Chris Anderson: Don’t Confuse Valuation With Tech Adaptation

the founder of three D Robotics. He was formerly editor in chief of Wired magazine, and he is the author of the book The Long Tail. Chris Anderson has been at the forefront of technology for a good couple of decades. He saw pretty much where the industry has been going, long before the bulk of the public has figured it out. He has tremendous insight into why certain things are as valuable as they are and why certain products, industries, sectors, software, gadgets, etcetera.

Are capable of achieving mass acceptance. I find him to be consistently insightful and forward looking, and I don't know anybody else who's quite had his vantage point throughout the nineties, two thousands and beyond. He really has seen a lot of things coming before anybody else did. Three three D Robotics, as an example, is a started out as a d I Y drone company and they just got so of warm with orders that they pivoted to being a drone

manufacturer and now they're a drone software creator. Really really fascinating stuff. If you are at all interested in technology, drones, software, this is sort of conversation that you're going to really enjoy. So, with no further ado, my interview with Chris Anderson. My special guest today is someone I've known for a long time and have been a big fan of his work for all these many years. His name is Chris Anderson.

He is the former editor in chief at Wired magazine, worked as a journalist and editor at the Economist for seven years. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller The Long Tail. Presently, he is CEO and founder of three D Robotics, which is a UH drone and software company, The Long Tale. You probably are familiar with it from either the original Wired article or the book itself. The book won the Lobe Award for the Best Business Book of the Year in

two thousand and seven. He has been named to all man or of lists, one of Time magazines one hundred most Influential People, Tech forty, the most influential minds in technology, foreign policies, global thinkers. Chris Anderson, welcome to Bloomberg Radio, and let me add thank you for having us here in the Three D Robotics headquarters. There is just great to have you on our coast. It's it's a pleasure out here to be out here. And I travel all over and don't frequently say I could I could live

in this climate. And this is one of those places where, yeah, I could live here if I had to adapt. It's worth noting. You're in Berkeley, which is the nicest part of the pay area, is it? Do you say so? Yeah? It's a little cooler here than down in normally what's cooler than Palaul? A bit warmer than the city. Okay, there you go. Um, so let's let's jump right into it. You have a really unusual background. You studied quantum mechanics and science journalism. Some people do science and some people

do journalism. Not a lot of people do both. How did you find your way to marry those two fields. I didn't actually study either of them properly. I might my degrees in computational physics, okay, but it just so happened that in writing up my my resume, I happened to take have taken a class in science journalism, which at the time seemed the only link I had to journalism, so I stuck it on my on my resume. But but no, my degrees in computation. So your whole career

is a sharade? Is that what you're it is? It is no you know in it's in it's big dimensions. It doesn't make a lot of sense. I went from from physics, um, to ultimately end up working for a fashion company. Um, it's conde NaSTA. But fashion advertising is the main revenue. Okay, But they're a little more than a fashion there. There are a lot more fine publication indeed, indeed,

and it's not fair to conde NaSTA call it. But but when you're in the you know, the elevators of when the time was four times square and it's supermodels up and down, you ask yourself, how did I get here? It is? It does require some explaining, to say the least, so computational physics. I don't want to jump too far ahead. The idea of how drones operate and managed to both fly within three dimensional space as well as do analytics of what's around them. That seems to be like, oh,

computational physics to drones. But the middle so years are a little aberrational. So let's start with with the economists. You were there for seven years a writer and editor, is that right? Yeah? I ran Faius bureaus, but it was mostly writing, as the case for most people. The economist, I mean the the You're absolutely right, there's a straight line from from physics to to drones and measuring the world and analyzing an etcetera. The wiggly in between bits

which consists of a about thirty years UM had to do. Um. It's kind of interesting paths. So physics in the late eighties e early nineties, which is when I was there, UM, we were all inspired by the way to physicists of the twentieth century, the you know, the fiem etcetera. UM,

and that really was that the noble science. Unfortunately, UM, the quest of physics was to get closer and closer to the Big Bang, to understand the origins of the universe, and closer to the Big Bang means higher energies, which means bigger particle accelerators, which means more money. And eventually we just scaled out of government budgets and so there were no more particle accelerators in the US that we're going to be built, and so and so you had

two choices. You could either like wait in line for you know, the LHC and CERN in Switzerland, wait in line for like twenty years and maybe your experiment would be would be a success, maybe wouldn't. Or you could take the skills that you learned in physics and apply them elsewhere. So the skills were when you think about the internet was invented in the physics world to connect labs.

The web was invented at CERN, a physics laboratory, and the first big data was physics data supercomputers using accelerator data, and so you really only had some Most people sort of said, well, what do I got here? I got I got you know, statistical skills, I can crunch big data. I'll go to Wall Street be a quant That was the natural one. A lot of people went went and did that for the money? Go for for the money. Some of us said, well, Okay, yeah, we can do that.

But there's also this Internet thing, which seems kind of interesting. The time, it was really just a network to connect scientific laboratories. Well, the original Dark Book concept was, hey, we have to have the capacity to send launch instructions in the event that we're hit first. Well sure, but I mean at the time this was a little bit past then. The true the Internet was largely to connect

supercomputer centers for things like climate modeling. You know, this is the part where Al Gore you know, invented it, um which you know, he actually had a lot He didn't invent it, but he had a lot to do with them with encouraging its growth during that era. Um. So, so those of us, you know, who were sitting here and say, well, I don't want to go to Wall Street, but I do have some some Internet skills. What's the

internet good for? Along comes this magazine in called Wired with like fuluorescent ink and saying, hey, this Internet thing is going to be big one day. One day. It's not just you know, a tool to connect labs. It's gonna be cultural revolution at cetera. And so I decided to make my career the Internet, and the first step you know, there was I went. I was working for scientific journals as an editor, and then the Economist asked me to take over their technology beat and I said sure,

but I'd like to cover the Internet. And they're like why, I don't know, whatever, whatever, you say, what do you need? And I like I needed internet connection? This is this was ninety three. Yeah, and and at what point did you end up leaving so the economists you weren't necessarily covering covering economics and business. I was, I was originally and then I went to China to to run the bureau there and China from just before the handover of Hong Kong Um. I guess that was ninety seven two

after wto in two thousand and one. Fascinating time to be in China, got to serve to see China emerge. And there was in New York where you and I spent time together and them was recruited from there too by Condyn asked to run Wired. Um so the only publication I would leave the economists. You were in the econom New York Bureau, and that's what led to Conde Nast and Wired. So you take over Wired, which was it was always a good magazine, but it was kind

of a hodgepodge for a while. Well it was, it was you know, it basically created this sort of esthetic and philosophical foundations of the Internet is going to be big. It's like the biggest things since electricity. That was kind of the wired concept. UM. I took over in two thousand and one. So this is after the stock after the dot com bust, and six weeks before September eleventh, UM, excellent time. Well, so you know, at that point everyone was dismissing the Internet as as as a fraud or

at least or at least wildly over high. But that's what I mean by excellent time. You come in with very low expectations. People aren't torturing you to why don't he we have any results this quarter? Precisely so, so I was betting that the Internet was real and that the dot com bust was about Wall Street, not about Silicon Valley. UM. And And as you say, when you when buy at the bottom, you get three wonderful things. Um. First of all, your failures are discard cloaked by the marketplaces.

It's just everybody's can't succeed in that in that in that environment, Secondly, a lot of talent had come to Silicon Valley during the boom and they were available, so I was able to hire really good people on the

cheap on the cheap um, well, they were available. And Thirdly, my year on years, I had a exactly the next year I was just going to blow through my n So before we move too forward past two thousand and one, having lived through the nineties and all the enthusiasm and all the excitement and then the collapse, how did that color your view of technology and the Internet or did it? It was? It was I think I was my um,

my faith and technology was completely unshaken. Um. You know, as a physicist, you basically think in terms of like, you know, what's like fundamental in the world, and there's something about the Internet that just struck me as fundamental. It struck me as in the same category as democracy and evolution. It's kind of one of these one of

these truisms. And as a matter of fact, when I was at the Economists my first they had these things called surveys, which are these big sixteen page special features. It's the only time you get to use your name as an author, and which is by the way, is unique in the world of journalism, pretty much unique exactly. I mean, where there's no byline, you write an article and it's by the economy. The notion of the collective voice. Yeah. Um so, my my first survey on the Internet was

entitled the Accidental super Highway. Um, and the notion of things happening, you know, by accident, suggests that really they're happening by nature. There's that that that you know, this this emerged it was an emergent organic universe exactly. And the fact that it was an emergent rather than synthetic, meant that it was more real. Huh. That that that's quite fascinating. The the thing I thought you were heading towards, and I think I'm mangling this is it met Metcalf's

law that does the each node multiplies the value. That quickly became obvious that every time you add another user to the Internet the value increased. Explanab absolutely. So that's the value element. But the governance structure, the fact that it was not centrally controlled. I mean, there's some trivial central control, but that's that's that's that's a very lowest level. But the terms of the content itself, the fact that it was the fact that it is, you know, truly

democratic ameritocratic system. Um. That is, that's actually the more important rule um. And that's why we've worked so hard to protect the openness of the Internet is because the emergent properties come from that openness. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you, you kind of answered already, So I want to expand on it. You've been quite a student at forecasting let's call it near trends, extrapolating

from just very nascent things not well formed. Well, at this point, I think we all can agree mobile is going to be big one thing. But on the other hand, you were looking at things that were the trend wasn't clear, It wasn't let's just extrapolate this in infinity. You identified seedlings and said this is gonna be significant. Is it simply the organic nature of it that court your eye? Or how did you How are you able to say, oh,

