Kyle Vogt: Cruise Automation | Lex Fridman Podcast #14

The following is a conversation with Kyle Vogt. He's the president and the CTO of Cruise Automation, leading an effort to solve one of the biggest robotics challenges of our time, vehicle automation. He's a co-founder of two successful companies, Twitch and Cruise, that have each sold for a billion dollars, and he's a great example of the innovative spirit that flourishes in Silicon Valley, and now is facing an interesting and exciting challenge of matching that spirit with the mass production and the safety-centric culture of a major automaker, like General Motors. This conversation is part of the MIT Artificial General Intelligence series and the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, please subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter at lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now, here's my conversation with Kyle Vogt. You grew up in Kansas, right?

Yeah. And I just saw that picture you had hidden-

Oh, boy.

... under there, so I'm a little bit- a little bit worried about that now.

Nervous.

Yeah.

So in high school, in Kansas City, you joined Shawnee Mission North High School robotics team.

Yeah.

Now, that wasn't your high school.

That's right. That was- that was, uh, the only high school in the area that had a f- like, a- a teacher who was willing to sponsor our first robotics team.

I was gonna troll you a little bit, jog your memory-

Yep.

... a little bit-

Yep.

... about that kid.

I was trying to look super cool and intense-

You did.

... 'cause, you know, this was BattleBots, this is serious business, so we're standing there with a welded steel frame and looking tough.

So go back there. What is it that drew you to robotics?

Well, I think, I- I've been trying to figure this out for a while, but I've always liked building things with LEGOs, and when I was really, really young, I wanted the- the LEGOs that had motors and other things. And then, you know, LEGO MINDSTORMS came out, and for the first time, you could program LEGO contraptions. And I think, uh, things just sort of snowballed from that. But I remember, um, seeing, you know, the BattleBots TV show on Comedy Central and thinking, "That is the coolest thing in the world. I wanna be a part of that," and, uh, not knowing a whole lot about how to build these 200-pound fighting robots. So I sort of obsessively pored over the, uh, internet forums where all the creators for BattleBots would sort of hang out and talk about, you know, document their build progress and everything. And, uh, I think I read- I must have read like, you know, tens of thousands of forum posts from- from basically everything that was out there on what these people were doing. And eventually, like, sort of triangulated how to- how to put some of these things together, and- and, uh- uh, ended up doing BattleBots, which was, you know, I was like 13 or 14, which was pretty awesome.