What is the galactic brain?
The galactic brain. Yes. This is something that I'd wanted to do probably my whole life. Started a company called Aether Flux with a mission to build power grid in space.
Hold on. Hold the fuck on. And the way you do it is with lasers. Yes. Space lasers. Space lasers more specifically. You want to freaking... What the... like that concept is kind of like Starlink for power, right? This is probably the most interesting the energy industry's been in our lifetime.
Yeah, I'm locked in on this, man.
The artificial intelligence brain of humanity orbiting Earth.
Have fun watching the show. Get your damn popcorn, 'cause you're going to need it.
What's up, guys? We are back and we are here at an amazing location in Midtown in Miami, Florida at 305 Podcast. And today's guest, I'm going to tell you what, probably one of the bigger accomplished guests that we've ever had on the show. And I'm really excited for you guys to hear what he has to say about his life, about his upbringing, and what he has built. And then later on in the show, we have a very big announcement for something that he has launched, and it's going to be a big deal. I have with me today Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, and just an amazing dude. We had so much fun talking off camera. I feel like we are already friends, already know each other. And just welcome to the show, man. It's great to have you.
Yeah, thanks for having me, man. It's fun to be here.
Oh, man. It's been great already. We had a great conversation already about like fitness and shit, which is... Yeah, like fitness and like you came in, you gave me a hug. I'm like, 'All right, this is my kind of dude, man.' Of course. This is great. No, dude. It's great to have you. And we've been throwing around when we can get this thing going for I think a couple months, and I finally forgot about it and just like, okay, maybe just not right now. If it's meant to be, it'll come around. And then I think like a week later after I said that, like Sarah just sent me the email and she goes, 'Hey, he gonna be in town.' I'm like, 'Well, let's do this thing.' So, yeah, it's perfect. We're here, man. You have an amazing story. I'm not just talking about the entrepreneurial story of what you've built and how you've, in my opinion, impacted the market and how the landscape is for the lay person now, right? That wants to invest and get into the market, whether it's traditional or Bitcoin. And like dude, you and Vlad were the pioneers in my humble opinion. We'll get to that later. But you know, your family came over from India, right? You were in the womb when your mom and dad came here as immigrants of this country. What was that like when growing up here and listening to their stories and their experiences?
I tell you, one of my first memories in life is watching the Dukes of Hazzard. Yeah, 'cause my family moved to the US from India right before I was born and my dad had... it's kind of an interesting story. I'll tell you a little bit about it. So my grandfather on my dad's side was, I think, one of the first western trained eye doctors in... at the time was probably much more of a village. Now it's a huge city in Bavagar and Gujarat. So he was one of the first western trained eye doctors. So he made glasses for everybody. He was like, 'Oh, all of my children are going to go into the optometry business with me.' And my dad had always wanted to study physics. He'd always had a love of science and the core truths of how the universe works to the extent that our little monkey brains can understand it. And so he starts out in biology and he starts switching to chemistry and he starts a PhD in India in chemistry. He kind of... I don't think he finishes that and he goes and joins my grandfather's optometry business, but all the while he's applying to PhD programs in the US. He wants to study physics. He wants to study in particular the real nature of how gravity works. And he's applying year in, year out. I think he's kind of at this point he's devoting himself to science. He's like, 'I want to be... that's all I want to do.' Doesn't want to get married, doesn't want to have kids, but ends up getting married to my mom and it kind of all happens in rapid succession. They get married, my mom is pregnant, and then he gets into University of Huntsville Alabama, which is where the Dukes of Hazzard connection comes in. And my mom didn't speak English, loved her family in India, had no interest in moving to America. And apparently my mom's dad, my grandfather, had a talk with my dad and it's like, 'You can marry my daughter, but under one condition: you can't go to America,' 'cause it was known that he was trying to go to America. And lo and behold, it happens immediately and he gets sent to University of Huntsville Alabama to study physics as a PhD student. And my mom doesn't speak any English. She wasn't even sure she was going to come. She goes to the embassy and they're like, 'Oh, you're pregnant, right?' And she was like, 'Yeah.' And they're like, 'Oh, it's a boy.' And they're like, 'Cool. You're coming to America and your son is going to be born in America.' So for the first 5 years of my life, I actually didn't even speak English. I learned English watching TV with my mom.
Watching Dukes of Hazzard.
Watching Dukes of Hazzard. Well, I mean, obviously, I love that show, by the way. Yeah. You know, like, dude, come on. I grew up on Dukes of Hazzard, too.
Yeah. I had the lunchbox. The Dukes of Hazzard Lunchbox and the Knight Rider lunchbox. That was dope. That was some good shit, man. I thought I could literally have a car that would talk to me like KITT would. But car culture was awesome in the 80s, dude. You love cars. I heard you love cars.
I love cars. Yeah. I love everything about them. I love the way they work. We can get into this more.
