AI Robots with Purpose with Jake Loosararian of Gecko Robotics | E1947

0:00There's so much sex appeal to building new things. And like in 10 years, we'll have this really cool new autonomous thing, drone, walking, humanoid that's going to solve all of these problems. But the problem is, there's a lot of issues going on today. And so the approach to solving and using specific robots for specific jobs is actually just to earn the right to begin building really cool robots that are able to do more interesting things. But you got to get the business model right. And the business model has to incentivize and make a CEO or a CFO give a f*** about how useful this industry 4.0 principles and tools are.

0:33Because right now, that's not true. I see this time and time again, where I won't name the AI companies, but these AI companies come in and say, well, completely turn on your head the way you're operating your entire business. And they'll come in for some contract that ends up expiring because it just did not produce. And that's the problem. You think you have all the information and data, but you're building your AI and your solutions off of ground truth that's actually not ground truth. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business.

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1:51Just search for The Next Wave on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. That's The Next Wave. All right, welcome back to another episode of this week in startups. ups. We like to talk about innovation here and AI has been on everybody's minds for the last two years. You know, it's just simply brilliant what AI can do. And we see it improving every week. Of course, there has been this dread of Oh my god, what if AI plus robotics gets put together and we have the Terminator films? The truth is autonomous robots are coming and they will have AI built in. You've probably seen figure or what Elon's working on with Optimus over at Tesla.

2:30This is going to change the world in my belief. And today we have a company that's been working on it for a little while. It's called Gecko Robotics. We have the CEO here. His name is Jay Lusararian. So tell me about the robots you're building. And for those of you not watching This Week in Startups on YouTube, or the video version on Spotify, you can go over to YouTube, just type in This Week in Startups, hit the subscribe button, you'll find this video there under the videos tab. and you can actually see what we're talking about here. Yeah, tell me what you're building with Gecko. Thanks for having me on.

3:03I'm really excited to dive in on one of my favorite topics with robotics and artificial intelligence, how it impacts the world. But I started in college. I started a robotics company at a college when I saw firsthand actually the state and how the physical world that we rely on every single day collapses and isn't always there for you. And this happened at a power plant where I got to see firsthand where power plant was having these massive shutdowns And the best way to stop it was sending a human into a dangerous environment and trying to predict when these built structures, in particular this boiler, was going to fail.

3:36And the best way to do that was sending a human into a dangerous environment. The same year I'd gone there, someone had fallen and died doing this job, sturdy, dangerous, and not typically talked about. So I built a wall climbing robot in college to solve for the decay of critical infrastructure that we care that we rely on so deeply to live our lives every single day. So, you know, 11 years after that, here I am still working on the same critical mission of protecting and helping to build new infrastructure, but more intelligently. So these are purpose designed robots to do very specific tasks.

