#45 - Michael LaFramboise, Co-Founder & CEO of Aurelius

0:00A million drones show up on the west coast of California tomorrow morning. What do we do? So if you use a missile, million dollar cost is shoot down a thousand or ten thousand dollar drone or even a hundred thousand dollar drone. You can't do that indefinitely. You can do that in small engagements, but if there's any kind of scale to where you can't do that. This is why we've chosen laser systems to really work on. We destroy the drone. We cut off its rotor. We drill through the center of it, right? It is destroyed. It's not like interfered with electromagnetically. I remember saying to myself, if I do this thing, like if I do this startup, no matter what happens, I will get out there.

0:28I will fight to the death. If I lose at the end of the day, I can live with it. This is Michael LaFamboise, the co-founder of Aurelius. They are basically building this station that uses lasers to shoot down drones, which is very based. The Ukraine war, there has never been a war with like more drones involved. How has that dynamic started and is shifting? Definitely. A lot of like the initial engagement in the Ukraine war was really the onus for John and I to go and start this company. where we had seen, I'd say maybe very early, very early 2024, late 2023, you know, drone warfare kind of proliferating across the battlefield.

1:10I don't think at that time the fiber optic cable drones had really come into the fray, but drone production was really ramping. You were seeing the production of Russian drones expand to like hundreds of thousands per month at that time. And there were people that had been on it for years before that, but that was really the time when John and I were like, we really need to go in and get into this, where we had seen on the battlefield, you know, you're reading reports where like 60, 70, 80 percent of Ukrainian casualties are due to FPD drone strikes. And it looks like we are spending billions of dollars in missiles to shoot down, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in drones.

1:48And you just play that forward with simple math and it's over if there's any kind of engagement. And, you know, having seen that you know over the last maybe 20 30 40 years we are what we're doing is building out our defense network our defense industry or defense industrial base to fight a near-peer adversary that also has f-35 type planes that also has big warships and aircraft carriers and boats and stuff and large tanks on the battlefield that is what our military had been set up to do post post global raw and terror post post iraq and afghanistan and so that is something that is um extremely dangerous and we had seen that we didn't you know we we'd kind of gotten a glimpse into what the future of warbear is going to look like and we didn't really have an answer and so that's a lot of that kind of the surrounding topics are the reason why we came forward and started aurelius yeah and i think to put this in perspective um i was talking with olav hitchwa from niros and he was saying that i believe china is producing something on the order of like 50 million drones a year yeah which is yeah to put it in perspective i believe that the us last year produced less than like a hundred thousand or something on that order you know so literally maybe three orders of magnitude more uh from china and they're selling to both sides um which is a very difficult situation yeah definitely i think they make 90 last time i checked they make like 93 94 percent of the world's drones so yeah which is crazy um what has been the like is the current uh way that we're shooting down drones and then why does this make so much more sense yeah for sure i think the so the current way that we're shooting out drones is generally through missiles uh it's will be a people often cite and like we cite also like the one to two million dollar missile for the thousand dollar drone that is true people do do that um especially like naval engagements so like um i think earlier in this year we had a we had a group of ships go through the red sea we had an attack from houthi rebels with drones it was like 30 to 40 drone attacks and we shot them down with like block four and sea sparrow missiles which are like million two million dollar missiles that's more of an emergency situation thing and we use them because we know that it works like you know 100 that that missile is going to work and that's really what the military commander is looking for they're not going to take chances on stuff like that um the ukrainians are really creative they will use some kind like they will have um kind of like small drone fighters that fly around up in the air that go and will fight other drones they will use machine guns that are kind of on auto turrets like i've seen like six something like six ak-47s all like like duct taped together or glued together or whatever in like a big like circular machine gun array and they're shooting it in the sky at things though he's like more traditional anti-aircraft weapons um those seem to work sometimes but at this point people are kind of just doing whatever they can and so where i think you know we saw over maybe from eight 17 18 and 19 till now you see kind of the the uas companies come up and do really well and kind of achieve product market fit on the west and the east side on both sides they come out and do well um the cuas side is pretty nascent what is ca uas counter uas okay okay yeah so i counter you so their uas systems are are really mature like the companies that are going to win in uas probably exist already yeah they're probably doing well they're probably in their b or c abc kind of phase right now counter uas companies most of them are at kind of their like seed or a stage is really around where they at where they're at and so you're seeing what you're going to see i believe over the next like three four five years is probably winners will be picked um it won't be one company it'll be a series of companies probably not as many companies that as exist right now um and uh you will see like this kind of layered defense which you see talked about a lot um it's talked about almost to the point of cliche but it's definitely very real where you want to use different modalities of drone shoot downs in different environments yeah yeah and is is is this kind of the uh i haven't really studied the history of war in in a whole lot of detail um but is this one of the situations where the counter systems are just lagging by like a year or two against the kind of scale up of new systems i would say that the counter systems in a way the counter system technology is a little bit more difficult to to do on like a on a scale point of view well it depends with the counter system is because you can make a missile like we can make that that's a solved thing the problem is the marginal cost and i think from a procurement point of view everyone look you need to look at the marginal cost of production versus the marginal cost to shoot down a drone so if you use a missile it's a million dollar cost to shoot down a thousand or ten thousand dollar drone it's just you can't do that you can't do that indefinitely you can do that in small small engagements but if there's any kind of scaled war you can't do that um there's some drones out there counter drone drones that are out there like anvil roadrunner type of stuff low hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe high tens of thousands, that is still a massive marginal cost of shoot down.

6:35It's an improvement, but it's not, you know, it's kind of the next iteration of the technology development. What we're doing at Arregeus is looking at where's the ball going? Like where at the end of the day do you get to when you get that really attractive marginal cost of shoot down? Where your marginal cost of shoot down is better than it costs to produce that drone. And that's where really what we're going for. This is why we've chosen laser systems this is why we've chosen directed energy to really work on um where if you use a laser to shoot down a drone and you can accurately target it and your capital expenditure cost isn't too high and we can go into to this as well but if your capital expenditure cost for your actual system is not too high then you can deploy in mass these these directed energy weapons systems for autonomous defeat to detect effective drones and you extract like a 10 cent to one dollar marginal cost of shoot down because it's just the electricity cost for the laser to be on.

7:26So when you like are going to deploy one of these systems into the field, how many drones do you expect one of these things to take down over the lifetime of the system? Of the lifetime of the system, I mean, we have the capacity to continue to repair them. And as long, I mean, a non-zero amount of them will be like blown up. You know, it's not like you have basically what we look at is like if you have an infinite, what we try to optimize for in terms of how many shoots you can get is like if you have an infinite swarm never-ending swarm it's got infinity drones in it how many can it take down when the swarm approaches you right we think it's somewhere in the like 20 30 40 50 kind of range in the range that we're looking at for our for our system that is uh like truly revolutionary for having basically zero meaningful marginal cost of defeat but that's for one system and what we develop is this system that interacts where the capital expenditure costs we want to be really revolutionary cheap revolutionarily cheap for a system like this and then what you can do is you can go and distribute a series of them that operate in parallel and they coordinate with each other and other and other detection and defeat systems that are in the area with so in the limit like how many of these things would you have in you know let's say you're trying to really lock down a position or something how many would you have there it depends on how hot the area is so so it would be like you know we we work with our government partners to to talk about like Like when you deploy this at a static facility on, say, the border or something like that, how many drones do you expect in an incursion?

