From Sci-Fi to Reality: The Rise of Humanoid Robotics w/ Brett Adcock | EP #57

Goldman Sachs predicts robots could generate 154 billion dollars in Revenue in the next 15 years that was their number that's impressive it's going to be a big deal we think there's an opportunity to put up to 10 billion humanoids on the planet oh my God that's amazing 10 billion humanoids on planet Earth you'll see humanoids and warehousing manufacturing factories yeah so the robot is up in it's working now it's working today call it over come on come on over we're really trying to build a humanoid to just insert into the economy and hopefully do really useful and good work for Humanity this is the right decade to make that happen and um I think over the next year or two we'll hopefully demonstrate that everybody Welcome to the moonshots podcast my next guest is Brett Adcock Brett is a Serial successful entrepreneur he was the founder and past CEO of Archer and Eve tall flying car company and since then he's been building an extraordinary humanoid robot company called Figure we're going to jump into the humanoid robot Marketplace how soon you can expect these robots expect there may be as many as billions more humanoid robots than humans on the planet in the next few decades we're going to see them can you buy them how much are they how are they going to impact your life and the world check it out with an extraordinary moonshot entrepreneur Brett Adcock let's dive into the episode everybody Welcome to moonshots and mindsets I'm here with Brett Adcock who is an extraordinary entrepreneur if you don't know his name you know his companies and you're gonna know his name real soon so Brett a pleasure to have you pal thanks for having me on yeah so first of all uh you know I don't want to go into in too much detail but I love that you took on one of the key challenges that we've talked about since the beginning of tech which is flying cars or EV tall select vertical takeoff or Landing uh you know I I love the old saying you know when Peter Thiel said we asked for flying cars and what we got were 140 characters well we've got Archer uh delivering Vehicles very shortly so congrats on that and when I heard that you were becoming the CEO of a new company called Figure and humanoid robotics I said hey that's the second option when people talk about we're living in the future flying cars and humanoid robots are the two sort of uh signposts that tell you we've arrived so uh full disclosure everybody my Venture fund both capital is an investor in Brett's newest company called Figure and let's jump in so what is figure let's begin there yeah football first thanks for having me on uh so figure is an AI robotics company designing an autonomous uh general purpose humanoid so a humanoid is um a robot that has some of the similar characteristics of a human we have two legs two arms hands and um our goal is over time to put as many humanoids as humans on the planet to make physical labor a choice I love that so if I were gonna ask your your moonshot since we're talking about moonshots and moonshot entrepreneurs and and you're a Serial moonshot entrepreneur here which is pretty cool a very few of those on the planet um how would you describe your moonshot your target yeah we hope I mean we look at the world today and feel like most of the world was designed for for humans um you know we have like in the physical world like a human operating system I'm going to leave this door that has a handle I'm gonna grab with my Haven hands we have tools shelves at a warehouse or designed for humans interact with so we feel that if there's a general purpose interface to this physical world it could be a substantial like or basically substantial benefit to humanity uh doing all this physical labor is happening in the world uh so we believe that over time we should be able to solve some of these really important problems in the labor force uh problems in you know doing work for companies helping out at home caring for the elderly and um and our goal over time would be is put we think there's an opportunity to put up up to 10 billion humanoids on the planet 10 billion humanoids on planet Earth so when do you let's let's go there for a second uh if you had to guess how many humanoid robots there will be on planet Earth by 2030 or 2040 what kind of growth we're going to see there I think over the next couple decades we're really going to be volume manufacturing limited and how much Supply we can get of humanoids into the market uh I think if we look out a very long term uh you know three to four or five decades I think every human's gonna want a humanoid and just like much like you have a car or phone I think there'll be one in every home I think there'll be billions in the labor market doing all the work that is dangerous monotonous and boring for humans to do today I believe over time we'll colonize space with humanoids we'll care for the elderly so I think certainly over the long enough period where we have time to volume manufacture uh I think there'll be billions of humanoids uh and then in the near term we're going to be constrained by how well the performance of the humanoids can be and how reliable they can be in the market and I think we're really working on that problem now in Earnest and with the goal hopefully with the next 24 months of demonstrating our robot into actual real use real real life applications I can't wait I want to uh there you go uh you know so many questions we'll get into it um you know in success as the cost of manufacturing these reduces and the volume increases you know do you have a vision of what the cost of a fully functional humanoid robot might get down to yeah I think I think you look back over time if any consumer product or vehicle the real um there's a really high correlation to price and Manufacturing volumes you really want to get up on the experience curve which is basically every doubling of manufacturing volumes your prices can fall or costs can fall by 20 30 percent so so price really is and in a lot of ways a real function of how much volume you really get out the door I think over the long term you look at this like first order of this like there's roughly a thousand Parts in our humanoid today um it's like electric car might have anywhere from like maybe 10 000 Parts be four or five thousand pounds we have a 150 pound humanoid with thousand parts um I think the cost of this should be less than like a cheaper electric vehicle in my mind um mostly dominated by the actuator basic motor and sensor costs and compute costs on the robot and it's so just to throw some numbers out there like if it costs 30k for a figure robot and if you were going to lease it versus buy it you can imagine having a you know a lease payment of 500 bucks a month for your robot and yeah that's amazing um you know and I imagine a future in which these robots are sort of sitting there on demand like go run these errands go do this go do that and it's um how I'm going to ask one time point and then we'll come back to it how long do you think before I can buy one and put one in my home I think obviously factory settings are going to be the first location but um is that is that this decade I certainly feel like as you said the first use cases will be in areas that are more constrained and lower veritability so factories manufacturing uh things that basically are um just much more structured in nature than the home that'll help us get cost down safety up um we have a whole AI data pipeline we need to go build out further manipulation and high level behaviors and perception policies but I I think we're probably end of decade early next decade before we start we're starting to see early life of humanoids in homes helping out and I think it's just going to take some time to uh we need a lot of maturity across the product that we're going to do through the corporate labor market safety as well you know I live here in Santa Monica and as I'm walking about on Main Street I'll see these little what they call Coco robots that are six wheeled robots that are rolling down delivering six packs of you know Diet Coke or or or burgers and you know at first they're an oddity as you see them um and people are taking photos and then you ignore them as they're walking by and it's going to be interesting to see humanoid robots sort of enter the live work play universe that we're in and they'll be like strange oddities and then just like I guess the Star Wars Universe where they're just every place of all different shapes and forms is that what you see it's funny you mentioned that because we have we have a lot we have a big presence of folks here from Boston Dynamics at the figure team and by the way are we looking in the back here so those you who are watching this on YouTube is that your factory floor back there yeah so we have um basically an office here in South San Francisco Bay um I'll give you a little quick tour sure um but we're about um 50 people or so and um yeah we're based here in South San Francisco so we have a facility I'm so excited to come visit yeah so um I'd be would be great to have you yeah so so uh yeah what I was mentioning before is uh we have a couple folks from Boston Dynamics here uh that have mentioned that you know wait till the robots walk around enough and stuff and it's not going to be as exciting because everything that happens now like you know the ankle rolls and we're just like oh we're watching it the robot just took first steps and started walking a few months ago and we're like the whole company is surrounding watching what's going on and um you know just it's such a it's such a spectacular thing to see robots in the office doing really useful things that um the novelty still surely hasn't worn off with me yet um but I think are you a dad do you have kids yeah so I have a I have a two and a five-year-old so it probably feels a little bit like that