The Man Taking on Tesla in the Race for Humanoid Robots w/ Brett Adcock | EP #116

I am curious how you think about Optimus and Tesla and Elon so inspired by what elon's done in the last like 20 30 years it's been just unbelievable we need more like really real players I think Tesla is a really real player like I mean you know highly capitalized great engineering team and I think they're directly heading in the right direction I'm tracking the robot companies coming out of China like spent a lot of time touring kind of what high rate manufacturing processes look like out there and I it was just um I was it

was it was shocking I mean listen you're amazing but the star of the show here is figure 2 so do you mind if maybe we open up this podcast with a a quick look at figure 2 yeah sure um yeah yeah so I guess welcome welcome to figure everybody Peter D mandis here welcome to moonshots on today's episode we're going to do a deep dive with Brett Adcock the CEO of figure robotics figure AI uh he's going to be giving us a tour of his shop and figure 2 his new robot release if you're watching

us on YouTube we're going to talk about what he thinks about Elon and uh an optimist talk about the robots in your home when to expect them and his projection of 10 billion robots on the planet by 2040 he just did a monster round with uh 700 million or so from open AI Microsoft Jeff Bezos Nvidia and we'll talk about how he's integrating open ai's software into is figure 2 robot an extraordinary conversation one of my favorites all right if you enjoy conversations like this please subscribe let's jump in over to Brett and figure AI

hey Brett good to see you my friend yeah Peter thanks for having me yeah know for sure uh it was super fun to come and visit your office uh I don't know it was like two months ago was before you rolled out figure 2 and I have to say you know I said it to you there uh the speed at which you're iterating designs is pretty amazing uh and I I didn't feel that kind of an energy uh since the early days of me seeing you know SpaceX back at at Falcon one days so congrats

on that yeah thanks um you know I I think everybody really I mean listen you're amazing but the star of the show here is figure 2 so do you mind if maybe we open up this podcast with a a quick look at figure two if you don't mind can we go uh take a a quick sneak peek on the shop floor yeah sure um yeah let's make sure it's not being used but let's uh I can give you guys a quick uh maybe cont toour the office um yes so I guess welcome welcome to figure

uh thank you so we're yeah we're well over 100 Engineers now um uh we're based here in Northern California in the San Francisco Bay Area um we just unveiled um last week figure two which is our our second generation humanoid robot and um we have um right now we're manufacturing about one a week in our facility here in California and um and we have you know several of them here now uh on the floor um so here's you know a quick look at uh figure two robot that we're um about ready start doing some tests

on uh right now amazing I know your team is about to to activate it if you're going to say the the principal differences between figure one and figure two I mean just for folks you know the company's like two years old or less right you've gone from like zero to Infinity super fast what what's the what's the difference between what upgrades did you make in figure 2 here yeah I mean there's um it's there's several so um you're top five yeah so I think um first is we triple the amount of CPU and GPU on

board uh just for more overall compute and inference uh the second is we almost doubled the battery to about 2.3 KW hours uh it's all on board the system in the middle of the Torso uh here next to basically the compute and uh and GPU uh we had all the wires all internal uh so there's no external wires uh cabling Electronics uh that's really for reliability and for overall packaging um we also have a exoskeleton structure so all the outer shells of the robot uh actually take loads um which is opposed to um kind of

how we did the first generation robots this this would be like more akin to how you do it like at say Aviation my last company Archer we like you know the skins on the aircraft take the loads of the vehicle um I think that's pretty unique here for um a system like this we also have U six onboard cameras so we have more perception more ability to see your surroundings where the where are the cameras on the on the robot here we have them in the head in the back and then the lower torso that's

and I I assume that the exoskeleton helps you reduce overall weight of the robot yeah it's basically like a like overall like um the parts will get a little bit stiffer as they get a little bit wider um we found that um having one structure for both crass loads and and stiffness uh is the right ideal Mass trade uh like figure one had kind of like both structure and outer shell for loads and that's just really not ideal where you um you know like the structure is really sized by crash load so then you end

up having basically double Mass sure in a lot of ways yeah and the hands have you made improvements on the uh on the hands on the yeah so show us hold his hand and and show us what it looks like these are our um uh fourth generation hands now um and uh We've made like quite a lot of improvements uh over the previous generations um better sensors better packaging better for Mass better strength better speeds of the fingers um overall just better dexterity and control of like fine grain Mini ulation that we're doing uh on

board the robot uh we need to do like humanlike applications uh so the more here that we can um do humanlike tasks and grab humanlike objects the better for uh for generalization of the robot amazing and it's standing what about 56 57 behind you 56 yeah amazing all right thank you for the the Quick Glance you want to hop back into your conference room I love the uh the beams up there for carrying heavy weights so how many how many how many figure robots are up in operational right now inside the facility yeah we have

a little um under 10 uh in our facility here and then we're in process of building as of right now basically one a week yeah amazing you know uh Brett one of the things that uh that I saw when I was there you know you showed me figure one uh and then figure two which hadn't been released yet and then drawings for figure three which I won't talk about uh which looked beautiful um but uh can you talk about your rapid iteration strategy here I mean how do you think about generations and and redesigning and

rebuilding because a lot of companies like get to something and then fix it and then sell it for a long time doesn't sound like your strategy is that yeah I think um I think the rule of thumb here is that like rough roughly you need probably minimum three Hardware versions to get to a point where the the hardware is um um relatively commercial reliable like bug free um and our goal is to in the limit make this basically a software limiting issue for us um which means we need really capable Hardware that's really reliable it's

safe it's low mass um and it's like low cost and we can manufacture really well um that's like a light a lot to to bite off in like the first version hardware and get that right it's just too difficult I mean it's like getting the iPhone one right and getting everything okay and I had the iPhone one and it was just not the greatest phone in the world but like iPhone 3 and four were like certainly the greatest phones in the world um you know same for cars right like the Tesla roads are probably not

the greatest car in the world and uh I have three Teslas now they're incredible probably the best car I've ever had um so we basically want to be on this Continuum of like rapid um uh like Hardware iterations where we're um basically looking at different fistic of things that we need to mature over those Hardware Continuum and making all like necessary improvements uh so that the hardware is at at some point um very mature and I think our first generation Hardware uh figure one was mostly trying to get the roughly the architecture trades right so

all the details of like the engineering system for you know um you as a batteries example um what is the energy is it going to be hydraulic is battery powered what type of battery sell chemistry um from there what type of P type of cell is it cylindrical is it presmatic pouch um you know how we going to how we going to pack those um thermal propagation like all those different trades you have that's just the battery alone then you have like the rest of the whole system so that you know there becomes like an

order of like 100 to 200 um decisions you have to make to go out and build a robot and you know you don't want to have to be a situation where you have to get all those right and I think we got most of those right on figure one we did even better job on some of those decisions on figure two figure two was really about getting to a feature complete robot it has all the systems on it whether we're going to build or buy it on the robot that are working we built most of

