EXCLUSIVE: $3B Founder Reveals His Next Big Idea

0:00If you had to describe yourself, what would you say you are? I just want to go build important things and win. That's it.

0:15We're live with Brent Adcock. I wanted to start off with something crisp. You told me this story, and this is something that's fascinating about you, which is about your ability to learn. So I think, I don't want to butcher the story, but you said something like, I was reading old, I think, research papers. And you found that I think in the 70s, NASA came up with this amazing thing. And you cold called or cold emailed NASA. And you're like, can you actually show me this device? Is that story right? Yeah, it's pretty close. This is like the first time I've talked about this publicly. So starting from maybe for context, I have been kind of following what's happening at K-12 schools in the US as it relates to school shootings.

0:59And And if you look at the charts of like, you know, how many shootings are actually happening at the schools, how many deaths are happening in schools, it's, it's, it's, it's like, basically you have like a school shooting, like basically once per day now in the U S in K through 12. That's true. Is that true? That's insane. I have to say we're like, I think it was like 200 over 200 people. Like, um, last year were like either shot or wound or, or I wounded or killed in the U S at K through 12. and a third of those are all in elementary and the chart if you look like a line graph of the chart it's just like exponential it's uh we we like 5x in 2018 uh kind of almost like year over year and then we like took another 3x move so we basically 10x the number of school shootings uh over the last um like seven years or so decade and it's just getting worse and worse what i found is that most of all the school shootings are not what we're seeing on tv where you know there's um like an over assault where somebody's bringing in like a machine gun uh planned it out driving a truck into campus and the shooting people up that's that's that's that happens a few times a year 90 99 98 of all the other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day to school they're getting in a fight at some point it escalates into a shooting so they're just like it's like a it's like a it's like an accessory it's like like bringing a right third and they have a handgun in their backpack and but from our analysis several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in k-12 every year in the in the u.s and not found and then a small fraction of those that we see now in the statistics are basically getting in like bullied or getting a fight and they're shooting somebody on school campus so one of my hobbies i love reading like research papers and papers in general um and uh the way i think you solve this is you need to be able to see the guns i think gun control is something i'm interested in and passionate about but i think it's not going to fix all school shootings forever there was like last year's 79 stabbings in k-12 schools so like you know even if you halted guns there's still like nice stabbings happening here so we need to see the weapons so i was reading um i came across a research paper from nasa's jet propulsion lab where they were doing work where they were trying to detect um bomb vests and weapons underneath uh like garments and clothes and jackets uh for like afghanistan and iraq and they developed some really interesting like weapons imaging technology and i flew to jpl like nasa's jet propulsion lab in pastadina and i was talking to the guy that ran it.

3:42Did you just cold email them or something? Oh, yeah. Cold called them for sure. Yeah. And what did you say? Oh, I said, hey, I need to learn more about this. I read your paper. Can we have a conversation? Most people in general will get on the phone with you at this point. If you're passionate about some work they did for years and years that they're no longer doing, somebody's going to take a phone call. I think most people could knock on that door and get that person to react um yeah i don't think that's a hard thing to do uh called him and i flew in and the high level was that they developed um a high frequency radar so similar like your wi-fi or phone like um like it's like it like lies in electromagnetic spectrum so uh like radio waves basically that were really high frequency so like think about like your phone or wi-fi but like really souped up to a much higher frequency level and they were able to start penetrating clothing and start like imaging our building or reconstructing images of what's happening inside of bags and clothing and stuff.

4:43And if you like read the research papers, you look at it, it's like, it's like a, it's like a airport security, uh, cam like airport security, but like you can do it, uh, 50 meters away and you can do it like a camera and you can take like almost like camera frame rate images, which means you could just like point this at the interest of a school in this example and you can see every gun and knife and bomb and it doesn't need to be metallic it doesn't need metal it could be plastic it could be any material is it radio waves it's radio waves is that dangerous if you have ionized uh electromagnetic waves uh like you would see like x-ray yes these are non-ionizing rays like almost like your cell phone and wi-fi so these are not yeah i mean listen we worked on it for like for like years and years and i think at the end of it was like 2013 or so so it was like when i got there i was like we were talking and chatting and didn't even think to ask to see the machine and at the end of the conversation he's like do you want to come see it and i'm like of course and we like walk down like four flights of stairs the basement he uh you know takes the cover off it's dusty it's like a huge like compact computer at the bottom and all this old stuff like all all the electronics and all the systems and stuff are like very dated he turns it on and demos for me uh he we have like a mannequin with a gun underneath the shirt and he shows me it and it was like it was unbelievable it was like it was like it was like a camera picture of the gun but then we also had like you also with radio frequency we get to we get a 3d reconstruction so you're almost like a camera point cloud of the product was this before you were going to do figure where you're like this is like my number one or number two or number three idea or something like that this was a while ago and i've been mostly curious about the space And then what happened from like 2018 to now is we've seen like a five X spike in the number of school shootings.