early stage of toddler Hood like look look what it just did amazing that is so fun I used to build robots when I was in MIT as uh uh and just having them not smash into the wall they were a little just roller they were supposed to map the room out in units of their own length and so forth but the electromagnetic noise would always hit the circuitry and they'd go whizzing off in some Direction it's come a long way you know the last few podcasts Brett that I've done have been in the field of AI and uh I know that you're developing your own AI there and I'd love to talk about that a little bit because I think one of the things that makes humanoid robots possible is the AI capabilities we have now but there's another part of the conversation I'd like to go into which is well that having a physical instantiation of AIS in a robot um I think is going to be an interesting part of ai's evolution all right um in AI That's in a box or just looking through a camera or speaker is very different than an AI it's able to actually go and interact with the world and there's a lot of individuals who feel like it's the embodiment of an AI that's going to make it ultimately sentient or conscious I don't know if that conversation takes place there at figure it all I believe like in the limit here we're going to make it we'll have the ability to make a hopefully a substantial impact into AGI I think there's this outstanding question that we're all debating now in 2023 is if there's enough words on the internet to train next word production language models to get us to you know like real like you know intelligence and if that answer ultimately turns into net you know we're not able to do it and I think the the longer but the surest path is through humanoid robots that can ingest human data online and then use Vision language models to do basically uh yeah to ultimately um interact with the environments and to be ultimate make progress to the AGI friends yeah I call it poking at the world and seeing what happens and learning through doing right there's a very famous uh uh and I don't know it well enough to do it justice when Helen Keller was learning language right it was through her um through her tactile sense through interaction with the world and her embodiment in the world that allowed her to um to become sentient in that sense otherwise she'd be living in a in a a a a a world of devoid of of uh of data into a large degree and so I I definitely I definitely see that um the word the name figure and I'm curious uh was the origin there you could have had a lot of different names of the company where did you choose that yeah so we um so I've been pretty thoughtful over my last like three companies starting veteri Archer and figured to really think about the the name the brand and um you know setting up even the basic stuff around the brand around the Mission Vision Values but um so we I basically spent the first nine months building the brand as well as a team in the product here so uh if funny enough when we started we were I was like I just told the lawyers like I put a placeholder in for the C Corp uh it ended up being uh called Adcock AI Inc they can maybe like you know 90 days later we'll change this so nobody will notice but it happened to be like hired like 40 people with like you know you're joining this AI Adcock AI which is really weird um but we spent a tremendous time on the name we really wanted something that was uh easy to say easy to pronounce very unique in the category somewhere we can build a lot of brand presence around and um there's something about the human figure that we really um uh like really aspire to and we thought this name was something we could really own a lot that had a lot of depth to it um so we ultimately you know we ultimately uh call the company figure um and um and so so far it's been great we've we've we came out of stealth in March and uh the feedback so far has been really good and uh you know a lot of the focus we have over the next like year or two now will be like product development Milestone Focus so hopefully what people see over the next like year or two would be a pretty substantial amount of uh product development on product for the humanoid robot so with AI systems like low-level controls um and ultimately showing the robot can actually do useful real world things so you know I'm gonna get into a little bit later your advice for entrepreneurs want to take big moon shots like you did in Archer and like you've done in figure because uh you know it means raising a bunch of money it means getting an extraordinary team and one of the things I commend you for uh is the team you pull together and figure it's you know when we ran through it it was like wow that's a rockstar team um and then it means being willing to run fast fail recover and and keep iterating and having enough Capital to do that so I'll come back to that a little bit and get your advice for entrepreneurs who want to do follow in your footsteps let's talk about the actual robot one second um I've got this the stats in front of me and I am curious uh you know its height is five foot six inches yeah okay well it's I'm about five four and a half so I can almost see eye to eye for it but it's like uh you didn't make it six foot or or six five or five foot is this like you know what's the average height and comfortable to you know humans don't find scary can still reach in the top shelf how do you think about the height yeah there's there's a very laborious process we went through to get to the height um because there's like two um like uh there's like kind of almost two Divergent things happening here one is um kind of from a physics perspective you really want the height probably smaller than five six you want um basically you really want the the amount of power the robust area to be as low as possible which means you want the lever arms or the externalities possible yeah if you don't want to like think about you don't want a huge arm holding a bunch of weight it means like there's so much more power needed uh given the length and distance there of that lever arm so you really want everything shorter and closer to the ground and also when you're false survivability is much better like little kids are so close to the ground but they fall they're fine um so I think um you know that's physics is pushing you one way and then separately the commercial Market which is like you know humans are going in and grabbing things and reaching over shelves and reaching up high and down low they really want like these um really long arms so you can reach across and grab the bin and turn it around and articulate it so from a commercial side they want like this Inspector Gadget type robot that can like you know reach really high and have superhuman strength here or there so it's really this balance we think five 6 is probably plus or minus a few inches of where we'll want to be commercially I think it was a pretty good A first order approximation on the robot and I think the the Next Generation robot that we're designing now that'll be out this year is the same almost the same exact height you know it's interesting because you don't want to make the arms extra long like a because it causes a a candy Valley type experience so you want you want these to actually look humanoid is that true I think there's you know if you look at The Uncanny Valley and the research around that like as you get really closer to human looks like there's almost like this trust that builds until this like until there's a point really close to a human look that uh gets really scary and terrifying um so our view is that we're not trying to look like a human we're not trying to put facial expressions in or chin or noses and ears we want to just ultimately have the human capabilities in terms of um you know manipulation and Locomotion capabilities and things like that because that's what's necessary to interact with the with the human operating system world that we talked about earlier meaning we don't have to change anything if we look like a human we can just go in and do all the warehouse work that nobody wants to do all the manufacturing work go to cook home and go cook at your home to do the things about any altering of the environment which is really really what humanoids are for right you're really trying to build a humanoid to just insert into the economy and hopefully do really useful and good work for Humanity yeah but you also don't want to make it look so strange right there's there's some comfort in in thinking that it's it looks like humans proportionally looks like humans it doesn't have like a third arm or extra long appendages and so forth um you know it's if we could without diving into it uh how many humanoid robot companies are out there everybody has heard of Optimus and hopefully now has heard about figure um what would you guess or like a dozen or a few decently funded yeah maybe like half a dozen like pretty serious maybe have funding have a team greater than five groups out there that we would like maybe put on our list I think of the vast majority of humanoid projects like last 10 years have been all researched in R D um so Boston Dynamics Atlas is still an r d project we have a lot of really great labs in the US at Caltech and uh Berkeley and other places that have like demonstrated some of these capabilities that are um you know under research and then commercially there's probably yeah maybe half a dozen groups out there we kind of look at as are you a commercial group are you walking do you have hands and the only groups that we know of that have those three qualities today uh are us and Tesla Optimus yeah I had um I run my abundance 360 uh CEO Summit and every year we highlight a different robotics company and we had Mark raybert here uh with Boston Dynamics and his robots a few years ago and then last year we had a robot called Amica from engineered Arts