E18: Future of War: Autonomous Ships & Race Against China

And when I say autonomous ships, we're talking about ships that are about 190 feet long, so a little bit more than half a football field on length. - No humans on board. - Like zero humans. One of the most important missions that we can do is these ships can actually carry and fire missiles. They're strike missions. And so it's not just a logistic ship that can move stuff between point A and B. (upbeat rock music) ♪ Farged in America ♪ (upbeat rock music) ♪ Farged in America ♪ - Welcome to episode 18 of Forged in America. As always, I am Rving Gandhi with my buddy, Al Goldstein. We are both entrepreneurs who have built and sold some businesses. Today we have an unbelievably cool episode. Rylan Hamilton is our guest. She is the co-founder of a company called Blue Water Autonomy that builds these unbelievable devices, you know, huge things for the Navy. He's going to get into. But prior to that, he had founded a company called Six River Systems that he sold to Shopify for $450 million. Prior to that, he was actually in the US Navy. So he's a super cool guy. Welcome to Forged in America, Rylan. - Good morning. Thanks for having me. - Rylan, thank you for joining us. I know we tried to kind of like schedule listening a few different times with all our conflicting schedules and that was always fun. But maybe my first question for you is, before you were in the Navy, you were an investment banking schmo like me, right? So I spent a summer as an intern at one of the top firms doing investment banking in 2001. And amazing experience. I learned a lot. I've surrounded by exceptional people. But I realized like, I did not want to spend the next five years behind a computer kind of in an office. It's just not how I'm wired. And then a couple of weeks after I came back to Boston for school, 9/11 happened. And there's very transformational where I said, what do I want to do with my life for the next like four or five years? And so I signed up for Officer Cannon School. And a year later, after kind of finishing that internship in investment banking, I was down in Pensacole, Florida as an Officer candidate trying to figure out this whole Navy thing. - Rylan, you know, Google Ventures has backed you. And I read the memo that the partner had written when they did it. And it's such a big vision. What is Bluewater autonomy? - So at Bluewater autonomy, we design and build autonomous ships. And when I say autonomous ships, we're talking about ships that are about 190 feet long. So a little bit more than half a football field on length. And these are ships that can cross the open ocean. And so there's a lot of kind of people developing autonomous ships or systems for the Navy. The ones that fly, they're kind of small drone boats. But we're developing a platform that can carry meaningful payloads, many, many, many thousands of nautical miles. And so we're one of the leading companies in this space. And we're actually building a ship for the Navy this year. - Like zero humans. And it's intentionally so because the minute you put one sailor on board, you add a ton of complexity and you raise the cost. You make it a lot harder to build. And you're not as willing to put it sort of into harm's way. And so we're taking a little bit of a leap. So we're saying we're gonna have zero humans on board from day one. So no bridge, no birthing, no optional area just in case. So it's a hard problem to solve, but it's a problem that can be solved. This is not a research thing. Like, hey, maybe in five years we'll solve this problem. Like we're solving it right now. - When you pitch the Navy and say, here's why you need this. What is the problem you're really solving? - Yeah, so we spent the last two years working with the Navy on this. And the Navy's pulling us in. So we're not trying to push something onto the Navy is saying, maybe you could imagine that you want this. Navy has very clear requirements for what they want. They've been testing and experimenting with all types of what they would call like unmanned surface vessels of many different sizes. And now there's like, you know, official program, there's requirement, there's a ton of money. They're gonna buy a lot of these ships over the next couple of years. And in fact over the next couple of decades. And so sometimes it has started up. There's only so many things you can control. Timing is kind of one of the harder things. But the timing for what we're doing right now is perfect. If we started this company five years ago, it would have been like too early. If we started this company now, it would be too late. And so we've got really lucky with the Navy. And part of it is because there's a very clear like con ops. There's a very clear requirement. They know exactly what they want. And when we design these ships, we design around the mission that we want them to do. And we design around the payload. And then we build a ship around that. You don't just build a ship and then figure out how you want to fit it into the Navy. So a couple of things. One, I think your point on timing is so critical. And I don't think I fully appreciated that when I was first getting going and just sort of got lucky on timing the first time around. But talk about maybe if you zoom out a little bit because what's going on right now with Iran, we have this massive build up. I think one of the largest naval buildups that we've ever had. Are there autonomous ships as part of that mix today? Should there be what does that look like 10 years from now if you have that kind of situation? When I first joined the Navy, my first ship was in the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And it is a small body of water and it is nasty. There's a lot of small boats and dows that were there. And so you really have to protect your kind of like multi-billion dollar platforms, whether the destroyers or their aircraft carriers. And so as we think about one of the missions for autonomous ships, these are kind of like platforms where you could carry like counter UAS systems. It's basically a pick-up fence around the aircraft carriers and the destroyers that are out there. Because we built it basically like this pickup truck for the open ocean. You can put these like novel payloads on the back of it. When you set out to build an autonomous ship, I mean, is everything bespoke? Can you use anything else? Yeah. So when we think about our company, we're optimizing on speed and schedule. And so it could be tempting to be like vertically integrated and do everything ourselves. But we're basically, we got really smart on the supply chain and we're picking best in class partners to move fast. So as an example, on the whole itself, we're working with a company called Domen. There are one of the largest international shipbuilders and ship designers that's out there. It's meant for the open ocean. It can cut through ways. It's very durable. It can handle up to 30 foot ways. So rather than redesigned a hole from scratch, we're taking their parent hole and then we're putting all of our technology on the inside. And so that's example where we don't need to be super bespoke. We don't need to be creative on everything. We need to definitely lean in on the technology side. There are certain parts where we're developing the tech kind of from the ground up where we say like the key up and there are certain parts where we're taking like, could designs or technology that already works right now and integrating it. So, Ryland, I think like 10 years ago or so, it would have been very, very difficult to raise venture capital for a defense tech. And the landscape has changed, you know, palantir. Androly, some names that people know really well. Can you maybe just lay out the landscape of what is allowed Google Ventures and others to get excited about defense technology? Yeah. So Kudos to companies like Androly and SpaceX and Palantir that show that you can take private capital, you can develop best in class technology and you can sell to the government and you can have big outcomes. So now I can say, well, how did Palantir do it? How did Androly do it? And I actually can hire people from those companies too. So we're leveraging and drafting behind those companies. There's also capital that's flowing into the space because there's examples of companies that came before us that have been very successful. Through one of my venture fund investments, I'm like a tiny, tiny investor in Androle. And Palmer Lucky has spoken at some of the conferences that I've been at. I'm a huge fan of what he's doing. He said, when we just started, we just started with things that we could kind of get off the shelf and