but apparently it's being uh eliminated from all countries and so this idea of oh well if we can't do the teu exclusion in China we'll just do it in Mexico yeah uh and still slide in under that day Minimus shipping uh threshold well it seems like it's off the table entirely um yeah the Market's crashing we're crashing our streaming software
but we're back up thanks for paying attention thanks for sticking with us as we uh continue to run the show um do you know say Chargers working yeah it was working for me um you should you should go there you go um so there's a quote from uh JP Morgan I don't know if we want to read through this is pretty
interesting on a static basis this was yesterday which is more or less a lifetime ago yeah on a static basis today's announcement would raise just under 400 billion in revenue or about 1.3% of GDP static basis meaning like if all the goods stayed the same and people just pay the taxes uh which would be the
largest tax increase since the Revenue Act of 1968 we estimate that today's announced measures could boost pce prices by 1 to 1.5% this year and we believe the inflationary effects would mostly be realized in the middle quarters of the year the resulting hit to purchasing power could take real disposable income growth in Q2 Q3 into
negative territory with the real risk of consumer spending could also contract in those quarters this impact alone could take the could take the economy paril perilously close to slipping into recession we of course saw on poly Market that the probability of recession is now up around 50% y headlines about
retaliatory measures about by us trading partners are already coming out and we expect to learn more in coming days the somewhat confusing nature of today's news coupled with the uncertainty uh over how long these tariffs will remain in place should make for an even less friendly environment for investment spending we mentioned that with the
capex stuff though that is one way to narrow the saving investment balance imbalance and hence narrow the current account deficit we plan to revisit our forecast later this week so JP Morgan is not very optim Joe wisenthal highlighted a chart uh from poly Market it's he says uh the odds of us recession in 2025 just
jumped from they were sitting at 40% uh jumped 25% to uh did you see the uh Restoration Hardware CEO reacting live oh yeah finding out their is down 25% so there so Restoration Hardware was having an earnings call after the market closed uh as one does but it happened to coincide with this tariff uh announcement which of course Restoration
Hardware probably sources from all over the world will be very seriously hit by this and he just uh has some expletives uh okay oh oh okay uh uh uh I just looked at the screen uh I guess I guess you know the the the the the stock went down you know based on some of the numbers we were reported and then it got
killed because of oh oh really I I just looked at the screen I hadn't looked at you know it got hit with I think the terrorist came out and you know I think everyone can see our 10K where we're sourcing from so it's not a secret and we're not trying to disguise it by putting everything in an Asia bucket you know and he's just like having a really
bad day rough very rough uh Logan bartler took us back a couple months ago from a quote from Stanley dren Miller Miller the billionaire investor uh Stanley dren Miller believes Trump's re-election renewed a jolt of speculative enthusiasm in the markets and surging optimism within businesses quote I've been doing this for 49 years
and we're probably going from the most anti-business Administration to the opposite dren Miller said on CNBC Monday we do a lot of talking to CEOs and companies on the ground and I'd say CEOs are somewhere between relieved and giddy so we're a believer in animal spirits that was certainly the case during the
Trump pump shortly after inauguration and the election um but then things been cooling off let's say uh potentially in freef Fall because of how how rough things have been um rough you liked this post uh by Trevor Scott tariffs on Bangladesh Vietnam are like a hedge fund manager fighting with his cleaning lady
to get the right back to clean his own toilet saying that like a lot of the jobs that we've sent over there America doesn't want that's always that's always it's always up for debate because when when America does something we do it a little bit differently we still wind up producing the product obviously we use a
lot of Automation and the things that are made here um and and and there's been there's been a shift to bring you know auto manufacturing back to the US and a lot but although a lot of that's still done in in Mexico and Canada um but it but but it is interesting to see you know if there really is Big onshoring efforts uh what will those new
factories look like I would imagine that they are highly automated at least at least hopefully yeah that's wild uh app's also down 9% today so far uh still just barely over the 3T Mark rough um but hopefully it doesn't affect Tim Cook's comp package because he was just scraping by yeah right poor guy yeah
poor guy poor guy should we go to Ryan Peterson he says uh remember that these Duties are on top of existing duties so for China you have the original duty of 75 to 25% Duty from section 301 then 20% from earlier this year then 34% today and 25% for China's purchases of Venezuelan oil so it's over 100% just in
the past few years uh based on on Chinese products and so we should see uh that work its way through the economy I do I do wonder I mean a lot of Chinese products like they're just so cheap that even if you double the price it's like well a DJI drone is still going to be cheaper than a GoPro drone because like
they were never price competitive to begin with um yeah but it will be interesting to see like this is all just news right now it's not really something we're feeling but the next time I'm like walking around a Best Buy or scrolling on Amazon I wonder if the prices will actually shock me um it's it's kind of
unclear I don't think of myself as like shopping that much generally let alone shopping for International Goods but again so much stuff comes from abroad but a lot of times the things like I mean these water Pistols that I bought they were probably like $2 and if they go up to $4 like it's hard to notice that you're still just like wow that's
the cheapest thing I've ever seen like a lot of the prices were suspiciously cheap honestly like we we talked about this with Teemu where Amazon launched a clone and they were saying like Okay guys if you're going to sell couches the couch can't be more than $25 to be on this app and it's like I don't know if I
would want to sit on a $25 couch like that doesn't seem safe they were like guitars can only be $8 it's like I feel like a guitar is like a $100 item right yeah so like if that doubles to $16 would people still notice it I mean certainly there would be an effect the economy like people would buy less guitars this is just supply and demand
obviously the demand for guitars is not fully pricing elastic but it is just very funny that some of these prices were so so low I mean Nike you know obviously the the cost of goods is going to get is going to go way up but I feel like Nike shoes are $100 plus and so if those go up uh you know people are still
going to want to buy Nike maybe I I it's unclear to me I mean it certainly hurts their margin certainly hurts their business but it's what it actually it's interesting again it's hard because Nike react with how many shoes they need to make and then not having yeah if if this was going to be if these tariffs were going to be steady state
and definitely they would have to make you know massive massive changes yeah uh but if if they think they're going to be rolled back you know it's just so I was thinking about ways to capitalize on this and I think uh the price of billboards in America probably unaffected by these tariffs so you should go to ad.com out of home
advertising Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising F only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad bulying uh and uh yeah I mean if you have an americanmade product like you really should buy a billboard right now
and you should tell everyone because it used to just be yeah raah ra America America Fourth of July like we're we're made in America there are plenty of companies that have been beating that drum for a while but now is like really really the time it'll drum up investor interest it'll drum up employee interest
like you if you are if you are long America like it's it's a great time as we saw with with Chris and hadrien um anyway there there's another Post in here I want to go through uh I I want to finish out some of Joe wiesenthal's thoughts uh yeah let's do that so uh okay so this is Joe continuing writing in his Bloomberg newsletter he says okay
well maybe we shouldn't set economic policy for the whims of the stockholding class yeah I'm down with that but what's interesting to me too is just how reviled all of this seems to be across the board with the only real specific voice of support the old Legacy Industrial unions which are not a big part of the economy again go back and
look at the comments from the manufacturers in the latest ISM they all hate it or go back and look at the comments from the latest survey of oil and gas companies by the Dallas fed it's re it's just really hard to find a major material constituency for this level of trade and the reason it's hard to find
big supporters of this policy is because the logical or sequential link between trashing trade and creating new wealth is very hard to see what are the new growth industries going to be who is going to finance the Redevelopment China famously crushed its own real estate and internet sectors a few years ago but at
the same time it directed its banks to lend more aggressively to its hard tech and Manufacturing sectors and so I think Chris would say yeah that's exactly what we want to do we we we we want to we want the government direct the banks and the Venture capitalists to lend more aggressively to hard tech and Manufacturing sectors and we're kind of
seeing that but it's interesting because we I don't think broadly in America people believe in the American dynamism movement yeah I think in BC people think it's cool it's I love and and I feel this way where it's like yeah we're talking to a kid from Sanford today who like makes laser weapons and I was just
like that sounds awwesome but when I really think about it I'm like look I don't know if you have a real business yet you probably don't you're you're young and you're just figuring it out and I don't know if there's like a program record and a really good easy way for you to scale this business up and create a power law company blah blah
blah blah blah um but I just think it's cool and I think that's how a lot of people perceive these hard tech and Manufacturing projects they're like it's a cool science project I don't know if it's going to work out but I want to support it so I'm just going at it whereas I think I think China was a lot more uh rigorous about this is a good
finan bet for us we're going lose a lot of money inm but we're going to gain a lot in the longm and I don't think as a country we're thinking like that yet like there's a lot of people that go to the reindustrialize conference and they're like this is awesome I hope it happens but like I'm not really going to
pull my money out of fang to do this right I'm not going to move you know a hundred billion dollars over for this there needs to be the AI narrative for to get like the masas of the world to do it and then even when Masa does it you have plenty of people that are like this is a top signal this is too crazy it's
POS and I don't think they were say that in China which fascinating situation right now where so many people in our you know industry and in our Corner the internet broadly think this is just a terrible idea yep uh we we have some people that think it's great but a lot of smart people think it's a bad idea and I'm sort of sitting here hoping that
the admin uh you know as somebody that ultimately wants America to win and Thrive I'm hoping that you know we're at a very crazy time right now but I think uh I'm sort of hoping that the the admin uh has a crystal ball that the rest of us don't have and is you know clearly they're they were convicted enough in in
this initial decision yesterday to to go out and and do this press conference uh like it was WWE um yeah that's true it's also true um but uh yeah let's continue with Joe in fact uh oh I I think we got our next guest coming in but first let me tell you about bezel go to bezel.set down but there's never a bad
we were talking with qu yesterday after the show but uh you know prices are going to have to go up yeah uh from from ads but if you go move quick on marketplaces like bezel uh it's very likely that people won't immediately price repic their yeah their uh watches so it'll be interesting to see that the market goes down but need sub you look
at your beautiful watch and you remember that uh the point of a watch is not to tell you the time but to tell you the time of your life that is right shop over 24,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in-house by bezel team of experts and thank you to bezel thank you to bezel coming into the studio we have
AEL from Shield Capital I'm very excited to talk talked to I boom yesterday how you doing hey good John good Jordy good to see you guys thanks for having on yeah thanks so much for taking the time um would you mind just giving us a little brief overview uh maybe some of your history uh what you're doing now
and uh just kind of generally how your week's going yeah absolutely and a great discussion uh prior to I think a good tea up to what needs to happen by 2027 and what needs to happen by 20120 by 2049 uh when it comes to our own National industrial base but by way background uh Akil yeah from from Buffalo originally did RTC in college
wanted to go serve had the opportunity to serve in the Marines as an infantry and special operations officer left my time in active duty in 2019 like many other vets Brandon included that you'll have here soon uh both Amazed by the type of Technology we had uh that the US and its allies could provide and also
incredibly frustrated by the lack of some of the basic commercial tools and had the opportunity via some mentors to uh to connect and and help build a new fund uh a new Venture Capital fund Shield Capital where our focus is this Nexus between commercial technology and National Security we cover early stage you know so as as early as a dream and a
team on on day Zero across autonomy cyber security Ai and space that's great Jordy uh you want me I mean uh I I'd just be interested to get your immediate reaction uh to the to the news yesterday and um yeah and then and then there's you know we we got uh bunch of other questions to go into did you have an immediate reaction yesterday
uh our point of view I'm sure you heard is you know it's hard uh some stuff is going to you know go poorly some stuff you know some some groups and companies and industries will benefit but I'm curious what you thought totally yeah I guess I'll I'll reemphasize the point that I that I made to start off it is we
got to look at this near term 2027 this Admiral Davidson window for those who are familiar with it how do we protect our interest in the Asia Pacific region and how do we look at it in 2049 um structurally right tariffs whatever you want um has Str immediate near-term structural effects um but a lot of that's not we are going to have the
industrial base we have by 2027 right that's not that that's 18 months from now um so we have to figure out what we can do with the capacity we have and I'm always reminded by you know Churchill's quote while America might be first um the only thing worse than fighting without allies I'm sorry fighting with
allies is fighting without them um so there's an aspect to that but ultimately how do we make the the structural changes long term so as we look at this 2049 particularly as again looking at this in the National Security context how how do we beat and win out technologically geopolitically against the the PRC um what that structure looks
like far beyond four years worth worth of tariffs can you break down uh the significance of 2027 and why uh why we need to be sort of like orienting our our defense planning around that date just for obviously people in the industry you know understand it but a lot of our listeners or you know and other
Industries absolutely well you know this comes originally from Admiral Davidson who used to uh prior to his retirement run the indopacific command so this is the asia-pacific force to our Command that's really in charge of protecting us interests and deterring would be adversaries namely the PRC from
conducting actions whether that's Taiwan or or or elsewhere um and 20 2027 came about as this sort of potentially vulnerable moment in which we as a nation and those that willing that are willing to support us to be ready to defend our interests and so you'll see that a lot in in the narratives and you'll see that a lot in terms of what
capabilities can we really deploy at scale and at speed um to defend our Interest come 2027 uh and that stands obviously that's super near term guys right uh you know only so much can get done within that period And so there's this two Horizons just like any you know coming from the Venture world right you
you you want entrepreneurs to be looking at multiple Horizons the near-term one uh but then also look for what that long-term structural changes will be and so that's the 2049 and really that's that aligns with the you know 100 Years of uh of the Chinese Communist Party can you talk a little bit about uh Chinese competition with regard to robotics
there's some highflying startups in America there's some just young hacker kids building Cool Stuff lot of awesome demos but it feels like the financial markets aren't taking humanoid robotics as seriously in America as they are in China is that a mistake what are you seeing in humanoid robotics yeah great
question and I'll typ together with AI just because there's so much intersection between uh the digital AI world and then AI applied to Hardware right yeah um I grow increasingly concerned that we are just frankly behind yeah in terms of the model development the application of hardware and the synthesis uh therein both from a
a hardware standpoint from the software standpoint and then critically the ability to test yeah right I mean part of it is just let's get the things out there um you know as a prior Marine I'll I'll always remember um you know we get taught in in sort of military history class you know the French had better tanks when World War II started but who
tested them better it was the Germans right they just got them out there and they they just started testing with them and experiment them at a pace and scale that was far greater than anyone else and so you see this environment now and you know a lot of the things that need to happen are actually regulatory nature
right how do we reduce the barrier for folks to actually go go go out and test either all sorts of Robotics applications right it doesn't actually have to be pure humanoids it can be autonomous systems too um and then how do you combine that with actually getting some of these deployed you know at a scale that you need to um the last
point I'll say specifically around um Robotics and autonomy um is that I don't think um well let me say um from a capital deployment perspective I think there's a real interest and and you had some folks come on last time last week when we talked about defenses is being willing to make some really big bets uh
and be able to provide the necessary Capital to help them deploy at speed and scale obviously we're a we're a early stage small fund to start off with we have big dreams but we want to be a part of that Journey particularly if that journey is here in the US that's very cool can you talk a little bit about
logistics and uh just H how can we increase resiliency there and what startups are kind of tackling that or how how should they even think about tackling that yeah great great question too um let me start framing it by I look at the defense National Security space and again we had Shield we think pretty broadly when we when it comes to
