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

24:14Baiju Bhatt:And so by the time I was four or five, my dad had to stop out of his PhD program to get a job to pay for the medical bills. So here we are moving to a little town called Pocosin, Virginia, next to Langley Air Force Base, because my dad got a job at NASA Langley. And I think one of the big things for him was he's like I have to get a job to pay for these medical bills because he started going on dialysis when I was damn when I was like five years old so there I was only child like not a lot of brown people around southern yeah uh yeah and actually interestingly I didn't learn English until I was like maybe four or five no kidding yeah I learned Gujarati was my first language because my mom didn't speak English.

25:10Baiju Bhatt:We learned English together. I learned English watching TV. Wow. Yeah. So that was kind of who I was as a kid when we got to Virginia. So what was I into as a kid? I was really into superheroes. I was really into like cartoons and X-Men and comic books and stuff like that. I was also really into science and space and that a lot of that came from my dad because he worked at NASA. That's cool. What does your dad do? He's a scientist at NASA. It was something that I was always really proud of and I thought was very cool. I remember I would go to visit my dad at work sometimes. Have you been to Langley Air Force Base?

25:50Baiju Bhatt:No. Yeah, there's these huge wind tunnels that are kind of on the facility. I remember going there as a kid and just being sort of awestruck by the machinery of science and space, right, and like how big it was. And I remember my dad had this, he had like a desktop computer and he was doing computer stuff on, I think he was using Linux in like the 90s. So I remember, distinctly remember going in, like my dad had his computer at his desk.

26:23Baiju Bhatt:So that was a lot of my childhood. I mean, I grew up not being a terribly athletic kid. I was actually quite overweight as a child. You were overweight? Big time. No kidding. Yeah. I ended up losing a ton of weight when I got a little bit older. Like I lost like nearly a third of my body weight in high school. Wow. Yeah. From exercising. Just, oh, okay. And so that was kind of my childhood, right? We were not terribly well-to-do. We lived in like a small apartment. My dad was a scientist at NASA. He was on dialysis. I was a little kid, you know, I was like a little boy. And the interesting, the point at which my life fundamentally changed was when I was in eighth grade actually.

27:14Baiju Bhatt:And my dad had been on dialysis this whole time and was waiting to get a kidney transplant. Like waiting year in, year out. I remember he had this little beeper that he would carry around with him. Just like, oh, did the beeper go off? Because if the beeper went off, it meant that one of the hospitals called because they had a kidney transplant for him. And you got to, like, pack up and go.

27:39Baiju Bhatt:And when I was in eighth grade, my dad's kidney disease kind of took a turn for the worse. So he was on dialysis and he got this infection. And I don't think they really understood what was happening at the time. but he got very very sick from the catheter that that was in his stomach basically for him to be able to do dialysis and my dad goes from being sick to being very sick to being hospitalized to my mom being like every day waking up in the morning and going and staying with my dad at the hospital all day and I was just kind of like home alone just fucking confused damn being like what what do I what do I do right like where where does life go from here feels completely rudderless didn't have any siblings right I was not cool at all I was like fat brown kid in school like there was a lot of at a couple of friends, actually one good friend from that period that's still a friend of mine, but I just remember feeling so unbelievably lost and then my dad's health continues to take a turn for the worse and he has a couple of really major surgeries where you know at this at 13 or whatever it was I remember staring down the specter of what happens if my dad passes away.

29:15Baiju Bhatt:By the way my dad My dad is healthy and alive today. So probably worth saying that. Like what happens, right? I wanna go back to India. I've never lived there. My parents couldn't even afford to go back to India. The last, by the way, the last time I went back to India was in 1997, 97, maybe 98. It was 97. Did you go back, did you, is that like the only time you went back to India or did you go back and forth a couple of times? Probably when I was a little kid, I went like two or three times. You don't remember it? Vague memories of it. But I'm an American, right? Like, through and through. So that's happening, and I'm like, well, what do I do, right?

30:00Baiju Bhatt:I don't feel like I can control anything in my life. But growing up in my household, it was like this... This theme will come back a little bit later on, right? It's like, you have to make the most of the opportunities in life. and America is the land of opportunity. And my dad did beat one thing into my head, which is education, education, education. Like that's your way out. So I go from not being a terribly good student to being like, I'm gonna get really good at math. I'm gonna get really good at physics because no matter what, that'll give me some purpose in life. And if I'm doing really well in school, that that'll be kind of like the thing that pulls me forward.

30:47Baiju Bhatt:Lo and behold, a few months later, my dad, his kidney, that like kidney disease that he had that had him hospitalized, which I'm talking about it kind of vaguely because I don't think they really know what happened other than the fact that he had a really bad infection. He starts to get better and they're like, give this man a kidney transplant. Like he's been on death's door. and so he gets a kidney transplant. By the time that happens, which is I think the summer between 8th and 9th grade for me, I was like a full-on man at that point because I'm like, I have to do well in school. That's my mission in life and if I do really well in school, that's going to be how I carve my own path out because I didn't want to feel rudderless anymore.

31:33Baiju Bhatt:I wanted some degree of agency, some control over my life. And so I go from being not a very good student to being just locked in. Wow. And just at that point, like figured out that I love physics. I love math. I'd kind of been given this gift of being introduced to this as a kid by my dad. Right. And one of the interesting things growing up, right? It's like doing well in school or studying math and stuff like this. This was not cool when we were kids, right? Like you're kind of a loser if you did stuff like this, which I think is not a good thing. Like I don't think that's a weird and bad thing for society to reinforce.

32:21Baiju Bhatt:Like we want our young people to cherish education because otherwise they're not going to know what the fuck they're talking about, right? That's what that era of life is about, is about learning stuff so that you have a better lens to look at like this weird thing called adulthood and life through. So. What was your dad studying at NASA? What was he working on? He was doing atmospheric sciences. What is that? I think he was doing like satellite imaging. No kidding. Is that fucking wild? Yeah. You can't make this stuff up. It goes around full circle. I mean do you guys talk a lot about what you're doing now?

33:03Baiju Bhatt:We do yeah He's my dad's a little bit older now And he really wants to be involved But honestly at this stage it's nice Just to have something cool to talk to my dad about with Yeah so they come over and hang out with the kids pretty often They live next to you or close to you? They live pretty close by you That's cool man That's cool which my parents live closer. Where do your parents live? They're in Florida. That's right. Yeah, they're in Florida. I moved to Florida, and then the whole family moved to Florida, and then I left Florida. So, yeah, wanted to, like I told you downstairs, I wanted to raise my kids in a different environment than South Florida.

33:47It's just a little too wild down there.

33:49Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, at which point I made the argument that the best place to raise kids is silicon valley which which i don't actually think that's true so where do we go from where do we go from school yeah so second half of college or second half of high school was very fun felt like my brain woke up and i could just learn stuff and i loved physics and i loved math so i just went i went whole hog like that's what i was like that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna try to get into Stanford or MIT or Caltech or Harvard or one of these like really good schools.

34:30Baiju Bhatt:And so I just like buried my nose in the textbook. And I started actually working for, I want to say like a year or two and the nights and weekends and during the summers at this place called Jefferson Lab, which is a particle accelerator in Southern Virginia. So I was deep into physics. A particle accelerator. What is that? That's where you take high energy particles and you collide them to study the quantum mechanical effects. This is like CERN. Yeah. Are you familiar with CERN? I am. What are they doing there? They're studying quantum field theory, right? So quantum field theory is a fascinating subject, by the way.

35:12Baiju Bhatt:Should we talk about this? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So do you know about quantum mechanics? No. All right. Okay. So Einstein, with his big old brain, figured a lot of this stuff out and actually didn't believe in a lot of it when he was alive, which is weird. Famously said, God doesn't play dice or roll dice. And quantum mechanics is this theory of the universe, which is fundamentally probabilistic, right? It's about probabilities. So the general idea of quantum mechanics is that you have, let's see if I can do a decent job of explaining this, is that things in nature have this particle behavior sometimes.

35:53Baiju Bhatt:Sometimes they have this wave behavior. And quantum states are when, I think it's actually easier to talk about quantum mechanics a little bit more specifically, like in the context of electromagnetism. Okay. And light. So that's kind of what I'm trying to get to, is there's this idea of, and this actually relates to the name of the company, Aetherflux, by the way. There's this idea of whether light is a wave or it's a particle. And different people through history have had different opinions on whether it's one or the other.

36:32Baiju Bhatt:And there was this, there's this idea, well, if particle, if light is a wave, then waves have some medium through which they propagate, right? and we knew that light has a lot of wave-like characteristics. It's got wavelength, and in turn, it's got a frequency. And you can kind of think about light in that way. One of the things that Einstein figured out, and a lot of the people that worked on quantum mechanics at the turn of the last century, was that it also has this particle behavior. And if you want to understand, like, how these two incongruent descriptions can fit together. Quantum mechanics is kind of the machinery behind it.

37:17Baiju Bhatt:But quantum field theory is taking the machinery of quantum mechanics and trying to explain more physical phenomenon with it. So let's see if I can do a paraphrasing of this or a good explanation of this. So quantum field theory basically says that there's different kinds of, for each of the fundamental forces that exist in the universe, right? There's different particles that carry the sort of interaction between things that are happening. And then there's the particles that actually carry the quantities, right? So if you have, in the context of electromagnetic interaction, you have charged particles, like electrons and protons.

38:01Baiju Bhatt:And then you have ways in which charged particles sort of communicate with each other, which is with light, right? So quantum field theory is kind of like the generalization of that framework to how quarks and neutrinos work, to how other kinds of fundamental particles that are predicted might exist or not exist. So one of them more recently is this thing called the Higgs boson. Have you ever heard of this before? No. See if I can explain this without going into too much of a rabbit hole. But it's this thing in quantum field theory, it's a particle that was predicted to exist a long time ago when quantum field theory was first invented as the particle that would give things mass.

38:50Baiju Bhatt:And there was a field that if different particles interacted with it would give particles the phenomenon of mass. And there was this fundamental, I'm kind of trying to give a short version of this. There's a prediction that there would be this particle called the Higgs boson, which was central to this thing, but it was really, really difficult to observe. One of the stories that I've heard, it's been called the God particle over time, because I think originally it was called the goddamn particle, because it was so goddamn and hard to observe. But at some point, I think they felt that that was not a, that didn't speak to the sensibilities of scientific publications in, I don't know, like the 50s or something like that.

39:36Baiju Bhatt:So they just called it the God particle. But creating these experiments that create collisions, that create these esoteric states of matter, where you might be able to observe a Higgs boson, this is the kind of stuff that CERN does. Okay. So they're probing this theory called quantum field theory, to see all the weird predictions and see if you can create those in the real world. Interesting. This is a very broad explanation. I mean, there's just a lot. There's a lot of theories out there that they're trying to create black, mini black holes and all this other stuff. Yeah, that's pretty catchy.

40:12I don't know if that's going to happen. Not buying it, huh? I'm not buying that.

40:15Baiju Bhatt:I mean, I think if something like that were to happen, it would probably evaporate in a very short amount of time. it's i mean does this have to do i watch this stuff i don't understand half of it so i'm going to butcher this because i watched this a couple years ago but i remember watching this uh thing on youtube and it was talking about mox plunk is this and i think what they were talking about there was a couple different things but they were talking about how different particles will act differently if they're being observed yeah there's consciousness around it. And even when they set a camera up, if somebody's watching the camera, then the particles will still act differently than if they're not being physically observed.

41:01Do you know about this? I do, yeah. What is that?

41:04Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, it's this thing called the uncertainty principle. And this is something that comes from quantum mechanics. And let's see if I can remember this correctly, but there's basically the amount of precision that you can theoretically have when observing the system, right? So if I remember this correctly, it's that there's a few different statements of this uncertainty principle. And to any of the listeners out there that are actual physicists, if I get something wrong here, I'm sorry.

41:41Baiju Bhatt:but there there's this basic idea that if you if you think about the measurement uncertainty of a physical system that the time uncertainty and the energy uncertainty and you multiply those two together that that uncertainty is not you're not going to be able to be more certain about those two things than a fixed amount so if you get more precise with the exact time something is happening, then the exact energy becomes more variable and vice versa. And so I kind of think about it as this lower bound for how accurately you can actually see or observe anything in the physical world. Because if you get more precise on the time measurement, the energy becomes uncertain.

42:27Baiju Bhatt:If you get more precise on the energy measurement, the exact time becomes uncertain. And there's other formulations of this uncertainty principle but it basically is like a lower bound on how precise the description of the universe can be did you i think i read somewhere maybe somebody said it on the show recently i can't remember but back to light i either read or somebody said it on the show that we just froze light yeah i've heard about that too i don't really know what that means i don't know what that means either yeah i don't really know what that means so is light a particle or a wave because i watched i seen i saw some other things it was it was talking about when you shoot a beam into like a slit the has both behaviors yeah yeah light is both a wave and a particle this is the wild thing it exists it is it exhibits this thing called wave particle duality.