Yeah, we'll get into that. I want to stay on where we're at right now. So first five years you learned English through watching TV with your mom. And every everyone that I speak to that is a successful entrepreneur, and I'm not talking like mid success, I'm talking massive success like what you've created, a lot of them are immigrants. And so I think there's a thing to be said and I don't know what it is. I have my theories, but I think that being born in America, myself, you go through life just kind of taking things for granted, knowing that you live in utopia. Right. You live in utopia. You may not live in San Francisco or New York. You might live in the Midwest, but you can go anywhere in the landscape of the United States and have anything you want. And immigrants, they come over with this different understanding. They are getting away from a country that they may not have the opportunity that they want. So they come here and they appreciate it more. And even if the children are not born yet, the benefit of being in a family that immigrates here, having a different perspective within the household and how to work and how to appreciate, I always find that those individuals are massively successful. What are your thoughts on that?
I mean, I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, we'll get to this in a little bit, but this kind of is the bedrock of the idea behind Robinhood even, right? Because my family came to the US because my dad wanted to study physics. They wanted to come here because this is a land of opportunity. And especially if you rewind the clock back to the 80s when they did this, right? It's like, as Americans, we kind of lose sight of the fact that living in this great nation is the envy of literally everybody in the world, right? And the reason people come here by and large is because of upward economic mobility. This is the land of opportunity has been and as long as we don't fuck it up too badly will continue to be for our kids' generation and kids' and kids' generation. It's the place in the world where if you want to do something and you want to make it for yourself, you can do it. And the thing is like where else in the world can you do this? What's number two? I don't even know. There is no number two.
I don't know. Exactly. To your point and yet, you made a comment of like hopefully we don't fuck it up. It's like we're trying to fuck it up. I mean, we are trying harder, damn. I mean like give it the college try, man. Like really screw this fucking country up so our kids and their kids and their kids don't have what we have. Hopefully it recorrects itself. I don't know the answer. But I think about this sometimes, right? Like we as adults of this generation, the baton is in our hands right now. We're grown ass men. This is our time to sort of shepherd society, culture, all these things through this era. And we kind of look at it where we are right now with a lot of skepticism. You can talk about where the United States position is in the world relative to China and some of our other adversaries. But this is also the era of the information boom, right? When we look back on what our generation's done, we should be pretty fucking proud of it, too.
I think so, man. Despite the fact that I think both of us are acutely aware of the risk of totally fucking it up right now.
Well, I think what's really sad is you go back to when we were kids, right? I don't know how it was in Huntsville, Alabama, but I grew up in the San Francisco Bay.
Yeah. I'm from Concord, California. So, like I look at these two things and it used to be, in California, if we needed an egg or if we needed sugar or a cup of milk, we go to our neighbors and ask for it. And it was a normal thing. It was a normal thing to go borrow shit from your neighbor and to knock on the door and see if Beiju want to come out and play. We don't have that now. What we have now is, I think, this constant need to be right and need to be better than somebody else to a point where you look at just even if we were to post a clip on Instagram and it goes viral, someone's going to say some shit because they're jealous of where they're at in their life and they haven't created what you have or what I have. But we don't have this culture of the love for the community more like we used to. I mean it's kind of how I feel. I love people in general until you give me a reason not to like you and not to love you. So I always start it with very open and that gap can close based on my experience level with you, right? Or if I read your energy and like okay I'm out, this is dark, right? I can't be a part of this. But I just feel, and I don't know if it's because of all the screens and everything else going on with the technology.
No, it is because of the screens. Like that is one of the main... kids don't get screens. So, but yeah, man. I just think we're on a tangent, but I just feel like in an effort to rebuild respect in the community and within society, it starts with dudes like us and wives like our wives to truly raise the children and to give them love and to provide this safe space for them that they can communicate their feelings when they're feeling a certain way and the proper way to talk to their friends or in relationships when they are feeling a certain way. It's on us. It's on parents, man, to really parent children to where they can go out in the world and be kind and successful and hopefully compassionately empathetic.
Yeah. I think we're talking about being trad.
Yeah. Right. It's actually kind of nice that being traditional is back in vogue in some way that it wasn't for a while. And I like we were just talking about this a little while ago, right? Is like you kind of think about what happened with a generation of people that you take a generation of developing young people and you isolate them for two years. Like what's going to happen? We did this during COVID. We did this all around the US, all around the world. And we're living with it right now in addition to all the screens, right? Where... Yeah. It's like play stupid games, win stupid prizes. COVID was one hell of a production. And I know, let me give some context to the audience. I believe in it. I believe people lost their lives. I believe it was a nasty thing. What I'm saying the production is from the media, the government, and how the byproduct of what happened, right? It's like the isolation of people for multiple years and we did it to everybody uniformly across society. And I agree. I'm not trying to say COVID didn't happen or it wasn't real or any of that sort of stuff. It's just commentary on what was the emergent phenomenon as we look back a couple of years.
One of the biggest things that I saw that I still see today because of that era. It gave people the permission to be assholes on social media.
