Science Corner Special: David Friedberg, Cleo Abram, Alex Filippenko, and Keller Rinaudo Cliffton

(0:00) Introducing Cleo Abram (1:12) Why YouTube has become the best platform for creators, techno-optimism at Huge If True (8:35) Astrophysicist Alex Filippenko on the James Webb Space Telescope (23:14) Q&A with Alex Filippenko, Cleo, and Friedberg: The universe, Fermi Paradox, black holes, NIH grants and the "war on science" (37:37) Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton on the future of drone delivery (53:29) Q&A with Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Cleo, and Friedberg: Instant delivery explosion, competitors, impact on healthcare Thanks to our partners for making this happen! Solana - Solana is the high performance network powering internet capital markets, payments, and crypto applications. Connect with investors, crypto founders, and entrepreneurs at Solana's global flagship event during Abu Dhabi Finance Week & F1: https://solana.com/breakpoint OKX - The new way to build your crypto portfolio and use it in daily life. We call it the new money app. https://www.okx.com/ Google Cloud - The next generation of unicorns is building on Google Cloud's industry-leading, fully integrated AI stack: infrastructure, platform, models, agents, and data. https://cloud.google.com/ IREN - IREN AI Cloud, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, provides the scale, performance, and reliability to accelerate your AI journey. https://iren.com/ Oracle - Step into the future of enterprise productivity at Oracle AI Experience Live. https://www.oracle.com/artificial-intelligence/data-ai-events/ Circle - The America-based company behind USDC — a fully-reserved, enterprise-grade stablecoin at the core of the emerging internet financial system. https://www.circle.com/ BVNK - Building stablecoin-powered financial infrastructure that helps businesses send, store, and spend value instantly, anywhere in the world. https://www.bvnk.com/ Polymarket - https://www.polymarket.com/ Follow Cleo: https://x.com/cleoabram https://www.youtube.com/c/CleoAbram Follow Keller: https://x.com/keller Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Friedberg?

  Good morning.

• 0:04David Friedberg?

  Where are my besties? They are not here. What does that mean? Science Corner.

• 0:14David Friedberg?

  I have a guest host because my besties abandoned me for Science Corner. Let's see who it is.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Bill, you're one of the fastest-growing channels on YouTube right now. Former Vox journalist that left to go independent on YouTube.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  She went from zero to 5 million subscribers in just three years. I don't know many other YouTube creators who are going to go to those lengths.

• 0:34Speaker 03

  There's a lot of very lucrative fear-mongering going on. That's why I want to bring a more optimistic point of view into the conversation. To help people imagine what could go right. That's why I went independent.

• 0:48Speaker 04

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Cleo Abram.

• 1:01David Friedberg?

  Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for being here.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:04David Friedberg?

  Grab a seat. You were here all day yesterday?

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07David Friedberg?

  How was it?

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Having a great time. This is my first All In Summit. I'm so excited to be here.

• 1:10David Friedberg?

  Welcome. So Cleo, you have 6 million subscribers on your YouTube channel. We have under a million. Thank you for having us on your show.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  Welcome.

• 1:23David Friedberg?

  How did you do it? What happened? So you were at Vox before?

• 1:27Speaker 03

  I was, yeah.

• 1:28David Friedberg?

  And you were an independent director. I mean, you were doing other projects. Tell us how you set up this channel on YouTube, why you did it, and how it got so big so fast.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Huge If True seems to me to be a bit of a microcosm of this big shift that we're in with media generally right now. I was at a media company and making what we call explainer journalism. So taking complicated issues and making them understandable, both to me and to millions of people. And I went independent to start this show because there was something that I felt like I was missing. When I looked out into my media diet, I really wanted to find a show that was optimistic, that helped me see where were the people that are working on hard problems, making them better every day, in a way that I could understand and I could participate in. So I left the media company where I was, started this show and had the opportunity, because of what YouTube offers,

• 2:21Speaker 03

  to reach a global audience very quickly and find out, "Oh, my God, I'm not alone. Oh, my God, there are millions of people that also want this kind of show." And YouTube made that bet that if you allow anyone to create their best creative work, the widest audience will watch. And so YouTube has become, in the last 18 months, I think, the most-watched streaming platform on televisions. So we're in the middle of this big moment of change in media and how media gets made. And I don't think most people know that it's really happening. They know that YouTube shows can get big, but they don't really understand the shift that we're in. And by the way, the shift is also very exciting for streamers because they're looking at this and they're saying, you know, a Netflix of the world, I used to make a Netflix show as well,

• 3:07Speaker 03

  can look at this incredible new wealth of creativity and IP and say, "Oh, my God, who do we want to work with to give upfront capital to make something that's even bigger?" And so now they're working with you.

• 3:19David Friedberg?

  This is something you and I have talked about.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 3:21David Friedberg?

  Because if you're on Netflix today, and we're going to talk with Neil and Ari about this later today, if you're an independent director, you go to Netflix, they're like, "Okay, we'll pay for your production cost plus 10%." And it's quite different than what it used to be, like when you made Friends, you could make the show and then you could eventually make VC. Like you could make hundreds of millions of dollars if it worked out and it became a massive show. But you're basically capped at Netflix. But YouTube's quite different. So there seems to be a financial or economic incentive, both creative freedom but also this economic incentive to go to YouTube. But then how does financing happen? Like where can creators drive the engine to fund and create new content?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Well, most YouTubers have ad-funded businesses. And so what that requires is you go out on your own, as we did with Huge If True. We went independent. We started this show. The show grows and then you are able to get sponsors who in turn fund better and better work and it continues to scale. The traditional model of paying upfront for a show that then the streamer owns offers something very different. And I think we're in an interesting... Flexible moment of change right now where Netflix might say, wow, we see a really exciting show on YouTube. We want to allow that creator to make something that is a version of that IP that is bigger and we'll invest in that upfront. And so what I think we're seeing is

• 4:43Speaker 03

  for the same creator and the same kind of IP, you can have a really wonderful relationship between the kind of show that you can make when you can reach global audiences immediately and grow and see how far you can take it with an advertising model. And then at the same time, you might be able to take that gem of an idea and say, what would I do if I had upfront capital? So I think there's a really interesting way in which these things all work together. And some of the headlines make it seem as though this is an antagonistic moment in media. I think it's really great for everybody. I think it's a really, really exciting moment. I'm also the optimist, so of course I'm going to say that.

• 5:19David Friedberg?

  Yeah, but I'm actually curious to hear what Neil thinks at YouTube. I know you know him. Because it opens up a window, I think, right now for YouTube to suck up some of the best content creators in the world from the more traditional platforms, broadcast and streaming.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it goes both ways.

• 5:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah. But so just talking about your show, your show is so great because it really meets what I always say is missing in media today, which is we've got this deep sort of techno pessimism. Everyone thinks that technology always has a catch. There's always something bad emerging. Robots are going to kill us all. AI is going to wipe out human civilization. Nuclear power is going to melt down and destroy neighborhoods. Every point of technology has some negative angle, but then that becomes the cycle. You watch all the shows on Netflix. You watch all the movies. Aaron Brockovich, like the ones that work, the ones that seem to resonate, which means that's what people truly kind of want, are the ones that talk about things gone wrong. But your show is quite different. And you talk about what if things go right?