it so that's software with whether firmware and beded systems Control software um uh all the hardware systems on board uh you know the ators Electronics wiring Battery Systems cameras sensors um so and then you know um so we think we got roughly to um uh like feature complete Hardware complete on figure two and so we're really excited there and then you know future generation for us will be how do we get the cost um down by well over order of magnitude from where we're at now and how do we get the ability to manufacture like

unprecedented scale that we've never seen before in robotics I and I know that you know one of the quotes I heard you say is everyone will own a humanoid and labor will be optional um and those are pretty provocative and I think actually true um let's you know for everyone to own a humanoid and I want to get into this for a quick moment um you said reducing the cost 10x uh you know elon's been aggressive on a price tag um he's not always been right on price or schedule uh but I think do you

think of these these humanoid robots as a ultimately uh converging on a price per kilogram of of total weight um and and what do you think you know 10 years out 20 years out these things will actually cost so I it's been the last like it's been all year now looking at how cheap we can make these robots and the answer really lies in like a bottom Up Bottoms Up analysis of the entire build material bomb uh bomb cost where we take basically a list of call it roughly a thousand parts and we like start

itemizing that down and then we start understanding at real scale um how are we going to procure those parts uh whether we build or buy and what um contractual uh you know volume estimates we can get with price prices there um I feel it's super volume it's super uh volume dependent on pricing I imagine yeah I mean every consumer device or car that we know of has been um as basically like uh BS of very high correlation with manufacturing volumes so the only real way to get you know like consumer electronics prices down is by

high volumes that's the only way we know of so you you really want to make a lot of the product to get it the cost down um so I yeah I think like uh over a long enough per with enough High volumes I think you're getting these costs down like sub $20,000 a unit like really cheap and that's amazing cuz if I we going to you know lease a $20,000 car you know that's costing me like a 100 bucks a month at at most and so you know why not get two um you you think

that the end yeah I was saying especially if it makes you money like if it can go out and do work and things like you know it could like actually be in the workforce or it can do things that you would be spending time on during the day if it can actually like be like a real utility here I think yeah what how many I guess yeah how many would you want that could if it could make you money real quick I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin truth is I use

a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a cytic that kills scile cells in your skin and this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it's one of the most incredible products I use it all the time uh if you're interested check out the show notes I've asked my team to link to it below all right let's get back to the episode yeah I mean when we first spoke um I remember you said something

that was kind of shocking but in retrospect makes sense uh correct me if I'm wrong but I think you said your estimate there would be a Market by 2040 for as many as 10 billion humanoid robots do you still hold to that there like if if these robots can do everything a human can I have to think that we'd be able to put um uh three to five billion in the workforce and I don't see any reason why every human wouldn't want to have a humanoid like you do a car or phone um perhaps even

more important than a car or phone where they can just do all the work uh that you just don't want to do all day whether it's you know walking the dog getting coffee uh doing errands um doing laundry chores like I mean every day I go home I'm clean up stories right so like there's just like uh like I could have a robot just just clean up kids toys two three hours a day every day no problem like uh it's like endless work every day yeah I I can imagine that there was something else who

said that really hit me um philosophically uh you said it's a moral imperative to have these kinds of humanoid robots because as we get to AGI and digital super intelligence correct me if I'm wrong here but you said if we don't have those human orid robots the AI are going to be having us do what they say and it's a lot better for the human soul if the robots are doing what the AI said correct me where I'm wrong there but that was an interesting point of view I hadn't heard before I think a pretty

depressing future would be one that we solve AGI that lives in in a box like not in the physical world and in order for that AGI to do anything in the real world it would have to ask or uh force a human um you know through wages or whatever to to do that action and um I don't know about you but that seems like a really uh kind of Downer future and um please please plug me into a higher to more more kilowatt hours yeah like the like the like the like Collective consciousness of Humanity's

intelligence is sitting there wanting to do things in the physical world and having to pay humans uh through wages to do that or through force uh that just seems like a I don't know just a terrible future yeah um I I was interested in in the mission statement you wrote I just recently saw some documents that You' put out and so the mission of figure is expand human capabilities through advanced Ai and uh uh that's you know I'm curious it didn't say about humanoid robotics it was you know um expand human capabilities through advanced AI

how did you end up there do you see yourself as an AI company ultimately we do see ourselves as an AI company in the limit that happens to do robotics um I think in the limit all the challenges that we Face uh to to to to do what we set out in our mission are ultimately majority be AI problems and hurdles and I think there's this dream that we're all having here now at figure where one day we have these robots out in the world um doing like really important work that's really needed for uh

Humanity helping to lower goods and services prices to hopefully bring a world of abundance and I happen to think that that'll free up a lot of the time me and you have we all have to do things like we really really love um Amplified by robots and AI you know to do far more per per unit time than ever before yeah exactly like if we could just spend time on what we really wanted to do what would like all humans do with their time I think that's one of the one of the most important questions

is what you know I I recently I've been working on my my next book which is called age of abundance and I heard you in a in a previous interview talk about uh robots enabling an age of abundance um what do you how do you describe that what do you think that looks like what did you mean by an age of abundance well I think one of the interesting things about humanoids is um we can put these robots in like the goal is putting these robots into the physical world with no additional infrastructure needed for

them to operate so you can put robots into the workforce and we don't need to go build like um new systems and new electronics and everything else for the robot to to work within you can just you know um like a special purpose machine we go in there we got to try to architect everything and make new space and build a new machine and roll it out integrate it like a humanoid just integrates right into the world you can just do humanlike things uh the next day um and and if we have robots ultimately we'll

build robots themselves from a manufacturing perspective I was going to ask you that that iterates very quickly down to uh yeah I mean if you basically bring I me most manufacturing today it's just like got a bunch of machines and you have humans that's basically it and if we're can do human level manufacturing you're basically at a point where you could theoretically have robots building robots the the price here just collapses to to nothing yeah and those robots can be put into the world to do work so what is that cost of the work it's

the cost of you renting the robot out and it's the cost of that land and if you have renewable energy on that facility like that you know this this work area then that cost will be very small and the output would be really high so you can basically create a world where goods and services prices are like you know Trend to zero in the limit and GDP spikes to Infinity yeah I mean like um yeah you basically can request anything you'd want would be relatively affordable for everybody in the world yeah it's interesting when you

when you look at GDP of countries um they scale with population and access to energy um right and population and energy is work so it feels like um this will become a mandatory part of Any Nation that wants to uh survive and thrive in the decades ahead I think it' be super important to figure this out um in your in your mission statement um you said you said uh hence the goal of figure is to develop general purpose humanoids that make positive impact on humanity and create a better life for future Generations these robots can

