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What's up, man? Oh man, I'm excited about this one. I want to dive right into this. I'm sorry I cut you off on that conversation. We got to have this on the show.
But we were you were looking at the bar over there and asking 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.' And you had brought up that it seems to be like a movement of the younger generation just booze doesn't have a place. And I think that's a good thing. But you brought up a good point.
Yeah. So, as a I feel like the contrary take here is that alcohol's kind of gone out of vogue in society, especially with young people. And it's at the same time that we see a precipitous drop in socializing, romance, all this stuff for the younger generation. I think alcohol is a very important part of human society. It's a very important social lubricant. My contrarian view is alcohol is actually really important.
That's an interesting con. You're the only one that I've ever heard say that. But I don't know. I'm in my 40s now, so I don't know how young people are socializing. Unless I go to downtown Nashville on Broadway, then I see it. No shortage of alcohol there. But I wonder how are people socializing that don't drink nowadays?
That's or they are they not socializing? I don't know. I think this is a broader thing. The era we grew up in, there weren't phones around. You'd get bored and have to think about stuff to entertain yourself. Long form thinking, being bored. Um yeah, and alcohol was like the universal social lubricant when I was in my early 20s.
Yeah, me too. I think it started at like 13. But what happens if you get rid of it? You have a lot of people that probably just socialize a lot less. It's got to be replaced with something. Unfortunately, it's probably replaced with Instagram and X. I think it's social media. I don't think that's great. I don't think the human brain is wired like that. We are social animals. It's weird if that gets replaced or augmented in a way that doesn't line up with how our brains work with the internet.
People say the same thing about cigarettes, too. Wait, do they? Yeah, absolutely. I used to smoke. You never smoked? I've smoked. I mean, you step outside of the bar and you talk to the other people that are smoking. Now I feel like I'm condoning drugs, cigarettes and alcohol, which is absurd for this show. Living in New York in my early 20s, if you go outside and have a cigarette with somebody, there's a connection. You make friends. Um, or work or anywhere. Yeah. Although I think cigarettes are bad for you. They make it hard to breathe and probably give you cancer. On the flip side with alcohol, all the broken homes, drinking with excess. It's ended a lot of relationships. I know in my prior relationships, you get to tug on the bottle a little bit too much and everything goes off the rails. But that's me.
I had the benefit of being Indian. My body just can't really handle alcohol. One of the nice things. I could never hold my alcohol that well. We're also talking about studying math and physics at Stanford, which let me tell you about that party culture. Tell me about it. There's a lot of really late nights of doing problem sets, all-nighter after all-nighter. Not your typical college experience. Like living in the physics building at Stanford, spending all night in the math library, dimly lit rooms smelling the musk of an old textbook. That was my college experience.
Nice. Well, we got a lot to talk about today. We do, man. A ton to talk about. So, let me start you off with an introduction here. Baiju Bhatt, son of immigrants who grew up in Virginia with a passion for science sparked by your father's work at NASA's Langley Research Center. A Stanford-educated physicist and mathematician who co-founded Robinhood alongside your college roommate Vlad Tenev. This no-fee trading app revolutionized the brokerage industry and shook up Wall Street, earning you an Apple Design Award in 2015 for its user-friendly design. Navigated Robinhood through turbulent waters, including the GameStop trading halt and SEC settlements. Recently, you founded EtherFlux, a bold new venture aiming to harness solar energy from space and beam it to Earth. I love that. We just had this guy Steve Quas on and he was talking about beaming energy to the earth. And it was so far out there. I'm like, is this actually real? And now here you are, you're legitimately doing it. So, husband, father of three boys, and you appreciate craftsmanship, hardware, product design, your patches, you're passionate about watches and cars. What are your favorite cars?
Oh man. I got a car recently which I love. It's a 1992 Porsche 911 RS in mint green. I like my cars old and stinky. I hunted for this car for years and finally found it in Germany. I got into building stuff with my hands during COVID. At the time, Vlad and I were co-CEOs of Robinhood, trying to lead the enterprise from my home office. I needed a creative outlet. I've always been this way where there's the main thing I care about and a creative muse or hobby that's completely unrelated. I find that's where creativity comes from, connecting unrelated ideas. During COVID, I wanted to try building actual stuff. I love cars, so I decided to build a car first. I ordered a kit from Factory 5, a Shelby Daytona. I had never done this before. I got connected to automotive mentors and during COVID, in my nights and weekends, I went from a box of parts to a thing that turned on. I like difficult things. I found it difficult, but that's the rite of passage. I remember being under the car trying to mount the fuel tank, becoming a contortionist. My thing is I love the way things work. I got a deep understanding of all the components. I've landed on the idea that it's better to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow. I like my cars underpowered and lightweight so you have to ring them out to keep up with traffic.
