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

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Baiju Bhatt is the Founder and CEO of Aetherflux, a space-based solar energy startup launched in 2024 that aims to beam power from orbit to Earth using infrared lasers. A first-generation American of Gujarati descent, Bhatt co-founded Robinhood in 2013 with Vlad Tenev, serving as co-CEO until 2020 and Chief Creative Officer until March 2024, helping to revolutionize commission-free trading.  He holds a BS in Physics and an MS in Mathematics from Stanford and previously started two finance companies in New York before launching Robinhood. Inspired by his father’s career at NASA, Bhatt founded Aetherflux, which has raised \$60 million in funding with plans for a 2026 satellite demonstration to deliver clean energy to remote regions. He is a Forbes-listed billionaire with a net worth of $2.5 billion and an advocate for commercial space innovation. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: ⁠https://betterhelp.com/srs⁠ This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. ⁠https://bunkr.life – USE CODE SRS⁠ Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get your 25% off your family plan ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://helixsleep.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://rocketmoney.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS⁠ ⁠https://ziprecruiter.com/srs⁠ Baiju Bhatt Links: Aetherflux - https://www.aetherflux.com X - https://x.com/BaijuBhatt IG - https://www.instagram.com/realbaijubhatt Robinhood - https://robinhood.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bejubot, welcome to the show. What's up, man? Oh, man, I'm excited about this one. Me too. I'm really excited about this one. But I would have dive right into this. I'm sorry, I cut you off on that conversation. We've 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 brought up that it seems to be like a movement of the younger generation, just booze doesn't have a place. And I think that's a good thing, but you brought up a good point. Yeah. So I feel like the contrary take here is that alcohol has kind of gone out of vogue in society,

I think especially with young people. And 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, Gantz. You're the only one that I've ever heard say that.

But, 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 you see it. There's no shortage of alcohol there. But I wonder, I mean, how are people socializing that don't drink nowadays? On the internet?

That's what they seem. 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 and 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 whole thing, like long-form thinking, like being bored. Yeah, and alcohol was like the universal social lubricant when I was in my early 20s, right? Yeah, me too. I think it started like 13. But yeah, that's all. But what happens if you get rid of it, right?

It's 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 great. I don't think that...

I don't think the human brain is wired like that, right? We're social animals. Like, we're animals, right? We're like, 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. You make friends, right?

Yeah, yeah. Or work or anywhere. Although, yeah, that's just, I think nicotine, I think, cigarettes I think are bad for you. Like, I think it makes it hard to breathe. 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, it drank with excess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, 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 talk on the bottle a little bit too much and everything goes

off the rails but but that's me. I had the benefit of being Indian and my body just can't really help alcohol. Yeah. Oh shit. One of the nice things yeah. Like I could never

like in college I would like to have thought that I could drink but I don't know I couldn't really hold my alcohol that well. 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? 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. a ton to talk about. So let me start you off with an introduction here. Bejubot, 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 Robin Hood, alongside your college roommate Vlad Teneff. 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 Robin Hood 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 Kwasht 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 now here you are.

You're legitimately doing it. Yeah. So, a husband, father of three boys. And you appreciate craftsmanship, 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 in 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 9-11 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. 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 Robin Hood. So at the time, Vlad and I were co-CEOES 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've always been this way where there's the main thing that I care about

that's kind of like 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 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 or I was like doing some research at this particle, sorry, 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 car 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 you're familiar with this company called Factory 5? No. All right. Very cool company. They build kit cars that are like basically like re-imaginations 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 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 find that difficult? Or it come naturally to you?

I like difficult things. So I did find it to be difficult for sure. But 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. It's not much to do.

There's not much to do. There's also not a lot of people I can help you do shit. So I remember finding myself a couple of times. 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 trying to prop the thing up on my legs and trying to screw it in.

You've become like a contortionist trying to build this stuff. When was that? This was during COVID. How many classes do you have now? I had a couple classes. Yeah. That's awesome. My thing is 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 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, then 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've got to really ring them out to actually keep up the 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, for obvious reasons. But now I just got a 19-7.

77 Ford F-150. Oh, sick. We were talking before. We both, 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, yeah, I literally just 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. I'm going to go on a bit of 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 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, 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 we used to drive them for work and verbally 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. 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, 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, yeah. Do 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, 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, this is that? 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 COL and contracting for CIA. They put us through a ton of schools.

