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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

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• 0:09Speaker 01

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• 0:10Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

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• 0:16Speaker 03

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  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 03

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• 0:25Speaker 01

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• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  Beijubat, welcome to the show.

• 1:02Speaker 06

  What's up, man?

• 1:02Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, I'm excited about this one.

• 1:04Speaker 06

  Me too.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  I'm really excited about this one, so. But I want to dive right into this. I'm sorry I cut you off on that conversation. We got to have this on the show. But you were looking at the bar over there and asking, you know, if people drink on the show. And I said, no, I actually haven't had a drink in over three years now. I did the psychedelics thing. And you 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.

• 1:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I feel like the contrary take here is that alcohol's 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, 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.

• 2:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's an interesting God's. You're the only one that I've ever heard say that. But it, I mean, I don't know. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm in my forties now, so I don't know how young people are socializing. Unless I go to downtown Nashville on Broadway, then I

• 2:29Speaker 06

  Then you see it.

• 2:29Shawn Ryan?

  No shortage of alcohol there. But I wonder, I mean, how are, how are people socializing that don't drink nowadays?

• 2:38Speaker 06

  On the internet?

• 2:40Shawn Ryan?

  That's

• 2:40Speaker 06

  Are they, are they not socializing? I don't know. I mean, I think this is like a broader thing, right? Is 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, that whole thing, like long form thinking, like being bored.

• 3:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. And alcohol was like the universal social lubricant when I was in my early twenties, right?

• 3:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me too. I think it started at like thirteen.

• 3:13Shawn Ryan?

  But yeah, that's all.

• 3:15Speaker 06

  But what happens if you get rid of it, right? Is like you have a lot of people that probably just socialize a lot less.

• 3:23Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's gotta be replaced with something. Unfortunately, you're probably right. It's probably replaced with Instagram and X and

• 3:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's social media.

• 3:32Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't think that's, I don't think that's great. I don't think that, I don't think the human brain is wired like that, right? We're, we are social animals. Like we're, we're, we're animals, right? We're like, we're, we're creatures that take on the human form, but we're an incredibly social species and it's weird if that sort of gets replaced or like augmented in a way that doesn't line up with how our brains work with, with the internet.

• 3:58Shawn Ryan?

  People say the same thing about cigarettes too.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  Wait, do they?

• 4:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I used to smoke. You never smoked?

• 4:05Speaker 06

  I've smoked.

• 4:06Shawn Ryan?

  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, uh, cigarettes and alcohol, which is absurd for this show.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  I mean, like going, like living in New York in my early twenties, right? And if you go outside and have a cigarette with somebody like that's

• 4:25Shawn Ryan?

  There's a connection.

• 4:25Speaker 06

  You make friends, right?

• 4:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:29Shawn Ryan?

  Or a work or anywhere.

• 4:31Speaker 06

  Although I, yeah, that it's just, I think nicotine, I think cigarettes, I think are bad for you. Like I think it makes it hard to breathe. Like probably going to give you cancer someday.

• 4:42Shawn Ryan?

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

• 4:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:50Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's, and I think it's ended a lot of relationships as well. I mean, I know in, in my prior relationships, you know, you get to tug on the bottle a little bit too much and everything goes off the rails, but, but that's me.

• 5:05Speaker 06

  I had the benefit of being Indian, my body just can't really handle alcohol.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:12Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  One, one of the, one of the nice things, uh, yeah, like I, I, I could never, I, like I, in college, I would like to have thought that I could drink, but I don't think I could really hold my alcohol that well.

• 5:26Speaker 06

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

• 5:32Shawn Ryan?

  Tell me about it.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  Ah, there's a lot of really late nights of doing problem sets. Like all nighter after all nighter of doing problem sets.

• 5:41Shawn Ryan?

  Not your typical college experience, huh?

• 5:43Speaker 06

  The like, living in the physics building at Stanford, right? Or, 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.

• 5:58Shawn Ryan?

  Nice, nice.

• 6:01Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we got a lot to talk about today.

• 6:03Speaker 06

  We do, man.

• 6:04Shawn Ryan?

  Ton to talk about, so let me start you off with an introduction here.

• 6:10Shawn Ryan?

  Baiju Bat, son of immigrants who grew up in Virginia with a passion for science sparked by your father's work at NASA's Langley Research Center. A Stanford educated physicist and mathematician who co-founded Robinhood alongside your college roommate Vlad Teniff.

• 6:28Shawn Ryan?

  This no fee trading app revolutionized the brokerage industry and shook up Wall Street, earning you an Apple Design Award in 2015 for its user-friendly design. Navigated Robinhood through turbulent waters, including the GameStop trading halt and SEC settlements. Recently, you founded Aetherflux, a bold new venture aiming to harness solar energy from space and beam it to Earth. It's, I love that. I, I, just like we were, I was telling you before, we just had this guy Steve Quast on and he was talking about beaming energy to the earth.

• 7:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:04Shawn Ryan?

  And it was so far out there. I'm just, I'm like, is this, is this shit actually like real? And, and now here you are, you're, you're legitimately doing it.

• 7:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:14Shawn Ryan?

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

• 7:27Speaker 06

  Oh, man. Um, so I got, I got a car kind of recently, which I love, love this thing. It's a 1992. I like my cars old. First of all, I like my cars old and stinky.

• 7:38Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 7:39Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. Um, so I got this 1992, uh, Porsche 911 RS in mint green.

• 7:48Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  Hunting for this car for years. Finally found it.

• 7:52Shawn Ryan?

  Where'd you find it?

• 7:53Speaker 06

  I think it was in Germany.

• 7:54Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, that's awesome.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, this thing is cool. I like, so I got into the, talk a little bit about building shit with our hands. So during COVID, um, this was kind of a wild time, for me at least, and I think for everybody it was wild, but we're all like stuck at home. And here I am, like, trying to lead Robinhood. So at the time Vlad and I were co-CEOs of the company, trying to lead this, 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, I need a creative outlet. Like, I'm, like, I,

• 8:36Speaker 06

  I've, I've always been this way where there's the main thing that I care about, that's kind of like the, the main thing that my energy's 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.

• 9:17Speaker 06

  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 material things. So I was like, all right, I also love cars. Cause I, I grew up in Virginia and I had to drive all fucking time. Cause 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, I want to get into classic cars someday. And I, I convinced myself that the way that I was going to do it was start out by building a car first. No kidding? Yeah. What'd you build? So are you familiar with this company called Factory Five? No. All right, very cool company.

• 10:01Speaker 06

  They build kit cars that are like basically like re, re-imaginations of like Shelby race cars. So they've got the, the Shelby Cobra that they make. Um, and then the one that I did is the hardtop version of it. So the Shelby Daytona. So during COVID, I like, I'd never done this before. I ordered one of these kits, um, 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.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  Did you, did you find that difficult? Um. Or it come naturally to you? I like difficult things. Mm-hmm. So I did find it to be difficult for sure, but that was, that's kind of like, that's the rite of passage in a lot of ways, right? Yeah. Like I remember I found myself a couple of times, this is also COVID, right? And so you're not. There's not much to do. There's not much to do. There's also not a lot of people that can help you do shit. So I remember finding myself a couple of times, like, it's like, all right, it's Saturday. What am I doing today? I'm going to figure out how to mount this damn fuel tank out of this car. And I remember finding myself sort of on one of those little sliders underneath the car and like trying to prop the thing up on my legs and trying to screw it in.

• 11:28Speaker 06

  You become like a contortionist trying to build this stuff.

• 11:31Shawn Ryan?

  When was that?

• 11:32Speaker 06

  This was during covid.

• 11:33Shawn Ryan?

  How many class of cars do you have now?

• 11:36Speaker 06

  Had a couple of classes. Yeah.

• 11:37Shawn Ryan?

  Awesome.

• 11:38Speaker 06

  My, my thing is I love, I love the way that things work and I think that that experience was super interesting because

• 11:48Speaker 06

  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 the mechanical things

• 12:00Speaker 06

  working in a particular way. For example, right? Like

• 12:04Speaker 06

  I think cars sound really good. Love the sound of cars. But it's like, well, what does that mean? Like what, what, what part of the sound do you like? Right? Do you like the exhaust note? Do you like the induction sound from the engine? Do you like the gears chattering? Cause 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 be like, actually. And this is kind of one of the places that I've landed now. It's better to drive a slow car fast than to drive a fast car slow. So I actually kind of like my cars. More underpowered, lightweight. So you gotta like really wring them out to actually keep up with traffic, for example.

• 12:46Shawn Ryan?

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

• 12:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Are you in a car? Tell me. There's an engine sitting over there.

• 12:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, well. Love to talk about that on the air, but I can't. But, uh, you know.

• 13:00Speaker 06

  There's an engine.

• 13:00Shawn Ryan?

  Obvious reasons, but, um, but, um, now I just got a 1977 Ford F-150.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  Oh, sick.

• 13:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. We, we, we were talking before we both, I was, I grew up in Missouri. You were born there.

• 13:14Speaker 06

  I was, yeah.

• 13:15Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, and that was like, they just don't make cars like they used to, man.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  No.

• 13:21Shawn Ryan?

  Even it's in, yeah, just, 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.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  What kind of engine does it have?

• 13:30Shawn Ryan?

  A 351.

• 13:32Speaker 06

  Nice. Yeah. I love old cars. Yeah. Cars today are,

• 13:38Speaker 06

  all right, I'm going to go on a bit of a limb here. They're like kind of perverted in my opinion. Cause 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 a hand.

• 14:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 14:26Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about?

• 14:28Speaker 06

  That's why I say it's perverted.

• 14:29Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  Me too.

• 14:49Shawn Ryan?

  I used to drive them for work.

• 14:51Speaker 06

  Big verbally V8?

• 14:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah, love it. But everything's going electric and that, I think the sound of like these supercars are amazing. I just, I can't envision a Ferrari flying by me with.

• 15:07Speaker 06

  No sound?

• 15:07Shawn Ryan?

  With no sound.

• 15:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's weird.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  Huge.

• 15:11Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like it takes from the experience.

• 15:14Speaker 06

  Oh, man, yeah, that's not good.

• 15:16Shawn Ryan?

  But.

• 15:17Speaker 06

  I, I, I find, I find the, not just the electrification, because that, 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.

• 15:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  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.

• 15:52Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, you drive, don't you?

• 15:54Speaker 06

  I do, yeah.

• 15:54Shawn Ryan?

  You go to the track?

• 15:55Speaker 06

  Not that much.

• 15:56Shawn Ryan?

  Have you taken driving schools?

• 15:58Speaker 06

  I have, yeah.

• 15:59Shawn Ryan?

  Which ones?

• 16:00Speaker 06

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

• 16:02Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, you have?

• 16:02Speaker 06

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

• 16:05Shawn Ryan?

  How was it?

• 16:06Speaker 06

  It was really fast. It was like too fast.

• 16:08Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, have you, have you? This is out.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  Have you done, have you done it before?

• 16:12Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I've done a bunch, I've done a bunch of driving schools for back in the old days when I was a SEAL and contracted for CIA. They, they put us through a ton of schools.

• 16:20Speaker 06

  They put you through the Ferrari school?

• 16:22Shawn Ryan?

  No, no. It was more, it was a lot more practical. It was 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, drive them faster.

• 16:36Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:38Shawn Ryan?

  So there's this course in New Hampshire. It's called the O'Neill Rally Racing Course. Have you heard of it?

• 16:43Speaker 06

  Mm-mm. I love rally racing.

• 16:45Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, it is fucking awesome. I went there and I think I went there for like two weeks. This is, this is a long time ago, but you're out in the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire. And day one, I think, is the first phase is front wheel drive. Then you do rear wheel drive. Then you do all wheel drive. Then you do off-roading. And you got like, you start off on little Ford Festivas. And move to Audis and BMWs for rear wheel drive. And you're just on these little trails in the mountains out there. The trails are like.

• 17:21Speaker 06

  We took BMWs on dirt roads?

• 17:23Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, it's awesome. It's awesome. You've got to, you've got to check this out. It's like the coolest fucking driving school I've ever taken. And, uh, yeah, like I said, I think it's about two weeks long. They got all kinds of different packages. But when my, when my son gets older, that's one of the first things I want to do with him when he, when he can see over the steering wheel, get him out there on, on that, uh, on those trails and it, dude, it's, it's awesome. You'll love it. I hope you do it.

• 17:49Speaker 06

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

• 17:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. O'Neill Rally Racing School. That's not a plug. It's just, it's just fucking awesome.

• 17:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. Also, off-roading is really fun.

• 18:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, they, it's.

• 18:03Speaker 06

  Really fun.

• 18:04Shawn Ryan?

  The whole, you do it all. And then you can go, you go there in the winter and do it in the snow. It's. Awesome. The instructors are phenomenal. I can't wait to do it again, but.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would actually love to do that. So I've done, I've done one actual driving school, which is like the Ferrari one. Kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum, too fast. Like it makes you feel like you're gonna throw up the whole time.

• 18:30Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 18:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I've not.

• 18:33Speaker 06

  Off-roading is way more fun.

• 18:34Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 18:47Speaker 06

  Were there any like big old trucks on this one?

• 18:50Shawn Ryan?

  Nah, 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.

• 19:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:09Shawn Ryan?

  But, well, everybody starts off with a gift here.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  Oh, amazing.

• 19:18Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance League gummy bears, legal in all 50 states.

• 19:21Speaker 06

  Can I have some?

• 19:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, man. Dig in.

• 19:25Shawn Ryan?

