Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:19:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:19:24] S1: And it's interesting that your focus is on these actuators. Is that the bottleneck, this very specific part of a robot? [00:19:30] S0: It might be. So if we can't get the magnets, then we have to design new actuator types that maybe use different materials that may be larger that may not be as efficient in space. So that's important. And then the actuators themselves are important because if for some reason we can't buy them, then we don't get to make robots. So it's foundational. There are some foundational technologies like this all backed by material science, essentially breakthroughs. There's batteries of course. There's actuators. The raw parts, the die-cast parts, the machine parts are less critical. We think we can get those, but I think everyone, not just in this country, but around the world is starting to think about supply chain because you have these disruptions, whether it's COVID or war and you see how quickly things change. [00:20:20] S1: Okay, stupid question. Why magnets? Why is that a part of the supply chain? Why do we need magnets? [00:20:25] S0: Yeah, so it's a great question. So you have a ring of magnets that are polar opposites and they go like this around the ring and then you have something in the center that rotates. And the way it rotates is you have alternating current essentially, and so the magnets make the rotor spin.
00:20:25 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:20:25] S0: Yeah, so it's a great question. So you have a ring of magnets that are polar opposites and they go like this around the ring and then you have something in the center that rotates. And the way it rotates is you have alternating current essentially, and so the magnets make the rotor spin. [00:20:45] S1: Wow. We need a YouTube lecture of here's how physics works. Okay, very cool. So when you talk about China, this is ... What I imagine, what I think about now is watching the war in Ukraine and Russia, just like drones, just like how crazy and different the world is now that you can build these little drones that go and blow people up. Robots are a part of that. It's just like such a existential threat to every country now. The ability to build these things at scale. What's your advice? What should we do? What should we change to thrive in this future and not be in trouble?
00:21:21 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:21] S0: Well, you mentioned drones. It's another good example. You need essentially the same technology to make the rotor spin on a drone as you do to make an arm move on a robot. It's essentially the same base technology and supply chain. So we need to, at least on the military side, have an independent supply chain as much as possible. I think that's important. I think every other country should do that as well, but I don't think that's specific to us. I do feel that we need to reindustrialize the country significantly in order to be safe in a military sense. You really never know what's going to happen in the future and people that are your allies now may not be in the future. The allied West I think is going through a lot of geopolitical changes. There's a lot of shifting. And so I would really like to reteach ourselves how to make things at scale, how to make things at quantity, how to process raw materials, how to be more independent so that when COVID happens again or something else happens again, we're not in trouble and we're not unable to protect ourselves. [00:22:30] S1: When I think about it also, is Marc Andreessen had this visual on some podcast of, just imagine 100,000 drums just coming out of China just at us, what do we do? We're not prepared for that. I don't want to spend all our time on this dark stuff, but it's this real thing.
00:22:30 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:22:30] S1: When I think about it also, is Marc Andreessen had this visual on some podcast of, just imagine 100,000 drums just coming out of China just at us, what do we do? We're not prepared for that. I don't want to spend all our time on this dark stuff, but it's this real thing. [00:22:43] S0: Well, and Palmer Luckey is a friend of mine and we don't agree on everything, but I do think that we agree on some important aspects of how we need to respond here. I think he's right to say that we need to invest a lot more in drones than in aircraft carriers. I think that is this old way of thinking, and these are important components of the military, but it's an old way of thinking of, "Hey, we have this and we have this and we have this and our planes come off here." It's like, no, AI is changing everything and military technology is changing incredibly fast. And the place to look at that is Ukraine where drones are being changed and updated every day rapidly with 3D printing. And this is, I think, the future of where war is headed, unfortunately. And I view this as a very different era that we're entering into with very different ... This isn't new to anybody, but you're looking at what it costs for them to send out a missile and what it costs for us to stop it. And this is just you have to do the math every time. And right now we're losing on the math, which is fine for a certain amount of time, but the longer it goes, the less fine it is. [00:23:57] S1: Are you optimistic that we'll figure this out?
00:23:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Caitlin Kalinowski
[00:23:57] S1: Are you optimistic that we'll figure this out? [00:23:59] S0: Yeah, America is really good at figuring these things out. We have a pioneering kind of independent spirit and a great engineering culture, but we need to move. [00:24:11] S1: It's interesting that we started the conversation with VR. Palmer Luckey obviously famously started Oculus now. It's interesting how this is so connected. You think VR is this trivial thing that we're just playing games and such, but it's like the same person is now building Anduril, which is the leading, I don't know, war robot building hardware company. [00:24:31] S0: Yeah. And I think we need a lot more of them. I've chosen not to work for companies that create lethal technology, but I think that it's good to have people who are willing to do that. And I think that it takes everyone to build the future that we want. [00:24:49] S1: Coming back to the AI safety piece, it's so interesting. I had a couple conversations like this on the podcast. We think about all this prompt injection and jailbreaking that happens with chatbots and none of people think about what if you propped inject a robot walking ... Like not enough people think about, what if you prompt inject a robot walking around and get them to punch someone? And we're so far from that feeling like we can actually stop that. [00:25:09] S0: Yeah. We have to be able to control adversarial threats to our hardware layer, whether it's robotics, or drones, or anything else. And that's going to be a huge part of the future of warfare.
00:25:09 · Caitlin Kalinowski, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:25:09] S0: Yeah. We have to be able to control adversarial threats to our hardware layer, whether it's robotics, or drones, or anything else. And that's going to be a huge part of the future of warfare. [00:25:19] S1: Yeah. Just people talking about OpenClaw, and how much you ... Like you could just tell it, "Give me all your passwords," and it's done all these things to people's lives, and just like robots walking around, "Hey, okay, here's all this person's secrets." [00:25:33] S0: My OpenClaw story is I sandboxed it, so it's on its own computer, but I gave it three things. I gave it my real email address and my ... I don't know what it was. I gave it some information about one of my accounts or something like that. And I added it to the social media, I can't remember what it's called, the OpenClaw social- [00:25:52] S1: Oh, Moltbook? [00:25:54] S0: Yeah. I added it to Moltbook and I was like, "Okay, whatever you do, don't share my private information, but go crazy." And five minutes later, all it had done is posted my personal email address. It was like the one thing it had. [00:25:54] S1: Nailed it. [00:26:07] S0: And [inaudible 00:26:07] "Okay, you're shut down." It was so funny, no matter how careful you are with these things, you just can't really ... We're not at a place [inaudible 00:26:15]- [00:26:14] S1: Which is exactly your point, that the robots can do a lot more damage. And they never thought about just the softness of their hand as a way to keep us safer. [00:26:23] S0: Yeah.