0:00We're living in an age of unprecedented possibility. We need to design missiles that can be made in car factories. We need to design aircraft that can be made in tractor factories. They're not waiting to be invented. They're waiting to be implemented. I want to try to get people out of big tech and into work on national security problems with the same rigor and vigor that they were working on consumer electronics product.
0:20Are there other domains you're thinking about looking over the horizon?
0:23I think that we're going to see the subterranean domain. I am talking about the real deal no subt fight. We're using the crust of the earth as a three-dimensional maneuver and battle space. The only thing stopping us is that it sounds so crazy. [music] Welcome to up next. I'm Klay my CEO of AIAA and I'm here in Costa Mesa, California with my wingman, Jessica Sting Peterson.
0:56Thank you for having me, Clay.
0:57We're here to inform listeners [music] by talking with visionary leaders who are shaping the future of aerospace. For over a century, aerospace and defense has run on a familiar model. Large primes, long timelines, and complex system of systems architectures. And that model is under pressure. Digital engineering, advanced manufacturing, and a new generation of companies are beginning to rewrite who builds what and how fast. Few people have pushed harder on that transformation than our guests here today. Palmer Lucky founded Oculus in his parents' garage and sold it to
1:27Facebook for $2.3 billion before the age of 21. 5 years later, he founded Android, a defense technology company that focuses on autonomous systems that integrate AI with robotics. He wanted to prove that a startup could build serious aerospace technology and actually deliver it at speed, revolutionizing the industry.
1:49Palmer, welcome to Up Next.
1:51No, thanks for having me.
1:52I'd like to start maybe with something about your personal journey, right? You you founded this consumer VR company, Oculus VR, and and sold that to Facebook and then a few years later you pivoted to defense and aerospace. If I could quote the Mandalorian here, how did you know this is the way?
2:10Weapons are a part of my religion. Uh, also from the Mandalorian. Um, so when I started Oculus, I was working on virtual reality because I was really interested in it and I had been asking myself the question as a gamer, what does the final platform look like? You know, I had this I had this really nice gaming setup of six monitors, really nice gaming PC, and I felt like it was kind of a dead end.
2:36Like, where does this go from here? It's not eight monitors, it's not 12, it's not, you know, I had to I had two graphics cards uh using an AMD Infinity rig sync together. Nvidia was in the process of dropping their their uh scalable link interface SLI product at the time. So, I was like, okay, well, what's next? It's not more graphics cards and more displays. And if you think about what the future of gaming looks like, my conclusion was it's virtual reality.
2:58It's the ability to feel like you're inside of the game, to feel like you're present inside of a simulation, to trick not just that uh conscious level into paying attention to the game, but to trick your subconscious into believing you're really there. And that was what got me started on working on VR as a hobby. It's what turned into Oculus VR. And I was doing it because I liked it.
3:16And I managed to convince a bunch of investors to give me money for it. And I I wouldn't say I conned them into it.
3:20There was a there was a there was a real pitch as to how it would make sense and how it would make money and how they'd get a return. And in the end, I made those investors hundreds of millions of dollars a piece. But I was doing it because I wanted to do it, not because I thought it was the most important thing that could possibly be done. When I started Andreal, I want explicitly wanted to to pivot from that. You I was fired from Facebook about 3 years after they bought my company. And I knew that whatever my next act was, it should be
3:49something that I picked because it was impactful, not because it would just be fun. If I want to do something fun, I would have built another VR company. Why bother? I had already done better than anyone could have ever done an Oculus and all that IP was trapped in Facebook anyway. I could have started a race car company or a rocket ship company seems to be very popular with the billionaires. You make your money, start your rocket ship company. But I decided I wanted to do one of three things.
4:11Either I was going to solve obesity in America, which especially at the time was a massive and growing killer.
4:17clearly something that the medical establishment was not putting nearly enough time or effort into solving and I had some ideas on how to do that by building zerocalorie foods based on longchain hydrocarbons. I was also looking at prison reform is something I might want to work on. So I was looking at could I start a nonprofit private prison chain that would compete with all of the other for-profit private prison chains and through a matter of tax efficiency and better contracting structures where I only get paid when people stay out of prison post sentence.
4:45uh you know I I could potentially drag everybody in that direction and solve this this prison problem in the US. And then the third thing was working in national security be a whole [clears throat] long discussion as to why I knocked out the other two. It basically boiled down to it became clear they were more political problems than tech problems. Whereas uh the defense national security side I was really worried about the fact that American national security apparatus was no longer working with the American tech community. not because of uh the national security apparatus. It's because the US tech community was doing
5:14whatever it needed to do to stay in the good graces of China. And uh I wanted to try to get people out of big tech and into work on national security problems with the same rigor and vigor that they were working on consumer electronics products and social media products and you get people away from building augmented reality mustache emojis and put them to work on building next generation autonomous fighter jets or robotic submarines. And uh that was the one that I decided to work on. That's where Andreal came from. And I will note
5:42this was not the first time I've worked on national security problems. Before I started Oculus, I worked for a few months at an Army affiliate research center, uh the ICT Mix Reality Lab on a program called Bravemind, which was using virtual reality exposure therapy to treat veterans with PTSD. That was the first time I'd had exposure to that set of problems. And I had always wanted to try to get back to it. I've always had a lot of respect for the military.
6:04I've always been impressed by the technology, but also a believer that it could be even better. Uh my grandpa flew as a civilian pilot in support of Operation Desert Storm. And uh when he passed, I got his letter from the Secretary of the Air Force thanking him for that. And I keep that in my office.
6:19And so I I think uh looking at that letter was one of the reasons I decided Androl was the thing I was going to focus on.
6:25That's motivating. Well, we had a great tour this morning here at your facility. Saw the petting zoo. You saw the public uh showroom, not the government facing one, I Yes. Uh the public showroom.
6:35Half of our products are in the public showroom and then we've got another showroom that we can only show to the gubbies. And uh stuff regularly moves from one to the other.
6:43So I know it piqued uh Sting's interest here in a number of the products. So Sting, you want to Yeah. So it seems like you guys are coming out with something every week. We've seen a couple of them. Uh specifically, I'm curious about Fury and the journey to the YQ YFQ 44A was the designation of the prototype. Worth noting that it is now moved to actual serial production and is now a proper FQ44.
7:04So I stumbled over but yeah the FQ44 is new, right?
7:07You were really rushing to that because I know this is a dumb vanity metric and it shouldn't really matter but I really wanted to be the first production fighter to get that proper, you know, F for fighter, Q for unmanned designation. So uh I'm really glad that we Congratulations.
