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The Rise and Fall of Travis Kalanick... And His Return With Atoms · In the Loop AI

0:00
Ejaaz: Just last week, one of the most controversial founders in tech history broke eight years of silence.
0:06
Ejaaz: His name is Travis Kalanick, and he is the person who built Uber into a $70 billion company.
0:11
Ejaaz: He got forced out in probably the most traumatic ousting since Steve Jobs,
0:14
Ejaaz: and then totally vanished.
0:16
Ejaaz: He was gone for eight years when he was secretly building this company in stealth
0:20
Ejaaz: that was just unveiled this week called Atoms.
0:22
Ejaaz: He's already acquired a self-driving startup founded by the engineer who went
0:26
Ejaaz: to prison for stealing Google's autonomous vehicle secrets. And Uber,
0:30
Ejaaz: the company that kicked him out, is reportedly funding this whole thing.
0:33
Ejaaz: So there's a lot of crazy chaos, interesting parts to this story.
0:38
Ejaaz: One of the most interesting is the fact that thousands of employees were forbidden
0:42
Ejaaz: to put their company name that they were working in on LinkedIn.
0:44
Ejaaz: There's a $15 billion valuation already reached in the dark.
0:48
Ejaaz: They've raised $1.1 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.
0:51
Ejaaz: But no one actually knows what this company does until last week.
0:55
Ejaaz: This is a crazy story about one of the most notable founders in Silicon Valley.
0:58
Ejaaz: I think it's important to take a step back and really understand who this character
1:02
Ejaaz: is at the core of this new company that's really important to the future.
1:05
Josh: Travis is one of those few founders where his backstory is actually...
1:11
Josh: Equally as exciting as the story that we're breaking on this episode today about his new company.
1:17
Josh: This guy's lived and died by the sword multiple times and then was resurrected.
1:22
Josh: He actually founded two startups before Uber that surged dramatically and then failed.
1:27
Josh: I think the first company was called Scour. It was like a peer-to-peer network
1:31
Josh: where you can have kind of file sharing systems.
1:33
Josh: So think of like Napster, but for like any kind of file system,
1:36
Josh: kind of like LimeWire-esque, I guess.
1:38
Josh: And he quickly got sued by a bunch of regulators for a quarter of a trillion dollars.
1:44
Josh: Now, back then in 1998, that is a heck of a lot of money. $215 billion.
1:49
Ejaaz: Today, that's a heck of a lot of money.
1:50
Josh: Today, that's, I don't know, with all the AI CapEx stuff, maybe it's not.
1:53
Josh: Maybe my mind's been warped. But that is a lot of money for four 22-year-olds to be sued with.
1:59
Josh: So he had no choice but to file for bankruptcy.
2:01
Josh: But he came back with the vengeance with his second company called Red Swoosh,
2:06
Josh: which was pretty much a similar type of company, but aimed at a more professional market.
2:11
Josh: Same thing kind of happened with them. They got sued, but they managed to get through it.
2:15
Josh: And then Google poached all of his engineers. It was just him, a one-man company.
2:20
Josh: And so he was about to fall for bankruptcy before, get this,
2:24
Josh: Mark Cuban makes an entrance, gets into an argument with Travis Kalanick online.
2:28
Josh: He's so impressed by Travis's response that he gives him $1.8 million.
2:33
Josh: Travis moves to Thailand and he lives there for a year and a half,
2:36
Josh: cuts down costs and runs this company, ends up selling it and makes $2 million and moves to SF.
2:42
Ejaaz: Which is pretty good for someone in their early 20s. And this was the start
2:46
Ejaaz: of a pretty unbelievable story.
2:47
Ejaaz: I mean, in between this time and 2009, when he started Uber, he was also working.
2:52
Ejaaz: There's a few funny stories that I like about Travis, one of which that I'd
2:56
Ejaaz: like to tell briefly is the one with the Wii Tennis story, just to kind of understand
3:00
Ejaaz: who this guy is. A famous investor named Chris Saka.
3:03
Ejaaz: And Chris Saka back in the day,
3:05
Ejaaz: I mean, still is, but one of the most legendary investors in the world.
3:07
Ejaaz: He was a seed round investor in Uber and he was hosting Travis for the weekend.
3:11
Ejaaz: And Travis was woke up in the morning and was playing Wii Tennis with his dad.
3:15
Ejaaz: Just for fun. His dad liked playing Wii Tennis.
