Inside Anduril: Exclusive HQ Tour w/ Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Matt Grimm & Trae Stephens

Welcome to Sorcery. Perfect.

We are here in what do we call our Building A. This is our research and development building. It's a 200,000 square foot building, 50 foot clear high ceilings here. We have a machine shop. We have a composites lab.

We have a development test lab. All of these different environments where we can prototype things quickly, test them quickly, find the fractures, find where they break to get products built and shipped faster.

Thinking back to when we started Anvil in 2017 as kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley. Was not something people were doing. It was incredibly unpopular. And now all of a sudden, it's a it's a much cooler place than most places in Silicon Valley. When we started the company, the idea was how do you build, you know, an apple for defense rather than the traditional model.

With Androle, we are constantly inventing new products. We're moving into, like, totally gnarly, hard political and geopolitical questions, and, like, how do we thread these, you know, different strategies? And that just requires constant creativity.

Artistry and meritocracy.

Artistry and meritocracy.

I'm really curious to hear from you. What would war look like on the moon?

What would war look like on the moon?

Ryan, welcome to Sorcery.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for having me at Anderle.

Yeah. It's pretty cool campus.

It's like tons of energy. Old LA Times printing press. It's like it's a very awesome space. When you look at the industrial base, the ability to produce and the ability to get new capabilities out quickly is one of the most determinative aspects you can have as a defense department. Right?

It's a war department. And that's not where we're at. Right? Like, we've had a strategy for generations, which has been the decades long technological edge is how we win. Right?

And The US invested more, had better engineers, and capitalized it more efficiently to, like, get to that massive technological edge. And there is still a dimension of that for sure. But increasingly, the ability to produce at scale when a way you can afford the ability to innovate fast on the software to rapidly adapt these capabilities, that's going to be the determinative characteristic. Right? We see this in Ukraine.

We kinda see this across the board. So everything he's trying to align around is this idea of how do we get capabilities out faster to the force in a way that is affordable and effective. Right? And companies that can work in that world, great. Companies that can't, you're gonna die.

And I think that's a healthy view. What he's not saying, and I and I think because the reality is is there is a mix is some of this stuff is gonna look like autonomous systems, but it's not all gonna be. Right? There's still gonna be a place for, you know, aircraft carriers and all these things, but the balance is gonna shift. And there's these new class of capabilities that are really relevant, that can be more cost effective, that you can produce at scale, and that's gonna be a key aspect of what we do in the future.

And so the focus is really on industry that can perform, setting up incentives for performance, and setting up the whole acquisition system around speed. Where prior, it was entirely set up around we just need the most expensive capabilities at any time at any cost. And that that's not the world we're in anymore.

Do you think the nearly trillion dollar budget is reasonable or unreasonable given the amount of efficiencies and technological advancements that we have? And maybe for people that don't understand how it's being allocated, could you also share that?

So there's borderline trillion dollar defense budget, and everyone thinks it's like we're buying a billion dollars of kit every year. Well, that's not true. Right? Forget the actual percentages, but it's you know, more than half goes to personnel costs, to facilities, to military construction. So you just have an outrageous percentage going to these fixed costs that you have that are not next generation technology.

And then there's an outrageous cost as well then to sustaining the legacy technologies you have bought. So maintaining aircraft, maintaining ships. These are huge bills. Right? That is significantly higher than the amount that's spent on procurement.

And when you look at this in terms of historic terms, the procurement budget as a percentage of GDP, for example, is I think the lowest it's ever been. And so we're we're not spending money on the new technology. We're spending money on sustaining the low the old technology. We're spending money on all the infrastructure that we have to have a global military, and that is that is very expensive. So now you're really talking about how do I get efficiency out of, you know, call it the 30% of the budget that I you know, you're you're actually maneuvering around.

And in that world, you know, there's a good argument, which is we could be spending that money a lot more efficiently. I think that is true. It's hard to argue we couldn't. How much more efficiently? I don't know.

