Brandon Tseng – Shield AI’s X-BAT: The First AI Fighter Jet to Outsmart Top Gun | SRS #247

brazil working with the brazilian navy went out to a place they said yeah we can do these steak knives for you and get them laser engraved look at that and so i'm like they're like what do you want on it first thing that came to mind was you know i was feeling sorry for myself uh suffer in silence and so uh with the seal trident on there um and uh then this one i'm pretty excited to give you two how do we give something that he's gonna be pumped about um that is uh civilian version of the hk mp5 are you shitting me and so um apparently started what yeah oh shit yeah so obviously mp5 a lot of history in soft socom um don't know if you ever got to carry one around but uh yeah that thing's uh that thing's sick this is awesome i mean i'm gonna get one myself thank you thank you yep yeah seal teams have a long history of the uh mp5 no i never carried one i shot him did you carry one i never carried one we had one guy who just like carried it it's his uh um his secondary just because it was fun to carry an mp5 so i'm like why he's like why not so i was like all right so um i've shot it before but yeah i never carried it man thank you that is fucking awesome and there are three patches from shield ai on there uh one our work

with the u.s coast guard interdicting uh drugs in the caribbean sea to um flying you know jet aircraft autonomously um and i think the third one is yeah ai has the aircraft which is uh the call that fighter pilots make when they push a button on the f-16 and it becomes autonomous that's what this uh the shirt is so that's yeah that's awesome yeah thank you thank you did you you You just said you're doing Shield AIs, doing counter-drug ops? Yes. Yeah. Let's just start right there before we get into the live story. I'd love to hear this because I saw a couple of boats get blown up here and there.

I joke with my government relations team that I want a letter of Mark, but they say don't talk about that. But no, we've been working with the U.S. Coast Guard actually in the past couple weeks. We went operational with them. So there's this big, long process. We passed operational testing and evaluation 100% on key performance parameters, 100% on key system attributes. It's our aircraft, the VBAT, which is 180-pound vertical takeoff launch and land aircraft. Easiest way to think

Brandon Tsengabout it is like a miniature Reaper Predator drone. And two weeks in, I've interdicted over half a billion dollars worth of cocaine in the Caribbean Sea. Yep, in the Caribbean Sea. Just

absolutely. Obviously, there's a lot of operations going there. We're with the U.S. Coast Guard. I've also done U.S. Navy operations down there with Fourth Fleet. Can't say about, like, all the ops going on in there, but, yeah, what I can say is we've interdicted a lot of drugs, interdicted a lot of vessels. I've seen a lot of ships set on fire in the past couple days or past couple weeks, which feels, right, good as an American. I actually, like, always, you know, I'm excited about what they're doing in terms of the Caribbean Sea. um and just stopping the flow of drugs into the country and so i'm i'm like the thing that i live for is mission impact and so it's cool to get to have a positive impact on the world in that way that's incredible that man a billion over a billion in less than in two weeks yeah yeah yeah we've been absolutely like it's it's wild i mean yeah holy shit any fentanyl stuff uh not that i don't know well like they they say what they give you is like the the the weight and they give you the street price and so then i hop on google to determine that that is most likely cocaine so um yeah right on man damn that's awesome one more thing so i got a subscription account it's on patreon and a lot of these a lot of these folks have been with us here

since the very beginning when i was doing this damn thing out of my attic and uh you know they're they're the real reason i get to sit down with people like you and uh so one of the things i do is i give them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question this is from hunter widden how did your battlefield experiences where lives depended on split second decisions shape your vision for building AI systems that protect warfighters in combat? Yeah, it had a massive impact in the sense, so like just really quickly, my first deployment as a Navy SEAL, I got to Augment Development Group, Augment SEAL Team 6. And just to be like super clear, I was not a member of SEAL Team 6, didn't go through Green Team, but the SEAL teams would send out junior officers to go gain experience deployed.

That was your first deployment? Yeah, it was amazing. I am very blessed. I also, it just happened to be with the troop that killed bin Laden. So this was one year after they had killed bin Laden, and it was just like a master class in ISR and targeting operations, a master class in direct action missions. And so during the day, well, during the night, the troop would go out, they'd conduct their rage, capture kill missions uh during the day we would conduct uh kinetic strikes and so um that is understanding that kill chain uh from the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance targeting to uh having effects on the battlefield like that was you know didn't know it at the time but really understanding that process in and out has helped me build shield ai helped me understand like how to build these uh the autonomous systems very interesting wow what a hell of a first deployment yeah and like to be clear i tell people i was like i was i was the the equivalent of a squire for the ground force commander i do everything from look i just wanted to be a good you know young seal officer load his magazines grab a muscle milks you know before the op uh get those guys what they needed uh to be successful um and then you know when we were doing strikes it was

coordinating with the the battle space commander uh with air assets and so um the the one fun thing i i did try to make it lively and energetic i would cheer when we would do kinetic strikes in the jock and everybody's like what the hell i was like look this is fun cool stuff like we're we're taking out bad guys like what's not to love about it so that's cool man well let's um let's do let's start with the life story. So where did you grow up? Uh, grew up. Uh, so I was born in Houston, Texas. It said, grew up in Seattle, moved to, uh, Seattle, Washington when I was 10 years old, finished high school in Florida. It was just my dad's job in corporate America. Um, but, uh, yeah, it was, uh, one of four kids. I have an older, the oldest is my sister, older brother, younger brother. So I was, uh, number three. Um, but yeah, that's where, yeah, a lot of good memories in Seattle, in Florida. It was fun times. What'd your parents do?

My dad worked in corporate America, started off his career at Bechtel, largest engineering construction company in the world, then worked for a small engineering construction company in Houston, Texas, did another company called Foss Maritime in Seattle. And then at the age of 50, decided to buy a small engineering construction firm in Orlando, Florida. And that's what took us uh to florida mom was uh you know 100 mom uh day in day out um so uh yeah that's what they did what were you into uh let's see so when i was four years or in fourth grade i wanted to be a professional basketball player uh when i didn't make the travel team in sixth grade quickly realized like basketball was not going to be my journey um so i grew up swimming yeah there weren't you know Yao Ming didn't exist when I was in uh or he wasn't playing professionally didn't have a you know uh an Asian NBA player uh back in the day um and I wasn't very good it turns out but um thought I was good uh got into uh so I had always swam uh yeah swam growing up and then um got into water polo um so for me um middle school high school it was swimming water polo and then video games. You know, there's some pretty intense video game playing in Seattle when it rains 300

days out of the year. I'll bet. Yeah. I'll bet. You close with your brothers and sisters? Yeah. Yeah. Work with my brother. Him and I started, my older brother started the company, brought in my younger brother during COVID to start the company. He was at MIT getting his MBA. COVID happened. I I said, Nick, you know, why are you doing online school? Why don't you, you know, come join Ryan and I and work on this? And my mom holds it against me to this day that I got him to leave MIT. So she's not happy about it. No shit. So three brothers. Yeah. Yeah. There's three of us. Yeah. Three brothers. Yeah.

Three brothers running the company. Oh, yeah. Working together. And yes. Yeah. Yeah. Enabling it. Yeah. That's awesome. That's very cool. I mean. There's pros and cons. Yeah. I was going to say. that you can communicate really well with your siblings almost too well sometimes right on right on man well what got your what got your interest in the seal teams yeah so um 10 years old saw uh two movies under siege uh which i To this day, Claim is the greatest Navy SEAL movie of all time. Not sure what yours is, but Under Siege and The Rock. The Rock? Yeah, where the Marines kill all the SEALs. Yeah, not a good look, but those two action movies, like I said, Under Siege is my favorite.

But that's what got me interested in it. And so then I asked my parents about it, right? I was like, this looks really cool. They're like, oh, they want you to read a lot growing up. like, oh, you should read books. They got me books on it, got me more interested in it. You know, they thought it was a phase and that it would go away. And then, you know, I think in 10th grade, I asked them like, how can I, you know, be a Navy SEAL? And they're like, all right, this isn't going away. And they said, you should go to college first. I said, well, can I go to college and be a Navy SEAL? They said, go to this thing called the Naval Academy.

And so, yeah, applied there, got in and just kept the dream alive. What age did that fascination start? The Naval Academy? Being a SEAL. Being a SEAL? Ten years old, yeah. Ten years old? Yeah. Damn, you followed through. Yeah. No, it was, I mean, yeah, it was my older brother. I remember I was like 11 years old at the time. It was winter in Seattle. He was like, yeah, you got to do cold weather training. Like, go sit in the snow and I'll spray you with a hose. Right? As an 11-year-old, you're listening to your older brother. You know, like, all right, if this is what it takes. So, yeah. Any family history in the military?

It skipped a generation. So, on my mom's side, my great-grandfather was actually a doctor on a hospital ship in World War II. Actually, I have a really cool picture of the Japanese surrender with Admiral Nimitz. And it's a letter. where it's signed by Admiral Nimitz saying, you know, Captain Carroll, thanks for your service, you know, to the country during World War II. My grandfather was also in the Navy. He graduated, I think, the Naval Academy in like 1949, but then like skipped a generation. I wasn't close to my, you know, grandfather on my mom's side. And then on my dad's side, Uh, his dad actually, um, fought in World War II.

Uh, he was a nationalist in China fighting the Japanese. Wow. Yeah, fighting the communists and then, uh, left China when, uh, the communists took over, left with Chiang Kai-shek and, uh, moved to Taiwan. Wow. Yeah. Taiwan. Yeah. That's a, that's a topic we'll probably cover later, huh? Yeah, yeah, for sure. well so what was it like when you i mean it sounds like you come from a educated family your dad was was your dad an engineer yeah he was an engineer electrical engineer yeah they're you know typical caught typical asian family push education really hard on you nothing you'd come back you'd get an a on a test and 96 my dad say why didn't you get a hundred percent you get you get a hundred percent my dad say it was their extra credit you know and if there was not he'd be like all right good job you know so right on yeah and your siblings sound like they're uh hard charges too yeah yeah yeah i think we're all um look i one of the things it was always you know be grateful work hard right um you know don't give up uh the opportunity that's been set in front of you guys like don't let that go to waste. And so that was something, you know, ingrained in us from my parents and then from

America. So they grew up in South America. And then, yeah, so just a sense of, you know, gratefulness and work hard and be thankful for the opportunity. And what they would tell us is you won the lottery being born in the United States of America. And didn't really appreciate that till I would say I saw more of the world and joined the Navy and saw the rest of the world. And like, yeah, I think if you're born in the United States of America, You have absolutely won the lottery in a very positive way. Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. But you sound like kind of an outlier in your family.

Yeah, in the sense that I wanted, you know, I joined the SEAL teams and, you know, I think that was, you know, different for them. But they're all, yeah, I think they've always been, my mom's always pushed like a lot of be confident, um like an insane amount of confidence in her her kids and uh you know brandon if you want to go to the nba you can which is completely unrealistic i was like mom there's no way right she's like oh if you put your mind to it but um no that uh i don't know my my brothers my older brother started a company he sold it uh uh to qualcomm but i would say we're we're all hard workers we're very competitive uh people and so um yeah and then yeah just like to have fun be grateful let's work it out yeah so you go to so you decide you're going to the naval academy in 10th grade yeah in 10th grade uh went up for something they do where they invite yeah uh yeah 10th graders um it's between your 10th and 11th grade it's called summer seminar saw that place was like okay this is like it's pretty cool right it's different um still wanted to be a SEAL. Um, yeah. And, uh, applied, got in and, um, yeah, it's, uh, you ever been?

No, I've never been there. It looks beautiful. It's pretty awful on the inside. Is it? It's a, it's a military school. It is not a typical college experience. Like I, it's, um, it's, you make a ton of great friends just like you do. And, you know, the SEAL teams, I have lifelong friends, uh, from that institution, just because you go through joint suffering together. Yeah, you know, I mean, I've never been there. I don't really know much about it, but I will say that the Naval Academy alum seem to be very tight and tied in with each other. I mean, just curious. I mean, how does that compare with the SEAL teams?