• 6:19David Friedberg?

  Why do you think that is resonating? And are we changing? Or are you kind of capturing a small audience and the bigger one's still sort of techno pessimistic?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Well, the best thing by far about making this show is realizing that there are millions of people out there that also want that same kind of work. I mean, you see it with Science Corner in so many ways. Those are very similar in tone. And I think from my perspective, when I started this show, I really was looking for a part of my media diet that I wasn't getting anywhere else. And that's what makes making something yourself on YouTube so special. You're creating something, asking, are there millions of people out there like me? And the answer turns out to be yes. With respect to optimistic science and tech content specifically, the reason why I make it in the first place, we spend months on these episodes. We travel all around the world. We invest a huge amount in the animations and the technical explainers so that you

• 7:12Speaker 03

  can understand, without any background at all, quantum computing and the impacts, supersonic planes and how we're trying to bring them back. I was in a zero-gravity plane the other day, trying to explain the cutting-edge of gravity research in theoretical physics. These are things that millions of people can understand if you explain them in the right kinds of ways. And that's what we try and do every day. And the reason why we do that is because we genuinely believe that when people see those better futures, they'll help build them. That's what I want to do. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a scientist. I look out at the world and I think, wow, there are so many people working on hard problems. I want to know how I can participate. And so my hope is that's what we're doing every day.

• 7:51David Friedberg?

  We used to have that after World War II. I always tell people, like, the Disneyland opened up in 1955. There's a YouTube video called "The Disney History Institute's The Channel," and it shows like what Tomorrowland was like when Disney opened in 1955. And it was all about like, we're building this better world with all of these crazy technologies: rockets to the moon, plastics so we could all have cheap furniture. Like, there was a crazy device that they had in the kitchen called the microwave, where you could cook in 30 seconds, so you wouldn't have to like sit around and cook for hours. But we've lost that. And I really hope that your content resonates with more people and that we get there again. So Cleo's going to join me this morning for two really fun panels that we're going to have, and we're going to kick it off now.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  How thrilling must it be to truly discover something or understand something that no human on Earth has ever seen or understood?

• 8:52Speaker 06

  He was a member of both the Supernova Cosmology Project and the Hi-Z Supernova Search Team to discover that the universe is accelerating. A leader in all of these undertakings.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  That's one of the big questions of cosmology.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Filippenko.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Wow, this is so fantastic to see you all here. Good morning. David, thank you for inviting me to Science Corner. It's such a pleasure. Most of you probably don't know that in fact, David was a student of mine at UC Berkeley 28 years ago and became an astrophysics major, in fact, you know? So I feel like I had some influence on him. I'll take some credit.

• 9:54Speaker 05

  You know, as Joe Tsai said yesterday, teachers want their students to become more successful, to become better than they are. And I always knew that David would be very successful in his career, but I didn't know that he'd be quite this successful. So, good, good job, David, you know? I'd also like to, yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  I'd also like to officially acknowledge California's 175th birthday today. California Admission Day. So, yep, we were told that yesterday and I looked it up and it's true, so. You know, California is beginning its 176th orbit around the sun. May it be revolutionary, so to speak, right? Get it? Get it? Okay.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Okay, well, it's my pleasure to be speaking today about the James Webb Space Telescope as just one example of an amazing mission where humans are pursuing science and exploring the universe. It's an amazing device, and it's already brought us so many interesting results. Now, it was launched on Christmas Day 2021 aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, and it's a wonderful example of how international collaboration and cooperation, in this case between the U.S., Europe, and Canada, can lead to incredible achievements in very complex projects.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  There are many comparisons with NASA and ESA's Hubble Space Telescope, which has been serving us well for over three decades. The primary one is that the Webb has a much bigger mirror, and a mirror can be thought of as a gigantic eyeball, a collecting area that brings together faint starlight from distant parts of the universe. And so the bigger the collecting area, the fainter the object you can see. And Webb has six times the collecting area of Hubble, so it's a more powerful telescope. Fundamentally, the Webb was designed to explore our origins. Where did we come from? How are we evolving?

• 12:17Speaker 05

  What's going to happen far, far in the future? How do galaxies, like the Milky Way Galaxy, form and how do they evolve with time? Now, we know now that many galaxies merge together, like the group that you're seeing here in a beautiful Webb image. By the way, to the lower right of the word "time" there, there's a star with a bunch of spikes. Ignore the spikes. They're not beautiful. They're ugly, okay? They're just a consequence of the interaction of light with the telescope, so ignore the spikes. But here are a bunch of merging galaxies. Now, the first image NASA released publicly...

• 12:55Speaker 05

  A little over three years ago, was of a tiny part of the sky. Imagine a grain of sand held at arm's length. Imagine how small that looks. Yet, in that tiny patch of the sky, there are thousands of galaxies, these fuzzy things you see out there. You can count them if you're interested. Over the whole sky, we can see about a trillion galaxies, a million, million galaxies. And some of them, we see forming just a few hundred million years after the explosive birth of the universe, the so-called Big Bang. And one of the interesting aspects of this image is that galaxies started forming and evolving earlier than expected.

• 13:40Speaker 05

  And so, we're working on that interesting puzzle right now. How do stars like our sun form? Well, they form in stellar nurseries, giant clouds of gas and dust, fine little particles that collect up as a result of gravity. And the central densest regions collapse and form these stars. But they're hidden from view when looked at with most telescopes because we can't peer through the dust. The Webb, looking at infrared wavelengths, heat wavelengths, is able to peer inside and see newly formed stars and stars that are still forming. We can also look at discs of gas and dust

• 14:25Speaker 05

  around newly forming stars. This is essentially the mechanism by which our solar system formed about four and a half billion years ago. Debris around the newly formed sun that collected gradually to form bigger and bigger objects, planets. All right? How about the death of stars? This is a snapshot, a preview, of the sun's future in about seven billion years when the outer atmosphere will start getting gently ejected off, leaving a hot, dying star in the middle that makes the gases glow. The star... The fainture of the two that you see there looks faint because there's dust,

• 15:09Speaker 05

  fine little particles that have formed in the ejected gases. These particles consist of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium that were cooked up in the nuclear furnace of the star during its life. These dust particles can later form new stars, planets, and ultimately life. And to get most of the heavy elements, you need the explosions, the cataclysmic disruptions of certain varieties of stars at the end of their lives. Our sun won't explode in this Titanic way, but some do. And here's one that we started studying about 40 years ago. Analysis of the Webb data shows the kinds of elements of which we are made,

• 15:54Speaker 05

  the calcium in our bones, the phosphorus in our DNA, the oxygen that we breathe, the carbon in our cells, the iron in our red blood cells. These elements were created through nuclear reactions in stars billions of years ago, and humans understand that. Is that cosmic or what? As Carl Sagan used to say, "We are made of star stuff." We can move closer to home and image planets in our own solar system, like Neptune here with its moons and rings. And those bright spots on Neptune are a storm which has been developing. And so you can monitor planetary storms

• 16:34Speaker 05

  and come to a better understanding of climate on Earth. We can move to other stars and search for planets orbiting them, so-called exoplanets. It turns out that nearly every star you see in the sky has a collection of planets around it. They're just really hard to see. Here, to see it, the Webb telescope had to place a disk in front of the star where that little five-pointed thing is in the circle, revealing the exoplanet orbiting it. And the hope is that through studies of the atmospheres of these exoplanets, we will find places where life could have arisen

• 17:18Speaker 05

  and maybe even did arise independently of life on Earth. And we don't have such evidence yet. But once we do have compelling evidence for life elsewhere, it'll be one of the most monumental discoveries in all of humanity. Well, you could say, "This is all very interesting, intellectually titillating." But so what? Why spend national funds on pure research of this type? Not applied research that will lead, in the short term, to new gizmos, pacemakers, and iPhones, and things like that? Why should we pursue this kind of research with taxpayer money? It's a legitimate question, okay?