100%. I mean like... well I think people already kind of were taking that permission but it just turbocharged it and it cut out all the normal communication that people do. Yeah, like I can literally someone called me a degenerate the other day on Instagram and I'm like it's funny because I read it in line now. You listen, it used to really bother me, Beiju. I'm like I'm not this person. They don't even know me. But I read it and I was in line for something, I looked at it and I laughed because I can separate now because I know who I am. But I just feel like it gave people on these platforms an opportunity like you don't agree with something, be as direct, be as mean, be as disgusting as humanly possible. And I'm allowed to type this and send it to somebody. It blows me away. I mean, like, don't... I don't feel like I'm saying you, but more broadly speaking, when you do stuff like that and you look back on it, you feel kind of shitty about yourself, it's like why did I put that out there? Why did I put that negative thought out there? Yeah, absolutely. But I don't think a lot of people have that awareness.
I think they live in this state where their limbic system has to be all rashed up, you know, and it's like, okay, I'm going to say this because I have to show that person they're wrong or that I don't like them. And then after that, they go on this thing to where they continue to do that because that's their baseline. That's what they were taught.
Yeah. These generational curses, man, they're a real thing.
This is not how my head works at all. Jeez, this is not how my head works at all.
I just like there's so much... We all have negative feelings, right? It's kind of what do you do with them. I'm very firmly of the opinion like I grew up idolizing people like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, right? You take somebody says something negative to you, you're like, 'Thank you. Love it. Thank you.' Right. It's like you internalize it, you motivate yourself with it. And I'm of the opinion that the fiercest competition, the thing that makes you the strongest is you versus yourself. You versus your own demons, your own fears, whatever it is, right? So there's other ways of taking this and the idea of negative feelings and then just vomiting it out on people. I don't get it. I think my brain is just not working like that.
Mine either, right? I could be in the darkest place of my life. I'm never going to go to a social platform and say something like that and spew negativity, or even respond negatively. Sometimes I don't even engage. But I truly do feel and to your point, our generation and depending on how we were raised or how anybody else was raised, if someone tells me that's not going to work or you can't do that, who do you think you are? Because I got a lot of that when I started the show.
Yeah. I've gotten that plenty of times over the years.
I bet you have. Like I'm of the school of thought. I'm like, 'Love it. You just added to this chip on my shoulder. You don't know who you're dealing with. You put jet fuel in an engine, buddy. Watch me.' And I think that if we handle those thoughts and feelings and process them correctly and stay in our process and really focus on the mission at hand for the cause and the purpose and not because of what they said, cool, I'm in. But if you let this control your actions, then you're going to hit so many roadblocks because you're operating out of a negative motivational space instead of the purpose. But yeah, man, when someone tells me I can't do something, I'm like, 'I know. Have fun watching the show. Get your damn popcorn, 'cause you're going to need it.'
I mean, I've had this example again and again in my life. I don't know if we talked about this or not, but I was jumping around a little bit. I was like a pretty overweight kid growing up and I got made fun of a lot for that. And at one point in 10th grade, to quote the great Michael Jordan, I took it personally. Yeah. And I was like, 'I don't want to live in this body anymore.' And watch me. And I came back and I lost like almost a third of my body weight. Granted, I was kind of a string bean at that point, but yeah, people were like, 'Who are you?' Like, yeah, I don't even... people didn't even recognize me afterwards. And I'm like, 'Hi, it's me.' I took it personally, you know? This exact thing we're talking about, right, is when people say negative things or they make fun of you or they do the things that actually kind of get to you a little bit. I personally relish those opportunities because I'm like... at this point because the alternative is malaise, right? The alternative is not having as much motivation and more motivation I think is just better. I'm in the space where I welcome people to push back and tell me that I can't do something or that it won't work. I welcome it. Like, go ahead. I'm fine. But I do want to share something with you.
My whole life I grew up overweight. I still battle it, right? So, it's like when I was in high school.
Wait, when was the last time you were overweight? You're not overweight at all.
November. I was November of last year. That's when I started my journey of getting back in shape. And you know when I was playing baseball in college I wasn't out of shape to be clear. It was high school freshman year and then some of the subsequent ups and downs as an adult. In November of 2024, I was severely depressed, couldn't get off the couch unless I was recording, under a blanket watching TV, and I was 230 lbs and 31% body fat.
Wait, this was November of '24?
And by January, I was 199 lbs. And then I worked my butt off and I got to July and I was 188 lbs. And then vacation happened and it took me a while to get back on track. And right now I sit about 195 in the morning. But I'm still working to get some of the stubborn areas off, right? Just staying consistent. But it's crazy because once I got in really good shape last year, everything changed.
Oh, dude. I couldn't get a dime of capital for people to invest. Couldn't... until Marina and Brad Miller. Brad Miller was... they're friends of mine. They were on the show. He owns this massive telecom company, $60 million company, Southern Tier Telecom. They crush it. And they saw me a couple weeks later and like, 'What are you doing? Holy shit.' And then they see me again like, 'Dude, you look phenomenal. Your discipline level, holy shit, the determination, this is unreal.' And then all of a sudden it was, 'How do we do this with you?' People respond to this dude across the board in society. And then another partner named Roman came on afterwards with another infusion. It's like, hold on. And now I'm turning people away.
