The Rise of Humanoid Robotics w/ Brett Adcock | EP #57

28:14We're going to start to see figure robots being demonstrated, you know, out of put this, Mark Raybert was putting out fun videos of Atlas and its capabilities before we saw it in any kind of useful commercial business. I'm still not sure what commercial businesses, other than sort of defense approaches that really have to robots done. But when are we going to see a functioning robot, your best guess on video or at maybe CES next January? Yeah. So the robot is up and it's working now. It's working today. We're walking. Call it over. Come on over. Yeah, sorry. Like yeah. Um, so we'll be putting it out.

29:01We're gonna try to I figure try to build in public as much as possible and keep the basically everybody at Brassel We're doing they get super important. They can be fun. We want everybody to be ready for us as well. 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 here in our office and then Daither Road, we want to do more things in perception and manipulation and other traditional operations. But our goal is to be putting out videos to not doing the parkour and showing the pure performance of, here's better than a human box jumper, backsflips.

29:41We really want to do just boring work. Let's get this robot. Yeah, let's get this robot in the warehouse just to do work over and over again. and I think that'd be pretty groundbreaking. We're shooting for that with our clients now. How do we get it to do work in our lab and 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 camera, visual, or using a lidar, what kind of imaging systems we're using aboard? Yeah, full vision, 100 % vision system, perception system. You're not going with any other augmentation.

30:20So it's what a camera can see is all you need to see. You've made the same decision. And I made it with autonomous cars. It sounds like. Yeah, we think, well, given the distances, and we do not think LIDAR is necessary here. As of now, we don't have the same view as Tesla. And we're not. We don't have a don't look at LIDAR policy. We've evaluated it. We've mapped our facility here. we've used it for some localization. We think it can be a helpful sensor, but that's not really the right answer. The right answer is, can you get there sufficiently without LIDAR? Having LIDAR on board, like, complicates both the supply chain.

31:02We 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 a lot going on with every single thing that goes in the robots. We have a pretty high bar for adding things to the robot. are proven to be necessary or sufficient for the robot to do the operations? I want to paint a picture of how humanoid robots are going to enter society with you. I've thought about this, you've thought about it more. Just to give a couple of data points here, right? Goldman Sachs predicts robots could generate $154 billion in revenue in the next 15 years.

31:38That 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. Do you, do you find people telling you, oh my God, you're going to displace jobs and you're going to cause, you know, a disruption, like AI is causing a disruption. And do you remind them that we have so many unfilled jobs and labor market is really becoming tough in different places?

32:23Yeah. So, if we look at the, like, how I think the business unfolds over the next 10 or 20 years, I think it looks very similar to what you saw on self driving cars, where the easier stuff will be demonstrated first. So, like, driving on the highway has been demonstrated at higher safety levels than driving and say San Francisco the city. And it's because in the city, it's got a higher safety case. It's higher, it's like more variability. It's less structured. It's probably like one or two orders and adding two to harder from an injury and perspectives do that reliably and safely than on a highway.

32:56The 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 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 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.

33:28So my strong view is that a lot of people have a misconception of humanoids because so many people have been working on the ladder. They've been working on this really hard consumer problem. If you look at Google's robot with sorting trash, it's very difficult. Toyota Research Institute is working in the, and grocery stores and things. Those are really hard problems. And I'm glad people are working on them. But for commercial groups, we really need to do the easier stuff that's necessary first that we can start demonstrating and building the AI -D engine into the harder stuff over time. So we're almost like an opposite of what the research groups are looking at today.

34:02So I have a strong bias that you'll see humanoids and warehousing, manufacturing, where the talent shortage is the most acute. And as you hit, from macro perspective, half the world is GDP is labor. We've had, we're having this huge issue with labor population globally. We have the baby boomers retiring. The amount of kids we've had has been busy, like, have been secular to climb for like a lot of several decades. Yeah, it's crazy. People don't realize we're in one of the greatest tragedies is not overpopulation, it's gonna be underpopulation. It's gonna be a big deal. And so you're seeing that, so we walk into a client, say a big fortune 100 company.

34:49Their first thing out of their mouth is like not, how's this gonna be used with my employees, and so on, they're first thing out of their mouth is last year we saw 140 % and your return over in a warehouse. We have nobody wants to do these jobs. They're dangerous. They're hot in the summer. They're cold in the winter. The turn of danger is... Dangerous dull and dirty is the phrase you all right now. Yeah, just like nobody. They can't find anybody that wants to do this. And, you know, so when you walk in there, they're like, if you can do these things, we will buy your service hand over fist. Now, doing the humanoid thing is nobody's ever done it before.

