00:00:00
Good morning. Where are my besties? They are not here.
00:00:07
What does that mean? Science corner.
00:00:14
I have a guest host because my besties abandoned me for Science Corner. Let's see who it is.
00:00:20
Leo, you're one of the fastest growing channels on YouTube right now. Former box journalist that left to go independent on YouTube. She went from 0
00:00:27
to 5 million subscribers in just 3 years. I don't know many other YouTube creators who are going to go to those lengths.
00:00:34
There's a lot of very lucrative fear-mongering going on. That's why I
00:00:39
want to bring a more optimistic point of view into the conversation to help people imagine what could go right.
00:00:45
That's why I went independent. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome
00:00:51
Cleo Abram. [Music]
00:01:01
Hi. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Grab a seat. You were here all day yesterday.
00:01:06
Yeah. How was it? Having a great time. This is my first All-In Summit. I'm so excited to be here. Welcome. So, Cleo, you have 6 million
00:01:14
subscribers on your YouTube channel. We have under a million. Thank you for having us on your show.
00:01:21
Welcome. How did you do it? What happened? So,
00:01:26
you you were at Vox before. I was. Yeah. And you were an independent director. I mean, you were doing other projects.
00:01:32
Tell us how you set up this channel on YouTube, why you did it, and how did it get so big so fast?
00:01:37
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
00:01:44
now. I was at a media company um and making what we call explainer journalism. So taking complicated issues
00:01:50
and making them understandable both to me and to millions of people. And I went
00:01:56
independent to start this show because there was something that I felt like I was missing when I looked out into my
00:02:01
media diet. I really wanted to find a show that was optimistic that helped me see where were the people that are
00:02:08
working on hard problems, making them better every day in a way that I could understand and I could participate in.
00:02:15
So, I left the media company where I was, started this show, and had the opportunity because of what YouTube
00:02:21
offers to reach a global audience very quickly and find out, oh my god, I'm not alone. Oh my god, there are millions of
00:02:27
people that also want this kind of show. And YouTube made that bet that if you allow anyone to create their best
00:02:35
creative work, the most the widest audience will watch. And so YouTube has become in the last 18 months, I think,
00:02:41
the most watched streaming platform on televisions. So, we're in the middle of this big moment of change in media and
00:02:48
how media gets made. Um, and I I don't think most people know that it's really
00:02:53
happening. They know that YouTube shows can get big, but they don't really understand this shift that we're in. And by the way, the shift is also very
00:02:59
exciting for streamers because they're looking at this and they're saying, you know, a Netflix of the world, I used to
00:03:05
make a Netflix show as well, can look at this incredible new wealth of creativity
00:03:11
and IP and say, "Oh my god, who do we want to work with to give, you know, upfront
00:03:16
capital to make something that's even bigger?" something you and I have talked about because if you're on Netflix today and
00:03:22
we're going to talk with Neil and Ari today, you can if you're an independent
00:03:28
director, you go to Netflix, they're like, "Okay, we'll pay for your production cost plus 10%." And it's like
00:03:33
quite different than what it used to be like when you made friends, you could make the show and then you could eventually make like a VC. Like you could make hundreds of millions of
00:03:39
dollars if it worked out and it became a a massive show, but you're basically capped at Netflix. But YouTube's quite
00:03:45
different. So there seems to be a financial or economic incentive both creative freedom but also this economic
00:03:51
incentive to go to YouTube. But then how does financing happen? Like where can creators drive the engine to fund and
00:03:57
create new content? Well, most YouTubers have adfunded businesses. And so what that requires is
00:04:04
you go out on your own as we did with huge if true. We went independent. We started this show. the show grows and
00:04:10
then you are able to get sponsors who in turn fund better and better work and it
00:04:16
continues to scale. Um, the traditional model of paying upfront for a show that
00:04:21
then the streamer owns offers something very different and I think we're in an interesting flexible moment of change
00:04:28
right now where a a Netflix might say, "Wow, we see a really exciting show on
00:04:34
YouTube. We want to allow that creator to make something that is a version of that IP that is bigger and we'll invest
00:04:40
in that upfront. And so what I think we're seeing is for the same creator and the same kind of IP, you can have a
00:04:47
really wonderful relationship between the kind of show that you can make when you can reach global audiences
00:04:53
immediately and grow and see how far you can take it with an advertising model. And then at
00:04:59
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
00:05:05
think there's a really interesting way in which these things all work together. And some of the headlines make it seem
00:05:10
as as though this is, you know, an antagonistic moment in media. I think it's really great for everybody. I think
00:05:16
it's a really, really exciting moment. I'm also the optimist, so of course I'm going to say that. Yeah. But I'm I'm actually curious to hear what Neil thinks at YouTube. I know
00:05:22
you know him because it opens up a window I think right now for YouTube to suck up some of
00:05:27
the best content creators in the world from the more traditional platforms, broadcast and streaming. Yeah, it goes both ways.
00:05:33
Yeah. But so just talking about your show, um your show is so great because it it really meets what I always say is
00:05:40
missing in media today, which is we've got this deep sort of technimism. Everyone thinks that technology always
00:05:47
has a catch. There's always something bad emerging. Robots are going to kill us all. AI is going to wipe out human
00:05:53
civilization. Nuclear power is going to melt down and destroy neighborhoods. Every point of technology has some
00:06:00
negative angle, but then that becomes the cycle. You watch all the shows on Netflix, you watch all the movies, Aaron
00:06:05
Brochovich, like the the ones that work, the ones that seem to resonate, which means that's what people truly kind of
00:06:11
want are the ones that talk about things gone wrong. But your show is quite different. And you talk about what if
00:06:17
things go right. Why do you think that is resonating and are we changing or is it are you kind of capturing a a small
00:06:25
audience and the bigger one still sort of technopesistic? Well, the best thing by far about making
00:06:30
this show is realizing that there are millions of people out there that also want that same kind of work. I mean, you
00:06:36
see it with Science Corner in so many ways those are very similar in tone. And I think from from my perspective when I
00:06:43
when I started this show, I really was looking for a part of my media diet that I wasn't getting anywhere else. And
00:06:49
that's what makes making something yourself on YouTube so special. You're creating something asking are there
00:06:55
millions of people out there like me? And and the answer turns out to be yes. With respect to optimistic science and
00:07:00
tech content specifically, the reason why I make it in the first place, we spend months on these episodes. We
00:07:07
travel all around the world. We invest a huge amount in the animations and the technical explainers so that you can
00:07:12
understand without any background at all quantum computing and the impacts supersonic planes and how we're trying
00:07:18
to bring them back. Uh I was in a zeroravity plane the other day trying to explain the cutting edge of of gravity
00:07:25
research and 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
00:07:31
try and do every day. And the reason why we do that is because we genuinely believe that when people see those
00:07:37
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
00:07:43
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
00:07:50
what we're doing every day. We used to have that after World War II. I always tell people like uh the Disneyland opened up in 1955. There's a
00:07:58
YouTube video called the Disney History Institute. It's the channel and it shows like what Tomorrowland was like when you
00:08:03
when Disney opened in 1955 and it was all about like we're building this better world with all of these crazy
00:08:09
technologies. Rockets to the moon, plastic so we could all have cheap furniture. Like there were all these
00:08:14
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
00:08:19
cook for hours. But we've lost that. Um, and I really hope that your content resonates with more people and that we
00:08:26
get there again. So, Cleo's going to join me this morning for two really fun panels that we're going to have. Um, and
00:08:32
we're going to kick it off now. We used to look up in the sky and wonder
00:08:39
at our place in the stars. How thrilling must it be to truly
00:08:46
discover something or understand something that no human on earth has ever seen or understood? He was a member
00:08:53
of both the supernova cosmology project and the high supernova search team to discover that the universe is
00:09:00
accelerating. A leader in all of these undertakings. That's one of the big questions of
00:09:05
cosmology. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Filipeno.
