Julian Dorey Podcast - #385 - “They’re Underwater!” - MIT Drone CEO on WW3, China Spy Drones & Submersive UFOs | Jesse Hamel

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

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Hey guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. All right. So I think this is probably the start of a second episode because we have a lot on the bone here to go through that. We've had an awesome conversation today. So people, if this one's coming out, the first one will also be linked down below. And these are going to be two very separate conversations. You'll be able to watch them separately, like in their own context. But really good stuff so far. So you did 20 years in the Air Force. You're now CEO of a tech drone company that integrates AI.

You were saying it's basically like the inner ear for drones. We're going to define what all that is right here. But I think a really, really good way to start this, Jesse, would be to go through something we touched on a little, but didn't like officially go through the evolution of it, which is like the actual history of drone warfare. You've mentioned some of the names of, I'm going to fuck them up. but some of the names of the initial drones that you would notice like flying next to you on the planes and stuff. But like we obviously got very heavy with it in 2008, 9, 10, 11. And now it's a whole different ballgame how we do it. So for someone out there who doesn't understand exactly how our drone program works, you know, where to come from and where is it now.

Yeah. No, it's a, and that's a great way to set it. So for like drone, by the way, the term, it's kind of. come full circle. Drones a, you know, what is a drone? Well, a drone is like a B. And an idea is like a dumb B basically. It just goes in a certain area. So we started calling him this almost as like a pejorative. But the first one's really, it was Operation Enduring Freedom.

So Afghanistan timeframe. So you had some stuff, you know, that was flying probably in the late 90s. And, you know, I don't know if I would know the full like when it started. But that it was kind of this idea of like, like, okay, we can make this big plane and we can control it from a radio controller on the ground. Like, that's the basic concept. And if we do that, then we can design the plane way cheaper because it doesn't have to have a human in it. So I can just put like wings, I can put weapons on it or a payload or that's it.

Because a lot of the expense of like an F-16 is because you're wrapping that thing around a human. So all of the injection seed and all the avionics and all that goes in it. But what if I could just control it from, you know, a controller with a radio signal like we've been doing with, you know, we grew up with cars, right? I'm just driving them. So that was kind of the impetus of like, let's save a lot of money. And we can, we can develop something that is low cost and we can have to do a couple other things. So like a lot of things, it gets probably most real with the military first or some early like drone

racing league stuff. But that doesn't really come up until I'd have to look at the history of that, but that's probably like 2010s. before that's really starting to happen. So your first ones are these big drones that I would call big now, based on what we're talking about in Ukraine. How big we're talking? We're talking well bigger in my wingspan. So you're talking like probably this room, you know, wing to wing.

Yeah. Yeah. The predator, yeah. The predator drone, I believe the predator drone has the larger wingspan than the Reaper does, but they're big. Like if you saw them taxiing around, like it's a big aeroplane. Like it's not this little drone kit. So we get these things, we build a little drone kit.

We build it to where it doesn't have to have a human in it. We start using these, you know, both Intel community and then USOCOM and even Department of Defense, start using these things, early Afghanistan and, you know, some other locations, but definitely using it there. And the benefit of them is I made it cheap. I've got this big wingspan so it can fly very long and very little fuel because it's not carrying a human around. And then we just started putting, hey, well, what we can do with this?

What if we put a camera on it? I can put a camera on it and I can see the ground. What if I pipe that signal back, just like a TV broadcast, pipe it back to somebody who can then see what's happening and not actually there? And you start, like, the utility becomes really obvious all of a sudden. And so in those early days, you had these things basically are flying cameras everywhere. And then eventually it's like, well, what if we put a weapon on these? What if we put a missile on these things? Like, why not?

And we put a laser seeker on it. So the basics of a laser seeker, right? you look at something with a laser seeker. That's usually boresighted, meaning that it's like hard looking to wherever your camera's looking. And it's looking at the ground, looking at a target. And then I can make,

what if I fire off like a hellfire missile from, from that same platform? And it just goes to where my laser seeker has is. Think of like, I could do this all like really simply, really low cost. So that became very attractive, like very early on.

The other thing that kind of happened, um, it became, almost like crack, and that's the right analogy, is that, so you'd have all throughout any, you know, any like military operating system in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, post-9-11 days, is what I'm talking about. So 2001, up to like 2010, you'd have, just kind of like a, you imagine like a wooden kind of hut that was somebody just hastily built out of plywood. And it would be probably three or four times the size of this room. And in the front, you know, you'd have a front

you've got a bunch of like 50-inch TV screens, probably five to sometimes 10 of them in there. And then you've got rows of like five or 10 people sitting on this side, five or 10 people sitting on this side, and they've got a workstation. They've got a laptop or they've got some kind of a computer. You got some radios in there and you've got some clocks. Inevitably, there's always a clock up there that has time zones of different areas. And that's kind of your basic setup. And then outside of that, you've got a bunch of antennas and satellites that are bringing in.

different feeds. One of those feeds, we call it like the video feed, one of those feeds they're bringing in is directly from whatever that drone was looking at. So one of the first things you started doing is immediately saying, well, you know, we had some intelligence that there is a potential terrorist in this building. First thing we're going to do, let's go send a drone over there, like a printer drone, and let's just get a camera on it and see what happens. What kind of pixelation were we working with it between these?

on these cameras, like fucking 360? Yeah, it was better than you'd think. Not high-deaf. 4-8. What was it, 480-48P? Is that what you say? Yeah. 360, 4-80.

Something like that. So enough of where you can, you never see a building, right? It's probably not in color. It's black and white. But you see a building. And think of where you were. So you had in this, we'll call this an operating center, like a joint operating center, like a jock. In this jock, you have a commander and a command team.

And they're trying to make sense of what's happening in, we'll just say Afghanistan. I'm saying things happening in Iraq and all the areas. They're trying to make sense of what's happening. Like, where are the good guys, where are the bad guys? That's like the fundamental. Let me like make sense of what's happening here. Well, I had this, you know, potential intelligence report that there's something here going on. What would I, if I'm irresponsible for this area, would I love to have a camera on top of that building?

You would love to have that. Of course. you probably would love to have as many cameras as possible, on top of as many buildings as possible, around that area. That desire for like commander removed from that area, awareness of where intelligence went off, that's what really started making drones popular very quickly. Because for very low cost,

I can send a drone over there. And I don't have to worry about a big gunship crew like that we had. I mean, it was, you know, my first gunship, It was 13 people. And this big $150 million C-130 that is expensive and there's only a couple of them. And even there, they can't fly forever. These other ones can fly much longer, much cheaper. So I put them over there.

And what ended up happening is like each of these screens, you'd call it a pred feed. Each one's a different pred feed. So it's another predator drone that's like looking at this building. And then I'm looking at this building. And then I'm looking at this building. And then you're building what you'd call pattern of life. basically trying to understand like what's going on in here right that's what drones really became then all of a sudden you start saying well i can also put a lethal engagement on there if we

positively identify a target and then i can just do it all right from that drone quick question so if we're talking about afghanistan and iraq obviously these are war zones that we're actively in it makes a ton of sense but even in these earlier days when we were doing this what was like the the airspace implications of flying a drone in fucking Pakistan or something. Well, in limiting that, just the Afghanistan, like the airspace, just airspace deconfliction was kind of a mess. So much of the same rules you use for like, I'm just differences, but a lot of the same rules used for commercial aviation, like FAA rules, you try to do the same thing in a combat

zone because you don't want an F-16 flying into a B-52. Like nobody wants that. So you do de-conflictions. You have entities that act like air traffic control and move things around. Well, we had to all of a sudden start doing that for drones. And that made everybody very paranoid, very extremely paranoid. And there was, there was some early incidents where this did not go well either. Do you have an example of that?

There was one. I wasn't, I was at a different part of the country, but I was flying. And we heard over satellite communication, what you called SATCOM. And that's a channel where you could kind of talk about large things that are happening in the country, not just like what you're looking at. And we heard that there was some incident. Basically the, a C-130 was attempting the land. I don't remember what year this was. It was pretty early.

A C-1-30 was attempting to land at one of the bases of Afghanistan. And a drone base just ran right into it. Just ran into it. I think took out one of the engines. I believe it landed safe. But just ran into it. Yeah. And, you know, part of it is like, I don't have a pilot on that predator going.

I guess I shouldn't fly right there. You see Tom Hanks going. There's a drone. There's a drone. So we had to work through that of like, okay, how do you control this thing? Yeah. So then it's also there's this complicated kind of handover where once these drones were overhead a target providing a picture that somebody in the jock is looking at, they're doing their mission, right? They're flowing around.

When they go take off and land, you can't just use that same, you know, thousands of miles away, like mechanism, because there's time delay, right? So that time delay ends up being like sometimes a couple seconds. That's a lot. You can't land a plane with that. No. You can't land a plane with that. So you have to have somebody there locally to do it.

So there's this handovers and it's a fairly like complex orchestrated thing that it was new. So then in the new days it's like, okay, I guess we got to add on something called T-CAS for traffic avoidance. We got to add on different things. Like we have to have new procedures because there's no human able to perform basic pilot rules of seeing a void and looking, you know, like there's nobody doing this kind of stuff in there. So we've got to figure that out. But even like with the example of hitting the C-130, that sends a shiver up my spine.

Like, imagine just being like these early days of drones, the guy on the ground like, oh, fuck. That's how the story. That's how the story goes. My bad. It's like. Fuck. Yeah. Well, the story goes like, well, I'm not getting any inputs anymore.

Yeah, I get that The story The story goes like, I don't really know what happened to that thing Like, oh, because he's not watching it either. Yeah. He's responding to, you know, he's responding to, you know, RF frequencies that all of a sudden just stopped emitting. So that's kind of bad.

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We had to grow through this stuff. Growing pains, growing pains. But clearly there's something there, right? It's way cheaper. We can make these things faster, easier, and they could do the stuff that it was hard to get at like a, you know, a human crew to do. Especially if you're flying these like 20-hour missions staring at the same building forever. like why don't just have a drone do that. Yeah.

That's basically how it started growing. So, and that need for, you know, a very like complicated Afghanistan thing that every year we felt was almost over and it just doesn't. And then we almost over and it isn't. And by the way, you were saying this in the last episode we did, but the years that you were there, the number of guys I have had sitting in that seat, be it from Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, I'm trying to think, Delta. who were in Afghanistan from like 07 to 2013. Holy shit, is that an ignored time of history? It is. It is.

It was, it was a mess. Like, it was a, it was an absolute mess. So, and if you're trying to cut through like chaos, what do you want? I want more awareness. Right. So I can never have enough drones in the air because I want every one of my TVs. And then as soon as I get those TVs filled, I want more TVs. How high would they be flying?

How high would they be flying in this time period? I mean, they're flying at, like, you know, the exact altitudes. You know, I don't know, but you're flying about the same thing like American Airlines flying. So you're flying, you know, some reason 20, 30,000 feet, 40,000. Like, you're flying like regular airplane. So basically, like, Taliban on the ground ain't seeing these drums. Well, they are probably not seeing them. Like, you might, you might, if you look up, you do hear it when it shoots.

Oh, so you hear. Well, what you hear, so health fire, and that's what ended up being. coming the weapon. You know, how far was, how far was created for army helicopters? And then somebody got, and it was a very good idea, somebody put it on the wing of one of these predators and reapers, and then that became the thing. And you hear, you hear it come off the rails, because it comes off the rails supersonic. So it sounds like a whip in the sky. So you, you'd think, like, you're, you hear something. And then eventually, you know, they become, ever becomes aware of like, oh, the Americans have these drones everywhere. So,

So if you hear it's bad. Much like fast forward to where we are now, if you are east of Kiev and you hear a high-pitched propeller in the distance, that's bad. You need to get out of there immediately. And much of what folks will talk about in like, Keeve and east of there is like the daily life of you fly a drone, let them just fast forward to where now, you fly a drone and then the rest of your time is setting up some kind of defense and then trying to live. listen. Right. And if you hear so you want it quiet, if you hear any kind of that high pitched whizzing coming from you, that's propellers coming at you from something even a very small drone, that's bad. And you got to get out of there. Okay. So a couple things that are obvious right now. Today, a drones can be way smaller. You talked about one is the size of this room at the beginning. Now they're, they can be a football size or something like that and carry enormous payloads as well. Yep. Right. True. Their cameras are also better, right?

We're not operating on like 360 anymore. Just like your iPhone's got better. Of course. What else about what are all the, I guess, like, bells and whistles they do now much more effectively. The key, like, so the key things that started to happen, two key things happened. So this kept developing in Afghanistan and Iraq for the same reason we just talked about. And that kept each year.

So it goes through 2010, up to about 2014-15. So 2014-15 is when you had the first annex of Crimea in Ukraine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, my Don, all that. Yes. And all of a sudden, you had a nation of like, you know, 40 million, mostly agriculture, and they had to defend themselves against the Russian Federation. Well, how do you do that? Well, what had happened at the same time, thank you video gamers,

we had pushed compute, unlike what RAM prices are doing right now, but we had pushed compute down way cheaper from PlayStation 3 and 4, actually. is a lot of what did this in the Xbox. So we had the ability to say, okay, I can take this little drone. And there was some open source coding projects out of Switzerland, PX4 and a few other ones that had come out. And the open source crowd is kind of building this.

And then all of a sudden, without, you know, a whole lot of technical skill. And if you watch a couple of YouTube's and put it together and then you kind of do it a few times, you figure it out, you can build your own drone. You can build your own drone. And you start to, you basically can piece it out of the compute, the propellers, brushless motors, you know, the other kind of the basic frame, you can 3D print out,

which is still what we're doing now. And you could make this thing very, very fast, kind of very, very cheap. And if you're in this very asymmetric situation of, okay, I'm at Ukraine, I've got funding from the U.S. and NATO and whatever else, but I'm trying to defend myself quickly and I'm trying to attack quickly, and I don't have T-Land Block 4s. I don't have a bunch of javelins all over. I don't have some of these really sophisticated weapons that are really expensive. What can I do cheap?

Well, I can build this little drone, and the drone racing league was starting to count on catch up then. So you had this whole hobbyist in drone racing league stuff that it kind of developed the software and the basic hardware for it. Right. Just go from point A to point B. And then what if I just literally duct tape a grenade to it or just put a little homemade explosive on it? Duck tape. Yeah. And just like send that thing five kilometers over the horizon.

and put it to where I need it to go. Just drop it. Just drop it. Drop it or run it right into it. Right? Because then drop it. I have to have a mechanism and all that. What if I don't want to screw any of that?

I just literally just, and that's what you see most of the videos, right? If you watch the videos. Most of them is just the drone flying directly into it. Yeah. And then that's like, wow, this is super cheap. I just created the same thing that like an American missile that costs, you know, maybe $2 million a pop.

