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

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

SPONSORS: 1) MIRACLE BRAND: Upgrade your sleep with Miracle Made—go to https://trymiracle.com/julian and use code JULIAN to save over 40% and get a free 3-piece towel set. 2) AMENTARA: Go to https://www.amentara.com/go/JULIAN and use code JD22 for 22% off your first order. JOIN PATREON FOR EARLY UNCENSORED EPISODE RELEASES: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Jesse Hamel is a former Air Force Lt. Colonel & AC-130 Gunship Combat Aviator. He is now CEO of Victus Technologies, a drone warfare company he founded while studying at MIT. JESSE's LINKS: X: https://x.com/jhMITgunship VICTUS: https://www.getvictus.ai/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 – Intro 01:22 – Jesse’s Air Force Background, 9/11, AC-130 Gunship, Combat Years 12:35 – Warfighters & Technology, Drones vs Human Trust, The Agentic Age 23:56 – West Coast Tech Power, CCP Exploiting Open Systems, Planning for 6G 34:31 – 6G, Humans & Machines, AI, Bio-Hybrid Hellscape 48:33 – AI Arms Race: U.S. vs China, Nuclear War 59:25 – Zooming Out on Power, Governance Problems, 1984, Corruption, Term Limits 01:12:20 – Palantir, War Has Changed, Bringing Our Team Home 01:22:00 – Snowden, Moral Tradeoffs, Combat, Mission Planning, Risk of Inaction 01:31:41 – Founders & Stress, Military, Resilience, Suffering, Slaying the Daily Dragon 01:41:45 – Turning Suffering Into Growth, Anxiety, CNS Limits, Breaking Bad Habits 01:57:03 – Mortality, Meaning, Being vs Doing, The Arc of Change 02:06:38 – AC-130 Squadrons, Dawn of Drone Warfare, Afghanistan, MQ-9 Integration 02:16:54 – Predators & Reapers, Psychological Cost of Killing, First Kill 02:27:21 – Moral Injury, The Charring of the Conscience, Faith, Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart 02:37:08 – Never Arriving at the Truth, Lifelong Learning 02:40:18 – Next Ep CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 377 - Jesse Hamel Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first time you blew somebody out from the sky, were you able to weigh the gravity of, holy shit, I just wiped the life off the earth? The first one I remember very distinctly. It was actually an al-Qaeda commander. So this is like the same organization that had directly attacked the towers close to here. You do feel it. But it was a defense of Americans. And in my perspective, it was merciful.

Paul talks about this in the New Testament. Governments have the responsibility to do force and evil to preserve larger good. But it's also true, right? Fast order we are now. We talk a lot about AI because that's the field I'm in. When I was at MIT, which is where I launched my company out of, there's actually some pretty impressive and disturbing things happening. Like, it's both machine and human biology.

Bio-hybrid robot made with living brain and muscle cells and even bestow a sort of memory for repeated tests. But let's just be hyper-paranoid about enabling a 1984 situation. 100% I think about that. So, Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review.

They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. You've got a hell of a voice. You got to put that to work in a little side gig. All right. That's happening. That's happening. That's definitely happening.

That's one of two, three, four things that will launch out of here. 100%. There's something. We'll find the right books. So how we get response to this? That will determine like what we read, what kind of stories we tell. Listen, I can see it now. Drone Warfare and Smutbook Audio.

That's it. Like Joe's telling me, Smuts back in. Can you just picture this guy like reading 50 shades of gray? And then Christian walked in the room and fucked her brains out. I think it would do numbers. I think it would. Let's see like,

you know, see what the up and over is on that. Like, it's a, yeah. We get estimates. I'll talk to my agent. I used to say.

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

20 years, 20 years and like 23 days. I don't know, they got those 23 days out of me. But yeah, we get a good pension from that? Yeah, the extra 23 days, yeah. That's important. Okay. All right. So we're going to get into like what your company's doing with drones and specifically

like how you're trying to, you know, counterman like the CCP and all the money they're putting into that. Did you actually, this is relevant for the first time in a while, have you ever read a book called AI Superpowers? I know of it. I think I've like hit some highlight. I didn't read the full thing, but I know what you're talking about. Read that.

It's by Kai Fu Lee. And even though it's like it's eight or nine years old now, he, that book had a real effect on me back when I read it when it came out. He defined like the AI arms race by four variables, which off the top of my head, it was like government support, entrepreneurs. Like entrepreneur talent. Steve, I don't know if you can pull it up, but there were two others. And he was very concerned that while the U.S. was ahead in two or three of them over the next, at the time, 10 to 15 years, China would pass us in all four. And so when I saw what you guys are doing too, where you're integrating AI with drones in, like,

war scenarios, I was like, oh, shit, this is like kind of the defense back to that, no? No, I think you're right. What are these four? Yeah, there's an article in The Economist. You can archive.is. I remember I was looking at that like three months ago, four months ago was from 2018. Diff will pull that up. But in the meantime, Jesse.

So it, but that was that like part of the motivation? Are you starting the company, Victus? No, 100%. I mean, and you can even zoom out. It's kind of worth for a second. Like zoom out even farther than that. So, you know, I'm in the Air Force for 20 years. I didn't actually plan on joining the military.

I don't really come from the military family. Where'd you grow up? I grew up Upper Peninsula, Michigan, right in the Canadian. border getting beat by the Canadians at hockey or anything like that. And, uh, you know, that's why I live in Florida now, too, by the way. I've had a, I've had a, a kick ass down there. Yeah. Yeah. One, yes. And I can't have the cold anymore. Um, but, uh, so this is cold enough for me. But, you know, so I joined there, joined after 9-11. So 9-11 happened, attacks happened, you know, I'm a junior undergrad at a small school, corporate finance guy, you know, trying to probably,

would get up to New York, do investment banking, have a yacht by 35, and then be done. Where were you in school? Just a small Christian school called Pensacola Christian College, little one, you know, had big dreams and just kind of going after it. That morning, when after the planes hit, do you remember exactly where you were? Exactly where it was, yeah. So I just left, I just left corporate finance one junior year. So, you know, junior year undergrad, so we start really hitting the harder classes.

Obviously, we'd only been in school for a couple weeks, right? you know i think we'd started late august and we we leave class we we had to like a um like an assembly where everybody was going up to meet something it's kind of like a mini little chapel service slash like just kind of like um cage everybody on what was going on that was already planned you know because the semester just kind of kicked off and you go there and i remember uh like a distinct remember this um one of the girls i was you know because everybody's a couple thousand people are just kind of converging on this building. And remember a couple of girls just freaking out and being like, what? You know, why? And not, you know, it's like, okay. And that's kind of

weird. This is pre-iphone. You know, I've got like a little flip phone or something like that, I think. The razor, I think is what I had. If you remember that, which is awesome. And a razor or no one, you were definitely cool. That, that was. Maybe I didn't get the razor until later. But that's the full. Maybe I just moved it out. I might just moved it out. I might have moved it out. It might have been a It might have been Nokia. It might have been the block phone. It might have been the block phone. Yeah.

You're playing snake on that shit. Yeah, like this. Yeah, like this. Yeah. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? So, so we walk in there, you know, seeing him freak out. And then, you know, and then one of the, one of the, one of the admin starts talking about it.

And then it was just like, wow, this is real. You know, then get out of there. And they were talking to family. That was in Pensacal, that was in Pensacola, that was in Pensacola, you know, so the big Navy base there. So they were concerned. you know, like everybody was, right? We don't know what's going on and you're hearing mixed reports and nobody kind of knows what's happening.

So, you know, really powerfully impacted me. That, you know, because that was at my young age, I don't think I'd even turn 20 yet. It started school a little bit early. And, you know, then it was like, okay, clearly the things that I'd taken for granted or at least just had become accustomed to, they may not be there if we don't actually fight for them. So kind of took me, you know, I wrestled with things for a little bit, but by like Christmas of that junior year, it's like, all right, I'm, I'm serving in some capacity in some capacity. Like, I don't care about this finance thing. Like, there are people that we need to deal with. And I'm going to go fight them and figure out a way to do that. So then, you know, it took a, you know, it took about a year to get paperwork and physicals and all that. And got actually pretty close to the Marines. The Marines were the paperwork was even harder. And it was, were opaque but the air force had an aviation slot so i got it and took about a year so i finished the degree and then went right to officer training school a couple months after i graduated in

o three and then it was 20 years all like to do you like kind of a straight shot of espresso actually straight why do you describe it like that yeah because so you know i went in went right through officer training school get commissioned go through the flying training get assigned AC130 gunships and I've tried to get into that. So I either wanted to go fighters or get into some kind of Air Force Special Operations, AFSOC. Got a gunship slot. This is before Call of Duty came out with gun shifts.

So I knew it was cool, but it got a whole lot cooler in a couple of years. So then. Stoge hanging out of your mouth. It's pretty much exactly. Just like the sleeves up. You got tats under there? No, no. Damn it.

I'm all natural. Damn it. I'm bringing back an older school vibe. I'm supposed to be out natural. You're supposed to have pets. I just, I make the, I like to outperform the tack guys in the gym. That's kind of the thing. It's a way, it's a passive way of trolling.

So I, you know, so then it was like, all right, get into gunships. And then by, you know, it takes a couple of years, got all the training done. But by Christmas of 06, I'm in combat. And then I'm in combat on and off constantly. for the next eight years. All right. Before we get to that, because wow, that's a long time. Yeah. When you got, you said it took like a year to get all the paperwork done and like get into

the Air Force. Physical sponsorship, yeah. Right. So you're there in the beginning of 03. Like what was drawing you to want to be in the Air Force? I know you're trying to get in the military in general, but like when you got that, what had you so excited about being in that end of things? Yeah.

two aspects of it. One, it was like, if I'm going to serve, I want to actually fight. And I want to find a way to fight that's kind of, you know, it came early on to me. It was like the unique kind of American

asymmetric dominance is in air power. Like that's kind of the unique thing that we have. You saw this just in Venezuela. You saw this in Iran. Just, you know, a little bit ago. It's air power. Yeah.

Like it's, and there's all kinds of other things that enable that. Um, and C power is important. You know, it's all important. Right. It's all,

you know, it's one team, one fight and all the, you know, normal buzzwords. But there's something unique about that. That was like very, very attractive, you know.

And I watched Top Gun just like anybody did. Right. So there's probably those two things together, you know. Top Gun was a good sales. Yeah, it's a good sales. Yeah. It's a good sales. The Top Gun, they,

most people are even like, it's funny too. Like, the Navy did all the work for Top Gun. and it really helped the Air Force out more. To this day, it still helps the Air Force out more. Like, it's just, you know, sometimes that works. They weren't smart enough to figure out what their recruitment needs.

Even the second one, even the second one still. Like, it's still like, oh, yeah, I want to go, you know, Air Force Academy, young guys. Like my two sons, both my two sons are like, man, flying fighters, that's pretty sweet. Like, you know, like. It's badass. Yeah. It's badass. And it's different, you know?

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

Like, you know, as far as like what this country has been able to do with air power, especially since World War II. Yeah, 100%. It's unreal. Yeah, 100%. Like it's, you know, that's how I thought about it too. And if put it, put it another way, you know, and I love everybody equally. I love all war fighters.

Yes. Let the record show. Let the record show. How many kids do you have? Three kids. Yes. All equally. You got a favorite.

No, all equally. You will not waterboard me out of that one. No. Oh, you did your homework. That ain't happened. That ain't happening. And I also love all of my potential, you know, war fighters I can sport equally. All of them.

I thought he was about to say potential kids he doesn't know about. No. Okay. Not that. That's good. But the, like one way to think about it is, or at least how I thought about it. You know, if there's a sense. I mean, for the last 10,000 years, there's a unique relationship that any warfighter has with the equipment they go to war with.

Is it your sword, right? And once you get to a point where that sword, like, you know it, you've drawn blood with that. It's been there when you needed it. And when you get really talented with that piece of war fighting equipment, it feels like an extension of you. It's your baby. Yeah. So swords for years and then in Civil War, we started getting like gatling guns and, you know, different explosives. and then the rifle and you still kind of have, you know, they call it the cult of the rifle,

even within the Army, the Marines, calls everybody, every Marine a rifleman. Like, that's, it's kind of like, this is my rifle, right? Like the, you know, like the movie says. And what was cool for me thinking is like, okay, I could establish that relationship with a rifle or I can wrap a $150 million flying gunship around me and establish it with that. More complicated, but it's kind of awesome. That's pretty awesome. That's also where, you know, and we'll get into this like,

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

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So once again, go to try miracle.com slash Julian. Link in my description below and use code Julian at checkout. Thank you to Miracle Made for sponsoring this episode. Well, that's the difficult thing about it because when you're talking about flying in the plane or holding the rifle or, you know, being a... a sniper, running around with your scope, it's there, you're touching it, you're feeling it, you're with it at all times. Yeah.

But when you're talking about a drone that you're playing like a video game in Las Vegas and it's fucking in Ukraine, there's a disconnect there. But we, but it's solvable. You know, I'm a bit of a gamer. You guys probably are too. You probably are to a point. I was when I was. You was.

Okay. Yeah. So you're, you're more mature now. I get it. It's much more mature. Remind me to show you a funny text, Jane, that happened right before you got here. Excellent. All right.

Okay. So if one were to game, you know, very competitively, does that not interface to that game for any game or does that not start to become kind of like an extension? You're 100%. Yes. Like 100%. Like if you're really good. You watch somebody who's really good at Call of Duty and the blur, the lines between where that human machine interface, well, it's a joystick, a hand controller unit, a keyboard, whatever it is they're using. And where like where that line stops and where that's, you know, they start is totally blurred. Yeah. It's totally blurred. Like, they're so good. Just the same way, like, you know, Van Halen was with a guitar. Like, you can't tell where his fingers are and where the guitar is anymore. It's that good.

That's, you know, to me, like, if we want to create a world where the machines enable human activity, empower humans, we start with how we secure ourselves, like how we defend ourselves, And then we enable machines to have that kind of relationship with their war fighters with whoever's using it. That's the key. And that's, I mean, that's what I'm passionate about doing, you know, and that to your earlier point, like that's that's kind of how I started the journey of like taking what I've learned and then applying it to the modern environment, you know, which we're now we're, you know, it's still a very real thing, but it's much more than just ISIS, Al Qaeda and kids hiding in caves shooting RPGs at us.