3:17
Ejaaz: That's when Wii was very popular. He was kind of kicking his dad's ass.
3:20
Ejaaz: He was getting a few points, but he was doing pretty well and he was playing
3:23
Ejaaz: with his opposite hand and he wasn't really paying attention.
3:25
Ejaaz: And then he switches over to his dominant hand and he starts playing seriously.
3:28
Ejaaz: His dad doesn't score a point.
3:29
Ejaaz: He moves over to the scoreboard and it turns out that Travis is number two in the world at Wii Tennis.
3:35
Ejaaz: And it's a testament to the type of founder that this person is,
3:38
Ejaaz: that we're going to uncover throughout this episode, is just hyper fixated on
3:42
Ejaaz: winning and success and being the absolute best at what he does.
3:45
Ejaaz: And this reflected itself in Uber, which is where I think a lot of people can
3:49
Ejaaz: pick up the story where they're familiar with.
3:51
Ejaaz: In 2009, he founded Uber, which went to go on to become the biggest ride sharing
3:54
Ejaaz: application in the world.
3:54
Ejaaz: And not only that, but created an entire sector of technology today that is ride sharing.
3:59
Ejaaz: This simply did not exist prior to Uber's existence.
4:02
Josh: And he kind of found or came across the idea for Uber as an accident after he
4:07
Josh: sold his company read swoosh for and made two million dollars he moved to sf
4:11
Josh: And he kind of started like the original incubator, which was just his apartment.
4:16
Josh: And he had founders like come through all the time. And one such guy he went
4:21
Josh: to Paris with to go to a conference and they couldn't hail a black cap.
4:24
Josh: So he ended up kind of like creating this idea around an app that can call a
4:28
Josh: black car for you, not necessarily a cab driver. And that's what ended up becoming Uber.
4:34
Josh: But where he kind of like really doubled down on with the company and as the
4:37
Josh: story goes was on like the regulatory arbitrage. So he just kept on hounding
4:41
Josh: state regulators to allow them to legalize Uber because it was completely legal to start off with.
4:46
Josh: And that's really how Uber became a massive boat. It's just a crazy,
4:49
Josh: crazy story. But then...
4:50
Josh: It ended up in him being ousted.
4:52
Ejaaz: Yeah, so there's a few steps just before the ousting, one of which is an important
4:57
Ejaaz: character in the store, which is Google.
4:58
Ejaaz: Google Ventures invested a quarter of a billion dollars in 2013 into Uber at
5:02
Ejaaz: a three and a half billion dollar valuation, which at the time was a pretty big deal.
5:06
Ejaaz: Briefly afterwards, around 2015, this is when Google was creating their self-driving project.
5:11
Ejaaz: Travis was aware of this because of their connection, and this self-driving
5:14
Ejaaz: project eventually is what became Waymo.
5:16
Ejaaz: And Waymo was viewed as an existential threat. If cars can drive themselves.
5:20
Ejaaz: Uber doesn't need drivers, but neither does anyone else.
5:23
Ejaaz: So whoever owns the autonomy owes us the future of transportation.
5:26
Ejaaz: So this was an existential crisis they were having.
5:28
Ejaaz: Travis goes ahead and he creates Uber's self-driving division in 2015.
5:32
Ejaaz: This is where he recruits Anthony Lewandowski, who we mentioned earlier,
5:35
Ejaaz: away from Google's self-driving program. Lewandowski was a founding member of what became Waymo.
5:40
Ejaaz: And with him, what he didn't know at the time was many documents that were actually
5:44
Ejaaz: stolen from Google and Waymo and eventually wound up putting him in jail.
5:50
Ejaaz: So this created a lot of chaos.
5:52
Ejaaz: This was, I guess, the beginning of the chaos that really started around February
5:56
Ejaaz: of 2017, where there was a blog post published that was detailing some not so
6:01
Ejaaz: favorable activities in the workplace.
6:03
Ejaaz: There was a Waymo lawsuit where Waymo sued Uber, alleging that Lewandowski downloaded
6:08
Ejaaz: 14,000 proprietary files, which turned out was loosely true.
6:13
Ejaaz: And these were There's secret files about trade secrets from Waymo's autonomous vehicle history.
6:18
Ejaaz: And then there is a series of videos that come out, one of which was dash cam
6:23
Ejaaz: footage from Travis inside of an Uber driver being not so nice to the Uber driver.