7:22Have you ever seen the film Stealth? You remember this like 2006?
7:25It's not great. It's [laughter] so it isn't great, but I'll tell you this. I saw it when I was like 12, 13 years old. Yeah. Opening night. It was a box office bomb. One of the last aviation films filmed with all a lot of practical effects. I got like even things like, you know, remember the cool missile dispenser that was rotating that was actually done as a practical shot.
7:45They actually built that whole revolving setup in a studio. I I remember watching stealth and saying, "Oh my god, I have to somehow be involved in in in in this type of stuff." So this answers part of my question, the journey. So I want to understand the journey of Androl to getting Fury out there in the collaborative combat aircraft uh program.
8:03The whole world we live in is one that was invented by science fiction authors, not the ones of today. Cuz you know, with a few exceptions, modern science fiction is space themed fantasy, not science fiction. And if you go back to older science fiction, a lot of it was written by NASA engineers, aerospace engineers, people who really deeply understood their craft. And the science part of it was just as important as the fiction. My wife gives me a hard time because I gave her some of my older science fiction books, you know, just to trade novels back and forth. I read some
8:31of her stuff and she's read some of mine and she's like, "Palmer, the novels are awful. There's no character development. The people are like hollow skins.
8:40They're clearly just vehicles to talk about the technological ideas." Um, you know, like in one of her novels, it'd be like the dreamy dark man walked in wearing techno gloves and then he looked her in the eyes and then mine be like the man walked in, he was wearing the cyberman 3000, a newer model of haptic cyber feedback glove. The implications of the haptic feedback evolution in the industry was really interesting. It's led to a divor like she's like there's I hate your books, Paul,
9:08but those are the types of science fiction books that I love. And the cool thing is a lot of stuff we're building like the FQ44 is not a new idea. The idea of computer-driven fighters and bombers goes back to World War II.
9:20Robert Heinland was writing about them in the serialized science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction in the early 40s. And at that point they were imagining that they were going to be inputting commands with uh voice commands and or punch cards. Nobody had even invented the idea of a graphical user interface yet. Nobody was using things like like we had radar displays but nobody had conceived of general purpose computing on a display. So it's like this weird retrofuturistic vision where there's no displays in the whole thing. And here's the craziest part of it. That's actually how we're building
9:49Fury today. You don't want to give a pilot a new computer in his cockpit. You want to be able to talk to it just like you would talk to any other pilot. You want to be able to work with it the same way. Turns out that everything we're doing was predicted by guys who were really sharp, really knew what they doing. Like Heinland was very technically savvy. And here we are.
10:06We're coming up on a hundred years later. We're just building what he makes. I love it.
10:09And it's interesting like the voice command, I mean, it's taken so long to get there. And I think it's probably from a hardware perspective or processing, right? I mean, that's why we weren't able to get there. And now we're finally to realize some of these ideas.
10:18Well, it's so it's so fascinating because science fiction authors get to conceptualize things without the limitation of what's commercially viable or possible. It's only very very recently that voice control has become good enough. And I don't mean like just literally the ability to transcribe voice. But I mean to understand the intent behind it, to turn it semantically into something a computer can act on. That's very very very recent. At the time they didn't know how we were going to get that done, but they they knew that if somehow we could get that done, that would be a lot better than having to like plot it out on a chart or, you know, like or punch it in
10:48as cards. And so I love building the things that were invented by people who didn't have to worry about how it was going to become real. They just knew it would be the right thing.
10:54So AIAA was our forerunner uh organization was the American Rocket Society. It was founded in the 1930s and it was a bunch of science fiction writers and rocket enthusiasts. We got these pictures of this.
11:05Interesting how there's so much overlap, right?
11:07Unbelievable. And these guys are like huddling on in in New Jersey across New Jersey to light off rockets and like hide behind a like a small thin barrier there. It was crazy that these guys then created the motor that they put on the Bell X1.
11:20That's right. Yeah. Well, and then a lot of them went on to write science fiction that was not just about, oh, you know, there's there's like shiny chrome stuff in space and it somehow moves through a warp drive. Like they were writing writing science fiction about the propulsion systems that were being built by the US government and things like, oh, like, okay, here's what we're doing today. Let's take that 40 years out. And a lot of the science, like to me, I was inspired as a kid reading about this stuff. It's like one of my favorite books growing up was uh 20,000 leagues under the sea. very very similar thing
11:49where like Jules Vern clearly he was just writing a thin skin to talk about maritime technology but captain how do you recharge the batteries of the submarine says oh I'm so glad you asked and then for three pages he explains we don't actually recharge them we actually reconstitute them from zinc and magnesium that we capture from the water using our electrolysis filtering system and then we breathe the oxygen and we use the minerals that we capture and we're actually building new primary cells. So in fact it's not a rechargeable battery. It's a continuous
12:17underwater battery manufacturing system.
12:20Andrew doing this now.
12:21We're not doing but I but I've looked at it. So [laughter] um and actually there's a L3 Harris bought the company that was doing the best work in this space trying to build um some of these like uh saltwater lithium reaction uh uh fuel cells. And uh there's there's problems. You create a lot of oxide layers that you then have to get off of the plates. Now Jules Vern didn't know this because he never actually built it.
12:42He just understood the science well enough to talk about it. And uh I feel like it's a problem that can be solved though.
12:46Yeah. But how crazy is I mean that was this is the 1800s. So in the 1800s you had this guy 1865.
12:52Yep. 18. You're then you know better than me. I mean so I mean we're coming up now on I know it's like 150 years ago he was conceiving this and today it is probably the most promising non-nuclear underwater vehicle propulsion scheme because now we have electric propulsion.
13:07Everything's gone around that. But you don't want to just like normal batteries where you have to carry all your reactant rather than using seawater uh flow. And and if you get to use seaw water as reactant, it's like a it's like an air breathing turbine. It's a lot better to use the oxidizer in the atmosphere than it is to have to carry all of it with you. That's that's why turbines are so much better than rockets.
13:27And he figured that out 150 years ago for electric submarines.
13:29Favorite movies as a kid. I love that.
13:32Well, all now you're talking about the the the Walt Disney film.
13:36Kirk Douglas. I'm a huge fan and I argue a musical because there's one song dancing.
13:41Yeah. A whale of a tale to tell you lies. A whale of a tale or two about fish and the woman I love. The birds I meet in the sky above. A whale of a tale and it's all true. I swear by my tattoo.
