How AI Clones and Robotics are Revolutionizing Life: Insights from Steve Favis

When I was about six years old, my father, my father was visually handicapped. He got the family a computer basically and he was, he was completely blind. So I read computer programming books to him to help him out basically. And I also helped him type some of the programs. And so I technically started programming when I was 6 years old and learning about it, basically.

You're gonna laugh at me. My last big taste and experience and mastery over gaming was galaga, created in 1981.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I worked in the game industry for 12 years and Galaga, Pac man, those were great games. Well, I think that's what makes life exciting. I think turning the next page, right, what's, what's going to happen next? I think that's, that's part of the excitement of life.

So these are exciting times and I'm excited about the possibility of seeing your robot maybe in my house doing some things I don't enjoy doing anymore.

I don't want to inhale something that hasn't been tested thoroughly in contained environment, basically so.

Well, but don't, don't all of us do that every day if we're walking down the street and breathing in.

Yeah, definitely. How would you like to spend more time with your family? How would you like to not have to do dishes and laundry and perpetual chores all the time? Well, my technology is basically giving you the ability to have that home help 24 7.

That's a very strong hook because sign me up, I'm ready for. I don't like doing any of that stuff. Robotics, AI, artificial intelligence. You hear these terms everywhere, but what does it really mean? You don't want to take my advice because I'm not really a high tech guru. I don't know Python from Cobra or any other C language. Fortunately, we have with us a world renowned expert on technology. Our special guest today is the founder and CTO of Fauvas, Advanced Robotics Corporation. A very warm welcome to Steve Favas to the program today. Steve, how are you?

Hey tj, how you doing? Thanks for having me. Doing great. How are you doing?

Fantastic. You know you're gonna laugh at me. My last big taste and experience and mastery over gaming was galaga, created in 1981 and before that Pac Man. I sort of majored in Pac man my freshman year of College, which was 1981 and started playing Galaga. You've been in this world of gaming of robotics at the highest levels. And we here at the TJ Walker show are fascinated with the use of technology for communication. Tell us about the biggest Projects you're working on right now, what is getting you excited?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I worked in the game industry for 12 years in Galaga Pac man, those were great games. I always say video games are the gateway drug to technology, basically.

Unfortunately for me, it didn't really take. That was about as far as it got.

Yes, so. So when I was about six years old, my father, my father was visually handicapped. He got the family a computer, basically, and he was, he was completely blind. So I read computer programming books to him to help him out, basically. And I also helped him type some of the programs. And so I technically started programming when I was 6 years old and learning about it, basically. So then, you know, I went to college and worked in the game industry, worked for Electronic Arts and ran an app development business for video games for about 12 years.

Now. Electronic Arts is a name extraordinarily familiar to anyone in the arts world. They're sort of the major domo of the whole industry, correct?

Yeah, that's correct. Electronic Arts was making video games even when I was six or seven years old. They had like Jordan versus Bird video game on the Amiga. They had a bunch of games. So they just became an extraordinarily large publisher, basically. So they're on pretty much every major platform now. Huge, huge gaming development company. EA Sports is super popular too. I worked at the Redwood Shores one down in the South Bay area of San Francisco.

And so what is exciting you the most these days? It seems like every day I wake up and there's some new extraordinarily innovative application for artificial intelligence. Generative AI. More things are coming into robots getting, getting computer brains and interactive brains. What is exciting you the most right now?

Yeah, so my video game background is basically related to the robotics background. Basically I was testing algorithms. I did a NASA DARPA hackathon testing something called a sphero. It's like a little orb that, it's like an Alexa for astronauts, floats around in zero G. It uses CO2 to propel itself around. Basically I was pathfinding and testing the algorithm in a video game engine, which is almost like a simulation of the real world. And then I realized if I just accelerate the clock a little bit, then I could get to the resolution of the algorithm in the 3D world a lot faster. Like, okay, what are we doing here? Why do we need to make robots today when we could make them in the simulator and train them in a simulator at an accelerated pace and then actually export that AI model to the real world model? So it's kind of like growing a robot baby to adulthood from, you know, in a matter of a couple of weeks or a couple months depending on processor speed or whatnot. Instead of, you know, waiting every day to watch it develop and pick it up if it falls down or whatnot. So I found out that we could train not only the reflexes and movements and proprioception in simulation, but we could also train the vision too. So like a picture of a coffee mug in all angles and all lightings and the center of gravity and physics around and stuff like that. There's nothing exotic. All these problems are solved in, in the video game engine or simulation engine basically.

I mean when it comes to sight, I mean my perception was that had already been fixed. You look at a self driving car with a lidar, it's seeing from every different division, it's not distracted by looking at its cell phone while driving. I mean the vision part is pretty much there, isn't it?

Yeah, so, so I, I've, I've driven some of the Tesla's autonomous, semi autonomous stuff before they released it and there, there are issues, basically there are issues. For example, a Tesla ran into an airplane on, in, in a, like a smaller aircraft when it didn't detect anything on the ground, but there was something above it obviously. And also in bad weather, adverse weather doesn't work either. They're using RGB cameras which I think they should be using like infrared or, or something like that because obviously heavy rain interferes with these vision cameras. So vision is not necessarily completely there because you're also dealing with other stuff such as lighting, weather and stuff like that. The only way you can really get that down is if you take for example a model or whatnot and put it inside of a simulator and change the lighting on it basically in all conditions from moonlighting, starlight, lights of flashing on it or whatnot. Once the AI learns those pretty much all conditions are possible scenarios, then it's going to know what the model model is and what it's looking at a lot better, including the physics behind it or whatnot. So it's not completely there yet. I know for a fact Tesla's autonomous driving is not completely there yet. There will always be outliers that will trick or confuse autonomous driving.

