#33 - Ben Nowack, Co-Founder of Reflect Orbital

23:15like this is stupid um and i just do that on the side of like having a real job which was great what was that process for you when you're thinking about a new idea and you come up with something in your head or just like pops into your head um what's that process from going from you know it's in your head to eventually having an actual like prototype that you're like showing on a youtube video i mean it depends on the project um or just throwing it out yeah like i don't know i remember i wanted to make a drone that could go to the top of mount everest um i was i did like all the propeller hand calcs like all the battery sizing hand calcs like figured out what size props i needed and then like started buying them um uh yeah i mean it happened a lot before like i did this lake tahoe camera and you know that started with like oh i want to take a picture at the bottom of lake tahoe i feel like that would be pretty cool obviously this is not a company idea but you know you just like do the hand calcs make like a nice spreadsheet um chuck in an ansys do some ansys analysis and then you start buying you know parts on mcmaster and you start machining them um that one i actually ended up seeing through to the end but yeah after after a couple months of like having more and more frequent ideas i started getting faster and faster at killing them to the point where I would start like killing the idea before I even started building it and I felt like I was actually going nowhere I felt like it was kind of a backwards step because I was like I can't even commit to getting things done anymore but it was also like but it wasn't actually that it was just like you being able to decide this is not worth working on yeah this isn't meaningful enough yeah well because you got to weigh it against like you're gonna die someday and like if you spend your entire life like chasing things that go nowhere you know it's just a waste of life um or like if you're not moving fast enough like everybody else is like competing and having new ideas.

24:41So like you're just completely uncompetitive. So there's this like, you know, you really want to take bigger risks and bigger bets, but you also don't want to do that on things that aren't good enough. So it's kind of both things at once. Do you have kind of like a list in your head or an order of operations for you have a new idea all the way down to you actually have designed and created something? Or is it like concrete like that? Or is it just going, you know, by however you're feeling or whatever? I have a very long list in notes. So it was just kind of in there for a while. No, it's mostly like how you feel.

25:13You really only have one idea at a time, like one idea that you're really excited for at a time. And until you realize it's dumb, you can't really move on to have another one. I kind of realized that it's like everybody has like their one idea for their company. And it's kind of like, oh, this is the big one. And it's like, usually not. And until you realize that you can't really move on. I mean, I mean, maybe like the like iteration process or going down, you know, some some set of steps right from going from just an idea to a thing that's actually created like yeah i think i think you have the idea um you do like your own analysis on it you see if it exists like you do some research just see if somebody else has done it before and why they didn't um you kind of like get an idea of how big the market is and like what impact it could theoretically have in the best case scenario that one kills a lot of ideas and then after you know a couple days or a couple weeks of that then you start like asking all your friends and then you start asking like all your the smartest people in your network and then you start like having those people introduce you to the smartest people they know and then you do that for a while and then if every if it checks out on that level um then you keep pursuing it then yeah then you just kind of keep going um so that's the process i i ran into most ideas don't make it past the like you know couple days of your own analysis um like if you do really aggressive analysis and you're like okay let me try to kill this as quickly as possible a lot of things don't make it yeah um and yeah again it's all just like chasing that that kind of maximum utility thing like if you can create something that's like net new for the world that is economically viable to the point where like a hundred lawyers can sit in a room and decide that it's a good idea to spend a billion dollars doing a thing um then it has a really good chance of existing after you die and it was kind of this like i want to create like an idea you know it was actually for a while i had this like very clear vision in my head it was like i'm like getting the soil ready for like the seed like and then when the seed is planted like i'll allow it to grow um and then like i want to make sure that like you know once the seed grows it'll be handed off to people and like people will like continue to care for this this tree after I die um it was the kind of thought that was running through my mind and like if you know if you want to do that it has to be like a really beautiful tree you know first of all you have to get the dirt really ready to make sure that it's going to grow so like that was like getting really good at building and all that um but then the seed was always this like missing piece I feel like I was kind of lost for a while trying to find the missing piece the seed um but still like eventually it ended up happening in the grand scheme of things it ended up happening a lot faster than I think I expected.

27:30I imagined it probably would happen in my 40s, in my 30s. You just like knew that you would have gone through enough iterations on enough different ideas that you would have found something that just like would, you know, satisfy your curiosity while also being useful and everything. I mean, most, most great people start their thing like in their 20s or 30s. Usually after your 40s, you kind of, it's done. Not always. Some people like have the best thing ever when they're like, I think like Walmart and retail for some reason like sam walton was in his 40s yeah he'd already gone through a few different you know running different grocery stores and stuff yeah some things like that work or like uh the other one is like the kfc guy he started when he was like 60.

28:04that was just insane to me um but usually if you're doing like a new thing like a lot of newton stuff was like you know when he was pretty young um so i figured like if i was getting into my 30s like that's like you know red zone like it better happen quick otherwise you're gonna have a real problem but i figured it would probably happen around then um but yeah i don't know this is getting a little pretty meta now but this is This is kind of the process. Yeah. Yeah. When you were so I know that there was this like experiment in 1992 where like Russia shot like I believe the first mirror into space.

28:34And so this wasn't like the first time, you know, you guys are the first people shooting a mirror into space. um what why did they do that in the first place and then like there wasn't i think the solar energy or solar industry back then uh so there was just no like obvious business model for you know orbiting mirrors um but like what was what was the process for you kind of coming on to this idea yeah zanamia they did it to warm up mines in siberia um that was mostly who funded it was like these these mine owners um yeah there was about 200 megawatts of solar installed in the world back then, which is like a medium-sized solar farm today.

29:10We've spent like$3 trillion building solar around the world since then. I mean, even in the 2010s, solar was like$359 a megawatt hour. Now it's like in the 30s. I think it's gone down by like 10x, right? Yeah. Just since 2010. It's really insane. Honestly, it's even faster than rockets, right? Because the industry is so much larger. It's the whole earth. So the combination of basically like mass orbit going down massively plus solar, you know, just massive build out of solar equals good business that couldn't have existed. Yeah, that's not why I had the idea. I really had the idea because I was thinking about moving sunlight around and how that could be valuable.

29:43And I was like, if you can move sunlight from a place where it's easy to get to a place where people really want it, that could be a company. And, you know, light is really easy to move around with a mirror. LIGO is this like laser interferometry experiment to measure gravitational waves. And they their mirrors and that thing lose about three photons per million it's just like insanely efficient um and even just normal mirrors like a bathroom mirror is like 80 efficient if you compare that with like you know solar panels are like 20 efficient um then you have to like convert it into electricity and send that around and all that stuff um so i was like oh moving sunlight around just like with a mirror could actually be more efficient than that um and you can move it a long distance like it moves pretty far um sunlight moving in a vacuum makes it 13.8 billion light years to our eyes when we look up at the stars that are really far away right like those are super far away like you don't you don't really lose light.

30:27So like light traveling in a vacuum is one of the most efficient forms of transportation. It's really easy to move with mirrors. So it's like, oh, there's probably something here. That was the core idea. And then obviously the best place to get sunlight is in space where it's constant. It's never nighttime up there. And the best place to send it is the dark side of the earth where people yearn for the light. Like nobody ever has sunlight on the dark side of the earth. And you could just send it down with one mirror. So I started looking into like how to build out the constellation, how expensive the satellites would be, exactly what the satellites should look like solar sail vehicles are a great architecture.