13:54So Palmer, you know, technology companies take different approaches to the market. Some build walled gardens, some are vertically integrated, others partner. What's your philosophy here at at how do you think about that?
14:05So a few things. I think of us as a product company, not a contractor. So, we like to use our own money to decide what products to build, when to build it, when it's done, and then sell it to the government customer. That's a very different model than a lot of cost plus contractors where they make money on time, materials, and then a fixed percentage of profit on top. It means that the guy who figures out how to cut the cost of manufacturing in a factory by a million dollars is naturally rewarded rather than naturally penalized. And I I think that we need to drag as much contracting as we can in that direction. It won't be everything.
14:33I think aircraft carriers are never going to be speculatively built uh you know as by product companies. It's probably going to remain like these national capital assets where especially one where if you if they don't buy it you can't sell it to anyone else. Those are probably remain on cost plus basis but for for so much of the stuff I think we can do that in terms of like open source open architectures I my belief is everything should talk to everything.
14:55Nobody should be allowed to create a proprietary silo. the government needs to take a much stronger harder role on interoperability. They need to own the interoperability standards between these things uh rather than allowing companies to to to build these silos that they or open source. Yeah, I'm a huge fan of open sourcing everything and I have been for a very long time. The Oculus Rift and the DK1 and the DK2, those were both full open source hardware and software when I was running Oculus and then they fired me and they never open sourced another headset again. But I was a big believer of that. I also have a side company
15:25releasing retro gaming hardware called Mod Retro. So, like we've released a Game Boy clone and also a Nintendo 64 clone. We've open sourced all the hardware and all the software. I'm a huge open source hardware and software guy. I And it's not on like weird communist like, you know, can't stop the signal, man. It needs to be free. It's just I I think it's good. People like I learned a lot from open source hardware and software. That's where I cut my teeth and I I want to keep giving back to the community. We often can't do that on the defense side. We're not allowed to open source a lot of this stuff. Like I will say we don't get very many
15:54patents because I think they're antithetical to the kind of competition that we're trying to run. I I often call patents Chinese instruction manuals.
16:02You're just putting everything out there for an adversary to rip off. And what you're doing with the patent is you're you're you're ensuring that the United States and our Western allies cannot build off your technology for the duration of the patent, but that all of our strategic adversaries absolutely will. Do you think anyone in Iran or Russia or China respects intellectual property law? Do you think that they're not going to rip off my patent? So to me, it's it's this very fundamentally malformed idea that you should protect
16:29your technology from your colleagues and comrades in the aerospace industry, the defense industry, and then give it away for free to all the people that supposedly are fighting. So most of what we do, we try to keep it just as a trade secret. And if somebody else rips off what we're doing because I don't have a patent on it, uh I guess they deserve to win. If they can really execute better than me, of course there's exceptions.
16:52Like I'll feel bad if I spend a billion dollars developing something and then somebody with none of that R&D cost gets to rip it off. But uh that's that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes it goes that way.
17:01My son's a gamer and he he asked me to you said there's Mod Retro, this console company, and he said there's a new console that's the Mod Retro M64, magnesium aluminum from the drones. So, uh, who else? So, okay, he's probably talking about the anderal edition mod retrochromatic. So, it's the ultimate way to play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. It's kind of a Game Boy if money were no object. So, it has a sapphire crystal uh screen lens rather than plastic. It's the largest piece of sapphire in any consumer product ever.
17:30Larger than any Rolex, larger than it's really expensive to do, but we make those out of the same aluminum magnesium alloy that we make our attack drone chassis out of. And so, it's very lightweight, very, very robust. And then we use the same low IR signature cerakote that we used on our Ghost X helicopter drone to coat the whole thing. And it's and then we titanium nitride uh plate all of the well, it's actually vapor vapor deposition, but we we vapor deposit titanium nitride onto all the connectors so that they're very
17:59lubricious. They don't corrode.
18:01All right. So, we're involved in a couple conflicts right now actively, right? Um US is struggling in some ways in some of these conflicts. What's it going to take for our defense industry and how is Andrew looking at this to have that battlefield dominance to regain that to regain air superiority?
18:17What what is it going to take?
18:18So, it's going to take a few things. One is the one that I think everyone agrees on. We need to have unified command and control. We need to have unified information sharing. You need to have every sensor be a sensor for every aector and vice versa. You can't have these stove pipes across systems, across services, and especially across our ally and partner forces. We want everyone to be able to sharing everything. And if I have an autonomous system that's making a decision, for example, about which particular way to go after a target or calculating a fight trajectory, I should be doing it not just with the sensors that are on that, but with every other
18:48sensor that sees the target that understands the battle space. And I think everyone's pretty much on board with this. Everyone agrees with this.
18:53The the place where I think I I run into uh debate is that I also think the United States in order to compete with China, in order to compete with uh I mean, it's really just China. It's China and their proxies and their partners because China can do a lot for these other guys. You saw a lot of Chinese manufacturing equipment going into Iran for them to use in their non-uclear conventional attack drone supply chain.
19:16You see the same thing with Russia.
19:18People people say, "Oh, well, China's not directly providing weapons to Russia for the Ukraine conflict." Yeah, but where do you think where do you think all the manufacturing equipment is coming from? Who do you think is doing the support for all his equipment? How many Chinese people do you think there are in those Russian weapons factories?
19:31Zero. Of course not. And so if we're going to compete with that, we need to start designing weapon systems that can be manufactured by the industrial base that we actually have in this country.
19:41Namely, automotive like car, the factories that make cars, the factories that make agricultural implements, and the factories that make certain industrial equipment. That's all we have left. We have nothing left in this country. We sent almost everything else overseas. And so we need to design missiles that can be made in car factories. We need to design aircraft that can be made in tractor factories.
20:01And we've done this before. We did this in World War II. One of my kind of controversial takes on the usual narrative, which is that we turned our car factories into tank factories. And then we turned our car factories into bomber factories. It's not quite true in my opinion.
20:15What we really did is we designed tanks that could be made in car factories. And then we designed aircraft that could be made by car manufacturing techniques. So if you look at the weapons that we were making a lot, German tank B24.
