title: #33 - Ben Nowack, Co-Founder of Reflect Orbital
author: Relentless
contenttype: podcast
publication: Relentless
sourceurl: https://anchor.fm/s/e402cdc8/podcast/play/105760821/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-6-20%2F404245561-44100-2-c3cce6f4b74d8.mp3
word_count: 21854
When did you build the first bomb? It was like middle school. Like after school, I just kind of hang it out with friends. Like, oh, let's take some like rocket engines apart. So my name has been, I like to build stuff. I was using like a table saw when I was five years old, but that was a carpentry. So we always just like, let me use the tools and I would build cool and cool or stuff. The harder the thing is, the more rewarding it is. Building bombs is a fun thing to do when you're a kid, but eventually you could just like own a build some useful stuff. Ben Noak is the CEO and founder of Reflect Orbital, which I like to call the Dyson Spirer Company. Yeah, Ben, can you talk about basically how you initially came up with this idea? I know that you had like a few other ideas for like energy companies and stuff. Yeah, we're thinking about energy from my whole life, basically. I mean, the climate crisis is one of the bigger problems we face as a species. So we was always trying to figure out a way to maybe solve that. We're going to be worth it. And I never really thought I would do it. I thought it was kind of impossible. Yeah. Yeah, one day I just something kind of clicked. I was looking at the amount of sunlight that you get in different parts of the world and how much more sunlight you get in Africa than you get in Europe. And it's basically triple the amount of sunlight. So if you build a solar farm there, it makes $100 million. That same solar farm would only make $30 million a year in Germany. So it was like holy crap. This difference in sunlight could be worth $70 million. I wonder if you could start a company moving sunlight from one place to another. And you also see the maps of a tiny little square on Africa could power the whole Earth. So I was like, oh, if I could just move that much sunlight, I could power the whole Earth and make just tons of money. So I was like, this could be a great company. It could theoretically solve the climate crisis because it has the energy potential. Right? The amount of energy that hits the surface of the Earth is a thousand times more than what we use. And then there's even more outside of what hits the Earth that just goes off into the solar system. And you said that basically every, I think, is like every second the sun produces like 5,000 times more energy or something. Yeah, then we've ever used. Yeah. Yeah, like if you integrate the human energy consumption over time, yeah, it's, I mean, we use a ton of energy. We burn a ton of fossil fuels and we're causing all these problems. But on the scale of the solar system, it's basically nothing. It's just a tiny little blip. And we feel like it's a big deal here. And like getting that much energy in other ways on Earth is kind of hard, right? Like we can only use 5x more energy if we were getting it all from wind. Like, wouldn't can only supply like 5x more than we currently use. Like all the rain, like all the hydroelectric stuff. Like if we damned up every river, we couldn't even power all the humanity right now. Like the capacity is extreme. We use a ton. But on the scale of the sun, it's very small. Was this one of those things where I know that you like considered hydroelectric nuclear and like wind and solar and then you kind of like landed on this? Was this one of those things where you're like working at SpaceX and you see the launch costs to orbit going down or very quickly I think, right? You are able to predict that out into the future. That one came kind of secondarily. Yeah, I mean, I got the job at SpaceX because I figured I wouldn't solve the climate crisis. I don't know, I kind of made a fusion reactor in high school. I was trying to make anti-matter after that. I was like, oh, fusions, you know, pretty complicated, maybe harder than people are letting on. And by fusion reactor, what do you mean? Just like a little farm's worth fuser. Right. A fused uterium into helium and you know, you got some neutron counts. That's about it. I mean, it was not generating power. You know, is just kind of doing some fusion, a small amount in a measurable way. But. And you also talked about basically like, when you were a kid, I think, you know, you really wanted to like build stuff and you just had a bunch of projects you have an entire YouTube channel. It's just full of different projects that you built. But basically like the harder something was to build, the more you wanted to build it. Yeah. Where did that kind of like come from? I don't really know. I was using like a table saw when I was five years old. My dad was a carpenter. So we always just like, let me use the tools and I would build cooler and cooler stuff. And I remember one time I was like, I really want to build an X-ray machine, like, you know, it costs like 60 bucks to everybody. It's actually two, but I can make a high voltage power supply myself. And it just kind of like, I think it kind of blew his mind a little bit and he like told some of my teachers at school. And then they were like, oh, if you write an essay about building this X-ray machine, we'll give you school credit for it. We'll give you like, you know, two credits or whatever, like as much as like a quarter of the last. Yeah, and high school. Of course, I'll do that. And then my dad was like, very happy to fund it. So I was like, wow, like the cooler the thing you build, like the more interested people are in helping support that. So I was like, oh, well, this is obvious. I just have to build the coolest stuff and people really want to support it and it will go a long way. And I don't know, like over the years that kind of compounded into this just desire to build the newest coolest stuff. That was kind of like, I don't know, there's like this, like you kind of want to challenge yourself. Like it got really fun and I just ended up enjoying it a lot. And after you do like two or three, you kind of realize that like the harder the thing is, more rewarding it is, not just for you, but like people care. Like yeah, people care about it. And it's going to build something useful. Like I've built a lot of things that were kind of useless. Like, you know, I want to make a gas powered flash that I never built that, but it was like, everybody I told that, they were like, oh, that's the worst idea I've ever heard. Like don't do that. Why don't you just don't do that? Why don't you just kind of do that? Well, I thought it'd be kind of sick for a video. But it was like obviously not useful for society. It's kind of like, you know, a bad idea squared. This is like, okay, maybe I won't build something like that. So then you kind of get this heuristic to like build more and more useful stuff. The other one is like, making explosives. Like that was pretty fun in high school. You know, you show your high school friends and they're all really excited that you built are that you made some RDX. But then you show your parents, they're like, your grandparents and then they're like, what's going on? Yeah, they're like, you're gonna go to jail for the rest of your life. So it's like, okay, maybe I'll do something for the good of. What was the first, like, when did you build the first bomb? How old? Oh, it was like high school or middle school. Like after school, I just kind of hanging out with friends. Like, oh, let's take some like rocket engines apart and like, you know, crush up a powder and stuff. Where did you get the rocket engine? Oh, you know, like model rocket. So I just fly model rocket slot. I don't know, yeah, building bombs is a fun thing to do here and there when you're a kid. But eventually you're just like, oh, this is a terrible path to go down. I want to build some useful stuff. So I don't know, these things kind of blended together into like, okay, I want to make things that are like maximal useful that are like generally accepted and generally for the good of people. But I just kind of had the attitude to just like keep doing things constantly. And that kind of, that could have pointed in any direction really. Yeah, especially in like middle school, high school. I think like a lot of people go through existential crises then and yeah, I kind of had the one where I was like, wow, I definitely have like ADHD. I need to be constantly moving. I need to be constantly like feeling like I'm going forward like ran around a lot like, you know, did flips like everybody else. But then when you build things like specifically things that are really cool and you show it to people, like, you know, RC planes and then people like, oh, you should like, you know, go fly RC planes and do zero gravity flights for NASA. Like test like zero gravity. And it's like, I didn't end up doing that. But like people just suggesting that to me was exciting enough to like want to continue down the road. So it's kind of like, oh, wow, you're actually doing something good for the world feeling that other people like tap into and get way more excited. So that like positive feedback. I think was the seed of all of us of all of this. Yeah, I know it's years before the YouTube channel or anything like that. Yeah, do you think there was like any projects in or think, you know, builds like your name is like Ben builds, right? Yeah. In particular, that I guess we're, I don't know, like inflection points along the journey, like specific things that were really difficult, like push your boundaries and then. Yeah, for a while, it was RC planes. Interesting. Even before the Ben and Bill's days, I had this channel called RC Motors CT, where I just built RC planes and flew them. I think since like 2009 to like 2014, that was pretty young. I just like flew them after high school, got really good at like building foamies and flying around. And yeah, that was kind of the thing. It was like this whole category of RC planes. And then with the Ben and Bill's thing, the X-ray machine started that. So I was already doing the RC planes before the X-ray machine. And then the X-ray machine was kind of the seed of like, oh, I want to build like newer, crazier things that are using weird physics or like things that people don't typically build. There's a lot of people that build RC planes. And then I kind of developed this real desire to build new stuff that nobody else had built. Or I was like, you know, maybe one of 10 people to build. Like a fusion reactor, like, you know, this is known as built that. Well, like 50 kids, right? It's like if you, that was actually probably one of the more common ones that other people have built. Common. Yeah. I mean, like liquid nitrogen and a liquid nitrogen thing. I made like a spotter gun. Like, you know, a lot of people have done that for like telescopes and stuff, but that one is pretty cool too. So I kind of wanted to be like different in a way where I was developing like new enough skills that could potentially be useful. And kind of like the goal became like, I want to build out this base of random skills that can be applied to doing new stuff in the future. So it's kind of like if you want to get really good at running, you got to go run every day. Like I wanted to get really good at building stuff. So I could build a new thing. So I just started building stuff every day. And yeah, I'll kind of just like snowballed and added on itself. But yeah, the big inflection point of being maximally different was really fun. And I think that kind of started with the extra machine and that kicked off kind of the whole Ben and builds thing. Where it was like, oh, I want to build these like maximally different things. And it was usually things that were just in industry. Like, wasn't like I did anything new for the first time. It was just like, oh, here's this thing. That's kind of hard to do. That industry usually does that costs a lot of money. Like I want to try to do that, you know, at a low cost or you know, do it myself or something like that. How do you like get your hands on all materials to build a different stuff? I went to the dump and just like found stuff. It's like this really good dump. I'm from Cape Cod. So we had this dump in East Town where you could just like go pick out like lawnmower engines or computers or things like that. So a lot of it just came for free. There was one somewhere where I just like crushed up grills every single day and melted down the aluminum. So I could like try to make a steam engine. There are a lot of just fun projects like that. And then yeah, my parents supported me a little bit. My dad was a carpenter and they like, he just like if I had a good idea and it made sense and he was like, oh yeah, this is going to like help your career. Like this is as good as a college class or something like that. Then he would he's really helpful. He helped out. So that was really helpful. And then it ended up being like teachers wanted to support me. So they would like donate things like one of my teachers like donate a laze to like the shop. So that was really great. And it was super rewarding. Yeah, it was really fun. Did anything go horribly wrong on any of the projects? Like explosions and you know, the furnace blowing up or something like that? Yeah, pretty bad. When I even in like, I think elementary school I was making like potato guns and like potato guns occasionally explode when you make them. It's just like PVC pipe and you spray hair spray in the back and they can hang it with a grill igniter. And yeah, the thing exploded and like shot backwards and broke my sliding glass door window. My parents were super mad about that. It's the worst I've ever felt probably. Did you get the credit in school for that? No, no, no, that was pretty school credit. No, I'm not one. Yeah, that was just yeah, young boys being dumb. Interesting. Interesting. OK, when did you decide to like start ever like at what age did you want to start recording the things that you were kind of building and showing the process? I think it was with RC planes. I wanted to put a camera on an RC plane