I just created that for pennies on the dollar. are let's make a lot more of these. And then that's where they really kind of, that showed the world just how powerful drones could be at that point. So you had compute that had gotten cheap enough to do this. You had the open source community had built the infrastructure, Pixhawk, PX4, Arru Pilot. The stuff had kind of gotten built, Raspberry Pies,

all of a sudden got interesting. I won't tell the whole story, but there was a... We got time. There's, yeah, there's, um, So Raspberry pies, for anybody that nerds out on anything, drones, they know about Raspberry pies. And you can build your own gaming ones. For those who don't nerd out on drones, please explain. Raspberry pies, it's a chip.

So it's a compute chip where you can, you can kind of do some cool stuff with it. And it's pretty user-friendly. So you can build a gaming emulator from it. That's what actually a lot of people do. You can put it on a drone to do different software control things. Raspberry Pi, I know the CEO, we actually have an M-O memorandum agreement with Raspberry Pi. They sell them to the screens that are in grocery stores that lists like the prices of bananas and apples. Like there's a very cheap kind of little chip in there that lists that out, right?

There's a computer chip that's running that. It's performing that compute. So these things start to become kind of available almost everywhere as well. So you had this, all of these things happen kind of at the same time. The software was developed by the open source community. 3D printing became where we can all have 3D printers and we can go online and I can find like a drone design and just hit print. It's pretty simple, right? Yep.

I can get motors from here. Most of that's Chinese, but I can get, I can buy motors. I can buy this hobby of stuff and I can put it together. And that's what really started propelling that with Chinese spyware. With Chinese spyware which is a whole problem. Yeah, we'll get to that. But this is, but Ukraine started doing this. It's just out of necessity. It was a way for them to, it was a way for them to quickly get precision munitions and precision, you know, ISR, like intelligence surveillance reconnaissance because they didn't have a bunch of really expensive predators. They didn't have a bunch of T-Land Block 4s, Tomahawk missiles.

They didn't have the javelins. So how do I get it fast? Well, I can just build these hobby drones. And then all of a sudden, the whole world's looking at this being like, man, they basically did the same thing that we've been paying the defense primes to do and other ones for pennies. on the dollar. Maybe it's time for us to innovate. That's kind of like where we're at now. Is that where you come in effectively? Where you're like, oh, shit. Very much. Because then you start to think about, okay, one drone is cool. What's cooler than one drone? A hundred. What's cooler in a hundred? A thousand. Yeah. Yeah. I like where your head's at. It's cooler than that.

So then you start thinking, okay, it's one thing to defend against one drone. something else with them against 10. What if a thousand of them were coming at me at once? What if a hundred thousand of them are coming at me at once? You know, so what if you had the, both the software to coordinate that and the hardware to produce that? What if you had the ability to do that? And you had the ability to do it where it didn't bankrupt your economy.

What if you had the ability to do that? What does that change? And I think that's what the lesson for U.S. security, you know, and U.S. has been involved at some level in Ukraine right now, at some level, and so is NATO. But if you just step back from that and say broadly, what are the lessons for modern national security is that I have to be at both defend against and use swarms of coordinating drones in the 100,000 of units. The other thing timeline that happened, so this is, this might even be interesting to look up. So the, this is a little bit historical, but it's worth it. The invention of a

software called Word to VEC. Word to VEC. Word to VEC. Word to VEC. Word to VEC. So word to veck. What's interesting about this, this was a, this is really the breakthrough. Yeah, you see the toggle. This is really the breakthrough that led to where we're at with AI. This is really the breakthrough. Okay. So word to veck was invented by a team at Google led by Tomas Mikhailov and published in 2013, introducing efficient methods, SIBO and Skipgram to represent words as dense numerical vectors that capture semantic meaning

from context, revolutionizing NLP by enabling computers to understand word relationships like King minus man plus woman equals queen. Exactly. The breakthrough allowed for processing larger vocabularies and improved performance on many language tasks by learning word meanings from surrounding words in large tech corpora.

One quick question, and now I want you to explain on this. If they did this in 2013, how long ago did DARPA do this? Well, yeah, and that's a question. I don't have a good answer for that. We know it's public. We know it's public in 2013. Because you're a private company CEO. Yes, yeah, I am a private company CEO.

Okay. But please continue. So this invention, so it mentioned national language processing or NLP. You know, NLP is like machines understanding English is just the simple way of kind of thinking about that. But it's actually much deeper in this. So this is overly simplistic.

But what Word DeVec enabled was taking human language, converting it into effectively a mathematic representation. Once it's in that mathematic representation, you can start to use linear algebra techniques, matrices to build large language models. Word to Vec technology is why we have chat GPT now. Like it all was unleashed there. The transformers were built off of this kind of thinking. So what is a large language model?

It's a human language. And it converts them into matrices. And then it does relationships between these matrices. And that's how it, that's how it derives synthetic intelligence. So this all started happening in 2013. Invention of Transformers is a couple years later. that's a key invention, right? The T and GPT is transformer.

So the invention transformers happen. Now all of a sudden you have what we would probably call AI, right? Even though what AI is, you know, sometimes not that clear. But we have some kind of intelligence where I can have this discussion with this entity, this model, and it can give me back information that is net new. It's a conglomeration of different things, but it's net new because it found a new relationship in literally a matrix through vector algebra enabled by word to VEC. As that started happening then, we have, okay, we've now had some advances in 3D printing

and we can print these drones out really, really cheap. That's pretty simple. We've had compute get a lot cheaper. Thank you, gamers. And then we've also had intelligent approaches to it being developed. This is all concomit to each other. So now that I have that. this developed and then the world is watching and saying, wow, they started using drones just

kind of added necessity, but now drones are still probably the best option. Best cost, best size, weight, power. You know, if you look at something like an engineer swap C, SWAP dash C, size, weight, power, and cost. Like, if you look at that, there's still probably the best tradeoff. Every engineer is engineering is our tradeoff decisions. They're still really good. And then it's all about, well, if one is good, 10 is better. And then 100 is even better. A thousand better. So then what you've,

we're now in the environment at 2026 where, and somebody said this, I think before us, I'm not saying anything new here. Drones are trending towards bullets. With their ubiquitous nature. Yes. Okay.

Yes. So you think of like your value as a soldier. One of the things you do is, you know, report is like, do you, you know, just I'm talking like basic infantry. How many rounds do you have? How many magazines do you have? like how many rounds you have.

Now, in many ways, I think you could argue, like, how many drones do you have access to? How many, how, what number of swarm are you able to do it? So what becomes really important is one of the physical manifestations of that. We have to be able to produce drones. Any country that wants to have really asymmetric capability in drones and just national security, you have to produce these things very cheap. That is not the same thing as making an F-22.

that is not the same thing as making a Columbia class submarine. Oh, I understand. So this part's important. The manufacturing goes into that is very different than like how complicated it is to make an F-22 fighter. That carries humans. That carries humans. Yeah. So what also we found ourselves as a situation is that you may have the capability to produce hundreds. I think Lockhe can do hundreds, maybe even up to a thousand a month, if they were at full everything or per year. I don't know.

But that doesn't translate into all I can produce millions of drones per year. Nor does it even defend against it at all. Like if I have a squadron of 100 fighters, can I defend against a million drones? No. There's not even enough weapons in there. Even if every round you shot, we're able to do that. You're not defending against that. So you're saying I may be way oversimplifying this, but effectively what it seems like you're getting at is that we're at a point in the evolution of drones.

where standing army, cavalry, worth of drones is the race at the moment. How many do you, like, assuming all things being roughly equal, which they're not, drones that China makes drones, that we make drones, that Russia makes drones, that whoever makes have very similar capabilities. How many does one country have? That's 100% accurate. Yep. 100% accurate.

Wow. I didn't really. Just like bullets. Yeah. Just like bullets. Yeah. Is there a fundamental difference between a Russian-made bullet and a U.S. made bullet? It's a caliber difference, but they ultimately do about the same thing.

It doesn't mean there's not some drones that are, you know, drone is a, I think of the term as drone, is just a flying robot. So can there be robotic systems that are bigger doing different things? Of course, you know, so it's a very flexible term that is only somewhat useful, even the term drone itself. Right. But the idea of, the idea of mass or high volumes is what's determined. for having the national security ability to coerce or compel peace through strength to actually deter conflict. One way you deter conflict is like, I literally have more bullets than you. Of course.

But that's a very real way of deterring conflict. So producing drones, that is, to me, I think that's existential for the U.S. to be able to say, we have more of this and the ability to produce more than anybody else. For sure. The other key thing about this is, and this is, we've been, you know, we've had kind of a front, right? You know, and I don't need to minimize like the real human suffering's happening in Ukraine, but like the, the West has kind of had, at least the U.S., because we're separated by oceans and continent. We've had a little bit of like a front row seat to this without directly participating in most cases. That's right.

So we can see that the other thing that anytime you have this kind of like dynamic, you're going to look at. for asymmetric ways to undercut it. Man, I don't have 10,000 or 100,000 drones. What is some like unique move I can make to neutralize that capability that somebody else has? And I mean, just country X versus country Y. All right, this one blew my mind. According to a recent RAND study, Omnita Muscaria is now the third most used psychedelic in the United States. That's right. About 3.5 million adults reported using Amanita over the past year. But here's the catch. A huge number of those people probably didn't even take the real Aminita. Most gas station Aminita gummies are either weird synthetics, mislabeled, or don't even actually contain the mushroom. So people think

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Link in my description below. promo code JD22. What we've seen, and this is really at the crux of like what Victus and my company is solving in the kind of autonomy space, what we've seen is that that Achilles heel is dependency on a clear signal from medium earth orbit to get a GPS or a GNSS signal, like a signal from GPS to say, where am I? Very easily disrupted. By the time that signal comes down, same thing for your Uber, same thing for your phone using Uber, same thing for a drone, same thing for an aircraft, same thing for even though a lower Thorough of a satellite.

By the time that signal is received, it's very, very weak. GPS was never intended to go up in a jammed or any kind of electronic attack environment. So the asymmetric kind of capability that's really emerged now is to, you know, is to. build some kind of a jammer. Some of these are very, very sophisticated jammers that Russia, China, and a few other people have, very high power jammers that can do things from orbit all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. In other cases, it's like you or me, go build a software to find jammers. It's very illegal. I don't recommend anyone doing it. But if you go build one of these, then you can have like a small little bubble around you that jams GPS, the signal prevents it because by time it's received like when it comes all the way down from

medium earth orbit the way GPS has you know been around since late 80s early 90s when we declassified it started using it for all these commercial purposes as well as military purposes yeah after all the nazis from operation clay paper clip invented it okay now we're yeah i'm fucking they didn't do that they didn't do that they did not do that uh but it was it was invented in that like 80s and declassified right and then it had that all these commercial purposes like all of uber's business model is predicated on this You know, all kinds of stuff are, right? It's in everything.

Even banking uses GPS, the timing in it, like the transactions. There's, there, GPS is so, yeah, it's, this is something. I didn't even know that. Yeah. My previous career was in banking. Yeah. I did not realize that. Yeah.

There's a, like, GPS solves something called PNT, position, navigation and timing. And ultimately how GPS, you know, works is this really precise timing to allow you to know where you're at from the signal that's up in medium earth orbit. And that timing is used for all kinds of things. And one of the clear ones is to get your positioning. So we, we both on the military side and then on the commercial side, we built up this system that I usually analogize it to the early days of the internet where we didn't think we needed encryption. Like there's no malign actors.

We can just have web pages out and talk to each other on our, you know, we don't need any encryption. We don't, nobody's going to hack or jam. or DDoS are connections. That's kind of a GPS ones. We just put these satellites up there and said, okay, the devices will receive this very faint signal. And as long as they get this faint signal,

it'll run through an algorithm called a common filter. That will create a state estimation. And then from that state estimation, that device can derive position data that can be used for navigation or timing and or timing, all from that kind of device. And this all happens in the background for our entire society right now.

And our entire national security apparatus is predicated on this. GPS guided munitions, aircraft that use it, low Earth orbit satellites, all the above. What kind of day-to-day, minute-to-minute existential threats to that system exist? Like, I'll give you a parallel example. We talk about like, oh, what if all the fucking power grids got hacked and went down for a day? Would there be enormous problems in this country? Like the parallel with GPS, do we have to worry about that as well over there? This is, you know, I don't have like specific war gaming data to supply this.

And then what I'm saying is just kind of speculative based on my understanding. However, like I said, many banking transactions use the GPS system. All of your Uber does. Many other communications do. Obviously all aircraft does. air traffic control, lower orbit satellites. The whole space economy is predicated on GPS to a point. Because the whole space economy, this is worth even talking about to paint this answer to this.

The space economy, like a Starlink, is based on, I want this satellite to be in this position, to do something like deliver internet to me down beneath that. If you can't put that satellite in that position, all that kind of breaks down. Drones, same thing. All of that predicated on it. on something that is as fragile as we just talked about, as easy to be jammed, both at a nation state level and even at like an asymmetric kind of level.

We were working with the trucking industry, believe or not. Your company. Yeah, one of the consortia in DC published a paper, it said in 2024, the US trucking industry lost, I think it was seven billion. And it's happening, rail industry as well we have a you know emerging relationship with a rail company too like lost as in here's what's happened here's like losses in theft yes so what's happening is in this is you know

a bit of a parallel but just you understand like how dependent we are and how how GPS is used you have a rail you know something traveling on rail or you have a bunch of like amazon prime packages in the back of an 18 wheeler and a bandit or a pirate or a cartel or some kind of maligned thief gets it to stop for whatever reason, not hard to do. They bring a GPS jammer with them so the first responders then don't know where to go because everything they're predicated on is that. Everything is. And then you can have all the time you need and then you can do what you need to do and

then it's over. And so what's happening in both industries, insurance premiums are going way up because they don't have a way to solve this right now. That's then also happening in combat. So I was talking with someone, a senior member in Ukraine now for Ukraine's military forces that does AIML or artificial intelligence machine learning for Ukraine. And he said, quote, to me, we assume right now that GPS is basically non-existent anywhere in the battle space.

It's just non-existent because it's because it never works there because there's so much jamming. There's so much jamming. On my Uber on the way here, this happens all the time in the city, right? And it was interesting to listen to the driver said this. So on my Uber away here, you know, I hit the Uber and hit button, hit button and it really pay attention. And it went like a block away from me is where he went to pick me up. And he's like, and he actually comes back and says, yeah, this happens all the time in New York because the signals and there's so much going on here that there's just no accuracy.

This happens. You can look this up. This happens in D.C. all the time. Yeah, it happens right outside sometimes. Yeah. It's not. It's just not not, not reliable enough. there's another thing that's kind of interesting. There's some good evidence of this too. 1990s, that's about when we declassified GPS to about 2020, was a year of apparently very low activity for solar flares. So it's a very calm solar epoch. So solar weather or something's starting to get a lot more attention,

I think for a good reason, right? Because the solar seasons are not like Earth seasons. There's good evidence to show that about 2020 to where now and, you know, potentially another 30, 50 years, who knows, we're in a much higher active area of solar activity. That's part of why we've actually had a lot of solar flares that have disrupted satellite communications over the last couple years. That's why the Northern Lights have been in the U.S. for a couple times this winter and last winter.

