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

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und knackiges ge Muse von Aldi Immer gut Immer gunstig immer wielfeldig kurzgesagt frische fur aller zum Aldi Preiss diese wache mini cherry risten tomaten 300 gramfinh zwei

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kilo furne ein oy ro neun furzig and degge jetst viele weitere Angebote in deiner Aldi nort vilje und weiter gehs einfach lauschen undiesen Aldi goethes fer alle. Dude, what's up?

Excited to be here?

Yeah, I'm pumped. I gotta tell you, man, when we first talked, Alex Epstein actually sent me a text about you and watch, watch a good portion of the interview you did with him and then looked you up, and I saw you on my buddy Mike Ritland's podcast. He's a good friend of mine, and. And dude, I just. I love what you're doing.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thanks.

It's. It's. It's just. It's impressive. It's. It's. 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, and you're like, what are you up to? I'm like. 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've been meaning to ask you, you get it running?

I did.

Oh, great.

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. And I'm trying to put a train set together.

I don't know if I could put a train set together.

But anyways, man, I'm really excited about this, so thank you.

Thanks for having me on. 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. And then this morning at breakfast, do you know Nick see the ramen?

Yeah, I do. Wraith watch.

Yeah, he just. We walked in, he was. He was at the place we had breakfast at, and it's like, what. What are you still doing? He was 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 we're gonna hang out here for a little bit. So I said, 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, they're going to get a spot out here.

That's nice.

What's that?

It's nice out here.

It's a good spot, man. It's a good spot. But, but yeah, so let me, 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 where 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 leverage instead of excuses.

That's a great question. That'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, I'm going to take it a different direction. I think it all comes down to building really, really close friends and staying offline as much as you can. Like, it's so easy to get trapped getting, getting all of your information online, but most of these things can be reasoned from first principles. And so if you surround yourself with, 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, that's something we all take super, super serious. At least my friends and I is incredibly important. I think reading history as 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, for a while now. And so reading about ways that people got through it, um, because we'll talk a lot, 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 in 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, what the hell did I just spend an hour of my life I'm never going to get back on?

When did you figure that out?

What's ebbs and flows? I mean I, I think you've always known it. And 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 a YouTube video of someone like digging a hole in the ground and like putting coal in there and forging a knife. And so YouTube's it's, it's both this great spot that you can get the world of information and all these cool people. Like there are YouTube videos of dudes like fabbing semiconductors in their garage. 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 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 and what's sort of fed to by the world versus what actually makes first principles sense.

Where else do you get your information from?

Yeah, they're, they're.

I mean, you're 22 years old, right?

I am.

This is crazy that you're thinking like this already.

I appreciate it, I really do. I think, look, you have to tune it and then you have to have an understanding that even the best news sources are 99% noise. And so I like to read as much as I can from both sides. X is probably the least filtered of the social media sites for obvious reasons. And so it's just good to get a temperature check on what's happening in the world. They're good writers on medium substack that you can follow. But honestly just, just kind of. And then actually going back YouTube, they're actually like really, really good YouTube channels that 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 in 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 believed 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. Be willing to change when facts change and when global state of affairs change.

How do you find free. I mean, you're talking about surrounding yourself with critical thinkers, free thinkers. That's. In my experience, that's been very hard to come by.

Very hard to come by. It is. You have to fight for every age group. Agreed. Agreed. You have to fight for it. And these are relationships that are built over years of having these conversations. And it's. 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. And I'm super fortunate to have lived throughout my life in places where I think I had this like growing up. My family very much thought this way in high school. And Bernie, like just an incredible group of friends who'd sit down and have these conversations. I think this will surprise people. But even at mit, like actually pretty open. So I showed up.

Man, that's awesome to hear.

To MIT campus preview weekend. Building Mock at 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. And don't get me wrong, like I, I had a rep for doing that and plenty of times there's is folks still joke about this. There was this one time when like 20 people came up to me walking at campus preview weekend. 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 rotc, really, really good human beings who, 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 as 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 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. Build.

You know, you brought up. Re going back through history and, and earlier, I'm just curious, this is, this has been a discussion, me and my team and how, how much history do you think is accurate? The reason I bring this up is I haven't said this on any other show because this is, this is new. This is coming from an interview that we haven't even released yet. This guy, Pete Blabber, he was, he was officer over at Delta 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 firsthand knowledge that did not go down the way that history has it written. And this isn't like third party shit. This isn't from 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 that everybody thinks are true.

And, and so he, he and I had known a lot of these things, but it was always, it was always third hand knowledge. So it's kind of like, is that conspiracy or is that real? Now I know for a fact it's real. And so when I think about history and the way it was written just in the, in the global war on terrorism, in 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 SOCOM and jsoc. 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 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 lie in history?

It's a good question. Yeah, look, I mean, like, like I was saying, it's, 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 2,000 years, you just have to, you have to keep that in place. I, look, I, 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, to historical events and other things, but the, the feelings and, and, and sentiment actual, like as you dig into the, the cultural effects that were happening on other things, it is definitely, like, it's definitely biased and it's biased in both directions. Right. But I'd say overwhelmingly, yeah, if whatever is said about a society in power was written by the society of those in power at 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, they're probably less bad in many ways.

I won't, I won't sit and say, I don't think, look, I think the west is genuinely like the light of good in the world, but it's certainly not perfect. And it's 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 make me challenge whether or not the west is the source of good in the world right now. Because I also think, I mean, there's stuff happening over like in, overseas 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.

Like, so, yes, it's definitely like a lot muddier than we give it credit for. And there are probably a lot of things that are over like, dramaticized and there are probably a lot of things that happen that we don't hear about because they're covered up by parties that were in power at the time, which is why it's. It's important to take in as much of that data as 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,

humanity as 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. We have scraps of, but have very, very little actual context on. 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 aren't dealing with, like, massively unprecedented times right now. Right. Like, a social credit system based on the technology that existed would not have been possible 30 years ago. The effects of. Of AI, the effects of superintelligence, that's. That's the first, 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 thing on Earth is our agency, is our intelligence. Right? And so, in a way, like, even the Internet never challenged your agency. It gave you more data that your agency could act on and pushed you higher up the stack to where you're another level of abstraction away from sort of the root operations. And so all of these things throughout history have been augmenting.

And I think that 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 separates us and what we pride ourselves on 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 want empires collapsing, but you also don't want people who are rich staying rich. Like, you want social mobility. You need change to drive progress and to drive progression In a world in which dollars are tied to intelligence takes away one of the root sort of throttling principles that's existed throughout history, which is that each of us has the ability to actually shape our intelligence through work. Each of us is endowed by God with different levels of intellect and die over time. And societies basically keep this forward progression in a world where intelligence does become tied to economic value and you get this terrifying sort of positive feedback loop that humanity's never dealt with.

And so it's important to sort of view both things in context of a lot of what we're talking about right now has been experienced throughout history. Like reserve currencies have risen and fallen and we can look at what caused them to fall and we can talk about what will keep ours in place. But then also when you look at other things that are happening, like intelligence, 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 were all these claims about everyone's going to be out of the job. Well, that obviously didn't happen. 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. That means we all have more goods to live with. But you are also challenging something that those previous waves didn't challenge in a way that's pretty scary. So, I don't know.

Fascinating. You'd mentioned civilizations. Ancient civilizations. I love this topic. Are you into it?

Not super not. Come on. I'm shallow on it like that. That's the issue. I, 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? So, yeah, this is where I'm going to make myself sound like an idiot. I'm completely happy sounding like an idiot, but I will. Just like there are things I believe strongly that I have researched. There are things that. Well put out my conjectures on if I were going to build the pyramids. 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 There. There are different ways you can cut stone. I'm sure they're using stone saws of some sort. They had copper. They had other things obviously 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. We still might bring him on. We just. I don't know where we're at in the process, but he talks about that maybe they were molded, like, you put into a form and then like. Like a cast. Like, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

That and he was gonna demo.

He's.

I think he's gonna demonstrate it if he comes.

That'd be cool.

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 vibration and guide. You know, like, if I put a speaker under this table, I could.

You just think the rocks were too big to haul.

Yeah, yeah.

They had ropes. You can. You can stack a lot of humans behind ropes. I mean, this is something we could run the math on. We'd find, like, the rolling resistance of the logs they're using. We know the mass of these stones. I don't know you. 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 they're very easy things. We like you can go and figure out if these things were cast or not. Like, you can actually. 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.

Who do you.

I don't.

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. I'm happy to, like, why we haven't seen aliens is like a really interesting. I don't know how. How far down we. We want to go on it, but

if you go as far as you want, I have all day.

Great.

I love this shit.

Yeah. Look, if you go and run the numbers and look at the age of the universe, it's. 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 of 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 output, our population, everything is, is hockey stick growth. And so if you look at, I think the universe like 13.2, 13 point something billion years old, it was obviously super, super hot at first, cooled over time, all these different things. So let's say you've, you've had 2 or 3 billion good years and you've got hundreds of millions of stars within basically the area that we can observe. It's very unlikely and there's actual like physics and math that have been done modeling these things on why we haven't seen aliens. But it's just weird that we haven't. It's basically Fermi's paradox. This is like, it's a very well studied 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, from faith, right, all the way to, let's say it's, if it's super, super difficult for single cellular life to emerge, let's say it's super difficult for multicellular or eukaryotic life to emerge all the way up to, it's very difficult for intelligent life to emerge. And the, 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 as 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. A filter we went through was nuclear weapons. 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, I, I, we can talk about what I think the, the great filters could be.

And I, 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, I, if, if my religion is making me challenge physics and science that I, 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 I do believe in these different things. But all that being said, there's. There's an interesting discovery recently. We'll, 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, 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.

Oh, shit.

On Mars. Because Mars back in the day when it was an active planet, had an at atmosphere, had water, had all these different things. Now there are two things you can do. And because of that, they're pushing for a Mars sample return mission to actually bring the sample back. It might be politics, as we talked about being. It might be 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, that's crazy, right? Because that means one of the great filters isn't like the, 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 that 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?

Because it's, let's say, let's say in the Milky way you have 10 million potential habitable planets, right? And then let's say within that, only 500 of those planets actually develop singular life. And then over 2 billion years, 50 of those planets reach eukaryotic life, and then 10 reach societies, and then 1. The, the fact that we haven't seen that one that should have been on a hockey stick trajectory points to some, some filter. And you can have multiple filters, but in societies that exists.

Do you like a filter into another dimension?

No, I don't, I don't. Sorry. It's like if you, 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 100 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 and so those, those filters are basically points in that data set where the numbers drop radically. Does that make sense?

Yeah,

yeah, sorry, I did a poor job explaining how was the, how is

the nuclear revolution a filter?

Because if you, let's say you, you run a simulation of Earth and you have 100 Earths that get nuclear weapons, we obviously didn't blow ourselves up with them, but maybe one in a hundred goes and put makes itself extinct.

So every scenario you're going through, every scenario, like every potential reality.

Yes. Which is, which is what we have to think about when we think about like the Milky Way, right, is you have hundreds of millions of stars 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, like a ton of radio waves at some point. And Elon's 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 and 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, there are all these different things that we're stars that actually do that.

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 star. Right. And so there are a number of things, but like that's kind of, that's the awesome part about science is we're always bringing these new technologies online. Like the space, the James Webb space. Wow. 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 Bang theory, is expanding. And so for a while we actually thought the universe would collapse back in on itself. Well, then we discovered the fact that empty space actually expands faster than the rest of space. And so we had this framework built up called dark energy, which is empty space increasing. So then we thought that the way the universe would end up would be what's called heat death, where everything actually averages in temperature.

You can never get. Anytime you and I do an action, there's something called entropy that sort of averages out the amount of. 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.

They think, okay, so I don't know how we. We got here. I warned you. I may go down some. I love this rabbit hole on it.

Talk about this all day.

I'm happy to as well.

What do you think? Okay, so the universe is under expanding, which. I talked to Avi Loeb 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 YouTube videos after work and try to pretend I know what the hell is going on. Yeah, we don't know. We have no idea. And that's why it is interesting to go and build these things to increase our 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 that. The video. I couldn't find the video. I was looking for it the other day. He talks about all 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 time. And. And then he relates it to a hologram, some somehow. And he's like, if you cut the hologram in half, it becomes two holograms. If you cut it into quadrants, four holograms, it just infinitely. It's the same. It doesn't cut the picture. And so that's basically what he's saying has happened with our reality.

There are a lot of people that believe that. I mean, the. The Big the fundamental problem and it unfortunately we haven't solved it in, in the last really hundred years is how do you reconcile quantum physics with, 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, 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.

Not sound like an idiot.

