Mike Adams details the catastrophic potential of an Iranian bombing on Saudi Arabia's Al Jubayl complex, which produces 7% of global petrochemicals and powers supply chains for plastics and fertilizers. He warns that destroying this hub would trigger a decade-long "Mad Max" scenario of scarcity, while China gains advantage over U.S. allies. The episode concludes with John Ferguson of Saxon Unmanned advocating for domestic drone manufacturing to counter foreign reliance, urging Americans to achieve self-reliance through off-grid living and survival supplies amid looming geopolitical collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Al Jubayil: Global Chemical Hub00:07:41
The largest industrial city in the world spans over a thousand square kilometers, and it's in Saudi Arabia, and it's called Al Jubayil.
Al Jubayil, industrial city, is the hub where a massive number of industrial chemicals are manufactured.
There are over 300 active industries that operate within that 1,000 square kilometer area.
It produces about 7% of all the petrochemicals in the world, including, by the way, Chemicals for lubricants, for adhesives, for paint, for personal care products, industrial products, medical products, scientific products, on and on and on.
Remember, we talked about BASF before in Germany, BASF, and how BASF created about 45,000 different chemicals.
That's basically Al Jubail, but in Saudi Arabia.
It's very similar in terms of the number of products that come out of it.
It's a massive complex.
Again, a thousand square kilometers.
It produces fertilizer.
It produces aluminum.
It produces all kinds of chemical products, like I just said.
And it's now on fire.
It's on fire because it's being bombed by Iran in retaliation for Israel, of course, bombing Iran's South Pars gas field.
It's clear that Israel wants the world to burn.
Israel wants the Gulf states to be destroyed and for Iran to be destroyed.
And even if Saudi Arabia is destroyed, Israel doesn't mind.
And it's on track, actually.
It's on track to do that.
So, what we need to do is to understand the implications of this and how this will be catastrophic to the world's supply chains and economies and consumer products.
For years to come.
You should also note, by the way, that the Al Jubail complex is connected to the King Fahd Industrial Port, which has 34 berths for large transport ships and an annual capacity of 70 million tons.
So a lot comes out of there.
But very few Americans in particular have ever even heard of this facility, even though your life depends on it.
Your life depends on it.
So, have you ever heard of the company called Sabic?
S A B I C.
It's the world's fourth largest petrochemical company in terms of its output volume annually, and it's headquartered there at Jubail.
There, they produce just the Sabbath Company produces over 135 million metric tons of metals, of chemicals, plastics, fertilizers, polymers, lubricants, I mentioned before, things like that.
It's got the largest independent water and power project on the planet.
They generate 2,743 megawatts of electricity.
That's gigawatts, folks.
It's really stunning.
And 800,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day.
This is the economic backbone of Saudi Arabia and, to a large degree, of the world.
This is the single most important industrial complex in the world.
Just the Satorp facility at Jubail, it's a joint venture between Aramco and Total Energies.
They alone produce 400,000 barrels of oil per day.
producing fuels, lubricants, petrochemical feedstocks, things like that, that are sent to Asia and to Europe.
So it's not just that if this facility is partially or fully destroyed, it's not just that it would harm the Saudi kingdom, but it would also destroy domestic water and electrical supplies for a much larger region, and it would absolutely gut Saudi Arabia's oil industry.
As well as the global supply chains that depend on all those things I just mentioned.
So, there's another facility there called Sadara Chemical that's a joint venture between Aramco, which is Saudi, and the U.S. chemical firm Dow.
They've already shut down.
So, they have an annual capacity of over 3 million metric tons of chemicals and plastics.
They have already shuttered production and they've publicly stated that they cannot ensure when they will ever be able to reopen.
And they said that before this most recent bombing of the complex, which of course is only making things worse.
So what you and I need to understand, and I'm going to cover here in some detail, but I'll try not to bore you with the facts, this is going to impact your life and my life and the lives of every human being living in any modern society around the world.
So remember that about 20% of the global supply of oil and refined oil products exited through the Strait of Hormuz.
That stopped over a month ago.
So that's already bad, but that could technically be reopened if there were an agreement for peace.
But what we're talking about now is totally different.
When the facilities are being utterly destroyed, and you could say semi-permanently destroyed, Even if the Strait of Hormuz is reopened, it doesn't bring those facilities back online.
And just as we saw with Qatar Energy and their announcement that it would take three to five years to rebuild the two LNG trains that have been utterly destroyed that's two out of 14, remember?
But that alone takes 17% of their natural gas production offline for three to five years.
Well, if this Jubail facility gets destroyed, we're talking decades.
We're talking decades.
The rebuild time, again, if it's totally destroyed, which perhaps that's not likely because it's so large, but if it were totally destroyed, it would end global supply chains as we know them, and it would last for decades before it could ever be rebuilt.
In fact, it would be hard to even fathom how it could be rebuilt because you need power and water to have workers there to do the rebuilding, and all the power and water would be offline.
So even with just the minor shutdowns that have happened so far, polyethylene costs in Asia have doubled.
And the bulk prices for polyethylene, the raw materials out of the Middle East, have increased about 50%.
But, you know, double the price on finished products.
So that's only going to get far worse.
So if you need anything in the near future, in the next couple of years, that comes from polymers, That is any kind of plastics, any kind of modern clothing that's made from, you know, rayon or what have you.
Middle East Lubricant Shortages00:15:10
Anything that is polymer based is going to go double, triple, quadruple in price, maybe more.
And don't forget that naphtha is also one of the big exports out of the region that's necessary for cracking oil to produce the various grades of fuels, even for cracking operations in Asia and other countries.
They need the naphtha and they can't get the naphtha.
So one of the biggest ramifications of all of this globally is going to be a cratering of supply chains of petrochemicals and plastics and lubricants.
And I want to talk about lubricants here for a second because this is absolutely critical.
When you don't have lubricants, you can't, you don't have transportation.
Because everything that hauls loads, whether it's trucks on the roads, or the barges up the rivers, or the ships on the ocean, or the cranes that move the containers onto the ships, or the forklifts that unload the containers on the ground, etc., all of these things require lubricants.
And of course, there's engine oil, which is critical, and most of today's engine oil is partially synthetic.
And synthetic engine oils are derived from natural gas.
Did you know that?
I mean, largely.
So there's a component of natural gas in all the synthetic engine oils, even if it's a blend with non synthetic that comes from actual oil.
But usually it's a blend.
And so the trucks won't be able to get any lubricants if this facility is destroyed.
And then, secondly, for all the machinery that's out there, whether it's the forklifts or the cranes or, let's say, excavators.
Skid steers, bulldozers, construction equipment, you name it, tractors for agriculture.
They all have grease zirks on them.
And I know because I've spent many hours greasing the equipment on my ranch, you have to grease it every once in a while, like for some parts every 10 hours of operation.
For other parts, maybe not as often.
But typically, about every full day of operation, you're going to grease a machine.
And in order to do that, you have to get The grease, obviously, which is a lubricant that depends largely on these petrochemicals coming out of the Middle East.
Now, not all lubricants come out of the Middle East, but what happens is even if you can produce some lubrication products domestically in the United States, the shortage of lubricants out of the Middle East causes global demand for the U.S. made lubricants to skyrocket because there's not that many places left.
Other countries can get the lubricants they need.
And so prices skyrocket because demand skyrockets for the limited supply.
And that drives up costs for everybody.
So even if you can get the canister of grease or the bucket of grease, I buy grease by the five gallon buckets, by the way.
I have a foot pumped greaser that I use for my equipment because it's so much easier than trying to grease by hand with a hand pumped greaser.
So yeah, I have a foot pumped greaser and I use a giant scoop to scoop the grease into this.
This big container that has a foot pump on it.
Anyway, you got to have the grease because there's, you know, it's difficult to have alternatives to that kind of grease when it comes to high temperature, heavy equipment.
And that's why they have MOLLE formulations, which is molybdenum, which is, you know, it's a specific element that happens to have anti friction properties and, you know, helps prevent wear and tear on moving parts.
So you can't take.
Molly grease and just replace it with, you know, vegetable oil.
It doesn't work the same.
It's not the same.
The grease has to stay in the joints for as long as possible.
That's why it's thick and tacky.
In fact, one of the grease products out there is called, I think, Red and Tacky.
And it's a high end grease product.
And they have to be able to work at certain temperatures and extremely high pressures.
So without grease, The economy begins to shut down.
Seriously.
A lot of people don't think about this.
