Mark Groden - The Future of Flying - [Invest Like the Best, EP.374]

[00:00] I know firsthand how complex the tech stack is for asset managers, and seemingly every new tool and data source makes the problem even worse, adding more complexity, more headcount, and more risk. [00:09] Ridgeline offers a better way forward, one unified platform that automates away all that complexity across portfolio accounting, reconciliation, reporting, trading, compliance, and more. [00:18] all at scale. [00:20] Ridgeline is revolutionizing investment management, helping ambitious firms scale faster, operate smarter, and stay ahead of the curve. [00:26] See what Ridgeline can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgelineapps.com. [00:56] dot com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUM.VC. [01:27] My guest today is Mark Grodin. Mark is the founder and CEO of Skyrise, a company on a mission to make general aviation as safe as commercial aviation and change the future of flying.

[01:38] If you're interested in flying in any way, I think you'll be engrossed in this one. [01:42] Sometimes when learning about companies, it's hard for me to figure out their mission or what exactly they really want to accomplish. [01:48] When I visited Skyrise in L.A. as part of an investment I made in the business, I'd never seen a mission so clearly stated and supported, in their case, to bring deaths in general aviation helicopters and planes to zero. [02:00] As you'll hear, Mark was born to do this specific job, clearly a person doing their life's work. [02:06] I'm blown away every time I talk with him by his command of the details and by his obsession with flying. [02:11] With the many scary recent helicopter crashes, I think understanding the past and future of these and other non-commercial jet aircraft... [02:18] is timely and important. [02:19] I still can't believe how big the gap is in safety standards between general and commercial aviation. [02:25] We also cover the general future of flying and the exciting but challenging pathways to more automated transportation of every kind made possible by technology from Skyrise and other great innovative firms. Please enjoy my conversation with Mark Gruden. [02:40] I want to ask you about your personal story. I know that this has been... [02:45] area of passion for you for a really long time. You're still quite young, but you've been in and around aircraft for a long time. I'll let you tell the story. Go back as far as you want with a bias towards as early as possible, and maybe just give us the background for how you came to this problem space, this world, and your motivations, where they came from. [03:05] So there's an easy version to the question, and I'll take the slightly harder path. Please go the hard path. I may get a little emotional, so bear with me. But I grew up in the Midwest and spent a lot of time traveling between different Midwest states. So this is upstate New York, Buffalo, Metro Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago. And there's almost always a five-hour car ride to get from one place to the next. And when I was a kid, I was so excited about anything that was a transportation vehicle.

[03:35] planes, helicopters. I just wanted to build models and I wanted to make these things work. [03:40] And so I was about 10 years old. I had just moved away from my grandfather, who is the closest person in the world to me. And I wasn't able to see him that Thanksgiving because of the drive. It just didn't make sense that year. [03:53] And he sends me this popular mechanics article from 1957, and it has a picture of a flying saucer on the front of the magazine. He writes in the note, he says, one day maybe you'll be able to see me more because we'll all have flying saucers like this and you can just fly to me. I'm a little kid and I'm reading this article. It's from 1957. This is in the early 2000s now. And it says inside of five years, because of plastics, we will all have these flying saucers. We can fly ourselves places. [04:23] it's been a long time since that, and this future hasn't been realized. [04:27] And so at that moment in time, I went from building all these different things to all I wanted to build was model airplanes and helicopters. [04:34] And I was fortunate enough to get pulled into an Air Force funded research project when I was 15, built a first of kind UAV shortly thereafter. And then I worked in different parts of this technology space for basically all of my schooling and then got a Ph.D. in Bayesian networks, which is a deterministic field of artificial intelligence. [04:55] And as I was finishing my PhD, I had a lot of different paths I could have gone. [05:00] And it was literally the weekend of my defense. My grandpa died. [05:04] And at that moment, I was like, wow, okay, hey, we can all die, which as a kid, 26 year old, you know, it's obvious, but it really hit me.

[05:13] And then B, there's not a lot of time necessarily. So I just knew at that moment, this is the thing that I wanted to dedicate my life to. And so immediately after defending my PhD, I jumped into Skyrise and have been doing it ever since. And part of what really drives me every day is... [05:30] There were long periods of time [05:32] where I didn't get to see him. And it was because of that drive. [05:37] And so [05:38] It's just so frustrating to me because there was no way – [05:41] using our modern transportation system [05:43] to effectively do that five hour journey. It was like drive to the airport, go through security, fly for 45 minutes and get on the car on the other side, which was still five hours. [05:52] And so that flying saucer, that flying car future, I believe if we can realize a safe and effective helicopter and small airplane, then I would have gotten to see my grandfather more often. And I believe that a lot more people would get to live out more opportunities in life if we can create more efficient transportation system in the sky to connect more people and places. So I still have that article on the wall. It literally hangs in my room from what he sent me and it drives me every single day. [06:20] To ground everyone listening in the import of the area that you've spent [06:25] your life and are devoting your business to solving. I'd love you to just give us a little lesson on the world of aviation, specifically general aviation, and contrast that against commercial aviation because everyone's flown in extremely safe commercial airliners. General aviation is a fascinating market that you basically have been the one to teach me about. So I'd love to give the listener a window into that world.

[06:47] So commercial airliners, the aircraft that fly to and from gates around the world, this is what's known as Part 25 air transportation. [06:55] Basically, you have Airbus, Boeing, and a bit of Embraer that play in this market. And there's a couple tens of thousands, say, doing all that useful work. Outside of those aircraft, the rest of the world that's non-military is what's known as general aviation. So these are helicopters, airplanes of all size, all the way up to, and in some cases, past around 40 seats. Everything that performs complex missions like firefighting and police operations, tourism, personal ownership, all of that. [07:25] That's general aviation. Today, when we fly in a Part 25 airliner, it is the safest mode of transportation per seat mile basis as compared to any other mode of transportation on the planet, with perhaps the elevator as the exception, which actually has a trip safety statistic. And by the way, it's incredibly automated, which is an interesting side point. General aviation is not nearly as safe today as commercial airliners for a number of reasons. [07:55] due to highly trained, highly skilled pilots and high levels of automation working in conjunction with, and then big teams of people both on the ground and in person supporting those aircraft on both sides of the trip, and then big teams of people behind the scenes supporting them as well. We've never had a mode of transportation that's as safe as the commercial airliner is today, and it's really impressive.

