Welcome back. My guest today is Skyler Chan. Skyler is the founder of Grew Space, the company building the very first hotel on the moon. Skyler's only 22 years old, but he's kind of a vintage guy. He's a Silicon Valley. Used to be a place that was organized around trying to do the biggest, boldest thing you possibly could, but over time it got more financialized and programmatic. And we went from a place focused on putting men on the moon to a place focused on sending valuations to the moon. But Skyler is old school. Skyler wants to put men on the moon again, even though I had my reservations about that industry, I still found Skyler to be such an inspirational and interesting guy. He's only 22, but he's lived this really rich and complex life. I had such a good time talking to Skylar and I could not be more proud to present this conversation to you. With that, I bring you Skylar Chen ready to go. Let's do it a let's do it. All right, Skyler, let's start with this. When and where were you born? I was born in Vancouver, Canada 2003, dude. Okay. Mostly what I wanted to get outta that was the 2003. Yeah, there is, I'm not like, contrary to what it looks like right now on camera. I'm not that much older than you. Okay. But. It's unbelievable to me that somebody born in 2003 is doing something of the scale that you're doing. And I think it will be to like a lot of the people listening too. Mm-hmm. Let's, let's take it back. Sure. Tell me about tell me about your first memory. What do you remember? At home outside. What, what's the very first memory you have? I love this already. Generally. First memory. I mean, one of the ones I, that just comes to mind at first is sitting in the couch, in the living room like I was. I don't even know how many months old I was, or a year or two, but Bill Knight, a science guy was playing. Mm-hmm. I only noticed because my parents kept reminding me of this moment.'cause it was a pretty pivotal moment. And Bill, I Steins guy was playing and there's this one clip about planets and space and I was like, oh my God. Like space? Like planets. So cool. And so I remember, when my parents came back, I was just, I talked, obviously asked a million questions about what are planets made out of? Like, how many planets are there? Like how, what is a moon? Like, all these things. And basically they, my parents are not in tech or not like space or anything related, right? So eventually they gotta to the point where they were like, all right, this little, this kid's a little annoying, right? So they got like books and that's how, or they taught me how to read pretty early. And so that's how I kind of got into it. How old were you? I think a year and a half. I don't remember how old I was. Wow. It was really, it was pretty early. I, that's all I remember. I can ask later, but tell me about your parents. Firstly, what are they like, and then what do you think they were hoping you would be like to start off? I mean, I'm really grateful that they named me Skyler. Mm-hmm. I think, I do remember actually being in like, well, I don't remember this, but I mean, I kind of do remember parts of this, just being in like the cradle or whatever and like looking up and there's these little like planes mm-hmm. On like the wall. And so I think they really leaned into the whole sky thing. Well, my, my parents are like, yeah, I, I love my parents. We have a great relationship. My parents are amazing. I'm, I'm very fortunate to have, be, be very close and open with both my, my mom and my dad. They're like the most important people in my life. They, everything right. I'm also an only child. And so a lot of the time growing up, like there were no siblings. There are no, yeah, I guess there's not many, people to really talk to. And so that's actually why I spent a lot of my time either talking to my parents, well, usually asking'em a million questions and they wouldn't know anything. They, they always say you ask too many questions. And then they would gimme books. Ew. Alone a lot. Yes. I was alone a lot. I fought a lot about what I wanted to do in my life at a very young age. Hmm. Apparently that's what my parents would like. Even at the dining table, I just start talking about it. I like the the Chinese Hebrew dinners and my, my aunts and uncles would be like I, I would bring the books on me, right. At the table, and I'd just read it like constantly. I was like so obsessed and basically books were like my, were like my friend, I guess. Sense. What was the. Did your family speak primarily Cantonese at home or no English actually. Oh, interesting. So yeah, my, my dad is a, yeah, fourth generation. I mean, my family's like fourth generation, so. Alright. We my, my ancestors helped build the railway Wow. In, in Vancouver. At any level, are you able to relate? To the people that built this kind of incredible infrastructure. I, you're, a descendant of, I relate that to what you're doing now. 100%. I, I fought about this a lot, is that I remember doing like a Heritage Fair Project in like grade five or six. I was in this they were called them gifted programs, but mm-hmm. It was like special program or whatever, and I just became really obsessed with interviewing like historians and my grandparents and stuff while they were still around. And I, I think part of me, I mean, so yeah, I mean I grew up in Vancouver in a very, pretty standard, I guess, environment. Mm-hmm. I do believe a lot in obviously basics, like hard work and all that or stuff, but I think that was instilled to me at a very young age. But that's. Sense of like building the foundation for humans to like thrive in a new place. Like I, I feel like I've carried that, or I try to like embody that a lot with what we're doing with building the foundation for people. Exploring the unexpected. How did you get to fly your first plane? How old were you? Oh, wow. Yeah, I was, 12 or 13. 12 or 13. How did you like your parents? How did you Oh lemme tell you that to let you do that. Yeah, so this is really funny. So basically with all the book stuff, all the space stuff, because, and to your point when I was like, when I get into space it just kind of just happened, I was like always dressed up as an astronaut, as a kid. I was like that kid in the back who would recite all the planets of Jupiter. Mm-hmm. Everyone's oh, okay, Scott, we're just riffing off now. Just glaze over their eyes. Right. Basically I wanna be an astronaut since I was like three. Hmm. That was like the singular like goal and it just felt so outta reach, especially in Canada where it's like, there's very few Canadian astronauts. And very few of them, they go for the training, but very few of them actually get to go to space. Mm-hmm. And so basically when I was like 12 is when I came across his book written by Canadian astronaut Chris Chris Hadfield. Hmm. He was he's, he was a great book and in the book he talked about how. This program called the Royal Canadian Gladder Palate Scholarship was very instrumental for him to be a stepping