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

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Speaker 3 brandon sang welcome to the show thanks sean really excited to be here yeah me too we've been uh we've been really looking forward to this for a long time and now i have a model uap sitting in my front yard here so uh it's going to be super interesting i know all the locals are like what the fuck is that thing doing here what is that excited to show you it it'll uh and yeah it's it's pretty cool I can't wait, man.

Speaker 3 And, and, you know, like I was saying at breakfast before we started the interview, I mean, it's just, I just love seeing not just veterans, but especially team guys, SEALs, you know, get out and do something totally different.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 1 it's just, it's just, it's cool, man.

Speaker 3 It's, it's, it's a huge inspiration for a lot of team guys getting out. And, and, uh, and, and, like, you just have really

Speaker 3 broken into a whole new,

Speaker 1 a whole new thing that is just unimaginable for a lot of people other than maybe Dino Mavrukis but but uh congratulations thank you no it's uh I appreciate that it's uh it's painful and um you know but uh you know we're excited about what we're doing and hope hope to make a big impact on the world and and similarly like I'm super inspired being in this room everything you've built is uh very cool as well thank you man thank you but uh everybody starts off with an introduction here So here we go.

Speaker 3 Brandon Tsang, co-founder and president of SHIELD AI, a defense technology company you co-founded in 2015 to build AI pilots for military assets.

Speaker 3 Helped raise over $1 billion in funding for Shield AI, growing the company to over 1,000 employees. You're a former Navy SEAL who served two deployments to Afghanistan and one to the Pacific Theater.

Speaker 3 A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, and you later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, advocate for advancing U.S.

Speaker 3 national security through AI and autonomy, testified before Congress on topics like technology innovation, acquisition reform, and the role of AI in warfare. You're a husband and a father.

Speaker 1 Yes, sir. Thank you.
So, Brandon, I'd like to do...

Speaker 3 a life story on you.

Speaker 3 And I know we got limited time today, but I'd like to go from childhood all the way up into what you're doing right now and talk a little bit about your time in the SEAL teams how you got into the into the AI business world and it's gonna be it's gonna be a fascinating interview cool but uh a couple things to crank out here before we get started

Speaker 3 I always like to give gifts so here we go

Speaker 1 First one,

Speaker 3 Vigilance League gummy bears made in the USA, legal in all 50 states, at least right now, until RFK outlaws red guys and quintessential amounts of sugar.

Speaker 1 No, I love it.

Speaker 3 Thank you. And, you know, since you're a team guy, I think you'll really appreciate this one.

Speaker 1 This is sick.

Speaker 1 Oh, love it.

Speaker 3 So that is the first Sig Sauer autonomous

Speaker 3 pistol. No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 1 That's the

Speaker 1 I wanted to do that first.

Speaker 3 But no, that's the SIG Sauer P211 GTO 9mm.

Speaker 3 It's

Speaker 3 first 2011 model from SIG.

Speaker 1 Amazing. Thank you, Sean.
I brought some gifts also.

Speaker 1 Two things.

Speaker 1 Like, you know, you got me a gun. Seals love guns and knives.

Speaker 1 And so brought you some guns and knives. I love guns and knives.

Speaker 1 knives these are uh you can open them up um i was in 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 because i was feeling sorry for myself uh

Speaker 1 suffer in silence and so uh with the seal trident on there um and uh then

Speaker 1 this one i'm pretty excited to give you too.

Speaker 1 How do we give something that is going to be pumped about?

Speaker 1 That is

Speaker 1 civilian version of the HK MP5. Are you shitting me?

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 apparently HK started selling.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So obviously MP5, a lot of history and soft socom um

Speaker 1 don't know if you ever got to carry one around but uh yeah that thing's uh

Speaker 1 thing sick this is awesome i need 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 them did you carry one i never carried one we had one guy who just like carried it as his uh

Speaker 1 um his secondary just because it was fun to carry an mp5

Speaker 1 so i'm like why he's like cuz why not so i was like all right so um i've shot it before but yeah never carried it man thank you that is

Speaker 1 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 two 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.

Speaker 1 That's what this shirt is.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's awesome. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Did you, you just said you're doing

Speaker 3 shield AI is doing counter-drug ops?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Let's just start right there before we get into life store. I'd love to hear this because, you know, I saw a couple of boats get blown up.

Speaker 1 I joke with my government relations team that I want a letter of mark, but

Speaker 1 they say don't talk about that. But no,

Speaker 1 we've been working with the U.S. Coast Guard actually in the past couple weeks.
Like we went operational with them.

Speaker 1 So there's this big long process. We passed operational testing and evaluation, 100% on key performance parameters, 100% on key system attributes.

Speaker 1 It's our aircraft, the V-BAT, which is 180-pound vertical takeoff, launch and land aircraft. Easiest way to think about it is like a miniature Reaper Predator drone.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 two weeks in, I've interdicted over half a billion dollars worth of cocaine in the Caribbean Sea. Yep, in the Caribbean Sea.

Speaker 1 Just absolutely.

Speaker 1 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 4th Fleet.

Speaker 1 Can't say about all the ops going on in there, but

Speaker 1 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 of days or past couple of weeks.

Speaker 1 So which feels right good as an American. I actually like always, you know,

Speaker 1 I'm excited about what they're doing in terms of the Caribbean Sea and just stopping the flow of drugs into the country. And so I'm like, the thing that I live for is mission impact.

Speaker 1 And so it's cool to get to have a positive impact on the world in that way.

Speaker 3 That's incredible.

Speaker 3 Man, a billion, over a billion in less than two weeks.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been absolutely like,

Speaker 1 it's wild. I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1 Holy shit.

Speaker 3 Any fentanyl stuff?

Speaker 1 Not that, I don't know. 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

Speaker 1 most likely cocaine. So, um, yeah.

Speaker 3 Right on, man. Damn.
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 One more thing.

Speaker 3 So I got a subscription account. It's on Patreon.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 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, you know, they're the real reason I get to sit down with people like you.

Speaker 3 And so one of the things I do is I give them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. This is from

Speaker 1 Hunter Widden.

Speaker 3 How did your battlefield experiences where lives depended on split-second decision shape your vision for building AI systems that protect warfighters in combat?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it had a massive impact

Speaker 1 in the sense, so

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That was your first deployment yeah it was amazing i i i uh am very blessed i also it just happened to be with the troop that killed uh bin laden so this was one year after they had killed bin laden and it was just like a master class um

Speaker 1 in

Speaker 1 ISR and targeting operations, a masterclass in direct action missions.

Speaker 1 And so during the day,

Speaker 1 we, well, during the night, the troop would go out, they'd conduct their raids, capture-kill missions.

Speaker 1 During the day, we would conduct kinetic strikes. And so

Speaker 1 that is

Speaker 1 understanding that kill chain from the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance targeting to 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,

Speaker 1 the autonomous systems.

Speaker 3 Very interesting. Wow.
What a hell of a first deployment.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And like, to be clear, I tell people I was like, I was, I was the equivalent of a squire for the ground force commander.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 get those guys what they needed to be successful.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, when we were doing strikes, it was coordinating with the battle space commander with air assets. And so

Speaker 1 the the one fun thing i i did try to make it lively and energetic i would cheer when we would do kinetic strikes and the jock and everybody's like what the hell i was like look this is fun cool stuff like we're 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

Speaker 1 let's do let's start with the life story so where did you grow up uh grew up um so i was born in houston texas i'd say grew up in seattle moved to uh seattle washington when i was 10 10 years old, finished high school in Florida.

Speaker 1 It was just my dad's job in corporate America.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I was one of four kids. I have an older, the oldest is my sister, older brother, younger brother.
So I was number three.

Speaker 1 But yeah, that's where, yeah, a lot of good memories in Seattle and Florida. It was fun times.
What did your parents do?

Speaker 1 My dad worked in corporate America,

Speaker 1 started off his career at Bechtel, largest engineering construction company in the world, then worked for a small engineering construction company

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's what took us to Florida. Mom was,

Speaker 1 you know, 100% mom day in, day out.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that's what they did.

Speaker 3 What were you into?

Speaker 1 Let's see. So,

Speaker 1 when I was four years or in fourth grade, I wanted to be a professional basketball player.

Speaker 1 When I didn't make the travel team in sixth grade, quickly realized like basketball was not going to be my journey.

Speaker 1 So, I grew up swimming. Yeah, there weren't, you know, Yao Ming didn't exist when I was in,

Speaker 1 or he wasn't playing professionally. Didn't have a, you know, an Asian NBA player back in the day.

Speaker 1 And I wasn't very good, it turns out, but thought I was good.

Speaker 1 Got into, so I had always swam,

Speaker 1 yeah, swam growing up and then got into water polo.

Speaker 1 So for me,

Speaker 1 middle school, high school, it was swimming, water polo, and then video games. You know,

Speaker 1 there's some pretty intense video game playing in Seattle when it rains 300 days out of the year. I'll bet.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I'll bet.

Speaker 1 You close with your brothers and sisters? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Work with my brother. Him and I started, my older brother started the company, brought in my younger brother

Speaker 1 during COVID to start the company. He was at MIT getting his MBA.

Speaker 1 COVID happened. I said, Nick, you know, why are you doing online school? Why don't you 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

Speaker 1 she's not happy about it.

Speaker 3 No shit. So three brothers.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There's three of us.
Yeah. Three brothers.
Three brothers running the company. Oh, yeah.
Working together. And yes,

Speaker 1 enabling it yeah that's awesome happens that's very cool yeah i mean there's pros and cons yeah we get along with 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

Speaker 1 10 years old saw

Speaker 1 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 but Under Siege and the Rock.

Speaker 1 So the Rock,

Speaker 1 where the Marines kill all the SEALs. Yeah, not a good look, but

Speaker 1 you know, those two action movies, like I said, Under Siege is the, you know, my favorite. But

Speaker 1 that's what got me interested in it.

Speaker 1 And so then I asked my parents about it, right? I was like, this looks really cool. They're like, oh, right.
They want you to read a lot growing up. So like, oh, you should read books.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, I think in 10th grade, I asked them, like,

Speaker 1 how can I, you know, be a Navy SEAL?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 They said, go to this thing called the Naval Academy.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 yeah, I applied there, got in, and just kept the dream alive.

Speaker 3 So, what age did that fascination start?

Speaker 1 The Naval Academy or being a SEAL? Being a SEAL? 10 years old. Yeah.
10 years old, yeah.

Speaker 3 Damn, you followed through.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, it was. Uh,

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 yeah, it was my older brother. He, I remember, I was like

Speaker 1 11 years old at the time. It was winter in Seattle.
He's like, Yeah, you got to do cold weather training. Like, go sit in the snow and I'll spray you with a hose.

Speaker 1 Right? As 11-year-old, you're listening to your older brother. You know, like, all right, if this is what it takes.

Speaker 1 So, yeah. Any family history in the military? Um,

Speaker 1 it It skipped a generation. So

Speaker 1 on my mom's side,

Speaker 1 my great-grandfather was actually a doctor on a hospital ship in World War II. I actually have a really cool picture of the Japanese surrender with Admiral Nimitz.

Speaker 1 And it's a letter. It's signed by Admiral Nimitz saying, you know, Captain Carroll, thanks for your service,

Speaker 1 you know, to the country during World War II. My grandfather was also in the Navy.

