Travis Beals

speaker

103 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Travis Beals’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

I think most people's reaction, including mine, when you first hear about this is like, wow, that's kind of crazy.

Could that actually work?

Right?

Like, it seems like it shouldn't work.

I'm Travis Beals, Senior Director, Product Management, and what I do is I lead Project Suncatcher.

I volunteered for that.

Back in 2016, I started working on Google's consumer hardware effort.

So like Pixel and later Nast and so on.

And Blaze was also part of the leadership team.

At some point, Blaze, I think this would have been early 2024, Blaze had the idea for doing AI in space.

And he talked to me about that, and I thought it was really interesting.

We convened a small group of folks, and this was almost all people's part-time or 20% time, to try to figure out why it wouldn't work.

Let's find the reason this is not going to work.

And we couldn't.

We kept finding all these things.

We're like, well, maybe this this won't work.

And then actually, no, no, there's a way to solve this.

There's no physics reason this is not going to work.

And the economics of it seemed like maybe that could work.

But at some point we got this far enough along that it's like, OK, we need to start doing this for real.

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