  Just candy. There's no funny business.

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Good stuff. I love gummy bears.

• 19:33Shawn Ryan?

  Me too. But, um, well, I'd love to do a life story on you.

• 19:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 19:38Shawn Ryan?

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

• 19:45Speaker 06

  So. Grew up in Alabama. And then in Southern Virginia.

• 19:53Speaker 06

  And I guess I was grown up by the time I got to college. My family moves to the US from India. Uh, my dad. Had grown up always wanting to study physics. So it was like his life goal. He wanted to study physics.

• 20:09Speaker 06

  And they're from a little town, I guess now it's a big town in India called called Bhavner in Gujarat. My dad, my grandfather was one of the first Western trained eye doctors. No kidding. 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 and his brothers. So my dad had always wanted to study physics, goes to college to study chemistry, I want to say, but 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.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  Applying to PhD programs in America.

• 20:59Speaker 06

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

• 21:13Speaker 06

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

• 21:19Speaker 06

  And I love him.

• 21:21Speaker 06

  But lo and behold, my dad, I think eventually was like, all right, I'm going to get married. Like he was, I, I, yeah, I think he was maybe like, all right, maybe this coming to America to study physics thing isn't going to happen. So he gets married to my mom. And then she's pregnant with me and then he gets into University of Huntsville, Alabama, to study physics. And my mom originally, I think was not going to come. Cause she's like, she was the youngest of a bunch of siblings. She really loved her family in India. And the story that they told me is that they go to the embassy in India. And my mom is pregnant with me and they're like, oh, your son, you've got, you're pregnant, right? And they're like, your son's going to be born in America.

• 22:04Speaker 06

  So my mom, much to her frustration. So this is going back a little bit further, but I think it's No, 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. Uh, yeah, Huntsville, Alabama. Yeah, that's where my dad was studying physics. And I think they knew like one Indian family in America that were also doctors that were in Warrensburg, Missouri. Right around where I grew up. Yeah. And so my mom, the story goes, she goes out to Warrensburg, right when she's about to give birth to me. Because you can't afford to go to the hospital for like a week.

• 22:48Speaker 06

  Right, so she goes there, I'm born, and then she comes back to Alabama, which is where I grew up. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's cool, man. It was a. You still tied with both of your parents? Yeah, yeah, very much so. Did you say your dad in the 40s? Or in his 40s? No, when, when my grandfather studied. Oh, okay. Which must have been in the 40s or 50s in India. Okay. Maybe, maybe it was 50s or 60s. No, he's, he was born in the 40s. Okay. He wasn't in his 40s in the 40s. Right on. What were you into? What were you into growing up? Yeah, so my childhood was.

• 23:32Speaker 06

  I had a really loving family, but the circumstances were, I think objectively, pretty tough a lot of times, so. 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 US.

• 23:54Speaker 06

  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 Pecoson, Virginia.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  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. Damn. When I was like five years old. So there I was, only child.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  Like, not a lot of brown people around Southern.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  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.

• 24:49Speaker 06

  Cause my mom didn't speak English. We learned English together. I learned English watching TV. Wow. Yeah. So that was kind of who I was as a kid when we got to Virginia. So what was I into as a kid? Really into superheroes, was really into like cartoons and X-Men and comic books and stuff like that. I was also really into science and space and that a lot of that came from my dad.

• 25:16Speaker 06

  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 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 nineties. So I remember distinctly remember going and like my dad had his computer at his desk.

• 26:03Speaker 06

  So that was a lot of my childhood. I mean, I grew up

• 26:07Speaker 06

  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. Just, oh, okay. And so that that was kind of my childhood, right? We were not terribly well to do. We lived in like a small apartment. My dad was a scientist at NASA.

• 26:39Speaker 06

  He was on dialysis. I was, I was a little kid, you know, I was like a little, little boy. And the interesting, the point at which my life fundamentally changed was when I was in eighth grade, actually. And my dad had been on dialysis this whole time and was waiting to get a kidney transplant, like waiting year in, year out. And we had this little beeper that he would carry around with him. It's like, oh, did the beeper go off? Because if the beeper went off, it meant that one of the hospitals called because they had a kidney transplant for him. And you gotta 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.

• 27:24Speaker 06

  So he was on dialysis and he got this infection.

• 27:29Speaker 06

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

• 27:44Speaker 06

  And my dad goes from being sick to being very sick, to being hospitalized, to my mom being like, every day, waking up in the morning and going and staying with my dad at the hospital all day. And I was just kind of like home alone, just fucking confused. Damn. Being like, what, what do I, what do I do? Right? Like, where, where does life go from here? Feels completely rudderless. Didn't have any siblings, right? I was not cool at all. I was like fat brown kid in school. Like, there wasn't a lot of, I had a couple of friends, actually one good friend from

• 28:29Speaker 06

  that period that's still a friend of mine.

• 28:33Speaker 06

  But I just remember feeling so unbelievably lost. And then my dad's health continues to take a turn for the worse. And he has a couple of really major surgeries where...

• 28:46Speaker 06

  You know, at this, at thirteen 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. 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 nineteen ninety-seven. Ninety-seven, maybe ninety-eight.

• 29:16Shawn Ryan?

  Did you go back? Did you, is that like the only time you went back to India? Or did you go back and forth a couple of times?

• 29:22Speaker 06

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

• 29:25Shawn Ryan?

  You don't remember it?

• 29:26Speaker 06

  Vague memories of it. But I, I'm an American, right? Like, um, through and through. So that, that, that's happening 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 is, this theme will come back a little bit later on, right? Is like, you have to make the most of the opportunities in life. And America is the land of opportunity. And my dad did beat one thing into my head, which is education, education, education. Like, that's your way out. So I go from not being a terribly good student to being like, I'm going to get really good at math.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  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's door. 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.

• 30:58Speaker 06

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

• 31:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 31:26Speaker 06

  And just at that point, like figured out that I love 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 this, one of the interesting things growing up, right? It's 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, 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. Cause otherwise they're not going to know what the fuck they're talking about. Right? Like that's what that era of life is about is about learning stuff.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  So that you have a better lens to look at like this weird thing called adulthood in life through.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  So.

• 32:23Shawn Ryan?

  What was your dad studying at NASA? What was, what was he working on?

• 32:26Speaker 06

  He was doing atmospheric sciences.

• 32:28Shawn Ryan?

  What is that?

• 32:29Speaker 06

  I think he was doing like satellite imaging.

• 32:31Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 32:32Speaker 06

  Is that fucking wild?

• 32:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:35Speaker 06

  You can't make this stuff up. It goes around full circle.

• 32:40Shawn Ryan?

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

• 32:43Speaker 06

  We do, yeah. He's, uh, 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.

• 33:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, so they come over and hang out with the kids pretty often.

• 33:03Shawn Ryan?

  They live next to you or close to you?

• 33:04Speaker 06

  They live pretty close, but yeah.

• 33:05Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool, man. That's cool. I wish my parents lived closer.

• 33:09Speaker 06

  Where do your parents live?

• 33:10Shawn Ryan?

  They're in Florida.

• 33:11Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 33:12Shawn Ryan?

  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, 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.

• 33:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, at which point I made the argument that the best place to raise kids is Silicon Valley, which, which I don't, I don't actually think that's true.

• 33:39Shawn Ryan?

  So where do we go from, where do we go from school?

• 33:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, so second half of college or second half of high school was very fun. Felt like my brain woke up and I could just learn stuff and I loved physics and I loved math. So I just went, I went whole hog. Like, that's what I was like, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna try to get into Stanford or MIT or Caltech or Harvard or one of these like really good schools.

• 34:10Speaker 06

  And so I just like buried my nose in the textbook and I started actually working for, I wanna say like a year or two, and the nights and weekends and during the summers at this place called Jefferson Lab, which is a particle accelerator in Southern Virginia. So I was deep into physics.

• 34:28Shawn Ryan?

  A particle accelerator, what is that?

• 34:30Speaker 06

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

• 34:36Shawn Ryan?

  This is like CERN.

• 34:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:38Shawn Ryan?

  Are you familiar with CERN?

• 34:39Speaker 06

  I am.

• 34:40Shawn Ryan?

  What are they doing there?

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Ravenhead.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped brewing? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  I'm not the first, Danny.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 35:13Speaker 07

  How about a latte?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Maybe dark roast?

• 35:15Speaker 07

  Vanilla?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Caramel?

• 35:16Speaker 07

  Blueberry?

• 35:17Speaker 04

  You could get them to agree on one flavor or give everyone what they want.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  With Keurig, there's over 500 K-Cup pod varieties of fresh, flavorful coffee.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  No effort, no grind, no settling.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Great coffee without the grind. Cure it.

• 35:39Speaker 06

  Uh, they're studying quantum field theory, right? So, quantum field theory is a fascinating subject, by the way. Should we talk about this?

• 35:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  All right, so do you know about quantum mechanics?

• 35:54Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 35:55Speaker 06

  All right.

• 35:57Speaker 06

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

• 36:06Speaker 06

  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, um, let's see if I can do a decent job of explaining this, is that things in nature have this particle behavior sometimes. Sometimes they have this wave behavior. And quantum states are when, I think it's actually easier to talk about quantum mechanics a little bit more specifically, like in the context of electromagnetism.

• 36:44Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 36:45Speaker 06

  And light. So that's kind of what I'm trying to get to, is there's this idea of, and this actually relates to the name of the company, Aetherflux, by the way. There's this idea of whether light is a wave or it's a particle. And different people through history have had different opinions on whether it's one or the other.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  And, um, there was this, there's this idea, well, if particle, if, if light is a wave, then waves have some medium through which they propagate, right? And we knew that light has a lot of wave-like characteristics. It's got wavelength. And in turn, it's got a frequency. 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 like how these two incongruent descriptions can fit together,

• 37:51Speaker 06

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

• 38:31Speaker 06

  So if you have, in the context of electromagnetic interaction, you have charged particles, like electrons and protons, and then you have ways in which charged particles sort of communicate with each other, which is with light, right? So, quantum field theory is kind of like the generalization of that framework to how quarks and neutrinos work, to how other kinds of fundamental particles that are predicted might exist or not exist. So, one of them, more recently, is this thing called the Higgs boson. Have you ever heard of this before? No. See if I can explain this without going into too much of a rabbit hole.

• 39:14Speaker 06

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

• 39:52Speaker 06

  One of the stories that I've heard, they've, 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, they, I think they, they felt that that was not a, that didn't speak to the sensibilities of scientific publications in, I don't really have 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.

• 40:27Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  So they're probing this theory called quantum field theory to see all the weird predictions and see if you can create those in the real world. This is a very broad explanation.

• 40:40Shawn Ryan?

  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, mini black holes and all this other stuff.

• 40:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's pretty catchy. I don't, I don't know if that's gonna happen.

• 40:50Shawn Ryan?

  Not buying it, huh?

• 40:51Speaker 06

  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.

• 40:59Shawn Ryan?

  It's, I mean, is this have to do? I watch this stuff, I don't understand half of it. So I'm gonna butcher this, because I watched this a couple of years ago, but I remember watching this thing on YouTube and it was talking about Mox Planck. Is this, and I think what they were talking about, there was a couple of different things, but they were talking about how different particles will act differently if they're being observed.

• 41:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:25Shawn Ryan?

  Consciousness around it.

• 41:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:27Shawn Ryan?

  And, 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?

• 41:39Speaker 06

  I do, yeah.

• 41:40Shawn Ryan?

  What is that?

• 41:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's this thing called the uncertainty principle. And this is something that comes from quantum mechanics. And let's see if I can remember this correctly. But there's basically the amount of the amount of precision that you can theoretically have when observing the system, right? So if I remember this correctly, it's that there's two, there's a few different statements of this uncertainty principle. And to any of the listeners out there that are actual physicists, if I get something wrong here, I'm sorry.

• 42:19Speaker 06

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

• 43:03Speaker 06

  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.

• 43:22Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 43:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've, I've heard about that too. I don't really know what that means.

• 43:40Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know what that means either.

• 43:42Speaker 06

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

• 43:43Shawn Ryan?

  So is light a particle or a wave? Because I watched, I seen, I saw some other things. It was, it was talking about when you shoot a beam into like a slit.

• 43:53Speaker 06

  The both behaviors. Yeah. Yeah. Light is both a wave and a particle. This is the wild thing. It exists, 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? Cause this is one of the things that people were studying in the late 1800s to kind of try to understand what is the phenomenon of light. And the idea, at the time, the prevailing theory is that light's a wave.

• 44:37Speaker 06

  And so if light is a wave, waves have mediums that they travel through, right? So if you have, we're talking to each other, these are sound waves. They're traveling from little vibrations in my throat. They're vibrating the air and you're hearing them in your ear and vice versa, right? So the medium that the sound wave is traveling through is the air. Similarly, if you have the surface of water and you drop a stone in it, right? You're going to create a little wave that's going to travel on the surface of the water. So if light is a wave, what's the medium? Like what is the, what is the thing that light is oscillating?

• 45:20Speaker 06

  That's behind this. So they famously called it the ether. So there's this, there's this medium that was postulated to exist called the ether. That light would travel through, that would give it this wave phenomenon. And there were a bunch of experiments done to, to sort of characterize the speed of light. And in turn, to characterize whatever this medium is that it's traveling through, which just led to a bunch of head scratching. So one of the famous, one of the famous scientific experiments during this time is called the Michelson-Morley experiment, where people tried to measure the speed of light.

