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The Obsidio Podcast explores the people, ideas, and real world challenges shaping hardware security, semiconductor trust, supply chain resilience, and deep tech innovation. Through candid conversations with founders, engineers, security leaders, manufacturers, investors, and industry experts, the channel looks at how critical technologies are built, protected, and trusted in an increasingly complex world. From counterfeit components and electronics supply chain risk to AI, cyber-physical security, and emerging technologies, Obsidio brings practical insight and thoughtful discussion to the issues that matter most across modern industry.
John, welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
Speaker 2:Glad to be here. Thank you for the invite and look forward to what's to come.
Speaker 1:So quite a few years ago, I'm not going give away your age here, but you made a decision to join the Navy. What were you thinking?
Speaker 2:Wow. You know, they had those cool commercials that said, Hey, get out and see the world.
Speaker 1:You're making a marketing person here really proud right now. What did your first date, were your parents like, No, don't do that, or were they fully supportive?
Speaker 2:My dad was a former Navy, so of course I had to follow on and also go Navy, but I got a slight upgrade. He was a corpsman and I loved everything tech. I went Navy fast attack submarine.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? Tell us more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So nuclear submarine, the USS San Francisco was my first assignment. Hold on, hold on.
Speaker 1:We've to
Speaker 2:stop there for a moment.
Speaker 1:So nuclear submarine. I know that that's a thing. I'm not sure everybody in our audience knows that thing. Let me ask the first question. Is it a little scary to think that there's a nuclear reactor maybe feet away from you?
Speaker 1:How does that even work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was enlisted as a nuclear electronics technician, and here's the history. I love this when people talk about nuclear and are afraid of it. Two fifty mobile reactors, been in service over fifty years. They're only about ten years newer than what's in the commercial nuclear power world, yet we've never had an accident, and they're operated by the average of, I think it's a 26 year old that's running
Speaker 1:Oh, you're trying to make us These two fifty nuclear power scare us away here of the the youngsters or make us feel comfortable. Look. There there's an element of of, you know, human, let's say bias here because, you know, my mother-in-law, she's terrified of planes, but she feels totally fine of getting in a car and obviously those things are much more dangerous if you just look at the amount of accidents there. So I truly appreciate your point. What did it look like to get trained to basically be able to support these technical systems on a nuclear submarine?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, it went everywhere from nuclear power to nuclear capable systems, being missiles or torpedoes even. I didn't realize how good the training was until I went to college after I got out of the military. Our military was developed to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. Our government is phenomenal at that.
Speaker 2:I don't care who's in office. They're phenomenal at it. Right? And that's what the government was established for. And when I went in, I was forty hours a week in school.
Speaker 2:And unfortunately I didn't do as well as they wanted. So I think I ended up in nuke school at one point with twenty eight hours a week of mandatory additional, training and study just assigned. So I was doing sixty eight hours a week in school. There wasn't a whole lot of time for anything else. When I disappeared on the weekend, when I got to do that, didn't have duty or whatever, I would go somewhere else and study.
Speaker 2:Right? So extremely intense. And then I went to college after getting out of the Navy and I could do in minutes what took me weeks in the Navy because the assignments were that much different in technical difficulties. So phenomenal training. I think submariners should also be in space.
Speaker 2:So, we might talk about that too sometime.
Speaker 1:If I don't get to this, you should remind me, but there's a lot of similarity between let's say the conditions in space and the conditions, you know, way under underwater, but I want to go somewhere else first. You kind of think about your service, what was your proudest, happiest, most joyous moment? And then tell us also the story about the moment where, and everybody has one, where you're like, holy shit, what did I sign up to? Or what was your worst moment in your career?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll start with the best moment and kind of touch on a couple of those. So the best moment was being assigned to the USS San Francisco in 07/11. It was the workhorse of the Western Pacific fleet. I mean, they did everything on that submarine. So getting assigned to it was absolutely phenomenal.
Speaker 2:But I got the world's best duty station, I would argue. Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I mean, who doesn't want to go to Hawaii, right? So I fly into Hawaii, I land and they say, You're going to pick up the submarine in Japan in three days. They'll be on the surface.
Speaker 2:You're going to go meet them. So I got delivered out to the submarine in Japan. I got on board. And at the end of my two and a half year tour on the USS San Francisco, I realized in the first year that I was on board from picking it up in Japan, I spent three forty six days underwater out of that first three zero seven. My favorite moment and the most, one of the things I'm most proud of is getting my submarine dolphins.