8:55Probably not that many. There'll probably be bigger ones. They're carrying supplies or information or doing observation. So that's less. If you were in a static base that's out forward deployed, probably a lot more. Yeah. Right. I would I would imagine that this is a little bit difficult because there's this whole dynamic where people are like optimizing for the last threat or the last disaster. If an earthquake happens, suddenly people are buying earthquake insurance and so on. And so until you see just like a large scale drone attack, I imagine it's a little bit difficult to get people to like buy in.

9:29Is that is that the case? Like, is the U.S. government supportive of kind of embracing stuff like this? Yeah, we've had a lot of people come out and be really, really helpful to us, especially in the Army and the Air Force side, where people are like we are getting kind of inbound for people that are really interested in this and also with international partners. People have been looking at directed energy for decades. Basically, every year the military will put a billion to a billion and a half into it, trying to make it work and nonstop. Doesn't matter how many projects fail or have failed in the past.

9:58They will keep doing it because of what you get when it works at the end of the day, how meaningful it is when this goes and deploys at the end of the day. And what kind of other systems has the U.S. spent a lot of money on? Yeah. There's a legendary one from the early 2000s where they gutted a 747 and put a chemical laser in it. And I think it was like approaching a megawatt, something like that, and flew it around. That's from the AFRL, I think, in 2003, 2004. that was really cool um it was really expensive and really heavy but laser like high power laser tech wasn't like ultra like there there have been a lot of advances in laser technology just in the last decade i think like four or five of the last 10 nobel prizes in physics have been given for laser tech really really crazy yeah yeah or optic stuff i think the last one um i think it might have been 24 not 25 or 23 whatever the the last one or the one before it was for um quantum dot stuff which is like like lazing like molecular lazing kind of in a way or like light emission so it's all like most of the physics stuff isn't light like where the where they're like a lot of the breakthroughs are in right now um and so that technology has continued to be advanced and developed um that market is really really expanding for for high-powered laser technologies very accurate small bandwidth laser technologies um so that uh to get back on track that 2004 giga laser system in a in a uh in a 747 we've expanded from there and what we've done is we've people started to work on um uh like mid mid high power like 40 50 60 kilowatt like uh systems called helio systems that are deployed on ships um there are some systems i believe dealt by lockheed that are more like 300 kilowatt systems um and there are videos of uh the the 300 kilowatt laser system on the USS Preble, like cutting the wing off of a plane from like 10 miles away.

11:46This is in 2021, 2020. So it's newer. These high power, like actual like weaponized direct energy systems, not just for dazzling or blinding, but for actual killing and cutting. Though there are eight of them deployed across, I think, a single class of ship. And that's the most successful, I think, of these laser weapon systems that have been deployed. They are like$80 million each. They are unbelievably expensive. um and you know operators still want like a human in the loop like there's still someone pressing the button and so that level of autonomy also is something that you actually has not been adopted or people have been really worried about in the dod but um we talked to there's been um there continues to be turnover in positions of leadership in the dod and the army navy air force and new people that have come in new generals are like more much more into the autonomy yeah Because they realize they know they'd like be like we do every like every infantry unit does these field tests.

12:43Right now there's drones integrated and there are you know you don't see any drones. And then you show the captain that like ran that like his unit has been observed his or her unit has been observed for three days straight and they never saw the drone or this other drone once. Right. They know what's going to happen if there's another engagement. We don't have like the CUS technology to deal with it. Yeah. So is this is this kind of like a weird situation where people they obviously they like want to keep humans in the loop. But because of the way that the future warfare is going to kind of unfold, it's just going to have to be more autonomous systems that are able to take out other autonomous systems.

13:18Definitely. And it's not just it's not just our space. It's everywhere. It's ground vehicles. It's aerial systems. It's drones themselves. Everything's moving to more autonomy. there will be human in the loop always in some capacity and and it probably converges let's say we go down the line of autonomy and we get to the end state and the end state where everything converges is probably something around like um the commander and the person running the unit or deciding how that technology is deployed decides the operational parameter by which things are shot or observed or alerted to um and that is just written into code and then it operates that way yeah so there's like a guy observing something occurring but he's not actually like manually pressing the buttons yeah it could be that um it'll just be it could be that it could be that you know i have rules of engagement that are converted into code and the military commander has the capacity to change those but these systems will be on operating and engaging or doing taking action based on those rules of engagement yeah is what i suspect i don't know but that's what i would suspect that it would converge to would have been the biggest you know you I think you've been at this for like over a year now yeah going on two years yeah almost going on two years okay um would have been the biggest like uh basically mistakes or learnings that you've made over the past two years on yeah directions you've gone down and they just didn't work I would say that I'll give two so one is just generally running generalism running a business that applies to a lot of other things is not like is like dealing with contractors and getting screwed over by contractors and cottage industries that have like spun up in our industry um there's like proposal writing stuff there's like lobbying stuff and everything and luckily we've converged on the series of like support networks that really worked for us but just not knowing what i didn't know like getting screwed over in that way took a lot of time and it was really really bad so that applies to everyone probably and then probably probably more specifically in our space I would say there have been staff that are on board in our company or or contractors that we use that you only really use in defense and in the initial side I didn't necessarily think that we needed them and it turned out that we probably should have brought them on earlier yeah what like it happened because you didn't have those people like what just late late to you like late to like late to proposals and stuff.

15:41Not that we like miss proposals, but that, you know, the proposal opportunities for stuff come in seasons, maybe two, three seasons a year. And it's like, if you bring someone on immediately when you start the company, you raise your first round of capital and then you go and get proposal writing staff, lobbying staff, everything like that. And you actually like set that in motion immediately. That's the Anderrill playbook and it's a really good one. You go put that together and you do it immediately. That is extremely useful for doing your business development. like getting in front of the right people at the army, getting in front of the right people in the Navy.