• 18:02Speaker 05

  So let me give you three reasons. The first is that of all known animals, humans are the only ones with the curiosity to ask complex questions, abstract questions, questions about their very origins. And we have the intellectual capability to pursue answers to those questions, and the hands with the opposable thumb with which to build machines like telescopes and particle colliders to help us answer those questions. If some subset of humanity were to not do this, we would be selling ourselves short as Homo sapiens. Now, you don't need many of us, but it's good to have some.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  The second point is that astronomy is a gateway science. It's like the bug that bites kids and gets them interested in STEM fields. Most won't go on to become astrophysicists, okay? Again, that's an okay thing. But they'll be more motivated to pursue fields of science and technology, which will lead them to careers that are more immediately beneficial to society: computer science, engineering, medical physics, applied physics, those sorts of things. I see this all the time as a board member of the Shabao Space and Science Center, and also at Lick Observatory in the hills east of Silicon Valley, where I conduct much of my research and public outreach.

• 19:29Speaker 05

  Kids love this stuff. Just like I and some of my friends were inspired in our youth by the American lunar landings. What an amazing accomplishment that was! We are on the moon! Wouldn't it be great to contribute to this grand enterprise? And go boldly where no one has gone before? It's just an incredible... It was an incredibly inspiring moment, and...

• 20:00Speaker 05

  The Hubble and Webb and things like that are providing that moment for kids now. And then there are the technological spinoffs and unanticipated applications, like quantum physics for the latter.

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Over a century ago, there were two outstanding questions in physics. What is the nature of light and why are atoms stable? And you could say, well, as long as we know how to make light bulbs, and as long as the floor doesn't collapse underneath me, who cares what light really is and why atoms are stable? You don't need to know, do you? Well, physicists over a century ago like Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Planck, they cared about the workings of nature, simply to satisfy their curiosity. No practical applications immediately in sight. Fast forward a century, you couldn't imagine today's world without an understanding of quantum physics.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  One example, lasers, a thirteen and a half billion dollar industry in the US with innumerable applications. Computer chips, Moore's law, with three and even two nanometers per pixel now, we have the equivalent of half a billion transistors on the head of a pin. That is amazing. That's quantum mechanics, folks, quantum electronics. And then specifically from something like the web, lots of spinoffs, infrared detectors, similar ones are now used in medical imaging, night vision systems and environmental monitoring, cryogenic engineering, you have to cool down the telescope. This led to advances in cooling systems now used in quantum computing,

• 21:43Speaker 05

  superconducting electronics, medical imaging and so on. And as just one other example in many, precision optics and materials. Segmented, gold-coated mirrors and deployment mechanisms for the web led to innovations in robotics, metrology and high-precision manufacturing. So those are just some of the spinoffs from the web itself. So I hope I've convinced you that spending some small amount of money on research of this type is exciting, is important, extends our grand vision as pioneers of the universe,

• 22:20Speaker 05

  exploring our origins. And to give you just a sense of scale, over 10 years, the $10 billion cost of the web was one $6 hamburger per US taxpayer per year. That's what you contributed to the web. Thank you very much. I hope that you feel it was worth it, okay, to give up this one hamburger. Now, listen, if you're interested in this sort of stuff, I give much longer talks with more details to corporate groups and others. Just contact me if you're interested. Thank you so, so much for being here.

• 23:09Speaker 07

  Thanks, Alex.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  All right.

• 23:10Speaker 07

  Good to see you. Grab a seat.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  So Alex, you are one of the world's greatest scientists and science communicators. So David and I have prepared a set of rapid-fire questions for you.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  I'll give rapid-fire answers.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Based on what our audience might have seen in headlines, or might be understanding and want to know more about, about not just James Webb, but generally.

• 23:31Speaker 05

  Yes, I just gave one example of Webb.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  The world of astrophysics.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  With the limited time, yep.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So one of the places I want to start is searching for life on exoplanets.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  I think many people might understand that James Webb is doing that, but might not fully understand how and what the implications might be. So as a way to understand this, if we were looking at Earth from 100 light-years away.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  What would we see?

• 23:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  And how would we understand that as life?

• 23:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So what you want to find is some sort of chemical disequilibrium. Now, that sounds fancy, but what do I mean? In the case of the atmosphere of Earth, the simultaneous presence of oxygen and methane is very curious, because methane oxidizes, that is, it reacts with oxygen very quickly. And so you Wouldn't expect any methane in the atmosphere unless there was some more or less continuous source of that methane. And although methane can be produced through chemical means, having nothing to do with biology, it's also produced by biology. You know, Carl Sagan called it bovine flatulence, right? So it's the decay of biological organisms.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  And so if we were to find that in another exoplanet atmosphere, that wouldn't be absolutely definitive, but it would be sort of a flashpoint. Wow, we better study that planet more because that's one that could have life.

• 24:53David Friedberg?

  And we're seeing that.

• 24:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're beginning to see that. We've not seen methane and oxygen in any other planetary atmosphere yet, but certainly there are interesting signs of elements that are reported by the Webb through these kinds of atmospheric studies.

• 25:10David Friedberg?

  One of the other big discoveries with the Webb was these early massive galaxies.

• 25:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mentioned the early massive galaxies, yeah.

• 25:17David Friedberg?

  And there was a paper that followed.

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:19David Friedberg?

  You and I talked about this, and there's been a lot of social media and nerdy YouTube videos.

• 25:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:25David Friedberg?

  About this paper and the theory that these early massive galaxies may actually disprove the Big Bang theory by saying these early massive galaxies are responsible or account for what we see as what's called the cosmic microwave background radiation, which may mean that what we assumed was coming from the early universe from the Big Bang may actually come from these galaxies. And it's like, do we have it all wrong?

• 25:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:51David Friedberg?

  We may. And these papers are getting a lot of attention. Is the Big Bang theory disproven now?

• 25:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:56David Friedberg?

  With this discovery?

