#377 - "First Kill!" - Palantir, Nuclear War, Bio-Hybrids & AC-130 Bombing | Jesse Hamel

Summary

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Julian Dorey Podcast #377 - "First Kill!"

Guest: Jesse Hamel
Date: January 27, 2026
Main Theme:
A gripping, honest exploration of modern warfare, drone technology, AI, bio-hybrids, and the philosophical and ethical dilemmas that shape national security—told through the eyes of Jesse Hamel, a 20-year Air Force veteran and founder working at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and defense.

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Episode Overview

Julian Dorey sits down with Jesse Hamel—recently retired Air Force officer, former AC-130 gunship commander, and founder of the defense tech firm Victus. They dive deep into Jesse's journey from 9/11-inspired military service through the dawn of drone warfare, up to his current work fusing AI with drones. The conversation navigates everything from the morality of killing in war, to China's infiltration of US tech, to the possible nightmare scenario of unchecked AI and bio-hybrids.
Tone: Honest, reflective, sometimes darkly humorous, continually high-stakes and deeply personal.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The First Kill & The Ethics of Remote Warfare

Timestamp: [00:30] – [01:19], [138:33] – [150:56]

• Jesse’s first combat kill was an Al Qaeda commander: “The first one I remember very distinctly was actually an Al Qaeda commander. So this is like the same organization that had directly attacked the towers close to here. You do feel it.” [00:38]
• Moral preparation: Before joining, Jesse spent months in “prayer about the moral consequences of what I was going to start doing… I am now comfortable with this. I understand what I'm doing.” [143:11]
• Hamel believes there is a “merciful” aspect to taking a life in defense of others, but acknowledges the “gravity” and cost of such actions—even at a distance.
• PTSD & moral injury, especially among early drone operators, is real and often exacerbated by the separation between action and consequence: “A psyche can only take so much of that… you’d monitor your crews. Can they carry that weight? You gotta get them out for a bit.” [149:28]
• The “distance” (both geographic and psychological) in drone warfare blurs lines: “That distance can kind of cause this dichotomy between, like, what just happened, what didn’t.” [141:34]

2. U.S. Tech Superiority, The CCP, & The AI Arms Race

Timestamp: [02:49] – [13:58], [21:21] – [33:13], [37:22] – [44:48]

• AI war & China: The episode highlights the four variables to victory in the AI arms race (from Kai-Fu Lee’s “AI Superpowers”): government support, entrepreneurial talent, and others. Jesse warns we risk falling behind: “While the US was ahead in two or three… China would pass us in all. When I saw what you guys are doing...I was like, oh shit. This is the defense.” [03:13]
• CCP uses U.S. freedom as a weapon: “Any area of human activity that has been monetized will be weaponized… US Telecom, every single aspect of the US telecom system, the CCP is fully penetrated.” [19:39–21:46]
• Exploiting openness: The Chinese combine economic interdependence, IP theft, and embedded technological presence.
• Julian references TikTok: “They use our freedom against us. TikTok in China...no TikTok after 9pm, only science videos. Here: 24/7, kids titties.” [25:32]

Quote:

“The same freedom that allowed this penetration can also be how we solve it because the American spirit uniquely does better than anybody in the history of the world.” —Jesse [27:11]

3. Guardrails: How Do We Prevent 1984?

Timestamp: [39:21] – [44:48], [61:26] – [70:38]

• Transparency & protocol: The US must develop AI/tech with transparency, not black-boxed systems coordinating beyond human oversight. “It’s in our interest to develop protocols to allow the machines to coordinate...in a transparent way...That will also help us extricate malign foreign actors like the Chinese.” [38:41]
• Moral risk & centralization: Both centralizing and abdicating technological power are dangerous—if the U.S. doesn’t lead, the CCP will. “We can create just tremendous human prosperity...if we do it wrong, we will enslave our kids and ourselves maybe permanently.” [39:15]
• Colossal Labs, Biohybrids, Jurassic Park risk: “Any person from any field can look at that [biohybrid robot] and say that could be used for tremendous good —or tremendous evil.” [43:49]

4. AC-130 Gunship, Combat, and the Dawn of Drone Warfare

Timestamp: [08:29] – [13:58], [127:18] – [137:10]

• Jesse’s story: Joined the Air Force after 9/11 (“I wrestled with things for a little bit, but by Christmas of that junior year, I was like, all right, I'm serving in some capacity.” [06:50])
• Chose air power for its uniquely American “asymmetric dominance.”
• AC-130 gunship: “When I think of drones and robotics, what I'm trying to enable is that same relationship...how do you get to the point where a warfighter thinks about their drone...as an extension of their own actions.” [13:58]
• Early drone integration: “You’re flying around, you look over, there's nobody in that plane...It was weird right at first.” [128:11]
• The first joint attacks with drones were “pretty wild… they got the 15 killstreak, or something like that from Call of Duty.” [137:35]

5. Decision-Making Under Fire, the Reality of Choices in War and Business

Timestamp: [87:44] – [103:23]

• Decisions are never clean: “There’s never a decision where it’s perfectly clear, I fully understand, and there’s zero risk... Maturity is understanding they're always like that.” [88:20]
• Cites Special Operations practice: always list “the risk of inaction” in every plan—not just risks of action. [91:03]
• Entrepreneurial crossover: “Founding a company is kind of a personal development journey disguised as a business...slaying your daily dragon.” [102:22]
• Stress and resilience: “How do you develop resiliency against stress is way more interesting than how do you manage it and try to reduce it.” [98:51]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Any area of human activity that has been monetized will be weaponized.”
  —Jesse Hamel [19:54]

• “Transparency, you know, sunlight will kill the disinfectant. That’s the disinfectant, right? It’ll kill the malign things.”
  —Jesse Hamel [153:39]

• “Do you want to live in a world where the CCP develops that tech for woolly mammoths?... We don't want that world.”
  —Jesse Hamel [50:42]

• “What can be monetized will be weaponized.”
  —Jesse Hamel [44:48]

• “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”
  —Jesse Hamel paraphrasing Kierkegaard [157:15]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro to Biohybrids/AI Dangers: [01:12] – [01:19]
  “Bio hybrid robot made with living brain and muscle cells...”
• China’s Infiltration of US Tech: [21:21] – [22:51]
• Moral Dilemma of Remote Warfare: [143:11] – [150:56]
• First Drone-Gunship Integrated Strike: [137:07] – [137:35]
• Drones & The 1984 Surveillance Trap: [61:26] – [70:38]
• Decision-making and ‘Risk of Inaction’: [87:44] – [93:04]
• Purpose, Identity, and Building the Future Self: [114:48] – [119:56]
• ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing’ (Kierkegaard): [157:10] – [159:52]

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Flow & Structure

• Candid camaraderie and dark humor—Julian’s “I do think you guys have a hell of a voice” [01:24], book and movie references (Top Gun, Lord of the Rings, Jordan clips).
• Technical, then philosophical: Rapid fire between war stories (“You’re flying, you look over, there’s nobody in that plane...”), national security analysis (“US telecom is fully penetrated by the CCP...”), then ethical deep-dives (Kierkegaard, the purity of single-mindedness, moral injury).
• Alternates between personal anecdotes and global implications, always grounding the technology in its lived human, moral, and political realities.

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Takeaways for Non-Listeners

• Modern warfare is being transformed by AI, drones, and bio-hybrids, with enormous stakes for national sovereignty and personal morality.
• China is not just an economic competitor, but a fully embedded adversary in America’s technology infrastructure, using our openness as a weapon—unless we can out-innovate them.
• Drones and autonomous systems present both the greatest opportunity for security and the greatest threat for abuse. Guardrails must be built with urgent, values-driven leadership.
• Those who have held the power to kill—even through machines—wrestle with the deepest moral consequences, emphasize the need for leadership with clarity, honesty, and character.
• At every level, from battlefield to boardroom, decision-making demands evaluating both action and inaction, risk and consequence, and being willing to confront the hard truth, not just learn endlessly around it.

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For a deeper look at combat, technology, and morality in the 21st century—told by one of America’s modern warriors and thinkers—this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

[Jesse Hamill]

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[Julian]

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[Jesse Hamill]

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[Julian]

The first time you blew somebody up from the sky, were you able to weigh the gravity of Holy. I just wiped the life off the earth.

[Jesse Hamill]

The first one I remember very distinctly was actually an Al Qaeda commander. So this is like the same organization that had directly attacked the towers close to here. You do feel it. But it was a defense of Americans and in my perspective, it was merciful. Paul talks about this in the New Testament. Governments have the responsibility to do force and evil to preserve larger good. But it's also true. Right? Fast forward to we are now we talk a lot about AI because that's the field I'm in. When I was at mit, which where I launched my company out of, there's actually some pretty impressive and disturbing things happening. Like it's both machine and human biology.

[Julian]

Bio hybrid robot made with living brain and muscle cells and even bestow a sort of memory for repeated tasks.

[Jesse Hamill]

But let's just be hyper paranoid about enabling a 1984 situation. 100% I think about that.

[Julian]

So hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge, huge help. Thank you. You got a hell of a voice. You got to put that to work in a little side gig.

[Jesse Hamill]

All right, that's happening. That's happening.

[Julian]

So that's definitely.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's where we'll launch. That's one of two, three, four things that we'll launch out of here. 100% is something, you know, we'll give find the right books. So how this, how we get response to this that'll determine like what we read, what kind of stories we tell.

[Julian]

Listen, I can see it now. Drone warfare and smut book audio. That's it. Like Joe's telling me smuts back in. I can you just picture this guy like reading 50 Shades of Gray like and then Christian walked in the room.

[Jesse Hamill]

And her brains out.

[Julian]

I think it would do numbers.

[Jesse Hamill]

I think it would let to see like, you know, see what the up and out. The up and over is on that. Like, it's. Yeah, yeah, we'll get estimates. I'll talk to my family guys to say, yeah, we'll get estimates.

[Julian]

Yeah, we'll work on it. But in other news, you are doing some rather important work as someone who has a. I mean, you were what, 20 years in the.

[Jesse Hamill]

20 years. 20 years and like 23 days. I don't know. They got those 23 days out of me, but yeah, you get a good pension from that. Yeah, the extra 23 days. Yeah, that's important.

[Julian]

Okay. All right, so we're going to get into, like, what your company's doing with drones and specifically, like, how you're trying to, you know, counterman, like the CCP and all the money they're putting into that. Did you actually. This is relevant for the first time in a while. Have you ever read a book called AI Superpowers?

[Jesse Hamill]

I know of it. Like, I think I've, like, hit some highlight. I didn't read the full thing, but I know what you're talking about.

[Julian]

Yeah, read that. It's by Kai Fu Lee. And even though it's like it's eight or nine years old now, he I that. That book had a real effect on me back when I read it. When it came out, he defined like the AI arms race by four variables, which off the top of my head, it was like government support entrepreneurs. Like entrepreneur talent default, if you can pull it out. But there were two others, and he was very concerned that while the US was ahead in two or three of them over the next, at the time, 10 to 15 years, China would pass us in all. And so when I saw what you guys are doing too, where you're integrating AI with drones in like war scenarios, I was like, oh, shit, this is like kind of the. The defense. Back to that.

[Jesse Hamill]

No, no, I think you're right. What are these four? And.

[Julian]

I don't. Yeah, there's an article in the Economist you can archive that is. I remember I was looking at that like three months ago, four months ago, from 2018 default. Pull that up. But in the meantime, Jesse. So it. But that. Was that, like, part of the motivation of you starting the company Victus?

[Jesse Hamill]

No. 100%. I mean, and. And you can even zoom out. It's kind of worth, for a second, like, zoom out even farther than that. So, you know, I'm in the air force for 20 years. I didn't actually plan on joining the military. I don't really come from a military family. Where you grow up? Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Right on The Canadian border, getting beat by the Canadians at hockey or anything like that. And you know, that's why I live in Florida now too by the way. I've had a kick ass down there. Yeah. One, yes. And I can't handle the cold anymore. But. So this is cold enough for me. But you know, so I joined there. Joined after 9 11. So 911 happened. Attacks happened. You know, I'm a junior undergrad at a small school. Corporate finance guy, you know, trying to probably get up to New York, do investment banking, have a yacht by 35 and then be done.

[Julian]

Where were you? Where you were you in school?

[Jesse Hamill]

Just a small Christian school called Pensacola Christian College. Little one, you know, had big dreams and just kind of going after it.

[Julian]

What that morning when after the planes hit, do you remember exactly where you were?

[Jesse Hamill]

Exactly where I was, yeah. So I just left. I just left corporate finance one junior year. So you know, junior year undergrads when we start really hitting the harder classes. Obviously we'd only been in school for a couple of weeks. Right. You know, I think it started late August and we, we leave class. We had to like a, like a, an assembly where everybody was going to meet something. It's kind of like a mini little chapel service slash like just kind of like cage everybody on what was going on. That was already planned, you know, because the semester just kind of kicked off and, and you go there and I remember like I distinctly remember this one of the girls I was. You know, because everybody's. A couple thousand people are just kind of converging on this building and I remember a couple girls just freaking out and being like what? You know, why? And you know, I was like okay. And that's kind of weird. Yeah, this is pre iPhone, you know, I got like a little flip phone or something like that. I think the Razer I think is what I had. If you remember that, which is awesome.

[Julian]

And Razor in 01, you were definitely cool that that was.

[Jesse Hamill]

Maybe I didn't get the razor till later, but that's the razor up. Maybe I just moved it up. I might have just moved it up. Yeah, I might have moved it up. It might have been a Nokia. It might have been a Nokia. It might have been the block phone. Yeah.

[Julian]

You're playing Snake on that. Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

This. Yeah. Like this?

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? So, so we walk in there, you know, seeing him freak out and then you know, and then one of the, one of the, one of the admins starts talking about it and then it was just like wow, this is real. You know, then get out of there. And they're talking to family that was in Pensacola, that was in Pensacola, Florida, you know, so the big Navy base there. So they were concerned, you know, like, everybody was right. We don't know what's going on. And you're hearing mixed reports, and nobody kind of knows what's happening. So you really powerfully impacted me that. You know, because that was at my young age. I. I don't think I'd even turned 20 yet. Started school a little bit early, and then it was like, okay, clearly, the things that I had taken for granted or at least just had become accustomed to, they may not be there if we don't actually fight for them. So kind of took. You know, I wrestled with things for a little bit, but by, like, Christmas of that junior year, I was like, all right, I'm serving in some capacity. In some capacity. Like, I don't care about this finance thing. Like, there are people that we need to deal with, and I'm gonna go fight them and figure out a way to do that. So then, you know, it took a. You know, it took about a year to get paperwork and physicals and all that and got actually pretty close to the Marines. With the Marines were. The paperwork was even harder, and it was more opaque. But the Air Force had an aviation slot, so I got it and took about a year. So I finished the degree and then went right to officer training school a couple months after I graduated in 03. And then it was 20 years, all active duty. Like, kind of a straight shot of espresso, actually.

[Julian]

Straight. Why do you describe it like that?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, because. So, you know, I went in, went right through officer training school, get commissioned, go through the flying training, get assigned AC130 gunships. And I. And I've tried to get into that. So I was either. I either want to go fighters or get into some kind of Air Force special Operations. AFSOC got a gunship slot. This is before Call of Duty came out with gunships. So, like, I. I knew it was cool, but it got a whole lot cooler in a couple years. So then.

[Julian]

Stogue hanging out your mouth.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's pretty much exactly.

[Julian]

Sleeves up. You got tats under there?

[Jesse Hamill]

No, no, damn it. I'm all natural.

[Julian]

Damn it.

[Jesse Hamill]

Bringing back an older school vibe.

[Julian]

I'm supposed to be on natural. You're supposed to have.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, you know, I just. I make the. I like to outperform the tech guys in the gym. That's kind of a thing. It's you know, it's a way. It's the. A passive way of trolling. So I, you know, so then I was like, all right, get into gunships, and then by, you know, takes a couple years, get all the training done, but By Christmas of 06, I'm in combat. And then I'm in combat on and off constantly for the next eight years.

[Julian]

All right. Before we get to that, because. Wow, that's a long time.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

When you got. You said it took like, a year to get all the paperwork done and, like, get into the Air Force.

[Jesse Hamill]

Physical sponsorship. Yeah.