6:27
Ejaaz: And there's just this really unfortunate cascading series of events that eventually
6:31
Ejaaz: unfolds, like you mentioned, Ejaz.
6:33
Ejaaz: He got kicked out of Uber.
6:34
Josh: Yeah, so this headline says Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigns following months
6:40
Josh: of chaos, the events that you just referenced.
6:42
Josh: But I don't think resigns is the right word here. In June of 2017,
6:46
Josh: whilst Travis was interviewing someone to become a deputy head at Uber,
6:51
Josh: two partners from Benchmark Capital, which were early and big investors in Uber,
6:56
Josh: turned up at his hotel room, walked in, and hands him a draft resignation letter for him to sign.
7:03
Josh: And they cite reasons of, we can't deal with the drama that you're creating,
7:06
Josh: the fraud that is all over the media.
7:08
Josh: We need you to step down or it's going to ruin the success of the business.
7:12
Josh: Now, they keep hounding him. And about a month later, they sue Kalanick for
7:17
Josh: fraud. And it ends up becoming this whole thing which forces him to resign.
7:21
Josh: And the most brutal part about this is it comes right after his mother died in a boating accident.
7:27
Ejaaz: It's pretty messed up. He almost lost his dad in that same accident,
7:30
Ejaaz: too. It was a really traumatic time for him.
7:33
Ejaaz: And he attended this board meeting two days after her funeral
7:36
Ejaaz: and it's a six-hour board meeting it's this like horrific series
7:39
Ejaaz: of events and you can't help but think that like bill
7:41
Ejaaz: girley and the benchmark team were really just leveraging this really nasty
7:46
Ejaaz: opportunity to impose their will on the company and then the day after uh travis
7:50
Ejaaz: resigns bill girley he quit the uber board um so it was this really kind of
7:55
Ejaaz: messy thing it destroyed travis this at this point this was the absolute love of his life.
8:00
Ejaaz: He had spent his life as a founder, finally found some unbelievable levels of
8:04
Ejaaz: success, and then at the darkest moment of his life got kicked out of the most
8:09
Ejaaz: important thing in his life.
8:10
Ejaaz: So it's this really difficult, tough time.
8:12
Ejaaz: And Travis kind of goes dark for about nine months time where no one really hears from him.
8:17
Ejaaz: And nine months later, he comes back very quietly in stealth and begins to work
8:22
Ejaaz: on this company called Cloud Kitchens, or also known as City Storage Systems,
8:26
Ejaaz: this weird unknown stealth company that was backed.
8:29
Ejaaz: By the $2.5 billion that he had actually sold when he left Uber.
8:34
Ejaaz: He sold all of his stock, he cashed out, and now he has this treasure trove
8:38
Ejaaz: of money that he could use to build the next thing.
8:41
Ejaaz: The idea is that he takes this controlling share of this company named City
8:44
Ejaaz: Storage Systems for $150 million.
8:46
Ejaaz: He becomes CEO. They own Cloud Kitchens, and Cloud Kitchens is a company that buys real estate.
8:51
Ejaaz: They build commercial ghost kitchens and then rents them to restaurant for delivery-only operations.
8:56
Ejaaz: So chances are, if you live in a major city and you've taken delivery from Chick-fil-A,
9:01
Ejaaz: Taco Bell, a lot of these larger brands, they have come out of a cloud kitchen.
9:05
Ejaaz: And the idea of a cloud kitchen is to automate the food delivery process.
9:09
Ejaaz: So if you've ever used Uber Eats, you're familiar with Travis's engagement with
9:12
Ejaaz: food delivery where Uber Eats is the food delivery version of Uber.
9:16
Ejaaz: You take food from one place, you move it to another.
9:18
Ejaaz: Cloud Kitchens is the automated version of that. You basically try your hardest
9:22
Ejaaz: to remove the people, the cost of labor from that loop, and you decrease the
9:26
Ejaaz: cost of these goods to get as close to the pure cost as possible by automating everything.
9:31
Ejaaz: So these cloud kitchens are totally automated. They have a lot of robots.
9:34
Ejaaz: They have a lot of automation.
9:35
Ejaaz: You order a bowl, the robot builds its bowl, and it ships it off to you.
9:39
Ejaaz: And it's a really effective, really efficient way of delivering food.
9:43
Ejaaz: And this was the first step in this redemption arc. But again,
9:46
Ejaaz: this was all silent. He's building in stealth mode.
