Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The Rise of Humanoid Robotics w/ Brett Adcock | EP #57

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

In this episode, Peter and Brett discuss the future of humanoid robots, predicting that there could be up to 10 billion humanoids on Earth in the coming decades. Adcock shares his vision for creating autonomous general-purpose humanoids that can be inserted into the economy to perform physical labor, making it a choice rather than a necessity. 07:32 | Humanoid Robots: Near Future 19:10 | A New Humanoid Robot Age 58:09 | Unlocking Humanoid Robot Potential Brett Adcock is an American technology entrepreneur and the founder of Figure, an AI robotics company building a general-purpose humanoid robot. Previously, Brett founded Archer Aviation, an urban air mobility company that IPO’d at $2.7B. He also founded Vettery, a machine learning-based talent marketplace that was acquired for $110M. Check out Figure _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover.  Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic – a 2-in-1 probiotic and prebiotic that supports digestive health, gut immunity, skin health, heart health, and more. Try Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic, and make sure to use the code MOONSHOTS at checkout to get a 25% discount. https://seed.com/partner/moonshots _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's poutine mixed with kimchi, maple syrup on Halo Halo, Montreal-style bagels eaten in brandon manitoba here we take the best from one side of the world and mix it with the other and you can shop that whole world right here in our aisles find it all here with more ways to save at real canadian superstore goldman sachs predicts robots could generate 15154 billion in revenue in the next 15 years. That was their number. That's impressive. It's going to be a big deal.

We think there's an opportunity to put up to 10 billion humanoids on the planet. That's amazing. 10 billion humanoids on planet Earth. You'll see humanoids in warehousing, manufacturing, factories. Yeah, so the robot is up and it's working now it's working today call it over come on come on over really trying to build a humanoid to just insert into the economy and hopefully do really useful and good work for humanity this is the right decade to make that happen and um i think over the next year or two

we'll hopefully demonstrate that. Hey everybody, welcome to the Moonshots podcast. My next guest is Brett Adcott. Brett is a serial successful entrepreneur. He was the founder and past CEO of Archer, an eVTOL flying car company. And since then, he's been building an extraordinary humanoid robot company called Figure. We're going to jump into the humanoid robot marketplace. How soon you can expect these robots.

Expect there may be as many as billions more humanoid robots than humans on the planet in the next few decades. We're going to see them. Can you buy them? How much are they? How are they going to impact your life and the world? Check it out with an extraordinary moonsonshot entrepreneur, Brett Adcock. Let's dive into the episode. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with Brett Adcock, who is an extraordinary entrepreneur. If you don't know his name, you know his companies and you're going to know his name

real soon. So Brett, a pleasure to have you, pal. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So first of all, I don't want to go into too much detail, but I love that you took on one of the key challenges that we've talked about since the beginning of tech, which is flying cars or EV tolls, electric vertical takeoff or landing. I love the old saying, when Peter Thiel said, we asked for flying cars and all we got were 140 characters. Well, electric vertical takeoff or landing. You know, I love the old saying, you know, when Peter Thiel said, we asked for flying cars and all we got were 140 characters. Well, we've got Archer

delivering vehicles very shortly. So congrats on that. And when I heard that you were becoming the CEO of a new company called Figure and humanoid robotics, I said, oh, hey, that's the second option. When people talk about we're living in the future, flying cars and humanoid robots are the two sort of signposts that tell you we've arrived. So full disclosure, everybody, my venture fund,

Bolt Capital, is an investor in Brett's newest company called Figure. And let's jump in. So what is Figure? Let's begin there. Yeah. Well, first, and let's jump in. So what is FIGURE? Let's begin there. Yeah. Well, first, thanks for having me on. So FIGURE is an AI robotics company designing an autonomous general purpose humanoid. So a humanoid is a robot that has some of the similar characteristics of a human. We have two legs, two arms, hands. And our goal is over time to put as many humanoids as humans on the planet to make physical labor a choice. I love that. So if I were going to ask your moonshot, since we're talking about moonshots and moonshot entrepreneurs, and you're a serial moonshot entrepreneur here, which is pretty cool. Very few of those on the planet. How would you describe your moonshot, your target?

Yeah, we hope, I mean, we look at the world today and feel like most of the world was designed for humans. We have like in the physical world, like a human operating system. I'm going to leave this door that has a handle. I'm going to grab with my human hands. We have tools, shelves at a warehouse are designed for humans to interact with. So we feel that if there's a general purpose interface to this physical world, it could be a substantial, or basically substantial benefit to humanity

doing all this physical labor that's happening in the world. So we believe that over time, we should be able to solve some of these really important problems in the labor force, problems in doing work for companies, helping out at home, caring for the elderly. And our goal over time would be is put, we think there's an opportunity to put up to 10 billion humanoids on the planet. Oh, yeah. That's amazing. 10 billion humanoids on planet Earth. So when do you... Let's go there for a second. If you had to guess how many humanoid robots there will be on planet Earth by 2030 or 2040, what kind of growth are we going to see there? I think over the next couple of decades, we're really going to be volume manufacturing limited

in how much supply we can get of humanoids into the market. I think if we look at a very long term, three to four or five decades, I think every human's going to want a humanoid. Much like you have a car or phone. I think there'll be one in every home. I think there'll be billions in the labor market doing all the work that is dangerous, monotonous, and boring for humans to do today. I believe over time we'll colonize space with humanoids. We'll care for the elderly. So I think certainly over a long enough period where we have time to volume manufacture, I think there'll be billions of humanoids. of humanoids. And then in the near term, we're going to be constrained by how well the performance of the humanoids can be and how reliable they can be in the market. And I think we're really working on that problem now in earnest and with the goal, hopefully, with the next 24 months of demonstrating our robot into actual real life applications. I can't wait. I want to. There you go. So many questions. We'll get into it.

