcasts.
Well, we decided to aggregate all of that into one simple document.
So you can read all of it.
You can see how we've learned copywriting.
But you can see the resources that we turn to on a daily basis.
You can see the frameworks and techniques we use.
It's in a simple document.
You can check it out in the link below.
All right. Now back to the show.
You're on 60 minutes the other day.
And on 60 minutes, I think you had like a plate and an apple and a banana like sitting in front of the robot.
And you said like, hey, hand me the apple or hand me the orange or something like that.
And it did a good job where it like reached and it found the right fruit.
And I think it made a mistake once or twice.
But then it like corrected itself.
And you're like, hey, that's the wrong one.
And it was like, oh, I'm sorry.
And it like picked up the right one.
What's crazy to me is that you're two years old.
The company's two years old.
I've seen that you've been able to do this so quickly.
And I think when I talk to someone, they go, everything's late with tech and and and hardware.
But somehow Brett hasn't been late.
Figure has been lightning fast.
What have you guys done to be so fast?
So when I started figure in also Archer, I did this in Archer 2.
I started the company before was even incorporated with this idea of like how to move extremely fast.
So like listen, it's like it's like a whole company was built just for speed.
We have a company mission statement.
We're just like, we want to go this direction as a company.
Then everything else as we like built out the org chart and thought about how we're going to do that.
The values that we think about hiring people for, or hiring people for, how we think about compensation, how we think about how do we build schedules?
How do we plan for schedules?
Like we don't have, we're 120 engineers here.
We have zero program managers.
Zero. And we have a certain philosophy around like what to do and how to build hardware and software that, or I think we're kind of the anti-silicon valley company and Silicon Valley as relates to this.
We really care about getting things brought up quicker and iterating faster and doing that over a very long period of time, like decades.
And building a company that can do that is extremely hard.
Like there's really no good precedent, maybe outside of like Tesla and SpaceX, that have done this well at scale.
Like Tesla has, you know, well over 100,000 people, like, arguably tens of thousands of, you know, product design engineers, and they're moving at a speeds of a small startup.
And generally when you're adding headcount, the companies are all slowing down.
It's almost every company slowing down with more headcount.
You're just going to be slower over time.
You don't notice that you don't care.
The board is like giving you indication that you should slow down to be safer and everything's just slowing to a halt and the limit.
So you have to basically fight this.
And you have to, like the best way you can fight it is like design the whole word from the ground up to do this.
Or do what Elon did with Twitter and walk in at 5 or 80% of people and restructure it at the start at that point in time to go faster and ship product.
And it's too laborious here to say like, okay, we move fast.
Like what do we want thing?
It's like it's the whole company was built just to move fast.
But what are you asking your recruits, your potential or your job applicants to figure out if they do have that ability?
There is a lot of things happening here.
A lot of times people haven't been in that environment.
So when they get in there, when they're moving fast and a much quicker pace environment, it just becomes overwhelming and just too hard and too stressful to handle.
So if you were like a PhD student for 10 years where you know, sweatpants and like moving slow and you come in here, it's like a real culture shock coming to the figure.
And we've had it happen several times where people are just like, you know, they're coming in late, they're moving slow and just like it's frustrating for them.
Having to move much faster and it's like probably a lot of anxiety there.
There are other folks that believe the longer that you take to build something the safer it is and the better job you'll do at it.
So if you give me, you know, two years design a robot, that robot will be safer at that end of the two years and better design.
Like folks feel like that.
It's for sure wrong. People think that the longer you spend designing something the safer it'll be and the better it'll be.
It's for sure wrong. Because in that two-year period of time without one robot got out, I'm going to have my third gen robot out.
And I'll have all of run it like an order of magnitude longer.
I will have found all the problems 10 times sooner.
I will have had time to go fix it recursively and make it better.
It'll just be a worse product.
How do you measure and how do other people measure if someone's fast enough?
You look at how many iterations somebody is doing and how much progress they made between those iteration cycles.
And what are your expectations?
A car could be like how many car versions you've gotten out over the last decade and how much progress you've made between those.
A rocket could be similar.
