What's Your Problem?Imagine picking up your phone and ordering something from Walmart. Fifteen minutes later, a drone hovers over your yard, lowers your order down to you, and zips away. Adam Woodworth wants this to be so boring you don't even notice. He’s the CEO of Wing, a drone delivery company. His problem is this: How do you turn a flashy idea like a delivery drone into something as ubiquitous as a shopping cart?
Pushkin.
If you live in the Dallas Fort Worth area, there is a good chance that right now you can open up an app on your phone and order a cup of coffee or a bottle of ibuprofen from a nearby Walmart, and then about fifteen minutes later, a drone will appear hovering in the sky above your yard. The drone will lower down a rope that holds a box that has your ibuprofen in it. Then the drone will leave the box on the ground, pull up the rope and fly away. People have been talking about drone delivery for a long time now. There have been pilot programs and test sites, but this thing in Dallas is big. Millions of people live in the delivery zone. It's the first place in the US where for lots and lots of people, drone delivery seems set to become a normal, everyday thing. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Adam Woodworth. Adam is the CEO of Wing. Wing is owned by Alphabet and it's one of the two drone companies doing deliveries for Walmart in Dallas. Wing has also been making deliveries in Australia for several years now. Adam's problem is this, how do you turn a delivery drone into something as boring and ubiquitous as a shopping cart? To start, I asked Adam to make the case for his project, like, why should I be happy to learn that delivery drones may soon be coming to a sky near me delivering coffee and burritos to my neighbors.
I've caught a lot of flack over the years for the burrito copter, and like, oh, you're just using drones to fire around and deliver cups coffee and stuff. But at the core of it, like people eat food every day, Like if you look at it from a holistic transportation perspective, like people are not going to stop ordering things, Like that's not like it's in fact the opposite. People are ordering more stuff every day. And it just does not make sense that we are moving around like burritos and cups of coffee in cars, Like it just does not make sense.
To what extent are people ordering coffee delivered by somebody in a car? Is that a thing?
And I just don't know it. It is a thing. It is a thing like you can go sort of look up. There's been a myriad of different studies about sort of what actual sort of like dipler use cases are, and it's a lot of small items. I can I can talk about a bunch of aviation math, but I think the simplest way to look at it is we are designing systems like to be able to fly in the national airspace. This is the same for everybody who's sort of in here to be building systems that are like sort of equivalent level of safety to like airliners. So if you take that and you abstract it down to things that people can sort of internalize in terms of sort of risk, it is safer to fly the package via drone than it is to walk the package in your hand down the sidewalk.
That's good, that's compelling, that's fun. Non intuitive, it's very non intuitive. I thought you were gonna say safer than to drive, and I'd be like, sure.
Everything everything, but like safer than to hand carry it.
The risk of hand caring is getting hit by a car.
Yes, that's it's usually serve pedestrian road risk. And so you have this form of transportation which is possible and real and financially viable. That is many orders of magnitude safer than the incumbent. If you look at on every metric from safety to emissions, sort of impact on infrastructure, It's like, it is silly that we are moving around these boxes and the way we do today. This is a fundamentally better way to do it.
So if I want to order something, I live near Walmart in Dallas and I want to order something from you, Like, how does that part work?
So basically like we built a pretty traditional looking marketplace where the order flow is very traditional until you get to the part at the end, which is the drone part.
So I use your app. I don't use like the Walmart app.
So it depends on which region you're in. So in Australia we're integrated into the door Dash app, So use the front end of door Dash. In the US right now we're integrate. We're using our own app. Okay, So you say what you want ordered, and then before you even get to that step, the back end will say is your address deliverable? Right? Like it is the place that you are, a place that the plane can get to just to be.
Clear that is you checking it out. You're using basically satellite data to say does this address work? Or that's you asking music. No, that's you just checking.
So it's just basic. And some of it is even like like if there's a big hill that the plane has to spend more energy climbing over, like you might be within the radius, but like your particular house like may be undeliverable, or you might be slightly outside of the radius because there's no there's no power lines or hills to get there, so the plane go slightly farther. So everybody thinks about a delivery area as a circle, but it's really like a weird amiba.
With lots of variables affecting where you can go.
Yeah, and so there's a there's a sort of there's an address checker that'll run that like just GPS coordinate through a terrain database to be like can the plane get there? And then once you get to check out, you'll be presented with either one delivery zone of like okay, this is the place on your property where the box can be dropped off, or a choice like if there's multiple spots, it'll be like okay, which one of these three, do you want it in the left side of your yards sell the ardor in the backyard the personal pick that. Then the order will process, the plane will be dispatched, and then it'll go to like a sort of countdown of like, Okay, the plane is on its way and it'll be here in three minutes and forty two seconds.
