I want to start with Adams. You have this great line on the website that I actually love. It's this awesome sentence. It says, 'Physical world autonomy requires AI for the physical world. This kind of intelligence requires computation we haven't invented at an efficiency we can't yet fathom with deep learning models to understand and act in the physical world that don't yet exist.' Tell us what you're building.
Let's start at the mission. It's easier that way. Physical automation to transform industries. So you start there. You can sort of go, it's almost Socratic, like what does that mean? And sort of in the terms that people use today is physical AI and robotics to transform industry. And you go, okay, well, so what is it, a humanoid? And no, it's not. It's not, I wouldn't call myself anti-humanoid. It's just what we're doing is not that. It's specialized robotics that it's not like we make robotics and anybody can have some. It's more like robotics and AI that go after an industry, one industry at a time. And in the industries we think it makes massive moves, big moves. And once we get our sea legs, we go to the next and the next. If you're doing it really well, I like to say that the only constraint on our imagination is management capacity.
We're solving problems every day. If I have to solve lots of small problems because I don't have a lot of management capacity under me, we're not going to do very much. I'm going to be constrained in what portion of my imagination can become possible, like real. But if you have lots of management capacity, lots of problem solving capacity, then those constraints unwind.
So how do you broaden and expand the management capacity you have?
Okay. So why don't we step back and talk a little bit about, like, I have a lot of frameworks for this kind of stuff. One of them I call the meta problem. Imagine if you had this equation which is the derivative of problem solving dt must always be greater than or equal to the derivative of problem creation dt. And if that's ever not true, you have a real problem. I call that the meta problem. So what's happening is that if you are creating problems faster than you can solve them, then you're kind of effed. But when you create problems, like in an Uber context would be like, let's go to China. That's creating a problem. Right now the way I think about problems, I don't think about them in a negative way. I think about problems the way like a math professor would think about a problem. A math professor without interesting problems to solve is a sad math professor. Yeah. So it's like a good thing. So you want to create interesting things to solve. You want to create problems to solve. You have to predict well the nature of the problem and your ability and capacity to solve it. You create a problem today. You may not understand the nature of the problem solving you're going to have to do. You have to predict it. And those problems start coming ashore in like six months in like a real heavy way and maybe even longer. And so you have to be good at predicting what is the nature of that problem and saying, okay, well, what is my management capacity to solve it. If that equation gets out of balance, then you have to stop problem creation while you get the solving going so that you're not drowning anymore.
Right. Can you give us an example of what happened in China then? I mean, China was like amazing, but very difficult and in some ways impossible to predict.
Let's go to China. Sounds like fun. It was a super awesome adventure because what happened was is I was like, 'Sounds cool.' And I got, it was 201, probably 2013 or early 13. Uber started in 2010, so it was still early crew. And I got a crew of folks, like super OG guys, and we stayed in an apartment in China for a week or two, a week and a half, two weeks, something like that, and met with everybody we could. It's actually when I first met Juan Shing, at Muan actually. And he told me I was crazy. Don't do it.
It's the worst idea ever. What was your response when people tell you you're crazy, it's not going to work? Like that's the best thing ever.
Okay. So I mean we're, there's many threads here. We're already poking through. We're gonna go everywhere. Okay. So in engineering we call this BFS, breadth first search. So I'm not able to go deep. We're like, we're painting the breadth of the tree before we're going deep. So we have a cultural value for that at Uber and I've pulled it into our new value system at, into my value system at my current company. But it's called super pumped, which is about infectious enthusiasm about the hard things. The harder it is, the more weird, gnarly, whatever words, whatever superlative you want to put in front of it, the more awesome it would be to solve it.
The more excited I get. And the problems that are more awesome to solve are the ones that people think are impossible to solve. Sometimes people think something is impossible. They perceive it that way, but it's very possible, but it's actually easy. And there's other ones that people think are impossible that are super difficult, but possible. That's how you think about Adams now, right? When I hear you speak about it, and when I read about it, you're like, 'This is going to be super difficult, but it is possible.'
So Adams is the name of my company. We just named it this. It came from a crazy obscure name that was done on purpose. We basically went ultra stealth. But the real question is coming out of Uber. What was the next thing and why? And it is Adams. We just started calling it that now. I was yearning or had a penchant for an affinity for something that's super hard, super complicated.
Have you always been like that or was the experience of Uber that crystallized how important that was? When did this desire...