A robot could be how many robot iterations are we doing?
What version of robot are we on?
iPhone could be, you know, how many versions of iPhone you've gotten out last 15 years?
How much progress do you maybe between each one of those?
That will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed that will ultimately be correlated at a high level to how much risk there is of failure in the business long term?
As we wrap up here, I want to ask something that I've been thinking about with you a lot.
So you've mentioned some type of genetically engineered food.
You've mentioned planes.
You've mentioned figure humanoids, these machines that detect guns.
You have like a pretty wide range of knowledge but unlike a lot of people who have a wide range of knowledge, I've been to your home.
I've seen like textbooks at your house on a variety of topics.
And you have a really unique way of learning.
You're basically like a human AI.
Do you have a framework for learning new things?
Learning stuff is always like really challenging for me.
I think like, I have to first, I think everything like a tree.
I have to first build this like trunk of like first order understanding about the topic before I can ever comprehend and remember the limbs and the leaves.
And so I have to have like a really fundamentally sound understanding of the tree trunk as I look at certain topics.
What do you turn to for that?
You just got to like, you know, find this stuff, whether it's Wikipedia papers, like Google searches, you can use GPT-4, like can you clearly communicate this topic, whether it's an engineering topic or not, to a 12 year old sitting on a bar stool?
And most people can't do that.
It's like the skill that most people can't do.
Like even people I work with, I have a hard time sometimes understanding what's the update on the, on the, on the, you know, this thing or that thing.
And it's a skill. Like you have to learn how to do that.
Same way of like understanding.
Something is a skill to really boil things down to really truly understand the basic characterization of what's really happening.
Some of the smartest people I know are also the most clear worded folks about about a topic.
That's a really good insight.
And it probably comes because you're an outsider that got into this stuff when you're older.
Uh, maybe or there's so many different multidisciplinary areas of like software and hardware and like electromagnetic and everything else that needs to be done here that you really need to be able to communicate clearly across several groups.
And it's important even here like we try not to use acronyms and a software purpose person that writes firmware and electromagnetic person that builds like a rotor stator for electric motor.
Like those, those folks don't understand those other disciplines.
Generally. So they need to communicate with each other as well.
And they can't be using inside baseball terms of electromagnetic work when like a firmware engineer hasn't spent any time on like, you know, stator and rotor design for electric rotor.
So like, I think this topic of be able to like communicate really well and understand things really well.
It's just like super important.
You have like a pretty strong outlook on life.
It seems like you you you have uh strong beliefs on what you want the outcome of your life to be.
How you want to spend your time.
Which uh people who you've read about has had the biggest influence on that uh philosophy or influenced you the most?
I think there's like there's been like really great entrepreneurs over time to show a path that this all can be done.
Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, these guys are the best of what they do have been able to show the world.
Like really incredible things can be done on the back of like persistence and focus.
And I think it's just like really incredible.
Like every time I watch like a SpaceX launch or holding Apple product in my hands, they'll have me that you know every company in the world has started out at some point.
So I think it's just um I don't know.
I think it's very energizing to think that you know somebody with with enough willpower can actually go out and do really incredible things for the world.
And I think that gives me energy every day.
I wake up and says you know eared up here figure we have like we haven't done really anything noteworthy today.
Over two years it's been interesting.
We have robots and stuff but people have built robots.
We need to go out now and like prove that we can actually ship really high quality product which is going to take us you know several more years from here.
But like that's just like a really exciting challenge for us now.
And it's really hard and everybody has just tempted that at least in human robotics commercially it's failed in history.
So but that should be doable and there are people that have gone over this hump in other industries of other very difficult things.
Maybe less difficult or more difficult here in history.
And that's just that should be very energizing for for us here at figure and other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things.
You're the man. I have this joke.
I'm like corn rows are cool but not for me.
And that's kind of how I feel about the way you think.
Where I'm like I don't know if I can do what you do.
But I am really excited and happy that people like you exist.
So thank you for doing everything you're doing.
I feel great after talking to you.
Yeah thanks for having me on.
All right that's the pot.
I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to.
