SPEAKER_06 0:00

Around 2016, um, I hatched this idea that you know it might be kind of neat to see if you could add the smallest amount of technology to a human um and see if you could fly in that way rather than get in a flight vehicle. I discovered how you could track ships. You know, we're all painfully familiar with watching the ships that aren't going through the Straits of Hormuz. I made my employer at the time$500 million in nine months from a$20,000 punt with something that they said, don't waste my time on.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

Well, hello there. Welcome back to another episode of the AJ Buckley Show. I'm so grateful that you are here. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and follow. It means the world. Today. Today is a day that I've been thinking about for a very long time. As a kid, I would have dreams of flying. I would literally be like, man, it'd be so cool to fly. Would be be one of those cool things if if you were if what if you could be an animal, what would it be? It would be a hawk. I would love to fly around and see. Well, today, I got to talk to the real life Tony Stark. We've all seen him on Instagram. He's the gentleman that has put jet engines on his body and flies around. He flies, lands on on naval ships, he flies up mountains, he's done everything that every young boy and every young girl has dreamt about when it comes to flying. He is a real superhero. The one thing, though, that I was blown away by more than anything, he is one of the most humble people I have ever had the chance to talk to. For what he's created and what he's done, he's one of those guys years from now, the history books will talk about this man. He has done something on planet Earth that no man was able to do. And to me, that is just so inspiring. And I just can't believe that I got to spend the last hour chatting with him. So please welcome to the show, Mr. Richard Browning.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Welcome to the AJ Public Show Don't know. He's totally kidding us.

unknown 2:10

Welcome to the ATT.

SPEAKER_03 2:16

Dude, welcome. Welcome to the show. This is a big moment for me. It's like the close I'm a big Marvel fan, so I feel like this is the closest I would get to chatting with Tony Stark.

SPEAKER_06 2:26

Um I'm not helping with that background, am I? It's uh it's it's feeding your uh enthusiasm.

SPEAKER_03 2:31

Oh, a hundred percent. Um what is back there, by the way?

SPEAKER_06 2:34

So this is this is our uh kind of museum, if you like, to uh to everything we've done in the last nine years. So it's it's a big room, and in the background there is lots of the earlier iterations of the uh suits, so right back to 2016, 2017. So we've kept all the old versions, so um we've got lots of stuff in here.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

It's totally normal. There's nothing weird going on in the world at all. Except nobody can sleep.

SPEAKER_03 3:10

For me, I fixed that. I got a split king hybrid deluxe from Ghostbed. And I'm telling you right now, my wife and I could not be happier. The best sleeps in our lives in the last three months. With all the craziness that's going on in the world, we hit that button and I'm out.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

The world could literally be exploding, and we are deep, deep in REM sleep. That's right. R-E-M sleep.

SPEAKER_03 3:35

Go get yourself a ghost bed. Don't worry about the world while you're sleeping. You need your sleep. Eight hours. That's why I look so good. I'm not tired anymore. Ghost bed. Stay ready to look this good. Go to ghostbed.com forward slash buckley. Code word buckley, B-U-C-K-L-E-Y.

SPEAKER_06 3:54

Are you still in Salisbury? So we moved about an hour out of there to a I bought like a 50-acre farm uh and I've converted all the buildings to be our kind of engineering and training and test facility, surrounded by a really lovely countryside. So um, so yeah, not that far uh from there, but um yeah, yeah, all of these old versions were built in that in that old facility.

SPEAKER_03 4:16

Wow. So I'm I'm guessing at a young age you just was was flight. Like I I as a kid would always have dreams about flying. You know, I remember watching the movie Rocket Man and and things. And then as I got older and I understood what like lucid dreaming was, I had like one dream where I was able to control flying, and I like looked at my hands and like you know how I heard on Joe Rogan say, if you look at your hands and they're fuzzy, then you can tell yourself you're dreaming. And I was like, oh, I'm dreaming. And I was like, I want to fly over here, and it did it. I was like, whoa. Yeah, that's cool. But you've done that in in real life. Like what like your your background was in oil, am I correct?

SPEAKER_06 4:55

Yeah, I I'll give you I'll give you a summary if you like, because it the summary doesn't much much of it doesn't help actually explain, but then I'll try and explain. So yeah, I was uh I was an oil trader in the city of London uh for about 16 years for with a big oil company. Um, but I still loved the idea of kind of going down sort of untrodden pathways and taking on challenges that people said couldn't be done and all this kind of stuff. So alongside of that, I used to race triathlons, I used to run ultramarathons. I joined the Royal Marines here um for about six years, which is hard work alongside a day job.

SPEAKER_03 5:24

Uh and also that's that's a big Salisbury's a big military community in that isn't there.

SPEAKER_06 5:29

There is a big military community there, yeah. But I was commuting into London, so I'd cycle and then as in on a bike and then get on a train and then cycle the other end. So I had like a two and a half hour commute either way. So that was like a it's like a mini military deployment every day. It was kind of crazy. But I I embraced the challenge and like I say, made loads of it actually physical training. But but I was working in central London. Um but yeah, I I I've always been inspired by the military, and I I my original default career plan was to join the military, and then at university I kind of did a lot of military stuff, and then I I eventually thought I might want to go and actually try and I don't know, pursue these uh I suppose it's sort of business and uh innovation and entrepreneurship ideas. So I knew I'd always regret it. That's why I joined the Royal Marines alongside that day job. But but in in the day job, I percolated up into trading, and that's where you're in a small team making quick decisions off imperfect information, trying to survive the failures and trying to let the successes run. That in hindsight now sounds very much or feels very much like being an entrepreneur. So it's funny how I percolated into that. And I had some big wins there, nothing to do with my day job, but I I discovered how you could track ships. You know, we're all painfully familiar with watching the ships that aren't going through the Straits of Hormuz. That system, I discovered that about almost 20 years ago, and they were only using it for anti-collision on ships. And I discovered that if you collected all that data entirely legally and it was all free to air and unencrypted, you could track trade flows. And so I made uh I made my employer at the time$500 million in nine months from a$20,000 punt with something that they said, don't waste my time on. Did he name like all his children after you? It was a big corporation. Um, I was very famous in it and uh ended up spending quite a bit of time around the board and the CEO, and it did catapult my trading career. But more importantly, it reinforced in my mind that I really love that kind of innovator entrepreneur kind of journey of taking on a supposedly impossible challenge. And sometimes you can prove the skeptics wrong and you can do something people didn't imagine. So anyway, this is still not helping explain why I built a Jesse.

SPEAKER_03 7:31

No, I love it. I love it, it gives it great context.

SPEAKER_06 7:33

That that then um uh I I then eventually left. I did actually scale a company around that same technology, but uh but then around 2016, um, I hatched this idea that you know it might be kind of neat to see if you could add the smallest amount of technology to a human and see if you could fly in that way rather than get in a flight vehicle. Um it's a bit like a surfboard or a pair of skis or a bicycle, they're all very basic pieces of equipment that if you bolt them onto a human, it's amazing what you can achieve. So I kind of thought no one had really done that very much in flying. I mean, like hand gliding and paragliding and stuff, maybe. Um so that was that was the inspiration. And I had a family background in the world of aviation and engineering, and I kind of knew enough to be, I I like to say sort of knew enough to be dangerous, but I didn't really mean that. I mean, knew enough to be dangerous in terms of taking on the conventional wisdom. Uh and so that's kind of where it came from.

SPEAKER_03 8:27

Because your dad is an engineer, right?

SPEAKER_06 8:30

Uh so my I one grandfather was an airline pilot and a wartime pilot before then. The other grandfather was a guy called Sabasil Blackhall, he used to run one of the big UK helicopter companies, he was Westland helicopters now, Leonardo's. My father was an aeronautical engineer, um, and I grew up around him uh making and building things. He actually was one of the pioneers of mountain bike suspension of all things. But actually, very sadly, and it's in the TED Talks and books and all sorts of things, um, he accidentally taught me one of the most powerful lessons of innovation and entrepreneurship, which is to make your ventures recoverable when everything goes wrong. And he didn't. He uh took his own life when I was 15 on that journey of being an entrepreneur because everything just like he was an amazing engineer, but I think he made that catastrophic mistake of thinking that that was the majority of the challenge, and yet actually, like we probably all know in business, you can have an amazing idea, but it's it's like 70% of the journey at least is actually all the branding, marketing setting itself up commercially. So uh yeah, so that that was a big kind of pivotal moment in my life, I think.

