Revolutionizing Drone Technology: Mark Valentine of Skydio on Sofrep Radio

Mark Valentine is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a combat veteran F-16 pilot who served for over 25 years. Today, he is the President of Global Government at Skydio, a leading U.S. drone manufacturer. Despite his vast experience flying combat jets, Valentine admits that in today’s battlefield, drones impact results in ways that new jets or missiles cannot.

As autonomous drones become more sophisticated, they now make far fewer errors compared to their human operators. However, in actual combat where lives are on the line, the humans behind the drones must face a deeper question about the desensitization that happens when a soldier uses a drone thousands of miles away, like a video game, to take another life.

Hey, what's going on? This is Rad with Sofrep Radio and you are watching another awesome episode. Today, I have a very cool guest, and it’s very relevant to what’s going on in our world today. But first, I always have to mention our merch store, right? You know, this fireplace is flickering because you guys buy our merch, and that keeps me on the air. So thank you so much for buying the merch and tagging us on Sofrep on Instagram and all these social medias. Keep doing that, check out the merch store. Thanks to Brandon Webb for always curating all these cool little things that are branded with our logo on it.

I also have to reference our book club, so sofrep.com Book Club, you’ve heard me say it before. It’s sofrep.com Book Club. Go check out a book that’s been curated by some of the special operators behind the scenes here at Sofrep, and they think that you would like to read these books like, you know, Steel Fear. Go check it out by Brandon Webb.

Now, this keeps me going. I love to interview folks who have gone from civilian to military back to civilian and their Rockstar story, and today’s guest is no different. Mark Valentine is my guest today, and Mark comes from a very dynamic background. A fighter pilot in the United States Air Force, now he is currently the president of the global government of business for Skydio. Think Sky Studio, Skydio. We’re going to talk about drones and technology. Let’s welcome Mark to the show. Mark, welcome.

Hey, I appreciate it, Rad. And by the way, I’ve got commercials on TV now that tell me we’re not allowed to call ourselves rock stars in business. I’m gonna get somebody from Kiss breaking down my door here telling me I can’t do that.

Oh, you can do it all you want, brother. It’s okay. Come at us, Kiss. Where you at? Rock and roll. Now, listen, before you sat in this chair that you’re in, and you got this huge long title of president of the global government of business for Skydio, what a title. Before that, you were in the military. You were Air Force, right?

Yeah, so I actually, before I came to Skydio, I worked in the AI business. I built a federal business at Scale AI. I did that for several years, and then I also ran the national security team at Microsoft for about seven years. And then prior to that, I retired in 2015 from the US military and flew fighters for most of my time there in the Air Force. Did some of the standard Pentagon tours and all the things you’d expect.

Did you ever get the chance to meet Bill Gates working at Microsoft?

You know, I did meet Bill Gates, but it was before I started working at Microsoft. So by the time I got there in 2015, he was like the chairman, and Satya had come on as the CEO. And by the way, you want to talk about phenomenal leaders, Satya Nadella is a phenomenal leader. But I did get a chance to meet BG a couple of times before I joined the company, actually.

I just find that cool. You know, you worked in his space, you got to at least bump through. I mean, if you’re going to work at Microsoft, you might as well say, did you meet Bill Gates? I’m just curious. I mean, he is a really, really rich guy, and he’s like a huge landowner of America. I’ve learned that. But who just joined us, Mark? Who’s our friend?

I think that’s Greg Rear, and he doesn’t realize that he is live on the internet right now.

Well, hey, what’s going on, Greg Rear? Welcome. You kind of give me some Zoolander vibes, bro. How you doing? Can you hear me? Is he speechless?

I think so. I think so.

Well, he’s gonna be on YouTube. I just want you to know that. And if there’s anything that you want him to say, say it for him because you’re the president of the global government of business at Skydio.

Greg just wants to tell everyone he’s really happy to be here, happy to be on Sofrep, and he’s going to buy some merch right after this.

Perfect. Perfect. And join the book club. Don’t forget to go buy your merch. Get that done, sofrep.com. Now, when it comes to F-16s, I’ve had my experience with some F-16s, right? I live outside of Hill Air Force Base. I have my business, which is set just 600 meters away from the South Gate. Do you remember Hill Air Force Base? You said you kind of played around there a little bit?

I spent a little time there, yeah. We fly some test and evaluation missions out of there in the Utah Test and Evaluation Range.

That’s right. That’s right. And I got to fly over Uter in a simulation. My instructor was Ira, that was his call sign.

About when was this?

I flew with him about 2002 or 2003, up on the Sims, just to give you a heads up. But what they did was they set Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake as a pirates destination of ships. So here I am, fighter pilot. I was going back in time and I’m dive bombing onto like Captain Jack Sparrow’s ship, and I’m like, and they gave me Iron Eagle mode. So like, we’re going to give you Iron Eagle mode. So I’m like throwing rockets at it, and all you hear is like, and they’re like, oh no, he’s going to go. And I pulled up, he’s like, very valid. That’s all he said, valid. Very valid. And then I had a buddy and he was flying in the other simulators on the F-16s, and we were chasing each other over Lagoon, the amusement park.

Yeah, I tell you what, there were some really weird visual illusions you could get when flying over the Great Salt Lake, especially at night because the lake was so calm and so reflected a perfect reflection of the sky. And there were these weird times where when you were flying over it, you really couldn’t tell what was the ground or what was the water, what was the sky. And this is a sad story, but I had a really good friend named Dylan McFarland, this was in the 90s, who was doing a training mission over that airspace and was doing a defensive maneuver at low altitude at night and did a really high G left turn and kind of got a little bit inverted and couldn’t tell the difference. And seconds later was in the water, really, really tragic story. So anyway, didn’t mean to bring it down.