16:12And we were probably lagging a little bit in our ability to do so just because at the time I didn't know what I didn't know. In order for you to get the best like training data and understanding, you know, how to actually build a system in the first place, ideally you have drones flying at it and you are like shooting down those drones and people are actually trying to not let you shoot down their drones. How do you like get that data in order to build the right system? Lots of field testing. Yeah. lots of field testing you go on the field and you fly your own drones have someone pilot them shoot them down record them and do all your own like ai training on your models that way yeah and do you have any interesting stories from doing that oh my gosh i would say i would say in the beginning like setting things on fire that you might not want to set on fire well what'd you set on fire oh like like you know like like you'd set you'd hit a drone and you'd hit the battery and it would go down and it would be on fire still and you need to like put it out and stuff luckily we we shoot in areas that you know there's a very hot and dry season in california and we have special places that we go that do not set on fire when we're there um but what we've learned this is like maybe over a year ago but what we've learned is that there are ways that you can in the actual way that you fire the system to really mitigate stuff like that so you focus on target and it also defocuses past target and so very quickly you don't have something that like actually and how does that work like how can you know like how does the laser stop and it doesn't just keep on lighting stuff on fire well it continues so you the laser you know you want to focus on target so you get so when you're detecting a drone you can observe its range and then you can essentially we have a custom um we have a custom design system for expansion focusing and variable variably changing focus length and so you essentially match up the focal point the where the focus is like a specific distance so you get maximum power density on target and when you go and do that it's kind of like an hourglass where you know you have like a cone that's focusing in and you want that small point to be on the drone and it also defocuses past target and so before the target and after the target you have some very low power density you have low power density areas so it's not gonna like set stuff on fire there is a depth that you need to worry about definitely for the system but everything can be managed autonomously basically as long as you make sure that you have a pretty aggressive focusing like you want to focus really aggressively yeah yeah and i imagine even out outside of like war zones uh and stuff drones are probably one of the most effective forms of like future kind of terrorist events that imagine you can take out like some very high value target for a thousand dollars or less autonomously from miles away um yeah yeah for sure no i mean that that's something that people are really worried about um we've thwarted a lot of terrorist attacks to date really that that are yeah uh there was uh someone was planning a drone attack in tennessee on a on a um it was either nuclear reactor or power plant but like big power power thing and they were they were caught um and you you can hear i don't think they make major headlines but you can read about them pretty it's becoming more and more frequent you can read about them um and yeah i mean it's just when it's so easy to do you have to expect that it will happen or people will attempt to do so um and the problem is that you know there are radio frequency measures that people use or have traditionally been used in ukraine to destroy drones um and there are some companies that are hopeful that it will continue to be useful the problem is it's also just too easy to autonomously guide the drone to terminally guide it it is very very easy to run vibe code on a drone and have it identify a target and then you never communicate with it again and have it go on and fly into that target it's very very easy to do so and so you need some kind of hard kill to protect critical infrastructure uh or the border so dhs is really big dhs just i think the homeland security has like 21 22 billion that they just got for counter uas to deal with border incursions and so the idea is you know what do you do you probably don't use the missile um in an urban environment or even at the border you definitely don't use a missile you aren't going to use like a machine gun like a saw like right right there right what we do is we provide a silent and invisible hard kill so kind of the way we kind of talk about is like the softest hard kill you can get so we destroy the drone we cut off its rotor or we drill through the center of it right it is destroyed it's not like interfered with electromagnetically um but you know you wouldn't notice it you wouldn't see the laser firing you wouldn't hear anything uh you would barely like you might see a turret maybe something like that um but it's really for what we're making is really for like you're at a stadium there's an event and this is like you know we have a drone coming in and we've identified it and it it has something on it it it we don't know what it is we don't know what it is wasn't there this whole situation with like uh what was it i think the latest um what's that football thing world cup not the no not the World Cup but uh Super Bowl yeah the Super Bowl football thing yeah yeah exactly the Super Bowl I'm not you know I'm from Alaska I don't know exactly about football but weren't there like hundreds of drones yeah they're over a hundred I don't think it was like 500 but it was over a hundred from what I was reading and no one was like detecting them or had anything yeah like you remember that drone incursion in New Jersey where I think that okay so I think there were some drones but I think it became a public hysteria thing and then everyone else was sending up drones to see what the drones are about and people were freaking out about it.

21:41But no matter, like, one thing, like, you know, everyone agreed that there's a drone problem and everyone also agrees that there was nothing we could have done about it. There's nothing we could have done about it if those were all weaponized drones. We couldn't have done anything about it. Like the systems weren't in place to stop them. There's nothing there. Like, we're not, we're not, like, like, you want to see our last, like, oceanic border defense? You check out Fort Funston with the, with the artillery emplacements from 1930. What? That's our border. I mean, they're not operational. They're like, it's like a museum thing, but they're like built into the hillside to the north and south of San Francisco on the West Coast.

22:17Those, like, that was like the last time that we did it. It was like 100 years ago that we were putting this. That's kind of what Golden Dome is about. Yeah. It's how do we, it's very clear that like, you know, the Chinese make like these millions and millions of drones per month, right? Tens of millions or 100 million per year. They're not all FPV drones. No. you can make drones that you can make like supersonic drones that are essentially like suicide aircraft that travel like thousands of miles an hour in the upper in the lower atmosphere or upper atmosphere um you can make underground underwater submarines that are ultra silent they don't have people on board they're totally autonomous and you can just manufacture them at scale and go and do it right and you do one of these things where you basically just like program in exactly what you want it to do and then send it off and cut off all communication so no one can see it and they're autonomous they're totally dark the the ocean could be filled with them we have no freaking idea right and so and i think i just think people hear this and they're like oh like we we want to go to war with china like no one wants to go to war with china ideally the entirety the the entirety of the like you know we want to be competitive on an economic level and on a military level like you can't let your country like fall to second place at least as far as the united no one wants to be in to be very clear no one wants to be in second place you know like uh like no one likes the idea of another country being more powerful than them right um but i think we need to have an answer right we need to be able to know that we can protect ourselves and that's really what and like at this time we can't there's just no detection capability we don't have it's not i mean it's not like like the the systems that we have like they work just not at not at scale necessarily like if there are incursions like we like we detect them like we have radars all over the place we have a bunch of sensing systems in alaska we can detect missiles pretty well um i think it's like we could probably detect really well i don't know what we would like a million drones show up on the west coast of california tomorrow morning what do we do we don't have any systems yeah what would we do i mean we'd start like shooting it's a little bit like we just wouldn't be able to it's like the asteroid hurtling to earth and it's like great now we know that it's happening and it's going to happen in like a month or two but like what do we do we don't do anything about it yeah we don't have any ability to do anything about it yeah okay interesting so when you think of like an adversary like china um i imagine that they're trying to be pretty quiet about whatever the hell they're building um i don't know they market a lot really oh yeah but for like these laser systems or oh not for laser systems for like drones and stuff okay yeah yeah yeah for for them though like when you're thinking about having like a superior technology capability whatever um how are you thinking about that like staying ahead of an entire country yeah no for sure i think the thing with the laser system is is the laser takes advantage of what makes the chinese able to produce or anyone really able to produce like a ton of these drones is that the drones are generally really shitty and thin they're made of not the best materials because you don't you don't want the you don't want the pv drone or even the group to like the small fixed wing you don't want them to cost a hundred thousand dollars that's the whole that's the reason what that's the reason why you produce them at the scale that you do and why you use them in the way that you do um and so what we do you know you could you could spend a lot of money and stand up like a whole like industry to go and like defend drones against these laser systems the drone would weigh a ton and be 100 to a thousand times more expensive and that's just functionally like impossible to actually manufacture at scale with like yeah not dumping money into the furnace yeah and then if we make the if we if because our system is out there to have a drone that has to go and is going to to to affect like change on the battlefield like an enemy drone for it to be effective it has to cost like 250 grand or something then you start you then you can use the missiles on it yeah right and and then that drone is probably very built up and it's more like a small helicopter of some kind right or like a like a normal like a seismicized plane right and so that is really really attractive because right now we have systems that can deal with that i'm not trying to go and take the lockheed missile business right what or whatever what i'm trying to do is provide an answer to group one group two right now when you're thinking like when you wake up in the morning what are the things that are kind of like the top priorities for you yeah i think on on like a street it's different like strategically versus tactically like on a small scale level i care a lot about hiring right now we need to double the team like right now um get really aggressive and go and go and what's your process for that like how are you how are you finding great people oh it depends on the role so if you have like a really key hire that's like uh needs to like run your bd team or something so that is like a very involved process on the engineering side you know my co-founder and i are engineers by trade um we've hired this team just him and i have done it all for the engineering team to date wow um and the team is amazing so we're just going to keep that process because it works right you keep a process you just smash the button more right if it works so that's that's what we'll do on that side yeah i would i would be kind of curious to know like the history of lasers in general um like even from initially creating a bunch of uh you know what was it like glasses or whatever to focus light to like burn ships oh yeah right oh yeah for sure well i think the um well our first product's called the archimedes the lightweight edge deployed weapon systems turret um that is called archimedes after archimedes of syracuse who was a um who was a a Syracusan, like mathematician, polymath, engineer, very famous for a lot of stuff.

