Innovation Bootcamp, Leadership Development, and Building Momentum with Brad Halsey

Callye Keen sits down with the insightful Brad Halsey to delve into the dynamics of modern technological advancements, from the power of speed in combat scenarios to the innovation bootcamps reshaping military and tech landscapes. 

Topic Highlights:

00:00 - Introducing Brad Halsey

Callye Keen introduces Brad Halsey, CEO and co-founder of Building Momentum, an organization that offers world class corporate, educator, and military training that teaches problem solving, leadership, project management, team idea creation and development.

[02:19] - Brad Halsey's Journey and Passion for Helping Others

Brad shares his journey from his time as a Navy officer to the creation of 'Building Momentum.' His experience led to a passion for assisting individuals during their toughest times, especially in war zones, disaster areas, and communities affected by systemic poverty. 

[07:09] - Four Pillars of Business at Building Momentum

Brad Halsey delves into the four main business areas of Building Momentum: "innovation bootcamp" focusing on tech training for the DOD and industries, "innovation elevated" geared towards corporate training with a technological twist, "innovation academy" dedicated to teaching children problem-solving with technology, and "innovation design" for unique, innovative product creation. 

[11:17] - Revealing Team Dynamics Under Pressure

Callye Keen points out that project constraints can reveal hidden challenges or "rocks in the path" within a team. Brad Halsey agrees, noting that putting a team, regardless of their professional background, under a technological and time constraint reveals their true nature. 

[15:30] - Team Ownership and Problem-Solving in Dynamic Environments

Callye and Brad discuss the pitfalls of waiting for hierarchical validation in a team setting, emphasizing the value of proactive problem-solving and iterating solutions quickly. 

[24:59] - Emphasizing Speed and Confidence in Technological Adaptation

Brad Halsey underscores the importance of speed and adaptability in modern conflicts, emphasizing, "speed is going to be the greatest weapon." 

"It's not because I'm some genius. It's just because I have the confidence to know that I've been there and done that." - Brad Halsey

Callye Keen - Kform

https://kform.com/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/callyekeen/ 

https://youtube.com/@kforminc  

https://twitter.com/CallyeKeen 

Brad Halsey - CEO and Co-Founder, Building Momentum

https://buildmo.com

https://linktr.ee/BradHalsey

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-halsey-74109933/ 

Brad Halsey CEO and Co-Founder, Building Momentum Founder and Chairman of the Board, Athena Rapid Response (501(c)3) Brad Halsey is a renowned world-class problem solver with decades of experience rapidly developing solutions on battlefields and disaster zones. As CEO and Co-Founder of Building Momentum, Brad leads a team of Ph.D.s, engineers, scientists, innovators, trainers, makers, educators, artists and thinkers to solve his clients’ hardest problems. Building Momentum also teaches people, from academics, engineers to corporate leaders and active-duty service members in the field, how to solve their own problems using new and emerging technologies.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

The technology thing and the deadlines that we provide, and sometimes we overlay it with a real life scenario something maybe I've seen in a war zone or a disaster zone adds that stress and uncomfort that is so critical to figuring out how to optimize your team, because trust falls and all that crap isn't going to really do it for you. You got to get the stress.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Welcome to the Startup of Defense. My name is Callie Keene. Today I have Brad Haseley of Building Momentum. Brad, welcome to the show. Can you give us a little bit of your background? What's the story of Brad? What's the story of Building Momentum? And I ask this of everybody what are you passionate about right now?

Speaker 1: 0:37

Well, thanks for having me. This is awesome to be on your show. I'm excited to talk about it. I think what I'm passionate about now will come out in a little bit of the back story. So I was a former Navy officer, was a diver, became a SWO and then hurt my shoulder and got processed out of the military due to a botched surgery. So I was trying to figure out what to do next and went to a think tank at Stanford Research Institute and became a scientist there and doing DARPA agency related technologies at very fundamental R&D levels. Really loved doing that but got frustrated that none of that tech was going anywhere Sort of straight out of Raiders of the Lost Ark where they roll the cool tech you just made into a warehouse and call today.