9:48
Josh: Yeah, I mean, it's a recurring theme. With Travis, his entire goal with Uber
9:53
Josh: and with this company, Cloud Kitchens, is he's trying to automate moving of
9:58
Josh: atoms of things, which suggests what his new company is called.
10:01
Josh: He didn't tell anyone about this. I think his original investment was acquisition
10:07
Josh: of a controlling stake in city storage systems was about 150 mil,
10:10
Josh: didn't make any headlines. No one knew what the hell it was.
10:13
Josh: And the concept itself, Cloud Kitchens, isn't something that you can kind of like visit publicly.
10:18
Josh: Josh, actually, you told me a story where you tried to visit their site in Brooklyn, right?
10:23
Ejaaz: Yeah, I'm obsessed with Travis, like disgustingly so. I think he's one of the
10:27
Ejaaz: best entrepreneurs of our time by far.
10:29
Ejaaz: And I suspect a lot more people will realize this over the coming years as he
10:33
Ejaaz: builds this new company, which we're almost getting to.
10:36
Ejaaz: We're almost there at the new company. But part of this fascination is wanting
10:39
Ejaaz: to get close to him and just wanting to see what that was like.
10:41
Ejaaz: So I was curious what it would look like to work at a company that Travis runs.
10:44
Ejaaz: There is no way to actually apply to these places. They're outbound only because
10:49
Ejaaz: they're totally in stealth.
10:50
Ejaaz: So I'll stop by one of the kitchens to check it out. And of course,
10:53
Ejaaz: it's a ghost kitchen. I mean, there's really, there's no one there. There's no markings.
10:57
Josh: There's no branding.
10:58
Ejaaz: Just a bunch of robots hanging out, right? I mean, there are people,
11:01
Ejaaz: but it is a very inconspicuous building.
11:03
Ejaaz: There's not much going on. It's fascinating because as an outsider looking in,
11:06
Ejaaz: there's really no signs that anything special is happening here.
11:10
Ejaaz: Meanwhile, they've deployed over 2,000 kitchen locations across America,
11:14
Ejaaz: and they're accounting for, I believe, 18% of all U.S. food delivery.
11:19
Ejaaz: And this was in 2024. So I'm assuming that number is going higher and higher and higher.
11:24
Ejaaz: And they've quietly built this like really impressive empire as it relates purely
11:27
Ejaaz: to food. This is just one pillar of the new company.
11:30
Josh: So let's get into the actual story about the company Atoms.
11:34
Josh: So collectively, since he left Uber, Travis has been in stealth for about eight years now.
11:40
Josh: And he's employed thousands and thousands of employees, presumably to work on
11:45
Josh: this cloud kitchen thing, but no one really knows what he's doing.
11:48
Josh: They can't officially list their title or the company that they work for on
11:52
Josh: their LinkedIn. So it's complete stealth mode for eight years.
11:56
Josh: Now think about anyone else that can potentially hold that. Like he's getting everyone to sign NDAs.
12:01
Josh: Like no one can really keep something hidden that large for that long,
12:04
Josh: but Travis did end up doing it.
12:05
Josh: Until Friday of last week where he announced his new company called Atoms.
12:10
Josh: And the vision is kind of simple or rather follows on from his founding of Uber and Cloud Kitchens.
12:16
Josh: He wants to do what he did with Uber. He wants to do what he did with food to
12:20
Josh: every single part of physical delivery that exists in the world today.
12:26
Josh: And he's gonna focus on three specific verticals. He's gonna focus on the mining industry.
12:30
Josh: He's gonna focus on the food industry. That's with Cloud Kitchens,
12:33
Josh: what he's rebranded it to Food Atoms. and he's going to do it with automotive transport.
12:37
Josh: And the company follows a framework of three specific steps to figure out which
12:43
Josh: industry and how to approach this.
12:45
Josh: One, he wants to understand the current state of the physical world.
12:48
Josh: So he's looking at food delivery, he's looking at the mining industry,
12:51
Josh: he's looking at automotive transport delivery, and he's like,
12:54
Josh: okay, this is how it functions right now.
12:55
Josh: These are where the problems are going to be. And so this is what it might potentially turn into.
13:00
Josh: So that brings us to step two, where he predicts what the future state of the
13:05
Josh: physical world will look like.
13:06
Josh: And then finally, step three, control the future state of that physical world.
13:10
Josh: So creating a new app or a new product like Uber to transform transportation
13:14
Josh: of humans or creating cloud kitchens to transform cooking of food and transportation
13:19
Josh: and delivery of that food.
