EXCLUSIVE: $3B Founder Reveals His Next Big Idea | Brett Adcock Interview

If you had to describe yourself as an entrepreneur, what would you say you are?

I just want to go build important things and win. That's it.

So you just raised $675 million, and I feel like that's a monster business.

Let's talk about this for a minute.

We talk about one-chart businesses where you like, you see some crazy chart and you're like, oh, well, there's like an opportunity.

Several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K-12 every year in the US and not found. And the chart, if you look like a line graph of the chart, it's just like exponential.

What's your answer for that?

This is like the first time I've talked about this publicly.

Um, we're live with Brett Adcock. I wanted to start off with something crisp. You told me this story and this is something that's fascinating about you, which is about your ability to learn. I think I don't want to butcher the story, but you said something like, I was reading old, I think, research papers and you found that, I think in the '70s, NASA came up with this amazing thing and you cold called or cold emailed NASA and you're like, can you actually show me this device? Is that story right?

Uh, yeah, it's pretty close. This is like the first time I've talked about this publicly. Um, so sorry for maybe from like for context, I have been kind of following what's happening at K-12 schools in the US as it relates to school shootings. And if you look at the charts of like, you know, how many shootings are actually happening at the schools, how many deaths are happening in schools, it's, it's, it's, it's like basically you have like a school shooting like basically once per day now in the US in K-12.

That's true. Is that true? That's insane.

I just say we're like, I think it was like 200 over 200 people like, um, last year were like either shot or wounded or killed in the US at K-12, and a third of those are all in elementary. And the chart, if you look like a line graph of the chart, it's just like exponential. It's, uh, we, we like 5x'd in 2018, uh, kind of almost like year over year, and then we like took another 3x move. So we basically 10x'd the number of school shootings over the last, like, 7 years or so, decade. And it's just getting worse and worse. What I found is that most of all the school shootings are not what we're seeing on TV where, you know, there's like an overt assault where somebody is bringing in like a machine gun, planned it out, driving a truck into campus and shooting people up. That's, that's, that's, that's— we— that happens a few times a year. 99, 98% of all the other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day to school. They're getting in a fight at some point, it escalates into a shooting. So they're just like, it's like a, it's like a, it's like an accessory. It's like, like bringing a thermal gun. They have a handgun in their backpack. And, but from our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K-12 every year in the, in the US and not found. And then a small fraction of those that we see now in the statistics are basically getting bullied or getting in a fight and they're shooting somebody on school campus. So one of my hobbies, I love reading research papers and just papers in general. And the way I think you solve this is you need to be able to see the guns. I think gun control is something I'm interested in and passionate about, but I think it's not going to fix all school shootings forever. There was like last year, 70 knife stabbings in K-12 schools. So like, you know, even if you halted guns, there's still like knife stabbings happening here. So we need to see the weapons. So I was reading, um, I came across a research paper from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab where they were doing work where they were trying to detect, um, bomb vests and weapons underneath, uh, like garments and clothes and jackets, uh, for like Afghanistan and Iraq. And they, they developed some really interesting like weapons imaging technology. And I flew to JPL, like NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and I was talking to the guy that ran it.

Did you just cold email him or something?

Oh yeah, cold call them for sure. Yeah.

And what did you say?

Oh, I said, hey, I need to learn more about this. I read your paper. Can we have a conversation? you know, most people in general will get on the phone with you at this point. Like, if you're passionate about some work they did for years and years that they're no longer doing, like, somebody's gonna take a phone call. I think, I think most people could knock on that door and get that person to react. Um, I, yeah, I don't think that's a hard thing to do. Uh, called him and I flew in, and the high level was that they developed, um, a high frequency radar, so similar like your Wi-Fi or phone Like, um, like it's like it like lies in electromagnetic spectrum. So, uh, like radio waves basically that were really high frequency. So like think about like your phone or Wi-Fi, but like really souped up to a much higher frequency level. And they were able to start penetrating clothing and start like imaging or building or reconstructing images of what's happening inside of bags and clothing and stuff. And if you like read the research papers, you look at it, it's like, it's like a, it's like a airport security, uh, cam, like airport security, but like you can do it, uh, 50 meters away and you can do it like a camera and you can take like almost like camera frame rate images, which means you could just like point this at an entrance of a school in this example and you can see every gun and knife and bomb and it doesn't need to be metallic. It doesn't need metal. It could be plastic. It could be any material.