Snowy conditions, dark, rainy. I was in a Waymo autonomous car just a few weeks ago in, in Phoenix and in Scottsdale, Arizona and it did work extremely well. But you know, things are dry, a lot of sunshine, things are flat. My perception of robots is the hardest part is still the Hand movement, the delicacy, the balance. It does appear to be getting better. But at what point for example, will Amazon be able to have nothing but robots in its warehouses and not have human beings doing it?

Yeah, definitely. The biggest challenge even from the modern humanoid nowadays is the engineers aren't modeling the anatomy closer to close to human anatomy. So they're anatomically the foundation is completely wrong. I mean our chest is not a box. They keep on using boxes. We don't run off of servos and actuators for example. And my patents which was granted to 2018, I, I run them off of soft muscles, similar human anatomy to us basically. So they can move and, and, and move around and use human tools basically. Why do we need to redesign a robot that's using custom tools when we could actually use existing tools that humans use? Basically. So I don't think it's very far away. I do have a mon monopoly on this type of, of patent basically because it was granted in 2018. So my technologies, I had a little bit of an economic espionage from China so it affected my ability to produce and, and deliver them on my, my original timeline basically.

But now far be it for me to cast aspersions on any country or ethnicity with respect to respect for intellectual property. My own wife is Chinese, but correct me if I'm wrong, the Chinese in the technology industry don't have what we would call the highest level of respect for intellectual property from sources out outside their country or inside their country. Correct.

My first wife was Chinese. She was from mainland, she was from the, she was living, I met her in the Beijing area. So I spent a year in China. And there is a difference between the ccp, the Chinese Communist Party versus the, you know, Chinese lineage and stuff like that. I'd say majority of these problems that we're having are from the CCP directly and their intervention. So for the most part, yeah, the, the, the, the primary issue is, is with, with my technology is I think it does disrupt the CCP's model for, for prison labor and really cheap slave labor and stuff like that basically because a robot's still cheaper than a human being as far as manufacturing and uh, in its productivity. Basically.

You don't have to feed it, clothe it, give it vacation time, rest time.

Vacation work, 20, 23, 22 hours a day. Yeah, non stop.

Now walk us through this patent process because a lot of us non techies have this sense that you know, you're a tinker, you come up with a patent and then the rest of your life you're sitting on a beach and you just sort of check your phone to see another million dollar royalty check has, has been sent into you by a major company. How does this whole patent thing work? And tell us more about the patents you have. You are quite renowned for your intellectual prowess, your ability to create patents and technology in the robotics space. Tell us how that's happened.

Yeah, definitely. So going back to the patents, the first patent was actually issued in ancient Rome for actually food, believe it or not. So they wanted credit and to give credit to the person who invented that recipe. Well, you know, flashback, you know, a couple thousand years later, we're America, we, we have property rights, which includes intellectual property rights. And when you create a new patent that is granted, you have a monopoly on that technology and can monetize it for about 20 years and you can extend that if you, if you modify, modify the patent or whatnot. So, so what it does is it gives you exclusive rights to manufacture and make and get royalties off of either through licensing or selling the patent or actually just manufacturing it yourself, basically. So that's, that's great part about America because we could keep our property here. Had I invented this in China, for example, with the ccp, they probably would have just taken it from me. So.

Yeah. And is that the most, I'm not asking for specifics, it's none of my business. But is that the most lucrative part of your business is, you know, you can dabble in a whole bunch of things. A couple of good patents that people are paying you every month forever can set one up for life. Is that the most lucrative part of your business?

Yeah, so, so, so there's, I would say the biggest part is actually the challenge I have actually now is, is getting to manufacturing. Basically. I'm very close to finishing a lot of them. There's, there's some that need to be some, some machining equipment is needed or whatnot, basically. But the, the most lucrative part is, is the intellectual property. And what I mean by that is actual patent valve valuation just sitting there itself. It's, it's worth a significant amount of money. And I think, I believe it's nasdaq, I believe NASDAQ or the New York stock exchange. Like 80 of what's traded there is actually intellectual property, believe it or not. It's not necessarily, not necessarily like widgets or whatnot. It's, it's a lot heavy intellectual property valuation based upon the fruit of what can come from that patent, basically.

And when it comes to intellectual property, what is the Most important part of someone wants to patent it, make money of it. I mean, do you have to show demonstrated value first before you get other people excited about it? I mean, I think of like robots in particular. So many people have this sense of, you know, I'm of a certain generation lost in space. Danger, Will Robinson. It has to be this big clunky thing. But a 3D printer can be a robot, can it?

Yeah, I would consider that a robot for sure. Definitely. Yeah, I would consider, you know, autonomous machines, that, that kind of just. Yeah, I would consider a 3D printer. Printer, a CNC, a robot, basically something that cuts metal, you know, in a machine shop. I consider those robots too, basically.

So what point do we get in time where a home can be built entirely by robots or a combination of robots and 3D 3D printers? Because I've seen certain 60 minutes famously earlier this year did a whole large segment on a 3D printing company that is in the construction space. When does something like this really take over in pop culture? Because we do have a housing crisis in the United States, a lot of parts of the world. So much of it is because the labor, the production of a house really isn't much different than it was a hundred years ago. Other than the cost for the labor.

Yeah, for sure. I'm still, I'm still between 3D printing a house and just framing a house with human labor. I'm still betting on the human framers basically at this point in time. Again, maybe my humanoid robots will be able to frame a house as fast as humans. But for now, when I still see those 3D printing robots Printing like houses and structures, it takes a significant amount of engineering to actually, you know, get that 3D model and then, and then print it out with whatever material that's available. Basically. By the time Most of those three 3D printed houses are made, a small crew of men with, with enough two by fours and enough wood could frame a house a lot faster, basically. So I'm still sort of skittish on the, on the 3D printing stuff, basically, so. Or 3D printing large structures, basically.