stone to becoming an astronaut. Teaches you a lot of skills of like, how do you make decisions quickly on the fly when you know your life is on the line? How do you, stay calm in a very like, complex environment, like all these different things. And so I remember when I was like at 12, right? So I went to my parents, I was like, Hey, I want to join this Air Cade program. I remember my dad was like, my son has not joined the Air Force at 12. Like this is, this is stupid. Spent a year convincing them to let me join the program.'cause it's not well the Air Force, but it's like you. You train at the Air Force base? If you get selected and it's I think 320 out, 23,000 people get to go each year. Wow. And were you the youngest? Well, I mean, you, you basically go the earliest you can go for the actual training mm-hmm. For the gladiator program is 16. And so what I did was like, you basically, when you join the program, you get the chance to go up on a familiarization flight. And so that's what I was doing when I was like 12, 13 when I joined. Hmm. And then you go through weekly trainings and you have a whole like very complex, examination process. Did go from multiple review boards, then you get the opportunity to go on the scholarship to train at the Air Force base for a summer. And so that was like my singular, like objective, in the beginning of high school I was like so obsessed with it, like even aid to some of my social activities too. Really. Some friends were like, dude, all you just do is study for this like Air, air Force pilot exam thing. So, anyways, yeah, that's how I got into flying. Did you have any concept at the time of oh, I could die doing this. Oh this is an important so one of the. I'd say most important and very thoughtful moments, I'd say of my life was the, was when I went to the Gladder P program summer of 2019. I was 16 years old. First time being away for, for a long time from home AKs, air Force Base. I, I'm there like, you do all training, like you wake up at 4:40 AM you fall out like 5:00 AM You march to the mess hall, you eat food in the mess hall, you have to eat, quickly a certain way. Right. It's, get yelled at. Mm-hmm. You go to the gliding field, right. The airfield, by the way, you can't take photos in the airfield. So, it's obviously a military base and your passing bodies like a huge air force planes that are used in like actual missions, right? And so it's really cool and inspiring. You go in the airfield, you push gliders and like the sweltering heat for four or five hours a day. It was probably the leanest I ever was. Wow. And then in the afternoon we switched to ground school, which is the program for learning like the basics, like fear of flight, like navigation, meteorology, radio et cetera. And so, we're doing this and it was probably one of the most intense times of my life. The reason why I wanna bring this up is there was, there was a, there was an event that occurred, during the program, and I remember it was a Saturday commanding officer called us all to the mass hall. This usually doesn't happen, and we were told that one of our fellow cadets passed away in mid our collision. Obviously my parents were really worried, especially if this is, their only kid. Right. That it's any point, like you're up there in the bladder, there's no engine, there's no parachute. You have to make the runway 100% of a time. There's no room for failure, and you're 16 and you go up, you got towed up 3000 feet above sea level, you pull the release gracefully fall. Mm-hmm. But yeah, there's, there's no, there's no like backup plan. You have the full send. Right. And so. I, I went, I went for a very deep reflection process, basically as a result of this. Mm-hmm. It was that, hey you it's crazy. Like you gotta be, you have to really, do you really want to be a pilot? Was was the biggest question. Do you really want to go for the Air Force? Do you really want to get selected to be a fighter pilot test pilot? I didn't get that 0.0001% or whatever chance of getting selected out of the thousands or hundreds of thousands of astronaut candidate applicants at like my late thirties or whatever. Yeah, and then do what Chris Hadfield did and do all the training. And then that's when I realized a couple important things, right? Because this keep in mind this entire time to 16, right. I was a very, I guess, excited, naive kid, mm-hmm. I was soaking up as much knowledge about space, the first realization was like, you can't follow someone else's footsteps for greatness. Mm-hmm. Right? This entire time I fought that. Because growing up I was trying to find this like secret sauce of like, how do you be an astronaut? Right? And like when I came across Chris Hadfield's book, I was like, oh my God. Like this is the playbook. I mean, it was literally called an astronaut's guide, right? So I took it for face value. It's way too naive. If you want to really make the most impact in the world, like there is no playbook. You gotta try your own path. So that's the first thing I realized. The, the second thing I realized was this, this is when my North Star change. Up until then, my North Star was like, I wanted to go to space before I die. That's it. Once I go to space my friends will say, oh, okay, once you go to space, like you, you're, you're fine if you get run over a bus or something. I'm like, okay, well, probably not. But you know, that's, that's the type of attitude I had. I started questioning like, why did I wanna go to space? Right. Like, why did I want to be an astronaut? What was the underlying reason? And so I went for this line of reasoning, which broadly was like, okay, first of all I wanted to, be an astro'cause, okay. Space is cool. I always was, I would like space. Yeah, space is my identity, like more importantly it's because I believe space, exploring space is the epitome of exploring curiosity. Basically, this is the realization I hit is that, okay, hold on. We were born this one time in human history where we can actually go interplanetary. No human being has ever left CI space. Think, think about that for a second. Nobody in, unless recorded history, maybe we did or maybe we're aliens or whatever, but who cares? Nobody has ever left the moon, earth, earth, moon system and like we actually could have a shot at doing that, I could've been born like 500 years ago. Or 500 years later, but this is like the pivotal moment in human history. Do we decide to shoot for stars or do we continue to like, fight over useless things on earth? And so this, sorry to cut you off, but did this brings me to actually a really important point in your story. Like I said, me finding out about your story. So I went to your website and I recommend everybody do this, and you have a section about life philosophy and you have six. And by the, by the time the interview is up, I will have asked you about each of the six. Okay, sure. At the time that they become relevant in your story. Right? I was, I will say, I was a little bit amazed as I was reading