Jason: All right everybody, welcome back to the allin interview series. I am thrilled really thrilled because Seronic is a defense company that has been doing amazing work and we are so lucky to have the co-founders here on the program. Welcome to the program Dino Mavukus. How are you sir?

Dino: Doing well. Thanks for having us.

Jason: And uh your co-founder here uh Vib Alakar. Let's talk a little bit about Seronic. Uh and we're going to get into everything but you were in the news. You were in the news because you're making autonomous ships and one of these was used recently in the straight of hormuz. I understand.

I'm: going. [singing] [music]

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Jason: I got to start there, Dino. Tell us about the mission. Tell us what happened. This is the first time an autonomous uh ship has ever rescued uh folks in the field. and then we'll get back into your history and everything. But I think like we got to start off with this story because it's incredible.

Dino: It it it's just a huge story and I look I can't get into too many specifics of the operation and the mission for for obvious reasons. But um before we get into what it means for the country, what it means for our company, I mean without saying the most important thing is that those two pilots came home safely regardless of how they got there. Right now, what we were able to demonstrate through this partnership with the Navy, like for us is the Navy actually trusted us in this moment. Lives are on the line. We're going to send this autonomous platform to go and rescue these folks. This is not a patrol. This is not maritime domain awareness. This is the highest stakes of the highest stakes. There's downed American pilots in the Straits of Hormuz. like Corsair, which you actually see right over my right shoulder, which is our 24 foot fully autonomous speedboat for th for those that that don't know. Um, he said, "We're going to use that to rescue the pilots." And that's that's actually like a milestone moment for the country. And I can tell you I'll tell you a personal story firstand kind of what this means, but you know this like leaving people behind in the US military just it's not a thing. Like the US military does not do it, right? Like I was in the Navy Seal teams for 11 years. From 2004 to 2015, uh my last five years were on SEAL team six. I personally experienced 2005 there were four SEALs trapped on a mountain side in Afghanistan and the helicopter got sh got shot down while going to rescue them. So what we were able to prove in this moment was that you can go and rescue people without putting additional soldiers in harm's way. That's that's the impact of what this had. That's what it means for the country and for our company. It was just an extremely proud moment where the Navy trusted us in this high stakes environment.

Jason: Absolutely incredible. And obviously thank you for your service. I and I know you can't get into too many details, but I've been reading all about it and I got to wonder when when these two pilots, did they know that this was an autonomous ship and the ship comes rolling up and they're like, somebody sent them a message, hey, you're going to get picked up by the autonomous ship. Grab the side of it, climb on board. Like, what's the protocol for the autonomous ship picking up two folks? Are they swimming out to it? Well, I I just got to get a little color on this before it becomes a movie.

Dino: I mean, it's the first time that it that it happened, right? And when a ship when a boat pulls up to you and there's nobody on it, you know, you can very quickly deduce that it's fully that it's an autonomous boat. And you know, these pilots were in the water for I don't even know how long. They're in a completely contested environment. We're in a conflict with Iran. They're in the Straits of Hormuz. And we can go through the dynamic there. But they looked at this platform and said that that's my way home,

Dino: That that's how I get out of here.

Jason: I love it. All right, let's step back a bit here. You're a Navy Seal uh VIB. You've uh worked in this space for a while. Uh you previously worked at Andrew, I understand. Uh the mission as I understand it for the company uh is to greatly increase our ability in America to produce ships. And for people who don't know, the amount of uh tonnage, the number of ships that we are able to make in America and most western countries is very low. But there's an adversary uh in the Pacific who is able to produce a lot of ships. It's known as the Chinese Communist Party. So maybe from first principles you could just explain what you're building and why it's important and just how insane uh the incompetence of the West in terms of building ships has become. I mean we are really bad at making ships right now. Am I correct?

Dino: We're beyond bad. Uh, let let me I'll take a step back and just kind of highlight where we're at and then I'll let Vib go through what we're doing about it, how how we're changing that dynamic. But Jason, what you were saying, right, just to put it in context, the United States can build a 100,000 gross tons of ships every year. Gross ton is this volumetric measure of ship. So if you build, you know, a 200 foot ship, that's different than an 800 foot ship. But let's compare apples to apples. 100,000 gross tons. The Chinese, which you were referencing, can build 23 million gross tons. So, they can out build the US 230 to1. And it wasn't always the case. Right? 30 years ago, the Chinese didn't have this capability. They had 5% of the world's ship building capacity. Today, they have 57% of the world ship building capacity. And actually that problem's getting worse because the cons the communist party is just con constantly it's like subsidizing the entire industry. So they're undercutting the commercial market on price. They're not just subsidizing the direct cost to build. They're subsidizing raw material and labor costs. So the ship built in the United States is actually five to six times the cost of that same ship built in China. And so they keep getting more and more orders. So that number is of 57% is just going up.

