Humanoids Cost as Much as an SUV Now | Nikhil Kamath x Brett Adcock | WTF Online Ep 2

[upbeat music] Let me know when you guys can start. Ready? [upbeat music] Would you leave your kids with your humanoid?

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.

Everybody talks about China is so far ahead in robotics. Why is that?

Yeah, I just don't believe it. [upbeat music]

Hi, Brett. Lovely to meet you. Uh, what's behind you? Maybe we can start there.

Yeah. Um, so I'm at, I'm at Figure offices. Uh, we design humanoid robots. So these are robots that, you know, like, kind of like move around the world like humans: legs, arms, hands. Um, behind me is our first-generation robot, second and third-generation, uh, humanoid robots here at Figure.

Okay. So tell us a bit about yourself, Brett. Where did you begin? Where were you born? How did you come to build a humanoid?

Yeah. Um, so I was born in the Midwest, here, uh, in, in the US, on a third-generation farm, actually. [chuckles] We, um, we farmed corn and soybeans. Um, and then b- basically, since, like, middle school and high school, I started working on technology businesses, in... mostly in software. Uh, and that led to basically, [clears throat] basically now twenty years building tech companies. Um, I spent about ten years in software. Uh, ended up starting a company in 2012 called Vettery, and it was an A-- it was an AI marketplace for recruiting. The goal was to basically help, uh, candidates find jobs and employers find great talent, and that, that whole process is extremely broken and hard. I ended up selling Vettery, uh, for a little over a hundred million in 2017 to the Adecco Group, which is, like, the largest recruiting company in the world. After that, I, I really wanted to get into hardware, so I started a company called Archer Aviation, uh, in 2018, and what we do is we build electric aircraft, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. So it's, it's kind of like a hel- it takes off kind of like a helicopter, [clears throat] so you can, like, put them in cities, and it flies a little bit like a, like an airplane, and it's full- fully electric powertrain. And the goal is to basically help move traffic that it's like, you know, in cities and move into the air, so folks can get around a lot easier. And yeah, ba- basically designed five generations of aircraft so far at Archer. Our current aircraft is Midnight. It's a piloted four-passenger aircraft that we're, we're flying now, trying to get that certified in the US airspace with the FAA. Ended up taking that company public about four years ago, five years ago, and then, yeah, three year- three years ago, I started Figure. So we, we design, we, we, we design and manufacture humanoid robots. And the goal, the goal here at Figure is to be able to do everything a human can in the physical world.