The speaker is developing know-how and a system for finding a successful outcome from a sequence of negative experimental results.

“like how something was made and so yeah and so there's actually even if there's a known material it can be highly non-trivial to replicate that some things are you know in like you know a high school textbook but other things are really at the frontier and you know we're building up that know-how as well and I'm building up a system that you know given the string of negative results how do you actually get to that positive case”