Julian Dorey Podcast - #409 - “KILL Chain!” - Navy SEAL Drone Expert on $4.5 Quadrillion Op, Anthropic & Pentagon | Brandon Tseng

Starting point is 00:00:10 You're not building the Antichrist, are you? I hear that's what they're doing with AI now. No, not building the Antichrist. So, yeah. That's a good start. We needed that checked off and everything. 100% not building the Antichrist. But it's great to have you here, man.

Starting point is 00:00:26 I appreciate Jeremy from over in Sean Ryan's place putting this together. He's like, you got to talk to Brandon. He's doing some pretty crazy shit with AI. And you were Navy SEAL for a long time, too. Yes, I was. How many years were you in? I was in the Navy for, seven years, probably about five and a half years in the SEAL teams. How old are you? I am,

Starting point is 00:00:46 I turned 40 this year. Really? Yeah. I'm kind of sad about it. Yeah, it's my, it's my Asian genes that make me look like that. Half Asian, yeah. So when I turn 70, I'll grow a beard and white hair and that's right. Just be instantaneous transformation overnight. That's right. Kimisabi. Yeah. You got to start like you got to start working on the voice. Yeah. That's funny as shit. But so how young were you when you got into the teams? Must have been 22, 23 years old. So right out of college. Going through Buds.

Starting point is 00:01:16 Yeah. Yeah. I graduated when I was 21, spent a year and a half on a ship and then laterally transferred into the SEAL teams. Into BUDs, you go through BUDs, seal qualification training, and then get assigned to a SEAL team after that. So you went to Naval Academy? I went to the U.S.

Starting point is 00:01:32 Naval Academy. Yeah, yeah. What made you want to do that? My parents you know, so I wanted to be a seal since I was 10 years old. And after I watched The Rock, greatest Navy SEAL, sorry, Rock and Under Siege, a lot of people don't give Underseech the respect that it deserves. But actually, an all-star cast, Gary Bucy, Stephen Seagal, Tommy Lee Jones, in that movie. Die Hard on a Battleship. Yeah, see all the movie posters here. So after seeing those movies, was inspired by them, wanted to, you know, told my parents, want to be a Navy SEAL.

Starting point is 00:02:07 they're like, you should read books and read a lot of books. You know, they thought, you know, they were just trying to encourage me at that stage. And then, you know, gotten to high school. It was like, mom, dad still want to be a Navy SEAL. How do I do that? And they're like, all right, he's serious about this. They should go to this thing called the Naval Academy. And, you know, said, what's that?

Starting point is 00:02:25 Oh, you become an officer at the end of it. And also, one of our family friends was a SEAL in Vietnam. And I talked to him. I said, hey, I want to be a Navy SEAL. He was like, oh, you should be an officer. And he's, I was like, why? He's like, oh, you get paid more, which is actually a lie and actually like the worst reason ever to decide to become an officer Navy SEAL.

Starting point is 00:02:44 But when you're a sophomore in high school like that, checks out. Like your parents are like, oh, go get a college education. Okay. And then, you know, you'll get paid more if you're an officer. Right. And again, you actually don't. But so that's learned what the academy was, was inspired by it. And, you know, applied, got in.

Starting point is 00:03:04 I do tell people it's a. It's a lot like once you're in, it's kind of like Shawshank prison, you know, again, with the movie themes here. That's not exactly getting people to want to sign up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's awful in a lot of ways. But you meet great people. You know, we're also suffering with you. Definitely in abnormal college experience.

Starting point is 00:03:26 But it was a lot of, you know, I enjoyed, I enjoyed my time there. I'm finally getting my heart to forgive the Naval Academy after about 19 years. I told myself I wouldn't forgive it, you know, when I graduated. But, yeah, after 19 years, I'm a, look, I'm a Christian. I'm going to forgive it. That's right. Yeah. Hey, guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review.

Starting point is 00:03:52 They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. You know what, in some ways, though, when I think about the Naval Academy and West Point or the Air Force Academy and stuff, because I hate people say that who went there like, well, you know, it's not exactly the college experience. It's also, A, like an amazing commitment and sacrifice for an 18 year, 17, 18 year old kid to make to decide to go there. But then B, once they do that, I almost wonder if there's like any other way for it to be because you're talking about guys like you who are going to go out and do like the, usually like tip of the spear type stuff. Like it's you get to, and for all the right reasons, like get ahead of people in the line of the military because you're more properly trained. Like that's, if you're going to be the greatest military in the world, it's got to be pretty rigorous.

Starting point is 00:04:36 on the way there, no? Yeah, yeah. Look, it's a system that works. And so, and I was back there, back in November, and I got to give this speech to the brigade, the 4,000 students there, the 4,000 midshipmen. And I think what you realize, like, you know, now me almost turning 40 is it's a special group of students of kids.

Starting point is 00:04:57 You know, I was one of those kids that sign up. And, you know, again, you don't really think about it too much when you're 17, 18 years old. and when you're actually in it. But as I like reflect back, I think it's such a special set of people that join that place. And they do make those sacrifices. And it's pretty awful. But they're signing up to be to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Starting point is 00:05:20 And so all the credit in the world to, you know, this young generation that continues to do that. Absolutely. And obviously, like those are great American traditions. I hope to see continuum. Like I said, we've had guys in here who went through that process and everything at some of these different. schools and it's a pretty amazing thing. But you said it was like a, you got out of college and then you were on a ship for a year or a half before going into the actual Navy SEALs program? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did not get selected to go into the SEALs right out of the Naval

Starting point is 00:05:51 Academy. Actually, like, the best thing that ever happened to me, where I saw my, you know, childhood dreams get crushed and vanished right before my eyes. I actually remember, like, You go in a senior year and right after lunch, you go into a room with 40 of your other classmates because we're all split up into sections of 40 people, 30 companies, 40 people in each company for a given class and open up an envelope, see that I don't get accepted into U.S. Navy SEAL teams. And that was the most soul-crushing moment of my life, actually, you know, as a 21-year-old at that time, I went into the shower, cried, skipped my afternoon classes, and felt sorry for myself for about a day. And then after that, it was like, okay, why didn't I get accepted? It's because I wasn't

Starting point is 00:06:45 the best candidate there was. Like, after you remove like every excuse, you're like, all right, why wasn't I accepted? It was not number one, right? It didn't matter that they took 26 people. I wasn't number one. And so that was a switch in terms of how I just thought about the world in my mentality where anything I did afterwards, I was going to be number one at. And so that has what driven me to this day. It's what made me successful on my ship, successful in the SEAL team, successful at Shield AI. And I say relative. Like I'm, you know, I'm still trying to achieve success. But that mentality came from the worst day of my life. Yeah, when you saw your childhood dream vanish before your eyes. I fuck with that a lot, though. I see.

Starting point is 00:07:31 I see that fire coming back right there as you remember that. And it's like, that's a really mature way to look at it as a 21, 22 year old kid. You know, you haven't seen any of the real world yet. You see more than the average person because of where you're going to school. But you haven't been out there yet. You have this dream. And suddenly they're like, fuck you. You can't do it.

Starting point is 00:07:50 And instead of, I don't know, pouting for a month or two months or something, you take a day. And then you're like, all right, bitch, let's go. That is what it was. That's awesome, man. Yeah, yeah. So how did it? It was not all right, bitch, was all right, motherfuckers. Like, let's fucking do this.

Starting point is 00:08:09 So, yeah. So you, but how soon after that did you find out you were going to be going to the ship? Yeah. Right away. So, yeah, you find out you're going to a ship. You don't know which ship you're going to. They do this cool thing where it's like a draft night. And like there's every ship in the Navy and everybody who's going on a ship, like, the top of the class gets to pick first.

Starting point is 00:08:29 and you just go down the list. And, you know, I was probably like middle of the class at that point in time. And so I picked my ship, got the USS, USS Pearl Harbor out of San Diego. Wait, the, like the new one? No, this is an old ship, 1990. Yeah, so the new one, not the one that was hitting 41. So, yeah, there's a ship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:54 That went down. So, yeah, it was based out of San Diego. Amphibious Glass Ship. I hated every moment of being on that ship. But, you know, again, learn some of the best leadership lessons ever on board. Look, it was just the two things that come to mind was, one, leading with energy and enthusiasm. And we were going through this process. We were getting ready for a congressionally mandated inspection.

Starting point is 00:09:23 It happens every five years. And it's really, really awful to get a ship ready for inspection. like this. And, you know, when I say awful, probably for eight months straight, we're working on average 15, 16 hours a day. And I went through a period. And this was, again, 21 years old, 22 years old in San Diego. During that's the summer of 2009, we worked 47 days straight. 16, 17 hours a day. No weekend. No, no time off. And so what I learned, you know, the energy and enthusiasm, one of my bosses, he would always have like the biggest grin, like rattling up the sailors, the troops. And I was like, I was like, sir, why are you so happy? Like this job sucks. Like we've,

Starting point is 00:10:23 we're working, yeah, 17, 18 hours right now. We've been doing this. I think it was like, It's day 28 in a row. Like, having had a day off. Like, why are you so motivated? And he's like, look, it's like the Nike slogan. You just do it. And he's like, just flip a switch. It's like a choice that you can make.

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Starting point is 00:12:02 That link is in my description below and use code JD22 at checkout for 22% off your order. Once again, that's Amantara.com slash go slash Julian. Link in my description below, code JD 22 for 22% off your order. And I did not like, again, I consider myself an enthusiastic energetic leader now. But, you know, before that day, it had not clicked with me. And so I started just like, all right, I'm just going to actively try to bring energy, bring enthusiasm to every single thing that I do. And so that was one of the best leadership lessons also. The other one was like accomplishing the mission at the expense of morale.