4:13You're not taking the approach that Elon's taking at Tesla or the figure robot is taking of specifically a humanoid robot. These are robots that are designed for a specific function like climbing up and inspecting a building, correct? The whole premise was, it seems like we don't care that deeply or at least know that much about like the built world that we rely on and that was the the thought you know when i was in college hey we go over a bridge every day um hey rely on power plants we learn manufacturing facilities um ships to carry supplies all around the world um how do we know if those things are are going to be around or there for us um is it the right assumption to believe that the bridge i'm crossing is you know it's going to be structurally sound not going to collapse so that's where you started the journey you said hey infrastructure is the ideal customer profile for your startup and for this product robotics your customer is essentially infrastructure and specifically infrastructure in the united states which for whatever reason we seem to have not allocated enough resources towards yeah it's um you know i in in 2013 when i was in college designing the first robot you know i've read this report it's a 3.34 percent of gdp around the world was spent on fighting corrosion i was like wow that's a crazy three and a half trillion dollar number um i wonder like why that is then you look into you know these uh these interesting reports that show the u.s is that like a d grade in terms of its infrastructure and you know it costs you know trillion dollars just to keep it there um and not to just not to improve it but just to keep it there maintain it yeah maintain it and that's you know regardless of building new things so it started with the critical industries infrastructure but it was mostly this like thought that was wow we seem like we talk as if we know a lot and have a lot of data about how the built world works and how to make it better but that's actually like very far from true for the physical world for example we don't know if a concrete structure like a bridge is going to be is going to be sound and going to be there and how long will it last you know the bridges and infrastructure that we rely on was not built for the kind of like traffic and loads that we currently are demanding today so we're stressing the infrastructure on top of it it was built for you know the golden gate bridge was built at a time when a certain amount of vehicles would go over it a certain amount of weight of those vehicles and obviously uh you know we've induced a lot more usage of that with a lot heavier vehicles so maybe you could show us uh and sportscast one of these robots doing inspections and i know that you're not just doing infrastructure you've got energy defense manufacturing other robots and other verticals you're flying in but i would love to see uh what these robots are and then get into you know the business model uh because it is this week in startups of how you make money with these robots yeah yeah absolutely yeah when i was in college looked around and like i was describing there seemed to be like this world that you know technologists and startups like didn't really pay that much attention to uh it's the world of energy is a world of manufacturing that's the world of defense and public infrastructure and you know i saw i saw this like up close and personally with the power sector and it was just this idea of man we don't really have that much data on the built world and and thus it makes it really hard to know and understand like how to predict how it's going to perform and what you're showing on the screen here is the golden gate bridge i assume a nuclear reactor and then it It looks like a really either another type of bridge and inspectors literally repelling up and down them, which is dangerous and I'm sure quite expensive.

7:50I don't know what those individuals get paid, but they're getting paid half as much as they should. What does a person get paid to repel off of a nuclear power plant or the Golden Gate Bridge? What do they make? A hundred bucks an hour? Fifty bucks an hour? Do you know? You must know. Yeah, it's about. It depends on the level. but it's about in between like 30 and 70 bucks an hour um that's it oh yeah it's probably it's even 30 bucks an hour is 60 000 a year just times about 2000 super low i mean yeah over time you can get a little higher but yeah it's exactly right this is a spherical tank um for example at a oil and gas refinery um but just like this you enter like this world you know like most most like folks who are starting technology companies or in robotics or ai like have never stepped foot at a refinery or don't really know the first thing about structural and material science or what are the hundreds of different types of corrosion instead of steels or instead of concretes.

8:45But these are really important, not just to predict and ensure that we're not suffering from some sort of catastrophic failure, which actually has environmental as well as just functional implications, but also how do you actually modulate how you're operating the infrastructure to actually get more out of the uh let's say the power plant or the refinery while also reducing the amount of greenhouse uh emissions that are being that are being released by this by the company because whenever there's a catastrophic failure of a pipeline guess what a lot of like explosion leads to unfiltered um carbon emitted right into the atmosphere and like the worst environmental you know recorded environmental incident was the nord stream pipe exploding, for example, or, you know, these, these deep water horizon events.

9:31So, ensuring that you don't have these catastrophic failures is actually really important as it relates to zero and those things. But yeah, so the story was 10 years ago in college, and basically came across as a weird problem of power plants having these shutdowns and someone had died. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2. What is SOC 2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC 2 compliant. If you don't have your SOC 2 tight, your sales team can't close major deals.