13:21
Josh: And so how he plans to enable this is the coolest part for me,
13:25
Josh: which is AI-powered robots, but not the humanoid type robots that you and I
13:30
Josh: have spoken about on the show many times, Josh.
13:33
Josh: Rather robots that are specifically designed to perform these acts, right?
13:38
Ejaaz: Yeah. If you've ever been to LA and you've seen these like four wheeled robots
13:43
Ejaaz: kind of riding around the sidewalk delivering food, that's kind of the vibe. It's wheel platforms.
13:47
Ejaaz: And I think the way you could think about Atoms and the reason why it's named
13:49
Ejaaz: Atoms is similar to the progress that we've seen in bits.
13:53
Ejaaz: So I think one of the things that we talk about a lot is we've had so much progress
13:56
Ejaaz: in the world of bits over the past few decades, meaning that all the software
14:00
Ejaaz: has gotten much better. All of the chips have gotten much better.
14:03
Ejaaz: Everything in our digital world has improved, while the external physical world
14:06
Ejaaz: has not really gone a long way.
14:08
Ejaaz: The goal of this company, the intention of this company, is to do what we just
14:11
Ejaaz: did for computers to the real physical world using the same framework.
14:15
Ejaaz: So if you think of this world of bits infrastructure, we have the chips,
14:20
Ejaaz: which is the intelligence. We have the storage, which is how you store the intelligence.
14:24
Ejaaz: Then we have the network, which is how you transfer that intelligence across the world.
14:27
Ejaaz: What they're doing with atoms is the same three-level stack
14:30
Ejaaz: you have the cpu you have the intelligence which
14:33
Ejaaz: is these cloud kitchens which is these automation systems that are actually
14:36
Ejaaz: deployed in the physical world you have the storage which is the real estate
14:40
Ejaaz: one of the huge parts of this company is real estate they're owning a lot of
14:43
Ejaaz: buildings they're building a lot of kitchens they own a lot of places to distribute
14:47
Ejaaz: this compute and then the network is this autonomous part of the business it's.
14:53
Ejaaz: Kind of what he envisioned for uber where you have truly fully autonomous
14:56
Ejaaz: movement of these goods and services using these
14:59
Ejaaz: robots so he explicitly said they're not building humanoids they're
15:02
Ejaaz: not in the business of disrupting tesla with full self-driving or
15:05
Ejaaz: their humanoid robots they're building supplemental things for their
15:08
Ejaaz: world of atoms for delivering groceries
15:12
Ejaaz: delivering food delivering objects and being
15:15
Ejaaz: the full stack and revolutionizing the world in the way that
15:18
Ejaaz: we did with bits but with atoms and it's a really grand plan
15:21
Ejaaz: and he's rolled it out in a few places so far i mean
15:24
Ejaaz: they have the mining they have the cloud kitchens and then they have otter which
15:28
Ejaaz: is the third part of the business so there's a lot going on here but it's around
15:32
Ejaaz: that one core thesis that atoms are the thing that really matters as we move
15:36
Ejaaz: forward from this like i guess artificial intelligence artificial general intelligence age one.
15:42
Josh: Thing that stood out for me is his approach to the design of robots i Like I
15:47
Josh: was fixated on why he was so anti-humanoid.
15:49
Josh: It kind of makes sense, right? The world is designed for humans.
15:52
Josh: So you would create human-shaped robots. That's what Tesla is doing.
15:55
Josh: That's what a bunch of robotic startups in the UK and China are doing.
15:58
Josh: So why wouldn't he do the same?
15:59
Josh: And he used, I watched his interview on TVPN and there's a story where he goes,
16:04
Josh: I watched the Robot Olympics in China last year or a few months ago.
16:09
Josh: And he was like, I was so impressed by all these robots dancing and running
16:13
Josh: and winning these races. But what I couldn't help think was,
16:16
Josh: This robot would be so much faster if it just had four wheels.
16:19
Josh: And it just raced that way.
16:22
Josh: And it made sense that this was his entire approach from first principles to
16:25
Josh: moving atoms from one place to the next, whether it's food,
16:29
Josh: whether it's mining and moving machinery from spot A to spot B,
16:33
Josh: or whether that's doing the same for automotive transports, be it trucks,
16:37
Josh: cars, delivering, whatever, right?
