From quirky sedans to stealth drone swarms

0:00Warning, the following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated. For Lauren even, like your efforts are futile and you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic! So, whether you need to hire four, 40, or 400 people, get ready to meet first rate talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip.

1:00Welcome to The Deep Dive, everybody. I'm your host and I'm super excited to get into our source material today. And I am your expert for today, thrilled to be here. So we are jumping right into something that I think is going to really surprise a lot of you listening. Like, if I were to tell you about a, well, a 63.7 billion corona aerospace and defense behemoth. Right. A massive, massive company. Exactly. A company that is currently building like AI-enabled drone swarms and these highly advanced multi-role fighter jets and literally radar evading submarines, you'd probably picture some shadowy, hyper-modern tech corporation. Oh, totally. You'd picture something out of a sci-fi movie. Yeah. But what if I told you that this exact same company is the one that built that quirky, you know, highly distinctive Swedish sedan that your favorite college professor with the elbow patches probably drove back in the 1990s? The one with the weird ignitions. Yes. The ignition is weirdly placed way down by the gear shift. The dashboard looks suspiciously like an airplane cockpit. We are, of course, talking

2:03about sob. It really is the ultimate corporate hidden identity, isn't it? The gap between the general public's perception of this brand and their actual like operational reality today is just staggering. It's completely wild because people neatly categorize them in their minds as this nostalgic, vintage European auto manufacturer. But that cozy memory completely obscures the fact that we are actually looking at a massive global military powerhouse. Okay, let's unpack this because our mission for this deep dive today is to explore the fascinating and frankly completely unexpected evolution of sob AB relying purely on their own historical records and sources. Right. We're going to uncover how a company that was basically born out of desperate World War II military necessity constantly reinvented itself. I mean, accidentally making iconic cars and pioneering commercial computers along the way. Just as like side quests. Exactly. Side quests just to survive and remain a technology juggernaut today. Which requires us to look at how severe geopolitical

3:05pressure forces a very, very specific type of innovation. To really understand the DNA of this company, we have to rewind to a place called Trollhitten in Sweden. Okay. This is back in 1937. Right. The origin story. So we start with this engineering company called NOHAB. And specifically, we're looking at their arrow engine division, which gets scooped up by a major industrial player named Beauforts. And they create SAB, SAB, Svinska, Aeroplane, Actibola gap. But like Beauforts wasn't just casually diversifying their portfolio here. Were they? No, not at all. They had a highly aggressive, almost monopolistic goal in mind from day one. They wanted total control. Wow. Beauforts had already been working really closely with the Swedish Air Force on weaponry. And they saw this golden opportunity to create an aircraft manufacturer that could lock down every single future aircraft order for the Swedish military. It just wanted the whole pie. Exactly. They wanted to be the sole provider for an entire nation's aerial defense. That is a wildly ambitious play.

4:07But they immediately ran into a brick wall, right? Because the playing field wasn't empty. No, there was serious competition. Yeah. There was another Swedish company called ASJA over in Ling Cuping. And they were already a dominant force. ASJA had even managed to poach a legendary aviation designer, Sven Blomberg. Right. The guy who was famous for designing the Jack Falcon fighter plane. Right. So Beauforts realized they couldn't just crush ASJA. So they tried to absorb them. They attempted to broker this parent company consortium in 1937 to, you know, merge the operations. They even went so far as to buy out a smaller third party competitor named Sparman, just purely to clear the board and force it to walk away. It's essentially a 1930 shotgun wedding between two rival tech startups. And the military is standing there holding the shotgun. That is exactly what it was. But this initial consortium is incredibly messy. They're clashing. ASJA is still winning the standalone contracts. And it looks like the whole thing might just completely fall apart. But then the ultimate catalyst hits. The spark that forces Sweden to

5:10completely change its strategy. The Seversky P-35 crisis. Well, this part is crazy. What's fascinating here is how isolation accelerates self-reliance. At this point, the Swedish government had ordered a fleet of Seversky P-35 military aircraft from the United States. So they were relying on an overseas partner for their national security. Exactly. But as World War II begins to escalate globally, the U.S. government suddenly steps in and just halts the delivery. The U.S. basically tells Sweden, sorry, we need all of our domestic manufacturing power to build tanks for our own war effort. You're on your own. Yeah. And for Sweden, that isn't just an administrative head. Oh, no. It was an existential threat. I mean, Sweden was officially a neutral country, but look at a map from 1939. They were entirely surrounded by a rapidly expanding, highly destructive global conflict. So when that American supply line vanished overnight, the Swedish government had a terrifying realization. You cannot outsource your own survival. Wow. Yeah, if they were going to defend their airspace, they had to figure out how to build the