Is it radio waves?

It's radio waves. Is that dangerous if you have ionized electromagnetic waves, uh, like you would see like an X-ray? Yes. These are non-ionizing rays, uh, like almost like your cell phone and Wi-Fi. So these are not— yeah, I mean, listen, they worked on it from like for like years and years, and I think at the end of it was like 2013 or so. So it was like when I got there, I was like, we were talking and chatting and didn't even think to ask to see the machine. And at the end of the conversation, he's like, do you want to come see it? And I'm like, Of course. And we like walk down like 4 flights of stairs to the basement. He, you know, takes the COVID off. It's dusty. It's like a huge, like compact computer at the bottom and all this old stuff, like all, all the electronics and all the systems and stuff are like very dated. He turns it on and demos for me. He, we have like a mannequin with a gun underneath the shirt and he shows me it and it was like, it was unbelievable. It was like, it was like, it was like a camera picture of the gun. But then we also had like you also, with radio frequency, we get the, we get a 3D reconstruction. So you almost get like a camera point cloud of the product.

Was this before you were going to do Figure? Were you like, this is like my number 1 or number 2 or number 3 idea or something like that?

This was a while ago, and I've been mostly curious about the space. And then what happened from like 2018 to now is we've seen like a 5x spike in the number of school shootings. So like the charter school shootings is like looking like a, like Nvidia stock price.

Well, we talk about an MFM. We talk about one chart businesses where you like, you see some crazy chart and you're like, oh, well there's like an opportunity. And it's like, well, if you just, there's a tidal wave, if you just sort of catch that wave and you aren't even that good, like the market's like pulling it out of you. Uh, like everyone just wants this thing. Yeah. So that was like your one, your kind of one chart where it was like, oh, well this is obvious.

So many came in to Figure at one point in 2023. It was an investor and he was looking at solutions for school shootings, like just coincidentally. And they were basically at the time looking at a startup that was using like CCTVs, like basically the cameras that are at a school to find guns. The problem is like all the guns are hidden. So whenever you like brandish a weapon or pull it out and wave it around, you're, you're at a point where like a second later you're shooting it. So you can't stop the shootings. You can just get more prepared about how to get there faster, maybe get to the right location, maybe stop, like, save some lives if the shooting lasts for a long period of time. You're not like, you're not stopping weapons from getting in school. You're not theoretically even stopping real shootings. So I was telling him about my experience here and the guy like looked me dead in the face and he's like, listen, as somebody who has kids, like, how are you not like trying this and seeing if you can make this really work? And yeah, so at that time I said, I gotta figure out how to spend some time and money making this useful.

And so is that what you're going to do? You're launching this as a startup. Are you going to have someone else run it? What are you going to do?

Yeah. So we haven't announced this yet, but like it is, we have about 12 people on the project and we own all the intellectual property from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, licensed all of it. Um, and we will have our first system brought up to start imaging weapons, uh, in 30 days.

Are you gonna run it? Who's gonna run it?

We have a team from JPL that's running the system, running there right now.

I, I don't think that business can be as big as Figure, but I feel like that's a monster business.

Let's talk about this for a minute. Um, this is not a school thing. This is, uh, stadiums, churches, Um, anywhere it's like a lot of, uh, like hospitals, everything. So, so my view of this is, um, over a long enough period of time, as longevity improves for humans, the, um, the, the severity to having an accident and dying is going to be higher and higher. Meaning, um, we're not going to want to do more riskier things as we live longer. It's why in the movies, if somebody's immortal, they're like living in their home. They don't leave, uh, because if you die, you're dead forever. And if you don't die die, you're like alive forever. Right now we have like some finite period of time where we won't, we won't be alive anymore. So humans take a lot of risks. We drive cars that are extremely dangerous and motorcycles. We do all this, you do motorcycles. We do all this like stupid stuff that like has pretty high, I would say, you know, pretty high risk. But if that, if you were going to live forever, like you wouldn't be doing that stuff. I would say over a long enough period of time, I don't think you'll really move through the world without imaging systems like this for safety.