[08:18] Can you talk a bit about the history and the key stages of that development? But maybe even before we do that for commercial, talk about the state of general aviation. So whereas we hear every news story today for something that happened on a Boeing plane, most of the time no one gets hurt, but it's still scary. A lot of people are scared to fly. It's been so long since there's been a major disaster that people take it for granted. Maybe you mentioned just the state of the general aviation market. [08:44] like you did the commercial one, how many aircraft, how many accidents, how many fatalities around the world? Like, what does that look like today? [08:51] Yeah, so general aviation, there's roughly 400,000 airplanes and helicopters around the world that are flying. And inside the United States on an annual basis, there's around 1,300 accidents and somewhere between 300 and 400 fatalities, which is frankly a quiet crisis, in my opinion, and it's in large part why I do what I do every day. [09:21] rent. But unfortunately, the [09:23] The technology that exists in Part 25 airliners hasn't yet made its way into general aviation for a number of reasons. And it's really holding back the safety and ultimately the adoption of this form of transportation into the broader community as a mode of transportation that's integrated into the fabric of our lives. [09:42] Why is that? If we're all so insistent on incredibly safe commercial travel, wouldn't that same safety standard have bled into a much bigger stock of general aviation aircraft? It's weird.

[09:55] Yeah, I think general aviation is something that, at least historically, it's been something that we either opt into or we don't. [10:02] Whereas commercial aviation feels like an integral part of how we live, and therefore we all, if we want to be a part of modern society, must engage with it. And therefore, the safety statistics that the collective, all of us, pushed it to, it's frankly beyond even the effective return on investment. It's just so incredibly safe and so much safer than any other mode of transportation that we engage in. If we were to make the same investment in another mode of transportation, we'd get outsized return for the increased safety benefit. [10:32] And it's something that people generally have to opt into. And for that reason, the technology and the safety related to it that people are willing to engage in is a little bit different. And so the skill that's been necessary to fly general aviation aircraft is so high that it really reduces the number of people that come towards this industry and are willing to engage in flying these vehicles. The other piece is the technology. [11:02] write an operating system as we are or build automation technology for smaller airplanes and helicopters. So if you look at a part 25 airliner, this is commercial aviation, beneath the cockpit is actually a giant room of boxes. And it's actually, it's a literal room you can stand inside of, and it's quite large. Those boxes are made by a number of different people in the industry, and they are what is the backbone for the digital fly-by-wire system and the high

[11:32] that support the pilots in those aircraft and ultimately drives them to the high level of safety that we all experience. [11:38] If you were to try and take that room of technology and all those processors and those boxes and bring them to a smaller airplane or helicopter, it simply wouldn't be able to fit, at least not till recently. And fortunately for us, Moore's law and a lot of other things that have gotten better over the last several decades allows the technology for the first time to be miniaturized and brought to an industry that has never before had that automation benefit. [12:09] And that's been a lot of what we've been focused on is how do you write an operating system that leverages the best of the technology and the best of automation and the best of the human intention? [12:18] the high level decision making of the pilot and bring that together to recognize a higher level of safety for this industry. [12:25] And if you were to say, let's go do this even five years ago, I don't believe it would have been possible. I think what's just available to us right now based upon where the processing technology is, that we can take this type of technology that's existed in commercial airlines for 20, 30 years and bring it for the first time to general aviation. [12:45] Maybe explain fly-by-wire and what is literally being processed. So I've got a room full of processors. What is the fly-by-wire system? How does that contrast against what you might find in a helicopter or something? And what is going on in that room that now can be brought to GA? [13:01] Yeah, so today inside these rooms underneath the cockpit is the whole bunch of processing power that basically translates the pilot's input to the flight control surface output. So when the pilot pulls back on the stick, we all expect the airplane nose to come up. And so right now there's no mechanical connection in most all commercial airliners between the pilot's input and what's actually happening on the back of the jet.

[13:31] the pitch of the control surface, and that's ultimately what changes the attitude of the airplane. Because of that computer in the loop, it gives the opportunity for an automation system to provide protections. So for example, when Sully Sullenberger landed that airplane on the Hudson River, he had the benefit of this technology. And no matter how hard he pulled back on that stick, the fly-by-wire system and the computers down in that room wouldn't change the pitch of the aircraft to be so much that it would cause it to stall. And therefore, they got a very graceful, [14:01] and settled beautifully and resulted in minimal damage to the aircraft and ultimately no lives lost. If you contrast that with [14:10] general aviation, that room doesn't exist, and it's entirely mechanical, much like a go-kart or your bicycle, where the mechanical connection of the human is actually directly coupled to the flight control surface itself. So when you push or pull on the yoke or the stick, whatever exists inside the cockpit of your choice, there's actually a bunch of levers and pulleys or push-pull tubes that connect it directly to the flight control surface, and there's no computer in the loop whatsoever. Right. [14:36] which means that, yes, you're directly controlling the flight control surface, but there's no intermediate computer. There's nothing helping you. There's nothing supporting you as the pilot to staying inside what we call the safe flight envelope, for example, keeping the airplane from stalling. So it's the same technology that existed when the Wright brothers first flew. The Wright brothers called it wing warping, and they had this giant stick that they held on to, and they pushed and pulled it left and right, and then on the ends of the stick were the cables,

[15:06] Today we have hinges and ailerons, which is the only major difference, but otherwise it's exactly the same. Helicopter controls also haven't changed since Igor Sikorsky first flew over half a century ago. It's exactly the same mechanical connections. [15:20] When you think of the scariest incidents with helicopters, is it mostly the case that the cause for those accidents, which I guess are most commonly fatal or catastrophic if the thing falls out of the sky, is it mostly engine failure that causes helicopter accidents? [15:35] Yeah, engine failure definitely makes it towards the top of the list, but the number one cause of fatal accidents in not just helicopters, but all general aviation, is loss of control in flight, which is actually wild when you think about it. Because what that means is you have a perfectly good flying machine, a good flying airplane, an effective flying helicopter, and usually the pilot becomes spatially disoriented and no longer is stabilizing the aircraft with the right side up and the other side down and starts putting in the wrong control input. [16:05] flight envelope, which is then unrecoverable. Engine failure is definitely up there as well. And in the case of the airplane and the helicopter, you can safely walk away, of course, from an engine failure in an airplane because it becomes a glider in the helicopter because of the high rotor inertia of the one large spinning disc that allows you to do the autorotation. But the same cannot be said true for aircraft that do not have one large spinning rotor. [16:29] I just want to go back and really nail this point about what is happening in these crafts. So you'll often hear in commercial aviation that most of the flight is fully controlled by a computer and that the pilots are mostly relevant on takeoff and landing. But what you're describing is that, yes, maybe they're more involved, but that their actual input is mediated by a pretty extensive, sophisticated fly-by-wire system. It is not literally them landing. They're sort of managing the landing versus actually conducting it. Is that a fair...