eliminate the need for unsafe and undesirable jobs uh ultimately allowing us to live happier more fulfilling lives and and I bu that you know I I love the idea of robots doing the jobs that are dull dangerous and dirty cleaning the toilets you know cleaning the rooms you know cuz most most people I think do work most people in the world do work not because they love that work but because they have to do it to get food or Insurance whatever the case might be and um but the question ultimately is I also think these

robots will you know I'm I've got a niece who's a who's a plastic surgeon and I'm like don't go into that you know robots are going to become our ultimate surgeons um is there any job you think that that robots aren't going to be able to take on if we want them to it certainly seems that over time both digital and physical intelligent robots will do more and more things a human can really well um and I think we're really just like in you know we've been seeing that though with technology over the last several

centuries but I think we're seeing that very like much accelerate this slope of that curve is accelerating and it's accelerating really interes in places with you know large language models and um it's almost accelerating in the wrong different direction that we probably probably have thought like you know 10 years ago um so I yeah I happen to think that over a long enough period of time we'll have automation with physical or digital automation that we'll be able to do as probably the majority of things a human can do today yeah just to note I I

checked this morning and there are 8.2 million uh job openings in the US right so it's not like there's no need for there's no jobs available um uh you I think the big news and congrats on this is the financing you just did um which is uh extraordinary just for those who don't know uh you raised 2.6 billion from open aai Microsoft Jeff Bezos Nvidia I know my own Venture fund full disclosure bold as an investor very proud of that that's a lot of money yeah we raised 675 million out of yes at a 2.6

billion valuation right yeah um yeah we're super proud we have like we brought on a lot of new investors including open AI Microsoft Nvidia um and yeah great to have your support um it was it was it was good it's G to give it's giving us the ammo now to really take the next step of our in our mission of rolling these robots out commercially and make him really viable um and that's that's really where we're at right now it's like how do we take you know like you know we're putting out cool videos and

um that's great but like the next big step is like how do we get those in the workforce working every single day and we're you know we just showed that we just got back from BMW and um you know and uh uh basically close to two weeks basically doing a full trial there that went really well uh BMW actually just put out a press release about that um we'll be going back here the near term and the goal is like to go back and do useful work continuously and um we I couldn't be more excited

it was it was both hard because we were like outside of our comfort zone in the office also just like really energizing when we got back we're like we can do this like this can be done reinforcing yeah yeah we're like we're all everybody here is fired up that like we get a chance to try to go do this over the next few years and I mean like post financing here like what's holding us back now we have we have more cash than we need at the stage of the company we're in we have great

Partners like open a helping us with models we have great companies like Microsoft helping us out with training Nvidia on like GPU Hardware other simulation work uh we have like the world's best AI robotics team every put together uh we have figure 2 now which is I would say the uh probably top humanoid Hardware in the world and we're doing some of the best AI learning work in the world um you know and we see this like small in the tunnel which is like this is what robots can really do so we're all just working

really hard at that this point would you say that what you're doing now is only possible because of the state of AI I mean is is artificial intelligence and and a mass amount of compute the thing that made this possible now because you know I mean we've been talking about robots for God knows you know 50 plus years I I built robots in higho school and college um I didn't call them robot I mean call them robots but they were nothing in comparison but is it now is it AI that made you say now I'm

going to you know commit cuz you put you put like $100 million of your own money into the kick this thing off right which which is a significant step for an entrepreneur I think there's like a few different things um I mean one is like the whole AI ecosystem it's not just like um it's not just the models um it it it's you know the the it's the overall infrastructure for for training for inference and deployment um like deep learning algorithms that can like support like um you know large scale imitation learning and reinforcement learning

um so I think there's just like a it was several building blocks there on the AI side that are all like maturing to a point where you can deploy these policies like embedded you know embody policies in in the in the world and they work which is pretty unbelievable like um I just got back from taking AO like last month in the city and it was just like very special um and it's just like you know this pretty clear it can just drive like a human can with enough data um and same with our robot

when you see our robot in the facility doing you know kind of like new generation work that we're working on now it just feels magical I think a SE separate thing is like um the whole like Hardware system um it's really hard to know if it was like 10 years ago this is really possible with like torque density of actuators batteries Battery Systems energy density there I I would happen to think that you know like the best humanoid robots 10 years ago were all hydraulic systems those are like 3,000 PSI systems uh they leaking hydraulic

fluid all over the place yeah like leaking oil everywhere like uh like intractable to put next to human you would kill you could kill a human with those next to those systems next to So like um certainly that that was the wrong like architecture decision 10 years ago it' been clear for me if like 10 years ago that would have been possible um assuming you even had AI that you could build electromechanical system that would work like would work at the levels we have now 10 years ago I would probably think not um and then

do think it's I do think it's convergence of a whole bunch of things I mean you know the theme for my abundance Summit next march is is Convergence and thank you for for joining because I think I think what you're building is the is the exact uh you know sort of uh principle example of converging uh Technologies making new systems and new business models possible um how how did you how did you connect with open AI in the first place I mean that's that's a big uh it's a big step yeah getting them involved I

got introduced to Sam a few years back and uh we got to know each other a lot better and spent spent a lot of time together in 2023 and uh you know ultimately they wanted to get back into the Robotics and specifically around like AI for you know embodied embodied systems and um you know now now here we are like working on like next Generation Um AI models for our robots to make that work and um they're they're supporting us on that that's been I would say so far 10 for 10 system we happen to

think that the best they're the best you know Vision language models in the world they're the best implementat of those models in the world and um you know we're trying to push the boundaries now on um how to push that work as hard and as far as possible in the robotic space which we're just you know we've just been starting the last like several months I imagine there's a lot of benefits for them as well um I mean embod you mentioned embodied AI there's a lot there's some theories that say listen we're not going to

get AGI unless we can embody AIS to understand you know sort of the uh embodiment gives him an understanding of the universe and allows them to explore and then there's the other idea that we're going to hit a data wall to get AGI and humanoid robots are a means for collecting a lot of data to help shape uh uh future models can you speak to that a little bit I think I think it's becoming more and more clear that some level some level of like output actions in planning better is is important to take their

kind of our next step in intelligence um what we're trying to do here is we're trying to help complete that last leg of like actions and reasoning that that we're seeing from kind of some of the best kind of world models that we're helping to work on here internally um at the end of the day if a if you can like talk to a robot and it can output actions like useful actions in the real world um that that would just be an an incredible technology for the world that we're trying to work on here

whether you want to call that you know Advanced AI AGI whatever like that's just such an important um focal point for us to try to get to is how do we output intelligent actions into the world and do useful things so most of our focus on the AI side is on that topic and and how to make that as scalable as possible and generalizable I mean I have to imagine you know gbt 40 and or you you know the multimodal versions of of gp4 are key for you right having having figure C and be able

to understand um uh was that a relatively when you started that didn't exist the multimodal models weren't there was was that the conversation you had going on with Sam was he sort of like uh uh you know sort of was he part of your inner conversation of what's going to be possible in the future I think yeah I mean like one of the biggest breakthroughs we have is we have like um with llms and you know VMS more specifically we've we've had like this like semantic grounding that's um that's occurred in robotics we have like