All right, look, the question that Sean and I get asked constantly is what skill set did we develop early on in our careers that kind of changed our business career? And that's an easy answer. It's copywriting. We've talked about copywriting and how it's changed our lives constantly on this podcast, and we give a ton of tips, a ton of techniques, a ton of frameworks, and throughout all the podcasts. Well, we decided to aggregate all of that into one simple document so you can read all of it. You can see how we've learned copywriting, but you can see the resources that we turn to on a daily basis. You can see the frameworks, the techniques we use. It's in a simple document. You can check it out in the link below. All right, now back to the show. You're really good at like telling a story. So you've, you've did this before when I've hung out with you about humanoids and robots and you just like, you tell these stories that are so grand. I just get bought into and I'm like, well, that makes perfect sense, but you do it at a much larger scale. So you went with like the longevity angle, which is like, well, we're going to live much. I mean, that's just such like a challenging way to think for a lot of people, myself included. And it's just such an easy, like when I hear that pitch, I think, yeah, of course that makes wonderful sense. And it makes me, it makes me think going big and having these grand visions is almost easier than not. Than not— than doing the alternative of something smaller. Do you know what I mean?

It's 100% easier. You could hire better people because they're more ambitious and they're interested in working on harder things. Um, they're generally larger— it could be larger outcomes. You're talking about like, you know, building like new industries that maybe never have been built before with huge TAMs. Uh, investors want like very high risk-reward trades where they can make, you know, 50, 100 times of their money. You know, most investments from VCs fail, so they really need like the 100-bagger in their portfolio. Big grand things offer that risk-reward opportunity for investors. Yeah, I have this philosophy. I think the harder things are easier. And I think it really depends what industry and what market you're going into. But relatively speaking, I think it's— there's some, there's some truth in that.

Yeah, because Vetri was— you sold Vetri for $100 million. That's a big outcome. That's a big outcome for virtually everyone, they're like, that's a life-changing thing. But it doesn't have an inspirational angle to it necessarily.

I mean, no, I think like, listen, outside of spending time with loved ones, we're at work most of our lives as humans. Most people, we are, most people don't like where they work. If you've ever looked for a job, it's like the worst process. We talk about bad, like bad products. Looking for a job is is embarrassing. It's, uh, it's like soul-crushing. So what we tried to do at Vettery is like, if we can get all the world's employers together with all the candidates in the world, we can use AI to make matches at scale and find the best opportunity for you with machine learning. And if you can solve that, you could put people in much better places for employment, much happier places. Like, they can find jobs they really love.

Yeah, I mean, you just— I would have pitched it as a sick job board. And you just totally like make it to be some really inspirational thing. But that, even as good as you are at pitching that, that pales in comparison to, I think, to like when you pitch this, this, uh, this x-ray machine, whatever you're gonna call it. And so it's just, it's cool to see like this evolution though, even though you're actually quite good at pitching something, uh, like Vetri. And I again buy into it. What, what's the name of this thing gonna be?

Yeah, the name is, is Cover, C-O-V-E-R.

And what's your philosophy on names?

I think names need— I think people do. I have a certain philosophy towards it, but I think I really like names that are at the very basic level are really easy to say and spell and pronounce. And I think most company names like violate one of those first 3 rules. Most names are just like too hard. To spell and remember and pronounce in my mind. And yeah, I really want something that over time we can build like a real iconic brand in the space. And that just takes a lot of time, I would say there too. But this, the branding around the name and the way you think about the, you know, the icon, the font, everything for me is like this, like almost like when you build a house, you make a really good foundation and pour a lot of concrete. It's that concrete, it's that foundation. And you do it in the early days, hopefully do it right. You know, I've definitely done it wrong before. I've done name changes before. And, and, you know, these names are really unique to my, my perspective of how I want my businesses to look and feel like whatever, Battery, Archer, Figure, and Cover. But like, I think, yeah, we, I, we just, I just spend a decent amount of time thinking through that in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand.

