#336 Byron Boots - He Turned a Polaris RZR Into a Self-Driving Military Vehicle

**Shawn Ryan** (0:00)
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Byron Boots, welcome to the show.

**Byron Boots** (2:47)
Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here.

**Shawn Ryan** (2:49)
It's awesome to have you. So I can't even remember. I think I actually found you guys on LinkedIn, which I'm never on. And I think I saw like a video on LinkedIn or something of Overland AI and then started, found you guys on YouTube and started following you, and then found out APC is an investor, and so led you around. And so, yeah, I wanted to get in touch and love what you guys are doing. Looks, you know, I've had lots of tech giants on here, a lot of drone stuff, so I put the water stuff. I guess they, I didn't even know. Your guy just told me out back that they just hit the Iranian port.

**Byron Boots** (3:32)
Yeah, pretty amazing. So, you know, first of all, it's an honor to be on the show and in that company. I mean, that's incredible. But yeah, just in the last day or so, there was news of Saronics boats being used in an offensive operation in the Strait of Hormuz.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:50)
Wow. And so you're the ground guy.

**Byron Boots** (3:52)
That's right.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:53)
You're bringing up autonomous vehicles to land warfare. So really excited to dig into this. But let me kick it off with an introduction here.
Byron Boots, you're the co-founder and CEO of Overland AI, a company building autonomous ground vehicles for the US military. Before founding Overland AI, you earned your PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon, became a professor at the University of Washington, and led the winning team in DARPA's racer off-road autonomy program.
Overland AI has raised more than $140 million and become the first autonomous ground vehicle company to win a production contract with a fully integrated hardware and software platform. Congratulations. Your vehicles are already being used by military units around the world to move supplies, support operations, and reduce risk for soldiers in the field. Welcome to the show.

**Byron Boots** (4:54)
Well, thank you so much.

**Shawn Ryan** (4:57)
Got a lot to talk about here. It's been a minute since I've talked to somebody that's doing the kind of stuff that you're doing. But before we get going, got a couple of things to crank out here. Everybody gets a gift.

**Byron Boots** (5:10)