But, you know, I tend to think we can get a lot more bang for our buck on weapons, on aircraft, you know, probably two x from where we are by just looking at a different mix of these things. But the hard part is we gotta transition to that world. Right? So we're we're not we can't just jump to that and say, all of a sudden, we're gonna abandon all of our, you know, manned surface combatants and move to this autonomous future or something like that. Like, that's that's just not believable.

So we're gonna have to go through this transition, which is sort of always true of how do we responsibly cycle out the old, think about what's still fit for purpose or not, and then get the new systems in place. That will cost more for a period of time. Right? And and that is a a hard world to live in. And so I I don't see a world where, like, the defense budgets could magically shrink and we still have the military that we need to have, but I do think these things can be done wildly more efficiently than they ever have in the past.

I wanna talk about Andoril's expansion. You have a global expansion, whether it's the facility in Australia or the new deal with Edge and The UAE. Yep. Let's maybe start with Australia and building out Ghostshark there.

Yep. Australia is a great example. So setting the context maybe a little broadly, we're in a period where things are just geopolitically more unstable. People like to talk about this, that we're in this time of peace, but doesn't seem all that peaceful to me. We've got a land war in Europe.

The Red Sea is still, you know, intermittently shut down. Israel and Iran going at it. You've got China doing constant aggression on The Philippines and the South China Sea. Cambodia and Thailand are sparring all the time right now. India, Pakistan doing air wars and doing, you know, it's like air combat.

I'm probably forgetting several of these going on right now. And so we're not in a time of peace. Right? Like, this is not a stable time. And so something has changed.

Right? Like, there's the sense that a lot of historic grievances, the political opportunism to use violence to get to your ends that has changed, and every nation's reflecting it, where they're increasing defense spending. They're ramping up their own defense. And I think the view of what The US is going to do or not do on everyone's behalf has shifted. Think The US reasonably is saying, we're not gonna go fight everyone else's wars.

We're gonna expect every nation to provide for their own defense. But that also does not imply The US is backing away as the sort of security guarantor for the world. Right? Like, we still have the only blue water navy in at scale that is able to project force anywhere in sort of multiple parts of the globe all the time, can guarantee international shipping and stability of the seas. There's all these things we're still going to do as America that are very aligned to our interests and aligned to the the the system that we have.

So that's the whole backdrop that's going on. There's a whole lot of other pieces to this. And on top of it, the backlogs on, like, you wanna order Patriot missiles. I'm hearing right now the latest number someone told me over the weekend was fifteen years. You have to get a new Patriot system.

Like, what does that even mean? Like, I have no idea what that means. Right? But it's like, call it even five to seven for a backlog. Like, this is crazy.

So The US isn't a dependable producer anymore. Can't get the weapons in time. This has resulted in basically every country looking a little bit differently in how they're gonna think about, well, when they are ramping spending, what does that mean, and what do they want to be true? They're all gonna look at a question of, if we're gonna spend a lot of money, we should get some economic benefit. Probably more importantly, we need to have assured supply.

We need to know that if we order this, this shows up, and that we want to shape our military for what we need it to be for our regional challenges. Australia is a great example of this. They shut down their French submarine program. They're going, you know, all in on The US nuclear submarine programs. That's not gonna show up for till 2035.

So this major gap of about a decade where their old technology was phasing out, and they were waiting on this next generation capability to come in. We went and pitched them on this idea of you could build these extra large autonomous underwater vehicles. You can build them fast, and we did this model of splitting the development fifty fifty. They had skin of the game. We did two, and we ended up executing that program incredibly quickly.

And to their credit, they saw the opportunity and said yes, basically, immediately. They said yes in just a couple of months, and we were signed in under contract. And we were able to deliver at pace. We built out a Australian engineering team. We built out an Australian production facility.

We have our first production GoShark already ran came off the production line. Then I think thirty days of signing the production contract. So just an incredibly fast pace that shows what you can actually do if you just hit go on this. And we wanna replicate that model in a number of other countries. It's not gonna look all the same.