Nice. I just got a 1977 Ford F-150. I grew up in Missouri. You were born there. I was. Yeah. They just don't make cars like they used to. I literally just picked it up last week. I love the damn thing. I'm putting some pipes on it because I like the exhaust sound. What kind of engine does it have? A 351. Nice. I love old cars. Cars today are perverted in my opinion. I think of cars as objects of industrial design, artistic because old cars were handmade. Today they're designed by computers and built by robots. There's something about it I really don't like.
I'm just curious, you know what I don't like is everything's going electric. Ferrari is not doing engines anymore, it's all electric. And the Mercedes G Wagon is going all electric. I love the sound of those things. I used to drive them for work. Burboy V8. Yeah, love it. But everything's going electric and the sound of supercars is amazing. I can't envision a Ferrari flying by with no sound. It's weird. I feel like it takes from the experience. I find not just the electrification, but how computerized cars are. It takes away from the experience. When I'm behind the wheel, I want to feel the road surface through the steering wheel and the traction through my butt.
Dude, you drive, don't you? I do. Yeah. You go to the track? Not that much. Have you taken driving schools? I have. Yeah. Which ones? I've had some people tutor me. I've taken the Ferrari driving school once. How was it? It was really fast, like too fast. Have you done it before? Well, I've done a bunch of driving schools back in the old days when I was a SEAL and contractor for CIA. They put us through a ton of schools. Did they put you through the Ferrari school? No. It was more practical, like pitting and crashing into things and how to get out of situations. But I took this course, you've got to do this. There's a course in New Hampshire called the O'Neal Rally Racing Course. I love rally racing. It is awesome. I went there for about 2 weeks. You start off in little Ford Festivas, then move to Audis and BMWs for rear-wheel drive, and you're on these little trails in the mountains. You took BMWs on dirt roads? DUDE, IT'S AWESOME. You've got to check this out. It's the coolest driving school I've ever taken. It's about two weeks long. When my son gets older, that's one of the first things I want to do with him. Get him out on those trails. You'll love it. I hope you do it.
Yeah, I'm thinking about wanting to do that with my boys. They would love that. O'Neal Rally Racing School. That's not a plug, it's just awesome. Also, off-roading is really fun. The instructors are phenomenal. I can't wait to do it again. I've done one actual driving school, the Ferrari one, at the opposite end of the spectrum. Too fast, makes you feel like you're going to throw up. Off-roading is way more fun. You're moving through trails barely wide enough for the car, taking right angle turns at 50 miles an hour. It's awesome. Were there any big old trucks? No, we used Jeep Cherokees for off-roading. That was 10-15 years ago. It was the most fun driving course I've taken.
But well, everybody starts off with a gift here. Oh, amazing. Vigilance League gummy bears, legal in all 50 states. Can I have some? Yeah, man. Dig in. Just candy. There's no funny business. Good stuff. I love gummy bears. Me, too. I'd love to do a life story on you. Yeah, let's do it. So, let's just start at the beginning and go in chronological order. Where'd you grow up?
I grew up in Alabama and then in southern Virginia. My family moved to the US from India. My dad always wanted to study physics. He grew up in a town called Babnager in Gujarat. My grandfather was one of the first Western-trained eye doctors. My dad went to college to study chemistry, started a PhD, then became an optometrist, but kept applying to PhD programs in America because he wanted to study physics. He put 'kumar' at the end of his name, meaning bachelor, because he wanted to devote his life to science. But then he got married to my mom, she got pregnant with me, and he got into University of Huntsville, Alabama to study physics. My mom was reluctant to come, but they went to the embassy and they said your son will be born in America. So she came. I was born in Warrenburg, Missouri, because my mom went there to give birth since they couldn't afford the hospital. Then we moved back to Alabama. My childhood was tough. My dad's kidneys failed when I was about four or five. He had to stop his PhD to get a job to pay medical bills. We moved to Poquoson, Virginia, near Langley Air Force Base, where he got a job at NASA Langley. He started dialysis when I was five. I was an only child, not a lot of brown people around. I didn't learn English until I was four or five; I learned Gujarati first. I learned English watching TV. As a kid, I was into superheroes, cartoons, X-Men, comic books, and science and space, which came from my dad. I would visit him at work and see the huge wind tunnels. I was overweight as a child, lost nearly a third of my body weight in high school through exercise. We were not well-to-do, lived in a small apartment. My dad was on dialysis for years, waiting for a kidney transplant. He had a beeper in case a kidney became available. When I was in 8th grade, his kidney disease took a turn for the worse. He got an infection from the catheter and became very sick, hospitalized. My mom stayed with him all day, and I was home alone, confused and rudderless. I was a fat brown kid with few friends. I felt lost. Then my dad had major surgeries, and I stared down the possibility of him passing away. But he is healthy and alive today. I didn't want to go back to India; I'm American. I decided to focus on education as my way out. I went from being a not very good student to being locked in. I loved physics and math. I worked at Jefferson Lab, a particle accelerator, in nights and weekends. I applied to Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Harvard. I got into Stanford and studied math and physics.