Speaker 1 He graduated, I think, the Naval Academy in like 1949, but then like skipped a generation. I wasn't close to my

Speaker 1 grandfather on my mom's side. And then on my dad's side,

Speaker 1 his dad actually

Speaker 1 fought in World War II.

Speaker 1 He was a nationalist in China fighting the Japanese.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah, fighting the communists and then

Speaker 1 left China when the communists took over, left with Shang Kai-shek and moved to Taiwan. So,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 3 Taiwan. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That's a topic we'll probably cover later.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 Well, so what was it like when you, I mean, it sounds like you come from an educated family. Your dad was, was your dad an engineer?

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was an engineer, electrical engineer. Yeah, they were, you know, typical, caught typical Asian family, push education really hard on you.

Speaker 1 Nothing, you'd, you'd, you'd come back, you'd get an A on a test and 96%. My dad say, why didn't you get 100%?

Speaker 1 You did. You get 100%? My dad say, was there extra credit? You know, and if there was none, he'd be like, all right, good job.
You know, so right on. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And your siblings sound like they're hard chargers too.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think we're all.

Speaker 1 Look, I, one of the things that was always, you know, be grateful, work hard, right?

Speaker 1 You know, don't give up 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

Speaker 1 parents and then from my dad's side of the family who had, you know, come from, you know, seeing war-torn communist China to, you know, growing up,

Speaker 1 my grandfather was a diplomat in South America. So they grew up in South America.
And then,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And didn't really appreciate that till I would say I saw more of the world and right, joined the Navy and saw the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, I would definitely agree with that. But you sound like kind of an outlier in your family.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 in the sense that I wanted, you know, I joined the SEAL teams and, you know,

Speaker 1 I think that was, you know, different for them. But

Speaker 1 they're all, you know,

Speaker 1 I think they've always been, my mom's always pushed like a lot of be confident,

Speaker 1 like an insane amount of confidence in her, her kids. And, you know, Brandon, if you want to go to the NBA, you can, which is completely unrealistic.
And I was like, mom, there's no way, right?

Speaker 1 She's like, oh, if you put your mind to it. But

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 I don't know. My brothers, my older brother started a company.
He sold it

Speaker 1 to Qualcomm. But I would say we're all hard workers.
We're very competitive people. And so,

Speaker 1 you know, and then, yeah, just like to have fun, be grateful.

Speaker 3 Let's work it out.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So you go to, so you decide you're going to the Naval Academy in 10th grade.

Speaker 1 Yeah, in 10th grade.

Speaker 1 Went up for something they do where they invite, yeah, yeah, 10th graders. It's between your 10th and 11th grade.
It's called Summer Seminar.

Speaker 1 Saw that place, was like, okay, this is like, it's pretty cool, right? It's different.

Speaker 1 Still wanted to be a SEAL.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And

Speaker 1 applied, got in. And yeah, it's, have you ever been?

Speaker 3 No, I've never been there. It looks beautiful.

Speaker 1 It's pretty awful on the inside. Is it?

Speaker 1 It's a military school. It is not a typical college experience.
Like,

Speaker 1 you make a ton of great friends, just like you do in, you know, the SEAL teams. I have lifelong friends from that institution just because you go through joint suffering together.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know, I mean, I've never been there. I don't really know much about it, but I will say that the

Speaker 3 the Naval Academy alum seem to be very tight and tied in with each other.

Speaker 3 I mean, just curious. I mean, how does that compare with the SEAL teams?

Speaker 1 It seems tighter after service. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 4 Black Buffalo has supported me since the early days of the Sean Ryan show. And back in the SEAL teams, I chewed constantly on the range, in sniper hides, before and after operations.

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Speaker 1 I actually, I'll tell you what, like, I actually,

Speaker 1 the Harvard Business School Alumni Association, I think, is like, like ridiculous in terms of the tightness.

Speaker 1 And then, yeah, the Naval Academy, you know, I would say is they're like pretty good, right?

Speaker 1 Again, everybody's got those shared experiences where you can understand the walk that they have taken in life. And then,

Speaker 1 yeah, I would say the SEAL teams, I don't think we do the best job of like an alumni association.

Speaker 1 But I think we do a good job just like.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I'm very big on vets helping vets, team guys helping team guys.

Speaker 3 So me too. Yeah.
I wish there was more of it, to be honest with him. Yeah, but,

Speaker 3 but, you know,

Speaker 1 yeah, teams are, they don't want, people don't want to ask for help, right? And

Speaker 1 that's, I don't like the teams especially, right?

Speaker 1 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 the what is the pathway from a naval academy guy to buds or the seal teams yeah so um

Speaker 1 Your your junior year,

Speaker 1 you know, when I was there, you go through, they still do it, you go through a SEAL screener, right? And this is

Speaker 1 Friday night to Sunday morning. It's, it's a hell, hell night, a hell 48 hours, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 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 seniors who were selectees for the SEAL teams.
You go through that.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Then

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When I was going through, I got to go spend three weeks

Speaker 1 with

Speaker 1 SEAL Team 2 in May, which was awesome.

Speaker 1 And so I went, spent three weeks with SEAL Team 2. Actually, you know, my fun fact was that's where I got to know Tim Sheehee, Senator Tim Sheehi.
Him and I were on the same SEAL cruise together.

Speaker 1 He actually lived a floor below me at the Naval Academy, but got to know him really well on that SEAL, we call it SEAL cruise.

Speaker 1 It was an awesome three weeks. We did, you know, combatives.
We did, they were doing the

Speaker 1 like aggressive driving course down at Blackwater.

Speaker 1 And I was like, this is amazing. And I can, you know, and so

Speaker 1 then you go back your senior year, you put in like your final application,

Speaker 1 final PT scores, get your letter of recs. Like we had a letter of rec from SEAL Team 2, commanding officer.

Speaker 1 Actually,

Speaker 1 Master Chief Jay Mante, I don't know if he was at SEAL Team 2 when you were there at the time. So yeah, he was CMC.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 then, yeah, so you put in the applications, you go in for an interview.

Speaker 1 I was competitive. I did not get a spot right out of the Naval Academy.
Most soul-crushing day of my life up up to that point.

Speaker 1 Right. You take your 10-year-old dream and like throw it in the trash.

Speaker 1 I remember like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 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, they give you an envelope, right?

Speaker 1 And you open it up.

Speaker 1 Open mine up. You're going to be a surface warfare officer.

Speaker 1 Was crushed, devastated, went back to my room, skipped my afternoon classes. I think I cried in the shower for like half an hour.

Speaker 1 And I was like, all right,

Speaker 1 you know, after I was done feeling sorry for myself, which was like, get a day to feel sorry for yourself. I was like, okay, well, let's figure out how to keep the dream alive.

Speaker 1 So went to the fleet and, you know, but yeah, then I had to laterally transfer.

Speaker 3 How was the fleet?

Speaker 1 I tell people,

Speaker 1 look, combat.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It was a spiritual torment.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It's because you weren't number one. You weren't the best.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That way, no one can ever tell me no again.

Speaker 1 So that was my mentality going on to the ship.

Speaker 1 Got my my surface war, 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.

Speaker 1 I boarded my ship in Phuket, Thailand on May 27th

Speaker 1 and was in the Arabian Gulf conducting amphibious operations in like mid-June

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 learned a ton.

Speaker 1 I learned like best leaders, like learned the best leadership lessons actually in in the fleet.

Speaker 1 Was a hard job.

Speaker 1 But, you know, I'm 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.

Speaker 1 And like, just, you know, yeah, the, the, the, the resilience it built in me and like the mentality that it built in me. Um, whenever like, yeah, it's just funny how things work out.

Speaker 3 So how do you get into the teams from there?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so put in an application. Um,

Speaker 1 You know, best day of my life up to that point. I remember in a parking lot

Speaker 1 right out, you know, right on the pier, right next to the USS Pearl Harbor.

Speaker 1 And I get a

Speaker 1 phone call from the detailer. Her name was Margaret, the officer detailer.
Like she's a legend in the SEAL teams, like was the detailer for like 40 plus years.

Speaker 1 She's like, hey, Brandon, like just to let you know,

Speaker 1 you've been, you know, selected to go to Buds and we'll work with your ship uh your ship's admin to like get you orders there and uh 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 like you know screams of joy like i was pumped um to go there so um yeah how was it checking in

Speaker 1 um it was awesome i loved buds like to the point like you coming from the fleet to like going to buds

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 uh it was um

Speaker 1 yeah i it is one i think it's

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 i loved every second of it um like

Speaker 1 just not being like that's where i wanted to be um and so like even in hell week like i remember like us pearl harbor was out on uh the water and i'm just like oh my god like like I'm out on that ship.

Speaker 1 Like, thank you.

Speaker 1 Blessed to be here. Blessed to be getting surf tortured.

Speaker 3 So you don't hear that very much. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 no, it was, it was great.

Speaker 3 What kind of, I mean, do you have a tough time at Buds at all?

Speaker 1 Do you have any hangups?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 like, there's always one thing, I think, for like everybody, even if like someone does things well. And this is the wild one.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Tread with the tanks. Yeah, tread with the tanks, right? Your hands out with the fins.
And it was treading with the fins, which I think was like, it's a different motion.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah.

Speaker 1 The instructors were baffled too, because look, I was coming in like first, second place on every swim.

Speaker 1 And they're like, what the hell is wrong with you, Sang? Like, you were a water polo player. And so, anyways, I end up, you know, getting it on my fourth try.

Speaker 1 Actually, I was underwater and the instructors were like, come to the side. I'm like, uh-uh.
I wasn't like, I wasn't sure like if they were like, you failed or not.

Speaker 1 And it's like, my head's underwater. My hands are up.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They're like, congrats saying you passed, you know,

Speaker 1 took you four tries. And I was like, who took four tries? And they're like, you know what you get for having, you know, you being a water polo player and it taking you four tries.

Speaker 1 I was like, what do I get? They're like, 1,008 counts. Go get it.
And I just

Speaker 1 hopped on the pool deck and started doing 1,008 counts, you know, for the next whatever, two hours. So, yeah.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Let's see. Hell Week one,

Speaker 1 loved the beginning, right? Loved Sunday night, loved breakout.

Speaker 1 Then like you get into it, right?

Speaker 1 I think it's Monday night. You feel really sorry for yourself.

Speaker 1 And at least that's like, I think it, 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.

Speaker 1 And I remember one of my friends was a brown shirt rollback, right? And so he's supporting. And I just ran by, like, I'm running to like Chow or whatever.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So like after that, like then you get into the the groove and like you're just like moving forward.

Speaker 1 I love, I don't think people talk about like how ruthless it is under a boat with people.

Speaker 1 One of the things I loved was like seeing boat crews kick their, the underperformers out and like just the viciousness of it. Like when you like, you see someone ducking boat and like

Speaker 1 their teammates would just punch them in the back of the head and they would like fall over.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't think like it is like, if you're not carrying your load, the instructors don't have to to do anything, right? Your, your classmates are going to take care of you.

Speaker 1 Um, so I love that aspect of it. Um,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 that to me was the worst evolution. So it was, you know, one in the morning and for four hours, there's like the wind is blowing.
It's probably like 50 degrees outside. You're soaking wet.

Speaker 1 And we're digging a trench with our paddles.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Every single time you would jump in that water, it was like shock therapy. It was like a million needles just like

Speaker 1 crushing my body to the point where you don't right after Hell Week, you never want to get into the ocean again.