Oh yeah. much more serious now what we're the kind of like things that we're talking about major countries with GDPs god damn near our size yeah yeah absolutely yeah whole brave new world and when you have multiple you know wars or you know brooding trying to die down but still like right there tethering on the edge type wars happening in different key regions around the world with major players involved major proxy players involved. I mean, it is the definition of what we say cliche, but a powder keg. Yeah. And at any moment, it's a very different, you know, you could speak to this more than I could because I was really little when 9-11 happened, but I do remember that day viscerally and I can

remember understanding some aspect of like the next few months and like what that was like. But looking back on that the best I can, it's a different feeling now not to like undersell that threat at the time. But again, like you said, it was guys running around in caves and we're, you know, it was the we gon't find you era. Yeah, exactly. Now it's the fucking, okay, Xi Jinping was just here for a meeting. And y'all just fucking spied on all our military bases with your cute little farms. It's the, this one thing I've been saying for a while. Any area of human activity that has been monetized will be weaponized.

That's a bar. So what does that mean? Let's unpack that for a second. That means if there's any area where we are performing some kind of economic activity, that also not only has the potential, it will be used for both coercion and compelling. It will be used for that. That would have been the case for, that would have been the case for, um, ISIS, Al-Qaeda.

They just didn't have the capabilities to do these things, right? Just didn't have the capabilities. Whereas now you're, you're talking about nation states and even like collective, you know, almost in access in some cases, maybe, right? And everything from medium earth orbit to the phone in your pocket, it's all a weapon. it's all a weapon and a weapon that can be used for to coerce you to do something or compel you to do something uh so what that's mean what that means is like the security environment like in the you know in the nine 11 era the global war and terror like that's what i came up in the gwatt you know everybody

called it in the gwatt it was like hey let's just make sure we take the fight this was the thinking at the time right let's make sure we take the fight to them keep the fight there and not allow them to launch external attacks on the U.S. homeland in theory, right? Did we accomplish it or not, you know, you could talk about that. But like, that's at least the theory of what you're trying to accomplish that. I think probably everybody's, okay, this is at least the right goal. Worked for a couple years. Yeah, and worked for a couple years.

And, you know, the ways and means or whatever, but that was at least the right goal. The goal now very different. Like now they're in everything. So full open source, you can pull this up too. And sometimes it's worth looking at this. the Chinese are in every aspect of the U.S. telecom. There's some open source stuff on this we're looking up. Every single aspect of the U.S. telecom system, the CCP is fully penetrated.

Can you break down how that's happened? Yeah. At this, like, okay, so what I can say and there's a little bit of, you know, broad kind of, I'd say, I can say broad, I can talk like kind of broadly to this. Okay. Yeah, exactly. That's actually a really good one right there. For the last 20 years, we've actually had almost a co-dependent economic relationship with China. So there are American citizens and other ones that have become unimaginably wealthy because of trade with China in subcapacity.

They've invested there. They've harnessed their talent. And the U.S. consumers have, in some cases, many cases really, that we benefit from this, right? This is how we get things that are cheap. This is how we get their manufacturing base that they've built out in like Guangzhou kind of very end of this. Like it's it's actually powered US consumerism for better for worse for a long time. I would say indisputably. Right.

Yeah. So that level of innovation has also said they have access to this all happened like as the Internet age happened. So as our economy transferred from kind of industrial age to the Internet age and now to what I would say we're. you know, right at the epoch of the agentic age. Agentic age. Yep. By that, I mean, like, we are switching to, it was industrial, then it was connected through the internet.

And now it's about intelligent entities. These entities live under computers. These entities have physical manifestations of a drone, a humanoid, a satellite, a submarine, a swarm of drones, all the above. That's the world we're living now. right or just starting to we're just starting to get into this because the china because the chinese were so they were so important in those early days and they're so there's so enmeshed particularly in the west coast and the west coast has and the numbers don't lie on this the west coast has

powered the west coast of the u.s has powered the tech innovation they've absolutely powered it like the numbers already even close yeah so all the companies and innovations and the CCP's been right there the whole time. That's given them the ability to do this kind of like coercive things and to infiltrate all of these different kind of systems as they've been upgraded. So you think about like upgrading systems that like if you were still using your phone, we were talking earlier right before this,

like if you're still using your phone from, I think my Nokia or my razor from like back in 01-03 and your job was to hack it in that. that's very different than if i was trying to do it for your iPhone right now 100%. But if i had that if i had awareness of how it has grown from that nokia to your iPhone now would that give me an advantage in getting into that yes all day that really like at a high level explains the kind of situation that we're in yeah there's a concept that's come up a million times on the show in all different contexts but applying back to the same kind of theme of like the modern world we're living in and you know how

nation states kind of attack each other but the idea of like being able to use our freedom against ourselves and what I mean by that is the CCP runs China they say how it goes it's a communist party they tell their people what the fuck to do if someone steps out of line it doesn't matter if you're jack fucking ma you're you're gone like you're out of the way yeah on the contrary in the united states we have freedom of speech a constitution freedom of private business to be able to operate on its own without the government intervening and everything they do. And so these freedoms basically create like turnstiles that bad actors who don't give a shit about having freedom in their own place, but see the beauty of how they can take advantage of the freedom of here, walk right

through and bang, there they are. And I always have cited this example, but like on a micro level, look at TikTok when it came here, right? TikTok in China, this is the one place where communism actually had an argument. TikTok in China told their kids they weren't allowed to be on TikTok after 9 p.m. And when they were on TikTok, it was science videos, math videos and nature videos. Here, they're like 24-7 kids, titties. Let's just dumb you down as much as we possibly can. So they're using our freedom against us. And you're basically talking about it on for any form of intelligence, both open and within even the military itself, they've been able to get access to this over the years because of the partnerships we have for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's 100% right. And that's also, you have to, like, that informs a mental model of how you do national security. So you have to think of, okay, to your point, like, so we'll build on this for a second. You talked about freedom being a, and what you basically said is in other way is that the CCP has exploited the U.S.'s freedom. That's right. So they've exploited that. Okay. Let's say that's true.

And I think, I think that's probably true. So how do you unravel that and how do you solve that? great question. So part of that, I think, is using that same freedom to out-innovate the CCP. And this is one thing that, so, you know, I'm as an entrepreneur and founder, I'm both ruthlessly pragmatic and eternally optimistic at the same time. You have to be both of these things. So my eternally optimistic is that when given the right kind of motivations, entrepreneurial motivations, the kind of things that the American spirit uniquely does better than anybody in the history of the world, I would argue. Yep.

That same freedom that allowed this kind of penetration that you're talking about, which is no kidding, threat pen into our telecon system can also be how we solve it because of the same, like, yes, there's a technology open gate that allowed that to happen. We can also innovate ourselves into a position where we can correct. these things. By kicking out all the Chinese? Like, I don't understand. Yeah, there's a, like, there's some, there's, like, for this one example, for this, for that specific example, there's definitely things that are interesting and I'll just say that like the broader cybersecurity world, um, agentic cybersecurity that could actually kind of go retroactively back

and fix a lot of these things. Hmm. But that's very doable. I'm trying to picture that. Do you have like an example of how that could happen? Well, I can give you a parallel to it. Okay. The parallel would be... By the way, just with the mic, just keep a point at you, don't talk over it and don't talk away from it. You know what I mean? Just kind of have it like that, if that's good.

The parallel of that would be, think of, I mean, just like, think of a large language model, like how that works. Right? So large angle model ingested all of this data, written data, right? And things that we typed on the internet and, you know, that kind of stuff. And from that, we've, you know, the models keep. getting better where you can parse out very specific points of that of what was in there. That's that same kind of approach is very doable within okay I can I can understand a large data set in my in my telecom system and then I can also start to parse out where the

malign actors are through that's through I mean this is overly simplistic but it's edifying I think so through that same kind of technology you know transformers and the same kind of models that have, those same things that are allowing us to create new intelligence, right, from just written words and old things that humans and sometimes machines came up with. That could also be used to create new technologies that can help undo some of the stuff and come up with new ways of like protecting it. Okay. So I have an example maybe we can use in my head as to how we could.

like show a way to undo this. But what might be helpful is if you walk people through who don't remember like what exactly happened. But I'm thinking of the Huawei example back in 2017, 2018, I want to say, where we discovered that they were basically just like going far beyond the bandwidth that we had given them here. So can you just explain what happened there? And then maybe we can work this around to like how we course correct that. Yeah. So the Huawei one, You might have to back me up on remembering some of this. But the Huawei one, it was basically like they were building these type of hardware chips and then performing telecom services.

Like, hey, let's do your 4G and 5G network. That was right about the time we were doing a lot of conversion into 5G. Like a lot of things were going upgrade from 4G to 5G. So there in lies like part of it. We were doing an infrastructure upgrade. That's kind of when you're a little bit more vulnerable. You know, we're doing those infrastructure upgrades. So you're doing this infrastructure upgrade.

And first it starts with, 0.1, maybe don't have the malign actors lead this for you. Maybe don't do that. Listen, they already have houses on the farm line right there. You don't even need a hotel. So one can imagine, as we go from 5G to 6G, we're doing the 6G planning right now, right, for our broader telecom system. 6G.

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely planning for that and what that's going to look like. These are buzzwords, just like Web 3 is a buzzer. word, right? But the point is being you're doing like an infrastructure upgrade for telecom and how we use telecom, both wired and wireless, how we transmit data to each other in different ways. Maybe when we go to 6G, let's not outsource it to the CCP. So we'll start with that. Let's not give them the contract. That's point number one. What if they bid the best? I know. Like, what if they're the lowest price? Somehow they came in as the lowest price. I don't know how they did it. It's amazing. I guess we got to give it to them. Yeah. So, yeah.

Some of it's like, okay, we could get a little smarter than that. Two, then, once you, in that upgrade process, there's going to be all new protocols and APIs that are written that will kind of negate anything that happened in the 5G and earlier world. Much like if, you know, something feels weird on your phone, what's one of the first things, you know, basic support types going to tell you to do? Well, you restart it. If that doesn't work, download, you know, do the update on your Mac.

and then reinstall the operating system because that has a way of like correcting certain things that might happen even at like the binary level like it has a way of correcting that that's also the opportunity we can do there the benefit of doing it in like the modern what i what i call like the agentic age is that as we transition i'm just and we're using telecom here but talk about like any network mesh network between humans by the way the 6g network will not just be about and should not be about just connecting humans should about connecting humans and machine clusters as well and how they transmit data between each other. When you say machine clusters for people out there. Yeah, machine cluster, I mean, it's a matrixy kind of sound in term. But what I mean by that is something that, by the way, I said when I did the Palantir DevCon, you know, it was all dark green in there. You did a Palantir DevCon? Yeah, we'll talk about this. Yes.

We'll get to this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who sent this guy? Don't worry, it's fine, it's fine. It's fine. There's a few folks downstairs waiting to meet you afterwards, but like, it's all good. If I blink twice. Yeah. Send help in the comment section. All right, I found a mushroom that doesn't melt your brain or make you see God,

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That link is in my description below. And use code JD22 for 22% off your first order. Once again, that's Amantara.com slash go slash Julian. Link in my description below. Code JD. 22 at checkout for 22% off your order. So they had this kind of cool vibe in it where it was all like, you know, the dark green. It looked very much like Matrix. And I'm like, oh, you know, I'm by far the oldest one around.

And that's like, okay, this is kind of cool. You guys are doing OG Matrix stuff. And I swear a couple people look back and me like, what do you mean by that? I'm like, come on, come on. Come on. Come on. That's real, though. That's real.

That's real. That's wild. Yeah, so. We're talking about machine clusters. So the, the, the, the machine cluster being just some kind of artificial and intelligence and I mean that term like AI is such a buzzword now and I don't know if anybody knows what it means anymore but I don't think they do I don't think so like here's what I mean by that I mean some kind of intelligence that came from a model not directly from a human just leave it at that and then it's broadcast from a machine that could be something that like mimics how a human talks that could be just a screen the laptop whatever we want to be at interact with that entity that agent from human to agent. We want those agents to be able to interact with each other in a way that we can understand. This is actually really important. And decipher so that we don't have a bunch of black boxes

where the machines on our networks, this is kind of already happening in some cases. Oh, yeah. We don't like this. We need to be able to see how the machines are coordinating. We need to be understanding this. Remember the Facebook one in 2016? Yes. Yeah. They invented like old-schools stuff too. And then they invented their own language. And they were like, Yep, all right, we're going to pull out the plug. Wait till you can't pull out the plug on these motherfuckers. I think it was, didn't Eric Schmidt just say something like this, I think. Did he talk about it now?

He just, I think he was Google, right? Yeah, he was Google. I just saw something where he was talking about. He said basically this. Like once the machine start interacting with a more efficient language because it's more efficient than English or some other kind of MLP, yeah, then that's probably like that's when it's like pull the plug thing. And then the real, like, you know, joke is, I think Open AI just advertised or roll that if you read in between it, it kind of looks like it's not.

But it kind of looks like, hey, I'm going to pay you just to stand at that corner right there next to the plug. And like if we blink twice in this case, pull that plug. It basically looks like they just advertise a role like this for somebody to sit in their data centers. Yeah. Oh, my God. So it's in our interest. It's in our interest to develop protocols to allow the machines to coordinate with themselves and with other humans in a transparent way. Right.

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

If we do it wrong, we will enslave our kids and ourselves, maybe permanently. Or they'll be dead. Yeah. Yeah, you ever read the book Super Intelligence by Bostrum? That one I know of as well. Read that. Yeah. I read that in 2019, 2018 or 2019.

And, you know, this was back when I would like try to have conversations with people about AI and they just look at you. Yeah. And now people won't shut the fuck up about him. Like, where you been? But Bostrum effectively went like psycho mode. And it's really incredible. It could be nothing or it could be brilliant. I don't know.