They put you through the Ferrari school? No, no. It was more, it was a lot more practical, like pitting and crashing into things and how to get out of situations and, 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-world drive. Then you do all-wheel drive. Then you do off-roading, and you start off on little Ford Festivas and move to Audies 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. 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 fucking awesome.

Yeah. Also, off-roading is really fun. Yeah. I mean, it's really fun. The whole, you do it all, and then you can 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. It makes you feel like you're going to throw off the whole time. Really? Yeah. Off-rooting 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,

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

It's just candy. There's no funny business. Good stuff. I love gummy bears. Me too. But, well, I'd love to do a life story on you. Yeah, let's do it. So we'll 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 grown 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 Gujarath.

My dad, my grandfather was one of the first Western trained eye doctors. This has got to be in like probably the 40s and 50s and 60s. It 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 brothers. So my dad had always wanted to study physics, goes to college to study chemistry, I want to say. 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 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, I, yeah, I think he was maybe like, 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, he 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, so this is going back a little bit further, but I think it's... Oh, this is 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 reminded I was studying physics. And I think they knew, like, one Indian family in America that were also docked. that were in Warnsburg, Missouri. Right around where I grew up.

Yeah. And so my mom, the story goes, she goes out to Warnsburg 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... Are you still tight with both of your parents? 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 it was 50s or 60s? No, he was born in the 40s. Okay. He wasn't in his 40s in the 40s. Right on. Well, what were he into growing up? Yeah.

So my time. 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 Picosan, 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 Virginia. Yeah, and actually, interestingly, I didn't learn English until I was like maybe four or five. No kidding. 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? I'm 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 a lot of that came from my dad.

Because he worked at NASA. That's cool. What does your dad do? He's a scientist at NASA. Or something that I was always really proud of. And I thought it 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 in, 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 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 in 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 and we had this little beeper that he would carry around with him just 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 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 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 do i what do i do

Right? Like, where does life go from here? It 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, at 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 worst. 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. The last, by the way, the last time I went back to India was in 1997. 87, maybe 98. Did you go back, did you, is that the only time you went back to India? Or did you go back and forth a couple times? Probably when I was a little kid I went like two or three times. You don't remember it?

Vague memories of it. But I'm an American, right? Like, through and through. So that, that's happened. and I'm like, well, what do I do? Right? 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 a 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 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. 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, 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? 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 in life through.

So what was your dad studying at NASA? What was he working on? He was doing atmospheric sciences. What is that? He was doing like satellite imaging. No kidding. Is that fucking wild? Yeah. You can't make the stuff up. It goes around full circle. I bet, 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, but yeah. That's cool, man. That's cool.

which my parents live 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, wanted to, 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 know. 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.

It 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 going to do. I'm going to 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 that 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.

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Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms. They're studying quantum field theory. Right. So quantum field theory is 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 was his big old brain figure 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 the general idea of quantum mechanics is that you have, 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. Okay. And light. I don't know what I'm trying to get to, is there's this idea of, and this actually relates to the name of the company, Aetherflex, 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 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 that's got wavelength and in turn it's got a frequency and you can kind of think about light in that way one of the things that Einstein figured out 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 how 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 charge 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's 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 a, that didn't speak to the sensibilities of scientific publications in, I don't know, like 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 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 so, there's just a lot, there's a lot of theories out there that they're

trying to create black, many black holes and all this other stuff. Yeah, that's pretty catchy. I don't, I don't know if that's going to 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 going to butcher this because I watched this a couple years ago. But I remember watching this 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. 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 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 a few different statements of this uncertainty principle. And to any of the listeners out there that are actual physicist, 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, 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 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 saw some other things. It was talking about when you shoot a beam into like a slit. The 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. So related to this, but a little bit of a tangent is the idea of like what is the speed of light? because this is one of the things that people are 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? What is the thing that light is oscillating that's behind this? So they famously called it the ather. So there's this medium that was postulated to exist called the ather 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 scientific experiments during this time is called the Michelson Morley experiment, where people try to measure the speed of light.

And again, 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'd 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, 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 ather. 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, 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, and 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 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 communication. especially crypto.