• 46:04Speaker 06

  And again, this is kind of the paraphrasing of it, is if you have a light source.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  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.

• 46:57Speaker 06

  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 ether. 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?

• 47:42Speaker 06

  And time and space like literally contract and expand to be able to keep that a constant. So this was kind of the beginning of...

• 47:54Shawn Ryan?

  What does that mean? Time and space can contract and expand?

• 47:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  Because of this relativistic effect, because the satellite is moving really quickly, in the reference frame of the satellite, you'll actually see the clock ticking at a slightly different pace than you'll see it on the surface of the earth. So you actually have to do some computation in the limit to be able to figure out that difference. See if I can do a better job of explaining how this actually works. It's a pretty esoteric one.

• 48:56Speaker 06

  But, um, now, let me see if I can think of a good example of how to explain length, time dilation, and length contraction. Or, yeah. Um, maybe we come back to this one. I'm not sure if I've got a great simple explanation.

• 49:13Shawn Ryan?

  Let me ask you about quantum entanglement. It sounds like it's going to revolutionize communications, especially crypto. And so, it's my understanding that you take a particle, you split it in half, put one over here, you could put the other one in another room, in another country, infinite, 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?

• 49:44Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 49:47Shawn Ryan?

  Can anybody explain why that is happening?

• 49:50Speaker 06

  This actually has to do with, um, this actually has to do with what we were talking about a couple of minutes go around, uncertainty, right? So what ended up happening is you have

• 50:04Speaker 06

  two particles that share, that you know together are in a certain quantum state. And if, for example, if this one is up, and

• 50:18Speaker 06

  So it might be the case that if you have these two things, you know that together on average, like half of the time this one's up, half the time this one's down. And so on average, it's flat. Just make a simple analogy here, right? But you don't know at any point in time whether this one's up. So there's two particles in your system. And you know, on average, one of them is up and one of them is down. It could be like this, 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?

• 51:00Speaker 06

  So if you can keep these things truly entangled with one of them and physically separate them. And you take this one and you look at it and you're like, oh, it's up. That's going to force the other one into the down state. Because you know, these things are entangled. And you know, on average, you know, the quantum state together shares like it's flat. Meaning if one of them is up, the other one's down. Then just by looking at one of them, you force the other one into the opposite state. So this is how you would be able to encode something at a long distance like this.

• 51:37Shawn Ryan?

  Man, how.

• 51:38Speaker 06

  Does that make sense?

• 51:39Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 51:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:47Shawn Ryan?

  Is it, is it, is it, everything is connected?

• 51:51Speaker 06

  This is the true, one of the true mysteries of the universe.

• 51:55Shawn Ryan?

  Does it, does it mean there's multiverse?

• 51:58Speaker 06

  I don't know about that, man. I don't, 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.

• 52:10Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think about this stuff a lot?

• 52:12Speaker 06

  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. And see if I, see if I can come up with an example that, that kind of makes sense. No, I do think about it a decent bit. I think there's, um.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  This is the thing about quantum mechanics. And one of the things that I love about quantum mechanics is that it's very, very unintuitive. Right, there's. When you think about physics and having been trained as a physicist, it's all about intuition for how the physical world works. Right? And it's kind of like you study 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.

• 53:15Speaker 06

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

• 53:21Speaker 06

  So when you think about like, what's a physical analog to how this might work in the real world? A lot of times with quantum mechanics, you're like, kind of drawing a blank. Because you're like, things don't really work like that in the normal world. But you know that if you zoom in close enough, they have all these weird phenomenons to them.

• 53:41Speaker 06

  I think a related question is, is um,

• 53:45Speaker 06

  like, is there a higher power?

• 53:49Speaker 06

  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.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  That's it. What do your parents do? What do your parents believe? My mom is religious. My dad is not.

• 54:13Speaker 06

  My dad is a very spiritual person, but he's not a religious person. And he told me that from a pretty early age. He's like, I'm not going to tell you to believe in God or not to believe in God. It's kind of up to you. My dad kind of raised me in that way. It's like, the big questions, you can ask me what I think, but I'm not going to tell you what to think. It's kind of on you to figure out. It's good. You? Do I believe there's a higher power? Yeah. Absolutely.

• 54:40Speaker 06

  Tell me about it.

• 54:42Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you know, I I grew up Catholic and uh but I didn't really take it serious. I'd never took it seriously. And um but you know, I was raised in that, went to church every Sunday. Then I joined the SEAL teams and

• 54:59Shawn Ryan?

  just lost it, like didn't believe in anything, couldn't couldn't explain why people were dying and why why why out of, you know, a platoon of us, I mean, there's

• 55:14Shawn Ryan?

  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

• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

  if you had somebody that didn't cheat on their wife and it was sober, it was it was almost like some type of a phenomenon within the SEAL teams. And time and time again, I would see you know, there would be a bunch of us and I loved all the guys that I was with. But like I said, ninety nine ninety nine percent of us were, I wasn't married at the time, but cheating on your wife, it's getting in bar fights, it's it's just, it's it's it's a different life. And I would see the guys that get killed in action. And a lot of times it would be the guy that's not out at the platoon drinking, bar fighting, womanizing.

• 56:16Shawn Ryan?

  It would be the guy that's that's a really good dad, that is a really good husband, that that somehow has figured out the balance between war and family life. And it was just time and time again, those were the guys that were getting killed and it made it it it made me feel guilty. And and it actually like took a lot of faith from me in in God. And it was like, this just this makes no sense. Why would you fucking take the guy that That guy, you know. 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

• 56:58Shawn Ryan?

  A guy like me who consider 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, kinda like quantum mechanics. And um, and so, and then, you know, and that was very early on in my career. And then, 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 five M A O D M T two after I did the Iba game, which is a, it's a death experience. You legitimately, like, there's no question in your mind, you are, you're, you're dying. You're going to die.

• 57:41Shawn Ryan?

  And so it's, it's, and I think what it does is it is a, it's a, you know, gland dump.

• 57:48Speaker 06

  Like, what does that do to your perspective?

• 57:50Shawn Ryan?

  It changes everything. Because when you do it, so basically, you know, in, we'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 kinda feels like an eternity, but it really only lasts maybe fifteen, thirty 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 the materialistic world and, and I mean, everything. And you don't have time to process what's going on, but you, you start to separate from,

• 58:36Shawn Ryan?

  you might be thinking about a friend and you, you, you make that separation. And for me, it was, it was getting rid of materialistic stuff, friends, you know, family, da, da, da, da. And then you go and, and, and it's all the things that you're holding on to that you value and, and, and the world that we live in, right?

• 58:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:54Shawn Ryan?

  And then the last things for me was, uh, 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.

• 59:21Shawn Ryan?

  And then, and then you separate from that.

• 59:26Shawn Ryan?

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

• 59:32Speaker 06

  You actually thought you were gonna die when you did this?

• 59:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, there's no, there is, there's zero question in your brain that you are departing life. It's, it's over. And, and you don't know where you're going. And it's, and it's happening and you cannot stop it. And, um, and so after, after you go through that, like that, like I said, it feels like an eternity, but it's, it's, it's only a matter of seconds. And then when you,

• 1:00:04Shawn Ryan?

  when you make that separate, 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,

• 1:00:26Shawn Ryan?

  sounds kinda hippie-ish, but you know, when I was growing up, the hippies and they're all talking about everything's energy and all this other shit. And I'm like, okay, whatever. Well, you feel that when you cross over and I, I did not, I wanted to do it. I wanted to see, I just wanted to see earth and nature when I did it. So I didn't put the blindfold on. And so when I, when I made that separation, I crossed over, I opened my eyes and like sat up. And this is off, um, just south of, it was in, um,

• 1:00:59Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's actually in Rosaria, um, Mexico. So you're on the beach.

• 1:01:07Shawn Ryan?

  And I opened my eyes and I, I could just, I did not see anything that wasn't there. It wasn't like Grateful Dead psychedelics, you know, pink elephants and rainbows and all this shit. Everything that I saw was actually there, but it was like this intuition was injected into me. And I could feel the flow of energy. And so I could see it like come from the ocean into the beach, into the grass, up the trees, the birds. I mean, everything just was in perfect harmony.

• 1:01:42Shawn Ryan?

  And that lasts for about fifteen minutes and a lot of people, um, a lot of people say they can feel, uh, friends or relatives that have passed and, and that are in this other realm or some, some people see them. I felt the presence of my best friend who we were talking about gave up there.

• 1:02:00Speaker 06

  That was your best friend?

• 1:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I could, 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, that there's, there's definitely something more to this than any of us have put together.

• 1:02:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Shawn Ryan?

  And so then I started looking and, uh, that's actually when I started watching all these quantum mechanics videos and stuff like that. Cause I, I wanted to understand what that was. And I was really into energy. I was like, what, what is it?

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  What is it?

• 1:02:47Shawn Ryan?

  Why are we here? What's driving all this? And so it sent me down this path and, 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, uh, we're, we're in Sedona and I had had this, um, I, I wasn't happy with the way the world was going. And, uh, 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, and I was, I was enraged about a lot of things like probably a lot of the stuff that, that

• 1:03:26Shawn Ryan?

  you see in, uh, in Silicon Valley, but, um, but I, it just really bothered me like the gender stuff with children is just something that I always, I, I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand reading about it, hearing about it.

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  I, I share that feeling with you.

• 1:03:43Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh,

• 1:03:44Speaker 06

  Especially as a father of young children, you're like, this is not, it's not appropriate for your kids.

• 1:03:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And, um, that stuff was really bothering me. And then, uh, I dived deep into China. I talk about it all the time. It's, it's, um, and, and a lot of the stuff that was going on over there and how they're pulling ahead and the spy balloon and all the, it was around this timeframe.

• 1:04:08Shawn Ryan?

  And um, I went to Sedona because I had read there's all these energy fields in Sedona. And I was like, maybe I'll feel something. I don't know. We'll see. We'll go on some hikes, go to some of these energy vortexes. I want to see if I feel anything. I didn't feel anything. And um, and the last day there, it was a really rough trip of mine too. My, a really good friend of mine had just died. I'd done some heavy interviews uh, with, with um, a really good friend, Brian Montgomery, who, who's dove into the, he's fighting sex trafficking and kids and, and sex exploitation and, and uh, had another interview with this kid, uh, Tyler Andrew Vargas.

• 1:04:50Shawn Ryan?

  Not a kid, he's a man. And uh, sorry Tyler, but uh, he was the only one that survived the Abigay bombing during the Afghan withdrawal. I watched, had him come in here. Nobody would give him a platform to talk about his story. Comes in here, one leg, one arm, hobbles up these stairs to do this interview. No media would touch it. It was disgusting how the last administration handled the withdrawal. Not only the withdrawal, but him personally tried to testify in front of Congress. Rough story, right? And so I got all this weight and I'm supposed to be on vacation with my wife. And I like, I broke down on the plane. Like, and

• 1:05:33Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not a guy that breaks down. Broke down- Cannot imagine that. In tears. And she's like, what, like, what the hell is wrong with you? And um, and I was just angry the whole trip. Very last day, I, I'd 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 gotta 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 uh like internal battle going on in my head. That's that's like,

• 1:06:17Shawn Ryan?

  I I felt like nobody else cared and I felt like I was the only one talking about this stuff. And and I was trying to basically convince myself like, Sean, why do you, 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 quit letting this stuff bother you like, it's it's painfully obvious that the majority. And this is all in my head, right? But the 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

• 1:06:59Shawn Ryan?

  the the the party that doesn't want it to happen. And and and so I anyways, it's just something that really weighed on me and I I felt like I was like surrendering my soul to the devil or something. And we walk through, we we we walk back into the gate. And uh we're in the in this, uh they had an armed guard at the gate. And and I pay attention to security just because of my background and a lot of the 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 wanna chat and and I'd been there for a whole week and I walked by and there's this old guy who I'd never seen there before, ever.

• 1:07:44Shawn Ryan?

  And he he stops me and he wants to talk and I'm I just told you to stay to mind. I'm in, I'm not in the mood. I'm like, looking at him over my shoulder, telling him, hey, I don't I don't wanna talk right now. I'm not in the mood. I just wanna 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 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'd met everybody.

• 1:08:29Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:08:45Speaker 06

  You're like.

• 1:08:46Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:08:48Speaker 06

  So this guy just said this.

• 1:08:49Shawn Ryan?

  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. Alright, I guess we're gonna have a conversation, you know, like. Kind of being a dick. And and that's what he that's what he opened up. His conversation with was. Reading my fucking mind.

• 1:09:12Speaker 06

  Who was this person?

• 1:09:13Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly. Who was this person? So. So I go.

• 1:09:21Shawn Ryan?

  So my mind blanks out after he said the China thing, you know, it's like talking about gender stuff, talking about China and I'm like. Freaked out, never seen this man before in my life. And he's. In my head, reading my mind.

• 1:09:36Shawn Ryan?

  And so that ends. And I um I look at my wife, we're walking back to which is like a two minute walk back to our. Bungalow.

• 1:09:47Shawn Ryan?

  And I'm like.

• 1:09:49Shawn Ryan?

  I think God just fucking talked to me. And uh 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.

• 1:10:05Shawn Ryan?

  Bungalow. And we're just talking about Gabe and I. I could go on for an hour about this, but Gabe has always been around. Like. I just feel his presence a lot and I know he's around because. Little rabbit hole.

• 1:10:24Shawn Ryan?