and fly it around and like look at trees from above and look at people's houses because you can't see that normally. So I was really interested in that. So I remember like I got this little flip camera and I like taped it to one of my RC planes and like I don't know, I'd crash it all the time. But I was that was kind of like the first time I started filming things. And then I was like, oh, I should like film it from the front. So I can like video myself like flying the plane. That would be a more interesting video. And then I don't know, one thing kind of led to another. And then by the time I got to the bed and build days, I had been doing that for a number of years. So I was like, oh, I want to start this fresh channel and like, you know, just have it all be just focused on building crazy stuff. Yeah, that was kind of the idea there. Yeah, I know that you didn't like immediately jump to like technically you're building all this stuff. But you're not trying to like commercialize it and build a company. You know, what was the process from you kind of like going through high school and getting the first like, I think like SpaceX and like SIP line and stuff like that? Why'd you like decide to go work for other people instead of just building your own thing? Yeah, kind of saw the path, the YouTube path, not really leading anywhere. Like I saw it leading into lots of cool videos and like getting money to spend on dumb stuff. But nothing like impacting humanity kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's all for entertainment. So you can kind of justify anything like Mythbusters or like, I mean, Mythbusters they build really cool stuff. But like then you get like, like who's that guy like Whistle and Diesel? Like he just like waste money and people watch it and it's so entertaining. Or like Mr. Beast, like just wasting money is entertaining enough that people watch it. And I kind of saw that as like probably the biggest hack with YouTube to do like the coolest weirdest stuff. And I was like, ah, like that's cool. But it's not the same as like what, you know, SpaceX is doing or do useful things. Yeah, I wanted to do useful stuff. And I was like, okay, if I want a job, you know, about a company that's doing useful stuff, I'm going to have to get a mechanical engineering degree and do the whole thing. So that's why I went on that path. And I was lucky enough to get into SpaceX, my freshman year of college. Somebody was watching my YouTube channel like at SpaceX. Yeah, their lunch break. They sent it to their manager and they gave me a couple of phone calls. Um, yeah. I think in touch with you. Like I don't, I had applied like twice and got twice before you got to reach out. You got to reach out. Yeah. Well, I was like a high schooler. I was like, yeah, man, I'm applying to college. But like I'll drop out and join SpaceX. It was like super crazy. Like nobody read that. I'm not read it. Yeah. But when somebody was watching YouTube channel and they reached out, it worked pretty well. Yeah. So that was, that was the first kind of like, oh wow, this YouTube thing is actually like different, like I'm the very good side of the bell curve. Like this is, this is kind of an unfair advantage. Like being able to create content and get attention. I'm just really happy to. Yeah. That was the first time I was like, wow, you can kind of do anything you want if you're willing to like take a weird enough path and feel confident enough in it. Because before I started the, the Ben and builds channel, I was kind of like, yeah, maybe one day like somebody would be watching it and then they'll all get like a really cool job and it ended up happening a couple of years later. Um, which was kind of like the dream. I didn't think that would, like, I didn't do that on purpose. I kind of just did it for fun. But it was like one of the things in the back of your mind. It's like, oh, this could be a really good portfolio for later. Like, you know, maybe I'll, I'll try a little extra hard here. Um, and then I'm working out just fine. So that was, that was kind of a mind blur. Um, and yeah, like I was, you know, getting them can't go into your degree. Obviously, that's critical for working at SpaceX. I loved working there so much as an intern. They gave me so much ownership and it was just like the coolest projects ever with the coolest people. Would you actually do that? Um, I worked on the Dragon 2 prop tanks and rocket engines team. Um, so I built like these giant automated test fixtures, mostly tooling. Um, they don't let interns on flight parts too much anymore. Um, but yeah, I did a ton of tooling projects like, you know, making sure tanks that had weird problems wouldn't, you know, like, stuff like that, um, making sure that they're performing all of that. Like, there's a lot of weird things, uh, that these components do that you have to make sure you're doing correctly. Um, so I got to, I got to solve some pretty fun problems. Um, and yeah, work on some like really cool projects with a lot of ownership too. Um, I think that was the coolest thing. I, you know, built some components that were like, you know, $120,000 and I was like, oh, wow, it takes so long to work to get, make $120,000. And they're just like, letting me do this on this really cool thing, you know, that's, that's actually going to test parts to go to space. Um, it was just like the best thing ever. And honestly, I probably would have dropped out of college if I didn't have that experience. Um, I didn't know if that, like engineering was the thing for me. I was like, uh, like, you know, maybe I'll just become a welder or maybe I'll just, like, do YouTube for a while. But I would, like, at what age are you just, like, thinking that, you know, in that, in that direction? Yeah. I mean, the year before I went to college, really. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I was, I wasn't sure about it because I wouldn't know what the work would be like. Um, but after SpaceX, it was like, oh, this is just, clearly the thing. Yeah. Um, I really wanted to double down on it. So that gave me the desire to, like, just, you know, finish school. Were there any, like, other thoughts on, like, the company side for your, your, your in that situation, your environment as SpaceX and you're kind of like thinking through different ideas on potential, like, I know energy and ended up being kind of like the big thing, but, or I think it's a big thing. Um, but were there any other, like, paths that you might have gone down that you just decided not to and why? Yeah. I mean, before I got the job at SpaceX, I was trying to make anti matter. And I was like, oh, before I make anti matter, I need superconductor wires. And before I make superconductor wires, I need to make liquid hydrogen or, uh, liquid helium. So I was like, making this helium liquefier. And like, I had, like borrowed money from my uncles and stuff and like friends and family. I had raised like eight grand from like friends and family to build, like, helium liquefier. And it was honestly completely nuts. Uh, I was like making the video for YouTube. And I was just like, God, like, there's just no world where this turns into anything. Like I'm just kind of doing stuff. Um, like, the mission is really important, right? Like the mission of SpaceX is really clear and really important. And this was just kind of just like lots of effort with no direction. Um, what was the idea behind like, okay, so you make anti matter? What is happening after that? All storage is pretty bad. Um, like batteries, batteries are good. Like they're getting very cheap, but it's still, you know, so much mass to like store a small amount of energy. So I was like, oh, anti matter is clearly the best way to store lots of energy. Um, clearly it's the way to like get around the solar system. Um, it's like also, you know, forget exactly. It was like, you know, a couple billion dollars or whatever. Or maybe it's even trillions of dollars per gram. I don't know. It's some crazy amount. Like we can't really make it. We've only made like a couple, yeah, you know, atoms of anti matter. And it just seemed like a really cool project too. Cause it's like, oh, I can make like a linear accelerator and like, you know, I could try to contain it in this super conductor thing. Um, but yeah, I mean, I hadn't even gone to school for mechanical engineering yet. So I was just like this kid on Cape Cod, let's like building, trying to make a healing look with fire for no reason. And it's something that you can buy anyway. It's like, I mean in the MRI industry, you can just like, look, liquid healing is pretty easy to get. You know, you just use it to cool the magnets. Um, so like wasn't even that big of a deal. And I was just like, okay, this is like, this is just saster. Like I want to do something that has a mission. So I decided to just work at the, like the company that had really figured out the team side that had the coolest people working out at that was working on the clearest mission. Um, and that was obviously SpaceX. Um, and yeah, that's mostly why I went there. Cause I was like, I kind of gave up on the energy thing with that anti matter project. I was like, this is just like, this is in nut slant and everything else is terrible. Um, so I just like, yeah, I got a job working at SpaceX. And obviously they're like the rockets work very well. They're, you know, they self land. They're absolutely crushing it. Um, but I was, I kind of realized like obviously they're doing like Starlink and Starlink is a great business. But I remember like when getting up on stage and talking about like, oh, you know, the rocket business is only a two billion dollar a year market. So the Starlink thing is like in the trillions of dollars per year market. And I was kind of like, wow, you guys have spent like, you know, 18 years on this rockets thing. And maybe it's not what you thought. Um, so now we're doing Starlink. And obviously the Starlink thing got me, but I was like, man, rockets really just need a greater purpose. And like you were there in like 2015, 2016, 2016, 2017, okay. Yeah. And I mean, the whole Mars thing was really cool, but it's not the same as like even the fossil fuel industry like compared with that. Right. Like it's very easy to spend 20 billion dollars or a couple hundred billion dollars a year on the fossil fuel industry. Cause it's serving all of humanity. You know, it's like turning on all of these lights and going to Mars. Doesn't have that same thing or it's not directly helping everybody. Everybody you tell, you know, everybody you're like, oh, I'm working at SpaceX. Everybody tell that to be like, oh, that's, that's cool. You're making these rockets. But like, what are they doing here on earth? They always bothered me a little bit. It kind of felt like, you know, telling people I was making a gas part flashlight a little bit. It was like, oh, here's this cool engineering thing. Like I'm really excited about it. But it's not actually like having, but it's just kind of like a vision and there's nothing really concrete that's going to impact the people on earth and the people that you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of what I went there for. Right. It's like this, this greater impact and this greater mission. So yeah, I was excited to work there. Like I love the projects. And I would have continued. I mean, it's like one of the best jobs you can have, like very clearly. But I made a pretty bold decision to like just go to crazy startups land. So like some SpaceX friends, they're starting companies or like pretty early engineers, the companies were like asking me to join the companies. And I said, yes, it was also kind of like I wanted to work on newer, hard things. And SpaceX said like, obviously, there's so many smart people there. And like I was nowhere near the smartest there. So I didn't feel like I would have a massive impact on exactly what the vehicles would do or exactly what impacts they would have. Like I didn't really think I would change the curve at all. Like it was already going to do this. It was already going to with or without me. Yeah. Yeah. Or whatever the success looks like for SpaceX, it's happening. Yeah. Like there's this line and I could only change it by a tiny little amount at best. And I decided like just starting something brand, it would be kind of like dividing by zero. So like you're kind of creating something out of nothing. And I didn't have the idea to do something new yet. And I was also very respectful of what doing something new requires. Like when you start a new company, you're kind of with you for like seven years. Like you kind of have to make it work. And like even after working at a couple of these startups, I realized like, yeah, if you start a company and it's kind of a bad idea and it kind of like, you know, the market goes to zero, you're really stuck just with a dud. And you've just like burned seven years on nothing. And honestly, sometimes your high-reability goes down when you start your own company. And yeah, after working at two startups that like didn't do very well, where I was like employee three or four, I realized like, wow, it's so important to just have a very clear idea and something really big to start with. So I became obsessed with big ideas. And like, you know, what could be the biggest thing? And like if you can compare any two things, like, you know, is this thing better than this thing? You can kind of do that for any number of things. And you can basically like sort an entire set, but just you just stack rank them. Yeah. And doing any number of comparisons on any particular scale. And like all the scales are different. But I started doing that with companies and ideas. And I probably like thought about a hundred different companies or ideas. What were some of the ones where you'd like genuinely consider them? And we're like, I could take this, you know, go down this path. Yeah, I mean, anti-matter is one of them, right? That was one of the crazy things. There was another couple, there was like drone stuff, like doing drone deliveries. Actually, yeah, one of them started as like, you know, I want to, you know, start with like, planes that look for sharks when you're surfing in the ocean. And then we'll turn that into like doing drone deliveries and basically replace UPS. And then it was like a couple months later, I learned about zip line. And I was like, oh, they're already doing basically that idea. Like, let me just go and like, see. And like, see. Yeah. And I had already written like this 300 page document, trying to go beyond visualized site. I don't know. But then I learned about zip line. And I was like, oh, this is like the perfect thing. So I ended up joining there. So that was, that was one that was pretty interesting. How'd you get in touch with, how'd you get in touch with the person as a plane? I just applied. You just applied. Yeah. They just had a lot of fun with you and liked you. Yeah. I was also like kind of leaving that, you know, one of the other startups I was at. So it was pretty good timing. But yeah, that was that was one idea. You know, some of the ones are other ones are smaller, like, you know, doing better sensing of soil compactness and soil moisture content. I've seen more crops. I don't know. Like a lot of things are just like pretty small and pretty terrible. And then there's a lot of like, I don't know, just, you know, crazy. Like it's stupid squared ideas. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, space planes and all sorts of energy storage things. Like flywheel energy storage and battery energy storage. And like, like, moving a mountain up and down energy storage. Like, are you are you basically? Well, I've never heard that before. Are you basically trying to kind of do something that's like maximally useful, but maximally also likely to actually have some real impact and not just like some kind of pipe dream possibility? Yeah. And spend seven to ten years on. And it just like does not work. Yeah, utility is really important. Yeah, I mean, seven to ten years is really not very much on the scale of good ideas. Like when you figured out that burning fossil fuels was a great idea, we did it. We've done it for hundreds of years. And like people continued long after the first guys, like, you know, lit some coal on fire, right? Because it just makes sense. It's like, wow, you can light coal on fire. That's freaking awesome. Or like the first people who invented fire, like, we still light camp fires. And basically the same way. But there was a guy who kind of did that for the first time. Or one thing I was always obsessed with is like people who build boats. Like imagine there's like an island over there. And it's just like driving a craze. Like, how do I get to that island? Like, I know my dad, like, died trying to swim over to the sea. I'm over to that island. But like, what if I like got this log and like, paddled it over there or something? And then it's like, aw, you know, like, a couple generations later, like, what if the log was deeper? And like, we came up south with like, how do people actually invent these ideas for new things? Like, like boats or fire or combustion? And that's kind of like the definition of utility. It's like it's new utility that never existed before. So I got really interested in that. And just like new utility that's never existed before. And mostly the ideas you have just do not, they just don't have it. Even make it. Like, you start rating it against like, the idea of a boat. And it's like, these aren't even in the same context. You can't hollow out this piece of wood. Yeah, it's just like, it doesn't matter. Like, it's nothing on the scale of like irrigation, like discovering that you can move water from one place to another. Like, it's not like that kind of idea. So yeah, like most of the hundred ideas, like, you know, they only make it like a couple hours or a couple days. You get really excited about it. You buy some stuff on Amazon. You start putting it together and you're just like, what am I doing here? Like, this is stupid. And I just do that on the side of like, having a real job. And it was great. What was that process for you when you're thinking about a new idea and you come up with something in your head or just like pops into your head? What's that process from going from, you know, it's in your head to eventually having an actual like, prototype that you're like showing on a YouTube video? I mean, it depends on the project or just throwing it out. Yeah, like, I don't know. I remember I wanted to make a drone that could go to the top of Mount Everest. I did like all the propeller handcawks, like all the battery sizing handcawks, like, figure out what size props I needed and then like started buying them. Yeah, I mean, it happened a lot before. Like, I did this like Tahoe camera and, you know, that started with like, oh, I want to take a picture with the bottom of like Tahoe. I feel like that would be pretty cool. Obviously, this is not a company idea. But, you know, you just like, do the handcawks, make like a nice spreadsheet, check an analysis, do some analysis analysis and then you start buying, you know, parts on McMaster and they start machining them that when I actually ended up seeing through to the end. But yeah, after a couple months of like, having more and more frequent ideas, I started getting faster and faster at killing them. To the point where I would start like, killing the idea before I even started building it. And I felt like I was actually going nowhere. I felt like it was kind of a backwards step so I can't even commit to getting things done anymore. But it was also like, but it wasn't actually that. It was just like you being able to decide this is not a worth working on. Yeah, this isn't the extra hours. Yeah, well, because you got to weigh it against like, you're going to die someday. And like if you spend your entire life like chasing things that go nowhere, you know, it's just a waste of life. Or like if you're not moving fast enough, like everybody else is like competing and having no ideas. So like you're just completely uncompetitive. So it's just like, you know, you really want to take bigger risks and bigger bets, but you also don't want to do that on things that aren't good enough. So it's kind of both things at once. Do you have kind of like a list in your head or an order of operations for you have a new idea all the way down to you actually have designed and created something? Or is it like concrete like that? Or is it just going, you know, by however you're feeling or whatever? I have a very long list in notes. So it was just kind of in there for a while. Now it's mostly like how you feel. You really only have one idea at a time. Like one idea that you're really excited for at a time. And until you realize it's dumb, you can't really move on to have another one. I kind of realize that. It's like everybody has like their one idea for their company and it's kind of like, oh, this is the big one. And it's like usually not. And until you realize that, you can't really move on. I mean, maybe like the like iteration process or going down, you know, some set of steps, right? From going from just an idea to a thing that's actually created. Like, yeah, I think I think you have the idea. You do like your own analysis on it. You see if it exists, like you do some research just see if somebody else has done it before or why they didn't. You kind of like get an idea of how big the market is and like what impact it could theoretically have in the best case scenario. That one kills a lot of ideas. And then after a couple of days or a couple of weeks of that, then you start like asking all your friends and then you start asking like all your the smartest people in your network. And then you start like having those people introduce you to the smartest people they know. And then you do that for a while. And then if it checks out on that level, then you keep pursuing it. Then yeah, then you just kind of keep going. So that's the process I ran into. Most ideas don't make it pass the like, you know, a couple of days of your own analysis. Like if you do really aggressive analysis and you're like, okay, let me try to kill as quickly as possible. A lot of things don't make it. Yeah. And yeah, again, it's all just like chasing that kind of maximum utility thing. Like if you can create something that's like net new for the world that is economically viable to the point where like a hundred lawyers can sit in a room and decide that it's a good idea to spend a billion dollars doing a thing. Then it has a really good chance of existing after you die. It was kind of this like, I want to create like an idea. You know, it was actually for a while. I had this very clear vision in my head. It was like, I'm like getting the soil ready for like the seed. Like, and then when the seed is planted, like all allow it to grow. And then like I want to make sure that like, you know, once the seed grows, it'll be handed off to people and like people will like continue to care for this tree after I die. It was the kind of thought that was running through my mind. And like, if you know, if you want to do that, it has to be like a really beautiful tree, you know, first of all, you have to get the dirt really ready to make sure that it's going to grow. So like that was like getting a really good building and all that. But then the seed was always like missing piece. And I feel like I was kind of lost for a while trying to find the missing piece to seed. But still like eventually it ended up happening. In the grand scheme of things, it ended up happening a lot faster than I think I expected. I imagine it probably would happen in my 40s. You just like knew that you would have gone through enough iterations on enough different ideas that you would have found something that just like would, you know, satisfy your curiosity while also being useful and everything. I mean, most great people start the thing like in their 20s or 30s. Usually after your 40s, you kind of, it's done. Not always. Some people like have the best thing ever when they're like, think like Walmart and like retail for some reason, like Sam Walton was in his 40s. He'd already gone through a few different, you know, running different grocery stores and stuff. Yeah, something's like that work. Or like the other one is like the KFC guy. He started when he was like 60. That was just insane to me. But usually if you're doing like a new thing, like a lot of new and stuff was like, you know, when he was pretty young. So I figured like if I was getting into my 30s, like that's like, you know, red zone, like, it better happen quick otherwise you're gonna have a real problem. But I figured it would probably happen around then. But yeah, I don't know, this is getting a little pretty meta now, but this is pretty the perfect. This is kind of the process. Yeah. Yeah. So I know that there was this like experiment in 1992 where like Russia shot like I believe the first mirror into space. And so this wasn't like the first time, you know, you guys are the first people shooting a mirror into space. What why did they do that in the first place? And then like there wasn't, I think the solar energy, there's solar industry back then. So there was just no like obvious business model for, you know, orbiting mirrors. But like what was the process for you kind of coming onto this idea? Yeah, there's an AMIA. They did it to warm up mines in Siberia. That was mostly fun to it was like these, these mine owners. Yeah, there was about 200 megawatts of solar installed in the world back then, which is like, like a medium size solar farm today. We spent like $3 trillion building solar on the world since then. I mean, even in the 2010 solar was like $359 megawatt hour. Now it's like in the days. I think it's like on out by like 10X, right? Yeah, in past years. Yeah, just since 2010. Like it's really insane. Like honestly, it's yeah, it's even faster than like rockets right because the industry is so much larger. It's the whole earth. So the combination of basically like mass orbit going down massively plus solar, you know, just massive build out of solar equals good business that couldn't have existed. Yeah. But that's not why I had the idea. I really had the idea because I was thinking about moving sunlight around and how that could be valuable. And I was like, yeah, if you can move sunlight from a place where it's easy to get to a place where people really want it, that could be a company. And you know, light is really easy to move around with the mirror. Ligo is this like laser interparametry experiment and measured gravitational waves. And they, their mirrors and that thing lose about three photons per million. It's just like insanely efficient. And even just normal mirrors like a bathroom mirror is like 80% efficient. And if you compare that with like, you know, solar panels are like 20% efficient. And then you have to like convert into electricity and send that around and all that stuff. So I was like, oh, moving sunlight around just like with a mirror could actually be more efficient than that. And you can move it along distance like it moves pretty far. Sunlight moving in a vacuum makes it 13.8 billion light years to our eyes when we look up at the stars that are really far away. Like those are super far away. Like you don't really lose light. So like light traveling in a vacuum is one of the most efficient forms of transportation. It's really easy to move with mirrors. So it's like, oh, there's probably something here. That was the core idea. And then obviously the best place to get sunlight is in space where it's constant. It's never night time up there. And the best place to send it is the dark side of the earth where people, like, urine for the light. Like nobody ever has sunlight on the dark side of the earth. And you could just send it down with one mirror. So I started looking into like how to build out the constellation. How expensive the satellites would be. Exactly what the satellites should look like. Solar sail vehicles are a great architecture. It's just like four booms that are really thin. And then, you know, the tensioned mesh reflector. And I was just like, wow, this is actually pretty light. It's pretty efficient. Obviously you lose a ton coming through the atmosphere. The sunlight spreads