#47 - Mike Grace, Co-Founder & CEO of Longshot

31:03Like that's how you solve hard problems. These hard problems, in my opinion. Yeah. And so when you're thinking about getting, you know, let's say a 20 kilometer stretch of land like that, I, my hunch is that it's not easy to prepare 20 kilometers. I think that because like engineers are the people who think about this problem, they don't think about the real estate side. I actually think one of the reasons why nobody's ever built a system like this is is more to do with real estate than many people realize string together 20 kilometers of land you know it's not even that it's it's the noise like who's like people talk about like oh there's this mountain else in um ecuador people live near that mountain right it's a national park um convincing a nation state that this is like a valuable use of like your national park that's like right next to a city and we're going to create sonic booms there multiple times a day that are like the worst ever heard by human beings.

31:54If you think the Concord was loud, wait till you get a load of this. This will just blow your eardrums out. You want to put this gun somewhere where you could detonate an atomic bomb and nobody would notice. That's the ideal type of location for this. Right. So like you're very limited. And this is why long shot is built flat on the ground. Right. Like we're not elevated because one, nobody's going to give you the right mountain. Nobody like good luck. You're not going to find it. There just isn't that there's no 10, 10 kilometer long slab of mountainside doesn't exist on this planet. Also, it's orders of magnitude harder to build.

32:30If you can build a thing flat on the ground, it turns out there's a shitload of open desert on the planet Earth. Australia. Great. The Outback. Northern Territory Australia has twice the land area of Texas with less than one percent the population. If I was trying to hide an atomic explosion, that's where I'd put it. Um, Australia has no indigenous access to space. They have to send, they want to launch a satellite. They got to send it to the United States, but they got to send it to India. Right. So for them, it's like a strategic game changer. Um, you know, so I think that like, I'm actually an economist by background.

33:07My bachelor's degree is in economics. You need to find a nation state, a ministry of defense, somebody for whom this is a big deal on like a strategic level. And that's how you get you need you need like local government jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. You need local government. You need regional government. You need national government buy in to try and do a project like this. And that's true of like a lot of big industrial projects. I think startup people don't typically think about those constraints. Is this something where the U.S. would want some other nation to have it put on their land versus ours?

33:40I mean, I think that you know what? If the United States, the hard part about building the United States is not the land. It's the airspace. So the United States lower 48 is one of the densest markets of air flight overhead in the world. And if you're doing space launch, you're talking about shutting down big corridors. And like even if you're in like Tonopah, Nevada, we're deploying a hypersonic test system there. It'll be half a kilometer long. I would love to go to altitude. But the trick is Tonopah is between Chicago and L.A., you know. and um i think that for space launch you need to go somewhere where the air is free you know because i want to launch multiple times a day i want to crack the solar system open like a fucking egg man and that means mega tons and that means many many launches so i think that australia is like a great place to do it i think you could also like alaska's also got some land for it but it's chilly don't like it okay so for the system to basically be rapidly reusable Nathan was talking about basically you can't use hot gas or else it'll just liquefy the inside of the.

34:48Yeah, you can use warm gas. And by warm, I mean like a few hundred degrees C. But, you know, in an artillery system, you're looking at like a short period of being like the temperature of the mantle of the sun. And that's what damages your steel. Is extending the cannon basically advantageous for both lower G plus you can use much cooler gas? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So lower pressure, lower temperature. But every time you double the length, the energy density of the system cuts lower and lower and lower because you're basically investing that energy over greater length and greater time. So you don't have to have this huge, violent event.

35:21You have many, many small, not a gigantic crack. Is there a reason that you wouldn't go for like 40 kilometers? No. And I want to. And I think that if you start talking about Papa Bear, which I literally hesitate to mention because it sounds so goddamn unhinged. Papa Bear is on the order of like seven to eight meter interior diameter, and it's throwing 100 tons. That is throwing a fucking full starship as a bullet. All right. And that gun might be on the order of 70 kilometers long. The curvature of the earth starts to matter. You have to cut the ground, right? You're not going underground, but you've got to cut it.

