SPEAKER_00: all right everybody welcome back to the all in interview series i am thrilled really thrilled because saronic is a defense company that has been doing amazing work and we are so lucky to have the co-founders here on the program welcome to the program dino mavrucus how are you sir doing well thanks for having us and uh your co-founder here uh vib alticar let's talk a little bit about saronic uh and we're going to get into everything but you were in the news you were in the news because you're making autonomous ships and one of these was used recently in the

SPEAKER_05: strait of hormuz i understand as your wealth grows have you noticed how much more complex things get between investments tax strategy and estate planning managing it all is a full-time job that you didn't ask for creative planning can help their coordinated team of investment managers cpas and affiliated estate attorneys can do much of the heavy lifting so you don't have to creative planning where wealth works together go to creative planning.com slash all in i gotta start there dino tell us about the

SPEAKER_00: mission tell us what happened this is the first time an autonomous uh ship has ever rescued uh folks in the field and then we'll get back into your history and everything but i think like we gotta start off

SPEAKER_10: with this story because it's incredible it's just a huge story and i look i can't get into too many specifics of the operation and the mission for for obvious reasons but um before we get into what it means for the country what it means for our company i mean without saying the most important thing is that those two pilots came home safely regardless of how they got there right now what we were able to

SPEAKER_13: demonstrate through this partnership with the navy like for us is the navy actually trusted us in this moment lives are on the line we're going to send this autonomous platform to go and rescue these folks this is not a patrol this is not maritime domain awareness this is the highest stakes of the highest

SPEAKER_10: things there's downed american pilots in the straits of hormuz and they're like corsair which you actually see right over my right shoulder which is our 24 foot fully autonomous speed boat for the for those that that don't know um he said we're going to use that to rescue the pilots and that's that's actually like a milestone moment for the country and i can tell you i'll tell you a personal story firsthand and kind of what this means but you know this like leaving people behind in the u.s military just it's

SPEAKER_13: not a thing the u.s military does not do it right like i was in the navy seal teams for 11 years from

SPEAKER_10: 2004 to 2015 uh my last five years were on seal team six i personally experienced 2005 there were four seals trapped on a mountainside in afghanistan and the helicopter got sound got shot down while

SPEAKER_13: going to rescue them so what we were able to prove in this moment was that you can go and rescue people without putting additional soldiers in harm's way that's that's the impact of what this had

SPEAKER_16: that's what it means for the country and for our company it was just an extremely proud moment where the navy trusted us in this high stakes environment absolutely incredible and obviously thank you for

SPEAKER_00: your service i and i know you can't get into too many details but i've been reading all about it and i gotta wonder when these two pilots did they know that this was an autonomous ship and the ship

SPEAKER_18: comes rolling up and they're like somebody sent them a message hey you can get picked up by the autonomous ship grab the side of it climb on board like what's the protocol for the autonomous ship picking up two folks are they swimming out to it well i just got to get a little color on this before

SPEAKER_19: it becomes a movie i mean it's the first time that it that it happened right and when a ship when

SPEAKER_13: a boat pulls up to you and there's nobody on it you know you can very quickly deduce that it's fully that it's an autonomous boat and you know these pilots were in the water for i don't even know how long they're in a completely contested environment we're in a conflict with iran they're in the straits before movies and we can go through the dynamic there but they looked at this platform and

SPEAKER_23: said that that's my way home right that that's how i get out of here i love it all right let's step

SPEAKER_00: back a bit here you're a navy cl uh vib you've uh worked in this space for a while uh you previously worked at andro i understand uh the mission as i understand it for the company uh is to greatly increase our ability in america to produce ships and for people who don't know the amount of uh tonnage the number of ships that we are able to make in america and most western countries is very low but there's an adversary in the pacific who is able to produce a lot of ships it's known as the chinese communist party so maybe from first principles you could just explain what you're building and why it's important and just how insane uh the incompetence of the west in terms of building ships has become

SPEAKER_20: i mean we are really bad at making ships right now am i correct we're beyond bad uh let me i'll take

SPEAKER_13: a step back and just kind of highlight where we're at and then i'll let vib go through what

SPEAKER_10: we're doing about it how how we're changing that dynamic but jason what you were saying right just to put it in context the united states can build a hundred thousand gross

SPEAKER_13: tons of ships every year gross ton is this volumetric measure of ships so if you build you know a 200 foot ship that's different than an 800 foot ship but let's compare apples to apples

SPEAKER_10: a hundred thousand gross tons the chinese which you were referencing can build 23 million gross tons so they can outbuild the us 230 to one and it wasn't always the case right 30 years ago the chinese didn't have this capability they had five percent of the world's shipbuilding capacity today they have 57 of the world's shipbuilding capacity and actually that problem is getting worse because

