Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0260_ Aliens in the Ocean, Asteroid Mining & Black Holes — The Mysteries Science Is Trying to Solve

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#0260_ Aliens in the Ocean, Asteroid Mining & Black Holes — The Mysteries Science Is Trying to Solve · INSPIRE STORY

0:05
Speaker 1: Matt Gallich, welcome to the show, man.
0:08
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on, man. This is awesome.
0:10
Speaker 1: Mining asteroids? Dude, that is so far out there. I
0:16
Speaker 1: can't wait to have this conversation. But I am curious.
0:20
Speaker 1: Why mining asteroids? What are you getting off of them?
0:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're going after what are called the platinum
0:26
Speaker 2: group metals, right? Very common. Very critical resource we all
0:29
Speaker 2: use here on Earth, but they're also worth a lot
0:31
Speaker 2: of money. And why asteroids? Well, some of the best
0:35
Speaker 2: ore sources we've ever discovered of the platinum group metals
0:38
Speaker 2: are orbiting us in space. It's a very specific type
0:40
Speaker 2: of asteroid called a metal asteroid that we're going to
0:43
Speaker 2: go after, mine, and bring it back to Earth. Wow.
0:47
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to dive into that deep, so I
0:49
Speaker 1: can't wait. But everybody starts off with an introduction, so
0:52
Speaker 1: here we go. Matt Galich. Co-founder and CEO of Astroforge,
0:58
Speaker 1: a pioneering deep space mining company focused on extracting platinum
1:03
Speaker 1: metal groups from asteroids. Engineering leader with over a decade
1:06
Speaker 1: of experience leading teams in high-stakes technical environments, turned down
1:11
Speaker 1: an opportunity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to start Astroforge
1:16
Speaker 1: in 2022. Driven by a vision to act faster and
1:20
Speaker 1: more economically than traditional aerospace giants. A risk taker who
1:24
Speaker 1: embraces fear is a requirement for innovation, telling your team
1:28
Speaker 1: that if they're not scared, they're not pushing hard enough.
1:31
Speaker 2: I love that.
1:32
Speaker 1: I think I know what it means, but I'm curious,
1:34
Speaker 1: what do you mean by that?
1:39
Speaker 2: Look, when you're going to go do something like attempt
1:41
Speaker 2: to mine asteroids or go travel to the cosmos, right,
1:45
Speaker 2: you have an option to go do that in a
1:46
Speaker 2: very safe way at a big company you've probably heard
1:49
Speaker 2: of called NASA. I probably shouldn't call them a company, right?
1:50
Speaker 2: A big government agency called NASA. It takes a lot
1:54
Speaker 2: of guts to take highly technical people and have them
1:57
Speaker 2: kind of throw that away and say, I'm going to
1:59
Speaker 2: go join a small startup and go try to explore
2:01
Speaker 2: the universe for a fraction of the cost. We're going
2:03
Speaker 2: to take a lot more risk to make that happen.
2:05
Speaker 2: We're probably going to fail multiple times. But if we
2:08
Speaker 2: can pull it off, we'd change the world. Those are
2:10
Speaker 2: special people and people that you rarely find. And those
2:14
Speaker 2: are the people that we hire at Astroforge, right? We
2:15
Speaker 2: hire the explorers of the future. And you kind of
2:18
Speaker 2: got to have that genie.
2:19
Speaker 1: To make it work. Yeah, yeah. I mean, how do
2:21
Speaker 1: you find them?
2:24
Speaker 2: There isn't one simple answer to how do you find talent.
2:27
Speaker 2: I wish there was because then I would just use
2:29
Speaker 2: it on repeat to find the best talent. People have
2:31
Speaker 2: come to us from people that have emailed us, the
2:33
Speaker 2: people that have said, investors that have then came over
2:36
Speaker 2: the fence and worked for us, people we go out
2:39
Speaker 2: and recruit, people I've spent, you know, our current COO,
2:42
Speaker 2: I spent over three years just talking to. Oh, really?
2:44
Speaker 2: Saying like, hey, this is what I'm doing. When are
2:47
Speaker 2: you interested? And, you know, he was early at a
2:49
Speaker 2: little company you've probably heard of called SpaceX. And- To
2:55
Speaker 2: get some of those people that are just really ingrained,
2:58
Speaker 2: also have a lot of capital. It's not like SpaceX
3:00
Speaker 2: has done bad for these people that were pretty early
3:02
Speaker 2: at the company, right? But to be able to convince
3:05
Speaker 2: them and get them kind of excited about a new
3:08
Speaker 2: push into the cosmos is really what pushes people over
3:12
Speaker 2: the edge. I would say most of the team at
3:14
Speaker 2: Astroforge isn't working for the money. They're working for the
3:16
Speaker 2: journey and the adventure. We're all on an adventure. Let's
3:19
Speaker 2: go see where it takes us.
3:20
Speaker 1: So I'm curious. Because I have so many questions. I'm
3:25
Speaker 1: not organized right now because there's just so many random questions.
3:29
Speaker 1: I mean, what was the, I mean, what was the
3:33
Speaker 1: motivator to start? I mean, what even got you interested
3:37
Speaker 1: in mining asteroids? Why not just mine here on Earth?
3:41
Speaker 2: So it's, yeah, I mean, look, those are two different questions, right?
3:45
Speaker 2: It's not that I actually got interested in mining asteroids.
3:48
Speaker 2: In early 2021, I went to JPL and looked at
3:52
Speaker 2: a mission called Europa Clipper. It's a mission that's going
3:54
Speaker 2: out to a moon. It's about five and a half
3:56
Speaker 2: billion dollar planetary mission. Amazing mission. But what I realized is,
4:01
Speaker 2: and I think we can all admit this, is it
4:03
Speaker 2: shouldn't cost five and a half billion dollars. Like there's
4:06
Speaker 2: just not that much material being used to justify that cost.
4:09
Speaker 2: And NASA has this process they've used, and it's almost
4:12
Speaker 2: at this point a jobs program, right? You got to
4:14
Speaker 2: like test your spacecraft in this state, and you gotta
4:17
Speaker 2: go to this state to do this, and these people
4:19
Speaker 2: in this state have to work on it. That's how
4:20
Speaker 2: you get Congress to approve these budgets. And we're kind
4:22
Speaker 2: of seeing that today all over the place, right? With
4:24
Speaker 2: NASA's budget, like every week you hear something different and
4:26
Speaker 2: it's become some Senator argued for his state to get it.
4:29
Speaker 2: And that's not a good way to build low cost spacecraft.
4:34
Speaker 2: And in fact, we've just seen these spacecraft balloon in price.
4:36
Speaker 2: And five and a half billion is just a massive,
4:40
Speaker 2: massive amount of capital to go do something that I
4:42
Speaker 2: don't think should cost anywhere near that amount. You know,
4:45
Speaker 2: you're gonna hear these famous stories about Elon, and I
4:48
Speaker 2: think a lot of founders will repeat this, that they
4:50
Speaker 2: go and they look at like the raw material costs
4:51
Speaker 2: of what it takes and then say like, well, this
4:55
Speaker 2: is X amount more, this is a good price to
4:57
Speaker 2: go and flex. And we've been using that for a
4:59
Speaker 2: long time in business, by the way, it's just called margin.
5:01
Speaker 2: And something that we looked at as well of like,
5:03
Speaker 2: hold on, why does this cost five and a half
5:05
Speaker 2: billion dollars? What if I could build it cheaper? And
5:08
Speaker 2: what I realized is I think I could build a
5:10
Speaker 2: satellite a lot cheaper than what NASA does, but Is
5:15
Speaker 2: it worth it building it cheaper? And what I mean
5:16
Speaker 2: by that is you still gotta launch the thing. It's
5:18
Speaker 2: not like I can throw a satellite into space, I
5:19
Speaker 2: still gotta be able to launch the satellite. And so
5:21
Speaker 2: one of the biggest reasons Astroforge is allowed to exist
5:24
Speaker 2: is actually because of that same organization, NASA. NASA does
5:27
Speaker 2: this thing called Eclipse Missions. These are the lunar landers
5:29
Speaker 2: you've probably seen. So I don't know if you've watched
5:31
Speaker 2: the Intuitive Machine Landers or the Firefly Landers go land
5:34
Speaker 2: on the moon. And we hitch rides on those rockets
5:37
Speaker 2: for a fraction of the cost, right? We no longer
5:39
Speaker 2: have to buy an entire dedicated launch to go out
5:42
Speaker 2: to the cosmos. And so for the first time, you
5:44
Speaker 2: can build a low-cost spacecraft, but also have low-cost launch.
5:48
Speaker 2: Those two things have never aligned before to go do it.
5:51
Speaker 2: And so now I can go access the universe at
5:54
Speaker 2: orders of magnitude cheaper than anybody's been able to in history.
5:57
Speaker 2: And then the question became, what do you do? Like,
6:01
Speaker 2: I can't go raise money from a venture capitalist. Like, hey,
6:04
Speaker 2: I'm going to go YOLO something to the universe and
6:05
Speaker 2: like explore it. They're like, cool, cool. There's no, what
6:09
Speaker 2: is that supposed to mean? And so- You know, what
6:12
Speaker 2: I first did was I sat down and I wrote
6:14
Speaker 2: this whole list of like, if I can now see
6:17
Speaker 2: this inflection point where I could access deep space for
6:19
Speaker 2: much cheaper, right? Under $ 10 million, including the launch. What
6:23
Speaker 2: could I do? And I had all these stupid ass ideas.
6:25
Speaker 2: You know, one of my ideas, Sean, was actually to,
6:28
Speaker 2: I say this one all the time because it was
6:29
Speaker 2: so dumb, but I followed it up for about a week,
6:31
Speaker 2: was like, could I sell ads? Like we all see
6:34
Speaker 2: these famous pictures of Jupiter and Saturn, and you've probably
6:36
Speaker 2: seen the Voyager mission or Cassini, and you don't know
6:39
Speaker 2: what mission they're from, but you see these gorgeous images.
6:41
Speaker 2: What if it was like stamped with Coca-Cola at the bottom, right? Like,
6:44
Speaker 2: could we sell it? And I called a couple of places,
6:47
Speaker 2: I called Red Bull and Red Bull was like, no,
6:50
Speaker 2: we're not interested. I'm like, okay, this is dumb. Um,
6:52
Speaker 2: but there was two companies before that I had really
6:55
Speaker 2: respected and read a lot about, and they were called
6:57
Speaker 2: planetary resources, deep space industries that attempted to go mine
7:00
Speaker 2: asteroids before. Now they had two different cases at the time.
7:03
Speaker 2: They wanted to mine them originally for water to refuel rockets.
7:08
Speaker 2: And then later on, they started to look at the
7:09
Speaker 2: platinum group metals because of the high concentrations on these asteroids.
7:12
Speaker 2: So I said, hold on, maybe I should be looking
7:15
Speaker 2: at these old business models and seeing if I have
7:17
Speaker 2: a lower entry point, maybe they make a lot of
7:18
Speaker 2: sense again. And that's what we did. That's how we
7:21
Speaker 2: landed on the idea of mining asteroids.
7:23
Speaker 1: Interesting.
7:24
Speaker 2: And you did ask a question like, why not just
7:26
Speaker 2: do it on Earth? Uh-huh. Right? Cool. Why go to
7:28
Speaker 2: space and do it? And you'll also hear this argument
7:31
Speaker 2: that we'll say something like, well, we have enough material
7:33
Speaker 2: on Earth to mine kind of forever. Why even bother?
7:38
Speaker 2: There's this thing called cost, and it's really important. And
7:42
Speaker 2: what we call the all-insustaining cost of mining, especially on
7:45
Speaker 2: the platinum group metals, is extremely high. And the reason is,
7:48
Speaker 2: is the good ore grades of platinum group metals are
7:51
Speaker 2: really deep in the ground. You know, when you go
7:53
Speaker 2: to South Africa, where some of the best mines are,
7:55
Speaker 2: about 80% of our PGMs come from South Africa, those
7:58
Speaker 2: mines are 1,500 to 2,000 meters deep. Like, these are
8:01
Speaker 2: not easy mines, right? They are extremely deep in the ground,
8:04
Speaker 2: which means they're super hot, they're really dangerous, and kind
8:08
Speaker 2: of at the threshold of where we can mine. The
8:10
Speaker 2: mining industry as a whole has been making a big
8:12
Speaker 2: push to say, can we mine below 2,500 meters? And
8:16
Speaker 2: the question isn't actually, can we mine below 2,500 meters?
8:19
Speaker 2: Like the answer to that is yes. Can we economically
8:22
Speaker 2: mine below 2,500 meters? The answer to that right now
8:24
Speaker 2: is a hard no. And so that's the problem that
8:27
Speaker 2: actually exists with us as humans is we're not able
8:30
Speaker 2: to access a lot of the resources we have here
8:33
Speaker 2: on the planet because of this thing called physics. We
8:36
Speaker 2: are now able to go hopefully mine asteroids, for a
8:39
Speaker 2: fraction of the cost it takes on Earth. And we
8:41
Speaker 2: think of today, even at the prices we're seeing today
8:44
Speaker 2: on both launch and building the spacecraft, we're looking at
8:47
Speaker 2: margins upwards of 80%, where a margin on Earth today
8:50
Speaker 2: for platinum on the high end is about 15%.
8:54
Speaker 1: Wow. No shit. I mean, how do you know what's
9:01
Speaker 1: on an asteroid? How would you know which one to target,
9:05
Speaker 1: what's on it? or is it just process of elimination?
9:08
Speaker 2: No, so we study them. They hit the earth all
9:10
Speaker 2: the time and we just rename them as meteorites. So
9:13
Speaker 2: in our office, we have about 300 different meteorites that
9:17
Speaker 2: are just laying around. It's kind of comical, right? It's
9:19
Speaker 2: like the science center going on there to some extent.
9:22
Speaker 2: And we study the shell, right? We put them under
9:24
Speaker 2: what's called XRF or X-way fluorescence and get samples from them.
9:27
Speaker 2: We have an electron microscope with another technology that allows
9:29
Speaker 2: us to understand composition. We use all the time on them.
9:32
Speaker 2: And we really try to break down their structures and
9:34
Speaker 2: see what's on them. Now, When we talk about asteroids,
9:36
Speaker 2: to be very clear, I'm not talking about all asteroids.
9:39
Speaker 2: I'm only talking about a small percentage of what we
9:42
Speaker 2: think is out there, which is about 5% that we
9:44
Speaker 2: believe to be these special type of asteroids called metal asteroids.
9:48
Speaker 2: So the real job of Astroforge is not, do they exist?
9:50
Speaker 2: We know they exist because they hit the planet all
9:52
Speaker 2: the time. We have a good example or concentration of
9:55
Speaker 2: where we think they are in the universe. In fact,
9:57
Speaker 2: NASA is sending a mission to one right now called
9:59
Speaker 2: the Psyche mission. It's a fucking awesome mission.
10:01
Speaker 1: Wait, what is that?
10:02
Speaker 2: Psyche 16 is a main belt, large, believed to be
10:06
Speaker 2: M-type asteroid. And NASA, about a year and a half ago,
10:09
Speaker 2: launched a mission to Psyche 16 called the Psyche mission.
10:12
Speaker 2: It's on its way right now. I believe it gets
10:14
Speaker 2: there in about a year and a half from now.
10:17
Speaker 2: We'll get our first images and spectral data from a
10:20
Speaker 2: direct orbiting metal asteroid. So it'd be really cool for
10:24
Speaker 2: the first time to actually see one up close. We've
10:26
Speaker 2: never been to one of these up close, right? We've
10:27
Speaker 2: only been to what are called, I'm gonna use, the
10:30
Speaker 2: types get a little complicated here. We've only been to
10:32
Speaker 2: essentially rubble piles, a bunch of rocks or kind of
10:35
Speaker 2: small little planets that we find in space. That's all
10:37
Speaker 2: we've really seen is asteroids or comets. This will be
10:40
Speaker 2: the first one to go to a metal asteroid.
10:41
Speaker 1: No kidding.
10:43
Speaker 2: By the way, it was really cool to think about
10:44
Speaker 2: a metal asteroid if you think about it. We think
10:47
Speaker 2: metal asteroids are the core of a dead planet. So
10:50
Speaker 2: it's the same as the core of Earth. It's the
10:52
Speaker 2: same makeup. And that's why they're really high concentrations of
10:54
Speaker 2: dense material, because when you watch a planet form, all
10:57
Speaker 2: the dense material sinks to the bottom. So what we're
11:01
Speaker 2: essentially harvesting is a planet that for some reason blew
11:04
Speaker 2: up hundreds of millions of years ago, and I'm going
11:07
Speaker 2: out to mine the core of that planet. That's what
11:10
Speaker 2: we're doing. Wow.
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13:41
Speaker 1: talking about satellites going out, taking pictures of planets. I mean,
13:45
Speaker 1: I don't know how far these things have gone. I mean,
13:46
Speaker 1: the James Webb, I mean, where did that go?
13:50
Speaker 2: The James Webb went to one of the grunge points.
13:52
Speaker 2: So James Webb went to the stable orbit on the
13:55
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Speaker 2: far away. I actually don't know the distance, but I
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Speaker 2: would assume the moon's about 240 million miles away. Sorry, 240,000
14:03
Speaker 2: miles away. So Webb is probably somewhere in the range
14:06
Speaker 2: of 500,000 miles away where it's stationed right now. And
14:09
Speaker 2: that was so it doesn't get any reflection from the earth, right?
14:12
Speaker 2: That's why they wanted it out there. So it could
14:13
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14:15
Speaker 2: to get better images.
14:17
Speaker 1: I mean, so my question is, I mean, you see
14:19
Speaker 1: all these, I watch this stuff all the You were
14:23
Speaker 1: talking about you watch wartime Netflix specials. I watch space
14:26
Speaker 1: stuff all the time. And I always wonder how these,
14:30
Speaker 1: I mean, you see these like miraculous images from Uranus
14:34
Speaker 1: and way out there, right? And how do these communicate?
14:39
Speaker 1: How are they getting the imagery back to the Earth?
14:42
Speaker 2: If you really want to dive deep, Sean, you can
14:43
Speaker 2: go read my blog post on this, which is like 10,000
14:46
Speaker 2: words of the details here. But how do they communicate
14:49
Speaker 2: on Earth is... So it's a lot of ways to
14:54
Speaker 2: think about this. At the end of the day, they're
14:56
Speaker 2: really far away. So they're losing a lot of radiated
14:58
Speaker 2: power from the spacecraft over that great distance. So how
15:01
Speaker 2: do we communicate? Really twofold. Big ass dishes on the ground.
15:04
Speaker 2: So if you've ever seen like the early James Bond,
15:06
Speaker 2: I should say early for me James Bond movies with
15:08
Speaker 2: Pierce Brosnan, right? Where he's like in Russia and they're
15:10
Speaker 2: in front of like a big dish. Those are the
15:12
Speaker 2: fucking dishes we used to listen to the spacecraft. The
15:15
Speaker 2: one we used on our last mission was 32 meters across.
15:18
Speaker 2: So put that in your head. There's a hundred foot,
15:21
Speaker 2: you know, freedom units dish that we're pointing in space.
15:25
Speaker 2: And we have to be accurate to be within 0.1 degree.
15:28
Speaker 2: So it's got a little tiny beam that we're trying
15:30
Speaker 2: to point out there. And that's just to get enough
15:32
Speaker 2: gain to pick up the signal from the satellite. On
15:35
Speaker 2: the satellite side, we use really, really powerful amplifiers. So
15:41
Speaker 2: spacecraft like Voyager, Psyche, New Horizons use what's called the
15:47
Speaker 2: traveling wave tube, and then get, you know, 100 dB gains.
15:50
Speaker 2: Now keep in mind, every 3 dB is twice the power.
15:52
Speaker 2: So you're talking exponential power growth to send back to Earth.