Speaker 2:That means you're qualified on every single system on the entire submarine. I did it in just about six months. Oh wow. Normally it's nine months to a year to get qualified. I worked twenty hours a day, every day for three forty nine out of those three sixty five days in that year.
Speaker 2:And those were all underwater. We were supporting a certain desert mission.
Speaker 1:I mean, you've got to say yes to this, but tell me the story. There's got to be something about that intense training and service that gave you the grit to kind of do well in life? What are the elements that you kind of look backwards fondly upon, I learned these things in service?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, it's really caring about others. When you realize that a valve in a wrong position can flood a submarine, as we got to experience at one point, and that water coming in and blasting across can hit an electrical panel that sends a fireball chasing people throughout the submarine. As you run, you create a vacuum behind you and that fireball goes after it. Sheer terror also of realizing that if you don't know how to control everything that you are near, you're a hazard to somebody else.
Speaker 2:And as you get on board, you're called a no, non useful being, right? Because you don't know enough short of basic firefighting that they teach you in submarine school or damage control, where they literally flood a space that you're in with extremely cold water. It's like 40 degree water that you're in as you're trying to patch pipes that they connect a pump to and they pump water into the space you're in, and you're trying to literally seal it up underwater. And those are the types of things that make you realize, you know what? I really care about my shipmates and I have got to be qualified where I can help instead of being a hindrance in one of those casualty situations that ultimately I'd say probably every submariner has seen at some point.
Speaker 1:I feel that that philosophy is really missing a little bit in today's corporate environment. Do you feel like the military leads to that or is this more from your education at home, your parents, your dad being in the Navy as well?
Speaker 2:You know, much of it is taught, more of it is caught. I really think those that you're around influence what I would call your purpose and your core values. What makes you, you? And you know, I'll take a energetic 18 year old to come out and learn how to operate the rocket before I'll take the guy with the PhD who knows it all. Right?
Speaker 2:So part of it is also that humbleness and humility that comes with anyone around you at any given moment knows something more about a situation than you would know. And if we can keep that in mind with that kind of call to service, much like I felt for the military, but even feeling it for your neighbor, that it's part of a core duty to help others, I think drives us and can drive us in business as well.
Speaker 1:When and why did you move from deep underwater into space? How did that happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I had a captain and we played, we basically had reactor drills and reactor readiness on one patrol and then you'd come back and the next patrol you'd set up and really do the tactical side where we shot torpedoes and did all sorts of cool things during Cold War period. And I had a captain. We were about to go out for those drills. And I said, You know, I've got an invention. I said, The last time we played war games, they found us.
Speaker 2:I've got something that I think will spoof us. And while the electronics won't all fit in it today, in the future, I think they will. I would like to try out a prototype. So I'm going to this captain and saying, Can I use your billion dollar submarine to launch my $500 homemade gadget to try and confuse other people? And I spent the next three months while I was off, and this was when I was on the Trident sub.
Speaker 2:So we were out for three months, a month of turnover, and then back for three months. So in that three months, I built this device and he allowed me to actually launch it out of a submarine three inch launcher and test this device. To make a long story a little bit shorter, that was the impetus for how I met a bunch of rocket scientists, because I had to take a three inch device by 30 some inches long and cram it full of electronics and telemetry and all sorts of neat gadgets to spoof and make an enemy think that, you know, we're somewhere else or, you know, basically a spoofing device. And of course, these are all talked about in Jane's fighting ship. I'm not revealing anything here twenty five, thirty years later, but the guys who were developing these electronics and machining these components and building a prototype for me to present to NAVSEA were rocket scientists.
Speaker 2:Armadillo Aerospace was run by John Carmack and he would fund it for about a million dollars a year to do everything from, hovering vehicles to rocket racing planes, to reusable rockets. They had been around for about fourteen years when he was working for Oculus, bought out by Facebook for a couple billion dollars. And he stepped back and he said, you know what? I'm going put into hibernation mode. I was there.
Speaker 2:These guys were developing that Navy sub tech for me for another company. I'm like, you can't stop. So how do we help you? And I had fired my boss a couple years earlier because this gentleman named David Mitchell taught me how to trade stocks. And I learned how to trade stocks, was making more part time trading stocks than I was as a full time controls engineer writing programs to run power plants.
