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All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Science Corner Special: David Friedberg, Cleo Abram, Alex Filippenko, and Keller Rinaudo Cliffton
01:07:50
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- [00:00]
David
Good morning. Where are my besties? They are not here. What does that mean? Science Corner. I have a guest host because my besties abandoned me for Science Corner. Let's see who it is.
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Keller Renardo Clifton
Leo, you're one of the fastest growing channels on YouTube right now. Former VOX journalist that left to go independent on YouTube.
- [00:27]
Alex Filippenko
She went from 0 to 5 million subscribers in just three years.
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Keller Renardo Clifton
I don't know many other YouTube creators who are going to go to those lights.
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Cleo Abram
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.
- [00:49]
David
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Cleo Abram. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for being here.
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Cleo Abram
Thanks for having me. Hi, everyone.
- [01:05]
David
You were here all day yesterday?
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Cleo Abram
Yeah.
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David
How was it?
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Cleo Abram
Having a great time. This is my first All In Summit. I'm so excited to be here.
- [01:11]
David
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.
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Cleo Abram
Welcome.
- [01:24]
David
How did you do it? What happened? So you were at Vox before?
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Cleo Abram
I was, yeah.
- [01:29]
David
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 did it get so big so fast?
- [01:37]
Cleo Abram
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, 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, a Netflix of the world. I used to make a Netflix show as well, 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 on.
- [03:19]
David
That's something you and I have talked about. Exactly. If you're on Netflix today, and we're going to talk with Neil and Ari about this later today, you can, 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 like 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. 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?
- [03:59]
Cleo Abram
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 up front for a show that then the streamer owns or 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 up front. And so what I think we're seeing is 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.
- [05:20]
David
But I'm actually curious to hear what Neil think. 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.
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Cleo Abram
Yeah, it goes both ways.
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David
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, Erin Brockovich, 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, why do you think that is resonating? And are we changing or are you kind of capturing a small audience and the bigger one still sort of techno pessimistic?
- [06:29]
Cleo Abram
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 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 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 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, they're so. 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.
- [07:51]
David
We used to have that after World War II. I always tell people, the Disneyland opened up in 1955. There's a YouTube video called the Disney History Institute's the Channel, and it shows what Tomorrowland was like when Disney opened in 1955. And it was all about, we're building this better world with all of these crazy technologies. Rockets to the moon, plastic so we could all have cheap furniture. Like, there were all these. 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 gonna join me this morning for two really fun panels that we're gonna have, and we're gonna kick it off now.
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Keller Renardo Clifton
We used to look up in the.
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Alex Filippenko
Sky and wonder at our place in the stars. How thrilling must it be to truly discover something or understand something that no human on Earth has ever seen or understood?
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Keller Renardo Clifton
He was a member of both the.
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Alex Filippenko
Supernova Cosmology Project and the High Z.
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Keller Renardo Clifton
Supernova Search Team to discover that the universe is accelerating. A leader in all of these undertakings.
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Alex Filippenko
That's one of the big questions of cosmology.
- [09:08]
David
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Filippenko.
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Alex Filippenko
Wow. 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. 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 job, David. You know, I'd also like to. Yeah, 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. Okay. Well, it's my pleasure to be speaking today about. The James Webb Space Telescope has 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. Of how international collaboration and cooperation, in this case between the us, Europe, and Canada can lead to incredible achievements in very complex projects. 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? 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 spikes. But here are a bunch of merging galaxies. Now, the first image NASA released publicly 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. And so, 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 disks of gas and dust around newly forming stars. This is essentially the mechanism by which our solar system formed about 4 1/2 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 7 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 fainter of the two that you see there, looks faint because there's dust, 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. 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 and are a storm which has been developing. And so you can monitor planetary storms 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, 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 will 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, 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. 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 Chabot 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. Kids love this stuff. Just like I and some of my friends 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, it was an incredibly inspiring moment. And 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, 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. One example, lasers. A $13.5 billion industry in the US with innumerable applications. Computer chips. Moore's Law with 3 and even 2 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 had to cool down the telescope. This led to advances in cooling systems, now used in quantum computing, 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 of is exciting, is important, extends our grand vision as pioneers of the universe, exploring our origins and to give you just a sense of scale, over 10 years, the $10 billion cost of the web was one six dollar 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.