15:57
Speaker 2: All of that being said, and I should quantify this
15:59
Speaker 2: maybe so it's a little bit easier to understand. We
16:01
Speaker 2: talk about something like, talk a little bit more about
16:04
Speaker 2: our spacecraft. We broadcast at about 15 watts. Your cell
16:09
Speaker 2: phone on its highest setting will broadcast at 100 milliwatts.
16:14
Speaker 2: So we're much, much more powerful than your cell phone
16:17
Speaker 2: can even get to. On top of that, the real
16:19
Speaker 2: trick we do here is we slow down the data substantially.
16:22
Speaker 2: So we communicate. Voyager is communicating at 160 bits per
16:26
Speaker 2: second right now. That is so slow. And that's why
16:30
Speaker 2: we have more integration time on the ground to determine
16:31
Speaker 2: if something is a 1 or a 0. So we're
16:33
Speaker 2: just adding it up at very high sample rates to say, oh,
16:35
Speaker 2: that was a 1. That was a 0. But 160
16:38
Speaker 2: bits per second. Think about that. If you want to
16:40
Speaker 2: send down a basic JPEG image, that's going to take you, what,
16:44
Speaker 2: 20 days? Like, these things can be really slow. So
16:49
Speaker 2: then you have to start thinking about, well, what kind
16:51
Speaker 2: of high-end compression do we use? How does the spacecraft
16:53
Speaker 2: process these? How many bits do we send back? The
16:56
Speaker 2: nice thing about space is most of it's black, so
16:58
Speaker 2: you can just, like, make it one bit pattern right
17:00
Speaker 2: as you go through. But the details of communication are
17:03
Speaker 2: extremely hard when you go.
17:04
Speaker 1: Out that far.
17:05
Speaker 2: It is not an easy problem to solve whatsoever and
17:07
Speaker 2: requires a whole bunch of infrastructure, what's called the Deep
17:09
Speaker 2: Space Network, to make it happen.
17:11
Speaker 1: So, I mean, how far can these satellites go before
17:13
Speaker 1: we lose connection?
17:16
Speaker 2: I mean, Voyager right now is 32 billion miles away
17:20
Speaker 2: from Earth. Someone should fact check me on that because
17:22
Speaker 2: it might be 3.2 billion and I might have got
17:24
Speaker 2: my number wrong.
17:24
Speaker 1: Whatever, billions.
17:25
Speaker 2: Billions of miles away from Earth. And I haven't done
17:28
Speaker 2: the link budget there. It can keep going. And I'm
17:30
Speaker 2: sure they can even slow down Voyager's bit rate even
17:32
Speaker 2: more to get farther. But we can go pretty far.
17:35
Speaker 2: It's an R squared loss on the distance we go out.
17:38
Speaker 2: So it's going to keep getting farther and farther away.
17:41
Speaker 2: And we'll be able to talk with it hopefully until
17:42
Speaker 2: the spacecraft actually fails. I mean, think about that spacecraft.
17:46
Speaker 2: It's kind of insane to think about, right? Things have
17:48
Speaker 2: been up there for 50 years and it's still working.
17:50
Speaker 1: Man.
17:50
Speaker 2: And there's two of them.
17:51
Speaker 1: That's wild. Yeah. That's wild. I mean, how long have
17:55
Speaker 1: you been in space industry?
17:59
Speaker 2: I mean, look, I grew up in Pasadena and there's
18:01
Speaker 2: the famous jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena. I mean, my first,
18:04
Speaker 2: my first intro to space was touring in an elementary school.
18:07
Speaker 2: Like I've, I've always loved space, but I think more importantly,
18:09
Speaker 2: I've always loved technology. It's not always refocused around space.
18:12
Speaker 2: It's focused around the cool missions that go out there,
18:14
Speaker 2: the things that happen. Space also can be really boring.
18:18
Speaker 2: And I think we forget about that as humans sometimes.
18:21
Speaker 2: Like when we went to the moon, that was a
18:23
Speaker 2: really exciting time in space. And then we made the
18:26
Speaker 2: space shuttle. I didn't give a shit about the space shuttle.
18:30
Speaker 2: I don't know how many kids of my generation were
18:31
Speaker 2: just bored with NASA. Like, oh, cool, you guys built
18:33
Speaker 2: an orbiter. Great. It's all cool, and I'm sure there's
18:38
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of scientific rationale, but it didn't inspire
18:40
Speaker 2: you to go explore. And in fact, NASA has still
18:43
Speaker 2: done some great planetary science missions and really has pushed
18:46
Speaker 2: the envelope on this. And I think we'll continue to
18:50
Speaker 2: push the envelope on planetary exploration and science. And those
18:52
Speaker 2: are inspiring missions, but they don't get a ton of
18:55
Speaker 2: press because they don't have people on them. You know,
18:57
Speaker 2: they're very much in the community as you look at it.
19:01
Speaker 2: I hope a little bit that we can bring that back.
19:03
Speaker 2: I hope by lowering the cost of entry to go
19:05
Speaker 2: explore the universe, we can bring back the inspiration piece
19:09
Speaker 2: as well. You know, again, if I can do this
19:11
Speaker 2: for double-digit millions, you now have private institutions that can
19:15
Speaker 2: go do this, universities that can go do this, and
19:17
Speaker 2: we can go inspire a whole new generation of people
19:20
Speaker 2: to go explore.
19:22
Speaker 1: Wow, deep. I mean, do you know anything about... I'm
19:25
Speaker 1: going down some rabbit holes here, sorry.
19:27
Speaker 2: Let's go down them.
19:28
Speaker 1: I got you here, so I got to ask this.
19:30
Speaker 1: I want to know about this Dark Matter stuff. What
19:33
Speaker 1: is it? What's going on?
19:35
Speaker 2: Look, I know absolutely shit about Dark Matter. Damn it! Yeah, sorry.
19:39
Speaker 1: It's all good.
19:40
Speaker 2: I don't know, but what I will say is that
19:43
Speaker 2: the reason we have so many questions about Dark Matter
19:45
Speaker 2: is because we just haven't been able to put the
19:46
Speaker 2: instrumentation in space to go explore it. So, I mean,
19:49
Speaker 2: dark matter was discovered by mistake, right? And the way
19:51
Speaker 2: it was discovered was calculating gravity and realizing like, hold on,
19:55
Speaker 2: these planets in these solar systems, we can see, really,
19:58
Speaker 2: I should say, these stars around these galaxies far away
20:01
Speaker 2: are going too fast. And if we do our normal calculation,
20:04
Speaker 2: they should fly off, which means our mass calculation is wrong.
20:08
Speaker 2: Why is our mass calculation wrong? One theory for that
20:11
Speaker 2: is dark matter. But really what we're saying is our
20:14
Speaker 2: math doesn't work on the model we're using. It's broken.
20:19
Speaker 2: And I think the most widely accepted solution to that
20:22
Speaker 2: math is that there's extra mass that we can't see.
20:25
Speaker 2: And so we call it dark matter because we can't
20:27
Speaker 2: see it. I hope we put more science in space
20:30
Speaker 2: to go figure this out. I want to figure out
20:32
Speaker 2: why the fuck we're here. I want to figure out
20:35
Speaker 2: if there's aliens. I want to figure out what the
20:37
Speaker 2: universe is built, how we did it, what is a
20:39
Speaker 2: new branch of physics we can go discover? There's so
20:42
Speaker 2: many things that space has unlocked for us as these
20:44
Speaker 2: key pieces in time, including dark matter. But because of
20:48
Speaker 2: the limited availability to actually go explore it, it's just handcuffed.
20:52
Speaker 2: And so unless you're willing to be a top-notch professor
20:55
Speaker 2: that spends 20 years writing proposals and hopefully gets your
20:58
Speaker 2: mission approved and then hopefully gets it launched and then
21:00
Speaker 2: hopefully doesn't get it canceled, and then maybe you'll make
21:03
Speaker 2: a really cool scientific discovery, I don't think that's the
21:06
Speaker 2: best process.
21:08
Speaker 1: I mean, in some of these documentaries, they kind of
21:10
Speaker 1: allude to the fact that it might be some type
21:12
Speaker 1: of new energy source. I mean, do you think there's
21:14
Speaker 1: anything to that?
21:15
Speaker 2: I love to go down these branches of physics and
21:19
Speaker 2: try to understand them and try to figure out, like,
21:22
Speaker 2: you have... anti-matter, you got dark matter, you got all
21:25
Speaker 2: these different states, you got all these different theories, you
21:27
Speaker 2: got theories on variable light theory. There's all these really
21:31
Speaker 2: cool theories that are out there that you can go
21:33
Speaker 2: read and explore. Here's the reality, Sean. I'm too stupid
21:36
Speaker 2: to understand all of them. I'm not going to pretend
21:38
Speaker 2: like I'm the genius on all this stuff, right? Well,
21:40
Speaker 2: I appreciate it. I think it's really cool for me
21:43
Speaker 2: to go read these. And what I would always suggest,
21:45
Speaker 2: because we all fall down this rabbit hole, which is
21:47
Speaker 2: like we turn on the Discovery Channel and there's some
21:49
Speaker 2: crazy dude with crazy hair on there being like, oh,
21:51
Speaker 2: if you vibrate an atom at this, it will turn
21:53
Speaker 2: into this and then teleport and you could like teleport
21:56
Speaker 2: humans and go read the actual papers. And usually you
21:59
Speaker 2: don't draw those same conclusions. You can get how they
22:02
Speaker 2: get there, but like the statistics to make that happen
22:05
Speaker 2: are infinitesimally small and non-realistic. The best is, here's a
22:10
Speaker 2: trick I would always recommend you use that I've used
22:12
Speaker 2: a lot. Scientists don't get reached out to a lot.
22:16
Speaker 2: Call them. Just call them and say like, hey, I
22:19
Speaker 2: don't understand this. Can you help me understand it? And
22:22
Speaker 2: they're some of the most helpful group of people I've
22:24
Speaker 2: ever run across. Some of the best things we have
22:26
Speaker 2: done at Astroforge are because I just emailed people on
22:29
Speaker 2: papers I read about certain things like metal asteroids. And
22:32
Speaker 2: you get in touch with these epic scientists who are
22:35
Speaker 2: willing to pick up the phone and talk to you.
22:37
Speaker 2: And they'll talk to you for hours. And like that
22:39
Speaker 2: amount of information I get from just calling people has
22:42
Speaker 2: changed the course of the company and my life. And
22:44
Speaker 2: you can do that as well, right? Anybody listening can
22:46
Speaker 2: do that as well of like, These people are all
22:48
Speaker 2: stars in the science community, but they're still accessible to you.
22:52
Speaker 2: Just reach out.
22:53
Speaker 1: Do you think there's aliens out there? You'd mentioned that.
22:56
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to go there, but hey, you brought
22:58
Speaker 1: it up. What do you think?
23:01
Speaker 2: I hope there's aliens. Do I think... So here's the
23:04
Speaker 2: sad truth that I think I'm coming to more the
23:06
Speaker 2: realization that may exist. I think there's got to be
23:11
Speaker 2: other intelligent life forms in the universe. There's too many stars,
23:15
Speaker 2: there's too many galaxies to... statistically not have that be
23:18
Speaker 2: a case. I don't know if we can communicate with
23:21
Speaker 2: them or ever reach them. I don't know if physics
23:23
Speaker 2: will ever allow us to travel faster than light. And
23:26
Speaker 2: I have seen no convincing evidence that we can. And
23:29
Speaker 2: so because of that, I actually come up with this
23:31
Speaker 2: really sad scenario, which is, yeah, I think there are
23:34
Speaker 2: other civilizations out there. And I think we'll never have
23:36
Speaker 2: confirmed proof that they ever exist because we either cannot
23:39
Speaker 2: communicate with them or cannot travel to them in any way, shape,
23:42
Speaker 2: or form. And so I hope we're able to break
23:44
Speaker 2: that down. I hope I'm incorrect. I hope somebody listening
23:47
Speaker 2: is like, oh, this guy's an idiot. Here's the solution
23:49
Speaker 2: to that. And we can go travel faster than light
23:50
Speaker 2: because we all see it in sci-fi movies. And it's
23:53
Speaker 2: what makes every sci-fi movie work. Yet it's one of
23:56
Speaker 2: the few things we don't have a theory on. And
23:58
Speaker 2: so that's, I think, is the cold hard reality of
24:02
Speaker 2: the universe. I do think there is life in our
24:05
Speaker 2: own solar system. I don't think there's intelligent life in
24:07
Speaker 2: our solar system. I'm pretty convinced that we're going to
24:09
Speaker 2: find microbes or signs of life on some of these moons,
24:12
Speaker 2: especially around Jupiter. Um, and some of these other places
24:16
Speaker 2: in the universe, like there's gotta be, it just doesn't
24:18
Speaker 2: make sense for there not to be. We've already seen
24:20
Speaker 2: that the signs of it. But again, the limitation Sean
24:24
Speaker 2: is that we send these really expensive missions out. And
24:28
Speaker 2: if you're going to go be a scientist, you're probably
24:30
Speaker 2: not going to write like, please find my instrument that
24:32
Speaker 2: will detect aliens. You're going to say like, oh, I
24:35
Speaker 2: want to detect the building blocks of the universe on
24:37
Speaker 2: this planet. And that doesn't always correspond with like, can
24:40
Speaker 2: you see microbes? I hope that some of the missions
24:42
Speaker 2: we do in the future are going to do that,
24:44
Speaker 2: are actually going to be so low cost that they
24:46
Speaker 2: can go have, I don't know, microbe detection instruments on
24:50
Speaker 2: them that we can send out and land on Mars
24:52
Speaker 2: or some of these other planets, right? That's the future
24:54
Speaker 2: I want to see created.
24:55
Speaker 1: What evidence have we found?
24:57
Speaker 2: Oh, God, you're asking me to go back through it.
24:59
Speaker 2: We found amino acids, right? We found some of the
25:01
Speaker 2: building blocks of life. We found, yeah. water on Mars, right?
25:05
Speaker 2: That's been a big one that we've come across.
25:06
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
25:07
Speaker 2: We've looked at Mars so many times and like you're
25:09
Speaker 2: seeing these discoveries now and it kind of makes you
25:11
Speaker 2: take a step back and realize like we think of Mars,
25:14
Speaker 2: at least I think of Mars as this little tiny
25:16
Speaker 2: thing in space that we've explored. And like the reality is,
25:19
Speaker 2: oh no, we haven't explored it at all. Like we
25:21
Speaker 2: barely scratched the surface of what is on Mars and
25:24
Speaker 2: finding water, finding ice is these huge discoveries that we've
25:28
Speaker 2: been going to Mars for 50 years and we just
25:30
Speaker 2: now figured this out. Like, what else are we missing?
25:32
Speaker 2: What else haven't we seen? We haven't gone subsurface. You know,
25:34
Speaker 2: we have these moons that we think are completely frozen
25:37
Speaker 2: and they have liquid water underneath them. Like, is there fish?
25:41
Speaker 2: Is there things swimming around down there? I don't know,
25:44
Speaker 2: but I really, really hope we get the chance to
25:46
Speaker 2: go figure it out and find out.
25:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too. Me too. I mean, what do you
25:49
Speaker 1: think about all the, you know, the stuff that hits
25:54
Speaker 1: the news with these Gravitic propulsion systems and things going
25:59
Speaker 1: in the water and coming out and all these sightings.
26:03
Speaker 1: What do you think?
26:05
Speaker 2: I love talking about that stuff. You know, if you
26:07
Speaker 2: would have looked at the A-12 or what became the SR-71, right,
26:13
Speaker 2: in the 1960s, what would you have chalked it up as?
26:16
Speaker 2: Because I would have said, like, holy shit, there's aliens. Like,
26:19
Speaker 2: what is this thing? It's going Mach 3. It looks
26:20
Speaker 2: like this thing we've never, ever seen what's happening. And
26:23
Speaker 2: what you realize is like, that actually isn't aliens. That
26:26
Speaker 2: was humans, right? That was Skunk Works and Kelly Johnson
26:28
Speaker 2: that built that. And it was physics that dictated that design.
26:32
Speaker 2: And I think what we've forgot is that we keep
26:35
Speaker 2: in our brain, extenuate that out to like, well, what's
26:37
Speaker 2: the SR-72? In fact, we've seen advertisements for the SR-72
26:42
Speaker 2: and it looks like a plane. We can all recognize,
26:44
Speaker 2: we can all draw the lineage from that to this.
26:47
Speaker 2: What we haven't looked at is like, well, what are governments,
26:50
Speaker 2: and I don't even mean our government, right? This could
26:51
Speaker 2: be China, this could be Russia, this could be us,
26:53
Speaker 2: this could be any developing nation that's pushing the envelope.
26:56
Speaker 2: We're all focused on air. I don't think air matters anymore.
26:59
Speaker 2: We've seen satellites kind of dominate our ability to get data.
27:02
Speaker 2: We don't really need reconnaissance aircraft anymore. What is the
27:06
Speaker 2: government building in the oceans? What are they building that
27:08
Speaker 2: goes in and out of the oceans? Like, are these
27:10
Speaker 2: just manmade objects that are classified and we don't have
27:12
Speaker 2: access to? Probably, that's probably the most likelihood of what
27:18
Speaker 2: we're going to see there from a probabilistic standpoint. Do
27:21
Speaker 2: I really hope they're like little aliens that are going
27:23
Speaker 2: to come and all of a sudden like, you know,
27:24
Speaker 2: come out with their little guns, like, you know, Mars
27:26
Speaker 2: attack style and like, okay. Yeah. But I find it
27:31
Speaker 2: really hard to extrapolate to that. And also put yourself
27:35
Speaker 2: in the shoes of an alien. If you came to
27:37
Speaker 2: a planet with a civilization that you could just dominate
27:40
Speaker 2: through will of force, what would you do, Sean? Would
27:43
Speaker 2: you go hide in the ocean?
27:48
Speaker 1: I don't know what I would do.
27:49
Speaker 2: I tell you what I would do. I'd become the
27:50
Speaker 2: fucking emperor of the world and it would be sick.
27:53
Speaker 2: That's what I would do, right? Like I would, I
27:55
Speaker 2: would say all you people are now dominant. Like I
27:57
Speaker 2: dominate all of you. I got better technology. I'm going
27:59
Speaker 2: to at least be known. I'm not going to go
28:01
Speaker 2: hide in the middle of the Pacific where like one,
28:03
Speaker 2: there's not even anything in the middle of Pacific. Like
28:04
Speaker 2: what a boring place to go. So it just doesn't
28:07
Speaker 2: make sense to me, right? I can't connect the dots
28:09
Speaker 2: that these are actual aliens coming here.
28:11
Speaker 1: Maybe we're an experiment and we're, they're just monitoring.
28:19
Speaker 2: That'd be a cool outcome, right? Again, I hope there
28:22
Speaker 2: is intelligent life and I hope that is what's going on.
28:24
Speaker 2: I just, it's this hard thing where until we have evidence,
28:28
Speaker 2: it's really hard to draw any delineation here to anything
28:30
Speaker 2: special happening. And you know, you gotta have extraordinary evidence
28:36
Speaker 2: to make extraordinary claims. And I just haven't seen any
28:39
Speaker 2: extraordinary evidence to suggest that anything is here other than
28:42
Speaker 2: some like shitty video showing some things move in ways
28:45
Speaker 2: that we can't describe. I think those are really cool
28:49
Speaker 2: to study. I think you can do calculations to figure
28:51
Speaker 2: out like, oh, actually humans can't be in there. They
28:53
Speaker 2: would be killed by gravity, right? Like G-forces are too
28:55
Speaker 2: high if we do this. And you can do math
28:58
Speaker 2: on these and kind of get a sense of what's
28:59
Speaker 2: going on and how we do this. But let's be honest,
29:03
Speaker 2: the F-22 was essentially handcuffed because pilots can't handle the
29:06
Speaker 2: G-forces in it. And that was what went into, I
29:09
Speaker 2: think that went into service in 1994. I think started
29:12
Speaker 2: its development in the late 70s. telling me that like
29:15
Speaker 2: oh all sudden after 1994 we're just like okay cool
29:18
Speaker 2: you know we can be we can beat g-forces on
29:20
Speaker 2: the human body on airframes now we're just going to
29:22
Speaker 2: stop development like i could just extrapolate it out and
29:25
Speaker 2: say 30 years later yeah that probably went up even
29:27
Speaker 2: more and maybe some of these g-forces we can calculate
29:29
Speaker 2: are now realistic with some of the propulsion techniques we're
29:31
Speaker 2: using i don't know There's a whole bunch of new
29:35
Speaker 2: propulsion techniques out there that some... There's one that I've
29:40
Speaker 2: looked at a lot. It's called a rotating detonating engine, RDE.