It's always been this way, which is, and I think it's funny how you got there because it's like that feeling when somebody tells you something that is impossible and you're like, 'Is that right?' And I'm like, 'Watch this.' I've always had that. Like when I was a kid I'd always have a sparkle in my eye to do something somebody was like, 'That's impossible,' that kind of thing.
Did you know when you started it, like, how, there's no way you could have known like how difficult it was or did you like, this is a hairy problem, I'm going to be fighting complexity?
There's a complexity to it that was part of the attraction.
Okay. And you saw that from the first spot?
Yeah, from the very early days I knew it was complicated. I didn't understand exactly how it was complicated.
I'm very curious, what you said was very interesting, you're creating all these problems, some of the problems you're creating are not coming ashore, I think is the word you use for...
It takes time to see what the nature of the problem is that you created.
So can you give an example of like a problem you're creating when you start in China, how long it takes to come ashore and what happens when it does?
Okay. So, what you learn when you go and do what we did in China is you learn that when you go and take your business and go to China, you have to start over. So many people think that you can take your business and take it somewhere, which by the way Uber kind of like trademarked that if there's such a thing, like we made that a thing where like cities, countries didn't matter, we created a system that was inevitable. But China was different because of how that country works. Everything's different and that means you have to start from scratch. It's like as something as simple as like the phones, or let's say maps, GPS. There's a different GPS system in China than there is here.
Well, it's like different. So, if I want to understand how cars are moving through space, I have to change my GPS system so I can do that. So, I understand. And that's like one of like a hundred things that are different in China, which means you have to start over. And so, yeah, you're starting a new business when you take it to China. And you have to be in a very receptive, like, I am going to learn how to do things differently in this very different place and be excited and interested in how different it is. Whereas most Western entrepreneurs that go to China, almost none succeed.
Have any succeeded at the time? Like Apple?
I'd say the two that you would come up with in our area, in our neck of the woods, there are others, but like in our neck of the woods, you're like, 'Okay, Elon definitely did.' Right. And Apple definitely did. Tim Apple and Elon, right? Those are the two guys.
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So, you start getting in this war with Didi. Was there anybody else besides, was there multiple competitors?
We eventually rolled out. So Uber Black was one thing much smaller than like a Didi thing. There was another company called Kuaidi. And we were just in this corner sort of doing a niche thing which is a super high-end thing in China which is like so niche, right? An S-class in China at that time is like very, it's thin. I mean we're growing. It was fun but it was thin. But I think it was 2014, I believe it was 14. Yeah I believe it was 14. Must have been where we basically said, 'Okay, we're going to do ride sharing in China.' Nobody had done that. Didi was taxis. And if anybody who's used a taxi app with taxis, the problem is you're a second-class citizen. Meaning taxis want people to wave them down. They don't want to take rides from an app where they have to give a percentage of the revenue to some middleman. That's not a thing. Right. So, it sort of will fill in the gaps, but it's not their main jam. But we went to full ride share, which is like peer-to-peer ride sharing where anybody driving a car could offer a ride to a citizen in the city, which before you did not exist at all in China. Certainly not coordinated by an app. This is now a ride sharing, what was at the time called peer-to-peer ride sharing. Think of, some people would think of Lyft or Uber X, this kind of thing in the US context. But what we called it was the People's Uber. And so in the app, you'd open it up and it was red cars. But we became Chinese. We had a massive awesome brand there because we cared and we were passionate about the user, the customer in ways that these other companies just weren't. But what was interesting about what was going on with Didi was that while we were inventing, innovating, they were copying. And these guys were so good at copying, it was almost an art form. To be able to copy as quickly and fiercely as they did was like warrior mentality in its own right. But it's like I like to say, the place to be is like a Braveheart, which is like the warrior poet. These guys were just pure warriors. There was no poetry. They weren't creating the new thing. They were copying.
But almost to a level of poetry in their ability to copy and the speed at which they were able to do it.
Right. But while they were getting ready copying it, it was a very wild sort of half technology, half regulatory arbitrage. Very bold. It took them a while to copy. And while that happened, it went vertical.
Yeah, Uber did. And I'd say like so vertical it almost leaned to the left. Like it almost started bending. The curve almost bent to the left. Okay. And that was what it was. The opportunity was massive where we would basically at some point probably our top 10 cities were all Chinese cities.
That's wild. In rides. Yeah.
