Travis Beals

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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 don't know if I can get into everything that went down in that room, but I can tell you a little bit about that.

So obviously, this is a big deal, trying to present a seemingly crazy-sounding idea like this to company leadership.

Blaise and I are all set to go present this to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet.

And so I walk into the room and then Sergey, who's one of the co-founders of Google, walks in as well.

And I was not expecting that.

And so you're nervous.

Yeah.

Yeah, but Sergey was actually also supportive of doing this, which was great.

He's also realistic about, and I think this is true for all the leadership, that this is hard too, right?

This is not an easy thing to go do.

We've gone from this being a thing that sounds crazy and impossible to actually this is possible.

This could make sense.

It's just going to be really hard.

I thought you were going to go with the Apollo project there.

I mean, that would have been the more straightforward kind of moonshot project here to make an analogy to.

Yeah, and we keep getting better at that.

So the way we send lots of data around on Earth, we usually do that through light in the infrared through optical fiber.

And if you want to send data around in space between satellites, kind of awkward to imagine stringing fiber between satellites, but it turns out you don't need to.

You can just beam the lights directly from one satellite to another.

In a sense, that can actually work even better through free space than through glass.

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