Speaker 1 It's because you have this like, like, this, you were just tortured into recognizing, like, it's not comfortable getting in that water. So that's what I remember.

Speaker 1 And then a fun thing we did around the world where you're rowing the boats around the entire San Diego or Coronado Peninsula.

Speaker 1 And one of the instructors brought out

Speaker 1 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 like we ran out of batteries i'll be back he paddles back like 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

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 yeah like one of the cool, you know, yeah, he, he told us, uh, he's like, look, if you guys are here after Hellwake, I'll tell you how I got the Silver Star and like told us that story.

Speaker 1 And to have that, I, you know, one of the things, again, amazing people, right? But that's your first phase instructor.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And like, that is the guy who's putting you through the gauntlet. Like, I loved every moment of it.
So,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 3 So, what did it feel like, you know, to graduate buds in SQT? I mean, when you, when you finally got your trident?

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 it feels, 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.

Speaker 1 It's like, look, congratulations, you know,

Speaker 1 you've, you've made it to the community. And now, like, it doesn't get easier.
It gets faster. It gets harder.

Speaker 1 The expectations are real. We're no longer in training environments.

Speaker 1 You're getting ready to go to war.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 loved that. Again, I checked in SEAL Team 7.

Speaker 1 Actually,

Speaker 1 one thing that I also,

Speaker 1 again, I don't think a lot of people appreciate this.

Speaker 1 At least,

Speaker 1 probably the same for you when you guys were going through it. But

Speaker 1 you.

Speaker 1 You experience just like in that community, you see a lot of death, like more than any, like I've been to more, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 extortion happened.

Speaker 1 And one of our classmates,

Speaker 1 Brock, his brother, Heath, was on that airplane right and so it's like very real you know we check into seal team seven um i think it's mike tatham he you know was you know uh he died in r r um 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 um

Speaker 1 like thankful to 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

Speaker 1 what was it like checking into seven for you um it was good again they 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

Speaker 1 and so

Speaker 1 and then you know after pro dev hit ULT and

Speaker 3 yeah that was a ton of fun too yeah so you you check in and you go right into

Speaker 3 a dev group deployment yeah so and that is look that's like winning the lottery too yeah no exactly and and

Speaker 1 you know, can cover down on that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 so to be clear, not part of SEAL Team 6, but got to augment them.

Speaker 1 The SEAL teams were sending junior officers out to basically get experience.

Speaker 1 And so I spent three and a half months in Afghanistan

Speaker 1 out of Fab Shank

Speaker 1 and Bagram. And so I got to augment the troop that had killed Bin Laden.
And I tell people, like, look, I was like basically the squire for the ground force commander.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then during the day, we were conducting kinetic strikes. And that's where, you know, I got to play

Speaker 1 a really nice role as a junior officer, just coordinating those airstrikes, which was a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 Did you get to go on any of the hits?

Speaker 1 Didn't get to go on any of the hits,

Speaker 1 which was, you know, I get it, right? That it's like those guys train up with

Speaker 1 you're a new guy, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 What, um, so coming back, I mean, to see to see the pinnacle of the SEAL teams,

Speaker 3 like the pinnacle, especially with that, with, with who you deployed with, you know, year after the bin Laden raid, I mean,

Speaker 3 did that, did that create some

Speaker 3 false expectations?

Speaker 1 It's a good, like,

Speaker 1 yes.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 right, a couple of times, my platoon commander, my chief commander, like, Brandon, like, yeah, we're not, we're not Damneck, right? We're not Dev Grew. Like,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 we, we get those guys only go out at night, right? Why are, why are we going out during the day, guys? They're like, look, we got to seize terrain. This is our mission.

Speaker 1 So, fortunately, when on my deployment to Afghanistan with my platoon, we had a ton of air assets.

Speaker 1 So that remained the same. But that was a very unique thing for my,

Speaker 1 for like our CL element in Afghanistan. But

Speaker 1 it wasn't to the point where I think it was, it was just part of that learning curve, right? I had seen what

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 it's just like you have to solve that mission differently than what DevCrew was doing with their mission set.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 understanding that was, I think, like, you know,

Speaker 1 very quick to understand that when, like, look, like, this isn't, we have a different mission than DevGrew. This is how we have to execute said mission.

Speaker 3 Where did you go?

Speaker 1 Where was your first

Speaker 1 deployment? So, first deployment was out of Tarankout, Aruzgon,

Speaker 1 multinational base, Tarankow,

Speaker 1 Soto Southeast. We would do helicopter assault force operations into Kandahar, into Aruzgon, into Ghazni, into Zabul.

Speaker 1 And then we forward staged out of Ghazni, sometimes going, I want to say Pektika and Pectia.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 gotta go. Our mission was we were paired up with the 8th Commando Battalion, 8th Kandek,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 we would bring 13, 14 guys and 130 Afghans.

Speaker 3 Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Talk about like moving pieces on the battlefield. Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 What did you think about worker with those guys?

Speaker 1 It was

Speaker 1 not. I did not like, there's pros, there's cons.
I would say like overall, I did enjoy it, right? It was

Speaker 1 when you go out with that many inexperienced guys, it makes the mission more dangerous.

Speaker 1 um it was very clear to us that uh that like

Speaker 1 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 hard chargers.

Speaker 1 But it was, I appreciated the challenge and the complexity of the operations, multi-day village clearances.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like we have to train the commandos to stand up on their own.

Speaker 1 And so that was an interesting mission set.

Speaker 1 But we were also at that point, 12 years into a war. And it was clear to us, like, look, this is

Speaker 1 right. It was like, don't get yourself killed

Speaker 1 was like kind of a mentality

Speaker 1 over

Speaker 1 this uncertainty was something that we thought about. Like, get the mission done.
Don't get yourself killed.

Speaker 1 And like, yeah, take it to the enemy when they show up.

Speaker 3 Was it pretty hairy out there at the time?

Speaker 1 I don't think it was hairy. No, like, we got into some good firefights, which I'm like thankful for.
And like,

Speaker 1 I'm glad the team had that deployment.

Speaker 1 And we got to, or rack up, like some of the guys got to rack up some EKIA and I get credit for some JTAC kills.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I think it's like one quarter or whatever. But the...

Speaker 3 Let's hear about it.

Speaker 1 No, the JTAC stuff.

Speaker 1 Let's see. There's this one.
Just like a, this was

Speaker 1 Got our new JTACs, right? We have experienced JTAC, new JTAC. New JTAC's the lead JTAC on this operation.
and

Speaker 1 I'm working with him. And there's this guy that's taking, you know, pot shots at us

Speaker 1 from probably like

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 But we're like, all right, let's bring on C-130

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 drop some ordinance on this guy. And turns out the C-130 had not doped in their 30 mic mic.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And he runs. And like,

Speaker 1 the new JTAC, I'm like, what's going on? He's like, they keep missing. Like, why are they missing? And like, right, because he wants to take out this bad guy.

Speaker 1 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 GBE39.

Speaker 1 Uh, it's a glide bomb because the guy like stops under a tree 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,

Speaker 1 yeah, it was new JTAC's first, you know, J-TAC kill, and so yeah, that was your first one, yeah, Yeah. Yeah.
Yep. How did that feel? Ah,

Speaker 1 indifferent. I'm like, yeah.
I was, I just wanted to, honestly, like, I just wanted the team to complete the mission. So.

Speaker 3 Right on. Where do you go from Afghanistan?

Speaker 1 So let's see.

Speaker 1 While I'm in Afghanistan, My orders were to go. I want to say it was the SEAL Team 2.
I had orders to go to the East Coast.

Speaker 1 During that deployment, I get an email from one of my sqt classmates another officer at seal team five says hey 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 bill at team five um he's like do you want to take it and uh i was like oh that sounds like

Speaker 1 awesome like like all right I'll get to go right into a workup

Speaker 1 or like yeah I was like what's the catch he's like you're gonna go right into a workup and so I call my wife said hey hon we um,

Speaker 1 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 and do a deployment. I was like, or we can stay in San Diego.

Speaker 1 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, do?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 got home,

Speaker 1 checked into SEAL Team 5, ULT started, was off to the races. I think out of a, for two, I tracked this because actually the teams were making us track it at the time.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It seems pretty normal.

Speaker 1 She's like, no, it's not. I was like, all right.
So,

Speaker 1 but yeah, so checked into SEAL Team 5, did the workup, deployed to the Pacific.

Speaker 3 How are you guys going over there?

Speaker 1 It was a lot of joint partner operations

Speaker 1 during the time. So I think like.

Speaker 1 We were like, we sent a lot of people to the, yeah, the joint exercises. We sent element to Korea, sent an element to the Philippines, sent an element to

Speaker 1 the Maldives, like all over the place. I personally, we went to,

Speaker 1 I went to Vietnam, I went to Singapore.

Speaker 1 We did the POTUS detail in Hawaii for President Obama, augmenting Secret Service. That was pretty cool.
But yeah, it was a really cool experience.

Speaker 3 All right, Don.

Speaker 1 Why did you get out?

Speaker 1 I wanted like a number of, like a whole host of reasons. I wanted to do something else.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But I wanted to see like what could be done outside of a military system.

Speaker 1 I knew what the career path looked like for officers.

Speaker 1 Like in the sense, right, it's like, okay,

Speaker 1 I would have to go do an ops job before I could go screen. And then you go screen, you be a troop commander and like you get, you know, maybe one or two more pumps.

Speaker 1 And then you're commanding and, you know, and then you're doing another staff job and then like a group command. And

Speaker 1 like, again, I got a lot of friends who are doing that.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 3 yeah i don't know a whole lot of people that were yeah so

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 shield ai i mean that that that popped on your i mean you wanted to do something before you left

Speaker 1 yeah so again kind of like a planner mentality. I

Speaker 1 wanted 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

Speaker 1 and I was trying to figure out what I want to do next.

Speaker 1 Was it going to do venture capital? Was it going to do private equity? Was it going to do hedge funds?

Speaker 1 I was very.

Speaker 1 like inspired by entrepreneurs.

Speaker 1 My dad was a small business, became a small business owner at age 50. My brother had sold a wireless power company to Qualcomm.
I want to say when he was like 24 years old.

Speaker 1 And so I had those like role models in my life. And

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 so eventually landed it on, and I think that fit my skill set, right? Leading teams, building culture.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I wanted to do something entrepreneurial.

Speaker 1 Was really interested in

Speaker 1 AI and autonomy just as an engineer. That was of interest to me.
Like always followed technology.

Speaker 1 I remember 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?

Speaker 1 Like, AI and autonomy is what I decided. And like, lots of people were talking about it at the time.

Speaker 1 And then I 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,

Speaker 1 right? Problems of military problems, problems of national security, global stability, you know, decide, you know what, these are actually really important problems.

Speaker 1 And I remember, again,

Speaker 1 look up to Elon Musk as an entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 And he has done a lot of interviews where he talks about like, yeah, was trying, you know, wanted to do something,

Speaker 1 you know, to progress humankind. It was going to be the internet, sustainable energy, and space, right?

Speaker 1 And so you have Tesla for sustainable energy, SpaceX for space travel, you have XAI, you had PayPal for,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And I think warfare is like one of those like massive unsolved problems in human history. And so it's like, wow, is there, you know,

Speaker 1 could work on solving, you know, call it the problem of warfare warfare was something that i was interested in also what what what problems specifically in warfare were you looking to solve

Speaker 1 one of like deterrence um right like and if you look at um

Speaker 1 why countries go to war like why they don't go to war um because there are 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 and has built this world order

Speaker 1 it's because of our military leadership since 1945.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 military.