put them together in a way that made the cost, you know, in some cases, like one tenth or even one 20th. And is there that situation in the Navy like is money no concern with the kind of contracts you're getting or is it just about you've got to hit the spec or is it both? What's really sort of exciting about what we're doing is that the new contract vehicles where basically the government can say, we're looking for a commercial offering. You industry tell us what you think we should do and we'll come and we'll say, hey, this is what we want to go build. And we think we, you know, it means about 80 to 85% of the requirements. It's not perfect. I'm sure we could always add this feature, this feature, this feature. But if you want it now, like it's ready and that's kind of what we're building right now for the Navy. It's like 85% of there. It's not perfect. But it really kind of prevents that scope creep. Literally, the government gave it and said, hey, here's 10 pages of what we're looking for. And then you tell us how you respond and what you go build. So they don't tell us if we need to build it with steel or aluminum, what type of engines, what type of hole. And so we had an opinion because we've been working on it for the last couple of years. And we proposed and we said, we think you want this. And we're like, yeah, that's pretty close. And so it takes out a lot of the blow. It takes out a lot of designs spirals out of it. And so we're building something that we'll have to government in like less than a year. And it's going to be a fraction of cost of what they paid traditionally for kind of platforms like this. And so I think it's a great model for the taxpayer. Has there been a significant change between administrations because you started the business under Biden and then Trump's come in. And obviously there's been significant news all over the place, but have you seen it on the ground? What we've seen as we've seen the administration move super fast into this space and partner with Congress. So for example, for our space like autonomous ships, and they would call it the medium on man surface vessel. There's also small on man surface vessels. So think for own boats, but there's over $2 billion for just our class of ship more than kind of the small on man surface vessels, more than like the unmanned submarines. And we had no inclination of this when we started this company two years ago. And so we've seen like we originally I was thinking like a five year kind of plan or something like that. And now it's going to be compressed into like two years and we've got to move super fast to take advantage of this opportunity. Do you think the fact that the Secretary of War can bench 315 as showcased on multiple social media forum? Does that correlate with the speed that they're moving? I don't ask me how much I could bench. So let's have your baby tears. I think within moments of Hegsat like finishing that said, Al had the video. He was sharing it widely and he was quite right. What I want to ask. Can actually just speaking of this Secretary of War, he's on he's on a tour right now actually visiting a lot of companies like ourselves right now. So he's on the front lines. He's with the people. And so if you talk about engagement, a lot of times like the most valuable resource that any of us have is our time. It is. It's not capital. It's not anything. It's like, where do you spend your time? And so right now the current administration and the current leadership within the Department of War is spending their time with some of these defense tech companies. And it's really powerful because they're saying you matter. We're not just spending all of our time with very like impressive companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Huntington Ingalls. Those companies are very capable. But you know, if you look at the time about where the administration is spending it, they're also spending it with this next wave of companies that are coming into the ring. Well, I think there's, I think there's just a key point there of just access. And this is not really a political point. But why does startups win when big companies don't? It's like big companies have all these gatekeepers and all the information get fed up through these silos. And you know, it startups, you have very qualified CEOs like you that are on the ground that are actually like me, the meeting with customers. And I think that's something for future administrations, hopefully to learn is that that's trying to mitigate those gatekeepers. And I think like when I started my business, there was a giant multi billion dollar incumbent that basically everyone said was impossible to displace. And I find myself in so many meetings with customer, customer where they would basically say, here are the five things that if you guys do, you'll basically get the business. They did not think we could do it. And most importantly, they didn't think that we could do it with the speed that we did it because to your point, these monsters like Lockheed and Raytheon, while great, probably have an unbelievable bureaucratic slow structure. Did you find some element of that when you got started? Yeah, and maybe I'll take us a little off script, but last night, I don't think we have a script. I know. It's going nuts here. Okay. So last night, there was some posts on social about Jack Dorsey laying off like I think 40% of this company. This box, I rocked. I think it used to be called Square. It's called Blok now. So 10,000 employees and now it's going to be 6,000 employees. And they're doing it in a very graceful way. They're giving people sovereigns and all that. But I've worked for some amazing companies. I've worked for Amazon, I've worked for Shopify. But what I've learned is that more people does not correlate directly to more velocity. And I think what we're seeing now is that agile and smaller teams can move a lot faster with modern day AI tools. And we're seeing it here. I mean, the pace of development, and if you put two or three people in the right tool set and you don't put any boundaries around them, they can move it 10 times what they could before. And so that's what gets me super excited. We're not a massive company right now with thousands and thousands of people. But we have the best engineers that I've worked with before that have been able to crude. We're all on the, most of us are on the East Coast right now. You pair it with the right tools and we don't have like, you know, artificial boundaries that are set and we're moving in an incredible pace. So, Ryland, so I assume you've seen the Citroen research and then Siddale's got sort of the counter piece on where's AI going and our kids going to have jobs or are they all going to be, I don't know, out there looking for purpose. But where do you sit on this? You think block, laying off 40% of their people, is that because they're seeing that much value in AI or is it because Jack Dorsey's prior company was Twitter and then Elon bought Twitter and laid off 70 or 80% of the people before the whole LLM revolution. And so is it that those companies were just pretty inefficient to start with and AI ends up being an excuse for companies making hard decisions they should have made earlier? Yeah. So I think generally big companies just inevitably become inefficient. They're just pockets of people that just aren't necessarily driving a lot of velocity. You find that like 10% of your employees create most of the value that's out there. So I think what we're seeing is that companies are realizing that like, there's an opportunity now for whatever reason. Maybe they want to be more efficient. Maybe they over hired during COVID or whatever to make big changes and then the markets are rewarding them right now. And I think SaaS is under a lot of pressure. I think going back to kind of like the broader meta point, there are a lot of problems that need to be solved in our world today. And so there's no lack of opportunity. I just don't see that we're going to have 20% of unemployment with people sitting around not trying to be productive in our economy. I think that's one of the great things about the United States is we have this capital XS society and there's tons of opportunities that out there. When the iPhone first came out, no one ever thought they were in app economy and companies that would be leading with apps and be multi-billion dollar companies, companies like Uber, that were enabled because you have the iPhone in apps. And so I think the same thing is going to happen with AI that I don't see this doomer kind of like view that there's going to be massive unemployment and kind of like all the wealth and resources is going