out of the UK and Amica is God appendages but it's some call it her special is facial expressions and movements extraordinarily humanoid right in a way that's eerie and amazing and Amica is driven by now gpt4 and obviously Atlas is is driven by its own systems and everyone's different you know I don't think what people realize is atlas as a robot is really heavy and and its hydraulic systems are really dangerous um and and you've taken a different approach here with figure right because the robot is a relatively uh reasonable weight and I think is less likely to injure somebody um and so five six what are the other parameters on it yeah so we're um our Target weight was 60 kilos and we weighed in at 61. nice 61 a little over 61 kilos which is great I've always been significantly overweight in every Hardware program I've ever been on um that doesn't work well with flying flying Hardware but this is yeah yeah we can talk about that at one point but like yeah talk about the the mass uh related engineering problems we had to solve at Archer to make that work we're so exciting yeah it was um so uh we have um uh we have uh we have a we have a we have a full charge uh full state of charge before charging Target of five hours so we want to be five hours on we want to be off uh fast charging close to 2C and back in operations again um we want to be able to do like kind of like fast walking we don't want to run but we don't want to be able to do a you know basically close to a couple meters a second in terms of uh walking speed what do humans do how fast are we as a walking speed yeah maybe like one and a half two so uh false pulse walking fast walking um yeah we have we have like no intention to do running or Sprints and things uh but we you know there might be times where we need to like you know walk a quarter of a mile down a warehouse and uh we want to do that in a fast way um and then we ultimately have some manipulation in uh basically speed and reliability and safety targets we also went ahead and internally um but for the for the most part we shouldn't be able to do the majority the hardware should be able to do the majority of what humans can do today will really be limited by software um in our ability to do you know where where it's at today and what it should be able to do long term is is basically just like a software we're software update away from being able to do that kind of stuff amazing and I love the idea that that your robots can be our software updated on a regular basis to increase their capabilities the same way your Tesla might be updated on a regular basis um you know I know uh Elon and Zucker are planning a wrestling match I'm just wondering why we're going to have the figure versus Optimus wrestling match as well but um yeah I mean listen we're like we're funny enough we're actually right across the street from like an unmarked Tesla like Tesla facility here in California and South Bay uh so yeah maybe if this doesn't work out this whole commercial humanoid thing we can just a pay-per-view yeah we can just figure out how to make money some other way yeah uh that's funny everybody I want to take a quick break from our episode tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day in fact I use it twice a day it's called seed Health now your microbiome and gut health are one of the most important and modifiable parts of your health plan your gut microbiome is connected to your brain health your cardiac health your metabolic health so the question is what are you doing to optimize your gut let me take a second to tell you what I'm doing every day I take two capsules of seeds daily symbiotic it's a two-in-one probiotic and Prebiotic formulation that supports Digestive Health gut health skin Health heart health and more it contains 24 clinically studied and scientifically backed probiotic strains are deliberate in a patented capsule that actually protects it from the stomach acid and ensures that 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power in like the whole Locomotion controller um yeah run the perception systems all the things we need for occupancy and stuff like that uh and it is there is an ability for us to uh basically like basically talk to the cloud uh for a certain amount of things in Market that are not like that are just much lower bandwidth and latency is not not as of issue so things like high level behaviors of like what should the robot be doing uh next things like that those those things can be done off board there's no reason we have to do that goes on board but for the most part we want to we want to be able to in like uh you know like 5G denied an environment to be able to do as much on board the robot as possible um the controller is running at such fast frequencies and stuff there's there's just a tremendous amount we have to do on board at very high speeds yeah I I imagine um I'd love to dive into the to the use cases but first the timeline so folks can start I mean I assume that there are going to be businesses built on top of your systems right people are going to just like I I know one of my friends Scott painters is is uh building a whole uh Tesla based uh service where you can rent you can buy and rent Teslas through him uh and there are lots of different other approaches from you know what's going on with Uber and electric cars and so forth but when are we going to see the first in commercial use what's your expected earliest delivery I think the earliest we would be able to have a humanoid in one of our clients that are getting we're getting paid for it and doing real work would be next year um so 24. I think yeah yeah 24 and I think if we missed that we're not going to miss it by five years we're going to miss about a year or two um but I think uh something as of now for the applications we'll be doing and the conversations we're having clients it certainly seems that next year would be the earliest but possible to be able to do are we going to start to see uh figure robots being demonstrated uh you know how to put this Mark rabert was putting out fun videos of uh of Atlas and its capabilities uh before we saw it in any kind of useful uh Commercial Business I'm still not sure what commercial business is other than sort of Defense approaches um that that really Hefty robots done uh but when are we going to see a functioning robot your best guess um on video or at you know maybe CES next January yeah so the robot is up in it's it's it's working now it's working today we're walking call it over come on come on over everybody yeah sorry like yeah um so we'll we'll be putting out we're going to try to I figure try to build in public as much as possible and keep the basically everybody abreast of what we're doing I think it's super important I think it'd be fun we want everybody to be Rudy for us as well uh I think we'll be putting out videos quite frequently every year and our plan is over the next you know two to three months here putting out the first walking videos of our humanoid uh here in our office uh and then down the road we want to do more things in perception and manipulation and other traditional uh operations but our goal is to be putting out videos to not doing the parkours and showing like the Pure Performance of like you know here's here's what's here's better than a human box jumper backflips we really want to do just like boring work yeah yeah let's give this robot in the warehouse just to do work over and over again and I think that'd be pretty groundbreaking we're so we're like we're shooting for that with our clients now it's like how do we you know get it to do work in our lab in as close of Representative of what our clients environment would look like so there's a high transferability next year into our client sites visual systems is it all uh camera visual or using lidar what kind of Imaging systems you're using on board yeah we're full full vision uh 100 Vision system perception system you're not going with any other augmentation so it's what a camera can see is is all you need yeah I see you've made the same decision made with autonomous cars it sounds like yeah we think it's all given the distances in yeah we we do not think lidar is necessary here um as of now we're like we're we're we don't have like a you know the same view as Tesla and like we're not uh we don't have like a don't look at lidar kind of policy we've we've evaluated it we've mapped our facility here we've used it for some localization uh we think it can be a helpful sensor but that's not what it's that's not really the right answer the right answer is like is this is it can you get there sufficiently without lidar uh you know have a lighter on board like complicates both the supply chain we have to fuse that data in we have to maintain it we have to fix it we have to procure it we have to pay for it it's a bomb cost like we have to maintain it so there's like a lot going on with every single thing that goes in the robot so we have a pretty high bar for adding things to the robot unless they're proven to be necessary or sufficient for the robot to do the operations I want to paint a picture of of how humanoid robots are going to enter Society with you um I've thought about this you've thought about it more uh just to give a couple of data points here right Goldman Sachs predicts robots could generate 154 billion dollars in Revenue in the next 15 years that was their number that's impressive and these are humanoid robots they're not the robots we're seeing in factories building cars and packing plants and so forth and I think the other thing when you and I were speaking early on when I first met you you know you made the point listen half of the global GDP is labor and that's your total addressable Market and that's amazing um uh do you do you find people telling you oh my God you're going to displace jobs and you're gonna cause you know A disruption like AI is causing A