27:52In his old age, he was living in Syracuse and the Roman Empire besieged his city and town and the mayor, the king or whatever at the time came to him and was like, I need your help to make like weapons of war basically to defend the city. And he's like 75 or something at the time. His career's over. He's like an old dude. And he's like, all right, retirement job, let's go. So there's two or three things that he made. The famous one that people constantly talk about is the lever, Archimedes' lever, where like, you know, give me a lever long enough and I can lift the world. I can lift. I forgot the actual phrase.

28:23But so the legend is he kind of made this lever on the top of the city wall and was flipping ships in the bay, shoot a harpoon into it, into the ship. And then you can, with a small amount of weight on a very long lever, you can flip something much heavier on the other end. the other one is he put a series of mirrors around the bay and focused sunlight a series of them onto the same spot in a ship and burned it and would burn the ships down um the the the you can do that people have recreated it the historical legitimacy of if he did it at that time is kind of contested but basically it's the first directed energy weapon the first one and so that's our first one And so we've gone out and named it that, continue forward.

29:08I'd say in terms of lasers, lasers, I don't know if I was taught and I always have read and my understanding is that, you know, in 1905 or 1915, I think it's 1905, Einstein has like a very famous year where he publishes four like seminal legendary papers. Three of them are on developments for what would end up be quantum mechanics. And then one of them is for the photoelectric effect, which is the relationship between electromagnetism and light, essentially. And that's the precursor to laser action. So and he predicts what is effectively laser action 50 years in advance of the first laser being made or 40 years, I think.

29:46And it was about 50. And they at the time, I think when he was awarded the Nobel for it, he I'll do a fact check on this. I think when he was awarded the Nobel for it, originally the quantum mechanics papers of what would be quantum mechanics were kind of contested. No one really believed them. So they just gave it to him for the photoelectric effect one. Yeah. For the light based one. And so from there, you know, there's a lot of like the first computer, like microprocessor transistor development that goes on. The beginning of semiconductors continues forward. and then i believe in 54 towns and charlestowns towns or townsend and one other person develop what is the first laser and what was that made out of by the way i think it was a ruby rod with a flash bulb around it and the whole principle we can get into it how much however much you want but the whole principle of laser action is basically um there are a few different ways to do it but basically you are you have a uh you have kind of a semiconductor lattice substrate with electrons in it or those are modern ones but you could do it in a crystal or some kind of doped crystal or doped glass and you have these electrons that you're raising to higher energy levels and then there's this phenomenon called spontaneous emission where at a random time pseudo random time the electrons will downshift to lower energy levels and then that energy that energy conversion differential with some losses turned into a light into into light into a photon um so that's like a more like an led where like light's just kind of randomly missing um and it's very wide band gap but if you essentially put mirrors on either side and you have that photon bounce back through the crystal structure it will force other other raised electrons to high energy levels to downshift themselves into more light and that light that second photon will be a copy in phase mostly a copy in phase and wavelength of that first one and you keep bouncing those photons back and forth and they keep pulling electrons into lower energy levels and that is the that is that is population aversion that is uh stimulated emission as opposed to spontaneous emission laser stands laser is an acronym it stands for light amplification and stimulated emission of radiation and you keep getting and basically these photons keep bouncing back and forth creating more and more photons and then you can selectively let them out and then you get these pulses of laser light that come out and they're very they're generally very powerful they're very directional uh they're very focused and they are all in the they are all about the same wavelength and so they're all the same kind of color right if that makes sense whereas it's stimulated and spontaneous it might not be too much so um we can talk about band gap structures if you want it's probably super freaking boring but um that that was all my all the work a lot of the work that i've done historically in the past yeah i know like wasn't uh lasers in general kind of like outlawed as a form of like weapon system it's in the geneva convention yeah how'd that happen i think it's that basically you do not you do not want a country to be producing laser systems that get deployed in the field to blind people you don't want to maim people and send a lot of people back home like maimed at the end end end of a war you should be prosecuting if you are in an engagement you should be prosecuting it to its end as quickly as possible to be done with it so that you can do statementship and rebuild rebuild countries and try and get the world order back back in line it's kind of kind of the idea around that lasers are held very close to the chest for most countries directed energy patents there are several that are out there a lot of them are classified and counter directed energy stuff is all classified why because it's so it's like the future of like machine on machine warfare it's very very like it's such a specialized technology not many countries have like a semiconductor industry to go and build laser systems right and so it's just like a generally the classified kept on the dl kind of industry yeah interesting so did that kind of like stifle the innovation in lasers like the u.s is still dropping a billion dollars or something a year but i think for directed i think for directed energy directed energy development you want to have the industry to produce laser systems to support your directed energy weapons systems industry um but it's not too super sci-fi where those laser architectures for directed energy are pulled oftentimes from the civilian welding and cutting industry that industry has exploded and continues to explode it's like a 25 to 30 billion dollar industry it's the biggest single industry among all laser systems so it's like 25 to 30 percent it's like a quarter or so or a third of all lasers sold in the globe um and that industry has grown by like 11 per year for the last like 30 years straight non-stop like It's just exploding because there's all these cutting and welding applications that people do manually with like TIG welding, for example, where they do like cutting or annealing or etching.

34:50And that is just a slow burn process for all of that to convert into laser systems. And so that will continue for many decades, I presume, and that market will continue. But those architectures are very similar to the ones you use in directed energy. And that's really what we want to do here. at Aurelius where like directed energy is a field where as soon as you say a laser is for directed energy it could be 98 percent the same as the industrial cutting one but the directed energy market is like the wedding industry where as soon as you say a laser is for directed energy the price 20x's and the complexity increases right and so it's just very very um not conducive to the weapon systems industry continuing um but markets are getting better companies are going out and producing more and more and more.

35:32Enlight is a company that makes directed energy lasers and their stock is up 160 % in the last six months, like from this day. Everything that they sell was sold a year in advance. So the market is really increasing. We're really at the inflection point where the volumes are getting up there, where the prices are coming down. So you can go and deploy these. But what we really want to do at Aurelius is pull everything from civilian industries. So I don't want a directed energy laser. I want to pull the cutting and welding laser and i want to modify it and uh eventually we'll go and make our own probably sometime early next year start produce our own laser system to go and really get this cost down get this capital expenditure cost down these systems if you're going to deploy them they cannot be 20 million dollars they cannot be 15 million dollars they have to be like one or less they have to be what do you think the like idea index on this is so for like a normal you know spacex rocket or whatever when he's going out you know elon's going out initially thinking about just buying a rocket he's looking at the numbers and he's like well the actual metal and materials that goes into this thing is roughly 100 the cost of the output product um how is is that similar and you know lasers i don't know if it's 100 i think that laser industry is it's very similar to and it's it's roots and the unit economics that affect the laser industry are very similar to the general semiconductor industry where you know when you make a chip the price of it is not necessarily the actual price that goes into it you're amortizing the cost of your billion dollar a sml machine and that story is kind of similar in the laser actually making a laser it's not as bad though it's not like a billion dollar machine or like a 100 million dollar machine it's you're talking about you know said like on the order of like 10 million something yeah you're talking about tens of millions dollars in capital expenditure probably total to go and produce your own laser system soup to nuts it depends on the laser we're talking we're talking about for res a very very specific type of laser um generally used in industrial cutting and fiber welding uh but it is um you know there are other types of lasers like a semiconductor diode laser that is much more like doing an asml machine type process and generally what you'll do um when you go and make your own diode lasers you will buy substrates from tsmc because they're they're very very similar so uh like a transistor pn junction like what you or the subconductor substrates that you're doing to make like compute chips um you know there's a ton of processes that continue to build up its sophistication and then as you build up its as you build up the product on the on the production line it can the possibility of things that could be in the future kind of narrows um at closer to the beginning it could also be a laser and so you take them and so those lines are made in mass the gallium arsenide gallium like indium gallium phosphate like subacoductor substrates and you you distribute them and use them in different industries um there are not many laser producers in the united states are u.s like u.s laser producers there's a coherent i used to work at coherent which is like the big laser like the big american laser multinational um n light is is a large is a smaller company than coherent but they're very specifically in the directed energy space so they will produce ipg is a russian company with an American carve out and they kind of produce in that in that space as well.