SPEAKER_13: they can the communist party is just constantly it's like subsidizing the entire industry so they're undercutting the commercial market on price they're not just subsidizing the direct cost to build they're subsidizing raw material and labor costs so the ship built in the united states is actually five to six times the cost of that same ship built in china and so they keep getting more and more orders so that

SPEAKER_00: number is a 57 is just going up how did they get that capability is that because as a manufacturer to the world they needed to ship out products so they did this in a commercial way for first or is this always very intentionally we need to own the south pacific revolves around the commercial market and

SPEAKER_10: then i'll talk about i want to talk about the status of our navy like where the naval fleet is today what that means and then where the chinese navy is and where that's going because again 30 years ago

SPEAKER_13: the chinese navy was a littoral backwater navy today they have nuclear submarines aircraft carriers and hypersonic missiles so there's a massive massive change over the last 30 years and what's happened in the u.s shipbuilding industry it's completely declined so the u.s naval fleet has 296 ships today

SPEAKER_10: there's a congressional mandate statutory minimum of 355 ships that was set by congress in 2018

SPEAKER_13: that was eight years ago last year we built nine ships but we retired 19 naval vessels so we're going in the wrong the completely wrong direction the chinese delivered somewhere in the ballpark of 30 ships their fleet size is around 370 they'll be at 450 before you know it but the commercial market is where that discrepancy lies even larger right they delivered over a thousand commercial ships last year the united states built five five one two three four five one two three four five one hand wow so if a conflict actually kicks off and we saw this in the u.s in world war ii where we had the production capacity where we're building thousands of vessels every year if a conflict kicks off that commercial capacity isn't going to go to building cargo containers anymore it's all going to flip to defense capacity and it's going to be building for what the chinese communist party needs to to win a conflict and that's what we have to be building towards that's what we're doing at saronic that's

SPEAKER_33: why we're thinking about okay how do we build mass how do we build scale in whatever it is that we do

SPEAKER_34: and so how do you do it vib i would think and listen i'm a neophyte here but if these are autonomous

SPEAKER_00: ships well you can remove things like you don't need beds you don't need a commissary and you don't need uh latrines and i don't know what percentage of a corsair or battleship are there to uh support

SPEAKER_35: humans on the ship but i gotta think it's half the mass of it is to is to keep humans on it am i

SPEAKER_36: directionally correct i think half is a little half a little excessive but okay there is a significant

SPEAKER_38: percentage of the components the cost the labor that actually goes into catering to human beings on board um i would say at a high level you know you're really reducing the complexity of the entire product right um you don't need to worry about a separate electrical system for humans you don't need to worry about as we mentioned doors bathroom stairs etc um and then at the end of the day you can actually start to end to end optimize a lot of different things so even if you look at corsair for example you know if you were to buy a commercial 24 foot boat it's unlikely to go a thousand anautical miles um it's also unlikely to drive and have the control authority um of the boat that we've built here um because you don't have again you don't have to worry about you know a person feeling uh you know you know taking g force yeah um and so you can actually optimize across a bunch of different areas naval architecture the speed range and payload of the craft itself and then again reduce a lot of the complexity where you're removing subsystems that are meant for humans yeah and the

SPEAKER_00: corsair which is my favorite ship just based on the name i believe for my research this me it was originally meant like a pirate ship or a privateering ship but it's is it now standard

SPEAKER_35: lingo that that's a 24-foot boat and and has a certain profile do you know is that is that how these designations come about the names of these ships i mean i wouldn't say that corsair is now

SPEAKER_42: universal 24-foot autonomous surface vessel it's the name of our product lines and we chose it uh very

SPEAKER_13: purposefully and we chose all our names purposefully even the name of the company i mean we were talking about you know our greek heritage before the show and where that came from you know the saronic gulf is a gulf off the coast of athens where the battle of salamis happened it's one of the most famous naval battles in history came after the battle of thermopoly or the famous stand of the spar 300 spartans and it was the naval battle between um the greeks and the persians where the greeks were wildly how much the persians had much much larger ships they had a much larger fleet and the greeks were able to lure them into this narrow strait and use smaller more maneuverable products to ultimately

SPEAKER_00: defeat the persians now cost is part of this uh in terms of these ships in the field and the number of ships my understanding of our contemporary china is that they don't build a lot of big ships they build a lot of ships so they've got a lot of smaller and very varied number of ships if i'm correct there then the cost becomes the issue because building a bunch of aircraft carriers i keep hearing that supersonics are going to take out all these uh aircraft carriers in the first 15 minutes vib is is that true what we hear that hey we need smaller ships faster ships and what is the cost of something like you know the corsair that you used on this incredible mission yeah i would say you know at a high