there's huge potential. You know, you're just you know the people who, especially after the crash, people said, you know, it's too good to be true, this is just overhyped. What made you turn around and say, no, this is substantial forget the finance part of it. The technology part of it is real. Yeah, I mean things like the long tail or or drones, which I would do right now. So basically it's there's two elements. One of them is

that it's just exciting. You know, it's just shiny and exciting and you know, my heart sings and all that kind of stuff. But that's that's necessary, but not suf issued. Um what sufficient is that also has to align with my world view of what what works, this sort of notion of openness or emergence or or you know the fact that it benefits and democratization. Um. So when you so like my first book, The long Tail, I mean the an article as well. I mean the way that

happened was not It wasn't an idea. Um. What happened is that I'm sitting here, you know, it's it's two thousand two. Um, I'm I'm a physicist in Silicon Value, right, I'm now running a magazine. I'm not really trained as a journalist. I'm not, you know, I was. I had a staff of brilliant narrative storytellers, but I was just kind of a nerd, you know, with number cruncher indeed indeed,

so I need some numbers to crunch. And I was I was thinking, you know, I was like, Okay, look, I believe that this is the you know, the seeds of the century being formed in the Googles and Amazons and ebays around me. And I'll bet that in those servers is the data that can illustrate what the century it looks like. Let's just ask them for the data. And has anybody previously asked them, Hey, we'd like to

see you know? And well, no, I mean because typically the academics weren't looking at that, because that was considered sort of cultural and trivial. Um. The companies themselves were just starting to bring up the data scientists and the commist was quite early, and UM and and journalists just typically weren't weren't quantitative exactly. So there was a brief window if you, if you asked nicely and you know, science, some n D s et cetera, that you could actually

get that data. And so I I got the dat different places, like it was a rhapsody I think was my music services original one, but I also got sort of scrubbed data from from eBay and elsewhere. I just started analyzing, and the long tailed popped right out of

it. It It was clearly obviously there was a kind of a power law distribution, and that the size of the tail, you know, depending on how you split it, was about the size of the head, which suggested that there was a market and a submerged marketplace out there beyond beyond.

And what's interesting that about a year later after I started got all this data, then you may be remember this M A O L. You know, then people started academics started saying, hey, you know, there's some interesting data here, let's ask for it. A O. L. Released a bunch of data and anonymized it, but didn't anonymize it well enough. It got de anonymized, um you know, privacy issues, and

then became impossible to get dat again. So it was like a window of about two years where you could have done the long tale, and I just happened to be there. Then I was a subscriber. I still have a subscribe to Wired for it's like a decade plus now. And and the thing that always stood out to me about Wired was the marriage of great content with the technology slant with fantastic design ethics. The the visual impact of the magazine felt like the Internet and a print

magazine had a baby. It was. It was so visual in ways that other magazines weren't. Was the thinking beyond that, So I can take no credit for that whatsoever. Is that that was the vision of the original founding team A Lewis Rosetto, Jane Metcalfe and John Plunkett, who was the original designer and their inspiration at the time, the

dear friends right now. As a matter of fact, every time there's a new editor, Nick Thompson from the New Yorkers now the In and we all had dinner together, we always kind of, you know, infuse the new editor with the creation myth and all that. But the idea. You know, if you if you ask them with the story, um, they'll say, well, you know, we were this was the emergence of computers and and so print ink has got

reflective properties, but screens have a missive properties. So pixels emit light, and so you know, we wanted to we want to use an aesthetic that seemed emittive, emissive. It like like it glowed, and a lot of the page, a lot of the neon colors and other things. Very much. We were like a screen amidden absolutely. Um So I think that I think they'll forgive me for for saying that this is a little bit of a kind of

a of a of a post facto expo nation. I think what really happened at the time is there was a new printing process, Like I again any about this. It was a five color printing process, and it was very expensive, and some printing plants that invested in these new kind of five color processes were looking for some examples to show them off. And it just basically that like a fancy ink and like fluorescent became available affordably, and so they took advantage of it. And it makes

perfect sense. And the magazine always popped. You turned the pages and it really it really was alive. So you take over wired with the air coming out of the bubble. It was mid collapse, um. And it would get worse and and got worse. How hard was it to stay positive as things just went down the tubes? Um? For me it was it was super easy. Um So. Um. I would say that if you and I, you know, I think you're gonna be talking to Mark andresen As as well, you know, those of us who were there

then never never doubted that the Internet was real. We understood the distinction between the this this stock market valuations and the underlying technology was the West Coast view. Oh, the guys in New York, really they really messed us up. You know, they took valuations too high. No surprise, Choris

crashed into the sea. I was actually in China during the bubble, uh to the dot com bubble, So I can't really say what they with the collective view was, but I do think that, you know, the underlying belief there was something fundamental going on here with the networks, um was was never doubted. Now this is of course, you know, you know how the Internet works, like there's the layers, right, There's like the hardware layer with the fiber opter cables, and then there's like you know, then

the software layers and content layers. A lot of the valuations were at the higher level of the content, and the notion was the content was ephemeral, would come and go. But the underlying notion of connecting the world was was really important. Um And so you know, the the I think when I got there, the consensus was that Wall Street had financed an extraordinary infrastructure build out which made fiber capacity super cheap and this was the best thing

ever for restarting. That's suddenly the cost of enter the barriers, the cost of entry was very low, thank you, thank you Wall Street, and that we would just now, you know, build for the next two years without you know, the financial microscope and see where it goes. Dan Gross wrote a book called pop While Bubbles are better than people realizing and the example use whether it's railroads or telegrams or in this case dark fiber, Global crossing and Metromedia

fiber and go down the list. They laid miles and miles of dark fiber at thousands of dollars per whatever it was, and it sells for pennies on the dollar. The theory is, but for this collapsing, you don't end up with YouTube and Facebook and all these other band with intensive intensive things. Yeah, now, Dan, Dan, Dan super smart And then the book's great um And I think when you look back now at that decade, it's almost impossible to see the bust when you look at the

underlying adoption curves and data curves, etcetera. It's weird. I mean, you can obviously see it on the nineties or in the if you look back today, if you look back at internet adoption trends, you almost can't see the dip right because the end customers continued to be added at a tremendous rate because there was something real there. People wanted what we were making in the fact that was cheaper and accelerated the often. So let's let's talk about Wired.

When you take over Wired, it's kind of uh we I said a Hodgepodge. I think at one point they didn't even own their own domain. So if you wanted to do internet stuff, how did that come about? Again? Before my time? But but yeah, so, um so Wired was you know, sort of the before the dot com bubble. There was there were previous bubbles, and Wired was the hottest thing around in the you know, in the late nineties.

UM basically created a lot of online media. So like Apache, the web server's use was actually created um, you know in the Wired offices. The first at the first banner ad was on Wired. You know, a lot of the things we take for granted today we're actually being pioneered in the laboratories that were Wired. UM and they filed to go public UM and Wired as a standalone stand company again I'm gonna say nineties seven ish, maybe ninety eight, um,

and didn't work. Filed again, didn't work. Had taken out some finance and debt on anticipation that they would go public and ended up having to kind of fire sale some of the bits and and the the magazine. The print bit went to Conde Nast and the digital bit went to Licos, which was which then got bought by

some Korean media company. Anyway, it was. It was. It was like one of those like you know, the children got adopted by different families kind of deal, and you helped bring them both under the same I didn't the

call credit goes to contact. It was clearly indeed to be done, and just you know, years went by and evaluations kind of stabilized, and kind of appropriately I bought it, brought it back, so you really, you really turned the entire magazine around and turned it into this award winning affair. I I actually, um, it was very much award winning before I got there. Um, I just Magazine in the Decade, not Editor of the Year. Those are pretty substantial awards in the industry. I think what we did is we

believed in the underlying story. The reason I left the Economist, which is the best gig ever. By the way, was that Wired had changed my life? Um that I'm as as as a as a physicist sitting there nerding away on these networks, you know, not believing there were any more than than than physics. Wired it opened my eyes to the potential technology to change the world. I know it's a very kind of cliche to say that, but

that's what it did. And um, And so when I had the opportunity to run Wired, I said, well, this is the biggest story of my lifetime. Um. The ability to be there in the middle Silicon Valley and tell this story is um. You know that that that story is not done. Um. And all I did is just kept the faith. So you're running the magazine, you're the editor in chief, you're overseeing publication, and you're writing both articles and books. How do you juggle any one of

those things or a full time job? How do you juggle all of that at once? Um? Yeah? And you, by the way, you're married and have five kids. And you am married and have five kids and a lot of hobbies because they ended up starting starting a drone company maker dad, and then you had a lot of

bulls in the airs. I did, Um, well, I mean I think I was, you know, I mean obviously I had a good staff, and you know that my general philosophy on on on, you know, leading teams is to kind of point them in a direction, set some some you know, some guidelines of what success looks, measurable targets and let them, let them, let them do their job.

