#299 Andy Lowery - Inside the World’s Most Advanced Drone Killing Machine

27:55And we've got about 12 or so designers, which at Raytheon, you know, no one ever hires designers at Raytheon hardly. It's like something unique. Well, they don't have a design-led philosophy there. And when we talk about what is Silicon Valley adding to the whole mix, if you will, you say, well, why is Silicon Valley sort of better in some way? I lean into the design-led thinking. And design-led thinking is human factors, human thinking from the very beginning. That's what it means at its core. In a Raytheon, you're a services contractor. You have the military that decides what they want you to build.

28:35they put them all down in like a thousand requirements. They hand you a bunch of requirements and you just build a system that meets the requirements. You get paid and then you move on to the next system. There's no real design process there. It's like baked into the system engineering. It's baked into the way that operational commands give feedback to procurement commands and to requirement commands. And all of that is a very bureaucratic process. You get good products out of it. You get expensive products out of it. You get exquisite products out of it. But what we're seeing now is a whole new chapter.

29:11The stuff that's built at the big primes are not sufficient for this new fight. And before anybody gets angry with that and why I say that, I'll give you an analogy. For the last decades, the primes have been focused on, let's say, going out and hunting a lion or lions, like big, big beasts. You know, they have to bring in the big nets, the big guns, the big whatever that they need to go hunt lions. The problem we see today are like mice and little mice that are running around. And what we're doing with our big rockets and our big defensive systems are using the same thing we would go up against lions, against mice.

29:55And it's really that fundamental. It's that, can you now develop mice-like apparatuses, Raytheon, quickly and short order, like they're doing in Ukraine, or are you not rigged to do it? Are you not set up to do that? And not that they can't change, and not that they can't, like, bolt on companies like EPRUS and let them operate sort of independently and still bring in the human factors and the design-led stuff, but... I mean, you're talking about shooting a$2 million missile to... Get a$10 ,000... A$500 drone. Right. That's what you're talking about. It's not sustainable. It's just not even like appropriate.

30:33It's like, would you ever take a huge gun or a huge, I don't know what you want to do if you don't say gun, like net or what, some cage, would you have a cage for a lion with the bars this far apart? You're stuffing mice in it and they're just running through the bars of the cage. You know, it's like, it just isn't the right stuff for this particular fight. And the right stuff needs to be here yesterday. It needs to be here yesterday. Why do you think the big prime, I mean, why aren't the big primes doing this? Did they just get cocky? Do they think they don't need to innovate? What is going on?

31:05I mean, I love it. I love seeing, I mean, I've interviewed a whole ton of these, of companies like Epirus that are coming up, Shield AI, Andrel, like a bunch of these. And the innovation that's coming out of these companies is just amazing. I don't know what's coming out of the other companies. I saw some of the stuff that Lockheed came out with at that event in D.C. that I met you at. But the younger, leaner, more innovative companies just seem to be outperforming the big five defense tech firms. Am I wrong on that? No, you're not wrong, but I wouldn't blame them. Palmer says this very eloquently.

31:48I've heard him speak on this topic a couple times, Palmer Luckey, Andrew. He would say they're not incentivized to be fast and creative and move very quickly. They're not incentivized to at risk spend$200 million developing a new system that they might have a customer for, but they're not quite sure that they're going to have a customer for. They're incentivized to listen very, very well to the customer, being the military, and go off like a services company. Like when you go to a law firm and you say, hey, law firm, I need you to help me with this dog bite case that I'm in the middle of here or whatever.

32:27And that law firm then pivots and says, okay, we're going to work on that. That's not how the new neoprimes work. They don't work like a law firm. They don't work like the primes. They guess. They go out, they survey the land, they see the problems, they talk with the generals, they talk with the various folks that are out in the field, and then they guess at what a product that they could invent that they have in their head might work to solve this problem or that problem. Some of them are winners. Some of them will win. Some of them will lose, just like in consumer products where you'll have a consumer product company that just doesn't make it but others that do.

33:00You're going to have winners and losers, and that's where the big risk comes into play. But if you're willing to take that risk, then you get way more innovation, way more creativity, because you're not bounded to this very systematic like hand, you know, hand you this, hand you that, stepwise, one, two, three, four, five, six. Never really do anything unless the government says, here's a check, here's how you get paid. And so they're incentivized to just wait for the requirements, wait for the direction on what they should build, and then they go build it. So like a law firm, just like it. That's what primes are today.

33:39So are they useful? Yes. Will they build the big exquisite machines still into the future on a very robust, well-exercised process? Yes. I still think there's a big place for them in the future world. But will they be the ones that can make the mice traps and all the things that need to come out like in a month-to-month-to-month type iterative cycle and risk a lot of money up in the front end of the thing to make it all work? They just, they're not really set up to do that. And the only way that I could see them becoming more like that is if they were to take a risk and, like, let's say buy EPRIS and then, like, let us operate exactly like we've been operating under our investors and our board that we're under now.

34:20Just operate the same, but be under their umbrella, so to speak, or their brand, but still operate the way that we've been operating. I could see that being one way. Is that starting to happen? I've seen it in bits. Like Lockheed, you mentioned, I know they have a big fund that basically funds different small companies that they find having a lot of potential. I'm not sure how many of those are transitioning yet to acquisition, but I think that's the intent, is to basically get involved by finding ones that have a real win, you know, and then transitioning them into a growth phase. Okay. Because as you start to scale and you're talking about field service operators out in the field, you're talking about people all over the world that are needing support maintaining these systems, logistics for these systems, all the mill PF type stuff that people talk a lot about.

35:11All of that, the primes do well. They're well-situated. They're well-staffed. They have people all over the world. When you need a scale in mass, it's nice to partner with primes because they have mass. And for example, General Dynamics Land Systems is a major, major partner to us. And I had really never had a partnership quite as close as we are with GD. And GD ends up being that sort of big brother to say, hey, do you have people in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and other places? Because we do. We have loads of people over there and we can help you scale when it comes time to scale versus trying to build everything from like new, like everything new and everything fresh.

35:52leverage what they're good at, scaling, mass production, field support, all of those types of elements, and then keep the innovation and keep the stuff that these neoprimes are doing really well, like Shield AI and all the rest of them that you named and more. There's many, many more. All of those companies are doing the innovation really, really well right now, in particular for these types of threats. Gotcha. Gotcha. I mean, it just seems, especially with the current wars that we're involved in right now, in particular Ukraine, with all the... I mean, everything just seems so cheap that they're doing over there.

36:35Yeah, cheap and innovative and quick and, you know, like death by a thousand cuts, as they say, right? And everything is very distributed. It's almost... It feels to me like... if people know in the audience about cyber and like how cyber works, right? If you look at Symantec and how it defends against these little Trojan viruses that get in and try to do harm to your system, those Trojans are like 110, 150, 200 lines of code. They can be very, very small pieces of software. But Symantec needs millions or billions of lines of code, right, in order to defend against these little harassing software-type drones, if you will.

37:20And if you look at the physical world now, we have that sort of like metaphor where the layered defense that we know in cyber defense and the swarms that you see in cyber attacks, where you'll get viruses coming in this way, viruses coming in this way, those types of attack vectors, if you will, call them attack vectors, are being used in the physical world now. So the drones are like the little Trojans that are everywhere doing mass swarms, trying to overwhelm the enemy through just sheer quantity and mass. And then our defensive networks are becoming more and more layered and nuanced so that we have these layers of protection.

38:03because what you don't hear in the news a lot is like nine out of every 10 of these drones were taken care of. It's just one or two out of 10 that are leaking past. Wow. And as they increase that ratio scale, so if they send in 100, that means 10 will get past. If they send in 1 ,000, maybe 100 will get past. And so we need more layers. We need more systems like Leonidas presented in the fight so that we can take care of the leakers, take care of the swarms, take care of the dark drones. Leakers? What are leakers? Leakers are what I just said. If you have a system in place, like an Iron Dome, that takes care of nine out of the ten Shaheds that come in and you get one that get in, that's your leaker that kind of gets through your traditional network.

