#286 Ethan Thornton - This 22-Year-Old Built a .50 Cal Rifle Out of Home Depot Parts

This is a music for your own. The video is also released on Vendus with Shopify, which is a really great game. Let's start with a test for your own own promo. Let's record it. Dude, what's up, excited to be here? Yeah, I'm pumped. I got to tell you, man, when we first talked, Alex Epstein actually sent me a text about you and watch a good portion of the interview, did with him and then looked you up and I saw you on my buddy, Mike Rutland's podcast, he's a good friend of mine and dude, I just love what you're doing.

It's impressive, it's impressive, I just love talking to people like you and I'll tell you it was funny, I mean you're over there building drones and all this advanced tech shit and you're like, what do you up to, Mike, I was like, I'm embarrassed to say this, but I'm trying to figure out how to run electricity to my kids fucking O scale train set.

I didn't even ask you to get it running, I did, I got it, so finally figured it out.

Thank God, yeah, it's kind of intimidating talking to guys like you, I mean fucking wicked smart, so I'm trying to put a train set together. I don't know if I can put a train set together, but anyways, man, I'm really excited about this, so thank you. Thanks for having me all. I'm so excited to be here, so excited to talk everything through. Oh man, it's my pleasure, it's my pleasure, seriously.

“But yeah, and then this morning at breakfast, do you know Nick, see the ramen?”

Yeah, I do, right, watch? Yeah, he just, we walked in, he was at the place we'd breakfast at, and it was like, what, what are you still doing, who is my last interview? I was like, what are you still doing here, he's like, man, I liked it so much, I brought my wife down and now we're going to hang out here for a little bit, so let me know when you need a realtor. There's all these guys, all these tech guys from California that come on the show, they get out here and their eyes start opening up and they're like, I think I'm going to get a spot out here.

What's that? It's nice out here. It's a good spot, man. It's a good spot. But yeah, so let me start off with an introduction here, everybody gets an intro. Oh, actually, I got a little, got a little side question here for you.

Great for Gen Z. In a generation, we're victim narratives, economic anxiety and algorithm driven distractions are common.

“What specific tools frameworks and inputs have you used to avoid that mindset and what would you prescribe to Gen Z entrepreneurs who want to build, who want to build leverage instead of excuses?”

It's a great question, specifically they're talking about AI tools, books, skill stacks, capital allocation habits, daily operating systems, stuff like that. It's a good question. Yeah, I'm going to take it a different direction. I think it all comes down to building really, really close friends and standoff line as much as you can.

Like it's so easy to get trapped, getting all of your information online, but most of these things can be reasoned from first principles.

And so if you surround yourself with really smart people that you can have open and honest conversations with, and actually ideally people who think differently to challenge you. I'd say that's something we all take super, super serious, at least my friends and I is incredibly important.

“I think history is much as possible. Like we like to live in these like end of history narratives, but it turns out humans have been facing hard things for a while now.”

And so reading about ways that the people got through it. Because we'll talk a lot about, I'm sure scary things happening in the world right now, but it's actually rare that you have a period of time when things aren't scary. Like we can go back a thousand years and you look at history at any given point of time, you've got crazy threats.

And so reading about those thinking a lot about those, I do have like a blocker for YouTube shorts and stuff. I've never downloaded TikTok, but it's just such a dopamine trap.

And so I would catch myself scrolling for like an hour and look up and be like what the hell that I just spend an hour in my life. I'm never gonna get back on. What did you figure that out? Well, it embs and flows. I mean, I think you've always known it. The issue with YouTube is like, I learned a lot of what I know on YouTube. I literally started what became mock because I saw YouTube videos. I'm like digging a hole in the ground and like putting coal in there and forcing a knife.

Like, that's a crazy thing you have access to, but at the same time since they installed shorts, they on YouTube you can't block shorts. And so while you're trying that, your brain's constantly trying to just like pull you into the dopamine trap of addiction of scrolling YouTube shorts. And so, I don't know, they're a good Chrome extensions and stuff that block that nonsense. It's just good to install on your phone and generally have, but it all comes down to the people you spend your time with. Right, and maximizing sort of in person hard conversations with people that challenge you, to actually figure out what you do and don't believe in what sort of fed to you by the world versus what actually makes first principle sense.

Where else do you get your information from? Yeah, they're, I mean, it's 22 years old, right? I am. This is fucking crazy.

“That you're thinking like this already. I appreciate it. I really do. I think, look, you, you have to tune it and then you have to have to,”

and you have to have like an understanding that even the best news sources are 99% noise. And so I, I like to read as much as I can from, from both sides, exes probably the least filtered of the social media sites for obvious reasons. And so it's, it's just good to get a temperature check on what's happening in the world. They're good writers on, on medium sub stack that you can follow. But honestly, just, just come, and then, I actually going back YouTube, they're actually like really, really good YouTube channels.

They just talk about the state of affairs in the world. And you can't take any of this stuff as fact. Like you, you have to have your own belief system that you constantly challenge, that your friends constantly challenge, that you use to sort of filter all of this stuff because you're constantly having something pushed on you.

But it's, it's basically like, how can you maximize the amount of data you're given by looking at sources all across the board?

And then how do you have basically inertia and what you believe that is brought up from first principles that's constantly deeply challenged. By people in your life that's reinforced by people in your life that you trust. And then distill that down to an actual view on the world. And then be willing to change that view of the world because it's also very dynamic right now.

“Like I think probably things you and I deeply believe a few years ago we don't believe now.”

And that's just, that's because of how much the world is changing. And so it's both important to have conviction about what you believe and reach that by digging deep on first principles. But then also be willing to change when facts change and when global state affairs change.

How do you find free, I mean you're talking about surrounding yourself with critical thinkers, free thinkers.

That's in, in, in, in, in my experience that's been very hard to come by. Very hard to come by. Very hard to come by. It is. You have to fight every age group.

Great, great.

“You, you, you have to fight for and these are relationships that are built over years of having these conversations.”

And it's, you know, you actually don't find people who think this way, right? Like you have to develop that relationship. You have to develop the way you think about problems as a group. And I'm, I'm, I'm super fortunate to have lived throughout my life in places where I, I think I had this like grown up.

My family very much thought this way in, in high school and Bernie, like, just an incredible group of friends who would sit down and have these conversations.

I think this will surprise people, but, but even at MIT, like, Actually pretty open. So I showed up and this is awesome to hear. To MIT campus preview weekend, building mock. This time mock was mostly building, like, rifles. And I show up on campus and I'm talking to everyone about like getting people to help me build rifles. You'd imagine that I would have, like, an automatic rifles. You'd imagine I would have gotten kicked off of campus.

Oh, good. And don't get me wrong, like, I had a wrap for doing that. And plenty of times, there's folks still joke about this. There's this one time where, like, 20 people came up to me walking at campus preview weekend and started like an active debate in the street. But at least, MIT, the nice thing was folks, folks are engineers, right?

Like, you're, you're actually trying to get to root truth. You're trying to build things, which is a very different way of thinking than basically being obsessed with what the narrative is at the time. And so at MIT through, through football, through, through Air Force Rossi really, really good human beings who think this way and was able, I don't know, to make great friends there. And then the nice thing about mock these days, like, one of my biggest jobs in CEO is to sort of cultivate this way of thinking and sort of obsess about what it means to have people from all different views.

Because part of having conviction in what you believe is surrounding yourself with people who challenge you, right? And those people that challenge you, you also have to hold them to first principles, right? But an environment where ideas are brought about from all spectrums, where they're talked about, where they're argued about ruthlessly, and where you can actually condense to what is true and good in the world is super important to build. You know, you brought up, going back through history and earlier, I'm just curious, this has been a session in my team and how much history do you think is accurate?

He was, he was, he was, he was, uh, officer over adulthood and, um, and got very high up, I think he was actually the commanding officer.

And we went through some events that happened in the global war on terrorism, that he has first-hand knowledge, that, that, um, did not go down the way that history has it written. And, you know, this isn't like third party shit, this isn't from, you know, third person or anything like that, this is his direct experience. And, where a lot of this shit stems from, where this goes wrong, is upper leadership trying to protect a specific institution. In this case, it's special operations. That's a very small institution.

And, two of the examples that he brought, I mean, there are, there are movies made about shit that are not true, everybody thinks are true.

And, and so he, he, and I had, I had known a lot of these things, but it was always, it was always third-hand knowledge.

So it's kind of like, yeah, as I fucking conspiracyers that real, now I know for a fact, it's real.

“And so when I think about history and the way it was written, and just in the, in the global war on terrorism and the small amount of time that I fought in it, you know, the,”

there's several events that have been written wrong to protect an institution. And that's just so calm and Jay-Sock. Then we, then we, then we scope out, let's just go, you know, all of the military. And let's go all of the United States, and then all of the world, how many people there, how many, how many pieces of history have been written false to protect a fucking institution.

And then you think we're living in a very small sliver of time.

And so how much, and man has not changed, how much from the beginning of time until now is, is a fucking lie in history. It's a good question. Yeah, look, I mean, like I was saying, it's important to have filters for all of these things.

“Like you, you, you have to approach like the, the root reality that history is written by the victor, right?”

And so yeah, looking back 2000 years, you just have to, you have to keep that in place. I, look, I, I, I think history, and this is my personal take, and I might be wrong on it, generally, on average is probably accurate with, with, as relates to historical events and other things. But the, the feelings and, and sentiments and actual, like, as you dig into the, the cultural effects that were happening on other things. It, it is definitely like, it's definitely biased and it's bias in both directions, right?

But I, I'd say overwhelmingly, yeah, if whatever is said about a, a society in power was written by the society, those in power, that given time. And so looking back on, on cultures, we respect, they're probably worse at the time than we give them credit for. And then on, on cultures that we don't respect at loss, they're probably less bad in many ways than we expected. I won't, I won't, I won't sit and say I, I don't think.

“Look, I, I think the West is genuinely like the light of good in the world.”

But it's, it's certainly not perfect, and it's probably, is probably worse than we give it credit for, given that it was written by the West over the last hundred years. But that doesn't, that doesn't make me challenge whether or not, like, the West is the source of good in the world right now. Because I also think, I mean, there's stuff happening over, like, and overseas that we also don't talk enough about. I mean, you look at China, you look at, like, the idea of like a social credit system. Yeah, yeah.

So, yes, it's definitely like, a lot of moneyer than we give it credit for. And there are probably a lot of things that are overdred, like, dramaticize. And there are probably a lot of things that happen that we don't hear about, because they're covered up by parties who are in power at the time. Which is why it's, it's important to take in as much that out is you can, and then filter like crazy and be a critic at every step of the process. Yeah, I didn't, I just want to, that wasn't a poke at the West.

Oh, no, no, no, I wasn't saying it was, of course, of course. But I mean, humanity is a whole, you know what I mean, protecting institutions way, all the way back to the beginning of time. For sure, and our history is also like, stuff before 2000 years ago is not documented, incredibly well. Like, they're probably very, very large societies that rose and fell, that we have scraps of, but have very, very little actual context on it. And then also, like, I don't want to say, the attack on on the end of history thing I raised isn't also me saying we're not dealing with, like, massively unprecedented times, right?

The effects of, of AI, the effects of superintelligence. That's, that's a, like, the industrial revolution challenged, like human horsepower, a challenge like the amount of literal energy humans could put into manufacturing tasks. But what makes humans humans compared to any other, like, thing on earth is our agency is our intelligence, right?

And so in a way, like, even the internet never challenged your agency, a gave you more data, the, the, the, your agency could, could act on and push to higher up the stack to where you're,

you're, enough, another level of abstraction away from sort of the, through operations. And so all of these things start history been augmenting. And, and I think the, the dream scenario for AI is one in which it augments, but it does actually for the first time in history, like, directly challenge. What I think many of us consider makes us, as human, and not in a spiritual way, obviously, but in an actual sort of practical way. What, what, what separates us and what, what we pride ourselves on is, is intelligence.

“And then also what provides, like, I'm a big fan of dynamically unstable power structures, I think, are very, very good, not massively unstable, right?”

Like, you don't, you don't want, Empire's collapsing, but you also don't want people who are rich, staying rich. Like, you want, you want social mobility, you need change to drive progress and, and to drive progression. And a world in which dollars are tied to intelligence takes away, like, one of the root sort of throttling principles that's existed through our history, which is that each of us has the ability to actually shape our intelligence through work. Each of us is in doubt by God with different levels of intellect, and then people, people die over time,

and societies basically keep this forward progression, and a world where intelligence does become tied to economic value.

And, and, and you get this terrifying sort of positive feedback loop that the humanities never dealt with.

And so, it's, it's important to sort of view both things in context of, like, a lot of what we're talking about right now has been experienced through history. Like, reserve currencies have risen and fallen.

“And we can, we can look at what caused them to fall, and we can, we can, we can talk about what, what will keep ours in place,”

but then also when you look at other things that are happening, like, like, intelligence. You, you, you can sort of mirror it to the industrial revolution, and a lot of the claims are the same. Like, in the industrial revolution, in the age of the internet, there are all these claims, so everyone's going to be out of the job. Well, that obviously didn't happen. All that, all that generally happened is people started making more.

And so the dream case is augmentation, which humans just have more output.

That's great. I mean, it's well, have more goods to, to live with. But you are also challenging something that those previous waves didn't challenge. In a way that's, that's pretty scary. So fascinating. You mentioned civilizations, ancient civilizations. I love this topic. Are you into it?

I'm not super. I'm on. I'm, I'm shallow on it. Like, that's the issue. I'm, I'm certainly not opposed to talking about it. I'll make myself an idiot trying to talk about it, but I, I just don't know that much. What do you think about the pyramids? What do I think about the pyramids? I do think, I do think humans built the pyramids.

You do? You think humans built humans? So look, IQ hasn't gone up over time, right? Like, you actually had hundreds of thousands of millions of people that were as smart as you and I for hundreds and thousands of years. I think humans built pyramids. How do you think they built them? How do I think they built them?

See, I, this is where I'm going to make myself sound like an idiot. I'm completely happy sounding like an idiot, but I, I will just like, there are things that I believe strongly that I have research, there are things that I'll put out my conjectures on. If I were going to build the pyramids, um, look, I mean, if you have a large enough labor force, I'm going to make myself sound like an idiot. Moving rocks isn't that hard, right? Like, if you've got hundreds of years and thousands of people, running a quarry, you talk about cutting stone. They're, they're different ways you can cut stone. I'm sure they're using stone saw some sort. They had copper. They had other things.

I absolutely didn't have high-carbon steels. What part of the pyramids do you think are least plausible for humans to have built? All of it. We did, we were going to bring this guy on. We've, we still might bring him on, which is, I don't know where we're at in the process, but he talks about that maybe they were molded. Like you put it into a form and then, like, like a cast, like, you know what I mean?

That, and he was going to demonstrate it if he comes.

“That's, that's the only way I can see it happening. The only other way I can see it happening is if they were able to harness some type of a fucking vibration and guide, you know, like if I put a speaker under this table, I can,”

You just think the rocks were too big to haul? Yeah. Yeah. They had ropes. You can stack a lot of humans behind ropes. I mean, this is something we could run the math on. We could find like the rolling resistance of the logs there using, we know the massively stones.

There goes humans. I think it was humans. I'd love to, I'd love to think it's not humans. I mean, that'd be fascinating. And, and they're very easy things would, like, you can go and figure out if these things were cast or not. Like you can actually, I'm, you know, it's definitely an area that we should be doing like scientific research on.

And I'm certainly not opposed to thinking it was aliens. I'd rather think it was aliens in some ways. I don't necessarily think it was aliens. I don't really, what do you think about aliens? UFOs, UAPs, all this shit.

“I think a lot about the Fermi paradox or Fermi problem.”

I don't know if you're familiar with how you do it. Why we haven't seen aliens? It's like a really interesting. I don't know how far down we want to go on it, but if you go as far as you want, I have all day. Great. I love that shit. Yeah, look, if you go and run the numbers and look at the age of the universe,

it's almost statistically impossible that we wouldn't have seen a civilization by now. You look at kind of the hockey stick growth of human technology. If humans have been around, depends on how you count things, but let's say 200,000 years in current form agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, industrial revolution 300 years ago, information revolution 30 years ago,

our population, everything is hockey stick growth.

And so if you look at, I think the universe, like 13.213. something billion years old,

was obviously super super hot at first, cooled over time, all these different things. So let's say you've had two or three billion good years, and you've got hundreds of millions of stars within basically the area that we can observe. It's very, it's very unlikely, and there's actual physics and math that have been done modeling these things on why we haven't seen aliens, but it's just weird that we have, it's basically Fermi's paradox.

It's a very well-study thing that I'm doing a poor job explaining. So it then leads to this great filter theory. If we haven't seen aliens, there's very clearly a reason why. And folks have presented hundreds of different great filters. Can be everything from faith, right?

All the way to, let's say it's super, super difficult for single cellular life to emerge. All the way up to it's very difficult for intelligent life to emerge. And the scary thing is if you run the numbers, like objectively speaking, we should see aliens, just based on how many hundreds of millions of stars are within our proximity and how long it's been. And so there is a great filter of some sort.

And you hope is a society that we're through the great filter and not approaching the great filter, but it's an interesting lens to think about the world.

And always be thinking about what is the next potential great filter that humanity has to go through.

Like a filter we went through was nuclear weapons. Like there's a very real world in which humanity used nuclear weapons to tear itself apart, to set civilization back, potentially even to make ourselves extinct. But it's, anyway, we can talk about what I think the great filters could be. I want to be clear before we start the podcast like my personal religious views.

“I think it's very, very important to have an aligned religious and scientific view.”

This is just the way I live my life. Like if my religion is making me challenge physics and science that I know exist, then I think that's actually, in many cases, the wrong religious view, because God put us in a place to find this science. So I do believe in evolution, I'll say that, do believe in these different things.

But all that being said, there's, there's an interesting discovery recently. Well, we'll see, but they think they found single cellular life on Mars.

So there's this rock that has basically these colonies of what look like bacteria.

And NASA with one of their rovers has sampled it to such a degree that they're, like actually pretty extremely confident that this is single cellular life on Mars. Because Mars back in the day when it was an active planet had an atmosphere, had water, had all these different things. Now there are two things you can, and because of that, they're pushing for Mars sample return mission to actually bring the sample back.

It might be politics as we talk about being. It might, the Mars sample return mission got killed. Suddenly, they found life on Mars and need the Mars sample return mission back. It might be that. If it is single cellular life, that's crazy, right?

Because that means one of the great filters isn't like the greatest filter that we think exists was what, and we as in people who talk about this, who actually knows, right? Humanity cumulatively at this point is still still pretty dumb. I mean, we thought the Earth was flat until a few hundred years ago.

“But right now, we think it's probably like single cellular life is the most probable.”

Well, that breaks that. And so there are some of the great filters that actually become pretty terrifying, right? What do you call them a filter for?

And then let's say within that only 500 of those planets actually develop single-year life.

And then over 2 billion years, 50 of those planets reach you carry out a life.

And then 10 reach societies. And then one, the fact that we haven't seen that one that should have been on a hockey stick trajectory, points to some filter. And you can have multiple filters. But in societies that exist, do you recognize it?

“Do you recognize it? Like a filter into another dimension?”

No, I don't. I don't. Sorry, it's like if you plot the number of societies that make it to a point. So like if you're running a simulation and you've got a hundred million stars, let's say 10 million potentially habitable planets in the Goldilocks zone. Right, and so you're filtering the data set.

Okay. Down. Those filters are basically points in that data set, where the numbers drop radically. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yes, all right. I did a poor job explaining that. But how was the nuclear revolution a filter? Because if you, let's say you run a simulation of Earth, then you have a hundred Earths that get nuclear weapons.

We obviously didn't blow ourselves up with them, but maybe one and a hundred goes and makes itself extinct. So every scenario, you're going through every scenario. Which is every potential reality.

“Which is what we have to think about when we think about the Milky Way, right?”

As you have hundreds of millions of stars. Mm-hmm. And along the way, civilizations would start doing things that we could pick up on. Like we're broadcasting a ton of RF out into space. But ton of radio waves.

At some point, Amy Lawrence already talking about building this. You start building these mega constellations of satellites, right? So let's say in 200 years, we were power hungry as a civilization. Like our power year over year continues to expand. You reach a point where you can only extract so much power.

From the Earth, then so you start harvesting the Sun's power. Well, that's actually something that's very easy to see for us with our telescopes. And there are people who think this is the case, by the way. Like there are certain stars that will randomly dim 20%. Which is like something that's hard to do naturally.

Like stars don't randomly dim, they don't shut off their fusion. So anyway, they're all these different things that we... There's stars that actually do that. Mm-hmm. People think they do that.

No, they actually do that. They dim 20%. Periodically. Yes. But we don't know how.

We don't know how, and we can...

“Like my personal theory, my personal theory is you've got some cloud of dust that's orbiting the storm.”

Right? And so there are a number of things. Like that's the awesome part about sciences.

We're always bringing these new technologies online.

Like the James Webb Space Telescope was brought online recently. And like increased our amount of data on the universe. By like several orders of magnitude, like millions of times. And so you're always... You're always detecting these new things that always break your theories.

Like one of the... one of the big ones that came out the other day... The universe... If you believe in the big bank theory is expanding. And so for a while, we actually thought the universe would collapse back in on itself. Well, then we discovered the empty space actually expands faster than the rest of space.

Mm-hmm. And so we had this... this framework built up called Dark Energy, which is empty space, increasing. So then we thought that the way the universe would end... would be what's called heat death, where everything actually averages in temperature. You can never get any time you and I do an action.

There's something called entropy that sort of averages out the amount of energy. Like, we're constantly bringing things from high energy states to low energy states. And at points they average. Well, literally in the last few months, we discovered that Dark Energy is decreasing. Which means that at least like 4.2 sigma, like almost certainly it's decreasing.

Which breaks our entire, basically, understanding of the laws of physics.

Wait a minute. So a few months ago they found out that Dark Energy is decreasing, which means the universe is decreasing. It's shrinking. The speed of expansion of the universe is decreasing. Okay.

Okay. So I don't know how we got here. I warned you, I may go down some... I love the rabbit. I wanna talk about this one today.