Speaker 1 Nuclear weapons deter nuclear war. The conventional weapon systems that have deterred conventional warfare have been our aircraft carriers, our submarines, our ships.

Speaker 1 Those have deterred largely state-on-state conflict

Speaker 1 up until Russia invading Ukraine,

Speaker 1 like major state-on-state conflict. Obviously, there have been a handful of small examples.

Speaker 1 But it became,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 it like, how can you continue to deter warfare just at the conventional level and then also at the asymmetric level? And,

Speaker 1 you know, my belief is that AI and autonomy has a massive

Speaker 1 role to play in deterring conflict.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. I would,

Speaker 3 we're going to get heavy into that. I would love to hear what you think the future of warfare looks like and if

Speaker 3 pilots, people on ships,

Speaker 3 commandos

Speaker 3 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 shield AI, let's take a quick break.

Speaker 1 Okay.

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Speaker 3 All right, Brandon, we're back from the break. I need to work on my shooting.
That was a little rough out there, but good break.

Speaker 1 Good time.

Speaker 1 It was was a little rough for me, too.

Speaker 3 But so I want to get into, you know, why you're here, Shield AI. So you started it in 2015.

Speaker 1 2015.

Speaker 3 What was the vision?

Speaker 1 Look, I believe in a world of autonomous systems.

Speaker 1 I think they're going to have a profound impact on humanity.

Speaker 1 I like as it relates to the defense world, I just fundamentally believe that

Speaker 1 autonomous systems are like swarms of autonomous systems are going to be the most strategic conventional deterrent of the 21st century.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And that's not what the traditional defense primes are known for.

Speaker 1 They're not known for their software systems. They're known for building the aircraft carriers, the submarines, the fighter jets of the world.

Speaker 1 But, you know, the best of AI and autonomy was all going to Silicon Valley at the time.

Speaker 3 I mean, so what is, I mean, I know you guys have a bunch of different projects, but you know,

Speaker 3 overall, what is SHIELD AI?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 mission is to protect service members and civilians with artificial intelligence systems. In pursuit of this mission, we have been building and proliferating the world's best AI pilot.

Speaker 1 Easiest way to think about an AI pilot is self-driving technology for unmanned systems. Why is that important?

Speaker 1 It enables unmanned systems to operate without GPS, without communications, or while GPS or communications are jammed.

Speaker 1 It enables them to operate without a remote pilot, and then it enables them, it enables enables the concept of swarming or teaming, where they are able to share information with each other, read and react, and work together as a team.

Speaker 3 And so these,

Speaker 3 all the different stuff that you're making, these aren't piloted from somebody in Nevada or...

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 they are piloted by an onboard autonomy stack, an AI pilot.

Speaker 1 Again, it's 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.

Speaker 3 Damn, damn.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, so what was the, I mean, that's like,

Speaker 1 it's just a huge, yeah,

Speaker 3 thing to take on, especially, you know, coming out of the SEAL teams. I mean,

Speaker 3 where do you even start with that idea?

Speaker 1 Look, I think you actually start with like the vision, right? And I asked myself,

Speaker 1 and then you work backwards from there. But in 2015, I asked myself, what does the military of 2035 look like? And what is the role that AI and autonomy plays?

Speaker 1 I decided that AI and autonomy should be powering, commanding, maneuvering every single military asset under the sun.

Speaker 1 And then you say, okay, well, how do we get there?

Speaker 1 Like in Buds, like in the SEAL teams, just just one step at a time.

Speaker 1 And so we started with a problem that I was super familiar with, clearing buildings of threats.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 No shit, completely autonomously. Yep.
Has that been deployed?

Speaker 1 It has been deployed to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel,

Speaker 1 Ukraine. It's been widely deployed.
It's been used, like I'm super proud of the product.

Speaker 1 The quadcopter market for the military back in 2015 to like 2000, honestly, like maybe even now is it was a very small market.

Speaker 1 So, but like the mission impact that we got to have, like I'm very proud of, you know.

Speaker 1 The best of the best soft forces have used it on operations. It has absolutely brought guys home back safely to their families.

Speaker 1 Super proud of that product. Couldn't build a large business from just that product and so had to expand.

Speaker 1 And we executed climbing the aviation food chain, which led us to, you know, autonomous F-16s, autonomous V-bats.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 now it's like we're just making, like, we're working with every prime contractor to make their systems autonomous. Wow.
Wow.

Speaker 3 I mean, what is it? I mean,

Speaker 3 so, you know,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 other folks have put things on these quadcopters.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's everything from, like I said, the small quadcopter that's clearing buildings to,

Speaker 3 I mean, the latest thing that you've made, I think, is 2,000 miles, 2,000 mile range

Speaker 3 outmaneuvering an F-35.

Speaker 1 It weighs about 18,000 pounds. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And that's just wild to even think about.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, what's it like, you know, seeing your product, your innovation get implemented into the SEAL teams where you came from?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was, it's like, what I care most about, it's not like the size of the company. It's not the valuation.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they sent the quadcopter into a house clearing problem down at La Posta.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they gave a SEAL squad the exact same problem.

Speaker 1 Quadcopter, right, like solved the... Solved the problem faster.

Speaker 1 And at the end of this problem, this house clearing problem, there's a houseborne NIED, which was like a way for the SEAL teams to say like, yeah, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Like that's, you know, you cleared the building, but you still get blown up.

Speaker 1 And so seeing the reaction from the guys after that, they're like, okay, like, I can see why this is like a valuable capability,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And again, this was like early days innovation. Holy smokes, the team must have been like 40 people at this stage in the game.

Speaker 1 But like, again, proud of like, no one had ever seen this thing before. No one, a lot of people had.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Damn. I mean, do you, are you on site when they're, when these exercises are going on?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, we were. We were working hand in hand with these guys.

Speaker 3 So what's it like when you see

Speaker 3 something that you've innovated, something that you've developed, outperform

Speaker 3 the same community that you came from? I mean, is there a lot of pushback? I would think that

Speaker 3 it's taking a job.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's, it's, you know what I'm saying? There's a lot of passion to become a SEAL and then to

Speaker 3 have you show up with a drone that's like, watch this.

Speaker 1 Like, so one, it augments a mission. I don't want to say it takes a job.
And I think everybody understands that.

Speaker 1 And the thing that I think a lot of folks understood in the SEAL teams and SOCOM writ large was, hey, this thing,

Speaker 1 like close 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

Speaker 1 does in terms of a mission.

Speaker 1 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, how, is there a better way to do this?

Speaker 1 And that's where 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, because they're always asking the question, like, is there a better way to do this?

Speaker 1 And so that's been just like a positive mentality.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 it was fun doing the tests, the exercises. Again, they were great partners.
Their innovation cell working directly with us.

Speaker 1 Very proud of like what we accomplished. But at the same time, like very, it was at small scale.

Speaker 1 And that's why we had to figure out how to like build other products because they're just not a lot of people, unfortunately, care about the soft, you know, fighter or like the infantry soldier.

Speaker 1 There's just, it pales in comparison in terms of like the amount of funding that's going towards other capabilities.

Speaker 3 So was there, was there any, I mean, did they implement it immediately or did they?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they took, they took it over

Speaker 1 to the battlefield. They used it, right? And you get feedback, right? It sucked in this scenario.
Why wasn't it working here?

Speaker 1 And like, that's when like team would solve bugs, solve problems, send it back, we fixed this, they'd use it, you know, again, it was successful in a lot of operations, unsuccessful in some, and that's just like the name of the game in terms of like early stage, highly technical products.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 but yeah, again, what I'm like, I'm very proud of that product because 100% used on some of the most important missions

Speaker 1 that this country does.

Speaker 1 And 100%,

Speaker 1 you know, brought guys back home safely to their families.

Speaker 1 And so I can't, like, I 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,

Speaker 1 we all know what that looks like.

Speaker 1 Or you and I know what that looks like. Wow.

Speaker 3 So you're always getting direct feedback from the field on how these things are going. Yep.

Speaker 3 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, some of the, the, the successes and failures that you saw the product doing?

Speaker 1 Yeah, simply it would, it would, it would go inside these buildings.

Speaker 1 In terms of like the S-Vest world, right? People actually, drones had been hunting bad guys for 20 plus years.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 What were some of the failures? What were some of the things that you're doing?

Speaker 1 You'd have trouble in like highly dusty conditions. Our first generation product used a LIDAR, our first generation generation quadcopter.

Speaker 1 And so LiDAR, when you're operating in dusty areas, it spins up a lot of particle sand in the air. And every single time that LIDAR is scanning, it's getting a reflection back from that dust.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 dusty, desert-like environments where people lived in mud huts or there's just sand and, you know, or there's war zones where there's just like dust everywhere.

Speaker 1 And then when you fly a quadcopter that's spinning up all that dust, that would be a challenge. Going through really small

Speaker 1 doorways and tunnel systems was another challenge because

Speaker 1 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 such close proximity.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They're like, oh, what the hell? It doesn't work. Right.
Customer at the end of the day just wants their product to work.

Speaker 1 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 in its maturity life cycle.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Interesting.

Speaker 3 I mean, how small are these things?

Speaker 1 These things were about two and a half pounds this big. Yeah.
Yeah, size, like it fit through a standard doorway. That was one of our product requirements.
So what would

Speaker 3 I mean, how would it be implemented? I mean, we were just talking about, you know, doing hits and all this stuff. And so

Speaker 3 what exactly in the soft world, because that's all I can relate to.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But like when you have a deliberate target where you're executing a call out,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But during those types of operations, you execute a call out, right?

Speaker 1 People will 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.

Speaker 3 Damn.

Speaker 3 Damn. I mean,

Speaker 3 what? I mean,

Speaker 3 what did that wind up developing into? What was the next product?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 This is, again, back in 2018, 19, 20, like there's not real money flowing towards these quadcopter products. We said, hey, we have to figure out how to get onto more strategic, more

Speaker 1 strategic platforms, strategic capabilities. That's where a lot of the defense dollars are moving.
So what we ended up doing was during the time,

Speaker 1 we decided, hey, we have to,

Speaker 1 we're going to buy another platform.

Speaker 1 So made that decision in late 2019, 2020. There was a couple of acquisition targets that we were looking at.

Speaker 1 Ended up in 2021 buying two companies, both at the same time.

Speaker 1 One of the companies, Martin UAV, they made the V-BAT. The other company, Heron Systems, they were working on AI and autonomy for fighter jets.

Speaker 1 And so what we were able to do is, hey, let's put the AI pilot on the V-BAT, which is, again, you think of it as like a miniature Predator Reaper drone.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, we wanted access to these programs where we could put AI pilots onto fighter aircraft.

Speaker 3 I mean, so we'll get into the fighter aircraft here in a little bit, but I mean, how do these things,

Speaker 3 how do they think? I mean, is it literally like to the quadcopter all the way up to the

Speaker 3 just called it the expat?

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 how, is it just you switch it on and point it in the right direction?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so for the quadcop, there was a button on the side. You press it, it like spin its rotors and like take off from your hand and like go inside the buildings.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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, you have a state estimation module.