through it about how much the first three overlap perfectly with my life philosophy. Oh, cool. And so I kind of wanted to hear from another, if you, without having read that, if you asked me to describe my life philosophy, I think the first three would be the exact same, the first three. Okay. Absolutely. The other three I agree with, but I don't think in those terms. Okay. guess, this is a good point for me to ask you about this these two stories about losing a fellow cadet and then you coming to this realization about you have one singular opportunity to make something happen to me, these connect perfectly to bullet point number one in your life philosophy, which is yolo, you only live once. Right. How often, I guess my question there is. How many times a day do you remind yourself of that? Oh man, this goes into our story. This is a good question. Like I, by the way, like I am incredibly grateful, like incredibly grateful, like every day to be waking up and like doing, chasing the childhood dream. Mm-hmm. I mean, I have time of this, this, this podcast is recorded. We haven't launched yet, but we're about to, and I just I remember waking up every single day this week being like. Yeah, we're about to make humanity inter planter, you know how insane that is. Just gets you going. Every day to, and, and to be able to do this at but yeah, Yolo I, I mean. I do think about that a lot. There are times where I don't always, when you're, you're just day-today work, right. And you don't think about that. Mm-hmm. But one of, and this is a different story I'll get to in a sec, but one of the moments that this happens a lot is when I, funnily enough, when I eat peanuts mm-hmm. Or accidentally, that I go to the ER and and this happened multiple times. 17 times to date. Oh my God. Don't worry, I have an EpiPen here, so I don't think it's gonna happen. I was gonna give you a PB and J afterwards. Put it away. Yeah, no. Every time that's happened though, right? It's, it's always reminding me, right? It's kinda like a checkpoint and okay, are you on the path? Are you. But are you like, do I course, are you on the right path? And I asked myself, do I course correct or not? Right? And it's a good check.'cause example, right? Like freshman year at Berkeley, I know we're jumping around. Mm-hmm. But spring break, I was in Korea actually. My family and uh mm-hmm. My mom actually loves BB q Chicken, I think is what it's called. And so she was like, we have to go to BB q Chicken stop. I, is this a chain? What is BB q Chicken is or is it just literally barbecue chicken dijuan? Our producer is Korean Chicken Does Korean. Fried chicken. Okay. Greek fried chicken. My bad. But is is it a restaurant or it's a cheese, it's chain. Cool. So your mom wants to go peanut chicken. So she, she's been wanting to try for a while, right. And so, I mean, sure. I don't, I'm like, I'm hungry, right. So I'm like, say last, we go in right. We do, we do the thing, we order and then, obviously I always check, is there peanuts? Some, you notice. Cool. Sit down. I'm like eating. I'm like, oh. Oh. Oh no. I'm feeling a little tingling. Oh, God. And then yeah, tdr, there, there was some cross contamination. We went to the er, but the, this time for some reason, number 17, I think 15. It's ha happened twice since then too. Yeah, yeah, oh my God, dude. I have a notes out with all the, but anyways no, but that, that is insurance carriers watch out. No, that, that, that's funny. That is an experience that I think what I'm getting at here. That's really special about your life and about the way that you think is you have this like relationship with death and this understanding of it that most people don't achieve until they're very close to death. And so, and I think honestly 17 ER visits probably has something to do with that. I think like being a part of flight school, starting at age 12 has to do with that. Let's, let's, let's jump ahead a little bit in the story. Okay.'cause you, you kind of touched on it, right? Give me a quick rundown of your professional experience between being a pilot or training to be a pilot to showing up to the greatest university in the world. University of California, Berkeley, go Bears. You did more between those years than any human being I've ever met. Tell me just a quick list of the things that you did between that and Berkeley. I came back from the program and I was like, okay, my North Star is make humanity inter planetary. That was it. I want put people on Mars. Why just me go to space when everybody else can go to space? That's the most impactful thing. Like we're making a physical identity universe. Mm-hmm. So I was like, okay, I gotta dive into space. So, right away I hit up all the rocket teams and satellite teams in Canada, like UBCU of T, other places. And I was just shadowing students at these clubs. Understanding like the basics of mechanical engineering was what I thought I was gonna study. And so, I was. Working on various things. So one thing was like this orbit propagator for a satellite that EOT was developing and like working on this like pipeline script for stuff like that, right? Mm-hmm. Just diving into that the other thing was, I actually, I credit this a lot to the journey is I joined this thing called Sets Canada, SEDS Canada Students for the exploration development of space. Long name. But basically it was a completely university and young, professional run organization. But I was like, man, like these people like, are like, in the industry, like I wanna learn about it. So I applied to be like the chief recruiting officer. I've never done recruiting. I was like 16. So I, I, I applied, I did the interview and, we, we chatted and the interview was amazing. She was, she wanted to take a be on me and I'm very grateful for her. And so I joined the organization as the CRO. We had the opportunity to interview like. Loads of people, like in the industry, people who are double my age. And that I think developed my, I guess, professional skills and understanding how the space industry works. And yeah, I mean, besides that, I was also doing this program called Global Space School, which is hosted at GSC and in at NASA Johnson Space Center. Fortunately, this is when COVID happened. And so the program went online, but basically every country in the world could send one delegate or. Couple, a few delegates. So I was a Canadian delegate for this. And you were how old? Like 17, maybe. 16. 