43:28Baiju Bhatt:And this is actually one of the things that Einstein figured out. So related to this, but a little bit of a tangent is the idea of like, what is the speed of light? Because this is one of the things that people were studying in the late 1800s to kind of try to understand what is the phenomenon of light. And the idea, at the time, the prevailing theory is that light's a wave. And so if light is a wave, waves have mediums that they travel through, right? So if you have, we're talking to each other, these are sound waves. They're traveling from little vibrations in my throat. They're vibrating the air, and you're hearing them in your ear, and vice versa, right?

44:17Baiju Bhatt:So the medium that the sound wave is traveling through is the air. Similarly, if you have the surface of water and you drop a stone in it, you're gonna create a little wave that's gonna travel on the surface of the water. So if light is a wave, what's the medium? What is the thing that light is oscillating that's behind this? so they famously called it the aether so there's this there's this medium that was postulated to exist called the aether that light would travel through that would give it this wave phenomenon and there were a bunch of experiments done to to sort of characterize the speed of light and in turn to characterize whatever this medium is that it's traveling through which just led to a bunch of head scratching.

45:16Baiju Bhatt:So one of the famous scientific experiments during this time is called the Michelson-Morley experiment where people try to measure the speed of light. And again, this is kind of the paraphrasing of it is if you have a light source and you pass it through basically and you split it in half and you have half of it go this direction, half of it go that direction, you have two mirrors that are the same distance, and you bounce the light back, then presumably you would be able to see light traveling at a slightly faster speed in one direction or the other. Because the earth is rotating, right? The earth is moving, and in turn, the surface on which the light is being transported is moving.

46:06Baiju Bhatt:So if the earth is rotating this way and you're firing the light that way, then you'd expect to see the speed of light to be a little faster in that direction versus in this direction, right? So they do this experiment, they find it to be the exact same. They're like, what the hell's going on here? So there's a bunch of sort of thinking that was done around the time to try to characterize whether there was something about our misunderstanding of the aether. Maybe it was like a really thick, viscous thing where it sort of smoothed out on the surface of the earth and that's the reason why light was behaving in this weird way through it.

46:42Baiju Bhatt:There are all these like ideas that people are coming up with. And then Einstein comes along and he's basically like, no, actually, it is the same in every direction because the speed of light is constant in every reference frame, whether it's moving or stationary. theory and the thing is it's the speed of light that's the constant and time and space like literally contract and expand to be able to keep that a constant so this was kind of the beginning of what does that mean time and space can contract and expand yeah this is the theory of special relativity this is like what put einstein on the map and if you go through and you actually just work out the equations for what happens.

47:33Baiju Bhatt:Let's see if I can explain this in a simple real-world example. So here's a real-world example that you'll see. So if you have a clock on a satellite, because of this relativistic effect, because the satellite is moving really quickly, in the reference frame of the satellite, you'll actually see the clock ticking at a slightly different pace than you'll see it on the surface of the earth. So you actually have to do some computation in the limit to be able to figure out that difference. See if I can do a better job of explaining how this actually works. It's a pretty esoteric one.

48:21Baiju Bhatt:But let me see if I can think of a good example of how to explain length, time dilation and length contraction.

48:32Baiju Bhatt:Maybe we come back to this one. I'm not sure if I've got a great simple explanation. Let me ask you about quantum entanglement. It sounds like it's going to revolutionize communications, especially crypto. and so it's my understanding that you take a particle you split it in half put one over here you could put the other one in another room in another country infinite infinite distance away and if you put a vibration on this half then the other half will mimic that exact same vibration no matter what the distance is am i correct yep can anybody explain why that is happening this actually has to do with um this actually has to do with what we were talking about a couple of minutes go around uncertainty right so what ends up happening is you have two particles that share that you know together are in a certain quantum state and if for example if this one is up and so it might be the case that if you have these two things you know that together on average like half of the time this one's up half the time this one's down and so on average it's flat just make a simple analogy here right but you don't know at any point in time whether this one's up so there's two particles in your system and you know on average one of them is up and one of them is down.

50:02Baiju Bhatt:It could be like this, it could be like this, or it could be like this as it's changing states between the two. But you know that together these two things are entangled and that always on average they're going to be one is going to be up and one is going to be down. Now this kind of comes back to that uncertainty thing that we're talking about, right? So if you can keep these things truly entangled with one of them and physically separate them and you take this one and you look at it and you're like oh it's up that's going to force the other one into the down state because you know these things are entangled and you know on average you know the quantum state together shares like it's flat meaning if one of them is up the other one's down then just by looking at one of them you force the other one into the opposite state.

50:54So this is how you would be able to encode something at a long

50:59Baiju Bhatt:distance like this. Does that make sense? It does make sense. I mean, maybe nobody can. I don't know. But how are they communicating? How are they still untangled? Is it everything is connected? This is one of the true mysteries of the universe. Does it mean there's multiverse? I don't know about that man I don't know if I I don't know if I I don't know if there's enough evidence to suggest that there's a multiverse I think it's a theoretical possibility but there's a lot of theoretical possibilities out there Do you think about this stuff a lot? I do I do actually yeah I have a lot in the past I'm not sure I think about it that much today that's why I'm kind of like let me see if I can explain this and try to like reach back about a decade and see if I can see if I can come up with an example that that kind of makes sense no i do think about a decent bit i think there's um

51:57Baiju Bhatt:this is the thing about quantum mechanics and one of the things that i love about quantum mechanics is that it's very very unintuitive right there's when you think about physics and having been trained as a physicist it's all about intuition for how the physical world works right? And it's kind of like you study equations enough and then you form a sort of literally that an intuitive understanding of how it might work in different contexts. Because a lot of physics is like you're trying to imagine how something could happen. You've got a problem on a piece of paper and you're trying to paint a picture of it in your head.

52:37Baiju Bhatt:Quantum mechanics makes that really hard because it's fundamentally very, very unintuitive. So when you think about, like, what's a physical analog to how this might work in the real world, a lot of times with quantum mechanics, you're, like, kind of drawing a blank because you're like, things don't really work like that in the normal world. But you know that if you zoom in close enough, they have all these weird phenomenons to them. I think a related question is, like, is there a higher... Power? Is there a higher being? I don't know. I fundamentally don't know. I'm curious. I've gone back and forth on it.

53:19Baiju Bhatt:The place I've landed is that I'm not sure that it's a question that we as humans can really answer. What do your parents believe? My mom is religious. My dad is not. My dad is a very spiritual person, but he's not a religious person and he told me that from a pretty early age he's like i'm not going to tell you to believe in god or not to believe in god it's kind of up to you my dad kind of raised me in that way it's like the big questions you can ask me what i think but i'm not going to tell you what to think it's kind of on you to figure out it's good you do i believe there's a higher power yeah absolutely Tell me about it.

54:05Well, you know, I grew up Catholic, but I didn't really take it seriously. I never took it seriously. But, you know, I was raised in that, went to church every Sunday. Then I joined the SEAL teams and just lost it. Like, didn't believe in anything. I mean, couldn't explain why people were dying and why out of, you know, a platoon of us. I mean, SEAL teams are a fucked up place for a young adult. There's a lot of, it's just, it's not a great environment. A lot of drinking, a lot of infidelity, a lot of fighting. And then, you know, there's the whole war thing. And, you know, I would see if you had somebody that didn't cheat on their wife and that was sober, it was almost like some type of a phenomenon within the SEAL teams.

55:05And time and time again, I would see, you know, there would be a bunch of us. And I loved all the guys that I was with. But like I said, 99 % of us were, I wasn't married at the time, but it's cheating on your wife. It's getting in bar fights. It's just, it's a different life. And I would see the guys that get killed in action. And a lot of times it would be the guy that's not out at the platoon, drinking, bar fighting, womanizing. It would be the guy that's a really good dad, that is a really good husband, that somehow has figured out the balance between war and family life. and it was just time and time again those were the guys that were getting killed and it made it it made me feel guilty and and it actually like took a lot of faith from me in in god and it was like this just this makes no sense why would you fucking take the guy that that guy that has kids that is there for his kids who is a good dad and is a good role model and a good husband and not just for his kids but for society as a whole and then you got a guy like me who considered myself a piece of shit who's womanizing you know what i mean and it's like it made me feel guilty it didn't make any damn sense kind of like quantum mechanics and um and so and then you know and that was very early on in my career and then and then i kept moving and and i just I never really thought about it.

56:43And then recently, it was after my psychedelics. I did psychedelics, and I did this thing called 5-MeO-DMT2 after I did the IVA game, which is a death experience. You legitimately, like there's no question in your mind, you're dying. You're going to die. And so I think what it does is it's a penal gland dump.

57:10Baiju Bhatt:Like, what does that do your perspective? It changes everything. Because when you do it, so basically, you know, and I'll speed this up a little bit, but you smoke this and then you feel like you're dying and it gets stronger and stronger. It kind of feels like an eternity, but it really only lasts maybe 15, 30 seconds and maybe even less than that. but you start sorting through everything in your life and it's it it like light speed and you start to separate from the materialistic world and i mean everything and you don't have time to process what's going on but you you start to separate from you might be thinking about a friend and you you you make that separation and for me it was it was getting rid of materialistic stuff, friends, family, da-da-da-da.

58:09And then you go and it's all the things that you're holding onto that you value in the world that we live in, right? And then the last things for me was when I did this, I only had my son and my wife. And those were the last things that I was grasping onto. And it was like a fight. It was like, I cannot die because if I die, I'm leaving my you know less than one year old son at the time behind in this fucked up world and my wife you know who is a stay-at-home mom and then and then you separate from that and when you separate from the last thing you cross over into like this other realm and a lot of people actually thought you were going to die when you do this yeah there's no there's there's zero question in your brain that you are departing life it's it's over and and you don't know where you're going and it's and it's happening and you cannot stop it and um and so after after you go through that like that like i said it feels like an eternity but it's it's it's only a matter of seconds and then when you to And when you make that final separation, then you cross over into this other realm.

59:36And it's also called the God molecule and it's called the bliss drug or something like that. And you cross over and, you know, sounds kind of hippie-ish, but, you know, when I was growing up, the hippies and they're all talking about everything's energy. and all this other shit. And I'm like, okay, whatever. Well, you feel that when you cross over. And I did not, I wanted to do it. I wanted to see, I just wanted to see earth and nature when I did it. So I didn't put the blindfold on. And so when I made that separation, I crossed over. I opened my eyes and like sat up. And this is off just south of, it was in, I think it's actually in Rosarito, Mexico.

1:00:25so you're on the beach and I opened my eyes and I could just I did not see anything that wasn't there it wasn't like Grateful Dead psychedelics you know pink elephants and rainbows and all this shit it was everything that I saw was actually there but it was like this intuition was injected into me and I could feel the flow of energy. And so I could see it like come from the ocean, into the beach, into the grass, up the trees, the birds. I mean, everything just was in perfect harmony. And that lasts for about 15 minutes. And a lot of people, a lot of people say they can feel friends or relatives that have passed and they're in this other realm or some people see them.

1:01:18I felt the presence of my best friend who we were talking about, Gabe, up there. That was your best friend. Yeah, I could feel his presence. And it made me realize that everything that has happened and that will happen in the world and in my life is exactly the way it's supposed to be no matter how it happened or how I experienced it. and so when i came out of that it made me realize that that there's there's definitely something more to this than any of us have put together yeah and so then i started looking and uh that's actually when i started watching all these quantum mechanics videos and stuff like that because i i wanted to understand what that was and i was really into energy i was like what what is it what is it why are we here what's driving all this and so it sent me down this path and and i started watching all these things and that's when i was looking at the big bang and the multiverse and all these other things fast forward a couple of years and uh we're we're in sedona and i had had this um i wasn't happy with the way the world was going and uh this is what i guess this is probably about two years ago so a lot of things that were going on in the country just really tugged on my heart and and i was i was enraged about a lot of things like probably a lot of the stuff that that you see in uh in silicon valley but um but i it just really bothered me like the gender stuff with children is just something that always i i couldn't stand it I couldn't stand reading about it, hearing about it.

1:03:05Baiju Bhatt:I share that feeling with you. Especially as a father of young children, you're like, this is not appropriate for the kids. Yeah. And that stuff was really bothering me. And then I dive deep into China. I talk about it all the time. And a lot of the stuff that was going on over there and how they're pulling ahead and the spy balloon and all. It was around this time frame. And I went to Sedona because I had read there's all these energy fields in Sedona. And I was like, maybe I feel something. I don't know. We'll see. We'll go on some hikes, go to some of these energy vortexes. I want to see if I feel anything.