38:46And Leonidas is good for those. It's a good last line of defense, like a close-in weapon system, but with electromagnetic energy. It's a good analogy if the listeners know about the Sea Whiz, the little R2-D2s on ships that have the 5 ,000 rounds a minute type of ability to just do that close-in protection. What we're doing with the Leonidas at EPRES is creating basically a close-in weapon system, but using electromagnetic bullets versus physical bullets to kind of provide that last line of defense. And one, it can provide a very nice last line of defense against leakers. We talked about those.

39:24Really nice line of defense against swarms. Like the gift I gave you was a 49 shootdown, but that doesn't mean we can't shoot down 500 or 1 ,000 or more. And then it gives you a really nice defense against fiber optic drones that you've seen these in the Ukraine now, these guys that are - What about the drones, the tethered? Tethered, yeah. We call them dark drones because it could be fiber optic in the future. It could be autonomous drones that just don't use any sort of RF or any sort of global positioning or any of that in order to see where it's at and to navigate, autonomous drones will be like fiber without the line, without the tethered fishing line that goes behind it.

40:04But those types of drones are just as susceptible against our effects as a regular remote-controlled drone. So it doesn't really jam it. It's like an EMP, like you said at the very beginning. It's like small little electromagnetic pulses that we're putting out exactly directed where we want to direct them. Wow. Wow. Let's dive into Leonidas. What are all of its capabilities? What does it do? Where is it deployed? So just to start really simple, and then we'll double-click down, in a simple way, it's sort of like the first version that the human race of a force field that anyone's ever created.

40:45If listeners are seeing Star Trek and Star Wars, they'll put these fields up, and those fields, obviously, in the movies are like against physical objects that'll like bounce off of them like a wall or whatever. Our system isn't quite to that level of sophistication yet, but as far as a version one of a force field that is a close in protective field that sends out these very, very, very high, high powered electromagnetic interference waves that when the drone, if you imagine here, here's the, here's the field that we're putting out there. As the drone gets into this electromagnetic field, it might stutter, the camera might stop working, then it gets deeper and deeper, closer and closer into the intensity of the electromagnetic interference, and eventually the computer just can't operate.

41:32It just does not operate under that strong of a field surrounding the computer board. And computer goes dead, or one of the servos locks up or whatever, and it's closed. So this is like a bubble. It's like a bubble, exactly. You could put a bubble around an embassy. You could put a bubble around a White House. You could put a bubble around, you know, anything. Anything that you can think of, really. We've got... A country. What's that? A country. A country. Well, that would take a lot of money and a lot of systems, but you could theoretically do that if you wanted to, like, make something huge, building size.

42:09You could go out miles with a system like this. Like, if you wanted to, let's say, protect the Straits of Taiwan and you wanted to build an enormous building-size version of Leonidas. You saw the one out there earlier. That one was like 10 foot by 10 foot. Imagine 100 feet by 100 feet or bigger. Oh, shit. Okay. You can really power project then and start thinking about huge things to defend against these types of drones with a system that big. Can they interconnect? Yes, they can interconnect. So, meaning what I'm talking about, I mean, And what comes to my mind is the Iron Dome over Israel. Correct.

42:50How is that built? Is that a bunch of systems all linked together for one big dome, or is that one massive device? I think in essence, it basically gives you a theoretical, in our minds, dome. but how it actually operates is much more down the traditional OODA loops, where you have detect, you're scanning, basically, wide area search, and then you're tracking, and then you're like, okay, assign this effector to that type of threat. We know that it can take out of it, and then it takes out of it. So it's really, I think, the coordination that makes Iron Dome so successful. It's a very close-knit, coordinated system that works really, really well.

43:30In fact, I met not too long ago in Singapore, one of the original engineers that designed, has credit to designing that Iron Dome. And they have other versions with directed energy now and other things, but nothing like Leonidas. We've been talking to Israel and we've been talking to others about something like Leonidas. They're very interested. They want to work with us, you know, because of all the issues that are now plaguing Israel. You see it on the news every night. If you see something get hit in Israel, that's a leaker, or it's a dark drone, or it was a swarm that just overwhelmed their defenses as they're now rigged.

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46:13crime, not everything is urgent, but this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know.

46:29So I've seen, Grant actually sent me some videos of capabilities, and actually maybe maybe I found those whatever I might have found them on your website but uh but the way it appeared to me is it's it's it's 49 drones 49 individual shots all that all happened simultaneously is it am I off on this yeah if you could if and I'm even thinking about using like um augmented reality glasses to show what's going on and tie that into the com the computer uh that's doing the commands and stuff so that you could see what's happening. What happened in that 49 drone video, if the viewers like really frame by frame, take a look at it, we do three major spots.

47:17So, but it all happens in less than a second. So we hit the one group that sits there, the second group there, and then the third group there. And we do that within like a half a second. We go one, two, three. Holy shit. So we're steering the beam, kind of like in a laser light show, you know how they can steer one laser and make like a whole shape. We're steering the beam so quickly that the drones that are falling prey to us think that they're all over, like the beam's all over. But what we're really doing is very quickly on the time scale, moving the beam around in whatever pattern the drones require us to do.

47:54So we're not going to throw away energy. Like, if there's not a drone there, we're not going to point it in that direction. We'll shape the basically force field for whatever sort of targets that are out there in front of us. So the force field morphs into what you need it to morph. Exactly. That's a great way of putting it. Okay. Shit, that's badass. Wow. It's tip of the spear tech. It really is. And that's why I told you at the beginning I love learning. I love being part of something that's so advanced, even in some ways controversial. We have our naysayers out there. We have the folks that say...

48:30Controversial? What the fuck is controversial about counter-drone? No, not about that. I don't have too many people that say, hey, let's forget about this counter-drone problem. I don't think it's going to be a problem in a couple of years. I think most people are wedded to the idea that drones are here and here to stay, and they're a really big problem. But there's all kinds of opinions of what the best way to solve the problem, right? There's all differences. You've got laser systems. You have guys making, you know, Gatling guns in the back of pickup trucks, you know, the bullfrog guy at Allen Control Systems building something like that.

49:07Another kind of close-in weapon system that provides with bullets anyway, sort of that last layer of attack or defense, I should say. And then you have a whole bunch of other types of systems that, again, like I said earlier, work really well in certain conditions and not as well in other conditions. So the hard, hard problem that the Army, that the Air Force, that our foreign allies have right now is figuring out what to pick, what to use in this layer or that layer. And that's why we've leaned into the simulation. Like, we've leaned into the video game where you can play, like, tower defense in real life and drop in Leoniduses, drop in other electronic warfare systems, drop in radar systems, and say, if I set up a protection scheme like this, and then we partnered with another company called Gambit, and Gambit's another neoprime that basically runs scenarios.

50:00Like drones could come in and do this. They could come on high and drop down. They could and run 100 different scenarios and say, will this this layered defense network or this layered defense scheme work for this particular target? That's going to be absolutely 100 percent required as we move further and further in the future. And lots of companies are doing it. I think we're doing it in a unique way right outside of Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma. We have a big experience center, experience site that soldiers and others can come into and play video games. It's like Ender's Game, right? It's like if you practice, it's just like you fight.

50:38And so we've created simulators and emulators that look like you're in the fight. It appears like you're doing it. So when you go from the Fort Sill area over into the battlefield, you're not going to see any difference. You're going to see the same sort of scenarios play out, one in simulation and one in real life. Wow. Man, I got a ton of questions. I'm trying to organize them into some type of order. But I mean, what's the range on something like this? You know, as usual, I'm going to give you probably an answer that's a function of your question. So the range is 100 % dependent on the size of the system.