And so it's my understanding that you take a particle, you split it in half, put one over here, you could 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, this actually has to do with what we were talking about, a couple of minutes go around to uncertainty, right? 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, 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, it could be like this, or it could be like this as it's 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're 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 downstate. 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. Does that make sense? It does make sense. I just, I can't, I mean, maybe nobody can. I don't know. But how are they communicating?

How are they still untangled? 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 I, I don't know if I, 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 knowledge and see if I can come up with an example that kind of makes sense.

No, I do think about 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? 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 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 time 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, 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. Are your parents do? 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 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. It'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 serious. I never took it seriously. And, but, you know, I was raised in that, went to church every Sunday. Then I joined the SEAL teams and just lost it. Like, didn't believe in anything. Couldn't explain why people were dying and why, why out of, you know, a platoon of us. I mean, there's, 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 it was sober, it was almost like some type of 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 all the guys that I was with. But like I said, 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 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 the platoon, drinking, bar fighting, womanizing. it would be the guy that's that's a really good dad that is a really good husband that somehow it's 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 like 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 um and so and then you know And that was very early on in my career. And then I kept moving and I just, I never really thought about it. And then, uh, I, recently, it was after my psychedelics, I did psychedelics and I did this thing called

5MEO DMT too after I did the I-B game, which is a, it's a death experience. You legitimately, like there's no question in your mind, you are, you're dying. You're going to die. And so it's, and I think what it does is it is a, it's a, you know, gland dump. Like, what does that do your perspective? It changes everything. Because when you do it, so basically, you know, in, 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's, it kind of feels like an eternity, but it really only lasts maybe 15, 13, 30. seconds and maybe even less than that but you start sorting through everything in your life and it's it like light speed and you start to separate from what the materialistic world and I mean everything and you don't have time to process what's going on but you you start to separate from you might be thinking about a friend and you 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 and it's all the things that you're holding onto 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 stay-at-home mom and then 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 actually thought you were going to die when you did yeah there's no there's there's zero question in your brain that you are dependent

parting life. It's over. And you don't know where you're going. 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, 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 um the bliss drug or

something like that and you cross over and you know you sounds kind of hippieish 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 made that separation, I crossed over. I opened my eyes and like sat up. And this is off just south of Canada.

It was in, I think it's actually in Rosary, Mexico. So you're on the beach. And I opened my eyes and I could just, I didn't. not see anything that wasn't there. It wasn't like Grateful Dead, psychedelics, you know, pink elephants and rainbows and all the 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 come 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 say they can feel friends or relatives that have passed and they're in this other realm, or some people see them. I felt the presence of my best friend who were talking about Gabe up there. That was your best friend. Yeah, I could feel his presence. And it made you, 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 and that's actually when I started looking. watching all these quantum mechanics videos and stuff like that because I wanted to understand what that was and that was really into energy.

I was like, 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, it's not appropriate for the kids. Yeah, yeah. And that stuff was really bothering me, and then I dive deep into China. I talk about it all the time. It's, 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 time. frame. And I went to Sedona because I had read there's all these energy fields in Sedona. And I was like, maybe I feel something. I don't know. We'll see. We'll go on some hikes, go to some of these energy vortex. I want to see if I feel anything. I didn't feel anything. And the last day there, it was a really rough trip of mine too. A really good friend of mine had just died. I'd done some heavy interviews with a really good friend, Ryan Montgomery, who's doved 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 I'm sorry, Tyler, but he was the only one that survived the Abigate bombing during the Afghan withdrawal. He 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. It's hard 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 I broke down on the process. plane like and i'm not a guy that breaks down but broke down cannot imagine that in tears and she's like what like what the hell is wrong with you and um it and i was just angry the whole trip very last day i i stayed off social media the whole trip it's the last day i'm like well 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've 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 like, I felt like nobody else cared. And I felt like I was the only one talking about this stuff. And I was trying to basically convince myself.

Like, 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 quitting this stuff bother you like it's 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 and it seems like america wants this to happen everywhere i look they're talking about this and they're complaining about the the party that doesn't want it to happen and And so 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 walk back into the gate. And we were 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'm... I just told you to say to mind him and I'm not in the mood. I'm like looking at him over my shoulder telling him, hey, 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 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 guy just said this guy 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, 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 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 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 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, You 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 them

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, fast forward. Panthers went the Stanley Cup for the first time ever. What's that?