Areas where when I was a kid, it was never Northern Lights. Never. Now, you know, my family back in Michigan, they're seeing them like every, every winter now, like heavily seeing them. And this is pretty common. So there's, and it's because of solar activity. The solar activity is happening. That disrupts the kind of, you know, GPS signals.

It's very fragile. It just wasn't designed for this kind of stuff. So that kind of sets a stage for what we're trying to do with our company is enable US, both commercial and security professionals to use drones and robotics. and other platforms like that to their fullest extent without having to be dependent on a really clear GPS signal, something that a malign actor can easily disrupt. Solar flares might disrupt it.

A building might just get in the way. Because if you think about it, like as we have drones just being another robot, as we have robots do more, like more and more advanced things for us that protect us, carry us to school, deliver our food, you know, deliver a DoorDash or Amazon Prime, fight our wars. Like, as we do that, we need them to work. Like, we need them to work. We need to rely.

We need to be relying on them. And it's not good enough to be like, well, that drone was working, but all of a sudden GPS kind of dropped out for whatever reason because that building was in the way. It was a little solar flare here. We're in combat. Somebody brought a jammer with them. It's useless at that. It's useless at that point.

It's a brick, right? It's a paperweight. So this is something that we've thought about as you think of autonomy, which is another term that in some case doesn't mean anything anymore because it's been used so much. But do you think of just allowing these machines to work with us? We start by, you know, and what we invented and kind of developed is a system to allow that device to know where it's at, basically answer the question, where am I? After we talked about, like you hinted at it, like the inner ear for a robotic system.

Which is what you're different. Which is what we developed, yeah. And from there, then you can go up kind of higher orders of intelligence to say, If I know where I am, like if I have orientation time and space, then I can start to think about where should I go, what should I do? I can start to kind of use this. The systems we have right now, it's, you know, it's like having, I usually know, this way, it's like a blob of a million eyeballs with no brain.

So you have all these cameras on there, servos, radars, Doppler sensors, magnometers, gravitor, whatever, right? You have all these sensors on there. but there's no intelligence that uses, just like you and I do, that use our prefrontal and our limbic system together so that if we shut our eyes and move our head, I still know my orientation. And I know that because of that inner ear, gravity shift

and some kind of complex things that are happening in my head, that's what we've done. We've built kind of our autonomy solution on that premise so that it works in the like toughest environments. then from there something you can scale to say, hey, I need to train agents to do this particular task where you have like a human kind of like a quarterback and I have 10 other swarms around them that are doing it.

And they have a level of intelligence to understand what needs to be done and then they coordinate with them. That human can't trust that swarm. We'll just say swarm of 10 right now. You can't trust them if they don't have a good idea where they're at. Because as soon as GPS goes away, it might think it's doing the right thing. it probably does think it's doing the right thing.

Yeah, now it's flying to fucking Saudi Arabia. It's flying a little bit. Yeah. The other thing that we're seeing a lot of evidence on this, definitely the combat side, but even in band aviation, I saw a Notum from Airbus the other day. Notum is a notice to airmen. So it's like how you publish to pilot saying, hey, this is happening. And you publish like interesting things or cautions you need to watch for.

There was one just off the coast of Virginia of like massive jamming that was happening. So the Airbus was not able to get GPS signals. I know of personally I've talked with maintainers for Gulfstream that are taken off a G5 with an ultra high net worth person in the back that person has no idea

what's actually happening with this and the pilots are having to pull the circuit breakers for GPS 1 and 2 and take off visually because they're getting spoofed and jammed so much it will corrupt the flight management system so there's like this level of risk being accepted people in the back have no idea like they're not going to tell them like the people have

back have no idea it's happening yeah don't worry about it we'll fix it like hopefully right hopefully that's the where we're living it right now yeah yeah hopefully it works oh my god yeah it's there is with this again because it's like a remote technology there is just so much that can go wrong and you're laying that out right now and yet it's still come so far in the past two decades right in particularly that they are so so ubiquitous everywhere in private business. Like you're even doing that as well. But you in your Air Force career, you saw these things introduced on the battlefield early on.

You stayed in the Air Force for 20 years. Eight of them were in a lot of combat. Where were you in the back half of your Air Force career? Yeah. So after you're basically the first first half of it, just flying combat back, flying combat back. Went to Air Force weapons school, did some other like advanced kind of weapon stuff deep in the, deep in the vault. So doing things in precision munitions, doing things in directed energy, all kinds of stuff like that. Directed energy.

Yeah. So I got like, um. That's a fucking loaded term. It is a loaded term. It is a loaded term. Yeah. Just like swipe that. Yeah.

A little direct energy. Flink that in. And then pretty kind of normal like for an Air Force officer progression at, you know, called half time. At half time of the career, go, uh, get a, get a degree at in my case, Air Command and Staff college, like a one year school for the Air Force. Now I did some, I did a, I got to do like an internship with Air Force Research Labs, kind of like an interview, more like a fellowship where published a paper with them on software defined manufacturing. So you have to go really deep on that for a year.

Like really started. Software defined manufacturing. Yeah. Yeah. It was, uh, um, it's still searchable. Um, but it did some work on 40 printing, um, which is like an adaptive style technology. Uh, and now, like, I was a little bit ahead of my time on that. Now there's some companies like actually developing this.

Yeah, the idea being using graphene and some other materials that can conduct really well. The fourth dimension being after time where you produce something and then that time or other can mean other stimulus as well, that time or other stimulus then changes it to some other shape. This is very real. This is very, yeah, this is very real. Yes. So there are, if you use the right kind of systems, the right kind of systems and the right kind of materials, you can program into it behaviors that will happen at a later point. Oh, now I get it.

Yeah. Okay. That behavior could be triggered by an environmental change or by a time change or by a couple of different things, depending on how you design it. So it could be water. One of the ones that I think is really compelling. I believe some companies looking at this. is like self-healing pipelines for oil, gas. So the idea of like, okay, it has a certain coating on it.

That coating probably has a substance called graphene in it. Which they call like the miracle material. Yeah, it's like the miracle material, right? But there's some derivatives of that, so it wouldn't have to necessarily be graphene. That's where some of the like real research, people out on the cutting edge of this would know that. But the idea is like, okay, it detects a weakness and then it's able to extend its thickness in a certain area to prevent. like structural damage from it. So it got to go really deep on that,

for the Air Force, which is a fun little kind of side. And that was like, so what was the name of that place you were for a year for the education? That's Air Command and Staff College. Air Command and Staff. Where is that? Maxwell. Maxwell Air Force Base, which is in Montgomery, Alabama. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then you, so you're doing all these other different jobs as opposed to what you did earlier on your career. Do you, did you go to MIT after you left the Air Force? As soon as I retired. So first of all, what went into your, I mean, 20 years is a long time. It is a long time. It is a long time.

It's a long time to be in the Air Force. This is all you've known in your adult life. What went into you saying it's time to turn the page? Kind of some of the last couple things I did were informative of that. So I was over in Stuttgart at, it's a staff tour, pretty normal, like my one non-fly. non-operational tour called Special Operations Command Europe. So I was over there from 2015 to 2018. This is also when all this stuff was happening in Crimea. So I was very focused on this, doing all kinds of kind of interesting things there. All right. So here's a gross fact.

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So I got kind of a real interest in ML, which informed like kind of what we do with Victus now. Yep. So I just, I got a capability and I got interested in it. Victus is your company. Victus of the company, yeah. And it was also, this is like, we talked more than like the first half of this, but like it was a time where there was this kind of unique period for about of those three years. There's a unique period about 14 months, maybe somewhere in there where I stood. It was kind of like the closest thing to being in the military, but being an entrepreneur at the same time.

So I got to stand up this brand new task group organization from nothing to like 75 people in a year, a bunch of resources, big budget. And you got to do like really cutting edge stuff with it, really kind of cutting edge stuff with it. That it was the closest thing like zero to one. And not, you know, it wasn't an actual business. There was no like profit to it or anything like that. But but it had the cultural fit of it had like all of that kind of. And as I was retiring, one of the things you tell, and I tell people to do this too, is you want to, you, anybody, and any veterans separating, really anybody in any, like, major kind of inflection point of their life, you know, reflect on one of the, besides some of the other things we've talked about, reflect earlier in your life and think about those things where you really enjoyed it and try to put more of that into your future life. Yeah.

And then those things you don't enjoy, try to not repeat that. You know, it's kind of like a very pragmatic way of looking at it. And at this point, you're married with kids? Oh, yeah. For a while? Yep. Yeah, married kids. So we got married shortly after I joined the Air Force.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so we're married for a while. Yeah, married for a while. My third was born over in Europe as well. During that 2015, 2018. Yeah, 2015 and 2018. Crimea baby. Yeah, not in Crimea.

Yeah. Yeah. He does have the, he has the coolest birth certificate because he has like the U.S. citizen born abroad and, you know, the embassy and the council do like a real good job with that. So he has a cool. And the rest of ours will look like they're on page. paper like napkins and his looks really cool. So that kind of informed it. I came back to the States, got requalified to fly the latest gunship, again, AC130J at that point. Didn't get to fly

a whole lot just because I'm a more senior guy at this point. And then I commanded a squadron. And the squadron I commanded had drones in it. A drones is actually one of the primary things they did. So we had all these different Socom drones. We had some commercial off the shelf drones, like civilian drones, all the above. So it got to really put those things together. Like, okay, I've seen some stuff in Europe. I have an idea, kind of what's like to start a new organization. I learned a lot of like machine learning and started getting into coding even the stuff.

And had this whole background of precision munitions and guidance, navigation control. I had this background here anyhow. And then, you know, did that command tour and decided, okay, this is, you know, let's go through COVID and all this. too and then decided, okay, I'm going to hang it up. I'm going to hang it up right at 20. So I turned down War College, which is kind of like taking the poison pill. War College? Yeah, so I got selected to go to War College.

That's, war college is, as you progress, like, in a certain level, war college is like when you go from Lieutenant Colonel to the Colonel, typically. Sometimes Colonel right to one star general. So you were effectively, you're doing that chain you talked about earlier, and it just turned out that way that you were actually rising through that chain, and you made the call to be like, wow. I've gotten all the way this point, but I'm going to go off in the private sector. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was, didn't like the politics of the military kind of thing. There was a, I mean, there's a number of things that went into that. There was a number of things that. Probably the most elemental one. My kids were at a certain age, too. You know, I'd been gone a lot when they were very young.

Now they're teenagers. They're in high schools. Like, no, I need to be there for him. Oh, so you had the third one way late. The third one's still younger, but the other two were, you know, they're in like early high school now and forecasting where they're going to be. So it's like, no, I need to be there. That's part of it for sure. I also felt, I just felt like I had unfinished business in the private sector. And then sometimes you just know, right? And I just know, like I can see these things put

together. Wait, unfinished business. Yeah. Unfinished business. Had you ever been in it? No. But to my, to me, it's a good point. But to me, it was unfinished business because like I told you before, I had planned on going into the business kind of private sector pretty aggressively. Right. And I knew like, okay, I'm going to go back and I've got all these skill sets and all this kind of tools and tricks that I know, you know, that I'm 44 right now, but in some ways more like 440. So I've learned a lot.

And I can apply this. Yes. Like I can apply this. For sure. And then also, that's kind of like a lower level thing. Also, at a deeper level, being like, you know, the future is, the future is we got to figure out how to solve these technology problems. Where can I solve these technology problems? Start my own company, invent the technology, or be on the Gov side and try to help somebody else do it.

Right. Like, nope, I'd rather just do it. We had started to talk about this in the last podcast with regard to like your concern specifically also really focusing in on China with this and we'll break that whole thing down. But would you say your exposure to that and the growing concern was something that you figured out while you happened to be kind of more working on the European side in 2015 to 2018? If so, what was your exposure to figuring that? No, you're right. And it was that that was where it was, you know, the shift was this.

The shift was like, okay, you know, it's one thing to fight this kind of like attritable, asymmetric. I'm throwing my words here, right, but like to fight the Taliban Al-Qaeda. It's one thing to do that. All of a sudden it's like, okay, now we're thinking about like the Russian Federation. Like, this is a very different thing. Very different. Very different. And we all

really know that it's about the CCP. Yeah, we all really know that. And like obviously Russia's got problems, but we always said it's that they got a GDP similar to Italy. Exactly. Exactly. You're dealing with a different piece. It's different beasts. It's different beasts. So, you know, that's where I looked and just said, okay,

We have a problem within U.S. military. And that problem is kind of victims of our own success at a tactical level. The victim of our own success at tactical levels, you got really, really good at fighting Afghanistan-style wars at a tactical level. I would not say that at a strategic level, but at a tactical level. We got really good at that. Really good at that. Yeah, on the ground.

Yeah, yeah. The problem is, like, that doesn't necessarily apply to something in, you know, in the Pacific or something, you know, in the conversation, it probably doesn't apply at all. And, yeah, I just became very convinced that like, okay, what it really is about is like, we need new technology. And the primes, the traditional primes,

they're just not delivering this. They're just not. Is it, this may be way over generalizing how you may look at it, so just correct me if I'm wrong, but is it fair to say the concern with the potential of warfare and like a quote unquote next war that could be with China is much more concerning as a technological based espionage war versus an actual like commando unit kind of war?

I think it's actually all the above. It's definitely what you just said. Okay. I mean, it's all. But the prelude is the technological espionage. It's all of it. It's all of it. Like the tech, the surveillance and or coercion, whether it's like I think I can't remember we were

talking off camera before the. Whether it's like programming somebody, programming our kids through TikTok Slop. Yeah, we talked about that on that. Yeah, whether it's that or whether it's, you know, building blackmail dossiers, whether it's monitoring congressional staffers and using their own emails against them, whether, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah, or that.

Yeah, all the above, right? You know, full intelligence operations. Whether it's that, that's just, that's just preparation. like, you know, that's nothing compared to the shooting potential. So it's all of it. Like, it's the full spectrum of it. And that did become like, you know, it still is very deeply concerned to me. Okay.

So and looking at looking at the system, the system. And we can go deep on this too, if it makes sense. But like the system of how we acquire, develop technology for, America's national security. I do want to go deep on this because we got off this in the last episode because you said it and you seem to be correct about this, by the way. I've heard this from a lot of people. Obviously, we rely on places like China so much to make all the shit that goes into our tech.