[16:59] Assessment. [17:00] Yeah, they definitely have control over the attitude of the airplane, but there are safety protections around them as they're doing that. And the way to think about this is as a pilot, you're trained in three categories, aviate, navigate, communicate. And the navigate and communicate, the best pilots in the world are really, really good and way better than your average. The aviate portion, which is how do you safely land the airplane and basically manage the joystick, [17:30] today. [17:31] So when you started Skyrise with this resolve to improve the standard of what's possible in this world, how were you thinking about the problem itself? What was your original hypothesis on how you and a company and a product could directly impact this? And how has that same question evolved through time? It's such a big problem space. I'm sure there's lots of ways you could have taken it. So what was your original hypothesis? How did you think about what to do? [18:01] reality sense, what have you learned is actually the most important. [18:04] The interesting thing that's remained true the whole time is this deep-seated belief that [18:08] we could leverage today's technology to create [18:11] safer and easier to fly helicopters and airplanes. The question was, how do you best leverage that technology inside of the market and inside of the regulatory landscape in order to ship the best possible technology to deliver on that? And when I started the company, one of the things that

[18:30] I think we did that was pretty valuable at different points as we actually deployed pieces of the technology and operationalized it in the field with real missions like flying first responders to scenes for emergencies, real 911 calls coming in and operating an air taxi service, which we did in Los Angeles. Experiences like that really helped solidify the product requirements and helped us see what are the key value propositions the technology needs to bring to market in order to be successful. [19:00] fundamentally. Believe in the human plus the machine can do something greater than some of the parts. And that's the same is true of the elevator. It's not reading your brain and figuring out where you want to go. So in the early days, we did have an unmanned helicopter flying around three months after I founded the company and no safety pilot on board, which was a first in a lot of respects. [19:19] And which also goes to show you, it's not that hard to build an unmanned flying machine. The hard part is taking that technology and graduating it to a very high level of safety and capturing the real time intention and skill of the pilot. That's what's taken us the better part of seven or eight years. [19:35] And so how do you leverage the best of automation and the best of the human pilot [19:40] Together, we're aspiring to create the safest mode of transportation. [19:44] We want there to be zero deaths in the industry on an annual basis. So there are a lot of question marks around what does that optimal human machine interface look like? [19:53] We iterated on dozens, if not hundreds of different ways. When you have a fully digital system that is working through a computer,

[20:00] The world is your oyster. You can put whatever you want in there. It could have a thumb stick. It could have two joysticks. It could have pedals. It can have whatever you want. And it took us a very long time to figure out, well, given we have this human and computer working together, how do we capture the human intent and how do we do it in real time given they can change their mind at any given moment? We're actually on the right path initially, but it's one thing to have a conceptual design of one control stick and two touchscreens. It's a whole other to realize it and then solve for all the edge cases. [20:30] Thank you. [20:30] And then the other layer on top of that is we wanted to create a universal interface across all different airplanes and helicopters. So today when you get into a different helicopter airplane, no two are the same. Unlike the car where you get into a Prius or a choose your vehicle, Ford Fusion, it's exactly the same. It's a steering wheel gas pedal, brake pedal, and you can drive any vehicle anywhere in the world. And we all kind of take that for granted, but it's basically a consistent human machine interaction. [20:57] And the skill that we developed is translatable to all those different vehicles. [21:01] Today, when you learn how to fly an airplane or helicopter, that cockpit is specific to that make model vehicle and has minimal translation in terms of muscle memory to the next one. And so you see professional pilots with just two types of aircraft that they're rated on to fly. That's what they do for a living. And so one of the design requirements that we had was we want to create not just the first ever operating system for this industry, but we also want to leverage that operating system to create a user interface and a cockpit that is the same, irrespective of both the airplane or helicopter.

[21:31] that strongly contributes to safety. And then also the requirements around it needs to be able to fly in all weather conditions, which is one of the other things that I think really holds back this industry, especially when we think of this flying car, flying taxi future. Currently, helicopters, as we saw with COBE, they really struggle to fly through clouds. It's not a very safe thing. In fact, the United States helicopter safety team cites 56 seconds from entering the cloud until on average, it's a fatal accident. And so how do you make it so that not only can [22:01] So it's rated to take off when it's cloudy outside. And if you can do that, you can dramatically change the dispatch reliability. And if you can fly more often through clouds, which is necessary if you want to realize the transportation system, then it also redefines the unit economics. [22:17] How would you address the people out there, whom I know many for sure, that are just [22:21] terrified of flying a helicopter specifically, whether it's COBE or other very high profile disasters and accidents where people have died. It seems as though people are maybe somewhat justifiably very scared of flying in a helicopter relative to even any kind of plane because of the notion of gliding. What would you say about how accurate this fear is just in the data, what you think the future of this might become, why helicopters are useful in the first place,

[22:51] craft that has been around a long time, but has a certain fear in the public consciousness. [22:57] Yeah, unfortunately, the safety statistics of the helicopter as compared to the airplane really do justify a lot of these fears. You are more likely to be in an accident in a helicopter today as compared to an airplane, but it's incredibly rare. [23:11] for it to be the case as a result of something wrong with the helicopter itself. What's more likely the case is either it's not been maintained effectively or the pilot just got inundated with so much going on and dropped one of the balls they're metaphorically juggling. The helicopter is so much harder to fly than the airplane because the pilot is actively stabilizing it. And the way to think about that is flying a helicopter in a hover is like trying to put a [23:41] poking that marble as quickly as they can with two of their index fingers to keep it there. [23:45] And so it doesn't really leave you much left to think or there's no other extremity. You literally have one hand on one stick and another hand on the other, and then both of your feet on pedals. So if something goes wrong or you have to do something inside the cockpit, there's not a lot of available cognitive load. As to why the helicopter has existed for so long and what type of utility they can have, I think Igor Sikorsky's quote was a great one. He basically said, the airplane can fly over you and drop a life jacket, whereas the helicopter [24:15] life. And so this flying car future, a lot of people point to where imagine getting from point A to point B in a more efficient way really can be offered with the helicopter, but it's been held back because it's so hard to fly. And because of the complexity of flying, the safety record is what it is. And-

