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

What's up, man? Oh man, I'm excited about this one.

But we were you were looking at the bar over there and asking, you know, if people drink on the show, and I said, 'No, I actually haven't had a drink in over 3 years now. I did the psychedelics thing.'

booze doesn't have a place. And I think I think that's a good thing. But you brought up a good point.

That's an interesting con. You're the only one that I've ever heard say that.

then you see it. No shortage of alcohol there.

on the internet.

Um yeah, and alcohol was like the universal social lubricant when I was in my early 20s, right?

But but yeah, that's all

I mean, it's got to be replaced with something. Unfortunately, you're probably right. It's probably replaced with

Yeah. I think it's social media.

Yeah. I don't think that's I don't think that's great. I don't think that I don't think the human brain is wired like that, right? We're we are social animals. Like we're we're we're animals, right? We're like we're we're creatures that take on the human form, but we're an incredibly social species. And it's weird if that sort of gets replaced or like augmented in a way that doesn't line up with how our brains work with with the internet.

Wait, do they?

I've smoked.

there's a connection.

Yeah. Yeah.

or work or anywhere.

Yeah. Yeah.

I had the benefit of being Indian. My body just can't really handle alcohol.

One [clears throat] one of the one of the nice things. Uh yeah, like I I I could never I like I in college I would like to have thought that I could drink, but I I don't think I could really hold my alcohol that well.

Tell me about it. Ah, there's a lot of really late nights of doing problem sets, like allnighter after all nighter of doing problem sets.

Like living in the physics building at Stanford, right? Or or spending all night in the math library at Stanford and just like these dimly lit rooms where you're like smelling the musk of an old textbook. That was my college experience.

We do, man. A ton to talk about.

Oh man. Um, so I got a car kind of recently which I love love this thing. It's a 1992. I like my cars old. First of all, I like my cars old and stinky. Um, so I got this 1992 uh Porsche 911 RS in mint green. Hunting for this car for years. I finally found it. I think it was in Germany. Damn, that's awesome. Yeah, this thing is cool. I like So, I got into talk a little bit about building [__] with our hands. So, during co um this was kind of a wild time for me at least and I think for everybody it was wild, but we're all like stuck at home and here I am like trying to lead Robin Hood. So, at the time, Vlad and I were co-CEOs of the company, trying to lead this this enterprise from like my home office, right? And you're just like in this little vortex of your own world the whole time. And I remember thinking to myself like I I need a creative outlet. Like I'm like I I've I've always been this way where there's the main thing that I care about that's kind of like the the main thing that my energy is going towards and there's always like a creative muse or a creative outlet or something that's completely unrelated to the work that I'm doing which is like a passion or a hobby. And I find that that's usually where a lot of the creativity is all about connecting unrelated ideas together, right? And seeing the threads that connect things that maybe you don't necessarily see if you just look at things very plainly. For me during co I was like, man, I've been building technology, digital technology for years and years, coming on 10 years at that point and I kind of wanted to try my hand at building stuff like actual stuff. So, I'm like, I know how to build technology, but I don't really feel like I know how to build mechanical material things. So, I was like, all right. I also love cars cuz I I grew up in Virginia and I had to drive all [__] time cuz I was taking classes at like a community college or I was like doing some research at this particle accelerator, which meant I had to just drive around all the time. So, I loved cars and I was like, if I I want to get into classic cars someday and I I convinced myself that the way that I was going to do it was start out by building a car first.

So, you familiar with this company called Factory 5?

All right. Very cool company. They build kit cars that are like basically like re reimaginations of like Shelby race cars. So, they've got the the Shelby Cobra that they make. Um, and then the one that I did is the hard top version of it. So, the Shelby Daytona. So, during CO, I like had never done this before. I ordered one of these kits. Um, got connected to a couple of people that sort of were like my automotive mentors in the early days and kind of taught me how to do it. But during COVID, in my nights and weekends and whatever spare time I had, I go from a box of parts to like a you know like a thing that turned on. Awesome. Yeah.

I like difficult things. So I did find it to be difficult for sure, but that was that's kind of like that's the right of passage in a lot of ways, right? Yeah. Like I remember I found myself a couple of times cuz there's also co, right? And so you're not there's not much to do. There's also not a lot of people that can help you do [__] So I remember finding myself a couple of times like it's like, 'All right, it's Saturday. What am I doing today? I'm going to figure out how to mount this damn fuel tank onto this car.' And I remember finding myself sort of on one of those little sliders underneath the car and like trying to prop the thing up on my legs and trying to screw it in. [laughter] So you become like a contortionist trying to build this stuff.

