Shaun Maguire on the Elon empire, Tesla Optimus robots, and his bet on Reflect Orbital

what it is yeah I don't know I think you got it at the end well uh let's see about Sean let's see it's 12:31 I'm here I'm here what's up boys amazing welcome to the show I'm scared to pop on with you guys you guys are uh Wittier Wittier than me and that's unfair territory well oh I love the T-shirt Counter-Strike do it I fig this one I I I what what what versions of Counterstrike did you play throughout the years so I I was unbelievably hardcore and I mean I played early but primarily 1.

0 to 1. 6 1. 0 I started in 1. 3 I was 1.

6 played multiple Cal invite teams Cal baby me too did you yeah yeah yeah God's exiled Angels gxa gxa dude I don't remember and then uh e the elite Knights for a while I was on a bunch of these teams I remember I remember dek I was I mean I'm probably older than you yeah I was on a team called HTP high tech performance one called neg did you ever go to the CPL of course I I could never go I could never convince my parents to go cuz I was too young they're like what are you doing lugging a CRT monitor out to Texas no way exactly in the Volvo station wagon yeah yeah exactly I and I would go to a lot of tournaments in SoCal is the best oh yeah yeah I remember going to a Best Buy a tournament at Best Buy and we played against this team called uh what was it it was these guys made one of the uh the protocols before 3G there were there were two different Wireless protocols I forget what they were called I mean so I mean I think I can't remember the timing like maybe one G was primarily tdma like the original time division multiplexing then that's right was primarily like CDMA CDMA yeah so we so we go up against these guys and their and their clan tag is CDMA and we're like why what what does that stand for like it is it like you know counter cool guys you know like everyone everyone's name usually is like something a reference to like the game and name was like was like this reference to this Wireless protocol and and we were like why did you name it that and they like well we're the guys that invented that and like way and like we're the founders of the company or something that did something and they absolutely destroyed us they were really really good yeah yeah exactly they were like Qualcomm Engineers basically uh and so they destroy us and and then they felt so bad because we were like 13 years old that they gave us the prizes which was great so there was when I first started playing the best team in the world was called Tso and they were based in Seattle yeah um and they were like I I never met them because I was a little kid at the time but they were described as like yeah Telecom Engineers too but they were more on I think more on the infrastructure side like they like they would actually build the early fiber connections and stuff and so I mean that was how you got an advantage back then like if you could figure out a better internet connection you would have yeah you would have an advantage every time you played and so I got an F in Algebra 2 in high school but I but I got a networking education through Counterstrike yeah fantastic uh well I don't know are we live guys we we are live we've been live anyway Sean Maguire's here partner it's yeah we're live I'm so glad we didn't have like a Zuck moment Zuck was on Rogan and he was like pretend he was laring like he does like bow hunting and hunting and like Joe Rogan started kind of pressing him on it like John's asking you like oh you got the Counterstrike t-shirt and like you actually could back it up but like like uh of course zck like actually didn't have much substance behind it I'm sure he had it but no we live uh super excited to chat there's been so many SpaceX Elon companies that's what we want to dive into today yeah first of all uh we are a show built on X uh take a little Victory lap on X you invested in take private $800 million guys and no Victory laps until it's exited in liquid but there has been some saving of democracy that's been happening no in the bigger the bigger thing is you know I think around 6 months ago there had been uh you know Legacy Media like the Washington Post basically reporting coming out and saying Sequoia capital and listing out all the investors have lost $20 billion on this investment now that obviously wasn't you know true it wasn't uh it had been I think marked down internally and some of the other asset managers had but it was more so to kind of repic it for employees and uh you know it's very clear that the in in many ways uh there's there's two things happening right now one uh people that used to be active on Twitter that are less active now they message us and they say like I'm I'm sh social yeah yeah um but I I think the app has never been better yeah and it's very clear that it's here to stay uh so I just wanted to give you a little bit of credit there uh you never lost conviction I mean no on on that I I never lost conviction a lot of people did um and I think that I people people are very susceptible to believing what they're told and I think if you believed what you were told by the media then you could understand oh it's dead but if you used your own eyes it's like the whole thing is operating no major outages Elon at the helm product Innovation