35:26So it's the hill to climb to do that successfully is extremely challenging and we happen to believe that this is the right decade to make that happen and 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, 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 clearly 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?

36:06When does that enter your build process? I think the way we're going to get humanoids out of the factories and into people's homes like are working with humans is going to be through language, as you mentioned. So we think your substantial benefit our business has to use in like basic, 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 behavior's 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 to be able to react to it.

36:55And so we will most likely not be building our own language models, but being able to train vision language models on the robot system is a really censored 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 in our 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 neural disk can be trained correctly to deploy over time. That's what really drives our interest in getting to market as fast as possible.

37:31The more robots we can get into market collecting data, 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 one robot that learns that they all learn it And that's a beautiful a beautiful thing That's my it's like my kids right like once you learn how to do something They like they fail like a thousand times So I was a little like reinforcement learning policies and once they figure it out they really don't forget it.

38:12And then they just keep building on that. So yeah, once we train a robot and how to unload boxes from a pallet successfully, every robot in the fleet will know how to do that. Once we train the robot and how to unload a truck successfully, and to manipulate certain boxes that are damaged or whatever it looks like, then every robot in the fleet will understand that. And so it's just like, it's gonna be a huge power curve that we're gonna be able to, yeah. It's gonna be a huge power curve for us in the future. Yeah, so there's a huge advantage to get that out into the real world and get those models learning.

38:44I'm going to go back to the founding of the company. So you had an incredibly successful exit early on with your first company that was in the hiring space, Vetterie. And then you start Archer, really hard challenge EVTAL, 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 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.

39:48I said if you know if somebody came to me tomorrow wanted to purchase this is for $5 billion. I would say no And you might think that's a little bit crazy, but I think you know So where are 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 one A a really hard problem. B it have as a live inside the largest economy in the planet of human labor.

40:24We think the technologies necessary to do this are kind of exist today and have been demonstrated in much more of advanced research state. And for, I think in the limit, I think we, I hope we can make some progress towards AGI here at figure. 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 in my life. But take me back a little bit more. Or 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?

41:00I mean autonomous cars and flying cars are robots of a type. But when did you say, you know, I know when I'm building my companies, I have this moment in time where I think something crystallizes that would be a next cool chapter to work on. Do you remember that moment? Growing up, I've always been a huge sci -fi fan. So I've read all of Isaac Asmultt books. And kind of in my high school period, I really realized that I wanted to spend basically my life building companies. And a couple of the areas that I really thought were important were robotics, AI, the internet. And yeah, I think from a, I think for a long time, I've always felt that robotics were extremely important to industry, they were really far.

41:50Like there's not a lot of entrepreneurs like tax on this problem. It's, no, they're not. They're not. So, I'm not, just like there never used to be a lot going in building the space industry, right? There was just the government that did it. And we're in this, you know, GM made giant robots for building cars. Yeah, 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 friend, I actually grew up on a third generation agriculture farm, a middle of a low -way. Yeah, so it never really been an insider my whole life.

42:26My parents, yeah, entrepreneurs for many generations. I remember growing up, my parents were like, you know, at some point you wanna control your own destiny, you need to do it yourself. And you need to go out and build stuff for the world. That's a really, really 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. So I've been, you know, now building companies for 20 years. I did, you know, 13, 14 years of that and software and internet and last like, you know, six or seven years have been in advanced hardware and AI areas.

43:02and do you know to be honest be able to work on these things and I know you spend so much time in these areas like It's like what a blessing right? It is our hard problems and they're just so fun and It were like almost inventing the future and so we are we're predicting the future by inventing it ourselves I want to quote you. I love this quote 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 when you're setting your massive transformative purpose and taking your moonshot, like stop building another photo sharing app and go do something that's a hard problem that is going to change the world and make the world a better place.

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45:10Visit www .8sleep .com that's e -i -g -h -t -s -l -e -e -p .com slash moonshots and you'll save 150 bucks on the pod cover by 8Sleep. I hope you do it. It's transformed my sleep and will for you as well. Now back to the episode. And so you retire from Archer. You hopefully, I'm sure you did, do financially well, because you've been personally investing in figure a sizeable amount of your own net wealth and using that and recruiting some of the best people. And I went over it 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?

