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#385 - “They’re Underwater!” - MIT Drone CEO on WW3, China Spy Drones & Submersive UFOs | Jesse Hamel
02:49:08
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- [00:00]
A
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 help. Thank you. All right, so I think this is probably the start of a second episode because we have a lot on the bone here to go through that. We've had an awesome conversation today. So, people, if this one's coming out, the first one will also be linked down below. And these are going to be two very separate conversations. You'll be able to watch them separately, like in their own context. But really good stuff so far. So you did 20 years in the Air Force. You are now CEO of a tech drone company that integrates AI. You were saying it's basically like the inner ear for drones. We're going to define what all that is right here. But I think a really, really good way to start this, Jesse, would be to go through something we touched on a little, but didn't, like, officially go through the evolution of it, which is like the actual history of drone warfare. You've mentioned some of the names of. I'm gonna fuck them up, but some of the names of the initial drones that you would notice, like, flying next. Oh, right, yeah, on the planes and stuff. But like, we obviously got very heavy with it in 2008, 9, 10, 11. And now it's a whole different ball game how we do it. So for out there, who doesn't understand exactly how our drone program works, you know, where to come from and where is it now?
- [01:33]
B
Yeah, no, it's a. And that's a great way to set it. So for, like drone, by the way that, you know, the term, it's kind of come full circle. Drones say, you know, what is a drone? Well, drone is like a bee. And the idea is like a dumb bee, basically. It just goes in a certain area. So, you know, we started calling them this almost as like a pejorative. But the first one's really. It was Operation Enduring Freedom. So Afghanistan timeframe. So you had some stuff, you know, that was flying probably in the late 90s. And, you know, I don't know if I would know the full, like, when it started, but that it was kind of this idea of, like, okay, we can make this big plane and we can control it from a radio controller on the ground. Like, that's the basic concept. And if we do that, then we can design the plane way cheaper because it doesn't have to have a human in it. So I can just put, like, wings, I can put weapons on it or a Payload or that's it. Because a lot of the expense of like an F16 is because you're wrapping that thing around a human. So all of the injection seed and all the avionics and all that goes in there. But what if I could just control it from, you know, controller with a radio signal? Like. Like we've been doing with, you know, we grew up with cars, right? I'm just driving them. So. So that was kind of the impetus of, like, let's save a lot of money and we can develop something that is low cost and we can have it do a couple different things. So, like, a lot of things, it gets probably most real with the military. First. There's some early, like, drone racing league stuff, but that doesn't really come up until. I'd have to look at the history of that. But that's probably like 2010s before that's really starting to happen. So your first ones are these big drones that I would call big now, based on what we're talking about in Ukraine.
- [03:16]
A
How big we talking?
- [03:17]
B
I mean, talking. Well, bigger. My wingspan. So you're talking, like, probably this room, you know, wing to wing. Yeah, the. The Predator. The. Yeah, the Predator drone. I believe the Predator drone has larger wingspan. The Reaper does, but they're big. Like, if you saw them taxiing around, like, it's a big airplane. Like, it's not this little drone kit. So we get these things, we build it to where it doesn't have to have a human in it. We start using these, you know, both Intel Community and then US SOCOM and even Department of Defense start using these things early Afghanistan and, you know, some other locations, but definitely using it there. And you're. The benefit of them is I made it cheap. I've got this big wingspan. So it can fly very long on very little fuel because it's not carrying a human around. And then we just started putting, hey, well, what we can do with this? What if we put a camera on it? I can put a camera on it and I can see the ground. What if I pipe that signal back, just like a TV broadcast, pipe it back to somebody who can then see what's happening and not actually there. You start, like, the utility becomes really obvious all of a sudden. And so in those early days, you had these things basically flying cameras everywhere. And then eventually it's like, well, what if we put a weapon on these? What if we put a missile on these things? Like, why not? And we put a laser seeker on it. So the basics of a laser Seeker. Right. You look at something with a laser seeker that's usually bore sighted, meaning that it's like hard looking to wherever your camera's looking and it's looking at the ground, looking at a target. And then I can maybe what if I fire off like a hellfire missile from, from that same platform and it just goes to where my laser seeker has is think of like I could do this all like really simply, really low cost. So that became very attractive like very early on. The other thing that kind of happened is yeah, it became almost like crack. And there's. That's the right analogy. Is that. So you'd have all throughout any, you know, any like military operating system in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, post 9, 11 days is what I'm talking about. So 2001 up to like 2010, you'd have just kind of like a, you imagine like a wooden, a wooden kind of hut which somebody just hastily built out of plywood. And it would be probably three or four times the size of this room. And in the front you've got a bunch of like 50 inch TV screens, probably 5 to sometimes 10 of them in there. And then you've got rows of like five or 10 people sitting on this side, five or 10 people sitting on this side. And they've got a workstation, they've got a laptop or they've got some kind of a, some kind of computer. You got some radios in there and you got some clocks. Inevitably there's always a clock up there that has time zones of different areas and that's kind of your basic setup. And then outside of that you've got a bunch of antennas and satellites that are bringing in different feeds. One of those feeds, we call it like the video feed. One of those feeds they're bringing in is directly from whatever that drone was looking at. So one of the first things you started doing is immediately saying, well you know, we had some intelligence that there is a potential terrorist in this building. First thing we're going to do, let's go send a drone over there, like a Predator drone and let's just get a camera on it and see what happens.
- [06:31]
A
Pixelation. Were we working with it?
- [06:33]
B
Yeah.
- [06:34]
A
These cameras like fucking 360.
- [06:36]
B
It was better than you'd think. Not high def. 480, was it 480, 480p. Is that what you say? Yeah, something like that. So enough to where you can. You never see a building, right? It's probably not in color, it's black and white. But you see a building and think of where you were. So you had. In this. We'll call this an operating center, like a joint operating center, like a jock. In this jock, you have a commander and a command team, and they're trying to make sense of what's happening in. We'll just say Afghanistan. Same things happen in Iraq and other areas. They're trying to make sense of what's happening. Like, where am I? Where are the good guys? Where are the bad guys? That's like the fundamental. Let me, like, make sense of what's happening here. Well, I had this potential intelligence report that there's something here going on. What would I. If I'm responsible for this area, would I love to have a camera on top of that building? You would love to have that. Of course, you probably would love to have as many cameras as possible on top of as many buildings as possible around that area. That desire for, like, commander removed from that area. Awareness of where intelligence went off. That's what really started making drones popular very quickly, because for very low cost, I can send a drone over there, and I don't have to worry about a big gunship crew like that. We had. I mean, it was, you know, my first gunship was 13 people and this big $150 million C130. That is expensive. And there's only a couple of them. And. And even there, they can't fly forever. These other ones can fly much longer, much cheaper.
- [08:13]
A
Right.
- [08:14]
B
So I put them over there. And what ended up happening is, like, each of these screens, you'd call it a pred feed. Each of the ones a different pred feed. So it's another Predator drone that's, like, looking at this building, and then I'm looking at this building, and then I'm looking at this building. I'm looking at this building. And then you're building what you'd call pattern of life, basically trying to understand, like, what's going on in here. Right. That's what drones really. Then all of a sudden you start saying, well, I can also put a lethal engagement on there if we positively identify a target. And then I can just do it. All right, from that drone.
- [08:45]
A
Quick question. So if we're talking about Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously these are war zones that we're actively in. It makes a ton of sense. But even in these earlier days when we were doing this, what was like, the. The airspace implications of flying a drone in Pakistan or something?
- [09:06]
B
Well, in limiting that, just the Afghanistan, like the airspace, just airspace deconfliction was kind of a mess. So you much of the same rules you use for. Like, there's differences, but a lot of the same rules used for commercial aviation, like FAA rules. You try to do the same thing in a combat zone because you don't want an F16 flying into a B52. Like, nobody wants that. So you do deconflictions. You have, you have. You have entities that act like air traffic control and move things around. Well, we had to all of a sudden start doing that for drones. And that made everybody very paranoid. Very, extremely paranoid. And there was. There were some early incidents where this did not go well either.
- [09:47]
A
Do you have an example of that?
- [09:49]
B
There was one. I wasn't. I was at a different part of the country, but I was flying. And we heard over satellite communication what you called satcom. And that's a channel where you could kind of talk about large things that are happening in the country, not just like what you're looking at. And we heard that there was some incident. Basically the A C130 was attempting to land. I don't remember what year this was. It's pretty early. A cemetery is attempting to land at one of the bases. Afghanistan, and a drone base just ran right into it. Just ran into it. I think took out one of the engines. I believe it landed safely, but just ran into it.
- [10:23]
A
Yeah.
- [10:24]
B
And, you know, part of it is like, I don't have a pilot on that Predator going, I guess I shouldn't fly.
- [10:30]
A
Right there, see Tom Hanks going, yeah.
- [10:32]
B
Yeah, there's a drone there. So we had to work through that of like, okay, how do you control this thing? And then, then, so then it's. It's also there's this complicated kind of handover where once these drones were overhead a target providing a picture that somebody in the jock is looking at. They're doing their mission, right? They're flown air. When they go take off and land. You can't just use that same, you know, thousands of miles away like, mechanism because there's time delay, right? So that time delay ends up being like sometimes a couple seconds.
- [11:08]
A
That's a lot.
- [11:08]
B
You can't land a plane with that. No, you can't land a plane with that. So you have to have somebody there locally to do it. So there's this handovers and it's. It's a fairly, like, complex, orchestrated thing that. And it was new, right? So then in the new days, it's like, okay, I guess we got to add on something called tcas for traffic avoidance. We got to add on different things. Like we have to have new procedures because there's no human able to perform basic pilot rules of seeing a void and looking, you know, like there's nobody doing this kind of stuff in there. So we got to figure that out.
- [11:39]
A
But even like with the example of hitting the C130, that sends a shiver up my spine. Like imagine just being like these early days of drones, the guy on the ground like, oh fuck, that's.
- [11:49]
B
Yeah, that's how the story, that's how the story goes. It's like, fuck, yeah, this. Well, the story goes like, well I'm not getting any inputs anymore. Yeah, I got. Not the story, the story goes like, I don't really know what happened to that thing like, because he's not watching it either. Yeah, he's, you know, he's responding to, you know, RF frequencies that all of a sudden just stopped emitting. So that's kind of bad.
- [12:14]
A
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- [13:54]
B
So you had to grow through, like, you had to grow through this stuff. We had to grow through stuff. It's grow growing pains. Growing pains. But clearly there's something there, right? It's way cheaper. We can make these things faster, easier. And they could do the stuff that it was hard to get it like a, you know, a human crew to do. Especially if you're flying these like 20 hour missions staring at the same building forever. Like, why not just have a drone do that? Yeah, that's basically how it started growing. So. And that need for, you know, very like complicated Afghanistan thing that every year we thought was almost over and it just isn't. And then we almost over and it isn't.
- [14:38]
A
And the, by the way, the. You were saying this in the last episode. We did, but the years that you were there, the number of guys I've had sitting in that seat, be it from Army Rangers, Navy seals, I'm trying to think Delta who were in Afghanistan from like 07 to 2013. Holy. Is that a ignored time of history?
- [15:00]
B
It is.
- [15:01]
A
It was.
- [15:02]
B
And it was, it was a mess. Like it was a, it was an absolute mess. So. And if you're trying to cut through like chaos, what do you want? I want more awareness.
- [15:12]
A
Right.
- [15:13]
B
So I can never have enough drones in the air because I want every one of my TVs. And then as soon as I get those TVs filled, I want more TVs.
- [15:20]
A
How high?
- [15:21]
B
I don't want more of them.
- [15:22]
A
How high would they be flying in this time period?
- [15:24]
B
I mean, they're flying at like, you know, the exact altitudes. You know, I don't, I don't know. But you're, you're flying about the same thing like American Airlines is flying. So you're flying, you know, somewhere in 20, 30,000ft, 40,000. Like you're flying like regular airplane.
- [15:36]
A
Basically. Like Taliban on the ground ain't seeing these drones.
- [15:40]
B
Well, they are probably not seeing them. Like you might, you might. If you look up, you do hear it when it shoots. Oh, so you hear. Well what you hear. So hellfire. And that's what ended up being coming the weapon, you know, hellfire was. Hellfire was created for army helicopters. And then somebody got and was a very good idea. Somebody put it on the wing of one of these predators and reapers and then that became the thing. And you hear, you hear it come off the rails. Because it comes off the rails supersonic, so it sounds like a whip in the sky. So you, you'd think like you're, you hear something and then eventually, you know, they become. Everybody becomes aware of like, oh, the Americans have these drones everywhere. So if you hear it's bad. Much like fast forward to where we are now. If you are east of Kiev and you hear a high pitched propeller in the distance, that's bad. You need to get out of there immediately. And much of what folks will talk about in like Kyiv and east of there is like the daily life of. You fly a drone. Let's fast forward to where we are now. You fly a drone and then the rest of your time is setting up some kind of defense and then trying to listen.
- [16:52]
A
Right.
- [16:54]
B
And if you hear, you want it quiet. If you hear any kind of that high pitched whizzing coming from you, that's propellers coming at you from some, even a very small drone, that's bad. And you got to get out of there.
- [17:05]
A
Okay, So a couple things that are obvious right now. Today a drones can be way smaller. You talked about ones the size of this room at the beginning. Now they're, they can be a football size or something like that and carry enormous payloads as well.
- [17:18]
B
Yep.
- [17:18]
A
Right.
- [17:19]
B
True.
- [17:20]
A
Their cameras are also better. Right. We're not operating on electricity. Cameras got better anymore.
- [17:24]
B
Just like your iPhones got better.
- [17:25]
A
Of course. What else about what are all the, I guess like bells and whistles they do now much more effectively.
- [17:32]
B
The key, like so the key things that started to happen, two key things happened. So this kept developing in Afghanistan, Iraq for the same reason we just talked about then that kept each year. So it goes through 2010 up to about 2014 15. So 201415 is when you had the first annex of Crimea in Ukraine.
- [17:51]
A
Right. Maidan, all that.
- [17:53]
B
Yes. And all of a sudden you had a nation of like, you know, 40 million, mostly agriculture. And they had to defend themselves against the Russian Federation. Well, how do you do that? Well, what had happened at the same time. Thank you, video gamers, we had pushed compute, unlike what RAM prices are doing right now. But we had pushed compute down way cheaper from PlayStation 3 and 4. Actually there's a lot of what did this in the Xbox. So we had the ability to say, okay, I can take this little drone. And there were some open source coding Projects out of Switzerland, PX4 and a few other ones that had come out. And the open source crowd is kind of building this and then all of a sudden without a whole lot of technical skill and if you watch a couple YouTubes and put it together and then you kind of do it a few times, you figure it out. You can build your own drone. You can build your own drone and you start to. You basically can piece together the compute, the propellers, brushless motors, you know, the other kind of the basic frame you can 3D print out, which is still what we're doing now. And you could make this thing very, very fast, kind of very, very cheap. And if you're in this very asymmetric situation of okay, I'm at Ukraine, I've got funding from the US and NATO and what, whatever else. But. But I'm trying to defend myself quickly and I'm trying to attack quickly and I don't have T land block fours, I don't have a bunch of javelins all over. I don't have some of these really sophisticated weapons that are really expensive. What can I do cheap? Well, I can build this little drone. And the drone racing league was starting to kind of catch up then. So you had this whole hobbyist and drone racing league stuff that had kind of developed the software and the basic hardware for it.
- [19:35]
A
Right.
- [19:35]
B
Just to go from point A to point B. And then what if I just literally duct tape grenade to it or just put a little homemade explosive on it.
- [19:42]
A
Duct tape?
- [19:43]
B
Yeah. And just like send that thing 5km over the horizon and put it to where I need it to go.
- [19:50]
A
Just drop it.
- [19:51]
B
Just drop it. Drop it. Or run it right into it. Right. Because then drop it. I have to have a mechanism and all that. What if I don't want to screw any of that? I just literally just. And that's what you see most of the videos, right? If you watch the videos, most of them it's just the drone flying directly into it.
- [20:03]
A
Yeah.
- [20:04]
B
And then that's like, wow, this is super cheap. I just created the same thing that, like a American missile that costs, you know, maybe $2 million a pop. I just created that for pennies on the dollar. Let's make a lot more of these. And then that's where they really kind of. That showed the world just how powerful drones could be at that point. So you had compute that had gotten cheap enough to do this. You had the open source community, had built the infrastructure, Pixar, PX4, autopilot. This stuff has kind of gotten Built. Raspberry PI's all of a sudden got interesting. I won't tell the whole story, but there was, we got time. There's. Yeah, there's so Raspberry PIs. For any like anybody that nerds out on anything. Drones, they know about Raspberry PIs, you can build your own gaming.