No, no, no, I love that. I don’t love the fact that that happened. I just know that that happened. I was living here. I remember these things that happened. I also remember when the Blackhawks in ’93 or ’96 kind of crashed off of the jetty that goes out there. They built the road off of Antelope Island to go out to the Antelope Island. And yeah, there’s a memorial there. And I think your friend has got a memorial there as well.

He does. And it’s one of those things that reminds you that, I mean, in some ways, we’ve forgotten how dangerous the stuff is. It’s for real, even in training. I mean, not to mention when you get in combat and people are actually shooting back at you.

Well, if anything, you gave him a shout out and that will go up on the internet and there’s his name. If someone listens again, they’ll hear his name. So there’s another shout out for that. And bro, F-16s, man, not the easiest stick to move, right?

I learned that in the 80s, they just gave it like two pounds of pressure to just move because the stick didn’t move at all when they first came out. And so it just sensed the force in your hand and then pilots, we hated it. We’re like, hold on a minute, you got to feel that you’re moving the stick. So finally, they put a quarter inch of travel in all directions. Now the piezoelectric sensor that sensed the force stayed the same, but they just gave a little bit of feel so you could feel like you’re moving the stick and that really changed a lot. So from a human factors engineering thing, you wouldn’t think that would be such a big deal, but it was a huge deal.

Oh yeah. My instructor, he was like, you’re going to be sore tomorrow because I’m just like trying to like, I’m like, he’s like, one guy was putting like 280 pounds of pressure on the stick, which is where they started to loosen it back in the 80s to like give it a little bit of that movement, but like him with the maxes, but really anything over 30, it doesn’t matter. But you don’t know that man, you’re just cranking that thing.

Yeah, you’re just cranking. And the thing is, I think of the demo team, the Thunderbirds. Bro, like 18 inches away, 14 inches, 16 inches away from each other’s wing tips. And they’re just like, it’s fine. It’s just feeling my pressure of my hand. It’s totally cool. Like what’s in my head goes to my hand and I could just like, and I look to my right and left as if there’s a wingman on my right and left right now. I’m like, where are you at?

Well, the cool thing is once you got used to it, you didn’t put as much force on it and it did get easier to do. But we would call it, we didn’t call it a stick anymore. We called it, this is our earth rotator switch. And you could just, you just rotate the earth.

Yes, right now it’s the F-35. Is that this weekend?

That is this weekend. So the demo team’s going to be there. They’ve got like 20 different people flying. C-5s are already coming in and all the different aircraft have been starting to fly into the Air Force base. So my business is just outside the South Gate. I own a building just out there. There’s a huge parking lot, there’s a Pizza Hut in the corner. So I do airsoft war games inside of there. So all the youth and everybody come in and fight each other and we do all these war games. And then all of a sudden you have an F-16 flying over. I’m like, oh, you want sound effects? Oh, you want sound effects with your war games? How about F-35s? You want F-35s?

They shake the ground too, so there’s a haptic thing you got going on.

Well, and some of them are our customers. Let’s be clear. They got kids and those kids are like 13 too and they want to play airsoft. So here comes the general of the base one year. He’s like, Rad, I’m the general of the base. And I’m like, okay, do I stand up and salute? It’s been a minute. He’s like, no, no, no. And then the next day he came in to pick up his son’s gun and he was in full uniform. And I was like, oh, you’re the general. You weren’t kidding. Yeah. He had his little star on his bear jacket. And I never saw the star over there. I’ve always seen like where, but he had his on and I was like, all right, bro. So were you a part of those guys up there? Did you fight or did you fly with like the Black Widows or the Rams, the Rude Rams?

No, no. So I was never stationed at Hill, but I flew up there a lot. We did an exercise called Combat Hammer, which we would drop live weapons. And I did a lot of EW or electronic warfare work in the Block 50, the F-16. So that was one of the only places in the world for training you could go shoot high-speed anti-radiation missiles, the HARM, AGM-88. So we would go up there quite a bit. And this was when I was stationed in Germany. We would bring airplanes over, base out of Hill for a couple of weeks to a month and do a bunch of combat drops, whether they were GBU-24s, big 2000 pound paveway threes, or shoot the AGM-88s because again, that was one of the only places in the world that you could do that. So it’s phenomenal range for that.

Yeah. The Lakeside, Lakeside, Lakeside out there is legit. I mean, really the desert.

That’s right. That’s right.

Oh man. A friend of mine was a firefighter when I was growing up. He was our neighbor and their dad was the firefighter. He’d be out there for three days on, home for two days, out there for three days on. And we’d go out there to drop him off. And then we would, funny enough, hunt rabbits on the way back on the dirt road from Lakeside because it’s like the middle of nowhere.

Well, you’re like, hey, what else are you going to do?

What else are you going to do? You know, so we were like 13 years old and anyways, wow, dude. So, so, so cool. You’re so cool. Shoot the watch, bro. Right there. Straight up now.

Yeah, I’ll give you one. There we go.

Yeah, exactly. Now, now, sir. Now that I know you’re sir. Now you go from-

No one calls me sir.

No, no, no. Be called by my real name.

President of the global government of business at Skydio. That’s your name now. With that, you go from the military, you learn about everything you can in the military. You’ve learned about the F-16. You’ve learned how to march left, right, left, to fight in a team, to be a part of a team. And then you transition out of the military. How old were you when you kind of got out? What rank did you get out as an age, if you don’t mind?