00:09:20
Wow.
00:09:25
Wow. This is so fantastic to see you all here. Good morning, David. Uh, thank you
00:09:30
for inviting me to Science Corner. It's such a pleasure. Most of you probably
00:09:35
don't know that in fact David was a student of mine at UC Berkeley 28 years
00:09:42
ago and became an astrophysics major. In fact, you know, so I feel like I had
00:09:49
some influence on him. I'll take some credit. Uh, you know, uh, as Joe Sai
00:09:57
said yesterday, teachers want their students to become more successful, to
00:10:02
become better than they are. Uh, and I always knew that David would be very
00:10:08
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
00:10:17
also like to uh yeah, I'd also like to officially acknowledge
00:10:24
California's 175th birthday today, California admission day. Uh so, yep, we
00:10:32
were told that yesterday and I looked it up and it's true. So, you know, California is be is beginning its uh
00:10:41
176th orbit around the sun. May may may it be revolutionary, so to speak. Right.
00:10:49
Get it? Get it? Okay. Uh, okay. Well, it's my pleasure to be uh
00:10:54
speaking today about the James Web Space Telescope as just one example of an
00:10:59
amazing mission where humans are pursuing science and exploring the
00:11:06
universe. It's an amazing device and uh it's already brought us so many
00:11:12
interesting results. Now, it was launched on Christmas Day 2021 aboard an
00:11:17
Aryan 5 rocket and it's a wonderful example of how international
00:11:23
collaboration and cooperation in this case between the US, Europe, and Canada, can lead to incredible achievements in
00:11:31
very complex projects. There are many comparisons with NASA and
00:11:37
issa's Hubble Space Telescope, which has been serving us well for over three decades. The primary one is that the web
00:11:45
has a much bigger mirror. And a mirror can be thought of as a gigantic eyeball, a collecting area that brings together
00:11:53
faint starlight from distant parts of the universe. And so the bigger the collecting area, the fainter the object
00:12:00
you can see. And web has six times the collecting area of Hubble. So it's a more powerful telescope.
00:12:08
Fundamentally, the web was designed to explore our origins. Where did we come
00:12:14
from? How are we evolving? What's going to happen far far in the future? How do
00:12:21
galaxies like the Milky Way galaxy form? And how do they evolve with time? Now,
00:12:27
we know now that many galaxies merge together like the group that you're seeing here in a beautiful web image. By
00:12:34
the way, to the lower right of the word time there, there's a star with a a bunch of spikes. Ignore the spikes.
00:12:41
They're not beautiful. They're ugly, okay? They're just a consequence of the interaction of light with the telescope.
00:12:46
So, ignore the spikes. But here are a bunch of merging galaxies. Now, the
00:12:52
first image NASA released publicly a little over three years ago was of a
00:12:59
tiny part of the sky. Imagine a grain of sand held at arms length. Imagine how small that looks. Yet in that tiny patch
00:13:06
of the sky, there are thousands of galaxies. These fuzzy things you see out there, you can count them if you're if
00:13:13
you're interested. Over the whole sky, we can see about a trillion galaxies, a
00:13:19
million million galaxies. And some of them we see forming just a
00:13:25
few hundred million years after the explosive birth of the universe, the so-called big bang. And one of the
00:13:32
interesting aspects of this image is that galaxies started forming and
00:13:37
evolving earlier than expected. And so we're working on that interesting puzzle
00:13:43
right now. How do stars like our sun form? Well, they form in stellar nurseries. Giant
00:13:51
clouds of gas and dust. Fine little particles that collect up as a result of
00:13:57
gravity. and the central densest regions collapse and and form these stars. But
00:14:03
they're hidden from view when looked at with most telescopes because we can't peer through the dust. The web looking
00:14:11
at infrared wavelengths, heat wavelengths is able to peer inside and
00:14:16
see newly formed stars and stars that are still forming. We can also look at
00:14:23
discs of gas and dust around newly forming stars. This is essentially the
00:14:30
mechanism by which our solar system formed about 4 and a half billion years
00:14:35
ago. Debris around the newly formed sun that collected gradually to form bigger
00:14:41
and bigger objects, planets. All right. How about the death of stars?
00:14:46
This is a snapshot, a preview of the sun's future in about 7 billion years
00:14:53
when the outer atmosphere will start getting gently ejected off, leaving a
00:14:59
hot dying star in the middle that makes the gases glow. The star, the fainter of
00:15:06
the two that you see there, looks faint because there's dust, fine little particles that have formed in the
00:15:12
ejected gases. These particles consist of elements heavier than hydrogen and
00:15:18
helium that were cooked up in the nuclear furnace of the star during its
00:15:23
life. These dust particles can later form new stars, planets, and ultimately
00:15:29
life. And to get most of the heavy elements, you need the explosions, the
00:15:35
cataclysmic disruptions of certain varieties of stars at the end of their
00:15:40
lives. our sun won't explode in this titanic way, but some do. And here's one
00:15:46
that we started studying about 40 years ago. Analysis of the web data shows the
00:15:52
kinds of elements of which we are made. The calcium in our bones, the phosphorus in our DNA, the oxygen that we breathe,
00:16:00
the carbon in our cells, the iron in our red blood cells. These elements were
00:16:05
created through nuclear reactions in stars billions of years ago. And humans
00:16:11
understand that is that cosmic or what? As Carl Sean used to say, we are made of
00:16:17
star stuff. We can move closer to home and image planets in our own solar system like
00:16:24
Neptune here with its moons and rings. And those bright spots on Neptune are a
00:16:29
storm which has been developing. And so you can monitor planetary storms and
00:16:34
come to a better understanding of climate on Earth.