Not in revenue because the rides instead of like, at the, in my day 13 bucks, 15 bucks, whatever, they were, these were like three bucks, two bucks type stuff, right? I remember we were doing this fund raise in China. We had to raise money in China because we, I mean it was a huge, I mean it was just pulling a huge amount of money.
You mean you were burning a ton of money?
We were burning a lot of money, but also we needed a partner. When we first went to China, everybody told us that we needed a partner. And they'll just tell you that. We're like, 'What is a partner?' They're like, 'Well, that person or that entity has like 50% of your company in China.' I go, 'Why is this a law?' They're like, 'No, but if you don't do it, you're totally screwed.' And I just never got it. Nobody could tell me why. And why I had to. I just said, 'I'm going to try. Screw it.' Which is like again, Apple, Tesla, these guys said screw it and they just did it. Right. Now and we eventually did get a partner but instead of giving up 50% we gave up I think it was 7%. And it was to Baidu, but it was because we were getting massive regulatory heat and as long as we had a partner by our side we could be Chinese.
Right. And like this is like when you start meeting with ministers in China, you know, like at the top at the highest level, you have to be vouched for by somebody in China or things start to get weird.
And that's what the 7% is for.
That's what the 7% was for. We needed a partner inside China that was trusted essentially. But like I remember, you know, right about the time that we got that partner, you know, we of course were doing this and there was a strike, a pan-European strike for all taxis in all European cities. And at some point, I think there were like, I think this is 15, I believe, 2015, July, I think. You know, there were vehicles being lit on fire in Paris, you know, but it was like every major city, they just tried to shut the thing down.
And what are they protesting?
Progress. So I'm going and meeting with the transportation minister in China and he throws down three newspapers, western newspapers, that top of the fold, old school newspapers, right? Remember those? Because pictures of this chaos across all these cities and he's like, 'This is a problem and this is not going to, you know, this is not something we're okay with.' And I said, 'Why?' And you know, there's obvious, I knew what he was going to say and I said, 'But this is all western democracies.' And I'm like, in western democracy, we know, is a popularity contest. And what that means is that the politician succeeds by being popular. He doesn't succeed when progress comes. And the only way to get progress in a democracy is for that politician who seeks to be popular when he's under threat. When there is a threat of disruption or instability is the only time you'll get progress in Western democracy. And I'm like, 'But so what? We're here in China and it's totally different.' He goes, 'What do you mean?' And I'm like, 'Well, the only time I'm able to get progress in China is when stability is in harmony with progress.' So, or let's say progress, those two must be harmonized. You will only get progress when it is in harmony with stability. And I said it in that way, those three words. And that was very Chinese, you know, and totally different. It's like I'm like, if there was ever any hint of instability that we were to bring to China, we would be shut down immediately. But as long as we create a foundation of stability, progress is super welcome. Progress must be in harmony with stability. And totally different.
So when did they take the viewpoint, if they took the viewpoint that Uber is injecting instability into their city or area?
Yeah. But they at some point felt like we were, we may win.
And instead of really seeing super problems at the, we didn't, for the most part we were treated fairly at the cities for the most part. Not completely but for the most part. But what happened was the, what I would say at the time is that the China war went global. So, we were spending, let's say, tens of millions of dollars a month fighting Didi in all these cities. And the fight was like, I needed to subsidize rides to gain market share. When I gain market share, there's network effect because if I'm bigger, then my system is more efficient. And if I'm more efficient than them, they have to subsidize more than I do to compete with me. So how do I subsidize where, when, how to get that efficiency edge, that network effect efficiency edge so that I subsidize less than them? This is why, you know, like Lyft is smaller than Uber because we were better at this part of the thing and people don't really know that's what it takes. But like how do you get efficiency edge? Efficiency edge starts when somebody even downloads the app and signs up. If it's easier to sign up on one versus the other, you have an efficiency edge. If it's easier to call a vehicle and like get it to you without problems, you have an efficiency edge because you'll have less support. You'll have less like people are getting their higher completion rates. Like if the cars are moving to where the demand is because the driver app has good sort of ways to point drivers to the right place, that means you have shorter pickup time. Efficiency edge. Efficiency edge means you get bigger faster. You get bigger faster means you have a bigger network of drivers which means wherever you are in the city you are going to get a faster pickup. And it will be cheaper because well if there's less dead time for the driver to pick you up then if he's generally trying to optimize for dollars per hour then the whole thing just starts working better. That's the network effect. So you're like okay how do I get bigger? Well, I'll make the rides really cheap. That's one way of doing it. And if your rides are cheaper than them, then all of a sudden your network gets bigger. Your network gives you efficiency, which then means you can get to a lower price point without subsidies that the competitor still has to subsidize.
