00:29:02 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[00:29:02] S1: Yep. Yep. I think people will soon realize that like basically, you know, the only way to defeat a drone is another drone and then there's gonna be this drone war where, you know, one side is gonna deplete all of their drones and then the other side is probably just gonna surrender. There's no point in fighting a like man on drone war. You'll lose, and when people know they lose, like they generally don't fight. [00:29:23] S0: That's one thing that I saw earlier today. You collect some footage when the operators like send it back, and I saw something that I just like, I don't know, never even occurred to me, is like a soldier getting targeted by a drone, turning around, and then trying to shoot at it before it blew him up. And you said that like 40% of drones get taken out this way or [00:29:45] S1: Something like that. [00:29:46] S0: Something like that? How is kinda like warfare evolved and the way that like people... Because I imagine like being that guy, I'm like what the fuck am I doing out in this field, you know, getting targeted by a drone?
00:29:56 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:29:56] S1: I think this is a good lesson in, like, contact with reality. Like, I'm sure if, like, before Ukraine, you sat down like a weapons expert, they would tell you about, like, oh, we're gonna do laser laser defense. The lasers are gonna work. You're gonna you're gonna use, you know, directed energy weapons to take out the drones. You're gonna hack the drones or something. You're gonna use AI to take out the drone somehow. I'm sure there would have been, like, a really, really complex, like, plan of what defeats the drone. When you look at, you know, reality, like, I saw this shotgun that came out, branded like Drone Buster AI or something like that. AI stands for advanced impact. It's just a regular shotgun, with anti drone rounds, because that is the most effective weapon system in taking out FPVs close range. And in war, have to kind of make do with what you have, and kind of the non optimal solution is is often what you have to work with. And and so now Ukrainians have mastered the art of, like, anti drone schools. Like, you know, infantry members, they'll they'll go to these schools, they'll learn how to shoot down a drone with with a, you know, an assault rifle that they have or a a... Their just... Their main their main rifle that they have. And, yeah, it's it's... You gotta make do with what you have. I watch a lot of, like, YouTube about how these weapon systems are used and it's it's it's really heavy stuff. Right? Like behind these videos, there's lives that are lost. It's it's really impactful, like heavy heavy content. But you learn a lot about the tactics. And obviously, you know, tremendous respect for the people that actually fight. They learn so much more, but you can learn a lot via just, like, watching YouTube. And and these these, you know, highly trained Ukrainian operators are insane. They'll hear an FPV, bang, bang, five bullets later, the the drone's taken down.
00:31:43 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:31:43] S0: Is there anything that you've taken or learned because you watched that footage that you just would never have figured out if you hadn't? [00:31:50] S1: 100%. I mean, like, half the features of our product are based on on those those videos. I think, like, watching users like put their rucksack down and get in position quickly to deploy the drone, that was one of the reasons we came up with, like it sounds simple, but color coding the antenna mounts. Like it's very important you get the antenna on in the right place. You don't want to be like, ah, which one goes to where? Reading some code like logos to... Screw that. Orange to orange. White to white. I think that was made very clear via like one of these videos. Things like how the the ground station displacement kit works, like being able to just super quickly plug in these connectors and making sure that they're keyed to work very carefully comes from video inspirations. And then also watching how like the... Usually it's not just like one dude with the drone, it's a team. So like two, three guys. Watching how the navigator talks over the shoulder of the pilot, we set up this like secondary screen. There's a port on our ground station so that you can do USB video. You can plug in your iPhone and use that or your ATAK device. Details like that have been absolutely uncovered via these YouTube videos. [00:33:03] S0: What other things are you guys making tweaks on, making iterations on to just improve the operator experience?
00:33:03 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:33:03] S0: What other things are you guys making tweaks on, making iterations on to just improve the operator experience? [00:33:09] S1: We recently redid the ground station software interface. There's like six different radios in the system that you gotta configure just right. There's different modes for these radios. We try and automate it as much as possible, but there's a lot of systems that go into... [00:33:27] S0: People are manually configuring six different radios every single time they launch? [00:33:31] S1: There are auto modes. But, yeah. Like, if you're an expert operator, you gotta mess with these different radios. And and we work very hard... [00:33:39] S0: Is it like mission specific? [00:33:40] S1: Yeah. They'll find out there's jamming in certain areas and then pick a certain mode. There are manual modes to things that you want to use sometimes. You might wanna change your car to to to manually shift gears, as an example. Or really, you should have a stick by default. But anyway, just how those how those, like, menus work out, they're so important. Like someone's life is in a balance on whether this menu is a good user experience or not. So we care so much about every every page. And that's just like one tiny example. How the drone interfaces with various other systems, like what battlefield management softwares we interface with make make all the difference in the user experience, and we care a lot about it.
00:33:40 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[00:33:40] S1: Yeah. They'll find out there's jamming in certain areas and then pick a certain mode. There are manual modes to things that you want to use sometimes. You might wanna change your car to to to manually shift gears, as an example. Or really, you should have a stick by default. But anyway, just how those how those, like, menus work out, they're so important. Like someone's life is in a balance on whether this menu is a good user experience or not. So we care so much about every every page. And that's just like one tiny example. How the drone interfaces with various other systems, like what battlefield management softwares we interface with make make all the difference in the user experience, and we care a lot about it. [00:34:21] S0: Is there anything that you can see is a product or project that you're definitely going to wanna tackle in the future, but are not going to tackle today because you just don't have the bandwidth or the necessarily, like, technical know how yet? [00:34:35] S1: Yes. Consumer photography drones. Okay. Right now, of American weapon systems, like, obviously... It's gonna sound obvious, but they're funded by taxpayers. Thank you, Ty, for your support of Bandit and Archer. You know, it is your dollars that you... [00:34:53] S0: I actually don't make money, so I don't pay taxes.
00:34:55 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:34:55] S1: Okay. Fair enough. Well, thank you my other friends for paying taxes. That sounds very obvious, like weapon systems are funded by the government. China has kind of like, transcended this to a certain degree. I, as a DJI customer, am funding China's military industrial base. You know, they make in China cargo ships. They're required to meet the PLAN, People's Liberation Army Navy, standards for military vessels. So when I buy that thing from China, I'm actually funding their navy. So it's crazy that they have, their entire military budget, but a good chunk of their military budget is actually funded by like American and other western taxpayers. That is is smart. We should start doing that. We've fallen so far behind that it's it's almost impossible. Competing with DJI, the world's largest drone producer, is nearly impossible. They own 70 plus percent of the world consumer drone market, and I don't know of another consumer company with a bigger advantage on all the competition than DJI. Like you look at an iPhone and, I don't know, a Samsung, and like you could see the difference in quality of product is like this much. To DJI, it's... DJI is the next competitor. It's insane. They're just so far ahead, and kind of building an American competitor to that takes time. We're we're not ready for that yet. I think it's gonna take a million drone factory first to get to the unit economics where that makes sense. But, yeah, my my answer to that is consumer drone products. That will will be a challenge one day. It's a great way to have credible deterrents. China will start buying them. They'll start putting cameras, pointing at their critical infrastructure, and that'll be a really interesting data source. Maybe I'm dreaming there, but having a consumer product is is is critical to maintaining credible deterrence.