the world's knowledge like in a in some way like you know analogy like in a zip file for the robot to access and understand and that bridge from like robot to human was never really here before uh if you want to talk to um you know autonomous car and say Dro me off on the you know um on the curb over there on the right there was no no real semantic bridge for that in the world um and you know arguably we have that now we have like that semantic Bridge has been built in the

world and what we're really lacking is this like like I guess reasoning and planning and perhaps actions from that system to for us to provide useful work in in a robot and um so I would say you've had this like unbelievable technology has been opened up and we're seeing some really cool stuff right now in the world like you know with different Technologies all over the world in AI but like um one of the things people are not talking a lot about is like what does this mean for robotics this means like a robot knows

everything you're saying and knows knows what you mean and we have all this grounded in human level data I meaning we have all this like semantic world's knowledge is written by humans for humans which is an incredible um uh ability for a humanoid robot that looks like a human to really um have really high efficiency transfer rates so we like um the way humans open up jars is pretty similar to robots or humanoid robots to open a jar um so uh like the forces are roughly you know really high forance levels as it relates to

humans work so um this this is like unlocks like an ability for humanoid robots to really tackle like General robotics like how do we talk to robots and how do we output actions that everything a human can do and there's um there seems to be at a point in time where we can really try to see if we can crack that so you mean that we're going to see the normal course of interactions with robots be like you speak to a human it's like can you please go grab that for me and it says what

what do you want me to grab you say that thing over there and you point and it looks and it understands the stapler the bottle of water and so it's got contextual knowledge and and geometric and uh what do you call positional knowledge um how far is that yes this is all realistic today yeah it's not it's beyond even all those things like in the neural net weights lives the material of the plastic bottle roughly Mass characteristics sure and friction you know characteristics and how it will feel to grab and um all of this is

in the weights I I I work I work on longevity because I want to see as much of this stuff as I possibly can how what kind of hours do you work um because I know your passion Brett I know your dedication to this and you are a kid in Candy Store uh what's what's your what's your and you have to balance family as well what's your work week like um yeah I would say I work almost like basically almost seven days a week um there's really no time I'm like really not working um except

with home like with the you know wife wife and my kids yeah um and how old are your kids do they do they get what you're doing at we just had a family day at at figure so um you know my daughter's five and like was like and my son was to so uh we had the robots walking around all the kids were so excited uh it was really cool yeah they they get it they talk about Dad building robots all the time and um you know I think like uh yeah it's like um yeah

I I think um we we actually had probably 50 kids here like last week uh like watching all of them like uh see the robots and touch them and um yeah like uh it was pretty special you know I I think about that my boys are I have two boys who are 11 13 and I can't wait to have them see what you're building here um and I I think about the fact that their future and your kids' future are going to be you know if your numbers are correct and I think that they are

uh they will be more prevalent than cars are out there right there's like a million cars like a million other vehicles and we could see you know 5 to 10 I'm sorry a billion cars out there a billion other vehicles um and so it's going to be a very different future for them I asked a friend of mine what's it going to be like when you're seeing humanoid robots walking around the street all the time uh in in 5 years and his answer was interesting he said it's G to seem normal yeah yeah can I

tell you something we yeah about you know we have a lot of folks here have been around robots for a long time they're like um yeah as soon as we do something everybody's going to be in awe and then nobody going to care anymore yeah it's funny sometimes that happens we we're walking you know figure two now around the office quite quite frequently and the first few times like everybody's just like stopped doing work they're like fist pumping from the conference room or whatever uh taking photos we have this like we have this really crazy

video where everybody was falling around the robot the first time I walked around the office with like their phones out like you know and we do it now pretty regularly and no nobody cares like nobody is like uh oh the robot's close to me like uh you know you know like that's it like uh it it's pretty unbelievable how like um used to all the stuff we get right yeah we adapt so quickly it's like comes boring remember the first time I I got like a one of the first model x's and you know the

the door Wings come up and everybody's snapping photos and looking at it and then it's a nuisance after that yeah yeah yeah we get used to things really quick I don't know it's uh even like using you know like large language models and stuff today like chbt it's just like I use it you know pretty frequently during the week and it's just uh I like it's totally normal part of my workflow yeah it it it is it becomes just an extension uh gp5 are have you had conversations about um integrating that and its derivatives or

the mythical strawberry is it's being unveiled do you get any any early views of uh of open eyes content for for op for figure no comment Peter no comment okay okay can't hurt to ask everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called Fountain life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented Physicians you know most of us don't actually

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most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans go to fountainlife decomp it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let's go back to our episode I am curious what you uh how you think about uh about Optimus and Tesla and Elon um I know you have great respect for him as an engineer and entrepreneur um I what are your thoughts there um I just like have to be

uh you know so inspired by what elon's done in the last like 20 30 years it's been just unbelievable um I think they're doing a great job at Optimus and I think they have a really good engineering team I think they're making really good progress and I think the dire heading in the right direction um like the ve the vector for where where we need to go as a society to integrate and build humanoid robots I think they're following a very good direction um so I I think they're going to be um you know a

really real competitor with us I think um the world needs them out there doing this uh and um yeah I hope I hope them I hope they do really well like um I think we're at a point in time where the the window has just open now for humanoids to be possible I don't think it was really possible 10 years ago so you know it's um it's going to be this a little bit of a race here to get volumes out the door in terms of manufacturing and you get the AI training sets built and

deployed uh on the embodied systems and um yeah it could be like a more important time to make this really work so yeah I think overall just like very um I I think will do very well and I'm um very glad they're tackling it yeah I think when he walks into a new industry like that he credentials it in a big way did did they serve as sort of a a stalking horse for you to keep the team do you guys like look at and go oh my God how' they do that or or you

know ours is better is it is it provide a little bit of that kind of like gamified motivation for the team or are you guys just open loop otherwise I think we try to like make we try to make all of our decisions from Like A first order reasoning like what was the right decision to make if and that's super important for every company to really do is like um I think we have our own Mission Vision Values what we care about it's very different than any other company and we want to head a certain

direction like vector space like that we think is the right way to go longer term um so I think that's like where we really ground ourselves and like the decisions we make um I think there'll be things that we um do a lot differently than other groups uh you know um longer term because like we're just making these decisions like in vacuum with knowledge that we have and going through that um yeah I think they're a really good competitor so for sure we want to be um we want to be winning and we want to

compete you know overall we um so yeah I think um you know our goal is to to build the best humanoid robotics company in the world over here I figure and and I think the since since the marketplace is arguably near infinite uh there's plenty of room for for two or three uh significant players on the planet I think there'll be like I think the the way I look at it is we need more like really real players and I think Tesla's a really real player like I mean you know highly capitalized great engineering team