20:29Exactly. What we the way they were designed was fundamentally say, okay, what kind of welding technology do we have right now? What are people trained to do? What kind of fasteners can we make? How tight of a bend radius can I get bending metal of a certain heat treat pre and post heat treat? And so what we did is we designed weapons that could be made by the machines, the people, the talent that was already making cars. So we we made weapons to be made by car and tractor and sewing
20:57machine etc. factories. And I think we need to start doing that again for two reasons. One, because if we don't do that, anything we build is going to be impossible to scale up in a wartime scenario. Anything that we design that can only be made by the highly trained composite technicians by hand in a bespoke aero facility is not going to be able to scale in wartime nearly fast enough. And the other reason is because we actually want China and others to be looking at our total industrial capacity
21:25as part of the deterrent equation. If they look and say, "Okay, America can't scale. It's going to take them years to reconstitute." They're they know that when they're deciding to take action. If they know that GM could start cranking out hundreds of thousands or millions of cruise missiles, if they know that Ford could turn back into a combat vehicle uh company, they're going to know that going into a potential action. And so, I want all of America's industrial might.
21:51The bit we have left is a result of coordinated labor efforts. I mean, not to be too political here, but the only reason we have any manufacturing capacity left in this country is because of coordinated labor actions to artificially preserve those industries.
22:04Basically, like the car companies were told uh that they could not outsource certain things and anything that could leave left. Everyone who did not coordinate in that way, they they had their their jobs sold out from under them. And unfortunately, those jobs are all in China now. So, they have all that capacity that we used to have. Arsenal one. Are you trying to prove something there with this huge investment in Ohio?
22:25Well, with Arsenal 1, we're building this 5 million square foot facility that honestly looks a lot like a car factory.
22:31The tools that are in it, the machines that are in it, the processes that are in it, they are less like aerospace and more like automotive. And that is on purpose. And the things that we can make in Arsenal, I really strongly believe could transition to other partners. If we actually end up in a real shooting war and we need 100 extra capacity, Arsenal is going to make hardly a dent in what we actually need to make. And so I fully anticipate that the government is going to nationalize my designs, farm them out to a whole bunch of other people. This is what we did during World
23:00War II as well. But we need to be building for that assumption. And instead, you have a lot of companies that didn't get into this for the same ideological reasons that I did. And they're building the opposite. They're building capacity that cannot be nationalized and taken away from them.
23:13They're building it in a way where nobody could replicate it in less than 5 years or 10 years. And so they get to hold on to all that capacity. And uh I'm very opposed to that. Now we we I'm I'm I lean libertarian, but this is a place where the government needs to hold people accountable. They need they need to make sure that Palmer Lucky cannot trap our stuff inside of our ecosystem.
23:34And I'm I'm a big fan of the government owning a lot of the intellectual property around critical weapon systems. Uh, and then if if if I really am not the guy who can make it the cheapest or the fastest, I have a hard time being super angry about them having somebody else do a better job.
23:48So, everybody can build your super cool designs.
23:50I would be I would be totally fine with that.
23:52I'm going to paraphrase again. So, when everybody's super, that means nobody is.
23:56That's right. Well, I hope everybody's super, right? My preferred end state would be for the entire US aerospace industry, but also automotive industry to be kind of co-capable of building all of this stuff. And right now, it's not. There's a huge division between the two.
24:10So I mean we've talked about manufacturing. I'm also curious about the interconnectivity. That's one of the big struggles that I've seen working around different systems, right? Is one thing can't talk to another and we can't. How are you guys taking that on?
24:20Well, this is a place where the government needs to take a very active role in owning the interoperability standards and they need to hold everybody to account and they need to make sure that everyone actually abides by those standards. Uh I think they've been getting much better about this there. We've run into problems where we've been trying to plug into stuff that was supposed to be interoperable.
24:35the contracts required it and in some cases it just was never actually tested like literally the interoperability does not work. You cannot act you plug the thing in and you send the calls that are in the documentation and they just never actually tested it when they accepted delivery of these things. And so now after the fact we're trying to figure out well how in the world are we going to integrate these systems and on paper it's not in a silo but in reality it is.
24:59And uh the government needs to not take people they need not take them at their word. they need to actually enforce interoperability of these things. So like Lattis is an open system. We have about 700 companies in the Lattis partner program. Uh you could actually do it without even talking to us. So like we have customers who have absolutely just gone out and done that in the government. Uh one of the most common misconceptions is people who try to frame Lattis as some kind of like closed system. In reality we've integrated with over a 100 existing DoD
25:27platforms. It's compliant with every messaging system that we've been able to get our hands on. every type of radio we've been able to get our hands on. Everything that customers wanted to do and in fact a number of customers have done just that.
25:38Amazing. So you guys recently announced Thunder.
25:41Yeah, I want to hear about Thunder. So this is an electric uh rocraft, right?
25:45It's a hybrid electric. Uh batteries are going to be good someday, but they're not good yet. And so I'm still a huge fan of longchain hydrocarbons. Jet fuel is great. Nothing beats it. You get to burn off all that weight. You get to if you're in an emergency situation, you can dump all your fuel. So your landing load, your maximum landing loads in an emergency situation are vastly less than a battery born or battery carrying craft that has to bear all that weight during even an emergency landing. And that that's especially true. I mean, you might be landing in a sub-optimal
26:14scenario where you don't even have all of your nominal propulsion. So it's not even a regular landing. You have to survive crash landings with batteries. It's it's the numbers get bad very very very fast in terms of the gear you need to have and the crash structures you need to have. So, no, it's a hybrid electric. It does. It has some batteries on it, but it's it's most of the energy is coming from jet fuel.
26:33Archer that you're Yeah. So, we've been working with Archer on this for for for a number of years now. They they've been working very closely with us. They're going to be manufacturing a lot of the composite structures, a lot of the drivetrain systems. They've developed a lot of stuff for their civilian EV toll systems where you look Andrew could have developed a lot of our own stuff like we've done on other platforms like we we have our own motors team, we have our own actuators team, but it didn't make sense to redesign all those from scratch. When you have Archer building really good
27:01solutions that are also being built for FA FAA certified manned aviation standards, why wouldn't I just want to reuse stuff from from a company that's done a really good job on all and the mission set for I mean it's a collaborative aircraft as well. Is that the the plan?
27:14Yeah. So you can kind of think as Thunder as you if CCA is a loyal wingman for fighter jets. This is a loyal wingman for attack helicopters. So, it's a rotary wing VTOL platform, long range, high-speed tilt rotary aircraft that can carry an enormous weight of munitions. And then it can be the tip of the spear.
27:34It can be the thing that you push forward to deliver effects, to do sensing before you're actually putting any people in harm's way. And of course, there's certain missions where you probably won't even put any people in harm's way. In in my opinion, you only get credit for deterrence for strength that you are politically able to deploy.