17. It was, it was the following summer. So 17. I feel like I'm missing some stuff, but basically a bunch of other things. And then I took a gap year before Berkeley. So basically coming outta, so I did French immersion IB at the public school in Vancouver. And I was very lucky enough to be able to go to most universities in Canada without paying. So I had a slow ride scholarship to University of Toronto to be in the engineering science program for aerospace engineering, which at the time was like my dream thing to do. Right? Then I had the opportunity, Berkeley, there's this thing called MET, it's like the dual degree in like business engineering. And it was for mechanical engineering and business, and I was like. Wow. It's a hard choice, berkeley is very expensive, obviously is outta staying international. So, I fought a lot about this. And ultimately I actually ended up saying no to Berkeley and taking a gap year and saying no. Yeah, it was a big risk like saying no to. Everyone follow crazy. Like my parents were like, what? The WTF? Right? What the, right. And so but my gap year, I actually wrote this like full on plan. It's interesting to bring up because if you look at the plan, it's all centered around being an astronaut. And so basically I was like, okay, I feel like exploring space is always about understanding objective truth and like curiosity about this whole essay on this that to submit to ask for a deferral from the other school. And it was basically like, okay, I wanted. Finish. I wanted to get like my private pilot's license. Which is a different one. It's like an engine for an engineer aircraft. I wanted to, go to Hong Kong and learn Cantonese and Mandarin'cause I didn't know any mm-hmm growing up in Vancouver.'Cause I felt that, learning, these languages is important to like, connect with people and then the third thing was like, biking across Canada. So I was biking a lot at the time. I was like, from Vancouver to where? Toronto. Holy shit. I ended up doing it about that, that one, that one got segued. Okay. So yeah, the first two basically happened partially and then what happened was. And this is how I stumbled into startups. Mm-hmm. So I basically worked on my first startup when I was 18. And I remember we were backed by the founders of a teal fellowship. And yeah, it was a, it was a cool experience. My first rodeo, learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes learn, learn the ropes basically. But the important part is that at the end, it was a hiring marketplace in the end. I was like talking to a lot of friends who went to school and now I'm like seeing like. They used to work on such cool projects in high school, and now they're like recruiting for all these, like very cookie cutter jobs. I'm like, dude, like you have that in you, like you, I know you wanna build something like truly meaningful to you, but so I just felt that like I, it was a very naive take, right? But it was like trying to change the paradigm of how people. Think about resumes and their background. Changing from one page to something else. Anyways, the, the, the takeaway is that at the end I was, closer to when school was supposed to start, I was like, Hey what happened to like this is what I've always wanted to do is to make you manage planetary. And I realized that I was yeah, I learned a lot. And a lot of important things that I'm applying today. But. This is not what my life's work is. And so that's when I went to Berkeley. This actually brings me to the second bullet point on your list. Mm-hmm. And one that I relate to really hard. Mm-hmm. Which is that the greatest risk in life, is not taking the greatest risk in life. I have said a version of that to, I had a team member once leaving my company, so he wanted to go start a company and he said, Hey, HAI do you have any advice? I'm about to have a kid. I'm gonna start a company soon. And I just, I, I get really nervous or rather, I, I've wanted to do this forever. And I just, I'm like a little bit nervous about doing this at the same time. And what I told him was, look man. The greatest risk is not that your kid is gonna be going hungry and that you're gonna be like, no, but let me just get to the series A. You're far too good of a person to let that ever happen. Like you'll stop well before that. The greatest risk is that your kid grows up. Never having seen their dad really chase after that and reach its really have potential. Go for it. And so I'm a really big fan of this idea. The greatest risk in life is not taking the greatest risk in life. You apply that idea and you start, you, you go through Berkeley, you do a bunch of stuff at Berkeley, you're part of basically every space related organization there is at Berkeley. You come out of it and you start grew. Yes. Let's, let's start with that. What, what is gr? So, guru is galactic resource utilization. We are building the first hotel in the boat. The long-term goal is we wanna make humanity a galactic. And so, yeah, I mean, I can kind of, I can talk about this for years. But, well, let me, let me ask you a couple of quick questions. Mm-hmm. Why is group, let's answer the small question and then the big question, why. Build a hotel on the moon. And then number two. Mm-hmm. And please dumb this down for me. Why build a hotel on the moon? And then number two, why is it important to make humanity intergalactic? Why is that a, a good goal to aspire to? I you've done a really good job of articulating. Why it matters a lot to you, but why should it matter to everybody? So let's, let's attack the small question. Let's shift it back to, why build a hotel on the moon? Why build a hotel on the moon? To answer that, like we have to kind of, if you don't mind, we kinda have to backtrack to like why they go to space, right? Again, resource utilization, I through the core of the economy, right? We just look at just purely from a business perspective, the core of. The economy is just a group of people who, trade different things and money is just value. Right. And so, you know what usually ends up growing the economy at a Mac very, very macro scale. Mm-hmm. And benefiting all us. All is every when we explore and expand and we understand how to make use of resources in a new way, and that's how I see like each technological revolution, right? Agricultural revolution. We understand how to make use of it these, crops in a different way. Same with like tech, like turning like. Sand into computers and stuff. Resource utilization is like the foundational backbone of what improves all our lives. That's also tied to what makes us richer or grows the economy also tied to expand people deeper into space. And so what that means is okay. If we want humans to become an interplanetary species, right, which is incredibly important for a couple reasons, right? First of all, if anything were to happen on Earth, right? Like we're okay again, if this is like a different time, we're like airplanes. Were starting to get developed. The Earth is, it's not as globalized. Like we live in an era where like within an hour and hour, like ICBMs can get anywhere, right? And so at any point, all of humanity could be wiped out if something were to happen, right? One way to de-risk this is to have humans live both on earth and the moon and Mars and beyond, right? The second thing is, and this is why I felt when I did the space school summer program in 2020, when people like, we had people from everywhere in the world with different political beliefs and all that stuff. Mm-hmm. But like when everyone is working towards a goal like space, like