Aelius is building portable laser weapon turrets to shoot down drones for 25 cents per engagement

much how you doing how are you breathing today you got the nose strip is the oxygen coming good how you doing going well dude one of my nostrils like barely works so it's just all draged up I got I gotta figure that out at some point but you're out for a while if you get like a like an ENT fix right it'll be fine I think the same I've tried those I've tried the nose strips for sleeping at night they're pretty pretty wild this guy's the Alex Heros of laser weapons yeah uh but I apprciate I got to get a new thing then yeah yeah but I appreciate you dming me you just said hey let's talk about laser weapons and I was like I've never heard of this guy before this company but I'm in and uh and and so I I I did a little re research I want to hear about your experience at Stanford I want to hear the basic picture of the company your background can you just take me through kind of the the 101 level of who you are and what you're building for sure yeah for sure so uh I'm an engineer worked all across a bunch of different heav Industrial Systems um I've worked in uh uh a lot of my time was spent in electrooptic system development I helped work at at the biggest US laser company on laser weapon systems and an R&D capacity and and then I went into sales and I sold a bunch of systems including some components into a lot of the primes for the the big laser weapons that are that are out there um I didn't I didn't uh you know I didn't go to Stanford but at we had a Stanford we were essentially um when we first started the company we were hiring the first round of Engineers we had sent out hiring calls to a bunch you know among link and x and stuff also to um a series of universities and all of them were cool with it except we got kick back from Stanford where the Stanford hiring board was like you cannot you know post here because you have like you're a weapons company right and uh and you know that's really bad I think for Stanford students but great for us because we just start posting it we're like dude this is this is BS this this doesn't make any sense and uh it's great that was that was uh you know um Larsson Jensen made made a bunch of posts about it and we' contined to um to kind of chat about it and got a lot of interest on on that front especially for hiring like if people want to work in defense there just aren't that many companies and the one that's getting flamed because they make weapon systems you know if you want to make weapon systems there's a good chance you V our company yeah so can you uh can you talk about the history of uh lasers I was going to ask the same thing you said the big laser weapon systems laser weapon systems right now after you talk about the the real history maybe you can sort of uh talk a little bit about I have a big hat St and no there's been a lot of there's a lot of conspiracy theories about directed energy weapons space lasers things like that but talk about the the sort of uh the the the history from your point of view yeah definitely well you know the the Death Star doesn't exist yet but the Death Star and stuff like it is how we become you know like a trillion dollar company eventually we become an orbital weapons platform company so probably the only way that you do like low earth orbit trans lunar or trans Martian Warfare is through light you know if you're going to take the missile system up and lower Earth orbit and there's 50,000 Chinese satellites there's almost no way that you can do it shooting down in a cost effective way but orbit weapons platform is great but um history of of directed energy weapons you know maybe 40 years ago when lasers started to kick off in the um in the you know commercial space in terms of cutting and welding and then also in the communication space people like wow I can cut sheet steel with this can I shoot down a missile from like a th meters away and that kind of kickstarted a bunch of effort and interest um those systems haven't necessarily panned out over the last 40 years um I think in the last 10 years we started to get a series of systems that are deployed by lock and Northrup and so you know there are massive warships that will have you know when you're building the ship you have to build a laser weapon system turret into it but we've deployed I think there are eight ships that have a series of like multi 100 kilowatt laser systems on it and you can cut the wing off of a plane from 10 miles away with those systems in about 10 seconds so they're pretty they're they're pretty metal they're pretty rad and that's what a lot of the the directed energy supply chain is look like the directed energy are development has looked like in the country uh does blue is blue effective against lasers the color blue I know that like uh isn't there something about like a specific frequency of blue that sort of prevents damage from lasers am I making that up to the the power density and the lasers we're talking about like you need some very very specialty materials to kind of defend against them in any kind of you know scaled capacity so like the color blue I'm not sure about that I mean you could like you have mirrors that reflect the laser light right but they're very small and they have they have extreme like extremely