00:16:40
We can move to other stars and search for planets orbiting them. So-called
00:16:46
exoplanets. It turns out that nearly every star you see in the sky has a collection of
00:16:52
planets around it. They're just really hard to see here. To see it, the web telescope had to place a disc in front
00:16:59
of the star where that little five-pointed thing is in the circle,
00:17:05
revealing the exoplanet orbiting it. And the hope is that through studies of the
00:17:11
atmospheres of these exoplanets, we will find places where life could have arisen
00:17:18
and maybe even did arise independently of life on Earth. And we don't have such
00:17:24
evidence yet. But once we do have compelling evidence for life elsewhere, it'll be one of the most monumental
00:17:30
discoveries in all of humanity. Well, you could say this is all very
00:17:36
interesting, intellectually titillating, but so what? Why spend national funds on
00:17:45
pure research of this type, not applied research that will lead in the short term to new gizmos, pacemakers, and
00:17:52
iPhones and things like that? Why should we pursue this kind of research with
00:17:57
taxpayer money? It's a legitimate question. Okay, so let me give you three
00:18:04
reasons. The first is that of all known animals, humans are the only ones with
00:18:10
the curiosity to ask complex questions, abstract questions, questions about
00:18:16
their very origins. And we have the intellectual capability to pursue
00:18:22
answers to those questions and the hands with the posible thumb with which to
00:18:27
build machines like telescopes and particle colliders to help us answer those questions. If some subset of
00:18:34
humanity were to not do this, we would be selling ourselves short as homo
00:18:40
sapiens. Now, you don't need many of us, but it's good to have some. The second
00:18:45
point is that astronomy is a gateway science. It's like the bug that bites
00:18:51
kids and gets them interested in STEM fields. Most won't go on to become
00:18:57
astrophysicists. Okay? Again, that's an okay thing. But they'll be more motivated to pursue fields of science
00:19:04
and technology which will lead them to careers that are more immediately beneficial to society. computer science,
00:19:11
engineering, medical physics, applied physics, those sorts of things. I see
00:19:17
this all the time as a board member of the Shabbo Space and Science Center and also at Lick Observatory in the hills
00:19:24
east of Silicon Valley where I conduct much of my research and public outreach.
00:19:29
Kids love this stuff. Just like I and some of my friends were inspired in our
00:19:36
youth by the American lunar landings. What an amazing accomplishment that was.
00:19:42
We are on the moon. Wouldn't it be great to contribute to this grand enterprise
00:19:48
and go boldly where no one has gone before? It's just an an incredibly
00:19:56
inspiring uh moment and the Hubble and web and things like that
00:20:02
are providing that moment for kids now. And then there are the technological
00:20:07
spin-offs and unanticipated applications like quantum physics for the latter.
00:20:15
Over a century ago, there were two outstanding questions in physics. What
00:20:20
is the nature of light? And why are atoms stable? And you could say, well,
00:20:25
as long as we know how to make light bulbs and as long as the floor doesn't collapse underneath me, who cares what
00:20:33
light really is and why atoms are stable? You don't need to know, do you?
00:20:38
Well, physicists over a century ago like Einstein, Schroinger, Heisenberg, Boore, Plunk, they cared about the workings of
00:20:46
nature simply to satisfy their curiosity. No practical applications immediately in
00:20:52
sight. Fast forward a century, you couldn't imagine today's world without
00:20:57
an understanding of quantum physics. One example, lasers, a 13.5 billion dollar
00:21:03
industry in the US with innumerable applications. Computer chips. Moore's law with three
00:21:11
and even two nanometers per pixel. Now we have the equivalent of half a billion transistors on the head of a pin. That
00:21:18
is amazing. That's quantum mechanics, folks. quantum quantum electronics. And
00:21:23
then specifically from something like the web, lots of uh spin-offs, infrared
00:21:28
detectors, similar ones are now used in medical imaging, night vision systems, and environmental monitoring.
00:21:36
Cryogenetic engineering, you had to cool down the telescope. This led to advances in cooling systems now used in quantum
00:21:42
computing, uh superconducting electronics, medical imaging, and so on.
00:21:47
And as just one other example in many precision optics and materials segmented
00:21:53
goldcoated mirrors and deployment mechanisms for the web led to innovations in robotics metrology and u
00:22:01
high precision manufacturing. So those are just some of the spin-offs from the
00:22:06
web itself. So I hope I've convinced you that spending some small amount of money
00:22:13
on research of this type is exciting, is important, extends our grand vision as
00:22:19
pioneers of the universe exploring our origins. And to give you just a sense of
00:22:24
scale, over a 10 bill o over 10 years, the $10 billion cost of the web was one
00:22:33
$6 hamburger per US taxpayer per year. That's what you contributed to the web.
00:22:40
Thank you very much. I hope that you feel it was worth it, okay, to give up
00:22:45
this one hamburger. Now, listen. Um, if you're interested in this sort of stuff, I give much longer talks with more
00:22:51
details to corporate groups and others. Just contact me if you're interested. Thank you so so much for being here.
00:23:02
[Music]
00:23:09
Thanks, Alex. All right. Good to see you. Grab a seat.
00:23:14
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
00:23:21
for you. I'll give rapid fire answers based on what our audience might have seen in headlines or might be
00:23:27
understanding and want to know more about about not just James Webb but generally. Yes. I just gave one example of web
00:23:34
limited time. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. So, one of the places I want to start is searching for life on
00:23:40
exoplanets. I think many people might understand that James Webb is doing that but might not fully understand how and
00:23:46
what the implications might be. So as a way to understand this if we were looking at Earth from 100 light years
00:23:54
away. Yeah. What would we see and how would we understand that as life? Yeah. Yeah. So what you want to find is
00:24:00
some sort of chemical disequilibrium. Now that sounds fancy but what do I mean? In the case of the atmosphere of
00:24:06
Earth, the simultaneous presence of oxygen and methane is very curious
00:24:12
because methane oxidizes. That is, it reacts with oxygen very quickly. And so,
00:24:17
you wouldn't expect any methane in the atmosphere unless there were some more or less continuous source of that
00:24:24
methane. And although methane can be produced through chemical means having nothing to do with biology, it's also
00:24:31
produced by biology. uh you know Carl Sean called it boine flatulence right uh
00:24:36
so it's the decay of uh of biological organisms and so if we were to find that
00:24:42
in another exoplanet atmosphere that wouldn't be absolutely definitive but it
00:24:48
would be sort of a a flash point wow we better study that planet more because that's one that could have life yeah
00:24:54
and we're seeing that yeah we're beginning to see that we've not seen methane and oxygen in any other
00:25:00
uh planetary atmosphere yet but Um uh certainly there there are interesting signs of of elements that are reported
00:25:07
by the web through these kinds of atmospheric studies. One of the other big discoveries with the web was these early massive
00:25:14
galaxies. Yeah. I mentioned the early massive galaxies. Yeah. And there was a paper that followed. Yeah. You and I talked about this and
00:25:21
there's been a lot of social media and nerdy YouTube videos. Yeah. about this
00:25:26
paper and the theory that these early massive galaxies may actually disprove
00:25:32
the big bang theory by saying these early massive galaxies are responsible
00:25:38
or account for what we see as what's called the cosmic microwave background radiation which may mean that the what
00:25:44
we assumed was coming from the early universe from the big bang may actually come from these galaxies and it's like
00:25:49
do we have it all wrong we may and these papers are getting a lot of attention is the bang big bang theory disproven
00:25:55
moving now with this discovery. The the big bang theory is in on is on very solid ground. There are many
00:26:01
details we don't understand. The basic tenets, however, of the theory are just three-fold. The universe long ago was
00:26:08
hot. It was dense and it was expanding. Nothing in those studies
00:26:14
uh contradicts any of that. Uh as I mentioned, the early formation of galaxies is an interesting puzzle. It
00:26:21
means that our understanding of how galaxies formed and evolved is still incomplete. But that's part of the fun
00:26:27
of doing science. There's new things. You know, the cosmic microwave background radiation is the a the
00:26:33
afterglow of the big bang. And it turns out it uh agrees to very high precision
00:26:39
with a very single temperature. Meaning that the universe everywhere was the same temperature then expanded by the
00:26:45
same amount and we see see the same temperature everywhere. There's no way you can do that with galaxies forming at
00:26:52
a range of times and distances. They would each contribute light that would not give this so-called black body
00:26:59
thermal spectrum. And there are many other details of the microwave background, the spots and stuff that are
00:27:04
not at all addressed. So, a lot of these theories, you know, as scientists, we can dream up things and we just kind of
00:27:10
put them out there to be explored more. But of course, the media likes to highlight the the really snazzy sounding
00:27:18
things. And so sometimes, often the very speculative ideas get way too much
00:27:24
attention. We're exploring them, but they're probably wrong. Yeah. Okay.