Speaker 1: 1:21

At the same time we were pretty much knee deep in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of my friends are out there is calling me and saying you got the smartest people in the universe all around you and yet we can't get basic robotics, we can't get basic ISR, we can't get any of this stuff. So it kind of haunted me enough to where I finally left. Sri found a consulting company that had a contract with the Army and immediately went down range in 2008 to see what was going on. What was the deal? I had a lab in Baghdad, but just pushed out all around the country on missions as much as I could, to sort of see what the heck was going on, and I spent about a year there building tech, prototyping things, and at the end of that, at that time, the Army wanted more of that, and so I started training nerds mostly PhDs to go to war and in that, developed this insane sort of training process where it was like hell week of attack. So they had to build something that would learn a 3D printer. They have built something that would do well. They have to build something.

Speaker 1: 2:23

You know, very purpose driven technology development, and I fell in love with that too. So when I started building momentum, I wanted to do both. I wanted to go to fun places of the world and do sort of the in situ prototyping and problem solving and then teach people how to do that. So that was. That was a lot of fun. That's where the company started. So then about passion it is truly around helping people when they're at their worst, whether in disaster zone I was in Ukraine in the fall trying to help out over there or you know, war zones, disaster zones, but even in the community we work with severely underserved or people in systemic poverty around here in Northern Virginia, and that's what I'm passionate about just helping humans, especially those in need at the most.

Speaker 2: 3:08

I was really excited for this conversation because your background really encapsulates some major themes that we have on the show seeing and solving real problems in the situation, empowering people with the tools that are commercially available and kind of the speed of commercialized process, but for really high value applications.

Speaker 2: 3:27

So I like that you went for the historically disadvantaged what we can do in our community, because I really think that DoD or IC experiences these problems at a very high level. But when we solve for a high value proposition in one area that it's immediately transportable to other areas that are of equal value or of much larger scale and that leads to this dual use conversation. And I want you to introduce everyone to building momentum and the garden and kind of what you're doing in our Northern Virginia community, because you can kind of see this as like it's giving accessible training and tools to innovators, but you're also serving people in the DoD as well and kind of mashing everybody together with an event space and we've had events there and brought in adventures and entrepreneurs and you're getting at that triple helix of innovation where you get government and universities and innovator and people all together. So can you give us a little bit more like brass tacks about the space and the kind of things that happen there. You know what bubbles up there at Building Momentum.

Speaker 1: 4:39

Yeah, you said that really well. The sort of helical imagery that you gave was fantastic and I you know a lot of what we've been doing was very evidence when I was in Keeve about, like the community helping the warfighter. So I really I do truly believe that all of these things overlapped. But, yeah, so, building Momentum and the garden I own the both of them but I'm a terrible marketer, and so the idea was that initially the garden would be this like event space that was kind of running independent of Building Momentum. Building Momentum was this prototype being in and training team, and it turns out they are completely intertwined as well.

Speaker 1: 5:12

So we have a facility here in Alexandria that does all sorts of things, but they're all again centric around problem solving. So I have an event space that holds a couple hundred people with everything from microphones and stages to a bar and all the accoutrements around hosting events like that. And we've done, you know, we do weddings and we do parties, but we also do things like TED Talks and symposiums and things where we're trying to do problem solving. You know, frankly, you think about even a wedding. It's like someone needs a venue and you're helping them solve that problem. But it's more of those human intersections that I found are so important in the innovation space.

Speaker 1: 5:48

And then sort of around that place I have two different facilities one that's very adjacent to the event space, which is a giant workshop that has welders and 3D printers and laser cutters and woodworking equipment and that has become more of a training lab for us. And then two doors down I have a sort of a higher end machine shop with CNC mills and metal 3D printers and, you know, cnc plasma cutters and it's also where our electronics and drone team work and that's where we do a lot of our interesting training for some of our, you know, socom friends or special operations friends and conventional forces we do down there. But even this week we're doing some really interesting stuff with some, some ODA groups down there and teaching them sort of nascent and emerging technologies. It is a weird space and in any given day I was walking from one end to the other. You know, about six months ago we were building these like mobile labs for for the Australians.