6:12planes themselves from scratch immediately. That sheer desperation forces the issue. ASJA and the Trollhett and SA operations are formally like tightly merged into the SAB concern in 1939. With link cupping, becoming the headquarters. Right. And because their backs are completely against the wall, they just start cranking out innovations at a breakneck pace. I mean, they build the SAB 17 light dive bomber in 1940. They build the SAB 18 Schnell bomber in 1942. But the aircraft in the source material that absolutely blew my mind is the SAB 21 single-seat fighter, which first flew in 1943. Oh, the SAB 21 is a masterclass in solving bizarre engineering problems. It was designed as a twin boom pusher propeller aircraft, which for anyone who is a navigation mechanic means the plane looks backward. Yeah, pretty much. Instead of the engine sitting in the nose, the plane like pulling it through the air, the engine and the propeller are mounted in the very back of the fuselage pushing the plane forward. Right. But that unique design created a horrifying

7:12safety issue. The bailout problem. Exactly. In a traditional fighter plane from that era, if the plane takes damage, the pilot opens the canopy and jumps out. But in a pusher propeller aircraft, if the pilot jumps out, the slipstream will pull them directly back into those massive spinning propeller blades. Yeah, it's basically a giant flying meat blender right behind your head. That is terrifying. So SAB's engineers realize they have to invent a way to get the pilot up and over that rear propeller in a fraction of a second. They need an ejection seat. And the Germans were also developing early ejection seats at this time, but they were using compressed air systems to launch the pilot. Okay. The engineers at SAB, however, took a much more aggressive route. They decided to use gunpowder. Yes. They literally designed a system that would detonate an explosive charge directly beneath the pilot seat, blasting them out of the cockpit with enough force to clear the rear blades entirely. I cannot imagine being the test pilot who had to volunteer to sit on a controlled explosive.

8:14Like, no, thank you. Right. But it perfectly encapsulates the culture SAB was building. They were isolated. They were under extreme pressure. So they engineered solutions that were pragmatic, highly effective, and entirely homegrown, which creates a fascinating dilemma because you have this intense war driven company that has mastered complex metallurgy, aerodynamics, and high stakes engineering. And then the war ends. Yeah. The geopolitical pressure cooker suddenly depressurizes the massive blank check military contracts that fueled their growth just dry up overnight. So how does an aerospace engineer who just spent five years designing gunpowder ejection seats, walk into work on a Monday morning and decide to build a civilian car? It's a huge shift. It feels like a massively. Well, it wasn't a passion project. I'll tell you that. It was a desperate pivot to avoid bankruptcy. Oh, really? Yeah. SAB had this incredible roster of highly skilled aerospace engineers and massive factory infrastructure. But their primary customer, the military,

9:14was downscaling. They needed a new market immediately. And as it turned out, the civilian world had a massive gaping hole in its supply chain because of the exact same dynamic that caused the airplane crisis earlier. Right. The US and European auto manufacturers had spent the late 1930s and 1940s building tanks, jeeps, and munitions instead of private cars. Exactly that. So when the war finally ended, the US domestic market greedily absorbed whatever limited car production American factories could muster. So Europe is left with nothing. Europe and specifically Sweden was left in a total vacuum. There were virtually no new private cars available. Buyers were sitting on waiting lists that were literally years long. Wow. So SAB looked at that demand and realized they had the tools to fill it. But the friction of that pivot must have been immense. I mean, these guys didn't know the first thing about civilian automotive supply chains. No, no at all. But they knew how to shape lightweight metal and they understood aerodynamics better than almost anyone else in the world. So they build a prototype called the Ersab. And if you look at photos of

10:18the Ersab, it makes perfect sense why it looks so strange. It's so weird looking. It essentially looks like a wing without wheels or like a metal teardrop. They didn't design it to look stylish. They designed it using the exact same aerodynamic drag coefficient principles they used to make bomber planes fly through the air with minimal resistance, which makes sense. And that prototype eventually leads to the full scale production of the SAB 92 automobile in December 1949, which explains why for the next 50 years, SAB cars always retained that distinct, slightly boldest, highly aerodynamic shape. They were literally born in a wind tunnel. Exactly. But the cars are just one civilian side quest because the sources reveal an even wilder pivot in the late 1950s. SAB decides to venture into the commercial computer market with a division called data. Sob. Yes, data. Sob. And I have to admit, I was completely lost reading this part. I can understand an airplane company bending metal to make a car. But why is an aviation firm in