So uh, and and what's the cost?
It depends it's uh, it's sort of uh. That's that's that's more of a partner question.
What's it what's it cost you?
That's a that's an unanswerable question.
A lot right, now, A lot right?
No, I mean I think, uh, I think less than less than what folks would assume.
I mean, the marginal cost is low, right, but it's not that many deliveries against a large fixed costs.
That's fair. But the marginal metrics are all sort of you know, favorable or in the direction of favorable. Yeah. So, like you know, people are well accustomed to getting stuff delivered today, and so like those costs are well understood, and the sort of costs per delivery that you know, either is either the partner is charging they're sort of all in line with that, depending on sort of which region you're in. But that's that's ultimately up to the partner.
A few bucks, I mean, is is that what that means? Reason which you know it can't be more than that if people are out in coffee, right though, it is amazing how much people spend on, you know, on the marginal thing. So so that's how it works from the consumer's point of view, How does it work from you know, from the drones point of view. From from the company's point.
Of view, what happens every every morning the service turns on, Folks can can order the stuff. Planes will get automatically tasked to go take off, pick up the box and go.
How many deliveries what they do in a day?
Like our high water mark right now is around for one store was about like one hundred and thirty deliveries, okay, So it's like these are like, these are real numbers. This isn't like like, oh okay, like three people ordered stuff today, And I think that that's the that's I think sort of the phase that the industry is moving into now is it's it's these aren't like pilot programs and trials. These are like, okay, this store opened up offering this service and all the people in the area expect to get that service.
How how big and how heavy can something be?
So you know, we carry about a little bit over a kilo of of of good, so you know, two point two pounds of stuff, and in.
Terms of volume, like.
Like I think about like a shoe box, shoe box ish shoe box, okay, And a lot of it ends up being you know, prepared food, drinks like you know, soft drinks, you know, grocery items. And I think the one of the interesting observations I've always had on this is, uh, back back to the sort of original like did we pick the right use case piece. We did a bunch of surveys sort of early on in the program of you know, what would you want delivered by drone if you if you had the option, and you know, there were dozens of different options sort of from food all the way to medicine, clothing, all these other things, and overwhelming the responses were always like, you know, drones should only be used for medical delivery, like they should only be used for medicine first aid bits like that. And then we went and offered the service in Australia. We had we had all those goods in there. We had like a lot of you know, like type of you know, over the counters, pharmacy items, sort of food, clothing, a bunch of different local restaurants, and like eighty percent of people ordered coffee. Like that was the overwhelming sort of thing because it's like that's something that people got every day, and it made.
Sense stated preference versus revealed preference. I mean there is there is also the externality thing, right, Like it's one thing to say, if a drone's going to be flying over my house all the time, what do I want it to be delivering to everybody? Versus if it's coming to my house, what am I going to order today?
Right? I mean that is another way to frame that's fair.
So like what what are when you look back after ten years of working at it and like now you're actually doing it, Like, what are a few key things you figured out?
I think one of the most defining moments is or maybe one of the most defining constraints. Most sort of disruptive or merging technologies sort of start off in a permissive environment. So you know, one of the one of the things that I you know, one of the questions I've gotten asked many times sort of over the years, is well, why didn't you take the approach that like ride share took of. Okay, you know, offer the service in a big metro area, build up a big customer base, and then as the rules change, you have, like you have customers to say, Okay, this is a valuable thing.
Why didn't you do it?
Why not just go? Why not why not just go? Do it? And I think at the core of it, it's because aviation does not operate that way right, Like aviation is is is built around a preempted set of rules where the federal government controls the airspace, so it's not up to sort of anyone given municipality. And from that place, you know, how do you build consumer demand, How do you show that this thing works? How do you even go and do a trial where the existing regulatory frameworks are just say no, you can't fly at all.
Yes to Australia.
Yeah, So that's that's what That's what drove us to to start in Australia because they were one of the first markets where the National Aviation Regulator there they sort of quantify the risk of the operation. They look at the specifics the operation and they sort of approve on a case by case basis of all right, like this meets the same level of safety as an airliner, even though it's a very different use case.
So just tell me like one thing that you know you had to figure out. Maybe you tried something and it didn't work, and you tried something else and it worked. You know what I mean? Is there just one kind of a microcosm example.