27:50And nations like China look at the United States and they know that a lot of our systems were not actually willing to deploy them in a great power conflict unless we were truly forced into it. Everyone knows that Congress does not want an American aircraft carrier within range of Chinese anti-hship missiles.
28:06It's just not going to happen. We're not going to lose 6,000 sailors to get some fighter jets into into an area. And uh so I my belief is as time passes the only systems that our adversaries will credibly believe we are willing to put at risk are the ones that don't put human lives in danger. And so I think autonomous systems have an enormous advantage there in a way that manned systems never will.
28:28So in your animated video you show like drones and then more drones coming out of drones. Yes. That the answer is like drones on drones. Are we hunter seeker?
28:36Do you get down to that level of drone?
28:38So yeah, Thunder has has some vertical launch tubes on it for for countermeasures, effects, other drones, launched effects in addition to some of the more conventional fire systems. The thing worth noting about the the the Thunder launch video, it is not intended to be an actual perfect representation of the conop for how you would use these. It's it's more represented the ideas. Like people are like, Palmer, Thunder flies in front of the human pilot and then eats up a missile at like a hundred yards. Is that really what you're going to do with them? No, of course not. That's not actually how this is going to go. But it's representative of the idea.
29:08It's like the coolest.
29:09It looks cool. And the point is, look, thunder is there to eat up these missiles. No, it won't be a hundred yards, uh, you know, off your nose. It's probably going to be miles out, if not hundreds of miles out. But the idea bears and the same thing with a lot of the counter measures. Like the countermeasures that we were showing in the video are modified anvils. Our counter UAS drone, they fly out, they take out the other drones. In reality, the countermeasures are not literally going to be anvils. They're probably going to be special canister counter measures. in there. There's electronic countermeasures, kinetic ones, uh
29:37thermal invisible ones, but the idea bears, yeah, yeah, these things are going to carry countermeasures that take out incoming drones. Right now, rotocraft are very vulnerable to small drones, especially at low altitude. I think that's going to change over time.
29:50Like, just to give you one really, really boring example, uh radars are pretty good these days. They're especially good at seeing things that are moving really, really fast. You just create a lot of signature for them to pick up pick up on. I'm a believer that on a not tooistant time frame, you're going to be able to use radar to pick up bullets, generate a trajectory, and then shoot bullets out of the air with other bullets. Like that's a hard problem.
30:12That's a really hard problem. But like we we're within the realm of doing you look at things. Have you f with the trophy system? Uh it's it's for land vehicles. It's a it can go on originally tanks and armored vehicles. Now there's a version that can even go on Land Rovers and Humvees. It basically is a disruptor where an incoming missile like if someone fires an RPG7 at a vehicle, it tracks it, tracks its trajectory, tracks its approach using a radar, and then when it gets about 10 m away, fires an explosive shaped charge from the roof of the vehicle that slices the thing in
30:40half, blows it up, and then you just have a bunch of debris run into the vehicle. Oh, this is a real This has been around for like a decade. The trophy system is really, really cool. I highly recommend looking into um think of it as like ultra close range kinetic counter measures. It's been on land vehicles. I think you're going to see things more things like trophy on aircraft and that's trying to stop really fast moving stuff.
31:01The reason that you haven't seen these systems built to kill like drones are way easier. The reason I bring up shooting bullets out of the air is that if you could shoot a bullet out of the air, you could definitely shoot a quadcopter out of the air with similar systems. The reason that drones are so deadly right now to land vehicles, to people on motorcycles, to people in helicopters, is because those countermeasures have not had time to be developed and deployed. It's not that hard to shoot down a quadcopter from a gimbbled like like what do you need to shoot down a quadcopter? A 9mm handgun.
31:29You got to point it in the right direction and shoot a shotgun. It's not that much. So you look at something like an Apache where you're carrying this huge gimbbled auto cannon and a whole array of bristling weapons. You're like, "Oh, it's going to get wrecked by drones. Warfare has changed forever."
31:44Dude, it's not that hard to put a little like 20 pound gimbbled gun somewhere on the helicopter that's just going to blast away anything that gets within 50 yards of it. I really do think this problem is going to be solved. People are overindexing on what war warfare looks like in Ukraine. They're saying, "Oh, warfare in Ukraine. This is the future of warfare. This is advanced warfare." And I think it's actually a reflection of a moment in time about how the Europeans are going to fight with each other.
32:10Can we talk about artificial intelligence and warfare and see that evolution? I know you've got some specific questions.
32:16Yeah. So, my background, I've worked collision avoidance technology. I worked ground collision avoidance, air collision avoidance, and there definitely working on those programs. There was resistance. There was resistance from the pilots having a automatic system taking control away.
32:27And even if you look back in history, there had been there had been resistance to fly by wire systems or autopilot. You just have to overcome these things. And I think it's by demonstrating the technology really works. How do you see the trust of AI or the trust of collaborative aircraft? How do we overcome this and how do we really get it to the field?
32:44So, the easiest thing to do I like human pilots don't love it when like you know their tecast slaved into their autopilot takes over and throws them around. And I I'm I'm a helicopter pilot. Um I don't like it either. And so a lot of these problems go away just with autonomous systems. Nobody cares if the autonomous system is is you know is is getting thrown off of this synthetic terrain and if it does so in a way that's really abrupt and it doesn't like it. Who cares?
33:07So humans not in the thing makes it easier.
33:10So a lot of pilots they're not trying to do the maximally safe thing. They and like I'm not saying pilots are unsafe.
33:16Remember that pilots are working within industry constraints. Like a guy who flies a biz jet or a charter helicopter operation. He is flying within the same constraints as a chauffeur, right? He you got to approach everything smooth.
33:29You if something's going wrong, you don't want it to show until it has to, right? Like you you are not going to want to take aggressive really aggressive evasive maneuvers at the first sign of trouble. If I have a robot, that's what it's going to do.
33:40It's going to see the first sign of possible trouble and do the most evasive action. Your charter helicopter pilot is not going to do that because you're going to get really bad reviews and you're going to lose your job really fast. I think just the way that you look at these are very different between human pilots and unmanned pilots. My experience has been that a lot of like let's take like fighter pilots for example yes they love to fly but more they want to win and well I think I think with our autonomous systems I mean really it was like seeing is believing right like we demonstrated the capability and I mean now everyone's on board for collision avoidance
34:10well you run the mission and you run the mission simulations and also I mean with human pilots you run them in simulators you're like okay let's see you not hit the terrain in this situation right your GPS is out look at this recent GPS jamming scenario where where it took out the medivvac pilots Yeah. Like so put a lot of pilots into that same situation and they're going to they're going to have a controlled flight into terrain for sure. And maybe a few of them will avoid it. And then you integrate that with some of these safety systems and all of a sudden every person in the sim lives. And I I think that does convince
34:40people. We need to show people more of that stuff.