Isn't it funny how that happened?
Isn't it funny? I mean, you have a similar story, too, right? When you... I don't want it to be about me, but I'm just saying that when I fixed me, that one thing that always bothered me that was in my frontal lobe every single day, like I don't feel good in these clothes. I don't feel good in this shell right now. This has got to be impacting the way people view me because if I'm giving off an energy that I'm not confident, I need to fix that. And all of a sudden it blew up. But you had a lot of people tell you and Vlad no when you were creating, when you're looking for money for Robinhood. Let's go through that.
Yeah. Haters at every step along the way.
Yeah. Adversity, bro. Adversity. I mean, one thought on this, right, is like it's for some reason it's okay for successful men to just be fatsos. Right. Like historically speaking, if you're a successful dude, it's totally fine to be completely out of shape and not give a shit about your outward appearance. And I think the point that you're kind of getting at here is like, at the risk of being a little controversial, the same rules apply for men as for women. If you take care of yourself and you present yourself in a way that you feel like you're putting your best foot forward, I say this 'cause women kind of do this naturally and a lot of dudes don't. But if you actually show that you care about your body, the way that you look, that feeds back, right? People take notice of that. They show you more respect. If you just in the way that you show up, you're like, 'I'm showing myself respect by being fit, being reasonably well-groomed, not smelling like...'
Cologne for the last 12 hours or whatever.
Smell like Little Debbies.
Yeah. Smelling like hard work.
Yeah, exactly. It's funny because I always take it a step further for myself too. Like how do I want Beiju to feel and his entourage to feel when they walk through the door and meet me for the first time. Pretty good, right? Like a big hug. But that's the thing for me, I have to chase those feelings for myself so I can exude that to other people and give it to the audience, right? Because that's the deal. I want... this show is about determination, overcoming obstacles. And when you and Vlad were building Robinhood, it wasn't the first thing that you tried, right? You went through multiple ventures that failed, which is normal. Failure is good. But then you were looking for VC money for Robinhood. And I mentioned it earlier, I can't remember if it was when we started the show or in the kitchen. Like dude, you and Vlad are the pioneers. I look at you. I'm sitting here with a guy right now and I want the audience to really understand this. There's teachers right now on their planning period day trading. Day trading to make more money. I truly believe that Robinhood is the cause of that because before you had to go to a broker and there was broker fees, commission fees, like all this kind of stuff. But then insert Robinhood. And now there's no minimum. There's no minimum spins. There's like, okay, you can do it this way. Do it under your own terms and educate themselves on the market and this trading. So like, dude, you built something amazing. And I'd love for you to share with the audience some of the pitfalls that you've had in creating it and how you feel about it now.
I mean, I think it's interesting because at this particular moment in time, it's like in many ways it is the zeitgeist, right? Let me just tell you the emotional philosophical backdrop of this.
When we started Robinhood, this was in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. And I entered the working world literally the month or two months before Lehman going under. And I stumbled into a job in finance. Didn't really know whether I even wanted to be doing it or not. I had been an academic mathematician before this and a combination of the economy going south is how I ended up working in finance. And just kind of looking around and seeing these financial tectonic plates moving and seeing a generation of young people like my generation entering the working world looking at the financial system and being like, 'This thing is totally broken. It doesn't work for ordinary people. It systematically advantages the people that already have money.' All these things. And then the 3 to 4 years that followed 2008, I don't remember the exact numbers on this but I remember something like 90% of the recovery went to the wealthiest people. And this is the backdrop of things like Occupy Wall Street that are happening. Mind you, at the time, Vlad and I are two wildly unsuccessful, nobody entrepreneurs, right? Roommates at Stanford. Roommates for years and years after that too, for like seven or eight years we were roommates in a row.
This is major like Facebook vibes.
Yeah. It was a really fun period of time. We had nothing but we had each other, right. So this period that follows 2008 and this is kind of talking about society and the way the zeitgeist is changing. You talk to young people and it was not cool to know what you were doing with your money. If you actually kind of showed up and you were kind of dopey about it, it's like, 'Yeah, I just like spend money. I don't really care.' You would get nods of social approval for that. And coming back to this immigrant story stuff, I remember just being like, 'What is happening here, right?' because I grew up without a lot, wanting to get further ahead in life. It was the story of my parents' life. And all of a sudden, I'm an adult now and I look around at my generation of peers and they don't believe in this anymore. They just straight up don't believe in the financial system. If you want real evidence of that, look at clips of Occupy Wall Street. And this was the point in time where the light bulb went off for both me and Vlad where like, wait a second. To the extent that people are protesting the financial system, right? What are they asking for? What's the implicit ask here? It's that somebody's going to come to save this thing, right? Maybe the government will help. Maybe it'll fix the financial system. And I remember just thinking to myself, that ain't happening. There's no way that's happening. Moreover, if you look at this, right, it's like how could it be that a generation of young people don't realize that they have access to the greatest tool for upward economic mobility? And how is it that engaging in the capital system is something that is falling out of the bloodstream of society in some way? And we saw it very clearly as immigrants looking in because again our families opted into wanting to be a part of the system. We wanted to come to the land of opportunity. And to Robinhood, we're like we can't solve the whole thing, right? We're two entrepreneurs with really bad haircuts and have been borderline homeless for the last couple of years.
