#223 Baiju Bhatt - Co-Founder of Robinhood & CEO of Aetherflux

Beiju Bot, welcome to the show.

What's up, man?

Oh man, I'm excited about this.

Me too.

I'm really excited about this one.

So, but I want to dive right into this.

I'm sorry I cut you off on that conversation.

We got to have this on the show.

But you were looking at the bar over there and asking, you know, if people drink on the show, and I said, no, I actually haven't had a drink in over three years now.

I did the psychedelics thing.

And you had had brought up that there seems to be like a movement of the younger generation just

booze doesn't have a place and i think i think that's a good thing but you brought up a good point yeah so as uh i i feel like the contrary take here is that uh

alcohol has kind of gone out of vogue in society i think especially with young people and it's it's kind of like at the same time that we see like a precipitous drop in socializing romance all this stuff for the younger generation, right?

And like,

I actually think it's, as I was making this point earlier, I think alcohol is a very important part of human society.

I think it's a very important social lubricant.

And like, yeah, my contrarian view on it is alcohol is actually really important.

That's an interesting concept.

You're the only one that I've ever heard say that.

But it, I mean, I don't know.

I mean, you know, I'm in my 40s now, so I don't know how young people are socializing.

At least I go to downtown Nashville on Broadway, then I then see it.

There's no shortage of alcohol there.

But I wonder, I mean, how are, how are people socializing that don't drink nowadays?

On the internet?

That's what I mean.

Are they not socializing?

I don't know.

I mean, I think this is like a broader thing, right?

It's like the era that we grew up in.

went to college, went to high school, all this stuff.

There weren't phones around, right?

You'd get bored.

You'd have to like sit and think about shit entertain yourself right that that whole thing like long-form thinking like being bored um

yeah and alcohol was like the universal social lubricant when i was in my early 20s right yeah me too i think it started at like 13.

but but yeah that's all

but what happens if you get rid of it right is like you have a lot of people that

probably just socialize a lot less i mean it's got to be replaced with something.

Unfortunately, you're probably right.

It's probably replaced with Instagram and X and.

Yeah, I think it's social media.

Damn.

Yeah, I don't think that's...

I don't think that's great.

I don't think that...

I don't think the human brain is wired like that, right?

We are social animals.

Like,

we're animals, right?

We're like, we're, we're creatures that take on the human form, but we're an incredibly social species.

And it's weird if that sort of gets replaced or like augmented in a way that doesn't line up with how our brains work with the internet.

People say the same thing about cigarettes, too.

Wait, do they?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I used to smoke.

You never smoked?

I've smoked.

Yeah.

I mean, you step outside of the bar and you talk to the other people that are smoking.

Now I feel like I'm condoning drug

cigarettes and alcohol, which is absurd for this show.

I mean, like going, like living in New York in my early 20s, right?

And if you go outside and have a cigarette with somebody, like that's...

there's a connection.

Yeah, you make friends, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Or work or anywhere.

Yeah.

Although I, yeah, that it's just, I think nicotine, I think, cigarettes, I think, are bad for you.

Like, I think it makes it hard to breathe.

It's like probably going to give you cancer someday.

Well, I think, I mean, you know, on the flip side with the alcohol, all the broken homes, I mean, drinking with excess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, and I think it's ended a lot of relationships as well.

I mean, I know in my prior relationships,

you know, you get to tug on the bottle a little bit too much and everything goes off the rails.

But that's me.

I had the benefit of being Indian.

My body just can't really handle alcohol.

Yeah.

Oh, shit.

One of the nice things.

Yeah.

I could never.

Like, in college, I would like to have thought that I could drink, but I don't think I could really afford my alcohol that

We're also talking about studying math and physics at Stanford, which let me tell you about that party culture.

Tell me about it.

There's a lot of really late nights of doing problem sets.

Like all-nighter after all-nighter of doing problem sets.

Not your typical college experience, huh?

No, like living in the physics building at Stanford, right?

Or spending all night in the math library at Stanford and just like these dimly lit rooms where you're like

smelling the musk of an old textbook.

That was my college experience.

Nice, nice.

Well,

we got a lot to talk about today.

We do, man.

Ton to talk about.

So let me start you off with an introduction here.

Beju Bhatt, son of immigrants who grew up in Virginia with a passion for science sparked by your father's work at NASA's Langley Research Center.

A Stanford educated physicist and mathematician who co-founded Robinhood alongside your college roommate, Vlad Teniff.

This no-fee trading app revolutionized the brokerage industry and shook up Wall Street, earning you an Apple Design Award in 2015 for its user-friendly design.

Navigated Robinhood through turbulent waters, including the gain stop trading halt and SEC settlements.

Recently, you founded Etherflux, a bold new venture aiming to harness solar energy from space and beam it to Earth.

It's, I love that.

Just like we were, I was telling you before, we just had this guy, Steve Quast on, and he was talking about beaming energy to the earth.

Yeah.

And it was so far out there.

I'm just, I'm like, is this, is this shit actually like real?

And, and now here you are, you're, you're legitimately doing it.

Yeah.

So, uh, husband, father of three boys, and you appreciate craftsmanship, hard, hardware, product design, your patches, you're passionate about watches and cars.

What are your favorite cars?

Oh, man.

So I got a car kind of recently, which I love.

Love this thing.

It's a 1992.

I like my cars old.

First of all, I like my cars old and stinky.

Really?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So I got this 1992

Portion 911 RS in mint green.

Nice.

Hunting for this car for years.

I finally found it.

Where'd you find it?

I think it was in Germany.

Damn, that's awesome.

Yeah, this thing is cool.

I like, so I got into

talk a little bit about building shit with our hands.

So during COVID, this was kind of a wild time for me at least.

And I think for everybody, it was wild, but we're all like stuck at home.

And here I am, like trying to lead Robinhood.

So at the time, Vlad and I were co-CEOs of the company, trying to lead this enterprise from like my home office, right?

And you're just like in this little vortex of your own world the whole time.

And I remember thinking to myself, like, I need a creative outlet.

Like, I'm like, I, I've, I've always been this way where there's the main thing that I care about.

That's kind of like the, the main thing that my energy is going towards.

And there's always like a creative muse or a creative outlet or something that's completely unrelated to the work that I'm doing, which is like a passion or a hobby.

And I find that that's usually where where a lot of the creativity is all about connecting unrelated ideas together, right?

And seeing the threads that connect things that

maybe you don't necessarily see if you just look at things very plainly.

For me, during COVID, I was like, man, I've been building technology, digital technology

for years and years, coming on 10 years at that point.

And I kind of wanted to try my hand at building stuff, like actual stuff.

So I'm like, I know how to build technology, but I don't really feel like I know how to build mechanical and material things.

So I was like, all right, I also love cars because I grew up in Virginia and I had to drive all fucking time.

Because I was taking classes at like a community college where I was like doing some research at this particle accelerator, which meant I had to just drive around all the time.

So I loved cars.

And I was like, if I want to get into classic cars someday, and I convinced myself that the way that I was going to do it was start out by building a car first.

No kidding?

Yeah.

What'd you build?

So are you familiar with this company called Factory 5?

No.

All right.

Very cool company.

They build kit cars that are like basically

like reimaginations of like Shelby race cars.

So they've got the Shelby Cobra that they make.

And then the one that I did is the hardtop version of it.

So the Shelby Daytona.

So during COVID, I like, had never done this before.

I ordered one of these kits, got connected to a couple of people that sort of were like my automotive mentors in the early days and kind of taught me how to do it.

But during COVID in my nights and weekends and whatever spare time I had, I go from a box of parts to

like a, you know, like a thing that turned on.

Yeah.

Did you, did you find that difficult?

Or did it come naturally to you?

I like difficult things.

So I did find it to be difficult for sure.

But that was, that's kind of like, that's the right of passage in a lot of ways, right?

Yeah.

Like, I remember I found myself a couple of times.

This is also COVID, right?

And so you're not.

There's not much to do.

There's not much to do.

There's also not a lot of people that can help you do shit.

So I remember finding myself a couple of times.

Like, it's like, all right, it's Saturday.

What am I doing today?

I'm going to figure out how to mount this damn fuel tank onto this car.

And I remember finding myself sort of on one of those little sliders underneath the car and like trying to prop the thing up on my legs and trying to screw it in

you become like a contortionist trying to build this stuff when was that it was during covid how many classes of cars do you have now

a couple classes yeah awesome my my thing is i love i love the way that things work and i think that that experience was super interesting because

you kind of go from like loving cars to being able to really be like okay the thing that i really like about cars is like the way that mechanical things

working in a particular way.

For example, right, like

I think cars sound really good.

Love the sound of cars, but it's like, well, what does that mean?

Like, what, what, what part of the sound do you like, right?

Do you like the exhaust note?

Do you like the induction sound from the engine?

Do you like the gears chattering?

Because there's like, you know, no sound deadening in the thing.

Yeah, it's like getting a really deep understanding of all the components and being like, actually,

and this is kind of one of the places that I've landed now.

It's better to drive a slow car fast than to drive a fast car slow.

So I actually kind of like my cars

more underpowered, lightweight.

So you got to like really ring them out to actually keep up with traffic, for example.

Nice.

I just got my first, I don't know if I'd call it a classic car, but.

Yeah, are you in a car?

Tell me.

There's an engine sitting over there.

Yeah, well, I'd love to talk about that on the air, but I can't.

But, you know,

but

now I just got a 1977 Ford F-150.

Oh,

you know,

we were talking before.

We both, I was, I grew up in Missouri.

You were born there.

I was, yeah.

And

that was like.

They just don't make cars like they used to, man.

No.

Even it's in, yeah, I literally just picked picked it up last week i love the damn thing i'm putting some pipes on it because i like the exhaust sound what kind of engine does it have a 351 nice yeah i love old cars yeah cars today are

uh all right i'm gonna go on a middle limb here they're like kind of perverted in my opinion because i think of cars as these objects of industrial design right i think of them as these like these things that humanity invented for transportation and there's like this artistic component to to them because

old cars were handmade, right?

They were envisioned by the mind and built with the hand.

And you look at the cars that exist today, number one, they're designed by computers and they look like it, in my opinion.

And they're built by robots.

And just like the materials and the way that things fit together, there's something about it

really, really don't like.

What do you think about?

That's why I say it's perverted.

I'm just curious.

You know what I don't like is everything's going electric.

Like, didn't Ferrari get rid of all of the...

They're not doing engines anymore, right?

They're doing, it's all electric.

I think so.

And

what?

The Mercedes-G-Wagon, those are getting ready to go all electric.

And those things, I love the sound of those things.

You used to.

I used to drive them for work.

Big burbly V8.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Love it.

But everything's going electric, and I think the sound of like these supercars are amazing.

I just, I can't envision a Ferrari flying by me with no sound.

With no sound.

Yeah.

It's weird.

Huge look.

I feel like it takes from the experience.

Oh, man.

Yeah, that's not good.

But

I find the not just the electrification, because that, you can like very quickly point a finger to that and be like i don't like the way that that works but i think just in general how computerized cars are yeah right i mean there it really takes away from the experience because when i when i'm sitting behind the wheel of a car like i want to be able to know what's going on with the road surface through the way the steering wheel is moving in your hand right you want to be able to feel how much traction the car's got based on how much you can kind of like

feel it moving through your butt.

Dude, you drive, don't you?

I do.

Do you you go to the track?

Not that much.

Have you taken driving schools?

I have, yeah.

Which ones?

I've had some people tutor me on it before.

Dude, you have...

No, no, actually, I've taken the Ferrari driving school once.

How was it?

It was really fast.

It was like too fast.

Dude, have you, have you...

Have you done it before?

Well, I've done a bunch.

I've done a bunch of driving schools for back in the old days when I was a COM contractor for CIA.

They put us through a ton of schools.

Did they put you through the Ferrari school?

No, no.

It was a lot more practical.

It was like pitting and crashing into things and how to get out of situations.

But I took this course.

You've got to do this.

Like you were talking about lighter cars to drive them faster.

So there's this course in New Hampshire.

It's called the O'Neill Rally Racing Course.

Have you heard of it?

I love rally racing.

Dude, it is fucking awesome.

I went there and I think I went there for like two weeks.

This is a long time ago, but you're out in the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire.

And day one, I think, is the first phase is front-wheel drive.

Then you do rear-wheel drive.

Then you do all-wheel drive.

Then you do off-roading.

And you got like, you start off on little Ford Festivas

and move to Audi's and BMWs for rear-wheel drive.

And you're just on these little trails in the mountains out there.

The trails are like.

Well, you took BMWs on dirt roads?

Dude, it's awesome.

It's awesome.

You've got to check this out.

It's like the coolest fucking driving school I've ever taken.

And yeah, like I said, I think it's about two weeks long.

They got all kinds of different packages.

But when my son gets older, that's one of the first things I want to do with him when he can see over the steering wheel, get him out there

on those trails.

And dude, it's awesome.

You'll love it.

I hope you do it.

Yeah, I actually, as you're saying this, I'm thinking about wanting to do that with my boys.

They would love that.

Yeah.

O'Neill Rally Racing School.

That's not a plug.

It's just

awesome.

Yeah.

Also, off-roading is really fun.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really fun.

The whole, you do it all, and then you go there in the winter and do it in the snow.

It's awesome.

The instructors are phenomenal.

I can't wait to do it again.

Yeah, I would actually love to do that.

So I've done one actual driving school, which is like the Ferrari one.

Kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum, too fast.

Like, it makes you feel like you're going to throw up the whole time.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm not.

Off-roading is way more fun.

This is, this is, it's a lot of fun, man.

And you're moving through like these trails that are barely wide enough for the car to get through,

taking right-angle turns at like 50 miles.

It's awesome.

It is awesome.

Were there any like big old trucks on this one?

No, it was, I think we used

Jeep Cherokees for the off-roading.

But like I said, this is like 10, 15 years ago that I did that course.

I haven't taken a driving course since, but it was

the most fun driving course I've taken, and I've taken a ton of them.

But,

well, everybody starts off with a gift here.

Oh, amazing.

Vigilance League gummy bears, legal in all 50 states.

Can I have some?

Yeah, man.

Dig in.

Just candy.

It's no funny business.

Good stuff.

I would love Cummy Bears.

Me too.

But

I'd love to do a life story on you.

Yeah, let's do it.

So let's just start at the beginning and go in chronological order, but where'd you grow up?

So

grew up in Alabama.

And then in southern Virginia.

And I guess I was growing up by the time I got to college.

My family moves to the U.S.

from India.

My dad

had grown up always wanting to study physics.

So it was like his life goal.

He wanted to study physics.

And they're from a little town.

I guess now it's a big town in India called

Bhavnagar in Gujarat.

And my dad, my grandfather, was one of the first Western-trained eye doctors.

This has got to be in like probably the the

40s and 50s and 60s.

He was one of the first Western trained eye doctors

and was like, my children are going to go into optometry.

So this is like my dad and his and his brothers.

So my dad had always wanted to study physics, goes to college to study chemistry, I want to say.

I think he started a PhD in chemistry in India.

And then stops doing that and is an optometrist.

He's like a contact lens doctor in India, applying to PhD programs in America

because he wanted to study physics.

And the story that my dad tells me is that he put the word Kumar at the end of his name, which apparently means you're a bachelor, because he was like, I'm going to devote my life to science.

My dad is like a very, he's a very studious man.

And I love him.