45:56And so you're putting a significant amount to the company because you believe in it and you've built an amazing team. How did it begin? What was the first thing you did? I mean, this is sort of a one -on -one training for the entrepreneurs out there that want to take on a moonshot. And I don't know if you to go back to the days of 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 of building companies is like one of the, it's like one of the best experiences that I never wanted to do. You know, it's like it's, they're just so hard.

46:37And I remember for like for nine months here, a figure I was like living in this like really cramped, we work phone booth in Palo Alto, just like cold calling everybody in the space, like talking to every human or a robotics person anywhere in the world. Were you educating yourself or recruiting or both? 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. Trying to find the rare book here there that could help educate me on, you know, whole body and burst dynamics or NPC controllers or whatever it would look like.

47:21So I just bit 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 I could get my hands on and trying to figure out how to, how do I get this built? I think as an early founder, the most important thing is to show that you have a product or even a minimally viable product and 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. And a lot of places, a lot of companies that could be like, you know, raising capital higher and some people, in my case, for both archery figure was putting my money where my mouth was.

47:59So 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. 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. And I basically built a, you know, 4 ,000 square foot Archer Aviation EVTEL lab at the University before it was just still there today.

48:38And I basically built three, four generations of electric aircraft down there with a small team of PhDs. And 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 for making autonomous? These were like business decisions that affected timelines and certification, all this. And so yeah, the early first year at Archer was really me, self -funding, getting the initial team set set up, and then also building small, like basically sub -scale versions of what we have now, which we have built now, 6 ,000 pound, five passenger EV telegraphed.

49:17And that's like four years before that we were building 20 foot aircraft that were kind of more hobby grade than what we have now. And then maybe to ask for a figure, I spent a large percentage of my time understanding in the technologies, basically designing out and architecting what the first generation robot would look like and then building the team up. And I did that self -funding the whole way. So I basically felt like I didn't have to answer anybody and I could just move at lightning speed. And the ignition's really quick. How you describe this is exactly, I've known Elon for 23 years from the early days of SpaceX.

49:58And 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 things I think that's interesting in the early days of a startup is understanding the highest value trades and what the limiting parameters are, right? To help you decide, you know, what, so for figure, what have been the limiting parameters that drove you make one decision over another. Has it been battery life, material weights, AI? Yeah, so we spend if considerable amount of time understanding the requirements. We have a very strong action -matic design process here.

50:46I have a very strong philosophy for it. And then we do a lot of what you call a trade setting. He's basically like, what are the right decisions we need to make? I would say, at the highest level, the battery in actuator side are very mature. Like we have enough energy empowered and city out of the actuators in the batteries to do what we need to do with humanoids. I think the locomotion controls of balancing and walking robots are really mature for folks that know what they're doing. And 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.

51:24I think the limitations in actuators, middleware operating systems, batteries, control software, some of the cases of perception that I thought would be easier to secure off the shelf and put into a robot were really not the case. I think I got most of that stuff wrong. I think there are no good actuator solutions in the market. There are really not any good battery solutions. There's no good control solutions. There's no good middleware operating system solutions. There's some off -the -shelf caught sensors that are fine, and almost all the electronics for the next generation robot, we're building ourselves an house.

52:02And that's not because we want to, it's because we're being forced to. 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 you had to solve them because you were already getting in that direction? I think if I knew how hard Archer was and how figure it was You know who knows if an entrepreneur would have started those businesses, you know Like there's certainly extremely hard 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.

52:42I think a lot of robotics like startups, think that hardware is just like easy to procure and it's really a software issue. It's really not the case. 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. The hardware in the space is especially for EV teleaircraft and I think you're for figure. The hardware 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 it couldn't be further from the truth. I've heard this so many times for entrepreneurs.

53:14I know it's been true for myself where everything looks rosy from a distance. 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 in money already. You can't turn back and you've got to dissolve them. You have to work when you're going through hell. Keep going as old saying. So that is fascinating. And then I just did a podcast with Palmer Lucky. Do you know Palmer? That creator of Oculus and he's building a 10 billion dollar defense company, which is amazing. And you might look at all of the hardware, I laughingly call him the real 20 -star and it's amazing what he's been building there.