So where are we going to see a breakthrough first? Is it people instead of like, you know, right now you go to Amazon and say, oh, I want this coffee cup, I want this plate, I want this silverware. I mean, I'm as guilty of it as the next you, you buy all these one off household pieces. Is that what is going to take over first with the 3D printer where you, you no longer have to have all the, inefficiency of something coming from a warehouse in one part of the country and getting on a plane and coming to you, I can just push a button and it's printed out on my kitchen table.

Yeah, so, so I, I've worked with a numerous amount of 3D printing technologies. It's not quite there yet. There's still a lot of complexity setting up. The printers aren't super reliable or whatnot basically and they're not, they're not made for mass manufacturing. So if you're talking about churning out you know like hundreds of products a minute, hundreds of hundreds of widgets a minute or whatnot, mass manufacturing will always out compete like an independent small 3D print shop or machine shop or.

But as far as a consumer having one in a home, I mean there was a point when it was it head of IBM famously said why would anyone want a computer in their home? I mean at some point won't everyone want to have a 3D printer at home so that anything, you know, this size or smaller, they wouldn't be going to a store and they wouldn't be going to Amazon. Is that something you foresee in the near future?

I, I, the problem is materials. I mean you can't, you, it takes a very special printer to print metal and then some of the stuff, for example, if you want to print like a dish set or something like that requires a special materials that you would have to be able to eat off of basically. So I mean it's very niche and boutique at this point in time for consumer grade 3D printers or whatnot. So it's very niche and boutique for toys, you know, toys it may be popular. I think if somebody had a good 3D printer that you know, you could select and down or download models for, you know, like Warhammer, these other board games, you know, like army men or whatnot. I think something like that's fine. I could see kids, you know, getting something like that and printing out their, their like war toys or airplanes.

Certainly so many toys are made from plastic. So yeah, toys would probably be the.

Ideal one for a kid to tinker around with.

I think I have a 3D pen. I gu my own 11 year old daughter's experimented with making little jewelry from I guess you call it a 3D printer pen. But we haven't gone to the next step of creating a whole 3D or getting a whole 3D printer. Our guest today is Steve Favas. If you want to know more information about his patents, about his innovations, what he's doing, go to his website, stevefavas.com we're going to post the link to that in the description. He's also active on Twitter. You can also reach him@far-corp.com and you're probably going to want to listen to his podcast, Mr.robots.com Tell us about the podcast and what people experience when they're a regular member of your audience.

Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of technology news updates. We have a little signal group where we pass information back and forth basically about news and updates. But for the most part, Mr. Robots, that's M I S T R robots dot com, not Mr. Robots. M I S T R Robots.

And we'll provide a link to that in the show notes.

Definitely. Yeah, yeah. For the most part it's mostly covering technology, technology trends. I've covered a lot of stuff from directed energy weapons to the latest Internet technology, the, the decentralized Internet, which I'm currently working on also with somebody. So I, I cover mostly technology topics. Sometimes it traverses into politics, technology, politics and stu. That too. So everything technology related that I think is important I cover on that show, basically.

So what does your community think of Ray Kurzweil's latest book, the Singularity Is Nearer. I mean, I, I try to read every book I can get my hands on with respect to artificial intelligence and the future and what's going on. His did strike me as particularly interesting. I wanted to get your take.

Yeah, I think we were talking a little bit about digital twins before we were, before we started broadcasting. But yeah, I think Kurzweil's interpretation of the Singularity, I think only we could duplicate like your digitals when we can only make, I want to say, a shadow of that personality of the original person. Again, I'm somewhat of a spiritual person. We have DNA which is infinitely more complex than any machine code out there, basically any AI code that's out there. And if there would be a duplication of personality or a place where we could upload something similar to our conscience, it'll just be kind of a copy or shadow of it. It'll never be the exact same thing. I don't think we're ever going to be able to create enough data to outcompete a strand of DNA, even for the simplest entities, basically. So I'm a little bit more on the human side as far as humans will always be superior to any copper, silicon or whatever.

So Rick Kurzweil, I mean he has, he's had a number of controversial opinions and predictions in the future. For the past 50 years, a very high percentage of them came true. Even the ones that were initially scoffed at? Yes. I guess two main theories that relate to this issue. One is that your consciousness could be uploaded into a computer and you could transcend your physical existence. I think that's what you're saying. You're not really buying into that. The other is that between nano robots in your body, the ability to program your own cells, we're going to get to the point that you'll be able to live at least one year longer for every year you've been born. So at some point you, your body reaches escape velocity so that your body, your actual current body, never has to die. So he's kind of looking at, you know, your immortality from two different perspectives. What do you think about his, you know, the second one where the science of health care, regeneration of cells, nanotechnologies floating around your body all the time, repairing things instantly will get us to the point where maybe not for you don't live forever, but the idea of the average lifespan being 78 or so will seem archaic.

Yeah, for sure. Going back to DNA, we haven't really mastered the DNA molecule. We can't reverse engineer and say, hey, this section does this, this section does what. All we're doing is guessing and hacking at this point in time. And there has, have been some successful hacks with CRISPR or whatnot, but I'm still, I'm still skeptical of us being able to go back to our actual DNA, increase our telomeres or the think that reduces your cell life or whatnot. I'm still skeptical on that, on those points. Basically until we get a grasp of full understanding of DNA and how to, how to command that molecule like we command a V8 engine. I'm still skeptical on full transcendence or, or infinite lives or whatever for our physical DNA limited time body, basically. So that, that's kind of my, my, my philosophy on DNA versus computing, basically singularity stuff.

Fair. Where do you have very strong opinions that are. This is, I guess a famous Peter Thiel question. He asked people in job interviews. Where do you feel really strongly about something that would strike most people as crazy or, or really counter to conventional wisdom as it relates to AI in the future?