Right? There's not that many places that will do, you know, fully ground up capabilities. But this idea of integrating into their military, helping them think about ways they can use technology to modernize, do warfare differently, and understanding a more nuanced approach to how they're gonna get local engineering and local production that fits while still being aligned with The US, which is still, again, the backstop of world security. Everyone needs that US alliance. And so this is just a very nuanced, complicated thing to actually solve for, but the numbers are pretty clear.

Europe is gonna spend something like four times the amount of procurement that The US is over the next five years. Like, it's a massive buildup. Japan's gonna substantially increase their budget. Taiwan's increasing their budget. Australia.

Like, everyone is ramping. So that problem I talked about with The US having so much in sustainment and keeping the legacy going, so the countries won't have that problem as much. They have an opportunity to build new and build efficiently and something we very much wanna help them with.

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Trey Stevens.

Good to be here. How's it going?

Welcome to Sorcery.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me at Andoril.

It's a it's a much cooler place than most places in Silicon Valley.

You wrote the factory is really the weapon.

Yeah. You know, for decades and decades, The United States was the global manufacturing powerhouse. I mean, we had the ability during World War two to outproduce our adversaries. And, you know, you had companies like Ford that turned over their production lines to build bombers for the allied war effort. Fast forward to the last thirty years, the fall of the Soviet Union, we've atrophied massively in our manufacturing chops.

We offshored a lot of manufacturing work to lower cost labor locations like China. And not only did they soak up a lot of that manufacturing capacity, but they also developed advanced tooling and know how to build the things that we use every day, whether it's the microphones that we're wearing today or the iPhones that are in our pockets. And so at this point, even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability to just magically reassure a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next fifty or one hundred years. And so we're in this place where we really need to re industrialize. It's incredibly important.

It's incredibly important culturally, geopolitically, strategically. And this is what Andriel is really focused on right now, is bringing back our ability to not build hundreds of things or thousands of things, but tens of thousands of things or hundreds of thousands of things efficiently, scalably, and to do it in a way that enables us to retain that magazine inventory advantage against our adversary. And so I think that's really what I was saying with the factory is the weapon because without the factory, you have no weapons.

Are you also outsourcing and finding different ways to manufacture

We have a lot of manufacturing partners. Obviously, we're not building every subcomponent of everything that we're building. So we're working with other vendors. We're working with other machine shops. We're working with other manufacturers, and then we're pulling it all together generally in our own facilities.

But in the first quarter of next year, we'll be opening our soon to be 5,000,000 square foot factory campus called Arsenal 1 just outside of Columbus, Ohio, which is where we'll start ramping up our collaborative combat aircraft for the autonomous fighter plane production. And we have other facilities around the country. We have shipyards. We have loitering munition assembly that's happening in Atlanta, Georgia. You know, we do some stuff right here in Costa Mesa at our headquarters.

So I imagine that there will be multiple factories across not just The United States, but across allied and partner nations as well where we're ramping that manufacturing muscle at the same time.

What was it like to open up Arsenal one? I know it's under development, but choosing Ohio where you're from, what was that like?

Yeah. At at some point when we got down to, the final three states, I realized that the the bias was going to look really bad to the company. So I just kinda sat back, and I'm like, you know what? I don't I don't wanna push this. I think Ohio is great.

Obviously, as a native Ohioan, I thought it would be awesome to land there.

Opening something so large like that, does this feel real? I mean, primes have existed for a very long time, but you're known as the new prime. So how does that physicality feel?

Well, I'm I'm certainly experiencing the realness of it with all the LinkedIn messages from my high school classmates that I haven't heard from in twenty years that are now looking for jobs.

Yeah.

So it feels pretty real. Now, I mean, one of the cool things to remember is that Ohio is the birthplace of aviation. And so in some ways it's like you're starting with the Wright Flyer and then coming back with fully autonomous fighter planes to be built less than an hour drive away from where the Wright brothers were building the first airplane. And so there's a tremendous history. GE Aviation, GE Aircraft, where they build the jet engines is also right down the street, about an hour away from where we're setting up the factory.