disruption um and do you remind them that we have so many unfilled jobs and the labor market is really becoming tough in different places yeah so if we if we look at like the like the how I think the business unfolds over the next like 10 or 20 years I think it looks um very similar to what you saw in self-driving cars where the easier stuff will be demonstrated first so like driving on the highway has been demonstrated to higher safety levels than driving in say San Francisco the city yeah and it's because in the city it's got a higher safety case it's higher it's like more veritability it's less structured it's probably like you know one or two orders of magnitude harder from an engineering perspective to do that reliably and safely than on a highway the same thing exists for humanoids there are applications in the world that are easy to do you're moving bins or boxes you know exactly what the bin is you know exactly the payloads you know where you're moving it to you're in a basically a space that you already can map and you already understand you can have communication with the manufacturing or Warehouse execution system it's a really like well-known or kind of highway driving equivalent and then there are things that are really much harder which are you know cooking somebody food in their home caring for the elderly those are like City Driving equivalent to self-driving cars um so my my strong View is that a lot of people have a misconception of humanoids because so many people have been working on the latter they've been working on this really hard consumer problem if you look at Google's robot with sorting trash it's very difficult uh Toyota racist institute's been working in the you know in grocery stores and things those are really hard problems and I'm glad people are working on him but for commercial groups we really need to do the easier stuff that's necessary first that we can start demonstrating and building AI data engine into the hardware stuff over time so we're almost like almost the opposite of what the research groups are looking at today so I have a strong bias that you'll see humanoids in warehousing manufacturing where the talent shortage is is the most acute and as you hit you know from the from macro perspective you know half the world is like GDP is labor we've had we're having this huge issue with labor population globally we have the Baby Boomers are retiring the amount of kids we've had has been in basically uh like like I've been been secular decline for like a lot of several yeah it's crazy people don't realize we're in a one of the greatest tragedies is not overpopulation it's going to be underpopulation it's going to be a big deal and um so you're seeing that so we walk into a client-side like say a big Fortune 100 company their first thing out of their mouth is like not you know how's this going to like be used with my employees things like that their first thing in their mouth is that last year we saw 140 annual turnover in a warehouse we uh we have nobody that wants to do these jobs they're dangerous they're hot in the summer they're cold in the winter uh the turnovers dangerous dull and dirty is the phraseology yeah just like uh nobody they can't find anybody that wants to do this and you know so we walk in there they're like if you can do these things we will buy your surface Handover fist now doing the humanoid thing is nobody's ever done it before so it's uh the hill to climb to do that successfully is is extremely challenging um and we happen to believe that it's this is the right decade to make that happen and um I think over the next year or two we'll hopefully demonstrate that here so I have to imagine that the large language models that are are feel like they're coming on just in time for the humanoid robot Marketplace so that I could speak to the robot and have it understand what I want and and clearly uh say yes I get it I'll go do that right now and have a conversation that's meaningful are you going to be building your own large language models or are you going to be incorporating other ones and when does that enter your uh your sort of your build process I think the way we're going to get humanoids say out of the factories and into people's homes like are working with humans is is is going to be through language as you mentioned so we think there's a substantial benefit our business has to using like basically large language models or Vision language models to basically help us understand like we need like a semantic understanding of the world and language can bring us that and large language models can bring us that so we will be building here over time Vision language models to really help from like a high level behaviors perspective of letting the humanoids understand what humans are saying and be able to talk to humans but also be able to infer and understand what they're saying and be able to react to it um and so uh we will most likely not be building our own language models but being able to train Vision language models on the robot system as always the sensor data that's coming off of there and to be able to do useful thing with those models is going to be something that we're going to have to do internally and are doing now internally it's going to be extremely important to build that AI data engine correctly so that data coming off the robot can be trained accurately and the neurologist can be trained correctly to deploy over time and that's what really drives our interest in getting to Market as fast as possible the more robots we can get into Market collecting data the you know the smarter our Fleet of robots will become in the future and the more applications the robot will learn how to do I mean people don't realize that these robots because their AIS are connected their data sets are connected when one robot learns how to do something uniquely or runs into unique situation it isn't that that one robot that learns it they all learn it and that's a beautiful a beautiful thing um it's like my kids right like once you learn how to do something they like they fail like a thousand times like a little like reinforcement learning policies and once they figure it out they'll they really don't forget it and then they just keep building on that so yeah once we train a robot on how to unload boxes from the palette successfully every robot in the fleet will know how to do that and once we train the robot on how to unload a truck successfully and to manipulate certain boxes that are damaged or whatever it looks like then every robot the fleet will understand that and so it's just like it's going to be a huge power curve that we're going to be able to um yeah uh it's gonna be a huge power curve for us in the future yeah so there's a huge advantage to get that get out into the real world and get those models uh learning um I I want to go back to the the founding of the company um so you had an incredibly successful exit uh early on um with uh with your your first company that was in the hiring space um uh veteri and then you start Archer uh really hard uh Challenge evitol and build it demonstrate the technology take the company public start getting orders and then you decide you're going to take your next moonshot I want you to take me back if you would Brett to uh you've retired out of Archer did you know what you wanted to do next at that time or did you start sort of looking around and saying what's the next challenge yeah I so I think you know when I left Archer was a really good time for me to kind of really reset and you know what did I really want to work on and I think and I still say I still say I said this kind of like off the cuff to somebody yesterday I said if you know if somebody came to me tomorrow wanted to purchase the business for five billion dollars I would say no um and you might think that's a little bit crazy but I think you know one of the greatest assets for an entrepreneur is like really loving what you're working on and be able to spend a significant amount of time on a really hard problem and build hopefully a really great business long term I can't think of a more important business for the world than humanoid robots at scale serving Mankind and helping out and I think it's a 1A a really hard problem be it happens to live inside the largest economy on the planet of human labor uh three we think the technology is necessary to do this or kind of exist today and have been demonstrated and much more of like Advanced research state and four I think in the limit I think we I hope we can make up some progress towards AGI here at figure so um so from a founding company perspective I looked at this and said that this is somewhere where I could probably spend the next 30 plus years of my life take me back a little bit more did you have this in the back of your mind while you were at Archer has this been something like from the childhood you saw Rosie the robot or you saw Lost in Space or and robots have always been a Fascination for you I mean autonomous cars and flying cars are robots of a type but when did you say you know I I know when I'm building my companies I have this moment in time or where I think something crystallizes that would be a next cool chapter to work on do you remember that moment growing up I was a I've always had been a huge sci-fi fan um so I've read all of Isaac asimov's books and kind of in my high school period I really realized that I wanted to spend basically the rest of my life building companies in a couple of areas that I really thought were important were robotics AI the internet and um yeah I think from a like I've I think for a long time I've always felt that robotics were extremely important to Industry they were really hard like there's a lot of entrepreneurs like tackling this problem it's no they're not so I'm not just like there never used to be a lot going in in building the space industry right there was just the government