[24:36] I would say if you can come up with a way to make the helicopter easier to fly where the pilot isn't literally both hands and feet fully occupied basically all the time, and you can also make it inherently stable so that it's not a marble on top of an upside down bowl, then you can make them a heck of a lot safer than they are today. And that's really what a lot of the safety statistics point at. The other thing that I would mention is... [24:59] It is incredibly frequent that we have controlled flight into terrain, which is effectively what happened to COBE. [25:06] It was an intact helicopter and a mountain that was there at the beginning of their flight. And they got spatially disoriented because they flew into a cloud. So if you have technology that can stabilize the aircraft and tell you where you are in space and not require the pilot to be, again, poking at that ball on top of the bowl, then you can avoid things like that. [25:26] What do you think about the potential pathways to a future with, I'll call them flying cars? [25:31] The famous idea from Peter Thiel. [25:34] We wanted flying cars. We've got 140 characters. So much of the development was digital, purely digital. And we're going to talk today a lot about the wide range of autonomy in transport and craft. But what do you think specifically about this very easy to imagine flying car future and whether we might get it? And if so, how? [25:52] I think the flying car future, sometimes the problem statement isn't well defined, but I think we all subscribe to this concept of we want to fly to work or fly where we're going as opposed to driving there. And there's been a lot of... [26:04] attempts at delivering that future. And maybe I'll just talk about some of the things that I'm very confident in, not the answer, and then some paths that could be the answer to getting us there. The first one is the concept of a car that flies. That just makes no engineering sense whatsoever. You're trying to make a rotable aircraft, basically. And these are two completely at odds engineering requirement sets that basically makes for a really bad car or a really bad airplane or both. And so that's just a logical...

[26:32] The next is, what is holding us back from using existing airplanes and helicopters from delivering to us that future and this concept of being able to fly places? And through the course of Skyrise and my journey since I was a little kid, I fundamentally believe that the existing aircraft types, airplanes, helicopters, these form factors, fully have the ability to deliver to us this future if you can make it safer, if you can make it easier, and ultimately, as a result of those things, make it more accessible. [27:02] and these existing vehicle types, everything gets better. You get economies of scale for the first time, and you can make meaningful investment in new technologies, even beyond safety once you have that, to make them more efficient, to make them quieter. And I don't believe the answer is necessarily go and reinvent, because on a fundamental level, these are incredibly efficient platforms at taking stored energy and translating into flight, whether it be with vertical takeoff and landing, or from a runway with a wing. We've solved that physics problem, and we've done a really good job. [27:32] The question is, how do we improve upon that leveraging technology today? And the first step to getting there, in my mind, is building a market. And I think the first step in building a market is solving the safety problem that plagues this industry. So I think the flying car future can actually come. It's not far away. I think with our technology integrated into a helicopter, that will offer effectively what everybody's been looking for in the eyes of a flying car.

[28:02] from A to B at a reasonable cost. [28:04] You said something interesting there, which is economies of scale for the first time. So would you say that we just haven't ever enjoyed economies of scale in the production of these craft before? [28:13] Yeah, that's right. I don't think we've enjoyed economies to scale in general aviation to date. I do new employee roundtables with everybody that joins the company. And one of the trivia questions I ask is, how many Model Ts were built in 1925 a day? [28:28] And I don't think I've gotten a guess greater than a thousand from anyone that's joined the company. And the correct answer is 25,000 units per day. [28:37] And that, of course, is just the Model T. This doesn't include all the other competitors and all the other make model cars in the industry. And so that's the number of cars that were being built. [28:46] about 100 years ago on a daily basis for that MEC model. If you compare that to general aviation today, [28:52] General Aviation is about 2,500 new aircraft per year right now. It has historically peaked at about 17,000 in the 1970s and has been a little bit higher, but that's just getting the annual rate to be closer to the daily rate of the Model T a long, long time ago. So if you could imagine that Tesla or Choose Your Automotive Company was building the volume of aircraft that we are currently building as a general aviation industry today,

[29:22] of the pre-production prototypes. So when I bring folks into the company who are from the automotive space and show them the aircraft, I love opening it up and showing the number of systems and then explaining how much simpler it is as compared to even the most basic car. Take a Ford Fiesta or a Toyota Camry and compare it to even the most kitted out general aviation airplane or helicopter [29:44] The amount of compute, the number of systems on boards of these machines, they're not even in the same ballpark. The reason why the automobile is so great is because we're building so many of them. [29:53] So what do you think will happen next? [29:56] if this gets much safer... [29:58] Obviously, the demand would be there. If you told me there's no way I could get hurt and I had to pay, I don't know, $120 at the cost or something like that to get from point A to point B way faster, I would certainly do it. And I think lots of people would. So do you think that that's the story, that there's just tons of latent demand for air transport and that fundamentally the unit to unlock that demand is safety? [30:20] Yeah, I think that's spot on. I think there's a lot of people that would rather fly places. In fact, through Skyrise, I've learned this is one of the most innate human conditions that we have. Almost everyone I meet or talk to has had some dream of flying at some point, whether you're floating above the buildings or you're in your own version of the Iron Man suit. Literally everyone dreams about this. [30:41] And what's keeping us back from engaging with it on a daily basis, I think, really comes down to the safety issue. Because if you look at the number of people who start learning to fly a general aviation airplane or helicopter, the graduation rate is roughly one out of seven people. So six out of seven people are washing out. I don't know very many people who start learning to drive a car and then don't graduate. It's certainly not six out of seven. It's probably 99.9 and some number of nines after that people graduate and can drive a car.

[31:11] so difficult to fly the aircraft. And oftentimes, you're only one mistake away from killing yourself and potentially your entire family someday. There just aren't many weekend activities you can engage in that has that type of situation around it. And so I believe if you can change that paradigm and make it so that it's safe, and you're not constantly worried about your proficiency being good enough in order to fly, then we'd start to use it more. And if we use it more, then it becomes more integrated into our daily lives as a new mode of transportation. [31:39] Let's say that's all true. What are the other impediments that we would have to deal with if all of a sudden the helicopter was completely safe and cost 120th? I would imagine that I could look outside right now and see 50 of them above my head and that might piss some people off. What are the other considerations around this more air-based, more accessible transport future that you think are important to contend with? [32:02] I would start by saying the infrastructure necessary to support this future is largely already in place. There are thousands of general aviation airports around the country that were built 50 plus years ago. And most people live within 20 minutes of a general aviation airport. So the quote unquote subway stations for the sky are already there. They already exist. They're just. [32:23] for the most part, very underutilized. There are a few that are way overutilized, but by and large, they're underutilized because there's not a lot of people flying general aviation aircraft. And so then if you're using hubs like this, then it establishes more natural flight paths and corridors. And if you're thoughtful about how people fly through the air, you can make the impact on the surrounding environment very minimal. And that comes by way of steep climb