But

lo and behold, my dad, I think, eventually was like, all right, I'm going to get married.

I think he was,

yeah, I think he was maybe like, all right, maybe this coming to America to study physics thing isn't going to happen.

So he gets married to my mom.

And then she's pregnant with me.

And then he gets into

University of Huntsville, Alabama to study physics.

And my mom originally, I think, was not going to come.

She's like, she was the youngest of a bunch of siblings.

She really loved her family in India.

And the story that they told me is that they go to the embassy in India, and my mom is pregnant with me.

And they're like, oh, your son, you've got, you're pregnant, right?

And they're like, your son's going to be born in America.

So my mom,

much to her frustration, sorry, this is going back a little bit further, but I think it's

cool.

Pretty relevant.

She comes to America and we grow up.

So when she first lands in America, she's in Huntsville.

Or sorry, yeah.

Yeah, Huntsville, Alabama.

Yeah, that's right.

I was studying physics.

And I think they knew like one Indian family in America that were also doctors that were in Warrensburg, Missouri.

Right around where I grew up.

Yeah.

And so my mom, the story goes, she goes out to Warrensburg right when she's about to give birth to me

because you can't afford to go to the hospital for like a week.

Right.

So she goes there, I'm born, and then she comes back to Alabama, which is where I grew up.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's cool, man.

It was a...

You still tied with both of your parents?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very much so.

Did you say your dad in the 40s or in his 40s?

No, when my grandfather studied.

Oh, okay.

Which must have been in the 40s or 50s in India.

Okay.

Maybe, maybe it was 50s or 60s.

No, he's he was born in the 40s.

Okay.

He wasn't in his 40s in the 40s.

Right on.

Well, what were you into?

What were you into growing up?

Yeah, so my childhood was,

I had a really loving family, but the circumstances were, I think, objectively

pretty tough a lot of times.

So this is like one of the pretty heavy-duty things that happened in my life at a pretty young age.

My dad's kidneys failed.

Pretty much, I think it probably started around the time he came to the U.S.

And so by the time I was four or five, my dad had to stop out of his PhD program to get a job to pay for the medical bills.

So here we are moving to a little town called Pocosin, Virginia,

next to Langley Air Force Base, because my dad got a job at NASA Langley.

And

I think one of the big things for him was he's like, I have to get a job to pay for these medical bills because he started going on dialysis

when I was like five years old so there I was

only child

like

not a lot of brown people around Southern yeah

and actually interestingly I didn't learn English until I was like maybe four or five

kids yeah I learned Gujarati was my first language

Because my mom didn't speak English.

We learned English together.

I learned English watching TV.

Wow.

Yeah.

So that was kind of who I was as a kid when we got to Virginia.

So what was I into as a kid?

Really into

superheroes.

I was really into like cartoons and X-Men and comic books and stuff like that.

I was also really into science and space and that a lot of that came from my dad

because he worked at NASA.

That's cool.

It's like, what does your dad do?

He's a scientist at NASA.

It was something that I was always really proud of and I thought was very cool.

And I remember I would go to visit my dad at work sometimes.

And have you been to Langley Air Force Base?

No.

Yeah, there's these huge wind tunnels, right, that are kind of on the facility.

And I remember going there as a kid and just being sort of awestruck by the machinery of like science and space, right?

And like how big it was.

And I remember my dad had...

This he had like a desktop computer and he was doing computer stuff on I think he was using Linux in like the 90s So I remember distinctly remember going and

like my dad had his computer at his desk.

So that was a lot of my childhood.

I mean I grew up not being a terribly athletic kid.

I was actually quite overweight as a child.

You were overweight?

Big time.

No kidding.

Yeah.

I ended up losing a ton of weight when I got a little bit older.

Like I lost like nearly a third of my body weight in high school.

Wow.

Yeah.

From exercising.

Oh, okay.

And so that, that was kind of my childhood, right?

We were not terribly well-to-do.

We lived in like a small apartment.

My dad was a scientist at NASA.

He was on dialysis.

I was a little kid, you know, it was like a little

boy.

And

the interesting...

The point at which my life fundamentally changed was when I was in eighth grade, actually.

And my dad had been on dialysis this whole time and was waiting to get a kidney transplant, like waiting year in, year out.

I remember he had this little beeper that he would carry around with him.

It's like, oh, did the beeper go off?

Because if the beeper went off, it meant that one of the hospitals called because they had a kidney transplant for him.

And you got to like pack up and go.

And

when I was in eighth grade, my dad's kidney disease kind of took a turn for the worse.

So he he was on dialysis and he got this infection.

And I don't think they really understood what was happening at the time, but he got very, very sick from the catheter that that was in his stomach, basically, for him to be able to do dialysis.

And

my dad goes from being...

sick to being very sick to being hospitalized

to my mom being like

every day waking up in the morning and going and staying with my dad at the hospital all day

and i was just kind of like home alone

just fucking confused damn being like what what do i what do i do right like where where does life go from here feels completely rudderless didn't have any siblings Right, I was not cool at all.

I was like fat brown kid in school.

Like there wasn't a lot of.

I had a couple of friends, actually one good friend from that period that's still a friend of mine.

But I just remember feeling so unbelievably lost.

And then my dad's health continues to take a turn for the worse.

And he has a couple of really major surgeries where,

you know, at this, at 13 or whatever it was, I remember staring down the specter of what happens if my dad passes away.

By the way, my dad is healthy and alive today.

So

probably worth worth saying that.

I'm like, what happens, right?

I want to go back to India.

I've never lived there.

My parents couldn't even afford to go back to India.

By the way, the last time I went back to India was in 1997.

97, maybe 98?

Did you go back?

Did you, is that the only time you went back to India?

Did you go back and forth a couple of times?

Probably when I was a little kid, I went like two or three times.

But you don't remember it?

Vague memories of it.

But

I'm an American, right?

Like

through and through.

So that, that, that's happening.

And I'm like, well, what do I do?

Right.

And I don't feel like I can control anything in my life.

But growing up in my household, it was like this.

This theme will come back a little bit later on, right?

It's like, you have to make the most of the opportunities in life.

And America is the land of opportunity.

And my dad did beat one thing into my head, which is education, education, education.

Like that's your way out.

So I go from not being a terribly good student to being like, I'm going to get really good at math.

I'm going to get really good at physics because

no matter what, like that's like.

That'll give me some purpose in life.

And if I'm doing really well in school, that that'll be kind of like the thing that pulls me forward.

Lo and behold, a few months later, my dad, his kidney, that like kidney disease that he had, that had him hospitalized, which I'm talking about it kind of vaguely because I don't think they really know what happened other than the fact that he had a really bad infection.

He starts to get better, and they're like, give this man a kidney transplant.

Like, he's been on death store.

And so he gets a kidney transplant.

By the time that happens, which is, I think, the the summer between eighth and ninth grade for me,

I was like a full-on man at that point.

Because I'm like, I have to do well in school.

Like, that's my mission in life.

And if I do really well in school, that's going to be how I like carve my own path out.

Because I didn't want to feel rudderless anymore.

I wanted some degree of agency, some control

over my life.

And so I go from being not a very good student to being just locked in.

Wow.

And just at that point, like figured out that

I loved physics.

I loved math.

I'd kind of been given this

gift of being introduced to this as a kid by my dad.

Right.

And

one of the interesting things growing up, right, is like doing well in school or studying math and stuff like this.

This was not cool when we were kids.

Right.

Like you're kind of a loser if you did stuff like this,

which I think is not a good thing.

Like, I don't think that's

a weird and bad thing for society to reinforce.

Like, we want our young people to cherish education because otherwise they're not going to know what the fuck they're talking about.

Right?

Like, that's what that era of life is about, is about learning stuff so that you have

a better lens to look at like this weird thing called adulthood and life through.

So,

what was your dad studying at NASA?

What was he working on?

He was doing atmospheric sciences.

What is that?

I think he was doing like satellite imaging.

No kidding.

Is that fucking wild?

Yeah.

You can't make this stuff up.

It goes around full circle.

I've been.

I mean, do you guys talk a lot about what you're doing now?

We do, yeah.

My dad's a little bit older now.

And he really wants to be involved.

But honestly, at this stage, it's nice just to have something cool to talk to my dad about with.

Yeah.

So they come over and hang out with the kids pretty often.

They live next to you or close to you?

They live pretty close by.

That's cool, man.

That's cool.

I wish my parents lived closer.

Where do your parents live?

They're in Florida.

That's right.

Yeah, they're in Florida.

I moved to Florida, and then the whole family moved to Florida.

And then I left Florida.

So, yeah.

Like I told you downstairs, I wanted to raise my kids in a different environment than South Florida.

It's just a little too wild down there.

Yeah, at which point I made the argument that the best place to raise kids is Silicon Valley,

which

I don't actually think that's true.

So

where do we go from school?

Yeah, so

second half of college or second half of high school was very fun.

Felt like my brain woke up and I could just learn stuff.

And I loved physics and I loved math so I just went I went whole hog like that's what I was like that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna try to get into Stanford or MIT or Caltech or Harvard or one of these like really good schools

and so I just like buried my nose in the textbook and I started actually working for I want to say like a year or two

and the nights and weekends and during the summers at this place called Jefferson Lab,

which is a particle accelerator in southern Virginia.

So I was deep into physics.

A particle accelerator.

What is that?

That's where you take high-energy particles and you collide them to study the quantum mechanical effects.

This is like CERN.

Yeah.

Are you familiar with CERN?

I am.

What are they doing there?

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They're studying quantum field theory.

Right?

So

quantum field theory is a fascinating subject, by the way.

Should we talk about this?

Yeah, let's do it.

All right, so do you know about quantum mechanics?

No.

All right.

So Einstein, with his big old brain, figured a lot of this stuff out and actually didn't believe in a lot of it when he was alive, which is weird.

Famously said, God doesn't play dice or roll dice.

And quantum mechanics is...

this theory of the universe which is fundamentally probabilistic, right?

It's about probabilities.

So So the general idea of quantum mechanics is that you have,

let's see if I can do a decent job of explaining this, is that

things in nature have this particle behavior sometimes.

Sometimes they have this wave behavior.

And quantum states are when,

I think it's actually easier to talk about quantum mechanics.

a little bit more specifically, like in the context of electromagnetism

and light.

So that's kind of what I'm trying to get to, is there's this idea of, and this actually relates to the name of the company, Aetherflux, by the way.

There's this idea of whether light is a wave or it's a particle.

And

different people through history have had different opinions on whether it's one or the other.

And

there was this There's this idea, well, if particle, if light is a wave, then waves have some medium through which they propagate, right

and we knew that light has a lot of wave-like characteristics it's got wavelength and in turn it's got a frequency um

and you can kind of think about light in that way one of the things that einstein figured out um and a lot of the people that worked on quantum mechanics at the turn of the last century was that it also has this particle behavior.

And if you want to understand like how

these these two incongruent descriptions can fit together, quantum mechanics is kind of the machinery behind it.

But quantum field theory is taking the machinery of quantum mechanics and trying to like

explain more physical phenomenon with it.

So

let's see if I can do a paraphrasing of this or a good explanation of this.

So quantum field theory basically says that

there's different kinds of, for each of the fundamental forces that exist in the universe, right?

There's different particles that carry the sort of interaction between things that are happening, and then there's the particles that actually carry the quantities, right?

So if you have, in the context of electromagnetic interaction, you have charged particles like electrons and protons, and then you have ways in which charged particles sort of communicate with each other, which is with light, right?

So quantum field theory is kind of like the generalization of that framework to how

quarks and neutrinos work, to how other kinds of fundamental particles that are predicted

might exist or not exist.

So one of them more recently is this thing called the Higgs boson.

Have you ever heard of this before?

No.

See if I can explain this without going into too much of a rabbit hole.

But it's this thing in quantum field theory.

It's a particle that was predicted to exist a long time ago when quantum field theory was first invented

as the particle that would give things mass.

And there was a field that,

if different particles interacted with it, would give particles the phenomenon of mass.

And there was this fundamental, I'm kind of trying to give a short version of this,

there was a prediction that there would be this particle called the Higgs boson, which was central to this thing, but it was really, really difficult to observe.

One of the stories that I've heard,

it's been called the God particle over time,

because I think originally it was called the Goddamn Particle, because it was so goddamn hard to observe.

But at some point, I think they felt that that was not,

that didn't speak to the sensibilities of scientific publications in, I don't know, like the 50s or something like that.

So they just called it the God particle.

But

creating these experiments that create collisions, that create these esoteric states of matter where you might be able to observe a Higgs boson.

This is the kind of stuff that CERN does.

Okay.

So they're probing

this theory called quantum field theory to see all the weird predictions and see if you can create those in the real world.

There's a very broad explanation.

I mean,

there's a lot of theories out there that they're trying to create black, mini black holes and all this other stuff.

Yeah, that's pretty catchy.

i don't i don't know if that's gonna happen not buying it huh i'm not i'm not buying that i mean i think if if something like that were to happen it would probably evaporate in a very short amount of time it's i mean is this have to do

i watch this stuff i don't understand half of it

so i'm gonna butcher this because i watched this a couple years ago but i remember watching this uh thing on youtube and it was talking about Mox Planck.

And I think what they were talking about, there was a couple different things, but they were talking about how different particles will act differently if they're being observed.

Yeah.

There's consciousness around it.

Yeah.

And even when they set a camera up, if somebody's watching the camera, then the particles will still act differently than if they're not being physically observed.

Do you know about this?

I do, yeah.

What is that?

Yeah, it's this thing called the uncertainty principle.

And this is something that comes from quantum mechanics.

And let's see see if I can remember this correctly.

But there's basically the amount of

precision

that you can theoretically have when observing the system, right?

So if I remember this correctly, it's that there's two, there's a few different statements of this uncertainty principle.

And to any of the listeners out there that are actual physicists, if I get something wrong here, I'm sorry.

But

there's this basic idea that if you think about the measurement uncertainty of a physical system,

the time uncertainty and the energy uncertainty, and you multiply those two together, that that uncertainty is not going to you're not going to be able to be more certain about those two things than a fixed amount.

So if you get more precise with the exact time something is happening, then the exact energy becomes more variable, and vice versa.

And so, I kind of think about it as this lower bound for how accurately you can actually see or observe anything in the physical world.

Because if you get more precise on the time measurement, the energy becomes uncertain.

If you get more precise on the energy measurement, the exact time becomes uncertain.

And there's other formulations of this uncertainty principle, but it basically is like a lower bound on how precise the the description of the universe can be.

Did you, I think I read somewhere, maybe somebody said it on the show recently.

I can't remember, but

back to light.

I either read or somebody said it on the show that we just froze light.

Yeah, I've heard about that too.

I don't really know what that means.

I don't know what that means either.

Yeah, I don't really know what that means.

So is light a particle or a wave?

Because I watched,

I saw some other things.

It was talking about when you shoot a beam into like a slit,

the...

It has both behaviors.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Light is both a wave and a particle.

This is the wild thing.

It exhibits this thing called wave-particle duality.

And

this is actually one of the things that Einstein figured out.

Related to this, but

a little bit of a tangent is the idea idea of like what is the speed of light because this is one of the things that people were studying

in the late 1800s to kind of try to understand what is the phenomenon of light and the idea at the time the prevailing theory is that light's a wave and so if light is a wave Waves have mediums that they travel through, right?

So if you have, we're talking to each other, these are sound waves, they're traveling from little vibrations in my throat.

