When you think back to Hell Week, what was the, what's the hardest part of Hell Week?

The hardest part of, uh, Hell Week, um, it's, it's all mental.

Uh, and so, 'cause it, I will tell you, Hell Week puts you into a situation where you just feel incredibly sorry for yourself to the point where it makes you wanna quit, right? And 80% of every class does quit, like, during Hell Week, um, because it makes you feel really bad.

It is, you know, called the...

You couldn't actually start BUD/S in Hell Week today because people would deem it as modern-day torture.

Um, and it is, it's just awful, right? It, uh, to the core.

And I, I would say, like, the worst thing is getting surf tortured.

That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, upwork.com.

... underappreciated?

Um, y- you know, it's funny.

I would actually say, you know, defense tech, quote-unquote, "didn't exist" in 2015.

It w- d- people couldn't even shun it if it didn't, you know, no one was talking about it.

Look, I'll, I'll tell you, actually, uh, fun, quick story.

Peter Levine from Andreessen Horowitz, uh, sits on our board.

I- incredible investor, also a Stanford professor.

This idea of sort of ubiquitous autonomous drone warfare making us safer, I, I, I have to say that for some folks, like, the vision of millions of drones flying around overhead can sound a bit terrifying.

the world in conflicts, and are they learning them?

Yep.

No, a- absolutely.

Look, I think there's two, two primary lessons.

Um, one is that, uh, the electronic warfare environment is gonna be, uh, uh, very prevalent, uh, in any type of hot conflict between China, Taiwan, the US, and, and allies in the region.

Uh, and that's to say that the very first thing, the very first thing the Russians did, the very first thing the Chinese do, the very first thing the US does when we go into, you know, these areas, we're going to, uh, they're gonna, China's gonna jam GPS.

They are going to jam, um, uh, uh, communication systems, right? And that, what that does is it, uh, it disables so many weapon systems that are reliant on it.

So what, w- what, what are the roles of drones in a blockade scenario, and how can they help Taiwan?

But, um, you wanna talk about the XBAT?

Yeah.

I'll, I'm happy to, to talk about the XBAT now that, yeah, now that we're talking about it.

Um, all right, so XBAT, just some background.

Um, Shield AI, when we think about hardware, like, we want to build...

Hardware's, y- you know, really effing hard to build.

Um, it is, because you're stuck with the design choices that you make for a long time.

But, uh, you know, one thing we didn't cover is the V-BAT flew 130 sorties so far in Ukraine.