The following is a conversation with Natalia Bailey,

a rocket scientist and spacecraft propulsion engineer

previously at MIT, and now the founder and CTO

of Axion Systems, specializing in efficient space

propulsion engines for satellites and spacecraft.

So these are not the engines that get us

from the ground on Earth out to space,

but rather the engines that move us around in space

once we get out there.

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As a side note, let me say something

about Natalia's story.

She has talked about how when she was young,

she would often look up at the stars and dream

of alien intelligences that one day

we could communicate with.

This moment of childlike cosmic curiosity

is at the core of my own interest in space

and extraterrestrial life, and in general,

in artificial intelligence, science, and engineering.

Amid the meetings and the papers and the career rat race

and all the awards, let's not let ourselves

lose that childlike wonder.

Sadly, we're on Earth for only a very short time,

so let's have fun solving some of the biggest puzzles

in the universe while we're here.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,

support on Patreon, or connect with me

on Twitter at Lex Freedman.

And now, here's my conversation with Natalia Bailey.

You said that you spent your whole life dreaming

about space and also pondering the big existential question

of whether there is or isn't intelligent life,

intelligent alien civilizations out there.

So what do you think?

Do you think there's life out there?

Intelligent life?

Intelligent life, that's trickier.

I think looking at the likelihood of a self replicating

organism given how much time the universe has existed

and how many stars with planets,

I think it's likely that there's other life,

intelligent life.

I'm hopeful, you know, I'm a little discouraged

that we haven't yet been in touch.

Allegedly, I mean, it's also.

In our dimensions and so on, yeah.

It's also possible that they have been in touch

and we just haven't, we're too dumb to realize

they're communicating with us.

In whichever, it's this Carl Sagan idea

that they may be communicating at a time scale

that's totally different.

Like their signals are in a totally different time scale

or in a totally different kind of medium of communication.

It could be our own, it could be the birth of human beings,

whatever the magic that makes us who we are,

the collective intelligence thing,

that could be aliens themselves,

that could be the medium of communication.

Like the nature of our consciousness and intelligence

itself is the medium of communication.

And like being able to ask the questions themselves,

I've never thought of it that way.

Like actually, yeah, asking the question

whether aliens exist might be the very medium

by which they communicate.

It's like they send questions.

So some this like collective emergent behavior

is the signal.

Is the signal, yeah.

So.

Interesting, yeah.

Cause maybe that's how we would communicate.

If you think about it, if we were way, way, way smarter,

like a thousand years from now, we somehow survive,

like how would we actually communicate?

In a way that's like, if we broadcast the signal,

and then it could somehow like percolate

throughout the universe, like that signal having an impact.

Multiverse.

Multiverse, of course, that would have a signal,

an effect on the most, the highest number

of possible civilizations.

What would that signal be?

It might not be like sending a few like stupid little

hello world messages.

It might be something more impactful.

Where it's almost like impactful in a way

where they don't have to have the capability to hear it.

It like forces the message to have an impact.

Right.

My train of thought has never gone there, but I like it.

And also somewhere in there, I think it's implied

that something travels faster than the speed of light,

which I'm also really hopeful for.

Oh, you're hopeful.

Are you excited by the possibility

that there's intelligent life out there?

Sort of you work on the engineering side of things.

It's this very kind of focus pursuit

of moving things through space efficiently.

But if you zoom out, one of the cool things

that this enables us to do is get even intelligent life,

just life on Mars or on Europa or something like that.

Does that excite you?

Does that scare you?

Oh, it's very exciting.

I mean, it's the whole reason I went into the field

I'm in is to contribute to building the body of knowledge

that we have as a species.

So very exciting.

Do you think there's life on Mars?

Like no longer, well, already living,

but currently living, but also no longer living,

like that we might be able to find life

as some people suspect, basic microbial life.

I'm not so sure about in our own solar system.

And I do think it might be hard to untangle

if we somehow contaminated other things as well.

So I'm not sure about this close to home.

That'd be really exciting.

Yes.

Like, do you think about the Drake equation much of like?

That was what got me into all of this, yeah.

Yeah, cause one of the questions is how hard is it

for life to start on a habitable planet?

Like if you have a lot of the basic conditions,

not exactly like Earth, but basic Earth like conditions,

how hard is it for life to start?

And if you find life on Mars or find life on Europa,

that means it's way easier.

That's a good thing to confirm

that if you have a habitable planet,

then there's going to be life.

And that like immediately, that would be super exciting

because that means there's like trillions of planets

with basic life out there.

Though of all the planets in our solar system,

Earth is clearly the most habitable.

So I would not be discouraged

if we didn't find it on another planet

in our solar system.

True, and again, that life could look very different.

It's habitable for Earth like life,

but it could be totally different.

I still think that trees are quite possibly

more intelligent than humans,

but their intelligence is carried out over time scale

that we're just not able to appreciate.

Like they might be running

the entirety of human civilization

and we're just like too dumb to realize

that they're the smart ones.

Maybe that's the alien message, it's in the trees.

It's in the trees.

Yeah, it's not in the monolith

in the Utah desert, it's in the trees.

Right, yeah.

So let's go to space exploration.

How do you think we get humans to Mars?

I think SpaceX and Elon Musk will be the ones

that get the first human setting foot on Mars

and probably not that long from now

from us having this conversation.

Maybe we'll inflate his timeline a little bit,

but I tend to believe the goals he sets.

So I think that will happen relatively soon.

As far as when and what it will take

to get humans living there in a more permanent way,

I have a glib answer, which is,

when we can invent a time machine

to go back to the early Cold War

and instead of uniting around sending people to the moon,

we pick Mars as the destination.

So really, I say that because there's nothing

truly scientifically or technologically impossible

about doing that soon,

it's more politically and financially

and those are the obstacles, I think, to that.

Well, I wonder of when you colonize with more than,

I say, five people on Mars,

you have to start thinking about the kind of rules

you have on Mars.

And speaking of the Cold War, who gets to own the land?

You start planting flags,

and you start to make decisions.

And SpaceX says this, it's probably a little bit trolly,

but they have this nice paragraph in their contracts

where it talks about that human governments on Earth

or Earth governments have no jurisdiction on Mars.

Like the rules, the Martians get to define their own rules.

It sounds very much like the founding fathers

for this country, that's the kind of language.

It's interesting that that's in there

and it makes you think perhaps that needs to be leveraged.

Like you have to be very clever about leveraging that

to create a little bit of a Cold War feeling.

It seems like we humans need a little bit of a competition.

Do you think that's necessary to succeed

in getting the necessary investment

or can the pure pursuit of science be enough?

No, I think we're seeing right now

the pure pursuit of science.

