No, you're not feeling it. Okay, you're not feeling it. Okay, you're not feeling it. I thought it was really, you know, I have really great friends out there that weren't invited this evening, but they're good friends. Well, that's true. Okay. So, I think a lot of folks know that sort of my whole thing and you hear me talk about all the time digitizing the physical world, bits to atoms, this kind of thing. Um, you know, some people like, 'Oh yeah, physical AI, of course he's going to say that. That makes sense.' We've been doing this for a long time. Okay, this is a continuation of a lot of the awesome things we did back in the Uber day. So, I'm going to show you a video from 10 years ago.
Consider the bit, the building block of the digital world. It was invented just 70 years ago. Yet in its short life, it has changed the way we communicate, do business, and live almost every aspect of our lives. For Uber, the bit represents our technology. It's complex, precise, and advanced. But when it's expressed, it is effortless and refined. And if you think the bit is a big deal, consider the atom. Born 13.8 billion years ago. The atom is responsible for everything from the BLT to moms everywhere to New York City. And for us, the atom signifies our rapidly improving cities, the goods we move from place to place, and most importantly, the people we serve. Until a few short years ago, atoms and bits existed in entirely different worlds. But then something happened at Uber. We asked, 'What if we brought these two worlds together? What would that look like?' It looks like this. We are able to create safe, low-cost transportation options like Uber Pool and Uber X. We are able to create efficient and more reliable ways of getting people the things they need. We are able to deliver fresh-cooked meals from the most popular iconic restaurants within minutes and someday safe, efficient movement of people and things at a giant scale. Most of us don't think about bits or atoms much if ever. We think about how to get from here to there, the people in our lives, the millions of tiny dramas that play out across the world each day. The human stuff. Uber ultimately succeeds because we think about the human stuff first. But the way we do it, that's our secret. We leave no bit or atom unturned to create industries that serve people and not the other way around.
So we, I talk about digitizing the physical world all the time. I've been doing it for 10 freaking years. I think I'm making a lot of the folks that are at Uber, they're like, 'We're tired of it. Please stop talking about bits and atoms, it's crazy. I don't even understand what you're talking about.' Look, we know what bits are. Bits, the bits world is a computer. And those of us who were engineers, computer science, etc., and some of us who weren't, we know what that is. The three core computing resources: CPU manipulates the bits, storage stores bits, network moves bits from point A to point B. But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. And you're like, well, I know that CPU manipulates the bits. What manipulates atoms? That's manufacturing or digitized manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? That's real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B. What moves atoms? Well, that's transport or logistics. So, we didn't exactly think of it, we were close, but we didn't exactly think of it this way at the time. But Uber was network for the physical world, digitized transportation, but it's not totally digitized like you see the Waymos out there. Okay, now we're getting there. Of course, I think people are still driving them from the Philippines or something like this. But they're going digital. But the thing is, and this is something that's interesting for entrepreneurs generally, especially in the physical world, digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate still has a long way to go. Huge amount of innovation left to go. And so we have advanced. We've been working really hard. A lot of folks think I'm back, but like, I'm like, dude, I've been working my ass off the whole time. I just haven't been talking about it. Um, what if you're making atoms-based computers, digitized manufacturing, real estate and network for the physical world, or sorry, CPU, storage and network for the physical world. What if you're just the OEM that makes food computers, mining computers, or take your industry and put computer behind it? What if you are doing sort of this, you're making industrial atoms-based computers? That's kind of how we think about what we do. And you know, we look around us and you're like the physical world, you're like, you look, OpenAI is doing really well. Anthropic was doing pretty well. Um, but look around you. Everything we see, whether it's this room or any room or anywhere you go, everything you see was either grown or mined, manufactured and moved. Everything. And so we look at what we do as industrial AI. And I sort of have a nice little definition there. Systems of software, sensors, robotics, and AI used to automate operations of entire industrial sectors. Okay, that's what we do. I don't know if anybody else does it. I mean, there are people doing it that they don't call it this. We're one of the main guys doing this. Okay, so we're going to go through a couple of our atoms-based computers. So, the first one's a food computer, Adam's food, infrastructure for better food. The real question is, can you make a meal that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store? You're like, okay, well, that's a pretty good question. If you can do it, it's awesome, but what would it take? Well, it means that your manufacturing has to be automated. So, we have robotics that basically do the production of food. Let's call that between six and eight, between six and eight dollars per meal. Okay. Um, there's lots of cool things we're going to do in the future here. Um, you also need to be able to move the food, whether it be inside of a facility where it's being made or actually robotic couriers, what I like to call autonomous burritos. You roboticize production. You roboticize the logistics and transportation of food, but you still need a space to do it. This goes back to that sort of atoms-based computer, right? You still need real estate, industrial real estate where that robotic production happens and where the robotic logistics occurs. That's our food computer.