In success, as the cost of manufacturing these reduces and the volume increases, do you have a vision of what the cost of a fully functional humanoid robot might get down to? Yeah. I think you look back over time of any of the consumer product or vehicle, there's a really high correlation to price and manufacturing volumes. You really want to get up on the experience curve, which is basically every doubling of manufacturing volumes, your prices can fall or costs can fall by 20, 30%. So price really is in a lot of ways a real function of how much volume you're really getting out the door. I think over the longterm, you look at this like first order of this,

like there's roughly a thousand parts in our humanoid today. It's like an electric car might have anywhere from like maybe 10,000 parts, be four or 5,000 pounds. We have 150 pound humanoid with thousand parts. I think the cost of this should be less than like a cheaper electric vehicle in my mind um mostly dominated by the actuator basically motor and sensor costs and compute costs on the robot and so just to throw some numbers out there like if it costs 30k for a figure robot and if you were going to lease it versus buy it you can imagine having a you know a lease payment of 500 bucks a month for your robot and that's amazing um you know and i imagine a future in which these robots are sort of sitting there on demand like like go run these errands, go do this, go do that. And it's,

how, I'm going to ask one time point and then we'll come back to it. How long do you think before I can buy one and put one in my home? I think obviously factory settings are going to be the first location, but is that, is that this decade? I certainly feel like, as you said, the first use cases will be in areas that are more constrained and lower veritability. So factories, manufacturing, things that basically are just much more structured in nature than the home. That'll help us get cost down, safety up. We have a whole AI data pipeline we need to go build out for their manipulation and high-level behaviors and perception policies. But I think we're probably end of decade, early next decade before we're starting to see early life of humanoids in homes helping out. And I think it's just going to take some time. We need a lot of maturity across the product that we're going to do through the corporate labor market. that we're going to do through the corporate labor market? Safety as well. You know, I live here in Santa Monica, and as I'm walking about on Main Street,

I'll see these little what they call Coco robots. They're six-wheeled robots that are rolling down, delivering six packs of, you know, Diet Coke or burgers. And, you know, at first they're an oddity as you see them, and people are taking photos, and then you ignore them as they're walking by. And it's going to be interesting to see humanoid robots sort of enter the live, work, play universe that we're in. And there'll be like strange oddities. And then

just like, I guess, the Star Wars universe where they're just every place of all different shapes and forms. Is that what you see? It's funny you mentioned that because we have a lot, we have a big presence of folks here from Boston Dynamics at the figure team. And by the way, are we looking in the back here? So those of you who are watching this on YouTube, is that your factory floor back there? Yeah. So we have basically an office here in South San Francisco Bay. I'll give you a little quick tour. Sure. But we're about 50 people or or so and um yeah we're based here in south san francisco so we have a facility i'm so excited to come visit yeah so um it'd be great to have you yeah uh so so uh well yeah what i was mentioning before is uh we have a couple folks from boston

dynamics here uh that have mentioned that you know wait till the robots walk around enough and stuff and it's not going to be as exciting because everything that happens now like you know the ankle rolls and we're just like oh we're watching it the robot just took first steps and started walking a few months ago and we're like the whole company's surrounding watching what's going on and um you know just it's such a it's such a spectacular thing to see robots in the office doing really useful things that um the novelty still surely hasn't worn off with me yet. Are you a dad? Do you have kids?

Yeah. So I have a two and a five-year-old. So it probably feels a little bit like that early stage of toddlerhood. Like, look, look what it just did. Amazing. That is so fun i used to build robots when i was at mit as and just having them not smash into the wall they were a little just roller they were supposed to map the room out in units of their own length and so forth but the electromagnetic noise would

always hit the circuitry and they'd go whizzing off in some direction it's come a long way you know the last few podcasts brett that I've done have been in the field of AI. And I know that you're developing your own AI there. And I'd love to talk about that a little bit. Because I think one of the things that makes humanoid robots possible is the AI capabilities we have now. But there's another part of the conversation I'd like to go into, which is well that having a physical instantiation of AIs in a robot, I think is going to be an interesting part of AI's evolution, right? An AI that's in a box or just looking through a camera or speaker is very different than

an AI that's able to actually go and interact with the world. And there's a lot of individuals who feel like it's the embodiment of an AI that's going to make it ultimately sentient or conscious. I don't know if that conversation takes place there at Figure It All. I believe in the limit here, we'll have the ability to make hopefully a substantial impact into AGI. I think there's this outstanding question that we're all debating now in 2023 is if there's enough words on the internet to train next per word prediction language models to get us to, you know, like real, like, you know, intelligence. you know, like real, like, you know, intelligence.

And if that answer ultimately turns into, you know, we're not able to do it. And I think the longer, but the surest path is through humanoid robots that can ingest human data online and then use vision language models to do basically yeah. To ultimately interact with the environments and to ultimately make progress on the AGI fronts. Yeah, I call it poking at the world and seeing what happens and learning through doing, right? There's a very famous, and I don't know it well enough to do it justice, when Helen Keller

was learning language, right? It was through her tactile sense, through interaction with the world and her embodiment in the world that allowed her to become sentient in that sense. Otherwise, she'd be living in a world devoid of data to a large degree. And so I definitely see that.

The word, the name Figure, I'm curious, was the origin there? You could have had a lot of different names for the company. Where did you choose that? Yeah, so I've been pretty thoughtful over my last three companies, starting Vetteri, Archer, and Figure, to really think about the name the name, the brand and,

um, you know, setting up even the basic stuff around the brand around the mission, vision values. But, um, so we, we,

I basically spent the first nine months building the brand as well as a team and the product here. So, uh, if funny enough, when we started, we were, I was like,

I just told the lawyers, like put a placeholder in for the C Corp. Uh, it being called Adcock AI Inc. I was thinking maybe 90 days later we'll change this and nobody will notice, but it happened to be we hired 40 people with, you're joining this Adcock AI Inc., which was really weird. Um, but we, we spent a tremendous time on the, on the name. We really wanted something that was, uh, easy to say, easy to pronounce, very unique in the category, somewhere we can build a lot of brand presence around. And, um, there's something about the human figure that we really, um, uh, like really aspire to. And we thought this name was something we could really own a lot that had a lot of depth to it.

Um, so we ultimately, you know, we ultimately, uh, called the company figure. Um, and, um, and so, so far it's been great. We've, we've, we came out of stealth in March and, uh, the feedback so far has been really good. And, uh, you know, a lot of the focus we have over the next like year or two now will be like product development milestone focus. So hopefully what people see over the next year or two now will be product development milestone focus. So hopefully what people see over the next year or two would be a pretty substantial amount of product development for the humanoid robot. So with AI systems, low-level controls,

and ultimately showing the robot can actually do useful real-world things. So I'm going to get into a little bit later, your advice for entrepreneurs want to take big moonshots like you did in Archer and like you've done in figure because, uh, you know, it means raising a bunch of money. It means getting an extraordinary team. And one of the things I commend you for, uh, is the team you pulled together and figure it's, you know, when we ran through it, it was like, wow, that's a rock star team. And then it means being willing to run fast, fail, recover, and keep iterating and having enough capital to do that.