SPEAKER_03 9:36

Let's talk about born of discipline. Go to bornofdiscipline.com and get yourself some merch. The staple merch of the AJ Buckley show. It's something that I really believe in. It starts with spirit, okay? Then it's the mind, then it's the body. Spirit leads, get your mind right, body will transform. This is the ethos of bornofdiscipline.com. Now, do you like you from what I've read up on you, you come from a big family? No, I don't know. I'm an only child. That's so crazy. That's so crazy. There one of the articles reading that you had like seven brothers and sisters.

SPEAKER_06 10:12

It's amazing when you read about yourself in the media over the last sort of nine years, it's amazing how you inaccurate you realize the media can be. And I think it's getting worse. Yeah, my birthdays were on online by a few days. Um, I've been called an airline pilot, all sorts of things.

SPEAKER_03 10:26

So uh only child. I I've I I've been through it myself, but it's I was like, I was like, oh, because I come from a really big, I'm originally from Dublin, Ireland, and uh I come from a very big family. Uh there's there's seven of us. But uh uh there's nine of us, but and so I have seven adopted brothers and sisters. Um but uh but yeah, I read that I was like, oh, that's so crazy. So I was like the chaos of a household that's and I was like, how does someone with a brain like yours in a household that packed deal with that? But you were volunteering.

SPEAKER_06 10:56

I had a bit of that, so I went to boarding school when I was nine. So I went from being a pretty shy, introverted only child kid to suddenly having 200 virtual brothers and sisters uh at boarding school, which is quite a baptism of fire. It sort of makes you or breaks you, and I think it mostly made me, but it was uh quite tough.

SPEAKER_03 11:12

Now, for you like the the books that I've read on entrepreneurs and stuff, like they're always looking for like a gap in the marketplace. Like, how can I it's but it's like how do you like it's a it was you came up you were looking at this idea like a giant gap. It's not like someone's like, oh, let's segue to you know jets on your arm and flying. Like that's such a it's such a leap, and it's so fascinating to me because it's the history books will write, like you are will be forever known as as this guy. Like you've done something on planet Earth that no other human was able to do. And that is like it's so remarkable. And you can just tell by your demeanor that you're like, God, it's like you know, like that's such a a huge. And I've been watching you from afar. The first time I saw the videos, I'm like, this is what I've dreamt about. Like that's the guy, like that's what I've wanted to do.

SPEAKER_06 12:03

So it is, it is, uh, it is quite cool. I mean, I I think when you go on your entrepreneur journey and you you realize how tough it is and how many times it nearly all falls apart and how difficult it is to build a business out of this. I mean, we're just shy of a hundred million dollar company now, which is crazy. But very early on, it was very hard to try and make up from scratch how you build a commercial model around this. Um, I was feeling all the pressures of my father's journey because I I'd done the engineering, and it's like, actually, damn, this is this isn't anything. It's like, how do I communicate this people? How do I market this? How do I how do I go on a journey where this means things to people in the right way and it fuels its own journey? Um, I think you get a lot of humility when you go on that entrepreneur's journey because you know inside yourself how close you were to failing so many times, and therefore it's lovely people taking so much energy and inspiration from what we've done, but you you I don't know. Me anyway, my reaction to that is it that doesn't like inflate some crazy ego. It's like I'm just grateful. I'm just grateful that I managed to navigate that journey because the skills you need to go from the mad inventor uh through to raising money, hiring people, branding it, marketing, understanding, steering, all the headwinds. Anybody listening to this, you know, that built their own business will appreciate this. It's nearly an impossible mixture of things that are all such different skills. And I guess the overriding one is the humility to notice when you don't know something. To know that you don't know something is really valuable. It's one of those Rumpfeld things. The known unknowns. The unknown unknowns are the ones that can kill you, right? And and I therefore I think you just I'm always surprised when I when I see any entrepreneurs, and there's not that many, not that real, not that many real true entrepreneurs that are massive egos, because I think if you had a massive ego, you wouldn't have gone down the journey and and drawn upon up uh drawn upon lots of other people's perspectives. You wouldn't have had the humility to go, look, I I don't know, I'm very open to your ideas. Um but but anyway, I am it's very kind of you to say that. And um and yeah, I guess we have done one of what we I often say we've we've like we've created a little notch on the I don't know about the bedposts, maybe that's wrong. We've created a little notch in the in history of delivering a little more on that dream of sort of our caveman ancestors looking up at the birds and going, that looks epic. I wish we could do that. I bet we never will. And yet we have delivered on a little bit of that, a little bit of Da Vinci kind of magic of we nearly got to that sort of Iron Man vision of very little stuff attached to you. So yeah, it's cool.

SPEAKER_03 14:29

Was there a a person or a mentor, like a North star for you in this process that you called up and was like, out of all the people you told us, the person was like, I like where you're going with this. Because I'm sure when you pitch this to people, people are like, What? Are you that?

SPEAKER_06 14:44

I didn't so for a start, I didn't really pitch it to anybody. I just gradually in this museum, I've got sketches all over the you know, one part of the wall as you follow the journey around. Of all the sketches in these sketchbooks, I used to take traveling when I was doing my corporate job. And I just probably after too many glasses of wine on a plane, I would I would sketch all these crazy ideas and I'd loved it. I loved just deep disappearing into that kind of zone, usually listening to some hands image soundtrack or something, and just going on that kind of journey. Like deep church organ boom. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like like like um like you've had too much coffee or alcohol, whichever, probably both. Yeah, um, and you just believe in this, like just imagine if that thing's possible. Um, I used to love that. It's just daring to dream and imagine, but I didn't tell anybody because people asked me about the mental thing before. No, I didn't really there was there wasn't anybody I could really go to. It was kind of me. I had to just kind of conjure up my own belief. Um now I enrolled one or two people early on because there was a couple of things that I couldn't do within my skill set. There was a there was one electronics thing and a coding thing that wasn't really square in my in my you know wheelhouse. Um, but other than that, no, I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell anybody at work, I didn't tell anybody because honestly, I thought this was a good chance it wouldn't work. I mean, it was mad. Conventional wisdom says, A, no one goes around holding onto jet engines, right? It's sort of the imagine that forget the math, right? Yeah, forget the engineering and math. Just holding a jet engine, it's gonna be hot, it's gonna be loud, it's gonna try and push you and rip your arm off. It's maybe if you really think about the physics, it's gonna gyroscopically fight you. You know, when you spin a bike wheel, you get kids to hold a bike wheel and you can feel the gyroscope, right? Even with the penis elbow that that ball that you spin in the case. The spindle of these engines is going round 120,000 times a minute, right? You'd think it would fight you, right? And and and I think the sort of Lockheed Martins of this world, they would never even they wouldn't have got off the whiteboard with this, right? Because you're never gonna be able to carry enough fuel, it's gonna be too hot, you're gonna have to have a control system and a seat and a big structure, and you've just reinvented a crap helicopter, right? The very idea you've got to hold the engines, in my mind, I thought if it pushes with 50 pounds of thrust, if I lean on a surface and my weight has reduced on my bathroom scales by 50 pounds, I'm pushing on that surface with 50 pounds. It should, in a Newtonian kind of way, for the physics enthusiasts listening, um, it should feel like that. And I stood in this lane, you can see if you look for Richard Browning and TED Talk or our Gravity Industries YouTube channel, you could see the clip of this. And I stood in this lane and it was just like I imagined. It was fine. It was apart from the god-awful noise and the chaos and everything, it was just like leaning on a surface. So I thought, if I can create that surface on both arms in a way that doesn't feel like it's it's canting my arms round, so you put one an edge in each side, and then maybe engines on my legs, because your legs are good at taking your weight. I'm just gonna be leaning on this surface, and if I manipulate it around, like flare it out to the side, I should come down and point it down, I should go up. I think it might work, and it it kind of did. I mean, it took like nine months of messing around and falling over a lot, but it it worked brilliantly, and as per all the social media you see, it is as effortless as we make it look. I mean, frankly, with AI now it all looks like AI, but it genuinely isn't. Um it's amazing how the human brain adapts to it, and it feels like your dream of flying.