30:57It's just like four booms that are really thin. And then, you know, the tension mesh reflector. And I was just like, wow, this is actually pretty light. It's pretty efficient. I mean, obviously, you lose, you know, a ton coming through the atmosphere, the sunlight spreads out a lot from the small satellite, you know, you get like a five and a half kilometer diameter circle on the ground. So that loses a ton of the irradiance. But if you're capturing that over a solar farm, that's on the order of five kilometers across. Yeah, it's actually quite a good conversion efficiency. You don't have to build that thing on the ground.

31:23So I had initially done the calculations for energy because that seemed like the biggest business. And yeah, I mean, it was like, oh, yeah, this can work. This can be obviously cheaper than batteries, cheaper than, you know, fossil fuels. And even one day it could be as cheap as solar during the day. So with with cheaper launch costs, I was like, wow, this is such a good thing to get into. It might be like a really good idea. Yeah. And I was like, you know, I knew the energy industry was gigantic. You know, it's like, is it 8 % of the global economy or something like that? It's like, you know, this constant amount of value that you could generate.

31:50And obviously, I cared a lot about the climate change. I knew how big of a deal that was. And I was like, I mean, the energy industry is one of those things like you get really excited about like a 1 % increase in, right? Like I had a couple ideas that were like, oh, this could be like a 1 % increase in like, you know, natural gas. Of global energy. Yeah. And this, but this was like, you know, you could, you could materially double it. So that's just like, you could materially double$3 trillion of assets, solar assets. So that was a big deal. The other one was like just building on the energy market with all the lighting markets because it's, we're moving sunlight around and there's so many other things you can use sunlight for so one of the early concepts was just moving sunlight around in vacuum tubes from one place to another and i was like oh you could like use that to like light up all of europe and power all of europe like you could basically have this like just like tube of like full of sunlight like a pipe because this other thing in like startups is like oh man like we're kind of just competing with pipes here like this is stupid um so it's like oh we could make the pipe full of sunlight and bring it to everybody um did you have did you have any other ideas like filling a pipe with pipe with light with or you know iterations of you know moving sunlight around other than through wires and through like pipes i guess yeah i mean for a while i thought an optic would be really important um so i thought about like making basically a beam expander or like a an inverse telescope in space and then beaming the sunlight down in a more accurate way um if you could beam sunlight down and hit like a 500 meter diameter circle it could be more valuable than a five kilometer diameter circle because there's much more small solar farms and big solar farms There's much more small towns than big towns.

33:09And you can like graph all this out. It turns out it adds so much cost that it's actually worth it to just, you know, do the one satellite. And there's enough big solar farms out there to receive that giant area of light that it's just way more economical to do that. But yeah, I looked at that for a long time. Yeah, the vacuum tubes was the other one. And then like, yeah, vacuum tubes plus storage. I don't know, like a bunch of weird little things like that. There was this like vacuum tubes derivative idea where you basically just make intense solar farms a bit more effective. But that would never be competitive with PV solar.

33:35because like, you know, by the time you build one of those things, PV solar is like half the cost. And it's just like, you know, that was that was a nonstarter. PV solar is really hard to beat. I think for a while I was actually trying to beat PV solar, realized that it was so impossible. And then one day I was on a run and I was like, wait, what if I just made PV solar better by like just sending sunlight down to it? Yeah, I actually heard that. And has there been any other moments where you're just like out on a run and like ideas kind of come to you or things just kind of like coalesce? Because I know that like exercise is absolutely insane for, you know, generating ideas.

34:05Yeah, no, all the time. Yeah, I think most of my good ideas come from from runs. It's also like if I get really stressed out, like I'll get super fidgety and I can't sleep. I'll just like go on a run at like 2 a.m. Sometimes that's pretty nice. And yeah, I think going for a run, I don't know. Running was really special to me in college because college was pretty depressing. Felt like my life was kind of going nowhere and I didn't really want to build stuff. So I was just like, you know, I'll just get like really good at running and like climbing stuff. And it'll be like something to get better at while I'm kind of just like plateauing here at school.

34:36It's just like finishing things. Why did you decide to go to college, you know, knowing that like you weren't happy doing it? I thought it would be very important for like, you know, getting a solid career, like working at places like SpaceX. I mean, you kind of like you're like learning a language that you can use to communicate with other folks. So it made sense that way. Like, yeah. Did parents think that it was like the right move? Yeah. OK. Yeah. I mean, they were like pretty supportive of kind of whatever. I decided to do but yeah after like you know meeting all the great folks at SpaceX I decided like yeah I want to do the college thing like all these people so I can like hang out and not feel like an outsider um I think that was important it's also like you're kind of risking like we're so like in society right now college is like becoming more okay to not go to um and you can still get a good job but it's still like it's a curve right um it's getting better I don't know if we're quite there yet.

35:29I wasn't willing to take the risk. Um, I thought that it was the right move. Yeah. I didn't have a good enough option. Like I didn't start reflect in college. Um, I probably would have dropped out if I did. There was a while where I wanted to like drop out of college to just work at SpaceX, but like my mentor was like, it's probably not a good idea because it's going to be hard to get a job anywhere else. Um, and I took that advice to heart. Um, and I think it's getting more okay. I think like right now it makes more sense to like not go to college. I think in the future, it's going to make even more sense.

35:55I think college is ineffective and expensive and honestly terrible for society in a lot of ways. Like if you're just excited about doing things, you should just be given, like, honestly, you should be given the amount of money that you'd spend on college to do your own stuff. With the right person, it's so much more effective to do that. I think I got a way better education for like 10 grand in high school, like with the Ben and Build stuff that I did in all of college. But still, you learn things that you wouldn't learn on your own in college. And I think some of that's nice. But yeah, back when I went, it was, I don't know, it felt like a different world then than it does now.

36:23I think now it's a little bit a little bit cooler to not go to college. How much how much do you think like the total cost for all the different bills that you did over the years like the total amount of money actually invested in doing all these different things was? Do you track it? Yeah. Ben and Builds was like like 20 to 30 grand. Really? Like only? Yeah. Crazy. It wasn't terrible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean college you know it's in the hundreds right? Yeah like easily you know 300 grand. Yeah. A lot of stuff i got for free a lot of stuff i got on ebay um have people kind of been i don't know if kind is the right word but like wanting to help you yeah because you build stuff yeah for the most part like i would do like some contracting work in high school like i worked for like peter brown a little bit we did this project where he put a camera on you know out in hawaii on the reefs to like protect from poachers um and he gave me like you know pretty generous contract gig for that um i also had this like this you know this like excited kid fly out and like work with me for nine days and like you know got got paid a decent amount for that um which was great because then i could like buy more stuff and build more cool things um so there were like a cool little like pretty unique things that that came from from building stuff that people were like you know happy to support um i never like actually made money on my youtube channel though i made like 70 cents total yeah i hated ads so i never ran ads same with me yeah i don't run yeah i'm never gonna run ads yeah it's interesting i don't know ads are ads are annoying did you was there like a toggle where you could turn off ads on your youtube channel um i think i just never toggled it on yeah okay but yeah you could like run ad sense or whatever yeah um it was like before pre-roll ads were common so i don't know i wasn't interested in that anyway i didn't have the biggest channel either well i mean you got like 20 000 subscribers which is like not small especially if like a few of your videos get like hundreds of thousands of views yeah it wasn't huge though um i don't know i just i hated ads it was more of like a thing like i feel like ads are kind of like stealing your attention in a big way and it's like oh man it should not be ads it should be like cool facts or something like i wish billboard just had cool facts on the matter this is like so super beside the point obviously company companies need a way to get their story out but but still yeah yeah um so during the first like uh i don't know after that run what was the process from kind of going from there to actually getting that first balloon launch done like what what are the you know the early days kind of look like yeah the early days of reflect looked a lot like me in a garage living out of my van.