that did it or in this case you know GM made giant robots for building cars um do you come from a family of entrepreneurs what was it that gave you that entrepreneurial bug and was this like high school years college Years yeah so my fair I actually grew up on a third generation agriculture Farm in the middle of Illinois um yeah so it never really been an Insider uh my whole life um my parents yeah were entrepreneurs for many generations I remember growing up my parents were like hey you know at some point you want to control your own destiny you need to do it yourself and you need to go out and build stuff for the world that's really real way to impact and I think you know my Awakening was I thought technology was probably the greatest lever arm of my generation it's the area that I could spend a lot of time in and make the greatest impact um so I've been you know now building companies for 20 years I did you know 13 14 years of that in software and internet and last like you know six or seven years have been in Advanced Hardware and AI areas and do you know to be honest be able to to work on these things and I know you spending so much time in these areas like it's like what a blessing right it is hard problems and they're just so fun and we're like almost inventing the future and so we we are we're predicting the future by inventing it ourselves I want to quote you I love this quote uh I don't know if you remember saying it but you said we have the potential to alter the course of history and fundamentally improve millions of lives it's time to build I couldn't agree more right and like when I tell people uh when you're setting your massive Transformer to purpose and taking your moonshot like stop building another photo sharing app and go and do something that's a hard problem that is going to change the world and make the world a better place so thank you for that you know I'm super passionate about longevity and health span and how do you add 10 20 Health years onto your life one of the most underappreciated elements is the quality of your sleep and there's something that changed the quality of my sleep and this episode is brought to you by that product it's called Eight sleep if you're like me you probably didn't know that temperature plays a crucial role in the quality of your sleep those mornings when you wake up feeling like you barely slept yeah temperature is often the culprit traditional mattresses trap heat but your body needs to cool down during sleep and stay cool through the evening and then heat up in the morning enter the Pod cover by age sleep 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that and recruiting some of the best people and when I'm over whenever I'm looking at Investments through my Venture fund or co-investing as an individual I'm like okay how much are you putting into the deal and um until you you're putting a significant amount to the company and uh because you believe in it and you've built an amazing team uh what was how did it begin what was the first thing you did I mean this is this is sort of a one-on-one training for the entrepreneurs out there that want to take on a moonshot um and I don't know if you want to go back to the days of uh Archer beginning or figure beginning but what's your advice to entrepreneurs who want to take a shot at the gold ring here the first year a building companies is like one of the it's like one of the best experiences that I never want to do again you know it's like it's they're just so hard and I remember for like for nine months here I figure I was like living in this like really cramped wework phone booth in Palo Alto just like cold calling everybody in the space like talking to every human or robotics person anywhere in the world were you educating yourself or recruiting or both uh both like trying to get answers trying to understand trying to find the best people in the world trying to get referrals trying to find this you know offshoot small lab that nobody's ever heard of where I could understand actuators better or you know Locomotion controls better um trying to find the rare book here or there that could help educate me on you know whole body and burst Dynamics or NPC controllers or whatever it would look like um so I just spent an enormous amount of time same story at Archer for the first year when I started Archer I was in a room just making phone calls reading anything to get my hands on and trying to figure out how to how do I get this built I think as a early founder the most important thing is to show that you have a product or even a minimally viable product in the making that's like what we're all here to ship product or services like that's it and so the most important thing you could be doing is getting to that point in a lot of places a lot of companies that could be like you know raising Capital hiring some people in my case for both archery figure was putting my money where my mouth was so I put millions in both companies the first year and I went deep into bringing a team together and also deep into under like getting myself up to speed on how this works so at Archer I basically moved back down temporarily to University of Florida where I started undergrad engineering uh I partnered with the Aerospace and mechanical engineering Lab at Archer at University of Florida that lab that was building drones the time was off of Archer Road so I called the business Archer Aviation okay and I basically built uh you know 4 000 square foot Archer Aviation evtel Lab at the University of Florida which is still there today and I basically built three four generations of electric aircraft down there uh with a small team of phds um and that was that really helped me understand the technology understand certification decisions we had to make decisions Peter unlike do we put a pilot in the aircraft or make it autonomous uh these are like you know business decisions that affected timelines and certification all this um and um so yeah the early first year at Archer was really me uh you know self-funding getting the initial team set stood up and then also building Small Engine like basically subscale versions of what we have now which you know we we have I built now six thousand pound five passenger EBT aircraft and uh you know that's like you know four years before that we were building 20-foot aircraft that were uh kind of more hobby grade than what we have now um yeah so um and then you know maybe uh fast forward a figure I spent a large percentage of my time understanding the Technologies uh basically designing out an architect team with the first generation robot would look like and then building the team up um and I did that self-funding the whole way so I basically the felt like I didn't have to answer anybody and I could just move at lightning speed uh this is really quick you know how you describe this is exactly you know I've known Elon for 23 years from the early days of SpaceX and it it sounds exactly like his early days at SpaceX where it was like find the textbook read the chapter learn the stuff interview people begin building and then one of the other things I think that's interesting early in the early days of a startup is understanding um the highest value trades and what the limiting parameters are right um to help you decide uh you know what so for a figure what have been the limiting parameters that drove you to make one decision over another it has it been battery life material weights uh AI yeah so we spent a considerable amount of time understanding the requirements or very like uh we have a very strong axiomatic design process here I have a virtual Philosophy for it um and then we do a lot of like what you call a trade settings like basically like what are the right decisions we need to make I would say at the highest level the battery and actuator side as are very mature like we need we have enough energy and power density out of the actuators and the batteries to do what we need to do and uh with humanoids I think The Locomotion controls of like balancing and walking robots are really mature for folks that know what they're doing um and uh I think a lot of the bigger trades came down to the availability of either software or Hardware off the shelf that we could purchase to make this work I think the the limitations in actuators middleware operating systems batteries Control software uh some of some cases of perception that were that I thought would be easier to procure off the shelf and put into a robot we're really not the case I think I got most of that stuff wrong I think there are no good actuator Solutions on the market they're really not any good battery Solutions there's no good control Solutions there's no good middleware operating system Solutions sensors there's some off-the-shelf cot sensors that are fine and then almost all the electronics for the Next Generation robot we're building ourselves and that that's not because we want to it's because we're being forced too so so that's a fascinating so is it fair to say you were a little bit naive getting in and then you discovered the realities the difficulties and had to solve them because you were already heading in that direction I think if I knew how hard Archer was and how figure it was uh you know who knows if an entrepreneur would have started those businesses you know uh like they're certainly extremely hard um yeah I would say definitely did not understand the maturity of the supply chain there I don't think a lot of people really understood that though too I think um a lot of Robotics startups think that Hardware is just like easy to procure and it's really a software issue it's it's really not the case you really in order for good software to work you really need good hardware and good Hardware is like I think harder to find the good software uh the hardware of the space is especially for Evita aircraft and I think you never figure the hardware is