Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and C podcast. I'm Sonal and today's topic, continuing our DC theme, is drones. And more broadly, policy and airspace as a platform for innovation. Joining us for that conversation just to really quickly do the intros, we have Eli Dorado, who directs the technology policy program at Georgia Mason University's Mercatus Center. And he's here

with Samuel Hammond, who's a graduate research fellow in that program. And they've done a lot of

research and policy reports around drones. And then we have Jonathan Downey, who's the founder and

CEO of Airware, which provides operating systems for commercial drones, so enterprises can take

advantage of aerial data for business applications. And we also have Grant Jordan, who's a CEO and co-founder of SkySafe, which is a company that provides security for airspace,

for example, by taking control of and safely landing rogue drones. And by the way, those are both

A6 and Z companies full disclosure. We have another drones investment, Skydeo, which focuses on

onboard intelligence by giving drones the same visual awareness and agility of human pilots, but they couldn't join us today. So those are the intros, and now let's just get started. I think the place to start

off is, you know, Eli, you wrote an op-ed for me a few years ago, where we talked about airspace as

the next platform for innovation. And I thought that was a really eye-opening concept for me. And I think

we need to just break down what each of those terms mean. Like, what is airspace? Why a platform and why is it the next platform for innovation?

Well, yeah. When I wrote that op-ed, I think it must have been about three years ago when I was

first starting to get interested in drones. The thing that I noticed immediately was that

drones are completely legal to use for hobbyist purposes and completely

illegal to use for commercial purposes. And it reminded me of the internet back in the 1980s, right?

In the internet in the 1980s, it was this research program that the government had. But there were

guidelines that MIT had an AI lab. And the

guidelines for students were like, you may not use this for any commercial purpose. You know,

we could get in trouble with the government. It's just illegal. And, and I thought about the people

running this program, they didn't mean to like hold back the internet. They, they were very, I'm sure,

very well intentioned. They wanted this to succeed. And they weren't thinking about how much

holding something back from commercial operation was likely to, to affect the success, right?

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