Jason: How did they get that capability? Is that because as a manufacturer to the world, they needed to ship out products. So they did this in a commercial way f first or was this always very intentionally we need to own the South Pacific?

Dino: Much revolves around the commercial market and then I want to talk about I want to talk about the status of our navy like where the naval fleet is today what that means and then where the Chinese navy is and where that's going because again 30 years ago the Chinese navy was a lural backwater navy today they have nuclear submarines aircraft carriers and hypersonic missiles so there's a massive massive change over the last 30 years and what's happened in the US ship building industry it's completely declined So the US naval fleet has 296 ships today. There's a congressional mandate statutory minimum of 355 ships that was set by Congress in 2018. That was 8 years ago. Last year we built nine ships, but we retired 19 naval vessels. So we're going in the wrong like the completely wrong direction. The Chinese delivered somewhere in the ballpark of 30 ships. Their fleet size is around 370. They'll be at 450 before you know it. But the commercial market is where that discrepancy lies. Even larger, right? They delivered over a thousand commercial ships last year. The United States built five.

Jason: Five.

Dino: 1 2 3 4 5.

Jason: 2 3 4 5. One hand.

Dino: So if a conflict actually kicks off, and we saw this in the US in World War II where we had the production capacity where we're building thousands of vessels every year. If a conflict kicks off, that commercial capacity isn't going to go to building cargo containers anymore. It's all going to flip to defense capacity and it's going to be building for what the Chinese Communist Party needs to to win a conflict. And that's what we have to be building towards. That's what we're doing at Seronic. That's why we're thinking, okay, how do we build mass? How do we build scale in whatever it is that we do?

Jason: And so, how do you do it, Vib? I would think and listen I'm a neopight here but if these are autonomous ships well you can remove things like you don't need beds you you don't need a commissary and you don't need uh latrines and I don't know what percentage of a corsair or battleship are there to uh support humans on the ship but I got to think it's half the mass of it is to is to keep humans on it am I directionally correct

Vib: I think half is a little half is a little excessive but there is a significant percentage of the components, the cost, the labor that actually goes into catering to human beings on board. Um, I would say at a high level, you're really reducing the complexity of the entire product, right? Um, you don't need to worry about a separate electrical system for humans. You don't need to worry about, as we mentioned, doors, bathroom, stairs, etc. Um, and then at the end of the day, you can actually start to end optimize a lot of different things. So even if you look at Corsair for example, you know, if you were to buy a commercial 24T boat, it's unlikely to go a thousand nautical miles. Um it's also unlikely to drive and have the control authority um of the boat that we've built here. Um because you don't have again, you don't have to worry about you know a person feeling uh you know you know taking in the middle of the oceans. Yeah. Um and so you can actually optimize across a bunch of different areas. Naval architecture, the speed, range and payload of the craft itself. Um, and then again reduce a lot of the complexity where you're removing subsystems that are meant for humans.

Jason: Yeah. And the Corsair, which is my favorite ship just based on the name. I I believe for my research this me was originally meant like a pirate ship or a privateeering ship, but it's is it now standard lingo that that's a 24 ft boat and and has a certain profile? Do you know? Is that is that how these designations come about the names of these ships?

Dino: I mean, I wouldn't say that Corsair is now universal 24 foot autonomous surface vessel. It's the name of our product lines and we chose it uh very purposefully and we chose all our names purposefully. Even the name of the company, I mean, we were talking about, you know, our Greek heritage before the show and where that came from. You know, the Seranic Gulf is a Gulf off the coast of Athens where the Battle of Salamis happened. It's one of the most famous naval battles in history. came after the battle of Thermopoly or the famous stand of the spar 300 Spartans and it was the naval battle between um the Greeks and the Persians where the Greeks were wildly on mesh. The the Persians had much much larger ships. They had a much larger fleet and the Greeks were able to lure them into this narrow straight and use smaller more maneuverable products to ultimately uh defeat the Persians.

Jason: Now cost is part of this uh in terms of these ships in the field and the number of ships. My understanding of our contemporary China is that they don't build a lot of big ships. They build a lot of ships. So they've got a lot of smaller and very varied number of ships if I'm correct there. Then the cost becomes the issue because building a bunch of aircraft carriers I keep hearing that supersonics are going to take out all these uh aircraft carriers in the first 15 minutes. Vib is is that true what we hear that hey we need smaller ships faster ships and what is the cost of something like you know the Corsair that you used on this incredible mission.