38:45Trump is a German company with an American carve out. And there are a few of these companies that that do that. But there are not that many. And there are like 12 Chinese fiber laser companies that produce at one hundredth the cost and they produce at like a scale and a delivery time. That's absolutely insane. Yeah. And when you're thinking like there's this thing on the wall that even says, you know, every day that we kind of delay is people are dying. And I'm kind of wondering for your scale up and going from like one system in the field or whatever to like thousands or whatever how do you kind of get that to happen as fast as possible yeah for sure i think that you you want to strike a partnership with a laser producer or go and do it yourself and this is kind of the make versus buy question that a lot of people have in their various industries you talked about elon doing the make versus buy question he's very much on the make side in a lot of cases there's a lot of things that we don't want to go and produce you know we use we have a bunch of sensors that we use in different modalities um like i'm not going to go make we don't necessarily use all these but like i wouldn't i wouldn't go make a lighter i wouldn't go make a radar i wouldn't go make a camera that's insane i wouldn't go do that and the prices are down it's basically you look at like like you were just talking you like you were just talking about you were talking about like looking at the bomb cost and what you think the capital expenditure is to go make that system and if you're getting totally freaking gouged you should go do it yourself if you think you can do it that's one answer the other thing is is it so important that you have control over that supply chain that you want to go and make it and maybe the dollar question doesn't even maybe maybe it's break even or something or it's really close um and you're kind of deciding you're like how much control do i want to have over this is there any like specific part of this that there's like an extremely long lead time or something you maybe don't necessarily want to make in-house but you kind of have to in order to scale the way that you want to yeah definitely i think the laser yeah i think the laser for sure okay we'll go out here soon to go and go and produce our own start to make prototypes i think um that's extremely important for us and i think it's extremely important for the country where we're getting a lot of like congressional interest and support in the idea of going in like producing more fiber lasers here that market is exploding the chinese are really destroying us part of it is part of it is that there are only a couple companies and that are doing it in any kind of scale and what they do is they have like a they have one product line there's there's between three and six different power options and pulsing options that's it that's all that they'll produce and they'll go and try and like ship your big their big box that is supposed to fit for everything into your specific application and like i like this like when you go when this gets released this is the first time i've ever talked about going and making my own laser like on any kind of recorded anything but i i haven't announced that at all and i have people reaching out to me on linkedin and they're like are you going to make your own laser please for the love of god let me know really yeah like they're they're do people just like get excited about building that no no to buy it to buy it to buy it they'll run companies they'll do um they'll do uh like um like battery tacking flange tacking for batteries which is a single mode fiber application and they use fibers for it but there's like three companies that are ndaa compliant or like u.s compliant to do that um catheter production there are tens of companies that produce catheters or like stints or like just medical device stuff that needs to be very precision micro machined or welded or annealed and there are like four companies like those companies I listed like someone reached out to me that runs a catheter company and they're like they're like please if you make something please let me know I need to talk to you as soon as possible because I'm buying them and trying them from all those companies I just mentioned and it all sucks it's just killing me and it's just like it's like an industry it's like it's like an industry where the bottom end of it has been subsumed by Chinese cheap products and so the american and european players are moving into uh bespoke high margin stuff and then the medium is kind of so your two options are basically something that doesn't work or something that costs so much that is like in uh what is it exclusive no the chinese systems work yeah yeah the chinese systems work and they're incredible they they do work they're unbelievably good the chinese i i admire them so much they're unbelievably good i spent i spent uh like christmas like the christmas time this past year breaking apart a chinese welding laser and like looking into it they're so good They're so good.

42:57They're so good at scale. And people always talk about like, oh, you know, well, that's just because they use slave labor or that's just because they subsidize their industries really heavily. I'm not totally sure that that's the whole story. I'm not totally sure. But let's say, but I don't think it actually matters whether that's true or not. What matters is what's happening on the field and what's happening on the field is that we're losing. And I don't care how it's happening. Have you gone to China? No. And I don't know if I would be welcome. Yeah. Although I do say, the Chinese are unbelievably impressive.

43:31Anytime new products come out, especially high-tech stuff, they're unbelievably good. When I was growing up, a lot of people used to say, oh, cheap Chinese and crappy. But now it's really just cheap Chinese. They're just producing great stuff. They just produce great stuff at scale. They're incredible. They're incredible. They're so good. They're so good. what are you going to try to kind of copy uh from like a company building perspective um what are the biggest things that you're kind of thinking about and trying to adopt personally yeah i think the thing that i think that the thing that chinese companies don't do that a lot of american companies do is virtue signaling so like getting really into like the social war stuff i don't want any part of that in any way all i care about is is making this and winning yeah Okay.

