YES! Yes They Did Taunt The Ranch And THIS Is What Happened Next!

Has a minute? Oh good.
Hey Thomas.
Hey Thomas, nice to see you again.

So just you know, I’ve teased a little bit and I actually said, “Gosh, you guys need to have this conversation with Thomas,” and we both in frame. And I mentioned that we had a conversation, it was kind of a fun conversation. We talked about what might happen.

Yeah.

Do you want to share your version of it?

Well, you know it’s funny because I’ve been looking forward to this episode since it happened last year. And I mean out of all the things that happened it’s just absolutely crazy. But time has a funny way of messing with our minds.

And so I watched the episode last night, first time I’ve seen this episode. And I was trying to think because we had the drone guys come out twice. Yeah. And the first one, I mean it was relatively calm other than we started having a lot of electromagnetic stuff.

But I remember you and I were over there, and correct me – did this conversation take place on the first exercise or did it take place as we were setting up the second exercise?

This was, as I recall, the evening before we did this.

We did this, okay.

That’s what I was thinking but I wasn’t sure because I couldn’t remember. We were right over there, we were standing right in that room through that door.

And yeah, I want to say joking, but that’s not really the frame of—

Wait wait wait, where did you think we had it?

Right over there. I remember having it at the tent out at the triangle.

Now that’s crazy because I remember having Preston close by.

Yes.

And Preston was like, “Don’t talk like that.”

Well you may have repeated the conversation that we had. Maybe that’s what it was.

We had it here. We were telling about—

Okay I’m sorry, my memory on this stuff gets… this is why I really like running things by because sometimes it gets off.

But yeah, so basically the premise was just Eric and I were talking, and kind of half in jest and kind of joking around like: we’re getting awfully tired of this same old electromagnetic interference.

I mean yeah, you’ve messed with the phones, you’ve messed with the computers, you’ve wiped memory cards. Okay, you’ve made the drones disconnect. Like yeah we get it, you can interfere with equipment, big deal.

And we’re sitting here like, you know, I’m getting tired of this. If this is the best you can do, that doesn’t really impress me anymore. Like you’re gonna have to up the ante to keep my attention.

And Eric and I are both sitting here and we’re playing off of each other. And we’re like, yeah I mean listen, if that’s as powerful as you are, Ranch…

And so then we said, “If you want to get my attention, I want to see all the drones fall out of the sky.”

I remember the words were flaming sparks and fire. Total devastation, chaos. It was kind of a Ghostbusters-esque delivery – cats and dogs, that sort of thing.

And you know, if I was to characterize that conversation, I mean look, we’re blowing off steam and whatnot. But I could see that if an observer was watching that, they’d be like, “That’s a pretty irreverent conversation.”

And then when we recounted it to Preston over there at the tent, Preston looked at us and was like, “Don’t say that.” He’s all funny and he’s like, “Do you know how much money is sitting out in that field?”

And I said, “Don’t worry about it, that’s what insurance is for.”

And he’s like, “We don’t want to do that.” So yeah, that’s their livelihood.

So I’m so glad you came in when you did, because I was teasing these guys, I said you need to get both of us in frame and we need to have this conversation. I would like to hear your version of it.

So you and I had a conversation standing in front of that black couch in that room where we were very much like you just described, reflecting on what had happened with previous experiments, of course the telescope night and some of the other stuff.

And we were describing what we pictured in our minds as drones falling out of the sky and bursting into flames. You used the term “bursting into flames,” I remember that.

And so we had this picture of mayhem. We were constructing this story.

Why would we do that?

Yeah, we were framing it like, “Ranch, if you want to get our attention, if you want to impress us, this is what it would take.”

And it came right for you Thomas. Out of the two of you, you were the only one standing out there with the drone with my tracker on it.

And there weren’t that many flies under the tent as I understand it.

Now I’d like to get your description of, well they start falling, right?

And the thing is that when they started falling, the formation had come to the south, so it’s like over top of the tent. It shouldn’t have done that. So it’s going the wrong way.

So it comes south over the tent and they start dropping. And so I dive under the tent and Preston’s sitting right there.

And as I’m sitting there I look up and here’s our camera guy not even flinching. He’s just got this big camera on his shoulder and he’s not missing a beat.

And I see this drone start coming down, and now it’s under the tent, and it starts coming in the tent. And the camera guy is standing right there.

And I realize those blades are so sharp, if it hit his neck it would just cut him up, maybe even cut some serious arteries there.

And I’m like, “Hey, watch out.” And he’s just so focused on what he’s doing he doesn’t even look.

And I realized at that moment I needed to do something. That’s when I jumped back up and I took my jacket off and I went up to get it.

And it was still coming down inside the tent towards us. And Preston, again, total professional, he’s sitting at the table the entire time trying to get the drones to abort and land, and they will not respond.

So Preston’s trying to land these drones and he can’t get them to respond to his commands. And he’s not paying attention.

I told him, “Preston these are coming in,” and he didn’t even flinch. He was so focused on what he was doing.

So when that drone came in and started coming towards the camera guy and Preston, then yeah I took my jacket off and I swatted at it.

I told these guys I wanted that drone. I wanted drone 108.

I thought they said they’d give it to you.

I know they did!

Now do you think it’s okay if we talk about the dollar value?

Yeah, okay.

I don’t want to say anything that I shouldn’t, but let’s put it this way: in terms of drone hardware destroyed by this event, we’re talking about approaching half a million dollars.

I think it was 475,000. Four hundred something thousand.

Wow.

Yeah, that’s not a stunt.

Wow. Does insurance cover something like that for them?

You know, Preston and those guys have insurance on their drones. The production obviously has insurance on everything that’s going on. I don’t know how they worked it out.

But I can imagine the insurance company being like, “No, you took it to the ranch…”

If they come back with that many drones they’re probably going to have a conversation about next time asking it to write out a binary code or something rather than ask something else.

Quite honestly, I think the gift would be, if bad things are going to happen when we dig, then let’s see this massive million-dollar machine burst into flames while I’m digging.

There you go. That’s the flavor of our conversation.

I’m not impressed by drill rods breaking off in the hill. You want to impress me, then by no fault of my own we just need to see that machine burst into flames while we’re doing it.

There you go.

As long as you get out of it.

There’s my irreverence, and I’ll probably regret that.

Please let us know how you’re doing tomorrow after you go back out to work. Hopefully we’re not here in a year telling you, “Oh my gosh, can you believe I said that?”

Let me show you this. We were talking about the video there and I did have a little bit of it.

This is where – and I don’t know, is that Preston there?

Yes. And he was telling everybody to get back, get back. They used some really colorful language. I’m glad they bleeped it.

So did they ever determine what caused them to drop? Because that looks like instant power loss. I mean that’s freefall.

Yeah it looks like it.

So you saw on the show how they thought they were over in the east field.

Important to understand that when they set these shows up they have three different geofences. If the drones hit the first geofence they get the command to go back and land. If they go past the second one they get the command to land right there immediately. If they hit the third geofence it cuts the power and they drop.

So the drones thought they were far outside of where they were supposed to be.

But interestingly enough we had several that took off and headed towards the east. They went so far beyond the geofence and they just kept flying out there and eventually landed out in the field.

And then when the entire swarm landed back where they’re supposed to land – right back at the exact spot they took off – the entire drone swarm finally landed, they were all shifted towards the south by like 15 or 20 feet.

That is a serious positional error.

I’ll let you get it from here, Tom.

See you guys.

Thanks for the invite.