Vib: Yeah, I would say, you know, at a high level, the goal is mass, right? Um like large scale attritable mass. And yeah, if an aircraft carrier takes 10 years to build and $13 billion, like you're not really achieving that. Um I think there's always going to be like kind of a role and responsibility for for a craft like that. Um but ultimately, you're right, like if you're big and and you know, very obvious to find and you can find you from space, etc. um you know that's that's a real risk when you reduce you know the the overall cost of like just doing things in the ocean right like that's ultimately where the autonomous piece comes in um you can deploy at scale you can monitor a large larger body of water with less people um and ultimately what you're what you're really getting to is removing people from harm's way right um so what when we think about designing and kind of thinking through the price points of these things the comparison to Mancraft isn't really um necessarily even comparable as you get into larger ships, right? Um for for us, it's really a question of like what is the cost that you would typically have to use humans for and how much is that actually being reduced by having a large autonomous fleet.

Jason: Corsair's a million bucks or something. Do you know the the Corsair costs about a million?

Dino: Yeah, I want to go back to we'll get that. I want to go back to one thing you said earlier and it's like China's building both very large ships and a lot of ships. They're right. They're doing it all. Right. And when we think about, okay, how do you actually change the paradigm for the US Navy, it's let's actually boil it down to unit economics. Let's think about this like a commercial company. How do you Viv mentioned like payloads? What are you actually moving on the ocean? One of the most important metrics is VLS tubes. So vertical launch systems. Basically, how many big tomahawk missiles can you carry on a ship? It's how much firepower are you fielding. So, let's use an example of that, right? A destroyer, naval destroyer costs about $3 billion. Takes three billion three billion. And I'm not even getting into the sustainment and maintenance costs over the life cycle of the destroyer. I'm just talking about what it costs to buy. If we do that, it's 10 10 billion over 30, 40 years. $3 billion, 6 to 8 years to make. You carry you you can field about 96 VLS tubes. So, I'm going to round up. I'm going to make that 100 for easy math. So on average, you're fielding somewhere between 10 to 15 VLS tubes per year at a cost of 30 million per tube. Marauder, I won't give you the exact price or cost, but can reduce that cost by a significant amount, but we're building 20 Marauders for we're going to be building 20 marauders per year at our shipyard in Louisiana. Right? So now you can field, we can carry the equivalent of 16 VLS tubes on the back of that 180 foot fully autonomous ship. So now you can field 320 VLS tubes per year as opposed to 15. And you could do it at a fraction of the cost. This is how you actually save the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and you get more capability into the field faster.

Jason: I mean, that's just extraordinary thinking about it. What do you lose by not having humans on it? You know, are we going to be faced with a moment in time where these are kind of like uh drones, you know, where there's no pilots. They're just pilots in a shipping container dropped somewhere either, you know, in the middle of America and doing it remote like we've done. Is that the future of warfare with these ships or and and what do you lose when you don't have a team there on the boat? What is the criticism, valid or invalid, that people have of unmanned ships?

Dino: Well, I'm going to let V talk about the way that we're using software because I think the criticism to your question is, well, what happens if we're in the middle of the ocean and the ship breaks down? Who's going to fix it? It's not it's not that we don't need this technology. It's folks that aren't used to technology saying, "Oh, how's the technology actually going to work?" And that's what we're proving out every single day. To your point of like what do you lose by not having people on them? Look, it all it all boils down to the mission, right? And this is why we partner so closely with the Navy. This is why we work with actual operators. It's like what are you using? What are you delivering? If the mission is long range fires, we're packing a bunch of VLS tubes on the back of Marauder. You actually don't lose anything, right? you're just delivering those capabilities into the field while keeping people out of harm's way. And that's a very very important part of the equation. But if our ships, let's be clear, like if our boats and ships aren't accomplishing the mission, then they're not relevant. They're not going to be used in the first place. And there is going to be some mix. I don't know what that mix is. I don't think anybody really knows what that mix is of manned and unmanned ships. So what you're going to see in the Navy is like a hybrid Navy. So the things that you're missing from having people on the ships, forward deployed decision makers in the environment, you can actually have out there onman ships, but you're using unmanned ships to put into combat areas and conflict areas to keep those people very safe.

Jason: Fib, take us through the production of these. How do you achieve speed at it? you know, uh, friend of the pod, Elon Musk, with the Teslas. Over time, he eventually built the full stack. In the beginning, if you had a Tesla, you would look at the the shifter and you'd be like, "Hey, that looks like my Mercedes." And that's because they had their steering column from Mercedes, one of the early investors. The HVAC was from somebody else. But eventually, he had materials coming in one side of the factory, cars coming out the other, and he made every single thing in that car. He was now no longer dependent on any third party manufacturers or a supply chain, you know, and famously the HVAC, I think in the Model 3 and Y when it came out reduced massively the drain on the battery, right? So, it's purpose-built for that mission. So, I'm assuming you're doing that from first principles, but what what's the secret to this rapid production and lowerc cost production?