00:27:29
Yeah. Okay. So, I don't need to throw out what I learned in high school. No, no. The Big Bang is on very solid
00:27:35
ground. What about the theories coming out? We've been talking a little bit about this um on whether or not we are inside
00:27:42
a black hole. Oh yeah. Are we inside a black hole? Yeah. So a black hole is a region of space where matter is compressed so much
00:27:48
that nothing not even light can escape. And it turns out that in a sense our
00:27:53
universe, if you look at the total amount of matter, dark matter and dark energy and all that stuff, visible
00:27:58
matter in the volume out to which we can see, okay, that has uh about the right
00:28:05
value to make the universe as a whole, wh
00:28:11
it resembling a black hole, h that would mean that our universe is
00:28:18
finite. We don't actually know whether it's finite or infinite. We actually only know that it's much bigger than
00:28:24
what we can see. And mathematically there is some correspondence between the equations governing a black hole and
00:28:31
those governing the universe. But there are some important differences like a black hole is a physical structure
00:28:37
within our four space-time dimensions like right here. Whereas applying that
00:28:42
to the whole universe is um it's a qualitatively different idea. But there
00:28:48
are some mathematical correspondences that um that that are useful and
00:28:53
interesting. I personally doubt that we are uh a a giant black hole. Some people
00:29:00
say it's actually a black hole that was given birth from another universe. And for that
00:29:06
there's really no evidence. Um, but Alex, one of the the many things that blows my mind about astrophysics
00:29:13
and cosmology, the further out we look, the faster objects are moving away from
00:29:19
us to a point that at a certain distance from us, the objects in whatever
00:29:25
direction we look are moving away from us at nearly the speed of light or even
00:29:30
faster. And so that becomes the observational limit of our ability to
00:29:35
see or ultimately experience our universe. That there's this boundary that without crossing the speed of
00:29:41
light, we will never get to and we will never see what's beyond it. Right? That's our observable universe.
00:29:48
That feels pretty up. Well, you know, space can become really
00:29:53
big. Okay. And in fact, you know, good student, you asked me the right question. You need some help?
00:29:58
Ah, thank you very much, my assistant. Okay, so I've got these galaxies here. They don't expand, by the way. They're
00:30:04
held together by by gravity in in the case of real galaxies, but then the hose between them expands. So, let's expand
00:30:10
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
00:30:17
perspective of our galaxy here, the the more distant ones, you know, with each bit of space expanding can and do go
00:30:24
away faster than the speed of light. And Einstein wouldn't wrap me on the knuckles for that. Einstein simply said
00:30:30
that no material object or no information can travel through a pre-existing space faster than light.
00:30:36
But space itself expanding, especially if it expands exponentially, which we think it did early on in its existence,
00:30:43
it grows faster than the speed of light, and you get a truly humongous universe, maybe even an infinite universe. And
00:30:49
yeah, most of it we can't see, but there are other independent volumes out there
00:30:55
where we could be having this conversation right now or or you could
00:31:00
not like what I said and punch me in the face, but then I would respond by p punching you in the face. In other
00:31:06
words, all these possibilities could occur in these parallel observable universes beyond the observable part
00:31:13
that we can see. And it's freaky, but this is the kind of stuff we get to think about. And I'll ask you the
00:31:18
question I asked you on the phone the other day, which is there's mathematics that shows that the geometry maybe
00:31:24
inverses inside of a black hole or some some some things are reversed or inverse. What's the right term?
00:31:29
Right. Therefore, is the expanding universe that we see our version of being inside
00:31:34
of a black hole which is effectively an accelerating contraction towards the singularity.
00:31:40
Yeah. So um what David is referring to is that if you look at the mathematics of a black hole from our perspective,
00:31:46
what we call space and time outside reverse their meaning. Um time becomes
00:31:53
space and space becomes time in terms of directionality. So for example, if you're in a black hole, there's no way
00:31:59
you can avoid the so-called singularity where you get squished into nothing because it's in your future no matter
00:32:05
what you do. Now applying that as you wanted to do to the whole universe. I don't think that the correspondence is
00:32:13
such that the expansion that we see is the reversal effect of um this um going
00:32:21
toward the singularity because uh well because of some technical issues. Again
00:32:28
if you look at the mathematics there are some interesting correspondences but they shouldn't be taken too too
00:32:33
literally in most cases. Okay. Yeah. So the question I would be wondering if I were in the audience listening to we have a expanding
00:32:39
universe. It is uh potentially infinite. My question would be so where is
00:32:45
everybody? Yeah. So yeah where are they all the fairmy paradox? Is the great filter in front of us is
00:32:51
the question. Yeah. I actually think the great filter is in front of us. It's a an idea where uh civilizations such as ours rarely get
00:32:59
past this point uh where they can achieve interstellar travel easily and stuff. Something happens either
00:33:06
intentionally or unintentionally or through neglect they get destroyed. All right. And uh I I I actually think that
00:33:14
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
00:33:22
one-two punch is that there's almost always a great filter. And so rarely do
00:33:28
civilizations reach interstellar capability to the extent where they colonize a galaxy. If it had happened
00:33:35
even once in our Milky Way, we would easily see the aliens here. Not just the
00:33:40
sketchy UFO evidence, okay, that's been presented. Doesn't reach the bar of credibility and science, by the way. Uh,
00:33:48
but we would be the aliens more likely, right? Because they would already have colonized Earth and we would have been
00:33:54
the aliens. So, I think they're makes sense to maybe not travel and just
00:33:59
transmit information back and forth and maybe we just don't know how to see or understand the information that's being
00:34:04
sent our way and we don't know how to transmit it. Yeah, certainly communication techniques could be different. So, I I'm not saying
00:34:10
we know at all. And, you know, there could even be this dark forest where they're intentionally,
00:34:15
you know, uh not transmitting toward us cuz they don't want us to know about them. They're sort of maybe even
00:34:21
pursuing us and stuff going to kill us before we kill them. Um these are all possibilities you know but um I think
00:34:27
the most likely in my view is that the what I said and also the vastness of
00:34:33
space means that we wouldn't be able to communicate or or hear from um aliens
00:34:40
that were much farther away than you know 100 or a thousand lighty years and the galaxy is 100,000 light years in uh
00:34:47
space in in extent. So unless they colonize the galaxy, if they're very
00:34:52
rare, we won't see them because the the signals are too faint and they haven't had a chance to to get here. You know, I
00:34:59
I want to give you an opportunity to share with us uh what's going on with respect to hiring graduate students and
00:35:06
funding research right now. Yeah. I've heard from lots of scientists uh that NIH grants have been cut.