  Right before Gabe died, he had started this, he, he was, he wanted to start this Wounded Warriors Hockey League. And he told me he was gonna have the, the Florida Panthers sponsor it. And I'd also told you Gabe was a heroin addict at the time, and I'm like.

• 1:10:39Speaker 06

  Are you gonna do?

• 1:10:39Shawn Ryan?

  You better clean it up if you're gonna pull that one off, buddy.

• 1:10:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Shawn Ryan?

  Cause 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, had to knock on the door to tell him they were gonna sponsor his team. The NHL was gonna sponsor the first ever Wounded Warriors hockey team. When they knocked on the door to tell him, that's when they found him dead, uh, from a heroin overdose. Fast, fast forward, Panthers win the Stanley Cup for the first time ever. What's that?

• 1:11:13Speaker 06

  What year was this?

• 1:11:14Shawn Ryan?

  This was, this was, it was about two years ago, so probably 23.

• 1:11:21Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  Um, so I got.

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  Sorry, for some reason, I thought your friend passed away years prior. Sorry, I just put two and two together in my head.

• 1:11:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:11:41Shawn Ryan?

  So, the team gave me, uh, one of the original jerseys, and it has Gabe's name on it, so Team 10, uh, logo and, and. Panthers won the, the, uh, Stanley Cup. And that jersey's hanging down there in the front doorway.

• 1:11:59Shawn Ryan?

  And I come in, in 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, they, so anyways, I'm telling you, Gabe's always around.

• 1:12:17Speaker 06

  Excited.

• 1:12:18Shawn Ryan?

  And there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of other things that I could talk to you about on, on how he's been around. In fact, when we went to there, I told you I was in this vulnerable state, and we saw this guy that looked exactly like my friend Gabe. Like, same build, same brow line, same jawline, like, if you, if you put them side by side, they would be identical twins. But I could tell, you know, obviously that it wasn't Gabe, but I was like, that's like, it's legitimately like an identical twin. With some minute differences.

• 1:12:51Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 1:13:03Speaker 06

  Talk to this guy?

• 1:13:04Shawn Ryan?

  No. We go out, if we go out in town and leave the resort for dinner, he, the guy winds up being at the same restaurant. And, and my wife Katie's like, there he is, there he is, there he is, there he is. So sure as shit, we walked back from the gate. Like I said, this is like a two-minute walk.

• 1:13:26Shawn Ryan?

  And I s- 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.

• 1:13:46Shawn Ryan?

  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, uh, here in Franklin. He was a SEAL, and he owned a bunch of, uh, 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 gonna ask me for favors, or promote his product, or whatever, you know, the podcast. He, 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, and our, our relationship starts developing really fast.

• 1:14:28Shawn Ryan?

  He died of a heart attack on a hunting trip right before I left. On his trip, uh, probably in his fifties.

• 1:14:37Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, 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,

• 1:14:50Shawn Ryan?

  but he, he had just died days before. Go into the, into the room.

• 1:14:58Shawn Ryan?

  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 It's happening. Falling in your lap right now. Like, he's slapping you in the face.

• 1:15:14Shawn Ryan?

  And my phone dings. Don't answer it, because I'm in the middle of this discussion with my wife. And so we get done with that discussion, and I'm kind of cleaning myself up. It's pretty emotional. And I pick up my phone, and it's his daughter,

• 1:15:29Shawn Ryan?

  who I'd not met. Didn't have my number. Wasn't close with his family. I'd met his son a couple of times. I'd met his wife. I'd not met his daughter. And his daughter sends me this text. And she says, I'll summarize it. It says, hey, I just walked into my dad's gun room for the first time since he had passed. And basically says that her dad talked to her and said, I want you to talk to Sean, because Sean knows a side of me that nobody else knows. And Sean was becoming my best friend really fast. And, and he just wanted her to tell me that he loves me for who I am. Now, this shit all happens within

• 1:16:14Shawn Ryan?

  five, 10 minutes.

• 1:16:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that's And so that, to me, was that, that to me was, that was it. I was like, okay.

• 1:16:28Shawn Ryan?

  You've got my attention. Yeah. And, uh, and so, so anyway, so then I came home and made a bunch of calls to people that I, um, people that I know that are in this. My first call was this guy Eddie Penny, uh, who had talked about his journey to Christ. Eddie Penny, uh, was a SEAL Team Six, uh, guy, and had another really rough go, and then found Christ. And I released his episode on Christmas of 2022, maybe? And ever since then, just about every single person on the show has brought up God in some way, shape, or form.

• 1:17:12Shawn Ryan?

  And I didn't put that together really until, until this. And I went back through and I was like, Every single one of them. And so I called Eddie anyways, and that's what led me to to believing in God is that that experience. So it was it was through psychedelics, turn 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.

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  I've never had an experience like that. I

• 1:17:51Speaker 06

  I kind of hope I do at some point in my life.

• 1:17:53Shawn Ryan?

  I hope you do, too. It's it's it was life changing.

• 1:17:58Speaker 06

  That's incredible, man. I'm kind of speechless.

• 1:18:02Speaker 06

  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,

• 1:18:20Speaker 06

  we know what the what and the where? And the how is, but like, what's the why? Right? And the the version of it that I've wrestled with through the course of my life is

• 1:18:34Speaker 06

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

• 1:18:41Speaker 06

  I I tell you honestly, I haven't had too many people that I've been close to pass away. I consider myself really fortunate in that. I know it's coming, right? Like, time, time will take us all eventually. But

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

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

• 1:19:05Speaker 06

  And kind of saying, OK, well, if you if you believe that these are the laws of nature, right? That these are the things that govern how the universe works. You study physics, that's fundamentally what you're doing, right? Is you're looking for a theory of how the world works. And if you look at that theory and it's looking to your eyes like it's very accurate and it really is describing the whole world around you. You're like, that's how the world works. Right? And it's like, well, how could there be a?

• 1:19:42Speaker 06

  Human like thing, human like being that has the emergent phenomenon of humanity. That is the higher calling. That's the higher being, right? How could you reconcile those two? Where you know through studying and empirical evidence that light has this wave particle duality, right? And that quantum field theory, for example, is, I think it's the most experimentally verified scientific theory. Because every time you scatter some particles off of each other, you measure the angle in which they kind of come out of it. And if you can measure those really accurately, and you get a lot of scattering events, like you'll get more and more data that says this

• 1:20:26Speaker 06

  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,

• 1:21:10Speaker 06

  how could you have such well-written theories without somebody writing them down? Yeah, I mean, I, 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.

• 1:21:38Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense, I mean.

• 1:21:41Shawn Ryan?

  I s- I I see like.

• 1:21:43Speaker 06

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

• 1:21:46Shawn Ryan?

  But then there's all these, then there's the, then there's the, the no answers, you know, the, the, the, where we can't find the answer, like, a fundamental part of life, it's like, where, where does consciousness reside? Nobody seems to be able to figure that out. What makes you you? It's your consciousness, right?

• 1:22:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Shawn Ryan?

  Where does it live? Where does it go?

• 1:22:07Speaker 06

  It's an emergent phenomenon.

• 1:22:08Shawn Ryan?

  Where the fuck does it go?

• 1:22:11Speaker 06

  Does it go anywhere? Yeah.

• 1:22:13Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and, and so, and I don't know, maybe we just have not, you know, maybe, maybe we haven't hit that point where, or maybe we never will hit that point and we never will figure that out. I don't know, but, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's.

• 1:22:31Shawn Ryan?

  It's a mystery.

• 1:22:33Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:22:42Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think?

• 1:22:42Speaker 06

  There's life elsewhere in the universe.

• 1:22:46Speaker 06

  I think there is.

• 1:22:47Shawn Ryan?

  You do?

• 1:22:48Speaker 06

  I do, yes.

• 1:22:48Shawn Ryan?

  What makes you think that?

• 1:22:51Speaker 06

  I want to believe that. I want to believe that, because I think the alternative is like, uh, 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.

• 1:23:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think.

• 1:23:12Speaker 06

  Like, I don't, I don't want to believe that.

• 1:23:18Speaker 06

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

• 1:23:24Speaker 06

  Has somebody else figured this out? Right? Might the answer be? I think this is like people care about aliens, right? It's like, might there be some other species out there that knows the answer? Might they be trying to tell us the answer? If we could just talk to them, would we get the answer? Right? Is there an understanding of how the universe works that

• 1:23:47Speaker 06

  is so crystal clear after, in 10 million years, for example, right? From where we are today? Or somebody could just explain that?

• 1:23:58Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:24:09Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, man, I just.

• 1:24:14Shawn Ryan?

  I've gone onto this topic quite a few times and it's obviously very conspiratorial. And there's never any hard evidence, you know, and, and, I don't think there is.

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  Oh, there being life out there?

• 1:24:26Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think there is.

• 1:24:28Speaker 06

  There's some pretty good evidence of it.

• 1:24:30Shawn Ryan?

  Like, I have not heard it. Well, I'd love to hear it.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:24:46Speaker 06

  Because I'm sure there's some real scientific people that are watching this. There, there was that star system. I want to say this was James Webb again, I'm kind of, I don't, I'm kind of guessing a little bit on this. But there was the observation of a star system and in particular, looking at the, um, 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

• 1:25:20Speaker 06

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

• 1:25:27Speaker 06

  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 and Jupiter. Jupiter's big, it's a big planet, right? So as Jupiter is orbiting the sun,

• 1:25:46Speaker 06

  the mass of Jupiter is also pulling the sun, right? So the actual orbit's more like this. It's kind of an exaggerated version of it. Where if you look at a bright spot in the night sky with a telescope or with a really fancy one like the James Webb Space Telescope, right, if it's got a planet or planetary systems around it, it's going to be wobbling a little bit.

• 1:26:11Speaker 06

  Moreover, you can take these bright spots in the night sky and look at the spectrum of light that's coming from it, right? So if you just plot out, this is a simple example, your x-axis, you plot 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 dims, right? Because literally, there's something in the way.

• 1:26:51Speaker 06

  So the light coming from it kind of goes down as the planet's moving in front of it. Now, this is the thing that was reported in a bunch of scientific journals earlier this year, actually. Pretty sure it was earlier this year, is there was this one star system and a planet orbiting it where they actually observed, this is the star, this is the planet, and in this case, my eyes are the Earth, right? The planet passing in front of the star system, and the light from the star, like, passing through the atmosphere of the thing that's in front of it, right?

• 1:27:35Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:28:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they found, they found water on, I think they found water on Saturn, right? And, and is it Neptune?

• 1:28:19Speaker 06

  Uh, I don't, I don't know. I know they found, they found water on, um, see if I remember.

• 1:28:25Shawn Ryan?

  Mars.

• 1:28:26Speaker 06

  Found water on Mars. Yeah, there's presumably, um, like water, like lakes of water, or an underground ocean of water on some of the planets, or some of the moons of Jupiter.

• 1:28:40Speaker 06

  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 Europa and drilling down and seeing if there's an ocean underneath there. 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, I want to say it was methane.

• 1:29:22Speaker 06

  Could be wrong that they found the bio, the signature form in the frequencies of light that were coming back as this planet passed in front of the star system. But the thought process there was that that is the only way that we know that that's made on Earth is through life. So if there's a ton of this stuff in the atmosphere of this planet, like, how is it getting there? The hypothesis is that this is kind of a smoking gun, that there's some sort of

• 1:29:53Speaker 06

  biology on this planet that's producing this gas.

• 1:29:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:30:15Speaker 06

  But. As we, as we develop better telescopes and more of them and have them simultaneously pointed at more spots in the night sky, might this be the case in a lot of different places? Right? Might this actually be the case that if we look simultaneously, like everywhere in the night sky, that there's some star system that's broadcasting some electromagnetic signal that's got information in it?

• 1:30:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I did, I did hear something that we were receiving, some type of, some type of a beacon or a signal from wherever, way the hell out there.

• 1:30:51Speaker 06

  The conspiracy.

• 1:30:52Shawn Ryan?

  They can't explain what it is.

• 1:30:53Speaker 06

  The conspiracies I love is where you see like a star system or a set of star systems or something related to specific spots in the night sky that show up in conspiracy theories, because it just makes you wonder, it's like, is that actually a conspiracy?

• 1:31:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:11Speaker 06

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

• 1:31:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. It's, 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.

• 1:31:32Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:31:42Speaker 06

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

• 1:31:44Shawn Ryan?

  I wonder, I, sometimes I wonder, you know, I mean, they talk about ancient civilizations and, and, you know, maybe there were more advanced civilizations here on earth than what we are now, you know, a hundred million years ago or whatever, and then there's dozens of things, gets rid of all the evidence and then it's, here we go again, you know, and sometimes I wonder, I mean, they, they talked about the pyramid or supposedly they found a pyramid on Mars, I don't know if they ever debunked that or, or what, but, um, I've talked to remote viewers, I do think that's real, remote viewing.

• 1:32:21Speaker 06

  What is remote viewing?

• 1:32:23Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, you don't know about remote viewers?

• 1:32:25Speaker 06

  Tell me.

• 1:32:26Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. So, remote viewers, how do I put this? Remote viewers, they...

• 1:32:35Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, you've seen like surely you've seen some type of a movie or a TV show where they bring on the psychic and the psychic's like, oh, it happened over there in the shower and they used a knife. And then they go in there and they're like, holy shit, here's the knife. You know, that that is, that's remote viewing. So that's actually, people can do it. It's it's a real thing. Really? Yeah, the CIA had a program going with the Monroe Institute for a long time. I brought in Joe McMonigal, who was remote viewer number one for the United States. And, uh, remote viewed a, a Russian submarine that was gonna be launched on a particular date.