They're vibrating the air, and you're hearing them in your ear, and vice versa, right?

So, the medium that the sound wave is traveling through is the air.

Similarly, if you have

the surface of water and you drop a stone in it, right?

You're going to create a little wave that's going to travel on the surface of the water.

So, if light is a wave,

what's the medium?

Like, what is the

thing that light is oscillating

that's behind this?

So they famously called it the aether.

So

there's this medium that was postulated to exist called the aether that light would travel through

that would give it this wave phenomenon.

And there were a bunch of experiments done to sort of characterize the speed of light and in turn to characterize whatever this medium is that it's traveling through

which just led to a bunch of head scratching so one of the famous one of the famous scientific

experiments during this time is called the Michelson Morley experiment where people tried to measure the speed of light and again this this is kind of the paraphrasing of it is if you have a light source

and you pass it through basically and you split it in half and you have half of it go this direction, half of it go that direction you have two mirrors that are the same distance and you bounce the light back

then presumably you would be able to see light traveling at a slightly faster speed in one direction or the other because

the earth is rotating right the earth is moving and in turn the surface on which the light is being transported is moving.

So if the earth is rotating this way and you're firing the light that way, then you would expect to see the speed of light to be a little faster in that direction versus in this direction.

Right?

So they do this experiment and they find it to be the exact same.

They're like, what the hell's going on here?

So there's a bunch of sort of thinking that was done around the time to try to characterize whether there was something about or misunderstanding of the aether.

Maybe it was like a really thick, viscous thing.

where it sort of smoothed out on the surface of the earth and that's the reason why light was behaving in this weird way through it.

There are all these like ideas that people are coming up with.

And then Einstein comes along, and he's basically like, no, actually,

it is the same in every direction because the speed of light is constant in every reference frame, whether it's moving or stationary.

And the thing is, it's the speed of light that's the constant.

And time and space like literally contract and expand to be able to keep that a constant.

So, this was kind of the beginning of

what does that mean?

Time and space can contract and expand.

Yeah, this is the theory of special relativity.

This is like what put Einstein on the map.

And if you go through and you actually just work out the equations for what happens,

let's see if I can explain this

in a simple real-world example.

So here's a real world example that you'll see.

So if you have a clock on a satellite,

because of this relativistic effect, because the satellite is moving really quickly, in the reference frame of the satellite, you'll actually see

the clock ticking at a slightly different pace than you'll see it on the surface of the Earth.

So you actually have to do some computation in the limit to be able to figure out that difference.

See if I can do a a better job of explaining how this actually works.

It's a pretty esoteric one.

But

let me see if I can think of a good example of how to explain length, time dilation and length contraction.

Maybe we come back to this one.

I'm not sure if I've got a great simple explanation.

Let me ask you about quantum entanglement.

It sounds like it's going to revolutionize revolutionize communications, especially crypto.

And so

it's my understanding that you take a particle, you split it in half, put one over here, you can put the other one in another room, in another country,

infinite distance away.

And if you put a vibration on this half, then the other half will mimic that exact same vibration no matter what the distance is.

Am I correct?

Yep.

Can anybody explain why that is happening?

This actually has to do with what we were talking about a couple of minutes ago around uncertainty.

So what ends up happening is you have

two particles

that share, that you know together are in a certain quantum state.

And if, for example, if this one is up and

so it might be the case that if you have these two things you know that together on average

like half of the time this one's up half the time this one's down and so on average it's flat just make a simple analogy here right but you don't know at any point in time whether this one's up so there's two particles in your system and you know on average one of them is up and one of them is down it could be like this could be like this or it could be like this has its changing states between the two but you know that together these two things are entangled.

And that always on average, they're going to be one is going to be up and one is going to be down.

Now,

this kind of comes back to that uncertainty thing that we were talking about, right?

So if you can keep these things truly entangled with one of them and physically separate them,

and you take this one and you look at it and you're like, oh, it's up, that's going to force the other one into the down state.

Because you know these things are entangled and you know on average, you know, the quantum state together shares like it's flat, meaning if one of them is up, the other one's down.

Then just by looking at one of them, you force the other one into the opposite state.

So this is how you would be able to encode something at a long distance like this.

Man, how does that make sense?

It does make sense.

I can't, I mean, maybe nobody can, I don't know, but how are they communicating?

How are they still entangled?

Yeah.

Is it everything is connected?

This is

one of the true mysteries of the universe.

Does it mean there's multiverse?

I don't know about that, man.

I don't know if there's enough evidence to suggest that there's a multiverse.

I think it's a theoretical possibility.

But there's a lot of theoretical possibilities out there.

Do you think about this stuff a lot?

I do.

I do, actually.

Yeah.

I have a lot in the past.

I'm not sure I think about it that much today.

That's why I'm kind of like, let me see if I can explain this and try to like reach back about a decade in my physics knowledge and

see if I can come up with an example that kind of makes sense.

No, I do think about it a decent bit.

I think there's

this is the thing about quantum mechanics.

And one of the things that I love about quantum mechanics is that it's very, very unintuitive.

Right?

There's

when you think about physics and having been trained as a physicist,

it's all about intuition for how the physical world works, right?

And it's kind of like you study the equations enough and then you form a sort of

literally that, an intuitive understanding of how it might work in different contexts.

Because a lot of physics is like you're trying to imagine how something could happen.

You've got a problem on a piece of paper and you're trying to paint a picture of it in your head.

Quantum mechanics makes that really hard because it's fundamentally very, very unintuitive.

So, when you think about like what's a physical analog to how this might work in the real world, a lot of times with quantum mechanics, you're like kind of drawing a blank because you're like, things don't really work like that in the normal world.

But you know that if you zoom in close enough, they have all these weird phenomenons to them.

I think a related question is: um,

like, is there a higher power?

Is there a higher being?

I don't know.

I fundamentally don't know.

I'm curious.

I've gone back and forth on it.

The place I've landed is, is that I'm not sure that it's a question that we as humans can really answer.

What do your parents believe?

My mom is religious.

My dad is not.

My dad is a very spiritual person, but he's not a religious person.

And he told me that from a pretty early age.

He's like, I'm not going to tell you

to believe in God or not to believe in God.

It's kind of up to you.

My dad kind of raised me in that way.

It's like, the big questions, you can ask me what I think, but I'm not going to tell you what to think.

It's kind of on you to figure out.

That's good.

You?

Do I believe there's a higher power?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Tell me about it.

Well, you know,

I grew up Catholic,

but I didn't really take it seriously.

I never took it seriously.

But I was raised in that, went to church every Sunday.

Then I joined the SEAL teams and

just lost it.

Didn't believe in anything.

Couldn't explain why people were dying and

why out of

a platoon of us.

SEAL teams are a fucked up place for a young adult.

There's a lot of,

it's just,

it's not a great environment.

A lot of drinking, a lot of infidelity, a lot of fighting.

And then, you know, there's the whole war thing.

And, you know, I would see

if you had somebody that didn't cheat on their wife and that was sober, it was, it was almost like some type of a phenomenon within the SEAL teams.

And time and time again, I would see,

you know, there would be a bunch of us, and I loved loved all the guys that I was with, but like I said, 99% 99% of us were, I wasn't married at the time, but it's cheating on your wife, it's getting in bar fights, it's just, it's, it's, it's a different life.

And I would see the guys that get killed in action, and a lot of times it would be the guy that's not out with the platoon

drinking, barfighting, womanizing.

It would be the guy that's, that's a a really good dad, that is a really good husband, that

somehow has figured out the balance between war and family life.

And it was just time and time again, those were the guys that were getting killed, and

it made me feel guilty, and

it actually took a lot of faith from me in God.

And it was like, this just, this makes no sense.

Why would you fucking take the guy

that has kids, that is there for his kids, who is a good dad and is a good role model and a good husband, and not just for his kids, but for society as a whole.

And then you got

a guy like me who considered myself a piece of shit who's womanizing, you know what I mean?

And it's like, it made me feel guilty.

It didn't make any damn sense.

Kind of like quantum mechanics.

And so, and then, you know, and that was very early on in my career.

And then, and then I kept moving.

And, and I just, I never really thought about it and then

I

recently it was after my psychedelics I did psychedelics and I did this thing called 5MEO DMT2 after I did the IB game which is a it's a death experience you you legitimately like there's no question in your mind you are you're you're dying you're going to die

and so it's it's

I think what it does is it it is a

penal gland dump

like what does does that do to your perspective?

It changes everything

because when you do it,

so basically, you know, and

I'll speed this up a little bit, but you smoke this and then

you feel like you're dying and it gets stronger and stronger.

It kind of feels like an eternity, but it really only lasts maybe 15, 30 seconds.

And maybe even less than that.

But you start sorting through everything in your life and it's

like light speed.

And you start to separate from the materialistic world.

And I mean, everything,

and you don't have time to process what's going on, but you start to separate from

you might be thinking about a friend and

you make that separation.

And for me,

it was getting rid of materialistic stuff, friends, you know, family, da, da, da, da.

And then you go,

it's all the things that you're holding on to that you value

in the world that we live in, right?

Yeah.

And then the last things for me was when I did this, I only had my son and my wife.

And those were the last things that I was grasping onto.

And it was like a fight.

It was like, I cannot die because if I die, I'm leaving my, you know,

less than one-year-old son at the time behind in this fucked up world and my wife, you know, who is a a stay-at-home mom.

And then

you separate from that.

And when you separate from the last thing, you cross over into like this other realm.

And a lot of people.

You actually thought you were going to die when you did this.

Yeah, there's no, there is,

there's zero question in your brain that you are departing life.

It's, it's over.

And you don't know where you're going.

And it's, and it's happening, and you cannot stop it.

And so

after you go through that,

like I said, it feels like an eternity, but

it's only a matter of seconds.

And then

when you make

that final separation, then you cross over into this other realm.

And

they call it, they also, it's also called the God molecule, and it's called

the bliss drug or something like that.

And you cross over and, you know, you.

Sounds kind of hippie-ish, but, you know,

when I was growing up, the hippies and they're all talking about everything's energy and all this other shit.

And I'm like, okay, whatever.

Well, you feel that when you cross over.

And I did not, I wanted to do it.

I wanted to see.

I just wanted to see Earth and nature when I did it.

So I didn't put the blindfold on.

And so when I, when I made that separation, I crossed over, I opened my eyes and like sat up.

And this is off just south of, it was in,

I think it's actually in Rosaria,

Mexico.

So you're on the beach.

And I opened my eyes and I could just, I did not see anything that wasn't there.

It wasn't like Grateful Dead, psychedelics, you know, pink elephants and rainbows and all this shit.

Everything that I saw was actually there, but it was like this intuition was injected into me.

And I could feel

the flow of energy.

And so I could see it like

coming from the ocean into the beach, into the grass, up the trees, the birds.

I mean, everything just

was in perfect harmony.

And that lasts for about 15 minutes.

And a lot of people,

a lot of people people say they can feel friends or relatives that have passed and that are in this other realm or some some people see them.

I felt the presence of my best friend who we were talking about, Gabe, up there.

That was your best friend.

Yeah, I could feel his presence.

And

it made me realize that everything that has happened and that will happen in the world and in my life is exactly the way it's supposed to be, no matter how it happened or how I experienced it.

And so when I came out of that,

it made me realize that

there's definitely something more to this than any of us have put together.

Yeah.

And so then I started looking into, that's actually when I started watching all these quantum mechanics videos and stuff like that because I wanted to understand what that was.

And I was really into energy.

I was like, what, what is it?

What is it?

Why are we here?

What's driving all this?

And so it sent me down this path.

And I started watching all these things.

And that's when I was looking at the Big Bang and the multiverse and all these other things.

Fast forward a couple of years.

And

we're in Sedona.

And I had had this,

I wasn't happy with the way the world was going.

And this is what, I guess this is probably about two years ago.

So

a lot of things that were going on in the country just really tugged on my heart.

And

I was enraged about a lot of things, like probably a lot of the stuff that you see in

Silicon Valley.

But it just really bothered me.

Like the gender stuff with children is just something that

always

I couldn't stand it.

I couldn't stand reading about it, hearing about it.

I share that feeling with you.

Especially as a father of young children, you're like,

this is not, not, it's not appropriate for kids.

Yeah.

And

that stuff was really bothering me.

And then I dive deep into China.

I talk about it all the time.

And a lot of the stuff that was going on over there and how they're pulling ahead and the spy balloon and all the, it was around this timeframe.

And

I went to Sedona because I had read.

There's all these energy fields in Sedona.

And I was like, maybe I'll feel something.

I don't know.

We'll see.

We'll go on some hikes go to some of these energy vortexes I want to see if I feel anything I didn't feel anything and

and the last day there it was a really rough trip of mine too my a really good friend of mine had just died I'd done some heavy interviews uh with with um my really good friend Brian Montgomery who who's doving into the

he's fighting sex trafficking and kids and sex exploitation.

And

I had another interview with this kid, Tyler Andrew Vargas.

Not a kid, he's a man.

And sorry, Tyler, but he was the only one that survived the Abigail bombing during the Afghan withdrawal.

I watched, had him come in here.

Nobody would give him a platform to talk about his story.

Comes in here, one leg, one arm, hobbles up these stairs to do this interview.

No media would touch it.

It was disgusting how the last administration handled the withdrawal, not only the withdrawal, but him personally tried to testify in front of Congress.

Rough story, right?

And so I got all this weight, and I'm supposed to be on vacation with my wife.

And

like, I broke down on the plane.

Like, I'm not a guy that breaks down, but I broke down

in tears.

And she's like, what,

like, what the hell is wrong with you?

And

I was just angry the whole trip.

Very last day,

I stayed off social media the whole trip.

It's the last day I'm like, oh, let's see what's going on.

And, you know, I have to be on there for my business.

I look, I see something that really pisses me off.

And I'm like, we got to go on a hike.

So we go on a hike, go up to this energy vortex, don't feel shit.

And on the way back down, I had had this

internal battle going on in my head that's, that's like, I felt like nobody nobody else cared and I felt like I was the only one talking about this stuff and and I was trying to basically convince myself like Sean

why do you let this shit affect you so much like this isn't like just give in maybe you're the fucked up one maybe kids should be able to change their gender at six years old and

quit letting this stuff bother you like it's very it's painfully obvious that the majority

and this is all in my head right but the majority of the population is for this, and it seems like America wants this to happen.

Everywhere I look, they're talking about this, and they're complaining about

the party that doesn't want it to happen.

Anyways, it's just something that really weighed on me.

And I felt like I was like

surrendering my soul to the devil or something.

And we walked through,

we walked back into the gate, and we were in the in this,

they had an armed guard at the gate.

And I pay attention to security just because of my background.

And

a lot of the security guards there knew who I was because of the podcast.

And they would always come up and say hi and want to chat.

And I'd been there for a whole week and I walked by and there's this old guy who I had never seen there before, ever.

And he stops me and he wants to talk.

And

I just told you to stay to mind him and I'm not in the mood.

I'm like looking at him over my shoulder, telling him, hey, look, I don't, I don't want to talk right now.

I'm not in the mood.

I just want to go to my fucking bungalow and call tonight.

And so he snags my wife and

she's with me and he starts talking to her.

And I'm like,

turn around and I look at him and I square up, you know, and he looks at me right in the eyes.

And he fucking read my mind from front to back.

And

like every thought that I was having on that hike,

never met this guy, never seen him.