So I'll come back to that a little bit and get your advice for entrepreneurs who want to follow in your footsteps. Let's talk about the actual robot one second. I've got the stats in front of me. who want to follow in your footsteps. Let's talk about the actual robot one second. I've got the stats in front of me, and I am curious, its height is five foot six inches? Yeah.

Okay, well, I'm about five, four and a half, so I can almost see eye to eye for it, but it's like you didn't make it six foot or six five or five foot. Is this like, what's the average height and comfortable to, you know, humans don't find scary, can still reach in the top shelf. How do you think about the height? Yeah, there's a very laborious process we went through to get to the height because

there's like two, like there's like kind of almost two divergent things happening here. One is kind of from a physics perspective, you really want the height probably smaller than 5'6". You want basically, you really want the amount of power of the robot steering to be as low as possible, which means you want the lever arms or the extremities to be as short as possible. Yeah. You don't want like, think about it, you don't want a huge arm holding a bunch of weight. It means like there's so much more power needed given the length and distance there of that lever arm. So you really want everything shorter and closer to the ground.

And also when you're false, survivability is much better. Like little kids are so close to the ground. When they fall, they're fine. So I think, you know, that's physics is pushing you one way. And then separately, the commercial market, which is like, you know,

human rights are going in and grabbing things and reaching over shelves and reaching up high and down low. They really want like these really long arms. So you can reach across and grab the bin and turn it around and articulate it. So from a commercial side, they want like this inspector gadget type robot that can like, you know, reach really high and have superhuman strength here or there. So it's really this balance. We think five, six is probably plus or minus a few inches of where we'll want to be commercially. I think it was a pretty good first-order approximation on the robot.

And I think the next-generation robot that we're designing now that'll be out this year is almost the same as our kite. You know, it's interesting because you don't want to make the arms extra long like a because it causes a uh a canny valley type experience so you want you want these to actually look humanoid is that true i think there's you know if you look at the uncanny valley and the research around that like as you get really closer to human looks like there's almost like this trust that builds until this like until there's a point really close to a human look that gets really scary and terrifying. So our view is that we're not trying to look like a human. We're not trying to put facial

expressions in our chin or noses and ears. We want to just ultimately have the human capabilities in terms of manipulation and locomotion capabilities and things like that, because that's what's necessary to interact with the human operating system world that we talked about earlier. Meaning we don't have to change anything if we look like a human. We can just go in and do all the warehouse work that nobody wants to do, all the manufacturing work,

go cook at your home, do the things without any altering of the environment, which is really what humanoids are for, right? You're really trying to build a humanoid to just insert into the economy and hopefully do really useful andids are for, right? You're really trying to build a humanoid to just insert into the economy and hopefully do really useful and good work for humanity. Yeah, but you also don't want to make it look so strange,

right? There's some comfort in thinking that it looks like humans, proportionally looks like humans. It doesn't have like a third arm or extra long appendages and so forth. You know, it's, if we could, without diving into it, how many humanoid robot companies are out there? Everybody has heard of Optimus and hopefully now has heard about Figure. What would you guess? Are there like a dozen or

a few decently funded? Yeah, maybe like half a dozen, like pretty serious, maybe have funding, have a team greater than five groups out there that we would like maybe put on our list. I think the vast majority of humanoid projects like last 10 years have been all research and R&D. So Boston Dynamics Atlas

is still an R&D project. We have a lot of really great labs in the US at Caltech and Berkeley and other places that have like demonstrated some of these capabilities that are under research. And then commercially, there's probably maybe half a dozen groups out there we kind of look at as, are you a commercial group? Are you walking? Do you have hands? And the only groups that we know of that have those three qualities today are us and Tesla optimists.

Yeah, I run my Abundance 360 CEO summit. And every year we highlight a different robotics company. And we had Mark Raybert here with Boston Dynamics and his robots a few years ago. And then last year we had a robot called Amica from engineered arts out of the UK and Amica is god appendages but it's some call it her special is facial expressions and movements extraordinarily humanoid right in a way that's eerie and amazing and Amica is driven by now GPT-4. And obviously, Atlas is driven by its own systems. And everyone's different.

You know, I don't think what people realize is Atlas as a robot is really heavy. And its hydraulic systems are really dangerous. And you've taken a different approach here with FIGURE, right? Because the robot is a relatively reasonable weight and i think is less likely to injure somebody and so five six what are the other parameters on it yeah so we're um our target weight was 60 kilos and we weighed in at 61 nice 61 little over 61 kilos which is great i've always been significantly overweight in every hardware program i've ever been on um it doesn't work well

with flying flying hardware but this yeah yeah we could talk about that at one point but like yeah talk about the the mass uh related engineering problems we had to solve at archer to make that work were like substantial yeah it was um so uh we have um uh we have uh we have a we have a we have a full charge uh full state of charge before charging target of five hours so we want to be five hours on we want to be off uh fast charging close to 2c and back in operations again um we want to be able to do like kind of like fast walking we don't want to run but we want to be able to do like kind of like fast walking we don't want to run but we want to be able to do a few you know basically close to a couple meters a second in terms of uh walking speed what do humans do how fast are we as a typical walking speed yeah maybe like one and a half two so uh false false walking fast walking um yeah we have

we have like no intention to do running or sprints and things uh but we you know there might be times where we need to like you know walk a quarter of a mile down a warehouse and uh we want to do that in a fast way um and then we ultimately have some manipulation in uh basically speed and reliability and safety targets we also may want to hit internally um but for the for the most part we shouldn't be able to do the majority. The hardware should be able to do the majority of what humans can do today. We'll really be limited by software and our ability to do where it's at today and what it should be able to do long-term is basically just like a software. We're software update away from being able to do that kind of

stuff. Amazing. And I love idea that that your robots can be our software updated on a regular basis to increase their capabilities the same way your tesla might be updated on a regular basis um you know i know uh elon and zucker are planning a wrestling match i'm just wondering when we're going to have the figure versus optimus wrestling match as well but um yeah i mean listen we're like we're funny enough we're actually right across the street from like an unmarked tesla like tesla facility here in california south bay uh so yeah maybe if this doesn't work out this whole commercial humanoid thing we can just a pay-per-view yeah we can just figure out how to make money some other way