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10:40Show us the robot. Okay, all right. Show us the robot. We want to see this thing in action. Okay, sounds good. Every founder's got a charming story. Do you have a PR team that helped you craft that? or that's the authentic story? This is me. No, this is me. This is the authentic story. Okay. Yeah. I believe you. The first robot was one that was climbing up a wall and gathering information, visual and ultrasonic. Basically, what we're looking at, what I was looking at 10 years ago was, what is the structural integrity of the pressure vessel? And how do you ensure that you're understanding, just like you're doing a CAT scan or doing a sonogram, you use high-frequency sound wave to look inside of a material without needing to open it up and destroy the so what we're seeing on the screen is a robot that's about the size of a pool cleaner with a tether and it's zipping up and down some pipes and it's open so you can see all the innards of it it looks like an insect crawling along the pipes that's the size of a pool cleaner like i said am i about right the robots yeah it's the size of a briefcase i mean it comes in a couple different uh forms forms but basically yeah because it's upside down and it's gripping is it suction cups magnets what is it doing there so it's climbing up surfaces whether it be an outside of a ship or let's say a some sort of like piping or a dam even we'll use neodymium rare earth magnets arranged in a hallback array and that maximizes pull force into a surface to allow for payloads to be added onto the robots and they're collecting different kinds of data layers one of the data layers for example is this ultrasonics um ultrasonic data layer that's looking at what's the structural integrity corrosion erosion um of the surface to get generalized idea what is the health of this just like you would do like a picture of a belly um using a sonogram test for a pregnancy wow so do humans yeah do this when they're climbing up and down we saw them repelling do they have some device that they do this manually with yeah they do so the best so basically our savior today is joe um joe on a rope but basically it's it's it's these guys these guys are our best our best defense um the guys who are hanging off of off ropes or climbing on scaffolding or on jlgs and they're armed with single probes that you use some gel you squirt the gel on a surface let's say on kilometers of pipeline you'd squirt gel every 10 meters every one meter depending on this the criticality and then you use the ultrasonic sensor and you record the waveform and then because you know if you understand the speed of sound through that material you can actually understand what's the thickness of that material and then you could use um and then you record that down on a piece of paper or in an excel sheet and basically that's the way that we understand how the works they're taking a sample but you're taking continuous so you have the full picture it's possible in fact probable that the humans are going to miss most issues am i correct that they're going to miss most or some they're going to miss um a fair amount or there's actually human errors it relates to interpreting the the waveforms but there's other kinds of techniques that you either are or are not using so visual is one just like hey this thing looks like it's leaking that's bad um or um with around like welds like you have to do certifications of welds on critical pipelines for example and you're using x-rays um interpreting the x-ray is actually pretty difficult and um it's also super dangerous because you're using something that can cause cancer if you're not appropriately operating it.

14:13So we actually will put on the robots something called phased array, which is basically ultrasound for just like hundreds of different sound waves going into like a very small area. You can apply basically these different payloads onto the robots to look at erosion, look at cracking, look at generalized erosion. But then you can also add other kinds of information. You can use electromagnetics to look at what's the damage over top of some substrates that you have to remove some sort of insulation. So anyway, what you're trying to solve for the customer is how do you reduce the downtime or the time I'm spending not making my product?

14:53And so that's what you're trying to first help the customer understand is how do you ensure that you are solving this problem of ensuring that there's not going to be some catastrophic event? but limiting the amount of time you're not making your your product and so the robots are going into these like missile silos for example or on top of flight decks on destroyers um it's climbing inside of power plants at boilers um it's going on to dams using suction um and adhesion and um there but basically we've we've gone from like what you just saw in terms of the robot climbing up a wall looking at corrosion and erosion um and we would now like combine that into a bunch of different robots um some of which are doing this climbing uh some of which are using um i just like you know drones that are looking at using photogrammetry to understand what is like in general um let me do a quick analysis of potential damaged areas over like large uh geographical area or maybe uh integrating like um a walking dog or and then and then um you can use fixed sensors to continually monitor you know what this reminds me of this reminds me of the prenovo a full body scan which a lot of doctors will say hey you don't need it it's going to cause you to find things nodules little things growths in your body you're not going to know what they are and you might panic and get anxiety and i'm like well wait but what if it is something and you live longer because you found you know some god forbid cancer or tumor early or something with your brain i would much rather have that therefore you are going to inspect these things and have an image in time and then you can look for the deltas and what's changed between the two imaging so if you were to do this every year on the golden gate bridge what would be the frequency that the golden gate bridge or you know a submarine should have this done to it so we're actually working on i'm so i'm in pittsburgh pennsylvania right now which is uh um which where i you know so i started the company did three and a half years of bootstrapping it down to like a hundred bucks mega count, ended up choosing to go to YC opposed to an acquisition offer, went out to California against all investors like Desires, came back to Pittsburgh, close to customers, was able to grind closer to there.