Like I said, I'd been there for a week.

I thought I had met everybody.

And he goes, he's like, hey,

all this gender stuff that you're worried about, that's not your fight.

And you don't need to worry about that.

And all this stuff that you're worried about with China, that's not your fight either.

And I'm like, after he said that,

it freaked me out because I'm like, this is.

So, this guy just said this.

This guy's in my head.

He's in my fucking head.

And he went on.

No, I turned.

I didn't say a word.

I just turned and looked at him like, all right, I guess we're going to have a conversation.

You know, like

kind of being a dick.

And

that's what he opened up

his conversation with was reading my fucking mind.

Who was this person?

Exactly.

Who was this person?

So,

so I go,

so my mind blanks out after he said the China thing.

You know, it's like talking about gender stuff, talking about China, and I'm like, freaked out, never seen this man before in my life.

And he's in my head reading my mind.

And so that ends.

And

I look at my wife.

We're walking back to, which is like a two-minute walk back to our bungalow.

And I'm like,

I think God just fucking talked to me and

and my wife goes yeah Sean she's like God's always talking to you you just don't make room for him

you don't realize it

we go into my into my

bungalow

and we're just talking about Gabe and I

I could go on for an hour about this but Gabe has always been around

like

I just feel his presence a lot and I know he's around because

little rabbit hole.

Right before Gabe died, he had started this.

He wanted to start this Wounded Warriors Hockey League, and he told me he was going to have the Florida Panthers sponsor it.

And I also told you Gabe was a heroin addict at the time, and I'm like,

better clean it up if you're going to pull that one off, buddy.

Because you look like shit.

Well, I'll be damned.

He gets it done.

And the fucking Panthers sponsored his Wounded Warrior team.

In fact, when they went to deliver him the good news and to knock on the door to tell him they were going to sponsor his team, the NHL was going to sponsor the first ever Wounded Warriors hockey team.

When they knocked on the door to tell him, that's when they found him dead from a heroin overdose.

Fast forward, Panthers went to Stanley Cup for the first time ever.

What's that?

What year was this?

This was

it was about two years ago, so probably 23.

Okay.

So I got sorry for some reason I thought your friend passed away years prior.

Sorry, I'm just putting two and two together in my head.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, he passed away before this.

This is, this is a while when the Panthers won in this event that I'm about to tell you happened is about two years ago.

So the team gave me one of the original jerseys, and it has Gabe's name on it, SIL Team 10 logo, and and

panthers won the the uh stanley cup

and that jersey's hanging down there in the front doorway

and i come in and the day the panthers won the stanley cup that frame has been sitting there for three years hasn't moved falls off the wall probably weighs about 35 40 pounds not a scratch on it no broken glass nothing i mean that's

so anyways i'm telling you gabe's always around excited and there's

there's a bunch of other things that I could talk to you about on how he's been around.

In fact, when we went to there, I told you I was in this vulnerable state, and we saw this guy that looked exactly like my friend Gabe.

Like

same build, same brow line, same jawline.

Like

if you put them side by side, they would be identical twins.

But I could tell, you know, obviously that it wasn't Gabe, but I was like, that's like,

it's legitimately like an identical twin with some minute differences.

And throughout the trip, this guy's everywhere with me.

He's, if we go to the pool, this guy happens to be at the pool.

If we're going out on a hike, he's coming down the same trail going the opposite direction.

Talk to this guy?

No.

If we go out in town and leave the resort for dinner, the guy winds up being at the same restaurant.

And my wife, Katie, is like, there is, there is, there is, there is.

So sure as shit, we bought back from the gate.

Like I said, this is like a two-minute walk.

And I, and we were, there's, it's like a duplex, like a bungalow that's a duplex.

Didn't know who was staying on the other side this entire time.

Walk up there, and there's this fucking guy that looks identical to Gabe.

And he's the guy staying in the other half of the bungalow with his family.

And I'm like, holy shit.

Like, Like,

okay, that's weird.

Now, I told you that I just lost a really good friend of mine here in Franklin.

He was a SEAL,

and he owned a bunch of smaller hospitals.

And

he's like one of the only friends that I had at the time where I knew he wasn't going to ask me for favors or promote his product or whatever, you know, the podcast.

He didn't need the exposure that I could bring him.

And we could just sit down.

I didn't want anything from him.

He doesn't want anything from me.

We both know that, and our relationship starts developing really fast.

He died of a heart attack on a hunting trip right before I left.

What was trip?

Probably in his 50s.

And died with his son, was on that trip.

Actually, like a really good way to go.

You know, he died happy.

His son was with him.

Like, it was good.

And,

but he had just died days before.

Go into the, into the room,

and I'm telling my wife, I can't believe this has happened to me.

Like, what the hell is going on?

I can't believe this.

And she's like, quit saying you can't believe it.

Like, it's

falling in your lap right now.

Like, he's slapping me in the face.

And my phone dings.

Don't answer it because I'm in the middle of this discussion with my my wife.

And so we get done with that discussion and I'm kind of cleaning myself up.

It's pretty emotional.

And I pick up my phone and it's his daughter who I'd not met.

Didn't have my number.

Wasn't close with his family.

I'd met his son a couple of times.

I'd met his wife.

I'd not met his daughter.

And his daughter sends me this text.

And she says, I'll summarize it.

It says, hey, I just walked into my dad's gun room for the first time since he had passed and basically says that her dad talked to her and said, I want you to talk to Sean because Sean knows a side of me that nobody else knows.

And

Sean was becoming my best friend really fast.

And

he just wanted her to tell me that he loves me for who I am.

Now, this shit all happens within five, ten minutes.

Yeah, that's.

and so that to me was

that to me was that was it I was like okay um

you you've got my attention yeah and uh and so

so anyway so then I came home and made a bunch of calls to people that I

people that I know that are in this one my first call was this guy Eddie Penny who had talked about his journey to Christ.

Eddie Penny was a seal team six uh guy and had another really rough go and then found christ and i released his episode on christmas of

2022 maybe

and ever since then

just about every single person on the show has brought up god in some way shape or form

And I didn't put that together really until until this.

And I went back through and I was like, every single one of them.

And so I called Eddie.

Anyways, and that's what led me to believing in God is that experience.

So it was through

psychedelics turned the light on and had me exploring.

And then that

solidified it right there.

I was like, wow,

that's too many coincidences going on all at one time for there not to be something, not to be some type of a higher power.

I've never had an experience like that.

i kind of hope i do at some point in my life i hope you do too it's it's it was life-changing

that's incredible man i'm kind of speechless um

i think this question of what

what is the higher calling what's out there

where did we come from

These are all kind of intrinsically related, right?

And it's kind of the question of like

we know what the what and the where

and the how

is, but like, what's the why, right?

And the, the version of it that I've wrestled with through the course of my life is

I've never had a personal experience that, that's like led me to believe it one way or the other.

And I,

I tell you honestly, I haven't had too many people that I've been close to pass away.

I consider myself really fortunate in that.

I know it's coming, right?

Like time, time will take us all eventually.

But

the version of it that I've always wrestled with is kind of what I know about physics and math

and science

and kind of saying, okay, well, if you if you believe that these are

the laws of nature, right?

That

these are the things that govern how the universe works.

You study physics, that's fundamentally what you're doing, right?

Is you're looking for a theory of how the world works.

And if you look at that theory and it's looking to your eyes like it's very accurate and it really is describing the whole world around you,

you're like, that's how the world works, right?

And it's like, well, how could there be a

human-like thing, human-like being that has the emergent phenomenon of humanity that is the higher calling, that's the higher being, right?

How could you reconcile those two?

Where you know through

studying and empirical evidence that

light has this wave-particle duality, right?

And that quantum field theory, for example, is, I think it's the most experimentally verified scientific theory.

Because every time you scatter some particles off of each other,

you measure the angle in which they kind of come out of it.

And if you can measure those really accurately and you get a lot of scattering events, like you'll get more and more data that says this theory that's predicting this is matching nearly identically to what's happening in the real world.

So you're like, are those the laws of nature?

And

they're incomplete, right?

Because we were just talking about like what happens when you get to a small enough time scale.

Well, your understanding of the universe starts to get really wobbly, right?

Or if you get to a really precise energy scale, like when it happens starts to become really wobbly.

So it's not a perfect theory of all this, but it is a theory that explains this stuff.

So how could there be a God,

right?

And then,

at least for me, time goes on, and then you ask the question,

how could you have such well-written theories without somebody writing them down?

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I think.

Right.

How could you not have God?

Yeah.

So the question is, which one of these is right?

And I think the place that I've landed is, is that my little monkey brain

can't really answer this question.

And I'd rather spend my time thinking about things that I can't understand.

Makes sense.

I mean,

I see like...

How could the pieces fit together so nicely if they weren't

but then there's all these then there's the

then there's the the no answers you know the the where we can't find the answer like a fundamental part of life it's like where where does consciousness reside nobody seems to be able to figure that out what makes you you it's your consciousness right yeah where does it live where does it go it's an immersion phenomenon where the fuck does it go

does it your soul yeah you know and and and

so

i don't know maybe we just have not you know maybe we haven't hit that point where, or maybe we never will hit that point and we never will figure that out.

I don't know.

But, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's,

it's a mystery.

I tell you, this is not directly related to it, but it kind of is in the same way.

I'm very curious about whether there's life on other planets.

What do you think?

There's life elsewhere in the universe.

I think there is.

You do?

I do, yes.

What makes you think that?

I want to believe that.

I want to believe that.

Because I think the alternative is like

it's very grim.

It's very dark.

The alternative is that there's nothing out there and that this thing that we call consciousness or life is incredibly fleeting and fragile.

Well, I think.

Like, I don't want to believe that.

But it kind of, of at least to me leads me to ask the question like what

has somebody else figured this out right might the answer be

i think this is like people care about aliens right it's like might there be some other species out there that knows the answer might they be trying to tell us the answer

if we could just talk to them would we get the answer Right?

Is there an understanding of how the universe works that

is so crystal clear after in 10 million years, for example, right?

From where we are today, or somebody could just explain that.

Aside, I think we need a lot more observation of the night sky.

Because if there is life out there, I don't know that we're really looking for it.

I don't know, man.

I've gone onto this topic quite a few times, and it's obviously very conspiratorial.

and there's never any hard evidence, you know, and

I don't think there is.

Oh, there being life out there?

I don't think there is.

There's some pretty good evidence of it.

Like, I have not heard it.

Well, I'd love to hear it.

Okay, so this one is a more recent historical one, recent in the scope of human history.

And again, to the scientists out there, if I'm missing some of the points and butchering them, I'm sorry.

Because I'm sure there's some real scientific people that are watching this.

There was that star system.

I want to say this was James Webb.

Again, I'm kind of, I don't, I'm kind of guessing a little bit on this, but there was the observation of a star system, and in particular,

looking at the

behavior of stars as planets pass around them far, far away in the night sky.

right so neighboring star systems i think in this case the star system was like one and a half or two light years away So

the amount of distance it takes light to travel is a tremendous distance, right?

But if you look at a star from far, if you look at a star system, right, that's got planets going around it, and for example, let's take the example of the Earth and Jupiter, right?

Or sorry, the Sun and Jupiter.

Jupiter is big.

It's a big planet, right?

So as Jupiter is orbiting the Sun,

the mass of Jupiter is also pulling the Sun, right?

So the actual orbit's more like

this.

It's kind of an exaggerated version of it.

Where if you look at a bright spot in the night sky with a telescope or with a really fancy one like the James Webb Space Telescope, right, if it's got a planet or planetary systems around it, it's going to be wobbling a little bit.

Moreover, you can take these bright spots in the night sky and look at the spectrum of light that's coming from it.

right so if you just plot out this is a simple example your x-axis you plot you plot out an xy plot right your x-axis is different frequencies of light your y-axis is how much light of that frequency right so you kind of see a curve like that

and you look at this bright spot in the night sky

and

you see this sort of wobbling thing and then you see as one of the planets passes in front of it the brightness dims

right?

Because literally, there's something in the way.

So the light coming from it kind of goes down as it's as the planet's moving in front of it.

Now, this is the thing that was reported in a bunch of scientific journals earlier this year, actually.

Pretty sure it was earlier this year.

Is there was this one star system and a planet orbiting it where they actually observed

this is the star, this is the planet, and in this case, my eyes are the earth, right?

The planet passing in front of the star system

and the light from

the star,

like passing through the atmosphere of the thing that's in front of it, right?

And when the light passes through the atmosphere,

Right it scatters off some of the particles, it excites some of the particles, and you can actually see the signature of the molecules in the atmosphere of the thing that passed in front of it by looking at that XY plot I was saying, right?

So it goes dim, but you also see some peaks and valleys cropping up that give you a snapshot of what molecules are in the atmosphere of the planet that's passing in front of it.

And they basically found the biomarkers for life.

I mean, they found water on, I think they found water on Saturn, right?

And

is it Neptune?

I don't know.

I know

they found water on

Mars.

Found water on Mars.

Yeah, there's presumably

water, like lakes of water, or an underground ocean of water on some of the planets, or some of the moons of Jupiter.

So if you want to look for extraterrestrial life, I think there's one of two ways you do it.

The first one is you just try to knock on the door.

and it's like, is anyone there?

Right.

I think that's the

going to Mars and looking for

like microbial life in the water, right?

Or subterranean.

I think that's going to

Europa and drilling down and seeing if there's an ocean underneath there and there's whales or something like that, right?

The other approach is looking at bright spots in the night sky and seeing if you see any markers for life.

And this example that I'm talking about more recently, I want to say it was methane, could be wrong, that they found the bio, the signature form, in the frequencies of light that were coming back as this planet passed in front of the star system.

But the thought process there was

that that is

the only way that we know that that's made on Earth is through life.

So if there's a ton of this stuff in the atmosphere of this planet, like how is it getting there?

The hypothesis is that this is kind of a smoking gun, that there's some sort of

biology on this planet that's producing this gas.

So, if that's the case, number one, we should be observing the shit out of that planet and see, for example, if there's any electromagnetic radiation that might indicate some sort of intelligent life.

But

as we develop better telescopes and more of them and have them simultaneously pointed at more spots in the night sky,

might this be the case in a lot of different places, right?

Might this actually be the case that if we look simultaneously, like everywhere in the night sky, that there's some star system that's broadcasting some electromagnetic signal that's got information in it.

Well, I did hear something that we were receiving

some type of a beacon or a signal from

wherever, way the hell out there.

But they can't explain what it is.

The conspiracies I love is where you see like a star system or a set of star systems or something related to specific spots in the night sky that show up in conspiracy theories.

Because it just makes you wonder.

It's like, is that actually a conspiracy?

Yeah.

Or is or might might if you just observe the crap out of it, might there be a little bit more to it?

Yeah.

It's It's a, I mean, I don't know.

I just, I feel like, you know, like I do, I do believe in God.

I think a lot of the things people are seeing are some type of a spiritual thing.

And then, but didn't, you know, they're starting to find, I mean, I don't know, did they ever debunk the pyramid on Mars?

Sometimes I wonder if there's life, if there was life.

As this conversation gets more serious, I'm going to eat some gummies.

I wonder, sometimes I wonder you know i mean they talk about ancient civilizations and and

you know

maybe there were more advanced civilizations here on earth than what we are now you know 100 million years ago or whatever and then the earth does its things gets rid of all the evidence and then it's here we go again you know and sometimes i wonder i mean they talked about the pyramid or supposedly they found a pyramid on mars i don't know if they ever debunked that or or what but um i've talked to remote viewers.