Yeah, it was years after college, too. Plenty of our peers had good jobs. We were bumbling, spending months at our parents' house coding in the basement trying to make one of our startups work. We're not going to be able to solve the whole thing, but we...
Wow.
Understand how the stock market works, and the stock market is kind of a microcosm of all the stuff that young people are upset about, right?
We thought it was prohibitively expensive for young people to invest in the stock market. There's kind of this pervasive wisdom where, you know, finger wagging like you don't know what you're doing, right? Like you need to go and talk to an expert before you do it. And you end up with the phenomenon of a generation of people that just doesn't engage in this. And we're like, there is another way. You can make it accessible for people. You can make it something that young people have access to. You can put it on mobile. And if we're able to solve this problem, meaning give more people access to the markets, that's actually a microcosm of this bigger thing and we can put a real dent in it. And what is like 10, 15 years out from that now? Putting aside the fact that you have a generation of people that have had the ability to participate in the upward mobility of the economy, look at the way culture is now. Especially, let's talk, let's be real, for young men, right? Where not knowing about your money, you look like a dumbass.
Right. That's what we want. Like we want there to be societal pressure for people to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, engaged with the economy because we have it here at our disposal. Like, dude, pressure is such a fucking privilege. I'm so tired of people thinking pressure is a bad thing.
No matter what it is, pressure is just malaise, dude. It's boring.
It's boring. You'll be in your blanket watching TV, right?
I got some good binging in, though.
Got some good TV watching in, dude.
Not going back, man. I've played The Legend of Zelda so many times.
Oh my god, what a game, dude. What a game.
My son, we've played it like multiple times now, but he's a little kid. I'm like, remember we played this once already. He's like, 'Nope.' I'm like, 'Okay, so let's just play it again.'
Do you have the original Nintendo?
Uh, no, I don't. I've got a Switch.
I wish I... I remember when I was a kid, this is like what my life was like as a kid. I at like once or twice a year my parents would rent a Nintendo, like a Super Nintendo, for the weekend from like Blockbuster or some shit. Yeah, those were the days.
That was like pretty much what I got back in the day.
That's awesome, dude. That's awesome. I had the Nintendo. I had the original one.
The original. Original, bro. I'd sit there and play Techmo and fuck shit up, bro. I'd be like all the time. Now we have this thing that plugs into the TV and I get like 250 of them.
Oh, yeah. The little sort of like dongle that you plug in that has everything on it.
It's okay. It's okay. It's not the same, but anyway, sidetracked. But yeah, dude, like it's... you know, where were you at with that? You went Nintendo and then we got...
Oh, yeah. Binging, watching TV, not having any motivation. Yeah.
Coding in a basement. So yeah, that we were talking about Robin Hood for a second there. So that was kind of the backdrop of it. And you look at it today and it's ubiquitous that people understand the importance of this. And in many ways, if you look around at the economy as a whole, there was a study I was reading on this kind of recently, but you look at the people that feel good about the economy today versus the people that don't feel so good about it, and one of the dividing lines is whether or not they're engaged in the capital markets. Wow, that's very interesting.
Yeah, that is very interesting.
Because there's a lot of the structure of capitalism. To me, it feels like we're in the beginning of what feels like a pretty substantial change, right? Where there's this boogeyman of AI and its impact on the job market, which I intuitively both believe it and don't believe it at some levels, but it's there, right? It's very real. And there's prices of things going up, like the prices of things you need to live, not the prices of things that you necessarily want to have. There's a lot of layoffs that are happening in the system, and at the same time, the stock market, or at least parts of the stock market, have been showing a lot of strength. So it's kind of we live in changing economic times, I guess is the point I'm trying to make.
Yeah, I agree. And I also think that the people are the happiest with the economy or the things that are going on are those that are taking control of what they can. And I think that's a special thought for any industry. You're going to be happier with your health, you're going to be happier in your business if you're a student, you're going to be happier in your math class because you're taking ownership of what you're doing. You're allowing yourself to become educated in that vertical. I think that's massively important. The one thing I do want to touch on though, you know, and I've hinted around at it a couple different times, you know, in building something, there's a massive amount of adversity and low points, you know, and you guys went through that. You went through a ton of different things to build this platform to where it is now. How did you guys, and maybe more you specifically, navigate those waters of the adversity and potential thinking about, man, this isn't going to work and nobody believes, they don't want to invest. Because the audience right now is listening and like, okay, how can I apply that information to what I'm doing right? So what, how did you go through all that?