You know. One of the things that Wired as a as a as a bully pulpit, I guess for the technology stories, one of the things that you know that the editors can do is to be a public persona um, and to do their own writing. And you know, because I mean, unlike most media, which is which is an American media, which is required to be impartial and just passionate and not point take a point of view, the Commist and Wired shared one thing, which is that they

do have a point of view. They have a worldview. The economists one famously is British liberalism, which is free markets and free people. Um. Wired basically took the same approach,

but then had this evangelism for technology. So the notion of being evangelical that being a preacher um, which meant also being a doer U was kind of core to the to the Wired credo and so, um, the reason I did all these side things and you know, did the research that led to the long tail and and free and and makers was that that was the hands on, that was the doing. I mean, that's what Silicon Valley is all about. It's about it's about doers um And I just didn't feel like I could tell the story

if I wasn't doing it. That's quite fascinating. You mentioned, uh, the free and the freemium model that was pretty prescient when you when you put that out. What do you think of the freemium model today? Is it's still working? Um? And and how has it negatively impacted other industries like like print journalism? Yeah, I know exactly. Um So, I mean, just to be clear, I've written three books that I'll basic the same book, so the long tail hold on

a second. So, so the long tail, that's a very specific book that an eBay or an Amazon or any online built, any online retailer. Netflix has the ability to have essentially an infinite warehouse versus a brick and mortar seers which is circling the drain, cannot have every or Barnes and Noble. For that matter, they can have every single book available in the store. That's a very different

article argument. Then all right, give this stuff away for free, and some percentage of those users will pay you a small fee for a higher level of whatever it is. Um, you've articulated the thesis of those very well. Um, but let me suggest that the more connected than you they may suggest. Okay, So if infinite shelf space creates infinite choice, and therefore we can measure people's actual inter actual likes and dislikes in a world of infinite choice, and how

do you get infinite shelf space. Well, the only way you can get infinite shelf space is the cost of shelf space, the marginal cost to zero or certainly as close to zero, close to zero. So what are the economics of zero cost markets? You know, these are markets where where essentially free is a is an attainable price. What are the economics are free Well, there weren't any. Um. You know, economics by definition is monetary economics, non monetary economics,

or something else, psychology, sociology, sociology exactly. So, but what if you applied economic principles to try to create an economic framework for free to treat it the same way

you would treat monetary markets. UM, then you could explain not only not only you know how things could be free, but how maybe you would use free as the way as a form marketing, that you would basically give things away for free and that and that unlike traditional market where you can give out you know, you can get free tastes of brownies, but not many, but a finite

amount of a fixed cost to free exactly so. And so in worlds where you have non zero marginal costs, you can give away one percent and you must sell ninety nine. Where you have near the marginal costs, you can give away to sell one. And just that notion that there was an underlying economic model behind the long tail that drove the long tail led me to two free. Um. The so freemium, you're correct, is is the is the

is the business model around it. And when I wrote it, freemium was you're kind of starting to be known in kind of business to business software, etcetera. UM. It was just before the app store on you know and mobile um, and you could start to see the beginnings of it was mostly in web games that you were seeing freemium as a as a model. But this is an example of you identifying something when it was just germinating and saying, oh,

this is gonna be big one day. It was a you know, most people have one of those in their lifetime if they're lucky. Here it is not long after the long tail, and here's the next big thing, and you were dead right about it. I mean, I I have to admit that I didn't do anything. I mean, this was it was happening around me, and there was

a bazillion great entrepreneurs. Fred Wilson from Union Square Eventure I think was that it was the person who deserves the most credit for popularizing freemium, but all I did. Did he he gave it the name, or did he just popularize one of his entrepreneurs I think coined the term, but freemium freemium, which is the combination of free in premium um. So you give all this away for free. And if you want to exactly and you can actually

measure the metrics, here's here's our user research. Here's how many Here's how many people open it, Here's how many people engage, log in, sign up, and here's how many of those convert to the paying model in app purchases being the perfect example. So so today freemium is the canonical business model of online of web mobile apps, which is to say, most apps are free, especially games, etcetera.

And there's all these in app purchases that encourage some people to to to pay upgrade you get secret levels or more weapons or whatever it. So again, I didn't you know, I didn't coin anything. I didn't I didn't invent anything. What I saw, though, is that there was a smart people were starting to act in a certain way, and I just created a framework for it. All right, So let's go from longtail to two free, two makers, which again I'm gonna argue as a totally different same

book book, the long tailed physical goods. So you have the ability to put so when I was a kid, and we're not that far apart in age I was a kid, you could have these little scientific what was it called the company that put up Yeah, you you would either get a chemistry set or there were a variety of electronics set. I remember the electronics set, right, and you could put together. You can combine these things in different ways. Oh look, I could make a little

home radio kit. Just by combining these different things. You didn't go much beyond that, right you point out that, hey, the cost of these things, including little electric engine little electric engines that you could order from China for next to nothing, here's what you could do today, and it's nothing like it was back then. So the fundamental difference there was not just the cost of the goods, because

that they were already pretty cheap. It's just that when you and I were tinkering in our in our in our bedrooms or workshops or basements, etcetera, were essentially re all doing the same things while doing the same kids, but weren't kind of weren't doing anything new innovating. We weren't building on other people's work because we didn't have an internet back then. So we had a we had a book, and we followed the instructions of the book and we but yeah, that was it. We weren't doing

anything innovative. Um. The virtue. So what was new about the maker movement? In two thousand and seven was the key year in the maker movement? Um? A bunch of things happened that year. Um, you know, first of all, um, and on all those things were standing on the shoulders of the web and oh and communities and open source, etcetera. But you had things like our duino, which was an open source computing board that allowed you to to to use your coding skills but actually move things in the

physical world. There was the three D printing that allowed you to fabricate things you couldn't do on your own. There was you started to see these and the sensors with thinks in like a wee control or in my case it was Lego mind Storms that you allowed to measure the real world with the extraordinary little chips that could measure things. Um, there was Maker Make magazine, there was the Maker Fair and behind it all. That was the year the iPhone was released. And it wasn't clear

initially that the iPhone had a connection to this. But when we said why is it that, you know? So I started with my kids. Um, we made a drone on the dining room table out of Lego parts, you know, fully autonomous, GPS guided, you know. And this is like you know a few years earlier that was like military industrial, classified export control stuff. And we did leg we did with Legos. You know, Lego mind Storms is pretty cool. Um. Only later did I say, how is it possible that

we were able to do this? I mean, I can see you've got a you've got a fitbit of something on your on your arm, I've got a pebble. They're terribly inaccurate. Um. They make me feel good because I do twenty thou steps. Apparently every day I see, Well, there's a little green led that's just flashing like crazy and it's because my h it tries to measure my heart rate and it's unable to keep up. Okay, maybe not the best example, but the technology and this is astonishing.

Go back in time and this so what I was I was sitting there in two thousand said, with my kids and Lego mind storms. Um, a guy named James Park had just gotten a wee controller. UM, and we you know the video showing the controller and he's like, what is this? What isn't this stick that? Let's that cursor in the three dimensional opens us a little chip in there and he says, awesome, what what else would that chip be good for? And he comes up with

fitbit UM with with his colleagues. So, um, so what happened is that a series of core technologies, UM, what's called mem sensors. These these sensors on a chip, um micro electro mechanical sensors and this like a sensors so they can sense motion, direction, gravity, exact else. Um, these you know, these incredibly fast, low power processors, the arm UM, why I FI cameras, GPS, lithium battery technologies. All this stuff was coming out of the iPhone and other smartphones.

And because you have these extraordinary kind of you know the amount of R and D and economies of scale production, those components were now available to adjacent industries. And you know that very inexpensive, very inexpensive, and I call this the peace dividend of the smartphone. Course. Um, what happened is that you take you take these extraordinary technologies, these chips,

they are now available really you know, expensively. Then you have the uh these desktop fabrication tools like three D printers and seen C machines and laser cutters, et cetera. And then you have open source communities. You combine them and now you've got the germs of an industrial revolution. And that's and that's and this this kind of this ability for regular people to do to take take like the long tail of physical things rather than just digital things.

Is what drove the maker movement and the kickstarter phenomenon what we're experiencing today. So yeah, so so um so I started by just sort of like, you know, just just a weekends throwing together kids, and you know the problem is that they sold out immediately and the kids just wouldn't do it again. So I'm like, I got

better things to do than stuff pizza boxes. So I found a guy on the internet named Jordi MNOs who seemed really smart, and I sent him a check for five hundred bucks and he's just started doing it instead. And then it gets kept sending me pictures and he's like, yeah, I've expanded the space. I haven't met him, right, have expanded the space and hired some people, and by two thousand and twelve he's in Mexico. Is that wrong? I

didn't know at the time. It turns out that he was, you know, when I met him, he was a nineteen year old in Tijuana, scraduate from high school. Um. But by you know, by the time I actually went it was like he keeps sending these pictures of bigger and bigger drone factories. By the time I met him, I mean,

we're probably doing five million a year. UM. By the time, by the you know, by around two thousand and twelve, I think we were making more drones per month than all of America's aerospace companies combined out of a Tijuana drone factory, which by the way is a greating him

for a band. Do you want a drone factory? That's absolutely and UM and so you know, so so by the time I actually made it like not a hobby but like my job and took venture capital, et cetera, is already pretty de rist and so yeah, we at this point we were making physical drones. UM. And you know, but we started UM. I'll just finish with one last story about this. UM in around two thousand and nine

or ten or twelve or something like that. UM, there's the the aerospace industry has an annual conference is called a u VS a u v s I, and it has has Autonomous Vehicles Systems internationals like that. Anyway, it's like you know, the Boeings and the Lockets and they have predator drones that it's happening actually this week I think in Las Vegas is the only one anyway, UM,

one of the more you know, innovative. Guys on the board invited me to speak to like, you know, the military industrial complex, and I gave I spoke and I held up this little board that we were making called arch Pilot, was based on our duino, and it cost and I said, uh, yeah, so we can do you know this point, drones cost ten million dollars end up and I come out with this board this night five and say, if you take this board and you stick it in like a toy airplane, you basically got the

same thing you guys do, just for ten million dollars. And they just couldn't figure I mean, they couldn't decide whether I was you know, whether it was crazy or dangerous or both. But they knew that it wasn't that it was a joke. You know, they knew that I was not to be taken seriously. And you know the Gandhi phrase. They answers to ignore you, that I laugh at you, then they fight you, then you then you've won today. You know that board and others like that.