[Julian]

Right. So you're there in the beginning of O3. Like, what. What was drawing you to want to be in the Air Force? I know you're trying to get in the military in general, but, like, when you got that, what. What had you so excited about being in that end of things?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, two. Two aspects of it. One, it was like, if I'm going to serve, I want to actually fight, and I want to find a way to fight. That's kind of, you know, it became early on to me is like the unique kind of American asymmetric dominance is in air power. Like, that's kind of the unique thing that we have. You saw this just in Venezuela. You saw this in Iran just, you know, a little bit ago. It's. It's air power.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Like, it's, It's. And there's all kinds of other things that enable that. And sea power is important. You know, it's all important. Right. It's all, you know, it's one team, one fight, and all the, you know, normal buzzwords. There was something unique about that that was, like, very, you know, very attractive, you know, And I watched Top Gun just like anybody did.

[Julian]

Right.

[Jesse Hamill]

So there's probably those two things together.

[Julian]

You know, Top Gun was a good sales.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, it's a good sales. Top Gun, they. Most people are even like, it's funny, too. Like, the Navy did all the work for Top Gun, and it really helped the Air Force out more. To this day, it still helps the Air Force out more. Like, it's just. It's, you know, sometimes they weren't smart.

[Julian]

Enough to figure out what their recruitment needed.

[Jesse Hamill]

Even the second one. Even the second one still, like, it's still like, oh, yeah, I want to go, you know, Air Force Academy. Like, young guys, like, my two sons, both my two sons are like, oh, man. Flying fighters. That's pretty sweet. Like, you know, like, it's badass.

[Julian]

Yeah, it's badass. And it's different you know, like, there's something as. As a civilian, and I've been really privileged to talk with a lot of amazing operators in here. You know, all the teams do something different, and they have different specialties and different ways that they can go into the battlefield and all that. But, like, when you're first thinking about it in your head, when they first say, okay, I served in the milit. And then it's like, I was Navy or I was army, you kind of put it all in one container. Like, just mentally quickly it's not. But, like, mentally you do, and someone says Air Force, you're like, all right, wait, that's way over here.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

You know what I mean? So there's definitely, like. Like, a difference to it. And your point is well taken as well. Like, you know, as far as, like, what this country has been able to do with air power, especially since World War II.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, 100.

[Julian]

It's unreal.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, 100. Like, it's. You know, that's how I thought about it too. And if. Put it. Put it another way, you know, and I love everybody equally. I love all my kids weekly. I love all war fighters.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

Let the record show. Let the record show.

[Julian]

How many kids do you have?

[Jesse Hamill]

Three kids. Yes.

[Julian]

You got a favorite?

[Jesse Hamill]

No. All equally. You will not waterboard me out of that one. No.

[Julian]

Oh, oh, you did your homework.

[Jesse Hamill]

That didn't happen. And I also love all of my potential, you know, war fighters. I can support equally. All of them.

[Julian]

I thought he was about to say potential kids he doesn't know about.

[Jesse Hamill]

No, no, not that.

[Julian]

That's good.

[Jesse Hamill]

But the, like, one way of thinking about it is. Or at least how I thought about it, you know, if there's a. Since. I mean, for the last 10,000 years, there's a unique relationship that any war fighter has with the equipment they go to war with. Is it your sword? Right? And once you get to a point where that sword, like, you know it. You've drawn blood with that. It's been there when you needed it. And when you get really talented with that piece of warfighting equipment, it feels like an extension of you.

[Julian]

It's your baby.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. So. So swords for years. And, you know, then civil war, we started getting, like, Gatling guns and, you know, different explosives and then the rifle, and you still kind of have, you know, they call it the cult of the rifle. Even within the army, the Marines calls, you know, everybody. Every Marine a rifleman. Like, that's. That's kind of like, this is my rifle. Right. Like, the you know, like the movie says. And what was cool for me thinking is like, okay, I could establish that relationship with a rifle or I can wrap $150 million flying gunship around me and establish it with that. More complicated, but it's kind of awesome.

[Julian]

That's pretty awesome.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's also where you know, and we'll get into civil. Like when I think of drones and robotics, any system like that, that's what I'm trying to enable is that same relationship. Like, how do you get to the point where a war fighters like thinks about their drone or their weapon system, their platform from orbit down to seabed, whatever it is, this, this machine that has an intelligence to it, how do they feel? Get to the point where they trust it, rely on it, and integrate towards an extension of their own actions, whether that's from 5,000 miles away or that's right next to them.

[Julian]

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[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

But when you're talking about a drone that you're playing, like a video game in Las Vegas and it's fucking in Ukraine, there's a disconnect there.

[Jesse Hamill]

But. But it's solvable. You know, I'm a bit of a gamer. You guys probably are too proud to a point.

[Julian]

If you was. When I was.

[Jesse Hamill]

You was. Okay, yeah. So you're more mature now. I get it. Much more.

[Julian]

Remind me to show you a funny text chain that happened right before you got.

[Jesse Hamill]

Excellent. All right, so if. If one were to game, you know, very competitively, does that not interface to that game for any gamer? Does that not start to become kind of like an extension of you? 100%, yes. Like 100%. Like the. If you're really good, you watch somebody who's really good at Call of Duty and the blur the lines between where that human machine interface, whether it's a, you know, joystick, a hand controller unit, a keyboard, whatever it is they're using, and where, like, where that line stops and where they start is totally blurred. Yeah, it's totally blurred. Like, they're so good. Just the same way. Like, you know, Van Halen was with a guitar. Like, you can't tell where his fingers are, where the guitar is anymore. It's that good. That's, you know, to me, like, if we want to create a world where the machines enable human activity, empower humans, we start with how we secure ourselves, like, how we defend ourselves, and then we enable machines to have that kind of relationship with their warfighters, with whoever's using it. That's the. That's the key. And that's. I mean, that's what I'm passionate about doing, you know? And that, to your earlier point, like, that's. That's kind of how I started the journey of, like, taking what I've learned and then applying it to the modern environment, you know, which were. Now we're, you know, it's still a very real thing, but it's much more than just ISIS, Al Qaeda and kids hiding in caves shooting RPGs at us. It's Much, much more serious now. What we're the kind of like things that we're talking about.

[Julian]

Major countries with GDP is goddamn near our size.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

[Julian]

Whole brave new world. And when you have multiple, you know, wars or you know, brooding, trying to die down but still like right there, tethering on the edge type wars happening in different key regions around the world with major players involved, major proxy players involved. I mean it is the definition of what we say, cliche, but a powder keg.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

And at any moment it's, it's a very different. You know, you could speak to this more than I could because I was really little when 911 happened. But I do remember that day viscerally and I, and I can remember understanding some aspect of like the next few months and like what that was like. But looking back on that the best I can. It's a different feeling now. Not to like undersell that thread at the time, but again, like you said, it was guys running around in caves and we're, you know, it was the. We gonna find you.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

[Julian]

Now it's the. Okay, Xi Jinping was just here for a meeting.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

And y' all just spied on all our military bases.

[Jesse Hamill]

Well, cute little farms. The. This one thing I've been saying for a while, any area of human activity that has been monetized will be weaponized.

[Julian]

That's a bar.

[Jesse Hamill]

So what does that mean? Let's unpack that for a second. That means if there's any area where we are performing some kind of economic activity that also not only has the potential, it will be used for both coercion and compellence. It will be used for that. That would have been the case for. That would have been the case for isis, al Qaeda. They just didn't have the capabilities to do these things. Right. Just didn't have the capabilities. Whereas now you're. You're talking about nation states and even like collective, you know, almost in access in some cases maybe. Right. And everything from medium earth orbit to the phone in your pocket, it's all a weapon. It's all a weapon. And a weapon that can be used for. To coerce you to do something or compel you to do something. So what that's mean, what that means is like the security environment, like in the, you know, in the 911 era, the global war on terror. Like that's what I came up in the G. What you know, everybody called it in the G. Wat it was like, hey, let's just make sure we take the fight. This was the thinking at the time, right? Let's make sure we take the fight to them, keep the fight there and not allow them to launch external attacks on the US Homeland. In theory, right? Did we accomplish it or not? You know, you could talk about that, but like that's at least a theory of what you're trying to accomplish. That I think probably everybody was, okay, this is at least the right goal.

[Julian]

Worked for a couple of years.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. And worked for a couple of years and you know, the ways and means or whatever. But that was at least the right goal. The goal now very different. Like now they're, they're in everything. It's a full open source. You can pull this up too. And sometimes worth looking at this. The Chinese are in every aspect of the US Telecom. There's some open source stuff on this. Worth looking up every single aspect of the US telecom system. The CCP is fully penetrated.

[Julian]

Can you break down how that's happened?

[Jesse Hamill]

Like, yeah, At this, like. Okay, so what I can say. And there's a little bit of, you know, broad kind of, I'd say I can say broad. I can talk like kind of broadly to this. Okay, yeah, exactly, that's, that's actually a really good one right there. For the last 20 years we've actually had a, almost a co dependent economic relationship with China. So there are, there are American citizens and other ones that have become unimaginably wealthy because of trade with China in subcapacity. They've invested there, they've harnessed their talent and the US consumers have, you know, in some cases, many cases really, that we benefit from this. Right. This is how we get things that are cheap. This is how we get their, their manufacturing base that they've built out in like Guangzhou kind of area. This like it's, it's actually powered US Consumerism for better or for worse for.

[Julian]

A long time, I would say indisputably.

[Jesse Hamill]

Right, yeah. So that level of innovation has also said they have access to. This all happened like as the Internet age happened. So as our economy transferred from kind of industrial age, the Internet age and now to what I would say we're, you know, right at the epoch of the agentic.

[Julian]

Agentic age.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yep. By that I mean like we are switching to. It was industrial, then it was connected through the Internet and now it's about intelligent entities. These entities live under computers. These entities have physical manifestations of a drone, a humanoid, a satellite, a submarine, a swarm of drones, all the above. That's the, that's the world we're living now. Right. Or just starting to. We're just starting to get into this. Because the China Mike. Because the Chinese were so. They were so important in those early days, and they're so enmeshed, particularly in the West Coast. And the west coast has. And the numbers don't lie on this. The west coast has powered. The west coast of the US has powered the tech innovation. They've absolutely powered it. Like, the numbers aren't even close. So all the companies and innovations, the CCP has been right there the whole time. That's given them the ability to do this kind of, like, coercive things and to infiltrate all of these different kind of systems as they've been upgraded. So you think about, like, upgrading systems that, like, if you were still using your phone. We were talking earlier, right before this, like, if you're still using your phone from, I think my Nokia or my razor from, like, back in 01 03, and your job was to hack it in that. That's very different than if I was trying to do it for your iPhone right now, 100%. But if I had that, if I had awareness of how it has grown from that Nokia to your iPhone now, would that give me an advantage in getting into that? Yes, all day. That really, like, at a high level, explains the kind of situation that we're in.

[Julian]

Yeah. There's a concept that's come up a million times on the show in all different contexts, but applying back to the same kind of theme of, like, the modern world we're living in and, you know, how nation states kind of attack each other. But the idea of, like, being able to use our freedom against ourselves. And what I mean by that is the CCP runs China. They say how it goes. It's a communist party. They tell their people what the fuck to do if someone steps out of line. Doesn't matter if you're Jack ma, you're. You're gone. Like, you're out of the way.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

On the contrary, in the United States, we have freedom of speech, a constitution, freedom of private business to be able to operate on its own without the government intervening in everything they do. And so these freedoms basically create, like, turnstiles that bad actors who don't give a shit about having freedom in their own place, but see the beauty of how they can take advantage of the freedom of here, walk right through and bang, there they are. And I always have cited this example, but, like, on a micro level, look at TikTok when it came here, right? TikTok in China, this is the one place where communism actually had an argument. TikTok in China told their kids they weren't allowed to be on TikTok after 9pm and when they were on TikTok it was science videos, math videos and nature videos.

[Jesse Hamill]

Exactly.

[Julian]

Here they're like 24, seven kids titties.

[Jesse Hamill]

Let's just dumb you down.

[Julian]

Let's dumb you down.

[Jesse Hamill]

Possibly can.

[Julian]

So they use in our freedom against us. And you're basically talking about it on for any form of intelligence both open and within even the military itself, they've been able to get access to this over the years because of the partnerships we have with them.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah, that's 100. Right. And that, that's also. You have to like that informs a mental model of how you do national security. So you have to think of. Okay, to your point, like, so build on this for a second. You talked about freedom being. And what you basically said is another way is that the CCP has exploited the US's freedom.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Jesse Hamill]

So they've exploited that. Okay, let's say that's true and I think, I think that's probably true. So how do you unravel that and how do you solve that?

[Julian]

It's a great question.

[Jesse Hamill]

So part of that I think is using that same freedom to out innovate the ccp. And this is one thing that so you know, I'm, as an entrepreneur and founder, I'm both ruthlessly pragmatic and eternally optimistic at the same time. You have to be both of these things. So my eternally optimistic is that when given the right kind of motivations, entrepreneurial motivations, the kind of things that the American spirit uniquely does better than anybody in the history of the world, I would argue that same freedom that allowed this kind of penetration that you're talking about, which is no kidding threat pen into our telecon system, can also be how we solve it because of the same like yes, there was a technology open gate that allowed that to happen. We can also innovate ourselves into a position where we can correct these things.

[Julian]

By kicking out all the Chinese. Like, I don't understand.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, there's a, like, there's some, there's like for this one example, for that specific example, there's definitely things that are interesting and I'll just say like the broader cybersecurity world, agentic cybersecurity, that could actually kind of go retroactively back and fix a lot of these things. But that's very doable.

[Julian]

I'M trying to picture that. Do you have like an example of how that could happen?

[Jesse Hamill]

Well, I can give you a parallel to it.

[Julian]

Okay. The parallel would be either way, just with the mic. Just keep it pointed at you. Don't talk over it and don't talk away from it. You know what I mean? Just kind of have it like that, if that's good.

[Jesse Hamill]

The parallel. The parallel that would be. Think of, I mean, just like think of a large language model, like how that works. Right. So large language model ingested all of this data, written data. Right. And things that we typed on the Internet and you know, that kind of stuff. And from that we've. You, you now you've. The models keep getting better where you can parse out very specific points of that, of what was in there. That's. That same kind of approach is very doable within. Okay, I can, I can understand a large data set in my, in my telecom system. And then I can also start to parse out where the malign actors are through. That's through. I mean, this is overly simplistic, but it's edifying.

[Julian]

I think I see what you're saying.

[Jesse Hamill]

Through that same kind of technology, you know, Transformers and the same kind of models that we have, those same things that are allowing us to create new intelligence, right. From just written words and old things that humans and sometimes machines came up with, that could also be used to create new technologies that can help undo some of the stuff and come up with new ways of protecting it.

[Julian]

Okay, so I have an example maybe we can use in my head as to how we could show a way to undo this. But what might be helpful is if you walk people through who don't remember, like, what exactly happened. But I'm thinking of the Huawei example back in 2017, 2018, I want to say, where we discovered that they were basically just like going far beyond the bandwidth that we've given them here. So can you just explain what happened there and then maybe we can work this around to like how we course correct that.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. So the, the Huawei one, you might have to back me up on remembering some of this, but the Huawei. The Huawei one, it was basically like they were building these type of hardware chips and then performing telecom services, like, hey, let's do your 4G and 5G network. That was right about the time we're doing a lot of conversion into 5G. Like a lot of things were going to upgrade from 4G to 5G. So they're right therein lies like part of it. We were doing an infrastructure upgrade.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's kind of when you're a little bit more vulnerable, you know, when you're doing these infrastructure upgrades. So you're doing this infrastructure upgrade and first it starts with point one. Maybe don't have the malign actors lead this for you. Maybe. Maybe don't do that.

[Julian]

Listen, they already have houses on the farmland right there. You don't even need a hotel.

[Jesse Hamill]

So one can imagine as we go from 5G to 6G, we're doing the 6G planning right now, right, for our broader telecom system. 6G, yeah, yeah, there's definitely planning for that. And how, what that's going to look like. These are buzzwords, just like, just like Web three is a buzzword. Right. But the point is being you're doing like an infrastructure upgrade for telecom and how we use telecom, both wired and wireless, how we transmit data to each other in different ways. Maybe when we go to 6G, let's not outsource it to the CCP. So we'll start with that. Let's not give them the contract. That's point number one.

[Julian]

What if they bid the best.