Yeah. So I retired as a Colonel. I was 45. Most people with my background, you know, fighter pilot, Air Force, what have you, you would go one of two paths, right? You’d either go to the commercial airlines or you would go to a large defense contractor and work on the next fighter or the next missile. And I was really lucky in my career, Rad. Like I had already done war college and stuff. So I got picked up for this special program called the Secretary of Defense Fellows Program, where they took about 10 folks, a couple of Army, a couple of Navy, a couple of Air Force, and they sent us to UVA School of Business for a while and then farmed us out to work at different Fortune 500 companies for a year. And so this was like 2009 timeframe. I got an opportunity while I was still in uniform to go work at Microsoft for a year. And that was a pretty interesting time. If you rewind the clock and think like the iPhone just came out like in 2008. So there was this revolution happening in like what we now call the hyperscale cloud providers, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera. They were all like operationalizing cloud computing. And it raised some interesting questions, right? It’s like, okay, if you can bring the marginal cost of compute, networking and storage down to functionally zero, what does that mean for humanity? And it turns out it would unlock certain things like AI and ML. Anyway, I got really deep into that while I was there for the year. And then when I left that, I came back to the Pentagon, did another tour, then did a command tour and elected to retire in 2015. So instead of going that standard path that a lot of my colleagues had gone on, which by the way is not pejorative. I mean, there are some people doing great things. None of it really excited me. So I just kept thinking back to that experience in the tech world. I’m like, man, I honestly think that stuff is going to have a bigger impact on how wars are deterred, how they’re fought and how they’re won in the future. Maybe more than the next fighter jet or the next missile or the next ship. And I’m like, I think that’s where I want to be. Now, between you and me, I have a technical background. I’m an engineer by training and I messed around with computers my whole life and taught myself how to do coding at a really, really young age. But dude, I’d done almost none of that throughout my Air Force career, other than a lot of the EW stuff that I did led to some beeps and squeaks stuff that I call it. But really, for almost 30 years, I hadn’t done any of that. But I had a background in it enough. So I ended up calling some colleagues at Microsoft and going, hey, here’s what I can’t do. I know here are some things that I probably can’t do, but here’s a bunch of stuff in the middle that I think I could really be valuable in. And it worked. I got an opportunity. And then I think I successfully turned that opportunity into more opportunities. And here we are now. So from there, I started up with Scale AI after Microsoft and kind of helped them build their federal business, which was super amazing. Got to do some really cool things in the AI ML space, creating everything from computer vision algorithms to tuning LLMs. And then between you and me, Rad, I was happy, man. I was going to retire and hang up the cleats. Actually, I did that. I did it for about four months. My wife tells me I’m really bad at retiring. So I helped a few friends out with some consulting things and some DC firms, helping some CEOs answer some questions. And I ran into Adam Bri, who’s the founder of Skydio. And we started talking and I’m like, man, you have a super interesting confluence of things happening, right? You got aviation on one side and AI on the other. And I’m like, this is really exciting to me. And I’m like, believe it or not, I have a background in both of these things. And if you need someone to help, let me know. And so here I am. And about a week later, I joined the company. And so I’ve been here now for about a year and a half. And I lobbied, you say my title’s president and it is. That’s only because I lobbied for the title of emperor, but he wouldn’t give that to me. I don’t know why.

Now, I just want to be clear and let my listener know that not only are you a cool fighter pilot, but you’re also part of one of the largest drone companies for Department of Defense, right? In America, like probably renowned worldly.

We

are the largest small drone manufacturer outside of China.

Tell me about that. Let’s talk about that. Right. So right now they have a brand that is being pushed through to be banned in the US right now, like can’t be sold. DJI, I think, is something like that’s going on. Where is your stuff made?

So we make everything here in the US. So we are headquartered in California and everything’s manufactured there. I mean, that’s just a simple answer.

Yeah. Now, to be fair, some of our chips still come from Taiwan. Sure. So we have some of those standard supply chain dependencies, if you will. But yeah, we’re made in the US and we’re actually really proud of that.

I’m cool with Taiwan, man. Democratic country, bro. I’m cool with Taiwan. It’s totally fine.

Yeah. We invested a lot into our factory in Hayward, California. So when I joined the company, we had just plugged money in there to 10x the manufacturing capacity. So we’ve got it ramped up pretty good and we’ve got capacity to go beyond that. So we’re ready to rock.

Let me ask you, here’s a left field question. So if there’s a veteran out there that has worked in something similar to you, or someone who’s maybe worked in the Navy on some electronic systems, would they be who you’re looking for to maybe apply to your company?

Absolutely. So I think a lot of people, when they think of, especially the smaller quadcopter drones that we’re talking about, many people think they’re toys. And you know what? They’re not. And we can talk about what’s going on in Ukraine right now and how drones are being used in real-world combat in a minute. But the bottom line is these things are not toys and especially our drones. We’ve infused them with artificial intelligence to do everything from obstacle avoidance to tracking subjects, staying with a convoy, all sorts of things. And that is not just a simple soldering job. So we have teams and teams of engineers doing everything from data annotation to building computer vision models, configuring neural networks to run on the device so that the drone can actually conduct and perform these AI activities at the edge without connectivity to anything else. We have radio engineers, network engineers, folks doing some incredible stuff. Believe it or not, we have computational fluid dynamic engineers doing aero. We’ve got electrical engineers distributing power across the drone. It’s really complex. And again, that’s why I say these things aren’t toys. They’re not something you could go find 10 components online and just solder these things together yourself. Well, you could do something like that, but to integrate that into an integrated package that can do the things that our drones can do, especially in the autonomous space, it’s not easy. And then, oh, by the way, you’ve got those people. So now you’ve built something. You’ve got to test it. So we have a phenomenal group of flight test engineers, many of whom come from a military background that understand how to run a military test program, like our lead, Nicole Bienne. She is from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, has a background in flight test, and she’s running a great team there. And again, I came from the US Air Force and we were pretty proud of ourselves and how we managed our airplanes and our people that flew them. And I was blown away that at an essentially 800 person company, we were running a flight test regimen that even the US Air Force would go, man, that’s pretty impressive. And a flight training regimen that even the US Air Force would go, holy shnikes, I had no idea that people were doing things like that. So we’ve got all that going on. Then you’ve got the folks who are working business development. Then once something is sold, we’ve got teams. And we think this is part of our secret sauce at Skydio, is that you’re not buying a drone, you’re buying a company that’s trying to help you get a drone program. So we will white glove everything from unboxing to training to support, whether that’s changing props or arms or batteries, whatever you need. We try to make that a seamless kind of white glove service. So from end to end, it’s a phenomenal engine to watch. And we do have tons of veterans that are working all across the company.