SPEAKER_03 17:59

Now, when you are building this out, did you have like a like a prototype that was like an RC model first? Or you were the guinea pig? Did you go straight?

SPEAKER_06 18:10

Yeah, so I I got an engine. Yeah, I got a little little model aircraft engine. I learned how to run it on a bench test kind of thing and made sure I could turn it on and off. Important. Yeah. And I got to know how they work, and actually, yeah, they're loud, and yeah, there's lots of heat coming out one end, but but but actually there's a bunch of clear rules that once you get your head around, actually they're pretty controllable. But then there was this moment, and I've got the arm assembly somewhere in the background here. I built this really uh overly engineered, massively solid, robust arm thing, and I remember starting up the engine and like gunned a bit, and it's like, oh my god, it feels like a fire hose of water. It just feels like water coming out. It's not flailing around because a hose pipe does that because of the rest of the hose. It doesn't do that because physics is is forcing it by definition to do that. It's just because it's pushing against a bendy hose. Well, when it's pushing against my arm, it just felt like it was okay. Uh and and as I say, it just it just accumulated from there. I tried two engines, I tried four engines, and it just kind of built up. But yeah, I was the guinea pig, and I think what made it made it slightly less mad than maybe it's seeming in your head is that quite early on I realized that quite simply, if you point the engines down, you go up, and if you flare them out, you come down again. And I learned that before I had enough power attached to me that I could ever keep going up. There was not enough power to lift my my body. So that was that's a good piece of knowledge to have to know that you're not going to go off like a firework and die.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

Jason, you better answer. We're calling Jason, who's the owner of PureX. You better answer.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

So PureX is really unique because uh, you know, we're taking the white glove customer, uh, the the actors, the elite athletes that have always had access to some of the best medications in the world, best treatment program, supplementation, coaching. Uh we've made it available to the masses.

SPEAKER_03 19:53

All right, Jason, thank you so much. Thanks for being a sponsor of the show. Um, make sure you go to www.purrx.co. Go do it now. I promise you. By summertime, you're gonna be so shredded, you're gonna be wearing a speto, and that package yours is gonna be looking glorious. Did you have that sort of Christopher Lloyd Marty McFly? Like, you know, like where he comes out like that moment with yourself when you when it worked, where you're just like internally, because you've kept it very private to yourself, so the excitement of you've just, you know.

SPEAKER_06 20:28

Oh, there was. Do you know what they're there there really was like, I mean, whether it's the whether it's the Tony Stark after having escaped the cave and got in his own man cave with all the expensive cars that he wrecked, yeah, there's that lovely moment when he kind of straightens up and gets it. And we actually see our clients do this. We train people in California and UK, and there's a moment where just like watching a child realize their parents let go of the saddle and it's like, I'm gonna die. Oh no, no, I'm doing it, and you never think about it again. There's a moment like you see in that film, there's a moment when all of our clients get that, and you just look up and grin like an idiot and you never think about it. And actually, we had the CGI guys from the first Iron Man film reach out back in 2017, they contacted me and said, This is so epic. Exactly what you've just put out online is what we imagined this would be like, and that's what we did in the film, and you've kind of shown this is exactly what actually you've done. And it's like we had this massive mutual nerd out thing. Um, but yeah, that the it was it was an an amazing moment back in about November 2016, and it again it's it's online. Um I I did this wobbly-legged because I stupidly had an engine on each leg, which I I turned out to be a rubbish idea, but it worked. Um your legs, there's a whole you can ask me about that if you like. That's a weird bit of physics and and biology going on with engines on your legs, but anyway, it worked, and I took off and I wobbled around, wobbled around and landed, didn't fall over. I flew like for six seconds and I spun around and looked at the camera, and then I just like was so like blown away by it. And within minutes I realised this is the end of phase one, and now the work begins to build a company out of it, and that was like, God, that's this daunting. Like, where do I even begin?

SPEAKER_03 21:59

So, was there Was there a moment in that time too that was a like you maybe hit hit a wall where you're like, I don't know, this is like you had d doubt, doubt started to creep in, you're like, this is I'm wasting my time.

SPEAKER_06 22:11

There was more wool than there was no wool. Um for that whole kind of sort of nine months, eight months or whatever, alongside a day job, I'd I'd get home like eight o'clock at night, I'd then, you know, have some dinner, and then I'd stay up late, like soldering away or whatever, and like try and prepare the next bit of gear to test. And then I'd drag the family out like Saturday morning, probably spend an hour rigging it all up. There'd be a puff of smoke, something would have cooked, and then we'd have to go home again. And then I'd try and go out again later that evening, and then something would start up and shut down, and then battery had broken. Or it was just relentless, and all the time you're thinking, like, what am I doing? Like, this is probably never gonna work. And I'd say, well, maybe I can just put like a jet engine on one of my kids' bikes for fun, right? At least I can convince myself I'm not waiting for the biggest. You're the coolest dad ever.

SPEAKER_03 22:53

The coolest dad ever.

SPEAKER_06 22:55

But we had but yeah, but you know, it it was really hard, and and it's it was a fascinating journey building into a void, as in building, you know, it's like choose your analogy, right? Um, it's like walking down a forest pathway with a torch like bumping into trees and falling in holes, and you don't even know where you're going, right? You don't know if this the daylight's gonna come up sometime or whether you're just literally wasting your time. And I just feed off any little successes I'd have. Um it was a it was a it was in hindsight, it was a privilege of a journey, but it was tough during it because yeah, I didn't know at all if this was ever gonna work.

SPEAKER_03 23:28

It's it's funny, you mentioned at the beginning with the Iron Man stuff. I mean, that in itself is a very much in your head, you know, sort of talking your talking to those demons as it gets tougher in the road gets it's such an isolated sport in one sense, and then this road that you're going on, building something, it's impossible. And to most people in the world, doing an Iron Man is impossible, but it takes that mental fortitude to sort of break things. Do you think that sort of pre-training or that that that coming from that background of just sort of digging in and working the problem, working the problem in that sort of as a human performance? Did that come into play at all?

SPEAKER_06 24:04

Yeah, so I so so my self-analytics from doing lots of keynotes around the world where people ask you awkward questions at the end and then you're live on stage and you hear yourself answer. I've learned so much about myself in that in that in that environment. So I've come to learn that I am driven in life, like many of us are from something that happened in my childhood, you know, my father killing himself. I felt this Y junction of like, do I let it kill, like, like get on top of me, crush me, or do I just run hard at every challenge and and I'm not scared of anything anymore. And I I've looked into the abyss, I want to make good on my life, and unknowing to me, I'm gonna take on every possible mad challenge I can to try and make good on his unfulfilled ambition because he was always like, we're gonna build, you know, we're gonna have a big house and we're gonna have a helicopter and whatever, and everything just went to shit over two years, and we had no money and it was a disaster. So it's it's better than a Coke habit, this app, this this reaction at least. Yeah. Um, but but I I my safe zone, if you like, for the first probably decade in my life was physical. So if I could self-flagellate, you know, in other words, to smash myself trying to do military stuff or join the Royal Marines or run ultramarathons or or triathlon, it was the safe zone. It's just my pain. It's not can I put food on the table? It's a sort of and again, I think this is quite common with a lot of people, especially military people. I think you un often unknowingly are torturing yourself to try and make good on that pain, try and control the pain that you went through and all this complicated stuff. Um, so I think doing that, being in a big grown-up business for a long time, um, testing myself in so many different realms and learning that hard lesson that if you're gonna do anything difficult and spectacular in your life, in whatever realm, the degree to which it's spectacular is gonna mostly be proportional to how unlikely it was to succeed and how hard it was on that journey. So I knew that this journey I was going on was pretty unlikely to succeed, but if it did, just if it did, I just believed enough that it might just work, and if it did, it would be all worth it. And I think having that, that's an unusual mindset. I think a lot of people would have been put off very much earlier on in that journey, I think.