If I could do two a lot? If that's yeah. So the first one is sort of how do you achieve aerospace reliability with like consumer electronics costs? So you know, we started from a place of how do you build these planes in a way where the unit economics will work? Not how do you build these planes and then try to figure out how to make the unit economics work?
Right?
So what is I mean?
Obviously the cost of one is going to be a function partly or largely of scale. But since you brought it up, like, what has one of them got a cost for it to work for you?
I mean it has to look like cell phones basically. And I think that the interesting one that the sort of specific point here is is if you looked at just the reliability case Okay, so how many propulsion system elements do you need in order to be able to make the airplane sort of close all the reliability numbers. That requires eight motors in our use case, so you know, you need eight hover motors so that you can have any one of them fail at any given time and the airplane can still sort of have controlled flight. In our cost trades, it ended up being that if you move to twelve motors instead of eight motors, so the reliability numbers close at eight. But if you went to twelve, you got to use a much smaller motor that didn't need a carbon fiber propeller. You could use a plastic propeller. And there was a huge change in the cost of the total propulsion system by increasing the number of motors, which is not a thing that you would on the surface look at and be like, okay, this is intuitively obvious.
So you're using twelve cheaper motors, so more smaller. It's more smaller motors rather than fewer larger motors. And I mean presumably you could keep going that way. You could have twenty tiny motors. I mean, you find the optimum.
What settled on twelve was really driven by noise. So like as you get the burders smaller, they have the you know, the frequencies go higher, they spin faster, that discon goes up all these different effects. And so moving to twelve let you get the sort of cost benefits by going small motors. But you didn't sort of start climbing up that that noise curve by having like you know, like one hundred little half inch motors hu and even that there isn't an off the shelf propeller solution that sounds pleasant.
Yeah, So that the sound, the sound is a big one, right, Like there was a good Wall Street Journal story I thought, uh from Australia where you were doing a lot of the early work, and the headline was delivery drones, cheer shoppers, annoy neighbors, scare dogs. Tell me about that piece of it. Tell me about the noise.
So that's a that's a it's a thing you have to be conscious of. So, you know, we did a bunch of work early on in the development of this aircraft around sort of how do we how do we shape the tone of the noises being generated. So it's sort of less of like one big peak and sort of more broad spectrum, how do we reduce the noise of it? Like, if you look closely at our propellers, they're they're like asymmetrics. So there's one long set of blades and one short set of blades, and that creates like two tip forto sees that destructively interfere and like spread out noise. So all these things. So we did all this work on on the hover propulsion system, and the vast majority of of sort of noise feedback from the communities and mind you, like, if you compare this to the noise feedback you get about an actual airport or you know, construction project is still like far less than that. But it was all overflight, so it was like people weren't complaining about the airplanes hovering. They were complaining about them flying over overhead. And if you you look at the fact that the person that ordered the goods, like the plane is coming, then they asked for it, right, Like they're like they're like, I want the service. Their neighbors are probably also ordering things. But the thousand homes that you flew over to get to that spot, like may not be participating in the service.
It's a negative externality, right, you're imposing a cost on someone who's not a party to the transaction.
So so that was that was a very interesting learning sort of early on in our that we only would have learned by actually operating the service.
Huh, it's that it's not it's not the next door neighbor who hates it. It's all the people between the store and the customer.
And in that sense, it was like, okay, well, well, like we thought we needed to put all this development work in the hover propulsion system, but it's actually the crew system that they need to work.
People never get mad about what you think they're going to get mad about, right again, I.
Think that that's the at the core of it, Like the dron delivery space is like so full of has been so full of what ifs for so long, and in the absence of regulatory frameworks that let you go and operate like you can't move out these things that it it oftentimes like there's a lot of misconceptions about either noise or sort of what the use cases will be or what people want to order, and then when you go and offer the service, sort of the cure for the what ifs is the actuality of an operating.
So okay, so you realize that the noise complaints aren't the noise complaints you're expecting. You had mitigated the one, the hovering, but not the other, the flying over. So now you have this new challenge, right that people getting mad if a drones are flying over their house all day long? What do you do about that?