And effectively, we are inviting spyware right into everything we do because of that. Yeah. But let's expand upon this. So you have you have this dependency that we created both for our national security and our commercial stuff. with drones that are flying over a farm that happens to be next to a nuke power plant that's obviously obviously collecting data and then buying the farmland and all the other kind of like intelligence operations the penetration of all of our top labs and universities that you know at the open source

level like is is kind of widely understood now penetration of congressional areas and other ones like so you have you have all that kind of like problem set you also have a like so even zim back how does the military get new technology like how do you ensure a technology edge goes through this procurement acquisition kind of process that process is largely the same as when McNamara invented it and that doesn't work anymore so we're buying stuff i mean and this is oversimplified but still kind of useful even if we do everything right there's and i can get into how we're not doing it right but even if you do everything right we buy stuff off of a three to five year budget when technology is innovating at like a monthly if not weekly

level right so you're always three to five years behind is it comforting to think that a defense you know the u.s military is three to five years behind no but it's not yeah it's also really concerning that like the Pentagon can't pass the basic you know budget test that's you know and yet now we're going to buy fast because i agree with you we have to right Right. But like what the fuck? The bureaucracy like is so top heavy. It's so top heavy. And that's also all part of the like problems with. It's easy to say problems with the system. But it's true. Like that's all part of the problems with the system. There's also just worth like even talking like just acquisition. There is. There's an incentive problem. So the in the process. The process. The process. The process. Program managers, like these are the people like actually buying stuff for the U.S. military.

Like they have like authorities and responsibilities to do this. The program managers, their incentives are every, they have every incentive to avoid risk. Every incentive to avoid risk. If they go fast, it's just risk for them. Something goes wrong. You know, then the other opposing one protests, there's lawsuits. Like, it's just risk. And they get no professional incentives that I'm aware of at all.

to actually go fast and take a little bit of risk, which is what you have to do when you're in like a really innovative environment. Yeah, you have to do this. They have zero incentive for that. That is, you know, so a lot of people talk about the federal acquisition regulation, the FAR, if you hear this term. We'll talk about the FAR. They'll talk about, oh, we need to use other transaction authority.

I love this too, analogy, by the way. This is the best way to describe, like, this is how you know a system needs. needs to be reformed. So we've, we actually have like real documents out there that say, okay, the primary way we should buy stuff and develop technology, new technology,

buy technology. And I'm talking everything. I'm talking like very high tech stuff, even medium tech, kind of low tech, all the above. We're saying that we have documents out there saying the, because the federal acquisition regulation,

which if I printed out, it'd be like this. And like, really. Because that's so bad, our primary way is going to be something called an OTA. OTA stands for other transaction authority. So it's like, you know, zoom out and think about that where we're at for a second. Our own rules have gotten so cumbersome that the other way is now the primary way.

The other way is now the primary way. That is like actually codified. We've now gotten to the point where we write rules to not use the rules we have. and use the other rules. It's the most government thing. It is the most government thing you'll find. And it's a symptom of just how bad that system has really become. Lack of incentives and a complexity that few can kind of really even understand.

That was also part of, I mean, I have to deal with it because I'm selling to the government. So I have to deal with it. But that was part of like my thinking of I'd like to get outside of that, build the technology. build the technology that I know that we need, and then we'll find ways to work with them in this. We'll find ways to thread the needle and work with them. Yeah, as a side note here, because it's always the 500 pound elephant in the room, there has been a longstanding necessary, but also slippery slope, complicated, and even dangerous alliance, if you will, between the defense sector and the military.

And we know the term military industrial complex to where it becomes almost, but not almost. It literally is incestuous. It creates a lot of, by the way, intelligence loopholes. It creates a lot of taxpayer money loopholes as an example of this that I'm thinking of off the top of my head. You could have someone work at CIA for 10 years making fucking 95 grand a year, 90 grand a year. They have a desk on row three, aisle five of floor four. and they leave on a Friday after putting in their two weeks. They go to Lockheed where now they're making $925,000 a year.

They walk back through the front door on Monday. They're giving the same land yard, have the same desk, but now they technically work in the private sector. And the government gets to say it's a contract that they're contracting out to this company who handles what the salaries are. Right. So we have all this going. On the one hand, two really positive things that are important. Number one, I do want my American companies innovating. the best defense shit for our military.

We have to have that. People that say you don't, you're living in another reality. Number two, you do have to have an incentive to do that. So you're not going to get the best innovators if you're paying them the same government salary of $95,000 or whatever to do the work.

So this is not like, I get frustrated with the two sides of this argument, like burn it all down or keep it all because I'm focusing more on the burn it all down. I'm like, all right, that's not the solution here. However, the burn it all down crowd has an amazing point that the amount of waste, loopholes, bullshit, over, you know, overspending on stuff we're never going to use without any transparency whatsoever is a huge problem.

So you, listen, it's a big ocean. My buddy Tommy G has got an amazing quote where he says, you know, I can't boil the ocean, but I can boil my pot. You can only focus on your pot. but like in doing what you do, it sounds like you do truly believe that the product you're making, which of course is an entrepreneur of a company, CEO founder, like you are trying to scale it. You are trying to make sure you make a lot of money and have a successful company, as you should. But it sounds like that is because you genuinely do believe that the technology you're creating

is some of the most important investments that the U.S. government is going to make over this next ruling 10-year period. Dude, 100%. And put another way, we don't want a defense industrial base that is just war profiteers. We do not want that. We do not want that. What we want is a lean, efficient, and we want more than just three or four or five primes at the top taking it all. We want a highly competitive, you know, I envision this whole idea of like, hey, let's have five primes. and just add two more. That's not enough. Like, I think you want an environment

where there's like a thousand companies. Yes, we have an oligarchy right now. You want a democracy. We need, we need like a thousand companies that are all competing and teaming with each other, by the way. Like you're going to do both. We team with all kinds of folks, right? They play nice with other companies, not box them out.

And then your overhead is so much lower. The overhead in these companies has mirrored the bureaucratic kind of rot within USCG, like for sure. That that has to be addressed. I can't remember if we said it's on camera or not, but like, you know, the budget just got massively increased, apparently. Yeah, we didn't say it on camera. Went from like 900 to 1.5 trillion or something.

1.5 is what, yeah, POTUS just tweeted out, I think, which is unprecedented. Definitely not a war coming. Oh, yeah. Definitely that would never. It hasn't happened since, World War II. So it is a logical assumption to say that there's a war fun. Just look at the pizza restaurants around the Pentagon. That's what I'm saying.

I think Secretary has Hague Seth one other and said, yeah, now I just like to screw with people and order pizzas randomly, which is funny. I would do the same thing about that position. But there's a couple takeaways of this, at least immediate that I think about for the company. And my company, to your analogy, like my pot that I'm trying to boil. But I'm thinking of the broader ocean too. Okay. Like I am thinking of the broader, because it is about the broader ocean. Right. That is one, do the, are the U.S. taxpayers getting 900 billion, soon to be maybe 1.5 trillion a year worth of defense? Are they getting that kind of national security? Okay. If the answer is no, I would argue it's no. How do we fix that? I think a massive way to fix that is small startups,

medium-sized companies that are lean, mean, bring unique capabilities to them, and better contract mechanisms. That, I think, is actually a very important one. That is something I can kind of both, I can't, I can't influence, I can't fully solve that, but I can influence it. What I am encouraged to see is, you know, what I've seen is a real kind of shift away from, like what we're saying right now. I think there's actually a lot of people in the Pentagon right now that would agree with what we're saying. Oh, actually, yeah. And I think that the number is actually grown. And I think there's a there's a real understanding of like just paying for stock buybacks and, you know, doing this kind of work in the defense industrial base is not what we need to be doing here. It's not we need

to actually. So there's two things need to happen. We need to use this money much more efficiently. And we also need to be buying and developing the kind of technology that actually matter, not just keeping programs alive because their jobs in district X. Not just doing that. That happens a lot. Yeah. So there's a lot of work to be done there. And can it be done without a, you know, literally an act of Congress?

I don't know, to be frank. I don't know. I think it probably does take congressional action. Goldwater Nichols-style congressional action that created USOCOM, like that kind of action back from the 80s. So I think, like, ultimately, the, you know, the people's representatives have to make something like this happen. Like, they have to push for that.

So I think that's, that's important. And that's part of the kind of the overall solution. But also, like, success wins. Success wins. Like, you know, it's solely deeply within like both Americanism and all. also like very pragmatic people that are trying to do defense and ultimately just care about, does it work? Does it have the capability? So what we try to do is be very focused on like delivering very real capabilities, solving those nasty problems that have not been solved

within drones and robotics and then offering it to something that's and this is something that my brother talks about this. It was a commercial software type for his whole career. And and he kind of co-founded the company with you. He did, yeah, he did, yeah. And he's an advisor kind of now. And part of the thing he said early on, which I really took on, I like, is treat the government like a commercial customer. Not treat the government like something we're fleecing to do these inflated, you know, these inflated contracts that we're never going to deliver on. Like, treat them like a commercial customer, you know, whether it's a B2B or whether it's a consumer, like, hey, they have pain points.

They have their price sensitive, like all the things that you would do in commercial. commercial software to deliver real value to that customer. And we've, and we've just lost that for all kinds of reasons, you know. And there's not, not that there's not patriots and good Americans at any defense contractor or traditional primes there are. You know, I've got friends and all of them. But, but there's something, something's just gone awry. Something's just gone awry.

Well, it's passing the buck, too. It's opportunism. Geysered in, you know, one big deal with the government. or like, I can make 400 million instead of 300. I'll do it. Someone else will not waste the money. And it happens extrapolated in all those situations a million times. Yeah.

No, I agree. Like it, you know, and you can justify it. Right. And there's a degree you can. Of course. You can justify it. Well, look at, you know, it's better than a Somali daycare. It's like, you know, life's about perspectives sometimes.

Yeah. 100%. weapons of war. There's perspectives at least. You know, at least they're producing actual F-35s. You use these in Mogadishia, not Minneapolis. Yeah. So.

Yeah, actually. Yeah, actually. But there's a, I mean, there's just a lot of work to be done there. So, but I, that was, that was very animated to me. That's ultimately why I retired. So basically, I retired. I did a machine learning fellowship with MIT like as I was retiring. And then went and got a degree out of there.

and founded the company out of there. So you got, you got, that's a big deal getting into MIT. I mean, insane, insane human capital of talent over there. You,

the kind of stuff you're looking at. The, the good thing about MIT is like, nobody's arrogant there because the person sitting next to you actually is smarter than you. In almost every context. Among the student base or the,

I, my experience was it, there's a unique kind of culture there that, you know, it's very engineering focused. There's no law school. there's no med school you know there so it's very very like research focused um of course there's like you know different hierarchies and clicks like any group of humans are um but it was still you know so

it was uh i enjoyed a time there for sure because it was still very much on like performance and inquisitive minds you know um which i liked so that what's the what's the number outside like the education on the material what's the number one skill set you developed there added to the repertoire. The, um, and I got to test this too was, um, working, collaborating and leading like very diverse engineer skill sets. Mm. You know, so like you take a PhD from robotics versus a AI one versus somebody's doing like

mapping human genome. And these are all like PhDs. Oh yeah. Right. And then putting them together and trying to extract something meaningful. This is, you know, this is ultimately what a tech startup has. to do. You put some kind of variables like this together. And then you have to extract something meaningful that's so compelling that it will separate a customer from their money. Right.

You know, so it can't be like a lab project. Can't be a pet project. That's an extremely low ego, collaborative. But that skill set I got to like do reps on this. You know, multiple times kind of there. Because, you know, engineers are very, especially the highest level ones, very wired in on what they do. Yeah. And then when you're bringing across them, to entirely different engineers. Like you said, it's like, yeah, these lanes, it's Japanese, English. No, it's very different.

Very different. I developed some of that, like, in those, those early days, like, right before I went to Air Command Staff. So, like, you know, as like a kind of looking at, like the pinnacle of your flying career is like, they called like a mid-level captain. I've been in it for about eight years. I'm an instructor.

Like, that's when you got your best in some cases, depending on how much you get to fly, but that's usually kind of like a key, key part of your overall, like, flying career. And I started to do that with like some of the weapons stuff and all that we did and worked with like very different engineers. And I found I really enjoyed it. So even then.

So that was something I kind of doubled down on and carried into. And ultimately what it comes to, it comes to just being a leader with very low ego, staying humble, but confident at the same time. and the ability to drill in to an engineer to extract something that you might need for someone, someone else on the team. And then kind of the ability to be like, all right, the best thing now is for me to just maybe remove myself from this part and just make sure the blocking and tackling is done. Right.

And it's kind of like, it's very, it's very fluctuating kind of back and forth. Confident in your vision by hiring people to actually tell you what to do within their specific still. Yeah, 100%. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's a tough, listen, it sounds simple, but to be able to do that. That separates leaders. It does. But there's a couple of things that are very awesome about it. And one is that hand selecting a team is awesome.

When you get to like hand build a small team and then and you get to, you know, we have very high standards. We don't advertise jobs or anything like that because I got a list of all kinds of people that want to get in. I make a wear a shirt here. You make a wear a shirt. Yeah. Sometimes. Okay. Sometimes.

Right, good. You got to have standards, man. That's right. You have standards. That's our standards. Our, everyone we have is on the spectrum in some capacity. So, you know, you got to have the people staring at fractals to make the good shit to flies there. Everybody's on some level. That's right. It's like, if you're an artist, you're in.

If not, get the fuck out. My wife hates it when I say that. But like, it's, it is what it is. It is what it is. That's where the capital is, bro. Everybody in our, everybody in our company is. Like, everybody is. And it's awesome.

and it's awesome. Like, I don't know, it's so boring in other places. Like, I was just at, where was that? I did this pitch at Amazon headquarters. They called HQ 2 in D.C. And it was, yeah, but it was like, I'm going to just describing it, right? It was like nothing about these like sleep pods and people walking like three different dogs at the time and having their fourth match for the morning. Oh, kill me.

And I'm like, put a bullet on my head. That's, you know. Well, I go to these, like I go to them, but I love Amazon, but I go to these ones. It's like, you know, the question, you know, the question comes up for any like startup founders. Like, well, why can't X do what you're doing? You know, why doesn't Lockheed just make this technology? Or if you're building a new software, why doesn't Facebook just do it? Or why doesn't Microsoft just do it?

It's like, have you been in their headquarters? Like, have you seen how little work happens in some of these places? Like, I've been in some of those. You got a fair point. You don't have to run that fast in some of these ones. It's amazing what happens when you get too many people together in one area. Yep. You get too big.

You lose the magic of what built in. There's just, there, and you stay lean, small, and agile. And I hate meetings. I tell them I hate meetings. I feel you. I hate meetings. I've actually ended meetings because I'm just like, no, I'm done. Like we're in mid-sense, but no.

Right. I got a hard stop at three. Yeah. This meeting went, this meeting went for six minutes and it was always scheduled for three minutes. So we just wanted to review what was on the table. Yes. Oh, God. I just, yeah.

Yeah. So we've, like, that's what's been, that's what's part of all, part of my motivation too for Victus was I did the interviews as I, as I retired. Like I interviewed at one of the big defense primes. Like every. Like, everything. Like, like, everybody goes, right? Like, you know. And like, like, one of them I went through.