• 25:57Speaker 05

  The Big Bang theory is on very solid ground. There are many details we don't understand. The basic tenets, however, of the theory are just threefold. The universe long ago was hot, it was dense, and it was expanding. Nothing in those studies. contradicts any of that. As I mentioned, the early formation of galaxies is an interesting puzzle. It means that our understanding of how galaxies formed and evolved is still incomplete. But that's part of the fun of doing science. There's new things, you know. The cosmic microwave background radiation is the afterglow of the Big Bang. And it turns out it agrees to very high precision with a very single temperature,

• 26:42Speaker 05

  meaning that the universe everywhere was the same temperature, then expanded by the same amount, and we see the same temperature everywhere. There's no way you can do that with galaxies forming at a range of times and distances. They would each contribute light that would not give this so-called black body thermal spectrum. And there are many other details of the microwave background, the spots and stuff that are not at all addressed. So a lot of these theories, you know, as scientists, we can dream up things and we just kind of put them out there to be explored more. But of course, the media likes to highlight the really snazzy sounding things. And so sometimes, often, the very speculative ideas get way too much attention.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  We're exploring them, but they're probably wrong. Yeah. Okay? Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  So I don't need to throw out what I learned in high school physics?

• 27:32Speaker 05

  No, no, the Big Bang is on very solid ground.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  What about the theories coming out? We've been talking a little bit about this, on whether or not we are inside a black hole.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, are we inside a black hole? Yeah. So a black hole is a region of space where matter is compressed so much that nothing, not even light, can escape. And it turns out that in a sense, our universe, if you look at the total amount of matter, dark matter and dark energy and all that stuff, visible matter, in the volume out to which we can see, okay, that has about the right value to make the universe as a whole, W H O L E, wrap around itself resembling a black hole, H O L E.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  That would mean that our universe is finite. We don't actually know whether it's finite or infinite. We actually only know that it's much bigger than what we can see. And mathematically, there is some correspondence between the equations governing a black hole and those governing the universe. But there are some important differences, like a black hole is a physical structure within our four spacetime dimensions, like right here. Whereas applying that to the whole universe is it's a qualitatively different idea. But there are some mathematical correspondences that that are useful and interesting. I personally doubt that we are a giant black hole.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  Some people say it's actually a black hole that was given birth from another universe, and for that, there's really no evidence.

• 29:08David Friedberg?

  But Alex, one of the many things that blows my mind about astrophysics and cosmology, the further out we look, the faster objects are moving away from us.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:19David Friedberg?

  To a point that at a certain distance from us, the objects in whatever direction we look are moving away from us at nearly the speed of light, or even faster. And so that becomes the observational limit of our ability to see or ultimately experience our universe, that there's this boundary that without crossing the speed of light, we will never get to and we will never see what's beyond it.

• 29:45Speaker 05

  Right. That's our observable universe.

• 29:48David Friedberg?

  That feels pretty [bleep] up.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  Well, you know, space can become really big, okay? And in fact, haha, you know, good student, you asked me the right question. You need some help? Ah, thank you very much, my assistant, okay? So I've got these galaxies here. They don't expand, by the way, they're held together by by gravity in the case of real galaxies. But then the hose between them expands, so let's expand it here. Try not to aim at your eyes or David's eyes. That would be very bad, lawsuits and stuff. But anyway, from the perspective of our galaxy here, the more distant ones, you know, with each bit of space expanding, can and do go away faster than the speed of light. Einstein wouldn't wrap me on the knuckles for that. Einstein simply said that no material object or no information can travel through a pre-existing space faster than light.

• 30:36Speaker 05

  But space itself, expanding, especially if it expands exponentially, which we think it did early on in its existence, it grows faster than the speed of light and you get a truly humongous universe, maybe even an infinite universe. And yeah, most of it we can't see, but there are other independent volumes out there where we could be having this conversation right now, or you could not like what I said and punch me in the face, but then I would respond by punching you in the face. In other words, all these possibilities could occur in these parallel observable universes beyond the observable part that we can see. And it's freaky, but this is the kind of stuff we get to think about.

• 31:17David Friedberg?

  And I'll ask you the question I asked you on the phone the other day, which is, there's mathematics that shows that the geometry may be inverses inside of a black hole, or some things are reversed, or inverse, what's the right term?

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 31:30David Friedberg?

  Therefore, is the expanding universe that we see our version of being inside of a black hole, which is effectively an accelerating contraction towards the singularity?

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, so what David is referring to is that if you look at the mathematics of a black hole, from our perspective, what we call space and time outside reverse their meaning. Time becomes space and space becomes time in terms of directionality. So for example, if you're in a black hole, there's no way you can avoid the so-called singularity where you get squished into nothing, because it's in your future no matter what you do. Now, applying that as you want it to do to the whole universe, I don't think that the correspondence is such that the expansion that we see is the reversal effect of this

• 32:21Speaker 05

  going toward the singularity because, well, because of some technical issues. Again, If you look at the mathematics, there are some interesting correspondences, but they shouldn't be taken too literally in most cases. Okay.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  So the question I would be wondering if I were in the audience listening to, we have a expanding universe, it is potentially infinite, my question would be, so where is everybody?

• 32:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, yeah, where are they all?

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  The Fermi paradox.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Is the great filter in front of us, is the question.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I actually think the great filter is in front of us, that's an idea where civilizations such as ours rarely get past this point where they can achieve interstellar travel easily and stuff. Something happens, either intentionally or unintentionally or through neglect, they get destroyed, alright? And I actually think that, first, life at our level is very rare, I'm not saying we're alone, okay, but very rare, and the second punch of the one-two punch is that there's almost always a great filter, and so rarely do civilizations reach interstellar capability to the extent where they colonize a galaxy.

• 33:34Speaker 05

  If it had happened even once in our Milky Way, we would easily see the aliens here, not just the sketchy UFO evidence, okay, that's been presented, doesn't reach the bar of credibility in science, by the way. But we would be the aliens more likely, right? Because they would already have colonized Earth and we would have been the aliens, so I think they're rare.

• 33:55David Friedberg?

  Would it make sense to maybe not travel and just transmit information back and forth and maybe we just don't know how to see or understand the information that's being sent our way and we don't know how to transmit it?

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, certainly communication techniques could be different, so I'm not saying we know it all, and, you know, there could even be this dark forest where they're intentionally, you know, not transmitting toward us because they don't want us to know about them, they're sort of maybe even pursuing us and stuff, gonna kill us before we kill them. These are all possibilities, you know, but I think the most likely, in my view, is that what I said, and also, the vastness of space means that we wouldn't be able to communicate or hear from...

• 34:39Speaker 05

  Aliens that were much farther away than, you know, a hundred or a thousand light years. And the galaxy is a hundred thousand light years in space in extent. So unless they colonize the galaxy, if they're very rare, we won't see them because the signals are too faint and they haven't had a chance to get here, you know.

• 34:59David Friedberg?

  I want to give you an opportunity to share with us what's going on with respect to hiring graduate students and funding research right now.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:08David Friedberg?

  I've heard from lots of scientists that NIH grants have been cut.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:13David Friedberg?

  And it's affecting their ability to hire and build out their labs and do some of their research. Are you seeing the same today? And maybe just give us a sense of on the ground what's going on with respect to what you're seeing in funding.