[32:53] and then certain procedures that reduce the noise impact of the aircraft. And technology can do a lot to change the noise that these vehicles are creating. But you can imagine if they're not as safe as they could be today, noise is way down the list of things that as an industry we're working to solve. So the first is we have the infrastructure. The second is using the infrastructure that we have, we can define flight routes and corridors that minimize the presence of these aircraft. And once you get over a couple thousand feet, which is the normal [33:23] Most of the time it's imperceptible and you can do a lot to make it almost invisible to the naked eye and also the ear, especially flying over population centers. The other thing that I would say is if you believe in that future, you probably also would then believe that there would be technology on board these machines. And that technology can help coordinate when they're taking off, when they're landing, how they're sequenced, and then obviously those flight paths, those highways in the sky, quote unquote, which leads to another interesting point, which is that not only are the subway stations built, [33:52] there are no train tracks delay. The train tracks are fly these GPS points through the airspace, and there's no environmental impact on more flight hours being accumulated or flying more air miles because you don't have a highway system to maintain. So people will talk about this a bit, but I don't think it is well enough understood. The throughput of our airspace is almost infinite relative to where we are today because you have those three dimensions. And you can do very simple

[34:22] the airspace, and you can drive a tremendous amount of throughput without a huge ground impact. [34:27] In any conception of a sci-fi utopian future, automated transport is a key feature of any movie you watch or any book you read. And you're building something in and adjacent to either fully or partially automated systems. And I don't just mean aircraft here. I mean, all sorts of automated automatic transport. What have you learned about that world just in general? AVs has been a topic, it seems like for a really long time. It's both incredibly promising. You're [34:57] but it always seems like perpetually five years away from total autonomy or something. What have you learned as a participant in this field, in this quest to get more forms of automated transport? What would the outsider not appreciate about what's going on in that world? [35:12] Early on when I started the company, a lot of people thought, oh, we really need autonomous aircraft. And the definition of autonomy has a lot of different ways of looking at it. And one of the things that we came to understand very rapidly is you don't need full quote-unquote autonomy. In fact, there is no truly autonomous transportation vehicle that I know of that's used at any reasonable scale. It's about coupling the human intention with the machine and leveraging high levels of automation in the machine to capture the human intention and then go and carry it out. [35:42] this to flight, a lot of people are saying, oh, we need to make the aircraft fully autonomous. That's the only way to realize this future. And the reality is, no, there's actually a number of steps before that that drives almost all of the economic value that you would get from quote, unquote, autonomy.

[35:56] Namely, right now, the number of pilots specifically for a helicopter is about 20,000 helicopter pilots in all the United States and maybe 1,000 of them that we would suggest you get into a helicopter with. Well, that's basically like saying if you want to go drive around in a car, you need Max Verstappen with you. You need a Formula One driver to hop in the vehicle with you. That's the level of skill and the scarcity of those people right now. Well, imagine if any one of us could hop into a helicopter or small airplane and fly ourselves safely. Right. [36:23] Now it's no longer Max Verstappen driven ride. It's driven by us and we're commanding the vehicle and we're making the decision making and it's totally accessible to us. And that's been a necessary ingredient to get widespread adoption of the automobile because we can all drive ourselves without drivers sitting up in the front seat. And so when we think about flight, we think about highly automated and how do we make it so that you don't need one of those 20,000 or 1,000 people in the front of that cockpit as a seat that isn't actually there for the trip. [36:51] That drives an incredible change to the unit economics because now each seat is occupied by somebody that actually is paying passenger. They want to go on this trip and go through this journey, and they're capable of doing it themselves. [37:03] When you think about the car, I think a lot of the reason why people go to full autonomy in the car is because we've already driven the cost all the way down and everybody on the planet can already drive a vehicle. And so the only thing left is to take the human completely out of the loop. But it is the hardest application of this type of technology that exists today. And I believe someday we'll get there, but we're still a ways away. And part of the proof of that is

[37:26] When I started the company, I would always explain to people, we've had unmanned aircraft breaking the sound barrier more than 50 years ago. And people would look at me like I was crazy, and then they'd go Google it, and sure enough, they would find that to be the case. And the thing about flying is it's an incredibly infrastructure-dependent environment. You're not going to ride your bicycle up into the sky. There's no fire hydrant versus dog versus something else that you have to identify and instantly react to. There's really, by and large, there's nothing out there. [37:56] regulated and communicating with everything around it, at least almost all the time. And so that makes for an environment that is incredibly good for taking today's automation technology and applying it as compared to the autonomous car, where literally one [38:11] city block in New York City has more complexity than an entire cross-country trip of an airplane, the number of things that you could encounter and the number of edge cases. And so it is a far more reasonable application of advanced automation to bring us closer to high-level decision-making and capturing the intention of the human. And so that's one of the other reasons why I had such high conviction when I founded the company. I understood that we could take this technology and reap a lot of the economic benefit. [38:39] So maybe this all zooms in now on an important discussion of an operating system. I think you call it SkyOS. [38:45] Everyone listening is a huge fan of the notion of operating systems in technology and in business. If you think about Microsoft or if you think about Apple iOS or Android, an operating system and a standard like the way you describe pedals and the steering wheel.

[39:00] is the basis upon which so much of modern technology is built. [39:05] Maybe just talk us through what it's like to build an operating system, which I think is the core unit of technology that will hopefully unlock lots of cool stuff and transport in the future from Skyrise. But what is that like as a business person thinking about designing and implementing an operating system? What are the challenges that are unique and interesting? What's hard? What's exciting? [39:26] I'm super interested in just someone building one of these things and what you've learned. [39:30] Yeah, well, it's been quite the journey. A lot of learnings. [39:33] I didn't know how to fly a helicopter when I started the company, so that was something that I thought was a good skill to have, something good to know. So I went through that process because I really wanted to better understand what the operating system was required to do and also where the state of the industry is today. As far as the challenges... [39:51] One of the things that Apple, I think, really discovered was if you can get 90, 95% of the value in terms of what the device can do for you with, in their case, iOS, then people prefer simpler. And ultimately, they use more of its capability because of the simplicity of accessing all of those different capabilities inherently built in. And the same is true for us. And that's exactly what we did. So we said, OK, we're going to do everything we can to maintain the capability. And I actually believe in a lot of respects, we've enhanced the capability of the vehicle. [40:21] helicopter can fly through a cloud once our SkyOS technology is certified. There's a lot of other things as well. But if you can make all of that accessible to people and...