SPEAKER_03 26:05

I I bet you that wall, it that's never gonna get all for you behind you. Like every time you walk in, you're like, that's my that's me.

SPEAKER_06 26:12

It is do you know I've only created this only in the last six months because we've been at this farm two and a half years and we've done a big build, lots of build work here, and it takes ages doing golden projects. And this once we'd moved out of this room, I made this without telling my team, I made this into this kind of cool museum. And it took a lot of time. I did a bit and then sat back, look at it, and then did in a bit more, and it really grew iteratively. Like this glowing table behind me is like loads of innovative iterations of different designs of things, so you can really see just how long it takes to iterate design. So we've had university groups here and school groups here, and they kind of just love immersing themselves in it. But the real rewarding bit, over and above me being quite proud of what's in here, it's actually watching my team. So I didn't really tell them about it. I said, Oh, there's a thing you might want to go and see. Honestly, I've had like half a dozen of my team, we've got like 30 people, half done on my team, half a dozen of my team that have been with me the longest, individually all came up to went, Oh my god, I got I got I meant to go home, but like two hours later, I hadn't made it halfway around the room. Because they are just nerding out on the stuff that they were part of and going, Oh, I remember we got picked up by a C-17 by a certain friendly Middle Eastern country in the middle of COVID and lived out there for a week, having just got literally airlifted in there. And I remember when we were in Amazonian jungle doing like a mining tailings dam emergency rescue thing for like two weeks. And I remember when we lived with Jeff Bezos for 10 days at you know at Mars, and you know, we've done 300 events in 53 countries, and they're all mad. So a lot of the cues to that are in here as well. So I love seeing my team who often join me at like 22, 20, you know, kind of the really young age. Um, it's lovely seeing them relive a lot of that in here.

SPEAKER_03 27:48

I can imagine. I mean, and that in itself is like, you know, I I was very close with my dad. He died 12 years ago, and I my mom lives with us. But uh no, it's all right. But you know, my mom and dad both believed like if you could make a different, you can make all the money in the world, but you make a difference in a child's life or inspire someone in that direction, you you've done what you're supposed to do in some way, shape, or form. Yeah, that's nice. And you've passed on that thing. And I think that just in that like having that moment to step back, you as sort of the the pioneer of that with your your students or with whoever I'm that that's a that's a hell of a an accomplishment to and to stay grounded on that and sort of do that. Does that fuel you then for the next step to keep going? Or are you all out? Are you like you're still building?

SPEAKER_06 28:34

I I know I I'm I'm trying to supersize it in some ways, but I'll just share a little anecdote. So we get lovely emails and letters, handwritten letters sometimes from people. A lovely one recently was from this girl who's just she's just like completed her first year at something like MIT, a really like, really great university in the US. And she started with that and whatever, but she did it in such a neat way. At the bottom of the letter of the letter, she like went into actually, I knew I wanted to do this when I was 12 and watched a documentary that was done on what we've done. Lots of people have covered us on TV.

SPEAKER_04 29:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 29:04

And and um, she remembered a documentary when she was 12 that talked about us, and she said, from that moment onwards, I just shifted all my studies. I wanted to be an engineer, I wanted to go and study this, I knew what I wanted to do. And she was writing this letter, having never contacted contacted us before, like what, like eight years, seven, eight years later, to say that she's actually was this wasn't like somebody watching a thing last night and then saying, I want to go and do this. That's lovely. But she'd gone on a whole life journey, just she claimed because of what she saw in that documentary. It was like 60 minutes kind of equivalent, one of your shows. Like that. That's cool. I mean, so I actually I I mean, what I'm what I'm now giving myself as the latest very unlikely to succeed ridiculous challenge. Uh, and this mostly applies to UK, very much to Europe, but actually, sadly, I think it also is increasingly relevant to the US. I'm sad to say. Um, I think we are, as a Western society, we are gradually losing so we have gradually lost sight of what two miserable little words mean, right? These two little words, they don't mean to much to people on the street, right? Um, and yet it's the closest we've got, they represent the closest magic we've got to a silver bullet to address so many problems in society. From inventing problems, uh inventing solutions to climate change to cancer to whatever, to giving our kids a prosperous future.

unknown 30:19

Right.

SPEAKER_06 30:19

They are innovation and entrepreneurship. Right? They're the failure-strewn pathway of turning an idea, a dream, a vision into a product, a service, or an efficiency that with a pinch of entrepreneurship becomes a business that employs people that pays tax revenue. Right. That's the that's the little food chain that has built the Western world, frankly, most of the world. I keep saying Western because frankly, the Chinese have done a really good job of this. Um you know, to their credit. Uh, but but in the West, we've like, we've like forgotten about this somehow, and we've got obsessed with risk, we've got obsessed with a school-like mentality of if you get something wrong, that's bad, that's a failure, try and avoid it. And yet that journey I just described of innovation and entrepreneurship is fueled by risk, it's fueled by people trying things that might not work out. And I've got one mantra that really like solves for this problem, and that is just make the inevitable failures associated with innovation and entrepreneurship, make those inevitable failures recoverable from a safety, reputation, and financial perspective. And I feel this obviously powerfully because my father didn't do this. But when you try something, a new business, a new design, a new venture, whatever it is, just be able to get back up again from you know, the reputation point of view, don't go to prison or you know, break any rules that are, you know, not too many rules anyway. Don't hurt anybody or yourself and don't run out of money for each experiment, right? Otherwise, you just go gambling. Yeah. If we could just reinject, I think, uh a rediscovery, a re-engagement in society of what innovation and entrepreneurship means, and bake in those rules about recoverable failure. I think our kids, right through to people in corporate jobs and in the government and whatever, would would light up. And I've done a lot of work here in the UK and the evidence suggests it works. But I'm I'm trying to find a way of supersizing this message and using maybe our company as that.

SPEAKER_03 32:12

You know, there's places you can go, you can take your truck, you can get things done, and you you you leave and you're like, eh, it was good. It was good. I was introduced to Total Off-Road and Moore about a year and a half, two years ago when I got my Ford F-150 tremor. And let me tell you something. First of all, it's like a family, and people say the family, but these are some of the nicest people you will ever meet. TJ and Dan and the rest of the crew at Total Off-Road Moore Charleston are some of the best guys. I had my sister, her tire blue. She happened to be outside the store. I literally called Dan. I was like, my sister who's got my mom has got to go to a doctor appointment, they're outside your store. Can you help? They literally saved her everything. Like, these are just great people. So if you're in Charleston, you need something done with your truck. If you're anywhere in America and you need something done in your truck, they have stores across the country. This is the best place to go anytime, anyplace. It's a family, it's good people. They do good by you. And uh, we all work hard for our money. And when we put something into our truck that we love or whatever we're building, we want to make sure that it's done right. And these guys at Total Off-Road and more, they do it right. That's that's a really great work. I like I've I've dabbled a bunch in entrepreneurship. I started a diaper bag company and I pat, so I got my first patent. I took it uh there was no at the time there was no uh uh uh changing tables in men's bathrooms with my first child, and my partner and I already baxxed her. He was just about to have a baby, and I went to take my daughter to a bathroom, and there was no changing table in men's bathroom. I forgot the changing pad, so I took my shirt off and put it down on the floor and put the diaper bag in front of it. And as I was changing her diaper on a dirty bar floor, I was mortified and upset at myself. But I was like, imagine if the the diaper bag folded out into a changing table. And but I came home and told like my my wife I was gonna, you know, you know, this is while I'm filming a show, and she's like, okay. And I just kept and then my friend Artie came over and I'm a terrible, you know, he was penciling this thing out, and I had a few cocktails and I was like, this out of looking. He was like, dude, I'm like, I'm a terrible. He's was much more business and so, but we like flew to China and like met with some people, went through the whole thing. The crazy part, just going back to what you said, at no point in that sort of thing did I ever think I was gonna fail. Like I was just like, but but within the time now that I look back, the amount of like failures that we had, but I was so determined within that. I see now in society how people will go, I shouldn't do that. That's a that's that's it might it might not work.