1:03:45I didn't feel anything. And the last day there, it was a really rough trip of mine, too. A really good friend of mine had just died. I'd done some heavy interviews with a really good friend, Brian Montgomery, who's doved into the – he's fighting sex trafficking and kids and sex exploitation. And I had another interview with this kid, Tyler Andrew Vargas. Not a kid. He's a man. And sorry, Tyler. But he was the only one that survived the Abigate bombing during the Afghan withdrawal. I watched – had him come in here. Nobody would give him a platform to talk about his story. Comes in here, one leg, one arm, hobbles up these stairs to do this interview.

1:04:33No media would touch it. It was disgusting how the last administration handled the withdrawal, not only the withdrawal, but him personally. Tired to testify in front of Congress. Rough story, right? And so I got all this weight, and I'm supposed to be on vacation with my wife. and I broke down on the plane. I'm not a guy that breaks down. I broke down in tears. And she's like, what the hell is wrong with you? And I was just angry the whole trip. Very last day, I stayed off social media the whole trip. It's the last day. I'm like, well, let's see what's going on. and I have to be on there for my business.

1:05:22I look, I see something that really pisses me off. And I'm like, we got to go on a hike. So we go on a hike, go up to this energy vortex, don't feel shit. And on the way back down, I had had this like internal battle going on in my head that's like, I felt like nobody else cared and I felt like I was the only one talking about this stuff. And I was trying to basically convince myself like, Sean, why do you let this shit affect you so much? This isn't, just give in. Maybe you're the fucked up one. Maybe kids should be able to change their gender at six years old. And quit letting this stuff bother you.

1:06:05It's painfully obvious that the majority, and this is all in my head, right? But the majority of the population is for this. And it seems like America wants this to happen everywhere I look. They're talking about this and they're complaining about the party that doesn't want it to happen. And so anyways, it's just something that really weighed on me. And I felt like I was like surrendering my soul to the devil or something. And we walked through. We walked back into the gate. And we were in this. They had an armed guard at the gate. and I pay attention to security just because of my background and a lot of the security guards there knew who I was because of the podcast and they would always come up and say hi and want to chat.

1:06:57And I'd been there for a whole week and I walked by and there's this old guy who I'd never seen there before, ever. And he stops me and he wants to talk and I just told you the state of mind and I'm not in the mood. I'm like looking at him over my shoulder, telling him, hey, I don't want to talk right now. I'm not in the mood. I just want to go to my fucking bungalow and call tonight. And so he snags my wife. And she's with me. And he starts talking to her. And I'm like, turn around. And I look at him. And I square up. And he looks at me right in the eyes. And he fucking read my mind from front to back.

1:07:40and like every thought that I was having on that hike never met this guy never seen him like I said I'd been there for a week I thought I had met everybody and he goes he's like hey all this all this gender stuff that you're worried about that's not your fight and you don't need to worry about that and all this stuff that you're worried about with China that's not your fight either and i'm like after he said that you're like it freaked me out because i'm like this so this guy just said this guy's in my head he's in my fucking head and he went on no i turned i didn't say a word i just turned and looked at him like all right i guess we're gonna have a conversation you know like kind of being a dick and and that's what he that's what he opened up his conversation with was reading my fucking mind.

1:08:35Baiju Bhatt:Who was this person? Exactly. Who was this person? So I go, so my mind blanks out after he said the China thing. You know, it's like talking about gender stuff, talking about China, and I'm like freaked out. Never seen this man before in my life. And he's in my head reading my mind. and so that ends and then I um I look at my wife we're walking back to which is like a two-minute walk back to our bungalow and I'm like I think God just fucking talked to me and uh and my wife goes yeah Sean she's like God's always talking to you you just don't make room for him you don't realize it. We go into my bungalow and we're just talking about Gabe.

1:09:31I could go on for an hour about this, but Gabe has always been around. I just feel his presence a lot. I know he's around because little rabbit hole. Right before Gabe died, he had started this. He wanted to start this wounded warriors hockey league and he told me he was going to have the the florida panthers sponsor it and i also told you gabe was a heroin addict at the time and i'm like how are you going to do better clean it up if you're going to pull that one off buddy because you look like we'll all be damned he gets it done and the panthers sponsored his wounded warrior team in fact when they went to deliver him the good news and to knock on the door to tell him they were going to sponsor his team.

1:10:20The NHL was going to sponsor the first ever Wounded Warriors hockey team. When they knocked on the door to tell him, that's when they found him dead from a heroin overdose. Fast forward. Panthers won the Stanley Cup for the first time ever. What's that?

1:10:36Baiju Bhatt:What year was this? This was about two years ago, so probably 23. Okay. And so I got... Sorry, for some reason, I thought your friend passed away years prior. Sorry, I'm just putting two and two together in my head. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he passed away before this. This is a while. When the Panthers won in this event that I'm about to tell you happened, it was about two years ago. So the team gave me one of the original jerseys, and it has Gabe's name on it, of Seal Team 10 logo, and Panthers win the Stanley Cup, and that jersey's hanging down there in the front doorway. And I come in, and the day the Panthers won the Stanley Cup, that frame has been sitting there for three years, hasn't moved.

1:11:29Falls off the wall, probably weighs about 35, 40 pounds, not a scratch on it, no broken glass, nothing. I mean, so anyways, I'm telling you, Gabe's always around. And there's a bunch of other things that I could talk to you about on how he's been around. In fact, when we went to there, I told you I was in this vulnerable state, and we saw this guy that looked exactly like my friend Gabe. Like, same build, same brow line, same jaw line. Like, if you put them side by side, they would be identical twins. but I could tell him, you know, obviously that it wasn't Gabe, but I was like, that's like, it's legitimately like an identical twin with some of my new differences.

1:12:14And throughout the trip, this guy's everywhere with me. He's, if we go to the pool, this guy happens to be at the pool. If we're going out on a hike, he's coming down the same trail, going the opposite direction.

1:12:26Baiju Bhatt:Talk to this guy? No, we go out. If we go out in town and leave the resort for dinner, the guy winds up being at the same restaurant. And my wife, Katie, is like, there he is. There he is. There he is. There he is. So sure as shit, we bought back from the gate. Like I said, this is like a two-minute walk.

1:12:51And it's like a duplex, like a bungalow that's a duplex. Didn't know who was staying on the other side this entire time. walk up there and there's this fucking guy that looks identical to Gabe and he's the guy staying in the other half of the bungalow with his family and I'm like holy shit like okay that's weird now I told you that I just lost a really good friend of mine uh here in Franklin he was a SEAL and he owned a bunch of smaller hospitals. And he's like one of the only friends that I had at the time where I knew he wasn't going to ask me for favors or promote his product or whatever, you know, podcast.

1:13:37He didn't need the exposure that I could bring him and we could just sit down. I didn't want anything from him. He doesn't want anything from me. We both know that and our relationship starts developing really fast. He died of a heart attack on a hunting trip right before I left on this trip. Probably in his 50s. And died with – his son was on that trip. Actually, like, a really good way to go. You know, died happy. His son was with him. Like, it was good. And – but he had just died days before. go into the into the room

1:14:21and i'm telling my wife i can't believe this has happened to me like what the hell is going on i can't believe this and she's like quit saying you can't believe it like it's it's happening falling in your lap right now like he's slapping you in the face and my phone dings don't answer it because i'm in the middle of this discussion with my wife and so we get done with that discussion and I'm kind of cleaning myself up. It's pretty emotional and I pick up my phone and it's his daughter who I'd not met. That man, my number, wasn't close with his family. I'd met his son a couple of times. I'd met his wife.

1:15:00I'd not met his daughter and his daughter sends me this text and she says, I'll summarize it. It says, hey, I just walked into my dad's gun room for the first time since he had passed. And basically says that her dad talked to her and said, I want you to talk to Sean because Sean knows a side of me that nobody else knows. And Sean was becoming my best friend really fast. And he just wanted her to tell me that he loves me for who I am. Now, this shit all happens within 5, 10 minutes. Yeah, that's. And so that to me was, that to me was, that was it. I was like, okay, you've got my attention. Yeah.

1:15:54And so, anyway, so then I came home and made a bunch of calls to people that I, people that I know that are in this. My first call was this guy, Eddie Penny, who had talked about his journey to Christ. Eddie Penny was a SEAL Team 6 guy and had another really rough go and then found Christ. And I released his episode on Christmas of 2022, maybe. and ever since then just about every single person on the show has brought up god in some way shape or form and i didn't put that together really until until this and i went back through and i was like every single one of them and so i called eddie anyways and that's what led me to to believing in god is that that experience so it was it was through psychedelics turn the light on and had me exploring, and then that solidified it right there.

1:17:00I was like, wow. That's too many coincidences going on all at one time for there not to be some type of a higher power. I've never had an experience like that.

1:17:13Baiju Bhatt:I kind of hope I do at some point in my life. I hope you do too. It was life-changing. That's incredible, man. I'm kind of speechless. I think this question of what is the higher calling, what's out there, where did we come from, these are all kind of intrinsically related, right? And it's kind of the question of like, we know what the what and the where and the how is, but like what's the why, right? and the the version of it that i've wrestled with through the course of my life is i've never had a personal experience that that's like led me to believe it one way or the other and i i tell you honestly i haven't had too many people that i've been close to pass away i consider myself really fortunate and not i know it's coming right like time time will take us all eventually but um the version of it that i've always wrestled with is kind of what i know about physics and math and science and kind of saying okay well if you if you believe that these are the laws of nature right that these are the things that govern how the universe works you study physics that's fundamentally what you're doing right is you're looking for a theory of how the world works.

1:18:46Baiju Bhatt:And if you look at that theory, and it's looking to your eyes, like it's very accurate, and it really is describing the whole world around you. You're like, that's how the world works. Right? And it's like, well, how could there be a human-like thing, human-like being that has the emergent phenomenon of humanity that is the higher calling that's the higher being right how could you reconcile those two where you know through studying an empirical evidence that light has this wave particle duality right and that quantum field theory for example is i think it's the most experimentally verified scientific theory because every time you scatter some particles off of each other you measure the angle in which they kind of come out of it and if you can measure those really accurately and you get a lot of scattering events like you'll get more and more data that says this theory that's predicting this is matching nearly identically to what's happening in the real world so you're like are those the laws of nature and they're incomplete right because we were just talking about, like, what happens when you get to a small enough time scale?

1:20:07Baiju Bhatt:Well, your understanding of the universe starts to get really wobbly, right? Or if you get to a really precise energy scale, like, when it happens, starts to become really wobbly. So it's not a perfect theory of all this, but it is a theory that explains this stuff. So how could there be a God, right? And then, at least for me time goes on and then you ask the question how could you have such well-written theories without somebody writing them down yeah i mean i you know i think right how could you not have god yeah so the question is which one of these is right and i think the place that i've landed is is that my little monkey brain can't really answer this question and i'd rather spend my time thinking about things that i can't understand makes sense i mean i i see like how could the pieces fit together so nicely if they weren't but then there's all these then there's the then there's the the no answers you know the the where we can't find the answer like a fundamental part of life it's like where where does consciousness reside nobody seems to be able to figure that out what makes you you it's your consciousness right yeah where does it live where does it go it's an emergent phenomenon where the fuck does it go does it go is that your soul yeah you know and and and so and i don't know maybe we just have not you know maybe maybe we haven't hit that point where or maybe we never will hit that point and we never will figure that out i don't know but you know it's it's it's it's a mystery i tell you this is not directly related to it but it kind of is in the same way i'm very curious about whether there's life on other planets what do you think there's life elsewhere in the universe um i think there is you do i do yes what makes you think that um i want to believe that i want to believe that because i think the alternative is like uh it's very it's very grim it's very dark the alternative is that there's nothing out there and that this thing that we call consciousness or life is incredibly fleeting and fragile well i think like i don't i don't want to believe that.

1:22:40Baiju Bhatt:But it kind of, at least to me, leads me to ask the question, like, what, has somebody else figured this out? Right? Might the answer be, I think this is like people care about aliens, right? It's like, might there be some other species out there that knows the answer? Might they be trying to tell us the answer? If we could just talk to them, would we get the answer? right is there an understanding of how the universe works that is so crystal clear after in 10 million years for example right from where we are today or somebody could just explain that

1:23:20Baiju Bhatt:aside i think we need a lot more observation of the night sky because if there is life out there i don't know that we're really looking for it I don't know, man. I just... I've gone on to this topic quite a few times, and it's obviously very conspiratorial, and there's never any hard evidence. You know, and I don't think there is. Oh, there being life out there? I don't think there is. There's some pretty good evidence of it. Like, I have not heard it. I'd love to hear it. Okay, so this one is a more recent historical one, recent in the scope of human history. And again, to the scientists out there, if I'm missing some of the points and butchering them, I'm sorry.

1:24:08Baiju Bhatt:Because I'm sure there's some real scientific people that are watching this. There was that star system. I want to say this was James Webb. Again, I'm kind of guessing a little bit on this. But there was the observation of a star system, and in particular, looking at the behavior of stars as planets pass around them far, far away in the night sky, right? So neighboring star systems. I think in this case, the star system was like one and a half or two light years away. So the amount of distance it takes light to travel in is a tremendous distance, right? But if you look at a star from far, if you look at a star system, right, that's got planets going around it, and for example, let's take the example of the Earth and Jupiter, right?