Starting point is 00:12:45 It's just like, look, at the end of the day, our captain made really hard calls. It was awful doing all that work. And I asked him, like, if he knew that he was destroying morale on the ship by having these ridiculous work hours. He's like, look, Ensign saying, Ensign being the rank that I was, a new officer, he goes, he's like, it's our mission to make sure that this ship is ready for tasking, ready for deployment. The U.S. Navy expects it of us, the American people expected of us. He's like, absolutely know that I am putting the crew through hell, but we have to figure out a way to a way to accomplish. accomplish the mission. And so that really put things in perspective again, where you put, you know, in the military, it's like mission. We say mission first people always, but like the

Starting point is 00:13:32 mission does come first. And so that is what I learned on that ship. Again, hated every moment of doing it. It was awful. It was not what I was like built to do. And again, no different than like being in a job that you don't like. I don't know, probably similar like, you know, You didn't want to be a banker your whole life. And you probably hated those moments. So I can really resonate with, like, people who have done jobs that they don't like. That was nothing wrong with being a banker, nothing wrong with, you know, being on a ship. Just, I was not built for that.

Starting point is 00:14:03 That's right. But you learned from it. But I learned from it. Yeah. Yeah. I would have the same perspective. It's like I don't regret doing banking coming right out of college. I learned so much about the world.

Starting point is 00:14:14 And then when I had to do things, just like you said, that I didn't necessarily want to do, but had to learn how to be really good at them. Yep. Once it's over, there's something fulfilling in that and you know like you can. 100%. And even with this job, you know, I'm still at a point where it's still about 10% of what I do is in here, which is crazy to think about. I'm trying to make it 100%.

Starting point is 00:14:35 It's not 5% anymore, so we're getting there. But it's like there's never something that I'll ask somebody on the team to like help with or do with me or something like that that I have not done myself before. Oh, 100%. And there's really something to be said about that because the way I was translating the second leadership lesson you were talking about when it comes to like mission over morale was, and correct me if I'm wrong here, it seems to me like what you're saying is the concept that like leadership means you can't always just make popular decisions that people are going to love you for.

Starting point is 00:15:08 You got to do the hard stuff. Yep. Yeah. And to your point, like the leading by example is just so important in all of that. And look, all my bosses were, I've been grateful. like I'm grateful to have every single boss in the Navy was always leading by example. So they weren't perfect, but they all, you know, that's just a leadership trait that I think the military tries to do very well.

Starting point is 00:15:33 And so they did that. And even you talk about doing, you know, it's a lot of times it's just doing the small, unsexy stuff. I'll pick up the trash. I'll mop the floors at Shield AI still to this day. And look, it's like I want to set the example that it's a place that, you know, I care about that we all should care about. And it's a reflection of like who we are. And so I want people to see me.

Starting point is 00:15:59 It's like, yeah, no task is beneath me. I've done everything. I will do everything if it's required for the business. That's awesome. Yeah. When you talked about the flipping that switch of like perspective where you turn the energy up to actually like try to get you and the other guy's excited about shit that you objectively probably weren't naturally excited about. Yeah. You know, the first few days you're doing that, because I didn't even ask you, like, what kinds of things you were doing.

Starting point is 00:16:21 You should probably tell us all what kinds of things the congressional committees are looking for for guys like you to do. But, like, obviously, it's not fun stuff. So did it feel weird, like the first few days you're doing that where you're purposely like, all right, I'm getting excited for this. Like, it's a football game. But we're just scrubbing the fucking floor right now. Yeah. Yeah. No, that, I mean, look, that is exactly how it is.

Starting point is 00:16:42 It did feel, right? It doesn't feel natural. It felt uncomfortable. It's like, oh, what am I? I, what am I doing? This isn't what I've normally done. Now doing it like 11 years. Look, I get, I'll get fired up. I can fire up a team. Like, it feels very natural for me. But yeah, in those first instances. And it was, hey guys, guess what? We're going to go into the bilge and clean the oil and like take some rags and we're going to do the best fucking job we can doing this. And

Starting point is 00:17:09 they're like, sir, what do you want? Right? Like, what are like, you know, something like, sir, what do you want to get off it? Others are like, yeah, give me some of that. Um, and And so, but yeah, it was in, you know, what we were doing, I was the auxiliaries engineering officer, and then I became the assistant chief engineer. And so it was the maintenance repair of every single piece of engineering equipment on the ship from, and this is an amphibious ship, we had the AF steering, we had the main engines, we had elevators, we had trash compactors in the galley that, like, I was responsible for. It was literally the lights, the generators, everything, you know, as the assistant chief engineer,

Starting point is 00:17:50 was every single piece of equipment on that ship. So, yeah. Well, build character. Yeah, I build character. Yeah. And again, yeah, I'm glad I, you know, looking back now, I went to have, I'm very glad I had to go on that journey. And so you guys, how long was it the process and the buildup to Congress doing that approval? Like, was it a year of it?

Starting point is 00:18:13 So, yeah, it was, the inspection was November of 2009. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, it was on our schedule for a long time. I knew it, but like the real work started eight months before. Yeah. So you're on that? We passed. Sorry, that was the good news story.

Starting point is 00:18:30 I mean, I wasn't going to ask because I feel like after all that, if you're like, we failed, people were going to like, oh, fuck this guy. Doesn't matter how hard you work, you will lose. Yeah. But you were on the ship for a year and a half. total and then you were able to go try out for the SEALs and buds. So what happened to get you there? Well, so one, you'll reapply. There's a process to reapply. And I actually remember again, I talked about the worst day of my life was not getting into the SEAL teams. Best day of my life was getting in. I called, they're called a D. Taylor. Her name was Margaret. And I said, hey, do you have

Starting point is 00:19:08 an update? She's like, yes. You know, Ensign saying, congratulations. You've been, accepted into Naval Special Warfare, you're going to go try out for Buds. We'll work with your captain in your admin office to figure out the orders. I was in my car, let out like a scream of joy. Like, I was fucking pumped. And so, yeah, that was, it was an amazing experience. So in November of that year, transferred over to Naval Special Warfare command and waited to class up into a Bud's class and then went through Buds with Class 280.

Starting point is 00:19:43 and seal qualification training with class 284. Who was your trainer and buds? So you have a number of different trainers. Our first phase proctor instructor, his name was Maddie Roberts and just someone, you know, I'll say a personal hero of mine, someone I look up to massively a beast of a human being, just a warrior through and through. He'd been nominated for the Medal of Honor. Like didn't receive it, but like, holy crap.

Starting point is 00:20:13 That guy was, he was awesome. So I had, I assumed he had served like in Afghanistan. Yeah, he had been to Afghanistan, Iraq. Yeah, he, he was, like, his story's ridiculous. He had gotten, he got shot up, pulled his interpreter back to, like, interpreter, medic, back to safety, was bleeding out. He thought his arm got blown off as, you know, a wild, wild story. So, yeah. It's always amazing when you hear about it with the Buds classes, where,

Starting point is 00:20:43 very often it's guys who have seen like a ton of warfare with the Navy SEALs for years. And then they come back and they're like teaching the classes and teaching the next generation while they're still doing it. Dude, the most inspirational thing in the world. You're like, oh, my God. Like this, you know, and you're nobody when you start buds. And like, you're like, this is my professor, right? This is my instructor.

Starting point is 00:21:07 Like, this guy who has done all of this, just like an amazing opportunity to learn to, like, you know you just want to you you know for me i think for a lot of the guys that you know actually get through the program it's like you just want to show those guys that you belong yeah you're going to work your ass off to and like show them they're like yeah i belong to be part of this you know organization this club um you know and would do anything to you know show them that right now you and i were talking just before camera you were an athlete as as well in college you play water polo so you know great swimmer great shit the whole bit, but I've talked with a lot of Navy SEALs before who tell me about their

Starting point is 00:21:47 buds classes and a common, I guess, like, refrain I'll get is they'll say, the first day we got there, we'd see the stereotypical dude who like, you know, was winning all the triathlons and everything, 14-pack, you know, the whole bit, and then the dude who looked like an average schmo. Yeah. And we'd think, like, triathletes going to be the head of the whole class and the other dude's going to be out right away and it would be the other way around. Yeah. And not only the time but in a lot of cases so obviously like you had all the physical tools you had the desire and the dreams to always have want to do this but then you get there and you got to go through these weeks and weeks and effectively months of some of literally like the most rigorous training

Starting point is 00:22:28 in the military how do you mentally prepare yourself for that just on the mental side look i i think i had just mentally prepared since since age 10 right it's a dream and so it was my my mentality going into it was I'm going to die before I quit, right? And that is, and I think the guys that make it through, that is the mentality that you have to have, because it is the worst fucking gauntlet that you can imagine going through. And if you don't have that mentality, then doubt starts to, like I'll say doubt creeps into everybody's mind. Like you'd be lying if there's no doubt in your mind. But you have to have that, that resilience in that that mentality, it's like, no, you're going to have to, you're going to have to pull me out. I'm

Starting point is 00:23:16 going to have to go into cardiac arrest for me to like get pulled out of this program. And so that's where I think the mentality like being mentally prepared comes from. And if you don't have that, if you truly don't have that into your deepest core of who you are, yeah, you're going to, you're going to quit. Yeah. So when you say doubt would creep in, was it always literally the feeling of like, maybe I'm not cut out so I should quit or doubt like, oh, maybe my body's literally going to break down involuntarily. I think it's different for different people. Like, I'll tell you, the worst night of Hell Week where I think it's Monday night, everybody

Starting point is 00:23:54 feels sorry for themselves. Like, you know, like, holy crap, this is unlike anything that I've ever experienced before. And, you know, for me, I was running past one of our classmates who had already gone through Hell Week. And I was like, hey, Joe, like, you know, I was like, is this as bad as it can get? And he's like, yeah, brother, just keep moving for us. It's like, all right. But it's like, even like you're like, oh, fuck, I don't want to ask him.