SPEAKER_38: level the goal is mass right um like large scale attritable mass and yeah if an aircraft carrier takes 10 years to build and 13 billion dollars like you're not really achieving that um i think there's always going to be like kind of a role and responsibility for for a craft like that um but ultimately you're right like if you're big and and you know very obvious to find and you can find you from space etc um you know it's that's a real risk when you reduce you know the the overall cost of like just doing things in the ocean right like that's ultimately where the autonomous piece comes in um you can deploy at scale you can monitor a larger larger body of water with less people um and ultimately what you're what you're really getting to is removing people from harm's way right um so what when we think about designing and kind of thinking through the price points of these things the comparison to mancraft isn't really um necessarily even comparable as you get into larger ships right um for for us it's really a question of like what is the cost that you would typically have to use humans for and how much is that actually being reduced by having a large autonomous fleet

SPEAKER_48: corsairs a million bucks or something do you know the corsair costs about a million yeah i want to go

SPEAKER_13: back to we'll get that i want to go back to one thing you said earlier and it's like china's building both very large ships and a lot of ships they're right they're doing it all right and when we

SPEAKER_10: think about okay how do you actually change the paradigm for the us navy it's let's actually boil

SPEAKER_13: it down to unit economics let's think about this like a commercial company how do you mention like payloads what are you actually moving on the ocean one of the most important metrics is bls tubes so

SPEAKER_10: vertical launch systems basically how many big tomahawk missiles can you carry on a ship it's how much

SPEAKER_13: firepower are you fielding so let's use an example of that right a destroyer naval destroyer costs about three billion dollars three billion three billion and i'm not even getting into the sustainment and

SPEAKER_10: maintenance costs over the life cycle of the destroyer i'm just talking about what it costs to buy if we do that it's 10 10 billion over 30 40 years three billion dollars six to eight years to

SPEAKER_13: make you carry you you can field about 96 vls tubes so i'm going to round up i'm going to make that 100 for easy math so on average you're fielding somewhere between 10 to 15 vls tubes per year at a cost of 30 million per two marauder i won't give you the exact price or cost but can reduce that cost by a significant amount but we're building 20 marauders for we're going to be building 20 marauders per year at our shipyard in louisiana right so now you can feel we can carry the equivalent of 16 vls tubes on the back of that 180 foot fully autonomous ship so now you can field 320 vls tubes per year as opposed to 15 and you can do it at a fraction of the cost this is how you actually save the taxpayers hundreds of

SPEAKER_25: billions of dollars and you get more capability into the field faster i mean that's just extraordinary

SPEAKER_34: thinking about it what do you lose by not having humans on it you know are we going to be faced with

SPEAKER_00: a moment in time where these are kind of like uh drones you know where there's no pilots they're just pilots in a shipping container dropped somewhere either you know in the middle of america and doing it remote like we've done is that the future of warfare with these ships or and and what do you lose when you don't have a team there on the boat and what is the criticism valid or invalid that people have

SPEAKER_10: of unmanned ships well i'm gonna let viv talk about the way that we're using software because i think though the criticism to your question is well what happens if we're in the middle of the ocean and the ship breaks down who's gonna fix it it's not it's not that we don't need this technology it's folks that aren't used to technology saying oh how's the technology actually going to work and that's what we're proving out every single day to your point of like what do you lose by not having people on them look it all it all boils down to the mission right and this is why we partner so closely with the navy

SPEAKER_13: this is why we work with actual operators it's like what are you using what are you delivering if the mission is long-range fires we're packing a bunch of vls tubes on the back of marauder you actually don't lose anything right you're just delivering those capabilities into the field while keeping people out of harm's way and that's a very very important part of the equation but if our ships let's be clear like if our boats and ships aren't accomplishing the mission then they're not relevant they're not going to be used in the first place and there is going to be some mix i don't know what that mix is i don't think anybody really knows what that mix is of manned and unmanned ships so what you're going to see in the navy is like a hybrid navy so the things that you're missing from having people on the ships forward deployed decision makers in the environment you can actually have out there on manned ships but you're using unmanned ships to put into combat areas and conflict areas

SPEAKER_34: to keep those people very safe fib the take us through the production of these how do you achieve

SPEAKER_00: speed at it you know a friend of the pot elon musk with the teslas over time he eventually built the full stack in the beginning if you had a tesla you would look at the the shifter and you'd be like hey that looks like my mercedes and that's because they had their steering column from mercedes one of the early investors the hvac was from somebody else but eventually he had materials coming in one side of the factory cars coming out the other and he made every single thing in that car he was now no longer

SPEAKER_35: dependent on any third-party manufacturers or a supply chain you know and famously the hvac i think in the model 3 and y when it came out reduced massively the drain on the battery right so it's purpose-built for that mission so i'm assuming you're doing that from first principles but what's the secret