11:18the 1950s building banking computers for European countries? If we connect this to the bigger picture, you start to see Sob's aerospace division functioning as a stealth incubator for all kinds of civilian technology. They didn't launch data sob because they wanted to compute with IBM. They built computers because they had an extremely complex aerospace problem that the open market simply could not solve for them. An navigation equipment. That's the core of it. As the Cold War escalated, fighter jets became exponentially faster and their missions became infinitely more complex. Right, they're going supersonic now. Exactly. A human pilot could no longer calculate navigation, radar tracking, and weapons targeting manually at those speeds. They needed an onboard computer to process that data. But in the late 1950s, a computer wasn't something you held in your hand. No, it was a machine powered by massive vacuum tubes that literally filled an entire climate controlled room. In a U, obviously cannot fit a room size machine into the cramped cockpit of a fighter jet. No, you definitely cannot. So Sob is sitting there realizing that if

12:22they want their next generation of planes to actually work, they have to invent a way to shrink a room size brain down to the size of a suitcase. Which forces a massive leap in miniaturization. They pour resources into developing solid-state electronics and compact microprocessors. And they pulled it off. They did. This immense effort eventually results in the CK-37 aircraft computer, which becomes the digital heart of their famous vegan fighter jet in 1971. So they successfully shrink the computer to fit in the plane. But because they spent millions of corona developing this baseline computing technology just to make their planes fly. Some executive at SOB must have realized, wait a minute, if our computer is powerful enough to track a supersonic missile. It's definitely powerful enough to process a civilian bank transaction. Exactly. It is one of the clearest examples of military research and development spilling directly into the civilian sector. They commercialized the tech they were forced to invent, selling these robust, highly advanced data-sob systems to banks and businesses across Europe.

13:27But here is the fascinating twist in this whole narrative. They didn't keep these civilian divisions. Sob didn't become a massive conglomerate making everything from sedans to laptop. No, they didn't. They slowly shed that skin. They sold off the commercial computer division to Spare Univac in 1975. And the car division, the one the entire global public associated them with, was gradually sold off to General Motors. GM bought 51% in 1990 and took complete ownership by the year 2000, which leaves SOB AB stripped entirely back down to its absolute core without the distraction of marketing consumer sedans or servicing bank computers. They refocused every ounce of their engineering talent and capital back into aerospace and defense. And we really need to look at what that hyper-focused defense juggernaut looks like today, because the scale is just incredible. As of 2024, they are pulling in over 63 billion corona in revenue. That's a massive number. How did they achieve that kind of stability after shedding their most famous public-facing products?

14:28Well, a major, often overlooked, factor is their financial architecture. SOB is firmly backed by the Wallenberg family. Okay, who are they? They are one of the most powerful industrial families in Europe, and they control 47.7% of SOB's voting rights through their investment firm, investor AB. Why does that matter so much, though? Because the defense industry operates on timelines that most normal companies just can't survive. Developing a new fighter jet takes decades. If you are a standard publicly traded company obsessed with making your shareholders happy every single quarter, you can't weather those long development cycles. You go under. Exactly. The Wallenberg backing gives SOB the luxury of patience. It allows them to plan for the security needs of the next 20 years, rather than just worrying about the next earnings call. And when you look at the hardware they are producing with that long-term vision, it goes way beyond planes. Oh, absolutely. I mean, yes, they have this legendary lineage of fighter jets that turn into Lance and the Drac in the Vigan. Today, they build the JAS-39 Grip

15:31and Multi-Roll Fighter with over 300 of them built by 2020. And they even partnered with American aerospace giant Boeing to develop the T7 Red Hawk Advanced Trainer. But they aren't just an airplane company anymore. No, they've organized themselves into highly specialized business areas, like aeronautics, dynamics, and surveillance. They have effectively become a one-stop shop for an entire nation's defense infrastructure. It's unbelievable. They build the Carl Gustaf portable anti-tank weapon. They build the saber-tooth unmanned underwater vehicle. They had an entire shipyard division, SOB Cochems, that manufactures actual stealth submarines. Now, I want to zoom in on one specific piece of their surveillance and stealth portfolio because it genuinely sounds like science fiction to me. Oh, the camouflage. Yes, they have a facility in Lillington, North Carolina, Saab Barracuda, LLC. And they manufacture something called the Ultralight Weight camouflage net system or UL cans. They want to compete at $1.76 billion contract supplying

16:32this to the US military. When I first read camouflage net, I just pictured like a heavy canvas tarp painted with green and brown splotches. Which is how most people understand camouflage, right, fooling the human eye. But visual detection is the least of your worries on a modern battlefield. UL cans provides what is called multi-spectoral protection. Okay, what does that actually mean for a soldier on the ground trying to hide a tank? Well, an enemy drone or satellite isn't just looking with a regular camera. They are using thermal imaging to look for the massive heat signature of a tank's engine. Right. They are sweeping the area with broadband radar, bouncing radio waves off the metal hull of the vehicle to pinpoint its location. If you throw a painted canvas tarp over a tank, the radar waves pass right through the canvas, hit the metal, and bounce back to the enemy screen. So they see right through the disguise. Exactly. But the UL cans material actively disrupts those signals. It physically blocks and dissipates the thermal radiation, so the tank doesn't glow on an infrared screen. That's wild. And it contains specialized