35:58And you have to find like the right topology to make that make sense. And that's a multibillion dollar project. But I still think it's cheaper than building starship. Let's say that you have something that can launch. For the record, it's it's almost all concrete. Yeah. You're basically building a concrete like the billion dollar concrete structure. Yes, exactly. It's a it's a concrete hallway. The concrete is actually mostly there to function as a vacuum. It's keeping the atmosphere out. So you got to pump that down when you want to fire because you can't compress gas ahead of yourself as you're trying to accelerate to these speeds won't work.

36:28Is there is there anything where you're genuinely concerned about, like physics just not working? No, not really. like i think that like it turns out two-dimensional gas dynamics are pretty simple um and um like the physics are extremely uncontroversial i do think that the numbers are big like the particularly the heating numbers on exit with the atmosphere the gun i actually think is is actually kind of trivial the accelerator is trivial atmospheric transit is not so i think that to the degree that we have technical risk, it exists in that space between Mach 15 and Mach 25 in flight. But you know what happens when you build the world's best hypersonic test system for the DoD?

37:07You have the world's best hypersonic test system. So like we'll be uniquely suited to solve those problems once we get this thing built that DoD is prepared to butter me up for. So that's a, I think we'll be well positioned to answer the question. And you know what? If I can't go to space, okay, I'll sell all the defense applications to Raytheon and like cry my little lies out from like cocaine island that I've built out of a just pure air dropping cocaine into a gigantic island where I live the rest of my life you know crying with my hundred dollar bills to wipe my tears I'm lighting Fabergé eggs on fire every morning like I'll be super loaded and it'll be fine um but uh I do think that like the defense applications are great and significant um Um, I don't know.

37:54The good Lord put me on, on earth to go to space though. Yeah. So that's, that's where my focus is on the longterm. Let's talk about like the early days and what kind of was the early iterations of this and what went wrong? Uh, did anything go horribly wrong? Oh, um, so the early iterations of this were in my garage. Um, they were made entirely of PVC from home Depot. It was a multi-injection potato gun and it was scary as shit. Definitely the most dangerous thing we've ever done. Right. Right. Because like I'm not an engineer. I'm an economist and a molecular biologist who's handy. Right. And.

38:31PVC is dangerous, like it fails in a catastrophic mode that steel actually doesn't. And it gets soft when it gets warm in the sun and all kinds of scary shit. uh so yeah i built like um a mach 1.8 40 foot long pvc potato gun um with brendan my nine foot tall um chief operations officer so neither of us are engineers we're in my garage we're at friends places we're doing this stuff i've got no money i didn't take a salary for like the first year and a half of long shot i have to make real sacrifices to do like a hardware startup that's crazy this is obviously crazy so it's it's it's hard um and uh you know early on like those pressure vessels sometimes they'd fail like when we had we had stuff going up to pressure we'd like want to be behind a steel plate um like it was it was very sketchy um and we did have some explode and that was scary give videos of that of not of the failures but we do have video of the um that old gun that old the big potato gun mach 1.8 with pvc though like let me tell you that's an accomplishment right there yeah um like uh pvc does not want that to happen the universe is fighting you you know um but yeah you draw vacuum ahead a lot of pressure behind use helium and you can go to really high speeds really high speeds with with this gun so once you build it uh and you're testing it like what are you testing for that's a lot of actually vehicle work at this point so we like the burst discs are really important for this um and then like figuring out how to align the rails and like what are the actual tolerances that matter on the rails is a question um now we're instrumenting the projectile so we can get vibration and like um uh we want to get telemetry off the vehicle which is challenging because there's a safe behind me with two tons of concrete in it and that's what stops the projectile so you're gonna get telemetry off of it you better or get it off of it quick, you know, before it absolutely obliterates.

40:31So, yeah, but that's actually like important problems to solve if we want to do the hypersonic test application as well, because if we build this thing, you know, a hundred times as large out in the desert, there's going to be something also very large and concrete downrange of that that's going to stop it. So we need to get the customer's telemetry off before the thing is halted. So these are like, there's still good technical problems we can solve with this thing. Although I do think it's just about run its course. I want to get bigger. This is Tinker Toy right here. How long have you had this?

41:00Two and a half years? Two and a half years. Two and a half years. But it's grown in stages. It's been through many iterations. How many iterations has it gone through? Oh, geez, Louise. I mean, you get into like version 1.15 and stuff. It depends how big of a change you consider to be a big change. I'd say that we've built two barrels, which were basically like, we figured out a better way to align the thing. Let's just go back to square one, weld it and like reinstall the rails. We've done that twice. So I suppose you could say that we've gone through three iterations of this diameter of gun.