Starting point is 00:24:16 He's a friend. Like, is you going to think? I'm like, but, you know, again, not, I don't want to say it's like a lot of doubt, but you feel sorry for yourself. Yeah. So the craziest thing about all of it. I mean, the physical activity is obviously insane. But you guys, you're basically like sleep deprived for a lot of it as well.

Starting point is 00:24:36 You know, there's nights where you're not. Five days without sleep in hell. Yeah, you get like two hours on, start Sunday night. You get two hours on Wednesday, two hours on Thursday. That's the part. That is what keeps me up at night thinking about this because that's the part I couldn't imagine. Because I train really hard and I'd like to think if I mentally prepared myself for something

Starting point is 00:24:55 like this, like all the physical stuff I'd be able to do as hard as it would be. Yeah. But like, I sleep well. You know what I mean? That is the most important thing for all of my training. and you guys will, like you said, you go at one point like five days with damn near no sleep,

Starting point is 00:25:09 and you got to do all that shit. I don't know about that. So it's funny you bring it up because 100% that is the thing that no one can actually understand how you can achieve it. Like, you know, all right. Like, look, growing up, I pulled an all-nighter one.

Starting point is 00:25:28 You know, like maybe did that a couple times. Like, if you weren't out partying, like it was just like, all right, I'm going to stay up with, you know, in high school. did an all-nighter with your friends. You're like, oh, my God, I'm so tired. You have to go asleep. You're like, how can I do that for five nights in a row? Turns out, it's really easy. If you're forced to run and hit the water, like, if I, like, I say really, like, it's like people,

Starting point is 00:25:54 it's like, oh, how am I going to stay awake? It's not a problem when someone's yelling at you and you are freezing cold and you're being told to get to the ocean every minute, you know, of that day. You're going to stay awake. Like, it's just the movement, the momentum is, uh, is what keeps you awake. I tell people like, one of my, one of my friends, he's like, oh, I've got mild narcolepsy. I was like, I can cure that for you. I was like, all you got to do is get in the water every minute on a minute. I promise you, you'll stay awake for five days straight.

Starting point is 00:26:27 So, yeah. But do guys get like, you know, because you're going in freezing cold water and everything. And then you're coming out, you're shaking, your body's sleep deprived. Is it common for guys to get like the flu or stuff like that as well? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's a number of different like medical challenges that people get. One is SIP.

Starting point is 00:26:48 I don't know what it stands for, but it's when your lungs fill up with fluid. And basically, yeah, it can be really bad. I think you can die from it. Yeah, I don't know. That's not great. Swimming-induced pulmonary endema. Yeah. It's awesome. It's a rare potentially fatal condition where fluid accumulates in the lungs

Starting point is 00:27:09 during strenuous, swimming, diving, or snorkeling without water being swallowed. It causes severe coughing, coughing, breathing difficulty, pink lings spule them, and low blood oxygen. Immediate exit from water and sitting up is critical for recovery. So this is very common in the first phase of buds. Like that is what students will get dropped for. And the cadre are very attuned to this medical condition. You're getting medical checks probably every four hours during hell week. They're just like, all right, and they're looking for, they're looking for this. The other one, which I would actually claim is worse than this, is viral gastroenteritis. BGE, BGE. Yeah. BGE. Is this like where you got the shits? Yeah. Okay. So it's a highly, it's a highly contagious intestinal infection

Starting point is 00:27:56 causing vomiting, watery diarrhea, nausea, and stung at cramps, often with fever or aches. Symptoms appear 12 to 48 hours after exposure to viruses like neurovirus and usually last one to three day. Imagine going through like three days of hell week. So this is, so half my class got VGEE. Oh my. During Hell Week. And this is what like, God bless. Like I can't imagine.

Starting point is 00:28:21 Like hell week's bad enough. You have Hell Week in this? This is what I'm saying. Like it is, it's coming out both ends just to be clear. And like my funny story, one of my good buddies, names Josh. He gets VGE during this. And in Buds, you have a swim buddy. Like, you're always having a swim buddy.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Someone you're running next to, you have to be next to them at all times. And there's like the funny part of Butts. Josh, and this is probably like Wednesday, he's like, sir, permission to go to the ocean. I have to go to the bathroom, right? And this is like half my class at this point. Like they're just raising their hands. Like, I have to, you know, you're going into the ocean to basically shit yourself. and Josh, they're like, hit the surf, Josh, like, bring a swim buddy.

Starting point is 00:29:07 And so I go with Josh. Oh, my God. I'm like running towards the ocean with Josh as he's about to go to the bathroom. And they're like saying, get the fuck out of the ocean. Like, we're joking. Like, you don't have to go follow him in there as he's going to the bathroom. He's like, you want to get sick too? I was like, no, I don't want to get sick.

Starting point is 00:29:23 Yeah. I got VGE in third phase. which is on San Clemente Island. And I remember, and again, half our class got it there too. And it's awful. But you, I was running. I'm running with a gun. And I'm like yell out.

Starting point is 00:29:44 I'm like, Andy, grab my gun. I just throw him my gun. And the instructor's like, saying, what the fuck are you doing? And then I just start throwing up, like vomiting, projectile bombing on the guy. He's like, all right, something's wrong. And then you're shit. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:57 Yeah. Yeah. I'm picturing like that South Park. episode where Randy's going like yeah it is it is exactly like a South Park episode and so yeah not a not a fun thing to do

Starting point is 00:30:09 oh man once you got through hell week though you feel like oh shit I'm built for this yeah you feel unstoppable after that there's no I mean yeah the funny thing is like you're still not a seal so you still get treated like crap

Starting point is 00:30:24 just you're you're like they do a really good job making, you know, these incremental wins along the journey to become an Navy seal. After you finish Hell Week, you get to wear a brown t-shirt instead of a white shirt. And so you're like, oh, look at me. I'm a brown shirt, right? In second phase, once you pass pool competency test, you get to do the obstacle course. And there's this, like, this long rope and you get a climb down at face first. You're like, oh, look at me. I'm a commando. In third phase, they give you a gun and, you know, this like 1970s, uh, Vietnam era, like body armor without any plates in it.

Starting point is 00:31:03 You're like, oh, look at me. I get a gun and this. And again, you're still no one. Yeah. You're, uh, and then, you know, steel qualification training. It becomes very much, I'm going to call it a gentleman's course. If you mess up, you're still getting punished. But like, it's, okay, guys, you guys are on track to be a seal. And then, then you check into the seal teams. And even then, you're like, all right, you're a new guy. Uh, so it's, it's, it's, you're you're always they do a good job of you know this idea that you're earning it every single day that you're in there like you've never made it uh in the seal teams no matter you know whether you get to a seal team whether you're going to you know got a bunch of friends at seal team six

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Starting point is 00:33:25 Yeah. You got to keep that. It's the constant pursuit of excellence is what they're really, really good at. 100%, man. Yeah. So when you, when I forget which phase it is officially where they're like, well, you are a seal now and you can go to a team. But when that happened, you know, how did your selection process go? And actually, I always forget what year the cutoff was, but I remember it used to be like each seal team served in a specific region of the world and then they changed that. So when you got there, had they changed that already? Yeah, it was not. It was not. It was not, region-specific. I actually think that, well, sorry, it was, hey, the East Coast teams are going to Afghanistan, the West Coast teams are going to Iraq. That was the region-specific. And even then,

Starting point is 00:34:07 I was on the West Coast with SEAL Team 7, and we sent, my platoon got to go to Afghanistan. I went to Afghanistan twice. So I was like, look, it's not exactly like black and white, hey, just because you go West Coast, you're going here and East Coast you're going here. And some of the East Coast teams, I'm sure they, I'm 100% sure they sent you. Sure. Platoon's the Iraq also. Did you happen, did you get to choose SEAL Team 7 or were you placed there? No, you choose at that point in time.

Starting point is 00:34:35 It was you can choose West Coast, East Coast, or the SDV teams, which are in Hawaii. Actually, they didn't have any billets for the officers to go out to the SEAL delivery vehicle teams in Hawaii. These are the submarine teams. And so it was just, it was like, okay, West Coast or East Coast and pick West Coast. So submarine teams, they're on the sub? So they have a mini sub. Yeah. It's a minute.

Starting point is 00:34:59 Is that like a cocaine sub right? Yeah. Sealed delivery vehicle and SDV. They're sick. They're cool. A bunch of my friends have done it. Actually, the best part is one of my, perhaps one of my best friends. His name's Martin.

Starting point is 00:35:13 He is six foot 10. And he has had to put himself into that submarine. Yeah. And those are pictures with light on. Like the truth of the matter. They're always operating in pitch black. No, that's Titanic blow-up sub-vives. Is that made out of carbon fiber?

Starting point is 00:35:33 I don't know what it's made. I don't want to know. They're sick, though. They're cool. They do cool missions. Yeah, they're cool to look at. I'll stay out here looking. They do the missions you never hear about.

Starting point is 00:35:42 So. Yeah, I was going to, I never hear of like a Navy SEAL mission done from a submarine. Yeah, those are, yeah, you won't. We just don't talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. That's how we invaded Venezuela for the first time. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:35:54 I don't know if they did. I gotcha. He's revealing classified info. So you end up on seven and you said you went to Afghanistan? Yeah. So how soon after you got into Team 7 did you go there? So I checked into SEAL Team 7 probably in like October of 2011 as my guess. And I actually got to, the team was actually coming back from Afghanistan after a one-year deployment there.