It seems tighter after service. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you what, like, actually, the Harvard Business School Alumni Association, I think, is ridiculous in terms of the tightness. And then, yeah, the Naval Academy, I would say, they're pretty good, right? Again, everybody's got those shared experiences where you can understand the walk that they have taken in life. And then, yeah, I would say the SEAL teams, I don't think we do the best job of like an alumni association no but i think we do a good job just like trying to talk to each other trying to like i make myself available to any you know any veteran but like team guys specifically it's like all right you know someone gives me a call i'm i'm picking up and uh or they want to talk i'll talk to them so i'm very big on vets helping vets team guys helping team guys yeah me too yeah i wish there was more of it to be honest with him yeah but yeah but you know i think Yeah. Teams are, they don't want, people don't want to ask for help. Right. And, uh, that's like the teams, especially. Right. It's like, I'm a team guy. I'll figure it out. Type mentality is probably why they don't, you know, aren't more active in that, uh, in that alumni sense and extremely competitive. Yes. And extremely, very competitive. Yeah. But, uh, you know, I'm curious. I mean, what is, what is the pathway from a Naval Academy guy to buds or the seal teams?

Yeah. So your junior year, when I was there, you go through, they still do it. You go through a seal screener, right? And this is Friday night to Sunday morning. It's a hell night, a hell 48 hours, whatever it is. It's run by the seal on the yard. They bring in a bunch of seals from the East Coast to help run it. And along with the seal. years who were selectees for the SEAL teams. You go through that, that is, I mean, I don't know, we probably started with 120 people and you finished that screener with like 40 people. And so it's very much, yeah, it's no joke in that sense. Then based on your performance, you can get a SEAL billet. And so they didn't have like, they used to have something called mini buds now they have something different when i was going through um i got to go spend three weeks um with uh seal team two uh in may which was awesome um and so uh went spent three weeks with seal team two actually you know my fun fact was that's where uh i got to know uh tim she he senator tim she he him and i were on the same seal cruise together um he actually lived a floor below me at the Naval Academy, but got to know him really well on that, on that, uh, seal, we call a seal cruise. Um, it was an awesome three weeks we did, you know, combatives we did, uh, they were

doing the, uh, like aggressive driving course down at Blackwater. Um, and I was like, this is amazing. And I can, you know, and so, um, then you go back your senior year, you put in like your final application, final, final PT scores, get your letter of recs. Like we had a letter of rec from SEAL Team 2, uh, commanding officer. Um, actually master chief Jay Manti. I don't know if he was a SEAL Team 2 when you were there at the time. So yeah, CMC. Um, but then, yeah. So you put in the applications, you go in for an interview. Um, I, I like, I was competitive. I did not get a spot right out of the Naval Academy. Most soul crushing day of my life up to that point um right you take your 10 year old dream and like throw it in the trash um i remember like uh you know they they do they tell everybody what they're doing right you go into this room with your 40 classmates and they say you're going to be a pilot you're going to be uh they give you an envelope right and you open it up um open mine up you're going to be a surface warfare officer um was crushed devastated went back to my room skipped my afternoon classes i think i cried in shower for like half an hour um and i was like all right um you know after i was done feeling sorry

for myself um which was i get a day to feel sorry for yourself i was like okay well let's figure out how to how to keep the dream alive um so went to the fleet and you know but yeah then i had to laterally transfer how was the fleet um i tell people uh look combat uh buds the seal teams is the most mentally and physically challenging thing in the world, hardest thing in the world. I tell people being a surface warfare officer was a suck on my soul. It was a spiritual torment. No, and that's just because, like, I, right, if you've ever had a job that you didn't like, like, when people say, like, oh, I hate my job, I didn't like my job, like, I did not, like, that job was not for me.

And it's not to say there's anything wrong with that job. It's just like I could not relate to that job. Now, I did that job extremely well, and that was my mentality. I post, you know, my mentality after getting denied the SEAL teams was like, you know, after you go through all the excuses in your head, it's like, all right, why weren't you picked up? It's because you weren't number one. You weren't the best. And so that became my mentality. It's like to avoid ever having to experience that again, I better be number one. I better be the best. that way no one can ever tell me no again. So that was my mentality going onto the ship.

Got my surface, we deployed. I gave up 30 days of leave right after I graduated. I was the first person Naval Academy class of 2008, graduated May 23rd. I boarded my ship. In Phuket, Thailand on May 27th. And was in the Arabian Gulf conducting amphibious operations in like mid-June. And learned a ton. Learned like best leaders, like learned the best leadership lessons actually in the fleet. Was a hard job. But, you know, very thankful for, like, it's funny how things work out in life. And, like, I'm forever grateful for getting to experience that year and a half on a ship. And, like, just, you know, yeah, the resilience it built in me and, like, the mentality that it built in me whenever, like, yeah, it's just funny how things work out.

So how do you get into the teams from there? Yeah, so put in an application, you know, best day of my life up to that point. I remember in a parking lot right out, you know, right on the pier, right next to the USS Pearl Harbor. And I get a phone call from the detailer. Her name was Margaret, the officer detailer. She's a legend in the SEAL teams, like was the detailer for like 40 plus years. She's like, hey, Brandon, like just to let you know, you've been, you know, selected to go to BUDS. and we'll work with your ship's admin to get you orders there. And I was like, thank you so much. I hung up the phone and I was in my car and I was just like let out screams of joy.

I was pumped to go there. So yeah. How was it checking in? It was awesome. I loved Bud's. To the point like you're coming from the fleet to like going to Bud's. Uh, it was, um, yeah, I, it's one, I think it's, I love the ruthlessness of buds. I love the humor of, but the instructors are the funniest people on the face of the planet. Like I, uh, I loved every second of it. Um, like just not be like, that's where I wanted to be. Um, and so like, even in hell week, like I remember like USS Pearl Harbor was out on, uh the water and i'm just like oh my god like i'm not on that ship like thank you blessed to be here blessed to be getting surf tortured so you don't hear that very yeah yeah so um no it was it was great what kind of uh i mean did you have a tough time at buds at all did you have any hang ups um yeah uh like there's always one thing i think for like everybody even if like someone does things well and this is the wild one i i had a the tread took me four times which like i'm embarrassed to say as a water polo player all my water polo friends from the academy who were uh you know seal officers also they're like what the hell is wrong with you why can't you tread the water i was like dude i have no idea um with the tanks yeah try with the tanks all right your hands

out with the fins and it was treading with the fins which i think was like it's a different motion um and so yeah the instructors were baffled too because look i was coming in like first second place on every swim um and they're like what the hell is wrong with you saying like you were a water polo player and so anyways i end up you know getting it on my fourth try actually i was underwater and the instructors were like come to the side i'm like i wasn't like i wasn't sure like if they're like you failed or not and it's like my head's underwater my hands are up um they're like get over to the side and like finally like ran out of breath they're like all right and then you have to like swim across and like you know was dead doing it get out they're like congrats saying you passed you know uh took you four tries and i was like yeah and they're like you know what you get for having you know you being a water polo player and it takes You four tries, I was like, what do I get? They're like, 1,008 counts, go get it. And I just hopped on the pool deck and started doing 1,008 counts, you know, for the next, whatever, two hours. So, yeah.

Right on. Let's, we got to cover Hell Week. Everybody wants to hear about Hell Week. So let's, let's hear about your experience in Hell Week. Yeah. Let's see. One, loved the beginning, right? Loved Sunday night, loved breakout. Then you get into it, right? I think it's Monday night, you feel really sorry for yourself. And at least that's what, I think it hits like 24 hours, that high wears off and you're like, okay i've been doing this 24 hours you feel sorry for yourself um and i remember one of my friends was a brown shirt rollback right and so he's supporting and i just ran by uh like i'm running to like chow or whatever and i was like joe like is this as crappy as it gets he's like yeah brother just keep moving forward i was like all right good but like you know that's when yeah i want to say majority of the class quits that monday night because people are feeling sorry for themselves Second thing that I would call out, so like after that, like then you get into the groove and like you're just like moving forward.

I love, I don't think people talk about like how ruthless it is under a boat with people. One of the things I loved was like seeing boat crews kick the underperformers out and like just the viciousness of it. Like when you like, you see someone ducking boat and like their teammates would just punch them in the back of the head and they would like fall over like I don't think like it is like if you're not carrying your load the instructors don't have to do anything right your your classmates are going to take care of you um so I love that aspect of it um Wednesday night um was I think it's Wednesday yeah it's uh we did camp surf um and I like I don't know if people that was that to me was the worst evolution. So it was, you know, one in the morning and for four hours, um, there's like the wind is blowing. It's probably like 50 degrees outside. You're soaking wet and we're digging a trench, um, with our paddles. Um, and every minute on the minute for four hours, we go hit the surf and your body is so saturated with like salt water. So chafed, um, every single time you jump in that water, it was like shock therapy.

It was like a million needles just, like, crushing my body to the point where you don't, right after Hell Week, you never want to get into the ocean again. It's because you have this, like, this... You were just tortured into recognizing, like, it's not comfortable getting in that water. So that's what I remember. And then, fun thing, we did around the world, where you row on the boats around the entire San Diego or Coronado Peninsula. and one of the instructors brought out a boombox and they played the techno hit around the world, like around the world, around the world, for the entirety of that like 10-hour evolution to the point where like at one point the music stopped and he goes, oh shit, we ran out of batteries, I'll be back.

He paddles back, comes back, you know, 30 minutes later with it bearing he's like i got new batteries boys and like puts it on and you're just like listening it to again so then i will say like again i love the instructor cadre uh maddie roberts was our first phase uh instructor that guy is yeah um guy's an animal he is uh yeah like one of the cool you know yeah he he told us uh he's like look if you guys are here after hell week i'll tell you how i got uh the silver star and like told us that story and to have that You know, one of the things, again, amazing people, right? But that's your first phase instructor.

A lot of people don't know. Like, he was nominated for the Medal of Honor. And, like, you get to learn from that person. Like, how cool is that, right? And, like, that is the guy who's putting you through the gauntlet. Like, I loved every moment of it. Damn. Yeah. So what did it feel like, you know, to graduate BUDS and SQT, I mean, when you finally got your trident? Um, it feels good, right? it's a good accomplishment. And then I would claim like the real work starts. Right. And it's like, you know, I think the teams do a good job of that. It's like, look, congratulations. You know, um, you've, you've made it to the community and now like, it doesn't get easier. It gets faster. It gets harder. Uh, the expectations are real. We're no longer in, you know, training environments. Um, you're, you're getting ready to go to war. Um, and so, uh, love that again, i checked in seal team seven um actually you know like one thing that i also i again i don't think a lot of people appreciate this um at least you know probably the same for you when you guys were like going through it but um you you experience just like in that community you see a lot of death like more than any like i've been to more right you go to a ton of memorials like a lot of funerals

and you just that's something that I don't think the public realizes like oh it's 21, 22, 23 year old young men are just you know in those first couple years going to a ton. The week before we graduated SQT extortion happened and one of our classmates Brock his brother Heath was on that airplane, right? And so it's like very real. You know, we check into SEAL Team 7. I think it's Mike Tatham. He, you know, was, you know, he died in R&R, you know, but he was deployed to Afghanistan during that time. And so you just like, you're like, I thought that was kind of, you know, when I reflect back and think about it, that's something I don't think, like, thankful to be part of the teams, but a lot of people don't get to, you know, that's like one of the things that I think helps shape you as like a young man being around uh you know all of you know war death all of it so yeah yeah what was it like checking into seven for you um it was good again those guys were deployed and so we had like two months of I was going to schools uh I went to tier one off-road which was cool got to learn how to drive off-road uh vehicles um and then when the team got back they're reorganizing that's when i got to go uh deploy uh with um i got to augment uh development

group um and so um and then you know after pro dev hit ult and um yeah that was a ton of fun too yeah so you you check in and you go right into a dev group deployment yeah so and that is look that's like one in the lottery too yeah no exactly and um you know can cover down on that um but uh so to be clear not part of seal team six but uh gotta augment them um the seal teams were sending junior officers out to basically get experience um and so i spent uh three and a half months in Afghanistan, um, out of Fab Shank, uh, and, uh, Bagram. Um, and so I got to augment the troop that had killed, uh, bin Laden. And I tell people like, look, I was like basically the squire, uh, for the ground force commander. Um, but during that time got to learn, it was a master class in ISR and targeting. The troop would go out in the night and conduct direct action raids.

