PROTECT INNOVATION

“California has this ballot initiative system that a lot of political actors use as leverage to get what they want out of the legislature and the governor. And so now that this thing has qualified for the ballot, this is a period over the next couple months where there could be some backroom negotiations to try to get this thing off the ballot. Sergey Brin and the committee that he created, they have put money into a couple of ballot measures that would negate the billionaire's tax. And it's possible that those could be used as leverage.”

“But what we're seeing now is a a whole new chapter. It's the the stuff that's built at the big primes are not sufficient for this new fight. ... I mean, you're talking about shooting a $2,000,000 missile to Get a $10,500 drone. Right. Exactly. What you're talking about. Yes, sir. It's not sustainable. It's just not even, like, appropriate. It's like, would you ever take a huge gun or a huge I don't know what you wanna do if you don't say gun like net or what some cage would you have a cage for a lion with the bars this far apart?”

“In a simple way, it's sort of like the first version that the human race of a of a force field that anyone's ever created. ... Our system isn't quite to that level of sophistication yet. But as far as a version one of a force field that is a close in protective field that sends out these very, very, very high, high powered electromagnetic interference waves that when the drone if you imagine, here here's the field that we're putting out there. As the drone gets into this electromagnetic interference field, it might stutter, the camera might stop working, then it gets deeper and deeper, closer and closer into the intensity of the electromagnetic interference, and eventually, the computer just can't operate.”

“What we're doing, with the Leonidas at EPRIS is creating basically a close in weapon system, but using electromagnetic bullets versus physical bullets to kind of provide that last line of defense. And one, it can provide a very nice last line of defense against leakers. We talked about those. Really nice line of defense against swarms. Like, the gift I gave you was a 49 shoot down, but that doesn't mean we can't shoot down 500 or a thousand or more.”

“The longship could sail across oceans but also navigate tiny rivers deep into Europe.”

“For the Norse, your physical body dies, but your reputation lives on forever.”

“And that's why when he does talk about this, he really focuses on his objection to a state specific wealth tax. And he does frequently say, we ought to have a conversation about a national wealth tax, leaving the door open to the idea of a wealth tax if it was applied evenly across the country. It is worth noting that he has opposed many wealth taxes in the past when they've come up in the California legislature.”

“The raid on Lindisfarne in 793 is what we call the official start of the Viking Age.”

“And then it gives you a really nice defense against fiber optic fiber optic drones that you've seen these in The Ukraine now. These guys are about the drones that Tethered. Tethered. Yeah. They're dark we call them dark drones because it could be fiber optic. In the future, it could be, autonomous drones that just don't use any sort of RF or any sort of global positioning or any of that in order to see where it's at and to navigate. ... But those types of drones are just as susceptible against artifacts as a regular remote controlled drone.”

“For the billionaires and also many tech leaders who are not billionaires, but who are aspirational, they see this as a kind of an existential threat that it really would set a precedent of going after the wealth that people have earned and taxing their possessions in a way that really has never been done before. On the other side, that is also part of the motivation for this thing to really shift the paradigm in how the government taxes wealth and how the government gets people to contribute to society.”

“I'd stand in front of the main beam, not for like an hour, but I'd stand in front of the main beam for like fifteen seconds and go zap me. It won't do anything. It won't it wouldn't do a thing to me. ... We happen to use frequencies that are so low, they're close to kind of RF. They're still microwave. They're considered microwave, but they're almost in the RF or radio frequency band of waves, and those waves pass harmlessly through us. Those are the kinda radio towers and stuff like that. The very, very long wavelength, very, very, low frequency waves.”

“So this would place a 5% tax on the net worth of any billionaires who are California residents as of January 1. The money would go into a special fund at the state level and would have to be spent on health care services. It's unusual to tax the assets of a person as opposed to their income. So their assets would be, you know, their stocks, the jewelry they own, the cars in their garage, the paintings, anything that contributes to their wealth.”

“But even though it has a lot of support seemingly from the public, there are a lot of high profile Democrats who have come out against it and a lot of unions who are just sitting on the sidelines. Meanwhile, some of the most influential unions in the state, the teachers union, the umbrella group for SEIU, They haven't publicly taken a position. And privately, they're concerned about the idea of a tax that gets locked up in this special box and doesn't fund the programs that most tax dollars do.”

“I went to this conference in Orange County a couple months ago where a bunch of tax advisers and wealth managers were meeting, and one of the sessions they had was basically kind of like how to help your clients reduce their net worth. So suggestions that were like, oh, move your Picasso out of your house in Beverly Hills to your house in Aspen, or if you were carrying more insurance than you needed on your wife's, you know, six figure diamond necklace that just reduced the insurance policy to what it's actually worth because that's what you'll be taxed on.”

“The berserkers worked themselves into a frenzy where they were seemingly impervious to pain.”

“And when we talk about what is Silicon Valley adding to the whole mix, if you will, you say, why is Silicon Valley, sort of better in some way? I lean into the design led thinking. And design led thinking is human factors, human thinking from the very beginning. That's what it means at its core. In a Raytheon, you're a services contractor. You have the military that decides what they want you to build. They put them all down in, like, a thousand requirements. They hand you a bunch of requirements, and you just build a system that meets the requirements.”

“So they started freaking out late last year in advance of this January 1 deadline because the ballot measure says that anyone who was a resident of California on January 1 could be subject to this tax. So at the end of the year, there was a lot of jockeying, and there were a few pretty high profile billionaires who made moves to leave the state to change their official residency. A couple of the founders of Google relocated. Sergey Brin moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Larry Page left for Florida. And then also some of the people who are really influential in the world of, you know, investing in technology left. David Sacks moved to Texas, and Peter Thiel moved to Miami.”

“It's this really remarkable semiconductor like silicon. Silicon is a semiconductor. It's a remarkable semiconductor that can amplify signals and withstand huge, huge power densities way, way, way better than traditional semiconductors or things that we've used before in the past. And that is really what's unlocked kind of a new class of directed energy, a new class of electronic warfare, a new class of a whole bunch of different systems that leverage that kind of technology, the gallium nitride technology.”

“For the last decades, the primes have been focused on, let's say, going out and hunting a lion or lions, like big, big beasts. You know, they have to bring in the big nets, the big guns, the big whatever that they need to go hunt lions. The problem we see today are like mice and little mice that are running around. And what we're doing with our big rockets and our our big defensive systems are using the same thing we would go up against lions against mice. Mhmm. And it's really that fundamental.”

“It's likely that Ragnar is a collection of the deeds of several different Viking leaders.”