41:34Yeah. I would even imagine like, uh, if you have a object moving at Mach 25 or Mach five or Mach 10, uh, the wheels, like if you had wheels to align along the pipe, it would just kind of explode because it's moving so fast. No, you can't. Yeah, you can't do that. The way that this guy works is you'll actually see there's plastic bushings made it into it. Those are press fit onto the rails and friction turns that plastic into a gas. So there's actually a layer of plasma between. Yeah. Between the HDPE or Teflon. So the thing is, people have known this like Gerald. This is Gerald Bull. Actually, this is like the 1950s, 1960s, because they had like gas guns, which actually go faster than this thing ever will.

42:19so just like super heated hydrogen can get you up to like orbital velocities pretty easily and so what you do is you have your vehicle and it's it's in a cup that's made of like teflon or hdpe you never want to have metal on metal so you have plastic on metal and then the plastic gets super hot almost instantaneously and it doesn't gall or anything it's because there's this barrier of gas it's almost like you're on a air hockey table between you and the and the walls so yeah um a dense hard plastic between you and the steel is the way to do it and then as the steel as the plastic wears out over the shot you basically have like a hard spring forcing more of it in so you're feeding this puck of plastic into the rail how hard is that like how strong does that spring have to be strong because it's going yeah yeah you want a couple thousand pounds of pressure OK, but like, no, steel.

43:11You want like a heavy, like a leaf spring basically made of steel that's driving that in. One thing that's really special about this company that I've heard of a few other kinds of companies is there's like specific space for certain types of businesses where no one wants the space except for a massive gun company or a cannon company. And then suddenly it's like the perfect space for you. So what's it been like finding first this place and then also the new place that's going to be like a few thousand dollars a month? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It turns out there's there's this old Navy gun testing facility on Alameda Point, which is the old naval air station that Alameda, the city now now controls.

43:53And it's just it's perfect. It's like this 300 foot long 20 foot by 20 foot by 20 foot hallway. way. I couldn't imagine a better test facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. By the way, the view, it's on the water. You can see to San Jose to Alcatraz, right, left to right on this thing. It's amazing. And then inside, like they used it for testing the phalanx guns, which were the Navy's point defense guns for their ships. You can actually see spray marks on some of the steel walls from where the bullets had pinged off and stuff like that um and yeah it's been closed up since the 1990s i think uh and i think like the city of alameda has like um given permits for people to use it for raves a couple of times and that's basically been it it's got crazy acoustics on the inside there's like nothing wrong with it right no it's great it's just it's not old enough that it's made out of like a block of asbestos it's modern enough that it doesn't have those problems right so it's like it's this awesome facility that is perfect for us and i'm furious at myself for not knowing about it earlier why didn't you i had a friend tell me about it and i think i was just too busy i think i just like was just like too distracted with like day-to-day fire putting out to like put much attention into it we had this facility i was like this is good enough i can make do with this but like looking back on it that was a mistake um it would have been a stroke of luck to run into that like four years ago when the company was starting i could have just built in there and that would have been awesome when you're thinking about first starting to build that massive test site in the desert?

45:25How do you even, what was the critical path to launching something? Well, I want to say that my thought is that the technology and the physical infrastructure, the engineering side is the easy part. It is, you've got to interface with a local community. You have to get people, there is a video of the Spin Launch guys at a town hall meeting in Hawaii. And if you want to see the most, It's like somebody crossed over between Parks and Recreation and an episode of Silicon Valley. Like it is like your rocket's going to give my cat cancer. And like, you know, they dropped. That was a bad meeting, you know, an hour long of like a bunch of like kooky old people in Hawaii, you know, yelling at these young Turks to get the hell off their island before they hurt their property values.

46:16You have to find a local community that wants you. Once you have a local community that wants you, then you talk to like a county. Then you go to the state. Then you're talking to congressmen and everyone. Right. But there's like a whole process that you have to get for to make sure that the people who are there want you. And if you don't do that, if you come in like this is going to be great, it's going to be great. It's going to be awesome. Don't worry, guys. Everything's fine. We're smart. Like we're smart dudes from California. We know what we're doing. You fucking idiots. People are going to be very angry.

