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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

Let's talk about this for a minute.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

Several 100,000 guns are being brought into schools in K-12 every year in the U.S. and not found. If you look at a live graph of the chart, it's just exponential.

Sam Parr

What's your answer for that?

Brett Adcock

This is like the first time I've talked.

Sam Parr

About this publicly, 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 your ability to learn. So, I think I don't want to butcher the story, but you said something like, "I was reading old research papers," and you found that, I think in the seventies, NASA came up with this amazing thing. You cold-called or cold-emailed NASA and you're like, "Can you actually show me this device?" Is that story right?

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

Like I say, I think it was over 200 people last year who were either shot, wounded, or killed in the U.S. at K through 12 schools. A third of those were all in elementary schools. If you look at a line graph of the chart, it's just exponential. We like 5x'd in 2018, kind of almost year over year, and then we took another 3x move. So, we basically 10x'd the number of school shootings over the last 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 there's an over-assault, with somebody bringing in a machine gun, planning it out, driving a truck onto campus, and then shooting people. That happens a few times a year. Ninety-nine, or even ninety-eight percent of all the other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun to school every day. They're getting into a fight, and it escalates into a shooting. So, it's like an accessory; it's like bringing a...

Sam Parr

Right.

Brett Adcock

Third man, they have a handgun in their backpack. But from our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into K-12 schools in the U.S. every year and are not found. A small fraction of those that we see now in the statistics are basically getting in, like being bullied or getting into a fight, and they're shooting somebody on school campus. So, one of my hobbies is that I love reading research papers. Some of these 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 don't think it's going to fix all school shootings forever. Last year, there were 70 knife stabbings in K-12 schools. So, you know, even if you halted guns, there are still knife stabbings happening here. We need to see the weapons. I was reading and came across a research paper from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, where they were doing work trying to detect bomb vests and weapons underneath garments, clothes, and jackets for Afghanistan and Iraq. They developed some really interesting weapons imaging technology. I flew to JPL, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and I was talking to the guy that ran it.

Sam Parr

Did you just cold email him or something?

Brett Adcock

Oh yeah, I cold called him for sure.

Sam Parr

And what did you say?

Brett Adcock

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. If you're passionate about some work they did for years, years that they're no longer doing, like, somebody's going to take a phone call. I think most people could knock on that door and get that person to react. I called him and I flew in. The high level was that they developed high-frequency radar, similar to your Wi-Fi or phone. It lies in the electromagnetic spectrum, so like radio waves basically, but at a really high frequency. Think about your phone or Wi-Fi, but really souped up to a much higher frequency level. They were able to start penetrating clothing and begin imaging or reconstructing images of what's happening inside bags, clothing, and stuff. If you read the research papers and look at it, it's like airport security but you can do it from 50 meters away. You can take almost like camera frame rate images, which means you could just...

Brett Adcock

This is in the interest of a school. In this example, you can see every gun, knife, and bomb. It doesn't need to be metallic; it could be plastic or any material.

Sam Parr

Is it radio waves?

Brett Adcock

It's radio waves.

Sam Parr

Is that dangerous?

Brett Adcock

If you have ionized electromagnetic waves, like you would see with an X-ray, yes, these are non-ionizing rays, almost like your cell phone and Wi-Fi. So, these are not... Yeah, I mean, listen, they worked on it for years. I think at the end of it, it was around 2013 or so. When I got there, we were talking and chatting, and I didn't even think to ask to see the machine. At the end of the conversation, he said, "You wanna come see it?" and I was like, "Of course!" We walked down like four flights of stairs to the basement. He takes the cover off, and it's dusty. It's like a huge, compact computer at the bottom, and all this old stuff. All the electronics and systems are very dated. He turns it on and demos for me. We have a mannequin with a gun underneath its shirt, and he shows me it. It was unbelievable! It was like a camera picture of the gun, but then we also had radio frequency, so we get a 3D reconstruction. You're almost seeing it like a camera.

Brett Adcock

Cloud of the product.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

Well, we talk about an MFM. We talk about one chart businesses where you see some crazy chart and you're like, "Oh, well, there's an opportunity." 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 pulling it out of you. Everyone just wants this thing. Yeah, so that was like your one... your kind of one chart where it's like, "Oh, well, this is obvious."

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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?

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

Are you going to run it? Who's going to run it?