44:20Yeah. I don't care about either side. I don't care about being super anti-virtual signal either. I just think that I notice it in these American companies and I just don't want to be involved. Yeah. So when you're thinking about building out, you know, the production of your own lasers, are you going to do that? I imagine that you have to do that in the U.S. Yeah. Yeah. How does that work? Detroit. Detroit. Yeah. I mean, I saw that you like were interested in working at Detroit. Definitely. We have, well, my co-founder and I are from Detroit Metro. We hired our first Detroit employee. so we have a kind of like a like a sales office there um we will go to skilled production in that area probably it's it's still a lot of it is still up in the air because we haven't kind of planted down but the michigan kind of like like the like the state and the the state and the federal level really seem to want to play ball um we're still we're still looking at other areas like a little bit but i think it's looking like detroit but i think that i think that it's it's just one of these places there are probably six or seven locales in the country that are like this where it's like really good at manufacturing a very large experienced talent base labor prices are not extremely extremely expensive there are cheaper places but but it's fine um major international airport that's like within 20 minutes of anything that you want to get to around there so a lot of these things come together center of the country you can get anywhere from it fairly easily like it's a six-hour flight from here to dc right which is horrible or five and a half so that's bad um yeah so all these things kind of kind of come together where you want to be and and again there are a few areas that are like this that we're looking at but it detroit it just works detroit seems to be playing ball the most or like michigan yeah in general yeah i know that like long term we are going to be sending millions and millions of satellites into orbit and i imagine you know one of the things that you were talking about when we were mentioned you know just talking at a party a few days ago was basically lasering down uh satellites in space yes yes this is a few products down the road but basically we have a whole roadmap where we you know we make the counter group on group two product we deliver it at scale um we prove that we can deliver it and then from there we move into more you know more like counter hypersonics big group three group four stuff where we're making you know 100 kilowatt systems or larger that are um more stationary or more like less expeditionary i would maybe describe it as um but they're really for like you know um like we don't compete with anyone on this product that we're making right now really but um on this one you know i used to work on on so i used to work at a big laser company i worked in um in research and development and then i worked in sales in the company and a lot of and i worked on a series of projects some of what i worked on was in directed energy and engineering and in sales and you know you'd work with the primes and some of these like bigger systems um and i think from that experience i see a lot of ways that we can make them better and i think what we do but but to to to make a product that sells for like tens of millions of dollars you you need to it's gonna be it's very hard to go and like jump start that from the beginning so plan if i was to write like a tesla master plan type thing that you go and publish there's a b c d e group on group two counter turrets small expeditionary move into larger systems for counter hypersonic ballistic missiles um and uh would those still be ground stations that are just like yeah yeah we're on ships something like that we move we move up the stack and then eventually the way we become a trillion dollar company is you make like kind of like death stars in orbit where you know like think like we're talking about the million or two million dollar missile to shoot down a drone on earth what does a missile like that cost to destroy satellite in orbit 50 million 70 million i don't know probably somewhere around there i don't i i don't even know i actually i have no information on what we would even do in that situation but um you look at it from first principles from a physics perspective the same marginal cost equation applies in orbit as well where there are like there are 10 000 russian satellites in orbit or 20 000 or something it's probably like seven years from now something like this and um you have you're tasked with having a deterrent to make sure to to to try and deter these areas these fields of engagement and do you want a bunch of missiles that you're going to run out of or you're going to bankrupt yourself making them to destroy what is 50 million dollars times 10 000 cost just doesn't work right or even times 100 000 yeah it just doesn't work so you have these stations or things in orbit that are um you know they're creating ammunition from their solar panels you don't have to put missiles up there in them you don't have to put ammunition up and then they're creating ammunition from their solar panels um they rotate and they just destroy or render useless um it's much easier to destroy optics you know you don't necessarily have to cut the thing in half yeah you can render the solar panels ineffective things like that and that skills very well and then you continue outward even further where the only way that you do trans martian or translunar warfare is through light you're not going to wait three years for the missile to hit some target on mars right right and it's not instantaneous it'll take a couple minutes but it's literally three million meters per second is your your uh effect hit and so we extract a lot of value on that at uh at a relatively shorter range on earth all the way up through the stack and so that's the roadmap that's the roadmap baby that's where we're going and so when you're thinking about that like what is you know i think it's kind of one of those things where you have to plan for the short term and you know obviously it takes a little while to build death stars in orbit um and so how are you how are you thinking you know this is like probably a 20 plus year kind of vision i think it's more is it less i think it's less i think it's less because the need is there i think it's less because we don't have an answer right now right now 10 years ago i'm going out to do this it's going to be extremely difficult because the people who are in charge of acquisitions the people who are in charge of r &d spending of rdt and e spending right they're they're they're looking at this and they're like you know what people like generals that i talked to admirals that i talked to they're just not really concerned about this not really a thing the the drone question is literally the number one thing that these people think about all day right now it is because and it's because you see their their job is to prepare how do we protect the united states critical infrastructure how do we protect united states lives civilian and military what what is the plan what is the con ops for what we do in the next engagement if there is something and the war is probably not over and so what do we do and they're not assuming this kind of inevitability yeah and there isn't really a good answer at the moment yeah interesting so when you're when you're thinking from now like to kind of scaling so you're actually able to ship these systems at all um how are you kind of like minimizing the days uh taking the most actions that you can today and every single day you know in between now and when you're actually shipping yeah to kind of shorten the time frame for sure tactically working with our working with our um local state and federal federal partners and supporters um to you know standing up a production facility is not like a tomorrow thing right it is a long-term thing we've been working on it for a while and we'll continue to work on it and we'll we'll look for sometime early next year to go and do production on our own laser systems really you're able to like do it in like 12 months does that work well you would you would you would start yeah yeah well i think it's that you know to start a luckily making making these laser systems there are stages for how early you want to get in the production process and you know you it's not that difficult to go to production with several hundred units per year right something like that that is not a hundred million dollar like like car factory to do that right it's more like a plant you want to make sure you can expand there's a whole there's a whole process to this that you continue to do um so that's really in the that's that's a big goal that we that we're working towards um the other one is to go and uh distribute these these production units as soon as we possibly can to our partners we're working with um people across like the army navy and air force right now.

52:39We have a series of demonstrations. We just did a demonstration at Northern Strike a couple weeks ago in Camp Grayling, Michigan for the Army and the Air Force out there. The demonstration went very well. We have a bunch of memorandums of support from those people. And then we have a series of demonstrations at a couple months as well. A lot of them in Texas, a lot of them in California that we continue to run. And so you're showing this really progressive iterative development and um and uh yeah so it's you continue to do that go forward um be prepared essentially to produce 50 units next year something like that wow okay so you're actually like deploying next year at like a meaningful scale yeah it'll be deployed across so there there are these kind of like test test units that you can go and deploy to um but yeah you want to be you want to be ready essentially to go and produce and we want to be ready to go and go and do you know how fast the uh like drone market is growing like right now i don't know it's probably 30 i have no idea yeah it's just some insane number 50 i don't know i imagine that in 19 2021 we're like the massive percentage expansions and now it's probably less percentage wise but just like the sheer volume is so insane yeah and i think especially i mean the european countries have renewed like renewed their vow to actually start spending in defense and in like a really significant way like upping the defense spending which is awesome like you want you want your allies to be strong and capable of their own defense so that's great news um the japanese mod has announced that they're i think they're doubling defense spending so it's not just us it's like oh the western nations and the people allied in the united states with the united states have um kind of continued to support that so that'll feed the market also that'll pump the whole market i mean between japan and europe that's probably like 150 percent so it's probably like us and europe is double yeah it's probably about the same amount total between all the countries and then japan adds maybe another 30 40 50 on and so like the spending is really increasing as well what is the thing that kind of keeps you up the most at night this is like this year 2026 is like probably the year that like you see you start to see who is going to go and deploy at scale and see UAS it's probably the year where you can kind of start to pick like what's going to happen in over the next like two three four years and you know people like the rules for government acquisition have totally fallen down like you government sales is not necessarily like a two, three year long sales cycle right now.

55:22The administration has opened up the aperture. The entirety of the acquisition pipeline is being reworked at the moment, especially for UAS and counter UAS. And so like this is the year to get ultra aggressive, really, really aggressive on the market with the projects that you're doing, who you're going to go to, who you're going to try and sell to, and who you're going to try and assist. From a strategic level, that's what I really think about. I'd say this is in our first two years or so, you know, our first year was more about proving the technical risk, which I think we've done sufficiently.

55:55I don't, I'm not worried about it. Um, like our demos, our demos work. Yeah, they work in the way that we want them to. So, um, that was probably our first year and we were, you know, we wanted to make sure that we weren't just burning money in ways that we didn't necessarily need to. Now we know the playbook and what we need to do and we just need to execute on it. So now it's all about like get really aggressive especially we just had our raise announcement we raised that run a couple months ago but we just announced it uh today when you're in here so that's really cool um and so now basically just all i think about like how do we get more aggressive at this point yeah what does that actually look like right now yeah i'd say it gets really aggressive it's really aggressive about how many how many contracts you're applying to what you're applying to do in those in those proposals as well team size where uh you know we need to double our engineering team we're hiring a bunch we just have more people join this week we'll have more join next week we continue to do that um to increase the technical loading and the capacity to do multiple evolutions multiple demonstrations at the same time the capacity to go and uh produce against the units that we want to produce against in this upcoming year yeah and so that's i'd say it's about team size increase getting more aggressive and contract proposals because at this point there there are like cuas proposals that open up unannounced and they close 10 days later.