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backslash moonshots and use the code moonshots to get 25% off your first month of Seeds Daily Symbiotic. Trust me, your gut will thank you. All right, let's get back to our episode. So I'm curious, the AI, so the capabilities of figure, five hours runtime, good walking speed, being able to lift what, like 20 kilograms, I think is your target, lifting mass, which is good. Is all of the processing on board or are you doing it on the edge of the cloud yeah so all of our like short horizon like low level processing is all done on board uh so we need a pretty substantial amount of compute and graphics uh on board the robot to be able to um basically run the onboard computer it's powering like the whole locomotion controller

um yeah run the perception systems, all the things we need for occupancy and stuff like that. And it is, there is an ability for us to basically like basically talk to the cloud for a certain amount of things in market that are not like that are just much lower bandwidth. And latency is not a, not as of issue.

So things like high levellevel behaviors of like, what should the robot be doing next? Things like that. Those things can be done off-board. There's no reason we have to do those on-board. But for the most part, we want to be able to, in like a 5G-denied environment, to be able to do as much on-board the robot as possible.

The controller is running at such fast frequencies and stuff. There is just a tremendous amount we have to do onboard at very high speeds. Yeah, I imagine. I'd love to dive into the use cases, but first the timeline so folks can start. I mean, I assume that there are going to be businesses built on top of your systems. People are going to, just like I know one of my friends, Scott Painters, is building a whole Tesla-based service where you can buy and rent Teslas through him. And there are lots of different other approaches from, you know, what's going on with Uber and electric cars and so forth.

But when are we going to see the first in commercial use? What's your expected earliest delivery? I think the earliest we would be able to have a humanoid in one of our clients that are getting, we're getting paid for it and doing real work would be next year um so 24 i think yeah yeah 24 and i think if we miss that we're not going to miss it by five years we're going to miss about a year or two um but i think as of now as of now for the applications we'll be doing and the conversations we have our clients

it certainly seems that next year would be the earliest possible to be able to do. Are we going to start to see figure robots being demonstrated? You know, how to 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 hefty robots done. But when are we going to see a functioning robot,

your best guess, on video or at, you know, 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, come on over. Yeah. So the robot is up and it's, it's, it's working now. It's working today. We're walking. Call it over. Come on. Yeah. Sorry. Like, yeah. Um, so we'll, we'll be putting out, we're going to try to, I figure, try to build in public as much as possible and keep the, basically everybody abreast of what we're doing. I think it's super important. I think it'd be fun. We want everybody to be 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 down the road, we want to do more things in perception and manipulation and other traditional operations. But our,

our goal is to be putting out videos to not doing the parkours and showing like the pure performance of like, you know, here's, here's what's, here's better than a human box jump or backs flips. We really want to do just like boring work. And let's get this robot in the warehouse just to do work over and over again. And I think that'd be pretty groundbreaking. So we're shooting for that with our clients now. It's like, how do we get it to do work in our lab and as close a representative of what

our client's 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 LiDAR? What kind of imaging systems are you using on board? Yeah, we're full vision, 100% vision system, perception system. You're not going with any other augmentation so it's what a camera can see is

all you need. I see. You've made the same decision Elon made with autonomous cars, it sounds like. Yeah, we think, given the distances in you know, we do not think LiDAR is necessary here. As of now, we don't have the same view as Tesla. We don't have a don't look at LiDAR kind of 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 complicates both the supply chain. We have to fuse that data in. We have to maintain it. We have to fix it. We have to procure it. We have to pay for it. It's a bomb cost. We have to maintain it. So there's a lot going on with every single thing that goes in the robot. So we have a pretty high bar

for adding things to the robot unless they're proven to be necessary or sufficient for the robot to do the operations. I want to paint a picture of 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. That was their number. That's impressive. And these are humanoid robots. They're not the robots we're seeing in factories, building cars and packing plants and so forth. And I think the other thing when you and I were speaking early on when I first met you, you made the point, listen, half of the global GDP is labor. And that's your total addressable market. And that's amazing.

Do you find people telling you, oh, my God, you're going to displace jobs and you're going to cause a disruption like AI is causing a disruption. And do you remind them that we have so many unfilled jobs and the labor market is really becoming tough in different places? Yeah. So if we look at how I think the business unfolds over the next 10 or 20 years, I think it um very similar to what you saw in self-driving cars where the easier stuff will be demonstrated first so like driving on the highway has been demonstrated at higher safety levels than driving in say san francisco the city yeah and it's because in the city it's got a higher safety case it's higher it's like more variability it's less structured it's probably like you know one or two orders of magnitude harder from an engineering

perspective to do that reliably and safely than on a highway. The same thing exists for humanoids. There are applications in the world that are easy to do. You're moving bins or boxes. You know exactly what the bin is. You know exactly the payloads. You know where you're moving it to. You're in a, basically a space that you already can map and you already understand. You can have communication with the manufacturing or warehouse execution system it's a really like well-known or kind of highway driving equivalent and then there are things that are really much harder which are you know cooking somebody food in their home caring for the elderly those are like city driving equivalent to self driving cars um so my my strong view is that a lot of people have a misconception of humanoids because so many people

have been working on the latter they've been working on this really hard consumer problem if you look at google's robot with sorting trash it's very difficult uh toyota research institute's working in the you know in grocery stores and things 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 data engine into the harder stuff over time. So we're almost like almost the opposite of what the research groups are looking at today. So I have a strong bias that you'll see humanoids in warehousing, manufacturing, where the talent shortage is the most acute. And as you hit, from a macro perspective, half the world's GDP is labor.