00:35:13
Yeah. And it's affecting their ability to hire and build out their labs and do some of their research. are you seeing the same
00:35:20
today and maybe just give us a sense of on the ground what's going on with respect to what you're seeing in
00:35:26
funding. Yeah. Uh the issue is a very serious one. Um in a sense, you know, science is
00:35:32
is under attack to some degree, intentionally or unintentionally, maybe part of a a broader thing. Uh but it's
00:35:39
it's having an enormous effect. The number of National Science Foundation graduate fellowships, for example, was
00:35:46
cut in half this year. NASA funding has been cut in half and I'm all for going
00:35:51
to the moon and Mars. But if all of the remaining NASA funding goes toward those ideals, then nothing will be left for
00:35:58
professors and their students and postocs to analyze the great data that the Hubble and Web and all that are are
00:36:05
giving us and and various space telescopes are now in jeopardy of not being launched. The Nancy Grace Roman
00:36:11
telescope and stuff. So graduate schools are um now reluctant to to accept new
00:36:18
graduate students and to hire new postocs because frankly we don't have the funding with which to do so. And I'm
00:36:24
personally very worried about my own research group. I'm not taking on any new researchers until I personally can
00:36:31
fund my existing group. That's got to be my my primary concern right now. and I
00:36:36
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
00:36:43
immediately useful fields like NIH you said, right? Cutting the funding there.
00:36:48
These are researchers who are going doing things that are going to be good for humanity soon, not these
00:36:55
unanticipated spin-offs, but the kind of stuff I do should be supported as well.
00:37:00
Yeah. Well, um, you know, I was a physics and math major. I don't know if I would have gotten the math degree,
00:37:06
I'll be honest. But, um, I took Alex's Astro 10 class cuz I was partying a little bit too much that year and I'm
00:37:11
like, I got to take an easier class. I heard it's a great 800 people in the class. The most inspirational class I've
00:37:17
ever taken and every student that's taken it says the same. And Alex became nine times, 10 times, I don't know how
00:37:22
many times, the favorite professor at Cal Berkeley. And I think you can all understand why his contributions to
00:37:28
students and to science are profound. So, please join me in thanking Alex. Thank you. Thanks so much.
00:37:37
Regulators are now approving drone deliveries. There is one company that is huge in
00:37:43
this space. They're called Zipline. Keller Renado Clifton is the co-founder and CEO of Zipline, the world's largest
00:37:50
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
00:37:56
advanced than anything from Google or Amazon. What nerds are working on during the weekends in their garages today are
00:38:02
what will be the giant companies of five or 10 years from now. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Zip
00:38:09
Lines Keller Ronaldo Clifton. [Music] [Applause]
00:38:16
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
00:38:22
Well, good morning everybody. So, David was talking a little bit about technesses. I hadn't heard that before,
00:38:27
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
00:38:32
take your jobs? Okay, so basically everybody, the cool thing is today we get to talk about
00:38:38
robots that save lives. And I thought it'd be cool to just take you back to 2016. Uh in in 2016, you know, we had
00:38:46
been our our backgrounds were in automation and robotics. We had this simple naive idea that it should be it
00:38:53
should be possible to build a new kind of logistics system a fully automated logistic system that would be 10 times
00:38:58
as fast half the cost and zero emission. The first contract we signed was with
00:39:04
the government of Rwanda to deliver blood transfusions primarily to moms with postpartum hemorrhage um at about
00:39:10
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
00:39:15
nothing nothing fancy but you can actually see uh what we call zips that
00:39:21
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
00:39:28
Cubai which is in a rural part of Rwanda. Here we were delivering I think three units of packed red blood cells
00:39:33
and platelets. We could deliver to a couple parking spaces um in a way that was about 10 times as fast. Uh and you
00:39:40
can see the women in this in this video are like what the hell did we just see? which is funny. You know, I was taking
00:39:45
the video. I kind of looked up at them and they were looking at me very suspiciously. You know, we often try to describe, it's a funny thing about what
00:39:51
we do. We try to describe uh what we're going to do to either to doctors or to nurses or hospital administrators and
00:39:58
they look at us like, you know, we're completely crazy or on drugs.
00:40:04
You know, and so we have to do the first delivery. Once we do that first delivery, a doctor looked at me and
00:40:09
said, "It's as though Jesus Christ is delivering blood from the sky." But what's what's hilarious is that, you
00:40:15
know, you get about seven days the way, you know, the way we work as humans, you get about seven days of science fiction
00:40:20
amazement and then people are completely bored of it. Like it's totally normal. In fact, I had one nurse look at her
00:40:26
watch and then look at me and say, "It's 30 seconds late." Which made me realize, you know, humans
00:40:32
go from science fiction to entitlement in approximately 7 days, which is great. That's what technology should do. you
00:40:38
know, it should fade into the background like
00:40:43
let doctors and nurses do the work that they were trained to do which is save lives and logistics should just work.
00:40:48
That was always the vision. So, quick tour of the distribution center. Uh, you
00:40:53
know, Zipline builds uh designs, manufactures and operates these vehicles
00:40:59
completely from scratch. This is one of our flight operators launching a zip. Accelerates from zero
00:41:05
to about 100 km an hour in a third of a second. From the moment the vehicle leaves the end of that launcher, it's
00:41:10
fully autonomous. It will fly out up to 100 miles to make a delivery to a hospital and then fly all the way back.
00:41:16
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
00:41:22
thing. Landing is even a little bit more complicated. We were inspired by aircraft carriers. This vehicle, as it's
00:41:27
flying back, We're aiming for a 1 centimeter tail hook on the back of that aircraft. This
00:41:34
really only possible with autonomy and you know robotic solutions that can be far far more precise in controlling
00:41:40
these kinds of vehicles than humans. The system at this point can recover an aircraft about every 60 seconds and we
00:41:46
operate about 20 distribution centers uh across eight countries. So people always
00:41:51
think like oh uh you know drone delivery it's not really real. So I thought it'd be cool to actually just show you a time
00:41:57
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
00:42:03
take a day off. It's, you know, 3:00 a.m. here. You're seeing fulfillment operations where we're packing and loading packages, getting them packed
00:42:09
into vehicles. Here you can see the launcher and the recovery system with like sunrise just happening in the back
00:42:14
at 5 or 6 a.m. Um, this is a second distribution center, another fulfillment
00:42:19
center. And so this is all basically both fulfillment centers across the country of Rwanda, which is the smallest
00:42:24
country we operate in today. But the cool thing is you can see that at 8 a.m. every single one of these little triangles on the map, this is what we
00:42:31
call the sky map, is an autonomous aircraft going out making a life-saving delivery of blood, vaccines,
00:42:37
transfusions, infusions, cancer products, almost the entire public healthcare supply chain. And by 10:00 a.m., there are 50 autonomous aircraft
00:42:43
out making deliveries simultaneously to all of the 500 hospitals and health facilities that we serve in the country.
00:42:50
So, I actually used to show this uh video to investors and we would get to the end of the presentation and they
00:42:55
would say, "Oh, I think my favorite slide was that simulation of what this could look like one day." And I got so
00:43:01
pissed off because it's like it's not a simulation that happened yesterday. So, we put we put the CCTV on the right hand
00:43:06
side so you can actually see the teams doing this work so people understand this is this is not like far future. This is happening day in and day out in
00:43:13
a way that is saving lives. And you know on that point it's not just about making logistics more efficient.