out a lot from the small satellite. You get like a five and a half kilometer diameter circle on the ground. So that loses a ton of the irradiance. But if you're capturing that over a solar farm that's on the board of five kilometers across, yeah. It's actually quite a good conversion efficiency. You don't have to build that thing on the ground. So I had initially done the calculations for energy because that seemed like the biggest business. And yeah, I mean, it was like, oh, yeah, this can work. This can be obviously cheaper than batteries, cheaper than fossil fuels. And even one day it could be as cheap as solar during the day. With cheaper launch costs. I was like, wow, this is such a good thing to get into. It might be a really good idea. Yeah. And I knew that energy industry was gigantic. It's like, is it 8% of the global economy or something like that? It's like this constant amount of value that you could generate. And obviously I cared a lot about the climate change. And you had a big, big deal that was. And I was like, I mean, the energy industry is one of those things that you get really excited about. Like a 1% increase in. Like I had a couple of ideas that were like, oh, this could be like a 1% increase in natural energy. Yeah. But this was like, you could materially double it. So that's just like, you could materially double $3 trillion of assets, solar assets. So that was a big deal. The other one was like just building on the energy market with all the lighting markets. Because we're moving sunlight around. And there's so many other things you can use sunlight for. So one of the early concepts was just moving sunlight around in vacuum tubes from one place to another. And I was like, oh, you could like use that to light up all of Europe and power all of Europe. Like you could basically have this like, just like tube of, like full of sunlight, like a pipe. Because it's another thing in like startups is like, oh man, and like we're kind of just competing with pipes here. Like this is stupid. So it's like, oh, we could make the pipe full of sunlight and bring it to everybody. Did you have any other ideas like filling a pipe with light? Like with, or iterations of moving sunlight around other than through wires and through like pipes, I guess. Yeah. I mean, for a while, I thought an obstacle would be really important. So I thought about like making basically a beam expander or like an inverse telescope in space and then beaming the sunlight down in a more accurate way. If you could beam sunlight down and hit like a 500 meter diameter circle, it could be more valuable than a five kilometer diameter circle. Because there's much more smaller farms than big solar farms, much more small towns than big towns. And you can like graph all this out. It turns out it had so much cost that it's actually worth to just do the one satellite. And there's enough big solar farms out there to receive that giant area of light. That it's just way more economical to do that. But yeah, I looked into that for a long time. Yeah, the vacuum tubes was the other one. And then like, yeah, vacuum tubes plus storage, I don't know, like a bunch of weird little things like that. There was this like vacuum tubes derivative idea where you basically just make your dense solar farms a bit more effective. But that would never be competitive with PV solar. It was like, by the time you build one of those things, PV solar is like half the cost. And it's just like, that was a non-starter. PV solar is really hard to beat. I think for a while I was actually trying to beat PV solar, realized that it was so impossible. And then one day I was on a run and I was like, wait, what if I just made PV solar better by like just sending sunlight down to it? Yeah, I actually heard that. And has there been any other moments where you're just like out on a run and like ideas kind of come to you or things just kind of like coalesce? Because I know that like exercise is absolutely insane for generating ideas. Yeah, no all the time. Yeah, I think most of my good ideas come from runs. It's also like if I get really stressed out, I'll get super fidgety and I can't sleep. I'll just go and run it like 2am. Sometimes that's pretty nice. And yeah, I think going for a run, I don't know, running was really special to me in college. Because college was pretty depressing. I felt like my life was kind of going nowhere. And I didn't really want to build stuff. So I was just like, you know what? I'll just get really good at running and like climbing stuff. And it'll be like something to get better at while I'm kind of just like plateauing here at school. It's like finishing things. Why did you decide to go to college? Is knowing that like you weren't happy doing it? I thought it would be very important for like, you know, getting the solid career. Like working at places like SpaceX. I mean, you kind of like you're like learning a language that you can use to communicate with other folks. So it made sense that way. Like, yeah. One of the parents think that it was like the right move. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean they were like pretty supportive of kind of whatever. I decided to do, but yeah, after like, you know, meaning only great folks at SpaceX, I decided like, yeah, I want to do the college thing like all these people. So I can like hang out and not feel like an outsider. I think that was important. It's also like you're kind of risking, like we're so like in society right now, college is like becoming more okay to not go to. And you can still get a good job, but it's still like it's a curve, right? It's getting better. I don't know if we're quite there yet. I wasn't willing to take the risk. I thought that it was a right move. Yeah. I didn't have a good enough option. Like I didn't start reflecting college. I probably would have dropped out if I did. There was a while where I wanted to like drop out of college and just work at SpaceX, but like my mentor was like, it's probably not a good idea because it's gonna be hard to get a job anywhere else. And I took that advice to heart. And I think it's getting more okay. I think like right now it makes more sense to like not go to college. I think in the future it's gonna make even more sense. I think college is ineffective and expensive and honestly terrible for society in a lot of ways. If you're just excited about doing things, you should just be given, like honestly you should be given the amount of money that you would spend on college to do your own stuff. With the right person, it's so much more effective to do that. I think I got a way better education for like 10 grand in high school, like with the Ben and build stuff that I did in all of college. But still you learn things that you wouldn't learn on your own in college. And I think some of that's nice. But yeah, back when I went, it was, I don't know, it felt like a different world then than it does now. I think now it's a little bit cooler and not gonna college. How much do you think like the total cost for all the different bills that you did over the years? Like the total amount of money actually invested in doing all these different things was. Do you track it? Yeah, Ben and builds was like 20 to 30 grand. Really? Like only? Yeah, crazy. It wasn't terrible. Yeah, I mean college, you know, it's in the hundreds, right? Yeah, like easily, you know, 300 grand. Yeah, a lot of stuff I got for free, a lot of stuff I got on eBay. Have people kind of been, I don't know if kind is the right word, but like wanting to help you? Yeah, because you build stuff. Yeah, for the most part. Like I would do like some contracting work in high school. Like I worked for Peter Brown a little bit. We did this project where we put a camera out in Hawaii on the reefs to like protect from poachers. And he gave me like, you know, pretty generous contract gig for that. Also had this like, you know, this like excited kid fly out and like work with me for nine days and like, you know, got paid a decent amount for that, which was great because I could buy more stuff and build more cool things. So there were like a cool little like pretty unique things that came from building stuff that people were like, you know, have a sport. I never like actually made money on my tube channel though. I made like seven designs total. Yeah, I hated ads, so I never ran ads. Same with me. Yeah, I don't run ads. Yeah, I've never got to run ads. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know, ads are annoying. Was there like a toggle where you could turn off ads on your YouTube channel? I think I just never toggle it on. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you could like run ads sense or whatever. It was like before pre-roll ads were common. So I don't know, I wasn't interested in that anyway. I didn't have the biggest channel either. Well, I mean, you got like 20,000 subscribers, which is like not small, especially if like a few of your videos get like hundreds of thousands of views. Yeah, it was a huge though. I don't know, I just hated ads. It was more of like a thing. Like I feel like ads are kind of like stealing your attention in a big way and it's like, oh man, it should not be ads. It should be like cool facts or something. Like I wish we'd all worked just said cool facts on the matter. So super beside the point, obviously companies need a way to get their story out, but still. Yeah. So during the first like, I don't know, after that run, what was the process from kind of going from there to actually getting that first balloon launched on? Like what did it, you know, the early days kind of look like? Yeah, the early days are a flex. It looked a lot like me in a garage living out of my van. The really early days, I was like, you know, working as a blind kind of doing stuff at like 2am. You were just tankering on the side. Yeah, yeah. What was the early tankering? Well, it's just like running Excel, like doing equations there, spending some CAD, making some big mirror prototypes and stuff like that. I was really obsessed with trying to like get light, call a maid and sent down a vacuum tube without just a solar panel and a laser. Obviously it didn't work at all. But I was like, I was working on that for a little while, which was pretty fun. I don't know, it was just like messing with mirrors. I had never done optics before. So it was kind of like teaching myself optics. Yeah, so a bit of that, like just like spending personal money on some fun optics things. And then yeah, I took an angel check and he was like, yeah, if you quit your job, I'll give you 50 grand. And I was like, yeah, I think this is the thing. I think there's something about this sunlight thing that's big enough that this is going to be worth it. And it was really, it wasn't like the vacuum tubes thing. I feel like that's the technical solution for the fundamental idea of moving sunlight around. And I was like, yeah, I don't know if this is the right technical solution, but I feel like the sunlight thing is valuable enough. It's the biggest amount of energy I've encountered. And it seems like the easiest to access. And so I was just like, yeah, you know what? This is worth it. I don't want to wait anymore. And you want to just go for it. Yeah, and I was like, I just want to spend all my time on this because it felt like the time I spent, even just doing those excelsiates at 2am was more valuable than my daytime job is this feels more impactful. This feels like it has higher potential. So I just like, I can't keep doing this. How long did you feel like just not great? You go through college, you're not feeling awesome. You feel like you're not doing a lot of stuff. And then even at that job, it's like maybe useful, but it's not like the thing that you were just put on this earth to do kind of thing. How long was that kind of gap from just building things as a kid on YouTube or making things to deciding to start the company? It was pretty long. I think the was it like 2015. It's kind of like when I gave it the YouTube thing. And this would have been like 2021. It was like six years. Yeah, it was a while. And I kind of tossed it up to like, you know, because honestly, like I would look back on the YouTube days as one of the best times in my life. I was just going crazy. Like I would not sleep for two days, just like writing code for an ROV, like just trying to figure it out. It's how I taught myself how to code. And it was just like so, I don't know, so fun. And it's just so good and so new and so exciting. And the normal college and kind of normal jobs weren't really that. And it was all this side project stuff. That felt like it wasn't going anywhere. I don't know, it was like, it was good and bad. Like it was like, okay, I'm being more integrated in society. I'm not being as insane like I'm being more normal. Like it's it's okay, but you didn't eventually. It won't be. I like, yeah, not really. Now, yeah. It wasn't the same as just like building stuff and like being super weird and like really leaning into what I like doing. This is like, yeah, I don't know. Even like having a social life is like kind of nice at first, but I was like, oh, this isn't the same as like building stuff. I don't know, it's super weird. I guess I'm kind of just a weird dude. And what I wasn't letting myself be a weird dude is not as fun. It just wasn't as fun. Yeah, it wasn't as fun. So yeah, like starting the company felt like that, you know, for a while too. It was just like me being really weird, like working on a crazy project, like just trying new crazy stuff every day and trying to make something cool happen. And yeah, I ended up working out. I think I got really lucky. Do you think it was luck or was it just kind of like, you had already gone through this process of trying a whole bunch of different things and think through a whole bunch of different problems. And then you finally figured out something that like fit the, you know, it's gonna be useful. Likely to succeed, can work on it for the next 10 years and good things will happen. Yeah, I mean, there's a formula for luck, right? Like say something as a half a percent chance we try it like 400 times. Like yeah, we try it 