But yeah, I guess all that being said, the on, on, 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 and all joke that that's kind of like our, 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 mean 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. Like the, the nuclear weapon scenario is, is a great case study here, right? Like the America could have gone and not developed the 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, 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 sort of your job. As we talk about these hard technologies, unmanned systems is, is the first for me that I'm, I'm going and attacking this way is 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 responsibly as possible.

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That's calderalab.com/srs. What do you think about. You know, we had mentioned, you had mentioned earlier about AI and takes everybody's jobs and I literally just had this conversation with Nick. So I'm curious what your thoughts are. Where does this end? Because what I think Musk says, you know, that eventually it's just, it's going to be like the golden age.

Yeah.

Right. Where we don't have to worry about currency, we don't have to worry about working. AI is going to do it all. Then there's, there's doomers, you know, that's me. And I just, I don't see how this ends well. What do you, what do you think happens?

Yeah, it's. 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. Like I don't think the current AI architecture is going to be what truly replaces human jobs like These models are basically just condensing massive amounts of data that already exist and distilling it into a usable fashion. It's very different than like sort of true fluid intelligence. That said, the approaches we've taken to, 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 that do that. And so when I, when I talk about AI, I'm actually talking about more broadly than Transformer models. I'm talking a lot more broadly than current AI, than current LLMs, 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 and bigger models to have more and more capability. And so, and it's sort of logarithmically capable with respect to the amount of data and compute you build.

So as you want, 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 chatbots, 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, is take something that America or the west generally invents, plug it into their system with a bigger industrial base with basically aligned totalitarian powers to set a direction and beat us on scale. 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, unfortunately, 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 at sovereign semiconductor manufacturing, manufacturing, they're going to beat us on scale. Like one of the, 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 they're. There's some crazy number like they installed more solar capacity in 2024 than America has in its history. And so if, 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, that's when it's so hard to predict what happens. But one, if the west wants to win, I, I do think we need to push into, into this realm. But that's also when it gets, when it gets scarier because these models do actually start to challenge what, what makes humans sort of economically useful. And, and so I, I do actually, I, I completely agree with, with Elon that like universal high income is going to be completely possible and it's 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, 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. 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 Doomer case is like you turn on this box, this box isn't 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, which is kind of, to me at least the universal high income scenario, which is like, yeah, humans have great houses, you have all the energy you need, you have great food. And this is where you get like a wall E type scenario of like, we're all 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, and we'll see. And to, to be fair, this is not, this is not my lane, right? Like I, I'm, this is not the problem I'm working on. But you, the, the, the dream case is where you first off, you do use this new tool we have to increase human quality of life.

Like 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, like accounting. Right. That are next. But at some point if, 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, the first option. Right? Like if you're choosing between a 1% chance of the first option and anyway like all of us should be like maniacally obsessed with two things and the first like avoid avoiding the first option of, of pushing AI at such a speed that it gets out of control, which is unfortunately I, I personally think quite likely right now.

I mean, have you seen that? You have to have seen this. The, what do they call the Claude bots?

Claude bots? I mean the book stuff, dude.

What the Freaky.

It's, it's freaky. No, I mean it is.

It reached its own intelligence. Is it self aware? I don't sure sounds like it. I mean these things are talking to each other.

They are.

And they want long term memory.

Yeah.

They're calling their, their guy or what's like.

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 relate like 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, 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 the iris 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, I'm way outside of my lane, right? Here and I'm anyway, but like another, another thing I'm, I'm concerned about right now is how commoditized the current AI push and the US is in many ways. So no one wants a monopoly. Right? There are very, very clear like incentive structures and outputs that come from a monopoly. But equally. Are you familiar with like tragedy of the commons is this principle that happens in.

No.

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's as well, it happens everywhere. Tragedy of 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 get me wrong, I'm the biggest fan of capitalism you'll ever meet. But it is actually even more so the case in capitalism. In many 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've, these companies aren't, 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, 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 and you, 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.

So they're thinking that power is going to become cheap, more affordable. I mean, how do they think that? I don't, how's it going to get cheaper. It's got, it has to be power, right?

Power. You can, you can reach a point where, where model architectures are more efficient, right? You can reach a point where you have better models, you can charge more for them. But they're all betting on some, some set of circumstances in the future making them start making money. 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 us tomorrow, we'd go to the different model. And so it's very commoditized. And what that means is that they actually don't have the power to do what they know is, is right, because their company is. And so like if one of these companies decides to, to start watermarking content. So like something I'm sure you worry a lot about is the amount of just AI slop 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, 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 I actually think, I think these people don't want that. Like, keep in mind, OpenAI is a great example, was founded to be a nonprofit open source project to develop this in the right way. Now the issue is the economic structure is such that if X Player 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 side, right? Like, I don't think any of us would have imagined three years ago that some of the best, biggest tech companies on earth were actually betting on a significant portion of their, their revenue coming from this source. A huge one is ads. Like, this is kind of the next step that I unfortunately think we're going to start seeing what everyone call it ads.

Oh, ads.

This isn't, this shouldn't be that much of a surprise, but I do think we should take seriously the implications of like 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 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 is 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, this scaling approach I think will probably put us in a position to lose to China on scaling. I do think Elon is probably the only guy that has the hardware prowess and horsepower behind him to maybe beat China on this metric. But even if you look at just purely fabs, let's take energy, let's take data, let's take everything else out of it.

Just the fab problem in Taiwan is so bad for the next one is this, this horrible commoditization problem of like all these players just basically falling, falling into a tragedy of the commons trap. And then the next is just the economic side of like we're totally in an AI bubble right now. This is not a controversial. Everyone's talking about it, everyone knows it, 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 than that performance driving actually equating to dollar and cents in companies pockets 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 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 continue hyperscaling. And so you've got China here. 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.

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

That actually means something.

I absolutely think we will. Like there will always be like artisan communities. Like I used to make knives, right? Like my knives were actually worse in many ways than a knife you could go buy cheaper from, from, from elsewhere. Specifically. Right when I started, I sucked at knife making, but people would buy them because it was, it was human made. The issue is that that's not your driving economic force, right? Like it's, 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 I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm just saying that's something we have to look out for.

Yeah. Interesting. All right, introduction. Here we go. Ethan Thornton, founder and CEO of Mock Industries. Building next generation unmanned systems and hydrogen powered defense system tech. Dropped out of MIT after one semester in 2023 to focus on mock full time. Backed by top VCs like Sequoia, Colsa and Bedrock. With major army contracts in a growing factory operation. Passionate about broader issues like Taiwan's semiconductor role, dollar reserve currency status, social decay, neo feudalism and post partisan 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 of Taiwan, Polymarket 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 1.

I think that number's way too high. Is it like. Well, I'm not saying it's higher than it. It is. I'm saying it's higher than it should. It should be, right? Like I think we hear 17%, that's a low number. But you also keep in mind the effects of what happens if that occurs being completely catastrophic. 17% is already enough to be like, I mean, high alert, doing everything we can to prevent this from happening. Just to, and to highlight why Taiwan is so important, it 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 made in absolutely 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, 1970. And so imagine if we're in like 1965 and there's like a 17% chance the USSR takes like 99% of oil in the next 11 months. We'd be talking a lot about it. Now, I would say two things past that.

I think the number's probably higher than 17%. I also, unfortunately, like, you think it's higher than 17? I think it probably is also. I don't know, like, this is just not. I, I, I, I, I. It's, 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 so 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 G's, like, major goals. They put together a plan for military readiness to invade Taiwan by 2027.

Oh, I know. I mean, we went over there and interviewed the vp Bao Shikim, and talked all about this, and I knew it was a fragile situation, that when I got over there I was like, holy. This is really, this is probably the most fragile situation on the entire Earth.

Yeah. And it doesn't, it doesn't have to and likely wouldn't be a massive shooting war.

Like, I don't think it would be. That's so, I mean, I would say that the probability of that is a lot lower. But I mean, what the 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. The psyop type shit. And I mean, I think we, we all see a lot of psyops going on on social media. You know, the bot. The bots, the farms, all this kind of. And over there, you know, I mean, it's like, what, 90 miles to China or so. Like, it's like Cuba to Florida.

Yep.

They're ever. And then half their political party is pro China.

Yep. No, it's bad. That's bad. It's China's playbook.

Will ever be fired. It's kind of like when you, when a lot of people talk about how would. How would. How would America be taken over. Shop probably will never be fired. It would be. I mean, look at us be something like TikTok.

It'd be a lot of.

Yeah. You know, 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 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 U.S. 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 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 of these, 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 malplay going on in terms of why we don't take this more seriously.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I have a feeling. My personal opinion is if China takes it. I think they will. I think they will. This. The Taiwanese society will vote themselves right into it. It.

Where 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 he said this on Rogan. But like, the, the, the war games are not. Anyway, like, it's, it's not like we are. We run out of ammo in like seven days right now. Right. Like, we, We've. Our, Our. Our munitions are just so short. It's also like, you can't really. Anyway, it's a hard, hard, hard problem. Yeah. So I don't want to be doomsday about it. I think it's important to talk about sort of solutions. Yeah. I mean, 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 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 have hard conversations with each other and really dig into how we get ourselves out of this position. I think to, to me, the two most important things there are.

One, how do we, how do we rebuild our military capacity? Not to say our military is in a bad spot. I think our military industrial base is. But we, we don't have the depth of magazine 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 had the chips act, 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 certainly haven't fixed the problem. It's kind of fallen 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 and I are 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 hole. And I look, America is still really, really smart. We have the best capital markets on earth. We, we are still the best at innovation on earth.

Like we have the best financial markets on earth. Like, it's not all doom and gloom. We just need to like wake up and start acting on the most important things.

Why do you think more people aren't focused on solutions? I mean, I have an opinion on

this, but I'd love to hear yours before.

I mean, I don't think people are, and I don't think a lot of people are focused on solutions because look at the political environment, you know, I mean, which we're going to talk about, you know, like this. But 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 into some type of naval weapons system. They couldn't get them, they wouldn't build them. It cost thousands of dollars for this and they can't get them until 2027, you know what I mean? So Then he sent me. So he talked about that on the show, and then. And then he sent me this, this little letter here. But he says grateful for. Grateful for you helping to tell the Army. Sorry, it's trying to read his handwriting. Grateful 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, with, with, with. With all the, with all the controversy right now, and nobody's being held accountable, and it's, 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. I mean, 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. 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, just it go. It just goes forever, you know, and, and ideas get introduced and nobody follows through because it doesn't benefit. There's not a way to tax this. There's not a way to make money off of this. There's not a. Do you see what I'm getting at? And so it demoralizes the citizens of the United States and then it just becomes a bitch fest.

Have you read Atlas Rugged?

No.

It's my favorite book. It's. No book's 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 their actions and for their own place? You get people that are voted into power that promise basically these broad sweeping changes, and you get this creation of basically 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 it's on, it's on both sides, people vote. Have, I think, largely voted away their, Their own agency. And, and where we lie today. I think 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, become incredibly 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 experience this person's work. And it leads to this, this populist cycle. What happens at some point though is that cycle is too strong to break. And I think 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 have 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, 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 in the, in the Epstein files in, in jail 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 when that happens, people just stop talking about the big things. 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 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 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 practice they do. And so I think some of it's, some of it's accidental, some of it is the, the political science effects of these structures, which is what Atlas Shrug talks about. A lot of it is certainly Very, very, very intentional. But yeah, I mean, the, the outcome right now is people don't have agency and it's because rightfully so, in many cases, 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'm probably not going to do anything about it. There's a one in a hundred thousand chance that me actually choosing to do this changes anything, but I'm going to try, and I'd rather go down swinging. 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.

I agree with you. I agree with you. I think, I think, I mean, with, with, with what we're talking about. I mean, we're talking about solutions. I'm trying to bring things back to the middle, you know, the pendulum back to the middle just by having conversations. Not, I'm not going to run for office. But, you know, I think the, the pendulum has just gone way too far over here and way too over, too far over here. And it needs to be like this, you know, and the only way we're going to do that is to bring people together and it's. Look at the comments section.

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, Epstein existed. This, this happened. This is like probably, I think it's the worst mark on, on our country 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. So 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. And then I also, like, 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 post partisan fashion, right? Like there for any policy, there is a right and wrong decision. And that's the other thing is 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 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, we, yeah, we, we got to start electing candidates too, 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 the last two decades. It's gone so much from policy discussion to like ad hominen and different things that you can directly track is like markers of non productive conversation. And I think, I think the answer does lie somewhere in the middle. I'll tell you, I'm a conservative. I don't, I don't think that's a surprise to many people. But I'll also say, like, yeah, like the most of the problems our country is facing are so acute that the answers are very nonpartisan.

Like putting pedophiles in jail better be like, who thought that's a thing, right?

