>> if he is right, one day, drones will be everywhere. chris anderson started playing around with robots in the backyard with his kids on a whim. his company manufactures self flying planes. helicopters, blimps, around the world. his flight to ceo has been anything but direct. he has been a punk rocker. a particle physicist. a journalist. editor-in-chief of "wired" magazine for 12 years. a three-time author. joining me today on studio 1.0 is inventor, father, and founder, chris anderson. thank you for joining us.

>> thank you. >> i would love to hear about the day when you started playing around with robots with your kids. five kids, by the way. >> five kids. it was a big day. my origins were as a scientist. my wife is a scientist and we hoped someday our kids would be excited by science and technology. so far no luck, but we keep trying. one weekend when i was the editor of "wired." these products would come in review on on friday. if you promised to review them, you could take it home. we would put it together and program it, and when he were done, you get this three wheeled tripod that rolls slowly towards the wall and bounces back. the kids are like, you have to be kidding. >> they were not impressed. >> we have seen transformers. where are the lasers? i flew a plane into the tree. total disaster.

i had to buy them ice cream. i'm thinking, what could have been better? what would have been a cooler robot and a better flying plane? what if the robot is flying the plane? i literally googled "flying robot" and the first result was drone. i googled drone, and the first result was autopilot. i said kids, we are going to build a lego autopilot. they said, all right, one last go. we sat together around the table and put together the plastic, the sensors, the processors, and stuck it in the plane. the next weekend, we flew it and it almost flew. the kids lost interest. i went down the rabbit hole. >> what year was this? >> 2007. >> this was before drones were cool. >> it was before drones were available to regular people. military drones -- something had happened. in that moment, i got chills. it should not be possible for a dad and his kids to build a drone on the dining room table with toy parts. 2007 turned out to be the key

year. this hardware renaissance is all starting in 2007. the guts of the smartphones -- the chips, the processors. they were being made in the millions. the reason regular people were able to do things like drones is that the essential enabling technologies were now available to everybody. the question was, what are we going to do with them? >> by drones you mean something that has its own brain. right? >> exactly. drones are aircraft that fly themselves. you can if you want to manually control them, but you don't have to. have gps, they have sensors, they have cameras. what that is is essentially a flying robot. you don't need any skills. it is not a piloted aircraft. it is an autonomously-control vehicle. that means that you don't have to worry about how the vehicle is getting around. all you care about is what it is doing, the image, the data. >> once you decided you were going to do this, how did you start?

>> how did you get the parts together? >> this is about 2009. i need to buy these parts efficiently. i had met jack ma, the founder of alibaba in 1997 in hong kong, where i was based. i go to alibaba, where do i buy wholesale parts? i need to buy electric motors. i pick from the menu. 10 days later, a crate shows up on my doorstep. there are 5000 parts made to my custom spec. i was stunned. i got chills that i had gotten robots in china to work for me. and they took paypal. >> how did you go from journalist/drone enthusiast to drone company ceo? >> after i started the community and it takes off. people started talking about doing things together. designing drones. the software, the hardware, etc.

initially, i started putting parts into cardboard pizza boxes with my children. that was the manufacturing line. that did not work well. it was clear it had to be like a real company. making real stuff, was someone doing it full-time. i invited the smartest guy on the site and said, you want to start a company with me? and he said sure. initially, he was 19. in tijuana, mexico, he just graduated from high school. by the time we started the company, he was maybe 20 or 21. by 2012, he had been doing it for a couple of years. the company was doing like $5 million in revenues. i realized he had built a real company with his friends, many of them from tijuana. i was like, it is amazing. it is ready to go to the next stage. we raised venture capital round, i quit my job and took over the ceo role. and here we are.

>> how likely is it drones will be delivering my amazon package? ♪

>> what is the mission of 3-d robotics? >> to create the world's leading uav platform. the reason is to put it in the hands of regular people. >> what do you make? >> drones, autopilots. software. by and large, we make a platform. it's open source, anyone can use it. hundreds of thousands do. for brain you can put in a vehicle. >> what are your drones capable of? >> that is the exciting part. the drones started by being able to fly on their own. the big driver is putting go pros in the air, getting video. the ability of drones to take this camera and pull back, to see not just you, but to sweep around, capture your life the