I mean, that results in pretty tiny budgets for exploration.

There has to be some disaster impending doom

to get us onto another planet in a permanent way.

I don't know.

Financially, I just don't know if the private sector

can support that, but I don't wish

that there is some catastrophe coming our way

that spurs us to do that.

Yes, I'm unsure what the business model is

for colonizing Mars.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like there is for, we'll talk about satellites.

There's probably a lot of business models around satellites,

but there's not enough short term business.

I guess that's how business works.

You should have a path to making money

in the next 10 years.

Well, and maybe even more broadly

and looping back to something we said earlier,

I don't know that getting humans off this planet

and spreading bacteria is what we're supposed to be doing

in the first place, so maybe we can go

but should we, and I'm probably an unusual person

for thinking that in my industry

because humans want to explore,

but I almost wonder, are we putting unnecessary obstacles?

We're very finicky biological things

in the way of some more robotic

or more silicon based exploration.

And yeah, do we need to colonize and spread?

I'm not sure.

What do you think is the role of AI in space?

Do you, in your work, again, we'll talk about it,

but do you see more and more of the space vehicles,

spacecraft being run by artificial intelligence systems

more than just like the flight control

but like the management?

Yeah, I don't have a lot of color to the dreams

I have about way in the future in AI,

but I do think that removing,

you know, it's hard for humans to even make a trip to Mars,

much less go anywhere farther than that.

And I think we'll have, you know, more,

again, I'm probably unusual in having these thoughts,

but perhaps be able to generate more knowledge

and understand more if we stop trying to send humans

and instead, you know, I don't know if we're talking

about AI in a truly artificial intelligence way

or AI as we kind of use it today,

but maybe sending a Petri dish or two of like stem cells

and some robotic candlers instead

if we still need to send our DNA

because we're really stuck on that.

But if not, you know, maybe not even that Petri dish.

So I see, I think what I'm saying is, you know,

I see a much bigger role in the future

of AI for space exploration.

It's kind of sad to think that, I mean,

I'm sure we'll eventually send a spacecraft

with a efficient propulsion like some of the stuff

you work on out that travels just really far

with some robots on it and with some DNA in a Petri dish.

And then a human civilization destroys itself

and then there'll just be this floating spacecraft

that eventually gets somewhere or not.

That's a sad thought like this lonely spacecraft

just kind of traveling through space

and humans are all dead.

Well, it depends on what the goal is, right?

Another way to look at it is we've preserved,

it's like a little time capsule of knowledge, DNA,

you know, that we've, that will outlive us.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Yeah.

That's how I sleep at night.

So you also mentioned that you wanted to be an astronaut.

Yes.

So even though you said you're unusual in thinking like,

it's nice here on earth,

and then we might want to be sending robots up there,

you wanted to be a human that goes out there.

Would you like to one day travel to Mars?

You know, if it becomes sort of more open to civilian travel

and that kind of thing.

Like, are you like vacation wise?

Like if you're talking, if we're talking vacations,

would you like to vacation on earth or vacation on Mars?

I wish that I had a better answer, but no.

I wanted to be an astronaut because I,

first of all, I like working in labs and doing experiments.

And I wanted to go to like the coolest lab, the ISS,

and do some experiments there.

That's being decommissioned, which is sad,

but there will be others, I'm sure.

The ISS is being decommissioned?

Yes, I think by 2025, it's not going to be in use anymore.

But I think there are private companies

that are going to be putting up stations and things.

So it's primarily like a research lab, essentially.

Yes.

Research lab in space, that's a cool way to say it's like

the coolest possible research lab.

That's where I wanted to go.

And now though, my risk profile has changed a little bit.

I have three little ones and I won't be in the first thousand

people to go to Mars, let's put it that way.

Yeah, earth is kind of nice.

We have our troubles, but overall it's pretty nice.

Again, it's the Netflix.

Okay, let's talk rockets.

How does a rocket engine work?

Or any kind of engine that can get us the space

or float around in space?

The basic principle is conservation of momentum.

So you throw stuff out the back of the engine

and that pushes the rocket and the spacecraft

in the other direction.

So there are two main types of rocket propulsion.

The one people are more familiar with is chemical

because it's loud and there's fire.

And that's what's used for launch and is more televised.

So in those types of systems, you usually have a fuel

on an oxidizer and they react and combust

and release stored chemical energy.

And that energy heats the resultant gas

and that's funneled out the back through and not

the back through and nozzle directed out the back.

And then that momentum exchange pushes

this basic craft forward.

Is there an interesting difference in liquid

and solid fuel in those contexts?

They're both lumped in the same.

So chemical just means that the release of energy

from those bonds essentially.

So a solid fuel works the same way.

And the other main category is electric propulsion.

So instead of chemical energy, you're using electrical energy

usually from batteries or solar panels.

And in this case, the stuff you're pushing out the back

would be charged particles.

So instead of combustion and heat,

you end up with charged particles

and you force them out the back of the spacecraft

using either an electrostatic field or electromagnetic.

But it's the same momentum exchange

and same idea stuff out the back

and everything else goes forward.

Cool, so those are the big two categories.

What's the difference maybe in like the challenges of each,

the use cases of each and how they're used today,

the physics of each and where they're used,

all that kind of stuff.

Anything interesting about the two categories

that distinguishes them

besides the chemical one being the big sexy flames and.

Yeah, fire.

Fire, yeah.

Chemical is very well understood in its simplest form.

It's like a firework.

So it's been around since 400 BC or something like that.

So even the big engines are quite well understood.

I think one of the last gaps there is probably

what exactly are the products of combustion,

our modeling abilities kind of fall apart there

because it's hot and gases are moving

and you end up kind of having to venture

into lots of different interdisciplinary fields of science

to try to solve that and that's quite complex

but we have pretty good models

for some of the more like emergent behaviors

of that system anyways.

But that's I think one of the last unsolved pieces

and really the kind of what people care about there

is making it more fuel efficient.

So the chemical stuff, you can get a lot

of instantaneous thrust but it's not very fuel efficient.

It's much more fuel efficient

to go with the electric type of propulsion.

So that's where people spend a lot of their time

is trying to make that more efficient

in terms of thrust per unit of fuel.

And then there's always considerations

like heating and cooling.

It's very hot, which is good if it heats the gases

but bad if it melts the rocket and things like that.

So there's always a lot of work on heating and cooling

and the engine cycles and things like that.

And then on electric propulsion,

I find it like much more refreshingly poorly understood.

Well, that's more mysteries.

Yeah, I think so.

One of the classes I took in college

spent, we spent 90% of the class on chemical propulsion

and then the last 10% on electric

and then professor said like,

we only sort of understand how it works

but it works kind of and it's like that's interesting.

