get started with internet and voice for $64.99 a month. and ask how to add securityedge™. or, ask how to get up to an $800 prepaid card. this week, defending the nation's infrastructure and national treasure against drones. a tv manufacturer navigates supply chain and finally the flying car we were all promised. we sit down with silicon valley valley genius, sebastian thrune. that's all this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. around about this time of year, we warn young people and some not-so-young people there are a lot of rules about flying drones. because come december, there are a lot of new drone flyers in the

sky. a simple consumer-level drone can have a devastating impact with an airplane or a helicopter. but more and more organizations are worrying about something far more scary. drones that were deliberately weaponized with explosives or other deadly cargo. a san francisco company called d-drone is working on drone detection and mitigation. i'm looking forward to hearing what mitigation means in this context. mary lou smulders is a leader and says the nation's political infrastructure are unprotected and overconfident. thank you for joining us. let's start with the threat. the fbi revealed a short time ago, a couple of days ago, they knew of an attempted drone attack on a power substation in pennsylvania. so this is really the first time we have documented proof that people were using drones to do something nefarious. >> that's exactly right. in fact, it was the first drone-based attack on u.s. soil

that we're aware of. and building on that, i think, it's safe to say that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of imagination, or frankly, even effort, to create something like the next 9/11 attack, which did require quite a bit of imagination. just imagine. >> yeah, it seems fairly obvious, if i'm a bad guy, and we're not giving any bad guys' secrets away here. this has occurred to lots of bad guys. drones seem to be a very easy way of getting that in. okay, so you protect certain places from drones. tell me the process. how do you detect a drone, then how do you derp it's a threat. and how do you end that threat? >> that's a great question. so you're exactly right. the first thing you have to do is detect it. the next step is to identify, friend or foe, what kind of drone is it? does it have a payload?

what kind of range is it? how far can it go? and track it. where is it and where is the pilot? we do that through a series of censor inputs. we have our own radio frequency capability, but we also bring in many different kinds of censors. we create a lot of time creating an open platform, and then building on that with an aiml, artificial intelligence machine learning capability to eliminate false positives. you don't want someone crying wolf every time they might see a drone. and ultimately be able to tell you, friend or foe, through recognized or not recognized drones. >> so -- but you're not setting up radar stations, right? these are maybe audio censors that are detecting or radio frequency censors that are looking for -- because we know what frequency drones work at. >> right. we do use radio frequency censors. and we use triangulation to

locate those drones, as well as the pilot. you ask the second piece of the question. now, i see the drone, what do i do about it? and we have that problem today. often, we see them too close to the critical infrastructure that we are concerned about. but either way, once you see the drone, what can you do about it? locating the pilot is going to be the first and most important step for most security officers today, to be able to, like a stranger entering a plant, go and have a conversation with them and talk to them about what they may or may not be doing. whether they are nefarious, or what we in the industry call the careless and the clueless. >>t ones that are simply flying don't mean to be in a place they shouldn't be, but are perhaps too close to an airport or a power station. >> and then, can you end that threat? can you jam a frequency or how -- let's say that we have determined that this thing is a threat. we haven't found the pilot yet, but this is a critical threat at this moment.

can you knock that drone out of the sky? >> do you live in orange? >> of course. >> the short answer is that inside the united states, drones are given the same protection as airplanes. so unless you are a -- in a very special situation and work for, say, the fbi, you cannot mitigate that drone with knocking it out of the sky. there are ways to do it. our company does offer that, but that is more in a warfare type of situation. >> okay. but -- outside of the united states, you also hinted at that. but inside the united states, even if i had, say, a critical infrastructure -- actually, let's think of a prison. a prison yard, a prison can't, either through a kinetic way or through radio frequencies, knock that drone down, even though st hovering over the yard.

>> that's correct. so what do you do about it? right, that's the big question. and you're exactly right. prisons are one of the biggest industries facing this issue today. drones are cheap, easy to fly, and have bigger and bigger payloads. there was over the summer a 50-pound drop in a prison yard that was documented. so the idea is, you need to detect it early and far away enough, just like any security issue to give the security team time to react. once it's over the prison yard, you're too late. and that's what we do is help to detect the drone much further away, giving the security teams time to react. >> and because air space law in the united states is pretty complex, i can't -- well, i could set up your stuff, your equipment in my backyard to detect a drone coming, but i can't do anything about it. the air space above my house is sort of a public venue.