17:09In Pittsburgh though, it's interesting, there's so many bridges. It was where we, 6, 9 % of the world's steel was built here. And now it's kind of reinventing itself in terms of like this robotics and AI hub. But what's exciting is actually, it's actually a really great state as it relates to the political support to try and utilize technologies like geckos to do things like create um the uh the most sophisticated bridge um evaluation infrastructure process there's like you know we're we're uh we're still working with the governor actually on on an initiative with bridges but to answer your question yeah how often you got to inspect a bridge you want to be able to look at a bridge you would you'd want to look at it with uh a deep scan like we would do like a full health like here's exactly what's going on with the entire bridge maybe like once three five years you don't want to like look at it every year you actually but though like once you understand um the general the general health um similar to how you would do like with a human um you would you would then um use fixed sensors that are enabled by wi-fi or 5g and then those are constantly updating a digital twin and um and that actually like this explain what a digital twin is for people so digital twin is it's represented in software it's three-dimensional you can manipulate it but it needs to update itself so it needs to be continually um updating in with information whether information is the health of the asset or how the asset is performing so an example for a bridge might be a real world example you've come across might be yes a real world example is a um a tank um so a tank at let's say a pulp and paper manufacturing place, the place where we all get our toilet paper.

18:46So we have a really big contract with this company that's interested in extending the useful life of their tanks. But then what they want to do is instead of, you know, the tank is 20 years old, you have to, you know, it's past its useful life. So we have to build a new one. And we come in and say, actually, you don't need to. We'll take, you know, this tank plus 50 to other tanks that look similar to this. And we'll tell you how to make it last 10 years longer or even 20 years longer. We'll tell you exactly what to repair. And Jason, we're actually, because we now have this information on the health and structure, structural integrity of the world's, some of the world's critical infrastructure, like 500 ,000 assets, that's where we use AI.

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20:59I'm assuming you can show me one or? Yeah, because this is fascinating. you inspect this container right um and let's say it's got you didn't give the exact example of what you would continuously monitor in the digital spin but i'm assuming maybe there's some area where you think it might get fractured or be compromised and so you put a sensor on that permanently yeah that sends a contiguous continuous reading to let you know if it's getting worse and at one point you think it's going to explode or crack or fail which would be the equivalent of like in a human body just monitoring some you know tumor that might be benign or might not be benign am i correct am i that's right framing here that's right but you also okay so this oriented towards the business model too it's like you know we started building robots and they're really exciting cool um what we ended up finding was that just building robots and using the robot as a service we don't actually sell the robots we're going out to site with the robots and getting data and then giving it to customer got it what we ended up finding was that That wasn't a model that actually oriented towards value creation.

22:03So we were creating outsized returns, in some cases, like nine. And there was even a case of a half a billion dollar value creation because we stopped this crazy explosion at this refinery, the biggest refinery in the US, because they had gotten bolting information from the guy in the rope, Joe. What we ended up doing was charging them a couple hundred thousand bucks for this. And that was crazy because how outsized the value creation was. So what we ended up also finding was there was the lack of ability to take action on the data to improve how the customer was operating their assets. So let me walk you through that.

22:38So what we'll do is we'll have a suite of different robotics that we offer and work with the customer to try and solve for around a problem. In this case, it was how do I manage 50 of my most important pressure vessels and tanks for this customer? And about five years ago, we started developing Cantilever, which is our enterprise software. So when a customer buys Gecko, they're buying enterprise software, and that's called cantilever. And what they're getting from that is a solution oriented towards a very specific problem for that customer set. So we actually not only had to become experts on robotics and AI and software, we also had experts on our customers' actual problem, both upstream and downstream.