- [20:55]
A
Don't nerd out on drones.
- [20:56]
B
For those that don't, Raspberry PI is, it's a chip. So it's like a compute chip where you can, you can kind of do some cool stuff with it and it's pretty user friendly. So you can build a gaming emulator from it. That's what I see a lot of people do. You can put it on a drone to do different software control things. Raspberry PI, I know the CEO. We actually have an memorandum agreement with Raspberry PI. They sell them to the screens that are in grocery stores that lists like the prices of bananas and apples. Like there's a very cheap kind of little chip in there that lists that out. Right. There's a computer chip that's running that is performing that compute. So these things started becoming kind of available almost everywhere as well. So you had this. All of these things happen kind of at the same time. The software was developed by the open source community. 3D printing became where we can all have 3D printers and we can go online and I can find like a drone design and just hit print. It's pretty simple, right? Yep. I can get motors from here. Most of that's Chinese, but I can get, I can buy motors, I can buy this hobby of stuff and I can put it together and that's, that's what really started propelling that with Chinese spyware. With Chinese spyware, which is a whole problem. Yes, we'll get to that. But this is, but Ukraine started doing this. It's just out of necessity. Like it was a way for them to. It was a way for them to quickly get precision munitions and precision, you know, isr, like intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. Because they didn't have a bunch of really expensive predators. They didn't have a bunch of TLAN Block Fours, Tomahawk missiles. They didn't have the Javelins. So how do I get it fast? Well, I can just build these hobby drones and. And then all of a sudden the whole world's looking at us being like, man, they basically did the same thing that we've been paying the defense primes to do and other ones for pennies on the dollar. Maybe it's time for us to innovate that that's kind of like where we're at now, you know?
- [22:50]
A
Is that where you come in effectively? Where you're like, oh, very much.
- [22:54]
B
Because then you start to think about, okay, one drone is cool. What's cooler than one drone?
- [23:02]
A
A hundred.
- [23:03]
B
What's cooler than 100,000? Yeah, yeah, I like where your head's at. It's cooler than that. So then you start thinking, okay, it's one thing to defend against one drone, something else with them against 10. What if a thousand of them were coming at me at once? What if a hundred thousand of them are coming at me at once? You know, so what if you had the. The. Both the software to coordinate that and the hardware to produce that? What if you had the ability to do that? And you had the ability to do it where it didn't bankrupt your economy? What if you had the ability to do that? What does that change? And I think that's what the lesson for US national security, you know, and US has been involved at some level in Ukraine right now. At some level. And so is NATO. But if you just step back from that and say, broadly, what are the lessons for modern national security? Is that I have to be able to both defend against and use swarms of coordinating drones in the hundred thousands of units. The other thing, timeline that happened. So this is. This might even be interesting to look up. So this is a little bit historical, but it's worth it. The invention of a software called Word2Vec. Word2Vec. Word 2Vec. Vec. Word 2Vec. Word to Vec. So Word 2Vec. What's interesting about this, this is really the breakthrough. Yeah. You see the time. This is really the breakthrough that led to where we're at with AI. This is really the breakthrough.
- [24:39]
A
Okay, so Word2Vec was invented by a team at Google led by Tomas Mikalov and published in 2013. Introducing efficient methods Sibo and Skip Graham to represent words as dense numerical vectors that capture semantic meaning from context. Revolutionizing NLP by enabling computers to understand word relationships. Like king minus man plus woman equals queen.
- [25:04]
B
Exactly.
- [25:05]
A
The breakthrough allowed for processing larger vocabularies and improved performance on many language tasks by learning word meanings from surrounding words in large tech corpora. One quick question, and I want you.
- [25:19]
B
To expand on this.
- [25:21]
A
If they did this in 2013, how long ago did DARPA do this?
- [25:25]
B
Well, yeah. And that's a question I don't have a good answer for that. We know.
- [25:29]
A
I'm glad you don't have a good answer. We don't have.
- [25:31]
B
We know it's public in 2013.
- [25:33]
A
Because you're a private company, CEO.
- [25:35]
B
Yes, yeah, I am a private company, but please continue. So this invention, so it mentioned National Language Processing or nlp. You know, NLP is. NLP is like machines understanding English is just a simple way of kind of thinking about that. But. But it's actually much deeper in this. So this is overly simplistic. But what word2vec enabled was taking human language, converting it into effectively a mathematic representation. Or once it's in that mathematic representation, you can start to use linear algebra techniques, matrices to build large language models. Word2VEC technology is why we have ChatGPT now. Like it all was unleashed there. The transformers were built off of this kind of thinking. So you know, what is a large language model? It's a human language and it converts them into matrices and then it does relationships between these matrices and that's how it derives synthetic intelligence. So this all started happening in 2013. Invention of transformers is a couple years later. That's a key invention, right? The T in GPT is Transformer. So invention transformers happen. Now all of a sudden you have what we would probably call AI, right? Even though what AI is is, you know, sometimes not that clear, but we have some kind of intelligence where I can have this discussion with this entity, this model, and it can give me back information that is net new. It's a conglomeration of different things, but it's net new because it found a new relationship in literally a matrix through vector algebra enabled by word2vec. As that started happening then we have, okay, we've now had some advances in 3D printing and we can print these drones out really, really cheap. That's pretty simple. We've had compute get a lot cheaper, thank you gamers. And then we've also had intelligent approaches to it being developed. This is all concomitant to each other. So now that I have this developed and then the world is watching and saying, wow, they started using drones just kind of out of necessity. But now drones are still probably the best option. Best cost, best size, weight, power. You know, if you look at something like an engineer swap C, swap dash C. Size, weight, power and cost. Like if you look at that, there's still probably the best trade off. Every engineer is a, you know, engineering is our trade off decisions. They're still really good. And, and then it's all about, well, if one is good, 10 is better and then 100 is even better, a thousand Better. So then you, what you've. We're now in the environment in 2026, where. And somebody had said this, I think before, so I'm not saying anything new here. Drones are trending towards bullets.
- [28:27]
A
With their ubiquitous nature.
- [28:29]
B
Okay, yes. So you think of like your value as a soldier. One of the things you do is, you know, reports like, do you, you know, just, I'm talking like basic infantry. How many rounds do you have? How many magazines do you have? Like how many rounds do you have? Now in many ways, I think you could argue like how many drones do you have access to? How many, how, what number of swarm are you able to do it? So what becomes really important is one the physical manifestations of that we have to be able to produce drones. Any country that wants to have really asymmetric capability in drones and just national security, you have to produce these things very cheap. That is not the same thing as making an F22. That is not the same thing as making a Columbia class submarine.
- [29:14]
A
Oh, I understand.
- [29:15]
B
So this, this part's important. The manufacturing goes into that is very different than like how complicated it is to make an F22 fighter that carries humans. That carries humans, yeah. So what, what also we found ourselves is situation is that you may have the CAP capability to produce hundreds. I think Lockheed can do hundreds, maybe even up to a thousand a month if they were at full everything or per year, I don't know. But that doesn't translate into, oh, I can produce millions of drones per year, nor does it even defend against it at all. Like, if I have a squadron of 100 fighters, can I defend against a million drones? No, there's not even enough weapons in there. Even if every round you shot were able to do that, you're not defending against that.
- [30:01]
A
So you're saying I may be way oversimplifying this, but effectively what it seems like you're getting at is that we're at a point in the evolution of drones where standing army calvary worth of drones is the race at the moment. How many do you like? Assuming all things being roughly equal, which they're not drones, that China makes drones, that we make drones, that Russia makes drones, that whoever makes have very similar capabilities. How many does one country have?
- [30:33]
B
That's 100 accurate. Yep, 100 accurate.
- [30:36]
A
Wow. I didn't realize.
- [30:37]
B
Just like bullets. Yeah, just like bullets.
- [30:40]
A
Yeah.
- [30:40]
B
Is there, you know, is there a fundamental difference between a Russian made bullet and a US made bullet? It's a caliber difference, but they ultimately do about the same thing. Doesn't mean there's not some drones that are, you know, drone is a. I use, I think of the term as drone is just a flying robot. So can there be robotic systems that are bigger doing different things? Of course. You know, so it's a very flexible term that is only somewhat useful, even the term drone itself.
- [31:04]
A
Right.
- [31:05]
B
But the idea of, the idea of mass or high volumes is what's determinative for having the national security ability to coerce or compel peace through strength, to actually deter conflict. One way you deter conflict is like, I literally have more bullets than you, of course. But that's a very real way of deterring conflict. So producing drones, that is. To me, I think that's existential for the US to be able to say we have more of this and the ability to produce more than anybody else, for sure. The other key thing about this is, and this is we've been, you know, we've had kind of a front, you know, and I don't mean to minimize like the real human sufferings happening in Ukraine, but like the, the west has kind of had at least the US because we're separated by oceans and continent. We've had a little bit of like a front row seat to this without directly participating in most cases.
- [31:58]
A
That's right.
- [31:58]
B
So we can see that the other thing, that anytime you have this kind of like, dynamic, you're going to look for asymmetric ways to undercut it. Man. I don't have 10,000 or 100,000 drones. What is some, like, unique move I can make to neutralize that capability that somebody else has? And I mean just country X versus country Y.
- [32:23]
A
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- [33:38]
B
What we've seen and this is really at the crux of like what Victus and my company is solving in the kind of autonomy space. What we've seen is that, that that Achilles heel is dependency on a clear signal from medium earth orbit to get a GPS or a GNSS signal. Like a signal from GPS to say where am I? Very easily disrupted by the time that signal comes down. Same thing for your Uber, same thing for your phone using Uber, Same thing for a drone, same thing for an aircraft, same thing for even a low earth orbit satellite. By the time that signal is received, it's very, very weak. GPS was never intended to go up in a jammed or any kind of electronic attack environment. So the asymmetric kind of capability that's really emerged now is to build some kind of a jammer. Some of these are very, very sophisticated jammers that Russia, China and a few other people have. Very high power jammers that can do things from orbit all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. In other cases it's like you or me go build a software defined jammers is very illegal. I don't recommend anyone doing it. But if you go build one of these, then you can have like a small little bubble around you that jams gps. The signal prevents it because by the time it's received, like when it comes all the way down from medium earth orbit, the way GPS has, you know, been around since late 80s, early 90s when we declassified it, started using it for all these commercial purposes as well as military purposes.
- [35:14]
A
Yeah. After all the Nazis from Operation Paperclip invented it.
- [35:17]
B
Okay.
- [35:18]
A
Now yeah, they didn't do that.
- [35:20]
B
They did not do that. But it was, it was invented in the like 80s and declassified. Right. And then it had all these commercial purposes. Like all of Uber's business model is predicated on this. You know, all kinds of stuff are right. It's in everything. Even banking uses gps. The timing in it, like the transactions there's there GPS is so it's, this is something I didn't know that yeah.
- [35:42]
A
My previous career was in banking. Yeah, I did not realize that.
- [35:45]
B
Yeah, there's a, like GPS solve something called pnt, position navigation and timing. And ultimately how GPS works is this really precise timing to allow you to know where you're at from this signal that's up in medium earth orbit. And that timing is used for all kinds of things and one of the clear ones is to get your positioning. So we both on the military side and then on the commercial side, we built up this system that I usually analogize it to. Like the early days of the Internet where we didn't think we needed encryption. Like there's no malign actors. We can just have web pages out and talk to each other on our, you know, we don't need any encryption. We don't, nobody's going to hack or Jam or DDoS our connections. That's kind of what GPS was. We just put these satellites up there and said okay. The devices will receive this very faint signal. And as long as they get this faint signal, it'll run through an algorithm called a Kalman filter that'll create a state estimation. And then from that state estimation that device can derive position data that can be used for navigation or timing and, or timing all from that kind of device. And this all happens in the background for our entire society right now and our entire national security apparatus is predicated on this gps. Guided munitions, aircraft that use it, Low earth orbit satellites, all the above.
- [37:12]
A
What kind of day to day, minute to minute existential threats to that system exist. Like I'll give you a parallel example. We talk about like oh, what if all the power grids got hacked down for a day? Would there be enormous problems in this country? Like the parallel with gps? Do we have to worry about that as well over there?
- [37:35]
B
This is, you know, I don't have like specific war gaming data to, to supply this. And then what I'm. So what I'm saying is just kind of speculative based on my understanding. However, like I said, many banking transactions use the GPS system. All of your Uber does many other communications do obviously all aircraft does air traffic control, low earth orbit satellites. The whole space economy is predicated on GPS to a point. Because the whole space economy. This is worth even talking about to paint this question for, you know, answer to this. The space economy like a starlink is based on. I want this satellite to be in this position to do something like deliver Internet to me down beneath that, right? If you can't put that satellite in that position, all that kind of breaks down, right? Drones, same thing. All of that predicated on it, on something that is as fragile as we just talked about, as easy to be jammed both at a nation state level and even at like an asymmetric kind of level. We were working with, working with the trucking industry, believe it or not.
- [38:47]
A
Your company.
- [38:47]
B
Yeah. One of the consortia in D.C. published a, they published a paper said in 2024 the U.S. trucking industry lost, I think it was 7 billion. And it's happening in rail industry as well. We have a, you know, emerging relationship with a rail company too.
- [39:04]
A
Like lost as in here's what's happened.
- [39:06]
B
Here'S like losses and theft.
- [39:08]
A
Yes.
- [39:09]
B
So what's happening is, and this is, you know, a bit of a parallel, but just so you understand like how dependent we are and how, how GPS is used. You have a rail, you know, something traveling on rail, or you have a bunch of like Amazon prime packages in the back of an 18 wheeler and a bandit or a pirate or a cartel or some kind of maligned thief gets it to stop for whatever reason, not hard to do. They bring a GPS jammer with them. So the first responders then don't know where to go because everything they're predicated on is that everything is. And then you can have all the time you need and then you can do what you need to do and then it's, it's, it's over. And so what's happening in both industries, insurance premiums are going way up because they don't have a way to solve this right now. That's then also happening in combat. So I was talking with someone, a senior member in Ukraine now for Ukraine's military forces that does AIML or artificial intelligence machine learning for Ukraine. And he said, quote to me, we assume right now that GPS is basically non existent anywhere in the battle space. It's just nonexistent because it's, because it never works there because there's so much jamming. There's so much jamming on my Uber on the way here. This happens all the time in the city, right? That and it was interesting listening to the driver say this. So on my Uber way here, you know, I hit the Uber and hit button, hit button and button and really pay attention. And it went like a block away from me is where he went to pick me up. And he's like. And he actually comes back, says, yeah, this happens all the time in New York because the signals and there's so much going on here that there's just no accuracy. This happens, you can look this up. This happens in D.C. all the time.
- [40:49]
A
Yeah, it happens right outside. Sometimes you guys have to walk around.