Speaker 2:I decided, you know what? I'm going go off and develop this Navy submarine tech in service of my nation as a commercial, you know, outside the military person. And then I said, wait a minute, you're building reusable rockets. And this was before Elon had, well, both Carmack and Elon are friends. They kind of got into it at the same time around 2000, but we had already done vertical takeoff, vertical landing and really cool stuff for the time and built the Morpheus vehicle that NASA used to test what lunar landings can look like with new tech.
Speaker 2:So that was the setup and the transition into Exos Aerospace as a commercial entity was the end result.
Speaker 1:So tell us about Exos. What are you doing today? And you mentioned operating. What does this look like? What do people in your company do?
Speaker 1:It sounds crazy.
Speaker 2:Everything. So we have 15 people, and in 2018, so we started in 2015. In 2018, we launched our SARG reusable rocket, total team of 15 built pretty much everything in house, had a few exceptions where there was something we could actually get someone else to build less expensive because they had really cool equipment like NASA Mishu. And what it looks like is a reusable rocket that we take a team of 10 guys out and you fly it four times in fourteen months with three months in between to analyze all the data and learn everything you can learn. And today we stand as one of three in The United States with a reusable rocket launch license from the FAA.
Speaker 1:Oh wow.
Speaker 2:You know, SpaceX, Blue Origin, you know, billion, well, number one and number two wealthiest people in the world from time to time. And, then you've got us with, 15 people and just an amazing team that's been doing it for twenty six years.
Speaker 1:That sounds not a lot of people at all. 15 people. How do you make it work with such a small team? What are they doing? How's the company structured?
Speaker 1:What are the big tasks?
Speaker 2:It's naturally efficient because I'll use Phil, rocket propulsion guy. He does the design for the rocket engine, and then he goes out to the machine and he machines the parts to build the rocket engine. Now we do call someone in by the time we've taken a week later, All the parts for the rocket engine are machined out of different metals, and if Phil messed up something where he made a design element that couldn't be machined, guess what? He's going back to his desk to fix it. And then he comes out and he redos the program for the mill or the CNC machine and he makes the part.
Speaker 2:And then he calls in a welder and we've got James is a phenomenal welder. He comes in and the guy's a machine. I mean, he makes a robot look bad. He does 800 welds in a day and they're all perfect. The guy's just amazing.
Speaker 2:And a day later, we've got a rocket engine. And then Phil helps Joseph put that on the rocket and mount everything up and run the wires to the actuators and plumb everything up and tie it into the computer system that's fully autonomous from the time we hit launch to the time it comes back and lands on earth, the computer did everything. And, you know, he's the guy fueling the vehicle and going through the countdown and making all the checks prior to long.
Speaker 1:Talking about the checks, what are the things that you do to give you the confidence to know that this is going to work and not God forbid, you know, something really bad happens?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Process and procedure. So that comes from my Navy background. Making it more robust and continuously improving those process and procedure comes from my work at Florida Power and Light, where Six Sigma was the cat's meow, and we got the Deming Award from Japan for quality.
Speaker 1:So for those of our audience who are not manufacturing in their background like myself, what is Six Sigma?
Speaker 2:What does
Speaker 1:that even mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Six Sigma is how we measure the capability of a system basically, and it drives data. And we can use data to make informed decisions. And that's at the core of everything in the Navy. Amazing that in a stainless steel little file folder on the wall of almost every room, there were 10 cards. And depending what the casualty was, you pulled one of those 10 cards.
Speaker 2:I don't care if you can do it in your sleep, in the dark, whatever else. You pull those 10 cards in a grease pencil and you mark off every check mark for flooding. There's another card for fire. There's another card for rig for silent operations. So there's like 10 procedures in every compartment that say, For where you are right here, this is what you have to do.
Speaker 2:And to launch a rocket, guess what? There's a certain number of things that you can do to ensure that it's going to be reliable. But my favorite is what our Chief Operating Officer, Neil Milburn, did twenty plus years ago. He went to the FAA and said, You know, I don't want to come talk to you every time I want to test my rocket. So what we propose is we're going to tie our rocket down to a 70 ton crane and we're going to tell it, we're going to lift it five feet off the ground and we're going to tell it to fly 10 feet high, but I shouldn't have to call you.