heading the right direction like longer term uh moving fast through those High rate iteration cycles and Milestones that are needed for engineering teams to really um prove out the product is getting commercially viable and um what we're lacking in humanoid space is that like we have a lot of groups that have been around for a long time around the hoop and um you know it does not look like there going be a lot of players that all win it looks like there'll be very few that make it through this like Chasm uh like crossing the

chasm here that's needed for getting into market and I think many will die is trying to you know trying to to bridge this uh I hope that we live at figure but like we have like 14 Peaks to go climb now we have like a a very hard road ahead to go from where at now which is like like two-year-old company to like a commercially viable like a real business and that's what we need to go do right like we have like Year s s single- digigit years to go prove that and get into market

so like that's we're charging forward as hard as we can to ship our product into customers and make it useful yeah I I think you know thing most people probably don't realize is you're only two years old right and what you put together in terms of team and I think this last round of financing if I looked at what you know if you had said to average person or average technologist or venture capitalist what's the advantage that Elon has for for Optimus it's he has a manufact he has a car company there that could use

it he's got compute um he's got capital I think this last round Gave You parody uh if not in some places um uh you know it's like it's such a it's just like such a stupid argument though because like you could say that about every company that's and why they can't be disrupted you could have said that those are all T Tesla weaknesses 20 years ago when they didn't have any of those none of them there already groups to make electric cars and somehow they won so like that's not really what happens in real life

like that's not the that's not those attributes do not set the winner um I'm not saying set the winner I'm just saying that you uh those attributes were ADV advantageous and and now you've got the capital you've got the compute with open Ai and you've got BMW and so forth so yeah no I think like all the building blocks that we need to do to build a healthy company are all like starting to show up and that's good because we need like those are like requirements that are needed in our long-term road map and we

just got to put all those pieces together very intelligently and then not not die in the market and make a product work not not dying is a great part of the business plan um can we talk about China because I find that absolutely fascinating so China succeeded on the backs of lowcost Labor and that's going away we hit uh we hit covid and no one wants to manufacture and the shipping costs and so I'm I'm tracking the robot companies coming out of China because I think that Ro for so many reasons like their aging population

their one child you know per family policy all of that uh and trying to actually maintain a manufacturing base all requires robotics um I see unry and a few others what do you think of the of the Chinese robots um are there any that seem like good competition out there I I just got back from China a couple months ago and it was one of the best visits I've done in my career to be honest um went to a bunch of um kind of uh like manufacturing focused companies in mainland China and it was just

uh it was crazy like I we were Torn One facility and I was like what's that written on the wall over there and they're like oh that's just our motto for this building I'm like what does it say they're like if you're having a bad day just work harder and I was like holy cow these guys are they're animals over here uh they're just like they're just trying to build and ship um the work ethic was really high um the the sheer will of the country to try to be a good like be like compete

and win is really high and um I was floored I was just I was like man you have you have you been there many times before I've not been there like I would call it like a lot um and you know specifically was like spent a lot of time touring kind of what high rate Manufacturing processes look like out there and I it was just um I was it was it was shocking um I I think I think the you know I think we have in the humanoid space like we have like you know figure

and and Optimus here you know outside of China I do think China is like the next group of folks that are um are going to be really competitive long term in the humanoid space I think they have to be um you know I used to when I I used to go to China every year and bring a a group of abundance members with me and we'd go and and visit all the top tech companies and I remember the motto there was 996 like a great lifestyle was 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. 6 days a week

that was the work ethic and you know everybody China had the had the reputation as being copycats but you know sure they copy a lot of things but they also did a lot of authentic new development work there is that your experience as well my experience uh has been that that those folks out there want to win they want to do it at the lowest cost they want to do it at the highest rate um and they'll stop at nothing to try to try to try to be number one and that's uh that's that's like

you know think about like what startups are it's like it boils down to like those key principles you start a company with that are successful you you have nothing and it's just sheer willpower to get there and to go in and they have that in Spades in China and um they do not the resources we do here in the states um does that you know like we said before does that really matter that you have like all these things or you know is that is that um you is Ultimate crutch and um so I I

think I think there are going to be some unbelievable robotics companies come out of China just for the um just because of the sheer number of projects being worked on and with the the will that I saw out there um is second to none yeah I mean I think in the same way that Israel developed an amazing defense industry because they had to um to survive I think China and Japan and South Korea with dwindling populations and aging populations are going to need to develop an incredible robotics industry to Survive and Thrive and maintain a

GDP yeah so you you take Archer public um which was an incredible success and congratulations on that uh and after starting that running that for a number of years um you break away to found uh figure and if I'm correct you know you made a commitment uh you put a significant amount of capital on the table to start the company um which you were able to do because of your previous exits from from veter and from from Archer uh but I think when I when I first heard your presentation and I brought it to my

Venture fund what I was so impressed by uh which clinched the deal in my mind was the team you built um I mean it was an extraordinary group of Engineers from the top Ai and Robotics companies OR tech companies out there uh you can you just a word of advice for for Founders who are starting a company I mean you're you're a technical founder as well which is important right um but how did you recruit your team yeah um so my my belief is that in in order to ship like a really good highquality product

you need the world's best team there to go do that um especially against like um like the difficulty level we have a figure of like succeeding like the odds of success are always like pretty low so we need like just you need to give it everything you got you need the best team here you need them onsite every day you need to work hard um you know you need to have like a high functioning workaholism bit so um I uh so I spent the first year basically trying to map out what the what the organization

needs to look like in terms of skills and um like what does the ultimate orc chart need to do to support like a really high functioning team uh to build a product and um I spent the first year just basically head hunting all that whole team by hand and um like like you know cold I was cold emailing and calling uh drafted the offer letter would give the offer letter go do ERS try to close on board you know 30 6090 day on boarding bring them in lead the engineering decisions uh and direction and you

know work work on those projects with those teams like I think um you know it's been a huge payoff because we've gotten like now this point where I think we have like one of the better teams ever built in the world for this and it's like snowballing we're able to track like really high quality Talent over all our disciplines but in the early days in the ear in the early days Brett I mean how' you get that that first dozen was it your conviction was it you know your Capital commitment to it I mean because

in one in one way you had uh you had Tesla bot I don't know if it was called Optimist back then you know and sort of Elon tends to suck the oxygen out of a room on the stuff that he does um you know convincing people to jump where they were and join you was it how did you do that cuz that jiujitsu is really important yeah I mean the pitch for early figure was we're working on humanoids we have this big mission to advance human capabilities with AI um we believe in AI first into