I do think that's real remote viewing.

What is remote viewing?

Dude, you don't know about remote viewers?

Tell me.

Holy shit.

So remote viewers, how do I put this?

Remote viewers,

they,

okay, you've seen like.

Surely you've seen some type of a movie or a TV show where they bring on the psychic and the psychic's like, oh, it happened over there in the shower and they used a knife.

And then they go in there and they're like, holy shit, shit here's the knife you know that that is that's remote viewing so that's actually people can do it it's it's a real thing really yeah the cia had a program going with the monroe institute for a long time i brought in joe mcmonable who's remote viewer number one for the united states and uh remote viewed a a russian submarine that was going to be launched on a particular date.

And the director of the CIA said he was full of shit.

Another agency got in touch with him and they were like,

where is it and when is this happening?

And he was like, it's right here

in Russia.

They're going to roll it off into this canal and it's going to

go into the ocean from there and it's going to happen on this date.

And I think he was only like a couple of dates off

and it happened.

And so that triggered them to start this program called Stargate.

It's called the Stargate program.

I'm going to look this up.

I'll send you the interview.

Please do.

I'm

fascinated by this.

So I went down that rabbit hole and brought on a bunch of these guys.

Some of the guys that started Stargate and some of the guys finished the program managers, finished Stargate.

Does it still exist?

Stargate doesn't exist, but I'm sure it's renamed it under another program or so.

I know Naval Special Warfare was looking into this stuff recently.

I got some dots.

Is there any scientific explanation for how this works?

Just

an emergent phenomenon?

Well, the way Joe describes it,

Joe says, you know, early human beings, you know,

had this, you know,

and

we used more of our brain back then.

And he goes, he goes, you know, at the beginning, you know, we would look at each other and we would know what each other's thinking and, you know,

point to things and whatever, but you would,

I guess, kind of like how animals communicate.

yeah you know we're we're sense and subtle stuff and we think that's we think we're so much more advanced but look how look how long it takes us to converse and to get our thoughts out now that we have language you know and and so basically what he was saying is we were a lot more intuitive back way back in the beginning and that

we could kind of read each other's thoughts.

And so communication was almost instantaneous.

And he goes, and then we started traveling around in tribes and we started, you know, developing language.

And then technology came along and we got our head buried in a fucking phone or watching TV and talking.

And, you know, and he goes, and so he goes, well, we feel like that's more advanced.

What we actually did is we're going this way because we had the intuitive

brain power to be able to communicate without language, without any type of electronic communication.

It was just instantaneous.

And he goes,

he thinks that,

this is theory, obviously, but he thinks that we've lost that over time and that everybody still has the ability to do it, but

most people know you'll never figure it out, you know, because we're too busy wrapped up in other things.

And kind of like what my wife was telling me when I just told you, she's like, hey, God's always around you.

You just don't, you don't make the time to let him in and you're not paying attention.

Yeah.

And when you just see the world presented to you on a screen in such a digestible format, like we're little monkey brains will just spend all day on that.

Yeah.

Like our, we will basically follow down the path of the thing that's the most understandable.

That's kind of how humans work, right?

Given choice between something that maybe is really hard to understand, but very important,

and something that's very easy to understand, but very unimportant.

Humans are going to follow the, you know they're going to follow the path down this direction on average

but but what i was getting at is maybe maybe there was life on other planets

before there was life maybe there's only life

in the universe it

maybe there's only life at one place at one specific moment in time and then when that's over it pops up

i don't know you know what i mean but

are you um are you familiar with this thing called Fermi's Paradox?

No.

Fermi's Paradox?

Yeah, it's like the where is everybody?

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All right, we're back from the break.

Man, we went down some rabbit holes there.

Did I love rabbit holes?

Me too.

Remote viewing.

You got to look into it.

I'm absolutely going to look into it.

It is fascinating.

But I want to get into

Robinhood.

How did that come about?

How indeed?

Company was the brainchild of two good friends from college.

We talked about it a little bit.

I don't know if we were chatting.

I can't remember if it was on the air.

I guess it was.

Yeah, we were talking about Occupy Wall Street a little bit, right?

No, that was not on there.

Oh, that was just so shit.

That was before.

Okay, yeah.

So, do you remember Occupy?

I do.

I don't remember the whole premise of it.

I don't know much about stocks or any of that kind of stuff.

So, so you have to walk me through it a little bit.

But, what was what I remember the movement?

It was basically,

from what I understand, it was the everyday Americans were getting pissed off that they couldn't invest in the stock market, correct?

That's kind of a version of it that we saw.

There were just general, I feel like the frustration was after 2008, right?

Like we bailed out the banks

and everybody else felt like they got screwed.

Yep.

Right.

And I remember the exact number on this, but like a lot of the recovery did go back to the wealthiest in this country.

And so we're talking like 2011.

So this is three years-ish after, two years after the financial crisis.

And people were really, really upset about that.

And so there were protests in New York, York, right?

They were literally occupying Wall Street.

And we weren't a part of the protests, but we were working in finance in New York at the time, right?

And we had a lot of friends in college.

And they were like, what are you doing, man?

And I was like, what do you mean?

What am I doing?

I'm trying to, at the time, we were building a different finance company that was building technology for other financial institutions, like hype, sort of computerized trading, low latency trading, you know,

sort of like the direction that markets were becoming more and more electronic.

And we're like, we're building technology to make markets more efficient.

And a lot of her friends were like, no, you're part of the problem.

And I'm like, what do you, what, what are you talking about?

Like, what does that even mean?

Right?

They're like, you guys are like not, you know, you're part of the system, man.

Like that sort of sentiment.

So that was kind of the backdrop.

And then we would see these protests happening in New York.

And I remember just being like, there's a,

the sentiment here is very real, right?

But it's kind of like the idea of, and this is kind of, we talked a little bit about the immigrant background, right?

But as people whose families made huge sacrifices to be in America, to look at the financial system and be like, this thing is messed up or rigged or doesn't work or whatever, right?

It just doesn't ring true.

It's like that,

this is the envy of everybody in the world, this financial system, right?

Like you should, we should have more people be a part of it.

So this was kind of like the backdrop for what would become Robinhood.

This was kind of the cultural backdrop, right?

And I remember the genesis of the company started over a phone conversation that my co-conner and I had.

And it was kind of like...

The company that we were building then like was not doing super well.

And we're like, what else?

What else can we do?

And we're like, you know, like people are really upset about access to the markets.

They're really upset about wealth inequality and all these things.

And I remember the thought was, it's like, actually,

access to the stock market is kind of a microcosm of this bigger thing that people are frustrated about.

And we weren't going to be able to change politics.

We weren't going to be able to change policy.

And I think at the time, the sense was there's a people want

the government to do something about this.

And this is probably the beginning of of my like

view towards individuality really emerging and kind of having the sense of like, this is not

the government's not going to solve this problem

in no way.

Like, it's not going to happen, right?

Like, you're going to get some people that like make noise about it that get elected and nothing's actually going to change here.

But maybe this is something we can change with technology.

This is kind of like the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed optimism you get from

young people, right?

When you you don't know what you don't know, and we're like, we could change it, we could fix this problem.

And

if we could make access to market zero commission, which is kind of what the original idea behind the company was, wouldn't that actually be kind of directly speaking to the frustrations that people have about not being a part of the financial system?

And this is where the bigger leap of faith came, right?

It's like, and if

more people of our generation were a part of the financial system, then they wouldn't be so frustrated and we'd basically live in a more harmonious or like happier society.

Because I didn't want to grow up with people being up in arms about this.

Like it just seemed like a really nasty discourse.

Enter Robinhood.

Mobile.

Zero commission

and

kind of like built from the ground ground up brand new.

At least the interface and the way the product looked was,

I think, pretty different than what was out there at the time.

Yeah, it was different.

Everybody was different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When did you hear about it?

I don't remember.

I don't remember exactly when I heard about it, but

I remember when I did hear about it,

it didn't matter how much money you had, you got access to the market.

And I was like, oh, this is

this is cool.

So I started using it.

I mean, I can't remember.

It was probably around,

I would bet, 2010 timeframe, maybe.

A little later than that.

We released it publicly, I want to say in 2015.

Well, then it was

then it was after then.

But yeah, I did, I had heard about it and I was like, oh, this is fucking cool.

You know what I was spending a lot of my time doing?

Interviewing customers, talking to customers.

Because I basically realized at a pretty early point in that company's history

that

if we try to build this product like Google builds Gmail, for example, right, that it wasn't going to go super well.

And that the way that people used our product was...

going to be fundamentally a little different.

What am I talking about here?

If you have a person, like a very wealthy person

and you've got an ordinary person using an email client right

the way that you use an email client is not going to be fundamentally different right you're like the rich person still like typing in a message and sending it to somebody

and so for example if you have a bunch of really well-paid engineers that are building Gmail, for example, and they're like, this is how I use it.

And that's how I think other people are going to use it.

The fact that those people make a lot of money is not going to like, it's not going to change their perspective on the product.

Now, on the other hand, with a product like Robinhood, I think that's actually completely different.

Because if you have a bunch of people in Silicon Valley that are making Silicon Valley tech startup salaries and income, and they're like, this is the way that I live my life.

I live in an apartment, for example.

I, you know, have a really high rent.

I'm not married.

And I have a high, you know, I have like a good income for my, for my primary job, and you're like,

I want to save enough money to be able to buy a five or $10 cup of coffee every day, right?

This is not going to map to the expectations, reality, financial circumstances of people living in the rest of the country that are having kids when they're in their 20s and 30s, right?

They're looking to buy a home pretty early on in life.

Like that doesn't happen happen in the coastal cities in this country like the the way people behave is pretty different

and I kind of had this idea that if we wanted to build a product that resonated with a large part of the population that the way to do it was actually to make sure that we were getting the feedback from those kinds of people and incorporating that into the product

So even from the very early days of Robinhood, we would do this thing where we would go from, here's a feature that we want to build.

It could be something small, it could be something like, could be how we introduce a new product, whatever.

So you got a team of people working on it, you come up with a design for it, you come up with like how you think people are going to use it, and you create a prototype of it, you create a first version of it.

What we would do even in the very, very early days of the company is we would make a prototype and I would say, okay, we start on Monday,

then either on Friday evening or or on Saturday morning,

let's take the prototype that we built and let's go put it in front of some customers or some hypothetical customers.

And at the time, you know, we had, we were kind of either had just launched or had just announced the product.

And so what we would do is we would go to Stanford campus and we just camp out at the coffee shop

and just be like, hey, to random students, like, can we give you 50 bucks for like 30 minutes of your time?

And you'd just be like,

here's a product or a feature.

What does this do?

Like, tell me what this does in your own words.

And when you actually get to that point,

it was pretty eye-opening because you're like, people

don't see this the way that we do, right?

People are in their own world.

They're not paying attention.

Like, the amount of attention that people give to a new product or a new thing, pretty vanishing.

And so if it's,

you know, for one example right was like

zero commission stock trading people like what the hell is that

they're like is that like the interest rate on your car and you're like

no

and then you you you know you let people ask their questions and you listen to it and you're like oh it's like that thing when you trade a stock and you have to pay ten dollars because at the time a lot of brokers were charging ten dollar commissions like this is like

closer to 15 years ago at this point or not quite that much, maybe about 10 years ago.

And you're like, holy shit, people don't know what the basic part of this is.

And so we have to unpack that and see if we can explain that to people in a way that makes sense.

So you kind of like realize that if you're not getting actual feedback from people that use the product who may have a pretty different financial life than you, you're going to be way off the mark.

And what we ended up doing, and this was really important to me, is I would try to prioritize time every quarter, every half to go and travel somewhere outside of the Bay Area and just interview people.

And a lot of the times in those interviews, we'd have like,

you know, like an actual like customer research person that we'd hired leading the interviews.

And I'd just be sitting in the room, listening, kind of forming opinions, and people like, who are you?

I'm like, oh, I just work here.

Don't mind me.

It's kind of interesting, right?

Because that took us to a lot of middle America.

So the whole premise was to get everyday Americans access to the stock market and crypto, correct?

Yeah.

How did you, I mean, how did you gain access to the markets?

Me?

Yeah, you.

How did

the app, how did Robinhood get access to the markets

without going through all the middlemen oh i thought you were asking how i got introduced to the stock market no how did how did robinhood get introduced yeah so we were we are still a broker dealer so we're registered as a broker dealer and when we started the company we worked with a lot of financial institutions on the back end so we worked with a third-party clearing firm right we worked with a lot of different service providers and so we kind of got the regulatory licenses and stuff to be able to offer this service.

But we were a little startup, right?

We were like 15, 20 people when we first launched the product.

Like that's

teeny tiny, right?

And so we kind of had this path where we went from building the parts that we had the resources to build to over the next five to ten years,

sort of vertically integrating key parts of the company over time.

So a couple of years after we started the company, we went self-clearing.

So we built our own clearing house.

And

that was a big sort of like,

you know, technology build out, basically.

How fast, I mean, how fast did Robin Hood take off?

Once it was introduced?

Yeah, this is an interesting one because

it kind of to me always speaks to the question of product market fit.

Have you heard of this before?

Right.

So

product market fit is this tricky one, especially with consumer products.

Because when you got it,

you kind of know you got it.

And if you're not sure, you probably don't have it.

Right.

It's kind of like the sort of like sound of click almost that happens when people are like, oh, I get it.

Oh, I, why is it?

Oh, that's interesting.

How does it work?

Right?

And I remember when we first announced the product,

we had a waitlist for people to be able to sign up to get it.

No kidding.

Yeah.

And that wait list got real big real fast.

So I want to say,

see if I remember this correctly, but I want to say we had like

50 or 100,000 people on the wait list in the first month.

Holy shit.

It was really, really good.

In the first month?

Yeah.

I'll have to go back and check, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was.

and i remember when we first announced the product we actually had the product like we kind of had this in in this kind of in-between stage where we were testing that the website worked

right and then it got picked up and posted on reddit on the internet and it sort of got announced

quote unquote when it was half picked

we were actually working on redesigning the actual logo And when it first sort of like got out there and got posted all over the internet,

we actually still had the old logo, which looked like a little, it looked like a little

rectangle with a little chart in it and a little talk box.

And we had we like in the next week had to like kind of finalize the version of the logo that we had for many, many years until kind of recently we did a subtle redesign of it.

So it was like

it was one of those moments where I built products before that did not have product market fit.

And it was very

fucking frustrating.

Because you put all your heart and soul and effort into building this thing.

And you think it's awesome.

And you think it's something that people want.

And if you do a good job of like introducing it to the world and announcing it, it'll get, you know, if you talk to a bunch of reporters beforehand, right?

People will hear about it.

Like you can get awareness for a new product, but then you see the awareness and then you see people not really sticking around.

Like they download it, they try it and they go away.

And you just look at what percentage of the people are still using your product after a month, three months, six months, and you see it's just going

down and down.

You're like, that does not have product market fit because you could get more people to use the thing.

But the evidence is there is when people find it, they don't stick around.

So there's no point in getting more people to find out about it or to use it because they're just going to go away pretty quickly.

This is also why I was like stressing that point about talking to customers and customer research because having built a few products, or you know, or at least one product before that didn't have product market fit,

you're like, I really, really want this to succeed.