Speaker 2:There's no way this 5,000 pound thrust engine is going to lift a 70 ton crane and go anywhere. So how about we write that regulation? He wrote the regulation for us to be able to test that way. It's called tethered testing, and I think we're the only one in the world that hovers a rocket to test out all our systems. Our probably best day is when we had Purdue University on-site testing a lunar lander leg saying, Instead of using $1,000 per inch material, what if we use $10 per inch material?
Speaker 2:We use aluminum instead of niobium on this particular part, and they use us as the heat source. And you know what? They said, You know, why don't we invite UCF? And EXOS, would you support us bringing another research university in because we know they're trying to test regolith, And we're going to put simulated regolith down so that when your rocket engine fires on it and hits this leg, it's very similar to what we would see on a lunar landing. So just that type of one university caring about another just because they know what their experiment is, They come out for free.
Speaker 2:We volunteered to mount up all their equipment and everything. Then we fire the rocket and we shut it down and we fire it again and we shut it down. We fired a third time and we shut it down. We fired a fourth time. So within two hours, we had fired our rocket engine four times at four different thrust levels and tested the thermal impact and then measured all the regolith and all the particles that were being fired at that thing, through a collaboration between Purdue and UCF.
Speaker 2:And Purdue paid for it. Ultimately, I think NASA funded that particular test, but UCF got the benefit too. That's the best day. That's how you know your systems are reliable when you can start and stop a rocket engine four times in a day. And if I go back to the heritage of our team, rocket racing planes, they put rocket engines on basic aircraft and put people in them.
Speaker 2:And the people, Len Fox and Dave Morse, Navy test pilots, I'll add, said, we want to see the rocket engine start a thousand times before we get in this plane because you're telling us that after about eighteen seconds in a 70 degree up climb with the rocket engine on, I'm going to have to shut it off. And I really want to know I can make it back to the runway and have an engine again. And some crazy number, 32,768 pounds of fuel later, we had started and stopped a rocket engine 1,000 times without failure.
Speaker 1:The same rocket, basically?
Speaker 2:The same rocket engine. Wow. Just refueling it. So that's how you determine reliability. And they went on after that to do hundreds of in air relights and fly these two rocket racing planes head to head.
Speaker 2:So repetition and reuse of the systems. It's of hard with a solid rocket engine. That's why I love liquid fueled propulsion.
Speaker 1:So I don't know if you know this story about the physicians basically, surgical rooms, they introduced this brilliant innovation. The checklist completely improved significantly their outcomes in surgeries. They do it at the beginning, at the end. I have a feeling the Navy was doing it a long time before the doctors figured it out.
Speaker 2:I think that might have gone back a few years.
Speaker 1:So, but it's interesting, right? Such a simple concept of just have a checklist for what you do in that scenario can give you, you know, much, much, much higher outcomes from a quality perspective. That's absolutely brilliant. So I want to talk to you a little bit about the future of space. You know, we're seeing a much brighter future for space.
Speaker 1:We were at the Space Symposium here in Colorado not so long ago. For those of us who are in the audience listening today, they're not in the midst of everything that's happening in space, what has changed over the last four to eight years? What is exciting about the future of space and where do you see it going?
Speaker 2:You know, I have to give Bezos a little bit of props on this. You know, he said, you know, we should be making everything in space. Today we have that capability. And the reason is the earth is a horrible place to make things for multiple reasons and not to get into an environmental bend at all, but contaminating the earth, people don't like, obviously, right? Because we still have to live here.
Speaker 2:And we have to expand and I'll just throw a random number out. Don't scientific check me on this one or fact check this one, but we use 10 times the energy to make something on earth than we'd have to use to make it in space.
Speaker 1:A big part of that is because you need to get it from earth to space after that.
Speaker 2:Well, not even that. If I want to make a fiber optic cable, on Earth, what do I have to do? Well, first I have to make the power to make it. Now, the solar panel that I get the power from on Earth is about 20% efficient, and the sun only shines eight hours a day. I put that same solar panel in space, and guess what?
Speaker 2:It sees the sun twenty four hours a day. It doesn't have the earth's atmosphere blocking 80% of the power that it could generate. So guess what? There's your 10x, right? So power production is 10x more efficient, and I can actually do it with solar in space today with today's technology.
Speaker 2:Now I need to make that fiber optic cable. Why is it so hard to make a really great fiber optic cable? Because there's contaminants in the air. Well, space doesn't have contaminants, right? It's a vacuum.