- [40:52]
B
It's not. Yeah, it's not. It's just not. Not reliable enough. There's another thing that's kind of interesting. There's some good evidence of this too. 2019 90s, that's about when we declassified GPS to about 2020 was a year of apparently very low activity for solar flares. So it's very calm solar epoch. So, you know, solar weather is something starting to get a lot more attention, I think for good reason. Right. Because, you know, the solar seasons are not like Earth seasons. There's good evidence to show that about 2020 to we're now and you know, potentially another 30, 50 years, who knows? We're in a much higher active area of solar activity. That's part of why we've actually had a lot of solar flares that have disrupted satellite communications over the last couple of years. That's why the northern lights have been in the US for a couple times this winter. And last winter areas were. When I was a kid, it was never northern lights. Never. Now, you know, my family back in Michigan, they're seeing them like every. Every winter now, like heavily seeing them. And this is pretty common. So there's. And it's because of solar activity. The solar activity is happening that disrupts the kind of, you know, GPS signals. It's very fragile. It just wasn't designed for this kind of stuff. So that kind of sets the stage for what we're trying to do with our company is enabled us, both commercial and security professionals, to use drones and robotics and other platforms like that to their fullest extent without having to be dependent on a really clear GPS signal, something that a malign actor can easily disrupt. Solar flares might disrupt it. A building might just get in the way. Because if you think about it like as we have drones just being another robot, as we have robots do more, like more and more advanced things for us that protect us, carry us to school, deliver our food, you know, deliver doordash or Amazon prime, fight our wars like as we do that, we need them to work. Like we need them to work. We need to rely. We need to be relying on them. And it's not good enough to be like, well, that drone was working, but all of a sudden a GPS kind of dropped out for whatever reason because that building was in the way. There was a little sort of flare here. Or in combat, somebody brought a jammer with them. It's useless at that point it's useless at that point. It's a brick. Right. It's a paperweight. So this is something that we've thought about as you think of autonomy, which is another term that in some cases doesn't mean anything anymore because it's been used so much. But you think of just allowing these machines to work with us. We start by, you know, and what we invented and kind of developed is a system to allow that device to know where it's at, basically. Answer the question, where am I? We talked about, like you hinted at it, like the inner ear for a robotic system, which is what you're doing, which is what we developed. Yeah. And from there, then you can go up kind of higher orders of intelligence to say, if I know where I am, like, if I have orientation, time and space, then I can start to think about where should I go, what should I do? I can start to kind of use this. The systems we have right now, it's. It, you know, it's like having. I usually analog it this way. It's like a blob of a million eyeballs with no brain. So you have all these cameras on there, servos, radars, Doppler sensors, magnometers, Gravitron, whatever. Right. You have all these sensors on there. But there's no intelligence that uses. Just like you and I do, that use our prefrontal and our limbic system together so that if we shut our eyes and move our head, I still know my orientation. And I know that because of that inner ear, gravity shift and some kind of complex things that are happening in my head, that's what we've done. We've built kind of our autonomy solution on that premise so that it works in the, like, toughest environments. Then from there, something you can scale to, you know, say, hey, I need to train agents to do this particular task where you have, like, a human, kind of like a quarterback, and I have 10 other swarms around them that are doing it, and they have a level of intelligence to understand what needs to be done, and then they coordinate with them. That human can't trust that swarm. We'll just say swarm of 10 right now. You can't trust them if they don't have a good idea where they're at. Because as soon as GPS goes away, it might think it's doing the right thing. It probably does think it's doing the right thing.
- [45:19]
A
Yeah. Now it's flying Saudi Arabia, flying over the place.
- [45:22]
B
Yeah. The other thing that we're seeing, a lot of evidence on this definitely in the combat side, but even in manned aviation. I saw a notam from Airbus the other day. Notam is a notice to airmen. So it's like how you publish to pilots saying, hey, this is happening. And you publish like interesting things or cautions you need to watch for. There was one just off the coast of Virginia of like massive jamming that was happening. So the Airbus was not able to get GPS signals. I know of, I know personally I've talked with maintainers for Gulfstream that are taking off a G5 with an Ultra high net worth person in the back. That person has no idea what's actually happening with this. And the pilots are having to pull the circuit breakers for GPS 1 and 2 and take off visually because they're getting spoofed and jammed so much it will corrupt the flight management system. So there's like this level of risk being accepted. People in the back have no idea. Like they're not gonna tell them. Like the people in the back have no idea what's happening. Yeah, don't worry about it. We'll fix it. Like hopefully, right? Hopefully. That's the world we're living in right now. Yeah, yeah, hopefully it works.
- [46:28]
A
Oh my God.
- [46:29]
B
Yeah, it's.
- [46:31]
A
There is with this again, because it's like a remote technology. There is just so much that can go wrong. And you're laying that out right now. And yet it's still come so far in the past two decades in particularly that they are so ubiquitous everywhere in private business. Like you're even doing that as well. But you, in, in your Air Force career, you saw these things introduced on the battlefield early on. You stayed in the air force for 20 years. Eight of them were in a lot of combat. Where, where were you in the back half of your Air Force career?
- [47:03]
B
So after you. Basically the first, first half of it just flying combat back. Flying combat back. Went to, went to Air Force weapons school, did some other like advanced kind of weapon stuff deep in the, deep in the vault. So doing. Doing things in precision munitions, doing things in directed energy, all kinds of stuff like that.
- [47:21]
A
Directed energy, yeah.
- [47:22]
B
So I got like.
- [47:23]
A
It's a fucking loaded term.
- [47:24]
B
It is a loaded term. It is a loaded term. Yeah, just like that. In. And then pretty kind of normal like for an Air Force officer. Progression at, you know, called halftime. At halftime of the career. Go get a, get a degree at. In this, in my case, Air Command staff college, like a one year school for the Air Force. Now I did some, I did got to do like an internship with Air Force Research Labs, kind of like an. More like a fellowship where publish a paper with them on software defined manufacturing. So you have to go really deep on that for a year.
- [47:56]
A
Like really software defined manufacturing?
- [47:58]
B
Yeah, yeah, it was. It's still searchable, like, but it's did some work on 4D printing, which is like an adaptive style technology. And now like I was a little bit ahead of my time on that. Now there's some companies like actually developing this. Yeah. The idea being using graphene and some other materials that can conduct really well. The fourth dimension being after time, where you produce something and then that time or other. Other can be an other stimulus as well. That time or other stimulus then changes it to some other shape. This is very real. This is very real. Yes. So there are. If you use the right kind of systems, the right kind of systems and the right kind of the right kind of materials, you can program into it behaviors that will happen at a later point.
- [48:59]
A
Oh, now I get it.
- [49:00]
B
Yeah.
- [49:01]
A
Okay.
- [49:01]
B
That behavior could be triggered by an environmental change or by a time change or by a couple different things depending on how you design it. So it could be water. And one of the ones that I think is really compelling. I believe some companies looking at this is like self healing pipelines for oil gas. So the idea of like, okay, it has this certain coating on it. That coating probably has a substance called graphene in it which they call like the miracle material. Yeah, it's like the miracle material.
- [49:29]
A
Right.
- [49:29]
B
But there's some derivatives of that so it wouldn't have to necessarily be graphene. That's where some of the like real research people are on the cutting edge of this would know that. And but the idea is like, okay, it detects a weakness and then it's able to extend its thickness in a certain area to prevent like structural damage from it. So, so did. Got to go really deep on that anyhow for the Air Force, which is a fun little kind of side.
- [49:54]
A
And that was like. So you. What was the name of that place you were for a year for the education?
- [50:00]
B
That's Air Command and Staff.
- [50:01]
A
Air Command and Staff. Where is.
- [50:02]
B
Yeah, Maxwell. Maxwell Air Force Base, which is in Montgomery, Alabama. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
- [50:07]
A
And then you. So you doing all these other different jobs as opposed to what you did earlier on your career? Do you. Did you go to MIT after you left the Air Force?
- [50:18]
B
Soon as I retired. Since I retired.
- [50:20]
A
So first of all, what went into your. I mean, 20 years is a long time.
- [50:23]
B
20 years, long.
- [50:24]
A
23 days. Yeah, it's a long time to be in the Air Force. This is all you've known in your adult life. What went into you saying it's time to turn the page?
- [50:32]
B
Kind of. Some of the, the, the last couple of things I did were informative of that. So I was over in Stuttgart at, it's a staff tour, pretty normal. Like my one non flying, non operational tour called Special Operations Command Europe. So I was over there from 2015 to 2018. This is also when all this stuff was happening in Crimea, you know. So I was very focused on this, doing all kinds of kind of interesting things there.
- [50:59]
A
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- [52:39]
B
We did some early stuff in machine learning so I got to learn some machine learning things earlier. So I got kind of a real interest in ML which informed kind of what we do with victus now. So I just. I got a capability and I got interested in it.
- [52:52]
A
Victims your company.
- [52:53]
B
Victor's of the company. Yeah. And it was also this is like we talked more in like the first half of this but like it was a time where there was this kind of unique period for about of those three years. There's a new period about 14 months maybe somewhere in there where I stood up. It was kind of like the closest thing to being in the military, but being an entrepreneur at the same time. So I got to stand up this brand new task group organization from Nothing to like 75 people in a year. A bunch of resources, big budget and got to do like really cutting edge stuff with it. Really kind of cutting edge stuff with it. That it was the closest thing to like 0 to 1 in not. It wasn't an actual business. There was no like profit to it or anything like that. But. But it had the cultural fit of it. It had like all of that kind of. And as I was retiring, one of the things you tell and I tell people still this too is you want to you anybody and any veteran separating really anybody in any like major kind of inflection point of their life, you know, reflect on one of besides some of the other things we've talked about. Reflect earlier in your life and think about those things where you really enjoyed it and try to put more of that into your future.
- [54:04]
A
Yeah.
- [54:04]
B
And then those things you don't enjoy, try to not repeat that. You know, it's kind of like a very pragmatic way of looking at it.
- [54:09]
A
And at this point you're married with kids.
- [54:11]
B
Oh yeah.
- [54:12]
A
For a while.
- [54:12]
B
Yep. Yep. Married, kids. So we got married shortly. Shortly after I joined the Air Force.
- [54:17]
A
Oh wow.
- [54:18]
B
Yeah. So we're married for a while. Yeah, married for a while. My third was born over in Europe as well during that time. Yeah. 2015.
- [54:26]
A
Crimea baby.
- [54:27]
B
Yeah, yeah. Not in Crimea. Yeah, yeah. He does have the. He has the coolest birth certificate because he has like US citizen born abroad and you know the embassy and the consul do like a real good job of that. So he has a cool. And the rest of ours all look like they're on paper paper like napkins. And his looks really cool. So that kind of informed it. I came back to the States, got re qualified to fly the latest gunship again. AC130J at that point didn't get to fly a whole lot just because I'm more senior guy at this point. And then I commanded a Squadron. And the squadron I commanded had drones in it. Drones, actually one of their primary things they did. So we had all these different SOCOM drones. We had some commercial off the shelf drones, like civilian drones, all the above. So got to, you know, really put those things together. Like, okay, I've seen some stuff in Europe. I have an idea kind of what it's like to start a new organization. I learned a lot of, like, machine learning and started getting into coding, even the stuff, and had this whole background of precision munitions and guidance, navigation, control. Had this background here. Anyhow. And then, you know, did that command tour and decided, okay, this is. Let's go through Covid and all this too, and then decide, okay, I'm gonna hang it up. I'm gonna hang it up right at 20. So I turned down war college, which is kind of like taking the poison pill. War college, yeah. So I got selected to go to war college. That's War college is as you progress, like, in a certain level. War college is like when you go from Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel typically sometimes colonel right. To one star General.
- [55:55]
A
So you were turning. You were effectively, you're doing that chain you talked about earlier, and it just turned out that way, that you were actually rising through that chain and you made the call to be like, wow, I've gotten all the way to this point, but I'm gonna golf in the private sector.
- [56:09]
B
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and it was.
- [56:11]
A
Didn't like the politics of the military.
- [56:13]
B
There was a. There was. I mean, there's a number of things that went into that. There's a number of things that. Probably the most elemental one, my kids was at a certain age too. You know, I'd been gone a lot when they were very young. Now they're teenagers, they're in high school. It's like, I need be to be there for them.
- [56:29]
A
Oh, so you had the third one way late.
- [56:31]
B
The third. Third one's still younger, but the other two are. The other two are, you know, they're in like early high school now and forecasting where they're going to be. So it's like, no, I need to be there. That's part of it for sure. I also felt. I just felt like I had unfinished business in the private sector. And then sometimes you just know, right? And I just. I just know. Like, I can see these things put together.
- [56:53]
A
Wait, unfinished business?
- [56:54]
B
Yeah, unfinished.
- [56:55]
A
Well, you ever been in it?
- [56:56]
B
No, but to my. To me, it's a good point. To me, but to me it was unfinished business because, like, I told you before, I had planned on going into the business kind of private sector pretty aggressively.
- [57:09]
A
Right.
- [57:10]
B
And I knew like, okay, I'm, I'm gonna go back and I've got all these skill sets and all this kind of tools and tricks that I know, you know, that I'm, you know, 44 right now, but in some ways more like 440. So I've learned a lot. And I can apply this.
- [57:26]
A
Yes.
- [57:27]
B
Like, I can, I can apply this for sure. And, and then also that's kind of like a lower level thing, but also at a deeper level being like, you know, the future is, the future is we got to figure out how to solve these technology problems. Where can I solve these technology problems, start my own company, invent the technology or be on the gov side and try and help somebody else do it?
- [57:47]
A
Right?
- [57:47]
B
Like, nope, I'd rather just do it.
- [57:50]
A
We had started to talk about this in the last podcast with regard to like your concerns specifically, also really focusing in on China with this and we'll break that whole thing down. But would you say your exposure to that and, and the growing concern was something that you figured out while you happen to be kind of more working on the European side in 2015-2018? If so, what was your exposure to figuring that.
- [58:19]
B
No, you're right. Like, and it was that, that was where it was. You know, the shift was this. The shift was like, okay, you know, it's one thing to fight this kind of like attritable, asymmetric, I'm throwing out words here, right? But like to fight the Taliban, Al Qaeda, it's one thing to do that. All of a sudden it's like, okay, now we're thinking about like the Russian Federation. Like this is a very different thing. Very different, very different. And we all really know that it's about the ccp. Yeah, we all really know.
- [58:48]
A
And like, obviously Russia's got problems, but we always said it's that they got a GDP similar to Italy.
- [58:53]
B
Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
- [58:54]
A
You're dealing with a different beast.
- [58:55]
B
It's different beast. It's different beasts. So that's where I looked and just said, okay, we have a problem within US military. And that problem is kind of victims of our own success at a tactical level. The victim of our own success at a tactical levels got really, really good at fighting Afghanistan style war. At a tactical level. I would not say that a strategic level, but at a tactical level we got really good at that. Really good at that.
- [59:22]
A
Yeah.
- [59:22]
B
On the ground.
- [59:23]
A
Yeah.
- [59:23]
B
Yeah. The problem is like that doesn't necessarily apply to something in, you know, in the Pacific or something, you know, in the conversation, it probably doesn't apply at all. And yeah, I just became very convinced that like, okay, what it really is about is like we need new technology and the primes, the traditional primes, they're just not delivering this. They're just not.
- [59:48]
A
Is it. This may be way over generalized in how you may look at it. So just correct me if I'm wrong, but is it fair to say the concern with the potential of warfare and like a quote unquote next war that could be with China is much more concerning as a technological based espionage war versus an actual like commando unit kind of war?
- [60:14]
B
I think it's actually all the above. It's definitely what you just said.
- [60:17]
A
Okay.
- [60:17]
B
It's, I mean it's all.
- [60:18]
A
But the prelude is the technological espionage.
- [60:21]
B
It's all of it. It's all of it. Like the, the tech, the surveillance and, and, or coercion. Whether it's like, I think, I can't remember we're talking off camera before though, but whether it's like programming somebody, programming our kids through Tick tock slop.
- [60:35]
A
Yeah, we talked about that.
- [60:36]
B
Yeah. Whether it's that or whether it's, you know, building blackmail dossiers, whether it's monitoring congressional staffers and using their own emails against them, whether. Whatever it is. Yeah, or that. All the above. Right. You know, full intelligence operations. Whether it's that, that's just, that's just preparation. Like, you know, that's nothing compared to this, the shooting potential. So it's all of it. Like it's the full spectrum of it. And that did become like, you know, it still is very deeply concerning to me.
- [61:11]
A
Okay.
- [61:12]
B
So, and, and, and looking at, looking at the system, the system and, and we can go deep on this too, if it makes sense. But like the system of how we acquire, develop technology for America's national security.
- [61:31]
A
I do want to go deep on this because we got off this in the last episode because you said it and you seem to be correct about this, by the way. I've heard this from a lot of people. Obviously we rely on places like China so much to make all the shit that goes into our tech. And effectively we are inviting spyware right into everything. Yeah, but let's expand upon.
- [61:52]
B
No, you know, so you have, you have this dependency that we created both for our national security and our commercial stuff with, you know, drones that are flying over a farm that happens to be next to a nuke power plant that's Obviously, obviously collecting data and then, you know, buying the farmland. All the other kind of like intelligence operations, the penetration of all of our top labs and universities, even at the open source level, like is. Is kind of widely understood now. Penetration of congressional areas and other ones. Like, so you have, you have all that kind of like, problem set. You also have a like, so even zoom back. How does the military get new technology? Like, how do you ensure a technology edge goes through this procurement, acquisition kind of process? That process is largely the same as when McNamara invented it. And that doesn't work anymore. So we're buying stuff. I mean, and this is oversimplified, but still kind of useful even if we do everything right. And I can get into how we're not doing it right, but if you do everything right, we buy stuff off of a three to five year budget when technology is innovating at like a monthly, if not weekly level.
- [63:06]
A
Right.
- [63:07]
B
So you're always three to five years behind. Is it comforting to think that a defense, you know, the US Military is three to five years behind?
- [63:16]
A
No, but it's not.
- [63:17]
B
Yeah.
- [63:17]
A
It's also really concerning that like the Pentagon can't pass the basic, you know, budget test. That's, you know, and yet now we're gonna buy fast. Because I agree with you, we have to.