1:25:01Baiju Bhatt:Or sorry, the Sun and Jupiter. Jupiter's big. It's a big planet, right? So as Jupiter is orbiting the Sun, the mass of Jupiter is also pulling the sun, right? So the actual orbit's more like this. It's kind of an exaggerated version of it, where if you look at a bright spot in the night sky with a telescope or with a really fancy one like the James Webb Space Telescope, right? If it's got a planet or planetary systems around it, it's going to be wobbling a little bit. Moreover, you can take these bright spots in the night sky and look at the spectrum of light that's coming from it, right? So if you just plot out, this is a simple example, your x-axis, you plot out an x-y plot, right?

1:25:48Baiju Bhatt:Your x-axis is different frequencies of light. Your y-axis is how much light of that frequency, right? So you kind of see a curve like that. And you look at this bright spot in the night sky and you see this sort of wobbling thing and then you see as one of the planets passes in front of it, the brightness dims, right? Because literally there's something in the way. So the light coming from it kind of goes down as the planet's moving in front of it. Now, this is the thing that was reported in a bunch of scientific journals earlier this year, actually. Pretty sure it was earlier this year. Is there was this one star system and a planet orbiting it where they actually observed this is the star this is the planet and in this case my my eyes are the earth right the planet passing in front of the star system and the light from the from the star like passing through the atmosphere of the thing that's in front of it right and when the light passes through the atmosphere, right, it scatters off some of the particles, it excites some of the particles, and you can actually see the signature of the molecules in the atmosphere of the thing that passed in front of it by looking at that x-y plot, I was saying, right?

1:27:17Baiju Bhatt:So it goes dim, but you also see some peaks and valleys cropping up that give you a snapshot of what molecules are in the atmosphere of the planet that's passing in front of it. And they basically found the biomarkers for life. I mean, they found water on, I think they found water on Saturn, right? And is it Neptune? I don't know. I know they found water on, let's see if I remember. Mars. They found water on Mars. Yeah. Yeah, there's presumably like water, like lakes of water or an underground ocean of water on some of the planets or some of the moons of Jupiter. So if you wanna look for extraterrestrial life, I think there's one of two ways you do it.

1:28:07Baiju Bhatt:The first one is, is you just try to like knock on the door and it's like, is anyone there, right? I think that's the going to Mars and looking for like microbial life in the water, right? Or subterranean. I think that's going to Europa and drilling down and seeing if there's an ocean underneath there and there's whales or something like that, right? The other approach is looking at bright spots in the night sky and seeing if you see any markers for life. And this example that I'm talking about more recently, I want to say it was methane, could be wrong, that they found, the signature form, and the frequencies of light that were coming back as this planet passed in front of the star system.

1:28:53Baiju Bhatt:But the thought process there was that that is, the only way that we know that that's made on Earth is through life. So if there's a ton of this stuff in the atmosphere of this planet, like how is it getting there? The hypothesis is that this is kind of a smoking gun, that there's some sort of biology on this planet that's producing this gas.

1:29:22Baiju Bhatt:So if that's the case, number one, we should be observing the shit out of that planet and see, for example, if there's any electromagnetic radiation that might indicate some sort of intelligent life. um but as we as we develop better telescopes and more of them and have them simultaneously pointed at more spots in the night sky might this be the case in a lot of different places right might this actually be the case that if we look simultaneously like everywhere in the night sky that there's some star system that's broadcasting some electromagnetic signal that's got information in it well i did i did hear something that we were receiving some type of some type of a beacon or a signal from wherever way the hell out there the conspiracy can't explain what it is the conspiracies i love is where you see like a star system or a set of star systems or something related to specific spots in the night sky that show up in conspiracy theories because it just makes you wonder.

1:30:30Baiju Bhatt:It's like, is that actually a conspiracy? Yeah. Or might, if you just observe the crap out of it, might there be a little bit more to it? Yeah.

1:30:42I mean, I don't know. I just, I feel like, you know, like I do believe in God. I think a lot of the things people are seeing are some type of spiritual thing.

1:30:54And then, but then, you know, they're starting to find, I mean, I don't know. did they ever debunk the pyramid on mars or sometimes i wonder if there's life if there was life as this conversation gets more serious i need some gummies i wonder i sometimes i wonder you know i mean they talk about ancient civilizations and and you know maybe there were more advanced civilizations here on earth than what we are now you know 100 million years ago or whatever and And then the Earth does things, gets rid of all the evidence, and then it's here we go again. And sometimes I wonder, I mean, they talked about the pyramid or supposedly they found a pyramid on Mars.

1:31:36I don't know if they ever debunked that or what. But I've talked to remote viewers. I do think that's real, remote viewing.

1:31:44Baiju Bhatt:What is remote viewing? Dude, you don't know about remote viewers? Tell me. Holy shit. So remote viewers, how do I put this? Remote viewers, they, okay, you've seen like, surely you've seen some type of a movie or a TV show where they bring on the psychic and the psychic's like, oh, it happened over there in the shower and they used a knife. And then they go in there and they're like, holy shit, here's the knife. You know, that's remote viewing. So that's actually, people can do it. It's a real thing. Really? Yeah, the CIA had a program going with the Monroe Institute for a long time. I brought in Joe McMonigle, who was remote viewer number one for the United States, and remote viewed a Russian submarine that was going to be launched on a particular date.

1:32:37And the director of the CIA said he was full of shit. Another agency got in touch with him, and they were like, where is it, and when is this happening? And he was like, it's right here in Russia. They're going to roll it off into this canal, and it's going to go into the ocean from there, and it's going to happen on this date. And I think he was only like a couple of dates off, and it happened. And so that triggered them to start this program called Stargate. It's called the Stargate program. I'm going to look this up. I'll send you the interview. Please do. It's fascinating. I'm fascinated by this.

1:33:13So I went down that rabbit hole and brought on a bunch of these guys, some of the guys that started Stargate, and some of the guys that finished the program managers, finished Stargate. Does it still exist? Stargate doesn't exist, but I'm sure it's renamed it or another programmer. I know Naval Special Warfare was looking into this stuff recently. I got some documents.

1:33:38Baiju Bhatt:Is there any scientific explanation for how this works? Just nope. just an emergent phenomenon? Well, the way Joe describes it, Joe says early human beings had this, and we used more of our brain back then. And he goes, at the beginning, we would look at each other and we would know what each other's thinking and point to things and whatever, but you would, I guess kind of like how animals communicate. You know, we're sense and subtle stuff. We think we're so much more advanced, but look how long it takes us to converse and to get our thoughts out now that we have language. You know, and so basically what he was saying is we were a lot more intuitive way back in the beginning and that we could kind of read each other's thoughts.

1:34:36And so communication was almost instantaneous. And he goes, and then we started traveling around in tribes and we started, you know, developing language and then technology came along and we got our head buried in a fucking phone or watching TV and talking and, you know, and he goes, and so he goes, well, we feel like that's more advanced. What we actually did is we're going this way because we had the intuitive brain power to be able to communicate without language, without any type of electronic communication. It was just instantaneous. And he goes, he thinks that – this is theory, obviously, but he thinks that we've lost that over time and that everybody still has the ability to do it.

1:35:23But most people know – You'll never figure it out because we're too busy wrapped up in other things. And kind of like what my wife was telling me when I just told you. She's like, hey, God's always around you. You don't make the time to let them in, and you're not paying attention.

1:35:40Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, yeah. And when you just see the world presented to you on a screen in such a digestible format, like we're little monkey brains. We'll just spend all day on that. Yeah. Like we will basically follow down the path of the thing that's the most understandable. That's kind of how humans work, right? Given the choice between something that maybe is really hard to understand but very important and something that's very easy to understand but very unimportant, humans are going to follow the path down this direction on average. but what I was getting at is maybe maybe there was life on other planets before there was life maybe there's only life in the universe it

1:36:30maybe there's only life at one place at one specific moment in time and then when that's over it pops up somewhere else I don't know you know what I mean but

1:36:40Baiju Bhatt:are you um are you familiar with this thing called Fermi's paradox no yeah it's like the where is everybody

1:37:03all right we're back from the break man we went down some rabbit holes there we did I love rabbit holes me too remote viewing you gotta look into it

1:37:13Baiju Bhatt:I'm absolutely going to look into it. It is fascinating. But I want to get into Robin Hood. How did that come about? How indeed. Company was the brainchild of two good friends from college. We talked about it a little bit. I don't know if we were chatting. I can't remember if it was on the air. I guess it was, yeah. We were talking about Occupy Wall Street a little bit, right? No, that was not on there. Oh, that was just before. Okay, yeah. So do you remember Occupy? I do. I don't remember the whole premise of it. I don't know much about stocks or any of that kind of stuff, so you have to walk me through it a little bit.

1:37:57But I remember the movement. It was basically, from what I understand, it was the everyday Americans were getting pissed off that they couldn't invest in the stock market, correct?

1:38:09Baiju Bhatt:That was a version of it that we saw. There were just general, I feel like the frustration was after 2008, right? Like we bailed out the banks and everybody else felt like they got screwed. Yeah. Right? And I remember the exact number on this, but like a lot of the recovery did go back to the wealthiest in this country. And so we're talking like 2011. So this is three years-ish after, two years after the financial crisis. and people were really really upset about that so there were protests in new york right they were literally occupying wall street and we weren't a part of the protest but we were working in finance in new york at the time right and we had a lot of friends in college and they were like what are you doing man and i was like what do you mean what am i doing i'm trying to at the time we were building a different finance company that was building technology for other financial institutions, like sort of computerized trading, low latency trading, you know, sort of like the direction that markets were becoming more and more electronic.

1:39:19Baiju Bhatt:And we're like, we're building technology to make markets more efficient. And a lot of our friends were like, no, you're part of the problem. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, what does that even mean? They're like, you guys are like not, you know, you're part of the system, man. Like that sort of sentiment. So that was kind of the backdrop. And then we would see these protests happening in New York. And I remember just being like, there's a, the sentiment here is very real, right? But it's kind of like the idea of, and this was kind of, we talked a little bit about the immigrant background, right?

1:39:57Baiju Bhatt:But as people whose families made huge sacrifices to be in America, to look at the financial system and be like, this thing is messed up or rigged or doesn't work or whatever, right? It just doesn't ring true. It's like that, this is the envy of everybody in the world, this financial system, right? Like you should, we should have more people be a part of it. So this was kind of like the backdrop for what would become Robinhood. This was kind of the cultural backdrop, right? and I remember the genesis of the company started over a phone conversation that my co-founder and I had and it was kind of like the company that we were building then like was not doing super well and we're like what else what else can we do and we're like you know like people are really upset about access to the markets they're really upset about wealth inequality and all these things And I remember the thought was, it's like, actually, access to the stock market is kind of a microcosm of this bigger thing that people are frustrated about.

1:41:03Baiju Bhatt:And we weren't going to be able to change politics. We weren't going to be able to change policy. And I think at the time, the sense was there's a people want the government to do something about this. And this is probably the beginning of my, like, view towards individuality really emerging and kind of having the sense of like, this is not, the government's not going to solve this problem. In no way, like that's not going to happen, right? Like you're going to get some people that like make noise about it that get elected and nothing's actually going to change here. But maybe this is something we can change with technology.

1:41:37Baiju Bhatt:This is kind of like the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed optimism you get from young people, right? When you don't know what you don't know and we're like, we could change it, we could fix this problem. And if we could make access to market zero commission, which is kind of what the original idea behind the company was, wouldn't that actually be kind of directly speaking to the frustrations that people have about not being a part of the financial system? And this is where the bigger leap of faith came, right? it's like and if more people of our generation were a part of the financial system then they wouldn't be so frustrated and we'd basically live in a more harmonious or like happier society because i didn't want to grow up with people being up in arms about this like it just seemed like a really nasty discourse enter robin hood mobile zero commission and kind of like built from the ground up brand new at least the interface and the way the product looked was I think pretty different than what was out there at the time I mean yeah it was totally different when did you hear about it?

1:43:02I don't remember I don't remember exactly when I heard about it but But I remember when I did hear about it, it didn't matter how much money you had, you got access to the market. And I was like, oh, this is cool. So I started using it. I mean, I can't remember. It was probably around, I would bet, 2010 timeframe maybe.

1:43:26Baiju Bhatt:A little later than that. We released it publicly, I want to say, in 2015. Well, then it was after then. but yeah I did I had heard about it and I was like oh this is fucking cool you know what I was spending a lot of my time doing interviewing customers talking to customers because I basically realized at a pretty early point in that company's history that if that if we try to build this product like Google builds Gmail for example right that it wasn't going to go super well. And that the way that people used our product was going to be fundamentally a little different. What am I talking about here?