Speaker 2:It's naturally devoid of most things except small dust particles and maybe some orbital debris in LEO, but beyond that, it's a pristine environment. And then I expand that to say, okay, when I manufacture that fiber optic cable, it doesn't automatically bend because there's 14.7 pounds of pressure from the atmosphere on. So guess what? I can make that perfect fiber and it'll just keep extending out for miles if I just want to keep printing the material to make it. Right?
Speaker 2:So super simple. Power is super efficient. I don't have to create a clean room environment because space is essentially a clean room. And then that translates. Where it translates is, have you ever seen a blood sample?
Speaker 2:When the doctor takes a little bit of your blood, what do they do? They put it on a slide, right? And what immediately happens? 14.7 pounds of pressure flattens those blood cells out. And they're looking at them trying to figure out what's happening in your blood, right?
Speaker 2:Well, in space, if I were to take your blood and take a blood cell out, guess what? It's still nice and round. And now I want to treat it with something. Guess what? It's not under the pressure of the earth's atmosphere.
Speaker 2:So now I can introduce something to treat a condition in your blood, for example, in its native environment. It has the same protections in space that your skin and your body provide. So that allows us to do things that we just can't do on earth. We try and create centrifuges and vacuum chambers, we run the two together, but it's creating an environment that naturally exists in space. So very few things that are easier to make on earth than in space.
Speaker 2:And we get the added benefit of we're not corrupting an environment and power is really clean and really easy once you have the lift equation solved.
Speaker 1:So we're talking about, and we'll come back to the lift equation. We're talking about basically having a colony on the moon where we can make stuff. How far is that dream? What are the big issues that need to be solved in order to get there and what's driving this as an incentive?
Speaker 2:Wonderful question. So, think there's, and I'll just go off of NASA reports. I think there's still a 100 things that we don't know how to do today that we have to figure out to sustain life on the moon. It does start with power because the moon does go dark for weeks at a time on one side. Those long lunar nights are kind of a challenge and it ends up at lunar regolith because you take the regolith and it gets into everything.
Speaker 2:We don't even know how to make a bearing that'll survive on the moon. Those are some of the challenges. Again, there's about a 100 of them, but why? And the why is Star Trek. Remember Star Trek, no money, right?
Speaker 2:Wasn't needed anymore. Well, you take, and these are public numbers, I haven't verified them, but if you take one of the resources, between 12% of the resources that we can extract from the moon and bring them back to earth, which that direction is easy. Getting from here to the moon is hard, but very easy to transport stuff from the moon back to earth. If you bring back 2% of the products that we can mine from the moon, you matched the global domestic product of the earth for a year. Right?
Speaker 2:So the value in what is on the moon changes humanity.
Speaker 1:I'm going to guess this is the rare earth minerals that we're looking for and don't have for all
Speaker 2:the electronics we're Rare looking earth minerals all the way up to maybe it's real, maybe it's not. Three being in enough abundance to literally get rid of the need for fission and move to fusion and have that capability. We see reports of that having been done in Germany already. So what happens when you have energy abundance? Food becomes cheap.
Speaker 2:Everything you buy becomes obtainable. And we start talking about people who have done amazing things through We have participated, our team in the Ansari XPRIZE years and years ago, to develop a lunar lander. That was the challenge, right? Well, now Peter Diamandis has a $20,000,000 prize set out to find out how we can sustain a person for $250 a month. Housing, food, clothing, everything.
Speaker 2:And I believe we're in the singularity, which for those who don't know that term, where AI is solving everything and escalating at such a rate that the future can be written quite easily by AI to solve all the world's problems within a matter of years, and a small, less than a decade number of years.
Speaker 1:I think that the majority of the population would not agree with that, and yet I work with AI on a day to day basis, and I know, you know, an important point in history we should note, you know, is World War II and basically one person, you know, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but more or less one person won World War II and that person who cracked Enigma also came up with the thing named after him called the Turing test. And what the Turing test is, well, is it AI? Is it true AI? And we kind of blew past the Turing test and AI as it is today passes the Turing test and nobody flinched. Nobody was like, well, this is a problem.
Speaker 1:We're like, ah, the Turing test must have been wrong. So this genius of a generation, Alan Turing, came up with this thing, we could never pass it, suddenly we pass it, like, never mind, it's fine. So I think we need to think long and hard. I think that AI is in a state that might be way more advanced than we're willing to recognize. I completely agree with that.