If you don't own heavy equipment, you probably don't think about this, but you got to grease stuff all the time.
I still remember one day, it was a couple years ago, I was in my own warehouse and I was checking on the forklifts that we have there and my staff had purchased a new electric forklift.
I think maybe it was even a Toyota brand.
And they had the forklift for like two months or something.
And It's a really great forklift.
It's all electric, you know, it doesn't burn propane, no combustion engine, and, you know, it's quiet, right?
So it's great for indoor warehousing as we have at healthrangerstore.com for all of our food warehouses or food warehouse operations.
And I said to one of the foreman workers there, I said, So what's the grease schedule on this forklift?
And they looked at me and they said, This forklift needs grease?
I just about lost it.
Like, didn't the dealer tell you you got to grease this thing?
No.
No, they just sold us.
They didn't tell us anything.
Like, did it come with a manual?
No.
What the hell?
You got to grease the forklift.
And so I pull out my flashlight, because I always carry a flashlight, of course, and look under the.
Oh, there's the Zerks right there.
You got to grease these things, brother.
You know?
So I had to tell my own staff about the importance of greasing the forklift.
Fortunately, it had only been a couple of months, so there was no long-term damage.
But a lot of people don't even know that equipment has to be greased.
So, you know, if you're running a forklift or if you're running, I don't know, even a side-by-side on a ranch or if you're running a tractor and you don't know what grease is, you've done a lot of damage to your equipment and you're going to break it.
So that's how important grease is.
And, you know, everybody in construction is laughing because everybody knows, you know, like if you have an excavator, first thing you do in the morning before you crank it up, you open it up, you check the oil, right?
You check the oil, and then you check the grease schedule.
And you might have to grease certain pivot points.
If you can't do that, then you can't use the equipment.
So if the grease stops, then all the heavy equipment stops almost the next day.
I mean, you can run it a little while.
I'm talking like excavators and things.
You can run them a few days, but you don't want to push it because you'll start wearing out all the parts and the pivot points.
You start breaking it.
And it starts squeaking, too.
It starts to squeal and make weird noises.
That's when you know you've gone too long without greasing it.
Anyway, that's just grease, not to mention engine oil that has to be changed on a very frequent basis.
So you think about these long haul trucks on the highways, the diesel trucks, and they'll do crazy numbers of miles in a year.
I don't know, maybe they'll do, some truckers might do 50,000 miles a year or more.
Well, the diesel engine has to have the oil changed every, I don't know, what is it?
What is it?
6,000 miles or something?
You know, maybe 8,000 miles.
I don't know what it is these days because I don't own one of those, but it, you know, you can't run it more than 10,000 miles without changing oil.
You just tear it up the engine.
So the oil has to be changed on a regular basis.
And if you don't have those oils, you don't have transportation.
And if you don't have transportation, you don't have food at the grocery store.
You don't have parts delivered to your local auto supply store.
You don't have deliveries from Amazon.com.
You don't have Home Depot restocked or whatever.
None of that happens.
And so that's when the shelves start to go empty very, very quickly.
Now, we had a scare, I don't know what it was, a year and a half ago.
Maybe it was a couple years ago because of COVID about the engine oil situation.
And that's when I bought some 50 gallon drums of diesel engine oil that I am still sitting on and very happy to do so.
They're sitting in my barn on pallets.
I'm like, yes.
But I'm one of the few people that's ever bought 50 gallon drums of engine oil.
That is a non-commercial.
I mean, I don't run a fleet of vehicles, right?
So it's highly unusual for someone like me to buy that.
But I did.
And I have many, many five gallon buckets of grease also, enough to last for years of operations.
Plus, I have stored diesel and I also have a full set of replaceable Zerk pieces just in case the Zerks break off, which has happened before also.
But I'm a prepper.
And what I do is very unusual.
Most people, most truck owners, the owner operators, most fleet operators, et cetera, they may have a little bit of supply, but they don't have a one year supply.
Backup supply of engine oil and grease and zerks and tires and everything else.
They don't do that.
It'd just be cost prohibitive for them to do that.
They buy the oil as they need it.
Well, when that oil supply chain stops, the trucks stop.
Done.
So I don't know if that day's coming.
I mean, if we get to peace, like right now, and the Strait Of Hormuz opens up again and there's not too much damage done to this facility, then maybe we just go through a very difficult rough patch where prices are high and supplies are scarce, but it's not mad max.
However, if this situation continues for months and, more importantly, if there's permanent destruction of these facilities that will take years to bring back online, then you're living in a different world.
You're going to be living through some kind of mad max scenario that you thought was just science fiction or, you know, Hollywood fiction, but it's going to become a reality.
So, yeah, not good.
South Korean petrochemical producers have already cut their run rates by 50%.
Some have declared force majeure because they can't get the naphtha and they can't get other raw materials or feedstocks from the Middle East, including natural gas.
So you might think, well, you know, we get our fuel or we get our chemicals from Korea, not the Middle East.
Yeah, but Korea is dependent on the Middle East for the feedstock chemicals.
A very similar thing is true in, let's say, Vietnam and Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia.
China, to some degree, also depends on this, although China has a lot of other options, such as turning to Russia.
So China is not in the worst situation here.
It's the smaller countries that don't have their own domestic oil production or oil byproduct production or refineries, etc.
Those are the ones that are going to get hurt the worst.
Now, in terms of large countries getting hammered, India is in a very bad situation right now.
The entire polypropylene unit in Odisha, it's part of the Indian Oil Corporation, it has shut down.
The polyethylene unit in a town called Uttar Pradesh has also completely shut down.
70% of consumer packaging that's produced in India is made from flexible plastics.
But these flexible plastics are basically headed towards a total shutdown because of the lack of supplies coming out of the Middle East.
So because of these flexible plastics, which are used very heavily in the food industry, including in the United States, these production shortfalls are going to hammer the food and beverage industries.
And probably there will be tens of thousands of small manufacturers across India that will go bankrupt if this continues for a very long period of time.
And that will then deprive the world of a major source of manufacturing of these plastics products that are used throughout Southeast Asia as well as China and Europe and the United States.
So, you don't want India to go broke and go offline.
India produces a lot of stuff that's important to the rest of the world, and not just plastics, but they also produce tractors and things like that.
They produce vehicles.
I mean, they're not great tractors, just to be clear.
I mean, they're tractors made in India.
You need a lot of extra oil because, you know, they leak a lot, you know, they leak a lot.
But they make tractors, and those tractors are used by a lot of countries in Southeast Asia because they're low-cost tractors.
And yeah, India makes its own low-cost diesel engines.
They leak a lot.
Yeah, the gaskets don't always match up and everything, but they're affordable.
You can even buy those in America.
The brand is called Mahindra, I believe.
Mahindra.
Which I think means extra leaky.
So that's one thing to keep in mind.
All right, now we've talked about fertilizer shortages before.
I'm just going to reiterate the fact that if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed and if this Al-Jubail facility stays offline for very long, then you're not going to have ammonia, you're not going to have urea, you're not going to have the diammonium phosphate, etc.
Things are going to get very bad for crops in the world.
Now, let's talk about China for a moment because China has, Really valuable partnerships with Russia.
And because of that, China can turn to Russia for a lot of things that used to come out of the Middle East for China.
For example, Naphta, that we talked about for cracking oil and producing different fuels.
Russia can supply all of that, or virtually all that, that China needs.
China's Strategic Material Shifts00:10:17
In addition, China uses coal a lot more than other countries.
So China can produce PVC products using just coal instead of oil.
Or naphtha, whereas a lot of other countries that might produce PVC are using, you could say, a more modernized method, but it requires more scarce fuels in order to do it.
So China actually has more redundancy, which is pretty wise.
And since Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, all U.S. allies, are facing extreme shortages of natural gas and other feedstock materials, this is going to give a major advantage to China.
So, think about this, for example.
China and South Korea compete on battery manufacturing big time.
South Korea has a lot of technology.
They've got car companies like Hyundai and Kia, and they've got even like heavy equipment manufacturing and so on.
A lot of big industries there.
But if they can't get the materials they need, then they're not going to be able to produce.
Whereas China next door will be able to continue producing things like batteries, and ultimately that's going to put South Korean large conglomerates out of business if this goes on very long.
So, South Korea could be facing dire economic consequences that can be largely avoided by China.
Now, in the United States, in the U.S., we actually produce some fairly sizable amount of our own petrochemicals, including some lubricants and chemicals that are used for things like coatings and paint and medicine, etc.