- [23:09]
David
Thanks Alex. All right, good to see you. Grab a seat.
- [23:14]
Cleo Abram
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.
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Alex Filippenko
I'll give rapid fire answers based on.
- [23:24]
Cleo Abram
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.
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Alex Filippenko
Yes, I just gave one example. Example of Webb with the limited time. Yep.
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Cleo Abram
Yeah. So one of the places I want to start is searching for life on exoplanets. 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, what would we see and how would we understand that as life?
- [23:58]
Alex Filippenko
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 were 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. Carl Sagan called it bovine flatulence. Right. So it's the decay of biological organisms. 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. Yeah.
- [24:54]
David
And we're seeing that.
- [24:55]
Alex Filippenko
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 web through these kinds of atmospheric studies.
- [25:11]
David
One of the other big discoveries with the WEBB was these early massive galaxies.
- [25:15]
Alex Filippenko
Yeah, I mentioned the early massive galaxies. Yeah.
- [25:17]
David
And there was a paper that followed. Yeah, you and I talked about this, and there's been a lot of social media and nerdy YouTube videos 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? We may. And these papers are getting a lot of attention. Is the Big Bang theory disproven.
- [25:56]
Alex Filippenko
Now, with this discovery, 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. 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, 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. We're exploring them, but they're probably wrong. Okay.
- [27:29]
David
Yeah.
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Cleo Abram
Okay, so I don't need to throw out what I learned in high school.
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Alex Filippenko
No, no, the Big Bang is on very solid ground.
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Cleo Abram
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.
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Alex Filippenko
Oh yeah. Are we inside a black hole? Yeah. So a black hole is a region 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. 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 space time 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 are useful and interesting. I personally doubt that we are a giant black hole. Some people say it's actually a black hole that was given birth from another universe. And for that, there's really no evidence.
- [29:08]
David
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 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.
- [29:45]
Alex Filippenko
Right. That's our observable universe.
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David
That feels pretty up.
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Alex Filippenko
Well, you know, space can become really big. Okay. And in fact, you know, good student, you asked me the right question.
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Cleo Abram
You need some help?
- [29:59]
Alex Filippenko
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 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, with each bit of space expanding, can and do go away faster than the speed of light. And Einstein wouldn't rat 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. 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.
- [31:18]
David
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? Right, 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.
- [31:40]
Alex Filippenko
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 wanted 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 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.
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Cleo Abram
So the question I would be wondering if I were in the audience listening to. We have an expanding universe. It is potentially infinite. My question would be, so where is everybody?
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Alex Filippenko
Yeah, so yeah, where are they all? The Fermi paradox.
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Cleo Abram
Is the Great Filter in front of us is the question.
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Alex Filippenko
Yeah, I actually think the Great Filter is in front of us. That's a, 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. All right. 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. 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 and 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.
- [33:56]
David
Makes 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.
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Alex Filippenko
Yeah, certainly communication techniques could be different. So I'm not saying we know at 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, going to 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 aliens that were much farther away than, you know, 100 or 1,000 light years. And the galaxy is 100,000 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.
- [34:59]
David
You know, 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.
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Alex Filippenko
Yeah.
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David
I've heard from lots of scientists that NIH grants have been cut.
- [35:13]
Alex Filippenko
Yeah.
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David
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?
- [35:27]
Alex Filippenko
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 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 gotta be my primary concern right now. And I don't know how I'm gonna 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.
- [36:47]
David
Right.
- [36:47]
Alex Filippenko
Cutting the funding there. These are researchers who are doing things that are gonna be good for humanity soon. Not these unanticipated spinoffs, but the kind of stuff I do should be supported as well.
- [37:01]
David
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 Filipenko.
- [37:33]
Alex Filippenko
Thank you. Thanks so much. Regulators are now approving drone deliveries.