Vib: Yeah, listen, I think there's, you know, within the ship building industry at large, there's a bunch of different challenges of of why the production isn't as high as it should be. And one of those core reasons, and the Navy's talked about this extensively, is is investing in the supply chain, right? Um, when you don't when you only build five commercial ships a year, your gen set manufacturers, the marine engine manufacturers also don't have to produce at a at a very high rate. So one of the things that we get the luxury of doing u by being vertically integrated is that we get to work with these manufacturers directly do non-recurring engineering work invest in really digitizing a lot of the components that historically have been very analog right um you know you asked earlier like what do people what do the people do on the ships like what are they going to do if if the ships are autonomous well when you think about you know Dina mentioned the life cycle of these ships are 30 years you think about a ship that was built 30 years ago you know you have people that are doing extremely manual things in the engine room that today should be extremely trivial to automate through software. Um, and so a lot of that work actually gets completely absorbed by the software stack and so you don't have to worry about it. Um, and as we choose components, we invest in the supply chain. We invest in invest in the industrial base. We actually help bring all of these analog components that for a long time were you know meant to be operated by humans. We give them software APIs. We make sure that they can be controlled by you know MCP or software stack somewhere else and can be you know remotely accessed and whatnot. Um,

Vib: so the complexity is going to go down massively when you're building one of these. Yeah,

Dino: absolutely. Yeah. And and you know, frankly, I don't think the the person who's sitting in the engine room is super thrilled about it anyway.

Jason: No, not a great idea.

Vib: You're actually changing the um you're democratizing the decision-m, right? Like now there's going to be you have more mass out in the ocean. More sailor is going to be making decisions about what those what that mass is going to be doing and where assets are going to be instead of worrying about, you know, coolant pressure in an engine, right? Um, and so, you know, when we think about the the actual design, there's there's a lot of different variables there. There's some components that are commercial off the shelves, right? Elon in the early days, um, from a compute perspective, they had to invest in A6, right? The comput stack wasn't there to run, you know, large models and run inference at the speeds and power budgets that they wanted to. In 2026, it's a totally different game, right? Um, and so there's there's a lot of different parts of the supply chain that, you know, sometimes we're looking at, you know, investing in the industrial base and making sure that, you know, our engine manufacturers and genet manufacturers are keeping up. Um, on the other side, there's particular components that we're like, hey, the marine industry actually hasn't had this level of investment in in a long time, so we're going to have to build this in house. Um, you know, a couple of examples around that are related to a lot of the electronics, related to the sensors and compute. Um, but you know, bunch of different things there that help us build and assemble quickly.

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Jason: Let's talk a little bit about Adino on the business side. How you work with the Department of War, formerly known as the Department of Defense. Emil Michaels and a bunch of the folks over there are really focused on getting startups essentially like you are uh more contracts but you also are moving out I assume of this cost plus world and you're just figuring out hey what what's the right price for this and take us inside that paradigm shift. You have these primes and then you have these up starts and it seems like based on history the incumbents sometimes don't uh take this lying down. So take us inside the paradigm shift from cost plus to what these I guess they call the new primes like yourself and Andrew are doing.

Dino: Yep. And I'll just define cost plus everybody that's listening basically means hey we're going to go build you something Mr. government and however long that takes, however much it costs, you're just going to pay us 10 to 15% on top of that. So, I'm actually incentivized and I'm not saying there's malicious intent, but I'm incentivized to make it take longer and cost more because if it costs $100 million, well then I only make $15 million. But if it costs a billion dollars, then as a company I make $150 million. So, there's this perverse incentive to drive up cost. Now, that's not the only reason the industry is where it is today, but we're we're very encouraged by the push from the administration um to adopt things at speed and scale and to do that quickly and differently and to move away from cost. Plus, you hit it like we invest our own capital. To date, we're we're just about four years old. We've raised $2.5 billion in private capital. We're pouring that into R&D. I remember when we decided to build Marauder again 180 foot ship. Viv and I were talking and it's like who who's crazy enough to go and build a ship on Irad? And it's like well well we are cuz that's what the country needs. That's what it demands. That's what we're going to go do. And our investors are giving us the capital to go do it. They're actually entrusting us with that capital. That's the reverse of what's happening in the large primes where their investors are kind of demanding share buybacks. They're saying give us our capital back. So the country very much needs us to build for needs companies like us to build for the future. Um, and when you look at what the administration is doing, even just in ship building, just recognizing that ship building is a critical strategic industry, right? The president, one of the first things he did was put out the maritime executive order that was followed with the maritime action plan, right? There's ships act sitting in Congress. You had the Secretary of War give a whole speech on defense acquisition reform, talking about how we're going to push the department to be better, to move faster, to work with companies like us that are building on firm fixed price contracts that are focused on delivering at speed and scale and driving down cost for the taxpayer. So all of that is extremely encouraging. But I want to be I also want to be clear here on the flip side. We're in the early days, Jason. Like very early days. When you look at the overall Defense Department of Wars budget, 1% 1% goes to autonomous systems. That's not nearly enough. Make that 5%. Make that I don't know the right mix, but it needs to go up and it needs to go up quickly.