But he's definitely a very smart guy. And he basically created decision trees worth of all the different possibilities. Yeah. And just like went full, like seeing the fractals, like where it could all go. And I ain't going to lie. It scared the shit out of me because there are so many ways that if you let this jack out of the box, it walks away bipedal and you never fucking see it again. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right.

I also think it's all in how we design it. It's all how we design. Here's a parallel. We talk a lot about AI and I do because that's the field I'm in. And I know a little bit about, this is not my feel, but there's actually some pretty both impressive and disturbing things happening like human biology and genes right now. So when I was at, when I was at MIT, which where I launched my company out of. Just a casual.

No big deal. Just dropping that. We'll stick that in the title for you. It'll make you feel better. I'll fling that at you. I'll fling that. Yeah. Yeah.

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

I mean, there's a, okay, there is a, this is worth pulling up. There's a lab that just came out This just came out, what, two, three weeks ago? It's both machine and human biology And it's crawling around on a table Yeah, yeah, this is worth finding, yeah, this just came out Trying to think of which lab came up with this Machine

It has a machine and human biology It has like human flesh on it And it has these two little arms crawling around, yeah It's like about a bit of a chopper. Yeah, it's a small machine. Okay, what does that title say, Joe? This crawling robot is made with living brain and muscle cells. Scientists want to know if a bio-hybrid robot can form a long-lasting biological mind to direct movement.

Tell me more. It's a bizarre sight with a short burst of light, a sponge-shaped robot scoots across a tiled surface, flipped on its back, and repeatedly twitches as if it's doing sit-ups. By tinkering with the lights frequency, scientists can change how fast. the strange critter moves and how long it needs to rest after a long crawl. Soft robots are nothing new, but the spongy bot stands out in that it blends living muscle and brain cells with a 3D printed skeleton and wireless electronics. This is the great society. The neurons genetically altered to respond to light trigger neighboring muscles to contract a release.

Watching the robot crawl around is amusing, but the study's main goal is to see if a biohibrid robot can form a sort of long-lasting biological mind that directs movement. Neurons are especially sensitive that rapidly stop working or even die outside of a carefully controlled environment. Using blob-like amalgamations of different types of neurons to direct muscles, the sponge bots retained their crawling ability for over two weeks. Scientists have built biohybrid bots to use electricity or light to control muscle cells. Some mimic swimming, walking, and grabbing motions. adding neurons could further fine-tune their activity and flexibility and even bestow a sort of memory for repeated tasks.

So this is what I love about this, like just in general, this, like any person from any field can look at that and say, that could be used for tremendous good or tremendous evil. That's the truth for a lot of the way we're interacting with machines right now. I completely agree with you. It's also, I say this a lot too. That's why this is why American leadership matters so much in this, in this, in this domain. Define leadership there.

So. People who are running the companies? Not necessarily that, although it could be. What I would say is maybe more, maybe even broader than this, is that the leaders of companies and there's the government. you know, that are involved in this area. If they don't start from a value system that values human life, you can see where this is going to go. Yes.

That, that, that has never been more important. That's never been more important. If you have one of these transhumanists or someone else in some kind of environment that is a venting tech like what we just saw, don't take a rocket scientist, figure out what that's going. I think people out there have a genuine, and well-founded concern that there are people like that running some of these places who do think that way.

I think that's, I think it's probably right. I think it's right. And it's like, okay, that feels sociopathic. And all it takes is one who, you know, lets the T-Rex out of the, out of the cage. And that's it. You know what I mean? It's why that's part of my motivation. is, you know, I think, again, the, back to like, you know, ruthlessly pragmatic but eternally optimistic,

we can, we, we can decide, and I mean, we is like the royal we, we can decide how we want to use technology like this. Like, we can decide how to use this. So there's never been a time where we need leaders of high character and value more. There's never been a time where we need that. Have you, are you familiar with Colossal Labs? Yeah. Yeah. So, Thief's actually wearing the shirt right now.

Oh, excellent. All right. They brought back a genetic version that's similar to a dire wolf. There's a lot of arguments there as to whether or not it's a true dire wolf and all that because they manipulated gray wolf genes to be able to get there. So a lot of ecologists and scientists are like, it's fucking nothing. And then others are like there's something there. You know, I'm still like trying to. to figure out exactly where it goes from there but we had been in here who's the CEO of the company

we also had Matt James who's their chief animal officer and i'm going down there in march to visit the labs and like see what's what but you know the big concern is that not even like as a joke it sounds funny to say but it's serious is that this turns into like Jurassic Park Frankenstein all wrapped in one and you'll have to wrap it out of the hat and we're fucked because you invent something that's crazy. And so I think it's important that because like we like Ben, really good guy, like business guy, right? So seeing him surround himself with a lot of people, he's got a million people on the team that are like conservation and animal first. That's important to me because it's like, okay, are there's going to be good guard rails to make sure that like,

even if Ben has a well-intentioned idea as a guy who doesn't, he's a business guy. As a guy who may not think of where that could go too far. Do you have people there being like, no, no, no, that's Pandora's box. Don't touch that. Now, you talk about the good. This is where I'm very curious about the company. And I'm still like undecided on where this all goes. I'm open-minded. But for example, one of the things that sold Matt James, the chief animal officer on joining the company in the first place, was the fact that Matt had spent decades working with a lot of animals, but specifically elephants. And there is a virus. It's basically like, it's called something, but it's basically like elephant herpes that currently

kills 20% of the elephant population around the world. And so one of the goals of colossal is to recreate a woolly mammoth. And in recreating it using basically like CRISPR and AI technology to create like a genome and genetic code before it's a living thing, like an actual like, oh, maybe we made a woolly mammoth. They can take the data from that because it is a distant not even that distant, a relative of an elephant, and test it outside of it being alive, like on the computer simulation system to see what they could possibly use to pluck out of that, and I'm oversimplifying it here, but this is how it works. Pluck it out of that and basically inject it into the current living elephant population

and destroy that disease forever. If they could accomplish something like that, it's incredible. Just don't make fucking three-headed human hybrids that suddenly are like clones of Tom Brady's dog. Yeah. That's where... No man bear pigs. Yeah, exactly. No man bear pigs. I'm like, you know, I text a Ben, I'm like, because Tom Brady talked about cloning his dog.

I'm like, Ben, you clone Tom's dog. He's like, I don't know. I'm like, all right. Let's not do that, you know, but you see the point. It's the same lane. It's the same thing. And it, and it's kind of a fine, it's a super fine line because to break down what you're talking there and this applies to AI, it will not be obvious.

It will not be obvious where that line. is. There'll be people that are thinking about it, but this is just part of pushing frontier tech. You literally haven't done it before. Same kind of tech we're doing for machine learning to have something to operate without a GPS at all. It hasn't been done. So you're going to push it to a point and you end up solving the math term like objective function. So you're like objective function solve for this. And then as an inventor in a lab, you intentionally just like laser focus on that. Like I will solve this problem. And typically it, you have to decompose it into like a thousand different mini problems to solve. So then you solve these 1,000 mini problems. You've uncreated

new problems the whole time and things didn't work. But you finally get to that point. You've intentionally done like a tunnel vision. Like you have intentionally done this. So it won't be, it will not be obvious. I think your point about guardrails is salient. What also complicates this. And there's both real in this and I think probably not real. And

what complicates is that every one of these labs, back to my earlier premise, what can be monetized will be weaponized. So everything you're talking about here also has weapons implication. Every single thing does. So that also means it's a mini arms race.

Do you want to live in a world where the CCP develops that tech for woolly mammoths? I do not want to live in a world where fucking laser-eyed woolly mammoths are running at 700 miles per hour through Iraq and, you know, trying to take over Saudi Arabian oil fields or what, you know what I mean? We don't want that. I don't want that. We don't want that world. Then we're all just going to have to go to Mars.

I guess I'll just turn that on. So rather than do that. So Paul Ler as he says, he's like, die on Mars. Yeah. So that, so that. is the argument that I think, and I think in most cases that argument is correct, that that's why we have to lead in these, all these areas. Yes. Like, because, and this is, this is just, we being America. We being America. This is not, this is recognizing that there's dangers in America,

there's malign influences here. There's, there's, you know, this is far from perfect. But do you want to live in the world where the CCP beats us on this? Do you want to live in a world where they have better autonomous robotic systems than the U.S. does. No. I don't think so. I don't think anybody wants that. Yeah. And I do feel like people have, because what's been going on over the last couple years,

people have very righteously pointed out a lot of concerns with like the United States relationship with Israel and some of the influence here between APEC and us being dragged into some of these wars over the years and just a lot of problems there. And they are all well-founded. and they should be talked about on the show, debated it. I have issues with that. The one thing that has like, that is starting to get me a little concern, though, is that people are just focusing on that for everything.

Yeah, I agree right. Which is like, it's over the top, right? Like, let's focus on the problem. And then they're ignoring other problems too. Well, and to me, I'm like, I'm looking at everything. You have to look at all because it's all interconnected. Yes. The other one being like,

It's just a basic premise. How do you achieve peace? I mean, that's kind of what our goal is, right? Like nobody wants to go fight and die in a war. Nobody wants to do that. So how do you achieve that? Well, the way you do it is through strength. So if we were to, if we were to be like, hey, we don't want to get enmeshed with this or we don't want to do this, we don't want to develop this technology because of potential ramification, X, Y, or Z, whatever it is, whatever it, make up whatever you want.

So what you're saying is we're going to take a knee on this technology and we're going to allow the CCP to get it. Right. That then changes the calculus for how all of the political relations happens between us. And that puts us in that puts the free world in position that we do not want and I don't think we can afford at all. Yeah. There was something I've done episodes over the years with Andy Bustamante. He was actually, he was in my parents' house back in the day doing it. podcast probably wondering what went wrong with his life but it worked out for him but there's one thing

you know he says a lot of shit that i fight with him about and that people righteously call them out for in the comments is like a government mouthpiece but there's you know he also gives some harsh truce on stuff that people don't want to hear on things that's why i respect them and one of the things that he went through the i don't even think this one's like an example of the harsh truth it's just like reality i just never simplified it to this like duh but like he said the only fucking three letters that matter for any country in the world overall at the top, you know, 90% of it are GD and P. What's their GDP? So when you look at China and seeing how tight they are with our GDP and their population and their lack of rules and what they take from us,

that's something that should be blinking red. 100%. And I'll throw a couple more just that amplify that. One is, last number I saw we have 11.49 million full-time employed manufacturing workers 11.49 million in the U.S. Okay. The Chinese have 198 million. That we know of. That we know of.

Yeah. Yeah. There's another 200 in like, you know, locked downstairs. So one, there's a, there's GDP, but there's also massive disparity in the ability to produce things. And then the other, the number that's probably not even captured in GDP is the IP theft. What's that like 600 billion or some shit? Oh, it's way higher than that. The IP theft of what has been stolen or taken from all across US, EU as well, but mostly the US.

Think about this. So you have cutting edge intellectual property developed at a lab, at a textile. at a VC backed this, at a government entity, whatever. At a university, you have some kind of cutting edge breakthrough in something. The amount of that that's been stolen, so they didn't have to put any of the R&D into it. They didn't have to invest into getting it to that point. They just control C, control V. And then they have nearly 200 million people full-time employed in massive manufacturing capabilities

to then push something from the digital space into the physical world. That's right. that that's to me one of the most damning things of our kind of position so if you think of you know just broad even national security are do nuke weapons stop wars right now no they don't they probably limit them they limit actions they put governors uh and they bring into the calculus okay i would argue but i would argue like the new way of deterring is and it's really between the u.s and china maybe Russia, but it's really between the US and the CCP, is which one can credibly generate

hundreds of thousands of robotic agents in medium earth orbit, low earth orbit, stratosphere, the air at sea subsurface, wave after wave of unrelenting systems and swarms that coordinate themselves every night. Whichever country can do that credibly, and the other one believes that happens, that will give them the ability to coerce

and defend their national interests without having to fire a shot. This is actually like really important. That's so that's part of that's a deep part of my motivation is that if we achieve that thing, we achieve a level of national security dominance that prevents conflict. Conflicts happen when they perceive that that dominance has eroded. When they're throwing balloons over. Yep, they're throwing balloons and they're like, and they're like, And they're like, well, they're not going to respond or maybe their systems are too old or, you know, they still have kind of a 1990s, 20, early 2000s military that's optimized for defeat ISIS and Al Qaeda. They can't hang with us in this. Or we have this unique asymmetric capability to neutralize them. I have a unique munition to attack carrier strike groups. Or I have unique jamming to deny them GPS, which everything relies on GPS. Or I have some kind of a cyber attack or some other capability. Or I've

you know, created blackmail dossiers on everybody that matters in decision making. And I can use that. Whatever it is. Whatever it is, right? And it's probably a combination of all these things, right?

The world's complicated. Imagine if Epstein had drones? We don't, yeah. Epstein drones. That should be a good band name, by the way. Epstein drones. I'm writing a mental note of that.

Epstein drones, like, garage band name. Yeah, you'd listen to that. You'd at least hit play. You would hit play if you saw it. I would probably hit play once. Yeah, what fun was, yeah. And then I might be like, no.

Yeah, now. No, too many bad images coming around. But you're, so you're focused on the drone. Like, I totally agree with you that, and we're going to get into the science of it and all the different use cases and all that. We'll get there. I totally agree with you that being able to use something non-human robotic at large distances in all different places and environments to either stop other threats similarly coming in or be a threat and actually get information is a huge part of this next-gen warfare and all that.

But like, it's still fair to say there are other elements. Like, I'll even use a simple age-old one. You have a whole system where, like, the CCP sends people through South America all the way up, like the Mexican coast through Tijuana with like full directions. This is a problem. Sitting there and then they come in and then we lose them once they come in. You know, like that's just one thing. They end up on farmland or they end up with I had a guy in here talking about all the evidence he uncovered in Maine, Steve Robinson, about, you know, they end up being marijuana growers for the triads.

Yeah, yeah. You know, like there are other problems too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. That, you know, so I kind of zoom out and then zoom back in the way I think about it from me. So it's like the zoom in is like, okay, you know, and this is why we launched a company and did the things I'm doing is where do I have unique experience, skill, unfair advantage like any good entrepreneur has? Unfair advantage.