There are other people were doing the same thing at the same time. I'm there now a million drones sold per year. You can now there's never been a technology I can think of that went from military industrial complex to the toy shelves of Walmart faster than drones. And when we started, people said you can't use the word drone because it sounds like a weapon. Now they tell us we can't use the word drone because it sounds

like a toy. So so the question, all right, so I have to ask the question I asked when I saw that big black drone out outside of your reception areas. All right, so where's the hunter killer adaptation? How do I add something too? If I need to take care of business? What's the adaptation to It's got elements of Skynet to it. How often do you get that idiotic question? Because some of these things, look, it's not that idiotic. I mean isis is using drones very much like ours?

Hopefully not ours, but very much like ours today. Um, they did exactly what you described. They bought typically they'll buy um uh drones from China. Um. They stick a little a little hook on the bottom, and then they drop bombs off of the drones. So there was another drone I was looking at uh last weekend in the Apple store. That it's very light, it's very small. The

um rotors are engaged in a sort of hovered drone. Yeah, and it has his facial recognition software built in, so when you lock it on somebody, it just tracks them. And I'm like, oh, that's how you assassinate people. You just need some some minor thing. So it's not that far from skynet. Yeah, I can be pretty you know, whatever the science fiction catastrophe you imagine. You know, there may be catastrophe, but it won't be that. Oh, I

don't think it's a broad catastrophe. I think it's just an efficient way to remove certain people who are problematic. Well how far away is that that? So that Tuesday, that particular one. So that's not going to happen for a number of reasons. First of all, if you'd actually take an hour of the box and turn it on, you would have heard that it's really noisy, and you're not gonna let this like buzzing. You know many laws, by the time you hear it, it's too that's their tagline.

By the time you hear us coming, it's too late. Would that that were true? You heard drums this morning? There there there their noise. You're not gonna stealth, you know, now, at least not. What the hellico, how far away are we from stealthier rotors or is that just physics and that's never going to change. Well, you know we work hard on that. You know, we don't make the drums anymore.

We just do this off where but you know, um, you know, up against so we can absolutely do more with you know, there are different propeller designs and you know, vibrations and resonant frequencies and on speeds and all this kind of stuff, but but by large you up against physics. Now that's not to say that an airplane, you know, the ones with wings can't just glide their way silently. But it's not gonna hover, So you get hover and noise or you get non hovers, so either stealthy or

or very mobile. So you mentioned earlier the you realize this is a real business. You um said, let's let's most of this is the risk. Let's go to the venture capital route. What was that process? You had VC money from Qualcom, from Richard Venture, Richard Branson from True Ventures. What is the process like going to a VC and saying, hey, we have this idea for a new company, what we're gonna build and sell this new technology. Well at this

point it wasn't a new company. Remember we bootstrapped it to you know, to to something like five million of revenues, and you know, it was make money and and so that's quite unusual to do risk something that that much. Um So, taking it to to venture capitals, I mean, it's very early. And at this point we were roughly basically technology. We're sort of saying, you know, we have autopilots, which are these boxes the brains for the planes instead

we have autopilots. You know, we have some kits. Um it was by no means the shelves of Walmart yet, and we actually um articulated the the the ultimate goal not being selling consumer electronic devices and Walmart, but rather putting sensors in the sky. The intention was always to use drones as a tool, um to extend the Internet into physical space. And so you know, part of extending the Internet into physical spaces to gather it's a sense

the space and the cameras, etcetera. The other is to extend the intelligence of the Internet out so the devices can basically harness the collective whatever, the big data in neural networks whatever. Um So, the idea was, Okay, we're gonna put sensors in in in in the sky. It's gonna compliment ground sensors, it's going to complement satellites. If you look up, this guy is empty. It's just the just thing. I mean, it's very hard to find a

market as empty as the sky. But that's there's a lot of sky out there in this room for plenty of drones, and it doesn't look like you're really taking up a lot of space exactly. And the drones are smart in the same way, the same way. You know. The analogy I would use is on wireless. You know, there was a time when the f c c S job was to give give wireless carries monopoly ownership of

certain way of certain spectrum. You know, you know, this frequency is yours and that frequency of somebody else's, and we have to kind of, you know, block off the bits so they don't interfere and ruin you know, grandma's television reception or whatever. It wasn't those then along came WiFi, which says, hey, you know what if we have like low power and the ability to kind of listen before

you talk, and you know, digital radios etcetera. Maybe you could just give us a sandbox, a little sort of you know, spectrum, just let us know play, no licenses, no ham radio, just you know, no no monopolies, just let us play. And that's a sense to you what we achieved. Um, with drones, we sort of we said, hey, you know, give us a sandbox, and sandbox is going to be visual line of site under four hundred feet, don't fly over people, private land and things like that.

And and recreated originally was recreational used, not commercial use. And all those things were were legal, you know, call them loopholes or call them. You know, it was a carve out, it was. It wasn't. I think it was a carve out actually for radio control hobbyists rather than for drones. That happened in the seventies. But we used that carve out to to basically stick a million drones in the air. And then we're like, okay, now they're here, they're good. Now what are they good for? And this

became the commercial use. And originally I thought it was gonna be agriculture. I thought we were going to be you know, um, and they are currently used pretty robustly, and they are, but not as agriculture, real estate. I can't tell you how many homes I've seen that standard drone and over. Oh isn't that lovely? Look at it? I mean, that's become stand So Hollywood, of course is

that was was was one. So you guys were involved with Fast and Furious, if I've seen some of your toys actually, and we were involved in the Benghazi film. But the Fast and Furious is that we have these sprints, um and you know, so sprints are are our development milestones are all named after Fast and Furious films. Uh, you know, Fast and Furious exactly. And it just turns out there making the films about as quickly as we

can develop. So so you know, I think this is the towards the end of them at this point, this last one. You think the number eight is going to be the I'm hoping, well, we'll have to come up with another theme for our sprints. So so what have you done much in with Hollywood? Have you done much on that side? So so we we did a tiny

bit in Hollywood. But actually there's a you know our you know, back when we were making drones, our biggest competitive with a Chinese company called d g I, which was extraordinary, perhaps the best company I've I've ever seen anywhere, not just in China. And um, they really focused on the on the cameras, the stabilization, et cetera. And today Ji makes the Parrot. No no, but the Parrot is a fringe company makes the Fantom, the Phantom of and

you know it's something called the magick. I remember when the Phantom first came out, it was like two thousand dollars and it was twelve dollars and it was seven. The prices just plummeted in that is that China subsidizing this or these guys really ringing out economies of scale like that? It's that good. Yeah, so, um, you know I lived in China. I knew, you know when I lived in China for those those years of the Economist,

everyone said, oh, don't worry about China. They can't do x. X was like innovate or design or software global or global brands or anything like that. It's a very subtle racism built into that, which is a repeat of what I recall hearing about Japan right Japan early on was oh they only make junk and they're good in imitating. They can't innovate anything, and then suddenly, wow, this is

really first class products. And if you remember when Hyundai first came out, they were kind of junkie cars, and now suddenly they were the only company that comes out of the financial crisis increasing market share. I think with them so that, oh, those guys can't do anything. That's a very dangerous assumption for anyone to ever make. So so, you know, everything I learned about China before going there,

I think turned out to be wrong. Everyone said, oh you know, um, you know, the political system is unsustainable, their economic growth is unsustainable. It's Quoe unquote. Centrifugal forces would sort of splinter. They you know, they can't innovate, They only copy and and I And it was it was around two thousand eight or two thousand nine where I spent most of my time in Guandong province around Shenzhen,

and I spent uh. I spent a night in Huawei, which is the telecoms company at the time they were being accused stealing from the Cisco stuff. It was way before iPhone. I just said, this is nineties, um and uh, and so I spent a night. You know, the engineers are working all night and sleeping on phutons, and I was like, these guys are awesome. They're serious. They're basically and you know they're basically. Yes, they're making iPhones today,

but they're taking notes. And um, the company we ended up competing with d G I started around actually a little bit before US. Um but um, you know, the so called in China can't do X. We haven't found an X. So they they innovated. They raised ten billion dollars billions of dollars of of venture capital, ten billion dollar valuation. They went global initially, they actually targeted outside of China before China. Their design exquisite, their marketing is fantastic.