We're having this huge issue with labor population globally. We have the baby boomers are retiring. The amount of kids we've had has been in basically a secular decline for several decades lot of several yeah it's crazy people don't realize we're in a one of the greatest tragedies is not overpopulation it's going to be underpopulation it's going to be a big deal and um so you're seeing that so we walk into a client site like say a big fortune 100 company their first thing out of their mouth is like not you know how's this going to like be used with my employees things like that their first thing out of their mouth is like not you know how's this gonna like be used

with my employees things like that their first thing out of their mouth is that last year we saw 140 annual turnover in a warehouse we uh we have nobody that wants to do these jobs they're dangerous they're hot in the summer they're cold in the winter uh the turnover dangerous dangerous dull and dirty is the phraseology yeah just like uh nobody they can't find anybody that wants to do this and you know so we walk in there they're like if you can do these things we will buy your service hand over fist now doing the humanoid thing is nobody's ever done it before so it's uh the hill to climb to do that successfully is is extremely challenging um and we happen to believe that it 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 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? And when does that enter your build process? I think the way we're going to get humanoids, say out of the factories and into people's homes, like are working with humans is, is, is, is going to be through language, as you mentioned. So we think there's a substantial

benefit our business has to using like basically large language models or vision language models, uh, to basically help us understand, like we need like a semantic understanding of the world and language can bring us that and large language models can bring us that. So we will be building here over time, vision language models to really help from like a high level behaviors perspective of letting the humanoids understand what humans are saying and be able to talk to humans, but also be able to infer and understand what they're saying and be able to react to it.

And so we will most likely not be building our own language models, but being able to train vision language models on the robot system as it relates to the sensor data that's coming off of there and to be able to do useful thing with those models is going to be something that we're going to have to do internally and are doing now internally. It's going to be 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. And that's what really drives our interest in getting to market as fast as

possible. The more robots we can get into market collecting data, the 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 just that one robot that learns it they all learn it um and that's a beautiful a beautiful thing that allows you to scale it's like my kids right like once you learn how to do something they like they fail like a thousand times so like a little like reinforcement learning policies and once they figure it out they like they really don't forget it. And then they just keep building on that. So yeah, once we train a robot on how to unload boxes from a pallet

successfully, every robot in the fleet will know how to do that. And once we train the robot on how to unload a truck successfully and to manipulate certain boxes that are damaged or whatever it looks like, then every robot in the fleet will understand that. And so it's just like, it's going to be a huge power curve that we're going to be able to, um, yeah, uh, it's going to be a huge power curve for us in the future. Yeah. So there's a huge advantage to get out, get out into the real world and get those models, uh, learning. Um, I want to go back to the, the founding of the company. Um, so you had, uh, an incredibly successful exit, uh, early on, um, with, uh, early on with your first company that was in the hiring space, Vetteri. And then you start Archer, a really hard challenge, eVTOL, 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. So I think, you know, when I left Archer was a really good time for me to kind of really reset and, you know, what did I really want to work on? And I think, and I still say, I still say, I said this kind of like off the cuff to somebody yesterday. I said, if, you know, if somebody came to me tomorrow and wanted to purchase a business for $5 billion, I would say no. And you might think that's a little bit crazy, but I think one of the greatest assets for an entrepreneur is 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 be it happens to live inside the largest economy on the planet of human labor uh three we think the technologies necessary to do this are kind of exist today and have been demonstrated in so and much more of like advanced research state and four I think in the limit I like advanced research state. And four, 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 of my life. But take me back a little bit more. Did you have this in the back of your mind while you were at Archer? Has this been something like from the childhood you saw Rosie the Robot or you saw Lost in Space and robots have always been a fascination for you? I mean, autonomous cars and flying cars are robots of a type. But when did you say, you know, I 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 have been a huge

sci-fi fan. So I've read all of Isaac Asimov books. And kind of in my high school period, I really realized that I wanted to spend basically the rest of my life building companies. realized that i wanted to spend basically the rest of my life building companies and a couple of areas that i really thought were important were robotics ai the internet and um yeah i think from a like i've i think for a long time i've always felt that robotics were extremely important to industry they were really far like there's not a lot of entrepreneurs like tackling this problem it's no they're not they're not just like there never used to be a lot going in in building the space industry right there was just the government that did it or in this case you know gm made giant robots for building cars um yep do you come from a family of entrepreneurs what was it that gave you that entrepreneurial bug? Was this like high school years, college years?

Yeah. So my family, I actually grew up on a third generation agriculture farm in the middle of Illinois. Yeah. So never really been an insider my whole life. My parents, yeah, were entrepreneurs for many generations. I remember growing up, my parents were like, at some point you want to control your own destiny. You need to do it yourself. And you need to go out and build stuff for the world. That's a really real way to impact. And I

think 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 now building companies for 20 years. I did 13, 14 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 in software and internet. And last like, you know, six or seven years have been in advanced hardware and AI areas.

And do you know, to be honest, be able to 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 a blessing. Art problems and they're just so fun. And we're like almost inventing the future in so many ways. 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 moon shot, 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. So thank you for that. You know, I'm super passionate about longevity and health span and how do you add 10, 20 health years onto your life? One of the most underappreciated elements is the quality of your sleep. And there's something that changed the quality of my sleep.

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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 um and so you retire from archer uh you hopefully i'm sure you did do financially well because you've been personally investing in figure a sizable amount of your own net wealth and using that and recruiting some of the best people and when i'm over whenever i'm looking at investments through my venture fund or co-investing as an individual, I'm like, OK, how much are you putting into the deal? And 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 want 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 want to do it you know it's like it's they're just so hard and i remember for like for nine months here 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 robotics person anywhere in the world were you educating yourself or recruiting or both uh both like trying to every human or robotics person anywhere in the world were you educating yourself or recruiting or both uh both like trying to get answers trying to understand trying to find the best people in the world trying to get referrals trying to find this you know offshoot small lab that nobody's ever heard of where i could understand actuators better or you know locomotion controls better um trying to find the rare book here or there that could help educate me on you know whole body inverse dynamics or npc controllers or whatever it would look like um so i just spent an enormous amount of time same story at archer for the first

year when i started archer i was in a room just making phone calls, reading anything I could get my hands on and trying to figure out how to, how do I get this built? I think as a early founder, the most important thing is to show that you have a product or even a minimally viable product in the making. That's like what we're all here to ship product or services. Like that's it.