Market uh we believe a vertically integrated approach to Hardware design is important we're living in the largest ham or we're working in the largest H in the world it's you know under half a GDP as human labor yeah uh I'll fund the first several years there's no funding risk in the near- term um and uh you know it's my second time going around building Hardware building Hardware team so you know having done I think decently well at Archer um you know we're getting back and doing it from scratch did it even better this time in

terms of like setting the right direction and Mission Vision Values the team and then I just spent a lot of time with those folks saying uh you know come here let's go out and build this commercial let's let's build the best organization we possibly can from early days um the early folks got all like founding you know founding member stock which also was helpful and beneficial got good salaries I was you know funding myself so it was like you know being a part of like a from scratch startup almost like cushioned by my ability to

sell funded for multiple years good Equity uh you know by the time we had five or six people in the team they were all superstars and then that was like more D risking for the next you know five or six folks that were joining um so was able to find folks that really believed in the space and believed in me a lot of folks that used to work with me my last two companies a lot of folks that were new as well um I had a you know I had my my first two people were

folks that I've worked with at you know were like my first employee of veter my early employees at Archer that I worked with they were like you know so it was you know three of us day one basically that have all worked together added some more folks on my old team at Archer added some more folks from Boston Dynamics and other other organizations that were really great soon enough we had a dozen people that were Superstars and their discipline and then you know we walked our robot within 12 months of incorporating the company so we

worked really hard and got out of the gates pretty fast and you know now it looks like okay you know looks everything looks great then but I was in a we work phone booth for months making cold calls trying to convince and talking to you know wives and husbands and tell them to convince their you know spouse to to join and uh it was it was hard yeah not going to lie I I I I bet what what did you give the the the chances of success back then in the early days or to get

to the point where you are now I mean if you had to give a thing back then you like yeah yeah I would not have ever assumed that we would be out of place now we we've really you know we I think there just the like you know I look at everything as like how well is the product doing as it relates to like the the road map into commercialization we're still you know we're not like we're not successful like we're not even like shipping like I but like you know we've been around for I

don't know like 20 uh you know a little over like a little over two years or something like that um unbelievable like the amount of the hardware that's doing the AI systems and working ex those those policies uh like the the the look at the humanoids Now versus like 10 years AG it's unbelievable and we don't ever walk into the office and like things go backwards like they always go forwards like we're not like you know sometimes we have like couple days where like you know uh a couple robots break and we don't make progress

because we're fixing them or whatever else or a lot of pro meaningful progress but most weeks we're like making pretty decent like if folks are gone for a week they come back and be like this is a whole new company it feels like um so like you know every every week goes by we're making pretty substantial uh impact so I would say like we far exceeded my my early uh impressions of where we'd be at two years from now yeah two years ago I'm curious what did you think would be really hard that turned out

to be easy nothing's easy but was easier than you expected um well I thought I maybe like the opposite I'll do I thought we a to a lot ofly chain to build a robot like uh electronics boards Motors actuator systems uh battery pack systems uh cameras like out lights like speakers like we like speakers on figure to like I thought may go to Alibaba or go to Amazon buyers uh screens like Bas like screens speakers lights um these things have to be about off the shelf right like you have to go buy those things and

they come in from Amazon and you put them on a prototype like that's like that's like what that's should be that easy it's it's still not that easy like we're making custom speakers like how is it possible that we're making custom speakers and we're writing custom firmware for some of those areas like how is that even it doesn't make any sense that that's even possible so going into it a little naive of like these sensors for torque cells or whatever like would be procured and would come in I would have to do it like we

we like we make our torque cells like force cells here which need like a flexure the board they need to be gauged they need to be calibrated tested integrated there's like there's software and firmware on those on there like like like and like that's got to work then at really high high rates like um it still boggles my mind there's no like mature supply chain across all this stuff it's just unbelievable and I'm assuming that that's not your first choice that you'd rather buy from a reliable supplier versus vertically vertically integrate everything everybody would always

choose to buy something if it's like easy to procure and um not the only vendor in town everybody would always choose to buy uh nobody in the right mind would ever want to build in that case it just enormous effort and burden to maintain it and to QA it and to fix bugs and pay human salary and manage humans it's just like it's just a hard it's like a hard thing to do and uh damn humans you you'll get you'll get through the human phase pretty soon um yeah what what percentage of the robot is

manufacturing house do you think like rough order is it like 75% 90% by whatever but whatever metric you want weight or I mean we probably look at how much of this like we're designing ourselves um I don't I don't know the exact number off top of the head but I have to think it's probably like 70 80% of things we're designing at this point for the robot um there is there is an advantage of of controlling quality and and pulling out um overhead or margins out of the vendors I I remember I was I was

visiting Elon shop in the early days and he was in this conversation by some supplier because it's a lot of these suppliers are all defense Aerospace and they're just extraordinarly expensive and he was like screw them we'll just make it ourselves was was the attitude I don't know if that's what we like we've been around for two years so most of the engineering decisions around the build materials and the supply chain would have been let's get speed by getting parts in the robot get robots to AI you know um AI Engineers controls Engineers let's get

work done um so we would have made those decisions quite quickly to uh Outsource that work to get robots up and up up and running faster so um and I think longer term we would have worked the supply chain to own it better to have less risk to reduce uh like the the margin profile across all the you know supply chain um but there's just like um yeah I think we thought that was easy it became like a bloody hell so what's what's the what's the flip side of this thing that you thought was going

to be hard and turned out to be easy would it would it maybe be the AI integration did I mean when you started did you imagine you're going to have to build out your own AI models we still do like a lot of our own AI models here which is like maybe not super well known but like um but we do we have a whole AI team we do most of the lot of work ourselves I would say across this we leverage some group like you know open AI we like work with on new models

and stuff and use their like VM for some things so I think uh then that's been really helpful I think AI systems is probably the one that's been like wow this is really working and it's you know you think about like this split of like what percentage of the things are you going to have to hardcode and code to go do which is like you know more classical controls and her istics what percentage of things can we do through neural networks and I you know I would I would have thought going into this I guess

my thoughts two years ago is like you know a large percentage of the stack would be written in in heris stics and code um call like 95 90% And then as we are able to you know write neural nets for those that are at equivalent performance we will just take those uh that level of like code or C++ and remove it with the neural net and it's kind of been flipped yeah um all the is working uh for like a small team with like you know we don't have like a ton of tooling and infrastructure

and things almost like right off the bat uh with like everything like just like like using slam or perception systems and object detectors and um planning and uh Speech to speech reasoning everything everything the St like the high and low low levels have been working incredibly well and um so yeah I think it's pretty magical I just like it would take us such a long time to code all this stuff did you see the movie Oppenheimer if you did did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs that they spent

billions on biod defense weapons the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA well a company called viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood now viome has a product that I've personally used for years called full body intelligence which collects a few drops of your blood spit and stool and can tell you so much about your health they've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical Health guidance like what foods you