You'd make money profit at a place where they would make a loss. And the robber barons all understood this, like Carnegie, all...
Yeah. When you're talking I'm like, this is Rockefeller.
It totally, so I read, I think it was a Chernow biography, Titan.
Yes. Okay, there's actually a better one I'm going to send you. And what it is is this book from 1970 by David Freeman Hawk, it's called Rockefeller the Founding Father, John D the Founding Father of Rockefellers. Titan is 800 pages and you got a lot about his like family history, this is like 250 pages of how he built Standard Oil and it's this thing.
It is exactly what you're describing. I want to interrupt you one second before you go back to it. My question to you now is like I spend thousands of dollars a month on Uber and I only use Uber Black SUV. It's insane. What in a mature market in the United States in these big cities that I'm using Uber? What would, how would the network effects of Uber be reversed?
Okay, so there's a couple things. First is a small player competing against Uber has certain advantages. Let's say a small player said, 'I'm going to have cheaper rides than the big player.' Okay, the small player, let's say, is one-tenth the size. Let's just say their subsidies on an absolute basis are somewhere around one-tenth as much. So, if I am the small guy and I go and subsidize rides, I'm going to gain market share unless the big guy is spending 10 times as much as me. Now the efficiency edge can make it instead of 10x can make it 7x. Okay. But you ultimately, a well-funded competitor, you have to let them grow to some degree so that they have to feel the weight of the size of what they are. So when they're subsidizing it becomes a problem and it hurts some more. I like to talk about situations where if we had a competitor we weren't exactly sure what was going on because what happens is you have to guess when you're subsidizing you have to guess do I have an efficiency edge on them or not. You try to make yourself as efficient as possible but you don't know if you are more efficient than them or not. So you need signal to determine whether you're better. One of the ways you could totally do it is let the competitor get to 50%. So it's 50/50. You have the same network size, then you would start to see, okay, is my price lower than theirs while maintaining a 50% market share or is my price higher than theirs while maintaining a 50% market share? If I can maintain 50% market share while having a higher price, then my system is more efficient than them. Then I could start dialing because I know they'll lose because why? Because at some point efficiency outstrips subsidy. What I mean by that is when you're subsidizing you go through huge growth and at some point you get so big that you can't really subsidize a lot. Like if you're doing 10 billion rides a year, you can't subsidize two bucks a ride because you run out of money. Just $20 billion a year. Nobody's going to fund that. Okay? Right? And so as you get bigger and bigger, the amount of subsidy you can actually put to it is smaller and smaller. And at some point, the amount of subsidy you can put to it realistically is smaller than your efficiency gain by just being better. And so then you efficiency outstrips subsidy. Anybody who's a small player in a market has a natural advantage if they're well-funded, is that you can gain market share very quickly and you can force the big guy to burn money.
But why wouldn't the big guy be able to drown the smaller competitor faster?
Well, there are ways to reverse it. So, for instance, the other way where there's asymmetric going the other way is recruiting drivers. So, for instance, I could give subsidies to drivers if I'm the big guy. I can give subsidies to drivers that are like, they're like $1,000 if you join Uber and you do 100 trips in that first week. I could suck up that supply. The only way they're going to be able to keep those drivers is they're going to have to subsidize across the pole of their drivers even though I just took a small number of them. So, I'm going to suck up all of their drivers unless they defend their driver base. There's like a lot of little things like this and I'm almost like remembering, it's been 10 years since I did any of this, but like I'm trying to remember all the ways where it's asymmetric one way versus the other way.
I think you hit on it, it's this paying attention to every single little detail. So like when you were speaking about even the sign up flow and like how fast the ride comes and how easy to put in your credit card information, everything else. What I'm sitting here thinking is not necessarily about you and Uber and China. I'm thinking about Rockefeller walking by and saying, 'Hey, you guys are putting 50 drops of solder on these barrels and you're doing that because you think it's 50 so it doesn't leak. Try 48.' They try 48, it leaves. What about 49? 49 doesn't leave. And he says the first year that only saved us $2,500 a year because that one drop, but we were tiny. Now it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he did that with a thousand different things. So by the time he got to his scale, you're not competing at all. It's impossible.