Yeah, definitely. I think we're, it's going to be one of man's greatest and most dangerous things that are happening. Basically part of the reason why I, I build my road robots is not only for manufacturing, agriculture, for the worst case scenario for an AI leak or whatever, where, where where somebody, a foreign adversary does create something that just create, that kills all warm targets, basically. I mean, AI weapons are a thing basically. And the only thing that can fight an AI weapon is another AI, basically. And then since that we're commanding, you know, 10,000, 10,000 drone swarms now, basically, which in my humble opinion with, with the invention of swarm technology, assault rifles are basically obsolete. So, so yeah, the, the worst case scenario fears are out there. I realize they exist. But I believe that we can create counter AI to help preserve human life and save lives and stuff like that. So the only thing that's really going to fight an AI is a good AI. And going back to the nanotechnology, I'm super skittish on nanotechnology. I don't want to inhale something that hasn't been tested thoroughly in a contained environment, basically. So.

Well, but don't, don't all of us do that every day? If we're walking down the street and breathing in car exhaust and bus exhaust, aren't we inhaling things all the time? If we eat something from a potato, chips from a bag, I mean, the gazillion chemicals and garbage that we all consume regularly, that we don't really know what it's doing is, isn't, isn't that risk already there?

Oh, definitely, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of our, our additives that are banned in Europe, basically, a lot of food additives that are allowed in America that aren't allowed in Europe. But again, we're, we're already, we're already tinkering with something that we don't fully comprehend again, our DNA or whatnot. So we're already adding a, a potential nanotechnology that could, if it's designed, could self replicate or self duplicate based upon, you know, maybe sun energy or, or whatever. And we're inserting something in the environment that could be affecting us in a negative way or whatnot. So it would have to be thoroughly tested. And again, I'm not, so, I'm not so bullish on man's ability to control nano stuff. So I'm still a little skittish on that stuff myself.

What do you think of Nuval Harari's latest book, Nexus? If you've read that he talks a lot about, I would highly recommend the book. He does talk about the problem. I mean, I see you're prominent on Twitter. He was saying we have so many robots on Twitter and that the concept of free speech relates to humans. But if we get to the point where 70, 80, 90% of all speech coursing through social media is done by robots and it's putting out disinformation. You essentially destroy the possibility of there being a real conversation among citizens. And once that happens, you've destroyed the possibility of democracy. Wondering if you have thoughts on that because you're a communicator, you have a podcast, you're active on Twitter, other social media forums. What are your thoughts about robots not just being a part of the conversation, but through the power of AI and everything else actually dominating it?

Oh, I, I believe robots are already dominating. I believe 78 of what's going on is already robots on, on Twitter right now. So again, we're, we're at a war of the worlds as far as world views from, you know, the CCP versus America and some of our values are in direct conflict with the ccp. So I, I already know for a fact they're sending, they're sending a significant amount of our discourse and they're learning our discourse too. For example, if they learn that somebody says democracy is xyz, they will use that imperative in their AI chat bot. So every time somebody talks with our discourse, we're also training their robots to argue with us, basically. So I believe 70, 80% of it is already robots. And if you have 10,000 followers on Twitter's, or Twitter or X, it may only be 150 or 200 people. So I've tested the X analytics and stats and they, they're not correct. So that their, their, their algorithms are a little bit shady right now.

Yeah. So where does this end up? Because increasingly in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk and others are taking this absolute position, at least semi absolute, when it comes to messages they like. We must maintain absolute free speech. That's the most important thing at all times. Harari points out in his book Nexus that when you look at the history of communications technology going back to the printing press, that that's been a problem. And something I didn't know, 50,000 people were murdered in Europe because of people using the printing press to print books, talking about witches in their community, that, you know, freedom of speech only really works when you have journalistic mechanisms for self correction, where you've got editors and people scrutinizing things and things that are fabrications are held up as fabrications and either eliminated or marked. We don't have that anymore. So someone can just say, you know, a candidate, for example, I don't mean to be too political here, but someone can just say the candidate I like won the last election. I don't really care what the vote tab says. And if I can just get the majority of people, at least the majority I care about to say the same thing, it becomes reality.

Yeah.

How do you feel we deal with that issue?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to use an example of that. When I was a game developer for the iOS store, they were using click farms to manipulate the charts. So not the best game was making it, but they were using click farms in China to, to increase the, the download rate, which would also increase the hype. So what you're talking about is social media hype and what's happening with some of these accounts that are boosted by bots. Absolutely. This is a very important discussion basically because we know that there's bots on, on social media and we know that they are pushing messages depending on their, their bot agenda or whatnot. So, so again I allude back to, to common sense and people being able to discern whether they're, they are being manipulated or not.

Basically, I think a truthful message is that common sense. I mean, isn't the more common thing to see someone who says something you agree with the confirmation bias creeping in and to just want more of that? And then the algorithms say, oh, you know, tj, TJ loves news that says balding men with gray hair are the new sex symbol of Hollywood. Let's say for example. And if it can tell that I like stories like that and click on it, I'll just get more and more of it. And if it's all from robots, in theory, not me of course, but someone would like that.

Yeah, no, you're talking about a deep concept here. And some of these, these concepts you're talking about, I, I believe are, that can happen, which actually do happen in negative effects is self radicalization where you're, you're, you're fed this machine that keeps on bringing you down this path of more extreme, more extreme, more extreme views where you eventually become a fanatic or whatnot and do something nefarious, basically. So I think this does already exist what you're talking about.

Yeah, but that, that's really Harari's central thesis, which is in the modern algorithmic driven world, every single, not just social media platform, but Google for that matter, even the New York Times, it, it's programmed to go after engagement and the number one way to get engagement is outrage and therefore hatred. So the number one way I can hook you is by saying things that's going to make you so angry your Head will almost explode. That can be good for any one platform, but it's absolutely destructive for society. Any society that wants to have major institutions, whether it's academia, journalism, government, non profits that help people, it's. It's the absolute destruction of that.