6:33So like the, the charter school shootings is like looking like a, like Nvidia stock price. Well, we talk about an MFM. We talk about one chart businesses where you like, you see some crazy chart and you're like, oh, well there's like an opportunity. And it's like, well, if you just, there's a tidal wave, if you just sort of catch that wave and you aren't even that good, like the market's like pulling it out of you. Like everyone just wants this thing. So that was like your one, your kind of one chart where it's like, oh, well, this is obvious. Somebody came in to figure at one point in 2023, it was an investor and he was looking at solutions for school shootings, like just coincidentally.

7:09And they were basically at the time looking at a startup that was using like CCTVs, like basically the cameras that are as a school to find guns. The problem is like all the guns are hidden. so when you like grandish a weapon or pull it out and wave it around you're at a point where like a second later you're shooting it so you can't stop the shootings you can just get more prepared about how to get there faster maybe get to the right location maybe stop like save some lives if the shooting lasts for a long period of time you're not like you're not stopping weapons from getting in school you're not theoretically even stopping real shootings so I was telling him about my experience here and the guy like looked me dead in the face and he's like listen as somebody who has kids like how are you not like trying this and seeing if you can make this really work and yeah so at that time i said i got to figure out how to spend some time and money making this useful and so is that what you're going to do you're launching this as a startup are you going to have someone else run it what are you going to do yeah so we haven't announced this yet but like it is we have about 12 people on the project and we own all the intellectual property from nasa's jet propulsion lab licensed all of it um and we will have our first system brought up to start imaging weapons uh in 30 days are you gonna run it who's gonna run it we have a team from jpl that's running the system running there right now i i don't think that business can be as big as figure but i feel like that's a monster business let's talk about this for a minute um This is not a school thing.

8:45This is stadiums, churches, anywhere. It's like a lot of hospitals, everything. So my view of this is over a long enough period of time, as longevity improves for humans,

9:01the severity of having an accident and dying is going to be higher and higher. Meaning we're not going to want to do more riskier things as we live longer. It's why in the movies, if somebody is immortal, they're living in their home. they don't leave because if you die you're dead forever and if you don't die you're like alive forever right now we have like some finite period of time where we won't we won't be alive anymore so humans take a lot of risks we drive cars that are extremely dangerous and motorcycles we do you do motorcycles we do all this like stupid stuff that like has pretty high i would say you know pretty high risk but if that if you were to live forever like you wouldn't be doing that stuff I would say over a long enough period of time I don't think you'll really move through the world without imaging systems like this for safety you're really good at like telling a story so you did this before when I hung out with you about humanoids and robots and you just like you tell these stories that are so grand I just get bought into and I'm like well that makes perfect sense but you do it at a much larger scale so you went with like the longevity angle, which is like, well, we're going to live much.

10:09I mean, that's just such like a challenging way to think for a lot of people, myself included. And it's just such an easy, like when I hear that pitch, I think, yeah, of course that makes wonderful sense. And it makes me, it makes me think going big and having these grand visions is almost easier than not, than not, than doing the alternative of something smaller. Do you know what I mean? It's a hundred percent easier. you can hire better people because they're more ambitious and they're interested in working on harder things um they're generally larger it could be larger outcomes you're talking about like you know building like new industries that maybe never haven't been built before with huge tams uh investors want like very high risk reward trades where they can make you know 50 100 times of their money um you know most investments from vcs fail so they really need like the 100 bagger in their portfolio uh big grand things offer that risk reward opportunity for investors um yeah i have this philosophy i think that harder things are easier and i think um it really depends what industry and what market you're going to but uh relatively speaking i think it's there's some there's some truth in that yeah because vetery was uh you sold vetery for 100 million dollars that's a big outcome that's a big outcome for virtually everyone they're like that's a life changing thing but it doesn't have an inspirational angle to it necessarily i mean no i think like listen outside of spending time with loved ones where i work most of our lives as humans most people we are most people don't like where they work if you've ever looked for a job it's like the worst process we talk about bad like bad products looking for a job is is embarrassing it's uh it's like soul crushing so what we tried to do at vetery is like if we can get all the world's employers together with all the candidates in the world we can use ai to make matches at scale and find the best opportunity for you with machine learning.