And you ask the question very earnestly: like,

what do I need to do to figure out what people actually want out of this?

What were people saying

in terms of what they wanted from him?

Yeah, what did, I mean, they loved it.

I obviously loved it.

I mean, there was, you said, you said a 100,000 person wait list.

The interesting thing was

people were like, oh, I try that.

That's interesting.

I try that.

Or like, I'd always thought about investing in the stock market.

And, oh, there's no minimums because I think at the time we didn't have any minimums for the product either.

And like, oh, this is something I definitely want to try.

And so you had a lot of people that had not invested before that were like, this is interesting.

I'd always thought about investing.

Maybe I'll give it a try.

There's also some group of people out there that were actively investing before this.

And they're like, oh, I see the economics of zero commission.

Let me try it for that reason.

That's kind of the interesting part about it, right?

Because the thesis of the company wasn't that we were going to build a great product just for the people that invest today.

The thesis was there's this generation of people

that if you give them a product that they want to use will actually start investing.

Does that make sense?

It does.

So you're not really like

You're not like solving a problem that people necessarily are frustrated about.

It's more that they haven't done the thing

right

yeah what a wild journey that has been

I mean it was the only product like that at the time correct is its

zero commission yeah I mean it took a few years before the rest of the market kind of

did the same thing right it was like 2019 there was at the end of 2019 if I'm remembering correctly is when a bunch of the brokerage houses all all got rid of their commissions.

That was triggered from you guys?

Yeah.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, yeah.

That was, that was like, that was both very

you've revolutionized the entire market.

How fucking cool does that feel?

I don't know, man.

It's a, it's, it's a,

It's crazy to

have made all that stuff happen,

still on the board of directors of the company, still actively involved.

And to have the chance to work on something else at this stage of life also feels like a gift.

Let's move into, because you revolutionized it in more than one way.

You took out the commissions, you gave everybody access.

Then we move into the GameStop AMC.

What was the other one?

Was there another one involved in that?

GameStop's one, I remember.

There were a couple of other ones, too.

Yeah.

So,

what happened with the GameStop stuff?

What was the whole scenario?

That was a wild time, too.

So, it was kind of interesting.

So, this was like right,

this was January of 21, right?

And

we built

navigating Robinhood through COVID, like going from a company that was at a nascent stage, right?

I think we were still under a thousand people before COVID happened or getting, getting pretty close to it.

And to go from that to having

some real trials and tribulations.

rapidly scaling the engineering and the technology because when people went home for COVID, like

they, a lot of people were like, let me check out the stock market.

Let me check out Robinhood.

And that was a lot more traffic than we were planning for.

And so that whole year felt like just a mad dash to keep our service, to keep up with the customer growth that we were seeing.

How many customers did you have at that point?

I don't remember a lot.

Millions.

Yeah, I don't remember what the number was.

It was a lot, though.

The other interesting thing was I had actually just had my first son.

And I was kind of at this interesting point in my life where I was kind of starting to ask the question like, what do I want to do?

Because

physics and science, one of these things that was in the back of my head still.

Finance was something that I

like loved doing and I loved changing the industry.

It wasn't something that I felt like I wanted to do my whole life.

Are you the kind of person that

you go all in on something,

and then once that's accomplished, you start to become bored

with the next thing?

I'm very much a one-track mind person.

I'm not a great multitasker.

Like I'll pick one thing and I'll pulverize it and then I'll move on to the next thing.

Do you like the journey or the achievement better?

I like the journey for sure.

I actually think about this a lot right now

because

when I think back about the Robinhood era, right, of my life, like

what as it was for me, right?

It was the journey of going from having this idea,

wanting to make this thing a reality.

Not a lot of people believed in it, but my co-founder and I, like, we both saw it.

We believed it with our mind's eye.

To then

figuring out the path, right, to make it real, to go from a person that didn't know much about finance,

you know, to being on the forefront of this industry.

And like, when you're at the forefront, I'm sure you feel this way with podcasting, right?

It's like the way that you kind of take what you're doing with your own work is kind of the direction the whole industry follows, right?

And it's like this feeling of mastery that I think you only get if you start from first principles.

Man, that felt cool.

That was like, that was, that was the, that's the thing when I look back on that, that's kind of the high that I find myself chasing is the process of going from a novice to being a master of the field.

I don't want to like toot my horn here about how much of a master of that I was but to go from not knowing

to having our company have the place that it did in the marketplace just intuitively understanding the problem space like intuitively understanding how to do it

like I want to prove to myself that I can do that in other things

So that's kind of the thing that I find myself chasing.

Is it the outcome?

I'll be honest, like I grew up poor.

Grew up very poor, right?

And so at that time, the money was a big motivator, right?

Like I didn't, I didn't want to be in poverty.

I wanted to have more for my future family, right?

I wanted to have a better financial outcome.

I feel like I've been talking about this whole podcast, right?

So I'm not going to come on here and be like, oh, well, it was, you know, just about the accomplishment.

It was, It was the journey of a man that didn't have very much money that was trying to create his own legacy.

when you get when i got to that point i find myself craving the uncertainty in the journey and finding myself like back in the mix of something that

looking for the next thing yeah

so that's it this time right the

the question i'm trying to ask myself is

Could I do it again, right?

Could I revolutionize something else?

Could Could I figure out the path

to going from being a novice at satellite engineering

to being at the forefront of it?

Like, I don't know how to do that.

I have a lot of ideas, and I'm testing my ideas all the time, and I'm trying to get better at it.

But yeah, it's like the uncertainty that really fuels me sometimes.

Yeah, I can relate to that.

It's, I mean, it's.

I don't know, but for me, like

when you hit the apex of whatever industry you're in or whatever you're doing in life, whether that's sports or

business or whatever, I mean, once you hit that apex,

there's an aspect that becomes boring.

And it's time,

I

almost just said I suffer from that, but I think it's a good thing.

I mean, I think it's just

find something new.

You want to figure out how to be the best at it.

And then when you figure it out,

you enjoy for a minute, then you're on to the next thing.

And so, like, right now, like, I'm, I'm looking for the next thing.

I think I found it, and I'll use,

you know,

you have, yeah.

Can I ask what it is?

I can tell you it's in the tech space, but, um,

but it has to do with with cyber security cool but this this this is like my next thing and i met some amazing people that i'm going into business with and i'm

really fucking excited about it and and because i like you had mentioned i can't remember if it was downstairs if it was on the show but but you had talked about you know you always have to have that creative outlet yeah you know and you know like when i started this i this was my creative outlet well

like when it becomes the main thing, it's different.

Yep.

Yep.

I mean, once you hit, you know, as close to perfection as you think you can, and there's not really much left to innovate, you know, and

in the particular space that I'm in, you know, I mean, yeah, we got a new studio coming and all that stuff, but the model is here.

And, and so it's,

it's not taken near the creativity that took me to build this from a small little room in my attic into what it is today, you know, being a top 10 podcast.

We've been on the number one slot.

And, and, and, you know, we got, yeah, we got the new studio and all that stuff's awesome.

I'm really excited about it.

And I love doing this still because I get to talk to people like you.

But as far as the creativity aspect, it's not really here anymore.

And so I like

I feen off creativity.

Like, I love it.

I love

disrupting things things

and going to new ventures because I've realized

I'm about the journey.

I mean, even

the Navy SEALs, you know, like I joined at 17

or I enlisted at 17.

I was in buds by 18 SEAL training.

Got in there.

And yes, there is another level.

You could go to SEAL Team 6, but I wasn't sure what that was like at the time.

I mean,

it was not

nearly as publicized as it is now.

And I was like, I mean, I

became a SEAL, went to war.

The journey was awesome.

This isn't everything I thought it was going to be.

I'm going to move on to the next thing.

And then I went on and tried business, failed miserably, and real estate.

And then

the CI thing popped up, which I didn't even really know was a CIA at first that I was contracting, that I was trying out to contract for.

But then I got there

and

once again, like, I was like, all right, well, here I am.

This is contracting for CIA.

It's pretty cool.

Well, what's next?

You know, and

now I'm finding myself in that exact same headspace again.

What's next?

And

yeah, so it's, it's interesting.

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Do you ever think about the balance between being a student and a teacher?

Yeah.

I think about that sometimes, too.

What do you think about it?

I felt, this kind of comes back to the question that you asked a while ago.

It was like, what was happening during that time?

I remember the balance of being a student and a teacher felt off to me.

Because we were, let's say, a thousand people, right, at the company.

And I found myself spending the lion's share of my time, and I think rightfully so,

teaching everybody at the company what I knew, right?

Teaching people how to do it in the way that we kind of thought the right way was to do it was, right?

And I found myself like looking in the mirror and being like

35, 36, whatever I was at that point,

35, and I was like, I'm

like, I'm spending all of my time teaching people stuff.

And actually, this was right around the time that I got into building cars.

And I literally, I had a mentor for a while.

I was like literally a student and I remember the joy and satisfaction of learning something new from from the beginning and

how quickly how much how much stuff there was to learn, right?

When you get to the point that you're teaching people stuff all the time, it's kind of difficult to find new things to learn.

You have to be pretty,

you have to be looking for it basically, right?

And if you're not careful, you can certainly end up in a situation where your shit doesn't stink, where you're like, well, I said it, therefore it's right.

And I,

you know,

we all suffer from that to a certain degree.

When you hit that point, you just stop developing.

Yeah, you stop developing, right?

So

I did a kind of, I did a pretty,

I think, somewhat

out of left feel thing, which was right actually before the GameStop stuff happened.

probably two or three months prior um

i announced that i was actually stepping back as CEO of the company because before Vlad and I had been co-CEOs from beginning till right before IPO.

And I was like, you know what?

I want to keep doing this, but I also want to carve out a little more time for my family.

And I think the

all this to say,

when the GameStop stuff was happening, which was in January of 21,

I actually just stepped back as CEO of the company a few months prior.

and so it was like this

so that was a that was a new ceo that

no no no we we had been ceos together oh okay but this was like the beginning of him as ceo by himself

yeah tough time so my my my experience there was like

holy cow how do i help

this comp how do i help the company that i started like navigate this like

Black swan event that's like once in a lifetime, right?

It was stressful.

It was scary

It was really exhausting, right?

But we navigated through it.

I mean so let's

so you revolutionized the entire market with with with no commission trading

you gave everyday Americans a platform that they can invest their money in both stocks and crypto.

And I don't know all the dynamics around what went on with the GameStop

AMC stuff, but

it was

to my limited understanding of it.

This is the

this is the everyday this is the little man sticking it to the big to the big man, correct?

And so can you just walk me through what exactly was going on with GameStop at the time?

Why it was so controversial?

Because that's the other thing that you revolutionized.

Is then I remember seeing, I remember seeing all these hedge funds experts and

hedge fund managers and all these fucking stock gurus.

And they're like, This is happening because these people don't know what the fuck they're doing.

And it's like, well, it doesn't really matter if they know what the fuck they're doing because

like you're going to have to learn to adapt to adapt because

they're not going anywhere so maybe you're the one that doesn't know what the fuck you're doing anymore i think the best way to this is like the version of it that makes the most sense in my mind is there were like two freight trains that were marching down the train tracks on a collision course the first one was

this idea of democratizing

finance for all.

It's the mission behind Robin Hood, right?

Which is this idea that more people should have access to the markets.

And the other freight train was internet meme culture.

And those two

collided and it created the GameStop saga, right?

It was kind of this confluence of like

a lot of like memes and

you know, just like

people being

sort of like exaggerated versions of themselves online.

And a lot of that stuff happening on Robinhood.

And

it was wild.

Yeah, old, old,

remember seeing old, old

wild, man.

It was wild.

And all the while, I was like, yeah, it was crazy because I had literally just stepped back a few months prior, and I was like, oh my goodness.

Coincidentally, six months later, we took the company public.

I was in the middle of 2021.

Yeah.

So

why did it come come out that people couldn't sell GameStop?

They could buy it, but they couldn't sell it on Robinhood.

Did the SEC get involved?

What happened there?

So

what happened was

it was actually

there was a regulatory clearinghouse requirement around the capital that we needed to have to operate the brokerage.

And actually, this was something that was going on between the registered, you know, financial services registered people that worked at Robinhood, talking to the regulators.

And they made the decision to limit the,

I think it was to limit the buying, more buying of that symbol because it was increasing our regulatory capital requirements.

And so for a day,

we put that pause on,

which

created this like

frenzy on the internet.

And it was kind of interesting because people were like

batting around all these conspiracy theories and were like, no, we're actually just

trying to

work with this sort of like clearinghouse regulators to operate our business.

That's all it was?

And we ended up raising a bunch of money over the next couple of days to help support that capital requirement, right?

Like that, and it's kind of interesting on this one because

this one has been talked about so much.

And like

Dan Gallagher, for example, chief legal officer of Robinhood, also recent board member, Aetherflux,

was actually one of the people that was kind of navigating Robinhood through it and spoken about it a ton over the years.

But it was.

Black swan.

Yeah.

Wow, that was a time.

It's crazy to think that was five years ago.

Damn, was that five years ago?

It was almost five.

Well, was it no, not quite five years.

Four years, right?

Four and a half years.

2021.

Yeah, four and a half years.

Wow.

Yeah, that that

navigating through that dominated a lot of the next couple of the few years that ballot of my life.

And then

probably the next big change for me was

a little over a year ago leaving full-time the company I started.

Just being like, I'm going to stay on the board, but I want to focus on the space idea that I've had.

How long have you had that idea?

So I had the idea of wanting to do something commercial in space for a long time.

What the commercial thing was, it took me kind of while to figure out.

So this kind of is where these two companies have some shared thought process behind it because

there's a common creator between the two of them, right?

How many times have I said capitalism on this call or on this conversation?

Quite a few.

A lot, right?

It's something that I fundamentally believe in.

The reason I keep talking about it, and the reason I think it's so important is that I think it has this like

huge benefit for individuals and their own pursuit of life, liberty, happiness, right?

And their own self-betterment.

Capitalism is also an incredible force for innovation, right?

And I kind of felt that one of the things that when we got, when we created Robinhood, there was this sense that

there were like the access to capitalism wasn't available to everyone.

And so our app literally put

capitalism in the capital markets on your phone in your pocket.

And look at how quickly the stock market changed.

Happened really fast.

The name was perfect, by the way.

Yeah, the name was on point.

How did you guys come out?

I mean, that was a...

It's perfect.

Yeah.

Like, there is no better name for what you guys built.

There were some other much worse working titles for what the company would be.

Robin Hood was really good on.

I think my co-founder's

girlfriend, now wife, was the one that came up with that.

No, but the thing thing that had been in the back of my head was this idea of capitalism and growing up around the space industry I think one thing that was very

it was very frustrating for me is I grew up in the space household and hearing about the space industry and all of it was in the past tense

right the space race or whatever it happened before either of us were born.

It was over by the time we were born.

And how could this be?

How could this thing that was

presented in all of pop culture as the future, as the frontier, we're done with it?

Like, what the hell?

Like, we should be having, space should be all over the place,

right?

Because it was one of these big technological evolutions

that we thought was going to bring us to the stars as a species.

And then the 90s and the 80s and the 2000s, it felt like we as a society collectively got distracted by the internet.

Like the internet was just so darn entertaining that, like, nothing was happening in space.

This is kind of

my worldview, right?

Or my sort of caricaturization of the world.

When I saw the SpaceX rockets, the original Falcon rockets landing upright,

I was like, holy shit, man.