happening and like lowering costs I I I honestly found that to be one of the more interesting like cultural Mass hysteria moments that I've lived through uh and that was just so easily disprovable in like a short period of time but you know yeah teach their own I'm glad it I'm glad you only had to wait a couple years it would have been more excruciating if it if it had taken uh much longer to get kind of repriced um what uh there there's so many different things we want to run through today I'd love to get your you know and we run through your guys style like how are you guys so well dressed well we had to come out the gates we we were calling ourselves you know uh we tech tech bro was sort of derogatory we were the technology Brothers we need to kind of reclaim it elevate it and part of that was was dressing uh dressing nice but you've had your sort of uh Hands Across the whole sort of uh Elon Empire obviously have a relationship uh with Elon I kind of want to go Company by company and just kind of get your take on them uh right now I think Tesla's very interesting it's uh it's not a pure play humanoid bet but it does feel like humanoids are the next platform for Tesla especially when you look at uh sort of gen you know generalized EV sales uh for Tesla H have not been performing great uh talk about kind of the humanoid Market I'm sure you've gotten pitched by a lot of these uh companies I'm guessing you're still uh you know a Tesla shareholder but you know talk to us about that category because it seems to have everybody's attention for good reason so let me first of all I work at a register investment advisor none of it is cial advice this is my own also not the opinion of SEO Capital this is all me as a dumb individual sham Maguire a poster nonsense um and also we're not investors in Tesla just given the timing and that it was public we're you know major investors in SpaceX investors in boring company investors in X investors in XI um and I love all those companies and very optimistic about all of them on humanoids uh um look I I strongly believe it's going to be a real thing and a giant thing I think the only question is like the time frame for when this happens I don't think it's a it's an if I think it's a when um I really struggle to make a forecast there BEC in part because there's such a complex supply chain and there's like there's just so so many different subcomponents from you know my partner Constantine has spent a lot of time thinking about rare earth metals and like getting uh you know different rare Earths for making magnets all the way to um you know like scaling manufacturing to you know like every just every individual sensor every actuator like I really just don't know the scaling of it but I was at the Tesla Optimus event I can't remember when maybe you know months ago or whatever and it was more impressive in person than I think people realized online like you I was just standing there in the street is at some studio in LA and you're just standing there and all of a sudden like 20 robots started walking out from behind a curtain like right next to me and I think it's one thing when you just like see a robot video it's another thing when you see like a tethered robot demo to see 20 untethered robots walking in like a progression and I I genuinely couldn't tell at first if it was human in a costume or a robot and you I had to like figure out how do I verify because it's about the same size and they were maybe 20 feet away when they first started coming out and so I was like scanning down the whole thing and then you look at the waist and the waist was very narrow it's like holy crap you know that really is a robot just walking and they were out there for for about two hours interacting with the crowd and um like even if there was like some human control for safety reasons and all of that the vast majority of actuation and all that was autonomous you know meaning like the whenever you have multiple actuators you get feedback loops of you know all these things and like you can't no human can can like put out handle all the like feedback loops intuitively and so you need controllers that smooth out all the noise and like can map whether it's like a computer brain that's telling you the goal or a human telling you the goal mapping it's it's almost like with computers how you take raw electronic signal in transistors and then they there's like you have very very lowlevel programming um you know and then you have you know you have like you have assembly you have you know firmware you have operating system you have you know higher level systems you have all these things up the que it's like everything other than maybe the final operating system level was everything else was basically autonomous and it was just it was insanely impressive and so it's just it really gave me the sense of the stuff that's coming soon I just don't know exactly when and I look I think that for Elon he is playing all the different angles of AI from you know Foundation model with xai to to robots which I think will be like the ultimate embodiment of like the combination of if you have AGI plus a robot that's what lets you do kind of un unlimited amounts of physical work in the real world the foundation model lets you do kind of un unlimited just knowledge work and then you know