[Jesse Hamill]

I know, like, what if they're the lowest price? Somehow they came in as the lowest price. I don't know how they. It's amazing. I guess we got to give it to them. So some of it's like, okay, we could get a little smarter than that. Two, then once you in that upgrade process, there's going to be all new protocols and APIs that are written that will kind of negate anything that happened in the 5G and earlier world. Much like if something feels weird on your phone, what's one of the first things, you know, basic support types going to tell you to do? Well, you restart it. If that doesn't work, download, you know, do the update on your Mac and then reinstall the operating system. Because that has a way of like correcting certain things that might happen even at like the binary level. Like it has a way of correcting that. That's also the opportunity we can do there. The benefit of doing it in like the modern, what I call like the agentic age is that as we transition, I'm just. And we're using telecom here. But talk about like any network mesh network between humans, by the way, the 6G network will not just be about and should not be about just connecting humans. Should about connecting humans and machine clusters as well and how they transmit data between each other.

[Julian]

When you say machine clusters for people out there.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, machine Cluster. I mean, it's a matricy kind of sound in term. But what I mean by that is something that, by the way, I said when I did. When I did the palantir devcon. You know, it's all dark green in there.

[Julian]

You did a palantir devcon?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. We'll talk about this. Yes, we'll get. We'll get to this. Yeah, yeah.

[Julian]

Who sent this?

[Jesse Hamill]

Don't worry. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. There's a few folks downstairs waiting to meet you afterwards, but, like, it's all good.

[Julian]

If I blink twice.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

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[Jesse Hamill]

With the American Express Platinum card, I can unlock experiences like no other. Since I'm always booking my next trip, I love that I can earn points on travel. Plus I get a resi benefit. So, you know, I'm hitting the restaurants everyone's talking about. And you can find out your welcome offer after you apply, which could be as high as 175,000 points.

[Julian]

For experiences like no other.

[Jesse Hamill]

There's nothing like Platinum. Learn more@american express.com Explore Platinum Terms Apply so they. They had this kind of cool vibe, and it was all like, you know, the dark green and looked very much like Matrix. I'm like, well, you know, I'm by far the oldest one around. And that's like, okay, this is kind of cool. You guys are doing OG Matrix stuff. And I swear a couple people look back at me like, what do you mean by that? Like, come on, come on, Keanu Reeves. Come on, come on. That's real, though. That's real. Yeah. So we were talking about machine clusters. So the, The. The machine cluster being just some kind of artificial intelligence. And I mean that term, like, such a buzzword now.

[Julian]

I don't know.

[Jesse Hamill]

I don't know if anybody knows what it means anymore, but I don't think they do. I don't think. So, like, here's what I mean by that. I mean some kind of intelligence that came from a model, not directly from a human. Just leave it at that. And then it's broadcast from a machine. That could be something that like, mimics how a human talks. That could be just a screen, a laptop, whatever. We want to be able to interact with that entity, that agent, from human to agent. We want those agents to be able to interact with each other in a way that we can understand. This is actually really important and decipher so that we don't have a bunch of black boxes where the. The machines on our networks. This is kind of already happening in some cases. Oh, yeah, we don't like this. We need to be able to see how the machines are coordinating. We need to be understand this.

[Julian]

Remember the Facebook one in like 2016, they invented like some AIs, they invented. And then they invented their own language and they were like, oh, all right, we're going to pull out the plug. Wait till. You can't pull out the plug on these.

[Jesse Hamill]

I think it was. Didn't Eric Schmidt just say something like this, I think.

[Julian]

Did he, did he talk about it now?

[Jesse Hamill]

He just.

[Julian]

I think he was Google, right?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, he was Google. I just saw something where he was talking about, he said basically this, like once, once the machines start interacting with a more efficient language because it's more efficient than English or some other kind of mlp. Yeah. Then that's probably like, that's when it's like pull the plug thing. And, and then the, the real like, you know, joke is I think OpenAI just, just advertised or role that if you read in between it, it kind of looks like it's not, but it kind of looks like, hey, I'm gonna pay you just to stand at that corner right there next to the plug and like if we blink twice in this case, pull that plug. It basically looks like they just advertise a role like this for somebody to sit in their data centers. Yeah.

[Julian]

Oh my God.

[Jesse Hamill]

So it's in our interest, it's in our interest to develop protocols to allow the machines to coordinate with themselves and with other humans in a transparent way.

[Julian]

We got a leash on them.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yes. That will also help us extricate malign foreign actors like the Chinese and others from our own data systems. So if we do it right, it's all about if we do it right. That's why this is such an important time. Like if we do this is true for so many different things in tech right now. If we do it right, if we do it from a value base that cares about the human as an individual. If we do it right, we can create just tremendous human prosperity. I 100% believe that if we do it wrong, we will enslave our kids and ourselves maybe permanently.

[Julian]

Or they'll be dead.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Yeah. You ever read the book Superintelligence by Bostrom?

[Jesse Hamill]

That one I know of read that.

[Julian]

Yeah, I read that in 2019, 2018 or 2019. And you know, this was back when I would like try to have conversations with people about AI and they different guy.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

And now people won't shut the up about him. Like, where you been? But Bostrom effectively went like psycho mode. And it's really incredible. It could be nothing or it could be brilliant. I. I don't know. But he's definitely a very smart guy. And he basically created decision trees worth of all the different possib buddies.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

And just like went full like seeing the fractals, like where it could all go. And I ain't gonna lie, it scared the out of me because there are so many ways that if you let this jack out of the box. It walks away bipedal and you never see it.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's right. I also think it's all in how we design it. It's all how we design. Here's a, here's a parallel. We talk a lot about AI and I do because that's the field I'm in. I know a little bit about. This is not my field, but there's, there's actually some pretty both impressive and disturbing things happening like human biology and genes right now. So when I was at, when I was at mit, which, where I launched my company out of just a casual. No big deal, just dropping that.

[Julian]

Just stick that in the title for you. It'll make you feel better.

[Jesse Hamill]

I'll fling that at you. So. But they're all in on this. Like, so that's where I knew, like, I got to go talk to some lab folks doing this. They're, you know, so there's some folks doing, doing things that are not as much in the news with large data sets, big computational power, agentic analysis on the human genome and different ways to solve problems and maybe create a whole new set of problems for us if we don't do it the right way. So in that.

[Julian]

And I think that's an offshoot species kind of thing.

[Jesse Hamill]

I mean there's a. Okay, there is a. This is worth pulling up. There's a lab that just came out. This just came out what, two, three weeks ago. It's both machine and human biology and it's crawling around on a table. Yeah, this is, this is, this is worth finding. Yeah, this just came out. Trying to think of which lab came up with this machine. It's, it has a machine and humans. It has like human flesh on it and it has these two little arms crawling around. Yeah, it's like a butt as a small machine.

[Julian]

Okay, what does that title say, Joe? This crawling robot is made with living brain and muscle cells. Scientists want to know if a bio hybrid robot can form a long lasting biological mind to direct movement. Tell me more. It's a bizarre sight. With a short burst of light, a sponge shaped robot scoots across a tiled surface. Flipped on its back repeatedly twitches as if it's doing sit ups. By Tink tinkering with the light's frequency, scientists can change how fast the strange critter moves and how long it needs to rest after a long crawl. Soft robots are nothing new, but the spongy bot stands out in that it blends living muscle and brain cells with a 3D printed skeleton and wireless electronics, this is the Great Society. The neurons genetically altered to respond to light trigger neighboring muscles to contract a release. Watching the robot crawl around is amusing, but the study's main goal is to see if a bio hybrid robot can form a sort of long lasting biological mind that directs movement. Neurons are especially sensitive that rapidly stop working or even die outside of a carefully controlled environment. Using blob like amalgamations of different types of neurons to direct muscles, the spongebots retain their crawling ability for over two weeks. Scientists have built biohybrid bots to use electricity or light to control muscle cells. Some mimic swimming, walking and grabbing motions. Adding neurons could further fine tune their activity and flexibility and even bestow a sort of memory for repeated tasks.

[Jesse Hamill]

So this is what I love about this, like just in general this like any person from any field can look at that and say that could be used for tremendous good or tremendous evil. That's the truth for a lot of the way we're interacting with machines right now.

[Julian]

I completely agree with you.

[Jesse Hamill]

It's also, I say this a lot too. That's why, this is why American leadership matters so much. In this, in this, in this domain.

[Julian]

Define leadership, there people who are running the companies.

[Jesse Hamill]

Not necessarily that, although it could be. What I would say is maybe more, maybe, maybe even broader than this is that the leaders of companies and, and there's the government, you know, that are involved in this area. If they don't start from a value system that values human life. You can see where this is going to go. Yes, that, that, that has never been more important. That's never been more important. If you have one of these transhumanists or someone else in some kind of environment that is inventing tech like what we just saw, don't take a rocket scientist figure out where that's going.

[Julian]

I think people out there have a genuine and well founded concern that there are people like that running some of these places who do think that way.

[Jesse Hamill]

I think that's, I think it's probably right. I think it's right, you know, and.

[Julian]

It'S like, okay, that feels sociopathic. And all it takes is one who, you know, lets the T. Rex out of the, out of the cage and that's it. You know what I mean?

[Jesse Hamill]

It's why that's part of my motivation is, you know, I think again the back to like, you know, ruthlessly pragmatic but eternally optimistic. We can, we, we, we can decide. And I mean we as like the royal we, we can decide how we want to use technology like this, like, we can decide how to use this. So there's never been a time where we need leaders of high character and value more. There's never been a time where we need that.

[Julian]

Have you? Are you familiar with Colossal Labs?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

In Dallas?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

So thief's actually wearing the shirt right now, but they. All right, so they brought back a genetic version that's similar to a dire wolf. There's a lot of arguments there as to whether or not it's a true direwolf and all that because they manipulated gray wolf genes to be able to get there. So a lot of ecologists and scientists are like, it's nothing. And then others are like, there's something there. You know, I'm still like trying to figure out exactly where it goes from there. But we had Ben in here, who's the CEO of the company. We also had Matt James, who's their chief animal officer. And I'm going down there in March to visit the labs and like, see what's what. But you know, the big concern is that not even like as a joke, it sounds funny, say, but it's serious, is that this turns into like Jurassic Park.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah.

[Julian]

Frankenstein all wrapped in one. And you let the rabbit out of the hat and we're. Because you invent something that's crazy. And so I think it's important that. Because, like, we like Ben. Really good guy, like business guy. Right. So seeing him surround himself with a lot of people. He's got a million people on the team that are like conservation and animal first. That's important to me because it's like, okay, are those going to be good guardrails to make sure that like, even if Ben has a well intentioned idea, as a guy who doesn't. He's a business guy.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

As a guy who may not think of where that could go too far, do you have people there being like, no, no, no, that's Pandora's box. Don't touch that.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Now you talk about the good. This is where I'm very curious about the company and I'm still like undecided on where this all goes. I'm open minded. But for example, one of the things that sold Matt James, the chief animal officer, on joining the company in the first place was the fact that Matt had spent decades working with a lot of animals, but specifically elephants. And there is a virus. It's basically like, it's called something, but it's basically like elephant herpes that currently kills 20% of the elephant population around the world. And so one of the goals of Colossal is to recreate a woolly mammoth and in recreating it using basically like CRISPR and AI technology to create like a genome and genetic code before it's a living thing, like an actual, like, oh, maybe we made a woolly mammoth. They can take the data from that because it is a distant rel. Not even that distant a relative of an elephant and, and test it outside of it being alive, like on the computer simulation system to see what they could possibly use to pluck out of that. And I'm oversimplifying it here, but this is how it works. Pluck it out of that and basically inject it into the current living elephant population and destroy that disease forever. If they could accomplish something like that, it's incredible. Yeah, just don't make fucking three headed human hybrids that suddenly are like clones of Tom Brady's dog.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's no man bear pigs. Yes. No man bear pigs.

[Julian]

I'm like, you know, like, I texted Ben.

[Jesse Hamill]

I'm like, not a fan.

[Julian]

Tom Brady talked about clone. I'm like, Ben, you clone Tom's doggies. He's like, I'm like, all right, let's not do that. You know, but you see the point.

[Jesse Hamill]

It's the same, it's the same thing. And it, and it's, it's kind of a fine, it's, it's a super fine line because to break down what you're talking there, and this applies to AI, it will not be obvious. It will not be obvious where that line is. There'll be people that are thinking about it. But this is just part of pushing frontier tech. It's. You literally haven't done it before, right? Same kind of tech we're doing for machine learning to have something operate without a GPS at all. Like it hasn't been done. So you're gonna push it to a point and you're. You, you end up solving, you know the math term like objective function. So you're like, objective function solve for this. And then as an inventor in a lab, you intentionally just like laser focus on that. Like, I will solve this problem. And typically you have to decompose it into like a thousand different mini problems to solve. So then you solve these 1000 many problems. You've uncreated new problems the whole time and things didn't work. But you finally get to that point, you've intentionally done like a tunnel vision. Like you have intentionally done this. So it will not be obvious. I think your point about Guardrails is salient. What also complicates this and there's both real in this and I think probably not real. And what complicates is that every one of these labs, back to my earlier premise, what can be monetized will be weaponized. So everything you're talking about here also has weapons implications. Every single thing does. So that also means it's a mini arms race. Do you want to live in a world where the CCP develops that tech for woolly mammoths?

[Julian]

I do not want to live in a world before we do laser eyed woolly mammoths are running at 700 per hour through Iraq and you know, trying to take over Saudi Arabian oil fields or what.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know, we don't want that, I don't want that. We don't want that world. Then we're all just gonna have to go to Mars. Like I said, I'll just turn that up. So rather than do that, he says.

[Julian]

He'S like, die on Mars.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, so, so that, that is the argument that I think and I think in most cases that argument is correct. Yes. That that's why we have to lead in these, all these areas. Yes. Like because, and this is, this is.

[Julian]

Just we being America.

[Jesse Hamill]

We being America. This is not, this is recognizing that there's dangers in America, there's malign influences here. There's, there's, you know, this is far from perfect. But do you want to live in the world where the CCP beats us on this? Do you want to live in a world where they have better autonomous robotic systems than the US does? No, I don't think so. I don't think anybody wants that.

[Julian]

Yeah. And I do feel like, like people have, because of what's been going on over the last couple of years, people have very righteously pointed out a lot of concerns with like the United States relationship with Israel and some of the influence here between AIPAC and us being dragged into some of these wars over the years. And just a lot of problems there and they are all well founded and they should be talked about. We've talked about on the show, debated it. I have issues with that. The one thing that has like, that is starting to get me a little concerned though is that people are just focusing on that for everything.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Which is like it's over the top. Right? Like let's focus on the problem and then they're ignoring other problems too. Well, and to me I'm like, I'm looking at everything.

[Jesse Hamill]

You have to look at all because it's all Interconnected, Yes. The other one being like just a basic premise. How do you achieve peace? I mean, that's kind of what our goal is, right? Like nobody wants to go fight and die in a war. Nobody wants to do that. So how do you achieve that? Well, the way you do it is through strength. So if we were to, if we were to be like, hey, we don't want to get enmeshed with this, or we don't want to do this. We don't develop this technology because of potential ramification. X, Y or Z, whatever it is, whatever make up, whatever you know you want. And so what you're saying is we're going to take a knee on this technology and we're going to allow the CCP to get it right. That then changes the calculus for how the all of the political relations happens between us. And that puts us in, that puts the free world in position that we do not want and I don't think we can afford at all.

[Julian]

Yeah, there was something, I've done episodes over the years with Andy Bustamante. He was actually. Yeah, he's in my parents house back in the day doing a podcast. Probably wondering what went wrong with his life, but it worked out for him. But there's one thing, you know, he says a lot of shit that, that I fight with him about and that people righteously call him out for in the comments is like a government mouthpiece. But there's, you know, he also gives some harsh truths on stuff that people don't want to hear on things. That's why I respect them. And one of the things that he went through that I don't even think this one's like an example of the harsh truth. It's just like reality. I just never simplified it to this. Like duh. But like he said, the only three letters that matter for any country in the world overall at the top, you know, 90% of it are GD and P. What's their GDP?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

So when you look at China and seeing how tight they are with our GDP and their population and their lack of rules and what they take from us, that's something that should be blinking red.

[Jesse Hamill]

100 and I'll throw a couple more, just that. Amplify that.

[Julian]

Yep.

[Jesse Hamill]

One is last number I saw, we have 11.49 million full time employed manufacturing workers.

[Julian]

11.49 million in the U.S. okay.

[Jesse Hamill]

The Chinese have 198 million.

[Julian]

That we know of.

[Jesse Hamill]

That we know of. Yeah, yeah.

[Julian]

There's another 200 in like locked downstairs.

[Jesse Hamill]

So one. There's GDP, but there's also massive disparity in the ability to produce things. And then the other, the number that's probably not even captured in GDP is the IP theft.