space is such a unifying thing for humanity. Right. I believe that every kid, every, every adult out here, like you, you and everyone else, like people have always looked at the moon. And being like, wow. Like I, I wonder what it's like to go there. That's, there's something so like pure about that, that is, it's one of the very few things in life that's pure, right? Is dreaming about going to space. And so that brings me to like the how, right? So let's talk about the hotel on the moon, right? Like why, okay. If we establish like we want to go to space, like why the heck is hotel in the moon? The first part, and this is again, something that I've thought about. For many, many, many years is like, how do we actually get to this goal of making humanity planetary as quick as possible? So a couple findings. First, the space industry, the landscape of the space industry is, is basically propped up by two pillars. Number one, it's. Governments. Number two is billionaire backed companies, governments. So like things like nasa, the Space Force, sers like such and such. The second one is like SpaceX, vast Blue Origin, right? All grade things that way. If you think about, okay, I, I, I, us as individual people, right? As individual agents, like with agency. Like what, what is like the thing that I could do? To impart the most amount of impact in like the delta of like time that I have on Earth to actually get us there. Okay. You can work at one of these companies, you can work at one of these organizations. If you're starting your own company, you could try to sell product to like these things. That's what most of the space industry does. Most of the space industry is, in terms of economic value is building things from earth to Leo. So Leo is lower Earth orbit. Yeah, and that makes sense because, well, a lot of these things serve everyday people on earth, like GPS, like comms, et cetera, imagery. It's make something people want, mm-hmm. There's people why that's tattooed on the inside of both of our eyelids. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is, it is still true in the space industry. Where I'm getting at though is that. Let's look at okay, how then how do we jumpstart the lunar economy? Like lots of people, by the way, and this is time I was doing in the customer discovery era, which is like over summer, I was like going to all the space conferences. I mean, even during Berkeley as well, I noticed that like I, I was just always the youngest dude. I try not to play it off for anything. I try to just blend in, but like it's just, can I, can I make you pause real? Real. I had a question that I didn't get to ask related to Go for it. How important is it for you to be the youngest guy in the room, the youngest guy to do x to achieve something? Is that an accomplishment you care about at all, or is that just a random detail? I guess it, people are catching onto it as a nice thing to put in the, in the headline or whatever, but it just kind of happened I mean it just all by the way, for one, it's worth, for the record, all I give a shit about is do we go to Mars before I die? That's it. Yeah, because when I was in the pinot allergy in Korea, I basically almost died. And that's why I brought it up. And I only thought of two things. How sad would be my parents saw me die in from them before I turned 20. I was turning 20 the next day. Oh my God. Or, and the second thing was, wow, what happened to all the Mars stuff, man. And that's when I decided to start the Mars Habitat Club. Literally the moment I got back to Berkeley, it was like, okay, I'm done with, I don't care about like internships. I wasn't even thinking about like relationships or anything like that. I was just so laser focused on wow, I need to do as, as fast as humanly possible. Mm-hmm. Right. And I think part of that just ended up. Being like, okay. I guess I just was like the youngest student in a lot of these conversations, but it's not can I tell you a personal story about that? That of course, of course. That I just, I wanna kind of warn you about. Alright. Okay. This is how I found out that I was no longer young in Silicon Valley. Okay. I, I mean, this experience is adding to it where I'm wearing a tie and I'm interviewing, interviewing a founder, doing an unbelievable thing. I was born in 2003 a year. I remember very well. But dude, I, for the first, I was your age. I was like 21. 20. Not your age right now, but Right, right. I was 21, 22 when I started my company. Okay. So, and, every year we would have an article written about us, and it would, the first words of the article would always be my age. So it'd be like 21-year-old founder, 22-year-old founder wants to do XY. Right. Which I think is not it's not, but they, they love it outside of the valley. They, I never cared about it, but it was like they wrote I same as you, right. And then one year. They stopped. I was like, they stopped doing it. It got up to 25 and it's alright. 25 is not good enough. I got, I got the 30 under 30 at 25 and then people stopped mentioning my age. And that's how I knew, I was like, oh, I'm no longer in Silicon Valley. But so that's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. No, for sure. But dude, actually let me, yeah, let me I totally forgot where we're going actually, but this is so freeform Bob way. This is just kinda how my brain works too. What dude? No, you're, you're incredibly articulate on these topics. It makes my job very easy. Let me, let me bring this back. So let, let me try to summarize what I'm hearing, right. And a after this, this will be the first, this episode is the first of many, all right? Which is for us is like maybe the 15th episode we've shot. The first time I worn a tie, as the first time the guest has, has brought a prop. So you better let me set this up a little bit. So if I hearing you correctly. It is absolutely essential for the long-term survival of humanity that we become an interplanetary species. If we're going to do that, we need to get good at resource utilization outside of Earth. We can be shipping stuff back and forth. Yeah, we need to be able to use the stuff that's available in space. And a good first step for that is building a hotel on the moon. Warm intro is brought to you by Wefunder. Wefunder created this thing called the Community Round that lets you raise money directly from your community. So instead of going to VCs and rich people, angel investors, you can go straight to your friends and your family and your customers. And this is not a traditional ad read. I used Wefunder for my company three times. We ran three rounds in Wefunder, we raised over a million dollars, and I found that it completely changed how everybody felt about our business. Our customers all of a sudden didn't feel like they were just customers. They felt like they were owners in the business. They shopped with us more. They told their friends about us. My team felt like what we were doing was important because our community had shown up to invest