- [37:41]
Keller Renardo Clifton
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. What nerds are working on during the weekends in their garages today are what will be the giant companies of five or ten years from now.
- [38:06]
David
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Zipline's Keller Renardo Clifton.
- [38:22]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Well, good morning, everybody. So David was talking a little bit about technopessimism. 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, we had been. Our backgrounds were in automation and robotics. We had this simple, naive idea that 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 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 Kabgai, 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 ten times as fast. And you can see the women in this video are like, what the hell did we just see? Which is funny. I was taking the video. I kind of looked up at them, and they were looking at me very suspiciously. We often try to describe. It's a funny thing about what we do. We try to describe what we're going to do either to doctors or to nurses or hospital administrators. And they look at us like we're completely crazy or on drugs. 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 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. 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. Which made me realize humans go from science fiction to entitlement in approximately seven days, which is great. That's what technology should do. 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 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 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. This vehicle, as it's flying back, we're aiming for a 1cm tail hook on the back of that aircraft. This is 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, you know, 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 1:00am the system operates 24, 7, 365. They never take a day off. You know, 3:00am 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 the back at 5 or 6am 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 8am, 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 life saving delivery of blood, vaccines, transfusions, infusions, cancer products, almost the entire public healthcare supply chain. And by 10am 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 of what this could look like one day. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. So 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 is evolving, how what we started doing in 2016 is evolving into the next generation technology and launching in the U.S. wow, that was so cool.
- [46:02]
Alex Filippenko
We love the.
- [46:11]
Keller Renardo Clifton
So if you're like, okay, that's cool, but when can I use it? 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 health care Systems in the U.S. 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 growing 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 the US Right now in April and by July, 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 has a net promoter score of 94. And I was talking to a grandma a couple 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, you know, 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. 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. 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 8, 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. 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. 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 or the 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. The first delivery happened in under seven minutes from 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. Just a hint at something cool that we can't announce just yet. You know, 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 had 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, kids are telling their parents what do they want to do for the weekend? They want to go and watch the zipline aircraft. And so we do take these pictures just when we're at the sites of people hanging out on the hoods of their cars, or a mom with her kids sitting in her lap, or the kids looking through the window of the car just watching the system operate. And that brings me to my last provocative point, which is that our parents had this incredibly inspiring mission. The United States was in this geopolitical race to get to the moon, the 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. Wakanda. Yes. Okay, good. There are nerds in the audience. This is Wakanda. 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. I think that winning the AI and robotics race for America isn't just us building exquisite AI technology to serve the richest people on the coast 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. These countries want to be leapfrogging into the future. They want access to the best technology that America has to offer. 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.
- [53:30]
Cleo Abram
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.
- [53:38]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Cool.
- [53:39]
Cleo Abram
So taking it back to where you began, why start in Rwanda?
- [53:44]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Yeah. It's funny. Everybody makes this assumption that the most advanced technology in the world is going to start in the United States and then trickle its way out, maybe to. 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 developing countries. I think that paradigm is largely wrong. And it has a lot to do with 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. 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 toward kids with severe anemia due to malaria. And she was like, just show us that you can do that. And so it's interesting. That was the best advice the company ever received. And we've really just been kind of following their lead for the last eight years as we've developed the technology from.
- [55:05]
Cleo Abram
There, the reduction in maternal mortality. When you showed that stat, I got goosebumps. It's just incredible.
- [55:11]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Yeah. And by the way, I think a lot of times people in the US Think like, oh, those poor Africans, it's unbelievable that they have those kinds of health care problems. We have this exact same problems in the U.S. people in the audience may not know, but the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality of any developed country, and rates for African American women are three times that the average. I mean, we have a lot of challenges with rural health care 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.
- [55:49]
Cleo Abram
So you come to the United States, you launch it here. Tell me about the first period of.
- [55:54]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Launching in the U.S. 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 birthday cakes and rotisserie chickens via just those 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 two. It's the video I showed today. And we only launched Platform 2 on January 15, 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.
- [56:33]
Cleo Abram
What has it felt like?