[Julian]

What's that, like 600 billion or some shit?

[Jesse Hamill]

Oh, it's way higher than that. The IP theft of what has been stolen or taken from all across us, EU as well, but mostly the US Think about this. So you have cutting edge intellectual property developed at a lab, at a tech startup, at a VC backed this at a government entity, whatever at a university. You have some kind of cutting edge breakthrough in something, the amount of that that's been stolen. So they didn't have to put any of the R and D into it, they didn't have to invest into getting it to that point. They just control C, control V. And then they have nearly 200 million people full time employed in massive manufacturing capabilities to then push something from the digital space into the physical world. That, that's to me one of the most damning things of our kind of position. So if you think of, you know, just broad, even national security are do nuke weapons stop wars right now? No, they don't. They probably limit them, they limit actions. They put governors and they bring into the calculus. Okay, I would argue, but I would argue like the new way of deterring is and it's really between the US and China, maybe Russia, but it's really between the US and the CCP is which one can credibly generate hundreds of thousands of robotic agents in medium earth orbit, low earth orbit, stratosphere, the air at sea, subsurface wave after wave of unrelenting systems and swarms that coordinate themselves every night. Whichever, whichever country can do that credibly and the other one believes that happens, that will give them the ability to coerce and defend their national interests without having to fire a shot. This is actually like really important. That. So that's part of, that's a deep, part of my motivation is that if we achieve that thing we, we achieve a level of national security dominance that prevents conflict. Conflicts happen when they perceive that that dominance has eroded.

[Julian]

When they're throwing balloons over, they're throwing.

[Jesse Hamill]

Balloons and they're like, well, they're not going to respond. Or maybe their systems are too old or they still have kind of a 1990s early 2000s military that's optimized for defeat. ISIS and Al Qaeda, they can't hang with us in this. Or we have this unique asymmetric capability to neutralize them. I have a unique munition to attack carrier strike groups. Or I have unique jamming to deny them gps, which everything relies on gps. Or I have some kind of a cyber attack or some other capability. Or I've, you know, created blackmail dossiers on everybody that matters in decision making. And I can use that. Whatever it is. Whatever it is. Right. I. And it's probably a combination of all these things. Right. The world's complicated.

[Julian]

Imagine if Epstein had drones.

[Jesse Hamill]

If we don't. Epstein Drones, like that should be. That'd be a good band name, by the way. Epstein Drones. Right, that. I'm writing a mental note of that. Epstein Drones, like garage band name. Listen to that. You'd at least hit play. You would hit play if you saw.

[Julian]

I would probably hit play once.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. What fun was. Yeah.

[Julian]

And then I might be like, no, yeah, no, no. Too many bad images coming around. But you're so you're focused on. On the drone. Like, I totally agree with you that. And we're gonna get into the science of it and all the different use cases and all that. We'll get there. I totally agree with you that being able to use something non human robotic at large distances in all different places and environments to either stop other threats similarly coming in, or be a threat and actually get information is a huge part of this next gen warfare and all that. But like, it's still fair to say there, there are other elements. Like, I'll even use a simple age old one. You have. You have a whole system where like the CCP sends people through South America, all the way up like the Mexican coast through Tijuana with like full directions. This is a problem sitting there. And then they come in and then we lose them once they come in. You know, like, that's just one thing. They end up on farmland or they end up. I had a guy in here talking about all the evidence he uncovered in Maine, Steve Robinson, about, you know, they end up being marijuana growers for the Triads. You know, like. Like there are other problems too.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree that, you know, so I, I kind of zoom out and then zoom back in. The way I think about it, for me, so it's like the zoom in is like, okay, you know, and this is why we launched a company and did the things I'm doing is where do I have unique experience, skill, unfair advantage, like any good entrepreneur has.

[Julian]

Unfair advantage.

[Jesse Hamill]

Unfair advantage. Yeah, that's a. That's actually MIT ism. They actually say that it would be.

[Julian]

Yeah, they have a lot of.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, unfair advantage. Yeah. I mean, I think it's true to like the. A good entrepreneur needs two things. Passion for the subject of material because there's ups and downs. Right. You're just gonna get kicked down. There's tough days. Especially like true, like what we've done. True. Zero to one. Yes. But then an unfair advantage, like you need like what is your unique insight capabilities that you can bring something to market that one of the other companies can't do or won't do or both. So I think about that as kind of my area. But to like what we were saying earlier, it is connected. So if you had a more dominant drone, robotic kind of autonomous system, does that then also improve our ability to do. To go after the use case you just talked about? Maybe, maybe directly it does, maybe it doesn't. But if you're dominant in this area, then all of a sudden that frees up political capital and. Or real capital.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

To then address that particular issue of, you know, somebody coming in through Tijuana and then, you know, doing some kind of subversive behavior within the States.

[Julian]

Now here's the other side of that and you know where I'm going with this, the 1984 aspect. Do you use, do the people in charge use something like that as a Trojan horse? Meaning like legitimate threat. Chinese spies coming through Tijuana into San Diego. And then. Okay, we're going to use drones there.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know, by the way, we're going.

[Julian]

To watch this protest.

[Jesse Hamill]

It's very like any, you know, good red blooded American. I like to watch part of my Christmas thing. I just did it with my 9 year old this year as between, you know, that the kind of like that special zone after Christmas before New Year, everybody's out of school. So we watch all Lord of the Rings, all of them, fully extended version.

[Julian]

I actually did on the flight back from Rome.

[Jesse Hamill]

Boom.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Now we're talking. Yeah. So. But you know, it still stands up so well. Right.

[Julian]

You know what?

[Jesse Hamill]

Amazing.

[Julian]

It's funny because I had always said I saw them when I was a little kid and I'd always use them as an example of like it's not my kind of movie because it's like kind of fantasy world.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

And whatever. But I respected the fuck out of it because Peter Jackson crushed it and they had this unbelievable cast and then now I literally hadn't watched it in 20 years.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's how, that's about how I was too when I watched it this past time. Yeah.

[Julian]

And I watched it and I had a whole. I was like, wait a minute, no. This is genius.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. Like it really stands.

[Julian]

Got me into it for sure.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. And just so. So are our drones like that special ring. So I was gonna do it earlier. So powerful.

[Julian]

Something you were saying.

[Jesse Hamill]

Feel free.

[Julian]

I forget what it was, but I'll use it later.

[Jesse Hamill]

I don't do a good Smeagol. I have other. Other ones I can do, but obvious reasons. Yeah.

[Julian]

You ever seen what's his face? Speaking of people doing audiobooks, you ever seen Andy Circus do the Lord of the Rings audiobook?

[Jesse Hamill]

No. I. I need to. Okay. That needs to be.

[Julian]

Steve. Can you go to Twitter real fast? I. If. If this gets cut out, it's because for some reason it's copyrighted. But type in Andy Circus audio. S. It's like S, S, E, R. S, E, R, K E, S. I want to say. Or is. Yeah, right there. Right there. Yeah. Play this real fast. Let's get some audio on that. We're going to find out. If it gets cut out, it's because it's copyrighted. But listen. This is like, unreal. He's doing the audiobook for Lord of the Rings and he goes into. Into character.

[Jesse Hamill]

Good. Quite uselessly, one of the orcs sitting near laughed and said something to a.

[Julian]

Companion in their ability.

[Jesse Hamill]

Abominable tongue. Rest while you can. Little fool.

[Julian]

A sign.

[Jesse Hamill]

Gossiping in the common speech which made him almost as hideous as his own language. Rest while you can. We'll find a use for your legs before long. You wish you had got none before we get home. If I hadn't my way, you'd wish you were dead now.

[Julian]

Said the other. Exactly. When he does Smeagol.

[Jesse Hamill]

Squeak, you miserable rat. He stooped over Pippin, bringing his yellow fangs close to his face. He had a black knife with a long, jagged blade in his hand. Lie quiet or I'll tickle you with this. He hissed. Don't draw attention to yourself or I may forget my orders. Curse the Isengarders.

[Julian]

What the fuck? This is all one take. Pause this real fast.

[Jesse Hamill]

Speech in his own tongue.

[Julian]

Just add. Add to the search Smeagol, when he does the schmeagle thing. So he's like just talking in and we'll make a note. That is a good one. We didn't have the audio at the beginning to cut that little part.

[Jesse Hamill]

That is a different level.

[Julian]

All right, so go down. Go down. Go up. Is it that one? No, no, go down that one right there. Yeah, Yeah. I think. I think this is it. Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Smeagol was holding a debate with some.

[Julian]

Other thought that used the same voice but made it squeak and hiss.

[Jesse Hamill]

A pale light and a green light alternated in his eyes as he spoke. Twenty years later, Wild still got it.

[Julian]

Yes. Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yes, my precious, came the answer.

[Julian]

We promised to save our precious nut. To let him have it.

[Jesse Hamill]

Never. But it's going to him. Yes.

[Julian]

Nearer every step. What's the Hobbit going to do with it? We wonders. Yes, we wonders.

[Jesse Hamill]

I don't know.

[Julian]

I can't help it. Master's got it. Promised to help the master. Ah, that's good.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, that's the level. That's the level, man. That is. Yeah.

[Julian]

Different. Different level right there. But you're right, it does hold up, like, incredibly well. And there's a lot of symbolism to the world. Like the real world.

[Jesse Hamill]

Well. And one of the themes all throughout it of the human race and mankind just being so easily corrupted by power. So to your earlier point of like. And it's a valid question. Right. Put in. And you're actually posing kind of two different sides. And neither of them, when you play it out, is acceptable. And that's kind of the interesting one. One is, let's not give centralized power any kind of real advantage in autonomy and machines because we're concerned that it could be used in a evil way. I'll just keep it very simple. Okay. That's one path. That path where you play that out is like, okay, I pretty much just guarantee the CCP is going to dominate us in that. The other path is we invest in it. We harness the American economy and entrepreneurship and innovation. We do it. And then how do we then prevent it from being used for malign kind of purposes?

[Julian]

Yeah. How do we put the guardrails?

[Jesse Hamill]

How do we put guardrails? How do we do it? And are those guardrails the same? That's probably an important thing. As we expand into new kind of domains and doing things in different areas, there's a level of governance that needs to kind of happen with that. So I definitely support that. And it will be frontier. I think this is important too. Like, it's not. There's no playbook like this. You know, you're not going to pull up a court ruling from the 80s or a policy paper written by someone that's going to give you the answer on that. Like you're not. This is frontier tech. So it's going to actually be much like the lab, Colossus labs like we were talking about earlier. It's going to be kind of opaque from a policy and government standard of what is what kind of governance is like a speed bump versus a guardrail? That's going to be kind of hard to determine. So to me, what I think matters, and this is not to be tried or trivial about it, but what matters is like one, the character and values of the people making those decisions has never been more important because the place they come from is going to allow them to iterate on it a certain way. And then I think a very realistic view of the incentives has to be looked at. So the incentives of balancing incentives, you look at like our, our economy in theory. That's what it, that's what we're trying to do is balance incentives. You know, you allow entrepreneurs and business leaders and technologists and innovators and engineers to build something to a certain point. If it gets to us too far too large to where it gets, you know, monopolistic power, then the government actually has like a responsibility to break that up to ensure competition. That's right, you know, to. And that, that's all part of like how they're governing this, you know, and that's, and that's viewed as a positive thing. I think probably by most people that's views a positive thing.

[Julian]

But when, hold on, when a government's looking at say Rockefeller Oil, these guys may understand that better. The where I get a little cynical and go, oh, it's like when you listen to some of these 80 year old 50 year senators talk about social media. Like, yeah, we went up to this, what's called the Facebook and it's like you're gonna have a real con. Exactly. You're gonna have a real conversation with these people to govern them when you know, you're, you know, a Luddite.

[Jesse Hamill]

No, I 100 agree. I mean that, that's also why like this. And I do not believe this is a controversial position. I'm a businessman, like so you know this, I don't get a lot involved a lot of this, but like term limits kind of make a lot of sense here.

[Julian]

Like good luck.

[Jesse Hamill]

Like that also. Good luck. I agree. That could be part of it. And you could, you could make, you can play out an argument where the lack of term, term limits might be what causes one of those innovation pathways to go malign. It could, you could trace that back from, you know, you have to imagine you're in the year 2050 and then you're debriefing like a historian where we are now at how we got to some malign place in 2050. You could probably, you could play at a very credible Scenario where you trace that back with contributing factors to the root cause being. We just. The term limits weren't enacted. So the same people sat in the same environments and they weren't the right people to make this happen. You know, as, as we're going through like, you know, what Thomas Kuhn write about, I believe we're in is a. If you read Structures of Scientific Revolutions, like a. It's kind of a, you know, it's an old school book. But the basic premise of the book, he literally says this is a book. It's a little bit older. But the basic premise of that book is like as you have these epochs of new scientific revolutions, you know, from steam engine to, you know, airplanes and jet age and all this as you, as you progress through that. He actually says it's like sometimes you have to just wait for that previous generation to die off before you can really, like, you know, really move fast. Innovation now is happening so fast that's not going to happen. And life's being expended extended, which is a positive thing. So yeah, I think you could, you could argue that. I think that's actually a very salient argument of like another reason why term limits matter is to get the right kind of people in place to put very well thought out governance to allow us to maintain technology dominance while preventing it from turning it into a 1984 situation. And that will not be easy. That will not be easy. Like that's going to take very serious. People with very high IQs doing very real things. And it will. And you know, you know, it will also be not just humans, it'll be a group of humans and machines doing this. The machines will be involved in this. Machines already are. Right. Who makes a decision now without at least gpting it once?

[Julian]

Okay, I see they're all.

[Jesse Hamill]

And that's influencing you like you're programming your own mental algorithm.

[Julian]

Sure.

[Jesse Hamill]

100 and humans are much more suggestible than we like to admit we are.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

So you're all. It's already happening. We already live in that world.

[Julian]

But you also, you know, there's optics with this stuff everywhere, just like there's with everything. And the company people think about with this whole space at the top is Palantir. They are the example company. And when you see a company that was funded by. In Q Tel, by the bureaucracy, CIA, run by guys who are part of. Especially when you look at Peter Thiel like the elite structure, the Illuminati elite, if you will, and you know they're bragging about Using surveillance everywhere, including on domestic protests. People get worried, Everyone out there gets worried about that because it's like, well, we're already seeing it play out.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

And not only is it not being legislated, the government's funded them, you know, and, and I would like to think, because there's a litany of problems here, I would like to think that we find a way to harness this all. I am an optimist with things and sometimes I'm like, damn, am I too much of an optimist? Do I just think we're just going to figure it out all the time? But I, I just, over time we have always figured things out. And I used to, and when I was in my parents house for the first three and a half years in the studio behind me, I had two pictures on top of each other. And I remember like even back in episode 16 with my buddy Mitch, like a little more than two hours in that episode I was, we were talking about the Isaac Asimov last question. And I pointed to these pictures. I said, okay, top picture was a grayscale shot of Bikini Atoll, which is the island we blew off the earth for a nuclear test in like 1946 or 47, something like that. And the bottom picture was a recreation of Michelangelo's hand of God in Adam, but instead of the hand of God it was a robot.

[Jesse Hamill]

Sure. Yeah.

[Julian]

And the reason I had that there was because to me it was like the ultimate symbolism of we had the quote unquote, I have become death weapon 80 years ago and now like the whole world has it. And for some reason through multi generations, knock on wood, we haven't used it to kill all of each other and have a nuclear holocaust. And then the world meaning through all the ups and downs of dictators, regime changes, espionage problems, wars, whatever, people have always just decided that's a button we don't push. Which says something about even the worst of humanity at least having some sort of like line in the sand that they won't go past. And my optimism there was that with the robot hand, you know, with AI if you will, we will be able to have the same type of outcome. The difference between the two is that a nuclear weapon, until it has AI and it can't think for itself, if we develop things that can think for themselves, there are a lot of ways this could go wrong.

[Jesse Hamill]

I definitely agree reactions of this too. Context matters and the right mental model matters here. You can even probably check fact check me on this. But the, you know, a couple things have happened like One, I think, I do think in general, because of our, and I mean the world, at least the west, and in many cases beyond just the west, we've become very successful, almost opulent in how we live. And that can make you soft in a lot of ways and lose some context. So to your. Just to add to your point about nukes, didn't the advent of the nuke, and even using it, an atom, an atom bomb, at least it didn't actually cause the end of the world. Right? We're still here.

[Julian]

We're still here.