29:43
Speaker 2: There's a couple companies now building them, which is pretty awesome.
29:47
Speaker 2: I'd love to see this. Russia did a whole bunch
29:49
Speaker 2: of publications here until 2010 and then stopped.
29:54
Speaker 1: What is it?
29:55
Speaker 2: It's a very special type of engine that allows you
29:58
Speaker 2: to get, theoretically... uses a totally different instead of using
30:01
Speaker 2: combustion it uses detonation so you can get much more
30:04
Speaker 2: efficiency out of the same fuel sources going into it
30:06
Speaker 2: best way to put it is you could take something
30:09
Speaker 2: like a falcon 9 and by replacing the engine with
30:12
Speaker 2: one of these rdes make it lift as much mass
30:15
Speaker 2: as a falcon heavy right so you can essentially make
30:17
Speaker 2: a rocket much much better by using these engines it's
30:20
Speaker 2: a long extrapolation there's a lot of questions to them
30:22
Speaker 2: there's a lot of physics to still be figured out
30:24
Speaker 2: but why did russia go silent in 2010 like did
30:27
Speaker 2: they just give up on developing it maybe Or did
30:30
Speaker 2: they make some breakthroughs that they didn't want to release
30:31
Speaker 2: anymore that now enables these type of technologies to exist, right?
30:35
Speaker 2: Hypersonic missiles are a big thing that we're looking at
30:37
Speaker 2: with RTEs. There's a lot of cool things you can
30:40
Speaker 2: draw from this that don't require you to believe in aliens.
30:43
Speaker 2: As much as I want to, Sean, I just find
30:47
Speaker 2: it hard to believe they exist. And if they did, God,
30:49
Speaker 2: I wish they were cooler because, again, I want to see, like,
30:52
Speaker 2: Emperor Alien.
30:55
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know. I'm leaning towards no.
30:58
Speaker 1: They don't exist. I've interviewed a bunch of people about
31:02
Speaker 1: this stuff. It's all, oh, that's classified. That's classified too. This, that.
31:10
Speaker 1: It's like, all right. So nobody really knows anything.
31:13
Speaker 2: So much of what is classified is not like you
31:17
Speaker 2: get a clearance and all of a sudden you walk
31:18
Speaker 2: in a skiff and they're like, oh, hey, actually there's
31:20
Speaker 2: fucking aliens and they fly these ships. They're like, you
31:23
Speaker 2: walk in there and they're like, here's the frequency. You're like.
31:26
Speaker 2: That's it? What are we talking about here? This is
31:28
Speaker 2: not how it works. And I think movies have really
31:31
Speaker 2: turned our brain to think there's some Area 52 where
31:35
Speaker 2: they have Element 114 and I love all that. I
31:38
Speaker 2: think they're awesome to go explore. And you got to
31:41
Speaker 2: go explore whenever you hear new things like this. It
31:44
Speaker 2: just doesn't make sense to me though. And understanding how
31:46
Speaker 2: the government works, I'm sorry. The government is one of
31:49
Speaker 2: the most inefficient things I've ever seen operate. And usually
31:53
Speaker 2: everything that comes out, we got the the signal messages
31:56
Speaker 2: from the secretary of defense. They couldn't even hide that.
31:59
Speaker 2: You're telling me that we're going to go hide like
32:01
Speaker 2: secret alien aircraft underneath a mountain and nobody's going to
32:04
Speaker 2: leak this? Please. I just, I can't, I can't draw
32:07
Speaker 2: that conclusion.
32:08
Speaker 1: I'm with you. I'm with you. Man. Well, back to asteroids.
32:15
Speaker 1: Let's get back to, let's get back to asteroids. So,
32:18
Speaker 1: you know, I'm, you're the second guy that I've had
32:21
Speaker 1: on that's talking about mining stuff in space. I had
32:23
Speaker 1: this gentleman on Steve Quast. And he came in and
32:30
Speaker 1: he was talking about how China is mining helium-3 off
32:34
Speaker 1: the backside of the moon for energy. Have you heard
32:38
Speaker 1: about this?
32:40
Speaker 2: I don't think, first off, China is not mining helium-3
32:44
Speaker 2: off the backside of the moon for energy right now.
32:46
Speaker 2: It has been theorized. There's a couple of companies in
32:47
Speaker 2: the United States going after helium-3 mining off the moon.
32:51
Speaker 2: So what happens is when you have the solar flux
32:54
Speaker 2: coming through, like we have an atmosphere on Earth, so
32:55
Speaker 2: we don't have this happen. On the moon, high-energy protons
32:58
Speaker 2: will hit those. I'm probably saying this wrong. Some physicists
33:01
Speaker 2: will yell at me, right? But some particles from the
33:02
Speaker 2: sun hit the helium atoms on the moon and will
33:05
Speaker 2: create this isotope, helium-3. And that's what people want to
33:08
Speaker 2: go mine because it has really good power properties. It
33:11
Speaker 2: allows you to cool things really, really low. And it's
33:14
Speaker 2: theoretically worth a lot of money. I think there's a
33:17
Speaker 2: couple problems with helium-3. What's that? I think this is
33:22
Speaker 2: something we get wrong a lot when we look at
33:25
Speaker 2: companies and we look at markets, which is the market cap.
33:28
Speaker 2: It's my same problem with rare earth metals as we
33:30
Speaker 2: go into it, right? The market cap for helium-3 is
33:33
Speaker 2: extremely low. So helium-3 in 2023 had a total market
33:37
Speaker 2: cap of $ 5. 8 million. So yeah, it might be worth
33:41
Speaker 2: $ 100 million a kilogram or $ 20 million a kilogram or
33:44
Speaker 2: whatever the number is, but that's not how economics work. Right?
33:48
Speaker 2: It's supply and demand. And if you increase the supply,
33:52
Speaker 2: you lower the demand. Thus, the cost goes down. There's
33:55
Speaker 2: all these people that study this. But again, basic business
33:58
Speaker 2: isn't that hard. And sometimes we try to convolute it.
34:01
Speaker 2: It's pretty straightforward. Helium-3 has a really small market cap. Now,
34:05
Speaker 2: it may grow. And one of the ways we think
34:07
Speaker 2: Helium-3 may grow is with nuclear. We've talked about fission
34:11
Speaker 2: reactors being able to use off Helium-3. And there's this
34:13
Speaker 2: whole philosophy how to get there. The big problem with
34:17
Speaker 2: that is that nuclear reactors make helium-3. It's one of
34:21
Speaker 2: the byproducts of them. So we know how to make
34:23
Speaker 2: helium-3 on Earth. Really? Yeah. I don't think there's going
34:28
Speaker 2: to be a supply problem as we go into the future.
34:31
Speaker 2: But the cool thing at startups is we all get
34:33
Speaker 2: to make these different theses and bets on what's going
34:35
Speaker 2: to happen. And maybe I'm wrong, right? There is also
34:38
Speaker 2: another theory that says on the positive side for helium-3
34:40
Speaker 2: that quantum computing is going to use it at a
34:41
Speaker 2: high level. Someone makes a breakthrough tomorrow in quantum computing
34:45
Speaker 2: and it takes off like, I could be totally wrong
34:47
Speaker 2: and this shit could be worth 10x, right? And those
34:49
Speaker 2: are the huge markets you can go into. But as
34:52
Speaker 2: of today, it's a really small market. And it's one
34:54
Speaker 2: of the things that will allow us, it's one of
34:56
Speaker 2: the few economic use cases you can even think of
34:59
Speaker 2: on the moon right now. Because the reality is like
35:01
Speaker 2: lunar dirt is pretty much the same as the dirt
35:03
Speaker 2: we have here, right? Maybe it's a little bit higher
35:05
Speaker 2: in aluminum content, I believe, than what we have here.
35:07
Speaker 2: I'm sure some geologists can give you some details, but
35:10
Speaker 2: it's not really that different. There's nothing that special in it.
35:13
Speaker 1: Interesting. So when we're talking about Metals like platinum and
35:19
Speaker 1: what other metals are you looking at?
35:21
Speaker 2: Really right now, we're looking at the platinum group metals, right?
35:23
Speaker 2: Massive market caps. The platinum group metals used in manufacturing
35:26
Speaker 2: last year was about $ 60 billion. That's the market we
35:29
Speaker 2: want to go after. I'm not even talking about the
35:30
Speaker 2: store of wealth. Like people will wear platinum as jewelry,
35:33
Speaker 2: things like this, right? But platinum group metals enable the future.
35:37
Speaker 2: So you've probably had a lot of people come on
35:40
Speaker 2: the show recently and talk about, I see your nuclear
35:42
Speaker 2: head over there. That's why I'm talking about this. And
35:45
Speaker 2: I know you've had Scott Nolan on here and some
35:47
Speaker 2: others talk about nuclear.
35:48
Speaker 1: Isaiah Taylor.
35:50
Speaker 2: Energy demand as it's growing. And I think they're right.
35:55
Speaker 2: The one piece they're forgetting on that, in my opinion, though,
35:58
Speaker 2: is like, that's not the only thing that goes into
36:00
Speaker 2: a big data center. The other thing that goes into
36:01
Speaker 2: a big data center are computer chips, right? That mostly
36:06
Speaker 2: NVIDIA is making that go build there. What metals do
36:08
Speaker 2: you use to make computer chips? One of the biggest
36:10
Speaker 2: metals consumers in making ASICs is the platinum group metals.
36:14
Speaker 2: So I think in the future, and look, we can
36:17
Speaker 2: go on this long road about capitalism. Capitalism requires you
36:20
Speaker 2: to have a pretty high growth rate as a country.
36:22
Speaker 2: We have to keep growing, right? We have to grow
36:23
Speaker 2: two to 3% a year to maintain capitalism. If we
36:26
Speaker 2: become flat, like this system does not work. And that's
36:29
Speaker 2: really how we've driven it. That means we're going to
36:31
Speaker 2: have to have exponential growth as we go into the
36:33
Speaker 2: next century. And it's going to get huge. We're going
36:37
Speaker 2: to have all of these things. Energy is going to
36:38
Speaker 2: have to grow exponentially. So are materials. And the one
36:42
Speaker 2: I'm going after on the material front, just like these
36:44
Speaker 2: guys are going after on the power front, is the
36:45
Speaker 2: platinum group metals. We use it in computer chips. We
36:48
Speaker 2: use it in your cars. We use it to treat cancer.
36:51
Speaker 2: It's used throughout our lives. The honest truth is, Sean,
36:55
Speaker 2: it's just not a sexy metal. If you ever look
36:56
Speaker 2: at this stuff, it's kind of boring. It looks like
36:58
Speaker 2: some gray iron shavings. You're like, cool, what is this shit?
37:00
Speaker 2: Don't care. But it's a pretty important metal to our
37:03
Speaker 2: way of life.
37:05
Speaker 1: So how abundant is it on some of these asteroids?
37:08
Speaker 2: I mean, look, we got examples of asteroids that are
37:10
Speaker 2: extremely rich in the platinum group metals. We have one
37:12
Speaker 2: that's just above 1% platinum group metal by mass in
37:16
Speaker 2: the office. Now that is an N of one, right?
37:19
Speaker 2: As a general part, they're probably gonna be about two
37:20
Speaker 2: orders of magnitude lower than that as a general concentration.
37:23
Speaker 2: But compare that to what we have in South Africa.
37:26
Speaker 2: We have a mine in South Africa, it's eight parts
37:28
Speaker 2: per billion. Like it's a very, very thin margin of
37:31
Speaker 2: what we have on ore quality here on earth. So
37:34
Speaker 2: these things on average are about Five to ten thousand
37:38
Speaker 2: times better than the best ore mines we have on.
37:39
Speaker 1: Earth Wow, so, you know Mike we were just talking
37:42
Speaker 1: about Margins and supply and demand and all that stuff.
37:47
Speaker 1: So if if platinum is that abundant on Asteroids and
37:53
Speaker 1: I don't know we'll get into how you're gonna mine
37:54
Speaker 1: it and bring it back and all that stuff I
37:56
Speaker 1: mean wouldn't that lower the demand by quite a quite
38:00
Speaker 1: a bit.
38:00
Speaker 2: Of course, but that doesn't happen overnight. I Right? And
38:03
Speaker 2: so I'll give you two different futures, both of which
38:05
Speaker 2: I'm happy to create. And I really don't have a,
38:07
Speaker 2: I really don't actually care which one happens. I shouldn't
38:09
Speaker 2: say that out loud, but I really don't give a shit.
38:12
Speaker 2: So again, $ 60 billion market cap. Now keep in mind,
38:15
Speaker 2: on our first mission, we're going to bring back $ 60
38:17
Speaker 2: million worth of platinum. That's a drop in the bucket.
38:20
Speaker 2: On the first mission? On the first mission that we
38:21
Speaker 2: go do the mining on, right? That'll happen. That will
38:23
Speaker 2: launch in about two years.
38:25
Speaker 1: Okay. We'll bring it back. Real quick, before we go on,
38:28
Speaker 1: how much is $ 60 million worth of platinum?
38:30
Speaker 2: 1,000 kilograms of the platinum group metals.
38:32
Speaker 1: Thousand kilograms.
38:33
Speaker 2: Yeah of these six elements, right? So that's at the
38:35
Speaker 2: expected concentration We expect to be worth right around 60 million.
38:39
Speaker 2: It's price. It's a commodity. They vary, right? You might
38:41
Speaker 2: by the time the show comes out It might be
38:43
Speaker 2: twice as much or half as much. It's actually gone
38:45
Speaker 2: up quite a bit in the last two months as
38:47
Speaker 2: this goes forward, but We bring back around 60 million
38:51
Speaker 2: So when you look at that into a market cap
38:53
Speaker 2: of 60 billion we look at elasticity of this element
38:56
Speaker 2: like That's not gonna affect the price at all It's
38:59
Speaker 2: like if you go take your gold ring and turn
39:01
Speaker 2: it into a pawn shop, you don't affect the price
39:02
Speaker 2: of gold. Now, if you go back up a Brinks
39:06
Speaker 2: truck with 1,000 tons of gold, you're probably going to
39:09
Speaker 2: fuck the price up a little bit. But the other
39:12
Speaker 2: thing here is I think we all got to be
39:14
Speaker 2: reminded of someone named Napoleon. And the reason is Napoleon,
39:19
Speaker 2: his silver was made out of aluminum. Because in the 17,
39:22
Speaker 2: I don't even know when this guy lived, right? 1780s
39:25
Speaker 2: or whatever, you know? Some shit like that. The most
39:28
Speaker 2: baller shit you could have was aluminum. So, like, he's
39:31
Speaker 2: eating with aluminum silverware because it was what the kings,
39:35
Speaker 2: you know, the kings had. And then we found this
39:37
Speaker 2: new process to make aluminum. And now if you have
39:40
Speaker 2: aluminum silverware, you're like, what is this garbage? Like, can
39:42
Speaker 2: you make it out of steel so it's a little heavier? Like,
39:44
Speaker 2: our water bottles are aluminum. The airplane I flew here
39:47
Speaker 2: is aluminum. Like, Our actual modern way of life was
39:50
Speaker 2: created because of this process of extracting aluminum. We knew
39:53
Speaker 2: about aluminum before. We knew what it was. The difference
39:57
Speaker 2: was is the cost of aluminum was astronomical. Try those
40:01
Speaker 2: same analogies to platinum right now. Platinum costs are very high.
40:04
Speaker 2: They're astronomical because it's a supply and demand created ecosystem.
40:08
Speaker 2: But you've probably heard of hydrogen. The way you make
40:11
Speaker 2: green hydrogen so it isn't spewing out carbon and isn't just,
40:15
Speaker 2: you know, being a less effective energy transfer is with
40:18
Speaker 2: a platinum catalyst. There's all these theoretical use cases. And
40:22
Speaker 2: I shouldn't even say theoretical. There's all these use cases
40:24
Speaker 2: for platinum that monetarily don't make any sense right now
40:27
Speaker 2: that if you could flip the switch on do. And
40:29
Speaker 2: so I'm happy with two outcomes. One is. We have
40:33
Speaker 2: an aluminum revolution, right? We changed the way that we
40:35
Speaker 2: operate on this planet because we now have an abundance
40:38
Speaker 2: of a resource coming from outside of the earth that
40:40
Speaker 2: allows our growth rate to continue. It allows us to
40:42
Speaker 2: expand out in the universe and it allows us to really,
40:45
Speaker 2: I think, level up as a civilization. The other use
40:48
Speaker 2: case is, is I bring back $ 60 million at a
40:51
Speaker 2: time into a massive market and we make a shitload
40:55
Speaker 2: of money. Either one of those I'm good with. We'll
40:59
Speaker 2: see which ones happens.
40:59
Speaker 1: Right on, right on. So how far along are you
41:04
Speaker 1: in the process to mining asteroids?
41:06
Speaker 2: We are getting ready for our next mission. Next mission
41:08
Speaker 2: is called Vestry. Vestry is a 200-kilogram spacecraft. For a
41:12
Speaker 2: deep spacecraft, by the way, that's extremely small on relative terms.
41:16
Speaker 2: And that will go out and do a landing on
41:18
Speaker 2: one of these metal asteroids. So that's targeted to launch
41:20
Speaker 2: next year.
41:21
Speaker 1: No kidding.
41:22
Speaker 2: The following year, we will send essentially Vestry Part 2.
41:25
Speaker 2: It will be the same overall spacecraft, but we will
41:28
Speaker 2: add the refinery to it and return capability. and we'll
41:31
Speaker 2: go out and mine the asteroid and bring it back
41:32
Speaker 2: to Earth.
41:33
Speaker 1: So the first one, what is the mission of the
41:35
Speaker 1: first one?
41:35
Speaker 2: So the first one, well, the first mission we launched,
41:37
Speaker 2: the first planetary mission we launched was one called Odin.
41:40
Speaker 2: We launched that in February. That was our first commercial
41:43
Speaker 2: attempt to go to deep space.
41:44
Speaker 1: February of this year?
41:45
Speaker 2: February of this year. Smaller spacecraft went out. We made
41:48
Speaker 2: it about twice as far as the moon. So last
41:50
Speaker 2: signal we got from it was 850,000 kilometers away from
41:53
Speaker 2: the planet. But one of the solar panels stuck. Didn't work.
41:57
Speaker 2: And that's the hard realities of space sometimes is these
41:59
Speaker 2: things don't always work. They don't always work the way
42:00
Speaker 2: you want to. And again, that's when it comes back
42:03
Speaker 2: to like, how resilient are you as a, as a
42:06
Speaker 2: leader of a company and how resilient is your company
42:08
Speaker 2: to pick up the pieces, say, cool, we made some mistakes.
42:11
Speaker 2: We fucked it up. Let's go fix it.
42:13
Speaker 1: So what happened there? Just, you lost connection?
42:16
Speaker 2: We'll know what happened there is when we departed Falcon. So,
42:19
Speaker 2: you know, we fly on a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket.
42:21
Speaker 2: We're shot towards the moon on a trajectory called translunar injection.
42:25
Speaker 2: It's the same trajectory the Apollo astronauts flew on. And
42:28
Speaker 2: we depart from the rocket and one of our solar
42:30
Speaker 2: panels did not open. And we don't actually know why.