SPEAKER_06 34:46

And by the way, what I'm sure there's big companies doing it. Why why do you think why do you think you you can do that? You should just keep stay safe, stay in the normal, boring job, and yeah, that's nuts that attitude, right?

SPEAKER_03 34:58

It's so crazy because there's so much there and they talk you out of taking that chance. And I've never actually heard of that term before, recoverable failure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 35:08

If you think about it, so I I've I've spent like 25 years doing a lot of unusual business all over the world, and I've tried to distill what I just it distill all the learnings into what I just gave you there. Because lots of people say we need more innovation, entrepreneurship, we need more business, we need less tax. It's just like, yeah, great, but that doesn't help. That's just more of good and less of bad. It's like, how do you actually have a mindset that is that is actually applicable? So America generally is much better at this than most places in the world. California is legendarily even more crazy because they just don't think about the downside and everything's gonna be great, and that's the sort of attitude you need. But even there, you've got to be careful that when your enthusiasm doesn't mean you've spent so much on that prototype that you now think, oh no, it didn't quite work out like I thought. Yeah, I don't have enough money for like version two, and it might be version 20 that actually succeeds. So I do think, especially in schools and for young people that are saturated with social media telling them everything's been done already and done brilliantly, um, I do think they need to have this inspiration around building, making, creating, and that rule set about it's gonna involve getting things wrong and call out the fact that education kind of tells you you're a failure if you've got something wrong. Getting something wrong, the entire journey behind you here, behind me here, was entirely getting things wrong. But each time we took some learnings and some lessons, and sometimes it it shone a light on something we never imagined.

SPEAKER_03 36:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 36:30

And as long as you make the failures recoverable, they're quite cheap, quite quick. No one no it's it's like the the crap way of saying this is like, what's the worst that's gonna happen, right? Yeah. On with it. Yeah. You survived going to China and trying all this stuff. What was the worst gonna happen? You will you waste the airfare and some some hotel costs, right?

SPEAKER_03 36:45

I mean, who cares, right? We'll learn loads. Yeah, you win or you learn. You know, I always say that to my kids, you win or you learn. It's like, it's like, and even like in in in the writing process of like writing a script or anything like that, you know, any of the great writers or or even directors and stuff that I work with, if you're doing a scene as an actor, right, and you can't you can't figure out the scene. And someone goes, well, just try it this way. And someone goes, My character wouldn't do that. Right? You're stopping the ability just to go down the road and just try it out. Because on that road of discovery, maybe that choice that you're gonna try might not work, but within there, it'll provoke other thoughts, other ideas, because it's a new way to look at it. So just being open to the try, if it you fail, you fail. But it'll it'll actually give you perspective of where you're at within the scene in the context of the story that you weren't seeing because you were so damn close to it.

SPEAKER_06 37:38

Yeah. When you really unpack this, uh you really realize that every major leap, every major discovery, invention, business venture, world record, new athletic boundary, whatever it was, came about because somebody looked at that arena and went, I'm gonna have a go at doing something different or new or better or unusual. Which at the moment, if you asked everybody in the room, they'd all say can't be done. We've got a we've got a big uh phrase stuck across the front entrance, we've got this big steel tunnel that goes into our whole kind of campus here, and it is lit up and it literally says impossible is nothing, and it's on our challenge models as well. That sounds a bit rubbish initially. Impossible is nothing. Well, there are some things that are impossible, right? However, all the things that were breakthroughs, and and we we live and survive off things that were breakthrough from farming to mobile phones to whatever, all of them were impossible until somebody had the balls to go. I'm not so sure. I'm gonna give it a go. And that's why I love science fiction as well. And you mentioned it right at the beginning. I think science fiction, to America's credit, as the sort of home I think of a lot of that, science fiction represents pure human creativity when you don't care about money or physics. I just want to be super strong, super fast, invisible, whatever. And it's amazing how science gradually catches up, having planted that seed of inspiration into the wider community. I I love that.

SPEAKER_03 39:02

Yeah, I actually remember the first time I saw one of your videos, it was season one of the the show that you sealed team, and one of the guys that we was our tech advisor show, he was he was uh a former team six guy, Deb Grow, and I chilled, I'm like, I was like, hey, have you seen this? And he watched the video, he was like, he's like, I'd heard about this. He's like, This is changes everything from a military standpoint. What was that? Did you get a call from the DOD that was just like we need to speak? Did that did the black car show up? And they're like, Step inside, sir.

SPEAKER_06 39:35

I did do a trip, again, I can't mention the country, but I did a trip to Southeast Asia where I was actually at a commercial event in Australia, and I stopped off in this Southeast Asian-friendly country. They picked me up from the airport, I drove with two cases to a secret military base, unpacked it, built it, flew it, and then they loved it and unpacked it away, got back to the airport and flew away again. And that was wicked. That did feel a bit kind of Tony Stark for them for that moment. Um so where we stand now, so nine years in, we built a big entertainment business, which has been great because we can earn money from that and we get people aware of what we do, and we battle test it in 53 countries, and that's been great. But calling upon my Royal Marines background, about eight years ago, seven years ago, we started doing military exercises. Because you flew around the ship?

SPEAKER_03 40:18

Is that what you did the chip?

SPEAKER_06 40:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh that was with my bunnies in the Royal Marines. So um, because it it's in danger of looking so superhero, that almost was a sort of negative in a way. It's like senior military leaders, even in the US, would look at it and go, Well, this is just, you know, it's like too is it even real? So it's taken years to convince them. Um, but we've been in Ukraine, we've done stuff everywhere you can imagine, and we can pick up special forces, move them immediately over any terrain, minefields, wire, water, mud, the sea, low, below anti-aircraft systems, below drone countermeasures, uh, any weather pretty much, land on an objective the size of a dinner plate, do a job, and then self-extract. And there's nothing else that can do that. But it has been interesting that it's been very slow because we are just so unusual. We don't fit in a category, it's not an aircraft. We, you know, we've got great support from all the aviation authorities around the world because it's manual, because it's not like a computer that can take you off. But we are we are now, I mean, the reason it's nearly a hundred million dollar business is because of the military engagements and the folks you just mentioned, I won't go into too much detail. Um, there was a really impactful engagement with them, and all the operators gathered around and we had this wonderful conversation, and they were completely sold. What we delivered for them as a demo was like really impressive, if I say so myself. However, sadly, back to my earlier point, in many countries, and this is this even applied to you guys, they pointed to a big gaggle of middle management kind of civilians with clipboards and said, Look, we don't get to choose, right? If we're at war and everybody's dying, we can we can make very quick decisions. But with something really new and unusual, and this was a few years ago, landing on ships has become quite in vogue in the last few months. Um uh they they said, Look, we're beholden to those guys, so we'll it'll literally take two or three years, and then we'll look forward to having you back, and then we'll go kick the ass out of this. So they, you know, I don't want to speak on behalf of the world special forces community. There are still some skeptics who haven't really seen it live. Um, but everybody who has and that knows their stuff realizes just what you can do with it.

SPEAKER_03 42:22

Now, with all of the the sort of flying cars, and I I saw uh one um the guy looks like he's on like a stormtrooper bike, you know. The have you seen that?

SPEAKER_06 42:32

Oh yeah, there's a little motorbike thing, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

Yeah, in that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_06 42:36

So where where are like how far are we out in the world where you walk outside with your suit on and you pop and you you head off to work with with that sort of is that something I mean you could do that, but it would be a bit like taking a an indie car or a NAS car to get a like uh you know to get a Walmart. You could, couldn't you, right? But for a lot of obvious reasons, it's not the most obvious mode of transport. Um it is it is a niche um few mile, you know, uh mode of transport. I think the most the biggest breakthrough that's gonna happen, and the Chinese will lead it and then we'll all catch up, is gonna be the autonomous air taxi type things. There'll be a quadcoptery thing that predicts when you need to be taken from A to B and it'll be there and you get in as a pod and off it goes. Um I I don't think, not with jet engines anyway, maybe with the electric fan version. We built an electric version, it just needs way better batteries. So that the Tony Stark magic power source thing he's got, if we could have that, then the electric version, which is sitting in this room actually, um wouldn't need to carry about a hundred pounds of batteries, which is what it took, which is ridiculous, right? It's like it's carrying almost more more batteries than human. Um if if you could do that, then maybe you could. But I don't think the jet engine one, it's super loud and you know, there's the heat and fuel and whatever. So No, it it's never say never. The first motor cars were considered crazy compared to horses.