Starting point is 00:36:24 But in the year. Yeah, it was 13 months, actually. Like, it was the longest deployment in special operations history. Wow. Which is, it's awful to be over there for 13. It's dangerous. It's awful to be over there for 13 months. Right.

Starting point is 00:36:38 The, I went, I think it was April. I went to Afghanistan in April as a augmentee for SEAL Team 6 for a development group. And so, just to be clear, like, I was not on. SEAL Team 6, but they were sending junior officers at the time. From other teams. From other teams to go support what those guys were doing in Afghanistan. And so I got to go. This is right after Bin Laden, too.

Starting point is 00:37:07 Yeah, the cool thing was I was actually with the troop that killed bin Laden. So that was like the coolest thing in the world is a junior seal. I'm like, look, I didn't, uh, I tell people was like, I was just the squire for the ground force commander. Right. I was like, I just, again, wanted to be a good seal. I was a liaison officer for the task force, but I would... But you're with them. Yeah, but I'm with them.

Starting point is 00:37:31 I'm learning from them. I'm seeing everything they do, the types of missions. I'm getting that one-on-one with time with them, getting mentored by them. It was awesome. You know what I got to ask. Yeah, what's up? I don't know. Who did it?

Starting point is 00:37:46 Who did it? Oh, which one? Yeah. I don't know who the ground force commander is. But I'm not going to, yeah, disclose who that was. Yeah. That's clear. So, yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:59 Yeah, it seems like to me that's, that is, you know, I don't have the military scope history like you do. But when you look at that mission and how they pulled it off and they were even prepared for the situation where the Black Hawk would go down and they had to get rid of it. And you see how flawlessly they did it with no loss of life on their end. It's fucking amazing. They took the guy out and like, you know, I ask you jokingly. but it's also like, I don't care. I'm glad you got them. No, the, dude, it is, look, I did this thing the other day.

Starting point is 00:38:30 I just thought about, like, the top five special operations that have ever been conducted. I think, you know, for me, I think it was like number three in terms of the binlon raid. And actually, number two is the Maduro raid that we just did. Really? That thing is just the complexity of that operation. Just amazing. You see some of the stuff from the ground on that? I don't, I haven't looked like.

Starting point is 00:38:52 like in detail at it. Well, no, it's not public. Yeah. No, I have. Yeah, I'll show you something. But that was, so that one was like 28 minutes or something, they got it done? It was, it was awesome. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:39:03 I'm sure it was fast. I'm sure it was furious. What's your number one? It is the radon and tebe. This is a cool one if you want to pull this one or not. E-N-T-E-B-B-B-E. You're talking about the Israeli one? Israeli hostage rescue.

Starting point is 00:39:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a cool one because they just flew into a commercial airport and like, rushed into the building grab the hostages killed the terrorists and then like jumped out yeah so you got that number one yeah that's a that's a legendary operation yeah i actually it's it's funny you bring that one up because i talk about this a lot as it really i don't know how much i talked about this on the show though but as it relates to benjamin net and yahoo because i always try to figure out how people become the people they do good and bad and indifferent but you know his brother dying on this one like i think that whatever

Starting point is 00:39:52 existed in his soul from a human perspective was ripped from him that day. Yeah, I don't know. I think so. He wasn't on the mission. Yeah, yeah, I know that. Yeah, this had a profound, this is the most profound thing that ever happened to him in his life. But the mission, you're right.

Starting point is 00:40:07 Wasn't this when, was this when Idi Amin was still in charge? I do not. I don't know. I don't remember. Yeah, look at that. Ugandan dictator, Ediamine. Yeah, so he was still in charge then. If anyone's ever seen the last

Starting point is 00:40:22 King of Scotland with Forrest Whitaker. That was about Edie Amin. Really? Yeah. Yeah, really. He won the Oscar for that. I think that was back in 05, but really fucking good movie. Idi Amin was... Oh, yeah. Bad guy. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:35 Really bad guy. But yeah, so you got Bin Laden mission number three. Yeah. It's definitely got to be up there. I thought I had these pictures for you, by the way. I should have been more prepared, but I'll show you off camera. I was just like, I couldn't believe how fast they were going, and I've told the story on the podcast a couple of times, but one of my guys,

Starting point is 00:40:55 Christian de Venezuelan who works with us, he lives right there on the hillside, right above Caracas. So we couldn't get a hold of him the next day. I was like, oh my God, he's dead. And then we got him on the phone and he was like, bro, it was amazing, man. We heard all the choppers going above us. We run outside and then we just see, do, do, do, do, pooh. And we were cheering in USA, man, it was amazing.

Starting point is 00:41:17 And then they were gone, I was like, whoa. That's what I don't think people will appreciate the speed that these guys operate at. And it is, I equated to like, you know, if you've ever seen a running back in like the NFL, like sideline, you're like, and they're running with a gun, right? It's just like, it is incredibly fast paced. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:38 Yeah. You see the video of Trump at the base watching them practice it like eight months before? I saw like a small clip that he was there. Yeah, seeing it. Yeah. But it's funny to watch because he's just standing there like, like, but then you see like 400 yards in the distance,

Starting point is 00:41:56 motherfuckers just balking it into a building. You're like, whoa, imagine what they're doing in real time. Yeah, you know, that's like the simulation. Yeah. But so you were, you were like a, what did you call it with Seal Team 6? What was the name? A squire. No, a liaison officer.

Starting point is 00:42:12 Yeah. So you, how much time did you spend with them? Three months. Three months. Yeah, yeah. That's really, that's got to be pretty special to cut your teeth, not just at that time given what they had just done, but cut your teeth in a war zone with SEAL Team 6, like your first time going into something. Yeah, yeah, it was awesome. Now, your team seven had come back

Starting point is 00:42:33 from the longest deployment ever. Yeah. Had you even had a chance to meet those guys, really, before you went and did the shooting? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had, the answer is like, yes. I want to say again, I want, like thinking about the timelines now. Probably, they were all back, November, December, 2011. Again, we checked in. We reformed as a platoon, probably like March 2012, and then that's when I went to, you know, Afghanistan. So I, yeah, we had, and then I came back and rejoined the platoon because that in, in those first six months after a platoon forms, basically all the, the enlisted guys, they're getting shotguned out to school, sniper school, breacher school, offer. road driving J-TAC refreshers, J-TAC school.

Starting point is 00:43:26 And for the officers, because we're not being trained as a sniper, we're not being trained as a breacher, we're not being trained as a J-TAC. They're like, cool, you can go to, you know, go to Afghanistan and spend time with them. And so then you come back and then you start what we call unit-level training, which is basically your workup, which is six months of preparation before you deploy again. And so during that time, it's just going to a bunch of different, I guess, what do I call them? It's just more training. But you're doing land warfare.

Starting point is 00:44:00 You're doing diving. You're doing jumping. You're doing close quarters combat. You're doing urban operations training. You're just going through all of this training again. Now, when you were over there, though, as the liaison with Seal Team 6, did you have a chance to go out into the field a little bit as well? No, not with them. Not in the, yeah, you got to earn your right.

Starting point is 00:44:22 Right. So you're not seeing it. You're not seeing that yet. It's just interesting though, because I want to get to when you went back to Afghanistan with your guys and actually did that. But I've had so many guys in here over the past two years, whether it be from the Army Rangers, Delta, Navy SEALs, a bunch of different places who happened to be in Afghanistan between the years of 07 and like 2014.

Starting point is 00:44:49 Yeah. And it's given me a whole new perspective on stuff because I've learned from all their different stories just how fucking insane Afghanistan was during that time period. Like there was shit going down everywhere. So you weren't going out with SEAL Team 6 at the time. But were they constantly in firefights? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:10 They're going after the most dangerous missions. Like they got, you know, some guys wounded on, they were wounded in one operation. and like, yeah, they're going out every day. Like, they don't get tasked with the easy missions. Right, right, right. Every day is crazy. Yeah, every day, every night. The cool thing was at night they would go out and what I got to do,

Starting point is 00:45:30 which actually played into like how, you know, what I do now, I got to see how the entire, you know, targeting process worked, how the entire kill chain worked from intelligence collection to, because the SEAL teams are, you know, those J-Soc units, they would go out in the night. But during the day, we were just swacking people with predator drones, with Reaper drones. And that was like, okay, great. You're basically finding people.

Starting point is 00:45:57 It's 24 hours, seven days a week operations. You're not, there's, you know, yeah, the guys who are going out. That was probably like the hard part of, you know, what I did is like, you really weren't allowed to sleep because you'd support the task force going out at night. And then they're like, all right, new guy, like new officer, go support the kinetic strikes during the day, you're like, wait, when am I supposed to sleep? They're like, yeah, fine time. Oh, you made it during the week.

Starting point is 00:46:21 Yeah, you can manage that. Was Dan Corbett wasn't still there on six at the time, was he? I, uh, he was, I want to say he was one. He in seal qualification training was one of my instructors. Oh, he was? Yeah. Yeah. So, why are you saying it like that?

Starting point is 00:46:39 He's a great guy. Yeah. He just said in that seat. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:44 Yeah. He's, you could tell. He's like, he's this smooth, laid back dude. Hey, what's that, man, how are you? But you know there's a switch there and not that I get to see the switch in here, but I feel like when that thing goes up, a whole different person. Yeah, yeah. No, I, there are so many great people.

Starting point is 00:47:05 He's one of them. Like, there's so many guys who've done so many things. No, I'm not going to say anything. Supreme Leader was great. Yeah. No, they're all. Yeah, again, I'm thankful for all of my instructors. They make you who you are.

Starting point is 00:47:20 Like, those experiences and, like, getting to work with those guys is like, they're the funniest, they're the most professional. They're like the best deeds in the world, right? They're like your older brothers. Like when you're, again, going through that training, just look up to them. And then what corporate had done as a SEAL, it's like amazing stuff. So, yeah. Now, what was it like after your six months when you came back, you get acclimated with SEAL Team 7? You're doing all your training.