to go to handful of people that invest in the right AI companies or invest in video or something. Well, I think it has literally become a Rorschach test because last week that first thing went viral and I felt like all of my friends that I know are kind of the doomers were gleefully sharing it saying, look, can you imagine a world in which there's eight or 10% unemployment and GDP is shrinking because that's what it said in there. And so that I could see kind of who was like into that narrative. And then when the counter narrative came out, you kind of had people sort of battling back saying, well, here's the other side of it. I personally am with both of you guys. I think that it's going to be a world that is much better than we're in right now. But just to give it some air time, how many people work at the Navy today? Like how many sailors? Oh, something like 300,000 or something like that. Oh, the USA hundreds of that. It's hundreds of thousands. Let's say, let's say, I guess my question then is, is there with the rise of, say, blue water and any number of autonomous situations, will there be a shrinking of the number of humans that the Navy requires? So let me just ask, I actually just looked on chat and it's 345,000. I was like, I hope I'm not, or I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to opt out of magnitude. So like, your class, yeah, you're good. All right. I'll say this, our Navy is at a moment right now where we need more sailors. We need more platforms that out there. And so there's not a lack of opportunity. There's no like, hey, let's go cut 40% of the workforce because we're good in the world. We have a very, you know, a peer competitor China that has a very capable Navy that has as much time as with the waters we do. We still have the best Navy in the world, but we can't be complacent at all. It's as 200 times the shipbuilding passie of the United States Navy. And so 200 times, try to build 50% of commercial ships. These stats are crazy. It's actually more, it's something like 232 or something, but like, it's 200 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States. And so we need to change, like, you know, and the Navy realizes that they need to like, you know, break itself from the status quo and look to companies like Blue Water Autonomy and others for like, you know, to bring in some new technology and some new ways of doing business with the Navy. And so I don't think there's a moment like a SaaS company where you can see like headcount reduction. In fact, the Navy can't hire enough sailors for the existing ships that are out there. But do I see our Navy increasing to like 600 sailors, 600,000 sailors over the next 10 years? I don't. You can see the kind of keeping like maybe the count kind of flat because that's a number of people that we can recruit every year and keep within the force. And so we need to think of ways to basically extend the capabilities of the fleet without necessarily just hiring more people. And so that's where I think some of these autonomous, you know, ships come into place where we can do the same missions. We don't have people. But like when I was in the Navy 20 years ago, one of my first ships was pretty old as the steam ship. We had, I don't know, 80 to 100 engineers that were basically maintaining the plant and all the systems on the ship. And for 24 hours a day, we'd have one, two sailors, but one sailor per switchboard, one sailor watching a switchboard. Just in case anything ever happened, they'd be able to turn knobs on the switchboard and kind of re-architect the electrical plan. You had another sailor who's basically per boiler watching a boiler to make sure there's always a flame on the boiler to make sure it's operating. It's a miserable job, but it's just a job that has to be done. And so there are a lot of, now the ships today are a lot more modern and so we don't have that. But like those are the jobs that we want to replace. Those are the jobs where we don't need people standing watch all the time in engine rooms. And so these are ways that we make jobs easier for people. So we can have the people do the important things and then automation technology do everything else. Thailand, can we maybe pivot to China a little bit? As you think about a potential conflict with China over Taiwan, with administration or prior administration has told some of these senior tech executives that China would take Taiwan before 2027. Who knows if that's true or not true? But in that hypothetical scenario, what is the state of play? So there's any conflict over Taiwan has to be really nasty and worthy of way team, which is really hard. We're many, many thousands of miles away. I think the Taiwan straights is about 80 miles or something like that. So it's not very far. What we've been doing is we've been creating what you call a hellscape where we're using a lot of different types of drones and different technology to create these speed bumps and create deterrence. And so it's going to be nasty regardless of what happens. So for what we're doing for our platform, our platform's not necessarily something that you're going to go jam the Taiwan straight with. Our ships cost many tens of millions of dollars. They're made for the open ocean. They're not an expendable drone boat that costs a couple hundred thousand dollars and maybe carries an explosive on it that's meant to swarm attack Chinese ships trying to cross the state of Taiwan. I think there's a lot of inspiration for stuff that's happening in Ukraine and their companies focused on those types of vessels. So we're basically trying to create a hellscape, but I hope we don't get into any conflict over the next couple of years. We're all big fans of Musk, obviously. And he has said some pretty incendiary things about potentially how much waste we have going on in the government. And when people talk to him about D.O. Dignian and it's a poking a trillion dollars in span and he said, it's probably half. Probably half of that money is in some way being squandered away. Do you now have supply into that and getting to know some of these people? Do you buy that? Could it be true? Yeah. So I think since World War II, we've basically contracted the Department of War, not to necessarily be the most efficient organization, but to be a very predictable organization that can make sure that our own forces have the best technology and the best platforms to do their job. And so we think in five year cycles, we think in kind of taking out as much risk as possible. So it's very predictable in terms of what we're doing. So while our guy and Mrs. Lussur is cost $2 billion, our aircraft carriers cost over $10 billion. They are just the best warships that are out there, like hands down. Like there's nothing better that's out there. However, we just have to pay a cost for that predictability and for that certainty. However, we're getting to a phase where we need to take a little bit more risk. There are more threats that are out there. And so we need to like accept risk and take out some of the inefficiencies that are in our system and just kind of re-architect it in a different way. So I think it's happening, but I think Elon trite in the same way that like any big organization, whether it's like in IBM or someone like that, like they're just not the most efficient organizations, but they know how to do the job pretty well. Well, given that your ships are going to end up, you said costing many tens of millions and you've raised 64 million. So how does one go from zero to one in terms of demonstrating efficacy, you know, like a pilot program, what do you have going on with the Navy to use that capital? Yeah. I think it's a beauty of a startup is you always have constraints and then you need to like work your way outside of this constraints and be very creative. And so for us, when we started this company, you know, we didn't have a lot of money, but we had a thesis and we said at a first principles, we think our Navy needs autonomous ships because they can do the missions at a much lower cost. But like when we're a handful of people, like just outside of Boston working on this, there's no way to make any sense versus to go just build the first ship and see how it worked. And so we had to think, we had to think like, how can you, we actually use the terminology, how can you crawl, then walk and then run? And so one of the things that we've done is to do risk a lot of the technology is we basically built a test vessel that's just outside of Boston. It's actually out of new Bedford, so the Bedford actually has the largest commercial fishing fleet in New England. So we benefit from that whole ecosystem. I can't comment on