And so that's super important. Now I read Titan after Uber. Okay. And I'm reading him going, 'Holy shit, this dude was way more hardcore.' But the reason why is because I got an anti, like there we had antitrust attorneys at Uber and they're like very making it very clear. Like there's certain things you can do, certain things you can't. They're like training me and educating me on antitrust law. Now, at first when you hear that and you're just a startup kid, like literally just get, you're like antitrust law. That's like what are you, can't wait to have that problem, you know? But it ends up being obviously very important. But Rockefeller didn't have that.
No, he, the laws passed because of him, of course, but it's like he's the super, like people use OG, they use it the wrong way. It means original gangster. He's the OG. OG.
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I think the other thing about monopolies too is there are different things because sometimes the monopoly emerges because the company is so competitive. Sometimes the monopoly emerges because the company is anti-competitive and they're different.
That's interesting. Say more about this. Yeah. Well, where I ended up at Uber was it basically sort of the motto was more like the one who serves the customer best gets all the customers.
That's where we ended up. So, you can be highly competitive. And look, we had never at Uber, we never got a regulation passed that would hurt a competitor. We never would do that. That's just not how we rolled. We never donated to a campaign ever to try to get something passed.
You wanted to win because you built the best service.
I'm reading this biography right now. It was published in 1975. It's on the founder of Honda who's competing in Japan. He founds Honda 1948. Japan's in ruins. And the technology in Japan is really low at the time. And so all these, all of his, the people that are building motorcycles and cars, they're like, 'Let's get together and petition the government to not allow imports.' And he's like, and he was the only one that voted against it. He goes, 'No, no, no.' He goes, 'The way to win is to build the superior technology.' Yeah. Because if we have the best product, that product will go, it won't just be profitable in Japan, it'll spread throughout the entire world. Very much like what you're saying here. It's like, 'No, I don't want protectionism. I want to win because I built the best product and customers are choosing me.'
And also remember what we were overcoming to do what we do was a system that was perfectly anti-competitive.
Can you explain a government condoned monopoly or a government condoned cartel called taxi? People don't understand this. Can you explain the environment in which you started Uber?
Let's start with what is a taxi. Okay. What is a taxi? We'll do New York because it's the best way to tell it. In the early 1900s, there were people that were picking up other citizens that needed a ride across town and charging them for it. And eventually the city decided, hey, look, we want to have this to be licensed and controlled in some way or like certainly rules of the road, just rules of the road. So, you'd get a license, but anybody could get a license. You'd get that license for free and they would make sure like you weren't like a felon and like different things like this, which you'd go, 'That sounds great. Good idea.' But anybody could get a license and get it for free, a taxi license in New York. And eventually that number got to, I don't know, somewhere around 13,000. And then those 13,000 people who had licenses, this is now like, let's call it the 1920s, the 1930s, decided that they would lobby the city to give no more licenses out. And the city, they did some deals. Who knows, you know, that era in New York, you know, how that went down, but no more licenses. And of course that was great for the people who had them because as the city was growing there's more and more demand to get across town but there are a fixed number of licenses, people who could do it, who are allowed to do it. Then the taxi guys go to city council and they lobby again. And the next version of the lobbying is we want to be able to sell the license to somebody else. So now I have this thing now. It's known as a medallion. Now I can, it's sort of artificial scarcity. And I can sell it to somebody else who wants to get a cash flow that's an artificially high cash flow because nobody's allowed to compete essentially. And then they went to city council one more time and they said, 'We want to be able to lease out this license to an individual on a daily or weekly basis.' And that is the modern taxi system today. When Uber rolled into New York, the driver was getting a 12-hour shift 7 days a week, but there are two 12-hour shifts. Each of those drivers was paying $40,000 a year to rent a car for half time.
Which means the guy who had the license, whose grandpa got it for free. Okay. All right. The guy who has a license, whose grandpa got it for free, is getting $80,000 a year renting a car to a taxi driver. And that taxi driver who's paying $40,000 a year for 12 hours a...
He's renting a car for $40,000 a year. For that privilege, he gets to be impoverished. That is the taxi system. And they are over a hundred years. So it's like Stockholm syndrome or regulatory capture is so freaking tight that the regulators, the difference between the regulator and the taxi company is almost indistinguishable.