way hollywood directors do without any skills, for me, that is what drones can do with video. in the commercial domain, to be able to map the world and digitize surroundings. we can do 2-d maps. we can do 3-d modeling. we can scan any building anywhere. turn it into a 3-d model. >> what industries will drones revolutionize? >> today, it is a consumer revolution, and it is starting to become a commercial revolution as well. one industry is agriculture. minimizing chemical use in farms. construction is another one. we can only manage what we can measure. how do you digitize the workflow and how do we digitize construction? use drones to model and map still you can see the progress

of construction, the deviation. the changes from day to day. without it even being there. >> what is the coolest thing you have seen a drone do? >> there is a long list. >> choose one. >> one of the things we have is a follow me function. as you bike or ski or whatever, the drone follows you. keeping the camera on you, orbiting around to automatically capture this moment. when you are done, push a button and it flies home. >> what do you make of the interest of facebook, google, and amazon, in an industry you have been in for eight years? >> amazon is interested in drone delivery. google is interested in a number of things. they want to use drones to provide internet access. i think both of them are thrilling. they are great technology companies with deep pockets. it is the classic swords to plowshares moment. we are taking what is formerly military technology and putting it in the hands of consumers with the hope that the positive uses will drown out the old military uses. the amazon video was the first

time people thought of them in a nonmilitary context. >> how likely is it that they will deliver amazon packages? >> it is some ways off. >> how long? >> a decade. but delivering to the center, where you could pick up the package. rural areas would be easy as well. warehouse to warehouse, we can do that today. once you get delivering to an arbitrary front doorstep, that is a little hard. as the instantaneous gratification movement takes off, we could start to get the next generation of mailboxes where certain homes end up with well-defined machine-readable delivery boxes. >> you are saying this is going to happen. this will happen. maybe it is a decade out but it will happen. >> it is happening now in limited ways. dhl has an experiment in germany where they are delivering

pharmaceuticals to an island. you are going to start to see it happening in places with small, high value packages delivered to safe areas. >> is there any reason it will not happen? >> regulations. in the u.s., it is not legal. >> i know the faa is considering changing the rules. how are those conversations going? >> they are going. the faa's mandate in the safety of the national airspace. it was designed around manned aircraft. relatively large aircraft, human pilots and passengers. what we have here is a completely different kind of problem. these are small vehicles. they can be as small as your hand. drones are now so small, flying so low and smart that they can essentially navigate the space themselves. we do not need air traffic control. we don't need to treat them like a 747. we are arguing for a sandbox.

tell us what altitude, distance, weight, and speed. what zones and areas they are allowed to fly in, and then create this open spectrum, open airspace. where the technology industry can innovate with minimal regulations. >> how safe are they and how much safer are they going to be in the future? >> the safety has to do with the size. if it is the size of your hand, even if it were to fall out of the sky, it is lighter than a bird. there is an intrinsic safety to it. if it hit your house, it would not do any damage. if it hit you, it wouldn't do much damage. again, make it smaller so it doesn't seem dangerous. the other safety measure is technological. these things are smart. they do not fall asleep. they are not texting. they are not distracted. they know where they are at all times. when robots are done right, they are safer than humans. >> how about google's drone delivery operation? have you taken a close look at

it? what do you think? >> google went with an airplane model, good for long distances. amazon with a helicopter model, which has been vertical takeoff ability and is good for short distances. both have their place. the google one is very smart. it has the ability to use aerodynamics to travel for maybe tens, maybe even hundreds of miles. it is difficult to hover in place and dangle a package. i love the fact that google and amazon are doing this with different approaches. you cannot ask for two better companies to be innovating in this space. >> does amazon or google win? is there a place for both of them? what about facebook? >> absolutely. google hasalistic? also bought a drone company to

compete with connecting the developing world. there you are competing with satellites and balloons. google has mentored a balloon logic -- an internet balloon project. >> what's a better way? balloons or drones? >> the great thing about balloons is they stay up for weeks on end. their natural instinct is to float. a drone's instinct is to fall. the great thing about the drones is they can stay in one place whereas the balloons float around with the wind. there is a case for both of them. there is no one answer. >> do you see these companies on a collision course? >> no, this is complementary. it is the first minutes of the day of the drone age. there is room for everbody. >> how omnipresent will drones be in the future? >> i think they will be everywhere. they will be in farms, you will see drones over cities. maybe there will be police drones, maybe they will be doing delivery. >> how will they change our lives? >> how does google street view change your life? you know you can open up your

phone and see the world around you in increasing resolution at ground level. you can see it from air level as well. but those maps were taken a year ago. to get that same notion of simultaneous information about the world around us, we can see real-time high-resolution data. this can be taken to the air. >> how worried should we be about robots taking our jobs? even a step further -- human extinction? >> you went there. >> i went there. [laughter] >> these are by and large doing jobs that are not being done at all. >> there is the ups guy taking the package out of the truck and putting it on my doorstep. >> that is a ways off. ups is good at what they do. when it comes to drones, they are doing jobs that are not being done. robots are good at doing jobs that are dull, dirty, and dangerous. these are jobs people shouldn't or do not want to do. >> how much are these going to cost? is it going to be economical for a farmer to have multiple drones flying over his house? >> today they cost $750.