46:45You're going to they're going to be very angry and you're going to get fucking nowhere. So I think that there's almost kind of like a political economy and small town politics dimension to getting this stuff built. Again, people in this town just don't credit that that's important and how hard that is. That's real work. And if you don't do it, you're going to be in trouble. So when I think about like building a big and, you know, the thing is people who do gold mines and people who do oil and gas, they know this. They are totally hip to this game. Right. Right. So but like, yeah, people who are normally thinking about like, I'm going to build like the technology problem is the most difficult problem to solve.

47:21Yeah. It's actually regulatory because these companies are started by technologists. Right. I consider myself a technologist, but my in my heart of hearts, economist, man, economist. So I think it just gives me a different view on the situation. And I think that if you're talking about large scale infrastructure, which is really what Longshot's doing, I'm trying to build a goddamn Panama Canal for putting stuff into space. That's an infrastructure project. And it has the problems and the benefits of infrastructure projects. So, yeah, that's my thought on it. Do you have any specific story of like some great serendipity or some people engaging with you?

47:58Yeah. Because because of this, like this is an awesome company or an awesome idea. You know, I want to say the town of Tonopah. I was reaching out to like lots of local municipalities sort of like around Mojave and around Nevada and a bunch of things and just like calling people on like town councils and stuff like that, trying to find something and just like radio silence for the most part. But this woman, Joni Eastley, who's on the town council, basically the city council for Tonopah, it's a town of like 150, 1 ,500 people. Most geographically remote community in the continental United States, really.

48:36It's like a lithium and gold mining town that's like equal distance between Reno and Vegas. It's like a three hour drive from Reno, three hour drive from Vegas, middle of nowhere. But like they reached out and they were like, this looks super cool. You should come out and use the airport that we have here. We have an old World War II bomber training air base here. That's like basically gone fallow that like we need people to use. You should come. And they were super pro business and they were super welcoming and they brought us out and they helped us lobby with the county and with the state. And they were really supportive.

49:09And like that's probably why we're building out in Tonopah. I'll say that like that was amazing. And I'm super grateful to Joni and everybody in the town. And like, because, you know, you're never going to get like a congressman to cram you down the throat of a town. It doesn't work that way. Like they want you to do the work. They have to want you to be there. Yeah. They're like, I'm not I don't want to lose the votes of like, you know, jamming you down these people. The lobbying doesn't work that way. You've got to go from the ground up. And, you know, the town of Tonopah made that super easy for me by being open to it.

49:42So, yeah, they're like they're super pro and national defense and like space stuff. like yeah yeah great awesome jobs jobs jobs jobs yeah um so that that that was incredible getting the call from joanie was awesome um that was completely unexpected totally unexpected yeah i was blasting i'm not shy um i have a um a quantity um approach towards sort of like outreach and so i was just like going after everybody um gabs goldfield whoever i could and i got one reach back and that was like just the right person in this community I got lucky and hit has there been uh on the hiring side I think this is probably one of the only companies in the entire world or the only company trying to launch things into space through no sir no I can think of three others three others spin launch is still around so that's a they're building a centrifuge for lobbing stuff into space I think they've blown through like 140 million bucks and I want to say I got to Mach 1.4, excuse me, I got to Mach 4.2 after spending like 3 million bucks.

50:50And I think Spin Launch got to Mach 1.6 or something after spending 140 million bucks. Wait, but didn't you get to Mach 1.2-ish just on a PVC pipe? Yeah, on a PVC pipe. I literally spent like$13 ,000, I think, or so on that. And like, I think that like if you and they might say like, well, our thing was a lot bigger and that's true. But if you have to build something that costs 140 million dollars to like prove that you can do that. You got a problem on your hands. So there's Spin Launch and they're actually still around. I thought they were about to go kaput, but I think the DoD puts more money in them for like non space launch purposes.