12:02And if you can solve that, you could put people in much better places for employment, much happier places. Like they can find jobs they really love. Yeah. I mean, you just, I would have pitched it as a sick job board and you just totally like make it to be some really inspirational thing, but that even as good as you are at pitching that, that pales in comparison to, I think to like when you pitch this, x-ray machine, whatever you're going to call it. It's cool to see this evolution, though, even though you're actually quite good at pitching something like Vetteri. I, again, buy into it. What's the name of this thing going to be?

12:40The name is Cover. C-O-V-E-R. What's your philosophy on names? I think names need... I think people... I have a certain philosophy towards it, but I think I really like names that are at the very basic level are really easy to say and spell and pronounce and i think most company names like violate one of those first three rules most names are just like too hard to spell and remember and pronounce in my mind um and yeah i really want um something that over time we can build like a real iconic brand in the space and that just takes a lot of time i would say there too but this the branding around the name and the way you think about the like you know the icon the font everything for me is like this like almost like when you build a house you make a really good foundation and pour a lot of concrete it's that concrete it's that foundation and you do it in the early days hopefully do it right um you know i've definitely done it wrong before i've done name changes before um and uh and you know these names are unique to my my perspective of how I want my businesses to look and feel at like whatever better your Archer figure and cover but like I think um uh yeah we I just spend a decent amount of time thinking through that in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand are you adamant on a certain url or domain name because cover.com is it looks like an insurance company I assume that's a huge insurance company I don't know uh but based off of the fact that they have that url I imagine they're quite large do you care about the domain uh we own cover.ai and i own like obviously cover or sorry figure.ai and um i bought archer.com a month before going public uh so not really so it was like flyarcher.com for a while that was like you know nine dollars and then i spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying archer.com you know a year later two years later um we bought figure.ai for 100 grand and then we bought cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars so um i would own the dot coms or dot ais in these cases if possible i know you don't care about money but when you are pitching to investors when you're thinking about how big cover is going to be what's your pitch we're not pitching investors now i'm just funding it it's more of like a passion project, to be honest.

15:06The pitches are going to be really unique because if we end up do raising capital outside, I don't know. There might be a path where we never raise capital here. There are also a path where the technology is very difficult. So I mean, hopefully we make it work. The biggest market is not in schools. Schools is like the worst market to go into. It's just a bad pitch. The schools have very low budgets. They don't have systems like this exactly at the schools right now um you know like sure the severity is high with shootings but like the the money-making opportunity is like relatively small comparatively like stadiums and concerts and hospitals and areas that have big budgets like most big stadiums you go through now like you go through like some metal detector and stuff uh tsa pre-check like the homeland security there's like there's real security applications for this outside of schools that could pay a lot more the schools is like the the worst pitch for like fundraising uh for me uh i don't give a shit i really want to solve the k-12 school problem i wouldn't be doing this if i if it wasn't for that and we're going great great to schools to help solve like i want to see if i can help prevent school shootings over time and that's what i that's that's the only reason i'm working on this like you know like funding this project i'm trying to work on it if i had to bet you're sort of like me where like you have a document where you just like jot down interesting ideas and you probably aren't ever going to get to them maybe you would if you had an additional 24 hours uh in your day some more time in your week uh what would you be spending it on what ideas interest you i think a few things i think there's um areas on like genetics i'm interested in a bit that i you know when i have time i'm doing a lot of research i think there's areas of like electric supersonic that are really interesting i'm really interested in supersonics travel and i'm really interested in electric and there's areas of my experience at you know building e-vital aircraft that i'm like pretty excited about i have like a couple of like ideas about how to design an aircraft that could like work through these very divergent like um parts of the mission uh very like high altitudes and high speeds i really like the industry of like synthetic foods there's been a lot of like controversy recently is this synthetic meat is that like impossible or is that like the people who are like literally growing like a cow like they're growing meat that you're you can eat it's not impossible so those are all plant-based uh it's you're basically taking um uh these are like these are like cultured cells you're growing you're growing real meats in a lab why does that interest you does that interest you in because you're an animal lover does it interest you because uh cows create a lot of pollution where's the interest come from it seems super unnecessary to like like raise animals and butcher them and eat them it just seems like super like for for many reasons like if you if you could choose to eat a steak and it was just as good as a as a steak you have today and it is real steak like real muscle tissue and fats, and it wasn't come from a cow and it came from a lab, but it had all the same, you know, uh, same chemical properties.