Well, not only that, but the clicks. And you get more clicks sending those messages that people or want to click bait or click them and then keep on clicking in that path, which sends more ads that give the second. The clicks too, that you're talking about. So, yeah, again, this is where civics is really important. We have to understand the law of the United States and only that, but have a good moral compass, basically. So this foundational law, understanding, for example, our Constitution, our, our domestic law or whatnot, not only that, but a spiritual aspect too. That, that's why these foundations, these are, these are pillars of being, you know, an American. You know, we're, you know, a human being based with morality and understanding our law and following our law, which is really important.

Yeah. I mean, I'll point out someone I generally like. I generally like Bill Maher of, you know, Real Time with Bill Maher on hbo. I generally share a lot of his worldview, but I saw him just this weekend talking about, oh, the UN is such a joke, such a pathetic joke. My gosh, there's nothing but, you know, people get together and they bring in prostitutes from around the world. And to me, that's a classic example of how algorithms feed a bias. And you go deeper and deeper and deeper. You know, the United nations was set up after World War II with a few missions to stop more nuclear war, to stop more world wars, to deal with the fact that, you know, back then 90% of the world was living in abject poverty to stop infant mortality. It's basically been the most wildly successful institution in the history of the world when you look at what its objectives are. And yet you say that in public, most people think you're crazy. They just. A bunch of bureaucrats go around in New York City and cause traffic. It's, it's impossible for there to be mass publicity and news. If you see the poverty rate in any one year went from 42% of the world to 41%, had a huge impact on hundreds of millions of people making their life better. But there's no one hook for a story the way there is if there's a story about an ambassador who got 2000 parking tickets in New York and didn't pay because they were off at an orgy in New York City.

Yeah.

So it drives that and erodes trust. Let me ask you, as someone who spends a lot of time in the media with your podcast with X, how do you even decide where to put your energy with the media? Because part of the, part of the challenge these days is you can be live streaming on YouTube all day long. You could be making podcasts, you can cut everything into shorts. There's every platform you can be on. You can self. You can turn your best podcast into a Kindle book. That same Kindle book can be a hardback, it'd be a paperback, it could be turned into an audio version. I mean there's just, there's almost an infinite number of things someone like you, who is creative, who creates intellectual property can do to put out your property, your intellectual property to the world. How do you make rational decisions given an almost infinite number of options?

Yeah, exactly. Again, in summary, I'm very transparent about this to my users. I'm simply basically bringing out the podcast to get my message out there about the importance of, of American innovation as far as robotics and AI and stuff like that. So the idea is I'm just going to build up, I'm still building up a crowd basically to eventually just do an equity, equity based crowdfunding for, for like a series A for my robots. I found that it's less risk for, for, for each individual if they pledge or chip in a small amount. So I'm just, I'm still in the process of building that crowd up. So the whole purpose of the Mr. Robot show is not only to bring out technology news, but it's also bringing awareness of my skills, my technology, my trade basically, and what I can make and manufacture. And then, and then that's the, the, the launch platform for my actual like series a robot race to complete my robots, basically.

Let's hear more about that because here, you know, this show is all about communication and promote. We're actively encouraging people to promote, to pitch, to talk up and get people excited about what they're doing. So let's assume this is a shark tank on steroids and everyone in the audience, including me, we all have a few extra hundred million sitting around looking to invest in technology. Give us your best pitch.

Yeah, definitely. How would you like to spend more time with your family? How would you like to not have to do dishes and laundry and perpetual chores all the time? Well, my technology is basically giving you the ability to have that home help 24, 7 and, and, and help you with any other tasks as far as like laundry, dishes, housekeeping, yard Work or whatever. And owning your own personal robot is definitely the future. Rosie the Robot for Jetsons is here, basically. And. And I would like everybody to have something like that in their home, basically, if you're a creative person or want to spend more time with your family instead of doing dishes, laundry, and perpetual cleaning and yard work or whatnot. So that's kind of the summary. That's my, like.

Well, that's a very strong hook, because sign me up. I'm ready for. I don't like doing any of that stuff. Nor do I. This sounds like a sort of a snotty, elite thing to say. I don't really like hiring people to do that, too, because then you have to be there and you have to coordinate with them, and you have to call 10 people to get one person to return a call, and then you got to call them 10 times to have them show up. I mean, it's one reason why I personally downsized from, you know, a house with a whole lot of amenities and toys to an apartment is I just. I don't want to do this stuff myself, and I don't want to spend my life managing other people, in part because I think we live in a modern culture where everyone wants to be a bitcoin billionaire. Nobody wants to do someone else's dirty work, which I don't blame them. I don't want to do other people's dirty work. I don't even want to do my own dirty work. So I would love to figure out a way of getting robots to do that. I know I've certainly experimented with the robot vacuum cleaner, and at some point, that ends up being more work. I've seen robot, robot lawnmowers I've seen. So I'm excited about all of that. But tell us specifically, is yours going to be like Rosie the Robot? Because that is a cultural reference I get from the Jetsons. Having grown up watching the Jetsons, what does it actually look like?

Yeah, so. So we can make it look anyway, any way you want. The actual representations. I actually. I could. I could flip over my camera here.

Oh, please do.

We'd love to show the audience. So here. Here's what it looks like. And this is. This is. This is it without skin. It'll obviously have skin. So I'm going to switch over here. This is kind of what it looks like right here. So that's a picture of me standing right next to it underneath that. That's what it looks like underneath, but it will have skin. More for more for more of A pleasing look, basically. Okay, so if I. I'll show you another rendering of it here. There's.

That's not what I wanted to say. Hang on one second. I want to just. Actually, if you can hit the share button and share that with our.