I was like, is this actually happening in my lifetime?

Because if it is, I need to, like, I feel feel compelled to

want to work on this.

And I'm like, I'm not quite sure how, or I'm not quite sure when, or I'm not quite sure if, but I felt this like,

this, this physical force inside of me, I'm like, I have to work on this.

And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, there's got to be, if we could bring more capitalism to space, more, more sort of ways for people to make money in space, that's how you make space a bigger part of everybody's life.

And I want to say that to contrast that with what the space industry is today or has been,

is I'd say it's for the government, by the government, at government prices, which means it's not happening very quickly.

It's like happening at a glacial pace.

Now, if we could come up with more ways for capitalism to happen in space, meaning you can find more industrial applications for space, you're going to untether this from like the government being the sort of like primary purveyor of this to like everybody and individuals being able to have

like a bigger role in this,

um,

but you also create opportunities for people to get jobs in this industry because if you want to work in aerospace, what are you going to do?

You're going to work at SpaceX, but Lockheed, Boeing,

like there's got to be a lot of options and a lot of great careers.

And if you look at the sort of

set of commercial things that are happening in space,

it's actually only a handful of industries.

It's only like I, this is kind of also my caricaturization, but it's defense,

earth imaging/slash academia,

and telecom.

Like, those are the main industries in space.

There's other stuff that's kind of on the periphery, but those are like the main big ones.

And my thought process was, there's got to be something related to natural resources we can do in space.

There's got to be natural resources that we can bring from space to Earth that would create a reason for people to want to build more industrial stuff in space.

And I think the light bulb went off more recently in the last couple of years

when I realized that if you wanted to bring natural resources from space back to Earth, the obvious one is energy.

Now, space solar power is actually kind of an old idea.

It's like an old 1970s idea from NASA and the DOD,

which I love.

I love old ideas.

The idea of zero commission stock trading is actually kind of an old idea.

Like people had been talking about this in the 80s and 90s as like a theoretical possibility.

And so the idea of wanting to work on this idea of space solar power that people thought about in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, but doesn't exist in society today.

It's like, man, this is checking a lot of boxes.

It's an old idea, which to me says it's on

strong intellectual footing for its rationale.

There may not be a good solution, but the rationale is on solid footing.

The reason why you would want to do it.

And it has this opportunity to increase the capitalist envelope in space.

And the part that is the more recent sort of thing that made me want to do this full time is I saw a path to doing it

with technology that exists today at a small enough scale that we could iterate on it.

So, enter Aetherflux.

The company with the mission to deliver energy to planet Earth.

And I think next year is going to be a really important year,

both for space energy, and I think

with an exclamation point for our company, because we're putting

two satellites in space.

The first one next June, so like a year ago.

Oh, man, that's awesome.

Are we in July now?

We're in July.

Bless the year.

Yeah, that's why I gotta go fucking get to work tomorrow morning.

Yeah, we're putting a first satellite up that does it.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

That's

that's incredible.

So that's kind of a long-winded answer, but.

So you are launching satellites into space, which will collect solar power and beam it to Earth.

Yeah.

That's fucking wild, man.

You know what the wildest part about this is?

Is you don't have to have a scientific breakthrough to do this.

We're doing this with technology that exists today.

That's That's one of the core theses behind the company, right?

It is to take this thing that has been science fiction for a long time and then make it science reality.

And I think that there's definitely ways of doing space solar power where you can hinge it on an individual scientific breakthrough, right?

You could find a version of it that makes great sense on paper, but requires a billion dollars to build a test vehicle.

You're like, that's not going to happen.

Right?

what I was looking for was a path to do it that you could do it at small scale so that you could iterate on the technology.

Because I think the iteration speed is really closely tied to how quickly the technology can get better.

If you can only iterate on something once every five years, it's not going to be very good because

you're not going to get to update it.

but every five years.

If on the other hand, you have an iteration cycle that's like you can update this thing every six months,

every year, maybe even faster then you're even if you start out at the wrong answer you're going to be moving in the direction of the right answer quickly um

so what is this thing called space solar power should i tell you about it yeah please do it's a water tube

best way to explain it i think is to kind of walk through the three things that are happening in our design and then kind of build up from there.

So the first satellite that goes to space next June, again, this is like

we have to actually do a bunch of work between now and then.

It's a satellite bus that we purchased from a third party called Apex.

So what is a satellite bus?

It's basically like

the frame of the satellite, the solar panels, the way to mount it to the SpaceX rocket, all the communications antennas so that when it's in space, you can talk to it you can orient the thing in space you can point it in space it's basically like um

it's the satellite minus what they call the payload and the payload is the thing that's doing whatever the job is that the satellite does so common payloads are like uh

communications antennas, right?

Or maybe a big camera to take pictures of the earth or the atmosphere, right?

So it's everything minus

the payload, which is the job that it does.

So we're buying that from another startup actually.

We are designing and integrating the power transmission system on the satellite, which is the laser system, all the optics for pointing it,

and the final part is the ground station for receiving the power.

So the satellite does broad strokes two things.

First thing it does is it collects power.

And so the Sun is a big power plant.

It's just spewing off energy from nuclear fusion, right?

So you have hydrogen, helium, fusion happening, heats the whole thing up, thing glows red, emits solar radiation, which our solar panels

convert from

photons, which are the particle of light,

to electrons energized.

So you go from

a beam of light from the Sun to an electrical current on the satellite.

That's what the solar panels do.

There's different kinds of solar panels you can use.

You can use very expensive solar panels that have a longer lifetime and a higher efficiency, or you can go the Home Depot route.

And there's a pretty interesting discussion there and why you might do one or the other.

So let's say you've got a big,

excuse me, a big, beautiful

solar ray on your satellite that's generating power.

That power in the form of an electrical current then,

you can either have that go directly to the laser system, or for this example, let's say there's a battery, which our satellites, for the first demo missions, at the very least, will have a battery on it.

So you take all the electrical current that the solar panels are generating and you charge up a battery on the satellite.

That's step one.

Let's move on to step two.

That's the pointing and the laser system.

The pointing in the laser system is basically how you go from the charge on the battery to a beam of light that's exiting the satellite that's precisely pointed to a small spot on the ground.

So what does this do?

So we use something called a fiber laser.

which takes the electrical current that's in the battery and it goes into a bank of photodiodes, which are basically glorified

they're like glorified LEDs okay

those things those are thin silicon wafers that when you run a current through them they start emitting light you take the light from tons and tons of these you put them into fiber optics

and then inside of the fiber optic you have

what's called a gain medium or a second stage to the laser that takes all the light that's coming out of each one of the LED, the photodiodes.

these are called diode pumps in our case, where the light coming out is kind of diverging like this.

And you have it go into fiber optics.

When it goes through the second stage of the laser, it takes all the diverging light and it straightens it out.

So then you have a fiber optic that's got

energy in it in the form of light.

Wow.

You take that beam of light and then you put it into basically a telescope which then takes the beam of light and it projects that beam down to the ground.

On the ground, at first we're going to have a bigger array to receive the power.

The array on the ground is going to be bigger simply because the

actual satellite optics are smaller.

Turns out if you make the optics on the satellite bigger, you can get a smaller spot on the ground.

It's a physics conversation for another time.

But on the ground, the architecture, and this is where the tie-in with the DOD comes in, is designed to be portable,

small,

and ideally of little to no strategic value if captured.

So what is this receiver on the ground?

There's the, we'll talk about the more beefy version of it, and then you can kind of strip this down if you needed to use it for more tactical applications.

The future version we think is going to be a solar array that's five to ten meters in diameter.

Probably

about the size of this room.

Right?

On some sort of platform that you can gimbal so you can point it at the satellite and a big old battery.

And as a satellite's passing overhead, it's charged up or it's charging itself up and it's going to have these windows of time where it passes overhead.

where it's over the ground station.

It starts out by forming a link with the ground station.

When it does, and it knows that it's got a clear path to transmit power, it'll start discharging the energy from the battery into this

laser system that'll then

put that energy into the form of light.

That light then that's pointed down at the solar panel on the ground, which then takes that one frequency or that small set of frequencies of light that you're passing down.

and the solar panels are tuned for those frequencies of light so you get higher efficiency.

So, you have this ground station that then is taking the light that's coming down from the satellite and turning it into an electrical charge again, which you can use for whatever you can use it to power stuff.

Wow.

How, how

it is both the power plant,

which is the, so the vision that we have for this, right?

So, we have one satellite that does this next year.

Ideally, we have a second one that does the same thing that's on an orbit behind it, so we can test some of the more

technical functionality but the idea is is that as you demonstrate this

you'll be able to get it more mature as you are able to get it more mature you intend to be able to make it more accurate right you you kind of want to be able to like step up the maturity of the technology

Then you start building bigger, higher power satellites.

And the way that you have more power available available in space is you put more satellites up.

So, the idea is that

over time, we're going to continue to build more and more satellites to build a constellation,

an energy constellation.

So, imagine like Starlink for power.

Wow.

That's kind of the long-term vision of it.

What do you think?

Is that how wild does that sound?

It's pretty out there.

But, you know, I mentioned, you know, I'd interviewed this gentleman, Steve Quast, who was talking about this just about a month ago.

And I was,

I saw a tweet that he did, and he was talking about beaming energy down and

all kinds of wazoo stuff.

But I was like, this guy actually seems like legit.

He's not.

He doesn't seem like your typical internet weirdo.

Me or him?

Him.

Oh, yeah.

And so I dug into him a little bit and brought him on.

And then he started talking about how we have the technology to be.

Is that why you reached out to him?

Because he was talking about power beaming?

Yep.

Sick.

He was talking about power beaming.

He was talking about manipulating space and time.

And he was talking about

being able to

transport yourself in a matter of seconds, basically, from, you know, I don't know.

Washington, D.C.

to Beijing.

Really?

Yeah.

I love that power beaming is in the conversation with that stuff.

Me too.

Yeah.

And then we found you.

But

so what I want to ask is, I mean, with one satellite,

and

what do you call the ground station?

Some crowd station.

Just a ground station.

Receiver station.

Receiver.

Maybe we'll come up with a more...

We haven't entered the branding phase of this yet.

That'll come.

Gotcha.

So how much power?

will the ground station receive from the satellite?

For the first satellite that we're putting up, we're like, we're the thing, the version of this that I was kind of articulating, right, is we're we're trying actively

to have every one of the components be things that are manufactured, meaning there's other people that have uses for these technologies that are either commercially available or in the case of our laser system, for example, right, we're working with a third party that's taking

similar technology and basically making it work better for space.

So the whole idea behind this first satellite is we want to use existing supply chains, existing commercial uses for the technology, and try to package these things together so that they're more than the sum of their parts.

Right?

Meaning like you take a laser that's used for metal cutting and a satellite bus that's used for telecommunications and you kind of like put these pieces together and make it work to do this thing that's power beaming.

The reason I mentioned this is that there's a lot of constraints and the power output of the first one, we kind of have pegged it at a point where we think it's power beaming, but the future systems are going to be much higher power.

Okay.

So the first one is going to do an output of about a kilowatt of power out of the laser system

into free space.

And on the ground, we think that worst case, sort of like, you know,

the base case scenario is that we're able to get, you know, enough energy out of it to light maybe a light bulb or, you know,

less than 100 watts of power.

Oh, God.

But we think that if the system works, we should be able to get significantly more than that.

So a couple hundred watts of power.

So the first version of this next year is like proof of concept.

Like we're able to get enough power down with all these constraints that we have to actually generate an electrical current and use that electrical current for a demo, like a light installation, right?

And I think that

in and of itself, even at a lower relative power level, it kind of shows that the whole end-to-end thing is doing what we say it's going to do.

After that, the goal is to start power scaling, right?

Make higher power satellites and make your ground stations able to receive a lot more power.

And the vision that I kind of have for this in the future is that each satellite is going to generate enough power

so that if it's transmitting power to one ground station, that one ground station,

you know, whether it's one dish or several dishes that are receiving the power, will be able to generate enough power to power a small neighborhood.

Wow.

Ten homes.

Wow.

Would this, would the beam punch through clouds?

Depends on how much clouds there are.

So yeah.

I think more

likely than not, what we'll end up doing is we'll end up beaming power when we see pockets of openings in the clouds.

Okay.

How fast, so

we're talking about with the satellite's in orbit and it comes,

so it's a line of sight beam, correct?

So wouldn't it, how, how long will the satellite be in the line of sight window?

Five to ten minutes.

That's it.

That's it.

Yeah.

Is that enough time to drain the entire battery?

We may not want to do that, actually, because it might be the case so first of all the idea is is that similar to starlink right is as you put more and more satellites up you start getting so it'll be multiple satellites beaming in at once well you'll have handoff you'll have one satellite powering a ground station it's going to move out of the field of view and another one will take over okay

right so it'll be handing off from satellite to satellite and as the first satellite moves out of the field of view of the first ground station, it's immediately going to start looking for another satellite, another ground station to start beaming power to.

Oh, shit.

So the idea is many satellites, many ground stations.

And for each satellite at any point in time, there is a ground station within its field of view.

Because the satellites eventually are going to be operating

around the clock, right?

Like they get power.

They need a ground station to just distribute the power to.

Cool, that one's out of the line of sight.

We've got another one there.

Start distributing there.

Cool, that one's out of sight, next one.

So, kind of back and forth, back and forth.

So, it will, so basically,

tell me if I'm correct on this.

Let's just say there's a hundred ground stations.

So, these satellites around the globe, so these satellites will

pretty much always be discharging its load of energy, correct?

So it will constantly be receiving,

well, I guess not constantly,

but it'll be receiving.

It depends on which orbit it's in.

And then it will always be, it will almost always be beaming energy into one grand station or another.

And there'll be a line of these.

And so it's just,

it's almost like

a patrol.

Just

this one's beaming in here, it moves, it's beaming over there, and the next one picks up.

Yep, and it's just a consistent orbit of that.

It's also worth mentioning there's other ways of doing this.

This is the version that we think is going to pan out.

The other ways of doing it are like you build one big, beautiful satellite.

You build one truly large and exquisite satellite, and we're talking about putting all these things in low Earth orbit.

Right?

So you're talking about like 500 to 600 kilometers straight up.

In the grand scheme of things, that's kind of not that far, right?

Whereas

geostationary or geosynchronous orbits, so the Earth is rotating, right, around its axis.

If you get far enough away from the Earth, the satellite will be rotating around the Earth at the same speed that the Earth is rotating.

So you'll stay over one fixed point.

Interesting.

That's 36,000 kilometers up.

Holy shit.

That's real fucking far.

So another version of this architecture, and this is kind of like the version that was written about in the 70s, was instead of doing this super complicated handoff maneuvering thing, which remember in the 1970s, probably the computers weren't there to do this, right?

Like in order to do this handoff stuff, you have to be able to exchange data between neighboring satellites to even be able to say,

I was sending power here, I'm handing this off to you, right?

Like that satellite's not just going to like have a premonition.

You know, it's not going to be remote viewing the other satellites.

Even to do something like that, you need modern computers and modern computing, right?

The old version of this was, excuse me, one big,

beautiful satellite in geostationary that's like maybe the size of a small city.

And that thing is continuously beaming power, or nearly continuously beaming power down to one,

again, really large ground station that might be kilometers in diameter.

Yeah, but I mean if you did that and then and cloud cover in the atmosphere does dilute the beam somewhat then I mean then you would

you'd be in a worse spot, right?