National Security right so that is anything that touches autonomy AI cyber that has an application to both when I think about the National Security context it's how do you sense make sense affect and sustain sense is easy right that's that's satellites like toofer came on one of our portfolio companies
right he's sensing the environment and making sense of it how do you affect it so what are you actually going to do about it and that could be something physical that could be Brandon and shield AI drones or that could be non-physical digital in nature and there's this and then there's a sustainment part and I think this is
such a huge opportunity there's a lot of companies working on it and so much more to do and I specifically call it sustainment not logistics for a couple reasons one this term of contested Logistics while important doesn't get to the root of the issues which is how do you both operate in a constrained environment so how do you do things when
you know you're going to run out of fuel or you're going to have these certain constraints um uh and then what are you going to how are you going to sustain it more broadly not just from a physical movement so there's two aspects there's a there's a very physical Hardware component to it we need just more
Munitions we need more capacity here to do it knowing though back back to the two two Horizons by 2020 by 2027 we may not have all of that so you just need to be able to digitally operate and be more efficient with the things that you might have now or within 18 months and so I think there's just so many opportunities
here in terms of how you deploy at the edge so what capabilities do you decide to go produce you know in uh in the edge being some location where it's just easier to get to um how do you combine the the two together and then how do you use artificial intelligence to actually optimize it all mhm how do you think
about 2027 as a wedge for new defense Tech you know companies that are emerging a lot of companies come in and they're just focused on Legacy systems like I want to build a better version of this missile and I think I'm going to be able to get a contract because the you know the dod doesn't want extreme vendor dependency on like one or two old primes
versus you know looking at 207 2027 in Taiwan and saying hey we want to build a capability for this specific um uh you know potential conflict and is that an opportunity or or do you know is that not even the right way to think yeah I mean a lot needs to happen in 18 months right but that's not the only timeline I
thought you brought up some great points in the group that came last week about you know trying to build a feature within the defense space there's only going to be so many Andals right yeah um there's only be so many that can that that can speed and scale now do I think there's more opportunity to do so
absolutely that's why we're in this business it's not the only business though um I think there's a lot of enabling features to to your question some of the most interesting things that I found from say the conflict in Ukraine weren't necessarily the the missiles and drones it's how did they move their their physical their their
Administration to a digital environment using outposts and snowballs to actually make sure that the state functions right you wouldn't necessarily think that it's like core National Security but to me that absolutely is right um half have to challenge with a lot of the AI applications is you don't have the models accredited you don't have the
models deployed in a way that they can actually be used and obviously that has a compounding Advantage the more times you can get Hardware the software and the data together but directly to your to your question I mean I still think there's a ton of room right there's a really unique moment in time especially
now with the desire to want more startups within the ecosystem you know my colleague just testified uh to the Senate uh uh panel with regards to cber reform so how do we actually use our small business innovation research dollars to actually incent not necessarily just small business or ones that are churning that through but the
ones that actually want to go and scale it and go scale to something bigger like a traditional pilot program should be can you talk a little bit about Edge AI we've seen like the studio gibli moment we've passed the touring test Whos are driving around like is there something that we should we've seen those drone
shows that seem like okay that's a weapon system uh what what AI kind of Studio gibli moments are we waiting for in defense is there anything that you're excited about in EDI yeah you know um with you guys at at Founders fund uh we're investing in a company together called ourada um and it's really kind of giving me a new glimpse into what not
just Edge so Edge being where am I going to deploy compute again go back to the sense makes sense of the environment but how am I going to connect together with some cloud-based right it's always going to be some disaggregated Network there but what I'm excited about is I mean there's just so much can that can be
done with smaller models and with reasonable compute knowing that we're only going to get so much compute and we talked about tariffs earlier right there's there are those bottlenecks that exists um we're not going to produce the best in semiconductors overnight and so we have to be able to do more uh in in those
environment you know and Ro is a early Pioneer at that right in the National Security space how do you bring computer vision and other aspects of Sensor Fusion with other modalities to together and that's just only the start so I'm super excited by that um and I think it meets a lot of the customers where
they're at not just for National Security right people are worried about Cloud bills people are worried about how much like what am I actually getting for AI return on investment with all the compute that goes into it yeah do you think there's enough private Capital going into defense Tech broadly you know
there's been talk of you know you know we've seen over the last year investors that have no background in National Security uh you know sort of foming into the category but maybe that's actually good for America because we just should have more private investment coming in yeah I guess as a uh let me first say I'm glad that there's more people
interested I mean I don't think you need to have a military background to do this I think there's amazing American Patriots that just want to get involved and they have really core technical skills elsewhere I think it's helpful that you know folks came from the visceral operating experience but that's not necessarily necessary nor arguably
is that is that why you should go pursue that path right go serve because you want to go serve and you want to go defend the nation um it just so happens that I came out of that experience having some really you know interesting insights that I thought I could go leverage and go help out you know with within the space uh and be
able to support actually my the I love most importantly I love when non-military non-national security just amazing entrepreneurs and technologist just want to go tackle these problems and we're able to help them out I'm not the best when it comes to you know what's next in computer vision or distributed models but you know what I
can help you find the right customer set or identify the right contract Vehicles that's what our fund does and so that part's actually most exciting is how do you get you know the folks who may go to Snap Chat working on you know some background filter to actually work on some like really cool problems within
National Security space that have the same technical aspects uh I I I think our audience is probably familiar with the idea of like if you're starting a defense tech company you might start with some SB money then you're kind of sprinting towards program of record maybe there's the Valley of Death where
you have something that's working but you're not ready to really start producing it at scale what are the other pools of Revenue that defense Tech entrepreneurs should be thinking about and can you give us a little more granularity or sense of scale of you know how should I be thinking about an SBI how should I be thinking about a
program record and everything in between yeah absolutely I'll keep it quick because I know uh we're on on the clock here let me let me give you a financial answer and a non-financial answer I think both both are important that's great the first is right it's not just cbers and program of record right and you saw the Secretary of defense's memo
around use of you know the newer software acquisition Pathways and specifically other contract vehicles or other transactions to help facilitate this and that's exactly what organizations like defense Innovation unit are there for so there's this middle ground that I think is being tapped now far far greater um by the new
entrance within the National Security space I'll give you a non-financial answer too sometimes an unpaid pilot is super helpful oh yeah going on aat um which I think you know ponic and others had had done in the early days access to data access to testing environments is just as important particularly for those
within the autonomy space right that need to go test and validate get access to the right data or just have ranges where uh you have at least at least a little lower barrier to entry when it comes to Flying certifying Etc that's great uh last question no this is great up yeah this is so this is awesome thank you so much for stopping by we great to
have you thanks guys thanks we'll have to have you back on soon thanks so much yeah would love to talk to you soon well next we got Phil arinstein from dra coming in the building we'll see when he gets here any minute now um do you remember my brutal mispronunciation oh yeah what was that never again what was
it was it that you mispronounced his name or was that you called him a kid and he was upset about that there was something think it was probably both now is your opportunity to say you're sorry Mana I did I did yeah we made we made up never apologize always claim victory I pronounce your name more correctly than
you pronounce your name Phil no I Love Phil I met him uh uh must be a couple years ago uh probably through Augustus and I I think he moved out to Elsa Gunda was like sleeping in the factory with Augustus getting the company off the ground but has uh done some amazing work building out his business and we're excited to talk to
him today so welcome to the show Phil how you doing boom living life Life's good we're rocking and rolling we're out here in New York very apt introduction thank you Mr cougan yeah I heard you're in the the Empire State Building is that right that is correct we are in the capital building of the capital city of
the Empire you know what better place to help rebuild the American Empire if I uh take my camera and PIV it behind me you can kind of see overhead that's the The View I loveon yards back there a little bit of a foggy day but on a clear day you can actually see New Jersey and very cool we've intentionally positioned it such that you know we can
keep an eye on them make sure they don't invade okay okay yeah yeah little manhattanite nationalism I I like it uh have you thought about getting have you thought about trying to get logo rights on the building yes if you text like one of those five digit numbers you can actually get uh daily updates on how they'll change the
colors for the building oh really okay so yeah we're you know we got something cooking you know yeah you got to get like an iconic color way for the company so that when you throw it up in the building everyone knows these guys are working late tonight they threw their colors up on the building you know like
ramp owns yellow YC owns orange you need to pick a color probably going to be you know we're building the blueprint of the future so some variant of blue I love it I love it uh G just I mean we jump right into it but can you give a little background on like the company what you're building where you are in terms
of like kind of stage and and size yeah sure um give everybody a little bit of background about myself background's originally in electrical engineering and Robotics uh was over ging for a little bit you know got TS clearance worked on some pretty cool radar stuff over there uh did a little bit of e work a little
bit of mechi work a little bit of Technic work over there just got to see how absurdly archaic all of the infrastructure was on the manufacturing side of things was starting to get the feeling that the West Was forgetting how to build great things and I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen so got my best friend and co-founder and when I
have to go start Thea um so as a company we are building the first automated work construction plat sounds like a very vague very Niche thing but turns out everybody actually has had experience with work constructions um if You' ever built like Ikea furniture oh yeah a little paper instruction book that tells
you how to build a thing uh turns out that is actually basically how they make missiles and cars and everything in between so that process is like imagine you're a dude in Factory somebody says here is a cad file or 3D model of like an engine go figure it out like literally go figure out they will like pull this assembly apart they'll figure
what order to do the assembly in super duper me manually take hundreds of screenshots or photos and then throw all that together into a several 100 page document or you know word Docker PowerPoint over the course of weeks or months super brutal super manual sounds as awful as it is almost as bad as being
like a Mackenzie analyst with like a 100 page PowerPoint it's like making an Ikea slideshow by hand yeah yeah I think we saw this week uh some videos went viral of uh folks painting artillery shells by hand and arer shell moves from one station to the other and there's the basic commentary was like how are we
still doing it like this this is not great uh but you could imagine some work order system was built at some point for that and that that that kind of concretizes what you're building uh so so yeah how's it going uh where is the business now are you live in public beta how much does this thing cost like H how
does the business actually work right so what CAD you know CAD software was for mechanical engineers we're building basically that 2 for Century update to the process for their blue collar counterpart person called the manufacturing engine got we pric pretty similarly we price 5K per seat per year okay um it's a cpay system uh we
actually great timing for me to come on the Pod and chat with you guys uh we actually just went live and announced uh build the West V1 uh yesterday you know Fully live we are now you know Enterprise gradations iar compliance here for itar compliance we love an itar compant company on the show congratulations
ah epic thank you fellas uh so yes we can now Deploy on Prem to defense customer we're already working with some defense companies working with a bunch of Automotive companies uh we love tier one through three suppliers oems got a bunch of really cool companies that are not just you know Aerospace and Automotive these are like two the only
two industries that apparently most people think exist but you know we're working with like Agriculture and construction manufacturers these are companies that like Rec recent one that we just started working with super cool company called uh spudnik these guys make the potato harvesting equipment you drag behind name I love it spudnick it's
the Sputnik moment for potato farming apparently they're saying yes so we're We're Off to the Races product is live we're deploying congratulations what is it like deploying on Prem does that mean you have to package your software up and send them like a CD or something or floppy drive like not a CD the the
caveat here is that they have to have their own uh cloud-based resources themselves got it can inter API as you need to yeah yeah it's a little bit more complicated than that but I'll sort of leave it at that like they have to have some like cloud based infrastructure deploy by terraform this is a thing we
can now do ladies and gents oh cool yeah it's there process for it I'm sure you've been talking to your customers constantly as one does but uh what's their broad reaction been over the last 24 hours are people I imagine some of your customers are super excited uh about the tariffs others on sure others negatively impacted in varying ways but
you know give us the update there yeah so on on the whole tariff thing uh man so some of our customers are a little bit upset because prices are going to go up for them um it sort of depends where you are industry yeah so that's that's like the input costs are going to go up because maybe they're sourcing in the short term
in the short term um you know they're they're pretty upset about that um on on a couple of different vectors but it again depends like if you look at the um what's really cool about like our compan is we get to see like the widest varieties of like the coolest CAD files coolest assemblies you'll ever see and
so you know if you look at like the hierarchy and the structure of a cad file it's very tree likee and so that hierarchy of like an assembly of subassemblies of subassemblies of subassemblies really neatly mimics the supply chain of that product there some really really neat novel insights that we get to see and so if you are like a
one of those subassemblies you're called like a tier one through three supplier if you're making like the top level thing and you're like you know an andil or a Toyota you're an oem the oems are a little bit more upset than the tier one to three suppliers as from what I've seen um and so more broadly like
material input costs are like closer to the tier one through 3es than like the oems the oems get like the final markup which is sort of like a pain uh and so that's kind of what we've seen but I think by and large people are short-term like upset long-term pretty excited because what it means is it's going to force a lot of capital to be allocated
towards rebuilding domestically which is honestly what a lot of the folks that we work with want right you want your supply chain proximal to you you want to have expectable lead times you know that's been like one of the one of the worst things that a lot of folks we work with have SE so for a company uh for an
ATS Scale Company like you know that like a prime like Northrup what percent for the average product at Northrup do you have any sense of what percentage of the parts that go into a specific end product are americanmade today and do you think that companies at that scale are going to you know feel like they
need to react and even invest in some of these uh tiered suppliers so uh I don't have a perfect number for you but what I do know is that companies like seens companies like uh stellantis these are companies that are Global in nature and actually not like traditionally headquartered in the us and we're seeing a lot of them shift
more of their production to the US immediately like over the past you know couple of months we've seen huge announcements from Seaman and stantis to move production to the US and open up new facilities triple down on you know American based production because if you are selling to the American Market you want your cost to be as low as possible
and so it only makes more sense to have your production be domestic um so yeah yeah how do how do you think about uh I feel like one of the bottlenecks to D Rock's growth I said that right correct DQ durak durak I'm GNA get it this time it's Iraq with a d uh uh one of the bottlenecks to drax's growth is going to
just be having enough if you're selling by the seat having enough manufacturing Engineers right I yeah I don't I wish I knew more myself um how how do you think about kind of like the talent equation to solving um you know to reindustrialize so there's uh okay I I can get on my Soap Box there's like a coup there's like two to three pieces
get on it get on it get on it see you know broadly um kind of interesting the number of manufacturing I'll give you a little bit of like the history lesson the blueprint in general so basically until like the like early 70s mid 70s engineers and manufacturers were connected by one thing and that was the