My my thing is I love I love the way that things work. And I think that that experience was super interesting because you kind of go from like loving cars to being able to really be like, 'Okay, the thing that I really like about cars is like the way that mechanical things um working in a particular way. For example, right? Like I think cars sound really good. Love the sound of cars.' But it's like, well, what does that mean? like what what what part of the sound do you like, right? Do you like the exhaust note? Do you like the induction sound from the engine? Do you like the gears chattering because there's like, you know, no sound deadening in the thing? Yeah. So, like getting a really deep understanding of all the components and being like actually, and this is kind of one of the places that I've landed now, it it's better to drive a slow car fast than to drive a fast car slow. So, I actually kind of like my cars more underpowered, lightweight, so you got to like really ring them out to actually keep up with traffic, for example.

What kind of engine does it have? A 351. Nice. Yeah, I love old cars. Yeah, cars today are all right. I'm going to go on a bit of a limb here. They're like kind of perverted in my opinion cuz I think of cars as these objects of industrial design, right? I think of them as these like these things that humanity invented for transportation. And there's like this artistic component to them because old cars were handmade, right? They were envisioned by the mind and built with a hand. And you look at the cars that exist today. Number one, they're designed by computers and they look like it in my opinion. And they're built by robots and just like the materials and the way that things fit together. There's something about it really really don't like. What do you think about That's why I say it's perverted.

But I I I find I find the not just the electrification because that that you can like very quickly point a finger to that and be like I don't like the way that that works. But I think just in general how computerized cars are. Yeah. Right. I mean it really takes away from the experience cuz when I when I'm sitting behind the wheel of a car like I want to be able to know what's going on with the road surface through the way the steering wheel's moving in your hand, right? You want to be able to feel how much traction the car's got based on how much you can kind of like feel it moving through your butt.

Yeah. I actually, as you're saying this, I'm thinking about wanting to do that with my boys. They would love that.

Were there any like big old trucks on this one?

So, grew up in Alabama and then in southern Virginia and I guess I was grown up by the time I got to college. [snorts] So my family moves to the US from India. Uh my dad had grown up always wanting to study physics. So it's like his life goal. He wanted to study physics. Um and they're from a little town, I guess now it's a big town in India called uh called Babnager in Gujarat. And my dad, my grandfather was one of the first western trained eye doctors. No kidding. This has got to be in like probably the 40s and 50s and 60s. It was one of the first western trained eye doctors and was like my children are going to go into optometry. So this is like my dad and his and his brothers. So my dad had always wanted to study physics goes to college to study chemistry I want to say. I think he started a PhD in chemistry in India um and then stops doing that and is an optometrist. He's like a contact lens doctor in India applying to PhD programs in America because he wanted to study physics. And the the story that my dad tells me is that he ch he put the word kumar at the end of his name which apparently means you're a bachelor cuz he was like I'm going to devote my life to science. Um my dad is like a very he's a very studious man. Um, and I love him. But lo and behold, my dad, I think eventually was like, 'All right, I'm going to get married.' I think he was I I yeah, I think he was maybe like, 'All right, maybe this coming to America to study physics thinging isn't going to happen.' So, he gets married to my mom and then she's pregnant with me and then he gets into University of Huntsville, Alabama to study physics. And my mom originally I think was not gonna come. She's like she was the youngest of a bunch of siblings. She really loved her family in India. And the story that they told me is that they go to the embassy in India and my mom is pregnant with me. And they're like oh your son you've got you're pregnant right? And they're like your son's going to be born in America. So my mom to her frustration sorry this is going back a little bit further but I think it's no this is cool pretty relevant. She comes to America and we grow up. So when she first lands in America, she's in Huntsville or sorry, yeah, uh yeah, Huntsville, Alabama. Yeah, that's where my dad was studying physics. And I think they knew like one Indian family in America that were also doctors that were in Warrenburg, Missouri, right around where I grew up. Yeah. And [clears throat] so my mom, the story goes, she goes out to Warrenburg right when she's about to give birth to me because you can't afford to go to the hospital for like a week, right? So she goes there, I'm born, and then she comes back to Alabama, which is where I grew up. Wow. It was uh That's cool, man. You still tied with both your parents? Yeah. Yeah, very much so. Did you say your dad in the 40s or in his 40s? No, when when my grandfather studied. Oh, okay. Which must have been in the 40s or 50s in India. Okay. I was maybe maybe it was 50s or 60s. No, he's he was born in the 40s. Okay. He wasn't in his 40s in the 40s. [laughter] Right. Right on. [clears throat] Well, what were you into? What were you into growing up?