specific contracts with the Navy or something like that. But what's great about the Navy is when they want something, they'll actually pay for it. And so like what my experience in being in other industries and like B2B and warehouse automation is sometimes like when we create the first mobile robot, automated warehouse in a different way and it's collaborative. And we talk to like customers like DHL and GXO and Walmart and Target and others, they're like cool technology. We like your approach, but we know you're early and so we'll pay like half like you got to subsidize them with some of the private dollars. But I think what's different in kind of data G is like if the government wants something, they will actually fund the kind of the build out of that first. And so it actually allows us to extend our capital a lot more and spend our capital on the technology development. And then when we get a different dollar to spend that on actually building the prototypes. And so I think we have a lot more leverage than what's obvious to people on that. So given where you are today, you still need to raise probably significantly more capital I imagine, right? Is there a next step where I don't know, these series A's and these they all blend to me now where I remember when I raised my first series A, we raised I think eight million dollars. We were really excited. We raised eight on 20 pre. And now we just had on this amazing guest who was our last guest in episode 17, he raised 130 million in a series A. So you know, the world's changed. So what is the next step for you? What are the types of investors that make the most sense? We raise an announcer series B, a series A last year, there's a $50 million around led by Google Ventures. You know, I always think about raising money in terms of hitting key milestones and then raising the next round and just keeping that momentum going over time. And so it's not hard to figure out when we'll raise a series B after we hit these milestones. And then we'll have a series C and a series D. And so we will raise a fair amount of capital over time because we're going after a really big opportunity. But we'll just kind of measure the kind of pace of capital that we'll raise over time. Can you talk about just Google Ventures and Google a little bit? Alan and I are small investors in a humanoid company that has Google DeepMind and Google has famously so many moonshots. So and when I read the memo that they had written, it sounds like the partner had worked with you for many years in the past. You can just talk about them generally. Yeah. So I just want to say, if Google and AlphaBet and the Google Ventures, Google Ventures is a venture arm. Google is the LP within Google Ventures, but Google Ventures operates like pretty independently of Google. But the partner who led our series A, his name is Dave Michello, like myself, he actually served in the military right out of school. And then we worked together at this company called Kiva Systems that became Amazon Robotics. And so we've known each other very well for the last 15 years. But Dave really leaned into Bluewater, Tommy. He saw the opportunity before others saw it. Anyway fast. And also I think for Google Ventures, they've seen the impact of Tommy's having in a bunch of different industries, including Waymo. And so I think, you know, Google and Google Ventures has this like long term view on technology and they know it will happen and they know when it happens as a huge impact on society. And they saw the same opportunity here. And so for Google Ventures, we're not just like an autonomous warship company. We're in a ton of a ship company. Our first customer is the United States Navy. Dave, a huge need. And we are going to go focus on them for the next couple of years. If you take a step back, everything we're building in-house, all the different technology can be applied to the whole maritime industry. And so over time we want to kind of get into the commercial space and take our technology and build more efficient ships that can lower the cost of moving payloads from point A to B, whether it's for naval or commercial applications. And Google Ventures sees that vision and they're a great partner on that journey. So Riley, maybe it's a good time to pivot just more to your background because one of the things we love talking about is this idea of forged in America is how did you get to this point? Obviously, you're doing some amazing stuff now, raising capital, operating at this very high level. But you have to get there somewhere to your point of crawl, walk, run. So you're in the Navy. You talked about that. At that point, were you already thinking about building a company and actually that's pretty daunting? Like, how do you get from there to the civilian life and start to build? Yeah. So when I was in the Navy, I married my college sweetheart and we then moved back to Boston where I grew up and she grew up too. And I went to graduate school. The last thing the world I ever thought was that it'd be an entrepreneur and I'd start companies. But I also knew going back to my experience kind of being an intern at investment banking firm that I didn't want to just go into sort of like a traditional service kind of role because they could be, you know, I went to business school and you looked a lot of people graduating from business school and the top jobs were investment banking consulting. I don't think those are the top jobs now, but they're still like, you know, various strong career paths coming out of business school. But I want to do something different. I just knew my mind was wired in a different way. Why did you decide? And I know a lot of military guys end up going to business school as a reset, but why did you decide to do that versus just go back to the workforce? Yeah. I think one of the hard parts about people transitioning from the military into the workforce is that a lot of employers don't know what to do with you. It's really hard for a lot of employers to kind of like put you into a role where your peers are people who have been in that company for the last three or four years. And so I think what business school does, it kind of levels the playing field. It brings you up to speed on all kind of like the corporate jargon. It gives you a tool set that can complement all the leadership experience. You learn sales motion. Exactly. And then you go to these job fairs and people are like, great, you're in the military perfect. And this person was in CPG and this person was in financial services, but they look at you all the same. And then they have these development programs for people, you know, for instance, got an MBA. And so I think the graduate programs like an MBA are an amazing transition tool for people getting out of the military who want to get then get into the corporate world. I was in I was in Kellogg getting my MBA 99 2000 and I'm older than you guys, which is, you know, wonderful. You look great. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I felt like you have on there. It's all holography. But the point is that we had a number of guys who had just come out of the military. And I remember when we were starting doing these group projects, their experience would just blow people out of the water in terms of like getting things done. And I found it to be a really cool thing. And my question for you is having been having done it. And now you know, built these businesses. What is your general view, societally, about the value of being in the military? You know, for some period of time as just a life enhancement, our last guest was from Israel. And you know, everyone there is in the IDF. You know, my kids are ninth and seventh grade. And my wife and I talk about it like, would we let him do less point or be in the military? Like, what is your just like big picture of you? Yeah. I mean, I wish in our country, I don't want to say it's mandatory, but I wish a significant percentage of people coming out of college, you know, chose a path of national service for release a couple years. And the military might not be the only, you know, obvious for everyone or the right fit for everyone, but just some path of national service. So it's less about how much money you make, what your LinkedIn profile looks, or it's just about serving people and giving back and having a humbling experiences and then going to professional world. And I think for instance in Israel, like I love hiring, you know, people who are working even with people who serve in the IDF because they're focused, they're determination. It's just like, it's remarkable. But I think for people who serve in the military, it's just, it's a great experience, especially