51:19And you size the system and then therefore the range based upon the target that you're trying to protect. So if you're trying to protect a tank, you've seen maybe some videos of first-person viewers with fiber optic tethers on them hitting an Abrams tank in the back and blowing up the tank or whatever. So you get a$3 ,000,$4 million tank blown up by a$10 ,000,$20 ,000 first-person viewer drone. Those types of systems are like small, right? Or relatively small. Like a big toolbox. You know, about as big as a big toolbox. Very dense, the electronics. And then the range, though, is maybe 50 meters.

52:01But a tank's not going to need much more than about 50 meters by our calculations. And so you've got certain size ones that have ranges at that low of a level. And then you have ones that have the need to go much, much bigger than that. If you're trying to defend a base or an airfield or an embassy or any of those sort of things, then you're going to need at least what you see in kind of a lot of other different protective systems where you're out at like CWIS. CWIS goes out to about one and a half kilometers. If you look at the nominal range of what a close-in weapon system can defend, it's about 1.5 kilometers.

52:37So we are like defending a ship, need about that size, it's about a building size. We need something in that range. So the big one you see out there that we kind of toured around and take a look at, that one is for the embassies, for the fixed targets, what sometimes they're called the point defense type applications. Those ones are in that kind of manifold of range. So that would basically defend this entire property? you could it since it's mobile absolutely because if you could detect out at five or ten kilometers then you move the system both on the ground and then with the antenna to kind of protect and so out to like a half mile mile that type of distance which is what about this property would be you you would be safe and if you had a really critical target you might want two on a on a property about this size one having like 180 and 180 exactly and then that way you don't need to beam over the house or whatnot.

53:36You've got one half of Leonidas this guy, one half Leonidas this guy. And to your question earlier, you can take the beams and steer them in the same direction, point them at the same target. And it doesn't quite double up, but it gives you about 50 or 60 % more range by having two systems. So the seams, like if you had two left and right of your house right now, the seam down the middle is where people would think to go, but that seam is covered as well or even better than coming right at the system. So we try to make a very sort of robust shield, if you will, so that nothing can get through.

54:11And we're that final last line. What would this do to a human? Nothing. Like I would stand in, like I tell people like there's a famous, one of my sort of fans from the nuclear Navy was Admiral Rickover. He was like one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, created the entire nuclear program in like four years for subs and resurface ships and all of that. And there's a famous scene where Admiral Rickover goes into Congress and drinks the effluent of the primary coolant. He drinks down a glass of it saying how safe to try to illustrate how safe. I was telling someone before we came out here, I said, I would stand in front of the main beam, not for like an hour, but I'd stand in front of the main beam for like 15 seconds and go zap me.

54:52It won't do anything. It won't. It wouldn't do a thing to me. And I'll tell you why. You go, well, why? I mean, these microwaves, ovens and stuff. we happen to use frequencies that are so low, they're close to kind of RF. They're still microwave. They're considered microwave, but they're almost in the RF or radio frequency band of waves. And those waves pass harmlessly through us. Those are the kind of radio towers and stuff like that. The very, very long wavelength, very, very low frequency waves. Those frequencies are not harmful to humans. They just pass right through us and pass right through biologics, not harmful to plants, not harmful to birds.

55:33We are a little bit above that, but not much. So we do have to be somewhat safety conscious. We have to do HERO, HERP, HERF, these different hazardous electromagnetic radiation for personnel. There's these limits that are very, very tight and very tightly controlled. We have to be below those by measure, but it's not hard for us to be below them. We're well below them and you can stand very close to the machine and not have any sort of effects whatsoever. Okay. And it's not, it's not radiating any microwaves unless it detects something, correct? Exactly. So even if you do radiate, it might be 20 seconds or 10 seconds of radiation, then it's off again.

56:13The drones are down. Okay. And so when it does detect something, is it, if you could visualize, if you could see the beam, what would it look like? Would it be, would it look like a laser? Would it look like a, like a, like a blast wave? What would it look like? It would look like, it would not look like a laser. It would look more like a, uh, it's about, oh, um, let me think about this, how to say this right without giving away too much. It's nowhere near as thin of a beam as a layer. It's a thicker beam. And if you look at it, so it would look like a... A spotlight. Oh, that's a great analogy.

56:57It's about like a spotlight. Yeah, like a spotlight that you would see. It would be, yes, that's absolutely dead on. That is a great way of looking at it. Like the spotlight you see in the parking lots to say, hey, come over here. And they shine up in the sky and they zoom them around and make different sorts of things. that's about in the microwave frequencies exactly what the beam would look like how many of those beams can it we keep it at just one because we want to eke out every bit of power we can we don't want to distribute the beams into a bunch of beams so then that but we move it at at microsecond speeds so like it's hard for a human to even think about this just like the lights in this room are blinking on and off right now, but we can't see them.

57:39And that's only at 60 hertz. We're at a much, much faster repetition rate that we're doing. So we can basically go around this whole 60 degrees by 60 degrees and fill the sky with pulsating electromagnetic interference energy. And a drone anywhere in that big sort of section of the sky would fall. So it's so fast, it just looks like it's happening all simultaneous. It looks like a blast wave. Exactly. To the physical system, like if you were on the drone, like a little guy inside the drone driving it, you would just see, no matter if you were here, here, here, you would see this electromagnetic pulsating wave just hitting you and hitting you and hitting you.

58:20Like as if you took that spotlight that you made the reference to and just had a guy that in a one second could just run that spotlight across the whole sky. Shit. How does it detect the drones? It does it through a combination of radar and electro-optical and infrared. So we have three bands of frequencies. We have the radar, which goes out, and it's pretty high-frequency radar because it has to find these little drones as far distance as we can find them. So we start with like a 360-degree radar, and we're searching, and we're searching. Or we're tapped into Andrel Lattice, and Lattice is doing the searching and then handing us, hey, we found something.

59:02We're going to assign it to you. But in the headed situation where we're doing everything, we search. We search about maybe a 10-kilometer to 20-kilometer space. We see things way out as they're coming in. And then as soon as we see them, we're starting to move or position our system to be able to take the attack. But we're not firing until it gets in that kind of final sort of layer is where we fire, where we don't try to hit them way out at 10 miles or 5 miles. It's in that last sort of engagement zone. So other things are handling, other layers are handling the further out fight. We're sitting back just like a goalie in a hockey game, just pointed, ready, ready, ready, ready to stop, ready to stop.

59:42We get either the assignment or if we're a standalone, we give ourselves the assignment. It's locked onto by our telescope, basically. It's electro-optical and infrared telescope. Some of the videos online, you can see the infrared version of that telescope. So it locks onto it very tightly. We hit the trigger. It goes on for about two seconds. Every drone in the sky falls down. Damn. Very, very quickly. How big of a drone could you take out something like a Predator drone? How big of a machine can you disable? The theory applies in scales to anything with electronics. However, as you get bigger and bigger drones, you're able to get bigger and bigger weight capacities and you can do a lot of things with electromagnetic shielding.

1:00:34So even drones that even fly at 100 ,000 feet, they have cosmic radiation and electromagnetic fields that have to like be shielded against. And so and this is actually in one side you go, oh, that shoot, you can't get those big drones. But on the other side, we're also not taking out airplanes or 747s or anything like it's super safe. safe because of the kind of controlled short range nature of the system. So, so it works really, really well against group one and group twos. So these harassing first person viewers, it's, that is what it was designed for. It was a drone group one, group two goalie stop.

1:01:16We have tested against some group threes. We have lots of information, commercial information around and commercial testing around bigger systems that enterprising people pick up out of the field into Ukraine that get down. And then we buy those commercially and we test our system to see the viability. And it does seem to have good effects, at least in a chamber where we test it. We haven't flown a Shahhead at it or anything like that. We don't have any Shahhead pilots and don't have a Shahhead that's operational. So we rig up the systems that we have and we're able to gain access to, and we test in the chamber how our system would affect the system out in the field.

1:01:56And we have kind of math equations that are really accurate, like within 5%. If we can down the drone inside of our chamber at such a distance or a calculated distance, then it equates to that same distance out in the field. So we do believe they will be effective against group threes. It is effective against group threes, But I wouldn't call it, again, I just caution everyone to say nothing is a panacea. There's always need for layers. There's always need for more than just one set of stopping things. You have to have other different types of systems in order to be safe, in order to be safe and get everything.