I won't throw a spear on here, but one of them. So I went through and did like three, four rounds. At the end, there's, so it's me and two other guys interviewing me. Okay. One of them is like an old, you know, retired aviator from the Navy. And there's like a much younger engineer, pure engineer. As we're interviewing, this is like primary data, right? As we're interviewing, they start arguing with each other in front of me, like as we're interviewing.

And then I have, I was like, okay, noted. So I'm just kind of taking notes, right? Like, what do you do? Like, I'm in a job interview and they're arguing, like, there's overt hostility between these two. Is this like a corporate argument or like a go fuck yourself, New York argument? Like, what's going on? Corporate.

Corporate. It's very passive aggressive. Very passive aggressive. But, yeah. But the older grizzled mill guy, you know, he's just like, he starts red here. And it's just like, it's working it up. It's working it up. It's working.

So I'm just watching it. Like, I didn't draw it in, but I could have, like, drawn a face and been, like, scribbling up like, oh, the red's gotten higher. The red's gotten higher. So then I, and I have my little set of questions. And, you know, you have these questions, right? Like, you go to an interview. I have these questions.

So then I go to the younger guy and, you know, pure engineer. And I ask a question something to the effect of, hey, tell me a time where you like really empowered your team, which is obviously. You asked them that? Yeah, which is obviously a set of question, right? What I'm really doing is being like, okay, are you a micromanager or not? that's what I want to know. So I ask him this question.

He comes back. He says this. He comes back and goes, sometimes you just got a micromanager guys. So then I flipped the page and I wrote like, in the year of our Lord, 2023, I just had someone say micromanagement is something that they should do within this. So this just went on. Like this was my experience with one of these interviews. So then I, then, like, you know, everybody has these, anybody veteran watching this will know,

like the little green books. I was still rocking the green book at this point. It's like standard army issue green books, right? So I've write that in there. So then we go, we leave. I go out with this guy afterwards. I don't drink, but I'm just like, you can have as many whiskeys as he want.

Then he tells me all kinds of stuff about. Oh, that's the best. Oh, it's the best. He tells me all, and he's just like, this place like, you know, and it was just like, you're good. So then the day after. That was like summer. I had already gotten in MIT, but I wasn't sure like what I was going to do.

Maybe I take a job. Maybe I don't. As I was retiring, they called on terminal leave like at the very end where I'm basically done, but I'm still technically in the Air Force. And that's where I was like, okay, I actually thought about this corporate lifestyle. Like for now, this is not happening. And the job that I want apparently doesn't exist. So I'm going to create it.

Love that. And that's then that with that at that point, it was like, so I showed up at MIT. I was like, I know where I'm going. I have some of the invention already. Like, this is what we're doing. What year is that MIT, 2020? That's 23. 23.

So I retire. My effective retirement date is 1 September 23. And then I start at MIT a couple weeks later, like 19 September. All right. So you come out of MIT. Did you immediately have Vic this as like the idea ready to roll? Well, I had it during there. So good thing about like, and a lot of schools have this, right?

A lot of good tech schools. But they have, you know, MIT is a bunch of these kind of like napkin level hack or you can kind of get stuff together. It's super fun, right? So we did one of these as part of my program in spring of 24, week long one, had all kinds of folks helping, did a little pitch, you know, had some risk capital like VC types come in kind of at the end. And we did well. There's the only like defense thing even close, even close. We got like number two at a 68. So I had been consulting for like, you know, Intel community, socom based and like some other kind of facing companies.

And I was like, okay, we have, that validated my hypothesis that we're on to something here. Like, we're on to something. You know, we've identified the mountain. That's, that's what we did. We've got to climb the mountain stuff. But we've at least identified there's an actual mountain here to climb. So I was like, all right, I'm going to power down all my clients. I'm going all in on this.

So then I was like, all right, let's build in stealth. We didn't really tell anybody we were doing to start building in stealth. And your brother came in at this point. He came in right at that point. And we started just kind of building in that summer of, what's that summer of 24 yeah he has the he has an engineering background yeah like a like a i engineer he done stuff with microsoft he's a striper for years you know the striper for years you know the air force commando a i engineer yep do it exactly and then started you know i had some other folks

helping too like advisors they're basically working for free but they're helping out in that area to be like okay we think there's something here so you know we want to start getting involved all right real quick i got to pee one more time and then we're going to now we're going to go through the whole product and how it works and then go into like the counter intel stuff and I want to talk underwater. Oh yes sweet as well. Yes. Yes. We'll be right back. Excellent. All right. So we've hinted at it throughout the day. You again, I think this is the third time we've at least mentioned. You're effectively trying to build the inner ear for drones. But I guess like technologically and scientifically, can you break down how this works and what that looks like on maybe you know,

field of battle or a surveillance situation. Yeah, yeah. So first, like, a minute or two on how GPS works, because then that understands, like, okay, how do we fix one of it? So the way, like, basic GPS works, you have an algorithm on, it's on everything. It's even actually part of GPS itself. It's called a common filter. This is a math problem, not problem, algorithm, that basically does state estimation.

So if you think about it, it's kind of like if you took a, if you took a bunch of points, it resolves it into one thing. Like I get a fix here, here, here, here. I'm going to call it here. It's kind of like a simple version of how that works. Colman filters are invented back in the 60s by guy named Dr. Coleman. And they worked for navigation for years. So they took something that was some kind of an accelerometer. Accelerometer just measures the shift in gravity. This is in your phone. That's how step counting works. It's in a drone. It's in every aircraft and every satellites and every submarine, it's in almost everything. They just kind of measure the shift, the fuel this way.

So the common filter helps integrate that into a GPS signal as well. So when you get GPS signals, you're getting them from different satellites, different satellites around, and you're getting kind of like different cuts. And it resolves that into one position that you call like the position of where you're at. So the way Coleman filters are designed, they're back in the 60s, we use them to to pilots would like overfly a mountain and they'd be like, hey, my inertial system say I'm here, but then I'm going to click update when I'm over the mountain and that will kind of tighten my solution is what you'd call it. So you used to have an error, you'd measure your error,

meaning I know I'm somewhere within this circle, but then if I, once I go over that mountain, I know where that is and I can kind of resolve that. And then it starts drifting again. And then I'd go over another mountain. I resolve that. So you need base points, basically. Kind of like a base point. Yeah. And it's like a visual reference. So common filters work really well, whether it's a human or a computer, computer vision, giving those references. It works well when those things are available. In late 80s, early 90s, we said, well, we don't actually need visual reference anymore. All I need is a signal up to medium earth orbit. And it works really well as well. Therefore, when you get, you know, your phone has,

when it has a good GPS fix, it has a location error of something like one meter around there. That means that that blue dot that shows up on your maps, it's accurate to about one meter. So it's like, I know there's a, if you have really good GPS signals, if you have, this is assuming you have really good GPS signals. That has to do with the strength of the signal, clarity of the atmosphere, how many satellites, there's a couple things that go into that. How good your processes are on board. Like, it's all that. If you, like, there's a, there's a GPS technology called real-time kinematic GPS, R-TK GPS. That's what the drone shows use.

So if you're watching a light show that's like, and that's where it's very precise, right? A drone has to fly here. The other one has to be here. The other one has to be here. Or it doesn't look like the shape from you looking at it. They can get down to sometimes like centimeter accuracy. Yeah. So you can very, very accurate.

Didn't we see one of those in Paris? Is that what we were looking at, a drone show? Oh, yeah. That was Paris or Italy? Yeah. Oh, it was Italy. Yeah, yeah, we were on the roof, right? They're pretty cool.

And they're still using GPS. So the problem with all of that, like we talked about, is that GPS itself as a signal is very easily disrupted for stuff we said. Solar flares, jammers, building in the way, atmospheric disturbances, all the above. And that has nothing to do with like in a wartime, can you do something up in orbit to the satellites that are actually there? Right. Absolutely. you can. Like absolutely, they're just flying around. Like they're just, they're just waiting to be shot at, quite frankly, or jammed or tampered with in some capacity. So that's how all robotic systems

have worked. And if you think about it, what that really means is any robotic system or drone, something to know where it's at in time and space. It's reliant on getting that signal, either seeing the ground or getting that signal from up in GPS. When we started using GPS in the 80s and 90s, we just basically converted everything. We really start with aviation. But it went to the robotic system and drones kind of were bore out of that and said, okay, we're going to use that for how we understand the world, basically, how we know where we're at. The problem is, like we talked about, that's very easily disrupted.

And that's what's been proven in Ukraine. It's been proven in all kinds of other areas. It's a, it's a massive like Achilles heel. So we say and invented something, and this is what our provisional patents over with kind of the foundation of the companies about is that instead of doing it that way, what we do is say, all right, let me take this edge device. By edge, I mean like a drone, robotic system, whatever it is. Let me build a model, which kind of looks like an agent, but it's a model around how that works, which is done pretty fast. Let me also model how the inertial sensors work inside of it. They're in everything. And that is

like how they shift in the XYZ access, how they shift in these different axis. So it's gravity shifting, much like your head, you feel the gravity shift as you move your neck around, right? So we model that. We put that in synthetic environment and then we train with unique data sets and then, you know, to use the term ontology, a unique ontology, as well as a unique machine learning model. We train something that we call a synthetic GPS. That's a machine learning model. So it's like a no kidding, you know, computer Python script.

That's then deployed to an edge device, humanoid. satellite, submarine, drone, aircraft, ship, lower orbit satellite, like, doesn't matter, right, phone, anything. It's deployed there. It then sits on a very lightweight compute. So we got it down to like we talked about Raspberry Pi earlier, but like it sits on a pretty lightweight compute. So it doesn't require this big like data center or GPU cluster, anything like that. And then it's what it's doing. It's passively receiving all of those accelerometer streams of information.

in real time. So if I took like the drone and moved it and had it hooked up to a screen, you would see those shifts in XYZ access, like actual numbers say, hey, I just moved at this rate, at this distance. I just moved all this.

So we trained it on that. At the same time, it's then monitoring the GPS signal. There's a couple ways we do that. If GPS is good, we just operate in the background. So it's silently operating the background and it's doing state estimation.

It's answering the question, where am I? That's all it's doing, like, where am I? When we detect GPS gets jammed or spoofed, and we actually detect both of these things, spoof being it's a fake GPS or I've done, yeah, this is a very real thing. Do fake GPS is I can do cyber attacks to a device

through its GPS antenna. And make it think it's somewhere else. You can make it think somewhere else. You can actually even disrupt the message traffic at the API level from the GPS antenna. This is a problem. This is a problem that you're experiencing Ukraine. quite frequently, actually, because it's very fragile.

That whole system is very, very fragile. You can think of the GPS antenna as like a screen door saying any cyber attack, here's how you come in. Like, that's really what it is in a lot of ways. So we monitor if something happens with it. If that happens then, we then transmit from our state estimator that's been calculating where I am in time and space independently. We transmit that to the, you know, a drone, it's a system called

flight controller, but it's basically the autopilot, like the brain that's controlling, hey, this is where I'm going, this is what I'm doing. We transmit to that so that it has an answer to the question, where am I? And then it answers the question, where am I going, what am I doing, in the same way that it's been doing that. So it's seamless, so it doesn't know it. So part of the key of what we wanted to really both invent and bring the market for national security and our commercial customers is something where they don't have to change

the hardware or the software of what they're using. They have a drone or a platform or a weapon or an aircraft or ship or a satellite that works in this environment. It works how they want. But the problem is they need it to work when GPS doesn't. And they can't just rely on a computer vision technique that looks at the ground or hoping for a magnometer to work correctly with magnetic lines of the earth. So they can seamlessly insert your product. Inserted the product in. Yep.

Seenely inserted that product into that. That's what we've built with, that's what we've built is basically like a workflow for. for our end users, whether that's a drone, whether it's a, the Navy uses the term USV or UUV or AUV for autonomous undersea vehicle, unmanned surface vessel. These are like drone boats, drone submarines, all the same thing. All right, keep going. We'll come back to that. Yeah, but it's questions on that.

But they, from a technology perspective, they basically work the same way. So our software applies to those devices as well. So it sits on that device and then it's there when you need it. If that means you have no good GPS for the entire time, you know where you are. That's fine. You know where you're at. We can keep kind of a very good location for it.

And there was nothing like this in existence? Nothing. Nothing. What people have tried to do, I mean, so that, you know, this problem set's been understood. Like, hey, it's probably a bad idea to be dependent on GPS. But what most have tried to do is some kind of a goofy bolt on. So like, hey, put this quantum sensor that might work on here. Put this magnometer.

And then we'll map out. full magnetic lines of the earth. Maybe that'll work. Hey, put computer vision on there and say that we have GPS denied. Just don't tell them if a cloud is out. It doesn't work. Let's just not talk about that. Put an atomic clock on there.

That'll do it. And then it'll figure out the timing without it. These are all terrible ideas. Which is why we gain traction so fast. They don't work. We work with a client. So, you know, we work with all kinds of different companies, drone manufacturing companies, direct for government.

We worked with like the chip manufacturers that produce things for the drones. There's one. Base level. Base level. Yeah. Like fully throughout the supply chain. So there's one company that is trying to get, and this is for all the reasons we talked about earlier about massive drones.

They're trying to get the price point for their drones down. They're trying to keep making them cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, which is a righteous mission for all kinds of reasons. They're also being told, hey, this thing's got to be able to operate in a contested environment, meaning it's got to be able to operate with cheap. GPS jamming or denied GPS. So they do what any drone OEM does, as in, you know, a manufacturer of them. They don't make that kind of stuff.

So they go to the market and they do, you probably call it like an analysis of alternatives to say, okay, what capabilities cannot buy off the shelf to try and solve this requirement that my end user customer has? And they go to try and find this and this one, this is a real company that we're working with. This company comes back and says, yeah, for this $2,000 drone, one of the quantum computing sensor companies said, well, we can solve this for you with an $80,000 ad on. So I'm going to take a $2,000 drone that's designed.

And the low price of $80,000. We're going to bolt this thing onto it. And the whole purpose of this drone is like one-way emissions. And we're going to put this really expensive thing on it that destroys the battery. It's just turned into an $82,000 drone. It's a terrible situation. So it's not workable. So that's kind of the key part of what we're solving.

that's amazing. And you're so like you said, you can integrate at the base level. You can integrate with the existing technology. You can integrate with the existing physical infrastructure of any of these types of drones. And you're working on both a government contract side and a private company side as well. Yep. You were saying like, yeah. In the commercial space, I mean, the commercial space is using drones for all kinds of stuff, right?

We got drones that are doing power line inspections. I like very much. I like drones as first responders. Some kind of powerful anecdotes from 2024 and actually early 25. Wildfires out in California in L.A. County. And hurricanes, both of them hit around the Tampa area in Florida back in 24 just last year. Those hurricanes were pretty nasty and the wildfires were nasty too. Both states, ostensibly, had all kinds of drones that were dedicated for first response.

None of them worked in either situation. That's why they're dependent on good GPS, good 5G, good LT. What's the first thing that goes that goes away after a big hurricane comes in and knocks out everything? So none of it works. So they all just paper weights everywhere, paper weights. And then that's why you had all the images in, I mean, you could develop and there was technology. You could do this better. That's why you have manned aircraft, like scooping up water and trying to drop stuff.