What was your dad studying at NASA? He was doing atmospheric sciences, satellite imaging. Is that wild? You can't make this stuff up. It goes around full circle. Do you guys talk a lot about what you're doing now? We do. He's a bit older now and wants to be involved. It's nice to have something cool to talk to my dad about. They come over and hang out with the kids pretty often. They live pretty close by. That's cool. I wish my parents lived closer. Where do your parents live? They're in Florida. I moved to Florida and then the whole family moved there, then I left. I wanted to raise my kids in a different environment than South Florida. It's a little too wild down there. At which point I made the argument that the best place to raise kids is Silicon Valley, which I don't actually think is true. So, where do we go from school?
Second half of high school was very fun. My brain woke up and I could just learn stuff. I loved physics and math. I went whole hog. I tried to get into Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Harvard. I buried my nose in textbooks and worked at Jefferson Lab, a particle accelerator. That's where you take high energy particles and collide them to study quantum mechanical effects. Like CERN. They're studying quantum field theory. Quantum field theory is fascinating. Should we talk about this? Yeah, let's do it. All right. Do you know about quantum mechanics? No. All right. Einstein figured a lot of this out and didn't believe in it. He said God doesn't play dice. Quantum mechanics is fundamentally probabilistic. Things have particle and wave behavior. Light is both a wave and a particle. Quantum field theory generalizes that to all fundamental forces. There's the Higgs boson, which gives things mass. It was called the God particle because it was so hard to observe. CERN creates collisions to observe these particles. They're probing quantum field theory to see if predictions hold. There are theories about creating mini black holes, but I don't buy that. If it happened, it would evaporate quickly. The uncertainty principle says there's a lower bound on how precisely you can measure certain pairs, like time and energy. So you can't be absolutely certain about both. That's the wild thing about light.
Did you I think I read somewhere that we just froze light? Yeah, I've heard about that. I don't really know what that means. I don't know what that means either. So, is light a particle or a wave? I've seen things about shooting a beam into a slit, it has both behaviors. Yeah, light is both a wave and a particle. This is the wild thing.
Exists. It exhibits this thing called wave particle duality. This is actually one of the things that Einstein figured out. A related tangent is the idea of the speed of light. In the late 1800s, people were studying light. The prevailing theory was that light is a wave, and waves have mediums they travel through. Sound waves travel through air, water waves travel on water. So if light is a wave, what is the medium?
You're going to create a little wave that's going to travel on the surface of the water.
So, if light is a wave, what's the medium? Like, what is the thing that light is oscillating? They famously called it the aether. There were experiments to characterize the speed of light and the aether. 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. This led to many ideas, until Einstein said the speed of light is constant in every reference frame, and time and space contract and expand to keep it constant. That was the beginning of special relativity.
Yeah, this is the theory of special relativity. That put Einstein on the map. A real-world example: a clock on a satellite ticks at a different pace due to relativistic effects. You have to compute the difference. I'm not sure I have a great simple explanation for time dilation and length contraction.
Let me ask you about quantum entanglement. It sounds like it's going to revolutionize communications, especially crypto.
And so, it's my understanding that you take a particle, split it in half, put one here and the other infinite distance away. If you put a vibration on one half, the other half mimics it exactly. Am I correct?
Can anybody explain why that is happening?
This has to do with uncertainty. You have two particles in a quantum state. On average, one is up and one is down. They are entangled. If you look at one and see it's up, the other is forced into the down state. This is how you can encode information at a distance.
Then just by looking at one, you force the other into the opposite state. So you can encode something at a long distance.
Man, how about that?
Does that make sense?
It does make sense. I just can't understand how they are still entangled. How are they communicating? Is everything connected? This is one of the true mysteries of the universe.
Is it just that everything is connected? This is one of the true mysteries of the universe.
Does it mean there's a multiverse?
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.