23:14I'll take you through an example of a... Which I'm assuming you got by asking them questions in customer interviews and saying, well what are you going to do with this data we've now given you the data and they told you hey well we need to make this decision when to retire this tank and then it became your business becomes not selling a robot or selling an inspection your business is now extending the life of tanks that is one of the important value outcomes yes and but it also was like in the beginning like i had to like spend all my days and time at the customer sites and just like living and understanding their problems like better than they could um and did that for not just power plants but you know manufacturing facilities like places that are making steel or places that are making aluminum uh places that are refining oil that are uh that are operating hydroelectric dam like you we have to end up going into these these industries and understanding exactly what they're trying to produce and from our first principles what goes into both the like good and poor outcomes and then also understanding where they get um where they are getting value and can pull value like what from a regulation standpoint it gets really complicated so so for this customer we call this technique by the way in the business a bear hugging uh so when you have a customer who's like a key customer yeah you give them that big bear hug which means you get on location you spend time with them i learned this from a company we're investors in called density.io that does people counting and when you are on site you will overhear things you know and you're going to have the customer just through the course of hanging out with them give you insights that you're not going to get in a 20-minute customer interview you might get them but in all likelihood just hanging out at the facility or maybe having even a drink or having lunch with folks at some point you're going to have these epiphany moments yeah then that's what happened for you yeah 100 but but also like you can codify that into a business model so So our Series A investor was Founders Fund.

25:12Oh, wow. Trey Stevens is our partner and board member there. But what was interesting is while I was... We took a trip to the UAE in 2020. It was literally right before COVID. We almost got stuck actually in Oman, I think it was. We ended up just talking through Palantir in the early days and how he's helped set up the Palantir office in the Middle East. We ended up talking deeply about forward deployed engineering. And I was like, wow, this is so cool that they have taken this approach, forward deployed engineering, as you send out your engineers on deployments as an implementation team of the software you sold.

25:50And then you work alongside customers to understand their problems to help create the software modules that are oriented towards the solutions that the customer is actually trying to solve. Because in reality, when you deal with these industries, they're so complex, these problems are so complex, and they are so hesitant to either communicate or even to talk about the different problems that exist in these Manhattan-sized environments, like the size of refineries, the size of Manhattan. And so there's so many different things, like variable frequency drives that need to be looked at and wrench turned in this way and all these nuances.

26:27And this is actually one of the big issues as well is that these people that we rely on every single day are completely... They're reaching this point of phasing out, whether they're dying or retiring, and there's a huge knowledge gap. So anyway, they began to think about what if actually we took the early learnings of forward deploying roboticists in combination in concert with forward deployed software engineers to actually build a vertically integrated stack of data collection of various types and a lot of it. So we call them data layers, and then pull all that into a single source of truth, a data warehouse, and then deliver the modules and software to solve customer problems, but do so located actually alongside customers because, you know, you have to convert someone into using a different system, you actually have to help build it alongside of them.

27:22yeah and the current system was probably pencil and paper pictures and you know stuff scattered across disparate systems i'm assuming yeah that's right um and inconsistent like you know per site so like marathon you know they might have um seven refineries and each of those refineries operates completely differently because they're both producing you know 20 billion dollars each or something like that you didn't show us the actual digital twin let's get it make sure we show that yeah of course yeah so fascinating what you're doing it's easy in an interview like this to get sidetracked into all the different nuggets of what you're discovering as a founder but i did want to see the digital twin concept okay let's do it yeah so you start with like uh okay what problem are you trying to solve well we're trying to solve for um you know increasing life extension or understanding like how to fix like 50 tanks and manage all right sounds good so the outcomes we were able to do the software i'll just skip that to the end basically uh customer will send we'll say like okay customer i need i need your metadata as it relates to the structures that we're going to go out and try to evaluate.

28:20So they'll send us the metadata, and then we'll incorporate that inside of cantilever as we build out their profile. And so we're delivering using just drawings, you know, what is a very rudimentary digital twin. And so this is an example of a 3D representation of a tank using the dimensions of the customer. Then you send out your robot fleet. And so the robots go out there, and they're climbing all over these structures, and they're trying to evaluate what is the health of this tank, and doing so as quickly as possible while the tank is actually in operation. So you don't have to shut the thing down.