And it had to be jarring for you to walk into a system where you just described, you're just describing corruption.
It is legalized corruption. So remember, what is a taxi system? It is a government-condoned cartel that outlaws competition. But it'd be jarring for you because then you come in with a better product at a cheaper price that customers love. You've caught me in 2010 or whenever you open up in New York, you've kept me since then. I've never opened up another app like 16, 17 years, however long it's been. It's like I'm choosing to do that and then the governments are like, no, no, this legalized corruption is good. You, Travis and Uber, get the hell out of here.
So what happens is, being anti-competitive is illegal in the United States unless you get a government official or regulator to do it for you, then it's legal.
Pretty interesting. We were talking before we started recording about capitalism and he has some interesting thoughts and ways to describe it. I would also say, you know, this show is a love letter to capitalism. It's very pro-entrepreneurship. I'm the son of a Cuban immigrant. I grew up meeting people that came over here in rafts. From the time I was 9 years old, I knew I'm obviously born into a very special place. If these people risk their lives to get here and the wealth that this country has created. What I think also has to be called out is this crony capitalism where it's like, I like the Hondas of the world where it's like, no, I want to win because I'm the best, not because I gave you a bunch of money and you shut down my competitors. That should be called out. So it's super interesting because you go, okay, well in this case Uber was the symbol of hyper-capitalism in many ways, like it was embracing all of the values and principles of capitalism but it started with the most important which is an individual has a right to choose between different suppliers of a good or service.
It's like a pro-competition thing. The consumer has a right to choose between different offerings. The other side of that is an individual can start a business to provide that service or offering. So you go, okay. So capitalism at its foundation is somebody can start a legal business, make a product or a service and offer it to people and the people have the right to choose which one they use. That's capitalism. So the question is what's anti-capitalism? Anti-capitalism is the constraint on people being able to start a business or have a vocation that they choose and/or individuals not having the right to choose which service or product that they buy. At the core, that's what it is. Now, people get confused. Sometimes they think something is capitalism that is not. It's pretty obvious, you know, anybody watching any part of this conversation on taxis, it's super clear that taxis are definitely not capitalism.
But it's why they are not very good and it's why they are more expensive than they need to be. And if people are taking Ubers today in New York and wondering why it's so expensive and why it's getting more unreliable, it's because after I left Uber, they started passing a bunch of laws that are turning Uber into the taxi system.
Yeah. They have a limit on the number of drivers that can be on Uber. They've turned it into a medallion system that cannot be traded. And as people retire out of driving, the number of Ubers, I believe, I may have this wrong, but it's either fixed or shrinking right now. And that is why the prices are going up and the service is going down. But Uber's thought of as a capitalist thing, but actually the government is constraining it. And why? Because of the taxi owners who want their medallion prices to go back up.
This is madness. Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged?
I mean a lot of people are like what's happening now feels like the scenario, you know, the scenes from that book.
I haven't, it was recommended to me a million times. There's a bunch of people, guests that have been on the show that have talked to me about it in private and finally I was like, all right, the 12th person that recommended it, I finally read it and I'm like, and then I went looked up, I was like, wait, this was written from like 1946 to 1956, I think the 10-year period she was writing. I was like, this sounds, the people in this book is exactly, it's the same kind of person today.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I agree with that.
The whole book is like we have these prime movers and then we have these people that are just trying to restrain their competitive and they're, I love what you said, like what are they protesting?
Yeah. But what happens when the people building the progress then go on strike? That's a very fascinating theme throughout the book.
Yeah. I mean we get to some pretty interesting places with this kind of thing. In your career, did you only run into this government corruption in Uber? Have you run into any, I know you started City Storage Systems, Cloud Kitchens was in City Storage Systems. Now you renamed it at Adams. Have you run into, because your whole thing, what I love about you is just like all physical world. I think you said it's a, you consider it a calling to digitize the physical world. I love that you use the word calling though. I think that's really important. Have you run into other forms of...
It's everywhere, but taxis is by far the most intense. Literally, we talk about anti-competitive things and antitrust law and Rockefeller and things like this. No, no, no. Taxis, competition is illegal. But why do they still have power? They've captured the regulators through lobbying, through donations, through legalized corruption. And it's not like the only industry where this exists. You know, there are obviously many other industries, but in terms of what I've seen, competition is outlawed.
