Sep 10, 2025 · 1 hr 14 min · 13 segments
Keller Cliffton joins John Collison to talk about Zipline’s journey to 115 million miles flown, the lost art of American airplanes, building 50k drones a year in California, getting to 99.9%…
John CollisonHost
Yes, and you've made the point that, like, what does a UPS truck weigh? Like, you know, five, six thousand pounds.
It's like we've taken for granted that we just have these, like, massive vehicles trundling around our suburban streets as the best answer for delivering things.
I think the best way to think about that is that when you're batch processing things and delivering things over the course of a day, that works pretty well.
You can load tons of packages into a car and then the truck over time can deliver things slowly to lots of homes.
But obviously the thing we've seen over the last five or seven years is the rise of instant delivery.
There are now five and a half billion instant deliveries happening every year just in the US.
And this is where we're using a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human sitting in the front, moving the steering wheel back and forth to deliver something to your home that weighs on average five pounds.
So actually, you do not have to be a physicist to realize this is a really weird way.
But this is, it creates traffic in our neighborhoods, it creates pollution in our neighborhoods, it creates safety issues in our neighborhoods.
And obviously, competing vision is the sidewalk robots that some people are pursuing, but I presume you think for many of these applications, they're just too slow, and you actually can't fit that many of them before they start clogging up sidewalks.
My personal opinion is that we should be giving space back to humans, not taking space away from humans.
So, you know, we have already, I mean, I grew up, maybe you grew up, you know, we played in the streets, like we played street hockey.
So something has mentally changed where that doesn't seem like as safe a space anymore.
The idea that, okay, now the robots are gonna take those over too, and humans are gonna have to jump out of the way as these sidewalk robots go back and forth, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Yes, and you've made the point that, like, what does a UPS truck weigh? Like, you know, five, six thousand pounds.
It's like we've taken for granted that we just have these, like, massive vehicles trundling around our suburban streets as the best answer for delivering things.
I think the best way to think about that is that when you're batch processing things and delivering things over the course of a day, that works pretty well.
You can load tons of packages into a car and then the truck over time can deliver things slowly to lots of homes.
But obviously the thing we've seen over the last five or seven years is the rise of instant delivery.
There are now five and a half billion instant deliveries happening every year just in the US.
And this is where we're using a 4,000 pound gas combustion vehicle driven by a human sitting in the front, moving the steering wheel back and forth to deliver something to your home that weighs on average five pounds.
So actually, you do not have to be a physicist to realize this is a really weird way.
But this is, it creates traffic in our neighborhoods, it creates pollution in our neighborhoods, it creates safety issues in our neighborhoods.
And obviously, competing vision is the sidewalk robots that some people are pursuing, but I presume you think for many of these applications, they're just too slow, and you actually can't fit that many of them before they start clogging up sidewalks.
My personal opinion is that we should be giving space back to humans, not taking space away from humans.
So, you know, we have already, I mean, I grew up, maybe you grew up, you know, we played in the streets, like we played street hockey.
So something has mentally changed where that doesn't seem like as safe a space anymore.
The idea that, okay, now the robots are gonna take those over too, and humans are gonna have to jump out of the way as these sidewalk robots go back and forth, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
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