So we we basically did the same thing we did on the other propulsion side, So we used the same technology as to redesign the props. We sort of set the design target so that like basically the aircraft that the cruise altitude would be inaudible to a to an observer on the ground. But this is like everything in aerospace is a trade and so you know, for us, it was like we want to we want to address sort of any of the noise concerns. Uh, And so we're willing to go and do that development time and exercise and costs, redo the propulsions, and then redo the plane to to be able to use it. So that that's uh, that was that was one interesting one and the other one is just like you know, how you get the box to the people. So early on in the program, uh, we had basically you know, you have the little tope that hangs below the plane, and then it was connected to playing with a tether, and that tether went around a school and just sort of like you'd open up a latch and it would descend and you'd leave behind the string. So it was like the way of letting go the box was just well, there's only so much string on the on the on the aircraft.
So so the customer would get a box with a long string.
Not a great user experience, but very simple, like super simple. And uh, we spent a huge amount of time around how do you drop off the box without a bunch of mechanical complexity? So how do you how do you lower down the box, make sure that it lets go of the box one hundred percent of the time. Make sure that that little hook at the bottom doesn't get snagged on anything else as it's getting pulled back up. Uh. Making sure that that whole system could operate reliably, you know, thousands of times with dirt and leaves and stuff. Uh. And so like this is little, that little yellow bit of plastic. So you're just.
Talking about the hook at the end of the line that holds the box. Like that is like a nightmare to get.
Just right, nightmare to get just right. And it is probably one of the most iterated components on the whole aircraft.
Still to come on the show. Why despite all that work on the hook and on everything else, drone delivery may never really take off. Also, what the world will look like if drone delivery does work? So what like what's the frontier for you? Like, what are you trying to figure out that you haven't figured out yet?
Yeah, I think that for us right now. A couple of years ago in Australia when we were sort of ramping up volumes there, we demonstrated what scale looked like for a sort of confined geographic area. So, you know, one of the common I think misconceptions about drones is, you know, folks like, well, when drone delivery is real, I'll look up at the sky and all I see is drones. And I was like, well, no, when you when you actually do it, when you actually offer sort of the scaled out service to like a you know, one hundred square kilometer piece of the Earth, even when there's even then when there's a thousand deliveries happening in one day, and that that little space you can look up and not see any planes for a while. And so for the last couple of years that's what we were focused on was Okay, how do we demonstrate the unit scale of Okay, this is what drune delivery looks like at scale for one one small space. Now I think with the DFW expansion, we have the opportunity to do that at a whole sort of metro wide scale. So I think that the ability to offer the service across a big metro to like, you know, where you're gonna cover millions of people. Let's you answer, let's you sort of validate that those assumptions that have been proven out at smaller operational scales hold as you go up and so looking at things like how frequently do people order, like is it is it a novelty that people order once and then they're like, okay, well I got my cool TikTok video of a drown delivering me something or do they find value in it? You know, do you start to get to the place where you know, for us, like, you know, is one operator able to you know, do we have the permissions and is it working to have one operator do multiple locations and you know, many aircraft in the sky at once looking less and less like sort of a one to one relationship between sort of the person the operation to like more of a sort of dispatcher view of the world of like, okay, this person is managing a fleet of airplanes rather than energing sort of anyone flight.
So in the in the current service as it exists, Now, what what is the role of human beings?
It's it's really is like, uh, you know, a person has to put the stuff in the box. A person has to bring the box to where the plane is going to be, and you know, the plane hovers and lowers down the little hook and they hook the box on it and it takes it up. And then you know, somebody in the morning needs to take the planes and put them out on the pads, and at night take them and put them back in the shipping container. And then our pilots are sort of monitoring the operation.
I mean, just to be clear, they're not flying the planes, right. The planes are flying themselves.
Planes are the planes are flying themselves, but they're responsible for the operation, right. So like if if you look at the sort of like some of the core tenets of aviation, like the pilot is responsible for the airliner flight or for the charter flight. Like they're responsible for the operation. And so what does that mean when things get very highly automated, it's okay, well they're looking for other air traffic. They're looking for sort of is the system performing as we expect it to? Is there is there weather that's rolling in? Is there something else like that?
So just so I can see, just so I can like visualize it, is there like at each place where you have a nest, like at each Walmart, is there like a room where there's a guy sitting or do you guys have like an office.
There's an office where the folks are sitting.
I mean you said there's a pilot, Like do they So what do they have like a little radar thing?