And then during the day we were conducting kinetic strikes and that's where, you know, I got to play, you know. a really nice role as a junior officer just coordinating those airstrikes which was a lot of fun did you get to go on any of the hits or didn't get to go on any of the hits um which was you know i get it right it's like those guys train up with uh uh you're a new guy right you're you earn your way onto that onto that mission and i was a fresh navy seal with a month and a half of you know at the team and so um no i didn't get to go with them what um so coming back i mean I mean, to see the pinnacle of the SEAL teams, like the pinnacle, especially with who you deployed with, you know, year after the Bin Laden raid, I mean, did that create some false expectations?

It's a good, like, yes. like right a couple times my platoon commander my troop commander like brandon like yeah we're not we're not damn neck right we're not dev grew like like we we get those guys only go out at night right why are we going out during the day guys they're like look we gotta seize terrain this is our mission um so uh fortunately when on my deployment to afghanistan with my platoon we had a ton of air assets um so that remained the same but that was a very unique thing for my uh for, like, our CL element in Afghanistan. But it wasn't to the point where I think it was just part of that learning curve, right?

I had seen what, you know, the top tier was doing, and then it's like, okay, like, look, it's a different mission is kind of like what it was at the end of the day. It's not that, it's just like you have to solve that mission differently than what DevGrew was doing with their mission set. Mm-hmm. So understanding that was, I think, like, you know, very quick to understand that when, like, look, like, this isn't... We have a different mission than DevGuru. This is how we have to execute said mission. Where did you go? What was your first deployment? So first deployment was out of Terankaut, Aruzgon, multinational-based Terankaut, sort of southeast.

We would do helicopter assault force operations into Kandahar, into Aruzgan, into Ghazni, into Zabul. And then we forged a stage out of Ghazni, sometimes going, I want to say, Paktika and Paktia. And got to go. Our mission was, we were paired up with the 8th Commando Battalion, 8th Kandek, Afghan commandos, 900 Commando Battalion, every single mission at that time in the war. It was a 10 to 1 force ratio. we had to bring 10 afghans out for every single operation and so we would bring 13 14 guys and 130 afghans holy shit yeah talk about like moving pieces on the battlefield wow um yeah what'd you think about working with those guys uh it was uh not i did not like there's pros there's cons i say like overall i did enjoy it right it was um when you go out with that many inexperienced guys it makes the mission more dangerous um it was very clear to us that uh that like probably like 85 of them didn't want to be there um those guys would sit down in front of like target compounds in front of the fatal funnel like they they didn't value like you know self preservation um and so now again there's probably like you bring 130 out there's like 15 hard chargers and like you use those 15 hard chargers um but it was uh i appreciated the challenge

and the complexity of the operations multi-day village clearances um it was cool we got all the air assets in the world. Right, our mission was, you know, hey, this is 2013. America's not going to be here forever. Like, we have to train the commandos to stand up on their own. And so that was an interesting mission set. But we were also, at that point, 12 years into a war, and it was clear to us, like, look, this is... Right, it was like, don't get yourself killed, was, like, kind of a mentality over this uncertainty was something that we thought about. Like, get the mission done. Don't get yourself killed.

And, like, yeah, take it to the enemy when they show up. Was it pretty hairy out there at the time? I don't think it was hairy. No. Like, we got into some good firefights, which I'm, like, thankful for. And, like, I'm glad the team, like, had that deployment. And we got to rack up. Like, some of the guys got to rack up some EKIA and i get credit for like some jtac kills um but i think it's like one quarter or whatever but um the uh let's hear about it oh the the jtac stuff um let's see there's this one just like a this was uh got our new jtacs right we we have experienced jtac new jtac new jtac's the lead jtac on this operation and um i'm working with him and there's this guy that's taking you know pot shots at us from probably, like, 1,300 meters away from a mountain, right?

And it's, like, hard to find them. They're moving. And it's indirect fires, right? But we're like, all right, let's bring on C-130 and drop some ordnance on this guy. And turns out the C-130 had not doped in their .30 Mike Mike. And, like, and so they're shooting at this guy. and we have a rover feed where we can see and rounds are just missing him and the guy is running um and he runs and like our my the new jay tack i'm like i'm like what's going on he's like they keep missing like why are they missing and the like right because he wants to take out this bad guy um they uh he runs probably for about four and a half minutes just like smoke going everywhere like rounds coming in on him um finally they drop a i want to say it's called a griffin gbe 39 uh it's a glide bomb um because the guy like stops under a tree uh and tries to like hide under the tree but we we had him on ir footage and so that was that was an interesting one so um yeah it was new jtac's first you know jtac kill and so yeah that was your first one yeah yeah yeah Yeah. Yeah. How did that feel? Ah, indifferent. I'm like, yeah, I was, I just wanted to honestly, like I just wanted the team to complete the mission. So. Right on. Where do you go from

Afghanistan? Um, so let's see, uh, while I'm in Afghanistan, my orders were to go. I want to say it was to seal team two. I had orders to go to the East coast. Um, during that deployment, I get an email uh from one of my sqt classmates another officer at seal team five to say brandon you want to hop on the phone i was like cool so i hop on the phone from afghanistan he's in coronado he's like hey i've got family issues um i have to step down from my platoon commander billet at team five um he's like do you want to take it and uh i was like oh that sounds like awesome like like all right i'll get to go right into a workup uh or like yeah i was like what's catch she's like you're gonna go right into a workup and so i call my wife said hey hun we um we can either go to the east coast right and like make that move and go through a pro dev cycle and do a ult into a deployment i was like or we can stay in san diego um and uh but here's the catch is like i'm home for a week and then rotating right into ult um i was like what do you want to do and so she said like hey let's you know like she's like i'm down for staying in san diego if you are and i was like yeah that sounds great um so got home um checked into seal team five ult started so off to the races i think out of a

for two i i tracked this because actually the teams were making us track it at the time two years in a row i was gone 300 days out of 365 days wow yeah and i was my wife's like this isn't normal i was like i don't know all our friends are doing it it seems pretty normal uh she's like no it's not i was like all right so um but yeah so checked into seal team five did the work up uh deployed to the pacific uh you guys going over there um it was a lot of uh joint partner operations um during the time so i think like we were like we sent a lot of people to the uh yeah the joint exercises we sent uh element to korea sent element to the philippines sent an element to uh the maldives like all over um the place. I personally, we went to, uh, I went to Vietnam. I went to Singapore. Um, we did the POTUS detail, uh, in Hawaii for President Obama, augmenting Secret Service.

Uh, that was pretty cool. Um, but yeah, it was, it was a really cool experience. All right. Why did you get out? Um, I wanted, like, a number of, like, a whole host of reasons. I wanted to do something else. I wanted to see like what could be done outside of the confines of the military and I don't mean that like in a negative way big very blessed excited like I would encourage everybody actually like I think the amount of accountability and responsibility you get in the military like at such a young age is like one of the most amazing things I would encourage people to do it but I wanted to see like what could be done outside of a military system I knew what the career path looked like for officers, like in the sense, right, it's like, okay, I would have to go do an ops job before I could go screen, and then you go screen, you'd be a troop commander and like you get, you know, maybe one or two more pumps.

And then you're commanding and, you know, and then you're doing another staff job and then like a group commanding. Like, again, I got a lot of friends who are doing that. I just was not, you know, commanding a SEAL team was not something that I-I aspired to do. Um, I was like, I absolutely aspired to be a SEAL platoon commander, but, um, you know, I was interested in other things. So, yeah. Wasn't happy how things were going in Afghanistan. That was, you know, um, yeah. I don't know a whole lot of people that were. Yeah, so. So, S.H.I.E.L.D. AI, I mean, that-that-that popped up. on your, I mean, you wanted to do something before you left. Yeah. So again, kind of like a planner mentality. I want to be a SEAL since I was 10 years old. When I got accepted into business school, I was on deployment. I was based out of Guam. And I was trying to figure out what I want to do next. Was it, hey, was it going to do venture capital? Was it going to do private equity? Was going to do hedge funds um i was very like inspired by entrepreneurs uh my dad was a small business became a small business owner at age 50. my brother had sold uh a wireless power company to qualcomm i want something he was like 24 years old um and so i had those like role models in my

life and um I, uh, so eventually landed on, and I think that fit my skill set, right? Leading teams, building culture. Um, and so, uh, wanted to do something entrepreneurial, um, was really interested in, uh, AI and autonomy just as an engineer, um, that was, you know, of interest to me, like always followed technology. Um, I remember, you know, thinking like, wow, it would have been, it was 2014. I was like, it would have been really cool to have been part of that internet wave of companies. Like what's going to be the next wave, like AI and autonomy is what I decided. And like lots of people were talking about it at the time. And then was trying to figure out what problems I wanted to solve. And typical entrepreneur story just kept coming back to the problems that I had faced, right? Problems of military problems, problems of national security, global stability, you know, decide, you know what, these are actually really important problems.

And I remember, again, looked up to Elon Musk as an entrepreneur, and he has done a lot of inter-space travel. You have XAI, you had PayPal for, he didn't have XAI at the time, but he had PayPal for the internet. And I was like, what problems is he not working on that are like actually really important for the future of humanity? And I think warfare is like one of of those, like, massive unsolved problems in human history. And so, it's like, wow, is there, you know, could work on solving, you know, call it the problem of warfare, was something that I was interested in also. What problems specifically in warfare were you looking to solve?

One of, like, deterrence, right? Like, and if you look at why countries go to war, like, why they don't go to war. Because a lot of countries have grievances with each other, but they choose not to fight, right? It's expensive, it's costly. And if you look at how America has built this world order, it's because of our military leadership since 1945, right? For the past 80 years, there's been more global prosperity in the world because there's been more global stability in the world. That has been because of, like, the power projection of the U.S. military. That's, right, nuclear weapons deter nuclear war.

The conventional weapon systems that have deterred conventional warfare have been our aircraft carriers, our submarines, our ships. Those have deterred largely state-on-state conflict up until Russia invading Ukraine. Like major state-on-state conflict, obviously, there have been a handful of small examples. But it became, you know, like how can you continue to deter warfare just at the conventional level and then also at the asymmetric level? And, you know, my belief is that AI and autonomy has a massive role to play in deterring conflict. Yeah, yeah, I would, we're going to get heavy into that.

I would love to hear what you think the future of warfare looks like and if pilots, people on ships, commandos are obsolete. Yeah. You know, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that a little bit later. But before we get too far into S.H.I.E.L.D. AI, let's take a quick break. Okay. There are a lot of choices out there when it comes to cell phone service, and it feels like more are popping up all the time. But Patriot Mobile isn't just another option. They're different. A company built by people who actually share your values and who are committed to doing things the right way. They're also ahead of the curve when it comes to tech. Patriot Mobile is one of the only carriers with access to all three major U.S. networks, which means...

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If you've enjoyed watching, there is a lot more waiting for you over at Vigilance Elite Patreon. All right, Brandon, we're back from the break. I need to work on my shooting. That was a little rough out there. Good break. I mean, it was a little rough for me, too. but um so i want to get into you know why you're here shield ai yep so you started it in 2015 2015 what was the vision um look i uh i believe in a world of autonomous systems um i think they're going to have a profound impact on humanity um i like as it relates to the defense world i just fundamentally believe that um autonomous systems are like Swarms of autonomous systems are going to be the most strategic conventional deterrent of the 21st century, and I think it's important for the U.S. to lead here, and so wanted to start a company that realized this vision.

I think there are a couple people talking about it in 2014, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, but what I was seeing was no one was really working on it because it requires a lot of software expertise to actually build the AI and autonomy, and that's not what the traditional defense primes are known for. They're not known for their software systems. They're known for building the aircraft carriers, the submarines, the fighter jets of the world. But, you know, the best of AI and autonomy was all going to Silicon Valley at the time. I mean, so what is, I mean, I know you guys have a bunch of different projects, but, you know, overall, what is SHIELD AI?

So, mission is to protect service members and civilians with artificially intelligent systems. and In pursuit of this mission, we have been building and proliferating the world's best AI pilot. Easiest way to think about an AI pilot is self-driving technology for unmanned systems. Why is that important? It enables unmanned systems to operate without GPS, without communications, or while GPS or communications are jammed. It enables them to operate without a remote pilot, and then it enables them uh enables the concept of swarming or teaming uh where they are able to share information with each other read and react and work together as a team and the and so these all the different stuff that you're making these aren't piloted from somebody in nevada or no they're the they are piloted by an onboard autonomy stack an ai pilot Like, again, if you've ever driven a Tesla or been in a Waymo where it's just navigating the streets, executing the mission of dropping you off from point A to point B, making decisions about what to do, same type of technology, but for military applications.