[40:31] basically give them what they need to know when they need to know it, then it becomes that much more intuitive. So we spend a lot of time, [40:39] you could say bringing people in of all walks of life. So somebody who's never been in an airplane or helicopter before, somebody who's an expert pilot, somebody who's a military pilot, who's only flown airplanes, who's only flown helicopters. And we've gotten all of their experience from actually using different variations of the product. And then also... [40:57] effectively interviewing them. Because what our operating system is, and we haven't talked about this publicly at all until this discussion, it is an expert decision artificial intelligence system. And basically, it's a giant equation. And it would fill up the entire room I'm sitting in if we were to write it out. And the expert system that we devised basically takes the collective expertise of this whole industry and all the people closest to the products and knows exactly [41:27] The computer and our operating system knows exactly what it's going to do in every possible scenario you can encounter. And we can show you if we wrote out the equation and traced it all the way through the trees and the offense statements, what's going to happen. And we believe that's the responsible way of creating a technology like this. So we only picked up the Lego blocks, if you will, that are known and certifiable. And then we assembled them in a way that hasn't been realized before.

[41:57] It was the same across all the vehicles. But on a foundational level, it's this deterministic artificial intelligence approach that encodes the entire industry and all of our learnings. [42:08] We can take people with zero flight experience whatsoever and put them in a simulator for 15 minutes and then put them up in a full-scale aircraft and they're in full control from skids up to skids down. And if you compare that to the automobile, I distinctly remember the first time I got in a car. I certainly couldn't park it, let alone barely drive around the parking lot. And here we have people with 15 minutes of training flying a helicopter in full control from takeoff to landing. [42:38] an operating system that leverages higher levels of automation than we experience in the automobile, which we all take for granted is a known and easy quantity. [42:45] It raises a question around pilots. Everyone's a driver, which is a key thing for the scale of cars and the usability of cars. I think probably some listening, I put myself in that category, would be massively intimidated to think I'm going to get in a helicopter and press some buttons and there's not going to be a pilot with me and I'm going to get where I want to go. [43:15] How do you think about the role of the pilot? You said there's only 1,000 pilots maybe that you would personally fly with in a helicopter. That's just an insanely small number. Talk about pilots and what you think could happen next.

[43:30] in the pilot community and the number of pilots when technology gets more standardized and there's not a different set of technology for every single aircraft. [43:38] we think about it like empowering pilots. Because part of the problem today is that [43:43] Not only is there a very small community of people who can safely fly these machines, [43:47] But they're restricted on when they can fly because this category of aircraft just doesn't have very high – [43:52] reliability of dispatch. So if it's cloudy outside, oftentimes they're not going. And in L.A., [43:58] It's sufficiently cloudy so as to not be able to fly about a quarter of the time. So if you think about that, that means the top line revenue coming in to pay the pilots and pay for these aircraft is taking a really significant hit. It shouldn't even be thought of as 25%. If you're running a transportation system that's down 25% of the time, it's not a transportation system at all, right? You can't rely upon it. We would abandon it as a society. So if you're a pilot, though, and now you can fly 99% of the time, that completely changes [44:28] to use it, the utilization goes up. And then I actually think pilots will end up getting paid more, not less, in the not-too-distant future. And not to mention, as a pilot now, you should be able to fly more aircraft types. So if you're sitting there with a pilot's license and you can now fly 99% of weather days or whatever it is, much better than 75, and I can also fly as a pilot any type of airplane or helicopter, well, that has a lot more utility for more missions. So we see it

[44:58] When you look at it even further out, let's say even beyond that, humans are incredible at high-level decision-making. We're really good at ascertaining all kinds of different things and thinking about what our intentions are and the intentions of the people that are with us, and then changing [45:13] the state of our decision based upon an evolving environment. And that's why you see the most advanced pilots in the world. That's all they do. They're mission commanders. They're thinking about what they want that mission to look like and how they want to carry it out. They're not in the weeds on the detailed systems and their management. Because it's not a good use of the human to be troubleshooting all those different systems. It just doesn't make any sense. Same is true here. So you really want to make it so that all of us are in charge of where we're going and making [45:43] imagine a future where [45:45] When you're a teenager, you get a driver's license and a flyer's license. And from a complexity standpoint, the technology already makes it easier to fly than it is to drive. I totally think that's the future. I think it'll take a couple decades to get there. I do think one of the things that we have the benefit of, though, is all of our children, they all are playing with technology. And when they imagine what a flying machine looks like, they imagine it to look like what we've created. I can't tell you how many people. We show them our cockpit and show them our operating system. [46:15] No, not at all. Take a look at what it looks like today. And it looks like it belongs in World War II. And they're like, oh, I thought that you guys are building is already real and realized. [46:24] And what about non-human transport? [46:27] uses of aviation i'm thinking military applications or cargo applications like what is going on in that world that you think people might find interesting

[46:36] Yeah, it's fascinating because [46:38] Obviously, the technology being the field that there is far more advanced than the commercial space. And I mentioned earlier that the military has had unmanned aircraft for many, many decades. What I think is interesting is it's the overlap of a willingness to field revolutionary technology that doesn't necessarily have the ability to be certified in the commercial market. [46:59] But it's also the hardest mission profile set because you're flying in obviously GPS-denied environments. You're flying against adversaries. You have people trying to shoot you out of the sky. So it is fertile ground for deploying new, cool, advanced technologies that otherwise really wouldn't have a home or market fit. [47:18] So a simple example would be U.S. Coast Guard helicopters generally do not dispatch if it's not a full moon, or they have no moon whatsoever, I should say, because they can't tell the difference between the sea and the sky, and that leads to spatial disorientation, and that's really unsafe for the dispatch. But you could see a day in the future where if that helicopter or that airplane was equipped with our technology, then that aircraft could be flown optionally piloted on a mission that it otherwise wouldn't have dispatched. And so I think the same could be said for... [47:47] Going back to your question, not just the commercial market for unmanned flight, but also the military. And the military has already made that decision a number of times over. I think it would be really compelling for them if they could have the same asset, have a person on board in one moment, and then the next jump out. And then the aircraft is doing some type of logistics mission or other for them. And I think there may be opportunity for our technology to support that.