Like pretty much like if you think about like sort of what what an aircraftic controller station would look like, or what a sort of train dispatcher station look like, that's more or less what the pilot interface looks like. So there is there's no live video feed from the aircraft. So like the airplanes sort of get their assigned flight when somebody places an order, because like we don't know where the next order is going to come from. So there's this whole route planning algorithm in the background that when somebody orders something, it's like, okay, I need to go fly this way, and here are the other flights in the space. They'll see those tracks like so they'll see, okay, I've got you know this many airplanes that are sort of active right now, I've got this many airplanes that are on the ground waiting getting assigned in order. And they're just little icons moving around the screen. So it's not like there's not some video feed. There's not like and then they've got like a view of the individual nests. So there's a little security camera looking down on it. It's like, oh, okay, there's here all the airplanes, like you know, so it really is it is that sort of like supervisor interface. I think it's probably the easiest way to think about it, rather than like there's no like sort of controls and handles that people are manipulating to fly the planes around.
I mean, is there like a button they can push if the plane needs to turn around or like whatever bail in some way?
Yeah, there's a button. So one of the things they could do is they can pause the whole operation, so they can say like Okay, you know we're outside of our weather limits, or there's a airspace conflict that has gone through. Stop receiving orders.
That's the easy one, don't any more planes out.
The other one is they have a they have a button where they can tell the plane to land, and that's basically the plane is following like a four D trajectory, so it's got a like a three D path plus time where it's like, Okay, I'm supposed to be in this airspace at this time, and it'll it'll keep flying on that path until it gets to a place that sort of has been procedurally generated as like okay to land, so like you know, open fields and like trees and stuff like, not roads, not like sidewalks, and so the plane will keep flying until it gets to one of those places and it'll sort of slow down to a hover, come down, and land and that those are really the those are the two commands.
How often does that one happen?
Very land, Yeah, very infrequently. And I think it's more I think it's more akin to like like if you pulled your car over to the side of the road with a check engine light it's it's not like it's not like sort of anything is like fundamentally broken. It's more like a precautionary step. And I think that's that's one of the pieces that sort of underpins this whole sort of operational cases, like all these layers of redundancy. The plane can either the plane can go to the delivery zone and say like, well, I don't think I should deliver the package because there's an obstacle and they'll come back. The plane can go and deliver the box and say I delivered it, but I had to move two meters over because there was an obstacle, like disable this delivery zone. The plane can come back and say, hey, I was doing that, and when I was on my way back, I noticed that I was using slightly more power than I usually use, like I'm gonna ground myself. And sort of there's all these layers, and one of those layers is the plane or the pilot can say, hey, like, why don't you pull over the side of the road so we can we could check on you.
Uh is there a camera on the plane?
Yeah, surely.
Something many people ask you, like, is the drone looking at me?
So the drone is not looking at you. Again, I think it's like there's no uh, there's no live feed, so it's not like there's like an operator sort of interfacing that video. But the aircraft has two sets of stereo cameras on the back of it that are used for uh so both visual odometry so like a backup to GPS, and for like sort of broad scene understanding, so like building a depth map of sort of what you're flying over. But those are all like that's a point cloud, that's not like images of stuff. You know. One of the biggest challenges of like residential drone delivery is like you're going to you're going from a very structured environment to a very unstructured environment. So like like the sky is like usually it's very clear, clear of obstacles. Somebody's backyard like may not be clear obstacles. There may be there may be a tree branch that has grown sort of since the last time that sort of satellite imagery was refreshed. And so the cameras on board the aircraft are used mostly for the reason they're used for navigation and for sort of obstacle detection. They run what's what are what's called like a bunch of semantic modeling. So like if you think about like a toddler putting blocks into the little toy, they'll be like triangle goes in triangle, circle goes in circle. The plane is like car, tree, house, road, huh.
Like computer vision, like basic computer visions, computer vision stuff. So that one is interesting in that I feel like when you started that wasn't nearly as good.
Right, Yeah, you can do We could do a lot more now than then we could at the beginning of the program. And like you know, we we can run like live classification on like you know, cell phone like avion X.
Yeah, I mean, does does it also do that to say like, oh, don't lower the box. There's the dog running around the.
Yard yep, yep, so'll it'll do that. And it'll do basically what's what's called delivery zone nudging, so like a spot is picked sort of before the plane gets there where to lower the box. If the plane is coming down, it says, well, where you told me to lower the box. There's a car or the tree branch is bigger than what you said it was. It can, within a bounded set of decisions sort of move it a certain distance to drop off the box and then it will tell us like, hey, I had a move where the delivery zone was.
How often how often does a delivery fail? Like does it get there and it's like, no, this isn't going to work. I got to get out here pretty infrequently. I mean, like one, it's in the hundreds or thousands. Okay, So so big picture, if things go well for drone delivery, what will the world look like in say five or ten years.