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of all viome is Affordable which is part of my mission to democratize health if you want to join me on this journey go to vi.com Peter I've asked navine Jane a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of viome to give my listeners a special discount you'll find it at vom.com Peter I remember you talk describing to me the uh the time when figure one uh put the Cur you know cup and made you a cup of coffee and you were like we're trying to code this and then we just had them watch somebody

do it like a dozen times and uh and they were able to model it I'm I'm curious you know is the way you're interacting with with figure 2 like hey watch me pick this thing up and put it over here and now you do it is that conversational you know uh and the the visual models is that where the state of the practices yeah we're like literally talking to robot to go do something and it does it so what's like the most interesting thing you've had figure uh you know do for you um I mean

we can literally talk to our robot and it can like do tasks right now which is like unbelievable I mean like the instate for this is you really want the default UI to be speech you just want to talk to the I I wna when I'm like working on yeah I another another way to think about it is like I'm on the robot I'm like um you know one way to do is like I pull my phone out or my laptop out and I'm like you know opening a terminal and like trying to get a

command to the robot to go do something and the robots like standing right there listening and I'm just like I it just like wants to be talked to like you just want to just be like put all this stuff away and it's be like figure two you know go do this and we're doing that now and it's just magical it's it's it's um it's really clear that the default UI for human robot is going to be speech yeah you really just want um spee to speech reasoning to get really high and you ultimately at the

end State want to talk to a robot and have it be able to uh learn as it's in the environment through vision and sensors and you want it to get better um over time and it certainly seems like they were heading in that direction yeah I remember rethink robotics used to like move the hand for them and say do this again but I yeah I mean speaking to it and and showing it what you want if it doesn't understand um can we talk about robotic safety I mean um how you know where are you on

safety and and how do you make sure there's no like uh errant firmware upgrade that turns robots into uh you know overpowered Slayers uh you know I mean there's enough there's enough dystopian Hollywood movies I don't want to you know uh bring them forward but how do you think about safety how important is that um where does asimov's laws come into your mind and practice there's like many ways to think of this we have like the like this system safety engineering side of like making the robot like actually really safe when it walks around the

facility and does things where next to humans um there's a whole like AR architecture it's actually designed from Top like like the bottoms up to make that a safe safe system that ultimately we can like put a safe Hardware system into the world and it will um basically react like we would wanted to um in all these different various conditions um and I think that's just one piece like like we need to like save Hardware around humans there's another piece of like cyber security and other things of like we don't want anybody to have like

Rude access to the robot and be able to take command of robots and to do potentially bad malicious things with them um and then you have other things like what happens on the onset of AGI how does that really impact the safety of the robot um so I think there's like many things we're doing here as it relates to like like the lowlevel like read only um like firmware on the robot is relates to like what it like um what is like the lowest level code sitting at the robot that can't that can't be overwritten

say so more kind like the you know three Three Laws I mean it's pretty cool you get to you get to think about you know the laws of robotics you want to instill in your robots uh yeah I think you I mean like a lot of this stuff is like if we don't think about this now we have to do like full architecture rebuilds which affect the system quite a lot so we kind of have to start thinking about all this stuff now to design so so think help me understand this so right now can

a robot mechanically have enough velocity and torque to harm you um because a lot of the sort of Automotive robots you know they put cages around them and so forth and they're been designs where it's like okay I'm just going to make the robot so it can't build enough velocity it can't outrun you you can't you know sort of you put that kind of a constriction on it um I mean the robot's like 150 pounds uh you know it certainly has enough like gravitational potential energy no matter what to hurt you so if it fell

off a bunch of stairs and was falling on you like it certainly could hurt you so like no matter what I think whether doesn't have even has like you know uh torque sensing applied so it can't hurt you next to you there's certainly a scenario where it could be harmful uh no matter what so I think um yes this is for sure A system that can be harmful to humans if not designed properly um or has like a certain episod or um like fault on the robot that like somehow like um is next to human

and hurts them so uh this is something that has to be done uh very thoughtfully from the beginning as like system safety architecture and then we have to gradually prove out performance of that CC system over time through like in incremental approach so like our first robots in our in the work cells in the workforce will be isolated from humans um if humans enter those work cells we will shut the robot off uh over time we'll go from there to like fully um next to humans uh you know collaboratively and that will be like a

gradual time frame best guess is that two years five years um I actually don't like we're mostly concerned on trying to get the performance up of the system in the first few years and the reliability that's probably the hardest thing we have to do like getting you want to go and see a robot like working full like whether it's like you know let's say you have like a light curtain like like an artificial cage or a robot um I think solving like a collaborative robot next to All Humans longer is like super solvable I think

the hardest hill we have now to climb which is harder than that is getting the robot to do inin work every day without like failure like you know it makes like local failure it's like sometimes I miss like I miss an object but I go and regrab it so we can like we can fail locally but not globally we need to like we have certain performance outputs like let's say we go into to a warehouse they're going to have a certain amount of output per day of packages or whatever they're going to do of SKS

they'll need to go hit if it's a bunch of robots doing that they'll still have those same performance goals so we we know if we miss a package we just got to deliver it know the right way uh on time so what I guess what I'm trying to say is um yes there's I think I think we'll solve this decade humanoids around humans and interacting with them closely but it'll but before you ever see that you'll see it's like the analogy with wayo right you saw in weo in certain permitting areas of San Francisco before

you saw in other cities sure and you saw you saw it with the practice drivers in the seat you know watching everything you know yeah you've seen it with everything even like auto pilot right like you've seen it on highways doing it well as they're beta testing the new software updates for other types of concept operations so like I think for us we're just um you know we're at we're at this period now where we need to prove that it can work and do useful work even on a confined perspective and then over time like

yeah we got to build in the right system safety uh certification almost to uh like make sure it's be it can walk around humans it can like give items to humans it can you know um and we'll have certain safety precautions we do next to humans to make sure we're not operating at full torqus and full speeds next to humans do you think uh ASM mob's laws would should actually be incorporated um you know they're pretty fundamental you know don't harm a human or do something that causes a human to be harmed or by you

know not do something that by by uh uh by not taking action causes a human to be harmed I mean this sounds pretty fundamental but it sounds like that's the AI layer yeah there's certainly a select number of really important do not override read only um instructions that need to live on the robot that can never be altered that's like for sure and then do you imagine figure I mean so one of the biggest advantages of having a robotic Workforce is that they can all learn uh when one robot learns a task they all know

the task um and that requires sort of a a a you know sort of central control um is that going to be you know is that like one central control for a BMW plant or is that figure on a global level where there's a sort of mission control that is watching all robots and and learning from them yeah you um sorry for us we we would want robots as a fleet doing continuous learning and continuous training on that dat set so it'll be a situation where we have millions if not billions of robots on the

planet hopefully someday that are all continuously learning as a group um we're doing we're doing offline training on that and then the robots are basically getting smarter collectively uh that's like as a collective intelligence uh that's for sure what's happening in the direction we're heading to towards uh you want um what's so powerful about this is like humans you know my kids like they they learn how to walk they learn how to walk they're mostly failing like learning not like what not to do in some ways and learn new things that that takes a lot