• 1:33:14Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, the director of the CIA said he was full of shit. Another agency got in touch with them and they were like, like, where is it and when is this happening? And he was like, it's right here in, in Russia. They're gonna roll it off into this canal and it's gonna go into the ocean from there and it's gonna 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, uh, Stargate. It's called the Stargate Program. I'm gonna look this up. I'll send you the interview. Please do. I'm fascinated by this.

• 1:33:50Shawn Ryan?

  So I went down that rabbit hole and, uh, and brought on a bunch of these guys, some of the guys that, uh, started Stargate and some of the guys that finished the program managers that finished Stargate. Still exist?

• 1:34:04Shawn Ryan?

  Stargate doesn't exist, but I'm sure it's, you know, renamed it or another program or so. I know Naval Special Warfare was looking into this stuff recently. Um, I got some. Is there any scientific explanation for how this works? Just, oh, just an emergent phenomenon? Well, uh, the way Joe describes it, Joe's, Joe says, you know, early human beings, you know, had this, you know, and, and.

• 1:34:33Shawn Ryan?

  We used more of our brain back then and and he goes, he goes, you know, at the beginning, you know, we would look at each other and we would know what each other's thinking and you know, point to things and whatever, but you would, I guess, kinda like how animals communicate.

• 1:34:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:49Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we're.

• 1:34:51Speaker 06

  Sense and subtle stuff.

• 1:34:53Shawn Ryan?

  We think that's, we think we're so much more advanced, but look how, look how long it takes us to converse and to get our thoughts out now that we have language, you know, and and so basically what he was saying is we were a lot more intuitive back, way back in the beginning, and that we could kind of read each other's thoughts. And so communication was almost instantaneous. And he goes, and then we started traveling around in tribes and we started, you know, developing language and then technology came along and we got our head buried in a fucking phone or watching TV and talking and, you know, and he goes, and so he goes, well, we feel like that's more advanced, what we actually did is we're going this way because we had

• 1:35:38Shawn Ryan?

  the intuitive, um, brain power to to be able to communicate without language, without any type of electronic communication and it was just instantaneous. And he goes, he he thinks that, and this is theory, obviously, but he he thinks that we've lost that over time and that everybody still has the ability to do it, but but.

• 1:36:01Speaker 06

  Most people know.

• 1:36:03Shawn Ryan?

  You'll never figure it out, you know, because we're too busy wrapped up in other things and kinda like what my wife was telling me when I just told you, she's like, hey, God's always around you, you just don't, you don't make the time to let him in and you're not paying attention.

• 1:36:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:18Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 1:36:18Speaker 06

  And when you just see the world presented to you on a screen and has such a digestible format, like we're little monkey brains.

• 1:36:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:27Speaker 06

  We'll just spend all day on that.

• 1:36:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 06

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

• 1:36:47Speaker 06

  Humans are gonna follow the, you know, they're gonna follow the path down this direction.

• 1:36:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:51Speaker 06

  On average.

• 1:36:53Shawn Ryan?

  Bud, but what I was getting at is maybe, maybe there was life on other planets before there was life. Maybe there's only life in the universe. It...

• 1:37:08Shawn Ryan?

  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? Bud.

• 1:37:17Speaker 06

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

• 1:37:21Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:37:22Speaker 06

  Fermi's Paradox? Yeah, it's like the where is everybody?

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what...

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9.0 without parent.

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what...

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9.0 without parent.

• 1:38:39Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 1:38:44Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stalled, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:39:11Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break. Man, we went down some rabbit holes there.

• 1:39:15Speaker 06

  Did.

• 1:39:16Shawn Ryan?

  I love rabbit holes.

• 1:39:18Speaker 06

  Me too.

• 1:39:18Shawn Ryan?

  Remote viewing. You gotta look into it.

• 1:39:20Speaker 06

  I'm absolutely gonna look into it.

• 1:39:23Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, it is fascinating. But I want to get into Robin Hood. How did that come about?

• 1:39:33Speaker 06

  How indeed. Um, company was the brainchild of two good friends from college. Um, 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, right? I guess it was, yeah. We were talking about Occupy Wall Street a little bit, right?

• 1:39:49Shawn Ryan?

  No, that was not on there.

• 1:39:51Speaker 06

  No, that was just so shit. That was before. Okay, yeah. So, do you remember Occupy?

• 1:39:55Shawn Ryan?

  I do. I don't remember like the whole premise of it. I'm, I, I don't know much about stocks or any of that kind of stuff. So, so you have to walk me through it a little bit. But what, what was, well, I, I remember the movement. It was basically, from what I understand, it was the everyday Americans were getting pissed off that they, they couldn't invest in the stock market, correct?

• 1:40:17Speaker 06

  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?

• 1:40:26Speaker 06

  Like, we bailed out the banks.

• 1:40:27Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  And everybody else felt like they got screwed.

• 1:40:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Speaker 06

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

• 1:40:40Speaker 06

  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? I'm trying to, 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, the direction that markets were becoming more

• 1:41:25Speaker 06

  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, what, what are you talking about? Like, what does that even mean? Right? They're like, you guys are like not, you know, you're part of the system, man. Like that sort of sentiment. So that was kind of the backdrop. And then we'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 was kind of, we talked a little bit about the, the immigrant background, right?

• 1:42:05Speaker 06

  But as, as people that, whose families made huge sacrifices to be in America, to look at the financial system and be like, this thing is messed up or rigged or doesn't work or whatever, right? It just, it doesn't ring true. It's like that, this is, this is the envy of everybody in the world, this financial system, right? Like you should, we should have more people be a part of it.

• 1:42:30Speaker 06

  So this was kind of like the backdrop for what would become Robinhood. This is kind of the cultural backdrop, right? And I remember the genesis of the company started over a phone conversation that my co-founder 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, 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.

• 1:43:14Speaker 06

  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's actually going to change here. But maybe this is something we can change with technology. This is kind of like the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed optimism you get from young people, right? When you don't know what you don't know. And we're like, we could change it. We could fix this problem.

• 1:43:56Speaker 06

  And if we could make access to market zero commission, which is kind of what the original idea behind the company was, wouldn't that actually be kind of directly speaking to the frustrations that people have about not being a part of the financial system? And this is where the bigger leap of faith came, right? It's like, and if more people of our generation were a part of the financial system, then they wouldn't be so frustrated. And we'd basically live in a more harmonious or like happier society. Because I didn't want to grow up with people being up in arms about this.

• 1:44:39Speaker 06

  Like, it just seemed like a really nasty discourse. Enter Robinhood. Mobile. Zero commission and kind of like built from the ground up, brand new.

• 1:44:55Speaker 06

  At least the interface and the way the product looked was, I think, pretty different than what was out there at the time.

• 1:45:04Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, yeah, it was diff- everybody was.

• 1:45:05Speaker 06

  Totally different, yeah. Did, yeah. When did you hear about it?

• 1:45:10Shawn Ryan?

  I don't remember, I don't remember exactly when I heard about it, but, but I remember, I remember when I did hear about it. It, it didn't matter how much money you had, you got access to the market. And I was like, oh, this is, this is cool. So I started using it. I mean, I, I, I can't remember, it was probably around, I would bet 2010 timeframe, maybe?

• 1:45:34Speaker 06

  A little later than that. We released it publicly, I want to say in 2015.

• 1:45:38Shawn Ryan?

  Well, then it was, then it was after then.

• 1:45:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:45:48Speaker 06

  You know what I was spending a lot of my time doing? Interviewing customers, talking to customers. Cause I basically realized at a pretty early point in that company's history,

• 1:46:00Speaker 06

  that if, um, that if, if we, if we, if we tried 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,

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  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 gonna like, it's not gonna change their perspective on the product. Now, on the other hand, with a product like Robinhood, I think that's actually completely different. Because if you have a bunch of people in Silicon Valley that are making Silicon Valley

• 1:47:09Speaker 06

  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 from my, from my primary job. And you're like, I wanna save enough money to be able to buy a five or $10 cup of coffee every day, right? This is not gonna 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 twenties and thirties, right? That are looking to buy a home pretty early on in life. Like, that doesn't happen in the coastal cities in this country.

• 1:47:54Speaker 06

  Like, the, the way people behave is pretty different. And I kinda had this idea that if we wanted to build a product that resonated with a large part of the population, that the way to do it was actually to make sure that we were getting the feedback from those kinds of people and incorporating that into the product. So even from the very early days of Robinhood, we would do this thing where we would go from, here's a feature that we wanna 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 gonna use it, and you create a prototype of it,

• 1:48:39Speaker 06

  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 front of some customers, or some hypothetical customers. And at the time, you know, we had, we were, kind of either had just launched or had just announced the product. And so what we would do is we would go to Stanford campus, and we'd just camp out at the coffee shop, and just be like, hey, to random students, like, can we give you 50 bucks for like, 30 minutes of your time? And you'd just be like,

• 1:49:25Speaker 06

  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 are like, what the hell was that? They're like, is that like the interest rate on your car? And you're like, no. And then you, you, you know, you let people ask their questions and you listen to it.

• 1:50:10Speaker 06

  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 were 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

• 1:50:54Speaker 06

  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 are like, who are you? I'm like, oh, I just work here. Don't mind me.

• 1:51:24Speaker 06

  It's kind of interesting, right? Because that that took us to a lot of middle America.

• 1:51:31Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:51:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:51:40Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:51:43Speaker 06

  Me?

• 1:51:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you. How did? How did the app? How did Robinhood get access to the markets?

• 1:51:50Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:51:50Shawn Ryan?

  Without without going through all the middlemen?

• 1:51:53Speaker 06

  Oh, I thought you were asking how I got introduced to the stock market.

• 1:51:56Shawn Ryan?

  No, how did how did Robinhood get introduced?

• 1:51:58Speaker 06

  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 backend. So we worked with a third-party clearing firm, right? We worked with a lot of different service providers. And so we kind of got the regulatory licenses and stuff to be able to offer this service. But we were a little startup, right? We were like fifteen, twenty people when we first launched the product. Like, that's

• 1:52:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:52:30Speaker 06

  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 10 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 like a, that was a big sort of like, you know, technology buildup, basically.

• 1:53:03Shawn Ryan?

  How fast? I mean, how fast did Robinhood take off?

• 1:53:09Shawn Ryan?

  Once it was introduced?

• 1:53:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is an interesting one because it it kind of, to me, always speaks to the question of product-market fit. Have you heard of this before?

• 1:53:19Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:20Speaker 06

  Right? So it product-market fit is this tricky one, especially with consumer products. Because when you got it, you kind of know you got it. And if you're not sure, you probably don't have it. Right? It's kind of like the sort of like sound of click almost that happens when people like, oh, I get it. Oh, I, why is it? Oh, that's interesting. How does it work? Right?

• 1:53:47Speaker 06

  And I remember when we first announced the product, we had a waitlist for people to be able to sign up to get it.

• 1:53:54Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 1:53:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that waitlist got real big, real fast.

• 1:54:02Speaker 06

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

• 1:54:10Speaker 06

  fifty or a hundred thousand people on the waitlist in the first month.

• 1:54:14Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:54:16Speaker 06

  It was really.

• 1:54:17Shawn Ryan?

  In the first month?

• 1:54:18Speaker 06

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

• 1:54:23Speaker 06

  And I remember when we first announced the product, we 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.

• 1:54:35Speaker 06

  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 baked.

• 1:54:43Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding?

• 1:54:44Speaker 06

  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,

• 1:54:53Speaker 06

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

• 1:54:59Speaker 06

  little rectangle with a little chart in it and a little talk box. And we had, we like in the next week had to like, kind of finalize the version of the logo that we had for many, many years until kind of recently, we did a subtle redesign of it. So it was like, it was one of those moments where I built products before that did not have product market fit. And it was very fucking frustrating. Cause 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?

• 1:55:44Speaker 06

  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 the downloader, they try 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.

• 1:56:10Speaker 06

  Like that does not have product market fit because you could get more people to use the thing, but the evidence is there is when people find it, they don't stick around. So there's no point in getting more people to find out about it or to use it because they're just gonna go away like 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 asked the question very earnestly, like, what do I need to do to figure out what people actually want out of this?

• 1:56:53Shawn Ryan?

  What were people saying?

• 1:56:55Speaker 06

  In terms of what they wanted from it?

• 1:57:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, what did, I mean, they loved it. I obviously loved it. I mean, there was, you said, you said a hundred thousand person waitlist.

• 1:57:07Speaker 06

  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 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?

• 1:57:50Speaker 06

  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?

• 1:58:10Shawn Ryan?

  It does.

• 1:58:11Speaker 06

  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?

• 1:58:24Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:58:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. What a wild journey that has been.

• 1:58:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it was the only product like that at the time, correct? Is it's?

• 1:58:36Speaker 06

  Uh, zero commission? Yeah, I mean, it took a few years before the rest of the market kind of did the same thing, right? It was like 2019, there was, at the end of 2019, if I'm remembering correctly, is when a bunch of the brokerage houses all got rid of their commissions.

• 1:58:56Shawn Ryan?

  That was traded from you guys?

• 1:58:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:59:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 06

  That was, that was like, that was both very.

• 1:59:09Shawn Ryan?

  You've revolutionized the entire market.

• 1:59:14Shawn Ryan?

  How fucking cool does that feel?

• 1:59:18Speaker 06

  I don't know, man, it's a, it's, it's a.