Vib: I'll just add one more thing that um that you know historically ship building you know the design is bifurcated from the builder right so the design someone gets paid to do the design um and the groundup general assembly and all of that and gets handed off to a totally different person to go build a ship um and I think there's a statistic out there that's like 70% of sequence critical components on on some Navy ships are sole source suppliers like single source suppliers um and so to Dino's point it's not just that you're incentivized to to take longer it's that you're not incentivized to change that necessarily um because you know that you're still going to get paid. Um whereas like from our perspective when you own the design, you own the shipyard, you know, software engineers, ship builders, naval architects, and welders can all all sit down and eat lunch together in the yard. Um there's end to end optimizations that you get that, you know, the system from a from a historical perspective just wasn't set up to gain.

Jason: Yeah. Let's do a little uh look at what happened in the straight of Hormuz. Uh we weren't able to control it completely. doesn't seem like anybody in history has been able to uh control it. If we were to fast forward and you had your entire fleet, you had let's assume uh not unlimited but massive capacity, how would you or would you be able to secure something like the straight of Hormuz with these autonomous vehicles? What might that look like? Take us into a you know scenario five years from now. What would it take?

Dino: That's the type of scenario that that we're building for. I think before talking about the scenario, let's talk about the straight of Hormuz itself, right? The environment, the part of the world like what neighborhood is it in, right? It it connects. So you have the Persian Gulf which is 200 miles wide which narrows down to a 20 mile wide strip which is the straight of Hormuz and then it connects to the Indian Ocean and connects these large oil producing countries to global markets. On the one side of the Persian Gulf, you have, you know, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Oman. And on the other side of the Persian Gulf, the north side is all controlled by Iran. So now Iran is saying, "Well, how are we going to disrupt traffic in the straight of Hormuz?" Well, it's only a 20 mile wide stretch. I can use missiles. I can use fast attack vessels. I can use naval mines. I can use cheap drones because I don't have a large distance to cover. I can launch these things anywhere from shore. So, it becomes this completely chaotic environment that sending in naval destroyers into or trying to get commercial ships pass becomes extremely dangerous. So, using large numbers of autonomous vessels, you can combat these threats in completely different ways. You can offer scale, persistence, and risk reduction in ways that, you know, man vessels just can't. And again, we won't get into too many of the specifics on the types of operations that we're building towards, but autonomy is a way to counter these effects, these these um these effects that are overwhelen meant to be countered by traditional man ships alone. We can counter that with scale and technology and keep people out of harm's way.

Jason: Well, you have some small ships. So yeah, you got the cutless and you got the spy glass in this uh you know buildout. Those are 6 foot 15t or whatever.

Dino: We actually started with those and I and I'll give you an interesting story. We actually don't build those aren't we haven't productized those. Those were great subscale demonstrators but our real flagship product is Corsair. And when you talk about again the the scenario in the straight of four moves and what type of volume can we bring there like it's not only five years in the future. We could build 2,000 Corsair per year right now at our manufacturing facility in Austin.

Jason: So I I know you live in Austin. We'd love to show you around. When you see it when you see it, it actually comes to life. You're like, "Oh, wait. We can actually build thousands of these vessels every single year."

Jason: How many would you need? th000 5,000 in the straight hormonous I don't think it's a 20 mile wide straight

Dino: so you're just going to and and they this is their offensive strategy they have these speedboats that they use I don't know what they're called but

Jason: they call them fast attack vessels

Dino: fast attack vessels these guys essentially are kamicazi right they just zip in you kn no regard for safety in their life etc and they will attack

Vib: they're using fast attack vessels they're using cheap drones so you have to be able to count have counter UAS capabilities. They're you they're using mines. They're just floating mines into the straight without regard for what those mines may set off. So, it's a really complicated environment that you need to bring a lot of capabilities towards.

Jason: Yeah. But it sounds like VIB with artificial intelligence, which is the next card that I think is going to turn over. You put these Corsaires out there. Could they with AI be able to, you know, be using satellite data from planet or whoever is providing it to just and or military satellites and just zip out there and know, say, somebody's putting out some mines. Hey, somebody's putting out some of these fast attack vehicles. Just intercept them. And now they have an actual cost, human life, and a limited amount of resources. And hey, we're America and we have you guys building ships at scale. They don't have this ability to build AI based ships. So talk about what AI on these ships could do eventually.