1:02:32I mean, if this is as successful as you think it's going to be, or than it is. And this would make drone warfare obsolete at some point in time, probably in the near future, correct? If we do what I hope we're able to do, it will change the face of drone warfare completely. Now, I'm not saying it will obsolete it, because this is a chess game or cat and mouse game, you know, where they build a bigger mousetrap and they figure out a better mouse. And you just back and forth, back and forth. Any, if you ask anyone who's an expert in electronic warfare, that is all of electronic warfare. Like Next Generation Jammer.

1:03:19We might be jamming something at 150 miles and then all of a sudden they change the physical construction of the radar and it can't jam it but 75 miles out. So you're always playing this who's got the lead, who's got the upper hand, the enemy or us, the enemy, the us. But with that said, this is a game changer. It is a game changer. It's going to force our adversaries back into normal, more back into normal lanes where they're not attacking data centers and civilian type targets and all of that. We'll be able to build enough of, I think, of a robust network with our system and others that are emerging onto the market that will cripple the ability for bad actors to be able to use drones.

1:04:02It will really cripple them. And so. What about nukes? A lot of... Big talk right now. Iran, Russia, China. Been going on forever. You know, a lot of fear about nuclear war, though. There has been for what? Probably since, I don't know, 20... Probably since the Ukraine War kicked off, which was what, 22 maybe? But, I mean, could they be repurposed, or is the technology there to develop the baseline technology there to develop an iron dome that would defend against, you know. This, I would say that the best use for the golden dome, iron dome, or golden dome is President Trump and the team has been calling it.

1:04:52The golden dome, those are a whole bunch of different, very important systems like THAAD systems, Patriot missile systems, and a network that networks all of that together in this much larger air picture. Now, I'll say that, and those systems have been shown to be vulnerable against mice. The nukes are the lions. The nuclear ballistic missiles are lions. And in fact, a lot of the ballistic missiles are exactly what they They go way up into outer space, and then they calculate exactly where they need to drop their little bombs, and they got like a bunch of them inside a warhead. And then they just drop these things.

1:05:36They're ballistic. They're not electronically steering. They're not doing it. They're using all this really high math to figure out, okay, if we drop it right here at this time in this direction and launch it there, it'll fall to the Earth and hit or explode in the atmosphere, just depending on the type of nuke. So they're tough. It's tough. It's a tough problem. to stop ballistics. And you really want to get at it as close to the launch as you can. Like, you know, you want to be able to, like, have your target hit their rocket before their rocket even gets a chance to ballistically drop those missiles and stuff like that.

1:06:09So it's a little bit different equation. But I'm not, you know, like I'll ask Joe, and he'll have five ideas about how it could help in any case. I can't visualize how it would help in that mission right now. But where I can visualize it will help, it will protect the protector. So as we set up THADS and we set up these different bases, we should have our systems and other systems like ours protecting those type of things from a Jersey drone type. You know, like if you have a Chinese boat with a bunch of containers off the shore, sending in a swarm of drones like the Ukrainians did in Operation Spiderweb, you have that last lane of defense so that your big missiles and your big sort of defensive-type systems aren't being taken out.

1:06:53Okay. Wow, man. Warfare is changing. Totally. So much. It is really changing. Shit. I feel like it was yesterday. I was at war. I wouldn't even recognize it today. Oh, it's the same. I was telling someone when I was in the Navy, when I'd go out overseas, I'd bring warfighters like you over there, but I was just driving the airport, running the nuclear plants underneath. And when my wife would say, are you going to be hurt? Are you going to be injured? I said, no, no, we're sitting on an airport way out in the water. There's no way anything's getting to us. Inland, those are the guys having all the risk.

1:07:30You can't say that anymore. Everything's a target now. Now, ships have pretty good close-in defensive networks like the Sea Whizzes we were talking about earlier and all that, but it's not improbable or even unimaginable for a carrier or something like that to become susceptible to a drone attack. It just is a new way of warfare. So where will these be utilized? I mean, I know you guys have some that are already out in the field, but I mean, are these going to be on every naval vessel, every overseas FOB base, every embassy over the White House? I mean, you mentioned everything from tanks to entire bases.

1:08:16Yeah, I think there is a potentiality for these types of systems, and as they evolve into more and more and better and better capabilities, for them to become almost as ubiquitous as radars. I mean, when we built radars back in the 40s and 50s, we hadn't, I mean, there was a lot of people poo-pooing them saying, oh, you know, radars, they're just a fad. They're going to come and go. But, you know, now radars are everywhere. They're like everywhere. Everybody has a radar. I had a radar on my little, I had a ranger tug for a while in the Columbia River. I had a radar on my ranger tug, you know, so you can get radars just become commodity.

1:08:53I think this type of technology very may well be a commodity type technology that if we continue to live in a world where bad actors are using these toys and these mice, as we call them, to kind of get out of the lane, you know, get out of the normal lanes of warfare, to try to use these things to create terror-type stuff. Even if the war ends in two or three weeks, that doesn't end, right? We don't end the Houthis hurting people in the Red Sea and trying to mess up our shipping lanes. It doesn't end people trying to throw drones into American bases and such over in that region, other bad actors.

1:09:32I think even if we pull out the big guns and we go back or whatever in a few weeks from now, there's going to be at least many, many years sort of tale to this, that drones and this mice warfare is gonna be really prevalent, I think, in that region, especially in that region. How much will something like, I mean, you know, at the beginning, earlier, we said, I had said, you know, a$2 million missile to take out a$500 drone. I mean, what do these cost? What are they... What does each shot cost? I mean, it's just energy. So I don't know what that equates to. Yeah, we have, and this is something that is very relevant and we're doing right now with the Department of War.

1:10:15We're showing them basically each and every sort of perturbation, what you just asked. So a system, just a standalone system, the big ones, like the ones you see out there, they can go for, depending on how you outfit them, what kind of sensors you're using, they can go from anywhere from the mid-teens to upwards to 20 million or more if you want all the bells and whistles and stuff. So they're not cheap. They're not cheap to buy the system. But then every drone they're on after is pennies, is literally pennies. The fuel that it takes us to take down an individual drone costs just a few cents, 5, 10, 20 cents, something like that.

1:10:54If you combine those two, then it becomes an equation of how many drones are you taking out in a given month, in a given year, utilizing that system. And if you take out, let's say, 50 drones in a month, it becomes dollars. even the you know you're like hundreds of dollars per drone verse and that's counting all that you know between 10 and 20 million dollars of costs and all of that all of that all in you're still down at hundreds of dollars per shot once you start to have utilization of the system so there's two ways that someone would decide to use their system one it would be a lot cheaper than going the missile routes because if i'm using it all the time it's going to get a lot of utility and that's going to drive my price per shot way, way, way down.

1:11:40So then that big sort of bill up front is much, much littler.

1:11:47Or what was I going to say? Either one, that you're going to drive that cost per shot down, or two, you're going to understand that target that you're defending, even if it doesn't get like a million drones a day or whatever, if that target even has a chance of being attacked by drones, It's so valuable, you don't even want the chance to happen. So I think those are going to be the two really sort of robust applications we get at right away, where either one, they're going to protect something extremely important and vital to be protected at all costs, or two, it'll be a very high op tempo of many, many drones flying in per day, and then that'll drive the cost way down.

1:12:26If you want to stick a big expensive thing like this in like some port in Louisiana or something like that on the Gulf, it'll probably be overkill at this point. You know, at least at this point, and still we start driving costs down as we start to scale and we start to get into production, then they become more and more ubiquitous. But first movers and first users will probably be, you know, very high value targets at this point. Okay. I mean, I'm just curious, how small do you think you can make this thing? Well, I know it's probably not a high priority right now, but I'm just wondering, you know, we see, I just had this Ukrainian drone operator actually show up here, and he hunted me down on the property.