in us. I tell every founder I can find to go raise a we fund around, especially for companies that care about community, there is nothing greater you can do than letting that community invest. Go to wefunder.com/join to check it out. Yes. Because basically what I was getting at is that yes, with, with the whole analysis of the space economy, a lot of it's government and commercial. It's, it's just not gonna be the the first step to getting people on the moon. The trick is we use space tourism as the wedge. Mm-hmm. We extend that to the moon. You spin up the lunar economy, right? Only after you build the first hotel on the moon. Only after you build America's moon base by 23. Which by the way, just amazing news, right? For us is the executive order that came out literally like during Christmas. Like I could not chill at home. I was just, my god, on Twitter the entire time. Talking to my dad about this'cause he loves this stuff. But. Yeah, like it's, you've gotta use that. We're basically gonna l flank everyone in the space industry.'cause when we, when I go to these conferences, right, and I listen I'm like, Hey, I'm a student, which I was when I was doing this as a student, but it's the same people talking about the same things. We need to bring, commercial utilization to the moon. We need to bring commercial use cases to Mars. Cool. That's great and all, but like it's the same presentation year after year and no one's doing anything about it. Mm-hmm. And so basically, I mean, this is a trend throughout my life is just, I just got tired. I'm very impatient. I was just like, let's just do it now. Let's just start. Right. And we're really lucky that we're in this inflection point where it's happening next month. NASA is sending astronauts to the moon around the moon. Since the seventies. Wow. That's a monumental mo. The whole world is going to be ins, the next generation after me is gonna be inspired, and they're gonna wanna be astronauts too, and they're gonna wanna walk the moon. It's gonna happen like we're going to the moon and this time to stay. And I think that is again, I don't know. I don't, I mean, you guys are early that like you're listening to this or whatever, but I really do believe that. This is the moment in human history. Right. Like it's an Adam and Eve moment. If you can design like the systems that people are gonna live in mm-hmm. On the moon and Mars, it's I mean, think about San Francisco. Who, who designed Mission Street? Who designed the Embarcadero? Like who, who architected these things? These people have. A generational impact on our generation. We are gonna have a civilizational level impact if we succeed at making humanity planetary, at solving off world surface habitation. Because following launch costs of SpaceX and a whole other host of other reasons is, is is part of the reason why this is not a great time but. If we can get the space, that's cool and all, but where do we stay? Where do we live? We haven't solved off world surface habitation and until we solve off world surface habitation, we cannot live on the moon to Mars. So, can I ask you to. Pick up and show us the prop that you brought. Sure, explain it a little bit. Yeah, no, this is a simple, I'll tell you after that, the first thing that made me think of when you when you broke, showed it to me. So yeah, tell me. So tell us about what you're holding this, this is a. The grew brick. So basically this is a brick we made in our lab. We actually just moved to our first office in the lab. Sorry. Congratulations. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's and so this is basically made out of lunar reiff stimulant. So lunar reiff is a term for the top soil on the moon. And what we plan to do is. Hopefully around 2029, our first mission towards building the first hotel on the moon is we need to prove that we can make products on the moon. No human has ever made a product on the moon, and so this has made a lunar relow, simulant and geo polymers. So we basically have a alkali solution that is mixed with the regular stimulant. So you can kind of think of similar to like with concrete, right? That makes us brick. Let me tell you two very quick mechanical engineering stories. Okay. That immediately ran through my head when you showed me that. Let's do it. And I couldn't tell you off camera'cause gotta make content. So I started mechanical engineering. I come long line of mechanical engineers and two moments I find magical in my journey with mechanical engineering. I was a. Dog shit. Mechanical engineer, but I love it dearly, right? It doesn't love me, but I love it. Two moments. The first is the moment that I, my dad worked in steel and so he, and he started a company when we were, when I was still toddler, so he would also babysit me. So he would take me to steel plants with him as a child. Wow. And the most powerful first experience of my life was. Standing with my dad at a steel mill, and there's a moment that happens in a steel mill that anybody that's ever seen one knows where molten steel actually, it's molten iron gets, gets poured into, into these molds and you can feel the heat on your face from like hundreds of meters away, right? You immediately, you just see this bright. Orange fluid and you feel the heat on your face. And I remember at that time it was bright and sunny outside like it is right now. Right. And I saw this bright burning ball of metal. Right next to the sun, bigger than the sun. Mm-hmm. And I felt the heat of it stronger than I felt the heat of the sun. And I remember thinking that this was, I was not old enough or smart enough to articulate it, but I remember feeling like this was a really big deal. And then fast forward. To my own moment when I show up to the Berkeley Mechanical engineering machine shop, right? And the guy over there, I, I wonder if he still works there at Chare Hall, at Chare Hall where dreams go or die. And I go to, I go to the machine shop and one of the first things he told us was, and he said, in such a matter of fact way, man, he said, mill and a lathe are very special machines because a mill and a lathe, they're the only two machines in the world. Or only two machines in this machine shop at least that you can use to make another mill in a lathe. And I remember there is, to me, something very primal and something very human and base about being able to make something out of nothing. And being able to make more of yourself. And I think like when I saw that brick, that's what I thought of.'cause to me it goes right back to you hold it. I would love to hold it. This goes right back to. I think of Moon Rocks when I see it because this is, to me, human beings having done what we do. Mm-hmm. When at our best, what we do. To Moon Rocks. And I think that this is a really beautiful can I hold it for the rest of the interview? Yeah, no, please do. Please do. It'll gimme power. Well, Well's, let's talk about this. Number four on your, did I, did I miss one? I did, I did miss a life philosophy. Oh, you say always