38:44The really early days I was like, you know, working at Zipline and kind of doing stuff at like 2 a.m. You're just tinkering on the side. Yeah, yeah. What was the early tinkering? Mostly just like running Excel, like doing equations there, spinning some CAD, making some big mirror prototypes and stuff like that. I was really obsessed with trying to like get light collimated and sent down a vacuum tube without just a solar panel and a laser. Obviously it didn't work at all. But I was like, I was working on that for a little while, which was pretty fun. I don't know. It was just like messing with mirrors.

39:14I'd never done optics before. So it was just kind of like teaching myself optics. Yeah. So a bit of that, like just like spending personal money on some fun optics things. And then, yeah, I took an angel check and he was like, yeah, you know, if you quit your job, I'll give you 50 grand. And I was like, yeah, I think this is the thing. I think like there's something about the sunlight thing that's big enough that this is going to be worth it. And it was really it wasn't like the vacuum tubes thing. Like, I feel like that's the technical solution for the fundamental idea of moving sunlight around.

39:41And I was like, yeah, I don't know if this is the right technical solution, but like, I feel like the sunlight thing is valuable enough. It's the biggest amount of energy I've encountered. And it seems like the easiest to access. And so I was just like, yeah, you know what? This is worth it. Like, I don't want to wait anymore. And you want to just go for it. Yeah. And I was like, I just want to spend all my time on this because it felt like the time I spent, like even just doing those Excel sheets at like 2 a.m. was more valuable than my daytime job. It was like, this feels more impactful. This feels like it has higher potential.

40:09So I just like I can't keep doing this. How long did you feel like just not great? Like you go through college, you're not feeling awesome. You feel like you're not doing a lot of stuff. And then even like at that job, it's like maybe useful, but it's not like the thing that you were just put on this earth to do kind of thing. How long was that kind of gap from just building things as a kid on YouTube or making things to deciding to start the company? It's pretty long. I think the, what was it, like 2015? It's kind of like when I gave up the YouTube thing. And this would have been like 2021. So it was like six years.

40:44Yeah, it was a while. And I kind of tossed it up to like, you know, because honestly, like I would look back on the YouTube days as like one of the best times of my life. Like I was just going crazy. Like I would like not sleep for two days, just like writing code for an ROV, like just trying to figure it out. That's how I taught myself how to code. Like, and it was just like so, I don't know, so fun and just so good and like so new and so exciting. and you know the normal college and like kind of normal jobs weren't really that and it was all like this side project stuff um that felt like it wasn't going anywhere i don't know it was like it was good and bad like it was like okay i'm being more integrated in society i'm not being as insane like um i'm being more normal like it's okay but you didn't eventually won't be i like yeah not really no um yeah it wasn't the same as just like building stuff and like being super weird and like really leaning into what I like doing um this is like yeah I don't know even like having a social life it's like kind of nice at first but I was like oh this isn't the same as like building stuff um I don't know it's super weird I guess I'm kind of just a weird dude and when I wasn't letting myself be a weird dude it's not it just wasn't as fun yeah it wasn't as fun yeah um so yeah like starting the company felt like that you know for a while too it's just like me being really weird, like working on a crazy project, like just trying new, new crazy stuff every day and trying to make something cool happen.

42:07And yeah, it ended up working out. I got, I think I got really lucky. Do you think it was luck or was it just kind of like you had already gone through this process of trying a whole bunch of different things and think through a whole bunch of different problems. And then you finally figured out something that like fit the, you know, it's going to be useful, likely to succeed, can work on it for the next 10 years and good things will happen. Yeah, I mean, there's a formula for luck, right? Like, say something has a half a percent chance. We try it like 400 times. Like, yeah, if you try it 400 times, it's like, you know, I guess like a 200 percent likelihood that's going to happen.

42:36That's a terrible map. Guaranteeing it. Yeah. That's the Andrew Huberman map. Yeah. Like, but that's all you have to do, right? So it's like, oh, it's really unlikely that this is actually going to happen. But like, if I just try enough things, like maybe maybe one of them will work. And you just kind of have to roll the dice. And that was the same thing with like hot air balloon testing, too. It's like and like sharing that with like the rest of the team was pretty fun. It's like, okay, there's like a, you know, a 10 % chance it's going to work on any particular test. So let's go try it 10 times, you know, and like just bringing that energy into everything I do is, yeah, how to make things happen.

43:08Going into that hot air balloon test, how many, like, how much money did you raise? Was it just like a super small, like we're just going to keep super lean until we can actually prove something that we can like beam light using a mirror? It was like$2.1 million. It wasn't massive. Yeah, it wasn't massive. And you know, you got to spend a lot of that on like the, you know, the rest of the company too. There's a lot of like BD work that you have to do. There's a lot of like, you know, you need an office, you need employees, you got to pay salaries and all that. Paper tools. Yeah, there's a lot of other things that you need to do.

43:36The hot air balloon test itself was pretty cheap. You know, a couple hundred K for the whole thing. Was it useful that you had had like this experience making YouTube videos, like showing off, you know, here's how you are like making how to videos on this is how I built a thing? Yeah, that one was really useful. I don't realize how useful that one was until people ask like how did you do it? It's like well I just filmed everything. I've already done it a hundred times. Yeah it's like well this angle would be cool like let's just set up a camera here. It's like what? Why? It's like no no no it'll just take three seconds let's just do it.

44:03And then you have the footage later it's like oh my god that's the perfect shot. I think yeah it definitely helps a lot. Like just you kind of have to film everything and you always have to be like thinking like oh this thing would look really cool from this angle. Yeah that's basically it. But the way I think about it is like there's very there's like a lot of there's a lot of really good you know hard tech founders that are building things in the real world but there's not very many that are also really good at like the distribution problem and you do seem to have like that specific mix of like traits and talents I guess like built up yeah no the YouTube thing has been really helpful I I've spent like a disproportionately small amount of time doing it and it's had a disproportionately large effect on my life um yeah it's been really crazy I mean just the ability to like capture people's attention this is insane um like yeah we had that short little video it was like 15 seconds long me and Tristan had the idea for that like just like one day like halfway through work and we were like oh like later today it'd be really sick if we like did this thing to launch a new website and they just like went out with a drone that night and like filmed it and like it got 55 million views across all these reposts and stuff we got 200 ,000 applications for sunlight from 157 countries and it's just like like we just we kind of knew it would be good like and I remember like watching it I was like oh this has like that little piece of magic in it yeah and like you could feel it and it was like oh it's like so short it's so crisp we just kind of like pushed for that like short crisp magic and then like it just went so crazy and I don't know like developing the taste for what that magic is was probably like a 15 year thing of like thinking about like oh what the hell is it in like these Mr.

45:28Beast videos that like makes people watch it all the time it's like like what is that like weird thing like but there is kind of this weird like magic yeah there's like this thing and it's kind of tangible and like when you see it you know it but it's like it's I don't know it's really hard to figure out like what that is when you're like okay I have a clean slate what do I do what do I film what like what shots do I put in all this stuff yeah totally and I think there was a lot of like because I had the YouTube channel back in the day and none of those videos really went viral apart from one, which was, I thought was kind of boring when this iron furnace video, I got like a million views.

