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#299 Andy Lowery - Inside the World’s Most Advanced Drone Killing Machine - The Shawn Ryan Show | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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#299 Andy Lowery - Inside the World’s Most Advanced Drone Killing Machine

The Shawn Ryan Show

Mon Apr 27 2026

Summary

The Shawn Ryan Show – Ep. 299: Andy Lowery – Inside the World’s Most Advanced Drone Killing Machine

Episode Overview

In this compelling episode, host Shawn Ryan sits down with Andy Lowery, CEO of Epirus, to explore the revolutionary world of anti-drone technology—specifically, Epirus’ flagship product, Leonidas. The conversation delves deep into the origins and engineering behind high-power microwave (HPM) weapons, the evolution of modern warfare, the shortcomings of traditional defense giants, and the future of layered security in an age of ubiquitous drone threats.

Key Topics & Insights

1. Andy Lowery’s Background and Journey

[03:35]

Started his career as a Navy Surface Warfare Officer, working on nuclear engineering aboard the USS John C. Stennis.
Transitioned into high-tech defense roles at MACOM, then Raytheon, where he led major radar and electronic warfare projects, including the Next Generation Jammer for the EA-18 Growler.
Explains the crucial role of gallium nitride technology in enabling new advances in electronic warfare.
Founding CEO of RealWear (AR technology), then brought into Epirus as Chief Product Officer, before becoming CEO.

“If you look at the designs we are now releasing, those were designs that when I was the Chief Product Officer, me and the team just redid completely.” – Andy Lowery [16:50]

2. The Birth of Epirus and Leonidas

[20:26]

Epirus founded in 2018 with a vision for ultra-high-powered RF transmitters, not initially just for drones.
COVID era forced rapid, close-quarters engineering experimentation—resulting in the first proof-of-concept for Leonidas.
Early successes were captured on viral videos of drones dropping from the sky by invisible means: “Looked like an EMP weapon in the very beginning stages.” – Shawn Ryan [02:25]
Leonidas is a scalable product, developed with the support of investors and visionaries Joe Lonsdale and Grant Verstandig, who anticipated the global drone proliferation years ahead.

3. “The Mouse vs. Lion” Analogy: Why Defense Needs to Adapt

[30:53]

Traditional “big primes” (Raytheon, Lockheed, etc.) were built to “hunt lions”—large, costly systems for large threats.
New era of warfare is “death by a thousand cuts,” driven by attacks from swarms of low-cost, easily accessible drones (“mice”).
Legacy systems are expensive and slow to adapt; need for nimble, risk-taking new-tech firms is critical.

“Would you ever take a huge gun… to hunt a mouse? It just isn’t the right stuff for this particular fight.” – Andy Lowery [31:01]

4. Why Leonidas is a Game Changer

[41:02]

Leonidas creates the “first version that the human race [has seen] of a force field”—a localized, configurable electromagnetic defense bubble.
Drones entering the field experience rapid disruption and shutdown of their electronics, regardless of RF jamming countermeasures or autonomous/fiber-linked operation.
The “force field” can be precisely focused, morphing its energy output in microseconds to hit multiple targets in rapid succession.

“It’s sort of like the first version that the human race of a force field anyone’s ever created.” – Andy Lowery [41:02] “To the physical system… you would just see this electromagnetic pulsating wave just hitting you and hitting you like a spotlight.” – Andy Lowery [58:37]

5. Design, Range, and Deployment

[51:39]

Leonidas systems are modular: small toolbox-sized versions for vehicles/tanks (approx. 50-meter range), up to building-sized arrays with multi-mile coverage.
Mobile variants, like the AGV (autonomous ground vehicle) version, partner with General Dynamics and Kodiak Defense to allow rapid repositioning on the battlefield [82:59].
Sophisticated sensing layers combine radar, electro-optical, and command-and-control software to coordinate with other defense nodes.
Designed to ensure safety: system’s operating frequencies are “harmless to humans, birds, plants, or animals” when used as intended [54:46].