What year was this? This was, 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 a while. When the Panthers won in this event that I'm about to tell you happened, it's about two years ago. So the team gave me one of the original jerseys, and it has Gabe's name on. I have Silteam 10 logo, and Panthers won the 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. I'm excited. And there's a bunch of, 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, was in this vulnerable state, and we saw this guy that looked exactly like my friend Gabe, like same build, same brow line, same jaw line. 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 of my new 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's like, there he is, there he is, there he is. So sure, 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 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 he's 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 podcast he 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 in our our relationship starts developing really fast he died of a heart attack on a hunting trip right before I left on this trip uh probably in his 50s and died with his

son was on that trip actually like a really good way to go you know died happy his son was with him like it was good and um but he had just died days before go 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 you in the face. And my phone dings, don't answer it, because I'm in the middle of this discussion with my wife. And so we get down 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 had not met.

That name my number. Wasn't close with his family. I'd met his son a couple of times. I'd met his wife. I've 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, you've got my attention. Yeah. And 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. My first call was this guy, Eddie Penny, who had talked about his journey to Christ. Eddie Penny was a SEAL Team 6 guy

and had another really rough go and then found Christ. And I released his episode on Christmas of 2020, 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 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 too, to believing in God, is that experience. So it was through psychedelics turned the light on and had me exploring.

And then that, like, solidified it right there. I was like, wow. Like, 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 it at some point in my life. I hope you do too. It's,

it was life-changing. That's incredible, man. I'm kind of speechless. 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 yeah and 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 tell you honestly I haven't had too many people that I've been close to pass away I consider myself really fortunate and not I know it's coming, right? Like 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 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 as 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,

where we can't find the answer, like a fundamental part of life. It's like, where does consciousness reside? Nobody seems to be able to figure that out. What makes you, you, you're your consciousness, right?

Yeah. Where does it live? Where does it go? It's an emergent phenomenon. Where the fuck does it go? Does that your soul? Yeah. You know,

and, and, So, I don't know, maybe we just have not, 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 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, 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, I don't want to believe that. But it kind 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? 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, where somebody can 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 on to 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, they're being life out there? I don't think there is. There's some pretty good evidence of it. Like, I have not heard it. 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 kind of guessing a little bit on this but there was the observation of a star system and in particular

looking at the 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 in is a tremendous distance right um 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 the sun in 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 orbits 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 the 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? right? So if you just plot out, this is a simple example, your x-axis, you plot out an x-y 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 dips. Right, because literally there's something in the way. So the light coming from it kind of goes down as the plant'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 X, Y, 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. water on Saturn, right? And is it Neptune? I don't know. I know they found, they found water on Mars. And they found water on Mars. Yeah. There's presumably like 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, is you just try to like 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 europe 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. It could be wrong that they found 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 on 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 good? conspiracy? Yeah.

Or might, if you just observe the crap out of it, might there be a little bit more to it? Yeah. It's, 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 spiritual thing. And then,

but then, you know, they're starting to find, I mean, I don't know, did they ever debunk the pyramid on Mars or anything? Sometimes I wonder if there's life,

if they're, was life. As this conversation gets more serious, somebody eats some gummies. I wonder, sometimes I wonder, you know, I mean, they talk about ancient civilizations 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 a thing, 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 debunk that or what, but I've talked to remote viewers. I do think that's real remote viewing.

What was 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 psychics 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, there's the knife. You know, that's, that's remote viewing. So that's actually people can do it. It's a real thing. Really? Yeah, the CIA had a program going with the Remembro Institute for a long time. I brought in Joe McMountable, who was remote viewer number one for the United States and 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 has this happening? And he was like, it's right here. And 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 that finished Stargate. Stargate doesn't exist, but I'm sure it's renamed it or another program. I know Naval Special Warfare was looking into this stuff recently. I got some doctors. 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, 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. Sense and subtle stuff. 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 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 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, I mean, 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. and 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 them in and you're not paying attention. Yeah. Yeah.

So. And when you just see the world presented to you on a screen and that's such a digestible format, like we're little monkey brains. We'll just spend all day on that. Yeah. Like, 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. Yep. On average. 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. 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 somewhere else i don't know you know what i mean but are you um are you familiar with this thing called fermi's paradox no vermice paradox yeah it's like the where is everybody all right we're back from the break man we went down some rabbit holes there did i love rabbit

Me too. Remote viewing. You got to look into it. I'm absolutely going to look into it. But it is fascinating. But I want to get into Robin Hood. 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, like, the whole premise of it. I don't know much about stocks or any of that kind of stuff, so we have to walk me through it a little bit, but what was, well, 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, that was 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. Yeah. 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. So there were protests in New 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?