Vib: Yeah. So I would say today, you know, there's a bunch of different, you know, machine learning applications that run on our boat today. Um there's heavy amounts of compute on all of our crafts. Um that allows people to have tons of capability, whether it's, you know, the navigation and kind of the autopilot or self-driving of the craft itself or compute for payloads, whether that's counter UAS, as Dino mentioned, or or a bunch of other things really. Um there's a variety of different mission sets. The end state here is that you know you have a distributed fleet you know across the ocean that you know in variable like listen the ocean is a tumultuous place like by default without war zone like the ocean's still bad um you know saltwater hits antennas you lose you lose comms uh so there's a bunch of different communications on this there's a bunch of different sensors um all of those things kind of areworked together with ML with a bunch of different software components of the software stack to make sure that you can basically translate intent from a commander or a sailor and then result in a mission outcome.

Jason: Let's talk Dino a little bit about the adversary China and they have started to put weapons on robots. I'm assuming that they're doing the same if they're willing to put it on a you know one of those dog robots like the spot robots. They're putting weapons on them. They're demonstrating it and whatever they're demonstrating they've already got in production. Let's just call it what it is. And they're not signing some UN treaty to not put autonomous and AI weapons. This is a different type of adversary. And I'm sure North Korea and and other bad guys are doing similar things. We have um I believe treaties where we're not allowed to put weapons and use AI based weapons. Am I correct about that? In the West here,

Vib: there is a autonomous weapon system standard called 3009 that basically outlines exactly how AI can be used on an on an autonomous system. Yeah,

Jason: tell us all about that. Like or cuz this is the Robocop scenario. This is the robotic soldier or the robotic boat that's able to engage the enemy without a human, you know, if it loses comms or to do a kamicazi mission, which seems like something we might have to do. These are things we might have to do, Dino, versus the Chinese because they're not signing these treaties. They are not thinking ethically. They are not respecting the Declaration of Human Rights. They've got their own playbook. Yep. Yeah. And I think the the important thing to to articulate here is especially when you use the kind of Robocop example and just to kind of quell people's fears a little bit is even in that example where we're sending boats off the off of Taiwan and we're in the Taiwan Strait and they're engaging, we're still using artificial intelligence to bifurcate between an enemy vessel and a friendly vessel, between a non-combatant and a combatant. And people are still making the decisions and setting the mission intent. It's just government policy that's setting, okay, when are you authorized to engage versus not. Artificial intelligence actually just gives the military the opportunity to one operate at a greater scale and then operate more efficiently. These aren't robots actually just making decisions on when to go to war or not.

Jason: Got it. So it says, hey, this is a bad guy. Hey, our recommendation is to, you know, neutralize it. And then a human has to say, okay, neutralize it. But if you're up against an adversary who says, hey, no, no, we built this thing. Anybody comes in to the blockade in Taiwan, which, you know, we think is uh, you know, a pretty significant nonzero probability in our lifetime. If you're up against somebody who says, "I'm just going to have these ships kill anything that's not our ship." Period. Full stop. Then we lose, don't we?

Dino: No. Because the the technologies the all you're doing is putting policy thresholds and approval thresholds into the technology. There's a real world scenario where doomsday scenario, we go to World War II, the Taiwan Strait is a complete conflict. Exactly what you said. Our commanders are going to make that same judgment, right? and they be like, "Hey, if anything, there's no fishing boats out here right now."

Jason: There's no cruise ships coming through.

Dino: If you're not if you're not a friendly vessel, you're an enemy vessel. And that's that. And our technologies actually enables that. What we were talking about earlier is like the autonomy, the artificial intelligence, and everything else is there. And you're building the policies into the software based on government procedures. And when those authorizations need to be in place, those authorizations will change based on the threat environment that we're in.

Jason: Is the plan for you to sell to our allies? And what are the rules there? Because it sounds like we need as many ships for our navy as we can get, but if you can get up to capacity, then hey, the French, the Germans, and the English have essentially just stopped making ships, right? and they they they have very deprecated militaries. My understanding is the only people who are really doing a great job at this are the folks in South Korea which I believe are building but one ship for us. So maybe you could talk about the other uh top countries in the world, democracies and our allies and what their capability is and then your ability to help arm them and sell to them.

Dino: I mean very very focused on our allies and partners. If you talk to the Department of War, if you talk to the United States Navy, they actually want our allies and partners to have these capabilities as well. This is going to be a combined effort, right? We mentioned earlier that China has 57% of the world's ship building capacity. That's not limited to just that one industry. We could go industry by industry and talk about their manufacturing might and their manufacturing dominance. Um, so you really do need a combined effort. We need our allies and partners to have this technology. We're talking to um our allies in Asia, obviously, in Europe, and in the Middle East right now about getting not only our our products there, but also how do we stand up, you know, domestic production in those countries. How do we give them the sovereign capability? How do we have production lines overseas so that they're already forward deployed if we get into a conflict in the first place?

Jason: Pretty amazing stuff. And you have an announcement today, I understand, that we're going to share with the all-in audience for the first time.