Yeah. So my childhood was I had a really loving family, but the circumstances were I think objectively pretty tough a lot of times. So um so this is like one of the pretty heavy duty things that happened in my life at a pretty young age. My dad's kidneys failed pretty much. I think it probably started around the time he came to the US. Um, and so by the time I was four or five, my dad had to stop out of his PhD program to get a job to pay for the medical bills. So here we are moving to um a little town called Picosen, Virginia um next to Langley Air Force Base cuz my dad got a job at NASA Langley. And I think one of the big things for him was he's like, I have to get a job to pay for these medical bills. Cuz he started going on diialysis when I was damn when I was like 5 years old. So there I was only child like not a lot of brown people around southern. [laughter] Uh yeah. And actually interestingly I didn't learn English until I was like maybe four or five. No kidding. Yeah. I learned Gujarati was my first language. Um cuz my mom didn't speak English. We learned English together. I learned English watching TV. Wow. Yeah. Um so that was kind of who I was as a kid when we got to Virginia. So what was I into as a kid? Really into superheroes. I was really into like cartoons and X-Men and comic books and stuff like that. Um, I was also really into science and space and that a lot of that came from my dad because he worked at NASA. That's cool. Like what does your dad do? He's a scientist at NASA. It was something that I was always really proud of and I thought was very cool. And I remember I would go to visit my dad at work sometimes. And have you been to Langley Air Force Base? No. Yeah. There's these huge wind tunnels, right, that are kind of on the facility. And I remember going there as a kid and just being sort of aruck by the machinery of like science and space, right? And like how big it was. And I remember my dad had this he had like a desktop computer and he was doing computer stuff on I think he was using Linux in like the '9s. So I remember distinctly remember going and like my dad had his computer at his desk. Um so that was a lot of my childhood. I mean, I grew up not being a terribly athletic kid. I was actually quite overweight as a child. Um, you were overweight? Big time. No kidding. Yeah. Um, I ended up losing a ton of weight when I got a little bit older. Um, like I lost like nearly a third of my body weight in high school. Wow. Yeah. From exercising. Just Oh, okay. And so that that was kind of my childhood, right? We were not terribly wellto-do. We lived in like a small apartment. My dad was a scientist at NASA. He was on diialysis. Um I was I was a little kid, you know, I was like a little little boy. And the interesting the point at which my life fundamentally changed was when I was in 8th grade actually and my dad had been on diialysis this whole time and was waiting to get a kidney transplant like waiting year in year out. I remember he had this little beeper that he would carry around with him just like oh did the beeper go off? cuz if the beeper went off, it meant that one of the hospitals called because they had a kidney transplant for him and you got to like pack up and go. And um when I was in 8th grade, my dad's kidney disease kind of took a turn for the worse. So, he was on diialysis and he got this infection and I don't think they really understood what was happening at the time, but he got very very sick from the catheter that that was in his stomach basically for him to be able to do diialysis. And [sighs and gasps] my dad goes from being sick to being very sick to being hospitalized to my mom being like every day waking up in the morning and going and staying with my dad at the hospital all day. And I was just kind of like home alone just [__] confused. Damn. Being like what what do I what do I do, right? like where where does life go from here? Feels completely rudderless. Didn't have any siblings, right? I was not cool at all. I was like fat brown kid in school. Like there wasn't a lot of I had a couple of friends. Um actually one good friend from that period that's still a friend of mine. Uh but I just remember feeling so unbelievably lost. And then my dad's health continues to take a turn for the worse and he has a couple of really major surgeries where you know at this at at 13 or whatever it was I remember staring down the spectre of what happens if my dad passes away. By the way my dad is healthy and alive today. So probably worth worth saying that. I'm like what happens right? I don't want to go back to India. I've never lived there. My parents couldn't even afford to go back to India. Um, the last, by the way, the last time I went back to India was in 1997, maybe 98. It was Did you go back? Did you Is that like the only time you went back to India or I think Did you go back and forth a couple times? Probably when I was a little kid. I went like two or three times. You don't remember it? Vague memories of it, but I I'm I'm an American, right? like um through and through. So that that that's happening and I'm like, well, what do I do? Right? And I don't feel like I can control anything in my life. But growing up in my household, it was like this this is this theme will come back a little bit later on, right? Is like you have to make the most of the opportunities in life. And America is the land of opportunity. And my dad did beat one thing into my head, which is education, education, education. like that's your way out. So, I go from not being a terribly good student to being like I'm gonna get really good at math. I'm gonna get really good at physics because no matter what like that's like that'll give me some purpose in life and if I'm doing really well in school that that'll be kind of like the thing that pulls me forward. Um, lo and behold, a few months later, my dad, his kidney, that like kidney disease that he had that had him hospitalized, which I'm talking about it kind of vaguely cuz I don't think they really know what happened other than the fact that he had a really bad infection. Mhm. He starts to get better and they're like, 'Give this man a kidney transplant.' Like, he's been on death store. Um, and so he gets a kidney transplant. By the time that happens, which is I think the somewhere between 8th and ninth grade for me, I was like a full-on man at that point cuz I'm like, I have to do well in school, like that's my mission in life. And if I do really well in school, that's going to be how I like carve my own path out cuz I didn't want to feel rudderless anymore. Wanted some degree of agency, some control over my life. And so I go from being not a very good student to being just locked in. Wow. And just at that point like figured out that I loved physics. I loved math. I'd kind of been given this gift of being introduced to this as a kid by my dad, right? And this one of the interesting things growing up, right, is like doing well in school or studying math and stuff like this. this was not cool when we were kids, right? Like you're kind of a loser if you did stuff like this. Um, which I think is not a good thing. Like I don't I don't think that's that's a weird and bad thing for society to reinforce. Like we want our young people to cherish education cuz otherwise they're not going to know what the [__] they're talking about. Right? Like that's what that era of life is about is about learning stuff so that you have a better lens to look at like this weird thing called adulthood and life through. Uh so