6. The Economics and Asymmetry of Drone Defense

[70:18]

Leonidas systems cost mid-teens to $20M per unit, but each shot is “literally pennies.”
“If you start using it all the time, cost per drone taken out drops to cents or dollars—not $2 million missiles versus $500 drones.” [70:38]
The conversation references the critical “magazine depth” issue: US cannot mass-produce missiles as quickly/cheaply as adversaries can produce drones (China: up to 30 million drones/year) [116:59].

7. Myths, Safety, and Limitations

[95:29]

Addresses common misconceptions, including confusion with "Havana Syndrome" and potential harm to humans, clarifying the system is targeted at electronics and is safe for life forms.
Clarifies wideband vs. narrowband HPM systems, and how Leonidas’ approach offers both effectiveness and flexibility.
Acknowledgement: no technology is a “panacea”—Leonidas is envisioned as a key part of a layered defense network, not a single magic solution [63:22].

8. Real-World and Future Applications

[103:49]

Leonidas has seen deployment in exercises in the Philippines; legal and ITAR restrictions have thus far limited deployment to Ukraine, but demand is rapidly increasing, especially in the Middle East.
The system preserves drone electronics for forensic analysis post-downing—a crucial advantage for threat identification [107:02].
Potential for wide adoption: from bases, embassies, naval vessels, to stadiums and theoretical civilian soft-targets.
Future development could see miniaturization for squad or vehicle-level defense—even portable/”bazooka” form-factors envisioned [73:22-77:50].
AI and full autonomy: can operate manual, semi-auto (“man on the loop”), or fully auto as the situation demands [79:31].

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Innovations in Defense Startups

“They’re not incentivized to be fast and creative… they’re incentivized to listen very, very well to the customer, being the military, and go off like a services company.” – Andy Lowery [32:13]
On the Changing Face of Warfare

“Now ships have pretty good close-in defensive networks… but it’s not unimaginable for a carrier to be susceptible to a drone attack. It just is a new way of warfare.” – Andy Lowery [67:37]
On System Safety

“I would stand in front of the main beam for like 15 seconds and go—zap me. It won’t do anything. It wouldn’t do a thing to me.” – Andy Lowery [54:46]
On Cost-Asymmetry

“Every drone [Leonidas shoots down] thereafter is pennies… the fuel it takes us to take down an individual drone costs you just a few cents, 5, 10, 20 cents...” – Andy Lowery [70:38]

Key Timestamps

[03:35] – Andy’s introduction and career background.
[09:16] – Entry into the Navy, early inspirations.
[12:15] – Work at Raytheon and gallium nitride breakthrough.
[20:26] – Founding of Epirus and COVID-era prototyping.
[31:01] – The “lion vs. mice” analogy for modern defense.
[41:02] – Explanation of Leonidas and the “force field.”
[47:25] – Explanation of how Leonidas hits multiple drones almost simultaneously.
[51:39] – Discussion of range, scalability, and protection zones.
[54:46] – Safety of Leonidas for humans.
[70:18] – Cost analysis: system vs. per-drone shot.
[82:59] – Tour of the Leonidas AGV variant; partnership details.
[95:29] – Debunking myths, addressing "Havana Syndrome."
[103:49] – Real-world deployments and operational constraints.
[107:32] – Bureaucratic inertia and the “frozen middle” slowing adoption.
[116:59] – The Chinese drone production threat and U.S. capacity gap.

Final Thoughts

Andy Lowery provides a rare behind-the-scenes look at the urgent, rapidly evolving challenge of drone warfare and defense. With Leonidas, Epirus appears poised to fundamentally reshape the battlefield and domestic security, leveraging cutting-edge technology, layered defenses, and Silicon Valley-style innovation.

“It’s our moment—to turn the whole thing over on its head and get at these bad actors.” – Andy Lowery [118:33]

For more in-depth discussions, technical demos, and cutting-edge defense guest interviews, follow The Shawn Ryan Show and explore bonus content on their Patreon.