So it's a cool kind of cultural moment, I think, not only for us and what we're trying to deliver to the department, but also to the state of Ohio.

One thing that was kind of the central focus of our interview with Alex Carr was, like, moral and ethics around this. Right. Christian Garrett, he's a big fan of you. We've done so many interviews with him at this point. He's great.

But his one of his questions he wanted me to ask you was about the just war theory Yeah. And Saint Augustine. So how does that play into all of this?

Mean, since

the very beginning, this was always a big part of the conversation that I was drawing the rest of the team into is Just War Theory, was developed over a thousand years ago by Saint Augustine, talks about how you engage in lethal defense activity in the most ethical way possible. And if you look back at the course of all human civilization, you had this massive ramp up in lethality. So we started with hitting each other with rocks. And then it was like, at some point somebody was making a knife and then someone makes bow and arrow. And then you have catapults that could do like one to many destruction, trebuchets.

And then you have the advent of gunpowder. So you have guns and simple bombs. And that just kept going up and up and up until the atomic bomb in 1945. And at that moment, I think humanity looked around at each other and they said, I don't think we wanna do this. Like, global nuclear war is a pretty bad bet.

And so from then until modern day, you see the climb back down the ladder. And so you had precision guided munitions. You you see, like, some of the counterterrorism work we were doing was literally shooting non explosive AIM-9X missiles into windows to take out individual targets without blowing up buildings, no collateral damage. We've become really, really good at being accurate. And so people are constantly talking about kind of the freak out of the intersection of AI and defense and autonomy.

And what does that do from an ethics perspective? The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs. So we're not putting our men and women, brothers and sisters in horribly dangerous situations and become as accurate and precise as possible. And that's really what Just War Theory is all about. Principles of discrimination, principles of just cause.

Like how good is the information? Do we know for sure that this action that we're going to take is actually going to address the problem that needs to be solved? So this is very it's a big part of annual culture. We talk about these things internally a lot. And I think we would only do something that we fundamentally believed would be better, more just for humanity.

Where do you get pushback on that?

I mean, there's a lot of pushback from, you know, people who don't necessarily understand why defense is important. You know, pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like, you can't be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That's just, like, not possible for humanity. And so I'm glad that people get to have these positions, these kind of anti national security positions where they can sink sink down into their comfy couch with their hot chocolate and talk about pacifism because it means that someone out there is willing to risk their lives to protect their ability to be pacifists.

So I'm all for it.

Do you have any cultural commentary on what's going on in America right now?

I think culture is really hard to predict. I mean, we've seen big shifts even in the last ten years that I don't think I would have expected. You know, there's a lot of surveys that show that for the first time in modern civilization, more men in the most recent generation in Gen Z going to church than women. It's like that has never happened before. Ten years ago, if you had asked me like, do you think Gen Z will have a rising church attendance and it will be more men than women?

I would've gotten that answer totally wrong. So I'm not sure that I would be able to predict this stuff necessarily. But I think you've probably seen the meme like hard times create serious men, serious men create easy I think that's kind of the moment we're in as people realize that, man, being serious is very important. And there's more important stuff out there than monkey JPEGs and AI slop. And I think it's an opportunity for people to step into a good quest.

And so I'm I'm hopeful at least that we're in a moment of a transition from slop to good questing.

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Paul Wurf, Lucky. Welcome to Sorcery.

Thank you for coming to NRL HQ, former Los Angeles Times Printing Net Press. So it's a lot of fun. I mean, you can see where we cut all of their machines out of the floor even. So, yeah, we just we we didn't actually rebuild the floor. We just went in with a grinder and cut out all of their machines.

And you're building something similar. Right?

Oh, yeah. Very similar. All kinds of cool stuff.

So I'd love for you to just maybe walk through one or two of your favorite things here.

Sure. So this is our public showroom. We have another one that's full of stuff that I can't show to anybody without permission from the government. But of the things that are in this showroom, one of the things we're most proud of lately is Fury. Okay.