34:42So I got to follow on now. So I've seen things that work great in the sim. They work great in a laboratory environment.
34:47This is not just autonomy. That's going to be sensors. You know, I've done a lot of helmet queuing type things. Work great in the sim. you get in the real flight environment, you get to some of those edge cases, it's a lot more challenging. How is Andrew taking that on and how do you test I guess to those conditions?
34:59I mean, you need to have exercises that that are realistic and representative of your actual workflow and workload and ideally overloaded. One of the big flaws of a lot of exercise and including ones that we're part of is that they have this nice scripted thing and here's how it's all going to go and it's it's all very easy. Like you have a bunch of beyond visual line of sight engagements.
35:19Oh, we've picked it up. We passed the queue and I'm going to fire my I've got I'm going to fire my weapon. It's going to pick up the track. Great. It all works. Well, what happens when actually there was a bunch of stuff that you didn't expect and now it is shooting at you. Also, a bunch of your support systems are offline. Maybe you've actually lost some of your stability augmentation system in your rotor. Maybe because it was shot or maybe just because the combat cadence, maybe we're in the middle of the third week of the war and you haven't been back to actually properly maintained in 3 weeks and so it's just total and not
35:49Now, what is it like to do it? Or one of my favorite ones, like I most my daily flyer is a Euroopter EC120. Uh, yeah, I love it. I know it's a little underpowered and I'd rather be flying an MD500, but there's things I like about it. Um, like I can fly hydraulics out.
36:04I really would not want to be flying a hydraulics out in a high workload situation with a lot of other stuff at night in the weather.
36:11At night in the weather or and and worse, maybe at night in the weather and I didn't even expect to be at night in the weather. Right. So, or worse, I end up overseeing. I'm not wearing my emergency suit and I'm thinking, okay, what risk do I want to take? How far?
36:24Like, I want to be able to auto rotate to the coast if I lose my main power. Maybe my chip light is on. I know that I've only got so much time left on my engine.
36:32Unexpected scenarios should be part of these exercises. We should be we should be putting people into the worst case scenarios and then seeing how this stuff works out. And I'll be honest, a lot of our stuff totally fails to work when you get in those scenarios because my guys are computer kids, right? And and like we work we have a lot of veterans here and we try to work c with the customers to understand these problems, but it's very easy to develop a system that works great in the science fair project scenario. And then you put it into something real and it all falls apart.
36:58And so this is why I'm all about early test, right? Early test as soon as we can when we're in the design phase so that we can find the problems and fix the problems.
37:05That's right. If you wait too long, sometimes the fixes are just totally nonviable. Like to use an extreme example, what if you were considering voice controls and it reads out over the radio and everyone gets to hear it versus a dedicated tablet for controlling something. What if you find out that the tablet's just completely unworkable in high workload environments?
37:24The only fix at that point is try to make the UI on the tablet better. It's very hard to say, well, that's was 5 years of development down the drain. We're just going to rip this out and start from touchscreen is one of those touchscreen can be challenging. And I hate touch screens. They're so bad. They're so bad. Don't even get me. Steve Steve Steve Jobs. That's why I like the guy, but man, he ruined technology.
37:43I miss my Blackberry.
37:46I love tactile feedback. I really do.
37:48The whole Yeah, it's a huge thing.
37:50It's so critical. Well, it's the tactile feedback that's like a very specific in example of what I'm talking about. I've got this whole anti- Steve Jobs and I remember I I respect Steve Jobs to death. Shannon worms. Here's the short version of a long rant.
38:02Steve Jobs wanted the computer to be a bicycle for the mind. He wanted to enhance our capabilities, make us more efficient, make it so we could do, you know, a bicycle takes a a human way further than they can walk off the same person. And so he wanted a computer to enable a person to do far more than they could do unaided by a computer. The problem with the iPhone is that it made it so easy to use. And but he they they made it so easy to use that a person could approach it for the first time and in 5 minutes they could be using it perfectly. Heck, the first the first 10
38:31seconds you could grasp it. The problem is the same interface that made it easy to learn to use also put a maximum skill skill ceiling on it that was very very very low. The opposite of an iPhone is a keyboard and mouse.
38:45A keyboard takes thousands of hours to be truly mastered. Hundreds of hours to be barely barely proficient. And but but once you do it, it's a superhuman interface. Have you ever seen a guy running through crazy Excel macros on a keyboard and he's doing like 80 words per minute, 150 actions per minute, and he's swiping. There's no voice interface that can mimic that. Certainly not one that allows him to talk and also do it.
39:09And you can't do anything remotely like that on iPhone. And so what happened is the iPhone as a thing on its own. I don't mind. The problem is that everything became an iPhone. Every app optimizes for the first 5 minutes. Even if it makes it where the power users who've been using it for 5,000 hours cannot work as fast, even if there's no you can't get it to a really really high skill ceiling. That's one of the like losing physical keyboards, losing physical controls. Yes, you get this this ease of use, this uh you know very flexible user interface and you like you
39:38don't have to have different uh keyboard for every language. You could just do it all in software. I get the gains but there were real losses with it as well.
39:44Efficiency, right? I mean really losses in efficiency and maybe how effective that you can be.
39:48And then what happens is nobody wants to do any hard work. Nobody wants to think what would what's really the right way to interface with this? Like what's the right set of physical controls to do this? Instead, they want everything to be on a touch screen and look like Uber or Google Maps or some other app that they're familiar with. Like people aren't even building novel touch interfaces. I've seen stuff, for example, where you have keyboards where you swipe in different directions, like literally like vector-based keyboards, but nobody wants that. They want it to
40:15be the Steve Jobs approved cordy keyboard up on a screen. and and like with corded keyboards. Have you ever seen this technology? It's a single-handed keyboard where there's only a handful of of switches on it, like like a little over a dozen switches, and you hit two or even three keys at a time to input each character.
40:34So, with only a few buttons, you can build a keyboard where you barely move your fingers. You can type very quickly using just one hand. And corded keyboards have not taken off because of the iPhoneization of the world where everyone wants to be an iPhone. Nobody wants to learn. Nobody wants to put in a 100 hours. Nobody wants to put in 500 hours. Me, you, you. We're the last of a dying breed. We're the people, the Gen Z. They are not going to learn.