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Transcript

A (0:00)

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B (1:03)

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A (1:05)

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B (1:06)

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A (1:23)

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B (1:24)

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A (1:36)

Andy Lowry, welcome to the show.

B (1:38)

Thank you for having me. Good to see you in person, Sean.

A (1:42)

I've been trying to get you guys on here for two, two or three years now.

B (1:47)

Oh, is that right?

A (1:48)

Yeah. And so got a couple of mutual friends, Joe Lonsdale and Grant for standing. And Grant actually put you and epirus on my radar. And I. I don't even know if I'm supposed to say this, but I saw this cell phone video that was taken, I think, a long time ago. And it was like very, very beginning stages of epirus.

B (2:14)

All right.

A (2:15)

And then the video, you just see, it looked like these, these drones were tethered to like a dog chain or to the ground or something.

A (17:17)

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B (26:28)

We have, we have platforms and right now we have the platform called Leonidas. Now when I say that people focus on the directed energy machine but it's really a whole series of different things. We have to have first of all layers. You never are going to get a panacea against this kind of threat. You're not going to get one system that works in all situations. Counter drone, you're always going to have various layers and various technologies. And we can get into the details of what those are and why some technologies work really, really well in some applications and then other technologies work really, really well in other applications. And so when we started to take a look at what other products we need in order to finish sort of the system, the system of systems, so that we're not just saying, hey, we have this great effector, but it has to plug in or we have to leverage what you have and what you. You're using already inside your country. We knew kind of at the beginning, or when I started as a chief product officer, that we would need sort of a standalone version where we could have radar, electro optical telescopes, all of that stuff, and our own command and control software to kind of tie it all together. So we built that and then we built basically where we can take the head off and plug into systems like Anduril's Lattice. And so, you know, we're working with Anduril pretty tightly in order to ensure that as they release Lattice for their various customers that are starting to pick up, that our system is well controlled by that software. So it basically became a situation where we needed other products in order to complete the product that we had. And so by that need, we went out and either sourced through third parties or developed ourselves a whole sensing suite, command and control suite simulator. We have this really incredible. It's built by guys that used to work at Call of Duty on the Call of Duty program and Blizzard. And we've got about 12 or so designers, which at Raytheon, you know, no one ever hires designers at Raytheon hardly. It's like something unique. Well, they don't have a design LED philosophy there. And when we talk about what is Silicon Valley adding to the whole mix, if you will, you say, well, why is Silicon Valley sort of better in some way? I lean into the design LED thinking and design LED thinking is human factors, human thinking from the very beginning. That's what it means at its core. In a Raytheon, you're a services contractor. You have the military that decides what they want you to build. They put them all down in like a thousand requirements. They hand you a bunch of requirements and you just build a system that meets the requirements, you get paid, and then you move on to the next system. There's no real design process there. It's like baked into the system engineering. It's baked into the way that operational commands Give feedback to procurement commands and to requirement commands. And all of that is a very bureaucratic process. You get good products out of it, you get expensive products out of it, you get exquisite products out of it. But what we're seeing now is a whole new chapter. It's the stuff that's built at the big primes are not sufficient for this new fight. And before anybody gets angry with that and why I say that it's. I'll give you an analogy. For the last decades, the primes have been focused on, let's say, going out and hunting a lion or lions like big, big beasts. You know, they have to bring in the big nets, the big guns, the big whatever that they need to go hunt lions. The problem we see today are like mice and little mice that are running around. And what we're doing with our big rockets and our big defensive systems are using the same thing. We would go up against lions against mice. And it's really that fundamental. It's that can you now develop mice like apparatuses, Raytheon, quickly and short order like they're doing in Ukraine? Or you're not rigged to do it, or you're not set up to do that. And not that they can't change and not that they can't like bolt on companies like Epirus and let them operate sort of independently and still bring in the human factors and the design LED stuff. But I mean, you're talking about shooting

