Future Career Awaits in Drone Robotics with Air Force Top Gun Veteran and CEO of Target Arm Jeffrey McChesney

Warriors Fall In…

Today we’re joined with guest who’s an alumnus of the USAF Academy, Columbia University and Harvard University. He’s also a graduate of the USAF Fighter Weapons School (TopGun) and if that’s not enough he’s a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and a Harvard National Security Fellow.

Our guest today is the CEO and founder of Target Arms, which is a cutting edge UAV company that’s currently commercializing some exciting technology that’s revolutionary and today, we’re going to learn all about it.

Our guest today will also cover potential careers in this new spectrum of career opportunities. I’d like to welcome Mr. Jeffrey McChesney to The Morning Formation Podcast.

Target Arm Website:
https://www.targetarm.com

Jeffrey McChesney's LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreymcchesney/

UDemy Courses on Drones:
https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?src=ukw&q=drone

Transcript

KP: 0:00

This episode is powered by act now education, go to www.actnoweducation.com for free, comprehensive educational resources and opportunities for active duty, veterans, military spouses, and children.

Jeffrey McChesney: 0:16

This is my my personal vision, is drones are going to take over virtually all facets of society. You're going to have drones on the ground, you're gonna have drones in the water, you're gonna have drones in the air. Twenty-five years ago, whenever you were in transit, military or commercial, your digital world was disconnected to you. At best, you had a radio. And over the last 25 years, you expect your digital world to be connected to you wherever you go commercially, or militarily. It's like, do not disconnect me, I want to know everything I can get on my hand, all the time, for what I want right now.

KP: 0:54

Warriors fall in. Today, we're joined with a guest who's an alumnus of the United States Air Force Academy, Columbia University, and Harvard University. He's also a graduate of the United States Air Force fighter weapons school, also known as Top Gun. And if that's not enough, he's a certified Project Management Professional(PMP) and a Harvard National Security Fellow. Our guest today is the CEO and founder of Target Arms, which is a cutting edge UAV company that's currently commercializing some exciting technology, that's revolutionary. And today, we're going to learn all about it. Our guest today will also cover potential careers in this new spectrum of career opportunities. And I'd like to welcome Mr. Jeffrey McChesney to The Morning Formation Podcast. Sir, thank you so much for giving us your time today.

Jeffrey McChesney: 1:43

You're very welcome. Glad to be here.

KP: 1:45

The honor is all mine, as I always say and just want to get things started. Man, you have a very, very impressive background, Jeff, and would you mind telling our audience a little bit about your extensive military career and how it all started for you?

Jeffrey McChesney: 1:59

It's a It's relatively simple, my dad was in the Air Force. And that seemed like a great place to go to, to go ahead into the Air Force. So I got selected to the Air Force Academy, went to the Air Force Academy and was a, majored in aeronautical engineering, going in to fly airplanes made a lot of sense to me be in aeronautical engineering. And from that stage, I immediately went into a Guggenheim Fellowship over to Columbia University once I graduated, and got my master's degree in engineering there before I started my flying career. And then I went to pilot training, and was selected for F-15s, and was a combat fighter pilot and Commander through the rest of my career, and had a fabulous career going on, in the Air Force. I loved every moment of it.

KP: 2:44

So how many years did you do in total?

Jeffrey McChesney: 2:45

I only did, only did 21 years, I had to get out early. I had, I have a family issue that came up, where the moving that we were doing as I was, you know, getting promoted and escalating my caree, we started moving very, very often. And because of that I was I was really, really hurting my son who had a mental disorder. And I had to get out to sustain his, his life essentially, and and lock him into a single location, which we were very successful at doing. So it was a it was a family decision over a career decision. A very difficult one to do. And I had a lot of people mad at me that I was getting out.

KP: 3:28

Yeah, you said just 21 years, I laughed, because that's not just 21. That's, that's, that's a career in itself. And that is impressive to do. Because that is a lot of sacrifice. And I completely understand. I've known folks personally, who have made the same decisions as well, just due to family and just due to the moving every four years and TDYs and deployments. That can be very, very taxing on just the overall situation that people are in. But 21 is not just 21. That is very impressive, sir.

Jeffrey McChesney: 3:59

Thank you.

KP: 3:59

So after you got out, when did you decide to start your company Target Arms?