- [63:29]
B
Right.
- [63:29]
A
But like, what the.
- [63:33]
B
The bureaucracy, like, is so top heavy. It's so top heavy. And that's also all part of the like, problems with, and it's easy to say problems with the system, but it's true, like, that's all part of the problems with the system. There's also just worth, like even talking, like just acquisition. There is, there's an incentive problem. So the ins, the program managers, like, these are the people like actually buying stuff for the US Military. Like, they, they have like authorities and responsibilities to do this. The program managers, their incentives are every. And they have every incentive to avoid risk. Every incentive to avoid risk. If they go fast, it's just risk for them. Something goes wrong, they're, you know, then the other opposing one protests, there's lawsuits. Like, it's just risk. And they get no professional incentives that I'm aware of at all to actually go fast and take a little bit of risk, which is what you have to do when you're like a really innovative environment. Yeah, you have to do this. They have zero incentive for that. That is, you know, So a lot of people talk about the Federal acquisition regulation, the far, if you hear this term, they'll talk about the far. They'll Talk about, oh, we need to use other transaction authority. I love this too analogy, by the way. This is, this is, this is the best way to describe like, this is how, you know, a system needs, like, it needs to be reformed. So we've, we actually have like real documents out there that say, okay, the primary way we should buy stuff and develop technology, new technology, buy technology. And I'm talking everything, I'm talking like very high tech stuff, even medium tech, kind of low tech, all the above. We're saying that we have documents out there saying, because the federal acquisition regulation, which if I printed out it'd be like this, like really, because that's so bad. Our primary way is going to be something called an ota. OTA stands for other Transaction authority. So zoom out and think about that. Where we're at for a second. Our own rules have gotten so cumbersome that the other way is now the primary way.
- [65:51]
A
The other way is now the primary.
- [65:52]
B
Way that is like actually codified. We've now gotten to the point where we write rules to not use the rules we have and use the other rules.
- [66:02]
A
It's the most government thing.
- [66:03]
B
It is the most government thing. You'll find like, and, and it's, it's, it, it's a symptom of just how bad that system has really become. Lack of incentives and a complexity that few can kind of really even understand. That was also part of, I mean, route is I have to deal with it because I'm selling to the government, so I have to deal with it. But that was part of like my thinking of, I'd like to get outside of that, build the technology that I know that we need and then we'll find ways to work with them in this. You know, we'll find ways to thread the needle and work with them.
- [66:39]
A
Yeah. As a side note here, because it's always the 500 pound elephant in the room, there has been a long standing, necessary, but also slippery slope, complicated and even dangerous alliance, if you will, between the defense sector and the military. And we know the term military industrial complex to where it becomes almost, not almost, it literally is incestuous. It creates a lot of, by the way, intelligence loopholes. It creates a lot of taxpayer money loopholes. As an example of this that I'm thinking of off the top of my head, you could have someone work at CIA for 10 years making 95 grand a year. 90 grand a year. They have a desk on row three, aisle five of floor four and they leave on a Friday after putting in their two weeks they go to Lockheed where now they're making $925,000 a year. They walk back through the front door on Monday, they're given the same lanyard, have the same desk. But now they technically work in the private sector and the government gets to say it's a contract that they're contracting out to this company who handles what the salaries are. Right. So we have all this going on the one hand, two really positive things that are important. Number one, I do want my American companies innovating the best defense shit for our military. We have to have that people that say, you don't, you're living in another reality. Number two, you do have to have an incentive to do that. So you're not going to get the best innovators if you're paying them the same government salary of $95,000 or whatever to do the work. So this is not like I yell, I get frustrated with, with the two sides of this argument, like burn it all down or keep it all. Because I'm focusing more on the burn it all down. I'm like, all right, that's not the solution here. However, the burn it all down crowd has an amazing point that the amount of waste, loopholes over, you know, overspending on stuff we're never going to use without any transparency whatsoever is a huge problem. So you listen. It's a big ocean. My buddy Tommy G's got an amazing quote where he says, you know, I can't boil the ocean, but I can boil my pot. You can only focus on your pot. But like in doing what you do, it sounds like you do truly believe that the product you're making, which of course is an entrepreneur of a company, CEO, founder, like you are trying to scale it. You are trying to make sure you make a lot of money and have a successful company, as you should. But it sounds like that is because you genuinely do believe that the technology you're creating is some of the most important investments that the US government is going to make over this next rolling 10 year period.
- [69:21]
B
Dude, 100 and put. Put another way, we don't want a defense industrial base that is just war profiteers. We do not want that. We do not want that. What we want is a lean, efficient and we want more than just three or four or five primes at the top, taking it all. We want a highly competitive. You know, I envision this whole idea of like, hey, let's have five primes and just add two more. That's not enough. Like, I think you, you Want an environment where there's like a thousand companies.
- [69:59]
A
Yes. We have an oligarchy right now that needs to democracy.
- [70:02]
B
We need, we need like a thousand companies that are all competing and teaming with each other. By the way, like you're going to do both. We team with all kinds of folks, right. That play nice with other companies. Not blocks them, not box them out. And then your overhead is so much lower. The overhead in these companies has mirrored the bureaucratic kind of rot within usg. Like for sure that that has to be addressed. I can't remember if we said this on camera or not, but like, you know, the budget just got massively increased apparently.
- [70:34]
A
Yeah, we didn't say it on camera. Went from like 900 to 1.5 trillion.
- [70:38]
B
1.5 is what you know, POTUS just tweeted out, I think, which is unprecedented.
- [70:44]
A
Definitely not a war coming.
- [70:45]
B
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
- [70:47]
A
That would never.
- [70:49]
B
It hasn't happened since World War II. So it is a, is a logical assumption to say just look at the.
- [70:54]
A
Pizza restaurants around the Pentagon. That's what I'm saying.
- [70:58]
B
I think Secretary Hegseth went out there and said, yeah, now I just like to screw with people and order pizzas randomly. Which is funny. I would do the same thing about that physician. But there's two. There's a couple of takeaways of this at least immediately that I think about for the company and my company. I'm like to your analogy, like my pot that I'm trying to boil. But I'm thinking of the broader ocean too.
- [71:20]
A
Okay.
- [71:21]
B
Like I am thinking of the broader. Because it is about the broader Ocean.
- [71:24]
A
Right.
- [71:25]
B
That is one. Do the. Are the US taxpayers getting 900 billion soon to be maybe 1.5 trillion a year worth of defense? Are they getting that kind of national security? Okay. If the answer is no, I would argue it's no great. How do we fix that? I think a massive way to fix that is small startups, medium sized companies that are lean mean bring unique capabilities to them and better contract mechanisms. That I think is actually a very, a very important one. That is something I can kind of both, I can't, I can influence. I can't fully solve that, but I can influence it. What I am encouraged to see is, you know what I, what I've seen is a real kind of shift away from like what we're saying right now. I think there's actually a lot of people in the Pentagon right now that would agree with what we're saying.
- [72:18]
A
Oh, I actually. Yeah.
- [72:19]
B
And I think that the Number's actually grown. And I think it's, there's a, there's a real understanding of like just paying for stock buybacks and, you know, doing this kind of work in the defense industrial base is not what we need to be doing here. It's not. We need to actually. So there's two things need to happen. We need to use this money much more efficiently and we also need to be buying and developing the kind of technology that actually matters, not just keeping programs alive because they're jobs in District X, not just doing that a lot. Yeah. So there's a lot of work to be done there. And can it be done without a, you know, literally an act of Congress? I don't know. To be frank, I don't know. I think it probably does take congressional action, Goldwater Nichols style congressional action that created us SOCOM, like that kind of action back from the 80s. So I think like, ultimately the, you know, the people's representatives have to make something like this happen. Like, they have to push for that. So I think that's, that's important and that's part of the kind of the overall solution. But also like, success wins. Success wins. Like, you know, it's so like deeply within, like both Americanism and also like very pragmatic people that are trying to do defense and ultimately just care about does it work, does it have the capability? So what we try to do is be very focused on like delivering very real capabilities, solving those nasty problems that have not been solved within drones and robotics, and then offering it to something that's. And this is something that my brother talks about, this commercial software type for his whole career. And, and he kind of co founded.
- [74:08]
A
The company with you, right?
- [74:09]
B
He did, yeah. He did, yeah. And he's an advisor kind of now. And part of the thing he said early on, which I really took on, I like, is treat the government like a commercial customer, not treat the government like something we're fleecing to do. These inflated, you know, these inflated contracts that we're never going to deliver on, like treat them like a commercial customer, you know, whether it's a B2B or whether it's a consumer, like, hey, they have pain points, they have, they're price sensitive. Like all the things that you would do in commercial software to deliver real value to that customer. And we've, and we've just lost that for all kinds of reasons, you know, and there's not, not that there's not patriots and good Americans at, you know, any defense contractor or traditional primes. There are, you know, I've got friends and all of them. But. But there's something. Something's just gone awry. Something's just gone awry.
- [75:02]
A
Well, it's passing the buck, too. It's opportunism. Geyser in, you know, one big deal with the government. Like, I can make 400 million instead of 300. I'll do it. Someone else will not waste.
- [75:13]
B
I agree.
- [75:13]
A
And it happens extrapolated in all those situations a million times.
- [75:17]
B
Yeah, no, I agree. Like, but it, you know, and. And you can justify it, right? And there's a jury. You can. Of course you can justify being. Well, look at. You know, it's better than a Somali daycare. You know, life's about perspective sometimes.
- [75:36]
A
Yeah.
- [75:38]
B
There's perspectives at least, you know, at least they're producing actual weapons.
- [75:43]
A
Not Minneapolis.
- [75:44]
B
Yeah, actually, but there's a. I mean, there's just a lot of work to be done there. So. But I. But I. That was. That was very anime to me. That's ultimately why I retired. So basically, I retired. I did a machine learning fellowship with mit, like, as I was retiring, and then went and got a degree out of there and founded the company out of there.
- [76:08]
A
So you got. You got. That's a big deal getting into mit. I mean, insane, insane human capital, Italian over there stuff. You're looking at the.
- [76:17]
B
The good. Like, the good thing about MIT is, like, nobody's arrogant there because the person sitting next to you actually is smarter than you in almost every context among.
- [76:27]
A
The student base or the.
- [76:29]
B
I. My experience was it there's a unique kind of culture there that, you know, it's very engineering focused. There's no law school, there's no med school, you know, so it's very, very, like, research focused. Of course, there's like, you know, different hierarchies and cliques like any group of humans are. But it was still, you know, so it was. I enjoyed my time there, for sure, because it was still very much on, like, performance and inquisitive minds, you know, which I liked. So that.
- [77:01]
A
What's the. What's the number outside, like, the education on the material? What's the number one skill set you developed there added to the repertoire?
- [77:08]
B
The. And I got to test this, too, was working, collaborating and leading, like, very diverse engineer skill sets, you know, so, like, you take a PhD from robotics versus a AI one versus somebody who's doing, like, mapping human genome, and these are all, like, PhDs.
- [77:31]
A
Oh, yeah, right.
- [77:31]
B
And then putting them together and trying to extract something meaningful. This is, you know, this is ultimately what a tech startup has to do. You put some kind of variables like this together and then you have to extract something meaningful that's so compelling that it will separate a customer from their money.
- [77:46]
A
Right.
- [77:48]
B
You know, so it can't be like a lab project, can't be a pet project, has to be extremely low eagle, collaborative. But that skill set, I got to like do reps on this.
- [77:58]
A
You know, that's a hard job too because, you know, engineers are very, especially the highest level ones, very wired in on what they do.
- [78:05]
B
Yeah.
- [78:05]
A
And then when you're bringing across them to entirely different engineers, like you said, it's like, yeah, these. Lane is Japanese. English.
- [78:14]
B
Yeah, no, it's very different.
- [78:16]
A
Very different.
- [78:16]
B
I developed some of that like in those, those early days, like as a. Right before I went to Air command staff. So like at, you know, as like a kind of looking at like the pinnacle of your flying career is like, they'd call it like a mid level captain. I've been in it for about eight years. I'm. I'm an instructor. Like that's when you got your best in some cases, depending on how much you get to fly. But that's usually kind of like a key, key part of your, you know, overall like flying career. And I started to do that with like some of the weapon stuff and all that we did and work with like very different engineers. And I found I really enjoyed it. So even then. So that was something I kind of doubled down on and carried into. And ultimately when it comes to, it comes to just being a leader with very low ego, staying humble but confident at the same time, and the ability to drill in to an engineer to extract something that you might need for someone, someone else on the team. And then kind of the ability to be like, all right, the best thing now is for me to just maybe remove myself from this part and just make sure the blocking and tackling is done right. And it's kind of, it's very, it's very fluctuating, kind of back and forth.
- [79:29]
A
Confident in your vision by hiring people to actually tell you what to do. Do within their specific.
- [79:34]
B
Yeah, 100%. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
- [79:37]
A
It's a tough. Listen, it sounds simple, but.
- [79:39]
B
No, it's tough to do that.
- [79:41]
A
That separates leaders.
- [79:43]
B
It does. But the. There's a couple of things that are very awesome about it. And one is that hand selecting a team is awesome.
- [79:51]
A
Yeah.
- [79:51]
B
When you get to like hand build a small team and then. And you get to, you know, we have very High standards. We don't advertise jobs or anything like that because I got a list of all kinds of people that want to get in.
- [80:01]
A
I make people wear a shirt here.
- [80:03]
B
Yeah, you make a wear a shirt?
- [80:04]
A
Yeah, sometimes.
- [80:05]
B
Okay, sometimes good. Yeah, you gotta have standards, man.
- [80:07]
A
That's right.
- [80:07]
B
You have standards.
- [80:08]
A
That's our standards.
- [80:10]
B
Everyone we have is on the spectrum in some capacity.
- [80:13]
A
So you know, you gotta have the.
- [80:16]
B
People staring fractals to make everybody's got. Everybody's on some level.
- [80:20]
A
That's right. It's like if you're an artist, you're in. If not, get the out.
- [80:23]
B
My wife hates it when I say that. But like it's.
- [80:26]
A
Listen, it is what it is. Geniuses. Yeah, that's where the cat capital is, bro.
- [80:30]
B
Everybody in our, everybody in our, our company is like, everybody. It's. And it's awesome. And it's awesome. Like, I don't know, it's so boring in other places. Like I was just at. Where was that? I did this pitch at Amazon headquarters. They call it HQ2 in DC.
- [80:45]
A
Oh, that's so.
- [80:46]
B
And it was. Yeah, but it was like. I'm gonna just describe it, right? It's like nothing but these like sleep pods and people walking like three different dogs at a time and having their fourth matcha for the morning. And I'm like, put a bullet in my head. That's, you know. Well, I go to these. Like, I go to them, but I love Amazon, but I go to these ones and I'm just like, you know the question, you know the question comes up for any like startup founders, like, well, why can't X do what you're doing? You know, why doesn't Lockheed just make this technology? Or if you're building a new software, why doesn't Facebook just do it? Or why doesn't Microsoft just do it? It's like, have you been in their headquarters? Like, have you seen how little work happens in some of these places?
- [81:31]
A
I've been in some of those. Fair point.
- [81:33]
B
You don't have to run that fast in some of these ones. You just. It's amazing what happens when you get too many people together in one area.
- [81:40]
A
Yeah, you get too big, you lose.
- [81:43]
B
They just lose the magic. There's just. There you stay lean, small and agile. And I hate meetings. I told myself, I hate meetings. I hate meetings. I've actually ended meetings because I'm just like, no, I'm done. Like we're in mid sentence, but now, right.
- [82:00]
A
We just got a hard stop and.
- [82:03]
B
Yeah, this meeting went this meeting went for six minutes, and it was always scheduled for three minutes.
- [82:08]
A
So we just want to review what was on the table. Oh, God.
- [82:12]
B
I just. Yeah, yeah. So we've, like, that's what's been. That's what's. Part of. Part of my motivation, too, for Victus was I did the interviews as I. As I retired. Like, I interviewed at one of the big defense primes, like, every. Like, everybody does, right? Like, you know, and like, one of them I went through. I won't throw spear on here, but one of them. So I went through and did, like, three, four rounds at the end. There's. So it's me and two other guys interviewing me. Okay? One of them is, like, an old, you know, retired aviator from the Navy. There's, like, a much younger engineer, pure engineer. As we're interviewing. This is, like, primary data, right? As we're interviewing, they start arguing with each other in front of me, like, as we're interviewing. And then I have. I was like, okay, noted. So I'm just kind of taking notes, right? Like, what do you do? Like, I'm in the. I'm in a job interview, and they're arguing. Like, there's overt hostility between these two.