Unfair advantage. Yeah. That's actually a MITism. They actually say that. It would be. I have a lot of spooky people. Fair advantage. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's true to like the, a good entrepreneur needs two things. Passion for the subject and material because there's ups and downs, right? You're just going to get kicked down. There's tough days. Especially like true, like what we've done, true zero to one. Yes. But then an unfair advantage. Like you need, like, what is your unique insight capability is that you can bring something to market that one of the other companies can't do or won't do or both, you know?

So I think about that. It's kind of my, like my area. but to like what we were saying earlier, like it is connected. So if you had a more dominant drone robotic kind of autonomous system, does that then also improve our ability to go after the use case you just talked about? Maybe directly it does. Maybe it doesn't. But if you're dominant in this area,

then all of a sudden that frees up political capital and or real capital. Yes. To then address that particular issue of, you know, somebody coming in through Tijuana and then, you know, doing some kind of subversive behavior within the states. Now, here's the other side of that. You know where I'm going with this. The 1984 aspect.

Sure. Do you use, do the people in charge use something like that as a Trojan horse, meaning like legitimate threat? Yeah, yeah. Chinese spies coming through Tijuana into San Diego. And then, okay, we're going to use drones there. you know by the way we're going to watch this protest over here it's very uh it's very uh like any you know good red-blooded american um i like to watch uh part of my christmas uh thing i just did

with my nine-year-old this year as um between you know that the kind of like that special zone after christmas before new year uh everybody's out of school so we watched all laura the rings all of them fully extended version i actually did on the flight back from rome boom yeah now we're talking Yeah. So, but it still stands up so well, right? You know what? It's amazing. It's amazing. It's funny because I had always said, I saw them when I was a little kid and I'd always use them as an example of like it's not my kind of movie because it's like kind of fantasy world and whatever. But I respected the fuck out of it because Peter Jackson crushed it and they have a unbelievable cast. And then now I literally hadn't watched it in 20 years probably. That's about how I was too when I watched it this past time. Yeah. And I watched it and I watched it. And I watched it and I had a whole. I was like, wait a minute. No, this is genius. Yeah.

Like it really stands up. It got me into it for sure. Yeah. And just so are our drones like that special ring? So powerful. I was going to do it earlier. It's so powerful. I was about to do the smegel voice on something you were saying.

Feel free. I forget what it was, but I'll use it later. I don't do a good smigel. I have other ones I can do. But obviously reasons. You ever seen what's his face? Speaking of people doing audiobooks, you ever seen Andy Circus do the Lord of the Rings audiobook. No, I need to...

Bro. That needs to be... Steve, can you go to Twitter real fast? If this gets cut out, it's because for some reason it's copyrighted, but type in Andy Circus audio. It's like S-E-R-K-E-S, I want to say, or IS. Yeah, right there, right there. Yeah, play this real fast. Let's get some audio on that. We're going to find out. If it gets cut out, it's because it's copyrighted.

But listen, this is like unreal. He's doing the audio book for Lord of the Rings, and he goes into character. Go ahead. Quite uselessly, one of the orcs sitting near laughed and said something to a companion in their abominable tongue. Rest while you can, little fool. That's not even scary. It's awesome.

in the common speech, which made him almost as hideous as his own language. Rest while you can. We'll find a use for your legs before long. You wish you had got none before we come. If I had my way, you'd wish you were dead now, said the other. Exactly. I'll make you squeak, you miserable rat. He stooped over Pippin, bringing his yellow fangs close to his face.

He had a black knife with a long, jagged blade in his hand. Lie quiet, or I'll tickle you with this. He hissed. Don't draw attention to yourself, or I may forget my orders. Curse the eyes and guarders. Oh, gluckabagrong, Shappuzuk, Sarumanglobubus, not sky. What the fuck?

This is all one take. Pause this for Festy. Just add to the search Smeagel when he does the Schmeagel thing. So he's like just talking in, and we'll make a note for the editor. We didn't have the audio at the beginning to cut that little part.

That is a different level. So that people don't have it. All right. So go down. Go up. Is it that one? No, no, go down. That one right there.

Yeah, yeah. I think, I think this is it. Yeah. Smeagel was holding a debate with some other thought that used the same voice, but made it squeak and hiss. A pale light and a green light alternated in his eyes as he spoke. He smigel. Premised.

It's like 20 years later. Wild, I still got it. Yes. Yes, my precious. Gain the answer. We promised to save the precious nut to let him have it. Never. But it's going to him, yes.

Near every step. What's the orbit going to do with him? We want us. Yes, we won this. I don't know. I can't help it. Master's got it. Smith, I promise to help the master. That's good.

Yes. Yeah, that's the level. That's the level, man. That is, yeah. Different, different level right there. But you're right, it does hold up, like, incredibly well. And there's a lot of symbolism to the world, like the real world. Well, and the theme, one of the themes all throughout it of the human race and mankind just being so easily corrupted by power.

So to your earlier point of like, and it's a valid question, right? And you're actually posing kind of two different sides and neither of them when you play it out is acceptable. And that's kind of the interesting one. One is, let's not give centralized power any kind of real advantage in autonomy and machines because we're concerned that it could be used in a evil way. I'll just keep it very simple. That's one path. That path when you play that out is like, okay, I pretty much just guarantee the CCP is going to dominate us in that. the other path is we invest in it we harness the you know American economy and entrepreneurship and

innovation we do it how do we and then how do we then prevent it from being used for the blind kind of purposes yeah how do we put the guardrails how do we put guardrails how do we do it and are those guardrails the same that's probably an important thing as you you know, as we, as we expand into new kind of domains and doing things in different areas, there's a level of governance that needs to kind of happen with that. So I definitely support that. And it will be frontier. I think this is important, too.

Like, it's not, there's no playbook. Like this, you know, you're not going to pull up a court ruling from the 80s or a policy paper written by someone that's going to give you the answer on that like you're not this is frontier tech so it's going to actually be much like the lab colossus labs we were talking about earlier it's going to be kind of opaque from a policy and government standard of what is what kind of governance is like a speed bump versus a guardrail that's going to be kind of hard to determine so to me what i think matters and this is not to be tried or tributt or tribally about it but what matters is like One, the character and values of the people making those decisions has never been more important.

Because the place they come from is going to allow them to iterate on it a certain way. And then I think a very realistic view of the incentives has to be looked at. So the incentives of balancing incentives. You look at like our economy and theory, that's what we're trying to do is balance incentives. You know, you allow entrepreneurs and business leaders and technology. and innovators and engineers to build something to a certain point, if it gets to far too large to where it gets, you know, monopolistic power, then the government actually has like a responsibility to break that up to ensure a competition.

That's right. You know, and that's all part of like how they're governing this, you know, and that's viewed as a positive thing. I think probably by most people. That's views a positive thing. But when, hold on, when a government's looking at, say, Rockefeller Oil, these guys may understand that better. where I get a little cynical and go, oh, fuck.

It's like when you listen to some of these 80-year-old 50-year senators talk about social media, like, yeah, we went up to this, what's called the Facebook. And it's like, you're going to have a real conversation with these people to govern them when, you know, you're, you know, a ludite. No, I 100% agree. I mean, that's also why, like, this. And I did not believe this is a controversial position. I'm a businessman. Like, so, you know, this, I don't get a lot involved in a lot of this. but like term limits kind of make a lot of sense here.

Good luck. Like that also good luck, I agree. That could be part of it. And you could make, you can play out an argument where the lack of term, term limits might be what causes one of those innovation pathways to go malign. It could, you could trace that back from, you know, you have to imagine you're in your 2050 and then you're debriefing like a historian where we are now and how we got to some maligned place in 2050.

You could probably, you could play at a very. incredible scenario where you trace that back from contributing factors to the root cause being we just the term limits were weren't enacted so the same people sat in the same environments and they weren't the right people to make this happen you know as as we're going through like you know what thomas coon write about i believe we're in is a if you read structures of scientific revolution it's like a it's kind of you know it's an old school book but the basic premise of the book he literally says this is the book it's a little bit older but the basic premise of that book is Like as you have these epochs of new scientific revolutions, you know, from steam engine to, you know, airplanes and jet age and all this, as you, as you progress through that, he actually says it's like, sometimes you have to just wait for that previous generation to die off before he can really like, you know, really move fast.

Yeah. Innovation now is happening so fast that's not going to happen. And life's being extended, extended, which is a positive thing. So, yeah, I think you could argue that I think that's actually a salient argument. of like another reason why term limits matter is to get the right kind of people in place to put very well thought out governance to allow us to maintain technology dominance while preventing it from turning it into a 1984 situation and that will not be easy that will not be easy like that's going to take very serious people with very high IQs doing very real things and it will

And, you know, you know, it will also be not just humans. It'll be a group of humans and machines doing this. The machines will be involved in this. The machines already are, right? Who makes a decision now without at least GPTing at once? Okay. And that's influencing you. Like, you're programming your own mental algorithm.

Sure. 100%. Like, you know, and humans are much more suggestible than we like to admit we are. Yeah. So you're all, it's already happening. We already live in that world. But you also, you know, there's optics with this stuff. everywhere, just like there's with everything. And the company people think about with this whole

space at the top is Palantir. They are the example company. And when you see a company that was funded by NQTel, by the bureaucracy, CIA, run by guys who are part of, especially when you look at Peter Thiel, like the elite structure, the Illuminaity Elite, if you will. And, you know, they're bragging about using surveillance everywhere, including one fucking domestic protests, people get worried. Everyone out there gets worried about that because it's like, well, we're already seeing it play out.

And not only is it not being legislated, the fucking government's funded them. You know? And I would like to think, because there's a litany of problems here, I would like to think that we find a way to harness this all. I am an optimist with things. And sometimes I'm like, damn, am I too much of an optimist?

Do I just think we're just going to figure it out all the time? But I just over time, we have always figured things out. And I used to, when I was in my parents' house for the first three and a half years in the studio behind me, I had two pictures on top of each other. And I remember, like even back in episode 16 of my buddy Mitch, like a little more than two hours in that episode, we were talking about the Isaac Asimov last question. And I pointed to these pictures. And I said, okay, top picture was a gray scale shot. of Bikini Atoll, which is the island that we blew off the earth for a nuclear test in like 1946 or 47, something like that. And the bottom picture was a recreation of Michelangelo's hand

of God and Adam, but instead of the hand of God, it was a robot hint. And the reason I had that there was because to me it was like the ultimate symbolism of we had the quote-unquote, I have become death weapon 80 years ago. And now like the whole fucking world has it and for some reason through multi-generations knock on wood we haven't used to kill all of each other and have a nuclear holocaust and then the world meaning through all the ups and downs of dictators regime changes espionage problems wars whatever people have always just decided that's a button we don't push which says something about even the worst of humanity at least having some sort of like line in the sand that they

won't go past. And my optimism there was that with the robot hand, you know, with AI, if you will, we will be able to have the same type of outcome. The difference between the two is that a nuclear weapon until it has AI in it can't think for itself. If we develop things that can think for themselves, there are a lot of ways this could go wrong. I definitely agree. Um, reactions of this too. Like context matters and the right, the right mental model matters here. You can even probably check, fact check me on this.

But the, you know, a couple things have happened. Like one, I think, I do think in general, um, because of our, and I mean the worlds, at least the West and in many cases beyond this, the West, we've become very successful. almost opulent in how we live. And that can make you soft in a lot of ways and lose some context. So just to add to your point about nukes didn't, the advent of the nuke and even using it, an atom, an atom bomb at least, it didn't actually cause the end of the world, right? We're still here. We're still here.

And if you look at the number of deaths from, from combat, from, from, wars, it's a fraction since 1945 to 2026 of what was experienced from even just just the Great War, you know, World War I, a fraction of it. We've, as a globe, we've actually experienced unprecedented levels of peace. It may not feel like it, but if you define war as someone dying, not just feeling anxious, but like actually dying from somebody who's trying to kill you. you shedding blood out of anger. If you define it that way,

unprecedented peace we're actually in. A level of prosperity which is never even experienced. You're talking about gross numbers and also literally per capita percentages too. Both. Yeah. Both.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So that, you know, that begs a, that begs a little bit, it puts some context on. Yes. Like, it puts some context, you know. Some of the anxiety

for how we view technology is simply just, it's alleviated when you just kind of step back and say, okay, look at actually where we're at right now. Like, yes, it's unknown. There's some unknowns, right? Nobody knows the future. There's some unknowns.

We're doing some new things and doing things differently. And yeah, that happens. But that's a very real thing to, you know, and to just go on, we want to talk about Palantir from it in our experience with them. We were a cohort startup with them. So we worked with them. We've co-developed with them. And what I

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

So there's that. The other thing that, the other thing is kind of interesting is, is there's different size to look at it too. But what I'm, what I am like animated by is that, you know, that individual, that war fighting individual, that American citizen, that we've asked to go manage violence or to do very dangerous things somewhere else. And if using, if they use, and they do, right, they use, they use Palant, volunteer type products, then if I can work with them and give them that asymmetric advantage

that we just talked about to give Americans national security forces. And these are like real humans now. We're not talking about like abstract things. We're talking real people your age, trying to do really dangerous things and trying to sense make from a crazy world. And if these tools are helping them and it's actually helping whether it's law enforcement so they get back to their families every night, whether it's a warfighter, so they also can get back to their family. I'm very animated by doing that. That doesn't mean there isn't

guardrails that should be talked about for all of this, right? Doesn't mean there isn't guardrails. And like any industry company, we are, you know, there is that facet of like we're fashioning the ring and then giving that ring to somebody else and hoping it works out. Yes. There is a facet of that. Like, that is. And I think we, I think we as a society have to wrestle with that and how we can keep improving that for sure. But, you know, I say that my experience is that I'm very motivated by giving those war fighters, those professionals, those Americans doing critical infrastructure disaster response. We're doing some things in those environments as well. Like, giving them the best possible tools do their job.

That's very animating, you know, for us. And that clarifies ambiguity. Like, when you go, like, go sit in one of their environments. Go try and do their job. and do it under a threat of lethal engagement on both sides. Go to a war game and do it. Like where somebody's coming after you. That's where it gets hard.