1:44:13Baiju Bhatt:If you have a person, like a very wealthy person, and you've got an ordinary person using an email client, right? The way that you use an email client is not going to be fundamentally different, right? Like the rich person is still like typing in a message and sending it to somebody. and so for example if you have a bunch of really well-paid engineers that are building gmail for example and they're like this is how i use it and that's how i think other people are going to use it the fact that those people make a lot of money is not going to like it's not going to change their perspective on the product now on the other hand with a product like robinhood i think that's actually completely different.

1:44:56Baiju Bhatt:Because if you have a bunch of people in Silicon Valley that are making Silicon Valley tech startup salaries and income, and they're like, this is the way that I live my life. I live in an apartment, for example. I have a really high rent. I'm not married. And I have a high, I have like a good income for my primary job. And you're like, I want to save enough money to be able to buy a$5 or$10 cup of coffee every day, right? This is not going to map to the expectations, reality, financial circumstances of people living in the rest of the country that are having kids when they're in their 20s and 30s, right?

1:45:41Baiju Bhatt:They're looking to buy a home pretty early on in life. Like that doesn't happen in the coastal cities in this country. Like the way people behave is pretty different. And I kind of had this idea that if we wanted to build a product that resonated with a large part of the population, that the way to do it was actually to make sure that we were getting the feedback from those kinds of people and incorporating that into the product. So even from the very early days of Robinhood, we would do this thing where we would go from here's a feature that we want to build. It could be something small. It could be how we introduce a new product, whatever.

1:46:23Baiju Bhatt:So you got a team of people working on it. You come up with a design for it. You come up with how you think people are going to use it. And you create a prototype of it. You create a first version of it. What we would do even in the very, very early days of the company is we would make a prototype. And I would say, okay, we start on Monday, then either on Friday evening or on Saturday morning, let's take the prototype that we built and let's go put it in front of some customers or some hypothetical customers. and at the time you know we had we were kind of either had just launched or had just announced the product and so what we would do is we would go to stanford campus and we just camp out at the coffee shop and just be like hey to random students like can we give you 50 bucks for like 30 minutes of your time and you just be like here's a product or a feature what does this do like tell me what this does in your own words and when you actually get to that point it was pretty eye-opening because you're like people don't see this the way that we do right people are in their own world they're not paying attention like the amount of attention that people give to a new product or a new thing pretty vanishing.

1:47:42And so if it's, you know, for one example, right, it was like

1:47:47Baiju Bhatt:zero commission stock trading. People are like, what the hell is that? They're like, is that like the interest rate on your car? And you're like, no. And then you, you, you know, you let people ask their questions and you listen to it. And you're like, oh, it's like that thing when you trade a stock and you have to pay$10. Because at the time a lot of brokerages were charging$10 commissions. And this is like closer to 15 years ago at this point, or not quite that much, about 10 years ago. And you're like, holy shit, people don't know what the basic part of this is, and so we have to unpack that and see if we can explain that to people in a way that makes sense.

1:48:28Baiju Bhatt:So you kind of like realize that if you're not getting actual feedback from people that use the product, who may have a pretty different financial life than you, you're going to be way off the mark. And what we ended up doing, and this was really important to me, is I would try to prioritize time every quarter, every half, to go and travel somewhere outside of the Bay Area and just interview people. And a lot of the times in those interviews, we'd have like, you know, an actual customer research person that we'd hired leading the interviews. And I'd just be sitting in the room listening, forming opinions and people like, who are you?

1:49:10Baiju Bhatt:I'm like, oh, I just work here. Don't mind me. It's interesting, right? Because that took us to a lot of middle America. So the whole premise was to get everyday Americans access to the stock market and crypto, correct? Yeah. How did you gain access to the markets? Me? Yeah, you. How did the app, how did Robinhood get access to the markets without going through all the middlemen? Oh, I thought you were asking how I got introduced to the stock market. How did Robinhood get introduced? Yeah, so we are still a broker-dealer. So we're registered as a broker-dealer. And when we started the company, we worked with a lot of financial institutions on the back end.

1:50:02Baiju Bhatt:So we worked with a third-party clearing firm, right? We worked with a lot of different service providers. And so we kind of got the regulatory licenses and stuff to be able to offer the service. But we were a little startup, right? We were like 15, 20 people when we first launched the product. Like that's, wow, teeny tiny, right? And so we kind of had this path where we went from building the parts that we had the resources to build to over the next five to 10 years, sort of vertically integrating key parts of the company over time. So a couple of years after we started the company, we went self-clearing.

1:50:43Baiju Bhatt:So we built our own clearinghouse, and that was a big sort of like, you know, technology build-up, basically. How fast, I mean, how fast did Robin Hood take off once it was introduced? Yeah, this is an interesting one because it kind of, to me, always speaks to the question of product market fit. Have you heard of this before? Mm-hmm. Right? So product market fit is this tricky one, especially with consumer products. Because when you got it, you kind of know you got it. And if you're not sure, you probably don't have it. Right? It's kind of like the sort of like sound of click almost that happens when people are like, oh, I get it.

1:51:33Baiju Bhatt:Oh, why is it? Oh, that's interesting. How does it work? Right? And I remember when we first announced the product, we had a wait list for people to be able to sign up to get it. No kidding. Yeah. And that wait list got real big, real fast. So I want to say, see if I remember this correctly, but I want to say we had like 50 or 100 ,000 people on the wait list in the first month. holy shit it was really in the first month yeah i'll have to go back and check but i'm pretty sure that's what it was and i remember when we first announced the product we actually had the product like we kind of had this in in this kind of in-between stage where we were testing that the website worked right and then it got picked up and posted on reddit on the internet and it it sort of got announced, quote unquote, when it was half baked.

1:52:36Baiju Bhatt:No kidding. We were actually working on redesigning the actual logo. And when it first sort of like got out there and got posted all over the internet, we actually still had the old logo, which looked like a little, it looked like a little rectangle with a little chart in it and a little talk box. and we had we like in the next week had to like kind of finalize the version of the logo that we had for many many years until kind of recently we did a subtle redesign of it so it was like as one of those moments where i built products before that did not have product market fit and it was very fucking frustrating because you put all your heart and soul and effort into building this thing and you think it's awesome and you think it's something that people want and if you do a good job of like introducing it to the world and announcing it it'll get you know if you talk to a bunch of reporters beforehand right people will hear about it like you can get awareness for a new product but then you see the awareness and then you see people not really sticking around like they download it they try and they go away and you just look at what percentage of the people are still using your product after a month three months six months and you see it's just going down and down you're like that does not have product market fit because you could get more people to use the thing but the evidence is there is when people find it they don't stick around so there's no point in getting more people to find out about it or use it because they're just gonna go away like pretty quickly this is also why I was like stressing that point about talking to customers and customer research because having built a few products you know or at least one product before that didn't have product market fit you're like I really really want this to succeed and you ask the question very earnestly like what do I need to do to figure out what people actually want out of this.

1:54:47What were people saying?

1:54:51Baiju Bhatt:In terms of what they wanted from it? Yeah. I mean, they loved it. They obviously loved it. I mean, you said a 100 ,000-person wait list. The interesting thing was people were like, oh, I'd try that. That's interesting. I'd try that. Or I'd always thought about investing in the stock market. and oh there's no minimums because i think at the time we didn't have any minimums for the product either and like oh this is something i definitely want to try and so you had a lot of people that had not invested before that were like this is interesting i'd always thought about investing maybe i'll give it a try there's also some group of people out there that were actively investing before this and they're like oh i see the economics of zero commission let me try it for that reason it.

1:55:38So that's kind of the interesting part about it, right?

1:55:42Baiju Bhatt:Because the thesis of the company wasn't that we were going to build a great product just for the people that invest today. The thesis was there's this generation of people that if you give them a product that they want to use, will actually start investing. Does that make sense? It does. So you're not really like, you're not like solving a problem that people necessarily are frustrated about. It's more that they haven't done the thing, right? Yeah. What a wild journey that has been. I mean, it was the only product like that at the time, correct? Is it? uh the zero commission yeah i mean it took a few years before the rest of the market kind of did the same thing right it was like 2019 there was at the end of 2019 if i'm remembering correctly is when a bunch of the brokerage houses all got rid of their commissions that was that was triggered from you guys yeah yeah me too yeah yeah um that was that was like that was both very you've revolutionized the entire market how fucking cool does that feel i don't know man it's a it's it's a it's crazy to to have made all that stuff happen still on the board of directors of the company still actively involved um and to have the chance to work on something else at this stage of life also feels like a gift let's move into because you you revolutionized it in more than one way you took out the commissions you gave everybody access then we move into the gamestop amc what was the other one was there another one involved in that game stops one i remember there were a couple other ones too yeah so what happened with the game stop stuff what was the whole scenario that was a wild time too so it was kind of interesting so this was like right this was January of 21, right?

1:58:17And we built, navigating Robinhood through COVID,

1:58:23Baiju Bhatt:like going from a company that was at a nascent stage, right? I think we were still under a thousand people before COVID happened. We're getting pretty close to it. And to go from that to having some real trials and tribulations, rapidly scaling the engineering and the technology. Because when people went home for COVID, a lot of people were like, let me check out the stock market. Let me check out Robinhood. And that was a lot more traffic than we were planning for. And so that whole year felt like just a mad dash to keep our service, to keep up with the customer growth that we were seeing. How many customers did you have at that point?

1:59:09Baiju Bhatt:I don't remember. A lot. Millions. Yeah, I don't remember what the number was. It was a lot, though. The other interesting thing was I had actually just had my first son. And I was kind of at this interesting point in my life where I was kind of starting to ask the question, like, what do I want to do?

1:59:31Baiju Bhatt:Because physics and science, one of these things that was in the back of my head still. finance was something that i like loved doing and i loved changing the industry it wasn't something that i felt like i wanted to do my whole life um are you the kind of person that

1:59:53you go all in on something and then once that's accomplished you start to become bored looking for the next thing?

2:00:02Baiju Bhatt:I'm very much a one-track mind person. I'm not a great multitasker. Like, I'll pick one thing and I'll pulverize it, and then I'll move on to the next thing. Do you like the journey or the achievement better? I like the journey, for sure. I actually think about this a lot right now because when I think back about the Robin Hood era, right, of my life, like as it was for me, right? It was the journey of going from having this idea, wanting to make this thing a reality. Not a lot of people believed in it, but my co-founder and I, like we both saw it. We believed it with our mind's eye. to then figuring out the path, right?

2:00:54Baiju Bhatt:To make it real, to go from a person that didn't know much about finance, you know, to being on the forefront of this industry. And like when you're at the forefront, I'm sure you feel this way with podcasting, right? It's like the way that you kind of take what you're doing with your own work is kind of the direction the whole industry follows, right? And it's like this feeling of mastery that I think you only get if you start from first principles. Man, that felt cool. That was like, that was, that was the, that's the thing when I look back on that that's kind of the high that I find myself chasing is the process of going from a novice to being a master of the field.

2:01:43Baiju Bhatt:I don't want to like toot my horn here about how much of a master of that I was but to go from not knowing to having our company have the place that it did in the marketplace just intuitively understanding the problem space like intuitively understanding how to do it like I want to prove to myself that I can do that in other things so that's kind of the thing that i find myself chasing is it the outcome i'll be honest like i grew up poor we're very poor right and so at that time the money was a big motivator right like i didn't i didn't want to be in poverty i wanted to have more for my future family right i wanted to have a better financial outcome i feel like i've been talking about this whole podcast right so I'm not going to come on here and be like oh well it was you know just about the accomplishment it was it was the journey of a man that didn't have very much money that was trying to create his own legacy when you get when I got to that point I find myself craving the uncertainty in the journey and finding myself like back in the mix of something that looking for the next thing Yeah.

2:03:00Baiju Bhatt:So that's it this time, right? The question I'm trying to ask myself is, could I do it again, right? Could I revolutionize something else? Could I figure out the path to going from being a novice at satellite engineering to being at the forefront of it. Like, I don't know how to do that. I have a lot of ideas and I'm testing my ideas all the time and I'm trying to get better at it. But yeah, it's like the uncertainty that really fuels me sometimes. Yeah, I can relate to that. It's, I mean, it's, I don't know, but for me, like, When you hit the apex of whatever industry you're in or whatever you're doing in life, whether that's sports or business or whatever, I mean, once you hit that apex, there's an aspect that becomes boring.

2:04:08And it's time. I almost just said I suffer from that. But I think it's a good thing. I mean, I think it's just find something new. You want to figure out how to be the best at it? And then when you figure it out...

2:04:28You enjoy it for a minute, then you're on to the next thing. And so right now, I'm looking for the next thing. I think I found it, and I'll use what I'm doing. You think you have? Yeah. Can I ask what it is? I can tell you. It's in the tech space. Okay. But it has to do with cybersecurity. Cool. But this is my next thing, and I met some amazing people that I'm going into business with, and I'm really fucking excited about it. Because like you had mentioned, I can't remember if it was downstairs, if it was on the show, but you had talked about, you always have to have that creative outlet. Yeah.