Dino: That's right. So, we've been working on Port Alpha for a long time now. So, Port Alpha, just for the listeners, is our shipyard of the future. This is going to bring American ship building back to a place that we haven't seen since World War II. Um, to be clear, we're already operating a shipyard. We have a shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana. That's where we're building Marauder. We're ramping that up to 20 Marauder. We can bring that up to 50 marauders per year, every single year. And that is a 100 acre shipyard. What we're doing at Port Alpha is 10xing that. We're looking at a shipyard that is well over a thousand acres. We've been doing this search for over a year now on what is the ideal location for this shipyard. Where are we going to find the right partner, the right land, the right workforce, the right community to be a part of? Um, and we're proud to announce that we found that in Brownsville, Texas. So, we're we're headquartered in Austin. We're going to be basing Port Alpha in Brownsville. We're going to start on a 800 acre plot of land, which in and of itself, 800 acres is now the largest shipyard in the United States.

Dino: Just to give you a sense of scale, we have the opportunity over time to scale that to 4,000 acres. We're going to invest billions of dollars into this project. We're going to create 10,000 jobs over the next 10 years and we're going to bring ship building in this country back again to a place that we haven't seen since World War II. And we're just grateful for the partnership from the state, from Governor Abbott, from Cameron County, and then the city and the port of Brownsville for making this happen.

Jason: I mean, this is one of the great things, Vib, about being based in Texas. They let us build things in Texas. Yeah. As a recent resident here, it's pretty amazing to live in a state where the state's like, "What do you want to build? How can we help?" as opposed to, "Hey, uh, you know, f off like they told uh Elon in California." And he got the message received reply uh to that lunatic. So, maybe you could talk a little bit about operating VIB in Texas and the crazy support you get from Abbott and everybody.

Vib: One of the uh questions that we used to get like back in the day was, "You guys are a maritime company. There's no water in Austin. What are you guys doing there? Um, and I would say like, you know, Austin has this like magical um kind of nexus of both digital and physical labor forces. Like you can find software talent, you can find AI talent, you can find designers. Um, but you can also tap into, you know, the industrial base from San Antonio, from the oil and gas industry in Houston. Um, and when you marry those two together, like you can actually start to co-design these things across the entire stack, right? I mentioned earlier like typically ship design and ship build is is totally independent. Um but with port alpha we get the luxury of like green field designing what the the manufacturing plant for ships should look like. Um and so you can design the you can you can optimize the design as ship for the yard and the design of the yard for the ship. And it's very similar to kind of like you know how how companies today like do hardware software co-design on chips, right? You design the compiler and they stick together to optimize both for for the other. Um, and we can we have the luxury of being able to do that for for ships here. And um, I I can't think of a better place to do it than Texas.

Jason: Well, and uh, Starbase is right down the block. SpaceX obviously and Elon's made that work. And I think it's like a four what, maybe four, five, six hour drive down to the coast. Yeah. So you guys can either zip there on a PJ or you can just drive. So it's pretty straightforward.

Dino: It's pretty straightforward. It's easy for logistics. What what SpaceX has did has done in Brownsville is incredible. I think what Brownsville has done for SpaceX and helping them build out build the community down there. Um, we were very impressed, very very excited to be basing Port Alpha there. And look, at the end of the day, it's the people that are going to make this work. It's it's the labor force. It's the workforce. Viv mentioned it earlier, and we can talk about, you know, why the American ship building industry has declined so much, but it's the supply chain and the workforce that has suffered the most. And so like one of the things we focus on is really how do we rebuild that workforce? How do we upskill existing talent to advance manufacturing? How do we take somebody that's building a car at Ford and get them building ships very very efficiently, very quickly, right? and that actually all starts with the design. If you design a ship from the ground up from a first principles approach to be more simplistic to be designed and manufactured at scale, then you can put in the training, the work instruction, the processes and everything else where hey, let's go make this much faster. Let's train, let's build the workforce. And then let's be honest, like you have to make it cool for young people to go work in a shipyard again. You have to you have to pay them good wages. like every one of our employees, every welder, every pipe fitter, um they have good wages, the same benefits as our Silicon Valley software engineers, they have equity in our company, um they're they're fired up. Like I mentioned our our shipyard in Louisiana. Like people are fired up down there. And it's not just the workforce, it's the community. Like some of the some of the stories I hear when I'm down there are like so encouraging. People are like, I'm wearing my hat in the grocery store and people are coming up to me saying, "You guys are kicking butt. Keep building ships because nobody else in the country is doing what we're doing."