That's where it gets hard. And that's where a lot of the anxieties and questions, they have a way of melting away and things get very simple, very, very, simple. Like many of the combat missions I flew in gunships, where it gets very simple in certain points, especially around lethal engagements. And it gets to the point of like,

let's make sure my team comes home tonight. And that's basically all the matters. Which is a perfectly understandable motivation. And, you know, these are one of those where the motivation can be used for the underlying method or it could just actually be the motivation, which is what it's supposed to be. And let me clarify that. I almost like, while guys like you were talking, and I like picture the ghost of Scott Horton sitting there and like going,

come on, man, you know, like the whole time and flipping out because like he's very, very libertarian. I love talking with Scott. He's great. But like, you know, it might be happening. I felt this like cold presence. Yeah, I feel like he's like sitting there just like, like, I mean, like, Julian, you're really going to let this guy keep going on like this? But like, there's things Scott says that have a ton of evidence to it that also point to ways that. it, you know, whether it be agencies or the military, you know, the Pentagon obviously running the military or administrations have taken advantage of these types of national security things in the past to make it for blanket for every single thing they do. Now, he may go too far and say,

therefore, none of it's real. I'm going to disagree with Scott there. I sit in the middle of you too, quite literally. And so I hear you, like when I, especially when I'm hearing about like American lives or like our guys at the tip of the spear being being, being, forget these are these are human beings that are part of my country as well and they're going to engage other human beings that I also would rather not see die right and so naturally in those types of situations I want to be like okay whatever we got to do but then what do we do that then becomes a precedent that we can't undo and this kind of goes to like this isn't a perfect parallel but you'll see what I'm saying it goes to the slippery slope argument with Ed Snowden sure yeah yeah Snowden was stuck between a shit and fart he was fucked either way On one hand, he was going to break his oath and whistleblow on something, which went against his contract and, you know, could have been called treasonous or whatever. Or on the other hand, he was going to allow the administration and continue trampling everyone's constitutional rights illegally using a backdoor to the legal system that no one knew about without them knowing it if he doesn't say anything. And to me, I think he made the right call. But here's like, here's and it's not necessarily his fault, but this is the problem.

he now set a precedent that you can whistleblow. So the next guy whistleblows for something a little bit less and then a little bit less and a little bit less and pretty soon, you know, someone whistle blows because someone took a shit in the wrong place. Yeah, that's all right. And that's not his fault. Like it was a shitty situation to be in. But like it's the same kind of psychology I think of when you're painting that example of like how many times do, whether it's Palantir, which is the example we use or any company could be your company or whatever. Do we say, ah, fuck, we don't want to risk it. Just just hit the button. And then that becomes the norm. And it has cascading butterfly effects that make things actually worse than they were. Do you think about that? I 100% do. And I think two of the things that just I thought of as you as reflecting on this. This is an important conversation too. One is, and I think we've kind of lost this art because it's nuanced.

You know, we have to, there's a, it starts from a level of mutual respect regardless on like, okay, you're an American, you're an American. There's a level of respect. so we could have a certain conversation on this. We used to, you know, and this is built into even kind of our code. We code with the military and other agencies where you could have this, you know, conscientious objector, right? And there's a whole, like, way of doing this.

And that was literally designed, I think, to, it was designed to prevent somebody from doing damage to their own soul. And here's what I mean by that. You, you will erode your own soul. You'll do moral harm to yourself. If you're engaging in something that you, don't believe, you know, or you have questions on. Maybe it's questions. Maybe you're just concerned. Maybe it's a gut reaction that you can't get over on this. And, you know, we used to

have society, and it's kind of degraded, unfortunately, I think. Like, I don't hear a lot of people talk about this or even acknowledge this. This was a way for it to be like, okay, basically, let's allow this person to take a knee from what we're doing because we don't want them to do harm to themselves from a moral, we care about them as a soul. We care about them as a soul. And all humans are a soul, right? Even the enemies that I've put into the ground, they're still a soul. So we, there's an element that you care about them for. Like there's a humanity. There's a spark of divinity there that you care about. I think there's a way to acknowledge and respect that. That acknowledges and respects that each human also ultimately, you know, it's between them and their

creator and they have to feel comfortable with that. And if you do, if you're having somebody do something that violates their conscience, like genuinely violates their conscience, not they're manipulating it to try and talk about it, but genuinely violates it. That's not a good thing. Like, that's not a good thing. So I think, one, I think there's some off ramps that we used to have that would, that kind of help in these situations, because these are tough, these are tough life and death situations. And in all of the reasons that we talked about earlier, okay, let's, let's be, and maybe there's a good reason, right? Let's be, and I don't, and I don't, me as is a pejorative, but let's just be hyper paranoid about enabling a 1984 situation.

Right? So like going down that road. I think about, so you, you asked like, do I think about could we be paving a 1984 situation for me? 100% I think about that. I also think about could, if we don't, am I enabling the CCP to do it over me? And this is where like, this is where wisdom comes into play. This is totally fair.

keep going. So within, you know, a wise man needs to look at the full situation and think about not just the slippery slope or try to think through second, third, and fourth order consequences of taking an action, but it's also, what if I do not take that action? What if I don't go down that road? Then what is the second, third, and fourth order effects on that? Yes. Meaning sometimes, and this is just the reality of the world, and I don't know. like it. But sometimes your choices are a piece of shit and you got to pick the best one at the top of the pile. They're always like that. Yeah. Maturity is maturity. Maturity is understanding they're always like that. Yeah. Like if, you know, if a decision maker, and this is true, like if you're a

policy type, this is true when I was a commander, I commanded in combat and both in peacetime. This is true me as a founder. There's never decisions, never a decision where it's, it's perfectly clear. I fully understand everything's going to go and there's zero risk. Like, that's never it. So the way I approach any decision maker, decision like that with my company now and born out of how I did it in combat in more intense situations before was you take all available data, you evaluate potential courses of action.

If none of them are acceptable, acceptable doesn't mean perfect. It means acceptable as best you understand the situation. That's all real leaders make real decisions. And you may have months to make that decision. You may have seconds to make that decision. Depends. Wisdom understands that as well. And if none of them are acceptable, you work to generate another option for yourself.

What made you effective as a battlefield commander when you were in the Air Force and had to make decisions in seconds? What made you effective at being able to do that? Making decisions in seconds starts with preparation. So it starts with that. So you rehearse, you think through, much like what we're talking about right now. Mission planning for a combat situation. Let's take the Venezuela, you know, action that was just taken. And I have no particular insights on this.

But undoubtedly, it was planned for months. It was planned for months. You see the video, Trump watching the... I've seen a lot of hilarious videos off of this. He was watching them do the war game of it like four months ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's been... It looks great.

It takes for these. These things take a lot of time. As they're doing it, they're playing out. What they're attempting to do is answer like, okay, if we go this way, what are the second, third and fourth order effects of that? If we don't do it, we go this. One thing and God love them. I love everybody equally.

I almost, you know, pains me to admit a little of it that a seal taught me this. But when I was working with some seals, they did, they taught me this. Which seal? It was a unit out in, it was a guy's name. I don't want to drop his name right now. was a unit out in uh in germany well i lived on germany um yeah yeah yeah yeah um and uh they were presenting like a con ops which you'd say a concept of operations basically get approval to go do an action and they went through this is what we want to do this is why we want to do it you know uh etc and

then they get to the end and this is this is this is actually something that i to this day i still talk with us. And they talk about different risks of taking that action. We take this action. This could go bad. This could go bad. This could go bad. This could go bad. You identify these risks. This is answering how I, how I make decisions and how I made them effective in combat. You identify these ones and they say, well, how can I mitigate that risk? Like right now, I'd assess it's a 20% chance that happening. How can I get that down to 5%? A lot of times there's little actions I can take. I can't dig it down to zero, but I can get it down to like less likely. Or if it happens, it's less painful, mitigating.

So you get all these ones. They also, and this is what they did, I thought they'd exceptionally well, they also then publish the risk of inaction, not just the risks of the action. Many people forget this part. And it's just easy to forget. And then they go through the risk of inaction

and say, yeah, if we don't do this, this could happen. And then this could escalate. And then this could happen. And it gives you a more balanced approach of how to make good decisions of both what is the risk of the action what is the risk of not taking that action i hope people listening to this as a side note are applying this to their life too this is very applicable to everything it's how i think of every decision it's definitely how i think

of um you know as a founder going from zero to one and you know going you know building something like you're confronted with constant decisions and it's kind of like there's a thousand doors you can go through you only go through one and you don't have the resources to go through the other 999. So I hope I picked the right one. And you and then maybe I don't go through any at all right now. Maybe I wait. Like it's constantly this. So evaluating risk of the action, risk of the inaction, which risk can I mitigate?

Which risks come with the high ROI? Because sometimes you want to take the risk. But I don't want to take a high risk if it, if it's only going to give me a low return. That's right. But if there's a, but I will take a high risk. in some cases if the potential payoff is huge. And I mean, as an entrepreneur, I live in that world, right? I live in the world of 1% probability of success, 100xR.

That's right. Like, that's, every day is like that. That's also thinking, thinking through risk of action, inaction, how to mitigate it helps quantify. It's not pure quantify, it's qualified too, but it helps quantify and clarify your thinking. It's like a framework for how to make decisions. And then you do that with the available time.

Kind of like a general decision-making principle. I can't remember where I read this. No, I didn't come up with it, but I apply it. And that is you delay a decision as long as possible. So if I'm confronted with like a complex decision, one of the first things you do is say, what is the last possible minute I have to make that decision? You're like, no kidding.

Put a star on the counter then. Okay, the decision point is here. So then that buys me all this time to do analysis and data gathering. Hey, I don't know this. I don't know that I can buy all that. I can buy all that. Do better risk analysis. And then I know I have to make it by this point or there's some kind of like very, you know,

bad things are going to happen, like an off ramp. That sometimes that's like a, you know, sometimes that's months down the road. And sometimes that's like four seconds from now. That's right. You know. So you have to be a variable on that. Yeah. I think you also got at least like the amazing decision makers that I've observed across all different backgrounds in my life.

They have an incredible ability to respond and immediately reduce to zero or as close to zero, I should say, as possible stress. And just look at the facts of the situation as well. And there's no better example than like in warfare where bullets are fucking flying and people are dying. You have to be clear. You've got to be not stressed. I mean, that's like impossible. Yeah. But, you know, the guys who can just look at it, and I don't mean this to make light of it,

but gamify it for a minute, understand like exactly. Oh, it's a right move. I just laid it out. Great system. Yeah. Like there is, there is just an incredible advantage to being able to do that. That comes with time. That comes with, you know, so this is, if you're well trained, especially in the military context,

early on, you get a bunch of, um, um, kind of like stress inoculation things right you go to survival training and all kinds of stuff happens there you do intense things in the air in my case and you you kind of ramp it up so there's a to do what you're talking about to me i think there's a physical aspect of it where you have to be able to know how to manage your own central nervous system like that actually is a real thing yes you know you can't let it take over and start getting panic attacks or flight or fight like you can't have that and it's really it's really like flight or freeze you can't have any freezing going on like you've got to be at a process in the midst of that. So how do you process in the midst of that? It's all kinds of stuff

going on. There's a, there's an interesting, maybe worth looking up. There's a institution I've done a little bit of work with called the Institute of Human Machine Cognition. Yeah, they do work. It's kind of a small little lab. They do work for all kinds of folks. But they've done some work. I'm, you know, this is in my area. I'm not biologist, but they've done some work. They actually talked to me about this, where they've studied the biology at some kind of cellular level. And if it finds that you'll probably see it. They've studied the biology of like people that have successfully been through lethal combat, been shot at, been engaged, been, you know, in these kind of life for death situations

routinely or through survival training and or some kind of, you know, intense situation and still are high functioning. There's there appears to be some evidence that there's actually DNA differences. There's actually some DNA differences here. I believe that. I believe that. What is not clear, what is not clear from what I've talked to them about on this, is that if it's like born DNA, you know, from your bloodline, or is it that you've, you've actually changed your own DNA from your actions, like a, I would say like a, a spirit-led altering of your DNA. From a young age. From my own perspective, I think that's what happened.

I think the inoculation, I think the mindset, I think my deep personal faith as a Christian, I think all of those has literally changed my DNA. I totally believe that I was actually talking with someone the other day about this in the context of toughness. And they're like, you think people are just born with that? And I said, no. But I think people's environment and the way they respond to that environment molds, molds what that is immediately. And then when environments may change drastically, they can develop it later or lose it.

Yeah, also true. And I'm the furthest thing from a DNA geneticist, so let's not go outside my lane here. But I would be very curious to see the science of people studied both environments that they're born into and how that affects them while they're growing up. Right, right, right. But then also people that you start square zero,

at age 22 out of college and study them from 22 to 30 and see how or if their literal DNA may just move the little bit, you know, with a variable. Or what years that happens? There's there's also this thinking, this is probably all the time. Like I was just on a a call, you know, well-intentioned call with a- bad way to say it is. It's like, yeah, I was with the Antichrist Peter Thiel. It was not like that. It was an, it was an, it was an,

individual that's trying to like, you know, work with founders and like, you know, high stress kind of like business types, entrepreneurs and all that. And we're talking about like ways to manage stress. One, I freaking hate that term. I don't teach my kids that. I don't manage stress. Honestly, it's weak and it's dumb. What you do, this guy's talking to his nine year old. Stop being a pussy. Here's, you know, it's like, yeah, maybe. What I would say is how do you develop a resiliency against the stress is way more interesting than how do you manage it and try and like reduce it. So it doesn't mean that you don't, you know, get a good night's sleep or go take a few breaths

or do yoga, whatever the freak you want to do. Like, whatever. Fine. Like, fine. If you really know that, go for it. But if it helps you go for it. But, but really, like, think about, you know, what kind of men do we need in the year 2026 and beyond?

ones that can be resilient to the environment and actually, and I believe this, they get stronger with the stress. Yes. That's the kind that you need. We need more of that. We do way more of that. Do you think people can use, how do I want to put this? Do you think people have an ability potentially in certain environments to use, to use?

use major psychological weaknesses they may have as a strength? I do. Yeah, it's such a good, good question. Like, there is no growth without suffering. So if someone is suffering, and we're all humans, so there's a level of suffering that is just part of the human experience. And if there's someone who has a pernicious type of suffering, physical, psychological, perhaps something else.