400 times if like, you know, I guess like a 200% like that's gonna happen for that's terrible amount of time. Guaranteeing it. Yeah. That's the entry human map. Yeah, like, but that's all you have to do, right? So it's like, oh, it's really unlikely that this is actually gonna happen, but like if I just try enough things, like maybe maybe one of them will work and you just kind of have to roll the dice. And that was the same thing with like hot air balloon testing too. It's like, and like sharing that with like the rest the team was pretty fun. It's like, okay, there's like a, you know, a 10% chance is gonna work on any particular test. So let's go try it 10 times. You know, and like just bringing that energy into the, it's everything I do is, yeah, how to make things happen. Going into that hot air balloon test, how many, like, how much money do you raise? Was it just like a super small, like we're just gonna keep super lean until we can actually prove something that we can like beam light using a mirror? It was like $2.1 million. It wasn't easy round. Yeah, it wasn't massive. And you know, you gotta spend a lot of that and like the rest of the company too. Yeah. Like there's a lot of like, BD work that you have to do. There's a lot of like, you know, you need an office, you need employees, you gotta pay salaries and all that. Pipitools, yeah, there's a lot of other things that you need to do. The balloon test itself was pretty cheap. There's a couple hundred K, the whole thing. Was it useful that you had like this experience making YouTube videos like showing off, you know, here's how you, they're like making how to videos on this is how I built a thing? Yeah, that one was really useful. I don't really tell you so that one was until people asked like, how did you do it? It's like, well, I just filled everything. Like I've already done it a hundred times. Yeah. It's like, well, this angle would be cool. Like let's just set up a camera here. It's like, what, why? It's like, no, no, no, it'll just take three seconds. Let's just do it. And then you have the footage later. It's like, oh my god, it's the perfect shot. I think, yeah, it definitely helps a lot. Like just, you kind of have to film everything. You always have to be like thinking like, oh, this thing would look really cool from this angle. Yeah, that's basically it. But it's the way I think about it is like there's very, there's like a lot of, there's a lot of really good, you know, hard-tick founders that are building things in the real world. But there's not very many that are also really good at like the distribution problem. And you do seem to have like that specific mix of like traits and challenge talents. I guess like built up. Yeah, no, the YouTube thing has been really helpful. I've spent like a disproportionately small amount of time doing it and it's had a disproportionately large effect on my life. Yeah, it's been really crazy. I mean, just the ability to like capture people's attention is insane. Like yeah, we had that short little video. It was like 15 seconds long. Let me interest in how the idea for that like just like one day like halfway through where I can be like, oh, like later today, we really sick if we like did this thing to launch a new website and they were just like, went out with the drone that night and like filmed it. And like it got 55 million views across all these reposts and stuff. We got 200,000 applications for sunlight from 157 countries. And it's just like, we just, we kind of knew it would be good. Like I remember watching it. I was like, oh, this has like that little piece of magic in it. Yeah. And like you could feel it and it was like, oh, it's like so short, it's so crisp. We just kind of like pushed for that like short crisp magic. And then like it just went so crazy. And I don't know. Like developing the taste for what that magic is is was probably like a 15 year thing of like thinking about like, oh, what the hell is it in like these Mr. Beast videos that like makes people watch it all the time? It's like, like what is that like weird thing? Like, but there is kind of this weird like the virologic. Yeah, there's like this thing and it's kind of tangible. Like when you see it, you know it. But it's like, it's, I don't know. It's really hard to figure out like what that is when you're like, okay, I have a clean slate. What do I do? What do I film? What, like what shots do I put in all this stuff? Yeah, totally. And I think there was a lot of like, because I had the YouTube channel back in the day. And none of those videos really went viral. Apart from one, which was, I thought was kind of boring when this iron furnace video. I got like a million views. I know I watched that a few times. Yeah, I was like, what is it about this video? Like I was talking really slow. And it wasn't that interesting. It was like, I felt like it was my least interesting video. But everybody loved it. And I was like, I guess it has this kind of like weird magic to it. I don't know. But I had been thinking about that for years. And like, yeah, I guess it all came together in like that 15 second viral video. And yeah, I mean, sometimes like you kind of have to have the vision too. Like you can't just like go out and like make something that's gonna, that a lot of people are gonna like, like I've done that so many times. And it's just failed terribly. Really? Yeah, I think like you'll send it to the video to your friends. You'll be like, oh I'm really excited about this. Like what are you thinking? You look like a crack pot or like, what is this? And it's just like, oh man, I don't know. I don't know how to fix that. And then like you can't fix it sometimes for a couple of months. And then all of a sudden you'll have a new vision and you're like, oh it's gonna be this. And then like everybody loves it. It's so like hit and miss and creative. And like, yeah, you kind of have to just make space for it and put in the iterations to get lucky. Yeah. What percentage of the things that you like make or do do you realize just very quickly like, oh, this doesn't work versus does work? Is it like 5% works? I don't think. Probably less than 5. Less than 5. Probably like, yeah, maybe 1%. Yeah, 1% maybe less. Yeah. Interesting. It's maybe even worse than that. I mean, there's all the ideas that like, you kind of have like half of an idea of and then it kind of goes nowhere. Like, yeah, if you include all of those, it's, yeah, less than 1%. That's pretty much the one percent. Yeah, yeah. I mean, most things just don't work, right? Like, most, like you can put any combination of things together in a terrible order. Like if you just like mesh words around in random orders and be like, oh, this is my idea. It's probably not a good one. Like the probability of having a good one is extremely rare. And I think that's why like, I don't know, I really love reflect because it's just, it feels like it's somehow like perfect in a way. Like the core idea is like so simple, just like move sunlight around, like give it to people on demand. And that's all you need and it can kind of just carry you through anything. I got super lucky with this one. And every time I think about it, it's just like, oh, this is somehow like so perfect and so like so clean. It's not like a combination of dumb stuff. It's not like a derivative of anything. It's kind of just this fundamental thing. It's so valuable. Well, what I find funny is that this is basically like, I do think I'm like, right, that this is like the very early early iteration of the like a Dyson Sphere. Yeah. Is you're just like, it's like 0.0001% V, you know? Like the yeah, that. And like, okay, so how do you think about actually like moving up the like hard to shove scale? How much do you think about that? Yeah, quite a bit now. I didn't think about it at first. I actually, it was a couple months before I had the thought that this was a mini Dyson Sphere. I assume my girlfriend told me or my ex girlfriend was like, oh yeah, it's, you know, you're like, basically making a Dyson Sphere, right? Like you're getting more energy from the sun than we have on Earth. And it's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of right. Because I always thought like a Dyson Sphere is something around the sun that's like, you know, converting energy into infrared light and we're just picking that up. It doesn't actually have to be directly right next to the sun though. It could just be like, you know, millions or billions of, you know, light years away or whatever. Or yeah, miles away. 93 million miles, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, you kind of want to reflect it from somewhere close by because the sunlight spreads out. It makes your job a lot easier. We already have these great little satellites. You don't want to make mega structures. That's pretty complicated and annoying. Yeah, just do it with a lot of little mini flat satellites. Like the more numerous the better is an idea because you're basically approximating a parabola with more elements when you do that. Sounds pretty helpful. And yeah, I mean, why not start with a Dyson Sphere around the Earth like way closer? It makes total sense. I mean, one thing our chief engineer Charlie Garcia says we're critical path to a Dyson Sphere. So like, yeah, we'll start here. We'll keep building out around the Earth and we'll add like dozens and dozens of rings. We want to do a hundred thousand satellites within the decade. I think we won't stop until we're in the millions. I think this can support that if we're able to do it effectively. And we have so much control of it. I'm really confident that we can. But then yeah, eventually you kind of build it out and then you're like, all right, now you want to go near the sun. You want to, you know, maybe you want to do solar and lasers and then be met to the reflectors and then be moved back down. Maybe you just want to do like castigrain optics out there. Whatever works, right? But it's still going to be the same thing. It's going to be like reflection and then light traveling in a vacuum. And I think like, actually developed like a healthier respect for like what the car chef scale actually means. I think like if you're thinking on the scale of like, you know, one more than the energy in the solar system. If you're like in the galaxy, I feel like you just want to move things around with light and you end up with these like effectively light beings because you're over such a large vast scale. Like basically the only thing that can cover distances is light and light has energy. So it's like, you know, clearly, this is actually the thing that you'd use for that. Like you wouldn't, you don't want to send mass around at the scale of the galaxy, you know, just take like millions of years to get anywhere. Even light can take millions of years to get anywhere. So yeah, it's just like clearly the way to do things or at least get it started, right? And like when you hear a Dyson sphere like, you know, I remember watching like the videos on YouTube. It's like, oh, car to chef too. Like that's so crazy. And it also has like the immediate thing is like, it's just this massive and possible thing to build. Yeah, like and it's impossible to light up in this. Like if you throw up one mirror into space and you just redirect a little bit of sunlight, you've actually done the very first step. Yeah, I mean, every satellite you see is already doing it. Yeah, they're just, they're diffuse reflectors, they're doing it pretty poorly, but every satellite you see is reflecting sunlight. You know, that's why you see them. There's just a little reflection, right? Like the Starlink train, like they're all just reflecting a little bit of light. They tried to reduce it because it was too much. But yeah, there are like many, you know, accidental Dyson spheres or like the precursor. They do, you know, just do it more. Add more satellites, do it deliberately. Have them very deliberately point at certain places. Add more rings, like, yeah, you know, you can optimize the heck out of it. It's pretty fun. Yeah. When you think through it, so you've got like this kind of, I love the whole critical path to a Dyson sphere. That's hilarious. And I loved it. How did you actually come up with that? Or how did you think? That was Charlie. Charlie, I don't know. He comes up with all these crazy things. You guys have like an actual doc that's like, okay, here are the steps. No, I mean, you just like, you know, a lot of times it's in conversation. I feel like I have my best like one-liners in conversations with people or like new people. Like I'll just like think of something and it's like, oh, I gotta remember that and then you just remember it for later. So I don't know, he probably was telling somebody about it and came up with that. Interesting. Okay, so how do you, so let's talk about the timeline on basically doing, you know, the first, I think it's gonna be first launch in like a few months. 294 days. 294 days. Yeah, I got it. Currently slated. You know, SpaceX. You know, even if you're on the list. Anybody can move it. Yeah. Doing things in space is hard. Yeah. So how many satellites are you gonna launch on that first one? And then the next one after that, what do the timelines look like? And then what is like the main feedback or information that you're trying to get from those launches? We're doing two satellites next year. So the first launch is just gonna be one satellite. We don't wanna do the thing where we launch up two satellites and they both fail for the same dumb reason. Like the radius we're plugging back where just something like that. Launching the first two starships on the same day. Yeah, you don't wanna do that. You know, like you insulated from certain failures, but not all. Yeah, so we're doing two different launches. And a couple months apart, we have time to change some things, but not too much. We're not gonna like launch one vehicle and then change very much about the vehicle between the next one. We're currently looking at April and October. That seems quite good. It's also possible to move them in, you know, for any number of reasons. But yeah, we wanna get up as soon as possible. And the idea with these vehicles is, we wanna be brighter than a full moon. Cause the Russians were about as bright as a full moon. So I should launch something that's not as cool as them. And we also wanna be better than the Russians. Yeah, we wanna be better than the Russians in 1992. You know, that was a long time ago. Space was like 97x more expensive back then and there was no solar. So we can definitely do better than that, especially with how good, you know, you can make reflectors and stuff. And it's like, our reflectors actually gonna be a little bit smaller than that. You can see it back there. It's like actually smaller than the Russian one, about 18 meters by 18 meters. And yeah, so we wanna, you know, fully be brighter than a full moon. We have a bit of margin on that, like 5x margin on that right now, which is great. And yeah, use it as a full commercial vehicle. We're actually doing sweeps onto the ground. We obviously got 264,000 applications from 157 countries. And what was that day like when you released the launch post of, you know, you've got the balloon. And suddenly you just, it did it just like, start streaming in. Just people reaching out to you insanely. Well, we were like every second. We were like, I hope we get 1,000. Right. 