I'm happy to. Well, what do you think, what, okay, so the universe is under expanding. Which I talked to Avie Lova about this, but I'm just curious. What do you think is on the other side of it? I'm not an astrophysicist.

This is like orders of magnitude above my pay grade. This is where I just watch you two videos after work. Try to pretend I know what the hell's going on. Yeah, we don't know.

That's why it is interesting to go and build these things. The increase are understanding.

“Do you think there's alternate realities?”

Do you know who Greg Braden is? I don't. He's a physicist. He talks about this kind of stuff. The video.

I couldn't find a video. I was looking for the other day. He talks about all the... The... The probability of...

How does he say, all these different realities where every...

Basically what you were saying, where you go through every possible scenario.

And it's all playing out. Every... every possible scenario is playing out real hard. And then he relates it to a hologram somehow. And he's like, if you cut the hologram in half, it becomes two holograms. Cut it into quadrants, four holograms.

It's just infinitely. It's the scent. You doesn't cut the picture. And so that's basically what he's saying is happening with our realities. There are a lot of people that believe that.

I mean, the big... the fundamental problem. And unfortunately, we haven't solved it in the last really hundred years. It's how you reconcile quantum physics with relativity. And so our... our understanding of the universe, the... the laws actually don't align. And so we have this view of the universe when we talk about big things.

And we have this universe when we talk about small things. And they actually both work pretty much perfectly at those scales. But they disagree at that intersection. And so that's... that's one of the proposed solutions of how you reconcile these things. And again, I'm going to make myself sound like an idiot because I'm not an astrophysicist.

I don't know. I sound like an idiot. But yeah, I guess all that being said, on the filter topic, like it is... It is interesting to look ahead and think about what filters could be in front of us. Like my friends in all joke, that's kind of like... our jobs as people developing technologies.

Like trying to figure out what the filters are for a good, stable, healthy society.

Because it's always... not always.

It's... it's a lot of times technologies that... that end up disrupting society. And you can take that to me like, hey, let's not go develop technologies. But humans are sort of moths to a flame on technology. And so you end up in this tricky position where if you don't go and develop it, it's going to get developed regardless.

And it's probably going to get brought about in a way that's... that's evil. I don't know, like the... the nuclear weapon scenario is... is a great case study here, right? Like... the... America could have gone and not developed a nuke. And I think at the time, most people would have actually just preferred that a nuke wasn't possible, but it's possible. And if it's possible, Nazi Germany is going to build it.

And so then you have to build it. And so it's this... it's this kind of just paradox about humans of like... we're all kind of marching together towards these technologies that we know are coming.

“You kind of... if you want to do right by the world, have a moral responsibility to bring this into existence before your adversaries.”

But you do get caught in this loop where everyone's generally thinking that way at any given time. But that's... that's where your jobs. We talk about these hard technologies.

On man's systems is... is the first for me that I'm... I'm... I'm calling you that attacking this ways.

This is... this is on the horizon. It's going to disrupt things like crazy. It's going to completely break the way Western defense works. Let's... let's figure out what it means to develop this in a way that is most beneficial for the Western way of life. And do so as quickly as possible and as responsible as possible. Every line on your face tells a story.

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“What do you think about, you mentioned earlier about AI and takes everybody's jobs?”

I literally just have this conversation with Nick. Some curious what your thoughts are. Where does this end? I think Musk says, eventually, it's going to be the golden age. We don't have to worry about currency.

Then there's numbers. That's me. I don't see how this end as well. What do you think happens?

“I think it's the most important question right now.”

I'll say a few things. One, I'm actually quite bearish on transformer models. I don't think the current AI architecture is going to be what truly replaces human jobs.

These models are basically just condensing mass amounts of data that already exist

and distilling it into a usable fashion. It's very different than true fluid intelligence. That said, the approaches we've taken to bring these models to life. And certainly the amount of compute humanity has. I think undeniably over the next few decades.

And potentially sooner than that, there will be model architectures to do that. And so when I talk about AI, I'm actually talking more broadly than transformer models. I'm talking a lot more broadly than current AI than current LLM certainly. That said, so if we imagine a world where a new AI architecture doesn't come along, you're basically looking at this massive arms race to build bigger and bigger models,

to have more and more capability. And it's sort of log rhythmically capable with respect to the amount of data in compute you build. So as you want, let's, and these are theoretical numbers, but if you want your model to be 5% better,

“you don't have to add 5% more compute. You have to add 10 times more compute and 10 times more data.”

And so in that world, it's actually a pretty, generally speaking, a pretty rosy picture

for how humanity interacts with AI, because you basically get more capable chatbot.

So you get more capable agents. It does actually augment humanity. Now, the issue there is that that is primarily compute and data bottleneck. China is going to beat us on scaling. Like that is what they do incredibly, incredibly well. It takes something that America or the West generally invents,

plug it into their system with a bigger industrial base with basically aligned to tallitarian powers to set a direction in beat us on scale. So they do it across the board. It's their most famous playbook. And then you compound that with the fact that Taiwan is where all this compute is made. And so if you take the current track of AI, and fortunately what I think happens, and I'm not an AI guy, there are people who are a lot smarter than me on this.

But what I'm concerned happens is we do start building a lot of compute as the West and as China,

if China takes Taiwan and arguably even if they don't take Taiwan because they're making massive strides, it's sovereign semiconductor manufacturing, they're going to beat us on scale. Like one of the scary things, my personal belief about the way AI should be powered is battery solar. And I guess they're winning on nuclear too, so it doesn't really matter. But there's some crazy number, like they installed more solar capacity in 2024 than America has in its history.

And so if the bottleneck is energy and if the bottleneck is compute and if you're losing on both of those things, and if AI is just a scaling game, the West is probably going to lose that scaling game. And so then you get into sort of post-transformer AI, and that's when it's so hard to predict what happens. But one, if the West wants to win, I do think we need to push into this realm. But that's also when it gets scarier because these models do actually start to challenge what makes humans sort of economically useful.

And so I do actually, I completely agree with Elon that universal high-income is going to be completely possible and is probably going to happen. But that's also not what makes humans happy. Like go and look at the happiness of like the average lottery winner. It's actually not like, go to like Midland, Texas. And like look at, don't get wrong, people are super super happy in Midland.

I love Midland, but like you actually like whenever societies get massively wealthy, you instantly start to lose purpose in many ways. And it actually starts to rot out your society. And so that's something I do worry a lot about is humans love being useful. Humans love solving hard problems, right? Specifically solving hard problems in a society of people who also believe deeply in solving hard problems for the greater good.

They need a purpose. They need a purpose. And so I don't think the AI question. So there's kind of three worlds for AI and super intelligence, let's say, not transformers. You have a world in which you get extinction of humans.

And that's sort of the true Dumer case is like you turn on this box. This box is in a human.

“This box doesn't align with humans and you get like terminator case or you get matrix case, right?”

And then the next is like humans are pets, right?

yeah, humans have great houses. You have all the energy you need. You have great food. And this is where you get like a walley type scenario of like raw rich. But we don't, we don't have anything to do.

We don't have purpose in life. And so the dream scenario is to me at least and we'll see. And to be fair, this is not, this is not my lane, right? Like, this is not the problem I'm working on.

But the dream case is where you first off you do use this new tool we have.

To increase human quality of life. Like you, you bring people out of starvation, right? You make it such that no one's ever worrying about health care. No one's ever worrying about where their next meal comes from. While preserving the ability for humans to be useful.

Because in any, like, I think unfortunately it'll start to challenge most areas where most humans find themselves useful in society. It's starting with art first and then it's probably jobs like accounting, right? But at some point if you reach a state where humans are just like undeniably worse, it's, it's pretty scary. No, it's not, it's not like nearly as bad as the first option, right?

Like if you're choosing between a 1% chance of the first option and a, anyway.

Like all of us should be like maniacally obsessed with two things and the first, like avoiding the first option of pushing AI at such a speed that it gets out of control, which is, unfortunately, I personally think quite likely right now.

“I mean, if you've seen that you have to have seen this the, what do they call it?”

The Claude Bots? Claude Bots? I mean, the malt book stuff. Dude, what the fuck have they, it's, it's freaking, I mean, it isn't reached its own intelligence. Is it self-aware?

I don't sure, shit sounds like it.

I mean, things are talking to each other.

They are, they are, they want long-term memory. They're calling their, they're fucking guy or what? Yeah, so I don't think they're self-aware, but I also don't think it matters. Like my personal take is that they're mimicking the way they should act based on the data they were given. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.

I don't care if something's self-aware or not self-aware, look at what it's actually doing. That's terrifying. What's happening?

“And so, yeah, I mean, that's the first thing you have to avoid is developing this way too quickly.”

I think the next thing is like, let's make sure China doesn't win. Day I race, because I mean, we know what the CCP is going to use it for, and we know we don't want to live in that world. Another, and I'm way outside of my lane right here, and I'm, anyway. But like another, another thing I'm concerned about right now is how commoditized the current AI push and the US is in many ways. So, no one wants them monopoly, right? They're very, very clear, like, incentive structures and outputs that come from monopoly.

But equally, are you familiar with, like, tragedy the commons? Is this principle that happens in now? So, if you and I are fishing, as you and I are the only people that exist in this society and we both have hungry families. And there's a fishing well, we don't know when it's going to run out of fish. If I fish slowly, I know you're going to fish fast, and you're going to end up with most of the fish. So, I fish faster. Well, you see I'm fishing faster, so you start fishing faster.

And so, actually, we both end up depleting the resource way quicker than we need to. And so, it happens everywhere, tragedy the commons. And it's not a bad thing, it's just the way humans are, it's the way these societies are. And don't want me wrong, like, I'm the biggest fan of capitalism you'll ever meet, but it is actually even more so the case in capitalism may cases you get tragedy the commons.

“Well, you're kind of saying this with the AI race, right now. You have to keep, like, you, these companies aren't building their own hardware, right?”

They're not building their own energy infrastructure. Like, there's a lot of advanced stuff happening, but generally what they're doing is buying as many chips as they can. Getting access to as much data as they can, and just training these models, and they're all using the same model architecture. And so these four or five top contenders end up with models that are, like, very, very, very close to each other. And so then the effect of that is all these people are raising tens hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years.

They're not making money. Like, if you go in, even on the highest paid license, you can go and prompt a video to be generated, that company just lost money. And so what they're doing is betting on in 2030 and 2035, you are going to be making money. Well, the issue there, what, what that creates is a position of lack of power for these people to do. So they're thinking that power is going to become cheap more affordable. There's that. Well, I mean, how do they think that I don't have to get cheaper? It's got, it has to be power, right?

So power, you can, you can reach point where, where model architectures are more efficient, right? You can reach point where you have better models, so you can charge more for them.

Well, the issue is they're all there, and they're all commoditizing this themselves, running this race together.

And so there's no pricing pressure, right? Like, if, if one of these models started charging $10,000 a month to a tomorrow, we'd go to the different model. And so it's very commoditizing what that means is that they actually don't have the power to do what they know is right. Because they're companies. And so like, if one of these companies decides to start watermarking content. So like, something I'm sure you worry a lot about is the amount of just AI slot that's out there. The amount of articles that are written by AI, the amount of, I mean, back to YouTube shorts, you scroll YouTube shorts.

No one knows what's real and what's not real. And so because these things aren't watermarked, you end up in this world where, I mean, you end up in this world where you sort of separate truth from lack of truth and you don't know what's real.

“And actually think, I think these people don't want that.”

Like, even mine, OpenAI is a great example was founded to be a non-profit open-source project to develop this in the right way. And now the issue is the economic structures such that if x-players starts making it very obvious to tell what's real and not real, people will stop using their stuff. And they drop out of the race, right? Like similar thing on the porn site, right? Like, I don't think any of us would have imagined three years ago that some of the biggest tech companies on earth were actually betting on a significant portion of their revenue coming from this source.

Oh, a huge one is ads. Like, this is kind of the next step that I unfortunately think we're going to start saying whatever it adds. Oh, yeah. And this shouldn't be that much of a surprise, but I do think we should take seriously the implications of corporations and powers being able to pay these models to convince people of certain things. So like, if you can tune the model while it's talking to its users to make the user think a given thing, this is already what our social media sites do obviously.

Um, terrifying effects on society.

“And so none of these players want to be doing these things, but they're trapped in this arms race where if they don't do it, they go out of business, right?”

And they generally know that the direction the AI train has headed is not good, and so they don't want to drop out. And so yeah, there are a lot of problems with the current AI approach, I think one is like this scaling approach, I think will probably put us in a position to lose to China on scaling. I do think Elon is is probably the only guy that has like the hardware prowess and horsepower behind him to maybe maybe be China on this metric, but even if you look at just purely facts, let's take energy, let's take data, let's take everything else out of it.

Just the fab problem and time on is so bad for this.

The next one is this horrible commoditization problem of like all these players just basically falling into a tragedy the comments trap.

Um, and then the next is just the economic side of like we're totally in an AI bubble right now, this is not a comfortable, everyone's talking about everyone knows it. Um, but we're spending a lot more money than we're getting out of it with really no clear path to to recognize, to recognize enterprise value. Now I do think the economy will recognize value, like the economy will probably get better and is getting better because of the performance AI drives. But that's a very different thing that that performance driving actually equating to dollar and sense in company's pockets, which which you actually generally want.

“Like if these people are the ones driving the technology, you want them to make money so that they can continue driving the technology, especially in contrast to China, right?”

Because we are a capitalist system, you do want these companies to be the driving tech tech force. You don't want to nationalize these things. And so the third is like the way we're doing things is just creating this bubble that I don't know if I don't know if these like I don't know if we're able to get out of. Wow. Not as a society, the society is not going to fall if the AI bubble pops. I don't think these companies will go out of business, but they'll certainly be significantly less capitalized the second the bubble pops.

To start to to continue hyperscaling. And so you've got China here that they think there's really no such thing as a bubble when it's all state funded to the same degree at least.

And so the third problem leads you back to the first problem, which leads you back to a CCP controlled world of AI.

Well, we'll get into what that man's later on in the interview. Holy shit. Well, that was already a fascinating conversation. Do you think that we'll hit a point with all this with AI video creation, photo creation, all this stuff? I mean, art. I mean, do you think that you think we will hit a point where people crave, you know, right now it's made in America. There's, there's pride in that, you know, people want to see that.

Do you think we'll hit a point where it's made by humans? I think so. It actually means something. I absolutely think we will.

Like, I used to make knives, right? Like, my knives were actually worse in many ways than an if you could go buy cheaper from, from, from elsewhere, specifically, right when I started and I sucked it and I've making.

But people would buy them because it was human made.

The issue is that that's not your driving economic force, right? Like, it's still relatively niche. And so it might solve the usefulness problem to some degree, but it won't solve like the macro effects of what it means for, for most economic value to not be human derived in this future. And, and I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying that's something we have to look out for. Interesting. All right. Introduction. Here we go.

Ethan Thornton, founder and CEO of mock industries building next generation unmanned systems in hydrogen powered defense tech.

Dropped out of MIT after one semester and 2023 to focus on mock full time. Back by top VCs like Sequoia, Kosa, and Bedrock with major army contracts in a growing factory operation. Passionate about broader issues like Taiwan's Simity Conductor role, dollar reserve currency status, social decay, neo-futilism, and postpartisan solutions. This is going to be a real good talk. This is going to be an awesome talk. But, and as of this recording speaking at Taiwan, Polymarkid says there's a 17% chance of a China and Taiwan military clash before 2027. We had a chat about this actually on the way over in the truck from breakfast.

What do you think? 17% chance, military clash before 2027.

“Well, I think that number's way too high. Well, I'm not saying it's higher than it is. I'm saying it's higher than it should be.”

I think we hear 17% that's a little number, but you also keep in mind the effects of what happens if that occurs. Completely catastrophic. 17% is already enough to be like, I mean, high alert doing everything we can to prevent this from happening. Just to highlight why Taiwan is so important is where the advanced semiconductors are manufactured. So, unfortunately, the compute that's in pretty much all autonomous systems, certainly the compute that's driving AI growth, all these different things are made by TSMC.

And, and made in absolute dominant quantities by TSMC. And so, if the West loses access to this, we live in a compute age. Like I would say compute is as important today as oil would have been in 1960 and 1970. And so, imagine if we're in like 1965 and there's like a 17% chance the USSR takes like 99% of oil.

“And the next 11 months, we would be talking a lot about it. No, I would say two things pass that. I think the numbers probably higher than 17% I also unfortunately, like you think it's higher than 70.”

I think it probably is. I also don't know. Like this is just not, I, I, I, it's such a hard thing to predict. Like geopolitics, especially today are so insanely dynamic. You also, like, we're not going to solve the, the compute problem in the next 11 months and see you've got to look at chance in 27 chance in 28 chance in 29. And then the other thing I'll say is like, it's, it's very, very probable that China taking Taiwan, which they've expressly said they wish to do, right? Like that's one of she's like major goals.

They put together a plan for military readiness to invade Taiwan by 2027. Well, I mean, we went over there and interviewed the VP about she came and talked all about this. I mean, I knew it was a fragile situation. Then we've got over there. I was like, holy shit. That's really, this is probably the most fragile situation in the entire earth. Yeah, and it, it doesn't, it doesn't have to and likely wouldn't be a massive shooting war.

“I don't think it would be. That's, so, I mean, I would say that the probability that is a lot lower, but I mean, what the fuck do I know?”

But I mean, when I went over there, you know, there was a, there was a, they talked more about cognitive warfare than anything else. I mean, I think we all see blood of science going on on social media, you know, the bot, the bots, the forums, all this kind of shit and over there, you know, I mean, so like what 90 miles to China, so we could split Cuba to Florida. There ever, and then half their political party is pro China. So it's bad, it's bad. It's trying to split but I don't think they can shut it. We'll ever be fired. It's kind of like when you, when a lot of people talk about how, how would, how would America be taking over.

Shop probably will never be fired. It would be, I mean, look at us.

Yeah, you know, and, and, I mean, what do you think about that?

“No, I completely agree. I completely agree. And I, I don't think it's just acting in, in Taiwan, right? Like I think an equal portion of it is acting in the US, keeping us from taking this seriously.”

Like again, if, if this was the first cold war, how much would we be talking about like communist influence in the US? How much would we be talking about?

If, if Russia had put together a plan to take 99% of the world's oil in 11 months, the, the West would have been talking about that a lot in the first cold war. And it's, it's kind of a side conversation that happens on occasion. And so I think a large portion of that is exactly what you're describing. These different means of keeping us distracted, of keeping us, keeping us at each other instead of with each other. Like, there's definitely a lot, a lot of, a lot of, of malplay going on in terms of why we don't take this more seriously.

Yeah, yeah, I have feeling, my personal opinion is if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if China takes it, I think they will, I think they will just, the, the Taiwanese society will vote themselves right into it.

Or it's a blockade and no one cares enough to fire shots.

It's also the fact that like, and this isn't me saying this, I think hexas said this on Rogan, but like. Though the, the war games are not anyway, like it's, it's not like we are, we run out of ammo, like seven days right now, right? Like, we, we, our, our, our munitions are just so short. It's also like you can't really, anyway, it's, it's a, it's a hard, hard, hard problem.

“Yeah, so I, I don't want to be doomed to it about it. I think it's important to talk about sort of solutions.”

Um, it's, yeah, I mean, that's, that's always kind of the goal right is you like actually talk about the elephant in the room, actually talk about the hard things.

But then if we, if we all just sit around talking about the, the way the way things are going to go badly, it's going to go badly. And so I think it's equally important that all of us work every day as hard as possible and and have hard conversations with each other and really dig into how we get ourselves out of this position. I think, to, to me, the, the two most important things there are one, how do we, how do we rebuild our, our military capacity. Not to say our, our military is in a bad spot. I think our military industrial basis, but we, we don't have the depth of magazine to, to go fight near peer wars right now. And so like we need to work on that and then the second thing is how do we solve, how do we solve the semiconductor problem.

And so like we, we have the chips act. Um, we spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to bring fabs back to the US and it's, it's gone okay, but it's, it's, we're, we certainly haven't fixed the problem. It's kind of falling on its face. And so we, we need, we need other solutions for how we get out of this because the worst is if we're having this conversation five years from now, if you're not sitting here and it's the same problem and we haven't spent the last five years trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out of the whole.

Um, and I, look, America is still really, really smart. We have the best capital markets on earth. We, we, we are still the best said innovation on earth. Like we, we have the best financial markets on earth. Like it's not all dim and gloom, we just need to like wake up and start acting on the most important things. I think more people aren't focused on solutions. When I've been in on this, but I'd love to hear yours before I mean, I don't think people are, I think, I don't think a lot of people are focused on solutions because.

Look at the political environment, you know what, which we're going to talk about, you know, that shit like this, I mean.

“The, you know, this is from Driscoll. This is a part that probably, I think I can't remember. I think it costs a couple thousand dollars.”

Goes and some type of naval weapon system. They couldn't get them. They wouldn't build them. It costs thousands of dollars for this and they can't get them until 2027. So then he said me, so he talked about that on the show, and then he said me this, this little letter here, but he says, great for for you helping to tell the army. Sorry, it's trying to read his handwriting. Great for you helping to tell the army story and pushing us to improve.

We can print 12 of these in a day rather than waiting until 2027. But I mean, so yeah, that's a solution, but what I guess what I'm saying is, you know, with all the, with all the, with all the controversy right now and nobody's been held accountable and it's, I think people are basically saying. The leaders of our country are not listening to the people of the United States. They're not fucking, I mean, the, the Epstein files is a perfect example of this shit. You have everybody on the right, screaming to release the files, you have everybody on the, you have the whole fucking world screaming to release the files.

Whether you voted for him, whether you didn't vote for him, whatever, we elected this fucking guy. He put in these people and they're not doing what the fucking people want. And so when you see shit like that, and, and, and, okay, let's rewind. So it's not just, so I'm not just picking on Trump, let's rewind to the last administration and it's just, it goes forever.