51:29There's Auriga. They're doing magnetic magnets. How do they work? I think the insane clown posse fundamentally recapitulates my thesis on this matter. So Arriga, they're in L.A. and you should totally talk to them. They seem cool. And then there's Green Launch. They're doing a gigantic light gas gun approach. And I think they're just about done now. But John Hunter is a really smart guy. He seeing a talk by him back in like 2010 is actually what got me interested in this idea originally. yeah i was well i was thinking from more like a hiring side i imagine that then there's this is an interesting idea and problem to work on and so i imagine that you have quite a few people that are kind of like i couldn't imagine trying to do a startup like there are hard things about doing a hard tech startup it's not hiring my problems revolve around like telling a plausible story about like capital generation and like closing a business case and speed to investors people want to work on this stuff like i i think that one of the reasons why spacex gets to um treat people like um uh like uh the morlocks did like with uh the the surface dwellers that they cannibalized in um uh that hg wells book um uh that's how they treat their engineers and they get away with that because they work on the coolest stuff on the planet earth right they work on rockets and if you're an aerospace engineer you were born to work on rockets and there's one company that's doing it well on the planet earth right now okay okay i'm sorry peter back i'm sorry all right rocket lab's cool don't get mad at me peter um but spacex is king of this domain and aerospace engineers every single aerospace engineer on the planet earth is a chemical engineer who decided to take like a 50 pay cut to do something awesome yeah right these are people who care deeply about what they're doing working on their stuff about yeah they just care about that.

53:25And so like, um, give these people something cool to work on and they'll break themselves for you. And I feel like SpaceX has taken too much advantage of that, frankly, like they're, they're, they are not kind to their employees. Um, but they show up, man, they show up, they're wonderful. They're inspiring people to work with and for, and, um, uh, to hire Like, yeah, I can't imagine doing like some B2B SaaS bullshit. I could not imagine that shit, man. That's got to be absolutely soul-rending. Can you imagine standing up in front of a bunch of people like, yeah, we're going to make the world a better place.

54:02We're building a blockchain-supported dating app for Latinx dog walkers. Fucking kill me. Kill me. Like, oh my God, I'd rather go work at a fucking fang company, which is basically suicide for me. That's like that's like the worst thing. Imagine you were telling me off camera. Bigger fish to fry than bigger. Yeah, bigger fish to fry. Elon talks a lot about Mars. And I actually saw Elon speak at a Mars Society symposium when I was like 15 years old and he had his original bald head before he got all the hair plugs in. The 2000s. Yeah, yeah. This was a Falcon one times. Yeah. So they were early.

54:38They hadn't actually been to orbit yet. And everybody thought they were stupid. This was the everybody thinks SpaceX is dumb. And even the Mars Society, which is not like a super grounded group of individuals were like oh yeah this dude that was totally the vibe um but uh yeah he came in he was bald back to here og elon with no hair um and uh yeah came over and give a talk that's that's what i saw then so even you know very early on he was like hanging out with bob zubrin and like had the mars idea in his head um uh that's what i refer to as a very planetary mindset i think that like if you're going to spend a bunch juice getting out of um the gravity well why put yourself in another gravity well um that the thing to do is sort of like get human beings to live in the broader solar system like the solar system as a whole has like the the stuff necessary to support a human civilization of trillions of people at an american level of consumption like the stuff the energy is there um a planet is cool but like i i don't think that it's going to be okay so let's talk about biology for a second i'm a biologist master's degree in molecular i'm a bacterial geneticist by training um today like um i would say that there's some dude of my same demographics my same age in uh uh let's say shenzhen china doesn't speak english um i have more in common with that guy than my great grandfather had in common who was an irish peasant had in common with a welsh peasant right like the guy in china and i have probably both seen star wars we probably actually play some of the same video games we both know about germ theory um like we have all this stuff that is in common we can buy plane tickets and go anywhere in the world.

56:33We have a whole bunch of stuff in common. My great grandfather may or may not have been intelligible to the Welshman. Right. They had different religions. They had different expectations about society and social and everything. And they had completely different educations about the world. Very different life experiences. Right. Human. We're going through a period of incredibly rapid homogenization as a species that we don't really notice because it happens on a timescale that is sort of like outside of the scope of what most people encounter. But if you think about this in the biological analogy, the way that you get diversity is you have radiation separation and then natural selection takes place over time.