1:13:10And it just, I've never been involved in drone warfare. It was not a thing during my time, other than predators, you know, and another problem, but not FPV drones running me down. And so throughout that exercise, it just, it got my mind jogging. And would you be able to, would this be a squad defense weapon potentially for a team of special operators? Yeah, it very well could. We have a system that we design prototypes. We never got into production with it, but we have several prototypes of something about the size of the toolbox, weighs about 40 pounds so it's not light and it's not super light but you could get a soldier to carry it or you could get you know a couple people to move it around with with a squad um the range is is limited that that's the issue like if you want to have something the size of a toolbox and go you know 50 100 200 meters or something like that that's right now with where the technology is that's really not possible, other than if you had a whole bunch of those boxes and you were pointing them all at the same thing, then you could start getting sort of into those type of ranges.

1:14:25But that's been a real hard one. I mean, you've seen out on the news, maybe, these drone guns that folks have. I don't know if you've seen them. Those are electronic warfare. Those are jammers. They're trying to use jamming to kind of like if the bad actor isn't sophisticated or if it's a hobbyist or whatever. The drone guns work pretty good. We're looking at if we could design something like a drone gun, like a drone bazooka maybe it would be more like, where we could have an individual basically hit something at 50 meters or 100 meters that just isn't close in sight. I think it's possible. I think the first step, and we're working alongside Andrel on a bunch of things, but one of the things we've looked at is, and I heard Joe talk about this, is their Roadrunner vehicle that does the vertical land sort of like Elon's rockets or or whatever.

1:15:15It's a really cool system. And it has a small little payload section that if Palmer can get his Roadrunner in six, eight feet, nine, 10 yards, something like that, between three to 10 yards from a target, then we can electromagnetic pulse it, falls, move on to the next one, move on to the next one. There's an application for that kind of a potential. So you could have maybe a drone you could launch and with a squad and go up and project that range that way if you can't tolerate the littler range that you're going to get on a smaller system. We're right now in process of taking our electronics and making them much smaller, much denser to make the power density go way up.

1:16:01And the primary driver of that is vehicle protection. So we've kind of been working our way down. We've gone from kind of the larger fixed and semi-fixed site type protection with the bigger system. And we have a medium system that the Marines want to use for some of their platoons and sort of like expeditionary units and things like that that have drone problems, but they could bring them with them on a JLTV or some other vehicle that they have in their arsenal. That's the medium size. And then the small size is for individual vehicle protections, like the tanks, like we were talking about earlier.

1:16:33We haven't quite kicked off yet an individual soldier protection, although So we're getting tons of pressure and tons of requests out of the army to do that. I mean, they really want to get it down to kind of an individual soldier level that has something other than what they have today to protect themselves. Yeah, actually, I didn't even mean for the individual soldier. But if you were to do something like the bin Laden raid, you know, where they could just, you know, roll a vehicle up. Maybe it's attached to the helicopter that lands. Maybe it's on a vehicle. Maybe it's a fucking backpack that you just set right in the middle of the target, and then it gives you, you know, you don't have to worry about FPV drones, you know, coming to mess with you while you're trying to pull a hostage out.

1:17:19Well, I even give you one better. You could take that system and point it at the wall that you're about to bust through or the door you're about to bust through and knock out all the computers, all the different things inside. I mean, it, again, works on everything. So drones, yes, but it also will work if Bin Laden's sitting there on his computer network... Shit. ...take out his computers, everything goes dark in his room, and then, boom, the explosion happens, they go in and get him. So it has a ton of applications. When we start looking at special ops and some of the three-letter agencies and stuff, it's got just a ton of adjacent applications other than just DroneStop.

1:17:58You can stop vehicles with this thing. So imagine like a cop with a thing on its hood, like one of the medium or small size systems on the hood of a car, chasing out after someone, stop them by hitting them with electromagnetic energy. The car engine shuts down, like calmly and easily take the guy in. Or someone running a gate, right? Trying to do a run a gate. Typically, some tragedies have happened that we've had to just shoot those folks that have gone off the deep end and trying to charge into a gate with a vehicle. You could create a system that stops vehicles with electromagnetic energy prior to having to do small arms fire on an individual doing that.

1:18:38Wow. Jet skis and ports. That's another one that is a big problem. Jet skis running around ships and stuff in port. Don't shoot the jet ski. Just shoot it with a little electromagnetic energy. Turn off the jet ski and arrest the perpetrator. Who is operating these? Is this operated by AI? Is this an individual operator? It's a range. It's like, I think Sea Whiz is a really good, I used to be a combat information center officer on the Incheon, was my first ship where I got my SWO pin and stuff. It had three modes of operation. It has a man in the loop, which is just manual. You have a man on the loop where the system will go through and give you a recommendation and say, we recommend this course of action.

1:19:26and you say yes or say no and change. And then you have fully auto, just like in a Seaways, where you're just like, oh, man, this is, you know, the world is crashing down. I've got a thousand drones from every direction coming in, and I just wouldn't even have time to just, I've got to save myself. And you put it in full auto, and it does it all. Yeah, it does it all. Right on. You ready to go take a look at this thing? Let's do it. spring is here the days are getting longer the weather is getting better it's important you have the energy to do what you love without crashing and i'll be honest with everything i've got going on if my energy is off i feel it pretty quick ever feel like you just don't have the energy you used to brain fog slower recovery just feeling worn down one reason is that as we age NAD levels can decline fast and NAD is critical for how your cells create energy that's why I've been taking Roe Nutrition's liposomal NAD plus and the difference is real clean sustained energy sharper focus and better recovery without relying on caffeine or stimulants NAD supports mitochondrial function the powerhouse of your cells that keep you energized and your mind sharp.

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1:21:53The VE Ranch just got some defense tech upgrades. Check it out.

1:22:16All right, so we're out here with Andy Lowery, and we got the Leonidas right behind us on a truck with all kinds of whiz-bangs on it. What are we looking at here? Well, we debuted. This is our Leonidas AGV, autonomous ground vehicle, and what we have is a full-size system, like we were talking about, ones that would be appropriate against maybe a base defense or something larger range, but now this is made to be mobile. Now, three companies came together to make this mobile. One, EPRES. See the big antenna? Two, General Dynamics Land Systems, and three, Kodiak Defense. And Kodiak Defense provides the autonomy, so they're kind of doing the Waymo of this truck.

1:23:01So this truck can drive with a driver or without, just like a Waymo car, drive around wherever you need it, drive by wire or drive autonomously, Position the system wherever you need to position it. Like let's say we get a detection and 10 kilometers away on your property, here comes some hostile drones. Thing can start up, drive itself over, start close on those drones, get closer and closer, stop, position the antenna, take out the drones. Wow. All in one package. You've got two radar panels on the bumper here, Echodyne radar, high frequency, very, very much tuned to drone and drone detection.

1:23:38And then on the front, on the top of the roof, you see two more panels. Those are Echodyne radars. You have four panels that give you 360-degree situational awareness that you're surveying everything. And then you see cameras all along for the autonomy by the rearview mirrors there. On top, you have a Starlink antenna. So you have a Starlink antenna and then some UHF antennas for communication. So you're getting everything sort of, this is totally live node, if you will, a node on the battlefield. And then the antenna itself, of course, is your electromagnetic interference field creator that's going to take and position it wherever it needs to position, then form a wall or a shield of energy.

1:24:17Wow. So this is a really big request on the Army side. The Army really said to me, look, it's great. We like the technology, but it needs to be mobile. It's just the way the Army's going. They want everything to be maneuverable as they're starting to defend different bases. They're realizing that mobility is like a necessity. And then two, the Army has said that when the range is limited and they can't get far enough out, they can power project forward. They can move the mobile system out forward to the front line and then from there get another half a mile or a mile out in order to stop the drones.