maybe in a few years it will cost a few hundred dollars. you might not even buy one, just the data. the cost of the drone is immaterial compared to the material to create it. >> will they ever be able to feel? will they have intentions? >> there are other kinds of intelligence. the internet is much better than us at many things. perhaps it is already intelligent on some level we cannot define. by the time we recognize that computers are intelligent, they will have surpassed us. the singularity may have happened, not just in a way we can measure. >> what about emotional intelligence? will computers ever have emotions? >> i don't know. yes. depends on how you define it. >> is that dangerous? is that scary? should we be scared? >> i generally assume technology will empower us, allow us to do what we do better. but we will see. >> what do you want to do with

3-d robotics? what's the long-term plan? >> just to make these things as easy and ubiquitous as possible. if we can put them in the hands of regular people, we will have won. >> google and facebook have been snapping up companies. have they tried to buy you? >> we talk to everybody. >> is selling something you are considering? is this something you want to keep independent or take public? >> we haven't thought about it. >> what do you prefer, being a journalist or ceo? ♪

>> you actually started off studying physics, studying quantum mechanics. >> i thought that it would be exciting. i went to study physics, after failing out of college and doing punk rock. by the time i got through physics, physics had changed and hit a dead end. the golden age of physics was over. basically everybody went to wall

street. to become a quant. >> and you became a journalist. >> my parents were journalists and i had promised i would never do that. obviously, it was in my blood. >> you worked at two scientific journals, "nature" and "science." you went on to "the economist." and then "wired." editor in chief, 2001. just as the bubble had burst. >> the best time, though it did not feel that way at the moment. my career makes no sense in the big picture. every step makes perfect sense. at "the economist," i said, i want to start on internet coverage. they were like, inter-what? i was like, it is going to be big. this started me on the path of chronicling this remarkable moment in our history. in 2001, after conde nast bought "wired," they called me and said would you like to edit it? i said, absolutely. it changed my life.

>> was it depressing? >> super depressing. 2001, a year after the dotcom implosion. everyone was like, it was a hoax. there was a lot of interest in seeing it go away, not just because it led to the financial crash, but also it was very threatening to existing industries. i was betting they were all wrong. i was betting the bubble had been a stock market phenomena, not an underlying technology hoax. the internet had just started, it was going to be as big as everyone said, may be delayed by a year or two, and it was real. i moved here in the worst of all times. three great things happen when you take over the worst of all times. i was sucky as an editor for 18 months. but because even the good editors couldn't get any traction, my failures were covered. the second thing, it was a great time to hire talent. all the smart people had come to the silicon valley during the bubble.

as the media had vaporized, they were available. the third thing is, once i did start to get traction, my year on year comparables looked awesome. >> what do you prefer, being a journalist or ceo? >> they are quite similar. running a magazine, we shipped a product every month. we shipped a product every day. websites, web stories. ran a team of about the same size. took ideas and packaged them into a product. it is more similar than you think. the difference is that our factories were printing and now they make drones. >> what is the myth of chris anderson and the reality? >> i have been very lucky to be at the right place at the right time. i failed out of college. didn't do particularly well in school even after that. there is no particular genius here. just very lucky to be at the birth of the internet in silicon valley at the right time. if i have a talent, it is connecting the dots. i have been privileged to see the dots early on. and good enough at connecting them to see where we were going. >> you have written three books.

will we see another? >> i am busy. i don't think you can run a company and write a book at the same time. >> of the things you have done, what is the most fun? what do you enjoy? >> every friday, we fly. we have an open house. people in our community come together and show what they are doing. every friday, my jaw is on the floor. e-mails and spreadsheets all week. then on fridays, i see drones do things i have never seen. it is as amazing as it was in 2007. >> what is next for you? >> more drones, bigger company. getting more people to experience what i have been lucky enough to experience. >> how do you want to be remembered? >> that i helped start an industry that changed the world. >> chris anderson, ceo and founder of 3-d robotics. thank you so much. >> thank you.

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