Are you adamant on a certain URL or domain name? Because cover.com is, it looks like an insurance company. I assume that's a huge insurance company. I don't know. But based off of the fact that they have that URL, I imagine they're quite large. Do you care about the domain?

We own cover.ai and I own like obviously cover, or sorry, figure.ai. And I bought archer.com. A month before going public. So not really. So it was like flyarcher.com for a while. That was like, you know, $9. And then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying archer.com, you know, a year later, 2 years later. We bought figure.ai for $100 grand and then we bought Cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars. So I would own the.coms or.ais in these cases if possible.

I know you don't care about money, but when you are pitching to investors, when you're thinking about how big Cover is going to be, what's your pitch?

We're not pitching investors now. I'm just funding it. It's more like a passion project, to be honest. The pitches are going to be really unique because if we end up raising capital outside, I don't know, there might be a path where we never raise capital here. There's also a path where the technology is just very difficult. So I mean, hopefully we make it work. Um, is the biggest market is not in school. Schools is like the worst market to go into. It's just a bad pitch. The schools have very low budgets. They don't have systems like this exactly at the schools right now. Um, you know, like, sure, the severity ties with shootings, but like the, the money-making opportunity is like relatively small comparatively, like stadiums and concerts and hospitals and areas that have big budgets. Like most big stadiums you go through now, like go, you go through like some metal detector and stuff. TSA PreCheck, like the Homeland Security. There's like, there's real security applications for this outside of schools that could pay a lot more. The schools is like the, the worst pitch for like fundraising. For me, I don't give a shit. I really want to solve the K through 12 school problem. I wouldn't be doing this if I, if it wasn't for that. And we're going straight, straight to schools to help solve, like, I want to see if I can help prevent school shootings. Over time. And that's what I, that's, that's the only reason I'm working on this, like, you know, like funding this project. I'm trying to work on it.

If I had to bet, you're sort of like me where like you have a document where you just like jot down interesting ideas and you probably aren't ever going to get to them. Maybe you would. If you had an additional 24 hours, uh, in your day, some more time in your week, uh, what would you be spending it on? What ideas interest you?

I think a few things. I think there's areas on like genetics I'm interested in a bit that I, you know, when I have time, I'm doing a lot of research. I think there's areas of like electric supersonic that are really interesting. I'm really interested in supersonic travel and I'm really interested in electric. And there's areas of my experience at, you know, building eVTOL aircraft that I'm like, pretty excited about. I have like a couple of like ideas about how to design an aircraft that could like work through these very divergent like, um, parts of the mission, uh, very like high altitudes and high speeds. I really like the industry of like synthetic foods. There's been a lot of like controversy recently.

Is this synthetic meat? Is that like Impossible? Or is that like the people who are like literally growing like a cow? Like they're growing meat that you're, you can eat.

It's not the Impossible. So those are all plant-based. It's, you're basically taking, these are like, these are like cultured cells. You're growing, you're growing real meats in a lab.

Why does that interest you? Does that interest you because you're an animal lover? Does it interest you because cows create a lot of pollution? Where's the interest come from?

It seems super unnecessary to like, like raise animals and butcher them and eat them. It just seems like super, like for many reasons, like if you, if you could choose to eat a steak and it was just as good as a, as a steak you have today, and it is real steak, like real muscle, muscle tissue and fats, and it wasn't come from a cow and it came from a lab, but it had all the same, you know, uh, same chemical properties. What, what would you say?

Well, I think that I'm a little bit an early adopter on weird things, and I would say, that sounds awesome, I'm in. You understand how that's weird for like your average person? Like, dude, do you remember when we were kids? Do you remember when green ketchup came out? I remember eating green ketchup and I was like, I know this is the exact same thing, but for some reason, because it looks different, I don't even want to touch it.

Yeah, but like TV and radio and lights and electricity, where those are all weird for folks at some point, like those were all just like, yeah, it takes time. Cars were weird, right? Like everybody's like, why would you have a car when you have a horse? Like all of these are just like really radical in the moment. But like, if we think about the civilization 1,000 years from now, we've been around for like thousands of years. If you think 10,000 more years and we're on Mars and the moon, you're going to be grow— like having cows and bubbles on Mars and then butchering that.

