Terahertz imaging could detect concealed weapons at school entrances

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:16:14

   research report done by a few of these guys that were at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. I write these two guys and they said, sure, we'd love to have you over. I get over there and they're like, they tell me the whole backstory. They're like, listen, we developed this technology for standoff distance detection for the Iraq and Afghanistan war. It was funded by the US government. We worked on it for 10 years. And when the war stopped, funding dropped to zero and we were done. We And I'm like, oh, it sucks.

2. 2:16:46

   And then I'm like, okay, well, I guess keep me posted if this thing ever works out. And then towards the end, they're like, oh, you want to go see it? I'm like, what do you mean, see it? They're like, it's in the basement, it's done. We did it. And this is in 2017, 2018. So this is like, I was like, oh, yeah, let's walk down. Walked down to the basement. There's like this tarp over this machine. Took a tarp off.

3. 2:17:10

   They had a guy with a mannequin that's sitting there with a gun underneath a shirt, like, I don't know, three or four meters away. It turned this machine on. It was built like 10 years ago. It had like a computer tower inside of it. And then it had like a little screen next to it. So I started this machine and they basically moved over to the screen and the screen showed like as clear as day, like a photo of the, you can see the exact gun.

4. 2:17:37

   You could see it in 3D, you could see it in 2D, you could see it in power. There's a bunch of other ways we can look at the data, but it was just like crystal clear wow and i was like what what happened here like we basically got to the end of this program and we don't have any more funding so it's done and i basically made the decision you know long story short i ended up chasing archer at the time i went and built archer and at the time i only had like a like you know this was a big endeavor for me like going from software like you know deep tech hardware so i basically decided to put cover on Hold and Chase Archer.

5. 2:18:11

   And then about two years ago, somebody came to my office, one of my investors, and was like, hey, I'm looking at trying to solve school shootings. I was just back from LA, and I'm trying to solve it with CCTVs, like the security cameras. He's like, the problem is, like, you can't, you won't know until the gun goes off. And you won't, like, brandish your gun. You won't pull the gun up until you're, like, trying to, like, shoot it.

6. 2:18:32

   So it's just, like, way too late. I told him a story about how I went down this path in here, and he kind of looked me dead in the eyes. He's like, I have kids, and you have kids. Like, you have a fiduciary duty to go build this. And it was right when my daughter was also applying for first grade, and we were worried about it at schools, you know what I mean, just looking at, like, the fence, and just, like, kind of anybody can go in.

7. 2:18:53

   You know what I mean? So, like, I was like, shit, you know, I got to go do this. I ended up spinning the technology out of Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech. And I own it. And started cover two years ago. The OG team that built it is with me now. No way. We put an office in Pasadena. It's the main office is right next to JPL. And we've been working on this now for two years. I've been self-funding the whole thing.

8. 2:19:18

   And we will have, we have a prototype that already works last year. and we'll have a full-scale prototype out, like, I hope by summer, like in our lab. And then we, hopefully, if all goes well by end of year, we're beta testing in school. Wow. And we'll put it in that figure campus first, even. Wow. This is like an optical play, like, can you see it? This is an AI play saying, can you detect it now?

9. 2:19:43

   There's 130,000 K-12 schools in the US. There's like 60 or 80 million K-12 students. It's huge. and um but it's not just schools it's stadiums and airports everywhere hospitals malls every any venue you can movie theaters i had my last baby a year ago just like anybody can walk in the hospital it's just like just doesn't matter they don't check you in it's just like scary and so anyway um we're we're getting close here and um the technologies we designed are incredible actually we designed all of it like we designed the whole system that i saw redesigned the whole system i saw seven years ago last year but it was just too expensive the systems we were using were like certain parts on it were like 50 60 000 so we moved all of that into a into a chip and we spent last year and a half doing that work those chips are in our office

10. 2:20:38

    now and working those chips are like seven dollars instead of fifty thousand dollars there's only a few groups in the world that could make them and design them we co-designed We worked on the design with them, made them, fabricated them, and we have them now in our office. They work. We use many different, we use a lot of chips, but they're really cheap. And that's important.