Jeffrey McChesney: 4:06

Yeah, so so it's it's a long story. I'll try and make it short for you. So I when I got out of the Air Force, I wasn't starting or even thinking about Target Arm. I was involved in an airline called Atlas Air. And the idea there was I was going to join Atlas Air and help redesign the airline, which I had done a lot of the same stuff inside the Air Force before. And it was working out really good until a year, a year and a half in, the chairman and CEO who had hired me, ended up getting killed in his own airplane crash. And at that point, that company started coming apart at the seams and I elected to leave. Once I left, I started my first startup and I'm a serial entrepreneur. So I'll just jump ahead fairly quickly. Target Arm was my sixth startup. I was involved in earlier ones, including a stint where I stopped and went to work for the largest hedge fund in the world, which is known as Bridgewater Associates. And I was the CEO of the family office running the personal wealth and empire of Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, and ran that in the middle of the startups that I was doing. But what ended up happening was, is I got a email which asked me in 2014, late 2014, actually, at Thanksgiving, "Does anyone know how to launch and recover a drone from a moving cargo aircraft while it's in flight," in this case, a C130, or C17. And I immediately said, "I know exactly how to do that,." I'd use it, what I what I ended up filing a patent on, I said,"I'll do that." And the next day I wrote the patent for it, literally, in one day, wrote the patent. I had done patents before, so it wasn't that unique to me, but it was to do it in one day. I submitted the patent and went on with my life. And was in another startup, I was raising money for a private equity firm. I was trying to buy some cybersecurity companies along the way, because a lots of your readership and listeners are probably in the cybersecurity arena, it was a very, very interesting place for me to get involved in. Because I'd been in venture capital as well. And it turned around and the patent office calls me and says, "We're going to grant your patent." So this is in in early 2017, which I've never known anybody else to get a call from the patent office, where they're calling me to tell me they're giving me the patent, not even a piece of paper at that stage. And at that point, I turned around said "Let's go talk to my buddies that are still in the Air Force," in my case, a bunch of general officers that were still in the Air Force at that time, and some of my classmates. And I went and said, "Look, if I build this the way that I've got Target Arm designed, can we went to war with it?" And I had a pretty good idea we could otherwise it would not have even developed the concept to start with. And they said, "Yeah, go build it and bring it back." So that's how, that's how Target Arm got started. And that's how I started building this company in early 2017. So we're at five years into it now. And we're growing and things are going fabulous.

KP: 7:15

Wow, you remind me of the movie Iron Man with the the guy who invents all the all the cool inventions and cutting edge inventions. And you definitely solved a need by coming up with your patent. When you transitioned out though, going back to that, did you find any difficulty at all, making a transition after 21 years being in the culture, of being in the Air Force, and then jumping over into the civilian side? Or was that a pretty smooth transition for you?

Jeffrey McChesney: 7:45

It was an extremely smooth transition. But it wasn't because because I fell into it, I got prepared. So I knew that my son was having problems, I knew that I needed to get organized. I did a lot of due diligence, I did a lot of research, I did a unbelievable amount of preparation on how to speak to companies. So I outside of the the transition programs that the Air Force provided me which were somewhat marginal, I did it on my own. And I actually hired people to coach me and to teach me how to present myself in the commercial world, and to speak about the leadership experiences that I had in the military, in the in the terminology of the commercial world, right. Unbelievably successful in knowing how to use that nomenclature. Because everybody in the in the military is doing leadership, you're teaching somebody somewhere along the way, you're, you're leading them into combat, you're doing something with them, that you can translate into the commercial world, which many of them have never seen or heard of before. So once I understood how to do that, I started interviewing, it was a great time to be interviewing, I had 32 interviews, while I was in the Pentagon actually getting ready to get out. And I ended up with four offers in my pocket and picked the best one that I wanted to go do. So it was it was a beautiful transition. But it wasn't because I fell into it. It was, again, as most military guys look at, you know, preparation.

KP: 9:15

You know, and I think a lot of times when people see folks make a good transition, or they see folks succeed, a lot of times people don't quite realize that there was a struggle with that. And there was a preparation with that. And there was a lot of trial and error. There was a lot of failure and pick yourself back up again type of moments. And I can I can say that even for myself, like a lot of people assume that "Oh, he just had everything made for him." Well, no. There was deployments involved. There was sacrifice. There was time away from the family involved with that. And I'm sure your overall preparation was something that, it sounds like you've been doing that your whole life was being very prepared to go into the Air Force, to be accepted into the academy, and then being a fighter pilot man that is a very, very high calling in itself. Very, very impressive. And for you to know that it's important for you to speak the language, the civilian language, you know, as I like to say, is, is very crucial. And I'm glad that you mentioned that specifically right here. Just transitioning and pivoting to talk about Target Arms. When I visited your website, I saw a really cool video of the latest technology that you have, and it involves Tular. Am I saying that correctly?

Jeffrey McChesney: 10:30

It's called Tular.

KP: 10:32

Tular 3.0. Would you mind explaining this, this tech concept? And where are you, where are you right now with its overall development?