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

Let's talk about this for a minute. This is not just a school thing; this applies to stadiums, churches, hospitals, and everywhere else. My view is that over a long enough period, as longevity improves for humans, the severity of having an accident and dying is going to be higher and higher. This means we won't want to engage in riskier activities as we live longer. It's why, in movies, if someone is immortal, they tend to stay at home and not leave. If you die, you're dead forever, and if you don't die, you're alive forever. Right now, we have a finite amount of time where we won't be alive anymore, so humans take a lot of risks. We drive cars that are extremely dangerous, ride motorcycles, and engage in all sorts of risky behaviors that have a pretty high risk of injury or death. However, if you were to live forever, I don't think you would engage in those activities. Over a long enough period, I don't think you'll really move through the world without imaging systems like this for safety.

Sam Parr

Alright, 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. We give a ton of tips, a ton of techniques, and a ton of frameworks throughout all the episodes. Well, we decided to aggregate all of that into one simple document. You can read all of it, see how we've learned copywriting, and check out the resources that we turn to on a daily basis. You can see the frameworks and techniques we use. It's in a simple document, and you can check it out in the link below. Alright, now back to the show. You're really good at telling a story. You've done this before when I've hung out with you, about humanoids and robots. You just tell these stories that are so grand. I get bought into them, and I'm like, "Well, that makes perfect sense." But you do it at a much larger scale. You went with the longevity angle, which is like, "Well, we're going to live much longer." I mean, that’s just such a challenging way to think for a lot of people, myself included. And it's just such an ease. When I hear that pitch, I think, "Yeah, of course, that makes wonderful sense." It makes me think that going big and having these grand visions is almost easier than doing the alternative of something smaller. Do you know what I mean?

Brett Adcock

It's 100% easier. You could hire better people because they're more ambitious and interested in working on harder things. They're generally larger, and it could lead to larger outcomes. We're talking about building new industries that maybe have never been built before, with huge Total Addressable Markets (TAMs). Investors want very high risk-reward trades where they can make 50 to 100 times their money. Most investments from venture capitalists (VCs) fail, so they really need the "100 bagger" in their portfolio. Big, grand things offer that risk-reward opportunity for investors. I have this philosophy: I think the harder things are, the easier they become. It really depends on the industry and the market you're going into, but relatively speaking, I think there's some truth in that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, because Vettery... you sold Vettery for $100,000,000. 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.

Brett Adcock

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 don't like where they work. If you ever look for a job, it's like the worst process. We talk about bad products, but looking for a job is embarrassing. It's soul-crushing. So what we tried to do at Better is, 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. If you can solve that, you could put people in much better places for employment—much happier places—like they could find jobs they really love.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

The name is **Cover**. (C-O-V-E-R)

Sam Parr

**And what’s your philosophy on names?**

Brett Adcock

I think names need... I think people do. I have a certain philosophy towards it. I really like names that, at the very basic level, are easy to say, spell, and pronounce. I believe most company names violate one of those first three rules. Most names are just too hard to spell, remember, and pronounce in my mind. I really want something that, over time, we can build into a real iconic brand in the space. That just takes a lot of time. I would say there’s also the branding around the name and the way you think about the icon, the font... everything. For me, it’s almost like when you build a house; you need to make a really good foundation and pour a lot of concrete. It’s that concrete, that foundation, and you do it in the early days. Hopefully, you do it right. You know, I’ve definitely done it wrong before. I’ve gone through name changes before. These names are all unique to my perspective of how I want my businesses to look and feel. I like whatever better your archer figure and cover, but I think we’d just spend a decent amount of time thinking through that in the early days to build a good foundation for the brand.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

We own Cover.ai and I own, like, obviously, Figure.ai. I bought Archer.com a month before going public. So, not really. It was like, "Fly Archer.com" for a while. That was, you know, $9. Then I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying Archer.com. You know, a year later, two years later, we bought Figure.ai for $100,000, and then we bought Cover for a few tens of thousands of dollars. So, I wouldn't own the .coms or .ais in these cases if possible.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