00:43:19
It turns out that if you can deploy AI and robotics infrastructure for healthcare you can save a lot of lives.
00:43:25
The system has been able to reduce maternal mortality as measured by the University of Pennsylvania by 51% across
00:43:31
the hospitals we serve.
00:43:38
Had 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
00:43:45
this. The a new study came out uh a couple months ago actually showing a 60% reduction in under five childhood
00:43:52
mortality due to malnutrition. One of the new products we've begun delivering in the last few years. And when this was
00:43:57
studied uh uh by a major global health institution for the cost effectiveness of delivering vaccine, it was found to
00:44:04
be the most cost effective way of delivering vaccines to zero dose children ever studied. So, it turns out
00:44:09
that, you know, yeah, it's exciting.
00:44:14
People think about robotics as being expensive or fancy or maybe solving problems for rich people. It's not just
00:44:19
that. We can solve some of the most important problems that we face as a world. We can um we can make this
00:44:25
technology work for um for everybody. So, you know, stepping back, Zip Lines
00:44:31
now surpassed 115 million commercial autonomous miles. We serve about 5,000 hospitals and health facilities
00:44:37
globally, over 1.6 million deliveries like that one you saw in that video. Um, and zero safety incidents, which is
00:44:43
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
00:44:49
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
00:44:55
about how this technology is evolving, how what we what we started doing in 2016 is evolving and into the next
00:45:01
generation technology and launching in the US.
00:45:06
[Music]
00:45:19
[Music] We play this. [Music]
00:45:59
Wow, that was so cool. We love the fun.
00:46:05
[Music] So if you're like okay that's cool but
00:46:13
when can I use it? Uh the news is ve the good news is very soon. So just to give you a sense it's you know as we started
00:46:19
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
00:46:24
hey we want teleportation from our hospitals or our primary care facilities or our stores or our restaurants
00:46:30
directly to customer homes. And so, not only did a lot of the biggest health care systems in the US um sign up to
00:46:36
start using Zipline, but we've also seen these additional major verticals in food and retail. Um we've been scaling
00:46:42
incredibly fast with Walmart over the last 6 to9 months. We just launched Chipotle along with a lot of other amazing food partners over the last
00:46:49
month. I'll show you a little bit more about what that looks like. One of the kind of amazing things, you know, over the last 3 months, the service has been
00:46:55
growing about uh between 20 and 30% week-over- week. So it's more than doubling flight volume every month. This
00:47:02
is a little bit startling. Uh we only launched Dallas, which is kind of the major metro we're scaling in in the US right now in April. And uh by July, so
00:47:10
ju just just to give a sense the customer behavior that we're seeing. Customers are ordering three to four times per week from Zipline. The service
00:47:17
has a net promoter score of 94. And I was talking to a grandma a couple weeks ago. Uh she's 78 years old. She's
00:47:24
ordered from Zipline 350 times in the last nine months. We were we were doing a little customer research and she's
00:47:29
showing me on her phone, you know, like clicking around ordering everything she needs for the day. She's double click, you know, Face ID, Apple Pay. She's
00:47:35
like, "It's on its way. It'll be here in 8 minutes. This woman's living in the future." But by by July, we were
00:47:42
actually sufficiently nervous about uh you know, about the capacity of the system. We we ended up turning off all
00:47:47
the demand generation marketing um because we were trying to slow down growth. So, you can see the impact that turning off our marketing had on the
00:47:54
growth of the system. which is approximately zero. And we were
00:47:59
trying to figure out why that is. And basically, it just turns out that having a robot deliver whatever you need to
00:48:05
your home in less than 10 minutes is really good content for Tik Tok.
00:48:10
Um, a lot of our different customers have been making tons and tons of Tik Toks of of of receiving these deliveries
00:48:15
and a you know, a lot of these videos have gone viral like they they get seen 8 10 12 million times. We're delivering
00:48:21
to universities, to offices, to hotels, to town homes, to apartment buildings. So, every time one person is getting a
00:48:27
delivery, there are 10 other people who are like, "What the hell is that? And how do I get it?" Even cooler than that, uh, you know, as
00:48:34
we're launching new sites in Dallas, you know, the first site that we launched in April, it took us about two and a half
00:48:40
months to get to 100 deliveries a day, which was kind of like the the, you know, uh, break even point for the site.
00:48:45
Uh, the site that we launched two weeks ago hit 100 deliveries a day in 5 days. So, we're seeing the sites themselves
00:48:52
ramp way, way faster. And a big part of that is that it's getting simpler and simpler for us to build this
00:48:57
infrastructure. So, just for you to kind of get a sense for what the infrastructure looks like, you know, we integrate right into the side of
00:49:03
hospitals, primary care facilities, stores, restaurants, you basically can just think of it like a magical portal.
00:49:08
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
00:49:14
they want through this magical portal and it's teleported directly to the home that it needs to go to. Um, we do this
00:49:20
uh 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
00:49:26
installed in 1 hour. So, if you're a business and you want to access a zipline, we show up, boop, drop a zipping point. And now that business is
00:49:31
enabled with zipline, it can deliver in this way. Just to give you a quick sense for what this infrastructure looks like. You know, we're now building these
00:49:36
sites. We're launching about one a week. Um, by Q1 of next year, we expect to accelerate to about one a day. But this
00:49:43
infrastructure is relatively quick to build um and enables up to 500 deliveries a day from a site like this.
00:49:50
quickly. You know, one of the one of the cool things is that customers are all just using the Zipline app to order these things. And when they are ordering
00:49:56
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
00:50:01
deliver. You can pick the dinner plate level area, whether it's in your backyard, side of your house, your
00:50:07
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
00:50:13
you want. Um, and the average time of delivery right now is 18 minutes. A lot of deliveries happen in under 10
00:50:19
minutes. In fact, you know, we just launched Chipotle 2 weeks ago. The first delivery happened in under 7 minutes
00:50:24
from like the customer ordering to it being delivered to their house. So, I I think it's going to redefine what is
00:50:30
what is possible in terms of instant delivery in people's minds. And just to hint at something cool that we can't
00:50:35
announce just yet,
00:50:41
it, you know, we'll be adding a lot of people's favorite brands to the service very soon over the coming weeks. And you
00:50:48
know, I joke before, just last thought, I had joked before about like this sense of like science fiction to entitlement
00:50:53
in about 7 days. We do enjoy that science that period of sci-fi amazement.
00:50:58
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 and and
00:51:04
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 zipline, you know, the
00:51:11
zipline aircraft. And so we we do take these pictures just when we're at the sites of people like hanging out on the hoods of their cars. Uh or, you know, a
00:51:18
mom with her kids sitting in her lap or the kids like looking through the you know, the window of the car just
00:51:24
watching the system operate. And that brings me to my last kind of provocative point, which is that,
00:51:31
you know, our parents had this incredibly inspiring mission, right? The United States was in the this
00:51:37
geopolitical race to get to the moon, the space race, and it united all the best engineers. It inspired us. It made
00:51:44
us dream with optimism about what the future could represent. And we did something impossible. We put men on the
00:51:49
moon in 9 years. Obviously, the US is in a similar technological race today. It's
00:51:54
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
00:52:01
just a slightly provocative answer to that question. But first, who knows what city this is? Shout it out if you know.