40:55See, I have a 14-year-old. I'm watching I'm watching her, you know, adapt to technology.
40:59Look, she's adapting to technology, but like how fast can she type?
41:02That's true. She talks to her phone actually, right? And so, and and which is fine, but there's a hard limit on the actions per minute and the accuracy of it and the depth of information you can do. So, anyway, I like I said, this is a long rant. I I I want to see a return to high skill ceiling technology for people who use technology for hundreds or thousands of hours. I want to see that I want people to design for what an F-35 pilot can be doing on his 30,000th flight hour in that system. And I don't want to be
41:31constrained by what Steve Jobs showed on a stage in 2007 when he announced the ultimate phone computer. And right now they do today. Like that is why all the touchscreen keyboards look like what Steve Jobs showed. It's uh like we need way more imagination.
41:46So Andrew's got capabilities, air, sea, land.
41:50Are there other domains you're thinking about looking over the horizon?
41:53It's every domain. So we're also working in the space domain. Uh it's public knowledge now that we're working on space-based interceptors and a variety of other space-based systems. We've had our AI on orbit since 2022.
42:04That's now public knowledge as well. The weird one is uh I I I think that we're going to see the subterranean domain become [laughter] everyone says that I'm nuts for this and I'm going to keep saying it because it is true. The US used to believe this. The Soviets used to believe this. Both countries were working on subterrains. So vehicles that could move through the crust of the earth. A lot of people when when you say subterranean, what that currently means is fighting in tunnels, fighting in trenches, fighting in collapsed in
42:33buildings or bunkers. I am talking about the real deal no subt fight where you are using the crust of the earth as a three-dimensional maneuver and battle space and you have vehicles moving through it, people moving through it, supplies moving through it and you could have fights that are fought entirely in this domain or using this domain to hit things on the surface in the air and subca and there are a lot of things that have happened that make it a lot more viable. building a subterranean with
43:02people inside of it. Uh to go back to another bad 2006 film, uh the core.
43:07Oh, I remember that.
43:08The core. [laughter] So I was thinking more journey to the center of the earth.
43:12Okay, there we go. Yeah. So um building the the nuclear laser train uh uh submarine from the core and putting a bunch of people in it is really really hard. But if you have autonomy now, you can build much narrower diameter systems. You need much less energy to bore. When you're in the subterranean environment, diameter is very expensive because you have to bore it out. But length is not quite free, but it's cheaper because once you dig a length, everything you drag through it
43:40afterwards is free. And so if you take that to the extreme, you end up with very narrow diameter, very, very long things. If you run the math on what you need to do to displace or compact that amount of Earth, it's not that much. And it's totally within the bounds of what you can put in batteries, much less nukes or tethered power, things like that. And so it is inevitable at this point. The only thing stopping us is that it sounds so crazy. You say subt warfare is the future of warfare. It's the next major war fighting domain.
44:09We're going to have a US subterran at some point. Like, [laughter] oh man, that's a good one, Palmer. You're such a funny guy. You are always out there on the edge. I think we're going to look back on that. It's just not going to be so funny. It's the people who thought about air power as combined with naval power and and what air power would mean for naval power.
44:29They were similarly ridiculed. People had their careers ended over. The only reason I can't have my career ended over it is I'm not in the government. And so I I can say whatever I want and nobody can fire me. And has a closely held board. My investors can't do anything to me. I control most of the voting shares of the company. And so I can say crazy stuff like this.
44:45Well, we need people like you coming up with these crazy ideas, right? Because we talked at the beginning of this podcast, it was the science fiction writers and these ideas that have gotten us where we're at now, Journey to the Center of the Earth. And so I I think what we really need to do is we need to normalize the idea of getting these old ideas, whether it's, you know, the 2006 film Stealth or Journey to the Sun or the Earth, and we need to ask ourselves without any preconceptions of what's reasonable, is this possible? Because if you run the numbers from first principles on these
45:13things, we're living in an age of unprecedented possibility. We can build things that we can build anything. I mean, it's I'm so blessed to live in a time where almost anything that you can imagine can be done. And there's things that I can imagine that we can't do, and I'm sure we'll do them someday. But like I have not run into very many things that cannot be done with modern technology if you apply them. And and they're just wait they're not waiting to be invented. They're waiting to be implemented. Yeah. And I'm I'm I'm less
45:42of an inventor and more of an impletor. And uh that's what I'd rather be doing. It's a lot of fun.
45:47Just learned about subterrines.
45:50I mean, what's down might be what's up next.
45:51Well, look, it people then laugh and I I remind them the Soviet subterranean program. It was a nuclearpowered subterranean. It was successful enough that they lost their prototype in the crust of the Earth. They lost contact with it and they don't know where it went. And there's just a somewhere there's a bunch of old radioactive material somewhere underground and they don't know where it is. The fact that you can lose your nuclear subterranean to the extent you can't find it is a great indicator that it is a workable problem. You know, if you can't if you
46:21can't bore through the earth, how do you lose it? Do you remember that scene from the core? It was it was so good. It was something like uh they need to go to the center of the earth so they can drop the nukes around the core so they can detonate the nukes in a circle to spin the core again to restart the magnetosphere somehow. And uh they go to this scientist in the LA in the desert.
46:38He shows off his laser and it boards through a bunch of rock and they say uh you know when can this be ready? He said you don't understand. This is just a prototype. Uh there's no amount of money that could make this happen in in less than 10 years. The general then pulls a check out of a briefcase and you you the viewer don't see what happens. But he shows it to them and the guy's eyes go wide. He says, "Would this be enough?"
46:58And then the next scene is the giant laser train plunging into the Mariana's trench about to board to the center of the earth. And I think think about it a lot and it gets referenced quite a bit here here at where there's a will, there's a way, right?
47:11Where there is a will, there is a way. I I try I try to be that guy in in the desert. I I want I want the government to come to come to me and say, would this be enough? [laughter] And I want the next scene to be whatever the hell it is they they they want me to be doing. So, you've talked some about being a pilot, which I think is awesome.
47:28I want to know um your favorite vehicle and then how flying these vehicles has influenced and your design considerations.
47:36Favorite air vehicle or vehicle period.
47:38One that you fly. So, something that you are a pilot of.
47:41I'm a flight test flight test engineer.
47:45Um let me give you a little So, in preparation for this event, I went and I flew a Jetson one EV toll. So, I did this just so I did. As you know, I was the first owner of a Jetson one. I'm I'm a big fan of what they've done. I think they've done a great job. They're they're going after a different space in most of the EV companies. They're not trying to build an air taxi. It's more like the Polaris of the sky. Like it's a flying ATV or a flying, you know, flying uh, you know, off-road truck, right? It's a short range thrill ride experience.