[Jesse Hamill]

And if you look at the number of deaths from, from combat, from wars, it's a fraction since 1945 to 2026 of what was experienced from even just the Great war, World War I, a fraction of it as a globe, we've actually experienced unprecedented levels of peace. It may not feel like it, but if you define war as someone dying, not just feeling anxious, but actually dying from somebody who's trying to kill you, shedding blood out of anger, if you define it that way. Unprecedented peace, Rachel, in a level of prosperity we just never even experienced.

[Julian]

You're talking about gross numbers and also literally per capita percentages too.

[Jesse Hamill]

Both. Both. Absolutely, absolutely. So that, you know, that begs, that begs a little bit. It puts some context on.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

Like, it puts some context. You know, some of the anxiety for how we view technology is simply just, it's, it's alleviated when you just kind of step back and say, okay, look at actually where we're at right now. Like yes, it's unknown, there's some unknowns. Right. Nobody knows the future. There's some unknowns or we're doing some new things and doing things differently. And yeah, that happens. But that's a very real thing to, you know, and to just go on, you know, we want to talk about Palantir for a minute and our experience with them. We were a cohort startup with them, so we worked with them, we've co developed with them and what I, what.

[Julian]

I developed with them.

[Jesse Hamill]

Co developed with them, yep. For, for our company now what I like about them, so I can tell you first hand stuff. One, there's a level of like software competency there that is underwhelming in some other big name companies. So I like working with people that actually know how to do their stuff and do it well. Like professional matters, skill matters, capability matters.

[Julian]

The CIA cares about that.

[Jesse Hamill]

So there's that. The other thing that, the other thing that's kind of interesting is, is there's different sides to look at. It too. But what I'm, what I am like animated by is that in, you know, that individual, that war fighting individual, that American citizen that we've asked to go manage violence or to do very dangerous things somewhere else. And if, if using, if they use, and they do right, they use Palantir type products, then if we, if I can work with them and give them that asymmetric advantage that we just talked about to give Americans national security forces. Like, and these are like real humans now. We're not talking about like abstract things, we're talking real people your age trying to do really dangerous things and trying to sense make from a crazy world. And if these tools are helping them and it's actually helping, whether it's law enforcement, so they get back to their families every night, whether it's a war fighter so they also can get back to their families like I'm very animated by doing that. That doesn't mean there isn't guardrails that should be talked about for all of this, right? Doesn't mean there isn't guardrails. And like any industry company, we are, you know, there is that facet of like we're fashioning the ring and then giving that ring to somebody else and hoping it works out. Yes, there is a facet of that like that is. And I think we, I think we as a society have to wrestle with that and how we can keep improving that for sure. But, but you know, I say that my experience is that I'm, I'm very motivated by giving those war fighters, those professionals, those Americans doing critical infrastructure disaster response. We're doing some things in those environments as well, like giving them the best possible tools, do their job, that's very animating, you know, for us. And that clarifies ambiguity. Like when you go like go sit, go sit in one of their environments, go try and do their job and do it under, under a, you know, a threat of lethal engagement on both sides. Go to a war game and do it like where somebody's coming after you.

[Julian]

That'S where it gets hard.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's where it gets hard. And that's where, that's where a lot of the, a lot of the anxieties and questions, they have a way of melting away. And things get very simple. Very, very simple. Like many of the combat missions I flew in gunships, where it gets very simple in certain points, especially around lethal engagements. And it gets to the point of like, let's make sure my team comes home tonight. And that's basically all that matters.

[Julian]

Which is a perfectly understandable motivation. And, you know, these are one of those where the motivation can be used for the underlying method, or it could just actually be the motivation, which is what it's supposed to be. And let me clarify that. I almost, like, wow, guys, like, you were talking. I like, picture the ghost of Scott Horton sitting there and, like, going, come on, man. You know, like the whole time and flipping out. Because, like, he's very, very libertarian. I love about talking, talking with Scott. He's great. But, like, you know, it might be happening.

[Jesse Hamill]

I felt this, like, yeah, I feel.

[Julian]

Like he's, like sitting there just, like, looking me like, julian, you're really gonna let this guy keep going on like this? But, like, there's things Scott says that have a ton of evidence to it that also point to ways that, you know, whether it be agencies or the military, you know, the Pentagon, obviously running the military or administrations have taken advantage of these types of national security things in the past to make it for blanket. For every single thing they do now, he may go too far and say, therefore none of it's real. I'm gonna disagree with Scott there. I sit in the middle of you two, quite literally. And so I hear you, like, when I. Especially when I'm hearing about, like, American lives or like, our guys at the tip of the spear being. Being wrist. Forget. These are. These are human beings that are part of my country as well, and they're going to engage other human beings that I also would rather not see die. Right. And so naturally, in those types of situations, I want to be like, okay, whatever we got to do. But then what do we do? That then becomes a precedent that we can't undo. And this kind of goes to, like, this isn't a perfect parallel, but you'll see what I'm saying. It goes to the slippery slope argument with Ed Snowden.

[Jesse Hamill]

Sure, yeah.

[Julian]

Ed Snowden was stuck between a shit and a fart. He was fucked either way. On one hand, he was going to break his oath and whistleblow on something which went against his contract and, you know, could have been called treasonous or whatever. Or on the other hand, he was gonna allow the administration to continue trampling everyone's constitutional rights illegally using a backdoor to the legal system that no one knew about without them knowing it if he doesn't say anything. And to me, I think he made the right call. But here's like, here's. And it's not necessarily his fault, but this is the problem. He now set a precedent that you can whistle Blow. So the next guy whistleblows for something a little bit less and then a little bit less and a little bit. And pretty soon, you know, someone. Whistle blows because someone took a. In the wrong place.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, that's right.

[Julian]

And that's not his fault. Like, it was a shitty situation to be in. But like, it's the same kind of psychology I think of when you're painting that example of like how many times do. Whether it's Palantir, which is the example we use, or any company could be your company or whatever. Do we say, ah, we don't want to risk it. Just, just hit the button and then that becomes the norm and it has cascading butterfly effects that make things actually worse than they were do.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know, I 100% do. And I, I think, I think two of the things that just. I thought of as you as a reflecting on this. This is an important conversation to. One is. And I think we've kind of lost this art because it's nuanced. You know, we have to. There's. It starts from a level of mutual respect regardless. On like, okay, you're an American, you're an American. There's a level of respect. So we can have a certain conversation on this. We used to, you know, and this is built into even. Even kind of our culture code. We code with the military and other agencies where you could have this, you know, conscientious objector. Right. And there's a whole like way of doing this and that. And that was literally designed, I think to. It was designed to prevent somebody from doing damage to their own soul. And here's what I mean by that. You, you will erode your own soul. You'll do moral harm to yourself if you're engaging in something that you don't believe, you know, or you have questions on. Maybe it's questions, maybe you're just concerned. Maybe it's a gut reaction that you can't get over on this. And you know, we used to have society and it's kind of degraded, unfortunately. I think, like, I don't hear a lot of people talk about this or even acknowledge this. This was a way for it to be like, okay, basically, let's allow this person to take a knee from what we're doing because we don't want them to do harm to themselves from a moral. We care about them as a soul. We care about them as a soul. And all humans are soul, right? Even the enemies that, that I've put in the ground, there's still a soul so we, there's. And there's an element that you care about them for. Like there's a humanity, there's a spark of divinity there that you care about. I think there's a way to acknowledge and respect that, that acknowledges and respects that each human also ultimately, you know, it's between them and their creator and they have to feel comfortable with that. And if you do, if you're having somebody do something that violates their conscience, like genuinely violates their conscience, not they're manipulating it to try and talk about it, you know, but genuinely violates it, that's not a good thing. Like that's not a good thing. So I think one, I think there's some off ramps that we used to have that would that kind of help in these situations. Because these are tough, these are tough life and death situations. And all of the reasons that we talked about earlier, okay, let's, let's be. And maybe there's good reason. Right? Let's be. And I don't mean this is a pejorative, but let's just be hyper paranoid about enabling a 1984 situation. Right? So like going down that road, I think about. So you asked like, do I think about could we be paving a 1984 situation for me, 100%. I think about that. I also think about could. If we don't, am I enabling the CCP to do it over me? And this is where, like this is where wisdom comes into play.

[Julian]

This is totally fair. Keep going.

[Jesse Hamill]

So within, you know, a wise man needs to look at the full situation and think about not just the slippery slope or try to think through second, third and fourth order consequences of taking an action. But it's also, what if I do not take that action? What if I don't go down that road? Then what is the second, third and fourth order effects on that? Yes.

[Julian]

Meaning sometimes. And this is just the reality of the world and I don't like it, but sometimes your choices are a piece of shit and you got to pick the best one at the top of the pile.

[Jesse Hamill]

They're always like that.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Maturity is maturity. Maturity is understanding. They're always like that.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Like if, you know, if a decision maker. And this is true, like if you're a policy type. This is true. When I was a commander, I commanded in combat and both in peacetime. This is true. Me as a founder. There's never decisions, never a decision where it's, it's perfectly clear. I fully understand everything's going to go and there's zero risk. Like, that's never it. So the way I approach any decision maker and decision like that with my company now and born out of how I did it in combat in more intense situations before, was you take all available data, you evaluate potential courses of action. If none of them are acceptable. Acceptable doesn't mean perfect. It means acceptable. As best you understand the situation, that's how real leaders make real decisions. And you may have months to make that decision. You may have seconds to make that decision. Depends. Wisdom understands that as well. You. And if none of them are acceptable, you work to generate another option for yourself.

[Julian]

What made you effective as a battlefield commander? When you were in the Air Force and had to make decisions in seconds, what made you effective at being able to do that?

[Jesse Hamill]

Making decisions in seconds starts with preparation. So it starts with that. So you rehearse, you think through much like what we're talking about right now, mission planning for a combat situation. Let's take the. The Venezuela, you know, action that was just taken. And I have no particular insights on this, but undoubtedly it was planned for months. It was planned for months.

[Julian]

See the video of Trump watching the.

[Jesse Hamill]

I've seen a lot of hilarious watching.

[Julian]

He was watching them do the war game of it.

[Jesse Hamill]

Like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been.

[Julian]

It looks great.

[Jesse Hamill]

It takes. It takes for these things. Take a lot of time as they're doing it, they're playing out. They're. What they're attempting to do is answer like, okay, if we go this way, what are the. The second, third, and fourth order effects of that? If we don't do it, we go this one thing, and God love them. I love everybody equally. I almost pains me to admit a little bit that a SEAL taught me this, but when I was working with some seals, they. They did. They taught me this.

[Julian]

Which seal?

[Jesse Hamill]

It was a unit out in this guy's name. I don't want to drop his name right now. It was a unit out in, In Germany. Well, when I lived on Germany, yeah, yeah. And they were presenting like a Con Ops, which you'd say a concept of operations, basically get approval to go do an action. And they went through, this is what we want to do. This is why we want to do it, you know, et cetera. And then they get to the end. And this is. This is. This is actually something that I, to this day, I still talk about this. And they talk about different risks of taking that action. We take this action, this could go bad. This could go bad. This could go bad. This could go bad. You Identify these risks. This, why didn't. This is answering like how I, how I make decisions and how I made them effectively in combat. You identify these ones and they say, well, how can I mitigate that risk? Like right now I'd assess it's a 20% chance that happening. How can I get that down to 5%? A lot of times there's little actions I can take. I can't get down to zero, but I can get down to like less likely or if it happens, it's less painful mitigating. So you get all these ones. They also, and this is what they did. I thought they exceptionally well. They also then published the risk of inaction, not just the risks of the action. Many people forget this part. It's. And it's just easy to forget. And then they go through the risk of inaction and say, yeah, if we don't do this, this could happen and then this could escalate and then this could happen. And it gives you a more balanced approach of how to make good decisions of both. What is the risk of the action? What is the risk of not taking that action?

[Julian]

I hope people listening to this as a side note are applying this to their life too. This is very applicable to everything.

[Jesse Hamill]

It's how I think of every decision. It's definitely how I think of, you know, as a founder, going from zero to one and, you know, going, you know, building something. Like you're confronted with constant decisions and it's kind of like there's a thousand doors you can go through. You only go through one and you don't have the resources to go through the other 999. So I hope I picked the right one and you've, and then maybe I don't go through any at all right now. Maybe I wait like it's, it's constantly this. So evaluating risk of the action, risk of the inaction, which risk can I mitigate? Rich. Which risks come with the high roi? Because sometimes you want to take the risk, but I don't want to take a high risk if it, if it's only going to give me a low return.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Jesse Hamill]

But if there's a but, I will take a high risk in some cases if the potential payoff is huge. And I mean, as an entrepreneur, I live in that world, right? I live, I live in the world of 1% probability of success 100xry that's right. Like that's, that's. Every day is like that. That, that's, that's also thinking, thinking through risk. Of action, inaction, how to mitigate it helps quantify. It's not pure quantified. It's qualified too, but it helps quantify and clarify your thinking. It's like a framework for how to make decisions. And then you do that with the available time. Kind of like a general decision making principle that. Can't remember where I read this now. I didn't come up with it, but I apply it. And that is you delay a decision as long as possible. So if I'm confronted with like a complex decision, one of the first things you do is say, what is the last possible minute I have to make that decision. You're like, no kidding. Put a star on the calendar, then. Okay, the decision point is here. So then that buys me all this time to do analysis and data gathering. Hey, I don't, I don't know this. I don't know that I can buy all that. I buy all that, do better risk analysis. And then I know I have to make it by this point or there's some kind of like very, you know, bad things that happen. Like an off ramp that sometimes that's like a, you know, sometimes that's months down the road and sometimes that's like four seconds from now.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know, so you have to be variable on that.

[Julian]

Yeah. I think you also gotta at least like the amazing decision makers that I've observed across all different backgrounds in my life, they have an incredible ability to respond and immediately reduce to zero, or as close to zero, I should say, as possible. Stress. And just look at the facts of the situation as well. And there's no better example than like in warfare where bullets are flying and people are dying, you gotta be not stressed. I mean, that's like impossible. But you know, the guys who can just look at it, and I don't mean this to make light of it, but gamify it for a minute. Understand, like.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, exactly.

[Julian]

Just laid it out. Great system.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

Like there is, there is just an incredible advantage to being able to do that.

[Jesse Hamill]

That comes with time, that comes with, you know, so this is. If you're well trained, especially in a military context, early on you get a bunch of kind of like stress inoculation things. Right. You go to survival training and all kinds of stuff happens there. You do intense things in the air, in my case, and you, you kind of ramp it up. So there's a. To do what you're talking about. To me, I think there's a, there's a physical aspect of it where you have to be, to know how to manage your own central nervous system. Like that actually is a real thing.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know, you can't let it take over and start getting panic attacks or flight or fight. Like, you can't have that. It's really, it's really like flight or freeze. You can't have any freezing going on. Like, you've got to be at a process in the midst of that. So how do you process in the midst of that? It's all kinds of stuff going on. There's a, there's an interesting. Is maybe worth looking up. There's a institution I've done a little bit of work with called the Institute of Human Machine Cognition. Yeah, they do work. It's kind of a small little lab. They do work for all kinds of folks. But they've done some work. You know, this is in my area, I'm not a biologist, but they've done some work. They actually talked to me about this where they've studied the biology at some kind of cellular level. And if it finds it, you'll probably see it. They've studied the biology of people that have successfully been through lethal combat, been shot at, been engaged, been in these kind of life or death situations routinely or through survival training or some kind of intense situation and still are high functioning. There appears to be some evidence that there's actually DNA differences. There's actually some DNA differences here. What is not clear, what is not clear from what I've talked to them about on this is that if it's like born DNA, you know, from your bloodline, or is it that you've, you've actually changed your own DNA from your actions, like I would say like a spirit led altering of your DNA.

[Julian]

From a young age.

[Jesse Hamill]

From my own perspective, I think that's what happened. I think the inoculation, I think the mindset, I think my deep, deep personal faith as a Christian, I think all of those has literally changed my DNA.

[Julian]

I totally believe that. I was actually talking with someone the other day about this in the context of toughness. And they're like, you think people are just born with that? And I said no. But I think people's environment and the way they respond to that environment molds what that is immediately. And then when environments may change drastically, they can develop it later or lose it, you know?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, also true.

[Julian]

And, and I'm, I'm the. For this thing from a DNA geneticist, so let's not go outside my lane here. But I would be very curious to see the science of people Studied both environments that they're born into and how that affects them while they're growing.

[Jesse Hamill]

Right, right, right.