>> again, there are certain privacies that you are allowed -- >> particularly under california law. >> right. >> and you absolutely could set up -- we have vips that have this kind of solution in place, but it then requires cooperation with local law enforcement to help mitigate that threat to your home. >> now, airports are a particular worry. i mentioned that off the top. there was a serious of drone problems near gatwick in london. people may be surprised to understand that airports, what you think of as full of radar, can't necessarily detect drones. >> right. again, absolutely. and gatwick is interesting, because clearly, the worry is human life threat. but what's underdocumented is that over 60 million pounds was lost in operations over the three days that they were on again, off again. and the faa is actively working this problem.

they're counting drone sightings. and that's purely visual drone sightings, across the u.s. and they're noting 74% -- we're on track for a 74% increase in drone activity across airports in the u.s., based purely on that visual sighting. so, again, what can you do about it? the issue with radars is, they have many false positives. they see a bird, they see a plane, they see a drone, it's really hard for a pure radar solution to be able to differentiate between what is a drone and what is not a drone. and that's where you need a specialist solution, like dedrone to come and give you that information. >> so you know what a drone sounds like, you know how it behaves, you know what radio frequencies. that's how you're detecting them. are you working directly with drone makers on this, like dji? >> we often reverse engineer the drone frequencies and other, as

you say, tell or marks that drones give. you're exactly right. >> now, you know, one measure of how seriously people are taking your company, because there are, i'm sure, lots of start-ups doing this, is you have contracts with department of defense and other federal agencies, and cities all over the world. i mean, this is, this is something where people have found your solution and are taking it seriously. >> we do, indeed work for four of the g-7 nation governments. we're in 33 countries around the world. and as you hinted, our main industries are airports. we're at almost 20 international airports around the world. prisons. we're at over 50 prisons around the world, and the substation that you mentioned earlier, we're at over 55 critical infrastructure areas around the world. interestingly on that note, you know, if you go back to your

idea of a terrorist attack and what could happen, what's easier than if we think back to the houston incident that just happened, imagine dropping fentanyl on a stadium full of people. or almost equally detrimental, just talcum powder. >> right, that would cause the same panic, yeah. >> the same panic. so i do think, as sort of a closing thought, that it is something that, you know, fingers crossed, and knock on wood, nothing as serious has happened in the u.s. yet. but like the pennsylvania incident that you mentioned at the top, it's something that we really need to think about going forward. >> well, mary lou smulders, thank you so much. mary-lou smulders is from dedrone. thank you for joining us this morning and "press: here" will be right back

. welcome back to "press: here." when i was a kid, heck, when my parents were kids, we were promised a bunch of things for the future, and one of the main things was the flying car. and leave it to the guy behind google's self-driving car to perhaps figure it out. the kitty hawk heavy side is an electric vertical takeoff and landing and it works. sebastian thrune is one of the smartest people in silicon valley and i think the other

smart people in silicon valley might say he's smart than they are. ceo of kitty hawk currently, a company backed by larry paige. thanks for being with us. kitty hawk is obvious to most americans of where the reference is, particularly to people who like aviation. your airplane is called the heavy side. and my immediate thought was, that had something to do with the musical "cats." but apparently not. >> a little bit, because the one thing you want to do in aviation is make things lighter and lighter and lighter. so we started out pretty heavy and now down to about 400 kilograms. >> excellent. so you've got a very efficient airplane. this carries -- and it is -- are we going to call it an airplane. it's not a drone. what are we calling this thing? >> i don't quite know. i think flying car is beautiful, because there was a childhood dream, but it doesn't have wheels. it doesn't drive. >> it doesn't drive around, but you would use it to, say,

commute. >> you kind of lift up and drive in the sky. it's like a gravity shield kind of thing. so we call it -- it's a tongue twister, and no one can remember it, but electric vertical, almost like an electric helicopter, but it's more like a drone. >> it is almost like a drone. there is a person that will sit inside. is this person a passenger, a pilot, both? >> not a pilot. you're a pilot, i know this. it takes forever to be a pilot. we want these things to be autonomous. we want them to be trustworthy, just like your elevator, you don't have an elevator boy or girl anymore, or your airport train. you get inside, with your phone put in this destination and it gets you there. >> have you put people in it yet or are you still testing it? >> in the latest version, we are just about to get a person in there. maybe two people around, more than 100 different people and they loved it. >> the earlier version. that was a model that you