better on yourself. Yes. I, which I agree with. Now I'm curious about your experience at Silicon Valley because my experience of it was, even though I fully believed in what I was working on, still do, and I de thought that we deserved every penny that we raised and all the press we got, I would still sitting alone in my room. I think to myself, it is absolutely fucking crazy that people gave my 22-year-old dumbass millions of dollars to go do this. Have you been surprised by how much people have bet on you? I. I, I, I guess I never thought about, I mean, I was just kind of like to, to, to be honest I wasn't thinking about doing this so soon. The, the, actually yeah, it's, that's a crazy part. It is kind of crazy. It is. I I just kind of was just doing it. And then, eventually I was like, all right, let's do more and then let's do more. And then, we just kept building and building and growing and just yeah, I mean, yeah, it is kind of crazy. So, I mean, like for us, I mean for, for me at least when I go back home to Vancouver I'm like, it's nice. It's very grounding, right? Mm-hmm. Because it's like I'm reminded by where, I came from, right? Very humbling. It's I'm just eternally grateful to just do my life's work. Mm-hmm. Or start now, really. So I think it's, it's that. But I also feel like it's something I realized about myself pretty recently, I guess, with, especially with a lot of these, conversations I've been having just ahead of the launch. Is that, I guess, it is such a to me, this is not a crazy idea. That's the thing. I, I realized that that's actually, funnily enough, that's why it's hard for me to write like launch posts is'cause like I just write it and I, my friend's look at, I'm like, dude, what, what, what the f yeah, you need to explain like this. I'm like, that's kind of like a given, like it's just obvious to me. And so I think the, the beauty of Silicon Valley and to your other question is it, it, it just, there's so many really interesting people here, and I'm just mm-hmm. Even though lately on, I, I wish, but we've just, I'm having a really good time just doing. Join. You gotta come by the office. It's sick. Like just, I will be there. It's like a dreams place. Like I, I, I've never dreamed of it like that, man. Just send me a text. I'll be there in 15 minutes. Do you feel like you're like Iron Man in a fucking cave? Making anyways no, no, no. I, dude, I told you the only thing I said to you, the one thing I said to you before we started this interview was like, dude, you are in the absolute best part of starting a company. It's does not get better than, so you are 23, 20, 22, 20, 23. 23. Next 22 years old office in Soma. One other guy. Sleeping three, four hours a night and just working. You look, it does not get any better than that. True energy is it's just different. I mean, and, and I was working solo for a bit recently I brought on, our first team member full time. And it's just been, it's just been great. It's just upwards, we're, or no, it's, it's crazy. On the point about Upwork, this is a very forced transition I'm about to make right now. Okay. Number five, bullet point. We're just kind of floating everywhere, so just feel free to just swing this. Yeah, dude. When we edit this, it's gonna sing. But point number five is the sky is not the limit, right? Yes. I want to bring up what I think is probably the most common criticism you're gonna get. Right. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe people hate Moon Hotels from all these years. I've had so many people who are like, you can't do this. You can't do this, you can't do this. Just keep going. And but I wanna, I wanna try to like, be fair to the people that I think are gonna Oh, of course. I think I'm like even a little bit partial to it at times. Sure, sure, sure. But there is a criticism of projects like this, right? That's right. Where people go, did we run out problems on Earth? Like why are we Oh oh that if what you care about is the survival of humanity, then there are way more things we could do on earth. And that, it is, some, might even say a waste or like misallocated talents. Have somebody with your abilities and your background. Working on working on space when you could be solving problems on Earth. Is there any, I've heard that so many times by the way. I heard this a lot in the early days too. What, so I wanna, I wanna kind of get your take on this, first of all is there any part of that that you think, no. Okay. There are some truths to that. And clearly you've, you've made a decision to to continue working on it. So what is to you, the, the reason that that. And that argument is, does not bear out. So, so, and this actually plays out to how a lot of the things in terms of like how I think about the world too. So one thing, just want, for the record, right. I, I love it when people bring these things up.'cause it also just makes me think more and, reflect more and people are always learning. Right? I would just put this blatantly, like I personally disagree with this specific statement. The reason why is because, I'll break it down. Sky's not the limit, right? What we mean by that is that the sky's no longer the limit. You gotta think bigger, like people gotta swing bigger. I think too just graduated or dropped out for a program. They're like, yeah, I'm gonna build like a new B2B SaaS company or AI company. I'm like, dude, like we need more people building foundational things for civilization. Yeah, like it is very important. Are we gonna remember this like millions of years later? Probably not. I mean, I'm sorry, like that's very direct. But I remember being at an event where I, I usually, I'm like, I mean, I'm generally a really friendly guy, but like I got, I'm starting to grow, turn to the point where I'm I'm just gonna be, honestly, I, I am not interested in learning about this B2B SaaS company. I'm sorry. I just, I just don't have the bandwidth for that in my head. I, to address the point though, so I've gotten this a lot of times and in a much more harsher way, it's yo or even letter ways you're too young or why are you working on this now? Shouldn't you be doing grad school or shouldn't you be like working out, going back to Tesla or something like that? This is my take. So for what it's worth, I do believe there's a lot of problems on Earth that need to be solved. Working on this is not a dismiss dis submission of that or, or whatever. However, the way I think about things is okay, agency, right? It's what can I do in my lifetime to impart the most amount of impact in the world? Right? And so there's two subpoints in that goes back to what we talked about earlier is impact is like my belief of impact. Well, first of all, I believe impact is subjective. And so my belief of what's impactful is making it physical dent in the universe by. Putting humans on Mars. Okay. Then the other thing is like, what could I actually do? What am I best positioned to accomplish that impactful goal that, we just self-defined, that's