B (32:13)

No, you're not wrong, but I wouldn't blame them. Palmer says this very eloquently. I've heard him speak on this topic a, a couple times. Palmer Luckey of Andrew he would say they're not incentivized to be fast and creative and move very quickly. They're not incentivized to at risk spend $200 million developing a new system that they might have a customer for, but they're not quite sure that they're going to have a customer for. They're incentivized to listen very, very well to the customer being the military and go off like a services company. Like when you go to a law firm and you say, hey law firm, I need you to help me with this dog bite case that I'm in the middle of here or whatever, and that law firm then pivots and says, okay, we're going to work on that. That's not how the new Neoprimes work. They don't work like a law firm. They don't work like the primes. They guess. They go out, they survey the land, they see the problems, they talk with the generals, they talk with the various folks that are out in the field and then they guess at what a product that they could invent that they have in their head might work to solve this problem or that problem. Some of them are winners, some of them will win, some of them will lose. Just like in consumer products where you have a consumer product company that just doesn't make it, but others that do. You're going to have winners and losers and that's where the big risk comes into play. But if you're willing to take that risk, then you get way more innovation, way more creativity because you're not bounded to this very systematic like hand, you know, hand you this hand of that step wise. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Never really do anything unless the government says here's a check, here's how you get paid. And so they're incentivized to just wait for the requirements, wait for the direction on what they should build and then they go build it. So like a law firm, just like it's that's what primes are today. So are they useful? Yes. Will they build the big exquisite machines still into the future on a very robust, well exercised process? Yes. I still think there's a big place for them in the future world. But will they be the ones that can make the mice traps and all the things that need to come out like in a month to month to month type iterative cycle and risk a lot of money up in the front end of the thing to make it all work? They just, they're not really set up to do that. And the only way that I could see them becoming more like that is if they were to take a risk and like let's say buy Epirus and then like let us operate exactly like we've been operating under our investors and our board that we're under now, just operate the same, but be under their umbrella, so to speak, or their brand but still operate the way that we've been operating. I could see that being one way.

B (49:05)

I mean, no, not about that. There's. I don't have too many people that say, hey, let's forget about this counter drone problem. I don't think it's going to be a problem in a couple of years. I think most people are wedded to the idea that drones are here and here to stay and they're a really big problem. But there's all kinds of opinions of what the best way to solve the problem. Right. There's all differences. They've got laser systems, you have guys making Gatling guns in the back of pickup trucks. The bullfrog guy at Allen Control Systems building something like that. Another kind of close in weapon system that provides with bullets anyway, sort of that last layer of attack or defense, I should say. And then you have a whole bunch of other types of systems that again, like I said earlier, work really well in certain conditions and not as well in other conditions. So the hard, hard problem that the army, that the Air Force, that, that our foreign allies have right now is figuring out what to pick, you know, what to use in this layer or that layer. And that's why we've leaned into the simulation like we've leaned into the video game where you can play like tower defense but in real life and drop in Leonidas's, drop in other electronic warfare systems, drop in radar systems and say if I set up a protection scheme like this. And then we partnered with another company called Gambit and Gambit's another neoprime that basically runs scenarios like drones can come in and do this. They can come and high and drop down. They could and run a hundred different scenarios and say, will this layered defense network or this layer defense scheme work for this particular target? That's going to be absolutely 100% required as we move further and further into the future. And lots of companies are doing it. I think we're doing it in a unique way. Right outside of Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, we have a big experience center experience site that soldiers and others can come into and, and you know, play video games. It's like Ender's game, right? You know, it's like if you practice just like you fight. And so we've created simulators and emulators that look like you're in the fight, it appears like you're doing. So when you go from Fort Sill area over into the battlefield, you're not going to see any difference. You're going to see the same sort of scenarios play out, one in simulation and one in real life.