That is super expensive. It's not your best first response. So that one we're kind of very passionate about. That's working through both government, state agencies, private companies, power companies. So it's a complex kind of thing. And then the thing we were talking about earlier is that, you know, security where now you, what we're seeing is like bandits or thieves are bringing GPS jammers with them to prevent first responders from doing anything. So, you know, there's a, there's a market there for sure that those, you know, those kind of folks need.

acknowledged where they can operate in a GPS contested environment for sure. Now, to look at it more on the national security side of things, because all those use cases are extremely, they're incredible and it can also save lives and improve how we respond to the worst natural disasters, which we have no control over. But looking at it from a national security perspective, obviously you take away the jamming problem. Obviously, you take away the very lackadaisical GPS system problem. occurs with drones. But like, is their technology, like what is the status, I guess,

and if I'm going to put this broadly, of the drone warfare competition between the U.S. and China right now? Does China already have technology like this and companies over there that are working on what you're working on or not? Well, I start from the premise. Well, first I'll answer this way. We definitely have a novel technology. that has not been replicated anywhere. We've invented very new technology for this in a new category. Having said that,

there's not a single technology that we can't assume that the Chinese are actively trying to pursue. Like they're gonna pursue every, not a single one. I don't care what green door it's behind. It doesn't matter. They're pursuing kind of everything. Part of what we've gonna do,

we've been, you know, the way we've built this, the way we've created this without technical debt kind of from scratch using the very latest ways of both software coding and both AI and ML ops really to kind of nerd out on that but that is a novel way of doing things it just hasn't been done you know before having said that are the chinese going to work on something like this yeah 100 percent like you know because it's just a powerful problem set so they're they are definitely going to try and develop develop systems that give them a asymmetric advantage. The reason this one's kind of a uniquely US one is because the US has developed all the systems off of GPS. So we put GPS up in orbit in, you know, late in the 80s and started using it a lot in like the early 90s. And then we built our own systems off of that. So it's a unique Achilles heel for the US. It's a unique Achilles heel because of all of the national security platform.

I mean, almost every one of them that is relying on GPS to some level, almost every one of them. That one, you know, because if you're building stuff totally from scratch right now, there's probably some other ways you could do some things in some cases. Now, you're not going to get the low cost like that a software solution brings, but there's, for example, in Ukraine right now, you have fiber optic drones. Fibro optic drones. So fiber optic drones are a terrible, terrible idea. But they did it because

And they're doing it because there's no better solution that they've had yet. Can you explain how they work? Yeah. And my mind is run into some interesting images right now. It's probably the right image. The basic being, it's so jammed over there. They can't trust any signal.

So they have a fishing line of fiber optic from somebody controlling it somewhere. Whether that's a machine or a human. Yeah. So it's a terrible idea from an engineering perspective. The last person in the world you want to be. is the one on the other end of that line. You've basically told the whole world, hey, here's where I'm at right now.

So you don't want to be that person right there. But they've went to it because this problem has gotten so bad for them. Like it's just gotten to where they can't. There's been no other kind of real solutions for it. What ways are, like we know all these famous stories like we mentioned earlier, like the Chinese spy balloon and stuff like that. But like what ways are countries like China or Russia, whoever you want to focus on?

or any other countries using drones effectively right now that we're having serious problems with in our airspace or in our waters. Well, okay. All right. So there's a lot. I'll tell you what I am most focused on or maybe there were to be concerned, but at least focused on. Open source, you can look it up. The Chinese are developing some pretty interesting like stratosphere level bullets, balloons, excuse me.

Stratosphere level balloons. So you're talking stuff that you're flying like way to freak up there, right? Way up there. And somewhere in like 100, sometimes 150,000, like somewhere in that range. Could even be a little bit lower in that. But it's just way up there. And you're basically taking that balloon. That balloon's in kind of this unique band of airspace, right?

And they're putting on some kind of a drone. And basically you get that balloon close enough. And then you launch the drone off of that. And then you put really good propulsion on it. and then you have a hypersonic drone that's very cheap. Hypersonic drone. Yeah, because you think of you're so high, and you're shooting this thing straight down,

like a dart, straight down. That is a problem for a couple reasons. That's a problem. One, you have all kinds of balloons that are used for weather and all that, so it's easily masked, and it's also a problem because I don't know if that's got a drone on it. I don't know what kind of system it has on it. And it solves a lot of the problem with hypersonics,

which is often like they're very expensive. And when you launch them, the whole world knows that you've launched them. In this case, it's like, no, I put a balloon up. I'm floating it. Maybe it's in weather. Maybe it's not.

Maybe it's soon weather. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's hanging out. And I've got a drone that it's carrying on it and can launch down. And every, so I don't know if this would apply to the stratosphere level balloons. But like the balloons that, that was so crazy, by the way.

We're just like letting the fucking Chinese balloon fly across the airspace. Like shoot that. bitch down. Like, what the fuck? But it was sucking up all the data. Oh, 100%. That it goes over. Yeah. So these things up at that level, can they do that too? There's all kinds of payloads you can sniff data with. All kinds of payloads. Yeah. Yeah, all kinds. So if you think about it, the, you know, the, the, the, without like trying to psychoanalyze China, which many have tried to do, maybe successfully, probably not. take the art of war, right?

You know, all kinds of like little snippets in the art of war. Sun Tzu. Yeah, Sun Tzu, yeah. So I'm thinking, I'm thinking. You pronounce it to Zoo. To Zoo. Jersey. Thank you for that.

Yeah, good. Yeah. Jersey. Yeah. Excellent. So, son to zoo, you know, he talks about like, feigning deception, you know, acting weak when you're actually strong.

Like this, you know, these kind of like, you know, there's a broad concepts. But if you, and then you also think, so one, that's a cultural kind of way of like, whether it's overt or not. I'm not saying like the CCP goes and picks up the art of war and says, what should we do on page four? I'm not saying they do that. But it's part of their culture. Yes.

It's definitely part of their war fighting culture. The, so there's that piece. They're also with, you know, the Chinese economy. And I mean, it went from a third world to a,

you know, first world near peer in like, what, a generation? It went, it did it. He Kifu Lee writes about it. He literally opens that book. Yeah.

Superpowers. Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm thinking of the right book where he's like all these kids. He said pictured in 1999, a bunch of kids coming outside with like flashlights reading on the streets at night. And he's like, China's a third world country. Right. This is a university.

And then 10 years later, he's like, first world. Yeah. It's like Dubai. All right. Like, yeah. Yeah. So what that means is they didn't have to like bring in the old industrial age into the information age.

Right. They just got to start with that. That's right. So it also means if you're going to build up capability, like, what are you going to do? I'm like, okay, I got to go up against this trillion dollar a year behemoth. So let me develop and invest in capabilities that asymmetrically neutralize it, like electronic attack, like balloons, like super cheap drones that take advantage of my manufacturing supremacy. That's what I'm going to invest in.

So maybe they get, you know, some. really sophisticated hypersonic stealth munition. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Who cares? They're like, we're the ones that can produce millions of these drones. And we can steal all your software and the autonomy stuff that you've already done. And we can produce it. And then we can invest in electronic attack.

We can invest in balloons. We can invest in unique carrier, you know, weapons to go against carrier strike groups in the Pacific. We invest in these things. all the neutralizing ways you know and then because then the idea is like okay if i can if i can at a national security level like if you basically take away your credible way to coerce me so i can take away all right yes united states america i know that your military power is really not that real because you're not willing to have you know three carrier strike groups at the bottom of the ocean on night one and you know that i can do that all of a sudden you

that gives them freedom and maneuver to kind of do whatever they want. Also, with drones, again, because you don't have to have humans in them, and they can be smaller, and the engineering is a lot different. Am I, this, I'm way out of my wavelength here, so just correct me from all. But you're not operating with the engineering issues that like the Titanic sub guy ran into because he's got to make something humans can go. Yeah, totally. Yeah, and they are simple.

And the Chinese also, they're just good at drones. So there is an argument by far. Like within the U.S. drone industry on the commercial side, it's actually kind of sad, right? Basically all U.S. companies got out of the drone business. The Chinese ran them out. The DJI drones and a couple other ones related to DJI, they dominate the U.S. consumer market. Dominates. We got Chinese spyware all over the country.

All over the farms, all the hobbyists, all the people doing real estate. There's not a way we can check for that? well we know it's happening yeah but like before the drone gets imported you know comes into the port of elizabeth and you know it can't go through like some sort of government screening check for like let's magnetically find a spy or something this is something we actually tried to do some work on with this um yeah try harder we won't well i won't name the state but we actually worked with a state on this on legislation to try and do almost exactly what you're talking about and and this is worth like people understanding.

We had strong support. This is in May of 25. We had strong support for it. Bill got killed. All of it got killed. What ends up happening is people wearing law enforcement uniforms and or firefighting uniforms. Other folks get kind of like pulled out and testify saying, you can't take my Chinese

drones away. The American stuff all sucks. And if you take this away from me, then you don't care about me and my family and you're not there to help me do my job. Okay, so this bill was to take away. This bill was to have a U.S. capability to inspect these kind of drones,

ensure that the software is clean on them, and prevent data exfiltration, meaning prevent the spying, still using a core DJI drone product, which is actually a good load of drone. Right? It works. Why were they concerned about losing their drones? I don't understand. This is just how the argument goes. So the argument goes of like because the argument was, the argument goes twofold in this case. The argument said we're going to give you like a five year period and then we're going to start making, you're going to have to start buying American. You're going to start buying Americans after a five year period where theoretically the U.S. drone industrial base would build up and then these law enforcement, firefighting, public safety type.

could then buy the equivalent of a U.S. drone. Right. So there's a time limit on it and it's a product change and legislation on where you're allowed to buy from. Yes. So this bill wasn't dealing with we're going to have a system in place to be able to like, you know, put a one like a security wand over the drones and just have that moving forward. So they could buy Chinese drones 10 years from now. But when it comes in the country, we wand it. Oh, there's spyware. Get rid of it. And then give it to them. It was that we, you know, the attempt of the bill was saying, we'll give you a sunset period. Yeah, but I'm saying into perpetuity.

Like, why not develop a tool that could just check this and be like, oh, there it is. We got it out. Here you go. That's what you would have had from this. Yes. Yeah, but at the end of five, at the end of five years, they wouldn't, you wouldn't even have that system anymore. It would just be, you must buy American.

Which I'm all for buying American. That part was actually in that bill, that part was even up for negotiation. Yeah, they should have negotiated that. Right. That was, but here's the, like, the part that people need to understand what is, like, actually happening here is that you had all kinds of people on DJI's payroll that were the ones that said, oh, no, we need to have Chinese drones. The American stuff is just terrible. Again, this has happened in multiple areas, and they kill these bills. Yep. They kill them. Using our freedoms against ourselves again.

Potentially, yeah. In fact, no, that's what they're doing. I personally think there should be an investigation of this. I agree. Like the Chinese drone lobbyists and who they've paid off. Because other states have looked at this too. And if you look, I don't have it up right now, but if you looked, the FCC recently just came out with something said,

we're not going to allow any Chinese drones to do anything. And I don't even know if they, like, I don't know exactly how you're going to enforce that or make that happen. Because it wasn't, it's not a bill. It's just like an executive thing. The FCC came out. And again, this is another problem where like this is a typical thing, please correct me from wrong again, where this kind of thing is happening here, but not in reverse. Well. So we are doing some.

All the world's complex. I mean, the world's complex. You know, we focus on what's happening here. I, what I would in drones, I would just cage at the drones. And drones specifically, because the Chinese drones, the DJI drones, basically were allowed to dominate the market and drive all the U.S. competition out of it. They all just, almost all of them just said, we're going to stop making these things. Like, we're just done. We can't compete on price.

All kinds of reasons that's happened, right? The Chinese, you know, they use state-sponsored funding within their manufacturers to make it orders of magnitude cheaper than like a. regular company does just starting of one of this, one of the reasons. And then there's definitely a very real, very real currency manipulation. If you hold, I think the Chinese central bank holds three some trillion dollars a US right now, that's done on purpose, right? As a devaluing of currency. So there's these external things that they've done to enable their own manufacturing sector. And then their own manufacturing sector, very sun to zooish of them is everything's dual use. that drone's taking pictures of your wedding

and looking at your roof today, that drone can be remissioned for something tomorrow. And then even if it's that drone or that manufacturing plant that produced that drone, you know, and that's where, is it using our own freedoms against us or is it using a naive view of the world? Yeah, I'm just saying like,

Like, they don't let X in there. Google's not in fucking China, but their companies are here. True. You know what I mean? And it's a similar aspect. Like, they get to access our free markets, get capitalized to New York Stock Exchange even and all that. And then the reverse, they really watch from a counter espionage perspective on that end. You know, and it's not 100 and zero, but I'm getting at like the Windsor.

blowing more in our direction of threat with this rather than in theirs. No, that I totally, I totally agree with. And that, that's something we just haven't, for all kinds of reasons, we just have allowed to happen. And there's a, and I'm not, you know, there's a, there's a number of Americans that have gotten, you know, fabulously wealthy over allowing Chinese investment into the U.S. Oh my God. Fuck yeah. Which is ultimately like the, why a lot of this happens. And it's not just, you were saying that.

It's not like, to put it at a higher level, corporations. There are corporations who have literally lived and died off this. Yeah, yeah. You know, so it's a real thing. And like, you keep also pointing out, like, the open source intel world we live in now and how everything, we all have this in our pocket and all that and give it all kinds of permissions. And then that's in the cloud and it's hackable to people and stuff like that. And like, you know, that's where I think the wins might be a little more equal because there's things that even the Chinese Communist Party can't control.

Like they can't control all their people having phones, which we could go, you know, I guess like use that data for our own good as well. But like, they can do it to us. I had this guy, Mike Yagley in here for episode 343 and 351. You ever hear of that, dude? I think I remember just perusing your sight, I think, but I don't, I need those on it. watch it. So he's a data guy, data expert, and he looks like he's going to explode every time he talks. He's just like, Jesus Christ, if you knew what I knew. But he really, he had done some work, some contracting for like DARPA back in the day and everything and then was working in the private

data sector and all that. And effectively, he, he was in his bedroom one day and wanted to know. if he could just like buy some data and figure out some information on cell phones that looked unique to him so he did and he spent whatever money he did on it and these were specifically cell phones emanating from what was it fort knox is that right in north carolina fort brag sorry it was in fort brag and he started tracking these phones off the base to a town that was a wealthier town meaning like the starter homes cost a lot more. And he would see these phones go to these different houses where he could then go get openly available property records and get the names and figure out who they were. And then he would watch these same group of phones, you know, maybe it was six,

maybe it was 12. Like once every other month, they'd fly to Syria. And they'd go to some like French cement company called LaFarque. It's like, oh, that's funny. And then when he looked into the guys, he goes, oh, these are all Delta Force guys. They're running an undercover mission in Syria right now, standing in his cement contractors, and I just found it in my bedroom. So he goes, this is like 2014, 2050. So he goes to the government and, like,

does a giant report on this and says, guys, you're fucked. And they thought he was like a charlatan. They're like, there's no way this is really. He's like, I bought this off the open market because all of your guys carry a phone. Yeah. What the fuck do you think China and Russia are doing right now? Yeah.