Damn. Damn. So, I mean, so what was the, I mean, that's like, it's just a huge thing to take on. And especially, you know, coming out of the SEAL teams. I mean, where do you even start with that idea? Look, I think you start, you actually start with like the vision, right? And I asked myself, and then you work backwards from there. But, you know, in 2015, I asked myself, what does the military of 2035 look like? And what is the role that AI and autonomy plays? I decided that AI and autonomy should be powering, commanding, maneuvering every single military asset under the sun. And then you say, OK, well, how do we get there?

Like in Bud's, like in the SEAL teams, just one step at a time. And so we started with a problem that I was super familiar with, clearing buildings of threats. And so our first product, we put an AI pilot on a quadcopter and it would go inside buildings and structures. completely autonomously looking for threats. No shit, completely autonomously. Yep. Has that been deployed? It has been deployed to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Ukraine. It's been widely deployed. It's been used, like I'm super proud of the product. The quadcopter market for the military back in 2015 to like 2000, honestly, like maybe even now, it was a very small market.

um so but like the mission impact that we got to have like i'm very proud of you know the best of the best soft forces have used it on operations it has absolutely brought guys home back safely to their families uh super proud of that product couldn't build a large business from just that product and so had to expand um and we executed climbing the aviation uh food chain which led us to, you know, autonomous F-16s, autonomous VBATs. And now it's like we're just making, like, we're working with every prime contractor to make their systems autonomous. Wow. Wow. I mean, what is it? I mean, so, you know, one of the interesting things about autonomous warfare or, you know, drones specifically is it's everything from clearing a building.

i don't know if they have weapons capabilities on these uh quadcopters or not do they uh they like we would not ship it with them but folks have um figured out like how to strap their own things but that's not like we don't even make these quadcopters anymore uh because we've had to focus like in the same way tesla doesn't make a sports car anymore um we were used as a stepping stone to get to other markets but um other folks have put things on these quadcopters i mean And it's everything from, like I said, the small quadcopter that's clearing buildings to, I mean, the latest thing that you've made, I think, is 2,000 miles, 2,000-mile range, outmaneuvering an F-35.

Yeah, it's about 18,000 pounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's just wild to even think about. Yeah. So, I mean, what's it like, you know, seeing your product, your innovation get implemented into the SEAL teams where you came from? Yeah, it was like what I care most about. It's not like the size of the company. It's not the valuation. It truly is like when our products make an impact for our customers, the warfighter at the end of the day. That's when like I get, you know, the hair stands up on my arms still every single time. Like it doesn't matter. And like the cool thing at this stage in the game is that is happening at increasing frequency.

And so I remember, look, we did a really cool test. I want to say this was back in 2017. The SEAL teams actually, they filmed it. They called it the John Henry test because man versus machine. And they sent the quadcopter into a house clearing problem down at La Posta. And they gave a SEAL squad the exact same problem. Quadcopter, right, like solve the problem faster. And at the end of this problem, this house clearing problem, there's a house born NID, which was like a way for the SEAL teams to say, like, yeah, it doesn't matter. Like, that's, you know, you cleared the building, but you still get blown up.

And so seeing the reaction from the guys after that, they're like, OK, like, I can see why this is like a valuable capability, even with all its flaws. And it had a lot of flaws back in 2017, 2018 timeframe, but they took it overseas, found utility out of it. And so, you know, I was very proud of that product. And actually working a lot with the Army also was probably even a bigger user of the product than the SEAL teams were. And again, this was like early days innovation. Holy smokes, the team must have been like 40 people at this stage in the game. But like, again, proud of like no one had ever seen this thing before.

A lot of people had talked about autonomous systems. they put it in their 10-15 year roadmap and here it was completely you know going through these house clearing problems by itself damn i mean do you are you on site when they're when these exercises are going on or yeah yeah we were um we're working hand in hand with these guys so so what's it like when you see something that you've innovated something that you've developed outperform the same community that you came from i mean is there a lot of pushback i would think that i mean it's taking a job right and so a job that that there's a lot of i mean there's a lot of sweat blood tears dedication drive that goes i mean yeah we just talked about you know your pipeline into the seal teams i mean it's it's you don't there's a lot of passion yeah to become a SEAL, and then to have you show up with a drone that's like, watch this.

So one, it augments a mission. I don't want to say it takes a job. And I think everybody understands that. And the thing that I think a lot of folks understood in the SEAL teams in SOCOM writ large was, hey, this thing, like, close quarters combat is a really cool thing to train to. It's a lot of fun doing it. It's also like one of the most dangerous things that a soldier, a SOF warrior like does in terms of a mission. And so like, again, clearing buildings, clearing tunnels, it sounds really cool until you start taking fire from the other side and you say, look, is there a better way to do this?

And that's why I think SOF has been a great partner, not just like from the quadcopter, but all the way up to like all of our products. Cause they're always asking the question like, Like, is there a better way to do this? And so that's been just like a positive mentality. But yeah, it was fun doing the tests, the exercises. Again, they were great partners. Their innovation cell working directly with us. Very proud of what we accomplished. But at the same time, it was at small scale. And that's why we had to figure out how to build other products because they're just not a lot of people, unfortunately, care about the soft, you know fighter or like the the infantry soldiers there's just it pales in comparison in terms of like the amount of funding uh that's going towards other capabilities so was there was there any i mean did they implement it immediately or did they yeah they took they took it over um to the battlefield they used it right and you get feedback right it sucked in this scenario why wasn't it working here and like that's when like team would solve bugs solve problems send it back we fix this they'd use it you know again it was successful in a lot of operations was unsuccessful in some and that's just like the name of the game in terms

of like early stage highly technical products um but yeah again what i'm like i'm very proud of that product because 100 used on some of the most important missions uh that this country does and 100%, you know, brought guys back home safely to their families. And so I can't, like, can't go into those missions, but missions where H-bids went off, S-vests went off, those types of missions where it's like, if there had been guys inside that building, you know, like, we all know what that looks like. So, or you and I know what that looks like. Wow. So you're always getting direct feedback from the field on how these things are going.

Yep. Can you talk about, if you can't talk about these specific missions and what they were for, I mean, can you talk about some of the successes and failures that you saw the product doing? Yeah, simply, it would go inside these buildings. In terms of, like, the SFS world, right? People actually, drones had been hunting bad guys for 20-plus years, and all of a sudden, right, the Americans show up with a drone that goes inside buildings. And so we have seen terrorists see this thing come inside a building and clack themselves off. Oh, shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What were some of the failures? What were some of the things?

You'd have trouble in like highly dusty conditions. Our first generation product used a LIDAR, our first generation quadcopter. And so LIDAR, when you're operating in dusty areas, it spins up a lot of, you know, particle sand in the air. and every single time that lidar is scanning uh it's getting a reflection back from that dust and so that caused a lot of challenges a lot of headaches in the early days because simply you know that's where our customer was operating in these dusty desert-like environments um where people lived in mud huts uh or there's just sand and you know or there's war zones where there's just like dust everywhere um and then when you fly a quadcopter that's spinning up all that dust that would be a challenge going through really small doorways and tunnel systems was another challenge because when you like the wind vortices that these things are like when they're flying it's sucking them into the wall because you're flying in so such close proximity and so that's just like a controls challenge that we had to solve but those are like some of the headaches and problems that you have to solve where the customer uses it they're like oh what the hell doesn't work right customer at the end of the day just wants their product to work and so

the other good thing about that soft customer is that like they are they're a very demanding customer but they're also like understanding of where a product is and its maturity life cycle interesting interesting i mean how small are these things these things were about two and a half pounds this big yeah size like it fit through a standard doorway that was one of our product requirements. So what would, what would, I mean, how would it be implemented? I mean, we were just talking about, you know, doing hits and all this stuff. And so what exactly, in the soft world, because that's all I can relate to.

It was primarily used in call-out operations. So, right, it wasn't going to be used in a dynamic, like, HR mission or anything like that. But, like, when you have a deliberate target where you're executing a call-out, where, right, you can think of, like, for the non-military audience, like, the FBI surrounding. a house like come out with your hands up right there's pros and cons to executing an operation that way but during those types of operations you execute a call out right um people would come out of the building it's like well let's go make sure everybody's out of the building you send a quadcopter in or you send the quadcopter in first those types of operations damn damn i mean what i mean what what did that what did that wind up developing into what was the next product yeah so a couple things one to the point where like recognize really quickly that hey this market is vicious small everybody thinks of quadcopters as toys this is again back in 2018 1920 like

Brandon Tsengthere's not real money flowing towards these quadcopter products. We said, Hey, we have to

figure out how to, um, get onto more strategic, more, uh, yeah, strategic platforms, uh, strategic capabilities. Um, that's where a lot of the defense dollars were moving. So what we ended up doing was during the time, um, we decided, Hey, we have to, we're going to, we're going to buy, uh, another platform. So made that decision in late 2019, 2020, there was a couple acquisition targets that we were looking at, ended up in 2021 buying two companies, both at the same time. One of the companies, Martin UAV, they made the VBAT. The other company, Heron Systems, they were working on AI and autonomy for fighter jets. And so what we were able to do is, hey, let's put the AI pilot on the vbat which is again you think of it as like a miniature predator reaper drone um and then you know we wanted access to these programs where we could put ai pilots onto fighter aircraft i mean so we'll get into the fighter aircraft here in a little bit but i mean how do these things how do they think i mean is it literally like to the quadcopter all the way up to the You just called it the expat.

I mean, you know, is it just you switch it on and point it in the right direction? Yeah, so for the quadcopter, there's a button on the side, you press it, like spin its rotors and like take off from your hand and like go inside the buildings. The way that like it works from a technical perspective and like this is a simplification of it, but there's a series of software modules and every self-driving car or humanoid robot is working like this um it and like every one of shield ai's products is working like this the software modules that make up this ai pilot or this autonomy stack uh you have a state estimation module state estimation is like where in the world am i you have a mapping module it builds a map uh you have a controls module you have uh right that's like how to actuate motors um yeah you know your your steering mechanisms um you have um a reasoning model what we call global reasoning you can think of this as like the mission is the mission to go inside a building and clear the threats is the mission to dogfight f-16s is the mission to find surface to air missile systems like what the mission is that's what the reasoning module is then you have like path planning module which is like okay what are the steps that i'm going to take

to execute uh said mission so those are the different software modules that make up an autonomy stack The way that, you know, it operates without GPS, right, it's building a map of the room, its environment, whether it's using cameras, whether it's using LIDAR, whether it's using radars, to basically build a map of its environment, and then it's estimating its position based on the map that it's built. Again, I think a lot of people try to, like, over-complicate autonomous systems. At the end of the day, like, you and I, we are autonomous systems, and we operate the same way these robots do in the sense that we sense the world with our, you know, five senses, then we think about the world using our brain and then we actuate our muscles supported by our skeleton to maneuver around the world. When we come into this room, like we don't think about it this way, but like we've made a map of this room in our head and we can now navigate off of this map. I know that wall is, you know, 10 feet away. This wall is eight feet away, right? You're six feet from me. These These autonomous systems are doing the exact same thing.

And just like we learn from our experiences, these things are learning from their experiences. How do they learn from their experiences? Yeah. So, one of the principal ways that we developed a methodology called reinforcement learning. And so, this was pioneered... There's probably academic papers, I would say. like it became pretty famous with like alpha go alpha star, um, where it was, um, they would put these, uh, alpha go, you know, beat a world champion, uh, at the game of go, right. It's any time reinforcement learning is really an, a good learning methodology when the number of variables or outcomes are massive, right. In the, the multiple, like trillions of outcomes, right then which i i couldn't bring up what the outcomes of the game of go are but right it's you know it's almost uncountable yeah right same thing with like the game of starcraft which was alpha star it's like the number of like moves are uncountable in terms of like the number of scenarios that's where you find something like reinforcement learning really shine right in the real world the number of moves that you have are uncountable um and so uh what you're doing is you're taking

Brandon Tsengyou know, you'll, you basically give it a goal and then behaviors that you believe are positive, you reinforce those behaviors, you reward those behaviors. And then, um, things that are negative,

like you don't reward those behaviors. And what you'll do is spin up millions of simulations where these things are just playing against each other millions of different times and they just continue to improve. And then you have your engineers, right? They architect this, this This training environment, this, you know, this, I think we've called it a dojo before. But they just keep learning from those experiences. You check in, you validate, you cross-validate, you make sure it works in the real world. And that's how you're teaching these systems anything from clearing a room to dogfighting to, you know, hunting surface-to-air missile systems to navigating, you know, yeah, any unmanned system.