Like we don't have room for that.

Like it just seems unrealistic.

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

I don't know. I don't really reflect like that too often. I, I just, I, I just want to go build important things and win. That's it.

What percentage of your philosophy is based on winning versus the excitement of making stuff?

All of it's winning. I don't want to do something exciting in a lab that doesn't have the ability to have commercial applications and build a big business that has implications for the masses. Like, that's just— I'm not a, I'm not a research scientist. Like, I, I don't have passion for that. Um, I like thinking about how we've evolved as species the last, like, even like several hundred years and how technology has like been probably the biggest lever arm for our consciousness and understanding of the world. And the only way to really do that is on a mass level. Like, you know, electricity in a lab that wasn't brought to all of civilization is marginally helpful, marginally. But the orders of magnitude improvements we've had in humanity have come from like releasing that to the world as like an ubiquitous utility. And for me, winning is the most important thing here because, you know, let's call it like we have a certain finite time to Sam, like to do this kind of stuff. At some point we'll be just too old or incapable of doing it and it's on to the next generation. So I think we have a certain amount of time to go win and go do things useful with our time because I think it's just devastating to spend like 20, 30 years working on something that doesn't work. That's like, that's, that's the worst. Worst-case scenario for an entrepreneur as you're devoting all your time away from friends and family or whatever you could be spending time on as an opportunity cost into this business. Like if it doesn't win, it's just like a terrible story.

Yeah, I think that when new— when I talk to people who are just starting stuff, that's often what I'll say is like the biggest issue is that you spend 10 years on this and it's just a mediocre thing. It's better to just— for it to suck right away. Agreed.

I actually do like all these calls sometimes with like early entrepreneurs that are just getting going and I'm like so intense about like the idea and the direction and the whys and they're just like, yeah, yeah, I like whatever. How do we hire? I get the first engineer in here. I need to raise a SAFE note. Like, how do I do that? I was just like, dude, like if I had to reverse time, I would spend like a month on these questions. And most early guys just don't want to, don't want to hear it. They don't want to get moving and get, go build. And I think, you know, we've talked about this here last time I was on MFM. Like, I kind of fell into Vettery and I kind of like, I really built Archer and Figure with a lot of purpose and intent. It's the one thing I would pass down to like the newer generation that's coming up building stuff. Like, we have a choice on what to go build.

What's your criteria that you tell them is your checklist for if something is worth my time?

Like you can't just get the one thing right. Like you just can't get the idea right or the commercial plan right or the fundraising. Like you can easily fundraise this because it's a hot topic and get that right. I think it's like really about you have to build this, you know, um, I mean, they call it a business plan or something, but like you have to come up with this like idea of like how you're actually going to get this thing done in the face of like 95% of all companies that go try to do this and start a plan failing. And I would say it's not just about the idea and how you're going to execute it and how you're going to balance like moving fast versus slower and product quality and what you're going to build as feature sets first or later and who are going to be your first clients, the enterprise or the SMBs, and how are you going to actually get distribution? Is it, you know, is it organically? Is it through social? Is it outbound or inbound sales? Like, I think it's like putting that whole thing together and having a good, clear direction of where the ship's sailing. Is most important. I have like a little chart. I always draw people of like north, south, east, and west. I'm like, you want to go north, you want to get this cone going north, right? You want to be heading this direction. You're not going to be straight dead north, but you want to be like not heading south for too long or you'll die. And those are a factor of like all those kind of like, you know, heuristics I talked about earlier, which is like just commercialization plan, how you're going to make money, how you're going to fund it, how you're going to fund the business, whether it's like organically or you're going to raise capital and team you're going to bring on, the culture you go build and the execution of the product. Like all those have to be like very thoughtful and driven in the right direction. And you know, we have this to figure, right? Like we're going to BMW, we're going to these industrial settings, but we want to be in the home. Like if we could be in the home today, like home robots, we would do that. We are using the commercialization industrialization industry as a way to get us ready and more prepared for putting a robot in every home in the world, which is a common way of going about it.

You know, you think, um, I think Tesla did this where they started more expensive, even though he was like, you know, I would like it to be the Model T where everyone could have one, but I'm just going to start with high-end because that will give us more profits to fund more stuff.