And so the most important thing you could be doing is getting to that point. And a lot of places, a lot of companies that could be like, you know, raising capital, hiring some people in my case for both Archer and figure was putting my money where my mouth was. So I put millions in both companies the first year and I went deep into bringing a team together and also deep into 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 University of Florida. That lab that was building drones at the time was off of Archer Road, so I called the business Archer Aviation. And I basically built a 4,000-square square foot Archer Aviation eVTel lab at the University of Florida, which is still there today. And I basically built three, four generations

of electric aircraft down there with a small team of PhDs. And that was, that really helped me understand the technology, understand certification decisions. We had to make decisions, Peter, on like, do we put a pilot in the aircraft or make it autonomous? These were like, you know, business decisions that affected timelines and certification, all this. And so, yeah, the early first year at Archer was really me, you know, self-funding, getting the initial team set up, and then also building small gen, like basically subscale versions of what we have now which you know we have i built now 6 000 pound five passenger eb tall aircraft and uh you know

that's like you know four years before that we were building 20 foot aircraft that were uh kind of more hobby grade than what we have now um yeah so um and then you know maybe uh fast forward a figure i spent a large percentage of my time understanding the technologies, basically designing out an architect team, 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 this is just really quick you know how you describe this is exactly you know i've known elon for 23 years from the early days of spacex and it it sounds exactly like his early days at spacex where it was like find the textbook read the chapter learn the stuff

interview people begin building and then one of the other things i think that's interesting early in the early days of a startup is understanding um the highest value trades and what the limiting parameters are right um to help you decide uh you know what so for figure what have been the limiting parameters that drove you make one decision over another has it been battery life material weights uh ai yeah so we spend a considerable amount of time understanding the requirements we're very like uh we have a very strong axiomatic design process here i have a very strong philosophy for it um and then we do a lot of like what you call like trade studies like basically like what are the right decisions we need to make? I would say at the highest level, the battery and actuator side as are very mature.

Like we need, we have enough energy and power density out of the actuators and the batteries to do what we need to do. And, uh, with humanoids, I think the locomotion controls of like balancing and walking robots are really mature for folks that know what they're doing um and uh i think a lot of the bigger trades came down to the availability of either software or hardware off the shelf that we could purchase to make us work interesting i think the the limitations in actuators middleware operating systems batteries um control software uh some of some cases of perception that I thought

would be easier to procure 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 on the market. There are really not any good battery solutions. There's no good control solutions. There's no good middleware operating system solutions. Sensors, there's some off-the-shelf COT sensors that are fine. And almost all the electronics for the next generation robot we're building ourselves a house. And that's not because we want to. It's because we're being forced to. So that's fascinating.

So is it fair to say you were a little bit naive getting in and then you discovered the realities of the difficulties and had to solve them because you were already heading in that direction? I think if I knew how hard Archer was and how figure it was, uh, you know, who knows if an entrepreneur would have started those businesses, you know, uh, like there's certainly extremely hard. Um, yeah, I would say definitely did not understand the maturity of the supply chain there. I don't think a lot of people really understood that though, too. I think, um, a lot of robotics startups think that hardware is just like easy to procure and it's really a software issue. It's really not the case. You really, in order for good software to work, you really need good

hardware. And good hardware is, I think, harder to find than good software. The hardware in the space is, especially for eVTOL aircraft, and I think even 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 couldn't be further from the truth. Yeah. I've heard this so many times for entrepreneurs. I know it's been true for myself where, you know, everything looks rosy from a distance and you think all of those solutions are there. You just have to cobble them together and it'll work. But you find out, no, there's a ton of work to be done, but you've spent so much time and money already you can't turn back and you've got to just solve them and you have to work you know when you're going through hell keep going

as the old saying um so that is fascinating and then i just did a uh a podcast with palmer lucky do you know palmer the creator of oculus yeah and he's building uh and, a $10 billion defense company, which is amazing. And you might look at all of the hardware. I laughingly call him the real Tony Stark. And it's amazing what he's been building there. But they're a 60% software, 40% hardware. But from the outside, they look just like a hardware company. But they've had to build both together what ratio do you see internally now we're probably a little bit bigger overall on all software if we include controls middleware and autonomy than we are

hardware um our hardware team's maybe 15 or so um so yeah definitely software would be a little bit bigger software will definitely be as the biggest part of the company long term. In the limit, we think of figure as an AI business, so we'll have a large autonomy team. There's a very significant AI data engine that we need to build here long term. But the hardware stuff can't be overlooked. If you really want to play in human rights today, you're going

to need to develop your own actuators, electronics, battery, and then almost all the software. There's really not a COTS or commercial off-the-shelf solution for this if you want to play in the if you want to do it a high performance high reliability high safety and low cost there's there's no other way to say it I mean we have a term here which is like the only way out is through yeah and we use that a lot because like you know in hardware it's like death by a thousand cuts it's like bringing bringing up the robot. It's just like problem after problem after problem.

And it's like, things look good. And there's like a mountain more problems. And yeah, it's just, it's brutal. I mean, 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 attack time of iteration cycles that

kill you here yeah yeah no it's uh i like to joke it's overnight success after 11 years of hard work yeah totally yeah uh so let's let's allow people to live in the future a little bit here um uh we're going to see these robots there is a ton of capital going in. And, you know, I put my bet on figure and I'm excited and hopefully we'll massively be successful. But there are a few other companies as well. I 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've spent a decent amount of time now at the larger car OEMs in the world. Interesting.

What are you going to do for them? There's just a tremendous amount of people at these facilities. We just went to a facility, a large OEM that you would know in the US. Last week, they had 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 finding enough people. A lot of these were dangerous. They were working next to other machines.

They're doing like tons of spot welding so you can like smell the fumes, you know. So, yeah, there's like there's different things of large fulfillment and logistics areas of these facilities because they need to do just-in-time inventory and they need to have this facility we saw you know had you know roughly you know four to five million parts that were touched by humans every day in one facility um or one location at the facility yeah it's a lot so i think about the amount of fulfillment you have to do a lot of touches or human touches that need to happen there uh so there's a fulfillment areas there's also a lot of overall just like sheet metal being moved around right like a lot of sheet metal being moved to different machines those being spot welded and that being repeated over and over again at hundreds of stations and they've got to deal with i mean are they operating 24 7 or are they operating eight hours a day no they're operating almost

like 21 22 hours a day two two 10-hour shifts. Yeah. So, I mean, the robots can, in fact, work lights out, meaning they can operate on 24-7 basis. There's no drug testing. There's no vacations. There's no insurance. I mean, 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? What do you hope to get up to 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 we're in now is can we show a robot humanoid robot can be useful in a in a in a client scenario and in a real way like can it get the performance can it be safe can it be reliable is it going down all the time and you need tons of human interventions that's that's not helping anything so it needs to make roi sense uh and it needs to be safe and reliable uh ultimately if we can prove that then even in these very um specific class of problems like of moving boxes and bins we think there's an ability to ship tens of millions of humanoids uh I would say it would take us decades to do that. It took, what did it take Tesla and Ford, a little over a decade for each company to put a million cars on the road.