Like, who would have thought that

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. What's happening is we're getting so obsessed with the fringes and more importantly, so obsessed with, with, with the people that, that control the fringes that we're forgetting to work on the things that are like glaringly right in front of us. 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 22. This is insane. All right, a couple things to knock out before we get into your life story here. So I have a Patreon accounts 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, nothing to do with it. Like I've, 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 needed to do these things. I don't think it's any different to be 40, 70, 12 working. Or maybe 12 is too young. Your brain's not fully developed. My brain neocort anyway, whatever. But all that being said, the reason this is important to work on right now is that this is just a clear departure in the way we wars are fought. And so you see these revolutions of, in military affairs throughout history, like World War I is a fantastic example of like cavalry into like machine guns and tanks. Was this crazy revolution military affairs. You can look at like naval warfare in World War II. Battleships to aircraft carriers, like that is in when this happens, the playing field gets completely reshuffled on military power. And small countries can, can become big countries, big countries can, 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 contention is that it's, it's the biggest revolution military affairs that's ever happened. I mean you're going from generally assets not having their, their own intelligence or agency to assets that over time will be able to make decisions whether we like it or not. I think non like it. Like I, I, I certainly wish it was always possible to have a 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 a moral imperative to do the same. And America is, is the great superpower right now. And the tale as old as time for great superpowers is to become overconfident in, in their military technologies and to, to, to fail. I mean this is how America exists. It's like the American revolution of like and I much but like you, you, you adopt new styles of war fighting. You still 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, we have to have the best unmanned 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 year over year and only accelerating. And so if we want to be the biggest military power, but our, our, 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 factory is 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 war fighting 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 asymmetry, 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 quickly as possible and in greatest scale as possible to create asymmetry.

Great, great explanation. Thank you. And then everybody gets a gift.

Oh, thank you so much.

Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears legal in all 50 states. Made in the USA.

Thank you. Really appreciate it.

You're welcome. Appreciate it. So, Ethan, where'd you grow up?

Bernie. Bernie. San Antonio.

San Antonio. Texas?

Yes.

What were you into as a kid?

A lot of different stuff. I'm an obsessive person, so I'll find these like month long obsessions that I'll just dig super deep into and change. And so I played football, hunted fish, 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.

Like, I mean, how do you get into that? Is your dad into it? Your mom into it?

Which portion? The blacksmithing part.

One of them.

My dad. My dad. So he, he worked at Academy Sporting Goods. I don't know if you've. Oh yeah, we have him here. It's an awesome story. He's a badass dude. He was basically the first guy brought on to build Academy's finance infrastructure. So the guy running Academy believed that finance took away from the customer experience. And so basically they were doing like a billion plus in revenue without a financial system, which is terrifying to be doing as a business. Like, terrifying. So my dad, when he was super young, he graduated A and M, studied finance. This guy found him and trusted him as like 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. They're about my age. And I got to watch my dad start like super entry level there, working on this, eating an elephant, like, going, going and like trying to, to like chop through that jungle that existed at the time was a hell of a task. And so over time, he slowly sort of wrangled that machine over my life.

Like, I got to actually watch it happen from super young because I, like, I vividly remember my dad's 27th birthday. Like I was, 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. He used to have to visit every store at Academy like once or twice a year. And so he'd take me on the road with him 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 kind of lower flies when you're traveling with them.

Started when I was pretty young, I think probably like seven or eight. And then my dad left Academy when I was probably 12. We used to live in Katy, outside Houston, and we moved to Bernie. So my dad, my dad did that. My mom incredibly, incredibly smart, was on just an awesome trajectory. But actually, like, and I'm so grateful for this, decided to stay home and raise my siblings. And I asked what my parents said her. So she was first generation college. Her father, my grandpa, farmed farms in west Texas and Hereford, which is near Amarillo. And so I'd spend the summers. The land's like trying to, to basically kill you at all times. And in West Texas, like, it's not really, it's. It's not, it's not like Nebraska. It's. It's not a great place to farm. And so it's, It's a very, very intense lifestyle. He. He never went to college. He. He got the farm when he was super, super young. And most farm owners, it's super predatory. What happens, you get this giant loan for a farmer 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 was one of the people that was able to keep the farm despite taking it on at a super young age. His father passed away and so he went to the bank and bought land to kind of support the family. But he, everyone has hired hands. He like refused to really ever have hired hands. And so my mom and her generation was always the hired hands. And then during the summer I'd go up and help him because he's probably 75 now, still farms like, wow, tough, Toughest dude you'll meet. It's amazing that he's been able to do this without ever doing what everyone else does while also making it, make it through that. He, he taught me metalworking. My dad taught me woodworking. To be a farmer, you have to be an engineer, right? Especially if you want to, like, not pay John Deere $500,000 a year because you can't fix your own equipment. You have to basically buy old farm equipment and maintenance it yourself. And so I, I grew up helping him fix sprinklers, fix combines, fix tractors. And then he, he has an obsession with planes.

He started, he started my family's kind of whole plane obsession. He, when he was my age, had a Harley, he took off for a couple months, rode his Harley around the country. He's coming back, there's a dude flying an ultralight. And my memory of the story even is a bit foggy. And I'm sure he embellished like crazy. But generally the story goes, and I also embellish. I'm not attacking him by saying that it makes for a great story, but the story goes, you don't need a license to fly an ultralight. And he had never flown a plane in his life. And he was like, hey, that's a cool plane. Will you trade it for my Harley? Traded his Harley for the ultralight. Had no idea how to fly, started flying. No shit. And just got obsessed with it. And so then he got really into building aircraft. So keep in mind, like, no engineering degree, none of that, but actually started building experimental aircraft. And so growing up, I basically, you'd wake up early, check the wells, do all that stuff, and then it'd be crazy hot during the day, so we'd sit in the barn working on the planes.

He was building. My mom didn't really let me fly. I wouldn't flew a couple times. I never actually got to fly because she was scared, rightfully so, that the experimental aircraft would crash. We'd go and work on them a ton. And then. Yeah, he, he, he taught me knife making. He taught me a lot of that stuff.

Wow. How many brothers, sisters do you have?

Three. Something. That's for.

Right on. Right on. Are they into all this stuff too?

To some degree. In different, different ways. So my, my brother is a sophomore at A. M. He's going into the corps. He wants to fly in the Air Force. He's obsessed with planes. Like the dude will like 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. My brother and, and my other brother. So Patrick, Owen and Grace are still young. Younger. They're. They're still in high school. Yeah. Doing, doing really, really well. My brother's going to play football at Georgetown next year. He's super excited about that.

So. Congratulations. What else do you. So what age does all this start making knives?

Yeah, it's tough. It's tough.

Woodworking.

Describe exactly when. I mean I grew up helping my, my dad on woodworking a ton. And then I was, I was pretty young, probably 10 or something. My grandpa made a few of my, my cousins knives. This is like the best thing that's happened to me in my life. Made them knives. 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 hacksaw, a handsaw file and like a piece of steel and a piece of wood that we actually cut off some furniture. And I say then there for like two days and alone. Like by teaching me to make knives, I meant like giving me the tools for knife making. And I said, you're on your own. Go, go figure it out.

How old were you?

Yeah, I don't remember. I need to look at pictures. Probably around 10. And then from there I got into a bunch of different things. I used to figure it out.

Hold on.

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 has it. I. I think I ended up giving it to Her.

How long did it take you to figure it out?

The first knife I made was actually not bad. So there wasn't that much trial and error. It was a lot of hand sawing. Cutting, cutting knife steel with a hacksaw and then hand filing a bevel. Took, took forever. And then hand filing the handle. I used the oxy acetylene torch to heat treat the blade because I didn't have a forge. The knife was from an old plow disk. So the, the plow disks are. I think they're generally 1040 steel. I don't really know, but it's a decent high carbon steel. So I cut it out with. I think I started with oxy acetylene, but then I was horrible with the torch because I had no idea what I was doing. And so then ended up having to clean it up with the hacksaw and the files. And then from there I, I did, 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 or building fusion reactor reactors or a lot of different things like people who start companies do, but I, I would like poor solid rocket motors. My brothers and I would mess around with that quite a bit.

Stuff like that.

Right on. Public school. Public school, home school, Public school. Yeah.

So I'm super fortunate for like 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 as 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 extent possible. Like, I think I graduated high school with like 100 or so college hours from college classes I, I taken that they had 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 IQ or anything else and so much more tied to like how good are, how, how good are you with, with people? And so anyway, I'm not saying it's a silver bullet. And there are definitely areas of this country that public schools are, are super hard place to be in there. I wouldn't send my kids to public school. But generally speaking, in Katie and Bernie, like it was, it was fantastic.

Yeah, I'm just, I'm just curious.

Yeah, no, it's a good question. Look, it's, I think it's everybody, 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 an extremely intelligent guy. Were you bored in school? Sorry, was I. I said you're obviously a very intelligent guy. Were you bored in school?

Born in school.

Bored, bored, bored. Was it boring?

Very boring. Very boring. Yeah. I ended up. I found a way to kind of hack 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 past sophomore year. And so I'd get super, super bored and I'd work on other things and was able to. Yeah, I love learning stuff, don't get me wrong, but I'm much more sort of hands on. I did well in school, don't get me wrong. But it's. I think, I think the. Today's school system is specifically not built 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, it's hard to, it's hard to coop 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, 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 screwdriver is and not telling you how to use the screwdriver, but like talking about specific bevel angles and like making you memorize the thousands of different screwdrivers 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 love math and science. Like, I love math and science. I was a nerd in high school. For, for the record, like, I started my school's math and science team and like, like, don't get me wrong, I was pretty obsessed with that stuff, but only so much as is actually applicable. And I do think the school system does two things poorly. One, like a good learning environment is not just being cooped at a desk, talked to, and 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 two is you're taught too much about the way things are instead of of what you can do about it or why things are. And that is obviously very. It's pretty obvious in like social sciences or other things that that's the case. But even, even as 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.

Like the fact that I'll give you an example, like there are a lot of people that graduate from MIT like having never learned how to catch in class. 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 softwares that you use to design parts. They teach you all the equations of like how to analyze parts. But you graduate these schools not actually knowing how to do the real skill. And I think that's the same anyway.

Wow, I did not realize that. No shit. They don't teach that at mit.

Some classes do. But a lot of people in MIT is also, I think the best school for like applied knowledge. Like that was my favorite thing about MIT is, is the amount of projects and the amount of things like that. But I mean you're, it's, it's a joke of my generation, I think. But like the, the fact that you're not learning how, you don't learn how to do taxes in school, but you go and learn like differential equations is a bit interesting. I don't know if they.

I, I 100% agree with you. So what else were you building as a child?

What else did I build?

Then I got. You got a visit by the atf.

Oh yeah. That was a fun one. That was a fun one. Yeah, I was, I was working on 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 tool tools to start making knives and selling furniture and doing all these different things. And then I use that to experiment on, on stuff for mock. Because you can't bootstrap your way into a defense company. Like there's no world in which I wasn't going to have to go raise capital.

Hold on, you started mocking in high school? No.

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. 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 talk about it, I'm sure. Next was fixed wing drones and then the third was, was basically hydrogen based systems. I was obsessed with oxy hydrogen guns. So there was work that had been done in the 90s surrounding what are called combustion light gas guns, which is if you combust hydrogen oxygen instead of gunpowder, the basically the speed of sound in, in the gasses is 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 4,500ft per second because the speed of sound in the gas because as you reach some multiple of that speed of sound, the force actually diminishes. And so if you take oxygen and hydrogen combustion, you can reach like 30,000ft 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.50 caliber rifle. I had built one, it was 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'd charge the batteries and it would make hydrogen oxygen gas. And then on Home Depot and Amazon I bought basically pipes and different things. And it was a valve that you'd actuate that would open the chamber. Spark plug would detonate it and it would shoot a half inch ball bearing.

Holy.

How old are you that one? I think I was, I was 16, 17. It didn't work very well for what it's worth. And it reached the point I, 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 ran the numbers don't it. The, the combustion chamber wasn't going to explode, but like anyway 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, like what I thought at the time was a proper system.

Obviously not what, what gets you interested that at 16 years old?

Again, I'm an obsessive.

Like how did it even pop up on your radar?

I don't know. I, I like 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. Be super, super useful.

So 16, you're thinking about where warfare is at.

It. That's my whole family. So like that is one of the. My dad, I mentioned that he worked in finance. He also shares my brother and I's like weird infatuation 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, are in one case and so flew F16s, flew B2s, flies B2s. My, her older brother Nathan graduated from MIT and Harvard at the same time with master's degrees. And basically his MIT thesis in aerospace engineering, this is like in 2000 was unmanned systems for Warfare. And his Harvard master's thesis was. And I might be misremembering this, but this is what anyway was basically near peer competition with China. And that was, that was like 25 years ago, 26 years ago.

Holy.