We're not pitching to 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, I don't know... there might be a path where we never raise capital. The other path is that technology is just very difficult. So, I mean, hopefully, we make it work. The biggest market is not in schools. Schools are like the worst market to go into; it's just a bad pitch. The schools have very low budgets and they don't have systems like this exactly at the schools right now. Sure, the severity is tied to shootings, but the money-making opportunity is relatively small compared to places like stadiums, concerts, hospitals, and areas that have big budgets. Most big stadiums you go through now have some metal detectors and stuff, like TSA PreCheck and Homeland Security. There are real security applications for this outside of schools that could pay a lot more. For me, schools are like the worst pitch for fundraising. I don't give a shit; I really want to solve the K-12 school problem. I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for that. We're going great to schools to help solve this issue. I want to see if I can help prevent school shootings over time, and that's the only reason I'm working on this—funding this project or trying to work on it.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

I do have a few things I'm interested in. There are areas in genetics that I find intriguing, and when I have time, I'm doing a lot of research. I think there are areas of electric supersonic travel that are really interesting. I'm particularly excited about supersonic travel and electric technologies. Additionally, my experience in building eVTOL (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) aircraft has led me to develop a couple of ideas about how to design an aircraft that could effectively operate through these very divergent parts of the mission, such as very high altitudes and high speeds. I also really like the industry of synthetic foods. There has been a lot of controversy recently surrounding this topic.

Sam Parr

Is this synthetic meat? Is that like Impossible Foods, or are there people who are literally growing a cow? Like, they're growing meat that you can eat?

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

Well, I think that I'm a little bit of 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, right? 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."

Brett Adcock

Yeah, but like TV, radio, lights, and electricity... those were all weird for folks at some point. Like, those were all just...

Sam Parr

It takes time.

Brett Adcock

Cars were weird, right? Like, everybody's like, "Why would you have a car when you have a horse?" All of these are just like really radical in the moment.

Sam Parr

Yeah.

Brett Adcock

But, like, if we think about civilization a thousand years from now... We've been around for like a thousand years. If you think ten thousand more years and we're on Mars and the Moon, you're going to be growing cows and bubbles on Mars and then butchering that. We don't have room for that. It just seems unrealistic.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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. That's just the way I feel. I'm not a research scientist; I don't have a passion for that. I like thinking about how we've evolved as a species over the last several hundred years and how technology has been probably the biggest lever arm for our consciousness and understanding of the world. The only way to really do that is on a mass level. You know, electricity in a lab that wasn't brought to all of civilization is marginally helpful. But the orders of magnitude improvements we've had in humanity have come from releasing that to the world as a ubiquitous utility. For me, winning is the most important thing here because, let's call it what it is, we have a certain finite time to do this kind of stuff. At some point, we'll be too old or incapable of doing it, and it will be on to the next generation. So, I think we have a certain amount of time to go win and do things that are useful with our time. I think it's just devastating to spend 20 or 30 years working on something that doesn't work. That's the worst-case scenario for an entrepreneur. 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. If it doesn't win, it's just a terrible story.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I think that when I talk to people who are just starting out, the biggest issue is that they spend 10 years on something, and it's just a mediocre thing. It's better for it to suck right away.

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

Which is a common way of going about it. You know, I think Tesla did this where they started with more expensive models. Even though he was like, "I would like it to be the Model T where everyone could have one," he decided to start with high-end models because that would give them more profits to fund more projects.

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

You were on *60 Minutes* the other day, and on *60 Minutes*, I think you had like a plate, an apple, and a banana sitting in front of the robot. You said something like, "Hey, hand me the apple," or "hand me the orange," and it did a good job. It reached and found the right fruit. I think it made a mistake once or twice, but then it corrected itself. You were like, "Hey, that's the wrong one," and it was like, "Oh, I'm sorry," and it 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. When I talk to someone, they say everything's late with tech and hardware, but somehow Brett hasn't been late. Figur has been lightning fast. What have you guys done to be so fast?

Brett Adcock

So, when I started Figr, and also Archer, I did this at Archer too. I started the company before it was even incorporated with this idea of how to move extremely fast. Listen, it's like a whole company was built just for speed. We have our company mission statement, which is that we want to go in this direction as a company. Then everything else, as we 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 building schedules, and how we plan for schedules. We don't have... we're 120 engineers here, and we have zero program managers. We have a certain philosophy around what to do and how to build hardware and software that... I think we're kind of like the anti-Silicon Valley company in Silicon Valley as it relates to this. We really care about getting things brought up quicker, iterating faster, and doing that over a very long period of time—like decades. Building a company that can do that is extremely hard. There's really no good precedent, maybe outside of Tesla and SpaceX, that have done this well at scale. Tesla has, you know, well over 100,000 people—arguably tens of thousands of product design engineers—and they're moving at the speed of a small startup. Generally, when you're adding headcount, companies are all slowing down. It's almost every company that slows down with more headcount. You're just getting slower over time. You don't notice it, you don't care. The board is giving you indications that you should slow down and be safer, and everything's just slowing to a halt. So, you have to basically fight this. The best way you can fight it is to design the whole world from the ground up to do this, or do what Elon did with Twitter: walk in, fire 80% of people, and restructure it at the start.