At the time, we were building a different finance company that was building technology for other financial institutions, like 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 our friends were like, no, you're part of the problem. And I'm like, 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.

And like that sort of sentiment. So that was kind of the backdrop. And then we'd 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 really. 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 to be a part of it. So this was kind of like the backdrop for what would become Robin Hood. This was kind of the cultural backdrop, right? And I remember the genesis of the company started over a phone conversation that my co-connor and I had. And it was kind of like the company that we were building then was not doing super well. And we're like, 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 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 that'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 is 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 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 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 Robin Hood. Mobile, zero commission, and kind of, like, built from the ground up brand new.

At least the interface and the way the product looked was, I think, pretty different than it was out there at the time. I mean, yeah, it was different. Everybody was totally 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 cool. So I started using it. I mean, I can't remember. It was probably around, I would bet, 2000. 2010 time frame maybe. A little later than that.

We released it publicly, I want to say, in 2015. Well, then it was after then. But yeah, 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 that if if we 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? Like the rich person's 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 Robin Hood, 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 and 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 $5 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 in the coastal cities in this country. Like, 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 Robin Hood, we would do this thing where we would go from, here's the 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 in the, even in the very, very early days of the company is we would

make a prototype. And I would say, okay, if we start on Monday, then either on Friday evening or on Saturday morning, let's take the prototype that we built and let's go put it in. And let's go put it in front of some customers or some hypothetical customers. And at the time, you know, we had 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 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 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 $10 because at the time a lot of brokers are charging $10 commissions. And this is like closer to 15 years ago at this point, or not quite that much, 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 Robin Hood get access to the markets? Oh. Without going through all the middlemen. Oh, I thought you were asking how I got introduced to the stock.

market. How did Robin Hood 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 the service. But we were a little startup, right? We were like 15, 20 people. when we first launched the product. Like that's, wow, 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 clearinghouse.

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? Mm-hmm. Right. So product market fit is this tricky one, especially with consumers. 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 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 wait list 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... 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 actually... had the product, like, we kind of had this 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-paked. 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 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 as 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 or 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 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, 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 it? Yeah, I mean, they loved it. I obviously loved it. I mean, you said a 100,000-person wait list. The interesting thing was people were like, oh, I'd try that. That's interesting. I'd 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 they're 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. So 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? Mm-hmm. Yeah. What a wild journey that has been.

I mean, it was the only product like that at the time, correct? Is it... 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. At the end of 2019, if I'm remembering correctly, is when a bunch of the brokerage houses all got rid of their commissions. that was triggered from you guys yeah yeah me too yeah yeah um that was that was like that was both

very if you've revolutionized the entire market how fucking cool is that feel i don't know man it's a it's it's a it's a it's crazy to to have made all that stuff happen still on the board of directors the company is still actively involved. And to have the chance to work on something else at the 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 other ones too. Yeah. 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 Robin Hood through COVID, like going from a company that was at a nascent stage, right? I think we're still under 1,000 people before COVID happened or 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, a lot of people were like, let me check out the stock market. Let me check out Robin Hood. 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 know what the number was. It was a lot, though. The other interesting thing was I'd 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. 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. A little bit, you know, looking for 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 Robin Hood era, right, of my life, like, 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, 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 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. We were very poor, right? And so at that time, the money was a big motivator, right? Like, 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 question I'm trying to ask myself is, could I do it again, right? Could I revolutionize something else? 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 or business or whatever. I mean, once you hit that apex, there's an aspect that becomes boring. and it's time and 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

I'm I'm looking for the next thing I think I found it and I'll use you know what I think you have yeah can ask what is I could tell you it's in the tech space okay um but it has to do with with cyber security cool but 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 because I like you had mentioned it 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 look Like when I started this, this was my creative outlet. Well, like... When it becomes the main thing, it's different. Yep. Yep. It, 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 so 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, 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'd like, I fiend off creativity. Like, I love it. I love disrupting things and going to new ventures because I've realized like I'm about the journey. I mean, even, you know, 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. that was like at the time i mean it was it was not nearly as publicized as it is now and i you know was like um yeah 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 and real estate and then and then the c i think popped up which i I didn't even really know was a CIA first that I was contracting, that I was trying out to contract for. Then I got there.

