“There's a SEAL, well-known SEAL that came to help us evaluate these and fly these things. … He's four standard deviations on this thing. I can't rely on his judgment about which drones to buy for that reason. He wants to fly the drone, do backflips, and land it on a dinner plate. I don't need that. We want the drone that takes care of itself.”

ChinaTalk · Geopolitics & World Affairs · October 2026

Metz says one mistake at the first drone trials was having too many special forces operators judge the drones. The aim is aircraft an ordinary soldier can learn in a few weeks, with the drone carrying most of the mental load. He expects jamming on the battlefield to make autonomy essential.

ChinaTalk · 2026-10-17 Listen to the episode → More from Travis Metz → More Geopolitics & World Affairs quotes →

Transcript

ChinaTalk Around 58:42 into the episode

Travis Metz

…to fly them. This is going to be at most a few weeks' school. We're going to put enough technology on these drones that they take over most of the cognitive load. One of the mistakes we made in Gauntlet One, with all respect to Justin's heritage here, is too many special forces folks were there.

Justin McIntosh

…in their basement and know how to do it. And that's what they live to do. And they're going to be the guy that shows up and they're going to be like, this thing is great. And then it's going to get into a private's hands and they're going to be like, I don't know how to make it take off.

Travis Metz

Yeah. I won't use the name because of OPSEC, but there's a SEAL, well-known SEAL that came to help us evaluate these and fly these things. And he's smart. He's thought about drones a ton. He's really helpful for people like me. And then you see him fly it. And you're like, oh, this is not the guy. This is Maverick. He's Maverick, right? He's a top gun. Like, he's exquisitely good at this. He's in the top. He's four standard deviations on this thing. I can't rely on his judgment about which drones to buy for that reason. Like, I…

Speaker 2

Can we talk about this for a second? The idea

Brian Clark

of like inference on the

Travis Metz

edge, I mean, that's basically been like cell

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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