Adam's mining. Uh, we have a really cool mission. Uh, I've gotten super geeked out on mining. I love it. Like, I'm loving it more every day. Um, more productive mines to power Earth's industries. What makes super intelligence? Well, it's chips and its energy. We know that. Where do the chips come from? Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, 'Oh, it comes from the sun.' Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right? So being in the ground at this sort of almost like this primitive of physical AI is like a super interesting place. And when you're automating that thing, it's super interesting. So when we talk about mining, we're talking about, you know, we go to gold mine CEOs and we're like, would you like 20% more gold per year? We haven't heard no. Uh, but they say prove it. And that's kind of the fun part. Um, but it means your opex is lower and it means, by the way, these mines are pretty damn unsafe. And so making these places way safer is also part of the purpose of what we're doing. And so you go, okay, well, when I talk about mining, I like to talk about digitized storage. What is digitized storage in mining? It's called land, right? This is storage for the mining computer. And this is network, right? Because you're moving the rocks. This is network. Um, this is me by one of those vehicles. Check that out. Okay. I'm standing next to a TCP packet. There's like eight people understood what I just said. But look at that thing. So fully loaded. That's probably like 2 million pounds. All right. And uh, this is an autonomous mining machine operating on our stuff. There are probably about three drones that were injured in the filming of this video. But CPU is really interesting in mining too, right? Like, how do you process the material to make it the metal and mineral that we need to do all the things that we do to push civilization forward, progress forward? There's lots of really cool things to automate here. You guys ever see these things? This is called flotation. You see these when you're flying over? Most people don't know what this is, but this is about distilling material down to the actual metal or mineral that you're trying to go for. This is a lithium plant, by the way. Uh, and then of course all that stuff has to be orchestrated. So you need software almost like an operating system for that computer that's sort of moving things around and making sure it's doing exactly what needs to happen.
And then we have transport, which I call wheelbase for robots. It's not exactly a computer. It's part of a computer. If you're not doing humanoids, right, humanoids are like low-scale, do low-scale tasks in human environments. If you're doing high-scale tasks, industrial-scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels. If they have wheels, you got to make the autonomy for those machines, those specialized robotics which are transforming that industry. Um, and if you depend on only one or two companies that exist, you're not going very far. Um, so autonomy is sort of like a critical part or critical platform you have to first make for yourself. Um, but there's lots of other industries that you can make it for, right? So, we know Phelps is the gold medals guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals, right? A lot of people think about ride sharing as a gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery? What about personal autonomy? What about trucking, freight? What about off-road autonomy? Like with mining? There's many multi-hundred-billion-dollar industries that are going to be powered by these specialized robotics and that are made for industry. These computers made for industry. And here's sort of like a breakdown of some really interesting, just several of the silver medals that are out there. And I say, look, if you make autonomy and you make it really fast, faster than Waymo's making it, let's just say, uh, there's a dark horse angle. Like, I don't know if you guys are like Kentucky Derby guys or not, but like there is a dark horse angle here, which is pretty interesting, but the silver medals alone are freaking insane. And so I call what we build progress machines. And what does that mean? It's like, well, I'm like, well, at the company, sort of our culture is about discovering valuable unknown truths because if you are good at finding valuable unknown truths, then it means you're going to know a lot of things other people don't know. And if you know a lot of things that other people don't know, it means you can do a lot of things that other people can't do. And the better you are at those valuable unknown truths, the more things you're going to be able to do that other people can't do, which means you're bringing change faster and faster, like in a shorter amount of time. That's called progress. That progress is everything that's powered civilization since the beginning, including now. But there's what I call the final boss. The final boss for progress. It's like the boss you got to go up against and every one of the entrepreneurs in this room knows it. It's called resistance to change. It's natural because like, you know, a lot of times change is bad. Um, and so you have to deliver an overwhelming amount of progress to make your change happen. And so I like to make