1:24:53Right on. Wow. So four radars, two Starlink dishes. Some UHF antennas on top. UHF antennas. Yep. And then some cameras and automated systems. You can see these 360 degree cameras and servos and all of that. That helps. This is like you see on a Waymo car. They're just made to be militarized for this particular system. Okay. Wow. So you can imagine a guy in the passenger seat will have a laptop where he'll have full situational awareness. He might have lattice running on his laptop by Andrel inside, have full situational awareness where everything's happening, where other effectors might be. And then when assignment comes into this particular guy, comes in onto the computer, if a guy is inside, might be in a container somewhere, just running everything automatically.

1:25:44But if there is a manual operator, he'd get all of that information inside the cab and then be able to drive the thing wherever he needs to drive to protect whatever he needs to protect. So this is fully autonomous and we need, this thing decides it needs to be all the way over there, it will just drive itself over there and then position the antenna in the way that it needs to be positioned to take out the thread? Absolutely, yeah. And then talk about this, the antenna here. So the antenna itself, you can see if you've measured it right now, it's about 10 foot by 8 foot where you see that square right on top of where the sticker sits.

1:26:21behind that antenna are hundreds of individual elements. They look like little square silver boxes and there's hundreds of them back behind here. And phasing all, they call it phasing all of those up. What you do is each one puts out a little bit of energy, a little bit of energy, a little bit of energy. And you take all of that energy and phase it up into one tremendously strong beam and then push that beam out into the atmosphere. And that's what causes the the electromagnetic interference field or the directed energy field that causes all the problems with any sort of electronics. So it's not easy, think about it.

1:26:58We are creating out of a machine made out of electronics, something that disables any electronics being able to fly or being able to operate from hundreds of meters, if not kilometers away, without kind of self-destroying ourselves, right? And taking ourselves offline. There's a tremendous amount of innovation when it comes to shielding, when it comes protecting the circuits from getting their own electromagnetic interference energy back on top of it. So that's why it's so state-of-the-art and that's why I think it's so unique, is that we're taking into consideration things that just really have never been done before, or even attempted before for that matter.

1:27:38Is this the, so would the beam be about the size of this rectangle here? Or? No, the beam would be a smaller than the rectangle because right behind the rectangle are hundreds of those elements. Just if we pull that rectangle off, you'd see hundreds. The beam would come down to be about, let's say, 10 degrees or so, 5 to 10. Between 5 and 10 degrees is where your beam is going to get shaped. Wow, so they all just go like this? Yeah, they interconnect. If you think about it, like from the water, if you had like one wave maker in water making waves, and then you had another wave maker making waves, you try to time them up so those waves start to stack on top of each other.

1:28:19So like a hundred times over though, like if you had a hundred water wave makers that are making a wave in the water, wave in the water, wave in the water, and you time them such that every wave crest at the exact same point, fell at the exact same point. You could create a huge wave. If you imagine hundreds of those wave makers, you could create a huge wave out of a bunch of little waves if you just time the sequencing and the pulsing of those waves at the same time. Exactly what we do inside a microwave system. But the waves are moving much quicker. They're, of course, in microwaves, not in water.

1:28:52And we're timing those waves so that each one of those peaks and each one of those valleys line up and then form it into a very narrow, for the size of the system, narrow beam that we then move the narrow beam around electronically by, again, timing those waves in sequence so that the system goes to the left, goes to the right, goes up, goes down. Then on top of that electronic steering, we have our mechanical steering where we can spin the system around. It goes around about each second. It'll cover about 30 degrees of rotation, so it moves very quickly. and every time we see a drone, even if we start with an electronic scan and then turn the antenna to follow so that we get the biggest punch - Gotcha.

1:29:34For the system that we can possibly get. Because when you're face on like this, this is when the antenna is the most powerful. So as this moves around, nobody's detecting it. Nobody's seeing where it's at. Doesn't even know that the system can shoot down drones. Drones appear, we shoot them down, then we move the system away from where it just happened so it doesn't become a target. because, you know, sooner or later people will start saying, hey, we can't get any drones through if they've got one of these Leonidas's sitting out there. And if that happens, we're going to want to move the system, right?

1:30:03So that it doesn't become a target. Gotcha. And so these radars that you have up top and these two back here, that's what picks up the thread. And then this, you know, the bad boy right here, the Leonidas, which shoots it down. What is the operator seeing? what it when so the operator sees like a god view of the landscape so they will have like google earth and see your entire landscape here and then on top of that layered on top of that are the different drones and they get kind of all pulled in through the starlink all networked in that same network it can like see all the drones not only the drones right over your place where our radars might be detecting it but if there's drones in your neighbor's yard and they have a radar that's on the same network, it'll see the drones even starting from over there.

1:30:48So we get a really big, we try to get the biggest heads up as we possibly can to make sure that we're minimizing the need for like hundreds of these to surround your property. We want to have early detection, early observation, move the system into the optimal place to defend it, and then defend the place as the last line of defense. Is the distance that the radars can detect the drones, is at the same distance that this is max effective range of the Leonidas? So when you detect a drone, can you immediately shoot it down is basically what I'm asking. The detection range is longer. So you'll get detection of the drones, hopefully.

1:31:27I mean, sometimes you won't. If a bad actor decided to hide a drone in this weeds over here and it just popped up, we'd detect it and be able to shoot it in the same distance. but in a, like let's say in a desert, you might have a lot of landscape that you can see out to. You might detect a drone at 20 kilometers. You might detect a drone at 10, at least 10 kilometers. You'll be able to detect a drone. This one will just position itself and get ready to take the drones down when given the assignment. And then when it comes in around two kilometers or something, that's when we start engaging at about two kilometers.

1:32:01Shit. Damn, this is awesome. You see, we have these cables. This is where all the DC power is being fed up into the system. So you take AC power, alternate current power, so you get a generator like power in your house. It's at 60 hertz. You take that, you convert it back in the back end to DC. These DC cables bring the DC up into the columns. And then once that DC power is in the columns all stored up, it sends it into what we call the L-RAMs, those boxes. Those L-RAMs are magical converters that convert that DC power into RF power, microwave power, using, if you remember, I'll quiz you, gallium nitride.

1:32:43Using gallium nitride in order to do that conversion. So that's like the magic rocks, if you will, like a magic material that's able to take massive amounts of power and convert that power to massive high-powered microwave system or microwave energy. Wow. I just want to take a peek at the front. I haven't seen the front yet. On the front. Damn, that is badass looking. Look at that thing. Yeah, you feel protected just seeing it, you know? Wait till it operates and people are like, what? Oh man, I would love to see that. Yeah. I would love to see that. Well, we're getting close to being a lot more liberally able to shoot it.

1:33:25The FAA is very interested in seeing these things deployed. They feel safe with this sort of a system versus some of the kinetics. And even the laser systems can give people worry when you're shooting them over like El Paso or whatever. Like they had to shut down that airport a couple of times when they had a laser system or whatever down there. This system wouldn't need to shut down any airports. It wouldn't have any sort of issues just operating alongside other radars. It's kind of like a high-powered radar more than it is any kind of traditional directed energy system. Man, that is really cool.

1:33:59Really cool. And you're getting ready to crank out how many of these? We're trying to get this year, by the end of the year, we're trying to get one a week. So 50 a year, that's take us into next year. And then after that, we need to expand. We're in Southern California and we're looking at Oklahoma's where we can build volume, where we can get over 100 a year. So we're looking at multi systems per week. In California, we think we can manage about one a week. It's great to see someone so excited about it as I am. Like I said, I've been tracking this thing for like two or three years now. And to have one in the backyard is pretty fucking crazy.

1:34:35So have you had one in your backyard yet? No, no. You have that privilege. Right on. Interested in a CEO job? I am. Let's swap me out. I'll be your CTO. Cool. Cool.

1:34:56All right, Andy, we're back from the break. Right. What a awesome piece of machinery you've got out there. But I wanted to go over, I got some myths debunking Leonidas HPM myths. All right. Which I think we covered some of that, but Havana syndrome. Are you familiar with Havana syndrome? I've heard of what it is, and I've heard the theories, but again, I don't know, I don't have any inside information. I'm just a microwave engineer, directed energy guy, with some amount of know-how, and could perceive something to be at the right frequency and the right energy and all of that to hurt a human. I mean, obviously, microwave ovens, if you stood in a microwave oven, you wouldn't survive, you know, over a few minutes.