And once again, I was like, all right, well, here I am. This is a 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 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 is like what was happening during that time I remember the balance of being a student and 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 stopped developing. Yeah, you stopped developing, right? So I did a kind of, I did a pretty, I think somewhat out of left field thing which was right actually before the GameStop stuff happened probably two or three months prior I announced that I was actually stepping back as CEO of the company

because before Vlad and I had been co-CEOs from beginning until 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 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 new CEO that was? No, no, we had been CEOs together. Oh, okay. But this was like the beginning of him as CEO by himself. Yeah. Tough time. So my experience there was like, holy cow, how do I help this company, 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 revolutionize the entire market 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, it, this is, the this is the everyday this is the little man sticking it to the big to the big man correct and and so can you can you just walk me through what exactly was going on with game stop at the time why it was so controversial because that's the other thing that's revolutionized is then I remember seeing I remember seeing all these hedge funds experts and 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 you're going to have to learn 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, 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 Robin Hood and it was wild yeah old hold hold 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 step 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 out

that people couldn't sell GameStop? They could buy it, but they couldn't sell it on Robin Hood. Did the SEC get involved? What happened there? So what happened was it was actually there was 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 Robin Hood, 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 we're 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 Robin Hood, also recent board member Atherflux, was actually one of the people that was kind of navigating Robin Hood 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 twenty one yeah four and a half years wow yeah that that navigating through that dominated a lot of the next couple of the the few years that followed 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.

It's 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 well 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 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 Robin Hood, there was the 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, it's perfect. Yeah.

Like, there is no better name for what you guys built them. There were some other much worse working titles for what the company would be. Robin Hood was a really good one. I think my co-founders, girlfriend, now wife was one that came up with that. No, but the 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 and 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

that felt like we as a society collectively got distracted by the internet. 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, whole shit. Yeah. I was like, is this actually happening in my lifetime? Because if it is, I need to, like, I 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 not quite sure if, but I felt this like 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 sort of ways for people to make money in space, that's how you make space a bigger part of everyday'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, buy 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. But you also create opportunities for people 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. 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 as it first rationale. There may not be a good solution, but the rationale is on solid footing, the reason why you'd want to do it. And it has this opportunity to increase the capitalist envelope in space. 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 Atherflex. 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 into space, the first one next June, it's like a year ago. Oh, man, that's awesome. Are we in July now? We're in July 1st. Yeah, that's why I got to go fucking get to work tomorrow morning.

Yeah, we're putting a first satellite up that does it. Congratulations. Yeah. That's incredible. 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? You don't have to have a scientific breakthrough to do this. We're doing this with technology that exists today. That's like, that's one of the core theses behind the company, right? is to take this thing that has been science fiction for a long time and to 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're, even if you start out at the wrong answer,

you're going to be moving in the direction of the right answer quickly. So what is this thing called space solar power? Should I tell you about it? Yeah, please do. Some water too. 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 out 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 antenna, 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, you can point it in space, It's basically like, 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 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. They're just spewing off energy from nuclear fusion, right? So you have hydrogen, helium fusion happening, heats the whole thing up, thing glows red, amidst solar radiation, which are 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 array 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 were our satellites, for the first demo missions at 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 side. That's step one. So we want 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 a light that's a very light, in the battery, it goes into a bank of photodiodes, which are basically glorified, like, glorified LEDs.

Okay. Those things, those are thin silicon wafers that when you run a current to 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 going to 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 a 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 gonna have a bigger array to receive the power The array on the ground is gonna 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 of captured. So what is this receiver on the ground? 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 5 to 10 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 it'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, and use it to power stuff.

Wow. 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 a orbit behind it so we can test some of the more technical functionality. But the idea 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 kind of want to be able to step up the maturity of the technology. then you start building bigger, higher power satellites. And the way that you have more power 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 wide? does that sound it's it's it's pretty out there but um but you know i mentioned you know i'd

interviewed uh this gentleman steve quast who was talking about this just about a month ago and i was i saw a tweet that he he did and he was talking about beaming energy down and and and all kinds of wazoos stuff but i was like this guy actually seems like legit he's not It 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. 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 a 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, what do you call the ground station?

Ground station? It's a ground 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?