And it's like, God damn, like even our Delta guys. Like the tips of the spear are at risk with basic everyday stuff. You know, you're talking about the highest level things like drones, but also my dad has a drone. Yeah. He's fucking flying it around in the backyard. It's taking pictures for Xi Jinping. Yeah. That's a good time, though.

It's crazy. Yeah. Brave new world. And that's not going to, I don't see that. change like that that that's only going to increase you know that amount of like if you really want to find data like you're going to find it um how to protect that data how to protect uh you know the right data at the right time just like is isn't is the same kind of question of like how do you find the right data for a decision that you need at the right time in a sea of data where it's you know

like i just need this piece of information how do you know which data you need to protect at the right kind of time. That's definitely an open, like, that's an open thing. It does present, it does present, like, asymmetric ways for someone else to manipulate, for sure. That's the one, again, the one upside of that field is it does feel a little bit like mutually been, mutually assured destruction because everyone can do it to each other. It's a big problem for like intel missions and shit like that, but on the everyday person, there may be some incentivization to not do that. And I would like to think, and I hope I'm right about this, that's a similar idea to the power grits. You know, like, it's funny. I was reading this book Sandworm back in early 2020, written by Andy Greenberg. We later came on the show a couple times. And he was right, this is, you know, before Ukraine and everything happened. But he was right.

presciently about how Russian GRU teams had developed the ability to take down power grids. And they had literally tested this in like December 2015 in Ukraine in Kiev and took down the power grid and all that. I was like, holy shit, this is scary. But they never did it here. And my thought is it's because like, okay, they may have the ability to do that. But then we hit a button and they're fucked too. There's a lot of, I mean, the essence of deterrence, of all deterrence is mutually assured destruction. Yep.

Yeah. So there's a lot of that. And that, I mean, that, that probably, that probably encapsulates the real national security imperative, which is to be able to credibly. Credible is very important. and how do you define credibility? Like, you know, you have to believe it. It doesn't actually matter what my capability is. It just matters if you believe I have that capability. So if you believe I have that capability,

and it could be in one domain, but not the other. So maybe I don't have that capability in a certain domain, but you know that I do in a different one. And then it might just be ensuring that we maintain this one and that that person knows it. And that has a powerful deterrent effect on them doing anything in this other domain. That's a little bit messier right now. I got you. Or the tech hasn't evolved to a certain point.

Like we haven't cleaned it up yet. That all goes back to, or at least a common thread in this is not, You know, I think it's probably a fool's errand to some extent to try and have perfect information at all times about everything. Sure. So a more realistic way or something that has national security implications is in certain key domains, and my goal is to expand those domains to both establish a credible dominance and expand upon that dominance credibly. which has a deterrent effect against an adversary that might affect, you know, our, to use a polysy term, like our vital natural interest.

And then what you don't want is to lose ground. So, you know, the modern national security environment is kind of this like, you know, it's like this arm wrestle that's going on, these different domains. And like, okay, you gain something in space. And now maybe I need to gain something in information space or then I need to gain something. then I need to gain something in the maritime space. I need to gain something in the drone space. I need gain something in robotics.

That's part of what we see for the company is that there's a unifying thing that's happening in all those domains. And that is that machines are moving to the forefront of all of them. So being, being, you know, having in a very real way, like having the best machines in many cases is the best deterrent. For sure. You know. That's what you're trying to help. And that's what we're trying to do. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. All right. So we've touched on the underwater thing a little bit, but we haven't gone all the way there. This is fascinating to me. Like, back in the day, you had the German U-boats. They were like so powerful, but they're these manned submarines. And then manned submarines became the thing.

And then eventually even the cartels got into them and made the cocaine submarines and all that, which we still have a problem with. Yeah. You know, do we just have like tens of thousands of drones operating underwater at all times and to other countries as well? The sub-surface environment, the subsurface environment is like the last true frontier outside of like Mars. So that's where stealth still kind of still like really exists. Like you can you can actually sneak up on somebody.

Now you can do that in other domains to a limited point. But in the like subsurface domain is where you can really like sneak up on folks and people can sneak up on you. And there's just physics behind that, you know. So the key, like the key there is, really one of the keys in that one is, one, the more you have that has like a powerful deterrent effect. If I have 10 submarines, okay, I can, you know, I can plot out and be like, well, last time we saw one here,

I know how fast it goes. so it can only be in this radius. Because none of these things are super fast, right? And so I know one here, here, here, and I can kind of like track. And then, and then, and this is actually really important, they have to surface at some point, like a dolphin. Like, it's got to come up at some point, and then I can find out, right? Part of why they surface is to get a GPS fix.

So a GPS signal doesn't penetrate water. So they're in a position, so the name of the game for like real, maritime force projection is, I believe, in the subsurface environment, and it's having many, many autonomous and manned, unmanned teams, but having many, many of these that can stay submerged for increasingly long

periods of time. So there's all kinds of engineering challenges that goes into that. You stay under long enough, you know, you get the all kinds of stuff build up on, you know, you build up, you get like, There's, you know, at some point you need food, you need like, you know, especially if you humans on there. But so there's obviously a natural advantage than an unmanned system has. Of course. If the name of the game is I'd like to keep this, you know, swarm of 100 underwater drones

that can go at X speed. I'd like to keep them submerged for a year at a time. You know, you treat it almost like a space exploration mission. Like you treat it like sending something in orbit. A key part of that is I got to. to operate without a GPS fix for a year and still know where I'm at. That's where we come in. That's where we're very excited about partnering in that domain specifically.

Some cool stuff that we're starting to scope in that area too. There's other engineering challenges that have to go into that. But that's that that piece of drones I think is actually, and you can come drone summary and drone boats like the same thing. But that piece is actually really important. It's as important as the air piece. It's maybe even more important. Yeah.

And this is where my head goes. to DARPA a little bit because have you ever heard the David Fravor story? No. He's an Air Force guy, I think, right? Yeah. So Captain David Fraver with the famous gimbal video, I believe, back in 2004, I forget what the, it was the USS, wasn't the Roosevelt. Was it? Nimitz.

That's right. He's Air Force, right? Oh, I think I do know what you're talking about. Okay. So, you know, this. The speculation here is it's aliens, what he saw because he saw a Tick-Tac object come up out of nowhere and go, like in clearly aircraft that he was aware of even all the way back then in 2004 for sure, you know, never seen anything like this.

And I always like how he talks about it because he's like, I think it might be alien, but like here's the map. Here's what it did. You can see it. Your guess is as good as mine. Shit was crazy. my head does sometimes go to like you know DARPA was trying to talk they were allegedly talking to dolphins telepathically in fucking 1992 you think maybe they weren't making some crazy drones in

1982 you know or 1983 or whatever maybe you know but a a tick-tac drone like that if that's what it is and it's up this planet it most likely emanated from the water probably so it's a transmedium kind of thing which is what you're describing now, which makes me wonder, you know, you can at least see the air a little bit. You can't fucking see the water. So how long have we had these things on the, I don't know if you know, you probably don't even know the answer to these questions, but how long have we had these things under there? How long have other places had these things under there? Are our weapons better than theirs, which I hope they are?

It gets really complicated thinking about the water. Well, it does in the air too. The water definitely. For sure. Even in my career, like, you know, you fly with night vision on. And one of those beautiful things ever seen is flying at night and then using night vision, whether it's one of the big cameras that's mounted on the gunship or just like little ones, and looking up at the stars.

And, you know, under night vision, you see, especially on a clear, like, mountainous night, I mean, probably a thousand times more stars than you would see with the naked eye. because it's bringing in that light. And it's just amazing, like, how many stars are up there. You also see, and I'm going to say, you see little flickers like all over the place. And you see, and, you know, even in the IR, which is like the mid, the mid-Ir range, like the thermal range where you're looking at heat emissivity. I've definitely seen a few things that I couldn't explain. Like, I don't know what it was, but saw something I can explain.

Something moving very fast, locked on it with a sensor. And it just moved very fast, like much faster or anything else. So we do. Yep. Don't know what it was. Don't know what it was. Couldn't see anything, but the hotspot definitely found something. You know, is it a bad camera?

Is it something else? Like, I don't know. That's, that's all, but that's why I know. For subsurface, like, guaranteed that, you know, just because like, that's a domain that's hard for humans to get to, we know, we know less about that environment than any other environment. We know way more about space than we know what the subsurface environment. Right. So, I mean, even like the, you know, fish life and all that down there.

Like, it's very nascent, like, a real understanding of that. Yeah. So all that to say, like, there's no answers that I have on that, except to say, or just except to kind of like, you know, speculate that. Keeps looking away. Having this. Well, I'm thinking out of thinking, right? It's more about like, or what I would say is like, that domain we know, we know.

less about than any other domain. That's, that's a domain. What's it like we've only explored like 5% of the oceans? If that, yeah, if that, yeah. Crazy. Yeah, yeah. So, like, there's, and you, undoubtedly, there are, you know, biologic species of fish on there that we've never encountered. Like, undoubtedly, there's, oh, that, you know, is there an actual lockness monster?

I don't know, maybe, you know. Possibly. You know. I mean, you are, you're getting at it though. I got to go there with this. You're an Air Force guy. flown in the skies for a long time. Yeah.

You think there's some fucking UFOs out there, some aliens? You know, the, I've never seen any evidence of that. Real government man answer. There's a government man answer. I've never seen any evidence of that. I'm a spiritual man. I definitely believe in angels and demons. And I believe that the world is much more than what we see,

much more than what we see with our, you know, human eyes as happening. What do you mean by that specifically? Well, there are, there are unquestionably angels and demons that humans have believed in, even outside of like a Christian tradition for thousands of years. What those, what they are, what they are in the current world right now, I don't have a good answer for that. What I do know is like, okay, so we, you know, where we are right now in 2026, we've come up from kind of the, you know, we went. went through the age of enlightenment a couple of years ago. Then we went through like the age of reason.

And now we're in kind of a very hyper scientific age, which means we're also in kind of like a spiritually ignorant age. So I could hypothesize that there, you know, there's definitely things that we see that we just, you know, constantly grind of like, okay, what's the scientific answer to this? What's the scientific answer of this when there might actually just be a spiritual answer to this? You know what's interesting. There's two things very interesting about that. First of all, I think there's been a point in the last 15 years, especially where you're absolutely right. And we've seen those two things flying face of each other. But point one is one of the worst tragedies that's ever happened to humanity is the fact that many humans in the past and even in the present today have tried to convince and divide society on the idea that religion and science. are seeking different answers. They are seeking answers to the same things.

They should not be enemies. They should be friends that complement each other. That's number one. Number two, because of everything you just said, we're also in the last, I'd say, like, two, three years, seeing like a massive, even generational, like spiritual, if you will, revival of people who are like, God damn, we've had a crazy last 15, 20 years.

It's got to be some reason for this. I'm going to church. We've seen that. Yeah. right yeah so it could be like you know i think a lot of that's pretty positive you know i don't subscribe to an organized religion myself but i do believe in god right and and i think if people if more people are starting to develop like some sort of good positive moral north star in their life however they do that i think that's a net benefit for society for sure truth seeking is

always a net benefit maximally truth seeking individuals using both science, the best reason that we have, based on the best data that we can observe, that being the key part of science, right? It's like observable physical space. Married with, I agree with you, married with like a spiritual sense of acknowledging that there are all kinds of things that are very real but unobservable. And, you know, like the open up of, you know, kind of the mind blowing stuff of quantum mechanics that's kind of like, rewrote all the rules for what we thought we knew about physics. And I think that that's actually had this idea of science as a religion. Because I think it did, you know, it led to like a humanism and it led to kind of a

replacement for religion. It became the religion. And it kind of became like if you, you know, the only thing you believe is what you see, which is a historically a really ignorant position. Like no humans anywhere else would think that way. of any of any or you know location um like there there you know like time in history time in history anywhere like you you know that there is a spiritual element of who we are uh and we we intrinsically know this like you know if i put my hand out like this and i rub here there's all these microorganisms

that are falling off my all of my body off my body into the ground that's a part of me but i fully understand that that's not jesse hamill jesse hamill is more than just these little that popped off of here. Yeah, they helped make him up. There's something here that's more than just my body. That's right. So we, and that's spiritual. So we, like, we know this, but, you know, especially, you know,

what way I grew up and probably the way you grew up, sounds like, there's a, there was really kind of a, in a lot of society, there was just an ignorant, ignoring of that. Just like, I'm not going to pay attention to that. It's not real, you know, and we kind of like told ourselves that that's actually higher intellectualism like we told ourselves so so then if we see something we can't explain i think previous generations would have had no problem looking at the same well clearly there's a spiritual phenomenon happening here right clearly there's a spiritual phenomenon happening here and the what's happened now is it's like well i don't have that i don't have that muscle memory to go back to

so i guess it's a ufo or a you know uap or like i don't know like it's weird um i think it's a hell healthy things. It's on the road, but it's a symptom of, like, are there actual green aliens walking around? Well, no, not that's been observed. But it's a symptom of like, that's what happens when you just, you know, lobotomize yourself spiritually. Anything you can't observe with your senses, you're, you're going to start, if you're maximally truth-thinking, like, you're going to, you're going to start filling in the gaps. And you might fill in the gaps with something really stupid but it's also just part of like wrestling with something so i think i actually think your point is it is very positive this and there definitely is this kind of a spiritual awakening happening i think

that's also a time to kind of rethink of like we you know we definitely live in an existence that has both a physical reality and a spiritual reality for sure i agree and if you are only attuned to the reality, you're spiritually dead. Like you've missed this whole aspect of what's actually happening here. Yeah. And it actually, ironically, goes to a criticism I have of like both extremes. So meaning like the people who are really dogmatic about one religion and if you don't believe every fucking thing they say like you're banned to hell or whatever they say. And then the people in the other direction who are like there is definitely nothing.

Right. Like to both of those groups, I'm like. how ignorant is it of you to assume that you have all the answers here on earth as a physical being that you know everything how almost narcissistic is that because there is some crazy reason we're here something had to start something at the beginning of that and that is obviously some sort of supreme power however you want to define it whatever helps you sleep at night that's good with me but like to me If you're not humble in the face of that to try to live your life in the best possible way and treat people the best you can and do good and not be an asshole to other people, not do things that are evil or just for profit, which we talked about incentive structures today and things like that. Like then that's like your spiritual capital if you will. I don't mean to like dumb it into like some monetary checklist or whatever.