Starting point is 00:47:44 and then you guys are like, all right, you're deployed to Afghanistan? Yep. What happened when you got there? So we deployed to multinational base Taryn Kau. This is in Arousgan, Afghanistan, which was south central Afghanistan. And we were doing helicopter assault force operations with the eighth Kandek, which was the eighth commando battalion. And basically it was a 900. person battalion, we would take 100 Afghan commandos out on every single operation because

Starting point is 00:48:20 there was like a 10 to one force ratio requirement where they wanted the Afghans leading the way and we were there to make sure they were successful, didn't fail too bad at anything that they did. And so that's what we did. So I would do helicopter assault operations into a ruse gun, into Kandahar, into Zabal, and Ghazni. And sometimes we would stay job Ghazni. we'd go into like pectica and pectia what does it what does that look like when you say helicopter assault operations or you're coming in a helicopter you're landing yeah it was so this is like one of the cool things like have you're loading up we take four CH 47s uh and um you'd go we'd load up at like

Starting point is 00:49:05 you know midnight and we'd land somewhere at two in the morning uh with a hundred you know 120 people And we would go do village clearance operations. And then sometimes we would also do directed strikes, like going after specific individuals. So those were the operations that we were doing. And they would, the village clearance operations could be anywhere from, you know, 24 hours to, you know, four days in terms of four days. Yeah, yeah, it's a long time to be able to be able to get. What's a four day village clearing operation looks like? It sucks.

Starting point is 00:49:38 Yeah, yeah, you're tired. And sometimes we would just go from. village to village, like you'd take a helicopter and do like a two-day village clearance and just take a helicopter into the next village and go, uh, do, you know, do another 48 hours there. I mean, you got your interpreters with you and everything, but you're clearing like a whole village of people. I mean, it's kind of, it's not simple. No, no, no, yeah. I mean, it is, yeah, it was not simple. It's complex. It's dangerous. Um, you got a lot of people with you. Like, you haven't, like, we always had enough firepower, right? I was never worried about that.

Starting point is 00:50:10 Like I had full stacks of air support. I had Apaches, Predators, F-18s, supporting my element every single time. We would go, you know, in and there's always close air support on call. Plus, I had, you know, a hundred Afghan commandos with me. And not saying, like, that was like a nice, they're not a great partner force. But like, yeah, yeah, I was like, you know, you're not going to get overrun by anybody when you have close air support and 100 Afghans. and like, you know, 15 Navy Seals. You got enough human shields, right?

Starting point is 00:50:44 Yeah, you know, your words, not mine. So they, yeah, but complex in terms of like the moving people, like, especially for, you know, a ground force commander because that's what my role was. You have to be tracking the blue force. You have to be tracking the red force. You have to be tracking the civilians there. And so pretty complex in terms of those operations. Yeah, we do very disruptive to.

Starting point is 00:51:10 the populations that lived there, we'd, you know, go into the night, we'd get all the civilians, we'd bring them back, you know, keep them in a place that, you know, would be as safe as possible. I'd engage with them. And there might be like 200 civilians, 300 civilians. And these, you know, sure as we're trying to figure out where the Taliban, where Al-Aqaeda is. And, you know, sometimes we'd get in good firefights. Sometimes the Taliban would run away. But I think, you know, for us, it wasn't like the biggest threat in Afghanistan at that time were IEDs in green on blue. And so that's what we were primarily concerned about. I don't think we're ever like green on blue.

Starting point is 00:51:49 Yeah. So in the Afghan military, you would have, you'd have infiltrators, Taliban al-Qaeda infiltrators. So they would sign up for the Afghan army. They'd go through training. And then they would just wait to get attached. And they would do everything from shoot you on, shoot, you know, kill a U.S. service member at the range when they're training. They would just turn around and shoot you. They would, you know, come on to a compound. They'd killed people that

Starting point is 00:52:22 way. They would, you know, they'd kill you on an operation. And so it was, it was like, just a very dangerous thing because you don't know. Like, look, you're also going to battle with these people, but, yeah, there you go. Greenland Blues. Yeah. Crazy. Dief just found that green on blue deaths in August were only 15 out of 53 or 28%. I mean, that's a lot. August when, yeah. Analysis also, what year are we looking at, Dief, 2012? Yeah, that the trend in total coalition deaths is falling.

Starting point is 00:52:56 The total of 53 was the highest. Yeah, yeah, that's one. But either way, that's a crappy feeling. Yeah, but yeah. IDs are probably the other thing. That's wild. Fifteen guys are just getting fired on in the range. Yeah, getting fired by the people that you're going to war with.

Starting point is 00:53:09 Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, to the point. You know, again, you just, I was one operation. Actually, this was like our first operation that we were conducting. We were lining up. We're getting picked up by the helicopters. We're on X-Phil, on extract. We're getting lined up two in the morning.

Starting point is 00:53:30 Again, we got probably 100 Afghans with us. And we're in what we would call sticks. You're lined up before the helicopters land. You ride on. You make sure all the guys are there. And I'm looking, I'm counting people. off and I see an Afghan with a loaded RPG. And I was like, you know, that, I had to have like, wait a second. Like, we're about to hop on a helicopter. This guy's got a loaded RPG.

Starting point is 00:53:55 And I had to like dummy check myself. I was like, something's wrong here. And I go to my LP. I was like, Jared, like, look, this doesn't seem right. Like, the guy should not be carrying loaded. Again, I was just like, had to dummy check myself. It's like, we shouldn't be carrying loaded RPG. And this is Operation Number 1 in Afghanistan, my first operation. Afghan shouldn't be carrying loaded RPGs on a helicopter. He's like, oh, hell no. He's like, great point out, sir. Like, let's, and like, again, but you just don't know.

Starting point is 00:54:24 And that was like the threat that we were facing. The other thing we did, which was like, you know, it's kind of funny. We would, in these helicopters, again, I don't know how many people you fit in a CH47, probably 30, 40 people. But you would intersperse the seals with the Afghan. but you would have two seals wearing our plates. Basically, you know, the helicopter pilot is flying right here, pretend. And then what you would do is you have a seal right here

Starting point is 00:54:53 so that if anybody were to start shooting you in the helicopter, like, you don't want the pilots to get shot. You're like, all right, I'm here to take bullets, you know, while hopefully the other seals wrestle them to the ground if there was ever an incident on the helicopter. You know, I do like to joke. you know, for my guys, like, I was always the first one off the helicopter, so I always got to sit in the back. I never had to be the bullet sponge. But that was, you know, again, a,

Starting point is 00:55:22 you know, one of the force protection measures that we would take because we were very concerned about green on blue. We'd have snipers at every gun range that we trained the Afghans with. Yeah, it was a real threat. Yeah. Remember when I had Mike Yeagley in here for episodes 343 and 351? And remember what he said he used to do allegedly doesn't do these days but probably still does in the ways of collecting your data and using it without you knowing it and remember how he said that there are data brokers who make up one of the largest unseen industries on earth who are constantly doing this every day with your data that you don't even know about well yeah that's kind of a problem in mike's case he was looking at it

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Starting point is 00:56:40 number home address and income and it's all happening without you even realizing it so take back control of your privacy today visit protect my data.com link in my description below and use code Julian to get 30% off all annual plans and remove your information from data broker databases that's protect my data.com link in description below promo code Julian I mean and then when you're going in and taking the villages though obviously there's the language barrier you're getting help with that with some of the people that are there but still You know, you said it.

Starting point is 00:57:11 Like sometimes you'd have to go talk like you to 200 different people or whatever. And this is, we're talking over a decade into the war in Afghanistan. You know that there's Taliban presence all over the place. Shit, it's within your own military or the guys that you have with you from the Afghan forces. You know, are you just constantly on red alert, just looking at people like, all right, who is actually, who's sympathetic to the Taliban? Who could be with the Taliban? Who's lying to my face right now? I mean, it sounds so stressful.

Starting point is 00:57:39 Yeah. Look, the answer is like, yes, you're alert. I don't want to say you're on like red alert, but you're very, very cognizant of the threat environment there. And actually some of the best advice that I ever got, and I actually still use it to this day. Before we deployed to Afghanistan, it was the senior enlisted for all of Socom. He was some Delta Force sergeant major. I forget who it was. but he, you know, he came and he talked to all the elements that were going to Afghanistan,

Starting point is 00:58:10 talked to our SEAL platoon. He's like, just remember, guys. Like, he's like, he's like, best advice I can give you is you're already dead. And he's like, if you keep that mentality, you'll stop worrying about everything else around you and you'll operate freely. You'll operate without stress. Like, he's like, it doesn't matter. You're all already dead on this planet.

Starting point is 00:58:28 And I was like, that was actually like, you're like, holy crap, like a very fring thing where you're like, hey, if you're already dead, then you cannot. you're not worried about dying. That's some Max-Miss Desmustra-R-A-lizs vibes. You're already in Alicia. Yeah, that was. So, yeah. That's wild, man.

Starting point is 00:58:47 Now, did you- So that didn't keep, so because of that mentality, you're not on like, red alert where you're, like, worried about every single thing. You're very cognizant of it. You're cognizant of it. You're already dead,

Starting point is 00:58:55 so it doesn't matter. Did you see at that time? I mean, hindsight's 20-20 with this kind of thing, but you had obviously, while you were growing up, you watched these wars break out, out and then you come of age in the Naval Academy. They're still hot and going on.

Starting point is 00:59:10 And then you get in it while it's hot and going on. But like we said, you're over a decade in at this point to the actual war. Were you noticing patterns or trends on the ground going to the villages and talking with people who are in fighting the Taliban where you're like, shit, man, I don't know about this. This could be going the wrong way. I think it was so clear to every single person on the ground that there was not going to be a way to win that conflict.