blueprint right like classic cyano type blueprint that you imagine your head when you say blueprint and then like the you know late 70s early 80s cat software emerged and became ubiquitous and basically all of the mechanical who were on the shop floor super well integrated production they were more Blue Collar
than white collar generally all of them basically moved to the back office went from being generally blue collar to white collar and basically since then like manufact like the mechanical design had become like totally divorced from reality you often now have like mechanical engineers never going to shop floors often times designing systems
that are generally like not manufacturable and so the blueprint was basically like fractured into two parts cats sofware on the design side work instructions on the build side cats sofware got a ton upgrades for 50 years work instructions never did that's what we're working on and so when that happened you also saw like the you know
the archetypal mechanical engineer also fractur you know fractur into two different people like the mechanical engineer that's like your more typical like design engineer and a manufacturing engineer so actually if you look like statistically in the US there are actually roughly the same number of
mechanical engineers as there are manufacturing so there's like around 300,000 of these folks in the US I globally so it's actually like really big popular job um it's just like you know this is where you you would like get a mechanical engineering degree and like you know half the time people just like go into manufacturing engineering
and so there was an enormous uh so back to like the the portion about like the labor base um these are the folks who will get a cad file and like figure out how to put this thing together and their documentation systems suck I mean it is like often times if it's not PowerPoint or word it's a poit or like the back of
their head so what we've been seeing unfortunately is you know especially postco you know a lot of these folks are retiring a lot of these folks have all this information locked up in the back of their heads as tribal knowledge and so yes like we're automating like a good chunk of the grunt workk of making work
instructions you know we take a cad Final in we automatically figure out how to put together automatically generate 80 to 90% of the work instruction but that 10 or 20% that we can't automate that is like the tribal knowledge component and that is what we serve as like a data aggregation platform for so a lot of what we see is you know age of
the American manufacturer is like somewhere between like 45 and 55 I like to say 55 just to be a little bit more precautionary and you know in the US we do not want cheap labor right we want smart labor that's what we want to be advocating for we want to build new technologies and we want to build new
Manufacturing Systems that take advantage of automation but we do not want to like replace people in general we want to augment and aggregate as much of their tribal knowledge and bake it into the systems that we use for the next generation of American manufacturing like that's kind of how we see it however what we've seen like for
our customer base generally speaking is you know the the the classic question of like uh oh like I buy like some dra software now because I can do the work of 10 people with one person I can lay nine people off and it's like no no no it's actually that uh you know because nine of your people retired and you're
still left with one now I don't have to shut my manufacturing facility down so like that's where we see a lot of the value ad and value generation but also more broadly as a company we're not just stand and work instructions that's just uh you know where we're interjecting what do you what do you think about mbas you know buying small manufacturing
businesses rolling them up last question BR brutal brutal as a concept awful idea I'm actually generally Pro engineers and manufacturers rolling up uh like SBS like midmarket manufacturers this is uh you know I think a very interesting concept as a whole if you were to like you know if you as a uh as somebody with
a like a hardware background had a very specific like search fund for like pumps or valves and you like really knew who to like like where the optimizations could be generated if you came in and you were like we're going on Google Drive guys like no more like writing stuff on Post-its like that could be very interesting that's useful but like
an NBA comes in they look at the p&l and they're like ah like cut everybody over 50 and it's like no the tribal knowledge that's like where those guys knew how things fit together you didn't write it down and now your factory doesn't know how to build anymore and now we're Serbian we're cowt to China and it's
over and it's over but we don't want that to happen never cow toow never cow toow well thanks for coming on the show this is fantastic this is great uh you got to come back when you have more news I'm sure there's going to be a ton this year it's a crazy time crazy year and we're excited uh for what you're doing
out in New York keeping Manhattan safe from those New Jersey folks yes thank you guys for having me and I will catch you guys later looking forward to the next one cheers hello Phil great dude always a what a guy very well spoken yeah just high energy knows his business lots of good takes tapped in you love to see it
uh well speaking of tapped in we got Zach from plaid coming next uh he had some big news today fascinating story fascinating company uh if you've ever authenticated done ooth with your bank you've probably seen the Plaid pop up and he is here now I'll let him explain buiness because he probably knows him
way better than I do Zack welcome to the show hey guys thank you so much for having me great having you yeah uh can you give us a little background uh maybe brief introduction to the company I think most people know but then uh specifically what are you announcing today totally um so uh plaid we buil infrastructure for digital Finance
broadly U the core thesis is um banking was built for a world that didn't Enis the internet we wanted to help people be able to um get loans open bank accounts uh pretty much do anything in their financial life online um so we created the API for your bank account and youve probably utilized it when you linked
your let's say well Fargo checking account to the venmo app and any bank account you linked to pretty much any fintech company uh we build the the plumbing for all of that um increasingly it's not just ftech companies now but it's the big Banks the way that you open a checking account with City goes through plaid um and then a ton of
Enterprises so the way that you pay your rent with Invitation Homes or a bunch of those uh all that stuff's going through plaid last few years we had a big change to our business we um historically just focused on bank account linking um now we're very focused on utilizing a lot of the the aggregate data that's coming
through ourem assum to build things like a new version of fraud scoring if we can see your patterns you see that you committed fraud in Robin Hood we can tell venmo that you committed fraud we can tell your bank that you committed fraud so on and so forth we built a credit scoring division that that builts
alternative credit scores we built bun tooling to do better Bank things payments so it's been a big evolution for the business over the last two years or so yeah yeah talk about uh the the time period I guess it was like late 2022 2023 everybody just said okay fintech is over but you obiously have like more better data than everyone and
so you could see that like No in fact like fintech was not over despite VC's you know maybe opining on podcast yeah talking on podcasts uh uh I'm sure you never lost faith but I guess like talk about you know where we were a couple years ago versus now totally I mean like I fintech had a winter crypto has winter
as fintech definitely had a winter um basically there's a crazy amount of fintech demand pulled forward into 20 20 when people couldn't go into their bank they needed to figure out a way to do financial services online 2021 zero interest rate environment you had you had things growing like crazy you tons of AD budget so on and so forth and
first half of 2022 was kind of a continuation of of all of that and then interest rates started going up in the second half of 2022 um and in large part the fintech market wasn't prepared for that kind of change certainly not that kind of change at the speed with which it changed um a lot of ftech businesses were were predicated on lending and
lending slowed down quite significantly and a lot of them were predicated on on investing or crypto and those markets slowed down quite significantly and so you saw a slow down of ftech in the second half of 2022 and then and kind of like a bit of lethargy throughout of the first half and almost in the second half
of 2023 um and a lot of that was uh the businesses themselves like retrenching going in and focusing on profitability it was no longer growth at all cost you got to build a model in which you're actually profitable you're you're not just gross margin profitable but you're operating Mar POS profitable um a lot of
it was also like retooling from focusing just on you know investing and crypto to also doing things like core Banking and a bunch of other services and so you saw this whole rebuild of all of the fch companies and then going to 2024 there was a rebound in 2025 you know we've seen very much of fintech spring as I
like to call it um so things are moving really quickly there's a ton of startup formation at the earliest stages um in the mid-stages these companies have roled are now back to growth at the late stages you're about to see a couple of IPOs so is coming soon and we think we've heard that chime is coming soon
I've heard that a bunch of others are coming soon and so you know it is very much a sense of optimism right now um but H you know going through these cycles of difficult times um I think it makes companies and in our sense I think an industry a lot stronger um but I can't say it's fun to go through can you talk about uh stable coins how are you
thinking about that in general it seems like there would be some cross-pollination there but also like it's a wildly different industry in many ways yeah specifically you know you don't need to speak to this but we were covering the the circle a lot of news about it feels like they benefited from some amount of a
monopoly temporarily and maybe that's fading but just creates more opportunity for other fintechs snbs and and Banks totally well I haven't read the Circle S one yet so I wish I could comment on it no don't don't comment on that to be clear the uh like Broadway stable coins like huge opportunity um you in the US
if I want to send you money over the a system it takes three days that doesn't make any sense we have this whole new thing that's rolled out over the last few years called same day a great I can send you money the same day there's an RTP system real time payment system where I could send you money theoretically instantly except um not
every Bank accepts it it doesn't work universally like there's still some issues with it and stable coins I can just send you money really easily and so there there is no question in my mind the stable coins is going to grow quite massively um I think there's still a question on like consumer utilization
how is it going to get actually into consumer payments where you know no one's going to walk into a Starbucks and buy a coffee with their bank account no one's going to walk into a Starbucks and buy a coffee with a stable coin certainly not for any amount of time that I can think about you know maybe 10
15 years in the future um but for a lot of the core you know business to business especially cross border where it's really messy types of transactions I I expect it to grow quite a lot so definitely an area that we're we're participating working with a lot a lot of companies on and we're excited to uh to support on on that topic of like the
slow a transactions that feels like something that I understand the value of crypto but also like databases are fast now uh is there a world where if you were put in charge of like Doge for finance like doof or something and you just had like cart blanch in the government you could speed it up or or is it not like a personal issue you
could you think you could do it how would that actually work it's like the the the Federal Reserve has a system called fed now yeah um and fed now is actually just like instant bank to bank transfers yeah and they're cheap the interesting thing is it's actually a new Revenue line so the bank bank would make
processing revenue from this so there haven't been a lot of new new Revenue lines for the banks recently the issue is like getting Banks to install it getting Banks like setting up the right incentive systems to get Banks to actually set it up there are like you know a few hundred Banks and they're mostly small banks that are using it um
I think there are like four or five easy changes you change the incentive structure you create a mandate that every bank has to support it there like like this this the small set of changes that you could get instant Bank payments in the US very quickly now it's a question of like does the government
have the appetite to force things upon small Banks and like sure it is costly for the banks to implement it it's not crazy costly but it's not zero cost and so does the bank does the government actually have the appetite for something like that to happen that's really helpful true what what are you it feels
like there's so much to build still I had to go to the bank yesterday to send a large wire and it's still like every time you do that you're like you know they're looking at your phone and they're like writing down the wire instructions and they print it out and they're like can you confirm it again and then they're like can you sign this
and can you sign that and then I got to text the you know recipient the whole thing still do not copy and paste your account number twice you can copy and paste it in the first box but not the second box I feel like this is such a beautiful time for plaid you're you know founder run company you have incredible distribution and there's still so much
yet to build you know sort of what what gets you most excited in terms of I'm sure you just spend a lot of time like talking to Big Bank CEOs and startups and your position is just like how can we enable you to do what you want to do or or improve existing products but kind of what what are you most excited about
in the uh plaid ecosystem or I get to have the most fun conversations in the world with our customers and with the banks I get to go in and say hey what frustrates you about the financial system and they will just like talk for 30 minutes I'm like amazing we can't solve all that we can solve these things we can work together
to solve those things and like maybe over time we can as an industry find find find a way to make it better so they're incredibly fun conversations to your point like Financial Services is just barely becoming digital um you know it it's crazy to say that um because you know you have online banking and you
know maybe use venmo and maybe buy some coin B Bitcoin on coinbase and you can make a trade on Robin Hood that seems really easy to you um but to most people in the US most of their financial life is still not fully digital and so I think just the core the core of our business like has a lot of room to grow a long way to keep running like we got
to get rid of that like hold your phone up like type in your account number all that stuff can become instant and easy um I would say like the two big areas that we've really been investing in that I think will be game changers um kind of over the longer term so obviously the Core Business matters a ton but the the
two new areas um the first is fraud detection um so online financial fraud um is going up at somewhere between 20 and 25% a year off of a gigantic phase deep fakes are having a big impact on this a lot of AI tooling is having a big impact on this um I mean there's the like you've probably heard of like the
pig butchering stuff that's going on where like people are like you know calling folks and and tricking them into sending zel payments to to Crazy places so on and so forth but that is at an all-time high and going up really quickly and so we buil built a set of tools that look across all the data in our Network they inest a bunch of third-
party data we have customers reporting throw data back to us um and you can kind of think of it like palter networks for for financial services so like how do we notice if something is weird over here and then tell everyone over there that they should maybe be on alert it so that's one big area that we've been
focusing on the second big area is around credit scoring so right now if you get a new job tomorrow your income goes up by 3x um it will take a very long time for that to show up in your credit score right um you know because you have to get loans you have to then repay the loans and like the whole for the whole thing to trickle through the
system it doesn't make any sense but you were a better credit risk today because you got that new job and so we've built a series of tools including our own our own credit score that looks at real-time data and brings it into the model and then increasingly will allow more and more people to get loans that are based
on your today's data not five years from now's data so that's what I'm excited for yeah on AI specifically in plaid just in fintech generally do you think it's uh it it certainly hasn't felt like the most hyped category be and maybe that's because you know 10 years ago people were promising sort of like AI
based lending and all that stuff and maybe it was AI maybe it wasn't uh do you think it's getting enough attention I'm sure you guys are taking it seriously internally uh we're taking very seriously internally um like from an internal efficiency standpoint like like leaning in hard and frankly a lot of the banks
are leaning on hard um and so I think that'll be a big step forward I don't need to talk to you about that you've talked to everybody in the world about that kind of stuff um for me Financial Services product specific lens other than like you know AI causing fraud and then using AI to fight fraud um but like from a like core banking product
standpoint I don't think you're going to see a lot of changes fast I think behind the scenes if you go to a bank and you talk to a teller or more likely like you do a zoom call call with like a wealth advisor they're going to have an AI dashboard and a bunch of AI tools that are real time telling them like hey
what's what's what's going on with John's portfolio you know what recommendations should be making U you know how might it be different but you're not going to get that direct like AI bot style interaction for I think a long time mostly because there's so much regulatory overhead so much trust overhead that goes with it that I think
the banks are going to be hesitant and and slow to launch look I'm on the furthest edge of this like I would love to have a like like set of AI Bots that just like move my money across my accounts like leave it in treasuries until the minute that I needed to pay you know whatever bills I need to pay
and then if I have excess left over like move it back into treasuries or balance across my loans to pay the lowest interest rates but I'm probably like way on the furthest edge of that uh I have two questions out of the big Bank CEOs who's the best DJ well you know only one of them plays a Cella so but on a serious note uh I feel like
there's this interesting Dynamic with plaid where uh you guys have it's a financial infrastructure company uh but you take design incredibly seriously where does the design chops come from like how did that become so instilled in the in the company so from the earliest days our mission has been unlocked Financial Freedom for everyone like it
is a consumer Centric Mission like our our goal is to help consumers and small businesses um have a greater amount of Financial Freedom have more control over their financial lives and be able to do things that they want to do uh that are out there and so like we took the position that we need to fight for the