16:39
Josh: What was interesting was I was curious, like, why did he do mining specifically.
16:43
Josh: And looking into it, it just seems like an incredibly human-dependent,
16:48
Josh: bulky machinery-operated industry that is ripe for consumption by AI robotics.
16:54
Josh: And I don't think many startups are focused on this. The same could potentially be said for food as well.
16:59
Josh: The way he framed it was cloud kitchens was R&D for food automation or transport
17:04
Josh: automation, disguised as a cookout, as a kitchen that would just make food for you.
17:09
Josh: So he's been doing R&D for eight years.
17:12
Josh: And now he's expanding to these three very prominent sectors that no one else
17:15
Josh: has really been focused on.
17:16
Josh: I don't think even Tesla is like focused on like stuff like mining and stuff
17:19
Josh: like that. So it's really ripe for like consumption.
17:21
Josh: And I think that Travis is the perfect guy to do this because of what he pulled off at Uber.
17:25
Ejaaz: It's important to really understand these three pillars because Travis is not
17:29
Ejaaz: someone who reasons by analogy.
17:30
Ejaaz: He has really, he thinks very deeply about what meaningfully matters and what
17:35
Ejaaz: will actually impact the world going forward.
17:37
Ejaaz: And mining is such a huge one because when you think about AI,
17:39
Ejaaz: the world that we spend so much time I'm thinking about the common constraint
17:42
Ejaaz: outside of energy is just these materials. Like we don't have enough memory.
17:46
Ejaaz: We don't have enough raw materials.
17:47
Ejaaz: We don't have enough for batteries and to create enough storage for this energy.
17:51
Ejaaz: And mining is such a huge part of that.
17:53
Ejaaz: And mining is this incredibly laborious process with a lot of labor rules and
17:58
Ejaaz: laws. And it's not a very glamorous thing.
18:01
Ejaaz: But if you automate a lot of this mining process like he intends to,
18:04
Ejaaz: well, then suddenly a lot more areas open up for mining.
18:07
Ejaaz: There's a lot more efficiency to be had. it's just a huge part of
18:11
Ejaaz: how they plan to win. And you mentioned Tesla. I mean, he explicitly addressed Tesla,
18:15
Ejaaz: I think, on the All In podcast earlier this week about how impressive Tesla
18:19
Ejaaz: is and how much respect they have for it and how he's kind of in a way basing
18:22
Ejaaz: his ideas off of the Tesla stack because he believes that Tesla is very much the Google of this era.
18:29
Ejaaz: Meaning if you were to create a startup in the early 2000s, the first question
18:32
Ejaaz: you get is, why isn't Google going to kill you?
18:35
Ejaaz: Tesla is basically that for physical AI. They own the whole manufacturing stack.
18:38
Ejaaz: They own full production from sand in to vehicle out and even intelligence out
18:43
Ejaaz: through full self-driving.
18:44
Ejaaz: And Travis argued that not enough people are taking this seriously and not enough
18:48
Ejaaz: people are trying to be complementary to that.
18:51
Ejaaz: You don't have to fight this force. You could actually just be a contributor
18:53
Ejaaz: to the success and win as a result.
18:56
Josh: Yeah, if I were to like zoom out and distill what he's trying to do with this
18:59
Josh: company, what Claude Code did to automating software engineering,
19:03
Josh: what ChatGPT did to replacing a bunch of high schoolers is able to write like
19:08
Josh: PhD level essays, science,
19:11
Josh: automating mathematics, he's doing for the physical world.
19:14
Josh: So if you think of like mining as a technological stack, he is doing the sensors,
19:20
Josh: he is doing the compute on top of that, he's operating the machinery,
19:23
Josh: which is powered by the AI models that sit on top of this.
19:25
Josh: So if you could automate all of that, then you can think about automated factories
19:29
Josh: that sit on top of that. And then the produce that comes on top of that also being automated.
19:33
Josh: And so if you could scale that, not necessarily at the speed of software,
19:37
Josh: automated by AI, that's something pretty cool that we haven't seen in the world
19:40
Josh: today because we're constrained by humans, by our biological brains,
19:44
Josh: by making errors, by needing to sleep and a bunch of other things like that.
19:48
Josh: The other thing that like fascinates me about this is Travis is very much building
19:51
Josh: like a vertically integrated play here, right?
19:54
Josh: Like if I think about it, he's doing the sensors, he's got the compute,
19:58
Josh: he's got the AI models, and then he's like manipulating these atoms by physically
20:02
Josh: delivering them using robots, which then accelerates manufacturing.