57:13And this is like light speed. Yeah. Yeah. Light speed. Light speed. So when you when you first started this, I think the Biden administration was in, you know, in power. How what was the early reception for working on this stuff versus what's happened since, you know, November? I think so. I think that the Trump administration has had a very aggressive way of opening the aperture for defense acquisition i'm not so i i just don't know if that would have happened under the biden administration but i think everyone in the biden administration knew this problem also i don't think whoever was president right now would have changed our trajectory too much in terms of how aggressive and how expansive we're going because we're we're talking about just how it's like like the most salient issue that everyone in the dod is concerned about is drones that was true in 2024 and it is true in 2025 um when we started we were still getting the same we were getting the same urgent responses from people that are like yeah exactly i think during the biden administration we were in an earlier time at the company where people are like come to these demonstrations show us what you can do we show them and then they support us and then we go and do research agreements and we continue to get support for proposal applications and everything.

58:31And so with that, it already started under the Biden administration. I would say probably the change that I can see is that just the contracting aperture and the acquisitions aperture has opened up, or there's an attempt to open it up that has just started. Interesting. Okay. When you're kind of looking out, let's say, you know, 12 or 16 months, um what are the biggest like landmines that you're expecting or you can kind of like foresee these would be the biggest hurdles uh that could slow us down yeah i think well i generally just have plans against those because if i see hurdles i have gone and thought about and worked with our team and our supporters and our investors to figure out what we're going to do about them um i would say what we're i've talked about it a few times a year from now we're mid towards the end of 2026 um we've deployed a series of units in the field we've locked in more international partners for distribution um and we have gone and started to produce our own laser systems in some kind of small volume really really especially for our own system um but judging based on the way the direct energy market is going that market is a massive and exploding market based on the public comps that are happening right now where if you were making your own laser you are gonna sell them has that dynamic shifted and even like trying to raise money uh for putting it towards like directed energy systems or whatever like do people get it now in a way yeah definitely i mean i mean our pre-seed was like pulling teeth and our seed closed in like three weeks so it's right so it's just like yeah basically okay okay so when you when you like first started what you know what what were the things that you were focusing on the most like were you way more on the engineer it was engineering the building when we first started it was me and john and uh i was catting the first turret and coding some of the controls and John was doing like the AI and networking.

1:00:38I was collecting data, trained the first models. John was doing the microcontroller work and it was just him and I. From like February 24, March 24 or something like that for maybe like until... Like a few months. No, Chase is our first employee and he started September 11th. So he's about to head his one year. So we're, it's very hard. We're unbelievably picky and hiring engineers yeah and we will go months talking about the process what what is what like what are you optimizing for yeah so the first the first thing we do basically is we do um we rip tons of like 15 minute vibe calls because you know sometimes the vibe call should be like four minutes long because i just know right immediately uh so we get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications um for most of for most of our roles we cut kill probably 90 to 95 percent off the bat we go to a first 15 minute call interview that is probably another 90 percent down selection what do you when you go into that first like vibe call uh what are the things that you are like top of mind yeah for sure i think so first off i'm very intense so i'm like i'm like i'm gonna give you 60 percent of the i'm gonna give you 60 seconds about the company and then we're gonna move on and we're gonna start talking about you all most of what i hear about is you we move into that i ask about previous projects um previous interesting things that they've done and then something technical especially all interview for roles that i know about so like optics stuff yeah right and um on the optics side i'm trying to figure out really are you more of a theoretician or an experimentalist and a theoretician is someone that will do really well in a phd program an experimentalist is someone who might not do too well in a phd program that's we're doing five-year-long research projects but it's really really just into building things i'm trying to suss that out and i'm also trying to figure i'm trying to figure out are you a wrench turner what do you mean by that like are you someone who like do you know how to work a tool do you know how to work a tool have you been doing python scripts your whole life like trying to do like small experiments or have you been um like building things regularly and i'm trying to suss that out as soon as possible um and i'm also trying to see uh this is something that people do but like if you mention something on your resume and i find it kind of interesting or it's something i don't know i will just ask keep asking specifics until you get down to kind know like either the base physics or the base like business decisions why that so in software a lot of architectures were made for things outside of like technical reasons a lot of things were also made for like technical reasons like there's some networking reasons why like like packages work the way that they do historically um but uh you know yeah you just just keep getting down i don't even necessarily need you to know the answer but i need you to not bullshit me you need to like care yeah i need you to care and yeah i need you to have thought about it i need you to not not uh not bullshit me i think saying i don't know that's a good question and then talking about think reasons why you might think that it is the way that it is that's perfectly fine as well um but i think what i've come to realize is 98 of engineers got an engineering degree because they knew they were smart enough to get the degree and they wanted like a nice salary and like successful whatever right and i think you see that in like the cs degree program graduates at like Berkeley, for example, like 20 years ago or 25 years ago, it's about equal with electrical and mechanical hardware.

1:03:59And now it's just exploded. Like people will do CS. Most of the population, I think, or most of the population that ends up going to university could get an engineering degree. Like you guys could get engineering. Like if you had decided that at 18, I was going to do it, you could have gone and done it. You're perfectly smart enough to do so um but it's really about do you live to build things and that's really the core thing and 98 99 of engineers did it for other reasons than they're doing it for the grades and they're doing it for the eventual like job but they're not actually just building stuff on the weekends or tinkering after work or yeah exactly exactly and so that's the main that's the main thing what's been the biggest like successful hire um and what has been the worst also oh my gosh I'm not going to talk about the words I'm going to talk about I'm going to talk about I'd say it's like our our team right now has has As soon as they're split among a bunch of different fields.

1:05:00our optics engineers we got we got the dropout of their PhDs because they were so interested in what we were doing which is that's fantastic the ideal thing what's really interesting I've tweeted about this but what's interesting about hiring PhDs is what you need to do if you're gonna hire a PhD is you need to go to their PI their primary investigator or their their their doctoral advisor and ask them that question that I just asked which is are they more of an experimentalist or a theoretician and to the doctoral advisor the correct answer is not experimentalist it's theoretician and the when I did the reference calls for both of our laser engineers their doctoral advisors were like kind of cagey about the answer not really answering my questions too much and before I asked him this question and I'm like would you say they're more of an experimentalist or a theoretician and I'm like and they're like you know like they're more they're more experimentalists than theoreticians and for like and and and i'm like okay that's the crap and i'm like you know that's exactly what i'm looking for and they're like okay that's awesome they're going to be incredible because because you need it's it's just such a i dropped out of my phd it's just a very different uh type of skill set to be and there are phds that go and they're all they're they're they can convert and then they go and do really well in private industry and they're able to get really hands-on and stuff there are tons of phd founders that do super well and they're technical founders so they're that that's not an issue but i think um usually to make sure that they're that they're that kind of person and so it's kind of like the revealed counter answer that they don't want to give me is the one that i want and so oh so they're actually like optimizing for the exact opposite yeah and so they think that the answer that you actually want is the thing that will kind of disqualify them exactly yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah so it's good so when they're like I don't know.

1:06:46I'm like, just tell me what I, just tell me, because this is what I want. Yeah. Yeah. So that's for PhDs. Yeah. Yeah. For, for yourself personally, like on working on this stuff, um, when you were a kid, what were the things that you were most like fascinated by and the different directions, all those experiments that you want other people to have done? What did you do? I found my love for engineering when I was like 20, I would say I was not this kid that was like doing stuff. I wasn't like coding when I was 11 or something. I mean, I, so I, my, my co-founder and I are from, my co-founder and I went to high school together.