28:52And then you understand what the health of that structure is. This one was pretty bad. Red is good, for example. Green is bad. And it literally pixelated because as the robot's climbing, it's pulsing the area it's climbing over hundreds of times every single inch. And then you can either look at what's the mean in terms of how structurally sound or how healthy that area is, like an inch by inch grid. or you can look at the data in other ways. But you want to label all that data set because it'll be very helpful as it relates to what kind of corrosion is going on. And for whatever reason here, when you're looking at this tank shell, the bottom 25 % of the tank is green.

29:30Yeah, so the bottom is actually super healthy is what you're seeing. So the green is healthy. Red is not healthy. Yeah. All right. AI is moving really fast and we're seeing it in all aspects of our lives, in business, personally. And you know what? it's okay to be confused by all of this. I found a great podcast for you that's perfect at helping you navigate all things AI. It's called The Next Wave, and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The hosts Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands both have an insane level of AI expertise because they both founded and invested in AI companies. So think of The Next Wave as your personal chief AI officer.

30:10That's right. Serving up fresh perspectives, industry insights, tools, tips, and tricks on how to use AI to grow your business. That's the most important part, tactical advice to actually put AI to use in your business. Check out the episode, The Large Language Model Race with Peter Wang, founder of The Neuron. He covers the latest AI developments, trends, and research, including a fresh take on where AI and your creativity collide, its impact on industries like music and entrepreneurship, the balance between innovation and ethics and the rising capabilities of llms so here's a call to action super easy i want you to go search for the next wave on youtube or your favorite podcasting app and subscribe and discover how to leverage ai to unlock new opportunities for your business brought to you by the hubspot youtube network so the base is healthy but the top 75 for some reason is really weathered i don't know if that's caused by wind and that or the ground is painted or covered why what would cause that weird pattern so what we what we found is like it it's very correlated with how you operate the tank um and so this is a really important tank and they were typically filling their tank halfway up um and this is like a very common method you know in in fuel storage tanks for example you're filling you're filling over fuel storage tanks if you're exon like 40 percent of the way up because you just don't want everything to like collapse and um you have to you like a bunch of uh oil into a river somewhere but which is actually not good because you're actually destroying the asset um in a certain way and you're reducing the capacity you can run at um and how much oil and uh so they were scared of a disaster so they made a decision that increased the likelihood of a disaster so good intent bad outcome that's right but also you know for one of our customers um adnock which is the um the uae's national oil company and we just signed a 30 million deal with them.

32:02But the big thing they're trying to solve for is how do I produce more oil per day, barrels per day, go from three and a half million to five million barrels per day. But what we're trying to also show is that you can reduce the potential carbon emissions while also increasing your throughput if you just operate your assets more intelligently. So we'll get into exactly what that means. But you don't have to actually build new things necessarily, which is a huge deal. Then you send in robots that can do evaluations, again, while the tank is in operations in a submerged way. And so again, you're looking at what's the structural integrity of the floor because the floor is actually one of the most compromised areas.

32:43And so the green, again, is good. The red is bad. And you want to try and evaluate where to fix things. And then you use LIDAR to look at what's the depression of the tank because it's really heavy. And so it'll begin to depress in certain locations, which can also lead to a bunch of issues. So LIDAR is really important. And there's different kinds of rules and regulations that different bodies set out. And then we'll create these repair plans. And so what that's trying to do is help the customer understand how much capital to deploy, and then how many years you get from the life extension. So what we'll do is we'll use the data that we're collecting from this tank, the other 50 tanks at that site, and then also the thousands of other assets that look just like this to try and evaluate where are the areas that you want to fix right now to extend the useful life of the asset.

