The Exchanges

Q Do you love what you do, or do you like the byproduct of what you do?

A I love the byproduct of what I do, which helps me get dopamine and a feeling for, like, what I do every day in the office. So I really love being able to ship great product out. Nothing makes me happier to see a robot working for five months on out in the real world. That's awesome. It's like, it's like, but I need, I need, I want millions of that. You know what I mean? So, but my days are hard. My days, like all the, I have like this, um, problem funnel, like every problem funnel is right to me and I'm working on problems all day. I have this like joke when I'm telling people when I get to meet them, like tell me good news. I've had a bad day. And it's just like, they only, they never have good news. Cause like, Things that are going well, I don't spend time on. So, but I'm working on problem, fixing things. I'm, I'm doing things at a CEO level that are needed to block the critical path of the company. So I just work on problems all day. I, I work like sun up to sun down. I'm generally in the office every night. Uh, so like, no, my days are very hard, exhausting. Uh, I'm tired. And, um, No, they're like, they're, they're extremely difficult and not fun on the surface, but like the byproduct of this is we get to create general purpose humanoid robots here.

AI assessment note: “I love the byproduct of what I do, which helps me get dopamine”

Q you know, I don't know how different Archer is because I've not seen enough about it, but it's the typical electric taxi, uh, one 60 kilometers range on a charge. Meant to take off from hotels, the, the helipads on top of a hotel, get to the airport. How far are we from a world where this could be more pragmatic? This is something that will be used by people.

A I mean, we have aircraft today that are, are, that are flying fully piloted. Like, you, you have a couple components here. The first is you, you have to be in the right decade to make sure the technologies are all feasible to make this really happen. This is a really hard technology. Most of the problems and challenges here happen because we have, um, um, there's probably like a 30 x difference in energy density between, like, traditional fossil fuel, say kerosene, that you might find in an aircraft, in an electric aircraft. Um, like, what we find in batteries. There's the problem of just, like, building the technology and really making it viable. I, I think we've shown at Archer that that is, like, fully possible today. I mean, we, we fly basically every week, um, our full-scale aircraft at this point, fully electric, similar concept operations we'd want to do in market. Uh, at this point, it's largely, like, a safety and certification and policy, like, the, basically, like, what's gating this is certification. Uh, in, in most countries, it's, it's governed federally, where you need, like, um, You know, in Europe, it's YASA. Here in the US, it's FAA. You need, you need, like, basically a certification level at the, at the federal level, uh, that unblocks your ability to take passengers and make it ubiquitous. Uh, so at this point, like, largely missing certification. You didn'…

AI assessment note: “within the next, like, five years, we'll be taking passengers”

Q every task, the, the ingredient or the input is energy. Like me as a human, I can eat a sandwich and I can do X amount because I can convert that into the, I can convert the energy of that sandwich into something. Do you think the robot or the humanoid ever gets to that point where it becomes more efficient than a human in utilizing energy or creating energy?

A Today we're like far, like, like less efficient than a human. Um, humans are like, are like the, are, we are like extremely efficient. Um, Like, our, you know, biological neural nets are really efficient. The way, the, how much energy, or how much power we use to exert, like, walking and movements and things are, and even just sitting here idle is much better than we get on the robot today. Um, I see no reason over time, like, you know, we're seeing power drop now across our robot systems, like, you know, um, there's, there's, there's a bunch of work that we're doing now There's like, there's like the computational work to get more efficient, and then there's like the mechanical work to get more efficient, uh, overall that we're looking at. Both of those two are like, we're getting improvements on year to year, like our robot to robot. Um, I think we will approach We see a path, like, approaching human-like kind of energy consumption. Uh, it's gonna be really hard. Like, you're, you're talking to us now in the early days of this. Like, we're like, you know, it's like way more, like, 16 years ago. It's like, it's, it's early. It's just now happening. We, there's a lot of stuff on our roadmap that we're like, oh man, we gotta go, like, solve, you know, manufacturing at scale, all these different things. And, uh, reducing power, uh, footprint is, is certainly one of them. I wouldn…

AI assessment note: “We see a path, like, approaching human-like kind of energy consumption.”