Yeah, I think you have to be pretty stubborn about your ideas. I think you have to both be stubborn in your belief in yourself. You also have to be really systematic about verifying that you're not barking up the wrong tree. So for me, at least, it was kind of this... I mean, if I believe something is important, I will follow that belief very purely. But at the same time, what was the belief? The belief was that we could build something that would help a lot of young people be a part of the financial system. A prerequisite for that was that young people, or just people in general, would actually use it, which in and of itself I thought was the central challenge for the founding chapter of the company. It's like, how do you build something that resonates with people? How do you do that right? So what became kind of the mantra of the company for a very long time was we would spend an inordinate amount of time with our customers, with ordinary people, for years and years. When we were kind of through the early founding years of Robin Hood, let's talk about year one. What would we do? We'd be like, okay, we have an idea for why we think people are going to use this. We would go and spend hours every week interviewing customers, being like, here's what we're building. What is this thing? Can you read it? Can you understand it? Explain back to us what this is.
And it was through that process of... there's a word for it. It's called user research or customer research. But if you kind of boil it down to what it is, you're getting feedback for your ideas. So the point I'm trying to make is, you have to be stubborn about believing in yourself, but you don't want to be dumb about it. So while I think we were both very stubborn about wanting to see this thing come to life, we were also very deliberately and systematically trying to validate that we were barking up the right tree and tweaking it as we got feedback.
I think that's smart. You know, it's funny because the right answer here is not just to be a knucklehead and just be like an idea. No, I think you need to be really connected with the actual purpose of why you were doing something.
You know, I look at this and it's so funny because I watch a lot of things now, right? As research, I coin my TV time with my wife as research. I find things. I'm like, 'Okay, this is interesting. I can do a story on this. I can potentially get this guest and we can talk about this, tie this in.' So I'm always working in the background, right? And I watched this funny movie with Eddie Murphy and Jonah Hill called You People, right? And in that movie, he had a podcast with his good friend that was a female. And in that, there was this underlying tone of like, dude, I'm a douchebag because I quit my career and I'm a podcaster now. They can make fun of people like me. Like this is literally what I did. I left a successful medical sales business, right? Career sales career. And eventually in 2024, I went full-time. And I'm like, I'm that cliche, you know? And there was a lot of pushback. There was a lot of all these different things of why it wouldn't work. Like we don't understand how are you going to make money? How are you going to feed your family?
I was like, that's easy. Watch me. Like, you don't need to know the how. I guess is like really you need to know why. You need to know why. And so for me, and just like you and Vlad, my connection with my why or the reason I was doing this and the purpose was so great that I'm like, I'm going to double down because if I don't, I'm going to regret it.
I mean, dude, I get my fair share of that right now. It's like, 'Oh, aren't you just another successful tech guy trying to mess around in space? Isn't this just like a little hobby playground thing that you're doing? You and the billionaires club, like you know, just like launching satellites or whatever because that's what really successful rich people do.' And I'm like, no, I'm doing this because I want to do it right.
Well, let's talk about it. Right. A good segue, man.
You stole my thunder. Look at this guy. Look at this guy. So, okay, I can tell the audience right now that's not who you are, right? That's easy to see. You know, you're the same dude on camera than you are off camera. They were sitting here, you know, and that's what I really do love about you already. So, but talk to me about this. What is the Galactic Brain?
I do too. I read it. I'm like, what the hell?
Yeah. So, a little bit of backdrop. So, I left Robin Hood full-time a year and a half ago.
You're bored, right? You're on board now.
Yeah, very much so. Still actively involved. But I stopped working on it full-time because I'd had this dream of wanting to build a space company. And this is not a new thing. This is something that I'd wanted to do probably my whole life. This again, when I was growing up, my dad was a research scientist at Langley Research Center in southern Virginia. He was working with NASA. He was doing atmospheric science. And I remember, you know, we didn't have a lot, but I remember when my dad would go to work, it just felt like, oh, he's doing very important things. And you get to see the big buildings and kind of all the machinery behind the science there. So I'm like, if I ever get a chance to do this at some point in my life, I want to be a part of the space industry. And especially in the 2010s, like being like, oh, there's people building rockets. That's cool to watch. And then kind of realizing it's like, oh, this concept of reusable rocketry is actually the fundamental gaining factor for humans to be able to do a lot of stuff in space. Because you can't, if you were to blow up every time you flew from New York to San Francisco, you scrap the plane, you wouldn't do it very much.
Right. That's kind of the core idea behind it. And I remember thinking to myself, if I ever get a chance to do this in my lifetime, I need to take that opportunity. So I did that a year and a half ago and started a company called Aether Flux with a mission to build a power grid in space. Endless energy and endless power up there.
Yeah. Endless energy and power up there.
And that was kind of the core idea is we wanted to stand up another industrial use case for outer space. This is where the dots connect between this idea and Robin Hood. We started Robin Hood because we wanted to sort of create a native financial platform on mobile. The analogy is we want to build an energy company on the platform that is low Earth orbit or space, because it doesn't really exist. Like nobody, there's not a lot of people out there that are building energy companies in space. I guess up until maybe like a month ago where now everybody's doing it.