So we were competing against Boeing, North Grumman, Lockheed Martin. And in the end, Andrew will beat all of them, which was really really gratifying to, you know, go from starting this company to going toe to toe with the guys who are legends of the fighter community and actually get selected to build something build build build something to fly. So it's an AI powered fighter jet that flies alongside manned fighters. So imagine if I had an f 35 pilot, he might fly with two or three or four or five of these alongside with him, extending his weapons webs forward, his sensors forward, and allowing them to engage in risks that you would never want a person to do. You know, there's a lot of ways to win a fight and live to see another day.

There's a lot of ways to win a fight and sacrifice pawns on the board. And autonomy means that you can do that without the ethical problems of, you know, just throwing away human lives.

And what do you think this costs you compared to what the government would cost them?

I think that we're, in general, much more efficient than the government. We've done a pretty good job. You know, Adderall's up. We we like to think of our of our approach as being a defense product company, not a defense contractor. Right.

That is we're not getting paid to engage in contracted work where they say, go and do, you know, this many hours of work to build exactly this thing. Instead, we're investing our own money in building what we think the right products are, and then we sell them to the government. So we wanna be going to the government generally with a product rather than a PowerPoint or at least a prototype instead of a presentation. And that's gone really, really well for us. It leads to way better incentive structures.

We make more money when we move faster rather than more money when we move more slowly. We make more money when things work the first time rather than more money when it takes 10 tries. And you can imagine which of those leads to better outcomes.

How far do you think we are from invisibility cloaks and masking? And I don't mean by radar and Sure.

You mean,

like, vis Physically. Visible Yes.

Yeah. That's actually a lot easier.

You think so?

Oh, yeah. Way easier. Like, it's it's a lot harder to hide from synthetic systems. So if you're talking about, like, radars or lidars or there's a large number of ways that you can see the world that are not just visible spectrum imaging. People are actually relatively easy to fix.

Know, Adderall has a project going way back, building optical camouflage for the ghost helicopter drone that we make. And it's essentially a projection system that looks at the target, looks behind it looks at where the target is, knows where you are, looks behind you, and it calculates the luminance and color values that you would need to match whatever is between your target you're surveilling and the background. So that might be the sky. That might be a mountain. It might be a cloud.

It's not that hard, and our eyes don't have very good resolution. You know, Ghost has a very narrow frontal cross section. And so it was actually designed partly to make itself very workable with optical camouflage. So building drones that are invisible to the human eye at the ranges that you're using them, It's not just, like, a hypothetical. Adriel did this in, like, 2019, 2020.

Yeah. Actually, let me see if I can find let me see if I can find something for you. I I might I might have a picture I can pull up of some of those tests. An invisible. Yeah.

Invisible drone.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. We're looking for an invisible drone right now.

So what we did is down here at the end, we had our drone with the system turned on and off. So this is a ghost drone, just the body of it. Like, you know, not with a without without without the the landing gear attached. And we put it up on this tripod, and we're testing it against the the truck and then also the sky because it's a very, different system. So we're moving up and down to view you know, to make it change color as the observer moved.

But this is with optical camouflage disabled. See how you can clearly see the body as the sky?

Mhmm. That's how

you can see this ever so slight disturbance? Yeah.

You can

see how it's perfect, and it lines up. And then we we it can't the goal wasn't and by the way, you'll see how the body is also copying the truck as well. Right. So in this case, it was turned off, then we turned it on. So it has to have part of itself be the sky, part of it be the truck.

It's a very, very difficult high contrast problem to do both at the same time. If you're all in the air, it's even easier. The point is visible spectrum optic camouflage is actually quite easy. But something like this would be trivially easily seen by, you know, an infrared camera, thermal camera, lay you know, LiDAR, radar. So the biggest problem with optical camouflage and the main reason you don't see a lot of money being put towards it in the modern defense space is it's not actually that useful.