for people like my oldest son right now, he's actually, he's graduating from high school, he's going to the University of Wisconsin, he's a rower, I'm super excited for him, but I can relate a lot to him because he doesn't know what he wants to do. He doesn't know if he wants to be in sales, he doesn't know it being finance, he doesn't know if he starts a company. And so I think sometimes the military can be a great kind of on ramp into your kind of professional life where you don't know what you want to do, but you're guaranteed to have an amazing experience, you're guaranteed to work with amazing people. And especially for people who grew up in like the coast, the like United States is very broad and they're people like you work with people from all over. And it's just like I think it broadens your whole like view on life and our nation. And I think it's just a strong foundation for when you get out. And so for me, when I was 22, I did not know what I wanted to do. I never thought it'd be an entrepreneur. I joined the Navy for four years, I went to graduate school. I still didn't know what I wanted to do, but I had this whole tool set for myself, which has allowed me to be relatively successful since coming out of graduate school. And I think it's just, you know, I think that probably resonates with a lot of young people who are like, I don't know what I want to do. I'm 22. I mean, I guess I could go into investment banking, that's what all my friends are doing, but I don't even know if that's the right thing. And then you get stuck in this kind of like corporate kind of wheel, where it's hard to get out, whereas I think the military just gives you time to kind of like develop really important skill sets, but give yourself a lot of optionality for when you're older and you figure out what you want to do. Well, I got a drink last night in Chicago with a very senior investment banking partner, MD, who was basically saying they're not going to be hiring anybody because of AI, whether, you know, whether, whether, I think we all like joked about the fact that they probably are overreacting and then, and then they're going to have to like come back in a couple of years. But so maybe, maybe people will have to follow a different path anyway because those places are all adjusting. Well, I told my niece literally turned 22 a couple of weeks ago and we were on, we were in Park City and I told her I said, this is one of the hardest ages that there is because she's graduating from Indiana. She's got a job deciding, do I want to go back and live with my parents or do I want to get a place and what does the next few years look like? And, and, you know, back to the military angle, I think that one of to Ryland's point, one of the huge benefits that something like that provides for younger people is structure, that you don't have to worry and let's say, let's say you did one of the academies for instance or you did Roxy or you did any number of ways to get into the military. You know, from 22 to say 25 or 26, you're going to be stationed around the world doing all of these things that gives you this experience and so many people then land at business school. They land at law school and so personally, I just think in this era of a very unhappy young people and a lot of mental health challenges and a lot of like SSRIs, like I am just very big on helping these kids realize they don't have to go save the world when they're 20. Well, Ryland, we've talked about national education or jackprop and thought about this before, but I think, you know, when I got out of school, the skill sets that you wanted to learn, if you didn't go into the military, we're like, let's say you wanted to get an investment banking. How do you create a P&L and a balance sheet and a cash flow statement? How do you look through financial filings and figure out like, you know, what the right information is to put into that spreadsheet? How do you create a pitch book and a PowerPoint and how do you create like cap tables and all this different stuff? I don't actually think those skills are as important anymore because I think we're coming into an age. I think what the skills that you get in the military could be super relevant. How do you operate under pressure? How do you have extreme attention to detail? How do you know to work with different people? How do you know how to deal with like difficult situations? How do you deal with complex-- You don't hire your team. They say here's your team in the military. Yeah, how do you, yeah, how do you lead people? Like, when I first got into the Navy, I was like, who raw, go United States. And I really, it didn't resonate with my team. They're like, honestly, Sarah, like what we want to do is like, we want to, you know, initial day at 3 p.m. and just go home while we're in port. That's what matters to us. So if you tell us exactly what we need to do so we can go home at 3 p.m. we'll do whatever you want. But if you tell us what to do and we can't get home at 3 p.m. because the chief engineer is kind of can say you need to do even more stuff than like we're not going to be motivated. And so I think it's just like understanding people putting yourself in the position. But those-- that's an example of where like the military treats you like, give-- puts you in a manager position like right away and you've got to figure out what motivates people and how to communicate with them. Have you seen some challenges? Because I've worked with a lot of military guys and generally it's been a phenomenal experience. I have seen just a bit of a challenge from folks that are used to structure where basically your-- your folks, your employees in the military, they can't just like not show up to work, they can't leave. Whereas obviously in our free employment at will culture, people have to choose to be part of your team. So you hire your own team but they have to be motivated to be part of your team and they can leave anytime they want. Yeah, so-- I mean, when I was on a ship, I think about like a small business. You're basically operating in the middle of the ocean and you've got a supply chain department and operations department, a combat department and engineering department. And you're in the middle of the ocean. And so while there's structure at the end of the day, you have to make sure that you can get your mission done. And so you're always dealing with these ambiguous kind of situations for something broke and I need to go figure out where the part is. What's wrong? You can communicate with the captain or all this and so you're just problem solving all the time and you have to solve the problem. You can't go, well, we have an engine that's down. I don't know, what do you want me to do? Like it's just like not acceptable by any means. And so I think, you know, a lot of people have this problem solving mentality where there's a problem, there's a solution, you're very direct, there's no filtering, there's no polishing, it's not like, well, I hope we can fix it. It's like, here's like exactly what we're going to do. And I think that translates really well into the business world where there's always ambiguity, there are always problems, but you don't go to your boss and be like, there's a problem and like, you tell me boss what you want me to do. It's like you have to come with an answer. It might not be the right answer, but at least you're coming with something that, you know, that you can use to kind of figure out what the best answer is. But one of the things that I think just went so wildly wrong in this country was this veneration of and obsession with the four year college degree where people started to say, well, if you work in HVAC or you're an electrician or you're a welder, that is somehow worse than if you go to a four year university that, you know, is number 180 in America that all it does is give you all this debt and it does not come with the job at end of it. And I've been so happy to hear recently the data that with all the AI in the data center buildouts, you have electricians that are making 300, 400, 500 K and, you know, there's real copper wire. You can't, you can't automate that, you know, immediately. So I think that in the military, I am assuming that, you know, you're getting your hands dirty. You are doing the thing, you know, and I think that that's also just a really practical thing. So our kids are not just keyboard warriors. Oh, great. So when I was in the Navy, my first job was an electrical officer and so things would break and I'd have to go down to the things that were broken with, you know, an electrician. And we'd have to figure out how to go fix it. I have to understand like what was