42:33
Speaker 2: I have a couple of theories of why, right, as
42:36
Speaker 2: to why that could have happened. It's not really important, though.
42:39
Speaker 2: spacecraft then become power positive. And so what that means
42:41
Speaker 2: is we're constantly slowly draining our batteries with only one
42:44
Speaker 2: panel open, right? And there was no way to save
42:47
Speaker 2: the spacecraft. We knew that thing was essentially broken pretty
42:50
Speaker 2: quickly into the mission. But you still see what you
42:53
Speaker 2: can do, how you can communicate with it. We were
42:56
Speaker 2: able to do one thing, which is update our navigation.
42:58
Speaker 2: Like I mentioned, when you have a hundred meter dish
43:00
Speaker 2: and you have a 0.1 degree beam width, like you
43:03
Speaker 2: have to know where you are in space. You have
43:04
Speaker 2: to know it pretty accurately. And we were one of
43:07
Speaker 2: the first commercial companies to ever do that for a
43:09
Speaker 2: deep space trajectory, right? Something going out past the moon
43:12
Speaker 2: to confirm that we could locate and navigate to our
43:14
Speaker 2: spacecraft and communicate with it. And that was some of
43:17
Speaker 2: the big successes of Odin. Big failure was it didn't
43:20
Speaker 2: make it all the way to asteroid. It was supposed
43:21
Speaker 2: to do a flyby mission. Didn't happen.
43:23
Speaker 1: Interesting. So is it one satellite that it's not triangulating?
43:28
Speaker 2: No, it's one spacecraft.
43:29
Speaker 1: Nope.
43:30
Speaker 2: Nope. One satellite that goes out.
43:32
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, dish, not satellite.
43:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry. So, well, we did send one satellite, but
43:37
Speaker 2: also one dish on the ground, right? And we use
43:39
Speaker 2: two different techniques. We use what's essentially called range and
43:43
Speaker 2: range rate, very similar to GPS, very similar in the
43:45
Speaker 2: same way, except we don't have, you know, GPS requires
43:47
Speaker 2: four satellites to get a complete signal with time. We
43:50
Speaker 2: use one. And so we determine how far away we
43:52
Speaker 2: are and what velocity we're going. And then we have
43:54
Speaker 2: to propagate that through our filters to say where we
43:57
Speaker 2: should be, where we are, use it as an update.
43:59
Speaker 2: We know we're on a trajectory. Keep in mind, the
44:02
Speaker 2: spacecraft and Earth are moving in different relativistic trajectories from
44:05
Speaker 2: each other, right, at the time. So while we're not
44:08
Speaker 2: triangulating with multiple dishes, what we are doing instead is
44:11
Speaker 2: waiting for Earth to move and then getting an update,
44:13
Speaker 2: just like you would in a synthetic aperture radar. It's
44:15
Speaker 2: the same idea for how we do spacecraft communication, right?
44:18
Speaker 2: The Earth is moving away from the vehicle, so we
44:19
Speaker 2: get multiple data points of where it is, and we
44:21
Speaker 2: can correlate its trajectory out into space.
44:25
Speaker 1: So what happens when... There's got to be about, what,
44:31
Speaker 1: 12 hours where there's no connectivity, correct?
44:34
Speaker 2: So the earth does get in our way. That's why
44:37
Speaker 2: we use multiple dishes, which, oh my God, for our
44:40
Speaker 2: last mission, we had like disaster central with multiple dishes.
44:44
Speaker 2: It was, it was a fun, it was a fun
44:45
Speaker 2: exercise in learning this. One thing that's a little bit
44:48
Speaker 2: different than our Sean than, than a lot of space
44:49
Speaker 2: companies right now. Well, then all of them is we're
44:52
Speaker 2: going to deep space. And so what this is, is,
44:55
Speaker 2: is I'm assuming the same shit Elon went through with
44:57
Speaker 2: Falcon one. You're dealing with antiquated infrastructure. So our big dish,
45:02
Speaker 2: the 32-meter dish we used, was owned by ISRO, which
45:04
Speaker 2: is the Indian Space Agency. And we had to license
45:07
Speaker 2: it through a provider and then talk with them. We
45:10
Speaker 2: had a dish in the Azores that was owned by
45:11
Speaker 2: a totally different company that we had to independently contract with,
45:14
Speaker 2: with a different receiver stack and a different dish. And
45:17
Speaker 2: that dish actually caught on fire two days before launch,
45:19
Speaker 2: so we couldn't use it. We had one in the U.S.
45:22
Speaker 2: that we could only use to receive, but not to
45:24
Speaker 2: transmit with the spacecraft. We had one in Australia where
45:27
Speaker 2: we had a configuration issue with it early on. but
45:30
Speaker 2: it was too small, it would only work for the
45:31
Speaker 2: first day. Like it was just such a disparate thing
45:34
Speaker 2: trying to work across all these different independent organizations to
45:38
Speaker 2: figure out how to talk with the spacecraft. So one
45:40
Speaker 2: of the biggest challenges we have is how do we
45:43
Speaker 2: get access to these large dishes? And one of the
45:45
Speaker 2: changes we made on Vestry is we actually added more
45:48
Speaker 2: gain on the spacecraft so that the dishes on the
45:50
Speaker 2: ground could be smaller so we could have access to
45:51
Speaker 2: more of them. And it's this kind of like never
45:54
Speaker 2: ending cycle. To give you a sense here, Most spacecraft
45:58
Speaker 2: you hear about like Starlink or anything in low earth orbit, right?
46:03
Speaker 2: It's about a million times more power needed to communicate
46:06
Speaker 2: at the same data rate you would with Starlink to
46:08
Speaker 2: something that's at the moon. And we want to go
46:10
Speaker 2: 30 times farther than the moon. So like the dish
46:13
Speaker 2: size has to just be so much bigger than a
46:16
Speaker 2: little tiny dish that you can communicate with Starlink. That's
46:17
Speaker 2: why you can have something in your backpack that communicates
46:19
Speaker 2: with it, right? Or when we launch rockets, we usually
46:22
Speaker 2: use two to three meter little dishes that sits on
46:24
Speaker 2: top of your roof. Like those are easy, you know,
46:25
Speaker 2: a couple, cost 50 grand to go put up on
46:27
Speaker 2: your roof just doesn't work for us it's one of
46:30
Speaker 2: the biggest challenges we got.
46:30
Speaker 1: Are there any i'm just curious are there any national
46:35
Speaker 1: security concerns with using uh space agency in india or
46:42
Speaker 1: any other.
46:42
Speaker 2: Country so we don't fall under well we fall under
46:45
Speaker 2: some regulations any regulation right now but but realistically no
46:48
Speaker 2: i don't think we have formed a national security opinion
46:51
Speaker 2: about deep space i don't think it's hotly contested right
46:54
Speaker 2: now and The thing about it is when you talk about,
46:56
Speaker 2: you know, there's been a lot of talk of Golden
46:57
Speaker 2: Dome and some of these like Chinese satellites moving in space.
47:00
Speaker 2: And now we look at that, it's all in low
47:01
Speaker 2: Earth orbit. It's pretty close to us. It's a pretty confined,
47:05
Speaker 2: you know, volume that we're worried about. A lot of
47:09
Speaker 2: our really expensive satellites and really good national security assets
47:13
Speaker 2: are in MEO or GEO, medium Earth orbit or geosynchronous orbit,
47:17
Speaker 2: like GPS. We want to protect those assets. And I
47:21
Speaker 2: think that's why the government cares a lot about those
47:23
Speaker 2: areas of space. The nice thing is once you get
47:25
Speaker 2: past the moon, it expands. And there's nobody out there.
47:30
Speaker 2: Even if you could, go try to shoot me down.
47:32
Speaker 2: The orbits are really hard. There's a lot of energy
47:34
Speaker 2: needed to catch up with it. It's almost impossible to
47:36
Speaker 2: actually access our spacecraft once it's past the moon by
47:40
Speaker 2: any other spacecraft, unless it knows our trajectory before the launch.
47:43
Speaker 1: Okay. Okay.
47:44
Speaker 2: Wow. The expanses here are crazy. And when you really
47:47
Speaker 2: start to put it on a map, you realize, I mean,
47:51
Speaker 2: it almost doesn't resonate in your brain. Like something in
47:54
Speaker 2: low Earth orbit is 400 miles above us. You can
47:56
Speaker 2: see that with a telescope on the ground. We can
47:58
Speaker 2: study these, the space station. We all kind of have
48:00
Speaker 2: a sense of like what that picture looks like going down.
48:03
Speaker 2: There's the famous picture of Voyager looking back on Earth,
48:06
Speaker 2: that pale blue dot picture you may have seen, which
48:07
Speaker 2: is like Earth is this little tiny speck. That's where
48:10
Speaker 2: we are, right? Like that's the area we want to
48:12
Speaker 2: go operate in. It's a very different regime than what
48:14
Speaker 2: we have on Earth or in low Earth orbit.
48:16
Speaker 1: Who else is doing this? Anybody?
48:17
Speaker 2: Anybody? I mean, there's other, there's other companies going after
48:19
Speaker 2: this for sure. We have a couple of us companies
48:21
Speaker 2: that are going after it, but I think our biggest
48:23
Speaker 2: competitor is in China. Really?
48:26
Speaker 1: What's China. How far along are they?
48:28
Speaker 2: I wish China would publish more. Like I probably published
48:31
Speaker 2: too much. We're very, I'm very transparent about the company.
48:33
Speaker 2: Like I don't hide anything. We, we, we fuck up.
48:35
Speaker 2: I write about it. Right. We do good. I write
48:37
Speaker 2: about it. I think that's really important is that whether
48:40
Speaker 2: it's us or somebody else, like humanity has to see
48:42
Speaker 2: this happen to, to again, maintain our way of life.
48:44
Speaker 2: Like growth rates are exponential. Space mining has to happen
48:47
Speaker 2: at some point. I'm hopeful the timing is right now.
48:50
Speaker 2: I could be wrong. China doesn't take that same approach.
48:53
Speaker 2: They don't write about it. There's very little information that
48:55
Speaker 2: comes out. We've had some movie shit happen to us, Sean.
49:01
Speaker 2: We had some Chinese tourists show up at the door
49:04
Speaker 2: one time. We've had a lot of requests to go
49:07
Speaker 2: to Hong Kong. It's very interesting to see how China
49:11
Speaker 2: will try to work with you to see what information
49:14
Speaker 2: you have that can benefit some of their state-backed companies.
49:18
Speaker 2: This is pretty clear. I'm sure everybody gets this to
49:19
Speaker 2: some extent. It's been comical. Like, come on, guys, could
49:22
Speaker 2: you maybe try a little harder and mix this up
49:24
Speaker 2: a little differently right as you go through it? But
49:26
Speaker 2: China's definitely very interested in what we're doing and I
49:29
Speaker 2: think very interested in trying to beat us at it.
49:31
Speaker 1: Interesting. I mean, how do you navigate through that?
49:35
Speaker 2: Be better. Yeah. That's it. Like, I think the best
49:39
Speaker 2: way to beat anybody is just be better. There's nothing else.
49:42
Speaker 2: We could try to hide everything. We can try to
49:44
Speaker 2: keep our system super secure and spend all this money
49:47
Speaker 2: to kind of gatekeep everything and not tell anybody what
49:50
Speaker 2: we're doing. Or we could just go faster. And I
49:53
Speaker 2: think people have really seen that speed matters a lot.
49:58
Speaker 2: And this is the thing I preach all the time.
49:59
Speaker 2: It's like speed matters. If you think you can do
50:01
Speaker 2: something tonight, do it. Don't wait till tomorrow, right? And
50:04
Speaker 2: that's how we beat anybody. And if we can be
50:07
Speaker 2: there first and we can do it first, there's a
50:08
Speaker 2: lot of things that allow us to continuously do that
50:11
Speaker 2: at a high rate. Keep in mind, Sean, I just
50:14
Speaker 2: got to get to one of these asteroids. I make
50:15
Speaker 2: it to one. I can mine it multiple times. There's
50:18
Speaker 2: one asteroid we're looking at right now. It's about 400
50:20
Speaker 2: meters in diameter. I really love it. It's got like
50:22
Speaker 2: all the right spectral data. It's like this perfect asteroid
50:25
Speaker 2: that we think we can get to. I could mine
50:28
Speaker 2: it 1e to the 15 times before it runs out
50:30
Speaker 2: of ore. Like that's essentially infinity times, right? I'm not
50:34
Speaker 2: even going to really do the math. That's a shitload
50:36
Speaker 2: of times. So I just got to find one and
50:38
Speaker 2: I just got to do it continuously. Once I have that,
50:41
Speaker 2: I can protect that asset pretty easily, both through UN
50:43
Speaker 2: law and with our military, right? Like we know how
50:48
Speaker 2: to defend ourselves in every adversarial situation.
50:52
Speaker 1: Wow. How far, I mean, how, how far out is
51:01
Speaker 1: that asteroid? So.
51:04
Speaker 2: It's a really hard question to answer because it's rotating
51:06
Speaker 2: around the sun. I mean, sorry, it's orbiting around the sun.
51:09
Speaker 2: So at different times, it's different distances from us. There's
51:11
Speaker 2: times this asteroid has come within a million miles of
51:13
Speaker 2: the Earth. There's times, like right now, where this asteroid
51:17
Speaker 2: is somewhere in the range of about 50 million miles away,
51:19
Speaker 2: racing towards us, right? And so when you have it
51:21
Speaker 2: going around the sun, there'll be a little bit of plane.
51:23
Speaker 2: For the most part, we're pretty in lockstep, but they'll
51:25
Speaker 2: be out of phase a little bit, and they'll rotate
51:28
Speaker 2: at different speeds.
51:31
Speaker 1: How many asteroids are there? I mean, is this a
51:33
Speaker 1: belt or is this just a random asteroid? I don't
51:35
Speaker 1: know much about this.
51:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's something. So what we are going after is
51:39
Speaker 2: a specific type of asteroid called a near-Earth asteroid. These
51:42
Speaker 2: are newly discovered. In 2000, I think we had discovered
51:44
Speaker 2: about seven of them. There's estimated now to be, we
51:48
Speaker 2: think scientifically, it's 10 million of them. It's a good
51:51
Speaker 2: round number to think there is. Now, this ranges in
51:53
Speaker 2: particle size, you know, from down to, like, really, really small,
51:56
Speaker 2: up to about a kilometer and a half in diameter. Okay.
52:00
Speaker 2: One really important thing happened recently, though, the Rubin Telescope
52:03
Speaker 2: came online, Rubin Observatory, and in its first viewing, you know,
52:08
Speaker 2: found 4,000 bodies. Now, about half of them were new.
52:11
Speaker 2: That's a huge discovery in a huge amount of time,
52:13
Speaker 2: and it really correlates to that paper saying we think
52:15
Speaker 2: there's about 10 million of these near-Earth asteroids. What near-Earth
52:18
Speaker 2: asteroids do for us is just allow our trip times
52:20
Speaker 2: to be much shorter. If I have to go 10
52:22
Speaker 2: million miles away from the Earth, that's a lot faster
52:24
Speaker 2: than going out to the belt, right? The asteroid belt,
52:27
Speaker 2: which is 300 million miles away from the Earth, give
52:29
Speaker 2: or take, Um, it takes a lot longer. You know,
52:32
Speaker 2: I mean, those, those missions would be 14, 15 year
52:35
Speaker 2: missions to go out and mine a main belt asteroid
52:36
Speaker 2: and come back.
52:37
Speaker 1: How long does it take you to get a million
52:39
Speaker 1: miles away?
52:40
Speaker 2: We want to do all our missions in less than
52:41
Speaker 2: two years. It's what allows us to keep the spacecraft cheap, small,
52:45
Speaker 2: higher risk. Like radiation's a bitch in space. You just
52:47
Speaker 2: get blasted by the sun. And things like solar flares happen. Just,
52:52
Speaker 2: you know, we just wade by to our spacecraft as it,
52:54
Speaker 2: as it gets destroyed. So like limiting the amount of
52:56
Speaker 2: time you're actually in that environment is pretty key. to
52:59
Speaker 2: having a much more higher reliability spacecraft.
53:01
Speaker 1: So it would take two years. And your next launch
53:04
Speaker 1: is when?
53:05
Speaker 2: The max we look at is two years. Some of
53:07
Speaker 2: these missions take much less. But again, because we are
53:10
Speaker 2: not dedicated launch, like every interplanetary mission has been dedicated launch.
53:14
Speaker 2: This means they're on a rocket. They control exactly when
53:16
Speaker 2: that rocket takes off. And if they want to go
53:18
Speaker 2: to Jupiter, like you point the rocket at Jupiter and
53:20
Speaker 2: go to Jupiter. We don't get that option. We're going
53:23
Speaker 2: on a rideshare to the moon when the people that
53:25
Speaker 2: want to land on the moon decide to hit go.
53:27
Speaker 2: And so for us, we have to be really open
53:29
Speaker 2: to what asteroid we go to on any given time.
53:32
Speaker 2: We track about 20 asteroids for every single day for
53:35
Speaker 2: the next six years that we think are viable targets
53:37
Speaker 2: that we can get out to. That's how we kind
53:39
Speaker 2: of think about this. So there isn't one specific asteroid
53:42
Speaker 2: at any given time we're going to go to. There's
53:43
Speaker 2: some of my favorites, but they may or may not
53:46
Speaker 2: be in the launch window when we actually take off
53:48
Speaker 2: on the Earth.
53:49
Speaker 1: Gotcha. Gotcha. And then as far as, I mean, are
53:52
Speaker 1: these asteroids, these near-Earth asteroids, are they, sorry, I have
53:55
Speaker 1: no concept of distance in space. So when you're saying
54:01
Speaker 1: they're orbiting around the sun, are they closer to the
54:04
Speaker 1: sun than earth? Are they farther?
54:06
Speaker 2: They are almost the exact same distance as the earth
54:08
Speaker 2: from the sun. Now I say almost the exact same because,
54:11
Speaker 2: you know, we talk about this in astronomical units for
54:13
Speaker 2: distance from the earth to the sun, which is about
54:16
Speaker 2: 150 million miles. I'm sure I got that off a
54:18
Speaker 2: little bit. Um, we operate within plus or minus 0.1 AU.
54:22
Speaker 2: So we operate within plus or minus 15 million miles
54:25
Speaker 2: from earth. So when you say that, if you were
54:27
Speaker 2: to look at the picture of the universe, they're going
54:29
Speaker 2: to look like they're in the same orbit as Earth.
54:31
Speaker 2: They're almost indistinguishable from Earth orbit, most of the ones
54:33
Speaker 2: we're looking at. They are slightly off, and that allows
54:35
Speaker 2: them to be at a little bit different orbital speeds
54:39
Speaker 2: and thus go in and out of accessibility for us. Wow.
54:44
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break. When we come back, I
54:46
Speaker 1: want to talk about how you're actually going to mine
54:50
Speaker 1: the asteroid.
54:51
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
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Speaker 1: we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive
58:24
Speaker 1: into how are you actually gonna extract metals from the asteroids?
58:32
Speaker 2: This is a fun one to talk about, right? So
58:34
Speaker 2: the trick of an asteroid is when I get there
58:36
Speaker 2: and let's use a random number that's pretty simple for
58:39
Speaker 2: everybody to understand. Understanding this is like not what we're
58:42
Speaker 2: going to run into. But let's say the asteroid is
58:44
Speaker 2: 1% platinum group metals. That means it's 99% shit that's
58:48
Speaker 2: not worth a lot of money. And so if I
58:50
Speaker 2: bring it back to Earth, that's just wasted material. So
58:53
Speaker 2: what I have to develop and what we have developed
58:56
Speaker 2: is essentially a machine that can turn 1% platinum group
58:59
Speaker 2: metals into a much higher percentage of platinum group metals,
59:02
Speaker 2: so what I'm returning is worth a lot. You may
59:05
Speaker 2: have seen, actually, there was a pretty famous article that
59:07
Speaker 2: came out, I think about three years ago right now,
59:09
Speaker 2: and it said, there's a hundred quadrillion million, whatever bajillion
59:13
Speaker 2: dollar asteroid out there in the world. It was referring
59:15
Speaker 2: to that asteroid Psyche 16 that I talk about saying it.