But most of that relies on natural gas.
And even though we do produce natural gas domestically, the global price pressure on natural gas will raise those prices to the manufacturers in the United States.
So just because we make something in the U.S. doesn't mean it's going to be cheaply available to us, to our own industries, because it's a global commodity.
So the world determines the price.
And if you're a natural gas company in America and somebody in the U.S. is going to pay you, let's just say, $1 per cubic meter, which is actually not that expensive, but let's just say $1, versus somebody in Europe is willing to pay you $3 per cubic meter, who are you going to sell it to?
You're going to sell it to the Europeans because they're more desperate.
They're willing to pay more money.
You're going to make 300% more or whatever the additional profit margin is.
So it's the global demand on gas that is going to drive these prices through the roof for domestic manufacturers and producers and consumers in the United States.
Now, in addition, because of the Strait of Hormuz being closed and because of the semi-permanent damage that's being inflicted upon these various facilities, including Qatar Energy and Jubail, you're going to be dealing with a logistics cluster, cluster bleep.
That's the best way to describe it.
So global logistics are going to be a freaking nightmare.
For a long time to come, at least for the rest of this year, probably well into 2027, and perhaps even for a couple of years.
And that's if things begin to settle down right now, and there's no indication that they will.
So supply chains are going to be wrecked, which means there will be long delays to get the supplies that you need to make the things that your company sells, which means that suppliers are going to be wrecked, manufacturers are going to be wrecked, you're going to see layoffs, you're going to see bankruptcies, you're going to see Cash flow emergencies, you know, emergency lending to keep us afloat while we're waiting for the raw material to show up.
You know, waiting on the polyethylene or something like that, right?
So you're going to see small businesses, manufacturing, supply chains, logistics, distribution, smaller operations are going to go bankrupt like crazy over the next year because they don't have the depth of product diversity or the cash flow or assets in order to make it through.
So, just as I said earlier, you could see tens of thousands of companies go belly up in India.
You're also going to see something similar in the United States and Europe and Canada and Australia, et cetera.
Massive bankruptcies.
You'll see this in Korea and Taiwan and Japan as well, and New Zealand and probably Mexico.
You're going to see a COVID level, like times 100, wave of bankruptcies that will afflict our world for potentially years to come.
As a result, did you know that, for example, car manufacturers, Toyota, let's say, depends on over 100,000 suppliers to be able to get the parts to make one truck?
And each of those suppliers has all these other inputs that it needs in order to make whatever it provides.
And so, as the supply chains go haywire, then the larger manufacturers that build complex products, like, let's say, Boeing, or military manufacturers.
I already mentioned Toyota, but think about car companies.
Think about construction.
Think about construction equipment.
Think about complex electronics, things like that, manufacturing for industry.
All of these machines that have thousands of parts in them are going to be virtually impossible to make for a long time.
And some of those companies are going to go out of business.
How do you make appliances if you're missing two parts out of 2,000 and you just can't get the two parts because you know, it's all blown up in Saudi Arabia, right?
That's where this is headed.
And no, Trump didn't think about any of this.
He doesn't know any of this.
You know, Trump just kind of lurched into this war having no idea, I think, about the ramifications of what this is going to unleash.
Effectively, these bombings on the Al-Jubayil complex could be considered the destruction of the backbone of the global industrial ecosystem.
Let's put it that way.
If this facility is destroyed, which Iran seems to be promising to do if the attacks continue against Iran, and Trump is promising to continue to attack Iran, then the world will be facing, again, this is an if, if this facility is largely destroyed, the world will face a decade long scarcity Mad Max scenario in fertilizers,
plastics, packaging, textiles.
Automotive components, manufacturing components, medical supplies you name it.
You name it.
Plus, all kinds of things involved in energy and lubrication, like I already mentioned.
Just figure 10 years, the world will not have these things or will have a very, very limited supply that will be almost impossible to get.
And if that happens, then life as you know it will cease to exist.
Your world will change in ways that you cannot imagine, like the inability to get replacement parts for your lawnmower, let's say.
All the homeowners across the country, the homeowners' associations, are going to have to change their rules about mowing lawns because nobody can get lawnmower parts, that kind of thing.
And that's almost a joke compared to the more consequential things like, oh, and also there's no food delivery to your local grocery store.
Right.
That has a big impact on nations.
Now, I'm not saying that all the shelves will be empty.
I'm just saying that deliveries are going to get very expensive and the scarcity is going to get a lot worse.
And because so many people live on the edge of affordability for food, this is going to tip them over the edge into basically famine via the economics of it.
They won't be able to afford to buy the food that they need to not starve.
That's where this is headed.
Yeah, there might still be food on the shelves, just most people won't be able to afford it.
A pound of hamburger, $50 or $100, who knows?
Depends on how crazy this gets.
And right now, Trump has it on crazy path.
It's like the full crazy payload is loaded up and ready to unleash on the world.
And effectively, Trump and Netanyahu are burning down the world to try to punish Iran.
To try to get Iran to capitulate.
And Iran, you can't blame them.
They're saying, no.
No, we're not going to capitulate because if we surrender, then we lose everything.
Then we lose control over the Strait.
We lose the ability to manufacture our own nuclear weapons for self defense.
We lose our own leadership.
We lose our country.
We lose our culture, 5,000 years plus of history.
No.
Persia is saying no.
And again, you can't blame them.
So as a result, Trump and Netanyahu are going to burn down the world, and you are going to pay the price.
You and me, we're going to pay the price in not being able to get the things that we are used to getting in order to function with our cars, our trucks, our equipment, our food, our house repairs, our consumer products, our clothing, our tennis shoes, whatever.
It's going to affect all that.
Stockpiling for Uncertain Futures00:03:22
Which really only underscores the importance of living in the most self-reliant way possible, which is, of course, one of the principles I teach all the time anyway.
So you're wise to get as off-grid as possible, as decentralized as possible.
You're wise to grow as much of your own food as you can.
And you're also wise to use microbiology to replace a lot of synthetic fertilizers if you can.
You're wise to do composting.
You're wise to do things like, I don't know, have you ever heard of burying logs and wood under dirt piles and then planting in the dirt?
I forgot the name for that, but over time the wood releases a lot of nitrogen.
And so you can use dead trees as a source of fertilizer.
These kinds of techniques are going to become incredibly important in the years ahead.
And I should mention that if you want to learn about those kinds of things, You can do it for free.
Just go to my book website, brightlearn.ai.
And I've actually got news for you there.
Not only have we very nearly reached 50,000 books that you can download for free, and you can create your own book at any time completely free, but also we now have 200 audiobooks that are done, and they're all downloadable completely free.
200 audiobooks.
So now at the moment you have to download them one at a time, so it's a little bit cumbersome, but I'm going to.
I'm going to fix that.
I'm going to have like bulk download capabilities in place where you just enter your email address, you know, you just register and then you get a bulk download.
Like that's coming.
I just need time to work on it because I know it's kind of annoying to, you know, individually download 200 different books, right?
So we're going to fix that and give you bulk downloads.
But in the meantime, you can go there.
Just go to books.brightlearn.ai, find the books you want, download the PDFs or download the full audiobook for the 200 that are available.
And if you don't find the book that teaches you how to grow food and how to get decentralized and live, you know, more self, in a more self-reliant lifestyle, then ask it to create the book that you want.
And it will do that for you at brightlearn.ai.
So in the meantime, of course, you can buy food from us if you want clean, lab-tested, certified, organic, storable food packaged for long-term, long-term viability, especially with the freeze-dried products that we have in the number 10 steel cans that are sealed.
You can shop with us at healthrangerstore.com.
Healthrangerstore.com.
And if you want to get prepared in other ways, check out all the preparedness options that I I've made available for you with discount codes at rangerdeals.com.
And usually the discount code there is Ranger, which is pretty easy to remember.
And that would get you discounts on all the different providers there that have different things like the satellite phones and the de-Googled phones and the therapeutic peptides that you can stockpile because some of those are freeze-dried, too.
They're called liphalized.
That just means freeze-dried.
And they last for years.
So you can stockpile all kinds of things if you want.
Thermal Imaging Mission Capabilities00:15:35
But the bottom line is get ready for the world to break.
The global supply chains, as you and I have known them our entire lives, are going to break.
Worse than COVID.
Far worse than COVID.
And honestly, very few people have any idea that this is coming.
They just don't know.
They won't know until it hits them.
And when it hits them, it's too late because by that time, the supply chain pipeline is totally depleted.