57:13Two lizard populations get separated by some natural catastrophe or get put on a different island. They adopt and the population over here, the daughter population is subject to different conditions. And as a result, they go in a different direction biologically over time. And then those populations can recombine later and there's this wealth of diversity. And you can then kind of go through this sorting process of finding diversity within that option pool and it helps you solve more problems. And that's why diversity is like a valuable thing for a population to have. It helps you solve problems.

57:48And too much similarity is a potential vulnerability and a danger because a disease could come along. Something could come along. Humanity is going through a process right now of sort of harvesting an enormous reservoir of diversity that's been built up over our entire history right now. The number of languages is collapsing. The number of ways of thinking about the world is collapsing. And this is a good thing in that we're adopting and expanding on the very, very best ideas and the very best practices that we've got. Also, it is a potential vulnerability in that the failure modes start to coalesce and harden, right?

58:29And they don't become local failure modes anymore. They become global failure modes of these various ways of thinking, ways of being. If we actually want to build up new reservoirs of human diversity, you need separation and you need different conditions. I don't think we can get done on the planet Earth anymore. I don't think we can. I don't think there's enough space. There's not enough elbow room here. You are never more than a 24 hour trip away from anywhere else on the planet Earth today. You could get to McMurdo Station if you really wanted to spend the money. Right. So the planet Earth is kind of collapsed to a point and that's accelerating even more.

59:03Like language barriers with like AI tools in 25 years, not going to matter at all. Right. Effectively, there's going to be one global language because we're going to be able to talk to people. Global communication. Yeah. You're going to be able to walk up to somebody in Vietnam and just have a conversation with them. completely naturally, natively. I think that's going to just happen. And so the world collapses to a point. Where does our future diversity come from? I think we need people going new places. I want the solar system to open up. I want like the United States was settled by a bunch of convicts and religious weirdos.

59:38Those are the people who came like the Spanish had a different approach towards South America because there was like silver and gold to pillage. North America didn't have those concentrations. And so you got a bunch of like religious weirdos and fanatics and, you know, the Mennonites and the pilgrims and, you know, religious convicts sent over here to like do indentured labor and stuff like that. I want the barrier to entry for going to new places in space to get low enough such that weirdos, just straight up weirdos can decide Like this conservative Mormon enclave wants to go to Enceladus. Awesome.

1:00:14Knock yourself out, guys. Some billionaire wants to try and start a Trotskyite commune on like an asteroid. Fantastic. You know, great. You're almost guaranteed to fail. We need lots and lots of experiments. And I think that like the room for experimentation in new political, economic, biological systems here on earth is um it's gone it's it's collapsed the kind of goal is you basically want to make the the cost to orbit and the cadence to orbit so cheap that you can basically just send insane amounts of mass to orbit and go build civilizations elsewhere yeah yeah yeah a build brand i don't i don't i think whether or not those are legitimately different civilizations or whether or not like we're all part of some conceptual whole we'll leave that for future people to sort out but i think that I want the price of putting stuff into space to go to zero, right?

1:01:08There are other ways to make money. I don't want to make money putting stuff into space. That should be zero. And if that goes to zero, there are a lot of businesses out there right now that are being developed that hinge on the price of orbit, right? Like people who are trying to deploy in-space solar power systems or want to mine asteroids. If the price of putting stuff into space goes to zero, those businesses go from batshit insane Silicon Valley venture capital plays to gold plated overnight. Right. If I can make those people billionaires, I can scrape up enough for myself to make a business case closed.

1:01:45I own the railroad for God's sakes. Right. I don't need to charge people for access to space to make money. And I want to give it away for free. That is what I think the right price for putting stuff into space is like it should be the same cost for sending air mail to europe from the united states just asymptote to zero yeah yeah it should asymptote to zero it should it should effectively be a rounding error and everything else right maybe you buy fuel in space um yeah like sell ads and like use that to fund the space launch system just beam it on the moon yeah that's how you let's see you make your money there there are there are other business models that make sense I want the price to go to zero for putting stuff into space.

1:02:26Is this one of those things where you can actually launch? Like I know right now, I think it's 15 starships have to go up in order to refuel one starship to go to Mars. Yeah. And this send fuel into space. Totally. For cheap. Absolutely. And I intend to. I do think that you've got to start with satellites because that's where the market is. Until they're actually sending Mars missions, there isn't a market for fuel in space right now. It's like two tons a year. Right. Right. And that's like ISS and everything. So that's not a business. I think that you've got to start where the business is, which is telecommunications, low Earth orbit constellations, super high value things.