33:29But then once you do that, you have to send it back to the real world. So it goes physical, digital, physical. So it has to be an output where there's an action being taken from the insights that digital twin is actually helping to be used by folks that are welding and doing repairs, for example, or uh or like trying to make like an actual like functional decision around how to operate the asset um in this case the tank but then we'll install fixed sensors that are pinging the digital these are those black little circles around the compromised area one of the rings of this you can think of it like a barrel is compromised so you're putting sensors on it that tell you what it'll look at the the structural integrity um so it'll ping you every day because corrosion actually is doesn't funny that doesn't happen linearly it happens typically um in these like weird moments of large decay over short periods of time typically that's related to like what kind of chemical is in the um let's say the into the tank that may be out and abnormal or maybe there's some sort of you know it's really windy and rainy like that month or there's a lot of sodium in the air and that's like causing a lot of like increased corrosion uh if you're like by a gulf for example it also like people say how did it happen slowly then all at once yeah it's slowly degrading and then some event happens and all at once it gets compromised is generally aviation bankruptcy and structural failures all seem to go in that direction suddenly slowly then all at once that's exactly right and uh there are some root causes that you can begin to understand so you at a shipment of like new fuel or a new chemical um and that you know there might be actually a compromise in the quality of that yeah this is actually an issue as well with you manufacture new things like windmills are falling over in germany right now because of poor steel quality um and you know so like you know you ended up you end up having this like issue where you might be getting like really inefficient process um for some reason but you can actually tell when that inefficiency is occurring or when there's like imbalance of chemicals in your um you know in your processing um batch that you want to be able to react to and that's like something that's that's not predictable it's reactive people started coming to you saying hey we were installing this new thing we want to have a day one inspection so we have a benchmark and so if it was installed improperly we can you know before we make the final payment to the construction group we want you to do the inspection of the work done has that started to happen it has and actually has happened with um the 132 billion dollar columbia class um nuclear sub program um as well as um other sub um sub work so we're working with the navy actually on um new builds and manufacturing and so what's happening is when they're in dry dock so inspecting them while they're being built actually so what ended up happening was um so on the on the government side the defense side schedule adherence is like a really big problem as well as like if you're paying$132 billion for new subs, 12 new ones, you want to make sure your, you know, your tech dollars are actually being used for building good things with high integrity.

36:35So we're actually building out digital twins of the sub as it's being constructed and looking at the quality of, of welds, because that just recently caused like a six month delay in a process where they had to take, take sections of the sub apart. So anyway, this is like priority one right now, you know, on the, on the, on the manufacturing of new subside. And then we also do some work with the navy we just got an um yeah we've got a pretty a pretty large you have a digital twin of the sub you have a digital twin of the battleship uh not that i can show you but um but we're doing this as well with um actually it's an interesting program i can show you real quick but um we're beginning to use the same kind of tech philosophy as it relates to concrete so what we're doing for the u.s air force is um we're sending our robot uh you know different form factor robot with um leveraging the stack that we've developed to climb up nuclear missile silos so there's 450 in the u.s and what's going on right now with the sentinel program is about 125 dollars are being billion dollars are being deployed to upgrade the cold war era um nuclear deterrent system of you um of um of these icbms in silo but what's happening is the concrete's into decay and crumble it's actually causing these um and in oklahoma there was this oxidation explosion actually one of the icb missile silos which you don't want oxidation explosions inside of a nuclear chamber so yeah generally speaking explosions plus nuclear weapons not a good combination not a good combination so we're um we've got soul sourced uh on on work it'll be about 250 million dollar um project but it's um but what you're looking at is we want to understand there's a steel liner and then a concrete liner like five feet of concrete you want to understand what's the structural integrity of the concrete and where all the issues are occurring, and then what's the structural integrity of the steel.

38:26And then you can figure out, okay, now I can create a plan to fix all this stuff. Amazing. So anyway, there's these interesting applications in relation to new builds, as you're referring to. And you're... That's the example. Yeah, no, it's incredible. And I know you have in the deck the destroyer as well. And I guess looking at the hull of that, is all of this going to culminate in permanent robotics and permanent sensors being put onto these things or is that cost prohibitive in some way or just too bulky and too much maintenance in and of itself because based on what you're learning yeah maybe the sensors should just be built into everything in the same way i know this is like a minor analogy here but you know like air tags, the act of finding your stuff is going to be built into other devices.