Yeah, you

there are ways of transmitting power through the clouds and kind of ignoring them

So it actually has to do with the frequency of light that you use Okay,

right?

So actually like when you get to microwave frequencies like Wi-Fi frequencies and stuff like that, those will pass through the atmosphere much less disturbed than if you're using infrared, which is what we're using for our demos.

The flip side is, is that with infrared, we're able to use lasers, so we get like a tight beam of light as opposed to having to focus a bunch of antennas that are diverging.

Gotcha.

So if you're trying to like...

use microwave frequencies, for example, you would need to have an array of microwave antennas lined up so that you can send a signal to the ones at the outer ends of your array to basically noise cancel.

That makes sense.

It does.

It does.

This way, I mean...

So all this to say, there's a way to demonstrate this that we're working towards right now.

There's also the future build of how you make this an industrial, a commercial thing, which we have a sense of how to do it.

We're also pretty open-minded.

And I think that's kind of coming back to the idea of iteration cycle, right?

If you want to try to

sort of

sort of like will this thing into existence, right?

You kind of want to find the version of it that's most likely to work.

And you want to like be iterating towards it over time.

Because in order for this to work, to generate enough power for it to be useful, we're going to have to have lots of satellites.

Now, I think it's also worth mentioning, like, why DOD?

like what's the point of the DOD and all this, right?

The application that we're building for first is actually to power remote DOD installations.

Like it's kind of...

You could probably teach me a lesson on this, but fuel transport to the battlefield is very dangerous.

Yeah.

Right?

Imagine just snipping that supply chain all together and you have this little receiver dish

and all of your power infrastructures in orbit.

Yeah, it cuts so many logistics out of the game that it's

totally different.

Amazing idea.

And yeah,

we could have used that

for the last 20 years.

Yeah.

Interestingly, the DOD has been writing about this for a long time.

Like we, this version of this architecture that we're building

kind of arrived at it from a lot of conversations with a group out of DARPA.

So there's a group, this guy, Dr.

Paul Jaffe,

who, if he's listening to a, what's up, homie?

He is a research scientist, was at

Naval Research Lab before, and has been working on power beaming technologies for kind of a long time, recently moved over to DARPA and had been, has written a lot about this.

So I had been talking to him, reaching out to him as a, again, a student, right?

And I think it was in those conversations that he he kind of pointed us to a lot of the work that the DOD has done on this and kind of

trying to articulate, because the DOD has written a lot on this, about applications for this.

Like,

how do you use space-based solar power in this use case, right?

And it's all about these small portable receivers, at least as I understand it.

And

there was a project or a proposal that they were working on.

I think they still are,

where you generate power on the ground and you relay it between several satellites and you get it down to a spot on the ground where you need it.

My kind of thought on this was:

if that's in service of building that receiver, it's like, yeah, you'll need the receiver, but rather than doing these hops through the atmosphere, what if you just put the power plant in orbit?

So it's kind of an interesting idea, right?

Because what we're proposing building is both the power plant and the power lines

because in this model right you

you'll need like a local power grid wherever your receiver is but you're not going to need power lines from

space to earth yeah you're also not going to need power lines from like your home or you know some big data center where you're some application where you're using the power to the power plant

because that's just done directly from space.

Wow.

I mean,

you know,

General Petraeus said

that energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities.

General Mattis has asked the DOD to unleash us from the tether of fuel, and this does exactly that.

I mean,

there's a long history of technologies.

Sorry if I'm cutting you off.

There's a long history of technologies that have started in

space technologies that have started in the DOD sort of government world that have proven to be useful for people on the rest of the world.

Like GPS is one comes to mind.

Right.

What else do you see this?

Who else, like, what other customer base is there for this other than DOD?

Yeah, I think there's actually the goal of this is to build a full energy company, right?

Like a true energy company.

And as you can mature the technology, as the cost of launch starts to come down with Starship or other heavy launch vehicles, as we get our shit together and our manufacturing processes are able to really squeeze down the cost of manufacturing, the medium to long-term goal for the company is going to be reduce the price of energy that we can sell.

And the more we can reduce the price, the more industrial applications open up.

So if you can start to get this with cost-competitive with energy production on the ground, then you're really competing against terrestrial energy sources.

That's kind of where I want to take this eventually, right?

So whether it be receivers for our laser power beaming, you know,

in the like, you know, within existing solar farms, for example, or you set up a separate, like,

small receiver station where you're able to connect to satellites to get power from.

Like, I imagine this to be a new energy grid and one that augments

the, you know, the copper cables and lines on the ground in the same way that Starlink is you know complementing all the fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure on the ground

So I think there's that's kind kind of the goal: to make get the cost down.

As you get the cost down, you can start being cost competitive with more use cases.

Do you see this becoming more of a, how do I say this, more of a

decentralized grid?

I would love that for that to happen.

Yeah, that's kind of the vision for it.

I like to punctuate a very serious conversation with these gummies

that are great.

Can Can I ask you a question?

Sure.

Curious, any interesting stories from being deployed around energy infrastructure that you've had?

Like fuel transits, like any sort of dicey stuff that happened?

Well, I mean,

I'm not too into logistics.

I mean, with my background, I'm more of a warfighter, and so the...

the logistics are all you know pretty much taken care of for us but a lot of times you know we would be

especially with,

well, actually both with SEAL teams and contracting for CA.

I mean,

we're not really near

most of the time, at least where I like to go because I like the action.

We're not near like a big base like Bagram or Kandahar or Baghdad, you know, and we're pushed out.

And, you know, that could be in something that's just a safe house where you're sucking off the local energy grid, which a lot of those places were very unstable, you know, especially Yemen.

I mean, the power and the internet would just go out all the time.

Interesting.

Were there diesel generators around?

Yeah, some it depends.

If you're at a house, you're likely not going to have a diesel generator because that would stand out.

The whole purpose of having a safe house is to blend in with the local population, right?

Yeah.

So you couldn't have that.

That's what you mean by safe house.

Okay.

That's what I mean by safe house.

It's literally just a house

in a neighborhood that happens to be safe.

Maybe.

Kind of safe.

Yeah, you'd have them spread out throughout the city and

everybody there on the ground knows, hey, there's a safe house, there's a safe house, there's a safe house, and it could be an extract point or a safe haven, you know.

Or you could be operating out of a safe house, which is what we did the majority of the time.

And so

you're using local energy.

Now, if you're at like a forward operating base, like a SEAL platoon is there, or

a small element,

then yeah, you're running off diesel generators.

And so, you know,

what can happen with the logistics of that?

I mean,

one, it's expensive.

You know, two,

I mean,

convoys were getting hit all over in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And so if your fuel gets hit

blown up with by an IED, well then you're shit out of luck, buddy.

You're not getting any energy.

And so with something like this, I mean, it would, it would 110% be a game changer right off the bat.

Did you ever have to lug solar panels into the field?

Um or no.

Do you know people that did?

No.

Lots of communications equipment and antennas and shit shit like that, but not solar panels.

How would you charge that stuff up if it ran on a...

Was it battery-based?

Yes.

What happens if it runs out of batteries?

You always got extras.

Okay, you just carry more batteries.

Yep.

Everybody carries batteries.

That's wild.

Yeah, it makes sense, though.

I've heard some people talking about stories of carrying like a solar ruck pack into the field.

Like I said, I haven't been out there in 10 years.

So

this year is 10 years since my last deployment.

So who knows what the hell they're running nowadays?

But in my day, we had batteries called 5590s that powered all the communications equipment.

Cool.

And so everybody would have, I mean, batteries are like ammo for us, you know, because

if you lose communications, then you're dead.

And

yeah.

But

I'm sure they probably have some type of solar panels they're carrying around now.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit.

It's come up a couple of times in my research, but it's hard to tell how prevalent that stuff is.

Yeah.

Well, if you need connections, I can get you connected to the modern-day warfighter, they'll tell you all about it.

Yeah, so but I'll probably take you up on that at some point.

No problem.

Wow.

How many satellites do you think

it would take to power like a small

decentralized grid, like the size of a small town, maybe 15,000, 20,000 people?

I'll have to say, I'd have to do some back-of-the-autologue map on it.

I think also

the question that I kind of have right now is how big to make each one of the satellites versus whether to just make more of them,

right?

Because

I actually think there's probably an advantage in making them smaller because each one becomes

less strategically important.

Each one, if there's a failure of a component, kind of becomes more throwaway.

Yeah,

I'd have to do some back of the envelope to get a reasonable answer.

But I think it's also going to be

when you when you when you if you go the constellation route with this

As much as you're providing power for one location, you're also starting to build capacity to provide power pretty much anywhere in the globe.

Because you'll have some satellites that are over the place that you want to deliver the power, but a lot of the times they're going to be orbiting back around the Earth to get back to that spot.

Or they're orbiting around the Earth and maybe just missing that spot altogether.

But they'll catch it in two days when the other satellites won't be over it.

Gotcha.

Right.

So it's actually.

How will you make the determination of whether to go bigger or more?

That's a great question.

I think it's probably going to be

trial and error.

It's probably going to be like, where can we power scale it until some components start becoming really difficult to power scale, right?

And like what that is, it could be something small, it could be something big.

And I think it'll also be a trade-off of how to package them into the satellite, into the rocket, right?

Because

Starship is huge.

And each one of those, depending on how big the satellites are, you might be able to put like 100 or 200 of them in there.

Wow.

Yeah.

No shit.

100 to 200 satellites and one Starship.

One lift.

Yeah.

Some very early modeling we did, and we kind of thought that we could get those ballpark of numbers.

Wow.

Yeah, so that's kind of the part about this.

It was like, how does this ever going to become big?

How are you ever going to get to like proper constellation density?

Or like, how do you get to the same constellation size as Starlink, right?

Well,

Starship kind of changes that equation, right?

So if it's a hundred,

let's just say for the sake of this argument, it's a hundred satellites per Starship, right?

And let's say that there's 7,000 starships, 7,000 Starlink satellites in space, roughly speaking, let's just say for the sake of argument.

That's like 70 launches.

Bam.

And if you think about what the requirements are going to be, the point I'm trying to get here is, is in order for

Starship to be able to do something like the Mars mission,

they're going to have to build this thing for rapid, rapid, rapid reuse.

Like they're going to have to, to hit those windows of time to launch to get from Earth to Mars, for example, right?

There's going to be a time crunch in which they're going to need to put lots of...

payloads into orbit, which means that during those times, more, you know,

I haven't looked at their flight plan, so I'm kind of guessing how this is going to work.

But I'd imagine that there's going to be a period of intense launching where they have to do tons and tons and tons of launches to get the payload in orbit, to assemble whatever stuff they need to do to then send it to Mars.

If they're building for that kind of capacity and like rapid reuse,

when you're not trying to go to Mars,

there's going to be...

stuff that you have the ability to put into space, right?

The launch capacity,

maybe it's not the first year that Starship goes live.

Eventually, the launch capacity is going to be available to be able to do missions like this.

How long do you think these satellites will last?

I mean, there's no weather elements up there.

What's what

in low Earth orbit, things de-orbit naturally.

Okay.

There's enough drag up there that they'll just fall back down, which is actually probably fine.

So I think 10 years or so would be

kind of the target for the lifespan for satellite.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

And it's kind of interesting on the satellite design.

We talked about this a little bit in the beginning, right?

It's like, do you use cheaper, less efficient components or more expensive, higher efficiency components?

And the answer is like, it's not totally clear.

Like you actually kind of have to do the trade-off to figure it out.

I bring this up because a lot of the times the questions are around efficiency, where because the supply is free, it's actually the thing that matters more is like what are the overall economics,

which may actually be better with less efficient components.

Interesting.

Yeah.

What am I not asking?

I should be.

I don't know.

We've talked about a lot of stuff.

With the satellites.

Oh, with the satellites, right, right.

That's how my head was going.

Let me think.

What else did the satellites?

How small do you think these receivers can get?

I think five to ten meters in diameter.

That's kind of what.

I mean, look, we might end up being able, if we get to that, we might end up shooting for smaller.

We might end up shooting for like two and a half meters spot on the ground.

Do you see this overpowering individual homes?

I think it could, yeah.

I mean, I think it's, it's kind of, there's a lot of steps between this and that.

But like we're able to use Starlink to power individual homes for internet like

I Would like to be able to do that.

Yeah,

I think at the very least there might be a case for having receivers local to neighborhoods if you didn't want to put them like actually on top of a roof, for example

We're on the cutting edge of this so I mean

I don't know could it could it beam it to a car while driving like could this revolutionize everything in energy?

Yeah, so here's here's something you could do is you could beam it to moving platforms.

You could beam it to boats.

Ships.

You could beam it to ships.

You could possibly be.

A ship could hold a

five to 10 meter wide receiver.

Many of them if it wanted to.

Right.

And you could end up in a situation where you're able to electrify some of these things that batteries are never going to be able to do, right?

Man, that's fucking cool, man.

Yeah, imagine a fleet of satellites when they're flying over the Pacific, for example.

Dedicated to a fleet of naval ships.

Yeah, or they switch from providing power to like some industrial application to now they're over the Pacific and now they're powering ships.

And then they're back over land when they're powering industrial applications.

That's amazing, man.

Like what you're doing is just

is it's incredible.

This is the brave new world, man.

And I think it's, look,

this this is really hard, right?

Like, this, what we're talking about doing here, there's, it's not a foregone conclusion that this is going to happen.

Like, it's a tremendously challenging technical problem ahead of us.

But the point I'm trying to get at here is: like,

I think people like me in society that have the desire to do stuff like this, that have the experience and the means to make it happen.

Like, I think it's on us to try stuff like this, right?

Like, it's

a higher calling, right?

Like, you gotta, if you have the, if you have the ability to, like,

make this contribution to the technical landscape of humanity, and I'm 40, right?

Like, I have years ahead of me.

Knock on wood.

Yeah.

It's like, it's...

Seeing if you can will this into existence.

Well, seems like you're doing a damn good job, man.

Last question.

Yeah.

If you had three people to see on this show, who would they be?

Three people.

I'm assuming you're asking for people that are alive today.

Yeah.

I mean, this is maybe a.

There's been a couple of the better answers to this.

You've had Trump on, which I think is awesome.

I'm trying to think of non-obvious ones because the obvious one would be Elon Musk.

Would you have on somebody like Kamala Harris?

I tried to get her.

Did you?

Yeah, we were in touch with her camp.

She was going to do it.

I think that would be fascinating.

I don't know if she'll do it now, but she was going to do it.

And then for one reason or another, it just fell off.

And they decided not to come.

But I really wanted that interview.

Yeah, I believe that.

Yeah,

I think that would have been huge.

I think it would be interesting to see because Trump did so many of these interviews, right?

To get like a real apples to comparison.

Yeah.

Who else would be interesting?

I'm kind of blanking.

Let me think about it a little bit.

All right.

No worries.

Well,

man, I'm so glad we met.

Yeah.

What a fascinating conversation.

I really appreciate you taking the time and coming to Tennessee and sitting down and describing what you're doing and what you have done and all the rabbit holes we went down.

And

I hope to see you again.

Likewise, my friend.

perfect.

That's what.

I am Michael Rosenbaum.

I am Tom Welling.

Welcome to Talk Bill.

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Yeah, because I'm getting more screen time.

That's good.

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I had never been around anything like that before.

I mean, it was so fun.

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Talk, Bill.

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