Um you know, uh there and then the production efficiencies because they were insins and they vertically integrated, so they're doing everything. You know, they're you know, they weren't. They weren't like they weren't just like buying off the shell stuff like we were. They were making fundamental physics, you know, um, designed, etcetera. So so you know, watching them, you know it's uh, you know, I knew that these twenty one century Chinese companies were coming. I knew that they were going to

be good. Um, but just watching the price decline that came with that price decline in nine months, I think there's a you know, we were as the quality went up exactly and I don't think they were dumping. I think they're just that good. So we were one of the first Silicon Valley companies to encounter twenty one century native Chinese company, and um, we won't be the last. So let's talk about the pivot. You originally were designing and manufacturing drones and doing all the software that went

into it. The concept is, hey, we we don't even want to try and compete with this behemoth on manufacturing, but the software sort of an Apple model of hey, we'll let these guys build the hardware. We're gonna build the brains of it because that's where our expertise is. How how did that pivot come about and how is that going? So we originally we did it all. Um, we did the hardware, we did the software, which is like the operating system for the drone, and we also

did the apps that it ran with it. Um we ended up breaking into three parts. The hardware part we just spun off and don't do that at all anymore. And we now know support whatever hardware's out there. So if I want to go out and buy a three dr drone, are they still available for sale? They they they are. UM, it's called site scanned. It's our it's our commercial one. It's actually it's actually it is. It is a drone that we did make. But the the

solo or the it's it's it's it's a derivative. The solo, it's got a fancy Sony cameras, fancy GPS, etcetera nice skimble attached to it as well, exactly. But but soon enough, UM, if you want a different kind of drone, will support that as well. So we're trying to be hardware agnostic right now. We think that this particular integration with the Sony cameras, you know, the best camera, and that's the

way to go. But I think that over time we're going to be more flexible and if people want, you know, a different drone, that's that'll be fine. I think that's I'm almost all American drone companies have done the same thing. Everyone stopped making their own hardware. Most people are supporting d g I at this point. Um. Then there was the operating system part um and that was mostly open source thanks to the way we started, and so we spun that off and that's not part of the Linux Foundation.

Is it's called drone code and so on the chairman of that as well. That's interesting. So that's open source, available to anyone who wants to anybody or improve it exactly exactly. That's drone code, um. And then there's the apps, and the apps is where we focus. This is using the drone data. So it's less about the drone, more about the data, using the drone data to do something useful. In our case, we've partnered with Autodesk, who's the dominant

company in the design. Yeah, it's auto cad. It's construction and engineering and architecture and things like that, and they, you know, their initiative has been to sort of say, well, you know, in construction, you start everything digital on screen cad, and then the moment you dig a spade of dirt, it's it's it's now analog and you can't measure it, you can't use the same tools. So what you need to do is redigitize the world as you're building it.

And that's called reality capture. And where the capture and the reality capture that's interesting. I've been watching somebody putting up it's got to be for the past I want to say, two years, every month or every two months, the drone flyover of the Apple campus. And I've watched this come together. It's it's it certainly is time compressed. It feels like cheef. They've been working on that a long time. It seems like it's only a year or so.

I've been watching this, but it's astonishing at the clarity and focus and amount of details that you can see for what is essentially private property. Yeah, we're gonna go in. And what sort of issues do you have when you're trying to get that granular on a construction site? And are there problems with people sending drones? So the first question is really the first question is really how granular can you get on a construction site and identifying how

big is this whole, how deep is this foundation? How much sand is this here? And then I'll save the question about people doing flyovers for later. Yeah, and the answer to the first is two centimeters per pixel. Two centimeters. Basically we can see a quarter Okay, Um, that's pretty detail. It's pretty detailed. Um, So what you describe as photographs maybe video. That's actually not what the construction industry you're

talking about. Actually the measurements of everything contained there, the processes, and you probably saw it this morning on a on a roof. The processes. You you take out an iPad. There's a drone just sitting there. You turn on the drone, pruss the button, take out your iPad. Um you you either either, but you're doing the same scan every day, which cakes you just swipe or you just drag a box around the thing you want to scan and then you swipe. The drone then takes off. It flies like

a law and mower pattern or cross hatch pattern. It takes photographs of exactly the right time. So this photographs can be stitched together into a three D model or two D model, and then that is then you superimpose the CAD file, which you know the underlying design over this this model, and you can compare AD as designed with as built. So so this is a little bit

of augmented reality. Yeah, you're essentially putting a it's almost like a wire map on top of the world and comparing it to what was supposed to be built precisely. And because it's all so precise. If something's off, it's actually off. So if you if a post is off, or trenches off or or you know, or one of the cables for the you know, for the it's called post tension in cables, which is a big thing in construction.

You can actually see it's called a clash. And when you see that, the the that the physical you know, the physical site is often the design. There's only it's only two possibilities. Either it was an intentional change for good reason um and which case you need to reflect that change back into the model so that everyone understands and things have changed. Or it was an accident, in which case you need to catch it and fix it.

And it sounds like it's vastly less expensive to catch it early than to catch it after the building is built. In Hey, why are we tilting in San Francisco. There's that famous building that's off. You guys would have caught that earlier, whatever was. I don't know if we would

have cat got that one. But the construction industries the second largest day the stry in the world after after food, eight trillion dollar industry, and unlike agriculture, which is hedged against all sorts of inefficiencies, constructions not it's got eight average cost overruns, so it's like it's like a five trillion dollar industry that overran the self to eight trillion

dollars UM. And those cost overruns are typically due to to just stuff happened right, mistakes, delays, it's a complicated supply chain. Any kind of delay turns into cost um So this is a huge efficiency created a huge cost savings. Is the expectation. Eventually every major contractor is using some form of drones to help build their don't you know it's it's UM. So there's lots of ways to to do reality capture. You can do it I'm on the ground with laser scanning. You can do it on the

ground with cameras. There's inside the building and outside the building. So what drones scanning is best force is commercial construction UM. Typically some of the larger sites often not like in in the city center because you have fa regulations about where you can fly and where you can't fly. So it's kind of commercial sites um lucky think as skyscrapers in big, big complexes to be the outside of a city center. But still that you're talking about maybe a

third of construction falls into that category. And then the most important time to do it is at the beginning, when you've got the site, you're digging the holes and the foundations, etcetera. That characterizing it because remember the drones just scanning the outside of the building. So you scan the site you scanned with foundations, and then you scan

each layer as they build it up. So given this NEPHU with that leaning tower of San Francisco, how unlikely is it that eventually ciney planters are gonna say, hey, if we want to avoid this, we have to allow some sort of external scanning. It's being required right now. It's part of a So Japan has just required drone scanning for in major cities. Yeah, well it's for government infrastructure. They do a lot of roads and bridges and highways

and things like that. Um. This is part of a trend called building information modeling BIM and building information modeling basically the notion of digitizing sites so you can manage. You know, you can only manage what you can measure, and governments are now requiring BIM, which is to say, hey, you know, we need you to measure these sites because these costs, over runs are being paid for by somebody, and it's either the ultimately it's the consumer, the end user.

Who's who's going to subsidize that, unless it's a government project, in which case it's a tax pay it's a reasonable request. Measure what you're doing so that we can manage it better. You know, either we're gonna avoid the errors, or if it happens, we know why it happened, who caused it? Paper trail. I mean, so many construction projects and in lawsuits and you have this like this question, like how

did that happen? We were discussing earlier about the low cost of all these chip sets and and individual chips that allowed you to do really incredible things at a very low cost. What made you realize that, hey, these drone things, this is more than just a cool little toy. Um. First of all, I didn't initially realize that. Okay, So, I mean my path was really simple. I've got five kids, and my wife and I are are former scientists. We try to get our kids sided about science and technology,

and we fail and fail and fail again. Um, And so every weekend, i'm you know, I'm I'm trying to think of something that will engage them keeping busy, well, I mean keep them busy. I mean video games will keep them busy, but I want to keep their minds busy as well. So, UM, one weekend, an editor wired, you know, and I we get these like products in for review, and this lego mind storms and xt robotics kit comes in, and this like radio control airplane comes in.

I'm like, okay, one of these two things is going to work. Um, either the robot building robot will be cool or at least flowing a plane will be cool. And um, you know, the kids roll their eyes and another one of Dad's things. Um, so we we build a robot, and um, it was not cool. It was not I thought it was cool. Um, but you know it's basically spent all morning building and I leg up pieces and it rolls very slowly. I guess it doesn't

all if I only a wave. Its arms basically just had two wheels and it rolled towards a towards the wall and then kind of backed away. And they're like, come on, we've seen transformers away the lasers. Um. And then you know, the next then then on the next day we flew the airplane, which is to say I flew directly into a tree and then right that sucked. Um, so I My thought process consisted of the following, Um, you know one those rotten kids to that actually wasn't

very cool. Three what would have been cooler? Ha? What if the robot could fly the plane? What if we had a flying robot? That'd be cool? What's a flying robot? Just came home googled flying robot. If you google flying robot, you will find the first result is drone And you're like, oh, ha, I guess the drone is a flying robot. Wait what's the drone? Google drone? Oh, a drone is like an airplane with an autopilot. It's like a plane with the brain.

Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense. Wait, what's an autopilot? Google autopilot. An autopilot is like sensors and and and software that you know, kind of measure you know, the orientation on the plane and flight. It's like, oh, wait, sensors and software. Isn't that what's in the Lego mind storms box. Let's just do that. And so they're on

the dining room table. We put together a Lego autopilot and we stuck it in the RC plane which I had retreat from the tree and took it back to the field, and you know, it worked just well enough and kind of flew autonomously, just just just long enough for me to say, holy cow, what have we just done here? The kids are like, yeah, as we said, that sucked dad, um, you know, and I'm like, wait, so there's Kittie Hawk watching the Invention of drones and

they're like, yeah, what else you got? Yeah? Because he flew flights sixty? Come on, you know, where's where's my jet back? Um? Um? I had that T shirt? Where's my flying car? So? Um? Uh? So I you know, I the hairs went up on the back of my neck. I was like, I don't know what just happened there, but I need to find out. And so I create a website called d I y Drones, which was basically a place for me to ask them questions in public. And when you ask dumb questions in public, two wonderful

things happened. Number One, people answer your dumb questions, and second, it liberates other people to ask their own dumb questions. And it was just that moment. Its two thousand and seven. It's the moment where all these disciplines were coming together. There were software, people on hardware, people on airplane people, etcetera. And over the course of a couple of years they based at the community basically created the most advanced drones.