• 35:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. The issue is a very serious one. In a sense, you know, science is under attack to some degree, intentionally or unintentionally, maybe part of a broader thing. But it's having an enormous effect. The number of National Science Foundation graduate fellowships, for example, was cut in half this year. NASA funding has been cut in half. And I'm all for going to the moon and Mars, but if all of the remaining NASA funding goes toward those ideals, then nothing will be left for professors and their students and postdocs to analyze the great data that the Hubble and Webb and all that are giving us. And various space telescopes are now in jeopardy of not being launched, the Nancy Grace Roman

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Telescope and stuff. So graduate schools are now reluctant to accept new graduate students and to hire new postdocs because frankly, we don't have the funding with which to do so. And I'm personally very worried about my own research group. I'm not taking on any new researchers until I personally can fund my existing group. That's got to be my primary concern right now. And I don't know how I'm going to do it, you know. And others throughout my field, and even in a sense you could say more immediately useful fields like NIH, you said, right? Cutting the funding there. These are researchers who are doing things that are going to be good for humanity soon, not these unanticipated spinoffs.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  But the kind of stuff I do should be supported as well.

• 37:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Well, you know, I was a physics and math major. I don't know if I would have gotten the math degree, I'll be honest. But I took Alex's Astro 10 class because I was partying a little bit too much that year, and I'm like, I gotta take an easier class. I heard it's a great class. 800 people in the class, the most inspirational class I've ever taken, and every student that's taken it says the same. And Alex became nine times, 10 times, I don't know how many times, the favorite professor at Cal Berkeley. And I think you can all understand why. His contributions to students and to science are profound. So please join me in thanking Alex Volpeco. Thank you. Thanks so much.

• 37:37Speaker 08

  Regulators are now approving drone deliveries.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  There is one company that is huge in this space. They're called ZipLine. Keller Renato Clifton is the co-founder and CEO of ZipLine, the world's largest autonomous logistics and delivery system. We should get back to like building real things in the real world. What they've been showing is way more advanced than anything from Google or Amazon.

• 37:58Speaker 09

  What nerds are working on during the weekends in their garages today are what will be the giant companies of five or 10 years from now.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome ZipLine's Keller Renato Clifton.

• 38:22Speaker 09

  Well, good morning, everybody. So David was talking a little bit about techno pessimism. I hadn't heard that before, but by a quick show of hands, how many of you have read an article in the last year about robots trying to kill you or take your jobs? Okay, so basically, everybody, the cool thing is today we get to talk about robots that save lives. And I thought it'd be cool to just take you back to 2016. In 2016, you know, we had been, our backgrounds were in automation and robotics. We had this simple naive idea that it should be, it should be possible to build a new kind of logistics system, a fully automated logistics system that would be 10 times as fast, half the cost, and zero emission. The first contract we signed was with the government of Rwanda to deliver blood transfusions,

• 39:07Speaker 09

  primarily to moms with postpartum hemorrhage, at about 21 different hospitals. Across the country. And so I thought it'd be cool to just show you this video. It's actually a video I took on my iPhone, so nothing fancy. But you can actually see what we call ZIPS. This is the very first version of this autonomous aircraft that we had built. We were delivering using a really simple paper parachute to a hospital called Kibai, which is in a rural part of Rwanda. Here, we were delivering, I think, three units of packed red blood cells and platelets. We could deliver to a couple parking spaces in a way that was about 10 times as fast. And you can see the women in this video are like, "What the hell did we just see?" Which is funny, you know, I was taking the video, I kind of looked up at them, and they were looking at me very suspiciously. You know, we often try to describe, there's a funny thing about what we do.

• 39:51Speaker 09

  We try to describe what we're going to do to either to doctors or to nurses or hospital administrators. And they look at us like, you know, we're completely crazy or on drugs.

• 40:04Speaker 09

  And so we have to do the first delivery. Once we do that first delivery, a doctor looked at me and said, "It's as though Jesus Christ is delivering blood from the sky." But what's hilarious is that, you know, you get about seven days. The way we work as humans, you get about seven days of science fiction amazement, and then people are completely bored of it. Like, it's totally normal. In fact, I had one nurse look at her watch and then look at me and say, "It's 30 seconds late."

• 40:30Speaker 09

  Which made me realize, you know, humans go from science fiction to entitlement in approximately seven days, which is great. That's what technology should do, you know?

• 40:41Speaker 09

  It should fade into the background. Like, let doctors and nurses do the work that they were trained to do, which is save lives, and logistics should just work. That was always the vision. So, quick tour of the distribution center. Zipline builds, designs, manufactures, and operates these vehicles completely from scratch. This is one of our flight operators launching a ZIP. It accelerates from zero to about 100 kilometers an hour in a third of a second. From the moment the vehicle leaves the end of that launcher, it's fully autonomous. It will fly out up to 100 miles to make a delivery to a hospital and then fly all the way back. Why do we have to have a launcher like that? Because we don't have runways, obviously, and the vehicle has no landing gear. So, taking off is one thing. Landing is even a little bit more complicated. We were inspired by aircraft carriers.

• 41:26Speaker 09

  This vehicle, as it's flying back...

• 41:30Speaker 09

  We're aiming for a 1-centimeter tailhook on the back of that aircraft. It's really only possible with autonomy and robotic solutions that can be far, far more precise in controlling these kinds of vehicles than humans. The system at this point can recover an aircraft about every 60 seconds. And we operate about 20 distribution centers across eight countries. So, people always think like, "Oh, drone delivery, it's not really real." So I thought it'd be cool to actually just show you a time lapse. This is one of our distribution centers. You can see it's 1:00 a.m. The system operates 24/7/365. They never take a day off. 3:00 a.m. here, you're seeing fulfillment operations where we're packing and loading packages, getting them packed into vehicles. Here you can see the launcher and the recovery system with like sunrise just happening in

• 42:14Speaker 09

  the back at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. This is a second distribution center, another fulfillment center. And so this is all, basically both fulfillment centers across the country of Rwanda, which is the smallest country we operate in today. But the cool thing is you can see that at 8:00 a.m., every single one of these little triangles on the map, this is what we call the "sky map," is an autonomous aircraft going out making a lifesaving delivery of blood, vaccines, transfusions, infusions, cancer products, almost the entire public healthcare supply chain. And by 10:00 a.m., there are 50 autonomous aircraft out making deliveries simultaneously to all of the 500 hospitals and health facilities that we serve in the country. So, I actually used to show this video to investors and we would get to the end of the presentation and they would say, "Oh, I think my favorite slide was that simulation

• 42:58Speaker 09

  of what this could look like one day." And I got so pissed off because it's like, "It's not a simulation, that happened yesterday." So we put the CCTV on the right-hand side so you can actually see the teams doing this work, so people understand this is not like far future. This is happening day in and day out in a way that is saving lives.

• 43:16Speaker 09

  And you know, on that point, it's not just about making logistics more efficient. It turns out that if you can deploy AI and robotics infrastructure for healthcare, you can save a lot of lives. The system has been able to reduce maternal mortality as measured by the University of Pennsylvania by 51% across the hospitals we serve.