consumer even though we built a B2B product and thus we're B2B Toc or like B2B the small business um and with that in mind we knew that we need to build a brand that resonated with consumers um it doesn't need to be the loudest brand but like in a lot of Senses we take inspiration from Visa like a lot of consumers don't know what visa does but
they certainly know that it helps them make payments all right well we want to learn from that like we would like every consumer to know what plaid does we're also realistic to understand that not every single one is necessarily going to fully understand it but we want them to have tools that come from us we want
them to have trust in us um and so we focus a lot on building that type of consumer experience and then you see us also like in the press and in the media like try to go fight these battles on behalf of consumer so fighting the open banking battle like fighting the against the de banking stuff that's going on
like being very public about saying like hey we believe that every consumer should have access to every Financial product that they might want and like we think that if we continue to live up to this like um this somewhat idealistic view that could consumer should be financially free um that's going to drive a lot of value
for the company and that that then flows through into the products that we build the way that we act the design design sensibility so and so forth uh last question on my side do you have any advice for Founders uh in maybe defense Tech or AI that are sort of like riding the high that fintech maybe felt in 2021
like uh is it time to you know I'm curious because like you know this is such an amazing moment for you and the team to come back you obviously you know the company's been marked up you have a bunch of uh you know a world of opportunities but you had to go through a couple darker years uh any any words of advice I mean as a saying goes things
are Never As Good as they seem nor nor as bad as they seem I would say that the dark times um honestly it's my favorite and it's the time that really forms the company and it it lets you know who you are it lets you know who's really on your team and it it forces you to make like the most important decisions um
nothing's ever going to be easy in startups nothing certainly is ever easy for plaid but knowing that we've like formed kind of an amazing team a good set of of customer relationships like we've made good product decisions in the times that are really hard allow us to go fast in those times where where it gets a little easier so um I don't know
if I have any specific advice other than like just keep on keeping on it's a great yeah I mean that is the best advice you can give I think no I'm genuinely excited and I can't wait for you guys to build more products CU every time I use plaid products it's a breeze and every time I use you know anything
from from the Legacy banking world it's absolutely brutal so you're don't talk too much trash about all those Partners we don't want them we love the banks in our goal we're very thankful for everythings good luck and congratulations on the round we ring for you it's great having you on always welcome and uh congrats to the whole
team we'll talk to you soon thanks for having me thanks bye next up we got Nathan minz coming in from CX2 very excited to to him going back to defense Tech had to give you the update because there's some breaking news about plaid um not a defense tech company but still got still snuck in a defense Tech question Jordy I like how you did that
that was very bring back you gotta bring back no it's just we're we're at this moment you know yeah plaid was started you know got to uh you know form itself when when fintech maybe wasn't so hyped and then went through this period of exuberance and you know insane valuations the same multiples you know we were seeing in AI
today fintech companies were getting even London companies for getting yeah well we're talking to a veteran of Defense Tech Nathan welcome to the show how you doing hey good John good good to be here with you I was listening in and I'm I'm bummed that I don't have as good a hair as Zachary or around he has
fantastic hair uh you know we get some compliments on our hair every once in a while but he blew us out of the water I think uh so you know the fans are just going to flock over to the Plaid now yeah but but yeah how you doing and can you give us a little intro on yourself and some background and what you're building
now um I'm doing great actually yeah so uh you know right now uh it's sunny and 72 degrees outside in uh in elag gundo and uh um you know it's it's it's a great day to be in defense uh we're seeing just uh you know it seems like every hearing that I watch of these appointees for this new Administration uh seem to be echoing our talking points
so it's kind of nice to know that uh uh the last few years of of pushing for a transformation in in the way we do our Force mix and and how we fight Wars is actually uh someone's actually been listening um so as you know I've been in defense for about 20 years I started out uh at the big uh Soviet tractor Factory
primes uh I spent 14 years at boing and rathon uh as a radar systems engineer electronic warfare uh engineer I worked on you know programs with names like next Generation Jammer and uh uh the radar for the F-15 and the F-18 and a bunch of space programs and stuff uh and then in about 2018 an old friend from
college uh Joe lale called me up and said hey we're starting a defense vertical do you have any ideas uh and I came to him a couple months later for with the idea for what turned into epis which is a high power microwave to kill drones and other electronics uh so got that started ran that for a couple of years uh then moved over into the
automotive radar space started a company called Spartan radar uh that does uh you know software that makes Automotive Radars have higher resolution uh that one we ended up selling to a uh a major equipment OEM uh in the past year uh and so we've we've exited that one at this point uh and then about a year ago I got
together with uh uh my co-founders mark tregar Porter Smith and Lee Thompson and we started CX2 with the goal of transforming the way that the US uh fights Warfare in the electronic warfare domain so uh that's where we are today the company's about 24 people we're here in uh based here in El Segundo uh we're
backed by hvc and Andre horowits uh and right now the office is pretty empty today because most of my team's out uh participating in an exercise so uh exciting times abound yeah um you know you see those viral videos of the Chinese drone displays where it looks like a dragon and everyone immediately quotes it and says like that's a weapon
system at the same time as scary as that is it feels like between epis and andal and you know Allen Control Systems is just pelting bullets and we're talking to a company today that's building laser weapons to take down drones there's a lot of different companies that have addressed this is it as dangerous as we
think or is it more of a solved problem maybe that we already know or is it just like we need to scale up the systems we have so I'll give you a couple statistics uh when I was over in Kow at the NATO innov Summit last year uh the ukrainians thre out a statistic that 30% of the uh of the casualties that they were experiencing were due to drone
strikes wow I think today in the kers offensive for the Russians it's the majority if not almost all of them for certainly for the tanks and vehicles so it's become uh a main stay of modern warfare and right now that's where we are today is just the beginning most of the systems that we see used it's these
f PV first person view with some guy sitting there with goggles like he's playing a video game and it's very One V one well in the next few years it's going to become one V many yeah and at that point those command and data links that today are essential for that drone to get there and we're figuring out how
to make them work more autonomously because there's all these countermeasures like you mentioned to try and jam that data link or deny it uh it's going to become even more vital because uh one one person suddenly that Archer is going to be firing 100 arrows right uh we're kind of St taking a step past that at CX2 and we're trying
to develop the systems that shoot the Archer not the arrow with that in mind uh and a lot of it comes down to finding the Drone controller uh which becomes an increasingly harder problem is the cat and mouse game continues uh in Modern Warfare so what uh what does the device look like that sending out the signal to
find the Drone operator are you putting up your own drone or is this something that can be from satellites or uavs or any sorts of other devices or can you even talk about it yeah so we're building our own uh uh electronic warfare stack uh to find fix and finish on those emitters of interest and that starts with a a drone that does uh Sig
and uh finds and fixes on those signals we call it wraith it's a it's a group two drone uh with about you know 45 minutes a loer time or 40 kilm of range depending on how you think about it that takes off and geocat those emitters and by that I mean it finds the position of those emitters it's a little different
from systems on the ground today that mostly kind of give you a line of bearing and say it's out there we'll actually give you a fix on it and identify what it is from there through our Nexus operating system uh we'll hand off to an attack drone called Banshee that'll go out it's a loitering munition with a home on omitter Seeker
that'll go out and take that emitter out so you go find the controller and then you you have another uh drone that follows it and and actually takes it out kinetically right so that's that's the Cur the the uh the full when I talk about the full attack stack that we're building right um and uh alongside that
we've actually built an fpv kit with a version of the Banshee Seeker that can snap onto another drone we call it vadas uh that will actually go out and seek uh that emitter out and it provides an overlay so the fpv user sees a line of bearing and kind of the strength of signal and you know you're getting warmer you're getting colder no no no
fly left fly right and can home in on the particular signal so that's kind of our product mix wraith Banshee vadas Nexus uh you're kind of seeing a Halo theme in here yeah I like it very cool you have a question or I I have another one I can yeah I as you're talking it feels like there's some there's plenty
of you know companies in in the gundo and just defense Tech broadly that can just sort of like think longterm about capabilities and trying to win these bigger programs it feels like you have to take a much more iterative approach because things are kind of evolving in real time and potentially that's like the the going to
be the case for the entire life cycle of the company right where you're just always trying to stay um always trying to stay whatever a step ahead of adversaries is that different than you think working at you said Boeing and Ron back in the day uh where they're just sort of thinking in sort of big programs
and big capabilities and and you're now having to be like nimble and and constantly trying to stay at the edge yes absolutely the way that we used to do product development in Aerospace was very much a bell curve with a long tale of sustainment right so pretty much all the effort would culminate around critical designer review and then at
that point most of the systems engineers and stuff would roll off and program would go into manufacturing sustainment whereas if you look at soft products if I was to look at how Facebook does a roll out or you know Google or any of these others for instance uh it's much more of kind of a a logarithmic Plateau
it gets up to a certain point there might be a little bit of a hump and effort once the the the posts are kind of put in on the house so to speak and at that point there's a software sustainment tail that's much more much larger that takes place over time and that's what we see in Ukraine with like the Drone manufacturers that are over
there there's like 200 drone companies in ukra that are out uh building the million or so drones that they're putting to use you know right now um what what they're able to do I is that they're able to rapidly iterate using commercial you know cicd commercial was it constant integration constant delivery type of processes um the the
most extreme report I've heard of this is they they had cases where the Russians were rapidly changing tactics and employing new systems where they were updating software at a rate of six times a day and like with with the systems I used to work on I mean the missiles would get software updates so infrequently they
called them tape updates because they had to man to go out there yeah and so you know they were lucky if they had an update every two years much less you know six times a day um so the way that we do s uh software acquisition in the dod has to fundamentally change uh there's been some good signs in that
respect with uh the rules that the SE def has pushed out for software acquisition p way where they're saying we really need to buy software using commercial processes as a default as opposed to still using the traditional waterfall you know I call it the Soviet tractor Factory way of of procuring things right um and and you know I think
on the hardware side we eventually need to move that direction as well it's a little harder when you're building a multi-billion dollar aircraft I mean just realistically that is building a drone but let's start with software and iron that out because that's where the most palpable Need Is Right I love I love all those phrases they're
they're going to stay in my mind forever uh can you can you break us down uh can you break it down for us about DJI uh there's a lot of fear that we're never going to catch up there's also just a general fear of like are all the DJI drones going to rise up one day and attack us uh uh you've probably seen
like the internals of these drones you know how to probably take them over at the drop of a hat you can probably do it on your phone if you wanted to uh how much of a risk is DJI uh we've had other guests on the show say maybe we should ban the importation entirely where do you stand on DJI I mean you know we already have
export or import controls in place and like they're banned from use from US government agencies for example with with exceptions y um the solution is we got to build our own drone uh you know industry here in the states I think we're doing a good job in that the uh CX2 is part of that but we're also partnering with Ukrainian drone firms I
don't know if you saw there was a big piece in the Wall Street Journal talking about and and Skyfall which is a Ukrainian drone firm and so like partnering with the guys that are already building a million drones uh a year overseas and try to take their lessons learned and scale it over here is one sheet code that we can apply uh
to catch up faster right um the the big advantage that the Chinese have is they applied consumer scale Technology and Manufacturing to the Drone problem and they took advantage of our own regulatory uh you know blockers that we were putting in place I don't know if you're aware of this but to fly a drone
in the US you had to have a I think it's a FAA type 109 license yeah is what it's called and the Chinese got around that by labeling what they were doing a toy so anytime that the US drone manufacturers you know we've been building fpv drones since 2005 2006 but nobody could get funding to actually scale it because of these regulations
and the fact that oh it's too hard to train the pilots it's not scalable the Chinese on the other hand found the loophole and they scaled up as a result right so our own barriers from our own regulatory infrastructure what need to be Revisited and that'll unle us Innovation and allow us to to compete
with them toe-to-toe got it are there any considerations for uh Indo payom versus what's going on in uh Eastern Europe clearly you're very focused on Ukraine but are you looking ahead to any other theaters yes I mean in Indo pcon the ranges are just a lot larger so you're going to have bigger drones with uh you know larger scale right
that's the main difference um also the Chinese are just more likely to uh to bring out you know more sophisticated systems I mean you know the Russians for all the talk about you know the zoo 57 Fel in the reality of it is is they filled it all of 12 of them the Chinese j2s and J 31s are starting to get into
the hundreds that's their quote unquote fifth generation stealth fighter uh I can make an argument that it's not quite fifth generation but anyway um and then and then just their the amount of drones that they're talking about bring it scale they they recently disclosed that they have an order for a million kamakazi drones that they're
putting forward right in Indo paycom right now our plan is to deploy a whole bunch of Legacy Battle Star Galactica assets with names like rivet joint Compass call that are mostly on older aircraft some are on 707s some are moving into GF stream fivs to do a lot of these capabilities and they're going to be pushed way back from the Taiwan
straight the only thing we have that can really get close is The Growler and all of our missiles that we're using to do this Mission cost millions of dollars that's what we're seeing over in you Gulf of Aiden right now you need a $6 million missile take out a $20,000 drone so we're here to help bring the cost
parody back well thank you for everything that you're doing we were certainly appreciate and we appreciate you stopping by uh you got to call back in when there's more news more updates uh those are some great we could keep yeah we can keep talking to you for another hour I'm sure we're just going to go into I mean it's the F It's the
Most Fascinating geopolitical situations the most fascinating technology and uh yeah we thank you for taking the time to chat with us today and I'm sure we'll have again soon so thank you absolutely happy to be here thanks for having me on have a great day talk soon talk soon uh and we got Brandon from Shield coming in
to the studio in just a minute uh I believe he's here let's bring him on in we got one minute if you're not familiar with Shield AI develop test and deploy autonomy faster than ever autonomy for the world another defense tech company and he is here now Brandon welcome to the show what's up guys how you guys
doing we're doing great how are you doing great Fant fantastic Thursday afternoon that's great yeah thanks for taking the time to be with us uh for those who don't know could you just give like a little intro on yourself and the company uh yeah sure quick intro on myself uh mechanical engineering background I went to the US Naval
Academy became an engineering officer on board of ship uh deployed to the Arabian Gulf on that ship um then laterally transferred became a US Navy SEAL uh and did uh three deployments two to Afghanistan one to the Pacific got out uh in 2015 while concurrently going to business school started Shield AI uh
with my brother and have been at it for the past 10 years that's background on myself uh quick background on Shield AI uh mission is to protect service members and ions with artificially intelligent systems in pursuit of this Mission we've been building the world's best AI pilot easiest way to think about an AI pilot
is self-driving technology for unmanned systems that enables them to U maneuver without GPS without Communications it enables them to maneuver without a remote pilot enables the concept of swarming or teaming um notable Milestones along this journey we're the first company in the world to put an AI pilot on the battlefield in 2018 we put
it on a quadcopter go inside buildings um ahead of Special Operations forces uh that was deployed to Iraq Afghanistan Syria uh most recently used in Israel to rescue hostages which was really cool have the text messages back from uh Israeli counterterrorism forces uh during uh from October 2023 um and then uh also uh we were the
first company in the world to put an AI pilot on an F16 and fly an F-16 autonomously we won the D alha dog fight in 2020 in 2022 um did the first F-16 flights in 2023 we did the first ever AI piloted F-16 versus human piloted F-16 uh dog fight and then in 2024 the secretary of the Air Force flew uh our AI piloted F16