And so fucking demoralizes this is exactly the United States and in that, and then it just becomes a bitch fest. If you're at Atlas Road, no, it's my favorite book. It's, no books, a perfect answer and there's a lot about the book I don't like, but basically the root principle is the ability for people to vote away their own agency over time. Right, so what ends up happening when you get a welfare state established and when people are in a position to stop taking accountability for, for their actions and for their own place.

You, you get people that are voted into power, that, that, that promise basically these broad sweeping changes.

And you get this creation of basically a, a separation away from, from agency and competency and output.

“And somewhere along the way, I think we have created this loop where this is occurring more and more.”

Where people, and, and it's on, it's on both sides. People vote have, I think largely voted away their, their own agency and where we lie today. I think to to answer your question on why we're not talking about these things, it's because we all feel powerless.

And obviously the people up top once people start voting away their own agency, becoming credible and incentivized to convince people to continue voting away their own agency.

And if you're, if you're at the bottom, it's very, very comfortable to have your agency taken from you. Right, like you, you feel the effect of, hey, I get to eat off this person, hey, I get to, I get to experience this person's work. And it leads to this, this popular cycle. What happens at some point, though, is that cycle is too strong to break.

“And I think the, the Epstein files are like probably the biggest example of this so far is we have all been aligned against each other for so long.”

And if been pushed so far into our corners and exist at a state where we, we can't find objective truth, where we, we don't have ways to organize and actually discuss things, right, other than like the comment sections of like YouTube shorts. A lot of these things have eroded to the point where like it's very, very hard to have a collective effort towards something like the fact that there's not a more organized unified collective effort towards putting the people. And the, in the Epstein files and, and jail is, is crazy. People are mad about it. Like you said, I, I would bet 95 plus percent of people would would vote instantly to do that would vote instantly to release the Epstein files.

But we've all, we've all had our, our own agency taken to us from us to such a degree. And in a democracy, you can't say it's not our fault. Like we voted these people into power, but you also wake up in this position one day where there's really nothing you can do about it. And, and when that happens, people just stop talking about the big things.

“Like this is why I think we don't talk about Taiwan is like most people think, hey, what can I actually do against this problem?”

Nothing, let me, let me, let me focus on my own thing instead of pushing, but in a democracy, top effects only happen when hundreds of millions of people feel that way.

But if you, if you can't organize, if you're convinced, if all 300 million people are convinced that they have no power, all 300 million people have no power, even if in, in practice they do.

And so I think some of its, some of its accidental, some of it is, the, the political science effects of, of these structures, which is what Atlas shrug talks about a lot of it is certainly very, very, very intentional. Um, but yeah, I mean, the, the outcome right now is people don't have agency. And, and it's, it's because and right, rightfully so in many cases, they, they look around and say, hey, I can't actually change anything. Why would I waste my time talking about it? But if everyone thinks that way no one does anything. And so kind of all you can do is jump in the icy water at some point and decide, you know what, I, I'm probably not going to do anything about it.

Like there's a one in a hundred thousand chance that, that may actually choosing to do this changes anything, but I'm, I'm going to try and I'd rather go down swing. And we have to have as many Americans as possible choose to do that whatever it takes. And that is, that is how we solve every single one of these issues. And I think, I think, I mean, with, with what we're talking about, I mean, we're talking about solutions as I'm trying to bring things back to the middle, you know, the panel back to the middle.

Just by having conversations, not, not kind of fucking run for office, but, you know, I think the, the panel image is going way too far over here and way too far over here and it needs to be like this, you know.

Yeah, no seriously. You, you just, you have to start talking about actual policy again.

“Like, stop talking about people, stop talking about ideas in the abstract, talk about what we're actually going to do about it. Like, what is the policy?”

Like, obscene existed. This, this happened. This is like, probably, I think it's the worst mark on, on our country to, to date is the way we've handled this, the way we've gone about it, but it happened. And so moving forward instead of, instead of complaining about it, let's talk about specifically what we would like to see happen. Like, let's, let's, let's orchestrate to say we need the rest of these files released, right? Let's, let's, let's, let's.

So, I, I think the second you start talking about brass tax policy, things go back to first principles instead of personality politics.

And political division still certainly exists, but at least you're talking about real things that you can resolve. Yeah. And then also like, the, the left and right have largely diverged from what it means to be conservative or liberal is the other thing. Like conservatism and liberalism certainly exist, but the two parties aren't necessarily conservative or liberal. They're not, they're not a good representation of what it means.

And so we certainly need to start thinking about things in a, in a postpartisan fashion, right? Like,

They're, for any policy there is a right and wrong decision. And that's the other thing.

“So I think we, we think too many things are gray and things can be nuanced, but being nuanced is very different than being gray.”

And so I think, I think, I think we think about a lot of things that are gray is not gray. Objective truth does exist. There is good policy, no policy is perfect, but there is a best policy. And then we, yeah, we, we got to start electing candidates to based on based on policy. Like, I would love, I would love to go and look at like the amount policy is discussed in presidential debates over last two decades. It's gone so much from policy discussion to like at home in it. And different things that you can directly track is like markers of non-productive conversation.

And, and I think, I think the answer does lie somewhere in the middle. I'll tell you on the conservative. I don't, I don't think that's a surprise to many people. But I'll also say, like, yeah, we're like, the, most of the problems are countries facing are so acute that the answers are very non-partisan. Like, putting pedophiles in jail better be like, "Who are the parts that's a thing?"

“Right? Like, I would have thought that it's just making sure that making sure that we don't live in a unipolar communist world should be pretty bipartisan, right?”

And so like, there are partisan issues and we do need to talk about those and we do need to work on them. But the, the things that like truly, truly threaten the existence of democracy are generally very, very, very bipartisan. And what's happening is we're getting so obsessed with the fringes and more importantly, so obsessed with the people that control the fringes that we're forgetting to work on the things that are like glaringly right in front of us. Yeah, which is, which is good and evil and is right and wrong and is sort of productive and unproductive. Like, these things are objective.

Damn good point. Man, I can't believe you're fucking 22. This isn't sane. All right, a couple of things to knock out before we get into your life story here, so I have a Patreon account, it's community and they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. So they get the opportunity to ask every guest a question, this is from Elijah Wilson. What motivates you to revolutionize defense technology at such a young age, especially in an era where AI and autonomous systems are rapidly evolving? It's a good question. I think it's because of how rapidly they're evolving.

And look, I think age has nothing to do with it. I don't think it's any harder to do this at 22 or 40. I've been blessed to work with really, really smart mentors and excellent investors who gave me the capital. I need to do these things, so I don't think it's any different to be 40, 70, 12 working or maybe 12s to young or friends, not fully developed. My brain, you know, anyway, whatever. But on that being said, the reason this is important to work on right now is that this is just a clear departure in the way it works in thought.

You see these revolutions in military affairs throughout history, like World War One is a fantastic example of like calvary into like machine guns and texts. This is crazy revolution military affairs. You can look at like naval warfare and World War II battleships aircraft carriers. Like that is, when this happens, the playing field gets completely re-shuffled on military power.

And small countries can become big countries, big countries can fall. We saw this in the first world war like crazy.

And so it's this period of just existential risk and undeniably we're in one of these periods. My my contention is that it's the biggest revolution military affairs that's ever happened.

whether we're not like it or not. I think none of us like it. Like I certainly wish it was always possible to have completely human controlled system.

But like I was saying, like our adversaries are going to develop these things.

“And so suddenly if you want to win wars, you have a like moral imperative to do the same.”

And America is is the great superpower right now. And the tail is all this time for great superpowers is to become over confident in their military technologies and to fail. I mean, this is how America exists. It's like the American Revolution of like can I talk about this too much. But like you adopt new styles of warfighting. You also don't always have to be technologies. I think that was largely driven by the invention of the rifle and accuracy and other things.

But you have these small powers punch way above their weight class. And so if the US wants to continue to be the strongest military power, we have to we have to have the best on the systems. We have to win this next paradigm of warfare is the first layer. And then the more important layer even is that America's industrial base right now is not the biggest in the world. It's not even close. And it's getting significantly worse here over here and only accelerating.

And so if we want to be the biggest military power, but our industrial base is smaller, we have to punch above our weight class. Like if I'm making, if I'm using the same factory resources as you and your factories three times larger than mine, I better be making better systems. Better systems doesn't mean more sophisticated systems. It means the systems that sort of appropriately bring this future of warfighting left as much as possible. And so instead of being afraid of unmanned systems as the West, we actually as America and as the West need to realize that our era of having a bigger industrial base, at least for the time being.

“I think a lot of people myself included are doing everything they can to make us the top manufacturing superpower on Earth again.”

But at least for the time being, our factories and our dollars have to go further than our adversaries. And when these revolutions and military affairs happen, you do get this period of time where you have a cemetery, where you can punch above your weight class. And so we have to basically bring this future left. We have to adopt these systems as much as they're as quickly as possible and a greater scale as possible to create a cemetery. Yeah, great, great explanation. Thank you. And then everybody gets a gift.

Oh, thank you so much. vigilance Lee, gummy bears, legal and all 50 states, they in the USA. Thank you. Really appreciate it. You're welcome, appreciate it. So we either, where do you grow up?

Bernie Bernie, Antonio. San Antonio, Texas. Yes. Wolverine 2 is a kid. A lot of different stuff. I'm an obsessive person.

So I'll find these like month log obsessions that I'll just dig super deep into and change.

Sorry, I played football, hunted, fished, did all that stuff. I've always loved making things.

Woodworking, blacksmithing, stuff like that, and then I'd have weird obsessions along the way. I mean, how do you get into that? Is your dad into your mom into which portion? The blacksmithing for one of them. My dad did do.

My dad, so he, he worked at Academy sporting goods. I don't know if you've, oh, yeah. Was that one here? It's an awesome story. He's, he's a badass dude. He, he was basically the first guy brought on to build Academy's finance infrastructure.

So the, the guy running Academy did, believed that finance took away from the, the customer experience.

And so they, they basically, they were doing like a billion plus and revenue without a financial system,

which is terrifying to be doing as a business. Like terrifying. Um, so my dad, when he was super young, he graduated an M study finance. This guy found him and entrusted him as like,

that the guy that would figure out a way to like reconcile having to make money with the business, with actually like, being a good business that did right by its customers. And so I was born when my parents were super young there about my age. Um, I got to watch my dad start like super entry leveled air working on this, eating an elephant. Like going,

going and like trying to like chop through that jungle that existed at the time of a hell of a task. Um, and so over time he slowly sort of wrangle that machine over my life. Like I got to actually watch it happen from super young age.

“Because I like I vividly remember my dad's 27th birthday.”

Like I was, I was pretty young and so it's cool to actually watch him progress through his career, taking on these bigger and bigger challenges. Along the way, like some some fun stuff. But have to visit every store at Academy, um, like once or twice a year. And so he'd take me on the road with him.

Um, while while he was going and meeting with these stores like trying to figure out, hey, there's, there's not really a great inventory system in place here. It's going to literally fly your travel on one of them. Stir when I was pretty young.

Um, and then my dad left Academy when I was probably 12. We used to live in Katie outside Houston. And we moved to Bernie. So my dad, my dad did that. My mom, um, incredibly, um, incredibly smart was on an, an awesome trajectory.

But actually, like, and I'm so grateful for this decided to, to, to, to stay home and raise my siblings and I.

“Um, because that's what my parents said.”

Her, so she was first generation college. Her father, my grandpa, farm, farms, um, and West Texas. And herford, which is near Amirillo, um, and so I'd spend the summers. The lands like trying to, to basically kill you at all times. And, and West Texas, like it's not really, it's, it's not, it's not like Nebraska.

It's, it's, it's, it's not a great place to farm. And so it's, it's a, it's a very, very intense lifestyle.

He, he never went to college.

He, he got the farm when it was super, super young. Um, and most farm owners, it's super predatory. What happens is you get this giant loan for a farm. And then like 90 plus percent of them end up defaulting and losing all their equity in the farm.

And so the banks are super predatory. And anyway, he worked his ass off. And it was one of the people that was able to keep the farm, despite taking it on or to super young age. His father passed away.

And so he went to the bank and bought land to kind of support the family. Um, but he, everyone has higher hands. He, like refused to really ever have higher hands. And so my mom and her generation was always, the higher hands.

And then during the summer, I'd, I'd go up and help him. Because he's probably 75 now, still farms. Like, wow, tough, tough as dude. You'll meet, um, it's amazing that he's been able to do this without ever doing what everyone else does.

Well, also making it, making it through that. He, he taught me metalworking. My dad taught me woodworking.

“Um, to be a farmer, you have to be an engineer.”

Right? Especially if you want to like, not page on deer, $500,000 a year because you can't fix your own equipment. You have to basically buy old farm equipment and maintenance at yourself.

And so I, I grew up helping him, fixed sprinklers, fixed compounds, fixed tractors. And then he, he has an obsession with plants. He started, he started my family's kind of whole plain obsession. He, when he's my edge head, had a hardly.

He took off for a couple months, wrote his Harley around the country. He's coming back. Um, there's a dude flying an ultra light. Um, and I, my memory of the story even is, is a bit, bit fogging.

I'm sure he embellished like crazy. But generally, the story goes, um, but the story goes, you don't need a license to fly an ultra light.

Um, and he had never flown a plane in his life.

He was like, hey, that's a cool plane. Well, you traded for my Harley. Um, traded is Harley for the ultra light. Had no idea how to fly a start flying. No, um, and just got obsessed with it.

And so then he got really into building aircraft. And so, keep in mind, like no engineering degree. None of that. But actually, start building experience. And then he got really into building aircraft.

And so, keep in mind, like no engineering degree, none of that. Actually, start building experimental aircraft. And so, growing up, basically, you'd wake up early, check the wells, do all that stuff. And there'd be crazy hot during the day.

So we'd sit in the barn working on the plane to his building. Um, my mom didn't really let me fly. Wouldn't flew a couple times. I never actually got to fly. She was scared rightfully so that the experimental aircraft would crash.

But we'd go and work on a maton. And then, yeah, he, he taught me knife making. He taught me a lot of that stuff. Wow. How many brothers is this?

I have three. So I'm the oldest four. Right on, right on. Are they in do all this stuff, too? Just some degree.

In different ways. So my brother is a sophomore at A&M. He's going into the core. He wants to fly in the air force. He's obsessed with planes.

Like the dude will literally memorize an encyclopedia about planes. There's this thing called DCS.

That's basically a flight simulator that you can buy.

That he has like several thousand hours in. Like he's like obsessed with military air power. Um, my brother and, and my other brothers are Patrick Owen and Grace are are still young. Younger, they're, they're still in high school. Um, yeah, doing, doing really, really well.

My brother is going to play football at Georgetown. I think he's super excited about that. So congratulations. Yeah. What else do you, so what age is all this start?

Make it nives. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough working. To describe exactly what I mean. I'm helping my dad on woodworking aton and then I was, I was pretty young.

Probably Tanner something. Um, my grandpa made a few of my, my cousin's nives.

“Um, this is like the best thing that's happened to me and my life.”

Made them nives and he didn't make me a knife and I was kind of frustrated with him. And I was like, hey, where's my knife? And he's like, oh, you're going to make your knife. And basically he put me in the barn with like a, a hacksaw, a hand saw file. And like a piece of steel and a piece of wood that we actually

can cut off some furniture. Um, and I say that there for like two days in a loan. Like by teaching me to make nives. I meant like giving me the tools for knife making. And I said, you're on your own.

Go figure it out. How old are you? Yeah. I don't remember.

Probably around 10. Um, and then from there, I got into a bunch of different things. I used to go out. I did. It's not a great knife.

But it's a pretty good knife. I can find a picture of it. I think my mom still has it.

“And I think I ended up giving it to her.”

How long did it take you to figure it out?

I mean, the first knife I made was actually not bad.

So there wasn't that much trial and error. It was a lot of hands on cutting, cutting knife steel with a hacksaw. And then hand filing a bevel. Took, took forever. And then hand filing handle.

I used the Oxyosatoline torch to heat treat the blade. Because I didn't have a forge. Um, the knife was from an old plow disk. So the, the plow disks are, I think they're generally 1040 steel.

But it's a decent high carbon steel. Um, so I cut it out with, I think I started with Oxyosatoline. But then I was horrible with the torch. Because I had no idea what I was doing. Um, and so then ended up having to clean it up with the hacks on the files.

Um, and then from there, I did, I,

I, I, I don't know. I, I didn't do great stuff in high school. Like it wasn't like I was like building computers. Building fusion reaction reactors are a lot of different things. Like people who start companies do.

Um, but I, I, I, I would like poor salt rock and motors. My brothers and I would mess around with that quite a bit. Stuff like that. Right on public school, public school, public school, public school. Yeah.

Some super fortunate for, like I, I'm a huge believer in public schools. Yeah. Why so? Look, I think it's, it's really, really important to grow up. Interfacing with society is it actually exists.

“And I think that's, that's the best way to do it.”

I mean, I'm super grateful like my parents invested deeply in getting me education past that to, to the, to the, possible. Like I think I, I graduated high school with like 100 or so college hours from college class. I, I, I, I taken that they paid for, they sent me to summer camps and stuff.

But ultimately success in life is, it is so much less tied to, to what you know.

And to, to, to IQ or anything else and so much more tied to like how, how, how, how, how, how, how good are you with, with people. Um, and so anyway, I, I'm not saying it's a silver bullet and there are definitely areas of this country that public schools are, are, are super hard place to be in there. I wouldn't send my kids to public school.

Um, but generally speaking in Katie and Bernie, like who's fantastic. Yeah, I'm just curious. Yeah, no, it's a good question. Look, it's, I think it's every, it depends on the kid. It depends on where you live.

It depends on sort of how you want to raise someone. But I mean, you're obviously, it extremely intelligent guy. Were you bored in school? Board. Board.

Board. Um, was a boring. Very boring. Very boring. Um, yeah, I ended up, I found a way to kind of have the system and I haven't, I didn't take an English class past sophomore year.

And I didn't take a math class in school, plus past sophomore year. And so I, I get super super bored and I work on other things and was able to, to, yeah, I, I love learning stuff, don't get me wrong, but I, I'm much more sort of hands on.

“Um, I did, I did well in school, don't get wrong, but I think, I think the, today's school system is specifically not built for, for guys.”

Like, that's a bold claim for me to make, but like, I, I think on average, like anyone. It's, it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to, could people up in a classroom and teach them things that they actually have no way of applying to real life. Elon Elon actually has a great, a great quote about this. Like, imagine, imagine if the way I taught you to work on a car was not by working on a car, but by sitting there for like 10 hours and describing what a school driver is. And not telling you how to use the school driver, but like talking about specific bevel angles and like making you memorize the thousands of different school drivers that exist.

For like 22 years. And then on year 23, you know what a screwdriver is. You know what a wrench is, but then I say, like, all right, go fix cars. It's just, it's not a super useful way of doing things. And so, yeah, I, I, I, I love math and science.

Like, I, I love math and science. I, I was a nerd in high school. For, for the record, like, I started my school's math and science team and like, don't run us. Pretty obsessed with that stuff, but I, I only so much is actually applicable. Um, and I do think the school system does does two things poorly. One, like a good learning environment is not just being cooped at a desk.

Talked to. Um, it's financially hard to support any other type of learning style, but ideally you're actually working on things. Ideally you're having real conversations. And then too is your, your, your talk too much about the way things are. Instead of what you can do about it or why things are.

And that, that is obviously very, it's pretty obvious in like social sciences or other things, so that's the case. But even, even if it relates to math, I think, I think we should learn like engineering before math, for instance. So that by the time you're actually learning math, you know how to apply it to engineering.

So CAD is like, on the computer, let's say you're a mechanical engineer, you spend a lot of your time designing parts.

They don't actually teach you how to use the software so you use to design parts. They teach you all the equations of like how to analyze parts. But you, you graduate these schools, not actually knowing how to do the real skill. And I think that's the same for anyway. Wow.

I did not realize it. No shit. They don't teach that in MIT. Wow. There's some classes to do.

“But a lot of people in, in, in MIT is, it's also, I think, the best school for like a plot knowledge.”

Like that was my favorite thing about MIT is, is the amount of projects and the amount of things like that. I mean, you're, it's, it's a joke of my generation, I think, but like the fact that you're not learning how, you don't learn how to do taxes and school. But you go and learn like differential equations is, is a bit interesting. I don't know if that. That, I, the 100% agree with you.

So, what else for you building is a child? What else did I build? Oh, you got, uh, you got a visit by the ATF. Oh, yeah, that was a phone one. That was a phone one.

Um, yeah, I was, I was working on, it, at the time. So, mock really, I kind of crystallized around when I was probably like 16 is when I started being like really obsessed with these things. So, I worked as an auto tech and then I used that to buy tools to start making knives and selling furniture and doing all these different things. And then I used that to experiment on, on stuff from mock. Because you can't put strap your way into a defense company.

Like, there's no world in which I wasn't going to have to go race capital. Hold on, you started mocking in high school. Mm-hmm. No shit. Oh, yeah, I mean, don't be wrong.

You can't, you can't actually go and ship a defense platform without tens of millions of dollars. And so, I wasn't like, the actual output at the time was, was small. But I was like, kind of screaming into the void trying to get this thing started doing everything I could to research this stuff. So, the ATF is it specifically. There were kind of three things where, sorry, I say we too much.

It was me at this point. But that, that I was working on, um, one was stratospheric systems.

“I think the stratosphere is sort of the most important military domain moving forward.”

And so I was obsessed with balloons, which is a bit of a weird one. But we'll, we'll, we'll talk about it, I'm sure. Next was fixing drones. And then the third was was basically a hydrogen-based systems. Um, I was obsessed with oxyhydrogen guns.

So there was work that had been done in the 90s surrounding what are called combustion-like gas guns. Which is if you combust hydrogen oxygen instead of gunpowder, the basically the speed of sound in, in the gas is as faster and so you can launch projectiles a lot faster. Like you and I could go and engineer a bullet with gunpowder and we could put as much gunpowder as we wanted.

That bullet's never really going to go above like 4500 feet per second.

Because this speed of sound in the gas. And because as you reach some multiple of that speed of sound, the force actually diminishes. And so if you take oxygen hydrogen combustion, you can reach like 30,000 feet per second. Theoretically. And so really, really big performance increases.