1:35:40So there are ways of directing that energy, just like we direct other energies, you know, to probably cause harm to others. Now, good news is, is that I don't need to worry about any of that, even in like a sort of a fratricide way with people. It's very safe, our system. Our system, as I kind of talked about earlier, I'd stand right in front of even the main beam for a short amount of time. It's totally safe. It's tuned in frequency and in energy. It's tuned for electronics. And humans, but not only humans, birds, plants, trees, any of that in the way of the beam won't be affected at all. You won't get any damage at all for any of these types of living creatures.

1:36:24Are there any other kind of misunderstandings or myths about Leonidas that you want to address? It will take out the tethered drones. We covered that, correct? Yeah, it takes out tethered drones. I think some people, this is getting a little deep, but I'll kind of talk about it. And then just for the listeners that maybe understand a little bit more about directed energy, and in particular, high-powered microwave, there's two kind of classes, I'll call them. They're what's called wideband, high-powered microwave directed energy, and narrowband, high-powered microwave. And when they say band, they're talking about the frequency.

1:37:02So how many frequencies does this particular system use or leverage? How many frequencies does this narrowband use and leverage? Traditionally, historically, narrowband systems have been working sometimes, sometimes not working. working on some targets, but not working on all targets. That's been historically the impression that directed energy experts have about narrowband systems. Wideband systems, which we started decades ago, which we started getting at decades ago, leverage something called vacuum tubes or transmit wave tubes, which are these very sort of simple but very effective amplifiers like gallium nitride, but they amplify in a way that causes you have to operate the system differently than the way we operate our system.

1:37:55You can't use the same sort of techniques and the same sort of ways that we operate our system. The difference between our narrowband system and previous generations and previous ages that they've tried this is, one, we have a component of being able to move the narrowband frequency to whatever frequency within a certain bandwidth that we want to move it at. So we can choose and pick. We can go through and say, try this frequency, try this frequency, try this frequency, try this frequency. So we're trying to match or map the electromagnetic interference to the drone susceptibilities. So some drones may be susceptible to these frequencies.

1:38:31Some may not be. Some are susceptible to these frequencies. Some others may not be. So we've changed sort of the way that narrowband-directed energy is used. And we do it in a smart way. We talked a little bit about AI. A lot of this system has a lot of software-defined AI and other sort of like control loops, machine learning and stuff like that, that helps with prosecuting these various drones. And that's the big myth that's out there. The second big myth that's out there is narrowband can't achieve the very, very high effect of radiated powers. Like some of the traditional systems would have 2 gigawatts, 3 gigawatts, 4 gigawatts of radiated power.

1:39:14But that's just not true anymore with gallium nitride. Gallium nitride, if built to the right size and shape, can rival the powers of even those traditional systems. The difference in the advantage of using solid state, which is gallium nitride, the advantage is you can also stretch energy, which means time. So power times time equals energy. So what I can do is hold a note, hold a frequency for a long span of time, which traditional directed energy could never do. And I'm leveraging that energy, those huge long pulses, I'm leveraging that energy so that, as you can imagine, a computer has a clock, it's ticking, the clock is ticking.

1:39:57You want to be able to overcome many, many clock cycles as you're trying to get this sort of electromagnetic interference in there. So that's a little deep for the folks that understand directed energy, but it is effective. I mean, the proof is the proof. I mean, we have tested this with the Army for three years. We have tested it in many, many different conditions. We've deployed it in two different regions of the world. We've tested it with warfighters. We've tested it with real air defenders. This all has been completely sort of put to rest. And folks that have not checked in with EPRIS for the last two and a half years, I don't think realize that.

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1:43:45Kraft Mac and Cheese is better than 90s hip hop. We'll remind you of your childhood without making you feel incredibly old. Kraft Mac and Cheese. Best thing ever. Have you seen if these deployed overseas? They have. Yes. Can you talk about where? I'm allowed on the public domain. People can see that one was in the Philippines on an exercise that we did. This was several months ago. Nothing in Ukraine yet? Nothing in Ukraine yet. No, we haven't been able to get through the, really the legal limitations and stuff like that, because our system, unlike some of the dual-use drones and the commercial drones and things that are able to easily be sold into Ukraine, our systems are a weapon system.

1:44:31They're considered what's called a Category 18 weapon system. Any directed energy system would be categorized as that. And when you have these ITAR systems, they require a little bit more, I guess, approvals and paperwork in order to get them through the hoops and ladders. And up until now, we've been limited in our ability to do that. Now, this war in the Middle East has kind of changed the game completely, and this administration is aggressively helping us to knock down any barriers to getting our allies protected with these systems, plus our warfighters protected with these systems. And that's ongoing.

1:45:09I can't say too many of the details because it gets into operational security, like back when we were in the Navy and we would never tell anyone where our ships are going to move and when they're going to move. These are sort of weapon systems that are moving right now, moving into theater, moving in to defend certain allies. And it's happening. Like right now, like I said earlier, we're trying to build one a week. If I could build one a week starting today, I'd do it. Wow. Wow. It's that big of a demand. It's going to be a big—can you talk a little bit about drone warfare, whether it's Ukraine, Middle East?

1:45:40We don't see it here in the U.S. much. I think the closest thing we've seen is all these damn drones that were up, what, a year ago over New Jersey, which I think wound up being an exercise. But everybody was freaking out when that happened. And I was shouting your guys' company out. I was like, this has to be us because we already have the capability to take this shit out. Yeah. But we're not. So it's, I mean. Well, the biggest one that I saw recently, and I'm not at all addressing them as a problem. And the Air Force is actually moving very, very quickly with us right now. But there was an incident not too long ago where the Barksdale Air Force Base that has a lot of our nukes and a lot of our strategic bombers got overflown.

1:46:23But it got overflown by swarms, 12 drones at each wave and multiple waves. A wave of 12, a wave of 12, a wave of 12. Totally impervious to jamming, according to the article, according to the news. totally impervious to jamming, flew over, surveilled everything, and flew back. So... Where were those from? We don't know. Do we know? We don't know. So when you talk about Barksdale, when you talk about those kind of surveillance missions, oh boy, are we perfect for it. Because not only would we drop all 12, and the next 12, and the next 12, we don't damage the system beyond being able to infiltrate and use for forensics and figure those questions out.

1:47:07The system, the computer, if you turn it off and on, works again. Like, the drone is broken because when it hits the ground, the plastics break or whatever, but the computer is still intact. Oh, wow. So we can go trace where those things were coming from and say, oh, okay, I got it. Now, we understand where these originated from or those originated from. So I am very, very encouraged this year that 2026 is going to be the year of EPRUS. It's going to be the year of Leonidas. I think a lot of these things we're seeing in the news around the corners, they're going to deploy our systems. And we're going to get to the bottom of a lot of the drone activity we're starting to see on the United States side as well.

1:47:45I can't believe they don't have these things deployed already on bases like that. Yeah, it's been a struggle. It's not all— What is the struggle? We had 12 drones come and surveil a nuclear site multiple times, and there's a struggle. Yeah. Like, what is the struggle? I'll tell you. That can't happen again. The top of the administration have, for the most part, executed to the theory or the thesis that we need 80%, 90 % of the solutions that are ready today. We need them deployed. We need them forward deployed. But there's still a frozen middle. I've talked about this. It's like the top guys say, do it.

1:48:28And if you get in with the frozen middle or the middle people that actually implement the tactics, there's a lot of sort of hesitation still, right? There's a lot of, well, until someone tells me officially I can do this differently, I'm going to do it the same way. And so there are a lot of wedded people to their old policies or old processes, their old sort of way of acquiring systems and testing systems and wringing out every little risk to get like 99.999 % of the risks out. And then when they're sure of it, they're ready to go ahead and deploy. Well, that's a peacetime attitude, right? That's a peacetime attitude.