analogies to, we're almost done guys, I like to make analogies to the second industrial revolution. There's like, we don't fully, I think a lot of folks here may not be totally schooled on what happened 100 years ago, 150 years ago, but there's a lot of analogies for what happened then to like what's happening now. And by the way, we all think, 'Oh, founder mode. Let's go. Founder mode, guys. 150 years ago, they did founder mode for real.' This is a picture, an illustration. You don't see that guy on the top has a gun. He's about to shoot Henry Frick. Henry Frick was a partner of Carnegie. They revolutionized steel. Like you talk about everything being mined and all the buildings and things that we see around us, all the infrastructure, etc. Started with Carnegie and Frick. Um, an anarchist came into his office and shot him twice and stabbed him several times. Uh, he didn't die. While the bullets were getting pulled out, the dudes kept working. Founder mode. All right. And by the way, there's other interesting things that happened back then. Super interesting stuff. Okay. If those of you who know about like Westinghouse and Thomas Edison, Edison was all about direct current. Westinghouse was all about alternating current. We kind of know what won. Like, yes, I have a flashlight with direct current, but basically AC won because it could go long distances. Edison was on the wrong side of this equation big time, but he wasn't going down without a fight. So, he was the ultra OG of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He was the ultra OG. You know what he did? He did public displays of electrocution of animals to show that AC electricity was unsafe. He was the OG. Now, we see this in the current world. Okay, the analogies, they play. I'm just saying. Okay, that might go online. This was a Homestead protest. Okay. Homestead protest. This is a Carnegie Frick thing. Actually led to him getting shot actually. Uh, and it was about, uh, it was a strike, sort of Homestead strike, and it was basically a unionization thing and they weren't willing to go union and there was obviously a scuffle of sorts. Um, and it's, I mean, it's one of the, it was the first big huge union situation for how we think about it today. Probably the archetype for it. And we're starting to see those things, right? So like, of course, go back to 2014 Uber, uh, well, there was a strike across all of Europe in all the major European cities. They lit cars on fire. They did crazy things to stop that kind of progress. This is the final boss, the resistance to change. And like, you know, they say history doesn't rhyme, this doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Okay. And not everybody can read it. Okay. So the Uber and Lyft drivers are now protesting at the Waymo office. Okay. There's a... What's this? Okay, fair enough. See, that happens. Okay. But we're bringing progress forward. There will be resistance. It is going to be a thing. And there are a ton of entrepreneurs, super badass entrepreneurs in this room. Like we have to be steely. We have to be hardcore. Um, like the guys on the invite that I sent, right? Uh, we've got Ford, we've got Carnegie, we've got JP Morgan. We got all the guys. Westinghouse on the right. Uh, we have to look to, we always think that we did things first, but actually there were dudes that did it harder, better than us for sure. Always. They walked to school uphill in the snow both ways. I promise. All right. And they had those things, right? They had the stuff, right? And it's like what you see in the press about what that stuff is isn't always what the stuff really is. Look at that empathy. But how do you lead 20,000 people and get them oriented towards a beautiful mission? And those 20,000 people are great minds, optimistic, good people. How do you do that? You can't do that by being a bad person. But you have to be hardcore. I don't know if you have to be as hardcore as Frick, but you got to bring it. Um, and there's a lot of things we got to hold and we got, like the entrepreneurs, we got to do this. And by the way, the folks that support us or the executives that are making magic happen too. Like you got to be all these things. And so at the company we have this thing called the champion's heart. 23 points for the golden golfers in their championship. So they're really relying on getting a lot this weekend. So, we have this thing called champion's heart, which is, um, you know, in life, you get knocked down like what just happened to her. Uh, but if you put everything you got on the field and when you get knocked down, you keep getting back up, it's very difficult to fail, right? Uh, you turn the volume back up.
And this is just a thing we believe at our company and I think it's a thing that most of the successful entrepreneurs believe in. Um, and so, you know, look, a lot of folks they say, 'Hey, Travis is back.' Or, you know, I think it might have even been on your invite, but, uh, I've actually been working for eight years. I just haven't been talking about it. Um, and so it is good to be back in this way because I was kind of in a cave for a while. Um, and I want to thank everybody for being here. And, uh, I think, uh, Eric, Ben, and I are going to have a nice conversation. And, uh, again, thank you so much.