59:18
Speaker 2: And the fallacy with that article is it was just
59:21
Speaker 2: calculating the iron content on Psyche. Like you could put
59:25
Speaker 2: that same number on top of Mars. It actually doesn't
59:27
Speaker 2: mean anything. It's not economical to bring back. I'm not
59:30
Speaker 2: trying to mine iron. Iron's essentially free on the planet.
59:34
Speaker 2: The cost of iron is actually just the processing cost
59:36
Speaker 2: of it. There's plenty of ore everywhere. There's plenty of
59:38
Speaker 2: nickel everywhere. The thing we want to bring back is platinum.
59:41
Speaker 2: So the way we do it is, first off, we
59:44
Speaker 2: have to land on an asteroid. Now, the trick to
59:48
Speaker 2: landing on an asteroid for us is these are primarily iron.
59:52
Speaker 2: M-type asteroids are iron-nickel asteroids, which means they should be magnetic.
59:56
Speaker 2: So the way we land on it is, or I
59:58
Speaker 2: should say more dock with it. Try to imagine this, Sean,
1:00:03
Speaker 2: at the biggest size, these are 400 meters in diameter,
1:00:05
Speaker 2: which in relative terms means they're tiny as shit in space.
1:00:09
Speaker 2: There's really no gravity here. You're not landing. We can't
1:00:11
Speaker 2: even really go into orbit around these asteroids. We almost
1:00:14
Speaker 2: dock with them like you would dock with the International
1:00:16
Speaker 2: Space Station. And we use magnets to stick to them.
1:00:18
Speaker 2: That's how we attach ourselves to the asteroids. There's an
1:00:23
Speaker 2: ESA mission that did a really complicated way to try
1:00:26
Speaker 2: to grapple onto an asteroid with these hooks. and it
1:00:28
Speaker 2: was pretty cool, and they spent a lot of money,
1:00:30
Speaker 2: I think about a billion dollars trying to figure it out,
1:00:31
Speaker 2: and it kind of worked. I mean, they were able
1:00:33
Speaker 2: to do it, but it was a little bit fraught
1:00:34
Speaker 2: with air. I don't think as a startup I have
1:00:36
Speaker 2: any other way to land on an asteroid other than
1:00:38
Speaker 2: to magnetically attach to it. Landing on a piece of
1:00:41
Speaker 2: dirt or a rubble pile in space that is really
1:00:45
Speaker 2: small like this is next to impossible, or I'm just
1:00:47
Speaker 2: not smart enough to figure it out for the capital
1:00:50
Speaker 2: we have. So we land on it.
1:00:53
Speaker 1: How close do you have to get to it for
1:00:55
Speaker 1: the magnets to.
1:00:57
Speaker 2: Pretty close. I mean, we have to touch the surface, right?
1:00:59
Speaker 2: We got to touch it. So we'll essentially crash into
1:01:02
Speaker 2: it at about one meter a second. That's the upper
1:01:05
Speaker 2: limit of velocity we'll have when we intercept the asteroid.
1:01:08
Speaker 2: So if you think about it, that's not slow, especially
1:01:11
Speaker 2: when you think about space hardware and how slow we
1:01:13
Speaker 2: usually go on space stuff. But it's not fast. It's
1:01:15
Speaker 2: a pretty low impact that we hit the asteroid with
1:01:17
Speaker 2: to attach to it. That's what we build the system for.
1:01:22
Speaker 2: And then what we do is we use a laser system.
1:01:25
Speaker 2: So we use a laser system to essentially start drilling
1:01:27
Speaker 2: into the asteroid. We remove the material. So we're removing iron, nickel,
1:01:31
Speaker 2: and platinum group metals. And then using that same philosophy
1:01:34
Speaker 2: that iron is magnetic and the platinum group metals are not,
1:01:37
Speaker 2: we essentially use magnets to reject the iron. And we
1:01:40
Speaker 2: keep the platinum group metals inside the spacecraft. It's a
1:01:43
Speaker 2: pretty simple approach to do it. Now keep in mind,
1:01:45
Speaker 2: I'm 10 million miles away and I'm a startup. If
1:01:47
Speaker 2: I start coming out here with, we got robot arms
1:01:49
Speaker 2: and we got conveyor belts and like, it's just not
1:01:52
Speaker 2: going to happen. I mean, if you look at any spacecraft,
1:01:54
Speaker 2: they're hard enough to fly when shit isn't moving. And
1:01:57
Speaker 2: then when you start to add mechatronics to it, like
1:01:59
Speaker 2: they're next to impossible, right? I mean, look at the
1:02:01
Speaker 2: arm that we developed that not we actually Canada did,
1:02:04
Speaker 2: MDA on the space shuttle. That was a huge undertaking
1:02:08
Speaker 2: to get two actuators to work correctly. Like it's really
1:02:11
Speaker 2: hard to do that in space. So we just can't
1:02:13
Speaker 2: do it. I don't want to have the team keeping
1:02:14
Speaker 2: it simple is one of the biggest philosophies we have
1:02:18
Speaker 2: at the company. And so we'll store that, and then
1:02:21
Speaker 2: we just essentially launch the spacecraft back at Earth. There's
1:02:24
Speaker 2: nothing special here. We crash into the atmosphere, use a
1:02:27
Speaker 2: heat shield to burn off kinetic energy and recover the material.
1:02:30
Speaker 2: In fact, the really cool thing about a spacecraft that's
1:02:33
Speaker 2: just mining and doesn't do any scientific exploration is I
1:02:36
Speaker 2: don't have to have all these weird constraints. It doesn't
1:02:38
Speaker 2: have to land nicely, right? It doesn't have to have
1:02:40
Speaker 2: nice parachutes that come out to slow you down really
1:02:41
Speaker 2: slow so I don't like hurt my precious cargo. In fact,
1:02:45
Speaker 2: I don't think we're going to use parachutes. What we're
1:02:47
Speaker 2: probably going to use is if, you remember when you
1:02:48
Speaker 2: were a kid and you would launch little model rockets
1:02:50
Speaker 2: and then have streamers? Probably just going to use a
1:02:53
Speaker 2: streamer to slow it down enough so that when it
1:02:55
Speaker 2: impacts the ground, the metal is recoverable. And like being
1:02:58
Speaker 2: able to remove those constraints of scientific instrumentation and value
1:03:02
Speaker 2: collection from it really opens up the envelope here. Wow.
1:03:07
Speaker 2: One thing that's a little bit crazy that I don't
1:03:10
Speaker 2: think a lot of people realize, you may not as
1:03:12
Speaker 2: well as, we've already mined asteroids before.
1:03:15
Speaker 1: We have.
1:03:16
Speaker 2: The Japanese, JAXA, has done this twice, and NASA has
1:03:19
Speaker 2: done it once. So the Japanese did it with a
1:03:21
Speaker 2: mission called Hayabusa 1 and Hayabusa 2. They both went
1:03:26
Speaker 2: out to asteroids, took samples from them, and brought it
1:03:27
Speaker 2: back to Earth. And Osiris-Rex went out to an asteroid
1:03:30
Speaker 2: called Bennu, which is how we really found out about
1:03:32
Speaker 2: these rubble piles, right? Bennu was a really cool asteroid.
1:03:35
Speaker 2: I think it was about a kilometer and a half
1:03:37
Speaker 2: in size. And it was just a whole bunch of, essentially,
1:03:40
Speaker 2: little particles stuck together with static electricity. And so if
1:03:43
Speaker 2: you ever watched the landing of OSIRIS-REx or landing, I
1:03:46
Speaker 2: call it landing because they didn't really land. They just
1:03:47
Speaker 2: like sunk into the surface. And then this is where
1:03:52
Speaker 2: NASA does extremely good job. And I don't think anybody
1:03:54
Speaker 2: else can do it to this level. They thought it
1:03:56
Speaker 2: was fucking solid. They go to land and they start
1:03:58
Speaker 2: sinking into the surface, but they had thought through this
1:04:00
Speaker 2: and had a theory that maybe it wasn't solid. What
1:04:02
Speaker 2: could we do? And we're actually able to like, not
1:04:04
Speaker 2: just destroy the spacecraft by going into some random dirt.
1:04:07
Speaker 2: They backed up, they re went around it. They re
1:04:10
Speaker 2: rethought about it and were able to still grab a
1:04:11
Speaker 2: sample and complete the mission. Cypress Rex returned a sample
1:04:15
Speaker 2: about a year ago now that came back in a
1:04:19
Speaker 2: small capsule to be recovered. I think we recently opened
1:04:22
Speaker 2: it up. It was really difficult for us to open
1:04:24
Speaker 2: for some reason. But so we understand the physics to
1:04:28
Speaker 2: all this. There isn't some physics barrier we have to
1:04:30
Speaker 2: get past to mine an asteroid. This is simply can
1:04:32
Speaker 2: we do it cheaper and economically to make it work.
1:04:35
Speaker 1: No kidding. Wow. So how does the... satellite actually get
1:04:44
Speaker 1: the metals inside of it? I mean, I get the
1:04:47
Speaker 1: magnetism pushing the iron and all the other shit away.
1:04:50
Speaker 1: Does it have like an arm that comes out?
1:04:54
Speaker 2: No, in fact, the metal and the way we do
1:04:56
Speaker 2: it with ring magnets is the platinum group metals flow
1:04:59
Speaker 2: up through the middle of the spacecraft and essentially are
1:05:02
Speaker 2: trapped in a very small mylar bag. This isn't a
1:05:03
Speaker 2: lot of volume to bring back, right? If you think
1:05:06
Speaker 2: about it, platinum group metals are some of the most
1:05:08
Speaker 2: densest elements on Earth. It's a third of a meter cubed.
1:05:12
Speaker 2: It's not a big amount of material.
1:05:14
Speaker 1: Did you say it's 1,000 kg?
1:05:16
Speaker 2: 1,000 kg is a third of a meter cubed of PGMs.
1:05:18
Speaker 2: It's not a lot of volume.
1:05:20
Speaker 1: That's it?
1:05:20
Speaker 2: It's pretty small. The shit's really dense. That's why it's
1:05:23
Speaker 2: worth a lot of money, right? It's a very dense
1:05:25
Speaker 2: element that we're going after, these six elements. So it
1:05:27
Speaker 2: kind of works out perfectly to be the first one
1:05:30
Speaker 2: we bring back. And then obviously, Sean, as we look
1:05:33
Speaker 2: at it, platinum is where we're starting. As prices change,
1:05:36
Speaker 2: as we're able to lower spacecraft, as we start thinking
1:05:39
Speaker 2: about things like, Hey, we launched one at a time
1:05:41
Speaker 2: right now. What if we bought an entire Falcon 9?
1:05:43
Speaker 2: We could fit about 20 spacecraft on it. What if
1:05:45
Speaker 2: we bought an entire Starship? We could fit, I don't
1:05:48
Speaker 2: know how many, but I'm sure it's a shitload of
1:05:49
Speaker 2: spacecraft on it, right? And like, as these technologies advance
1:05:53
Speaker 2: and we get lower cost into space, we can do
1:05:56
Speaker 2: a lot more for cheaper. And then other metals start
1:05:58
Speaker 2: to meet that price threshold, right? You have indium, you
1:06:01
Speaker 2: have- Indium. Indium is an element that's in pretty high
1:06:04
Speaker 2: concentration on these metal asteroids. We have quite a few
1:06:06
Speaker 2: of the rare earth elements on these metal asteroids. You
1:06:10
Speaker 2: can look at nickel, you can look at iron, you
1:06:12
Speaker 2: can look at cobalt, right? You can look at these
1:06:13
Speaker 2: different elements and see when do they hit the price
1:06:15
Speaker 2: threshold where it makes sense to actually bring them back. Obviously,
1:06:19
Speaker 2: if our economy keeps expanding at that 3% per year
1:06:22
Speaker 2: as world GDP, like as I mentioned, we're going to
1:06:25
Speaker 2: have to push out. We're going to use everything here
1:06:27
Speaker 2: and those prices will continue to fall and this will
1:06:29
Speaker 2: continue to be more economically viable as we go into
1:06:32
Speaker 2: the future.
1:06:32
Speaker 1: What do we use indium for?
1:06:34
Speaker 2: I have no idea. Literally have no idea what we
1:06:37
Speaker 2: use indium for. Um, I study it from an economic
1:06:39
Speaker 2: value proposition, not from a scientific.
1:06:41
Speaker 1: One, any gold silver.
1:06:43
Speaker 2: So gold is, uh, this is gold is in higher
1:06:46
Speaker 2: concentrations on asteroids than it is in your backyard. They're
1:06:50
Speaker 2: not high enough for me to mine gold on earth
1:06:53
Speaker 2: forms because of water. This is, uh, it should say
1:06:55
Speaker 2: high concentrations of gold form. Gold doesn't form high concentrations
1:06:58
Speaker 2: of gold deposits form in the presence of water. This
1:07:01
Speaker 2: is why you see it in veins. And this is
1:07:03
Speaker 2: why when you think of gold mining, you think of
1:07:04
Speaker 2: like panning for gold on a river, because that's where
1:07:06
Speaker 2: all the shit is. it's not really economically viable. We
1:07:10
Speaker 2: even have to remove too much material from the asteroid
1:07:12
Speaker 2: to get enough gold to make the return trip back
1:07:15
Speaker 2: right now.
1:07:16
Speaker 1: Gotcha. Gotcha. I mean, how many satellites do you think
1:07:26
Speaker 1: eventually you'll have up there?
1:07:29
Speaker 2: The best way that I think, so this is a
1:07:33
Speaker 2: question that has a little bit bigger meaning, which is,
1:07:35
Speaker 2: you know, Kind of funny to me about, I think,
1:07:37
Speaker 2: a lot of founders is I don't spend a lot
1:07:39
Speaker 2: of time thinking about like this grand future of how
1:07:41
Speaker 2: many satellites I'm going to set up or what this
1:07:42
Speaker 2: is going to look like. I pretty much spend every
1:07:45
Speaker 2: waking moment making sure we're not fucking up the next
1:07:47
Speaker 2: mission and the mission after that. And that's about it, Sean.
1:07:50
Speaker 2: But there's a really easy abstraction here, which is we
1:07:53
Speaker 2: can fit about 20 of our spacecraft in that 200
1:07:56
Speaker 2: kilogram size point on a Falcon 9 and go to
1:07:59
Speaker 2: the moon, right, and do one of these TLI launches.
1:08:01
Speaker 2: And so I do see us in the near future,
1:08:04
Speaker 2: probably in the early 2030s, trying to launch 20 at
1:08:06
Speaker 2: a time. And if we do that, we can launch
1:08:09
Speaker 2: probably once a quarter with the volume we see to
1:08:12
Speaker 2: manufacture on the satellite buses. So we'll be somewhere in
1:08:15
Speaker 2: the range of about 100 per year that we would launch.
1:08:17
Speaker 2: That would probably be the max we do for the
1:08:19
Speaker 2: platinum group metals. Because after that, when you're at that throughput,
1:08:23
Speaker 2: then you start to affect the elasticity of the metal, right?
1:08:26
Speaker 2: And that's when we start talking about the supply and
1:08:28
Speaker 2: demand curves getting out of whack. So I'm kind of
1:08:30
Speaker 2: upper limited to about 100 platinum group metal spacecraft per year.
1:08:34
Speaker 1: Okay.
1:08:35
Speaker 2: Just about $ 6 billion. Still pretty, I think, pretty good
1:08:39
Speaker 2: return on investment, right?
1:08:42
Speaker 1: Sounds pretty good to me. But I mean, so if
1:08:45
Speaker 1: you're targeting asteroids that take two years or less to
1:08:51
Speaker 1: get to, so you're looking at about roughly four years.
1:08:56
Speaker 2: No no two years or less round trip round trip
1:08:59
Speaker 2: two years or less round trip all the asteroids we
1:09:01
Speaker 2: keep on the board nine months or less to get
1:09:03
Speaker 2: to three months to mine them and a year to
1:09:05
Speaker 2: come back it's always a little bit longer to come
1:09:06
Speaker 2: back because we're heavier and we leave slowly um so
1:09:09
Speaker 2: yeah two years round trip is what we look at
1:09:11
Speaker 2: that's what we.
1:09:11
Speaker 1: Cap it at why do you why do you think
1:09:13
Speaker 1: you take why three months Why does it take three months?
1:09:16
Speaker 2: That is what, so anytime you're going to build a
1:09:18
Speaker 2: system like this, I got to give the team constraints, right?
1:09:20
Speaker 2: I got to say like, it's really easy when we're
1:09:23
Speaker 2: talking about a laser-based mining system, it's a linear trade
1:09:26
Speaker 2: between time and power. So when I say we have
1:09:29
Speaker 2: three kilowatts on the spacecraft and we have three months,
1:09:32
Speaker 2: you now know how much material you have to remove.
1:09:34
Speaker 2: It's really easy to say, oh, we have three kilowatts. Well,
1:09:37
Speaker 2: I could use known techniques that work really well and
1:09:39
Speaker 2: just sit there for 10 years. But then I got
1:09:41
Speaker 2: to build a spacecraft that can last in space for
1:09:43
Speaker 2: 10 plus years. That's actually really hard to do. So
1:09:46
Speaker 2: I've given the team the constraint of three kilowatts, three months.
1:09:50
Speaker 2: It's a pretty arbitrary constraint. I'm not going to say
1:09:52
Speaker 2: like there's a whole bunch of science that goes into it.
1:09:55
Speaker 2: What there is science that goes into is the two
1:09:56
Speaker 2: years or less. And that has to do with radiation
1:09:58
Speaker 2: tolerance of the spacecraft, right? The electronics on board can
1:10:01
Speaker 2: only handle so much radiation before they will start to
1:10:04
Speaker 2: fail at high rates. And that high rate failure in
1:10:06
Speaker 2: our spacecraft will start to happen around the three-year mark
1:10:08
Speaker 2: with what we use today. So I want to make
1:10:10
Speaker 2: sure in two years, we're back on earth and safe.
1:10:12
Speaker 2: And then all the components can fail once we're back
1:10:14
Speaker 2: on the ground.
1:10:14
Speaker 1: Right on. Will you be able to reuse these or
1:10:16
Speaker 1: rebuild them?
1:10:17
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. I know we have no plans to reuse them. Okay. Um,
1:10:21
Speaker 2: I mean, we're going to fucking crash land them, right?
1:10:22
Speaker 2: Like keeping them light, keeping them cheap is pretty important
1:10:25
Speaker 2: to us at this point in time. And the economic
1:10:27
Speaker 2: use case for satellites at that scale that can be
1:10:31
Speaker 2: reusable is extremely difficult to make work. I think if
1:10:34
Speaker 2: not impossible. I think when you start looking at Starship
1:10:37
Speaker 2: level reusability and these kind of massive structures, sure, you
1:10:40
Speaker 2: can talk about massive reusability when you're putting a lot
1:10:44
Speaker 2: of CapEx into one of these projects. The reality is, man,
1:10:48
Speaker 2: I'm not Elon Musk. I don't have, you know, $ 50
1:10:51
Speaker 2: billion behind me I can just dump into one of these.
1:10:53
Speaker 2: I have to think really economical at the beginning. And like,
1:10:56
Speaker 2: part of this is having the economic constraint as well.
1:10:59
Speaker 2: If we had unlimited money, we know how to mine
1:11:01
Speaker 2: an asteroid. It's called Osiris-Rex. It costs $ 1.
1:11:04
Speaker 1: 2 billion.
1:11:06
Speaker 2: You know, it's really easy to iterate to that works,
1:11:08
Speaker 2: that's a solution. It's not an economical business, though. We
1:11:11
Speaker 2: have to think cheap. We have to think light. And
1:11:13
Speaker 2: we have to make those trades all the time of, like,
1:11:15
Speaker 2: cost is in every trade study we do. And it's
1:11:18
Speaker 2: not a common thing for engineers to see. Most engineers
1:11:20
Speaker 2: are like, oh, you know, what's the feature? What's the requirement?