SPEAKER_03 44:06

But for now, not not not entirely. Because you see those videos like back in the day, like, you know, when you had the the the cars with the the wheels and the engine combustion engines and you know they're all in like the very, very much like the chap Charlie Chaplin type movies, you know. I feel like in a sense, we're it for people a hundred years from now, they'll watch these and be like, oh, this was the this was the beginning of like the flying cars and this stuff that we saw with the Jetsons and all this sort of stuff. Like, but now you're you guys are sort of first to market where we're like, what seemed impossible is now becoming more of like, oh yeah, this is actually can be it's like minority port, but it's it's real.

SPEAKER_06 44:47

So I I'm I'm conflicted, right? Because because I I can give you those two answers. The boring British sensible hat on says it's the IndyCar NASCAR to go to Walmart. Yeah. But the other half of me, the never say no to an impossible challenge part of me is like, you're exactly right. The very first motor cars were an utter joke. No one thought there was any potential in them. They lasted 10 minutes, they sort of blew up, they were smelly and loud, and you did what's wrong with a perfectly good horse, right?

SPEAKER_04 45:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 45:14

Um, so never say never, but there's some challenges, and I think it's going to be a breakthrough in electrical stored energy, which the world is always hungry for. Um, if there's a breakthrough in that, and there will be at some point, then we're in business, I think.

SPEAKER_03 45:26

From a search and rescue standpoint, is that something that will be really implemented or and is that something you guys have?

SPEAKER_06 45:32

Yeah, so so yeah. So the the application, uh again, there's lots on Gravity Industries YouTube for this, and we were like the second biggest story globally for Reuters. Like it was amazing when we did this. If you've got a heart attack or um, you know, your breathing difficulties or something like that on a mountain, um, yes, if there's a helicopter available and it can fly in the weather that's present on the top of that mountain, those answers to those two questions are usually no, um, or often no. There's not that many rescue helicopters, and they often can't fly in really bad visibility and stuff. Um, we can pop out of a back of a vehicle, I can put the gear on and start it up in 36 seconds, is my record. Then you're in the air, and I flew up a mountain. Um, there's lots of examples of these. There was one mountain that was an hour and a half to walk up, and it took me three minutes. That's one of the ones on YouTube. There's one in Transylvania in Romania we did uh as a rescue scenario.

SPEAKER_04 46:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 46:23

Yeah, that was like two hours to walk up, and that took two and a half minutes. Uh, it's amazing how without going that fast, and if that's the mountain, you know, you can just glide very closely. So if you had a problem, you're not far away, it's not very dangerous. It's amazing how fast you can climb up there. So, to answer your question, the vision is we've kind of proven it can be done. Um, I don't want to take money off mountain rescue charities. I want to take some of the money that we make off the military and put it into that charity and then scale the charity, and also you do fundraising. And if there's, you know, wealthy individuals want to be their own real-life Tony Stark, they can help, you know, fund some of these deployment vehicles. And it's most likely that when there's a really busy weekend on a particular mountain area, you could park that four by four in the base of the mountain ridge and fly any of the ridge routes and get there within minutes anywhere and save kids and old people's lives and rock climbers' lives and whatever. I really want to scale that, but I've got to be careful. My enthusiasm doesn't get us to a point where we're spending loads of money on it and we go bankrupt because we should have made money out of the military stuff. So the answer is yes.

SPEAKER_03 47:26

I really want to scale it. Is is that like with with something like this, you have to constantly then sort of sit back and say, okay, my excitement of potentially going down the road is could get carried the the the uh what was the saying you said r- rescu uh Yeah, the certain was getting carried away.

SPEAKER_06 47:45

My my sort of enthusiasm for that could easily get us into a place where we have spent too much money on it. You know, we're running a business at the end of the day that has to make enough money to keep it on the road. Um and w again, what you're touching on here though is a really important thing, which is that no one's built no one's built a business like this really before. And it's very diverse from doing branded activations. We've done stuff with Migdell and Google and all sorts of people, right through to delivering pizzas for dominoes for a cool advert that's terrified our aviation authority for five minutes. Anyway, um, right through to military exercises, through to selling to the military. So so you know, we've applied the same kind of entrepreneurial spirit to the commercial model that we do to the whole, you know, uh science and engineering of it. Um, and Mountain Rescue has been brilliant and I and it's created amazing awareness, not least in the military, because they a lot of military people looked it and thought, gosh, in Afghan, you know, that took us like three hours to slug up that mountain to put up that OP. You could get up there in two minutes. This is quite useful. Um, but I really want to scale it where with the money that we get from that military division and not get carried away, um, as I said, you know, and end up challenging the business.

SPEAKER_03 48:51

Did in in the early days, did you ever have like an oh like a butt-puckering moment where you're like, oh shit, this is this is gonna not end well? Like, were you like did you have a close call where you were almost crashed or something bad happened?

SPEAKER_06 49:04

Yeah, I I mean I I used to call myself founder and chief test pilot because I used to sort of enjoy the the getting the message across that we were constantly evolving and exploring this. And yeah, I've crashed the most out of the team. I've flown the most unusual missions. We've got like 20 pilots now, but uh and trained over a thousand people to varying degrees around the world. But um, yeah, I've had lots of good, let's say, learning opportunities. Uh I mean loads. So I mean there was What was the worst one? I mean, I don't know, it depends how you classify worst. I mean, um one of the one of the really embarrassing ones was so Bear Grills. I know Bear Grills quite well. Yeah, he's got a little island in the UK. Yeah, he's got a really nice little island off the UK, very remote little place. It's about a mile offshore, and we flew out and chased him around on jet skis, chatted, did an interview kind of stuff, had some great fun, and then I flew back after refueling. And I absolutely destroyed their uh really fast rib that he was driving. And there should have been a message there because he likes fast boats, and his boat was smashing through the waves, easily doing like 40, 45 miles an hour or something. And I destroyed it, and I just watched it disappear behind me, right? And I was flying towards this cliff, and I should have slowed down and then climbed this cliff, and the cliff was just steep enough that you could kind of scramble up it, right? As I was hammering along towards it, I learned the lesson that airspeed and ground speed are a thing, and they're often different. Now I knew this already, okay? I've flown lots of things in my life. However, as I was looking at this cliff thinking, I'll slow down, I'll slow down, I'll slow down. Oh my goodness, my eyes have not resolved the detail of the cliff clearly enough. It's way closer than I thought. And I whacked the anchors on, I vectored all the thrust forwards, and I realized the cliff just suddenly came at me because I'd judged the distance wrong. I must have been flying at 50 miles an hour, I must have had a 30 mile an hour tailwind. Um so I was doing 80 miles an hour ground speed and I hadn't factored it in. And now we train all our pilots to do what helicopters do when they come alongside to land on a ship. As you're coming along to the target, you've run parallel with the target, give yourself loads of runoff, adjust yourself, pause, and then land on the on the target. Um so that was annoying. I mean, I I I smashed the suit up. There was a big puff of dirt and stuff, a little lick of flame as the engine got a right whack. Um, I think somebody in the boat, an ex-Roll Marine, radioed very calmly and said, He's hit the cliff, I think he might be dead. I was I was completely fine, I didn't even injure myself. I've I'm luckily still quite bendy at 47. Um But I but that look that that was embarrassing. But I've crashed loads of times for lots of interesting, unusual reasons. But all the time, remember I said about recoverable failure? All the time, 98% of the reason sorry, 98% 98% of the time I'm crashing because um there is a you know, I I I've put myself in a position where if I have a failure, I can recover myself. There is probably 2% of my flights where that would hurt a lot if I had a failure just at the wrong moment. But but I've I you know you you always need a little bit of luck.

SPEAKER_03 52:02

And that's do you have any sort of ballistic parachute or anything? I think like those that the serious planes are?