neuralink lets you merge with the AI if we actually get like AGI that's way smarter than us it's maybe existential for humans but if you you know if we have neuralink we can merge merge uh just put the AGI in your own head and now you're you know an enhanced human um you know we're back to playing Counterstrike me and you are going to be piloting Tesla Optimus robots against each other shooting each other CH like no human can beat the chess systems but it's still fun to play chess you still have Magnus yeah up you know Heroku or whatever his name is um you know we're still gonna be tearing each other up at the land and I think we'll be doing more of that with AGI do you think it's a good time for me to put a deposit down on a Tesla Roadster I think I think think Elon might deliver it I think we've been waiting but all the pieces are falling into place I think it's going to be an epic car when it drops what do you think I I actually have to be careful around any public company stuff no comments on I want know the car yeah let's so let's let's talk uh uh some some some of your uh recent Investments so uh talk to us about reflect orbital that round got announced last year very exciting company uh uh I would love to hear it in your words and then a little bit more about your investment thesis uh and I'll stop there no I love it um so for anyone that doesn't know reflect orbital is an absolutely insane idea where they want to eventually have a constellation of satellites that refle reflect sunlight back down to the Earth with kind of two phases of the business the first phase is lighting applications and that's everything from like imagine in the LA fires um you know firefighters operating at night couldn't see anything it's it's genuinely really difficult to fight a fire at night and me able just like put sunlight and let these guys operate almost in daylight um you know say in a disaster when there's a hurricane like the hurricane in North Carolina or you know anywhere there there's lighting or like let's say you're doing a giant construction project um somewhere like away from a city that the lighting costs on these projects are insane um and so basically let you extend the hours especially like in Northern latitudes let you uh actually like do construction more year round um but the longer term Market is energy and you know I'll come back to like the thesis and why I was willing to make this investment in a second but basically the like the real the crazy big business someday is extending the useful time of solar power plants by a few hours a day um you know so depends on the latitude and time of year but like a solar farm will you know operate for with like decent efficiency call it 10 hours a day on average something like that and by having this reflector ring that basically lives kind of the satellite is a ring that basic the the constellations are a ring that basically only lives at the interface of Sunrise and sunet all the time like just the the light dark boundary and you can basically extend the very high efficiency time of a solar farm by you know call it two hours before sunrise and two hours after sunset with this constellation um so anyways insane idea I I I have been involved in the space Community for I mean officially for over 15 years unofficially for most of my life I've been obsessed with space since I was a little kid um like literally obsessed I can show you guys a sick ass video from I think like sixth grade where I did this thing called Satellite amateur radio experiment sarx which was this NASA program uh sick retro 90s video where we uh learned ham radio and talked to astronauts aboard one of the shuttle missions you know using ham radio got to ask a question in sixth grade it was pretty pretty fun but I've been obsess of space my whole life I've been skeptical on basically every space business model I've ever seen um the reflect guys there's a few things one I just profoundly believe that the launch costs launch Cost Plus a bit like Mass to orbit over the next five years or so is gonna increase the costs are going to drop dramatically and mass orbits going to increase dramatically basically guaranteed SpaceX is driving this if you look at the mass to orbit curves from the last five years like it's it's incredible how much more mass orbit we're doing every year because of SpaceX the cost hasn't dropped as much but I am very confident it will with Starship and so we're getting to the point where like you don't want to start making space Investments once all of that has already happened like then you're late and it's competitive you want to be a little bit ahead of the curve so I think we're at a point right now where for like the right businesses it makes sense to be building them right now so you can actually like be alive and be scaling a little bit as we hit like you you know you can ride with the cost and mass curve for what it's worth I passed on vaa early on obviously you guys are very close to Delan yeah I love Delan I think I should have done the investment the like and and I'll tie it to reflect in a second but the with vaa in my opinion in the like seed pitch I think they had the wrong micro idea but the right macro idea and it was my mistake for wanting both the right micro and the right macro and to unpack that like with Delian the