Blake Scholl

I kind of grew up as an adolescent being told that the world was safe.

They were kind of the post-war era.

And so it was like we were like the post-defense era was my assumption growing up.

And then 9-11 happened.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine.

And then we've watched China, which was trending free and capitalist, kind of get recaptured by the CCP.

And for me, the turning point was really Russia and Ukraine.

Or I was like, wait a minute, the world is not nearly as safe as I thought it was.

And we've let the bad countries, and I think it's important that we say there is such a thing as a bad country, get powerful.

And so we had to do something about that.

And had I been, I don't know, five years later and starting Boom, maybe Boom would have been a different company.

But fortunately, there are really great people working on defense tech now.

And it's become, I think there are at least a couple threads recently that played together here.

One is it's become socially acceptable to do a defense company.

It's become more clear that we need defense tech.

And then frankly, I think we've got a resurgence of a belief in America, which we lost for a good long while.

It was not fashionable to like this country.

And so I think that interplays with like, well, maybe we shouldn't be so proud.

there's a whole period of time and there's still pockets of our culture that are not proud to be American.

And if you're not proud to be American, you're not going to go build weapons to defend the country.