SPEAKER_06 52:07

No, because because even a ballistic parachute, even even in theory, a zero-zero shoot, that you know, in theory, it just catches you exactly where you are, um, they are very hard to rely on. And I would not want to go up to let's say a hundred feet and think, ha, you know, I've been clever now because I've given the parachute more time to open if I have a problem. What happens if I have a problem at 70 feet? Yeah. I've just I I've entered the debt zone, which many aircraft have. Um I'm gonna have to enter it when I come down again. I've actually generated more risk than if I terrain hug. So we try and just terrain hug, because from a military, medic, and entertainment perspective, why not just stay low to the ground? It leads lots of people to think that we push off the ground, which is bad physics. It's not how it works. Um, but we just try and stay low to the ground, and then then you're never generating the failure energy that could really hurt you in theory.

SPEAKER_03 52:59

Now, as far as like you you talked about this early, like the time that I've taken like a race, I did this like Audi experience and and I got into racing cars and stuff, and there's a track in uh in uh Northern California that I went up to, and it was the first time I really had to learn how to look like far ahead and pay attention to the markers where we had to downshift and stuff. Because I just you were coming at it so fast. How far are you actually like looking ahead to where you're starting to?

SPEAKER_06 53:28

I credit you with a good question that I I love, I love splitting questions I haven't really been asked before because I've done a lot of interviews over the years. That's a really good question. So the way we fly this is vectoring, right? So you point the engines down, you go up, flare them out, you come down again. It's a resolving the vertical component of thrust for engineering physics enthusiasts. Um but we have a nudge switch, a little rocker switch in the left-hand side. There's a sort of dead man's trigger on the right, so you just hold that in the whole time. So if you fell or need it to end, it's like a throttle pedal on a car, it's sprung loaded, and if you let go, everything will go to idle. Um it's nice to know you've got that ultimate control. Um but the rocker switch on the other side, if you click up, you get a little bit more power, and you click down, you get a bit less power. So it's like a trim. So as you're cruising along, if you're cruising with your arms quite wide, because if you put them down lower, you'd start rising, you can actually just trim the power down to mean that you can cruise horizontally with your arms down here. But to your point to your question, you are looking, depending on how fast you're going, easily 50 or 100 yards ahead. Because if I've got to turn sharply or I've got to climb, or I've got to stop hard, I will dial in more power so I can throw more of that thrust at stopping, turning, or climbing. If you don't do that, then the thrust keeping you in the air, when asked to then push you around a corner, is now not keeping you in the in the air anymore, and you'll gradually sink. So it's like a fighter pilot cranking up more throttle as they bank into the corners and stuff. When you do inefficient flying, you need more power. So it I think that the analogy that will make more sense to more people is just like looking ahead and changing gear on a mountain bike before you get to the hill. If you do it when you're grinding on the hill, it's really not ideal. You've missed the missed the moment you should have done it. What was the learning curve on that? Yeah, sliding through corners, um, not making it up slopes. Yeah. Um all of those things. Yeah. You you realize you need more power. So yeah, I've hit the ground a few times doing that, getting that wrong.

SPEAKER_03 55:23

Yeah, it's like that thing where you come in at a corner and then being able to keep all your tires on the ground and switching the weight and gearing down and and then and then finding that apex and accelerating at that point of where that's a lot more I've done a bit of racing driving my time.

SPEAKER_06 55:37

That, yeah, shifting the balance of the car and all that kind of stuff. Yeah that's a lot more complicated than flying a jet suit. Honestly, my kids learnt when they were 13. Um, it it it is your kids fly the jet suit too? Yeah, I mean they're 17 and 19 now, but um but yeah. They um yeah, they just jumped in when they were pretty small.

SPEAKER_03 55:56

Um, did they ever have like a f did they ever have like a first date where they go pick a girl up and like, hey, how like how do you how do you like if if your son shows up to him like if if a guy shows up to my daughter on a first date in jet suit, I'm like, you better marry this guy. That is the coolest thing.

SPEAKER_06 56:11

They're over with me uh in a few days' time, I'll have to mention that. No, I do know what even if I run a jet suit company, yeah, um, whatever your parents do, I mean they they do without any pushing, do acknowledge, they look in my eyes and go, yeah, this is a pretty cool business. But but it's like that's as good as it gets. Whatever your parents do isn't the coolest thing out there because it's your parents, right? So they've been great with it. They they never big made a big fuss at school. You know, it's weird having a parent with like four million followers on TikTok or whatever. That's odd. Um and they'll be like, yeah, whatever. They'd be just quite chilled, they're not really bothered about social media, you know, because the dad's on it. Yeah. Um, so they've played it pretty, I'm quite proud of how they dealt with it. They don't really make a big fuss about it. So um, but they do like it and they thought they think it's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_03 56:58

Was it I remember when my daughter or any of my kids like realized that I was on like my job was on TV or or whatever, you know. Um the one of the first experiences when I did this uh this movie called Good Dinosaur. It's a Pixar movie, and I brought my it was the first movie my daughter ever saw, but I she had the she had the doll Nash. So my voice was in that. And then we went to the movie, it clicked because she heard the voice of the dinosaur, and she heard my voice, and she was like, Dada, she's like, You're you're it's you? And I was like, Yeah, that's me. So it was like her first moment. Uh that's cool. What was it like for them, like that moment where she they were like, That this is what you do, Dad? You flip it.

SPEAKER_06 57:36

So so okay, so that's a that's a lovely question. So um they grew up around this farm yard. I've got a farm now, but back in then I didn't have a farm, right? So I literally drove to this farm and stuck an engine on my passenger seat on my Discovery, my Land Rover, uh knocked on the guy's door and said, Look, I've got a really weird question. Do you mind if I test run these in your farm? You know, I'll pay you for the yard. And he was like, That's the weirdest thing anybody's ever asked me. Yeah, why not? There's there's there's something like so weird, it's like disarming to be asked that.

SPEAKER_04 58:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 58:03

Anyway, for a few years, um, we um we used that yard. So my kids used to turn out there at weekends. It kind of normalized it for them because they'd just climb around the farm and climb all the hay bales and do the shit they weren't supposed to do. And they'd be like, Yeah, dad's just fine. They'd stop, look, and go, oh look, it's not worked again. So they would be they would be very kind of like normal with it. Um I think the moment that made the difference was when my eldest son, Oliver, who's like I say, 19 now and six foot four and crazy, it's like hugging a man, it's wearing weird. Um I'm not six foot four. Uh it it he was there with one of my with a Mavic drone, right? One of the DGI drones, right? And it was at his school at the time. And the deal was they'd all stand behind the wire fence. I was on the playing field, I started up, flew around, or whatever, landed. And he sat on this sort of little bench off to one side, and and he got permission from the school to fly my drone around and film it. And I just caught him out the corner of my eye as I as I sort of landed. And he was looking at the drone, looking at me, and then he looked back at the kids going, absolutely mental, like zombies on this wire fence. You know, it was like the volleyball court type thing. And I think that that moment something twigged in his brain and went, Yeah, I don't think they their dads fly jet suits. No. Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_05 59:16

I guess this is quite a cool thing. And he was like looking and then looking and then looking and then going, huh?

SPEAKER_06 59:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 59:22

Yeah, I guess this is kind of unusual.

SPEAKER_06 59:23

That was really lovely. That was lovely when he sort of because they'd grown up around it. I just didn't think they don't think and they're not really, they're genuinely not really big egos. They didn't go and you I was slightly worried that they're trying to make a big thing of it, and you don't want you don't want to be that kid, right?

SPEAKER_03 59:37

Um they are they are their own people. Have you managed to seem stay so grounded in in the world that you could like I know we talked about the ego and stuff like that, but it's it's the more that I talk to you, it's just it's just such a you can see the passion still in you to to discover it, but like how have you maintained that with your kids and and and that sort of like, hey, this is this is just what dad does? How have you how have those conversations gone?