54:05But there are 60 % software or 40 % hardware, but from the outside they looked 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, including controls, middleware and autonomy than we are hardware. Our hardware team is Miffy, 15 or so. So yeah, definitely software would be a little bit bigger. software will definitely be the biggest part of the company long term. In the limit, we think of figures in AI business, so we'll have a large autonomy team. And there's a very significant AI -did engine that we need to build here long term.

54:42But the hardware stuff can't be overlooked. If you really want to play in humanoid today, you're going to need to develop your own actuators, electronics, battery, and then almost all the software. There's really not a cost or commercial off -the -shelf solution for this. If you want to do a high performance, high reliability, high safety, and low cost, there's no other way to say it. We have a term here, which is the only way out is through. We use that a lot because, in hardware, it's death by a thousand cuts. It's bringing up the robot. It's just problem after problem after problem. Things look good and there's mountain more problems.

55:19It's brutal. Being in software for so long and then getting into hardware, hardware is just Hardware is just hard. It takes a long time to get stuff. It's a long iteration cycles. It's really the tack time of iteration cycles that kill you here. Yeah. No, I like to joke. It's overnight success after 11 years of hard work. Yeah, totally. So let's allow people to live in the future a little bit here. We're going to see these robots. There is a ton of capital going in. and I put my bed on figure and I'm excited and hopefully will massively be successful. But there are a few other companies as well.

56:02I think obviously, as you've said, going into the labor space of warehouses and environments that are dull, dangerous and dirty. So if you were going to be, I'm not holding you to this and hopefully willing to tell me, but like what kind of robot production rate are you hoping to achieve in the next few years? And will they all be going into warehouse settings, packing unpacking, trucking logistics? Is that the first sort of circle of capabilities you're circling up? Yeah, we're really spending most of our time now on like logistics fulfillment and We spent a decent amount of time now at the larger car OEMs in the world interesting and what you can do for them It's just tremendous amount of people at these facilities.

56:59We just went to a facility a large OEM that you would know in the US 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 in. Not find enough people, a lot of these were dangerous, they were working next to other machines, they're doing tons of spot welding so you can smell the fumes. So yeah, there's different things of large fulfillment in logistics areas, have these facilities because they need to do just in time inventory, they need to have this facility we saw, you know, had, you know, So roughly four to five million parts that were touched by humans every day in one facility or one location at the facility.

57:42Yeah, 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. So it was for fulfillment areas. There's also a lot of overall, just like sheet metal, if you move around, right? Like a lot of sheet metal being moved different machines. So it was being spot welded and that being repeated over and over again at hundreds of stations. And they bet a 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 hours 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 basis.

58:21There's no drug testing. There's no vacations. There's no, you know, insuring. I mean it's in one sense for the type of job if there's a good product market fit, they're the ideal laborers in that regard. Going back to the production rate, do you see hundreds of figures being produced in the next few years? Would you hope to get up to you by the 2030 timeframe? Yeah, I think about the businesses, like we need certain stages of maturity to unlock like the next, like, kind of almost the next phase. I think the big stage where it now is can we show a humanoid robot can be useful in a client scenario in a real way like can it get the performance, can it be safe, can it be reliable?

59:07Is it going down all the time? I mean, you need tons of human interventions. That's not help anything. So it needs to take ROI sense and it needs to be safe and reliable. ultimately. If we can prove that then even in these very specific class of problems like of moving boxes and bins we think there's an ability to ship tens of millions of human oids. I would say it would take us decades to do that. Like it took, what it would take Tesla and Ford like a little over decade for each company to put a million cars in the So if you want to put a million robots into the world, like it takes, you know, no sooner than five years, maybe no longer than 10 or 12 years to do that, you know, based on historical precedent.

59:54Now I think the manufacturing processes for this will be very different and I would say less complex. There's roughly maybe 10 ,000 parts in a Model 3 car. We have about a thousand in our robot here and it's like, you know, like we mentioned earlier, a lot less weight and mass. So I think we can manufacture at pretty high volumes as we relates to later in the decade, but the next two or three or four years, Peter is going to be figuring out, can we make a useful humanoid? Sure. And I think we really got to get there. Yeah, and I have very confidence knowing you and the team that you've built that you will get there.

1:00:29And 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, it's just substantial. Like, the facility we saw had, you know, giant robotic arms, after we're hundreds of them. And it was, it's, that is 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 only humanoid, we wanted to design a manufacturing actually, the process where only humanoids are building humanoids.