B (60:50)

The theory applies and scales to anything with electronics. However, as you get bigger and bigger drones, you're able to get bigger and bigger weight, weight capacities. And you can do a lot of things with electromagnetic shielding. So even drones that even fly at a hundred thousand feet, they have cosmic radiation and electromagnetic fields that have to like be shielded against. And so, and this is actually in one side you go oh that shoot, you can't get those big drones. But on the other side we're also not taking out airplanes or 747s or anything like it's super safe because of the kind of controlled short range nature of the system. So it works really, really well against group one and group twos. So these harassing first person viewers, that is what it was designed for. It was a drone. Group one, group two, goalie, stop. We have tested against some group threes. We have lots of information, commercial information around and commercial testing around bigger systems that enterprising people pick up out of the field into Ukraine that get downed. And then we buy those commercially and we test our system to see the Viability and it does seem to have good effects, at least in a chamber where we test it. We haven't flown a shahed at it or anything like that. We don't have any shahed pilots and don't have a shahed that's operational. So we rig up the systems that we have and we're able to gain access to and we test in the chamber how our system would affect the system out in the field. And we have kind of math equations that are really accurate, like within 5%. If we can down the drone inside of our chamber at such a distance or a calculated distance, then it equates to that same distance out in the field. So we do believe they will be effective against group threes. It is effective against group threes, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it again. I just caution everyone to say nothing is a panacea. There's always need for layers. There's always need for more than just one set of stopping things. You have to have other different types of systems in order to be safe. In order to be safe and get everything.

B (65:10)

this? I would say that the best use for the Golden Dome. Iron Dome, or Golden Dome, as President Trump and the team has been calling it, the Golden Dome, those are a whole bunch of different, very important systems like THAAD systems, Patriot missile systems, and a network that networks all of that together in this much larger air picture. Now, now, now, I'll say that. And those systems have been shown to be vulnerable against mice. You know, the nukes are the lions. The, the nuclear ballistic missiles are lions. And in fact, you know, a lot of the ballistic missiles are what, exactly what they say. They go way up into outer space, and then they calculate exactly where they need to drop their little bombs, and they got like, like a bunch of them inside a warhead, and then they just drop these things. These, they're ballistic. They're not electronically steering. They're not doing. They're using all this really high math to figure out, okay, if we drop it right here at this time in this direction and launch it there, it'll fall to the Earth and hit or explode in the atmosphere, just depending on the type of nuke. So they're tough. It's tough. It's a tough problem to stop ballistics. And you really want to get at it, it as close to the launch as you can. Like, you know, you want to be able to, like, have your target hit their rocket before their rocket even gets a chance to ballistically drop those missiles and stuff like that. So it's a little bit different equation. And I, but I'm not, you know, I like, I'll ask Joe and he'll have five ideas about how it could help. In any case. I can't visualize how it would help in that mission right now, but where I can visualize it, it'll help. Help. It will protect the Protector. So as we set up thads and we set up these different bases, we should have our systems and other systems like ours protecting those type of things from a Jersey drone type, you know, like, if you have a Chinese boat with a bunch of containers off the ship, off the shore, sending in a swarm of Drones like the Ukraine's did in Operation Spiderweb. You have that last lane of defense so that your big missiles and your big sort of, of defensive type systems aren't being taken out.

B (70:38)

