Shawn Ryan

My heroes were these guys who could just do cool shit.

They had built a company to have the resources to then do something that's valuable but not necessarily profitable.

I'm sure they found ways to make it profitable.

I thought that was cool.

I think they're doing all right.

No, no, but even in the scope of, like, how do you just build a... No, I get what you're saying.

So I thought that was the coolest thing, and I wanted to be like that.

And I figured, okay, like, if I just work for them, would I ever still be like that?

I don't know.

And I got a little disillusioned about, like, what's the product I'm going to build?

If you build, like, some suborbital thing, if, like, you accidentally kill a rich person, is it going to just be dead?

But they did a good job.

They didn't do this.

I'm surprised.

I'm like, damn, like...

If you accidentally kill a rich person, we'd... No, you know, so that type of thing scared me a little bit.

And then I figured they like physicists, so how can I be cool to the people I find cool?

Let me go into physics, which is the wrong reason to go into physics.

And then, by the way, I grew up with a bunch of mechanics slash engineers who maybe see the physics as this bottleneck that the physicists aren't doing it right.

There's got to be some cool tech that can come out of this.