Starting point is 00:59:36 And that was probably like the frustrating thing, you know, as a seal, like you want to win. But the outside influence, the fact, you know, when I say outside influencers, Iran and Pakistan, basically Taliban, Al-Qaeda, even Iranian operators, they could move freely in between those two countries and you couldn't pursue them. And so in the seal teams, like one of the things that you learn on the tactical side of things and actually applies to like the strategic side of operations is you want to isolate. and contain a target, right? Isolate in the sense that no one can come in to said target, contain, and that no one can come out. And that is the very first thing that you do when you go after a target. You set up isolation and containment, and then the assault force goes into the building

Starting point is 01:00:26 or whatever the target area is. And again, you could do it on a building. You could do it on a large geographic area. You could do it on a country. But we had the U.S. military, what we had never done was isolate or contain the target. And basically that made it an impossible problem to solve when the insurgency could move freely in and out between these two countries. And so I think, you know, as I think about warfare today, it's like you have to clear objective and isolate and contain the target. Otherwise you're not, you get stuck in, you know, the forever war.

Starting point is 01:00:58 Yeah. Now we're talking during a time where, you know, this. potential Iran war is breaking out because some attacks happened like a week ago and everything. They're talking about maybe some boots on the ground now and everything and that that will turn into a lot of different things. But, you know, people are, including people from the GWAT era, are very on right alert about this because unlike 2003 when we're invading Iraq, for example, you know, where you don't have social media, you don't have as much access to information. A lot of guys like in your position, guys in the military went there,

Starting point is 01:01:34 because that's their duty and that's what they do. And that's what the guys are doing today too. They don't make those decisions and everything. But the difference is today, these soldiers that are potentially being deployed to Iran, they know a lot more than those guys did back in the day. And they may look at this and be like, what the fuck are we doing here?

Starting point is 01:01:51 You know what I mean? Like if there's not a clear objective, do you worry about not military mutiny or anything like that, but do you worry about like the morale of the military if we get into conflicts that perhaps are not in our national, interests? Look, I always, I think it's important to have like that clear objective. If you are able to articulate a clear objective, I think, you know, we're, that's like step number one. Then it's like articulating the plan. And I actually think like our military leaders,

Starting point is 01:02:24 our political leaders have learned about like what not to do, right? And this is, again, the fact that we were in these ground wars for so long, it's like, And you see the commentary right now. There is not a desire to get into a prolonged conflict. We felt that, like, I think rightfully so, that there was a threat to America, to Americans, and they decided to take action. And so I do think it's a righteous cause, so I don't think, I'm not worried about, like, the morale of the troops, especially, like, one week into the conflict. Like, they're jazzed up. I know that.

Starting point is 01:03:00 Like, like, as a warfighter, you train to go to war as, as, as. as a, you know, as a Navy SEAL coming out of SEAL train, like the first thing, you just like, you just want to go prove yourself in combat, right? There's not another gauntlet in life like that. And so for our military, you know, these past couple weeks, it's been, one, it's been incredible execution. Two, like, this is what they train for. This is what they do. They're answering the call and the political will from, you know, the commander in chief in terms of the objectives. And look, I, I, again, I just think it's, you know, I, I just think it's, you know, know, it's one, it's really early to tell. I don't think that our leaders want to see us in a

Starting point is 01:03:39 protracted conflict. The other one thing I'll say, and this is like the fun fact, I, I was trained in Persian Farsi, which is what they speak in Iran. I spoke at a high school level. I say, you know, Yakami Farsi, Sobat Mikonam, Esbemam Brandenay, you know, so. You could be making it up, I believe you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm actually like, I'm, you know, I back in the day, it was like, oh, man, it would be cool to go visit Iran one day. And I'm excited about the idea of getting to go visit Iran, hopefully sometime in the future. I do, no matter what, and I've always said this, I do hope to see the Iranian people get their own government there and one that's actually widely wanted across the country. For sure, I have to look at it, you know, from an analytics standpoint, from America's interest and stuff like that, too and mistakes we made in the past.

Starting point is 01:04:30 because the one place I would probably disagree with you is on the politician's side. I think you're probably right about the military side. The military is not in charge of the government. The military is at the beck and call the government to support it and uphold their duty and oath and honor. And that's probably what they're doing. But it's you do have a recent American history, especially of some guys in some suits who have never seen anything close to a battlefield, making some decisions for people where, you know, lives are going to be lost. And to your point, it is an important point because all you guys say, and I believe you, you know, when, especially in the positions like Navy SEALs and stuff like that,

Starting point is 01:05:10 you want to be in the heat. Like it's, it's, you don't want to lose any of your guys and that's the worst thing ever. And you don't want to lose your life. That's the worst thing ever. But like, you are, you train for this. You want to be there. And that's, that's great. I would just like to think that when we're doing that, whatever missions you guys are going on, it's not something that will look back on and be like, oh, look, we pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021 and left like fucking Saigon. Yeah, yeah. Because to me, and that's not your guy's fault, it felt like a lot of guys who did all the right things and fought for freedom and all these things in Afghanistan. Some of them it's like, God damn, like, because of dumb decisions in Washington, D.C., did some of those guys die in

Starting point is 01:05:53 vain? And it's just, that's a really, really difficult thing for even me to think about, and I'm not in the military, you never was. Yeah. No, look, Afghanistan sucked. Like, seeing how that ended was, it's a pretty awful fucking feeling. Yeah. To be very candid and honest. I do think it's like, this is something I've had to reflect on. One, it's like really hard to know, like, if a right call is being made.

Starting point is 01:06:17 And look, everybody loves to armchair quarterback every single call. And it's really easy when you're not in the decision seat and don't have the full picture, the full intelligence picture, et cetera. one of the things that I was, you know, just thinking about, it's like the price of inaction in the world, in the long-term effects that it has is pretty interesting. And same with the price of action, just to be clear. And things that come to mind was like, look, in 1949, you know, at the time it was China, they were asking for help to, you know, defeat the communist, right? and they were unable to do that

Starting point is 01:06:54 and the nationalist government went to Taiwan and now we have China which is this major problem for us you know 70 something odd years later and it was like ah what it had what would have happened had we done something

Starting point is 01:07:10 and again it's like the price of the price of inaction or the price of action or the price of action I don't know same with like Iran in like 79 it's like ah what if we had actually gone and done something during that period of time, like as they were doing the revolution. And again, it's really easy to like armchair quarterback and say, ah, had we done something, we would have, we wouldn't have this regime of care that we've experienced for the past

Starting point is 01:07:37 40-something plus years. And also, I think it's like really easy to say, you know, and the same thing now, it's like, well, why are we doing something now? And it's like, look, no matter what, there are just long-term effects of everything the United States does. And so sometimes I think people lose sight of like, it's like, okay, there's the immediate, but like try to think about what the world looks like 50 plus years because of something that we do, whether or not do. So I think there are some that appear a little more obvious when it's happening. It doesn't mean it's 100% though.

Starting point is 01:08:08 But you raise a really good point because what you're talking about is the equilibrium. And this is something I look at with everything. And it's why, you know, Twitter is not the best representation of things because it's like, we're so. media in general represents like the extreme of one end of the spectrum. But basically, I think if you look on a scale from Ron Paul to Lindsay Graham, both, I think Ron Paul's intentions are a lot better, but both technically don't work. If you are fully, and Ron Paul's right about a lot of other stuff, like I'm not ripping Ron Paul at all. I'd like a lot of things Ron Paul says. But I think when it comes to like war, Ron Paul may see it a little bit like we can never get involved or anything. And that's,

Starting point is 01:08:47 that's not realistic because unfortunately the world doesn't work that way. Lindsay Graham never saw someone he couldn't fucking bomb, right? And just sucks and it's probably blackmailed out the ass. But like, no pun intended. But Ron Paul, that ideology may be well intentioned, but if you pull away from the world completely and never take that action, the price of inaction can be there. I will say at this moment because it's happening live and I'd like to look back on this

Starting point is 01:09:14 three years from now and see how wrong or not wrong I was. I do think that like us taking action in Iran who didn't pose a threat to us is not going to be something we look back finally on. However, if we pull out and it's not like we get ground troops in there, it'll be a blip on the radar. And that's kind of what I'm hoping for. But your point is well taken because these decisions are not just made technically on, you know, do we not like this government or not? You and I both know there's massive economic implications, whether that's both corrupt and not corrupt. There's just realities of that. There's currency implications, which is really the same thing.

Starting point is 01:09:49 And then there's basically like jurisdictional power implications, meaning like I'm just broadly, east versus west, that kind of thing. So it's just a it's a strange world sometimes looking at all the variables. It's a, it is a crazy world that we live in. Yeah. We'll see how everything plays out. I don't, yeah, I have no idea. Now, when you're there, though, you're not thinking about any of that, right?

Starting point is 01:10:10 You're doing the job. You're doing your job. At the same time, you're like. Like, you're thinking about like, what do you think about? One, you want to accomplish the mission. You want to, like, again, as a young seal officer, you want to go through that, that gauntlet of combat. At the same time, you know, yeah, I didn't want to get, like, I was very cognizant of

Starting point is 01:10:40 the realities of where we were in the war. It's like, hey, and even my seal. commander he's like don't he's like saying for the best of your ability don't get anybody fucking killed over there right um and that's something that i took to heart and i was like yeah like i don't want to get anybody killed over here all right so um because right in the back of your mind it's like all right how's this play out in the long run right and so you know i'm forever thankful that i was able to bring you know everybody home oh you didn't lose any your guys that's amazing yeah wow so how you said this earlier i just want to make sure i do it

Starting point is 01:11:15 that you would be going out that's like my proudest accomplished that's a that's a credit i haven't heard that like at all from anyone especially in that theater at that time but you were saying it was what was the ratio was like you wanted nine or ten to one or something we had to bring ten afghans i didn't want we had to bring ten afghans for every single uh seal uh that would take out on the field so on the average village clearing mission how many of your guys would be coming with you on that So there'd be like 12 seals with us. Wow. And then it's funny.