He was doing atmospheric sciences. What is that? I think he was doing like satellite imaging. No kidding. Is that [__] wild? Yeah. You can't make this stuff up. It goes around full circle. [laughter] Does Amed I mean do you guys talk a lot about what you're doing now? We do. Yeah. He's uh my dad's a little bit older now. Um and he really wants to be involved. Uh but honestly at this stage it's nice just to have something cool to talk to my dad about with. Um yeah. So they come over and hang out with the kids pretty often. They live next to you or close to you or they live pretty close by. Yeah. That's cool, man. That's cool. I wish my parents lived closer. Where do your parents live? They're in Florida. That's right. Yeah, they're in Florida. I moved to Florida and then the whole family moved to Florida and then I left Florida. So, yeah. Wanted to Yeah. Like, like I told you downstairs, I wanted to raise my kids in a different environment than South Florida. It's just a little too wild down there. Yeah. At which point I made the argument that the best place to raise kids is Silicon Valley. which [laughter] which I I don't I don't actually think that's true. So, where do we go from where do we go from school?

Yeah. So, second half of college or second half of high school was very fun. Felt like my brain woke up and I could just learn stuff and I loved physics and I loved math. So, I just went I went whole hog. Like that's was like that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to get into Stanford or MIT or Caltech or Harvard or one of these like really good schools. Um, and so I just like buried my nose in the textbook and I started actually working for I want to say like a year or two in the nights and weekends and during the summers at this place called Jefferson Lab, which is a particle accelerator in southern Virginia. So I was deep into physics. A particle accelerator. What is that? That's where you take high energy particles and you collide them to study the quantum mechanical effects. This is like CERN. Yeah. Are you familiar with CERN? I am. What are they doing there? Uh [sighs] they're studying quantum field theory, right? So quantum field theory is a fascinating subject by the way. Should we talk about this? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So, do you know about quantum mechanics? No. All right. [laughter] So Einstein with his big old brain figured a lot of this stuff out and actually didn't believe in a lot of it when he was alive which is weird. Um famously said God doesn't uh play dice or roll dice. And quantum mechanics is this theory of the universe which is fundamentally probabilistic. Right? It's about probabilities. Mhm. So the general idea of quantum mechanics is that you have um see if I can do a decent job of explaining this is that things in nature have this particle behavior sometimes sometimes they have this wave behavior and quantum states are when I think it's actually easier to talk about quantum mechanics a little bit more specifically like in the context of electromagnetism. Okay, and light. So that's kind of what I'm trying to get to. is there's this idea of and this actually relates to the name of the company Aetherlex by the way there's this idea of whether light is a wave or it's a particle and different people through history have had different opinions on whether it's one or the other [snorts] and um there was this there's this idea well if particle if if light is a wave then waves have a medium through which they propagate, right? And we knew that light has a lot of wavelike characteristics. It's got wavelength and in turn it's got a frequency. Um, and you can kind of think about light in that way. One of the things that Einstein figured out, um, and a lot of the people that worked on quantum mechanics at the turn of the last century was that it also has this particle behavior. And if you want to understand like how these these two incongruent descriptions can fit together, quantum mechanics is kind of the machinery behind it. Um but quantum field theory is taking the machinery of quantum mechanics and trying to like explain more physical phenomenon with it. So let's see if I can let's see if I can do a a