Wow. Wow. Wow. I mean, what do you envision? I mean, you had mentioned, what does warfare look like in 2035? And I mean, obviously, it's a lot of autonomous systems. Be a little more specific. I mean, what does it look like? I mean, we had talked about, I was just talking about, did you get any pushback from the SEAL teams or the SOF community about, is this going to take our job? which you know my perspective is yeah it probably will eventually take your job but you know and that you know that sucks for somebody that's aspiring to be you know a seal a green beret infantry whatever right but i mean for the for the you know broader consciousness of the country and even the world i mean that's less people coming home in bags yeah you know it's it's and so You know, I mean, I mentioned at breakfast, I interviewed, you know, Palmer Luckey and kind of asked him the same question, you know, what does it look like? Is this going to replace all personnel military-wide eventually? He says no. He knows a hell of a lot more about this than I do, but, you know, when he's talking about, and you too, I mean, when you guys are talking about this stuff, I mean, it's making pilots obsolete.

it's making you know dino mavrucus and other seal who's doing autonomous surface warfare vehicles it makes a lot of naval vessels obsolete i mean the drone that you you know the quadcopter that's that's taking somebody's you know job and and and so i'm just curious i mean which i like i want to i just want to be clear i think that's that is a good thing for the nation less less deaths on our own side and more is obviously better. Yeah. So, you know, what is your vision? What does it look like in 2035? In 2035, so there's like, directly in 2035, humans still play a massive role. I think it's going to be a human machine team augmented by swarms of autonomous systems, but you are still going to have, like, it will not have proliferated.

Autonomous systems will not have completely proliferated by that stage of the game in terms of, like, how militaries operate. Still going to be a heavy reliance on humans for a number of different mission sets, augmented by, often by, like, machines. If you look at, like, I don't know what the time span is. I'm going to, like, say 100 years simply because no one will be, like, get upset at me for making a 100-year prediction. Yeah, I don't think you see humans playing a big role in warfare a hundred years from now. I think that actually happens probably sooner where countries, you know, it becomes a, you know, robot on robot deterrence, um, where, right. And I think that's like a, it's a good place, right. Where it's like, we're not neither side. You want to be sending, you know, young men and women, uh, to fight each other, um, over, you know, often like what I would call like, you know, things that we shouldn't be fighting over. So I, I do think you'll see a lot of autonomous systems in 2035. I don't think they're going to be executing every single mission that the department of war, uh, executes on. Um, but there, I think people are going to see like, holy smokes in the same way we in the soft community saw what, you know, the Reaper

drones, the predator drones could do for us from 2000, 2020. I think you're going to see people say holy smokes look at what autonomous systems can do for us you know um we like need to double down triple down 10x down on like these these types of systems because they're going to have massive strategic impacts uh on the battlefield happy to talk you know about why let's do it yeah um i think and like this is why i believe autonomy if i had to like point out like the most strategic technologies in warfare for the past 90 years, 100 years, it'd be like our air power. And behind that, you have like, you know, our nuclear triad, our nuclear submarine, super important. In the 80s, we developed stealth technology and GPS guided munitions.

then we adopted large drones from 2000 to 2020 and I think the next evolution which is really a transformation is this proliferation of autonomous highly intelligent autonomous systems that are ubiquitous on the battlefield now from like again an engineer think about like first principles and if you look at like one of the principles of warfare or actually like two them it's like mass and maneuver um mass Super important, right? Those who are able to apply mass and maneuver on the battlefield more effectively than others have always been more successful in the history of conflict, right? Larger armies, just with mass, often won wars from like 4,000 BC to frickin', you know, the 1800s.

You know, then maneuver started becoming more important. And now it's like, how can you maneuver mass most effectively? um even when i was doing my first augment i was with uh the ground force commander who conducted uh the bin laden right he was kind enough to mentor me and he's like look he's like what we do at dev group is like really cool he's like but he's like we need our brothers our sisters in the army and the marine corps uh to bring the mass to the fight you need mass to occupy terrain you need mass to create stability um and like you know soft forces just don't bring the mass or the heft of the fight, and that's why you need the Army and the Marine Corps to bring that level of mass. What autonomy does is it unlocks the concept of near-infinite, intelligent, maneuverable mass, where you are no longer limited by the number of personnel you have, right? The number of warfighters that the United States could theoretically field, right call it able-aged you know men and women from age you know 18 to 55 um there's a finite number of people you're like with ai and autonomy and combined with you know industrial production you can field million tests to lead that's why it's like the most strategic ai and autonomy

being the most strategic capability for the next 50 years wow damn i mean what who are who are your competitors not not just domestic but i mean foreign competitors i mean we we seem to be you know from my perspective on the cutting edge of all this autonomous uh warfare type stuff but i mean you know everybody that i bring in here is talking about china china china China's right on our ass, if not a little bit ahead, you know, with AI, with energy, with autonomous systems, shipbuilding, all that kind of stuff. I mean, who are the key players in the world? In the world? I think China is the key player that matters.

Now, the good news is the United States remains best in the world at software, at AI, at autonomy. me. Um, but like that in no means we should be complacent. I think the Chinese are highly innovative. Um, they are able to mobilize resources in a faster way than the United States can mobilize resources, at least state sponsored resources. Um, and, um, their iteration cycle, like how quickly they go from version one to version two to version three to version four version 5 um is much faster than the usa and i've been in a number of classified briefings that actually show their ability to iterate and like obviously like can't go into like what those timelines are what those capabilities are but suffice to say like no one should feel good about it because like as elon musk says like all that matters is your cycle time all that matters is your iteration cycle if you suck at something but you can get really good at it really fast um then it becomes a problem like it doesn't matter if if you're here and if china's here and we're here like we shouldn't feel good if china's accelerating like this and we're just kind of like you know you know moving forward at a slower clip because eventually they pass us

so yeah they're by far number one and they yeah they understand the technology they've made claims they want to build a million uh drone sized army right and that's we're seeing that more and more from countries throughout the world basically stating that they're moving towards million plus drone drone armies what um i mean corporate espionage is a major problem especially in the defense tech space you know with with chinese nationalists coming into the country and getting into our schools and embedding into companies and so i'm just curious i mean do you do you take that seriously yeah yeah you're you're a major i mean you are you and your company could be detrimental to china pretty much i mean we just talked about the the the the the drug trafficking going across the you know it you got a part in that i mean you see where i'm going with this yeah yeah no we take security like uh very seriously it's um Um, it's, the hard thing is, right, you're in the intelligence community, a state-sponsored actor is, like, a really hard thing to stop, right?

If China can steal the plans for the Joint Strike Fighter, right, um, it is a, uh, it's like, what's the, like, it's hard to stop someone that is truly determined to take, um, no matter, like, what safeguards that you put in place. And I go back to like, right, and the SEAL teams would talk about speed versus security, right? And I like I would tell my platoon, like speed is a type of security, right? If you're iterating quicker, then that is going to make you like more secure, right? If you're just like because great, if a state sponsored actor is stealing something, hopefully it's going to take them a couple years to like crack through encryption. And then all of a sudden, like they're a couple years behind, right? And they're just getting started.

And hopefully by then you're on iteration 10 in terms of what you've been doing, right? And this is very similar to like, all right, Elon Musk not patenting anything from SpaceX because he's like, we just, he's assuming that, right, they're going to steal rocket plans at some point in time. And so what matters is just like moving faster than the adversaries. Moving faster than the competition is what matters at the end of the day. Yes, you have to take like basic security protocols. cause. And yes, you have to invest in security and you have to be aware. But like at a core first principles level, I think like what matters in business, what matters for our country is an emphasis on speed over security. And I think the U.S. actually has been more challenged in this world where it's always like compartmentalized, move things. Security slows things down in a lot of ways sometimes where it's like, no, we have to be moving at speed. Interesting. Interesting.

Interesting. Let's talk about the XBAT. I mean, we were talking about the two companies that you acquired. The VBAT. The VBAT. Yeah, yeah. The VBAT. What is that? So the VBAT, 180-pound vertical takeoff launch and land aircraft, does the mission of a Predator Reaper at a fraction of the cost. ISR and targeting mission. Does it differently than these larger Group 5. They call them Group 5 drones. VBAT is a Group 3 drone. Um, but essentially it is, um, yeah, conducting ISR and targeting. So we've deployed that thing to like our big wins have been in Ukraine. Uh, they have been, um, uh, in the Caribbean sea, uh, most recently.

Uh, but that's where it's like provided massive value to our customers. Takes off and lands like a SpaceX rocket. That's like logistics footprint is tiny. Those are like some of like the key AI piloted, able to operate where GPS and communications are jammed. That's where right on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, where we've been able to have some pretty unique and rare success. So these things vertically take off. Yes. Yep. I mean, can you go into why that? is so important yeah um so vertical takeoff at launch and land uh and this will this goes to the the uap that's in your that's in your backyard uh that we're going to talk about but why is that important it's um runways are massive infrastructure they're massive targets all right and so in this in like you can't really hide a runway um and then so when a pure adversary like that's one of the first things that they're going to target actually like the ukrainians um when president biden uh enabled them to use attackums into russia first thing the ukrainians went after were runways right actually then with their special operation where they had a bunch of you know, these are like FPV drones that they use to blow up Russian assets,

those, you know, they were targeting runways and the equipment on runways because they knew where all these things were. Because again, runways, very stationary, high value infrastructure that can massively disrupt operations. And so that's like, you want to, in this world where warfare is incredibly dynamic, where the enemies have long range missile systems that can hit your runways that where your adversaries know they're you look at their priority list of targets number one is runway right it's an aircraft carrier it's a it's a stationary runway in the pacific that's the first thing they're going after because every adversary wants to take away the u.s and our allies, like principal advantage, which is air superiority.

So they're going after your runways. What vertical takeoff, launch of land, besides like getting out of runways, it allows you to be very tactical, very maneuverable. The Ukrainians and the Russians, they're moving their strategic equipment every 10 minutes because they're just sitting targets. So you have to be mobile. If you're tied to a runway, like you're not very mobile. How would these, I mean, how would these be deployed? would they are they yeah how many of them yeah so the vbats um theoretically like a swarm you could use a swarm of vbats that would be um like it becomes like an operational challenge to like actually deploy swarms like more of a logistics challenge than anything but the way that like we're the ukrainians are using them they're putting them in the back of sprinter vans going to a launch point launching moving commanding the thing landing it somewhere else right again i don't think a lot of folks if you haven't been over there realize how dynamic the battlefield is at this stage in the game um it's it's just constant movement shoot and move shoot and move shoot and move but done like in the essence where it's like if you're not doing it you're just getting your your target you're a sitting duck so um you have to have this mobile

equipment you still have to have the ability to conduct isr and targeting but you're just limited not just from, like, that runways are targets, but also the proliferation of surface-to-air missile systems make large, exquisite aircraft very vulnerable. Whether it's, you know, everybody saw our Stinger missiles, or not our, like, they saw Ukrainians shooting down Russian helicopters with Stinger missiles. They saw that in 1980s in Afghanistan. They saw it again in Ukraine and just augmented by other surface-to-air missile systems. um it's really impossible like using large exquisite platforms um and even like too dangerous for manned platforms to operate in these highly contested uh environments and i and i say contested i mean lots of surface to air missile systems lots of gps jammers lots of communications jammers when you i mean when they are deployed are they i mean it's just so foreign to me, I mean, you know, you go to Bagram and you see everything. You go to biop and you see helicopters, fighters, everything, right? From C-130s to whatever, your fighter jets to Chinooks, Batches, all of that. And so because of the vertical takeoff, I mean, a couple of questions. I mean, are they dispersed throughout the country,