1:11:23
Speaker 2: How much do I get out of this? But, like,
1:11:24
Speaker 2: cost is a big part of what we look at
1:11:26
Speaker 2: on every spacecraft build we do. Mm-hmm.
1:11:29
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. Who all is interested in what you're doing?
1:11:36
Speaker 2: I think there's a, well, I'll put it in three categories.
1:11:39
Speaker 1: Who's going to benefit. I mean, who, who will you
1:11:41
Speaker 1: sell the metal to that kind of stuff?
1:11:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the metal we're going after a commodity. So
1:11:46
Speaker 2: the nice part is it's like, we have about $ 8
1:11:48
Speaker 2: billion in offtake agreements right now. And they're kind of
1:11:51
Speaker 2: comical because it says like, if you bring me $ 8
1:11:53
Speaker 2: billion in platinum, I will buy it from you. Like
1:11:56
Speaker 2: it's really easy to sell this into the commodity market
1:11:59
Speaker 2: that will then be used. So who's going to benefit
1:12:02
Speaker 2: from it. Tesla, Boeing. Nvidia, like every company that now
1:12:08
Speaker 2: has access to a U.S. source base of platinum group metals.
1:12:12
Speaker 2: I should make one thing really clear. We have one
1:12:15
Speaker 2: platinum group metal mine in the United States. It's in Montana.
1:12:17
Speaker 2: It's called Spain Stillwater, and it's recently been shut down.
1:12:21
Speaker 2: So as of today, none of the platinum we have
1:12:23
Speaker 2: comes from the U.S. Some of it is recycled here,
1:12:26
Speaker 2: but none of the new input comes from the U.S.
1:12:29
Speaker 2: We talk a lot about the rare earth elements, and
1:12:32
Speaker 2: you probably see this in the news all the time,
1:12:33
Speaker 2: like Trump signing all these executive orders and M &
1:12:36
Speaker 2: P Materials got this huge investment. The rare earth metals
1:12:40
Speaker 2: are a fraction of the market cap of the platinum
1:12:42
Speaker 2: group metals. And we have a lot of rare earth
1:12:46
Speaker 2: metal ore in the United States. The processing of the
1:12:48
Speaker 2: rare earth metals is very difficult. We don't have a
1:12:53
Speaker 2: lot of platinum group metals in the United States. As
1:12:55
Speaker 2: we expand, platinum group metals, if we continuously use it
1:12:58
Speaker 2: the way we use it in the United States, we'll
1:13:00
Speaker 2: run out of it by 2035. Now, The reality is
1:13:04
Speaker 2: the globalization on the world, that's not how it works.
1:13:06
Speaker 2: And we come up with these deals and, you know,
1:13:08
Speaker 2: half of this is like us posturing to other countries.
1:13:11
Speaker 2: And we've even seen this with rare earth, right? So,
1:13:13
Speaker 2: I mean, if you follow the news, it's like every
1:13:15
Speaker 2: other day, China is giving us rare earths or they're not.
1:13:17
Speaker 2: And I can't really keep track and we keep negotiating
1:13:19
Speaker 2: back and forth. It's like, this is how economies work.
1:13:22
Speaker 2: And this is actually a really beneficial way for economies
1:13:25
Speaker 2: to work. The next wave of this will be in
1:13:27
Speaker 2: platinum group battles. It's probably one of the most dangerous
1:13:30
Speaker 2: things that I foresee that we're coming up against because
1:13:33
Speaker 2: It's one of the critical building blocks to what we do,
1:13:35
Speaker 2: and the United States doesn't have any.
1:13:37
Speaker 1: So if you do this, I mean, how many other
1:13:40
Speaker 1: platinum mines are there in the world? Is there a
1:13:42
Speaker 1: ton of them, or is there not very many?
1:13:44
Speaker 2: There's a whole plethora of them in South Africa. There's
1:13:47
Speaker 2: quite a bit in Russia. China has a couple. I
1:13:49
Speaker 2: don't know the exact number, though, but there's quite a
1:13:52
Speaker 2: few of them.
1:13:53
Speaker 1: Well, so if you were successful in this, will U.S.
1:13:57
Speaker 1: become the leader in platinum?
1:13:59
Speaker 2: U.S. will become dominant in platinum. In fact, I'm going
1:14:01
Speaker 2: to say this differently. 3% of global carbon emissions are
1:14:07
Speaker 2: caused by platinum group metal mining alone because it's so deep, right?
1:14:11
Speaker 2: Because it's so deep, it's so hard to access, it
1:14:12
Speaker 2: requires so much to get it out. What if I
1:14:16
Speaker 2: told you a story of the future where we provide
1:14:18
Speaker 2: it from space at a fraction of the carbon cost
1:14:20
Speaker 2: to the point where platinum group metal mining on the
1:14:22
Speaker 2: planet becomes banned? That's what I think the future holds
1:14:25
Speaker 2: for mining, especially on these critical elements. It's like as
1:14:28
Speaker 2: soon as we can show that there's an economically feasible,
1:14:31
Speaker 2: reliable way to secure minerals from space, Earth-based mining becomes
1:14:35
Speaker 2: regulated out of existence. And so what Astroforge can become
1:14:40
Speaker 2: one day is one of the first regulated monopolies, right?
1:14:44
Speaker 2: We can dominate the mineral supply chain and also have
1:14:47
Speaker 2: laws in place where nobody else can dominate it. That's
1:14:51
Speaker 2: how I become the alien emperor.
1:14:55
Speaker 1: I mean, speaking of red tape, what kind of red
1:14:59
Speaker 1: tape are you dealing with? Is the government involved?
1:15:02
Speaker 2: Thank God. Are they getting away? There was a company
1:15:05
Speaker 2: called Planetary Resources because with Ted Cruz, they teamed up
1:15:08
Speaker 2: to pass the 2015 Commercial Space Act Agreement. I actually
1:15:12
Speaker 2: don't think that's what it's called. So space agreement, something
1:15:15
Speaker 2: like this, whatever. 2015, some space shit was passed. And
1:15:18
Speaker 2: what that says clear as day is commercial companies in
1:15:21
Speaker 2: the United States can mine asteroids and sell the materials
1:15:23
Speaker 2: for money. Clear as day. So from a regulatory perspective,
1:15:27
Speaker 2: we don't have a concern in the United States. Now,
1:15:31
Speaker 2: we do have the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that the
1:15:34
Speaker 2: UN made. And it has some lines about anything that's
1:15:39
Speaker 2: done in space must benefit all of humanity. So one
1:15:41
Speaker 2: of the common questions I get asked whenever I talk
1:15:43
Speaker 2: to any reporter that lives in Europe is how I'm
1:15:46
Speaker 2: going to share the wealth with the whole world. And
1:15:49
Speaker 2: I'll say on your podcast, my honest answer is I'm
1:15:52
Speaker 2: fucking not.
1:15:55
Speaker 1: Love it.
1:15:56
Speaker 2: I mean, like, I don't understand this logic. So, you know, it's,
1:15:58
Speaker 2: it's this kind of, man, it's a trap that, that
1:16:03
Speaker 2: we love to fall into. is this like, oh, if
1:16:06
Speaker 2: you're successful, we want to benefit, but if you're not successful,
1:16:08
Speaker 2: we're not willing to take the risk. And so what
1:16:10
Speaker 2: I'll say is like, hey, France, if you want to
1:16:12
Speaker 2: invest in Astroforge now, you can benefit from it. But
1:16:15
Speaker 2: you don't get to say at the end of the day,
1:16:17
Speaker 2: once we're successful, that, oh, we knew all along and
1:16:20
Speaker 2: now you need to share the wealth. Absolutely not. I
1:16:22
Speaker 2: do not think that is the best way for advancement
1:16:24
Speaker 2: of humans. Incentive alignment is a big deal in everything
1:16:28
Speaker 2: you do, right? And if you're not going to align incentives,
1:16:31
Speaker 2: then I'm not interested in talking to you. And like,
1:16:33
Speaker 2: I think the world, needs to take a look at this.
1:16:37
Speaker 2: You know, over the last 50 years, capitalism has greatly
1:16:40
Speaker 2: improved the standard of living to, I was thinking about
1:16:43
Speaker 2: this on the plane flight over here, Sean. Even though
1:16:46
Speaker 2: I'm in a plane and I'm at, you know, 40,000
1:16:49
Speaker 2: feet or whatever in this little tiny seat like this,
1:16:51
Speaker 2: like my standard of living is still probably higher than
1:16:54
Speaker 2: like a king in the 1600s. Not from a volume perspective,
1:16:57
Speaker 2: but like I could have hot water, I could have
1:16:59
Speaker 2: cold water, I could use the bathroom and like it
1:17:01
Speaker 2: flushes and there's not some dude at the bottom like
1:17:03
Speaker 2: scrubbing it. We have toilet paper. We have advanced so
1:17:06
Speaker 2: much as a human species and it's exponentially increasing. And
1:17:10
Speaker 2: that's because of the way we govern ourselves and we've
1:17:13
Speaker 2: progressed into the future. Capitalism is the dominant force behind that.
1:17:17
Speaker 2: And I want to see that continue into the future.
1:17:21
Speaker 1: I mean, as far as spreading the wealth, I mean,
1:17:23
Speaker 1: it's going to happen, right? If you sell, if NVIDIA
1:17:28
Speaker 1: takes a bunch of platinum, then that's up any more
1:17:30
Speaker 1: computer chips. So there you go.
1:17:32
Speaker 2: Let's think about leveling up humanity. not leveling up individuals, right?
1:17:36
Speaker 2: And I think as soon as you look at this
1:17:37
Speaker 2: from a greed perspective, like, you know, France or another country,
1:17:40
Speaker 2: I'm blaming this all on France, I don't even know why,
1:17:43
Speaker 2: but another country coming in and saying, like, we want
1:17:45
Speaker 2: our fair share, like, it's not how it works, but
1:17:48
Speaker 2: let me hope that I can help level up the
1:17:50
Speaker 2: entire world so our standard of living is even higher
1:17:51
Speaker 2: than it is today. That's the goal.
1:17:56
Speaker 1: Is the administration excited about this? I mean, do you
1:17:59
Speaker 1: have any talks within government.
1:18:02
Speaker 2: No, you know, we haven't. So I've had a very
1:18:04
Speaker 2: different approach to government than a lot of people that
1:18:07
Speaker 2: I think you see in space. Space has always started with,
1:18:10
Speaker 2: and you'll hear this all the time, you want to
1:18:12
Speaker 2: have a space company, like you start with the government.
1:18:14
Speaker 2: And then you go pretend you have a commercial use case.
1:18:17
Speaker 2: And we've invented some cool words that have even got
1:18:20
Speaker 2: into the regulatory bodies called like dual use technologies, right?
1:18:24
Speaker 2: I have a very different view on this, which is
1:18:27
Speaker 2: I don't really believe any of it. You know what's
1:18:30
Speaker 2: a great dual use technology? a Mac laptop. It's really
1:18:34
Speaker 2: the only thing I think the government buys and commercial
1:18:37
Speaker 2: customers buy. But, you know, about a year ago, I
1:18:41
Speaker 2: talked to a cruise missile company and they told me
1:18:43
Speaker 2: they were dual use. The fuck is your commercial use? What,
1:18:47
Speaker 2: can I buy a cruise missile? Like, I mean, that'd
1:18:49
Speaker 2: be pretty legit, right? But I don't think this makes
1:18:51
Speaker 2: any sense. And I think a lot of in space,
1:18:52
Speaker 2: we get trapped in this thing of like, we build
1:18:55
Speaker 2: geo satellites for the US government, but we're dual use
1:18:58
Speaker 2: because a commercial company is going to want them. I
1:19:01
Speaker 2: find that hard to believe and hard to see. And
1:19:04
Speaker 2: you'll see a couple examples here, but it's pretty rare
1:19:06
Speaker 2: that commercial actually takes a bite at these at any
1:19:09
Speaker 2: kind of level. that makes a commercial viable use case.
1:19:13
Speaker 2: I wanted Astroforge to be a commercial space company. And
1:19:16
Speaker 2: so we did not start off with the government. We
1:19:17
Speaker 2: started off with the mining industry. What do I do
1:19:20
Speaker 2: with this material? Who can I bring it to? How
1:19:22
Speaker 2: can I underwrite this company differently, right? Can I get
1:19:25
Speaker 2: investors to believe in the mission of trying to upend
1:19:28
Speaker 2: all earth mining? That being said, at this point, we
1:19:31
Speaker 2: have now gone the other way with dual use, which
1:19:33
Speaker 2: has said, cool, now that we are developing a low cost,
1:19:36
Speaker 2: really cheap, spacecraft that can access the cosmos can we
1:19:40
Speaker 2: start to work with the government on it as a
1:19:43
Speaker 2: way where this is viable i'm not interested in things
1:19:46
Speaker 2: that are not directly applicable to what we're doing in
1:19:48
Speaker 2: our space mission if you want to go send a
1:19:50
Speaker 2: satellite bus to low earth orbit there's a lot of
1:19:52
Speaker 2: companies doing that please go talk to them don't talk
1:19:55
Speaker 2: to me i'm not interested right i guess the honest
1:19:57
Speaker 2: truth because that kills the dream of the company it
1:19:59
Speaker 2: kills the dream of what we're doing and i'm also
1:20:02
Speaker 2: just not interested in low earth orbit like i said
1:20:04
Speaker 2: the space shuttle kind of like ruin my childhood. I
1:20:06
Speaker 2: don't want to continuously ruin my childhood because there's a
1:20:08
Speaker 2: great economic use case in low earth orbit potentially. It's
1:20:12
Speaker 2: not important. What's important is we have a mission to
1:20:13
Speaker 2: go mine, go mine the cosmos. And if we could
1:20:16
Speaker 2: help the government along that way, I'm all for it.
1:20:18
Speaker 2: And so those are the conversations we've started to have,
1:20:20
Speaker 2: especially around the moon, around, you know, this keyword of
1:20:24
Speaker 2: like space domain awareness around lunar. And as we go
1:20:27
Speaker 2: out further and also we have probably one of the
1:20:32
Speaker 2: most advanced detection algorithms for how we see things in space.
1:20:35
Speaker 2: Just keep in mind, we got to find these asteroids
1:20:37
Speaker 2: on our spacecraft. Like, we know in the general realm
1:20:40
Speaker 2: of where they are, but usually we're off by plus
1:20:42
Speaker 2: or minus 2,000 to 3,000 kilometers. So we have to
1:20:45
Speaker 2: be able to find it in these boxes. Those detection
1:20:47
Speaker 2: algorithms work really well for other things that you can imagine.
1:20:51
Speaker 2: And so those are the type of areas we started
1:20:52
Speaker 2: to branch off into with the government.
1:20:54
Speaker 1: Do you think, I mean, you know, and I don't
1:20:57
Speaker 1: know how real this is. I don't really believe much
1:20:59
Speaker 1: I see on any news outlets. You always see these
1:21:02
Speaker 1: things pop up every once in a while. It's, oh,
1:21:05
Speaker 1: this asteroid's going to be X amount of miles when
1:21:08
Speaker 1: it passes the Earth. It's the closest encounter we've had.
1:21:11
Speaker 1: This one's going to hit the Earth in, I don't know,
1:21:15
Speaker 1: 75 years. Do you think that your company could be
1:21:17
Speaker 1: used to... I mean, where I'm going is I saw
1:21:20
Speaker 1: the movie Armageddon a long time ago. Do you think
1:21:23
Speaker 1: you could be used for something like that to.
1:21:28
Speaker 2: I'm going to save the world, Sean. That's exactly what
1:21:29
Speaker 2: we're going to do.
1:21:30
Speaker 1: Explode an asteroid that's going to strike the Earth.
1:21:33
Speaker 2: This is a detailed question, but in essence, yes, 100%.
1:21:37
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the things we're talking with the
1:21:38
Speaker 2: government about is exactly this, planetary defense.
1:21:40
Speaker 1: You are talking to the government.
1:21:42
Speaker 2: Of course. Like I said, we just went the other way, right?
1:21:44
Speaker 2: We started with commercial, and then we'll shift it over
1:21:46
Speaker 2: to use cases in the government. We didn't go from
1:21:48
Speaker 2: government to commercial. I don't think that approach leads to
1:21:51
Speaker 2: a commercially sound company. It may lead to a Boeing, right?
1:21:54
Speaker 2: Or a Raytheon, which by the way, I shouldn't say
1:21:56
Speaker 2: that's a bad thing. You can make a lot of
1:21:58
Speaker 2: money off that. It's just not in my interest lane.
1:22:02
Speaker 2: Planetary defense is a big deal for sure. And planetary
1:22:04
Speaker 2: defense is all about early detection and how we get there.
1:22:07
Speaker 2: And so it needs to have multiple things. It needs
1:22:09
Speaker 2: to have ground-based assets that can help detect these like Ruben.
1:22:12
Speaker 2: You know, we can find thousands of asteroids and determine
1:22:15
Speaker 2: if any of them are going to detect us. And
1:22:18
Speaker 2: then we need to be able to access them quickly.
1:22:19
Speaker 2: And I think this is where we come in. A
1:22:21
Speaker 2: lot of people, a lot of companies that go build
1:22:23
Speaker 2: deep spacecraft like Maxar, which will contract through JPL to
1:22:26
Speaker 2: build big buses, will take five to 10 years to
1:22:29
Speaker 2: build a spacecraft, right? Because they start off very differently.
1:22:32
Speaker 2: It's a very different thought process. They also require a
1:22:34
Speaker 2: dedicated launch. We require neither of those, right? We can
1:22:37
Speaker 2: build them very quickly and we don't require a dedicated launch.
1:22:39
Speaker 2: We're almost perfect for this mission as we go out there.
1:22:42
Speaker 2: The other thing is you got to do something with
1:22:44
Speaker 2: the asteroid when you get there. What did I talk
1:22:47
Speaker 2: about in our refinery? We essentially reject a large amount
1:22:50
Speaker 2: of material. Well, when you reject that, even though it's
1:22:53
Speaker 2: very small, when you shoot an iron atom off an asteroid,
1:22:56
Speaker 2: it imparts a force into the asteroid to push it
1:22:58
Speaker 2: one direction. And so if we can continue to remove
1:23:01
Speaker 2: material and throw it out, you can start to steer asteroids. Now,
1:23:05
Speaker 2: I want to be clear. You can't steer them very much.
1:23:08
Speaker 2: And this is why it matters how early we detect it.
1:23:10
Speaker 2: If we detect an asteroid that's pointed right at Earth
1:23:12
Speaker 2: and it's three months away, start having parties. Like, we
1:23:16
Speaker 2: ain't going to do shit. But if we detect it,
1:23:18
Speaker 2: 10 years in advance, and we can put very, very
1:23:21
Speaker 2: small changes in it, we can hopefully steer it away
1:23:24
Speaker 2: from the Earth enough to minimize the impact. In a
1:23:26
Speaker 2: lot of cases, you're talking about impact minimization, not necessarily
1:23:29
Speaker 2: going to completely get it away from the planet. There's
1:23:31
Speaker 2: an asteroid called Apothis that's getting more and more press
1:23:34
Speaker 2: in the news. It's coming by in 2029, and we
1:23:37
Speaker 2: believe will break up when it comes by the Earth.
1:23:39
Speaker 2: And depending on how it breaks up, there may be
1:23:41
Speaker 2: some re-impact in, I think, 2034. Not to scare anybody,
1:23:45
Speaker 2: these will be relatively small-sized impacts We're really good at
1:23:48
Speaker 2: predicting them. We can evacuate cities if they're going to
1:23:51
Speaker 2: hit them. They'll probably land in the oceans, though, just
1:23:53
Speaker 2: on statistics. And those kind of missions are what we're
1:23:58
Speaker 2: kind of set out and purpose-built for.