So, you know, the day that the average American shows up, At the auto parts stores, like, how come you don't have the parts?
You know, the employee working there would be like, dude, you're not going to see those parts for six months if we're lucky.
It's like, what?
Yeah, you should have come here, you know, two months ago.
We had parts and we don't have those parts anymore.
You know, for some of the parts.
I'm not saying everything will be gone, but of course, it'll be the parts that you need that will be gone, right?
Because it always works that way.
The thing you need is a thing that's no longer in existence.
So that's when a lot of people are going to turn to 3D printers, by the way.
They're going to figure out how to print their own stuff.
Yeah.
It's actually going to be a kind of a renaissance in 3D printing, I think.
But I guess I'll cover that in another podcast.
You're going to have to buy filament and then 3D print the stuff that is no longer available, including, you know, 3D printing your own gaskets and things from special filaments that are now possible to use.
And then there's AI.
AI controlled 3D CAD programs now.
You don't have to learn AutoCAD.
You can describe what you want, or you can take a picture of what you want.
You feed it into AI systems, and then they'll render the I think it's like a 3D vector file that the printer will print.
So there's a lot of interesting stuff that's going to come out of this as people suffer extreme shortages, and then they innovate new ways to get the things that they need.
And of course, I've done a lot of 3D CAD design with the 3D printers a few years back.
And I've been watching 3D printing technology ever since then.
It hasn't advanced much, but there are a couple of promising new printers on the market that might be more interesting.
I'll take a look at it.
If I think there's anything that can benefit you, I'll let you know about it.
In the meantime, catch my work at brightvideos.com.
And you can also, of course, follow my articles and my infographics at naturalnews.com.
I'm Mike Adams.
Thank you for listening.
Get prepared.
Because, sorry to say, it's a shitstorm that's coming.
And people don't even know.
They have no idea.
All right, take care.
Yeah, you know, I come from a manufacturing family.
You know, my father started a plastics manufacturing plant in our garage when I was four years old.
And that's how I grew up.
And my father and my brother, you know, have always been, you know, kind of like my mentors because they were able to make things happen.
I also saw all of the manufacturing leave America, all because of going overseas.
So we can talk about the mining and the carbon footprint and all this other crap, which is all very important stuff, but we're either going to get to a point where we're either going to do it or we're not going to do it.
And the responsibility that we have to bear ourselves is if we do not do this, then whatever our future looks like, which appears to be somewhat bleak.
We just have to deal with it because that's the decision that we made.
I think we, as the American people, we have failed ourselves because we're not voting the right people into those positions.
And when they get put into those positions and they prove to us that we have made a mistake, we do not have the power to remove those people.
Welcome to today's interview here on brightvideos.com.
I'm Mike Adams, and we live in a world that has seen some radical paradigm shifts in warfare.
In automation, in deliveries, and so much more because of just one technology known as drone technology.
You've seen drones in the Ukraine Russia conflict.
You've seen Amazon drones getting ready to do mass deliveries, drones in agriculture and mapping, and also inspections of high voltage lines, and much more.
And today we are joined for the first time by special guest John Ferguson, and he is the CEO of Saxon Unmanned, which is a US based drone manufacturer.
So, welcome to the show, Mr. Ferguson.
It's great to have you on.
Well, thank you.
Thank you, Mike.
It's great to be on.
Thank you.
I'm honored to have you on.
And I really love the fact that you're making drones in America because, of course, we know China dominates this area.
Yeah.
And it's hard to compete with China in many ways.
But tell us a little bit about your company first, just a background and where you focus, and then we'll get into some questions.
Well, no, thank you.
I started out, I was a US Marine and I'd spent several years in the Corps and got out, went into deep sea diving and then into piloting submersible vehicles.
I traveled around the world doing that.
And I just didn't want to be attached to one specific industry, which is mostly oil and gas at the time.
And so in 2013, 2014, I saw that the drone industry was going to be kind of a big deal.
So I latched on and I saw the rise of the DJI drones.
The Chinese drones.
And I just thought, you know, I can make a decent product.
And so I sold my Harley and started the company.
And here we are today.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay.
And you're based in Kansas, is that right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Wichita, Kansas.
And who are your primary customers right now, or what industries mostly do you serve?
Well, you know, I started this company because I love the Marine Corps so much.
I was in the Marines for a while.
And I just love the military and supporting our men and women.
So I've, I really just kind of molded the company around being a military type of supplier.
And that's where we are still to this day.
But we sell aircraft to Raytheon and Georgia Tech Research Institute, Mexican police, and places around the world.
So we get around.
Well, I've heard that selling to the US military is paperwork intensive, bureaucratic, a lot of hurdles to go through.
And I've heard of some other companies also sort of diversifying their customer base into some other areas just to kind of level out the bumps in the road.
Is that something that your company does?
Yes, for sure.
You know, we sell our aircraft to the public.
You know, anyone can buy our aircraft.
But, you know, the military, it's crazy, but you have to have every single part and piece.
It has to have an origin, you know, of where that part came from, you know, like a nut or a bolt.
And we need to know what kind of steel it was made from and where that steel was.
Was brought in from and the cage code and everything.
So, you know, you can understand why things cost so much when you're selling to the Department of Defense or Department of War, just to the government in general.
So it's very taxing, but it's well worth it.
It's very well worth it.
Okay.
And then what role do your drones serve in military applications?
Well, like this big guy behind me here, it'll fly for about 18 to 20 hours.
And so this aircraft is perfectly suited for long range deployment, long range surveillance, loitering over a battlefield.
It could have battlefield munitions.
It's really good at collecting data, generating maps, thermal imaging.
There's a lot of different technologies that this aircraft has the potential to do that is more military specific.
I don't even know about.
So, but the nice thing is that it'll carry 15, 20 pounds and you can stick it up in the air and let it go out and do its mission.
And when it's time to deploy the aircraft or the munitions or whatever, this aircraft will absolutely have the ability to complete the mission successfully.
And they're rugged and reliable.
That's the most important part.
Okay, that's really interesting because it seems like a lot of what you're describing would allow it to replace the far more expensive multi million dollar.
The older drones that the U.S. military uses in many cases, not in all cases, but in many cases.
Is that true?
Yeah.
You know, drones are drones, right?
And so they don't have to be, you know, super high tech, you know, multi million dollar drones.
I mean, take a look at the Shahid drone that the Iranians are developing or building.
You know, it's what we would consider more of a kind of a dumber drone, right?
It just doesn't have a lot of capability or a lot of, you know, technology built into it.
It can.
But it just has to go out there for a very inexpensive price point and just go do the job.
And so that's what these things can do.
They can just go out there and fly.
And as long as they're reliable, then they're meeting their task requirements.
So again, you don't have to have really highly technologically advanced aircraft to go out there and just perform the most basic of missions.
Okay.
And then what level of autonomy do your drones exhibit if the Pilot chooses to engage that.
I mean, I've never used your drone, so I'm just guessing there's some autonomous flight.
Yeah.
And that's the great thing about the mission planning software is that you can just tell the drone to go do its job and let her rip and she'll go out and do it.
So, you know, you can plan the auto takeoff and auto landing.
You can plan different waypoints, different altitudes, different speeds.
And when you get over to certain points on the map, you can tell the aircraft to release a servo that could, you know, it could trigger a camera or it could, Release a payload or it can engage a certain type of sensor.
So you really, you just don't have to touch the thing that much.
We actually, when we sell an aircraft to our customers, we make sure that our customers know how to actually fly the aircraft.
And just, you know, punching values into software isn't flying the aircraft.
You actually have to be able to physically grab a hold of the sticks and be able to manually fly the aircraft just in case something happens.
Because we always want to prevent what we would call an unscheduled landing.
Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Now, when most people think of the word drone, at least the way it used to be, was a quadcopter configuration, vertical takeoff and landing.
Clearly, that's not what your drone does, but then yours, as I would imagine, is much more fuel efficient and longer range because of its fixed wing configuration.
Can you talk about why you made that choice?
Yeah, so we actually do provide, we do build quadcopters or, you know, multi-copters is what we call them.
They just take off vertically.
And those, for the most part, are battery operated.
And so when they're battery operated, you have more limited flight duration.
You can go in and do hydrogen or you can do a hybrid type system where you're partially battery, partially fuel.
And that will extend out your flight time.
But this particular aircraft behind me here, You know, we operate this thing off of a 35cc engine, which is a very small engine for this size of an aircraft.