you know, in onesies and twosies or... That's exactly right, right? You're pushing capability to the lower echelons. And that's actually like, right? When I got to do my commando mission in Afghanistan, I had a full stack of air supporting me. And so I was able to have outsized effect on the battlefield because a lot of incredibly strategic capability was pushed to a lower echelon element, right? A sealed platoon in Afghanistan. um and so what these countries are doing they're pushing this great capability to lower echelons the chat like it causes a lot of challenges for the adversaries right they don't know where they are because they're distributed they're small they don't have a massive infrastructure footprint and so you're creating dilemmas um where a dilemma for the adversary being like i don't know where the you know where these things are where they're launching from where they're landing from um and that's like it causes a lot of problems for the enemy if you don't know what your adversary is doing right if you don't know what the other guys are doing are they dedicated to specific units yeah they are yep okay okay and so how i mean that could mean a whole array of different capabilities you know with with one you know

with your with your product the vbat and so i mean if if if you have one mission that's an isr mission you know surveillance detection stuff like that and then you have a kinetic mission i mean how do you how do you tell the machine what you're going to do like what the mission is yeah so these basically right the way to think about it is um you're training a system to learn a mission right and that becomes you can think of it as like a library of missions and then you're going to check out said mission for, like, check out the book, check out the mission from said library for what you're going to be executing. So that's like the, you know, probably the easiest way to explain it, but it's not, you're not pre-planning a mission, right? But you're saying this is the mission I want to execute. The good thing is, is like every single military mission has been written in pretty like good detail and description in like army field manuals, in, you know the infantry squad books right in like every air operations manual these missions are well described and the cool thing is like software engineers can take those descriptions and then turn them into uh you know a software package uh you know a software mission package

and and you guys do both yeah yeah build the product or you build the hardware and the software yes we do yeah was it always like that um it was it was out of a necessity right when we wanted uh And we started off with the quadcopter, we said, hey, are there any other quadcopters that can carry the sensors, the compute, and the package that we need to do to make a product? And the answer was like, no, those didn't exist. And so we decided to, hey, we're gonna have to build our own quadcopter. So we built a hardware engineering team, built that product. and then when we decided to like move up the aviation food chain um a big reason for that was what like i could tell someone i could tell a four-star general four-star admiral or like uh you know an under secretary all day every day that this ai pilot that's flying your quadcopter you can put it on f-16 but back in like 2018 2019 everybody's like nah like i don't believe that right um so we were like hey we need another piece of hardware to demonstrate that this AI pilot is transferable from platform to platform to platform.

That led to the acquisition of the VBAT. We're like, okay, now we can put the AI pilot on the VBAT. Now you see the AI pilot running on a quadcaptor. You see it running on a VBAT. We bought Heron Systems and, you know, that won the DARPA-alpha dogfight. And then we're the first company in the world to fly the F-16 completely autonomously. Now you see the AI pilot running on an F-16. And since then, now we've put the AI pilot on 15 different platforms, one way attack drones, unmanned ground vehicles, you know, large target drones, jet powered drones, where I think everybody at this stage in the game in 2025, people realize, hey, the software is actually transferable, portable from system to system.

And again, this is something that we architected our autonomy stack from the get go, right? With that vision of a world of autonomous systems. And so like Shield AI stands alone in our ability to integrate onto platform, platform, platform, platform really rapidly. Like, one of the cool things, we can take... We've integrated on a variant of the Lakota helicopter. What used to take 40 engineers and, like, tens of millions of dollars and two years to do on our quadcopter,

Brandon Tsengwe can now do, with a couple hundred thousand dollars, three engineers in three months,

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So when you're talking about, you know, drum storms with the VBAT, I mean, these are big. Devices, big, big, big. Yeah, they're 180 pounds. They stand like nine feet tall, I think. They're not, but again, they fit in the back of a Sprinter van, like in terms of like, so they're big. They're not like F-16 big. And so if you're going to do a swarm of these things, I mean, are these, do they all know what each other is doing? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They're sharing information with each other. And so, again, building that map, sharing that worldview with each other, sharing positions, sharing friendly position, enemy position the same way. Like if we were doing an operation together, I hop on a radio, I can share a lot of information with you. These things are doing the exact same thing.

Just faster. Just faster. A lot faster. Yeah. Superhuman speeds. Is it real time? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing things. It's getting ready to engage something. Yeah, we've done things with fighter jets. Like one of the things I've learned about air warfare is like if you're doing like fighter jet tactics with like multiple fighter jets, like four of them in the air, right? The coordination is actually like a really, really important thing in terms of like executing the tactics. And it's a really hard thing even for the most experienced fighter pilots to pull off. We've had lifelong fighter pilots at S.H.I.E.L.D. AI who are like, look, I could never get my fighter pilot squadron to do what this AI just did, right?

Like, it's wildly impressive, like, the accuracy and the speed with which they are coordinating with each other, reading and reacting off each other. Wow. Let's talk about the DARPA-AlphaDogfight. Yeah. What was that? So, DARPA-AlphaDogfight, it was... So, go back to, like, you had AlphaGo, you had AlphaStar. DARPA's like, I believe that we could do an AI pilot dogfight to show that, you know, basically a great credit to DARPA is basically show that, uh, the value that these systems could be able to provide. Um, and so what it was is there's a number of companies that participated. It was AI pilot versus AI pilot dogfighting in simulation F-16s. The other good thing that I like about it is like, it was unclassified. So And AI pilot versus AI pilot in simulated dogfights.

And what Shield AI ended up doing, right? What Heron Systems, a Shield AI company, ended up doing was we ended up winning the alpha dogfight where we defeated every single AI pilot in this dogfighting competition. It was like a ladder, right? Like you beat them, you move on. A playoff bracket. And then the winner, we got to go up against an actual fighter pilot in simulation, a fighter weapons school pilot, a Top Gun. And I want to say we won 5-0 in that competition, right? And so what that did is basically say, like, hey, you know, and DARPA did that to basically say, like, look, this is why we should invest in this capability, this technology.

And it wasn't to say, hey, let's, you know, build autonomous F-16s. but as we build this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets, you know, a lot of people call them collaborative combat aircraft, we can actually have an AI pilot and an autonomy stack that is, you know, running these aircraft. Dude, I mean, you're probably like most overachievers, but I mean, what does that feel like to see your company's innovations outdo everything i mean do you even take the time to self-reflect and think about like the magnitude of what Unfortunately, I don't just because it's like, you know, like, it's like, I think it's really cool.

Again, I don't, it doesn't, the thing that I just, it's when there's like mission impact, that's what is like, truly does it for me. And I don't say that as like a talking point, but it's like, like truly like when the products do something, that's what like I really care about. I, yes, like the innovation is cool. The capabilities are cool. I'm very proud of the team, but like you don't, unfortunately you see a lot of companies, right? in the military space that we're just innovating for the sake of innovation versus actually building a capability that's going to make a difference on the battlefield.

And so that's, like, what I care about. I don't do enough reflection. I don't do enough. My wife's like, you never celebrate anything. I don't, like, sound familiar. Yeah, yeah, you get it, right? I actually love the, there's an old Kobe Bryant clip when they had won, like, game, like, three of the NBA finals. And they're like, Kobe, we can't get a smile from you. He's like, what's there to be happy about? Like, job finished? Job's not finished. And that is like, you know, the mentality that I have. Yeah, I am plagued by the same thing. Although I will say last night when the ex-bac got dropped off, I was like, I can't fucking believe this thing.

I went home and I told my wife, I was like, you got to come out here and see this with the kids. Yeah. We have America's aerial defense and offensive system that nobody knows about sitting in our fucking front yard right now. You have to see this. I'm super pumped to unveil it on your show. It's just wild to me. It's crazy. But you want to talk about the expat? Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the expat now. Yeah, now that we're talking about it. All right. So expat, just some background. Shield AI, when we think about hardware, like we want to build hardware's, you know, really effing hard to build. It is because you're stuck with the design choices that you make for a long time. Software, you can quickly like iterate on the design choices that you make.

There's certainly like there are challenges in architecting a good software system, but like same in hardware, it's just like harder to change things once you're bending steel and metal. So you have to get it right out of the gate. And then hardware is just like when you're dealing in the real physical world, everything's harder. Sensors fail, right? Computers have challenges, right? Sensors will fail for milliseconds on like average. And like there's just so many hard things about building hardware. So Shield AI is very deliberate about the hardware that we build, has to be absolutely transformative. For VBAT, VBAT was, hey, we're going to transform ISR and targeting, right? We need more intelligence. McChrystal, very famous for saying intelligence drives operations. Like if we can transform ISR and targeting with VBAT, like that's why we decide to buy VBAT and go with it.

but we're not looking to build 26 different hardware products out there. Like we are an AI and autonomy company. We build amazing aircraft and we have these great assets. We have a software engineering asset that's world-class. We have a hardware engineering asset that's world-class. And so we had to ask ourselves, okay, we've done VBAT. What's next? What's the next piece of hardware that we want to build? Do we want to build a one-way attack drone? Do we want to build a usv a maritime platform do we want to build a hypersonic missile and so after great deliberation and great credit to our head of aircraft uh of head of our aircraft business armor harris came from spacex came up with this thing uh called the expat um and so what is expat expat is a first It's kind, vertical takeoff, launch and land, multi-role, combat, strike, jet, you know, platform that is AI piloted. It is the first airplane in the history of airplanes that has both, or it doesn't require runway and doesn't require a human pilot. It's AI piloted and it doesn't, and it's vertical takeoff, launch and land.

And from that, there are a massive number of benefits to the platform. One of the big benefits, right, if I talk to the geographic combatant commanders, right, these are the four stars, admirals and generals running Indo-PACOM, running UCOM that are posed with the strategic problem. how do you deter our adversaries and if necessary fight to defeat our adversaries they would tell you like the value of expat comes from the ability to create a massive number of dilemmas by having geographically distributed long-range fires that can be launched from anywhere on the battlefield and so now where you know an adversary like china has to worry about these fixed runways and a couple air you know the united states has 11 aircraft carriers we have to worry about you know a couple fixed runways um and uh and these aircraft carriers now all of a sudden they have to worry about every you know 20 foot by 20 foot spot of earth on the planet um and that is you know why does that matter now it makes basically forces them to redefine their invasion calculus Uh, if you don't know where America's assets are, um, our, especially our aerial assets, which are our number one conventional strategic deterrent, um, it's going to force you to, yeah, rethink, uh, your war plans. It buys diplomacy another day.

Um, on the, like, other side of the coin of what I would, you know, tell you about, like, expat, um, and this is like, again, I want to be super clear, like, expat is going to augment, uh, you know, fighter pilots. for you know quite some time um but like when i look at something like the joint strike fighter um it is an incredible capability like if you actually like dig into like what that capability offers the usa it's amazing um but it requires runways it requires hardened bunkers um it requires a 10 million dollar pilot just to get like to be you know certified on flying it right Not even making them like an expert at that system, right?

It's like, I could put, you know, when we became Navy SEALs, we weren't expert Navy SEALs on day one, right? $10 million to make you, you know, base, you know, just dangerous enough with the aircraft. It is limited range. I want to say it's around like 550 nautical mile combat radius. And so, if you want to employ Joint Strike Fighter in the Pacific, where there are 1,000 nautical mile ranges, you have to have refueling tankers. And because of the threat environment, we've built autonomous refueling tankers, right, which is another, like, expensive capability. You have built the refueling tankers?

No, no, no, we did. Like, the USA has built refueling tankers for these Joint Strike Fighters. And then the platform itself is $100 million. So when you look at the all-in total cost of capability for the Joint Strike Fighter, again, amazing capability. It's wildly expensive. It's estimated $200 million to $250 million per aircraft when you look at all these add-on capabilities, not to mention the total lifecycle cost of it, the hourly cost of operating at $35,000 an hour. Expat, vertical takeoff, launch, and land, no run. It is, you know, AI pilot, so no human pilot. It has a 2,100 nautical mile range with mission payload.

And so you have, you know, massive range.

Brandon TsengWe're targeting $27.5 million per pop on it with a $6,000 per hour operating cost for the aircraft.

And so you're getting fifth, sixth gen capability um at a fraction of uh the cost and that's something that no one else is is doing or offering wow wow i mean these the the vbat beat the f f35 correct no no no the no no so vbat being the the and and now vbat expat can get confusing uh vbat's the mini reaper predator the The expat in development, we're going to, we've got a subsystem prototype that's flying in 2026, full system prototype flying in 2027, going to production in 2029. The AI pilot for that aircraft, we're developing AI pilots for this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets. Um, and so we have not gone up against, um, you know, F 35, but we've gone up against our F 16s, um, and actual F 16s and F 16 versus F 16.