Okay, definitely. Yeah. So if I hit share on. On the actual.

I'm seeing it.

Let me share screen.

I'm doing the wrong share. Okay. Oh, let me just turn mine off and I want to put a spotlight on. So go ahead and show us more about what yours looks like.

Definitely. Yeah. So I'll switch over to this one. I'll hit share on that. Basically, this is kind of.

I'm hitting stop share now. Now it should be able. You should be able to do.

So this is what the inside of it looks like. Basically. It's anatomically similar to humans. And it's gonna have. It'll. It will. The final product will have skin, and obviously it'll have clothes or whatnot. Whatever you. Whatever you want to put on them or whatever. This is a female version. It could be in any gender or whatnot, but anatomically similar to humans. So it could use human toys or human tools, I should say. And it could drive automobiles. It could fit in human spaces or whatnot. So this is kind of a rendering of it, basically, and these models are pretty much done. It's just a matter of cutting them and putting them in through a machine and manufacturing them, basically. But this is kind of what it looks like underneath. And then we'll have skin, basically. So this is kind of a representation.

Of what they'll look like. So what all can it do in the house? I mean, I don't have an infant in the house anymore. But is this going to be the sort of thing in the next five years people would trust it to hold the baby, or is there still a chance it, you know, crushes something, Crushes groceries? It might not matter that much, but.

A human being again. So these are trained in a simulator. We can see everything it's doing inside the computer, either from the first person's perspective or outside. Outside. We could watch it. If it does anything wrong, like dropping a knife on its foot, then we obviously don't train that logic. We prevent it from dropping a knife on its foot or whatnot. So if it does anything wrong or bad, we just make sure that logic doesn't get put on the actual system. So it's very safe because it's contained in a simulator until you publish the. Or push the AI model to the real world system by the time when do we go?

What is it going to take for it to go from a simulator to you having one, not the public, but you personally having one in your own house.

So I, I should be finished with a prototype in about two years. Two years. So I had a little, I had, like I said, I had an economic hit on my company because China doesn't work. Want these, these technologies being made in America, obviously they're a strategic competitor to us basically. So, so within about two years I, I'm relocating my shop from California to a different state and then I, I'm, I'm building them there to finish the prototypes, basically. So in summary, about, about two years to finish the actual physical prototype, but most of the software is already actually mostly done. It's just a matter of, of printing or, or, you know, machining a few, a few prototypes basically. So I'm close, about two years away and I should have a model, a working model prototype I could demo to the world or whatnot.

And what do you see? The most dramatic application that gets people excited? Is it just doing the dishes and the housework? Is it as a companion to elderly who needs some assistance? Where do you see the first use case that really drives, you know, consumers?

Yeah, yeah. So I, I like the idea of, of wildfires, firefighting and stuff like that. Low risk to human lives. Lives. And if these things get burnt, then it's just a robot, basically. They don't have families or whatnot. So I would like to see it in situations like wildfire fighting and stuff like that. Other than like standard and agriculture too, I think agriculture is huge. You know, agriculture is really backbreaking work. Very difficult, very laborious, very hard work. And I, I would like to see these, you know, bending over and picking up strawberries instead of somebody herniating a disc in their back or whatnot.

Now, I'm sure this probably isn't the main reason you created. It's probably not even something you'll enjoy talking about. But you know, you look at the world, what's going on today in the Middle east and elsewhere, I could see governments salivating over this, wanting to have an entire military made of. Because now you don't get the blowback from your population about civilian casualties. If you could have a robot going door to door and looking for the leader of someone you consider to be a terrorist organization, who could actually discern, okay, that's a young woman with a baby. We're not going to get them. Oh, that's Osama bin Laden. Let's get it. Is that something you see is a likely application for your product?

Yeah, I think so. I, I think it's, it's a potential application. I obviously, you know, I don't like war, I hate war. But if we have to fight a war, I think we want to win. And I think these things could, could do like a bomb disposal. A lot of people are using explosives to hurt innocent people. And these things, we essentially already have.

Robots to do that. They just look like boxes with an arm, correct?

Yes. We're talking about two opposable thumbs in a first person perspective from a bomb diffuser basically. So, so they could, they could control these things like they're their avatar basically, and, and, and you know, diffuse these types of bombs or whatnot. But for the most part I, I think the only thing that's going to happen to, to fight, encounter in AI, especially humanoid AI, is another AI basically. So, so again, even if you're talking about a highway patrolman that is pulling over a suspicious car and he could, he could have his partner, his robot partner walk out and just make sure he doesn't make firearms.

Yeah.

A lot of these highway patrolmen get lit up if they pull over like a cartel member or whatnot. So, so again, it's very dangerous for a cop to pull a suspicious car over and walk up to see what's going to happen because that's the vulnerable point, basically. Again, if you have this partner, robot partner, just make sure it's safe and then you know, get the ID or whatever.

And I should point out we are not an investment show. Nothing said here today should be construed as a formal prospectus or an offering for investment. But how can someone invest in you? And you mentioned your crowdfunding. Yes, you would have to be a certified investor, high net worth individual at this point. Or how can someone get involved with this if they're intrigued?

Yeah, good question. So I'm doing an SEC regulated equity based crowdfunding. I think it's called Regulation CF or Regulation C or something like that. Basically this is SEC regulated investment. Basically it could be casual investors or accredited investors either.

That's the term I meant, investors.

So if they go to far far co orp.com they can sign up for the newsletter. And I do have some investors ready, but I'm not ready to launch yet. I'm in the process of a relocation. So when I'm done I'll probably push the crowdfunding a little bit more. But I send out a newsletter maybe once every two or three Months as far as updates and stuff like that, basically.

But yeah, and they can get the newsletter@far-corp.com or Steve. Either one or both.