1:49:05I have some skirmishes, nothing killing any soldiers. I don't have any injuries going on. I'm not losing any equipment. I'm not at war. We can take our time to run through the different exercises, which we've been doing from even before this administration. We were working with the previous administration on these tests and trials and all the rest. But now we're at war, you know, I mean, or conflict, you know, whatever you want to call it. But we are in battle. We are combating with others overseas. It's a different, that's a different threshold. I think we need to change our attitude. We need to, you know, I have a pretty interesting story.

1:49:40It's just a two-minute story, but it was during 9-11. We were talking about up on the Hill how you joined right before 9-11 when you went into the Navy. I was out at sea during 9-11. We were off the coast of San Diego, about 100 miles on the John C. Stennis. We had no planes, no jets. I was running the nuclear plants. The two towers get hit. We get the order to go as fast as that aircraft carrier can possibly go to get off the coast of Los Angeles. Meantime, they're scrambling marines out of Miramar with Sidewinder missiles on F-18s and flying them out. We had no steam in the catapults. I had to get steam to the catapults.

1:50:20I had to heat everything up really, really quickly. I had to get everything military sort of like precision. The transformation of my sailors, I have never witnessed before or after anything like it. Like when we got hit, every person, every lady, every sailor snapped into a new, like a superhuman running around, knowing every one of their procedures, knowing exactly how to move. And within a few hours, we're flying basically escorts of every jumbo jet coming in from overseas that hadn't landed yet in LAX. We're escorting every single one of them down. Now, the same thing happens with the United States in almost every battle that I've ever seen.

1:50:59We are, culturally speaking, underdogs. We are, culturally speaking, the team that, when gets socked in the head, goes crazy and just responds. And I saw that with the sailors back there on the Stennis. I saw that when we did the MRAPs, when we had the IED problem in 2008. And that was an incredible, like, almost Oppenheimer thing that people don't know about, that the Army ASALT right now, Brent Ingerham, led that whole thing like a modern-day Oppenheimer. He went from, in 2008, where they were spending like$160 million on armored vehicles and such, to billions in just a year. In one year, they changed that whole face of that dynamic of the IEDs hurting our soldiers.

1:51:44So we are able to do this. I think now is our moment. We don't want to let off the gas pedal. Even if the major war and the major bombing all cease and we come back, we want to still treat this like a dangerous situation where we need to field and defend ourselves against this persistent, persistent threat. Certainly, in at least my vision, I can't see it going away. I can only see it getting worse. Me neither. I just, I mean, the utility of this thing is just... I think they're going to be everywhere. They're so easy. I think there's the potential for them. I mean, you know, we saw, what is it, Operation Spiderweb.

1:52:30The drone, I mean, it's just all over Ukraine. And, I mean, I don't know how, we just talked about 12 flying over a nuclear site. I mean, I feel like that potentially every stadium, shopping mall anywhere there could be a terror threat to be honest with you but i mean i don't know how realistic that is we can't even harden our schools you know but i think i mean there's just it's every military base cia nsa white house capitol hill state capitals it's a maneuver it's a maneuver against what we see as this totally asymmetrical vector. We have an asymmetrical vector. We need to put a piece on the chessboard that lets those guys know it's not free-for-all time anymore.

1:53:24We're going to knock down your drones. We're going to infiltrate those drones, and we're coming to find you. It's one thing to stop the bees from stinging, but there's another to find the queen bee where the nest is and stop them. And when we start doing that, it may not need the total ubiquity of every single station, everything, because we'll start getting to the source of the issues. But we need our system. We need other systems like ours. We need direction finding systems. We need other surveillance systems. But that whole network of layers, our system provides a key, key component that's going to level the playing field.

1:54:00Or not only level the playing field, I would say upend the playing field to put them on the, oh boy, how are we going to fly these drones in and do this? or how are we going to take that or take that when they see these systems standing up around a stadium, for example. I mean, are there any disadvantages to this system versus a kinetic one or a laser one? Well, I would say kinetics go further, like a Coyote, for example, by Raytheon or whatever. They have a longer range. They have a much longer range. That's an advantage of kinetics over our system. When you're talking about similar ranges, kinetics are known quantities.

1:54:42This is kind of like invisible rays, and the Army is traditionally bullets-orientated and moving in that direction. Air Force and Navy are a little bit more comfortable with new electronic warfare-type modalities and stuff, but Army is pretty comfortable, too. I mean, don't get me wrong. They're absolutely fascinated and want to invest and want to move forward with us. But it does have, I think that's one of its, actually, to answer your question more straightforward, that's its big disadvantage, is that it's a zero to one. It's like when Peter Thiel wrote that book, Zero to One. It's a zero to one system.

1:55:20It's a technology people don't understand. That's why I appreciate being on the show to try to explain it. And people are afraid of what they don't understand, either afraid it won't work, afraid it's going to hurt people. And we've dispelled a lot of that. If you look at the facts and data and all the stuff we've done over the last couple of years, we've dispelled almost all of those worries and all of those risks. And now it's a chance to just get some wartime kills, get it out there, get it in battle. and put it to the test. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But you're not going to waste that much more money by everything you've done already so far by getting it out there, getting it into the battlefield.

1:55:57And I don't think that's a, hey, let's go challenge and do that. It's like happening. I mean, this war is driving us to that. Well, it is very impressive what you guys put together out there. Very impressive. Is there anything I haven't asked you that I should be asking you when it comes to Leonidas or Epirus?

1:56:25I don't know. We've covered a lot. Oh, one other thing that it advantages. So we've talked about the collateral damage and it being a very safe system so you can use it in homeland, whereas kinetics you can't use in homeland in all situations without putting a lot of danger to houses and residential types of neighborhoods. So kinetics don't make for a good solution for the homeland. They make a good solution overseas in some cases, but the problem isn't just cost. We talked a lot about cost, but it's also magazine depth. And we only have a certain amount of missiles and a certain amount of production capacity to build new missiles.

1:57:05And it's very difficult. It's not like drones where you can just like, I think I read in something that China can make 30 million drones a year. Wow. There's nothing we can make$30 million of in a military lane, you know? So we have a real magazine-depth disadvantage as well by continuing to try to pursue drones with some of the tried-and-true kind of, you know, lion-type weapons and defensive weapons and stuff like that. Those are not easily reproducible and producible. And they have a long tail when you say, hey, I need another 10 ,000 of these coyotes, Raytheon. It takes a while to spin up and get that capacity and get that out to the field.

1:57:45So not just cost asymmetry, but magazine depth asymmetry as well. 30 million drones a year? I heard that. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, when you have a kind of a authoritarian communist party that can go in and tell a factory, hey, you're not building laptops, you're building drones, and do that to several places in Chongqing and Chengdu. I just have never heard that stat before. That's alarming. It is alarming. And they're right north of Iran, right? I mean, they could be helping outfit those guys. I mean, read about in the news as well, Russia, you know, giving them targeting information and such.

1:58:26And so it's an asymmetrical fight, and we are less equipped than others to start engaging. But it's our moment. I don't say that with negativity in my mind. I think of it just like the 9-11 moment. It's our moment to be the underdog, to turn the whole thing over on its head and get at these bad actors. I love it. I love it. I love what you guys are building. And man, it makes me, I mean... When we start hitting some real wartime shootdowns, I'll have to come back on your show and we can talk about how well they're working once they get deployed. I'd love to do that. I'm sure we're not far off, so...

1:59:07Absolutely. Perfect. Well, Andy, thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

1:59:23No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review. This episode sponsored by Maximus Tribe. You train, you track, you eat right. But if you're over 40, you've felt it. The results don't match the effort anymore. That's not willpower. It's biology. Hormones drop. Metabolism slows. your body stops responding the way it used to. Maximus is the online clinic that reverses your decline with prescription performance medicines, GLP-1s, testosterone, and peptides that reduce belly fat, restore energy, and boost recovery.

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