Yeah, we have, and this is something that is very relevant and we're doing right now with, with the Department of War, we're showing them basically each and every sort of perturbation what you just asked. So a system, just a standalone system, the big ones like the ones you see out there, they can go for depending on how you outfit them, what kind of sensors you're using. They can go from anywhere from the mid teens to, you know, upwards to 20 million or more if you want all the bells and whistles and stuff. So they're not cheap, they're not cheap to buy the system. But then every drone thereon after is pennies. It's literally pennies. The fuel that it takes us to take down an individual drone costs you just a few cents, 5, 10, 20 cents, something like that. If you combine those two, then it becomes an equation of how many drones are you taking out in a given month, in a given year utilizing that system. And if you take out, let's say 50 drones in a month, it becomes dollars. Even the, you know, you're like hundreds of dollars per drone verse and that's counting all that, that you know, between 10 and $20 million of costs and all of that, all of that all in, you're still down at hundreds of dollars per shot once you start to have utilization of the system. So there's two ways that someone would decide to use their system. One, it would be a lot Cheaper than going the missile routes because if I'm using it all the time, it's going to get a lot of utility and that's going to drive my price per shot way, way, way down. So then that big sort of bill up front is much, much littler. Or what was it going to say? So either one, that you're going to drive that cost per shot down, or two, you're going to understand that target that you're defending, even if it doesn't get like a million drones a day or whatever. If that target even has a chance of being attacked by drones, it's so valuable you don't even want the chance to happen. So I think those are going to be the two really sort of robust applications we get at right away where either one, they're going to protect something extremely important and vital to be protected at all cost. Or two, it'll be a very high op tempo of many, many drones flying in per day and then that'll drive the cost way down. If you want to stick a big expensive thing like this in like some port in Louisiana or something like that on the Gulf, it'll probably be overkill at this point. You know, at least at this point. And still we start driving costs down as we start to scale and we start to get into production, then they become more and more ubiquitous. But first movers and first users will probably be, you know, very high value targets at this point.

B (74:11)

Yeah, it, it very well. Could we, we have a system that we design prototypes. We never got into production with it, but we have several prototypes of something about the size of a toolbox. Weighs about 40 pounds. So it's not light and it's not super light, but you could get a soldier to carry it or you could get a couple people to move it around. With a squad, the range is limited. That's the issue. If you want to have something the size of a toolbox and go 50, 100, 200 meters or something like that right now, with where the technology is, that's really not possible. Other than if you had a whole bunch of those boxes and you were pointing them all at the same thing, then you could start, start getting sort of into those type of ranges. But that's been a real hard one. I mean, they. You've seen out on the news. Maybe these drone guns that the folks have, I don't know if you've seen them. Those are electronic warfare. Those are jammers. They're trying to use jamming to kind of like if the bad actor isn't sophisticated or if it's a hobbyist or whatever. The drone guns work pretty good. We're looking at if we could design something like a drone gun, like a drone bazooka, maybe it would be more like where we could have an individual basically hit something at 50 meters or 100 meters that just is in close in sight. I think it's possible. Okay. I think the first step, and we're working alongside Andrew on a bunch of things, but one of the things we've looked at is, and I heard Joe talk about this, is their Roadrunner vehicle that does the vertical land sort of like Elon's rockets or whatever. It's really, really cool system. And it has a small little payload section that if Palmer can get his roadrunner in 6, 8ft, 9, 10 yards, something like that, between, you know, 3 to 10 yards from a target, then we can EPM, we can, you know, electromagnetic pulse, it falls, move on to the next one, move on to the next one. There's an application for that kind of a potential. So you could have maybe a drone you could launch and with a squad and go up and, and project that range. That way, if you can't tolerate the littler range that you're going to get on a smaller system, we're right now in process of taking our electronics and making them much smaller, much denser to make the power density go way up. And the primary driver of that is vehicle protection. So we've kind of been working our way down. We've gone from kind of the larger fixed and semi fixed site type protection with the bigger system. And, and we have a medium system that the Marines want to use for some of their platoons and sort of like expeditionary units and things like that that have drone problems. But they could bring them with them on a JLTV or some other vehicle that they have in Their arsenal, that's the medium size and then the small size is for individual vehicle protections like the tanks, like we were talking about earlier, we haven't quite kicked off yet an individual soldier protection, although we're getting tons of pressure and tons of requests out of the army to do that. I mean, they, they really want to get it down to kind of an individual soldier level that has something other than what they have today to protect themselves.