Do you think about this stuff a lot?
I do. I used to think about it a lot. I'm trying to reach back a decade in knowledge. 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.
Is there a higher being? I don't know. I've gone back and forth. I'm not sure it's a question humans can answer. My mom is religious, my dad is not. He raised me to figure it out myself.
You do I believe there's a higher power?
Tell me about it.
I grew up Catholic but didn't take it seriously. Then I joined the SEAL teams and lost it. I saw good guys die while the wild ones survived. It made me feel guilty and took my faith. Then I did psychedelics, specifically 5-MeO-DMT, which felt like dying. I separated from everything, even my family, and crossed into another realm. I felt the flow of energy and the presence of my deceased friend Gabe. It made me realize everything is exactly as it should be. That experience led me to explore quantum mechanics and energy. Later, in Sedona, I had a strange encounter with a security guard who read my mind, and then I found out my friend's daughter contacted me. All these coincidences made me believe in a higher power.
What does that do to your perspective?
It changes everything. When you do it, you feel like you're dying, then you separate from the material world. You sort through your life at light speed. The last things I held onto were my son and wife. When I let go, I crossed over and felt the energy of everything. I saw that everything is in perfect harmony. I felt my friend Gabe's presence. It made me realize that everything that has happened is exactly the way it's supposed to be.
And then I started watching quantum mechanics videos to understand what that was. I was really into energy. It sent me down a path. Fast forward to Sedona, I was angry about the state of the world, especially gender issues with children and China. I had a rough trip. On the last day, I saw something that pissed me off, went on a hike, and had an internal battle. Then a security guard I'd never seen read my mind and told me not to worry about those things. That freaked me out. I told my wife I think God just talked to me. She said God's always talking to you. Then I had more signs, like a guy who looked exactly like my dead friend Gabe appearing everywhere, and then my friend's daughter texted me saying her dad wanted her to talk to me. All of that solidified my belief in God.
Exactly. So I go, my mind blanks out after he said the China thing. I was freaked out. Never seen this man before in my life, and he's in my head reading my mind. I look at my wife and say, I think God just talked to me. She says, yeah, God's always talking to you. Then we go into our bungalow and talk about Gabe. Gabe was a heroin addict who started a Wounded Warriors hockey league. The Florida Panthers sponsored it, but when they went to tell him, they found him dead from an overdose. Later, the Panthers won the Stanley Cup, and the jersey I had fell off the wall without a scratch. Gabe's always around. There were many signs.
And I also told you Gabe was a heroin addict at the time. How are you going to do that? Better clean it up if you're going to pull that one off.
Well, I'll be damned. He gets it done. The Panthers sponsored his team. When they knocked on his door to tell him, they found him dead. Fast forward, Panthers win the Stanley Cup for the first time ever.
This was about two years ago, probably 23.
So I got... Sorry, for some reason I thought your friend passed away years prior. Sorry, I'm just putting two and two together.
Well, he passed away before this. When the Panthers won, the team gave me one of the original jerseys with Gabe's name on it. That jersey had been hanging for three years. The day the Panthers won, it fell off the wall without a scratch. So anyways, Gabe's always around. There are many other things. In Sedona, I saw a guy who looked exactly like Gabe, same build, same brow line. He was everywhere. At the end, I found out he was staying in the other half of our bungalow. Then I lost another good friend, a SEAL who died of a heart attack on a hunting trip. His daughter texted me saying her dad wanted her to talk to me because I knew a side of him nobody else knew. All that happened within 5-10 minutes. That was it. I made calls, including to Eddie Penny, who had found Christ. Ever since, almost every guest on my show has brought up God. That experience solidified my belief in a higher power.
I've never had an experience like that. I kind of hope I do at some point in my life.
I hope you do, too. It was life-changing. That's incredible, man. I'm kind of speechless. I think this question of what is the higher calling, what's out there, where did we come from, are all intrinsically related. We know the what, where, and how, but what's the why? The version I've wrestled with is that I've never had a personal experience to lead me one way or the other. I consider myself fortunate not to have lost many close people. But I wrestle with 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 quantum field theory? But then you ask, how could you have such well-written theories without somebody writing them down? So the question is which is right? I've landed on the idea that my little monkey brain can't answer this question, and I'd rather spend time on things I can understand.
Makes sense. I see how the pieces fit together so nicely, but then there are no answers. Where does consciousness reside? Nobody seems to know. Where does it go? Is it your soul? Maybe we'll never figure that out. It's a mystery. I'm also curious about life on other planets.
What do you think? Is there life elsewhere in the universe?
What makes you think that?