Jason: And these are great salaries. People are getting paid significant amounts of money obviously to work in manufacturing at your company at uh down at Starbase. And now you have these two incredible companies. I I don't know if there's any other ones in Brownsville, but this is a small community. There's only like 200,000 people down there. This is going to be an incredible boom town. Oh, it's going to be incredible. SpaceX, you know, and I mentioned earlier like the cost of building ships in the United States. And the United States just isn't competitive in the commercial market. And again, we can go through the specifics and what happened over time, five to six times the cost of building a ship in China. We think just by investing in product and processes and new shipyards, we can cut the cost of a ship in the United States in half. So if you have a ship that costs $300 million, we can get that under $150 million. And that's not by simply just paying people less. We're paying people more, but we're investing in our product. We're investing in the process. We're designing the product to be built that way in the first place. So, we're making the investments that are needed for long-term sustainability and to rebuild the workforce.

Jason: All right. If people want to come work with you, VIB, how can they apply their career page and what are you looking for? What what talent do you need to come do this incredibly patriotic duty and go work at Seronic?

Vib: Yeah, I mean sur uh we have a careers page. Um you can you reach out on Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever you want. Um we're we're hiring pretty aggressively right now. I would say that, you know, the biggest thing, you know, we look for generally speaking is, you know, especially in 2026 when, you know, Chad GBT and Claude are getting so much better every year. Um, it's pretty important right now to be fairly, you know, neuroplastic. Um, you know, be ready to adapt for what the future looks like. Computing is changing. Um, you know, there's there's going to be agents that can help you on the manufacturing floor to to assemble faster if you have an issue. uh there's all these digital systems that are they're kind of changing the paradigm here. I mean, when we first got to Golfcraft um in in done in Louisiana, a lot of the processes were were pretty much pen and pen and paper, right? And that's pretty common across most shipyards. Um so, like kind of bringing that into the 21st century really quickly. Um I mean, it's just going to require people to be um thoughtful um adapt to the future and um and really be passionate and excited and and about about kind of building the future.

Jason: Yeah. go to the uh website s ar nic.com join the mission 300 jobs listed on the website there's something there for everybody and uh listen just as a fellow Greek dino uh you know we were obviously the cradle of innovation and or science math technology art and everything happened but we were also the great warriors uh and we patrolled the sea obviously Greece has a lot of coastlines so you're you're doing our Greek u brothers and sisters and ancestors Greek has a lot of Greek has a lot of coastline and they're actually big in the shipping industry. So now they are big. Yeah.

Dino: So now I hear more more often than not now. Oh, it's good to see a Greek in building ships.

Jason: So now I hear more more often than not now. Oh, it's good to see a Greek in building ships.

Jason: I you know what? I can sleep now at night. I was very worried about the straight of Hormuz. I was worried about the Pacific theater, the South China Sea. Dino, now that I know that my Greek brother is on top of this, my head's going to hit the pillow. I'm going to go right. I'm going to sleep like a baby tonight. I know you got us covered. Uh thanks so much guys and uh sincerely uh on behalf of all Americans like thank you for doing this work. You know this is something where we really need technologists and entrepreneurs uh to really help us innovate because we're falling behind and we're the good guys in this. We're the ones who are spreading democracy and freedom and protecting that. The only thing in the world that isn't trending in the right direction, man, if you look at lifespans, if you look at, you know, infant mortality, if you look at uh people's standard of living, everything is trending in the world in the right direction except the spread of democracy, which has been on the decline in our lifetime. Let that sink in, folks. More people living under authoritarians than democracies. It's it's a modest amount, but you've seen the statistics, I'm sure, Vib and and Dino. And we need to have a great military. We need to have this advanced technology if we're going to maintain uh the number of people living under a democracy of in and freedom and hopefully increase it. A lot of bad guys out there and uh you know just thank you so much for doing this work.

Dino: That's right. Well, thank you for having us and I I will end on a positive note where look we're seeing that starting to turn around in a really big way. It's not just Sironic. You mentioned Anduril. there SpaceX and Palanteer before that and now there's just a big wave a big push into defense tech because people realize the importance and the magnitude of the moment that we are living in right now. I I tell our team I'm like this is our generation's version of the space race.

Jason: Make make no mistake about it and we cannot lose. So that's how hard we're working at. That's how we're working with a sense of urgency and there's a lot of other companies into the coming into the space that are working with that same sense of urgency. So I am I am very optimistic. I know this country can do it. When we put our minds and we get a collective effort behind something, nobody can beat us. So

Jason: nobody can. Yeah. Nobody can beat us. And listen, if you were thinking of going, listen, there's no no dig to anybody, but if you're thinking about going and optimizing an ad network at some big tech company, like it's incredibly boring and it's incredibly meaningful. You'll get 20, 30 years into your career and you'll say, "What did I do?" Go work at Seronic. You'll get couple of years into your career and you say, "I'm doing important work."

Dino: That's right. That's right. Every person that walks through the door every single day is quite literally changing the world and we remind them of that and they they know it.

Jason: Yeah. All right, Vib Dino, thank you so much for coming on and we'll see you next time on the All-In Interview. [music]

I'm: [music] going all in.