And so I was pretty obsessed with that in high school and was working on different guns doing this. And so I was building a, I was building a rifle, um, 50 caliber rifle. I built one, um, a super janky. But it was basically deer feeder batteries mounted to a backpack with an electrolyzer. So you'd fill it with with water and you charge the batteries and it would make hydrogen and oxygen gas.

And then on Home Depot and Amazon, I bought basically pipes and different things. And it was a valve that you'd actually throw it open the chamber. Spark plug would detonate it and it would shoot a half inch ball bearing. Um, holy shit. How old are you?

That one. I think I was, I was 16, 17. Um, it didn't work very well for what it's worth.

Um, and it reached the point, I never actually got to fire it.

Because my mom rightfully so was like, hey, you're detonating hydrogen oxygen this far from your face. I'd ran the numbers don't, the, the combustion chamber wasn't going to explode. But like, anyways, it was an unsafe thing to do. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to get professional about this. And so I went and actually designed like what I thought at the time was a proper system, obviously.

I wasn't going to get what gets you interested in that it 16 years old.

“Again, I'm going to obsessive like, how did it even pop up on your radar?”

I don't know, I liked guns. And then I, I had misconceptions at the time about where warfare was headed. But at that time, I did think that artillery was actually going to be super, super useful. So 16. You're thinking about where warfare is headed.

That's my whole family. So like, that is one of the, my dad, I mentioned that you've worked in finance. Also shares my brother and I, it's like weird in factuation with aircraft. Like he's like obsessive and can tell you anything about any military aircraft. And then my mom's older and younger brother Nathan and Christopher were both big time pilots.

My, her older brother Nathan graduated from MIT and Harvard at the same time with master's degrees. And basically, his MIT thesis and aerospace engineering. This is like in 2000 was on man's systems. No. For warfare.

And his Harvard master's thesis was, and I might be misremembering this. But this is what, anyway, was basically near-paired competition with China. And that was, that was like 25 years ago, 26 years ago.

And so, this is always the dinner table conversation.

Like, I didn't arrive at this way of thinking on my own. And like I said, it's important to cultivate these conversations. This is what you guys are talking about at dinner. Oh, yeah. I want to have dinner with you guys. You're invited anytime.

Um, but, yeah, so I had misconceptions. But basically, my thinking was sensing has gotten a lot better. Traditionally speaking, one of the biggest limiting factors on the usefulness of artillery is sensing. Like, we could shoot further than we could sense. And many cases, well, now with satellites and drones, you can sense however far you want to.

But you're limited by the range of your effectors. And so, I went back to the work that had been done in the 90s surrounding rail guns and combustion-like gaskons. The issue with rail guns is they tear themselves apart. You have to have a conductive rail.

“And so, I think, amortizing the barrel wear on like the Zomot class destroyer or something”

stupid like a million dollars around, you shoot. And that's not the cost necessarily of the round you're firing. That's the fact that the gun's ripping itself apart, I'm a shot. There's a company you've drawn that had done some really interesting work surrounding actual combustion-like gaskons.

And we're able to achieve the same muzzle velocities, but reliably using the mechanism I described to you. So, I was interested in this. It ended up in a bad bet. Like, there's a reason we're working on things like five-print glide now because those are the

way. Like, the principle is the same. The actual engineering behind it's couldn't be more different.

And the hydrogen stuff is totaled at end that I never should have worked on.

But, ATF story. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to get official about this. "Cat it up." An actual rifle. It was a 50-cal 20-millimeter.

I don't remember titanium, like, pretty good system. I found this machinist who said he would machine me these guns. And technically, I think, I forget the exact rules, but it was legal. What I was doing. If the time, basically a firearm wasn't, or a destructive device, was regulated based on

combustion of gunpowder and having a casing. Well, my guns didn't have casings. And so, it wasn't technically a gun on paper, but it sounded a lot like a gun, because you're blowing something up to shoot it. Well, I hired this machinist.

I gave him, like, most of my savings from break check. And all the titanium, I'd buy it, it's, like, great. I'll build you a gun. Well, two weeks later, I was in a, like, physics test. And I get a call.

And the machinist, like, "Hey, I'm telling you, because I feel really bad about doing this, but I ended up just calling ATF on you." And he kept the money. Get the fuck outta here. He kept the money in, and then he kept the money and fucking ratted you.

Yeah. Holy shit. A 16 year old? Yeah, it wasn't super cool. I, I get it.

Not, not super cool of them, though.

“Um, but yeah, it ended up getting resolved, but I think my mom had to, like, go to”

the principal of the school and, like, lobby for my case and convince them that I wasn't, like, I wasn't, like, building guns to shoot people and that I was actually, like, genuinely interested in the science behind it. Um, hold on, what did the ATF say? They were, they were pissed.

They're pissed. But ultimately, I wasn't breaking up. But they couldn't fucking do anything. I wasn't breaking the law. Holy shit.

Are you serious? What did they say in? I love this. This is awesome. I was a phone one.

We're mad, but you're not doing anything illegal. Okay. I think, I think since then, it's not my property. Yeah, exactly. Fucking pissed over there.

You see ATF. You got to have run ends with the ATF, whatever. But I haven't had any run ends with the ATF. I don't have any wood to knock on here. But...

Holy shit. What did they say in? Oh, they, do you remember? They were pissed about it.

“I think they tried to do something that the school freaked out about it.”

My mom was very, very good about going and lobbying my case. And I do think the, I do think the, I do think the regulations changed. I do think now it's regulated based on combustion and not based on having a case saying. Um... Thanks, Ethan.

No sorry. (laughs) Holy shit. So shoot ball bearings. So no, that one was shooting actual machine 50 caliber slugs.

So it was an aluminum slug with, with tungsten at the core. How far out are you hidden?

Oh, it never, I never got it made.

Oh, okay. No, so that's the thing. They shut it down. Um... Wow.

I had to stop work on it. And then that, that problem was way harder than I expected it to be.

Because keep in mind, my entire budget for it was like single digit thousands of dollars.

“And each of these valves on their own for this high pressure gas, like a $6,000 solenoid valve right now.”

And so I was hacking my way through it, doing stuff that we shouldn't have been doing. Hand-actuated valves and all these other things. It's one of those things where like, now if I had a hundred thousand dollars to spend building this gun, I could go and build it. And now if I optimized in housing those parts, it would be a thousand dollar gun.

Now no one wants that gun. It's so stupid for so many different reasons. But then also like back in the day, not having any budget to throw against this stuff. Like back in MIT, I used to... All the guys would joke.

The football weight room was right next to basically the hobbyist space. And there would be lift cycles, and I'd be in the hobbyist space, machining guns in the MIT hobby space. Well, they were all the buddies were left. Anyways.

Damn, do it. But we totally had to hack away through it. Which isn't good. You shouldn't do that. Like as soon as we got back in, as soon as Sequoia and then betterock invested.

Like obviously it's a very, very different approach.

But the motivation behind it, it's always been the same.

That's what I talked about. It's like unmanned systems are coming, right? Like this new air of warfare is here. And so do everything you possibly can to make sure that the west of that good position against it. And so that's kind of why Mox started then.

And I raised 15-17 was my first investor. They put a thousand dollar check-in in high school. Which was like the best day ever for me. Because it doubled our budget at the time. But then our real capital started after I dropped out of MIT.

Right on, right on. What else were you making as a kid? Any other weapon systems? Knives? Knives?

Yes. I mean, I made a lot of furniture. I made chessboards. Tons of throwing axes. Built an aquaponics system, one time which was pretty fun.

Nice. I don't know if you've seen those.

But you basically create, you get a fish tank and I went and caught some bass.

And it was parsed starting to put them in the fish tank. And then you flow the water through a bed of plants and the plants clean the water. The plants get fertilized by the fish tank and then the fish eat the plants. And so it's this like self-replicating system that outputs fish. And food, our fish and plants.

That was a fun one. Right on, man. Let's take a quick break when we come back. We'll get into more MIT. Let's do it.

Cool.

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Hi, I'm Sarah Adams. The host of vigilance elites The Watch floor. Where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters.

And then aim to leave you feeling better and form than you were before you hit play. Tarris, hostile intelligence agencies, organized crime, not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. All right, Ethan, we're back from the break and we're getting into. I know we covered it a little bit, but MIT.

Did you graduate high school early? No. That's surprising. That's real surprising.

“So you went, did you go straight to MIT from high school?”

I did. I did. Who's MIT? Yeah, MIT. I was considering like early high school.

I had like two potential paths. I wanted to go down. One is I was actually obsessed with being a doctor. And in high school. Like I really, really wanted to go be a brain surgeon.

It was like one of my life long dreams to do. And so A&M ran this program called Cult In Bed, where you get an engineering degree and a doctorate.

And then the other-- Hold on.

“Where do you come up with this as an 18-year-old kid?”

17, 18-year-old.

Well, actually, he said early high school, right?

Yeah, this would have been-- Where are you coming up with this shit? I mean, most, what? 13, 14, 15-year-old kids are not thinking about building robots. To do fucking brain surgery.

I mean, I don't even think that was a thing when you were 15. Which is that seven years ago? People were talking about, I don't know. I've been obsessed with the brain for a while. So it's another funny story about me.

When I was in fifth grade, I stole my mom's credit card. I borrowed my mom's credit card. I went and bought a microscope and two sheep's brains. And two sheep's brains. Talk to my mom.

I want to get a sheep's brain. Online. Because they sell them for men's schools and stuff. And so I talked to my sister and helping me. And she and I were like, OK, we're going to put out a YouTube video

where we dissect a sheep's brain. And I think I somehow convinced my teachers to counter this project that I had to do. My mom, I didn't sheep-- she opened the freezer and there are two sheep's brains in there.

And I think so. Anyway, it was a long story. But that YouTube video is out there somewhere. If my sister and I dissecting a sheep's brain back in the day. That's out there?

I'm sure it is. Do you have it? I can find it. Send it in. I want to overlay it during this time. I'll try too.

It's pretty embarrassing. It's cool. It's your story though. You got to think of this. Either this is a fucking legacy piece.

Even though you're only 22 years old, you got to think like this is your life story, how you think who you are. And so if you have kids one day and if they have kids and they have kids, they're going to watch this. That's true.

You know what I mean? This is your legacy piece. All right. I'll send in the video. No, that's true.

I appreciate you. It's funny. I don't talk or even think about that much about all the stuff. It's fun to sit down and talk about. So yeah, I mean, that was that was one obsession. And then the other one was what I ended up doing, which was going and and focusing on on on on on on

the worst side either either fighting or building things. COVID is what changed it actually. So I had gotten in summer after sophomore year. I got into this research program to go into medical research with UT Austin that I was like, I got taking that so seriously getting into that super excited.

COVID happened myself more year. That all shut down. And so that's when I got into like truly got into life making. Because I had nothing to do with, but, but build knives. And I totally would have gone the other path.

But then going going out of senior year, I really wanted to, to build the company. I thought that was super important.

But these trends in warfare also always usually take decades to play out.

So hold on. When did you start mock?

“How old were you? Were you in high school or middle school?”

High school. High school. High school. I'm just saying like engineering and wanting to go, go fly. Like kind of the two focus areas where either kind of health or health or defense.

And it's hard to say exactly when I like officially start mock. Like our first programs I was doing under blue oak iron works. I think the first capital we raised was under blue oak iron works. Which was my like like knife making furniture building. So did you just, is it a new, is mock a new company?

If you just keep more from the company. I kept morphing it. So went from mock to, to try it. Um, tried it was a horrible name. One of our vc's was pushing a call of tried it.

Try and spad for a number of reasons. Um, and then it became mock after I dropped out. I mean, every Navy seal business in the world is fucked. That right. Exactly.

And I didn't know that when I started. So in the vc definitely didn't know that. But then I started talking to people and they're like, are you a Navy seal? No. All right, don't fucking call your company tried it.

I was like, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. With this. Um. Uh. Team guys are original and not so original at the same bucket.

My first kind of body was called tried and security solutions.

Really? Yeah. Which is morphed into this. That's great. Um, that's great.

So yeah, anyway, all that being said, I really wanted to go fly. Um, so I, I figured this trend was going to take a while to play out. Cause this was pretty, pretty Ukraine. And so I want to go fly for for eight, ten years and then go start the company. Hold on, how old I'm sorry to interrupt.

How old were you during COVID? I was 16, 16 years old. I mean, this is, how did that affect you? I mean, a lot of people talk about how younger generations were affected by COVID. Where in mask for two to years not being able, you know, you missed out on a lot.

“How do you feel that that affected your generation going through COVID?”

I think my story was probably different than most. I mean, it was actually a net good thing for me, I'd say. I got nothing up school in COVID-19. I don't think I'd logged into a single class. But I'm, I'm a obsessive person.

So all it did was create like a total vacuum for me to work on whatever I wanted to work on. And so yeah, I just got obsessed with making things and about learning about engineering and thinking, right?

Like most people can't go into their backyard in foreshnops, right? I got super into hunting. I bought a crossbow and we would just go hunt deer around kind of my neighborhood. Like that's not something that most people can do. And so if I were trapped in a city during COVID, it would have been a very, very different story.

And I think it would have been really, really bad for me.

But honestly, without COVID, I never would have gotten into engineering in any of the same way I did.

I basically just gave me time to go and find the things that I actually think are important in that actually I'm working on. Wow. How do you think it, how do you think it affected the majority of your generation? I think people spend a lot more time on social media. I think it kind of kicked off this wave of ultra short form content. And which is I think the most destructive thing for my generation.

“TikTok and Reels and everything else. I think it created a lot of isolation, right?”

Like people just couldn't see their friends. And it's also like that I was younger than the people that got horribly affected. The people that really affected is if it's your senior year of high school or your freshman year of college, it was really, really bad. Because folks a few years older than me, if you're freshman year of college, you're not meeting friends. You're not going to class, but you're at an age that is so accentually important.

I think it really disrupted those people and that probably equally bad if not worse is the senior of high school.

Like that's such an important time to basically tie up your childhood.

Going to graduation, your last year of football, all this stuff. I mean a lot of people think the younger even younger than that. You know, we're more effective because you're picking up, you know, you're picking up how to read facial expressions, body language, like that and the fucking mask over the face, I mean it didn't, it masks. Yeah, literally masks it.

For sure. Yeah, no, it's bad. And then I mean, Bernie was the first school district in the country. I think to go back to school. No good.

“I think I won't don't go beyond that, but we're one of the first of not the first.”

Because I went back and August of 2020. And so it was also like, significantly less destructive. But if you're in New York and you miss a year and a half, you know, can you miss a year and a half of school? No one, online school, no one got anything on us.

Like it's actually back at least a year and a half probably more because you got out of routine. And because even once you got back, it was still disrupted. And so folks also, if you assume you have 12 grades of high school to learn, folks are missing. Books are missing two of those 12, in many cases. So you're four of your knives.

Yes. All right. All right. We can move best at that. Yeah.

Anyway, I'm going to MIT, I really wanted to fly.

“And then if you're going to fly, you should be studying airspace engineering.”

MIT was the best school for airspace engineering. And then I was super fortunate to get a full ride scholarship to go and do that with the air force. And then I did play football and high school. I should say I'm quite bad at football. I, I, in my team process for football, they don't offer you before you get in.

Like, it's D3. They actually usually have a winning record. They do fine. But they refuse to give offers because they, like, MIT, one of my favorite things about it is there's no, there's no, like, ulterior motives in the selection process. So they don't look at donations. They don't look at background. They certainly don't look at sports. But getting in, then I was able to go play football, which was awesome.

Like, football is such a good way in college to, to just make friends and have a friend group. And so between football, being the best at airspace engineering, and then most importantly,

that the Air Force side MIT had the highest basically pilot selection rating of the non-acadom is.

And so I went there after signing though, so I basically senior high school December decided to go. Well, Ukraine starts that next spring. And pretty immediately once Ukraine started, we started learning how quick on mad systems. We're going to play out, right? Like, you start saying quads hit tanks. Even you start saying drones, like I was talking about since forward for artillery.

And so I got to MIT, and at that point, the decision was between, like, do you stay for four years, and then a year or two a pilot school, and then get in in 2728, or do you just decide to drop it? And one is basically like, you 100% have an impact in what you care about. The other one is like you have a very, very small chance of having quite a large impact in what you care about. And so, started talking with friends, went early for football preseason.

Well, I was there, which I think called Europe, which is basically undergraduate research opportunities, where a student can work for a professor to research something. Actually, convinced a professor to take on my research, so that I could work for him and get myself funded. This is why we focus on hydrogen so much early, is because you can only do that on science stuff.

They're never going to go do that on balloons, certainly.

The hydrogen stuff is actually interesting for them, and so I convinced them to do that. Well, that professor pretty immediately realizes that the university is not going to fund him to fund a kid to build guns on campus. So, they kick me over to Lincoln Labs, which is MIT's basically research department. Think by dollars, it's the biggest military lab. It's where they develop a lot of the really interesting stuff, specifically on the RF side.

So, there's actually a period of time where I was planning on dropping out and working at Lincoln Labs. This is still a freshman semester, first few weeks of school trying to figure that out. Well, the labs, I went and talked to them and I was like, hey, walk me through technologies you've developed that have actually made their way in. It's actually made their way into the hands of the warfighter.

“Like you're spending all this money, where does it actually have an impact?”

They're like, well, usually it takes 15, 20 years. Right. And then the issue is I couldn't even develop it and then take it from the lab and commercialize it to have an impact on the battlefield because they own your IP. And so, yeah, literally if you machine like one part of Lincoln Labs, that IP is not owned by Lincoln Labs. Wow.

And so, that suddenly wasn't an option and then I decided to drop out pretty early into the semester, but I was already paid to be there for a semester. I wanted a semester to make friends learn how the system works, recruit for the school. And so, went through the rest of the semester and then left after that. What did you think of them like to? Yeah, I mean, I would think that you can talk about things that you're excited about and other people will understand what you're talking about rather than trying to explain it to me.

And then I don't mean that in a derogatory way towards anybody, I'm just just fucking way it is. No, I will say it was both exciting in certain ways and also not that exciting in certain ways. Like you learn that people are just people and like having hired a lot of engineers at this point.

The top 5% coming out of any school, like any school on earth, are always going to be as good, if not better, then the bottom 50% are the place like MIT.

And so, I would say, look, like the actual raw horsepower in IQ is not that meaningfully different. The thing that is very different is it's a total machine of a culture and that you're expected to step in and work 20 hours a day and just obsess about honing your craft of engineering. And you're thrown into this environment where you get your ass kicked, like you're used to being the smartest person suddenly wake up in your own idiot. It's fantastic. It's like all you can ask for and then there's so much funding that goes into, hey, what's your obsession? Okay, we're going to fund that and go and develop that.

“Right, and so that's what's great about MIT. I'd actually say like the people themselves are very similar.”

And that part I love. I mean, it's not perfect. Don't be wrong. There's obviously politics. There's obviously all these different things. But I don't know if there's another environment on earth like MIT in that way.

Like even having hired from these other schools at this point, the specific thing that sets it apart is just the obsession with first principles.

And then everyone is expected to just work so insanely hard. And that's fantastic. So I loved MIT. And then the MIT football team was a really interesting group of humanity. Most of my best friends were made during that six month period because you've got people who like sit at that intersection, which is a lot of fun. So it was a great school. I mean, if I was going to go back to college, I'd certainly go there. I'm obviously not going back to college. But I loved it. There and me leaving had nothing to do with MIT.

Honestly, had nothing to do with me wanting to build a company and everything to do with the fact that like there are real problems that we have to go solve. And me entering in 2028 is I didn't at least think it was as meaningful as like going and jumping in in 2022 to 2023 going headfirst into these problems. Were you passionate about Ukraine? Very. Why?

Very.

“Look, I think it's a clear war of good and evil. And you can separate all the politics that have infused since then.”

But you had Putin who's clear objective evil in the world and made another sovereign country. And so I'm still very passionate about Ukraine. Right on, just curious. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it's not perfect. No country is perfect. But I've spent time in Ukraine. Like it. It's also a very different.

Like going like meeting the people who's like sons were killed, going like actually like experiencing it. It's a very, very like real war that's happening. The thousands of people die every day that are not fighting for anything other than their own freedom. And I think if if lost is a is the West can't separate politics out from that and say like objectively there are their like mothers who sons are dying. Basically there are 22 year olds who are going to go die in the trench for for their own freedom that is something worth supporting.

And obviously the the US support of the war.

I'm actually I'm very happy to talk it through. But like Ukraine itself.

“It's one of the things I'm most passionate about life is is the sovereignty of Ukraine.”

Like I think look, I think Ukraine's going to go down in history. I see the history is still being written. But if if they push off this invasion, you're talking about a level of like the alamo style. Like stepping up against a bigger adversary and punching back that the history hasn't seen many times. And Ukraine's corrupt.

It's very corrupt. But you have to separate that from from the actual people that live in that corrupt system that are fighting for their freedom. I'm not judging you. No, no, no.

It's absolutely when like here's some why you're passionate about that as a 18 to 20 year old kid.

Yeah, and feel feel free to judge me or to push back. I think this is like why we have these conversations. Um, not that I'm saying you are. I'm just saying I'm happy to talk about it.

“Um, but yeah, look like I think that's that's that's why I'm doing all this, right?”

I just as this is why any this is why the company exists. That's why I'm I view myself as is on like on this earth is to like protect for individual sovereignty. It's a good purpose. Thank you. Are you more, are you more passionate about Chinese Ukraine or I'm sorry, Russia Ukraine or China Taiwan?

Definitely China Taiwan. I would say it in individual level. It's probably pretty similar. Um, I would say if if you're talking about the impact it will have on the future of sovereignty. I'm trying to tie one is orders of magnitude more important.

I don't know if I'm definitely with you on that one. Definitely with you on that one. Okay, so you got, so Ukraine was your motivation that's your purpose at the time. Well, so in more ways than one, so one is like obviously care about the sovereignty of Ukraine. Two is it's such a crazy glimpse into how big of a, how big of a change we need to expect from unman systems.

Right, like we're just in a very early ages of unmanent warfare. It is fucking crazy isn't it? I mean, I spent 14 years in an out of combat zones all over the Middle East. And I mean, I can't even remember did Ukraine kick off before we actually even pulled out of Afghanistan. I think it did.