Speaker 1 State estimation is like, where in the world am I? You have a mapping module, it builds a map.

Speaker 1 You have a controls module. You have, right, that's like how to actuate motors,

Speaker 1 you know, your steering mechanisms.

Speaker 1 You have

Speaker 1 a reasoning model, what we call global reasoning.

Speaker 1 You can think of this as like the mission, is the mission to go inside a building and clear it of threats, is the mission to dogfight F-16s, is the mission to find surface-air missile systems.

Speaker 1 Like what the mission is. That's what the reasoning module is.
Then you have like a path planning module, which is like, okay, what are the steps that I'm going to take to execute said mission?

Speaker 1 So those are the different software modules that make up an autonomy stack.

Speaker 1 The way that 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.

Speaker 1 And then it's estimating its position based on the map that it's built. Again, I think a lot of people try to overcomplicate autonomous systems.

Speaker 1 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 five senses, then we think about the world using our brain and then we actuate our muscles

Speaker 1 supported by our skeleton to maneuver around the world.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I know that wall is, you know, 10 feet away. This wall is eight feet away, right? You're six feet from me.

Speaker 1 These autonomous systems are doing the exact same thing. And just like we learn from our experiences,

Speaker 1 these things are learning from their experiences.

Speaker 3 How do they learn from their experiences?

Speaker 1 Yeah. So one of the principal ways that we developed a methodology called reinforcement learning.

Speaker 1 And so this was pioneered.

Speaker 1 There's probably like academic papers, I would say, like it became pretty famous with like AlphaGo, Alpha Star, where it was,

Speaker 1 they would put these

Speaker 1 AlphaGo, you know, beat a world champion at the game of Go, right? It's any time, reinforcement learning is really

Speaker 1 a good learning methodology when the number of variables or outcomes are massive, right? In the

Speaker 1 multiple, like trillions of outcomes, right? Which 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 what you're doing is you're taking, well, you know,

Speaker 1 you basically give it a goal, and then behaviors that you believe are positive, you reinforce those behaviors, you reward those behaviors. And then

Speaker 1 things that are negative, like you don't reward those behaviors.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then you have your engineers, right? They architect this training environment, this, you know, this, I think we've called it a dojo before,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 and that's how you're teaching these systems anything from clearing a room to dogfighting to you know hunting surface air missile systems to navigating you know

Speaker 3 yeah any any unmanned system wow wow i mean what do you 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. Yep.

Speaker 3 Be a little more specific. I mean, what does it look like? I mean, we had talked about, you know,

Speaker 3 I was just talking about, did you get any pushback from the SEAL teams of the soft community about, you know, is this going to take our job?

Speaker 3 Which, you know, my perspective is, yeah, it probably will eventually take your job. But, you know,

Speaker 3 and that, you know, that sucks for somebody that's aspiring to be, you know, a SEAL, a Green Beret, infantry, whatever, right?

Speaker 3 But, I mean, for the, for the, you know, broader consciousness of the country and, and even the world, I mean, that's less people coming home in bags.

Speaker 3 You know, it's, it's, and so I, I, you know, I mean, I mentioned at breakfast, I interviewed, you know, Palmer Lucky and kind of asked him the same question. You know, what does it look like?

Speaker 3 Is this going to replace all personnel military-wide eventually?

Speaker 3 He says no.

Speaker 3 He knows a hell of a lot more about this than I do, but, you know, when he's talking about

Speaker 3 And you too, I mean, when you guys are talking about this stuff, I mean, it's making

Speaker 3 pilots obsolete. It's making, you know, Dino Mavrucas and other SEAL who's doing autonomous surface warfare vehicles.
It makes a lot of naval vessels obsolete.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 I want to, I just want to be clear. I think that's, that is a good thing for the nation.
Less, Leth's deaths on our own side and more

Speaker 3 is obviously better. Yeah.
So, you know, what does, what is your vision? What does it look like in 2035?

Speaker 1 In 2035, so there's like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's still going 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think you see humans playing a big role in warfare 100 years from now.

Speaker 1 I think that actually happens probably sooner where countries, you know, it becomes a, you know, robot on robot deterrence

Speaker 1 where, right. And I think that's like 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 to fight each other over, you know,

Speaker 1 often like what I would call like, you know, things that we shouldn't be fighting over.

Speaker 1 So 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 executes on.

Speaker 1 But I think people are going to see like, holy smokes. In the same way, we in the soft community saw what the Reaper drones, the Predator drones could do for us from 2000, 2020.

Speaker 1 I think you're going to see people say, holy smokes, look at what autonomous systems can do for us.

Speaker 1 We like need to

Speaker 1 double down, triple down, 10x down on like these types of systems because they're going to have massive strategic impacts on the battlefield. Happy to talk about why.

Speaker 3 Let's do it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 90 years, 100 years, it'd be like

Speaker 1 our air power.

Speaker 1 And behind that, you have like, you know, our nuclear triad, our nuclear submarine, super important.

Speaker 1 in the 80s we developed stealth technology and gps guided munitions then we adopted large drones from 2000 to 2020

Speaker 1 and i think the next evolution which is really a transformation is this proliferation of autonomous uh 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 of them it's like mass and maneuver.

Speaker 1 Mass,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Larger armies, just with mass, often won wars from like 4000 BC to freaking, you know, the 1800s. You know, then maneuver started becoming more important.

Speaker 1 And now it's like, how can you maneuver mass most effectively?

Speaker 1 Even when I was doing my first augment, I was with the ground force commander who conducted the bin Laden raid. He was kind enough to mentor me.

Speaker 1 And he's like, look, he's like, what we do at DevGrew is like really cool. He's like, but it's like, we need our brothers or sisters in the Army and the Marine Corps to bring the mass to the fight.

Speaker 1 You need mass to occupy terrain. You need mass to create stability.

Speaker 1 And like, you know, soft forces just don't bring the mass or the heft to the fight.

Speaker 1 And that's why you need the army and the marine corps uh to bring that level of mass what autonomy does is it unlocks the concept of near infinite uh intelligent maneuverable mass um where you are no longer limited by the number of personnel you have right the number of

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 there's a finite number of people.

Speaker 1 With AI and autonomy and combined with industrial production, you can field million, 10 million, 100 million drone-sized armies

Speaker 1 to employ mass effectively on the battlefield. And that's why it's such a big deterrent.
And that's why I think the United States has to lead.

Speaker 1 That's why it's like the most strategic, AI and autonomy being the most strategic capability for the next 50 years. Wow.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 who are your competitors? Not just domestic, but I mean, foreign competitors. I mean,

Speaker 3 we seem to be, you know, from my perspective, on the cutting edge of all this autonomous warfare type stuff. But I mean, you know, everybody that I bring in here is talking about China, China, China.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 who are the key players in the world?

Speaker 1 In the world?

Speaker 1 I think China is the key player that matters. Now, the good news is the United States

Speaker 1 remains best in the world at software, at AI, at autonomy.

Speaker 1 like that in no means we should be complacent. I think the Chinese are highly innovative.

Speaker 1 They are able to mobilize resources in a faster way than the United States can mobilize resources, at least state-sponsored resources.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 their

Speaker 1 iteration cycle, like how quickly they go from version one to version two to version three to version four to version five,

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 much faster. than the USA.
And I've been in a number of classified briefings that actually show their ability to iterate. And

Speaker 1 obviously like can't go into like what those timelines are or 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

Speaker 1 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 at a slower clip because eventually they pass us.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 yeah, they're by far number one. And yeah, they understand the technology.
They've made claims they want to build a million drone-sized army, right?

Speaker 1 And that's, we're seeing that more and more from countries throughout the world,

Speaker 1 basically stating that they're moving towards million plus drone, drone armies.

Speaker 1 What,

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 3 corporate espionage is a major problem, especially in the defense tech space, you know, with

Speaker 3 Chinese nationalists coming to the country and getting into our schools and embedding into companies. And so I'm just curious.
I mean,

Speaker 3 do you take that seriously?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 You're a major, I mean, you are, you and your company could be detrimental to China.

Speaker 3 Pretty much, I mean, we just talked about

Speaker 3 the drug trafficking going across the, you know,

Speaker 3 you got a part in that. I mean,

Speaker 3 you see where I'm going with those? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, we take security like very seriously. It's,

Speaker 1 it's,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It is a,

Speaker 1 it's like, what's the, like, it's hard to stop someone that is truly determined to take,

Speaker 1 no matter like what safeguards that you put in place. And I go back to like, right, in the SEAL teams, we talk about speed versus security, right?

Speaker 1 And I, like, I would tell my platoon, like, speed is a type of security, right? If you're iterating quicker, um, then that is going to make you like more secure, right? If you're

Speaker 1 just like, because great, if a state-sponsored actor is stealing something, hopefully it's going to take them a couple of years to like crack through encryption.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And this is very similar to like

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

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Speaker 3 Let's talk about the XBAT. I mean, we were talking about the two companies that you acquired.

Speaker 1 The VBAT. The VBAT.
The V-BAT, excuse me. The V-BAT.

Speaker 3 What is that?

Speaker 1 So the V-BAT, 180-pound vertical takeoff, launch and land aircraft does the mission of a Predator Reaper at a fraction of the cost. ISRN targeting mission.

Speaker 1 Does it differently than these larger group five, they call them group five drones. VBAT is a group three drone, but essentially it is

Speaker 1 conducting ISR and targeting. So we've deployed that thing to like our big wins have been in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 They have been

Speaker 1 in the Caribbean Sea most recently.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that's where it's like provided massive value to our customers.

Speaker 1 Takes off and lands like a SpaceX rocket. That's like logistics footprint is tiny.
Those are like some of like the key value. AI piloted, able to operate where GPS and communications are jammed.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 So these things vertically take off.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yep.

Speaker 3 I mean, can you go into why that is so important?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 vertical takeoff, launch and land.

Speaker 1 And this goes to the UAP that's in your backyard that we're going to talk about. But why is that important? It's

Speaker 1 runways are massive infrastructure. They're massive targets.

Speaker 1 And so in this,

Speaker 1 you can't really hide a runway.

Speaker 1 And then, so when a pure adversary, like

Speaker 1 that's one of the first things that they're going to target. Actually, like the Ukrainians,

Speaker 1 when President Biden enabled them to use ATACOMs into Russia, first thing the Ukrainians went after were runways, right?

Speaker 1 Actually, then with their special operation where they had a bunch of, you know, these are like FPV drones that they used to blow up Russian assets,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 high-value infrastructure that can massively disrupt operations.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So they're going after your runways.

Speaker 1 What vertical takeoff, launch, and land, besides getting out of runways, it allows you to be very tactical, very maneuverable. The

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 If you're tied to a runway, you're not very mobile.

Speaker 3 How would these,

Speaker 3 I mean, how would these be deployed? Would they, are they,

Speaker 3 how many of them get deployed?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so the VBATs, theoretically, like a swarm, you could use a swarm of V-bats. That would be

Speaker 1 like, it becomes like an operational challenge to like actually deploy swarms, like more of a logistics challenge than anything.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 target, you're a sitting duck.

Speaker 1 So you have to have this mobile equipment.

Speaker 1 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 air missile systems

Speaker 1 make large, exquisite aircraft very vulnerable.

Speaker 1 Whether it's, you know, everybody saw our Stinger missiles or not our, like, they saw the Ukrainians shooting down Russian helicopters with Stinger missiles.