B (88:34)

Yeah, they interconnect. And then if you think about it like from the water, if you had like one wave maker in water making waves and then you had another wave maker making waves, you try to time them up so those waves start to stack on top of each other. So like 100 times over though, like if you had a hundred water wave makers that are making a wave in the water, wave in the water, wave in the water, and you time them such that every wave crest at the exact same point, fell at the exact same point, you could create a huge wave. If you imagine hundreds of those wave makers, you could create a huge wave out of a bunch of little waves if you just time the sequencing and the pulsing of those waves at the same time. Exactly what we do inside a microwave system. But the waves are moving much quicker. They're of course in microwaves, not in water. And we're but timing those waves so each one of those peaks and each one of those valleys line up and then form it into a very narrow force the size of the system, narrow beam, that we then move the narrow beam around electronically by again timing those waves in sequence so that the system goes to left, goes to the right, goes up, goes down. Then on top of that electronic steering, we have our mechanical steering where we can spin the system around. It goes around about each second, it'll cover about 30 degrees of rotation, so it moves very quickly. And every time we see a drone, even if we start with an electronic scan and then turn the antenna to follow so that we get the biggest punch. Gotcha for the system that we can possibly get. Because when you're face on like this, this is when the antenna is the most powerful. So as this moves around, nobody's detecting it, nobody's seeing where it's at. Doesn't even know that this system can shoot down drones. Drones appear, we shoot them down, then we move the system away from where it just happened so it doesn't become a target. Because you know, sooner or later people will start saying hey, we can't get any drones through. If they've got one of those these Leonidas is sitting out there. And if that happens, we're going to want to move the system. Right. So that it doesn't become a target.

B (97:05)

Yeah, it takes out tethered drones. I think some people. This is getting a little deep. Deep. But I'll kind of talk about it. And then just for the listeners that maybe understand a little bit more about directed energy and in particular high powered microwave, there's two kind of classes I'll call them. There's what's called wideband high powered microwave, directed energy and narrowband high powered microwave. And when they say band, they're talking about the frequency. So how many frequencies does this particular system use or leverage? How many frequencies does this narrowband use and leverage? Traditionally, historically, narrowband systems have been working sometimes, sometimes not working, working on some targets, but not working on all targets. That's been historically the impression that directed energy experts have about narrowband systems. Wideband Systems which we started decades ago, which we started getting at decades ago, leverage something called vacuum tubes or transmit wave tubes, which are these very sort of simple but very effective amplifiers like gallium nitride. But they amplify in a way that causes you have to operate the system differently than the way we operate our system. You can't use the same sort of techniques in the same sort of ways that we operate our system. System. The difference between our narrowband system and previous generations and previous ages that they've tried this is one we have a component of being able to move the narrowband frequency to whatever frequency within a certain bandwidth that we want to move it at. So we can choose and pick, we can go through and say, try this frequency, try this frequency, try this frequency, try this frequency. So we're trying to match or map the electromagnetic interference to the drone susceptibilities. So some drones may be susceptible to these frequencies, some may not be. Some are susceptible to these frequencies, some others may not be. So we've changed sort of the way that narrowband directed energy is used, and, and we do it in a smart way. We talked a little bit about AI. A lot of this system has a lot of software defined AI and other sort of like control loops, machine learning and stuff like that, that helps with prosecuting these various drones. And that's the big myth that's out there. The second big myth that's out there is narrowband can't achieve the very, very high effective radiated powers like some of the traditional systems would have. 2 gigawatts, 3 gigawatts, 4 gigawatts of radiated power. But that's just not true anymore with gallium nitride. Gallium nitride is, if built to the right size and shape, can rival the powers of even those traditional systems. The difference in the advantage of using solid state, which is gallium nitride, the advantages is you can also stretch energy, which means time. So power times time equals energy. So what I can do is hold a note, hold a frequency for a long span of time, which traditional directed energy could never do. Do. And I'm leveraging that energy, those huge long pulses. I'm leveraging that energy so that, as you can imagine, a computer has a clock. It's ticking, the clock is ticking. You want to be able to overcome many, many clock cycles as you're trying to get this sort of electromagnetic interference in there. So that's a little deep for the folks that understand directed energy, but it is effective. I mean, the proof is the proof, I mean, we have have tested this with the army for three years. We have tested it in many, many different conditions. We've deployed it in two different regions of the world. We've tested it with war fighters, we've tested it with real air defenders. This all has been completely sort of put to rest. And folks that have not checked in with epirus for the last two and a half years, I don't think realize that in the early days there's a lot of information that got out there in the struggles we were having to get started up and getting booted up. If you look at what we're delivering today, it's transformative. It's just absolutely a different type of system than what we had even three or four years ago. So systems that are starting to go into production today do work and they work really, really well on what they're really good at.