1:07:22We met when we were 14 in a coding class, like high school. He didn't like me originally, but so we've been, and now we're, now we're early thirties. So we've been together for more than half our lives. Um, and we've done a bunch of projects together, but like, like growing up in, like I grew up in, I grew up in Metro Detroit. um when i was very young my father passed away my mother was was pretty troubled i would say and and so i spent a lot of my time alone i started working when i was 11. what was your first job i was a paper boy for lavonia observer and eccentric interesting it was awesome it was sick although like you you have to deliver papers early in the morning two or three times a week and it's like january it's like negative five so and so i have like a I have like a red wagon I felt that coming from Alaska I felt yeah yeah it's like yeah it's colder in Alaska for sure but like I mean once it's under zero it's it's cold yeah it's cold and I'm like 11 I probably weigh like 80 pounds and I'm so I'm like freezing cold and I'm like dragging red wagon delivering papers and stuff um my grandfather helped set up that job for me like that's what i was doing when i was a kid like i was like trying to like i was i was like i didn't have like the technology my parents weren't like engineers like my my dad didn't graduate high school i don't think my mom graduated high school but like that's it and so it's like that is the path wasn't laid out the path was not laid out and so i was and like i barely graduated high school i had like a 2.02 they like sent me a letter that like i was not going to graduate basically and unless i and so i took a bunch of choir classes got a's and i just what was what was the reasoning because like typically when i meet someone that didn't you know personally myself i don't know how i graduated somehow i did um i genuinely don't know how i wasn't interested at all uh in the stuff that i was learning but i i was interested personally learning stuff just through audiobooks or like interviews um what were you interested in high school was it just like business and making you know making money and like getting doing work or what no i was a loser i was a total loser i was like not what do you mean by that i i like was not particularly interested in anything i like i would say when i was a kid up until i was like maybe 12 13 i was like interested in like reading books and stuff but like i like i grew up like i i was suspended every year in school from when i was six to when I was like 13 for fighting so I was like I wasn't really bullied but that's I was like a super aggressive freak so like I didn't really have many friends and I also but I also wasn't like I wasn't bullied I also didn't have many friends so I was like alone most of the time um do you feel like you were kind of fighting against the world I don't know I don't know I haven't thought about it that much I think I think I I just didn't have like I just didn't have like like a nuclear family.

1:10:16I was like alone a lot. I was like left alone at home, had to find food, stuff like that. I won't go too much into it, but I think it was more like, yeah, I was really angry. She's a really angry little kid. Um, and then, you know, I became, um, and then I would say in high school, I got more friends. I kind of learned to socialize. I wasn't like fighting people all the time and that that was definitely really really better for me but I think probably I got like I got a super high standardized test score I had like a 32 33 ACT something like that and but I had like no under I had like no capacity to when I'm 17 I can't like fix my GPA and I was just like I think when I was like 18 I was like I don't want to be I remember thinking I don't want to be like a loser anymore I was just like a total loser I I was never going to go.

1:11:09I was like not going anywhere. And so I knew I had an acumen for like mathematics and engineering and I liked building things. I had cars that I worked on and stuff. And so I think moving into mechanical engineering was, that's what I did my undergrad. And I had to go to basically an open enrollment university in downtown Detroit for a couple of years. So I lived down there for several years and then transferred to Case Westerns, private school in Cleveland. But there I did mechanical engineering. um and then i really found a lot of my identity in building things that i was interested in moving into technology development what were those first uh like projects that you were working on i'd say cars cars really the first thing i would love to do a car company at some point uh what would what would that be around like electric or oh man someone's gonna steal it no one's gonna steal it cars are fucking hard no you're right no one no one's gonna steal it yeah um if someone does decide to run with it give me like a quarter percent and i will advise you um i uh i uh i'd love to do an open source car company open source the chinese are doing it the chinese are going to do it almost certainly which which chinese company is doing that right now i think it's like a startup i've heard like rumblings of it but uh in the chinese the chinese government lays out five year plans for things and they're very public and they actually execute on them you can you know what you can actually see publicly what china is going to focus on industrially for their their provinces and their country um and one of the things in the latest one is open source stuff hardware everything so open source hardware has been a business model that people have been trying to do here in the city for a little bit um uh generally for consumer devices is what we've seen it in but open source car company here's the idea you take like the skateboard ev platform you go this is what this is what you do okay you you you you say that you're going to take a skateboard ev platform you run android on it you run you run a phone os on the thing okay and you and you go find like whatever like fame it like uh like shelby or i think shelby's dead but uh some of these like a super famous like super car designer and you get them on board and you can make them an advisor or co-founder ideally and you say we're going to make beautiful 3d printed shells for them and then you go and you open source everything there are tons and the thing is like CS and soft CS people and software engineers are so involved in open source and that's a market it's a kind of hard to get good people to be on your open source project but CAD stuff like mechanical engineers or electrical engineers or power electronics engineers do not have that opportunity historically and so if you make an open source project and people love cars and if you make it really sexy then you can get definitely like American or European or best talent or you get really good talent to get on it and stuff right and so that's that's that's a great y combinator application company make me an advisor i worked on i worked on vehicle design in undergrad i went to chrysler my first job was at chrysler in the auto industry i worked in manufacturing planning and part design and everything i can help you if someone does it so that's my that's my pitch um but so i worked in the industry as a mechanical engineer for a couple years in detroit um i i actually start i actually um went to officer candidate school in the navy right out of undergrad i didn't really apply the jobs i wanted to be a fighter pilot went to flight school um i got medically disqualified from flight school why uh i have a low red blood cell count i think i might be anemic but i'm like on i'm like i'm like close to it i don't know but but i i power lift i got a three plate bench i run marathons i have no physical issues i just i'm just i'm just white as hell and i have low red blood cell count so they should have accepted me and i fought it But, um, but the rules are the rules.

1:14:46I think, um, what was that experience like? You're trying horrible. It was like, it was like the first, that was another thing. That was like the first time I felt like I like had like a mission for something. I would say, did you, did you have this for like an extended period of time? Like over a year, you're like, this is the thing that I'm going to go after. Probably I'd say my sophomore year of undergrad. I was like, I'm going to do this for maybe two years and then graduate and then go and do it. And that's another like three, four, five months. And so suddenly you've spent like multiple years on this.

1:15:10You're really trying. And. it just got kind of like rumpled on you at the last moment that you didn't realize that you like would automatically be disqualified from this totally wow yeah so um but i left during the autos during the auto industry that industry sucks our car our car are like ford and chrysler and general motors cannot compete with not only with tesla but with like the chinese in terms of their like capacity to produce and innovate yeah it's really horrible the detroit auto industry is like uh that was 2018 it's been seven years so maybe it's kind of wild like even outside of if you look at like the chinese uh car companies um i remember yilong in one interview he was kind of like laughing at byd's car i think this was maybe like 2015 2016 and then a few years later he again got interviewed and they were talking about uh byd's um car and he was like oh no they've become very serious like their cars are beautiful they're extremely performant and they're doing that at manufacturing at scale i think faster like scaled production of any like auto ever they're insane xiaomi was a phone company and in three years they stood up a car production facility they make a thousand a day i don't know so they produce our our factories at chrysler i think the some of the jeep factories the ones that sell really well they would produce 400 000 vehicles a year so xiaomi makes a fully scaled production factory in three years we could never do that we couldn't do that right now um i remember um i think bill gurley said this on a podcast a couple days ago where he's basically like we talked earlier about like the there's all these reasons there's this like american cope about why the chinese are able to so it's no longer that it's no longer that the chinese products are bad it's that they're bad is that they're good uh but for some cheating type reason and more or less maybe that's true maybe i don't think the slave labor thing is necessarily a thing uh well now it's just like all out of automatic factories like automated factories i I think it's also like subsidies might be true, but we subsidize our own industries.