we are finalist for the Coler trophy which is given to the greatest achievement in Aeronautics or astronautics R Brothers won it Chuck jger won it for breaking the sound barrier we were finalists and lost to some NASA asteroid mining thing cool whatever yeah but uh yeah he's paying attention yeah I mean it sounds like an
overnight success the type of overnight successes we like to highlight on the show overnight success that's always the way it goes all the all the greatest overnight successes take decades in my experience yeah I mean it's a 17-year overnight success if you count the the naval experience yeah yeah exactly uh uh
what's it like going uh having your your first you know real startup you know become a multi-billion dollar company uh most Founders have the benefit of you know starting a couple things that don't maybe you know little ideas or things like that is it you know going back 10 years ago at this point I guess nine years and 11 months uh did
you feel like you knew what to do from the beginning or you had good people around you I'm curious you know um one is you don't know what to do in the beginning um you want to surround yourself with great people just to be uh directly responsive to those aspects of the question um it's uh I I don't think
too much about like you know that that aspect of um like the aspect of oh it's now a multi-billion dollar company principally because it's a Night Bite every day um it's a lot of pain and suffering I I tell everybody that like when Jensen Hong from Nvidia talks about pain or suffering when Elon talks about
the pain and suffering that goes into uh building these uh these types of businesses it's absolutely true um and so uh like there's a a massive amount of stress there's a massive like number of times that you fail there's a massive amount of embarrassment like when you fail in front of customers or when you disappoint customers along that 10year
Journey um and so uh you know I think the re you know one of the reasons I think we've been successful is um the ab the resiliency the ability to keep moving forward the ability to pick yourself up once you get brought to your knees like when you get gut punched uh and it certainly happens and so you know
in in that sense you know I think we had that when we started I I experienced that in the Seal team so I was you know grateful to have those experiences and um and basically used to the life of suffering so uh you know that's that's paid off well over the past several years years can can you talk a little bit about the path to full autonomy for
fighter planes uh we saw this with chess where you know deep blue beat Gary Casper off but for a long time a combination of AI and human would outperform they call it like Centaur chess uh some people say we're in the Centaur era of AI image generation or a lot of people use chpt but then they're editing it themselves it's not pure AI
creation it's not pure human uh are we in the Centaur era of Air Supremacy right now or are we getting there and how long do you think it'll last I I I think um at this stage in the game uh autonomy is at superhuman levels of performance and so I don't yes people will always augment machines and make those machines
better and more useful to the people but the level of involvement in doing that um is becoming minuscule in terms of like what's required and so um look I you know that Journey right for us uh to flop starting to fly in F-16 unfortunately in 2015 um when you're a you know threers founding team with zero money zero track
record uh they don't hand you to the keys of the keys to the F-16 right away and so we had to earn our right you know our path you know our right to fly that aircraft um and it took a long time and we St stepped our way to get there uh right it took seven years before first life T 16 proving it on a quadcopter proving it in
simulation uh with the DARPA alpha dog fights uh proving it on our vbat aircraft and eventually you know they you know more and more people now are giving us quote unquote the keys to uh their jet aircraft yeah um but it's um I yeah I'll just say like I autonomy is a really really hard problem it's also
really you know value thing to create and we're at the stage now where you know I yeah I'm a big believer I think the entire future is going to be an autonomous future I think I agree with Elon Musk when he says there's going to be you know millions of autonomous systems in the world his goal is to put a billion humanoid robots on the planet
you know we'll have millions of self-driving cars um I believe there will be millions of self-driving aircraft and millions of other autonomous systems and shield AI our objective over the next 10 20 years is really to enable that future can you talk about the developer platform that you guys were building I know that's part of the that that was
part of the announcement that you did with the new round at the beginning of last month uh we asked ourselves the question um you know how do we put a million AI Pilots into customers hands in the next 10 years we spent 10 years building the world's best AI pilot for all the reasons I mentioned I feel like we've
checked that box um and then it became how do we how do we put a million AI Pilots into customers hands and the answer was we have to we have to supercharge um the Aerospace and defense Market we have to supercharge uh the autonomy industry and we took a page out of Amazon web services Playbook right uh if you're
unfamiliar Amazon web services um they had basically built a great internal product uh Team said Hey what if we you know brought this to Market what if we commercialized it would it be valuable for other people all this infrastructure these data pipelines these developer tools uh and obviously the rest is history massively valuable for Amazon
web services most profitable uh business unit they have um and so uh we basically said let's package up all of our developer tools our infrastructure our pipelines and enable the rest of the defense industrial base and again the rest of the the autonomy industry and those interested in autonomy to actually
uh develop evaluate test and deploy autonomy um and so spent you know the better half of last year well more than last year really focused on building that product um and rolling out to Beta customers and we're going to General availability here in May for that product and the response has been gamechanging it essentially enables you
um to reduce the number of Engineers reduce the time uh to actually build a ton of and take it to Market by 10 to 50x so it's just massive improvements we're we're flying first flights on a jet aircraft two engineers in six weeks right wow um if we had these tools back in 2015 they may have let us fly uh the
F-16 right out of the game so it's it's incredibly powerful yeah uh speaking of the F16 what what is actually the hardest part of flying an F-16 in a military scenario I can imagine the dog fighting feels like the most intense the most high stakes but then uh it also sounds really hard just to fly an X F16 like into the theater for 6 hours
straight you get tired and then landing on an aircraft carrier in like stormy seas that seems really hard are you trying to do it all is there is this the idea like self driving you kind of turn it on when you're on the highway uh what's the most difficult so uh just to be clear the work on the F-16 uh was to
burn down the technical risk for this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets but in terms of like what the you know the most technically hard like the techn technically hardest part about it is actually around safety and certifi ability right um the US Air Force the US Navy they're not putting up 20,000 pound
aircraft uh in the air right that are just going like not perform right especially in a you know in the dog fighting scenario when we have relative closure rates between two 15,000 pound aircraft going uh at 1,00 miles per hour closure rates within like you know call it 50 meters of each other you have to be able to say I can guarantee the
safety aspect of what's going on here yes there's risk but this is how it's been burnt down this is why it's safe this is why we believe it's going to do uh exact or why we know it's going to do exactly what it say it's going to do so as people think about um you know and I think that's where Shield AI has uh
really uh shown is our understanding of not just like the autonomy aspect but that intersection of autonomy uh jet aircraft safety reliability certifi ability um that's where Shield AI stands out do we need spent a long time working on uh do we need a new Top Gun movie where the protagonist is a software
developer um it probably wouldn't be as entertaining as as Maverick too but we're you know or as Maverick but we're I'm open to yeah I'm open to it I'd love how do you how do you think about uh m&a going forward I think you guys made a couple or at least a couple uh Acquisitions to date there's now a ton of new investment but you guys have
spent 10 years winning customer trusts you know winning uh you know contracts Etc and I imagine there's going to be some companies that develop you know cool Technologies or have great talent but don't quite uh reach the where you guys are you know how how how do you how do you look at that opportunity going
forward certainly we we've built in acquisition muscle and acquisition arm in our in our company um and we are constantly looking at opportunities um and there's just a very very um it has to go through a lot of different wickets for us to say let's let's get serious about something um right ideally it's strategic um because it takes up a lot
of executive time if it's truly going to move the needle for the business at the same time you'll see us do smaller Acquisitions um we'll announce like a really you know a smaller uh IP type acquisition here um in the next several weeks um and so there's that range but in the ideal World um you know strategic
needle moving for the business um enh you know gives us better Market access gives us uh enables us to build a better product uh one that's aligned with our strategy road map with our product road map with our vision for the business and so we're always on the lookout for uh new companies it's fantastic last question or we good no that was it I
mean come back on when you have UHS this was fantastic I mean such a fascinating business and like such a entertaining and just dramatic in so in so many ways uh I mean we could go way deeper uh but thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us uh really fun conversation thank youw thanks guys I'll see you we'll talk to you soon
bye jordy's uh hit in the bathroom but uh in the meantime we have Peter from Rune Technologies here let's bring him in and I'll have him do his intro and then Jordy will hop on in just a second uh so Peter are you there can you hear me hey Peter how you doing he I got you cool uh yeah thanks so much for joining
I've heard a lot of great things about the company I actually haven't gotten a chance to really dig in too much so could you just give me a brief intro on you your backstory and kind of what the company does today yeah absolutely absolutely happy to give you an intro and then tell you more about the company
great uh myself I'm I'm the CTO of run I lead the product engineering team here and uh before run I was at andal for four years as a software engineer had some incredible opportunities there with some amazing teams and before that I was at Facebook for three years uh Facebook a research you're the meme you're the
meme of like you were building ads and then Palmer said hey come do something meaningful with your life you over by Palmer I love it yeah it's amazing it's real and um actually dropped off College to join Facebook when I was 19 you in London at the time and um I'm originally um from Austria so I like to consider
myself the most patriotic austrian-american since Arnold Schwarzenegger Arnold Schwarzenegger I was it going to say exactly but I had the opportunity to come here when I was 19 and you know participa in the American dream and I'm grateful for that ever since that's fantastic yeah what about R can you tell me yeah so about R
so you know in short we're a military logistics technology company okay and really the the realization was that you know over the past few years as defense technology companies have invited on on drone swarms and Hypersonic missiles and autonomous submarines you know what they haven't had the focus to think about is
you know well if that drone breaks down in the fight you know where do it spare parts come from right or if you shoot one Hypersonic missile or do the next 30 come from or if you have a collaborative combat aircraft where does the fuel to charge the battery to get it off the ground come from right those those logistical considerations and you know
as I as I looked more into Logistics I realized that it was sort of the Forgotten part of the military especially at the Tactical level and I realized there was an opportunity to bring you know the great Innovation that other companies had brought to intelligence and command control and fires but now bring it over to to
Logistics because you know I also knew that you know the great quotes of amateur talk tactics and professionals talk Logistics and you know I knew how much Logistics mattered to patent's third Army and so it was just such a stark contrast between Logistics really matters but then when you look at logisticians in the field they're using
whiteboards and Excel spreadsheets and you know scraps of paper and there was a gap and that's why we found it ruin to fill that yeah I don't know if you ever played like hearts of iron 4 but it's very funny that uh you know Call of Duty is wildly popular but Hearts of Iron 4 is this like intense military simulator
where you can spend 12 hours just optimizing like the flow of oil to the front line it's very Logistics based and people say it's like never never play the game because it's too addictive and you'll just be playing it all the time but you're playing it in the real life uh can you can you talk to me more about
uh what contested logistics mean I've heard that term thrown around but I don't really understand it is that is that relevant to your business yeah know it's an interesting term because when I when I you know started out with Rune I also really tried to dig into what does contested logistics mean because that
you know it's a buzz word it's out there yeah the more and more I spoke with logisticians they actually laugh when they heard that term because all the logistics of the military they've ever done is contested right the military operates in contested spaces so the contest Logistics is is is really not you know it's actually not necessary
it's just Logistics so you know we're what we're building is not software for contested Logistics we're building software for Logistics got it can you take me through some of the history of uh Logistics obviously was like pen and paper and uh I don't know even before that probably like carrier pigeon um but then of course you know we've heard that
like Microsoft has actually been a great partner to the dod and they've vended in everything from Microsoft Outlook to Excel and those tools although they seem silly they're probably very helpful in terms of just understanding like how many bullets do we have in the be in the in the Armory or how many rations do we
have um but but has there been uh what what has the progression of technology and the adoption of Technology looked like over the last 20 years like post uh global war on ter yeah I mean you Logistics always has mattered right there's actually a great quote all the way back from alexand the great where he he called his
logisticians a humorless lot because they were the first to be slaughtered if anything went wrong right so it's always mattered always been important um you know when it comes to technology one thing that's interesting about the global war in terror is that Logistics wasn't actually really the focus there
because you know we really had air suppor so every shipment from you know Germany or the US that had to get to the Middle East made it there in one piece right it really wasn't the primary focus and it's really now more so as we're looking towards Ukraine and you know future conflicts within your peer adversaries the logistics is stug to
matter again the way it did in past large scale conflicts right and you know seeing you know Russia for example really almost fail at taking KF in large part because of logistics where kind of people up to that problem again now in terms of the technology there's been less focus on it and you know of course
you know Excel and PowerPoint are great general purpose tools but you know what Logistics is a really you know focused um you know specialty with lots of Doctrine and you know tactics and procedures and so you know you can solve any problem with PowerPoint but that doesn't mean you should and so you know the software re building is really
focused on what does a logistician need when they're in the field and solving their problems yeah how how do you think about the trade-off between flexibility of the design of your system versus uh creating something that's more deterministic more enforcing rules on on the user you obviously like the worst
thing when you're building software is like yeah we did the demo we did the install and then a week later they fell back to excel right I'm sure you want to avoid that yeah you know working with with um our customers it's often a back and forth between understanding their current workflows and supporting them
then also showing the art of the possible with what new technology can bring to the into the four right um you know what you can do in Excel you know isn't isn't what you can we do with AI for example and so it's actually showing them as possible as well as supporting their current workflows you know at the same time and you when it comes to
generalizing the software that's where you know we work with a lot of different service branches now you know with the army with the Marine Corps you we're looking you looking very closely at the Air Force and other branches and so looking at how Logistics is done in different parts of the military helps us
build really general purpose software that could even scale Beyond just the military one day right and disaster and rescue you know oil and gas also have similar logistical needs and also comment you mentioned earlier you know Microsoft there's also something that you know is unique realization for us is that you know the military doesn't
always have perfect re um infrastructure available when it comes to its internet bandwidth and whatnot and so we we've also really focused on you know building the software to run on a laptop in the jungle in the Philippines in the trenches and the way you would write your software in that kind of environment is very different than in a
stable you know data center with infinite band with infinite resources and so you know supporting that tactical you know trench warfare kind of environment is also what's unique about what we're doing so gpus every time you fire up a query and Rune yeah it's to me the interesting thing is you know if you look back at
the start of the Iraq War the iPhone didn't release for years after that right so I'm interested to think about how you think about mobile and now there's just like in theory like an order of magnitude more devices out in the field that theoretically could be used for you know uh to to make what you know the sort of logistics operations
more efficient so so uh is mobile like you know sort of widespread with these systems to date or is it or is it again like you know that the sort of laptop scenario in in the jungle and and just yeah I'm curious how you think about mobile broadly yeah mobile is popping up a lot especially at the lowest levels
where you really have you know soldiers or Marines uh with their phones typing in logistical reports that's that's happening right now and we're working on projects to integrate with that but you know what's I think even more interesting is how do you get away from humans even doing the county right now so you be very honest the way the
military right now knows how much fuel is in a certain place is that you have you know private dip stick in and see how far up it goes right and so you know that's how it's done right now and you phones get you to you reporting that perhaps more quickly but what we also want to get to is how do you not of a