Speaker 1: 6:45

In one of the rooms SEAL team was was getting trained. In another room I come down here we had been hosting some, some of the chaplains in the military. They were discussing suicide prevention keep going. There's a kids program going on in the workshop and an Indian wedding going on in the event space and I was like and see, we nailed, it's the most sort of diverse population sets around, that's what we do.

Speaker 1: 7:09

And then our business areas are really around four pillars and that's just kind of the same thing. We have innovation boot camp, which is our sort of technology training for the DoD and also for industry. We do innovation elevated, which is our corporate training side. So this is you're still building things, making things, but it's lends a little bit more to inner interpersonal dynamics and management dynamics. But you're still going to be welding or 3d printing or flying a drone or doing something, because technology is that amazing backdrop where you're, you're feeling uncomfortable and in those moments all those little sort of predilections for poor or good management come out.

Speaker 1: 7:44

And then we have innovation Academy, which is where we're teaching kids I mean kind of the same thing problem solving with tech. So there, when I taught my seven year old daughter how to weld, so the you know, it's very approachable. And then, lastly, we do something we call innovation design. So if you want that really weird thing built, we're great at that. If you want, you know, 100 of a very standard thing built, I'm not super interested in that. But if you want that weird, unique thing that no one's ever done before and you need it fast, that's kind of our wheelhouse.

Speaker 2: 8:12

I can see that really supporting a lot of the national lab teams but of course, the SOCOM teams, you gain so much actual experience and knowledge on the execution side. Once you understand the context of how things work and how they're made, I think that a lot of people I see retire out of the service. They have this built up catalog that any commercial company would value at millions or billions of dollars. Of these problems. Like, I understand the pure context of these issues that we have because of this very specific situation. This is something why current technology doesn't work. But this is why a commercial product would really solve that problem.

Speaker 2: 8:57

If I could just X, y, z it, you know, I could Tape it together, solder it together, put it in a better housing, often this kind of make it a little bit more portable, but without the context of well, how does that work like? How does an Arduino work? How does soldering work? What are the possibilities on execution? All those problems just kind of lay fallow. They lack value. Where is in the commercial area? It's all the opposite. We have all the execution capabilities in the world but very little context on the actual problems. So in powering either of those sides you're in a great place.

Speaker 1: 9:33

The problem set is why I really enjoy it. I think that's one of the things that is taken for granted. There's. So many times we develop solutions based on sort of the incomplete picture of the problem. And I'm actually not a huge technology honk like I use technology to solve a problem and I so I'm not going to Herald 3d printing being the penacea of all things. Do d or logistics. To me, everything is just a different flavor of hammer. That's fine, I'll learn it. I'll learn whatever the cutting edge is. I'm computing great. Give me one of those. If it solves my problem, that's great. If not, it just goes on to the shelf.

Speaker 1: 10:05

But it's really identifying what the problems are. And so a great example recently as we set up this other facility in what I guess I want the poorest areas of Virginia and the ideas we were going to start using some of the problems in the community to teach Carpentry, teach 3d printing, teach electronics is really interesting the things that you tease out of that situation, because you have to meet people where they're at right and so just blowing in there and being like I got you, we're gonna solve all these problems. There's a lot of distrust in the community. That way, they don't know me. It's really getting into the problem set itself, which in most cases, if I feel like Wells down to human, to human interaction, even in like the most technologically advanced whatever, whatever. When you distill it all down, it's really just working with humans every day and figuring out their problems are and then just sort of watching from that.

Speaker 2: 10:55

I really like the problem solving curation process really like something you said a little while back about the management principles or the management tactics, like In process of a project is the stress of actually doing a thing right, doing a project under a deadline kind of reveals maybe less desirable characteristics or Our weaknesses or our strength. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Because I think that in and of itself I'm thinking and super smart what Brad just said, because even if you had a team of technologists and you said you have an hour to do this, where you see the artist is like hey, sketch out Spider-Man in 15 seconds, in five minutes and in an hour, when we have those deeper constraints, it reveals a lot. It's like taking the water out of the harbor. You see the all the rocks in the path. I wonder if you have any fun stories that you can share about that. But if you could expand on it a little bit more. I'm kind of curious because it's so smart what you just kind of glossed out.

Speaker 1: 11:53

I like your metaphor again about the, about the rocks being exposed. That's a good one. That's exactly what this is. So I've seen this too many. I do have an anecdote for you, but I've seen this too many times where, like there's a team and there's an obvious asshole in the group, or several assholes in the group and in a team building situation, like they're on their best behavior there, everyone's like it's kind of new ish, but it's predictable with the outcomes are going to be, and so you can get away with, you know, not letting your true inner jerk self come out and add all those little cracks and fissures within that team. When you put even even PhD, mechanical aerospace, whatever, you put someone into a technology situation where they have to build something under a deadline. All of that is laid bare. So one of the great examples we had a couple years ago there was an organization that it was the organization in the government, so I'll just leave it at that right now, but they had a really senior team come in and then the head of that, the entire organization, was there and I hold that person aside. I was like, look, you need to not take over. Like your team is going to look for you to take over your the boss. You're just going to have to, like you know, facilitate so they can get something out of this experience as well. And they had to build.

Speaker 1: 13:02

It was an aggressive day. So in one day, one one time, the team had to build a slot car out of what they had. To solder up the motors. They had to make all the contactors. The other team had to weld up a water wheel, that it was a. There was a Tashio generator, and so the idea was that the end of the day, rain water over the water wheel, the water wheel would turn, the generator would power the track and the car would go around the track. That everything was hand built and then the team that got most laps for 55 gallons of water would win.

Speaker 1: 13:30

You know, one hour into this, they're having some issues. This one part of the team was having some issues without even like instantaneous or not even acknowledging our conversation. This guy just goes and takes over and gets in, goes into this rabbit hole and just starts, as he had an engineering background even before he became the head of this organization and was just like driving the ship driving the ship and what ended up happening? Is it fractured the team, just like you think. And when it came to that integration side between the water wheel and the car since no one was talking and this person was just heads down building and sort of taking over the whole situation they missed a very important part of the integration and they got blown away by the other team.

Speaker 1: 14:07

The other team had a bunch of very senior people, generals and things like that as well, but one of the generals had made a point to just communicate everything and just communicating, communicating. So at the end we were like is this representative of what you see in the workplace? And everyone was super sheepish to bring that up, and so I just started really poking people in the eye and being like I saw this behavior, is this what it's like in the office? And eventually they're like, yeah, it's kind of what's going on. And I said great, well, that's great, it's okay, it's fun, let's know, let's get that out and talk about it and let's think of strategies that go beyond this.

Speaker 1: 14:42

But what ends up happening in all these team buildings is you never get to that like at raw authenticity of what is actually happening and why. And so if you start killing that onion, why did that guy take over? Well, we were under the gun and it was urgent and I didn't you know, I didn't trust the team to do all the things I know how to do because I'm an engineer. Now you're starting to see some of the issues right. You need to trust the team, even when it's an urgent, you know deadline. You have to. You have to let go and let that trust happen. So the technology thing and the deadlines that we provide and sometimes we overlay it with a real life scenario something maybe I've seen in a war zone or a disaster zone adds that stress and uncomfort that is so critical to figuring out how to optimize your team, because trust falls and all that crap isn't going to really do it for you. You got to get the stress.

Speaker 2: 15:30

I love that we go to war with the team that we have too. So you can't just as a you see, as a toxic management trade is like, oh I would just have you know I'd have more engineers on my team, I'd have a better team, or I'd do this and I'd do that. Well, that's kind of your responsibility. Right now. You're not really taking ownership of the fact that this is the team that you have. You're not leveling them up. That's why you're here is to level them up, and so they're not getting leveled up because you're not letting them even participate in the training exercise that you're here to help facilitate their growth. Right, yeah, we go to war, we do a project with the team that we have, and I think that's fascinating because I've done. I've done enough startup weekends, hackathons, I've conducted some corporate training, some large local companies as well, and you definitely see this as like really smart people. They've been trained how the organization works and they're looking for someone to more, from the head down, authoritatively delegate a small role to them.

Speaker 2: 16:27

Well, why aren't you drawing up this possible solution? We have all these printers here. You can just do whatever you want. You're just waiting and doing nothing. They're like well, I don't know if it's going to be a good idea. We all kind of don't know it's going to be a good idea. That's. The whole point is, it costs me two cents and 30 minutes of printing to try something out. So let's try five things. They'll probably all be bad, but the second round of the two that we select will be pretty good. But if you're waiting for XYZ head honcho dude to say that you have a good idea, that doesn't know either, so it's kind of a waste of time. It's going to take forever to get to the 10 iterations. We need to create some kind of new innovation.

Speaker 1: 17:06

Yeah, we had an exact example of that not too long ago where the Navy approached us and said, hey, brad, can you make us a gimbal for 3D printers on ships? And I was like, do you need it active, do you need it passive? And they're like we don't know. And I said you don't know, you need a gimbal, is what I'm hearing. So I said give me a, give me a. You know, give me a minute.

Speaker 1: 17:24

So we went out and built this you can see it on our, on our YouTube channel this whole large I mean it's probably like eight feet by 10 feet system that you put a 3D printer on and it simulates a ship. It simulates the heaving and rolling and yawing of a ship. We actually had thumpers on there. So it feels like, you know, aircraft landing on aircraft carrier and you, we can dial this thing up. And, by the way, we made it out of like garage door opener parts and an Arduino and we had some high school kids help us and we did it a few weeks for a few thousand bucks and we mocked this whole thing up and we ran a bunch of 3D printers on it and actually some some industry 3D printer makers heard about what we're doing and just sent us theirs for free, just to like beat on it. And the result was you probably don't have a problem. Actually, if it's C state, like nine, and you're in a frigate or eight or something you're throwing up like I used to do go hit pause on the printer and throw up. If it's a nice day, print like this isn't rocket science. Like you don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a gimbal, like don't, what are you doing. And so that's that was the feedback we gave the Navy, which is just, don't worry about it.

Speaker 1: 18:32

And then, actually two days ago, I got another call that the Marine Corps thinking about putting these other printers on ships and they asked for the same information again. I was like here's our report, go read it, don't invest in gimbals. You know, just hit pause. And it's that sort of that realism where people are overthinking it. They're overthinking it and it's like I'll be right back and I just mock it up really fast and and, and you know, make some make some intellectual headway in that space. I just think that's something that isn't done enough. I was at think tanks like I know this, we everyone loves to, you know, postulate and sermonize and it's like, well, we just run out and get our elbows dirty really quick, we can probably make a lot of intellectual headway here. Anyway, that's kind of who we are.

Speaker 2: 19:14

I like that. I mean, for that specific example, the normal industry approach would be to pay an engineering company to come up with a test fixture, do a ton of analysis on the test fixture itself, do a requirements report so now you're into the tens of thousands, if not exceeding $100,000, then build the thing, test that thing and then do an industry survey for all the different printers and do this and this and this. The reality is like you could just build it and try it.

Speaker 1: 19:45

It was like $6,000 of stuff, by the way, and then we did it literally in four weeks with two high school interns.

Speaker 2: 19:52

You can't beat how smart high school interns are getting, though I'll tell you that right now and this is an analogy that I give to a lot of I think we have a lot of common friends and people like this that say look, you have to look at what smart teenagers are doing in their free time, on the weekends If you want to be ahead of every single possible innovation and curve.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Just look at what a 15, 16-year-old is doing on their own time. Look at what they're putting in their race car, look at what printer and what they're printing. You're going to see, you're going to jump two years of the big boy's innovation by just looking at what kids are doing for free, because a lot of the projects that we end up working on. I tell them hey, you know that there's an open source, I can just download this code Computer vision is a good example or different AI things. People come in there obsessed with this and I tell them hey, I can just get you a small form factor computer. We can just push some open source code to it and try it in a couple of weeks or a month if you really want, and then figure out why does this not work?

Speaker 1: 21:02

I saw that firsthand actually in Keev because I sat down with one of the drone builders there, got a chance to meet. He's posted a bunch of stuff on YouTube and you can probably hunt this stuff down. So I was talking to him about how we got started and what possibly we could do to help. He gives me all this drone story stuff about how he was a marketing guy and then used YouTube and GitHub. So I was really fascinated by that, because the drone world is very sort of that way. Then he started segueing into software defined radios. We had been just recently teaching JSOC how to use these things for some sort of a SIGINT type of applications and Mil-Deck applications, but also listening and things like that. He was like only one or two steps behind me just using GitHub and YouTube.

Speaker 2: 21:53

I mean, you have HackRF and Lime and LimeSDR and it's just like, yeah, I've been in this market for a long time and even five or 10 years ago you're looking at something might be $20,000, $30,000 to work on. Right now we use EpicSDRs, but you could just use LimeSDR for a couple hundred dollars and get started. It's pretty absurd what you can do, because you can beyond the owned waveforms and the specialized stuff. It's really not that hard. You literally can watch YouTube and build your own specialized radio network for under $1,000 and a weekend of time.

Speaker 1: 22:34

And so I came back from that experience like, holy crap, we need to outpace the hobbyists. Obviously, the war is adding significant urgency to people learning this stuff. I could talk all day about how we need to do that as well internally and be learning from all these things and just feed on that urgency so we are prepared. But yeah, it was like that's the utility of the internet these days you can get really quickly up to speed on some pretty complicated technologies which are actually made less complicated by things like GNU Radio, which is all open source, and so it was incredible and so it was something that I had known, that our teams should be learning how to do and I'm a big open source fan and then I get punched in the face with it, with these guys and Keeve. I was like, yeah, this is the world that we live in now. Things can evolve at the speed of days and not years.

Speaker 2: 23:19

To even expand that a little bit more, the benefits of using some of those platforms. You think taking that concept of Arduino, reservoir Pi and extending that across, like all the electronics that we use, it's not particularly that. Hey, there's a blue supply chain, secure supply chain for XYZ component. I need for people to understand that this capability exists and I need to educate as quickly as possible. So the documentation and the community that's around open source intelligence, or all of the peripheral tools that are around pen testing now, or the C5ISR applications of those tools, because there's YouTube about it, because there's open source, we can train somebody up where they can learn really, really quickly, whereas, yeah, five years ago and certainly 10 years ago, that was all like nobody knew anything.

Speaker 2: 24:09

Realistically, it makes changing capabilities and looking at rapidly changing missions, like we're seeing in Ukraine, much more accessible, I think. So that's why I really respect about what building momentum is doing, because there's such an open problem in the market Just educating people like, hey, you know, harris Radio has its place, but we all know that there's probably two extra zeros on top of it of what you need to use for a lot of the applications that you have. So let me show you what you can do with this $15 board and a Raspberry Pi. If you really want to send data, like let me show you what this little sensor package in Lora WAN can do. You know, you can build a mesh network for like 200 bucks and you could deploy it however you want. When you're done with it, just throw it in the trash. You know what I mean. So very interesting time we live in.

Speaker 1: 24:59

Speaking of my language. I love that. I mean, I love that you know a lot of these things too, so we can nerd out later about some of that. I think that's if I was to like a future cast that speed is going to be the greatest weapon that we will ever use in any type of conflict here on out. And to your Harris Radio concept, you're right, there's a time and place for those types of platforms. But if they get compromised which you know, given the fact that things like chatGPT are moving at such places like decrypting some of these things and sort of getting into the loops of those will become easier and easier as well. So at some point you can't take five years to build a new platform. You're going to have to build it. It's going to let, you're going to have to know that it lasts a month and then you're going to chuck in the trash and move on. What I found is that it's the confidence to know you can do it. So that's I mean.

Speaker 1: 25:44

Think about you and I, for example. I have a chemistry background. I'm not sure what your educational background is, but you know all this stuff I can. Just I can hear in your, in your description. You probably know how to program in our domain. You probably have messed around with Raspberry Pi. You probably know these things. But how do you know these things? How do you know that you can know the next thing?

Speaker 1: 25:59

And it's this confidence that there is information in the world that I can ingest and there's a piece of hardware here that I can touch and I can make those things do something. I know I can do that. So how do you get to that point? Because that point is the seminal moment of this. Like some JSOC guys told me the other day that I'm the most dangerous person they know, because I've played the soldier, I can do all the soldiering things, but I can do all the sort of the nerdy things. And that's like it's just a mindset before name. Some amount of years ago.

Speaker 1: 26:26

I've never touched a Raspberry Pi but I knew that I could use it and I knew that I was like capable enough to dig into it, even though I'd never touched Python. And sure enough, you know, after a couple days I was doing all sorts of crazy surveillance systems and image recognition stuff and things like that. It's not because I'm some genius, it's just because I have the confidence to know that. I've been there and done that. So I think that type of understanding or confidence or whatever that is to grasp information in the world and grasp things and sort of amalgamate them into a thing and then doing that fast, those two things will outpace a lot of our adversaries out there. If you think about, like China, for instance, which everyone loves to think about, they're more of a monolith, they're more like Russia, they have this bureaucratic monolith of a military and they will never be able to keep up with very agile sort of community industry driven force that is just pivoting constantly. It's just like a scurrying mouse of information.

Speaker 2: 27:22

So, yeah, we firmly believe in that and I firmly believe in the in providing people that confidence and then using speed as, like the other lever 100% agree about the speed thing is really that's the power of these prototype solutions, right, you'd be able to just get some confidence around that we understand what the problem solution fit would be, what types of technology to approach like.

Speaker 2: 27:45

Just diving in gives us a lot of confidence over time. It's like I have solved similarly difficult problems and we can never really get there unless we have undeserved arrogance. Right, we can't really get there without experience, and so participating with someone like yourself is really how we get there. I see just a really burning need for this at volume. So I'd like to just wrap this up and make sure that everyone knows how to get involved with what you're doing with building momentum. Like I said, we have a lot of friends in common, so if they're listening to this show, how do they reach out and say this would be really great, for my unit is really something that we should bring into our division as a program? How do they get in contact with you and maybe poke around at what they could bring in capability, capacity to pull innovation into what they do day in, day out?

Speaker 1: 28:35

Yeah, so in that space we have two kind of primary offerings in that I'm just going to have for lack of a better term called it like MacGyver school, we call it innovation boot camp we can go to places. So if we blow into Qatar or Japan or Australia, we bring pallets of gear, because every student gets a 3D printer and every student gets a whole box of tech sensors, arduino's, raspberry Pi, things like that, because I feel strongly that if you're going to play with it at home, you're going to be so much more capable in the field. So we give that to you. We go to places and we also have that here in Alexandria. We do something called innovation boot camp by the seat.

Speaker 1: 29:11

So, like today, we have a bunch of different services training together that would normally never spend time together. They're just orthogonal, sometimes in operational space, and that's fun because you could be with a SEAL team member, you could be then next to an FBI person, that are next to a Space Force person. We train all these groups and there's so much goodness that happens there too, and those are. So those training sessions, usually a week long. They're really intense. You're going to learn more than you've ever learned in a college class about all these different things about 3D printing and coding and mechatronics, and you build a robot and you might build a GPS tracker. You're going to use chat, gpt to write code, all these things. It's really intense, it's a lot of fun. And then we do advanced sessions.

Speaker 1: 29:55

After you've had that sort of foundational session, we do advanced sessions on build drone, drone from scratch, build a whole clandestine surveillance kit from scratch, and so we do those types of things. So if you're interested in any of that, you can go to our website at buildmocom or you can get a hold of me through info. Just hit info at buildmocom and ask whatever questions, and that will get filtered to me and and then we can. We can do. We can do some crazy things. I love the custom stuff. I want to build a CubeSat that, you know, that puts skittles over, you know, over Australia every month, or something Like. I would love to do some crazy projects like that too, and we train on some of that weird stuff too. So there's something, something out there that's interesting. You know, give us a yell.

Speaker 2: 30:40

Brad, thank you so much for your time and thank you for being on the show. Really appreciate it. This has been awesome. We got to do this again. Yeah, absolutely, my name is Callie Keane and this has been the Startup Defense.