• 43:38Speaker 09

  Had you told us when we were starting the company that we were going to reduce maternal mortality by 5%, we would have said, "Hell, yes, we have to do this." A new study came out a couple of months ago, actually showing a 60% reduction in under-5 childhood mortality due to malnutrition, one of the new products we've begun delivering in the last few years. And when this was studied by a major global health institution for the cost-effectiveness of delivering vaccine, it was found to be the most cost-effective way of delivering vaccines to zero-dose children ever studied. So it turns out that, you know, yeah, it's exciting.

• 44:14Speaker 09

  People think about robotics as being expensive, or fancy, or maybe solving problems for rich people. It's not just that. We can solve some of the most important problems that we face as a world. We can make this technology work for everybody.

• 44:29Speaker 09

  So, you know, stepping back, ZipLine's now surpassed 115 million commercial autonomous miles. We serve about 5,000 hospitals and health facilities globally, over 1.6 million deliveries like that one you saw in that video, and zero safety incidents, which is important, not just saving lives, but safe for the communities that it serves. It's actually become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth of any kind, ground or air, based on those flight miles. So I now thought it'd be kind of cool to just show you a bit about how this technology's evolving, how what we started doing in 2016 is evolving into the next-generation technology and launching in the US.

• 45:59Speaker 06

  Wow, that's so cool!

• 46:00Speaker 10

  This is really cool.

• 46:02Speaker 06

  We love Zipline!

• 46:10Speaker 09

  So, if you're like, "Okay, that's cool, but when can I use it?" The news is, the good news is very soon. So just to give you a sense, as we started doing this, focusing on healthcare, focusing on operating outside the US, a lot of the biggest brands in the US started to get pretty excited and saying, "Hey, we want teleportation from our hospitals, or our primary care facilities, or our stores, or our restaurants, directly to customer homes." And so not only did a lot of the biggest healthcare systems in the US sign up to start using Zipline, but we've also seen these additional major verticals in food and retail. We've been scaling incredibly fast with Walmart over the last six to nine months. We just launched Chipotle, along with a lot of other amazing food partners, over the last month. I'll show you a little bit more about what that looks like. One of the kind of amazing things, over the last three months, the service has been

• 46:55Speaker 09

  growing about between 20 and 30% week over week. So it's more than doubling flight volume every month. This is a little bit startling. We only launched Dallas, which is kind of the major metro we're scaling in in the US right now, in April. And by July, so just to give a sense of the customer behavior that we're seeing, customers are ordering three to four times per week from Zipline. The service has a net promoter score of 94. And I was talking to a grandma a couple of weeks ago. She's 78 years old. She's ordered from Zipline 350 times in the last nine months. We were doing a little customer research, and she's showing me on her phone, like, clicking around, ordering everything she needs for the day. She's double-click, Face ID, Apple Pay. She's like, "It's on its way. It'll be here in eight minutes." This woman's living in the future.

• 47:39Speaker 09

  But by July, we were actually sufficiently nervous about the capacity of the system. We ended up turning off all the demand generation marketing, because we were trying to slow down growth. So you can see the impact that turning off our marketing had on the growth of the system, which is approximately zero. And we were trying to figure out why that is. And basically, it just turns out that having a robot deliver whatever you need to your home in less than 10 minutes is really good content for TikTok.

• 48:10Speaker 09

  A lot of our different customers have been making tons and tons of TikToks of receiving these deliveries. And a lot of these videos have gone viral, like they get seen eight, 10, 12 million times. We're delivering to universities, to offices, to hotels, to townhomes, to apartment buildings. So every time one person is getting a delivery, there are 10 other people who are like, what the hell is that? And how do I get it? Even cooler than that, as we're launching new sites in Dallas, the first site that we launched in April, it took us about two and a half months to get to 100 deliveries a day, which was kind of like the break even point for the site. The site that we launched two weeks ago hit 100 deliveries a day in five days. So we're seeing the sites themselves ramp way, way faster.

• 48:53Speaker 09

  And a big part of that is that it's getting simpler and simpler for us to build this infrastructure. So just for you to kind of get a sense for what the infrastructure looks like, we integrate right into the side of hospitals, primary care facilities, stores, restaurants. You basically can just think of it like a magical portal. ZipLine is just building a magical portal in the wall. And now any healthcare worker, or Walmart employee, or Chipotle employee can just pass whatever they want through this magical portal, and it's teleported directly to the home that it needs to go to. We do this for a lot of different kinds of buildings. We also have what we call zipping points. You can see there on the bottom right. Zipping points can be installed in one hour. So if you're a business and you want access to ZipLine, we show up, boop, drop a zipping point, and now that business is enabled with ZipLine, it can deliver in this way. Just to give you a quick sense for what this infrastructure looks like, we're now building these sites.

• 49:37Speaker 09

  We're launching about one a week. By Q1 of next year, we expect to accelerate to about one a day. But this infrastructure is relatively quick to build and enables up to 500 deliveries a day from a site like this. Quickly, one of the cool things is that customers are all just using the ZipLine app to order these things. And when they are ordering for the first time, you type in your address. We actually show you a satellite image of your home, and you tell us exactly where you want us to deliver. You can pick the dinner plate level area, whether it's in your backyard, side of your house, your parking lot, apartment buildings, we can even deliver onto roofs. You can scroll and see all the different brands that are available on the app, order whatever you want. And the average time of delivery right now is 18 minutes. A lot of deliveries happen in under 10 minutes. In fact, we just launched Chipotle two weeks ago.

• 50:21Speaker 09

  The first delivery happened in under seven minutes, from like the customer ordering to it being delivered to their house. So I think it's going to redefine what is possible in terms of instant delivery in people's minds. And just to hint at something cool that we can't announce just yet.

• 50:41Speaker 09

  We'll be adding a lot of people's favorite brands to the service very soon, over the coming weeks. And you know, I joked before, just last thought, I joked before about like this sense of like science fiction to entitlement in about seven days. We do enjoy that science, that period of sci-fi amazement. And you know, just to, you know, the similar version of like Jesus Christ delivering blood from the sky, it's pretty cute to see families and kids actually, you know, kids are telling their parents, like, what do they want to do for the weekend? They want to go and watch the zip line, you know, the zip line aircraft. And so we do take these pictures just when we're at the sites of people like hanging out on the hoods of their cars, or you know, a mom's with her kids sitting in her lap, or the kids like looking through the, you know, the window of the car, just watching the system operate.

• 51:26Speaker 09

  And that brings me to my last kind of provocative point, which is that, you know, our parents had this incredibly inspiring mission, right? The United States was in this geopolitical race to get to the moon, this space race. And it united all the best engineers, it inspired us, it made us dream with optimism about what the future could represent. And we did something impossible, we put men on the moon in nine years. Obviously, the US is in a similar technological race today, it's a race for AI and robotics. But what does winning that race for the US really mean? So I want to leave you all with just a slightly provocative answer to that question. But first, who knows what city this is? Shout it out if you know. Yes, okay, good, there are nerds in the audience. This is Wakanda.