• 1:59:23Speaker 06

  It's crazy to to have made all that stuff happen. Still on the board of directors of the company, still actively involved.

• 1:59:36Speaker 06

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

• 1:59:46Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into, cause you, 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?

• 2:00:01Speaker 06

  GameStop's one, I remember, there were a couple of the ones too, yeah.

• 2:00:03Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So.

• 2:00:08Shawn Ryan?

  What happened with the GameStop stuff? What was the whole scenario?

• 2:00:12Speaker 06

  That was a wild time too. So it was kind of interesting. So this was like right.

• 2:00:20Speaker 06

  This was January of 21, right?

• 2:00:24Speaker 06

  And we built navigating Robin Hood through COVID, like going from a company that was at a nascent stage, right? I think we're, I think we're still under a thousand people before COVID happened, or getting, getting pretty close to it. And to go from that to having some real trials and tribulations, rapidly scaling the engineering and the technology. Cause when people went home for COVID, like they, a lot of people were like, let me check out the stock market. Let me check out Robin Hood. And that was a lot more traffic than we were

• 2:01:03Speaker 06

  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. But yeah, I don't know what the number was. It's 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 the question, like, what do I want to do? Cause 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

• 2:01:47Speaker 06

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

• 2:01:55Speaker 06

  Are you the kind of person that

• 2:02:01Speaker 06

  you go all in on something, and then once that's accomplished, you start to become bored? A little bit, yeah. 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, the journey or the achievement better?

• 2:02:24Speaker 06

  I like the journey for sure. I actually think about this a lot right now.

• 2:02:30Speaker 06

  Because

• 2:02:32Speaker 06

  when I think back about the Robin Hood era, right, of my life, like the what as it was for me, right? It was the journey of going from having this idea, wanting to make this thing a reality. Not a lot of people believed in it. But my co-founder and I, like, we both saw it. We believed it with our mind's eye.

• 2:02:58Speaker 06

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

• 2:03:09Speaker 06

  you know, to being on the forefront of this industry. And like, when you're at the forefront, I'm sure you feel this way with podcasting, right? It's like the way that you kind of take what you're doing with your own work is kind of the direction the whole industry follows, right? And it's like this feeling of mastery that I think you only get if you start from first principles. Man, that felt cool. That was like, that was, that was the, that's the thing when I look back on that that's kind of the high that I find myself chasing is the process of going from a novice to being a master of the field.

• 2:03:51Speaker 06

  I don't want to like toot my own 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.

• 2:04:10Speaker 06

  Like, I want to prove to myself that I can do that in other things.

• 2:04:16Speaker 06

  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, very poor, right? And so at that time, the money was a big motivator, right? Like, I didn't, I didn't want to be in poverty. I wanted to have more for my future family, right? I wanted to have a better financial outcome. I feel like I've been talking about this whole podcast, right? So I'm not gonna come on here and be like, oh, I 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.

• 2:05:00Speaker 06

  And finding myself like back in the mix of something that.

• 2:05:04Shawn Ryan?

  Looking for the next thing.

• 2:05:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:05:08Speaker 06

  So that's it this time, right? The, the question I'm trying to ask myself is,

• 2:05:16Speaker 06

  could I do it again, right? Could I revolutionize something else?

• 2:05:22Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:05:44Speaker 06

  But yeah, it's like the uncertainty that really fuels me sometimes.

• 2:05:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I can relate to that. It's, I mean, it's,

• 2:05:54Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, but for me, like,

• 2:05:59Shawn Ryan?

  when you hit the apex of the 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,

• 2:06:12Shawn Ryan?

  there's an aspect that becomes boring. And it's time, and I, I almost just said I suffer from that, but I think it's a good thing. I mean, I think it's just,

• 2:06:25Shawn Ryan?

  find something new. You want to figure out how to be the best at it? And then when you figure it out.

• 2:06:36Shawn Ryan?

  Enjoy it for a minute, then you're you're on to the next thing. And so like right now, like I'm I'm looking for the next thing. I think I found it and I'll use. You know. You think you have? Yeah. Can I ask what it is? I could tell you it's in the tech space. Okay. But it has to do with with cybersecurity. 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 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, like when I started this, I this was my creative outlet. Well,

• 2:07:22Shawn Ryan?

  like. When it becomes the main thing, it's different. Yep. Yep. It 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 and and the particular space that I'm in. You know, I mean, yeah, we got a new studio coming and all that stuff, but the the model is here and and so it's it's not taken near the creativity that took me to build this from a small little room in my attic into what it is today, you know, being a a top 10 podcast. We've been on the number one slot and and and, you know, we got, yeah, we got the new studio and all that 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

• 2:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  as far as the creativity aspect, it's not really here anymore. And so I'd like

• 2:08:14Shawn Ryan?

  I fiend off creativity. Like I I love it. I love

• 2:08:21Shawn Ryan?

  disrupting things and and and and going to new new ventures because I I've realized like I'm about the journey. I mean, even, you know, this 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 and yes, there is another level. You could go to SEAL Team Six, but I wasn't sure what that was like at the time. I mean, it was it was not nearly as publicized as it is now. And I and I was like, oh, I mean, I

• 2:08:58Shawn Ryan?

  became a SEAL, went to war.

• 2:09:03Shawn Ryan?

  The journey was awesome. This isn't everything I thought it was gonna be. I'm gonna 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 CIA thing popped up, which I didn't even really know was the CIA at first, that I was contracting, that I was trying out to contract for. But then I got there and, and once again, like, I was like, all right, well, here I am. This is a contract in for say, it's pretty cool. Well, what's next? You know, and, and now I'm finding myself in that exact same headspace again. What's next? And, and, and, and, yeah, so it's, it's interesting.

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• 2:10:46Speaker 06

  Do you ever think about the balance between being a student and a teacher?

• 2:10:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Speaker 06

  I think about that sometimes, too.

• 2:10:54Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about it?

• 2:10:55Speaker 06

  I, I felt, this kind of comes back to the question that you asked a while ago, is like, what was happening during that time?

• 2:11:03Speaker 06

  I, 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.

• 2:11:14Speaker 06

  And I found myself spending the lion's share of my time, and I think rightfully so.

• 2:11:21Speaker 06

  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?

• 2:11:30Speaker 06

  And I found myself like looking in the mirror and being like thirty-five, thirty-six, whatever I was at that point. Thirty-five 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?

• 2:12:14Speaker 06

  And if you're not careful, you can certainly end up in a situation where your shit doesn't stick. 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, um, I think somewhat

• 2:12:41Speaker 06

  out of left field thing, which was right, actually before the GameStop stuff happened, probably two or three months prior.

• 2:12:49Speaker 06

  I announced that I was actually stepping back as CEO of the company. Cause before Vlad and I had been co-CEOs from beginning till right before IPO. And I was like, you know what? I want to keep doing this, but I also want to carve out a little more time for my family.

• 2:13:09Speaker 06

  And I think the, all this to say, when the, when the GameStop stuff was happening, which was in January of twenty-one, I actually just stepped back as CEO of the company a few months prior.

• 2:13:22Speaker 06

  And so it was like this. So that was a, that was a new CEO that. No, no, no, we, we had been CEOs together. Oh, okay. But this was like the beginning of him as CEO by himself.

• 2:13:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:13:38Shawn Ryan?

  Tough time.

• 2:13:39Speaker 06

  So my, my, my experience there was like,

• 2:13:44Speaker 06

  holy cow, how do I help?

• 2:13:47Speaker 06

  This company, how do I help the company that I started? Like navigate this like?

• 2:13:53Speaker 06

  Black swan event that's like once in a lifetime, right? It was stressful. It was scary.

• 2:14:01Speaker 06

  It was really exhausting, right? But we navigated through it.

• 2:14:06Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so let's. So you revolutionized the entire market. With, with, with no commission trading. You gave everyday Americans a platform that they can invest their money in, in both stocks and crypto.

• 2:14:27Shawn Ryan?

  And I don't know all the dynamics around what went on with the GameStop. Uh, 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 it's so, can you, can you just walk me through what exactly was going on with GameStop? At the time? Why it was so controversial? Because that, that's the other thing that you revolutionized is then I remember seeing, I remember seeing all these hedge funds experts and, and, 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.

• 2:15:12Shawn Ryan?

  And it's like, well, it doesn't really matter if they know what the fuck they're doing because like you, you're going to have to learn to adapt, to adapt because.

• 2:15:23Shawn Ryan?

  They're not going anywhere. So maybe you're the one that doesn't know what the fuck you're doing anymore.

• 2:15:28Speaker 06

  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,

• 2:16:09Speaker 06

  you know, just like, people being sort of like exaggerated versions of themselves online. And a lot of that stuff happening on Robinhood and

• 2:16:20Speaker 06

  it was wild, yeah.

• 2:16:21Shawn Ryan?

  Hold, hold, I remember seeing hold, hold.

• 2:16:26Speaker 06

  Wild, man, it was wild. And all the while, I was like, yeah, it was crazy because I had literally just stepped back a few months prior and I was like, oh my goodness. Coincidentally, six months later, we took the company public. I was in the middle of 2021.

• 2:16:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:16:48Shawn Ryan?

  So why, why did it come out that people couldn't sell GameStop? They could buy it, but they couldn't sell it on Robinhood? Would, did the SEC get involved? What happened there?

• 2:17:01Speaker 06

  So what happened was, um, it was actually, there was, there was a, there was a regulatory clearinghouse requirement around the capital that we needed to have to operate the brokerage.

• 2:17:16Speaker 06

  And actually, this was something that was going on between the registered, you know, financial services, registered people that worked at Robinhood, talking to the regulators and they made the decision to limit the, I think it was to limit the buying, more buying of that symbol because it was increasing our regulatory capital requirements.

• 2:17:41Speaker 06

  Um, and so for a day, we, we, we put that pause on,

• 2:17:47Speaker 06

  which created this like frenzy on the internet. And it was kind of interesting because people were like,

• 2:17:57Speaker 06

  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 Robinhood, also recent board member Aetherflux,

• 2:18:32Speaker 06

  was actually one of the people that was kind of navigating Robinhood. They've been spoken about it a ton over the years. But it was

• 2:18:41Speaker 06

  Black Swan. Yeah.

• 2:18:45Speaker 06

  Wow, that was a time. It's crazy to think that was five years ago. Damn, was that five years ago? It was almost five. Well, was it? No, not quite five years. Four years, right? Four and a half. Twenty twenty one?

• 2:19:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, four and a half years. Wow. Yeah, that, the navigating through that dominated a lot of the next couple, the few years that followed in my life. And then

• 2:19:14Speaker 06

  probably the next big change for me was

• 2:19:19Speaker 06

  a little over a year ago, leaving full time the company I started. Just being like, I'm going to stay on the board, but I want to focus on the space idea that I've had. How long have you had that idea?

• 2:19:33Speaker 06

  Um.

• 2:19:36Speaker 06

  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 a while to figure out. So this kind of is where these two companies have some shared thought process behind it because there's a, there's a common creator between the two of them, right? You've, 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, and the reason I think it's so important is that I think it has this like huge benefit for individuals and their own pursuit of life, liberty, happiness, right? And their own self betterment.

• 2:20:20Speaker 06

  Capitalism is also an incredible force for innovation, right? And I kind of felt that one of the things that when we got, when, when we created Robinhood, 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.

• 2:20:46Speaker 06

  And look at how quickly the stock market changed. Mm hmm. Happened really fast. The name was perfect, by the way. Yeah, the name was on point. How did you guys come out? I mean, that was a It's perfect. Yeah. Like there is no better name for what you guys built them. There, there were some other much worse working titles for what the company would be. Robinhood is really good one. I think my, my co-founders girlfriend, now wife was the one that came up with that.

• 2:21:19Speaker 06

  No, but the, 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 that 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.

• 2:21:42Speaker 06

  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?

• 2:21:55Speaker 06

  Presented in all of pop culture as the future, as the frontier, we're done with it? Like, what the hell? Like, we should be having, space should be all over the place. Mm hmm. Right? Because it was one of these big technological evolutions that we thought was gonna bring us to the stars as a species. And then the 90s and the 80s and the 2000s, it felt like we as a society collectively got distracted by the internet. But 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.

• 2:22:35Speaker 06

  When I saw the SpaceX rockets, the Falcon, original Falcon rockets landing upright, I was like, holy shit. You know? 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 I'm not quite sure if. But I felt this like, this physical force inside of me, like, I have to work on this. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, there's gotta be, if we could bring more capitalism to space, more, more sort of ways for people to make money in space, that's how you make space a bigger part of everyday's life. Mm hmm.

• 2:23:19Speaker 06

  And I want to say that, to contrast that with what the space industry is today, or has been, is I'd say it's for the government, by the government, at government prices. Which means it's not happening very quickly. It's like happening at a glacial pace. Now, if we could come up with more ways for capitalism to happen in space, meaning you can find more industrial applications for space, you're gonna 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.

• 2:24:01Speaker 06

  But you also create opportunities for people to get jobs in this industry. Because if you want to work in aerospace, what are you gonna do? You're gonna work at SpaceX, at Lockheed, Boeing? Like, there's gotta be a lot of options and a lot of great careers.

• 2:24:18Speaker 06

  And if you look at the sort of set of commercial things that are happening in space,

• 2:24:26Speaker 06

  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. Then my thought process was there's got to be something related to natural resources that 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.