- [83:08]
A
It's just like a corporate argument or like a go yourself, New York argument.
- [83:11]
B
Like, what's corporate?
- [83:12]
A
Corporate.
- [83:13]
B
It's very passive aggressive. Very passive aggressive. But. Yeah, but the. The older grizzled mill guy, you know, he's just like. He starts red here, and it's just like, it's working it up. It's working it up. Like, it's work. It's working up, man. It's working. So I'm just watching it, like, only I didn't draw it in, but I could have, like, drawn a face and been, like, scribbling up, like, oh, the red's gotten higher. The red's got higher. So then I. And I have my little set of questions, and, you know, you have these questions, right? Like, you go to interview, I have these questions. And so then I go to the younger guy and, you know, pure engineer. And I ask a question, something to the effect of, hey, tell me a time where you, like, really empowered your team. Which is obvious.
- [83:53]
A
You asked him that.
- [83:53]
B
Yeah. Which is obviously a setup question, Right. What I'm really doing is being like, okay, are you a micromanager or not? That's what I want to know. So I asked him this question. He comes back. He says this. He comes back and goes, sometimes you just got to micromanage your guys. So Then I flipped the page and I wrote like in the year of our Lord 2023. I just had someone say, micromanagement is a, is something that they should do within this. So this just went on like, this was my experience with one of these interviews. So then I, then, you know, everybody has these. Anybody veteran watching this will know, like the little green books. I was still rocking the green book at this point. It's like standard army issue green books, right? So I write that in there. So then we go, we leave. I go out with this guy afterwards. I don't drink, but I'm just like, you can have as many whiskeys as you want. Then he tells me all kinds of stuff about, oh, that's the best. Oh, it's the best. He tells me all like. And he's just like, this place like that, you know, so, so then the day after the day, that was like summer. I had already gotten into mit, but I wasn't sure, like, what I was going to do. Maybe I take a job, maybe I don't. As I was retiring, they called on terminal leave, like at the very end where I'm basically done, but I'm still technically in the Air Force.
- [85:10]
A
When you host with Cut water canned cocktails, expect company, entertain effortlessly. Cut water, real cocktails perfectly mixed. Copyright 2026 Cut Water Spirits, San Diego, CA Enjoy responsibly.
- [85:26]
B
It's tax season and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it, guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. And that's where I was like, okay, I actually thought about this corporate lifestyle. Like, for now, this is not happening. And the job that I want apparently doesn't exist, so I'm going to create it.
- [86:08]
A
Love that.
- [86:09]
B
And that's then that. With that. At that point it was like. So I showed up at mit, I was like, I know where I'm going. I have some of the invention already. Like, this is what we're doing.
- [86:17]
A
What year is that? MIT? 2022.
- [86:19]
B
That's 23.
- [86:20]
A
23.
- [86:20]
B
So I retire. My effective retirement date is the first of September 23rd.
- [86:25]
A
Okay.
- [86:25]
B
And then I start at MIT a couple weeks later, like the 19th of September.
- [86:29]
A
All right, so you come out of MIT. Did you immediately have Victus as like the idea ready to roll?
- [86:34]
B
Well, I had it during there. So good thing about like. And a lot of schools have this, right? A lot of good tech schools, but they have, you know, MIT is a bunch of these kind of like napkin level hackathons where you can kind of get stuff together. It's super fun, right? So we did one of these as part of my program in spring of 24 week long one had all kinds of folks helping, did a little pitch, you know, had some risk capital, like VC types come in kind of at the end. And we did well. It was the only like defense thing. Even close. Even close. We got like number two out of 68. So I had been consulting for like, you know, intel community, SOCOM based and like some other kind of facing companies. I was like, okay, we have that validated my hypothesis that we're on to something here. Like we're onto something. You know, we've identified the mountain. That's. That's what we did. We got to climb the mountain still. But we've at least identified there's an actual mountain here to climb. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna power down all my clients. I'm going all in on this. So then I was like, all right, let's build in stealth. We didn't really tell anybody what we were doing. Just start building in stealth.
- [87:38]
A
Your brother came in at this point.
- [87:39]
B
He came in right at that point. And we started just kind of building in that summer of. What's that? Summer of 24.
- [87:45]
A
He has the, he has an engineering background, right?
- [87:47]
B
Yep. Like a, like a AI engineer. He done stuff with Microsoft. He was a striper for years.
- [87:53]
A
You know the striper force commando. AI engineer.
- [87:56]
B
Yep, do it. Exactly. And then started. You know, I had some other folks helping too, like advisors. They're basically working for free, but they're helping out in that area to be like, okay, we think there's something here. So, you know, we want to start getting involved.
- [88:09]
A
All right, real quick, I got to pee one more time. And then we're gonna. Now we're gonna go through the whole product works and then go into like the counter intel stuff. And I want to talk underwater.
- [88:18]
B
Oh, yes. Sweet as well. Yes, for sure. Yes.
- [88:20]
A
We'll be right back.
- [88:21]
B
Excellent.
- [88:22]
A
All right. So we've hinted at it throughout the day. You again. I think this is the third time we've least mentioned you're effectively trying to build the inner ear.
- [88:30]
B
Right.
- [88:31]
A
For drones. But I guess, like, technologically and scientifically, can you break down how this works and what that looks like on maybe, you know, field of battle or surveillance situation?
- [88:43]
B
Yeah, yeah. So first, like a minute or two on how GPS works, because then that understands, like, okay, how do we fix one of it? So the way, like, basic GPS works, you have an algorithm on. It's on everything. It's even actually part of GPS itself. It's called a Kalman filter. This is a math problem, not problem algorithm that basically does state estimation. So if you think about it, it's kind of like if you took a. If you took a bunch of points, it resolves it into one thing. Like, I get a fix here, here, here, here. I'm going to call it here. Like, it's kind of like a simple version of how that works. Kalman filters are invented back in the 60s by a guy named Dr. Coleman, and they worked for navigation for years. So they took something that was some kind of an accelerometer. Accelerometer just measures the shift in gravity. This is in your phone. That's how step counting works. It's in a drone, it's in every aircraft and every satellite. It's in every submarine, it's in almost everything. They just kind of measure the shift, the feel this way. So the Kalman filter helps integrate that into a GPS signal as well. So when you get GPS signals, you're getting them from different satellites, different satellites around, and you can kind of like different cuts, and it resolves that into one position that you call like, the position of where you're at. So the way Kalman filters are designed, they're back in the 60s, we use them to. Pilots would, like, overfly a mountain and be like, hey, my inertial systems say, I'm here, but then I'm going to click update when I'm over the mountain. And that will kind of tighten. My solution is what you'd call it. So you used to have an error. You'd measure your error, meaning I know I'm somewhere within this circle. But then if I. Once I go over that mountain, I know where that is, and I can kind of resolve that. And then it starts drifting again. And then I go over another mountain, I resolve that.
- [90:34]
A
So you need base points, basically, kind.
- [90:36]
B
Of like a base point. Yeah. And it's like a visual reference. So common filters work really well, whether it's a human or a computer, computer vision, giving those references. It works well when those things are available late 80s, early 90s, we said, well, we don't actually need visual reference anymore. All I need is a signal up to medium earth orbit. And it works really well as well. Therefore, when you get, you know, your phone has, I mean, if it has a good GPS fix, it has a location error of something like 1 meter around there. That means that that blue dot that shows up on your maps, it's accurate to about 1 meter. So it's like, I know there's a. If it's. If you have really good GPS signals. If you have. This is. So it's assuming you have really good GPS signals. That has to do with the strength of the signal, clarity of the atmosphere, how many satellites. There's a couple things that go into that, how good your processes are on board. Like, it's all that. If you like, there's a, There's a GPS technology called Real Time Kinematic gps, RTK gps. That's what the drone shows use. So if you're watching a light show that's like. And that's where it's very precise. Right. A drone has to fly here, the other one has to be here. The other one has to be here. Or it doesn't look like the shape from you looking at it. They can get down to sometimes like centimeter accuracy.
- [91:53]
A
Yeah.
- [91:53]
B
So again, very, very accurate.
- [91:54]
A
Didn't we see one of those in Paris? So we were looking at a drone show. Oh, yeah, that was that. Was it Paris or Italy? Yeah, yeah. Oh, it was Italy. Yeah, yeah, we were on the roof. Right. Rome.
- [92:05]
B
They're pretty cool. Like they're still using gps. So the problem with all of that, like we talked about, is that GPS itself as a signal is very easily disrupted for stuff we said, solar flares, jammers, building in the way, atmospheric disturbances, all the above. And that has nothing to do with like in a wartime. Can you do something up in orbit to the satellites that are actually there? Right, Absolutely, you can. Like, absolutely. They're just flying around like, they're just, they're just waiting to be shot at, quite frankly, or jammed or tampered with in some capacity. So that's how all robotic systems have worked. And if you think about it, what that really means is any robotic system or drone something to know where it's at in time and space. It's reliant on getting that signal, either seeing the ground or getting that signal from up in GPS. When we started in GPS in the 80s and 90s, we just basically converted everything really start with aviation, but it went to the Robotic system and drones kind of were bored out of that and said, okay, that we're going to use that for how we understand the world, basically how we know where we're at. The problem is, like we talked about, that's very easily disrupted. And that's what's been proven in Ukraine. It's been proven in all kinds of other areas. It's a, it's kind of a, it's a massive like Achilles heel. So we say, and invented something. This is what our provisional patents over and was kind of the foundation of the company's about, is that instead of doing it that way, what we do is say, all right, let me take this edge device. By edge, I mean like a drone, robotic system, whatever it is. Let me build a model which kind of looks like an agent, but it's a model around how that works, which is done pretty fast. Let me also model how the inertial sensors work inside of it. They're in everything. And that is like how they shift in the X, Y, Z axis, how they shift in these different axis. So it's gravity shifting. Much like your head, you feel the gravity shift as you move your neck around. Right. So we model that, we put that in synthetic environment and then we train with unique data sets. And then in, you know, to use the term ontology, a unique ontology as well as a unique machine learning model, we train something that we call a synthetic gps. That's a machine learning model. So it's like a no kidding, you know, computer, Python script that's then deployed to an edge device. Humanoid satellite, submarine, drone, aircraft ship, low earth orbit satellite. Like doesn't matter, right? Phone, anything, it's deployed there. It then sits on a little, a very lightweight compute. So we got it down to like we talked about Raspberry PI earlier. But like it sits on a pretty lightweight compute. So it doesn't require this big like data center, GPU cluster or anything like that. And then it's, it's what it's doing. It's passively receiving all of those accelerometer streams of information in real time. So if I took like the drone and moved it and had it hooked up to a screen, you would see those shifts in XYZ access, like actual numbers. Say, hey, I just moved at this rate, at this distance, I just moved all this. So we train it on that at the same time. It's then monitoring the GPS signal. There's a couple ways we do that. If GPS is good, we just operate in the background so it's Silently operating the background. And it's doing state estimation. It's answering the question, where am I? That's all it's doing. Like, where am I? When we detect GPS gets jammed or spoofed. And we can actually detect both of these things. Spoofing. It's a fake GPS or I've done. Yeah, this is a very real thing do. Fake GPS is. I can do cyber attacks to a device through its GPS antenna and make.
- [95:43]
A
It think it's somewhere else.
- [95:44]
B
You can make it think somewhere else. You can actually even disrupt the message traffic at the API level from the GPS antenna. This is a problem. This is a problem that you're experiencing in Ukraine quite frequently, actually, because it's very fragile. That whole system is very, very fragile. You can think of the GPS antenna as like a screen door saying, any cyber attack, here's how you come in. Like, that's really what it is in a lot of ways. So we monitor if something happens with it. If that happens, then we then transmit from our state estimator that's been calculating where I am in time and space independently. We transmit that to the. In a drone, it's a system called the flight controller, but it's basically the autopilot, like the brain that's controlling, hey, this is where I'm going. This is what I'm doing. We transmitted that so that it has an answer to the question, where am I? And then it answers the question, where am I going? What am I doing? In the same way that it's been doing that. So it's seamless. So it doesn't know it. So part of the key of what we wanted to really both invent and bring to market for national security and our commercial customers is something where they don't have to change the hardware or the software of what they're using. They have a drone or a platform or a weapon or an aircraft or a ship or a satellite that works in this environment. It works how they want, but the problem is they need it to work when GPS doesn't. And they can't just rely on a computer vision technique that looks at the ground.
- [97:10]
A
Right.
- [97:11]
B
Or hoping for a magnometer to work correctly with magnetic lines of the earth.
- [97:15]
A
So they can seamlessly insert your product.
- [97:17]
B
Inserted product in. Yep, Seamlessly inserted that product into that. That's. That's what we've built with. That's. What we've built is basically like a workflow for our end users. Whether that's a drone, whether it's a. The Navy uses the term USV or UUV or AUV for Autonomous Undersea Vehicle Unmanned Surface Vessel. These are like drone boats, drone submarines, all the same thing.
- [97:39]
A
Oh, all right, keep going. We'll come back to that.
- [97:42]
B
Yeah, but it's questions, but they, from a technology perspective, they basically work the same way. So our software applies to those devices as well. So it sits on that device and then it's there when you need it. If that means you have no good GPS for the entire time you know where you are, that's fine. You know where you're at. We can keep kind of a very good location for it.
- [98:01]
A
And there was nothing like this in existence.
- [98:03]
B
Nothing, nothing. What people have tried to do, I mean, so that, you know, this problem sets been understood like, hey, it's probably a bad idea to be dependent on gps, but we're. What most have tried to do is some kind of a goofy bolt on. So like, hey, put this quantum sensor that might work on here, put this magnometer and then we'll map out full magnetic lines of the earth. Maybe that'll work. Hey, put computer vision on there and say that we have GPS denied. Just don't tell them if a cloud is out, it doesn't work. Just. Let's just not talk about that. Put an atomic clock on there, that'll do it. And then it'll figure out the timing without it. These are all terrible ideas, which is why we gain traction so fast. They don't work. We were working with a client, so you know, we work with all kinds of different companies. Drone manufacturing companies, direct for government. We worked with like the chip manufacturers that produce things for the drone. There's one particular base level. Base level? Yeah, like fully throughout the supply chain. So there's one company that is trying to get, and this is for all the reasons we talked about earlier about massive drones. They're trying to get the price point for their drones down. They're trying to keep making them cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, which is a righteous mission for all kinds of reasons. They're also being told, hey, this thing's got to be able to operate in a contested environment, meaning it's got to be able to operate with GPS jamming or denied gps. So they do what any drone OEM does, as in, you know, a manufacturer of them. They don't make that kind of stuff. So they go to the market and they do. You probably call it like an analysis of alternatives to say, okay, what capabilities can I buy off the shelf to try and solve this requirement that my end user customer has and they go to try and find this. And this one, this is a real company that we're working with. This company comes back and says, yeah, for this $2,000 drone. One of the quantum computing sensor companies said, well, we can solve this for you with an $80,000 add on. So I'm gonna take a $2,000 drone.
- [100:01]
A
That'S designed low price of $80,000.
- [100:04]
B
We're gonna bolt this thing onto it. And you know, the whole purpose of this drone is like one way emissions and we're gonna put this really expensive thing on it that destroys the battery. It's just turned into an $82,000 drone. It's a terrible situation. Like it's not workable. So that's kind of the key part of what we're solving.
- [100:23]
A
That's amazing. And you're so like you said, you can integrate at the base level, you can integrate with the existing technology and exist integrate with the existing physical infrastructure of any of these types of drones. And you're working on both a government contract side and a private company side as well.
- [100:40]
B
You were saying like yeah, the, in the commercial space, I mean the commercial space is using drones for all kinds of stuff, right? We got drones that are doing power line inspections. I like very much I like drones as first responders. Some kind of powerful anecdotes on from 2024 and actually early 25. Wildfires out in California in LA county and hurricanes both of them hit around the Tampa area in Florida back in 24, just last year. They're both those hurricanes pretty nasty. And the wildfires are nasty too. Both states ostensibly had all kinds of drones that were dedicated for first response. None of them worked in either situation. Why they're dependent on good GPS, good 5G, good LT. What's the first thing that goes, that goes away after a big hurricane comes in, knocks out everything. So none of them work. So they all just paperweights everywhere. Paperweights. And then that's why you had all the images in. I mean you could develop and there was technology could do this better. That's why you have manned aircraft like scooping up water and trying to drop stuff that is super expensive. It's not your best first responders. So that one we're kind of very passionate about that's working through both government, state agencies, private companies, power companies. So it's a complex kind of thing. And then the thing we were talking about earlier is that, you know, security where now you. What we're seeing is like bandits or thieves are bringing GPS jammers with them to prevent first responders from doing anything. So, you know, there's a, there's a market there for sure that those, you know, those kind of folks need technology where they can operate in a GPS contested environment, for sure.