SPEAKER_58: to this rapid production and lower cost production yeah listen i think there's you know within the

SPEAKER_38: shipbuilding industry or at large there's a bunch of different challenges of why the production isn't as high as it should be and one of those core reasons and the navy's talked about this extensively is is investing in the supply chain right um when you don't when you only build five commercial ships a year your genset manufacturers the marine engine manufacturers also don't have to produce at a very high rate so one of the things that we get the luxury of doing um by being vertically integrated is that we get to work with these manufacturers directly do non-recurring engineering work invest in really digitizing a lot of the components that historically have been very analog right um you know you asked earlier like what do people what do the people do on the ships like what are they going to do if the ships are autonomous well when you think about you know dina mentioned the life cycle of these ships are 30 years you think about a ship that was built 30 years ago you know you have people that are doing extremely manual things in the engine room that today should be extremely trivial to automate through software um and so a lot of that work actually gets completely absorbed by the software stack and so you don't have to worry about it um and as we choose components we invest in the supply chain we invest in the industrial base we actually help bring all of these analog components that for a long time were you know meant to be operated by humans we give them software apis we make sure that they can be controlled by you know mcp or software sect somewhere else and can be you know remotely accessed and whatnot um so the complexity is going to go down massively when you're building one of these yeah absolutely yeah and and you know frankly i don't think the the person who's sitting in the engine room is super thrilled about it anyway no no you're actually changing the um you're democratizing the decision making right like now there's going to be you have more mass out in the ocean more sailors are going to be making decisions about what those what that mass is going to be doing and where assets are going to be instead of worrying about you know cooling to pressure in an engine right um and so you know when we think about the the actual design there's there's a lot of different variables there there's some components that are commercial off the shelf right elon in the early days um from a compute perspective they had to invest in asics right the compute stack wasn't there to run you know large models and run inference at the speeds and power budgets that they wanted to in 2026 it's a totally different game right um and so there's there's a lot of different parts of the supply chain that you know sometimes we're looking at you know investing in the industrial base and making sure that you know our engine manufacturers and genset manufacturers are keeping up um on the other side there's there's particular components that we're like hey the marine industry actually hasn't had this level of investment in in a long time so we're gonna have to build this in-house um you know a couple of examples around that are related to a lot of electronics related to the sensors and compute um but you know a bunch of different things there that that help us build and assemble quickly

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SPEAKER_00: let's talk a little bit about adino on the business side how you work with the department of war formerly known as the department of defense emil michaels and a bunch of the folks over there are really focused on getting startups essentially like you are uh more contracts but you also are moving out i assume of this cost plus world and you're just figuring out hey what what's the right price for this and take us inside that paradigm shift you have these primes and then you have these upstarts and it seems like based on history the incumbents sometimes don't uh take this lying down so take us inside the paradigm shift from cost plus to what these i guess they call the new

SPEAKER_14: primes like yourself and andrew are doing yep and i'll just define class plus service listening basically

SPEAKER_13: means hey we're gonna go build you something mr government and however long that takes however much it costs you're just gonna pay us 10 to 15 on top of that so i'm actually incentivized and i'm not saying there's malicious intent but i'm incentivized to make it take longer and cost more because if it costs a hundred million dollars well then i only make 15 million dollars but if it costs a billion dollars then as a company i make 150 million dollars so there's this perverse incentive to drive up costs now that's not the only reason the industry is where it is today but we're we're

SPEAKER_10: very encouraged by the push from the administration um to adopt things at speed and scale and to do that quickly and to do that differently and to move away from cost plus you hit it like we invest our own

SPEAKER_13: capital to date we're we're just about four years old we've raised two and a half billion dollars in private capital we're pouring that into r d i remember when we decided to build marauder again 180 foot ship viv and i were talking and it's like who who's crazy enough to go and build a ship on irad and it's like well well we are because that's what the country needs that's what it demands that's what we're going to go do and our investors are giving us the capital to go do it they're actually entrusting us with that capital that's the reverse of what's happening in the large primes where their investors are kind of demanding share buybacks they're saying give us our capital back so the country very much needs us to build for needs companies like us to build for the future um and when you look at what the administration is doing even just in shipbuilding just recognizing that shipbuilding is a critical strategic industry right the president one of the first things he did was put out the maritime executive order that was followed with the maritime action plan right there's ships act sitting in congress you had the secretary of war give a whole speech on defense acquisition reform talking about how we're going to push the department to be better to move faster to work with companies like us that are building on firm fixed price contracts that are focused on delivering at speed and scale and driving down cost for the taxpayer so all of that is extremely encouraging but i want to be i also want to be clear here on the flip side we're in the early days jason like yeah very early days when you look at the overall defense department of war's budget one percent one percent goes to autonomous systems that's not nearly enough make that five percent make that i don't know the right mix but it needs