48:15Easy though. Really easy to fly.
48:16Really easy to fly until you have some type of failure.
48:18I've heard once failures can make it if you have a failure. Although they've architected it so that you it's this parallel architecture. So you've got two battery packs, you've got two rotors on each arm and so you can lose about half of the aircraft and it will continue flying with with reduced authority and you better get to the ground as fast as you can. But they've architected it in in a pretty nice way. I love my Jetson one. It's fantastic.
48:38I hope they build uh more and more and more stuff. And I and I I know those guys pretty well.
48:42And you have a Blackhawk too, right? A demilitarized Blackhawk.
48:45I have Yeah, I have a UH60 Blackhawk. Everyone else is buying these alpha model ones that are uh you know the army is surplusing out now. Yeah.
48:52I was doing this before they were surplusing them. And so mine was one that was put together from a whole bunch of surplused parts and it was flying on an FAA restricted certificate. So these other ones, most people are putting them on experimental. I got to admit I feel like a little bit of a chump. I bought one years before and it was a lot more expensive than the ones you can buy at Surplus Now. Uh I I made the same mistake. I own a 1985 Humvey. Uh it's a 1985. So, first production year, US Marine, ex-US Marine Corps. And uh back
49:19when I bought it, there were very very few true Humvees, right? There were people had bought the H1 Hummer civilian variant and and painted them to look like them and put military hardware on them, but actual ex-military Humvees were very rare in civilian hands. Only a handful leaked out through weird contractor arrangements. And uh now you could just go on GovPlanet and you could buy one for like three, four grand in beat up shape. I spent a lot more than that getting mine. So, what's the next thing you're going to get? What do you want next thing?
49:47Or maybe what's the next thing you want to fly?
49:49My dream my dream aircraft. I want a Boeing 727.
49:53And I want I I want a Boeing 727.
49:55Navigator seat in there.
49:57Of course, you need that. You need You need have a flight. Yeah. So, three Yeah. Three Three people. You need your pilot, co-pilot, and your flight engineer.
50:03And you've got Yeah. You got three engines. I mean, the 727 is an incredible plane. It was designed by people who understood what jet planes were supposed to be before the bean counters got to them. and put like they knew you're supposed to cruise at 40,000 ft above all the weather before the people brought us down down down down down down into the weather at 30,000 ft. It cruises [snorts] at Mach.97.
50:25It's a low bypass turbo fan that is ridiculously fast and you have the rear air stair, so you don't need any support infrastructure. I can land at small airfields that don't have any kind of air stairs. I can land at untowered, unstaffed airports and get out of my plane. I've got tons of range. I can do trans-pacific flights and if I have an engine out, I have two more engines to go. I'm I'm I'm a huge fan of the Boeing.
50:51It's a very practical vehicle.
50:52It's a great airplane. I used to rent one from Big Apple Air to fly to French Gana when I was doing rocket launches down there and people loved it. It had a bar up front. Uh it was like just deluxe accommodations in the back. It was a gas hog, but it was great plane. Super comfortable.
51:06Well, the one I want, there was a conversion that only sold like a couple dozen units. It was a company called Val Valsen. They got an STC to put some of the newer Pratt and Whitney engines on it that have a bit less fuel consumption. It makes it even faster, quieter, more fuel efficient. So, I want a Valan Super 27 is my is my kind of dream airplane. Also, my grandpa was a pilot for United Airlines for about 45 years. And so, of all his planes, the 727 was also his favorite. He he ended
51:33his career in 747400s. And he flew all kinds of stuff. I mean, he like he he flew he flew commercial, he flew cargo, he flew the the rubber dog out of Hong Kong. He he did it all. And he the 727 he said was his favorite plane. Plus, it's all aluminum. So, you don't have to have the the modern composite.
51:51I feel like this is going to happen. I feel like this is going to happen.
51:52Well, I Here's my real plan. I'm going to show you my real my real secret. I don't think I've ever talked about this publicly. So, you're going to get All right, we won't tell anyone.
51:59So, here's what I want. [laughter] Oh, man. And I I I'm going to get the the numbers a little wrong, but so the 727 can fly with with Prattton Whitney JT 18Ds. Is that it? Or is it like the JT15-18D?
52:14I can't remember the exact one. It's it's one of those.
52:16You're the enthusiast. I'm not There's So So there was a there was a uh they licensed that engine Pratt and Whitney did to Saab and Saab did a license built version of that engine.
52:28same core, same compressor uh in in Sweden for the the Sprien 37 fighter. It was a fighter interceptor that was designed to take off and land from highways cuz that their defense theories was basically they could they could if all their airfields are blown up, they can and that's why all their highways have these straight sections mandated every so often so they can they can operate from the highway. It was a licensebuilt copy of the engine that's that's certified to go on a 727, but it has a it has a thrust reverser and an
52:57afterburner [laughter] and it's it's fod tolerant. So, it's designed so you have like rock. So, what I really want to do is I I've tracked down a couple stock pile and it was called the Volvo RM8. Anyway, I want to take a 727, put Volvo RM8 on it and I want to do unlimited climbs, unlimited vertical climbs out of my local airport.
53:15Well, you need to take it. I want I want to call up the tower. I want to request an unlimited [laughter] 2,000 ft.
53:21We were just at Oshkosh. We were just at Oshkosh. You would need to take it to Oshkosh and take off like 700,000 people there.
53:29And the cool thing is I could put it I could register as an experimental and I I'll never be able to charter it out to anybody, but who cares? I could do it for myself. So that is my Andre.
53:38Someday when I'm all old and used up and I don't have to put all my time in androl, I'm going to go out. We're going to get a 727. We're going to RM8 on it. We're gonna be after we're definitely gonna take it to Oshkosh.
53:47Yeah, you got it, man.
53:48I'm I'm gonna take uh all my grandpa's uh 727 paperwork and keep it in keep it in the uniform.
53:54I have part of his uniform. So, I have his uh I have his hat.
53:59And then I have his uh jacket, but it doesn't have the United epillets on. And so I've been trying to figure it out because it was like bas like a they bought it from like a like a uniform company and a bunch of the outfits at the time like when he retired they were actually using the same jackets and they just had different epolets that went on them and I don't have those. He took them off and put them somewhere.
54:19I'm sure these exist somewhere but they got it. I love that. Well, thank you for joining us. Fantastic. No, thank you so much. [music]