decided not to go with. this is a new model. what was the decision process moving on to this one? >> pushing performance. we looked at the performance of how you can fly fast and what energy you use. our most recent version is about three times as green, as the best electric car you get on the market. we fly at a third of the energy as a typical model 3. that means nor anyone who cares about things like global warming, they should really love what we do. because you can massively cut down on the energy consumed in cities. >> that is a fascinating statistic. i guess we would measure that in, what, kilowatt hours. you know, if we were trying to compare it to miles per gallon. your flying machine is more efficient, gets you to the place less than an electric car would. >> yeah, so we are at the point, so i firmly believe that the future of like daily transportation is going to be in the sky. because it's more energy efficient, but it's also safer. you have much more clearance

than other vehicles. cars are actually very unsafe. they kill more than a million people every year on this planet. and it's going to be faster, all right? so now all of a sudden, we go up to 180 miles per hour, which is roughly 10 times the average commute speed in the bay area. if you have an hour-long commute, imagine having a commute done in six minutes. how cool would that be? >> as carmakers struggle to auto mate cars, an automated flying machine is ironically easier. they're just fewer things to hit and modern-day airliners land themselves as this. >> there's an airplane that now has a button, where the pilot has like a heart attack, as passenger, you can push this button, and the aircraft lands itself safely. and it happens to not be as hard as driving a self-driving car. the sky is pretty empty, whereas the ground is pretty full. on the ground, we drive by

bicycles and kids playing around and trees grow on the ground, and all that stuff is there, but you go up 500 feet and there's virtually nothing. it's completely empty. that's something that society hasn't quite grappled that, the real estate called the sky that you can use for transportation. >> i'm counting eight propellers on this machine. what is the purpose behind that. a cessna has one propeller, a c-130 has four. you've got eight. >> it's redundancy. when you go electric, your motors become really small. cessna has this big chemical factory that turns gas into motion by burning it. we just have little tiny mag no electric motors and it gives us a a distributed redundant propulsion system, but you have eight motors, and if you lose one due to a bird strike, we have seven left and you can fly just about the same as before. >> the air force has expressed

interest in this device. is that something that you had imagined, that it be something involved with the military? i would imagine you started this as something that was going to be for commuters. >> we do this for every person. i'm a really, really big fan of the air force and the military, because i think they're important for our safety, and supporting that is important to me as a person, as an immigrant, and as a citizen of this country. and of course, the effort has provisions by which they can help us get visas and safety reviews that are different from civilian life. for example, we just did an experiment in ohio, together with the air force and nasa and the department of transportation in ohio, that we flew one of our aircraft in a way that a ground observer wasn't even seeing it anymore. that's something that is actually for an autonomous aircraft that has no person inside, a big, big, big step. it's not an acronym, beyond

visual line of sight, but it's the air force and our partners, nasa and odot has really made that possible. >> they can get things done that others can't. of course, off history of working with darpa as well. >> yeah. >> all right. >> i love darpa. >> so what do you see the end user being? let's say you have as many of these in the world as tesla does cars. in the case of tesla, we're talking about an upper middle class person, but not crazy rich, who can afford such a thing. is that about where that market fit is going to be? >> we want to build everyday flight for everyone, okay? and that means we can't be as expensive as a helicopter. helicopters cost 10, $20, $50 per mile. a car costs 50 cents per mile. you want to be at 30 cents per

mile. which gives you the benefit of a faster transportation at a lower cost. so that entire cities at some point will swap over. and when a city swaps over, you all of a sudden realize how much real estate is being used for roads. more than half of any city is roads and garages and driveways, that you won't need anymore. all of a sudden, you can have a booming real estate business using those areas for people that are currently being reserved for cars. >> you have a number of competitors who are working on the same so far thing, but you've also got a great team. you've got chris anderson, michael huerta. you have a team that you feel you can really win with. >> look, the biggest obstacle o. and i grapple with this every day. i'm getting older. the team is amazing. not to dismiss larry paige, our investor, who is involved in

