The Shawn Ryan Show
#299 Andy Lowery - Inside the World’s Most Advanced Drone Killing Machine
27 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What inspired Andy Lowery to join the Navy and transition to technology?
I didn't really think about how much my mattress was affecting me until I switched it. You just get used to whatever you've got and don't realize how off it is until you fix it. And that's what happened when I got a Helix. On the first couple of nights, I could already tell the difference. I wasn't tossing around. I wasn't waking up throughout the night.
I was just sleeping better and actually getting some real rest. One thing I like is they don't do a one size fits all mattress. You take a quick sleep quiz and they match you to what actually fits how you sleep. And it shows. It's been a big upgrade from what I was using before.
They've got free shipping, 120-night sleep trial, and a lifetime warranty, so there's really no risk at all in trying it. Go to helixsleep.com slash SRS for 27% off site-wide. That's helixsleep.com slash SRS for 27% off site-wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know who sent you. helixsleep.com slash SRS. Andy Lowery, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. Good to see you in person, Sean.
I've been trying to get you guys on here for two or three years now.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah. And so I've got a couple of mutual friends, Joe Lonsdale and Grant Verstanding. And Grant actually put you and Epirus on my radar. And I...
i don't even know if i'm supposed to say this but i saw this cell phone video that was taken i think a long time ago and it was like very very beginning stages of epirus all right and then the video you just see it looked like uh these were these drones were tethered to like a dog chain or to the ground or something.
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How did Andy Lowery become CEO of Epirus?
So not something that normally you think to go together right away, But that's what I think makes it so cool and why I'm very into it.
That sounds fascinating.
Yes, sir.
I'd like to talk about that at the end. Sure. Husband, father of two, servant leader, philosopher, and champion of American manufacturing and life-saving technology. Quite the resume.
Yeah, well, that's definitely me. Somebody that wrote it was very favorable to me.
I don't know if I would have been quite as bullish with my write-up. So a couple things here before we get going. Everybody gets a gift. Right.
All right.
Thank you. The Jones League gummy bears made in the USA up in Michigan, legal in all 50 states. Not that you have to worry about that in California, but... but there it is.
All right. Thank you. And, uh, I'll follow suit. Oh man. There's yours. That's a memento. We did a 49 drone shoot down and sort of our inaugural, uh, shoot down of a swarm, big swarm, 49 systems. And we made little baseball cards that have a piece of those drones that got knocked down. And then we've only made a limited quantity of that. And, and Sean, you get number 49 there.
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Chapter 3: What innovative technologies does Epirus develop for countering drones?
And I went, I want to be a Marine. I don't know what they do. I don't know how they actually, what they operate on, what they do. But if something like that lava monster, I've got to go do this. And so I went down to the Marine Corps recruiting station the next day, and they had the door closed. And a lot of people know everywhere you see a Marine Corps station, you see a Navy right next door.
And so the Navy was open and I looked in and he said, oh, come on in. I said, oh, sir, I'm looking for Marines. And he goes, well, you know, the Navy owns the Marine Corps. And I went, oh, no kidding. And he's like, come on in. I'll tell you about it. And the rest is history. I ended up going Navy nuke versus Marine Corps.
And my Marine Corps friends to this day say you made a big mistake that day. You should have stuck with the Marines.
So much for the lava commercial.
Yeah, the lava commercial did it though, but got me into the Navy and it was probably a better fit for me anyways, because I'm a strong engineer, strong in mathematics and physics. And I did real well. And the Navy is smart. They take the best enlisted guys and say, hey, these ought to be officers. And they put me through a program called Enlisted Commissioning Program.
And I went to University of Illinois in the mid-90s and I studied RF, microwaves, antennas, all of these things. But then I went back into the Navy and served another five or six years of active duty as an officer. Never got to use much microwaves in the nuclear power plants. It didn't really apply. So I wanted to get into that.
When I stopped being active duty, I transitioned to reserves in 2002. I went, let me find a company where I can work on microwaves. That's what I did in my college. And so let's revisit that. I ended up at Macom. And Macom is an RF microwave component company that makes the pieces. And I worked there very successfully for about five years.
And then that followed with my Raytheon chief engineer position. And after that, which I really got involved in electronic warfare and microwaves and electromagnetic energy systems. Wow. I mean, what was Raytheon doing? Well, Raytheon does everything. They're a prime. And this was back when Raytheon had a pretty doggone good reputation. It was under Bill Swanson was the CEO.
And then Tom Kennedy took over after him at a portion or down the line. But with Bill Swanson, he and I worked together on Next Generation Jammer, which was a big new age electronic warfare program that basically took older technology, transmit wave tubes, and vacuum tubes and that sort of thing.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Leonidas system in modern warfare?
So you're using a system that leverages a lot of pulse power. And that means your peak power is very high, your average power in comparison is very low. Whereas a microwave oven or something that is tuned towards like biological things has a very high average power.
