Ep 114: Flying Cars Are About to Change the World — Joby CEO JoeBen Bevirt

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:00)
I'm really excited, you're making flying cars.

**JoeBen Bevirt** (0:02)
What if you could take the people who's been two hours a day commuting and turn it into 15 minutes? It's an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, has capabilities similar to a helicopter, but it's dramatically quieter.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:12)
How fast are these first machines now?

**JoeBen Bevirt** (0:13)
200 miles an hour. On the road, those are linear, you need more lanes. With this, you build a new vertiport, and you can go to any other vertiport on the network.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:21)
You can go different heights for different lanes.

**JoeBen Bevirt** (0:22)
We want this to be comparable in place to taking an Uber Black. You're in New York, you want to go to JFK, that it will seamlessly stitch an Uber trip to the vertiport and a Joby flight to the terminal.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:33)
SpaceX and Palantir famously kind of broke into the government. Is this something like this?

**JoeBen Bevirt** (0:38)
Absolutely. Ensuring that American innovation can thrive is so vitally important. Life is short, and so we might as well spend it solving really big and important problems.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:55)
My friend JoeBen's been working on flying cars for about 20 years. This has been an idea that's coming for a long time. It seems like we're really close. They're working closely with the Trump administration, and the FAA is moving fast. JoeBen's now raised billions of dollars. He's scaling up manufacturing for groups like Toyota, preparing to launch in Dubai, preparing to launch in America very soon. Is this as big a deal as the automobile? JoeBen thinks it is. He thinks our lives are gonna change dramatically in the next two years. Let's hear from him about Joby Aviation. Welcome to American Optimist. Excited to have with us here today, JoeBen, who is CEO of Joby Aviation, a good name for a company. I was an early investor in Joby, and I'm really excited you're making flying cars. I think Peter Thiel had a catchphrase in 2011 I think he said we wanted flying cars and said we got 140 characters. Did you ever think about that when you were building this company?

**JoeBen Bevirt** (1:43)
Absolutely. It was absolutely inspiring to think about being able to transform the way we move around. And first, I'd just love to say thank you so much for your support for so many years now coming on a decade. And having partners like you on this journey has just been invaluable. I think when we look big picture at what we're trying to accomplish, we want to usher in the first transformation in the way people move around on a daily basis that we've had since the advent of the automobile. And the implications that that has on life and the productivity of our societies, I think, is really exciting.

**Joe Lonsdale** (2:23)
It's a really big jump. I actually tried to bring Peter and his guys in when I first got involved, unfortunately. I don't think they got very involved, but it's definitely an inspiring idea.
Since then, you've obviously raised, I think it's been a couple billion dollars. I think there was recent news on Toyota coming in again and backing you guys. This is a big public company now. Tell us about the product. It carries four people plus a pilot, six rotors. What does it do?

**JoeBen Bevirt** (2:44)
Yeah, so it's an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. So it can take off and land vertically, but then transitions and flies on a wing very efficiently. And what this means is we're able to build an aircraft that has capabilities similar to a helicopter, but it's dramatically quieter. It has redundancy across all of the systems.

**Joe Lonsdale** (3:06)
The double redundancy, right? If you lose two rotors or any two batteries, you're fine, which is pretty... So the idea is to be extremely safe.

**JoeBen Bevirt** (3:11)
Exactly. In fact, we've got two aircraft down at Edwards Air Force Base. And with those aircraft, we've been able to demonstrate the incredible robustness. And we've intentionally shut off lots of different systems on the aircraft and demonstrated in flight that piloting the aircraft, there's no change in piloting the aircraft. So it's transparent to the pilot even after you've had failures. And so again, putting layer on layer redundancy across all the different systems.

**Joe Lonsdale** (3:41)
So let's go back a little bit in your life. I think at one point, Larry Page tried to hire you, I remember hearing about this when he was trying to build flying cars and stuff. How long have you been thinking about and working on this area?