1:01:09I love that. A fun, annoying machine that it's best. So what's next? You hit logistics, you hit warehouses, you hit delivery services. What do you imagine the next big market would be? It will 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. In there, we have healthcare areas, real estate areas, construction. There's other areas of retail that we look at, I think are extremely large markets. Then there's all these other markets that don't exist. Sheff or humanoid robots are human, like that we could basically go into.

1:01:53Why do the major tech real estate, brokerage, real estate places, like Sillo, stuff, not have any human brokers on their platform is because their multiples get killed. I think it'd be pretty cool. I think it'd be pretty cool going to a website booking a house visit and then having the humanoid greet you by a luck in the door and in a staged house and basically selling that whole house digitally. It's a trillion dollar market and 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 done through teleoperation or other things that could, that'll be born out of this technology.

1:02:32One of the markets I look forward to that is so desperately needed is supporting 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 rapid fall off there. The soian did, they don't have feel comfortable, They don't have privacy, but there is a vision where these robots are taking fantastic care of humans as the age. What's the breakthroughs that are going to be required to enable that to happen? Yeah, so this is an area that's pretty close to my heart.

1:03:15My family's actually involved in independent and assisted living facilities. Yeah, one of the hardest things you mentioned is like, nobody really wants to leave their for the personal home they've been in for decades, for one of these, it's just a really tough process. And we're having, you know, like, we're basically having this huge amount of people getting to, like, leadership retirement. And, you know, being able to do at home care would be like a very substantial life benefit to let people age and place at home. You know, this is really just a maturity of a technology itself to be able to make the reliability and the safety and the cost to a point where we can do these things.

1:03:56On the whole, like the robot from a hard group perspective will be able to do like almost all this work that would be what would be needed in somebody's home. 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 cost down will be important to enter this like elderly area, a lot of people age in place.

1:04:31So I think of this very similar to the consumer conversation we had earlier. It's gonna happen like a decade from now. It's gonna be very substantial, maybe even a bigger business in some ways than the consumer side of things. But it's just gonna be the second chapter in the book with the first chapter being the commercial market. Yeah, I believe that. When you get into the home and you get into the elderly, do you imagine that future? So your the first robot's called figure 01 Yes So you can just keep the generations figure 02 and iPhone 3 and iPhone 27 We made room to go to 99. Yes good. Yeah, I got that much So as you get to figure 567, do you imagine there may be a a humanoid facial personality that you add for comfort.

1:05:24Because I mean, there is a value in having a robot who's got facial emotional expressions that you can feel they connect with you and so forth. And I think as the AI becomes, as we head towards AGI, that ability to recognize the person in your serving their emotional situation and to convey emotional response thoughts on that. There should be no reason why we couldn't do that. Like, our head today has basically a full wrap screen in the front that can convey information, like what the robot is doing, maybe a prompt, things like that. And then we have sensors. We have basically camera sensors and other things in the head.

1:06:10So there shouldn't be no reason we We can't display the right information back to the end user to make them feel comfortable whether we're caretaker or we're actually doing work on site at a big corporate Fortune 500. So certainly today, language and natural language processing is good enough to basically have a conversational understanding with a robot. Getting that, you know, the visuals in a place where it's comforting is certainly possible. 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 give the consumer that experience.

1:06:48Everybody to his 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.

1:07:25So 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, backslashblog, and learn more. Now back to the episode. I'm going to hit on my third favorite market and use case. So actually, let me ask you what your favorite third market is. So we talked about the industrial logistics, manufacturing, and we talked about health care as another.

1:08:13As a broad brush, what's your third next big market that you're excited about? I'll show you mine. Yeah. I would love to really help on the consumer household side and caring for the elderly. I think it's such an important business long term. I think everybody will have a humanoid as 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. Now you're hitting the one I didn't say. Space exploration. Yeah, just like so excited about we're in this like such a great time for space exploration and it's being enabled by this infrastructure that's being put in place for basically launches and rocket launches.

1:08:53And I think yeah, I think humanoids will be a really great tool for humanity to help colonize and set up colonization facilities and place like the moon in Mars and when I land there I want the peanut colladas ready. I want you know bed pre -heated. I want all the resources dug out I don't want to do the hard labor there. I want to pre -done. We'll be ready for you Peter You know it's interesting years ago one of the companies one of the moonshots I took swung and missed was at a company called Planetary Resources. We were going after asteroid mining. And you know, I was warned it was too early.