broken, what her approach are, what the part we needed for and so it's very hands on, roll up your sleeve type job. And it translate really well as I've gotten to robotics where I've never been a desk person just behind a desk doing spreadsheets and PowerPoints and I can do those things. That's great. But I've been like, you know, very connected to the physical world. And so I think your points spot on that like, I think a lot of jobs in the future will be very connected to the physical world and the jobs where you're just behind a computer, just trying to like move information back and forth and coordinate will become less important and the people who have physical world experiences more. And so going back to my son, like, you can do, you know, this summer is going to be in construction. That's perfect. Like interact with the physical world. I'm not sure if you're going to be in construction for the rest of your life, but I want you to like understand how you build a house and how that all comes together. And maybe you want to make that a career and that's, that's great. But like what I don't want him doing is being, you know, behind a computer, just doing data entry all day long because that's not a valuable skill set anymore. I want my kids to deal with conflict in the world and because that is the way the world works. Well, the thing that has just drive driven me and Al not just, I mean, we, it's partly some of the probably started this podcast is to create more conflict at home. That's why we already have that. Are we trying to avoid conflict by going to work every day? Well, seeing what is going or what was particularly going on, you know, when my kids were in third, fourth, fifth grade, where it was almost an obsession of asking these kids, are you sure you're okay? Are you sure? You're not okay, right? That is the reciprocal of how you become successful in the world. And I think that Alan and I both, you know, have been very, very passionate about if, you know, like when we take trips together and one of the kids' wines or whatever, make an example of the fact that we are not going to placate to your nonsense, like period. And there was another tweet that went around a lot in the last few days, which is about research around parent-kid relationships and kid outcomes when you have more discipline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was that, I think it was an article in the journal. Yeah. And it's just like, and when I say, it's not that I want my kids to deal with conflict, I want my kids to understand that the world is not designed to, to, you know, do what they want. And it's for them to adapt and to, if you want to poke the world and change the world, but I think this is, again, back why I'm such a pan of the military. Bunger has this unbelievable line that I constantly tell my kids when they complain. Like, you know what Charlie Munger said? He said, don't tell people about your problems because 90% of people don't care and 10% of people are happy that you have them. So anyway, right, Ryland, so you're, you're a business school, you're a Harvard business school and you're trying to figure out what you want to do. What happens next? So the real story is I look into all these like professional service jobs and I realize again that's not my calling. I look back at my experience in the Navy. I love being hands on. And so I got so interested in startups. I joined a company that was called Run My Earned At The Time. It ended up becoming tax-gravity. First full-time employee there. So this is like the app economy and I talked to my dad and my dad's like, how big is the market really to like, you know, basically connect people over an app to do different types of things. And the sort of errands that that company was doing at the time was actually driving people between different locations. So we're doing like Uber like tasks before Uber was doing them. But the CEO and founder ended up moving the company West Coast and so I was in Boston. And that was actually 2009 and that was actually not a great time for the economy. I ended up joining an amazing company called Vista Print, which was one of the first companies that actually figured out how to make a lot of money online. So creating and printing marketing material for small businesses, including business cards. But then I got recruited to this company called Kiva Systems, where I worked with Damien and Kelle from Google Ventures and I was like, business cards are pretty cool. You can make a lot of money, but robots are a lot cooler. And so I timed it well. I was a relatively early employee at Kiva Systems before they're bought by Amazon. So the company, the first company you founded was the Six River Systems. So I took that experience from being at Kiva Systems that they got bought by Amazon and became Amazon Robotics. And I spent two years after the acquisition, basically scaling that technology to where Amazon can now offer things like, you know, next day delivery, today delivery and prime. And so I had an amazing experience in Amazon. But then I saw the technology was evolving really quickly. Took that experience, took some people from there. In fact, one of my co-founders was also at Amazon Robotics and we started a company basically making next generation mobile robots to automate everyone else's warehouse that's outside of Amazon. And then we sold it to one of Amazon's competitive shop five four years later. Oh, how much capital do you raise along that journey? So we raised $45 million and we sold it for $450 million. Okay. So by any account, that is just a utter home run. And so did you feel like when that exit happened and you got the wire and like, did your life change in a fundamental way that you kind of got worried that you were going to go lay on a beach forever? So I thought about, I'm going to send them out and I'll tell you that. I'm very excited. I was so jazzed to go work for Shopify and to go work for another tech company. And we're so mission driven and we saw so much opportunity. And then right after the sale COVID happened. And so it was definitely, it did not feel like I was on the beach. I felt like we had a lot of ownership for the problem at hand. We had capital. And so we spent the next couple of years really kind of grinding it out to kind of go scale that system. And so when I left our technology was used in over a hundred warehouse as we had many thousands of robots and we upgraded them over the air overnight without people touching the robots. So I was really excited to kind of be a part of that journey. And it wasn't until a couple of years after the sale that I left and I really got to take a moment to kind of decompress and spend a little time on the beach. Okay, decompress and take some time on the beach. But at some point in that alchemy, let's go start an autonomous ship company. I mean, that is a choice that a lot of people don't make when they've already had a significant exit. And you know, you know, Musk has a great quote, starting a company is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. Right. It's hard. There is no two ways around it. You chose to go back into the system and to sell into one of the most kind of Kafka-like organizations, the American government. You know, why did you decide to do that? Yeah. So I took some time and I realized that like I was still restless and then, you know, none of my friends were playing golf like Monday through Friday. And so I just found myself having coffees and zooms and just connecting and talking different people. And once I kind of reset a little bit, I found that I had the energy to do one more thing. And you know, I think if you're, you know, if you want to become investor and you raise a fund, you've got a 10 year journey ahead of you. The same thing is if you started a company, you've got a 10 year journey ahead and you can't say, I'm going to start a company and like, oh, if I don't like it in a couple years, I'll leave. Like you really have to be committed. And I didn't really think I'd actually have conviction or find something that could really kind of get me going and have that same conviction because, but when I started talking to people, I found, you know, I was talking to people like, like, Andrew, and I was like, oh, you can start a company and you sell things into defense. And I was like, well, I was in the Navy and I started looking into how the Navy was adopting autonomous systems. And I looked into this kind of like this class of shift that like no startups were working on at the time. I know I have one more startup in me. And if I'm going to start something and if I'm going to chew glass like each year, I might as well, you know, make