45:54I know I watched that a few times. Yeah. I like, I was like, what is it about this video? Like I was talking really slow and it wasn't that interesting. It was like, I felt like it was my least interesting video, but everybody loved it. And I was like, I guess it has this kind of like weird magic to it. I don't know. Um, but I had been thinking about that for years and like, yeah, I guess it all came together in like that 15 second viral video. And, um, yeah, I mean, sometimes like you, you kind of have to have the vision too. Like you can't just like go out and like make something that's going to that a lot of people are going to like like I've done that so many times and it's just failed terribly really yeah and then you're like you'll send the video to your friends you're like oh I'm really excited about this like what do you think and they're like dude you like look like a crackpot or like like what is this and it's just like oh man I don't know I don't know how to fix that and like you can't fix it sometimes for a couple months and then all of a sudden you'll have a new vision and you're like oh it's gonna be this and then like everybody loves it um it's it's so like hit and miss and creative and like yeah you kind of have to just make space for it and put in the iterations to get lucky.

46:47Yeah. What percentage of the things that you like make or do do you realize just very quickly like oh this doesn't work versus does work? Is it like five percent works kind of thing? Probably less than five. Probably like yeah maybe one. Yeah. One percent maybe less. Yeah. Interesting. It's maybe even worse than that. I mean there's all the ideas that like you kind of have like half of an idea of and then it kind of goes nowhere like yeah if you include all those it's yeah definitely less than one percent yeah yeah um i mean most things just don't work right like most like you can you know put any combination of things together in a terrible order like if you just like mesh words around in random orders and be like oh this is my idea it's probably not a good one um like the probability of having a good one is extremely rare um and i think that's why like i don't know i really love reflect because it's just it feels like it's somehow like perfect in a way like the core idea is like so simple just like move sunlight around like give it to people on demand and that's that's all you need and it kind of just carry you through anything i got super lucky with this one um and every time i think about it it's just like oh this is somehow like so perfect and so like so clean it's not like a combination of dumb stuff it's not like a derivative of anything it's kind of just like this fundamental thing that's so valuable um well what i find funny is that this is basically like i do think i i'm i'm like right that this is like the very early early iteration of the like a Dyson sphere is you're just like, it's like 0.0000001 % V, you know, like the, yeah, that.

48:11And I like, okay, so how do you think about actually like moving up the like Kardashev scale? How much do you think about that? Yeah, quite a bit now. I didn't think about it at first. I actually, it was a couple of months before I had the thought that this was a mini Dyson sphere. I'm sure my girlfriend told to me or my ex-girlfriend was like, oh yeah, it's, you know, you're like basically making a Dyson sphere, right? Like you're getting more energy from the sun than we have on Earth. And it's like, oh, yeah, you're kind of right. Because I always thought like a Dyson sphere is something around the sun that's like, you know, converting energy into infrared light.

48:43And we're just picking that up. It doesn't actually have to be directly right next to the sun, though. It could just be like, you know, millions or billions of light years away or whatever. Or miles away. 93 million miles. Yeah, exactly. Right around the Earth. Yeah, I mean, you kind of want to reflect it from somewhere close by because the sunlight spreads out. It makes your job a lot easier. We already have these great little satellites. You don't want to make megastructures. That's pretty complicated and annoying. Yeah, just do it with a lot of little mini flat satellites. Like the more numerous, the better is an idea because you're basically approximating a parabola with more elements when you do that.

49:13So that's pretty helpful. And yeah, I mean, why not start with a Dyson swarm around the Earth like way closer? It makes total sense. I mean, one thing our chief engineer, Charlie Garcia, says is we're a critical path to a Dyson sphere. So like, yeah, we'll start here. We'll keep building out around the Earth and we'll add like dozens and dozens of rings. We want to do 100 ,000 satellites within the decade. I think we won't stop until we're in the millions. I think this can support that if we're able to do it effectively. And we have so much control of it. I'm really confident that we can. But then, yeah, eventually you kind of build it out.

49:40And then you're like, all right, now we want to go near the sun. You want to, you know, maybe you want to do solar and lasers and then beam it to the reflectors and then beam it back down. Or maybe you just want to do like cast grain optics out there. Whatever works, right? But it's still going to be the same thing. It's going to be like reflection and then light traveling in a vacuum. And I think like I actually developed like a healthy respect for like what the Kardashev scale actually means. I think like if you're thinking on the scale of like, you know, one more than the energy in the solar system, if you're like in the galaxy i feel like you just want to move things around with light and you end up with these like effectively light beings because you're over such a large vast scale like basically the only thing that can cover distances is light and light has energy so it's like you know clearly this is actually the thing that you'd use for that um like you wouldn't you don't want to send mass around at the scale of the galaxy it'll just take like millions of years to get anywhere uh even light can take millions of years to get anywhere um so yeah it's just like clearly the way to do things um or at least get it started right and like when you hear dyson sphere like you know I remember watching like videos on YouTube it's like oh Kardashev 2 like that's so crazy and it also has to like the immediate thing it's like it's just this massive impossible thing to build yeah like and it's impossible satellite up in this like if you throw up one mirror into space and you just redirect a little bit of sunlight you've actually done the very first step yeah I mean every satellite you see is already doing it yeah they're just they're diffuse reflectors they're doing it pretty poorly but every satellite you see is reflecting sunlight you know that's why you see them there's a little reflection right like the Starlink train like they're all just reflecting a little bit of light they tried to reduce it because it was too much um but yeah they're like mini you know accidental dyson spheres um or like the precursor you know just do it more add more satellites do it deliberately have them very deliberately point at certain places add more rings like yeah you know you can optimize the heck out of it um it's it's pretty fun yeah when you think through so you've got like this kind of uh i love the whole critical path to a dyson sphere that's hilarious um and i loved it how did you actually come up with that or how did that was charlie charlie i don't know he comes up with all these crazy things you guys have like an actual doc that's like okay here are the steps no i mean you just like you know a lot of times it's in conversation i feel like i have my best like one-liners in conversations with people or like new people like i'll just like think of something and it's like oh i gotta remember that and then you just remember it for later so i don't know he probably was telling somebody about it and came up with that interesting okay so how do you uh so let's talk about the timeline on basically doing you know the first i think it's going to be first launch in like a few months 294 days.

51:57294 days. Yeah. Currently slated. It could be, you know, SpaceX, anybody can move it. Yeah. Doing things in space is hard. Yeah. So so how many satellites are you going to launch on that first one? And then the next one after that, what are the timelines look like? And then what is like the main feedback or information that you're trying to get from those launches? We're doing two satellites next year. So the first launch is just going to be one satellite. We don't want to do the thing where we launch up two satellites and they both fail for the same dumb reason. Like the radios were plugged in backwards or something like that.

52:23launching the first two starships on the same day yeah you don't want to do that you know like you're insulated from certain failures but not all um yeah so we're doing two different launches um and a couple months apart so we have time to change some things but not too much we're not going to like launch one vehicle and then change very much about the vehicle between the next one uh so we're currently looking at april and october um that seems quite good um it's also possible to move them and you know for any number of reasons but yeah we want to get up as soon as possible and the idea with these vehicles is we want to be brighter than a full because the Russians were about as bright as a full moon.

52:53It sucks to launch something that's not as cool as them. You also want to be better than the Russians at least. Yeah, I want to be better than the Russians in 1992. You know, that was a long time ago. Space was like 97x more expensive back then, and there was no solar. So we can definitely do better than that, especially with how good, you know, you can make reflectors and stuff. And it's like our reflectors actually going to be a little bit smaller than that. You can see it back there. It's like actually smaller than the Russian one, about 18 meters by 18 meters. And yeah, so we want to, you know, fully be brighter than a full moon.