Uh, uh, and this was part of the DARPA ACE program, which was, uh, the care next program from the DARPA alpha dogfight, um, where we've gone up against F 16 pilots and yeah, we've, you know, we've, you know, AI pilot, like it wins crushes. So you ready to go take a look? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we've got, you know, a model out there that I'm excited to show you. It's really cool. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, Brandon, what are we looking at here? All right. So this is the Expat and the LRV, which is the launch recovery vehicle for the Expat. It's actually a scaled model, believe it or not.

This is only two thirds the actual size to get it into trade shows and events. We are limited in terms of like the actual size, but yeah, this is the aircraft that we are building currently. So, but yeah, this is our model that we take to events, help people understand what we're building, the capabilities and, you know, it gives them something visually to look at. But yeah, I don't know, this is actually my first time seeing it physically. I've only seen it in the photos from our team. And no, it's, like I've told you, I've been doing this now for 10 years. You get, it's hard, hard work, right?

But I think this is, like, I get inspired by this thing. Like, I'm fired up to build this thing. I'm fired up to make it a reality for the warfighter. I think the capability is, it is absolutely strategic. It's going to make a huge impact. And it's like, who gets to work at the intersection of AI pilots and fighter aircraft and actually build an AI pilot fighter aircraft that doesn't require a runway? So that's cool. Not very many people. Yeah. But so 2,100 nautical mile radius? With mission payload. Yeah. With mission payload. So basically, this thing can carry the same thing, same amount of payload as an F-18, F-35. It's carrying four AMRAAMs internal.

It's got a medium-range air-to-air missile, so multi-role, it can be for air-to-air missions, air-to-ground missions, air-to-surface missions. It can be used for electronic warfare missions. It is, yeah, it's an incredible aircraft. Yeah, it looks like it. Yeah, I'm happy to walk around, tell you all about it. Let's do it. All right. Let's do it. So one of the cool things, we're actually using the F-100 engine, is the engine that is used in F-15s, F-16s. One of the really cool aspects about it is it's a multi-plane thrust vectoring engine, which is also the only U.S. airplane, U.S. jet in existence that has multi-plane thrust vectoring.

So the F-22 uses 2D plane thrust vectoring. I want to say it's the Russians or Chinese have an aircraft that has multi-plane thrust vectoring. But basically what that enables is increased maneuverability, some low speed maneuvers. I was looking it up the other day. It enables something like, I want to call it like the Pugachev Cobra maneuver. It's something they may have shown in like Top Gun 2 when they're like, holy crap, what the hell is that? That type of stuff. So I know someone's got to check me and it's going to be some other maneuver. But like, you know. The internet will sort it out. Yeah, the internet will sort it out.

So is this how it launches? Yeah, so it launches from this position and it also recovers from this position. One of the things we had, so the LRV is also really cool. It's got this, called a blast shield. But one of the things that they were discovering with F-35 when it was taking off from aircraft carriers, because they have a vertical takeoff or short takeoff launch and land, but the engine was burning holes into the flight deck. And so that was just like a massive problem with the aircraft. This meant to deflect, you know, when we go afterburner on it and just the heat that's being generated from the engine when we're taking off or when we're landing. So, but yeah, it Launches, lands like a SpaceX rocket.

Again, our head of aircraft, Armour Harris, I feel like he was just built for developing this aircraft, but worked as a principal engineer on the Falcon 9, launching land, and then was doing Starlink, Star Shield, working with Elon, and just wanted to work on the air layer and build next-generation aircraft. So, yeah. That is amazing. Yep. What is that hole in the front? So that's the intake up there. Um, so air intake for the engine, um, and yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, not much more to it. Where do the, where do all the weaponry, where does the weaponry? So you've got internal and hard points on the, on the other sides of the wings there.

Um, those are, uh, the weapons bay for, again, um, carrying basically any weapon, any, you can carry, uh, Lorasms, long range anti-ship missiles. You can carry air-to-air missiles, air-to-ground missiles. You can carry bombs. Again, very much think of it as like, you know, the same thing that you would find on a fighter aircraft in terms of its weapon payload. The unique thing and, like, one of the differentiating things about this besides being vertical takeoff, launch, and land, but if I were to compare it to, like, some of the other new CCA capabilities that you're seeing built, those aircraft are using business jet engines, and so they can't generate the electrical power to run fifth generation, sixth generation sensor suites and electronic attack payloads.

And so electronic warfare being a massive aspect of the battlefield today, right? Jamming enemy GPS, jamming enemy communications, things that something like the F-18 still have your electronic attack abilities. And so you're still playing a role in the fight. practice, comms, relay. Yeah, this thing is sick. What do you mean electronic warfare? Like jamming capabilities? Yeah, jamming. Jamming, GPS, jamming, the communications on other enemy platforms, yeah. Wow. One of the other cool things, so we like to say this thing hauls ass and sips gas, right? It can fly for 2,100 nautical miles with full mission payload, but it's flying, cruising at 55,000 feet altitude, which is higher than any other, like, aircraft, like, definitely, like, in its class, right?

And why is that important? It actually allows your air-to-air missiles, it improves the kinematics on them, which makes for, you know, the easiest way to say it is, like, longer-range weapons. And so now your missiles can actually go further because they're, you know, they're actually, the air is less dense up there. They're able to, they're not, you know, using as much gas when they're being fired. And I don't think a lot of people appreciate, but like in air-to-air combat, air-to-air warfare, like what matters is your sensor range. What matters is the range of your missiles. It's not, you know, as cool as like dogfighting is, it's not, you know, within visual range dogfighting anymore.

It's, you know, F-35 is amazing because it can see everything before it gets seen and it can attack those things. Same thing with this aircraft. That is crazy. Yeah. Powered by Hivemind. Hivemind being our AI pilot. Again, just been working on Hivemind for the past 10 years. And so the mission sets, like we were talking about in the studio, being like that library of checked out missions, but continue to work on classified, you know, classified level missions for air to air, uh, uh, missions, air to ground missions, um, for this aircraft. Wow. 55,000 feet, 2,100 miles, nautical miles with a payload. How fast does it go? Um, we're cruising, uh, cruising at Mach 0.85. Um, we're expecting that you'll be able to dash supersonic. The problem when you dash supersonic is that your, your signature goes up, uh, people now and um right this thing is meant to be uh pretty pretty low observable in terms of uh what the enemy's looking for so yeah and it land it so when it lands yep it lands just like this my hands just like this takes off lands don't want to say like yeah we took inspiration from you know space x uh you know that's crazy so it just it yeah it lands like it goes in reverse and just lands

right here, hooked up, ready to roll again. Yeah, and we've got a lot of experience doing that with the VBAT, and actually, believe it or not, VBAT's a harder thing to launch and land than something like this, because, like, and Armour will tell you, it's like, look, Falcon 9, you have all the thrust in the world, and, like, you put that thing wherever you want on the planet, centimeters, like VBAT, and, like, you have perfect weather conditions. VBAT, you're operating in the worst weather conditions. You don't have a lot of thrust. It's a big challenge. XBAT, you have an incredible amount of thrust from like a technical challenge aspect. If this is VBAT and this is Falcon 9, you have XBAT like right, you know, next to Falcon 9. Again, that multi-plane thrust vectoring allows us to put this thing, you know, wherever we need to put it. So, but yeah, no, it's, right. It's, I mean, not only it's, you can now make every ship an aircraft carrier. You can make non-standard vessels, aircraft carriers, right. You can put these things on cargo ships, island chains it just becomes a really intractable thing for the adversary to track which can go everywhere everywhere anywhere yeah right we're in we're in a field here right you go into a forest

clearing we were joking around you put this thing on you know pickleball court if you want like Every pickleball court in the world is now... Uh, your runway, so. Damn. Yeah. That is awesome. I mean, could you imagine a, a drone swarm of these bad boys coming after your ass? Yeah. No, this thing is, um, no, and that, and that's what, look, we're, we're very much working on the behaviors, the missions of multi-agent expats, uh, flying around, augmenting, you know, fighter pilots, augmenting the mission, executing the mission independently. Like I said, I think this, for me, this is like an inspirational aircraft.

I'm like, holy crap, this is like one of those, this is a cool thing to build. One of those moments. Yeah, yeah. Like if you want to be at the intersection of AI, national security, building cool jet aircraft, Shield AI is a great place to do it. So, no limit, you know, in terms of the ambition and the imagination here. Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm excited to, you know, launch this thing on your show. I think that's like, you know, that's a cool thing. I know a lot of people watch it. I think it's, you know, thanks for letting us bring it onto your property. I'm sure your neighbors were like, what the hell is this?

They're really worried about it. What's Sean got going on right now? They're like, what the fuck is going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, man, congrats, that is, this is the kind of stuff that just makes me proud to be an American. Like, that is the future of aerial warfare, that is. Yeah, it fundamentally will transform air warfare, right? Again, no more, Earth is our runway, AI piloted. It's a mean machine that I think, to the point of it's going to deter our adversaries by diplomacy another day. Yeah, I'll say. I'll say. Wow. Awesome. I want to see a launch. Yeah. Yeah. So, right. We'll bring you out to the... Happy to bring you out to the first flight.

I think it's only appropriate that you come out to that. Yeah. I would love that. Cool. Thank you. Absolutely. No, thanks, Sean. do you feel it that something's off what if none of this is real for decades wars have been fought in silence no bullets no bombs just influence They're called psychological operations, PSYOPs. What if it's all designed for you? Find out who's really pulling the strings. I'm Sean Ryan, and this is Target Intelligence PSYOP, an Ironclad original. In this eight-part audio experience, we uncover the ghosts in the machine. Buy it today at psyopshow.com. hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world and so one thing we've done here at sean ryan show is we are developing our newsletter and the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman former cia targeter some of you may know her as sarah adams I'm super bad. She's made two different appearances here on The Sean Ryan Show.

And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind-blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. Here's the best part. The newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that.

but like i said it's a free cia intelligence brief sign up links in the description or in the comments we'll see you in the newsletter all right brandon we're back from the break and uh what an amazing piece of machinery you've got out there that is i can't wait to see the launch yeah it'll be sick and the land you got fired up to see that thing land yeah but uh you know one thing we didn't cover is the vbat flew 130 sorties so far in ukraine yeah probably i mean by the time this air is probably a lot more but um yeah one of the um again things that i'm like super proud of having that mission impact um our ukraine story is like i i think it's one our results are unique. But the story is kind of interesting in that in 2023, the British pushed out a bunch of VBATs to the Ukrainians. We told them, hey, Hivemind, our AI pilot, it's not integrated yet. You're not going to like, if GPS or communications is jammed, like it's not going to work. Because we were, again, we had bought that company in late 21, and we were still in integration process of the ai uh with the aircraft um and making it a hardened capability british gave it they're like look we just want to get equipment assets out to the ukrainians there's

a major push coming in the spring um and so uh they pushed out vbats they pushed out lots of equipment um jamming happened vbats failed right as we told them it would ukrainians basically said hey come back when you have this fixed we still believe in the capability um came back in uh uh, June, May, June of 2024. Um, and they're like, look, we're going to put it through an electronic warfare testing regimen, uh, went up against those three, four days of every jammer. They had seven jammers, GPS communications, running max power VBAT flying within 50 feet, no impact on it. Right. Cause we had integrated the AI pilot on board this time. Um, they, They kind of strung us along here and said, look, like, all right, great that you passed the test.

And this was unique. No one had, no one's ever passed this test. It was, they were trying to make us fail with all these jammers. They said, OK, great, we'll put in letters of request to the U.S. government if it actually proves its worth on the battlefield. And we're like, well, you guys didn't tell us about this, but we said, OK, let's look, we're here to make mission impact. First operation ever flew. GPS communications was jammed. I don't think people realize that it's completely jammed in Ukraine on the battlefield. And so every mission that we've done, GPS and comms has been jammed. But our first mission that we did, actually fun, the interesting part of the story is like one of the interesting parts.