I love that. You should just keep talking. I’ll just listen. I’m just going to listen to you.

No, it’s so cool. You know your lane so well. That’s what I love about it. So let me, there’s a place here called Rio Tinto Mine. I’m going to step away from the combat aspect of the drone and talk about a mine aspect of a drone, right? And there’s a big, huge smelter that’s just outside of, you know, on the way to Tooele, Utah, if you recognize that smelter. So you’re saying that this drone can go up inside of that smelter without risking the life of somebody having to repel down inside of it to check its infrastructure?

Dude, you have now hammered in the thesis behind a company like Skydio. And I tell this a lot to our internal teams and many people don’t like to hear this, but at the end of the day, Rad, no one really cares about a drone. What people care about is what the drone can do for them, whatever their business is, whatever their mission is. How can this mobile sensor help me do that job better? That is the goal. And you bring up another great point, right? So I think a lot of people, especially in this audience are watching, watching, you know, the news or reading the news or maybe have access to information you and I don’t have access to any longer about what’s happening in Ukraine. And, you know, we’re seeing these FPV drones being flown into Russian tanks and we’re like, wow, that’s, that’s pretty amazing. And so I think, you know, that is the seen part of what drones are doing to transform the battlefield and maybe the future, but there’s a whole part that I think is unseen. And you brought up a great point. So this smelter that you’re talking about, at Skydio, we are a dual use company, so which means we work with commercial businesses, you know, state, local entities, et cetera, and, you know, US government, national level governments, which by the way is where the title global government came from. It’s US federal and national level governments around the world.

The emperor would be so easy.

Yeah, exactly. But anyway, what we’re seeing in the commercial space are more and more people, because again, there’s no FPV, you know, go kill Russian tanks mission analogous in the commercial sector. But people are using these drones, especially drones like the ones we make at Skydio that have the autonomous capabilities so that anyone can fly them. You don’t necessarily have to be a fully trained operator with 30,000 hours of operating an aerial vehicle to be able to get value out of this. So where we’re seeing this happen are places like utility inspections. So right now there are utility companies, and especially in Utah, you see this where you’ve got, you know, I don’t know what the name of it is, but we’ll call it Utah Power and Light for lack of a better.

Yeah, I think it sounds, I think it’s it. Yeah, UPL.

That’s what we’ll call them, right? So they probably have hundreds of trucks, like fleets of trucks that they put gas in all the time, and hundreds of people, and they give them a map and they go, go check these four stations today. And they drive around, they take pictures, they come back, someone downloads the pictures, someone else looks at them. And then five days later, they go, oh, we’ve got a broken insulator on, you know, Schmuckity Schmuck number two. And they go, okay, now you go fix that. Think about this. What if you could have a smart intelligent sensor that you could hit a button and in say 30 minutes, it has done a 3D scan at the millimeter level of accuracy, right, without a human touching a stick or a throttle all around that substation. And it sends you back a notification that says, dude, transformer number two on Schmuckity Schmuck number one is broken. Send a new one. Just imagine the ROI you would get out of that. So that is actually happening right now, where there are drones living in little docks, which think about them as like pizza boxes. They look like an old mailbox and they sit in there out of the weather. They’re charging, they can transmit, then either autonomously or on command, this dude comes out, does this autonomous inspection, reads all the gauges with its camera, transmits that all back to the operation center, lands back in the dock, done. I mean, that is happening today. And so the cool part of what I get to do is see those innovations happening in the commercial sector and figure out how can we pull that into say the government or the defense sector. And we all know, you know, again, going back to the seen part, what’s going on in Ukraine, we see that piece and we see how tactical our drones are acting as spotters for the FPVs and the SU-25s coming in. But not many people, I think, recognize that the vast majority of even the defense department, they’re not doing that kind of stuff. They’re supporting, they’re building, et cetera. And so trying to bring these capabilities into that environment so, you know, our US Department of Defense and allied militaries can get the same benefits of them so we can get to that, you know, ultimate goal of predictive maintenance and, you know, reducing stuff so we can focus the limited assets we have on combat power, I think is a really phenomenal opportunity. That’s the part I love about being here.

Who’s the threat right now that’s doing this, that we’re watching, that’s trying to get their drones out? Who’s the other side of this? Is there somebody else or are we pretty much like, you know, air superiority in the Air Force? That’s what we were taught. We are the best in the air. Is there someone else trying to come at us that is doing this? Should I be more aware? Other than Skydio, who’s on my side, quote unquote, versus the other guy? Is there someone out there?

Yeah. So I think there are some great American companies that are getting into the space. Again, personally and admittedly, I have a bias. I think we and Skydio have a lead there. But outside of that, I think the vast majority of the competitive threat just in drones in general is coming from China, which, you know, you had asked earlier about, you know, the potential Chinese drone ban. There are legitimate security concerns that people should be aware of when they’re operating Chinese drones. And I’ll just point people, there was a unclassified paper released by the FBI and CISA, the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency, which codified some of those risks.

I see. Where’s my net gun? What am I going to use? What’s going to stop it? You know, how do we stop this? I mean, you know, did we not see Terminator?