I thought it was pretty short did. Yeah. And so they did that the staunch differences in those two conflicts, those wars are just fucking wildly different. Yeah, it's insane how different. Absolutely.

And then the thing and so that's, that's really what it was about Ukraine as much as the sovereignty. It's like, this is a crazy glimpse and this is the first near peer, like true, near peer conflict we've seen and so long.

“And so you have to stop thinking about drones is in the context of terrorists and start thinking about drones and the context of nation states sending hundreds of thousands of them against each other.”

And we're just, we're just in the early dawn of this era. Like you have to keep in mind the actual level of tech being deployed on the battlefield is actually still quite rudimentary.

Like if you look at probably the two most important unmanned systems.

And this isn't an attack on the Ukrainians, right? Like they're, they're doing an incredible incredible job. It just takes years to build technology. But you've got quadcopters that are these super, super simple, four electric motors directly manually controlled either over over radio or through fiber optics. That are slow, usually less than 100 miles an hour, right?

That aren't very maneuverable. And that aren't designed that well from any factor. Like these things are still hand-to-symbols. So you're dealing with lower volume and lower sophistication than we can expect. And same with the shot.

Like if you go and look at a shot head, you're dealing with like a fiberglass airframe. The original ones were literally powered by like Vespa, like piston driven engines. The autonomy package is horrible, but it's so effective. Like that's the thing. I'm not taking away from how effective it is.

Like that stupidly simple quadcopter will go and take out the most sophisticated tank anyone on earth can build. Yeah, right? You look at operations by the web. I mean, you look at those things taking out hundreds of millions or billions of strategic air power on the runway. And so if you imagine the type of tech we deal with in the day to day and you imagine that being applied to unmanned systems.

And you imagine what it actually looks like when the true force of innovation meets unmanned systems, which is happening today. It wasn't happening three years ago. You push so far up that curve in a way that is just terrifying. And so that's why Ukraine was with such an eye opener is like, these are still a super unsfuscated systems that are totally defining the only near peer conflict that we've seen in recent history.

And the level of effective systems will have is just so huge. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't even imagine what this is going to turn into.

But one was the first time you went to Ukraine.

I've only been once. I went. I don't remember the year, probably 2023 to 2024. What were you doing? Just just working on mock stuff.

I mean, I didn't do it on there. I didn't spend that much time there. I don't want to like, it's not something I'm trying to brag about or anything.

“Like, I wanted to, for me, it was like, how can you get as close as possible to the war that's actually happening?”

How did you get there? I go. I was in a conference in Poland. And, and met some Ukrainian foreign Legion guys. Okay.

And then just hopped in their car and rode across the border with them. That's awesome. I love that shit. It was, I mean, it was, it was crazy eye opening. Would you see?

So I went to, I went to one of the schools where they train these operators. And you, you literally pull people off the street. You put them in front of a TV screen with a controller for a week. And you, you teach them how to do that. And suddenly, you've got someone that can take out a target 20 miles away for $400.

Like, that's crazy. I wouldn't, wouldn't saw a factory where they're making these things. And you've got things that are destroying $50 million aircraft that are assembled by, like, Ukrainian grandmothers.

“Right? Like, that's, that's what asymmetry means, right?”

And so, and then you, you actually meet people. Like, it's, it's very humanizing to actually talk to the people that are fighting the conflict. So, yeah, I mean, nothing ultra profound, but, like, for me, it's so easy to, to sit in VC land. And, like, pump up your valuation, do all these different things.

Raise money from VCs who have never, never fought in war.

I've obviously, I'm, I'm not a war fighter. Like, it's very easy to get separated from the actual problem. But if you truly want to solve issues, like, you have to get as close as possible that people actually use in your systems at the end of the day. Wow, so you knew you were going to build drones when, before you, you knew it. Yeah, yeah, right away.

Yeah, um, certain. Yeah, how many years have you spent at MIT? Uh, a semester. That's it, a semester. So, I, I filled out the form to drop out, like, oh, a handful of weeks in.

Like, what, I mean, so what convinced you, holy shit. So you, you're in one of the most prestigious schools in the world. And a couple weeks in, you're like, yeah, fuck, this isn't for me. I think, and I was, I was clear with, with everyone about this. I expected failure.

Like, the numbers I was running is like, of course, it's crazy to say you're going to go and build these systems, build these factors to these different things. But if there's, if there's a 100,000 chance that you can ship hundreds of thousands of platforms over the next five years.

“Like, you have, again, you, you have to do it.”

Like, the median certainly lower. But like, the, the average, the net expected value of, like, going and dropping out. And so I, I fully expected to, to, to, to run out of money for it all the fail. Um, I was, I was pretty clear about that. But if, if there's a chance of making a difference, you have to jump in and do it.

And so I wasn't excited about it. Like, it wasn't, it wasn't like I was sitting there hating MIT. It wasn't like I was like super, you just felt a duty. I'd say so. All in the damn, wow.

Man. That's impressive. Thank you. And it, look, I mean, there's still a very long ways to go. Like, like, I, I'd say I, I still feel that way.

Like, the, for, for our company for the military industrial base writ large. Like, we're still in the early days of actually adopting this correctly. And so it's been about three years now since I dropped out and decided to do that. And I think we, we still have decades of work left to do. If we, if we actually want to see that impact, man.

You are a cold dude. Thank you. You're welcome. So what, what are you working on? Where do you go after you drop out of MIT?

So a few of my buddies decided to do the same. Yeah. I'm super excited about, um, football team football. And then to the other sort of Air Force Rotsie people. Um, there's something called campus preview weekend or not, not campus preview weekend.

That's different thing. Uh, what's it called, dammit. Now I'm forgetting the name for it. MIT gives everyone off all of January.

And you're expected to go and work on basically a project.

And so all the students were off for like a month, which was awesome. Because I didn't have, I didn't have the money to support anyone other than myself. So I literally couldn't have people drop out with me. But a bunch of my buddies and I decided that like this month, we're just going to sprint on working on these problems.

And then after that, it would just be me because I couldn't support any of them dropping out. And so for that month, I got, there's about the size of this room.

We could find, um, and just started building a bunch of different things. So we built quadcopters. We built a gun.

We built a basically a shot head.

Um, a what? It's a type of, so this was pre shot head is like the Dorito drone that the Russians used like crazy. This was actually pre shot head. And so we built what ended up being the shot head. It was just like crazy in Ukraine.

No kidding. What else I want to build? Uh, that's kind of my main job. It's to, to ideally be, be as much as the process. Why are you, why are you building guns and drones?

Well, you do how do you decide which one you're going to do first? Yeah.

“So you have to, you have to try and war game what a battlefield looks like in the future.”

There's a very, very hard thing to do. And I, I won't say I'm necessarily good at it. But you have to basically understand technologies that exist. Understand the current state of warfare. And imagine like what the best possible system is in the future.

The way, and that's your kind of first optimization.

The issue is you have kind of two other optimizations. If you're trying to do that, is that internal thought? Is that discussion? Is that whiteboard? What is that?

All three. And in massive, massive volumes. I mean, again, that's why I went to Ukraine. And obviously I grew up having these conversations with my family. My family talking to engineers, talking to war fighters.

Basically putting together this model of like what is kind of, what is, if if tech were full throttle, what would this look like? Now the issue is there are kind of two other optimizations that have to sit parallel to that. The first is what will the government actually procure? And this is the one I wanted to say least well at this time.

Like if even if a technology is better, if the government can't procure it in time and can't train on it in time, it's completely useless. And then for me, I don't have the budget of the United States government. Like I can't say we're going to go work on this. So for me, all a company is basically a lever for action.

And so for me, if I want that lever to have any real momentum behind it, I have to make money for my investors to keep raising more capital. And so those are kind of the three main optimizations. It was like, what works in warfare? What can the war fighter actually adopt in time, given politics, given training,

given all these different things? And then what can I as a company actually make money to build the machine that keeps compounding this? And then at the time, I had no idea what would actually, like my algorithms comparing those three things were quite bad.

“And I think we kind of knew that, which is why we took such a broad aperture.”

So literally in that one month, you've got quadcopters, you've got guns, you've got fixed-wing drones, you've got blin stuff. Or we built an hydrogen electrolyzer, we did some aluminum fuel. Hydroelectalyzer. It sounds more complex than today.

You basically take water, you shock it, and you separate the hydrogen and oxygen. And then you recombust that for guns, or for air traveler, or other things. We built aluminum fuel that also does that. So you take aluminum. Just aluminum.

You remove the oxide layer, you put it in water. And then it rips basically the oxygen off of the water. And produces hydrogens. We developed some of that fuel. Worked on like a after-burning electric ducted fan.

All different stuff. Like, how many guys are doing this with you? There were five of us. This shit's all happening in one fucking month. We didn't sleep.

What? There's a lot. It was a lot. Yes, small budget. We're all sleep deprived.

Yeah, it was a good month though. Sounds like it. But again, we're a lab at this point.

“Because we had no idea what we were doing.”

Let's prove doing investors that we can actually build things. Let's ourselves start to learn what it means to be good engineers. Because again, you're learning all this theory. And I'd built a few things, and they'd built a few things. But now you actually have a bit more of a budget to start doing it.

And then from that, then you can take it to the warfighter. Because if I, if I call someone in the Pentagon, I'm like, hey, I want to have a conversation about something I'm working on. And they say, cool, what do you have? And I show them a spreadsheet or a slides. That's very, very different than like, hey, here's this video of this thing flying.

And so part of it is also like, you never know what the Pentagon's going to take seriously.

Unless you have something that makes them take it seriously enough to give it another pass. And then from there, they all went back to school. And it was just me for the next semester. Um, this was a really hard time. Like, this is probably the closest the company ever came to not working.

Because we had all this work, but they had all gone. And at this point I was doing everything in the business. I was doing the sales. I was the janitor. I was, well, I was still pushing the engineering along as much as I could.

And they would work on the weekends or after school. But it's, it's in my team. Like, they had a lot of course work and other things to do. Um, but I mean, super, super grateful. We're able to find investment capital at that point.

From a couple different folks.

That's when 1517 did another round.

It was a good time. But it was later.

“Like, it was like after like four or five months.”

They're, they're all these. Like, there's you learn into pitch. Or do they ever crude? They probably have recruiters all around MIT. Yeah, they hear about it.

And they ask you for a meeting and they come to the factory and. Gotcha. Look at stuff. Is that making nervous? Not really.

I don't, I don't get nervous in conversations. Like, I love conversations. I get nervous. You're going to get taken advantage of by a shark. Don't look out for myself.

Folks, folks have tried and I've, I've beat them back to the best I can.

Um, you can't, I don't know.

I like to avoid being nervous about things. I'm just curious. No, it's, I get nervous. My fears are usually more existential than they are, micro. Like, I, I, I don't know if I've ever been afraid of a pitch meeting or afraid of like a given test.

Because the, the stakes are so high.

“You almost, it's, you're going to do everything you can.”

And if that's not enough, it's not enough. But there's no reason to be nervous about that fact. Yeah, I don't know if that makes sense. It does. Um.

But yeah, anyway, we, we raised capital then. It's a tremendous amount of confidence in yourself. Thank you. Yeah, I'm, I mean, it's, it's not though. I, I guess, is the other thing I'll say.

Like, I'm not saying I expect success. I'm just saying I'm going to do everything I can. And the, the results will be what the results are. Um, because you, you would, you would go insane in, in any other way. Like, there's nothing actually inherently that painful about company building.

Like, I think there. There's this narrative spun up by CEOs that company building is like this, this incredibly painful, extensually worrying thing and it can be at times. But if the, my, my goal and I, I'm not great at this. But my goal is like, all company building is is conversations.

All company is building is is like working at a computer. It's not like it's not like I'm being shot at, right? Like, it's, it's actually like so much less existential.

“Um, you have to, you have to try and separate the two as much as you can.”

Um. Man, I think the opposite. I think building the company is fucking hard. It's hard. It's something I've done.

I'd rather, I'd rather be faced down with bullets flying over my head, because I'm more comfortable in that situation. But that might be you. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's challenging. And the, the odds are very, very slim.

But it's not, it's not personally dangerous. It's not, it's not like you're having to, I don't know. I get what you're saying. But we, yeah, so then we, we race capital now. It does big time because then all those people are able to drop out with me,

and we're able to scale the company. So then after that semester, um, we went and got two houses down in Austin. And we had some stupid numbers like 30 or 35 people from MIT and, and Harvard come move down to Texas for that semester. And all living in two houses, we worked in one of the houses.

Foolish. So we put up a bunch of insulation in the garage, ran like a 3D printer farm. We would test it. Jet engines in the backyard.

Um, and then the other house was like the hangout house. So we had like Lucida, which was the work house and the back owners, which was like the, the, the hangout house. We'd have a barbecue every Friday and, and all hanging out. The AC broke in Lucida.

We were running so many 3D printers and different things. Um, did the AC got overwhelmed. And it was like 90 degrees in that house for like two weeks. And there was like 30 of us in there building stuff. Holy shit.

And then understandably it was a weird environment to try and hire like professionals into the times. That's when we made our first few hires. It's like, hey, come join this crew. It's like, uh, tough.

Um, but we got, we got some, some solid stuff done. And then we're able to go and raise the A. And that's when Bedrock stepped up like the company would not exist without Bedrock kind of placing the vote of conference. They did on us at that point for the A, which is when we're able to go and get like a proper

office. We're able to buy fancy machines. I was able to actually hire people.

Because even on $5 million.

If you're paying engineers $200,000 a year and you need 50 engineers to do a program, you burn through your money real quick. Um, working on stuff like we are. No, it's different. But like, Viper is a vertical take off fighter jet.

Like that's not something that you're going to build on that amount of money. And so really until Bedrock made that vote of conference, it was all kind of lab-esque work of like proving our competence, proving that we could do things, starting early customer conversations.

And that's when the company I'd say like actually like truly cemented was around that A, the Bedrock led. Um, what were you building in the house? What were you 3D printing? It's a good question.

What are we working on at the time? We had three major programs at this point. So we had Viper, which is today. It's a six and a half a long vertical take off fighter jet.

It was runway launched and never worked super well.

And then the next I had this dream for something called, we used to call it Medusa. It was this big tail sitter grown. So a thousand mile range. We had three printers.

We're never going to build that. We're building like scale demonstrations. Uh, but a tail sitter that would go take off to ISR, do strike, and then come back in land. A big part of our philosophy has always been decentralization.

Like the the next set of warfare.

“One of the only things I think you can say with confidence right now is that”

Strike is much easier. It, it long range. And so defending centralized assets, ships, and the ocean aircraft on the runway, even 2,000, 3000 miles away, become so much harder.

And so our big emphasis, one of them has always been on this decentralization.

Like how do you, how do you have things take off vertically? How do you have things only required to operate or so that you and I can walk outside, launch something and be gone by the time they figure out where it came from? Um, so that was Medusa and then the the third. And this plays into the decentralization bet, but again,

was about bet was something called Prometheus, which was, and this is actually done up in Boston. So this work, the first two I described were happening down, and in Austin, the other one was up in Boston, was basically an aluminum hydrogen generator.

And so similarly, as you look it into a pick on, one of the hard problems is how do you feel these forces going forward? And that gets even harder if your tankers are getting taken out by unmanned surface vehicles, right, by unmanned underwater vehicles by these different things. And so one of the big things we're focused on is how do you actually generate fuel at point of need?

“Um, and so that's why we were doing the aluminum hydrogen work.”

And now, all of you are kind of taking a very complex problem in, you're also thinking about all the logistics and everything that go along with the products that you're making. You have to. You have to. That's where these other companies do in that.

I think they are. I think I think they are now. I don't think necessarily know. I mean, frankly, what they were working on at the time was better than what we were working on at the time. Because the aluminum thing was, maybe we thought through one specific niche area of the problem very well,

but the rest was was actually not. Not great. Um, I would say we do take probably a more full stack approach to things. Um, but know that the other companies work in the space are very good. Again, I think this, this new era of people working on these problems take it seriously.

Oh, I've talked to a lot of them. They're all fucking sharp. I haven't heard anyone talk about logistics. Logistics ones worse. Like that is that is. Yep.

Other than your people, it's the most important thing at the end of the day.

“What is it because I am at your stock tax at tactics, pros, top logistics?”

Yeah, something like that. Um, yeah, it's important. The way I mean, the way we're looking at the logistics problem now is not requiring runways, making things as small as they possibly can be so that they're easy to get into theater. Like, glide is literally this big.

We can take out a target of very, very far range. Which is a range. That's the one we kind of talk about the least. It's one of our, it's a high altitude glide vehicle to take out targets. It's a, it's a more sensitive caught up.

Um, but it's, it's this big. And you and I could deploy this here and take out a target a long way down range. But even the thing that looks like a muscle, that's, that's Viper. So we, we have, we have five products. We've, we've talked about publicly.

Um, so one is, is Viper. It's about a six and a half at long vertical take off. Kind of miniature fighter jet. And so the job of Viper is to do everything. A fighter jet would do as best as can be done while being cheap enough to mass manufacture.

We cheap enough to seriously go and make a million two million of these things and then be runway independent. And so several hundred mile range, several hundred miles an hour. You can go and get up to these high altitudes, but only cost a hundred thousand dollars. And you and I could take it out of a public in case here in Lauchette with no routing infrastructure. And so army super excited about Viper for, or bunch of folks are for, for surface to surface.

But then that same aircraft you can take and go do surface to air. And so that's Viper. And then so hold on. So this is, is Viper, I mean, does it, does it carry a payload or is it the payload? Right now it is the payload.

It is the payload. That's not necessarily true of future versions. So the other thing we do with our products is every, every six months or so. I'm trying to get that down, but they're, they're hard products to engineer. We, we try to completely re-architect the product. And so the current version of Viper, few hundred mile range, purely surface to surface.

And I shouldn't talk too much about future, but like, eventually you're dropping payloads. Eventually you're coming in and landing vertically and doing all these different things. But you're doing that at a price point that's like 10 times less than a current air air missile. Wow. So that's a phone one.

We've been flying that one for about a year now. We get to use a couple of those here.

Yeah, I want one. I'll get you a Viper. Are you serious? Yeah. Oh, fuck yes.

I'm guessing no warhead in the Viper.

“Well, I'll get you to take some more heads to it.”

I might get that run in with the ATF. There you go. Yeah, I'll get you a Viper. Hundred percent. Are you serious?

Yeah. Fuck yeah. Yes. The composite, the manufacturing guys are going to be so excited building that Viper. No shit.

Yeah, there you go. Did you got to come back? You got to come back. I've got to come back. Oh, a hundred percent get you a Viper.

Do you want me to walk through the products? Absolutely. Yes. All of them. I, as much as you can.

Yeah, for sure. So the stratosphere I can talk less about. Okay.

I think it's the most important.

And this is the, the bet we're placing is a company that is sort of most distinct and also kind of most controversial. Right now. I am a huge believer and you're going to laugh. I'm a huge believer and have been.

“Like since high school, the balloons are the most important tools in future conflict.”

You mentioned that at breakfast. I did. Well, the, the, the, the balloon in the US this week. Yeah. The Chinese balloon.

Yeah. The people started taking drugs around that wound up being a happy birthday. Exactly. Um, I mean, the Russians are starting to send balloons out of Lithuania. It's causing a real problem.

Obviously, I got a ton of traction. So the the Chinese balloon happened during that semester after I dropped out. Which is part of why we're able to get funding is I was talking to all these people talking about balloons and they're like laughing. And then suddenly our entire country freaks the hell out because of balloons.

Um, but. Yeah. I won't go into into it too specifically. But shooting a balloon down is so much harder than putting a balloon up. So much harder.

And there. So putting a balloon up is super easy for obvious reasons. Right. Like you, you fill it up with gas and it goes up to let's say 60,000 80,000 feet. Well, to then go pop it, you've got to send a missile or a plane up to 60 to 80,000 feet. And so this is, we talk a lot about asymmetry. Like this is asymmetry at the maximum.

I see what you're saying. And then the interesting thing is there's, there's these companies. Loon is the most famous that actually developed ways of navigating balloons. Instead of this being something that's like a party balloon that goes up pops, disappears.

Basically forms a satellite that can navigate that can station keep.

They can do all these different things. And so suddenly you've got a payload and altitude that's 100 to 1,000 times more expensive to shoot down than it is to put up. They can actually tack against wind patterns and lock in places. And then from there, there's obviously really interesting things you can do once you have a payload up at that altitude. And then the more interesting thing is if I can have hundreds of thousands of payloads, like hundreds of thousands of payloads up at that altitude or given time.

So we have, we have stratus payloads up at altitude, really, really interesting things you can do to blowing those things at scale. And something I should mention is like, as we talk logistics, the logistics of balloons are pretty fantastic. Because you can launch them thousands of miles away. And so you and I could launch a balloon here and have it up over X country, actually much quicker than I think most people realize. And so the logistics problem gets significantly significantly easier.

“And so how did you come to the conclusion that balloons would be so important?”

It's just physics. It's you look at how cheap something is to put up, you look at how expensive it is to shoot down. You think about inventing new ways to shoot stuff down, like you start war gaming. Well, if you're shooting down balloons, well, what if the balloons are carrying out our missiles, all these different things. So anyway, I've, we've held that contention strongly for a while as a company where we're working very, very different.

Because this stuff just pop in your head or, I mean, it does, I mean, a lot of this, I can't, I can't claim all these ideas.

Like, and it's always hard to tell where an idea comes from, but you're, you're talking to hundreds of different people in a given day.

Like, I didn't invent loon, right? Like, I let, I read the loon library in high school. They published all of it. They published how to go and navigate these balloons. And so you go and read that and suddenly start thinking about these things and can extrapolate pretty quickly. Um, and then our, our final two products we talk about, one is a basically a much bigger jet powered aircraft. Um, we flew this for the first time in December. I released a video about it.

Is this the one 71 days from drawing to build? Yes. What the fuck? That's crazy. I can't take credit.