So if you want to put a million robots into the world, it takes no sooner than five years, maybe no longer than 10 or 12 years to do that, you know, based on historical precedent. Now, 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 a lot like, you know, like as we mentioned earlier, a lot less weight and mass. So I think we can manufacture at pretty high volumes as we relates to later in the decade, but the next like two or three or four years, Peter is going to be figuring out, can we make a useful humanoid? And I think we really got to get there. Yeah. And I have every confidence knowing you and the team that you've built that you will get there. And 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. I left this big auto group last week and I was like, for anything a human is involved with in the manufacturing process, it's just substantial. Like the facility we saw had giant robotic arms everywhere, hundreds of them. And it was about as 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 want to have only humanoid. We wanted to design a manufacturing process where only humanoids are building humanoids.

I love that. A von Neumann machine at its 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 when we'll start to see these humanoid robots? I think you're going to scale into the commercial labor market for well over a decade before you even try to touch some other things. 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. And then there's all these other markets that don't exist yet for humanoid robots that we could basically go into. I think, why do the major tech real estate brokerage like real estate places like

solo stuff not uh you know have any human brokers on their platform is because their multiples get killed um i think it'd be pretty cool i think it'd be pretty cool going to a website booking a a house visit and then and then having the humanoid greet you by unlocking the door and uh in a staged house and basically selling that whole house digitally it's a 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. One 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. They disoriented, they don't feel comfortable, they don't have privacy, but there is a vision where these robots are taking fantastic care of humans as they 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. My family's actually involved in independent and assisted living facilities. Ah, beautiful. Yeah. One of the hardest things you mentioned is nobody really wants to leave their home for the personal home they've been in for decades for one of these facilities. It's just a really tough process. And we're basically having this huge amount of people getting to like later stage retirement and, you know, being able to do at home care would be like

a very substantial life benefit to let people age in place at home. You know, this is really just a maturity of the technology itself to be able to make the reliability and the safety and the cost get to a point where we can do these things. On the whole, the robot from a hardware perspective will be able to do almost all this work that 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 costs down will be important to enter this elderly area to let people age in place. So I think of this very similar to the consumer conversation we had earlier. It's going to happen like a decade from now. So I think of this very similar to the consumer conversation we had earlier. It's going to happen like a decade from now. It's going to be very substantial, maybe even a bigger business in some ways than the consumer side of things. But it's just going to be the second chapter of 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 the first robot's called Figure 01.

Yes. So are you going to just keep the generations, Figure 02 and iPhone 3 and iPhone 27? We made room to go to 99. That's good. I got that much. So as you get to figure five six seven uh do you imagine there may be uh a humanoid um facial personality that you add for comfort and

because i mean there is a value in having a robot who's got 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 you're serving, their emotional situation and to convey emotional response. Thoughts on that? There should be no reason why we couldn't do that. Like we, 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. So there shouldn't be no reason we can't display the right information back to the end user to make them feel comfortable, whether we're a 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 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. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity,

age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmandus.com backslash blog and learn more now back to the episode i'm going to hit on my third favorite market and use case so actually

i'm going to ask you what your favorite third market so we've talked about the industrial logistics you know manufacturing and we talked about health as another, as a broad brush, what's your third next big market that you're excited about? And I'll show you mine. Yeah. I mean, I would love to really help on the consumer household side and caring for the elderly. I think that's such an important business long-term. I think everybody will have a humanoid as like an assistant to do things. And I think another one that really doesn't get a lot of attention is i think planets will be colonized by humanoids ah now you're hitting the one i was going to say space exploration on this yeah just like so excited about we're in this like such a great time for space exploration and um it's being enabled by this infrastructure is

being put in place for basically launches and rocket launches. And I think, yeah, I think humanoids will be a really great tool for humanity to help colonize and set up colonization facilities in places like the moon and Mars. When I land there, I want the pina coladas ready. I want the bed preheated. I want all the resources dug out.

I don't want to do the hard labor there. I want it pre-done. We'll don't want to do the hard labor there. I want it pre-done. We'll be ready for you, Peter. Thank you. 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 And I was warned it was too early. And maybe it was. But what was wrong was I didn't have enough personal capital to see it all the way through.

And when we missed financing, it really 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 dollars of disposable capital to spend on that and not have to wait for someone else to decide because as you know there's a huge advantage of being able to just fund it in the beginning yourself and not have to convince everybody because a lot of moonshot entrepreneurs will spend 70 80 percent

of their time raising money trying to convince person after person versus doing the hard work. And in the asteroid business, having humanoid, I mean, space exploration is so enabled by being able to send robots out there to do the work and prep the materials. And 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. I am curious. I am a space and tech geek.

I know you are too. So I'd love to review, what are your favorite robots? What did they get right? And what did they get wrong in uh on in the tv and movie world oh uh like not like the sci-fi world yeah the sci-fi world yeah let's take it let's take it science fiction like um you know you want to go to uh uh you want to go to star trek with commander data you want to go to star wars do you want to go to lost in space you want to go to you know the jetsons what

are the robots that like yeah man they got so close or that was really stupid uh it's it's like so funny that like it's almost like the last couple decades it's like the next couple decades 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 um you know flying cars coming we have rockets going colonizing planets we uh we have home robots hopefully coming we're extending healthy lifespans we're going to longevity yeah exactly we're almost like predicting the future like you know 50 years ago and um i don't know it's just like so funny how all this is like in so many ways coming true today.

And I think if you're just like, you know, even if we're going out in 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 lifetimes, I think it's going to feel like 50, 100 years is pulled forward into the present. It's just going to feel crazy and it's going to be hopefully spectacular. I think so. So I'm going to hold your feet to the fire here. Commander Data at Star Trek.