But we have an air hybrid system where we can give it a boost so we can get up to altitude quickly and then turn off the boost feature.
And then we're just on this very fuel efficient 35cc fuel injected engine.
So, again, you know, just different missions for different aircraft.
But the most important part about these aircraft is the modularity.
There's 1,440 minutes in the day.
And if you're screwing around on the ground trying to figure out CG, center of gravity, or weight distribution in the aircraft, either somebody's dying or you're wasting money somewhere.
So it's very important to have the aircraft in such a way that you can really just swap out the sensor.
It's already pre designated in its location.
And you don't have to worry about CG too much because you're pretty close to being there.
You can get the aircraft up in the air and go out and save a life or earn money.
So, but again, just two different types of aircraft for two.
Well, they share similar missions, you know, mapping, surveillance, et cetera.
So, for let's say, for example, search and rescue mission, I imagine you have customers that do that and they would want, you know, high precision thermal cameras.
What kind of cameras can, let's say, the sheriff's department, what can they buy?
That can plug into your platform.
How does that even work for the sensors?
It's very simple.
Well, I say it's simple.
It's simple for us, but not always that simple.
But thermal imaging sensors are fantastic sensors that you could use across both platforms.
You know, thermal imaging, there's two types of thermal imaging just straight thermal, and then there's radiometric.
So with the straight thermal, you can lock onto targets at night.
So if there's a person that's stranded out in the woods, or if you have a chance to see through the woods, or if they're in the mountains or whatever, As long as we can see that person or that animal or whatever, they create a heat source.
And so we can identify that.
And so it's a very efficient way to save a life.
But I'm sorry, but what I mean is, can a customer just buy off the shelf optics and plug them in somehow?
Or do they have to buy them through your company?
Or how does that work?
Is there a, what kind of standard do they have to adhere to on that?
There are a plethora.
Of websites out there that will sell those optics.
You can even buy them on Amazon.
There's a certain frequency that you can't just buy.
There's a higher frequency that these thermal imaging systems operate off of, which gives you a lot more clarity, a lot more data.
Those systems, you can still buy them, but there's some paperwork that you have to do behind that.
Drone Manufacturing Realities00:15:21
I see.
Like an end user statement, right?
And then you can't ship those overseas.
Because now you are entering into what we call ITAR, which is International Traffic and Arms Regulations.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I'm familiar with that just with buying optics for rifles.
Yeah.
But yeah, any sensor for the most part, you can just buy it online.
And then where do the sensors physically go on the aircraft?
Depending on the weight distribution, but normally being that our aircraft are more heavier in the back, we always would put our sensors on the forward edge of the aircraft.
I see.
We have underneath, you can't really see it, but there's a place where is it here?
Right there.
Yeah.
There's a place there where we have like a sacrificial canopy where you can just cut a hole in it and pop your sensor through.
And you can have 50 of these with 50 different types of sensors.
Oh, okay.
You just, again, you've got to worry about your center of gravity and also the vibration mounting.
You want to make sure that you give your sensor a nice, calm, smooth ride.
Oh, yeah.
And just go.
But Yeah, very, you know, it's time consuming, but it's well worth it because you just capture better data that way.
And then the fuel is gasoline or what's the fuel?
Just regular 91 octane gas for this particular engine.
Okay, interesting.
And you said flight time of 18 to 20 hours.
Did you say that earlier?
I did.
I did.
Yeah, depending on, you know, we have a larger fuel cell.
This particular aircraft is actually sitting out in the hangar.
Has a six and a half liter fuel cell, you'll, you know, maybe get 10 or 12 hours of flight duration.
But the bigger fuel cells, you can get up to 18 to 20 hours.
But it's really hard to really quote accurately what your flight duration is because you don't know the weight of the vehicle, the all up weight.
You don't know what the wind conditions are.
Yeah.
You know what the barometric pressures are.
And there's a, you know, the altitudes that you're flying.
So there's a lot of factors that go into that.
But the best this aircraft could possibly do is 18 to 20 hours.
Wow, that's really remarkable.
And then I'm sorry to be asking so many questions, but I'm trained as a pilot also just on Cessna or what have you.
So I do have a lot of questions, but what about takeoff distance and landing distance?
What's required?
Yeah, this particular one has that boost so that we can get off the ground, we can be wheels up within about 30 to 40 yards.
Wow.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, that's the nice thing about having that little boost on the engine, you know?
But if you have a shorter runway or if you have a heavier payload and you need to get the aircraft off the ground, that boost really works great.
So you get off the ground, you get up to altitude, then you can shut that boost off and go right back to just straight gas and just accomplish your mission.
But we're actually converting this aircraft over to a VTOL.
We have a new design.
No way.
Yeah, it's a fixed wing aircraft that is going to take off vertically and then it'll transition to.
To a standard forward flight like any other fixed wing aircraft.
Those are kind of like the new sexy versions of the evolution in drone technology right now.
Wouldn't that take quite a bit more thrust than what your current engine produces?
Yes, but those are electric motors.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, and then we have a generator on the back of this thing.
So we can take off with the electric motors, we can gain altitude, and then we transition over to the fuel engine.
And then, when the aircraft is on its mission, then the generator will actually recharge the batteries in the nose.
So, like a hybrid, like a Toyota Prius.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But if you stick your hand out the door, you're not going to turn.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a Jeff Dunham joke.
Well, that's really interesting.
Okay.
So, this technology, and I mean, I'm sorry to put you on the spot here, but roughly just for our audience, there might be some, I don't know, ranchers or law enforcement watching or government people.
Roughly, what kind of price range are we talking about for the base model?
If you can answer that, I love that because our competitors, this is $150,000 to $250,000 bird all day long.
But our base price on that is around $80,000.
So depending on how you want it configured, but yeah, base price is about $80,000.
Wow.
And I just don't have the overhead the big guys do.
Yeah, that makes sense.
A lot of sense.
And I would guess for 80 grand, you know, you definitely don't want to be the user that crashes it, right?
I mean, you want to take care of this thing.
You know, there's just a certain part of owning a drone manufacturing company where you just have to face that reality and that stings sometimes.
Yeah.
What's worse is when you have your employees do it, that stings even more.
Okay.
All right.
So, wow, for less than 100 grand, then, as the base model, you've got a drone with up to 20 hours flight time, but could be less.
Now, how does this compare to Iran's drones, what I call the Flying Doritos?
You know, and you already kind of mentioned the Shahid platform, but my understanding is that Iran is cranking these out with some very rapid manufacturing.
And this has changed the nature of warfare, also, as we saw with Ukraine versus Russia.
Both.
I mean, Russia took some heavy hits recently with Ukrainian drones striking oil facilities.
Yeah.
So, talk to us about how this changes the nature of warfare and surveillance.
This is such a huge evolution in warfare.
This to me is the equivalent of the dawn of the cell phone, you know?
Because.
Whether you support the war with Russia and Ukraine or not, they have taught the world how to fight with these systems and how to fight with very inexpensive drones, $1,500 drones.
And they're out there just decimating the battlefield.
You can go on Amazon or you can go to Best Buy and go pick up a $2,000 or $3,000 drone, and you can go out there in just a matter of minutes.
You can complete All of the battlefield intelligence that men and women for decades have used that has died, you know, trying to gather that intel, you know, prior to, um, you know, some type of uh, uh, you know, conflict, right?
So, like, you take forward observers or whatever, and you go uh, sneak out for days to go get on top of a mountain to go, you know, collect information on a position that you're getting ready to attack.
And of course, the minute the attack happens, that person is going to be.
You know, be gone because they know where they're going to sit to collect that data.
A drone just go out there and fly over and take those images.
And all of those images have GPS coordinates on the back of them.
They're all geotagged, right?
And then you can take that software and you can stitch it all together and you can create very quickly a map that's accurate and, you know, less than an inch in accuracy, right?
So you can fly over.
And I mean, how many military maps have you ever seen or pilot maps have you ever seen?
Every single one of them has.
Elevations, right?
Because that's so incredibly important for flying an aircraft or, you know, battlefield preparation.
So, with these aircraft, you can fly over a battlefield, you can get all of the elevations.
It's called a digital elevation model for those that don't know or haven't seen that.
Then, you can create a 3D model of the terrain and you can create a 3D model of the building.
So, if you need to know what kind of a missile you're going to use to blow up a building or whatever.
You now have how tall it is.
You have, you know, you know, how wide it is, and you even have the volume of what it would take or the volume to fill up that building or depression or whatever it is, right?