• 2:25:03Speaker 06

  And I think the light bulb went off more recently, in the last couple of years,

• 2:25:09Speaker 06

  when I realized that if you wanted to bring natural resources from space back to earth, the obvious one is energy.

• 2:25:18Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:25:43Speaker 06

  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

• 2:25:59Speaker 06

  strong intellectual footing as it for its rationale. May not, there may not be a good solution, but the rationale is on solid footing, the reason why you'd want to do it.

• 2:26:13Speaker 06

  And it has this opportunity to increase the capitalist envelope in space. And the part that is the more recent sort of thing that made me want to do this full time is I saw a path to doing it with technology that exists today at a small enough scale that we could iterate on it. So, enter Aetherflux. The mission, the company with a mission to deliver energy to planet Earth. And I, I think next year is going to be a really important year. Both for space energy and all, I think with an exclamation point for our company. Cause we're putting two satellites in, in, in space.

• 2:26:58Speaker 06

  The first one next June, it's like a year.

• 2:27:00Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, that's awesome.

• 2:27:02Speaker 06

  Or is it, are we in July now?

• 2:27:03Shawn Ryan?

  We're in July.

• 2:27:04Speaker 06

  Last year first. Yeah, so I gotta go fucking get to work tomorrow morning. Yeah, we're putting a first satellite up that does it.

• 2:27:14Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:27:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:16Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's incredible. So.

• 2:27:20Speaker 06

  The kind of a long-winded answer, but.

• 2:27:22Shawn Ryan?

  So you are launching satellites into space, which will collect solar power and beam it to Earth.

• 2:27:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:33Shawn Ryan?

  That's fucking wild, man.

• 2:27:36Speaker 06

  That's, you know what the wildest part about this is? Is you don't have to have a scientific breakthrough to do this. We're doing this with technology that exists today. That, 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 then make it science reality.

• 2:28:01Speaker 06

  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 gonna happen. Right, you, what, 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. Cause 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 gonna be very good, because you're not gonna get to update it, but every five years.

• 2:28:44Speaker 06

  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, even if you start out at the wrong answer, you're gonna be moving in the direction of the right answer quickly.

• 2:29:01Speaker 06

  So, what is this thing called space solar power? Should I tell you about it? Yeah, please do. It's a water tube.

• 2:29:10Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:29:33Speaker 06

  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, the frame of the satellite, the solar panels, the way to mount it to the SpaceX rocket, all the communications antennas, so that when it's in space, you can talk to it, you can orient the thing in space, you can point it in space. It's basically like,

• 2:29:59Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:30:44Speaker 06

  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, emits solar radiation, which our solar panels

• 2:31:10Speaker 06

  convert from photons, which are the particle of light, to electrons energized. So you go from

• 2:31:22Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:31:41Speaker 06

  And there's a, there's a pretty interesting discussion there and like why you might do one or the other. So let's say you've got a big, excuse me, a big, beautiful.

• 2:31:51Speaker 06

  Solar ray on your satellite that's generating power.

• 2:31:57Speaker 06

  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 satellite. 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?

• 2:32:42Speaker 06

  So we use something called a fiber laser. Which takes the electrical current that's in the battery. It goes into a bank of photo diodes, which are basically glorified. Like glorified LEDs. Okay. Those things, those are thin silicon wafers that when you run a current through them, they start emitting light. You take the light from tons and tons of these, you put them into fiber optics.

• 2:33:08Speaker 06

  And then inside of the fiber optic, you have.

• 2:33:12Speaker 06

  Uh, 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 photo diodes. These are called diode pumps in our case. Where the light coming out is kind of diverging like this. And you have it go into fiber optics. When it goes through the second stage of the laser. It takes all the diverging light and it straightens it out. So then you have a fiber optic that's got. A energy in it in the form of light. Wow.

• 2:33:46Speaker 06

  You take that beam of light and then you put it into basically a telescope, which then takes the beam of light and it projects that beam down to the ground. On the ground, at first, we're going to have a bigger array to receive the power. The array on the ground is going to be bigger simply because the actual satellite optics are smaller. Turns out if you make the optics on the satellite bigger, you can get a smaller spot on the ground. It's a physics conversation for another time. But on the ground, the architecture, and this is where the tie-in with the DOD comes in, is designed to be portable, small,

• 2:34:32Speaker 06

  and ideally of little to no strategic value if captured.

• 2:34:36Speaker 06

  So what is this receiver on the ground? There's the, we'll talk about the more beefy version of it and then you can kind of strip this down if you needed to use it for more tactical applications. The future version, we think, is going to be a solar array that's five to 10 meters in diameter. Probably about the size of this room.

• 2:34:57Speaker 06

  Right? On some sort of platform that you can gimbal so you can point it at the satellite and a big old battery.

• 2:35:05Speaker 06

  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 like laser system that'll then put all, 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.

• 2:35:52Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:36:03Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. How, how?

• 2:36:07Speaker 06

  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, is that as you demonstrate this, you'll be able to get it more mature. As you are able to get it more mature, you intend to be able to make it more accurate, right? You, you kind of want to be able to like step up the maturity of the technology.

• 2:36:45Speaker 06

  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, is that

• 2:36:57Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:37:07Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:37:07Speaker 06

  That's kind of the long-term vision of it.

• 2:37:10Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think?

• 2:37:11Speaker 06

  Is that, how wild does that sound?

• 2:37:14Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's,

• 2:37:17Shawn Ryan?

  it's pretty out there.

• 2:37:21Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know, I mentioned, you know, I'd interviewed this gentleman, Steve Quast, who was talking about this just about a month ago. And I, I was, I saw a tweet that he, he did. And he was talking about beaming energy down and, and all kinds of wazoo stuff. But I was like, this guy actually seems like legit. He's not, he doesn't seem like your typical internet weirdo.

• 2:37:46Speaker 06

  Me or him?

• 2:37:46Shawn Ryan?

  Him.

• 2:37:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:48Shawn Ryan?

  And so I dug into him a little bit and brought him on. And then he started talking about how we have the technology to.

• 2:37:53Speaker 06

  Is that why you reached out to him? Because he was talking about power beaming?

• 2:37:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:58Speaker 06

  Sick.

• 2:37:58Shawn Ryan?

  He was talking about power beaming. He was talking about manipulating space and time. And he was talking about

• 2:38:06Shawn Ryan?

  being able to transport yourself in a matter of seconds, basically from, you know, I don't know, Washington DC to Beijing.

• 2:38:16Speaker 06

  Really?

• 2:38:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:17Speaker 06

  I love that power beaming is in the conversation with that stuff.

• 2:38:21Shawn Ryan?

  Me too.

• 2:38:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38:23Shawn Ryan?

  And then, and then we found you. But, so what I want to ask is, I mean, with one satellite,

• 2:38:30Shawn Ryan?

  and what do you call, what do you call the ground station?

• 2:38:33Speaker 06

  Ground station.

• 2:38:34Shawn Ryan?

  Just a ground.

• 2:38:34Speaker 06

  Receiver station.

• 2:38:35Shawn Ryan?

  Receiver.

• 2:38:36Speaker 06

  Maybe we'll come up with a more, we haven't entered the branding phase of this yet, that'll come.

• 2:38:40Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. So what, how much power will the ground station receive from the satellite?

• 2:38:47Speaker 06

  For the first satellite that we're putting up, we're, like, we're, the thing, the version of this that I was kind of articulating, right, is we're, we're trying actively to have every one of the components be things that are manufactured, meaning there's other people that have uses for these technologies that are either commercially available, or in the case of our laser system, for example, right? We're working with a third party that's taking similar technology and basically making it work better for space. So the whole idea behind this first satellite is, we want to use existing supply chains, existing commercial uses for the technology,

• 2:39:32Speaker 06

  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 beaming, but the future systems are going to be much higher power.

• 2:40:02Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:03Speaker 06

  So the first one is going to do an output of about a kilowatt of power out of 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, you know, less than 100 watts of power.

• 2:40:28Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, good.

• 2:40:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:40:40Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 2:40:40Speaker 06

  Like, we're able to get enough power down with all these constraints that we have to actually generate an electrical current and use that electrical current for a demo, like a light installation, right? And I think that, in and of itself, even at a lower relative power level, it kind of shows that the whole end-to-end thing is doing what we say it's gonna do.

• 2:41:07Speaker 06

  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 gonna generate enough power so that if it's transmitting power to one ground station, that one ground station, you know, whether it's one dish or several dishes that are receiving the power, will be able to generate enough power to power a small neighborhood.

• 2:41:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:41:37Speaker 06

  Ten homes.

• 2:41:38Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Would this, would the beam punch through clouds?

• 2:41:44Speaker 06

  Depends on how much clouds there are.

• 2:41:46Shawn Ryan?

  So...

• 2:41:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. It, I think more, more likely than not, what we'll end up doing is we'll end up beaming power when we see pockets of openings in the clouds.

• 2:41:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. How fast, so, we're talking about with the satellites in orbit, and it come, it, so it's a line-of-sight?

• 2:42:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:06Shawn Ryan?

  Beam, correct?

• 2:42:06Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:42:07Shawn Ryan?

  So, wouldn't, how, how long will the satellite be in the line-of-sight window?

• 2:42:12Speaker 06

  Five to 10 minutes.

• 2:42:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's it?

• 2:42:14Speaker 06

  That's it, yeah.

• 2:42:15Shawn Ryan?

  Is that enough time to drain the entire battery?

• 2:42:18Speaker 06

  We may not want to do that, actually, because it might be the case. So first of all, the idea is that similar to Starlink, right? Is as you put more and more satellites up, you start getting.

• 2:42:30Shawn Ryan?

  So be multiple satellites beaming in at once.

• 2:42:32Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:42:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:42:41Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:42:54Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 2:42:55Speaker 06

  So the idea is many satellites, many ground stations. And for each satellite at any point in time, there is a ground station within its field of view. Because the satellites eventually are going to be operating around the clock, right? Like, they get power, they need a ground station to just distribute the power to. Cool, that one's out of the line of sight. We've got another one there, start distributing there. Cool, that one's out of sight, next one. So kind of back and forth, back and forth.

• 2:43:26Shawn Ryan?

  So it will, so basically, tell me if I'm correct on this.

• 2:43:36Shawn Ryan?

  Let's just say there's 100 ground stations.

• 2:43:40Shawn Ryan?

  So these satellites around the globe. So these, these satellites will

• 2:43:47Shawn Ryan?

  will pretty much always be discharging its load of energy. Correct? So it will, it will constantly be receiving. I guess not constantly, but, but it'll be receiving.

• 2:43:59Speaker 06

  Depends on which orbit it's in.

• 2:44:01Shawn Ryan?

  And then it will always be, it will almost always be beaming energy into one ground station or another. And there'll be, and there'll be a line of these. And so it's just,

• 2:44:11Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:44:21Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:44:21Shawn Ryan?

  And it's just a consistent orbit of that.

• 2:44:24Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:44:45Speaker 06

  Right? So you're talking about like 500 to 600 kilometers straight up. In the grand scheme of things, that's kind of not that far, right? Whereas geostationary or geosynchronous orbits. So the Earth is rotating right around its axis. If you get far enough away from the Earth, the satellite will be rotating around the Earth at the same speed that the Earth is rotating. So you'll stay over one fixed point.

• 2:45:11Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:45:12Speaker 06

  That's 36,000 kilometers up.

• 2:45:16Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 2:45:17Speaker 06

  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 gonna like have a premonition.

• 2:45:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:50Speaker 06

  You know, it's not going to be remote viewing the other satellites.

• 2:45:57Speaker 06

  Even to do something like that, you need modern computers and modern computing, right? The old version of this was, excuse me, one big, beautiful satellite in geostationary. That's like maybe the size of a small city. And that thing is continuously beaming power, nearly continuously beaming power down to one, again, really large ground station that might be kilometers in diameter.

• 2:46:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but I mean, if you did that and then in cloud cover and the atmosphere does dilute the beam somewhat, then I mean, then you would.

• 2:46:33Speaker 06

  You'd be in a worse spot, right?

• 2:46:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:35Speaker 06

  You, you. There are ways of transmitting power through the clouds and kind of ignoring them.

• 2:46:42Speaker 06

  So it actually has to do with the frequency of light that you use. Okay. Right? So actually, like, when you get to microwave frequencies, like Wi-Fi frequencies and stuff like that, those will pass through the atmosphere much less disturbed than if you're using infrared, which is what we're using for our demos. The flip side is, is that with infrared, we're able to use lasers. So we get like a tight beam of light as opposed to having to focus a bunch of antennas that are diverging. Gotcha. So if you're trying to like, use microwave frequencies, for example, you would need to have an array of microwave antennas lined up so that you can send a signal to the ones at the outer ends of your array to basically noise cancel.

• 2:47:29Speaker 06

  That makes sense. It does. It does.

• 2:47:32Speaker 06

  I mean, this, 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

• 2:47:55Speaker 06

  sort of

• 2:47:58Speaker 06

  sort of like will this thing into existence, right? You kind of want to find the, the version of it that's most likely to work. And you want to like be iterating towards it over time. Because in order for this to work, to generate enough power for it to be useful, we're going to have to have lots of satellites. Now, I think it's also worth mentioning, like, why DOD? Like, what's the point of the DOD and all this, right? The application that we're building for first is actually to power remote DOD installations.

• 2:48:32Speaker 06

  Like, it's kind of

• 2:48:35Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:48:49Speaker 06

  And all of your power infrastructure is in orbit.

• 2:48:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it cuts so many logistics out of the game that it's

• 2:48:55Speaker 06

  Totally different.