Yeah, any stevefavis.com or mrrobots.com or far-corp.com any of those websites. You can send me your email. I have, I do have some, actually a lot of people interested in investing. I just haven't launched yet. So if they sign up for that newsletter, they'll be the first ones to know, basically.

And can you say roughly how much you'll be trying to raise?

So equity based crowdfunding has a limit of 5 million. So I can't, I can't raise more than that without a certain type of investment. So I'm going to be raising less than 5 million basically. And there, there will be only, there will only be less than 5 million basically. Just it's mostly to purchase industrial equipment. Industrial equipment's very expensive nowadays, so. But it's very important for manufacturing.

And I hope you don't mind me asking, but you know, with a track record like yours, you're in California. We live in a current investment environment where, you know, OpenAI is raising, you know, talking about raising trillions. They raised tens of billions of dollars. Certainly the perception of us who are sort of outside that immediate bubble is that if you've got a good idea and a good track record and a good bio with something that relates to artificial intelligence, the money is flowing freely. Why not just get a major venture capital firm to just give you 50 million?

Yeah, exactly. So, so there's, there's, there's a high risk factor here and there's a high risk factor, but I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe that I could do it. Basically. High risk factor. I want to lower the risk for the actual investor and I want to, I want to, I want to basically not give up a part of my company for, for a strategic investor that may be an adversarial investor. Basically. This happened to me, I had one adversarial investor basically. And I don't want this happening in. So I'd rather have preferred preferred shares being held by a lot of smaller investors than one.

And then you'll be able, you'll be able to retain 100 control that way.

Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. There'll be preferred shares, which is the, the first one to pay dividends and then there'll be the actual, the actual stock or the company control stock or whatnot. So. Yeah.

And do you have a timeline for when you are going to be making this official and do you have a particular platform where you'll be crowdfunding?

I'm considering doing it off of netcapital.com There's a lot of people already on Net Capital. I already have a certain amount of people ready to invest. I'm just waiting. I'm in the process of a move right now. I'm moving out of California to a different state. Basically, when that move is complete, I may launch it around that time, basically. But I'm so close to finishing. As far as the. The actual.

No, I love. I love California and CASE can certainly be made. There's more intellectual capital there than any place in the entire world. More patents per square inch there in Northern California. It is the birthplace of so many great corporations. But it's in a very expensive place to live. I mean, you can live in a shack and it's $2 million a year. So I can understand wanting to leave, but. But are. Are you in danger of not being able to have the. The brains and the. The IT people and the software engineers if you move to other states?

No, I'm not concerned. I. I can handle everything on this robot by myself if I have to, from all the way from the copper processors all the way up to the actual manufacturer.

Okay.

Yeah. As I spearhead everything, I can handle everything.

So I'm guessing Nevada, Texas, Florida, or you don't want to say a little.

Farther east because I had an economic hit on my company. I'm keeping my location secret, but.

Okay, well, we don't have to know.

Midwest, basically. South, South, Midwest. I'll keep it to that region, basically.

All right, so just realize In Arizona, it's 120 degrees a day each day, so be careful.

Yeah, yeah. It's pretty hot here, too. It's pretty hot in Sacramento. Also. I've been in South. I've been staying in Sacramento temporarily. Okay.

I personally relocated from New York four years ago to Florida. So familiar with some of the issues you're going through. But we wish you luck there. I can tell you from just a selfish standpoint, I have a family member who has some debilitating health issues, age issues, others where she does. This person does require home health care workers on a regular basis. It is quite expensive. The timing is an issue. Scheduling personalities. I could definitely see. Having a robot that can talk in a human way, interact, take care of things, not mind being yelled at because it doesn't really get its feelings hurt would be fantastic. So I. I definitely see where something like this could be hugely, hugely useful.

So I'm going through the same thing you are. I have, I have a close family member that, that's going through this aging phase right now. And it's, it's, it's tough. It's tough for the care worker and it's also tough on the family members. So, yeah, yeah, a lot. So the, the robot would be obviously very friendly, cheery, and, and, and not get tired of repeating itself for the same conversations over and over again or whatnot.

So, yeah, I mean, that's one thing I found from my own clone is Mike, you know, people like to talk about, can a clone ever be as good as a real human? In some respects, my clone is better than I am. When I have people say, well, tj, how do I get more confident giving a presentation? There are times when I'm thinking I'm tired of hearing this question I've heard of thousand times, and the answer is obvious. I might be a little bit quick or glib. My clone is never glib. It's never impatient. It will take the time. It'll give a nice, you know, three, four minute answer. Whereas I might sometimes be, be quick. So there is a real, a number of issues where a clone, and therefore a robot that's got a clone's body, brain, or you just an artificially, Artificially intelligence created brain could be far superior to a human being. I'm not saying superior in every respect. I don't want to marry a robot or a clone. At least I don't think I do. But there are some advantages as far as it's, you know, total recall. If you ask me, tj, who gave the best Academy Award acceptance speech? Because that is something I rate from time to time and go on media and talk about who gave the best acceptance speech in 2013 or in the last 15 years. I'd have to really think my clone knows perfectly and it can tell you the exact ten things they did. Well, because it's pulling from data from something I said on a YouTube video in 2013. So it has perfect recall. And I'm assuming that the way you would program your clones, your robots would be similar. So would you. I'm just imagining one that is programmed with every recipe Julia Childs ever wrote and could create the most fabulous French feast for a dinner party if it, I mean, that is all something that is just algorithmically based cooking. Right? Is that something you're seeing or is that. So is that 10 years out? Because that's so advanced?

Yeah, definitely. If it was a cooking robot. I would go with a Gordon Ramsay clone for cooking.

Again, I'm dating myself. So Julia Child.

