Welcome to Talking Points. I'm your host Brian Kelly. Today we're going to take to the skies, but not by plane. Let's talk, drones, helicopters and more with the head of aviation programs at Uber.

Eric Allison, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So Uber has a head of aviation program. For most people think Uber is, you know, the cars that get us around or the eats that come to us.

So how long has Uber been focusing on air transport?

So I've been at Uber for about a year and a half, but the Uber Elevate team, the Uber Elevate program,

which is kind of the division of Uber that's focusing on flying things, has been around for about three years, actually, but it was basically founded by the former chief product officer at Uber, and when we released a white paper on this idea of a future form of transportation using vertical takeoff and landing all electric aircraft that could be woven into the Uber network in a really interesting way, building

on this kind of network, amazing network of cars and drivers that we have right now on the ground.

How do we extend that? How do we make it better?

Is Uber currently working on building a proprietary drone taxi?

Which is what it's not? So we're actually not. So yeah, so we're taking a little bit of a

different approach to this than a lot of other people in industry.

So this is the kind of generic term that people use is urban air mobility or air taxis.

It hasn't really settled out as to what exactly to call this.

NASA calls it urban Air Mobility, though.

And so a lot of companies are really focusing on the vehicle.

So new technology take the same type of electric power

train technology that's in a Tesla batteries, motors, the power electronics that run the motors really efficiently, the computers that control the whole thing, apply them to aircraft, and you can make kind of a new class of aircraft that's really different.

Take off and land vertically like a helicopter, fly on a wing like an airplane, be quieter,

be safer, be a lot cheaper to operate. That's kind of the vision a lot of people are taking and so at

Uber we think that's great. We think that that vision of these vehicles is

something that totally complements what we've built already. But we think that you need

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