18:20What, what would you say? Well, I think that I'm a little bit in early adopter on weird things. And I would say that sounds awesome. I'm in, you understand how that's weird for like your average person. Like, dude, do you remember when we were kids? Do you remember when green ketchup came out? I remember eating green ketchup and i was like i know this is the exact same thing but for some reason because it looks different i don't even want to touch it yeah but like tv and radio and lights and electricity where those are all weird for folks at some point like those were all just like yeah it takes time cars were weird right like everybody's like why would you have a car when you have a horse like all these are just like really radical in the moment yeah like if we think about the civilization a thousand years from now we've been around for like thousands of years if you think 10 ,000 more years and we're on Mars and the moon, you're going to be having cows and bubbles on Mars and then butchering that?

19:14We're not having room for that. It just seems unrealistic. I don't think you understand how unique some of the things you think are. And I like to think that because of where I'm from, which oddly you are too, but I don't know if you totally grasp that. The way that you think is quite unique and a little bit larger than the average person. And so, yeah, what you're saying makes sense, but there's just a lot of emotional baggage that comes with that to overcome. But I do agree with you. I think that that interests you or that interests me as well. And I would do it. If you had to describe yourself as an entrepreneur in one word, what would you say you are?

19:52What word best describes your philosophy? I don't know. I don't really reflect like that too often. I just want to go build important things and win. That's it. What percentage of your philosophy is based on winning versus the excitement of making stuff? All of it's winning. I don't want to do something exciting in a lab that doesn't have the ability to have commercial applications and build a big business that has implications for the masses. I'm not a research scientist. I don't have passion for that. um i like thinking about how we've evolved as species the last like even like several hundred years and how technology has like been probably the biggest lever arm for uh our consciousness and understanding of the world and the only way to really do that is on a mass level like you know electricity in a lab that wasn't brought to all civilization is marginally helpful uh marginally but the orders of magnitudes improvements we've had in humanity have come from like releasing that to the world as like an ubiquitous utility and for me winning is the most important thing here because you know let's call it like we have a certain finite time to say i'm like to do this kind of stuff at some point we'll be just too old or incapable of doing it and it's on to the next generation so i think we have a certain amount of time to go win and go do things useful with our time because i think it's just devastating it's been like 20 30 years working on something that doesn't work it's like that's that's the worst case scenario for an entrepreneur as you're devoting all your time away from friends and family or whatever you could be spending time on as an opportunity cost into this business like if it doesn't win it's just like a terrible story yeah i think that when new when i talk to people who are just starting stuff that's often what i'll say is like the biggest issue is that you spend 10 years on this and it's just a mediocre thing it's better to for it to suck right away agreed i actually do like all these calls sometimes with like early entrepreneurs that are just getting going and i'm like so intense about like the idea and the direction and the whys and they're just like yeah yeah i like whatever how do we hire like you get the first engineer in here i need to raise a safe note like how do i do that i was just like dude like if i had a reverse time i would spend like a month on these questions and like most early guys just don't want to like don't want to hear it they want to get move in and get go build and i think you know we've talked about this here on last time i was on mfm like i kind of fell into vetery and i kind of like i really built archer and figure with a lot of purpose and intense it's the one thing i would pass down to like the the newer generation that's coming up building stuff like um like we have a choice on what to go build what's your criteria that you tell them is is your checklist for if something is worth my time like you you can't just get the one thing right like you just can't get the idea right or the commercial plan right or the fundraising like you can easily fundraise this because it's a hot topic and get that right i think it's like really about you have to build this you know um i mean you call it a business plan or something but like you have to come up with this idea of like how you're actually going to get this thing done in the face of 95 % of all companies that go try to do this and start a plan failing.

23:18And I would say it's not just about the idea and how you're going to execute it and how you're going to balance moving fast and slower in product quality and what you're going to build as feature sets first or later and who are going to be your first clients, the enterprise, the SMBs, and how are you going to actually get distribution? Is it organically? Is it through social? Is it outbound or inbound sales? like i think it's like putting that whole thing together and having a good clear direction of where the ship's sailing is most important i have like a little chart i always draw people of like north south east west like you want to go north you want to get this cone going north right you want to be heading this direction you're not going to be straight dead north but you want to be like not heading south for too long or you'll die and those are a factor of like all those kind of like you know heuristics i talked about earlier which is like just commercialization plan how you're to make money, how you're going to fund the business, whether it's organically or you're going to raise capital and team you're going to bring on, the culture you go build and the execution of the product.