1:24:01
Speaker 1: How long did it take for those discussions to start?
1:24:05
Speaker 2: With planetary defense? Mm-hmm.
1:24:09
Speaker 1: Who brought it up? Was it you?
1:24:11
Speaker 2: No, actually, planetary defense was brought to us by NASA
1:24:14
Speaker 2: to ask if we could help with these kind of
1:24:16
Speaker 2: missions as we've gone out there. So it's not something
1:24:19
Speaker 2: that we bring up a lot. Again, I got to
1:24:21
Speaker 2: keep the, Sean, the problem that is with government work
1:24:26
Speaker 2: is you become a government company. And if you ever
1:24:28
Speaker 2: have worked at Boeing or anybody that contracts with the government,
1:24:31
Speaker 2: which I have, not with Boeing, but with a government contractor,
1:24:34
Speaker 2: it's a very different methodology. You have time cards. You're
1:24:37
Speaker 2: keeping track of your hourly rates. You're trying to manage
1:24:40
Speaker 2: all this. And what it becomes is marginal dollars for
1:24:43
Speaker 2: a service. You're a consulting service, right? Now you're just
1:24:45
Speaker 2: consulting for what the government wants. That is not the
1:24:48
Speaker 2: company I want to build. I do not think that
1:24:50
Speaker 2: is the most efficient company you can build. I want
1:24:53
Speaker 2: highly motivated people that are willing to go explore the
1:24:55
Speaker 2: universe and work really fucking hard seven days a week.
1:24:58
Speaker 2: And that doesn't jive with the culture of a Boeing.
1:25:01
Speaker 2: Not saying those people don't work hard, but they work
1:25:03
Speaker 2: hard for a dollar amount that is calculated as an
1:25:05
Speaker 2: hourly rate that is charged to a charge number on
1:25:08
Speaker 2: a contract. The incentives again are just misaligned and that's
1:25:12
Speaker 2: where we get different here. So for us, if we
1:25:14
Speaker 2: can go work with NASA in a way where we
1:25:16
Speaker 2: can have aligned incentives with them Amazing. Um, if we
1:25:20
Speaker 2: go with private institutions or even the government in a
1:25:22
Speaker 2: way where incentives are aligned, I'm all for it. If
1:25:26
Speaker 2: I need to become Boeing 2.0, which let's say all
1:25:29
Speaker 2: of a sudden we get a billion dollar contract tomorrow
1:25:32
Speaker 2: to become Boeing 2.0. Great. Get a new CEO. Not interested.
1:25:37
Speaker 2: I have zero passion for it.
1:25:41
Speaker 1: You're driven. You know exactly what you want.
1:25:44
Speaker 2: That's. That's it, right? Like, It's not, that's the whole
1:25:49
Speaker 2: point of starting companies, I think. I mean, again, you
1:25:52
Speaker 2: could look at every single, you can go to get
1:25:54
Speaker 2: your MBA from any university and sit there and do
1:25:56
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of mouth and be like, I found
1:25:57
Speaker 2: this economic opportunity. There's plenty of people that do that
1:26:00
Speaker 2: and they're very good at it and they can make
1:26:01
Speaker 2: a lot of money and they're super respected. And I
1:26:03
Speaker 2: know a lot of them and I have nothing bad
1:26:05
Speaker 2: to say about them. I'm just not that person.
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1:29:26
Speaker 1: were you going to do for NASA?
1:29:28
Speaker 2: Work on Europa Clipper. On what? Work on Europa Clipper.
1:29:31
Speaker 1: What is that?
1:29:31
Speaker 2: That is the mission going out to the moon Europa
1:29:33
Speaker 2: to go do a scientific discovery mission on it, right?
1:29:35
Speaker 2: It was a big NASA class A mission, cost five
1:29:37
Speaker 2: and a half billion dollars. I was going to be
1:29:39
Speaker 2: a piece of that wheel at JPL. And then, you know,
1:29:42
Speaker 2: at JPL, like you get hired, you work on some
1:29:44
Speaker 2: of these and you go on to the next mission
1:29:47
Speaker 2: and blah, blah, blah as you go through. A lot
1:29:48
Speaker 2: of people have had really great careers at JPL and
1:29:50
Speaker 2: get to talk about some really cool stuff and JPL
1:29:54
Speaker 2: has these like inspirational pictures of people working on Voyager
1:29:57
Speaker 2: and people working on, you know, Curiosity and Spirit and
1:30:00
Speaker 2: Opportunity and like these kind of monumental missions that we've
1:30:03
Speaker 2: done as humans. A lot of them have come out
1:30:05
Speaker 2: of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So again, it's not about cash.
1:30:08
Speaker 2: It's not even about the job. It's about, you could
1:30:12
Speaker 2: be a small part of writing history.
1:30:14
Speaker 1: I mean, where did you say they're going?
1:30:17
Speaker 2: Nopal Clipper is going to one of the moons. It's
1:30:19
Speaker 2: going to Europa.
1:30:20
Speaker 1: Which moon is that? Where's that?
1:30:21
Speaker 2: It's a moon of Saturn. In fact, check me on that.
1:30:25
Speaker 2: Is it Saturn or Jupiter?
1:30:26
Speaker 1: I mean, that's pretty cool, man, that you had the
1:30:28
Speaker 1: opportunity to do that and you switched and started this.
1:30:35
Speaker 2: It's either cool or stupid. I don't know. I think
1:30:38
Speaker 2: like you kind of– I say this all the time.
1:30:39
Speaker 2: You kind of got to be stupid to start a company.
1:30:41
Speaker 2: Like all the kind of math doesn't math. You're like, hey,
1:30:44
Speaker 2: hold on. I can make a lot of money going
1:30:46
Speaker 2: into– I mean– Look, to be honest with you, Sean,
1:30:48
Speaker 2: I was at a company called Bird Rides, which was
1:30:50
Speaker 2: the scooter company. And we can go into why I
1:30:52
Speaker 2: went there. It's actually not important. I wanted to learn
1:30:54
Speaker 2: how you built if you had no constraints. Like, if
1:30:57
Speaker 2: you use China, instead of saying China's the enemy, what
1:30:59
Speaker 2: if we use China? How fast could we build? And
1:31:01
Speaker 2: I was blown away by how fast you could build
1:31:03
Speaker 2: if you got rid of all your preconceived notions about
1:31:05
Speaker 2: what you could do. That's why I went to Bird.
1:31:08
Speaker 2: When I left Bird, I left seven plus figures on
1:31:11
Speaker 2: the table to go start this company. Why? Why? probably
1:31:17
Speaker 2: because I'm stupid, but also because it's not what drove me, right?
1:31:21
Speaker 2: The money is great. I don't come from a wealthy family.
1:31:25
Speaker 2: I wasn't rich growing up or anything like that. And
1:31:27
Speaker 2: I just, look, I think if you can, if you
1:31:32
Speaker 2: can afford to go to dinner and not have to
1:31:33
Speaker 2: worry about the bill, you're in a pretty good fucking
1:31:35
Speaker 2: spot in life. That's it. I don't need much more
1:31:38
Speaker 2: than that. So like, let's go do what you want
1:31:40
Speaker 2: to do. And I asked myself the question of, if
1:31:43
Speaker 2: I had Elon Musk level of wealth, If I had
1:31:46
Speaker 2: $ 300 billion, what would I do? I'd go try to
1:31:49
Speaker 2: explore the fucking universe. So why don't I just go
1:31:52
Speaker 2: do that now? That's all this company is.
1:31:54
Speaker 1: I think it's more than that to me. But, I mean,
1:32:02
Speaker 1: because you could have just explored the universe at the
1:32:05
Speaker 1: JPL lab.
1:32:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I wouldn't have got to control where I
1:32:08
Speaker 2: explored or actually saw those missions go faster. The thing
1:32:13
Speaker 2: that I had a real problem with at JPL was
1:32:16
Speaker 2: simply saying, hold on. Our missions in spacecraft cost $ 4. 5 million.
1:32:25
Speaker 2: Europa Clipper costs $ 5. 5 billion. It's a lot of zeros
1:32:30
Speaker 2: in between those two numbers. And you don't see that
1:32:33
Speaker 2: in what's produced. And I'm not saying what's produced as
1:32:35
Speaker 2: a NASA Class A mission isn't a really great mission,
1:32:38
Speaker 2: really great people work on it. What it is though
1:32:41
Speaker 2: also is a jobs program. And when I talk about
1:32:43
Speaker 2: the same reason we're not a government contractor, JPL is, right?
1:32:47
Speaker 2: That's what they're doing. They're a contracting agency. And you
1:32:50
Speaker 2: see that in the work ethic there. You see that
1:32:51
Speaker 2: in the people there. And you see that in how
1:32:53
Speaker 2: it's constructed. There's people that definitely dream about space there.
1:32:56
Speaker 2: And there's visionaries at JPL. But there's also people that
1:32:59
Speaker 2: are clocking in and clocking out. And that kind of
1:33:01
Speaker 2: culture just doesn't attract me. It doesn't interest me. When
1:33:06
Speaker 2: I want to do something, I want to go all
1:33:07
Speaker 2: in to the point where it's unhealthy. And if I'm
1:33:10
Speaker 2: not unhealthy about it, then like, What's the point? I
1:33:14
Speaker 2: don't live for the weekends, right? I don't actually even
1:33:17
Speaker 2: live to retire. Like, I live for this. I live
1:33:19
Speaker 2: for the experience of what I'm going through today to
1:33:21
Speaker 2: see if you can make it, to see if you
1:33:23
Speaker 2: can have a lasting impact on the future.
1:33:25
Speaker 1: I love that. I love that. What else excites you
1:33:28
Speaker 1: in space? Or do you, is there anything else? Are
1:33:31
Speaker 1: you 100% like? Do you dive into anything else?
1:33:35
Speaker 2: I mean, look, like anybody that's around space and you're
1:33:38
Speaker 2: around this, what else excites me? I think there is
1:33:40
Speaker 2: a revolutionary going on in rocketry right now as we
1:33:42
Speaker 2: look at it. Whether it's the RD that I talked about,
1:33:45
Speaker 2: whether it is Starship coming online. I think Starship is
1:33:49
Speaker 2: fucking hard rockets to build, man. And I think you're
1:33:51
Speaker 2: seeing that. You're seeing that move fast culture really get
1:33:55
Speaker 2: tested right now with how Elon is building Starship. And
1:33:58
Speaker 2: I hope Elon... I hope Elon goes back to dedicating
1:34:01
Speaker 2: himself 100% to SpaceX because I think he could really
1:34:04
Speaker 2: make an impact there on Starship. I think it needs
1:34:07
Speaker 2: that back in there. And then you have vehicles like
1:34:11
Speaker 2: the rumored new Armstrong, which will be Blue Origin's Starship competitor.
1:34:18
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's real or not, but I
1:34:20
Speaker 2: fucking hope it is. It's kind of like aliens. I
1:34:22
Speaker 2: hope that these companies are working on bigger rockets, right?
1:34:24
Speaker 2: Because it's fucking cool. I want to see what that
1:34:27
Speaker 2: revolution enables. Now, what it's going to enable is two
1:34:29
Speaker 2: things in my mind. It's going to enable different business cases.
1:34:32
Speaker 2: And so you're probably going to have more Starlink competitors
1:34:34
Speaker 2: come out. I don't know what else. I don't really
1:34:38
Speaker 2: care because those are all boring. And I'm sure those
1:34:40
Speaker 2: people make a lot of money again. All my friends
1:34:41
Speaker 2: work in those industries. And I tell them this, if
1:34:44
Speaker 2: you're low earth orbiting, like, I don't care. It's boring.
1:34:46
Speaker 2: I want to see. Like, it just is. It just
1:34:50
Speaker 2: doesn't excite me, right? It doesn't. Like, Starlink, really cool technology.
1:34:53
Speaker 2: I don't care. That's the honest truth. I want to
1:34:57
Speaker 2: see what we do with the science side. Like if
1:34:59
Speaker 2: Starship comes online, we can launch some gigantic fucking ass telescopes.
1:35:02
Speaker 2: We can get really far. We can launch cheaper interplanetary missions.
1:35:06
Speaker 2: Can we actually go colonize Mars? Can we get there?
1:35:08
Speaker 2: Can we become multi-planetary? I don't know. To be clear,
1:35:13
Speaker 2: I don't know the answer to any of this. All
1:35:15
Speaker 2: I'm saying is I really like when people go try.
1:35:18
Speaker 2: Same thing with Ashford. I'm not going to sit here
1:35:20
Speaker 2: and say I'm 100% confident this is going to work
1:35:22
Speaker 2: and I'm going to pull it off. I actually don't know.
1:35:25
Speaker 2: I think the magic in this is that you still
1:35:27
Speaker 2: got enough balls to go for it and try.
1:35:31
Speaker 1: Do you think that the... This is what I watch
1:35:35
Speaker 1: at night. I just fall asleep to space documentaries.
1:35:39
Speaker 2: I fall asleep to war documentaries. My wife laughs at
1:35:43
Speaker 2: me all the time. She's like, dude, you're literally listening
1:35:45
Speaker 2: to people die in Vietnam and you just pass out
1:35:47
Speaker 2: to that? That's how you go to sleep? I'm like, yeah,
1:35:48
Speaker 2: it's kind of... It's some great stories, right?
1:35:54
Speaker 1: Is the universe expanding So.
1:35:57
Speaker 2: When we look at, again, I'm not a physicist or scientist,
1:36:01
Speaker 2: so I'm probably going to get shit on for this.
1:36:02
Speaker 2: But what I'll say is when we look at data
1:36:03
Speaker 2: from telescopes and we see light shifts on galaxies, they
1:36:06
Speaker 2: appear to be moving away from us. And so the
1:36:08
Speaker 2: logical thing you can draw from that is that the universe, again,
1:36:12
Speaker 2: it is a hypothesis based on observation we have in space.
1:36:16
Speaker 2: So we've seen something that happens. We've seen a redshift
1:36:18
Speaker 2: out of these galaxies. We think they're moving away from us.
1:36:21
Speaker 1: Everything's moving away from each other.
1:36:23
Speaker 2: Everything is moving away from... Well, not everything. Andromeda's moving
1:36:25
Speaker 2: towards us, right? So, not everything is moving away from us.
1:36:28
Speaker 2: Certain things are moving away from our galaxy. And when
1:36:31
Speaker 2: we look at that, we can make the assumption that
1:36:33
Speaker 2: the universe is expanding. And we have no fucking idea why.
1:36:38
Speaker 2: We don't know why it's accelerating. So, there's two ways
1:36:40
Speaker 2: you can look at this. You can either say... Well,
1:36:42
Speaker 2: probably three, actually. The universe is expanding. Our understanding of
1:36:47
Speaker 2: physics is fundamentally incorrect. our understanding of how to take
1:36:51
Speaker 2: these scientific measurements is incorrect. I think we understand how
1:36:56
Speaker 2: to take scientific instruments. I think you have to say,
1:37:00
Speaker 2: is our basic thesis for physics correct, or are we
1:37:04
Speaker 2: missing something? And I think there's a lot of holes
1:37:07
Speaker 2: in our modern way of physics, but it does a
1:37:09
Speaker 2: really good job of explaining all the phenomenon that we
1:37:11
Speaker 2: witness today and we see here, and it kind of
1:37:13
Speaker 2: falls apart at the super small and the super large.
1:37:16
Speaker 2: And we don't know why. But it's really, really interesting
1:37:21
Speaker 2: to go talk to some of these people that are
1:37:23
Speaker 2: going and trying to solve these problems and the math
1:37:25
Speaker 2: they do and the, and the way they look at this.
1:37:27
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, Kip Thorne's discovery of gravity waves
1:37:31
Speaker 2: was essentially just math equations. And he said like, Hmm,
1:37:33
Speaker 2: I see this in mathematics. I should be able to
1:37:35
Speaker 2: see it. And here's how I think we would be
1:37:36
Speaker 2: able to see it. And that's pretty fucking cool, man,
1:37:40
Speaker 2: that we can go from that level of understanding of
1:37:42
Speaker 2: math and, and, and make observations that then 20 years
1:37:45
Speaker 2: later we can detect this gravity waves. Right. And, and,
1:37:48
Speaker 2: and see these experimental results. And so is the universe expanding?
1:37:54
Speaker 2: We observe it to be expanding. Is it, or is
1:37:57
Speaker 2: it not? We can get super philosophical here on like,
1:38:01
Speaker 2: what is expanding? What is the universe? What is time? Yeah,
1:38:03
Speaker 2: let's do it. Like, you know, there's all these things.
1:38:06
Speaker 2: I love this stuff. There's all these variables you can
1:38:09
Speaker 2: have there. And if you start to question the fundamentals
1:38:12
Speaker 2: of every variable, you can lead to some really interesting theses.
1:38:19
Speaker 2: And so, like I said, there's a thesis called variable
1:38:21
Speaker 2: light theory, that light is not static, that we don't
1:38:23
Speaker 2: think the speed of light is a constant. That obviously
1:38:26
Speaker 2: goes counteractive to all other physics, right? And probably- is
1:38:29
Speaker 2: totally wrong.
1:38:29
Speaker 1: I just talked to somebody, I think it was Bhaji Bhatt,
1:38:31
Speaker 1: who is setting up satellites and wants to beam solar
1:38:35
Speaker 1: energy back into Earth. He was talking about, I think
1:38:38
Speaker 1: it was him, he had mentioned that we've recently frozen light.
1:38:46
Speaker 2: I don't know how you freeze light, but that's pretty sick,
1:38:47
Speaker 2: but that sounds cool.
1:38:48
Speaker 1: But they said that they wasn't, I think it was
1:38:51
Speaker 1: him that was talking about it, that had mentioned that
1:38:53
Speaker 1: we have found a way to freeze light.
1:38:56
Speaker 2: So this is where the math becomes super important, because
1:38:59
Speaker 2: we say we can't travel faster than light. That's wrong.
1:39:03
Speaker 2: We can't travel faster than light in a vacuum. We
1:39:06
Speaker 2: can travel faster than light in different mediums, right? And
1:39:09
Speaker 2: so there's all these different ways to chalk up what
1:39:11
Speaker 2: we're talking about and how you take your assumptions and
1:39:14
Speaker 2: make them different. And this is where the math and
1:39:16
Speaker 2: the details, details matter. Details matter a lot. And we
1:39:19
Speaker 2: start to talk about these kind of math equations and
1:39:21
Speaker 2: the way we look at physics, like you gotta dive
1:39:23
Speaker 2: into detail. So what does freezing light mean? Did we
1:39:25
Speaker 2: go really cold? Did we use a different medium? Does
1:39:27
Speaker 2: it mean to just slow down? You know, how do
1:39:30
Speaker 2: we look at this? Like people love to put Hollywood
1:39:32
Speaker 2: on top of these physics discoveries. And the reality is
1:39:36
Speaker 2: they're not usually that Hollywood. They're actually usually pretty mundane
1:39:39
Speaker 2: and boring. And that's why I think going back to
1:39:41
Speaker 2: my original point is like, I really think you should
1:39:45
Speaker 2: do this, Sean. It's just like, when you're reading one
1:39:46
Speaker 2: of those, just call the fucking author.
1:39:48
Speaker 1: We will.
1:39:48
Speaker 2: Call the paper and say like, hey, what does this mean?
1:39:51
Speaker 2: Or I was talking about the, you know, call Kip Thorne.
1:39:53
Speaker 2: He's at Caltech. Like, he will pick up the phone.
1:39:57
Speaker 2: When I was at NASA Goddard, there was a guy
1:39:59
Speaker 2: named there named John Mathis. And he discovered the background
1:40:03
Speaker 2: radiation of the universe. Won a Nobel Prize for it, right?
1:40:06
Speaker 2: With a mission in 92, I think it was, that
1:40:08
Speaker 2: took that famous picture of the background radiation of the universe.