17:36materials that scatter and absorb specific frequencies of broadband radar. So the radio waves don't bounce back to the enemy receiver. It essentially creates a localized black hole in the enemy sensor network. Yes, it's not just hiding. It is active electronic deception. Okay, but here's where it gets really interesting though. We just talked about submarines, supersonic jets, anti-tank weapons, and radar-absorbing materials. Heavy stuff. Exactly. That is all heavy, highly complex physical hardware, metal explosives thrust. But you look at Sobs' major acquisitions in 2023, and they seem to be entirely abandoning that physical realm. You're talking about their aggressive move into the software space. Right. In 2023, Sob acquires a UK-based company called Blue Bear, which specializes in AI-enabled autonomous form systems. Basically teaching dozens of drones how to fly an attack together without a human steering them. Right. And literally a month later, they buy crowd AI, an artificial intelligence

18:37and machine learning company based out of San Francisco. I mean, I have to push back on this. You have an 80-year-old Swedish company famous for bending metal and building fighter jets, suddenly buying up Silicon Valley tech startup. It's quite a contrast. That feels like a massive cultural and operational clash. Are they even a hardware company anymore? This raises an important question about the fundamental nature of where global conflict is heading. For the entirety of the 20th century, military dominance was defined by the physical vehicle. The hardware was the product. Exactly. Who had the jet that could fly the highest? Who had the submarine with the thickest hull? The biggest muscle. Precisely. But Sob's 2023 acquisitions demonstrate a profound realization that the era of hardware dominance is ending. The physical jet or the drone is now just the delivery mechanism. It's just the muscle. Right. The true advantage in a modern conflict lies entirely in the nervous system controlling that muscle. So if the grip and jet is the fist, crowd AI and blue bear are the frontal lobe.

19:38That is a perfect way to look at it. They aren't just building the fists anymore. They're building the brain that decides when, where, and how to punch. Processing thousands of variables a second. Faster than a human pilot ever could. By buying up Silicon Valley machine learning companies, Sob is acknowledging that whoever writes the best algorithms will ultimately control the air space. So what does this all mean? Bringing this back to you listening right now. Why should you care about the 80 year corporate history of a Swedish defense contractor? It's a fair question. Because Sob's journey is honestly the ultimate masterclass in adaptability and survival. It shows that the true secret to longevity in any industry isn't just about what you're building today. It's about your willingness to constantly shed your own skin. They never let nostalgia for their past successes trap them into obsolescence. They drop the consumer cars the moment that industry no longer serve their core mission. Yeah. They abandoned commercial computers. They didn't cling to their identity as an auto manufacturer just because the public loved their quirky sedans. They just kept relentlessly

20:43solsing the next impossible problem in front of them. From figuring out how to blast a pilot out of a plane with gunpowder because they couldn't buy American tech. To shaping a car like an airplane to realizing that the future of their hardware company is actually borderless software. And as defense companies like Sob move deeper into artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous drone swarms, it forces us to reconsider everything we know about global security. How so? It leaves us with a heavy thought. In a future where the most critical military technology is no longer physical steel forged in a local factory, but rather borderless code and algorithms living on servers, will the historical concept of a strictly national defense industry even make sense anymore? Wow. That is an incredibly provocative thought to leave on. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive into the sources. The next time you are walking down the street and you see one of those quirky vintage Swedish sedans roll past you. Just remember, its younger sibling is currently a radar evading machine learning drone swarm. Catch you next time. Finding great candidates to hire can

21:48be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. At zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. Its powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of, hey, Zippercrooter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire, and right now you can try Zippercrooter for free. That's right, free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. That zippercrooter.com slash zip zippercrooter.com slash zip. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are built to keep going blending rugged muscle with precision

22:49engineering all supported by Toyota's time tested legacy of dependability. Step into a Tundra and feel the unyielding capability with the available iForce Max engine. Tundra puts out impressive power torque and towing performance and the roomy high tech cabin keeps you connected on the go. Or take a look at Tacoma made for drivers who push past the path agile tough and relentless with available features like crawl control, portable JBL speaker, a power lift gate, so gear goes in fast and the adventure keeps moving. The Tacoma and Tundra are engineered to endure season after season, mile after mile. So drive one home today, visit toyota.com or stop by your local Toyota dealer to find out more Toyota. Let's go places.