Starting point is 01:11:46 It's the most ridiculous formula because we're like, hey, do dog, sorry, actually, you're like, we'd get a couple extra seals. We'd be like, do dog handlers count as seals? They're like, no, a dog handler does not count as a seal. So you're like, all right, I don't have to bring 10 Afghans if I bring the dog handler out. Do EOD technicians, these are your bomb disposal guys, right, who are going after I, Do they count against the formula? They're like, no, like, EOD does not count against the formula.

Starting point is 01:12:15 And so I'd get to bring two EOD guys out with me. And then, uh, I'm going to tell Mike Ritalin. He said that about dog handling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's not going to like, no, there's seals. You're like, oh, this is a free seal that you bring with me. They just don't count against the formula that was being used.

Starting point is 01:12:29 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. And then, yeah, then there's like your technical surveillance, like didn't count against the formula. So it's like, again, you'd have, you'd have 13, seals, but only 12 that counted against it, and you'd bring 120 Afghans. And then our total U.S.

Starting point is 01:12:46 citizens going on those ops would be like 16. So. And so you didn't have any green on blue incidents or anything like that. That's great. No, we didn't have any green on blue incidents. Now, how long was the- And to be clear, like, look, we are hyper-vigilant, like, hyper-vigilant during those things, we're vetting guys. Again, that was a big concern for us. And it's like, again, I was the operational side. It's like when we're not conducting operations, we're working with these Afghans day in, day out, over at their compound, training them, you know, meeting with them. And like when I would go meet with the battalion commander of this eighth Kandek, I would go. I would bring, I'd have my pistol with me and body armor.

Starting point is 01:13:32 And then I would bring, you know, three Navy SEALs with me. And they would be wearing, they'd have their M-4s. a, uh, their mark 48 machine guns. And like, it was like, it was kind of neat because it's just like your own security detail. And so I'd go into the room. I'd be the battalion commander and those guys would be out there. And like, but doing that stuff, you know, makes it harder for someone to, you know, for, you know, a psychotic terrorist to say, uh, like weak target. Let me go after like, yeah, I'm just going to get lit up by these guys if, um, I try anything. Right. Did you have any very direct dealings or, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:14:09 mediated conversations for lack of a better way of putting it with anybody in Taliban? We mean mediated conversations. Meaning like you're not, you're not in a firefight shooting them, but you know you're talking with someone in the Taliban and they know that you know that they're in the Taliban and you're having some conversation for a higher purpose. Not for some higher purpose. We, uh, you see what I'm saying, right? Maybe. I'll tell you like what we're like, I'll tell you the conversations that I've had with

Starting point is 01:14:36 the Taliban, um, which was like, we're on an. operation, we find these motorcycles, the Taliban would move with motorcycles. Al-Qaeda would move with motorcycles, dirt bikes, whatever they were, whatever they were. And it's like, oh, there's IEDs on these motorcycles. And so we, you know, our EOD technicians, they take care of it. Then we take these motorcycles in the Taliban, they go into the mountains whenever we go

Starting point is 01:15:07 into a village. They go up into the mountains. They see us taking their motorcycles and they come over the radio. And we could intercept the radio communications. They were using like unsecured, unencrypted, like radio shack type, you know, radios. And our interpreters, I'm like, what are they doing? They're like, you know, they're saying, oh, the Americans are taking our motorcycles. And I told them, I was like, yeah, tell them we're taking their motorcycles because they had IDs on them.

Starting point is 01:15:34 And so they go back over the radio and they're like, yeah, we're going to blow these up. because you guys tried to blow us up with IEDs. And the Taliban's like, no, don't take our motorcycles. Don't blow up our motorcycles, please. It's like how we get around. We're like, I'm like, tell me to fuck off. Like, we're hung up their motorcycles. So that's, again, not a super deep spirited conversation.

Starting point is 01:15:55 I don't know what you were going for. Yeah, I was like, yeah. Well, I know that sometimes you got to like, I'll talk to guys who are out in the field and like they have to sit in a room with Taliban. I just had a guy here the other day. He was talking about that. You got to sit in a room with Taliban and be like, oh, okay, all right, all right, please stay the fuck out of the way.

Starting point is 01:16:13 All right, I'm not going to shoot you because we're in here, but I'm going to shoot you later when it, you know what I mean? It's almost like an awkward thing because you're dealing with them everywhere. That's the only reason I ask. Yeah. I mean, again, when we would, you know, a handful of operations you end up with prisoners, you don't, like, you don't talk to them. You know, like, I didn't, I didn't engage with them.

Starting point is 01:16:29 Yeah. So I actually, it was funny. The one thing, when they would shoot at us, I would take it as like a personal affront. That was a strange. Because you don't know what it's going to be like the very first time you get into a firefight. You're like, I don't know. How am I going to react? Right?

Starting point is 01:16:44 I've been trained. What emotions am I going to feel? And the emotion that I felt was just like anger because I was pissed off. I was like, why the fuck is this guy trying to kill me? Like what did I do to him? Like I took it very personally, you know, which is like just a strange. No, I was like, oh, all right, you're going to kill me? Like, F you.

Starting point is 01:17:03 Like, what's your problem, dude? That's a very reasonable. response. I feel like I'd probably have a pretty similar response as well. But what is it like the first time you get out there. I always talk with you guys about this because it's one thing to do the most insane, intense training for forever, basically. And you're shooting guns all the time. You're very used to weapons and you're obviously great with them. You're in the highest level of the military. But then you get out there and suddenly bullets start flying. And I don't know when your first time was with that. But what, you know, does time slow down?

Starting point is 01:17:35 What goes through your head? And what was that like to react to that for the first time? I don't think, I don't think, I would, sorry, maybe like time slows down a little bit the very first time. Like, it happens. Yeah. And it's not like something in the movies where it's like in slow motion. Like, yeah, I will acknowledge that you're like, all right. But then it's like you're just falling back on your training.

Starting point is 01:17:58 And it's, we trained so much. we shoot so much. I told someone, it was like, shooting when you're a seal is like, it's, you know, no different than breathing.

Starting point is 01:18:10 And you're like, right. And like, you do so many immediate action drills and immediate action. And I add is like, what do you do when you take fire? And so,

Starting point is 01:18:21 like, you know how to react. Like, it is like, like, like breathing. So, yeah.

Starting point is 01:18:28 Yeah, I've heard, I've heard very similar responses from other guys, too just because they did it so much and they used that exact phrase. Yeah. It's just like breathing. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:18:36 Clock in, let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still very hard to imagine. It's one of those things it's like people often say, if I were blank, then I would definitely blank. And it's like, you don't officially know. You know, it's like when you do something so much, like one, you're really good at engaging in conversation and having questions, right?

Starting point is 01:18:55 Thank you. You've done this, you know, podcast so much. I was thinking it's like, it's like probably like breathing for you. Like, it was. I watched the, uh, the Alex Honnold climbing the Taipei 101, right? That guy climbed the Yosemite, uh, whatever mountain that's called. Um, and like, everybody's like, oh my God, I can't imagine. Like, what was it going?

Starting point is 01:19:14 It's like, dude, he's done that stuff so many times. It's very, very natural for him. And so that's, it's like, I don't think it's that different when it's, you've done something so many times. You're so well rehearsed for it. Like you're just, you know, you're falling back on what you've rehearsed so many times and done so many times. How long was that first?

Starting point is 01:19:31 deployment when you were seven months it's a long deployment it was yeah it was long he was good what's it like coming back home from that and now you're off oh and you're still on training but you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah yeah no uh bu bu it was good my wife said i sucked at driving she's like like like look so one of the funny things they sent you to germany for like four days before they bring you to the united states because they're like all right if they don't want to i forget what they call it it's like some transition period where you're like, okay, drink, get it out all of your system, like these four days that you're in Germany, and then we'll send you back to the United States. And whatever study they had done, like this is actually a better way to reintegrate you into society.

Starting point is 01:20:17 But yeah, I came back home. The one thing was like, I actually went immediately, I was probably home for two, three weeks, and then went immediately into one of those workups again. I had taken a job as a platoon commander at SEAL Team 5. Oh, you moved teams? Yeah, I moved teams. One of the platoon commander had a family issue. They're like, hey, we need a new one.

Starting point is 01:20:40 Because I was supposed to go to the East Coast and join, I want to say, Seal Team 2 or Seal Team 10 out there. But because this platoon commander, they basically said, hey, Brandi Dianna do you want to stay in San Diego. Be a platoon commander at Seal Team 5. Said, yeah, sure. What's the catch? The catch is like, you're going right into a workup as soon as you get. at home, right? You're going to have two, three weeks at home, and then you're going right into the workup. And when you're in a workup, it is, it's three weeks gone, one week home, three weeks

Starting point is 01:21:09 gone, one week home, three weeks gone, one week home for another six months. Wow. Actually, it was funny. My wife, they, uh, we tabulated, actually, they forced you to like figure out how long you were gone. This is a problem in like 2013, 14, um, because guys were gone for so long. And for two years in a row, I was gone 300 days out of the year. And so my wife, and so my wife's like she's like yeah this sucks like I'm like well whatever like everybody else is doing this yeah I was like I was like our friends are doing this like this is completely normal she's like Brandon this is not normal to be gone for 300 days out of the year for two years in a row so but again it was it seemed normal at the time did you have kids yet at the time no no no kids

Starting point is 01:21:54 yeah how long you've been with your wife at that point like before Navy shows yeah yeah we met at the Naval Academy. She was a nurse out in town. Okay. All right. So she gets it. Yeah, she, she, yeah. She get, but that's still, I agree. Three hundred days is a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's it like also like so early on, you get yourself acclimated, you get into a SEAL team. You go do the real thing. It's like, all right, here we are. And now it's like, oh, shit, I'm moving teams. Like culturally. Oh, that's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's not. It's, it's, every, team, every platoon has its own dynamic, but it's, it was all good. Yeah, it was fun.