Yeah.
So you get that battlefield data, and you're, you're, you know, you're 10,000 steps ahead of what we used to be back in the Vietnam days, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
And that's a $2,000 or $3,000 drone can offer all of that information.
See, I see drone technology as parallel to the invention of the musket.
So, back during the Revolutionary War, you know, the invention of the musket, which allowed decentralized manufacturing of low cost firearms, allowed a bunch of rebels to challenge an empire, right?
And I think drones are very much the same way.
We see this in Ukraine, where drones are making, in many ways, you know, tanks can be rendered obsolete by drone warfare.
And I want to show you something on my screen here, which is the ultimate expression of this.
I couldn't believe it, but this is a cardboard drone.
And the name of this video is Ukraine's flat pack cardboard drones are destroying Russian tanks.
And apparently, and I've seen, you know, this is just a rendition, but I've seen an actual working cardboard drone that can be taped together.
You know, obviously wouldn't work in the rain probably that well, but, you know, it can be taped together where you can.
You know, you can assemble your own drone out of cardboard so that your cost of crashing it is a lot lower.
I mean, how inexpensive are these going to get in terms of functionality?
I mean, I know yours is less expensive than competitors, but there are drones a lot less expensive than even what you make, as you just mentioned.
What are your thoughts?
Well, I think Orville and Wilbur Wright would be proud that we're still making drones or we're still making aircraft out of wood and cardboard.
So, a lot of people get wrapped around the axles on this.
They're like, oh my gosh, they're making drones out of wood and cardboard, and it's It's cool.
It's very inexpensive.
I mean, that blows my mind that they're out there doing that.
But still, I mean, we've been building aircraft out of wood for many, many, many years.
The real thing that people are getting wrapped around the axles on is the fact that it's less susceptible to being spotted by conventional radar systems.
Oh, I see.
And we have counter drone technology, which there's a lot of wonderful companies out there that are evolving that counter drone technology.
But, you know, these types of aircraft would be more capable of getting through those types of radar systems, kind of like the Iron Dome over in Israel, you know.
So every once in a while, you know, a couple of them will get through.
That's just because there's just certain failures of technology that won't pick everything up.
So it concerns me actually to be building these out of cardboard just simply because they're so low cost and they're going to, Highly probable that they're going to avoid the standard or conventional radar systems that, you know, we're going to get stung here pretty soon here in America, if you ask me.
I would think that some of that's already happened with the destruction of, you know, the billion dollar US radar systems that were taken out by drones because they're so slow that, like, they're not identified as incoming missiles.
You know, they're just like, I call them sky mopeds that are coming in from Iran, just and hitting the radar and blowing it up.
I want to ask you about this.
You know, you're a Marine.
I support our Marines, but I also think the best way to support our Marines is don't send them into places where they're going to get killed.
And part of the problem right now is, and I don't mean to make this political, but Trump may be proposing, you know, a landing of Marines and special forces in Iran.
The thing is, they're going to be subjected to drone warfare if that happens.
Clearly, that's the case because Iran's already demonstrated, you know, drone technology.
So, how do U.S. Marines defend themselves then against incoming drones?
Well, no, that's a fantastic question.
And again, even though I spent several years in the Marine Corps, I'm not an advocate for sending people out to go die.
Right.
Neither am I.
I like to keep Marines alive.
Right.
So, I mean, I've flatlined twice.
And I can tell you, both times that I flatlined, it hurt.
So I don't want to do that again.
I damn sure don't want to send any of my.
Brothers, sisters, kids, or anybody out to go die, especially for somebody else's country.
So I'm not that guy.
But we do have to understand that there is technology out there that we are going to have to deal with.
And as far as the administration putting troops on the ground in Iran, I'll just divert back to you.
I mean, how many.
Wars has America been in where there's not been one single body or one single person deployed with boots on the ground in that particular region?
I don't think any, right?
So, no war is ever won by complete absolute air superiority.
There's always boots on the ground and there always will be boots on the ground if you're going to do it.
And I completely agree with you.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just would add that America has never had boots on the ground anywhere in the drone era of warfare.
No.
So, we've never encountered that other than maybe a few specialists that are running like radar systems in Ukraine, but they're kind of off the books or whatever, you know.
But in terms of uniformed United States Marines on the ground in large numbers, they've never encountered drone technology like what has come into being over the last five years.
You're absolutely correct.
And you can thank the Russia Ukraine war for that, you know.
But they're, I've been saying this an awful lot, but, you know, the Trump administration, they brought in all these tariffs and all this investment into the United States.
States, and there's all this money out there somewhere.
US Drone Technology Gap00:11:41
You know, I think he probably needs to shave off two or three billion dollars to beef up our drone technology here in the United States.
I mean, the Chinese government subsidized their drone industry, and that's why they're ruling the roost right now in commercial type technologies because they just got hundreds and hundreds of smart engineers just sitting around engineering stuff, right?
So we don't do that.
But I think, and again, I said this a lot, but I think the administration needs to give.
Every single drone manufacturer that's making American made drones here in the United States a contract.
And we need to spur that technological development because if not, we're going to continue sitting in the backseat.
And right now, militarily, our drones, I think, are far more sophisticated than the Chinese drones.
Commercially, I believe that we're kind of behind the eight ball a little bit compared to China.
But again, we have got to really beef up the counter drone technology.
And I will say this you know, there's a few ways we can take drones down.
One is the frequency, right?
But they have frequency hopping on drones now.
So if you get hit with one frequency, you can switch to a different frequency and not have that frequency eliminator take your aircraft down.
You have microwave pulse.
Dangerous.
And then you have lasers, dangerous.
And then you have drone on drone technology, which I am a big proponent of.
The problem we have here in America is that our bureaucracy is not going to allow us to deploy this type of counter drone measures because we're afraid of the family of four flying that Cessna that's behind the drone.
Right.
So just because you send a pulse out or a laser or microwave or frequency eliminators out, that doesn't mean it's going to stop at the drone.
Right.
So we're tripping over our own feet in that regard.
So, again, my favorite is drone on drone, you know, risk mitigation.
I actually think that makes a lot of sense to my producers.
Going to show my screen here.
This is one example of an anti drone drone.
So, this thing loiters looking for incoming drones and then it can go kamikaze itself against another drone.
And I think you're right.
I think that's by far the most effective technology.
And it's also, you know, it's small, it's compact, it's modular, et cetera, and they're disposable.
But back to what you just said earlier, I think you make a very valid point that, you know, we have a government, whether it was Biden or Trump, that just keeps sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, almost all of which just vanishes into people's pockets somewhere.
Nobody even knows.
Why not just throw a couple of billion into domestic drone technology investment?
Because that will last.
I mean, that will impact decades of innovation.
And what you were just talking about, your vertical takeoff drone tech, what could you do with $50 million on that?
I mean, that's a lot of engineers you could put to work.
Oh my gosh, with $50 million, I could build a very powerful drone.
And again, you're absolutely right.
You know, I did, I've done a lot of work on the border and south of the border fighting cartels, human trafficking, child sex trafficking, and narco terrorism.
And there's a lot of things that we've discovered down there.
And there's, you'll probably remember a couple of years ago, you'll have heard maybe one blip on the news where they had stated that they were finding weapons, small arms that we sent to Ukraine that they were selling out the back door to the cartel.
Here, you remember that?
Yep, you know, uh, that just reeks, uh, that just reeks in my book, and I think that's disgusting.
And I think those people should be, uh, you know, held very responsible for what they've done because that's that's killing Americans.
Those weapons are that we built and gave to our taxpayer dollars, gave those to that country to help them, are now killing Americans from an adversarial organization like the cartels, right?
So, again, um.
You absolutely hit the nail on the head that if I were in this administration, I would absolutely shave off a couple of two or three billion and spur that job creation and growth here in America and get us back on our feet where we need to be.
Because right now, on the commercial side of things, the Chinese, I believe, have pulled ahead.
Well, they most definitely have pulled ahead.
And so, You know, these small drones like that one that you just showed.
I mean, hell, we crash into each other on accident.
Surely we could do it on purpose, right?
Right.
But no, there's software out there that you can lock on to another aircraft and you can tell that drone to go out and go hit that software.
That software needs to be further refined.
Sure.
But it's out there.
So there's so many things we can do as a country.
But right now, a lot of what I would say nefarious type organizations that are here in the United States are more focused on dividing us and getting us to hate each other than we are defense of our own country.
Yeah.