But the core idea behind this was to build an energy grid in space. Why? Because there's a lot of really unique advantages to collecting power in space. We can get into that a little bit more, but maybe zooming in a little bit on this idea of the Galactic Brain is we announced this week that we're targeting 2027 for the first version of a solar-powered AI data center satellite. So if you kind of look at energy as an industry and as a problem space, this is probably the most interesting the energy industry's been in our lifetime.
Yeah, I'm locked in on this, man.
Right. Because the amount of energy that is going to be required for scaling artificial intelligence is difficult to fathom, right? The numbers that I've heard are there's something like a 44 gigawatt power gap in the next like 5 years or even less between what's planned to be built and what people actually need to do AI.
And the issue too, and forgive me if I'm wrong, I did read it in the press release, there's a massive time frame, like an 8 to 10 year, it's like a decade to build a data center. So it would take 10 years to build something to support.
Well, think about what we're talking about doing here, right? It's like we've got the path of technological progress, which is developing artificial intelligence, and it's being resolved down to the timeline of like digging dirt and constructing buildings and getting permitting and putting power lines into these data centers. This is the problem that we're solving from a practical perspective. Because our approach, the thing that we see playing out here, is that space is this abundant place for power, in particular in orbits that are still pretty close to the Earth, so you can fly way more consumer-grade electronics. You can get near continuous illumination from the sun. So imagine if you're the sun. Let's see if we can get some props as an analogy in here. Imagine you're the sun. This is actually perfect. There are these orbits that go over sort of near the North Pole and South Pole. Not exactly, but are kind of like if the Earth is rotating like this, this half of the Earth is where there's sunrise, this half of the Earth is where there's sunset. These satellites will kind of always be going over sunrise and sunset. The reason that's relevant is because those solar panels are always facing the sun, meaning they're producing power darn near 24/7.
Exactly. So, and also there's a lot of space up there. There's no real limits to how much stuff we can put in space because it's so big. And even this, we're just talking about like a little sliver right off the surface of the Earth.
Have some coffee as I'm saying this.
Yeah. Drink from the Earth right now. That's your Earth. Yeah, it literally is. So, the idea is that this is actually a very natural place to build really power-hungry applications, and artificial intelligence is kind of the biggest one of them. So more specifically, the concept is we're going to build a constellation of satellites. Each one doesn't have to be this monumentally large thing. It can power a cluster of GPUs that are used for artificial intelligence, and you actually kind of start with that cluster of chips and you build a satellite out from it. So you start with the chips and you say, what's the power requirement of it? And you size the power array based on that. And you say, okay, how much heat is this thing generating? You size out the radiator array that you need for it. And it turns out the math on this points to something that's actually quite buildable and at a normal size of satellites that are being built all the time, like Starlink. You can build something really useful that will over time, we think, substantially put a dent in this energy use problem for artificial intelligence.
That's some wild stuff, dude. That's wild. The Galactic Brain.
And it's cool. If you kind of fast forward in the future, what does this look like? This will look like rings around the Earth, like the rings around Saturn.
And I kind of imagine the artificial intelligence brain of humanity orbiting Earth.
That's freaking cool, dude. And you did it. Like I haven't done it yet.
Well, you're going to. So, I read something too, and forgive me if I completely butcher this. The power source from space to here. There's a gap, right? There's a time period gap. And I read it in the press release or something. It was like what, four to eight years or something like that? And these satellites cut this down because it's through laser.
Ah, yeah, there's a couple...
I sound like a complete jackass right now. I told you I was going to sound like one.
No, no, no. So there's a four... it'll take however long, say 8 to 10 years if that's what it takes to build a data center on the ground. The difference here is that you can kind of take the chips for artificial intelligence and put them on an assembly line, right? Build satellites around them. And it's literally how quickly you can build a satellite. How quickly can you build a car? Pretty darn quick, right? Like you can apply those same manufacturing techniques to building satellites. And then you kind of turn this problem that otherwise requires multiple years buildout to build a new data center to just say, 'Hey, we're going to take chips and turn them into satellites.' You get stacks and stacks of them, put them on rockets that go to space, and rockets are launching multiple times a week. So you can kind of cut the time from when you buy the chips for artificial intelligence to get them into working use to basically how quickly you can build the satellites. How long do you think it would take to build a satellite?
Good question. We're going to be scaling that up over the next couple of years. So I think we're going to have two satellites that go to space in '26. Both of which are currently targeting doing a slightly different variation of this power grid in space concept, which I can talk about in a minute. But we're going to be targeting, let's say, roughly speaking, 10 to 20 satellites the year after. 50 to hundreds of satellites the year after that, to thousands the year after that. Now, these are ambitious, right? We haven't done it yet, and no guarantees we'll do it, but if you don't set your goals at ambitious, you'll never hit them.