first product that they wanted to do was ZB land so like this Ultra Pure um you know fiber optic cables that are really good for very long range Communications to me I just don't think that's a very important product and I actually think that with starlink we're going to need very little like ZB land in the future almost all long range data movement in the future is going to be done via starlink in my opinion I think starlink has like 10x Plus cost Advantage per gigabyte for Long Hall data transmission compared to say putting a fiber optic cable line under the ocean and that's where you actually get a benefit from something like ZB land and so anyways Dyan and I love to argue with each other super smart guy that's the one where like I had been so involved in space for so long that I already had a thesis on ZB land and already thought it was like irrelevant with star link and kind of passed because of that but the Mac I think was 100% right of just like we at the right time in space and just building an a cracked team of space engineers that know how to get things in and out of space like I think that will be very valuable and I I think it's like hard to imagine what varda's Revenue driving product will be in five to 10 years but I think they will have a successful product I just can't tell you what it will be so anyways back to reflect like I've met with so many space teams in the past and these guys just they're just insanely good and they know they and they have like a real even though it's such a crazy idea I think that the best businesses in history oftentimes sounded like insane ideas early on um you know a SEO was seed investor in Airbnb the like hearing the stories of how people thought about Airbnb in the beginning like it's crazy people were like I would never share my you know house with a stranger they're going to trash it they're gonna like you know use all my toilet paper whatever people's issues were um but Lo behold like it worked and seoa we you know made a huge amount of money from this and they couldn't even raise a seed round um you know if you look at SpaceX when Elon started it everyone thought he was insane like you're a internet entrepreneur is going to build a rocket company isn't there NASA for that um I just there's I think so many of the best businesses in history really sounded insane but for reflect I think I think they have if you really go through the details and I think very few people have actually gone through the details like they have unbelievable macro Tailwind so one is like just dropping launch costs second is I don't think you could have done this business 10 years ago even if the launch was there because we hadn't yet built enough like solar power plants on the ground um something that's nice for reflect is they don't we don't have to build any of the ground infrastructure zero um there's already you know C 10,000 solar power plants we get to leverage that anyways you go is the idea that uh reflect would take basically a REV share on the incremental sort of energy generated that they are directing at these farms and is that why uh yeah exactly right so basically um like for one of these solar Farms There is almost no additional operating expense to operate for these extra call it four hours throughout the day it's it's literally just like Silicon photovoltaics sitting on the ground that is otherwise just not generating power um and so it's like either they get no revenue from this or if they work with us then they get revenue and it has it actually has very profound ramifications to the kind of financial engineering of running a solar farm a lot of these utility style infrastructure projects you know you basically juice it where the con you use debt to build the solar farm and your revenue is we call it the first 15 years is just paying off the like all the debt you have and then years 15 to 30 is like a lot of profit but it takes a long time to get to the point where you're you know you've paid off a lot of the loan and it's generating lots of profit if you can increase the useful Time by 40% whatever of a solar farm that's all profit upfront it's insanely valuable and so it's like an incredibly easy sale so one of these things like if you build it they will come and they will come in droves um and but the the point is this company would have made zero sense before there were 10,000 solar Farms on the ground because building each of we couldn't build those ourselves it'd be too expensive but now that they're there we have just this very clear value prop and and like I I I think these guys actually know how to build the satellites needed and anyways it's an easy idea to [ __ ] on and it may not work you know like the but I believe in taking risk and I think these guys what I'm excited for I want to sit outside at night have set up our podcast set you come over and the sun just appears and we we do the uh you know the first podcast uh under space sunlight um question for you I think uh you know it's easy to see why SpaceX is a multi hundred billion dollar company uh in many ways that feels cheap at times being the sort of toll road to space uh at the same time uh how do you advis is there sort of any type of fear among Founders that are building uh you know space fairing startups that what if SpaceX does this right so so you're