- [56:37]
Keller Renardo Clifton
You know, it's stressful. Hardware is incredibly hard. We have been scaling a hardware product while the tariff craziness has been going on through March, April and May. Building a global supply chain, I mean, zipline. Just to put it into perspective, 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 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 as you're launching.
- [57:43]
David
In the U.S. 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 a 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?
- [58:07]
Keller Renardo Clifton
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 5 1/2 billion instant deliveries being done every year just in the U.S. 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 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. This is a bizarre solution. I think the reality is we have this new demand and the demand is vast. People want things delivered quickly and they want to have more time with their family rather than spending time in traffic or 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. 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 realize 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 U.S. wow. So this is kind of a.
- [59:37]
David
Based on the order rate, provocative idea.
- [59:39]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Yeah. Basically, if you make the deliveries less expensive, 10 times as fast and just a way better experience or a lot more, not that surprising. So I think the reality is actually 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 can have something delivered in 7 minutes or 8 minutes or 12 minutes, you.
- [60:05]
David
Does it need to be much cheaper?
- [60:08]
Keller Renardo Clifton
I think it will be naturally, but I don't believe it needs to be. I mean, it's the reason that Waymo right now is more expensive and people prefer Waymo.
- [60:15]
David
What's the weight limit? And then how much of the market does that address?
- [60:18]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Yeah, I mean, right now the system is designed to deliver up to 8 pounds, and 8 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.
- [60:38]
Cleo Abram
So while this is all happening, while zipline is exploding, I think many Americans came to believe that the, 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?
- [60:56]
Keller Renardo Clifton
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.
- [61:09]
David
Who was it? I don't even know what that interview was.
- [61:12]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Jeff from Amazon.
- [61:13]
David
Oh, Jeff did that?
- [61:13]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Yeah, it was like 2013. He's like, oh, well, you know, we'll be doing.
- [61:16]
David
I know that.
- [61:17]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Yeah. So he, I mean, they promised, you know, they announced Amazon Prime Air and they said by 2015, you know, 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, you know, similar trend that you see happened with autonomous vehicles, you know, 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 Robo Taxi scaling commercially. The reality is with these kinds of technologies, I think you always have like the bubble and 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, you know, 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. I mean, when you, when I talk to that grandma or you like 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, you know, that's the retail use cases, let alone the life saving implications this has for healthcare logistics.
- [62:58]
David
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 is invested, by the way. I thought it was like either Elon or someone from Google or Jeff. And then there've been 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? Help us understand how hard the tech is. What do you have to engineer to get the unit cost advantages that you're having today? And how persistent will that be?
- [63:34]
Keller Renardo Clifton
I mean, I think there are a lot of people out there. We saw over the last 10 years so many companies or teams, they would 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 TechCrunch to write an article about it and be like, it's a kitty hawk. Moment drone delivery is here and we've seen that like 50 times at this point. I think people kind of know that it's not real. 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 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. That's hard. And it kind of has to be built from scratch. So we honestly don't worry that our competition is motorcycles and cars. If we are better than motorcycles and cars, 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. It's so obvious that this needs to exist. The demand is unbelievably vast. It's going to be one of the biggest markets on earth. 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 most ready to for primetime.
- [65:13]
David
Want to talk about Wakanda?
- [65:15]
Cleo Abram
I do. So just to jump ahead, 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.
- [65:34]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Yeah, the thing that always really inspired us, you know, you talk about logistics. I mean, logistics is boring, 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 that's also what makes it great for robotics and automation. And I think the thing, the key thing to realize is the golden billion that Cleo is talking about. Right? The richest billion people on Earth. Like the goal, my assumption is we're all in the golden billion. Like 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, five and a half 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? Why should we be applying it to this industry is it's not just 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 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 is going to save lives, increase economic opportunity. I think it's going to make the world a more stable place. 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 know we're both kind of like solar punk techno optimists, right? 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.
- [67:28]
Cleo Abram
That's the future I think we all want to be part of.
- [67:30]
David
Amazing. Guys, please join me in thanking Keller and Cleo. Did you guys love Science Corner?
- [67:42]
Keller Renardo Clifton
Thanks, Cleo.