Speaker 1:How far, and I think what this really creates is just an acceleration in a pace that we don't understand. We're moving faster than ever before and that kind of makes everything weird. What are we looking at? Are we looking at a base on the moon in next year, five years, ten years, fifty years, one hundred years? In very broad terms, is this going to be in my life?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I would say there will be countries with bases on the moon definitely within a decade. And the reason I say that is this year we have seen AI solve math. Okay? If you take the world's leaders in math and you put them up against AI, AI wins every time.
Speaker 2:And within, even with today's technology, which six months ago, I needed a supercomputer to run some of these frontier AI models. Today, it'll run on my phone, right? So you take just what exists. With that, within three to five years, physics is solved. And today we might say we have laws of physics.
Speaker 2:I believe that we will have within five years the solution to physics. And when we understand physics, the world, the universe shrinks. And as we do that, monetary systems become the least of our problems. What do humans do when the equivalent of $50,000 is all you need for your entire lifetime, right? Oh, by You the way, you can extend
Speaker 1:mentioned this before about the connection between fusion and abundance of energy and how that fundamentally changes basically life on earth. It's a non trivial point. I want to drill into this. What is a very, very low, almost zero cost of energy, what does that do to life on earth and how? What are the kind of stepping stones that makes food freely available, water freely available, light, energy that grows that crops?
Speaker 1:Like what are those stepping stones that it's just like, well, we're in a completely different society?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I mean, everything comes to energy. The world runs on energy. The world's conflicts are about energy and resources, because that's what makes the difference between the caveman without fire who needed a way to cook his food and the abundance that we see today where we can cook food in a microwave in thirty seconds. And that's our expectation, right?
Speaker 2:When you have low cost to no cost energy, it now comes down to a bigger challenge actually, think is what do we as humans do? Because I can have machines building the machines, right? We can have humanoid robots that replace workers. I think I'll give our audience a little bit of peace there in that. I think it's actually the white collar jobs that are going away first.
Speaker 2:Thought leadership, right? AI can look at a 100 different variables at the same time, come to a conclusion, argue it with 10 opposing models, and come up with a solution that a mathematician, a thought leader, a think tank person would take weeks and weeks and months to even build the poor train of thought that AI can put together literally in seconds or milliseconds. So we're entering that age and that changes everything.
Speaker 1:You know, one the things I like to point out is if you look at the biggest redistribution of wealth in the history, they are single handedly driven by technology. It's the movable type, it's the wheel, it's the internet, know, it's always been technology that's just improved human life significantly. We've had a few blunders for sure there. Einstein and a few other people were involved in those and we, you know, there's been a lot of regret documented in history but those are definitely the minority, right, the nuclear bombs and such. John, what an absolute delight.
Speaker 1:We're quite over time today but this has been so much fun. I have just one last question to you. If you had to look back over your entire career, whether this was two years ago or twenty years ago, it's your hardest moment that you can remember. What would be the piece of advice that you would give yourself?
Speaker 2:I'm going show my space geek here. I'm going say, never say die, never surrender. You know, as I look back, the hardest situations in my life, I'll tie it to my faith and you know, that those are the times when I've grown the most.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:not giving up, and I'm probably just so stubborn that I just refuse. I'll flip that to say never giving up on what you believe, but giving up on those things that don't serve others. If I'm doing it for me, I've come to a point where I wasn't there in my younger life where I would just brute force through it. And today I take a different approach. I brute force things that help others, not things that would help me or that I think get me to where I want to be.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that would be the one. Look internal and say, am I doing this for me or for somebody else? And if this helps others, which I think is why EXOS Aerospace exists today, is because I see how it can change humanity. And really for me, EXOS was very much born out of a capability that Doctor. Abu Zubair had where he flew stem cells.
Speaker 2:He activated those cells and he grew them in space, and guess what? They changed the world of medicine. When I could take cells out of my body, fly them to space, activate them, put them back in, and they start healing the very thing that's killing somebody or hurting somebody. When I saw that, I said, you know what? We need to get manufacturing in space.
Speaker 2:And while I'm not putting things on orbit, the guys who are reusable rockets show how to do that more cost effectively than we do today. And that's what gets me up every day.
Speaker 1:John, thank you so much for joining the show today. This has been an absolute delight, especially for a space geek like myself. Appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thank you for all those softball pitches. Those were great. I loved these questions and definitely a pleasure, all of mine. Thanks Ari.