- [102:24]
A
Now, to look at it more on the national security side of things, because all those use cases are extremely, they're incredible. And it can also save lives and improve how we respond to the worst natural disasters, which we have no control over. But looking at it from a national security perspective, obviously you take away the jamming problem, obviously you take away the very lackadaisical GPS system problem that occurs with drones. But like, is there technology? Like, what is the status, I guess in a, if I'm going to put this broadly of the drone warfare competition between the US And China right now. Does China already have technology like this and companies over there that are working on what you're working on or not?
- [103:09]
B
Well, I start from the premise. Oh, well, first I'll answer this way. We, we definitely have a novel technology that has not been replicated anywhere. We've invented very new technology for this in a new category. Having said that, there's not a single technology that we can't assume that the Chinese are actively trying to pursue. Like they're going to pursue every, not a single one. I don't care what green door it's behind. I don't like, it doesn't matter. Like, they're, they're pursuing kind of everything. Part of, part of what, you know, we've been to do. We've been, you know, the way we've built this, the way we've created this without any technical debt, kind of from scratch, using the very latest ways of both software coding and both, you know, AI and ML ops really, to kind of nerd out on that. But that is a novel way of doing things that just hasn't been done, you know, before. Having said that, are the Chinese going to work on something like this? Yeah, 100 like, you know, because it's just a powerful problem set. So they're, they are definitely going to try and develop, develop systems that give them asymmetric advantage. The reason this one's kind of a uniquely US one is because the US has developed all the systems off of gps. So we put GPS up in orbit in, you know, late in the 80s and started using it a lot in like the early 90s, and then we built our own systems off of that. So it's a unique Achilles heel for the us It's a unique Achilles heel because of all of the national security platforms. I mean, almost every one of them that is relying on GPS to some level. Almost every one of them. That one. You know, because if you're building stuff totally from scratch right now, there's probably some other ways you could do some things in some cases now, you're not going to get the low cost like the software solution brings. But there's, there's, for example, in Ukraine right now, you have fiber optic drones.
- [105:12]
A
Fiber optic drones.
- [105:13]
B
So fiber optic drones are a terrible, terrible idea. But they did it because. And they're doing it because there's no better solution that they've had yet.
- [105:22]
A
Can you explain how they work? Yeah, my mind is running to some interesting images right now.
- [105:27]
B
It's probably the right image. The basic being it's so jammed over there they can't trust any signal. So they have a fishing line of fiber optic from somebody controlling it somewhere, whether that's a machine or a human. Yeah, it's a terrible idea. From an engineering perspective. The last person in the world you want to be is the one on the other end of that line. You've basically just told the whole world, hey, here's where I'm at right now. So you don't want to be that person right there. But they've went to it because this problem has gotten so bad for them. Like, it's just gotten to where they can't. There's been no other kind of real solutions for it.
- [106:05]
A
What, what ways are. Like we know all these famous stories like we mentioned earlier, like the, the Chinese spy balloon and stuff like that. But like, what ways are countries like China or Russia, whoever you want to focus on, or any other countries using drones effectively right now that we're having serious problems with in our airspace or in our waters?
- [106:27]
B
Well, okay, all right, so there's a lot. I'll tell you what I am most focused on, or maybe the word to be concerned, but at least focused on open source. You can look it up. The Chinese are developing some pretty interesting, like stratosphere level bullets balloons. Excuse me, stratus. Stratosphere level balloons. So you're talking something. You're flying like way the freak up there, right? Way up there. And somewhere in like 100, sometimes 150,000, like somewhere in that. In that range could even be a little bit lower than that. But this is way up there and you're basically taking that balloon that balloons in kind of this unique band of airspace. Right. And they're putting on some kind of a drone and basically get that balloon close enough, and then you launch the drone off of that, and then you put really good propulsion on it. And then you have a hypersonic drone that's very cheap.
- [107:21]
A
Hypersonic.
- [107:21]
B
Yeah, because you think you're so high and you're shooting this thing straight down like a dart straight down. That is a problem for a couple reasons that's a problem. One, you have all kinds of balloons that are used for weather and all that, so it's easily masked. And it's also a problem because I don't know if that's got a drone on it. I don't know what kind of system it has on it. And it solves a lot of the problem with hypersonics, which is often, like, they're very expensive, and when you launch them, the whole world knows that you've launched them. In this case, it's like, no, I put a balloon up, I'm floating it. Maybe it's doing weather, maybe it's not. Maybe it's doing weather, maybe it's not. Maybe it's hanging out. And I've got a drone that it's carrying on it and can launch down and every.
- [108:04]
A
So I don't know if this would apply to the stratosphere level balloons, but, like, the balloons that. That was so crazy, by the way. We're just, like, letting the. Letting the balloons fly across the airspace, like, shoot that down, like, what the. But it was sucking up all the data.
- [108:21]
B
Oh, 100.
- [108:22]
A
That it goes over.
- [108:22]
B
Yeah.
- [108:23]
A
So these things up at that level, can they do that, too?
- [108:27]
B
There's all kinds of payloads. You can sniff data with. All kinds of payloads. Yeah. Yeah, all kinds. So if you think about it, the, you know, the. The. The without, like, trying to psychoanalyze China, which many have tried to do, maybe successfully, probably not take the Art of War, right? You know, all kinds of, like, little snippets in the Art of War.
- [108:54]
A
Son Tisu.
- [108:54]
B
Yeah. Sun Tzu.
- [108:55]
A
Yeah.
- [108:55]
B
So I'm thinking, I think pronounce it to zoo. Tis. Thank you for that. Yeah. Good Jersey. Yeah. Excellent. So Sun Tzu, he talks about, like, feigning deception, you know, acting weak when you're actually strong like this. You know, these kind of, like, these are broad concepts, but if you. And then you also think so one, that's a cultural kind of way of, like, whether it's overt or not. I'm not saying, like, the CCP goes and picks up the Art of War and says, what should we do on page four. I'm not saying they do that. But it's part of their culture. Yes, it's definitely part of their warfighting culture.
- [109:29]
A
The.
- [109:30]
B
So there, there, there's that piece. They're also with, you know, the, the Chinese economy. And I mean, it went from a third world to a, you know, first world near peer in like what a generation.
- [109:43]
A
It went, it did it. Kai Fuli writes about it. He literally opens that book, Superpowers. Oh, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm thinking the right book where he's like all these kids, he said, pictured in 1999, a bunch of kids coming outside with like flashlights, reading on the streets at night. And he's like, China's a third world country. This is a university. And then 10 years later he's like, first world?
- [110:04]
B
Yeah, it's like Dubai all like insane. Yeah, so, so what that means is they didn't have to like bring in the old industrial age into the information age. They just got to start with that.
- [110:17]
A
That's right.
- [110:19]
B
So it also means if you're going to build up capability, like, what are you going to do? I'm like, okay, I got to go up against this trillion dollar a year behemoth. So let me develop an investing capabilities that asymmetrically neutralize it. Like electronic attack, like balloons, like super cheap drones that take advantage of my manufacturing supremacy. That's what I'm going to invest in. So maybe they get, you know, some really sophisticated hypersonic stealth munition. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Who cares? They're like, we're the ones that can produce millions of these drones and we can steal all your software and the autonomous stuff that you've already done and we can produce it. And then we can invest in electronic attack, we can invest in balloons, we can invest in unique carrier, you know, weapons to go against carrier strike groups in the Pacific. We, we invest in these things, all the neutralizing ways, you know, and then, because then the idea is like, okay, if I can, if I can at a national security level, I can basically take away your credible way to coerce me. So I can take away. All right, yes. United States of America. I know that your military power is really not that real because you're not willing to have, you know, three carrier strike groups at the bottom of the ocean on night one. And you know that I can do that all of a sudden. That gives them freedom and maneuver to kind of do whatever they want also.
- [111:53]
A
With drones again, because you don't have to have humans in them. So the engine and they can Be smaller. And the engineering is a lot different. Am I this. I'm way out of my wavelength here, so just correct me if I'm wrong, but you're not operating with the engineering issues that like the Titanic sub guy ran into because he's got to make something humans can go, yeah, totally, yeah.
- [112:14]
B
And, and they are simple. And, and the Chinese also, they're just good at drones. So there is an argument by far, like in. Within the US drone industry on the commercial side. It's actually kind of sad. Right. Basically all US companies got out of the drone business. The Chinese ran them out. The ch, the DJI drones and a couple other ones related to dji, they dominate the US consumer market. Dominant.
- [112:39]
A
We got Chinese spyware all over, all over the place.
- [112:42]
B
All over. All the farms, all the hobbyists, all the people doing real estate for that. Well, we know it's happening.
- [112:49]
A
Yeah, but like, but before the drone gets imported, you know, comes into the port of Elizabeth and you know, it can't go through like some sort of government screening check for like, let's magnetically find a spy or something.
- [113:00]
B
This is something we actually tried to do some work on with this.
- [113:03]
A
Yeah, try harder.
- [113:04]
B
We won't. Well, I won't name the state, but we actually worked with a state on this, on legislation to try and do almost exactly what you're talking about. And then this is worth like people understanding. We had strong support. This is in May of 25. We had strong support for it. Bill got killed. All of it got killed. What ends up happening is people wearing law enforcement uniforms and or firefighting uniforms. Other folks get kind of like pulled out and testify saying, you can't take my Chinese drones away. The American stuff all sucks. And if you take this away from me, then you don't care about me and my family and you're not there to help me do my job.
- [113:52]
A
Okay, so this bill was to take away.
- [113:55]
B
This bill was to have a U.S. capability to inspect these kind of drones, ensure that the software is clean on them and prevent data exfiltration, meaning prevent the spying still using a core DJI drone product, which is actually a good little drone. Right. It works.
- [114:17]
A
Why were they concerned about losing their drones? I don't understand.
- [114:20]
B
That's just how the argument goes. So the argument goes of. Because the argument was, the argument goes twofold. In this case, the argument said, we're gonna give you like a five year period and then we're gonna start making. You're going to have to start buying American or you're going to start buying Americans after, after a five year period where theoretically the US drone industrial base would built up and then these law enforcement, firefighting, public safety types could then buy the equivalent of a U.S. drone.
- [114:50]
A
Right. So there's a time limit on it and it's a product change and legislation on where you're allowed to buy from.
- [114:57]
B
Yes.
- [114:57]
A
So this bill wasn't dealing with. We're going to have a system in place to be able to like, you know, well, put a security wand over the drones and just have that moving forward. So they could buy Chinese drones 10 years from now. But when it comes in the country, we want it up there, spyware, get rid of it and then give it to them.
- [115:15]
B
It was that we, you know, the, the attempt of the bill was saying, we'll give you a sunset period. Yeah.
- [115:22]
A
But I'm saying into perpetuity. Like, why not develop a tool that could just check this and be like, there it is, we got it.
- [115:28]
B
That's what you would, that's what you would have had from, from this. Yes.
- [115:31]
A
Yeah. But at the end of five, at the end of five years they wouldn't, you wouldn't even have that system anymore. It would just be, you must buy American. Which I'm all for buying.
- [115:40]
B
That part was actually in that bill. That part was even up for negotiation.
- [115:44]
A
Yeah, they should have negotiated that.
- [115:45]
B
Right, that, that was. But, but here's the, like, the, the part that people need to understand what is like actually happening here is that you had all kinds of people on DJI's payroll.
- [115:57]
A
Oh.
- [115:59]
B
That were the ones that said, oh no, we need to have Chinese drones. The American stuff is just terrible. Again, this has happened in multiple areas. And they kill these bills. Yep, they kill them.
- [116:11]
A
Using our freedoms against ourselves, again, potentially.
- [116:15]
B
Yeah.
- [116:15]
A
Effect.
- [116:16]
B
No, that's what I think. I personally think there should be a, there should be an investigation of this. Like, like the Chinese drone lobbyists and who they've paid off because other states have looked at this too. And if you look, I don't have it up right now, but if you looked, the FCC recently just came out with something said we're not going to allow any Chinese drones to do anything. And I don't even know if they like, I don't know exactly how you're going to enforce that or make that happen because it wasn't, it's not a bill, it's just like a executive thing the FCC came out of.
- [116:47]
A
And again, this is another problem where like this is a typical thing. Please correct me if I'm Wrong again. Where this kind of thing is happening here but not in reverse.
- [117:01]
B
Well, so we are doing some, all the world's complex. I mean the world's complex. You know we focus on what's happening here. I, I, what I would in drones because I'll just cage it to drones and drones specifically because the u, the wheel, the Chinese drones, the DJI drones basically were allowed to dominate the market and drive all the US competition out of it. They all just, almost all of them just said we're going to stop making these things like we're just done, we can't compete on price. All kinds of reasons that's happened. Right. The Chinese, you know, they use state sponsored funding within their manufacturing to make it orders of magnitude cheaper than like a regular company does, just starting at 1. That's one of the reasons. And then there's definitely a very real, very real currency manipulation. If you hold, I think the Chinese central bank holds three some trillion dollars a U.S. right now. That's done on purpose, right. As a devaluing of currency. So there's, there's these external things that they've done to enable their own manufacturing sector and then their own manufacturing sector. Very sun to zoo ish of them is everything's dual use. That drones taking pictures of your wedding and you know, looking at your roof today, that drone can be remissioned for something tomorrow. And then even if it's that drone or that manufacturing plant that produced that drone, you know and that where, that's where you're using, it's using our own freedoms against us or is it, is it using a naive view of the world?
- [118:41]
A
Yeah, I'm just saying like they don't let X in there. Google's not in China but their companies are here.
- [118:51]
B
True.
- [118:52]
A
You know what I mean? And it's a similar aspect like they get to access our free markets, get capitalized through New York Stock Exchange even and all that and then the reverse, they really watch from a counter espionage on that end, you know and it's not 100 and zero but I'm getting at like the winds are blowing more in our direction of threat with this rather than in theirs.
- [119:17]
B
No, that I totally, I totally agree with. You know, and, and that that's something we just haven't for all kinds of reasons we just have allowed to happen. And there's a, and, and I'm not, you know there's a, there's a number of Americans that have gotten you know, fabulously wealthy over allowing Chinese investment into.
- [119:36]
A
The U.S. oh my God. Fuck, yeah.
- [119:39]
B
Which is all. Which is ultimately like, the. Why a lot of this happened.
- [119:42]
A
And it's not just. You were saying that. It's not like, to put it at a higher level, corporations. There are corporations who have literally lived and died off this.
- [119:51]
B
Yeah.
- [119:52]
A
You know, so it's a real thing. And like, you keep also pointing out, like, the, The. The open source intel world we live in now and how everything. We all have this in our pocket and all that and give it all kinds of permissions and then that's in a. That's in the cloud and attackable to people and stuff like that. And like, you know, that's where I think the wins might be a little more equal because there's things that even the Chinese Communist Party can't control. Like, they can't control other people having phones which we could go, you know, I guess, like, use that data for our own good as well. But, like, they can do it to us. I had this guy, Mike Yagley in here for episode 343 and 351. You ever hear of that?
- [120:34]
B
Dude, I think, I think I remember just perusing your site. I think. But I don't, I don't. I need those. I didn't watch it.
- [120:40]
A
So he's a data guy, data expert, and he looks like he's gonna explode every time he talks. He's just like, Jesus Christ, if you knew what I knew. But he really. He had done some work, some contracting for like, DARPA back in the day and everything, and then was working in the private data sector and all that. And effectively he. He was in his bedroom one day and wanted to know if he could just like, buy some data and figure out some information on cell phones that looked unique to him. So he did, and he spent whatever money he did on it. And these were specifically cell phones emanating from, what was it, Fort Knox? Is that right in North Carolina? Fort Bragg. Sorry, it was in Fort Bragg. And he started tracking these phones off the base to a town that was a wealthier town, meaning, like, the starter homes cost a lot more. And he would see these. These phones go to these different houses where he could then go get openly available property records and get the names and figure out who they were. And then he would watch these same group of phones. You know, maybe it was six, maybe it was 12. Like, once every other month they'd fly to Syria and they'd go to some, like, French cement company called LA Farc. That's funny. And then when he looked into the guys, he goes oh, these are all Delta Force guys. They're running an undercover mission in Syria right now, standing in as cement contractors. And I just found it in my bedroom. So he go, this is like 2014, 2050. So he goes to the government and, like, does a giant report on this and says, guys, you're. And they thought he was like a charlatan. They're like, there's no way. This is really. He's like, I bought this off the open market because all of your guys carry a phone.