[Julian]

But then also people that you start square zero at age 22 out of college and study them from 22 to 30 and see how, or if their literal DNA may just a little bit.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know, with a variable or what years that happens. There's, there's also this thinking. This is prevalent all the time. Like I was just on a, a call, you know, well intentioned call with. That's a bad way to say it is.

[Julian]

Like, yeah, I was with the Antichrist, Peter Thiel.

[Jesse Hamill]

It was, it was an individual that's trying to like, you know, work with founders or like high stress kind of like business types, entrepreneurs and all that and talking about like ways to manage stress. One, I freaking hate that term. I don't teach my kids that. I don't manage stress. Honestly. It's weak and it's dumb what you do.

[Julian]

This guy's talking to his nine year old. Stop being a pussy.

[Jesse Hamill]

Here's. You know, it's like, maybe what I would say is how do you develop a resiliency against the stress is way more interesting than how do you manage it and try and like reduce it. So it doesn't mean that you don't, you know, get a good night's sleep or go take a few breaths or do yoga, whatever the freak you want to do. Like whatever. We're fine. Like fine. If you're really into that, go for it. But if it helps you, go for it. But, but really, like think about, you know, what kind of men do we need in the year 2026 and beyond, ones that can be resilient to the environment and actually, and I believe this, they get stronger with the stress. Yes, that's, that's the kind that you need. We need more of that, that we do way more of that.

[Julian]

Do you think people can use.

[Jesse Hamill]

How.

[Julian]

Do I want to put this? Do you think people have an ability potentially in certain environments to use major psychological weaknesses they may have as a strength?

[Jesse Hamill]

I do, yeah. That's such a good, good question. I like. There is no growth without suffering. So if someone is suffering and we're all human, so there's a level of suffering that is just part of the human experience. And if there's someone who has a pernicious type of suffering, physical, psychological, perhaps something else, and if they have learned to not only just like deal with it, but learn to strengthen around it, that all of a sudden that suffering, as unpleasant as it is, may actually become the vessel for growth that allows them to do things they never would have done otherwise. Yeah, yeah. So this is where I say this all the time. Like, you know, founding a company is kind of like a. It's like a personal development journey disguised as a business. And this is where finding, you know, confronting your own demons, we all have them, your own weaknesses, slaying them on a daily basis and then they come back. The process of doing that enables a level of like, clarity of stress, inoculation, of good decision making of optimism, even. This process of like slaying your daily dragon, this process of doing that, that gives it tremendous confidence because a tremendous confidence that can come with that. You know, like a micro ism of that is like you start your day with a good workout. Like, you tend to like set you up for the day. Right.

[Julian]

100.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know that that's what you're going to there. You're like, you go into the gym so that you can slay a dragon.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's why you do it. You know, the, the second order effects is like, oh, I got cool veins today, or whatever. But you really go in for that reason.

[Julian]

Clarity.

[Jesse Hamill]

It's clear in the brain and, and it's clarifying because it's like, okay, I have, I have this. I'm going to be in this environment where there's no lies, there's no lies. In this environment, there's no, there's no, you know, there's no fakeness. The weight is either lifted or it is not. So I can be in this environment, get this kind of like quick dose of physical truth and a chance to conquer something immediately and then use that to kind of, you know, propel me throughout the day. That can be done in much bigger things with much harder things than just a little conquering, a little workout. And then I think if done right and if you respond with, you know, in a, in a positive way, that can create, you know, capabilities to do things, whether it's a business or, you know, whatever it is, and that you would never have done otherwise.

[Julian]

I have to admit that this is anecdotal from my own experience. And I haven't had someone in here who's an expert who could talk to me about this and other things and related things or been tested in any way. But the reason I asked you that question is because I truly believe your biggest weakness in your life can be harnessed to use as a major force in what you do. And one of the things I've recently started telling some people in my life about. And most of them are. Are shocked when they hear it, is that I have insanely crippling anxiety. Like, insane. And I hide it very well. There's probably some people in some environments who know me who'd be like, ah, I could see that. But in most environments, they'd be like, you. You know, usually I'm like, kind of the calmest person in those respects, But I actually think it's what allows me to do this job in here. Because when I walk through that door, like, I don't have anxiety about performing this job.

[Jesse Hamill]

Right.

[Julian]

But I have anxiety for the pressure of being the best in the world on this day, when I come in here with whoever's sitting in that seat across from me and I take that and then the cameras go on, the mics go on, and I'm able to simultaneously stay the same person I did when we were just bullshitting before camera. And also turn on this thing.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

To where all of that like, oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I got to be perfect. Turns into like, oh, free flow zoom. And then I may walk out of here and have serious troubles with it in other parts of my life right after this. And trust me, I do. But, like, something about it has created. And that's why I guess, like, there's a piece of it I'm grateful for. Like, it's created something to where I can do what I do at the highest level because of that problem.

[Jesse Hamill]

Knowing your upper and lower limits for your nervous system, which is what we're talking about here, and, and more, there's a. I definitely believe a spiritual aspect of this as well. But knowing an upper and lower level of your spiritual of your. Of your cns, like when you're way high, fully full anxiety, low sleep or REM sleep, you know, whatever in between, that allows you to better enter flow state. Kraft Mac and cheese is better than 90s hip hop. Will remind you of your childhood without making you feel. Feel incredibly old. Kraft Mac and Cheese. Best thing ever. This year's tax changes.

[Julian]

Better not get caught snoozing. Miss one deduction, lose thousands. Not amusing. Big tax changes can mean bigger refunds at Jackson Hewitt. And right now, get a hundred dollars just to try us.

[Jesse Hamill]

Don't worry, tax filers.

[Julian]

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[Jesse Hamill]

[e-mail] which is between those two ends. If you don't know your Upper and lower limit. It is harder to find that flow state. It is harder. So this, this, you know, this anxiety or, you know, or whatever it is that you're feeling is a, you know, it's an overacted CNS to some point and it's, it's allowing you to see your upper and lower limits. And a lot of good research on like flow is like in. Right in between. It's like halfway between upper and lower. Like that's where you're in that. You get in that time warp. You get to where you kind of get this like both very cool tunnel vision, but also like this very calm kind of thing.

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

And you start and you just are full performance mode, right?

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

That's what, that's what Brad Pitt's character played in F1. Like when he's, when he's driving. That was the only time he, you know, for all kinds of whatever for that character, the only time he could achieve it was driving A lot of people that when they're flying, they're like that, that's like, that's when they kind of achieve it. That movie, that was a great movie. So. Yeah, I like, I think that's. I think, I think you're. It's insightful and, and not something to be shied away from. Like, that's it. That's an advantage. You know, that's an advantage. And you know, I'm not suggesting that it's a good idea to go struggle with anxiety, but what I would suggest. What I would suggest is that if you have phobias, you need to go after them. Because you go after those phobias, that's going to push you to that upper limit of cns one you can slay it to. You're mapping out your own response systems so that you can find that flow state. And, and you know, professionally and personally, like, there's nothing better than me in that flow state. Like there's nothing better. There's nothing better than that. Yeah. Like doing, you know, doing something at a super high level where there's a clarity to it. You feel the performance. You're right at that, like, right. Engaged part. The neurons and your prefrontal and all, like, are most engaged. And you're, you know, you're just locked in. Like there's nothing, there's nothing like that. So for. It kind of is right. And you're, you've. Our chemistry is like designed for that. So how do I get to that? You could probably argue and I don't have any scientific basis on this, like, you know, to your point. I'm not, I'm not. This is out of my depth of 2. But if you were to go after your phobias or the things at least you think you've never mapped before, like try something you've never done and, and done it and went to like the edge of your fear, whether it's heights or whether it's public speaking or, you know, whatever, Right. You go, you push that to the edge. Because most people, if you put them in a certain environment, they'll also have tripping anxiety.

[Julian]

Sure.

[Jesse Hamill]

You know, if I dangle somebody from a certain height.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

If I put them in front of 10, 000 people to speak.

[Julian]

Absolutely.

[Jesse Hamill]

So it's all situational. It's all situational.

[Julian]

It's just strange when you're in a regular situation though, and you know, you're not saying anything, you're not shaking or whatever, and then you. I'm like, if I wanted to break it down to someone, be like, I'm feeling it right now, they'd be like, what? You know, whereas the other scenarios you get dangled from a building and stuff like that, we're all going to react well.

[Jesse Hamill]

It's, you know, it's a one. Strange is good. Strange is good. Yeah. This is a, this is, you know, the, the neurodivergent are incredibly important to our society right now in whatever capacity that is. So being different, having. Being wired a little bit different, looking at things a little bit differently. Lean into that. Like, I'd say that to anybody, like, lean into that. That's. That's what's uniquely you. Nobody needs a carbon copy of somebody else. Nobody needs a control C, control V. They need you to be you, which is what I try and do, Right. I try to just be me as much as I can and, you know, as authentic as I can. And it's kind of a wrestling of like, you know, continually becoming more authentic as you burn down all of these kind of facades around you and that allows you to enter that kind of state, I think a lot better. And what I found now, you know, founding the company and where I'm at now, like, it's. I'm pretty much like, I'm in that space a lot. Even when I'm doing. There's tasks on every once in a while you don't love. But even when I'm doing those things, like it's a. There's no kind of replacement for that. Like, I can be really creative, I can build things, I can do Kind of what I believe I'm meant to do at this time in my life right now. There's no kind of replacement for that. And if that is from, you know, without psychoanalysis, analyzing myself, like, if that is from things that happened in my past or early childhood stuff or combat stuff or, you know, whatever, if that is all an amalgamation of that, then awesome, awesome. Like, you know, both the, the trophies and the scars are part of who I am. Yes, that's true for all of us. Like, and they're both, you know, they're both, they're both just uniquely organic to us and something to kind of be embraced in a way.

[Julian]

Absolutely. You know, and to your point, you have to harness it for everything, including the things that aren't as fun. You know, you're running a company like you. Yes. You get to do a lot of the cool, creative stuff. You get to call the shots, you get to come up with the ideas. That's all fun. Then there's a lot of work that goes into it. There could be administrative. That falls on you. And I understand that doing, you know, I do a very different thing from you. But running a business, it's like, it's like that old Mike Tyson line. You gotta do discipline is doing the thing you hate the most. Like you love it.

[Jesse Hamill]

Like you love it. Yeah.

[Julian]

And I think I. Talking to a lot of military guys, especially who served a lot of time. I think the military does an amazing job of like accidentally teaching you.

[Jesse Hamill]

Do you do a lot of things that suck? Yes, that's. That's definitely true. You do a lot of things that suck. So even, you know, it's all relative. Right. Like, that's an advantage. It's an advantage. And there's some, like, there's some interesting. There's some interesting research on this too, about. This is something else I'm passionate about, about veteran led founding business. That there, you know, there's some. There used to be this kind of, you know, Post World War II, you had a bunch of vets came back and they. And the entrepreneurship was at massively high levels. And then you had a little bit more of that. It was still quite high. After like Vietnam, the vets came back and they founded businesses and did all kinds of small business, big business, medium, like all in between, after global war on terror. So let's talk like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan of 20 years of that from like Owand Covid, basically. And we pulled Afghanistan. The numbers are way lower, way lower. I don't have good answers for why that is either. But I think it's a problem. I think it's a problem. I think it's actually like a really interesting catalyst because of what you just said. The military teaches you these kind of like, unique skills that transfer really well to. And I'm not just trying to say just entrepreneurship, but like transfer well to doing that kind of stuff. And for some reason that just hasn't materialized as much when you look at kind of the numbers. So this is something, you know, I, as you talk with, like, people that, you know, like, transition out of a military and a civilian job, it's always a thing. Like, it takes a lot of work. It's. It's different. You have, you know, there's all kinds of different. There's all kinds of different aspects to it. You know, for a lot of folks, it, it's, it takes rethinking kind of your identity. Oh, you know, I mean, like, like I used to wear a flight suit with my name on it.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

It was like, yeah, that's who I am. I had these wings and had this special patch from a school I went to, and I had this, you know, that earned this thing. And I had this thing here and I had this rank up here and like, you know, so it's all kind of part of it. Part. It becomes very. Even though you try not to let it, everybody tries not to let it. It kind of becomes like part of that. So transitioning from like kind of burning that down in a way, not in a negative way, but just like, hey, that's over. It's time to, you know, Jesse Hamill has to be something else.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

It's not that anymore. Right. People are going to see you differently. You have to see yourself differently. It's important to kind of find a vessel for that. I think the benefit of, at least for my kind of own personal experience is that I think that's actually a really healthy thing for, you know, a person to do. I mean, I think like a man should probably do that every 10 years anyhow. Should probably turn the page, really assess, burn it down, build from there. Like, how do you prevent becoming kind of stale and calcified?

[Julian]

Yes.

[Jesse Hamill]

We all see it. We see people that, that didn't do that. How do you prevent that? So the exercise I go through and this was instrumental in deciding to not just retire, hang out on the beach, get like an easy, some kind of easy low impact job and just kind of hang out. Right. You know, why go back to zero? Why? You know, paper a company, work for nothing for a Long time and just kind of go after something, you know, in my mid-40s, like, why do that? And part of, for me, part of that was like, I think forward to. I'm 44 right now, so I think forward to 50 year old Jesse Hamill. What do I want him to be? Like, what experiences I want him to have? What skill set do I want him to have? What kind of a leader do I want him to be? What kind of character do I want him to have? Have? And I'm engineering that man right now. The decisions I make, the risk I take or don't take, the things I do or don't do. The way I live is I'm building that person right now. Like, brick by brick, I'm building them. So for me, a way of thinking about it was like, how do I build the person that, that I want to be at that age? And that's part of, you know, why I went down this journey to begin with.

[Julian]

You know, it's an amazing exercise. I could not agree with you more and not that I had anywhere near the serious context you did of like serving in, in war zones for many, many years in the military. I didn't do anything like that. But I've had a couple moments in my life where I asked that exact kind of question. Question, yeah, like, oh, where do you want to be when you're 30?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, exactly.

[Julian]

What, what does that look like? You can't know every single variable. But what are, what, what types of things are you pursuing? Where are you in your life? Stuff like that. And what I find is that I, I do have a, A very good ability to be like cold turkey on stuff. Meaning, like, I. And I'm very grateful for that. I guess that's like, you know, you get the high anxiety, but you have this. So you get something good. But, but like, I can wake up one day and be like, I've been doing this every day and then never do it again. Right. I'm never gonna test that out on heroin or something, to be clear. Like, I think there's probably guardrails there.

[Jesse Hamill]

Probably. Probably put that in the bad idea folder.

[Julian]

Right? Think of it. But on pretty much everything I've tried to do that with, I can. And you know, when you, when you can think of your life farther out, whether that's three years out, five years out, or 10 years out, I do think that even if you don't have quite as good of ability to do that naturally out there, like, if you're listening right now, I do think you'd surprise yourself with how much you could be like, wait a minute.

[Jesse Hamill]

I agree.

[Julian]

I'm gonna stop this thing or I'm gonna start this thing.

[Jesse Hamill]

100 agree. 100 agree. I like, because I've. I've said this to, you know, when I was in. I said to junior officers, junior NCOs, you know, same kind of folks that I would talk to and I would say it to them. And. And I found it to be a pretty, like, powerful way of just thinking, you know, and what. And what. It's also. It's forcing you to think of, you know, our time's a finite resource. Yes, it's a finite resource. You know. You know, it's over like that. You know, it's over like that. Ecclesiastes says, life's a vapor. That's a. That's the best term. It's a vapor. It's gone. So where do you want to spend your time? You know, And, And. And, you know, I don't necessarily think it can be a useful exercise. I don't. I'm not. I'm not one of these legacy types, you know, because that. Sometimes I think that can get a little. You start thinking that way and get a little narcissistic.

[Julian]

I agree.

[Jesse Hamill]

But, you know, but it. But it is. But the, The. The value is like, where do you spend your time? What do you. What are you trying to do? Like, who are you working? You know, working to help who? You know, what. What is kind of your role? Who did you become? You know, what did you do? That's actually kind of the most fundamental thing. Like, what did you actually do? There was a. This is another just, like, militarism. I heard this from a couple generals early in my. Early my time, where they gave kind of a bit of a speech. It was actually very inspirational. Was at Air Command and staff College in 2014. And the basic concept of this guy said is like, you're gonna. This is. He's talking to the concept of like an active dude military career, which is very regimented. Like, to become a general. Like, it's. There's like. Oh, yeah, there's basically like a thousand different check marks. You have to check. It's very. It's very regimented. And if you. If you drive your career off of this path, it can be very difficult to get back on, no matter who you are. It's just the nature of the machine. So he's talking through this and the kind of. One of the, like, key things he says, like, you can either Be somebody or do something. And that's how you kind of fashion your life from, you know, in this case, a professional career. But I think that applies all kinds of things.