Your peak and average power are equal because you're trying to get a very, very high continuous power or beam on like a human being or on a chicken in a microwave or something that you're trying to heat up. And so you design the microwave system very differently. You choose different frequencies. You operate it much, much differently.
And then if you do it on the safe side, which some companies have done, they do it up at W band, which is a way high frequency that you hear about the skin and stuff getting needles and stuff and feeling like, well, that's just kind of heating the skin. It's localized heating the skin. And so that can deter crowds and keep crowds at bay.
And then there's been rumors of other things out there like Havana effect and stuff like that. But really, I don't have any knowledge of any of that. I don't know that those things are real. If they are really real or they're not, I'm not aware.
Gotcha. Gotcha. So how did you get into Epirus?
Well, a lot of the folks at Raytheon, it's kind of almost, in some ways, a spin-out. Nathan Mintz worked for me at Raytheon. He was the founding CEO. He had Beau Marr. Dr. Marr came out of Georgia Tech, worked in my organization for a whole number of years. Me and Beau got real close at Raytheon.
And then when the team had built the company to a certain sort of stage, we had gotten through most of the initial technology discovery to see if it actually would work. And we were starting to look at product market fit and then eventually scaling the company. They called me and asked. They said, hey, what are you doing? You want to join the company?
And I told them, just as long as I'm not the CEO, I'll join. And they said, OK. And they made me the chief product officer. And I was really happy in that role. I was doing great stuff. And then
down the line it just one thing led to another and I ended up in the position of CEO a couple years later so I think Bo is happy and Nathan is real happy that that I eventually made that decision and together with the board obviously to offer me the position but I came in, this is my third CEO job and it's not an easy job for those out there that have done it.
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Chapter 5: How does the Leonidas system operate against drone threats?
And then I joined in 2021, right when we started to get into product market fit and doing our first demos for the Army,
uh army ricto was a name of organization which is now called pae fires we had done some tests with army ricto and some other companies in order to see what type of system would be at least worth the army taking a look at to see if it had a viability for some of their missions and that all started in about 2021. wow it was it always counter drone initiatives?
We brought up, yeah, we brought up with the idea with counter drone, but we really didn't set out to build a directed energy machine. What we set out to build was a really, really high powered RF transmitter, something that could put in all kinds of electromagnetic interference, or if you wanted to make it a transmitter for a radar or It could be a transmitter for a radar.
Then you could have a receiver sitting next to it that it could send the signals out and the receiver could take those signals back in and you could use it as a radar. We had ideas for that. We had ideas for other counter outboard motors, for example, on engines on boats. You know, you see a lot of the unmanned boats now getting out there with these engines in the back.
Well, it has the same effects on those commercial-type systems as it does on drones. It basically looks for anything that has a computer board, and it uses a very high electromagnetic interference field to couple voltages onto the computer board, so the computer board just basically ceases to function. We used to call this the blue screen of death when it was like Microsoft
causing it on our computers. And we would have to unplug the computer completely and plug it back in, give it a real big reboot cycle. This is very similar to the type of effect that Leonidas and this type of directed energy has on computer systems.
Okay, okay. So it basically developed into counter drone technology? Or is that just a sector?
Well, it was always there. I mean, the founders like Joe and Grant that you've had on a couple times, I think, Joe, now. It's like they had the vision. I mean, and this is something that Grant and Joe and even at that time, there was John Tennant, Alex Moore, who still sits on our board. All of those guys were involved in the very onset of the company. They were all founders.
It was basically financial founders in a way. But the type that dig in and actually help with the engineering and with the thought process and from a big picture, they kind of saw it. I mean, Joe, to his credit, and Grant too, they saw this coming. They saw... this drone explosion, if you will, before it really was anything.
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Chapter 6: What are the advantages of using directed energy systems over traditional weapons?
So it basically became a... situation where we needed other products in order to complete the product that we had. And so by that need, we went out and either sourced through third parties or developed ourselves a whole sensing suite, command and control suite, simulator. We have this really incredible, it's built by guys that used to work at Call of Duty on the Call of Duty program and Blizzard.
And we've got about 12 or so designers, which at Raytheon, You know, no one ever hires designers at Raytheon, hardly. It's like something unique. Why? Well, they don't have a design-led philosophy there. And when we talk about what is Silicon Valley adding to the whole mix, if you will, you say, well, why is Silicon Valley sort of better in some way? I lean into the design-led thinking.
And design-led thinking is human factors, human thinking from the very beginning. That's what it means at its core. In a Raytheon, you're a services contractor. You have the military that decides what they want you to build. They put them all down in like 1,000 requirements. They hand you a bunch of requirements, and you just build a system that meets the requirements.