So 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 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 mention 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 beming 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. Okay. 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 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, we'll be able to generate enough power to power a small neighborhood. Wow. Wow. Wow. Would this, would the beam punch through clouds?

Depends on how much clouds there are. So, yeah. It, I think more, more likely than not, what we'll end up doing is one of beaming power when we see pockets of openings in the clouds. Okay. How fast. So, we're talking about what the satellite's in orbit and it come it so it's a line of sight yeah being correct so wouldn't how how long will the satellite be in the line of site window like five to 10 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 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. Okay. 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 site. 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 basically, tell me if I'm correct on this. Let's just say there's 100 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, 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, 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. 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 access, 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 satellite thoughts. Even to do something like that you need to 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, 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 cloud cover and the atmosphere does dilute the beam somewhat, then, I mean, then you would... You'd be in a worse spot, right? Yeah. 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 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 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 one the ones at the outer ends of your array to basically noise cancel. That makes sense. It does. It does. I mean, 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 or 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 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 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 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 altogether, and you have this little receiver dish and all of your power infrastructure is in orbit.

Yeah, it cuts so many logistics. out of the game that it's... 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 he's listening to him.

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 has written a lot about this, so I have been talking to him,

reaching out to him as a, again, a student, right? And I think it was in those conversations that he kind of pointed us to a lot of the work that the DOD, done on this and kind of trying to articulate because the DoD has written a lot on this about applications for this. Like why, 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 really 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'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. I mean, you know, general, say, general, 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 full energy company, right? Like a true energy company. And as you can mature the technology, as the cost of, 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 reduced 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, 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 copper cables and lines on the ground in the same way that Starlink is, you know, complementing all the fiber optic telecommunications of the structure on the ground. So I think that's kind of the goal, is to make, get the cost down. As you get the cost down, you can start being cost competitive

with more use cases. 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 great can I ask you a question sure curious me 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 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 contract and for CIA. 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 out a house, you're likely not going to have a diesel generator because I 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. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 general. generators. And so, you know, what can happen with the logistics of that? I mean, one, it's expensive. You know, two, it, I mean, convoys were getting hit all over in Iraq and Afghanistan. So if your fuel gets hit blown up with by an IED, well, then you're shit out of luck, buddy. You know, 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? No. Do you know people that did? No. Lots of communications equipment and antennas and 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 Ruckpack into the field With 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 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. Yeah. But I'm sure they probably have some type of solar panels occurring around now. It's surprised me one bit. It's come up a couple of times by 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... It would take to power like a small, decentralized grid, like the size of a small town, maybe 15, 20,000 people?

Um... Tough to say, I'd have to do some back-of-the-a-the-o-map on it. I think also, um... 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, 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 time 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... 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 or 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... Star ship. Yeah. Some very early modeling we did and we kind of thought that we could get those ballpark of number.

Wow. Yeah, so that's kind of the part about this. 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 100 satellites per starship, right? and let's say that there's 7,000 starships out of 7,000 Starlink satellites in space,

roughly speaking, let's just say for the sake of argument. That's like 70 launches. Damn. 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, rapid reuse. Like they're going to have 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. 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 talked about a lot of stuff. With the satellites. Oh, with the satellites, right, right. It's how where my head was going. Let me think.

What else is the satellites? How small do you think these receivers can get? I think five to ten meters. diameter is kind of what I mean look we might end up being if we get to that we might end up shooting for smaller might end up shooting for like two and a half meter 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 roof, for example. I mean, we're on the cutting edge of this, so, I mean, I don't know. Could it beam it to a car while driving? Like, could this revolutionize everything and energy? Yeah, so 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 even... A ship could hold a five to ten 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 and they're powering industrial locations. That's amazing, man.

Like what you're doing is just, it's incredible. This is the brave new world, man. And I think it's, look, this is really hard, right? Like, that's what we're talking about doing here, it's not a foregone conclusion that this is going to happen.

Like, it's a tremendous, 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 got to, 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, you should have a couple of better answer 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. it and then for one reason or another it just fell off and and they decided not to come but i really wanted that interview yeah i believe that good yeah i think it would be i think that would

have been huge um i think it would be interesting to see because trump did so many of these interviews right to get like a real apples to apples comparison yeah um 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've 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. Best a lot. Hey, Ontario. Come on down to BentMGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive, the price.

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