53:19we have a bit of margin on that like 5x margin on that right now which is great and yeah use it as a full commercial vehicle we're actually doing sweeps onto the ground we obviously got 264 ,000 applications from 157 countries what was that day like when you released the launch post of you know you've got the balloon and suddenly you just did it just like start streaming in just people reaching out to you insanely well we were like every second we were like I hope we get a thousand right thousand applications yeah I was like oh if we got a thousand it'd be so cool so you're off by like 260x yeah well because i was like oh it's gonna be so annoying to like sign into the website like we're gonna lose so many people just in like how painful that is like yeah not true crazy uh what were what were the like uh what was it like going you know on that day or the next few days and then also what were the like the most interesting applications that you just hadn't even considered would you know people would want yeah the craziest thing was just what was in those applications like just reading through them like there were people who were like oh my uncle is a former astronaut and like I want to light up his birthday like there was just like the most inspiring stuff in there um it was a very distracting day in the office um we were just like constantly setting things like oh look who just applied um like oh look at this you're never gonna believe it um yeah it was super fun I mean there was just weird things like you could just search like bananas and then they'd be like oh I'm a banana farmer and I want some sunlight so I can like grow my crops faster and it's just like what the hell um there's weird things too like I want to use sunlight to like dry my clothes faster um there was a lot of like you know just things like that that we'd never thought about that probably aren't going to do, but we could do if we need to.

54:44And then people like actually had to fill out a form, like go to your website and fill out a form. Yeah. So you said that like, I think it got like 55 million impressions. The videos, the video. Yeah. Because like a bunch of people picked it up on like Instagram and that. Does that mean that it was roughly what? What is that? Like a 0.025 % conversion rate to actually someone filling out a form? It was pretty good. Yeah. About that. Crazy. Yeah. It was. Yeah. And like a form on our website. 0.5. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. You can put the math in the bottom. Crazy. But yeah, it's yeah, it was insane.

55:15Like we didn't expect anything close to that, like anything close to the views, anything close to the engagement. And a lot of them were like, I mean, really inspiring. Like a lot of people from up north were like, hey, this could like totally change what life's like in Norway or like, you know, Alaska. Yeah, I'm from Alaska and that would definitely be great. Yeah. And then. Yeah. And like, I mean, Alaska, like we, you know, we can't talk about it. We have like, you know, some letters of intent that we've signed with some folks who were like, oh, yeah, this is going to like totally change. which it's like to be at the school in this town or whatever.

55:41So that was like really interesting. What are the main first like applications that you're trying to solve? Because I know that you talked about basically like extending the day in any given area by like two hours or even starting the day two hours earlier kind of thing. Yeah, so the plan right now is we're doing the two satellites next year. Then we want to do two rings, basically 36 satellites total. When you do 18 satellites in a ring, you can do an hour wide strip anywhere on Earth. And if you do two of those, you get two hours. And that gives you ability, like that's available anywhere on Earth from like, you know, 7 p.m.

56:09to 9 p.m. And if you're in that time of day, you can just hit a button and you can turn on the lights. The light turns, you know, shoots down. Yep. So even if you're in the middle of the ocean, like the middle of the Pacific Ocean, having a huge problem, you can just hit a button on like a Garmin inReach and then all of a sudden, boom, the lights turn on and you can see everything. And it'll be over a whole like 6 ,000 acre area. So you can see everything around you. Like say you're like doing search and rescue and you're looking for somebody with like the tiny little headlamp and you can't call in a helicopter with a searchlight and like the guy's like just, you know, a couple hundred meters away, but you can't see them, right?

56:37You hit this button all of a sudden, like, oh, he's right over there. And you just walk over there. You said it takes like 30 seconds? Yeah. Yeah, because all we have to do is rotate a satellite around. It's like a degree or half a degree or whatever. Like 60 degrees. 60 degrees, okay. Yeah, I mean, kind of far, but, you know, we have a big reaction system. We have a lot of agility on this vehicle. So, yeah, we can just flip around and do that. And, yeah, that'll be with the 36. So that's, you know, two next year, 36 the year after. Then we can do two hours. And the two hours is kind of like a taste of actual utility.

57:02Like the first one is just a taste of like what the sunlight is like. Like, oh my God, it's like five times better than a full moon and I can see everything around me. When I do the 36, it'll be a little bit brighter. And obviously it'll be, you'll be able to do a handoff from one satellite to another and cover a whole two hours. And then it's just building up the constellation. So the year after that, we want to do 700 satellites. And 700 is enough to, first of all, add more satellites in that ring so you can serve more customers simultaneously. You can also overlap spots to get more irradiance.

57:27But then we're also going to build out rings that go into the middle of the night. So we can do 24-7 service anywhere on Earth, plus like, you know, most of the service in those first couple hours after sunrise and sunset. Because that's when most people want electricity. That seems like the best match of the supply demand curve. So, yeah, that's what we're shooting for. 700 the year after. And then, so, yeah, 2, 36, 700, 4 ,000, 10 ,000, you know, 20 ,000, like really ramping up quite quickly. And this is going to be like directly scaled with, you know, the fact that like Starship comes online and suddenly you can, you know, launch a bunch of mass orbit very cheaply.

58:00right yeah we're we don't require starship because we can do all these lighting markets the lighting markets are like hundreds to thousands of times more profitable than the energy markets um and they're not even like particularly small they're still in like the tens of billions of dollars per year um it's like construction like i thought energy was like the biggest market out there it's like eight percent of global gdp construction is like 20 so it's just like okay so extending like construction crews uh like day by an hour or two or something like that Yeah, yeah. We'll start with just extending the day by a couple hours and then we'll be able to do it all night as well over just a giant area.

58:35So if you have like 100 square mile construction projects, like you don't need to do anything. You just like be like, oh, yeah, we got reflect service tonight. Like you can just like schedule it on the calendar. You don't even have to think about it. It's pretty amazing. So we're basically turning on like the back half of the Earth's economy. Yeah. In a lot of ways. And yeah, the market for that is actually like larger than energy. And that was really surprising. Like we didn't expect that at all. um but yeah it's i mean sunlight is responsible for 99 of life on earth it's like while the trees grow it's like what powers the rain it powers rivers it powers everything um it's the reason that like i can see you i mean most of this light is coming from the sun it's the daytime out right it's like we sleep at night because it's harder to do stuff at night um we can fix that and you know we can give you exactly what you want exactly when you need it um so yeah that whole thing was actually much more exciting than we expected and i think a lot of that came from the 264 000 applications we didn't actually think lighting was valuable before we did that really yeah how long how long were you going just on the energy side i mean until yeah like the summer like last summer um i mean we were like oh yeah lighting we'll do that that'd be cool we had like no idea what it would be like um so yeah we were really surprised by that i mean that's what i mean like this idea of just like moving sunlight around is kind of just like in the way that most ideas get slowly killed over time and whittled down into nothing this idea has continuously built up it yeah and that was always like the biggest signal for like when i needed to double down and really commit harder to reflect it was always like well if i look back the last month it's gotten better so okay yeah this probably does make sense to keep going um every other idea i've had has gotten worse um so yeah consistently getting better was was a huge green flag and yeah it continues to do so um yeah we just got an air force contract at direct to phase two um you know and like that's deeply exciting i mean it's for energy and lighting right and it's just like yeah obviously it's useful to be able to light up anywhere on earth in under 30 seconds like you don't have to wait for a helicopter the searchlight show up like if you're having a problem if somebody falls overboard like you just hit the button and the lights come on um we had people apply for sunlight who like had lost friends for that exact reason they were like this could have saved my friend um and like that is i don't know completely unexpected do you think that like cruise companies would potentially be like a market just because you know someone falls over and there's like thousands of people on board and you just like light up an entire you know square mile or something of area yeah totally um yeah we can do that um i mean i've definitely seen videos of people like falling off the ship or jumping off the ship and then not being found ever yeah no we could definitely help with that um because even if they're really far away you'll be able to see them in the light as if it's daytime i mean it's it's a lot easier to do a rescue during the day than at night um when we can make the nighttime just like the daytime for for that operation um when it's critical yeah i mean even just like there's interesting aspects too like even just resorts in like you know say like the middle east right it's super hot in the summer and like people don't really go outside during the day so they'll light up the beaches at night it's called night beaches they have all these like light towers and they light everything up it could only be better if that was just done with sunlight just one beam yep yep yeah and you just hit the button and it'll be cheaper you're not like usually at night you're burning fossil fuels because the sun's not around and you know it's not always windy um so yeah we're like you know in that case you're just directly replacing fossil fuels as well so like the lighting thing i mean at first it was pretty easy to economically justify it's like well if we're as cheap as electricity we're definitely as cheap as like electricity plus the light bulbs, plus like all the installation costs.