of time um but once we know things like really well we we really don't forget it rarely do we forget you know how a walk or like a certain things and that's happened throughout history but most the time we really don't forget um so uh so for robots one of the biggest advantages we have is once one robot learns a certain task uh every robot in the fleet will know this yeah and so it'll be very exponential in terms of like the amount of new think about almost like almost like the Matrix like we will

plug like one we'll teach robots will learn through like human demonstrations and through reasoning like like how to do something and once it's been able to demonstrate that several times and we've been able to um uh you know like close a loop on that like okay that's worked really well and there's a reward system uh every robot in the fleet will know this that's why I think you know future surgeons will best be done surgery will best be done by robots you know where one robot is seen millions of different surgeries and can uh can

be the the the best and reliable surgeon out there um can we wrap up a conversation just talk a little about jobs cuz I have to imagine that that people are still fearful about robots taking their jobs we have like really good feedback um so far um you know our goal is to really um be able to do a lot of the jobs that are not desirable by by humans I mean you mentioned earlier in this podcast we had like 8 million us jobs that people just don't want to do like we want to do

those jobs and we want to do the things right now that like that are potentially harmful and dangerous for humans to do and a lot of those jobs have like very high unemployment rates uh very high like like very low like retention like um like really high like low retention rates um and uh we we want to start trying to do those and trying to help automate and you know like we've been doing that as a world for like several Cent like my my family was Farmers right at some point we like half the world

was Farmers I grew like like 80% of the world was Farmers yeah like everybody was farming and now you know like well 1% you know not very many so like uh you know grew up on a farm like that's like you know um nobody's mad that we're all not farming like you know what I mean like no like I'm like you know I'm not out there being like 80% of everybody should be farming right now like that that wouldn't be great right for all like um plowing and Fields and uh harvesting corn and soybeans like

that's not that I don't think that would been productive state for Humanity in 2024 do you remember um when at the Fukushima nuclear reaction reactor and then DARPA had the the DARPA robotics challenge have you ever seen those videos where the robot was just you know laughably incapable of opening a door climbing steps um yeah I mean I think that's the is it how is the defense department and the government uh uh a client or near client how do you feel about about plugging into that World um yeah we we won't do anything defense related

at all um uh it's like in our Manifesto online we um we think the civilian like Market is just orders of magnetude bigger than defense and it's not in our interest to like build a war machine of any kind either not a kinetic War Machine so uh we we won't even have conversations we won't take phone calls uh with anybody in this area fascinating how do you feel about uh civil police and security right now no like we're not touching any of stuff uh we don't want to give any we we don't want to give

any requirements that that are needed to have the robot produce harm um I respect that you know to to like any humans like our goal is our goal is to do work like we want to do work we think that freeze uh like we think it significantly helps um the economy and helps lower goods and service prices and do good work um for the world and I think it's much needed like I think um so like that's we're putting all of our eggs in that basket right now what industries do you see next I mean

you basically have I mean it's every industry but where where do you think you want to play I mean where you're probably getting a ton of solicitations right taking it a step at a time I mean these are big I mean we like these companies we're talking to like are massive we could ship thousands of robots into these groups so you know for us we'd rather work with only a couple groups right now and do that really well then like uh open it up to you know hundreds of groups at the moment um but a

some point in the coming years we we'll we'll we'll sell to anybody and uh and we're you know we're starting our uh we're starting a production line next year so um we'll start with a few as we um you know have like engineering really close with those customers and making sure that the product really works well there'll be like a bunch of bugs and process improvements we need to make to make those like a well oiled machine for uh for the market we want to do those with those customers now and you know as we

get to some level of product maturity we'll we'll Branch out to more and more customers and something that we're going to spend more and more time on is also like robots in the home yeah and what when can I own a robot in my home because I'd like to put my order now every six months that goes by I go to a couple folks here and I say the timeline for us getting in home is accelerating and it one of the things that'll be really helpful for us getting into the workforce it'll really help us

get system reliability up safety up and the cost down and volumes up for manufacturing it'll really help us in the home because you really want a like you'll probably have like an order of magnitude uh pricing collapse going into the home from the workforce sure and you really need economies of scale to get there and you really need a safety certified system uh in the home so like you need a really safe product in the home so um we we are using the workforce in a lot of ways to boost strap that vision for us

and but I think from a performance perspective I think like I think we'll start doing early work in the home and you know and then like you know I I think the the home for us is a area where yeah I think it's accelera in my mind every every six months that we okay but give me give me a guess is it is it three years 5 years eight years I would say within the next three years we'll definitely have robots piloting homes yeah nice okay I want to volunteer early on yeah I'll pay we'll

probably start with some lock homes here in our facilities and start you know getting the bugs worked out understanding how to the system architectures all work but uh I'm I'm interested in seeing what problems we face that we're not prepared for that are limiting our ability to get in the home longer term as well amazing so last question for you uh Brett uh manufacturing uh uh you scaling up you're building a manufacturing plant for figure yeah we're actually starting our production line next year um where's it going to go where you going to do that

uh we're going to do that here in California like close to engineering so we really work out the Kinks um on like more of a traditional like kind of pilot manufacturing line or production line and um and then from there we'll we'll start announcing our intentions for like where like like high rate manufacturing will look but um production line is being uh we're starting to design it as we speak uh we'll have Robots coming off the production line next year in 205 and you're scaling it for what kind of volume you think and uh we'll

start with hundreds of robots and then thousands like as uh we really want to get the pro what's more important for us than just like having like you know here's 3,000 4,000 robots out is getting the process really dialed in for how to do that and then also making sure those robots that we're producing are are working really well there's a situation where um anybody easily can get into where we have like Too Many Robots that don't work well and you're basically in this like recursive Loop fixing them uh always having them down like volume

doesn't really help so you really need the system reliability to be at a certain point and the production like the performance of those robots then into the into the use cases to be pretty high uh I do not feel like building thousands of robots is it seems super tractable to go do now building like hundreds of thousands of robots is a different story then building Millions is a different story but building like 2,000 5,000 10,000 robots is just uh at this point you know building we're building one a week so it might seem you know

and then we'll start building like one a day and then we'll start building multiples a day here next 12 months so like I think um but it it seems like pretty straightforward path um I mean we make cell phones almost by hand in the world make a few billion a year like um this is more complex than a cell phone but far less complex than a car so yeah I feel like the path to making thousands in the you know in the near term is just not super difficult what's the difficult part is making those

thousands uh to a point where they're really useful and really work that's like that's the name of the game for me Brett Adcock uh I'm a huge fan of what you built and um excited for uh for for figure twos roll out into the world and actually what I saw with figure three is absolutely gorgeous so excited for that as well thank you for all the hard work you're doing and you know I do think this is a way of uplifting humanity and creating an age of abundance so much appreciate let's do it Peter see

you see you pal [Music]