20:05
Josh: He's owning the real estate. There's a bunch of energy production around that.
20:08
Josh: He's involved in all parts of that.
20:10
Josh: That reminds me of a bunch of other companies that we've spoken about on the
20:13
Josh: show, like NVIDIA is doing that from Silicon all the way to AI agents that they
20:17
Josh: announced with NemoClaw this week.
20:19
Josh: Tesla is doing, or rather SpaceX, SpaceX and Tesla, they're all the same company.
20:23
Josh: They're going to merge anyway, is doing that from everything from energy production
20:26
Josh: to space transportation, to harnessing the energy from the sun itself,
20:29
Josh: to training AI and distributing it on social media on X.
20:32
Josh: Travis is doing the same with physical AI automation. And I think that it's a very ambitious task.
20:38
Josh: But if he's able to pull that off, this is going to be a world changing company.
20:42
Josh: And Travis is one of the few founders with the track record to be able to pull that off.
20:45
Ejaaz: You mentioned Tesla rolling in SpaceX and Tesla into the same company.
20:50
Ejaaz: I have a question about whether Uber will be doing the same because there's
20:54
Ejaaz: reports that Adams is receiving major backing from Uber.
20:58
Ejaaz: Travis has reportedly told people that he wants to be more aggressive in rolling
21:00
Ejaaz: out self-driving technology than Waymo. So it makes sense that the company that he built,
21:06
Ejaaz: he might actually be able to have the chance to play a meaningful role in.
21:10
Ejaaz: And to that, I want to refer to Polymarket, because there's a Polymarket for
21:14
Ejaaz: whether or not Uber will ask Travis to come back to the company.
21:18
Ejaaz: And I have to ask the question, because when you think about Steve Jobs in the
21:22
Ejaaz: past, Steve, I think he got kicked out of Apple in 1988.
21:26
Ejaaz: And it was only in 1997, I believe it was.
21:31
Ejaaz: The years could be slightly off, but 1997, when the company that he built was
21:35
Ejaaz: purchased, by Apple next.
21:37
Ejaaz: He came back to Apple. Apple was struggling at the time, and he rebuilt them
21:41
Ejaaz: into the Apple that we know and love today after a huge hiatus.
21:44
Ejaaz: Now, Travis has only been away for eight years now, so he's doing,
21:47
Ejaaz: he's kind of speedrunning the Steve Jobs arc, and there is a world in which
21:51
Ejaaz: he might come back to Uber.
21:52
Ejaaz: Now, Polymerca says this is improbable at 14%. It's not looking very likely.
21:59
Ejaaz: In fact, it was a 40% chance earlier
22:01
Ejaaz: in the month, I guess prior to the announcement of this new company.
22:05
Ejaaz: It seems like whatever they saw with this new company announcement it dropped
22:09
Ejaaz: from 46% to 14% so perhaps it's not going to happen although man how cool would that be the.
22:15
Josh: King is back yeah no someone knows something I mean that that that decline is
22:19
Josh: like super steep and like almost instantaneous it like dumped 20% in like an hour or so that's crazy
22:26
Ejaaz: Yeah pretty brutal well thank you to Polymarket for sponsoring that
22:29
Ejaaz: segment of the pod and I think that leaves us with a comeback arc not complete
22:33
Ejaaz: there's still a lot of work left to be done but this at least sets the stage
22:36
Ejaaz: for what's next which is this new foundational company built on doing what we
22:42
Ejaaz: just did to bits to the world of atoms and naming it after that by one of the
22:46
Ejaaz: best entrepreneurs to do it.
22:47
Josh: And that's the end of the episode thank you so much for listening a bit of a
22:51
Josh: different flavor of the episode today we were passionate about telling the story
22:54
Josh: of travis because it makes sense to explain why he's going after this big company
22:59
Josh: versus just explaining the company itself.
23:01
Josh: Let us know if you enjoyed this format of an episode. Also, a ton of new subscribers.
23:06
Josh: We officially hit, as we're recording this episode, 40,000 subscribers,
23:09
Josh: which is crazy because nine months ago we had, what was it, 10,000,
23:13
Josh: Josh? Maybe even less than that.
23:15
Josh: Pretty crazy growth from then, and we welcome all of you.
23:19
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23:23
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23:35
Josh: It helps us out massively. And we'll see you on the next one.