1,000 applications. Yeah, I was like, oh, if we got 1,000, it'd be so. So you're off by like 260X. Yeah, well, because I was like, it's gonna be so annoying to like sign into the website. Like we're gonna lose so many people just in like how painful that is. Like, yeah, not true. Crazy. What were the like, what was it like going, you know, on that day or the next few days? And then also what were the like the most interesting applications that you just hadn't even considered would, you know, people would want. Yeah, the craziest thing was just what was in those applications, like just reading through them. Like there were people who were like, oh, my uncle is a former astronaut and like I want to light up his birthday. Like there was just like the most inspiring stuff in there. It was a very distracting day in the office. Like you were just like constantly setting things up. Like, oh, look who just applied. Like, oh, look at this. You're never gonna believe it. Yeah, it was super fun. I mean, there was just weird things. Like you could just search like bananas and then be like, oh, I'm a banana farmer and I want some sunlight so I can like grow my crops faster. And it's just like, what the hell? There was weird things too. Like I want to use sunlight to like, dry my clothes faster. There was a lot of like, you know, just things like that that we'd never thought about that probably aren't gonna do, but we couldn't do if we need to. And then just like actually had to fill out a form. Like go to your website and fill out a form. Yeah. So you said that like, I think it got like 55 million impressions. The videos, the videos. Right. Yeah. Because like a bunch of people picked it up on like Instagram and that. Does that mean that it was roughly, what is that? Like a 0.025% conversion rate to actually someone filling out a form? It was pretty good. Yeah, about that. Crazy. Yeah. It was, yeah, I didn't like a form on our website. 0.025. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. You can put them out in the bottom. Crazy. But yeah, it's, yeah, it was insane. Like we didn't expect anything close to that. Like anything close to the views, anything close to the engagement. And a lot of them were like, I mean, really inspiring. Like other people from up north were like, hey, this could like totally change what life's like in Norway. Or like, you know, Alaska. Like I'm from Alaska and I would definitely be great. Yeah. And then yeah. And like, I mean, Alaska like we, you know, we can't talk about it. We have like, you know, some letters from 10 that we've signed to some folks. So we're like, oh, yeah, this is going to like totally change what it's like to be at the school, this town or whatever. So that was like really interesting. Um, whether the main first like applications that you're trying to solve, because I know that you talk about basically like extending the day in a make-even area by like two hours, or even starting the day two hours earlier kind of thing. Yeah. So the point right now is we're doing the two satellites next year. Um, then we want to do two rings. Um, basically 36 satellites total. Um, when you do 18 satellites in a ring, you can do an hour, white strip anywhere on earth. And if you do two of those, you get two hours. Um, and that gives you ability, like that's available anywhere on earth from like, you know, seven PM to nine PM. Um, and if you're in that time of day, you can just hit a button and you can turn on the lights. You might turn, you know, she's down. Yep. So even if you're in the middle of the ocean, like the middle of the Pacific Ocean having a huge problem, you can just hit a button on like a garment and reach and then all of a sudden pull them the lights turn on. And you can see everything. And it'll be over a whole like 6,000 day career area. So you can see everything around you. Like say you're like doing search and rescue and you're looking for somebody with like the tiny little headlamp and you can't call in a helicopter to search light. And like the guys like just, you know, a couple hundred meters away, but you can't see them, right? You hit this button all of a sudden like, oh, he's right over there and you just walk over. And you said it takes like 30 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because all we have to do is rotate a satellite around like a degree or half a degree or like 60 degrees, but yeah. I mean, kind of far, but you know, we have a big reaction system. We have a lot of agility on this vehicle. Um, so yeah, we can just flip around and do that. Um, and yeah, that'll be with the 36. So that's, you know, two next year, 36 year after, then we can do two hours. And the two hours is kind of like a taste of actual utility. Like the first one is just a taste of like what the sunlight is like. Like, oh my god, it's like five times better than a full moon and I can see everything around me. Um, when I do the 36, it'll be a little bit brighter and obviously it'll be, you'll be able to do a handoff from one satellite to another and cover a whole two hours. Um, and then it's just building up the constellation. So the year after that, we want to do 700 satellites. And 700 is enough to, first of all, add more satellites in that ring. So you can serve more customers simultaneously. You can also overlap spots to get more radiance. But then we're also going to build out rings that go into the middle of the night. So we can do 24 seven service anywhere on earth. Um, plus like, you know, most of the service in those first couple hours after sun, sunrise and sunset. Because that's when most people want electricity that seems like the best match of the supply demand curve. Um, so yeah, that's what we're shooting for 700 year after. Um, and then so yeah, two 36, 700, 4000, 10,000, you know, 20,000, and like really ramping up quite quickly. Um, and this is going to be like directly scaled with, you know, the fact that like Starship comes online. And suddenly you can, you know, launch a bunch of master orbit very cheaply, right? Yeah, we're, we don't require Starship because we can do all these lighting markets. The lighting markets are like hundreds to thousands of times more profitable than the energy markets. Um, and they're not even like particularly small. They're still like the tens of billions of dollars per year. Um, it's like construction. Like I thought energy was like the biggest market out there. It's like 8% of global GDP. Yeah. Construction is like 20%. So it's just like, okay. So extending like it's construction crews like day by an hour or two or something like that. Yeah, yeah. We'll start with just extending the day by a couple hours and then we'll be able to do it all night as well. Um, over just a giant area. So if you have like a hundred square mile construction projects, like you don't need to do anything. You just like be like, oh, yeah, we got reflect service tonight. Like you can just like schedule it on the calendar. You don't even think about it. Um, it's pretty amazing. So we're basically turning on like the back half of the Earth's economy. Yeah. In a lot of ways. Um, and yeah, the market for that is actually like larger than energy. That was really surprising. Like we didn't expect that at all. Um, but yeah, it's, I mean, the sun light is responsible for 99% of life on Earth. It's like while the trees grow, it's like what powers the rain. It powers rivers, it powers everything. Um, it's the reason that like I can see you. I mean, most of this light is coming from the sun. It's the day time out, right? It's like, we sleep at night because it's harder to do stuff at night. Um, we can fix that and, you know, we can give you exactly what you want, exactly when you need it. Um, so yeah, that whole thing was actually much more exciting than we expected. And I think a lot of that came from the 264,000 applications. We didn't actually think lighting was valuable before we did that. Really? Yeah. How long are you going just on the energy side? I mean, until, yeah, like the summer, like the last summer. Um, I mean, we were like, oh, yeah, lighting will do that. That would be cool. We had like no idea what it would be like. Um, so yeah, we were really surprised by that. I mean, that's what it mean. Like this idea of just like moving sunlight around is kind of just like in the way that most ideas get slowly killed over time and whittled down into nothing. This idea is exactly what's up. Yeah. And that was always like the biggest signal for like, up for when I needed to double down and really commit harder to reflect. It was always like, well, if I look back the last month, it's gotten better. So okay, yeah, this probably does make sense to keep going. Um, every other idea I've had has gotten worse. Um, so yeah, consistently getting better was was a huge green flag. And yeah, it continues to do so. Um, yeah, we just got an Air Force contract at direct-to-phase two. Um, you know, like that's deeply exciting. I mean, it's for energy and lighting, right? And it's just like, yeah, obviously it's useful to be able to light up anywhere on Earth in under 30 seconds. Like, you don't have to wait for a helicopter with a search light to show up. Like, if you're having a problem if somebody falls overboard, like you just hit the button and the lights come on. Um, we had people apply for sunlight who like had lost friends for that exact reason. They were like, this could have saved my friend. Um, and like that is, I don't know, completely unexpected. You think it like cruise companies would potentially be like a market just because, you know, someone falls over and there's like thousands of people on board and you just like light up an entire, you know, square mile or something of area. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, we can do that. Um, I mean, definitely see videos of people. Like falling off the ship or jumping off the ship and then not being found ever. Yeah, no, we could definitely help with that. Um, because even if they're really far away, you'll be able to see them in the light as if it's daytime. I mean, it's a lot easier to do a rescue during the day than at night, um, when we can make the nighttime just like the daytime for that operation, um, when it's critical. Yeah. I mean, even just like, there's interesting aspects too. Like, even just resorts in like, you know, say like the Middle East, right? It's super hot in the summer and like people don't really go outside during the day. So they'll light up the beaches at night. It's called night beaches. They have all these like light towers and like light everything up. Like it wouldn't be better if that was just done with sunlight. Just one thing. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And you just hit the button and it'll be cheaper. You're not like usually at night, you're burning fossil fuels because the sun's not around and, you know, it's not always windy. Um, so yeah, we're like, you know, in that case, you're just actually placing fossil fuels as well. So like the lighting thing, I mean, at first it was pretty easy to economically justify. It's like, well, it's cheap as electricity. We're definitely as cheap as like electricity plus the light bulbs, plus like all the installation costs. But it also turns out that people actually see it as much more valuable than an electron because you can get an electron in any other way. Like, you know, it could be XYZ fossil fuel plant. And it's totally a commodity. But the lighting market itself is this just value product where you're adding all this additional stuff. Is this almost kind of like a male versus email where like male you have to like have a physical letter and you have to build the roads and then like this whole male system and a little delivery network and all this stuff versus the email you just like shoot it on a computer and it just like fires over and, you know, some of that will just easily. So you don't need to build any of that infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I mean, you came here, you set up some lights, right? Like imagine if you could have just like texted the reflect phone number and like you got some sunlight or just got like my GPS location and say on and it just yeah, that's all it's going to be like, even if you're an entire city, like if you're an entire municipality and you need sunlight, it'll be that easy. You just hit the button. Like, you could do it on a web app. You could do it on a text. Like, you could call me on the phone and be like, I'll pay you later. You know, like, if I know you, like, it's that simple really. Yeah. And it's, I think it's kind of like Starlink in a way where Starlink is much better than, you know, cable-based internet in certain applications, like if you're in the middle of a rural area, it's really hard to like, you know, ride all the cables and it becomes expensive. It's like super valuable for anywhere that is very difficult to build infrastructure and it's not already built. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just put this stuff in space and it's over the whole earth right away. Once you get it operational in one place, it's operational around the whole earth to the same extent, which is pretty cool. You don't have to build it out individually every time. We're doing the same thing. You don't have to individually every time build out lighting. Yeah. I'd imagine that for this because there's, you know, you're only going to do like two launches next year and two satellites, you probably, like, go through a super, you know, complex iteration cycle and, you know, figuring out every little kink that you can possibly imagine before you send the first one out. What does that look like? Yeah. I mean, it's hiring really smart people and letting them work. I mean, as a CEO, it's kind of my job to keep the money flowing. Give them money flowing in, make sure we're buying all the right stuff, make sure we're hiring all the right people, make sure we're growing really quickly and effectively. What's been the biggest challenge? I mean, I think it's a lot of just like execution on the satellite. Satellites are still pretty hard to make work. Well, a lot of startups make them and they break. We're a pretty cool one. So it's been easy to hire. I think our mission's been really exciting. So that's been really positive. Like sometimes it's pretty hard to hire great people. But luckily, like, we've been able to. We've been really lucky. So that's been really helpful. But then, yeah, I mean, there's just like a lot of just manually actuating levers and like manually doing things. Like, oh, yeah, we need to design the satellite. It needs to work. We need to think about everything. We need to think about the requirements. We need to think about exactly what it's doing. We need to push back on all these things. We need to figure out who's making this, who's making this, who's making this. How are they going to fit together? Like, what's going to break? How are you going to get through environmental testing? How are you going to get through vibe testing? Like, how are you going to make sure this is going to be operational on the spacecraft? Like, I mean, just figuring all of that out. It takes a lot of work, takes a lot of conversations. I love it. It's like super fun. But it's like, you know, building anything. Everything is like 10 times harder than you think. And then it keeps being 10 times harder than you think. And you have to finish it way faster than you think, too. So it's always just that kind of game. But I don't know. It's always like that. I was ready for that when I started the company. I think that's one of the good things about being a technical founder is like, built stuff before. I know how much it sucks. I know how much it's going to cost. Kind of like, they also know how fun it is. Yeah, like satisfying. Yeah. But yeah, I think like, yeah, it's kind of expecting all of it. I wish we could launch like a thousand next year. Obviously that doesn't make sense. Like I wish that was the like main constraint for launch, you know, just bring up the timelines. Rock of launches. Is it like you don't want to spend, you know, millions of dollars per satellite? Or, you know, what is it? Yeah, you kind of want to test the thing before you spend a lot of money. I think even if we had, you know, a couple hundred million dollars right now, we'd still do this mission. We'd still do it first. We'd obviously in parallel start like a massive production facility and just be working on that. But yeah, we'd still do this first and it would still inform what we do in the production vehicles to a significant enough extent that like things may change. So we may not like fully commit uncertain items of the program before we do this first test. Yeah, we'd like it's hard to do the first test fast enough to because like in the space industry, you know, you can either make the thing yourself or buy it from somebody. Making the thing yourself takes months, right? It takes months to design new hard stuff. That's going to survive and actually like be effective and work and like get it through all the testing. The tradeoff is like the idiot index on most of the components and stuff in a satellite are super super high but it takes so many months and lots of effort to you know, make a thing that costs like $80,800. Yeah, it's just not worth it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the idiot index for space parts is like in the hundreds for basically all space parts. But you can't really fight that either because your NRE to make one part is going to be a hundred X the cost of the actual raw materials. So like you're not even able to beat that. It's just like the only way to beat it really is volume. It's to like do the NRE and then spread that over thousands of vehicles for the first spacecraft. We're spreading it over one vehicle. So it's kind of the same thing and really what we want is what you want to get something to space as quickly as possible. And there's a lot of great vendors out there that you can procure items from. But some of these space vendors like we don't work with these particular ones. But like some of these space vendors are like, oh, you want an apple. Yes, let me plant an apple tree. It will be ready in five years and then I will pick it perfectly. We'll get the perfect person to pick the apple and make sure it's tested properly before we give it to you. And it's like, I don't want that. It's like, just give me the apple right now. I don't need to just have a bunch laying around and it's like, well, every customer needs a different apple. You know, and it's just like, and literally in the space industry, every single satellite is bespoke. And like every customer wants different things from these companies. So it just becomes this whole mess. It's a very new industry. It's like instead of buying just going to the store and buying an iPhone, you know, you have to like ask Apple how to build the iPhone and they're like, okay, well, we need to figure out everything involved in building the iPhone. You know, yeah. It's like if Apple wanted to work with you to like get the right iPhone for you. It's like, well, how wide is your hand? Okay. Well, that'll take us another two years because we want to do that for you. It's like, no, can I just get the same one as everybody else? It's like, no, like it's custom. Yeah. Everything's kind of custom. And even the things that aren't custom, they just don't have it. Yeah. They haven't built it yet because it's too expensive and they need like your money to start building it or whatever. It's such a, oh my God. It's such a new industry. And this is why SpaceX just does everything themselves because it's honestly easier a lot of times. But it's pretty expensive to do that. And you have to be making a lot. Do you have any like good stories or like moments of serendipity that just led to interesting things happening? You wouldn't expect it. I reflect these days. I mean, there's all kinds of like little examples of things just working out pretty well. I think a lot of it's in like the people we've hired, like just kind of being the exact right person that's been really exciting. Yeah, like Robert Salazar is just like this incredible origami expert who has like 25 years of experience. Just you know, been doing like Starshaid and Lunar Flashlight for a while. Like just these crazy origami projects. He was on like, you know, stuff was on the front page and that geo. And he's like the perfect person to work on like he listats like this. Like he had looked into them for the moon in the past and he's just like, it's not about everything. It was exactly why this is valuable for the world. And it's just like, I don't know, the fit there was just so incredible. That was like, it felt like serendipity. It's like how, how, how do you exist? How do we get lucky enough to have? Yeah. Like how is a person like you like on the earth? Like, and like, how are we able to like, you know, attract you to work on this project with us? Like stuff like that has just been like so cool and so rewarding. So I think like, yeah, building the team around the project has been one of the most exciting things to really get into here. And yeah, I mean, most of my job is just like making sure that people are like pointed in the right direction and like have the resources that they need to execute on this. And doing that's been really fun. It feels like it's a lot more supportive than directive and like that's the only way to do it. So that there's just so much like, I don't know, it really feels like good work. And like just like, yeah, I go home and I'm just like, oh man, like, you know, I helped the team, like do a bit of a better job today on something that we're really excited to work on. So you're just like, you're the main thing is you're just trying to make the organization function well. Yeah, kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, few things without rewarding. And it's really like, you know, it's one of those things you have to get right from the beginning. You know, otherwise like, you know, if you hear so many stories of like companies that like the Euro too big and then like the culture is different, you can't change. And it's like, man, I really don't want that. It feels like just like, like, slop. Like you just did a bad job. Like you really want to make sure that like, I don't know, you're doing it right the whole time. Have you been trying to be like super methodical on hiring people? Like, what do you have any like framework similar to like Steve Jobs where he's thinking, you know, the first 10 people like imagine. If you're giving someone like 1% of the company or whatever, do they like massively increase way more than 1% like the company succeeds that type of. Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things where like, you hear the advice and you're like, oh, yeah, I'll totally do that. Definitely do that. And then you don't for a little bit. And then you like accidentally get lucky with like the perfect person and they just, they do better than like 10 or 20 people could in like two days and you're just like, oh, that's what they meant. Yeah, that's what a plus player is. Yeah, I feel like, yeah, you can listen to all the advice you want, but like until you actually experience it first hand, like you're not actually going to know what it means. So yeah, luckily I've learned first hand exactly what that means and then realize how valuable that is and have been doing it since. Yeah, I think with Tristan, my CTO is kind of like that. It's like, oh, like, interest is your, that's why you find Tristan. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you, you like initially did a whole bunch of interesting, you know, projects and builds and all the stuff on your own. How did you decide that you wanted to co-founder in the first place? Yeah, I mean, I knew Tristan from Zipline. He was a high school kid who was working on like the one of the cooler harder projects is Zipline, like directly out of high school. And he knew me from a YouTube channel back in the day. So he became like kind of instant friends watching that. Back in the day. Yeah, yeah. Like years ago, and he was like, oh my God, I can't believe Ben's like interviewing here Zipline when I was joining. It's like, whoa, it's cool. I never, I don't know. It's one of those things whenever you get recognized in YouTube, it's like, oh, it's super crazy. But then it's like, oh, wow, like, I don't know. People are actually watching this. The coolest kid. Yeah, but he's also like the like one of the smarter, faster people there. And I was just like, God, this kid's so awesome. And like he was watching my channel. Like, it was just big ego boost. I was like, yeah, like the cool people watch my channel. Anyway. And yeah, I don't know. We just picking him instant friends and like, but hang out all the time after work. And I don't know. Yeah, I was like, I would talk to him about the reflect idea pretty often, because it was kind of like all I was working on. Like, like, part of ways was Zipline and just kept working out full time. And I don't know. Just kind of kept getting more and more interested. And he was working, he was at Stanford. Like, he got into Stanford and he was going there for a little bit. And they would be like, asking me about it like late at night. And I'd be like, tell him about it. And I'd be like, you know, you could just leave Stanford and come and join me. And he was like, yeah, I'll think about it. And then yeah, he ended up being like, you know what, I think this is going to be way more valuable. And ended up joining, which yeah, was was pretty incredible. How is that like relationship evolved and like wet areas or what things can you just know that you can lean on him for? Yeah, he, I think we have like overlap in the right places, but he really understands like the organization stuff and the company thing and like the he's really good at like communicating really complex and weird visions. And figuring out exactly the right things to say for an organization to function. Like even as like a, you know, he was like the young one of the younger people on the team is applying and he was more wise on like how things should be approached and like what things mattered and what things to test for and who should be working on what than a lot of the full-timers there. Like he's just like wise way beyond his ears and whatever that is, it's just like, unbelievable and it's something I don't really have as much. And yeah, I just knew that like that would be one of the most important things to get early on a team because you just know that the thing is going to be done right and that the right people are going to be working on the right things. You can just count on him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's just like that deep trust and like doing the hot air balloon testing which just in was super fun. Like we both were we stayed up for like three days straight just like working on stuff. We like we speak the same language in a lot of ways. Like, oh, like, oh, we got to build this thing and it'll be done like exactly how I would have built it. Or he'll be like, oh, do this thing and like, I don't know, it seems like I do it correctly. So it's like, I don't know, there's just this like real camaraderie. And we have like kind of the same thoughts about what should be new in the world and what should be done and what should be changed. There's just like so much alignment there and so much alignment with like what this project is and what it means and how to do it right. It's like super fun, it looks like complimentary, you know, traits and values and all this stuff. Yeah, yeah, totally interesting. Let's end it on like what's the hardest thing you've ever come? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, I haven't overcome it yet. It's definitely reflect. This is the hardest one I've ever done. I mean, I've been working on this for a couple of years now. It's taken everything. They're like, I'm putting everything into it. We haven't done it yet, right? Like we haven't launched the satellite. I think it's even when we do that, it's going to be far from over. They're going to be like kind of decades from over. And I was kind of waiting for that for a long time. Like I figured if I started something new, it would have to be on that kind of scale. Like, you know, ideally say you live like 60 or 70 years, right? You kind of want to work on something for as much of that time as possible. Ideally one project. Like if you could focus on one thing for your entire life, it's going to be a lot better than if you focus on one thing for like five or 10 years or, you know, and the more excited you are about it, the more you're going to get out of it too. Like if you're kind of like half interested in your job, you're going to do a terrible job doing that for like 60 years, not interesting at all. So like I want to be really focused, really bought in on something for like as much of my life as possible. Very few ideas like most ideas aren't worthy of that. First of all, you have to be lucky to have one. I feel like I have one here. So I'm just like dumping everything into it to a really high degree. And I think it's like the potential here is so high. I don't see that stopping ever. If it does look like a terrible idea, I'll immediately stop. Like I think that's always the case. Like as soon as this is like, oh, this actually isn't what I thought. Like I'm going to quit immediately and do the next thing. And it's always been a promise that I've made to myself. When do you implement that? Like when you implement that kind of like philosophy of just like willing to cut losses? Oh, with all the like dozens of ideas I've looked at over the years. Was there any was there any idea that you like spent way too long on just trying to make something interesting work? And then you just realized that the date of it like wasn't worth it. I'll let me the healing liqueur fire was one of them. Right. How many like months on that? Oh, four, four. Four. Four. It wasn't too bad. Yeah. I mean, yeah, sometimes you just cut your losses. Like I used to like run all the time and like I climbed Denali. And I was like, you know, pretty young. Is that low? And just running not solo. I was like with guides and stuff. I did I did my own belong solo. That was pretty fun. But I was like, that was a big part of my life for a while. And I just kind of like realize it's not as important as reflect. So like I've given that up for reflect. That's just way more rewarding to do this than any of that. I don't know. Yeah, it's like it just like I keep wanting to give it more of my time and effort in a way that few other things have been. I guess if the hardest thing before reflect. Mentally one of the harder things was like finishing college. I think that was pretty tricky. I really like, I don't know. There was a whole like mental battle there. It's like, do you ever want to finish college? What at what year were you kind of like flip flopping on? Whether or not you wanted to. Oh, the whole time the entire time. Oh, yeah. Like was it four years? Day one. Yeah. I see you were like not happy almost immediately going in. And you were like, I was like, I think this is true. Did it feel like part of your kind of like soul was dying? Yeah, yeah. I was like, oh, this is like so much slower than just building stuff for like the Ben and build stuff. Yeah, college versus Ben and build was like very different. And like not everybody has that experience. Like sometimes it's great. I was just like, oh, wow, this is like really a big step backwards. You just like knew what your passions were and it wasn't college. Yeah. And I felt like it was like it was helpful because it's obviously like a big deal in society like society values college really highly and like other companies doing stuff. And it was kind of like, I'm really just like taking a big bet on society valuing this. Which like is true. And I think was the right decision. But it was like it was a hard one to keep doubling down on because it was like, I don't care. Society cares. I guess I care about society like valuing stuff. And that just kind of pulled me through it. So that was pretty tricky. Yeah, other than that, I don't know. I mean, like I'm generally pretty happy. I like just kind of working hard. I feel like I just enjoy the hard work for the hard work. Yeah, I think you kind of have to like decide to do that at a certain point. Like you can get up in the morning and kind of do nothing. Actually, I had like Lyme disease for a couple years. And like I had like a pick line in my arm and stuff. Oh, I'm like missed a lot of high school. And like it kind of was like really depressed and like, we'll just play Minecraft all the time. You know, like just really going absolutely nowhere. Like all my friends dropped off and like I really just got like super sick and like it was pretty traumatic. And I remember like I got injected with like anxilver. And I don't know it was just crazy hippy dude in Maine like injecting it with silver. And like all of a sudden got better in like two weeks. And I just like look back in the last two years as like a complete flatline. And I was like if I just stayed in that, I would have done nothing before I died. And I decided that I'd never wanted to do that again. Yeah. And then just kind of decided like yeah, I just want to like do stuff all the time. And since then I've just kind of like loved doing stuff all the time. And nothing really feels hard when you are just interested in it to do stuff all the time. Yeah. Even reflect. It's like I just want to come in here like work a lot of hours, work really hard. Make sure I'm always working on the most effective thing. Make sure I'm always like moving things forward as quickly as possible. Yeah. And just like if you love doing that, it never really feels hard. And it's like some of the commitments are hard. You know, you got to like sacrifice like you know personal life a lot. And that's kind of hard. You know, it's hard to like leave friends behind that aren't like quite there with it. Or yeah, they aren't like quite adding to reflect. Like oh, you're not really adding to what I want to be doing at reflect. So like I don't know when to spend this time with you and stuff. That's that's really tough. But I worth it, I think. Yeah. Yeah, it's worth it. Yeah, because like think yeah, plateauing is like the worst thing ever. Like I mean, you might like I remember thinking like after I had Lyme diseases like I might as well just like die now like what's the point of living the rest of my life? I never do anything else when you like got it. I was like 2012, 2013. I was it was like freshmen sophomore year college of high school. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're like 1415. Yeah. Yeah, and it like started off okay. And then it like got worse like you know started like not really being able to like focus and stuff. Just kind of yeah, it became bedridden for like a good year there. Did you work on projects? So you're like bedridden? But did you work on projects outside of being bedridden? Or oh no, that's like I did literally like nothing. Just totally nothing. Okay. Yeah, I like other than Minecraft. Yeah, basically that Minecraft. Yeah, I was terrible. Yeah, I became like a waste of waste of skin. It was it was bad. Yeah, I don't tell that story often. It's yeah, I like started writing about it for like my college essays and I was like, oh, nobody wants to hear this. Yeah, no, it was just like, you know, it was just extremely tough. Yeah, I like I had headaches constantly and like couldn't remember things like one week to the next. Do you think that you're kind of like are you almost like happy or sad you got it? Because I know that like some of those things there are there are a moment where you realize, you know, I really don't like this version of me or I don't like not doing stuff. Yeah, so thus I know that I definitely don't want that and that won't give me happiness and joy and you know, fulfillment and all this stuff. So going forward when you are actually working on the thing, you're just like, I definitely want to be working way more than most people think it's like normal. Yeah, I think there's a bit of it. I kind of flip flop on if it was helpful or not because it did still cost me a couple years of time. And I was working pretty hard and doing cool stuff before that. Like I did like all the RC planes and stuff before that and built stuff before that and it was kind of like this pause in a way. But I do think it kind of gave me like a little bit of an edge on like, wow, I wanted to do things before I, because holy crap would it ever sacrifice. I looked back on my life and didn't feel like I'd done enough. I think I don't think I would have had that without it. I think I would have kind of, I don't know, I was also kind of, I think I had way more of an ego before it too. Yeah, I think it kind of humbled me in a lot of ways. It's like, wow, you can just kind of lose it all. You're always like three bad decisions away from losing everything. And where did you come to that framework? It's like one of the limelies things. I don't know, it's like, yeah, think about it. Like it's not, it wouldn't be that hard to go homeless, right? Like, you know, you could just be like, oh yeah, let me just try. I was almost there like three days ago. Yeah, no, it's right there. It's always like sneaking up. Like, I don't know, I feel like I feel like a lot of for a lot of people, it's like, oh, like, let me try this new drug or whatever. Then they get addicted to it and then it's like, oh, wow. Then your family starts hating you and then you have no support system and then you lose it all. It's really terrible, but like it can happen to anybody. Like, I'm definitely not above that. And you just, you kind of have to make the decision every day to avoid that. Like very directly. And it's like, I don't want to just avoid that. I want to like do the exact opposite of that. Like, I want to figure out how to like grow and excel. I'm actually useful. Yeah. And I kind of took a lot of things for granted before, before getting sick. I was like, oh, this is like natural. What in like particular, did you take it or take a man's job or whatever? Like anything, you know, like eating food. You know, I had like, you know, really good family. So like I would always have like good food and like my parents spend time with me and stuff. And yeah, I think like, I don't know. I was really lucky in a lot of ways. Like growing up in America, it's very different from growing up in other countries. So you just end up with like all this privilege that you kind of take for granted. And like imagining all of it being just like for nothing and just going to waste was terrifying. Yeah, sorry, this is getting super deep but super weird. It was yeah. Yeah, like you don't want to take it for granted. Like you're eating food every day. You're like taking up some amount of space. You're using some amount of resource. I feel like a lot of, I don't know, there's a story a while ago where it's like you know, your biggest impact on the earth is going to be the amount of trash you create. And it's like the amount of plastic you leave behind and it's like, God, I really don't want that to be the biggest impact I have. I want to do something else. Like I don't know what. And it's like, I want to leave it better than you found it. Yeah. And it's pretty hard to actually do that right. And it's like, and you got to be risky enough. Like you don't just want to like do the normal path because that might not be risky enough to actually get you out of it. Like you need to be risky enough that like the positive side, you know, gets you above zero. Because just doing the normal thing may actually just be close to nothing. Yeah, my, the way I think about it is basically, you know, you can't necessarily like quantify better, but you can quantify more interesting. Yeah. And so I try to say like interesting good, you know. Yeah. Interesting is definitely one. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting, useful. I feel like the most useful thing is always like the hardest thing to do too. It's always like, oh, what, what path here has the most work associated with it? That's probably the one I should do. That was another one is like, it's kind of just like brute forcing utility. It's like, what is the hardest thing to do? Not for dumb reasons, like the hardest thing for real reasons to do. And sometimes it's like, oh, I have to like go talk to this person. I don't want to talk to you. Sometimes it's like a weird hard thing that you have to do. But that's usually the right path. Like usually the right path is one of the most work associated with it. Yeah. So it's like, okay, you just lean into that. Yeah, try to do the hard thing when you come to the crossroads. Yeah. Yeah, if you can't find any other reason, like you know, you're probably biased to the easy one. Just because you want to do the easy one. So like, including that bias, like, yeah, just figure out how to do the hard one. Like if you're going to flip the coin, like, you know, I don't know where I was going to that. Like, don't even flip the coin. Just do the hard thing. Just do the hard thing.