You get paid, and then you move on to the next system. There's no real design process there. It's like baked into the system engineering. It's baked into the way that operational commands give feedback to procurement commands and to requirement commands. And all of that is a very bureaucratic process. You get good products out of it. You get expensive products out of it.
You get exquisite products out of it. But what we're seeing now is a whole new chapter. It's the stuff that's built at the big primes are not sufficient for this new fight. And before anybody gets angry with that and why I say that, I'll give you an analogy. For the last decades, the primes have been focused on, let's say, going out and hunting a lion or lions, like big, big beasts.
They have to bring in the big nets, the big guns, the big whatever that they need to go hunt lions. The problem we see today are like mice and little mice that are running around. And what we're doing with our big rockets and our big defensive systems are using the same thing we would go up against lions against mice. And it's really that fundamental.
It's that, can you now develop mice-like apparatuses, Raytheon, quickly and short order like they're doing in Ukraine, or are you not rigged to do it? Are you not set up to do that? And not that they can't change and not that they can't like bolt on companies like Epirus and let them operate sort of independently and still bring in the human factors and the design-led stuff, but...
But you're talking about shooting a $2 million missile to get a $500 drone. Right. That's what you're talking about. It's not sustainable.
It's just not even like appropriate. It's like, would you ever take a huge gun or a huge... I don't know what you want to do if you don't say gun like net or what some cage. Would you have a cage for a lion with the bars this far apart? You're stuffing mice in it and they're just running through the bars of the cage. You know, it's like it just isn't the right stuff for this particular fight.
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Chapter 7: What challenges does Epirus face in deploying their technology in conflict zones?
That's what primes are today. So are they useful? Yes. Will they build the big exquisite machines still into the future on a very robust, well-exercised process? Yes, I still think there's a big place for them in the future world.
But will they be the ones that can make the mice traps and all the things that need to come out in a month-to-month-to-month type iterative cycle and risk a lot of money up in the front end of the thing to make it all work? They're not really set up to do that.
And the only way that I could see them becoming more like that is if they were to take a risk and, let's say, buy EPRIS and then let us operate exactly like we've been operating under our investors and our board that we're under now just operate the same, but be under their umbrella, so to speak, or their brand, but still operate the way that we've been operating. I could see that being one way.
Is that starting to happen? I've seen it in bits, like Lockheed you mentioned. I know they have a big fund that basically funds different small companies that they find having a lot of potential. I'm not sure how many of those are transitioning yet to acquisition, but I think that's the intent is to basically get involved by finding ones that have a real win
you know, and then transitioning them into a growth phase. Okay. Because, you know, as you start to scale and you're talking about field service operators out in the field, you're talking about people all over the world that are needing support maintaining these systems, logistics for these systems, all the mill PF type stuff that people talk a lot about. All of that the primes do well.
They're well situated. They're well staffed. They have people all over the world. When you need a scale in mass, it's nice to partner with primes because they have mass. And for example, General Dynamics Land Systems is a major, major partner to us. And I had really never had a partnership quite as close as we are with GD.
And GD ends up being that sort of big brother to say, hey, do you have people in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and other places, because we do. We have loads of people over there and we can help you scale when it comes time to scale versus trying to build everything from like new, like everything new and everything fresh. Leverage what they're good at, scaling, mass production,
field support, all of those types of elements, and then keep the innovation and keep the stuff that these Neo Primes are doing really well, like Shield AI and all the rest of them that you named and more. There's many, many more. All of those companies are doing the innovation really, really well right now, in particular for these types of threats.
Gotcha. Gotcha. I mean, it just seems, especially with the current wars that we're involved in right now, in particular Ukraine, I mean, everything just seems so cheap that they're doing over there.
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Chapter 8: How does Andy envision the future of drone warfare and defense systems?
that when the drone, if you imagine, here's the field that we're putting out there. As the drone gets into this electromagnetic interference field, it might stutter, the camera might stop working, then it gets deeper and deeper, closer and closer into the intensity of the electromagnetic interference, and eventually the computer just can't operate.
It just does not operate under that strong of a field surrounding the computer board, and the computer goes dead or one of the servos locks up or whatever.
So this is a, so this is like a bubble.
It's like a bubble. Exactly. You could put a bubble around a embassy. You could put a bubble around a white house. You could put a bubble around, you know, anything, anything that you can think of. Really. We've got a country. What's that? A country, a country. Well, That would take a lot of money and a lot of systems, but you could theoretically do that if you wanted to make something huge.
Building size, you could go out miles with a system like this. Like if you wanted to, let's say, protect the Straits of Taiwan and you wanted to build an enormous building size version of Leonidas, you saw the one out there earlier. That one was like 10 foot by 10 foot. Imagine 100 feet by 100 feet.
Or bigger. Oh, shit. Okay.
You can really power project then and start thinking about huge things to defend against these types of drones with a system that big.
Can they interconnect?
Yes, they can interconnect.
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