Speaker 1 They saw that in the 1980s in Afghanistan. They saw it again in Ukraine and just augmented by other surface air missile systems.

Speaker 1 It's really impossible, like using

Speaker 1 large, exquisite platforms,

Speaker 1 and even like too dangerous for manned platforms to operate in these highly contested environments.

Speaker 1 And when I say contested, I mean lots of surface air missile systems, lots of GPS jammers, lots of communications jammers.

Speaker 3 I mean, when they are deployed, are they, I mean,

Speaker 3 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 everything. You see helicopters, fighter, everything, right?

Speaker 3 From C-130s to whatever, your fighter jets to Chinooks, Apaches, all of that. And so

Speaker 3 because of the vertical takeoff, I mean,

Speaker 3 a couple of questions. I mean, are they dispersed throughout the country? Yeah.
You know, and in onesies and twosies or...

Speaker 1 That's exactly right, right? You're pushing capability to the lower echelons. And that's actually like,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 When I got to do my commando mission in Afghanistan, I had a full stack of air supporting me.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so what these countries are doing, they're pushing this great capability to lower echelons.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so you're creating dilemmas

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Are they dedicated to specific units?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they are. Yep.
Okay. Okay.

Speaker 3 And so how, I mean,

Speaker 3 that could mean a whole array of different capabilities, you know, with one, you know, with your, with your product, the V-BAT.

Speaker 3 And so, I mean, if, if, if you have one mission that's an IOSR mission, you know, it's surveillance, detection, stuff like that. And then you have a kinetic mission.

Speaker 3 I mean, how do you, how do you tell the machine what you're going to do? Like what the mission is?

Speaker 1 Yeah. So these basically, right, the way to think about it is

Speaker 1 you're training a system to learn a mission, right?

Speaker 1 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 the said library for what you're going to be executing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The good thing is.

Speaker 1 is like every single military mission has been written in pretty like good detail and description in like army field manuals, in the infantry squad books, right? In like every air operations manual.

Speaker 1 These missions are well described. And the cool thing is like software engineers can take those descriptions and then turn them into

Speaker 1 a software package, a software mission package.

Speaker 3 And you guys do both. Yeah.
You build the product or you build the hardware and the software.

Speaker 1 Yes, we do. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Was it always like that?

Speaker 1 It was out of a necessity, right? When we wanted to, we started off with the quadcopter.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 we decided to, hey, we're going to 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,

Speaker 1 a big reason for that was

Speaker 1 what like I could tell someone, i could tell a four-star general four-star admiral or like uh you know an undersecretary all day every day that this ai pilot that's flying a 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

Speaker 1 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 V-BAT.

Speaker 1 We're like, okay, now we can put the AI pilot pilot on the V-BAT.

Speaker 1 Now you see the AI pilot running on a quadcopter. You see it running on a V-BAT.

Speaker 1 We bought Heron Systems and, you know, that won the DARPA 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.

Speaker 1 And since then, now we've put the AI pilot on 15 different platforms, one-way attack drones, unmanned ground vehicles,

Speaker 1 you know, large target drones, jet-powered drones, um 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 um

Speaker 1 like Shield AI stands alone in our ability to integrate onto platform, platform, platform, platform really rapidly.

Speaker 1 One of the cool things, we can take,

Speaker 1 we've integrated it on a variant of the Lakota helicopter.

Speaker 1 What used to take 40 engineers and like tens of millions of dollars and two years to do on our quadcopter, we can now do with a couple hundred thousand dollars, three engineers in three months on something like a Lakota helicopter or something like

Speaker 1 a jet-powered drone.

Speaker 3 So, when you're talking about drone storms with

Speaker 3 the V-BAT, I mean, these are big

Speaker 1 devices the big big big yeah they're they're they're 180 pounds they're they stand like nine feet tall i think uh they're not um but again they fit in the back of a sprinter man like in terms of like so they're they're big they're not like f-16 f-16 big yeah

Speaker 3 And so if you're going to, if you're going to do a, a swarm of these things, I mean, are these, do they all know what each other is doing?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 exactly. They're sharing information with each other.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 again, building that map, sharing that worldview with each other, sharing positions, sharing friendly position, any me position the same way.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Just faster.

Speaker 1 Just faster. Yeah.

Speaker 3 A lot faster.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Superhuman speeds.
They turned it real time.

Speaker 3 Like it's yeah, yeah, you know, they're we're doing it's getting ready to engage somebody. Yeah,

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 them. Fighter jets, like one of the things I've learned about air warfare is like, if you're doing like

Speaker 1 fighter jet tactics with whether, like multiple fighter jets, like four of them in the air, right?

Speaker 1 The coordination is actually like a really, really important thing in terms of like executing the tactics.

Speaker 1 And it's a really hard thing, even for the most experienced fighter pilots to pull off.

Speaker 1 We've had lifelong fighter pilots at Shield AI who are like, look, I could never get my fighter pilot squadron to do what this AI just did, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about the DARPA Alpha dogfight. Yeah.
What was that?

Speaker 1 So DARPA Alpha dogfight,

Speaker 1 it was, so go back to like, you had Alpha Go, you had Alpha Star. DARPA's like, I believe that we could do an AI pilot dogfight to show that, you know, basically

Speaker 1 great credit to DARPA. It was basically show that the value that these systems could be able to provide.

Speaker 1 And so what it was, is there's a number of companies that participated. It was AI pilot versus AI pilot, dog fighting, in simulation, F-16s.

Speaker 1 The other good thing that I like about it is like it was unclassified, so we can talk about it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 AI pilot versus AI pilot in simulated dog fights.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what Shield AI ended up doing, right? What Heron Systems, a Shield AI company, ended up doing was we ended up winning the off a dog fight where we defeated every single AI pilot

Speaker 1 in these dog fighting competition. It was like a ladder, right? Like you beat them, you move on, a playoff bracket.

Speaker 1 And then the winner, we got to go up against

Speaker 1 an actual fighter pilot in simulation,

Speaker 1 fighter weapons school pilot, a top gun.

Speaker 1 And I want to say we won 5.0 in that competition, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 a lot of people call them collaborative combat aircraft. It's we can actually have an AI pilot and autonomy stack

Speaker 1 that is

Speaker 1 running these aircraft.

Speaker 3 Dude, I mean,

Speaker 3 you're probably like most overachievers, but I mean, what does that feel like to see your company's innovations outdo

Speaker 3 everything?

Speaker 3 I mean, do you even take the time to self-reflect and think about like the magnitude of what you're doing?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 When the products do something, that's what like I really care about. I, yes, like the innovation is cool.
The capabilities are cool.

Speaker 1 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 were just innovating for the sake of innovation versus actually building a capability that's going to make a difference on the battlefield.

Speaker 1 And so that's like what I care about.

Speaker 1 I don't do enough reflection. I don't do enough.
My wife's like, you never celebrate anything. I don't like,

Speaker 1 sounds familiar.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He's like, like, what's there to be happy about? Like, job finished, jobs not finished. And that is like, you know,

Speaker 1 the, the mentality that I have.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, I, I, uh, am plagued by the same thing. Although I will say last night

Speaker 3 when the expat got dropped off, yeah, I was like, I can't fucking believe this thing. So I went home and I was like, told my wife, I was like, you got to come out here and see this with the kids.

Speaker 3 Yeah. We have

Speaker 3 America's aerial defense and offensive system that nobody knows about sitting in our fucking front yard right now.

Speaker 1 No, I'm

Speaker 1 super pumped unveil it on your show.

Speaker 3 It's just wild to me.

Speaker 1 It's crazy.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 you want to talk about the expat?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the expat. Yeah, now that we're talking about it.

Speaker 1 All right. So expat, just some background.

Speaker 1 Field AI, when we think about hardware, like

Speaker 1 we want to build, hardware is

Speaker 1 really effing hard to build.

Speaker 1 It is

Speaker 1 because you're stuck with the design choices that you make for a long time. Software, you can quickly iterate on the design choices that you make.

Speaker 1 There's certainly like there are challenges in architecting a good software system, but

Speaker 1 same in hardware, it's just harder to change things once you're bending steel and metal. So you have to get it right out of the gate.

Speaker 1 And then hardware is just like when you're dealing in the real physical world,

Speaker 1 everything's harder. Sensors fail, right? Computers have challenges, right? Sensors will fail for milliseconds on like average.
And like

Speaker 1 there's just so many hard things about building hardware. So Shield AI is very deliberate about the hardware that we build.

Speaker 1 has to be absolutely transformative. For VBAT, VBAT was, hey, we're going to transform ISR and targeting, right?

Speaker 1 We need more intelligence. McCrystal, very famous for saying intelligence drives operations.

Speaker 1 Like if if we can transform ISR and targeting with VBAT, like, that's why we decide to buy VBAT and go with it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And so, after great deliberation and great credit to our head of aircraft,

Speaker 1 head of our aircraft business, Armour Harris, came from SpaceX, came up with this thing

Speaker 1 called the XBAT.

Speaker 1 And so, what is XBAT? Expat

Speaker 1 is a first of its kind vertical takeoff, launch and land, multi-role combat strike jet

Speaker 1 platform that is AI piloted. It is the first airplane in the history of airplanes that has both

Speaker 1 or it doesn't require runway and doesn't require a human pilot. It's AI piloted and it doesn't vertical takeoff, launch and land.

Speaker 1 And from that, there are a massive number of benefits to the platform.

Speaker 1 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 Paycom, running UCOM, that are posed with the strategic problem, how do you deter our adversaries and, if necessary, fight to defeat our adversaries?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so now, where, you know, an adversary like China has to worry about these fixed runways and a couple aircraft, you know, the United States has 11 aircraft carriers.

Speaker 1 We have to worry about a couple fixed runways.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 these aircraft carriers, now all of a sudden they have to worry about every

Speaker 1 20-foot by 20-foot spot of Earth on the planet.

Speaker 1 And that is, you know, why does that matter? Now it makes basically forces them to redefine their invasion calculus.

Speaker 1 If you don't know where America's assets are,

Speaker 1 especially our aerial assets, which are our number one conventional strategic deterrent,

Speaker 1 it's going to force you to, yeah, rethink your war plans. It buys diplomacy another day um

Speaker 1 on the like other side of the coin of what i would you know tell you about like xpat um and this is like again i want to be super clear like xpat is going to augment uh you know fighter pilots for you know quite some time um

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But it requires runways, it requires hardened bunkers,

Speaker 1 it requires a $10 million 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It is limited range.

Speaker 1 I want to say it's around like 550 nautical mile combat radius.

Speaker 1 And so, if you want to employ Joint Strike Fighter in the Pacific, where there are a thousand nautical mile ranges, you have to have refueling tankers.

Speaker 1 And because of the threat environment, we've built autonomous refueling tankers, right? Which is another like expensive capability.

Speaker 3 You have built the refuel.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, we did. Like the USA has built refueling tankers

Speaker 1 for these joint strike fighters.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's probably like estimated $200 million to $250 million

Speaker 1 per aircraft when you look at all these add-on capabilities, not to mention the total lifecycle cost of it, the you know, the hourly cost of operating at $35,000 an hour.

Speaker 1 Expat,

Speaker 1 vertical takeoff, launch, and land, no runways.

Speaker 1 It is, you know, AI pilot, so no human pilot.

Speaker 1 It has

Speaker 1 a 2,100 nautical mile range with mission payload.