human in the loop in there at all with you know sensors to just measure that you know whether it's ammunition in a in a base or fuel you know ideally that's all automated how do you how much sorry how much uh you talked about Ukraine uh and and learning you know maybe what not to do from from the Russians uh how much
do you think that the US has to learn in Ukraine around Logistics or is is is Ukraine doing anything really well uh are we being sort of efficient there they're making a million drones a year already so it seems like there's some industrial capacity there and then I've also heard those reports that like Russia was like ripping like
semiconductor chips out of like washing machines in like old Ford F-150s because they were so out of of like supplies and I I don't I never know what to believe with these stories but I'd love to hear your take yeah I certainly think that United States you would have fared better in Ukraine right the way we fight
is different but you know what's not too different is how we track Logistics at the Tactical level right now you know the ukrainians are using you know papers and whiteboards and that's why there largely isn't data at the Tactical level and what they're actually consuming and the United States military isn't too
different from that right now so you know even when it comes to Tactical Logistics you know the US Military has a lot he can modernize on that front and you know that's what we're interested in doing right now MH um and so you know that's that's what our Focus has been do you find who who do you connect with most on the customer side like are there
people you know within the dod that are just like Clearly Logistics nerds and you guys just like you know have a 30 minute call and end up going two hours and it's just like you know you finally are like yes like you getan uh because I feel like if you're you know anybody that's a true sort of student of History
you know could get to the point where they're like yeah actually I care less about like the sixth generation fighter and more just like the basics of like how we get one thing uh from point A to point B yeah you know honestly from from the get-go the one thing we've never had to convince somebody of is is that what
we're tackling is a problem everybody understood that Logistics matters everybody understands that you know the the technology that logisticians have in the United States military is not where where it's supposed to be and you you there's obviously the logistician branch of the military and when we work with
them and they've been you know our closest design Partners so far you know they understand these problems because they live them every day but even other War fighting functions and other you know military members understand the problem as well they they sometimes need to be you know they need to understand
why Logistics needs to matter to them you know when you're talking to an artillery officer for example you know they do sometimes have to you be led to understand how can AI for logisticians allow them to be more lethal right because they're going to have Munitions when they need them before they need them in the right place so that's
sometimes you know something that we show The Art of the possible but in general everybody understands this really matters uh how are you thinking about the go to market like the revenue side of the business is this uh the standard like get some SBI money then make it through the valley of death land it program of record or is there just
like a very different model because you're selling software in logistics you know the good thing is that you know over the past few years the military has woken up to Logistics really mattering a lot so you know there's a lot of Buzz around it now and you know in terms of what that allows us to do is one we can both go to
operational units in the field who actually need the software right there'll most often be our design partners and help us develop that's not going to be the big dollars but it's really important for us to build the best product and then we're also going to The Innovation Labs you know across
the services there's organizations that you know help feel technology you know um from The Innovation stage and then there's also the program offices themselves and you know across the services there's very large projects or programs underway that include sustainment now they maybe wouldn't of two years from now two years ago but
they do now and so it's really across the board from the largest modernization projects in the Army to The Innovation labs to the operational units we're you going to all of them and having success with all of them as well what kind of skill sets are you hiring for right now it feels like AI would be really important but maybe not today uh what's
like the kind of the the the type of engineer that fits in really well at Ru today yeah you know also we've we've been um you know scaling rapidly we're 12 people now we I've had an engineer on board every single week for the past four weeks ni you know so that's that's been really exciting growth for us we're
actually now looking for more product minded individuals so product managers that you know have lived the dream and you know perhaps were you know veterans themselves but now want to build technology and understand that as well so we're looking you know to scale our product team right now um you know and as we grow you know further you know
engineering will always be our greatest asset so Engineers that have you really cared about the mission before right you know we both cared deeply about the mission of what we're building for as well as you know having the right engineering skill sets so Engineers that identify with wanting to you know like I
did not build ads anymore but um you know build military technology you know that we're always going be looking for those Jordy got anything that's it um I I had one more question about kind of uh just on the data integration side is it important for you to build uh Integrations into different uh data Lakes data warehousing uh is it
important to just do really great like like PDF ingesting how are you thinking about actually getting I mean I'm sure as you grow and scale like there will be times when you run into like okay there actually is a lot of data here let's bring it in and and onboard it uh is paler a piece of all this like how do
you see Rune playing into like the broader ecosystem of like military data broadly yeah so it's important about logistics that it does really require very holistic decision making and then you you can't just know what you have on hand but also what Transportation you have so get it from A to B along which routes with what Crews to actually move
that equipment if you don't have any of those pieces you're not making holistic decision and it might actually just you break down when it comes to the real world so we're very you know interested in in Integrations we have a super you know open architecture let lets us integrate with programs of record and
other systems you we're talking to lots of other companies that want to integrate with us and then we're also allowing you know manual inputs as well you know like you said whether it is you know like PDFs or excels or your manual inputs too it's kind of like a mix of of you know other Integrations manual put
and you're combining all of that to give that you know real world recommendation that connects all those pieces that I just mentioned yeah that's great well good luck to you thank you so much for stopping by this is a wonderful conversation we'll have to have you back when there's more news yeah yeah thank great to meet yeah have a great day very
cool we got Sam we're Switching gears here we're going into uh from uh defense Tech into hard tech impulse stoves I want to talk to Sam about what big stove is doing in reaction to uh the tariffs well before we get into this yeah you know what somebody that's selling stoves online should use oh I know I think you know
John numeral baby numeral for sure put sales tax on autopilot they put it on autopilot for thousands of leading e-commerce and SAS businesses it is the platform for sales tax compliance you want a guy like spending any more than five minutes per month five minutes is is honestly the perfect amount you want
to be dialed in you want to be paying attention to it you don't want to be overing a stake and posting a great video and doing interviews you don't want him wasting time on sales tax as he sells all over the country we should film an ad yeah where we give an ad for numeral while searing you know a stake you could probably do your sales tax
faster thaning a stake on uh you could maybe make it a ritual you could maybe make ritual and just say every month I'm going to spend 5 minutes on sales tax compliance yeah and uh while I cook a steak and you know where I expect to see a lot of these stoves installed where's that in wanders for sure that's right
check into a wander you find your happy place find your happy place find your happy place book of wand with inspiring views Hotel grad amenities dreamy beds top tier clean got John Andrew Kyle let's get some impulse stoves and wanders people are going to be begging for be able to filter for it they have a
bunch of filters you can filter for great Wi-Fi has pool uh king bed all these different things you want I want to know if there's an Impulse stuff anyway we got the founder of impulse coming into the studio welcome Sam boom how you doing hey great to Great to chat with you guys live yeah yeah I'm so glad to hear uh We've I think we featured
your post before we've talked about you we've always said that it's uh it's interesting that I feel like in some ways impulse is kind of like a dividend of Ander roll it's not andal for stove but it's something that like people didn't think that you could start a new stove startup in a few years ago and now
you can and so uh give us the pitch so basically for context um though I think I overheard you guys talking about me before but basically we make a stove that's about 60 times seven times faster at boiling water than most other stoves so like you can boil like 10 cups of water in like a minute and a half or something crazy so like your mac and
cheese is immediate um but then it also lets you set an exact temperature sort of like an oven so it's like instead of low medium and high you can turn our like cool magnetic knob to an exact number and you don't get smoke you can like fry with seed oil without seed oils for all your esteemed health conscious
followers lot ofans um and you can buy it right now at impulse lives.com we have about 12 weeks that's amazing and you can lock in you know you know current pricing at that point I I'll joke about that later cool and uh and and and just uh like the technological innovation here is that there's like a massive battery pack a massive battery
inside so basically it's like value prop is you get this cool stove and it has all these capabil you you can't get in an inter stove it's like a a fundamental leap in performance but it wedges a battery into your house cool and once we install enough of these we actually deploy a decentralized battery Network
kind of across the grid and you can actually get like more distribution of batteries than like Tesla power wall relatively straightforwardly if you essentially intercept the like 55 million major appliances sold every year in the United States so like there's been like 400,000 total power wall installs in the US and Canada apparently
um but like there's always an appliance installation truck on your block like every couple days so like it's it's actually this really interesting thing of um you can actually deploy a crap ton of battery storage that way yeah so that's that's the big Vision right yeah and then we've actually figured out how
to get the distribution unlock so one is you can buy the stove at impuls labs.com it's awesome but we're also um partnering with a bunch of Major Appliance oems to get the tech in there and so that means that you can go to some random Appliance showroom like Joe and Bob's appliances buy a brand you already know and it might come with impulse inside
and so starting to roll that out over next year are you thinking about even I'm sure you've thought about this but I'm curious if you're doing it partnering with people that are building homes because that's a big yeah so it turns out interest rates being high means that that's a little less like like high volume it turns out that like
you want to intercept the like you want to intercept like where expensive appliances are made to start because you you you're putting a battery in it and like we managed to push the battery cost down substantially but it's it's still something where it's like there's an item that's not in the bomb of a normal
stove um and so you kind of want to start highend very similar to Tesla and all other stuff but then where the high-end Appliance is sold kind of diffusely so getting into these Brands um having a standout brand of our own but then also getting into brands that people are already buying lots of um is
is is is the way to do that and like I then have to talk to like 10 different oems versus thousands of developers basically it's actually and then and then you monetize the battery the same way either way like once the battery's on once the thing is in the batter is under our software control and so we can sell that battery to
utility we can rent that battery to utilities um for grid services and stuff like that so we get access to revenue either way awesome wait talk more talk more about that like talk about the grid integration and and and you know getting that extra leverage and specifically recurring Revenue I mean is the is the base is the base value prop even Beyond
like selling energy back to the grid is it is it more just like if the power goes down in my neighborhood this stove could potentially power my house for a couple hours a day what am I thinking the stove itself works and it's got an inverter so it can share power with the rest of your house so if you've got like
whole home backup it will support that whole home backup so it'll add like it's like a quarter of a power wall basically and so the vision is once we've rolled this out to multiple Appliance categories and multiple Brands like you could just turn this thing on and you'll have like you won't have to have a power
wall you'll just have this Tech how do uh I love the design of the product how do you think about making smart Tech uh stupidly sort of easy to use right I have this I I got a uh yeah I need an app on my phone I'm not the the other day have an app no so the other day the other day I I walk into my uh bedroom and I and I go to like raise
the the blinds and it doesn't work and I ask my wife about it and she's like oh yeah we need to charge the blinds I'm like what do you mean and I I look up there like a court I got to like charge it once a year I'm like give me a break I I don't want to think about charging my blinds it's hard enough keeping this
thing charged right uh so I think like we're we're entering into like there was like the last 10 years have been like the smart home era yeah but everything going back yeah we need to get smarter but also Dumber at the same time we've been in the midwit the midwit home era it's the midwit home it's the midw home
it's the midw home it's like um it's it's like okay does your smart home require someone who's like an IT expert to set it up and then don't want to tou anything because you'll like disconnect your light switch and then by the way like Google home still doesn't have an llm to it and it still doesn't know how to set an alarm
properly and like if I ask it to play a certain piece of content it thinks it I mispronounced it even if I always request that content like it is actually crazy how bad this stuff is yeah it's wild but what we realized was like okay people hate these touch panels on the stoves and stuff like that so we we we
figured out a way to do knobs where like they're magnetic and removable so you can clean all the gunk underneath them oh that's cool if um so so that was prettyy cool but then um basically the UI is really simple it's like you it's it's the same as like a gas stove it's like you basically push in and twist and
you get you get heat like it's not like any sort of yeah any of crazy it's like it's like and then the smart feature we realized was make it hold temperature accurately so instead of like you can say low medium high we still have that but like you also can say 315 degrees and then like your eggs come out exactly the same every day um and the butter
doesn't burn maybe it lightly Browns if you don't want the bottom of the egg to Brown you can set a lower temperature but like basically we just give you like direct control over the thing that people actually want to do which is not playback a smart recipe and like be on Rails with New York Times cooking it's
like no I just want to be able to do the thing that good chefs are able to do by like hovering the pan over the burner and like doing all the right motions that they how do you think about uh what's your vision for humanoids in the home because I it's not hard to imagine you know my my humanoid going grabbing
the steak out of the fridge slamming it on the impulse and then you know just like you know doing that but but maybe they don't even need to touch the knobs right if you just have the integration like they're just you don't really have to touch the knobs with ar thing either because you just turn it on once and
then it's just like it's just like at the temperature you don't have to mess with it but like I realized that the number one Automation in cooking was actually just holding temperature consistently on a on a pan and if you can do that you elevate a midwit cook to a decent cook and so do that and then that's that's kind of the 8020 of that's
the 820 of kitchen automation like I I cook at the office I made some like crazy bra thing and it was like super simple um I made rice without a rice cooker like you don't even need these accessories do you have a rule with your team where it's like you can't order out like you have to use the product every
day at lunch yeah I I got I got to tell everyone that the tariffs are you know cutting into the lunch budget now oh yeah yeah let's talk about the tariffs and your supply chain I'm sure you're impacted it's impossible not to be and and one one thing I'll with is like we're we're in an interesting space because all of our competitors are also
impacted so like basically even in the us-made appliances like so if you go to like a whirpool factory all the circuit boards in there are actually like made by like German or Chinese companies and so or a German company in China in many cases so it's like basically if you tear down any induction stove you pretty much
like see Chinese and German components inside even if it's made in the US and so for that reason it's like okay we're we're building our stuff overseas we're going to figure out hey what the lowest tariff regime is you know make it it Vatican City or whatever whatever whatever whatever works hopefully blessed by the pope yes
yeah yeah we we can commiserate over our Italian Heritage but um but the uh our shared Italian Heritage but basically um but basically the point is like everyone's going to be impacted because inputs are impacted so like even if I go in if I build a factory in in let in let's call it like Phoenix Arizona um I'm not like my Subs suppliers have
haven't on shored yet in volume like an example is like I'm like I'm an investor in hadrien like hadrien like does not have enough CNC machines to make all the world's iPhones yet for for instance like it would take them it would take them a second I I I'll I'll I'll I'll overestimate I I'll I'll be optimiz here
it'll take them at least a second to uh to uh to to get that capacity up and running and this is going to happen across the board so like the lesson from the last wave of tariffs was Vietnam um basically Vietnam was this like kind of quotequote pole country that now is seeing like 45 plus% tariffs or whatever
but Vietnam was the tariffs were only on China um there was a lot of Chinese manufacturers that just basically just drove across the border and set up a factory and all the all all the engineering staff Chinese like they're just flying in it's kind of like two-hour flight one hour flight situation from Shenzhen but effectively