Jeffrey McChesney: 10:40

Yeah, absolutely. It's my favorite subject to talk about. So thank you for asking. So Tular is the actual device that we use at Target Arm. And that device is, enables the launch and recovery of both rotary or fixed wing drones, from any moving vehicle. And we can do that autonomously. And we've already been at speeds at 65 miles per hour going back to an airplane at close to 200 miles per hour. So we we started where, when when I first built the idea it was around a cargo airplane, it was going to be a C17 that I wanted to put our system on. I designed it and then said okay, one of the things that I want to do is I want to test it using a truck. Because I don't have a wind tunnel, I'll just put on the back of a truck and see how it works. Going up versus down behind a a cargo airplane. And in so doing what we found was it worked unbelievably well, in our very first version, the very first prototype, it was like, I mean, unbelievably well, it worked. And we said, this dog will hunt. And at that point, once we understood that, the whole world of of any vehicle could use Tular. So anything that's moving, whether it's a plane, train, car, truck, ship, it doesn't matter what it's on. It works in space, it works under water, it works in the air. It doesn't matter where it is, you just have to make some additional considerations for the environment you're in. But you basically get co-speed. And when you're co-speed, you fly between two plates, and the two plates, extend pins and capture the drone from both sides and clamp it in position. And now you can bring it back inside whatever vehicle it happens to be. So we've designed it for package delivery as the primary commercial reason, or use case. But it works on SUVs, it works for fire chiefs of proceeding to a fire, it works on wind turbine generators out over the water that they can launch their own drones and spec your own blades without sending a ship out there. They're just, the use cases are unbelievable that it's either with something that's moving or something in a windy condition. And we're approached with new use cases. Virtually every day, someone comes and says "Could it do..." and we say yeah it could. And it's pretty cool.

KP: 12:53

Wow, that's absolutely fascinating. And I was I was just looking up like what was the name of the of the guy from Iron Man, it's Tony Stark. Yeah, that's what you remind me of. Like you have this extensive, impressive background of being a fighter pilot. And now here you are making these really, really incredible inventions. And I've got the video running over here on my other screen of the the Tular working, and it's very impressive. And man, I'm right off the get go. You said this thing was was working the way it should work. That's not very often for new inventions.

Jeffrey McChesney: 13:26

I mean, I'm an engineer as well, you know, as well, as a pilot. My lead engineer and co-founder, a guy named Ryan Bigham, he also you know, we build prototypes, and we test stuff, you know, throughout our entire careers. And we're like, "Holy cow, this thing works right off the bat." And it worked unbelievably well. And by the way, the first version has never failed. The system just keeps working. It just it's like, it's like the ever ready battery. It just keeps going and going and going. And, you know, we don't use it day to day because it's way too big and way too cumbersome. But we've, we've come a very, very long way. We've had multiple contracts. We've had seven contracts with the Department of Defense, we've had a contract with VA Systems on the commercial side. And we're currently working with a, to be named, because of confidentiality agreements, a multinational and global automotive company right now for proof of concept, to put it into an SUV. So we're, we're really at the cusp of getting ready to break out both from a military perspective and from a commercial perspective. The contracts we have right now, I've got one to put it with Space Force into. I've got it with the Air Force to put it on the C17. We're starting the initial aerodynamic studies on the C 17. And we've got one on the ground for nuclear munitions convoy protection, at the same time all those are going on.

KP: 14:48

I can definitely, you talk about convoy protection. I could have used that back in 2004. A lot of times we would require the the rotary wing, you know helicopters basically, to provide overwatch whenever we were doing convoy operations. And having a drone perform that duty is actually really...and there were times when they weren't available to do the overwatch.

Jeffrey McChesney: 15:12

Absolutely, you know, they break. There's limited assets, you know, you may be asked for, in your case, you know, battalion brigade or or higher echelon authority to give you some assets. They're not available, they're being used elsewhere, there's a different mission that they're there on. And to have your own capability to launch your own drone, that's looking out for your vehicle, and you're in it and you're going like, I can see what's around me. This is really, really powerful. You being from the army, KP, is...I haven't met a single soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine, who says, "Yeah, I would rather stop and get out and set up a drone and get shot in the process versus launch it from my vehicle while I'm doing 30 miles an hour." You know, it's like, it's a no brainer, right?