One of the assumptions we made was that we asked them like, look, we're going to, you know, near the front, is GPS going to be jammed on takeoff? They said, no, it's not going to be jammed on takeoff. So we go out to operate, and lo and behold, GPS is jammed on takeoff on this mission we're supposed to execute. VBAT starts flying in another direction, right, because of GPS jamming, because we had assumed it was going to be available just for takeoff. And what ends up happening is like six hours of our team driving through Ukraine, kind of like the movie Interstellar when they're like going through the cornfields trying to capture the drone.

Like, that's what our team did. They land it. ukraine was like yeah i didn't think it was going to work on the battlefield like well you guys gave us a bad assumption within 24 hours team worked it they came up with a software solution right it was just like basically changing an assumption um tested it in texas pushed the software update to ukraine next day we said hey give us you know we want to retake this mission execute the mission do fine on takeoff um executing the mission comms gps jam the entire time target an SA-11 Bukovell surface-to-air missile system. Ukrainians call in HIMARS airburst round, destroys the Bukovell target a second SA-11 Bukovell surface-to-air missile system. HIMARS misses due to GPS jamming. The effectiveness of U.S. weapon systems is really poor in these GPS jammed environments um so that leads to letters of request from the u.s government and then um president takes office in right stops you know funding which is you know again like i'm i'm fine with the decision as like an american taxpayer i understand it right as shield ai we're like oh my god we're at the finish line and then like um you know we're about to deliver capability thankfully Europeans uh uh step up to the plate um they get vbat aircraft over there and then we go through

training with the Ukrainians January to March and since April they have been absolutely um lethal with uh the system um and so um god there was like a two-week period where we were executing four to six strikes uh every day or enabling four to six strikes every single day destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian equipment. It's a capability that they had never had long-range ISR and targeting before. They were fighting a very tactical fight, but now with this capability to penetrate deeper into enemy-held territory, while GPS, while comms is jammed, they were finding targets that they had been looking for for six, nine months they couldn't find.

Wow. And so, again, super proud of the impact um that uh we've played there and you know as we think about you know when we talk to them now they're like man if we had been able to put up a bunch of these on our border right and knowing that every single v-bats tied into some sort of long-range weapon system you could deter your adversaries and so as we look to you know the pacific that's something that we think about a lot um we see that out of uh you know a country like taiwan that is absolutely trying to deter adversaries, it's like, well, you have to have the equipment that the adversary respects to deter them. And so, you know, I'm thankful that like VBAT is one of these things that has been battlefield proven. And to the point, like what I'm just going to hammer home in on again, like there aren't other US companies doing this. Like they are not having success in these GPS and comms jammed environments. It is a very hard problem. I actually would say that there's only two companies in the world i can't name the other company that's actually finding success there it's ukrainian company um in these environments and that's from reporting from you know uh you know call it the war fighters out there in terms of like actually executing the isr and targeting

mission now tactically when you're talking like fiber optic connected quadcopters uh where the gps like where you're tethered to something and you can fight in the you know one to 10 kilometer range yes there's like a lot of tactical innovations happening on that end but at like the strategic operational level um proud that shield ai stands alone man again congratulations thank you you know when it when it you know a lot of hacking you know and so is this is would this be a system that China could hack into, you know, if we were using it for an offensive? It'd be incredibly difficult. Like, it would be incredibly, incredibly...

I wouldn't say it'd be tactically feasible to actually, like, execute. You'd have to be, like, proximal to the command station where these things... You'd have to know where they were flying, whether it's VBAT, whether it's XBAT. And then you have to, like, get through encryption. It's just not, like... The way to take out these systems are going to be kinetically using surface-to-air missile systems. And that's actually like, look, we've lost VBATs to surface-to-air missile systems in Ukraine. And I remember like, you know, we get a report back, hey, you know, S-300 shot down a VBAT. And we're like, all right, million-dollar missile, you know, for a $750,000 aircraft will take that trade.

And so that's, you know, that's going to be the way that you see these systems that are able drones that are able to survive that electronic warfare because they have an ai pilot on them because they have our hive mind running on them the only way that you're going to be able to take them out is going to be kinetically now when you're talking about jam communications and jam gps i mean i would i mean you know all the way back to the quadcopter you know all this autonomous stuff that can think on its own and in in conduct missions i mean is there any do we need communication with these devices uh like if you want the best performance you're gonna want the communication is like very beneficial in the same way like if you it's like if we were a seal seal element if you were a fire team leader and i was a fire team leader if we have established communications we can operate much better together right if you're across a mountain ridge and you're saying hey brandon this is what i'm doing like i can then adjust my tactics behaviors on like what you're seeing what you're observing um in the absence of communications i have all the trust faith and confidence that you're going to be able to execute

right that commander's intent um without it and then you'll adjust your tactics your behaviors your mission based on you know new information uh coming through and so the autonomous systems work the same way communications when it's when you're in a jammed environment you can think of it as like swiss cheese sometimes you can find pockets if you're only working with low you know low amounts of data you can push that data out even though you're operating in a jammed environment um and so we'll compress a lot of that data and that allows you to actually push it out so that these systems can even you know interact like as a team better with each other oh okay i didn't mean i mean yeah that's a good that's a great point so so the jamming isn't only from human to machine it it is also from machine to machine when they're flying as a team yeah interesting interesting i mean what do you see what do you see these things what what is the expat going to replace um or is it just yeah another weapon in our arsenal or is it replacing i i don't like to i really like people get sensitive to to the word replace right and i and i don't think things replace things for like a long long time um it doesn't mean that it never happens but it takes like

you know self-driving cars right where it's going to replace drivers at some point in time i don't think that happens for you know 20 plus years um so in the meantime like it's just augmenting in like augmenting that human team um whether it's jet aircraft whether it's basically mechanisms to deliver long-range fires. So that could be, you know, anti-ship missiles launched from a ship. That could be, you know, fighter, bomber aircraft. It's doing the same mission. It's that strike mission or a air-to-air mission just differently. And so that can be with human pilots, augmenting them. And I think that's how it'll go in the early days.

And, you know, from there, yeah, if you extrapolate, you know, the rate of innovation around ai and autonomy um i think you get to like really interesting places again down the line where you start to replace some of these systems do you i mean is there going to be any will these machines fly along in the meantime in the interim before that happens which i'm sure it will yep i mean will they'll will they'll be will they co-mingle with with human 100 percent yeah they'll they'll augment they'll be part of that human machine team they will um augment uh the pilots i you know look i think something like and that will be like the first iteration then uh the u.s military started experimenting with like okay let's just have these systems run on their own and execute missions but like if you like i think the mission is going to dictate like what the uh the force requirement is in the sense like you're gonna to see missions that dictate hey we want to send in a package of like you know see what happens um and they can run certain missions independently and then certain missions as human machine teams can you could you give me an example of what a what a mission set would look like where it is

you know human pilots and expats together um yeah i think it's good like look again i think it's going to be the threat environment and so if you're going up against like the worst threat environment imaginable like so i would say like you could imagine a strike mission where you know intelligence estimates that there's a limited number of um surface-to-air missile systems but there's a complexity to the type of mission in terms of the effects that they want to have where it's like you want to put pilots up in the air and then there could be a mission where it's like look it's a simple mission but it's a target that is like hell for any aviator because the number of surface-to-air missile systems in the area are a ridiculous amount.

We know they're mobile. We don't know exactly where they are. You might basically go stimulate that environment by sending, you know, unmanned systems first, things like the expat first. Got you. Got you. Is there any stealth capabilities to it? It is. Its shape, its design is inherently low observable, meant to have a very small radar cross-section. And stealth is, there can be stealth coatings applied to it, but we want to get the capability out fast. And, like, one of the ways to do that is just, like, not worry about the stealth aspect of the capability to start. Like, true stealth coatings.

As far as DC is concerned, I mean, are our politicians on board with this? Are you getting a lot of... Yeah, I think they're very much, I think not only the politicians, but also senior DOD leadership. One, I think they're very much bought into the concept of collaborative combat aircraft, right? These uncrewed jets that are being built by lots of people. I think, you know, for us, the combination of hive mind and expat really stands out in the sense that, again, no one's ever seen an aircraft like this before. It's pretty unique. And then it's non-obvious in terms of the immediate benefits that it has for the warfighters, essentially that logistics aspect of it and just the tactical employment of it, putting it anywhere, right?

It fundamentally redefines how air warfare is executed when you start eliminating the need for runways. Everything has always been, like, constrained by that one thing. And so I think politicians very much understand that. And absolutely, like, the combatant commanders and, you know, senior military leaders understand that. and it's look i think yeah they're they're excited about it um there's a there's a lot of enthusiasm support for the capability the challenge is is that no one had ever conceived of something like this and so it's kind of like this unplanned product that you're like wait a second like okay how do how what impact does this have to you know the rest of our systems as this thing comes online. Not to mention the fact that, you know, Shield AI is funding the vast majority of its development. And so it's just kind of, you know, that will be one of the challenges.

It's like, okay, well, how does it affect current DoD resourcing plans as this capability comes online? How fast can you manufacture these? um we want to ramp to uh like we want this aircraft to be this generation's f-16 right i think there's something like 4 000 f-16s out there i think you're going to see more because lower costs lower life cycle costs ai piloted uh much easier to adopt and implement into a force structure um 2029 targeting 50 aircraft but ramping you know between 300 to 500 aircraft Again, it's, yeah, that's, right, and that's going to be done over a number of years to get to, but, and the demand for the aircraft is going to play a role in that, but it's the customer reception, right, we've gone public with it today, we've been engaging the customer now for eight, nine months, and the reception has been wild in terms of, like, again, pretty, it's a non-obvious way to solve a lot of problems that were never really, you know, articulated its problems it's like what would you do with an air force that didn't require a runway right where air force is right is you know what does this mean for uh the navy and marine corps where your your your your strike power is no longer limited to an aircraft carrier

um where you can have marines on uh island chains with um this type of you know organic capability It just redefines so much as we think about air superiority and how that's employed. Yeah, it's a lot to think about. Yeah, I would claim it's up to the point where people, I think it'll be as transformational as when we decided to launch airplanes from ships, right? Like right before World War II, someone had the crazy idea like, hey, let's try to launch one of these airplane things off a ship, right? And then what did that do? that basically defined the military force structure of the United States for the next 80 years.

Damn. Damn. Do you think we'll see these loitering for defense, loitering around fobs, loitering around the border of the country? I mean... I don't know if they'll be loitering. I think of it as they'll be used as power projection in the same way that our aircraft carriers are used as power projection. And so I don't see them, right? When an adversary or a country is being belligerent to another country and the United States wants to do something, what do we do? We park an aircraft carrier off of its coast and we're flying sorties and saying, hey, check yourself before, you know, you wreck yourself.

And I think that'll be similar. It's hard for me to see us using, like, that type of platform in terms of, like, local, you know, I say domestic, like, air patrol, domestic border security outside of, like, I don't know, the Caribbean Sea is a pretty interesting place right now. But, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, Brandon, we'll wrap it up the interview. And, um, you know, one thing that I just want to ask is, is, you know, for, for Gen Z, for the upcoming generations, I mean, what inspiration do you have for them being somebody who's an innovator? Yeah, I think, um, look, my recommendation would be, uh, like be bold, be courageous. Um, Like, you've got, you know, one, you know, precious life and just, like, make the most out of it. And don't be afraid to swing for the fences or be part of a team that is swinging for the fences. Like, in no way are you going to regret that. Like, I regret zero of my time in the Navy, even on a ship. Like, I'm very thankful for that time.

I'm thankful for my time in the SEAL teams. Like, the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it. And then, you know, Shield AI, like, thankful for it. And, like, I'm, for me and, like, what I'm encouraging, yeah, I want to encourage that from my kids. Like, be confident, be courageous, be bold, swing for the fences. Like, why, you know, what do you have to lose, is, you know, my mentality. And that would be my message for, you know, this next generation. Love that. Love that. But, well, Brandon, I just want to say it was an honor to interview you, man, and just, wow. Congratulations. It's awesome what you're doing.

Thanks, Sean. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show. Thanks for letting us bring in the expat to your facility and apologize for the complaints from the neighbors. No, no. I mean, it's like I said out there when you were giving me the tour of the aircraft, I mean, this is you, what you're doing, what you've built is, it just makes me proud as hell to be an American. So thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Cheers. No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.