SPEAKER_70: to go up and it needs to go up quickly i'll just add one more thing that um that you know historically

SPEAKER_38: shipbuilding you know the design is bifurcated from the builder right so someone gets paid to do the design um and the ground up general assembly and all that and gets handed off to a totally different person to go and build a ship um and i think there's a statistic out there that's like 70 percent of sequence critical components on on some navy ships are sole source suppliers like single source suppliers um and so to dino's point it's not just that you're incentivized to take longer it's that you're not incentivized to change that necessarily um because you know that you're still going to get paid um whereas like from our perspective when you own the design you own the shipyard you know software engineers shipbuilders naval architects and welders can all sit down and eat lunch together in the yard um there's end-to-end optimizations that you get that you know the system

SPEAKER_65: from a from a historical perspective just wasn't set up again yeah let's do a little uh look at

SPEAKER_34: what happened in the strait of hormuz uh we weren't able to control it completely doesn't seem like anybody in history has been able to uh control it if we were to fast forward and you had your entire

SPEAKER_00: fleet you had let's assume uh not unlimited but massive capacity how would you or would you be able to secure something like the strait of hormuz with these autonomous vehicles and what might that

SPEAKER_58: look like take us into a you know scenario five years from now what would it take that's the type

SPEAKER_10: of scenario that that we're building for i think before talking about the scenario let's talk about

SPEAKER_13: the strait of hormuz itself right the environment the part of the world like what neighborhood is it in right it connects so you have the persian gulf which is 200 miles wide which narrows down to a 20 mile wide strip which is the strait of hormuz and then it connects to the indian ocean and connects these large oil producing countries to global markets on the one side of the persian gulf you have you know iraq kuwait saudi arabia uae qatar and oman and on the other side of the persian gulf the north side is all controlled by iran so now iran is saying well how are we going to disrupt traffic in the

SPEAKER_10: strait of hormuz well it's only a 20 mile wide stretch i can use missiles i can use fast attack vessels i can use naval mines i can use cheap drones because i don't have a large distance to cover i can

SPEAKER_13: launch these things anywhere from shore so it becomes this completely chaotic environment that's sending in naval destroyers into or trying to get commercial ships pass becomes extremely dangerous so using large numbers of autonomous vessels you can combat these threats in completely different ways you can offer scale persistence and risk reduction in ways that you know man vessels just can't and again won't get into too many of the specifics on the types of operations that we're building towards but autonomy is a way to counter these effects these these um these effects that are over well or like really aren't meant to be countered by traditional man's ships alone we can counter that with scale

SPEAKER_33: and technology you keep people out of harm's way well you have some small ships yeah you got the cut

SPEAKER_00: list and you got the spyglass in this uh you know build out those are six foot 15 foot or whatever we

SPEAKER_20: actually started with those and i'll give you an interesting story we actually don't build those

SPEAKER_13: aren't we haven't productized those those were great subscale demonstrators but our real flagship product is corsair and when you talk about again the the scenario in the straight of four moves and what type of volume can we bring there like it's not only five years in the future we can build 2 000 corsair per year right now at our manufacturing facility in austin so i i know you live in austin we'd love to show you around when you see it when you see it it actually comes to life you're like oh wait you can actually build thousands of these vessels every

SPEAKER_79: single year how many would you need a thousand five thousand in the straight hormones i don't think

SPEAKER_00: it's a 20 mile wide straight so you're just gonna and they this is their offensive strategy they have these speed boats that they use i don't know what they're called but they call them fast attack vessels fast attack so these guys essentially are kamikaze right they just zip in you know no regard for safety in their life etc and they will attack they're using fast attack vessels they're using

SPEAKER_13: cheap drones so you have to be able to kind of have counter uas capabilities they're you they're using mines they're just floating mines into the straight without regard for what those mines may set off so it's a really complicated environment that you need to bring a lot of capabilities towards

SPEAKER_00: yeah but it sounds like vib with artificial intelligence which is the next card that i think is going to turn over you put these corsairs out there could they with ai be able to you know be using satellite data from planet or whoever is providing it to just and or military satellites and just zip out there and no say somebody's putting out some mines hey somebody's putting out some of these fast attack vehicles just intercept them and now they have an actual cost to human life and a limited amount of resources and hey we're america and we have you guys building ships at scale they don't have this ability to build ai based ships so talk about what ai on these ships could do eventually yeah so i would say today you know there's a bunch of