benefiting from the sort of decreased launch costs but at the same time there's this risk that somebody that uh you know can can has even more access to the to space can can sort of enter that market how do you think about that risk well I think that I think that Elon has probably the biggest Target on his back from a like regulatory perspective of anyone and there's no one I'm aware of who takes like antitrust and all that more seriously than him and like I I think that those guys are G to like they're just building the best launch platform in the world and they probably will launch some other business like obviously they launch starlink but I I think there's also a fixation on on Mars that's sort of helpful right it's like it's actually great that the the you know attention is going there uh and and there's plenty of opportunity in sort of low earth orbit for the rest of us yeah so I think that's a great Point um look I think I think SpaceX is deeply incentivized to have a giant ecosystem of lots of great independent companies in space and I think especially in Leo and yeah you're right I mean I think the focus is going to be Mars in addition to Starling which is already you know Opera rating and scaling and om Mars I'll just say I was I mean I've always thought just from an intellectual perspective it's the coolest thing ever to build a city on Mars but from like when I wrote my initial SpaceX investment memo you know was like yeah I don't really understand Mars from a business perspective but but like I think this is gonna be such a great company yeah like irrespective of it that it's fine like it's a side quest yeah from business perspective I'm now at the point where I actually I I I really believe that Mars is going to be like one of the biggest profit generating Endeavors in history and not necessarily not like from the direct like building a city on Mars but from all the indirect things and I'm sure you guys remember all the myths about or you know all the stories about NASA in the 60s and 70s all the spin-off technology microwaves materials and all these different things um I think this spin-off Technologies from having a clear goal of building a self-sustaining City on Mars which will have about a million people or whatever in 30 years the spin-off techn is going to lead to it's basically probably GNA have to make sure that nuclear power plants in a box get built that are very safe and reliable and you can transport in space going to have to perfect vertical farming you know GNA have to perfect surgical robots going to have to per you know or just have Optimus do it but you know it's there's so many things going to have to make Fabs that you can like assemble in space that can remake whatever you know Leading Edge silicon you need gonna have to do mining I I just I think all the second order effect spin out businesses that are going to come from this are going to be outrageously valuable and there's something about when you have a a clear goal and all the constraints of like being in Mars One it lets you recruit the best people in the world because it's such a cool project and the best people will do more than the SEC like a level below and the second is just having all these constraints forces you to come up with Solutions you would never come up with otherwise and those are oftentimes better Solutions um so anyways I think we're gonna I think the company is g to rip we have one more minute I want some advice for new entrepreneurs uh new grad wants to work with you wants to work with Sequoia wants to start a company at some point what are you telling them you had a little bit of an uh uncommon path PhD DARPA things what do you what do you recommend for new grads going into entrepreneurship in the age of AI in the age of Mars colonization I I mean look I it's not what people want to hear but I think that if you don't have a very very clear idea don't don't start a company just for the sake of starting a company go join an go join SpaceX or Jo go join X or Tesla or or you know some go join vaa go join some amazing company for a year or two I strong like I strongly think that's better than just like trying to start a company for the sake of starting a company um and then when you do like when you do have an idea for a company don't listen to what other people tell you even even me even like VCS you got to you got to kind of think for yourself and a lot of the best ideas seem crazy question place to end great place to uh you are a new Resident space brother it's been great having you fantastic nothing makes me happen than being your guys brother uh music my ears peace welcome welcome to the Brotherhood amazing thanks foring we're gonna play Counter Strike someday we should we should let's have a l party mid pod yeah yeah will be have a good one thanks for coming on thanks for having you fantastic uh I got a call right now yeah we got to wrap up this was a fantastic show thank you for watching thank you for listening tune in tomorrow we're doing more call-ins we're going to do more timeline more deep Dives we're just doing more of everything that's the theme of this year more and better and more and better and more and better and more and better Moss uh it's a live Moss lifestyle it's a live Moss lifestyle yes thank you everyone thanks everyone talk to you soon