That's not what I'm trying to do. But it's like you you should be humble in the face. of what you don't know. And there just seem to be a lot of people who, you know, if we're going to focus on the direction of people who are like, well, I'm only looking at what I can see. It's like, we don't even know what consciousness is, man. Take a chill pill. No, like your, I think your point's spot on on what, I mean, you could say this is a failure of organized religion in a lot of areas. And, you know, while there is a spiritual reawakening, I don't, I've not seen, nor seen any, you know, I don't think there's a like, hey, let's go,

let's go back to dogma. Those are two very different things. You're absolutely right about that. You know, yeah. So, so I think, you know, one, as a Christian for me, all truth runs through Christ. And that's how I define that. What that also means, and maybe this is also kind of answering, is that I, there's an acknowledgement of my own human condition, which means much of the supernatural is kind of outside of my grasp.

In fact, almost all of it is outside of my grasp. So yeah, when you you encounter anyone that is very, you know, in any, any persuasion of faith or what they decide to believe in, if that's real faith or not, but what they decide to believe in or what their reason has told them to or what is comforting for them to say out loud, that that, you know, that, that's kind of, it should be rejected. If it doesn't come from a place of, I understand how small I am on this universe, how limited and finite my understanding is, and that believing is not seeing. So if you're believing something, it's, you know, what I believe is that's, that's actually a

spiritual gift. It's a spiritual gift to be. to believe. And it's that your spiritual eyes have been opened. So, you know, I believe that's a gift. That also then comes with a humility because it's not like I earned that. It's not like I arrived at some enlightenment and now I've seen it because I'm so intelligent. Or I follow the religious rules so well.

Or I purified myself with a sacrament or I went on this mecca. Like none of that, none of that. That is all garbage. But if it's a gift that was given, then it's humbly maintained. And it's humbly maintained saying that that's a gift that's available for all of humanity. And that's it. And that's it. That's all I view it.

And that has allowed, I believe that's allowed me to that kind of opening of, you know, spiritual conscience and awakenness that's done through Christ. and I believe that's the only way it's done, that allows you to be, you know, in a humble way, it allows you to be a light in a dark world. And that's a dark world that is some people kind of like, you know, eyes closed, like looking for answers.

And that's a dark world that are other people of like, no, because I couldn't find the answers, I'm just going to make up the answers. Or that's other people are like, okay, I know there's answers out there somewhere, but I'm never going to find them, so I give up. Those are all comforting things, you know, those are all things that you have to have to kind of, you know, if there's a God-shaped hole inside of you, you're going to try to find some way to comfort that. And you're going to surround it with some kind of painkiller.

That pain killer might be a really detailed religious step process. That pain killer might be, I'm going to do this, I'm going to say this. That painkiller might be, I'm just going to say, I'm going to go fatalistic and say, I'll never know. Like, there's some big deity out there, but I can't figure it out. like give up that whatever that is you have to do something because you have this kind of you know you have this this something in you this flashing thing is like something they're not right something's not right and what i what i would say is like i think that's if you have that for

anybody that has that kind of feeling that's a really positive thing because what it means is like your spirit is still in an open truth-seeking mode, even if you're nullifying it without realizing it, you know? And even if you're not ready for the truth yet, maybe you're not. It still means you're in that open world. What you don't want to be is, you know, fat and dumb and happy, ambient, like it, none of it matters. And I'm just cruising full throttle to my grave. And then I'm just going to decay into a bunch of cells. A lot of people like that. A lot of people like that. A lot of people like that. Um, things change, right?

Things change. Spirits are powerful things. Um, but yeah, like, I think it's if you're, if someone was disquieted by, I don't understand what's happening after I go through that door at the end of my life. There's got to be more than just a collection of cells. That's a good place to be. That's a good place to be. That means you, that means your spirit is ready to start opening up to something that

your mind can never get you there. So, you know, anybody that talks about, um, talks about like spiritual things and, and justifies, there's, there's this kind of discipline called apologetics, right? Yes. And, you know, apologize where it's like, I rationalize my faith. It's not really interesting. It's not really interesting. Can you do it?

Yeah. But it's not really interesting because by definition, faith is not a rational thing. Faith is that leap of faith off the building and you don't know what's down there. You can't see what's down there. You know what's down there. but you can't see it. You can't observe it. So it's good. I think it's actually very healthy to kind of reject that. And then I would encourage you, encourage anybody, like, listen to that part of your spirit that's

trying to truth seek and lean into that. You lean into that, genuinely lean into that. Then I believe that starts to prepare a soul and a spirit for receiving a gift of belief. and it is a gift. The belief is a gift. Very nuanced perspective there. Impressive. From what we were talking about earlier, it sounds like you were Christian religious

since you were a kid. Yeah, I grew up in, you know, like a Christian household for sure. Accepted Christ early on, you know, kind of in my life. And, you know, I've had, you know, that's been a powerhouse for me from, you know, minute one, even though I've made all kind of mistakes, some kind of dumb stuff,

you know, and ups and downs like any man's life has, right? And, and even, and even looking at, you know, kind of like things within certain organized religions or things you were told dogmatically at certain ages, like, and being like, okay, is that really, like, is that really what Christ said? Is that really like, is that any makes sense? Is that just, is that just, you know, religion, a religious organization taken on another power structure? It's not all that is. They're trying to have their own power over you in some kind of way. So, you know, you're working through these kind of things.

But, but, but where, you know, where my, where my faith, like, has grown as a, you know, of age, where my faith has grown as aged is, is ultimately just a gift. It's just a gift, you know. It's not something rational I did. It's not, it's not a book you read. It's not a special prayer you recite. It's not a mentor that you have. It's not a mecca that you've done.

It's not a mountain that you climb. It's not a experience in combat that you had. You have all these things. And somehow, if you were to zoom out at an eternal, like timeless kind of perspective, somehow these things were all paths. I believe that. In a way, I'll never understand. Um, but what I found is I grow more humble as I get older on this.

and try to keep my faith more like childlike. Sounds like that. Sounds like that. But also like you're you're amalgamating all your timelines and all your life experiences there, which is exactly what you should do. I'm curious though, as someone who spent many years in war zones doing, you know, the life and death kind of things. Did you have moments where you like question things or, you know, felt it? I had fall from your system a little bit? Definitely not my faith.

Definitely not my faith. Not my faith in Christ. You have, you know, you have, you have moments where you might question your own capabilities. You might, you know, question after like the, I don't ever made a number of trips back to Afghanistan. Like, you might question the strategy or like, what are we doing here? Like, it's not just one more fighting season. Like, this winter is not the end, clearly. you know and you learn to that you know you kind of tear down those kind of structures around

but for me it was you know it was the opposite like for me it was uh the sometimes the most spiritually awake i ever felt was in combat you know you just boil everything down everything is very simple it's very simple and it would you know if you have if you have a perspective of uh I'm an eternal soul and I have faith in Christ for the care of my eternal soul. That gives you a boldness. That gives you a boldness. You know, so there was like, this is, you know, combat, kind of war story. But like, there was a time where we were, we were getting shot at and we're performing, you know, a defensive maneuver to try and, you know, get away from the surface to air fire that's shooting us down.

And, you know, one crewmate that was, you know, very understandably, right? He was very upset about this, kind of like, you know, there's screaming on the radio. There's things kind of going like that. And dark humor. So I embrace the dark humor as well, by the way. And, uh, seems like everyone in the military. Yeah, it's kind of a thing, right? It's a coping medicine, probably.

But like, and I remember, you know, I think I may have said some, but I was just like, well, I guess that guy really has something to live for. I don't know why he's so upset. Something along these lines. Um, and that's just dark humor, right? But like that the core of it is that, um, I remember other times like, you know, walking outside going to the child hall and you get starting to hit the rocks as an incoming rocket is like hitting it. And, and you, it was just interesting.

You'd see, uh, even like hardened warriors like, and some of them just immediately running to the bunkers or immediately to this. And I'm not, you know, throwing a spirit anyway like that. But, and I'm not trying to sound like a tough guy either. It just never really bothered me. you know i just i it just didn't i just you know what just had peace like it was like if it's my time it's my time um and i think i still live that way now uh if anything i'm motivated be like i don't know how much time i got left so let's make it count you know and try to every day make it count

and and that peace with it yeah yeah like and that that i think helped me in in all those combat deployments you know clearly it comes across for sure there's the there's the old Einstein quote I'm sure you're familiar with where he says I don't know what weapons World War three will be fought with but I know World War four will be sticks and stones yeah yeah and I think throughout our conversation today which again was two episodes it's been awesome you know you're on the frontier of trying to create things that can help prevent a World War three but do you have in the back of your mind the idea that you know we do technically have the ability to just completely destroy ourselves or maybe create things now that will destroy us without us even realizing it and it's some of the very same technology that you and many other people have been entrusted to work with yeah i i do i am concerned for that my the technology could be part of it like we talked about that and i think deeply that we need tech tech leaders of incredibly high character and vows

values that are shaping how this tech will work. And that I think will determine, again, freedom or enslavement from, from our own technology over the next, you know, 10, 20 years. I'm even more concerned just about kind of cultural rot. And the, you know, how we've, we have, both with Americans and even in many other areas, too, have we've just allowed, allowed basics to kind of decay to even like, repopulation, birth rates. And like, like, I think, I think that's actually as much of an existential strides

than anything technology wise. Like, we're going to do it to ourselves by being stupid and by embracing like very dumb ideologies. And, and some of this, you know, some of this, I think is probably best, or you, you, but you see it in hindsight easier. But I'm, I'm, that's where I'm, I'm most concerned about that, but like the cultural rot about, you know, what happens if, what happens if our own country, then in a country that I've served, you know, with pretty much my entire adult life, continue, you know, it has a path

of just like pure fraud, corruption, decay, you know, hollowing from the inside. And that probably happening in some other areas, too, outside of you in the U.S. What does that look like for our future. I think that's, you know, so there's the technology piece of it for sure that is valid, but our own like ethical just rot might actually be the more pernicious thing, you know, where we just, you know, we have, nobody wants to have babies anymore. Nobody wants to, I'm really like, this is, this is a problem. Nobody wants to have babies. Nobody wants to sacrifice. nobody wants to you know turn them go through the hard things to become a leader of character and in those things get minimized and then somehow our society like eats the people that are

and spits them back out and you get to a point where it's like maybe that you know that's going to take something i mean something nasty to kind of you know correct that yeah it also starts at a socioeconomic level too as well and and a cultural attitude. Like when you have so many dark years that we've had economically for the average person in this country, the downstream effects of that. And then you add in all the fucking endless wars. You add in all the crises, the COVID shit, government's lying. It creates a vibe in society where the light is just dimmed.

And I'm trying to help, you know, we'll cover the things that got to be pointed out and stuff like that. But I'm also trying to help be a part of boiling my pot in the ocean. where we can help re-inflame that. And, you know, I totally agree with you with like there should be an emphasis on people wanting to have kids. We also need to make it more affordable in this country for people to be able to have kids. The fact that money is even a question in reproduction, which is an evolutionary staple of what we've done as a fucking species for our existence on Earth is insane.

And then when you have these attitudes getting into the mainstream, I mean, there was a clip of Chapo, what's her name, Chapo, Roanne? Chapel Rowan. Yeah, so she, you know, she was talking about on, you know, some podcast about how, I think it was called her daddy, about how, oh my God, no one I know who has kids is happy at all. They're all fucking miserable. Oh, yeah. Saw this clip. I'm like, who the fuck are you talking to? It's terrible. Everyone, listen, it's a sacrifice with kids for sure. But like, it's the greatest sacrifice ever. I don't have kids yet, but I fucking look forward to it. And everyone I know with kids is like, this is greatest things ever happen to me. You know, I'm sure. to say the same thing. Life changing. And it's like, we got to stop this doom or gloomer shit with stuff like that because it is, it is literally anti-evolutionary. I completely agree with you.

Yeah. And that, that bothers me a lot. There's a stat that shows the average wage from like 1960 to the average home price. And then what they are now. It's insane. That is absolutely insane. And that one really bothers me for my three kids. Yeah.

Like thinking, you know, I was married with a wife and our first on the way when I was like, I don't know, 26, 27, something like that. Like, own my own house. Like on just like, good luck with that now. Exactly. On like military pay too. This is like, you're not getting rich there. And yeah, impossible now. Yeah, I can't afford a house.

100% impossible. Crazy. It's just like that part really bothers me. like that part really you know and then i'm setting into a world like um you're saying in a world where also like the the dei stuff is just so minimized um some of the meritocracy some of like my sons especially you know going into a world where they're just demonized that a lot of different areas a lot of companies that are like hey anything but the white man and trying to set them into one back around i think it is yeah um i think it is uh you know to

to like, no kidding, hey, let's actually bring in, like, people that are really good at their job, whatever they are. Right. You know, it's definitely only the way I hire. And, but it's, but there's still some remnants. There's still remnants of this. Sure. Absolutely. Yes. And so you, you know, you're demonized to a point, you're never going to own a home

now without some kind of major thing, you know, for a lot of folks. And just that, those socioeconomic things, I think, are, this is a real problem. I will say credit where it's due, that recent, I guess, like, order that Trump's putting out with the institutional investors unable to buy family homes. Incredible potential legislation there. Regardless, I don't care if you're Democrat, Republican, that is good for Americans because these businesses, I won't even, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I won't even call it evil. They're incentivized to get their quarterly report. They're finding all the business lines they can, and they've created this what as a result is basically like an evil business line where they're buying up family homes everywhere and then setting the market prices to places where people can't fucking afford it.

And then making people overpay for rent and setting the rent market in so many cities. And now hopefully they're not going to be able to do that. And we can start to bring back these prices. But yeah, we got to fix it. We got a lot of problems. And we definitely got to fix it for sure. for these generations. Yeah, I think that's like a, that's something you really have to, I think we focus on that a lot.

You know, and in my, in my kind of small little, you're in algebra really like, you know, the little bucket of the ocean that I have, trying to create at least a business environment that enables people to do this kind of, for sure, to live in that kind of way. It's definitely a goal of mine. Like there's, there's, I went out a couple times, like a small company, right? you know um and i've uh you know within the within the start we have but creating a quality job is like a is a big time rush like it's it's just a cool feeling to be like hey you know we you know this job was not there before it is there now it's amazing it's amazing and and uh the people that are working it enjoy what they do yeah like that's a that is a i didn't even intentionally set out for that like being kind of my thing but man that's cool i like man that is cool yeah yeah

Totally agree, man. Jesse, this has been awesome, man. We just did two episodes. Awesome. It's like more than five and a half hours between the two on the recording time or something like that. So it's very, very cool work you're doing. Obviously, a really important space with drones. And I really appreciate you giving like a full education, especially in the second episode on like how it all works and what the technology is like. And, you know, I'd like to continue tracking it moving forward. Awesome, man. Thanks for doing this. This is super fun. So great conversation, dude.

Yeah. All right. We'll do it again sometime. Yeah, man. Awesome. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is? Give a thought.

Get back to me. Peace. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.