00:52:08
Yes. Okay, good. There are nerds in the audience. This is Wakanda. So Wakanda is a fictional radically advanced uh
00:52:17
African city hiding in plain sight from one of my favorite movies, Black Panther. And the provocative idea is
00:52:23
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
00:52:30
us building like exquisite AI technology to serve, you know, the richest people on the coast of this country. It's about
00:52:37
extending the reach and influence of the United States. It's using AI and robotics infrastructure to lift the rest
00:52:44
of the world up with us. Like these countries want to be leaprogging into the future. They want access to the best
00:52:50
technology that America has to offer. And if we go and extend, we want these
00:52:55
countries building on US AI and robotics infrastructure, not that of our geopolitical adversaries. And if we can
00:53:02
do that, we can make the world a safer place, a wealthier place. We could potentially eliminate maternal mortality
00:53:07
and childhood mortality in a lot of these countries. And in doing so, we can secure US technological and
00:53:13
manufacturing leadership for the decade to come. So, thank you all.
00:53:22
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
00:53:29
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
00:53:35
want to play it out into the Wakanda future that you're imagining. Cool. So, taking it back to where you began,
00:53:41
why start in Rwanda? Yeah. You know, it's funny. Everybody makes this assumption that like the most
00:53:47
advanced technology in the world is going to start in the United States and then trickle its way out maybe to you
00:53:52
know and it'll start in the rich cities right and then maybe it'll trickle trickle its way to rural areas in the US and then after years it might trickle
00:53:58
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
00:54:05
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
00:54:12
regulatory paradigms. Um, and Rwanda is this, you know, it's kind of like the
00:54:17
Singapore of Africa. It moves incredibly fast. It's very entrepreneurial. It's kind of a startup country. And it it was
00:54:23
perfect for us to work with them. Um, they wanted to take this risk on us when we were 20 people. We were totally naive
00:54:30
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
00:54:37
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
00:54:46
she explained to me, you know, that 50% of blood transfusions are going to moms with postpartum hemorrhaging. 30% are going toward kids with severe anemia due
00:54:53
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
00:55:00
um, 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.
00:55:05
The reduction in maternal mortality when you showed that stat, I got goosebumps. It's just incredible. Yeah. And by the
00:55:12
way, you know, I think a lot of times people in the US think like, oh, you know, those poor Africans like, uh, it
00:55:17
gets 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
00:55:23
not know, but, um, the US has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any developed country. Um, and you know,
00:55:31
rates for African-American women are three times that, you know, the average. I mean, we have a lot of challenges with
00:55:37
rural rural healthcare in this country. So I I think honestly um people probably think that these countries are more
00:55:44
different than they are. Almost every health system is dealing with the same kinds of challenges. So you come to the United States, you
00:55:51
launch it here. Tell me about the first period of launching in the US. Yeah, we um we originally launched kind
00:55:58
of the the first version of the technology, the fixedwing technology that you could see in 2020. Um honestly, it's it's shocking. I mean, we were
00:56:04
delivering like birthday cakes and rotisserie chickens via just those like paper parachutes. It's pretty unfancy,
00:56:10
but customers loved it. Um, they and and this is kind of we were rapidly iterating um to build something that we
00:56:17
thought would be like the future version of logistics, which is ultimately platform 2. It's the video I showed
00:56:22
today. And we we only launched platform 2 on January 15th. And then we really only started scaling it in April or May.
00:56:27
So, this is all happening in real time. A lot of those videos we showed were just from yesterday or the day before.
00:56:33
What has it felt like? Um, you know, it's stressful. Hardware
00:56:38
is incredibly hard. Um, you know, we have been scaling a hardware product while like the tariff craziness has been
00:56:45
going on through, you know, March and April and May. Um, you know, building a global supply chain. I mean, you know,
00:56:51
Zipline just put into perspective like we designed the flight computer, all of the avionics on the aircraft. We design
00:56:59
the aircraft itself, all the mechanical um components, the primary structure and
00:57:04
then from a software perspective, it's flight control algorithms, multi vehicle deconliction, communications
00:57:10
architecture. We design, we we build unmanned traffic management system that we provide to the regulators like the
00:57:15
FAA and then we also design that app that you saw which is our customer ordering platform. So um you know all of
00:57:21
that and then you also have to figure out supply chain and maintenance and manufacturing and operations logistics
00:57:26
like all of it has to work for the end customer to just have this magical experience of like teleportation and um
00:57:33
you know I yeah there's no part of it that doesn't feel desperate and stressful as you're kind of scaling a
00:57:39
system at that level of of exponential growth as you're launching in the US. Do
00:57:44
you have a sense, Keller? Are you going to beat the unit cost to deliver with
00:57:50
delivery drivers today? And by how much? Can you give us a sense on if I want
00:57:55
Chipotle, why would I go to the Zipline ordering system or use Chipotle's app and have Zipline kind of fulfill for me?
00:58:02
What's the cost difference going to be percentage-wise, do you think, over traditional food delivery? Yeah. So I mean interestingly people may
00:58:09
not realize you know instant delivery has grown incredibly fast like especially through co but even before
00:58:15
there are now 5 12 billion instant deliveries being done every year just in the US and that's not like Amazon or UPS
00:58:21
that's just the instant deliveries and we're using a 4,000 lb gas combustion
00:58:26
vehicle driven by a human to deliver something to your home that weighs on average 4 to 5 lb. So, you know, if
00:58:33
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
00:58:38
a bizarre solution. Um, I think, you know, the reality is we have this new
00:58:43
demand and and the demand is vast. People want things delivered quickly and
00:58:48
they want like to have more time with their family rather than spending time in traffic or like in a store. Um, but
00:58:55
we're using technology that's 100 years old to solve that problem. So, I think all you have to realize is that instead
00:59:01
of using a 4,000lb gas combustion vehicle driven by a human, you should use a 50 lb vehicle that is autonomous
00:59:08
and electric. And that's kind of just reasoning from like physics first principles. Like you
00:59:13
don't have to be, you know, a genius. As soon as you've realized that, I think you know something really fundamental about the future that few people
00:59:18
actually understand. And so we think it's it's very inevitable that um that
00:59:24
and by the way that if you were to just extend the customer ordering behavior that we see with um with our customers
00:59:31
today there would be 50 billion instant deliveries happening in the US. Wow. So this is kind of a
00:59:37
based on the order provocative idea. Yeah. Basically if you make the deliveries less expensive 10 times as fast and just a way better
00:59:43
experience people order a lot more. Not that surprising. So, I think the the reality is actually, you know, these
00:59:49
kinds of systems will yes, definitely be less expensive than using a 4,000lb gas combustion vehicle. Um, but I think more
00:59:56
importantly, the reason customers are using them so much is it's just a way better experience when you can have something delivered in 7 minutes or 8
01:00:03
minutes or 12 minutes. Um, you have to much cheaper. Um, I think it will be naturally, but I
01:00:09
don't believe it needs to be. I mean, it's the reason that like Whimo right now is more expensive and people prefer Whimo to to
01:00:15
What's the weight limit and then how much of the market does that address? Yeah. I mean, right now we the the system is designed to deliver up to 8 lb
01:00:22
and 8 lb gets you like 95% of all packages delivered by Amazon. I think it's like 95% of food delivery orders.