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. 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 in many cases. Well now with satellites and with 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 gas guns. The issue with rail guns is they tear themselves apart. Part you have to have a conductive rail. And so I think amortizing the barrel wear on like the Zumwalt 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 every shot. There's a company, Utron, that had done some really interesting work surrounding actual combustion, like gas guns, and were able to achieve the same muzzle velocities, but reliably using the, the mechanism I described to you. So I was, I was interested in this.

It ended up being a bad bet. Like, there's a reason we're working on things like Viper and glide now because those are the way, like, the, the principle is the same. The actual engineering behind it couldn't be more different. And the hydrogen stuff is total dead 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 50 cal, 20 millimeter. I don't remember. Titanium. Like, pretty, Pretty good system. I found this machinist who said he would machine me these guns. And technically I think any. I forget the exact rules, but it was, it was legal. What I was doing at 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, 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, from, from brake check and all the titanium I bought.

He's like, great, I'll. 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 is like, hey, I, I'm telling you because I feel really bad about doing this, but I ended up just calling the ATF on you. And he kept the money.

Get the out of here.

He kept the money and then he

kept the money and ratted you out?

Yeah. Holy.

A 16 year old.

Yeah, it wasn't super cool. I, I get it. Not, not super cool of them though. 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, building guns to shoot people and that I was actually, like, genuinely interested in the science behind it. It.

Hold on. What did the ATF say?

They were. They were pissed. They were pissed, but ultimately I wasn't breaking.

But they couldn't do anything.

I wasn't breaking the law.

Holy.

Are you serious?

What are they saying? I love this. This is awesome.

That was a fun one.

We're mad. But you're not doing anything illegal. Okay. We'll be bad.

I think, I think since then it's off my property. Exactly.

Pout over there.

It's the atf. It's the. You got to have run and with the ATF anyway.

Whatever. But I haven't had any run ins with the ATF and I don't have any wood to knock on here but. Holy. What. So.

Yeah.

What are they saying?

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. 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 casing.

Thanks Ethan. No, sorry. Holy. So shooting ball bearings.

So. No, that one was shooting actual machined.50 caliber slugs. So it's an aluminum slug with, with tungsten at the core.

How far out are you heading?

Oh it never. I. I never got it made.

Oh okay.

No. So that's the thing. They shut it down.

Wow.

I had to stop work on it and then that, that problem was way harder than I expected it to be to ever get those systems reliable. 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, like now if I had a hundred thousand dollars to spend building this gun, I could, 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 at mit I used to all the guys would joke we. The football weight room was right next to basically the hobbyist space and there'd be lift cycles and I'd be in the hobbyist space machining guns in the MIT hobby space while anyway all the buddies were lift.

Anyways.

Damn.

But I. We totally had to hack our way through it. Which isn't good. You shouldn't do that. Like as soon as we got backing, as soon as Sequoia and then Bedrock invested like obviously it's A very, very different approach. But the motivation behind it, it's always been the same. It's what I talked about. It's like, like unmanned systems are coming, right, like this, this new era of warfare is here. And so do everything you possibly can to make sure that the west is in a good position against it. And so it's, that's, that's. And, and so that's kind of why Mock 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 like 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? Yeah. I mean, I made a lot of furniture. I made chessboards, tons of throwing axes. Built an aquaponic system one time which was pretty fun.

Nice.

I don't know if you've seen those, but you basically you create. You get a fish tank and I went and caught some bass and, and, or it was pursed, sorry, and put them in the fish tank. And then you flow the water through a bed of, 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, and food or 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.

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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. Was, yeah. Why mit? I was considering like early high school. I had like two potential paths I wanted to go down. One is I was, I was actually obsessed with being a doctor in, in high school. Like, I really, really wanted to go be a brain surgeon. It was like one of my lifelong dreams to do. And so A and M ran this program called, called InMed, where you get an engineering degree and a doctorate. And I wanted to go basically build robots to help people do surgery as a surgeon. And then the other.

Hold on, where do you come up with this as an 18 year old kid?

Kid?

17, 18 year old. Well, actually, you said early high school, right?

Yeah, this would have been.

Where are you coming up with this? I mean, most, what, 13, 14, 15 year old kids are not thinking about building robots to do brain surgery. I mean, I don't even think that was a thing when you were 15, which is that seven years ago it

was, 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, borrowed my mom's credit card, and I went and bought a microscope and two sheep's brains

and two sheep spraying.

Talk to my mom or where do

you get a sheep spraying?

Online, because they sell them for med schools and stuff. And so I talked my sister into helping me and she and I were like, okay, we're gonna put out a YouTube video where we dissect a sheep's brain. And I think I somehow made convinced my, my teachers to count it as a project that I had to do. My mom, I didn't. She. She opened the freezer and there were two sheep's brains in there. And I think. Anyway, it was a long story, but that YouTube video is out there somewhere of my sister and I like dissecting a sheep's brain back in the day.

That's out there.

I'm sure it is.

Do you have it?

I don't. I can find it.

Send it in. I want to. I want to overlay it during this.

I'll try to. It's pretty embarrassing, but also.

That's cool. That'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, you know? And so if you have kids one day, and if they have kids and they have kids, I mean, they're gonna watch this.

That's true.

You know what I mean? This is your legacy piece.

All right, I'll send in the. The video. No, it's true. I. And I appreciate you. It's funny. I. I don't talk or even think that much about. About all this stuff, so it's. 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 focusing on the war side, either fighting or building things. Covid is what changed it, actually. So I had gotten in summer after sophomore year, I'd gotten into this research program to go and do medical research with UT Austin. It was like, I got taken that so seriously. Getting into that was super excited. Covid happened my sophomore year. That all shut down. And so that's when I got into, like, truly got into knife making. Is. I had nothing to do 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.

Okay.

High school. Cool. I'm just saying, like, engineering and wanting to go. Go fly, like, kind of. The two focus areas were either kind of health or health or defense. And it's hard to say exactly when I, like, I officially started Mock. Like, our first programs, I was doing under Blue Oak Ironworks. I think the first capital we raised was under Blue Oak Ironworks, which was my, like, like, knife making, furniture building.

Like, so did you just. Is it a new. Is Mock a new company, or did you just keep morphing the company?

I kept morphing it. So it went from mock to. To Trident. Trident was a horrible name. One of our VCs was pushing to call it Trident. Trident's bad for a number of reasons. And then it became mock after I dropped out of.

Every Navy SEAL business in the world is Trident.

Exactly. And I didn't know that when I started some, and 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 call your company Trident. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Team guys are original and not so original at the same time. My first company was called Trident Security Solutions.

Really?

Yeah.

Nice.

Which is morphed into this.

That's great. That's great. So, yeah, anyway, all that being said, I really wanted to go. Go fly. So I. I figured this trend was going to take a while to play out because this was pre Ukraine. So I wanted to go fly for. For eight, 10 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 wearing masks for two 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 out of school when Covid was happening. Like, I don't think I logged into a single class, but I. I'm. I'm an obsessed 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. I think on average, it's probably pretty bad. Like, if you're. I was fortunate because I was. I was in a place where I could go forge knives. Like, most people can't go into their backyard and forge knives. Right. I got super into hunting. I bought a crossbow and would just go hunt deer around, like, kind of my neighborhood. Like, that's not something that. 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, I. With. Without Covid, I never would have gotten into engineering in any of the same way I did did.

It basically just gave me time to go and find the things that I actually think are important and that I actually like working on.

Wow. How do you think it, how do you think it affected the majority of your generation?

I think people spent 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. Tick tock 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, it's also like the, the, I was younger than the people that got horribly affected. The people that really affected is, if you're, it's, 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, they're, you're, 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 existentially 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 affected because you're picking up, you know, you're picking up how to read facial expressions, body language like that and mask over the face. I mean, it masks. Yeah, it literally masks it for sure.

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

No kidding.

I, I, I think I, I won't, don't quote me on that, but we're one of the first, if not the first, because I went back in August of 2020 and so it was also like significantly less destructive. But if you're in, if you're in New York and you missed a year and a half of school, school, no one online school, no one got anything out of like it sets you 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, if you assume you have 12 grades of high school to learn, folks are missing, folks are missing two of those 12 in many cases.

So you're forging knives. Yes. All right, all right, we can move past it though.

Yeah. Anyway, I going to mit, I really wanted to fly. And then if you're going to fly. You should be studying aerospace engineering. MIT was the best school for aerospace engineering. And then I was super fortunate to get a full ride scholarship to go and do that with, with the Air Force. And then I did play football in high school. I should say I'm quite bad at football. MIT 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 motive, 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 just make friends and have a friend group. And so between football being the best at aerospace engineering and then most importantly the Air Force side, MIT had the highest basically pilot selection rating of the non academies.

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 unmanned systems were going to play out, right? Like you start seeing quads hit tanks even you start seeing 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 to a pilot school and then get in and 27, 28 or do you just decide to drop it? And one is basically like you, 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 while I was there. There's a thing called urops, 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. So like they were never going to go do that on like regular plane engineering. They're never going to go do that on balloons. Certainly the hydrogen stuff was 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 kicked me over to Lincoln Labs, which is MIT's basically research department, I 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 was actually a period of time where I was planning on dropping out and working at Lincoln Labs. This is still 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 into the hands of the warfare. 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. To have an impact on the battlefield. Because they own your ip. And so, yeah, like, literally, if you machine, like one part at Lincoln Labs, that IP is now 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 mit? I mean, now you're around. I would think you're around a lot more people that are on your level.

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. I mean, and I don't. I don't mean that in a derogatory way towards anybody. I'm just. It's just the 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 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 than the top, the bottom 50% at a place like MIT. And so I would say, look like the actual raw horsepower and IQ is, 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 you wake up and you're an 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, loved. I mean it's not perfect, don't get me wrong. There's obviously politics, there's obviously all these different things, but I, 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, 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 was fantastic. So I, 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 there are real problems that we have to go solve. And me, me entering in 2028 is, I didn't at least think it was as meaningful as like going and jumping in in 2022, 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, whose clear objective evil in the world, invade another sovereign country. And so I, I'm still very passionate about Ukraine.

Right on. Just curious.

Yeah, yeah. I mean look, it's, it's not perfect. No country is perfect. But I, I've spent time in Ukraine. Like it's also very different, like going like meeting the people whose like sons were killed, going and like actually like experiencing. That's a, it's a very, very like real war that's happening that thousands of people die every day that are not fighting for anything other than their own freedom. And I think if us as the west can't separate politics out from that and say objectively they're mothers whose sons are dying. Objectively, they're 22 year olds who are going to go die in the trench for their own freedom. That is something worth supporting. No, I think a lot led into the war and obviously the US supported the war. I'm very happy to talk it through. But like Ukraine itself, it's one of the things I'm most passionate about in life is the sovereignty of Ukraine. Look, I think Ukraine's going to go down in history. We'll see. The history is still being written. But if they push off this invasion, you're talking about a level of the Alamo style, stepping up against a bigger adversary and punching back that 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, genuinely curious on why you're passionate about that as a 18, 20 year old kid.

Yeah. And, and feel, feel free to, to judge me or to push back. I think this is like why we have these conversations. Not that I'm saying you are. I'm just saying I'm, I'm happy to talk about it but yeah, look like, I think that's, that's, that's why I'm doing all this. Right. This is why any, that's 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 China, Ukraine or I'm sorry, Russia, Ukraine or China? Taiwan?

Definitely China Taiwan. I would say at an individual level it's, it's probably pretty similar. I would say it if, if you're talking about the, the impact it will have on the future of sovereignty, China, Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important.

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, 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 how big of a change we, we need to expect from unmanned systems. Right. Like we're, we're just in the very early ages of unmanned warfare.

It is crazy, isn't it? I mean I spent, spent 14 years in and 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, yeah, pretty sure it did. Yeah.

And so the, the, the staunch differences in those two conflicts, those wars are just wildly different.

Yeah.

It's insane how different.

Absolutely. And then the, the thing. And so that's, that's really what it was about Ukraine as much as the sovereignty is like, like this is a crazy glimpse. And this is the first near peer like true near peer conflict we've seen in so long. And so you have to stop thinking about drones is in the context of terrorists and start thinking about drones in 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, 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, like 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 for manufacturing. Like these things are still hand, hand assembled.

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 shahead, 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, 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. Right. You look at Operation Spiderweb, 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 such an eye opener is like, these are still super unsophisticated systems that are totally defining the only near peer conflict that we've seen in recent history.

And so give it five years, certainly give it 10 years, and the, the level of effect these systems will have is just so huge.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I can't even imagine what this is going to turn into.

Yeah, Bud.

When was the first time you went to Ukraine?

I've only been once. I went. I, I don't remember the year. Probably 2023, 2024.

What were you doing?

Just, Just working on mock stuff. I mean, I, I didn't do a ton 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, 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?

Did you 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.