You're gonna fall. Like, it's crazy. I always set something really, really high and people look at me like, 'Dude, that's not realistic.' I'm like, 'Oh, so should I make it more?' Because my thing is, if I set the goal here, then we're going to fall here and that's unacceptable. But if I make it out of this world, put it in space pretty much, set this goal, but if we fall short, we fall way higher.
I mean, I even think about this in the context of Robin Hood, right? Like what was our goal then? We're like, we're going to change the way a generation of people invest in the stock market. You kind of think about that as an idea on its face value. And you're like, that's kind of a long shot, don't you think so? Like you're going to figure out something that natively fits into the lives of tens of millions of people who you've never met.
Like you think you're actually going to be able to do that, right? And it's like, this is kind of the thing is you can shoot that high or you can shoot much more modestly, but a lot of the times doing stuff is just hard and the failure rate intrinsic in doing anything is intrinsically a number and it doesn't get that much harder. It doesn't get that much higher if you're doing something much harder for example, right? Like you're going to... there's still a probability if you compare trying to convince a generation of young people that the stock market is something they should care about versus building, let me think of something that feels more mundane, like an accounting platform for some kind of commerce.
Sure. Some type of SaaS software. Cool. Yeah. Neat.
Right. Like that's not easy. You're going to run into a bunch of roadblocks there too. There's like a 20% failure rate there. Like 20% of the time it's just not going to work. It might kind of be the same failure rate, but you just apply it to something much bigger.
You'll end up with something much bigger.
That's the one thing that I really want the audience to take home with them and really sit in it is set big hairy audacious goals. Dreaming big is free. Being optimistic is free.
Yeah. But then you also have to put in the work to get there, right? So it's like if you don't do it, you're just a talker, right? But if you dream it up and you take action, you're a doer. And that's who wins. But I always like to say this is I want to make myself and my direct team, whether it's my publicist, my production team, my partners in my business, my wife, whomever we're working with, whoever we've contracted for this business, my agent over at CA, it doesn't matter, whoever. I want everybody to be so uncomfortable with my goal. Like, if they're not uncomfortable, then I'm not doing my job. And I mean that in a good way. Like, whoa, you're actually trying to do this. You want to freaking... What the fuck, Sean? What the fuck? Like yeah, that's what I want. That's exactly what I want. And that's the reaction I want. So now you know how important it is. Let's try to get it done. You know, because if we don't hit it, but we fall short, we are going to be so much better. And I think that's the thing I want. I really want people to give themselves permission to dream again.
Yeah, there's another thing too is like, get your failures out of the way quickly. I kind of have this mantra where it's like whenever I do something new, which mind you, this has been the story of my whole fucking life. I've always been doing stuff where I didn't really know what I was doing. I entered the finance industry as a mathematician, physicist, 22-year-old college grad.
Like I didn't know anything about that and I spent a decade of my life being a novice to that industry, right? Doing it again 10 years, 15 years later, right? I kind of make this joke sometimes when I talk to people in the space industry because I'm building a space company right now. I'm like, you do realize for all intents and purposes I'm a finance bro. Like I've been a finance bro for kind of a long time, right? So just bear with me here. If you don't know how to do something, wear it as a badge of honor and try to get good at it.
You know, you gave me an interesting idea, a very interesting idea. I'm doing another TED talk in March.
And the topic is lifelong learner and being a lifelong learner and why is it important. And you give me a really good idea because I want to start off with a nice story. Maybe the story is what you've done. Maybe the story is building Robin Hood. And like I said earlier, you could be home doing nothing right now. You don't have to lift a finger the rest of your life. Instead, you've chosen to learn another industry.
It would be profoundly boring. It would be profoundly boring.
I don't even... because you're so young, too, dude. Like that would be miserable. I think there's a lot of truth to that. And without getting too political here, to quote our president, I think President Trump's right on this. It's like to retire is to expire. Like as soon as you stop...
Well, what's the true definition of retire? To put out of use.
Are you ready to be put out of use?
Fuck that. It's like what more can I do? I want to die tired and busy.
Yeah. Absolutely. Because then you stay sharp. You stay alive longer, right? You truly do. And you have that purpose and you're doing something. You stay healthier longer. Everything is still working, right? I mean, I always say, you know, someone asked me like, 'Hey, what happens when you get the big Spotify deal or the big deal from Sirius for hundreds of millions of dollars?' I'm like, 'What do you mean? What happens?'
I don't understand the question. Like, I'm going to fulfill my contract. I'm going to kick ass. But after that, you're just going to walk away, right? I'm like, 'Where's the fun in that?'
Like, I do this because I love it. I don't do this for the potential payout. I know that's going to come, but I could do this until I'm like 70 or 80. Like, I can sit in a chair and talk. Why would I ever stop? Why would I ever stop building? I have children to think about.
There's also something I'm acutely aware of, right? It's like I have a pretty hyperactive mind.
And I kind of draw the distinction between real problems and fake problems, right? Like another way of saying it, the idle mind is the devil's playground. I would way rather have a big healthy steaming dose of real problems to deal with.