- [122:31]
B
Yeah.
- [122:31]
A
What the do you think China and Russia are doing right now?
- [122:34]
B
Yeah.
- [122:35]
A
And it's like, God damn. Like, even our Delta guys, like, the, the tips of the spear are at risk with basic everyday stuff. You know, you're talking about the highest level things like drones, but also. My dad has a drone.
- [122:50]
B
Yeah.
- [122:51]
A
He's flying it around in the backyard. It's taking pictures for Xi Jinping. Yeah.
- [122:55]
B
It's a good time, though.
- [122:56]
A
It's crazy.
- [122:57]
B
Yeah.
- [122:59]
A
Brave new world.
- [123:03]
B
And that's, that's not going to. I don't see that change like that. That's only going to increase, you know, that amount of, like, if you really want to find data, like, you're going to find it. How to protect that data. How to protect, you know, the right data at the right time. Just like is. Is it is the same kind of question of like, how do you find the right data for a decision that you need at the right time in a sea of data where it's, you know, like, I just need this piece of information. How do you know which data you need to protect at the right kind of time? That's, that's definitely an open, like, that's an open thing. It does present. It does present, like, asymmetric ways for someone else to manipulate.
- [123:50]
A
For sure, that's the one. Again, the one upside of that field is it does feel a little bit like mutually benefit, mutually assured destruction, because everyone can do it to each other. It's a big problem for, like, intel missions and like that. But on the everyday person, there may be some incentivization to not do that. And I would like to think, and I hope I'm right about this, that's a similar idea to the power grids, you know, like, it's funny, I was reading this book, Sandworm, back in early 2020, written by Andy Greenberg, who later came on the show a couple times, and he was right. This is, you know, this is before Ukraine and everything happened. But he was writing presciently about how Russian GRU teams had developed the ability to take down power grids. And they had literally tested this in like December 2015 in Ukraine, in Kiev and took down the power grid and all that. I was like, holy, this is scary. But they never did it here. And my thought is it's because like, okay, they may have the ability to do that, but then we hit a button and they're fucked.
- [125:02]
B
There's a lot of, I mean the essence of deterrence, of all deterrence is mutually assured destruction.
- [125:10]
A
Yep.
- [125:11]
B
So there's a lot of that. And that, I mean that, that probably, that probably encapsulates the real national security imperative which is to be able to credibly. Credible is very important. And how do you define credibility? Like, you know, you have to believe it doesn't actually matter what my capability is. It just matters if you believe I have that capability. So if you believe I have that capability and it could be in one domain but not the other. So maybe I don't have that capability in a certain domain, but you know that I do in a different one. And then it might just be ensuring that we maintain this one and that that person knows it and that that has a powerful deterrent effect on them doing anything in this other domain that's a little messier right now or the tech hasn't evolved to a certain point, like we haven't cleaned it up yet. That all goes back to. Or at least the. A common thread in this is not, you know, I think it's probably a fool's errand to some extent to try and have perfect information at all times about everything.
- [126:40]
A
Sure.
- [126:43]
B
So a more realistic way or something that has national security implications is in, in certain key domains. And my goal is to expand those domains to both establish a credible dominance and expand upon that dominance credibly, which has a deterrent effect against an adversary that might affect, you know, our, to use a poli sci term like our vital natural interest. And, and then what you don't want is to lose ground. So you know, the modern national security environment's kind of this like, you know, it's like this arm wrestle that's going on these different domains and like, okay, you gained something in space and now maybe I need to gain something information space or then I need to gain something in the maritime space, I need to gain something in the drone space. I need gain something robotics. That part of what we see for the company is that there's a unifying thing that's happening in all those domains and that is that machines are moving to the Forefront of all of them. So being, being, you know, having in a very real way, like having the best machines in many cases is the best deterrent for sure.
- [128:02]
A
You know, that's what you're trying to.
- [128:03]
B
Help, and that's what we're trying to do. Yeah.
- [128:05]
A
Right.
- [128:05]
B
Yeah.
- [128:06]
A
All right, so we've touched on the underwater thing. Yeah, a little bit, but we haven't gone all the way there. This is fascinating to me. Like, back in the day, you had the German U boats. They were, like, so powerful, but they're these man submarines. And then man submarines became the thing. And then eventually even the cartels got into them, made the cocaine submarines and all that. Which we still have a problem with.
- [128:26]
B
Yeah.
- [128:27]
A
You know, do we just have, like, tens of thousands of drones operating underwater at all times? And do other countries as well?
- [128:33]
B
The sub stores surface environment, the subsurface environment is like the last true frontier outside of, like, Mars. So that's where stealth still, still, like, really exists. Like, you can. You can actually sneak up on somebody. Now, you can do that in other domains to a limited point, but in the, like, subsurface domain is where you can really, like, sneak up on folks and people can sneak up on you. And there's just physics behind that, you know, so the key, like, the key there is at least one of the keys in that one is one the more you have, that has, like, a powerful deterrent effect. If I have 10 submarines, okay, I can, you know, I can plot out and be like, well, last. Last time we saw one here, I know how fast it goes. So it can only be in this radius because none of these things are super fast, right? And so I know one here, here, here. And I can kind of like track and then, and then. And this is actually really important. They have to surface at some point. Like a dolphin. Like, it's got to come up at some point. And then I can find out, right. Part of why they surface is to get a GPS fix. So GPS signals and penetrate water so they're in a position. So the name of the game for, like, real maritime force protection projection is, I believe, in the subsurface environment. And it's having many, many autonomous and manned, unmanned, unmanned, unmanned teams, but having many, many of these that can stay submerged for increasingly long periods of time. Time. So there's all kinds of, like, engineering challenges that goes into that. Like, you stand there long enough, you know, you get the. All kinds of stuff build up on. You know, you build up, you get, like, there's, you know, at some point you need food, you need like, you know, especially if a human's on there. But. So there's obviously a natural advantage that an unmanned system has. Of course, if the name of the game is I'd like to keep this, you know, swarm of 100 underwater drones that can go at X speed. I'd like to keep them submerged for a year at a time. You treat it almost like a space exploration mission, like you treat. Like sitting sending something into orbit. A key part of that is I got to be operate without a GPS fix for a year and still know where I'm at. That's where we come in and that's where we're very excited about partnering in that domain. Specifically, some cool stuff that we're. We're starting to scope in that area too. There's other engineering challenges that have to go into that, but that's that that piece of drones, I think is actually. And you come drone submarine, drone boats, like the same thing. But that piece is actually really important. It's as important as the airpiece. It's maybe even more important, you know.
- [131:30]
A
Yeah, and this is where my head goes to DARPA a little bit because. Have you ever heard the. The David Fravor story?
- [131:38]
B
No, he's.
- [131:39]
A
He's an Air Force guy, I think, right? Yeah. So. So Captain David Fravor with the famous gimbal video, I believe, back in O4. I forget what the it was the USS wasn't the Roosevelt, was it? Nimitz. That's right. He's. He's Air Force, right?
- [131:57]
B
Oh, I think I do know what you're talking about. Yeah.
- [131:59]
A
Okay. So, you know, the speculation here is it's aliens, what he saw, because he saw a Tic Tac object come up out of nowhere and go like in clearly aircraft that he was aware of even all the way back then in 04 for sure, you know, never seen anything like this. And I always like how he talks about it because he's like, I think it might be alien, but like, here's the map, here's what it did. You can see it. Your guess is as good as mine. Shit was crazy. My head does sometimes go to like, you know, DARPA was trying to talk. They were allegedly talking to Dolphins Telepathically in 1992. You think maybe they weren't making some crazy drones in 1982, you know, or 1983 or whatever. Maybe, you know, but a Tic Tac drone like that, if that's what it is and it's of this planet, it most likely emanated from the water, probably. So it's a trans. Medium kind of thing, which is what you're describing now, which makes me wonder, you know, you can at least see the air a little bit. You can't fucking see the water. So how long have we had these things on? I don't know if you know. You probably don't even know the answer to these questions.
- [133:08]
B
Question.
- [133:08]
A
But how long have we had these things under there? How long have other places had these things under there? Are our weapons better than theirs, which I hope they are. It gets really complicated thinking about the water.
- [133:19]
B
Well, does in the air. To the water, Definitely.
- [133:24]
A
For sure.
- [133:26]
B
Even in my career, like, you know, you. You fly with night vision on, and one of those beautiful things ever seen is flying at night and then using night vision, whether it's one of the big cameras that's mounted on the gunship or just like, little ones and looking up at the stars. And, you know, under night vision, you see, especially on a clear, like, mountainous night, you. I mean, probably a thousand times more stars than you would see with the naked eye because it's, you know, it's bringing in that light and it's just amazing, like, how many stars are up there. You also see. And I'm gonna say you see little flickers, like, all over the place. And you see. And, you know, even in the ir, which is like the mid. The mid IR range, like the thermal range, where you're looking at heat emissivity. I've definitely seen a few things that I couldn't explain. Like, I don't know what it was, but saw something I couldn't explain something moving very fast. Locked on it with a sensor and it just moved very fast, like, much faster than anything else we do. Yep. Don't know what it was. Don't know what it was. Couldn't see anything. But the hotspot definitely found something. You know, is it a bad camera? Is it something else? Like, I don't know. You know, that's. Those are. That's all. But that's why I know for subsurface, like, guaranteed that, you know, just because, like, that's a domain that it's hard for humans to get to. We know we know less about that environment than any other environment. We know way more about space than we know about the subsurface environment. So, I mean, even like the, you know, fish life and all that down there, like, it's very, you know, it's very nascent. Like a really understanding of that.
- [135:02]
A
Yeah.
- [135:03]
B
So all that to say, like, there's no answers that I have on that except to say or just accept to kind of like, you know, speculate.
- [135:11]
A
That keeps looking away, having this thief.
- [135:14]
B
Well, thinking of thinking.
- [135:16]
A
Right.
- [135:19]
B
It's more about like. Or what I would say is like that domain we know less about than any other domain. That's, that's a domain.
- [135:26]
A
What's it like? We've only explored like 5% of the oceans.
- [135:29]
B
If that. Yeah. If that. Yeah.
- [135:31]
A
Crazy.
- [135:31]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So I guarantee. And you undoubtedly there are, you know, biologic species of fish on there that we've never encountered. Like undoubtedly there's of that. You know, is there an actual Loch Ness monster? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe possibly.
- [135:46]
A
You know, I mean you are, you, you're getting at it though. I, I gotta go there with this. You're an Air Force guy flown in the skies for a long time.
- [135:54]
B
Yeah.
- [135:54]
A
You think there's some UFOs out there, some aliens?
- [135:57]
B
You know, the. I've never seen any evidence of that.
- [136:04]
A
Real government man answer.
- [136:06]
B
There's a government man answer. I've never seen any evidence of that. I'm a spiritual man. I definitely believe in angels and demons and I believe that the world is much more than what we see. Much more than what we see with our human eyes is happening.
- [136:24]
A
What do you mean by that specifically?
- [136:27]
B
Well, there are unquestionably angels and demons that humans have believed in even outside of a Christian tradition for thousands of years. What those, what they are, what they are in the current world right now, I don't have a good answer for that. What I do know is like, okay, so you know where we are right now in 2026, we've come up from kind of the, you know, we went through the age of enlightenment a couple of years ago. Then we went through like the age of reason and now we're in kind of a very hyper scientific age, which means we're also in kind of like a spiritually ignorant age. So I could hypothesize that there, you know, there's, there's definitely things that we see that we just, you know, constantly grind of like, okay, what's the scientific answer? This was scientific answer of this. When there might actually just be a spiritual answer to this.
- [137:24]
A
You know what's interesting? There's two things very interesting about that. First of all, I think there's been a point in the last 15 years especially where you're absolutely right and we've seen those two things flying the face of each other. But point one is one of the worst tragedies that that's ever happened to humanity is the fact that many humans in the past and even in the present today have tried to convince and divide society on the idea that religion and science are seeking different answers. They are seeking answers to the same things. They should not be enemies, they should be friends that complement each other. That's number one. Number two, because of everything you just said, we're also in the last, I'd say like two, three years seeing like a massive, even generational, like spiritual, if you will, revival people who are like, God damn, we've had a crazy last 15, 20 years. It's got to be some reason for this. I'm going to church. Right, yeah, we've seen that.
- [138:23]
B
Yeah, right, yeah.
- [138:24]
A
So it could be like, you know, I think a lot of that's pretty positive. You know, I don't subscribe to an organized religion myself, but I do believe in God, right. And I think if people, if more people are starting to develop like some sort of good, positive moral North Star in their life, however they do that, I think that's a net benefit for society for sure.
- [138:48]
B
Truth seeking is always a net benefit. Maximally truth seeking individuals using both science. The best reason that we have based on the best data that we can observe, that'd be the key part of science, right? Is like observable physical space.
- [139:06]
A
That's right.
- [139:08]
B
Married with, I agree with you. Married with like a spiritual sense of acknowledging that there are all kinds of things that are, that are very real but unobservable and, and you know, like the open up of, you know, kind of the mind blowing stuff of quantum mechanics that's kind of like rewrote all the rules for what we thought we knew about physics. And yeah, I think that that's actually had, you know, this idea of science as a religion because I think it, it did, you know, led to like a humanism and it led to kind of a, a replacement for religion. It became the religion, right. And it kind of became like if you, you know, the only thing you believe is what you see, which is a historically a really ignorant position. Like no humans anywhere else would think that way of any, of any or you know, location.
- [139:59]
A
Like there, you know, like time in history.
- [140:01]
B
Time in history anywhere. Like you, you know, that there is a spiritual element of who we are and we intrinsically know this. Like, you know, if I put my hand out like this and I rub here, there's all these microorganisms that are falling off my ground, all of my bot off my body into the ground. That's a part of me. But I fully understand that that's not Jesse Hamill. Jesse Hamill's more than just these little cells that popped off of here.
- [140:27]
A
Yeah. They help make him up.
- [140:28]
B
There's something here that's more than just my body. That's right. So we. And that's spiritual. So we, like, we know this. But, you know, for the especially, you know, what way I grew up and probably the way you grow up sounds like there's a. There was really kind of a. In a lot of society, there was just an ignoring, ignoring of that. Just like, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna pay attention to that. It's not real. You know, and we kind of like told ourselves that that's actually higher intellectualism. Like, we told ourselves. So. So then if we see something we can't explain, I think previous generations would have had no problem looking at this, saying, well, clearly there's a spiritual phenomenon happening here.
- [141:08]
A
Right.
- [141:08]
B
Clearly there's a spiritual phenomenon happening here. And the. What's happened now is it's like, well, I don't have that. I don't have that muscle memory to go back to. So I guess it's a UFO or, you know, UAP or like, I don't know, like, it's weird. I think it's a healthy thing because it's on the road. But it's a symptom of like, are there actual green aliens walking around? Well, no, not. That's been observed, but. But it's a symptom of like, that's what happens when you just, you know, lobotomize yourself spiritually. Anything you can't observe with your senses, you're. You're going to start. If you're maximally truth seeking, like, you're going to. You're going to start filling in the gaps. And you might fill in the gaps with something really stupid, but it's also just part of like wrestling with something. So I think, I actually think your point is it is very positive this. And there definitely is this kind of a spiritual awakening happening. I think that's also a time to kind of rethink of like, we, we definitely live in an existence that has both a physical reality and a spiritual reality.
- [142:16]
A
For sure. I agree.
- [142:19]
B
And if you are only attuned to the physical reality, you. You've. You're spiritually dead. Like, you've missed this whole aspect of what's actually happening here.
- [142:30]
A
Yeah. And it actually ironically goes to criticism I have of like, both extremes. So, meaning, like the people who are really dogmatic about one religion and if you don't believe every fucking thing they say, like, you're banned to hell or whatever they say. And then the people in the other direction who are like, there is definitely nothing, right? Like, to both of those groups, I'm like, how ignorant is it of you to assume that you have all the answers here on Earth as a physical being, that you know everything. How almost narcissistic is that? Because there is some crazy reason we're here. Something had to start, something at the beginning of that, and that is obviously some sort of supreme power. However you want to define it, whatever helps you sleep at night, that's good with me. But like, to me, if you're not humble in the face of that, to try to live your life in the best possible way and treat people the best you can and do good and, you know, not be an asshole to other people, not do things that are evil or for just for profit, which we talked about incentive structures today and things like that, like, then that's like your spiritual capital, if you will. I don't mean to like dumb it into like some monetary checklist or whatever. That's not what I'm trying to do. But it's like, you, you should be humble in the face of what you don't know. And there just seem to be a lot of people who, you know, if we're going to focus on the direction of people who are like, well, I'm only looking at what I can see. It's like, we don't even know what consciousness is, man, take a chill pill.