[Julian]

Be somebody or do something. Why not both?

[Jesse Hamill]

You try to do both. The context of this was you kind of get this split personality and you do both poorly. So the decisions you're making, like professional decisions or life decisions, if you're focused on, I want to be. And I'm not necessarily throwing shade at one or the other, but I'm just saying if you're focused on. I want to be. I want to be known as this. I want to be the best this. Like, I want it like this. The example is this, I'll admit a weakness here, a nostalgia weakness I have. I do love watching Michael Jordan old videos. Like, that's just Me, too. I'm always like, if I'm, you know, if I'm doing the. Trying to try not to scroll and scroll in, like, in a Jordan video comes up, I'm probably gonna watch it.

[Julian]

Oh, you want. You watch.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. So. And Jordan, a great example of this. Like, and I don't know the guy at all. You know, I'm just. I'm just judging by what I've seen on, you know, screens, all that. But, like, this was not a guy who cared about being the best player ever. Like, everything I've seen, that's not what he cared about. What he cared about is winning the most ever. Like, doing the thing, not becoming something. Not like, hey, I'm going to join the NBA. And I want it to be said that I'm the greatest XYZ afterwards. And so his whole focus was just like, I'm just going to do whatever it takes to win every night. Whatever it takes to win. That's it. And it was also. It's all about doing that, for me, has always been very, you know, inspirational. And so it's very much like how I've oriented my life now is I want to do. I don't want to do. My name will be forgotten, just like all of us would be forgotten. Like, before I'm cold in the ground. It'll be, you know, it will be absolutely. Even though, you know, the most powerful people in society, that's that way.

[Julian]

A week later.

[Jesse Hamill]

A week later, it's gone. Yep, it's gone. So what you did, what you did. One. That's a. I think, a much better way of thinking about how to live your life. And I also then believe that there's eternal consequences for what you do as well. So there's a much higher kind of oculus that matters. If you were to like look down on like how we're living out our lives in a much broader thing that motivates me for like doing something, building something, doing, you know, solving some of these problems that we talked about earlier in this, you know, but for national security, for. And even broader just in robotics and AI, like doing it. And if you focus on that instead of being something, it takes a lot of pressure off. You take a ton of pressure off, you know.

[Julian]

So I'm going to slightly disagree with you by agreeing with you.

[Jesse Hamill]

Love it.

[Julian]

All right. It's just a semantics thing. When I was sitting in my parents house with their roof over my head, which allowed this thing to be able to happen in the first place. But outside of that, no money, no previous online fame, no recognition, no. No to ride, no nothing, Right. And I started this on zero. I had one goal in my head because it's like, why, why, why do you do something? Do you do something to show or do you do something because you want be the greatest? And I said, okay, I want to be the number one in the world at what I do and I want to be the greatest of all time, which is starting with a B, which is exactly what you're saying not to do. But immediately upon saying that every single thing I've done for the last five years, nine months and 29 days is doing.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

I don't think every day, I don't wake up every day and say I'm going to be the goat. Right. At some point that thought may come in my head, you know, once a month or something like that, but it's a quick thought and it's out. My thought is, what am I doing today that's making me better than yesterday? What am I doing for tomorrow that's going to have me in the best position to be better than I am today? What actions do I take to be consistent, disciplined, and keep moving this thing forward while also improving and iterating at the same time? So my entire life is doing and in doing, what's my goal? My goal is to win. Right? And winning is subjective in this business. And by the way, being a goat, being the greatest of all time, it's totally subjective. You can't control that. How people look at you when you're in the grave, they're going to talk, how they talk. You can have all the evidence of the world to back up that you're the greatest man to ever Live. And if someone's like, he was a jerk off, then guess what? That's what gets the headline. It is what it is. But what you can do is where are your W's and where are your L's? And a lot of that is less subjective over time when people see it, because they can see in my business, like how people may gravitate towards it or connect with it or how you're able to go across such a range of people and be able to get things from them and get them to open up and stuff like that. Like over time it shows itself. So for me, every single day I am exactly focusing on what you're saying, which is I'm going to do all this stuff and then my hope is at the end when I hang up the hat, you know, fucking 60 years from now, or whatever, you know, I'll walk off and hopefully people look at me the way that I had the goal in my parents house the first day, which is that it's the greatest. But I think one can be with the other. But to your point, what I'm saying is if you just then focused on the B, if you focus on the B, you don't necessarily do the things that make you that you just want the fucking, for lack of a better term, you want the clout of the be. It doesn't work like that.

[Jesse Hamill]

There's also no, I think that's really insightful and. But I, when I was your age and younger, I would have said something very similar to what you just said. And I think there's probably an arc of how you change a little bit and how you, you know, there's different perspectives which you want, right? Like if you still think the same. Like I would consider it like a massive failure if I still looked at the world the Same way at 44 that I did at 34. Like what a tragedy that would be actually. Like, you mean you didn't grow at all for 10 years? Like, dear God, like what you know, you know, like that is terrible. So some of, some of what I'm saying, I think, and we actually are like, there's, there's actually a lot of parallels here. But it will, I think the, the idea of doing something and then, you know, the, the challenge. I'd even give you this challenge. The challenges then is, you know, even what you're doing here is there's something bigger that you're doing that's bigger than yourself. And is that maybe something that starts to become more motivating as the years go on and that's just kind of a reflective thing. That's a reflective thing.

[Julian]

No, I think that's perfectly said because I can tell you one of the things that, that, you know, before I did this job, my whole life was being everyone's hype man.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right.

[Julian]

What do I get to do in this job?

[Jesse Hamill]

Right.

[Julian]

I get to be a lot of people's hype man.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

As long as I like them and you know, cool. And shoot the, I get to bring them on here, get them some visual to the world. I could have some of my best friends work with me and build all their too. And it's like that is the coolest reward from it. It's bigger than just some talking into a mic. You know what I mean? Like, that's not what this is about. This is just the fun part of it.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

You know, so I, I, no, I, and also what you're saying about you change, dude, I couldn't even have a conversation with myself four years ago, 10 years ago. It's like, who the is that guy? You know? Listen, I know you're dumb when you're young. I was, you know, so it's like we've come a long way. I'm probably still retarded, but we'll get there.

[Jesse Hamill]

Little, little is okay.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

Never go full a little bit.

[Julian]

But I, I, this, that was a awesome tangent. I love that talking about that stuff. But I do want to go back to, and we're going to tie this all together. I want to go back to those eight years where you were really in combat during GY because as you said, that started in 06. Right, Chris?

[Jesse Hamill]

So I'm trying to think here. Yeah. Christmas of 06.

[Julian]

So here's why I'm asking it. Because you were in the Air Force in the air and you're there at the dawn of drone warfare.

[Jesse Hamill]

That is true. That is true.

[Julian]

So, so let's start with this. What, What areas of combat did you see? What, what theaters and you know, what were some major key moments during, during your eight years being in the ship.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. So back then. And it's still true. There's not that many AC130 gunships compared to fighters bombers. There was a squadron of 16 and then a squadron of 8. I think we're up to 32, maybe to 36 right now. So it's grown, but that's still much, much lower numbers. So they use this term like high density or high demand, low density asset. Basically. Like everybody wants one, but there's only a couple of them to go around. What that meant was you kind of had. You had these basically two different squadrons. And in around those times, this is also. Iraq's going big and Afghanistan's going big. That's where. That's where basically the US Is. There's some other things, but those. That's where basically it was. So I spent most of my time, you know, in Afghanistan, probably every single corner of that country. Yeah, you know, but that's where. That's where a lot of it was. So you're, you know, this is a, you know, it was a troubled time. So. Yeah, you know, back then it was kind of like, oh, just one more fighting season. Like, we're almost done. We're almost done, guys. Like, we're wrapping it up. Wrapping it up in, oh, six. I remember hearing this, like now we're wrapping it up, guys. Like, like, like this isn't 04 anymore. It's not 03. Like, we're wrapping this thing up. And, you know, my first one over there, I'm like, well, okay, I guess, you know, we're about, about to wrap this up. Yeah, I guess we won. You know, it was not that at all. Yeah, so, you know, that, so my. The what that experience kind of felt like was, you know, at that point, you're. You're running kind of target operations. You're going after like, key. Al Qaeda, Taliban, like this kind of like entity, you know, terrorist and or insurgent network. You kind of use those terms almost interchangeably back then. And you'd have this big air stack. So you'd have like a ground team go do an action to try and find somebody. And then you'd have an air stack ready to have like maybe a gunship, maybe a couple other aircraft, and even a drone. Like you just said, like, early days, you had drones in there too. So I got very comfortable early on flying. It's kind of weird, you know, for like a. Just your average, like back then, like, it was kind of weird be like, okay, you're flying around, you look over. There's nobody in that plane. That plane's right next to me. There's nobody in that plane. It was a little weird right at first, but just, you know, working through that kind of like, operation. So all kinds of operations where there's all kinds of terms and different things we could use to talk about, like, you know, what it was. But what it really was was you'd have AC130 gunships overhead to provide protection in case something happened in the Ground party in most cases. So if they, you know, if they. If they encountered some kind of enemy fire, if somebody, you know, in those days was a big dishka or something, you know, rpg, something like that was popped out of a mountain and starts shooting at them, that would kind of be. That would be an area where we could then keep them safe from that. And that's the kind of stuff that you did. So what your typical mission would look like, just like broadly describing. So you'd take off. We used to have the pagers. So we'd have these little like, pagers. Yeah, so we'd have pagers out and you'd have these pagers have these different codes on them. And it's just numeric codes. And you'd just be at the gym or you'd be right next to the flight lines. You basically live almost next to your aircraft at an, you know, undisclosed location. And so you're at this undisclosed location, pager goes off, and that's somebody like back in an operating center saying, I need you to take off now. And inevitably it always happened when you're like halfway through the workout or something like this. Like, it was just. It was always. It was like this, or you're trying to. Trying to eat, you know, whatever it was, because it just happened, whatever. And then it was like, run, run, run, you know, out to the plane. And somebody else has already kind of prepped it. You're taking off, then you're going to respond. And it's probably because you had some kind of a ground team, an American or allied ground team that had taken fire, taken a casualty, in many cases, something. Something bad had happened. And then you'd bring the gunship. The gunship had, you know, kind of unique capability here because just a basic physics one, right, that you see in Call of Duty. You. It's not forward firing weapons, side firing weapons. So you're circling a target, meaning you can kind of see, stare at that target area. You're staring at like a large postage stamp because you're flying pretty high. So you're staring at a large posted stamp area. So you can see friendly forces here. You can find if somebody's like trying to sneak up on them or if an enemy force is trying to infiltrate in some kind of angle, and then you're calling that out. And then, you know, if as needed, you put down fires basically to keep them safe from this, you know, so all kinds of. All kinds of examples of. Of that. Where you'd have your ground team is just in these days In Afghanistan. Right. It would just pop out of nowhere. So just pop out of nowhere. It'd be like a building that you thought was fine. It was just like a little mud hut. And then all of a sudden, 30 people armed with AK47s and maybe even setting up a dishka or some kind of large caliber weapon, small arms weapon, and they just start shooting. They just are, you know, ambushing them. This was constantly happening, happening. Or you'd have a convoy of like five Humvees. They're trying to drive from one city to the next, you know, outpost. And they're driving, and there's a dead animal in the middle of the road. That's weird. That's weird. So do we stop for that dead animal? What is that? I don't know. It's like some kind of obstruction. So then they stop or something like that, and somebody's put a improvised explosive device, like, in this thing. They're ready to clack this off with a cell phone somewhere else. And then something like that would happen. And then all of a sudden there's an ambush that happens. So you'd also. We would do a lot of. And we. And we protected a lot of American and allied forces that were just moving from one place to another as well.

[Julian]

You're also fighting the geography, too. The geography.

[Jesse Hamill]

Geography is nasty, man. Yeah, it's insane. Like, you know, so you have. You have like the foothills of the Himalayas, so you got the Hindu Kush kind of all in that area. Super jagged mountains. I mean, nasty terrain. And that complicates both the flying, it complicates the weaponry. So, you know, shooting down a side of a mountain is much more complicated than, like shooting on a flat one. It's almost like a trick shot in some areas. So you're doing all of that and then we're doing it with. With drones. Like, it was the first time drones were kind of used ever in this, you know, in that environment. So you got them in the stack. You got. And then you're, you know, if you think about what's you in a plane.

[Julian]

Sometimes controlling a drone as well.

[Jesse Hamill]

That started. And that's still. That's happening now. That started to happen towards the end. That started to happen towards the end. Yeah. There's actually some programs we're working with. Yeah. You know, fast forward. We are now the difference between. But the. The pieces were all in the. Those combat days, you know, back in Afghanistan.

[Julian]

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[Jesse Hamill]

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[Julian]

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[Jesse Hamill]

Wherever you listen to podcasts, the difference between like a standoff weapon and a drone, it's actually not that much difference between them. One fly. I mean they fly, they both fly, they both have seeker heads on them. So they have some kind of like vision or laser or something where they can see in front of them, they have compute, they have the ability to navigate and move and they fly through space. Really not that much of a difference between them. So you're getting a point now where you know, you have weapons that can be controlled from like another aircraft, a gunship in my case. You could have them from any kind of strike aircraft, even helicopters, controlling a drone or even multiple drones from that same platform. It's actually pretty similar like from a basic like software and you know, just overall approach is pretty similar. So we started kind of seeing that. I didn't actually, I don't think we had that in mass by then in those days, but it started, that kind of stuff started happening. So you'd get used to, you'd get used to drones being they call in the stack right there, these aircraft are stacked on top of each other. They'd be somewhere in the stack and Right. For somebody to combined attack with MQ9, that's pretty wild the first time. Yeah.

[Julian]

What was that like?

[Jesse Hamill]

So the MQ9 dropped, I think a pair of 500 pounders GB38s if I remember right. And, and then we, we combined our 105 millimeter and 40 millimeter at that time cannons along with like in that same target area to basically mass firepower against some kind of an enemy. It's pretty awesome actually. Worked out really, really well.

[Julian]

So the 4th of July pretty much.

[Jesse Hamill]

Pretty much, yeah. They leveled up. They leveled up. They got the 15 kill streak or you know, something like that from Call of Duty. Yeah, but that was, that integration with drones was pretty wild because you've got, you've got people flying that, that in some cases they're not even on the same continent. Like they're all over the place. So it's a very like, it's kind of surreal. Yeah.

[Julian]

Yeah. It's kind of crazy to think about how much it ramped up though to where and, and this, this is where it's both an amazing tool, but you worry about it and how we integrate with it. It's like when you can fly something that doesn't have a human in it right there, who's reporting exactly what he's seen on the ground. And you're controlling a video game toggle, you know, 8,000 miles away, and on this, you know, grayscale, grainy screen with a little aimer, you see a spot and you blow it up. And then you find out afterwards it was like a wedding.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah.

[Julian]

It gets. It can get a lot. I mean, there's been drone operators who were like, they have severe PTSD because they were told to hit a target, and then they find out later it wasn't the target. They thought.

[Jesse Hamill]

Two things happened with those early drone ones, like, particularly predators and reapers. Reapers. MQ1, MQ9. Like in those. Those days. Because we weren't really even using the term drone then. Like, now it's cool to say drones then. It was kind of like an insult because the guy, the. The people that were flying MQ1s, MQ9s, a lot of times they've been taken out of a manned aircraft. And so it's all different now. But in those days, it was like it was not cool to get taken out and then be trying to fly MQ1 MQ9s when you're actually sitting stationary. It's all changed now, and I think for good, you know, in a good way. But as we did that one, there was a rash of. This is just my opinion, but we put people in positions that we probably normally would not have. So there's a significant amount of screening that goes into creating a combat aviator that's going to employ very explosive weapons to do very damaging things. Part of that screening is, you know, you want somebody who is not going to have that kind of moral injury as they're engaging. It's not for everyone. In fact, it's not for most. That screening was happening still very well and normal for within, like, AC130 gunships and F16s and, you know, other kind of strike aircraft. I don't think that happened well in Those days for MQ1, MQ9s for a couple different reasons. There was actually, like, a process problem with how we selected and found people to go to MQ1s and MQ9s and there was even kind of this, like, stigma within the Air Force of doing it.