Brett Adcock

In time to go faster and ship product, it's too laborious to say, "Okay, we move fast." One thing is that the whole company was built just to move fast.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

There's a lot of things happening here. A lot of times, people haven't been in that environment. So when they get in there and move into a fast-paced environment, it just becomes overwhelming and too hard and too stressful to handle. If you were like a PhD student for 10 years, wearing sweatpants and moving slowly, coming in here is like a real culture shock. We've had it happen several times where people are just coming in late and moving slowly. It's frustrating for them to have to move much faster, and there's probably a lot of anxiety there. There are other folks that believe the longer you take to build something, the safer it is and the better job you'll do at it. So if you give me two years to design a robot, that robot will be safer at the end of the two years and better designed. However, folks feel like that is for sure wrong. People think that the longer you spend designing something, the safer and better it will be, but that's for sure wrong because in that two years...

Brett Adcock

Of time without one robot got out. I'm going to have my 3rd generation robot out, and I'll have it run for an order of magnitude longer. I will have found all the problems ten times sooner. I will have had time to go fix it recursively and make it better. It'll just be a worse product.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

And what are your expectations?

Brett Adcock

A car could be like, how many car versions have you gotten out over the last decade? And how much progress have you made between those? A rocket could be similarly viewed. A robot could be, how many robot iterations are we doing? Like, what version of the robot are we on? The iPhone could be, you know, how many versions of the iPhone have you got now in the 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, which will ultimately be correlated at a high level to how much risk there is of failure in the business long term.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

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

Sam Parr

Where do you turn to for that?

Brett Adcock

You just gotta, like, you know, find this stuff. Whether it's Wikipedia, papers, or Google searches, you can use GPT-4. Can you clearly communicate this topic, whether it's an engineering topic or not, to a 12-year-old sitting on a barstool? Most people can't do that. It's like a skill that most people lack. Even people I work with, I sometimes have a hard time understanding what's the update on this thing or that thing. It's a skill you have to learn. Understanding something is a skill, too. You really have to boil things down and 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 a topic.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

Maybe there are so many different multidisciplinary areas of software, hardware, electromagnetics, and everything else that needs to be done here. You really need to be able to communicate clearly across several groups. It's important, even here, that we try not to use acronyms. A software person who writes firmware and an electromagnetics person who builds a rotor-stator for an electric motor—those folks generally don't understand each other's disciplines. They need to communicate with each other as well, and they can't be using "inside baseball" terms or electromagnetic jargon when a firmware engineer hasn't spent any time on stator and rotor design for electric rotors. So, I think this topic of being able to communicate really well and understand things thoroughly is just super important.

Sam Parr

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

Brett Adcock

I think there have been really great entrepreneurs over time who show a path that this can all be done. Like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk—these guys are the best at what they do and have been able to show the world that really incredible things can be achieved through persistence and focus. I find it truly incredible. Every time I watch a SpaceX launch or hold an Apple product in my hands, I am reminded that every company in the world started out as a startup at some point. It’s very energizing to think that someone with enough willpower can actually go out and do remarkable things for the world. That thought gives me energy every day. I wake up eager to have an impact. We haven't done anything noteworthy to date over the past two years. It's been interesting; we have robots and stuff, but people have built robots before. Now, we need to prove that we can actually ship a really high-quality product, which is going to take us several more years from here. That’s a really exciting challenge for us now. It’s hard, and everyone who has attempted this in humanoid robotics commercially has failed in history. But it should be doable. There are people who have overcome similar hurdles in other industries, whether those challenges were less difficult or more difficult. That should be very energizing for us here at Figr and for other entrepreneurs out there trying to do hard things.

Sam Parr

I have this joke: "Cornrows are cool, but not for me." That's kind of how I feel about the way you think. 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.

Brett Adcock

Thank you for having me on.

Sam Parr

Alright, that's the pod.