expensive rare materials that are kind of doped in those mirrors for for reflectance it looked like uh one of the first things you were starting with was anti drone counter uas systems we've seen a lot we talked to a lot of these companies Allen Control Systems kind of putting a gun on a truck there's uh electronic warfare attempts we just talked to Nathan Mintz uh anderol has a variety of systems for counter uas uh projects uh why is that the landing why is that the beach head for you why are laser weapons so effective against drones yeah definitely so fundamentally directed Energy Systems the the promise there is that if you are using electrons as your ammunition then you have a extremely low marginal cost to shoot down like you bring the price to shoot down a drone you know if you're using a missile it could be millions of dollars if you're using an and drone it could be 100 to $250,000 per drone sh done you know that's an improvement but it's still extremely expensive you don't have a cost differential on your side um if you turn a laser for 3 seconds to shoot down a drone that's like 25 cents in electricity cost to to to shoot those down uh essentially so that's that's really that's really what we're looking at um on on that front and then your second question was there was a second one uh oh I mean I mean I I I just love to know like like it feels like this technology is still somewhat sci-fi I mean you said that they've been deployed but you know we haven't seen like videos of this like oh in Ukraine it's changing the battlefield or like or like with the uh what was it the the shoulder mounted rocket during the uh during the Ukraine war when that broke out we were like uh like there's not enough in the supply chain like it it was like not just it's real it's like it's having such an impact that they're using too many of them and now we need to figure out the supply chain uh I haven't seen any stories like that about laser weapons or directed energy weapons so where where are we actually in the roll out of this technology yeah so there are large Las like like we were talking about earlier there are large laser weapon systems that are deployed across like the Navy for example those are really really big um Prime primes generally are interested in making extremely expensive bespoke systems this is like the endro play right is is that that their business models do not do not allow them to to do anything other than like the particularly um heavy expensive bespoke system what what we're do what we're doing is we're coming from the bottom up and saying what is the lowest swap like what is the lowest weight what is the lowest size what is the lowest cost for a directed Energy System com from bottom up and and doing it um we're approaching our Target for we're approaching our Target for distance very rapidly on our Rd systems that will then go out and we look to deploy um early early to mid next year in in kind of fielded capacity through some of the through some of the dod units um I think a really Salient part of what we do is like when you're talking about some systems like maybe microwave systems or radio frequency systems or even bullet systems is the range is extremely limited I mean when you're firing a a a round out of a M249 the bullet the muzzle the muzzle speed's like 700 meters per second so you have to lead something you know when you get out to 700 meters it takes one second for the bullet to land you're arcing a bullet the Drone is flying dynamically that's a very hard control problem we are we are shooting things down at the physics limit like the like the speed of action essentially this where you know when we shoot a a pulse of light at something a thousand meters away and it's moving left to right at maximum speed say 100 miles an hour the the Drone moves at thrs 30 microns 20 microns in the period of time that it takes for the light to hit it so we have some Salient control benefits and we also can continue to move out further and further and further you know as we kind of build out the system and build more products on top of it the pathway that one two 3 four five kilometers is is right there have you uh I'm curious you've thought about defending various assets Against drones that are non-military so you could imagine if if somebody has uh let's call it an oil rig somewhere and and uh it's threatened by drone for one reason or another and and or or potentially a better example is something like you know an NFL stadium that's worried about you know potential drone-based terrorism can you have you thought about you know putting these you know turrets uh because one of the issues with with traditional kinetic anti-drone weapons is you're sort of shooting bullets into the air those bullets are going to land somewhere uh theoretically with lasers you could take the Drone outs without any uh risk of you know uh you know un undesired damage yeah definitely so you know in an urban environment or at the border right you know like you're not going to shoot a missile or a bullet you know in an urban environment at at some drones but there are you know I think the Super Bowl had had something like 50 50 to 100 something like like un un unseated airspace like injections of drones where that were not supposed to be there and you couldn't really do any like like DHS couldn't really do anything about it so you know we go forward and we become an option where we're probably the only option in an urban environment where the laser invisible it is silent um we can autonomously Target detect track and Destroy uh drones in that is that are threatening civilian infrastructure um so that's a great Point that's exactly what that's exactly what we want to do um and you know when we you know when you focus the laser onto Target to get a high density there's a there's a small depth where you get a very very high density you also deconflict and defocus past Target so we have this kind of depth where it's fairly lethal to targets but then we can deconflict pretty easily as well interesting do you yeah sorry yeah this this is sort of a scary thought but do you do you expect there to be drone-based you know terrorism uh like some type of drone based Terror terrorism event in the next five to 10 years it seems like uh a huge threat that we don't necessarily have any it's not like a police officer standing outside some you know soccer stadium somewhere is going to see a you know a drone coming in and take it out with a handgun so it doesn't seem like we necessarily have any defenses for that kind of attack um and you don't need such a sophisticated actor to pull it off necessarily yeah definitely I mean there's almost certainly um there have been attempts that the FBI has thwarted so I think maybe three months ago someone was planning an attack in Tennessee on a um on a on a p either a power plant or nuclear reactor I forgot which um but they thed the guy in advance they found him checked his Communications and and and stopped him wow um but you know most certainly I think one of the main dangers and what people are afraid about with Jord Warfare is that it allows non-state actors to inflict massive damage on trillion trillions of dollars of of human and infrastructure assets um so you know I don't think that we're too far off from a major attack happening obviously our our state defense apparatus is doing everything that they can to stop stuff and they're fairly successful but like if you miss one out of a thousand that's that's pretty yeah it's pretty damaging how are you thinking about the the revenue and growth side of the business uh I can imagine pulling in some SBI our money I could imagine this being kind of like a DARPA project almost uh longterm you probably want to be at program of record but how are you thinking about staging things out and what does it look like so far yeah you know we have a lot of interest from a lot of the from a lot of the National Labs um in terms of going straight to otaa in terms of uh like procurement contracts we are moving like people didn't really think that this could be done no one was looking at small scale lightweight Edge deploy directed energy and at this point we're moving so quickly like it'll like by the time by the time of cber like is written for like exactly what we're doing right now we'll be like a year down the line and we'll be ready to produce like 50 to 100 units so at this point and you know our our customers are pretty pretty well receptive to that if you're deploying directly to um if you're deploying directly to to DOD and then we just have an unending list of people that want to want to demo the turret on their vehicle platforms like so exting vehicle companies like all the way like small startups mid startups primes stuff like that and so I think we're we're trying to find that sweet spot where you know where do we deploy we have it's like we have we've done a good job building for system everything that we're doing makes sense um and then what we're going at is like where do you go from here which of the which of the promising opportunities do you tackle with limited resources yeah well I'm I'm a potential customer I'm big into big game hunting and I'd love to take this on my next hunting trip dude and it'll be cooked it'll be cooked that's that's what I'm looking for shoot here and then you can just like eat it right there yeah that's that's exactly what I need I'm sure Peta will love that uh so thank you uh great it's great to meet Michael thanks for doing what you're doing yeah yeah thanks for the message and thanks for hopping on uh really fun chat and good luck to you thank you guys thank you of course thank you so much yeah talk soon we'll talk to you soon cheers uh well what a fantastic tour of uh defense Tech I feel like I learned a lot about all the different companies and got to talk to some really interesting people uh do you have anything else you want to cover before we jump off for the day America day America day was a success we'll be I just want to say that America day doesn't end when uh when the stream stops it's going to keep going uh forever forever sort of a Perpetual day regardless of what the Market's doing yeah um but uh no I want to say thank you to ramp uh poly Market public bezel numeral adquick eight sleep and wander they make the show possible we are 100% Corporation supported yes and uh we're very grateful for it yeah thank you everyone uh we will see you tomorrow can't believe it's Friday tomorrow John it's crazy flew by one more stream this week yeah it's going to be a rough weekend it's going to be great thanks all right thanks guys cheers