SPEAKER_06 1:00:02

I I think the kids um I think the kids have been a healthy age as they grew up. I was just looking up actually, I've got some photos of them in their pajamas in like a bedroom of my house that I converted into a little lab really early on, and they're there with the arm mounts and stuff in their pajamas and stuff. They they grew up around this, and as they saw it succeed, they can remember only a few years earlier just how hard it was and and how yeah, how uncharted it was and all the setbacks and all the challenges. So I'd like to think they've got a derivative of the same thing I mentioned to you about me, which is that I don't find it difficult to have humility around this journey because I remember how hard it was. Um I don't think it's a milli millions different from a sort of military veteran, right? You know, a military veteran from the outside is like, oh my god, like you've been through so much and you achieved all these things and you survived all these battles, and and yet and they're like, Oh, I just don't even want to I I can't even compute it. I don't, you know, thanks, but I I just just want to get on with my life. I yeah, it it means a lot to me that I that I've been through it, but I no one else is gonna really understand. I don't need to shove it in your face, it's the last thing in my mind. There are sort of parallels I think with entrepreneurs with that. It's like I know how I know how lucky I was. I know how lucky I was that so many times I it could have gone the other way. Um I almost think that it's a shame that people don't come up to you with that passion and that support if you're one of the entrepreneurs who didn't make it, or frankly, yeah, how veterans feel about the guys who didn't come home, yeah, they're the ones that need they're the they're the real heroes. They're the ones that need your love and support. Um really, therefore, they're relatives. If you were lucky enough to make it, I'm fine. I don't need it.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:48

Yeah, I think there's parallels like that. There's a saying I've I heard a lot of veterans saying is are the heroes are the ones that don't come home. You know, they say you're you know, but again, like yourself, you're you're you're a hero to to that that one girl that her entire career, her life changed, a pivotal moment. You were the North Star that she was like, I'm doing this. And who knows what book she'll write one day? Who knows what moment she'll have in life, but it was because the ripple effect of what you did and being fearless, you know, the recoverable failure, like having that, you know, setting that tone and that you know, we live in such a world where everybody gets a trophy now. Everyone is like, there's that that desire to to win, to, to which drives me bananas. You know, like I I've had had talked with my daughters' coaches or kids' coaches, if that that was sort of the MO. And I'm like, listen, uh when I see what when I saw trophies being handed out, I was like, uh don't give one to my kids. They were not paying attention. Like, in I want them to recognize who the leader is on the team, why they got the trophy, and what were the reasons? And I'll talk to them about that. I'm like, I want them to understand, like win or learn that that person there put the effort in, put the time when it was training, and they won.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:00

I couldn't agree more, right? And and again, another conversation needs to be had in the West, right? We we've explored down this road and we need to just wheel it back a bit. I know it was for good reasons, but you're right. It's kind of it's it's kind of toxic. So that there's a really obvious thing I'll share with you that really, really landed with me at an event I was at last week. There is a really obvious bunch of statistics that kids that really thrived in school and got really top marks score very low in terms of being of going on to become entrepreneurs and innovators and successful people in that way, right? Old industries, yeah, old corporate life, but that's currently dying. Then fair enough, you're right. You can go to Harvard and get still carry on going through life, getting top scores for everything, and go and get your corporate job or whatever. But when it comes to entrepreneurs, they disproportionately with the kids that did not thrive at school. And it's because of two reasons. One is, like we said earlier, about being a disruptor. If you're very good at just doing what it says in the textbook, you're not gonna be an innovator, right? You've got to be the annoying kid in the back of the class asking why. But the other thing is if you go through school being really good and finding it quite easy and getting really good marks, you have not learnt resilience. When you get burst out into the open world, guess what? It's difficult. You're not gonna succeed, things are gonna go wrong. And if you haven't learned to struggle at school and be told that you've got it wrong, and told to go back and try it again, and really have to grasp, you know, graft and generate your own motivation to keep going, you you you are gonna struggle to be that innovator later on. Because my God, are you gonna need it when you're trying to do something new like build your own business? I thought that was really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:34

Yeah, it's good. My my dad, who is a big believer, he just he said he's that he said never trust a person with soft hands. He's like, he's like, because it they've just they'd have never like me. My hands are gristly. You can even see how gristly they are. I wish can you can you see the wide? Can you go to the wide camera there? Can you see this back here? Yeah, you see that so on the wall there, that's my dad's hammer that he built all our houses with. And there's actually on the paint, there's his you can see his thumbprint still on. That's his work belt and some of his tools and his work gloves. That's amazing. And he wore like I as me as a child, my dad always had a hammer in his hand. He always um he loved remember tab soda, T A B soda. He was um, and we're I'm reaching from Dublin, Ireland. And so uh uh, but he always had his work belt on, he was always covered in dust, you know, and like even when he would go to like my graduation, he'd put on you know something nice, but he'd still have like paint in his hair, or like his hands just, you know, he just but he had these mallet hands and like just like he did he there wasn't a trade that he didn't know how to do. He was super talented, like the finish work, you know, crown molding and stuff. But it was it's like I put that there as a um there's a little quote he always said he's he goes, You have to be able to always look back at the work you've done and be proud of it, son. Always be proud of the work you've done. Yeah, that's lovely. And uh my dad was such a is such a stuff, but he just it was just a grit like we didn't grow up with money we didn't it it was just but but what I did grow up with was a lot of love and and and very rich in that like just just great moments and and great thing I was very fortunate to have that that that that closeness with him but you know he was a hard hard man like he just was there was nothing that he when we emigrated to Canada he just had that absolute desire and he always remember him saying he's like when I I did some martial arts and played soccer and whatnot and he says if the loss of the game or the thing doesn't eat you up inside don't do this this is you're in the wrong thing he said you you you want it to burn to get up and make you get better he says have your cry be upset he said when the sun comes up get up and start training again it should inspire you to and and you should be finding the person that is winning and focus on what they're doing. And then that in itself but if it doesn't bother you that you lost that's this is not for you. It's like we're not there's no point on me getting up and taking to a game and just at early hours in the morning if you just aren't into it. It should drive you to be like I want to I need to be the best never be complacent with losing. And I and he already had this this one quote that I live by he said you'll have you know you'll have the the um pain from discipline or uh pain from regret yes exactly and those are the two things that that he said and even on his deathbed I had these great conversations with even though he died with pancreat of pancreatic cancer I was very grateful that that's how he went because I got to spend like a solid month with them and just talked and we just talked about life and he just you know I asked him about that I said Dad pain for regret pain for discipline he goes I have no regrets son I I have one I have one he goes I made mistakes but what we talked about there he goes but I learned from them and I I I pointed my ship my ship in the right direction is to be better every day.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:06

Yeah yeah yeah that's really yeah it's that it's that discipline and resilience which I think we've been we've been slacking in the education system for the last 20 years.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:16

It's it's a crazy thing. Well I hey man I I just I'm from afar man I've been such a fan of yours and getting to meet you now I mean you're you're a stud. You are an absolute stud. Like just it's what what you're doing what you represent um we need more people like you out there and I think you're inspiring a a generation um to really to do great things. And I I'm actually going to be over in England I think in September. I'm doing a movie over there September October I think um I'll let you know when I'm over there.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:49

Yeah yeah dude so we're like two hours west of Heathrow so it's it's like no travel time at all. We've got an amazing campus here so you'd be very welcome you have to jump in and have a go.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:58

Yeah man I I'd love to but keep in touch man and again I just such a huge fan and and uh and just even more so now getting to sit down with you and I appreciate we had to reschedule a couple times but uh thank you for the time man uh Richard all the best man you you you are an absolute stud. I'll talk to you soon buddy take care my badass was that joke no all kidding aside I kind of geeked out the entire time I tried to contain my excitement during that entire time and if it wasn't the fact that he was so damn cool like what a stud. Just a good dude I mean you know you could be the cool guy at the party and then that guy shows up and it just like well time to go check please yeah and he's got an English accent just a stud. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I do that's one of the ones I'm gonna go back and listen to over and over again because I I really feel lucky that I'm getting to do a podcast but I I'm even I feel even more lucky that this is somebody that has I've been watching on Instagram and on other videos and following his journey for years and years and years. So just to get to sit down and chat with him don't forget to like subscribe and share the subscribing you guys have been killing it for us but let's uh there's some other folks out there let's uh let's subscribe some more really appreciate it thanks for watching the show I'll see you next time