I want to believe that. The alternative is grim. It means consciousness is fleeting and fragile. I don't want to believe that. It leads me to ask if someone else has figured this out. People care about aliens. 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. I've gone into this topic many times. It's conspiratorial with no hard evidence. I don't think there is evidence of life out there.
There's some pretty good evidence of it.
Like I have not heard it, but I'd love to hear it.
Okay, so this is a more recent historical one. There was a star system observed by James Webb. They looked at the behavior of stars as planets pass around them. They found biomarkers for life. They found water on Saturn? I'm not sure. They found water on Mars. There are lakes of water on moons of Jupiter. To look for extraterrestrial life, you can either go to Mars and look for microbial life, or look at bright spots in the night sky for markers. Recently, they found methane in the atmosphere of a planet passing in front of a star. That is a smoking gun for biology. We should observe that planet for electromagnetic radiation. As we develop better telescopes, we might find this in many places.
Well, I did hear something that we were receiving some type of beacon or signal from somewhere out there, but they can't explain what it is. The conspiracies I love are where you see star systems that show up in conspiracy theories. It makes you wonder if there's more to it.
Yeah. I don't know. I feel like I do believe in God. I think a lot of things people see are spiritual. But then they're finding things like the pyramid on Mars. I wonder if there was life. Sometimes I wonder if there were more advanced civilizations on Earth millions of years ago, and then the Earth resets. I've talked to remote viewers. I think that's real.
Dude, you don't know about remote viewers? Holy shit. Remote viewers, how do I put this? Remote viewers...
Okay, you've seen surely you've seen some type of a movie or a TV show where they bring on the psychic and the psychic's like, 'Oh, it happened over there in the shower and they used a knife and then they go in there and they're like, 'Holy [__] here's the knife.' You know, that is remote viewing. So, that's actually people can do it. It's a real thing.
Yeah. The CIA had a program going with the Romano Institute for a long time. I brought in Joe McMonal, who is remote viewer number one for the United States, and he remote viewed a Russian submarine that was going to be launched on a particular date. The director of the CIA said he was full of [__], but another agency got in touch and he was only a couple of days off. That triggered the Stargate program.
I'm going to look this up.
I'll send you the interview.
Please do. I'm fascinated by this.
So I went down that rabbit hole and brought on a bunch of these guys. Some of the guys that started Stargate and some that finished it, the program managers.
Stargate doesn't exist, but I'm sure it's renamed. I know Naval Special Warfare was looking into this stuff recently.
Is there any scientific explanation for how this works?
Just an emergent phenomenon. Joe says early humans used more of their brain and had intuition, could communicate without language. Then we developed language and technology and lost that ability. He thinks everyone still has the ability but we're too distracted. It's like what my wife told me: 'God's always around you, you just don't make the time to let him in.'
You'll never figure it out because we're too busy wrapped up in other things. We'll just spend all day on the most understandable thing. Given the choice between something hard but important and easy but unimportant, humans follow the easy path.
That's kind of how humans work, right? But what I was getting at is maybe there was life on other planets before there was life. Maybe there's only life at one place at one specific moment in time and then it pops up somewhere else.
Are you familiar with Fermi's paradox? No? It's like 'where is everybody?'
All right, we're back from the break. Man, we went down some rabbit holes there.
Remote viewing. You got to look into it.
I'm absolutely going to look into it. But I want to get into Robin Hood. How did that come about?
The company was the brainchild of two good friends from college. We were working in finance in New York during Occupy Wall Street. We saw the frustration about wealth inequality and access to the markets. My co-founder and I had a phone conversation and thought, if we could make stock trading zero commission, that would directly address people's frustrations. We believed that if more people were part of the financial system, society would be more harmonious. So we built Robin Hood from the ground up, mobile-first, zero commission, with a completely different interface.
You're going to get some people that make noise about it, get elected, and nothing's actually going to change. But maybe this is something we can change with technology.
That was the bright-eyed optimism of young people. We thought we could fix this problem.
Enter Robin Hood: mobile, zero commission, built from the ground up. When did you hear about it?
I don't remember exactly, but when I did hear about it, it didn't matter how much money you had, you got access to the market. I started using it probably around 2015.
We released it publicly in 2015. I was spending a lot of time interviewing customers because I realized early on that building a product for the mass market required understanding how everyday people with different financial lives would use it. We would go to Stanford and offer $50 for 30 minutes to test prototypes. It was eye-opening because people didn't see things the same way we did. For example, when we said 'zero commission stock trading,' people thought it was the interest rate on a car. We had to unpack that.
