This week we sit down with Brad Waldron, founder of Kali Protectives to take a deep dive into helmet tech and the new Grit gravel helmet. Kali Protectives Web / Instagram  Support the Podcast The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: Kali Protectives Craig Dalton: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to The Gravel Ride podcast. I'm your host Craig Dalton this week on the podcast. We've got Brad Waldron from Kali. Protectives talking to us about helmets. [00:00:15]Before we jump in just to reminder, The Gravel Ride podcast is sponsored by listeners like you and a select group of sponsors from the industry and outside the industry. We appreciate any contributions to the show's www.buymeacoffee.com/thegravelride. And when we do bring a sponsor on board, please make sure to check out their products because without their support, we couldn't continue doing what we're doing. [00:00:40] [00:00:40]With that said let's dive right into my interview with Kali. Protectives.     Brad. Welcome to the show. [00:00:46] Brad Waldron: [00:00:46] Thanks for having me [00:00:47] Craig Dalton: [00:00:47] I'm super stoked to talk helmets. It's interesting. It's one of those categories that. I haven't covered on the podcast thus far. So I figured going to an expert and talking about it will give the listener a lot of value about helmet technology for gravel, riding [00:01:02]Brad Waldron: [00:01:02] looking forward to it. [00:01:04] Craig Dalton: [00:01:04] Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about your background and how Kali was started? [00:01:09]Brad Waldron: [00:01:09] Sure. I was super lucky in a previous life career. I worked for an aerospace company working on military aircraft. So I was a carbon fiber R and D engineer. Mostly on the process side, not on the material side. [00:01:22]I was fortunate enough to work on the B2 bomber F eighteens joint strike fighter, and then a few airplanes that had never made it, but just stuff you've made it and broke it to see what we could do. And this will give you the idea of my age, but I was at Northrop Grumman in between the first Gulf war and the second Gulf war. [00:01:41] And they didn't want to put a lot of money in production at that time, but they want to put a lot of money into R and D. So I was just in the perfect place at the perfect time where you could almost do anything you wanted. If it made sense. I, one time my boss walked in and said, DARPA's going to be here next week. [00:01:57] Think of something. Go back to my desk and I, without five different projects and the next week sit down in front of these generals and you. Present these ideas in here I'm, in my late twenties, early thirties, somewhere in there. And they're like rubber stamping, all of them and oh shit. [00:02:12] Now I got, I do, so I got to build a $12 million milling machine and then just things like that. So that's where my real just try it. Mentality came from, when you hear are, you can't do that. And get into some of the things that people told me we couldn't do at Kali. It's let's just try, and that's been like theme sentence. [00:02:30] So I worked that and through some changes in life, I went to work or another aerospace company and didn't love it, so I was down in the Southern California area, working there. And then I moved back up to Northern California where I was born and raised. And I was in R and D at this satellite company and it just wasn't everything I wanted. [00:02:49] And lo and behold, there's this ad for the big red S in the paper. And so I put on my suit and went to my interview. Nobody's wearing a suit, got called back for a second interview and go, what do I wear when I knew I wore the suit? Yeah. So I guess it worked, they offered me a job as the Pumps and locks, designer, something like that. [00:03:09]And I was so happy to take my 25% pa