2:05:09And like when I started this, this was my creative outlet. Well, like - When it becomes the main thing, it's different. Yep, yep. I mean, once you hit as close to perfection as you think you can and there's not really much left to innovate, you know, in the particular space that I'm in. You know, I mean, yeah, we got a new studio coming and all that stuff, but the model is here. And so it's not taken near the creativity that took me to build this from a small little room in my attic into what it is today, you know, being a top 10 podcast. We've been on the number one slot. And, you know, we got the new studio and all that.

2:05:53That stuff's awesome. I'm really excited about it. And I love doing this still because I get to talk to people like you. But as far as the creativity aspect, it's not really here anymore. And so I'd like. I fiend off creativity like I love it. I love. Disrupting things and and and going to new new ventures because I I've realized like I'm about the journey. I mean, even, you know, the Navy SEALs, you know, like I joined at 17, or I enlisted at 17. I was in BUDS by 18, SEAL training, got in there. And yes, there is another level. You could go to SEAL Team 6, but I wasn't sure what that was like at the time.

2:06:42I mean, it was not nearly as publicized as it is now. And I was like, I mean, I became a SEAL, went to war. The journey was awesome. This isn't everything I thought it was going to be. I'm going to move on to the next thing. And then I went on and tried business, failed miserably, and real estate. And then the CIA thing popped up, which I didn't even really know was the CIA at first that I was contracting, that I was trying out to contract for. But then I got there and, and once again, like, I was like, all right, well, here I am. This is a contract and per se. It's pretty cool. Well, what's next, you know?

2:07:28And, and now I'm finding myself in that exact same headspace again. What's next? And, and, and, and yeah. So it's, it's interesting.

2:07:41Baiju Bhatt:Do you ever think about the balance between being a student and a teacher? Yeah. I think about that sometimes too What do you think about it? I felt This kind of comes back to the question you asked a while ago What was happening during that time? I remember The balance of being a student and teacher Felt off to me Because we were, let's say, a thousand people Right at the company And I found myself Spending the lion's share of my time And I think rightfully so teaching everybody at the company what I knew, right? Teaching people how to do it in the way that we kind of thought the right way to do it was, right?

2:08:25Baiju Bhatt:And I found myself, like, looking in the mirror and being like 35, 36, whatever I was at that point, 35, and I was like, I'm spending all of my time teaching people stuff. And actually, this was right around the time that I got into building cars, and I literally, I had a mentor for a while. I was like literally a student. And I remember the joy and satisfaction of learning something new from the beginning and how quickly, how much stuff there was to learn, right? When you get to the point that you're teaching people stuff all the time, it's kind of difficult to find new things to learn. You have to be pretty, you have to be looking for it basically, right?

2:09:10Baiju Bhatt:And if you're not careful, you can certainly end up in a situation where your shit doesn't stink where you're like well i said it therefore it's right and i you know we all suffer from that to a certain degree when you hit that point you just stop developing yeah you stop developing right so i did a kind of i did a pretty um i think somewhat out of left field thing which was right actually before the game stop stuff happened probably two or three months prior um i announced that i was actually stepping back as ceo of the company because before vlad and i had been co-ceos from beginning till right before ipo and i was like you know what i want to keep doing this but i also want to carve out a little more time for my family um and i think the all this to say when the when the game stop stuff was happening which was in january of 21 i actually just stepped back as ceo of the company a few months prior and so it was like this so that was a that was a new ceo that no no no we we had been ceos together oh okay but this was like the beginning of him as ceo by himself yeah tough time so my my my experience there was like holy cow how do i help this come how do i help the company that i started like navigate this like black swan event that's like once in a lifetime right it was stressful it was scary it was really exhausting right but we navigated through it i I mean, so let's, so you revolutionized the entire market with no commission trading.

2:11:10You gave everyday Americans a platform that they can invest their money in, in both stocks and crypto.

2:11:22And I don't know all the dynamics around what went on with the GameStop AMC stuff, But it was, to my limited understanding of it, this is the little man sticking it to the big man, correct? And so can you just walk me through what exactly was going on with GameStop at the time? Why it was so controversial? Because that's the other thing that's revolutionized is, And then I remember seeing all these hedge funds experts and hedge fund managers and all these fucking stock gurus. And they're like, this is happening because these people don't know what the fuck they're doing. And it's like, well, it doesn't really matter if they know what the fuck they're doing because you're going to have to learn to adapt because they're not going anywhere.

2:12:20So maybe you're the one that doesn't know what the fuck you're doing anymore.

2:12:22Baiju Bhatt:I think the best way to, this is like the version of it that makes the most sense in my mind, is there were like two freight trains that were marching down the train tracks on a collision course. The first one was this idea of democratizing finance for all, the mission behind Robin Hood, right? Which is this idea that more people should have access to the markets. And the other freight train was internet meme culture. and those two collided and it created the GameStop saga, right? It was kind of this confluence of like a lot of like memes and, you know, just like people being sort of like exaggerated versions of themselves online and a lot of that stuff happening on Robin Hood and it was wild.

2:13:17Baiju Bhatt:Hold, hold. I remember seeing old. old wild man it was wild and all the while i was like yeah it was crazy because i had literally just stepped back a few months prior and i was like oh my goodness coincidentally six months later we took the company public i was in the middle of 2021 um yeah so why why did it come out that people couldn't sell GameStop? They could buy it, but they couldn't sell it on Robinhood. Did the SEC get involved? What happened there? So what happened was, actually, there was a regulatory clearinghouse requirement around the capital that we needed to have to operate the brokerage.

2:14:11Baiju Bhatt:And actually, this was something that was going on between the registered, you know, financial services registered people that worked at Robinhood, talking to the regulators, and they made the decision to limit the, I think it was to limit the buying, more buying of that symbol, because it was increasing our regulatory capital requirements um and so for a day we we put that pause on which created this like frenzy on the internet and it was kind of interesting because people were like batting around all these conspiracy theories and were like no we're actually just trying to work with this sort of clearinghouse regulators to operate our business.

2:15:02Baiju Bhatt:That's all it was? And we ended up raising a bunch of money over the next couple of days to help support that capital requirement, right? And it's kind of interesting on this one because this one has been talked about so much. And Dan Gallagher, for example, chief legal officer of Robinhood, also recent board member at Aetherflux, was actually one of the people that was kind of navigating Robin Hood through it and spoken about it a ton over the years. But it was... Black Swan. Yeah. Wow, that was a time. It's crazy to think that was five years ago. Damn, was that five years ago? It was almost five...

2:15:49Baiju Bhatt:Well, what was it? No, not quite five years. Four years, right? Four and a half. 2021? Yeah, four and a half years. Wow. Yeah, navigating through that dominated a lot of the next couple, the few years that followed of my life. And then probably the next big change for me was a little over a year ago, leaving full-time the company I started. Just being like, I'm going to stay on the board, but I want to focus on the space idea that I've had. How long have you had that idea?

2:16:32Baiju Bhatt:So I had the idea of wanting to do something commercial in space for a long time. What the commercial thing was, it took me kind of a while to figure out. So this kind of is where these two companies have some shared thought process behind it because there's a common creator between the two of them, right? how many times have i said capitalism on this call or on this conversation quite a few a lot right it's something that i fundamentally believe in the reason i keep talking about it and and the reason i think it's so important is i think it has this like huge benefit for individuals and their own pursuit of life liberty happiness right and their own self-betterment capitalism is also an incredible force for innovation, right?

2:17:20Baiju Bhatt:And I kind of felt that one of the things that when we got, when we created Robinhood, there was this sense that there were like the access to capitalism wasn't available to everyone. And so our app literally put capitalism in the capital markets on your phone in your pocket. And look at how quickly the stock market changed. happened really fast the name was perfect by the way yeah the name was on point how did you guys come out i mean that was uh it's perfect yeah it's like there is no better name for what you guys built there were some other much worse working titles for what the company would be uh robin hood was really good one i think my my co-founders girlfriend now wife was the one that came up with that um no but the the thing that had been in the back of my head was this idea of capitalism and growing up around the space industry i think one thing that was very it was very frustrating for me is i grew up in the space household and hearing about the space industry and all of it was in the past tense right the space race or whatever it happened before either of us were born it was over by the time we were born and how could this be how could this thing that was presented in all of pop culture as the future as the frontier we're done with it like what the hell like we should be having space should be all over the place right because it was one of these big technological evolutions that we thought was going to bring us to the stars as a species and then the 90s and the 80s and the 2000s that felt like we as a society collectively got distracted by the internet but the internet was just so darn entertaining that like nothing was happening in space this is kind of my my my worldview right or my sort of caricaturization of the world when i saw the spacex rockets the falc original falcon rockets landing upright i was like holy shit man i was like is this actually happening in my lifetime because if it is i need to like i i feel compelled to to want to work on this and i'm like i'm not quite sure how or i'm not quite sure when i'm not quite sure if but i felt this like this this physical force inside of me like I have to work on this and I remember thinking to myself I'm like there's got to be if we could bring more capitalism to space more more sort of ways for people to make money in space that's how you make space a bigger part of everyday's life and I want to say that to contrast that with what the space industry is today or has been is I'd say it's for the government by the government at government prices which means it's not happening very quickly it's like happening at a glacial pace now if we could come up with more ways for capitalism to happen in space meaning you can find more industrial applications for space you're gonna untether this from like the government being the the sort of like primary purveyor of this to like everybody and individuals being able to have like a bigger role in this.

2:20:56Baiju Bhatt:But you also create opportunities for people to get jobs in this industry. Because if you want to work in aerospace, what are you going to do? You're going to work at SpaceX, at Lockheed, Boeing. Like there's got to be a lot of options and a lot of great careers. and if you look at the sort of set of commercial things that are happening in space

2:21:21Baiju Bhatt:it's actually only a handful of industries it's only like i this is kind of also my character caricaturization but it's defense earth imaging slash academia and telecom like those are the main industries in space there's other stuff that's kind of on the periphery but those are like the main big ones. And my thought process was there's got to be something related to natural resources we can do in space. There's got to be natural resources that we can bring from space to earth that would create a reason for people to want to build more industrial stuff in space. And I think the light bulb went off more recently in the last couple of years when I realized that if you wanted to bring natural resources from space back to earth, the obvious one is energy.

2:22:13Baiju Bhatt:Space solar power is actually kind of an old idea. It's like an old 1970s idea from NASA and the DoD, which I love. I love old ideas. The idea of zero commission stock trading is actually kind of an old idea. Like people had been talking about this in the 80s and 90s as like a theoretical possibility.

2:22:38Baiju Bhatt:and so the idea of wanting to work on this idea of space solar power that people thought about in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s but doesn't exist in society today it's like man this is checking a lot of boxes it's an old idea which to me says it's on strong intellectual footing as it first rationale may not there may not be a good solution but the rationale is on solid footing, the reason why you'd want to do it.

2:23:08Baiju Bhatt:And it has this opportunity to increase the capitalist envelope in space. And the part that is the more recent sort of thing that made me want to do this full time is I saw a path to doing it with technology that exists today at a small enough scale that we could iterate on it. So enter Aetherflux, the company with a mission to deliver energy to planet Earth. And I think next year is going to be a really important year, both for space energy and I think with an exclamation point for our company. Because we're putting two satellites into space. The first one next June is like a year now. Oh, man, that's awesome.

2:23:57Baiju Bhatt:Are we in July now? We're in July. It's July 1st. Yeah, so I got to go fucking get to work tomorrow morning. Yeah, we're putting a first satellite up that does it. Congratulations. Yeah. That's incredible. Kind of a long-winded answer, but... So you are launching satellites into space, which will collect solar power and beam it to Earth. Yeah. That's fucking wild, man. You know what the wildest part about this is? You don't have to have a scientific breakthrough to do this. We're doing this with technology that exists today.

2:24:46Baiju Bhatt:That's one of the core theses behind the company, right? Is to take this thing that has been science fiction for a long time and to make it science reality. And I think that there's definitely ways of doing space solar power where you can hinge it on an individual scientific breakthrough. You could find a version of it that makes great sense on paper, but requires a billion dollars to build a test vehicle. You're like, that's not going to happen. What I was looking for was a path to do it that you could do it at small scale so that that you could iterate on the technology, because I think the iteration speed is really closely tied to how quickly the technology can get better.

2:25:29Baiju Bhatt:If you can only iterate on something once every five years, it's not gonna be very good, because you're not gonna get to update it, but every five years. If on the other hand, you have an iteration cycle, that's like you can update this thing every six months, every year, maybe even faster, then even if you start out at the wrong answer, you're going to be moving in the direction of the right answer quickly. So what is this thing called space solar power? Should I tell you about it? Yeah, please do. It's a water tube.