And again, I see so much money leaving our country, but almost nothing being spent where we need it here, including on our own infrastructure from roads and bridges and railways, et cetera, and also industry.
And that leads me to one question I had for you.
You know, supply chains are becoming very fragile and politically sensitive also with so many tariffs and so on.
So the 35cc engine that you mentioned before, are you able to source that domestically or where do you get the engine?
Yeah, I'll plug those guys if I can.
That's desert aircraft in Tucson, Arizona.
No kidding.
Yeah, they build a very reliable engine.
And then they have another company called HFE International who take those cores and they do amazing things with those engines.
So I give them a little plug there.
But they struggle trying to keep up because I've had requests for thousands of drones.
You know, six, seven, eight, nine, 10,000 drones, and there ain't no way in hell I could ever do that.
You know, I don't have the investment capital to do that.
But, you know, the Chinese, you know, the motors, the electric motors that we use in these drones have, you know, copper windings and then they also have magnets in them.
And so the Chinese are throttling the magnets because right now, the only place you can really get magnets on a large scale is China.
So the Chinese are throttling.
Our economy when it comes to drones.
So, but again, I think President Trump is right, whether you like him or not.
We've got to get that manufacturing back here, you know, because if we don't, we're just going to continue.
We're going to be the lag and not the lead.
Well, yeah.
I mean, completely.
The manufacturing left America over a period of decades, long before Trump, even before his first term.
Yeah.
And bringing that back is difficult because it means Americans would have to get used to paying higher.
Prices for things, right?
But that supporting that domestic industry can be absolutely critical.
But you mentioned copper, right?
So We also don't want to do much mining in America because of the environmentalists protesting the mining.
Same thing in Western Europe.
So we've sort of dumped out to other countries like China, like, you do the mining, you do the super dirty rare earths extraction, and we'll just buy from you.
Well, that worked great until it didn't.
And now we're in a trade war with China, and we're in an energy war with Russia, and we're in a kinetic war with Iran, and the freaking Strait of Hormuz is closed.
So now it's like, wait a minute.
We were foolish to let all this go.
You know, we need it domestically.
I think you agree with that.
Yeah.
You know, I come from a manufacturing family.
You know, my father started a plastics manufacturing plant in our garage when I was four years old.
Wow.
In 1970.
And our very first customer was the Coleman Company.
So all of the Coleman coolers, the ice chests, and the straps and the hinges and all of that stuff were all made in my father's plastics manufacturing plant.
And that's how I grew up.
And my father and my brother, you know, have always been, you know, Kind of like my mentors because they were able to make things happen and they were pioneers of the plastic age.
And now, as I watched them evolve into a wonderful size manufacturing company, I also saw all of the manufacturing leave America.
There was, I think, a time where there were 60 manufacturing plants leaving a month.
In the United States, all because of going overseas.
So, you know, we can talk about the mining and the carbon footprint and all this other crap, which is all very important stuff.
But we're either going to get to a point where we're either going to do it or we're not going to do it.
We're going to mine here in America or we're not.
And the responsibility that we have to bear ourselves is if we do not do this, Then, whatever our future looks like, which appears to be somewhat bleak, we just have to deal with it because that's the decision that we made.
Or we have put politicians in positions of power that are not there for us, they're there for them.
And oh my gosh, have we seen that for decades upon decades upon decades?
So, we as the American people, in my view, and of course, I do plan on running for office at some point, I think that is in my destiny.
But I think we as the American people, we have failed.
failed ourselves because we're not voting the right people in to those positions.
And when they get put into those positions and they prove to us that we have made a mistake, we do not have the power to remove those people.
Yeah, we've, my goodness, we've seen so many promises made on the campaign trail that are just blatantly violated even right now.
A lot of people are unhappy with some of Trump's decisions, and we're supposed to put America first.
You know, it hasn't panned out yet the way a lot of people thought.
Battery Tech and Energy Sources00:04:49
But let me pivot to a different question for you about energy sources.
There is a lot of new battery tech that is just emerging on the world stage that has much higher energy density.
Per kilogram of the battery.
Now, I know that right now gasoline stores much more energy than a battery, obviously, but there's a company called Donut Lab.
They're located in Europe.
They claim to have a battery that powers their Vertiv motorcycles that achieves 400 watt hours per kilogram, which is more than double what is typically known right now.
Some people don't believe their claims, but they've been doing a lot of testing and demonstrating it publicly.
My question to you, sir, is that if If battery energy density becomes high enough, would you consider going electric on some of your drone models?
Well, we do go electric.
Even this aircraft behind me here, we can make electric.
But what I find in the industry, and it might sting for some people, but there's a lot of what we call vaporware.
Yeah.
There's a really good amount of people in this industry that.
I don't think they're deceiving people on purpose.
I just don't think they understand the technology and the capabilities of their aircraft.
So, when you go to a drone show, you're more than likely going to run into a large amount of people that are not properly selling their technology.
So, that's my practice for politics later on in life.
Yeah, right, right.
So, they're misleading their customers about the duration of flight or what?
Yeah.
You know, the thing is that when things look good on paper, you know, that means a lot, but it doesn't mean crap until you take it out into the field and go test it in the real world environment.
And that's the only way.
And I was subject to that.
You know, I mean, my first set of engineers, if they would have told me that the aircraft would fly around the world on AA batteries, I probably would have believed them.
Not really.
But again, you know, the battery technology, there's just some things out there.
There, that you can't overcome.
There's certain physics that you can't overcome, and that is that you can't charge faster than you discharge, right?
So, when you make the claim that you can charge in the air or you can charge faster than you discharge, then that's a false claim.
But I think you hit the nail on the head.
When you have this battery technology, that is one of the biggest places in this industry where we have to improve.
And the other thing is that we do not make batteries in the United States.
We have several wonderful companies out there who are getting the lithium packs from China because, again, you're mining lithium and then you're processing the lithium.
And that is, you know, the green energy guys are going to have a heyday with that one.
But we don't process that lithium here.
So we buy all of the lithium packs here and then we build our batteries here.
Right.
So there's always, they're marketed as made in America, and they are.
But the Chinese, you know, the materials come from China.
The materials come from China, right?
So, but until we can get over this hurdle, you know, we're just going to remain, we're like a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter backwards.
Okay, great, great visual there.
But the reason I ask this is because there are, you know, KATL, C A T L, that's one of the Chinese companies that's probably the leader in battery technology.
BYD is another one.
They are having breakthroughs that are pretty astonishing.
And the donut lab breakthrough, people say that it breaks the laws of physics because it's a solid state battery that can apparently last over 100 years with a daily discharge.
But, you know, I think our minds are going to be blown quite a bit here and there.
But they still, you know, it's a lot of weight to carry around for the energy density that they have.
And my question to you, sir, is that the fact that your drones need gasoline, you know, gasoline isn't necessarily something that the military carries around a lot.
They carry diesel or kerosene or something like that, but not gas, right?
Is that an issue?
That would be an issue in certain spots.
Laser Communication Range Boost00:07:10
I mean, gas is pretty readily available.
And if you're going to have an aircraft like this, you can either run it on gas or you can actually go to heavy gas, right?
Can you?
Yeah, you can do that.
So it's not that big of an issue.
It just runs dirtier or what?
Yeah, it'll run a little bit more dirty.
Okay.
But again, still having a large amount of gas and going into a location, say, let's just say Iran, for an example, that would be a huge logistical challenge to bring a separate set of gas for something like this.
So you have to make it so that you can go to heavy gas or diesel.
Okay, that makes sense.
And then your vertical takeoff technology.
That would seem to be a really major advancement to allow deployment in areas or off of ships, for example, that don't have landing like a tarmac, right?
What are your use cases for the vertical takeoff?
Well, you know, again, you know, this aircraft, it requires either it could be launched through, you know, like a rail system, a catapult system.
The landing may be a bit rough, but, you know, they fly them in the nets and all kinds of stuff.
And it's, you know, it's just hard on the aircraft.
So having the VTOL capability is paramount in today's world because, again, I spent most of my adult life working on ships, you know, piloting submersible vehicles and a deep sea diver, right?
So, You know, the challenging part about that is getting the calculation of the swell perfect because, you know, that's not so easy sometimes.
And then also, you get a lot of interference from the seawater or the water itself just simply because it's reflective, right?
So, you know, signals bounce off of the water.
So it's a little bit more of a challenge.
But just think about this, you know, with this type of aircraft, if you need 30 or 40 yards and then you need open.