• 52:11Speaker 09

  So Wakanda is a fictional radically advanced African city hiding in plain sight from one of my favorite movies, Black Panther. And the provocative idea is that we can go build this in the real world. Like, I think that winning the AI and robotics race for America isn't just us building like exquisite AI technology to serve, you know, the richest people on the coasts of this country, it's about extending the reach and influence of the United States, it's using AI and robotics infrastructure to lift the rest of the world up with us. Like, these countries want to be leapfrogging into the future, they want access. Access to the best technology that America has to offer.

• 52:52Speaker 09

  And if we go and extend, we want these countries building on US AI and robotics infrastructure, not that of our geopolitical adversaries. And if we can do that, we can make the world a safer place, a wealthier place. We could potentially eliminate maternal mortality and childhood mortality in a lot of these countries. And in doing so, we can secure US technological and manufacturing leadership for the decade to come. So, thank you all.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  So, we want to do a little bit of time travel with you today. We want to go back to your origin story and then we want to play it out into the Wakanda future that you're imagining.

• 53:38Speaker 09

  Cool.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  So, taking it back to where you began, why start in Rwanda?

• 53:43Speaker 09

  Yeah, you know, it's funny. Everybody makes this assumption that like the most advanced technology in the world is going to start in the United States and then trickle its way out, maybe to, you know, and it'll start in the rich cities, right? And then maybe it'll trickle its way to rural areas in the US. And then after years, it might trickle its way out to like developing countries. I think that paradigm is largely wrong and it has a lot to do with, you know, which countries, at least over the last decade, it had a lot to do with which countries are hungry and entrepreneurial and willing to move super fast to build new kinds of regulatory paradigms. And Rwanda is this, you know, it's kind of like the Singapore of Africa. It moves incredibly fast. It's very entrepreneurial. It's kind of a startup country. And it was perfect for us to work with them. They wanted to take this risk on us.

• 54:27Speaker 09

  When we were 20 people, we were totally naive nerds who had no idea what we were talking about. In fact, I remember this conversation with the Minister of Health in 2016 where I was saying, "Oh, you know, we're going to use autonomous aircraft to deliver all the different medical products in your health system." And she looked at me and was like, "Keller, shut up. Just do blood." And she explained to me that 50% of blood transfusions are going to moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. 30% are going to her kids with severe anemia due to malaria. And she was like, "Just show us that you can do that." And so it's interesting, like, that was the best advice the company ever received. And, you know, we've really just been kind of like following their lead for the last eight years as we've developed the technology from there.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  The reduction in maternal mortality, when you showed that stat, I got goosebumps. It's just incredible.

• 55:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, and by the way, you know, I think a lot of times people in the US think like, "Oh, you know, those poor Africans." Like, it's unbelievable that they have those kinds of, you know, healthcare problems. We have this exact same problems in the US. You know, people in the audience may not know, but the US has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any developed country. And, you know, the rates for African-American women are three times that, you know, the average. I mean, we have a lot of challenges with rural healthcare in this country. So I think honestly, people probably think that these countries are more different than they are. Almost every health system is dealing with the same kinds of challenges.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  So you come to the United States, you launch it here. Tell me about the first period of launching in the US.

• 55:55Speaker 09

  Yeah, we originally launched kind of the first version of the technology, the fixed-wing technology that you could see in 2020. Honestly, it's shocking. I mean, we were delivering like birthday cakes and rotisserie chickens via just those like paper parachutes. It's pretty unfancy, but customers loved it. And this is kind of, we were rapidly iterating to build something that we thought would be like the future version of logistics, which is ultimately Platform 2. It's the video I showed today. And we only launched Platform 2 on January 15th. And then we really only started scaling it in April or May. So this is all happening in real time. A lot of those videos we showed were just from yesterday or the day before.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  What does it felt like?

• 56:36Speaker 09

  You know, it's stressful. Hardware is incredibly hard. We have been scaling a hardware product while like the tariff craziness has been going on through, you know, March and April and May.

• 56:49Speaker 09

  You know, building a global supply chain, I mean, you know, ZipLine, just put it into perspective. Like, we designed the flight computer, all of the avionics on the aircraft. We designed the aircraft itself, all the mechanical components, the primary structure. And then from a software perspective, it's... Flight control algorithms, multi-vehicle deconfliction, communications architecture. We build unmanned traffic management system that we provide to the regulators like the FAA. And then we also designed that app that you saw, which is our customer ordering platform. So, you know, all of that. And then you also have to figure out supply chain and maintenance and manufacturing and operations logistics. Like, all of it has to work for the end customer to just have this magical experience of like teleportation. And, you

• 57:34Speaker 09

  know, yeah, there's no part of it that doesn't feel desperate and stressful as you're kind of scaling a system at that level of exponential growth.

• 57:42David Friedberg?

  As you're launching in the US, do you have a sense, Keller, are you going to beat the unit cost to deliver with delivery drivers today? And by how much? Can you give us a sense on, if I want Chipotle, why would I go to the ZipLine ordering system or use Chipotle's app and have ZipLine kind of fulfill for me? What's the cost difference going to be percentage-wise, do you think, over traditional food delivery?

• 58:07Speaker 09

  Yeah. So, I mean, interestingly, people may not realize, you know, instant delivery has grown incredibly fast, like especially through COVID, but even before. There are now five and a half billion instant deliveries being done every year just in the US. And that's not like Amazon or UPS. That's just the instant deliveries. And we're using a 4,000-pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human to deliver something to your home that weighs, on average, four to five pounds. So, you know, if aliens were to land on the planet and look at the way we're solving that problem, they would conclude there's no intelligent life on Earth. Like, this is a bizarre solution. I think, you know, the reality is that we have this new demand, and the demand is vast. People want things delivered quickly, and they want like to have more time with their family rather than

• 58:51Speaker 09

  spending time in traffic or like in a store. But we're using technology that's 100 years old to solve that problem. So I think all you have to realize is that instead of using a 4,000-pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human, you should use a 50-pound vehicle that is autonomous and electric.

• 59:10Speaker 09

  And that's kind of just reasoning from like physics first principles. Like you don't have to be a genius. As soon as you've realized that, I think you know something really fundamental about the future that few people actually understand. And so we think it's very inevitable that, and by the way, if you were to just extend the customer ordering behavior that we see with our customers today, there would be 50 billion instant deliveries happening in the US.

• 59:35David Friedberg?

  Wow.

• 59:36Speaker 09

  So this is kind of a

• 59:37David Friedberg?

  Based on the order rate.

• 59:38Speaker 09

  Provocative idea, yeah. Basically, if you make the deliveries less expensive, 10 times as fast, and just a way better experience.

• 59:43David Friedberg?

  They order more.

• 59:44Speaker 09

  Or a lot more, not that surprising. So I think the reality is actually, you know, these kinds of systems will, yes, definitely be less expensive than using a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle. But I think more importantly, the reason customers are using them so much is that it's just a way better experience. When you're going to have something delivered in seven minutes, or eight minutes, or 12 minutes, you have to plan less.

• 1:00:06David Friedberg?

  It doesn't need to be much cheaper?