2:26:06Baiju Bhatt:Best way to explain it, I think, is to kind of walk through the three things that are happening in our design and then kind of build up from there. So the first satellite that goes to space next June, Again, this is like, we have to actually do a bunch of work between now and then.

2:26:28Baiju Bhatt:It's a satellite bus that we purchased from a third party called Apex. So what is a satellite bus? It's basically like the frame of the satellite, the solar panels, the way to mount it to the SpaceX rocket, all the communications antennas so that when it's in space, you can talk to it. You can orient the thing in space. You can point it in space. It's basically like, it's the satellite minus what they call the payload. And the payload is the thing that's doing whatever the job is that the satellite does. So common payloads are like communications antennas, right? Or maybe a big camera to take pictures of the earth or the atmosphere, right?

2:27:14So it's everything minus the payload, which is the job

2:27:18Baiju Bhatt:that it does. So we're buying that from another startup, actually. We are designing and integrating the power transmission system on the satellite, which is the laser system, all the optics for pointing it, and the final part is the ground station for receiving the power. so the satellite does broad strokes two things first thing it does is it collects power and so the sun is a big power plant they're just spewing off energy from nuclear fusion right so you have hydrogen helium fusion happening heats the whole thing up thing glows red emits solar radiation which our solar panels convert from photons, which are the particle of light, to electrons energized.

2:28:14Baiju Bhatt:So you go from a beam of light from the sun to an electrical current on the satellite. That's what the solar panels do. There's different kinds of solar panels you can use. You can use very expensive solar panels that have a longer lifetime and a higher efficiency, or you can go the Home Depot route. And there's a pretty interesting discussion there and like why you might do one or the other. So let's say you've got a big, excuse me, a big, beautiful solar ray on your satellite that's generating power. That power in the form of an electrical current then, you can either have that go directly to the laser system or for this example, let's say there's a battery, which were our satellites for the first demo missions at very least will have a battery on it.

2:29:07Baiju Bhatt:So you take all the electrical current that the solar panels are generating and you charge up a battery on the satellite. That's step one. Let's move on to step two. That's the pointing and the laser system. The pointing and the laser system is basically how you go from the charge on the battery to a beam of light that's exiting the satellite that's precisely pointed to a small spot on the ground. So what does this do? So we use something called a fiber laser, which takes the electrical current that's in the battery, it goes into a bank of photodiodes, which are basically glorified LEDs. Okay.

2:29:52Baiju Bhatt:Those things, those are thin silicon wafers that when you run a current through them, they start emitting light. You take the light from tons and tons of these, You put them into fiber optics. And then inside of the fiber optic, you have what's called a gain medium, or a second stage to the laser, that takes all the light that's coming out of each one of the LED, the photodiodes. These are called diode pumps in our case. Where the light coming out is kind of diverging like this. And you have it go into fiber optics. When it goes through the second stage of the laser, It takes all the diverging light and it straightens it out.

2:30:31So then you have a fiber optic that's got energy in it in the form of light.

2:30:39Baiju Bhatt:Wow. You take that beam of light and then you put it into basically a telescope, which then takes the beam of light and it projects that beam down to the ground. On the ground, at first we're gonna have a bigger array to receive the power. The array on the ground is gonna be bigger simply because the actual satellite optics are smaller. Turns out if you make the optics on the satellite bigger, you can get a smaller spot on the ground. It's a physics conversation for another time. But on the ground, the architecture, and this is where the tie-in with the DoD comes in, is designed to be portable, small, and ideally of little to no strategic value if captured.

2:31:31Baiju Bhatt:So what is this receiver on the ground? We'll talk about the more beefy version of it, and then you can kind of strip this down if you needed to use it for more tactical applications. The future version we think is going to be a solar array that's 5 to 10 meters in diameter. probably about the size of this room right on some sort of platform that you can gimbal so you can point it at the satellite and a big old battery and as a satellite's passing overhead it's charged up or it's charging itself up and it's going to have these windows of time where it passes overhead where it's over the ground station it starts out by forming a link with ground station when it does and it knows that it's got a clear path to transmit power it'll start discharging the energy from the battery into this like laser system that'll then put all put that energy into the form of light that light then it's pointed down at the solar panel on the ground which then takes that one frequency or that small set of frequencies of light that you're passing down and the solar panels are tuned for those frequencies of light so you get higher efficiency so you have this ground station that then is taking the light that's coming down from the satellite and turning it into an electrical charge again which you can use for whatever and use it to power stuff wow how how it is both the power plant which is the so the vision that we have for this, right?

2:33:07Baiju Bhatt:So we have one satellite that does this next year. Ideally, we have a second one that does the same thing that's on an orbit behind it, so we can test some of the more technical functionality. But the idea is that as you demonstrate this, you'll be able to get it more mature. As you are able to get it more mature, you intend to be able to make it more accurate, right? You kind of want to be able to like step up the maturity of the technology. Then you start building bigger higher power satellites. And the way that you have more power available in space is you put more satellites up. So the idea is that over time we're going to continue to build more and more satellites to build a constellation, an energy constellation.

2:34:00Baiju Bhatt:So imagine like Starlink for power. Wow. That's kind of the long-term vision of it. What do you think? Is that, how wild does that sound?

2:34:12It's pretty out there. But I mentioned, I'd interviewed this gentleman, Steve Quast, who was talking about this just about a month ago and i i was i saw a tweet that he he did and he was talking about beaming energy down and and all kinds of wazoo stuff but i was like this guy actually seems like legit he's not he doesn't seem like your typical internet weirdo me or him him oh yeah and so i dug into him a little bit and brought him on and then he started talking about how we have the technology to is Is that why you reached out to him? Because he was talking about power beaming? Yep. Sick. He was talking about power beaming.

2:34:55He was talking about manipulating space and time. And he was talking about being able to transport yourself in a matter of seconds, basically, from, I don't know, Washington, D.C. to Beijing.

2:35:11Baiju Bhatt:Really? Yeah. I love that power beaming is in the conversation with that stuff. Me too. Yeah. And then we found you. But so what I want to ask is, I mean, with one satellite, and what do you call the ground station? Ground station? Just a ground station? Receiver station? Receiver? Maybe we'll come up with a more. We haven't entered the branding phase of this yet. That'll come. Gotcha. So how much power will the ground station receive from the satellite? So for the first satellite that we're putting up, we're like, we're the thing, the version of this that I was kind of articulating, right, is we're, we're trying actively to have every one of the components be things that are manufactured, meaning there's other people that have uses for these technologies that are either commercially available, or in the case of our laser system, for example, right?

2:36:07We're working with a third party that's taking similar technology and basically making it work better for space.

2:36:15Baiju Bhatt:So the whole idea behind this first satellite is we want to use existing supply chains, existing commercial uses for the technology, and try to package these things together so that they're more than the sum of their parts. right meaning like you take a laser that's used for metal cutting and a satellite bus that's used for telecommunications and you kind of like put these pieces together and make it work to do this thing that's power beaming the reason i mentioned this is that there's a lot of constraints and the power output of the first one we kind of have pegged it at a point where we think it's power beaming but the future systems are going to be much higher power okay so the first one is going to do an output of about a kilowatt of power out of laser system into free space and on the ground we think that worst case sort of like you know the base case scenario is that we're able to get you know enough energy out of it to light maybe a light bulb or you know you know less than 100 watts of power oh god but we think that if the system works we should be able to get significantly more than that.

2:37:28Baiju Bhatt:So a couple of hundred watts of power. So the first version of this next year is like proof of concept. Like we're able to get enough power down with all these constraints that we have to actually generate an electrical current and use that electrical current for demo, like a light installation. Right. And I think that in and of itself, even at a lower relative power level, it kind of shows that the whole end-to-end thing is doing what we say it's going to do. After that, the goal is to start power scaling, right? Make higher power satellites and make your ground stations able to receive a lot more power.

2:38:11Baiju Bhatt:And the vision that I kind of have for this in the future is that each satellite is going to generate enough power so that if it's transmitting power to one ground station that one ground station you know whether it's one dish or several dishes that are receiving the power will be able to generate enough power to power a small neighborhood wow and homes wow would this would the beam punch through clouds depends on how much clouds there are so yeah it i think more more likely than not what we'll end up doing is one of beaming power when we see pockets of openings in the clouds okay how fast so we're talking about what the satellites in orbit and it come it so it's a line of sight yeah beam correct so wouldn't how long will the satellite be in the line of sight window like five to ten minutes that's it that's it yeah is that enough time to drain the entire battery we may not want to do that actually because it it might be the case so first of all the idea is is that similar to starlink right is as you put more and more satellites up you start getting so it'll be multiple satellites beaming in at once well you'll have handoff you'll have one satellite powering a ground station it's going to move out of the field of view and another one will take over okay right so it'll be handing off from satellite to satellite and as the first satellite moves out of the field of view of the first ground station, it's immediately going to start looking for another satellite, another ground station to start beaming power to.

2:39:50Baiju Bhatt:Oh, shit. So the idea is many satellites, many ground stations. And for each satellite at any point in time, there is a ground station within its field of view. Because the satellites eventually are going to be operating around the clock, right? Like they get power. They need a ground station to just distribute the power to. cool that one's out of the line of sight we've got another one there start distributing there cool that one's out of sight next one so kind of back and forth back and forth so it will so basically tell me if i'm correct on this

2:40:31let's just say there's a hundred ground stations so these satellites around the globe so these These satellites will pretty much always be discharging its load of energy, correct? So it will constantly be receiving. I guess not constantly, but it'll be receiving. Depends on which orbit it's in. And then it will almost always be beaming energy into one grand station or another. And there'll be a line of these. And so it's just, it's almost like a patrol. Just this one's beaming in here. It moves. It's beaming over there. And the next one picks up. And it's just a consistent orbit of that.

2:41:20Baiju Bhatt:It's also worth mentioning there's other ways of doing this. This is the version that we think is going to pan out. The other ways of doing it are like you build one big, beautiful satellite. you build one truly large and exquisite satellite and we're talking about putting all these things in low earth orbit right so you're talking about like 500 to 600 kilometers straight up in the grand scheme of things that's kind of not that far right whereas geostationary or geosynchronous orbits so the earth is rotating right around its axis if you get far enough away from the earth the satellite will be rotating around the earth at the same speed that the earth is rotating so you'll stay over one fixed point interesting that's 36 000 kilometers up holy shit that's real fucking far so another version of this architecture and this is kind of like the version that was written about in the 70s was instead of doing this super complicated handoff maneuvering thing which remember in the 1970s probably the computers weren't there to do this right like in order to do this handoff stuff you have to be able to exchange data between neighboring satellites to even be able to say i was power i was sending power here i'm handing this off to you right like that satellite's not just gonna like have a premonition yeah you know it's not going to be remote viewing the other satellites even to do something like that you need modern computers and modern computing right The old version of this was, excuse me, one big, beautiful satellite in geostationary that's like maybe the size of a small city.

2:43:07Baiju Bhatt:And that thing is continuously beaming power, nearly continuously beaming power down to one, again, really large ground station that might be kilometers in diameter. yeah but i mean if you did that and then in cloud cover and the atmosphere does dilute the beam uh somewhat then i mean then you would you'd be in a worse spot right yeah you there are ways of transmitting power through the clouds and kind of ignoring them so it actually has to do with frequency of light that you use okay right so actually like when you get to microwave frequencies like Wi-Fi frequencies and stuff like that, those will pass through the atmosphere much less disturbed than if you're using infrared, which is what we're using for our demos.

2:43:57Baiju Bhatt:The flip side is that with infrared, we're able to use lasers. So we get like a tight beam of light as opposed to having to focus a bunch of antennas that are diverging. Gotcha. So if you're trying to like use microwave frequencies, for example, you would need to have an array of microwave antennas lined up so that you can send a signal to the ones at the outer ends of your array to basically noise cancel. That makes sense. It does. It does. This way, I mean... So all this to say, there's a way to demonstrate this that we're working towards right now. There's also the future build of how you make this an industrial or commercial thing, which we have a sense of how to do it.

2:44:42Baiju Bhatt:We're also pretty open-minded. and I think that's kind of coming back to the idea of iteration cycle right if you want to try to sort of sort of like will this thing into existence right you kind of want to find the the version of it that's most likely to work and you want to like be iterating towards it over time because in order for this to work to generate enough power for it to be useful we're going to have to have lots of satellites now i think it's also worth mentioning like why dod like what's the point of the dod and all this right the application that we're building for first is actually to power remote dod installations like it's kind of you could probably teach me a lesson on this but fuel transport to the battlefield is very dangerous yeah right imagine just snipping that supply chain all together and you have this little receiver dish and all of your power infrastructure is in orbit yeah it cuts so many logistics out of the game that it's it's totally different amazing idea and yeah we we could have used that for the last 20 years yeah um interestingly the dod has been writing about this for a long time like we this version of this architecture that we're building kind of arrived at it from a lot of conversations with a group out of DARPA so there's a group this guy Dr.