39:17I think like the Apple remote controls have air tags built into them, essentially. And so it does seem to me that based on all your learning and the stuff, man, they should just be putting these sensors in a lot of different places permanently or have these robots permanently installed because the robots currently have an inspector working with them, correct? They have to be supervised. They're not like, we're not at the point where like these robots just exist in a little cabin and go up every week and inspect and go back like a droid in star wars right we're not at that level yet no and i don't know if you need to be um actually you want to do what you said which is once you build something you want to understand what's the health of that structure so jake what i what i believe is like in the next like five to seven years like you won't be able to build new things without first understanding that the health of that asset on its construction and you create a digital twin um that is able to be updated as well with sensors that you build into these structures especially structures that are really important like the nuclear sub and what you want to do is instead of the sub saying it's going to last, you know, 40 years, going to last 50 years, that actually can be doubled.

40:14So you want to be able to, you know, you want to make sure that you can create something that can be updated every time that you're doing some turnaround. And then eventually maybe even don't need to spend 18 months in dry dock to do an evaluation of the health of the structure, which is currently the state of a lot of our Navy. So like a third of our Navy is currently in dry dock, trying to do its maintenance cycles, which means that a third of our Navy is not out there patrolling the seas and ensuring that conflict is being deterred so it's actually a pretty large problem that um secretary nabby del turro and i have talked about like a lot actually is just the schedule adherence and also understanding um what is the state of the structures as we build them and how do we ensure that we're having in creating these living uh models um of these um assets you could cut that dry dock time in all these cases down by 50 you think ultimately 90 well the goal should be actually like don't spend any time um if you can help it continuous monitoring so that if you're inspecting a battleship or a submarine you could have it at the surface as a submarine obviously the the ship is already at the surface you could have underwater robots inspecting the hull while it's out in the ocean yeah you can i mean there's like a two percent gain in efficiency if you can like scrub a hull while you're like um while a ship is going from like one place to the other it's because of like you know barnacle and and build up on the on the hull of a ship it's there's a bunch of things you can do to improve the efficiencies of existing critical infrastructure but i think the big thing we should be orienting to is like how do you and how do you not be so reactive and and incentivize a model which is currently incentivized for time materials right so whenever you're doing whenever you have like these large maintenance primes they're incentivized to have the maintenance cycle last as long as it can possibly last right show me an incentive i'll show you the outcome exactly the longer it's in dry dock the more of the the meters running right you are a big threat to maintenance companies because you'll tell them you only need to do maintenance on this 20 the other 80 is fine well i think it's not a not a threat it's like a it's it's it's orienting the outcome towards like improved performance and so it's a it's a how do you actually you know you know it's just like power by the hour was like the old rolls royce model it's like how do you um get paid for the amount of uptime you're producing that should be the orientation it should be like you know that's what should be the incentive is how do you keep this thing in service not how much service do you do and that's really hard to do because then you have an incentive the other way hey we got to keep this thing flying and maybe you put something up there in the air that shouldn't be flying and should be in dry talk and should be inspection and what you're trying to do is get to the truth and the truth shall make you free if you actually have the truth you don't need to if you can get to ground truth here first principles you're gonna not have to try to game an incentive but also yeah exactly but you when you build new things like think about it this is the way where i get excited about when you when you build new things um you know you want to be able to learn from the experience of the you know billions of iterations of that thing being in you know in use every single day we don't do that right now we don't you know we can model as much as we want about how to build the best sub or how to build the best destroyer how to build the best refinery or new hydrogen conversion power plant, but we haven't learned from what's the impact of the equipment in operations and use.

43:36That's what we have to figure out because you can't build new infrastructure unless you're learning from how the old ones are working. And this is why it's so important. There's so much sex appeal to building new things. And in 10 years, we'll have this really cool new autonomous thing, drone, walking, humanoid, that's going to solve all of these problems. But the problem is, there's a lot of issues going on today. And so the approach to solving and using specific robots for specific jobs is actually just to earn the right to begin building really cool robots that are able to do more interesting things.