That's what I'm gonna work on.

Yeah, and even an ion engine, which is probably

one of the most straightforward

because it's just an electrostatic engine

but it has this really awesome combination

of like quantum mechanics and material science

and fluid dynamics and electrostatics

and it's just very intriguing to me.

First of all, can you actually zoom out even more

like, because you mentioned ion propulsion engine

is a subset of electric.

So like maybe, is there a categories of electric engines

and then we can zoom in on ion propulsion?

Yes, so sure.

There's the two most kind of conventional types

that have been around since the 60s are ion engines

and hall thrusters and ion engines are a little bit simpler

because they don't use a magnetic field

for generating thrust and then there are also

some other types of plasma engines

but that don't fit into those two categories.

So just kind of other plasma like a Vazimir engine

which we could get into and then those are probably

the main three categories that would be fun to talk about.

Oh, and then of course the category of engine

that I work on which has a lot of similarities

to an ion engine but could be considered

its own class called a colloid thruster.

Colloid, cool.

Okay, so what is an ion propulsion ion engine?

Okay, so in an ion engine you have an ionization chamber

and you inject the propellant into that chamber

and this is usually a neutral gas like xenon or argon.

So you inject that into the chamber

and you also inject a stream

of really hot high energy electrons

and everything's just moving around very randomly in there

and the whole goal is to have one of those electrons

collide with one of those neutral atoms

and turn it into an ion.

So kick off a secondary electron and now you have

Plasma.

Yes, okay.

And now you have a charged xenon or argon ion

and more electrons and so on.

And then some fraction of those ions will happen

to make it to this downstream electric field

that we set up between two grids with holes in them.

And in terms of area, the same amount of those ions

also runs into the walls and lose their charge

and that's where some of the inefficiencies come in.

But the very lucky few make it to those holes in that grid

and there are two grids actually

and you apply a voltage differential between them

and that sets up an electric field

and a charged particle in an electric field creates a force.

And so those ions are accelerated out the back of the engine

and the reaction force is what pushes the spacecraft forward.

If you're following along and tallying these charges,

now we've just sent a positive beam of ions

out the back of the spacecraft.

And for our purposes here, the spacecraft is neutral.

So eventually those ions will come back

and hit the spacecraft because it's a positive beam.

So you also have to have an external cathode producer

of electrons outside the engine

that pumps electrons into that beam and neutralizes that.

So now it's net neutral everywhere

and it won't come back to the spacecraft.

So that's an ion engine.

What temperature are we talking about here?

So in terms of like the chemical based engines,

those are super hot.

You mentioned plasma here, how hot does this thing get?

I mean, is that an interesting thing to talk about

in a sense that is that an interesting distinction

or is heat, I mean, it's all gonna be hot?

No, so it's important, especially for some

of these smaller satellites,

people are into launching these days.

So it's important because you have the plasma

but also those high energy electrons are hot

and if you have a lot of those that are going

into the walls, you do have to care about the temperature.

So having trouble remembering off the top of my head,

I think they're at like a hundred electron volts

in terms of the electron energy.

And then I'd have to remember

how to convert that into Kelvin.

Can you stick your hand in it?

Is that not temperature?

Not recommended, yeah.

So what's a colloid engine?

So the same rocket people that came up with these ideas

for electric propulsion probably in the middle

of last century also realized

that there's one more place to get charged particles

from if you're going to be using electric propulsion.

So you can take a gas and you can ionize it

but there are also some liquids,

particularly ionic liquids, which is what we use

that you also can use as a source of ions.

And if you have ions and you put them in a field,

you generate a force.

So they recognize that but part of being able

to leverage that technique is being able to kind of

manipulate those liquids on a scale of nanometers

or very few microns.

So the diameter of a human hair or something like that.

And in the fifties, there was no way to do that.

So they wrote about it in some books

and then it kind of died for a little bit.

And then with silicon, MEMS, computer processors

and when foundry started becoming more ubiquitous

and my advisor started at MIT kind of put those ideas

back together and was like,

hey, actually there's now a way to build this

and bring this other technique to life.

And so the way that you actually get the ions

out of those liquids is you put the liquid

in again a strong electric field

and the electric field stresses the liquid

and you keep increasing the field

and eventually the liquid will assume a conical shape.

It's when the electric field pressure

that's pulling on it exactly balances

the liquids own restoring force,

which is its surface tension.

So you have this balance and the liquid assumes a cone

when it's perfectly balanced like that.

And at the tip of a cone, the radius of curvature

goes to zero right at the tip.

And the radius, sorry, the electric field

right at the tip of a sharp object would go to infinity

because it goes as one over the radius

and one over the radius squared.

And instead of the electric field going to infinity

and maybe like generating a wormhole or something,

a jet of ions instead starts issuing

from the tip of that liquid.

So the field becomes strong enough there

that you can pull ions out of the liquid.

What is the liquid?

We're talking about, there's a bunch of different ones.

You can do it with different types of liquids.

It depends on how easily you can free ions

from their neighbors and if it has enough surface tension

so that you can build up a high enough electric field.

But what we use are called ionic liquids

and they're really just positive.

They're very similar to salts,

but they happen to be liquid

over a really wide range of temperatures.

This sounds like really cool.

Okay, so how big is the cone over time?

What's the size of this cone that generates the ions?

So if you have a cone that's emitting pure ions,

I can't remember if it's the radius or diameter,

but that emission is happening from,

of that cone is something like 20 nanometers.

Oh, I was imagining something slightly bigger,

but so this is tiny, tiny,

hence the only being able to do it recently.

Yeah, that's right.

So this is all controlled by a computer, I guess.

Like, or like, how do you control,

how do you create a cone that generates ions

at a scale of nanometers, exactly?

So the kind of main trick to making this work

is that physically we manufacture hundreds

or thousands of sharp structures

and then supply the liquid to the tips.

So that does a few things.

It makes sure that we know where the ion beams are forming

so we can put holes in the grid above them

to let them actually leave instead of hitting, right?

Cool.

But it also reduces the actual field we have,

the voltage we have to apply to create that field

because the field will be much stronger

if we can already give the liquid a tip to form on.

And those tips we form have radii of curvature

on the order of probably like single microns.

So we are working at a little bit larger scale,

but once we create that support

and the electric field can be focused at that tip,

then the tiny little cone can form.

So wait, so there's something in them,

there's an already like a hard material

that like gives you the base for the cone

and then you pouring like liquid over it,

whatever that happens.

From the bottom, yeah, it's porous.

So we actually supply it from the back of the chip

and then it wicks.

It forms on top on that structure.

Yeah.

And then you somehow make it like super sharp,

the liquid, so the ions can leave.

And then we've applied that field to get those ions

and that same field then accelerates them.

That's awesome.

And there's like a bunch of these?

Yeah, I should have brought something.

So we...

You could just pretend that you have some nanometer cones

on the table.

Actually, you know, kind of about this scale,

we build, we call them thruster chips

and it's just a convenient form factor

and it's a square centimeter.

And on each square centimeter today,

we have about 500 of the actual physical,

we call them emitters, those physical cones.

And we're working on increasing that by a factor of four

in the coming months.

In size or in the density?

In the density, the number of emitters

within the same square centimeter chip.

So that thing, cause I think I've seen pictures of you

with like a tiny thing in your hand,

that must be the...

Okay, so that's an engine.

So that is kind of the ionization chamber

and thrust producing part of it.

What's not shown in that picture is the propellant tank.

So we can keep supplying more and more of the liquid

to those emission sites.

And then we also provide a power electronic system

that talks to the spacecraft

and turns our device on and off.

So that's the colloid engine.

That's the core of the colloid engine.

It's the way I've been talking about it.

It's more of ion electrospray.

Colloid tends to mean like liquid droplets

coming off of the jet.

But if you make smaller and smaller cones,

you get pure ions.

So we're kind of like a subset of colloid, yes.

What aspects of this?

You said that it's been full of mystery

from the physics perspective.

What aspects of this are understood

and what are still full of mystery?

Yeah, recently we've been understanding

the kind of instabilities and stable regimes of,

you know, how much liquid do you supply

and what field do you apply?

And why is it flickering on and off

or why does it have these weird behaviors?

So that's in the past just couple of years

that's become much more understood.

I think the two areas that come to mind

as far as not as well understood are the boundary between,

you know, you have, we actually use

kind of big molecular ions.

And if you're looking at the molecular scale,

you have, you know, some ions that you've extracted

and they're in this electric field.

One ion, you know, it's a big molecule.

It's getting energy from the electric field

and some of that energy is going into the bonds

and making it vibrate and doing weird things to it.

Sometimes it breaks them apart.

And then zooming out to the whole beam,

the beam has some behaviors as this beam of ions.

And there's a big gap between what are those,

how do you connect those

and how do we understand that better

so that we can understand the beam performance of the engine?

Is that a theory question or is it an engineering question?

Theory, definitely.

We're, Axion is a startup and we're more in the business

of building and testing and observing and characterizing.

And we're not really diving much into that theory right now.

Okay, zooming out a little bit on the physics,

I apologize for the way too big of a question,

but to you from either, you mentioned Axion is,

you know, more of sort of an engineering endeavor, right?

From a perspective of physics in general,

science in general, or the side of engineering,

what do you think is the most to you like beautiful

and captivating and inspiring idea in this space?

In this space, and then I'm gonna zoom out

a little bit more, but in this space,

I keep budding up against material science questions.

So I, over the past 10 years,

I feel like every problem or interesting thing

I want to work on, if you dig deep enough,

you end up in material science land,

which I find kind of exciting

and it makes me want to dig in more there.

And I was just, you know, even for our technology,

when we have to move the propellant from the tank

to the tip of the emitters,

we rely a lot on capillary action

and you're getting into wetting and surface energies.

At a scale of like, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it's, if you look further, it's quantum too,

but it all is, you know.

Like, capillary action at the quantum level.

Yeah, so I would, it all comes back to me,

to, you know, material science.

There's so much we don't understand at these sizes.

And I find that inspiring and exciting.

And then more broadly, you know,

I remember when I learned that the same equation

that describes flow over an airfoil

is used to price options, the Black Scholes equation.

And it's, you know, just a partial differential equation,

but that kind of connectedness of the universe,

you know, I don't want to use options pricing

and the universe and the same.

But you know what I mean, this connectedness,

I find really magical.

Yeah, the patterns that mathematics reveals

seems to echo in a bunch of different places.

Yes.

Yeah, there's just weirdness.

It's like, it really makes you think,

I think through definitely living in a simulation,

like whoever programmed it.

I like that, that's your conclusion.

It's using like shortcuts to program it.

Like they didn't, they're just copying pieces

and codes for the different parts.

Yeah, think of something new or just paste from over there.

They won't notice.

My conclusion from that was,

I'm going to go interview for finance jobs.

So I had like a little detour.

That's the backup option.

So in terms of using Colet engines,

what's an interesting difference

between a propulsion of a rocket from Earth,

when you're standing on the ground to orbit,

and then the kind of propulsion necessary

for once you get out to orbit

or to like deep space to move around?

Yes, the reason you can't use an engine like mine

to get off the ground is,

you know, the thrust it generates

is instantaneous thrust is very small.

But if you have the time

and can accumulate that acceleration,

you can still reach speeds

that are very interesting for exploration

and even for missions with humans on them.

An interesting direction,

I think we need to go as humans,

exploring space is the power supplies

for electric propulsion are limiting us

in that, you know, solar panels are really inefficient

and bulky and batteries.

I don't know when anybody's ever going to improve

battery technology.

I know a lot of people that work on that.

And nuclear power,

we could have a lot more powerful electric propulsion system.

So they would be extremely fuel efficient,

but more instantaneous thrust

to do more interesting missions

if we could start launching more nuclear systems.

So like something that's powered,

nuclear powered, that's the right way to say it.

But isn't a small enough container that could be launched?

Yeah, so, I mean, as a world,

we do launch spacecraft with nuclear power systems on board,

but size is one consideration.

It hasn't been a big focus.

So the reactors and the heaters and everything are bulky.

And so they're really only suitable

for some of the much bigger interplanetary stuff.

So that's one issue, but then it's a whole like

rat's nest of political stuff as well.

I heard, I think Elon described or somebody,

I think it was Elon that described the EV

to all electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.

So basically saying rockets,

obviously Elon is interested in electric vehicles, right?

But he said that rockets can't.

In the near term, it doesn't make sense

for them to be electrical.

What do you see a world with the rockets

that we use to get into orbit are also electric based?

It's possible, you can produce the thrust levels you need,

but you need this, a much bigger power supply.

And I think that would be nuclear.

And the only way people have been able to launch them

at all is that they're in a, you know,

100 times redundancy safe mode while they're being launched

and they're not turned on until they're farther off.

So if you were to actually try to use it on launch,

I think a lot of people would still have an issue with that,

but someday.

It's an interesting concept, nuclear.

It seems like people, like everybody that works

on nuclear power has shown how safe it is

as a source of energy.

And yet we seem to be, I mean, based on the history,

based on the excellent HBO series,

I'm Russian with a Chernobyl.

It seems like we have our risk estimation

about this particular power source is drastically inaccurate,

but that's a fascinating idea

that we would use nuclear as a source for our vehicles

and not just in outer space.

That's cool.

I'm gonna have to look into that.

That's super interesting.

Well, just last year,

Trump eased up a little bit on the regulations

and NASA and hopefully others are starting

to pick up on the development.

So now is a good time to look into it

because there's actually some movement.

Is that a hope for you to explore different energy sources

that the entirety of the vehicle uses something like,

like the entirety of the propulsion systems

for all aspects of the vehicle's life travel

is the same or electric?

Is it possible for it to be the same?

Like the coolant engine being used for everything.

You could, and you would have to do it in the same way.

We do different stages of rockets now

where once you've used up an engine or a stage,

you let it go because there's really no point

in holding onto it.

So I wouldn't necessarily want to use

the same engine for the whole thing,

but the same technology I think would be interesting.

Okay, so it's possible.

All right, but in terms of the power source.

The power source, that's really interesting.

But for the current power sources

and its current use cases,

what's the use case for electric?

Like the coolant engine,

can you talk about where they're used today?

Sure, so chemical engines are still used quite a bit

once you're in orbit,

but that's also where you might choose instead

to use an electric system

and what people do with them.

And this includes the ion engines

and hall thrusters and our engine

is basically any maneuvering you need to do

once you're dropped off.

Even if your only goal was to just stay in your orbit

and not move for the life of your mission,

you need propulsion to accomplish that

because the Earth's gravity field changes

as you go around in orbit

and pulls you out of your little box.

There are other perturbations

that can throw you off a bit.

And then most people want to do things

a little bit more interesting,

like maneuver to avoid being hit by space debris

or perhaps lower their orbit

to take a higher resolution image of something

and then return.

At the end of your mission,

you're supposed to responsibly get rid of your satellite,

whether that's burning it up,

but if you're in geo,

you want to push it higher into graveyard orbit.

What's geo?

So low Earth orbit and then geo synchronous orbit

or geo stationary orbit.

And there's a graveyard.

Yeah, so those satellites are at like 40,000 kilometers.

So if they were to try to push their satellites

back down to burn up in the atmosphere,

they would need even more propulsion

than they've had for the whole lifetime of their mission.

So instead they push them higher

where it'll take a million years

for it to naturally deorbit.

So we're also cluttering that higher bit up as well,

but it's not as pressing as Leo,

which is low Earth orbit,

where more of these commercial missions are going now.

Well, so how hard is the collision avoidance problem there?

You said some debris and stuff.

So like how much propulsion is needed?

Like how much is the life of a satellite

is just like a crap trying to avoid like

what if it's in there?

I think one of the recent rules of thumb I heard was per year

some of these small satellites

are doing like three collision avoidance maneuvers.

So that's not, yeah,

but it's not zero and it takes a lot of planning

and people on the ground and none of that really,

I don't think right now is autonomous.

Oh, that's not good.

Yeah, and then we have a lot of folks

taking advantage of Moore's law and cheaper spacecraft.

So they're launching them up

without the ability to maneuver themselves.

And they're like, well, I don't know, just don't hit me.

And three times a year that could become affordable

if it's like, if it gets hit, maybe it won't be damaged

kind of thing, that kind of logic.

Affordable in that instead of launching one satellite,

they'll launch, you know, 20 small ones.

Yeah, so if one gets taken out, that's okay.

But the problem is that, you know,

one good size satellite getting hit,

that's like a ballistic event

that turns into 10,000 pieces of debris

that then are the things that go and hit the other satellites.

Yeah.

Do you see a world where like in your sense,

in your own work and just in the space industry in general,

do you see that people are moving towards bigger satellites

or smaller satellites?

Is there going to be a mix?

Like what's, and what do we talk,

what does it mean for a satellite to be big and small?

What size are we talking about?

So big, the space industry prior to, I don't know, 1990,

you know, I guess the bulk of the majority of satellites

were the size of a school bus

and costs a couple billion dollars.

And now, you know, our first launches were on satellites

the size of shoeboxes that were built by high school students.

So that's a very different, you know,

to give you the two ends of the spectrum.

Big satellites will, I think they're here to stay,

at least as far as I can see into the future

for things like broadcasting.

You want to be able to, you know,

broadcast to as many people as possible.

You also can't just go to small satellites

and say Moore's law for things like optics.

So if you have an aperture on your satellite, you know,

that just, that doesn't follow Moore's law, that's different.

So it's always going to be the size that it will be,

you know, unless there's some new physics

that comes out that I'm not aware of.

But if you need a resolution and you're at an altitude

that kind of sets your size of your telescope.

But because of Moore's law,

we are able to do a lot more with smaller packages

and with that, you know, comes more affordability

and opening up access to space to more and more people.

Well, what's the smallest satellite you've seen go up there?

Like, what are the smallest kind, you said shoeboxes.

Yeah, so I think, you know, the smallest,

the smallest common form factor can fit a softball inside.

So that's 10 centimeters on each side.

But then there are some companies working on, you know,

fractions of that even.

And they're doing things like IOT type application.

So it's very low, you know, bandwidth type things,

but they're finding some niches for those.

Do you mean like there's a business,

there's a thing to do with them?

Yes, either. What do you do with a small satellite like that?

You can, you know, track a ship going across the ocean

is like, if you need to, if you just pinging something,

you know, you can handle that amount of data

and those latencies and so on.

You have to have propulsion on that.

You have to have a little engine.

No, those are just, you know, letting fall out of the sky.

Okay. Yeah.

But what, so what kind of solid lights

would you equip a colloid engine on?

Anything that's bigger than probably about 20 kilograms,

anything that needs to stay up for more than a year

or anything somebody spent more than like a hundred K

to build are kind of the ways I would think about it.

That's a lot of use cases.

What's the small set?

Like what's category?

Small set is actually very big.

I think it's like 700 kilograms or,

keep hitting my microphone.

Maybe a thousand kilograms down to 200 kilograms

or people have their own kind of definitions

of how they break them up,

but small set is still quite large.

And then it's kind of also applied as a blanket term

for anything that's not a school bus size satellite.

We need to get our jargon straight industry.

So what, do you see a possible future where, you know,

there's a few thousand satellites up there now,

a couple of thousand of them functioning?

Do you see a future where there's like millions of satellites

up in orbit or forget millions, tens of thousands?

Which just seems like where the natural trajectory

of the way things are going now is going.

Tens of thousands, yes.

The two, you know, buckets of applications.

One is imaging and the other is communication.

So imaging, I think that will plateau

because one satellite or one constellation

can take an image or a video and sell it

to, you know, infinity customers.

But if you're providing communications

like broadband internet or satellite cell

or something like that, satellite phone, you know,

you're limited by your transponders and so on.

So to serve more people, you actually need more satellites

and perhaps at the rate, you know, our data consumption

and things are going these days.

Yeah, I can see tens of thousands of satellites.

Can I ask you a ridiculous question?

Yes.

So I've recently watched this documentary on Netflix

about flat earthers that, you know,

the people that believe in a flat earth.

As somebody who develops propulsion systems

for satellites and for spacecraft,

what's to use the most convincing evidence

that the earth is round?

Probably some of the photos taken from the moon.

Photos in the moon, okay.

So it's not from the satellite space.

Yeah, I think seeing that perspective,

maybe I'm just, I'm answering too personally

because I really love those photos.

Because they're beautiful, yeah.

I really like the ones that show the moon

and the lunar lander and they're taken

a little bit farther back.

So you see earth and first you're like, wow, that's tiny

and we're insignificant and that's kind of sad.

But then you see this really cool thing

that we landed on another, you know, planetary body

and you're like, oh, okay.

Can you actually see her?

I don't know if I remember this one.

Yeah, I'll send you that picture.

Because I love the pictures or videos of just earth

from more from orbit and so on.

That's really beautiful.

That's like a perspective shifter.

That's the pale blue dot, right?

It probably appears tiny.

Yeah, and just that, you know,

juxtaposition of the insignificance, but.

You're another.

That's really cool thing, I just love that.

That'd be cool.

I personally love the idea of humans stepping out of Mars.

I'm such a sucker for the romantic notion of that

and being able to take pictures from Mars.

Next slide.

So you would go.

I would be, what did you say you said you wouldn't be?

Not in the first thousand.

The thousand, which it's funny because to me

that's brave to be in the first million.

I think when the Declaration of Independence

was signed in the United States,

that was like two million people.

So I would like to show up

when they're signing those documents.

Okay.

So maybe the two million.

Oh, that's an interesting way to think of it.

Cause like then we're like participating

as citizenry and defining the direction.

So it's not the technical risk.

You just don't want to show up somewhere

that's like America before.

Yeah, because I, from a psychological perspective,

it's just going to be a stressful mess

as people have studied, right?

It's like it's people, most likely the process

of colonization like looks like basically a prison.

Like you're in a very tight enclosed space with people.

And it's just a really stressful environment.

You know, how do you select the kind of people

that will go and then there'll be drama.

There's always drama in this.

And I just want to show up when there's some rules.

But I mean, you know, it depends.

So I'm not worried about the health

and the technical difficulties.

I'm more worried about the psychological difficulties.

And also just not being able to tweet.

Like what are you going to, how are you,

there's no Netflix.

So yeah, maybe not in the first million,

but the first hundred thousand.

It's exciting to define the direction of a new,

like how often do we not just have a revolution

to redefine our government?

As you know, smaller countries are still doing to this day,

but literally start over from scratch.

There's just our financial system.

It could be like based on cryptocurrency,

you could think about like how democracy, you know,

we have now the technology that can enable pure democracy.

For example, if we choose to do that,

as opposed to representative democracy,

all those kinds of things.

So we talked about two different forms of propulsion,

which are super exciting.

So the chemical base, that's doing pretty well.

And then the electric base is,

are there types of propulsion

that might sound like science fiction right now,

but are actually within the reach of science

in the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years

that you kind of think about,

or maybe even within the space of even just like,

like even ion engines,

is there like breakthroughs that might 10x the thing,

like really improve it?

So, you know, the real game changer

would be propellant less propulsion.

And so every couple of years you see a new,

now a startup or a researcher

comes up with some contraption for producing thrust

that didn't require, you know,

we've been talking about conservation of momentum,

mass times velocity out the back,

mass times velocity forward, yes, exactly.

And you have to, you know, carry that up with you

or find it on an asteroid or harvest it from somewhere

if you didn't bring it with you.

So not having to do that would be, you know,

one of the ultimate game changers.

And I, you know, unless there are new types of physics,

I don't know how we do it, but it comes up often.

So it's something I do think about.

And, you know, the one, I think it's called the Kazmir effect.

If you can, if you have two plates

and the space between them is on the order of these,

like the wavelength of these ephemeral vacuum particles

that pop into and out of existence or something.

I may be confusing multiple types of propellant less forces,

propellant less forces, but that could be real

and could be something that we use eventually.

We'll be the power source.

Yeah, the most recent engine like this

that has was just debunked this year,

I think in March or something was called the M drive.

And supposedly you used a power source.

So, you know, batteries or solar panels

to generate microwaves into this resonant cavity.

And people claimed it produced thrust.

So they went straight from this really loose concept

to building a device and testing it.

And they said, we've measured thrust

and sure on their thrust balance, they saw thrust

and different researchers built it and tested it

and got the same measurements.

And so it was looking actually pretty good.

No one could explain how it worked,

but what they said was that this inside the cavity,

the microwaves themselves didn't change,

but the speed of light changed inside the cavity.

So relative to that, you know, their momentum was conserved.

And I don't, you know, whatever.

But finally, someone I think at NASA built the device,

tested it, got the same thrust, then unhooked it,

flipped it backwards and turned it on,

but got the same thrust in the same direction again.

And so they're like, this is just an interaction

with the test set up or, you know,

some of the chamber or something like that.

So forwarded again, but, you know,

it would be so wonderful for everybody

if we could figure out how to do it.

But I don't know.

That's an interesting twist on it

because that's more about efficient travel,

long distance travel, right?

That's not necessarily about speed.

That's more about enabling like less.

Hook that up to the nuclear power supply.

There you go.

Okay.

But still in terms of speed, in terms of trying to,

so there's recently, already I think been debunked

or close to being debunked, but the signal,

a weird signal from our nearby friends,

nearby exoplanets from Proxima Centauri,

a signal that's 4.2 light years away.

So, you know, the thought is it'd be kind of cool

if there's life out there, alien life,

but it'd be really cool if it could fly out there and check.

And so what kind of propulsion,

and do you think about what kind of propulsion

allows to travel close to the speed of light

or, you know, half the speed of light,

all those kinds of things that would allow us

to get to Proxima Centauri

and that reasonable in a lifetime?

You know, there's the project Breakthrough Starshot

that's looking at sending those tiny little chipsets there.

And like accelerating really fast.

Yeah, using a laser.

So launching them, and then while they're still

relatively close to the earth, you know,

blasting them with some, I forget what,

even what power level you needed to accelerate them fast enough

to get there in 20 years.

Super crazy sounding, but a lot of people say

that's a legitimate, like it's crazy sounding,

but it can actually pull it off.

Yeah, I love that project

because there are a lot of different aspects.

You know, there's the laser,

there's how do you then get enough power

when you're there to send a signal back.

No part of that project is possible right now,

but I think it's really exciting.

But do you see like human,

like a spacecraft with a human on it,

so there's like a heavy one,

like us inventing new propulsion systems entirely.

Like do you ever see that on the radar

of propulsion systems like that,

or are they completely out there in the impossible?

Well, we're going to quickly leave the realm

of what I can describe with any credibility,

but I think because of special relativity,

if we try to accelerate some mass

so close to the speed of light,

it becomes infinitely heavy

and then we just don't,

we'd have to like harness a lot of suns to do that.

Or, you know, it's just that math doesn't quite work out,

but, you know, in my child's,

my child like heart,

I believe that, you know, we're missing something,

whether it's, you know, dark matter or other dimensions.

And if you can just have some anti matter

and a black hole and then ride that around

and somehow, you know, turn that into some.

Mess with gravity somehow.

Yeah, I feel like we're missing lots of things

in this puzzle and that, you know.

I wonder how that puzzle, yeah, right.

Well, I can speak with confidence

as a descendant of Apes

that we don't know what the hell we're doing.

Yeah.

So there's, we're like really confident,

like physicists are really confident

that we've like got most of the picture down.

But it feels like, oh boy,

it feels like that we might not even be getting started

on some of the essential things

that would allow us to engineer systems

that would allow us to travel to space much, much faster.

Yeah, and there's even things that are much more common place

that we can't explain,

but we've started to take for granted,

like quantum tunneling, you know.

Just things like, oh, the electron was here

with this energy and now it's here with this energy

and it's just tunneling.

But so, you know, we're missing a lot of the picture.

So yeah, I don't know to, you know,

use your same question from earlier.

I don't know if you and I will see it,

but yeah, someday.

You're the cofounder of just like we've been talking

about axion systems, it's a,

would you say space propulsion company?

Yes.

Broadly speaking.

So how do you, big question,

how do you build a rocket company

from like a propulsion company

from one person from two people to 10 people plus?

Plus, and actually, you know,

take it to a successful product.

Yeah, well, I think the early stage is quite,

I'm not supposed to use the word easy

when you work in rocket science, but straightforward.

When you're working on something, you know, sexy,

like an ion engine, it's more straightforward

to raise money and get people to come work for you

because the vision's really exciting.

And actually that's something I would say

is very important throughout is a really exciting vision

because when everything, you know, goes to crap,

you need that to get people getting themselves out of bed

in the morning and thinking of the higher purpose there.

And, you know, another thing along the way

that I think is key in building any company

is the right early employees

that also have their own networks

and can bring in a lot of people that,

you know, really make the whole greater

than just the sum of the early team.

And how do you build that?

Like, how do you find people?

It's like asking like, how do you make friends?

But is there, is it luck?

Is there a system?

Like how in terms of the people you've connected

with the people you've built a company with,

is there some thread, some commonality, some pattern

that you find to be, to hold for what makes a great team?

I think, you know, personally a thread for me

has been my network and being able to draw on that a lot

but also giving back to it as much as possible

in like an unsolicited sort of way,

like making connections between people that,

you know, maybe didn't ask,

but that I think could be really fruitful.

And even, you know, weirder than that is just really

getting, you know, having weird, uncomfortable conversations

with people like at a conference

and getting over the small talk quickly

and getting to know them quickly

and having a relationship that stands out

and then being able to call on them later because of that.

And I think that's been because I'm introverted

and I, you know, want to poke my eyes out

instead of go and do small talk.

And so I huddle in a corner with one person

and, you know, we talk about aliens or things like that.

And so, you know, that's all to say that,

you know, having a strong network

I think is really important, but a genuine one.

And let's see, other ways to build a rocket company,

kind of making sure you're paying attention

to the sweeping trends of the industry.

So everybody just cares about cost

and being able to get out ahead of that

and even more than we ever thought we'd need to

as far as what we needed to price our systems at,

you know, people for since the start

of the US space industry,

they've been paying 20, 25 million in adjusted dollars

for an ion engine and seeing that now people are going

to want to pay 10K for an ion engine

and just staying out ahead of that and those kinds of things.

So, you know, being out in the industry

and talking to as many people as possible.

That's crazy. So there's a drive.

I mean, I suppose SpaceX really pushed that.

It's frustrating for me.

So SpaceX really pushed this,

the application of, I guess, capitalism

of driving the price down of basically forcing people

to ask the question, can this be done cheaper?

This can lead to big problems, I would say,

in the following sense.

I see this in the car industry, for example,

that people have, it's such a small margin for profit,

like they've driven the cost of everything down so much

that there's literally no room for innovation

for taking risks.

So like cars, which is funny because not until Tesla really,

which is one of the, in a long, long time,

one of the first successful new car companies

that's constantly innovating,

every other car company is really pouring

in terms of their technological innovation.

They innovate on design and style and so on,

that people fall in love with the look and so on,

but it's not really innovation.

In terms of the technology,

it's really boringly the same thing

and they're really afraid of taking risks.

And that's a big problem for Rocket Space, too,

because if you're cutting out costs,

you can't afford to innovate to try out new things

and that's definitely true with Ion Engine, right?

So how do you compete in this space?

Do you, by the way, see SpaceX as a competitor?

And what do you say in general about the competition

in this space?

Is it really difficult as a business to compete here?

No, I don't see SpaceX as a competitor

and I see them as one day not too long from now

a customer, hopefully.

I mean, to compete against that,

I think you just have to do things in an unconventional way.

So bringing silicon MEMS manufacturing to propulsion,

you know, NASA doesn't make Ion Engines

using a batch mass producible technique.

They have one guy that's been making their Ion Engines

for 20 years bespoke pieces of jewelry.

So bringing things to what you're trying to innovate

to make them, in our case, more cost effective

was really key.

I like the idea of somebody putting out Ion Engines

on Etsy.

Yeah, my advisor at MIT would, you know,

the thruster chip I was holding up,

he would wear one as a lapel pin.

But in general, just on the topic of SpaceX,

you know, 2020 has seen some difficult things

for human civilization.

And it's been a lot of, first of all, it's an election year.

There's been a lot of drama and division about that.

There's been riots of a little different reasons,

racial division.

There's been obviously a virus that's testing

the very fabric of our society.

But there's been really, for me,

these super positive things, which inspiring things,

which is SpaceX and NASA doing the first commercial human flight,

launching humans to space and did it twice successfully.

What is that?

Did you get to watch that launch?

Did you, what does it make you feel?

Do you think this is first days for a new era of space exploration?

Yeah, I did watch it.

We played it outside on a big screen at our place.

And I was a little, you know, they kept saying,

Bob and Doug, Bob and Doug.

And, you know, astronauts usually are treated

with a little bit more fanfare.

So it felt very casual, but maybe that was a good thing.

Like this is the era of commercial crewed missions.

It was a little bit more, what is it?

What's his name?

Chris Hadfield.

Like playing guitar.

Yeah.

It's more, it's a different flavor to it.

Yeah, exactly.

More like fun, playful, celebrity type.

Yes, exactly.

Astronaut versus the aura of the magical,

sort of heroic element of the single human representing us in space.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think that's all for the better though.

It's so cool that it's such a common place thing now that we send,

you know, I can't believe that sometimes I'll have to,

you know, you don't even realize that astronauts are coming

and going all the time, you know, splashing back down.

And it's just so common now, but that's quite magical, I think.

So yes, we did watch that.

I love, love, love that we finally have that capability,

again, to send people to the space station.

And it's just really exciting to see the private sector stepping up

to fill in where the government has pulled back in the US.

And I think pulled back way too soon as far as exploration

and science goes, probably pulled back at the right time

for commercial things and getting that started.

But I'm really happy that it's even possible

to do that with private money and companies.

Do you like the kind of the model of competition of NASA funding?

I guess that's how it works is like they're providing quite a bit

of money from the government and then private companies compete

to be the delivery vehicles for whichever the government missions

like NASA missions.

Yes, I think for this type of mission is a little bit kind

of straddles commercial and science.

So I think it's good, but I do in general feel like we've pulled back

too much on, you know, NASA's role in the science and exploration part.

And I think our pace is too slow there, you know, for my liking, I suppose.

What do you mean?

Okay, so do you have, I mean, on the cost thing, do you feel like NASA

was a little too bureaucratic in a sense, like too slow, too heavy,

cost wise in their effort, like when they were running things purely

without any commercial involvement?

So I suppose it's more that I just want the government to fund.

I see.

And maybe NASA's not the best organization to do it rapidly,

but I think that, you know, again, depending on the goals,

we're just kind of at the very starting point of space exploration

and science and understanding.

So we should be spending more money there and not less.

And other countries are starting to spend more and more,

and I think we'll fall behind because of that.

So you have quite a bit of experience, first of all,

starting a company yourself, but also I saw, maybe you can correct me,

but you have quite a bit of knowledge of just the, in general,

the startup experience of building companies that you've interacted with people.

Is there advice that you can give to somebody, to a founder,

cofounder who wants to launch and grow a new company

and do something big and impactful in this world?

Yes.

I would say, you know, like I mentioned earlier,

but make sure the vision is something that, you know,

will get you out of bed in the morning and will get,

and that you can rally other people around you to achieve.

Because I see a lot of folks that sort of cared about something

or saw a window of opportunity to do something

and, you know, startups are hard and more often than not.

Just being opportunistic isn't going to be enough

to make it through all the really crappy things that are going to happen.

So the vision just helps you psychologically to carry through the hardships,

you and the team.

Yeah, you and the team, yeah, exactly.

To kind of younger people interested in getting into entrepreneurship,

I would say, you know, stay as close to like first principles

and fundamentals as you can for as long as you can.

Because really understanding the problems, you know,

if it's something scientific or hardware related,

or even if it's not, but having a deep understanding of the problem

and the customers and what people care about

and how to move something forward is more important

than taking all of the entrepreneurship classes in undergrad.

So being able to think deeply, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Have you been surprised about how much like pivoting is involved?

Like basically rethinking what you thought initially would be the right direction to go?

Or is there if you think deeply enough that you can stick in the same direction for long enough?

So our, you know, our guiding star hasn't changed at all.

So that's been pretty consistent.

But we, within that, we flip flop on so many things all the time.

And, you know, to give you one example, it's do you stop and build a first product

that's well suited to maybe a smaller, less exciting segment of the market?

Or do you stay head down and focus on, you know, the big swing

and trying to hit it out of the park right away?

And we've flip flopped between that.

And there's not a blanket answer and there are a lot of factors, but that's a hard one.

And I think one other piece for the aspiring founder,

spending a lot of time and effort on the culture and people piece is so important

and is always an afterthought and something that I haven't really seen

like the founders or executives that companies purposefully carve out time

and acknowledge that, yes, this is going to take a lot of my time and resources.

But you see them after the fact trying to repair the, you know, bro culture

or whatever else is broken at the company.

And I think that it's starting to change.

But just to be aware of it from the beginning is important.

Right.

I guess it should be part of the vision of what kind of place you want to create

or what kind of, like, human beings.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, you can't wait five, ten years and then just slap an HR person on to trying to fix it.

Like, it has to be thoughtful from the beginning.

Yeah.

Don't get me started on HR people.

Don't leave HR to HR people, but I'll just leave it at that.

You didn't say that.

I said it.

Okay.

Yeah.

HR's actual HR is really important.

This is so important.

Yes, but so important.

Culture is so important.

Yeah.

And then I also was surprised, like, I thought you could say, here will be our culture and

our values and that it was kind of distinct from who I and my co founder were as people.

And I was like, no, that's not how that works.

Yeah.

We just kind of like ooze out our behaviors and then the company grows around that.

So you have to do a lot of, like, introspection and self work to not end up with a shitty

culture.

It's kind of a, it's a, it's a relationship, but it's supposed to relationship with two

people.

It's a relationship with many people.

Yeah.

And you, yeah, you communicate so much indirectly by who you are.

You have to be.

Yes.

You have to live it.

Yeah.

As somebody, I think about this a lot cause generally I'm full of love and all those

kinds of things.

But like, I also get like really passionate.

And when I see somebody in the context of work, especially when I see somebody who I

know can do a much better job and they don't do a great job, I can lose my shit in a way

that's like Steve Jobsian.

And you have to think about exactly the right way to lose your shit.

If you're going to, or if at all, you have to really think through that cause it sends

a big signal.

You know, sometimes that's okay, like if you do it deliberately, like if you're going

to do it deliberately, if you're going to say like, I'm going to be the kind of person

that allows this and pays the cost of it, but you can't just think it's not going to

have a cost.

Yes.

This was like the first thing I worked on with my leadership coach was to how not to

just snap people when they were being an idiot.

And first I got really good at apologizing.

That was the first step because it was going to take longer to fix the behavior.

And then she, I've got, I'm actually a lot better at it now and it started with things.

She's like, every time you walk through a doorway, think, you know, calm and take breaths

before responding.

And there were all sorts of these little things we did and it was mostly just changing the

habit.

Yeah.

Yeah.