You know, open area where you don't run into any trees or anything, or you don't have to dip down over trees to go land and flare.
You know, that's very challenging.
So, again, going out into heavy, you know, densely occupied areas, you know, as far as cities or trees or whatever, as long as you can get that GPS signal to hit that aircraft and you can acquire the satellites that it takes to operate this aircraft.
You're good to go.
So, again, that VTOL is very, very, very important in today's battlefield.
Yeah.
Today's world.
Let me ask you about the control system, too, and then the communications range, because your aircraft has a lot of range, but for how far can you control it?
And do you have your own joystick screen pad or visors, or what are the options here?
Yes, you know, this is one of the aircraft that, you know, we actually require that you learn how to fly it manually just because, you know, sometimes technology has hiccups, right?
But the communications range, we use military grade communications systems that are, you know, a number of frequencies, but we really stick a lot to 2.4 gigahertz.
And then we also use a mesh network.
So I don't know if your folks understand mesh network, but.
Okay.
Okay.
Excellent.
So, again, you can hop through a mesh network and gain that range.
So, you can do well over 100 miles.
And then, also, using a tracking system is very important when you're using just standard radio frequencies.
So, you know, you have a swath like this, like a 90 degree directional, you know, you're putting like two watts of power through that, and there's only so far you can go.
But if you Shrink that into like a pie, and you're still putting two watts of power through there, then you can gain your range.
But if you kind of move it in and shoot like a laser beam of communications to the aircraft and it can track with that same two watts of power, you'll compound your range exponentially.
The problem is that if the aircraft is out there flying and you break that communications, your aircraft is going to go into a whatever you program it to do, it can go into loiter or it can go into a return to home.
And if you go into return to home, then you'll have to reacquire that communication pipeline.
And then you can send the aircraft back out on its mission.
So it's not simple.
It's not simple.
But SATCOM actually is really good.
It's just expensive.
Okay.
But then what's the range, though, from one ground controller to one aircraft?
Like, how far can that work?
You just described some of the narrowing of the beam, but what kind of range can a user get?
Usually on a like an omnidirectional antenna, if you're using that just basically out of your little radio transmitter, like a futaba or whatever, you know, you'll get less than a mile.
If you go into like a 900 megahertz type of antenna, you can get 30 plus miles.
If you're using, you know, 2.4 and 2 watts of power and you're using more of a directional type antenna, you can.
You can punch out to 40, 50, 60 miles.
And then, if you're using a tracking system, a tracking antenna, which will lock onto the aircraft, then you can punch out past 100 miles, maybe 125 miles, depending on the weather conditions and so on.
It's hard to honestly go out and say, well, you can do this much range because if you go out into the environment and something is there that you didn't plan for, It'll cut your range, right?
So, and those numbers you're citing that's direct line of sight, as we say, even though you can't see it because it's so far away, but it's still line of sight for the radio signals, correct?
Yes, yeah.
And what this aircraft is actually really good for is being that it has a long flight duration, is what you can do is you can take that mesh network.
Let's say, for example, you're going to fly out to let's say you need to fly out 200 miles or 300 miles or whatever, you can take this aircraft and you can fly it up to a thousand feet altitude.
And then you can create that network.
Mesh Network Flight Durations00:06:21
Oh, okay.
It'll jump off of that aircraft that's a thousand feet in the air because you have that direct line of sight.
And then you have the curvature of the earth, unless you think the earth is flat.
Pretty much, I'm convinced it's not flat at this point.
Yeah.
I thought I'd throw that in there for a little.
Yeah.
But then you can punch out past that aircraft another 100 miles or more.
So you can just piggyback these and just keep going.
As long as you have the flight duration in the aircraft, then you can just keep going.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay.
Very effective.
Well, that's really interesting.
Okay.
So let me give out your website again.
Saxonunmanned.com is where people can find you.
And if there's someone out there that wants to order one of these, what's the wait time on a unit?
Oh my gosh.
Well, right now, right now with the demand that we have, probably three or four months is where we're at right now.
Wow.
Yeah.
The supply chain is somewhat difficult right now for sure.
Well, but that's good to have that level of demand for your product, though.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
And we're trying to scale the company right now so that we can receive much larger orders.
We're going to try to get ourselves into a position to where We can set up the manufacturing point where we can knock out 50 or so of these a month or more.
But these are big aircraft and there's a lot of detail that goes into them.
These aren't punched out of an injection mold.
These are all handcrafted aircraft.
Yeah, well, I'm wondering one of the things that China does in automobile manufacturing is a lot of automation, factory automation, robotics, et cetera.
And here in America, the Tesla robot, I guess eventually it's going to be available.
I wonder if it could help with some.
I mean, I run a manufacturing firm for food, and we intend to have robots to help move boxes around, move cases around, things like that.
But what you're talking about is a lot more complex.
Yeah, but I was the guy that was pissed off when they started getting express things put into grocery stores.
I wanted to talk to somebody, but again, it's all right.
This is a very complex aircraft, and we can go to plastic injection molding or You know, blow molding or something along those lines to really kick those numbers up.
But that doesn't do, you know, people any good.
You know, my father, you know, he raised me to if I'm going to be self employed, I'm going to employ people and I'm going to give other people opportunities.
Right.
So, well, absolutely.
And yeah, I didn't mean that robots replace humans, but that they can help people get more done, you know, the same amount of people, but maybe doubling your output, you know.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And again, I think that this AI revolution that we're in right now is just, it's so incredibly amazing.
But it's also very scary.
And I think that my company is probably a ways out before we can actually start putting robots into beefing up our production.
Oh, I think so.
Yeah.
I could be wrong.
I could be wrong.
You're right.
I think it's a couple years out.
Yeah, we still have robots.
Well, my father and brother sold the plant several years ago, but a lot of the stuff that we did for many, many, many years was robots.
But that's another dig on us Americans because we as the American people need to kind of get off our butts and go back to work.
So don't worry about getting some dirt under your fingernails.
Just get out there and go make a living.
Yeah, exactly.
Well said.
All right, John.
Look, this has been a really amazing conversation, and I've learned a lot.
Is there anything else you want to add here before we wrap this up?
I, you know, thank you.
Thank you, Mike.
I just, I see with a lot of the work that I've done and a lot of work, you know, that I've volunteered to do down on the border and in other countries trying to build relations between African nations and the United States that, you know, there's a huge divide in America.
And I don't believe that this is something that was not planned.
I think that this is in the plan to divide us.
But we're in a situation now where we have this conflict.
It could potentially get bigger.
Hopefully, it doesn't.
But we have to, as Americans, we have to come together and leave all of this crap behind us, right?
You know, if we are going to hang on to our country, no matter what you think it needs to look like, we're going to hang on to our country.
We all need to just stop, you know, all of the internal strife and just say, all right, you know, we're all Americans.
Doesn't matter if you're, you know, Christian or Muslim or Jew or white or black or Mexican or gay or straight or legal or illegal.
It doesn't matter.
We're all here in this country.
We're all Americans.
And so.
Either we're going to figure it out or we're not.
And if we're not going to figure it out, then don't bitch when you don't like the outcome.
So that's kind of what I want to leave America with is that, you know, let's figure it out.
Let's get together and let's continue to create the most powerful nation in the world.
All right.
Well said.
And I think the innovation of your company is definitely contributing to that.
Again, I'm happy that you're making drones here in the heartland of America.
And you're in a.
You're in a pro freedom state too, as well.
So that's a bonus.
And to some extent, I am as well.
I'm in Texas.
And so, you know, we, I think, I think we represent what America was founded on, frankly.
So thank you so much for your time today.
It's been a lot of fun and wishing you the best success.
Thank you.
Thank you, Megan.
Thank you to all of your wonderful listeners.
Thank you.
Emergency Survival Supplies Guide00:04:04
All right.
Take care.
You too.
All right.
There you go, everybody.
John Ferguson from Saxon Unmanned.
For high end, long range drones with lots of applications, feel free to check out his website, Saxon Unmanned.com.
So, if you want to catch more of my video interviews, you can find them at brightvideos.com.
And yeah, I'm praying for America, too.
We're in a lot of trouble right now.
A lot of what John said is right on.
But we have to be willing to work, we have to be willing to innovate and manufacture.
And not be afraid to get our hands dirty in terms of making things.
That's how we, I think, make America great again.
If that's still on anybody's radar out there, who knows?
But thanks for watching.
I'm Mike Adams here for brightvideos.com.
Take care.
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