sure I optimize on impact and doing something that I personally care about, then no, we'll have impact on our nation. We'll have an impact on the world. And so it doesn't hurt to aim high because it's going to be hard work regardless. And so I got really jazzed about this category. But it took me like six months of research. And when you kind of look at just, you know, at the time, all the public information that out there, there weren't a lot of really positive signals. But it wasn't until we started talking to like key decision makers like in the Navy. We talked to people who would let just left the Navy and done forces on. And they're like, this category totally makes sense. The technology is not there. The Navy is investing some other platforms. They're like good for prototypes, but they still need a chase boat. And so if you have an autonomous ship with a chase boat with 10 people on it behind them, it kind of takes away the whole business case of not having people on the ship. And I said, you know what? Like I can raise the capital. I can hire the best people to go after this. I understand the customer. And so that's when I really built up the conviction. But it wasn't like one night or something. I said I'm going to go do this, but I built it up. But clearly you have a ton of domain expertise. You've been successful before. If you hadn't been in the Navy or if you hadn't had that prior success, do you think that this would have been possible or not? I think it could have been possible. But I think because I understood the customer really well to help build up conviction. And because I'd built companies before, I kind of knew like how to sequence in terms of raising capital and hiring different people. And so I feel like at this point, I'm moving a lot faster than I did at my old company. And I'm not as intimidated to go think about building a massive company where I need to raise a lot of capital over time to go build it. Whereas I think sometimes like the first company, it's like hard to get that first check of like $500,000 or a couple million dollars because you've never done it before. And so I think this time around, the capital raising has been a lot easier and a lot faster. You know, I've been able to hire exceptional people. And I hired exceptional people last company, but the hiring has been a lot easier. And so it just, it feels like I can go a lot faster on this one. So I think these stories sometimes seem like they're very linear because you've had success. But my own experience is it's not linear at all. You have these moments of ups and downs and sideways and like near death experiences, but maybe can you talk about some of the challenges along the way? Yeah, I mean, the challenges in early stage company is raising capital, making sure you're building the right thing and then hiring amazing people around that. And if you can do all three of those things, you'll be successful. We need to know the customer really well. And so I've an amazing co-founder Austin Gray, who liked myself served in the Navy and spends a lot of time in DC, make, you know, make sure we understand the voice of the customer. We need to do the hardware. So on the inside of the ship, we need to make sure that these ships are super reliable and make sure we have the right propulsion system and all the right auxiliary systems. And unlike on a man ship, if something breaks, you can't have someone go down and replace the filter. We need to do the software. So we need, we're building the operating system for the ship. We're doing full stack of tonne made to make sure these things like don't need any people on board. We need to be really good at naval architecture and marine engineering because we could be great at the technology. But if you put it on the wrong hole and it can't go fast enough or you've structural issues out at sea, it doesn't matter how good the autonomy tech is, you need to put the right hole. And then the final thing is we need to make a lot of these things and we need to make them easy to produce at the right price point because the Navy doesn't need a handful of these. They need a lot of them over time. And so our customer cares a lot about your ability to kind of like your production capacity. And so when we first started, I couldn't solve all five of those problems at once, but we've built out a team who can now do those things, but that was hard. And sometimes you get in conversation, you're like, I really hope they join because they're the best person that's out there. But it feels like at the moment, it's binary. Like, am I going to get them or not? And we've been really lucky that for, you know, we've gotten those people, but they're definitely those moments tonight. You're like, I met someone. They're amazing. I really hope they join. But we're limited with capital. We've got to make competitive offers, but like I hope they don't get snatched up, but like, I don't know, like SpaceX or something like that. It's some crazy salary that we can't compete with. I have a shameless book plug here because it's just come out into my mind. The concept of challenges that you just talked about, but then the concept of the ocean. And I just read the book Endurance by Alfred Lansing about Shackleton. Yeah. I mean, that earnest shackles it. That is, it is become one of my favorite books. It is an unbelievable story for people who don't realize it about this explorer to the South Pole in 1916 who got trapped in the ice in the wettle sea. And the boat got crushed and it sank. And these guys lived out on a floating ice raft for months and it ended up taking a little boat across the Drake passage. It's 550 days. No one died. I can't recommend that book enough, but it just came into my head because I just finished it. I just talked about startups and the challenge in eating glass and staring into the abyss. And I read that book. I'm like, everybody should read this book because it's not in the business, though, but holy shit. It's like there is no job description. Never stop working. Never give up. Yeah. I think that's right. And as we think about what we're doing is like the oceans are brutal. It is an environment that is unrelenting. We've got to deal with all different types of weather and waves and like extreme heat, extreme cold. And we have no people on board. So unlike Waymo, autonomous vehicle that goes into garage every night where you can inflate the tires, change the tires, change the filter, or inspect it. Like we need to be out there for months at a time. And so we have a really strong core design. But the challenge when you're ever doing anything that's full stack or basically products that are in touch with nature is you have this long tail of issues that you have to work through. And so in the same way that Chacleton just like, you know, had grit and just lasted and just persevered like we are going to do the same thing at Blue Water autonomy. We're going to have grit. We're going to persevere. And we're just going to work our way because we're not going to be perfect out of the gate. No company is. But if you have the right team that's kind of focused around it and you can be agile and you can react to things and you can make this technology better and better every year. In fact, in my home office, I have one of the first so Kiva robots. They're now Amazon robotics. But like it's in my office. I was able to get one of the early prototypes. And you can just you look at it physically and you see the wires and the connectors and the dev boards. They actually at the time couldn't do autonomous charging. So they'd actually basically put car batteries and they'd swap them in and out. And then you look at what they have now for the last 20 years. And you can just see what the progression is over time. But it wasn't overnight success. None of these companies are. So you've got to be pretty. Well, you've seen the SpaceX, like the first models they're out there and what that look like. And like you said, it's like all the wires everywhere. It's very crude and then what the actual ships look like over time. If you just keep with it, keep with it, improve, improve a little bit every day. That's why I tell all my people always is, you know, as long as you can sort of keep going up the hill, keep going up the hill, make a little bit of forward progress. And you have these ups and downs. Yeah. And you look back and it looks fantastic. I've done a good amount of hardware investing and at every one of these companies, when you kind of go into a conference room or like a certain hallway, they'll put all the generations of the white over time. And when you look at the first one that you remember obsessing over and