So Gordon Ramsey seems to be a phenomenal chef. But yeah, yeah, there, there would be your own personal Gordon Ramsay chef that would be able to duplicate his recipes Exactly. That's something that would happen. But yeah, you're right. I guess, I guess we're here. When you're talking about your, your, your digital clone, you were actually. It's like that Multiplicity movie or a digital version of it with I forgot his name. The. He duplicated himself.

Did you see the Multiplicity? I know what you're talking about, but it escapes my memory. We should, we could probably ask my clone. It would probably remember because I'm sure I've talked about it.

Yeah, exactly.

We're getting a bit, we're getting a bit better there. It does lead to questions that again are unpleasant, but people have to be dealt with. People are asking about, well, is this going to cause massive unemployment? You look just at self driving cars. Some estimates 3 million people could be out of business if were to happen overnight. And sorry to keep going back to Nual Harari, but he points out that the whole German Reich. Hitler, Hitler, it was all created in part because of an economic climate where change created 25% unemployment. And when you have that much unemployment, you have the capacity for tremendous political social upheaval where institutions, democracies are in fact destroyed. Short term, what everyone likes to say, and I don't know how much of it is just reassuring, is, oh, don't worry, the history of technology is always it creates more jobs than it destroys. And that is true. Yes, 400,000 people were telephone operators in 1960. They all lost their jobs. They all found jobs elsewhere, or at least most of them did. Do we really want to go back to the time when to make a phone call of Anyone more than five miles away, you had to spend $10? No one really wants to do that. But at some point, most predictions, and I agree with this, we get to the, we get to the point where AI is so good, especially as it interacts with robots, that 99% of human jobs, if not all of them, could be superfluous, then you have mass unemployment. And at some point, if everything is so cheap and easy and free and guaranteed basic income, maybe that's so. But the transition time when all of a sudden, just for example, self driving cars become ubiquitous, just 3 million unemployed truck drivers in America could radically change our political system. How do you think this adoption is going to happen in our culture.

Yeah, exactly. I, I always use my, my, I always use automotive painters as an analogy here. So if, if somebody's painting cars or you know, automobiles, whatever, trucks, whatever, it takes a certain amount of training and proficiency to be able to paint properly. And, and this automobile painter will most likely be having robots in his shop that paint for him that he's still training and supervising, basically. So this, this, this robot, robotic handler to robot ratio, there's always gonna be a relationship between what they're doing. So if, you know, I'm a programmer by trade, I, I don't belong in a, in a paint shop. I can't handle a robot that paints basically because I don't know, I don't know anything about that trade, basically. So what's going to happen is like our computer typewriters versus word processing. Now basically these people that already have a certain amount of skill, whether it be automobile painting, EMTs, whatever, any sort of, any sort of field that requires a certain proficiency should have like help with a robot helper, basically that, that is proficient in what they do. And he, and he will always supervise these robots and, and help them, help them learn and help them get better and make sure they're doing their job correctly. So I just see it as the ability of a person who specializes in something to just have more labor command, more labor power in their field. I don't see them being replaced. Like I said again, going back to DNA, I think we human beings will always be superior over autonomous AI, Silicon, Silicon COP or whatever. I think we will always be superior.

Well, maybe in terms of moral worth, but I mean, this is something I've thought a lot about because whether it's the people who run the clone technology platform I'm on or others, Khan Academy, you know, Salman Khan with his Khanmigo app, Everyone likes to be reassurance. Look, this AI technology is not going to make you irrelevant, not going to put you out of business. It's just going to be an extra tool to help you. And I think short term, that is correct. But a part of me also wonders, is it just a little bit of hubris that we all think, oh, I'm so special and I'm unique. When you look at, when you step back and you look at human behavior at macro level, it's amazingly consistent, the patterns. I mean, Coca Cola knows we spent X billion dollars on ads. Y billion gallons of Coke will be consumed by 23% of the population. We know it's an algorithm. We feed at the macro Level, you really can predict human behavior and it can be taught to do things. So my concern is short term. What is already happening and what's happened with technology in the last 20 years is people who learn to use technology, they benefit a lot. Personally, I've benefited dramatically. I, I got into online training courses in 1998 way too soon, lost money for 15 years. But then in the last 10 years it is skyrocketed and I've benefited wildly. I'm at 2 million online students. But at some level it does mean that people who did training just the old fashioned way, one on one, in person, a lot of them have gone out of business because they didn't adapt. But at some point the AI could be better than I am. And I could tell you right now, already there are people who enjoy interacting with my clone more than they want to talk to me because they know they can call my clone at three in the morning and I'll be asleep. They also know certain thing they like about a clone is they feel a little freer to reveal insecurities and their lack of confidence because it's not really a real human being. In some ways that's better. And the people who are in the therapy space and the psychiatric space are finding that true as well. People actually prefer sometimes talking to a computer into an AI. So I think again should short term it's going to be disruptive for people who don't learn how to use AI long term. I do think it could put us all out of business. And whether that means we're just free and wealthy to sit around composing poetry all day long, maybe. But I'm going to go down firmly on record and say, I just don't know those who say so firmly that oh, it's always going to be an enhancement for humans. Humans are always going to be in control and INV and their services will always be needed, I just don't know.

Well, I think that's what makes life exciting. I think turning the next page, right, what's, what's going to happen next? I think that's, that's part of the excitement of life.

So these are exciting times and I'm excited about the possibility of seeing your robot maybe in my house doing some things I don't enjoy doing anymore. I want to say a very special thanks to our guests, Steve Favas. If you want to know more about his robot and his inventions, go to his website, stevefavis.com it's steve f a v I s.com for those of you only listening. If you're looking at the show notes, whether it's the description on YouTube or listening on on itunes or any other platform, check it out. You can also listen to his podcast. It's Mr. Robots dot com. That's M I S T R robots dot com. Steve, thanks so much for being our guest today.

Thanks for having me, T.J. it was a lot of fun.