24:16All those have to be very thoughtful and driven in the right direction. And we have us to figure, right? We're going to BMW, we're going to these industrial settings, but we want to be in the home. If we could be in the home today, home robots, we would do that. We are using the commercialization, industrialization industry as a way to get us ready and more prepared for putting a robot in every home in the world which is a common way of going about it you know you think um i think tesla did this where they started more expensive even though he was like you know i would like it to be the model t where everyone could have one but i'm just going to start with high end because that will give us more profits to fund more stuff sure but why then why has like fisker failed twice in a row while tesla has just been dominating what's the answer what's your what's your answer for that they they didn't get the product and some the other stuff right, same way Tesla did.

25:06They didn't get speed right and the product quality and the way they introduced in the world, all of that wasn't balanced well enough. And the companies now failed twice in a row. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now. And let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery.

25:39And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean branded invoice. Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bank, the services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column A, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. You're on 60 Minutes the other day. And on 60 Minutes, I think you had like a plate and an apple and a banana, like sitting in front of the robot.

26:13And you said like, hey, hand me the apple or hand me the orange or something like that. And it did a good job where it like reached and it found the right fruit. And I think it made a mistake once or twice, but then it like corrected itself. And you're like, hey, that's that's the wrong one. And it was like, oh, I'm sorry. And it like picked up the right one. what's crazy to me is that you're two years old. The company's two years old. I've seen that you've been able to do this so quickly. And I think when I talk to someone, they go, everything's late with tech and, and, and in hardware, but somehow Brett hasn't been late.

26:45Figure has been lightning fast. What have you guys done to be so fast? So when I started figure in, in also Archer, I did this at Archer too. I started the company before it was even incorporated with this idea of like how to move extremely fast. So like, listen, it's like a whole company was built just for speed. We have our company mission statement, which is like, we want to go this direction as a company. Then everything else, as we like built out the org chart and thought about how we're going to do that, the values that we think about hiring people for or firing people for, everything about compensation, everything about how do we build schedules?

27:19How do we plan for schedules? Like we don't have, we're 120 engineers here. We have zero program managers, zero. And we have a certain philosophy around like what to do and how to build hardware and software that, or I think we're kind of like the anti Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley as relates to this. We really care about getting things brought up quicker and iterating faster and doing that over a very long period of time, like decades. And building a company that can do that is extremely hard. Like there's really no good precedent, maybe outside of like Tesla and SpaceX that have done this well at scale.

27:59Like Tesla has, you know, well over a hundred thousand people, like arguably tens of thousands of, you know, product design engineers, and they're moving at a speeds of a small startup. And generally when you're adding head cow, the companies are all slowing down. It's almost every company slowing down with more head count. You're just getting slower over time. You don't notice it. You don't care. the board is art is like giving you indication that you should slow down and be safer and everything's just slowing to a halt and the limit so you have to basically fight this and you have to like the best way you can fight it is like design the whole word from the ground up to to do this or do what elon did with twitter and walk in and fire 80 of people and restructure it at the start uh at that point in time to to go faster and ship product and it's too laborious here to say like, okay, we move fast.

28:53Like what one thing it's like, it's the whole company was built just to move fast. But what are you asking your recruits, your potential app or your applicant, your job applicants to figure out if they do have that ability? There's a lot of things happening here. A lot of times people haven't been in that environment. So when they get in there, when they're moving it fast and a much quicker paced environment, it just becomes overwhelming and just too hard and too stressful to handle. So if you were like a PhD student for 10 years wearing sweatpants and moving slow, and you come in here, it's like a real culture shock coming to figure.

29:27And we've had it happen several times where people are just like, they're coming in late, they're moving slow. And it's frustrating for them having to move much faster. And it's probably a lot of anxiety there. There are other folks that believe the longer that you take to build something, the safer it is and the better job you'll do at it. So if you give me two years to design a robot, that robot will be safer at the end of the two years and better design. Folks feel like that. It's for sure wrong. People think that the longer you spend designing something, the safer it'll be and the better it'll be.