You know that you well, certainly most advanced drones you could buy, and possibly most of advanced drones in the world, at least the technology. And it was our jobs to create a company to turn them into a product. So so originally you were selling kits. You could get these engines, you could get these motors, these battery packs. Here, put this to your together yourself and have have some fun. When did that? First of all, how long did that

go on? And how did that come about? And then when did that transfer to let's build drones and sales to the public. So it was a hobby from two thousand seven to thirteen oh so full six years of just me, just new LNG. Wait now when I say hobby, um uh, you know it started with me and my kids putting together robot blimp kids in the pizza boxes. Um did they ever get excited about the idea of drones? That never? Never, And you have some crazy cool stuff here,

even this stuff they're like, who cares? Yeah, no, I know, you know you got any more kids? I brought one and he's walking around, eyes bugging out of his head, going, oh my god, look at all this stuff. But he's in his thirties, so this is he's the right age. I think they're spoiled that. Let's talk about Silicon Valley and the so called bubble and unicorn. So I always hate when people pull out the most extreme example of something and try and paint everybody with that brush. Is

there a bubble and Silicon Valley today? I'm I'm the worst person to ask, um, So actually know it to evaluations really just it's it's not how we keep Doesn't it affect the ability to either fine talent higher source things that when things get crazy, it's like, hey, we can't hire anybody's engineers are asking for four hundred thousand as a base seller. Doesn't the when things get really out of hand doesn't affect everything? It must? I mean,

I'm sure you're right, um. I mean the engineers that I've worked with in the past are motivated primarily by the work. They want to do the most exciting work of their career. I mean, there was a while when our recruiting technique consisted of the words flying robot, do I sign? Yeah? Exactly. Um, I mean, I'm sure that at some level the ability to you know, have upside in your in your stock options or sorary. I mean, of course that's a that's a thing, but it should

be a second order um thing. I mean, the reason that you know, the Tesla's and ubers are able to there is a special case, let's say, the Teslas of the world where apples are able to hire so well is because you're going to do really exciting, meaningful work. On the way up here, we passed the Tesla factory and it's enormous, and it's just like, wait, what was there before? This was? Oh, that was just a field. No, it was actually no, it's a it's a great story.

Is a really good this American Life episode. It was a new me. Um, the GM Toyota, I think, um the future of of car manufacturing. Well, it turned out to turn out there that's the future of it could be the future of cars. People don't give give enough credit for that particular one. He was able to buy

that factory. It's a mile long, right, he was able to buy that factory for um, you know, for pennies on the dollar before there was any real case, and originally tested was like a tiny corner like one factory at the end. By the end, by the time he's done, he'll be using it, all of it and more. And then brought all that equipment as well for again pennies

on the dollar. That that was so the original slow was buying the Lotus, taking the engine out and filling the floor of the car with batteries essentially, And this is where they're actually making the cars, and it's it's astonishing to drive by. It's gleaming and amazingly amazingly huge. And then you know, keep going, you know you'll get to the solar City bit and battery factory, Gigga factory. You keep driving south and you'll get to SpaceX. So

there's some cool stuff happening after here. And by the way, you don't have to drive because he's digging a tunnel between the two the hyper loop. Is that really gonna I'm not think that the tunnel hyper different thing. Really, Yeah, I can't keep it's not actually taking a tunnel between the two. But would it would be fun if he if he was Um, so you don't really think about valuation or bubbles. What motivates people who are attracted to this part of the part of the world. What what

is the driving factor? There are vast riches here, but there's some really cool stuff here. What what's the dominant meme out here? Well, you know, I did, I mean, I don't dominant meme is is saying a lot. I mean, I think in general, and it sounds like a cliche. You know, the idea that this goes right back to the foundings of Wired, The idea that can technology that can change the world continues to resonate. Um. You know,

Elon Musk is kind of everybody's hero. But you know, Jeff Bezos and you know Larry and Saragei from from Google are all in the same category. They are tackling the big problems. This is the environment, food, life off the planet, the future of transportation of energy. I mean, this is like, you know, say nothing of biotech and medicine and all that. Um, people feel like they're doing meaningful work. It certainly makes makes a lot of sense.

Let's talk about all these private companies that have chosen not to go public. What do you again, I look at you as somebody who is a astute observer of the technology seen around you. So even if you don't necessarily care about valuation, what do you make of these companies? Go down the list of unicorns that have these huge valuations and just seem to show no interest in I p owing. What's the exit for the vcs and and what is the reluctance to cash out or raise more capital.

I guess for someone like Uber they don't need more capital. Well, the reluctance to go public is obvious, which is there's that it's a hassle to be a publicly traded company. Yeah, but it's how you, as an individual get liquid. It's how your backers. Well as an individual, there's lots of ways to go to get liquid. You know, a Travis you know, there's there's plenty of secondary markets for that.

It is for your employees, it's a little it's a little tougher, and you know, there's been a lot of me you will you'll probably you know, maybe you can advise me on this. It's been all this talk of like, you know, secondary markets that liquid, secondary markets that could allow people, employees, et cetera, to get liquid Um, they've

always they've never really come to fition. Course. Well, part of the reason is when you're you go public, you go through the SEC process, You go through this and there's a very standard set of ways of you're locked up for this period of time, and now if you want to sell some or all of your stock, here's the methodology. The various secondary markets simply aren't big and deep and liquid enough to do that for every company that wants to go public or doesn't want to go.

But that's right, and then you you also end up with the venture capital backers and the original founders who either put up money or sweat equity or both. It's hard to see how they capitalize on the success without going So is this I look at this as a little bit of a Koy dance and Uber will eventually go public, as will Lift as well all the other unicorns or am I you know old school? Well I wouldn't see the whole thing through the lens of unicorns.

I mean, obviously, have a multibillion dollar valuation, you know, there aren't a lot of ways to get liquid. But if you have a lower valuation hundreds of millions or something like that, then m and a is a perfectly reasonable short to do it. And so I would I would say that you know, the the you know there are when you look at our investors in particular combinations strategics like at a desk and qualcom and then venture capitalists, they're all looking at creating big value down the line.

Either it's you know, like you're looking at construction and we have the opportunity to be part of the you know, transformation of the second biggest industry in the world. Um. You know, if we get this right, there will be any number of companies that would want to buy us. We may not choose not to sell um. But but the notion of when you're creating value, you have you

open up optionality. That's the thing. Now, you don't want to create your valuation so high that you that there's you could have created a lot of value, but there's only like you know, three people, three countries, three companies in the world that could buy you, and they won't because then you have to go public. UM. So it's it's a it's a delicate balancing act. But if you created value and if you get taken the time to

sort of take a tackle a big, big industry. How far are we from flying robots really being uh an everyday part of life, ordinary life. You mentioned Bezos. There was a lot of buzz when he talked about using drones as as delivery vehicles. How serious is that? Are we eventually going to order something from Amazon and a drone is going to drop it at our house? Well, you know, so Bezos has the delivery. But there's also

Uber and others are talking about air taxis. Um, you know we're talking about you know, drones on every construction side or every farm, et cetera. Um, you know, of all of those, I think actually sing drones as a conventional part of you know, construction or agriculture is probably

the nearest. My grandfather, UM was the inventor of the automatic sprinkler system, and um he was my inspiration the automatic sprinkler system meaning if I have if I have timer really yeah, So he was a He was a Swiss engineer in Los Angeles working to bring the talkies. So you come from a long line of makers. In other words, one um, two generations back. That's pretty pretty

good ancestry for exactly. It was certainly mind spirence. I spent my summers as it was kind of a rotten kid, and so I was sent to spend my summers with my grandfather and we just spent the summer silently working in the in the workshop. But what I love about the sprinkler, sprinkler is my inspiration for drones. You may not think so. I mean, I could see the connection. But a sprinkler is a robot. You know, sprinkler is

connected to the internet, has got sensors. It's you know, it comes up mechanically, does its own thing, goes back. And well, I love about is how boring it is. You just put your sprinklers and you live in New York, so he probably no, I live in the burbs, have underground sprinklers. Absolutely, you're sticking war zones the rain sensors so it doesn't go on in its raining. It's an

interesting little technology. It just kind of works, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, to take it for granted, So I would that's that is the sign of success. So if someday drones are as boring as sprinklers, which is to say, there's a box, there's a box on the farm, there's a box on the construction site, whatever, And every morning it's like eight thirty a m. The box opens. The it's not a sprinkle coming out as a drone coming out. It surveys this, but it goes hone, charges itself and waits for the

next morning. And this whole thing is completely automated. And you and and we I would love to be covered in mud. I'd like that stickers like Union stickers on it, something like that, you know, just absolutely conventional construction equipment. And no one cares about it because all they care about the data. What they know is that every morning they have a you know, an up to date, super high resolution three D two D model of the site

they digitized. The site was just automatically digitized in the cloud every day. Now, that is not something that's decades or years off in the future. It's months or weeks away. We could do it today today. The only thing stopping us is that um f A A regulations currently require a pilot in command. Now the pilot that this is the p I C. The pilot command doesn't have to be a pilot doesn't actually have to be in command,

but there has to be human present. And when I meant when I said that, the way it works that you open up your iPad and just swipe. That's swiping acts acquired by regulation. So it can't be so it can't quite be like a roomba. Not that I have a room, but but the way I understand it is it knows where it's to home, dock is and how to charge. It goes and does its thing and then it returns and it does it regularly, like the irrigation system. So the regulatory reason you need a human to to

push a button. Yeah, so so our our our drones are fully autonomous. They do all that stuff all on their own. The only including coming back to a charging doc it can be it's a pad, and we don't happen to use the pad because because since we have a human there, we might as well to use them to change the batter. Um. But but yeah, such a thing exists. You can buy charging charging docks or pads and things like that. Um, but no the so, so what we're talking about is autonomy, the notion of taking

the human out of the loop. And it's simply a regulatory thing. So we work with the FAA to figure out what what would it take to allow them, So like right now has to be one person, one human, one drone. What about one human drones? What about one human global fleet of drones monitored remotely. Turns out that that actually, you know, you can sit there on the ground and you know you're in command, but you're not. You're you're not you're checking your email, you're not looking drones.