Sure, but why then, then why has like Fisker failed twice in a row while Tesla's just been dominating?

What's the answer? What's your, what's your answer for that?

They, they didn't get the product and some of the other stuff right the same way Tesla did. Uh, they didn't get speed right and the product quality and The way they introduced it in the world, like all of that, um, wasn't balanced well enough. Uh, and the company's now failed twice in a row.

You were on 60 Minutes the other day and on 60 Minutes, I think you had like a plate and an apple and a banana, like sitting in front of the robot. And you said like, uh, hey, uh, hand me the apple or hand me the orange or something like that. And it did a good job where it like reached and it found the right fruit. And I think it made a mistake once or twice, but then it like corrected itself and you're like, hey, that's, That's the wrong one. And it was like, oh, I'm sorry. And it like picked up the right one. What's crazy to me is that you're 2 years old. The company's 2 years old. I've seen that you've been able to do this so quickly. And I think when I talk to someone, they go, everything's late with tech and in hardware, but somehow Brett hasn't been late. Figure has been lightning fast. What have you guys done to be so fast?

So when I started Figure and also Archer, I did this at Archer too. I started the company before it was even incorporated with this idea of like how to move extremely fast. So like, listen, it's like, it's like a whole company was built just for speed. We have our company mission statement, which is like, we want to go this direction as a company. Then everything else, as we like built out the org chart and thought about how we're going to do that, the values that we think about hiring people for or firing people for, how we think about compensation, how we think about, uh, how do we build schedules? How do we plan for schedules? Like we, we don't have, we're 120 engineers here. We have zero program managers. Zero. And we have a certain philosophy around like what to do and, and how to build hardware and software that— oh, I think we're kind of like the anti-Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley as it relates to this. Um, we really care about getting things brought up quicker and iterating faster and doing that over a very long period of time, like decades, and building a company that can do that is extremely hard. Like, there's really no good precedent, maybe outside of like Tesla and SpaceX, that have done this well at scale. Like, Tesla has, you know, well over 100,000 people, like arguably tens of thousands of, you know, product design engineers, and they're moving at the speeds of a small startup. And generally, when you're adding headcount, the companies are all slowing down. It's almost every company slowing down with more headcount. You're just getting slower over time. Uh, you don't notice it, you don't care. The board is, is like giving you indication that you should slow down and be safer, and everything's just slowing to a halt and the limit. So you have to basically fight this, and you have to— like, the best way you can fight it is like design the whole org from the ground up to, to do this, or do what Elon did with Twitter and walk in and fire 80% of people and restructure it at the start, at that point in time to, to go faster and ship product. And it's too laborious here to say like, okay, we move fast. Like, what one thing? It's like it's the whole company was built just to move fast.

But what are you asking your recruits, your potential app or your applicant, your job applicants to figure out if they do have that ability?

There is a lot of things happening here. A lot of times people haven't been in that environment. So when they get in there, when they're moving fast in a much quicker-paced environment, it just becomes overwhelming and just too hard and too stressful to handle. So if you were like a PhD student for 10 years wearing, you know, sweatpants and like moving slow and you come in here, it's like a real culture shock coming to Figure. And we've had it happen several times where they're like, people are just like, you know, they're coming in late, they're moving slow and just like, it just, it's frustrating for them having to move much faster. And it's like, probably a lot of anxiety there. There are other folks that believe the longer that you take to build something, the safer it is and the better job you'll do at it. So if you give me, you know, 2 years to design a robot, it will be— that robot will be safer at the end of the 2 years and better designed. Like, folks feel like that. It's for sure wrong. People think that the longer you spend designing something, the safer it'll be and the better it'll be. It's for sure wrong because in that 2-year period of time where that one robot got out, I'm going to have my third-gen robot out. And I'll have run it like an order of magnitude longer. I will have found all the problems 10 times sooner. I will have had time to go fix it recursively and make it better. It'll just be a worse product.

How do you measure and how do other people measure if someone's fast enough?

You look at how many iterations somebody is doing and how much progress they made between those iteration cycles.

And what are your expectations?