this and in good shriek tradition, we shoot for the stars and challenge ourselves every single day to be smarter than yesterday so every single day we try to improve. that's what makes silicon valley great. it's a place that people don't take "no" for an answer. they imagine, they dream, they envision. and dreaming the self-drive ing car is not that hard. we've had them for quite a while. i think for us, it's just turning a dream into reality. >> sebastian, i wish you the absolute best of luck. sebastian thune is the ceo of kitty hawk and thanks for being with us. and "press: here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press: here." last week, we were talking to the makers of balsam hills christmas trees about the global supply chain. and one of my questions to their ceo was, why not just build the trees in america. wouldn't that be easier? the answer i got was kind of what i expected. and that is, it's not that easy. in every product, there is something that is coming from overseas, even if it's just one tiny piece. now, one company that's managed to build at least part of its product here on american shores is milpitas-based miravis. it makes a tv screen that it

says is lighter, brighter, and just about anything else out there. one of the executives is here. i've seen pictures of these tv screens, 100 inches. they're ginormous. you must have some trouble explaining to homeowners how big these tvs are. >> yeah, so tvs 65 inch, 75, 85-inch tvs, they really can't get much bigger, because they become too heavy, too unwieldy to move and mount. so we've taken a revolutionary different approach to actually designing a big screen tv, which is using a passive screen that takes in laser light. >> you're talking about a projector, right? this is not a screen, this is a high-quality projector, but the screen itself. this isn't something like my chemistry teacher used to pull down from over the chalkboard. this is a very personal screen. >> correct.

it's actually not really a projector system. the emphasis is really on the screen. so the projector is just providing a light source and the magic is in the screen. there's billions and billions of reflective optical elements in the screen, that take in later light from the projector and multiply it, making it extremely bright and extremely high quality. and you're making these screens on location. was that a conscience decision or what was the idea of making the screens here in the united states? >> it was really a thing of efficiency. because we did years of research here in the bay area, and so being able to use the research and trachbs late it directly into manufacturing was the reason why we kept it here. and we're also proud to make a product here in the u.s. and the bay area. >> i think part of what i'm

hearing you say is it's complicated, making these screens, and it may be easier to make them where you invented them? >> exactly. >> okay, that makes sense. >> okay, the projector, the associated projector that comes along with it sits right up against the screen. and i would imagine that there are some amazing light geometry that goes on to make that happen. you don't need to explain that, but my question is, on the projector, that is still made overseas, right? how is that working for you? are you able to get the product that you need shipped to you so you can ship out to the customer? >> our partner that supplies us projectors is having difficulties due to the semiconductor and global supply chain issues that are going on right now. so that's actually why we have a preorder system for our product. so that people order it. and then they can anticipate, you know, some time due to the supply chain issues before receiving it. >> have you had to tell people, you know, hey, we were targeting, you know, whatever,

november 27th, but it's looking more like january 6th. >> exactly, yeah, so, we wanted to have our systems delivered in early december, before christmastime. but because of the supply chain issues, it's looking like it's getting pushed to after christmas. >> and that's got to be frustrating for a young company. you want this word of mouth, etc. for somebody to come over to a house and go, oh, my gosh, look at that. look at the size of that thing, we need one of those, too, but you need to get them into houses first. >> exactly. >> let me ask this. will you have them in time for the super bowl? >> super bowl, definitely. and let me tell you, it's amazing, when you are sitting in front of a 100-inch screen and up against the players, you feel like you're actually on the field with them. >> what are you hearing from your suppliers? when did they think that things might get better? >> supply chain issues from our suppliers are predicted to get better potentially in the spring

of 2022. >> that seems good. all right. i wish you the best of luck. he makes a gigantic 100-inch screen. thanks for your time this morning. by the way, i bet "press: here" would look pretty good on a 100-inch screen as well.

that's our show for this week. a reminder, we have a sister podcast which is about venture capital. it's called "sandhill road" and you can find sandhill road anywhere you find your quality podcast. if you like this show, you'll like that as well. my thankses to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning care coalition, it's so good to see you all! alright! let's brainstorm. any ideas for new members? i'd like to nominate alaska airlines. this neck pillow i'm dating says great things! a caring airline?! wait, those exist?! it says here they were the first airline to switch from plastic bottles to boxed water. they also hire a lot of people from caring professions.

i'm seeing former teachers and nurses. it's settled! alaska airlines is officially in the running! round of applause! katy ledecky is wonderwoman. >>im >> the united states -- >> this is a presentation of the olympic channel. home of team u.s.a everything is bigger in >> well, they saeverything is bigger in texas. stars like caleb drexal and katy ledecky are about as big as they get. americans hoping to be large and in charge this weekend in san antonio.