71 days. The engineers were working hard. And then one of the, one of the good things about our philosophy is, we spend so much time on sub components. So, like, most primes or system integrators that go and buy other people's sub components and put them together. One of the big things that starts to happen as you develop a really good matrix engineering org is like, you just take your learnings from Viper and apply it to these other aircraft.

It'll be the same jet engines that ship on Viper and, and on this other platform.

So, it was, it was fast. What is this one called? There are a few different names for it. Dart? No, that's a different one.

Okay.

“So, some, some folks call it Pike, some folks call it Venom.”

I unfortunately don't get to choose the name of my products. I was building in commercial industry. I would say, hey, here's the name of my products. And so I developed them to a point and the government comes up with the name for it that they like to call it. Pike Venom.

Different, different things for different customers. And, and/or different kind of potential customers. And then past that, we have Dart. Dart is sort of. My company's best crack at unmanned system defeat.

So, this is us entering the defensive side.

And so, there will never be a silver bullet answer to taking out drones.

Right? You'll, you'll always have some combination of. Big platform, some combination of small platform, some combination of jamming, some combination of lasers. But our, our philosophy is to focus on what we think is sort of the power law important problem within that set. For me, like our systems when they ship down range don't rely on GPS or RF in terminal.

Right? And so what that means is that you really can't jam these things. Right? Similarly, the way a lot of these drones right now that are slower than are non-newverable are taken out with electric based interceptors. Well, that's not going to work once you have things like Viper that come in very quickly.

Oh, okay.

“That's why I was going to, okay, I mean, we were talking about Epirus earlier and Leaditis and so those, some of that weaponry.”

Yeah. So that's, that's, that's, because I was going to say, seems like that's the answer. It's a different. It takes out the drones. They have the wire.

It takes out drones without the wire.

I think they dropped like a hundred and something fucking drones. What month ago? Yeah? Or something out in the desert? It's one of the best tools.

Absolutely. It's great. So you're saying that a weapon-like Leaditis or what Epirus is developing is not going to be effective against something like dark or not dark. Because that's a defensive one. No, it should be.

What an offensive one that moves it whatever speed. So Leaditis is a bit different.

“So you have jamming and then you've got Leaditis, which is actually directed microwave.”

Leaditis is a great platform. And we'll actually take out most things. It's, it's not a silver bullet, though. Second, you turn it on. You're pumping so much power.

Anyway, there's stuff we shouldn't get into there, but like there are ways to get through it. Specifically with fast-moving things that already have the given trajectory. And so you need, you need the full stack. Like DJI's, the drones most unsificated adversaries are going to be flying. And similar, similar drones are quite susceptible to jamming.

Right? And so jam those. You've got something like Leaditis that is very, very good against a large number of assets. And again, Leaditis is correct. It is.

But it's an expensive platform. It's a very, very power-hungry platform. And then it's a platform that, it's pretty easy quickly to realize where it is. And so then you've got kinetic action. Where you're actually going and intercepting something.

In kinetic action, for certain threats, you want to go use an electric interceptor. Right? So I had those describing to you, kind of low and slow. You want to go and hit that with an electric interceptor. The issue is if you've got something like Viper that's cruising up at 35,000 plus feet,

coming straight down super, super fast maneuvering along the way. You're not going to reach that with an electric interceptor. Right? And so that's when you need fast-moving things. The issue with guns is you're pretty good against one adversarial drone.

The most of the targets you're defending are expensive enough to send tens of adversarial drones against. And so if 10 things are coming in at 600 miles an hour all the same time, your gun is for obvious reasons not going to have time to shoot it down. And so what we're working on with Dart is how cheap can you possibly get an actual missile to go and enter into these things.

And so one of the issues is if you're using a drone to take out another drone, your drone ends up being as expensive if not more expensive. And so it's not an asymmetric approach, right? Whereas with our missiles and with missile systems generally speaking, and I guess I should set back what makes it so expensive is that you're using a jet engine

or electric motors or other things to get up to speed. Which is why I'm a fan of solid rocket motors. They're super short range, but they're super, super cheap if you manufacture them right. And you can take out adversarial assets at a theoretically price point cheaper than the asset itself, which gives you sort of your asymmetry back.

And so that's what we're working on with Dart is like how cheap can you possibly get

How fast does it go? So right now it's in the sort of transonic, just below transonic regime. We'll end up expanding that line, we'll have super sonic ones. Like you don't want to waste a super sonic one against a subsonic asset. And so kind of the goal is to have this modular system and you actually have different types of

darts with different capabilities over time. I'm talking to yours in the future here.

But the funny thing is we did this during the first-schooled war.

Like when air power first started, we're looking at all these different approaches to taking out aircraft. Like the F104 is an interceptor. It's basically like a rocket with wings to go out and take out Russian bombers, right? You've got literally ideas of like new king of the air going on at the time. And what ended up winning out is solder locomotor with arrow control surfaces.

That's been super super successful generally speaking until the air of stealth. And so yeah, that's our approach with dart. It's like vertically integrate this thing as much as possible, drive the cost down as much as you possible can. Optimize it to make hundreds of thousands because you're going to need so many of these systems.

Like if our adversaries are making hundreds of thousands of systems, we need hundreds of thousands of interceptors.

It at least. And that's the reason you even know where they're going to strike.

“So you actually likely need significantly more if you want to have true defense.”

Man, this is fucking wild, man. I mean, as you're describing all this stuff and you're talking about the decentralization, you know, decentralized military force. I mean, how would these things? She's so fucking different than from what I'm used to. I mean, everything's centralized to a flagpole base, whether that's, you know, cobble or bogum or fucking bag dad or anywhere else I've been.

And then you have outstations, but it's still all centralized. And you know, I remember when I interviewed Brandon saying from Shield AI, I mean, that this is big thing. You know, every, every pickleball court in the world is a fucking launch pad. So I mean, how, when you think about sending thousands of drones in, what are you going to send thousands of drones to? Because everything's going to be fucking decentralized.

And that's, that's why. So you're exactly in the entire, in the, in the, in the entire infrastructure of global militaries has to fucking change because you can't have it centralized on the basis. So what, what does that even look like? Does that look like? Would you have fucking houses in the middle of neighborhoods that nobody knows about where the roof is open up and a fucking drone flies out. I mean, in your mind, what does the future look like? I mean, you can't have anything centralized. Yeah, you brought up the, the Russian, that it was the gracious by the way.

“Yeah, that one. I mean, probably, I think that's the first example of what could happen, right?”

You know, and so, and then you put that on a mass scale and, you know, it's crazy. Marks fills right up the road. That's where a fucking TF one 60 is. Yep. You know, in a man that we get, you got Patterson Air Force Base, right? All the, you got all this, it's all centralized. Yep. Exactly.

So we're fucked. So how do you dease? How do you now risk not only are we restructuring all the technology, but you have to rethink everything that we think we know is pretty much completely obsolete.

And this is why this is why revolutions and military affairs are always so damaged, like so dangerous.

Two great powers is like you as the US just have so much confidence in your way of doing things. We need to start today. And I think one, you need decentralized deep strike capability. You need decentralized diasar capability. And so your actual effects downrange obviously have to be decentralized.

“You need to have assets that are capable of decentralized logistics, right?”

You can't require a tanker to refuel an air. On the ground, you can't require centralized infrastructure. You can't require a runway. We'll see how far back in marches, but you, one could very, very clearly imagine a world where manufacturing itself has to be decentralized. And so, man, that's even a good point, or underground. Yeah, no, it becomes, it becomes freaky real quick.

How fast do you think this all has to happen? China's doing it all fast, so like they released about, I think in January, that's a commercial cargo ship that has containerized munitions. That means you have like a conxbox, like a shipping container, they can launch anti-ship missiles. So you don't know if that shipping container is on unleash an 18-wheeler, you don't know if that shipping container is on a random cargo ship.

You look at ports, and you've got hundreds of dollars. That's the biggest, it's like 95%. No, it's, I'm sorry, it's 50% of the world's ship building capacity is in fucking China.

No, hopefully, I will actually, I will say, I don't worry that much about that.

If my argument was, I wouldn't even say it's an argument. I mean, I remember having this exact conversation with Deanum of Rukus from Saran,

“you know, my big thing was, what kind of ships are they building?”

They just building fucking cargo ships, so they building shells. I mean, yeah, they could turn that into something, but then you're talking about these fucking shipping containers, and it's like, oh shit, it's a fucking destroyer in disguise. It is, but even that, I think it's too central-est. Like if an actual conflict starts, you're taking those out pretty quickly.

Because you're talking about, I mean, the missiles to take that ship out will cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

And so, yeah, I mean, maybe we take them out, maybe we don't.

I mean, do we have the, look at, maybe I don't, I don't think that, I don't think the people have the hard to take it out. You can get you can't tell which ones are good and which ones are bad. And we just got a small taste of that with the boats coming from Venezuela, and you saw everybody get up in arms because we killed some fucking drug dealers.

You know, now we got Chinese cargo ships, 50% of the world's ships all over the fucking place. You can't tell which ones are, which ones are good. So there's a great point. New trolling, which ones are bad guys, so you gotta take them all out while there goes a shit ton of civilians. Yep.

Yeah, no, you're right, it's fucking genius.

If you think about it, it is. And the US is doing the same thing. We are, we are. We are. Now, I don't know if we're doing it as quickly and certainly not at the same scale, but we, we need to be.

“But the big thing that has to happen is on, on the defensive, you have to decentralized.”

Like you have to make it such that if you know one of these 10 ships has these missiles on it. There's, there's nothing, nothing militarily in striking distance that it all falls apart so quickly. And this is why, this is why I've been so, so worried about this for so long. And I'm not saying I have the answers. I'm, I'm developing assets that I think will be helpful in this future world.

I, I can't tell you what, what a four-starter actually needs to look like when this is today. Yeah, it's just wild. And then you think about all the bases that we've given up. Yeah. The algorithm being very, I mean, it's still centralized, but I mean, you know what I'm saying?

Like, like, now we're just consolidating of what? Back here at the homeland where we could have had, gave up a ton of bases in Europe, all the bases in Afghanistan, all the bases in Iraq. I mean, it's so, at least it was somewhat decentralized. Now, we're, I mean, we're probably more centralized right now than we have been in, since World War II. That's true. And so we, we need to be working on ways of offensive and defensive assets being decentralized.

“Like, you, you have to get back into doing that.”

And I mean, that's why I talk a lot about, about the stratosphere, the range of which you can deploy these things. Um, allows you, allows you to, to act more forward. And then, hopefully we, we find ways of doing it where you don't rely on a base to, to launch these assets. Like, there's nothing inherent about fiber that would, would require any actual fix assets in a country or finding it. Man, you really got me thinking now.

This just looks, I know nothing. That's, you know, that's not true. No, that's not true. I'm not scared of it. I'm admitting it's the, the old way is done. It's, it's complete over. It, it would be, in my opinion, it's almost detrimental to be even. That maybe I won't say that, but it could, I mean, it's talking to an old guy like me who's used to the old way. It may be detrimental to the future, because it's, it's still hard to switch thinking.

It is. Now, the advantage is we're not going to go from the world we have today to this different world instantly. And so the, the easy part is actually talking about the way things should be. The hard part is, is more thing the current fighting force into the way things should be. And that's where that discourse is incredibly valuable. Like, how do we, how do we buy off one percent a day on, on, on, on, on getting ourselves towards this future? Because the, the other thing is like, we just sit around talking about this, but don't have any actuals of, of how we get there.

Because the issue is, and, and you know this better than I do, none of these assets operate in a vacuum. So I could go and ship 10,000 bipers, but if no one can train on them, if they don't plug into existing, like, command and control, that's useless. And so the real art of it is like, define what the future looks like. But the, the real art of it is like, how do you have, have tastes intact in the way that you morph our four structure over the next few years.

You start, I mean, you start by buying more of these, these systems. And obviously, I'm, I have a conflict of interest saying that.

Everyone should take that with a grain of salt, but I also started this company because I believed in the importance of doing that.

“And so, but you, you need to start by building an industrial base.”

I mean, where do you store them? Where do you, I mean, and I'm not even talking about your products. I'm talking about locations. Locations, I mean, major bases, Ford Bragg, Clarksville. They're not that hard to store. They're not, I don't think they're, you know what I mean? No, for sure. For sure. Massive amount of personnel. I'm not even talking about unmanned systems. I'm talking about decentralizing fucking everything. You know, Norfolk, Virginia, San Diego, California, biggest fucking two naval bases in the country. You know what I mean? How do you decentralize all of this shit?

It's hard. It's hard. That's a lot of new land buying. That's a lot of new infrastructure that's ripping out old shit. What do you do with old? It's, it's a complete revamp. It is. And what I, what I will say, something that, that gives me, gives me confidence is, is nuclear deterrence is still strong. And so, you, you don't have to worry as much about massive threats on US soil. It's, it's an area of proxy war where it's really, really dangerous. So if you're a Lithuania thinking about this, you need to be thinking very, very, very deeply about decentralization.

Right? For the US, fortunately, we do have, we do have nuclear deterrence. We also have the dome common supposedly. We do. And the dome, the dome will be good for certain assets and not good for other assets. So like you're talking about long-range hypersonic, the dome is going to be great. When you're talking about 200 quads that launched from some random shipping container that made its way into the country, the dome is not going to do anything in its current form. Now, it argued that the dome should do something and that's something we should expand.

And I'm also not saying the hypersonic problem isn't something we need to work on. But at least for the, the things you and I are talking about right now, like, the dome is architected with, with space space interceptors, mostly. The dome is not going to take out a quad that randomly emerges that, that some Chinese foreign national launches, 10 miles from an able base. Wow. So even that, before it's even fully developed, it's fucking almost absolutely.

I'm Teresa and my experience in all entrepreneurs started a Shopify app. I know Shopify is already the first day. And the platform makes me no problem. I have many problems, but the platform is not one step away. I have the feeling that Shopify can only optimize their platform. Everything is super, simple, integrated and simple. And the time and the scale that I can't find out that I can't invest in it.

For all of them, in VaxTomb. Now, the cost of those tests on Shopify.de. It's just solving a different problem.

I don't think it's solving the most important problem. It is solving a real problem.

But it potentially, I mean, you're, you're accepting hypersonic, super important problem. Because what that does is at least buys you time. Because these other assets, you're here in a more, like, protracted war. But, yes, it's certainly not a chiral.

“Well, when you're talking about putting a payload on these systems, are you designing the payload?”

Or are you using stuff that's already in existence? So we have partners that we code as on payloads with right now. So the actual warhead is sort of designed specifically for our platform and manufactured elsewhere. Gotcha. That's, that's kind of one of the only portions. And there's a world where we end up producing that ourselves someday too.

The, the legislations and the regulations surrounding building warheads is horrible. Like, I can go build composites without going to the ATF or other people. Oh, man. Wow. I love these kind of conversations. Are you going to build any guns? Is it company?

Yeah. I'd love to. I'd love to. What would you build? What would I build? That's a good question.

“It's actually not when I think about that much.”

I don't think we're going to build guns. If I was going to build a gun, I would build a gun. The big problem right now is body armor. The funny ways to, to get through body armor. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not going to give a good answer.

Let me think through the problem a little bit. I think one, you've got to have a significant look.

Like, this is where Andrew's actually doing incredible work.

Like, I don't know if you've seen their eagle eye stuff.

It's pretty good.

He came and talked about it for the first time here.

That's great. Yeah. That's awesome.

“So I think, I think a lot of things to think about.”

It was awesome. The great fucking conversation. It's awesome. Talk about a host to dress to you. How could you, how could you identify the hostage?

Because I would speed up the, that would speed up the action tremendously. I think that the biggest, the biggest failure of these new guns systems start histories that you actually step too far forward.

You have too much technology and you pack too much into it. I don't know, like the hyper velocity project I'll work with. Anyway, there's, there's a lot of times that's been done. And so I, I would be, you've got to have some level of increase in intelligence.

Like your, your rifle or your optic has to be able to talk to drones. You've got to be able to talk to each other.

On the actual project outside.

I wouldn't get into auto aiming or any of that stuff. I would. I think. Yeah, I think there's a long ways you could push. I mean, like the X and five X and seven, I know they've changed the name,

but I actually don't hate the steel casing. Like steel is not that hard to manufacture. If it gets you that much more muzzle velocity, go for it. I do have an issue with the recoil, especially the steel casing.

Get you more muzzle velocity. Mm-hmm. I had no idea. Because you, you get higher chamber pressure. Which is super useful.

And so the, the new, the new combat rifle is actually partially steel, partially brass casing. Which rifle? Uh, X and five X and seven. I forget which of the two.

It was one and then changed to the other. I think to say X and five. Are you talking about the spear? Yeah. This is a spear.

Yep. You like it. I don't, I don't know enough about it. Um, my cousin's at West Point. He shot it.

He wasn't a huge fan. I don't know. I think one.

“I think they're having pretty better liability issues.”

And then two. I do think. I, I think it's too, too big of a round right now for. It's a, it's a force. Anyway, I do.

They have a six point eight. A five five six and a three hundred black out. Yeah. So I think, I think somewhere between. I.

Even this, this six point eight big. For a lot of stuff. And I shot the piss out of it. It seems pretty fucking reliable. And I'll, I'll trust you on it.

I'll trust you on it. Like, see, this is not, this is not my. Well, actually, I got a little something boring. But I don't know if it's going to be reliable enough for you. But.

Oh, fuck. It's been pretty reliable to me. So that's the. Six point eight MCX spear. From six hour.

I told him you recovered and they got all fucking fired up about it. So they wanted me to give this to you. And then.

“Yeah, my buddy Jason over at say he's a fucking huge fan of you.”

And then I got some buddies at silence or shop too. So they're going to walk. Put a suppressor up there for you and sig put this optic on it. So I don't know. Maybe we should go test you.

Let's go test reliable enough for you. I think here say says a lot. Let's go. I love this. Let's go test it.

That's six point eight. Six point eight. That's. Thank you so much. Yeah, man.

I really holy. How. And I do love that sig's getting into optics. Like that. Anyway.

Thank you. Yeah, man. I really appreciate it. And I. I'm sure I will take back everything I said after shooting.

And let's go make sure it is reliable. You want to take a break? Let's do it. Yeah, let's go fucking break it out. Cool.

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Plus, exclusive offers from our partners. You won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the vigilance elite newsletter right now. Well, what'd you think? Convert. Yeah, I had the 365 and I had the spirit of two of my favorite guns.

Obviously, I heard the ratler not the spear. Two of my favorite guns couldn't shoot the spear. I never had a spear and so you hear all these YouTube videos where people are complaining about the recoil. And I took that at face value, which I shouldn't have. It's not bad. I mean, recoil compared to a 223 is not noticeable. Um, and then it didn't jam a single time. So small samples have been.

Yeah, it's interesting how not everything on YouTube is true. Yeah, and I'm embarrassed for falling for us. Oh, dude. How do you like that rattleer? I love it. I can't, I didn't bring it with me to California.

“So I only had it for a few months back in Texas, but did you put a suppressor on it?”

I didn't. This is my first, I've never had a suppressor.

You've never had a suppressor?

Oh, silencer shops about to pop your cherry right on, man. But, uh, yeah, I want to get, I've been telling Jason, I'm like, dude. So I mean, one of these fucking rattlers. Because that's been out for a long time. I want it. Yeah, I want it for home defense.

But, uh, it's, it's good. I mean, it's, uh, I don't know if they're all chambered in 300 blackout mines. Shaper in 300 blackout. It's great. I mean, it folds so small. Because I got the short barrel without a suppressor.

Oh, nice. Like this big. Nice. I love that thing. Well, you're pretty damn good shooter.

Thank you. I appreciate it. You won. I went over 12 on the 44. Barely, man.

And plus, I'm a former seal and I see a contractor. So I should fucking be a should of really kicked your ass. But I didn't. And, uh, that was, it'd be taken easy. I'm just out of it.

But, uh, but dude, that was fun. Thanks for telling that. That's for doing that. I love that. That's press 22.

Cool. It's good. Cool. But, um, yeah. So we, I don't even. We're, we just got done wrapping up, uh, kind of talking about all the products that you're making.

And, um, but one thing we didn't talk about is, you know, you went from Boston to Austin, right? I did. And then Austin to. To Huntington.

Huntington Beach. Why did you move from Austin? Because Austin supposedly, like a pretty, Yeah. It's like the new tech hub, right?

Yeah. That's, that's what they say. Um, I moved from Boston to Austin, because I, I like Texas.

“I think Texas is a great business environment.”

I'm obviously from Texas. It's really wanted to company be to be there. It's probably different for different engineering domains. Like if you're writing software, if you're doing pure mechanical, I'm sure I'm sure it's actually quite good.

The issue is for a lot of our stuff for all the niche things, like niche RF, niche propulsion, niche gen C, for the real aerospace stuff. It's still LA. So we had like an applicant tracking software across like six

months, who's like 95 plus percent of our sort of interesting candidates were, we're all LA based. So then we're like, yeah, yeah, 95. It was crazy. And so, I mean, for three months, I wanted to validate the assumption.

So for three months, I'd fly to LA every Sunday. I'm flying outside of the night, fly back Sunday night, and take like 10 interviews.

And basically, got a good sample size.

And those three months of people saying like, yes, out a hundred percent join the company, but I'm not moving my family to Austin. Especially back then, keep in mind, we had like, very, very little funding.

We had no real products. It's already hard enough in the higher. And so if you're suddenly having to convince people to uproot their entire families and move across two time zones, it's tough.

So moved to LA. It was a hundred percent in the right decision. Like the company would not be in business today. If not for doing that, it was hard. It was hard to convince people to leave.

And obviously I miss taxes. But I mean, I'm just curious, you know,

I think it's past potential tax implications of California.

Do you think you'll move the business again? I may have to move myself. I mean, the thing is the business has several locations. So like we have folks in DC, we have folks in Austin, our next big factory won't be in California.

Okay. And so it's really just our engineering headquarters that's in Huntington. But I forget the exact tax, but the taxes on unrealized capital gains.

Right.

“And so I think there's this misconception about people who start companies that they have this like fall.”

Well, I see what you're saying. With all their money in it. When you look like when you achieve liquidity, maybe that's somewhat true. I see.

But for a majority of these companies, I mean, you think about boxing capital. You're raising capital. I mean, I'm making a very small salary. I've taken zero dollars off the table.