Speaker 1 And so you have, you know, massive range. We'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

Speaker 1 fifth, sixth gen capability at a fraction of the cost. And that's something that no one else is doing or offering.
Wow. Wow.
I mean,

Speaker 3 the VBAT beat the F F35, correct?

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no. No, no.
So VBAT being the,

Speaker 1 and now VBAT XBAT can get confusing. VBAT's the mini Reaper Predator.
The

Speaker 1 XBAT 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.

Speaker 1 The AI pilot for that aircraft, we're developing AI pilots for this next generation of uncrewed fighter jets.

Speaker 1 And so we have not gone up against,

Speaker 1 you know, F-35, what we've gone up against are F-16s and actual F-16s and F-16 versus F-16.

Speaker 1 And this is part of the DARPA ACE program, which was the

Speaker 1 next program from the DARPA Alpha dogfight 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. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So you ready to go take a look?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we've got, you know, a model out there that excited to show you.
It's really cool.

Speaker 3 Let's do it.

Speaker 1 Let's do it.

Speaker 3 All right, Brandon, what are we looking at here?

Speaker 1 All right. So, this is

Speaker 1 the Xpat and the LRV, which is the launch recovery vehicle for the XPAT. 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.

Speaker 1 We are limited in terms of like the actual size, but yeah, this is the aircraft that we are building currently. So,

Speaker 1 but yeah, this is

Speaker 1 our model that we take to events, help people understand

Speaker 1 what we're building, the capabilities, and

Speaker 1 gives them something visually to look at. But yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 This is actually my first time seeing it physically. I've only seen it in the photos from our team.
team. And no, it's

Speaker 1 like I've told you, I've been doing this now for 10 years. You get,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think the capability is, it is absolutely strategic. It's going to make a huge impact.

Speaker 1 And it's like, who gets to work at the intersection of AI pilots and fighter aircraft and actually build an AI-piloted fighter aircraft that

Speaker 1 doesn't require a runway? So that's cool. Not very many people.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But so

Speaker 1 2,100 nautical mile radius. With mission payload.

Speaker 3 With mission payload.

Speaker 1 So basically this thing can carry the same thing,

Speaker 1 same amount of payload as an F-18, F-35. It's carrying four AMRAMs internal.
It's got two

Speaker 1 a medium-range air-to-air missile.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 at the same, 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.

Speaker 1 It is, yeah, it's an incredible aircraft. Yeah, we're actually, yeah, I can, I'm happy to walk around, tell you all about it, but.

Speaker 3 Let's do it. All right.
Let's do it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 One of the really cool aspects about it is it is a, it's a multi-plane thrust vectoring engine,

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 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 have this,

Speaker 1 Russians or Chinese have an aircraft that has multi-plane thrust vectoring, but basically what that enables is

Speaker 1 increased maneuverability, some low speed maneuvers.

Speaker 1 I was looking it up the other day. It enables something like a, I want to call it like the Pugachev Cobra maneuver.

Speaker 1 It's something they may have shown in like Top Gun 2 when, you know, they're like, holy crap, what the hell is that?

Speaker 1 That type of stuff. So

Speaker 1 I know someone's got to check me and it's going to be some other maneuver, but like,

Speaker 1 you know, the internet will sort it out. Yeah, the internet will sort it out.
So

Speaker 1 is this how it launches? Yeah. So it launches from this position and it also recovers from this position.

Speaker 1 One of the things we had, so the LRV is also really cool.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 vertical takeoff or short takeoff launch and land, but the engine was burning holes into the flight deck.

Speaker 1 And so that was just like a massive problem with the aircraft.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 but yeah, it launches, lands like a SpaceX rocket.

Speaker 1 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 launch and land, and then was doing Starlink, Star Shield, working with Elon, and just wanted wanted to work on the air layer and build next generation aircraft.

Speaker 1 So yeah, pretty good.

Speaker 3 That is amazing. Yep.

Speaker 1 What is that hole in the front?

Speaker 1 So that's the intake up there.

Speaker 1 So air intake for the engine.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, that's what it is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, not much more to it. Where do the...
Where do all the weapony did it? So you've got internal and hard points on the other sides of the wings there.

Speaker 1 Those are the weapons bay for it, again, carrying basically any weapon.

Speaker 1 You can carry Lorazms, long-range anti-ship missiles.

Speaker 1 You can carry air-to-air missiles, air-to-ground missiles. You can carry bombs.

Speaker 1 Again, very much think of it as like,

Speaker 1 you know, the same thing that you would find on a fighter aircraft in terms of its weapon payload.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so they can't generate the electrical power to run fifth generation, sixth generation sensor sweeps and electronic attack payloads.

Speaker 1 And so electronic warfare being a massive aspect of the battlefield today, right?

Speaker 1 Jamming enemy GPS, jamming enemy communications, things that something like the F-18 Growler would be doing, we can also do that mission.

Speaker 1 And so it's like, look, even, you know, if you were to go Winchester on the weapons on this aircraft, you still have your electronic attack abilities. And so you're still playing a role in the fight.

Speaker 1 You can act as comms relay. Yeah, this thing is.

Speaker 3 What do you mean by electronic warfare? Like jamming capabilities?

Speaker 1 Yeah, jamming.

Speaker 1 Jamming

Speaker 1 GPS, jamming the communications on other enemy platforms.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 1 One of the other cool things,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 cruising at 55,000 feet altitude, which is higher than any other like aircraft, like definitely like in its class, right?

Speaker 1 And why is that important? It actually allows your air-to-air missiles, it improves the kinematics on them, which makes for,

Speaker 1 you know, the easiest way to say it is like longer range weapons.

Speaker 1 And so now your missiles can actually go further because they're, you know, they're actually, the air is less dense up there.

Speaker 1 They're able to, they're not, you know, using as much gas when they're being fired.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's not, you know, as cool as like dog fighting is, it's not, you know, within visual range dogfighting anymore. It's, you you know, F-35 is amazing because it can see everything before it gets seen

Speaker 1 and it can attack those things. Same thing with this aircraft.
That is crazy. Yeah, powered by HiveMind.
HiveMind being our AI pilot.

Speaker 1 Again, I've 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, I've checked out missions, but

Speaker 1 continue to work on classified, you know, classified-level missions for air-to-air

Speaker 1 missions, air-to-ground missions for this aircraft.

Speaker 3 55,000 feet, 2,100 miles, nautical miles with a payload. How fast does it go?

Speaker 1 We're

Speaker 1 cruising at Mach 0.85.

Speaker 1 We're expecting that you'll be able to dash supersonic. The problem when you dash supersonic is that your signature goes up, people know, and

Speaker 1 right, this thing is meant to be pretty pretty low observable in terms of what the enemy's looking for. So, yeah.

Speaker 3 So when it lands,

Speaker 3 it lands just like this.

Speaker 1 Lands just like this. Takes off, lands.
Don't want to say, like, yeah, we took inspiration from, you know, SpaceX,

Speaker 1 you know, catching up. That's crazy.
So it just, it, yeah, it lands like, it goes in reverse and just lands right airpoke ready to roll again. We've got a lot of experience doing that with the V-bat.

Speaker 1 And actually, believe it or not, V-bat's a harder thing to launch and land than something like this because like in Armour will tell you, it's like, look, Falcon 9, you have all the thrust in the world.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You don't have a lot of thrust.

Speaker 1 It's a big challenge. XBAT, you have an incredible amount of thrust from a technical challenge aspect.
If this is VBAT and this is Falcon 9, you have XBAT, like right next to Falcon 9.

Speaker 1 Again, that multi-plane thrust vectoring allows us to put this thing, you know, wherever we need to put it. So,

Speaker 1 but yeah, no, it's right. It's, I mean,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It just becomes a really intractable thing for the adversary to track, which can go everywhere, everywhere, anywhere, ever.

Speaker 1 We're in a field here, right? You go into a forest clearing. We were joking around.
You put this thing on, you know, a pickleball court if you want. Like every pickleball court in the world is now

Speaker 1 your runway. So

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 3 That is awesome.

Speaker 1 Could you imagine a a drone swarm of these bad boys coming after your ass? Yeah. No, this thing is,

Speaker 1 no, and that's what, look, we're, we're very much working on the behaviors, the missions of multi-agent expats flying around, augmenting, you know, fighter pilots, augmenting the mission, executing the mission independently.

Speaker 1 Like I said, I think this, for me, this is like an inspirational aircraft. I'm like, holy crap, this is this is like one of those,

Speaker 1 this is a cool thing to build.

Speaker 1 One of those moments. Yeah, yeah.
Like if you want to be at the intersection of AI, national security, building cool, you know, know, jet aircraft, Shield AI is a great place to do it.

Speaker 1 So no limit, you know, on in terms of the ambition and the imagination here.

Speaker 1 So congratulations. Thank you.
I appreciate it. I'm excited to 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,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 thanks for letting us bring it onto your property. I'm sure your neighbors were like, what the hell is this? They're a little worried about what's Sean got going on right now.

Speaker 1 They're like, what the fuck is going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Wow, man. Congrats.
That is.

Speaker 3 This is the kind of stuff that just makes me proud to be an American. Like, that is

Speaker 3 the future of aerial warfare. That is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it fundamentally will transform air warfare, right? Again, no more. Earth is our runway,

Speaker 1 AI piloted.

Speaker 1 It's a mean machine that I think to the point of it's going to deter our adversaries by diplomacy another day.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll say, I'll say, wow,

Speaker 3 awesome. I want to see a launch.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 you come out to that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So I would love that.

Speaker 1 Cool. Thank you.
Absolutely. No, thanks, Sean.

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Speaker 3 All right, Brandon, we're back from the break. And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 1 You got to come up to see that thing land.

Speaker 3 But, you know, one thing we didn't cover is the V-BAT flew 130 sorties so far in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 Yeah, probably. I mean, by the time this airs, probably a lot more.
But yeah, one of the,

Speaker 1 again, things that I'm like super proud of having that mission impact.

Speaker 1 Our Ukraine story is like, I think it's, one, our results are unique.

Speaker 1 But the story is kind of interesting in that in 2023,

Speaker 1 the British pushed out a bunch of V-bats to the Ukrainians. We told them, hey, HiveMind, our AI pilot, it's not integrated yet.
You're not going to like.

Speaker 1 If GPS or communications is jammed, like it's not going to work.

Speaker 1 Because again, we had bought that company in late 21 and we were still in the integration process of the AI with the aircraft and making it a hardened capability.

Speaker 1 British gave it to, they're like, look, we just want to get equipment assets out to the Ukrainians. There's a major push coming in the spring.

Speaker 1 And so they pushed out VBATS. They pushed out lots of equipment.

Speaker 1 Jamming happened. VBATS failed, right? As we told them it would.
Ukrainians basically said, hey, come back when you have this fix. We still believe in the capability.

Speaker 1 Came back in

Speaker 1 June, May, June of 2024.

Speaker 1 And they're like, look, we're going to put it through an electronic warfare testing regimen. Went up against

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Because we had an integrated AI pilot on board this time.

Speaker 1 They

Speaker 1 kind of strung us along here and said, look, like, all right, great that you passed the test. And this was unique.
No one, they're like, no one's ever passed this test.

Speaker 1 It was, they were trying to make us fail

Speaker 1 with all these jammers. They said, Okay, great, we'll put in letters of request to the U.S.
government if it actually proves its worth on the battlefield.