How does the China Didi Uber story end? Did the government put the hand on the scale and favored Didi over Uber?
So, they ultimately did. What happened was the China war went global and what happened is the sovereign wealth funds in China started pouring billions of dollars into my competitors, Uber's competitors in different regions so that they would subsidize in those regions and drain my resources.
Wait, before you go there, take me your mindset when you realize the game that they're playing.
Yeah. I mean, you're like, damn, that's real. You're like...
What are you like not sleeping or are you like...
Well, I mean, the entire Uber thing was like a lack of sleep, you know? So, it wasn't like this was a new lack of sleep thing. It was just, I mean it was a new thing but lack of sleep generally was a thing just because I had a global business that was really intense and very game theory oriented in the ways that I'm describing which means it was always on and crazy weird things happen in cars at night. So like the first time I got woken up in the middle of the night because there was a drive-by shooting from an Uber. You know what I mean? Like that's not good. The thing is that what happens in a city happens in an Uber.
So you're exposed to all the vagaries of human behavior.
Yeah. The roads are the cardiovascular system for the city. There's nothing that happens in a city that road doesn't touch. You know, people are people. They do things they shouldn't do. What our goal was to make Uber the safest place in a city. And I think we accomplished that. We got pretty close to that. And I know they take it pretty seriously today.
But go back to the stress. Like you wanted the stress, right?
Okay. So, Herb Kelleher, do you know that is...
Founder of Southwest Airlines, most successful airline in history, 40 straight years was profitable. Yeah.
And you know, he was a gangster, right? Drink a fifth of bourbon every day, smoke cigarettes on the planes, and he was an unfiltered guy. I would love if he was still alive. He'd be like one of my top guests I want to talk to. And I love he was doing an interview one time. They're like, 'You undergo a lot of stress. How do you handle it?' And he goes, 'I don't handle it. I like it.' I get that same vibe from you.
The lifestyle of an entrepreneur, I believe at its core, there's a couple other things, but this is one pillar of it is I can take more pain than the other guy and I'll prove it. Once you take on that lifestyle, I mean it's a real thing. It's not just that I choose to take it on. It is the nature of the thing that I am doing. Then you are taking on a life of adversity and overcoming all the time. And once you are seeing adversity all the time and overcoming it, it just becomes normal. The downside of it is you can get used to adversity. It just becomes very normal.
Because you almost start accepting it. You don't, like something bad happens, you don't even get mad.
You're like, 'That's interesting.' But wouldn't it be beneficial to be like unruffled like that where...
There are benefits, but you need to make sure you don't get so used to it that it doesn't even bother you.
You can get so zen you're unbothered.
Now, you still act, but there's something special about the extra fierceness of being bothered, being upset about something that is wrong. Yeah. Wrong things. When what is adversity? What is adversity?
Usually adversity is like some bad shit went down that shouldn't have. And it was done to you. It's adversity. You know what I mean? Like for a farmer, it's like a drought, you know? It's like terrible. So or it could be a lot of things. Could be somebody stole his crops, could be pests, could be, you know, it could be anything. So, are you just getting numb to it? Is that what you're saying? Like, was there parts...
Just saying once you fully embody the lifestyle of adversity and overcoming it, you have to be careful of the ease at which you walk through it because there is an extra power in being bothered by something that is wrong. You can get too used to wrong things happening.
Have you reached that point in your career before?
Well, no. I would say today there are very few things that actually stress me out.
Are you worried about that?
Of course. So I remember the things that are important and that's where I channel fierceness through what is right and what is wrong.
You're almost telling me you've been inoculated from pain.
Yeah. Something like, there's a zen that can happen when a warrior has fought for a long time. You can get used to it.
Yeah. But you still, for at least from the outside you still have this like crazy, I told you you're the most intense person I've ever met and I've met almost all the top founders in the world.
But imagine fierceness with calm on the inside.
That's what you want or that's what you're...
That's what I got. Yeah. That's where I'm at.
Yeah. You weren't calm on the inside when you were building Uber. That's what you're saying. I'm just saying as one entrepreneurs longer and longer and does it properly...
I've never heard it used as a verb. You get to that place. You just get to that place.