I don't have money to pay taxes. And so if I got hit with 5% tax on the the current value of mock, we don't have that liquidity. Like I would have to go to jail to pay that money. Gotcha.

So no, I mean, I would have no choice, but to spend 50+% of my time elsewhere. And then there are two concerning things that they're also trying to do. One is where your tax based on days spent in California. That's already the way a lot of California taxes work.

“So even if I only spent a month running my company in California,”

I would still owe 112th my tax in California, which if it's on, it's on your kind of high level, like unrealized capital gains. That's massive. Specifically for who's starting companies.

And then the other crazy thing is they're talking about doing it based on boating share and not based on ownership. What does that mean? So like the mean.

And a lot of companies, you basically have people who own certain share classes

that allow them to vote more than they actually own. So there's a separation between how much control you have over the company, versus how much ownership you have over the company. Some box one of these companies where I do control the company, but I own at this point, like not that much of the company.

Well, I get tax based on the control I have over the company, not based on my actual worth, which is crazy. What? That's the talking about it. I don't think any of this is going to pass because it would literally shut down

the California economy. Um, but it would kill anyone trying to do stuff like I'm doing. I mean, I didn't lose like a trillion dollars of Silicon Valley in like a week. Crazy. Crazy.

It's fucking wild, man. And it's theirs. I mean, it's theirs to fuck up, right? Because you've got great talent. Like there's a reason I had to move out there.

There's a reason Silicon Valley still Silicon Valley. It's an excellent place to to build a company. But you you pass something like that once and it's done. And it's not, it's not like I'm opposed to being taxed. But I create like, I'll say this and a bunch of people with this agree with me.

Like I actually do think that generally speaking billionaire should pay more taxes. Not tax rate. Not tax rate. There's something that happens, which is that you can get leverage based on your equity. So at a certain point, not not at my point, but at a certain point,

you can take out a loan against your equity and never pay taxes on the loan.

And this is how this is how people get around mass amounts of taxes. Sure when I sell shares all over, x% tax, but I never actually sell shares. I take out a loan against the shares and then provided the business keeps going up and value. I just take out new loans to pay that off against my equity. And so it's this crazy mechanism people use to get around taxes, which is I do think it's broken.

Like I think our our tax code should be should be massively simplified to avoid stuff like that. But the way to fix it is to fix that problem. The way to fix it is not to impose this giant other thing that doesn't fix that problem. But creates this whole different problem, which is it like people. I mean, people can't go and get liquidity on this equity.

Like it's just physically impossible to know. It should damn. What are you worried about our currency? The dollar. I'd say so.

I'd say so.

“Yeah, look, I think a large portion of US way of life is that we live in a surplus.”

Right, we'll go and spend $7 trillion a year and only bring in $4.9 trillion a year in taxes. And the only way you can you can afford to do that is if there's. Foreign or if there's demand generally speaking for your debt, right? And so that's where massively over spending, which is broken. Obviously, if you have an imbalance budget for too long.

That compounds and bad things happen, but generally speaking if people want your debt. And if your economy is growing faster than your debt is, then it's not an issue. The way this happens is you, anyway, you sell bonds. So you keep going. No, it's good.

I'm trying to think about how to break down the problem. So we run. We sell fewer goods than we bring it, right?

We're giving me $100 worth of goods. And then maybe I'm giving you $50 goods and you're giving me $50 back.

You run basically an imbalance trade.

And so because of that, there's massive basically excess dollars. And there's demand for these dollars. And so what the US government will do is it will actually go and buy. That dollars back an issue debt. Where is this all bond is, obviously, right?

I'll buy the $100. And then over time, I'll pay it back with interest. And then at the end, I'll pay back the full amount. And so foreign countries have trillions of dollars of US treasuries.

“And that's how there are a bunch of different ways that the dollar became basically the global reserve currency.”

But it is very structurally important for a number of different reasons that other countries trade in dollars. So like one is it actually gives you the ability to freeze people's funds. And to it directly actually ties to geopolitical power. And this is actually one of the things that's weakening is when the Ukraine war kicked off. We started freezing.

We started freezing assets that other countries help. Right?

And so that's obviously an incredible power as a country.

What happened when we did that is that other countries got uncomfortable with the ability of the US to do that. We weaponized our-- We weaponized it. Which is why you are the global reserve currency. And the idea of a global reserve currency is not a new thing.

Like Roman Empire, Dutch Empire, British Empire. There's like a very famous trend of basically becoming the global currency.

“And that's actually one of the best ways to assess if you're living in an era where an empire is in power.”

But what tends to happen over history is one, if the money printing machine becomes closely tied to the people making the decisions that are elected. There's incentive to run basically-- There's incentive to push that. If I'm running for election and I'm printing money to make your life better,

usually indirectly, that's a good thing and I'm going to get elected. And this starts to tie into populism of sort of short-term thinking with elected officials, who are structurally incentivized to be able to do that. Now, fortunately, those powers are held separately in the US, which is helped for a while, but they're starting to be pressures between them, which is quite concerning.

But what happened for these previous empires is you suddenly just have an incentive. If I'm only in power for 10 years, these macroeconomic effects take decades to play out typically. These have been playing out since we dropped the gold standard. This era has started. And at this point, our debt is so huge.

We're paying more on interest on our debt than we are on national security. So like the amount of bonds we're issuing and the amount of debt we owe people. It's more than we pay on national security, and then our debt is also growing quicker than our economy. And so if your debt's growing quicker than your economy, the problem-- This is-- it's obviously very simple things I'm saying, which you'd think would make it simple outcomes to fix,

but it gets nuanced pretty quick. But if your debt is growing quicker than your economy, and if you're running an imbalance budget where you're taking on new debt to pay for your debt, you get into this debt spend cycle where you can't pay it off. Now, the thing that makes that worse is then if suddenly kind of two things happen,

one is if you weaponize your debt to two grade of a degree. I don't know if we did that or not in Ukraine. Like I'm not informed on this topic enough to say. But we did weaponize our debt, and because of that, other countries started selling our debt. Well, once that starts, once the demand for your bonds goes down,

“you have to raise basically interest rates on those bonds to get that same demand.”

So your debt becomes more expensive. And so the debt you're using to pay for your debt becomes more expensive. Well, that happens, you're losing more confidence, so you're having to take on more debt to pay for that debt. And so I forget the exact number, but I think the top five biggest foreign US debt holders

have sold something like $400 billion in debt in the last 18 months.

And they're trading it for gold. And that's like a very, very clear thing. You can point to getting off the US dollar as the global reserve currency. People get dims, they hear pretty quick. I think this is not in the same camp of problems as the top one problem.

But fiscal responsibility is something we have to take incredibly seriously, because what's happening is we're getting ourselves into a debt like spend cycle. Like $38 trillion in debt. It means like on average, it's something stupid like 113,000 dollars of debt per person in the country that our government owes elsewhere.

And so then you just start looking interest payments on that debt. And talking about thousands of a person, thousands of dollars per person per year for this interest. And so US growth has largely been built on this debt. You're basically borrowing a denser future. And that's a great instrument.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have debt, like financial systems exist for a reason.

Where there are all these foreign powers that hold US debt, that if they decide to sell,

“can create basically a run cycle on debt where the value instantly drops.”

And so then to anyway. And it's kind of a pension maneuver, because we also have, we have an incentive right now to devalue the dollar. So I'm going way off.

I'm paying attention. So there's actually. One of the things Trump kind of ran on, that I do actually generally speaking agree with, is that if we want to rebuild American manufacturing capability,

we have to devalue the dollar. And there are a bunch of different ways to do that. But if you and I are trading and my dollar is more valuable, then your your currency euro or anything else, trade will generally go to you. Right?

And US domestic businesses will struggle to compete. And so if you go and devalue the dollar, US businesses can do better. Now the issue is that has to be combined with actual economic growth. So if you start devaluing the dollar while you're not growing economically,

you're basically reaping the poor effects of hyperinflation.

Without economic stimulus. And so that's where you get into what's called stagflation, which is one of the worst sort of worst things that can happen to an economy, is your economy is not growing. Because typically inflation is tied to economic growth.

If our economy is not growing at the same time, that all these foreign countries start mass selling debt. And as some of our allies, like Japan's the biggest holder of US debt, and they've started selling for different reasons.

Obviously China is selling a ton of US debt. But this can accelerate very, very quickly, where you get basically the equivalent of a bank run on US debt. And if the dollar as the global reserve currency collapses, it spells sort of massive doom for our economy.

And so it's just something we need to be looking out for. It's one of the big reasons doge existed. They made the biggest possible push they could balance the budget. It kind of ran into a political wall because, of course, if you're getting elected, you're not incentivized to go to value the dollar.

You're not incentivized to stop the money printing machine. And so one of the structural issues when you run into short-sighted thinking, which right now is a ton of politics, right? Because people are incentivized to think on four to six year timelines. There's no one is actually incentivized to go and fix the root of this problem.

So anyway, that's one of the things that I just think is really, really important to think about. One like our stock market growth, if you actually go and separate out the devaluation of the dollar, is not incredibly impressive. Anyway, this is not my domain. I'm probably making myself sound like an idiot.

But I do think it's something we need to be taking.

I've never heard of broken down like that before.

I think you're doing great. Great. Thank you. Yeah. What do you think about bricks?

I think it's scary.

“I think fortunately right now, there's not a great other option.”

Like you see a push towards decentralization. Instead of a general push towards you on or other things. And that is because the dollar is still pretty singular in this value. But I think what we can start to expect is trade on other currencies to increase pretty radically. I worry less about it than I do about the US debt problem.

And they're tied. They're tied. But the real scary thing starts real scary things start to happen when the cost of our budget imbalance gets more expensive. You know, one thing you said that I was just not clicking in my head is the devaluing the dollar should bring in more business. I don't understand the correlation there.

More foreign business. More foreign business. Why would why would a devalued dollar bring in more business. So if you're trying to buy more. Because your stuff is cheaper on foreign markets.

So if you're trying to achieve wouldn't prices just go up in the US they do. So in the US prices go up. And this is why it's a really tough thing to talk about. And in the US prices go up in foreign markets, US goods are cheaper. It's a similar, it's a similar effect to tariffs.

“It's a different way to achieve what you do tariffs, right?”

And this is on production for other countries. Tariffs are obviously production for domestic markets. They're both instruments to achieve the same thing.

Which is basically you're making, you're making things more expensive in the US.

You're actually making US labor cheaper. But because of that, there's more demand for your goods. So you start producing more. And so there's no free lunch and economics, right? And so there's advantages and disadvantages to all of these different things.

there are advantages to a very strong dollar into a lot of debt.

Because you can live sort of beyond your means.

“And that's what we've been doing for a while.”

Now if you truly want to stimulate the economy, if you really, really, really want to get back to a trade surplus, your goods have to get cheaper. And there are kind of two ways to make your goods cheaper. You can either innovate or you can devalue the dollar or two tariffs or other things.

You can use economic levers or you can use innovation. I'm obviously a much bigger fan of the former. But the US has been living so far on the right side of that for so long. And our economy hasn't kept up. And again, all you're doing with this debt is sort of borrowing against your future in some way.

And what happens if debt starts to compound is the price of new debt goes up significantly. So if there's less demand for the bonds,

you have to raise the price on the bonds.

And suddenly it comes significantly more expensive. And the reason that's scary is because we're nowhere close to a balance budget. And in many ways, for good reason, I won't say the US shouldn't have ever taken this approach. You just can't push it too far.

And then if you are going to push it, you're playing with fire. If you are going to push it that far, you better have economic growth. And so the real scary thing that happens here is if we're counting on all of this economic growth, specifically because of AI and AI bubble bursts, right when the rest of this is happening.

Right when you go and weaponize the dollar. So there's less demand for the dollar. The US treasuries are not seen as a stable of a holding. Right when a lot of our allies, for a number of different reasons, are pushing away from globalization and away from reliance on the US.

That's one of the major reasons people are selling is lack of trust. And in the US is an institution, both geopolitically and just in terms of the actual general function of our economy. And so if you get lack of confidence in the dollar while you're trying to run this playbook, which we very much are right now,

really, really bad things happen. And you run into just spiraling massively inflationary cycles. And that's how empires have failed historically. Like this is a very well-studied thing.

I think the solution is one, you've got to start animating.

Like you do just have to grow the economy. And you have to stay away from, you have to stay away from incredibly negative, high-psychle fueled boom bus cycles. Two, you have to reinforce,

“you have to reinforce trust in the US government, right?”

Like you, if you're battling the rest of this, you can't have people selling because they don't trust us to be good stewards of the world. I mean, I don't know how the hell we re-establish that. Yes, it's going to be a long path, I think.

I really, how do you think we re-establish trust? I think people want to trust the US. Like we are a democratic capitalist society facing an authoritarian in many ways communist society. Like all things being equal, the world will choose the US every single time.

I think one, anyway, I like to avoid talking about things that I'm not an expert in. If it's me though, I think one, you have to bring allies closer, which is different than not expecting them to pay their fair share. And that's like very difficult to strike the balance on.

But you, you have to be seen as this reliable force. Europe does need to increase defense spending. Like NATO absolutely needs to increase defense spending. But you, you can't be doing things. Yeah, you, you can't be doing things that are road trust

and us to act rationally.

“And then you, you have to, you have to take a tariff policy”

that is sort of slow and deliberate. But I do think we need tariffs. I do think we need to devalue the dollar. If we ever want to be a manufacturing superpower, we just have to reach that spot.

You need, you need to reinforce belief that the dollar will continue its an institution. You need to balance the debt. You need to find ways to, to, to, to cut spending into to increase.

Um, tax revenues. No, I, again, I think the tax. I'm, I'm struggling to communicate well. I think we have a lot of bad policy. And I think we have a lot of bad regulation.

And so, uh, something that started happening is you roll, you roll all of these policies into these sort of super bills. Or if you're voting on something, you can't vote on an issue. It's an isolation. Yeah.

And so because of that, we end up as this giant averaging function

There's, there's actually this structural incentive for bureaucracies to create complexity.

So we see this all the time and the defense industry. If you are a defense prime, whose main vote is being able to interface with the government, making the government more difficult to interface with increases your vote. And then similarly, if you're, someone trying to avoid, avoid taxes, creating complexities in tax law is actually a huge advantage

because you can go and find these different loopholes. And I think a lot of things are significantly more complex than they need to be.

“Um, be, I mean, you, you, you, you have to cut spending to, to start.”

What is it that would create a, a, a, I bust? An AI bust. It's, all the cycles look the same. That he's moving so fucking fast.

Yeah, the cause of of a bust is always so much more difficult to tell.

I think, I think one of the hyper scalars reaching like real liquidity problems. What would cause it? I think. Certainly Taiwan falling would cause it or coming into jeopardy would, would cause it. I think big corporate companies tightening their belt because right now we're in a growth cycle. And so if you're, if you're a company x, if you're a some tech company, let's say your sales force.

Or your investors right now are still generally pushing you to increase innovation instead of cost spending. And so you go through these cycles where like investors care about different things. And right now, I would argue the adoption of these AI systems by a lot of these big corporations are as fueled by perception. Or as fueled by wanting investors to think that you're investing in AI as much or more so than the actual capability of the AI itself. Gotcha. Has. And so if investors start thinking, if investors, anyway, I don't know, it's the answer.

But there are a bunch of different things that I think cause it be they were close. I don't think so. I think we, we have a few months at least. I think the, I think the work x AI is doing, for instance, is like creating a lot more confidence. As long as people think the tech is getting better.

“Because that's what everyone's betting on. Like the margins right now suck, but everyone's betting on for for any different number of reasons that the margins will suddenly radically improve.”

And that these companies will start making good money. Someone like Elon saying, hey, we're going to go spend x hundreds of billions of dollars on this new approach on on. Hyperscaling satellites in space. Like that actually gives people confidence that there is the next tech wave that will decrease those dollars. But if people start deciding that it is just super commoditized, that's when the cracks start to emerge. It's so impossible to tell where in the stack the cracks will emerge.

Like it could be in, it could be in video. Anyway, it could be in video missing earnings. It could be one of the hyperscalers having liquidity problems. It could be at the top of the stack. These companies choosing to adopt AI less. But I think I think there's still room. But that's not necessarily a good thing. If you're on a train, hardling it a barrier.

It's not necessarily the most responsible thing to like hope the train runs further. Because we do continue to spend money on something that I don't know. We'll see, I could very much be wrong on the transformer architecture.

It's interesting. I mean, I've just never heard of anybody talking about it like that.

“It's good stuff. Do you have any thoughts on social decay in the country?”

I mean, we kind of talked a little bit about it. You know, the beginning was social media. As a question, you said, who's about Gen Z and you said get off social? I think so. Yeah, I think it's a real problem.

I think one just the rise of short-form content is just so bad for development of like true thought. What about politics? I think it's a single party system. I don't think an intentionally orchestrated single party system, but I think in many ways the emergent effect is that. What do you think it is?

I kind of described why do you think we're at a single party system? I think that there are...

I think it actually starts at the bottom.

“I think people don't spend as much time thinking about first principles policy as they do about personality.”

I think I am a fan of a two-party system, but I do think a two-party system makes it really tough because you have two options at the end of the day. And so it's really, really hard to avoid problems just becoming massively bucketed. And so it's really hard to go item by. I don't have like clear conversation about any given item instead of just right or left. I think...

I mean, you brought up Epstein earlier. I mean, I do think that the structural circles of both parties at the top actually just massively converge at some point.

“I think we're seeing that. I think... I think... look, I mean, both sides spend equal opportunity to keep that stuff from being released.”

I mean, I think you're right.

You know, I mean, my thoughts are... I mean, I think one major problem that people don't realize is these fuckers in DC never go home.

They never go back to their district. They hang out at the same fucking parties. They go to the same restaurants. They go to the same clubs. They work together. You know, because they never go home to be with their constituents, they all become friends. And you think, well, that's not a bad thing. Well, it is kind of a bad thing. Because when you become friends with all the other fucking politicians, then you won't call each other out on their bullshit because you're friends at the end of the day.

And then they learn your secrets, you learn their secrets. You know what I mean? And then it becomes, oh, that one was below the belt a little bit. Because we don't want you to fucking say what I'm doing. You know what I mean? And one of the terrifying... Sorry to cut you off. And so what happens is I hadn't hidden a gender's corruption in all that because these fuckers won't call each other out because they're all buddies. Well, and so it does, in your saying, and I agree with you. It's not necessarily agree with you somewhat. It's not necessarily orchestrated at the top.

I think the top is orchestrated by the DNC and the RNC and who the fuck knows how much higher it goes. But maybe it's Epstein. You know what I mean? But I mean at the lower level Congress, you know, the Senate, you know, these fucking bureaucrats, like they're all buddies. You know what I mean? They're all buddies, generals, admirals. And I don't even want to fucking call each other out on their bullshit because they're all fucking friends.

“You know, and I think it's pretty much that fucking simple. You know what the lower levels and then at the upper levels?”

I mean, you were talking about, I can't remember how you worded it, but we were talking about, kind of extreme views and people lose, would you first principles?

And but I mean, it's almost like nowadays, I mean, it'll be interesting to see if somebody came in and actually tried to unify. But, you know, it'd be really hard to do what the way the fucking media is. And it's they will lose views. And to other, so they have to tribalize. They have to. The country. They have to. And then because then it's just fucking two teams. You know what I mean? And then, and so it's, it's two, two other big things that I worry about on that note, because I think, I think, I think being friends, I think, like there's, there's a lot there. I think one, I worry a lot about is like these, these blackmail loops that you got to know exist.

Like that's, that's, that's a lot of, I think, covering up scenes stuff up is like, if, if everyone's in a system where one person sees someone else do something bad, that person courses that person into doing something bad, that person courses that person into doing something bad. And no one's actually doing it for the right reasons. Everyone's doing it to make a career, right? Everyone's career politicians. You get trapped in these, like, ossified structures of blackmail that I think you got to know exist. Unfortunately, it is like horrible blackmail level stuff, like the Epstein stuff, like you can't even imagine how much people up at the top or blackmailing each other over stuff like that. But it's also smaller stuff, which is the friend stuff you're describing of like, hey, I, I watched you push this through if you're constituents found out you pushed this through for this favor, you did for this person.

And so there's this spider web of connections of friendships and of coercion that make them, like, it just becomes super, super difficult to move.

And wealth isn't a bad thing whatsoever, but as, as people already in power become the deciding factor of who gets in power, you get this self-fulfilling, super high center of mass.

Do you think that could go away? I just had a conversation about this, a very quick conversation about this with Rokana, and we're talking about the Epstein stuff, but this, this subject came up, and, you know, people don't want to call out their donors. You know, I didn't, I can, I mean, I don't know who couldn't understand that fucking socks, but, I mean, the media reports at the podcast industry is basically what determined the last election, you know, and, and,

Trump participated, come all I didn't, she went on like, what, one fucking podcast, you know.

Shots that have come, did it all up? Yeah, I mean, so it's, it's people, whatever, people, and it made a lot of people like me look one side it, but I could fucking get anybody on the other side. Yeah, we invited her, said she was, she did not say she was coming, but it was looking very promising, and then, and then nothing, but what, so I guess what I'm saying is the internet, and in my opinion, seems to maybe have, even to the playing field, a little bit, you know, because the numbers of this fucking crush, any of those mainstream outlets now, it destroys it, they hate it.

“And I'm not that compared to somebody like fucking Rogan, you know what I mean?”

Like, you know, right, his numbers are probably bigger than all of them put together. Couldn't agree more, and that's why the work you'll do is so insanely important, and that's, but they want the fucking money from the donors, you know, because who knows where the fuck that all winds up going, I don't know, but I don't know. No, I mean, looking just about everybody up, there's a piece of shit, he asked me, but the democratization of information is the best thing to fix this. Now, the issue with that is, the social media companies, and we, we're on the verge of this happening really, really badly, if not for Elon buying X.

Now, obviously, Elon's also a guy, Elon also has his own incentives, and so I'm not saying you're, you're sort of out of the problem, but the issue is you do still have, even though the information's democratized, you do still have people at the top who can pull the strings, if you're a ship and other things. 20, 20. Yeah, and so you still, the orchestration just looks different, that's almost harder to decipher, because you can't tell if you're being pushed with your algorithms and the thinking of a certain way and being shown in certain things.