Speaker 1 And we're like, Well, you guys didn't tell us about this, but we said, Okay, let's look, we're here to make mission impact. Um, first operation ever flew, uh, GPS communications was jammed.

Speaker 1 I don't think people realize it, it's completely jammed in Ukraine on the battlefield. And so, every mission that we've done, GPS and comms has been jammed.
Um, but our first mission that we did, um,

Speaker 1 actually, fun, the,

Speaker 1 the interesting part of the story is, like one of the interesting parts,

Speaker 1 one of the assumptions we made was that

Speaker 1 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, like, it's not going to be jammed on takeoff.

Speaker 1 So we go out to operate, and lo and behold, GPS is jammed on takeoff on this mission we're supposed to execute.

Speaker 1 VBAT starts flying in another direction, right, because of GPS jamming,

Speaker 1 because we had assumed it was going to be available just for takeoff.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Like that's what our team did. They land it.

Speaker 1 Ukrainians are like, yeah, I didn't think it was going to work on the battlefield. We're like, well, you guys gave us a bad assumption.
Within 24 hours, team worked it.

Speaker 1 They came up with a software solution, right? It was just like basically changing an assumption,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Do fine on takeoff, executing the mission, comms GPS jammed the entire time.

Speaker 1 Target an SA-11 Bukovel surface-to-air missile system.

Speaker 1 Ukrainians call in HIMARS, airburst round, destroys the Bukovel second,

Speaker 1 target a second SA-11 Bukovel surface-to-air missile system. High Mars misses due to GPS jamming.
The effectiveness of U.S. weapon systems is really poor in these GPS-jammed environments.

Speaker 1 So that leads to letters of request from the US government. And then the president takes office and stops funding, which is, you know, again,

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you know, we're about to deliver capability thankfully europeans uh uh step up to the plate um they get v-bad 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

Speaker 1 God, there was like a two-week period where we were executing four to six strikes every day or enabling four to six strikes every single day, destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian equipment.

Speaker 1 It's a capability that they had never had long-range ISR and targeting before.

Speaker 1 They were fighting a very tactical fight,

Speaker 1 but now with this capability to penetrate deeper into enemy-held territory while GPS wall comms is jammed, they were finding targets that they had been looking for for six, nine months they couldn't find.

Speaker 1 Wow. And so, again, super proud of the impact

Speaker 1 that we've played there. And, you know, as we think about,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And knowing that every single VBAT's tied into some sort of long-range weapon system, you could deter your adversaries. And so as we look to the Pacific, that's something that we think about a lot.

Speaker 1 We see that out of

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so, um you know i'm thankful that like vbad 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 u.s 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 and i can't name the other company that's actually finding success there it's a ukrainian company um in these environments and that's from reporting from you know,

Speaker 1 you know, call it the warfighters out there in terms of like actually executing the ISR and targeting a mission. Now, tactically, when you're talking like fiber optic connected quadcopters

Speaker 1 where the GPS, like where you're tethered to something and you can fight in the, you know,

Speaker 1 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, I'm proud that Shield AI stands alone.

Speaker 3 Man, again, congratulations.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 3 You know, when it, when, you know,

Speaker 3 a lot of hacking, you know, and so is this, would this be a system that China could hack into, you know, if we were using it for an offensive?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the command station where these things, you'd have to know where they were flying, whether it's VBAT, whether it's X-BAT.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 V-BAT.

Speaker 1 I'm like, all right, million-dollar missile, you know, for a $750,000 aircraft. I'll take that trade.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 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 HiveMind running on them.

Speaker 1 The only way that you're going to be able to take them out is going to be kinetically.

Speaker 3 Now, when you're talking about jam communications and jam GPS, I mean,

Speaker 3 I would, I mean,

Speaker 3 you know, all the way back to the quadcopter, you know, all this autonomous stuff that can think on its own and, you know, and conduct missions. I mean, is there any,

Speaker 3 do we need communication with these devices?

Speaker 1 Like, if you want the best performance, you're going to want the communication is like very beneficial.

Speaker 1 In the same way, like if you what I tell, it's like, if we were a 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?

Speaker 1 If you're across a mountain range 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.

Speaker 1 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 without it.

Speaker 1 And then you'll adjust your tactics, your behaviors, your mission based on, you know, new information coming through. And so the autonomous systems work the same way.

Speaker 1 Communications,

Speaker 1 when you're in a jammed environment, you can think of it as like swish cheese. Sometimes you can find pockets.
If you're only working with

Speaker 1 low amounts of data, you can push that data out even though you're operating in a jammed environment.

Speaker 1 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 interact as a team better with each other. Oh, okay.

Speaker 3 I mean, yeah, that's a good, that's a great point.

Speaker 3 So the jamming isn't only from human to machine, it is also from machine to machine when they're flying as a team.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Interesting. Interesting.
I mean, what do you see? What do you see these things?

Speaker 3 What is the ex-pad going to replace?

Speaker 3 Or is it just

Speaker 3 another weapon in our arsenal?

Speaker 1 Or is it replacing?

Speaker 1 I don't like to, I really like people get sensitive to the word replace, right? And I don't think things replace things for like. a long, long time.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean that it never happens, but it takes like, you know, self-driving cars, right? It's going to replace drivers at some point in time.

Speaker 1 I don't think that happens for, you know, 20 plus years.

Speaker 1 So in the meantime, like it's just augmenting and like augmenting that human team,

Speaker 1 whether it's jet aircraft, whether it's basically mechanisms to deliver long-range fires. So that could be,

Speaker 1 you know, anti-ship missiles launched from a ship. That could be,

Speaker 1 you know, fighter bomber aircraft. It's doing the same mission.
It's that strike mission

Speaker 1 or a air-to-air mission

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 from there, yeah, if you extrapolate, you know, the rate of innovation around AI and autonomy,

Speaker 1 I think you get to like really interesting places, again, down the line where you start to replace some of these systems.

Speaker 3 Do you, I mean, is there going to be any,

Speaker 3 will these machines fly along in the meantime, in the interim before that happens, which I'm sure it will?

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 3 I mean, will they, will they be,

Speaker 3 will they co-mingle with human pilots? 100%.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 they'll augment. They'll be part of that human machine team.
They will augment the pilots. And look, I think something like, and that will be like the first iteration.
Then the U.S.

Speaker 1 military start 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 going to see missions that dictate hey we want to send in a package of f-35s and expats into this operation or f-22s and expats i think you're going to see some missions where it's like look just send in you know some expats see like you know, see what happens.

Speaker 1 And they can run certain missions independently and then certain missions as human machine teams.

Speaker 3 Could you give me an example of what a mission set would look like where it is, you know,

Speaker 3 human pilots and expats together?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's good. Like, look, again, I think it's going to be the threat environment.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 you know, intelligence estimates that there's a limited number of

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You might basically go stimulate that environment by sending, you know, unmanned systems first, things like the expat first.

Speaker 3 Gotcha. Gotcha.
Is there any stealth capabilities to it?

Speaker 1 It is, its shape, its design is inherently low observable, meant to have a very small radar cross-section. Stealth is,

Speaker 1 there can be stealth coatings applied to it, but we want to get the capability out fast.

Speaker 1 And like one of the ways to do that is just like not worry about the stealth aspect of the capability to start like like true stealth coatings

Speaker 3 as far as dc is concerned i mean

Speaker 1 are our politicians on board with this are you getting a lot of yeah yeah i think they're very much i think you not only the politicians but also senior dod leadership one i think they're very much bought into the concept of collaborative combat aircraft um right these uncrewed jets that are being built by 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.

Speaker 1 It's pretty unique. And then, like,

Speaker 1 it's non-obvious in terms of like...

Speaker 1 the immediate benefits that it has for the warfighters, essentially that logistics

Speaker 1 aspect of it and like the just the tactical employment of it, putting it anywhere, right?

Speaker 1 It fundamentally redefines how air warfare is executed when you start eliminating the need for runways. Everything has always been

Speaker 1 constrained by that one thing.

Speaker 1 And so I think politicians very much understand that.

Speaker 1 And absolutely, like the combatant commanders and senior military leaders understand that. And it's, look, I think, yeah, they're excited about it.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of enthusiasm, support for the capability. The challenge is that

Speaker 1 no one had ever conceived of something like this.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Not to mention the fact that 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 is like, okay, well,

Speaker 1 how does it affect current DOD resourcing plans as this capability comes online?

Speaker 3 How fast can you manufacture these?

Speaker 1 We want to ramp to

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think you're going to see more because lower cost, lower life cycle costs, AI piloted, much easier to adopt and implement into a force structure.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 and the demand for the aircraft is going to play a role in that. But

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 it's a non-obvious way to solve a lot of problems that were never really, you know, articulated as problems. It's like, what would you do with an Air Force that didn't require a runway, right?

Speaker 1 Or air forces, right?

Speaker 1 You know, what does this mean for the Navy and the Marine Corps where you're

Speaker 1 your strike power is no longer limited to an aircraft carrier,

Speaker 1 where you can have Marines on island chains with this type of organic capability.

Speaker 1 It just redefines so much as we think about air superiority and like how that's employed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's a lot.

Speaker 3 It's a lot to think about.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I would claim it's like

Speaker 1 up to the point where like people, it's.

Speaker 1 I think it'll be as transformational as like when we decide to launch airplanes from ships, right?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 That basically defined the military force structure of the United States for the next 80 years. So

Speaker 3 damn. Do you think we'll see these

Speaker 3 loitering for defense, loitering about, around FOBS, loitering around the border of the country? I mean,

Speaker 1 I don't know if they'll be loitering. Like,

Speaker 1 I think of it as like they'll be used as power projection in the same way

Speaker 4 our

Speaker 1 aircraft carriers are used as power projection. And so

Speaker 1 I don't see them

Speaker 1 right when

Speaker 1 an adversary or a country is being belligerent to another country and the United States wants to do something, what do we do?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I think that'll be similar. It's hard for me to see us

Speaker 1 using

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, Brandon, we're wrapping up the interview. And,

Speaker 3 you know, one thing that I just want to ask is, is,

Speaker 3 you know, for Gen Z, for the upcoming generations, I mean, what inspiration do you have for them being somebody who's an innovator?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think,

Speaker 1 look, my recommendation would be

Speaker 1 like, be bold, be courageous.

Speaker 1 Like, you've got, you know, one, you know, precious life and just like make the most out of it.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like, I regret zero of my time in in the Navy, even, 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.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, Shield AI, like thankful for it. And like, I'm.

Speaker 1 for me and like what i'm encouraging yeah i want to encourage that from for my kids like be confident be courageous be bold swing for the fences like uh why you know what do you what do you have to lose um is you know my mentality and that would be my message for for you know this next generation.

Speaker 3 Love that. Love that.
Well, Brandon, I just want to say it was an honor to interview you, man, and

Speaker 3 just,

Speaker 3 wow, congratulations.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 3 awesome what you're doing. Thanks, Sean.

Speaker 1 I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show.
Thanks for letting us bring in the expat to your, you know, to your facility and, you know, apologize for the complaints from the neighbors.

Speaker 3 So no, I mean, it's like I said out there when we were, when, when, when, when when you were giving me the tour of the aircraft, I mean, this is you, what you're doing, what you've built is, is, is, it just makes me proud as hell to be an American.

Speaker 3 So, thank you.

Speaker 1 Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you. Cheer.

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