It's useful against human adversaries who do not have any other technology to aid them, and those are not really the enemies The United States is focused on stopping these days. So, like, for example, you might notice ghost doesn't come with optical camouflage. All of our customers have been briefed on this. They've seen this. Their point is, Palmer, I'm not going up against a bunch of guys, you know, who are walking around with their naked eyes and nothing else.

These are people who are we are concerned about adversaries like Russia and China and Iran that are armed with very, very high levels of technology. And they're if anything, the opt the optocamouflage in some ways actually makes you easier to

So you don't think UIPs use optical camouflage?

To the you know, there's a lot of that we don't understand about these vehicles and what they are, where, or when they come from. But it is likely that whatever they are doing is us or a side effect or an artifact of what's going on. So, like like like, I've I've talked about this with people. They're like, well, you know, how come how come, you know, how come, like, sometimes they're invisible in certain spectrums? And my point is, well, like, what if they are not interacting with reality itself in a way you would expect?

Like, some of these things, when you see them, then they don't have any radar signature either. I don't know if that means they're cloaking themselves actively or if it means that just they do not exist even in the way that we think about physical matter. Yeah. I don't know if it's an active countermeasure so much as the nature of the thing itself. But, of course, there's so much that we don't know.

My current working theory is that they come from the past. So

Interesting. Okay.

Coming from the future is too hard. The physics just don't seem to work out. But if you think about it think about it in a certain perspective, like, there's a question of where they come from. Like, do they come from Earth? Do they come from nearby?

Do they come from really, really far away? Wherever they come from, you know, spatially, the question then is, okay, temporally, what is more likely that they happen to have come from this particular instant in time or the hundreds of millions or billions of years that existent prior to our existence? Yep. That that could be true if they were just, like, waiting around and then came over, you know, at some point. It could be the case if they are regularly surveying and have just been around for a long time.

You could imagine a world where maybe the Earth hosted advanced civilizations a billion years ago, and we just don't even know about them, and these are the remnants of that. I'm not betting on any of these. It's just that where where where would they come from geographically, there's a very, very long tail of time. And, also, there's ways to travel forward through time very quickly. You know, if I create a very strong gravity distortion, I can have subjective time inside of that bubble passing very, very slowly relative to the time racing by outside of it.

And so it's very believable that something from the distant past could come to our present, Not really believable that something can come from the future back into our present. So that's my that's my bet is basically, given that there's been a lot more time before now than now, just probabilistically speaking, I think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time. That's just my

Not saying I know, but I have some ideas.

I'm not saying I know what's up. I'm saying that is my current guess

Okay.

Based on what I know.

Interesting.

Mac Groove. Yes. Thanks for having me here. Where are we?

We are here at Androl's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California in Orange County, just South of LA. So we're about eight and a half years old now. So we were founded in early twenty seventeen. And our first office was a 5,000 square foot. I think it was 4,900 something, just under 5,000 square foot garage that used to be American Airlines storage facility for lost luggage.

So if you flew to John Wayne Airport and you lost your bag, American Airlines would store it in this garage and just leave it there until someone claimed it or or whatever. So it had it had mold on the walls. It had no bathroom. We had to put our own bathroom in. It had no air conditioning.

It had no ventilation. It was just a, like, storage shed that was where we where we got started. So we started on our first day with 10 employees, just the five the five cofounders of us and our first five employees, and just had a couple ideas. There's a famous picture of us brainstorming ideas of what to work on. It was just a bunch of ideas on the whiteboard, and that's what led to originally the Sentry Tower for border security deployments and then kind of expanded from there.

So from there, we then kind of expanded within Costa Mesa. We opened our DC office not that long after that have been kind of off to the races since then. So we're now just about 7,000 employees. Got about 34 or 35 offices around the world. Depends how you count a little bit of different buildings on the same campus, but thereabouts, and are really off to the races scaling, especially production side as we land some of these larger contracts and ramping the full scale production and getting out of just the, like, early r and d type of phase.

And what are we standing in front of right now?

We are standing in front of this is our XLUUV. In Australia, these are called ghost sharks. Here in America, they're just called the XL UUV. This is a fully robotic submarine. So no humans on board.