is really hard and I think a lot of folks think that the hardware is there and it's just an AI software game and I think that could be it could be further for the truth yeah I I've heard this so many times for entrepreneurs I know it's been true for myself where you know everything looks Rosy from a distance and uh you think all of those Solutions are there you have to Cobble them together and it'll work but you find out no there's a ton of work to be done but you've spent so much time and money already you can't turn back and you've got to just solve them and you have to work you know when you're going through hell keep going as the old saying um so that is fascinating and then I just did a uh a podcast with Palmer lucky do you know Palmer their creator of oculus yeah and he's building uh Andrew you know 10 billion dollar defense company which is amazing and you might look at all of the hardware you know I I laughingly call him you know the real Tony Stark and it's amazing what he's been building there um but they're a 60 software 40 Hardware but you from the outside they look just like a hardware company but they've had to build both together what ratio do you see internally now we're probably a little bit bigger overall in all software if we include controls middleware and autonomy then we are Hardware um our Hardware teams Miffy 15 or so um so yeah definitely software would be a little bit bigger software will definitely be as the biggest part of the company Long Term uh in the lenovating figures in AI business so we'll have a large autonomy team and uh there's a there's a very significant AI data engine that we need to build here long term but the hardware stuff can't be overlooked like if you really want to play in human race today you're going to need to develop your own actuators Electronics battery uh and then almost all the software there's really not a cots or commercial off-the-shelf solution for uh this if you want to play in the if you want to do it a high performance High reliability High safety and low cost there's there's no other way uh to say it I mean we have a term here which is like the only way out is through yeah and we use that a lot because like you know in Hardware it's like death by a Thousand Cuts it's like bringing up the robot it's just like problem after problem after problem and it's like things look good and there's like Mountain more problems and uh yeah it's just it's brutal I mean being a soft being in software for so long and then get into Hardware Hardware is just Hardware is just hard it's uh it takes a long time to get stuff it's a long iteration Cycles it's it's really the attack time of iteration cycles that kill you here yeah yeah no it's uh I like to joke it's overnight success after 11 years of hard work yeah totally yeah uh so let's let's allow people to live in the future a little bit here um uh we're going to see these robots there is a ton of capital going in um and uh you know I put my bet on figure and I'm excited and hopefully uh will massively be successful but there are a few other companies as well uh I think obviously as you've said going into the uh labor space of uh warehouses and um in environments that are dull dangerous and dirty so if you were gonna be I'm not holding you to this um and hopefully willing to tell me but like what kind of robot production rate uh uh are you hoping to achieve in the next few years and uh will they all be going into warehouse settings uh packing unpacking Trucking Logistics is that the first sort of Circle of capabilities you're circling up yeah we're really fitting most of our time now on like Logistics fulfillment and um we spent a decent amount of time now at the larger car uh oems in the world interesting what do you do for them there's just tremendous amount of people at these facilities we just went to a facility a large OEM that you would know in the U.S uh last week they had you know close to 10 000 people on site there were I mean a lot of stuff that we could do to help them out they were there having a lot of problems and uh not fighting enough people a lot of these were dangerous they were working next to other machines uh they're doing like tons of spot welding so you can like smell the fumes um you know so yeah there's like there's different things of um it's a large fulfillment in logistics areas of these facilities because they need to do just-in-time inventory they need to have this facility we saw you know had you know roughly you know four to five million parts that were touched by humans every day in one facility um or one location at the facility yeah it's a lot so I think about the amount of fulfillment you have to do a lot of touches or human touches that need to happen there uh so it was a fulfillment areas there's also a lot of overall just like sheet metal being moved around right like a lot of sheet metal being moved uh different machines those are being spot welded and that being repeated over and over again at hundreds of stations and they've got to deal with I mean are they operating 24 7 or are they operating eight hours a day no they're operating almost like 21 22 hours a day two 10 hour shifts yeah so I mean the robots can in fact work you know lights out meaning they don't they can operate on 24 7 bases there's no drug testing there's no vacations there's no you know insurance I mean it's it in one sense for the type of job if there's a good product Market fit they're the ideal uh laborers in that regard um going back to the production rate do you see hundreds of figures being produced in the next few years what do you hope to get up to by the 2030 time frame yeah we think about the businesses like we need certain stages of maturity to unlock like the next like kind of almost like next phase I think the big stage we're in now is can we show a robot humanoid robot can be useful in a client scenario and in a real way like can it hit the performance can it be safe can it be reliable is it going down all the time and you need tons of human interventions that's not helping anything so it needs to make Roi sense uh and it needs to be safe and reliable uh ultimately if we can prove that then even in these very um specific class of problems like of moving boxes and bins we think there's an ability to ship tens of millions of humanoids but there's I would say it would take us decades to do that like it took would it take Tesla and Ford like a little over a decade for each company to put a million cars in the road so if you want to put a million robots into the world like it takes you know no sooner than five years maybe no uh no longer than 10 or 12 years to do that um you know based on historical precedent now I think the manufacturing processes for this will be very different and I would say less complex uh there's roughly maybe 10 000 Parts in a model 3 car we have about a thousand in our robot here and it's a lot like you know like as we mentioned earlier a lot less weight and mass so I think we can manufacture at pretty high volumes as we released later in the decade but the next like two or three or four years Peter is going to be figuring out can we make a a useful humanoid sure and I think it's we really got to get there yeah and a very confidence uh knowing you and the team that you that you've built that you will get there I imagine the same way that AI is going to code AI I assume that you're going to use robots to help build robots too there's got to be some feedback cycle there yeah we we I left this big Auto Group last week and I was like we are gonna for anything a human is involved with in the in the manufacturing process which is substantial like the facility we saw had you know giant robotic arms everywhere hundreds of them and it was about as an automated place I've ever been in my whole life and then there was like another 10 000 humans at the facility so I think you know we we want to have um only humanoid we wanted to design a manufacturing process where only humanoids are building humanoids I love that um a uh Von Neumann machine that it's best um so what's what's next You Hit Logistics you hit warehouses you hit uh delivery services what do you imagine the next big Market would be we'll start to see these humanoid robots I think you're going to scale into the commercial labor market for well over a decade before you even try to touch some other things uh in there we have like healthcare areas real estate areas construction um there's other areas of uh like retail that we look at I think are extremely large markets and then there's all these other markets that don't exist Chef or humanoid robots or human like that we could basically go into like yeah I think uh you know like what why do the major Tech real estate brokerage like real estate places like Silo stuff not uh you know have any human Brokers on their platform is because their multiples get killed um I think it'd be pretty cool I think it'd be pretty cool going to a website booking a house visit and then and then having the humanoid greet You by unlocking the door and uh in a stage house and basically selling that whole house digitally it's a it's a trillion dollar market it's nothing that the tech guys want to touch because it's just so manual today but there are just many Industries like that that can be be done through teleoperation or other things that could that'll be born out of this technology one of the markets I look forward to um that is so desperately needed is supporting our our aging population right when you've got a mother or father and rather than you know one of the things that's terrible is when you take your aging parent out of their home and put them into an old age home right there's a very uh rapid fall off there they disoriented they don't have feel comfortable they don't have privacy but there is a vision where these robots are taking fantastic care of of uh of humans as they age um what's the what's the