[48:08] Maybe say a little bit about what you've learned of the business of flight. So... [48:13] You mentioned the duopoly on the OEMs for Boeing and Airbus or near duopoly, little oligopoly. What about the rest of the world? Who produces these things? What are the good businesses in aviation transporter or aviation, just generally speaking? And just generally, I'm just curious for you to riff on the business of flight, which we haven't talked much about. [48:33] Yeah, it's such a difficult industry to break into because of the regulatory challenge and then obviously inherent with the engineering challenge of building these systems that, to your point, there really is a duopoly on aircraft integrators for Part 25. You have the Embraer, which is number three on that list. [48:50] When you look at general aviation, there's not that many OEMs. There's a handful of OEMs, and these folks buy engines, they buy avionics, they buy seats, and they rivet wings into those aircraft, or they put a composite wing on and they integrate all the pieces together. What's really interesting is that the Tier 1 suppliers really have tremendous leverage, for better or worse, over these integrators. So the Honeywells of the world that are providing the Park 25 airliners, if that box is not working in that avionics bay, the airplane's not dispatching. [49:20] a life cycle contract with that airliner. And that box is going to see a spare very quickly. And they probably already have provisioned the spares. By the way, the cost of the spare is usually 3x what the cost of the initial unit was. And there's 80% gross margin. And they're locked in because the airframe has been certified with that technology. And therefore, if you're Boeing and you're Delta and you want to field that airplane today,

[49:44] Thou must have the Honeywell box. [49:46] What's interesting though is, at least in general aviation, [49:49] What we've learned over the years is that these OEMs would love to be able to ship better airplanes and helicopters, but they aren't in the business of building actuation. They're not in the business of building automation systems. They're certainly not in the business of writing software and writing an operating system. That's just not their skill set. [50:07] So if you can come along and give them a whole new set of technology that enhances the safety of their vehicles, then that has tremendous value proposition to them. And it's in their best interest because they want to move more metals. [50:19] For them, a lot of their revenue stream and also their margin comes from servicing that install base. For an OEM, they want the biggest fleet they can have because they're upcharging on all the spares and all the overhauls and all the maintenance. That's actually where they make most of their money. Many times, the margin on shipping a new vehicle is actually very low. It's single-digit percents. Then- [50:40] Okay, the vehicle is going to be in service for 30 years, sometimes longer. There's general aviation airplanes out there for 50 years. So the OEMs are incentivized to create the largest install base, accumulate the greatest number of flight hours they can, because the more flight hours flown, obviously, the more spare parts are necessary, and the greater that revenue stream. [50:57] are incentives in that respect. [50:59] are completely aligned because the safer and easier it is to fly, the more people are going to fly. Therefore, the more spare parts the OEM needs to ship and the more vehicles they get to service. So that's all positive. And then the safety element can't go understated. Every time there's an accident in this industry, it hurts everyone. It shakes the confidence that people have of engaging in flight and whoever the OEM was. Of course, people assume it's the aircraft. And so that's not good for anybody's bottom line. And what we've seen generally, and I think it's

[51:29] really positive is safety enhancing technology gets a hundred percent market adoption fairly rapidly. And it just goes back to, well, who wants to put their life on the line while they're [51:42] People will spend outsized check size to get a safer vehicle. [51:47] So if you think about the future, you're building... [51:49] SkyOS, this thing that hopefully will fuel literally a safety standard a thousand times safer than the current minimum standard for general aviation. Hopefully that's, you know, zero deaths down from tons and tons of incidences every single year just in the U.S. alone. [52:05] What gets in the way of this working? I suspect everyone listening is like, great. I hope this happens tomorrow. And this thing is as good as you say it is. And it changes the way we think about flying. [52:15] What would get in the way of that vision for the future coming to be a reality? Because it seems like everyone would just agree, like, yeah... [52:23] better safety, better standard, more standardization, more pilots, new kinds of craft. [52:28] We all want all this stuff. What do you think the most likely things are to get in the way of that future? [52:33] When I founded the company, the answer would have been very different than it is today. There were a lot of things that... [52:39] We had a lot of conviction, but we hadn't yet proven in terms of the technology's ability to deliver everything that now we know it can and has. So at this point, the technology is done. The product is done. And that's only true now, like in the last 12 months. And our target is next year to be able to give somebody the keys to an aircraft equipped with our operating system and all these safety benefits. After that, it's all about market adoption.

[53:09] on the safety of this industry. And that's obviously the thing that motivates me. That's the thing that motivates a lot of our team here. And I think the population of pilots, both existing and those who have always wanted to be a pilot, are all going to adopt that fairly quickly. We've been actually compared more recently to the F-35, which is incredibly humbling to say the least because it was a $500 billion development program to realize the F-35. Obviously, it was a [53:39] with in some respects is similar to what we've built. And what I think that just highlights is how the best pilots in the world are already benefiting from similar technology to what we've built here and are basically bringing to a market that more desperately needs it for its safety impact. So our goal is to get this into the hands of the expert pilots as quickly as we can, and then also the novice pilots who are new to the field and may be a pilot that same day, but trying to elevate their level of safety to something closer to the 10,000-hour pilot. [54:08] Technology never stands still. That's one of the coolest things about it. If you think out, [54:13] I'll say 10 years, 15 years, and you think about the future of SkyOS... [54:18] What comes to mind? [54:20] What are the ways that even after you're good to go and this is being used everywhere, you still want to drive – [54:26] technology, innovation, and improvement in this field. [54:30] In a couple of decades, I think everyone should wake up in the morning and have a trip that they want to go on. And it's a question of whether you want to fly or you want to drive. Air transportation should be that integrated into our day-to-day lives. And the cost should be no different between the different modes. The fundamental physics of flight points to that. And we can already realize that cost on a seat mile basis, assuming there's folks in the seats that rivals the automobile. So that's right there. That's right in front of us.

[55:00] storage device, that's around the corner. And once that starts to happen, then it's not that flight is going to take over all the other modes. You still need multimodality in order to go places. But you could imagine waking up and saying, we're based in LA. You wake up in Los Angeles and say, I want to go to San Francisco later today to see a friend. Great. You get an Uber and the Uber takes you to the airplane and you go straight from the Uber door closing to the small airplane. And maybe you're flying yourself because you're trained on how to fly the operating system. [55:30] and you fly yourself to San Francisco and it's an hour or two trip, depending on how fast your plane is, and you get in a car that's waiting right there for you and it drives you to your final destination. I mean, it could be completely seamless and at a cost that's very attainable for everyone. And I think that if that happens and transportation starts to become more accessible to us like that, that multimodal regional trip, which could be across states, the same trip that I experienced as a kid, what we've seen in the past for transportation is the more accessible [56:00] And that's when that flywheel really starts to spin. That Uber in the early days was forced to compare itself to taxis. And everybody's like, well, that market's tiny. And they spend a lot of cycles explaining, don't compare us to the taxi, compare us to other forms of transportation. And then this very point, which is if you can make... [56:17] ride hailing or taxis more accessible, more available to people, look at how much we all use. Same is true here. [56:23] And then the other thing, which I don't think is necessary, but will come into play, just like the car, when the car arrived, we had zero infrastructure. And the infrastructure investment to make the car what it is today is astronomical. We've never made that type of investment since into a transportation system as we did many decades ago. Well, fortunately for us, flight doesn't require a sizable investment in infrastructure like it did in the car, because you can have a couple miles of airports around the country servicing tens of thousands, millions of air miles available.