And if they have learned to not only just like deal with it, but learn to strengthen around it, that all of a sudden that suffering, as unpleasant as it is, may actually become the vessel for growth that allows them to do things they never would have done otherwise. So this is where, I say it's all time, like, you know, founding a company is kind of like a, it's like a personal development journey disguised as a business. And this is where finding, you know, confronting your own demons, we all have them, your own weaknesses, slaying them on a daily. basis and then they come back the process of doing that enables a level of like clarity of stress inoculation of good decision making of optimism even this process of like slaying your daily dragon this process of doing that gives a tremendous confidence is a tremendous confidence that can come

with that you know like a micro wisdom of that is like you start your day with a good workout like Like you tends to like set you up for the day, right? 100%, you know? That's what you're going to there. You're like, you go into the gym so that you can slay a dragon. Yes. That's why you do it, you know? The second order effects is like, oh, I got cool veins today or whatever.

But you really go in for that reason. Clarity. Yeah, it's cleared in the brain. And it's clarifying because it's like, okay, I have, I have this. I'm going to be in this environment where there's no lies. There's no lies in this environment. There's no, you know, there's no fakeness. The weight is either lifted or it is not.

not. So I can be in this environment. I get this kind of like quick dose of physical truth and a chance to conquer something immediately. And then use that to kind of, you know, propel me throughout the day. That can be done in much bigger things with much harder things than just a little conquering a little workout. And then I think if done right, and if you respond with, you know, in a positive way, that can create, you know, capabilities to do things, whether it's a business or, you know, whatever it is, that you would never have done otherwise. I have to admit that this is anecdotal from my own experience,

and I haven't had someone in here who's an expert who could talk to me about this and other things and related things or been tested in any way. But the reason I asked you that question is because I truly believe your biggest weakness in your life can be harnessed to use. as a major force in what you do. And one of the things I've recently started telling some people in my life about, and most of them are shocked when they hear it, is that I have insanely crippling anxiety, like insane.

And I hide it very well. There's probably some people in some environments who know me, who'd be like, ah, I could see that. But in most environments, they'd be like, you? You know, usually I'm like kind of the calmest person in those respects. But I actually think it's what allows me to do this job in here because when I walk through that door, like, I don't have anxiety about performing this job. Right. But I have anxiety for the pressure of being the best in the world on this day when I come in here with whoever's sitting in that seat across from me.

And I take that and then the cameras go on, the mics go on and I'm able to simultaneously stay the same person I did when we were just bullshitting before cameras. and also turn on this thing to where all of that like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I got to be fucking perfect turns into like, woo free flow. Yeah. Zoom. And then I may walk out of here and have serious troubles with it in other parts of my life right after this and trust me I do. But like something about it has created and that's why I guess like there's a piece of it

I'm grateful for like it's created something to where I can fucking do what I do at the highest level because of that problem. your upper and lower limits for your nervous system, which is what we're talking about here, and more. There's a, I definitely believe, a spiritual aspect of this as well. But knowing an upper and lower limit of your spirituals, of your, of your CNS, like when you're way high, fully, full anxiety, low sleep or REM sleep, you know, whatever, in between. That allows you to better enter flow state, which is between those two ends. If you don't know your upper and lower limit, it is harder to find that flow state.

It is harder. So this, this, you know, this anxiety or, you know, or whatever it is your feeling is a, you know, it's an overacted CNS to some point. And it's, it's allowing you to see your upper and lower limits. And a lot of good research on like flow is like right in between. It's like halfway between upper and lower. Like that's where you're in that, you get in that time warp. You get to where you kind of get the, you kind of get the,

this like both very cool tunnel vision but also like this very calm kind of thing yes and you start and you just are full performance mode right yes that's what that's what brad pitt's character played in f1 like when he's when he's driving that was the only time he you know for all kinds of whatever for that character the only time he could achieve it was driving is a lot of people that when they're flying they're like that's like that's when they kind of achieve it that movie it was a great by the way it was a great movie. So yeah, I like I think that's I think I think you're it's insightful and and not something to be shied away from like that's it that's an advantage. You know, that's an advantage and you know, I'm not suggesting that it's a good idea to go struggle with anxiety. But what I would suggest,

what I would suggest is that if you have phobias, you need to go after them. Because you go after those phobias that's going to push you to that upper limit of CNS. One, you can slay it. Two, you're mapping out your own response systems so that you can find that flow state. And, you know, professionally and personally, like, there's nothing better to me in that flow state. Like, there's nothing better. There's nothing better than that.

Yeah. Like doing, you know, doing something at a super high level where there's a clarity to it. You feel the performance. You're right at that, like, right engaged. part, the neurons and your prefrontal and all that, like, are most engaged. And you're, you're just locked in. Like, there's nothing, there's nothing like that. So it's euphoric. It kind of is, right? And your, our chemistry is like designed for that. So how do I get to that? You could probably argue, I don't have any scientific basis on this. Like, you know, to your point,

I'm not, I'm not, is that my depth of two. But if you were to go after your phobias or the things at least you think you've never mapped before, like try something you've never done. And, done it and went to like the edge of your fear, whether it's heights or whether public speaking or, you know, whatever, right? You go, you push that to the edge because most people, if you put them in a certain environment, they'll also have tripping anxiety. Sure. You know, if I dangle somebody from a certain height. Yeah, absolutely. If I put them in front of 10,000 people to speak. Absolutely. So it's all situational. It's all situational. It's just strange when you're in a regular situation, though, and, you know, you're not saying anything. You're not shaking or whatever. And then you, I'm

like if I wanted to break it down to someone, be like, I'm feeling it right now. They'd be like, what? You know, whereas the other scenarios, you get dangled from a building and stuff like that, we're all going to react. Well, it's a, you know, it's a one, strange is good. Strange is good. Yeah. This is a, this is, you know, the, uh, the neurodivergent are incredibly important

in our society right now in whatever capacity that is. So being different, having, being wired a little bit different, looking at things a little bit differently lean into that like i'd say that to anybody like lean into that um that's that's what uniquely you um nobody needs a carbon copy of uh somebody else nobody needs a control c control v they need you to be you uh which is what i try and do right i try to just be me um as much as i can and you know as authentic as i can and it's kind of a wrestling of like you know continually becoming more authentic as you burn down all of these kind of facades around you and that allows you to enter that kind of just state i think a lot better and when i want to found now you know

found in the company and where i'm at now like it's i'm pretty much i'm in that space a lot even when i'm doing there's tasks on every once while you don't love but even when i'm doing those things like it's a there's no kind of replacement for that like i can be really creative i can build things i can do kind of what i believe i'm meant to do at this time of my life right now there's no kind of replacement for that and if that is from you know without psychomansal analyze myself like if that is from things that happened in my past or early childhood stuff or you know whatever if that is all an amalgamation of that then awesome right like you know both the the trophies and the scars are part of who i am yes that's true for all of us like and they're both you know they're both uh

they're both just uniquely organic to us and something to kind of be embraced in a way. Absolutely. And to your point, you have to harness it for everything, including the things that aren't as fun. You know, you're running a company like you. Yes, you get to do a lot of the cool creative stuff. You get to call the shots. You get to come up with the ideas. That's all fun.

And there's a lot of work that goes into it. That could be administrative bullshit that falls on you. And I understand that. I do a very different thing from you. But running a business, it's like that old Mike Tyson line. You got to do discipline is doing the thing you hate the most like you love it. Like you love it. Yeah.

And I think I talk into a lot of military guys, especially who served a lot of time. I think the military does an amazing job of like accidentally teaching. You do a lot of things that suck. Yes. That's, uh, that's definitely true. You do a lot of things that suck. So even, you know, it's all relative, right? Like that's an advantage.

It's an advantage. And there's some, like, there's some interesting, there's some interesting research on this, too, about this something else I'm passionate about about veteran-led founding business, that there's some, there used to be this kind of, you know, post-World War II, you had a bunch of vets came back, and the entrepreneurship was at massively high levels. And then you had a little bit more of that. It was still quite high, but after, like, Vietnam, the vets came back and they founded businesses and did all kinds of small business, big business, medium, like all in between.

After global war on terrorists, was talking like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, 20 years of that from like O-Wand to COVID, basically, and we pulled Afghanistan. The numbers are way lower. Way lower. I don't have good answers for why that is either. But I think it's a problem. I think it's a problem.

I think it's actually like a really interesting catalyst because of what you just said. The military teaches you these kind of like unique skills that transfer really well to, and I'm not just trying to say just entrepreneurship, but like transfer well to doing that kind of stuff. And for some reason that just hasn't materialized. realized as much when you look at kind of the numbers. So this is something, you know, I, as you talk to like people that, you know,

like transition out of a military and a civilian job, it's always a thing. Like it takes a lot of work. It's different. You have, you know, there's all kinds of different, there's all kinds of different aspects to it, you know. For a lot of folks, it takes rethinking kind of your identity. Oh, yeah. I mean, like, like, he used to wear a flight suit with the name on it.

Yeah. I was like, yeah, that's what I'm. I had these wings and had this special patch from a school I went to. And I had this, you know, that earned this thing. And I had this thing here. I had this rank up here. And like, you know, so it's all kind of part of, it becomes very, even though you try not to let it, everybody tries not to let it.

It kind of becomes like part of that. So transitioning from like kind of burning that down in a way, not in a negative way, but just like, hey, that's over. It's time to, you know, Jesse Hamill has to be something else. Yeah. It's not that anymore. Right. people are going to see you differently.

You have to see yourself differently. It's important to kind of find a vessel for that, I think. The benefit of, is for my kind of own personal experience is that I think that's actually a really healthy thing for, you know, a person to do. I mean, I think like a man should probably do that every 10 years anyhow. Should probably turn the page, really assess, burn it down, build from there. Like, how do you prevent becoming kind of stale and, calcified.

Yes. And we all see it. We see people that didn't do that. How do you prevent that? And so the exercise I go through, and this was instrumental in deciding to not just, you know, retire, hang out on the beach, get like an easy, you know, some kind of easy, low impact job and just kind of hang out, right? You know, why go back to zero? why, you know, paper a company, work for nothing for a long time and just kind of go after something, you know, in my mid-40s. Like, why do that? And part of, for me, part of that was like,

I think forward to, I'm 44 right now. So I think forward to 50-year-old Jesse Hamill. What do I want him to be like? What experiences I want him to have? What skills I want him to have? What skill set do I want him to have? What kind of a leader do I want him to be? What kind of character do I want him to have? And I'm engineering that, that man right now. The decisions I make, the risk I take or don't take, the things I do or don't do, the way I live is I'm building that person right now, like brick by brick, I'm building them. So for me, a lot, you know, a way of thinking about it is like, How do I build the person that I want to be at that age? And that's part of, you know, why I went down this journey to begin with, you know.

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

What does that look like? You can't know every single variable, but what are, what types of things are you pursuing? Where are you in your life? Stuff like that. And what I find is that I do have a very good ability to be like cold turkey on stuff, meaning like I, and I'm very grateful for that. I guess that's like, you know, you get the high anxiety, but you have this. So you get something good.

But like, I can wake up one day and be like, I've been doing this. this every day and then never do it again, right? I'm never going to test that out on heroin or something, to be clear. Like, I think there's probably guardrails there. Probably, probably a bad idea. Put that in a bad idea folder. Right. That I never think of it. But on pretty much everything I've tried to do that with, I can. And, you know, when you can think of your life farther out, whether that's three years out, five years out or 10 years out, I do think that even if you don't have quite as good of ability to do that naturally out there, like if you're listening right now, I do think you'd surprise yourself with how much you could be like, wait a minute, I agree. I'm going to stop this

thing or I'm going to start this thing. I 100% agree. I like, because I've, I've said this to, you know, when I was in, I said to junior officers, junior NCOs, you know, same kind of folks that I would talk to. Uh, and I would say it to them. And, and I find, and I find, it to be a pretty powerful way of just thinking. You know, and what it's also, it's forcing you to think of, you know, our time's a finite resource. Yes. It's a finite resource, you know, you know, it's over like that.

You know, it's over like that. Ecclesiasty says life's a vapor. That's the best term. It's a vapor. It's gone. So where do you want to spend your time? You know, and, and, you know, I don't necessarily think it can be a useful exercise. I don't know I'm not I'm not one of these legacy types you know because I sometimes I think

that can get a little you start thinking that way and get a little narcissistic but you know but it but it but the the value is like where do you spend your time what are you what are you trying to do? Like who are you working, you know, working to help who, you know, what is kind of your role? Who did you become? You know, what did you do? That's actually kind of the most fundamental thing. Like, what did you actually do? There is a, uh, um, this is another just like militaryism. I heard us from a couple generals early in my, early my time where they gave kind of a bit of a speech.

It was actually very inspirational. Was that air command staff college in 2014? And the basic concept of this guy said is like, you're gonna, and this is, he's talking the concept of like an active duty military career, which is very regimented like to become a general. Like it's, there's like, oh yeah. There's basically like a thousand different check marks you have to. check. It's very regimented. And if you if you drive your career off of this path, it can be

very difficult to get back on, no matter who you are. It's just the nature of the machine. So he's talking through this and kind of one of the key things he says, like, you can either be somebody or do something. And that's how you kind of fashion your life from, you know, in this case, a professional career. But I think that applies all kinds of stuff. Be somebody or do something. Why not both? You try to do both. the context of this was you kind of get this split personality, you do both poorly. So the decisions you're making like professional decisions or life decisions, if you're focused on I want to be,

and I'm not necessarily throwing shade one or the other, but I'm just saying, if you're focused on it, I want to be, I want to be known as this. I want to be the best this. Like, I want it like this. The example is this. I'll admit a weakness here, a nostalgia weakness I have. I do love watching Michael Jordan old videos.

Like, it's just, it's just a thing. Like, I just, I'm always, like, if I'm, you know, if I'm doing the trying to try not to scroll and scroll in, like in a Jordan video comes up, I'm probably going to watch it. Oh, you want, you watch it. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And Jordan, a great example of this, like, you know, I don't know the guy at all.