SPEAKER_38: different you know machine learning applications that run on our boat today um there's heavy amounts of compute on all of our crafts um that allows people to have tons of capability whether it's you know the navigation and kind of the autopilot or self-driving of the craft itself or compute for payloads whether that's counter uas as dino mentioned or a bunch of other things really um there's a variety of different mission sets the end state here is that you know you have a distributed fleet you know across the ocean that you know in variable like listen the ocean is a tumultuous place like by default without war zone like the ocean's still bad um you know salt water against your antennas you lose you lose comms uh so there's a bunch of different running communications on this there's a bunch of different sensors um all of those things kind of are networked together with ml with a bunch of different software uh components of the software stack to make sure that you can basically translate intent from a commander or a sailor and then result in a mission outcome let's talk to you know a little

SPEAKER_00: bit about the adversary china and they have started to put weapons on robots i'm assuming that they're doing the same if they're willing to put it on a you know one of those dog robots like the spot robots they're putting weapons on them they're demonstrating it and whatever they're demonstrating they've already got in production let's just call it what it is and

SPEAKER_35: they're not signing some un treaty to not put autonomous and ai weapons this is a different type

SPEAKER_00: of adversary and i'm sure north korea and and other bad guys are doing similar things we have um i believe treaties where we're not allowed to put weapons and use ai based weapons am i correct about

SPEAKER_90: that in the west here there is a autonomous weapon system standard called 3009 that basically outlines

SPEAKER_38: exactly how ai can be used on an autonomous system yeah tell us all about that like our because this is

SPEAKER_00: the robocop scenario this is the robotic soldier or the robotic boat that's able to engage the enemy without a human you know if it loses comms or to do a kamikaze mission which seems like something we might have to do these are things we might have to do dino versus the chinese because they're not

SPEAKER_35: signing these treaties they are not thinking ethically they are not respecting the declaration of human

SPEAKER_10: rights they've got their own playbook yep and i think the the important thing to to articulate here is especially when you use the kind of robocop example and just to kind of quell people's fears

SPEAKER_13: a little bit is even in that example where we're sending boats off the off of taiwan and we're in the taiwan strait and they're engaging we're still using artificial intelligence to bifurcate between an enemy vessel and a friendly vessel between a non-combatant and a combatant and people are still making the decisions and setting the mission intent it's just government policy that's setting

SPEAKER_10: okay when are you authorized to engage versus not artificial intelligence actually just gives the military the opportunity to one operate at a greater scale and then operate more efficiently these aren't robots actually just making decisions on when to go to war or not got it so it says hey this

SPEAKER_00: is a bad guy hey our recommendation is to you know neutralize it and then a human has to say okay neutralize it but if you're up against an adversary who says hey no no we built this thing anybody comes in to the blockade in taiwan which you know we think is uh you know a pretty significant non-zero probability in our lifetime if you're up against somebody who says i'm just gonna have these ships kill anything that's not our ship period full stop then we lose don't we no because the the

SPEAKER_13: technologies that all you're doing is putting policy thresholds and approval thresholds into the technology there's a real world scenario where doomsday scenario we go to world war three the taiwan strait is a complete conflict exactly what you said our commanders are going to make that same judgment right they'll be like hey if anything there's no fishing boats out here right now yeah there's no cruise ships coming no collateral damage if you're not a friendly vessel you're an enemy vessel and that's that and our technologies actually enables that we're talking about earlier is like the autonomy the artificial intelligence and everything else is there and you're building the policies into the software based on government procedures and when those authorizations need to be in

SPEAKER_33: place those authorizations will change based on the threat environment that we're in is the plan for

SPEAKER_00: you to sell to our allies and what are the rules there because it sounds like we need as many ships for our navy as we can get but if you can get up to capacity then hey the french the germans and the english have essentially just stopped making ships right and they they they have very deprecated militaries my understanding is the only people who are really doing a great job at this are the folks in south korea which i believe are building but one ship for us so maybe you could talk about the other top

SPEAKER_55: countries in the world democracies and our allies and what their capability is and then your ability

SPEAKER_77: to help arm them and sell to them i mean very very focused on our allies and partners if you talk to

SPEAKER_10: the department of war if you talk to the united states navy they actually want our allies and partners to have these capabilities as well this is this is going to be a combined effort right we mentioned earlier that china has 57 of the world's shipbuilding capacity that's not limited to just that one industry we can go industry by industry and talk about their manufacturing might and their manufacturing dominance so you really do need a combined effort you need our allies and partners to have this technology we're talking to um our allies in asia obviously in europe and in the middle east right now about getting not only our our products there but also how do we stand up you know domestic production in those countries how do we give them the sovereign capability how do we have production lines overseas so that they're already forward deployed if we get into a conflict in the first place pretty amazing

SPEAKER_00: stuff and you have an announcement today i understand that we're going to share with the all-in

SPEAKER_109: audience for the first time that's right so we've been working on port alpha for a long time now so

SPEAKER_10: port alpha just for the listeners is our shipyard of the future this is going to bring american ship building back to a place that we haven't seen since world war ii um to be clear we're already operating a shipyard we have a shipyard in franklin louisiana that's where we're building marauder we're ramping that up to 20 marauder we can bring that up to 50 marauders per year every single year

SPEAKER_13: and that is a 100 acre shipyard what we're doing at port alpha is 10xing that we're looking at a

SPEAKER_10: shipyard that is well over a thousand acres we've been doing this search for over a year now on what is the ideal location for this shipyard where are we going to find the right partner the right land the

SPEAKER_13: right workforce the right community to be a part of um and we're proud to announce that we found that in brownsville texas so we're we're headquartered in austin we're going to be basing port alpha in brownsville we're going to start on a 800 acre plot of land which in and of itself 800 acres is now the largest shipyard in the united states amazing just to give you a sense of scale we have the opportunity over time to scale that to 4 000 acres we're going to invest billions of dollars into this project we're going to create 10 000 jobs over the next 10 years and we're going to bring shipbuilding in this country back again to a place that we haven't seen since world war ii and we're just

SPEAKER_10: grateful for the partnership from the state from governor abbott from cameron county and then the

SPEAKER_115: city and the port of brownsville for making this happen i mean this is one of the great things vib about being based in texas they let us build things in texas yeah as a recent resident here

SPEAKER_00: it's pretty amazing to live in a state where the state's like what do you want to build how can we help as opposed to hey uh you know f off like they told uh elon in california and he got the message received reply uh to that lunatic so maybe you could talk a little bit about operating vib in texas and

SPEAKER_35: the crazy support you get from abbott and everybody one of the uh questions that we used to get like

SPEAKER_50: back in the day was you guys are a maritime company there's no water in austin what are you guys doing that um and i would say like you know austin has this like magical um kind of nexus of both digital

SPEAKER_38: and physical labor forces like you can find software talent you can find ai talent you can find designers um but you can also tap into you know the industrial base from san antonio from the oil and gas industry in houston um and when you marry those two together like you can actually start to co-design these things across the entire stack right i mentioned earlier like typically ship design and ship bill is totally independent um but i mean with port alpha we get the luxury of like greenfield designing what the the manufacturing plant for ships should look like um and so you can design that you can you can optimize the design as ship for the yard and the design of the yard for the ship and it's very similar to kind of like you know how how companies today like do hardware software co-design on chips right you design a compiler and they stick together to optimize both for for the other um and you can we have the luxury of being able to do that for for ships here and um i can't think of a better place

SPEAKER_34: to do it than texas well and uh starbase is right down the block spacex obviously uh anyone's made

SPEAKER_00: that work and i think it's like a four what maybe four five six hour drive down to the coast yeah so you guys can either zip there on a pj or you can just drive so it's pretty straightforward it's

SPEAKER_14: pretty straightforward it's easy for logistics what what spacex has that has done in brownsville

SPEAKER_10: is incredible i think what brownsville has done for spacex and helping them build out build the community down there um we were very impressed very very excited to be basing port alpha there and look at the end of the day it's the people that are going to make this work it's it's the labor force the workforce viv mentioned it earlier and we can talk about you know why the american shipbuilding industry has declined so much but it's the supply chain and

SPEAKER_13: the workforce that has suffered the most and so like one of the things we focus on is really how do we rebuild that workforce how do we upskill existing talent to advance manufacturing how do we take somebody that's building a car at ford and get them building ships very very efficiently very

SPEAKER_10: quickly right and that actually all starts with the design if you design a ship from the ground up from a first principles approach to be more simplistic to be designed and manufactured at scale then you can put in the training the work instructions the processes and everything else where

SPEAKER_13: hey let's go make this much faster let's train let's build the workforce and then let's be honest like you have to make it cool for young people to go work in a shipyard again yeah you have to pay them good wages like every one of our employees every welder every pipe fitter um they have good wages the same benefits as our silicon valley software engineers they have equity in our company um they're they're fired up like i mentioned our shipyard in louisiana like people are fired up down there and it's not just the workforce it's the community like some of the some of the stories i hear when i'm down there is like so encouraging people are like i'm wearing my hat in the grocery store and people are coming up to me saying you

SPEAKER_122: guys are kicking butt keep building ships because nobody else in the country is doing what we're

SPEAKER_00: doing and these are great salaries people are getting paid significant amounts of money obviously to work in manufacturing at your company at uh down at starbase and now you have these two incredible companies i don't know if there's any other ones in brownsville but this is a small

