01:29:29 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
[01:29:29] S0: Not at Depending [01:29:29] S1: on depending on how much you train. Yeah. Like, how how does it feel making this sort of technology? [01:29:36] S0: There is a big question about whether we wanted to do this before we started doing it. Like, you know, going and deciding to build lethal systems is a very significant decision and something that Olaf and I talked a lot about. To me, I've through my entire life believed that defense is very, very important, and, you know, that it is critical that America controls the most powerful defense systems versus, you know, our adversaries, and and so it's it feels like a fundamentally correct thing to be doing. But again, still a very intentional decision, sort of a decision that everyone needs to make on their own, but I I hope that more people become willing to do that because... It's one [01:30:30] S1: of these weird things where if no one does it, then you just fail. Yeah.
01:30:30 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:30:30] S1: of these weird things where if no one does it, then you just fail. Yeah. [01:30:36] S0: You you... Like, you can't just assume that other people are gonna do it. Like, a healthy society is one where there are many people willing to work on defense, but not that large of a percentage that has to. We should be in a position where we don't have to have a massive, you know, percent of our population doing this, but people actually get why it's important. And I think the get why it's important is what's slipped the most. And unfortunately, defense has become a bit of a political topic, and and, you know, there... There's, like, extreme political views that have that have elevated across, you know, it's just gotten worse and worse in America, like both sides kind of going to the extremes, and then within that, people wrapping up the idea of defense with these other ideologies and and sort of thinking it's like a a morally wrong thing to be to be doing. I think it's very important that people are able to voice their criticisms of the government and what the military is doing, but that driving decision that, you know, working on defense systems is somehow immoral is, I think Is dangerous. Dangerous. It's a Mayan virus. It's the it's it's not correct. And that that's an unfortunate reality that exists in the country today. So you sort of have like people who are vehemently opposed, you have people who are just not thinking about it, somewhat complacent, and those two percentage... Those two groups together are are too large of a percent of the population right now.
01:32:22 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:32:22] S1: Yeah. The way I think about it is you really want the the people that are building these types of systems to be, like, doing it for the right reasons. Mhmm. And I think, I don't know. I think you guys are. How do you think we as a nation sort of shift this mentality that we currently have where defense equals bad, thus, you know, we should do less of it when very clearly if you were not the military superpower, you don't stay in power? [01:32:49] S0: I think the most toxic point of view are the people in America who aren't pro America, so then they're not pro American defense. And that's a... An alarmingly large... Well, it's an alarmingly loud part of the population. It's probably not that large of a percentage, but that is a message that you can find very, very publicly, very clearly. So I'd say that's that's the that's the most dangerous one. I think logically, like, you know, if you're if you're looking at like politicians in DC, defense is a bipartisan issue. It's it's it's not, you know, it's generally very well supported on both sides of the aisle as it should be. It's the like very loud small pockets of the population that are, you know, distrustful of America or don't actually believe in what America stands for, why America exists. And, you know, it's not just in opposing defense, but I think that's the... That is the toxicity that drives a lot of it. [01:33:57] S1: What do you think... Like, in your own mind, what do you want America to stand for?
01:33:57 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:33:57] S1: What do you think... Like, in your own mind, what do you want America to stand for? [01:34:02] S0: A huge part of it is people being able to make their own decisions. And it's sort of an odd loop where people get to make their own decisions and, you know, have free speech, which is absolutely critical. And then you end up with the, you know, the folks who can sort of go down this path that have this this mindset of like, you know, the place that I live that enables me to have this freedom is, is bad for these ways. So maybe that's just fundamental to to America, like, maybe there will always be anti America people in America because we have such freedoms. Sort of a weird... [01:34:44] S1: Catch 22. [01:34:45] S0: Yeah. Catch 22. But, you know, America is is a place that values innovation. It values freedoms, it values democracy. It's not perfect, but I believe the world is fundamentally safer with America in the number one position. I think, you know, history supports that view, and I think we've, you know, America has contributed the most to humanity. Like, we have fostered such innovation and ability for people to go and just do things that we... We've driven humanity for the most. So as a, you know, person who really cares about technology, I think if you really care about technology, it's very hard to be anti America. [01:35:37] S1: I think a potentially good place to end it is how do you think that warfare is going to evolve over the next couple years, especially with the kinda, like, rapid change in technology?
01:35:51 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:35:51] S0: Neros has been a bit odd in the sort of defense startup space by not having, you know, an AI pitch. Sort of every, like, hot defense tech startup that's been funded aggressively by his VCs, maybe not every one of them, but basically all of them are are, you know, applying artificial intelligence to the problem. And that's like, they're actually like a lot of companies talk more about applying artificial intelligence to the problem versus what the actual outcome of that is. You know, Neros, we come from a drone racing background, it's pretty natural we'd focus on FPV drones. That was like the first thing we needed to do. We're super pro autonomy. We are we are building autonomy internally and we're working with partners on autonomy. The thing we care about though is is maintaining manual precision and human decision making. So I I believe that the reason why FPV drones have been so effective is because they give a human operator the most precise control of an object through three d space at a large distance. There isn't really anything else, especially in the in the cost category, where you can be sitting 20, 30 kilometers away and precisely navigating, you know, like inch level precision basically. It's it's a wild technology. It's it's like, you know, if you if you'd thought about it fifty years ago, it's like a sci fi capability, you know, it's basically Ender's Game. So but I think the the the importance of that actually sometimes gets overlooked in the in the rhetoric about, you know, autonomous drone systems. Everyone's thinking about the drone swarm, which will be important, but you can't you can't overlook giving why it's so important to give the operator ultimate control. Right now, there's no AI model that is better than a human pilot in basically every circumstance and dealing with the edge cases that are, you know, all across the battlefield. So a lot of folks have chased this idea of sort of end to end autonomous missions where you're doing object recognition and classification on the drone. You're basically saying like, here's the general area for the target, go find it, do object recognition, and then strike it autonomously. Problem with that is basically everything on the battlefield now is highly camouflaged and highly dynamic.
01:38:34 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
So all of these object detection algorithms fail pretty miserably, unless it's like tank driving down the road out in the open. [01:38:43] S1: Which is fucking obvious.