Do you like Commander Data as a robot? I wasn't the biggest Star Trek guy growing up. I was more in, you know, Isaac Asimov 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 around figure zero seven uh probably all right how about how about rtd2 and c3po would they get right would they get wrong yeah uh what's your view of this oh you know i i3PO, but you know, that sort of lever arm on little, you know, actuator sticking out of their arm. No, I didn't like that very much. And R2D2,

I just, I don't think you're going to build that shape and form and find it very useful. I guess the back of a speeder, it might be useful. 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 with a recent one that looked pretty cool. So any other robots from the visual world? It's funny, like the R2-D2 story, I feel like everybody is coming at me now and saying, you got to put some wheels on this robot. Why are you dealing with that complexity of wheels? And you mentioned the form factor is probably not right. I have a hard time seeing a fixed wheelbase, which is even like manipulators working extremely well in the market.

There's a lot of people that have chased this for quite a long time. I mean, if you go into a warehouse, that robot that needs to have like a Z-axis, it needs to have like an elevator moving up and down. You need to pitch it forward, like in the back, so you can reach the back of a shelf or something like that. And then you're basically getting roughly to the same complexity and actuation and degrees of freedom than you would a humanoid. And so, yeah, it's funny, the R2D2, it feels like everybody's trying, the skeptics are all trying to force me into an R2D2 four-factor version. It's kind of funny. Well, I'm glad. There's a level of purity in actually going after the human form exactly. in actually going after the human form exactly. So I am curious about one other thing, actuators for muscles.

Because when I was a kid, I remember reading about actinomycin 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 electromechanical muscle tech coming our way? The human body is just so spectacular. Like the way that our muscles work, even the joints, like our, you know,

ball and socket, like, you know, I say shoulder has like three degrees of freedom. So we, you know, for figure we have, you know, pitch, yawn, roll here. We have to do 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 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 electromechanical actuators.

And we really have a hard time hitting any of our requirements for maybe packaging or mass. Reliability. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like this debate of people like well what about this or that it's like we have no problem hitting any of these with electromechanical actuators like the we have enough we have enough energy and power on board we have enough degrees of freedom we have right speeds and torques out of the actuators to make this happen there's just like there's it's just sufficient to make it work. And at high volumes, we get the cost down quite a lot. There are some areas that we're spending a decent amount of time on, on more of the academic

research side that we think are really interesting, but we think they're just a little bit far enough out where they're not applicable to be able to put onto a humanoid and to do useful work for the next few years. As we wrap this up, I want to ask you again to serve our entrepreneur listeners here. You start a company. What are the most important things that you did in starting this company in terms of creating culture, hiring the right people? creating culture, hiring the right people, like lessons learned. This is your third really big major success.

And a lot of people, hopefully one out of 10 might be a success, not three in a row, hopefully. But you had to learn some lessons and like, I'm not gonna screw that up next time. Or I'm gonna make sure that this is page one, line one of the company. So what's your mentorship for entrepreneurs for doing something like this? Yeah, I really don't have these like heuristics of like, hey, you just got to do this and it's

going to work. I think, you know, this is like problem solving on its finest. It's being extremely robust with these decision-making processes. I definitely have the playbooks that I've been operating for a long time that have seemed to be successful here at Figure and Archer and my past companies. First is really identifying a really useful idea that A, can work and B, it satisfies the personal goals of why you set out to do it. And for my case, it's really not about the money. It's about making a much larger impact as I can while I'm alive. And I think this is an industry where I can make a extremely large contribution to humanity. And it's just going to be a really spectacular future if this works well. So I think it really aligns well with what

I'm trying to do 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 to ship a useful product or service. There's like, you need a team to go do that. It's generally not like, you know, especially the stuff that's harder. It's not one person sitting around. It's, you know, a bunch of like maybe the best minds in the world working really hard and like together to make this really happen. So I'm a very strong proponent of like building the right team from the from the get-go i'm a very strong in terms of like trying to set the right direction for the company you really have at a company especially early stage you really have like two levers 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 in that in that order yeah you have to you don't hit the gas the wrong way it's like really tough it's really like you know you're early enough it's fine but when you get bigger it's like a big ship with a small rudder it's really tough to change directions uh so i figure in both archer but i figure i wrote the master plan which goes 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. Can I just pause? I want to pause there because 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,

your 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, uh, defining and creating the culture you want from day zero. So, um, is probably the most important thing I think you said here. Yeah. I think like, it's funny.

Um, I'll almost take another side of this, what I just said, which is a little counterintuitive, 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. And like, you know, as a young entrepreneur, you look at this and say, most of everybody dies. They don't make it two years. And I'm sitting here reading how to blitz scale and how to set the right culture 10 years from now and how to set the right direction. And like, I can't even feed myself, let alone like make the company work. And so a little bit of this is like having done it before, it is important at the end of the day, what is like, you know, maybe like the last thing I'll add to this section would be,

we got to get out and ship product. And I think at the very core of what I love about, you know, building figure and Archer and Vetteri is we had a strong mission belief that we need to ship product and ship it fast. And I think if you come here, one of the big shocks somebody might have from a big corporate somewhere else is that we move incredibly fast and we want to ship product as quick as possible and recursively make it better. And I think the rest of the stuff is almost like these guardrails to help that out like the culture the master plan the people everything is supporting this like middle like um like almost like river that's flowing and it's flowing fast so we can control the where it 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 like the most important thing we could be doing as an organization is focusing on product in shipping product not working on PR not working in some ways on like getting the brand perfect or getting the right article in tech crunch. And, um, it's really about, you know, getting a useful product or service out the door. And so I think my overwhelming advice for everybody is get out there and ship product. And that'll be like the biggest, the most important thing you could be doing as a founder or entrepreneur. Yeah. It's a hard, hardware walks, bullshit, 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, 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. And then your handle at Twitter is what? 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 kind of like get, you know, like a better understanding of the companies I've built. And yeah, and if you're, you know,

looking to try to make an impact here, I'd really like put a plug out to apply, apply to come to figure. We're trying to look for the best and brightest and, uh, hire the best talent in the world. It's always a top priority for us. Yeah.

And you've done that again. Congratulations. So blown away by the team you put and, really excited to come and play and see and touch. And, and, uh, yeah. And maybe we can, uh, do this podcast again, uh, and really excited to come and play and see and touch. And yeah, and maybe we can do this podcast again from your facility with one of your robots playing in the background next time. We're ready.

So let's get you out here and see some robots. Awesome. Everybody, Brett Adcock, figure. Thank you, buddy. Pleasure to have you on this. Thanks for having me.