breakthroughs that are going to be required to enable that to happen yeah so this this is an area that's pretty close to my heart my family's actually involved in independent and assisted living facilities beautiful um yeah one of the hardest things you mentioned is like nobody really wants to leave their home for you know their personal home they've been in for decades for for one of these facilities it's just a really tough process and we're having you know like like we're basically having this uh huge amount of people getting to like leadership retirement and you know being able to do app at home care would be like a very substantial life benefit to let people age in place at home um you know this is really just the maturity of the technology itself to be able to make this the reliability and the safety and the costs get to a point where we can do these things um on the whole like the robot from a hardware perspective will be able to do like almost all this work that would be what would be needing somebody's home uh there will be a maturity here of trust of the product and some of these other aspects I mentioned that'll be important for us to mature in the commercial market so maturing these with these big corporate groups that have this big labor areas making the robot more intelligent more dexterous higher reliability and then ultimately doing higher volume manufacturing to get costs down will be important to enter this like elderly uh area to let people age in place so I think of this very similar to the consumer conversation we had earlier it's going to happen like a decade from now it's going to be very substantial Maybe even a bigger business some in some ways than you know the consumer side of things but it's just going to be the second chapter in the book with the first chapter being the commercial Market yeah I I I believe that when you get into the home and you get into the elderly do you imagine that future uh so you're the first robot's called figure01 yes um uh so are you gonna just keep the generations Figaro too and like iPhone 3 and iPhone 27. we made room to go to 99. yeah that's good okay I got that much so as you get to figure five six seven uh do you imagine there may be uh a humanoid um facial personality that you add for comfort and because I mean there is a value in having a robot who's got uh facial emotional Expressions that you can feel they connect with you and so forth and I think as the AI becomes uh as we head towards AGI that ability to recognize the person you're serving their emotional uh situation and to convey emotional response um thoughts on that there should be no reason why we we couldn't do that like we our head today has basically has full wrap screen in the front that can convey information like what the robot is doing maybe a prompt things like that uh and then we have sensors we have uh basically camera sensors and other things in the head so there shouldn't be no reason we can't display the right information back to the end user to make them feel comfortable uh whether we're a caretaker or we're actually doing work on site at a big corporate Fortune 500 um so uh certainly today language and natural language processing is good enough to basically have a conversational understanding with a robot uh getting that like you know the the visuals in a place where it's comforting is certainly possible um we haven't spent a lot of time on it just given how early we are in the business but I don't see any reason why we can't um give the consumer that experience hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don't watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world's Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of you use you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demandus.com backslash blog and learn more now back to the episode I'm gonna hit on my third favorite market and use case so actually I ask you what your favorite third market so we've talked about the industrial Logistics uh you know manufacturing and we talked about health care as another as a broad brush what's your third next big Market that you're excited about and I'll show you mine yeah I mean I would love to have to really help on the consumer household side and caring for that elderly I think that's such an important business long term I think everybody will have a humanoid as like an assistant to do things and I think another one that really doesn't get a lot of attention is I think planets will be colonized by humanoids ah now you're hitting the one I was going to say space exploration I'm just yeah just like so excited about we're in this like such a great time for space exploration and um it's been enabled by this infrastructure that's being put in place for basically launches uh and rocket launches and I think um yeah I think humanoids will be a really great tool for Humanity to help colonize and set up colonization facilities uh in places like the moon and Mars and when I land there I want the Pina Coladas ready I want you know the bed preheated I want all the resources dug out I don't have to do the hard labor there I want it pre-done yeah we'll be ready for you Peter thank you you get the pizza oven yeah you know it's interesting um years ago uh one of the companies one of the moonshots I took swung and missed uh was it a company called planetary resources we were going after asteroid Mining and you know I was warned it was too early and maybe it was but what was wrong was I didn't have enough personal Capital to seat all the way through and when we missed financing it really um it tumbled and we had two launch failures and I couldn't survive all three of those and I'll take a I'll take a swing at it again but with 200 million dollars of disposable Capital to spend on that and not have to wait for someone else to decide because as you know there's a huge advantage of being able to just fund it in the beginning yourself and not have to convince everybody and a lot of moonshot entrepreneurs will spend 70 80 percent of their time raising money trying to convince person after person versus doing the hard work and in the asteroid business um having humanoid I mean space exploration is so enabled by able to send robots out there uh to do the work and prep the materials um and it's a massive multi-trillion dollar Marketplace so excited excited for that part of your business yeah I'm excited for you to get out there and and do round two here yeah me too um I am curious I am a space and Tech geek I know you are too so let's I'd love to review what are your favorite robots what what did they get right and what did they get wrong in uh on in the TV in movie world oh uh like not like the Sci-Fi world yeah the Sci-Fi world yeah let's take it let's take it science fiction like um you know you want to go to uh uh you want to go to Star Trek with Commander Data you want to go to Star Wars do you want to go to Lost in Space you want to go to uh you know the Jetsons what are the robots that like yeah ah man they got so close or that was really stupid uh it's it's like so funny that like it's almost like the last couple decades it's like the next couple decades it's like making all these Sci-Fi movies that we grew up with and novels real it's like it's like you know you look at like um you know flying cars coming we have Rockets going colonizing planets we uh we have home robots hopefully coming we're extending healthy lifespans we're going to longevity yeah exactly we're almost like predicting the future like you know 50 years ago and um I don't know it just looks so funny how all this is like in so many ways coming true today and uh I think if you're just like you know even Harvest if we're going out in the world we're seeing humanoids out there doing work it's kind of which I think could happen in like the near term like in our lifetimes I think it's going to feel like 50 100 years has pulled forward uh into the present it's just gonna feel uh crazy and it's gonna be hopefully spectacular I think so so I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna hold your feet to the fire here Commander Data at Star Trek uh do you like Commander Data as a robot I wasn't the big is Star Trek uh guy growing up I was more in you know Isaac Asimov uh side of things and a few others but uh yeah I mean Community is great okay um a positronic brand is a useful thing to have and so we'll see that around figure zero seven uh probably all right how about how about RTD2 and C-3PO would they get right would they get wrong yeah uh what's your view of this uh you know I I like C-3PO but you know that sort of lever arm on little you know actuator sticking out of their arm I didn't like that very much and um and R2D2 uh I just I don't think you're gonna build that shape and form and find it very useful I guess in the back of a speeder it might be useful yeah I remember uh one of the robots that really influenced my life early on was in Lost in Space um uh in the original TV series you're probably too young to remember that but they came out with a recent one that looked pretty cool um so any other robots from the visuals like the the R2D2 story it's like I feel like everybody is like coming at me now and saying like what you got to put some reels on this robot like why are we walking why are you dealing with that complexity of wheels and uh you mentioned the form factor is probably not right I just see you know we have I have a hard time seeing a fixed wheelbase with just even like manipulators working extremely well on the market there's a lot of people that have chased this for for quite a long time I mean if you go into a warehouse that that robot that needs to have like a z-axis it needs to have like an elevator moving up and down you need to pitch It Forward like in the back so you can reach the back of a shelf or something like that and then you're basically getting roughly to the same complexity and actuation