Yeah. I think at the core of it, if if this experiment works right, like if if drne delivery takes off, it will be the like primary means that people get small goods delivered, So I think that it will be it'll be everyday occurrence for the same folks that order food every day today. Most of that will be coming with airplanes. Because think it just just makes more sense. Uh huh.
What's the version of the future where it doesn't work? Like, what are the reasons it might not work?
I think some of it is if people can actually get past the what ifs, like you know, do people order frequently enough? Is it a good experience for the partners? Like are you integrating well enough into their workflow? Where Joon delivery is an asset, not a burden to their sort of the day in the life of their associates. Are all the companies in the space still around right? Like this is like these are really long timelines in a challenging funding environment.
So like, you know, it's really expensive to get to a point where the business makes sense to get to scale.
And then I think I worry sometimes that that folks will sty'll sort of chase the long tail of the sort of use case. So you know, drones don't have to deliver everything, right, and so I worry about sort of a lack of focus of like okay, like you know, here's a place where drones make a ton of sense to deliver stuff. Let's be really successful there rather than like, oh, they might be able to deliver you know, the case of bowling balls, Like yeah, they might be able to, but advan is a much better use case for that.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
So I just want to do a lightning round. I appreciate your time. I want to talk about I want to talk about your Instagram, Like it's it's stuff like I'm looking and like here's like it's a lot of Star Wars, like planes like X wing Fighter, and there's the X wing Fighter and it's it's actually flying right you click on it. And there's the like winged win a Bago from space Balls. There's the flying toaster, which is like a cut from the it's like the ninety screen saver, right, and like so you take these things and you actually make.
Them fly by. So not surprisingly, I'm a bit of a nerd, like I like star Wars and sci fi things. I always have, and I reached a point where sort of both the intersection of technologies and my skill at designing airplanes were such that I could make the toys that I had as a can work as like real things.
Right, So you take the like plastic X wing fighter that I had in my room, and like I made it fly by like throwing it in my hand and making the sounds right, and you actually make it fly.
Yeah, no, it's it's It's also like how I sort of continuously sharpened my skills as an engineer. So like often they're like really hard airplane design problems of like what are the aerodynamics of an X wing?
So let me ask you on that note, let me ask you, like is there a specific thing you learned in building these models that you brought to your work at Wing.
I think I've brought a similar philosophy, which is like, how do you how do you get to a complex result without a complex solution? Where it's like, okay, how do I how do I get that same joy? How do I get to that same result with a simpler answer? So, uh, that's I think that that's that's how I approach my professional life as well.
You got a white whale. Is there something you want to build that flies that you haven't been able to do?
I have always wanted to do a tie interceptor. This is always my favorite star warship. But there's like not much in the way of wing on that.
Who flew that?
Was that?
The the good guys? Okay, right, so it's like what the storm Troopers flew? Sort of a variation on that. You built one of those that goes in the water some some version of that.
Yeah. I saw that.
I was like, does that fly? And then I saw that it was in the.
Like every probably every four years, I get in the submarines and I'll like build some submarine stuff and then I'll put it on the shelf.
So I feel like I'm I'm moving on from what you built now. Just to be clear, the I feel like the word drone is is not doing drones any favors, right, I feel like it has a lot of negative notations. There's like a militaristic connotation. There's the connotation of like a worker who is unfeeling and doesn't do anything. Is there a word that you think would be better?
I mean at this point, I think that that that ship is long since sailed in his left board. I mean, there was like a there's been a South Park episode about it, Like I don't think that like like uh so, I don't know. I think it's it's a word. I don't think you should ever be afraid of of of the word. And at the core of it, like I don't know, I think of them all as airplanes, Like they fly around with other airplanes, like they need to do airplane stuff. And I think that like part of the reason that the skepticism that that you brought up earlier exists is the sort of the gap between the sort of promise and the reality. And so you know, the the sooner that we can get these services sort of real and live and interacting with more people. I think that people will just look at these as tools that are flying around providing a service. And my I've always I tell the team frequently, I like, I want people to look at the plane and think of it like a shopping cart, and it's just like it's a thing that's very useful. People use them all the time, but you don't really give it a second thought, and it's just that it's an asset that you use.
Adam Woodworth is the CEO of Wing. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lydia Jean Kott and engineered.
By Sarah Bruguer.
Please email us we are at problem at pushkin dot fm. Let us know would interview on the show, how to make the show better, et cetera. I'm Jacob Boldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem
