[00:00:00] Speaker A: Just got out of the busy season, I would say we got out definitely on the down.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Yep. And different things like repairs, spraying. I mean, it all kind of is winding down.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. The shop guys were just slammed there for.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, it's frustrating no matter. Like, we added, you know, 50% more capacity in the shop, but it's still not enough. It never will be enough during that season.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: And what I. I think what. What we did this year and what probably need to do even more next year is you just got to have, like, temporary, like, people come in.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: And you got. You probably should have.
I don't know. We could have had five more people probably.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: I don't know if this is true or not, but I feel like we didn't run out of critical parts like last year, did we?
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Nothing like last year, man. It was so much better than last year.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: There was a couple. I think there were a couple parts that were out, but for stuff that we were fixing, I mean, like for T100 stuff, T50 stuff, we were just taking apart drones, like, so that we could not. Yeah.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Like new. New drones.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: New drones. Yeah.
[00:01:00] Speaker A: So new parts being put on.
[00:01:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: If somebody needed a motor or esc. Like those two things for the T100 right now came in a big batch this week, but those were really low. And so if we needed one, we would just disassemble off of a new one.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. But now. Now we're going right into thermal season and that's starting to pick up, right?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah, dude. Thermal season.
I wonder what it's going to be like this year. Because the economy, you know, people say it's.
[00:01:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: It feels a little more shaky than it did, I think, 12 months ago.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Do you feel that way?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: I mean, food. And like, food is. I think I saw somewhere food. Is 30 more expensive.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: No.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Than it was like 12 months ago.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: What?
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Yeah, 30 more. Is that.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Do you see that at all? 30 that.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Does it feel like that? I don't know.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: I don't know. But I mean, me personally, I definitely feel from a people buying aspect, it slowed down. Like. Yeah. Not just our business, but in general, people just are not spending money.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: I saw Tucker Carlson had a piece where he was complaining about 20 burritos.
[00:02:05] Speaker C: Holy.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And that. That's the thing now, is $20 burritos.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Well, I guess we did stop making the penny. So everything is going up.
No need for those pennies anymore.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Yeah, man.
[00:02:16] Speaker A: So it's just a f. It's a nickel now, Right.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: I think that's the smallest. Yeah.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: When is the last time you've carried around change? I'm like five years.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Good question, dude. I actually never carried coins with me.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: It's just I was a bad counter to start with, so I just didn't want to go counting out coins and so I just throw bills up there instead. Yeah.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: And back when you were doing trees, if you got paid in cash, I mean, it was rounding to the nearest hundred in that business. It was. There's no.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the thing with trees.
Often people ask, well, how do you price a tree? Yeah, I price it whatever I want. Like, I. I walk up to it and I kind of figure out, okay, this tree is going to take me maybe three hours to take down. Yeah, I'd like to make 2500 bucks.
2500 bucks and not. Not 24.98 and 5.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
It's not how it worked.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Oftentimes it was based on what the skill it would take to remove that tree and the equipment required. On location, off with that business. Guys would look at it like, holy moly. Like, that's a lot of money. Yeah, it is a lot of money. But the equipment we had to roll up with like a 32 ton crane to crane out the. The tree, a big chipper, two chip trucks, you got a stump grinder, you got all this stuff.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: To do a $2,500 tree, do you
[00:03:40] Speaker B: think there's ever going to be a time where you'll have a fly cart 100 type drone with a cutting device underneath and you'll remove like an arm or a robotic arm, Then you remove the knee.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: I don't know that it's going to grab the tree and remove it. Like, like we have done it. But I think with the helicopters that do the power lines and clear the. The branches from hanging in, that could maybe be a thing.
But like hoisting pieces out that you remove in a backyard, that's definitely a real possibility.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: I, you know, I don't know how soon that's going to be. Maybe part 108 would loosen that up. Because, I mean, we, we did hear that part 108 has been pushed to the White House.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Have we at the White House. And it's expected to, you know, the next step, whether it's just certifying it or changing it, I think is happening this December is the current expected time.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah, but.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: And that seems unusually fast. Like, way faster than we thought it would happen.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Well, no, it's already A year. And I, I, it's already a year and I still don't think it's going to be published. I think it's going to need reiterations and it's going to be two, two years until it's actually like.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: We would be both surprised if in 2027, 108 goes into effect.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. I would be highly surprised. Yep. The, we got to touch on the fcc.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Fcc, probably the biggest thing right now in the drone industry.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Not probably. It is the biggest thing. You know, people are going to, you know, if they're tuning in to the drone on show, they're like really wanting to know about this stuff because we haven't published anything on Drone Deer or New Ag and we just didn't want to put more publicity out there with the uncertainty because they're like, nobody truly knows. Yes, you can put all the content out there that you want that these things are potentially going to be banned, but it just makes people more fear or fear mongering, I don't know. So, yeah, that's why we have it.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: And the only, really, the only accurate thing that we could publish is here's a proposal.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Here's what you can do about it. And you don't really know what will actually be binding or going to effect.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: And why I didn't put a video out like that is because other guys have put it out already and, and they did a really good job with explaining this is the proposal. This is what could happen. I'm just going to do the, like, if I were to put out a video, it's explaining the same thing over and over again. It's like, yeah, now if I would have had something specific to add, I think to that. But dude, there is a, a guy, Jeff from accus.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Like just really good video. Yeah, good video. Well put together.
He hit the points that needed to be hit. And, and I've shared that with our team. Like, here, watch this guy. Like I can explain it to you, but he did a really good job. So for me to go make more videos explaining the same thing over and I didn't think is important.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And, and with the proposed rulemaking like that, you know, there's two different ones, but the one that affects that, you know, the military designation is the one that most pilots are going to care about.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: And holy cow, how would that, if that actually passes with something similar to how it's proposed, how that would screw over so many industries.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Yeah. I was actually watching a video last night about there was A, there was this town that was built on marble like rocks, and then that whole industry just died or something in that area and everything shut down. I would feel like if this goes through, there's going to be a lot of companies that are going to shut down. Yeah, it's just, it's part of it. Because if they're going to not let it fade out and they're trying to cut it off like completely 100% from one month to the next, that would be devastating.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: It's.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like we've said it before on this podcast and in our videos. We understand that we have to move to American built drones, but do it in a slower transition. Even these American built drone manufacturers, they're not ready.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Yeah, they're not, they're not ready to
[00:07:54] Speaker A: take, you know, from concept that they have now to mass production. They're just not ready yet. So if you're going to do it, fade it out. And I thought that that's how they were going to do it with the original ban, which was no new models. But now with this proposal they're trying to say all foreign made drones, basically.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: All. Yeah, all foreign made drones. And even like lidar used for obstacle detection. Any advanced drone has that.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:22] Speaker B: So now it's almost like you're incentivizing. Well, but then I guess no foreign made drone that doesn't have LIDAR will ever get approved either.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Say that again.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Like, like if, if Autel or as ACSI or whatever, if they, for the US market, they make a specific drone without the obstacle detection, there's like for them to get a new product approved that's also cut off.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Yeah. But then there's that kind of backdoor deal. Get that, what is that called? It's conditional approval or something.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: It's so bad. It's so bad. But you know, if there's one thing that the US government is signaling to the US market is invest in manufacturing drones and do it now and we're going to protect your investment and you are going to make bucket loads.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: Well, there's a reason that there's a guy with the last name Trump invested heavily in a UAV components manufacturing company.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: There is a. Yeah, yeah. I mean how that works.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Should have just followed the politics. Yeah, right. Did you buy in Landon?
[00:09:22] Speaker C: Unfortunately, I missed that memo.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Yeah, well, little, little late.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: Some of those, yeah, like some of those trackers that you can now see like I, on my X feed, I now see like some of the interesting trades that politicians are doing in Real time because they have to disclose it. So I think within 30 or 90 days they're disclosing their trades and there it's made really easy to follow along like for the average retail Robin Hood investor.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: Yeah. The, the Kansas location, we've talked about it slightly or a little bit in some of our videos and we haven't really like gone super public with it. Yeah, that were there because we were kind of slowly opening the doors. Making it dialed in.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: It's actually a lot to.
It's not just making the store look good, but to actually have it run good. It actually is a lot.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: And when you're doing sales, when you're doing service and when you're doing distribution, like warehousing for our. What would be our second location, it has been stretching to figure out how all of our systems kind of pivot or adjust to now allow like all the things that need to work.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Yeah, but how close to being completely dialed in would you say?
[00:10:31] Speaker B: I think completely dialed in is probably a six month timeline, but I think we'll be 80% there in.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: By the end of September.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: What about the storefront? It's.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: I think that looks beautiful.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it looks really nice. We had DJI show up at the four at the storefront and they said they've never seen anything like this in the United States.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: I think they said it was the most beautiful or the best done retail space in the US that they had ever seen.
[00:10:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: So I would say if you guys are traveling and you're happening to go through Wichita, Kansas, swing in, check out the store, like you know, walk around, see these drones in person and check out the storefront that we put a lot of money in and let us know what you think.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And what's cool about that storefront is that we designed it not just around New Way Ag, but also around the Enterprise. So you'll see when once you walk in there, you'll see every agricultural drone. You'll see the fly cart, you'll see the.
All the enterprise, the thermal stuff, the dock. And we actually like. It's not just a place to look at and say, oh, that looks like a cool drone. It's actually a place for education.
So I dropped in there on. I was driving through and I dropped in and it was so cool to see somebody was getting a demo on the M400 and the different attachments. And over in the conference room, a live coaching or whatever was going on with somebody who just purchased an agricultural drone. And that space is actually utilized and we have these like learning TVs or like touch TVs where the idea is to help educate farmers who are totally new to what drones can do. Help them not only learn about the technology but then figure out what drone is going to be best for their application.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah, no, yeah, it's pretty nice.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: And brand new is we're going to also add all the consumer line so any like mini Mavic Air, like all of those you'll be able to just buy off the shelf.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: Also nice. I won't ask when that's coming because we probably don't know.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Don't know exactly.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely something we want to do is have those consumer drones. We have seen as we're building this company originally E Commerce, you know, New Way kind of took off and a lot of people were traveling across the country to come buy drones from us. But yeah, we quickly seen how this is changing into a more local type of buying experience.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: It's so different than in 2025. So different.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And that's why we went to Wichita is kind of more central still allowing those people to drive hours to get to us. But ultimately we want to have dealers and locations all over the place.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah, man. There was probably a three to six month time period where we as owners we saw that it just feels different than it did the previous year. And I'd say in 2025, a lot of our success was not only in the service and the, you know, we're actually our applicator. It's so different from buying from a company that's actually an applicator than from somebody who's just like they just buy and sell equipment and this is just a box to them. Do you want that box or do you want that box? And we did a really good job in 2025 of acquiring stock and inventory. And you know, New Way was a name that you could trust that had inventory and it would ship it out to you pretty quick.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: And a lot of people pretty quick. Let's say we're top 1% of all Shopify stores. All Shopify stores with fast shipping, with fashion. So don't take, you know that lightly.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: And I don't, I don't know that we were back in 2025.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: But we got a whole lot better this year. And that's like actually a reason that a lot of people prefer us. Because when you want a part, then yeah, you might shop around. But honestly, if. How dumb is it when you see somewhere and it says in stock but you order and then they're, oh, we don't have it.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: That's.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: That's the dumbest thing ever.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: So in 2025, it was like specialty E commerce was what agricultural drones were. And now it seems like more and more there's actually inventory flooded, and now you get to pick who you buy from. And there's also price controls now so that all dealers are selling at the same price. And dji, though not officially in this market, you know, there is actual price control. So what you now choose is you choose the service, you choose the support, because the price you're going to pay is going to be the same anywhere you go. And so now people are wanting to go local, like somewhere in their state. And I remember you and I would do demo days and people would have driven eight hours, 12 hours from Minnesota.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: And that was like. I mean, that was amazing. You know, people would drive that far to learn about this. And so I remember when we as owners had to sit down and figure out, the world is changing. Should we actually give up the retail sale and do we actually want to build a network and how do we do that? And now I didn't think we'd end up where we're at now. We're actually. Now if you go to newmag.com we have dealers, and we actually will tell you to buy from a dealer near you instead of buying from us. So it's almost like we did it in drone deer when we.
I think you made a video how we. We almost shot ourselves in the foot with our service business.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: We killed our own business in order to build something bigger.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Yep. Well, yeah, guys ask me all the time with drone day recovery, how many calls do you do? And it's like, I can't compare it to what it was like year one, year two, because by year three, we had built the, you know, pilot locator map. And so my calls went from hundreds of calls the first year to down to a few hundred and then down to just enough as just what I wanted. So, yeah, there's no doubt that as far as the retail sales side of agricultural drones, we might not sell as many units out of our locations to the end consumers. But we're. We're wanting to set up people in other locations that provide great customer service, great experience for those farmers, because that's what it's about is being able to, if your drone goes down, maybe make an hour and a half drive, go get your parts, go get your drone fixed and get it back up in the air rather than driving 100%.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: And where, what, what I see the world actually going is like last week we onboarded a farm ag equipment dealer that had 22 locations.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: And so why do you say had? They don't have it.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: They do have, I should say have. They have 22 locations.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: And so we onboarded them, we'll provide them with support. You know all the things that attributors.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: I think we, we should go into our dealer platform because it's hard to explain how ours is so much better than other people. Well, but, but it definitely is because we have had dealers of other distributors want to be new way dealers because of how well we have set up the system.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Yes. And the bar is shockingly low. Like if you are a dealer ordering parts, you do not want to do that over email.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: You just want to be able to go on side, log in with your account, you know, get your pricing hit buy now and it ships out that day by 3:00pm yeah. And if you pay for overnight, it should ship out overnight, you should get it the next day.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: But the flow is nice from the time that you contact the team, by the time you get signed up to having access.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: It's almost like a tech company says let's do distribution and let's actually make it easy and let's actually care about this. And that's the main thing that we do.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: So our whole company is organizing around how do we support dealers. And that means when you sign on as a dealer you should have a easy onboarding process. You should be able to docusign your contract, you should be able to do all of those things. Your initial order, your reorders, you should be able to easily drop ship to your customer.
You should, we should be able to do ACH payments to where as long as the payment is pending we can, you know, we'll ship stuff out to you. All of those things we should do because we want again, pricing is going to be about the same but we want to win on just service.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: When you say we should, are you saying we're, we're not quite there yet.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: I'm saying every dealer who signs up should expect that from their distributor. That should be the normal thing.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: So, so, but that is the normal thing with new.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: If you are a dealer for New Way Ag, that is a normal thing.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: That's the biggest thing is when you guys look at New Ag, you might see us outspraying and showing, you know, the trailer and the drones and how well they work.
But on the back end, we have a whole team that just building systems. And that's the biggest thing about companies that are going to stay at their size, that they want to be or grow and be bigger. You have to have systems, you have to make it easier or the easiest thing that they've ever dealt with to be able to scale.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: And when it comes to doing so, and the other two things that you should expect from your distributor is if you, if you want to be a dealer and you're thinking about this, you should expect regulation support or. And training support.
So if you are a new way dealer, we give you the resources that you can do those two things. You can actually create a profit by selling regulations to your own customer. And we just handle it for you. And then for training, we actually have videos that you can make available to your customer. It actually is the best out there. Not only is the content the best, but the way that when a farmer wants to answer a question, he wants to answer the very specific question. And he doesn't want to go to a library and see 28 videos.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: He wants to have his question about adjusting swath width answered immediately.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. This might be boring to some people listening to us, but it's like we don't talk about it enough. And to go out and make a video about showing how good our systems are and what we've done that other people haven't, it doesn't quite feel right to make a whole new ag video about it, but we could if that's what the people would want.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: And I suppose we should also say like this for us has, like since February, it's been a big focus. I'd say February is when we were like, okay, here's the path that we're going to go. And we have very ambitious goals of making the dealer successful. And in the beginning, Mike, you remember that, you and I, it was never about how can we make $100,000 on doing drone service. The thing that actually was most rewarding to us is how do we help people be successful in this?
And there's something in there that I think even beyond a business model that actually works, it's exciting to us to think of if I can help teach somebody how to spray and go make $150,000 spraying, and then in the off season, I can help him actually figure out how to sell drones to farmers around him. There's only 4% of fields that are being covered with drones right now.
[00:20:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: And there is never a better time to actually start a business and go do this.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: And it's not easy, but it's simple.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Oftentimes when somebody comes and they are buying equipment from us at New Ways, they asked are you going to come take my acres or are you? Because they, they have that fear that we're going to come and we're going to spray everything. It's like guys, that is not what we are doing here. It's just like again we, we bounce back and forth between new ag and drone day recovery. I'm not going to come find every deer in the country. I'm not going to do it. I want to set up other entrepreneurs to have their own business and make their own life changing money and grow from there.
I love nothing more than to see entrepreneurs that we sold a trailer to a couple of years ago and now they're scaling their company. Like to me that's way cooler than going out there and making $2 million spraying crop fields. Could I do that? Yes, we could totally do that.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: It would never be easier than it is now with the platinum.
[00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah, no, the platinum trailer.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: You're talking about platinum trailer.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: Oh, that thing is so nice.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: Before we, before we jump over to there on like the pilot locator for New way coming out this fall is one other way that we want to make it easy for farmers to find sprayed drone applicators. And what we're seeing in Kansas for example is that we have farmers walk in that are actually still like, oh, this is the thing. This actually works. You can actually do this at scale. I had a farmer call me this week in Kansas and said, huh, you know, to spray 100, I think 16 acres of sunflowers, like is that a one day job or like how does that work?
[00:22:18] Speaker A: It's just shocking to me that we, that, that this technology still isn't understood with inside of the farming community.
[00:22:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:26] Speaker B: And 116 acres is probably in a single field. That's probably, you could probably do that in one day. You think you can knock that out in one day?
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean that's with the, with the T40.
[00:22:35] Speaker C: You could go in there and knock that out in one day.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:38] Speaker C: And that's an eight gallon drone.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: Yeah. It just goes to show that people just aren't aware.
I mean they're probably not sitting down on their couch watching new way videos and being educated because they're out, you know, farming.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: But no, I feel like I should say about the dealer portal and like how we're creating support for dealer My email is Kevin Hle drones.com and since February, this is a primary focus and there's still things that is not the way it should be. And if there's something frustrating for you and how you've dealt with us as a distributor or us as a brand, then what I can assure you is I don't know that anybody cares more about it than what we do. And that's why I'd like you to email me and tell me if we suck somewhere. Tell me how we suck.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: You said it kind of fast, Kevin.
[email protected] H L E drones.com HLE stands for help, Lead, educate.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: Yep. And all I can, I mean, there's probably things that are broken, but what I can assure you is we're going to fix them and we're working on it. And it is so much better than it was 30 days ago. And my job is just as a company, offer the best service, like build a team that cares about this as much as we do and then do less stupid things every week.
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: And then as long as we just keep doing that.
[00:23:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Then you're going to see, I think you're going to see new way ag be.
We're just at the beginning.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Yeah. So with this potential, you know, foreign drone ban thing, why are you still so optimistic and excited about the future?
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Here's how I would. Again, this is a hot take. This is how I would read the FCC ban or the FCC proposed rulemaking. I would see it as our federal government in 2026, maybe 2024 is coming to grips with. Drones are changing the world. It's going to change agriculture, industry, robotics is changing how things are made.
And we need to bring this made to America. So our government is not saying let's put America behind the curve on technology and drones. They're not saying that at all. They're saying let's bring that to American soil. Unless that manufacturing happen here.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: So if that's the case, why didn't they do that with cell phones? I mean, come on, bro. Like, we've been making cell phones for years in China, so why not bring that here?
[00:24:52] Speaker B: Think they were going to, right? And then in Trump's first term, was it his first or second term? That app that Tim Cook went to the White House and gave Trump a gold trinket because the. Do you remember that? Well, the tariffs were going to make Apple's business untenable. Like, the tariffs were going to totally screw Apple. And if you'd have 150% tariffs or even 50% tariffs. Your made in China iPhone doesn't work anymore. You can't sell it anymore, you can't make money. Your whole thing is broken. And how is Apple supposed to in four years recreate their business, like their whole manufacturing supply? That, that is one of the, you know, in China. How are they supposed to recreate that in America? It doesn't work. And so Tim Cook went to the White House and you know, people say kiss the feet of Trump, but probably really just explained the business like, hey, listen, I can't move this to America ever.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: Or just not that fast, I don't know.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: And then these companies like Meta and like everybody says, I'm gonna, I'm gonna invest X amount of billion. Pick a number. What? Bill, how many billion do you wanna invest? I'll invest that by 2030. Great. All right. You get a conditional exemption. Right. And that's how it works. I don't know. That's that to me from the outside, probably uneducated, but that's how it looks. So what I think is the US government is signaling very strong. If you have a hundred million dollars and you wanna invest in American drone manufacturing, this is a great time to do it. And we're going to protect you so that you don't get squashed by superior technology made overseas. I see, but we actually want good drones in America. We don't have a government that's saying let's keep them using T40 technology. No. Heck no. We want the best drones, we want the best AI, we want the best chips. We wouldn't manufacture it in America. So I think it would be tenable. And the reason that like what I'm telling our internal team and what I would say to our dealers or farmers, whatever applicators is the future that I see is Trump does this all the time, week to week with Iran. He puts a very strong, like, here's the horrible thing that's going to happen to you. And then, you know, how many times did he say he's going to wipe you off the face of the planet. He's going to blow you to smithereens. He's going to do whatever.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: All the bridges were going to be gone.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: Yeah. All the power plants, all the water. It's like you're going to be in the Stone Age was his exact words. And he's trying to signal very strong, this is what you should do. And I think it would be an acceptable solution to our US government if a American owned company brought technology from China, from DJI from xag, from Altel, and they manufactured it in America. I think that would be acceptable to the US Government because if you don't do that, then what are you going to do?
[00:27:28] Speaker A: I mean, I guess I'm just that guy. Like, I feel like friggin manufacturing has just left the country and it's just manufactured in other places where yeah, labor stuff is cheaper and yeah, that's. I'm probably not looking at it the right way, but I look at this Matrice for td, like, I can only imagine what that sucker is going to cost because there's going to be some dude that's not willing to put this together for less than $35 an hour. He needs $35 an hour to, to, you know, put these plastics.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: It's. But robotics, like if you. We're at a point now where robotics could bring it back.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Oh, so you think this will be assembled by robotics? Yeah. Okay.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: I mean, I think a lot of that's going to be assembled by robotics.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: It has to be like that's how, that's how Tesla does.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: Okay. Bring manufacturing to the country. Where are the people going to work? Like, there's still how many people in America? Like, what kind of work are they going to do? Just fly these around, look for deer, fly them around, look for people.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: That's a great thing to do in this, in the, in the fall and winter, I mean. But you're saying they need work during the other time of the year.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: Well, I'm just, I'm just saying.
So they're the, the push to try to bring it to America isn't necessarily to create jobs.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: I, I think it is. I think that's what sounds good. I think that's what's good. But I'm with you. If we're, if we're replacing people behind Wendy's and Burger King with screens, then that's the only way it makes sense. And soon. And with AI especially, I think it's expedited. If all that you can do is say hello, thanks for visiting. Can I please take your order or order whenever you're ready? If that's your skill set.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: Yeah, but that's going away too.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: That's going away. That is going away. That's not going to happen.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Who did that? That is like, it's all AI Is it? Oh, Taco Bell.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Taco Bell is A.I.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: i, I think it's all.
[00:29:09] Speaker B: That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing and horribly scary and, but it's amazing and, and what that I think Means to the American worker is you better have skills. Yeah, I mean, and it's, it's easier than ever to have skills because you can teach yourself anything but motivation and drive, motivated. And do we Americans do good at that or do we suck at that? It's split down the middle. It is. Half of us suck at it. Half of us are like, go get motivated.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: That is why. And there's a big gap.
[00:29:36] Speaker B: The land of the free, the home of the brave, whatever. It's like if you're motivated and you want to teach yourself something. Golly, there's never been a better time.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: I agree. I could not agree more.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: I have a friend who has, you know, half a dozen short term rentals and he was explaining to me how he vibe coded solutions that make his customer experience better and make it more automated for his staff. So he's going down on hours. And when, when you call him now, something pops up on the screen and it tells you your reservation date, your special request, everything that you need. Yeah, and he did that. He said, I had so fun doing that over the weekend. I stayed up till 3am and I built it.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: That's cool.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: And that is now possible it just in like vibe coding or software development, but on anything. Like if you wanted to go build a power washing drone company. It almost pisses me off that in this life that we get to live, you only get to do one thing at a time. Well, and if I wanted to go do something else, I would fumble this. We have to like this thing that you and I are building. It takes all of our effort and focus. But we only get to live for 75 years or 95 years and holy moly.
[00:30:44] Speaker A: Do you want to live for 95?
[00:30:45] Speaker B: I don't know. I don't know.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Do you want to live for 95 years, Landon?
[00:30:48] Speaker C: I'll take 95.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Oh my gosh.
Why not? Why not?
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Only if I can still walk around and run.
[00:30:54] Speaker C: And I, I can tell that you're. You're looking at like the wheelchair immobile, but. Oh yeah, you know, there's.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Tell me how many 95 year olds are out there climbing mountains.
[00:31:03] Speaker C: There's 90 year olds that are still running track and marathons.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: So they'll use the exoskeleton by the time you hit 85. You're okay to use a. The hypershell exoskeleton. That's going to work. Climb mountains like never before. And peptides and trt. I mean, yeah. What Mike.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: People, can you imagine everything we're going to See if we're going to live till we're 90.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: Oh, dude, it's going to be. It' going to be horrible. And I feel like horrible and amazing. And amazing. I. I told my wife this week, I feel like if you actually just stop and look at it, we're living in, you know, what it was like before the Great Depression or before World War II. I don't know what it was like, but I imagine that after World War II, people thought, you remember how beautiful it was back then? Yeah. Inflation was 7%. Hugh gives a crap. The point is I could go home to my family. We played in the yard, we had a pool. You know, we just. It was just simple life. And I feel like we're living in that now and we won't appreciate it until the fan and China invades Taiwan or, or World War III breaks out or. I don't, I don't know. We're actually in a pretty sweet time of history right now, and we should enjoy it.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: I guess I don't consume enough news or I'm not on X because I have no idea what you're talking about.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: But think about it. The last 10 years for us as Americans, what have been our big, like, like we've been in a sweet time?
[00:32:19] Speaker C: Well, when I would say we, we are a soft society, right?
[00:32:23] Speaker B: We are soft.
[00:32:24] Speaker C: We. We have not had anything to challenge us.
Right? So you go to the gym, demand more from your body, right. And it, and it rises to the challenge, get stronger, faster. Right. Same thing with the society. Right.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:32:38] Speaker C: What challenges do we have that as a society we have to get out and work or, you know, like from a, from a, you know, conflict perspective or anything like that. We don't have many challenges. We have, I don't know, we have a sweet society.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: There's a lot of good times make soft men, and soft men lead to horrible, horrible times.
[00:33:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: So it's kind of like the last time we had men become men and really step up was the Twin Towers. Right?
[00:33:08] Speaker C: And even then, that's, that's more of a blip than, than anything, right? Because unfortunately, like, like airport security forever.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: But probably the.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: But what I'm saying is men were like, stepping up to the plate, like going and defending, I don't know. But.
[00:33:25] Speaker C: And there's, there's portions of the country that would have done that, right? And people fight fires and natural dis. Pastors all the time. So there's, there's portions of society that respond to events like that. But as a nation, we haven't had. We're, we are removed from, from a lot of things. As a nation, there's portions of our society that step up all the time. But you know, first responders, the Coast Guard, the military, they are being sent out. But as a nation, we haven't had anything that's challenged us in a really long time. Right. Yeah, it's all diplomatic channels and, but
[00:33:58] Speaker A: we probably won't need a bunch of men because it'll all be done with robotics. Like if, if a war breaks out, warfare, send out a bunch of drones or.
[00:34:05] Speaker C: Warfare has changed.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: Then when your AI server goes down because your data center gets bombed, then you're like, oh crap, how does this gun work? That's like, yeah, that's going to suck.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: I'd like to know. Like, and I, you and I have talked about it off air, but like we're so busy. We're like, personally, how do you, how have you taught your brain to stop thinking and spend time with your wife and children? Because I, I find that so intriguing that like, you know, let's just say it's, it's Friday night and it's 5:30 and I send you a text, you don't respond until like 10 or something.
You just shut it off. Are you thinking about it during that time or you just don't think?
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Sometimes I think about it. It like depending how I end the day, it actually kind of sucks.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Because it's like I have the same thing I think you do where this like thread is running through my mind and especially man, the worst thing is problems that actually are like emotionally tolling, like people problems, upset customer problems. Those things like I can't just forget about and eat supper. But I do look at my boys. I have a five year old and a two year old and a one year old. I'm like, like I see my five year old talking like an adult and I'm like, holy cow. Like I've already like. And I want to have like it's going to be a long time between now and when I have grandbabies and I just, I love. I don't know.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: So what happened? What. Who told you or what, what did you watch or listen to that was like, okay, like separate them or did you have to get to a certain point with certain dollars in your bank to be comfortable or.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. I mean I think, I don't know. So.
I think so. It's really important to my wife and so part of like me being able to live in harmony with my wife and my family is being able to do that.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: And, and I ask her a lot. Like, I ask her like, hey, I got to go to Vegas for a show, the, you know, the UAV Expo, or I got to go to. And I got to be gone. And, and so there's a lot of our life that actually is around what my career is. A lot of our life is around that.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: And it's not outside of the scope that I want to say to Liz, hey, Liz, what do you think of going to Texas to open something up for six months? Or why don't we go to New Mexico or. And she'll move across the country for me. But in exchange, what she'll ask me is like, I need to be able to turn it off. And which. And I go to work. I'm at work at 6 o'. Clock. So from 6 o' clock to 5:30, I'm working five days a week. And so what she says is, Kevin, if you're gonna see your boys from 5:30 to 8:30, when they go to bed three hours, put the frickin phone down and don't. Like, this is three hours you have, you have.
[00:36:48] Speaker A: So, okay, so like when you say you go to work because I go to work too, but I'm kind of in and out. I'll talk to Viviana, my children here and there.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: I don't do that. Oh, I'm like totally gone. And for me to go home for
[00:37:02] Speaker A: lunch, it, maybe that's what I'm doing wrong.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: Dude, I could not. Like, if for me to work at home would not work for me.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: Oh.
Yesterday I was working here in the studio making commercials. I was out in the yard shooting.
[00:37:14] Speaker B: So yeah, it's so, for me, it's so heavy. Like if I want to go home for lunch, it's so heavy for me because it's like I can't be who I need to be for like 45 minutes. And then I go back and like restart everything. It doesn't work. It's like I, I want a, give me a 12 hour chunk where I can accomplish what I want to accomplish. And then after that, you know, my brain's whipped and I'm like, let me just go lay on the ground, okay. And have my kids climb over me and tickle them to death.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Huh? Okay. Yeah, that's completely different.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Yeah, you do a thing where like you're working and like your fam. I would say something that's cool is like you and your wife and your kids, like your Life is more integrated than mine is. Probably like, it's all, you know, the,
[00:37:56] Speaker A: like next week we'll be going to Wisconsin for that former expo and we're taking the family with.
[00:38:01] Speaker B: Yeah, like, what is that like? Because that, isn't that, like, to me that would be stressful because how can I do the thing that I'm supposed to do and also like handle my family?
Is that not, not hard?
[00:38:13] Speaker A: That doesn't seem stressful.
Yeah, I don't know.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: When I drove to Kansas, you know, two weeks ago to help with the store and stuff, it's like I literally for a four hour period had like potty breaks every 30 minutes, literally. And 14 hour drive turned into like 18 hours really fast.
[00:38:33] Speaker C: That's incredible.
[00:38:34] Speaker B: But what do you say?
[00:38:35] Speaker A: I mean, put on a diaper.
Sorry.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: See, it's. That would have worked.
[00:38:44] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I, I've just found it really cool. But like, you're saying you have a different approach than I have. I feel like I do give some attention throughout the day, but yeah, I, I am getting better with the weekends, like completely shutting off and just being with the, with the children.
[00:39:03] Speaker C: But yeah, I, I would hear these or I would see these notifications of conversations being had at all times of day.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:39:12] Speaker C: And I was like, well, I know Mike's messaging somebody.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: Oh, you're talking to. Like somebody sends a dm. Yeah, I gotta probably shut that off.
[00:39:20] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's, it's like at random times.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: But.
[00:39:25] Speaker C: And I just, I know, and it's, it's curious, right, but it's also like people are reaching out. And to me it's, it's been normalized, right, that we have given people seven different inboxes. You know, you can reach, you can reach us on X, you can reach us on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, you can email us. You know, so people are, well, now they're listening.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Now they're like, I'll just send them a dm, right?
[00:39:53] Speaker C: Yeah, but we're, we're talking about customer service, right?
[00:39:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:57] Speaker C: And, and Mike, Mike has said that he doesn't mind it at all or he doesn't think about it. And I'm like, like keeping up with all those messages.
That's, that's stressful for me.
[00:40:10] Speaker A: So when I was on the really good job at it Chris Corner podcast and you know that he is very successful and he looked at me and he's like, Mike, if you shut your phone off and you don't get back to a customer, even if they're upset, is that really going to change your overall growth of your company. Like just at least three hours, four hours or whatever.
Valid point, but I don't want him to go online saying yeah, I wasn't able to get a hold of somebody but, but they're gonna do it either way.
And so that's when I was like, okay, I gotta let loose a little bit more on dude.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: Some customers are unreasonable.
99.9 of our customers are fantastic. One customer last week bought thermal drone on a Friday, wanted it delivered on Saturday.
I think we shipped it out to him. He ordered FedEx overnight, we shipped it out UPS because our team understood his requirements and it was going to actually get there quicker with ups than FedEx. And he was so he has a, he had somebody at home, a babysitter and the babysitter was supposed to be at home to sign. Whenever we send you a ten thousand dollar drone, we make sure that you need a signature to deliver it. Very weird practice. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience, but that's just what we do. The babysitter who was supposed to be at home actually left.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: Oh no.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: And so when UPS delivers it on time for him to go on vacation the next day and take it with him, he got an email that it was getting rescheduled and he called our warehouse, talked to three different people. So pissed, cursing like mad. Rachel, he was in our Ohio warehouse, took her laptop home that night and was trying to talk to our UPS rep to make them reroute the UPS driver and make him go back that Friday evening so that it would actually get delivered. So it would have been he ordered on Thursday, delivered on Friday and she got a hold of him after hours and the rep said this probably won't work, it probably never works.
And so she, the driver went back and delivered it. And our team got both really angry calls from the babysitter because it was found out that she wasn't actually doing her job. And then the owner, he was pissed about the whole thing and unreasonable and the UPS driver went back and delivered it and the next day he called and you know, was very appreciative and very reasonable.
[00:42:30] Speaker A: Did he leave a five star review?
[00:42:31] Speaker C: Probably not.
[00:42:32] Speaker B: Probably not. Probably too busy. But, but that to me was like I only found out about that this week and it is so amazing to me that Rachel took her laptop home.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: Yeah, like they truly care, they truly care. But, but like to get angry at people when everything was done right to start with and then we had to bend over backwards to try To.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: There's so much energy that goes into that point.05% of customers. So much energy.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:56] Speaker B: And I think, like, also something that serves me well in the evenings is I put my phone on the charger and it just stays there. It's not with me as I walk around the house.
[00:43:05] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: And then occasionally, probably two or three times as I walk to the kitchen and back, I'm looking at it and like, I'll look up the, you know, look at the. If there's anything that's like, truly urgent, like, if you text me and like, hey, we need to talk or something like that, I might, you know, I'll call you back before I put the kids to bed. But all the other stuff, honestly, like, even if, like we're group chat or something, like in the morning, I'll, you know, we'll deal with it.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: And yeah, that's good. Like for me right now with the T100 doggone stupid terrain follow issue thing that we've got going on.
[00:43:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:43:36] Speaker A: Not every single drone is doing it, but some of are doing it. And those customers are upset because they can't efficiently run a spray drone operation. And I get it.
I'm trying to help them. They send me a message. It's like, I'm trying.
[00:43:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm trying. And I see every day you're like, head engineer dj, like, what's up, what's up, what's up, what's up? And they don't know what's up. They're trying to figure it out.
[00:43:59] Speaker A: Yeah, they're trying to figure it out.
[00:44:00] Speaker B: It doesn't help the customer.
[00:44:01] Speaker A: It's just so strange that, you know, three out of four drones work perfectly and then fourth don't. Drone does.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes no sense.
[00:44:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it makes it difficult, even more difficult to pinpoint what the issue is, but just. Just being there when somebody texts and, you know, giving some type of feedback rather than waiting a whole day to get back to him. Yeah, people appreciate that. But then it's also.
It's hard to be present with your family if you're always, you know, responding back to people. But no, it's. It's good.
[00:44:30] Speaker C: Do you have a cutoff mic? It's like after nine.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: No.
[00:44:33] Speaker C: Or is it like just whatever you're feeling?
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Nope, just whatever I'm feeling. Usually it's. Once I go to bed, I'll put it on. Do not disturb. Yeah, I used to not do do not disturb when I went to bed. And then Karen, my wife, got so sick of the phone Just always beeping and doing things.
[00:44:51] Speaker B: There was a time when you were doing recoveries that.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's. That's kind of. That's how you have to have it.
[00:44:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: If you're going. If you're going to have a successful thermal drone deer recovery business, you're gonna have to keep your phone turned on.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Especially now when there's so many people. There's so many people. And if you don't.
[00:45:10] Speaker A: Because if you don't, they're gonna call the next. I mean, it happened to me last year. I said, here, give me three minutes and I'll see if I can send it. By the time I called him back, he said, no, I already got somebody. Yeah, okay, well. But that's all right.
[00:45:21] Speaker B: We make it so easy to do that.
[00:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just get on there and you're gonna find the closest dude. Yep. No, that's cool. So that's why you're so excited about.
Or you're so positive about the whole drone business going ahead is like.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:38] Speaker A: You're just not worried about it.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: Well, because I. If. Yeah, because I read, like, there's two ways that we do this. So one of the reasons that I'm positive about the FCC is because I don't think they want to crap on the American drone market. They want to have good American drones. How will they do that in the next 12 months? In the next six months? We either need to have. Be able to have American production, that is the quality and the quantity of what we're turning off, or we are. We're going to just. We're going to struggle.
[00:46:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: And I don't think that the US Government wants that. So in my mind, it's perfectly pivoted to maximum pressure. Maximum, Maximum pressure. We're showing a hand that says, six months, you're totally screwed. But then for any company that wants to play ball and actually build in America, conditional exemption, conditional approval. That's. I don't know. That's what I'm saying.
[00:46:27] Speaker A: So you just stay positive until it's done. And that's what I've told people. Not giving up on DJI because it is a really, really, really good product. I'm not giving up until they're completely dead. The coffin's been closed, they're putting in the ground, and the dirt's been covered. Like, so that's. That's how I'm. I'm sticking with that.
[00:46:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:46:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:44] Speaker B: And. And it is, like, if there's anything that we can all agree on, it's like drones are changing the world and they're not going away.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: Yes. 100.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: So for you and I to be in the drone business, for our dealers, for our customers to be in the business. Sorry. There's volatility when you have something that's exponentially growing every year. And I don't know if DJI is going to be the brand of drone you buy in 2030. I don't know. Yeah, could be a totally different.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: But you have like, Exceed is a couple years away.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: Shut it off.
I don't know if I can say that or not, but they said no drone. No drone for 27.
[00:47:14] Speaker B: For 2027.
[00:47:15] Speaker A: Yeah. Because they want to bring a good product.
[00:47:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:47:17] Speaker A: And they feel like they're being pressured. Like, we got to bring this, we got to bring that. They know they have to bring. It's not ready.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: And their investment is substantial. I don't know what it is, but it's substantial.
[00:47:28] Speaker A: They're huge.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: We had a guy Message us on LinkedIn or something say, hey, I'm. I'm a hobbyist. I want to manufacture stuff.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: But it.
[00:47:35] Speaker B: It's not how it works.
[00:47:36] Speaker A: No.
[00:47:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not how it works.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: Like that company, Exceed.
I thought it was exad. I don't know what. What the proper way is to pronounce it, but they have the funds, but they don't want to put a bad product out there. They sent a bunch of drones to users and yeah, I was told they're not. That's not ready to that point.
[00:47:57] Speaker B: Did you see. I saw. This week. Or actually maybe in June sometime. Okay, so a couple months ago, did you see the lawsuit filed against EA Vision?
[00:48:07] Speaker A: No.
[00:48:07] Speaker B: Dude, I was going to text you this and I forgot.
[00:48:10] Speaker A: Like, class action lawsuit.
Yeah.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: Let me pull it up here. It's a lawsuit from a group of Arkansas farmers.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: Oh, geez.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: That are naming every single. Like the dealer Agra Spray and then the Chinese companies.
Hold on.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: How did you find this out?
[00:48:28] Speaker B: Well, it's public filing.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: You just decided to go look for lawsuits?
[00:48:32] Speaker C: You have a. He probably has a bot scanning for anything that comes up.
[00:48:37] Speaker A: That is wild.
Something for that. I can tell them about the new New Way Ag Platinum trailer that we released.
[00:48:46] Speaker B: We haven't even talked about that.
[00:48:47] Speaker A: That trailer is truly insane. It is insane. Expensive too. I'll just tell you right off the rip. $87,500 retail price because it is crazy engineering. Push button, remote control, scissor lift your pilot command center goes up. Operate two drones. You can land and take off with Two drones on each side. AC heat inside. Your drones go down into your floor. You close the box, you can lock everything up. Two 10k axles on it. It's, it's truly insane how it's set up. It's a gooseneck. It's 34ft long, total length, bottom is 24ft at the, on the bottom flight deck or the, the bottom deck and the flight deck 34. It's really, really good. It's to the point where me and Jay are on the inside of the pilot command center and we like laugh and we look at each other and we're like this is ridiculous to think where we started, you know, unloading our drones, loading them back up, running to the truck and I'm running back and unloading them now. We just, we put, we put it in part, we push a button, our command center goes up, we walk up, we open the doors, the drones come out, we open it up and we're gone. And then we're sitting inside and we're, we got 360, you know, glass, you can look out. It, it is trust. Truly insane.
[00:50:08] Speaker C: The only, only correction I have, he said they walk up, they don't walk up him. I saw him and Jay, they are running up the stairs still.
[00:50:16] Speaker A: Yeah, we like going fast now. You could walk if you want to, but we just, I don't know, I feel like when you walk and you lollygag, you get tired. Like my body just gets tired because I'm so like laxadaisy. But that being said, I don't know that the trailer is going to be for a new startup because it's that expensive. But hey, if you got a lot of money, why not buy the best right off the rip? It's safer definitely because you're inside. Even though we have the pilot protection on the standard new way trailer, this is inside. Yeah. Less chemicals getting on you, less bugs and if the drone goes haywire, you're inside of a box. So it is really, really cool. We were hoping it wouldn't be this expensive but after American manufacturing and everything that we've got in it, it's just, it's the price, is the price. Yeah. So yeah.
[00:51:07] Speaker B: But I mean we were like last year when we went out spraying the fatigue that you feel at one o' clock in the afternoon when you've been working since 4am or 3am Just that heat.
[00:51:16] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:51:17] Speaker B: Just a hundred and some degree heat. The stickiness, it's like, it is actually. It's brutal.
[00:51:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:23] Speaker B: And you push through it or whatever. You rest for a couple hours or you just keep going. But to have an air conditioned box.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: Yeah. You got to go with and experience it like you haven't even been in it. It's, it truly is nuts. It's quiet in there. We can, we can have three loud DJI generators running.
You don't even hear. You can be on the phone, on speakerphone and have a conversation.
[00:51:44] Speaker B: And I think we got to give props to Jay, like some of the little details.
[00:51:48] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:51:48] Speaker B: In the pilot command center and stuff.
[00:51:50] Speaker A: Like we have a little sink in there.
[00:51:52] Speaker B: It's like mind blowing. You could probably put a little fridge in there.
[00:51:55] Speaker A: Yeah, you can.
[00:51:56] Speaker B: The whole thing is really cool.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:58] Speaker B: So who is it for?
[00:51:59] Speaker A: I mean it's, it's for really anybody that wants a really good trailer be enclosed, be safer. A farmer, a custom app guy. I would say that most farmers won't buy it unless you need to get rid of some money for tax write offs. Because it is an $87,000 trailer. Most farms won't buy it because they're just spraying maybe, I don't know, four weeks out of the year.
But I don't want to say that because I've had farmers buy things that I thought they wouldn't. But I would say 90% of these trailers will be sold to custom app guys that are upgrading their equipment.
[00:52:36] Speaker B: Adding another fleet, maybe.
[00:52:37] Speaker A: Adding another fleet. Yeah.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: And, and for those guys, the way you look at a $40,000 expense, like additional right over another new way trailer, you know, about 40, $45,000 more. How should you look at that and process that?
[00:52:50] Speaker A: Well, if you, you're gonna have to experience it because for me, right. I always thought, well, you be in an open trailer, be in the front, like, don't put anything down. Like you have to experience how fast it is. In a minute, 30 seconds, everything is up. Your pilot command center's up, your drones are up, you're ready to rip. And it was literally a push of a button like you didn't have to do manually, anything. So you have to experience, you have to be inside the box. You have to hear how quiet it is, how you can, you know, be spraying close to your rig, right close to your rig and not getting chemical on you. So now it's going to allow me to set up in areas that otherwise I wouldn't have set up because of the wind direction or whatever.
Now I can just roll up. This is the best place to fly, right next to my trailer. And I'm not spraying myself.
[00:53:38] Speaker B: So Then you. You deploy the cockpit and the drones. And then in the time that you grab a drink, start the generators, and run up the stairs, everything is deployed.
[00:53:46] Speaker A: Ready? Yep. Yep. Yeah. Minute and thirty seconds is what it takes to take the command center from the bottom of the trailer to the top. And then your drones are up. You've opened them up, you filled them up, and you're ready to go.
[00:53:57] Speaker B: So to this point, like, you have to experience it.
[00:54:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:00] Speaker B: So we're. Now, if you come to Discovery Day or any kind of coaching that we do at any of our locations, Kansas or Ohio, right now that trailer is in Ohio. The first one that we. The second one that we're getting off the line is going straight to Kansas.
[00:54:11] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know when it's getting there, though, so.
[00:54:13] Speaker B: And if you want to actually experience this for yourself, like you should.
[00:54:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:17] Speaker B: Then probably the best way is come to one of our locations and then just see what it's like.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. And for some people that have a successful spray drone business and they hear me that, you know, we have a inside or we have a climate control command center. That's all it's going to take. Yeah. They don't need to experience it. They're like, that's what I want. I don't want to be sunburnt. I don't want to be around the chemicals and all that stuff. So. Yeah. What did you find? The. The lawsuit?
[00:54:43] Speaker B: Yeah. So this lawsuit basically is a proposed class action against a Chinese manufacturer. And the core allegations are three. It's that the G1, the J100, drones were marketed as having advanced LIDAR and collision avoidance technology. Despite those claims, the drones have repeatedly crashed and lit fire and caught fire.
And the failures have endangered farm workers, damaged crops, and pose a risk to livestock. So the people named are the dealer, Agri Spray, and then the Chinese companies that produce it dog on it.
[00:55:14] Speaker A: I've just.
That sucks.
[00:55:17] Speaker B: The J100. Yeah. So basically, I think it's saying you marketed it with this. And here's the reality that happened, and that's not fair. You should. You should pay damages.
[00:55:25] Speaker A: Can you send that to me?
[00:55:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I don't know that I want to speak much into that, but there's no doubt that the J100 was a disaster. I mean, it's just that simple. It was a disaster.
I feel bad for people that bottom. I feel bad for dealers. I feel bad for distributors, because everybody was a test subject for that company to build a good drone. And. But a lot of people Suffered not
[00:55:57] Speaker B: to beat a dead horse, but that drone, that company is years old.
[00:56:02] Speaker A: You're talking about the distributor EA Vision or ea.
They actually never built drones to the masses in China because they can't, they couldn't produce.
[00:56:12] Speaker B: But I, okay, I don't know their history. I would imagine they did not start up in 2023.
I imagine that they're like they've been doing R D and development for more than two years or one year. When the J. It's not like in the. But here's my point. You don't produce the J100 in the first year that you spool up manufacturing and R D by the time it takes to write software and everything, then I would imagine that if you just think for a company to start now and actually produce a good drone, if the hundred million dollar exceed drone, you know that investment, it's going to take them a year and a half, two, three years.
[00:56:43] Speaker A: Well, yeah, they're, they're, I think they're already in year three.
[00:56:46] Speaker B: That is how our government is totally unreasonable. And we need to leave comments to let them know how unreasonable it is that the whole timeline of what they want to have six months is totally bananas and they need to do 18.
[00:56:57] Speaker A: That's a good point. Yeah, don't hold me on that. But I do believe that Excitie has been looking at building drones for more than a year. I can tell you.
[00:57:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's. It is a hard thing to build a drone.
[00:57:09] Speaker A: Yeah, there's no doubt, there's no doubt. Like anyhow, lawsuit. EA Vision, huh?
[00:57:15] Speaker B: Yeah, vision.
[00:57:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:57:16] Speaker B: So it's pissed farmers at the J100.
[00:57:18] Speaker A: Gosh.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:20] Speaker A: Maybe we got to dig into that and check it out because there's no doubt that people were threatening to do that. But I didn't know that people actually
[00:57:28] Speaker B: pushed through proposed class action lawsuit.
[00:57:30] Speaker A: What does that mean?
Like what is a class action lawsuit? That means like everybody's getting in on it.
[00:57:36] Speaker C: Oh, there's a group of people that
[00:57:38] Speaker B: are all led by a claim against it. Yeah.
[00:57:42] Speaker A: Oh, so it's like a group of people represented by one attorney maybe. Yeah.
[00:57:47] Speaker B: So it says Danny C. Day Jr individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated doing business as you know. So it's, he's saying for myself. And then I think the class action is where you rope in other people that were similarly affected.
[00:58:00] Speaker A: Oh, so they would if, oh geez, we're just adding to the fire right now. Then us talking and they find out about this, they'll get a hold of Them and be like, hey, I was one of those people.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Like, what, what is it? Like, what is your takeaway from this? Like, when you see that kind of velocity, what's the takeaway?
[00:58:17] Speaker A: For me, I, I know Taylor, you know, as a businessman, I don't know him personally, but I feel bad for him personally.
And, but, you know, then from the people that bought it from him, it was also marketed in a certain way. So the first thing I think about is him as a person.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: And what he's done for this industry is phenomenal. Like, how he's advanced it and.
[00:58:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:45] Speaker B: And when you think of, you know, five years ago, he was the. I mean, he was. Yeah, he did a lot to push this forward. And I, I, what I think of is, okay, even, like, think of, you know, for us or any other dealer, distributor, when you're going to sell a drone, you better feel comfortable standing behind it because not only is Agra Spray named in this, but also the dealer that sold the drone to these people.
[00:59:08] Speaker A: Well, I, but what they're going after is how it was marketed.
[00:59:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:59:12] Speaker A: Right. And we were told, this is the best. This the best.
[00:59:16] Speaker B: And, and we. Yeah, and the safety, like, that's one of the first things you said. This drone is not safe.
[00:59:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. No, and I agree. I had a J100 and I was freaked out how little safety was put into it. And they quickly, quickly made changes to their next model, but the damage was already done.
[00:59:35] Speaker C: And therein it's the 100 specifically, not the 150. The 150 has progressed significantly. Yeah, it has some really good additions to it, but the 100 is what they're pointing out specifically.
[00:59:48] Speaker B: And I saw a documentary of, like, Space X, how they built their launch pad, and they built a first version because it's impossible to know how to build a good version because you have like, I think they said it was 11,000 F150s hitting the ground every second. Like, that's the.
[01:00:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I watched that.
[01:00:08] Speaker B: Isn't that amazing?
[01:00:09] Speaker A: Yeah, but the difference between theirs and the J100 is they did it at the cost of their own money, not at the cost of other people.
[01:00:17] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, you're right. That is. And that is. But the cool thing is you have to almost. And that's where our whole industry is at. Who wants to build something and actually do 12 months of testing without monetizing it.
[01:00:28] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that is a hard thing. I think that's why these two companies that we know at this point which is Exceed or Exidy and Helio they have done a lot of that on their own dollars and I think that you know exceed is still willing to keep not making money to make a good product and you know time will tell who comes out on top but
[01:00:54] Speaker B: you don't have a multi billion dollar industry just go away overnight that's why I'm not worried you don't it doesn't happen we will have something else come up there will be a solution we will not strand the millions of thermal agricultural and enterprise drone pilot we're just not going to do that we're not that dumb even our politicians aren't that
[01:01:13] Speaker A: dumb There you go you heard it from Kevin himself Famous last words. Yeah all righty thanks for tuning in guys. If you liked it make sure to give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't already and we'll see you guys on the next one.