1:01:44But it also turns out that people actually see it as much more valuable than an electron because you can get an electron in any other way. Like, you know, it could be XYZ fossil fuel plant. It's totally a commodity. But the lighting market itself is this just value product where you're adding all this additional stuff. Is this almost kind of like mail versus email where like mail, you have to like have a physical letter and you have to build the roads and then like this whole mail system and a little delivery network and all this stuff versus email, you just like shoot it on a computer and it just like fires over and you know someone's able to just easily so you don't need to build any of that infrastructure to have a light yeah i mean like i mean you came here you set up some lights right like imagine if you could have just like texted the reflect phone number and like you got some sunlight or just got like my gps location say on and it just yeah that's that's all it's going to be like right um even if you're an entire city like if you're an entire municipality and you need sunlight it'll be that easy you just hit the button like you could do it on a web app um you could do it on a text like you could call me on the phone and be like i'll pay you later you know like if I know you.

1:02:39Like it's that simple really. Yeah. And it's, I think it's kind of like Starlink in a way where Starlink is much better than, you know, cable based internet in certain applications. Like if you're in the middle of a rural area, it's really hard to like, you know, rattle the cables and it becomes expensive. It's like super valuable for anywhere that is very difficult to build infrastructure and it's not already built. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just put the stuff in space and it's over the whole earth right away. Once you get it operational in one place, it's operational around the whole earth to the same extent, which is pretty cool.

1:03:05You don't have to build it out individually every time. We're doing the same thing. You don't have to individually every time build out lighting. Yeah. I'd imagine that for this, because there's, you know, you're only going to do like two launches next year and two satellites, you probably like go through a super, you know, complex iteration cycle and figuring out every little kink that you can possibly imagine before you send the first one out. What does that look like? Yeah. I mean, it's hiring really smart people and letting them letting them work. I mean, as a CEO, it's kind of my job to keep the money flowing, keep the money flowing in, make sure we're buying all the right stuff, make sure we're hiring all the right people, make sure we're growing really quickly and effectively.

1:03:41What's been the biggest challenge? I mean, I think it's a lot of just like execution on the satellite. Satellites are still pretty hard to make work. A lot of startups make them and they break. We're a pretty cool one. So it's been easy to hire. I think our mission's been really exciting. So that's been really positive. Like sometimes it's pretty hard to hire great people. But luckily, like, I don't know, we've been able to. We've been really lucky. Um, so that's been really helpful. But then, yeah, I mean, there's just like a lot of just manually actuating levers and like manually doing things like, oh yeah, we need to design the satellite.

1:04:15It needs to work. We need to think about everything. We need to think about the requirements. We need to think about exactly what it's doing. Um, we need to like push back on all these things. We need to figure out like, who's making this, who's making this, who's making this, how are they going to fit together? Like, what's going to break? How are we going to get through environmental testing? How are we going to get through vibe testing? Like, how are we going to make sure this is going to be operational on the spacecraft? Like, I mean, just figuring all of that out takes a lot of work, takes a lot of conversations.

1:04:34um i love it it's like super fun but it's like you know building anything everything is is like 10 times harder than you think um and like and and then it like you know keeps being 10 times harder than you think and you have to like finish it way faster than you think too um so it's it's always just like that kind of game but i don't know it's always like that i was ready for that when i started the company i think that's like one of the good things about being a technical founder is like i've built stuff before i know how much it sucks i know how much it's going to cost kind of like they also know how like fun it is yeah like satisfying yeah yeah um but yeah i think like yeah i was kind of expecting all of it i wish we could launch like a thousand next year obviously that doesn't make sense um like i wish that what's the like main constraint for launch you know just bringing up the timelines um rocket launches is it like you don't want to spend you know millions of dollars per satellite or you know what is it yeah you kind of want to test the thing before you spend a lot of money i think even if we had you know a couple hundred million dollars right now, we'd still do this mission.

1:05:32We'd still do it first. We'd obviously in parallel start like a massive production facility and just be working on that. Um, but yeah, we'd still do this first and it would still inform what we do in the production vehicles, um, to a significant enough extent extent that like things may change. So we may not like fully commit on certain items of the program before we do this first test. Um, yeah, we'd like, it's hard to do the first test fast enough too. Cause like in the space industry, you know, you can either make the thing yourself or buy it from somebody. Making the thing yourself takes months, right?

1:06:01It takes months to design new hard stuff that's going to survive and actually like be effective and work and like get it through all the testing. The trade-off is like the idiot index on most of the components and stuff in a satellite are super, super high, but it takes so many months and lots of effort to, you know, make a thing that costs like$80 ,000, 800. Yeah. It's just not worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the idiot index for space parts is like in the hundreds for basically all space parts. But you can't really fight that either because your NRE to make one part is going to be 100x the cost of the actual raw materials.

1:06:31So like you're not even able to beat that. It's just like the only way to beat it really is volume. It's to like do the NRE and then spread that over thousands of vehicles. But the first spacecraft, we're spreading it over one vehicle. So it's kind of the same thing. And really what we want is we just want to get something into space as quickly as possible. And there's a lot of great vendors out there that you can procure items from. But some of these space vendors, like we don't work with these particular ones, but like some of these space vendors are like, oh, you want an apple. Yes, let me plant an apple tree.

1:06:53It will be ready in five years. And then I will pick it perfectly. we'll get the perfect person to pick the Apple and make sure it's tested properly before we give it to you. And it's like, I don't want that. It's like, just give me the Apple right now. Why don't you just have a bunch laying around? And it's like, well, every customer needs a different Apple, you know, and it's just like, and literally in the space industry, every single satellite is bespoke and like every customer wants different things from these companies. So it just becomes this whole mess. It's a very new industry. It's like instead of buying, just going to the store and buying an iPhone, you know, you have to like ask Apple how to build the iPhone.

1:07:21And they're like, OK, well, we need to figure out everything involved in building the iPhone. you know, iPhone. Yeah. Like, it's like if Apple wanted to work with you to like get the right iPhone for you, it's like, well, how wide is your hand? Okay, well, that'll take us another two years because we want to do that for you. And it's like, no, can I just get the same one as everybody else? It's like, no, like it's custom. Yeah. Everything's kind of custom. And even the things that aren't custom, they just don't have it. Yeah. Like they haven't built it yet because it's too expensive and they need like your money to start building it or whatever.