1:03:01Yes. You've got to start there and then you work your way down. I do think that like the second, like think about how many cool businesses are starting on the sheer anticipation of Starship. Yeah. Right. So that's people assuming that prices are going to go from three thousand dollars to five hundred dollars, something like that. right that's their that's their anticipation their hope um if it goes from five hundred dollars to ten dollars right let's chop a couple zeros off this nonsense right um the magnitude more stuff is going to get built in space it's going to happen faster and it's going to happen bigger um and i think that like you know i think i think jeff bezos has actually pointed more towards this like there's a certain price at which it's it just makes sense to export the world's heavy industry to space and the earth sort of becomes a garden.

1:03:48The only thing that's unique about this planet is that we came from it. That's it. So, you know, we should treat it kindly and we should, we should work to try to preserve it. Man, that asteroid life has never touched it. Rip it the fuck apart. Who cares? Rip it apart. Just gut it. But like these mountains in the Congo that we're getting our cadmium out of, we're giving a bunch of people brain damage from heavy metals in these poor countries. Like that's not cool. Definitely not cool. ripping apart a dead asteroid that's floating around in space. Knock yourself out, homie. Go nuts. So I think that's a cooler future.

1:04:23I think it's a more interesting future. I don't like putting it in terms of existential threat. I think a lot of people do that where they're like, we do this or we die. I understand why that's a sales pitch. I also think that we do this or we just get more homogenous and more boring. I don't want a boring future for my children. The earth is getting claustrophobic. There's not enough elbow room here. We've got to go somewhere else. On that note, what's the hardest thing you've overcome? Hardest thing for long shot? Like, I think that like I've done harder things in like my life life, but like long shot, we've gone back nearly bankrupt like three times.

1:04:58I think that's a story that like almost every startup founder has. I think you've got to be really lucky for that. Not what pulled you out of those nosedives. First one was the Air Force. Direct to phase two SBIR. So we were getting ready to wrap up. I had like$4000 left in the bank and like Like I, my wife had basically been paying my rent for like, you know, I was like, you know, being a complete mooch. I literally had to sleep where I was building because I didn't have enough money for gas to go back and forth to go home. I was living off my friends and my wife building this potato gun. Everybody thinking I'm fucking stupid and they're right.

1:05:35This is not a rational thing. Normal, psychologically normal human beings don't do startups like this, right? This is a typical something's weird here. You need that. That to some degree, I think that's the price of admission for doing certain types of things. That was hard. That was really hard. You know, I think getting that close to failure is tough. And and then, you know, you're always confronted with this choice when you're doing a startup like this of like, I have to spend money. as though we're going to get more. And that's, this is a psychology that's hard to get into. Like I have to put myself in a position of desperation and close to bankruptcy.

1:06:25If I want to hit the milestones and do the things and look like the kind of company that can go fast and actually deploy the amounts of money and do the work that I'm telling these people I can do. Yeah. So then you have like, okay, we can do that, But that shortens the burn rate by half a year. And all these wonderful people that I've hired, like I'm in the position of like having to cut their salaries or fire them. I had to cut everybody's salary before this last fundraise that I did. I took myself, Brendan, the entire business team went to zero, went to zero salary. And the entire engineering team took a 25 cut, except for the CTO who took a 50 percent cut.

1:07:03The only people I didn't cut were the people who were on paternity leave. Those are the only people I didn't cut. And I just told folks like there is this opportunity that I'm going after right now. And if we don't get it, the company's done. And if we do get it, we're awesome. Turns out we were awesome. But like if you are a startup founder, you're going to run into that repeatedly and you're going to have people who you who you who are your friends, who you like, who you brought into this, right, who moved interstate with their families to come work on your thing. And you're going to have to say, I failed to raise money.

1:07:37And because of that, you've just been diverted for years of your life. Right. And I've underpaid you and compensated you with equity because that's the situation. That's the nature of this work. Right. And you put this faith in me and I failed you. That's a position that you're going to be in as a startup founder, working on something that's actually hard. And you had better be psychologically prepared to do that. That said, like, not the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I've done harder things than that. But it's hard. It's hard.