this. And so, when people are like, oh, like Shouldn, don't we have to solve, let's say climate change first. So that's probably the most common one I get. Which by way is totally important, valid, and very, very, very important. My mom is, is I mean, she's an architect and she worked at the Green Building Council, so she's all for this stuff. Like I'm a huge supporter of this. The thing is, I'm not the best person for this. Right. I'm not, even if I just try to force myself to do it, and like a lot of times in life, I, I do these things where it's like, all right, I'm complete not 180, but it's like I'm just gonna force myself to do this and just like stick for the pain, right? I could do that, but that is not the most impactful thing that I could do, and that will not lead to the world becoming better. As quickly as if I did this. And so that's my belief. So actually, I guess what I'm trying to, what, what the realization is, is okay, making humanity inter planetary is like the thing I've always wanted to do in my life. It's the thing I'm most aligned with and I have the most chance of success at. If I did anything else, I just don't think it, just the magic wouldn't be there. And I meet a lot of people who, are doing other things that are like incredibly amazing. They're doing things like, how do we stop like hurricane. From hurting people or how do you stop like specific areas of the world from getting hurt, from specific F threats, right? And so I think those are all really important things and they have like great, founder problem fit, I guess, or whatever it's called. So yeah, that's just, that's just my take. I I think that's really well said. I do think that there is an interesting, even though I am somewhat partial to that argument, right. I agree with you.'cause I, and I think that for whatever reason, people really only bring this up for space, right? None of us thinks no one thinks that it's a good idea to go up to an artist and be like, why are you making art when you could be curing cancer? Right? For some reason, only in the context of space, do we feel this way? So I'm, I'm aligned. Especially big ideas too. Especially if you're young it's oh, like why do this now? Why not? I'm like. I don't give a shit, man. Just do it. What are you doing? I mean, like when I talk to those critics and it's I mean, again, like there's only, you have only 24 hours in a day. And you can think about a half glass floor, half glass, empty. But my take is just do the best you can in those hours to do the most amount of impact. Don't think about what if this, what if that? Just do it. And if you just do it, I think you'll be fine. So that, that's always how I fought, told myself or coached myself. Everything in my life. It boils down to a Bob Dylan lyric. Nice. And the one that I think of when I talk to you and when I talk about this is mm-hmm. Everything's a bore, everything's a bust. You do what you must do and you do it well. And I think, yeah, it's, yes, we have problems at a cul cultural level and a societal level, and a species been problems really, but but every person does need to do the thing that they must do. The thing that's within them. Let's bring this back to you and not to my musings. Bob Dylan is, is cool though, Bob Dylan's the best. Um. When, at the end of your life, what is a defeat that you hope you're known for? We all have the list of victories. Of course. Yours will be helping make or make, making humanity in Tri Galactic. What is a defeat that you'd like to be known for? What is a thing that you hope to be remembered as having tried and failed at? Putting humans on Mars. Putting humans on Mars. There's two, there's two things that are gonna happen in this world, right? Either humanity becomes interplanetary before we die. Mm-hmm. Or happens after if it happens after we die. I mean, we don't have that precursor knowledge. Like it's, it is what it is. If it happens during, while we're still alive, like you sure. As you will know, I'll be on that side of history. I'll be making that happen. So, if I die, try, it's making manger die. Trying. I have that written up somewhere in the office that, brings to my final question. It is tied to both my first question from you, for you and tied to everything you just said. Elon famously makes a joke. I'm sure you've heard it a million times, that he hopes to die on Mars. Oh, hopefully not, not impact. How do you hope to die on Mars? It's, yeah, yeah, on Mars? Hopefully impact, hopefully not intact. Well, I mean, it is, it is. I, I mean, it is true hopefully not impact, but for me it's I mean, I think about this a lot. It's think about the first cities on Mars. Think about the first children on Mars. The languages, like the culture, like what are schools gonna be like the first passport, right? How, how are we gonna do time? Like all, all these things different, right? And these are all things that like, we, we don't think about on a day-to-day basis, but and, and if everything were to go well, by the way, where we actually do become intary, I don't die on impact and blah, blah, blah. Like it, I think for me it's just like knowing. That like I help contribute or rally the people like assembling the Avengers when they say our team to make this beautiful future of humans living and thriving on the moon in Mars and beyond. That's how I want to be known for Really? And by the way, I don't like, this is the other thing, this actually goes back to impact. I wanna highlight this, is that like a lot of times when people think of impact, it's like I wanna be the richest this, or I want to be like the best singer at this, or I want to be known for this. Or I want my name to be in history, whatever, which I. All our very important things. I can't pretend that, oh, like I'm not trying to do that too. I mean, I think this is a byproduct of doing this. However, the thing is how I see it like, it's like Macklemore, right? First time you die is when you die. Second time is when nobody says your name again and remembers your name, which is true. Eventually we're all going to die. Sorry, that's very morbid. But my point is, that's what I mean by impact is sure, maybe your name is never, known like generations of generations of generations of years later when humans are everywhere in the Milky Way. But if I could die with the conscious of knowing yeah, that I help play a part in humans living on the moon and Mars, and I know like generations of versions of me later will do that for the future of solar systems and all that stuff. I, I'm, I'm, I'm happy. That's, that's my, that. That's it. Skylar Chan, maybe we all die trying. Thanks so much, man. Thank you so much. It was beautiful. It's a great podcast. Oh, thanks man. Thank you guys. This was fun. Thank you guys. Yeah, dude. Great. Intense man. Wow. That was great. Oh, dude, you were fantastic. F yeah, we, I didn't intend to, but we kind of like with the heat, which, with the ringer too. No, the heat really makes you feel like you're can I give the exact.