A car could be like how many car versions you've gotten out over the last decade and how much progress you've made between those. A rocket could be similar viewed. A robot could be how many robot iterations are we doing? What version of robot are we on? iPhone could be, you know, what, how many versions of iPhone have you got now? Last 15 years, how much progress have you made between each one of those? That will ultimately set the slope of the curve for speed. That will ultimately be correlated at a high level to How much risk there is of failure in the business long-term.

As we wrap up here, I want to, I want to ask something that I've been thinking about with you a lot. So you've mentioned, uh, some type of genetically engineered food. You've mentioned, uh, planes. You've mentioned, uh, Figure, humanoids, uh, these machines that detect guns. You have like a pretty wide range of knowledge, but unlike a lot of people who have a wide range of knowledge, you, I've been to your home. I've seen like textbooks at your house on a variety of topics. And you have a really unique way of learning. You're basically like a human AI. Do you have a framework for learning new things?

Learning stuff is always like really challenging for me. I think like I have to first, I think of everything like a tree. I have to first build this like trunk of like first order understanding about the topic before I can ever comprehend and remember the limbs and the leaves. And so I have to have like a really fundamentally sound understanding of the tree trunk as I look at certain topics.

Where do you turn to for that?

You just gotta like, you know, find this stuff, whether it's Wikipedia, papers, uh, like Google searches, uh, you can use GPT-4. Like, can you clearly communicate this topic, whether it's an engineering topic or not, to a 12-year-old sitting on a bar stool? And most people can't do that. It's like the skill that most people can't do. Like even people I work with, I have a hard time sometimes understanding what's the update on the, on the, on the, you know, this, this thing or that thing. And it's a skill. Like you have to learn how to do that. Same way of like understanding something is a skill to really boil things down and really truly understand the basic characterization of what's really happening. Some of the smartest people I know, are also the most clear-worded folks about, uh, about a topic.

That's a really good insight, and it probably comes because you're an outsider that got into this stuff when you're older. Uh, maybe.

Or there's so many different multidisciplinary areas of like software and hardware and like electromagnetics and everything else that needs to be done here that you really need to be able to communicate clearly across several groups. And it's important even here, like, we try not to use acronyms and a software person that writes firmware, an electromagnetics person that builds like a rotor stator for electric motor. Like those, those folks don't understand those other disciplines generally. So they need to communicate with each other as well. And they can't be using inside baseball terms, electromagnetic work, um, when like a firmware engineer hasn't spent any time on like, you know, stator and rotor design for electric motors. So like, I think this topic of being able to like communicate really well and understand things really well, it's just like super important.

You have like a pretty strong outlook on life. It seems like you, you, you have strong beliefs on what you want the outcome of your life to be, how you want to spend your time. Which people who you've read about has had the biggest influence on that philosophy or influenced you the most?

I think there's like, there's been like really great entrepreneurs over time to show a path that this all can be done. Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, these guys are the best at what they do, have been able to show the world like really incredible things can be done on the back of like persistence and focus. And I think that's just like really incredible. Like every time I watch like a SpaceX launch or hold an Apple product in my hands, I mean, you know, every company in the world has started as a startup at some point. So I think it's just, um, I don't know. I think it's very energizing to think that, you know, somebody with enough willpower can actually go out and do really incredible things for the world. And I think that gives me energy every day I wake up and says, you know, even if you're a figure, we have like, we haven't done really anything noteworthy today over 2 years. It's been interesting. We have robots and stuff, but people have built robots. We need to go out now and like prove that we can actually ship really high quality product, which is going to take us, you know, several more years from here. But like, that's just like a really exciting challenge for us now. And it's really hard. And everybody that's attempted that, at least in humanoid robotics commercially, has failed in history. So, but that should be doable. And there are people that have gone over this hump in other industries of other very difficult things, uh, maybe less difficult or more difficult here in history. And that's just, that should be very energizing for, for us here at Figure and other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things.

I have this joke. I'm like, cornrows are cool, but not for me. And that's kind of how I feel about the way you think, where I'm like, I don't know if I can do what you do, but I am really excited and happy that people like you exist. So thank you for doing everything you're doing. I feel great after talking to you.

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

All right, that's the pod.