[Julian]

So that it's also nascent.

[Jesse Hamill]

It was very nascent. Yeah. They're Building it up, you know, so. So that I think contributed in some cases. The other one, this is a book on killing is the name of the book. Highly recommend reading for understanding.

[Julian]

This sounds like a real happy ending.

[Jesse Hamill]

It was written, I was written by retired 05 from Vietnam. And it's about the psychological cost of killing in combat. And you know what that does. Well written, well cited now, like, it's, it's all, you know, it's throughout any like, strike squadron, if they've all read it, you know, so. And one of the kind of premises that he has is that there's this difference between how close you are to the cognitive and even moral impacts of doing violence to another human. You know, it's different between like a fist versus a knife versus a weapon that's a little bit farther versus a sniper team versus a gunship versus like an MQ9 that's 8,000 miles away. And sometimes that, that distance can kind of cause this like a dichotomy between like, what just happened, what didn't.

[Julian]

It.

[Jesse Hamill]

They were also the other thing that happened in those days. And it's. This is still kind of a very real thing. This is something I never had to do. So I'm in combat. So if I go fly combat mission, I come back, I can talk with my crew about it. We can, you know, kind of do our normal debrief as a compartment thing. I can go get some food and go to bed and then wake up there tomorrow and do it again. Wake up. And that's, that's how it went in the MQ1, MQ9 ones. It was like, hey, I'm gonna go do this thing. It might pop up where I have to do this kind of combat, you know, very, you know, lethal engagement. And then I'm gonna be done and I'm gonna go home to my wife and kids for the night, like in my normal bed. So it was very much like a combat mode, peace of time mode. And they had to like turn that on and off.

[Julian]

Yeah. You walk out of a trailer into like a Vegas parking.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. Within the same day, you're having to turn that. That. So for, for my experience, it was, it was like, there's a ramp up and then you're in full fangs out combat mode for months at a time. And then there's a ramp down for a couple weeks and then you're back into like integrated.

[Julian]

Right. Because you're on the base, you're in the war zone, you have all that. But still you're doing a different job than the guys who are like right there on the ground. It's, it's critical but you're coming from the sky. So the first time you blew somebody up from the sky were you able to viscerally understand and like weigh the gravity in that moment? Of of course, you know, it was a bad guy hopefully that you were actually hitting because it's on the field of battle. But were you able to weigh the gravity of Holy, I just wiped the life off the earth.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first one, the, the reality is like many of I don't even remember or at least I'd have to really like kind of remember, you know, because I have so much time. I think I have 800 some combat hours in gunshot in Afghanistan. So there's a lot. Yeah, the first one I remember very distinctly and, and what I, what I had done, what I had done before I even joined the Air Force. So to back up to there when after 911 that, that September of 2001 to about May of 03 but really it was really through like May of O2 is when I kind of like just had the skill set and thank God had the foresight to really just spend time literally just me alone in prayer about the moral consequences of what I was going to start doing. Because I knew I was going for like I did not go to transport things. I didn't go to, you know, and I'm not putting, this is obviously not putting it right down but I went to be to deliver actually actual lethal ordinance. That's the whole reason I joined. So I've spent specific time just kind of like wrestling that in my mind and in my spirit and conscience and even in my soul. So that by the time it was really by About May of 2002, I was like yep, I, I am now comfortable with this. I understand what I'm doing and there was no like surprises to this at all. That served me very well. So it served me through training. It served me through the, you know, early training. Served me through the like the tactical mission qualification training in AC130 gunships, the kind of, you know, high fidelity exercises then actual deployment to combat served me very well. So the first time it happened I had been, I had kind of, it's all mental preparation, right Visualization mental preparation. I had fully prepared for that environment. So I had, I had a deep understanding of what was happening. And you do feel it 100 so you feel it, you know that that's why it, that's why it resonates when they Say the prayer in Boondock Saints after, like, they. You resonate like that. You know, a life has been taken here. And. And in my. My perspective, it was merciful. Like, this is a. You know, this is a merciful kill. Merciful, merciful kill.

[Julian]

Why did you think it was merciful.

[Jesse Hamill]

And still do that? These are, you know, these are nations at war. These are righteous things that we're doing regardless of whether the strategy will work out, regardless of whether all of the impetus that goes into it is righteous. Nobody would say that it is. I definitely wouldn't say it is, or even the conduct of it, but it was a authorized target. It was a defense of Americans, and they had stepped across that line. So now the merciful thing to do is to put them in the ground, period. And that. I never wavered from that. And I believe that that's also kind of like that mental clarity, that moral and mental clarity is really crucial to have in those environments. So my first engagement was actually an Al Qaeda commander, a local commander. So this is like the same organization that had directly attacked the towers close to here. The exact same organization.

[Julian]

And you knew damn well when you were hitting that button that it was.

[Jesse Hamill]

Him both before and after.

[Julian]

Right.

[Jesse Hamill]

And we also knew and had seen them in that group that they're with directly pointing weapons and trying to kill America as well.

[Julian]

Yeah.

[Jesse Hamill]

So you had all of that, you know, going into there.

[Julian]

Here's the one thing I'd say that it. I can imagine, because that's all I can do is try to imagine when you know for a fact it's like that, dude. Yeah, of course, you know, there's more of a. Like, all right, we got the bad guy. Right? There's. There's definitely that. There's still a gravity to it because it's like you take a life and you talk about that mental preparation, and there's no doubt you did a lot of it. That said, it's like the old Mike Tyson quote, Everyone has to. A plan until they get punched.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

[Julian]

You know, and you get punched in the mouth the first time, you have to actually weigh that you did the thing and you watched it happen. You watched the result. Boom, we're still here. It sounds like you were able to consciously understand that. Take a beat with it, keep flying the plane, land the plane, and be like, did the job.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah. The. The. There's a couple things that go into this as well. Paul talks about this in the New Testament, and that is that governments have the ability and actually the responsibility and they, in, you know, the, the epoch that we live in as humans to, if necessary, do force and evil to preserve a larger good. And those are dangerous words in the wrong person's. In the wrong person's mind. But it's also true, right? Like, you don't have to believe in capital punishment, but if you incarcerate someone who's committed crimes that's still doing harm to that person, Absolutely, you're doing harm to that person. And, and there is a, unquestionably, there is a weight and a cost that comes with that when you do that. So there was also, and this was not something that we managed very well during the SOCOM days that I was deployed in. And it caught a few people. I know that because I've been to some gunship reunions recently, and it caught a few people. And it's very real that a psyche can only take so much of that. You can only take so much of that. So one, the MQ1 and MQ9 types, we put them through the peacetime combat. Peacetime combat, Peacetime combat that already complicated that situation. And then in many cases, they had even more time than I'm talking about in that environment. Like, even more. Just because of the nature of the platform.

[Julian]

Yep.

[Jesse Hamill]

So where that line is, is very different for different people. And it kind of comes and goes and it's a, you know, it's a. A thing. But one thing that I definitely did as when I was in command is you. You would monitor. When I commanded a gunship squadron later in like 2013, 14, somewhere around 2013, you would monitor your crews. And part of that was seeing, like, are they able to cable carry that weight? The weight of what they're doing? It's just the weight of what you're doing. Can you, can you do that forever? And that's not dissimilar from like, you know, the, the signs of burnout. Right. Or the, you know, a nurse that's on the line too long or a firefighter, it's online. So a cop that's trying to do their job too much and two has seen too much. You gotta, like, we gotta get you out of here for a little bit. And so that's also. That's just part of it. And that's part of. That's part of the sacrifice that anybody that's been in that position for military has made. So it's like, it's very important. The some gave all and all gave some is very real. Like, there is a burning of the edges of your own kind of humanity that had to be done for your security. That's what warrants the like respect. And also what I'm motivated for the people that are still doing it. I'm, you know, I get to be cool guy now wearing jeans and just hanging out. Right. And talk with Julian. But the ones that are still doing it, it, they're still doing things that involve kind of burning the edges a bit.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Jesse Hamill]

And that's as a society we have to protect that, we have to honor that. And there's a couple things you can do. One of them is to respect and celebrate them. That's how damaging it was for all the Vietnam era to come back and get told, oh, you're a bunch of baby killers, you guys all suck. Because they had went there, they had charred their own conscience in the name of security as best they could in a chaotic situation where nobody knows anything, they're doing the best they can. And I mean the ones actually at the line and then they come back and their own people kind of like treat them terribly. That a true tragedy, like a true like moral failure of the citizenry in that case. Yeah, it's important for us to not let that happen like ever again. That doesn't mean that you have to glorify the violence.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Jesse Hamill]

That does not mean that. I don't do that. That does not mean that. But what it does mean is you respect the, you respect obviously the risk that, the personal risk that they took, but the personal risk sometimes is mitigated, especially if you're 8,000 miles away. Right. So then in that case, what you're, and I would say, you know something that's very as real as well is you're respecting that, that charring, that approaching and maybe even unfortunately crossing into moral injury that they did. You know, you respect that you and, and it's one, it's on the government organizations to ensure that doesn't happen to the people. Like they need to be monitoring that. It's a failure of leadership if they're not doing that. And I do think that's happened sometimes. That will apply to how we do drones as well. They'll apply to how we do drones for sure. And it, and it, it also applies upstream too. It applies upstream. So how we as a society talk about them I think is very important. So this goes like to the earlier point about you'll be very, you can be very careful with how we talk about it. And it's not because you don't question something that's not the point. Questioning needs to happen. Like, you know, robust debate 100 needs to happen. Transparency, you know, sunlight will kill the disinfectant. That's the disinfectant. Right. It'll kill the malign things. So we have to do that. The way we talk about is very important though. And the way we talk about in a way that acknowledges the general, like, you know, moral risk that people put themselves in. You know, we, you know, we understand the physical risk. In the drone age, the physical risk may start to withdraw, like it may start to lower the physical risk. Yeah, you're flying a drone. You know something else. Right. You know, it won't totally be gone, but it may start to like, erode.

[Julian]

I understand.

[Jesse Hamill]

The moral risk won't.

[Julian]

That's right.

[Jesse Hamill]

The moral risk will not. And it gets even more convoluted, which is, you know, what we've seen with the mq, the predator and reaper types, we've also.

[Julian]

Here's one thing that makes me a little bit cynical, unfortunately about it. We've already tested this on a population micro scale over the past 15, 20 years and completely failed when it comes to the moral risk. And I'm talking about a not life and death situation. But you look at social media, you look at the confidence people get behind keyboards to say things that they would never say to anyone's face 100% and become a totally different person because they are removed through the screen from it. And that is a real danger with, with drone warfare. And again, we've been doing it now for about 20 years. And so we now have some data and hopefully we've learned some lessons and are figuring out better ways to, you know, vet people to come in and properly train them to be able to handle that. And you and I could talk about that some more too, but, but I'm, I'm hearing like you talk about, like that example in the Bible with Paul, I think it was, where, you know, he's, he's talking about the moral ability to actually take action that may take a life or, or do something like that if it's for the greater good, which as you say, could be bastardized, but if used correctly, I, I, I get what he's saying right there. You do have the benefit of having done it, though, and from what it sounds like doing it not only at the highest level, but for the right reasons and the right motivations and the right places, with the right honor, because you're a good guy. The part that I'm hung up on is how you could have possibly. How do I want to ask this? Like in 02 when you were preparing to get in and you said you had a lot of these times in prayer and thinking about, about this and because you were prepared to go use lethal force, which you had never done before, and you realize this was right. Was. Do you think some of that, even though it turned out to be correct, and that is I, I agree with you. That's what it was. Do you ever think that some of that, especially because you're young, might have been you fitting the square peg in a round hole to just be able to tell yourself if your faith supports you doing this, Even if it's something where. If you're going to go kill people sometimes, maybe by accident, people that don't deserve it.

[Jesse Hamill]

Sure.

[Julian]

Could be argued as going directly against your faith.

[Jesse Hamill]

Sure. You know. No, it's a, it's a. This is an important question. I'm going to quote Peter now to the pure. All things. To the pure of heart, all things are pure. But to the. I think malign or forward, depending on how it's translated. Even the good is evil. True purity of heart produces pure actions even when the context around that you may not understand at all and there may be malign forces inside of it. Way beyond my control, my youth. I don't understand national security stuff. I've never done it before. I think that the. To flip what you're saying, moral ambiguity is a sign of someone's core being having some impurity in it or double mindedness in it.

[Julian]

Can you explain that some more?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. So one of my favorite authors is Soren Kierkegaard.

[Julian]

Wait, I know him. What do you write?

[Jesse Hamill]

Dutch philosopher. All kinds of stuff.

[Julian]

Talked about him?

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah, yeah, all kinds of stuff. Dense reading. Like super dense. Like you have to really, really, especially with the modern mind, you have to really sit down like and read that stuff if you're going to read like a, an older translation. But he, he wrote a book Purity of heart is to will. One thing that's my favorite of all of his. And there's another New Testament passage that says a double minded man is unstable in all of his ways. So part of describing what purity is maybe is describing what it is not. Just like a man often can best define himself by what I am not. So what does it mean to be double minded? Well, the key's a little bit in the words I think about this. But then maybe I waffle over to this. But maybe I waffle over to this. Maybe I'll Waffle over to this. If you're double minded, what does that mean? It means you're standing on quicksand. You don't actually have a foundation. You think you have values. You're wearing the skin suit of something that has values. You don't actually have any values. You're immoral. But can't confront that, can't understand it. So I vassal between a couple different things and then I try to learn more. Or is this Somali say, leer more so as I'm leering.

[Julian]

Oh, that was cold.

[Jesse Hamill]

That was. It was. But. But funny. So another, another passage that comes to mind is that you become that person who's always learning but never arriving at the truth.

[Julian]

Yeah. Yep.

[Jesse Hamill]

And why is that? Why is that? It's because the, because you're afraid of it. So if you always learn, I can just circle this. I can just circle the core of truth and reality and I can say things like, well, what is truth? Or maybe it's relative. Or maybe in this context is this. It's this and this. I can surround myself with nuance and sophistication to make myself feel intelligent and try to justify my double mindedness and what's actually my impurity. Because I don't want to confront that. Because if I confront that, that has ramifications.

[Julian]

That's. That's well said. The people gotta listen to that last part twice. I'm gonna listen to that twice as well. But that's very well said because it's. These are especially for like at the time, a 21 year old kid to think about. These are what I would term goddamn near impossible questions, you know, and so you do have to go live it to see who you are.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah.

[Julian]

As a man.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Julian]

Heavy stuff.

[Jesse Hamill]

It is. And you know, when we talk about, you know, you talk about doing evil things, which are done in war by definition. Right. Evil, horrific things, to include what drones are doing even in like, you know, Ukraine right now. You need a leadership that has wrestled with these exact things that has a moral clarity and a foundation built upon real rock and real truth. If there's a double mindedness in there, one that's going to have ramifications later on, and I think that will produce PTSD later on for that person.

[Julian]

Oh, yeah, I agree.

[Jesse Hamill]

And then even worse, if it's double minded and maybe doesn't produce ptsd, but then gives a. It gives a avenue for, you know, the, the person with the ring, the ring of power, and then they start using that for very malign reasons because you've created a mental habit of circling the truth, justifying it, rationalizing it, learning some more, studying some more, and then arriving at whatever conclusion you want just to justify your own power lust, which is a tale as old as time.

[Julian]

It's a tale.

[Jesse Hamill]

Yeah. That's not. That's not new. Right?

[Julian]

All right, real quick, let's take a break because I gotta go to the bathroom. We're gonna get deep into how modern drone warfare works.

[Jesse Hamill]

Excellent.

[Julian]

All the different facets that can be used, which you previewed earlier and we did not get into it all. I want to get into the counter intelligence aspects of that as well. I want to figure out what the bridge was from you deciding to go Air Force to this. We got a lot to do.

[Jesse Hamill]

Awesome.

[Julian]

So we'll be right back. This might be a second episode now, so if it is, hit that subscribe button. You'll see that second episode in a week or two, probably after this one, and I'll see you for the next one. And it did turn out to be a second episode, so we are going to be putting that out in a week or two. If you are not subscribed, please make sure you subscribe. This second one got crazy. You're really, really going to like this one. We got all into the drone work that Jesse's doing, along with a lot of other stuff. And if you aren't catching all of our podcasts, we are putting out two a week so you can catch up by hitting the podcast playlist in my description below. See you guys for the next one. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help and if you would like to follow me on Instagram at and x those links are in my description below.

[Jesse Hamill]

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