- [144:04]
B
No, like, you're. I think your point's spot on. On what? I mean, you could say this is a failure of organized religion in a lot of areas. And, you know, there, while there is a spiritual reawakening, I don't. I've not seen nor seen any. You know, I don't think there's a, like, hey, let's go. Let's go back to dogma. Those are two very different things.
- [144:27]
A
You're absolutely right about that.
- [144:28]
B
You know. Yeah, so. So I think, you know, one, as a, as a Christian, for me, all truth runs through Christ. And that's how I define that. What that also means, and maybe this is also kind of answering, is that I. There's a acknowledgment of my own human condition, which means much of the supernatural is kind of outside of my grasp. In fact, almost all of it is outside of my grasp. So, yeah, when you, you encounter anyone that is very, you know, in, in any, any persuasion of faith or what they decide to believe in, if that's real faith or not, but what they decide to believe in or what their reason has told them to, or what is comforting for them to say out loud that, that, you know, that that's kind of, it should be rejected if it doesn't come from a place of. I understand how small I am on this universe, how limited and finite my understanding is and that believing is not seeing. So if you're believing something, it's, you know, what I believe is that it's actually a spiritual gift. It's a spiritual gift to be, to believe and it's that your spiritual eyes have been opened. So if the, you know, I believe that's a gift, that, that also then comes with a humility because it's not like I earned that. It's not like I arrived at some enlightenment and now I've seen it because I'm so intelligent or I follow the religious rules so well, or I purified myself with a sacrament or I went on this Mecca. Like none of that, none of that, that is all garbage. But it, if it's a gift that was given, then it's, it's humbly maintained. And it's humbly maintained saying that that's a gift that's available for all of humanity and that's it. And that's it. That's how I view it. And that has allowed, I believe that's allowed me to that, that kind of opening of, of, of, you know, spiritual consciousness and awakeness that's done through Christ. And I believe that's only way it's done. That allows you to be, you know, in a humble way, it allows you to be a light in a dark world. And that's a dark world. That is some people kind of like, you know, eyes closed, like looking for answers. And that's a dark world that other people are like now because I couldn't find the answers, I'm just going to make up the answers or that's. Other people are like, okay, I know there's answers out there somewhere, but I'm never going to find them. So I give up. Those are all comforting things, you know, those are all things that you have to kind of, you know, if there's a God shaped hole inside of you, you're gonna find, try to find some way to comfort that and you're gonna surround it with some kind of painkiller. That painkiller might be a really detailed religious step process that Painkiller might be. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna say this, that painkiller might be. I'm just gonna say, I'm gonna go fatalistic and say I'll never know. Like there's some big deity out there, but I can't figure it out. Like, give up that, whatever that is. You have to do something because you have this kind of, you know, you have this, this something in you. This flashing thing is like something not right. Something's all right. And what I, what I would say is that, like, I think that's, if you have that, for anybody that has that kind of feeling, that's a really positive thing because what it means is like you're there. Your spirit is still in an open truth seeking mode. Even if you're nullifying it without realizing it. You know, and even if you're not ready for the truth yet, maybe you're not. It still means you're in that open world. What you don't want to be is, you know, fat and dumb and happy and being like it, none of it matters. And I'm just cruising full throttle to my grave and then I'm just going to decay into a bunch of cells.
- [148:38]
A
A lot of people like, a lot.
- [148:39]
B
Of people like that. A lot of people like that. Things change, right? Things change. Spirits are, Spirits are powerful things. But yeah, like, I think it's. If you're, if someone was disquieted by. I don't understand what's happening after I go through that door at the end of my life. There's got to be more than just a collection of cells. That's a good place to be. That's a good place to be. That means you, that means your spirit is ready to start opening up to something that your mind can never get you there. So, you know, anybody that talks about, talks about like spiritual things and, and justifies, there's. There's this kind of discipline called apologetics, right?
- [149:19]
A
Yes.
- [149:20]
B
And, you know, apologize, where it's like I rationalize my faith. It's not really interesting. It's not really interesting. Can you do it? Yeah, but it's not really interesting because by definition, faith is not a rational thing. Faith is that leap of faith off the building and you don't know what's down. You can't see what's down there. You know what's down there, but you can't see it. You can't observe it. So it's good. I think it's actually very healthy to kind of reject that and then I, I would, I encourage you. Occurs anybody, like, listen to that part of your spirit that's trying to truth seek and lean into that. You lean into that, Genuinely lean into that. Then I believe that starts to prepare a soul and a spirit for receiving a gift of belief. And it is a gift. The belief is a gift.
- [150:13]
A
Very nuanced perspective there.
- [150:15]
B
Impressive.
- [150:17]
A
You, from what we were talking about earlier, it sounds like you were Christian religious since you were a kid.
- [150:22]
B
Yeah, I grew up, grew up in, you know, like a Christian household for sure. Accepted Christ early on, you know, kind of in my life. And you know, I've had, you know, that's been a powerhouse for me from, you know, minute one. Even though I've made all kind of mistakes, I'm going to dumb stuff, you know, and ups and downs like any man's life has, right? And, and even, and even looking at, you know, kind of like things within certain organized religions or things you were told dogmatically at certain ages, like, and being like, okay, is that really, like, Is that really what Christ said? Is that really like, is that he makes sense? Sense? Is that just, Is that just, you know, religion, a religious organization taking on another power structure? Is that all that is? You know, they're trying to have their own power over you in some kind of way. So, you know, you working through these kind of things. But, but where, you know, where my, where my faith like, has grown as a, you know, of age, where my faith has grown as aged is, is ultimately just a gift. It's just a gift. You know, it's not something rational I did. It's not, it's not a book you read. It's not a special prayer you recite. It's not a mentor that you have. It's not a Mecca that you've done. It's not a mountain that you climb. It's not experience in combat that you had. You have all these things and somehow if you were to zoom out at an eternal, like, timeless kind of perspective, somehow these things were all paths. I believe that in a way I'll never understand. But what I found is I grow more humble as I get older on this and, and try to keep my faith more like childlike, like, very childlike.
- [152:14]
A
But also like you're, you're amalgamating all your timelines and all your life experiences there, which is exactly what you should do. I'm curious though, as someone who spent many years in war zones doing, you know, the life and death kind of things, did you have moments where you like, question things or, you know, I had fall from your system a little bit.
- [152:39]
B
Definitely not my faith. Definitely my faith, not my faith in Christ. I. You have, you know, you have your moments where you might question your own capabilities. You might, you know, question after like the. Or ever made a number of trips back to Afghanistan. Like, you might question the strategy or like, what are we doing here? Like, it's not just one more fighting season. Like, this winter is not the end, clearly, you know, and you learn to that, you know, you kind of tear down those kind of structures around. But for me, it was, you know, it was the opposite. Like, for me it was the. Sometimes the most spiritually awake I ever felt was in combat. You just boil everything down. Everything is very simple. It's very simple. And it would, you know, if you have. If you have a perspective of. I'm an eternal soul and I have faith in Christ for the care of my eternal soul. That gives you a boldness. That gives you a boldness, you know, so there was, I mean, this is, you know, combat kind of war story, but like, there was a time where we were. We were getting shot at and we're performing a defensive maneuver to try and, you know, get away from the surface to air fire that's shooting us down. And you know, one crewmate that was, you know, very understandably. Right. He's very upset about this. Kind of like, you know, they're screaming on the radio. There's things kind of going like that and dark humor. So I embrace the dark humor as well, by the way.
- [154:18]
A
And seems like everyone in the military.
- [154:20]
B
Yeah, it's kind of a thing, right. It's a coping medicine probably. But like. And I. And I remember, you know, I think I may have said something, but I was just like, well, I guess that guy really has something to live for. I don't know why he's so upset. Something along these lines. And that's just dark humor. Right. But like, the, the core of it is that I remember other times like, you know, walking outside, going to the chow hall and you get. Start getting hit with rocks as an incoming rocket is like hitting it. And. And you. It was just interesting. You'd see even like hardened warriors, like, and some of them just immediately running the bunkers or immediately. I'm not, you know, throwing a spirit anybody like that, but. And I'm not trying to sound like a tough guy either. It just never really bothered me, you know, I just, I. It just didn't. I just, you know, what? Just had peace. Like, it Was like, if it's my time, it's my time. And I think I still live that way now. If anything, I'm motivated to be like, I don't know how much time I got left. So let's make it count, you know, and try to every day make it count and, and have peace with it. Yeah, yeah. Like, and that, that I think helped me in, in all those combat deployments.
- [155:28]
A
You know, clearly it comes across for sure. There's the, there's the old Einstein quote, I'm sure you're familiar with, where he says, I don't know what weapons World War 3 will be fought with, but I know World War 4 will be sticks and stones. And I think throughout our conversation today, which again was two episodes, it's been awesome. You know, you're on the frontier of trying to create things that can help prevent a World War Three. But do you have in the back of your mind the idea that, you know, we do technically have the ability to just completely destroy ourselves or maybe create things now, that we will destroy us without us even realizing it and it's some of the very same technology that you and many other people have been entrusted to work with?
- [156:18]
B
Yeah, I, I do. I am concerned for that. My, the technology could be part of it, like we talked about. And I think deeply that we need tech, tech leaders of incredibly high character and values that are shaping how this tech will work. And that I think will determine again freedom or enslavement from. From our own technology over the next, you know, 10, 20 years. I'm even more concerned just about kind of cultural rot and the, you know, how we've. We have both with Americans and even in many other areas too, have we've just allowed. Allowed basics to kind of decay, to even like repopulation birth rates and like, like, I think, I think that's actually as much of an existential stride as anything technology wise. Like, we're going to do it to ourselves by being stupid and by embracing like, very dumb ideologies. And, and some of this, you know, some of this I think is probably best or you, you, but you see it in hindsight, easier. But I'm. That's where I'm most concerned about that. But like the cultural rot about, you know, what ha. What happens if. What happens if our own country, then the country that I've served, you know, with pretty much in my entire adult life continue, you know, has a path of just like pure fraud, corruption, decay, you know, hollowing from the inside. And that probably happening in some Other areas, too. Outside of you in the U.S. what does that look like for our future? I think that's. So there's the technology piece of it, for sure. That is valid. But our own ethical just rot might actually be the more pernicious thing where we just. Nobody wants to have babies anymore. Nobody wants to. I mean, really, like, this is. This is a problem. Nobody wants to have babies. Nobody wants to sacrifice. Nobody wants to, you know, turn them, go through the hard things to become a leader of character. And. And those things get minimized. And then somehow our society, like, eats the people that are and spits them back out. And you get to a point where it's like, maybe that, you know, that's going to take something. I mean, something nasty to kind of, you know, correct that.
- [158:53]
A
Yeah. It also starts at a socioeconomic level, too, as well, and. And a cultural attitude. Like, when you have so many dark years of that we've had economically, for the average person in this country, the downstream effects of that. And then you add in all the endless wars, you add in all the crises, the COVID government's lying. It creates a vibe in society where the light is just dimmed. And I'm trying to help, you know, we'll cover the things that got to be pointed out and stuff like that, but I'm also trying to help be a part of boiling my pot in the ocean where we can help reinflame that. And, you know, I totally agree with you with, like, there should be an emphasis on people wanting to have kids. We also need to make it more affordable in this country for people to be able to have kids. The fact that money is even a question in reproduction, which is an evolutionary staple of what we've done as a species for our existence on Earth, is insane. And then when you have these attitudes getting into the mainstream, I mean, there's a clip of Chappelle. What's her name? Chappelle Rowan Chapel. Rowan. Yeah. So she, you know, she was talking about on, you know, some podcast about how. I think it was called her Daddy, about how, oh, my God, no one I know who has kids is happy at all. They're all miserable.
- [160:12]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [160:13]
A
I'm like, who the are you talking to?
- [160:15]
B
It's terrible.
- [160:16]
A
Everyone listen. It's a sacrifice with kids for sure. But, like, it's the greatest sacrifice ever. I don't have kids yet, but I look forward to it. And everyone I know with kids is like, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.
- [160:26]
B
Yeah.
- [160:27]
A
You know, I'm sure. You say the same thing and it's like we gotta stop this doomer gloomer with stuff. Totally that because it is, it is literally anti evolutionary. I completely agree with you.
- [160:37]
B
Yeah. That and that. That bothers me a lot. There's a stat that shows the average wage from like 1960 to the average home price and then what they are now.
- [160:50]
A
It's insane.
- [160:51]
B
It's. That is absolutely insane. Like that. And that one really bothers me for my three kids.
- [160:56]
A
Yeah.
- [160:57]
B
Like thinking you know I was, I was married with a wife and our first on the way when I was like I don't know, 26, 27, something like that. Like own my own house like on.
- [161:10]
A
Just luck with that now.
- [161:11]
B
Exactly. Unlike military pay too. This is like you're not getting rich there and yeah. Impossible now. Yeah, I can't afford 100% impossible.
- [161:21]
A
Crazy.
- [161:22]
B
It's. Yeah. It's just like that part really bothers me. Like that part really. You know. And then I'm setting them into a world like you're saying in a world where also like the, the DEI stuff is just so minimized. Some of the meritocracy. Some of like my sons especially you know going into a world they're just demonized at a lot of different areas. A lot of companies that are like hey, anything but the white man and trying to set them into a one back around. I think it is.
- [161:51]
A
Yeah.
- [161:52]
B
I think it is. You know to like no kidding. Hey let's. Let's actually bring in like people that are really good at the job, whatever they are.
- [161:59]
A
Right.
- [162:00]
B
You know it's definitely only the way I hire and but. But there's still some remnants. There's still remnants of this.
- [162:06]
A
Sure. Absolutely. Yes.
- [162:08]
B
And so you, you know, you demonize to a point. You're never going to own a home. Not without some kind of major thing, you know, for a lot of folks. And just that those socio economic things I think are. This is a real problem.
- [162:24]
A
I will say credit, credit where it's due. That recent I guess like order that Trump's putting out with the institutional investors unable to buy. Oh totally, totally homes.
- [162:37]
B
Yeah.
- [162:38]
A
Incredible potential legislation there. Regardless, I don't care if you're Democrat, Republican, that is good for Americans. Because these businesses, I won't even. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I won't even call it evil. They're incentivized to get their quarterly reports. They're finding all the business lines they can and they've created this what as a result is basically like an evil business line where they're buying up family homes everywhere and then setting the market prices to places where people can't afford it, and then making people overpay for rent and setting the rent market in so many cities. And now hopefully they're not going to be able to do that and we can start to bring back.
- [163:17]
B
Right.
- [163:18]
A
These prices. But, yeah, we got to fix it. We got a lot of problems and, and we definitely got to fix it for sure.
- [163:23]
B
That's, that's definitely. Yeah, I think that's like a. That's something you really have to. I think we focus on that a lot, you know, and in my, in my kind of small little. Your analogy really like, you know, the little bucket of the ocean that I have, trying to create at least a business environment that enables people to do this kind of, to live in that kind of way. It's definitely a goal of mine. Like, there's, there's. I went on a couple times like a small company. Right. You know, and I've, you know, within the, within the startup that we have, but creating a quality job is like a, is a big time rush. Like, it's, it's just a cool feeling to be like, hey, you know, you know, this job was not there before, it is there now.
- [164:06]
A
It's amazing.
- [164:06]
B
It's amazing. And, and the people that are working it enjoy what they do. Yeah, like, that's a, that is. I didn't even intentionally set out for that, like, being kind of my thing, but, man, that's cool. I like, man, that is cool.
- [164:20]
A
Yeah, Totally agree, man. Jesse, this has been awesome, man. We just did two episodes, like more than five and a half hours between the two on the recording time or something like that. So it's very, very cool work. You're doing, obviously, a really important space with drones and I really appreciate you giving, like a full education, especially in the second episode on, like, how it all works and what the technology is like and, you know, I'd like to continue tracking and moving forward.
- [164:46]
B
Awesome, man. No, thanks for doing this. This is super fun. So great conversation, dude. Yeah.
- [164:51]
A
All right, we'll do it again sometime.
- [164:52]
B
Yeah, man. Awesome.
- [164:53]
A
All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. 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 and X, those links are in my description below.