1:09:33And maybe it was, but what was wrong was I didn't have enough personal capital to seed all the way through. And when we missed a financing, it really, it tumbled and we had two launch failures and I couldn't survive all three of those. And I'll take a swing at it again, but with $200 million 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 It's a lot of Mochot entrepreneurs will spend 70 -80 % of their time Raising money trying to convince person after person versus doing the hard work and in the asteroid business having humanoid I mean And space exploration is so enabled by able to send robots out there to do the work and prep the materials.

1:10:26And it's a massive multi -trillion dollar marketplace. So excited for that part of your business. Yeah, I'm excited for you to get out there and do round two here. Yeah, me too. Okay. 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 did they get right and what did they get wrong in on in the TV and movie world? Oh Like not like the sci -fi world. Yeah, the sci -fi world. Yeah, let's think it let's take it science fiction like um, you know You want to go to You want to go to Star Trek with Commander data when you're a star wars?

1:11:08Do you want to go to lost in space? Do you want to go to? You know, the Jetsons, what are the robots that, like, yeah, man, they got so close or that was really stupid. It's, it's like so funny that like, it's almost like the last couple decades, it's like the next couple decades is 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, you know, flying cars coming, we have rockets going, commas and planets, we, We have home robots hopefully coming. We're extending healthy life spans. We're going longevity. Yeah. I were almost predicting the future like 50 years ago.

1:11:48And I don't know, it's just so funny how this is like in so many ways coming true today. And I think if you're just like, you know, even a hard one, if we're going out of the world, we're seeing humanoids out there doing work, it's going to, which I think could happen in like the near term, like in our lifetime. I think it's going to feel like 50, 100 years has pulled forward into the present. It's just going to feel crazy and it's going to be so hopefully spectacular. I think so. I'm going to hold your feet to the fire here. Commander Data at Star Trek. Do you like Commander Data's robot? I wasn't the biggest Star Trek guy growing up.

1:12:24I was more in, you know, Isaac Asmoth, side of things and a few others. But yeah, I mean, Commander Data is great. Okay. A positronic brain is a useful thing to have and so we'll see that run figure 07 probably. Yeah. All right. How about RTD2 and C3PO? Would they get right? Would they get wrong? Yeah. What's your view of this? You know, I like C3PO but you know that sort of lever arm on little actuators sticking out of their arm. I didn't like that very much and RTD2, I just, I don't think you're gonna build that shape and form and find it very useful. I guess the back of a speeder might be useful.

1:13:10Yeah, I remember one of the robots that really influenced my life early on was in Lost in Space. In the original TV series, you're probably too young to remember that, but they came out of the recent one that looked pretty cool. So any other robots from the visual world? It's like the R2D2 story. It's like I feel like everybody is coming at me now and saying like what, you gotta put some wheels on this robot. Like why are you walking? Why are you dealing with that complexity of wheels? And you mentioned the fourth factor is probably not right. I just see, I have a hard time seeing a fixed wheel base which is even like manipulators working extremely well in the market.

1:13:54There's a lot of people that have chased this for quite a long time. I mean, if you go into a warehouse that robot needs to have like a Z -axis and needs to have like an elevator moving up and down, you need to pitch it forward like in the back, so you can reach it back up a shell for 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, yeah, it's funny the R2 -D2. I've filled like everybody's trying, the skeptics are all trying to force me into an R2 -D2 for factors come funny. Yeah. I'm glad, you know, there's a level of purity in actually going out through the human form exactly.

1:14:33So, I am curious about one other thing actuators for muscles because when I was a kid, I remember reading about actinomyosin 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 getting any kind of a electro mechanical muscle tech coming our way? The human body is just so spectacular. Like the way that our muscles work, even the joints It's like our, you know, a bone socket, like, you know, like, say, shoulder has like three degrees of freedom.

1:15:22So we, you know, for, for figure, we have, you know, pitch -on roll here. We have to do it through three different actuators that are, almost like, you know, activated serially across the kinematics. 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. like we're going to be off by a decent amount for a while. We've looked at a lot of different technologies, including a lot of hydraulics and other applications outside of just like rotary or linear election mechanical actuators. And really have a hard time hitting any of our requirements for maybe packaging or mass.

1:16:10I mean, it's almost like this debate of people, like, what about this or that? It's like, we have no problem hitting any of these with lecture mechanical actuators. Like, though, we have enough energy and power on board. We have enough degrees of freedom. We have right speeds and torques out of the actuators to make this happen. There's just like, it's just sufficient to make it work. And high volumes, we get the cost down quite a lot. But 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 enough out where they're not applicable to be able to put on to a humanoid and to do useful work the next few years.