You know, I'm just, I'm just judging about what I've seen, you know, screens all that. But, like, this was not a guy who cared about being the best. best player ever. Like everything I've seen, that's not what he cared about. What he cared about is winning the most ever. Like doing the thing, not becoming something. Not like, hey, I'm going to join the NBA and I want it to be said that I'm the greatest

X, Y, Z afterwards. And so his whole focus was just like, I'm just going to do whatever it takes to win every night. Whatever it takes to win. That's it. And it was all about doing. That for me has always been. very, you know, inspirational.

And so it's very much like how I've oriented my life now is I want to do. I don't want to do. My name will be forgotten. Just like all of ours would be forgotten. Like before I'm cold in the ground. Yes. It'll be, you know, it will be. Absolutely.

Even though, you know, the most powerful people are in society that's that way. A week later, it's gone. Yep. It's gone. So what you did, what you did, one, that's a, I think a much better way of thinking about how to live your life. And I also then believe that there's eternal consequences for what you do as well. So there's a much higher kind of oculus that matters if you were to look down on like how we're living at our lives and a much broader thing.

That motivates me for like doing something, building something, doing, you know, solving some of these problems that we talked about earlier in this, you know, but for national security for and even broader just in robotics and AI like doing it. And if you focus on that instead of being something, it takes a lot of pressure on you. It takes a ton of pressure off, you know? So I'm going to slightly disagree with you by agreeing with you. Love it. All right. Bring it. Bring it.

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

for the last five years, nine months, and 29 days is doing. Yeah. I don't think every day, I don't wake up every day and say, I'm going to be the goat, right? At some point that thought may come in my head, you know, once a month or something like that, but it's a quick thought and it's out. My thought is, what am I doing today that's making me better than yesterday? What am I doing for tomorrow that's going to have me in the best position to be better than I am today?

What actions do I take to be consistent discipline and keep moving this thing forward while also improving and iterating at the same time? So my entire life is doing and in doing what's my goal. My goal is to win, right? And winning is subjective in this business. And by the way, being a goat, being the greatest of all time, it's totally subjective. You can't control that. How people look at you when you're in the grave, they're going to talk how they talk.

You can have all the evidence of the world to back up that you're the greatest man to ever live. And if someone's like, he was a jerk off, then guess what? That's what gets the headline. is what it is. But what you can do is where are your W's and where are your L's? And a lot of that is less subjective over time when people see it because they can see in my business like how people may gravitate towards it or connect with it or how you're able to go across such a range of people and be able to get things from them and get them to open up and stuff like that. Like over time, it shows itself. So for me, every single day I am exactly focusing on what you're saying,

which is I'm going to do all this stuff. And then my hope is at the end when I hang up the hat, you know, fucking 60 years from now or whatever, you know, I'll walk off and hopefully people look at me the way that I had the goal in my parents' house the first day, which is that it's the greatest. But I think one can be with the other, but to your point, what I'm saying is if you just then focused on the B, if you focus on the B, you don't necessarily do the things that make you that. You just want the fucking, for lack of a better term, you want the clout of the B. It doesn't work like that. There's also, I think that's really insightful.

And but when I was your age and younger, I would have said something very similar to what you just said. And I think there's probably an arc of how you change a little bit and how you, you know, there's different perspectives, which you want, right? Like if you still think the same, like, I would consider it like a massive failure.

If I still looked at the world the same way at 44, I did at 34. Like what a tragedy that would be, actually. Like, you mean you didn't grow at all for 10 years? Like, dear God. Like, what, you know, like, that is terrible. So some of, some of what I'm saying, I think, and we actually are like, there's, there's actually a lot of parallels here, but it will, I think the, the idea of doing something

and then, you know, the challenge, I don't even give you this challenge. The challenges then is, is, you know, is. you know, even what you're doing here. Is there something bigger that you're doing that's bigger than yourself? And is that maybe something that starts to become more motivating as the years go on? And that's just kind of a reflective thing. That's a reflective thing. No, I think that's perfectly said because I can tell you one of the things that,

that, you know, before I did this job, my whole life was being everyone's hype man. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. Right. What do I get to do in this job? Right. I get to be a lot of people's hype, man. Yeah. As long as I like them and, you know, cool and shoot the shit, I get to bring them on here, get him some visual to the world. I get to have some of my best friends work with me and build all their shit too. And it's like that is the coolest reward from it. It's bigger than just some asshole talking into a mic. You know what I mean? Like that's not what this is about. This is just the fun part of it. Yeah. You know? So I, no, and also what you're saying about you change. Dude, I couldn't even have a conversation with you.

myself four years ago, 10 years ago. It's like, who the fuck is that guy? You know, listen, I know you're dumb when you're young. I was retarded, you know? So it's like, we've come a long way. I'm probably still retarded. But we'll get there. Little is okay. Yeah, a little bit. Never go full. A little bit. But I, this, that was a fucking awesome tangent. I love talking about that stuff. But I do want to go back to, and we're going to tie this all together, I want to go back to those eight years where you were really in combat during G-Y because, as you said, that started in 06, right? Christmas. So I'm trying to think here. Yeah, Christmas of 06. So here's why I'm asking it. Because you were in the Air Force, in the air, and you're there at the dawn of drone warfare. That is true, actually. That is true. So let's start with this. What areas of combat did you see? What, what theaters and, you know, what were some major key moments during, during your eight years being in the ship? Yeah. So back then, and it's still true, there's not that many AC130 gunships compared to fighters, bombers.

There was a squadron of 16 and then a squadron of 8. I think we're up to 32, maybe to 36 right now. So it's grown, but that's still much, much lower numbers. So they use this term like high density or high demand, low density asset, basically. Everybody wants one, but there's only a couple of them to go around. what that meant was you kind of had you had these basically two different squadrons and in around those times this is also Iraq's going big and Afghanistan's going big that's where that's basically the U.S. is there's some other things too but those that's where basically it was so I spent most of my time you know in Afghanistan probably every single corner of that country yeah you know but that's where that's where a lot of it was so you're you know this is a you know it was a troubled time

so you yeah man back then it was kind of like uh oh just one more fighting season. Like, we're almost done. We're almost done, guys. Like, we're wrapping it up. We're wrapping it up. In 06, I remember hearing this. Like, now we're wrapping it up, guys. Like, like, this isn't 04 anymore. It's not 03. Like, we're wrapping this thing up. And, you know, my first one over there, I'm like, well, okay, I guess we know, we're about about to wrap this up. Yeah, I guess we won. Yeah, it was not that at all. Yeah, so, you know, that, so my, the, what that experience kind of felt like was, you know, at that point, you're running kind of target operations. You're going after like key al-Qaeda, Taliban, like this kind of like entity, you know, terrorist and or insurgent network.

You kind of using those terms almost interchangeably back then. And you'd have this big air stack. So you'd have like a ground team go do an action to try and find somebody. And then you'd have an air stack where you'd have like maybe a gun. ship, maybe a couple other aircraft, and even a drone, like you just said, like early days, you had drones in there, too. So I got very comfortable early on flying. It's kind of weird, you know, for like a just your average, like back then, like it was kind

of weird. Be like, okay, you're flying around, you look over. There's nobody in that plane. That plane's right next to me. There's nobody in that plane. There's a little weird right at first. But just, you know, working through that kind of like operations. So, so all kinds of operations where.

there's all kinds of terms and different things we could use to talk about, like, you know, what it was, but what it really was was, was you'd have AC130 gunships overhead to provide protection in case something happened in the ground party in most cases. So if they, you know, if they encountered some kind of enemy fire, if somebody, you know, in those days it was a big Dishka or something, you know, RPG, something like that was popped out of a mountain and start shooting at them, that would kind of be, that would be an area where we could then keep them safe from that. And that's the kind of stuff that you did. So what your typical mission would look like, you know, just like broadly describing. So you'd take off, we used to have the pagers. So we'd have these little like pagers.

Yeah. So we'd have pagers out. And you'd have these pages that have these different codes on them, and it's just numeric codes. And you'd just be at the gym where you'd be, you know, right next to the flight lines. You'd basically live almost next to your aircraft at an undisclosed location. And so you're out this undisclosed location.

vacation, Pager goes off, and that's somebody like back in an operating center saying, I need you to take off now. And inevitably would always happen when you're like halfway through the workout or something like this. It was always, it was like this. Or you're trying to eat, you know, whatever it was. Because it just happened, whatever. And then it was like, run, run, run, you know, out to the plane.

And somebody else has already kind of prepped it. You're taking off. Then you're going to respond. And it's probably because you had some kind of a ground team, an American or allied ground team that had taken fire or taken the casualty. in many cases, something bad had happened. And then you'd bring the gunship. The gunship had kind of unique capability here because just the basic physical one,

right, that you see in call duty. It's not forward firing weapons, side firing weapons. So you're circling a target, meaning you can kind of stare at that target area. You're staring at like a large posted stamp because you're flying pretty high. So you're staring at a large posted stamp area. So you can see friendly forces here. you can find if somebody's like trying to sneak up on them or if an enemy force is trying to infiltrate in some kind of angle. And then you're calling that out.

And then, you know, if as needed, you put down fires basically to keep them safe from this, you know. So all kinds of, all kinds of examples of that where you'd have, you know, ground team was just, on these days, Afghanistan, right? It would just pop out of nowhere. So just pop out of nowhere. It'd be like a building that you thought was fine. It was just like a little mud hut. And then all of a sudden, 30 people armed with AK-47s and maybe even setting up a dish go or some kind of large caliber weapon, a small arms weapon. And they just start shooting.

They just start, you know, ambushing them. This was constantly happening. Or you'd have a convoy of like five Humveys. They're trying to drive from one city to the next, you know, outpost. And they're driving. And there's a dead animal in the middle of the road. That's weird. that's weird so do we stop for that dead animal what is that i don't know it's like it's some kind of obstruction

so then they stop or something like that and somebody's put a improvised supposed to device like in this thing they're ready to clack this off with a cell phone somewhere else and then something like that would happen and then all of a sudden there's an ambush that happens so you'd also we would do a lot of and we and we protected a lot of american and allied forces that were just moving from one place to another as well you're also fighting the geography too the geography oh geography is nasty man it's yeah it's insane like um you know so you have you have like the foothills of the himalayas so you got the hindu kush kind of all in that area super jagged mountains i mean nasty terrain and that complicates both the flying it complicates the weaponry so you know shooting down a side of a mountain is much more complicated

and like shooting on a flat one uh it's almost like a trick shot in some areas So you're doing all of that. And then we're doing it with with drones. Like it was the first time drones were kind of used ever in this, you know, in that environment. So you got them in the stack. You got and then you're, you know, if you think about what's happening here. Are you in a plane sometimes controlling a drone as well?

That started and that's still, that's happening now. That started to happen towards the end. That started to happen towards the end. Yeah. There's actually some programs we're working with, yeah, you know, fast order we are now. the difference between but the pieces were all in those combat days

back in Afghanistan the difference between like a standoff weapon and a drone it's actually not that much difference between them one fly I mean they fly they both fly they both have seeker heads on them so they have some kind of like vision

or laser or something where they can see in front of them they have compute they have the ability to navigate and move and they fly through space really not that much of a difference between them. So you're getting a point now where you have weapons that can be controlled from like another aircraft, a gunship. In my case, you could have them from any kind of strike aircraft, even helicopters. Controlling a drone or even multiple drones from that same platform, it's actually pretty similar.

Like from a basically like software and, you know, just overall approach is pretty similar. So we started kind of seeing that. I didn't actually, I don't think we had that in mass by then in those days, but it started, that kind of stuff started happening. So you'd get used to, you'd get used to drones being they call it in the stack, right, with those aircraft that are stacked on top of each other. Should they be somewhere in the stack? I remember my first time I did a combined attack with a MQ9.

That's pretty wild the first time. Yeah. What was that like? So the MQ9 dropped, I think, a pair of 500 pounders, Gb-38. if I remember right. And then we combined our 105 millimeter and 40 millimeter at that time. Cannons along with like in that same target area to basically mass firepower against some kind of an enemy.

It's pretty awesome, actually. Worked out really, really well. So. Go lateness up like the fourth of July. Pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah. They leveled up.

They leveled up. They got the 15 kill streak. Or something like that from Call Duty. Yeah. But that was that integration with drones was pretty wild because you've got you've got people flying that that in some case they're not even on the same continent like they're all over the place. So it was a very like it's kind of surreal. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of crazy to think about how much it ramped up though to where and this this is where it's both an amazing tool but you worry about it and how we integrate with it. It's like when you can fly something that does. doesn't have a human in it right there who's reporting exactly what he's seen on the ground and you're controlling a video game toggle, you know, fucking 8,000 miles away. And on this, you know, gray scale, grainy screen with a little aimer, you see a spot and you blow it up and then you find out afterwards it was like a wedding.

Yeah. Yeah. It gets, it can get a lot. I mean, there's been drone operators who were like, they have severe PTSD because they were told to hit a target and then they find out later. it wasn't the target they thought. Two things happened with those early drone ones, like, particularly like Predators and Reapers, MQ1, MQ9, like in those days.

Because we weren't really even using the term drone then. Like now it's cool to say drones. Then it was kind of like an insult because the guy, the people that were flying MQ1s, a lot of times they've been taken out of a manned aircraft. And so it's all different now. But in those days it was like, it was not cool to get taken out and then be trying to fly. MQ1, MQ9s when you're actually sitting stationary. It's all changed now.

And I think for good, you know, in a good way. But as we did that one, there was a rash of, this is just my opinion. But we put people in positions that we probably normally would not have. So there's a significant amount of screening that goes into creating a combat aviator that's going to employ very explosive weapons to do very damaging things. Part of that screening is, you know, you want somebody who is not going to have that kind of moral injury as they're engaging. It's not for everyone. In fact, it's not for most.

That screening was happening still very well and normal within like AC130 gunships and F-16s and, you know, other kind of strike aircraft. I don't think that happened well in those days for MQ1, MQ9s for a couple of a reason. There was actually like a process problem with how we selected and found people to go to MQ1s and MQ9s. And there was even kind of this like stigma within the Air Force of doing it. So that's also nascent. It was very nascent. Yeah. They're building it up.