• 1:00:07Speaker 09

  I think it will be naturally, but I don't believe it needs to be. I mean, it's the reason that like Waymo right now is more expensive and people prefer Waymo to Uber.

• 1:00:14David Friedberg?

  And what's the weight limit? And then how much of the market does that address?

• 1:00:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, right now, the system is designed to deliver up to eight pounds, and eight pounds gets you like 95% of all packages delivered by Amazon. I think it's like 95% of food delivery orders. So suffice it to say, you're not going to deliver flat screen TVs in this way anytime soon, but the vast majority of stuff actually fits and can be delivered like this.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  So while this is all happening, while zipline is exploding, I think many Americans came to believe that the era of drone delivery had somehow passed, that this wasn't a near future that they were going to experience. Why do you think that misconception happened? And what should all of the people in this audience go out and say to the people who might ask them what they've seen here?

• 1:00:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, it definitely didn't help that the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world went on 60 Minutes in 2013 and promised everybody drone delivery in the next like, you know, one or two years, right? Maybe some of you guys saw that interview.

• 1:01:09David Friedberg?

  Who was it? I don't even know what that interview was.

• 1:01:11Speaker 09

  Jeff from Amazon, right? Yeah, it was like 2013, he's like, oh, you know, we'll be doing, yeah. So he, I mean, they promised, you know, they announced Amazon Prime Air, and they said by 2015, you know, it'll be serving, you know, everybody in the US. And I think that that, you know, people probably believed it, right? Like, and then I think people were really disappointed when it didn't happen. And Maybe similar trend that you see happened with autonomous vehicles, autonomous cars, which is that like 2015, so many companies were raising billions of dollars and it was like right around the corner and people could see it working for the first time. But obviously, it's a whole decade later today that we actually now see Waymo and RoboTaxi scaling commercially. The reality is with these kinds of technologies, I think you always have like the bubble and

• 1:01:54Speaker 09

  the max hype and then you have the trough of disillusionment and then you have the eight to nine years of the actual hard work of making the technology work. And you know, ZipLine launched in 2016. We've spent 10 years driving the unit economics down, driving the reliability up. You kind of saw that statistic of 115 million miles with zero safety incidents. That's hard. It requires time to get manufacturing, technology, operations, maintenance, right in a way to achieve that. But the good news is that I think with both autonomous cars and with this technology, we're now, we've now done the 10 years of hard work and we now see it scaling in a way that like just fundamentally changing the way people live their lives.

• 1:02:36Speaker 09

  I mean, when I talk to that grandma or you talk to a mom who's using ZipLine every single day, it's like they're getting hours back a week to spend with their family or their loved ones so they don't have to spend stressing out about trying to like get kids buckled into a car and like drive to a car. And obviously, that's like, that's the retail use cases, let alone the life-saving implications this has for healthcare logistics.

• 1:02:57David Friedberg?

  What are the competitive barriers? Google's had, I think in X, a drone delivery, I don't know what the status is. Amazon obviously has invested. By the way, I thought it was like either Elon or someone from Google or Jeff. And then there've been a Meituan, I think, out of China, famously shown videos of delivering food to the Great Wall with a drone. How much advantage is ZipLine versus others and how quickly can they catch up? Like, help us understand how hard the tech is. What did you have to engineer to get the unit costs advantages that you're having today and how persistent will that be?

• 1:03:33Speaker 09

  I mean... You know, I think there are a lot of people out there. You know, we saw over the last 10 years so many companies or teams, they would like buy a quadcopter off the shelf and duct tape a Snickers bar to the bottom of it and then manually fly it a mile and they get like, you know, TechCrunch to write an article about it and be like, "It's a Kitty Hawk moment, drone delivery is here." And, you know, we've seen that like 50 times at this point. I think people have kind of know that it's not real.

• 1:03:58Speaker 09

  You know, the trick is designing a system that can operate 24/7, 365, in a way that people can depend on with their lives, that works in all weather, that can be reliable and safe, and they can achieve hundreds of millions or billions of autonomous miles. That's hard to do. That takes time. And, you know, and ZipLine has now spent a decade scaling these systems. And I think the realization is there's no like off-the-shelf hardware you can buy for this. Because there's, you can, you can look at like these cheap plastic quadcopters that DJI makes, you refer to China, or you can look at like Predator drones, but something in the middle which is more automotive grade, something that can do, for example, a million miles, just a single aircraft.

• 1:04:41Speaker 09

  That's hard and it kind of has to be built from scratch. So, we honestly don't worry that. I mean, our competition is motorcycles and cars. Like, if we are better than motorcycles and cars, I mean, I'm very confident someone is going to build a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company in automated logistics over the next five to 10 years. Like, it's so obvious that this needs to exist. The demand is like unbelievably vast. It's going to be one of the biggest markets on earth. And, you know, I think a lot of people are excited about a lot of different kinds of robotics, but this is the area of robotics that, in my opinion, is going to scale the fastest and is like most ready for prime time.

• 1:05:13David Friedberg?

  You want to talk about Wakanda?

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  I do. So, just to jump ahead.

• 1:05:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  If we were interviewing you here in 10 years, you're back. What do you hope you're saying about the impact of drone delivery, both on the golden billion, but also for everybody else? And to your point earlier, the relationship between those two things and those two groups might be closer than we think.

• 1:05:33Speaker 09

  Yeah, the thing that always really inspired us, you talk about logistics. I mean, logistics is boring, right? I mean, who wants to work in logistics? It's incredibly boring.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  Not today.

• 1:05:42Speaker 09

  You just do the same thing, day after day, just like doing the same deliveries. But that's also what makes it great for robotics and automation. And I think the key thing to realize is the golden billion that Cleo is talking about, the richest billion people on Earth.

• 1:05:55Speaker 09

  My assumption is we're all in the golden billion. Our access to logistics is really good. There are 7 billion people on Earth who are not in the golden billion, whose access either sucks or is non-existent. And as a result of that, 5.5 million kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products. This is not like, "Oh, we need some advanced therapy." It's like, no, no, we couldn't get them the basic, almost free drug that they needed to save their life. You know, we've been making excuses for decades about why we can't solve these problems. And so I think logistics is boring, but it's kind of only boring when it's like working well for you. And I think that the thing that gets me so excited about, why does AI and robotics matter?

• 1:06:40Speaker 09

  Why should we be applying it to this industry? It's not just like make people's lives better, give them new kinds of economic opportunity, save them time, let them spend more time with their kids. It's also because like reducing the cost of logistics, automating it, expanding it, improving the performance of these kinds of systems is going to extend access to logistics to 7 billion people on Earth who don't have it today. And that's going to save lives, increase economic opportunity. I think it's going to make the world a more stable place. And so that's really our vision. It's like, it's time to stop making excuses. We should eliminate these problems. And the thing that gets me excited about, I mean, I know we're both kind of like solar punk techno optimists, right?

• 1:07:20Speaker 09

  Like, that's the future that I want to build, that I want to tell my kids about. And if we can play a small part of it, that would be a good life.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  That's the future I think we all want to be part of.

• 1:07:30David Friedberg?

  Amazing. Guys, please join me in thanking Keller and Cleo. Did you guys love Science Corner?