01:00:28
So, suffice it to say, you're not going to deliver flat screen TVs in this way anytime soon. But the vast majority of
01:00:34
stuff actually fits and can be delivered like this. So while this is all happening, while zipline is exploding, I
01:00:40
think many Americans came to believe that the the era of drone delivery had somehow passed, that this wasn't a near
01:00:46
future that they were going to experience. Why do you think that misconception happened? And what should
01:00:52
all of the people in this audience go out and say to the people who might ask them what they've seen here? Yeah. Well, it definitely didn't help
01:00:58
that the CEO of one of the largest companies in the in the world went on 60 Minutes in 2013 and promised everybody
01:01:04
drone delivery in the next like, you know, one or two years, right? Maybe some of you guys saw that interview.
01:01:09
Who was it? I don't even know what that interview was. Jeff from Amazon. Yeah. He was like 2013. He's like, "Oh, well, you know,
01:01:15
we'll be doing Yeah. So, he I mean they promised, you know, they announced Amazon Prime and
01:01:20
they said by 2015, you know, it'll be serving, you know, everybody in the US." And um I think that that you know people
01:01:26
probably believed it right like and and then I think people were really disappointed when it didn't happen and
01:01:32
maybe you know similar trend that you see hap happened with autonomous vehicles you know autonomous cars which
01:01:37
is that like 2015 so many companies were raising you know billions of dollars and it was like right around the corner and
01:01:42
people could see it working for the first time. But obviously it's a whole decade later today that we actually now
01:01:48
see Whimo and robo taxi scaling commercially. The reality is with these kinds of technologies, I think you always have like the bubble and and the
01:01:54
max hype and then you have the trough of disillusionment and then you have the 8 to n years of the actual hard work of
01:02:00
making the technology work. And you know, Zipline um launched in 2016. We've
01:02:05
spent 10 years driving the economics down, driving the reliability up. You you kind of saw that statistic of 115
01:02:11
million miles with zero safety incidents. Um that's hard. It requires time to get manufacturing technology uh
01:02:19
operations, maintenance right in a way to achieve that. And um you know, but the but the the good news is that uh I
01:02:26
think with with both autonomous cars and with this technology, we're now you know, we've now done the 10 years of
01:02:32
hard work and we now see it scaling in a way that like just fundamentally changing the way people live their lives. I mean, when you when I talk to
01:02:37
that grandma or you like you talk to a mom who's using Zipline every single day, it's like they're getting hours
01:02:42
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
01:02:49
like drive to a car or and obviously that's like, you know, that's that's the retail use cases, let alone the
01:02:55
life-saving implications this has for healthcare logistics. What are the competitive barriers? Google's had I think in X a drone
01:03:02
delivery. I don't know what the status is. Amazon obviously has invested by the way I thought it was like either Elon or
01:03:08
someone from Google or Jeff. Um and then uh there have been a mtoan I think out
01:03:13
of China famously shown videos of delivering food to the Great Wall with a
01:03:19
drone. How much advantaged is Zipline versus others and how quickly can they
01:03:25
catch up? Like help us understand how hard the tech is? What did you have to engineer to get the unit costs
01:03:30
advantages that you're having today and how persistent will that be? I mean, you
01:03:35
know, I I think there are a lot of people out there, you know, we saw over the last 10 years so many companies or
01:03:41
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
01:03:47
like, you know, Techrunch to write an article about it and be like, "It's a Kittyhawk moment. Drone delivery is here." Um, and you know, we've seen that
01:03:53
like 50 times at this point. I think people have kind of know that it's not real. Um the you know the the trick is
01:03:59
designing a system that can operate 24/7 365 in a way that people can depend on with their lives that works in all
01:04:06
weather that can be reliable and safe and they can achieve hundreds of millions or you know billions of autonomous miles. um that's hard to do.
01:04:13
That takes time. And um you know, I mean, Zipline uh has now spent a decade
01:04:19
scaling these systems. And and I think the realization is there's no like off-the-shelf hardware you can buy for
01:04:25
this because there's you can you can look at like these cheap plastic quadcopters that DJI makes refer to
01:04:31
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
01:04:37
million miles just a single aircraft. um that's hard and it kind of has to be
01:04:42
built from scratch. So we honestly don't worry that I mean our competition is motorcycles and cars. Like if we are
01:04:49
better than motorcycles and cars, I mean I'm very confident someone is going to build a multiundred billion dollar
01:04:54
company in automated logistics over the next 5 to 10 years. Like it's so obvious that this needs to exist. The demand is
01:05:01
like unbelievably vast. It's going to be one of the biggest markets on earth. And uh you know I think a lot of people are
01:05:06
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
01:05:12
for prime time. You want to talk about Wakanda? I do. So just to jump ahead. Yeah. If we were interviewing you here in 10
01:05:19
years you're back. What do you hope you're saying about the impact of drone delivery both on the golden billion but
01:05:26
also for everybody else? And to your point earlier the relationship between those two things and those two groups
01:05:32
might be closer than we think. Yeah. the the thing that always really inspired us, you know, you talk about logistics. I mean, logistics is boring,
01:05:38
right? Like I mean, who wants to work in logistics? It's incredibly boring. You just do the same thing day after day, just like doing the same deliveries. But
01:05:45
that's also what makes it great for robotics and automation. And I think the thing, the key thing to realize is the
01:05:50
golden billion that Cleo is talking about, right? The richest billion people on Earth. Like the go my assumption is
01:05:56
we're all in the golden billion. Like our access to logistics is really good. There are 7 billion people on Earth who
01:06:03
are not in the golden billion whose access either sucks or is non-existent. And as a result of that, five and a half
01:06:09
million kids lose their lives every year due to lack of access to basic medical products. This is not like, oh, we have we need some advanced therapy to it's
01:06:16
like, no, no, we couldn't get them the basic almost free drug that they needed to save their life. You know, we making
01:06:22
excuses for decades about why we can't solve these problems. And so I think
01:06:28
like logistics is boring, but it's kind of only boring when it's like working well for you. And I think that, you
01:06:35
know, the the the thing that gets me so excited about why does AI and robotics matter? Why should we be applying it to
01:06:41
this industry? It's not just like make people's lives better, give them new kinds of economic opportunity, save them
01:06:46
time, you know, let them spend more time with their kids. It's also because like reducing the cost of logistics,
01:06:52
automating it, expanding it, um improving the performance of these kinds of systems is going to extend access to
01:06:58
logistics to 7 billion people on Earth who don't have it today. And that is going to save lives, increase economic opportunity. I think it's going to make
01:07:04
the world a more stable place. And and and so that's that's really our vision. It's like um it's time to stop making
01:07:10
excuses. We should eliminate these problems. And the thing that gets me excited about, you know, you I mean I
01:07:15
know we're both kind of like solar punk techno optimists, right? Um like that's the future that I want to build that I
01:07:22
want to tell my kids about. And um you know, if we can play a small part of it, that would be a good life.
01:07:28
That's the future I think we all want to be part of. Amazing. Guys, please join me in thanking Keller and Cleo. Did you guys
01:07:37
love Science Corner? [Music]
01:07:43
[Applause]