1:16:51As we wrap this up, I want to ask you again to serve our entrepreneur listeners here. you started a company. What are the most important things that you did in starting this company in terms of creating culture or hiring the right people? 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 I'm not 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?

1:17:39Yeah, 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 and it's finest. It's being extremely robust with these decision making processes. I definitely have like the playbooks that I've been operating for a long time that has seemed to be successful here, a figure in our shirt in my past companies. First is really identifying a really useful idea that can work and be like it satisfies the person who goes 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.

1:18:15And I think this is an industry where I can make a extremely large contributions to humanity and it's just going to be a really spectacular future at this worse well. So I think it really lies well with like what I'm trying to do as an on a personal perspective and on a mission. 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 the 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 stuff that's harder. It's not one person sitting around.

1:18:44It's you know a bunch of like maybe the best minds in the world working really hard and like together to make this really happen. So the very strong proponent of building the right team from the get go. I'm very strong in terms of like, find a separate direction for the company. You really have at a company, especially early stage, you really have 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. So I sit all the time in that order. Yeah, you have to. You don't want to hit the gas the wrong way.

1:19:15It's like really tough. It's really, you know, you're at early enough, it's fine, but when you get bigger, it's like a big ship at the small rudder. It's really tough to change directions. So I figure, in both archer, but I figure I wrote the master plan, which those online, it's like a 10 -year vision document. We have a culture doc, which I also wrote in terms of like defining our culture and like what you should expect if you come over here. I want to pause there. Yes. Those two things are what I wanted to call out of you, right? I think having a vision document, right, that is clear and defining that aligns the organization from the beginning.

1:19:50Your master plan and a lot of times if an entrepreneur is a founding CEO, founding entrepreneur, if you're not clear about that and if there isn't 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 equally important, defining and creating the culture you want from day zero. So, it's probably the most important thing, I think you said here. Yeah, I think it's funny. I'm almost to the other side of this, what I just said, which is a little countertuitive, but I remember like, you know, 15 years ago, I'd read so much literature about like, like, you know, blitz scaling and like, how to maintain a good culture.

1:20:37And 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 blood scale and how to set a right culture 10 years from now and how to set the right direction. And I can't even feed myself, let alone 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 last thing I'll add to this section would be we gotta get out and ship product. And I think at the very core of what I love about building figure in archer and veterans, we had a strong mission belief that we need to ship product and ship it fast.

1:21:17And I think if you come here, one of the big shocks somebody might have from the 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 guardrails to help that out, like the culture, the master plan, the people. Everything is supporting this middle, almost like river, it's flowing and it's flowing fast so we can control where it flows to. But we really want to ship product really quick. So I think my advice to a lot of entrepreneurs in the early days, 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 on getting the brand perfect or getting the right article and TecCrunch and it's really about getting the useful product or service out the door.

1:22:05And so I think my overwhelming advice for everybody is get out there and shit products. And that'll be like the biggest, the most important thing you could be doing as a founder of Otspinder. Yeah, it's a hardware, hardware, a walk's bullshit. Yeah, hardware, hardware talks bullshit walks, right? It's the ratio of something to nothing is infinite. Got to get out there and build it, right? Yeah, well, for sure. Brett, where do people find you on social media? Tell us where they can learn more about you as an entrepreneur and CEO. Yeah, personally, I'm basically trying to build in public with figure in my life as much as possible on Twitter, so you can find me there.

1:22:49And then you're actually... And you're gonna handle it, you're gonna handle it Twitter is what? It's my, it's adcock underscore Brett. Okay, perfect, thank you. Yep. And then professionally, like, figure .ai is the website, and then my last company, archer .com, are good ways to get a better understanding of the company's I built. And if you're looking to try to make an impact here, I'd really like put a plug out to apply to come to figure. We're trying to look for the best and brightest and hire the best town in the world to always have top priority for us. Yeah, and you've done that again. Congratulations.

1:23:26So blown away by the team you put and really excited to come and play and see and touch and and yeah, and maybe we can do this podcast again From your facility with when your robots playing in in the background next time We're ready. So let's get you out here and see some robots. Awesome everybody Brett Adcock figure. Thank you buddy. Pleasure to have you on this Thanks for having me.