Entrepreneurs for longer and longer, I'm using that line, man. You just get to that place. Well, I love what you said though about the pain because you know there's a bunch of maxims from the history of entrepreneurship that I love. Like I think something that we both support is trying to win based on providing the best service. So like one of my favorite maxims comes from Henry Ford where he says money comes naturally as a result of service. If you go read his autobiography you see how he organized Ford Motor Company like we're going to provide the maximum amount of service and the money will take care of itself if I'm just delighting the customer. The bank account will be fine but my favorite maxim from all of history of entrepreneurship is excellence is the capacity to take pain, which is exactly what you said.
Oh, this is, oh I love that one. That is 100% true. So once you say entrepreneurship is the lifestyle of entrepreneuring, the lifestyle of entrepreneuring is this sort of pride and I can take more pain than the other guy. You go, why? Well, the best example is like world-class marathoner on mile 21. You ever seen a marathon on mile 21? Probably on TV. Is that dude smiling? Fuck no. Of course not. Why? Because if he were smiling, if he were just not feeling pain, there's somebody else who will. What is the difference between feeling pain and not feeling pain? It's that extra push. That extra push means he loses if he's not getting into that pain. And that's what excellence is. Excellence is about pushing into the extent, what is a human capable of, the full potential because if you don't, somebody else does.
Yeah. And then that becomes the standard of excellence. And all of human progress is through that push towards excellence. That is a push through pain. If it is not painful, you're clearly not pushing hard enough. And I love that you've tied this to if you're doing something that's easy, you're doing something that's not valuable. If you're doing something that's easy, it may be valuable, but you're about to get your ass whooped. Or it may not be valuable. It just depends. So, you know, easy could be sitting on the beach for 6 months. Now, it could be valuable to you, respect, and that's all good. Everybody has that choice. That's all good. But you're not bringing human progress. And then you go, well that's interesting. So if somebody sits on the beach for 6 months, they're not bringing, there's no part, they're not participating in human progress. I'm like, well, how could they? You're like, well, what if they start thinking deeply about life and about philosophy and about society and they had really amazing thoughts. I'm like, well, did they write them down? I'm like, 'Okay, he wrote him down.' So now he's on the beach writing it down. And I'm like, 'Okay, but there's lots of people doing that. He's got to be better than those other guys if he wants to be about progress.' So now he's really fucking writing them down. And he's honing those words to such a degree that it's beautiful and perfect before somebody else has that thought and does it themselves. And now he's in pain.
How long did you take from when you left Uber, which obviously had to be fucking devastating, heartbreaking, to jumping into the next thing? Did you sit on the beach for a little bit? Like, what did you actually do?
No. So, it was like 7 months, six, seven months, something like this. And most of it was fending off lawfare.
So, wait, the lawfare was it criminal? Were they trying to like...
It was civil and criminal for sure. Yeah.
Yeah. So, you're fighting off that for...
Yeah. It's like a corporate cancel culture, lawfare, like all the things on the corporate side of all of those things. Remember I said, remember earlier we talked about business became politics.
We were talking about this off camera. Can you talk about this now?
Yeah. So there was, you know, in the 2010s there was something that happened in the media and it was that business became politics. If you just think about your favorite politician and just go on the internet today, do you think you're gonna see a lot of happy-go-lucky stuff about your favorite politician? Like, of course not. We know that because politicians basically just, the nature of what it is they do. There's a lot of mudslinging and a lot of stuff and a vast majority of it is just untrue. Though I'd say with some of our politicians today maybe a lot of it is true but you know it's just a dog-eat-dog mudslinging thing and the headlines are often not true which I think we know that in politics. What we didn't know in the 2010s is that, or that was just starting to happen, was that business was becoming politics. That the headlines you were starting to read about business were just narratives and often fabrications with substantial material perversion of truth.
And you were exhibit A for this.
For sure. I would say so.
Yeah, I would say so too.
Yeah. So, you know, like talk to anybody who knows me, they would basically say the difference between, especially if you talk about 10 years ago, the difference between the public persona and the actual person couldn't be more different.
Well, I can speak to this and I know when we before started recording and I've been chasing you for a while. And I saw you at Michael's house and everything else which was funny by the way when you walked up to us and I was like, do you remember me? You go like, yeah. I go, it's time to do the fucking show and you go, it's time to do the fucking show. I love that but what I would say is just like in terms of founders that actually know their shit, your reputation is sterling. Like if you're a killer entrepreneur, you say great things about Travis. It's the only shit I've ever heard comes from like investors. This is why I don't necessarily believe it comes from investors, but I'm saying what I hear.