Yeah. You know, and I get that. And I want to see, okay, now I see the first person drone footage and sometimes I see things I don’t want to see because they’re like, hey, Rad, check this footage out, you know? And I’m like, I don’t know if I wanted to see that footage, right? But it’s done with drones. It’s like right up their tailpipe. And like, that’s not a person having to die to do that per se, you know, in the drone. Like, I got a friend who I’ve known since he was about 15 and today he’s about 24. He’s gone through a military academy. He’s gone through schooling. And he talked to me the other day and he’s like, I’m going to the Air Force Academy. I was like, sweet. He’s like, I’m going to be a pilot. I was like, what are you going to fly? He’s like, drones. I was like, okay, not just F-16s or A-10s or F-35s, but whatever else they got in their drones. And he’s got like a big gulp, you know, next to his flight suit on, you know, he’s got an air pod in, he’s just doing his job.

I tell you what, Rad, it’s so first off, I’m an alumnus of the institution you just mentioned. And so I’ve got, you know, I mentor a lot of young men and women that want to go to service academies and end up going. And so, you know, I’m seeing a lot more of them enter the drone space. And I was actually in the cockpit in the F-16 when, you know, the first MQ-1 started to come into use, and then, or sorry, the RQ-1s, and then later the MQ-1s, they could actually shoot stuff. And this was right after September 11th, which, long story short, I was at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, and then I was moving to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, DC. And my first day of work at Andrews Air Force Base, so I was a young captain at the time, was September 11th, 2001. And so I really, we can talk about it separately, but not the time on the show. But a lot of things changed right after September 11th, which many of us saw here in the States. But obviously, you know, we started prosecuting a war in Afghanistan. And that was the first overt use of an uncrewed aerial system, which again, was the RQ-1 at the time or the Predator. And, you know, I think people started to go, okay, interesting. You know, it’s great. We can put up this high endurance platform that can orbit, which by the way, that worked because we had air superiority, no one was shooting it down. And now that thing gets airborne for, let’s say, 10, 20 hours and feedback this phenomenal tactical intelligence that then our ground forces can use to be able to better prosecute their targets and accomplish their mission. Awesome. Then we started adding Hellfire missiles to it, you know, and we started shooting those. And it’s really interesting, right? And, you know, a lot of manned fighter pilots, and I will admit, I fell into this category at one point in time, we used to look at that and go, okay, well, these aren’t real pilots, right? Okay. They’re not putting their life on the line. Their butt’s not in the combat zone. They’re not getting shot at. But I tell you what, I have super amount of respect for the people who do that. And it took me time to figure this out. But like when I would deploy and fly in those environments and do those missions, I was with a unit of people, and we were all in the same boat. And we would do our mission during the day or night or whatever. And then we would come back to our base, and you’re in your tent or whatever it was, and you’re around other people who had done that. And it gave you a chance to communicate, to offload these feelings that come with doing things like that, that humans just aren’t necessarily wired to do. But imagine this. Imagine you’re sitting in a cubicle, say you’re in Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, and you’re flying an airplane that is 7000 miles away. You’re watching a target, an individual, for hours, and then you are directed to essentially shoot your missile and take that life. And then 10 minutes later, Rad, you drive your kids to the soccer game. Imagine that. Just the context shift. And so for a long time, I didn’t understand what some of those folks were going through. But I tell you what, I have a lot of deep empathy for what they went through, because I can only imagine. And so getting back to this idea we’re talking about, about drones. So yeah, you’re right. You can go on YouTube now and see a lot of these FPV drones. And I think in some ways it’s desensitizing. But put yourself in the shoes of the person who had to make that call to do that. That’s where I hope the listeners and the people that are going to watch those videos are actually thinking through that part of it. Because again, my baseline thesis is humans don’t necessarily ever want to do something like that. So whenever they have to take an action like that, it chips away at your humanity, one chip at a time. So it’s tough.

And some of these, back in the early 2000s, there was a photo that leaked out of the EOD team, and they had an Xbox controller in one of the young EOD operators’ hands controlling the robot. And it shows that this Xbox controller and all of its configurations are just so muscle memory for that age range of that individual. So now what did they do? They just said, oh, why don’t we make the controllers like an Xbox? So now you’ve got this dude and he’s just like hunkered down, all his gear on, and he’s just like, all right, I’m just going to control the robot like I know how to control the robot, bro. So now you flash forward to today. This was about 20 years ago, that photo came out. Today, you’ve got kids who have been flying drones as a gift from Christmas time, and they’re already integrated with it. And then they’re playing video games where these things are used and implemented in missions. Just like what you’re talking about.

America’s Army made a video game called The Army of Two, and it was a recruiting tool. You would log in with your information. They would just capture your information. I can only imagine if there was a drone FPV game and you’re just pulling the last star fighter out of it.

It is. You are the last star fighter.

I tell you what, Rad, you mentioned the book club that you have, and I’m glad you have that. And I’ve actually read a couple of the books. Now, this author isn’t a former special operator, but I would encourage your viewers to actually go and read a book called Wired for War. It’s by a gentleman named Peter Singer, and he wrote it. This book is probably 15 years old, but it actually goes through this concept of, hey, what does the world look like when you’re not risking human lives to go to war? And there are some interesting discussions there because on one side, guess what? You’re not risking human beings, so that’s great. We have fewer losses. But on the other side is, if there are no human costs to war, do we see it more often or do we see it less often? So anyway, it’s a great book, and I encourage the

folks to go take a look at it if they haven’t.

You make me take my glasses off with that comment because what I’m thinking about is the human element in war. And let’s not get lost on the fact that somebody could take a moment and realize maybe they shouldn’t do what they were going to do. And something autonomous and robotic will not have that same probably stopping point of maybe their mother.

Or maybe, Rad, it could be the opposite. It really could, because we acknowledge human beings make mistakes in war. I know it. I’ve seen it. And so some of this, I come at looking at my experiences being a pilot. So in the F-16, when I first started flying it, our joke was everything was steam driven. You had all these gauges, and I realized that I, as the pilot, I was the integration engine for all these sensors. I had a radar thing that I could look at, a radar warning receiver. I had all these other gauges and data links and whatnot. And all those data came into my little brain, which I went to Alabama public school, so I can’t process that much at one time. So I was the limitation for the decision making power in that airplane. But over time, we started to add more and more, I’ll call them layers of automation. And then I had an opportunity to do some pilot vehicle interface work in the F-35, which had this one single integrated screen, and it was a fused picture of what was going on in the world. And I can’t share one of the specific stories, but someone was like, okay, you can do this now. I’m like, well, hold on a minute. You’re telling me to trust this computer when before I would do these 11 things to verify the rules of engagement were met, and then I would make the decision. And I’m like, because if that’s what I do, see, it says pilot right here. And so they’re like, okay, well, you can do those things if you want, but do you think you can do them faster and more accurately than the computer? And my initial answer was, of course I can. But what I learned over time is these things that I was spending my limited gray matter processing were really just rote calculations and adding this and that. And believe it or not, the computer was way faster at doing that than I was. And now it took time to develop trust. And this is the key point I think we have to get to is trust. But once I developed that trust, what I learned is that now all those things I was trying to do with the limited gray matter that got freed up, and now I could use that limited gray matter to accomplish the higher order things. And the things that maybe only a human can bring to a battle, and that’s applying moral precepts to it and moral concepts and going, okay, here’s the mission. Is it the right thing to do? Can I maximize or reduce risk by doing these other things? So I got to focus on those things instead of what’s the airspeed? What’s the angle? How many miliradians do you dial in and all those other things that you used to have to do. So in a lot of ways, I think that automation and in certain areas of autonomy will actually decrease the amount of errors that happen over time. And now I get it. I acknowledge that, you know, just based on understanding of computer vision models, there are errors. There could be biases in the training data, but we are learning how to solve many of those things. And if you look at the error rate of that CV model compared to the error rate of human being that is pissed off, tired, everything else that happens when you’re in combat, it turns out the human typically makes more errors. So from that aspect, you got it. But now what I do think I get back to this idea of trust. So the only way this works is when the operator trusts the system. And by the way, I saw several times in the airplane where we would institute new feature X and it, you know, the first two times you tried to use it, it didn’t work well. We never used it again. We turned it off. We’re like, don’t trust it. So it never got used. And then, but once you did start trusting it, you know, it became a very valuable tool. Now you have to worry about relying on something so much. So if it goes away, you know, people can still do the mission quote unquote manually. But the other part of this, and this is where I was lucky, I was able to work with some organizations on some AI ethics principles and the idea, and DOD has captured this by the way, in their 3.9 and some other documents where it’s like, all right, how must humans interact with some of these algorithms? And the most important thing, and DOD has captured this, is that at some point in this decision chain, I will call it, a human being must be accountable for the outcome or the output of that drone or of that algorithm or, you know, whatever happened. And if you can do that, that is, you’re narrowing in on about the best system that you can create.

I see. Well, you seem to make sense.

Okay. Well, you know what? Have another drink and I’ll make even more sense.

I’m following you so far. And that’s from a kid who went to Utah public schools. Cheers. Cheers.

Cheers to you as well.

Yes. No, I mean, wow, what a load on your plate. Let’s think outer space for a second. Drones in outer space. What about drones that want to go and harvest asteroid belts to bring back the minerals that they can? And upon reentry, I remember I was with a high tech company and I remember a few other high tech companies got together to give a billion dollars towards a program to send all these autonomous drones out of our atmosphere to harvest asteroids that have gold and platinum and titanium on them and bring it back. And they’re thinking if they send 500 drones to go do this mission and they get 300 back, one drone with any of that stuff is worth all of the drones. Is that something that’s in the Skydio world or are you guys looking to harvest asteroids?

Well, Skydio is not in the asteroid harvesting business at present. We are staying within the atmosphere and for the most part staying with small quadcopters for the time being. But just from a conceptual standpoint, and by the way, Rad, I mentioned I have an engineering background. That background is in astronautical engineering. So this is something I’ve actually thought about before. It’s conceptually possible. I don’t know if it’s economically viable in the short run because I just think of the energy that it takes to get out of the atmosphere, to get to an asteroid, to slow down, to stop on an asteroid, to dig and collect stuff, and then blast back off the asteroid. Fortunately, you’ve got the atmosphere and the Earth that would slow you back down to a certain point. But that’s a lot of ifs and a lot of energy expenditure. And like I said, from a conceptual standpoint, yeah, it’s 100% doable. We at Skydio are not going to do that. I want to make that clear. But yeah, economic viability, that part I don’t know.

Well, then let me ask you another left field question about drones within the extreme sports world. So how about a drone that can follow me while I snowboard or skateboard? I thought I saw something that trended on a social media page years and years ago. I say that like five years ago, six years ago. It’s like, yeah, buy in on this and you’ll get a first sample of it. I never saw it ever come to the market. Is there anything that Skydio is going to be looking at? Because I am a hardcore extreme snowboarder myself.

Yeah. Well, we’ve got to get you a Skydio drone, Rad, because that actually is how the company cut its teeth. So our founder, Adam, he was an RC remote control pilot and he was a world champion at doing that. But he recognized how hard it was to actually fly a remote control vehicle at the time. I mean, you had to be a highly trained pilot to make this thing sing and to do it at the level he was doing it. I mean, you had to be world champion level. So and he was getting his master’s degree at MIT and he was like, wait a minute, if I could abstract all the hard piloting stuff out of this and make it so that just about anyone could use an aerial vehicle, more people would use aerial vehicles and all these industries would pop up. And hey, I see a business opportunity. That’s how Skydio got its start. So one of the first things, and you can go online on YouTube, there’s kind of a viral video that you probably have seen. And it’s of a little glider with a small engine on it and it’s zipping through an underground garage with cars in it and it’s avoiding all of the stanions and the cars. Well, that was Adam Brie’s graduate thesis. That’s what he did. It’s create that obstacle avoidance using computer vision. And then from there, he got brought in by Google to create Google Wing, then later on put out his own shingle with Skydio. So step one was creating that obstacle avoidance in the drone. And then once that was done, so that made it easy to fly, hard to crash, all those things. Step two was to using those same technologies around computer vision to be able to do something simple like track a subject. So it turns out the first drones we made ended up in the consumer space, but it was more of a prosumer model because you’re injecting a lot of software and a lot of AI in them. So they were a little more expensive than the $99 drone you might be able to pick up on Amazon. So it was people in the extreme sports world. They were like, hey, I want to ski off this big ski jump at Jackson Hole, and I want someone to film me. But having your friend jump off next to you and try to stay, it just wasn’t going to work. But it turns out a drone could lock on to you, follow you, swishing down the hill, and then follow you through the jump. So that’s actually what really got Skydio its start.

I love that because I ride, my wife rides as well, and she’s really good. She’s actually better than me. Excuse me, let me just put it out there. She’s faster than me. She’s just got just a better edge on her snowboard, but she follows me everywhere we go. And so she’s basically like my chase.

I tell you what, Rad, invite me out to go to Park City. I’ll bring a drone with me, man, and we’ll film something on the slopes this winter.

Okay, then perfect. You’re invited, and we’ll go to Brighton. Actually, no, we could use Brighton. I can make a phone call and say, hey, can we come up here and do some stuff? He’d be like, Rad, you know it. And I’d be like, let’s go in the trees. You ski or snowboard?

Well, I’m a skier, man. I tried snowboarding. I spent a lot of time on my ass, so I stick with skis.

I snowboard, so I spend a lot of time on my ass, so we’ll be there. We’ll be just fine. We’ll be totally fine. And no, no, that makes me excited. I love talking about snow and snowboarding and getting ready to go ride and having something that could follow me. We tried to turn my indoor warehouse into like a drone race environment in the very beginning, but we were so close to Hill that it was like, you’re within 500 feet of an air base, bro. And I was like, yeah, I am. I know I am. I want that. I want them. I want to be that close, but I couldn’t even fly inside my own building. So there are restrictions with drones, and that should be put out there that you just can’t fly it near certain environments, like Air Force bases. Like, no.

Yeah, I would encourage everyone that’s operating a drone. There are some great training courses, and we at Skydio offer them. You can go to our website, skydio.com, and there are some resources there. But you can even go to the Boy Scout website, and there’s a drone training thing you can take to get what’s called a trust certificate. Then once you have your trust certificate, it will show you, all right, here are some great applications to use on your phone so you can hit the button and go, can I fly the drone here? And it will tell you, yes, you can fly it up to 200 feet, and you can go out this far and that far. And some of those things are just great things to have because you are sharing the airspace with other things, and many of those things have people in them.

It’s very real. It’s part of being a safe operator.

It’s very real. It’s respectful. You got to respect the airspace because there’s a lot going on. It’s a whole other roadway, right? You guys have maps and grids and coordinates. And if you’re not following it, you just fly a drone right into somebody that doesn’t need it.

So, Rad, you were talking about the, hey, follow me down the ski type thing. So with some of those technologies that we incorporated into our first drone, we’re part of the short-range recon program for the US Army. And it was some of those type things that we modified for use for the US Army. Like, for instance, there’s a mode that we call Scout Mode. So you’re in your Humvee, in your convoy, right? You throw a drone out, and this thing will zip without you touching sticks and throttles, zip out a couple of kilometers in front, scan the area, scan behind you, and you’re not touching the stick or throttle, but it’s building a 360-degree awareness bubble around you. The convoy turns, the drone goes with. I mean, it is things like that that you can see we took from that world and were able to incorporate into the combat world to bring value and save lives.

I love the lives saving. I do. And I understand it might cost a million dollars to build some fancy drone, but you’re priceless as a human, as a person.

Thankfully, we’re not millions of dollars.

Right, right. I’m just saying the worth and the worth of life versus the cost, you know.

100%.

We always want less life lost, period.

We just need more. We just need less tyrants.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, I mean, to that end, we’re doing what we can in Ukraine right now. So I think, again, a lot of people see the FPV stuff. What a lot of people don’t see, again, are what systems are the Ukrainians used to spot so they can shoot the Su-25 or the FPV drones. And it turns out they’re using small ISR drones like ours. And we have thousands over there right now. And that’s a meaningful thing. And actually, I’m going back over again in a couple of weeks and have been over there several times. Our team’s been over a few times here in the last year to get feedback. And one of the biggest things happening there, and by the way, if anyone questions, are these drones strategically valuable? The answer is yes. And if you want proof, just look at all the time, money, and attention the Russians are putting at stopping them from using them. And, you know, the primary way right now is they’re using electromagnetic warfare, EW. So they’re trying to jam either the radio link between the controller and the drone, or they’re trying to jam the GPS or GNSS signal, or sometimes both, right? And whenever they do that and drones can’t fly, the Ukrainians are limited in how they can use their firepower. So we’ve been spending a lot of time and effort into increasing our EW resilience by building, you know, better software-defined radios and using some different techniques to be able to operate in GPS-denied environments. And so that’s having a meaningful impact right now, which is why we’re spending so much time over there, because it’s a problem worth solving to save lives. And it’s not just in Ukraine. You know, I think that these things would be valuable for US forces, you know, anything that happens in Indo-PACOM. And by the way, you know, you’re operating even in commercial context, say you’re downtown New York, you’re trying to fly in that urban canyon of buildings. Well, due to something called multipathing, guess what? GPS signals get scrambled, and now you can’t operate. So this is one of those rising tides lifts all boats, but it’s something we’ve been spending a lot of time on.

We had to build a dock in Gaza to help try to get aid into Gaza. We had to build a pier, like, you know, so much CVS involved, so much engineering involved, you know, gunshots coming back and forth from sporadic actors in the situation. Would your drones be able to deliver aid to a place and drop it?

Yeah, so our drones are pretty small, so the payload carrying capacity would not be that much. You absolutely could drop small things. And like our newest drone, as a matter of fact, we call it the X10, was specifically designed for some modularity. So it’s got hard points, four of them, one on top, one on bottom, and then one on each side to plug in USB-C accessories. And so the idea is, you know, we’ve made a couple of accessories. We got a speaker and a microphone and a spotlight and things like that, you know, mostly things that maybe if you were in a law enforcement situation, needed to negotiate with a hostage or, you know, hostage situation, you could speak with and hear someone or a spotlight, maybe to track someone at night. And by the way, you know, all this obstacle avoidance and AI stuff that I’ve talked about, we’ve now incorporated all that capability at night with something that we call night sense. So it’s a great package. But one of the things we did realize is, hey, you know, we think we’re pretty smart at Skydio, but we don’t know everyone’s job, right? So someone’s going to need something that just isn’t in our wheelhouse to make. And so the idea was we can share, you know, an interface document with, here’s how you interface with the software through these USB ports. Here’s how you get power. And, you know, we already have some people working on, you know, a dropper in order to drop a life jacket to someone who’s in the water.

That’s a very valuable asset, you know, like that drone could get out there before a lifeguard could get out there.

100%. 100%.

Bottle of water or medicine or a med kit, you know, in a search and rescue situation.

Yeah, there’s

just so many, like, you know, I mean, I, you know, Amazon is dropping drone packages of delivery services, right? It’s like, it’s there. There is value and a need and a space for that. And I just see, you know, it’s like, how do we explain this? Okay. So like when Oppenheimer created, you know, when he could split the atom. Okay. And when he’s like, okay, what do I have here? I could either do, you know, save humanity or kill humanity with this idea. Okay. And then you have AI, which is where we’re at today. Again, it’s in its infancy. It’s either, do we save humanity with AI or kill humanity with AI? Okay. So it’s kind of like in that same kind of category. And, and, you know, we just have to wield it wisely and be the best stewards of what we have.

I agree with you. I think that fundamentally all technologies are amoral in that they have no morality. They receive their morality through how they are used. So it’s human agency that gives them the morality. So I think the real answer to this, Rad, is how do we educate people from day one through day whenever, you know, how to correctly use tools. Now, will there be people that misuse them? Absolutely. That we will never stomp that down to zero. But what you can do is minimize the number of people who misuse things and then have an appropriate, you know, regimen of discipline for those who do so and hopefully make the punishment such that people aren’t willing to do the crime if they can’t do the time.

Yeah, for real. No, really. And with that, dude, we’ve been talking an hour. I can’t believe it.

Oh, man, has it been an hour?

It has. It’s been an hour. No, I, I, I, it’s just like, it’s so, there’s just so much more to talk about with, with your lane. You just know so much about it. You’re such a subject matter expert. And I just want to let my guests know that are listening and watching that we really have a treat with having you on today, Mark, and talking to us. And, you know, I mean, you guys are part of the largest drone company in the world, and it’s just, it’s amazing to just know that you have your eyes on the world. I don’t know what else to tell you, bro.

It’s a big job. We’re trying to do our best and make good things happen, but appreciate the time today, Rad. No, it was a great conversation.

Let me plug you real quick. Let me just put you out there. Let me, let me, uh, pimp it a little bit. Can, um, if, if one of my listeners is interested or works in an agency and they’re like, so it’s Skydio, Skydio.com, right?

Yeah, pretty easy to find there. And folks can hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m, you know, I’m relatively busy, but I try to answer as much as I can. Happy to answer questions, but yeah, hit us up on the website. We, we have a lot of events going on. Uh, we are running around the country and the world doing, you know, flying demos, all sorts of things. Uh, you know, get your hands on one of the drones. And I tell you, once you see it, it’s, you can’t unsee it. You’re like, wow, it, it is pretty amazing.

Well, wax those skis up, bud.

All right, we’re gonna do it. I’m gonna call you on this, Rad.

Hey, call, call me. Call me every day. Go ahead and bring your buddy. Bring Adam. Bring him, bring him. Does he ride?

All right, man. Yeah, the dude, well, he’s from Colorado, so we know he’s got to ski.

Yeah, I mean, come on now. And Kelly too. Bring Kelly too. She’s cool too. So back and forth. Well, listen, I’m going to wind down the show by saying thanks so much to Mark Valentine for being on with Skydio.com. Uh, his former career in the Air Force is, is majestic and awesome. Colonel, you’re, you’re, you’re a boss and we appreciate you, uh, shooting the watch and living to tell the tales. Okay. So thank you for coming home, uh, to those that are your friends that are out there. Thanks for saying their name on here that didn’t come back. And, uh, again, on behalf of all of us here at Sofrep, Sofrep.com, Brandon Webb, uh, my producer, Anton, uh, my managing editor, uh, you, my listener, uh, you that buys the merch from our store that reads our books on our book club. Thank you so much for listening. And with that, I’m going to say peace. You’ve been listening to Sofrep Radio.