it's a Chinese run factory um now to get them made in Vietnam you had to actually get make some of the components there um but what this meant was all of the large format injection molding machines because what did people mov there first televisions um they moved all the T because like $600 TVs and stuff like that they moved them there but that
meant all large format molding machines are just completely occupied and so like if we want plastic parts like our like induction coil assembly or something like that want to do that in Vietnam we probably couldn't find the machine we'd have to import that part from China regardless um because the machine would
be occupied and then there's a back order of those machines and like all this other stuff so it ended up like even to get to this point where a ton of consumer electronics from like Samsung LG meta Etc moved to Vietnam it took like six year or five or six years wow from when those tariffs kicked off and so if you want like a preview of what
like us reshoring would look like it's going to be something of that nature or prices are just going to go up a bit and people want to put it in the put it in the line I'm want to check out so like weirdly enough it's like we're insulated from this a little bit by making a high ticket item that's cool um and like
maybe we'll get permission to raise prices by by other folks or whatever I don't want to be the leader in that space because I think that that would stick my neck out but it's something where and then additionally like as a component supplier to all these Appliance oems where we actually make our money in software and recurring
revenue from the battery storage we're very insulated in that respect of the business um but it's something where like I had kind of a reaction to this being like it would be really cool if uh I I would have a different approach to reshoring Manufacturing in the US and it would be more around like making it
legal to build a factory in San Francisco again and stuff like and stuff or the B the San Francisco Bay area again without getting like Angry nimes on your your ass um or having to build a tent in the parking lot like Elon did like five times uh I I me El's the only guy who did it because you have to basically
operate in this like legal gray area yeah yeah yeah uh where else are you seeing the most opportunity in home appliances or just like tech for the home uh ovens seem adjacent I don't know what you we can do that with the battery really well you think so that's fun uh anything else come to mind yeah so I mean I think there's actually there's
some interesting the hom Tech and the humanoids come to mind is like I think just making a laundry machine that folds stuff at the end would be sick that' be amazing people would spend like five grand on a laundry machine if it did that totally yeah it's crazy you would basically repic the whole like laundry
Market if you you like I think and I think the tech for that is going to exist like next year yeah I think you just spawned like five YC companies with that yeah yeah they can go license P like Pi's models or whatever um yeah but I'm excited for that that that sounds amazing yeah but so so you can do that um we're we're actually thinking like I
want to be the index startup for anything with a power cord effectively so anything with a power cord realize that like most appliances are used intermittently and even within that intermittent use they're not used at full power like you're you're not like blasting a turkey fryer level of power which we can do we can actually fry a
turkey indoors on our thing um but you're not even when you're frying a turkey you don't need full power all the time you just need oil and so um and so I'm be able to blow dry my hair in two seconds and it's just like there's a problem with like maximum temperatures and you know you don't want to burn your
hair and stuff like that um they've tried it they've tried it they tried it but yeah but basic basically I I I think that there's this play where you can essentially realize that energy is used super intermittently but the greatest size for Peak use all the way around I think power companies had really good
explainers on a bunch of these things as well but basically we solve a similar set of issues kind of like even at the more hyper local level than even at the home panel or something like that sure sure but um it turns out you can basically any device that kind of has like high peak low average draw shove a
battery in it and have an inverter in it so when the device is not active it's able to share the battery with the rest of the building so that's the vision get that into as many devices as possible turns out stoves are a kind of Juicy Target to start and then then go from there and why don't you just drop the
link one more time for the fans who want to pick one up where do they gool labs.com and if you order it now um it ships in like I think it'll ship like early summer and we just got most of our compliance shts all like officially granted and the rest of them should come very like momentarily so it's legal to install in your house as well which is
exciting fantastic well thanks so much for stopping byting thanks for hosting I'll be around for peanut gallery on tariffs and trade and all sort stuff whenever you want so fantastic that'd be great you you got you're a Tak Smith I can tell a takes Smith that sounds terrible okay I no it's a good thing it's a good thing uh you got good takes
ready to fire them off yeah we need to slap an Impulse we're getting a new studio soon you just put the stove in the middle and you guys can do some hot pot or something it'll work yeah yeah I just want to be uh yeah eating uh steak all day long throughout the show that's my future for sure do let me know if you
want one down in La I can yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll figure it out awesome awesome well thanks so much Sam great to talk to you we'll see you soon and we got Scott woo from cognition coming in uh to the Studio he's not here yet but I did get an interesting question for him I posted tune in to TBN today at 1:45 Pacific for
our interview with Scott woo if you have any extreme uh extremely complicated math problems you want him to do in his head leave it in the comments and we got one um someone said Aaron uh no no no no that that that was more of a joke uh uh Brian Shia says ask him if he really did cheese ioi 2014 problem 6 he'll know
what I mean Scott welcome to the show again great to have you back we will get to the amazing cognition news but I got to know did you cheese ioi 2014 problem number six you know I I can't answer that question actually but uh but know it's great to be back and it's great to see you guys again how are you guys doing we're doing
great and uh I mean congratulations on the launch can you break it down for us what what is different about Devon and cognition today yeah yeah absolutely and so what we rolled out today is um essentially an agent native IDE um and what that means is you know I think there are a lot of great products out
there that are about really accelerating you in a synchronous workflow um what we've always built deadin for is to be truly asynchronous and to be able to delegate and to have your own team of devans that's taking on tasks you know and to to be able to manage several devans at once or to be doing other things while you're working with devans
at the same time and um what we're rolling out essentially is is a way to really cleanly interactively work with your devons um as you're using it and so it's um it's it's a full IDE experience it's a collaborative planning experience at the start of each um at the start of each session and then you know some of
these other features like Devon Devon Serge and Deon Wiki that we've been rolling out um what else do you have I want to question no no go go into it well well I I want to just get into your overall thesis for AI and why uh and how the Market's moving broadly uh almost 10 years ago to the day Sam Alman posted a
blog post called Bubble talk where he said everyone was saying we're in a bubble here let's format it as a bet and he said uh the top six us companies in terms of unicorns are Uber paler Airbnb Dropbox Pinterest and SpaceX they're currently worth just over a 100 billion uh he thinks that uh in 2020 those companies would be worth over 200
billion there's a few of those companies that are worth over 200 billion alone he also said stripes zenefits instacart a bunch of other companies will be worth more than 27 billion and he was I think he was off but only by a few weeks and it was this interesting thing where everyone felt like it was a bubble he
formulated into a bet he was correct but how are you how are you feeling about the overall uh like murmurs about oh is AI a bubble yeah yeah and I think he was forecasting like a 3X or something in just a few years and so whether he was like barely off or or not quite you know or or barely made it I mean I think it's
like you know certainly if you just hear that list of companies you know Uber and Air BNB and SpaceX and stripe and all you know it's it's I I think the point was very clearly there that those companies did have real Merit and real value and they proved out a lot more of that actually I mean it's almost comical
to it's it's it's been 10 years now since then to just think wow like these are these are some of the the great public companies right um and I think that uh you know I I we were talking about this but I was thinking about it a lot because it's been almost exactly 10 years um and it's also I mean super cool Sam was running YC at the time which is
why he put that out obviously now he's running opening eye but but yeah I mean I think people talk about bubbles so much in Ai and and I it's it's almost I I I feel I I feel almost the exact opposite where the the value that we are suddenly proving out in AI is almost underrepresented in in what we're seeing
and and and what is what what is going on you know and and you see this in all these different spaces and you know I think as we were saying earlier like code is one of the first ones because it's it's it's so nicely automatable there's a clean feedback loop and and all of these things that you can really train mod to get really good at code but
I think we're really starting to see it basically everywhere um and it's a it's a crazy thing to think about but a lot of these businesses that we just mentioned you know these are really really amazing businesses and really powerful businesses right and and a lot of what they do arguably is you know they make particular flows of your life
1% easier you know something like that right they come in in this like particularly painful process and solve that hard part for you and and deliver this and obviously these are incredible incredible businesses this is less about the businesses and more just about just how big the world is out there you know
and how much value that there is to provide right and now when we're talking about Ai and we're thinking about what AI can do you know um for consumers it's you know an AI assistant that does all of your work for you you know it does all your hobbies and takes on all these things right and and in Enterprise
obviously you know we're talking about multiplying every single person's output by like 5x and so I I I think that the it's it's it's I I was thinking about it especially because you know it really does feel like across a lot of these different layers you know the foundation model layer the application layer and so
on it's sure it's it's a tough question to decide which which one is going to succeed which one's not going to be you know and only a few companies get to be the Google and Amazon and then a lot of companies obviously um you know have a tougher time but if you just ask the question overall is is AI as a space
going to deliver massive massive value and is it going to build these multi-trillion our companies I mean I think at this point it's pretty clear that it will yeah can you talk a little bit about uh the studio gibli moment happened last week um and I'm wondering like with the levels iio flight simulator Vibe coding on coin term
took uh a term everyone kind dancing uh are you expecting a studio gibli style moment for programming because I think what was so magical about Studio gibl was that it took the it took the onus of of creativity out of the process and it made it personal because you just take any photo from your camera roll any selfie you could take your own dog or
your own profile picture type one word and you get something that feels cool and different is there a world where we get something where it's like hey make a video game about my life or something and and it just does it uh what would a what would a mass adoption moment for Aid driven programming look like for sure yeah so I
think there's two kind of different categories I would say within within AI coding and one is you know I'll call it kind of the more um general purpose like let's say single used software type or or more hobbyist type work right where you you know you want to build a cool website you want to do this you want to
make a nice game or you want to put a lot of these elements together and I think that's going to I mean it's honestly it's already taking off um pretty pretty massively it's you know you don't have to know how to code anymore and you can put together like a really cool website and you know set things exactly as you want them and so
on right um and I think there will I I'm sure there will be more exciting moments to come where you know as we cross these new tiers of capabilities you know the interface is going to change for that and and the set of things that you can do um on the other side I would say is kind of the um the the the the massive
kind of just software engineering industry which is a little bit more obviously is a little bit more oriented towards um you know a lot of big companies that are spending maybe millions of hours of of you know software engineering time developing like really really great software right um and making it super resistant to to
all the different things you can think of you know figuring out all the little details of architecture and so on and and I think on that side you know I think for the time being that's going to be um primarily focused on software Engineers um just because you know it's while we're still working with these
layers of abstraction you still really need to have all of these kind of Concepts in your mind and the ability to to really just like reason with the computer architecture um but there it's kind of like you know we'll see like a 5x there so maybe maybe one way to describe it is like I think there will be a um a level of kind of programming
and being able to interact with the world through code that everyone will have access to which is super super exciting on the one hand and then on the other hand I think for a lot of the deep technical work that we do I I also think that you know Engineers who are focused on that and working on that are going to
be able to do like 5x more so we're kind of seeing both of those sides at the same time how do you uh what advice do you give Engineers that are just joining the cognition team you guys have such a ridiculous sort of you know uh sort of uh probably I would I would assume the average engineer at at cognition is a
10x engineer in any other organization and so you're looking for like you know there's uh there has to be this pressure of joining your your building the tools that build the tools you know uh how how do you think about sort of ramping people to the sort of um to the output that you want to see out of Engineers at
every level of the organization yeah yeah I was going to say I mean there's very little advice that I can give because these folks are all way smarter than I am but no I mean I think you know it's it's interesting I mean one one thing that that comes to mind you know people ask me all the time like should I even be studying CS like should I should
I even be you know what how how do I even think about software engineering and and I think the the main thing I would call out here is just um you know as the capabilities change the the the interface of AI product changes a lot as well right and so it's one thing you know it's for example like you know
there there was a phase where where text completion was was the the main thing and that was that was where the model capabilities were at right and you could get a lot of value from just pure text completion right uh and I think we're already past that and you know pushing into a lot of new things but each New Era that we get into in terms of
capabilities is going to unlock a new product experience in AI code and I think that the main thing to call out because I think a lot of this is going to happen so quickly is just it's really really important to as an engineer to stay on top of all these tools and to to understand how best to work with them I
think at this point it's you know there's no shortage of things to do in code you know I I don't think we're going to run out of things you know software that we want to build anytime soon and so I think it's more a question of how do you stay maximally effective um a a at at building software and a lot of that is just you know really being up
to date with everything that's happening and understanding each of the new waves and learning how to use these new technologies because it does take time to learn how do you think about AI adoption among Engineers Broad has every you know there has to be uh you know I I I think about the example of like the Japanese soldiers that like
didn't know the war ended and so they were just like on an island and like you know still like in like you know War fighting mode and it would been like 20 years or something like that and so I think there has to be Engineers out there that like you know maybe they don't know about cognition or they don't
know about open AI or any of these other tools and uh but it has to be some like I would imagine like 90% of people that are just obsessively writing you know know code every single day 90% plus are sort of aware of these tools but H how do you think about adoption broadly yeah yeah for sure no and I mean I think at
this point there's a um yeah I mean a pretty significant fraction of all the of all the top engineers in the world are using these AI tools every day um and they're getting a lot of value out of them the main thing I would just say here is this is where you know and folks sometimes like to to get a little kind
of wishy washy about you know AI is going to come in and then suddenly all of our problems are going to be solved right and and and I think one of the things that we're finding you know even in code is yeah there's just a lot of practical work to do out there in the world right and so I think I think it's one thing to um you know to be able to
solve these theoretical problems in a vacuum it's another thing to you know all of these different uh all of these different code bases out there all of these different development environments all these details you know there's a lot of cobal out there in the world still you know there's a lot of all these
various different languages or all these crazy idiosyncratic setups um and so I think one of the big things honestly that that uh that we're solving as a space is is actually not just the capability itself but but just solving for for a lot of these practical constraints and and getting the technology to the point where it works
for everyone and not just you know the subset of people who are building the latest and greatest apps and Python and typescript or whatever it is you know so uh can you talk a little bit about the importance of multi multimodality and image diffusion and understanding images in the context of coding I think a lot
of people assume that well it's just code you don't even need to think about the advantages of being able to process images effectively but at the same time it feels feels like the more data you throw at these models the better they get even if it feels completely tangential just having you know the ability to not just know python but also
speak Russian and Chinese and any any and Japanese and all these different languages it seems to increase overall intelligence even though it's not the narrow set that you thought thought it was yeah and by the way it's actually a fun exercise to if you've never done this before to basically you know a lot