No no people can remote controlling, fully autonomous. So you give it a mission. You program some waypoints. You program a mission set of what it's supposed to look for, where it's supposed to drop payloads, when it's supposed to surface, and you send it out on its way and it goes and performs its mission completely autonomously. So these are designed at our office in Sydney, Australia, which I had the pleasure of setting up a couple of years ago when we first launched this program.

And now they are currently being manufactured in our our Sydney manufacturing facility that just opened. It's about 75,000 square feet and is capable of making dozens of these a year. And we'll be expanding production for them to our new facility in Quonset, Rhode Island, where we'll be making both our dive LDs, our smaller submarines, and these big guys for The US market. The dev test area here is a an area that is meant to break things. It's the blunt version of it.

Blunt.

Yeah. These guys work on figuring out all sorts of ways to break our products. So whether that's spraying it with saltwater, as in the case of our little chamber over here. I don't know how much you've spent time on boats, but saltwater eats everything. Everything.

It eats water. It eats it eats cables. It eats metal. It eats plastic. It eats leather.

It eats eats rubber. Eats everything. So when our products get deployed either on coastal environments or on boats or in the water.

In the case

of submarines, obviously need to work on a lot of that resiliency. So it's one of the test chambers they use for that. Drop testing over over voltage, under voltage, like all sorts of different part of what we use the anechoic chamber for is different kind of resiliency to jamming techniques and all

of that. In our lab in here, we've got test ovens, test chambers. So if

you wanted to bake a product, freeze a product, low humidity, high humidity, run it through cycles like that. This is where

you do that. We have

our vibe room over here. So if you wanted to, take our product and then shake it and see if connectors come out, see if the the different motion kind of causes things to fracture

over time. Vibe tables in here, and then in our corner or back over there, you

can kinda see we take a couple steps forward our battery chargers and dischargers. So if you wanna cycle the battery over and over and over again, get up to high charge, low charge, high charge, low charge at different kind of power settings, and really kinda drive the batteries to failure, which is obviously important for testing. We would do all of that in here. So Menace is a distributed command and control platform. So think of it kind of like having smart compute.

So if you wanna have AI sensors in the field and you wanna have the smartest possible sort of platforms for soldiers in the field to interact with, you need to have distributed compute along these lines. So we have very mobile versions of them here on these chassis, and then we have slightly less mobile versions of them in in that sort of frame. That is what's called our our our menace. We'll come around over this side. And then there's a variant of all of these that's a on on a larger platform that's called Titan.

We're partnered with Palantir on the Titan program for bringing their software onto our kind of hardware for for this this joint program with the army. So so yep. So here on the on the Menace platform, got all sorts of antennas and communication protocols around built in, big compute nodes in the back. You can kinda hear the hear the fans humming there. And then the whole idea is that there there are soldiers would be deployed out, and then that gives you a lattice node and lattice compute wherever you are in the world.

Mhmm. And then this also filters into the broader landscape of having soldier born compute. So like the whole notion of the IVAS program that we acquired from Microsoft spin out, it's now called I don't know what they called it now. SBMC, soldier born something something. I don't know.

They changed the acronyms every year to keep us on our toes. But that program was basically like, could you put a lattice node on deployed soldiers? So whether that's a wrist mounted, head mounted, glasses mounted, of AR type system, and then that's, of course, EagleEye. Yeah. So all of this ties together into that distributed ecosystem where compute, comms, security, all forward deployed with the soldiers.

Is it it's It's automatic. My favorite,

but this one this one's pretty fun too. So Do you wanna drive drive off road

a little?

You just

wanna take, you know

Is there an off road track? There's not, drive If

you drive right up here, right up through the through the lobby, and I can just bring it right around here. Park wherever you want. In

the middle of the road? You don't trust me? You

just did the same drive Secwor Hagstaff did.

Who'd did better?

Oh, I mean, I don't wanna get into political hot water here, but he jumped the curb and drove it in into the He did. Into the crowd for the speech. Yeah.

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