paraphrasing of this or a good explanation of this. So quantum field theory basically says that um there there's different kinds of for each of the fundamental forces that exist in the universe right there's different particles that carry the sort of interaction between things that are happening and then there's the particles that actually carry the quantities right so if you have in the context of electromagnetic interaction you have charged particles like electrons and protons and then you have ways in which charge particles sort of communicate with each other which is with light, right? Mhm. So quantum field theory is kind of like the generalization of that framework to how quirks and neutrinos work to how other kinds of fundamental particles that are predicted might exist or not exist. So one of them more recently is this thing called the Higs Bzon. Um have you ever heard of this before? No. see if I can explain this without going into too much of a rabbit hole, but it's this thing in quantum field theory. It's a particle that was predicted to exist a long time ago when quantum field theory was first invented um as the particle that would give things mass. And there was a a field that if you if different particles interacted with it would give particles the phenomenon of mass. And there was this fundamental I'm kind of trying to give a short version of this. There's a there was a prediction that there would be this particle called the Higs Bzon which was central to this thing but it was really really difficult to observe. Um one of the stories that I've heard they've it's been called the God particle over time because I think originally it was called the godamn particle because it was so goddamn hard to observe. But at some point they I think they they felt that that was not uh that didn't speak to the sensibilities of scientific publications in the 50s or something like that. So they just called it the God particle. But um creating these experiments that create collisions that create these esoteric states of matter where you might be able to observe a Higs Bzon. This is the kind of stuff that CERN does. Okay. So, they're probing this theory called quantum field theory to see all the weird predictions and see if you can create those in the real world. There's a very broad explanation. I mean, there's so there's just a lot there's a lot of theories out there that they're trying to create black mini black holes and all this other stuff. Yeah, that's pretty catchy. I don't I don't know if that's going to happen. Not buying it, huh? I'm not I'm not buying that. I mean, I think if if something like that were to happen, it would probably evaporate in a very short amount of time.

I do. Yeah. It's this thing called the uncertainty principle. Um, and this is something that comes from quantum mechanics. And see if I can remember this correctly, but there's basically the amount of uh the amount of precision that you can theoretically have when observing the system. Right? So, if I remember this correctly, it's that there's two there's a few different statements of this uncertainty principle. And to any of the listeners out there that are actual physicists, if I get something wrong here, I'm sorry. [laughter] Uh but there there's this basic idea that if you if you think about the measurement uncertainty of a physical system, the the time uncertainty and the energy uncertainty and you multiply those two together that that uncertainty is not you're not going to be able to be more certain about those two things than a fixed amount. So if you get more precise with the exact time something is happening, then the exact energy becomes more variable and vice versa. And so I kind of think about it as this lower bound for how accurately you can actually see or observe anything in the physical world cuz if you get more precise on the time measurement, the energy becomes uncertain. If you get more precise on the energy measurement, the exact time becomes uncertain. And there's other formulations of this uncertainty principle, but it basically is like a lower bound on how precise the description of the universe can be.

Yeah. Yeah. Light is both a wave and a particle. This is the wild thing.

