EXCLUSIVE: $3B Founder Reveals His Next Big Idea

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
If you had to describe yourself, what would you say you are?

**Brett Adcock** (0:03)
I just want to go build important things and win. That's it.

**Sam Parr** (0:15)
We're live with Brett Adcock. I wanted to start off with something crisp.
You told me this story, and this is something that's fascinating about you, which is about your ability to learn. So I think, I don't want to butcher the story, but you said something like, I was reading old, I think research papers, and you found that I think in the 70s, NASA came up with this amazing thing, and you cold-called or cold-emailed NASA, and you're like, can you actually show me this device? Is that story right?

**Brett Adcock** (0:43)
Yeah, it's pretty close. This is the first time I've talked about this publicly.
Sorry, maybe for context, I have been following what's happening at K-12 schools in the US, as it relates to school shootings. And if you look at the charts of how many shootings are actually happening at the schools, how many deaths are happening in schools, it's like basically you have a school shooting like basically once per day now in the US in K-12.

**Sam Parr** (1:13)
That's true. Is that true? That's insane.

**Brett Adcock** (1:15)
I have to say, I think it was like 200 over 200 people like last year were like either shot or wounded or killed in the US at K-12. And a third of those are all in elementary. And the chart, if you look like a line graph of the chart, it's just like exponential. It's we like 5x in 2018, kind of almost a year over year. And then we like took another 3x moves. We basically 10x the number of school shootings over the last 7 years or so, decade. And it's just getting worse and worse.
What I found is that most of all the school shootings are not what we're seeing on TV where, you know, there's like an over assault where somebody is bringing in like a machine gun, planned it out, driving a truck into campus and shooting people up.
That happens a few times a year.
Ninety-nine, 98% of all the other shootings are from a kid bringing a handgun in every day to school. They're getting in a fight at some point and escalates into a shooting. So they're just like, it's like an accessory. It's like bringing a third grand, they have a handgun in their backpack. And from our analysis, several hundred thousand guns are being brought into schools in K-12 every year in the US and not found. And then a small fraction of those that we see now in the statistics are basically getting in like bullied or getting in a fight and they're shooting somebody on school campus.

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**Brett Adcock** (3:29)
So one of my hobbies, I love reading like research papers and newspapers in general.
And the way I think you solve this is you need to be able to see the guns. I think gun control is something I'm interested in and passionate about, but I think it's not going to fix all school shootings forever. There was like last year was 70 knife stabbings in K-12 schools. So like, you know, even if you halted guns, there's still like knife stabbings happening here. So we need to see the weapons. So I was reading, I came across a research paper from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab where they were doing work where they were trying to detect bomb vests and weapons underneath like garments and clothes and jackets for like Afghanistan and Iraq.
And they developed some really interesting like weapons imaging technology. And I flew to JPL, like NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. And I was talking to the guy that ran it.

**Sam Parr** (4:26)
Did you just cold, cold email him or something?

**Brett Adcock** (4:28)
Oh, yeah.
Cold called him for sure. Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (4:32)
And what did you say?

**Brett Adcock** (4:32)
Oh, I said, hey, I need to learn more about this. I read your paper. Can we have a conversation? You know, most people in general will get on a phone with you at this point. Like if you're passionate about some work they did for years and years that they're no longer doing, like somebody's gonna take a phone call. I think most people could knock on that door and get that person to react. Yeah, I don't think that's a hard thing to do. I called them and I flew in and the high level was that they developed a high frequency radar, so similar like your Wi-Fi or phone, like it's like it lies in electromagnetic spectrum. So like radio waves basically that were really high frequency. So I think about like your phone or Wi-Fi, but like really souped up to a much higher frequency level.