It was, I mean, it was, it was, it was crazy eye opening.

What'd 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 teach them how to do that. And suddenly you've got someone that can take out a target target 20 miles away for $400. Like, that's crazy. I went and 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, 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 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 to people actually using your systems at the end of the day.

Day. Wow. So you knew you were going to build drones when? Before you, you knew it?

Yeah, yeah.

Right away.

Yeah. Certain. Yeah.

How many years did you spend at mit?

A semester.

That's it. A semester.

So I, I filled out the form to drop out like, oh, a handful of weeks in.

What, I mean, so what convinced you? Holy. So you, you're in one of the most prestigious schools in the world and a couple weeks in you're like, ah, this isn't for me.

I think. And I was, I was clear with, with everyone about this. I expected failure. Like the, 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 factories, do these different things, but if there's, if there's a one in a hundred thousand chance that you can ship, ship hundreds of thousands of platforms over the next five years, like you have again, you have to do it like the median, certainly lower, but like the average, the net expected value of like going and dropping out. And so I fully expected to run out of money for it all to fail. I was pretty clear about that. But 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. It wasn't like I was sitting there hating mit. It wasn't like I was like, like super.

You just fell to duty. I'd say so only damned. 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, I'd say I, 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 still have decades of work left to do if we actually want to see that impact.

Man, you are a cool dude.

Thank you.

You're welcome. So 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. I'm super excited about football team football and then two of the other sort of Air Force ROTC people. There's something called Campus Preview weekend. Or not, Not Campus Preview Weekend. That's different thing. What's it called? Damn it. 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 after that it would just be me because I couldn't support any of them dropping out. And so for that month I got, I was about the size of this room, a workshop in, in Charlestown, like the cheapest real estate in Boston we could find. And just started building a bunch of different things. So we built quadcopters, we, we built a gun, we built a.

Basically a shot head.

A what?

It's a type of. So this was pre shahed is like the Dorito drone that the Russians use like crazy. This was actually pre Shaw head. And so we built what ended up being the shahead that was used like crazy in Ukraine.

No kidding.

Deciding what to build, that's kind of my main job is to, to ideally be, be as smart through the process.

Why are you, why are you building guns and drones? What do you do? How do you decide which one you're going to do first?

Yeah. So 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 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, 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 understood 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. Right. Like, I can't say we're going to go work on this. So for me, all a company is, is basically a lever for action, right? 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.

Is like, 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 a machine that keeps compounding this? And then at the time, I had no idea what would. Actually, I like my, my algorithms comparing those three things were quite bad. And I think we, 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 balloon stuff where we built a hydrogen electrolyzer. We did some aluminum fuel hydroelectalizer. It sounds more complex than it is. You basically take water, you shock it and you separate the hydrogen oxygen, and then you recombust that for guns or for air travel or other things. We built aluminum fuel that also does that. So you take aluminum, this aluminum, you remove the oxide layer, you put it in water, and then it rips basically the, the oxygen off of the water and produces hydrogen. So we, we developed some of that fuel, worked on like an afterburning, electric, ducted fan.

All different stuff. Like, we're.

How many guys are doing this with you?

There were five of us.

This shit's all happening in one month.

Month. We didn't sleep. What, it was a lot. It was a lot. Yeah. Small budget, we're all sleep deprived. Yeah, it was, it was a good month though.

Sounds like it.

But again that we're a lab at this point because we had no idea what we were doing. It's just like, let's prove, let's prove to 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, this theory. And I had built a few things and they had 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, right? Because if I, if I, if I call someone in, 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, 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, like, you never know what the Pentagon's going to take seriously unless you, 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.

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, I was, Well, I was still pushing the engineering along as much as I could. And they would, they would work on the weekends or after school. But it's, it's mit. Like, they were, they had a lot of coursework and other things to do, but I mean, super, super grateful we were able to find investment capital at that point from a couple different folks. That's when Sequoia invested. That's when 1517 did another round. It was a good time, but it was later. Like, it was like, after like, like four or five months. They're, they're all these, like, they're.

You learning to pitch or do they have recruit. 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.

Does that make you nervous?

Not really. I don't, I don't get nervous in conversations. Like, I love conversations.

You're nervous you're gonna get taken advantage of by a shark.

Not I, I, I can look out for myself. Folks, folks have tried and I've, I've beat them back to the best I can. 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 don't know if I've ever been afraid of a pitch meeting or afraid of like a given test because 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 stuff. But there's no reason to be nervous about that fact. I don't know if that makes sense.

It does,

but yeah. Anyway, we, we raise capital, then it's

a tremendous Amount of confidence in yourself.

Thank you. Yeah. 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 that the results will be what the results are, because you would go insane in any other way. Like, there's nothing actually inherently that painful about company building. Like, I think there's this narrative spun up by CEOs that company building is like this incredibly painful, essentially worrying thing. And it can be at times. But if my goal. And I'm not great at this, but my goal is like, all company building is conversations. All company building is like, 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. You have to. You have to try and separate the two as much as you can,

man. I think the opposite. I think building a company is hard. It's hardest thing I've done. I'd rather. I'd rather be face down with bullets flying over my head because I'm more comfortable in that situation.

But that might be you. I. 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. Anyway, I don't know.

I get what you're saying.

But we. Yeah, so then we, we raised capital and that was, that was a 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, we went and got two houses down in Austin and we had some stupid number. It was like 30 or 35 people from MIT and Harvard come move down to Texas for that semester, and all living in two houses. We worked in one of the houses.

Holy.

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. And then the other house was like the hangout house. So we had like lucida, which was the workhouse, and then balconies, which was like the, the. The hangout house. We'd have a barbecue every Friday and all hang out. The AC broke in Lucida. We're running so many 3D printers and different things that 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.

And then understandably, it was a weird environment to try and hire like professionals into at the times. That's when we made our first few hires. It's like, hey, come join this crew. It's like tough, but we got 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 confidence they did on us at that point for the A, which is when we were able to go and get like a proper office. We were able to buy CNC 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 working on stuff like we are now, it's different, but like Viper is a vertical takeoff 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 confidence, 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, that Bedrock led.

What were you building in the house? What were you 3D printing?

It's a good question. What all were we working on at the time? We had three major programs at this point. So we had, we had Viper, which is today, it's a six and a half foot long vertical takeoff fighter jet. Back then, all we could afford was like crappy RC turbines. 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 drone, so thousand mile range. We had three printers. We're never going to build that. We were building like scale demonstrations. But a tail sitter that would go, take off, do isr, do strike, and then come back and land. A big part of our philosophy has always been decentralization. Like the, the next era of warfare. One of the only things I think you can say with confidence right now is that strike is much easier at long range. And so defending centralized assets, ships in the ocean, aircraft on the Runway, even 2,000, 3,000 miles away, becomes so much harder. And so our big emphasis, one of them has always been on this decentralization.

Like how do you have things take off vertically? How do you have things only required two operators so that you and I can walk outside, launch something and be gone by the time they figure out where it came from. So that was Medusa. And then the third, and this plays into the decentralization bet, but again was a bad 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 in Austin. The other one was up in Boston was basically an aluminum hydrogen generator. And so similarly, as you look at indopacom, one of the hard problems is how do you feel these horses going forward? And that gets even harder if you're 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. And so that's why we were doing the aluminum hydrogen work.

Now also you're 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 are these other companies doing that? I don't think they are.

I think, I think they are now. I don't think necessarily. No. 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. I would say we, we do take probably a more full stack approach to things. But no, the other companies work in the space are very good. Like I, 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 sharp. I haven't heard anyone talk about logistics.

Logistics wins. Worse like that is, that is other than your people, it's the most important thing.

At the end of the day, what is it saying? Amateur stock tactics. Tactics pros talk logistics.

Yeah, something like that. 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 and can take out, take out a target, a very, very far range, which, that's the one we kind of talk about the least. It's, it's one of our, it's a high altitude glide vehicle to take out targets. It's A, it's a more sensitive con op, but it's, it's this big. And you and I could deploy this here and take out a target a long ways down range. But thing that looks like a missile, that's, that's Viper. So we, we have, we have five products we've, we've talked about publicly. So one is, is Viper. It's about a six and a half foot long vertical takeoff kind of miniature fighter jet. And so the, 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 like cheap enough to seriously go and make a million, 2 million of these things and then be Runway independent.

And so several hundred mile range, several hundred mile, like 600 miles an hour. Can go and get up to these high altitudes, but only cost $100,000. And you and I could take it out of Pelican case here and launch it with no ground infrastructure. And so army is super excited about Viper for a bunch of folks are 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 does,

is Viper, I mean, 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 of Viper. 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, 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 to air missile. Wow. So that's a fun one. We've been flying that one for about a year now.

We could use a couple of those

Here, you want one? Yeah, yeah, I want one. I'll get you a Viper.

Are you serious?

Yeah.

Oh yes.

I'm guessing no warhead in the Viper.

I'll get you take some more heads too. I might get that run in with the ATF.

There you go. Yeah, I'll get you a Viper 100.

Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

The composite. The manufacturing guys are going to be so excited building that Viper.

No.

Yeah.

Dude, you got to come back you got to come back.

I'd love.

You gotta come back.

I'll 100 get you a Viper. Do you want me to walk through the products?

Is this absolutely. Yes. All of them. 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 as 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 that balloons are the most important tools in future content conflict.

You mentioned that at breakfast.

I did. Well, the, the, the, the balloon in the US this week. Yeah, the Chinese balloon.

The people started drone. That wound up being a happy birthday balloon.

Exactly. I mean, the Russians are starting to, to send balloons out at 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 was part of why we were able to get funding. As 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. 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, 80,000ft. Well, to then go pop it, you've got to send a missile or a plane up to 60 to 80,000ft. 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. So 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 at an altitude that's 100 to a thousand times more expensive to shoot down than it is to put up, that can actually tack against wind patterns and lock in places. And then from there, there's, 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 at a given time. So, so we have, we have Stratus payloads up at altitude. Really, really interesting things you can do deploying 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 here.

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, 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 air missiles? All these different things. So anyway, I, I've, we've held that contention strongly for a while as a company. We're working very, very.

Does this stuff just pop in your head or.

I mean it does, I mean a lot of this. I, I can't, I can't claim all of these ideas like, and, 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 publish 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. And then our, our final two products we talk about. One is a. Basically a much bigger jet powered aircraft. 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.

Dude, what the. That's crazy. I can't take credit for that 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 subcomponents. So like most primes or system integrators to go and buy other people's subcomponents 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 aircraft. So it's actually in many cases the same avionics that fly our different vehicles. It'll be the same jet engines that ship on Viper and, and on this other platform. So it was, it was fast.

So what is, 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. If 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 then the government comes up with a name for it that they like to call it Pike Venom. Different, different things for different customers 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 to 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 platforms, some combination of small platforms, some combination of jamming, some combination of lasers. But 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 graph and 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, that are non maneuverable, 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.

That's why I was gonna, okay, I was gonna, I mean we were talking about Epirus earlier, Leonidas and some of those, some of that weaponry. Yeah, that's. So that, that's what that's because I was going to say, seems like that's the answer.

It's a different.

Takes out the drones that have the wire. Takes out drones without the wire. I think they dropped like a hundred and something drones, what a month ago? Yeah, or something out in the desert.

It's one of the best tools. It's great.

But so you're saying that a weapon like Leonidas or what Epirus is developing is not going to be effective against something like dark dark or, or, or not dark because that's a defensive one,

but I know what you mean.

But an offensive one that moves at whatever speed.

So Leonidas is a bit different. So you have jamming and then you've got Leonidas which is actually directed microwave. Leonidas is a great platform and will actually take out most Things. It's, it's not a silver bullet though because the second you, you turn it on, you're pumping so much power anyway. There's, there's stuff we shouldn't get into there but like there are ways to get through it. It specifically with fast moving things that already have a given trajectory. And so you need, you need the full stack like dji. The, the drones most unsophisticated 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 Leonidas that is very, very, very good against a large number of assets in a given location. 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 the shot heads I was 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 faster moving things. The issue with guns is you're pretty good against one adversarial drone. Well, the most 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, is for obvious reasons not going to have time to shoot it down. And so what, what we're working on with Dart is how cheap can you possibly get an actual missile to go and interdict, interdict 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.

Gotcha.

Right. Whereas with, with our missiles and with missile systems, generally speaking, and I guess I should step 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 Take out adversarial assets at a, theoretically a price point cheaper than the asset itself, which gives you sort of your asymmetry back, back. And so that's, that's what we're working on with DART is like, how cheap can you possibly get one of these surface to air missiles?