Light exhibits wave-particle duality, which Einstein helped figure out. In the late 1800s, people studied the speed of light to understand the phenomenon. The prevailing theory was that light is a wave, and waves need a medium—like sound travels through air. They postulated a medium called the aether. Experiments like the Michelson-Morley experiment tried to measure the speed of light in different directions, expecting a difference due to Earth's rotation, but found it the same. Einstein then proposed that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames, and time and space contract and expand to keep it constant—the beginning of special relativity.

So, if light is a wave, what's the medium? They called it the aether. There were experiments to characterize the speed of light and the aether, leading to head-scratching. The Michelson-Morley experiment split a light beam, sent it in perpendicular directions, and bounced it back—expecting different speeds due to Earth's motion, but found them identical. They wondered if the aether was thick and viscous. Then Einstein said the speed of light is constant in every reference frame, and time and space literally contract and expand to maintain that constant.

Yep.

This relates to uncertainty. Two particles share a quantum state. If they are entangled, you know that on average one is up and one is down. If you measure one and find it up, the other is forced into the down state. This allows encoding information over long distances.

Yeah.

This is one of the true mysteries of the universe.

I don't know about that. I don't think there's enough evidence for a multiverse. It's a theoretical possibility, but there are many theoretical possibilities.

But there are a lot of theoretical possibilities out there.

I do, actually. I used to think about it a lot. I'm trying to reach back a decade in knowledge to explain it. I love quantum mechanics because it's very unintuitive. Physics is about intuition, but quantum mechanics makes that hard. There's no physical analog in the normal world. A related question is whether there is a higher power.

My dad is very spiritual but not religious. He told me from an early age he wouldn't tell me what to believe. It's good.

Do I believe there's a higher power?

Absolutely.

Like what does that do to your perspective?

You actually thought you were going to die when you did this?

And so when I came out of that, it made me realize there's definitely something more to this.

I've never had an experience like that. I kind of hope I do at some point in my life.

That's incredible, man. I'm speechless. The question of higher calling, where we came from—we know the what, where, and how, but what's the why? I've wrestled with that. I've never had a personal experience. I consider myself fortunate. The version I've wrestled with is physics and math. If you believe the laws of nature are accurate, how could there be a humanlike higher being? How do you reconcile that with empirical evidence like wave-particle duality? Quantum field theory is the most experimentally verified theory. But it's incomplete—at small time scales or precise energy, understanding gets wobbly. So how could there be a god? Then you ask, how could you have such well-written theories without somebody writing them? So the question is which is right? I've landed that my little monkey brain can't answer it. I'd rather spend time on things I can understand.

Right, how could you not have God?

So the question is which one is right? I think my little monkey brain can't answer it.

Yeah.

Does it go to your soul?

What do you think?

I think there is.

I do. Yes.

I want to believe that. The alternative is grim—that consciousness is fleeting and fragile. It leads me to ask if someone else has figured this out. Might there be another species that knows the answer? If we could talk to them, would we get the answer? I think we need more observation of the night sky. I don't know if we're really looking for life out there.

Of there being life out there.

There's some pretty good evidence of it.

Okay, a recent historical example. With the James Webb Telescope, they observed a star system about 1.5 to 2 light-years away. They looked at the wobble of the star due to planets, and when a planet passed in front, the brightness dipped. They analyzed the spectrum of light passing through the planet's atmosphere and found biomarkers—molecules that on Earth are only produced by life. They found water and possibly methane. That's a smoking gun for biology on that planet. We should observe it intensely for electromagnetic signals indicating intelligent life. As we develop better telescopes, we might find this in many places.

Yeah.

Yeah.

As this conversation gets more serious, I'm going to eat some gummies.

What is remote viewing?

Tell me.

Really?

I'm going to look this up.

Please do. I'm fascinated by this.

Still exists?

Is there any scientific explanation for how this works?

Most people know.

That's how humans work: given the choice between hard but important and easy but unimportant, we take the easy path.

Are you familiar with Fermi's paradox? Where is everybody?

We did.

Me too.

Please do. I'm fascinated by this. But I want to get into Robin Hood. How did that come about?

Robin Hood was the brainchild of two friends from college. It came out of the Occupy Wall Street sentiment—everyday Americans were angry that they couldn't invest. My co-founder and I were building tech for high-frequency trading, and our friends called us 'part of the system.' We saw the frustration and thought, 'If we make stock market access zero-commission, more people could participate, and society would be more harmonious.' We believed in capitalism but wanted to democratize it.