1:07:45It's like, oh my God. It's such a new industry. And this is why SpaceX just does everything themselves because it's honestly easier a lot of times um but it's pretty expensive to do that uh and you have to be making a lot do you have any uh like good stories or like moments of serendipity that just led to interesting things happening you wouldn't expect it i reflect these days i mean there's all kinds of like little examples of things just working out pretty well um i think a lot of it's in like the people we've hired like just kind of being the exact right person that's been really exciting um yeah like robert salazar is just like this incredible origami expert who has like 25 years of experience he's you know been doing like starshade and lunar flashlight for a while and like just these crazy origami projects he was on like you know stuff was on the front page of nat geo um and he's like the perfect person to work on like heliostats like this like he had looked into them for the moon in the past and he's just like he thought about everything knows exactly why this is valuable for the world um and it's just like i don't know the fit there was just so incredible um that was like it felt like serendipity it's like how how did how do you exist how did we get lucky enough to have yeah like how is a person like you like on the earth like and like how are we able to like you know attract you to work on this project with us um like stuff like that has just been like so cool um and so rewarding so i think like yeah building the team around the project has been one of the most exciting things to really get into here um and yeah i mean most of my job is just like making sure that people are like pointed in the right direction and like have the resources that they need to execute on this and doing that's been been really fun um it feels like it's a lot more supportive than directive and like that's the only way to do it so that there's just so much like i don't know it really feels like good work and like just like i go home and i'm just like oh man like you know i help the team like do a bit of a better job today on something they're really excited to work on um so you're just like your main thing is you're just trying to make the organization function well yeah kind of thing yeah i mean few things are that rewarding um and it's really like you know it's one of those things you have to get right from the beginning you know otherwise like you know you hear so many stories of like companies that like they were too big and then like the culture is different you can't change and it's like man I really don't want that it feels like just like like slop like you just did a bad job like you really want to make sure that like I don't know you're doing it right the whole time have you been trying to be like super methodical on hiring people like what do you have any like framework similar to like Steve Jobs where he's thinking you know the first 10 people like imagine uh if you're giving someone like one percent of the company or whatever do they like massively increase way more than one percent like the company succeeds that type of thing yeah I mean this is one of those things where like you hear the advice and you're like oh yeah i'll totally do that definitely do that and then you don't for for a little bit and then you like accidentally get lucky with like the perfect person and they just they do better than like 10 or 20 people could in like two days and you're just like oh that's what they meant yeah um that's what an a plus player is yeah yeah i feel like yeah you can you can listen to all the advice you want but like until you actually experience it firsthand like you're not actually gonna know what it means um so yeah luckily i've learned firsthand exactly what that means and then realize how valuable that is and have been doing it since um yeah i think with tristan my cto it was kind of like that it's like oh like interesting that's why you find tristan yeah yeah yeah so you you like initially did a whole bunch of interesting you know projects and builds and all this stuff on your own how did you decide that you wanted a co-founder in the first place yeah i mean i knew tristan from zipline he was this high school kid who had he was working on like the one of the cooler harder projects at zipline like directly out of high school um and he knew me from my youtube channel back in the day so we became like kind of instant friends uh was he watching that back in the day yeah yeah like years years ago and he was like oh my god i can't believe ben's like interviewing here is that when i was joining um i was like whoa this is cool um i never i don't know it's one of those things whenever you get recognized on youtube it's like oh it's super crazy but then it's like oh wow like i don't know people are actually watching the coolest kid yeah but he's also like the like one of the smarter faster people there and i was just like god this kid's so awesome and like he was watching my channel like it was this big ego boost i was like yeah like the cool people watch my channel anyway um and uh and yeah i don't know we just became instant friends and like would hang out all the time after work and i don't know yeah i was like i would talk to him about the reflect idea pretty often because it was kind of like all i was working on like i'd like parted ways with zipline and just kept working on it full time and i don't know just kind of kept getting more and more interested and he was working he was at stanford like he got into stanford and he was going there for a little bit and they would be like asking me about it like late at night and i'd be like tell him about it I'd be like, you know, you could just leave Stanford and come and join me.

1:12:08And he was like, I'll think about it. And then, yeah, he ended up being like, you know what? I think this is going to be way more valuable and ended up joining, which, yeah, it was pretty incredible. How's that relationship evolved and what areas or what things can you just know that you can lean on him for? Yeah, he I think we have like overlap in the right places, but he really understands like the organization stuff and the company thing and like the he's really good at like communicating really complex and weird visions um and figuring out like exactly the right things to say for an organization to function like even as like a you know he was like the young one of the younger people on the team at zipline and he was more wise on like how things should be approached and like what things mattered and what things to test for and who should be working on what than a lot of the full timers there um like he's just like wise way beyond his years and whatever that is it's just like unbelievably valuable and it's something i don't really have as much um and yeah i just knew that like that would be one of the most important things to get early on a team um because you just know that the thing is going to be done right and that the right people are going to be working on the right things um you can just count on them yeah yeah yeah and there's just like that deep trust and like doing the hot air balloon testing with tristan was super fun like we both were we stayed up for like three days straight just like working on stuff we like we speak the same same language in a lot of ways we're like oh like oh we got to build this thing and it'll be done like exactly how i would have built it um or he'll be like i'll do this thing and like i don't know it seems like i do it correctly so it's like i don't know there's just this like real camaraderie um and we have like kind of the same thoughts about what should be new in the world what should be done and what should be changed um i don't know there's just like so much alignment there um and so much alignment with like what this project is and what it means and how to do it Right.

1:13:52It's like super complimentary, you know, traits and values and all this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Interesting. Let's end it on like what's the hardest thing you've overcome? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely I haven't overcome it yet. It's definitely reflect. This is the hardest one I've ever done. I mean, I've been working on this for a couple of years now. It's taken everything. Like I'm putting everything into it. We haven't done it yet. Right. Like we haven't launched the satellite. I think it's even when we do that, it's going to be far from over. I think it's going to be like kind of decades from over.

1:14:21And I was kind of waiting for that for a long time. Like I figured if I started something new, it'd have to be on that kind of scale. Like, you know, ideally say you live like 60 or 70 years, right? You kind of want to work on something for as much of that time as possible. Ideally one project, like if you could focus on one thing for your entire life, it's going to be a lot better than if you focus on one thing for like five or 10 years or, you know, and the more excited you are about it, the more you're going to get out of it too. Like if you're kind of like half interested in your job, you're going to do a terrible job doing that for like 60 years, not interesting at all.

1:14:48So like I want to be really focused, really bought in on something for like as much of my life as possible. Very few ideas, like most ideas aren't worthy of that. First of all, you have to be lucky to have one. I feel like I have one here. So I'm just like dumping everything into it to a really high degree. And I think it's like the potential here is so high. I don't see that stopping ever. If it does look like a terrible idea, I'll immediately stop. Like I think that's always the case. Like as soon as this is like, oh, this actually isn't what I thought. Like I'm going to quit immediately and do the next thing.

1:15:17it it's always been a promise that i've made to myself um when did you implement that like when you implement that kind of like philosophy of just like willing to cut losses oh with all the like dozens of ideas i've looked at over the years was there any was there any idea that you like spent way too long on just trying to make something interesting work and then you just realized at the end of it like it wasn't worth it oh plenty that the helium liquefier was one of them right how many how many like months on that oh four four four months it wasn't too bad um yeah i mean yeah sometimes you just cut your losses like i used to like run all the time and like i climbed denali when i was like you know pretty young um solo and just running not solo uh it was like with guides and stuff i did i did mon blanc solo that was pretty fun um but i was like that was a big part of my life for a while and i just kind of like realized it's not as important as reflect so like i've given that up for reflect um it's just way more rewarding to do this than any of that um i don't know yeah it's like it's just like i keep wanting to give it more of my time and effort in a way that a few other things have been.