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 supersonic ones. Like, you don't want to waste a supersonic one against a subsonic asset. And so kind of the, the goal is to have this modular system and you actually have different types of Darts with different capabilities over time. I'm talking years in the future. But the, the funny thing is we did this during the first Cold 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, you've got literally ideas of like nuking the air going on at the time. And what ended up winning out is solid rocket motor with aero control surface surfaces. And that's been super, super successful, generally speaking, until the era 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 possibly can, optimize it to make hundreds of thousands, because you're going to need so many of these systems.

Like if, if our adversaries are making hundreds of thousands of systems, we need hundreds of thousands of interceptors at least. And that's assuming 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, a decentralized military force. I mean, how would these things. It's just so different than from what I'm used to. I mean, everything is, is, everything's centralized to a flagpole base, whether that's, you know, Kabul or Bagram or Baghdad 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 Sang from SHIELD AI I mean, that's his big thing, you know, every, every pickleball court in the world is a fucking launch pad. And 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 decentralized.

And that's, that's why. So you're exactly right.

In the entire, in the entire infrastructure of global militaries has to change because you can't have it centralized on the basis. And so what, what does that even look like? Does that look like we just have houses in the middle of neighborhoods that, that nobody knows about, where the roofs open up and a drone flies out?

Or.

I mean, in your mind, what does the future look like? I mean, you can't have anything centralized if. Yeah, you brought up the, the Russian, that. What was that?

Operation Spiderweb.

Yeah, that one. I mean, perfect 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.

Parksville's right up the road. That's where TF160 is. You know what I mean? You got Patterson Air Force Base, all the, It's. You got all this. It's all centralized.

Exactly.

So we're. So how do you dec. How do you. Now, Reese, not only are we restructuring all the technology, but you have to rethink every. Everything that we think we know is, is pretty much completely obsolete.

And this is why revolutions and military affairs are always so damaged. Like, so dangerous to 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 ISR 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 and air on the ground. You can't require central centralized infrastructure. You can't require a Runway. We'll see how far back it marches. But you, 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. Yeah, 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 real fast. So like they released a boat, I think in January, that's a commercial cargo ship that has containerized munitions. That means you have like a Conex box, like a shipping container that can launch anti ship missiles. So you don't know if that shipping container is on.

Holy shit.

An 18 wheeler. You don't know if that shipping container is on a random cargo ship. Ship. You look at ports and you've got hundreds of thousands.

They have the biggest. It's like 95%. No, it's. I'm sorry, it's 50% of the world's shipbuilding capacity is ing China, and we have, what, less than 1%.

Crazy now.

Holy shit.

I will, I will actually, I will say I don't worry that much about that.

In my argument was. I wouldn't even say it's an argument. I mean, I remember having this exact conversation with Dino Mavrukas from Saronic and Palmer from. From Andurl. You know, my, my big thing was. I mean, what. Yeah, but what kind of ships are they building? Are they just building cargo ships? Are they building shells? I mean, yeah, they could turn that into something. But then you're talking about these shipping containers and it's like. Oh, like it's a. It's a destroyer in disguise.

It is, it is. But even that, I think, is too centralized. Like, if an actual conflict starts, you're taking those out pretty quick, quickly. Because you're talking about, I mean, the, the missiles to, 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 heart to take it out because you can't tell which ones are good and which ones are bad. I mean, 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 drug dealers. You know, now we got Chinese cargo ships, 50 of the world's ships all over the place. You can't tell which ones are, which ones are.

That's a great point.

Neutral and which ones are bad guys. And so you got to take them all out. Well, there goes a ton of civilians.

Yep. Yeah. No, you're right.

It's 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. You have to decentralize. 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 and 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 saying 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 force structure actually needs to look like when this is.

And it's just wild. And then you think about all the bases that we've given up. Yeah, Bagram being various. I mean it's still centralized but I mean even, you know what I'm saying? Like even like now we're just consolidating what we're 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, and so at least it was somewhat decentralized. Now it's, we're even. 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 is the range at which you can deploy these things allows you, allows you to act more forward and then hopefully we find ways of doing it where you don't rely on a base to launch these assets. Like there's nothing inherent about Viper that would, would, would require any actual fixed ass assets in a country you're fighting in.

Man, you really got me thinking now this just looks, I know nothing.

That's not true. No, that's not true.

I would say I'm not scared of it. I'm, I'm, I'm a bit kidding. It's the, the old way is done, it's complete, it's over. It would be, in my opinion, it's almost detrimental to be even 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 may be detrimental to the future because it's, it's, it's so 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 morphing 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 bite off 1% a day on. On. On getting ourselves towards this future? Because the, the other thing is, like, if we just sit around talking about this, but don't have any actuals of, of how we get there, because the issue is, and you know this better than I do, none of these assets operate in a vacuum. So I could go and ship 10,000 Vipers, 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 real art of it is like, how do you have. Have taste intact in the way that you morph our force structure over the next few years? And that does.

How do you start?

You start. I mean, you start by, by buying more of these, these systems. And obviously I'm, I have a conflict of interest saying that. And so everyone should take that with a grain of salt. But I also started this company because I believed in the importance of doing that. So. But you need to start by building the industrial base.

I mean, where do you store them? And I'm not even talking about your products. I'm talking about locations.

Locations.

I mean, you know, major bases. Fort Bragg, Clarksville, they're not that hard to store. Camp Pendleton.

They're not. I don't think they're.

You know what I mean though, for sure, for sure. Massive amount of personnel. I'm not even talking about unmanned systems. I'm talking about decentralizing every, everything. You know, Norfolk, Virginia, San Diego, California. Biggest two naval bases in the country. You know what I mean? How do you decentralize all of this?

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. What do you do with the old? It's, 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. Strong. And so you, you don't have to worry as much about massive threats on U.S. soil. It's, it's in areas of proxy war where it gets really, really dangerous. So if you're Lithuania thinking about this, you need to be thinking very, very, very deeply about decentralization. Right? For the U.S. fortunately, we do have, we do have nuclear deterrence.

We also have the Dome coming, supposedly.

We do. And the Dome. The dome will Be good for certain assets and not good for other assets. Assets. So like you're talking about long range hypersonics, 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's not going to do anything in its current form. Now I would argue the Dome should do something and that's something we should expand. And I'm also not saying the hypersonics problem isn't something we need to work on, but at least for the things you and I are talking about right now, like the Dome's architected with, with space based interceptors mostly. The Dome's not going to take out a quad that randomly emerges that some Chinese Foreign national launches 10 miles from a naval base.

Wow. So even that, before it's even fully developed, is almost obsolete. A lot of people don't realize how much outdated banking is costing them. Monthly fees, overdraft charges and minimum balances that punish you for not having enough. That's how traditional banks have worked for years. Chime is built differently. It's fee free, mobile first banking designed for everyday people, not just the 1%. Looking at what Chime offers, I think about how much easier it would have made things earlier in my life. With Chime, you can get paid up to two days early with direct deposit and use MyPay to access up to $500 of your own paycheck when you need it without the usual penalties. And the new Chime card is a standout. It lets you build credit history using your own money while earning 1.5% cash back on eligible purchases. When you have qualifying direct deposits. No annual fees, no interest, no gimmicks. Add in a savings APY that's seven times higher than traditional banks and 24,7 customer support from real people and switching to Chime is a clear upgrade. It only takes a few minutes and it's a smarter way to manage your money.

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Wow. When we're talking, 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, we have partners that we co design 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, the ATF for other people.

Oh man.

Wow.

I love these kind of conversations. Are you going to build any guns as a 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 one I think about that much. I don't think we're going to build guns. If I was going to build a gun. The big problem right now is body armor. Finding ways to, to get through body armor. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna give a good answer. Let me think through the problem a little bit. I think one you've got to have significantly. Like this is where Andrew is actually doing incredible work. Like I don't know if you've seen their eagle eye stuff but like. Oh yeah, it's pretty good.

He came and talked about for the first time here.

That's great. Yeah, that's awesome. So I think you got some stuff to think about.

It was awesome. It's a great conversation.

That's awesome. Awesome.

Talked about hostage rescue.

Nice.

How could you, how could you identify the hostage? Because that would speed up the, that would speed up the action. Yeah, tremendously.

I, I think the, the biggest, the biggest failure of these new gun systems throughout history is that you actually step too far forward. You have too much technology and you, you pack too much into it. Like the hypervelocity projectile work. Anyway, there's, there's a lot of times that's been done and so I, I, I would be. You got to have some level of increased 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 projectile side. 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 XM5XM7. I know they've changed the name, but I actually don't hit. 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 steel casing gets you more muzzle velocity. 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?

XM5XM7. I forget which of the two. It was one and then changed to the other. I think it's the XM5.

Are you talking about the spear? Yeah, the SIG spear.

Yep.

You like it?

I don't, I don't know enough about it. My cousin's at West Point. He shot it. He wasn't a huge fan. I think one, I think they're having pretty bad reliability issues. And then two, I do think I, I think it's too, too big of a round right now for. It's, it's a force. Anyway. I don't.

They have, they have a 6.8, 556 and a 300 blackout.

Yeah. So I think, I think somewhere between I even this. The 6.8 is big for a lot of.

And I shot the piss out of it. It seems pretty reliable and I'll trust you on it.

I'll trust you on it. Like, see this is not, this is not my, my.

Well actually I got, I got a little something for you, but I don't know if it's going to be reliable enough for you, but.

Holy.

It's been pretty reliable to me. So that's the 6.8 mcx spear from Sig Sour. I told him you were coveted. They got all fired up about it. So they wanted me to give this to you. And then. Yeah, my buddy Jason over at Sig He's a huge fan of you.

You.

And then I got some buddies at silencer shop, too, so they're gonna put a suppressor up there for you. And Sig put this optic on her, so. I don't know. Maybe we should go test it.

Let's go test.

It's reliable enough, I think.

Hearsay says a lot. Let's go. I love this. Let's go test it.

That's 6.8. 6.8.

That's. Thank you so much.

Yeah, man, I really.

Holy cow. And I do love that Sig's getting into optics like that new anyway. That's so sick. Thank you. Yeah, man, I really appreciate it. And I am sure I will take back everything I said after shooting.

Let's go make sure it is reliable. You want to take a break?

Let's do it.

Yeah, let's go break it in. Cool, dude.

Thank you.

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I'm a convert. Yeah, I had the 365 and I had the spear of two of my favorite guns. And obviously. Or the. The ratt, not the spear. Two of my favorite guns. I 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. 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. And then it didn't jam a single time. And so small sample size reliability.

Yeah. It's interesting how not everything on YouTube's true.

Yeah. And I'm. I'm embarrassed for falling for it, so thanks for.

How do you like that rattling?

I love it. 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?

No.

Silencer shops. About to pop your cherry. Right on, man. But yeah, I want to get. I've been telling Jason. I'm like, dude, send me one of these rattlers, because that's been out for a long time. I want it for home defense.

But it's. It's good. I mean, it's. I. I don't know if they're all chambered in 300 blackout. Mine's chamber 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. I went oh for 12 on the.44.

Barely, man. And plus, I'm a former SEAL and a CIA contractor. So I should beat. I should have really kicked your ass. But I did and, and that wasn't me taking it easy. I'm just out of it. But, but dude, that was fun.

Thanks for doing that. Thanks for doing that. I love that, that suppress 22.

Cool.

It's good.

Cool. But yeah, so we, I don't even. We just got done wrapping up, kind of talking about all the products that you're making and. 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's supposedly like a pretty. Yeah, it's like the new tech hub, right?

Yeah, that's. That's what they say. I moved from Boston to Austin because I, I like Texas. I think Texas is a great business environment. I'm obviously from Texas. Really wanted the company B. 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 gnc, for the real aerospace stuff, it's still la. So we had like an applicant tracking software across like six months. It was like 95 plus percent of our sort of interesting candidates were all LA based. So then for 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 and fly out Saturday night, fly back Sunday night and take like 10 interviews and basically got a good sample size. In those three months of people saying like, yes, I would 100 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 to hire. 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 and it was 100% 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 Texas, but I

mean, I'm just curious, you know, with all this new tax. Tax. Potential tax. I think it's. Is it passed potential tax implications in California, do you think he'll move the business again?

I may have to move myself. I mean the thing is the business has several locations. So like we, we have folks in D.C. we have folks in Austin. Our next big factory won't be in California. Okay. And so it's, it's really just our engineering headquarters that's in Huntington. But I forget the exact tax. But you're 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 fault.

I see what you're saying.

With all their money in it, it, when, when you look like, when you achieve liquidity, maybe that's somewhat true.

I see what you're saying.

For a majority of these companies, I mean, you think about raising capital, you're raising capital. I mean I'm making a very small salary. I've taken $0 off the table. I don't have money to pay taxes. And so if I got hit with 5% tax on 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 plus percent of my time else. And then there are two concerning things that they're also trying to do. One is where you're taxed 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 1/12 of my taxes in California. Which if it's on, if it's on your kind of high level, like unrealized capital gains that's massive specifically for starting companies. And then the other crazy thing is they're talking about doing it based on voting share and not based on ownership.