1:40:12
Speaker 2: I literally just walked up to his office and was like,
1:40:14
Speaker 2: can I talk with you? And he's like, dude, come in.
1:40:16
Speaker 2: I'm just working on this. Like, come in. What do
1:40:17
Speaker 2: you want to talk about? And I'm like, these people,
1:40:20
Speaker 2: we kind of hold them up as like these fictitious
1:40:22
Speaker 2: characters that are different than us. They're all just people.
1:40:26
Speaker 2: They're all just humans. Yeah, some of them are fucking
1:40:28
Speaker 2: total oddballs. But like what they are not is celebrities.
1:40:31
Speaker 2: And I think that's important. because that means they're accessible.
1:40:34
Speaker 2: And as soon as these things become celebrities, where we're
1:40:37
Speaker 2: watching documentaries on them, usually that math has been convoluted
1:40:41
Speaker 2: so much to help explain it to us as laymen,
1:40:44
Speaker 2: that you're actually not getting the true story of what's happening.
1:40:47
Speaker 2: And in some cases, you'll have the original authors of
1:40:49
Speaker 2: these papers or these theories come out and say like,
1:40:52
Speaker 2: it's actually not what I was saying at all. Like,
1:40:54
Speaker 2: this doesn't make any sense. It's not what I meant
1:40:55
Speaker 2: at all by this. I mean, a good one, again,
1:40:58
Speaker 2: the Psyche asteroid saying it's worth a hundred quadrillion dollars.
1:41:01
Speaker 2: Talk to Lindy about it. She's the PI for the
1:41:03
Speaker 2: NASA Psyche mission. She's like, this is not what I meant.
1:41:08
Speaker 2: I didn't mean like, oh, yeah, I was trying to
1:41:10
Speaker 2: equate for how much is on this, how much material
1:41:13
Speaker 2: is here in forms somebody else could understand. But that's
1:41:16
Speaker 2: been taken differently. And, you know, that's kind of how
1:41:19
Speaker 2: this works.
1:41:20
Speaker 1: So a couple of questions just from what you were
1:41:22
Speaker 1: talking about. One, I want to talk about background radiation space.
1:41:25
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is. But before that, you
1:41:27
Speaker 1: mentioned traveling faster than the speed of light in other mediums.
1:41:31
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that?
1:41:32
Speaker 2: Light travels slower in metal.
1:41:34
Speaker 1: Okay, so what does that even mean? Because it seems
1:41:37
Speaker 1: like you put a chunk of metal in front of
1:41:39
Speaker 1: light and it doesn't go through the other side. It
1:41:41
Speaker 1: blocks it. So what does that mean that it travels
1:41:45
Speaker 1: slower through metal?
1:41:46
Speaker 2: Any kind of fiber, whether it's... Look, there's a whole
1:41:48
Speaker 2: bunch of ways, I guess, to slow down light. Whether
1:41:51
Speaker 2: you're talking about fiber optics, it's going to go slower.
1:41:52
Speaker 2: And this is because the photons are hitting other atoms
1:41:55
Speaker 2: and being deflected. Light, what I'm getting at there is
1:42:00
Speaker 2: when we talk about these equations, though, the details matter, right?
1:42:03
Speaker 2: When we say light travels at a constant speed, we're
1:42:05
Speaker 2: referring to light in a vacuum. And so all of
1:42:08
Speaker 2: these ways we describe this science, again, those variables are
1:42:12
Speaker 2: the important piece of it. And if we forget about
1:42:14
Speaker 2: those other variables, we lead ourselves to believe falsehoods that
1:42:17
Speaker 2: are not true.
1:42:19
Speaker 1: Okay, okay. Let's talk about background radiation. Is that what
1:42:24
Speaker 1: you called it?
1:42:25
Speaker 2: That's what it's called. I know very little about background radiation, right? So,
1:42:29
Speaker 2: I talked with, so there was a Nobel Prize awarded
1:42:32
Speaker 2: on this. I think the scientific mission was in the
1:42:35
Speaker 2: early 90s and it was spacecraft that went out and
1:42:37
Speaker 2: mapped this as the background radiation of the universe. This
1:42:40
Speaker 2: was the famous story that was found, maybe it's just
1:42:43
Speaker 2: famous to radio engineers that when I went to school,
1:42:47
Speaker 2: of It was these guys on a military base, and
1:42:50
Speaker 2: I remember exactly what they were doing. They had this antenna,
1:42:52
Speaker 2: they had this radio telescope they were looking at things with,
1:42:54
Speaker 2: and they kept seeing noise on the telescope. And they
1:42:58
Speaker 2: thought it was birds nesting in the telescope. So they
1:43:00
Speaker 2: kept cleaning it out and cleaning it out and going like,
1:43:02
Speaker 2: what the fuck? Why is this thing noisy? And checked everything.
1:43:05
Speaker 2: And what they realized is their instrument was perfectly fine.
1:43:08
Speaker 2: What they were viewing was the background radiation of the universe.
1:43:12
Speaker 2: And that apparently, according to physicists, comes from the beginning
1:43:15
Speaker 2: of the Big Bang. Like, don't ask me how or why.
1:43:17
Speaker 2: I actually have no idea. But what John did with
1:43:20
Speaker 2: this imager was be able to image and categorize it.
1:43:23
Speaker 2: And so I'm sure you've seen the image before.
1:43:25
Speaker 1: Is this the thing that... Hear me out. Is this
1:43:29
Speaker 1: the thing they're talking about where it looks like a brain,
1:43:35
Speaker 1: how it's all connected? Is that what you're talking about?
1:43:38
Speaker 2: I don't know what you're talking about. That sounds awesome.
1:43:41
Speaker 2: But no, it looks like almost a map of the world,
1:43:43
Speaker 2: even though it is the universe. So it's like this
1:43:45
Speaker 2: oblong kind of ellipse. And you'll see light and dark spots.
1:43:49
Speaker 2: There's quieter spots of the universe. There's hotter spots of
1:43:52
Speaker 2: the universe. And I should call them colder and hotter
1:43:54
Speaker 2: because that's how they're measured. But I don't think we
1:43:57
Speaker 2: know why or understand why it's not uniform. This is
1:43:59
Speaker 2: kind of a big discovery. But again, there's so many
1:44:01
Speaker 2: cool things in science that we discover, we go witness,
1:44:05
Speaker 2: and we actually don't know why. That's what makes us beautiful, right?
1:44:10
Speaker 1: Please put a satellite into a black hole. Please put
1:44:14
Speaker 1: a satellite into a black hole. I want to know
1:44:16
Speaker 1: what's on the other side.
1:44:17
Speaker 2: I mean, if we did, we wouldn't know, right? Black
1:44:19
Speaker 2: holes are just, man, black holes are such a cool concept.
1:44:23
Speaker 2: And it went through this whole thing of like, hey,
1:44:25
Speaker 2: if you have infinite gravity and you can draw these
1:44:27
Speaker 2: math equations that show we should have black holes, and
1:44:29
Speaker 2: then you start to have all these theories, things like
1:44:31
Speaker 2: Hawking radiation and these disks. And it wasn't until recently
1:44:37
Speaker 2: that we were able to image a black hole. Now,
1:44:39
Speaker 2: we didn't actually image a black hole because no light
1:44:41
Speaker 2: can escape a black hole, right? But show the disk
1:44:43
Speaker 2: and And show everything going into it. And that was
1:44:45
Speaker 2: a pretty big moment because, again, it goes through what
1:44:49
Speaker 2: is probably 100 years of theory going down into one
1:44:52
Speaker 2: image to say, holy shit, that theory was true. That
1:44:54
Speaker 2: theory that started out with basic principles of math and
1:44:58
Speaker 2: physics and a human sitting there thinking outside the box
1:45:02
Speaker 2: was able to prove this to be right. It's not
1:45:05
Speaker 2: very often that happens in human history, but it's kind
1:45:08
Speaker 2: of revolutionary when it does. And there's some lesser famous
1:45:10
Speaker 2: ones that I actually think are more impressive.
1:45:12
Speaker 1: Like what?
1:45:13
Speaker 2: I mean, look, talk to anybody about Maxwell's equations, these
1:45:16
Speaker 2: four fundamental equations of electromagnetism that are, I mean, his
1:45:21
Speaker 2: paper to do this is like, his proof for it
1:45:23
Speaker 2: is like 300 pages long. This guy was clearly batshit insane.
1:45:27
Speaker 2: Came up with some of the most important theories for
1:45:29
Speaker 2: how the modern world operates with electronics. And I think he,
1:45:35
Speaker 2: because he wasn't good at the Hollywood style, because he
1:45:38
Speaker 2: wasn't good at articulating what he was doing, and because
1:45:41
Speaker 2: his proof is so fucking long that only some loser's
1:45:43
Speaker 2: gonna sit there and read it, it makes it so
1:45:47
Speaker 2: that you don't get the press from it, right? And like,
1:45:49
Speaker 2: you've probably never heard of Maxwell's equation. In fact, when
1:45:51
Speaker 2: I say Maxwell's, you probably think coffee, right? And there's
1:45:53
Speaker 2: Maxwell House or whatever, right? It doesn't resonate with anybody
1:45:57
Speaker 2: at the same level because there has always been a
1:46:01
Speaker 2: side of showmanship to science. This is why Einstein is
1:46:04
Speaker 2: so famous. You know who Einstein is. Probably because you
1:46:08
Speaker 2: always call somebody you don't like. You're like, oh, yeah,
1:46:10
Speaker 2: you're an Einstein, right? Like, you're stupid. I love how
1:46:13
Speaker 2: we use his name to be that. The reason you
1:46:15
Speaker 2: know about Einstein, though, I think is because of the
1:46:16
Speaker 2: nuclear bombs, right? And I think if it wasn't for that,
1:46:19
Speaker 2: we may not know him at the same level. There's
1:46:21
Speaker 2: probably a more important physicist at the time, like Bohr
1:46:25
Speaker 2: with the atom, right? And other things, all these other
1:46:28
Speaker 2: physicists at the time that are really not as well
1:46:31
Speaker 2: known as Einstein because they didn't have the marketing.
1:46:35
Speaker 1: Interesting. What do you think about the multiverse theory?
1:46:42
Speaker 2: Oh, God. I know so little about this that I'm
1:46:45
Speaker 2: just going to be... Multiverse theory is when you go
1:46:47
Speaker 2: into multiple dimensions to help describe phenomenon. It resonates from
1:46:51
Speaker 2: something called string theory. I don't know shit about it.
1:46:54
Speaker 2: And I think that these ideas are what you get
1:46:57
Speaker 2: when you extrapolate scientific equations. When you say, yes, if
1:47:00
Speaker 2: this happens, every possible scenario has to be true. Thus
1:47:04
Speaker 2: meaning we must have multiple universes for all of those
1:47:07
Speaker 2: scenarios to be true. And it's in pure conflict with
1:47:14
Speaker 2: other forms of our theories, right? Like, okay, so do
1:47:18
Speaker 2: we make universes? Are they created every instance? Is the
1:47:20
Speaker 2: universe exponentially expanding? Like, you can kind of take this
1:47:23
Speaker 2: any direction you want. And to be honest with you,
1:47:25
Speaker 2: I haven't spent enough time here to have a good
1:47:27
Speaker 2: idea of like, is this relevant? Is this not? I
1:47:31
Speaker 2: have no fucking idea. I think it's a cool theory.
1:47:34
Speaker 2: I think all these theories can be really interesting theories, but.
1:47:37
Speaker 1: I love diving into them.
1:47:39
Speaker 2: I love them.
1:47:39
Speaker 1: It just fascinates me. Then I fall asleep.
1:47:46
Speaker 2: It's a fun thing to talk about, but I think
1:47:47
Speaker 2: what's important to understand is almost all these theories are
1:47:50
Speaker 2: based off a very small amount of scientific observations. And
1:47:54
Speaker 2: the real way we're going to solve these theories is
1:47:56
Speaker 2: add more fucking scientific observations. Mm-hmm. And we've seen the
1:47:59
Speaker 2: capital cost and the capital allocation for each scientific observation
1:48:03
Speaker 2: go up by orders of magnitude. Look at the particle accelerators.
1:48:07
Speaker 2: We have how many particles accelerators in the United States?
1:48:09
Speaker 2: I mean, there's tons of them. You can make a
1:48:10
Speaker 2: really small particle accelerator in your office. We made one.
1:48:13
Speaker 2: I don't recommend it.
1:48:14
Speaker 1: Are you talking about the stuff like CERN?
1:48:16
Speaker 2: That's what I'm saying. As you get to CERN, they
1:48:17
Speaker 2: start to become, oh, these are now billion-dollar projects. And
1:48:20
Speaker 2: then we start looking at things bigger than CERN, and
1:48:21
Speaker 2: they're trillion-dollar projects. And then this law of scale almost
1:48:24
Speaker 2: applies to everything in the universe. It's something we try
1:48:27
Speaker 2: to apply to companies as well. I want my company
1:48:28
Speaker 2: to grow at the same growth rate, right? We want
1:48:30
Speaker 2: it to be exponential growth rate. But the cost of
1:48:33
Speaker 2: science has also become exponential. Mm-hmm. I hope we can
1:48:36
Speaker 2: change that. I hope we can actually stop that dead
1:48:38
Speaker 2: in its tracks and bring it back because I think
1:48:40
Speaker 2: we've seen the lowering of the accessibility to space. We've
1:48:43
Speaker 2: seen the lowering of how we access space. We've seen
1:48:46
Speaker 2: the lower thing of everything around the science of space,
1:48:49
Speaker 2: except for doing the actual science in space. How do
1:48:51
Speaker 2: we change that fundamental, fundamental theory of it, right? How
1:48:54
Speaker 2: do we make that cheaper to go send up these,
1:48:56
Speaker 2: to get more measurements on the universe expanding on what
1:49:00
Speaker 2: the hell is dark matter? Is there multiverse? I don't
1:49:04
Speaker 2: fucking know. but those scientists and engineers can set up
1:49:06
Speaker 2: instruments to go help us understand it.
1:49:10
Speaker 1: Well, Matt, we're wrapping up the interview, so I do
1:49:12
Speaker 1: have one question. I've been interviewing a lot of innovators
1:49:15
Speaker 1: like you over this year, and I just want to know,
1:49:19
Speaker 1: what's your advice to future innovators?
1:49:22
Speaker 2: My advice to future innovators? Don't fucking do it. And
1:49:30
Speaker 2: the reason I say that is actually because if you
1:49:32
Speaker 2: need to listen to my advice, you're You already don't
1:49:35
Speaker 2: believe in yourself. Don't listen to fucking anybody. It's really easy, Sean,
1:49:41
Speaker 2: to sit here and poke holes in everybody else's companies.
1:49:46
Speaker 2: Like I said, it's human sometimes. It's really, we love
1:49:49
Speaker 2: to want to know why people are going to fail. Oh,
1:49:52
Speaker 2: Elon's going to fail because he does this. Oh, Jeff's
1:49:54
Speaker 2: going to fail because he does this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
1:49:57
Speaker 2: You know what those guys, you know how much Elon
1:49:59
Speaker 2: cares about if I think he's going to fail? Zero.
1:50:01
Speaker 2: And that's really fucking important. that he doesn't give a shit.
1:50:04
Speaker 2: It's really easy to be a pessimist. I don't build
1:50:07
Speaker 2: statues of pessimists.
1:50:10
Speaker 1: Good point, good point. If you could see three people
1:50:13
Speaker 1: on this show, who would they be?
1:50:15
Speaker 2: Three people on the show, who would they be? I
1:50:19
Speaker 2: think you should get a real scientist in here to
1:50:23
Speaker 2: answer all your scientific questions because I think they're fucking awesome.
1:50:26
Speaker 2: So I try to get Kip Thorne or I try
1:50:29
Speaker 2: to get Lindy. Elkin Stanton from Berkeley, who runs the
1:50:32
Speaker 2: Psyche Mission. I tried to get one of them on
1:50:34
Speaker 2: the show because I think they could be really cool.
1:50:36
Speaker 2: They'd probably sit here and be like, who the fuck
1:50:37
Speaker 2: was that mad guy you had? He's an idiot. Here's
1:50:39
Speaker 2: how these things really mean, right? No, but I think
1:50:43
Speaker 2: getting someone really on here that you could dive into
1:50:45
Speaker 2: with those at the level of detail that isn't an engineer,
1:50:48
Speaker 2: that's a physicist, I think would be exceptional because you
1:50:50
Speaker 2: can go forever and talk about some of these rabbit holes,
1:50:53
Speaker 2: but get a different take on it, right? Get a
1:50:54
Speaker 2: different approach to how these work and what you think about.
1:51:00
Speaker 2: I think you should have, now you're going to be
1:51:03
Speaker 2: better at selecting this person than me, but I think
1:51:05
Speaker 2: getting people that have been in really interesting situations in
1:51:11
Speaker 2: times of high stress are really cool to interview. So
1:51:13
Speaker 2: somebody that's been on missions in war, right? Like I said,
1:51:16
Speaker 2: I love listening to these podcasts of like the old
1:51:19
Speaker 2: generation going through and fighting in the jungles of Vietnam
1:51:22
Speaker 2: or being in Iraq and just being able to explain
1:51:25
Speaker 2: that there's probably 50% of them are probably really good
1:51:29
Speaker 2: about explaining the emotional connection that people have when those
1:51:32
Speaker 2: high stress time comes. Because we're all going to experience
1:51:35
Speaker 2: high stress. There's a different level that's raised to when
1:51:37
Speaker 2: your life is on the line. And very few people,
1:51:39
Speaker 2: I think, experience that during their lifetime and live to
1:51:41
Speaker 2: see the other side of it. And like those people
1:51:43
Speaker 2: can really be exceptional storytellers when it comes through. The
1:51:47
Speaker 2: last person I think you should have on here is
1:51:49
Speaker 2: a guy named Victor Vesco.
1:51:51
Speaker 1: Who's that?
1:51:52
Speaker 2: He's the only Triple Crown Explorer in human history. So
1:51:56
Speaker 2: he's been to space he's been to the bottom of
1:51:59
Speaker 2: this marianas trench and he's climbed mountain everest nice and
1:52:05
Speaker 2: he's i don't know if i can talk about what
1:52:06
Speaker 2: he's doing next but it's fucking cool and like i
1:52:09
Speaker 2: just love these guys.
1:52:10
Speaker 1: Who do you know him yeah can you connect.
1:52:12
Speaker 2: Me absolutely absolutely victor's victor's amazing um he's one of
1:52:18
Speaker 2: the few guys that you have in history that like
1:52:21
Speaker 2: he has a lot of money. He's very, he's, he
1:52:23
Speaker 2: could do whatever he wants and he chooses to try
1:52:25
Speaker 2: to push the envelope and continue. I mean, the way
1:52:27
Speaker 2: I put it, honestly, it's like, there's very few people
1:52:30
Speaker 2: that do this, but there's, there's a certain subset of
1:52:32
Speaker 2: people that are always trying new ways to find new
1:52:34
Speaker 2: ways to kill themselves. And I love those guys because
1:52:36
Speaker 2: they're fucking awesome, right? Because they're the ones that are
1:52:38
Speaker 2: living on the edge and exploring. And that's, that's a
1:52:41
Speaker 2: really cool place to be. And, uh, Victor's one of them.
1:52:44
Speaker 1: Right on. Well, We'll reach out. And Matt, I just
1:52:47
Speaker 1: want to say thank you for coming on the show.
1:52:50
Speaker 1: I love what you're doing. It's fascinating. And I can't
1:52:53
Speaker 1: wait to see that 1,000 kilos of platinum come back.
1:52:56
Speaker 1: Me as well.
1:52:57
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on, man.
1:52:58
Speaker 1: You're welcome. Cheers.
1:52:59
Speaker 2: Appreciate it.
1:53:13
Speaker 1: No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan Show from, if
1:53:15
Speaker 1: you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe,
1:53:19
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1:53:28
Speaker 1: on Apple and Spotify podcasts.