Drones without the buzzword fog.
Do You Know Drones? tracks the serious business of drones through conversations with operators, utility leaders, founders, and standards-minded practitioners. Its center of gravity is practical: safer flights, better data, stronger maintenance habits, and drone programs that can prove their value.
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Do You Know Drones? follows the drone industry through the people trying to make it operationally serious. It is not centered on consumer gear or casual flying. Its recurring concern is whether drone programs can mature into reliable aviation operations with standards, accountability, and measurable value. Episodes talk about the gap between fast-moving technology and slower regulation. That gap creates opportunity, but the show keeps returning to the risks of winging it. Safety management systems, maintenance standards, pre-flight checklists, pilot reporting, and root-cause analysis are treated as business infrastructure, not administrative drag. Utility work is a major thread. Guests describe how drones and robotics support inspections, protect workers, reduce truck rolls, and create large image datasets that need secure storage, annotation, classification, and eventually useful AI. Disaster response also appears through conversations about tethered drones that help restore communications after events like hurricanes. The show has a plainspoken, sometimes irreverent style. It can be animated and loose, especially in short conference-floor interviews, but the practical questions are serious. What should founders build before betting on future FAA rules? How should U.S. companies respond to manufacturing pressure and competition from China? What does ROI look like when a drone is part of a geospatial, agricultural, or utility workflow rather than the whole business? The host pushes guests toward concrete answers. A repeated message emerges: drones matter most when they are integrated into disciplined systems. For PlayNext users, this is a strong fit for operators, founders, utility teams, geospatial professionals, agriculture technologists, and anyone who wants drone industry talk with fewer buzzwords and more operational consequences.
Made for: Built for drone operators, enterprise program leads, founders, utility teams, geospatial professionals, and agriculture technology builders who care about safety, standards, data, and ROI.
What sets it apart: The show pairs energetic trade-floor conversation with unusually practical scrutiny of drone programs, asking how operations survive regulation delays, maintenance demands, data overload, and real accountability.
Welcome to the 'Do You Know Drones?' podcast. Dive deep with us as we chat with insiders and explore today's drone buzz.
A cell site on wings is cool; the pre-flight checklist is why you'll stay.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded discussion of drone maintenance, accountability, and the standards commercial operators can no longer delay.
Commercial drone work is outpacing the rules meant to keep it orderly, and this episode puts that tension under a practical maintenance light.
A grounded look at how utility robotics turns inspection imagery into usable data.
NYPA's robotics work lands as a practical safety story, not a flashy tech showcase. The episode is clearest when it connects safer utility inspections with the harder follow-through: making sense of the imagery those inspections generate.
A grounded look at Verizon's tethered drones for emergency communications and the safety systems behind each flight.
Verizon's drone program is framed here as practical communications infrastructure, with disaster response doing much of the explaining. Scott Forbes, Senior Analyst for Drone Safety and Standards at Verizon and a former U.S.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Jason interviews Brandon Beal about the lack of industry standards in commercial drone operations and the need for change.
Peter Kalaitzidis discusses how NYPA uses drones and robotics to modernize utility inspections, prioritize safety, and manage data with AI.
Scott Forbes discusses Verizon's drone strategy for disaster response, safety protocols, and ROI.
Bobby Sakaki discusses the lack of US government investment in the drone industry compared to China.
Christian Stallings discusses the drone industry's challenges and the need for founders to focus on ROI and program maturity to avoid collapse.
Jason Sansusi interviews Isaac Piche about how drone founders can build real businesses by avoiding FAA hype and focusing on practical operations.
Bill Daggett discusses how drone startups fail by focusing on regulations instead of revenue, and the industry's current rebirth.
On Do You Know Drones?, Liz Forro explains how the FAA's proposed rules address one operator controlling multiple drones.
Elaine Ball argues that a QR code offering a six-week software trial can ask too much of a trade-show visitor who is still researching.
At GeoWeek, Jason Sansusi asks Trimble technical authority Mohamed Mustafa how Trimble and DroneDeploy are simplifying drone mapping.
Jason Sansusi interviews Kristen Costello, VP of Safety and Compliance at DroneUp, about her role and challenges in the drone industry.
Jason interviews Jordan Koch of Solid Clouds and Jonathan Stevens of Everypoint about using iPhones, drones, and camera systems to create 3D models for construction, solar, stockpiles, and industrial sites.
Jason and Yuval from Skywatch AI discuss common questions and misconceptions about drone insurance, aiming to clarify policy details for drone pilots.