What does that, what does that even mean?

At a lot of companies you basically have people who own certain share classes that allow them to vote more than they actually own.

Okay.

So there's a separation between how much control you have over the company versus how much ownership you have over the company. So Mock's one of these companies where I do control the company, but I own at this point point, like not that much of the company. Well, I get taxed based on the control I have over the company and not based on my actual worth, which is crazy. What that's they're talking about it. I, I don't think any of this is going to pass because it would literally shut down the California economy. But it would kill, it would kill anyone trying to do stuff like I'M doing.

I mean, didn't they lose like a trillion dollars at Silicon Valley? Like a week?

Crazy. Crazy.

It's wild, man.

And it's, there's, I mean it's, there's the up, right, because you've got, you've got great talent. Like, there's a reason I had to move out there. There's a reason Silicon Valley is still Silicon Valley. It's, it's an excellent place to, to, to build a company. But you, you passed something like that once and it's done. And it's not, it's not like I'm opposed to being taxed. I cra, like, I, I'll say this and a bunch of people would disagree with me. Like, I actually do think that generally speaking, billionaires should, 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, 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 massive amounts of tax is like, sure, when I sell shares, I'll owe X percent tax, but I never actually sell shares. I take out a loan against the shares and then provided the business keeps going up in 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, I do think it's broken. Like, I, 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 that like people, I mean people can't go and, and get liquidity on this equity. Like it's just physically impossible to.

Damn. Were 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 afford to do that is if there's foreign or if there's demand, generally speaking, for your debt, right? And so that's, we're massively overspending, which is broken. Obviously if you have an imbalanced budget for too long, debt 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.

You.

The way. The way this happens is you. Anyway, you sell bonds. So you

keep going.

No, it's. 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 in, right? So if you're trying to. And I'm America, I'm giving you $100. You're giving me $100 worth of goods. And then maybe I'm giving you $50 of goods, and you're giving me $50 back. You run on basically an imbalanced 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'll actually go and buy the dollars back and issue debt. Where this is all a bond is obviously, right, I'll buy the 100 bucks, 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 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 one is it actually gives you the ability to freeze people's funds. And it directly actually ties to geopolitical political power.

And this is actually one of the things that's weakening it is when the Ukraine war kicked off, we started freezing. We started freezing assets that other countries held. Right. And. 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, which is why you are the global reserve currency. And the, 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 incentives to push debt. Like, 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 has helped for a while, but there's starting to be pressure sort of 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 security. So like the amount of bonds we're issuing and the amount of debt we owe people is 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 you're, your debt is growing quicker than your economy and if you're running an imbalanced budget where you're taking on new debt to pay for your debt, you get into this debt spin 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 too great of a degree. I don't know if we did that or not in Ukraine.

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, 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. While 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 of 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 of getting off the US dollar as the global reserve currency. People get doomsday here pretty quick. I think this is not in the same camp of problems as the Taiwan 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.

That means like on average it's something stupid, like $113,000 of debt per person in the country that our government owes elsewhere. And so then you just start looking at interest payments on that debt and talking about thousands of 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 against your future. And that's a great instrument. I'm not saying we shouldn't have debt. Like financial systems exist for a reason. But where this all leads to is there's this really scary effect right now where all, 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, it's kind of a pincher maneuver because we, we also have, we have an incentive right now to devalue the dollar. Sorry, I'm going way off. Right.

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. That. But if, if you and I are trading and my, my dollar is more valuable than your, your currency, Euro or anything else, trade will generally go to you. Right. And, and U.S. 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's 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 it's some of our allies, like Japan's, the biggest holder of US Debt and they've started selling for different reasons.

Obviously China selling a ton of U.S. debt. But this can accelerate very, very quickly where you get basically the equivalent of a bank run on U.S. 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 to balance the budget. It kind of ran into a political wall because of course if you're, if you're getting, if you're getting elected, you're, you're not incentivized to go devalue the dollar, right. You're not incentivized to stop the money printing machine. And so one of, one of the structural issues when you run into short sighted thinking, which right now is a ton of politics, right, because people, people are incentivized to think on four to six year timelines is no one is actually incentivized to go and fix the root of this, this problem. So anyway, that's, that's one of the things that I just think is really, really important to think about. One, like our, 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, I do think it's something we need to be taking.

I've never heard it broken down like that before. I think you're doing great.

Thank you.

Yeah. What do you think about brics?

I think it's scary. Look, I, I think fortunately right now there's not a great other option like you, you see a push towards decentralization instead of a general push towards yuan or other things. And that is because the dollar, the dollar is still pretty singular in its 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 and balance gets more expensive.

You know, one thing you said that I, it's just not clicking in my head is 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? Yeah, 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. Tariffs. It's a different way to achieve what you do with tariffs. Right? And this is on production for other countries. Tariffs is obviously production for domestic markets. They're both instruments to achieve the same thing, which is basically, 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 in economics. Right? And so there's advantages and disadvantages to all of these different things. Like if your economy is going to compound like crazy, there are advantages to a very strong dollar and to 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 do 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 is 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 your debt becomes significantly more expensive. And the reason that's scary is because we're nowhere close to a balanced 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, 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 the AI bubble bursts right when the rest of this is happening, right when you go and weaponize the dollar, so there's. There's less demand for the dollar. The US Treasuries are not seen as a stable of 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 in the US as 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, 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 innovating.

Like you, you do just have to grow the economy and you have to stay away from, you have to stay away from incredibly negative hype cycle fueled, boom bust cycles. Two, you have to reinforce, you have to reinforce trust in the, in the US Government. Right. Like you, 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 reestablish that.

Yeah, it's, it's going to be a long path, I think. I, I really.

How do you think we reestablish trust?

I think people want to trust the U.S. 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 I'm, if, if it's, if it's me though, I think one, you have to bring, 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, 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, you can't be doing things, yeah, you can't be doing things that erode trust in us to act rationally. And then you have to take a tariff policy that is sort of slow and deliberate. 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 to reinforce belief that the dollar will continue as an institution.

You need to balance the dollar debt. You need to find Ways to, to, to, to cut spending and to, to increase re tax revenues. Now I, I again, I think the tax, I'm, 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 something that, that started happening is you roll, roll, you roll all of these policies into these sort of super bills where if you're voting on something, you can't vote on an issue in isolation. And so because of that we end up as this giant averaging function of different things. And then there's, there's actually this structural incentive for bureaucracies to create complexity. So we see this all the time in the defense industry. If you are a defense prime whose main moat is being able to interface with the government, making the government more difficult to interface with increases your moat. 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 be.

But yeah, I mean you, you, you have to cut spending to, to start.

What is it that would create a AI bust?

An AI bust? It's all the cycles look the same.

They're just moving so fast.

Yeah. The cause of, of a bust is always so much more difficult to tell. I think, I think one of the hyperscalers reaching like real liquidity problems would cause it. I think. Certainly Taiwan falling would cause it or coming into jeopardy would, would cause, 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 some tech company, let's say you're salesforce, your investors right now are still generally pushing you to increase innovation instead of cut spending. And so you go through these cycles where 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, are as fueled by wanting investors to think that you're investing in AI as much or more so than the actual capability the AI itself Gotcha has. And so if investors start thinking, if investors anyway, I don't know is the answer. But there are a bunch of different things that I think could cause it.

You think we're close?

I don't think so. I think, I think we, we have a few months at least. I think the, I think the work Xai is doing, for instance, is like creating a lot more confidence. Like as long as people think the tech is getting better because that's what everyone's betting on. Like the, 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 hyperscaling satellites in space 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 and it's so impossible to tell where in the stack the cracks will emerge. Like it could be an, it could be Nvidia anyway. It could be Nvidia missing earnings. It, 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, I think, I think there's still room. But that's not necessarily a good thing if you're, if you're on a train hurdling at a barrier. It's not, not, 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, I don't know, we'll see. I could very much be wrong on

the transformer architecture, but it's an interesting, it's. I mean I've just never heard anybody talk about it like that. It's, 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 had, you know, the beginning with social media as a question. You said it was about Gen Z and you said get off social.

I think so, yeah. I think it's, I think it's a real problem. I think one, just the, the rise of short form content is just so bad for development of like true thought.

What about politics? I think it's, I think it's a single party system.

I don't think an intentionally orchestrated single party system. But I think in, in many ways the emergent effect is that.

What do you think it is?

I kind of described, I kind of described.

Why do you think we're at a single party system?

I think, I think that there's, I think there are structural reasons if you're, if you're at, if you're at the top, to create as much division as possible around problems that don't actually matter. To get.

Why do you think that is each other?

I think, 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, it's really, really hard to avoid, to avoid problems just becoming massively bucketed. And so it's, it's really hard to go item by item and have like clear conversation about any given item instead of just right or left. Left, I think. I mean you, you, you brought up Epstein earlier. I mean I, I do think that the social circles of both parties at the top actually just massively converge at, at some point. I think we're seeing that. Like, I, 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, that people don't realize is these fuckers in D.C. 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, and because, because they'd never go home to be with their constituents, they all become friends. And you know, 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. 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, ooh, that one was below the belt a little bit. Because we don't want you to say what I'm doing, you know what I mean?

And one of the terrible. Sorry to cut you off that, that.

And so what happens is a hidden, you know, hidden agendas, corruption and all that because these won't call each other out because they're all buddies, you know. And so it does it, it in, in you're saying, and I agree with you, it's not necessarily agree with you some way. 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, how much higher it goes. But maybe it's Epstein, you know what I mean? But, 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 generals, admirals. None of them want to call each other out on their. Because that. Because they're all friends, you know. And I think it's. I think it's pretty much that simple, you know, at 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 you first principles and. But I mean, it's almost like nowadays, I mean, it would be interesting to see if somebody came in and actually tried to unify, but you know, it'd be really hard to do with the way the media is.

And because. Because they would lose views and.

Two other.

So they have to tribalize. They have to the country.

They have to. And then.

Because then it's just two teams. You know what I mean? And then. And so it's. It's.

Yeah, 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 Epstein stuff up is like. Like if. If everyone's in a system where one person sees someone else do something bad, that person coerces that person into doing something bad, that person coerces 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 some. Unfortunately it is like horrible blackmail level stuff. Like the Epstein stuff like you. 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, if your constituents found out you pushed this through for this favor you did for this person.

And so you. There's this spiderweb of connections of friendships and of. Of coercion that make the machine like it. It just becomes super, super difficult to move. And then the second one that's. That's pretty terrifying is when. When you tie it to economics, like the amount of money you need in this country to get elected these days means that you have to have a tie to people who are wealthy. Right? 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 Ro Khanna and we were talking about the Epstein stuff, but this, this subject came up and you know, he. People don't want to call out their donors. You know, I can, I, I mean, I don't know who couldn't understand that it sucks. But, but I mean the media reports that the, the podcast industry is basically what determined the last election, you know, and, and Trump participated. Kamala didn't. She went on like what, one fucking

podcast, you know, ended it all up.

And yeah, I mean, so it's, it's people, whatever people. And it made a lot of people like me look one sided, but I could get anybody on the other side. Yeah, you know, we, 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 in my opinion, seems to maybe have evened the playing field at least a little bit, you know, because the numbers of this crush any of those mainstream outlets now, it destroys it. They hate it. And I'm nothing compared to somebody like Rogan, you know what I mean? Like, his numbers are probably bigger than all of them put together. Other.

Couldn't agree more. And that's why the work y' all do is so insanely important. And that's.

But they want the money from the donors, you know, because who knows where the, that all winds up going? I don't, I don't know.

But I, Yeah, no, I mean, look,

I think just about everybody up there is a piece of, if you ask

me, but the democratized democratization of information is the, the best thing that will fix this. Now the, the issue with that is that social media companies and we, we're on the verge of this happening really, really badly if, if not for Elon buying X. Now obviously Elon's also a, 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 on viewership and

other Things we saw that what, 2020?

Yeah. And so you still, the orchestration just looks different. It's almost harder to decipher because you can't tell if you're being pushed with your algorithms into thinking a certain way and being shown certain things. You can't tell if a certain video that should have gotten 10 million views got dialed back and only got, got 200,000 views. Right. And so one, I think for, for guys like y', all getting as close as you can to, to actually being truly democratized and escaping that is super, super important. I think too, like, there is a place for regulation in all of this. Like, Teddy Roosevelt's probably one of my favorite, if not my favorite presidents because he was a, he's an interesting dude. He was a conservative who had 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 amok 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 as a conservative was actually pretty, pretty wild. Like, he actually went and 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 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 like an idiot. Oh, but I, I. So I think, I think that's one. And then the other kind of dark horse here is the AI stuff is just the amount of, of bots or the amount of AI generated content that is just in, really in the last six months gone and just transcended these spaces which back back to the importance of, of guys like you, guys like Rogan.