B (107:51)

I'll tell you, that can't happen again. The top, the top of the administration have for the most part executed to the, the theory or the thesis that we need 80%, 90% of the solutions that are ready today. We need them deployed, we need them forward deployed. But there's still a frozen middle. I've talked about this. It's like the top guys say do it. And if you get in with the frozen middle or the middle people that actually implement the tactics, there's a lot of sort of hesitation still, right? There's a lot of, well, until someone tells me officially I can do this differently, I'm going to do it the same way. And so they're a lot of wedded people to their old policies, their old processes, their old sort of way of acquiring systems and testing systems and wringing out every little risk to get like 99.999% of the risks out. And then when they're sure of it, they're ready to go ahead and deploy. Well, that's a peacetime attitude, right? That's a peacetime attitude. I have some skirmishes, nothing killing any soldiers. I don't have any injuries going on. I'm not losing any equipment. I'm not at war. Or we can take our time to run through the different exercises which we've been doing from even before this administration. We were working with the previous administration on these tests and trials and all the rest. But now we're at war, you know, I mean, or conflict, you know, whatever you want to call it. But we are in battle, we are combating with others overseas. It's a different, that's a different threshold. I think we need to change our attitude. We need to. You know, I have a pretty interesting story for just a two minute story, but it was during 9 11. We were talking about up on the hill how you joined right before 911 when you went into the Navy. I was out at Sea during 9 11. We were off the coast of San Diego about 100 miles on the John C. Stennis. We had no planes, no jets. My nuke, I was running the nuclear plants. The two towers get hit, we get the order to go as fast as the, that aircraft carrier can possibly go to get off the coast of Los Angeles. Meantime, they're scrambling Marines out of Miramar with sidewinder missiles on F18s and flying them out. We had no steam in the catapults. I had to get steam to the catapults. I had to heat everything up really, really quickly. I had to get everything military, sort of like precision. The transformation of my sailors, I have never witnessed before or after anything like it. Like when we got hit, every person, every lady, every sailor snapped into a new, like a superhuman, running around, knowing every one of their procedures, knowing exactly how to move, and within a few hours, we're flying basically escorts of every jumbo jet coming in from overseas that hadn't landed yet in lax. We're escorting every single one of them down. Now. The same thing happens with the United States in almost every battle that I've ever seen. We are, culturally speaking, underdogs. We are, culturally speaking the team that when gets socked in the head, goes crazy and just responds. And I saw that with the sailors back there on the Stennis. I saw that when we did the MRAPs, when we had the IED problem in 2008. And that was an incredible, like almost Oppenheimer thing that people don't know about that the army assault right now. Brent Ingerham led that whole thing like a modern day Oppenheimer. He went from in 2008, where they were spending like 160 million on armored vehicles and such, to billions in just a year. In one year, they changed that whole face of that dynamic of the IEDs hurting our sale, hurting our soldiers. So we are able to do this. I think now is our moment. We don't want to let off the gas pedal. Even if the major war and the major bombing all cease and we come back, we want to still treat this like a dangerous situation where we need to field and defend ourselves against this, you know, persistent, persistent threat that certainly in at least my vision, I can't see it going away. I can only see it getting worse.