and degrees of freedom than you would a humanoid and so um yeah it's funny the R2D2 ever it feels like everybody's trying uh the Skeptics are all trying to force me into an R2D2 form Vector which is kind of funny yeah well I'm glad like you know there's there's a level of Purity in actually going after the human form exactly uh so I am curious about one other thing actuators for muscles um because I when I was a kid I remember reading about actin and myosin and muscle contraction and so forth and always hoping and wondering would they come up with a material that when you apply an electric current it contracts like a muscle does right and that that would be the ideal actuator to replicate a robot with versus a rotary function and a screw function and so forth did you look at that are we are we getting any kind of uh electromechanical muscle uh Tech coming our way the human body is just so spectacular like the way that our muscles work even the joints like our you know ball and socket like you know uh I say shoulder has like three degrees of freedom so we you know for for figure we have you know Pidgeon roll here we have to do it through three different actuators that are uh almost like you know activated serially across the kinematics uh so you know imitating and getting to where the human is at in terms of degrees of freedom and efficiency is just a it's extremely hard uh like we're going to be off by a decent amount for a while um we've looked at a lot of different Technologies including um a lot of hydraulics and other applications outside of just like rotary or linear electromechanical actuators and um we really have a hard time hitting any of our requirements for maybe packaging or mass yeah I mean like it's almost like this debate of people like well what about this or that it's like we have no problem hitting any of these with electromechanical actuators like the we have enough we have enough energy and power on board we have enough degrees of freedom we have the right speeds and torques out of the actuators to make this happen there's just like there's it's just sufficient to make it work and at high volumes we get the cost down quite a lot there are some areas that we're spending a decent amount of time on on more of the academic research side that we think are really interesting but we think they're just a little bit far far enough out where they're not applicable to being able to put onto a humanoid and to do it useful work for the next few years as we wrap this up I I want to ask you again to serve our entrepreneur listeners here you start a company um what are the most important things that you did in starting this company in terms of creating culture or hiring the right people um like Lessons Learned this is your third really big major success and you know a lot of people hopefully one out of ten might be a success not you know three in a row hopefully but you had to learn some lessons and like like I'm not going to screw that up next time or I'm going to make sure that this is page one line one of the company so what's your mentorship for entrepreneurs for doing something like this yeah I really don't have these like heuristics of like hey you just got to do this and it's going to work I think you know this is like problem solving at its finest it's uh being extremely robust with these decision making processes I definitely have like the playbooks that I've been operating for a long time that have seemed to be successful here uh I figured archer in my past companies uh you know first is really identifying a really useful idea that I um you know can can a can work and be like it satisfies the personal goals why you set out to do it and for my case it's really not about the money it's about making a much larger impact as I can while I'm alive and I think this is an industry where I can make a extremely uh large contribution to humanity and it's just going to be a really spectacular future if this works well uh so I think it really aligns well with like what I'm trying to do on a personal perspective and on a mission uh two is I think getting the right team in place is probably really important if you work backwards like what is the goal of the company it's to ship a useful product or service there's like you need a team to go do that it's generally not like you know especially the stuff that's harder it's not one person sitting around it's you know a bunch of like maybe the best Minds in the world working in really hard and like together to make this really happen so the very strong proponent of like building the right team from the from the get-go although very strong in terms of like trying to set the right direction for the company you really have at a company especially early stage really have like two lovers you have a compass and you have a speed so you really want the compass to be dialed the right way and you really want to hit the gas as hard as you can open in that in that order yeah you have to you don't hit the gas the wrong way it's like really tough It's really like you know you're early enough it's fine but when you get bigger it's like a big ship with a small Rudder it's really tough to change directions uh so I figure in both Archer but a figure I wrote the master plan which goes online it's like a 10-year Vision document we have a culture dock which I also wrote in terms of like defining our culture and like what you should expect if you come over here okay can I just I want to pause there because those two things are what I wanted to call out of you right I think having a a vision document right that is clear and defining uh that aligns the organization from the beginning your master plan and a lot of times uh if an entrepreneur is a founding CEO founding entrepreneur if you're not clear about that and if there isn't uh that Compass heading and you are hiring High horsepower individuals they can start tearing you in different directions and that alignment is so critical and then the second thing you said which is equal important uh defining and creating the culture you want from Day Zero so um is probably the most important thing I think you said here yeah I think like it's funny um I'll we'll stick to the other side of this what I would just say which is a little counterintuitive but I remember like you know 15 years ago I'd read oh so much literature about like like you know Blitz scaling and like how to maintain a good culture and like you know as a young entrepreneur you look at this and say most of everybody dies they don't make it two years and I'm sitting here reading how to Blitz scale and how to set up my culture 10 years from now and how to set the right direction and like I I can't even feed myself let alone like make the company work and so a little bit of this is like having done it before it is important at the end of the day what is like you know maybe like the the last thing I'll add to this uh section would be you we got to get out and ship product and I think at the very core of what I love about you know building figure and Archer and Veterans we had a strong Mission belief that we need to ship product and ship it fast and I think if you come here one of the big shocks somebody might have from a big corporate somewhere else is that we move incredibly fast and we want to ship product as quick as possible and recursively make it better and I think the rest of the stuff is almost like these guard rails to help that out like the culture the master plan the people everything is supporting this like middle like um like almost like River that's flowing and it's flowing fast so we can control the where it close to but we really want to ship product really quick so I think my advice to a lot of entrepreneurs in the early days like the most important thing we could be doing as an organization is focusing on product in shipping product not working on PR not working in some ways like getting the brand perfect or getting the right article in TechCrunch and um it's really about you know getting the useful product or service out the door and so I think my over overwhelming advice for everybody is get out there and product and that'll be uh like the biggest the most important thing you could be doing as a Founder entrepreneur yeah it's uh uh Hardware walks yeah Hardware talks walks right it's the ratio of something nothing is infinite gotta get out there and build it right yeah for sure uh uh Brett where do people find you on social media tell us where they can learn more about you as an entrepreneur and CEO um yeah personally I um yeah I I'm basically uh trying to build in public with figure in my life as much as possible on Twitter so you can find me there and then you handle it your handle it Twitter is what um it's my it's Adcock underscore Brett okay perfect thank you yep um and then professionally like um you know figure.ai is the website um and then my last company archer.com are good ways to kind of like get you know like a better understanding of the company so I've I've built and um yeah and if you're you know looking to try to make an impact here I'd really like put a plug out to apply apply to come to figure we're trying to look for the best and brightest and uh hire the best town in the world it's always a top priority for us yeah and you've done that again congratulations so blown away by the team you put and uh really excited to come and play and see and touch and and uh yeah and maybe we can uh do this podcast again uh uh from your facility with uh one of your robots playing in the background next time we're ready so let's get you out here and see some robots awesome everybody uh Brett Adcock figure thank you buddy pleasure to have you on this thanks for having me [Music]

Channel: Peter H. Diamandis

Views: 33,889

Keywords: peter diamandis, longevity, xprize, abundance

Id: 1DV0yCuhY4A

Length: 83min 36sec (5016 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023