Oshkosh ($OSK) podcast mentions
I don't feel that different than I did 20 years ago, other than I know a lot more and I probably have more capabilities than I did 20 years ago. But I tell any young person, I would tell any old person, if you can be part of a startup, if you can Take an idea, especially an idea that people say is crazy, and you can will it into existence. It is the— one of the greatest things you can do that's legal and that you get paid for. It's crazy. You learn so much about yourself and you learn so much about humanity. I know more about people, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because of starting companies and watching people in the good and the gory and the glory. Like you, you You just see things and you become almost like a student. You're an anthropologist. You're like watching like this weird species of a human and like, how do they behave? What motivates them? Why do weird people do weird stuff all the time? I mean, that's the funny thing about being a CEO. By the time you hear about something happening with people, it's the weirdest shit you could possibly imagine. It's just wild. The stuff that like, wait, like someone did what? And it gets so weird that like by the time you're 55 and you're running your second company, almost nothing surprises me. I'm like, oh, okay, that happened. But, uh, but it's a neat thing. Uh, it's a neat thing to do. And I think, by the way, I think this could be another advantage of AI. And I'm not, I'm not an AI optimist. I'm a, I'm kind of an AI realist. There's definitely days where I'm quite dark about what AI could do to society. So I just want to talk about some of the good parts, which are, I do think it's going to, is and will be a lot easier to start a company. I think it is and will be a lot easier to be a 1 or 2 or 3 person company. And not necessarily you're trying to create a new chip to sell to NVIDIA. It'll be easier for my brother to run his construction company in Oshkosh.
Jim VandeHei · Prof G Markets · Why Nobody Trusts the News — And How to Fix It · 2026-09-06Well, I think, you know, there had been, you know, work in robotics where people were moving vehicles in simpler environments autonomously. And so the notion was like, well, what if we could do this on the battlefield, right? What if we could do it in these more complex environments? If you could take the warfighter out of the vehicle, you can imagine, you know, that not just provides safety, but potentially, you know, tactical things that you can do. We can maybe talk about that in a little bit. But in order to make those vehicles autonomous, you needed to know how to do it, right? And they didn't. And so DARPA— one of the things that was great about DARPA is that it is an organization that is designed to just like create new things, right? Like you have some crazy challenge, DARPA is out there and can create a program, pull together some of the best minds in the US to focus, like really focus on it for up to about 4 years and try to solve a problem. And so in 2004 and 2005, they came up with the DARPA Grand Challenge where they were trying to race vehicles from Barstow, California to Primm, Nevada. It was about 135 miles on dirt roads. And they just laid down a challenge. They said, if you can do this, you get prize money. And all sorts of teams came together to attack this problem. So there were university teams from places like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and MIT and so on. And there were industry teams like Oshkosh, you know, had a team and there were just people who were trying to put together autonomous vehicles in their garage, like just build robots. And they went out there and raced. And in the first, in 2004, the first challenge, no one made it beyond 7 miles. Like that was the, you know, so it was CMU's vehicle, I think made it that far. It got stuck, caught fire. It was like a whole thing. The next year though, in 2005, I think 5 teams competed this challenge. They made it the entire 134 miles.
Byron Boots · The Shawn Ryan Show · #336 Byron Boots - He Turned a Polaris RZR Into a Self-Driving Military Vehicle · 2026-09-03