You know, so that I think contributed in some cases. The other one, this was a book on killing is the name of the book. I highly recommend reading for understanding this. Sounds like a real happy ending. It was written by Retired O5 from Vietnam, and it's about the psychological cost of killing in combat. And, you know, what that does. Well written, well cited now. Like, it's, you know, it's throughout any like strike squadron, they've all read it, you know.

So, and one of the kind of premises that he has is that there's this difference between how close you are to the cognitive and even moral impacts. of doing violence to another human. You know, it's different between like a fist versus a knife versus a weapon that's a little bit farther versus a sniper team versus a gunship versus like an MQ9 that's 8,000 miles away. And sometimes that distance can kind of cause this like a dichotomy between like what just happened, what didn't it.

They were also, the other thing that happened in those days, and it's still kind of a very real thing, this is something I never had to do. So I'm in combat. So if I go fly combat mission, I come back, I can talk with my crew about it. We can kind of do our normal debrief as a compartment of thing. I can go get some food and go to bed and then wake up to tomorrow and do it again. Wake up tomorrow.

And that's how it went. In the MQ1 and Q9 ones, it was like, hey, I'm going to go do this thing. It might pop up where I have to do this kind of combat, you know, very lethal engagement. And then I'm going to be done and I'm going to go home to my wife and kids for the night, like in my normal bed. So it was very much like a combat mode piece of time mode And they had to like turn that on and off Yeah you walk out of a trailer into like a Vegas parking

Yeah within the same day you're having to turn that So for for my experience it was it was like there's a ramp up And then you're in full fangs out combat mode For months at a time And then there's a ramp down for a couple weeks And then you're back into like integrated right Because you're on the base you're in the war zone you have all that But still, you're doing a different job than the guys who are like right there on the ground.

It's critical, but you're coming from the sky. So the first time you blew somebody up from the sky, were you able to viscerally understand and like weigh the gravity in that moment of, of course, you know, it was a bad guy, hopefully that you were actually hitting because it's on the field of battle. But were you able to weigh the gravity of, holy shit, I just wiped a life. off the earth. Yeah. Yeah. The first one, the reality is like, many of I don't even remember, or at least I'd have to really, like, kind of remember, you know, because I have so much time.

I think I have 800 some combat hours in Guns in Afghanistan. So there's a lot. Yeah. The first one I remember very distinctly. And what I had done, what I had done before I even joined the Air Force, so to back up to there when after 9-11 that that September of 2001 to about May of 03 but really it was really through like May of 02 is when I kind of like just had the skill set and thank God had the foresight to really just spend time literally just me alone in prayer about the moral

consequence of what I was going to start doing because I knew I was going for like I did not go to transport things I didn't go to you know and I'm not putting it's obviously not putting it by down, but I went to be to deliver actual lethal ordinance. That's the whole reason I joined. So I've spent specific time just kind of like wrestling that in my mind and in my spirit and conscience and even in my soul. So that by the time, it was really by about May of 2002, I was like, yep, I am now comfortable with this. I understand what I'm doing. And there was no like surprises to this at all. That served me very well. So it served me through training. It served me through the, you know, early training,

serving through the like the tactical mission qualification training in ACE-130 gunships. The kind of, you know, high fidelity exercises, then actual deployment to combat. It served me very well. So the first time it happened, I had been, I had kind of, it's all mental preparation, right, visualization, mental preparation. I had fully prepared for that environment. So I had, I had a deep understanding of what was happening. happening and you do feel it 100% say you feel it you know that that's why it uh that's why it resonates uh when they say the prayer in boondock saints after like they you resonate like that's you know a life has been taken here and and in my my perspective it was merciful like this is a you know

this is a merciful merciful kill merciful merciful kill why did you think it was merciful and still do that these are, you know, these are nations at war. These are righteous things that we're doing, regardless of whether the strategy will work out, regardless of whether all of the impetus that goes into it is righteous. Nobody would say that it is. I definitely would say it is. Or even the conduct of it. But it was a authorized target.

It was a defense of Americans. And they had stepped across that line. So now the merciful thing to do is, to put them in the ground, period. And that, I never wavered from that. And I believe that that is, that's also kind of like that, that mental clarity, that moral and mental clarity is really crucial to have in those environments. So my first engagement was actually an Al-Qaeda commander, a local commander.

So this is like the same organization that had directly attacked the towers close to here, the exact same organization. And you knew damn well when you were hitting that button that it was him right there. Both before and after. Right. And we also knew and had seen them and that group that they were with directly pointing weapons and trying to kill Americans as well. Yeah. So you had all of that, you know, going into there. Here's the one thing I'd say that. I can imagine, because that's all I can do is try to imagine, when you know for a fact that's like, that dude. Yeah. Of course, you know, there's more of like, all right, we got the bad guy.

Yeah. There's definitely that. Yeah. there's still a gravity to it because it's like you take a life. And you talk about that mental preparation and there's no doubt you did a lot of it. That said, it's like the old Mike Tyson quote, everyone has a plan until they get for sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You know, and you get punched in the mouth the first time you have to actually weigh that you did the thing.

And you watched it happen. You watched the result. Boom. We're still here. It sounds like you were able to. consciously understand that, take a beat with it, keep flying the plane, land the plane, and be like, did the job. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of things that go into this as well. Paul talks about this in the New Testament. And that is that governments have the ability

and actually the responsibility in the, you know, the epoch that we live in as humans, to, if necessary do force an evil to preserve a larger good. And those are dangerous words in the wrong person's in the wrong person's mind. But it's also true, right? Like, you don't even have to believe in capital punishment. But if you incarcerate someone who's committed crimes, that's still doing harm to that person. Absolutely. You're doing harm to that person. And there is a, unquestionably, there is a weight and a cost that comes with that when you do that. So there was also, and this was not something that we managed very well during the so-com days that I was deployed in.

And it caught a few people. I know that because I've been to some gunship reunions recently, and it caught a few people. And it's very real that a psyche can only take so much of that. You can only take so much of that. So one, the MQ1 and MQ9 types, we put them through the peacetime combat, peacetime combat, piece time combat, piece time combat. That already complicated that situation. And then in many cases, they had even more time than I'm talking about in that environment, like even more. Just because of the nature of the platform.

Yep. So where that line is is very different for different people and it kind of comes and goes and it's a, you know, it's a thing. but one thing that I definitely did when I was in command is you would monitor when I commanded a gunship squadron later in like 2013 14 somewhere around 2013 you would monitor your crews and part of that was seeing like are they able to carry that weight the weight of what they're doing it's just the weight of what you're doing

can you can you do that forever and that's not dissimilar from like you know the signs of burnout right or the you know a nurse that's on the line too long or a firefighter's online. So a cop that's trying to do their job too much and too, has seen too much. You got to like, we got to get you out of here for a little bit. And so that's also, that's just part of it. And that's part of, um, that's part of the sacrifice that anybody that's been in that position for military has made.

So it's like it's very important. The sum gave all and all gave some is very real. Like there is a burning of the edges of your own kind of humanity that had to be done. for your security. That's what warrants the, like, respect and also what I'm motivated for the people that are still doing it. I'm, you know, I get to be a cool guy now wearing jeans and just hanging out, right? And talk with Julianne. But the ones that are still doing it, they're still doing things that involve kind of burning

the edges a bit. That's right. And that's as a society, we have to protect that. We have to honor that. And there's a couple things you can do. One of them is to respect and celebrate. them. That's how damaging it was for all the Vietnam era to come back and get told, oh, you're a bunch of baby killers. You guys all suck because they had went there. They had

charred their own conscience in the name of security as best they could in a chaotic situation or nobody knows anything, they're doing the best they can. And I mean the ones actually at the line. And then they come back and their own people kind of like treat them terribly. a true tragedy, like a true, like a moral failure of the citizenry in that case. It's important for us to not let that happen ever again. That doesn't mean that you have to glorify the violence. That does not mean that. I don't do that.

That does not mean that. But what it does mean is you respect the, you respect obviously the risk that the personal risk that they took. But the personal risk sometimes is mitigated. especially if you're 8,000 miles away, right? So then in that case, which you're, and I would say, you know, something that's very as real as well is you're respecting that, that charing, that approaching and maybe even unfortunately crossing

into moral injury that they did. You know, you respect that. And it's, one, it's on the government organizations to ensure that doesn't happen to the people. Like, they need to be monitoring that. And it's a failure of leadership if they're not doing that. And I do think that's happened sometimes. That will apply to how we do, drones as well. That will apply to how we do drones.

For sure. And it, and it, it also applies upstream too. It applies upstream. So how we as a society talk about them, I think is very important. So this goes like to the earlier point about, you could be very, it could be very careful with how we talk about it. And it's not because you don't question something. That's not the point. Questioning needs to happen. Like, you know, robust debate, one of the needs to have transparency, you know, sunlight will kill the disinfectant. That's the disinfectant, right? It'll kill the malign things. So we have to do that. The way we talk about is very important, though.

And the way we talk about in a way that acknowledges the general, like, you know, moral risk that people put themselves in. You know, we, you know, we understand the physical risk. In the drone age, the physical risk may start to withdraw. Like, it may start to lower the physical risk. Yeah. You're flying a drone. You know, you're something else, right?

You know, it won't totally be gone, but it may start to, like, erode. I understand. The moral risk won't. That's right. The moral risk will not. And it gets even more convoluted, which is, you know, what we've seen with the MQ, the predator and reaper types. We've also, here's one thing that makes me a little bit cynical, unfortunately, about it. We've already tested this on a population micro scale over the past 15, 20 years and completely failed when it comes to the moral risk.

And I'm talking about a not life and death situation, but you look at social media. You look at the confidence people get behind keyboards to say things that they would never fucking say to anyone's face. 100%. And become a totally different person because they are removed through the screen from it. And that is a real danger with drone warfare. And again, we've been doing it now for about 20 years. And so we now have some data. And hopefully we've learned some lessons and are figuring out better ways to vet people to come in and

properly train them to be able to handle that. And you and I can talk about that some more too. But I'm hearing like you talk about like that example in the Bible with Paul, I think it was, where, you know, he's he's talking about the moral ability to actually take action that may take a life or do something like that if it's for the greater good, which as you say, could be bastardized. But if used correctly, I get what he's saying right there. You do have the benefit of having done it, though, and from what it sounds like, doing it not only at the highest level, but for the right reasons and the right motivations and the right places with the right honor, because you're a good guy. The part that I'm hung up on is how you could have possibly, how do I want to ask this? like in 02 when you were when you were preparing to get in and you said you had a lot of these times

in prayer and thinking about this and because you were prepared to go use lethal force which you had never done before and you realize this was right was do you think some of that even though it turned out to be correct and that is i i agree with you that's what it was do you ever think that some of that especially because you're young might have been you fit in the square peg and a round hold to just be able to tell yourself your faith supports you doing this, even if it's something where if you're going to go kill people, sometimes maybe by accident, people that don't deserve it, it could be argued as going directly against your faith? Sure.

No, it's a, this is an important question. I'm going to quote Peter now, to the pure all thing, to the pure of heart, all things are pure. but to the, I think, malign or forward, depending on how it's translated, even the good is evil. True purity of heart produces pure actions. Even when the context around that, you may not understand at all. And there may be malign forces inside of it. Way beyond my control, my youth. I don't understand national security stuff.

I've never done it before. I think that the to flip what you're saying moral ambiguity is a sign of someone's core being having some impurity in it or double-mindedness in it can you explain that some more yeah so um one of my favorite authors is soren kirkegaard wait I know him what are he write Dutch philosopher um all kinds stuff talked about him yeah all kinds stuff dense reading like super dense like you have to really really especially with the modern mind you have to really sit down like pay and read that stuff if you're going to read like an older translation but he wrote a book purity of heart is to will one thing that's my favorite of all of his and there's another there's another new testament passage it says a double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways. So part of describing what purity is, maybe it's describing what it is not. Just like a man often can best define himself by what I am not. So what does it mean to be double-minded?

Now, the keys a little bit in the words, I think about this, but then maybe I waffle over to this, but maybe I waffle over to this. Maybe I waffle over to this. If you're double-minded, what does that mean? It means you're standing on quicksand. It means you don't actually have a foundation. You think you have values. You're wearing the skin suit of something that has values. You don't actually have any values. You're immoral, but can't confront that. Can't understand it.

So I vassal between a couple different things. And then I try to learn more. Or is a Somalis say leer more? So as I'm leering. Oh, that was cold. It was, it was, but funny. It was funny. So another passage that comes of mind

is that you become that person who's always learning, but never arriving at the truth. Yeah. And why is that? Why is that? It's because you're afraid of it. So if you always learn,

I can just circle this. I can just circle this. the core of truth and reality. And I can say things like, well, what is truth? Or maybe it's relative or maybe in this context is this, is this and this. I can surround myself with nuance and sophistication to make myself feel intelligent. And try to justify my double-mindedness and what's actually my impurity. Because I don't want to confront that.

Because if I confront that, that has that as that is ramifications. That's that's well said People got to listen to that last part twice I'm gonna listen to that twice as well But that's very well said because it's these are Especially for like at the time a 21 year old kid to think about These are what I would term God damn near impossible questions you know

And so you do have to go Live it to see who you are Yeah as a man Yeah Yeah Heavy stuff It is and you know When we talk about

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

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

It's a tale as long as time. Yeah, that's not new, right? All right, real quick, let's take a break because I got to go to the bathroom. We're going to get deep into how. modern drone warfare works. Excellent. All the different facets that can be used, which you previewed earlier and we did not get into it all.

I want to get into the counterintelligence aspects of that as well. I want to figure out what the bridge was from you deciding to go Air Force to this. We got a lot to do. Awesome. So we'll be right back. This might be a second episode now. So if it is, hit that subscribe button. You'll see that second episode in a week or two probably after this one.

And I'll see you for the next one. And it did turn out to be a second episode. So we are going to be putting that out in a week or two. If you are not subscribed, please make sure you subscribe. This second one got crazy. You're really, really going to like this one. We got all into the drone work that Jesse's doing, along with a lot of other stuff. And if you aren't catching all of our podcasts, we are putting out two a week.

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