2:46:17Baiju Bhatt:Paul Jaffe who he's listening to it what's up homie he is a research scientist was at a naval research lab before and has been working on power beaming technologies for kind of a long time, recently moved over to DARPA and has written a lot about this, like had been talking to him, reaching out to him as a, again, a student, right? And I think it was in those conversations that he kind of pointed us to a lot of the work that the DoD's done on this and kind of trying to articulate, because the DoD has written a lot on this about applications for this like why how do you use space-based solar power in this use case right and it's all about these small portable receivers as at least as i understand it um and there was a there was a project or a proposal that they were working on uh i think they still are where you generate power on the ground and you relay it between several satellites and you get it down to a spot on the ground where you need it.

2:47:27Baiju Bhatt:My kind of thought on this was, if that's in service of building that receiver, it's like, yeah, you'll need the receiver, but rather than doing these hops through the atmosphere, what if you just put the power plant in orbit? So it's kind of an interesting idea, right? Because what we're proposing building is both the power plant and the power lines. Because in this model, right, that you'll need like a local power grid wherever your receiver is, but you're not gonna need power lines from - Space to Earth. Yeah, you're also not gonna need power lines from like your home or some big data center where you're, some application where you're using the power to the power plant.

2:48:09Baiju Bhatt:Because that's just done directly from space. Wow. I mean, you know general general petraeus said that energy is the lifeblood of our warfighting capabilities general mattis has asked the dod to unleash us from the tether of fuel and this does exactly that i mean there's a long history of technologies sorry if I'm cutting you off there's a long history of technologies that have started in space technologies that have started in the DoD sort of government world that have proven to be useful for people on the rest of the world like GPS is one that comes to mind right

2:49:01what else do you see this who else like what other customer base is there for this other than DoD?

2:49:14Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, I think there's actually, the goal of this is to build a full energy company, right? Like a true energy company.

2:49:25Baiju Bhatt:And as you can mature the technology, as the cost of launch starts to come down with Starship or other heavy launch vehicles, as we get our shit together and our manufacturing processes is we're able to really squeeze down the cost of manufacturing. The medium to long-term goal for the company is going to be reduce the price of energy that we can sell. And the more we can reduce the price, the more industrial applications open up. So if you can start to get this with cost competitive with energy production on the ground, then you're really competing against terrestrial energy sources. That's kind of where I want to take this eventually, right?

2:50:07Baiju Bhatt:So whether it be receivers for our laser power beaming within existing solar farms, for example, or you set up a separate small receiver station where you're able to connect to satellites to get power from. I imagine this to be a new energy grid and one that augments the copper cables and lines on the ground in the same way that Starlink is complementing all the fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure on the ground. So I think that's kind of the goal is to get the cost down. As you get the cost down, you can start being cost competitive with more use cases. Do you see this becoming more of a, how do I say this, more of a decentralized grid?

2:51:00I would love for that to happen.

2:51:02Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, that's kind of the vision for it.

2:51:07Baiju Bhatt:I like to punctuate a very serious conversation with these gummies. They're great.

2:51:16Baiju Bhatt:Can I ask you a question? Sure. I'm curious. curious any interesting stories from being deployed around energy infrastructure that you've had like fuel transits like any sort of dicey stuff that happened well i mean i'm not too into logistics i mean with my background i'm more more of a warfighter and so the logistics are all you know pretty much taken care of for us but a lot of times you know we would be especially with well actually both with seal teams and contracting for ca i mean when when we're not really near most of the time at least where i like to go because i like the action um we're not near like a big base like bagram or kandahar or baghdad you know and and we're we're pushed out and you know that could be in something that's just a a safe house where you're sucking off the local energy grid, which a lot of those places were very unstable, especially Yemen.

2:52:20I mean, the power and the internet would just go out all the time. Interesting. Were there diesel generators around? Yeah. It depends. If you're at a house, you're likely not going to have a diesel generator because that would stand out. The whole purpose of having a safe house is to blend in with the local population, right?

2:52:39Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. So you couldn't have that. That's what you mean by safe house. Okay. That's what I mean by safe. It's literally just a house in a neighborhood that... Happens to be safe. Maybe. Kind of safe. Yeah. You'd have them spread out throughout the city, and everybody there on the ground knows, hey, there's a safe house, there's a safe house, there's a safe house, and it could be an extract point or a safe haven, or you could be operating out of a safe house, which is what we did the majority of the time. And so you're using local energy. Now, if you're at like a forward operating base, like a SEAL platoon is there, or a small element, then, yeah, you're running off diesel generators.

2:53:29And so, you know, what can happen with the logistics of that? I mean, one, it's expensive. You know, two, I mean, convoys were getting hit all over in Iraq and Afghanistan. So if your fuel gets hit, blown up by an IED, well, then you're shit out of luck, buddy. Yeah. You're not getting any energy. And so with something like this, I mean, it would 110 % be a game changer right off the bat. Did you ever have to lug solar panels into the field? um are no do you know people that did no

2:54:13lots of communications equipment and antennas and shit like that but

2:54:17Baiju Bhatt:not solar panels how would you charge that stuff up if it ran on a was it battery based yes what happens if it runs out of batteries you always got extras okay you just carry more batteries yep where everybody carries batteries. That's wild. Yeah, that makes sense, though. I've heard some people talking about stories of carrying, like, a solar ruck pack into the field. Like I said, I haven't been out there in 10 years. So this year is 10 years since my last deployment. So who knows what the hell they're running nowadays. But in my day, we had batteries called 5590s that powered all the communications equipment.

2:54:57cool and so everybody would have i mean batteries are like ammo for us you know because if you if you lose communications then you're dead and um yeah but i'm i'm sure they probably have some type of solar panels occurring around now wouldn't surprise me one bit it's come up a couple of times my research but i it's it's hard to tell how prevalent that stuff is yeah well if you need connections. I can get you connected to the modern day warfighter. They'll tell you all about it.

2:55:28Baiju Bhatt:Yeah. I'll probably take you up on that at some point. No problem. Wow. How many satellites do you think it would take to power a small decentralized grid the size of a small town? Maybe 15 ,000-20 ,000 people.

2:55:54Baiju Bhatt:I have to say, I'd have to do some back of the envelope map on it. I think also the question that I kind of have right now is how big to make each one of the satellites versus whether to just make more of them. Right? Because I actually think there's probably an advantage in making them smaller because each one becomes less strategically important. Each one, if there's a failure of a component, kind of becomes more throwaway.

2:56:25Baiju Bhatt:yeah i'd have to do i'd have to do some back of the envelope to get a reasonable answer but i think it's also going to be when you when you when you if you go the constellation route with this as much as you're providing power for one location you're also starting to build capacity to provide power pretty much anywhere in the globe because you'll have some satellites that are over the place that you want to deliver the power but a lot of the time they're going to be orbiting back around the earth to get back to that spot or they're orbiting around the earth and maybe just missing that spot altogether but they'll catch it in two days when the other satellites won't be over it gotcha right so it's it's actually how will you make the determination of whether to go bigger or more that's a great question i think it's probably going to be it's probably going to be trial and error it's probably going to be like where can we power scale it until some components start becoming really difficult to power scale.

2:57:24Baiju Bhatt:And what that is, it could be something small, it could be something big. And I think it'll also be a trade-off of how to package them into the rocket. Because Starship is huge. And each one of those, depending on how big the satellites are, you might be able to put like 100 or 200 of them in there. Wow. Yeah. No shit. 100 to 200 satellites in one lift? Yeah. Some very early modeling we did, we kind of thought that we could get those ballpark of numbers. Wow.

2:58:02Baiju Bhatt:Yeah, so that's kind of the part about this. It was like, how does this ever gonna become big? How are you ever gonna get to like proper constellation density? Or like, how do you get to the same constellation size as Starlink, right? Well, Starship kind of changes that equation, right? So if it's 100, let's just say for the sake of this argument, it's 100 satellites per starship. Right. And let's say that there's 7 ,000 starships, 7 ,000 Starlink satellites in space. Roughly speaking, let's just say for the sake of argument, that's like 70 launches. Damn. And if you think about what the requirements are going to be, the point I'm trying to get here is, is in order for Starship to be able to do something like the Mars mission, they're going to have to build this thing for rapid, rapid, rapid reuse.

2:58:59Baiju Bhatt:Like they're going to have to hit those windows of time to launch, to get from Earth to Mars, for example, right? There's going to be a time crunch in which they're going to need to put lots of payloads into orbit, which means that during those times, more, you know, I haven't looked at their flight plan, so I'm kind of guessing how this is going to work. But I'd imagine that there's going to be a period of intense launching where they have to do tons and tons and tons of launches to get the payload in orbit, to assemble whatever stuff they need to do to then send it to Mars. If they're building for that kind of capacity and rapid reuse, when you're not trying to go to Mars, there's going to be stuff that you have the ability to put into space, right?

2:59:43Baiju Bhatt:The launch capacity, maybe it's not the first year that Starship goes live. Eventually, the launch capacity is going to be available to be able to do missions like this. How long do you think these satellites will last? I mean, there's no weather elements up there. In low Earth orbit, things deorbit naturally. There's enough drag up there that they'll just fall back down, which is actually probably fine. So I think 10 years or so would be kind of the target for the lifespan for satellite okay okay yeah and it's kind of interesting on the satellite design we talked about this a little bit in the beginning right it's like do you use cheaper less efficient components or more expensive higher efficiency components and the answer is like it's not totally clear like you actually kind of have to do the trade-off to figure it out where i bring this up because a lot of the times the questions are around efficiency, where because the supply is free, it's actually the thing that matters more is what are the overall economics, which may actually be better with less efficient components.

3:00:53Baiju Bhatt:Interesting. Yeah. What am I not asking I should be?

3:01:03Baiju Bhatt:I don't know. We've talked about a lot of stuff. With the satellites. Oh, with the satellites. Right, right. That's how my head was going. Let me think. What else did the satellites? How small do you think these receivers can get? I think 5 to 10 meters in diameter. That's kind of what... I mean, look, we might end up being... If we get to that, we might end up shooting for smaller. I'm shooting for like two and a half meters spot on the ground. Do you see this overpowering individual homes? I think it could, yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of, there's a lot of steps between this and that. But like, we're able to use Starlink to power individual homes for internet.

3:01:52Baiju Bhatt:I would like to be able to do that, yeah. I think at the very least, there might be a case for having receivers local to neighborhoods if you didn't want to put them actually on top of a roof, for example. I mean, we're on the cutting edge of this, so I don't know. Could it beam it to a car while driving? Could this revolutionize everything in energy? Yeah, so here's something you could do is you could beam it to moving platforms. You could beam it to boats. Ships. You could beam it to ships. You could possibly even - A ship could hold a five to 10 meter wide receiver. Many of them if it wanted to.

3:02:33Right.

3:02:34Baiju Bhatt:And you could end up in a situation where you're able to electrify some of these things that batteries are never going to be able to do, right? Man, that's fucking cool, man. Yeah. Imagine a fleet of satellites when they're flying over the Pacific, for example. Dedicated to a fleet of naval ships. Yeah. Or they switch from providing power to like some industrial application to now they're over the pacific and now they're powering ships and then they're back over land and they're powering industrial applications like that's amazing man like what you're doing is just is it's incredible this is the brave new world man and i think it's look this is really hard right like this what we're talking about doing here there's it's not a foregone conclusion that this is going to happen like it's a tremendously challenging technical problem ahead of us but the the point i'm trying to get at here is like i think people like me in society that have the desire to do stuff like this that have the experience and the means to make it happen like i think it's on us to try stuff like this right like it's it's awesome it's a higher calling right like you gotta if you have the if you have the ability to like make this contribution to the technical landscape of humanity and i'm 40 right like i have years ahead of me knock on wood um yeah it's like it's seeing if you can will this into existence well seems like you're doing a damn good job man last question yeah if you had three people to see on this show who would they be three people i'm assuming you're asking for people that are alive today yeah i mean this is maybe um a couple of better answer to this you've had trump on which i think is awesome um i'm trying to think of non-obvious ones because the obvious one would be elon musk have you would you have on somebody like kamala harris i tried to get her did you yeah we were in touch with her camp she was gonna do it i think that would be fascinating i don't know if she'll do it now but uh she was gonna do it and then for one reason or another just fell off and and they decided not to come but i really wanted that interview yeah i believe that yeah I think it would I think that would have been huge I think it would have been interesting to see because Trump did so many of these interviews right to get like a real apples to apples comparison yeah who else would be interesting I'm kind of blanking let me think about it a little bit alright no worries well man I'm so glad we met what a fascinating conversation I really appreciate you taking the time and coming to Tennessee and sitting down and describing what you're doing and what you have done and all the rabbit holes we went down and hope to see you again.

3:05:45Likewise, my friend. Perfect. Best of luck.