of the the queries that we feed language models of just like raw massive Blobs of text to try to do those yourself like as a human and one of the things you find is like wow it's actually really hard if you're just looking at some massive chunk of text of just finding the thing that you want and getting the right
thing like humans naturally you know there's just like a lot of systems and how we process information visually and all these things um and and what I would say yeah I mean I think in terms of code for example the um I think it's it's one thing for it to be call it like theoretically possible you know it's
from the set of information I'm giving you it is theoretically possible to extract out exactly what needs to be done and you know you you could say this for example with um with let's say you're trying to build a new Fe feature and you just say all right here's the entirety of my you know 1 million line code base just tell me what I need to do
to build the feature and obviously no human can do that on the first try and just tell you exactly what needs to happen and really and for most of these more complex tasks no AI can either you know um and and in practice you know the the way that we solve these things is obviously through a much more iterative
process that involves using all of our different tools and you know it might involve for example running the front end locally and then clicking around on the website and seeing what happens and you know you're trying to fix this button so you go around and click on it you know and you move around and you see
what errors come up in the logs when you do that and so that's how you you know solve your problem right um and so a lot of it I would describe it as almost like um setting the the stepping stone instead of the The Rock Cliff face where you can make the incremental progress towards a solution and you know this is what we do all the time in software
engineering and similarly like I think you know being able to use image or being able to interact with these other data sources is is what really gives AI that same capability uh please one question that you are uniquely suited to uh answer do you think we see an AI win an IMO gold medal this year it was
silver last year uh and I imagine we made some progress since then but what's your take yeah I'd be pretty surprised if we don't we have a so so the the the greatest competitive programmer of all time is a guy named tourist is his name is Gennady he's from bellarus and he works at cognition actually um you can look this up true it's true
it is objectively true it's aje and and uh and so Gennady you know we we we have kind of a bet going internally on mainly the question not of whether it will be like a you know like a you know top level high schooler which is essentially what the IMO or II Gold Medal is but whether it will beat Gennady who's you know the greatest of
all time and I think most folks think it's probably going to happen this year yeah and and if not this year then then next year yeah I think Gennady is uh he he he's he's pretty adamant that he'll still be able to do it uh and so I I'm kind of looking forward I mean I I feel like we should have the we should do the
whole show match you know Gary kaspar of style and and do it let's do it live let's do it live on t uh well can you give us the call to action it sounds like cognition and Devon are much more accessible how can people get started how can they sign up how they can play how can they play with this tool and and
see if it works for them yeah so we rolled out a whole new experience and then on top of that we you know we've would really love to hear what folks think and so we're making it a lot easier to try out um and so we have a new plan that starts at a $20 minimum um and it's all available at app. de. so you can you can sign up immediately it's
fully generally available and you can try it out on your codebase cool well uh hope those gpus don't melt hope the servers stay online and good luck with uh with with the next couple months is I'm sure uh it's going to be a continued rocket sh yeah congratulations to the whole team appreciate you st we'll talk to you soon
thanks a lot Scott talk soon bye uh and like yeah he's actually on the team yeah well I I I've met Gennady because he he worked at ramp and I interviewed him and uh a lot of what he said went over my head if I'm being honest but uh he's a beast and crazy so so on poly Market there's it's only at a 59% chance that
AI wins an IMO doll for 59 folks not a financial advice but you heard it here like it seems pretty obvious anyway we got Michael from aelius coming in the studio uh welcome to the show Michael much how you doing how are you breathing today you got the nose strip is the oxygen coming good how you doing going
well dude one of my nostrils like barely works so it's just all draged up I got I gotta figure that out at some point but you're out for a while if you get like a like an ENT fix right it'll be fine I think the same I've tried those I've tried the nose strips for sleeping at night they're pretty pretty wild this guy's
the Alex Heros of laser weapons yeah uh but I apprciate I got to get a new thing then yeah yeah but I appreciate you dming me you just said hey let's talk about laser weapons and I was like I've never heard of this guy before this company but I'm in and uh and and so I I I did a little re research I want to
hear about your experience at Stanford I want to hear the basic picture of the company your background can you just take me through kind of the the 101 level of who you are and what you're building for sure yeah for sure so uh I'm an engineer worked all across a bunch of different heav Industrial Systems um I've worked in uh uh a lot of
my time was spent in electrooptic system development I helped work at at the biggest US laser company on laser weapon systems and an R&D capacity and and then I went into sales and I sold a bunch of systems including some components into a lot of the primes for the the big laser weapons that are that are out there um I
didn't I didn't uh you know I didn't go to Stanford but at we had a Stanford we were essentially um when we first started the company we were hiring the first round of Engineers we had sent out hiring calls to a bunch you know among link and x and stuff also to um a series of universities and all of them were cool with it except we got kick back
from Stanford where the Stanford hiring board was like you cannot you know post here because you have like you're a weapons company right and uh and you know that's really bad I think for Stanford students but great for us because we just start posting it we're like dude this is this is BS this this doesn't make any sense and uh it's great
that was that was uh you know um Larsson Jensen made made a bunch of posts about it and we' contined to um to kind of chat about it and got a lot of interest on on that front especially for hiring like if people want to work in defense there just aren't that many companies and the one that's getting flamed
because they make weapon systems you know if you want to make weapon systems there's a good chance you V our company yeah so can you uh can you talk about the history of uh lasers I was going to ask the same thing you said the big laser weapon systems laser weapon systems right now after you talk about the the real
history maybe you can sort of uh talk a little bit about I have a big hat St and no there's been a lot of there's a lot of conspiracy theories about directed energy weapons space lasers things like that but talk about the the sort of uh the the the history from your point of view yeah definitely well you know the
the Death Star doesn't exist yet but the Death Star and stuff like it is how we become you know like a trillion dollar company eventually we become an orbital weapons platform company so probably the only way that you do like low earth orbit trans lunar or trans Martian Warfare is through light you know if
you're going to take the missile system up and lower Earth orbit and there's 50,000 Chinese satellites there's almost no way that you can do it shooting down in a cost effective way but orbit weapons platform is great but um history of of directed energy weapons you know maybe 40 years ago when lasers started to kick off in the um in the you know
commercial space in terms of cutting and welding and then also in the communication space people like wow I can cut sheet steel with this can I shoot down a missile from like a th meters away and that kind of kickstarted a bunch of effort and interest um those systems haven't necessarily panned out over the last 40 years um I think in the
last 10 years we started to get a series of systems that are deployed by lock and Northrup and so you know there are massive warships that will have you know when you're building the ship you have to build a laser weapon system turret into it but we've deployed I think there are eight ships that have a series of
like multi 100 kilowatt laser systems on it and you can cut the wing off of a plane from 10 miles away with those systems in about 10 seconds so they're pretty they're they're pretty metal they're pretty rad and that's what a lot of the the directed energy supply chain is look like the directed energy are
development has looked like in the country uh does blue is blue effective against lasers the color blue I know that like uh isn't there something about like a specific frequency of blue that sort of prevents damage from lasers am I making that up to the the power density and the lasers we're talking about like you need
some very very specialty materials to kind of defend against them in any kind of you know scaled capacity so like the color blue I'm not sure about that I mean you could like you have mirrors that reflect the laser light right but they're very small and they have they have extreme like extremely expensive rare materials that are kind of doped in
those mirrors for for reflectance it looked like uh one of the first things you were starting with was anti drone counter uas systems we've seen a lot we talked to a lot of these companies Allen Control Systems kind of putting a gun on a truck there's uh electronic warfare attempts we just talked to Nathan Mintz
uh anderol has a variety of systems for counter uas uh projects uh why is that the landing why is that the beach head for you why are laser weapons so effective against drones yeah definitely so fundamentally directed Energy Systems the the promise there is that if you are using electrons as your ammunition then you have a
extremely low marginal cost to shoot down like you bring the price to shoot down a drone you know if you're using a missile it could be millions of dollars if you're using an and drone it could be 100 to $250,000 per drone sh done you know that's an improvement but it's still extremely expensive you don't have
a cost differential on your side um if you turn a laser for 3 seconds to shoot down a drone that's like 25 cents in electricity cost to to to shoot those down uh essentially so that's that's really that's really what we're looking at um on on that front and then your second question was there was a second one uh oh I mean I mean I I I just love
to know like like it feels like this technology is still somewhat sci-fi I mean you said that they've been deployed but you know we haven't seen like videos of this like oh in Ukraine it's changing the battlefield or like or like with the uh what was it the the shoulder mounted rocket during the uh during the Ukraine
war when that broke out we were like uh like there's not enough in the supply chain like it it was like not just it's real it's like it's having such an impact that they're using too many of them and now we need to figure out the supply chain uh I haven't seen any stories like that about laser weapons or
directed energy weapons so where where are we actually in the roll out of this technology yeah so there are large Las like like we were talking about earlier there are large laser weapon systems that are deployed across like the Navy for example those are really really big um Prime primes generally are interested in
making extremely expensive bespoke systems this is like the endro play right is is that that their business models do not do not allow them to to do anything other than like the particularly um heavy expensive bespoke system what what we're do what we're doing is we're coming from the bottom up and saying what is the lowest swap like
what is the lowest weight what is the lowest size what is the lowest cost for a directed Energy System com from bottom up and and doing it um we're approaching our Target for we're approaching our Target for distance very rapidly on our Rd systems that will then go out and we look to deploy um early early to mid
next year in in kind of fielded capacity through some of the through some of the dod units um I think a really Salient part of what we do is like when you're talking about some systems like maybe microwave systems or radio frequency systems or even bullet systems is the range is extremely limited I mean when you're firing a a a round out of a M249
the bullet the muzzle the muzzle speed's like 700 meters per second so you have to lead something you know when you get out to 700 meters it takes one second for the bullet to land you're arcing a bullet the Drone is flying dynamically that's a very hard control problem we are we are shooting things down at the
physics limit like the like the speed of action essentially this where you know when we shoot a a pulse of light at something a thousand meters away and it's moving left to right at maximum speed say 100 miles an hour the the Drone moves at thrs 30 microns 20 microns in the period of time that it takes for the light to hit it so we have
some Salient control benefits and we also can continue to move out further and further and further you know as we kind of build out the system and build more products on top of it the pathway that one two 3 four five kilometers is is right there have you uh I'm curious you've thought about defending various
assets Against drones that are non-military so you could imagine if if somebody has uh let's call it an oil rig somewhere and and uh it's threatened by drone for one reason or another and and or or potentially a better example is something like you know an NFL stadium that's worried about you know potential
drone-based terrorism can you have you thought about you know putting these you know turrets uh because one of the issues with with traditional kinetic anti-drone weapons is you're sort of shooting bullets into the air those bullets are going to land somewhere uh theoretically with lasers you could take the Drone outs without any uh risk of
you know uh you know un undesired damage yeah definitely so you know in an urban environment or at the border right you know like you're not going to shoot a missile or a bullet you know in an urban environment at at some drones but there are you know I think the Super Bowl had had something like 50 50 to 100
something like like un un unseated airspace like injections of drones where that were not supposed to be there and you couldn't really do any like like DHS couldn't really do anything about it so you know we go forward and we become an option where we're probably the only option in an urban environment where the
laser invisible it is silent um we can autonomously Target detect track and Destroy uh drones in that is that are threatening civilian infrastructure um so that's a great Point that's exactly what that's exactly what we want to do um and you know when we you know when you focus the laser onto Target to get a
high density there's a there's a small depth where you get a very very high density you also deconflict and defocus past Target so we have this kind of depth where it's fairly lethal to targets but then we can deconflict pretty easily as well interesting do you yeah sorry yeah this this is sort of a scary thought but do you do you expect
there to be drone-based you know terrorism uh like some type of drone based Terror terrorism event in the next five to 10 years it seems like uh a huge threat that we don't necessarily have any it's not like a police officer standing outside some you know soccer stadium somewhere is going to see a you know a drone coming in and take it out
with a handgun so it doesn't seem like we necessarily have any defenses for that kind of attack um and you don't need such a sophisticated actor to pull it off necessarily yeah definitely I mean there's almost certainly um there have been attempts that the FBI has thwarted so I think maybe three months ago
someone was planning an attack in Tennessee on a um on a on a p either a power plant or nuclear reactor I forgot which um but they thed the guy in advance they found him checked his Communications and and and stopped him wow um but you know most certainly I think one of the main dangers and what people are afraid about with Jord
Warfare is that it allows non-state actors to inflict massive damage on trillion trillions of dollars of of human and infrastructure assets um so you know I don't think that we're too far off from a major attack happening obviously our our state defense apparatus is doing everything that they can to stop stuff and they're fairly
successful but like if you miss one out of a thousand that's that's pretty yeah it's pretty damaging how are you thinking about the the revenue and growth side of the business uh I can imagine pulling in some SBI our money I could imagine this being kind of like a DARPA project almost uh longterm you probably want to be at program of record
but how are you thinking about staging things out and what does it look like so far yeah you know we have a lot of interest from a lot of the from a lot of the National Labs um in terms of going straight to otaa in terms of uh like procurement contracts we are moving like people didn't really think that this
could be done no one was looking at small scale lightweight Edge deploy directed energy and at this point we're moving so quickly like it'll like by the time by the time of cber like is written for like exactly what we're doing right now we'll be like a year down the line and we'll be ready to produce like 50 to
100 units so at this point and you know our our customers are pretty pretty well receptive to that if you're deploying directly to um if you're deploying directly to to DOD and then we just have an unending list of people that want to want to demo the turret on their vehicle platforms like so exting vehicle companies like all the way like small
startups mid startups primes stuff like that and so I think we're we're trying to find that sweet spot where you know where do we deploy we have it's like we have we've done a good job building for system everything that we're doing makes sense um and then what we're going at is like where do you go from here which of
the which of the promising opportunities do you tackle with limited resources yeah well I'm I'm a potential customer I'm big into big game hunting and I'd love to take this on my next hunting trip dude and it'll be cooked it'll be cooked that's that's what I'm looking for shoot here and then you can just
like eat it right there yeah that's that's exactly what I need I'm sure Peta will love that uh so thank you uh great it's great to meet Michael thanks for doing what you're doing yeah yeah thanks for the message and thanks for hopping on uh really fun chat and good luck to you thank you guys thank you of course
thank you so much yeah talk soon we'll talk to you soon cheers uh well what a fantastic tour of uh defense Tech I feel like I learned a lot about all the different companies and got to talk to some really interesting people uh do you have anything else you want to cover before we jump off for the day America day America day was a success we'll be I
just want to say that America day doesn't end when uh when the stream stops it's going to keep going uh forever forever sort of a Perpetual day regardless of what the Market's doing yeah um but uh no I want to say thank you to ramp uh poly Market public bezel numeral adquick eight sleep and wander
they make the show possible we are 100% Corporation supported yes and uh we're very grateful for it yeah thank you everyone uh we will see you tomorrow can't believe it's Friday tomorrow John it's crazy flew by one more stream this week yeah it's going to be a rough weekend it's going to be great thanks all right thanks guys cheers