The drones got much better perceptual powers than you have. You're there, it's over there. It has cameras all over the place. That's sensors. It's got you know, radar and sonar and light are and all this kind of stuff. How about just let the drone, you know, stay, it turns away and if it's got an issue, it can alert you and tell you to pay attention to make sense. But in the meantime, why don't you do what you're

best at, which is answering whatever it was exactly. So that's the process we're going through with the f A to figure out what what sort of evidence they need to allow that kind of autonomy. And that's my assumption is that's not all that far off in the field. I mean, I think when you're talking about places like farms, which is private land away from people, I think that's going to be a lower density againstity. You're talking about

going beyond visual minus site, which is particular phrase. So I think it's gonna be bits where it's accepted first. And when getting back to delivery, um, you know the Amazon, you know, original video delivering in your suburbs, that's that's hard dogs kids, telephone lines, treats. But delivering to a rural area that's quite expensive for the postal service to get to. That actually makes more sense. Do we have the battery life to send something fifty miles out into

a farming back? It seems fixed wing? An airplane you know said about you know, consumer drones or consumer sized drones flo across the Atlantic. Oh really, yeah, you know, so you doesn't have to elect consumer side like three ft across. I get like an airplane that's like a three ft four ft wingspans that it doesn't have to be a battery, but you can't use a gas power. Um, so yeah, it's it's not a problem. So I want

to talk about one of the Ted talks you did. Well, you talk about four key stages of viable technology, right price, market share, the displacement of existing technology, and finally becoming ubiquitous. Is that four stage process something that's pretty standard, or do I have them wrong? Chris Anderson? I get that a lot. So is the joke you're making is that the curator of of TED is also named Chris Anderson. Here, how big of a pain and necka is having someone

else in tech one plus one equals three. We have we have a mutual non destruction pact. Okay, that's promised not to ruin the Chris Anderson brand. There you go befward each other each other's misdirected emails without you do you guys get each other. So let me a quick digression. My last name is spelled O L t Z. We have cousins who don't have the second T. So I have a cousin named Barry Ridholts r I T H O l Z. He has a kid, brother, Richard, as do I. So there's two Barry and Richie ridholts Is.

At one point in time, we both had offices in three parts and we would get each other's male and it was pretty hilarious. Now I'm his nightmare because he has to deal with me in the media and he he's a lawyer at a mutual fund company. So is one of us is a little higher profile than the other, so he has the bigger headache. How does this work with you and Chris Anderson? Shank and he's a player too,

let's sell. So so you're both spelled with a C though, it's so, do you really get each other's I think he's full on British? He lived there for a long time. You were born in London. So is this a genuine like does genuine confusion happen with this? Um? Yeah, no, I mean but in the best sort of way, which is like people give it, give us credit for each other's work. It's like, you know, Chris, you know you've done something. You've written these books Wired three, dr Andy

run Ted, how do you do it? It's like, well, you know, I have a clothe that that's hilarious. So the four stages of tech, any viable technology, right price, market share, displacing established tech, and then eventually becoming ubiquitous. Is that the process that we always see with technology, or at least for the foreseeable future. Sure, Barry, I have to admit I can't even remember that talk. Really, I'm sure you've done it several of them. Yeah, I'm

sure it was inspired. The only reason that talk is on YouTube. Is that my other talks were abject failures And it turns out not all talks get Get, Get, Get put on the website. Yeah, my other ones were tech demos, right and fresh and Burn, Fresh and Burn. Oh, that's that's hilarious. We have been speaking with Chris Anderson. He is the founder and CEO of three D Robotics, as well as the author of the long tail Makers

and Free. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out the podcast Actus Will we keep the tape rolling and continue chatting about all in digital technology. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Follow me on Twitter at Dhults. You can see my daily column at Bloomberg View dot com. I'm Barry Hults. You've been listening

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dot org resolve faster. Welcome to the podcast, everybody. This is really fascinating stuff. I'm having a great time here, and thank you for the drone I get to take home with Palati drones that were sending U And we didn't get to do a demo that we need. If I'll be late going into the city. If I don't, I don't have time. But if you want to hang around,

the team will happily give you a demo. I have to be somewhere at twelve thirty, but I would love to and I we watched them take off and land before and it was just the return to home to land. It literally lands on the same square inch where it took off, right. It's amazing. So so let's get through some of these standard questions before you have to head into the city. The most interesting thing that people don't

know about your background. Um failed out of college and played in punk rock bands for most of my failed Would you go to school? Well, I fail. I ultimately went to school to George Washington study that you see Berkeley, which is where we are here as well. Um, I failed out of school. I won't mention, um. But but the cool bit why is that? Why won't you mention it? Just because it's fair to the school? Okay it was it was on you, it wasn't on the yea. Um.

But ultimately you got a college degree. Yeah. No, I went to I was I was as a playing punk rock bands. I was a bicycle messenger by day. And at age like twenty seven, Um, you know, finally get back to school and get a degree. Um. I was such a mess up that I decided to do the hardest thing possible just to convince people that I actually

had a brain. So that's why I did physics. Um. But the cool bit is that one of the bands I played in was called R E. M. But not that, not that, And we had a we had a very funny we released our albums on the same week and it was this coincidental like, I mean, who knew who are em? Well they were like these hicks from the Sticks and we were like these the coolest band in Washington. See, I know it's a bit of a non secure um.

And so our manager thought would be funny to have a battle of the R E M s where the winner got to rename the loser. And did that ever happen? It did? Indeed? Oh really? And what and what did they rename you? I'm gonna they renamed us a good assumption they need renamed us Ego Slavia. That's hilarious. Under which name we released our only album, Ego Slavia. Oh my god, that's that's hilarious. So let's talk about some of your early mentors, one of which I have to

assume is your grandfather. After the story you subsolutely Fred Fred House or Swiss immigrant l A. You know, by day working on in the film industry, bring sound to you know, bring the talkies in, and by night I'm inventing the automatic sprinkler system, which, by the way, is exactly what a Swiss engineer in l A would do. L A is greening the desert. The Swiss engineer would put a clock on a sprinkler. Did he make a fortune in this or was it one of those things

that the patent did? Fortune? Alright, hey, better than no fortune. That that's interesting? Who um who? Well? Any other mentors affected the way you think about either technology or writing. Um, well, you know Whired and it's and its founders had it had a huge influence on me. So you know Kevin Kelly in particular, Um, you know his book, well, Culturals is what he's you know, one of the things he's known for, but one of his original books, out of Control.

So earlier in the conversation, we're talking about emergence and the notion of capitalism and democracy and the Internet being essentially emergent you know, um phenomena. Um, well, out of Control extends that to biological and more net kind of natural examples. I mean, the notion of emergent phenomena, the notion that there's some general principles physics or chemistry, whatever that just set these rules and then everything else all that,

you know, life and civilization emerges from these principles. That's that was one of the most influential ideas of my of my formative years. Interesting, let's talk about who else influenced your approach to write, because you are a quite an accomplished writer, not just three books, you're a very influential writer. Who who shaped your approach to that aha moment and then turning it into Hey, this is an article in a magazine. Oh no, there's more here. Let's

turn this into a book. So I don't think of mice. I mean, thank you for saying that. I m my parents were writers, and so I promised to do everything but that and I failed once again. We become, we become our parents. Is no way to avoid it and bite everything. Genetics actually is a thing. Um. So I I think of I mean, I I don't. I don't think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as as a you know, a guy who can sort

of get capture ideas and get them out there. So as an editor, of course, you're not typically not writing. You're just packaging ideas. Companies package ideas, open source communities package ideas, and writing is one way to do it. I think the perhaps the most influential writer for me was that Nicholas Niggerponte and his um original book Being Digital UM, which very early days, but sweeping notions that digital was different, that it almost had kind of fundamental

physical properties UM. And I think that was probably I mean, I haven't read it for years, but I can't I can't tell you whether it's well written or not. But it's very powerful ideas. So since you brought up books, Uh, probably the question we get asked more than any other is hey, what are your guest favorite books? So let's you mentioned being digital. What other books have you found to be important, influential, valuable to you? Fiction, nonfiction, technology,

non tech, it doesn't matter. Yeah. Um, Well, recently I've been reading. UM. I had this rule for like thirty years. I would only read nonfiction. UM and the books the Keevin Colors of the World. I've recently I've been been reading fiction again, but only science fiction on the grounds that it's say, you know, I can I can almost testify it because there's you know, it's kind of a vision of the fay. Here's here's where tech is going.

I mean the Three Body Problem him series. UM. Uh oh, now you're now you're asking um it's Chinese um author um and it's uh something Lee. We can look it up Body Problems, the Three Body Problems series. UM, it's it is the most exciting science fiction. UM. If you liked Yeah, So there's the first one, the Three Body Problem. The second one was The Dark Forest, and the third one his name is Escaping Me. But with those two I can yeah, and it's Quinly something. No, it's not Quinly.