[56:53] see our better integration of flight into the fabric of our day-to-day lives. And this doesn't mean putting... [56:59] an air taxi vertiport on every street corner. I think it's actually quite the contrary. I think it's about really thoughtful architectures of our city and our urban to suburban environments positioning air transportation in the right locations with the right multimodal infrastructure to be able to take people from the flying machine to the vehicle, probably with wheels. So I think it's a really interesting future. And I actually don't think it's that far away because, again, once everybody got their hands on a Model T, it was not long until the highway system followed. [57:28] Yeah, it's fascinating to think about the whole Gibson idea that the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. And that there's a group of people with access and ability to pay for private aviation today that does stuff that I think would get anyone excited about going to fly to see the eclipse in the perfect spot or whatever the use case might be. That certainly is an exciting future. [57:49] So one of the things that [57:51] really stood out about my early interactions with you, Mark, was people talk about mission-driven companies and... [57:58] the nature of mission versus more mercenary type company building. You have always had an incredibly clear mission and it's all over your office walls, which is basically bring general aviation deaths to zero. You've told me stories about losing friends, very skilled pilots due to pilot error, things like that. I think actually right after we had met that had just recently happened to you. And the mission's incredibly clear. One of my favorite questions in the world came from this guy that built all these eye hospitals in India. And after he died, they found his journal and

[58:28] Finding him right. How can I become a more perfect instrument? He was so focused on structuring his own life. [58:36] to be able to do a better job in service of this thing that he decided to devote himself, you know, curing cataracts in rural India. So I'm just curious how you've approached that same problem. I think lots of people listening are interested in this question and this way of living in devotion to something. [58:51] How have you attacked that challenge across eight years or so building the business where my sense is you basically do a whole lot outside of that mission? Maybe just talk us through... [59:02] what that's like, what you do, [59:05] how you've designed the life around it. [59:07] Yeah, that's a great question. I guess at a high level, you hit the nail on the head. My whole life is... [59:12] orchestrated around delivering this future. [59:15] And after my grandfather died and I decided this is what I was going to do, it's just everything came into such clarity that, [59:24] And then everything gets passed through this filter. Does this add value to Skyrise and the mission that we have as a company to drive deaths to zero or does it not? [59:33] And the challenge for me is I'm such a – [59:36] regimented person, most of the time the answer is no as compared to the average person. And therefore, my life gets very narrow, very focused, and highly concentrated, which is [59:46] has helped the company be successful. So I've traded literally everything in my life [59:51] to push this as far as fast as I possibly can. And I've given it everything. [59:57] What's taken me years to figure out, though, is sometimes the experiences...

[1:00:01] outside of [1:00:03] what may seem like it directly contributes to skyrise in the moment actually helps my mind [1:00:08] And sometimes that lack of focus actually creates the insight or helps me see what the next step is on the roadmap. So sailing is something that I did when I was a little kid. [1:00:19] And there's something just so peaceful about it. I like to do that every now and again, just to clear my mind. And there's some other meditative activities, sometimes just meditation, that helps me focus and process. One of the things that I realized fairly early on was that much more is coming at me than I possibly have time to process, given how much time I'm spending actively working. So that was one of the first things that I had to figure out, especially as a first-time founder. Never led anybody. Never had a company. I was 26 and started this. [1:00:49] to exceed or at least keep up with the companies and never make the same mistake twice. How do you do that? And I found out one of the [1:00:57] Things that was super important to me, especially as introspective as I am, is giving myself the space or the ability to process so that I could be growing. [1:01:05] And that's taken a lot of different forms over the years. I think that's incredibly important. The other thing that I think is hard sometimes for the people around me to understand is it's not work. It's literally an expression of who I am, and I love it to the core. [1:01:20] There's nothing that matters to me more in life than getting to deliver this future to everyone and changing the safety for this industry and connecting more people. [1:01:29] My closing question that I ask everybody, always my favorite question is, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

[1:01:36] I had a coach at the beginning of the company that [1:01:39] I was 26 and... [1:01:42] PhD in engineering, right? So not necessarily any good at communicating. So good at writing an equation on the board, pretty good at solving it, but [1:01:51] communicating why that mattered and what it meant to the world was obviously not the thing I'd been trained on. And all parts of... [1:02:00] what I was bringing to the table, I was trying to improve it. So I was seeking out somebody to help me with speaking. And [1:02:07] I was really fortunate to get introduced to someone who was way outside of what I could afford. [1:02:12] And obviously he knew that when he took the call, I didn't. And he offered to coach me basically for free for years. [1:02:21] and has become a close friend since. At the time, I didn't realize the level of gift he was giving me when I met him, but since then, without that type of guidance, I don't think I would be here today. [1:02:32] What has he taught you? [1:02:33] A lot about the fundamentals of how to speak. [1:02:36] I think, [1:02:38] It boils down to knowing what you want to say and having clear intention with the statement before you begin it. And it's interesting because... [1:02:47] I naturally think a lot before I speak. [1:02:50] But I also have this... [1:02:52] ability to, which he's kind of brought out of me, [1:02:54] to take things up to a much higher level, like 10,000 feet, and just say what I want to say, as opposed to here's all the details inside of it. And I think if I were to try and identify one thing, that's probably it. And- [1:03:05] The ability to show people my passion was really hard for me when I first started putting those two things together. I think he saw the...

[1:03:14] passion on the inside, [1:03:16] But I struggled to share it with people in a way that they could understand. I think it actually extends beyond speaking. It extends to this is the thing that I want to do with my life. This is what I'm putting all my life force into. And he helped me find the words to express that to other people. And this helped me in every single respect in the business, whether it's hiring people or raising capital or just building relationships, that ability to articulate things. [1:03:40] why this matters so deeply to me and why for the right people, it should matter to them as well. [1:03:45] Just one follow-up question because it's a powerful lesson. For those that struggle to articulate the thing they're passionate about, what would you say to them? [1:03:53] What's interesting is the answer to the why, the second or third why, helped me a bit. And sometimes the... [1:04:01] The answer to why you're passionate about something [1:04:04] may not be obvious. [1:04:06] But if you're really centered and you're really in tune with [1:04:09] what that thing is. And it's coming from a place within and not because of some societal pressure or something that's happening in the world around you, but it's truly coming from inside you. And [1:04:20] you identify with and you care about, and I call it your truth, [1:04:23] Then when you start to ask those why questions and really think about it and think about where you've been in the course of your life journey and how you've changed or the experiences you've had. [1:04:34] it oftentimes becomes quite obvious. [1:04:37] Mark, it's been a real thrill learning about a part of the world from you that I didn't know a whole lot about and everyone takes for granted. Obviously, I wish you incredible success on this journey. If you succeed, I think we all get to benefit. Thanks for the lessons today and for all your time. Thanks for having me, Patrick.

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