SPEAKER_18: community is only like 200 000 people down there this is going to be an incredible boomtown oh it's

SPEAKER_101: going to be with spacex you know and you're absolutely incredible and i mentioned earlier like

SPEAKER_13: the cost of building ships in the united states and the united states just isn't competitive in the commercial market and again we can go through the specifics and what happened over time five to six times the cost of building a ship in china we think just by investing in product and processes and new shipyards we can cut the cost of a ship in the united states in half so if you have a ship that costs 300 million dollars we can get that under 150 million and that's not by simply just paying people less we're paying people more but we're investing in our product we're investing in the process we're designing the product to be built that way in the first place so we're making the investments that are needed for long-term sustainability and to rebuild the workforce all right if people

SPEAKER_00: want to come work with you vib how can they apply their career page and what are you looking for what what talent do you need to come do this incredibly patriotic duty and go work at saronic yeah i mean

SPEAKER_129: saronic.com uh we have a careers page um you can reach out on twitter linkedin whatever you want um we're

SPEAKER_38: we're hiring pretty aggressively right now i would say that you know the biggest thing you know we look for generally speaking is you know especially in 2026 when you know chat gpt and claude are getting so much better every year um it's pretty important right now to be fairly you know neuroplastic um you know be ready to adapt for what the future looks like computing is changing um you know there's there's going to be agents that can help you on the manufacturing floor to to assemble faster if you have an issue uh there's all these digital systems that are they're kind of changing the paradigm here i mean when we first uh got to gulfcraft um in down in louisiana a lot of the processes were pretty much pen and paper right and that's pretty common across most shipyards um so like kind of bringing that into the 21st century really quickly um i mean it's just going to require people to be thoughtful um adapt to the future and um and really be passionate and excited and and about about

SPEAKER_58: kind of building the future yeah go to the uh website s-a-r-o-n-i-c dot com join the mission

SPEAKER_00: 300 jobs listed on the website there's something there for everybody and uh listen just as a fellow greek dino uh you know we were obviously uh the cradle of innovation and or science math technology art and everything happened but we were also the great warriors uh and we patrolled the sea obviously greece has a lot of coastline so you're you're doing our greek uh my brothers and sisters and

SPEAKER_133: ancestors has a lot of greek has a lot of coastline and they're actually big in the shipping industry

SPEAKER_13: so they are big yeah so now i hear more more often than not now oh it's good to see a greek and

SPEAKER_18: building ships i you know what i can sleep now at night i was very worried about the strait of hormuz i was worried about the pacific theater and south china sea do you know now that i know that my greek brother is on top of this my head's gonna hit the pillow i'm gonna go right i'm gonna sleep like a baby tonight i know you got us covered uh thanks so much guys and uh sincerely uh on behalf of all americans like thank you for doing this work you know this is something where we really need

SPEAKER_35: technologists and entrepreneurs uh to really help us innovate because we're falling behind and we're the good guys in this we're the ones who are spreading democracy and freedom and protecting that the only thing in the world that isn't trending in the right direction man if you look at lifespans if you look at you know infant mortality if you look at uh people's standard of living everything is trending in the world in the right direction except the spread of democracy which has been on the decline in our lifetime let that sink in folks more people living under authoritarians than democracies it's it's a modest amount but you've seen the statistics i'm sure vib and dino and we need to have a great military we need to have this advanced technology if we're going to maintain uh the number of people living under a democracy of in in freedom and hopefully increase it a lot of bad guys out there and uh you know just thank you so much for doing this work that's

SPEAKER_13: right well thank you for having us and i will end on a positive note where look we're seeing that

SPEAKER_10: starting to turn around in a really big way it's not just saronic you mentioned anderal there's spacex and palantir before that and now there's just a big wave a big push into defense tech because people realize the importance and the magnitude of the moment that we are living in right now i i tell our team i'm like this is our generation's version of the space race yeah make no mistake about it and we cannot lose so that's how hard we're working at saronic that's how we're working with a sense of urgency and there's a lot of other companies into the coming into the space that are working with that same sense of urgency so i am i am very optimistic i know this country can do it when we put our minds and we get a collective effort behind something nobody can beat us so

David Friedberg: nobody can yeah nobody can beat us and listen if you were thinking of going listen there's no no dig

SPEAKER_00: to anybody but if you're thinking about going and optimizing an ad network at some big tech company like it's incredibly boring and it's incredibly meaningful you'll get 20 30 years into your career and you'll say what did i do go work at saronic you'll get a couple years into your career and

SPEAKER_10: you'll say i'm doing important work that's right that's right every person that walks through the door every single day is quite literally changing the world and we remind them and then they know it

SPEAKER_00: yeah all right vib dino thank you so much for coming on and we'll see you next time on the all in