I can't remember the exactly. But what's cool is that the guy the author like by day he's a he's an engineer in a like power plant in the middle of China, and by night he writes the most exciting kind of mind expanding um science fiction about you know about you know, what would the university like if there were? If there were, you know, how how would we encounter life? Um? Why haven't we encountered life? Um? How would we communicate? Um? Away?

It's six in louid C I X I N L I U the three body problem, the dark forest, remembrance of Earth's past, and Death's end? Are those the three? Those are the three? But then on the list that sounds fascinating, Yeah, is this firm his paradox is that what he's describing or something more more forward than that,

I it is. It is more so so one notion, I mean, the most interesting that I don't want to ruin the plot, but the dark forest, the middle one sort of explains the notion that if you encounter, if you know that there's another species out there, you assume that sooner or later they're going to kill you, and so it's really important that you that they not know you exist. And and he kind of walks to the logic, but you know, so we shouldn't be broadcasting television signals

in space precisely. And so the reason that you know the case, there's the reason we haven't encountered other civilizations since as they're hiding because they know that it's a fascinating that's a fascinating On sept I like that any of the books you want to mention, Um, those you know, I I got, I mean there's m I hate to you know, keep using U Kevin Kelly examples. Um, those are the ones I'm reading right now. Um uh there's a new book. Well anyway that those are the ones

I'm gonna I'm not a a highlight for now, okay. Um. We talked about changes in the technology industry. We talked about shifts and uh, let me briefly ask you about the digital shift in journalism and the problem that genuine media outlets are having competing with free and digital. How big of a problem is that for the idea of a free press in America when that business model is under attack from everywhere. So I'm always baffled by that, that question. I get it all the time. Um, there

is no shortage of media. You know, it's the golden age of media. Now we call that media Facebook, or we call it you know, you know, the web, but we're called social media. But there's you know, um, you know, we now have access to global media. Um. You know, I get the ft every day there you go, and India digitally as as well. So it's very hard to believe there's any kind of suppression of of of of media. Um. For economic reasons. I mean, you know, basically, the cost

of distributing, creating, distributing content is very low. Um. So when people talk about the free press, it's a very archaic, almost American notion of the fourth of state. I mean, no other country has this sort of maybe some other countries, but in general, this this notion that you know that you have these kind of you know, natural monopolies, big city newspapers who are necessary to counterbalance political forces. Very weird,

very American, very twentieth century. Doesn't seem relevant today. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience. Where where do I start? Um? Uh So you know, in our in our progression UM three dr from the technology to the consumer electronics to the tool using using drones as sensors. UM. Because of regulation, that regulation only allowed recreational use. So the only way you know, we couldn't do commercial use until last September

of last year. And so in between, the only way you could really get drones out there was on the shelves of Walmart and UM. And so we raised a lot of money and we spun up you know, outsourced manufacturing and consumer electronics and you know, perhaps the most complex consumer electronics device you know ever at that time. And we decided to you know, to do the consumer products, you know, the thing right with distribution and marketing and

distributing retail shelves and all that. UM. And we designed a good product and we um, you know, did everything right, UM and UM that's when the prices fell by by by sevent months and and we ended up we ended up with negative margins. Uh. And you know your units called dollars to build, yeah, exactly. We were so when we saw when we started, the going price for an advanced drone was about fiftie hundred even more. And so you know, our bill of materials was about half that,

which is appropriate. UM. By the time a couple of months after we after we launched, the going price was below bill materials and and as of like about a year ago, was down to about three D. So well, these were not like not like bad technology, not toys. These are serious, serious things. So so what did you learn from that? What was the takeaway? I learned that. I mean my instinct right now is that that essentially was the universe telling me what should have been obvious,

which is that Silicon Valley should focus on software. Um. China is extraordinarily good at hardware. The notion of advanced Silicon Valley cloud software running on Chinese hardware, which by the way, is your phone actually, UM, is the way we should go. And it's kind of like, don't fight it. It's you know, rather than build your own hardware, go find some brilliant company in China that's making the hardware and partner lets them have all the costs and produce

it at half. And every time I talked to you know, a new company and Silicon valid it's doing hardware, they're like, yeah, we know that the hardware is commoditized, and we know the chance. But we think we have five or seven years. And it's like, yeah, I said that too, you got six months, you got six months. Um, what do you do to keep either mentally you're physically fit, and what do you do to relax outside of the office? Um?

So physically fit, UM, I just play tennis. Um, but I have some of my dear friends and mentors or my tennis partners, and so tennis is not about the tennis. So not spending time with you know, with with with with with your friends, you wouldn't otherwise schedule. Um. Intellectually I have I still have tons of tons of hobbies. And ten years ago we did d I Y drones.

Now we're doing d I Y robot cars and applying the same sort of grassroots bob you know, you know, sort of like what what what if you made an autonomous car for a hundred ours now wouldn't carry a person in the same way of drone doesn't carry a person, But it's the same. It's light, our computer vision, neural networks, you know, Google clouds. This is now down to the d I Y level, the various At one point in time, this was a um was it a dark book? Dar

you know, the Darker Competition, the Grand Challenge, etcetera. So this weekend, for example, we're gonna be doing um, robot to robot, wheel to wheel Thomas car racing in a in a huge warehouse like semi abandoned warehouse in in Oakland, California. And then we're gonna do robot versus human um. And

this is not These are not toys. I mean they look like toys because they're like in a one tense scale, But the exact same technology, isn't it Tesla or And they could scale right up if they scale right up, it's basically using the same Google Neural network stuff. But the cost of the hardware itself is about a hundred dollars undred fifty dollars. And um, we made it so it's fun. We made it so that students could do it, and um, you know it's dangerous for the cars, but

not for humans. These are they're truly autonomous. You basically three to one go and this one, this one just outside this room, we're gonna have to take a look at that. Now I have to ask my final two questions. First, what sort of advice would you give to a millennial or someone just starting their career in either technology or journalism. So you know, I have kids who are who are just going to college or or soon will local or or elsewhere. No, they refused to go locally in the

same way. Why did I Why did I knew that? No, that was the answer. I mean, we live in Berkeley, you know, you see, you see, Berkeley is like one of the best schoals in the world. But they just won't go to it. Um. I didn't get in either, but they didn't. They didn't apply. I didn't in fairness, they didn't apply. Um uh so um. You know, if you ask me what I was to study today, I'm gonna give you an answer which sounds boring, and then you have to find a sexier way to sell The

answer is statistics. Probability and statistics are not boring at all, but it doesn't sound super compelling. So let's call it. Let's call it something a sex here like it's called data science. I'm gonna take it a step further. Probability and statistics is how you discern reality from falsity, truth from nonsense, and so sell it to my seventeen year old I can't tell you how often something comes along and you say, no, that's you're giving me a sample set of two Who cares it's it's not if you

don't know that, you cannot identify reality. So my seventeen year old is like, he's trying to choose a major, and you, Barry uncle Barry as we'll call you, for the purpose of this argument, are going to convince my seventeen year old to major in what you just said, sell it in a way that doesn't sound like spinach. Well, what do you want to do with your life? What do you what are you interested in? How would you like to have a way to identify what's real and

what's false in that? How would you like to be able to inject the truth serum into anything that takes place in meat space and some stuff that takes place in the virtual world and figure out if it's real or it's false. And what if they say it sounds hard and is it even a job? Anything that's worth doing is hard number one, And it's a job, but it's only a fabulous, paying, fascinating job. So if that's of interest, you know the ability to And by the way,

this is a well established science. Many people have problems with it. But the ability to walk in and look at something and say, here's how we know their story is false based on this is an amazing, amazing thing. And I'm I'm astonished more people who don't recognize it for what it is. So so the I agree with everything you just said. Um, the way I ended up selling it was I said, well, okay, um, let's call it. Let's call its computer science, and it's called data science.

The data science is basically computer science plus statistics of various sorts. Um. One of my one of my sons is at North Northwestern and and he did economics, econometrics, and computer science, which is another way. So and so when you put econometrics and computer science together, if if, if the employers want to see that as data science, data science, it is, and that's a very hot profession

and get paid for that. Sure to say the least our final question before I make you late for your next appointment, what is it that you know about technology writing journalism today you wish you knew twenty five years ago. I mean, I've been pretty lucky in being in the right place at the right time throughout im I've sometimes been too early. Is as bad as being wrong, and I've certainly been too early on on some things. UM yeah, I uh, I think I might have. UM, so I

could have moved to Silicon Valley sooner. Um, but in that if I'd done so, I would have missed China. I would have missed being in China. That's a cool into it and that was that was cooler. I guess I would have. UM. The only time I regret at the time I spent in Washington, d C, I was I was too long in Washington. I saw the world through kind of a political lens, and I wish I'd gotten out of there sooner. The you know, here's the

Looking Valley, d C fields a long way away. Governments seem not terribly not as important, markets and even countries don't seem as important as as as as trade relationships. So I wish i'd traveled center. We have been speaking with Chris Anderson, CEO of three D Robotics, author of The Long Tail and Makers and Free. If you enjoy this conversation, be showing look up an inch or down an inch on either Apple, iTunes, SoundCloud, Bloomberg dot com, and you could see our other hundred and fifty or

so such uh recordings. I would be remiss if I did not think Michael Battnick, who helped prepare these questions, Chris ven who has been my boyfriend today on this trip. And Chris, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I know you have other things and better places to do and be. I'm Barry Retults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Masters in Business is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association.

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