1:16:16I guess the hardest thing before FLECT,

1:16:21mentally one of the harder things was like finishing college. I think that was pretty tricky. I really like, I don't know, there was a whole like mental battle there. It's like, do I really want to finish college? At what year were you kind of like flip-flopping on whether or not you wanted to? Oh, the whole time. The entire time. Oh, yeah. Like, was it four years? Day one, yeah. And so you were like not happy almost immediately going in. And then you were like... I was like, oh, this is true. Did it feel like part of your kind of like soul was dying? Yeah, yeah. I was like, oh, this is like so much slower than just building stuff for like the Ben and Build stuff.

1:16:53Like, yeah, college versus Ben and Build was like very different. And like not everybody has that experience. Like sometimes college is great. I was just like, oh, wow, this is like really a big step backwards. You just knew what your passions were and it wasn't college. Yeah. And I felt like it was like it was helpful because it's obviously like a big deal in society, like society values college really highly and like other companies do and stuff. and it was kind of like i'm really just like taking a big bet on society valuing this um which like is true and i think was the right decision but it was like it was a hard one to keep doubling down on because like i don't care society cares i guess i care about society like valuing stuff um and that just kind of pulled me through it so that was pretty tricky um yeah other than that i don't know i mean like i'm generally pretty happy like i like just kind of working hard i feel like i just i enjoy the the hard work for the hard work yeah i think you kind of have to like decide to do that at a certain point like you can get up in the morning and kind of do nothing um actually i had like lyme disease for a couple years and like i had like a pick line in my arm and stuff oh and i like missed a lot of high school um and like it kind of was like really depressed and like you would just play minecraft all the time you know like just really going absolutely nowhere like all my friends dropped off and like i really just got like super sick and like it was pretty traumatic and i remember like i got injected with like ionic silver and i don't know it was this crazy hippie dude in maine like injected me with silver and like all of a sudden got better in like two weeks and i just like looked back in the last two years is like a complete flat line and i was like if i just stayed in that i would have done nothing before i died and i decided that i never wanted to do that again yeah um and then just kind of decided like yeah i just want to like do stuff all the time um and since then i've just kind of like loved doing stuff all the time and nothing really feels hard when you are just interested in it to do stuff all the time yeah even reflect it's like i just want to come in here like work a lot of hours work really hard make sure i'm always working on the most effective thing make sure i'm always like moving things forward as quickly as possible pathing yeah and just like if you love doing that it never really feels hard um and it's like some of the commitments are hard you know you got to sacrifice like you know personal life a lot and that's kind of hard you know it's hard to like leave friends behind that aren't like quite there with it or yeah they're like quite adding to reflect it's like oh you're not really adding to what i want to be doing at reflect so like i don't know i'm gonna spend less time with you and stuff that's that's really tough um but but worth it i think yeah yeah it's worth it um yeah because i think yeah plateauing is like the worst thing ever like i mean you might like i remember thinking like after i had lyme disease it was like oh i might as well just like die now like what's the point of living the rest of my life I never do anything else when you like got it um I was like 2012 2013 I was it was like a freshman sophomore year college of a high school yeah um yeah so when you're like 14 15 yeah yeah um yeah and it like started off okay then it like got worse like you know started like not really being able to like focus and stuff um just kind of yeah it became bedridden for for like a good year there um did you work on projects so you're like bedridden but did you work on projects outside of being bedridden or oh no that time i didn't i did literally like nothing just totally nothing okay yeah i like other than minecraft yeah basically other than minecraft yeah it was terrible um yeah it became like a waste of uh waste of skin it was it was bad um yeah i don't tell that story often is yeah i like started writing about it for like my college essays and I was like, oh, nobody wants to hear this.

1:20:25Yeah, no, it was just like, you know. It was just extremely tough. Yeah, I had headaches constantly and couldn't remember things one week to the next. Do you think that you're kind of like, are you almost happy or sad that you got it? Because I know that some of those things, there are a moment where you realize, I really don't like this version of me or I don't like not doing stuff. Yeah. So thus, I know that I definitely don't want that. and that won't give me happiness and joy and you know fulfillment and all this stuff so going forward when you are actually working on the thing you're just like i definitely want to be working way more than most people think it's like normal um yeah i think there's a bit of it um i kind of flip flop on if it was helpful or not because it did still cost me a couple years of time and i was working pretty hard and doing cool stuff before that um like i did like all the rc planes and stuff before that and built stuff before that it's kind of like this pause in a way but i do think it kind of gave me like a little bit of an edge on like wow i wanting to do things before i die because holy crap would it ever suck if i look back on my life and didn't feel like i'd done enough um i think i don't think i would have had that without it i think i would have kind of i don't know i was also kind of i think i had way more of an ego before it too um yeah i think it kind of humbled me in a lot of ways you know it's like wow you can just kind of lose it all you're always like three bad decisions away from losing everything um and where did you come to that framework is like one of the Lyme disease things I don't know it's like like yeah like think about it like it's not it wouldn't be that hard to go homeless right like you know you could just be like oh yeah let me just try I was almost there like three days ago yeah no it's it's right there it's always like sneaking up um like I don't know I feel like I feel like a lot of for a lot of people it's like oh like let me try this new drug or whatever and then they get addicted to it and then it's like oh wow then your family starts hating you and then you have no support system and then you lose it all um it's really terrible but like it can happen to anybody like you're Like I'm definitely not above that.

1:22:22Yeah. And you just you kind of have to make the decision every day to avoid that like very directly. And it's like I don't want to just avoid that. I want to like do the exact opposite of that. Like I want to figure out how to like grow and excel. Maximum useful. Yeah. Yeah. And I kind of took a lot of things for granted before before getting sick. I was like oh this is natural. What in like particular did you take it or take advantage of or whatever. Like anything you know like eating food. like you know I had I had like you know a really good family so like I would always have like good food and like my parents like spend time with me and stuff um and yeah I think like I don't know I was really lucky in a lot of ways like you know growing up in America it's like very different from growing up in other countries um so you just end up with like all this privilege that you kind of take for granted and like imagining all of it being just like for nothing and just going to waste it was terrifying um yeah sorry this is getting super deep but super weird but it was yeah um yeah like you don't want to take it for granted um like you're eating food every day you're like taking up some amount of space you're using some amount of resource i feel like a lot of i don't know there was a story a while ago where it's like you know your biggest impact on the earth is going to be the amount of trash you create and it's like the amount of plastic you leave behind And it's like, God, I really don't want that to be the biggest impact I have.

1:23:47I want to do something else. Like, I don't know what. And it's like, you want to leave it better than you found it. Yeah. And it's pretty hard to actually do that. Right. And it's like, and you got to be risky enough. Like you don't just want to like do the normal path because that might not be risky enough to actually get you out of it. Like you need to be risky enough that like the positive side, you know, gets you above zero. Because just doing the normal thing might actually just be close to nothing. Yeah. My, the way I think about it is basically, you know, you can't necessarily like quantify better but you can quantify more interesting yeah and so i try to say like interesting good you know yeah interesting is definitely one yeah yeah yeah interesting useful i feel like the most useful thing is always like the hardest thing to do too um it's always like oh what which path here has the most work associated with it that's probably the one i should do um that was another one is like it's kind of just like brute forcing utility it's like what is the hardest thing to do um not for dumb reasons like the hardest thing for real reasons to do and sometimes it's like oh i have to like go talk to this person i don't want to talk to you sometimes it's like a weird hard thing that you have to do that's usually the right path like usually the right path is one of the most work associated with it yeah um so it's like okay you just lean into that yeah try to do the hard thing when you come to the crossroads yeah yeah if you can't find any other reason like you know you're probably biased to the easy one just because you want to do the easy one um so like including that bias like yeah just just figure out how to do the hard one like if you're going to flip a coin like you know I don't know where I was going with that like don't even flip the coin just do the hard thing just do the hard thing