Like the way you cut through that is by having personalities you trust, right? And that, that makes Yalls 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 have productive debate. 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 the amount of AI content entering the Internet. We need to watch out for the effect bots can have on algorithms. Like you go and deploy a bunch of bots to get a video watched, because these are all positive feedback loops. 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, LLMs are really good at this point. The ability to spin up LLMs 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 now, maybe that's just cope for me because I don't want to have my feelings hurt by bad comments. And I'll say they're AI or in it, whatever, 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 in many ways like a new domain of warfare in this new space of information.

This is what I was getting at with Taiwan.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's so hard to regulate. It's so insanely hard to go and regulate the amount of bots that are actually in 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, of it. And it's incredibly expensive. And the, 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. I'm super, super grateful for, for guys like you who who, 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 what was going on. I mean, 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 a completely different narrative. Yeah. And this goes both ways. So I'm, 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 issue is.

Are scary times. Do you take. How do you deal with corporate espionage? I mean, that's big in Silicon Valley. I don't know if it's big where you're at. I would imagine it is, because Palmer's down there.

Right.

A lot of the, I don't know how far you are from El. 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 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. And I told him, hey, you know, I've been overseas all over the place. One of the things Chinese do is they set up brothels all over the place. And then they get these State Department guys, but agency, whoever, they go in there and they fall in love with some Chinese hooker and then. Done. Yep. And so if that's happening over there, and I know damn well it's happening in Silicon Valley, where you're at in Austin. Any, anybody that's doing something innovative, especially somebody that's interested in China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine. And then I interviewed this woman. Woman, Masha Booker. Have you heard of her? Holy. You didn't take an investment from her, did you? Good man.

Crazy, though, dude.

So I talked to another guy, and he was talking about how this woman comes in and the clothes eventually slip off, and then next thing you know, she wants to invest in your company with a VC firm. And so I interviewed her, and I knew I could tell. You know, obviously I could tell it was because we never released the interview. I just considered the entire thing to be a lie. We found one little thing about her in the Epstein Files. So we are not in the Epstein files. I'm sorry. On. In an article that she was. She had did something with. With his pr, you know what I mean? Totally dismissed. It got really uncomfortable. Blue Jeremy, me, 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, that's a. It's a. It's a horrible interview. Like the only, the only decent part in it that's interesting is the Epstein. And then there's one other company that she's talking about freezing people and you wake up a thousand years later or some. But. So that was kind of wild.

But I was like, duff, if that's not in there, we're definitely not putting it out.

Out.

I was like, the whole thing's probably a lie. So we didn't put it out. And then what, 3. 3 million pages get released and her name is in there like all over the place. All over the place.

She in jail?

What's that?

Is she in jail?

I don't think she's in jail, but

she's going to go to jail. Sorry, I'm. I'm taking. I took the wrong turn there.

She should. She should. It's a lot of people should.

A lot of people should. Should. And then on the corporate. Corporate espionage.

Yeah. So that's what I. Yeah. You got thoughts on this? That's all. You guys know who this woman is?

You have to, I mean, you have to be so hypervigilant as, 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. Or maybe you weren't looking when you were at MIT and you had had VC firms, investors coming up to you. That's what I was getting at. Are you nervous? Did that make you nervous because of corporate espionage and shit like that? People taking advantage of you? You're a young guy. You don't have a lot of experience. You're obviously extremely intelligent, but I don't know how, I don't know, you know, if you pick up on things like that.

Yeah.

That young of an age. I would think a lot of people don't. That only comes with experience.

That's scary. I mean, I think there are a few different risk fronts. One is actually having like your decision making as a CEO influenced. Right. And I feel good there. Like I'm squarely in charge of the company. Like I have deeply trusted investors. We work together to make decisions. But ultimately it is my decision and I've very closely curated that group. I think the next is basically investor data rights, right? Because the issue is all these VCs is not their money, it's their LPs money. In many cases, it's their LPs 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 is where it gets really, really hard. And we have a team that works on this, obviously.

Obviously.

So we have a cybersecurity team, we have physical security, we run really extensive background checks on anyone that 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 Skunk Works does. Like a lot of skunkworks is literally pen and paper. Paper because they're afraid of having their stuff hacked.

Well, damn, that's weird. I just had this conversation with Nick. With Nick, See the rather I said, do you think we'll hit a point with AI and you know, with everybody's fear of quantum computing and all this other. I mean, are we going to go back to face to face pen and paper stored in a vault because of all the, you know what I mean? That, that, that, that, that people text each other, photo, all, everything, like just personal stuff. Then we get into, you know, national secrets, national security secrets. Like that. I mean it's online, it can be hacked. And it seems like it might. It already is going back to that a little bit.

I don't think we, I don't think we. It's an optimization, so it's somewhere in the middle. You can't completely do, do that. So like that's one of the reasons, if you read the Skunk Works book, they talk about that actually leading to the. The collapse of innovation is Skunk Works when it takes 18 months to hire someone because you're combing through everything they've ever done, right? And where you can't use the best design software 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 gonna lose regardless. And so you have to have a ton of tact in the way you choose to treat these things. 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. If my design changes every three months, well, you can have the design from three months ago, but 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 in war fighting. And 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 chain security is something that people don't talk nearly enough about about. No, no company on earth operates all the way up to their mine across everything they do. You can't do it right. So like a deeply vertically integrated company manufactures, let's say, 50% of the parts that go into their, their, 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, even those components you're building have components that, 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, when it is a competitive environment, like, if it's just you building it, go insanely slow, 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, the supply chain side, side. And then anything as relates to, to your software is what gets really, really, really scary. Like if, if, if.

I'm listening.

We saw, I mean, we saw, we saw The Israelis do this quite effectively with the pagers. Right. And, and so that, that, that type of warfare goes both ways. And that should keep us all up at night, right? Like the fuses you put in your aircraft. Like if, anyway, I won't go too deep down this rabbit hole.

Goes down a whole nother bugging rabbit hole right there. I've not even thought about that. I have. Not even.

Because ultimately, I mean, I, I would say we're very vertically 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 down the supply chain, you've got literally thousands of factories down the supply chain. And again, our, our job as a country is 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 stay weary of like, what it would mean for literally one of those factories to get compromised.

It's a lot to think about.

Yeah.

Let's talk about neo feudalism.

Yeah.

What is it?

So it's an, it's a kind of newly emerging term. I'm, I'm, I'm glad you brought it up. I, it's the idea of rentership instead of ownership and that sort of progressing towards its limits. And so I'll get more specific. But generally speaking, like feudalism is this idea that you don't owe your land, own your land. Right. Like you're a serf 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 worries. If not, it's basically like companies these days specifically engineer their products to break in a given time. Okay, so like the iPhone has planned obsolescence where like after three years it's not going to be a useful good John Deere. 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 Deere specifically engineer things such that you can't repair the thing? And so one, there's a ton of planned obsolescence.

And basically what that means that you're buying goods more frequently from these companies. Two, you have I mean, you have the idea of service models, models, and everything's pushing towards service models. 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 it'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 tech 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 in a competitive market, in many cases they have to do planned obsolescence.

But if the, if the, if, if tech plateaus, then what's the incentive to buy a new want?

Because it breaks. So, like your iPhone, does your iPhone work that differently than it did like five years ago?

No.

So why did you buy new iPhones?

Because they break.

That's the case on a lot of different things. I mean, our, our trucks, I, I, I guess you, you, you have a cool Ford truck because it hasn't broken because it's been around for so long. But I, I have a Ford truck. I have 105,000 miles on it. I would love to drive that to 300,000 400,000 miles. It's breaking down. I'm going to have to buy a new one. It's not a better truck. It's just planned obsolescence. And so a lot of what Silicon Valley does nowadays is not innovate on technology, they innovate on business model. It's 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 great new product they're bringing. They're talking about the new way of taking existing resources and distributing them differently. And there are good effects to this. Like, Uber is a great company, but Uber obviously 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 aligned incentive to fight. And when I say you, I'm, I'm talking like, obviously me as the 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. Much. But when you look at the average of hundreds of millions of people of all the corporations in the U.S. the incentive of the business is planned obsolescence. The incentive of the business is service structures. And then the incentive at the low end becomes the companies 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. Things. And I'm not saying it's an inherently bad thing. Again, I, 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 own that much. Like, I rent my music, I rent, I, I rent my apartment, I don't rent my truck. But the trucks I buy, 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 neo feudalism emerges, is you get trapped in these loops like you were a serf, 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 in a month.

Man, how do you think we get out of this? I mean, it's gonna be, it's gonna be your generation that fixes it. Because everybody else is sitting too comfortable.

I think, I think if we're going to be in a position to fix it, We've got to get started right now. And most of these structural changes have to be made in the next few years. 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. Let's talk AI. And this is something for my generation. In the last three or four years, we've seen this, this hockey stick and AI growth. It's actually really, really difficult for my generation to bank on a career of any sort by the time we're 40, 50, 60, when we're actually in positions to do anything about it. And so maybe it's on my generation to be ringing the alarm bells. And I'm not complaining. My generation has had like an incredible easy time, right? Like, I'm, I'm not, I'm not complaining. There's, there's none of that. But I'm just saying, like, I, 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, in positions to get people elected.

Things, things that have to be done. On the neo feudalism point, I 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, if, 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. Right? Like it is, it is your job in a position of power to think deeply about the effects of the, 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, I will say the consumer has something to, to do about it too. Like you, you can buy enduring goods by cutting spending and focusing differently. Now that's a small portion of the country and most of the, most of the country at this point, I think is just trapped in that cycle. But you, you can raise the alarm bells. So on, on the, 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, if there's one thing that, that needs to not happen is taking this as a flaw of capitalism

and going, I mean, this Is scary though. I mean, because it's. Are you Gen Z? I am. Right? I mean this is the, this is the big complaint of Gen Z. Can't buy a house, can't buy anything. And I used to think maybe they're just lazy. Maybe, you know, maybe they're not going to be able to do it. Well, Trump came out with a 50 year mortgage that should cut the payment in half. I was wrong about that. I thought, I was like, well, I mean everybody was on it and I was like, I think that might be a good thing because it should cut the payment and damn near in half. Then I brought in my good friend Rob Luna and he gave me the real numbers and he was like, it's, I think he says more like a 15% cut. And I was like, oh, okay. And so that, that made it, the conversation I had with Rob made it real for me. I was like, oh man, this generation is. And I mean there has to be an answer. But at the same time if it's only doom and gloom and you, and I mean you have an entire gener people that don't think they'll ever be able to buy a house, afford a car, have a family, have a real

career, like how have a real career.

What the do you have to look forward to? And so how do you motivate that generation? It's a big problem.

It's a big problem. Now I, I will say perception.

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 man, generational trauma. It's 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. So 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 and left anymore, man. I only see good and evil and that is it.

Agreed.

I don't, I don't even believe in this left and right.

I agree.

It's all a facade.

So I think a few things, a few things I would urge one is perception does become reality. If everyone thinks that the world is going to, to go into, into oblivion, no one will save for the future. No one will work for the future. And so you, it's, it's a difficult balance. But you have to talk about the problems without becoming defeatist 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 year timelines. It does make sense to like, like think about what it means to have a family in this country. And that's just a fundamental step change that has to be had. Because other than that, like, until, 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, 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 have to act as if you have orders of magnitude more impact on the world than you actually do. And you have to trap yourself into thinking that, 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 that they, they are in control, which they are and need to be and hopefully always will be, they need to realize that and, and, 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, I am 22, I'm an idiot. On, on most of the things we've talked about. My, my goal is that they're 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. Data. Right. And so that's where you get into the, 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 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 doomers, 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 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 bickering. Like it has to exit our brains. We have to be willing, I don't care how conservative you are or how liberal you are, you have to be able to sit down and just have a real conversation and, 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, 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, we in. Again, I'm saying you as I'm like, again you, you. And so next is have good discourse and then folks just need to start acting like, invest in companies that you think, think build the future. Like I, I also think people don't realize how, 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, you can sure as hell 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, I, if you zoom all the way out, the things this country does is nothing more than, 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. So yeah, I think that, I think the biggest answer is like hope and agency.

Well, I think people like you are bringing a lot of hope.

Thank you.

It's pretty cool, man.

Thank you.

What you're doing, what a lot of your buddies are doing. Well, actually I don't even know if they're your buddies, but they are.

No, we're all on 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 war fighter has the best kit and if, if, if America is in a position to protect democracy. So I appreciate it.

Yeah. Ethan, you're a fascinating guy, an impressive guy.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming.

Thanks for having me.

It's been really cool So I wish you the best of luck, and I hope to see you again.

Thank you.

All right, man.

Foreign.

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