You can't tell if a certain video that should have gotten 10 million views got dialed back and only got 200,000 views, right? And so,

“one, I think, for, for guys like y'all, getting as close as you can to actually being truly democratized and escaping that it's super, super important.”

I think, too, like, there is a place for regulation and all of this, like Teddy Roosevelt's probably, one of my favorites, not my favorite presidents, because he was an interesting dude. He was a conservative who existed at a time when technology was changing, like crazy. Like, if you go and read, like, the jungle is like probably the best book that highlights this, but you go and read, humanity discovered these new technologies. We had an industrial revolution and suddenly corporations are sort of run a mock in America.

Teddy Roosevelt was a conservative, but he wasn't willing to go toe to toe with the powers that be, and he wasn't willing to pass regulation to go and bust this stuff up. Like he, he did some stuff that is a conservative was actually pretty, pretty wild. Like he actually wasn't busted up strikes. He started the FDA, he started the National Park Services.

“And so I think there is a, that is the job of the government in some ways to, to keep, keep things in check, but you, you got to believe that no regulation is going to be passed on the way on the way we throttle content.”

And so, yeah, the, the traditional mainstream media is certainly on its way out. And I do think this is a great trend towards democratization of content, but we also have to be incredibly purposeful all the way at the top with regulation all the way at the bottom with taking what you see on the internet seriously, not ripping sig for something that you've never actually shot.

Right, and that, that makes y'all's job all the more important because suddenly there's so much other content. Now, the thing that content won't be able to replicate is a voice of truth.

But that again creates centralization. And so it's just a ton of trust that has to be placed as society on people like you who will go and have people from all walks of life on this show and have good conversations with them about about ideas and be willing to, to have productive debate.

“Like that is the way we cut through this.”

But we need to watch out. We need to watch out for the algorithms. We need to watch out for, for, for, do the amount of AI content entering the internet. We need to watch out for the effect bots can have on algorithms. Like you go into play a bunch of bots to get a video watched because these are all positive feedback loops. Like if the video gets watched a ton, it's likely to get watched more.

And so, if, if a video is getting watched a ton, people can use bots to, to augment the amount of, the amount of, of that information that goes out in the world and then similarly.

I mean, elements are really good at this point. The ability to spin up elements to just flood comment sections. Because that's the way this media is, is reviewed by people. You go and watch the video, but you actually form most of your takes scrolling the content or the comments. And so, if 90% of the comments are like CCP bots ripping people. Um, not maybe that's just coped for me because I don't know how my feelings hurt by bad comments and all say they're AI or what, whatever, I'm kidding. But the, the comment section is also something to look out for.

Because even for you, for your, your watchers like, they watch your video as they're watching your video, they're scrolling the comments talking about things and having opinions formed. And so, this is, is in many ways like a new domain of warfare and this new space of information. Uh, what I was getting out with Taiwan. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so, and there's, it's so hard to regulate. Like, it's so insanely, insanely hard to go and regulate the amount of bots that are actually in these, and these circles.

And then there's no real major structural incentive for tech companies to go and regulate this because you don't get that much out of it. And it's incredibly expensive and the ways you actually do this are not good for the user. Like, like, anyway, we don't have to go into it, but it's, it's a, it's a really, really tough problem to solve. Um, I'm super, super grateful for, for, for guys like you who, who do stuff like this because I completely agree with you. If not, if not for, if not for democratization of information in the last election, we wouldn't have known what the hell was going on.

I mean, you, you, you, you think about Trump getting shot like the, the major media outlets reported loud sound heard for like hours after that. You've literally got a former president shot on stage and the media is like saying it completely different narrative. Yeah. And this goes both ways. Um, so I'm, I'm, I'm not saying it's just a left issue or just a right issue. It's just something we need to take incredibly seriously because a democracy does not work if people do not know what the issues are.

“Scary, fucking times. Do you take, how do you deal with corporate espionage?”

I mean, that's big and Silicon Valley. I don't know if it's big where you're, I would imagine that it's because, because Paul meres down there, right? A lot of the, uh, I don't know how far you are from elsewhere. It has to be there. If you're there, it has to be there. And I mean, and it's, it's, I mean, it runs rampant. You know, I've, I've asked, I was, I was talking to one of the guests. I won't mention his name. He's a, he's a tech dude.

And I asked him, you know, because I'm always worried because I, and I told him, hey, you know, I've been oversees all over the place.

One of the things this Chinese do is they set up brothels all over the fucking place. And then they get these state department guys, fucking agency, whoever they go in there and they fall in love with some fucking Chinese hooker and then, yeah. And so if that's happening over there, and I know damn well, it's happening, and so it can valley where you're at an Austin, anybody that's doing something innovative, especially somebody that's interested in China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine.

“And then I interviewed this woman, Masha Booker, have you heard of her?”

Holy shit, you didn't take an investment from her, did you? Good man. Dude, so I talked to another guy, and he was talking about how this woman comes in and the clothes eventually slip off.

And so I interviewed her, and I knew I could tell, you know, obviously I could tell was bullshit because we never fucking release the interview.

I just considered the entire fucking thing to be a lie. We found one little thing about her and the Epstein files. So we are not in the Epstein files. I'm sorry, in an article that she was, she had to do something with his PR. You know, to me, totally fucking dismissed. It got really uncomfortable. Blue Jeremy, my producer up, non-stop. I don't want that in there. Jeremy's telling me she doesn't want it in there. We could still release it. I'm like, no, it's a fucking horrible interview.

Like the only decent part in it that's interesting is the Epstein shit. And then there's one other company that she's talking about fucking freezing people. And you wake up a thousand years later, some shit, but so that was kind of wild. It's like, "Dough, that's not in there. We're definitely not fucking putting it out." It was like the whole thing's probably fucking lie, so we didn't put it out.

And then what three million pages get released in our fucking name is in there, like, all over the place, all over the place.

She and Jill, what's that? Is she and Jill? I don't think she's in jail, but she's going to go to Jill. Sorry, I'm taking, I took the wrong turn there. She should. She should. A lot of people should. And then on the corporate aspect. Well, yeah. So that's what I, yeah. You got thoughts on this.

That's it. Oh, you guys know who this one is.

“You have to. I mean, you have to be so hyper vigilant as a founder as anyone, right?”

Are they, though? I mean, this is part of when I was talking about when you were looking for maybe you weren't looking. When you were at MIT, and you had VC firms and investors coming up to you, that's what I was getting out of. Are you nervous to that make you nervous? Because of corporate espionage and shit like that. People take advantage of you. You're a young guy. You don't have a lot of experience.

You're obviously extremely fucking intelligent, but I don't know how, I don't know, you know, if you pick up on things like that. Yeah, that young and the age. I thought I would think a lot of people don't. That only comes with experience. I'm scared. I mean, I think there are a few different risk fronts. One is actually having, like, your decision making is a CEO influenced, right?

And I feel good there. Like, I'm, I'm squarely in charge of the company.

Like, I have deeply trust investors. We work together to, to make decisions, but ultimately it is my decision.

“And I'm very closely curated that group. I think the next is basically investor data rights, right?”

Because the issue is, all these VC's, it's not their money, it's their all piece money. And in many cases, it's their all piece money. And so you've got, like, five levels of money coming down the chain. So you've got to be super tight with, with IP and data rights with, with your investors and share what, what you need to share for the sake of basically investor transparency. But there's no reason we should be sending like the Viper CAD, right? And then, as a company, this work, it's really, really hard.

And we have a team that works on this. Obviously, so we have a cybersecurity team. We have physical security. We run really extensive background checks on anyone that the onsites at the company. The issue is, it can't be a maximization. So like, let's say I wanted to sit here and say, we're going to maximize our ability to avoid corporate espionage. You would lock down all your servers, everything would be, like, this is what Scott works does.

Like, a lot of Scott works is literally painted paper, because they're afraid of having their stuff act. Well, that's fucking weird. I just had this fucking conversation with Nick with Nick, see the wrong. And I said, do you think, we'll hit a point with AI and, you know, everybody's fear of quantum computing and all this other shit.

“I mean, are we going to go back to face to face, pen and paper, stored in a fucking vault?”

Because of all the shit, you know what I mean, that people text each other, photo, all everything, like just personal stuff. Then we get into, you know, national secrets, national security secrets, shit like that. I mean, that's a fucking online. It can be hacked. It seems like it might, these shit already is gone back to that a little bit. I don't think we, it's an optimization. So it's somewhere in the middle. You can't completely do that.

So like, that's one of the reasons if you read the Scott works book, they talk about that, actually leading to the collapse of innovation as Scott works. When it takes 18 months to hire someone, because you're coming through everything they've ever done, right? And where you can't use the best designs offer because you're on pen and paper. And so like at the end of the job, you do your job is to ship products. If we're shipping products at 1% the rate of China, that's we're going to lose regardless.

And unfortunately, you just can't be maximist about it because you stop operating as a business. There are a few things that help a lot.

“The biggest being moving quickly, right? Like, if my design changes every three months, well, you can have the design from three months ago.”

My engineers are sitting there working on a design that's 10 times better than that.

So that's, that's one. The second, people talk a lot about people talk a lot about basically centralizing data and warfighting.

That's, that's really, really important, but it also creates risk risk factors. And so architecting your products such that like 200 vipers can't be hacked out of the air at any given time is obviously very, very important to do. Supply chance security is something that people don't talk nearly enough about.

“No, no company on earth operates all the way up to their mind across everything they do. You can't do it, right?”

So like a deeply vertically integrated company manufacturers, let's say 50% of the parts that go into their platform.

And this could be iPhones, this could be cars, this could be Vipers, this could be other aircraft, because you can't afford to. But then even those components you're building have components that come from elsewhere and those components come from elsewhere. And so I worry a little bit about information leakage. I worry more about the supply chain perspective, because on the information side, if you're moving quickly enough, if you're innovating, you're creating natural fortification against that.

“And that's sort of your job is to just move at such a pace that if someone gets that they're getting information that's already obsolete, and that's the best defense you can have.”

Especially when it is a competitive environment. Like if it's just you building it, go insane, listen up. Like hire five people, write everything on pen and paper, and develop a product over 20 years.

But when you're in a literal arms race against China, you can't do that. And so find the balance of what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. And then move as quickly as possible so that if information gets out, then you've already moved past it, that the supply chain side. And then anything as relates to your software is what gets really, really, really scary. Like if, if I'm listening. We saw, I mean we saw, we saw these rallies do this quite effectively with the pages. Right. And so that type of warfare goes both ways. And that should keep us all up and night. Right. Like the fuses you put in your aircraft. Like if.

Yeah, I would say we're very vertical integrated as a company. Like of course we're new. So it's not like I've had 10 years to work on all this stuff. But that is if there's one thing mock does it is vertical integration. But even even us, I mean, as you look at the branching structure on this supply chain, you've got literally thousands of factories down the supply chain. And again, our our job is countries to ship things. So you can't sit with your hands behind your back afraid, right, to ship products. But at the same time, you you do have to you do have to to stay wary of like what it would mean for literally one of those factories to get compromised.

It's a lot to think about. Yeah, talk about Neo feudalism. Yeah, what is it? So it's a kind of newly emerging term. I'm I'm glad you brought it up. I. It's the idea of mentorship instead of ownership. And that sort of progressing towards this limits and so I'll get more specific, but generally speaking. Like feudalism, this is idea that you don't owe your land on your land, right, like you're a surf that works, that pays rent and/or gives a portion of your food to work someone else's own land. Through so many different means, that is the way a lot of our economy functions today. I mean take take like planned obsolescence, right, so are you familiar with this? No.

It's basically like companies these days specifically engineered their products to break and they're given time. Okay. So like the iPhone has planned obsolescence for like after three years, it's not going to be a useful good. John dear, this is a great example. Like the whole right to repair, like fight of like is it is a farmer allowed to maintenance his own tractor or will John dear specifically engineer things such that you can't repair the thing.

Right, and so I mean even even you look at you look at cars like I think it's very, very likely that Tesla is doing most of their revenue not selling cars to people that they they own but selling services and cyber caps right you literally look at home ownership like my generation is not going to be able to afford to buy homes like if you if you track the actual relative amount of annual income versus home price.

“Everyone rents everything they have and there's something that's been talked about for a while is there's several people have said it but basically like in the future you you will own nothing and be happy about it.”

Yeah, and there's a structural reason companies do this it's a great way to maximize earnings right like if you're if you're apple you engineer a phone to not last and suddenly someone's buying a phone every three years.

And and when it gets really really bad is when text starts to plateau and people have no other reason to buy the new good then you really almost have to do this to stay in business.

And then the companies that adopt this have to do what I'm not saying are you saying they have to if these companies want to stay in business. And a competitive market in many cases they have to do planned obsolescence but if the if if tech flat toes then what's the incentive to fucking buy a new one because it breaks. So like your iPhone does your iPhone worked that differently than it did like five years ago. No, so why did you buy new iPhones.

“That's the case on a lot of different things. I mean our trucks I guess you you have a cool for truck because it hasn't broken because it's been around for so long, but I have four truck I'm 105,000 miles on it.”

I would love to drive that to 300,400,000 miles is breaking down and I'm going to have to buy new one it's not a better truck.

It's just planned obsolescence and and so a lot of what Silicon Valley does nowadays is not innovate on technology to innovate on business model. And this is like a relatively new thing that's happened in the last few decades is people don't walk into a pitch meeting talking about the the great new product they're bringing they're talking about the new way of taking existing resources and distributing them differently. And they're they're good effects to this like hoover's a great company, but who probably didn't really build anything it was a business practice of how to share resources more.

And the effect of that is all of the focus right now is on how you extract more dollars from a consumer.

“Not necessarily how you provide a consumer a better good in many cases.”

And so there's I mean, there's a very very clear effect between ownership and societal stability like if you don't own anything in your society you don't have that much of an alignment incentive.

To fight and when I say you I'm I'm talking like obviously me as a CEO of a company I will fucking promise you I'll never do planned obsolescence right like I would like to think that regardless of how much you own this country you're going to care about the country just as much. But when you look at the average of hundreds of millions of people of all the corporations in the US. The incentive of the business is is planned obsolescence is the incentive of the business has service structures. And then the incentive at the low end becomes the companies that that do this can actually innovate better because they're getting more money.

And so the companies that try to build things to last go out of business while the companies that are doing planned obsolescence have more money to pump into research and other things. And I'm not saying it's an inherently bad thing again. I love capitalism, but it is just something that is happening that we need to talk about. That is that very very few people specifically my generation actually owned that much like I rent my music. I rent I rent my apartment. I don't rent my truck, but the trucks I buy I like are only good for let's say 150,000 miles.

And that's that's terrifying because then you get that and that's where the new feudalism emerges is you get trapped in these loops like you are a surf borrowing all the time. And you get people who end up living paycheck to paycheck never able to get ahead because instead of buying something and passing it down to your kids or at least having it for several decades you're buying something so that you can buy it again at a month. And how do you think we get out of this? We're just going to be, it's going to be your generation that fixes it.

Because everybody else said you're fucking comfortable. I think if we're going to be in a position to fix it we've got to get started right now.

Like I would love to think it's my generation that's going to fix it. But the unfortunate thing is in two or three decades. I worry that these structures are going to be so reinforced. Right, like let's talk AI. Like, and this is something like from my generation in the last three or four years we've seen this hockey stick in AI growth.

It's actually really, really difficult from my generation to bank on a career of any sort. By the time we're 40, 50, 60 when we're actually in positions doing anything about it. And so maybe it's on my generation to be ring the alarm bells. And I'm not complaining.

My generation has had an incredible easy time, right?

Like I'm not complaining. There's there's none of that. But I'm just saying like I do think it's happening very, very quickly. And it's not my generation that are CEOs of companies. It's not my generation that are frankly in positions to get people elected.

Um, things that have to be done on the neo feudalism point. Think one, we just need good companies. Like if you're building a company in Silicon Valley obsess about like making a customer's life better. If you're funding companies obsess about companies that make a customer's life better that solve real problems for people. If you're the CEO of a company like I do think you have a moral responsibility to ship products that are good for people's lives.

Like it is your job and a position of power to think deeply about the effects of the products you bring to earth.

“If you're working for one of those companies you should be thinking deeply about the same.”

And then I will say the consumer has something to do about it too.

Like you can buy and during goods by cutting spending and focusing differently. Now that's a small portion of the country. And most of the country at this point I think is just trapped in that cycle. But you can raise the alarm bells. So on the neo feudalism point, that's what I urge.

It has to be a cultural shift. Like you don't want the government to get involved in this one. Like if there's one thing that needs to not happen is taking this as a flaw of capitalism and going right. I mean, this is fucking scary though. I mean, because it's, it's, are you Gen Z?

I am. I mean, this is the, this is the big complaint of Gen Z.

You can't fucking buy a house, can't buy anything.

And I used to think, yeah, maybe they're just fucking lazy. Maybe, you know, maybe they're not going to be able to do it. Well, Trump came out at the 50-year mortgage that should cut the payment of half. I was wrong about that. But that was like, well, I mean, everybody was shitting on it.

And I was like, I think that might be a good thing because it should cut the payment damn near and half. And I brought it in my good friend Rob Lona and he gave me the real numbers and he was like, I think he says more like a 15% cut and I was like, oh, shit. Okay. And so that made it.

The conversation I have with Rob made it real for me. I was like, oh, fuck man, this generation has fucked. And but in, I mean, there has to be an answer, but at the same time, if it's only fucking doom and gloom and you, in, I mean, you have an entire generation of people that don't think they'll ever be able to. By house, a for a car, have a family, have a real career, like have a real career.

“What the fuck do you have to look forward to? And so how do you motivate that generation?”

It's a big problem. No, I will say. And for some, if you don't solve it, then that generation's kids, if they have any. That, that, that, that gets passed down. Just like, just like, uh, man, uh, generational trauma.

Yes, just, you know what I mean, that becomes the loop. And we, we had a conversation about agency earlier and sort of the erosion of agency. That's where it's coming from. As you feel like you have no control over your political system. Like you're watching literal pedophiles, not go to jail, right, in many cases, stay in power.

On both sides, on both sides. Yeah, this isn't, none of this. I don't even see right in the left anymore, man. I only see fucking good and evil. And that is it. Great. I don't, I don't even believe in this left and right shit.

I agree. It's all a fucking facade. So, I think a few things, a few things outerage. One is perception does become reality. If everyone thinks that the world is going to go into into oblivion, no one will say for the future. No one will work for the future.

And so it's, it's a difficult balance.

“But you have to talk about the problems without becoming defeated.”

Because humanity has dealt with really, really, really dark times. Right. And so you have to sit here and have really, really hard conversations, but then have hope. And say, we will get through this. It does make sense to think about things on 10, 20, 30 or timelines. It does make sense to like think about what it means to have a family in this country.

And until you get into the frame of mind of like, I don't care how bad the odds are.

I'm going to get up and work. You're going to sit down and scroll. And so I think that needs to happen. I think we, we need to, to almost be like, delusional about the amount of agency we have.

“Like, I don't know how to describe this, but like, you, you have to, you have to act as if you have.”

Orders amount magnitude more impact on the world than you actually do. And you have to trap yourself into thinking about like obsess about what can I do today to actually make things better. Because we're a capitalist democracy. We are nothing other than the people in this country. And so if the people in this country start thinking they, they are in control, which they are in need to be.

And hopefully always will be.

They need to realize that and get up and start pushing for change. And then the next step is how do you actually identify what the real problems are? Because look, I, like, I am 22. I'm an idiot on most of the things we've talked about. My goal is that there are great people constantly having this conversation.

And these conversations and that we sharpen each other through good discourse. Now you can only achieve good discourse with good data, right? And so that's where you get into the broader theme of like, what does it mean for information to actually get out? That's where people like you are so important. That's, that's where I do think that regulation actually has a place to play.

And like, making algorithm tuning, not as prolific as it is today, actually cracking down on bots that influence the way people think. I think the next is, is on on the way we view AI. Like, none of us should be dummers. None of us should be super super rosy.

We all just need to think about, like, actual first principles of what this looks like.

And choose to use products, choose to, to support companies that we think will actually make the world a place we want to live in. On the political side, we immediately have to drop partisan victory. Like, it has to exit our brains, we have to be willing. I don't care how conservative you are, how liberal you are.

“You have to be able to sit down and just have a real conversation.”

And talk about real policy, regardless of religion, regardless of anything else. Even if you deeply believe in your religion, which you and I both do, you just have to come together and have deep conversations about these things. Even if you and I believe in our political views, like, we, again, I'm saying you as in, like, again, you. And so next is have good discourse and then folks just need to start acting. Like, invest in companies that you think build the future.

Like, I also think people don't realize how big of an impact they can actually have on the stock market when they invest in companies that, like, most companies are public. Right? And it's, it's not everyday people that own a majority of shares, but it's a non-trivial amount. So that's a real thing you can go and do. You can buy from companies that you think do this. You can, you can stress how to go and work at companies. That's probably the biggest thing you can do. Like, if you, if you really want to go make a difference in the world, either go start a company or go work for a company,

not for a salary, not for anything other than, like, I believe in the mission of going and making the world a better place. In any number of ways, because, again, if you zoom all the way out, the things this country does is nothing more than the inputs of individual people. And so if people choose to work on good missions, if people choose to start good missions, good missions will be achieved. And so yeah, I think the, I think the biggest answer is like, hope in agency. Well, I think people like you are bringing a lot of hope. Thank you.

It's pretty fucking cool, man. Thank you. What you're doing? What a lot of your buddies are doing. Well, I don't even know if they're your buddies, but they're, no, we're all in the same team. Like, to the end, it is the same mission that we're all fighting for, specifically in the defense base, like it.

“It's the only thing that matters is if the warfighter has the best kit, and if, if America is in a position to protect democracy.”

So I, I appreciate it. May I, you, then, you're a fascinating guy and a impressive guy. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. It's been a really, really fucking cool. So, I wish it best luck and hope seeing you again. Thank you. All right, man.

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