• 2:48:57Shawn Ryan?

  Amazing idea. And yeah, we could have used that for the last 20 years.

• 2:49:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:49:20Speaker 06

  So there's a group, this guy, Dr. Paul Jaffe, who, if he's listening to it, what's up, Paulie?

• 2:49:27Speaker 06

  He is a research scientist, was at Naval Research Lab before, and has been working on power beaming technologies for kind of a long time, recently moved over to DARPA, and had been, has written a lot about this, like, I've been talking to him, reaching out to him as a, again, a student, right?

• 2:49:47Speaker 06

  And I think it was in those conversations that he kind of pointed us to a lot of the work that the DOD's 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, as, at least as I understand it. And there was a, there was a project or a proposal that they were working on, I think they still are,

• 2:50:23Speaker 06

  where you generate power on the ground and you relay it between several satellites, and you get it down to a spot on the ground where you need it.

• 2:50:32Speaker 06

  My kind of thought on this was, if that's in service of building that receiver, it's like, yeah, you'll, 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 it, what we're proposing building is both the power plant and the power lines. Because in this model, right, you, you'll need like a local power grid wherever your receiver is, but you're not going to need power lines from

• 2:51:02Shawn Ryan?

  Space to Earth.

• 2:51:03Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:51:18Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, I mean,

• 2:51:21Shawn Ryan?

  you know, General Patraeus said that energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities. General Mattis has asked the DOD to unleash

• 2:51:34Shawn Ryan?

  us from the tether of fuel, and this does exactly that. I mean,

• 2:51:42Speaker 06

  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?

• 2:52:05Shawn Ryan?

  What else do you see this?

• 2:52:09Shawn Ryan?

  Who, who, who else? Like, what, what, what other customer base is there for this other than DOD?

• 2:52:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think there's actually, the goal of this is to build full energy company. Right? Like a true energy company.

• 2:52:30Speaker 06

  And as you can mature the technology, as the cost of launch starts to come down with Starship or other heavy launch vehicles, as we get our shit together and our manufacturing processes are able to really squeeze down the cost of manufacturing, the medium to long-term goal for the company is going to be reduce the price of energy that we can sell.

• 2:52:54Speaker 06

  And the more we can reduce the price, the more industrial applications open up. So if you can start to get this with cost competitive with energy production on the ground, then you're really competing against terrestrial energy sources. That's kind of where I want to take this eventually, right? So whether it be receivers for our laser power beaming, you know, In the like, you know, within existing solar farms, for example, or you set up a separate like small receiver station where you're able to connect to satellites to get power from like, I imagine this to be a new energy grid and one that augments the, you know,

• 2:53:38Speaker 06

  the copper cables and lines on the ground in the same way that Starlink is, you know, complementing all the fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure on the ground.

• 2:53:50Speaker 06

  But I think there's, 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.

• 2:53:58Shawn Ryan?

  Do you see this becoming more of a, how do I say this, more of a decentralized grid?

• 2:54:05Speaker 06

  I would love that for that to happen. Yeah, that's kind of the vision for it.

• 2:54:12Speaker 06

  I like to punctuate a very serious conversation with these gummies. They're great.

• 2:54:21Speaker 06

  Can I ask you a question?

• 2:54:22Shawn Ryan?

  Sure.

• 2:54:23Speaker 06

  Curious, um, 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?

• 2:54:36Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, I'm not too into logistics. I mean, with my background, but more, 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 contracting for CIA, I mean, we're, we're not really near most of the time, at least where I like to go, because I like the action.

• 2:55:05Shawn Ryan?

  We're not near like a big base like Bagram or Kandahar or Baghdad, you know, and, and we're, we're pushed out. And, you know, that could be in something that's just a, 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.

• 2:55:28Speaker 06

  Interesting. Were there diesel generators around?

• 2:55:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, some, it depends. If you're at a, if you're at a house. You're likely not gonna have a diesel generator because that would stand out. You know, the whole purpose of having a safe house is to blend in with the local population, right?

• 2:55:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:55:44Shawn Ryan?

  So you couldn't have that.

• 2:55:46Speaker 06

  That's what you mean by safe house. Okay.

• 2:55:48Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I mean by safe. It's it's literally just a house in a in a in a neighborhood that.

• 2:55:53Speaker 06

  Happens to be safe.

• 2:55:54Shawn Ryan?

  That that, yeah, maybe, but.

• 2:55:57Speaker 06

  Kind of safe.

• 2:55:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it you'd have them spread out throughout the city and everybody, you know, everybody there on the ground knows. Say there's a safe house, there's a safe house, there's a safe house, and it could be an extract point. Or a a safe haven, you know, um, 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 you you you're using local energy. Now, if you're at like a forward operating base, like a SEAL platoon is there? Or a a a small element. Then, yeah, you're running off diesel generators. And and so, you know, what can happen with the logistics of that? I mean.

• 2:56:40Shawn Ryan?

  One, it's expensive, you know, two, it, I mean, convoys were getting hit. All over in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so if your fuel gets hit and blown up with by an IED. Well, then you're shit out of luck, buddy.

• 2:56:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:56:57Shawn Ryan?

  You're not getting any energy. And so with something like this, I mean, it would it would a hundred and ten percent be a game changer right off the bat.

• 2:57:07Speaker 06

  Did you ever have to lug solar panels into the field?

• 2:57:10Shawn Ryan?

  Um, are, no.

• 2:57:13Speaker 06

  Do you know people that did?

• 2:57:14Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:57:18Shawn Ryan?

  Lots of communications equipment and antennas and shit like that, but not solar panels.

• 2:57:23Speaker 06

  How would you charge that stuff up if it ran on a was it battery based?

• 2:57:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 2:57:28Speaker 06

  What happens if it runs out of batteries?

• 2:57:30Shawn Ryan?

  You always got extras.

• 2:57:31Speaker 06

  Okay, you just carry more batteries.

• 2:57:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. Everybody carries batteries.

• 2:57:37Shawn Ryan?

  That's wild.

• 2:57:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, it makes sense, though.

• 2:57:42Speaker 06

  I've heard, I've heard some people talking about stories of carrying like a solar ruck pack into the field.

• 2:57:48Shawn Ryan?

  Well, like I said, I haven't been out there in 10 years. So it's a little, 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.

• 2:58:03Speaker 06

  Cool.

• 2:58:03Shawn Ryan?

  And so everybody would have, I mean, batteries are like ammo for us, you know, because if you lose, if you lose communications, then you're dead. And, um,

• 2:58:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:58:14Shawn Ryan?

  But I'm, I'm sure they probably have some type of solar panels they're carrying around now wouldn't surprise me one bit.

• 2:58:21Speaker 06

  It's come up a couple of times by research, but I, it's, it's hard to tell how prevalent that stuff is.

• 2:58:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, if you need connections, I can get you connected to the modern day warfighter. They'll tell you all about it.

• 2:58:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:58:33Shawn Ryan?

  So, but.

• 2:58:35Speaker 06

  My, I'll probably take you up on that at some point.

• 2:58:39Shawn Ryan?

  No problem. Wow. How many satellites do you think it,

• 2:58:46Shawn Ryan?

  it would take to power like a small decentralized grid like the, the size of a small town, maybe 15, 20,000 people?

• 2:58:59Speaker 06

  Tough to say. I'd have to do some back of the envelope map on it. I think also,

• 2:59:05Speaker 06

  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

• 2:59:21Speaker 06

  less strategically important. Each one, if there's a failure of a component, kind of becomes more throwaway.

• 2:59:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'd have to do, I'd have to do some back of the envelope to get a reasonable answer, but I think it's also going to be.

• 2:59:37Speaker 06

  When you, when you, when you, if you go the constellation route with this, as much as you're providing power for one location, you're also starting to build capacity to provide power pretty much anywhere on the globe. Cause 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, it's actually. How will you make the determination of whether to go bigger or more?

• 3:00:15Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:00:34Speaker 06

  And I think it'll also be a trade off of how to package them into the satellite, into the rocket. Right? Because Starship is huge. And each one of those, depending on how big the satellites are, you may be able to put like a hundred or 200 of them in there. Wow. Yeah. No shit. A hundred to 200 satellites in one Starship. lift? Yeah. Some very early modeling we did, we kind of thought that we could get those ballpark of numbers. Wow.

• 3:01:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. So that's kind of the part about this. It was like, how does this ever going to become big? How are you ever going to get to like proper constellation density? Or like, how do you get to the same constellation size of Starlink? Right? Well, Starship kind of changes that equation, right? So if it's a hundred, let's just say for the sake of this argument, it's a hundred satellites per Starship. Right? And let's say that there's 7,000 Starships, 7,000 Starlink satellites in space. Roughly speaking, let's just say for the sake of argument, that's like 70 launches.

• 3:01:46Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 3:01:48Speaker 06

  And if you think about what the requirements are going to be, the point I'm trying to get here is, is in order for Starship to be able to do something like the Mars mission, they're going to have to build this thing for rapid, rapid, rapid reuse. Like, they're going to have to 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,

• 3:02:31Speaker 06

  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? There's 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.

• 3:02:59Shawn Ryan?

  How long do you think these satellites will last? I mean, there's no weather elements up there, what's?

• 3:03:06Speaker 06

  In low Earth orbit, things de-orbit naturally.

• 3:03:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:03:09Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:03:19Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:03:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:03:24Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:03:58Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 3:03:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:04:02Shawn Ryan?

  What am I not asking I should be?

• 3:04:07Speaker 06

  I don't know, we talked about a lot of stuff.

• 3:04:11Shawn Ryan?

  With the satellites.

• 3:04:12Speaker 06

  Oh, with the satellites, right, right.

• 3:04:16Speaker 06

  That's how my head was going.

• 3:04:19Speaker 06

  Uh, let me think, what else is the satellites?

• 3:04:23Shawn Ryan?

  How small do you think these receivers can get?

• 3:04:27Speaker 06

  I think five to 10 meters in 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.

• 3:04:39Shawn Ryan?

  Do you see this overpowering individual homes?

• 3:04:44Speaker 06

  I think it could, you know, I mean, I think it's, it's kind of, there's a lot of steps between this and that.

• 3:04:51Speaker 06

  But like, we're able to use Starlink to power individual homes for internet, like. I would like to be able to do that, yeah. I think at the very least, there might be a case for having receivers local to neighborhoods. If you didn't want to put them like actually on top of a roof, for example.

• 3:05:11Shawn Ryan?

  We were on the cutting edge of this, so I mean, so it's, I don't know. Could it, could it beam it to a car while driving? Like, could this revolutionize everything in energy?

• 3:05:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, so here's something you could do is you could beam it to moving platforms. You could beam it to boats.

• 3:05:26Shawn Ryan?

  Ships.

• 3:05:27Speaker 06

  You could beam it to ships. You could possibly.

• 3:05:29Shawn Ryan?

  Ship could hold a, a ship could hold a, a five to 10 meter wide receiver.

• 3:05:35Speaker 06

  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?

• 3:05:46Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's fucking cool, man.

• 3:05:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, imagine a fleet of satellites when they're flying over the Pacific, for example.

• 3:05:52Shawn Ryan?

  Dedicated to a fleet of naval ships.

• 3:05:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, or they switch from providing power to like some industrial application to now they're over the Pacific and now they're powering ships. And then they're back over land when they're powering industrial applications.

• 3:06:09Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing, man. Like what you're doing is just, is, it's incredible.

• 3:06:15Speaker 06

  This is the brave new world, man, and I, I think it's, look.

• 3:06:21Speaker 06

  This is really hard, right? Like this, what we're talking about doing here, there's, it's not a foregone conclusion that this is gonna happen. Like, it's a tremendously challenging technical problem ahead of us.

• 3:06:33Speaker 06

  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

• 3:06:53Shawn Ryan?

  It's awesome.

• 3:06:54Speaker 06

  It's a higher calling, right? Like, you gotta, if you have the, if you have the ability to like,

• 3:07:00Speaker 06

  make this contribution to the technical landscape of humanity. And I'm 40, right? Like, I have years ahead of me. Knock on wood.

• 3:07:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's like, it's seeing if you can will this into existence.

• 3:07:17Shawn Ryan?

  Well, seems like you're doing a damn good job, man. Last question.

• 3:07:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:07:22Shawn Ryan?

  If you had three people to say on this show, who would they be?

• 3:07:27Speaker 06

  Three people? I'm assuming you're asking for people that are alive today?

• 3:07:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:32Speaker 06

  I mean, this may be, um, I should think of a better answer to this. You've had Trump on, which I think is awesome.

• 3:07:39Speaker 06

  I'm trying to think of non-obvious ones, because the obvious one would be Elon Musk. Have you, would you have on somebody like Kamala Harris?

• 3:07:47Shawn Ryan?

  I tried to get her.

• 3:07:48Speaker 06

  Did you?

• 3:07:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we were in touch with her camp. She was gonna do it.

• 3:07:52Speaker 06

  I think that would be fascinating.

• 3:07:54Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if she'll do it now, but she was gonna do 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.

• 3:08:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I believe that.

• 3:08:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it would, I think that would have been huge.

• 3:08:15Speaker 06

  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.

• 3:08:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:25Speaker 06

  Who else would be interesting?

• 3:08:28Shawn Ryan?

  I'm kind of blanking. Let me, let me think about it a little bit. All right. No worries. Well, man, I'm so glad we met. Yeah. What a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time and, 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, and hope to see you again. Likewise, my friend. Perfect. Best of luck.