Yeah.

We registered as a broker-dealer and worked with third-party clearing firms. Over time, we vertically integrated—built our own clearing house a few years later.

We had a waiting list of 50,000 to 100,000 people in the first month. It felt like product-market fit—people were excited. I focused on customer research, even camping out at Stanford to test prototypes. That taught us that users didn't understand 'zero-commission trading'; we had to explain it. I made it a priority to travel to middle America to interview customers.

People loved it. Some had never invested and were curious; others were active traders attracted to zero commissions. The thesis was to bring in a new generation of investors.

Yeah, zero-commission was unique. It took until 2019 for other brokerages to follow.

It's crazy. I'm still on the board. Now I get to work on something else, which feels like a gift.

It was January 2021. Two freight trains collided: democratizing finance and internet meme culture. We had already stepped back as co-CEO a few months prior to spend time with family. When GameStop happened, we had to navigate a black swan event—our clearing house demanded more capital, so we limited buying for a day. That caused a frenzy, but it was just regulatory capital requirements.

No, it was about capital. We raised money quickly to meet the requirements. It was a wild time.

Yeah. That dominated the next few years. A little over a year ago, I left full-time to focus on a new idea in space. I grew up in a space household and was frustrated that space exploration felt like history. When I saw SpaceX rockets landing, I knew I had to work on it. My new company, Aetherflux, aims to apply capitalism to space—building infrastructure to democratize access.

My co-founder's girlfriend (now wife) came up with it. There were worse working titles.

I believe capitalism is a force for innovation and individual betterment. But access to it wasn't equal. Robin Hood put capital markets in everyone's pocket. Now I want to do the same for space—make it accessible through commercial innovation.

At Robin Hood, I spent a lot of time teaching. But I realized I was missing the joy of learning. So I started building cars to learn something new. When you're always teaching, you can stagnate. That's why I stepped back—to keep growing.

The journey. Going from novice to master is what I chase. The money was a motivator early on, but now I crave the uncertainty of learning something new.

Exactly. Right now, I'm asking myself if I can do it again in space. Can I go from novice to forefront in satellite engineering? That uncertainty fuels me.

Like, there's got to be if we could bring more capitalism to space, more ways for people to make money in space, that's how you make space a bigger part of everyday life. And I want to say that to contrast that with the government space industry, which is for the government by the government at government prices, happening at a glacial pace. If we could find more industrial applications for space, we could untether it from the government and allow individuals to have a bigger role, while creating jobs. Currently, commercial space is only a handful of industries: defense, earth imaging, academia, and telecom. I realized there's got to be natural resources we can bring from space, and the obvious one is energy. Space solar power is an old idea from the 1970s. The idea of zero commission stock trading was also an old idea. So I wanted to work on space solar power because it has a strong rationale and can increase the capitalist envelope in space. The recent catalyst was seeing a path to do it with existing technology at a small scale so we can iterate. Enter Aether Flux, with the mission to deliver energy to planet Earth. Next year we're putting two satellites in space, the first one next June.

Is it? Are we in July now?

Yeah. So, I got to get to work tomorrow morning. We're putting a first satellite up.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's wild. The wildest part is you don't need a scientific breakthrough. We're using technology that exists today. That's the core thesis: turning science fiction into science reality. There are ways to do it that hinge on a scientific breakthrough, but that requires billions. We wanted a path to iterate at small scale. If you can iterate every six months, you'll get to the right answer quickly. So, should I tell you about space solar power?

Some water, too. Best way to explain it is to walk through the three things in our design. The first satellite next June has a satellite bus from Apex and our payload: a power transmission system with lasers and optics. On the ground, a portable receiver station. The satellite collects solar power, charges a battery, and uses a fiber laser to beam light down to a tuned solar panel on the ground. We're starting with a proof of concept, aiming for a couple hundred watts. The long-term vision is a constellation of satellites, like Starlink for power.

Right. What I was looking for was a path to iterate at small scale. If you can only iterate every five years, the technology won't improve quickly. With a six-month iteration cycle, you'll move toward the right answer. So, the idea is to use existing supply chains and commercial technologies to package them together for power beaming.