30:01It's for sure wrong. Because in that two-year period of time where that one robot got out, I'm going to have my third-gen robot out. And I'll have run it an order of magnitude longer. I will have found all the problems 10 times sooner. I will have had time to go fix it recursively and make it better. It'll just be a worse product. How do you measure and how do other people measure if someone's fast enough? You look at how many iterations somebody is doing and how much progress they made between those iteration cycles. And what are your expectations? A car could be like how many car versions you've gotten out over the last decade and how much progress you've made between those.

30:38A rocket could be similar viewed. a robot could be how many robot iterations are we doing um what version of robot are we on iphone could be you know what how many versions of iphone have you got now last 15 years how much progress have you made between each one of those that will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed that that will ultimately be correlated at a high level to how much risk there is a failure in the business long term uh as we wrap up here i want to i want to ask something that i've been thinking about with you a lot. So you've mentioned some type of genetically engineered food.

31:12You've mentioned planes. You've mentioned figure humanoids, these machines that detect guns. You have like a pretty wide range of knowledge. But unlike a lot of people who have a wide range of knowledge, you I've been to your home. I've seen like textbooks at your house on a variety of topics. And and you have a really unique way of learning. You're basically like a human AI. Do you have a framework for learning new things? Learning stuff is always like really challenging for me. I think like I have to first, I think everything like a tree, I have to first build this like trunk of like first order understanding about the topic before I can ever comprehend and remember the limbs and the leaves.

31:57And And so I have to have like a really fundamentally sound understanding of the tree trunk as I look at certain topics. Where do you turn to for that? You just got to like, you know, find this stuff, whether it's Wikipedia papers, like Google searches, you can use GPT-4. Like, can you clearly communicate this topic, whether it's an engineering topic or not, to a 12-year-old sitting on a bar stool? and most people can't do that it's like the skill that most people can't do like even people i work with i have a hard time sometimes understanding what's the update on the on the on the you know this this thing or that thing and it's a skill like you have to learn how to do that same way of like understanding something it's a skill to really boil things down and really truly understand the basic characterization of what's really happening some of the smartest people i know are also the most clear worded folks about a topic.

32:58That's a really good insight. And it probably comes because you're an outsider that got into this stuff when you're older. Maybe, or there's so many different multidisciplinary areas of like software and hardware and like electromagnetics and everything else that needs to be done here that you really need to be able to communicate clearly across several groups. And it's important even here, like we try not to use acronyms and a software purpose person that writes firmware an electromagnetics person that builds like a rotor stator for electric motor like those those folks don't understand those other disciplines generally so they need to communicate with each other as well and they can't be using inside baseball terms electromagnetic work um when like a firmware engineer hasn't spent any time to like you know stator and rotor design for electric rotors so like i think this topic of being able to like communicate really well and understand things really well it's just like super important you have like a pretty strong outlook on life it seems like you you you have uh strong beliefs on um what you want the outcome of your life to be how you want to spend your time which uh people who you've read about has had the biggest influence on that uh philosophy or influenced you the most i think there's like there's been like really great entrepreneurs over time to show a path that this all can be done like steve jobs elon luss These guys are the best at what they do, have been able to show the world really incredible things can be done on the back of persistence and focus.

34:26And I think it's just really incredible. Every time I watch a SpaceX launch or hold an Apple product in my hands, every company in the world has started out as a startup at some point. So I think it's just, I don't know, I think it's very energizing to think that, you know, somebody with enough willpower can actually go out and do really incredible things for the world. And I think that gives me energy every day I wake up and says, you know, eager enough here figure we have like, we haven't done really anything noteworthy today. over two years it's been interesting we have robots and stuff but people have built robots we need to go out now and like prove that we can actually ship really high quality product which is going to take us you know several more years from here but like that's just like a really exciting challenge for us now and it's really hard and everybody that's attempted that at least in robotics commercially has failed in history so but that should be doable and there are people that have gone over this hump in other industries of other very difficult things uh maybe less difficult or more difficult here in history.

35:28And that's just, that should be very energizing for, for us here at Figure and other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things. You're the man. I have this joke. I'm like, uh, cornrows are cool, but not for me. And, uh, that's kind of how I feel about, uh, the way you think where I'm like, I don't know if I can do what you do, but I am really excited and happy that people like you exist. Uh, so thank Thank you for doing everything you're doing. I feel great after talking to you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. All right, that's the pot.

36:12Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

36:42If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC.