all space technology is ubiquitous it affects every part of our lives every part of the economy the tricky thing about 3D Systems is that they generally require everybody to sign up to them I do think it's going to be whoever can lay claim to something whoever can defend it owns it and that sets up a very very dangerous set of circumstances
unlearning things is a big deal you will never think to start building something that relies on something that to your mind is not existent you don't really have to be terribly smart to be a pessimist you can just be against against against well optimists are busy building the future if you can see that that is a robotic space snake the human
Spirit demands Endeavor the human Spirit demands hope we would all be better off if we listen to our spirit the thing that drove us to where we are today out of caves across oceans to the Stars well hello everyone it's Jim o shasy with yet another infinite Loops today's guest uh yuk Chi Chan I love your name man and I've seen it I've seen it done
the other way you're gonna have to educate me on that uh but I you literally are could either be a superhero or in a superhero movie or like as I'm going through your stuff you'd make a great character in science fiction novel I know that you have an affinity for that and have written science fiction but you are the founder
of the Tex starsback Charter space a space company building the operating system to simplify space programming which is amazing to me given the fact that most of the big guys are still using like Excel duct tape a variety of ancient software you're a published space lawyer you're a former Singapore army officer I want to
hear about that science fiction author military combat combat com combative practitioner and yet a high school dropout and I love this thing that you wrote because I kind of think the same way I write read I don't fight fight and think not necessarily in that order welcome thank you Jim I appreciate the the t-shir I appreciate the very kind
words um yeah I've had a I've had a bit of a weird Journey um I don't know if I necessarily characterize myself as as a as a character um life just takes us in funny directions right it does indeed um one of the first things that I noticed was you named your software package ubic and I'm I'm taking it that that is
a nod to one of my favorite science fiction authors Philip Kate dick it absolutely is Ive I I've read almost every single thing that phip K dick has ever written um UBC you know I mean ubic doesn't get I think the attention that it deserves because it's never been adapted into into a major feature film like everything else um the other highly
underrated novel I think um is flow my tears uh the policeman said which I'd love as well uh but yeah YC was was such an influential novel on me uh growing up um and I I always love the concept of you know the the core behind uh the UBC thing because it really is a thing in the novel right it it there is no um corporeal form to it it's such a
profound and and and and and and uh it's such a profound concept that cannot really be encapsulated in anything other than something as simple as a spray can and that's ultimately what I wanted our our software to be something that is profound that's life-changing that's world changing that is you know close to God um and close to what we what close
to that sort of ubiquitous power um and uh Grace but wrapped up in something extremely simple like a like a like a you like a like a easy to navigate user interface absolutely um I too think it's one of his actually one of his best books ever the fact that it has hasn't been made into a movie we also have a film division so we might try to get
after that but be Inc uh you know the the thing that I love about the story and the fact that you named it uh your your package that is that really the the story reality deteriorates right and Joe Dirt who or Joe chip rather who is the protagonist is like hm th this is this is weird and then you of course is the spray that
congeals and stabilizes the shifting realities um tell me a little bit about your experience with founding the company what was the mission and I know from the backstory and reading your stuff that uh you you share my idea that much space technology is from who when maybe I was 15 years old in 1975 yeah and uh you know I think that
we are making tremendous rides in terms of the hardware um so actually I'm in Utah today because uh we just wrapped up a major space conference here which by the way takes place in the middle of uh in Logan Utah which is the last place you would think a big space conference would would would have would take place but you know while those weird Oddities
of History um but we made tremendous strides and ultimately we are currently being held back I think um by that uh by the interface layers um you know between you know humans and other humans humans and the hardware um and you know between organizations right there there is that e essentially what you might know what
you might call The Ether the the stuff that exists between us that you know could either act as a a medium for us to convey information and data to each other or obstruct that conveyance um and so I used to be a program manager at a at a small company uh in the UK where I was responsible for getting uh our spacecraft built um organizing and
orchestrating all that but also communicating a lot of the data that we were generating to external stakeholders because you know space is the most regulated industry on the planet um a lot of people would debate me on that one but I think that space is at least up there um there's a lot of rules they're not very well defined um
sometimes on purpose uh in order to allow for flexibility um but that also leads to a lack of certainty as to what you're actually supposed to tell a regulator um when you want to fly and so communicating that to uh external stakeholders like Regulators but also uh you know other parties with financial interest potentially insurers has never
been an easy task for a manufacturer uh especially of these extremely complex systems designed for the most challenging environments ever known to humankind um you know there is no margin for error there is no such thing as corrective maintenance you can't just send up a repair man as soon as a satellite stops working once it's up
it's up and so uh these things have to be tested rigorously and a lot and that generates a lot of historical data a lot of historical artifacts um that have to be version controlled and managed um and cited in their correct context and place um and so communicating all that was immensely challenging for me as a program manager um because all I really
had at my disposal were thing with generic tools like Excel um and now Excel is fantastic I like Excel as much as the next guide um and you know given your Finance background Jim I I think you have a keen appreciation for the uh limits to which one can push Excel than most um but Excel is you know both a broad Tool uh as well as a deep tool um
but it can't be both at the same time um and so it does struggle in conveying a lot of contextual data it does struggle in conveying a lot of complex data when it gets down um to it and when I say conveying I mean in terms of you know I generate an Excel sheet I'd like to send it to somebody else so that they
understand what's going on in my mind and it takes me you know a 30 to 60 Minute call to actually explain the entire Legend of this Excel sheet and every single time that happens um you lose you know at least two hours one you one hour on each side of that call and that's just a huge tremendous source of inefficiency um in fact the Rand
Corporation um actually estimated that for most Aerospace programs between 12 to 28% the depending on the specific um thing that's being built but between 12 to 20% of all program costs or overall program budget is spent purely on program management and systems engineering if you contextualize that within say NASA's SLS program which
hasn't really flown um so far i' spent somewhere on the world I think $26 billion overall which means that about $6 billion you know call it happy median has been spent just on communicating with Excel which is an oversimplification of the problem but I hope it illustrates how insane all of this is and so that's really where
Charter came from I saw this and I thought God we we we're launching these incredible machines to the farthest reaches of space you know Voyager One relatively recently crossed um the threshold of our solar system and it's now in extra solar space we're doing all of this and it's fantastic it's inspiring we should have better tools we
deserve better tools the engineers in the industry deserve better tools so that they can go out and D Mighty things and so that's really what schalter exists for it exists to build the tools to enable the best and brightest amongst us to stop hsing around with Excel and to get back to building our Collective Ambitions as species I think it's really
great because that that environment is very viscous right there there are you've got Legacy thinking Legacy systems Legacy and and much of that was improvised right like if you uh Apollo 13 where they said you got to you got to improvise with just these tools and they they came they solved the problem but like where's the
manual where is the ease of use and the idea that there's so much complexity and the the risk and complexity of space travel space launches Etc I think is one of the things that we really really need to have a bunch of companies and Brilliant Minds working on and the thing that intrigued me about you is you're you're basically Outsider status uh coming in
able to in my opinion use very effectively your military training because you know you I I love people who've been trained by the military because they really understand life and death and no room for error and all of those things but also communication right like if your communication is up your team dies and so talk a bit about how that
has uh been both beneficial to you but also uh like have you faced any that you're not a member of our club so you're absolutely right um the milit is all about life or death Stakes um and especially so in so as you know Singapore enjoys a relatively peaceful um existence um you know in our low corner of Southeast Asia um but we are
uh always Vigilant um you know a big part of my childhood growing up was Reckoning with um Reckoning with the Legacy C of World War II so my my my family was impacted deeply by the War uh my great-grandfather was uh was was murdered um uh during the Japanese Occupation um essentially what happened was uh um the uh occupying forces uh of
the Empire of Japan at the time after the Singapore surrender of Singapore uh rounded up um a lot of military AED educated males um for re-education um and then they machine gun them on the beaches so we have no idea what happened to my great-grandfather we all we know is that he left one day and never came back and so that was was a terrible
terrible tragedy and you know Singapore's entire defensive posture is heavily informed by that lived experience of you know we've been there before we never want to go back and so despite the fact that we enjoy a relatively peaceful existence um and you know good cooperation with our immediate neighbors we never forgot that lesson
and so we maintain a fighting force um that is effective that's well trained that's professional and extremely well equipped um and so because of that um as you can imagine uh a lot of sophisticated equipment requires sophisticated maintenance um that was my job um I was a logistics officer I was the deputy uh S4 for the first Army
maintenance base uh we primarily worked on maintenance and Recovery operations for all tracked and aled vehicles across the entire of single pool Armed Forces so pretty much everything between bulldozers the main battle tanks is uh what I call it um and so because we have assets and troops deployed um you know far a field as well as at home
um and you know maintenance has to follow the combatants um we exist to ensure that they are ready for the fight um and that uh any deficiencies in that are quickly rectified and so a lot of my troops were deployed far away from me um it was a lot of logistics and coordination at a distance a lot of you know orchestration with lag time and
latency and so we had to build resilient processes internally um that could accommodate for that right and it is always a fine balance it's you you never want to be too prescriptive um you want to assign enough autonomy that you know uh your troops at the front line can uh exercise um exercise their own better
judgment their own discretion to achieve Commander intent and end state but at the same time you don't want to give them free reign because that's when uh you introduce risks when you introduce uncertainties um and that's when things go off the that that's when things go off the rails and so you're absolutely right um Logistics is well those things
that is not sexy right nobody writes about the logistician um the logisticians on you know repelling out of helicopters or uh you know doing cool things like kicking in the doors um and we it is a very thankless job um the only time anybody ever pays attention Logistics is when something goes wrong and somebody and they need somebody to
yell at um but it is a is a fantastic role because it is always operational it is always live um there is no such thing as a notional exercise because you're right if if if we don't do our job somebody dies or somebody is left starving or you know somebody is left in a deeply dangerous position and so no margin for error that's how we did it um
and we always and we did it right um and so bringing that into space I think has been an interesting experience now obviously a lot of space is still heavily colored by the military um it is still very much a you know uh not necessarily a 100% uh you know defense uh National Security domain but certainly it is very tightly coupled um
a lot of the commercial industry does still interface directly with government you won't find a space company out there that doesn't have a federal practice um and so that has been helpful somewhat um but yes coming in as an out Outsider has been uh has been interesting um I think that the thing that is most refreshing and actually has contributed a lot um to
our ability to break in has been the fact that we look at the problem fundamentally differently from I think how most others might um where other people might see an engineering problem because you know this primarily affects Engineers um it looks like an engineer it talks like an engineer uh and therefore you know it's very easy to
fall into that cognitive trap or thinking this must be an engineering problem and therefore I must solve it as such I fundamentally view it as a logistics problem because it's orchestration data management you know dat data is an asset like any other right um be it fuel be it data be it information be it knowledge transferring
between your different Generations uh within the same organization all these are assets and it comes down to good management good practices um to ensure that nothing is lost everything is accounted for um and that everything is serviceable um for uh whatever you need it for and so because I think we view it fundamentally as a as a logistics
problem um that has been that has allowed us to Target the root causes of what is actually holding up our our industry uh a lot more effectively uh than if we had approached this from you know the same Viewpoint that everybody else has tried and failed to tackle it from you know north of Gman locky they've all tried build internal tools
for decades and they to varying degrees of success um I think we are the first we are the first company to actually come along and say you know let's just take a second and let's you know calm down maybe this isn't a logistics maybe this isn't an engineering problem let's let's start thinking about it in a different way I love that because I
think that it's something that I try to do often which is maybe if I looked at this problem from a completely different Viewpoint I would see much better Solutions and uh that was what attracted me to your work um as well uh talk a little bit about uh again we're we're we're uh relying on your army uh experiences because you you've also
applied it to picking co-founders um and like one of the first things you list is trust it doesn't again in in like there there are three groups of people who probably are closer to reality in quotes than than most humans and the the first are special forces and those that support them again life and death data Integrity knowledge
all of that and communication absolutely vital uh emergency room doctors same thing they have to make life and death decisions very very quickly and they're going to make them wrong if they have bad information or if they things aren't working out or if the cart isn't right there um and then the other one is from my world
Traders Traders basically it's not a life and death in reality but it kind of is because if you up a billi dollar trade you're G to die as a Trader for that particular company and and so trust I I I make this case a lot when I talk about uh Wall Street because people laugh when they hear me and like I say they you don't understand that
underneath everything on Wall Street the first layer is trust because literally the system would not work without trust and so it gets policed very V villag um and you know you you literally do not give some you do not say to a counterparty I will do this and then not do it because if you do if they DK you don't know oh I didn't do that trade
you're out you're literally the black ball gets put in and you're not going to be making those those decisions anymore another thing that uh you've mentioned is no loan wolves uh because as you make the case I think quite eloquently people have to be taught how to uh cooperate and the uh the idea that you got some guy over here just off doing
his or her own thing is not gonna fly in something uh like as as in complex as space travel and and then real professionalism I I I love that it's the way I hire people as well um I don't really care what pieces of paper they have behind their name I want to look at their proof of work I want to look at their history and what they've been able
to create and can they move from one field to another um any more tips for because a lot of our listeners are starting companies and are looking for co-founders uh any any any additional insights from you um for listeners and viewers on that topic well Jim I people do ask me this sometimes I I I have to confess I am in a very privileged
position my co-founder I've known him for well over 10 years I was best man at his wedding we served together in basic training and so call it Kismet right um it was extremely fortunate that he also happened to be one of the most talented software Engineers I've ever met in my life and so um you know I've seen this
man in the absolute absolute worst of circumstances and I've always known him as somebody that I could count on um and so I think potentially uh a piece of advice that you can extract from that is um you know you never really know somebody until you see them at the lowest point um you never and you never know yourself until you see yourself at
your lowest point and you know that that that interaction um of you know we have nothing left what do we do here um that is probably the most real um human moment that you could ever have with another person um and you will never really know who they are until you have that and so um I guess that acts as a great filtering mechanism um if you
don't happen to know somebody like that uh manufacture scenario uh you know go camping and forget the food uh and see what happens I love that one uh another one uh because our industry is a little less uh precise if you will um and involves a lot more communication with uh people not in the industry right uh that that I
use is I take them to lunch and I watch how they treat the weight staff and if they treat them poorly no matter how many degrees they have no matter how good they look on paper I won't hire them because literally I found that to be a tell for a personality that kisses up and kicks down and that is a horrible combination um AB right the other thing
that I I love about you is you share with me the enthusiasm for this momentum momentous and almost miraculous timeline we are living in the odds against right the odds against are like so ridiculously huge you would never place a bet on this right like uh I I I I'm gonna end up in this timeline and and you talk about your great-grandmother
who you know saw dirt roads and oxen driven carts and then watched Apollo land on the moon and then watched the landing on Mars and I had a similar experience I'm much older than you so my grandfather was born in 1885 and I literally took a large language model and said what Innovations occurred between 1885 and 1973 when he
died holy like the world basically the world world that you and I live in was created and and so I I think that the question I'm going to ask you is do you find that even younger people are hampered in any way by like the how quickly and and how really new a lot of what we're doing is and by that I mean like radio radio wasn't around when my
grandfather was born neither were cars neither were planes right and he too watched the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon and and do you think there's any kind of underlying cultural lag that still uh affects younger people I I think that it definitely affects a lot of older people but I'm asking about younger people do
you think that that exists I think to an extent I think so I I once had a theory that um it's difficult to as as it is to learn things it is much more difficult to unlearn things and you know as soon as you learn something it constrains the probability space in your mind and so you know if if you are told for the longest time that
oh there are only three states of matter um the fourth state of matter coming along is it's just it it conflicts fundamentally with your world model and it becomes much more difficult to imagine um what happens next but you know for say matter plasma is a major component for a lot of satellite uh propulsion units um you know pulse plasma thrusters are
very well known and it is a Mainstay sort of technology in space but if you grow up and you operate and you form a world viiew that is constrained by plasma does not exist uh that you will never think to you will never think to start building um something that relies on something that to your mind is non-existent right and so unlearning
things is a big deal um and it is a a a a challenge for anyone because you know what do you unlearn what do you dump what do you what do you what are you replacing it with I think that there is just there's a we have the sum total of the world's knowledge at our fingertips at any given moment right if you don't have a phone or if you don't have a have
signal the person next to you probably does right and so we are only ever an arms length away from everything that Humanity has ever learned uh in its colle Ive history uh you know both real and fictional um and so I think that does lead to a little bit of um not necessarily Choice information paralysis call it you know there's way too much
stuff there's so much stuff to learn where do you go um and so I do think that coupled with the fact that I think there was a cultural moment um you know over the last couple of decades where pessimism and cynicism um became the most fashionable thing around um it became cool to to downplay incredible things that were being
achieved um you know people stopped wanting to work at Nasa people stopped wanting to work to be astronauts because oh that's not realistic that's not you know that's not tenable oh go be this or go be that um don't try and be you know the the the great things that the don't try and Aspire towards being one of our greatest that's not tenable um and I
think that the fact that there is just so much information out there some of it necessarily um conting less than positive feelings you know they they're all negatively coded um and the fact that there it becomes culturally cool to be uh pessimistic or cynical um I think there is a little bit of a myaso um but I do think we're
breaking out of it because you know culture is cyclical all things are cyclical and it is we're coming back to the point where it is now cool to build it is now cool to manufacture it is cool to look at something and go you know what I am gonna do that like it that is a good idea that's cool I'm gonna get it done and that is it's
coming back and I think um I think the great thing about the human soul and the human spirit is that we naturally yearn for that right um learned helplessness is a thing we we have taught ourselves over last two three decades that you know what we don't have to we don't have to Aspire we don't have to reach we don't have to to dream of bigger things
and it's Tyrant that naturally conflicts with what the human Spirit wants to do human Spirit wants to reach to yearn to climb to run fly and go even ever further and I think that that natural tendency that natural inclination is starting to break out um it's starting to crack the shell and we are now achieving ever greater things um
I have a very concrete example for you um so last year uh we spent most of 2023 piloting uh with a very particular special team uh at the NASA jet propostion lab um they are building uh at under the Robotics and autonomy group um it's mostly staffed by a bunch of folks who previously worked on your know Ms 2012 and Ms 2020 and they are
designing um I know that listeners won't be able to see this but you will um let me show you a photo of what they were building because it is the most incredible thing that you have ever seen and I and I do not make that assertion lightly um hang on let me let me pull up this phot okay so if you can see that yeah that is a robotic space
snake that is one day it is one day going to go to Saturn's second largest moon Enceladus to look for life now a little bit a little bit of a background uh and Enceladus is an ocean world with thick ice crust now a few decades ago when the Cassini probe flew past it detected uh clouds of water vapor emanating from the
surface and the determination that was made uh after you know several flybys was that there must be thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean that are you shooting up these uh jets of superheated gas that are causing fissures in the ice and that's what's causing you know essentially geysers to spew out uh into space and so there is another Ocean
World in our solar system Europa um JPL just pushed uh Clipper which is a fairly large satellite that's meant to go orbit uh Europa and actually look for uh look for you know biological compounds um it will be joined by the European space agency's uh juice Mission which is also meant to go look at uh Europa in a few
years but incel this is a much more interesting concept because in my op uh because Europa doesn't have evidence of thermal events and so anything that tries to land on Europa will have to drill down uh through about 10 miles of ice um before it can actually reach the ocean and celus has that natural pathway for us so um this uh robot space snake
um which is part of the project called e very very welln named um it actually stands for something it stands for exter exobiology life surveyor um eels is meant to launch to land um the the snake is going to Slither out of its Lander um find where these fissures go under go um through the fissure um reach the ocean underneath swim to the bottom of
the ocean find one of these Thermo Vents and look for life and this isn't going to this is a very complex Mission as you can tell right and you know NASA funding Cycles being what they are um you know they do very um based on the will of Congress but the target is hopefully hopefully one day in somewhere around 2050 in the 2050s this thing will land
and it will find life and you I'll be in my 60 at that point but I will hopefully get the ability to say to my grand kids and grandkids that hey you know what 30 years ago I helped I helped in this Grand quest for us to know ourselves better Callan had a fantastic quote we are the Universe um understanding itself and I will get to say that I help the
universe understand itself just a little bit better oh I love that and like that's why I'm so excited about where we are right now where we can potentially go pessimism you know you don't really have to be terribly smart to be a pessimist you can just be against against against you can naysay everything well well optimists are busy
building the future and I I completely agree with your comment about the cyclicality of uh culture you know two and fro the pendulum throws right and uh I I definitely as one who's been around for a while uh maybe a couple of years ago I started realizing that there was a group of specifically of younger people who were
like you know what this I'm not a pessimist I'm not I'm not buying into your oh learned helplessness oh for me and oh I'm such a victim I just loved it and it's actually one of the reasons why why we started OS Adventures we're going to try to do everything we can from investment from films from stories from movies to to get people excited again
because what a time to be alive what a time to be young uh I just like it's so insanely cool to me um and as far as Europa of course you're a science fiction fan didn't didn't uh didn't we get warned by our monolith uh friends attempt no Landing uh on Europa oh yes oh yes well you know that's the the good news is that we are not currently planning a land out on
Europa that was actually a table as a concept but you know what we'll do a fly a couple flybys first make sure there's a there's no monoliths hanging out um waiting to waiting to surprise us and you know science fiction is another thing uh we have publisher called infinite books and we're coming out we're publishing uh hopefully by the
end of this year if not the early 2025 two science fiction books that are literally optimistic about the future uh one's called White mirror the other is called a box full of stars and love that the authors are great and I think that you you you speaking of logistics right you've got to figure out how you can make as big of an impact as you can
using everything at your disposal right and and getting back to you though and and what you are passionate about and what you're doing um you're also a lawyer and you hate the legal industry but love the law what do you what do you think might emerge over the next couple of decades in terms of space law so so this is
going to be a little bit of a boring segue I think there's going to be a lot more regulation around uh insurance so uh space Insurance being a very very weird sort of thing um it is well it's whole captive by a few uh economic interests um that are you you can't they're blameless um that's just how it shakes out but essentially the
way that insurance currently works in the industry um You' got broadly speaking three types um you got uh and this is going to be uh hopefully an education uh because space insurance is an esoteric thing you know within the space industry uh which just goes to show what I pay attention to uh but this pre-launch insurance which is uh you pre
you build your sat line Virginia goes down Florida um you cover um UPS man's Journey all the way down uh launch insurance which governs uh the moment your spacecraft uh you know the rocket on which your spacecraft is integrated into uh the moment it lifts off to the moment uh it successfully spits it up in space um and you know the cut off point
does vary but broadly speaking that's uh that's the coverage period and then there's inorbit asset Insurance um and asset Insurance being for a variety of different things right it could be for it could be for Revenue it could be for asset value it could be for third party liability it could be for you know the
risk of War you know you know somebody uh Aid party there's a couple of GE geopolitical Bad actors that come to mind uh might launch a missile at you um just to see see what happens um and so you've got all these types of inorbit asset Insurance um but you don't really have the data to build quantitative models that really speak to the risk of
being in space um with any degree of certainty um I think a lot of people are generally quite shocked to realize that our space tracking abilities are not really all that accurate we're getting better but as you can imagine it's it's tough you know because you have a lot of groundbased sensors and these things are
going past extremely quickly um the average sort of orbit time um for a sound l in L orbit is about 90 minutes uh to make a full round trip around the earth and so if you imagine you know you've got a handful of ground based sensors um scattered around the world um and you've got a lot a lot of things in space there's well over 10,000 SP active
spacecraft plus a whole lot of debris up there um tracking all day is a god gin effort and so it becomes very very difficult you you can you can build large probabilistic models of the overall picture in space it's difficult to form a picture of any one particular object especially if it's just been launched um and so extrapolating that
from you know pre-launch um was your building satellite you know what is the risk of this thing getting slashed into or what is the risk of it failing is an extremely difficult Endeavor now that's not to say that in spacing insurance doesn't already exist um it does but only for a certain type of satellite generally only for geosynchronous
satellites because those are the big ticket uh those are the big money makers those cost you know upwards of $200 million in terms of sumur and so as I'm sure you know right uh as the premium is a percentage of that The Brokerage and underwriting fee is a percentage of that and so uh for most Underwriters in space
it is just plainly uneconomical to underwrite anything that is not a giant Geo satellite because it takes way too much effort it uh you know from the manufacturing side as well as from the underwriting side um for way too small of a fee and so what we've ended up with is the vast majority of satellites in space which are all primarily
concentrated low orbit they're all primarily small satellites that are nowhere near $200 million in value um are uninsured there is a crisis for lack of a better term um in for uh in terms of space asset insurability and that is a very dangerous and position to be in and so I think one of the big things is going to one of the B big developments in the
next decade or so will have to be some sort of insurance mandate for assets in space because depending the space law um the way that liability is actually handled in space is done purely at the international level so if a Russian company launches a Russian satellite and then SpaceX launches a satellite um and the two Collide um the matter is not
uated between bace XX on the Russian company it's done between the US and Russian governments and then you know they handle everything internally and so that effectively means that all governments the US government included is on the hook for anything that happens now the US government already forces uh launch operators to indemnify
them against losses every time they fly um and that's because it's relatively easier to ensure Rockets because you know we send them up often enough that you can build a proper probabilistic model and you know it's a sweet like it's a fairly isolated event when a rocket goes up everybody pays attention but each rocket spits out you know 40 50
60 satellites um each of them has to be tracked and marriaged individually kind of challenging um and so I think the next big move is going to be that uh insurance will become regulated and mandated in Space the question is how do you actually make that economical for uh the underwriters and I think there is something just beautifully poetic about
that because I I I compare it to yeah I think about the history of commercial shipping and global trade right prior to the 1680s who was really able to underwrite uh sea voyages and Expeditions three groups the church kings and queens or just really really rich people and you know you have a similar enough situation in space right
now where you know who are the people actually able to go to space there's a handful of Select Chosen Few um but then in 1688 a bunch of uh you Sal The Old Ship captains and Merchants gather around a low coffee shop in London um and they started you know Bing pools oh Jim yeah that guy's going to come back that guy's not going to come back and so
that then coales into insurance as we understand it very first mutual funds were founded or were created just by a bunch of guys betting on you know who's going to you know screw up uh and who's not and then that enabled more voyages to be undertaken with uh you know with distributed risk uh that W and solely reliant on the Goodwill and pocket Deep
Pockets of particular individuals and patrons um and you know fast forward a couple centuries we have global trade we have global Shipping we have the world as we understand it today um all enabled by Insurance because Insurance lets the common folk the average individual the person who's climbing up from the gutter
to get in on a booming economy and actually go out and adventure to DARE and to go out and win glory and riches for themselves um so yeah that's uh that's that's I think the big that's the big thing mandated insurance I love it but I'm very impressed by your knowledge of the what what created the industry uh I've met very very few people who know
that it's kind of like something I love economic history and so know know a lot about that and insurance by the way has always been one of the things that I check as a kind of an early indicator uh if insurance companies all of a sudden stop underwriting something uh watch out because they have much better models
than I do and and so it tends to be if you're paying close attention it it tends to be a leading rather than a lagging indicator uh and delighted to hear that you are working on solving that problem because as you were talking I was thinking wow now that sounds like a great company that could be a start up right there alone um what what do you
think about the whole notion of ownership right like I I use a lot of memes and gifs on Twitter for example to joke around and well one of them is uh this GI of of uh United States astronaut landing on the moon planting the flag and saying it's ours and then and then there's one landing on Mars planting the American flag and saying it's ours
how do you think that that's going to play out well there's two schools of thought here and really all it come the the the the the fundamental difference between these two schools of thought are where you stand on the existence of international law um is international law real now I I'm going to probably annoy a few
of my professors uh or past professors when I say this uh I don't think international law is real uh I think it is entirely based on the the threat of force you know the Monopoly on violence um and that comes from my military background right I I I look at things peely in a from a peely realistic standpoint um you know what is actually able
to what has embodiment in the real world guns do bullets do missiles do soldiers do the concept of international law you know I mean you there's there's a couple of couses uh you know in Europe um but I'm not really sure that they extend that their influence extends much further that's yeah definitely pissed off a lot of my former Prof professors
now uh but ultimately based on that perspective so in terms of actual space law there is a r there is a very firm rule um and this is one of the few um call it non vague um rules in space um that there is a principle of non-appropriation no country is allowed to lay claim um to anything outside of Earth's atmosphere and by the way the
the way that space law characterizes what is space is honestly hilarious um because it characterizes everything that is not earth as space and therefore under the realm of space law which if there is a galactic Community out there I think it's very funny that we basically just laid claim to all of space and we said this is all under our
legal system now this is this is our jurisdiction um which you know but that's how it is um but yes so the principle of non appropriation requires that no country be allowed um to actually appropriate lay claim um or uh exercise any sort of ownership over any part space now ownership is completely separate from control right and you know
again this goes to my this goes to another school of thought which is you know possession that is 9/10 of the law so can you really possess and control something without effectively owning it this is a a big live issue in space but because there is no such thing as National appropriation in space um there
is a there's a general principle in law that per it's not just space law it's all law um it really comes down uh the I'm going to butcher this because I suck at Latin um but the principle uh is uh Nemo which basically means you know simply put you can't give you can't give ownership to something that you don't own yourself right um and so if the
ultimately all property rights flow from the government and therefore if the government isn't allowed to lay claim to anything it cannot give the right for any other any individual private citizen to claim stuff um so that's one school of thought that there is no such as appropriation can't like planting the flag is purely
symbolic or you can think about it in terms of international law is not real and you know whoever is the biggest stick can do whatever the hell they want uh in which you know the United States passed an act in 2015 called the space act which effectively gave uh folks who mine resources to extract resources um so jurisdiction to do whatever the hell
they wanted with it so if I flew satellite to go mine an asteroid I brought back a ton of uh ton of pilum U that is mine to do with as I see fit I can sell it for whatever I want um and you know I get keep the proceeds of that and I don't have to pay anybody taxes because there is no tax regime in space um obviously you know if you arrive back
on Earth then you probably have to pay the IRS a a hefty sum but yeah maybe if you the IRS has no jurisdiction in space um so sell it on a little bit is the point um but yeah so I think ultimately that's the direction that we're going to go down um there is this is a recurring joke that we will never have another space treaty because
we are so the space treaties were all negotiated broadly speaking between 1962 uh and 1976 um sorry they W negotiated within that time but that's when all the instruments were actually you know adopted um produced and you know uh signed and ratified um and so at that time there were only really two voices in the room that mattered um the US and Soviet
Union and so it was a lot e it's a lot easier to have a conversation between two people and actually come out with a set of rules even then it took 14 years to actually feel figure everything out we have so many voices in space now so many emerging countries so many emerging space fairing Nations uh you know a lot
of African states have been launching satellites just to uh for various purposes obviously they could they could benefit immensely from having uh Superior Imaging and Superior Communications but also it is a point of national pride because you know it's something that anybody can do now um you know students launch cbats and so
everybody has a stake has has a voice um has a Stak at the table um has a voice to that has something to say have you ever had tried to moderate a caucus of you know 300 something voices each of whom has you know a ton of different opinions so we're likely not going to end up with another um set of space treaties just because yeah we can't all
get along and we're definitely not all going to agree on anything and the tricky thing about treaty systems is that they generally require everybody to sign up to them anybody who doesn't sign up to them they're not bound by the rules so you know it's kind of nuts right like if you come up with a set of laws and you can just opt out just say
nah it's not for me thanks and then you could just leave um so because of that um I think that ultimately the the the matter of space ownership is going to come down to a realistic take on what international relations actually looks like anybody who can defend their claim um and defending their claim obviously has a ton of different connotations from
purely legalistic to you know guns on the moon um but I do think it's going to be uh it's going to be whoever can lay claim to something whoever can defend it owns it and that sets up a very very dangerous set of circumstan aners right we don't want to trigger a land grab in space which is why we still have this
normative International legal order sort of try to you know hem everybody in I don't know I I do hope that it persists um against everything that I've said against all my uh criticisms of international law I do think that has immense value uh as a normative system I don't I don't know if it'll hold I hope it does um but I am this is one area
where I am a little bit more pessimistic than optimistic um but you know good things can come out of that too um a land grab inspires more folks to get into space faster much more aggressively because you got to beat your competition which is going to Spur space development it's going to Spur the development of additional Technologies
to sustain uh you know my whole thing is sustainment and so if we want a permanent base on the moon we want a permanent base on the Mars we have to have a supply chain that actually keeps those people alive and we're going to have to build all the technologies that go along with it so a land grab be tragic for the unity of the human race
but would be pretty great for development of space technology what a great answer because it also infs and implies that Logistics rather than international law is going to maybe be what what wins I was as you were talking about it I was thinking of the Dave Chappelle routine where he's the president and and he he says the United
na Nations is going to sanction him and and Chappelle goes oh okay go ahead sanctioned me you you and your army oh wait a minute you don't have a Army guess what I got one yeah and pretty much that yeah I mean and like honestly um international law well I certainly am in favor of there being protocols in place so that people can solve their uh disputes peacefully
right rather than uh you you at the barrel of a gun uh you look uh long enough at human history and you know it even turned into a joke at the height of cryptomania I I used to say that in addition to saying that if you want to know the original Bitcoin and I would hold up a a currency I would hold up a US dollar right because you can't track
it you can no one knows where it is uh but then when when they got on the soap box of you know oh the fiat currency the US dollar I'm like yeah the US dollar is backed by the most powerful military the world has ever seen which takes its orders from a political class that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness
to use them and so maybe I'm a little cynical on that point uh but I I definitely agree that like you know the gold rushes are a good uh analogy here right like the gold rushes were responsible for the development of huge tracks of uninhabited uh land both here Canada elsewhere and so you know I think leaning into human OS and understanding
how it really works as opposed to how it might ideally work is going to maybe give you an edge um I one of the things one of the things that you say that I love is two things actually U I want to talk to a bit about the angry man on your shoulder and you see you you say he's there in a variety of guyses to basically shout at you stop
being such a whiny little and get to work I love that I love that I use a similar technique but I want to hear about yours so he's always been a little bit of a voice in the back of my head not the not to sound nuts or anything but it's always that low voice in the back of my head that that that that push means just a little bit further um now I
think a lot of people have written about this um in various forms there's a there's one part particular um depiction of uh the concept that I really really like um so there's this web comic that I really enjoy reading uh it's called terminal Lance um it's written by this guy who was a Marine Lance corporal um
you know at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan um and he and then he you know draws these comics about uh what life was like in the Marines but also post separation and it's it's always the the the it's always a great read um and I think to that point it actually speaks about the universality of of the military experience that you know I've
never met this guy um you know Singapore does conduct exercises with the US Marines but you know we lived very different lives uh but somehow there was just this commonality across uh uh across all of it I actually once met this um through an accident of Life uh I met this uh for former Bulgarian uh Air Force officer um and so he was yeah he
was he he served in the time when Bulgaria was still a communist state and so they also practiced conscription and he didn't speak a word a word of English um and I was just you know casually sort of chatting through somebody who was you know known to both of us as a mutual interpreter and I just got on the subject of uh cleaning your weapon uh
and you getting stuck outside the Armory for hours because you feeding your weapon the Armory kep just kept turning it away and he just his face just lit up and he just started laughing and he just started telling me about you're getting stuck on this air Bas in in middle of God forsaken you know nowhere and just being like yep that is that is a
universal experience oh Sor that's seg but yes the angry B on my shoulder so the this this particular comic that terminal Lance made years ago at this point um basically it's just a little M uh it it depicts you know the the the author or you know the author's analog um going through college he's just tired and then little you Sprite pops up in
his shoulder in uh in you know uh digital uh desert cams and he just screams at me he's like stop being such a dude you you've been in you've been in way worse you You' have to be the 240 Gunner and you know on like two hours of sleep and you had the the PO pole fire watch it's like what are you even doing and he was like oh yeah
actually that is I I can push through this and I had a very similar experience in myself um and so I I was I was cramming for for a late night um and uh you know law school is uh is challenging uh for most right uh and I I remember I I went to sleep at so I crammed all night I I was pushing out this essay um I also wasn't particularly diligent in
law school uh unfortunately I was just trying to have a great time after separating from the Army and so uh you know I I at the last minute as I usually did um and so I F the deadline was noon um the following day so I crammed from I think maybe about 10: in the evening to about 5: in the morning um and I managed
to push this thing out uh wrote a fairly decent essay um I actually did quite well on that one I I realized that there's a there there's an inverse correlation um between uh how much how much time in advance of a deadline I spend on on an asyland and how well I do I my best my best ever scoring essays I did literally right before the deadline
um but so I'm I'm laying down in my bed uh after a long night you know it's 5: in the morning the sun's starting to come up and so it's starting to get a little bit lighter and I think to myself you know what this actually reminds me of a lot a lot of this other thing that I once did so I I think one year prior well still in the surface um and I had
the worst night of my life I was so uh Singapore we have a VAR we have a skill test um an infantry skills test that is actually very closely modeled on the US Army's uh expert infantry men badge um course and what it involves is a 32 click Marsh with about 70 pounds of gear um it's a timed fast March so you have
to clock all 32 clicks under uh 7 hours um so not not a breezy straw by any stretch of the imagination but part of that test also requires you to perform several skills at Arms tests um so you know we could range between uh your weapons handling to grenade throwing you know stuff that you you should be able to do as an infantryman um and then
finally there is a water crossing um so normally this water crossing is conducted uh at the 29 click Mark so that you don't have to ha 70 pounds of Kio now weighed down with a ton of water um but when I when I did this test uh as a as a young officer Cadet um some genius decided to shift well they did redid the route and now the water
crossing was at 19 clicks well still the water crossing was done not over a river as it normally is but through a swamp and this swamp uh unbeknownst to us at the time was actually being used as a latrine Point by a different training company and we only found this out much much later and so you know we so it's at night right um because you know
Singapore being as hot as it is it's basically suicide to to try and do any of this stuff at the daytime um so it's at night we're marching you know it's it's not a breezy Pace at all we're basically running with 70 pounds of GE on our back on our backs and we're just you know trying to get through this thing um so we get to the water crossing
which is swamp and it smells it smells like the entrance to hell because I imagine that the entrance to Hell smells like sulfo um and so I am the second man the cross uh my my my battle budy he's he's the first guy to go over um and he just you know there's there's flood lights but they only really extend so far out in the swamp
and then beyond a certain point you know the do just takes over right and so I watch him walk out slowly and so then you know my turn so I start waiting into the water right I've got my rifle overhead U I've got my pack dragging behind me and I'm just walking and walking and then you know the light starts to feed and everything starts to
go dark around me and you I there's a rope that I'm Tethered to so I'm just contining to walk along the rope and then I slip and I sink into the swamp all the way up to my wrist so literally the only thing that's still above water is my rifle and I slip I think to myself you know I I get a face full of swamp marck and I think to myself okay don't
panic let's just keep walking sooner or later the I have it has to come back up so I keep going I go for maybe about 30 seconds before my feet fine purchase on the on a on a on a mud bank I stopped climbing up and I emerge like you know the thing right I I'm just covering head to toe and crap and I as I clear you
know all my Airways and then I hear all my instructors yelling me hey are you all right I'm like yes sir he like then hurry the up you're holding rest you're holding up the company okay great so I keep marching right and I get to the other side and now I'm coveting God knows what I can't even smell anymore because it's just like you know smell is
the weakest of all our sensors right mine's just been completely overrun and so I I get to the other side you know I I get my stuff I'm now soaking wet I am you know covered in everything everything is way heavier now um and I lie down by the side of this road and I look at my watch and I see it is 5:00 a.m. and I think to
myself yeah okay that makes sense uh and I fall asleep and I have the as I'm waiting for rest of the company to pass I I lay down my packs on my back and I L Le against my pack and I have the best 30 minutes of sleep I have to date ever had in my life and so you know the rest of that test went relatively uh smoothly you know we finished the remaining 13
clicks we did a shoot at the end um I we all most of us passed um and then afterwards I caught a nasty viral infection from that swamp which basically made me rendered me incapable of eating for like two weeks because my mouth was just covered and ESS it was it was horrendous I had a I had like a degre uh fever of like 104 for like 2
weeks but anyway fast forward a a year I'm laying down my bed in college and I am just lying there I look at the clock and I see it's 5:00 a.m. I think you know what things could be so much worse I am I have a soft bed it's nice it's cozy you know what ain't so bad what a fantastic story and because it illustrates so many things that I
also oh dear right like I a lot of younger people would often come to me you know for advice on like um investing and things like that and and the the one thing that I would tell them that they they really didn't like but when I would hear back from them those that had succeeded in the career they were like oh man you were so right and
that was you will never be able to achieve what your goals are until the market repeatedly kicks and punches you in the face to the point where you are literally just like all right all right I get it right and and that is such a filter the the the the people who there's a great saying there are old Traders and bold Traders but there are
no old bold Traders right if you haven't accept it that the market is right and you are wrong and and you keep insisting yeah no no right like I I'm going to just continue getting punched in the face I'm going to learn nothing you don't have anything to compare about it and so like had that experience luckily i' had been in the world for a long time
when the financial crisis happened and uh my my head of research and um uh other portfolio UH responsibilities used to come into my office every morning during the financial crisis and I didn't think anything of it right like he would come in and say good morning and I'd say good morning Griff and like was that
right and much much later we were out at dinner and he goes hey do you remember how I always came into your office and during the financial C I'm like yeah I guess and he goes I wasn't coming in to say good morning and I'm like what do you mean he goes I was coming in to see that you were calm and he goes I was so freaked out by what was going on
but I always knew like if I would go into your office and you were calm that it was going to be okay and then we basically started talking about it much like your thing I'm like hey I was around for the crash too and when you have that ability to compare like you were lying comfortably in your college bed uh and then you had
that reference point in the past it just makes it so much easier and I loved love love that story another thing that you you that you do that I really like is you think of years and dog years and so of course I'm like okay isn't the standard measure of dog years 7 to one and so I log on to our large language model we have an internal uh AI stack at
osv and I don't know if you know this I didn't know this until this morning but the actual way to calculate dog years is not multiplying however old you are by seven the actual way is the first dog year equals 15 human years the second dog year equals nine human years and then you h four to five years for every
year thereafter uh by that calculation by the way I am 334 years old in dog years but but explain why that's a helpful uh thing to do absolutely by the way Jim you look fantastic for somebody who's over 300 so congratulations thank you but you're absolutely right it is not it isn't a it isn't a linear um correlation and
actually the the dog ears um differ from breed to breed as well so smaller smaller dogs yep it's uh it's all relativistic um is is the point um so I have um well rather I and my parents have three dogs we used to Fourth uh but she passed very tragically from from cancer a couple years ago she's a she's a hell of fighter she she held on for well over a
year and she was a fantastic dog um but so I have spent the better part the last 10 years um actually a large part of the last 10 years um away from my home away from my family um and away from my dogs and you I raised two of them from puppies now all my dogs are rescues um and they they've come to us from variety of different means uh but
they all rescues from the street um they they were never except for one um one did see a little bit of time inside the kennel um because he was rescued first and then we picked him up from there but two we picked up directly from the street um essentially because um one was going to be put down and another didn't
have a place to go and through uh so my both my parents are civil servants um they both work uh uh in various roles um and my dad is essentially well he was um the I don't really know if there is an equivalent in in the United States but essentially he worked for the city or he worked for yeah he worked for the city um as uh an operations and like
facilities manager um and so his basically his uh one of his sanitation teams had picked up this dog um that they'd found in a in a gutter um in the middle of a rainstorm and you know they were like sir you should definitely take this one because he he's a Greek dog um they didn't have the ability to to to look after him so that's where my dog
Zeus came from and he he's been my lifelong best friend um he is he is the greatest companion I could have ever asked for um and so it it kills me that I spend so much time away from him because he's not getting younger obviously um he is 15 years old in human years uh this year um and he is he actually just crossed 15 uh about a
month ago um and so when I think about time is time is one thing that we cannot make more of um and all time is has to be contextualized within the know the people that we spend it with right time spent uh in isolation is not the same as time spent with family um and so when I think about whenever I engage in an Endeavor whenever I commit my mind to
something whenever I put time whenever I invest time into something I think of it as time that I'm not spending with my dog with my family with my friends you know quality to time quality time is is I guess the simplest way to put it and as the clock continues to run forward each additional second or each marginal
or each uh yeah each additional second or each marginal second is much more valuable than the last because there's so much less of it um I I I once read about this thing um basically do you want to really start treasuring time um with loved ones more think about it in terms of how many times you'll see them again before you won't get to see them
ever again um and you know if if you really count it out if you really sound it out and you really get very specific it's not as much time as we think it it never is as much time as we think we never have as much time as we hope we have um and so whenever I whenever I think about what do I do next I always think about in terms of am I willing to
invest years uh the the remaining years or whatever time my dog has left am I willing to invest that on this because that is the real cost it for me it's whatever I you I'm I'm an easygo guy I'm a you know I'm a simple dude um I I I I'm happy to give my time to people who ask for it but I am extremely judicious with the time of
others especially the time that I am depriving them um that they would otherwise want to spend with me now if I say that about a human being I sound like an egotistical Maniac because oh look at me I am this great person that everybody should love being around no I so I don't ever really I think it's a little bit uh it's a little bit
presumptuous to assume that uh about a another human being's uh view of me but with my dog I have full confidence that I am the the the only thing in this world I am and you know it is I can never communicate to him why I'm doing the things that I'm doing right I can never help him understand all he really knows is that I'm not there and you know I
should be there and so it is I think the purest measure um of time of effort of value to think about it in terms of somebody or something that loves you utterly what are you willing to spend time away from them for what is the thing that is truly worth that and so I can say with absolute certainty that you know if I did not believe in you know
what I'm doing now with every ounce of my being every fiber in my soul I would not because I have much better things to do if for nothing other than to go spend time with my dog such an inspiring uh way to look at things and very clarifying as well um I I struggled with with I mentioned mentoring these young
people and one thing that I would always begin with is you are a Time billionaire and you you are that it is a wasting asset and as you put it much more eloquently every second cost more than the one that preceded it and if you start thinking that way it will really changes the way you look at what you want to do uh in terms of getting
getting things done um and dogs like I love dogs are natural bowst right and we we had an experience uh my daughter was traveling with my wife and I in Bhutan and I don't know if you've ever been to but um no but here is the happiest place on Earth it's amazing and the people are amazing and I highly highly recommend going if you get a chance to but we we
were we were being followed by uh a dog that was essentially in need of rescue and now I like dogs my daughter loves dogs so literally we spending uh the evening at dinner with her trying to figure out the logistics of getting that dog from Bhutan back to the United States uh and she lives in California and and I'm just
like Kate you know I'm sure that there are a ton of dogs in California that are in need of rescue as well but I I also love the way that you frame it because you're right if if you make these statements in terms of other human beings you sound like the biggest egotistical jerk in the world uh but putting it in the framework of a dog I
love that I think that that is kind of just chef's kiss because you know most people love dogs and um they can immediately get it uh because dogs are with us for uh such a shorter period of time relatively um Shi shifting years um what has surprised you the most with your Enterprise and uh obviously um you know what was like the oh I didn't
think about that and then how did how do you look at solving that problem or problems so not to rehash a point but actually the the biggest one so far has been Insurance um so in speaking with folks uh on the underwriting side and I I think for from the manufacturing side it's a it's kind of given right it's a very simple cognitive exercise you're
launching a $10 million thing um which is expected to generate call it40 $50 million worth of rede why would you not want to ensure it um and I've got different opinions about this right the entire reason why satellite constellations exist um and are exist as an architect as a concept is to be downside mitigation right you don't want
to put all your eggs in one basket that's the that's the that's the problem historically been the problem with reliability of geostationary satellites that everything you know hundreds of millions of dollars of fun it divers one machine there incredibly intricate and complex if one thing goes wrong that's 700 million just Up in Smoke immediately
much better diffuse that risk out amongst you know 10 20 30 satellites and you and the the the industry estimate for how many satellites actually fail on orbit as soon as they deployed um is actually a lot higher than you think so I I've heard varying reports on this but the number that I keep coming back to is somewhere between 10 to 20% of each
launch you know imagine you know Falcon 9 deploys deploys 60 satellites six of them will not work just for any number of reasons and it's almost impossible to do any sort of postmortem because you know they're not exactly close by um and so that is it's just nuts to me but you know that's why you have constellations
so that if those six go down we still have 54 that work right and you know that is a way to maintain service um and you always launch more things than you need to but what an insane proposition that is uh in terms of in in terms of insuring service right I'm going to launch an extra $10 million worth of stuff because I'm worried that the
previous 50 million won't cut it or some proportion of the earlier 50 million won't cut it um that's just it's it's wasteful it's silly I think um from a pure efficiency perspective cuz why wouldn't you want every single thing to work but things don't always work right and that is just a that's just a fact of life and so I like Insurance because it
does make it a lot better but honestly understanding the actual process of getting it insured has been fascinating to me because so I mean in my in my in my previous role as a program manager at that small company in England um I had to tangle very briefly with insurers um now the the the long and short of it was that we were flying
a particular type propulsion system that was slightly hazardous call it um and because it was slightly hazardous uh the government actively said to us um yeah we're not letting you fly this thing unless you ensure it um you should probably go talk to some folks and so we did and we basically got to go we we got told uh to go you know hit uh you know
hit the bricks um now I didn't realize why at the time I thought it was because our thing was so ludicrously hazardous that they just did not want to touch it which it could have entirely factored into into the conversation that could have been very much a factor but I also found out that it has to do with economics so I I kind of alluded to this
earlier um in terms of why Underwriters don't want to touch anything that that worth less than $200 million sumur um but the actual mechanics of how underwriting is done is so qualitative and manual and just laborious that it is it it it really does confound the mind so you know the way that's normally done is the manufacturer will um engage a
broker broker will gather up a bunch of Underwriters using some basic information um then they all gather together for a big presentation and the for that presentation the uh manufacturer has compiled a stupidly big technical report um now depending on this particular satellite depending on the flight Heritage uh their support can
range anywhere between 500 pages to 5,000 pages of very dense technical information uh now most of these Underwriters are themselves technical um a lot of them have space systems engineering backgrounds um they are also balanced out in lawyers who can actually you know come comment and opine on policy itself um but basically all these
you know guys who built satell lights and then went into insurance will now assess this other satellite being built and they will pour over every single line because you just like healthcare right you agree to something means you're liable for something and so they will go over this entire report which by the way is not even actually
comprehensive because the number one reason for claim the number one historical reason for claims getting denied in space insurance is non declaration so lots of things are still being left out it's just if you try to include in everything God knows what this report would end up being and so you know they go over this Entre so
Underwriters pour over every single detail every single line come with a series of questions send them back manufacturer answers them they go back and forth and as you can kind of tell this would probably take a good amount of time now that means Lally uh it who's the manufacturer to engage with the underwriters significantly early in the
process because there lead time but here's the Catch 22 of it the earlier you engage in the process the less firm your satellite design and your your actual manufacturing and and and assembly integration test is the plans and the in in terms of your planning in terms of what you're actually going to do in terms of even your requirements
and so the higher the likelihood the earlier you engage the higher likelihood of some sort of major design change and because these systems are so intricate and so tightly coupled there's no such thing as an isolated change so that one change quickly ripples throughout and then uh it affects so many different things that the entire technical report
now needs to be recompiled and it now needs to be reassessed from top to bottom thereby extending the lead time even further behooving you to engage even more even earli in the process and so on and so forth and so it becomes a very very vicious cycle and so you end up with some sound like companies um having to engage the underwriters five
years ahead of their launch um in order for the underwriters to actually feel comfortable and that is a real life example by the way I didn't just invent that I heard about it like two weeks ago um and so it is just such an honorous process and it is so silly and at the end of it because yeah you're probably going to
leave out a ton of stuff because you don't want to inundate the underwriters because if you do then that just costs everybody much more time um you still get claims getting denied for yeah lack of Declaration or misrepresentation and that's why all of this costs so much money um that's why you can only really get insurance for a giant satellite
because otherwise it's the the underwriting fee is literally not worth the effort um and why the entire system does not work insurance and space is pretty broken and we do everybody wants to fix it the insurance guys want to fix it the manufacturers want to fix it it should be fixed um last year last was a
particularly bad year but as an indic as an indicative example last year the industry posted $500 million in Revenue against $1.8 billion in claims and so it one yeah it was 1.3 billion now other 1.8 billion in claims about a third of that came from two satellites that failed just two and you got to remember that this is just the 1.8 billion is
representative of Sal that were able to get insurance and so there was a lot more outside of that that wasn't inur that wer insured that still nonetheless failed and so the actual loss value is probably significantly higher so yeah um that's probably one of the most interesting things I had briefly Tangled with insurance I've been thinking about
this insurance thing for well over two years because I've because of my previous experience but I had no idea what the actual mechanics were like and how broken it was it's just been it's just been one of those holy moments it's like good good God that we are we are on the precipice of a complete collapse that somebody needs to fix this
yeah it's like the workflow gets you trapped in Zeno's Paradox right if you're familiar with Zeno's Paradox and uh it's it's really interesting to me because um those are the things that that trip you up I think um you know I I I I would bet that most of our listeners and viewers were not expecting answer and yet holy
if you can't get that fixed it flows and and pollutes the entire Enterprise right and so that's that's a that sounds like a very thorny problem to solve what what other what what other things come to mind uh that would you would highlight as differences between doing space based deep Tech uh versus just deep Tech in general here on
jerma well I think deep Tech is a very broad term and you know it can incom it can be as wide or as narrow as you want it to be um I've heard varing definitions you know uh I think one of the more restrictive definitions is that deep Tech is anything that requires you to have a PhD in which yeah I mean you know you don't really need the PHD to do
like applied Ai and yet applied AI is so mathematically and computationally intensive that you know arguably you require a ton of resources which was another definition it's just something de Tech is anything that requires a ton of resources to go actually um make real um I think probably one of the big differences with space is
that okay so let's take for example um GPS right GPS is a very agile technology you know we we have it in our calls we have it in our phones um it is everywhere it is ubiquitous uh which by the way is of course what ubic product is short for it's short for ubiquitous um but much like GPS all space technology is ubiquitous you know when
you when you get Wi-Fi on the on the plane that's probably satellite internet right as you're walking around and you're trying to get directions for Stuff um you it is uh via GPS um and site Imaging um I I know people debate me on this I like having the satellite imagery view on my on on on Google Maps on my phone because I like being able to
look at stuff um I I'm I'm okay at interpreting Maps but I'm a lot better at interpreting satellite imagery um because I can see that you know there are trees there or there AR trees there and therefore it is probably it is or probably is not a pork um and so I think the thing that's most interesting about deep Tech uh that
about space relative to other forms of deep Tech is that space is a lot more ubiquitous it affects every part of our lives uh every part of the economy if if all of our satellites went down right now we'd be so as a civilization it is it is ludicrous and there only a handful of other deep Tech sectors that I think really um have that sort of H
have that you know critical uh impact on civilization but are still unknown nuclear energy being another right because nuclear energy is kind of like this big O oh my God things glow green which by the way they don't even glow green that's a joke from The Simpsons right Ching go of radiation blue um it just blue doesn't look as threatening um
but other than nuclear energy you know space affects everything and nobody understands space everybody still thinks of space as being oh it's super far out there it doesn't impact me um a lot of the Contemporary commentary around space spending and government spending in space and how it should be applied towards I know one social welfare
program or another is just silly because all space exists for Earth space doesn't exist in a vacuum you know pardon the pun uh everything in space is an enabler for other things on earth and so th this figure is definitely outdated by now this was back from like 2021 um but space enables $5 trillion dollar worth
of adjacent industries that are primarily based here on Earth right agriculture weather monitoring National Security Communications these things are things that these are all industries that we rely on every single day to live Life as we do and you know I think for every other deep tech industry it is the impact is a lot more immediate it's a
lot closer right um even with applied AI now thanks to you know uh chat uh chat Bots and you know sort of uh user uh user interfaces um that are public facing right you can look at you know grock or Claude or you or gbt 40 and you can play with it you can ask it questions you can you ask it tell you jokes and you never really have to think
about the sheer amount computation that went into it right um all the all the all the gpus that were used all the energy that was expended um but it is a lot more immediate and so when you think of AI you don't think of this far off concept of you know oh no I Robot something that's walking around it's going to kill me or Skynet you think of
ah yeah GPT full but when you think of space what what is what what is the average impression of space Moon Mars SpaceX NASA astronauts like but that's not the vast majority of the of the space indust the vast majority of space industry exists almost exclusively to serve life on Earth um and then there's a handful of other companies out there that are
looking to serve the next generation of human beings and so there is no a lot of people like to think of space as diance they couldn't be further from the truth and I think that disconnect is probably the thing that is most star about space relative to all other forms of deep Tech nowhere else but deep Tech do you sort
of hear about it and go yeah well yeah yeah but like what's the point of that like you think of human robots you don't think of what's the point of that you think of holy that's cool I can send into a war zone well I could make it a butler even though you know what is why would you actually want a human or robot this is a completely separate
topic but I I I have an opinion that robotics human beings are great the human spirit is great the human form yeah not super optimal if you can build a robot that does the job a lot better in a different form factor why the hell would you ever want to build a humanoid robot that just mimics all the same weaknesses that a human being has
but yeah this this completely a sarate topic and we are incredibly sympatico on that last bit like why on Earth are we going going to build them in this suboptimal format we're not right like it the the the way that the robots that are going to actually truly function when we build them we're going to look a
lot different than we humans it's just so funny it's part it's part of the way we add mortifies everything right and it all and it also leads to that shortsightedness that you referred to I I could not agree with you more about the importance of space the importance of understanding and I love the way you do it first off you you explain uh guys
you want real Armageddon wipe out all the satellites and you know I think there was even a show um with uh called uh black orphan Orphan Black I can't remember but it's set in the future where there's a war that knocks out all the satellites and literally people are back in the Stone Age um and and so yet another reason why we're using this
multiplatform approach you've gota you've got to tell better stories right like this the story is the thing and if if you're not telling better stories about the the incredible importance of uh space of ultimately you've got to also have a North Star right so like we should probably should think about being multiplanetary uh planetary because you
know uh there's single point of failure here on this sing Single planet um so um that's another thing that I know that you think a lot about um well I I am I'm getting the hook for my nanny also known as my executive assistant who keeps me in line uh she says that trying to govern me is trying to govern the ungovernable but she does a very good
job of it um so uh first I want to thank you sincerely for taking time away from Zeus uh to to chat with us um I I'm I'm I'm definitely honored can you can you tell people where they can find you uh online or offline yeah absolutely so I'm on Twitter uh I spent too much time on Twitter uh I my I think my handle is
asro lawyer um and Fant fantastic short was unoccupied at the time um I'm on link uh I write uh I sometimes try to write I haven't written in a good long while so I should probably get to get back to it but uh my substack is called sorry speak up uh I have tonitas which is yeah I have I had tonitas um yeah um
if not yeah Twitter LinkedIn and uh substack terrific uh I can hardly wait to see what you accomplish I would uh I would think you're going to do great things uh and uh would actually Bet On It um if you've seen this uh uh or listened to this podcast in the past you know that we have a final question for all our guests and that is we are going
to create you as the emperor of the world you cannot kill anyone you can not put anyone in a re-education camp but you can we're going to hand you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of Earth and what the hell let's it let's incept the entire cian population of the
universe what and because we'll have uh Babble fish in our ears so everyone will be able to translate it automatically uh what two things are you going to do where everyone is going to wake up the next day and unlike almost every other morning they wake up they're going to say I've just had two of the greatest ideas and this time around I'm gonna act
up so somewhat at odd at each other um the first thing is to I think be grateful um you know take stock remember that we are here for a limited amount of time um and that that time has to be spent and whatever it is spent on we should be grateful for it um we cannot go through life discontent oh sorry we cannot go through life
discontent yeah now the other one is to be hopeful and to reach ever further so it is at odds right be be happy be be content but never happy or sorry be happy but never content is probably the better way to put it right be grateful appreciate what you have love the love the people around you spend time with them but also reach do more strive for
more because that is what we were that's that is what we were put on this Earth to do um the human Spirit demands Endeavor the human Spirit demands hope and we should we would all be better off if we listen to our spirit uh our inherent Spirit the thing that drove us to where we are today out of caves you know across oceans to the
Stars we would be all better off if we can listen to it so be hopeful I love both of those Man's Reach should exceed his grasp or what is say happen before listen this has been so much fun for me uh thank you so much for your time um likewise can't wait to watch what you do next and thanks for coming on infinite Loops thank you for having me Jim this is excellent