KP: 15:59

Yeah, no doubt we needed this, like 20 years ago, man. I mean, there were so many times where I would go into a new, I guess a new battle zone where another division was going to be taking over. And they would say, oh, you know, "We have, we have Overwatch and you're just kind of on your own out there. Just proceed with caution." And that was never good, because that's when we usually hit an IED or we would encounter some small arms fire. And having something like that would be...that's a lifesaver. That would save literally countless lives to have something like that. And I think that's what when I started looking at your website and checking out what this thing is about, and and it's not just a concept, this thing actually works. And it I guess the possibilities are endless. And in this situation, unlike most I mean, I would say the patent came first before the business, right?

Jeffrey McChesney: 16:48

It did. I literally read the the request from DARPA, I filled it out, I responded to DARPA, I fill out the patent the next day and submitted it. And then I waited two and a half years until the patent office called me. And then I said, Okay, I'll start the company. So it wasn't, it wasn't like it was a lifelong dream. It wasn't. I had, I had never thought about this concept until the day I thought of it. I never thought about launching off the back of C17 until I was asked about it. So he was like, asked me a question. How would I do it? Yeah, that's how I would do it. Wrote the patent. Literally it was in seconds. So I came up with the idea. And now we you know, five years later, it's a full up company.

KP: 17:28

Wow. Incredible. Now, as far as Target Arms is is the Tular specifically, the main, I guess, the main focus? Or is there other things that Target Arms is also involved in as well?

Jeffrey McChesney: 17:42

Yeah, that's a good question. So so our, our primary objective is universal launch and recovery of drones. So universal, meaning that we don't care what drone we have, we're drone agnostic. We can capture rotary wing, we can do fixed wing, we can make them large or small, we just scale the size of the pins up and down. Like on the C17 that's going to be 16 feet wide. And it's going to be an unmanned combat air vehicle, that'll be launching off a C17. Basically, as an F15 guy, putting me out of business, right, which is okay. You know, they're playing behind me will be a historical picture, not a not an actual picture someday. That being said, what, what would end up happening here is, is because we've gained so much expertise over the last five years, we do have some additional ideas about how to do things like this. We are now becoming experts in the software side of this, that tells you how to approach and look, it's called localization. How do you localize a drone with a moving vehicle. We're getting pretty good at that. And so we have some new skill sets that are applicable for that. And we've got some ideas about some some external and add on capabilities to Tular. But too large is no kidding, the central theme that we've got going now. Five years from now, 10 years from now, maybe we'll come up with a better idea. But right now, it seems to be the again, this dog will hunt.

KP: 19:08

Yeah, listen, I totally get it. Me doing podcasting. I'm just a knucklehead, right. So when I started doing podcasting, I knew I wanted to reach a larger audience. I wanted to make a difference. And I thought, okay, just talking to the microphone. That's all I got to do, and then publish it right. No. There's marketing involved. There's speaking involved. There's interviewing skills involved. There's reaching out involved, connecting, networking. There's so many things involved with it. And that's sort of what happened to you when you started actually learning some of the additional skills that are involved with actually launching this thing. And you guys got into software, and you're learning that too. And it sounds...

Jeffrey McChesney: 19:45

KP, one of the things that's really evident to me, when I started this with my with my lead engineer Ryan, we both thought we were just going to do hardware. We said let's just do hardware. Software is, when you combine the two it's a lot had to do. Let's just do hardware. And as we got further and further along, we found that people couldn't do the software that we needed. So we decided to take it in house. We made that decision about two years ago. And we started taking software in house. By doing so, we have evolved from a hardware-only Tular company, to a robotics company. So we are a leading edge robotics company now, not a Tular company, we're a robotics company first. And I'm hiring robotics people, roboticists that are, you know, that are hard to come by. And they're tremendous capabilities. And there are people that tinker with little cars and airplanes, and you know, whatever they've got there. They're building mechanical stuff. And they're building robots. They all get what we're doing. They love what we're doing.

KP: 20:52

Yeah that's fascinating. Very, very cutting edge careers. With that specifically. And I don't even know if you can tell me this. But is this something that we could see with delivery service? I know, we talked about big companies like Amazon was talking about doing drone delivery back in the mid 2000, there. And there were some issues with you know, airspace, you know, with the airports and everything. And something like this, though, could really localize product delivery using drones. Is there any conversation about that?

Jeffrey McChesney: 21:23

There is. And you've already alluded to the main problem. Right now there are so many drones that are in the commercial sector. Give you an idea, there's about a million commercial drones in the United States. You're like, "Well, where are they? I don't see them all." Because one of the problems that they have right now is because there's there's so much conflict with airlines and general aviation, they're trying to work on those procedures and the systems to deconflict those. And you understand this from your battlespace arena, you know, you can't have everybody shooting at each other, otherwise, it's it's mayhem. So same problem in the airspace. So the rules have been written. The initial capabilities have been built, and the testing and the release of the airspace is happening by the FAA now. That is called Beyond Visual Line of Sight. So the drone can, right now a drone, one drone pilot can work one drone airplane, one airplane simultaneously. And he or she has to maintain sight of it. You can't go over the tree lines and lose sight of it. That's the current rule. Knowing that the real business models occur when you can go beyond that, right. You can go two miles, five miles, 10 miles away, and still fly the drone, either automatic or you're flying it through cameras. That capability is imminent, meaning next year, probably at the late part of 2023, if they stay kind of on track. And what that will do is it'll unleash a tremendous number of new business models. They're all being suppressed right now. You'll hear about you know, FedEx or UPS is delivering in some some one town for ice cream cones and stuff. But you know, they're limited. They're just looking at how to do this stuff, not how to scale the capability yet. When they scale the capability, and you add Tular into this from Target Arm, you now have the ability to have all 600,000 vehicles that do package delivery the United States today. 600,000 vehicles and growing every day, that could, that could have Tular on board. And what that allows you to do is increase, with the with the financial model that I built using some FedEx numbers that they had, we predict a three times productivity improvement on that truck today for delivery. You know to get three times as many packages through that truck during its total cost of ownership. When you take the driver off, and you make it autonomous, which is coming as well. Autonomous trucks are now coming in Texas for delivery on semis. So autonomous trucks are coming. It's at nine times productivity improvement over the life of that vehicle. And so what this is, is it's an unbelievable ROI, return on investment, for the package delivery companies to start using drones for delivery from a moving vehicle versus a static location like a distribution point. So it's coming, we're not there yet. To give you a scale size in the, in the United States, package delivery 600,000 vehicles, the Department of Defense is 200,000. Just give you an idea the difference in scale. It's it's three times bigger, that's not counting the rest of the world.

KP: 24:31

Wow. Incredible. Very incredible. And so we just talked about, you know, package delivery and, you know, delivery services. Is there anything else, because this sounds like it goes beyond the imagination. Is there anything else that this could be utilized for that we may not be thinking about?

Jeffrey McChesney: 24:47

Yeah, there are. I don't, I don't profess to say I know every utility of it, but I'm finding out new ones every single day. In particular, what's happening is is that the things that need drones now are the ones that are coming to the forefront. And those are first responders. So fire chiefs and police responses, when they're heading to a calamity or a fire or whatever, you understand this from your military background, which is you need an on-scene commander. You need somebody to get there and say, "Okay, go get that truck over there and get the water out of the pond, you guys go in the back door and get those kids out." So to make those decisions are three to five minutes earlier, are going to save lives. And so the first responders have a high demand signal coming. Even in the United States, today, where they're saying "Hurry up, give us the capability to start flying long distances." And once they understand and they are starting to understand, they can launch it from their vehicle even more so about what they're doing. Another one that is that is coming, which is not readily apparent, is offshore wind farms. And you go like, okay, you know, "How does Tular work on an offshore wind farm?" Well, there's no difference to the drone flying at speed on a highway to catch up to the truck. Or being in a 60 mile an hour wind, it's the same thing. So the drone doesn't know anything except it's flying. And it has a Tular to go into, and we capture within one to two centimeters of our centering position. It flies into there and gets captured. So you're able to put a Tular and a drone on the wind turbine generator up at 150 feet off the off the water. What that allows you to do is allows you to launch drones to inspect all of those wind farm blades, without sending a ship and crews out there, which is unbelievably expensive. And so now you can launch this from Houston, or from you know, from your from your place right now. You can launch them off of those wind farms and do those inspections for mere pennies and decide that now we need to send the crew out to you know, the unit number 27, because it's got a problem. And that's all you need to do. There's another component to it, which I didn't know this was new to me as well, is as they're building these new wind farms off of Martha's Vineyard and off in New Jersey. And these are massive wind farms. You know, hundreds and hundreds of wind turbine generators are gonna be out there, you know, 30, 40, 60, 80 miles off the coast. They're worried about whales. And they're worried about the whales running into them. Who knew? I didn't know you know, I didn't know a whale would have a problem running into them. So what they want to do is launch the drones to see the spouts. And then they use Echo devices to make them go away, scare them away. And so now they're protecting the whales passively without having to send people out there in a boat, chasing the spouts and trying to run them away. That's kind of like chasing them down in the old days. So those are just some examples. And there are many, many more that keep coming up every single day. For example, the one in space. The one in space is to go capture debris. We turn Tular around and we're able to capture debris going after it. Basically like a PacMan, capture that capture the debris in space, then we can pick up multiple things because we control it. Once we once we capture it, we can control the actual piece of debris and move it inside or throw it back in the atmosphere and burn it up. So there's all kinds of new use cases that are coming. And it's an unbelievably exciting time to be doing what I'm doing.

KP: 28:27

No doubt, there's the possibilities are endless. I did not realize even myself and so you started talking about the wind farms and the whales. And then you could also, you know find debris, garbage in the ocean, garbage in the space, and so many great things that this could be used for. Now I'm curious, before I pivot to talk about careers in this specific spectrum. Can you tell me where you got the name Tular from?

Jeffrey McChesney: 28:55

Yeah, so the original design was to call it Talon. Because our device looks like a talon on an eagle. You know, I flew the F15 behind me, it's an eagle. So Talon was in, we ran into a patent issue, or sorry, a trademark issue. And I didn't want to fight it. So I said "I'm not going to fight this I just don't have time for it." So we have the universal launch and recovery system. Which if you use the acronym, it sounds like Tular. We didn't we didn't really have it as that but we've made the two kind of the same. So Tular is literally a made up name. Just like you know, I don't know, just like Yahoo as a company. So the more, the more odd the name is, the easier it is to get the trademark and we've nearly got the trademark on it as well. So we have Target Arm trademarked and we have Tular trademarked, both are registered.

KP: 29:46

Very true, that's why I call this The Morning Formation. I couldn't find any other podcasts that was called The Morning Formation so. It also has another meeting, too. Because the morning formation was where I was able to take accountability and disseminating the information, first thing thing on a Monday morning for the soldiers. So, yeah, let's definitely get into the career side of things. Would you mind talking about drone training? And do you have any advice for military service members or veterans who might be interested in breaking into the UAV career field?

Jeffrey McChesney: 30:16

Yeah, so so a couple of things. The military has been doing this for 20 plus years, whether they're remotely piloted, or they're actually autonomous capabilities. The skill sets...if anybody's around drones today, immediately transferable, I mean, like immediately transferable. Now you may need to go take the test with the FAA, to get what's called a part 107 commercial license. Not hard to do. If you've been around aviation, it makes sense, if you haven't been around aviation doesn't make sense. So you're gonna have to do some studying, but it's not an insurmountable task to study and pass. It's no different than learning a new weapon system or a new skill that you don't have in the military. So you just got to go learn it. And you can get this part 107 certificate. More importantly, is how to fly the drones. And so there are good simulators you can do on a desktop. You can learn to fly with a drone. I'm a fighter pilot, I'm used to having a stick, I'm not really good, the little teeny sticks. But I know how they work, and I know what they're doing. But I really, I really like holding a real stick and a real throttle, it's just, you know, it's kind of like riding a bike. And, you know, versus a tricycle, they're just different, right. So so you can, you can learn how to fly the drones. And then the more experience you have, and you can buy drones and practice today. You don't need to be in the military. You can you can own them, you can fly and you can practice with them. And the better you are at flying them, the easier it is going to be to transition into a job. If you join a company like ours, which is a robotics company, and we're dealing in the launch and recovery system, we do have drone pilots. And we do build some of our own drones. And we also use other people's drones. And so because we're drone agnostic, we're going to certify their drones on our system Tular. But the more important thing is that we're hiring roboticist right now that have very limited drone flying capabilities. Military members have a, have a lead way ahead of the of the commercial side of the equation. The rest of the commercial roboticist that are coming in, extremely well paid, by the way. So from a career field, it is a extremely well paid career field like day one. Scary, scary prices that we have to pay for these people. But you can come in the day one and be able to have your part 107 capabilities with maybe five years of doing it, flying in the military, you're gonna be at the top of the pile. Right at the top of the pile. And then what you really need to be focused in on is, okay, now what else can you add to the robotic side of the equation? Have you have you dealt with motors and done the wiring and understand the software? All those are skills that you can learn. Everyone can learn these skills, there's not a lot of competition in front of you. This is a very, very fertile ground. So if people want to get out of the military, they've been around RPAs, they've been around flying a drone in a, you know, a battalion brigade and Air Force Squadron, whatever it happens to be, they can immediately transition. And even the veterans that are in front of them in the company have only a couple of years. It's not like you're gonna walk in, and someone's gonna tell you, "I have been doing drones for 27 years. Get out of the way, you're just a rookie." Everybody's a rookie. And so it's an extremely exciting place to be. And it's a place that you can really, really grow a career in very, very fast. I can't hire enough people. Nobody I know, every other CEO I know, in this arena, every single one I know, is trying to hire hardware and software people in robotics. They're at a tremendous disadvantage. They're not out there. And no one has more than like five years experience.

KP: 34:03

Yeah. And so do you partner with anyone that does training? Is there a Ivy League of drone training that's being done anywhere? Or do you recommend anywhere for anyone to start?

Jeffrey McChesney: 34:16

I can tell you what we've done. So one of the ways that we got ready to take the part 107 FAA training, is we hired a company called Drone Pilot. And Drone Pilot has an online software, led, you know, video expertise. Here's Module One, here's Module two, here's Module Three. Takes you right down through standard training type program you'd get in the military, except it's designed for drone pilot license. They're called remote pilot licenses, and you can get that relatively fast. The same thing applies if you want to go and learn how to do software. So we use a software system called or language called Rust. Very few people use it because it's so new. We're talking only five or six years old, this language. And we use it for extreme speed with our drones. It's got very low latency, and it's very low overhead. You can go on to Udemy, which we use, which is an online academy. And you can take courses and start learning that as well. So you don't have to wait. People can train today, they can do it while they're in the military, they can do it at night. There's more than enough courses to handle the hardware, the software, and the actual certifications that you're going to need, if you want to come in and be a drone pilot.

KP: 35:33

It's fascinating man. I'm actually a board member for a military nonprofit called ACT NOW Education. And what we try to do is, we try to partner with different organizations to offer either free education training certifications. And I don't know if drones is something that or UAVs is something that we've really covered yet. But you've given me some ideas to talk about it our next meeting, for sure. Maybe we need to reach out to those folks and start marketing to our military community.

Jeffrey McChesney: 36:00

I'm gonna throw something out at you. That's gonna that's gonna scare you. So a roboticist intern in a master's degree program is getting $30 to $45 an hour. Okay, and they can be 21 years old.

KP: 36:21

Wow.

Jeffrey McChesney: 36:22

22 years old.

KP: 36:23

Wow. That's just an intern.

Jeffrey McChesney: 36:25

That's an intern. That's not even a full-time employee. That's an intern.

KP: 36:29

That's insane. Yeah, no, that's, that's actually that's a great place to start. I can't imagine man. And from here on out, you talked about the expansion of the actual invention itself and the product, the career is going to expand as well. And the necessity for it.

Jeffrey McChesney: 36:43

It's going to explode. I mean, I was involved in cybersecurity seven or eight years ago, and that one has exploded and continuing to explode. Drones are going to be the same thing. But I think, and this is my, my personal vision, is drones are going to take over virtually all facets of society. You're gonna have drones on the ground, you're gonna have drones in the water, you're gonna have drones in the air. And to give you a case, an idea of my vision here, KP is it 25 years ago, whenever you were in transit, military or commercial, your digital world was disconnected to you. At best, you had a radio.

KP: 37:23

Right.

Jeffrey McChesney: 37:24

Right. And you said, "Okay, somebody tell me what's going on. Because I don't know. Tell me what's over the next hill, because I don't know." That's all you had. And over the last 25 years, you expect your digital world to be protected with you, or connected to you, wherever you go commercially, or militarily. It's like, do not disconnect me. I want to know everything I can get on my hand, all the time, for what I want right now.

KP: 37:47

Right.

Jeffrey McChesney: 37:48

I purport that your physical world is going to connect to you everywhere you go. And everywhere society is moving to, in transit, where they don't have it today. We can get delivered to a set point like your home, or your business. But what we don't do is when you're driving from New York to Boston, can you get connected physically? And Tular is gonna allow you to do that. You're gonna be able to launch things to that vehicle, and from that vehicle, and from vehicle to vehicle. About a month and a half ago, we did our first vehicle to vehicle transfer of a drone, while they're both moving. First one, we believe in the world, that's done that. So the ability to connect things is going to happen physically, it may take a little bit longer, because it's a little bit harder problem than a digital packet. But I believe and my vision is that you're going to have the whole world connected in some way, shape or form. Whether it's Tullar or somebody else's new technology that's better than ours, it's going to happen.

KP: 38:50

Wow. This is probably one of the most exciting interviews that I've ever had, as far as looking into the future and what are the possibilities out there. You know, if anyone that was listening to this podcast today, were interested in contacting you just to follow up on anything that you had mentioned, what's the best way for them to connect with you? And just, I know, I'll definitely for the shownotes, I'll put your LinkedIn and I'll put your website down in the show notes. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you can check the description. I'll put, I will put the contacts on there as well. But what's the best way for someone to connect with you if they're interested in following up?

Jeffrey McChesney: 39:30

You've already identified the two major ways to get to get to me, which is my LinkedIn account is absolutely usable. The problem, the problem is we're going so fast with so many things. There's so many people trying to get to us as well. So I you know, noise is part of the problem. You know, I've got, we've got like 40 interns chasing us wanting to join us, because they all know how cool stuff we're doing here. So LinkedIn will be one, the second one would be to come in on our website, and just in our contact page, just contact Target Arm. The key to that one is that goes directly to my assistant. And Diana is the clearing house to me, she's always watching what I'm doing, where I'm going and who's trying to get in touch with me. That's probably the best way to get in touch with me. I'm not always looking at LinkedIn. I'm not always listening to, you know, contacts that are coming in there. Email is the same way. There's just so much coming at me. The best way is my assistant because she's filtering my time. And if it's not me that we need to have the person talk to, then it's to my engineers and people elsewhere inside the company. And we'll we'll forward that if it makes sense.

KP: 40:47

Fascinating. You know, I don't know how I got you on the show. But I actually I do know. And I'm very thankful for Yasmin, for connecting me with you because you are one of the most fascinating individuals I've ever spoken to. And it's been quite an honor to learn about you, and your company and your product as well that you patented yourself, which is rare. And it's usually have to hire someone to do that. And you did it all. So Wow. Just to finish off the episode today. Jeff, do you have any other last pieces of advice for our military community out there who might be looking to transition themselves with their career after the uniform? Or just anything in general that you've learned over the years that you'd like to share?

Jeffrey McChesney: 41:27

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. The thing that I would say, and the thing that has led me is find out what you're passionate about. And you can find that out, you probably already know if you're getting ready to get out of the out of the military, whether it's Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, or guardians. You, you probably already know that you like dealing with drones, you like dealing with art, or you like dealing with building bridges, whatever it happens to be. If you find something you're passionate about, it's not work. It's life, it's play. I'm playing, very seriously, but I'm doing everything I know how to do, because it's fun. It's not, I don't wake up going to work, I wake up trying to get to work. I'm waking up trying to get more done every day. Because it's, I'm passionate about it. It's something I care about. And so I would advise most people not to go after a career in X industry. Go after a career and what you're passionate about. Now, if it happens to be in robotics, it's a great place to be because it's really expanding fast. And if you really just want to go after the money, come here as well. But you're going to want to end up doing something that you're passionate about, because it's sustainable. I've been able to do my entire career, everything that I've ever wanted to do,I've been passionate about. I don't waste my time on anything that I'm not passionate about. I've been very fortunate. Everything I've done has turned out to be that way. So it's kind of like is it a self fulfilling prophecy or was it actually a plan. It just worked out. I mean, flying fighters, I'd do it today. I'd go back and fly F15 today, if somebody would let me and I can actually sustain the Gs. I don't think I could anymore. I would go back and do it. It's so much fun. Same thing I'm doing now. It's so much fun. It's not work. So find something you're passionate about. If you do, and you're fortunate enough to do that. You'll have an unbelievably fulfilling life.

KP: 43:23

This has been such a fun, just a fun, interesting conversation with you, Jeff. And I'm so appreciative that Yasmin got me connected with you. And what you just mentioned right now, I always ask people, "so what's your end game?" Like are you just working from day to day and collecting a paycheck? Or what is like, what is your ultimate goal in life and in general? Where do you want to be? And that's how I feel about podcasting. Like I just got off work. I'm tired right now. But at the end of the day, I was looking forward to this interview, because I wanted to learn more about you and learn more about Tular and this exciting, exciting field that is is our future. So thank you for taking the time today and talking to our audience. The Morning Formation audience that's out there listening to this. We're very fortunate to have you and Jeff, thanks so much. And I'm looking forward to following Tular into the future. Maybe one day, she'll be delivering some of my Amazon goods to my house or whatever, driving 60 miles an hour down the road.

Jeffrey McChesney: 44:23

I think you're gonna you're gonna KP, I think you're gonna be driving down the road in two or three years, and you're gonna see a drone launch from FedEx truck or UPS truck, you're gonna like,"Oh, I talked to that guy. I know the guy who invented that, right. He was he was talking to me said it's coming and here it is." It's only a matter of time, to me. It's it's an inevitability. And it's a world that is going to change. It's not anything I thought about when I was young, you know, like the world is going to be connected physically. I've never even, never crossed my mind. But now I've you know, to me, there's a vision of this. And I and I do think Yasmin for putting us together as well. I would have never known who you are either. So it's one of those things in life, you just get connected and you're like, oh, there's something here.

KP: 45:05

Things happen for a reason, sir. Mos definitely. And for folks out there listening, I hope that we're able to expand your mind a little bit as far as your careers and where you might want to go. Really take this into consideration. And I hope that we were able to underline the fact that there's so many different so many different things that this is going to affect into the future. So I thank you, Jeff, so much and for the audience out there listening. Three things I want you to stay tuned, stay focused and stay motivated. Warriors fall out.