Q And you spoke about kids, Brett. Would you leave your kids with your humanoid? And also this whole companion concept, how important is it that the robot doesn't look menacing or does not look scary? Does the robot of tomorrow have, does your humanoid of tomorrow have facial expressions and stuff like that?

A Um, so actually, I've had a robot in my house now for like a few months. And, um, You know, my, my kids have been there, but we, like, we monitor the robot. So we're not, like, we're not, like, we're, like, we have somebody with the robot. Like, we're not letting the kids go up and hug it. We're, like, we're just doing tasks. We're trying to understand real robot performance. True safety for me is, like, having a robot that I've just, we've designed in my home with my kids. We have young kids. And, like, fully autonomously. And we're not, we're not there today. Like, I would not let my, like, robot roam free for hours and weeks right now with my young kids. There's a, there's a certain track record of safety in performance that we, like, I would want to see internally before, like, doing that. I think that's just, like, a really high watermark for me, uh, of trying to get there, and we're, we're pushing, like, every day to try to achieve this. Um, and then I think, like, you, you touched on a few things on the design side. It, it's funny, like, it's almost like, does this, like, end at Westworld, is what you're trying to ask, like, maybe. Like, um, And it certainly seems possible to go build this. Like, you've seen, like, I've seen, like, um, robots with, like, you know, real, like, human-like faces and expressions, and, um, like, really good, I would say. Um, Our view right no…

AI assessment note: “I would not let my, like, robot roam free for hours and weeks right now”

Q Can I push you a bit on Elon? The way to review Tesla's talk as a multiple of earning to the price the stock trades at, suddenly the humanoid is starting to form a part of how one would evaluate the stock. What are they trying to build?

A I don't know what they're trying to build. They're building a humanoid. I don't, um, know anything more than you know what's public. Um, like internally here, we kind of like put like a little bit of horse blinders on in terms of like our focus to what we're doing. Um, You know, we're kind of reasoning from the, from the ground up of, like, what we should really do. We don't really pay too much attention to, like, what the competitors are doing. I think that would have been, I think that would have ended pretty badly the last three years if we did. I think, like, for instance, like, a lot of groups in the space don't work on, like, high-dimensional hands. And we made a big bet internally, like, we're going to go all in on hands, make them, over time they'll be complex, and they'll be extremely important for high, high dexterous manipulation. Tesha should be really great at this, like, ah, so I'm rooting for them to do well.

AI assessment note: “I don't know what they're trying to build. They're building a humanoid.”

Q humanoids have the biggest use case in societies with, say, a declining demographic dividend or really high labor cost, for countries like India, where the cost of labor is still quite low compared to, say, America, for example, And if I were to be a bit more candid, the access to risk capital is significantly lower here. What do we build? What does my community build in the humanoid space?

A What I can relate to on my side is like, I, I grew up on a farm, came from very humble beginnings, had, uh, No to negative money most of my life. And, um, I think a couple pieces of advice I have just for folks in general is like, I have, I have a big thesis on just like just going for it. Like I've spent, I spent a decent amount of my career as even entrepreneur like de-risking into areas where I felt like are possible, um, especially in software that were like, um, You know, like, weren't like the really big, big ideas. And I think with, you know, Archer and Cover and Figure now, and stuff I'm working on, these are like, these are big ideas, and I could really get to go for it. I've learned a lot from that experience. I've learned that a few things. One is, I think, um, when you're going for these big ideas, they generally have like bigger markets, like bigger TAMs. And I think investors like to fund bigger, harder things that have, like, bigger outcomes. They just, like, like that binary, like, risk-reward. So I think you just access the capital. I've seen it's generally easier when you're working on harder things that can have bigger outcomes than working on smaller things like a, a calendar app, or whatever it would look like. Um, I think the second thing is people from an employee base that want to work for you. You need to hire, like, really good people. They want to wor…

AI assessment note: “a couple pieces of advice I have just for folks in general is like”