Fil Aronshtein on DRA's maritime deal and selling into defense-adjacent industrial markets

Give us an update. You haven't been on the show in weeks. It's been far too long. Gentlemen, we got Phil from Dra in the studio in the Temple of Technology in the capital of Great. Great tie, by the way. Is that a tie? What's on? I thought it was a unicorn. Actually, it is Mughal Conquerors. I was recently in London.

Okay. took a trip down Savo, walked into Drakekes and said, "You know what? That six of six, you know, yes, only six made tie, you got to have one. You got to meet the other five guys who wear the same tie. " So true. I was thinking about this. Let's get a group check. Let's get a group, you know, Patrick Baitman style.

Like, you know, let's see Baitman's card. Yep. Popular in the '90s. I'm thinking we're going to be bringing back ties. I love it. Let's see. Uh, we've talked about your business before. uh it feels like mostly B2B selling into defense tech companies, selling into uh uh hard tech companies.

Uh what is top of mind for you here? Obviously, it's a great event, good to meet people, but is there uh is there a particular agenda item that you think is important to highlight at Hill Valley this year? Absolutely.

So, yes, we sell into uh airspace and events, automotive, agony, construction, maritime recently uh to be announced uh soon, but uh closed a maritime deal, which is very exciting. Congratulations. There is a very very critical lack of discussion around the American worker. Sure.

You know, we the average age of the American manufacturer is 55. Over the next 5 10 years, we're losing a lot of those folks. And with that critical tribal knowledge that without writing down, institutionalizing, capturing in some way, we are going to see an immense loss of our ability as a nation to produce.

And so there, you know, I I've said this before, I'll say it again. You know, we have spent billions of dollars on environmental conservation. We have spent zero dollars on tribal knowledge conservation as the country. Um, this is something I'm advocating for from a policy perspective.

You have a hot take on AI not disrupting your business or not really disrupting uh the I I I guess like the American worker. Can you unpack that a little bit and take me through how you see AI changing the way we uh design and manufacture things in America? So little bit of a complex uh perspective I guess.

Um when you look at what LLM are useful for generally right people will throw them at generative tasks but when you look at what LM have been trained on is more broadly like the internet. the internet full of forums and all of this context and context is key. Yeah. Right.

And what you do not have in those LLMs is the context of what you need made the specs of it uh and how to actually do it because kind of like what I mentioned earlier, it's tribal knowledge. And by that virtue, it means it wasn't written down anywhere.

And even if you like even if it was written down, your scan is probably private. It's not just out on the internet, not crawable like you know some sort of private database. Interesting. Exactly.

And so while LM are useful as a technology, you need to put them in a position to aggregate, contextualize, and then leverage critical information that is not, you know, in a LLM that open AI might have been able to train on.

So, uh, you know, I think if you were ever going to see AI actually, uh, disrupt manufacturing, you're going to have it, you're going to have to have a way to embed it within the workflow and infrastructure of an existing manufacturing facility and make sure that you are able to well integrate it into the flow of folks who are not super techsavvy.

That's where are you bullish in terms of AI and manufacturing? I can imagine we've seen those reports that like, oh, I I emailed a Chinese manufacturer, a European manufacturer, and an American manufacturer, and the Americans and the Europeans didn't even get back to me for a week.

That feels like at the very least you could just have a chatbot that takes your order and gives you some data. What's about um that specific problem is the problem of quoting complex, not really AI LLM. Um, people have been doing quoting software for a while.

It's really computational, geometry intensive, generally pretty complex. Um, and so companies like uh, you know, paperless parts will or or zometry will like help you with this. Um, what we're describing there isn't really like a an AI problem. It's a like work culture problem generally.

Like we as Americans work very very hard, but the the Chinese have the underdog mentality. They've been hungry for 30 years. They've been on the come up. you know, we what what we're running into is that 1991 was a 1776 moment for China, you know, for you know, specifically 199.

So, basically for 50 60 years from 1945 to 1991, we were in the cold war, right? And so we had this, you know, global battle of, you know, the west versus communism. But is 91 different than 89 follow the Berlin wall? Why 91? I say 91 generally, you know, either one.

sort of like that marker of when we basically said the west has won global American you know hijgemany has won you know we can sort of like rest on our laurels very similar to beginning of the Clinton era yeah exactly you know NAFTA and all that stuff we basically said let's pick a couple of nations to offshore our production to globalism is going to win let's pick China Japan Korea offshore all production you know fund all that infrastructure and then you know just trust they'll have our best interest in mind very much like this industrial colonialism like our own version of it so if you look at historically you know you had the global power do that set of colonies and then get very uh you know comfortable and think you know it's the end of history we've won what's happening with China is exactly what happened in 1776 now where we you know have basically seen China say you know what you know Japan and Korea you want to play with the US fine you know just like Australia and Canada you know pay ties to the vassal state or to to the to the mother ship um fine right but China is now saying, you know what, we're not going to play ball.

We are going to go, you know, 1776. We are on the come up. So, there's that underdog mentality of one generation, two generations of 30 years of that baked into the culture of the Chinese manufacturer and that's where we're fighting against.

Not talk about uh do you think there's enough conversation at Hill Valley around just labor in general? Cuz I imagine like part of your thinking is like who's going to be using my product in 20 years, right?

Like that's a big question and and it's one that's interesting because it actually does feel like there's less direct ways for private companies to develop the next labor force for manufacturing, right? It's like yeah, individual companies can train people. Yep.

You can h try to, you know, poach people from legacy firms, but it does feel like an area that the government can have a a tremendous impact.

Are you hearing conversation uh so far throughout the event on that or or should certainly a little bit um but I would like to see more a lot of technology brings the top up and so you see this distribution of technology at manufacturing companies this is always you know always been the case and so the companies with the most money all the enterprises the Lockheeds the Toyotas the Fords you know all the big guys can just dump money on the fanciest you know AILM stuff but the key to saving the American industrial base isn't just making the top most, you know, wealthy companies have more and more advanced technologies and having like a 99% 1% split of that distribution technology.

It's bring the bottom up. And so when you talk about like the labor base, what I'm starting to hear folks get is, you know, this is and something that I deeply agree with. We don't want cheap labor. Like we don't want bugman cheap labor. We want smart labor.

And so that's why, you know, tools like us, tools like a bunch of other things out there are geared towards saying, "Hey, we are not just going to radically improve quality of life for the modern manufacturer. We're going to build something that makes people want to go into this job because of how cool and modern it is.

" Like, you know, people love building, software engineers love building tools for other software engineers. And there's this flywheel effect and positively reinforcing feedback loop of cool tool, cool tool, cool tool.

When you start doing that for production, you end up having younger folks saying, "That looks super cool. SpaceX has all these cool tools. That sounds awesome. Let me go work in that facility.

" And so government um yeah, SpaceX is actually an interesting example cuz didn't didn't their uh their warehouse management system like spin out as its independent company or something? Uh no, not exactly.

It is uh people have it is like very very common for like somebody to work in this like thousand plus software engineering org. They have this uh internal software they call uh warp speed. Okay. Um, warp speed, warp drive. It is, you know, fairly sophisticated.

Um, and you'll often have like somebody who was at SpaceX fairly early on that team say like, I'm going to do this and productionize it. And then they like spin out. There's been like five. Yeah, there's been a couple other they're fine, but you know. Yeah. Anyway, Jordy, uh, any other questions?

Should we back to the conference? Thank you so much for stopping by. If Aaron's out there, you want to send him in or anyone else? Well, I think I just saw him. Let me Okay, great. Yeah. Yeah, grab him cuz I think he was hanging out for a little bit and we got to bring him on.

We got four more people, maybe five more people on the guest list. Ben is sweating. He needs a bathroom break. Should we take five? Can we go to Can we go to a break? Uh, we are going to take a 5minute break, folks. Thank you for