thinking, oh, product market fit and look at this, it looks like a team. You should be embarrassed. You should be embarrassed about the first one, but you're also proud in the same way. Because you want to move fast, yeah. But at the time, these things look cool, right? Like at the time, I think it's the human fallacy. When you first build it, you're like, oh my god, it's amazing. And then you look back at like, oh, that's what create about capitalism. It's the creative destruction, right? It's like you got better because you already made something that works and it goes on and on. Well, Riley and I love your mindset. And we talked about AI a little bit. And I generally, and I think Ravine also, I generally have the same positivity that we happen to live in America. We have the ability to live in the greatest country in the history of the world. And hopefully we'll continue to be that for a very long time because of what you're doing and people like you are doing. And Ryleann, if you have to give advice to young people in terms of either coming up with a skill or knowing what you want to do and you're staring at it, you have a son who's about to go to Madison. Do you have advice for young people in terms of like, don't focus on this or here's a leadership thing or one thing that I wish I knew when I was, you know, 22, 24? Well, the first thing I tell people is we should be, you know, realize that we live in the greatest country on earth at one of the greatest times. And we should be optimistic. I think there's a lot of doomerism up that's out there and, oh, what's my job can be. But I think the world's as uncertain and it's unclear exactly what career paths will look like over the next 20 or 30 years. And like, if you ever told me, you know, I don't know, 20 plus years ago that I would be starting a company building a top ship. So it would never even be on the top 100 ideas that I could kind of list down. But I think what's important is for people to be independent thinkers and to use your own sources, sources of information and to kind of make, uh, and to learn how to be a critical thinker. I think it's also to be a constant learner. Like, what I love about my job is I'm just, like, I'm really passionate about what I do. And I love learning about every part of our business. I love learning from our customer. I love learning from our engineers. In fact, yesterday I was geeking out about some of the sensors that we're putting on our ship and how it's architected. But it was like super fascinating. I'm like, I just love what I'm doing. And it's this like idea of like constantly learning and getting it smarter. Uh, and so I think it's really important for like, you know, my son's my daughter and everyone. Well, continuous learning is such a competitive advantage. And I think that you, I'm trying to bake that into my kid at this young age. But it, what people don't realize is that it might, to, uh, a kid who's not into it, it might sound like kind of like homework or a grunt. But to your point about like, I'm geeking it out on the sensors. You didn't know that you were going to get into it. But the second you started to see it and I find myself so often, I'm reading about something. I see some stupid real on my own. And I'm like, Oh, that's interesting. I'm going to go Google that. And yeah, you can end up learning a lot of stuff. So I think I think most things in life compound and people don't fully appreciate that, that compounding the eighth wonder of the world. The challenge today, and I do think there are challenges. It's nothing you've ever straight line is the, uh, the shorts, the reels. Like all the social media, I just think it kind of like makes all of us dumb or and just, like, the focus is harder. So if you can balance the focus and be curious, like I'm, I kind of think the opportunity has never been greater. I think one of the best ways to learn at least that I found is long form content. And what's amazing today is there's so much long form content that's available on the web. So it can be, you know, um, whether it's a blog post or whether it's like, actually, I pay for YouTube. So it doesn't have ads on it. So one of the smart TVs. So it feeds me some really interesting content about like ships and the Navy and robotics and automation and how to start companies or even on podcasts. So I have a Tesla itself driving. You might commute it's like 35, 40 minutes into work. So I hit the like the self driving. It does 95% of it. And then I listen to a ton of podcasts. In fact, I was listening to one today with a recently retired rear admiral who was in charge of resource, uh, resources for the Navy. And so like I consume all this information all the time. But I agree that like the short form content, like it's just not good for our brains, but the long form content is just amazing. And we can be constant learners away that we couldn't be constant learners, especially about these kind of niche areas like 20 years ago. The long form content, I think, and it inoculates you against the media noise because when you have listened to X or Y person speak for 30, 60, 90 minutes, whoever they are. And then you hear a story from some opponent of them. You'll be much less likely to believe it if you know, you know, it's not true and vice versa. Yeah. So in terms of books, what are you reading? What are some of your favorite books that you've read recently? And we try to compile these and we'll share them later with our listeners. So I hope we get this one right. My favorite book is The Box by Mark Levinson. It's about intermodal containers and how it's shaped and changed commerce and made kind of commerce global. And basically the kind of really short story is we had all these extra shifts in World War II. And the way we used to transport stuff in World War II and before was we put like the bet, you know, the pallets and the bags and everything would be loaded by hand. And then some said, well, imagine if everything was on a container, you use automation and crane to take things on and off. But like it was an obvious idea, at least today it's an obvious idea, but it took like 50 years or like almost 50 years for it to kind of transform the industry. And it's really interesting to see how that evolved over time. So that's like one of my favorite books. Recently, I've read Victor ships, I think by Doug Moses about the Liberty ships. We actually just named the, you know, our autonomous ships, the Liberty class ship because Liberty ships is one of the platforms that kind of like saved us in World War II. It allowed us to basically build thousands of ships per year. They're easy to produce relatively low cost. When you read about people like Henry Kaiser, who basically went from, you know, constructing the Hoover Dam to saying, our nations in need. So I can take my skill set to go build whatever the country needs and he built a lot of ships. And so like, you know, that's a current book that I'm reading right now. I love it. I love it. So what about movies? Favorite movie. Oh, probably like Caddy Shack. I think some of that humor is, it's amazing. I don't think we have that same, I think the bars a little bit different in terms of the type of humor that comes out in movies today. And it's your favorite movie about the ocean. Yeah, and it's got to be like under siege, right? Or the, the boot. Oh, what's the Tom Hanks? Is it Sea Wolf or something about basic convoys in World War II crossing? And it's very visual about, you know, the U-Boats coming and attacking these convoys that are out there. That's probably one of my favorite. I'm not like a huge movie person or called a person stuff. So Ryan, last question. Big one, are we going to be in some sort of serious conflict with China before 2030? Um, I really hope that we're not. And I don't, I think the odds are pretty low. I think they're, I do not, I do not think China is going to take Taiwan anytime soon. I don't think it benefits either country. I think it has major implications. But I do think we're, you know, the power dynamics are very volatile in that region. And I think, you know, I think they're very level headed people that will figure this out. But I think we need to create, it doesn't mean we need to have deterrence and we need to have, you know, powerful, you know, for instance, a powerful navy. But I really hope there's not a conflict. And I don't think there will be. There you have it. I think that's a wrap to episode 18 of Forged in America. Ryland, it's been fantastic. And thank you for listening. Please like and share every single day. We get new followers. And so this little journey keeps going with amazing guests like Ryland. So see you all next time. Thank you.