Starting point is 01:22:31 And they sent you back to Afghanistan another time? No, for that one. So Afghanistan, they weren't sending any more West Coast SEAL platoons. I don't even think they sent East Coast SEALs to Afghanistan at that point in time. And so this was 2000, because we deployed October of 2014. Okay. I went to the Pacific Theater. So that was, yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:54 It was a lot fun. It's way easier. We were based out of Guam. I did. We would do training exercises and like working with other countries, militaries, worked with. And I would send small elements, four guys, six guys to all these different countries, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam. No, just to go train with them for like a month. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:23:16 And so it's building, we call it building partnership capacity. You're building relationships with these countries. But yeah, Philippines. Thailand, Singapore, Korea. Where else do we go at the time? We sent guys to the Maldives. That's a fun vacation. Yeah, I think it was like, I want to say like Al-Qaeda was like vacationing there.

Starting point is 01:23:37 It was like, you know. All right, go to the bar, but, you know, like from 9 to 5, go hunts from Al-Qaeda. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was like intelligence gathering first and informal. But like, yeah. So. When you do something like that, if you send, I don't know how. how many guys you sent to the Maldives for the Al-Qaeda thing?

Starting point is 01:23:56 Small, small, small, like four dudes. Okay, so you send like four dudes there. Is this the kind of thing where you're like, all right, here are the targets? No, to be clear, again, they were working with the Maldivian military, but the Maldivian military, one, it's tiny. I actually don't know, like, how large is,

Starting point is 01:24:14 but, like, you know, again, their problem is, I don't know, they would have, like, we knew that, you know, some bad actors would come to the Maldives. It's not like they were doing stuff in the Maldives. But it was just like, hey, you're going to build, you know, capacity for these guys. Because that's the thing. We focus on, like, the Iraqs, the Afghanistan and all this stuff. But there's little missions happening all over the world all the fucking time.

Starting point is 01:24:37 And you guys are doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, again, that's Africa, South America. There are guys doing stuff, like you said, all the time. Yeah. I always think it's pretty wild when you hear the stories about the Navy SEALs missions where they'll be like in planes clothes and spending time in a place like doing undercover reconnaissance and then suddenly like go go go yeah when we go into these countries

Starting point is 01:25:02 we're all going plane clothes like so you were doing yeah i went to yeah vietnam Singapore like yeah you're not going and you know yeah what's vietnam like these days uh it was one i spent four weeks there um weren't with their coast guard their navy uh it was uh so this is in 2015 was in Hanoi and Haiphong. It was awesome. Like, it was cool just to go see that. Some wild things about that trip.

Starting point is 01:25:32 One is, like, they hate China. You know, they see China as, like, a huge threat as a bully in the neighborhood. They were encroaching on their economic zones, like their building islands all in the South China Sea. Like, Vietnam did not like China. Second thing, I got to go to the Hanoi Hilton,

Starting point is 01:25:54 which was the Vietnam prisoner camp prison. What was that like? It was, so it was pretty interesting because it's now a tourist attraction, but it's actually not, it's a prison that has become a tourist attraction. That prison was used before the, you know,

Starting point is 01:26:13 the Vietnam War. And what they have done now is they just have one small, room dedicated to what they would call the American War. And again, didn't know, it's similar to like, how, what emotions and like, do you feel like went into that one room. And again, I was just like angry because it was all propaganda. It was all lies. Like, they're like, look how well we treated the American prisoners.

Starting point is 01:26:39 Like, and like they were fed every day. They got exercise. It was just like a bunch of BS. And so I was pretty, you know, again, as an American, I was upset going into that room. that that was what was being told. And then the other cool thing about Vietnam, I was like the fun, you know, one of the fun stories. We go to a brewery one night and you ask, like, oh, it's like dollar beers.

Starting point is 01:27:04 You're like, all right, here's a dollar, give me a, like, which beer do you want? And they're like, ah, that one. And it's like, they come back with the 12 pack. You're like, oh, this. You're like, this amazing. Yeah, yeah. So, and then the other cool thing, the other surreal thing was like, Look, we, I had worked with some, like some of their senior officers.

Starting point is 01:27:25 It was like, yeah, I was a mig pilot in the, the American War, right? And so it was, again, now this was 40, 50 years later, whatever, yeah, 40 years after that war. And it was just, again, kind of surreal. It's like, look, you know, we were doing what our government was telling us to do. You guys were doing what your government was supposed to deal. And so I didn't, like, I didn't have any emotion about, like, hanging out with those guys. And it's like, yeah. Yeah, that's actually kind of cool.

Starting point is 01:27:49 Because it's like, that was a different generation, too, different time. And like to see that there could be, I don't know, some sort of like mended fences there where it's like, all right. Yeah. We both have some of the same goals now. Yeah. That gives you some hope. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:28:04 We did. We played volleyball with them. There you go. They were surprisingly good at volleyball. We would. Yeah. I don't know. They're good at volleyball.

Starting point is 01:28:14 Yeah. That was crazy. We got our asses kicked in volleyball like every Friday while we were with them. All right. That's. Yeah. That's where you're going to do some propaganda. You kick their ass.

Starting point is 01:28:22 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're not hoping. That's the start if you can actually lie. Yeah. So you, how long was the, it was Guam officially the? Yeah, we were in six months, like staged out of there. But again, those cool things.

Starting point is 01:28:35 I got to go to Vietnam, got to jump into the South China Sea. We ran. What were you doing jumping into the South China? It was training exercise. That was cool. So just like a proof of concept in terms of like, like, all right, you, get an alert and go do this and like, hey, are you ready to go? Like, jump with boats. It was fun. Got to do presidential detail for Obama in Hawaii. Again, it was like, it was a 180

Starting point is 01:29:02 from like being in combat operations in Afghanistan. So there's, you know, it was nice. And there wasn't, there were no live operations going on at this time that any seal platoon was doing. ISIS had kicked off, like had come back in Iraq, and SEAL Team 5, we had sent a troop to Iraq, but those guys didn't leave the wire. And so, like, I joke, like, as a, because again, there just wasn't, hey, the political will hadn't existed. They weren't sure exactly what they were going to do. You don't want to risk American lives. You know, as a SEAL, you never want your friends to have better deployments than you do.

Starting point is 01:29:43 And so a lot of our guys, like, oh, my God, like, are we going to? to miss out on the action that's going to happen in Iraq. And I was like, guys, like, nothing's going to happen and nothing, you know, you were that confident. You were that confident. You're, you say it confidently. You're not exactly sure. I was like, you know, there'll be like, in our new guys, right, they want to go to combat, right, who haven't experienced it. I was like, look, we'll see how it plays out. Like, I don't think we'll leave the wire. Those guys didn't leave the wire. And it was good. Actually, like, two years later, the same guys that I deployed with went back to Iraq and just absolutely laid waste to ISIS out there and it was awesome.

Starting point is 01:30:22 It was like, yeah, Mad Max type style stuff that they were doing. What do you mean mad Max? Like they were like because one of the big threats were these suicide vehicles, right? These are armored vehicles that had explosives and you would see ISIS just drive into convoys into positions, whatever it was. And so they would be our, you know, the seals would be in armored vehicles and you, sometimes get like, you know, a mad max chase where you had, you know, a suicide bomber and a vehicle trying to chase down these other guys as they're shooting up the vehicle.

Starting point is 01:30:55 So, yeah, really cool stories. And you weren't on that one? I was not on that one. Did you ever deploy to Iraq? Nope. No, never went to Iraq. Where else did you go? So it was twice to Afghanistan, once the Pacific.

Starting point is 01:31:05 And then I was on the ship, I went to the Arabian Gulf. Before we get to that, what was, when was the second Afghanistan deployment? 2013. So first one was in 2012. second one is summer 2013 so you go Afghanistan Guam Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan oh you did two straight in Afghanistan yeah so that's kind of what you were talking about earlier you were blending those two together with different missions one was seal team six with Afghanistan oh that's right I'm sorry so you're counting when you were a liaison with

Starting point is 01:31:34 team six I'm sorry I was thinking you were going through like when you were shield team seven okay and then what were you doing in the Arabian Peninsula that was on a ship we were doing amphibious operations. We had Marines with us. This was, again, that was 2008, 2009. Nothing too sexy. What made you want to get out of the SEALs? How many years were you into? So I was in the Navy seven years. I just wanted to do something else. You know, see what else there was in the world in life. Yeah. Yeah. So you had accomplished, you felt like you'd Accomplish a dream. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:09 The other thing is like, look, you, you everybody, every, if you're an officer in the SEAL teams, you live to become a platoon commander, right? That's what you want to do it. You want to lead a group of 16 Navy SEALs, no different than like Michael Bean in the movie, U.S. Navy SEALs, like, that's, you want to go do operations. And so I got to go and do that. I had no aspirations to become a SEAL team commander. And like, again, nothing, like respect the hell out of my, a lot of my friends now are SEAL team commanders.

Starting point is 01:32:43 And I'm very thankful for them staying in the Navy and doing that job. I just was not interested in staying in to become a SEAL team commander. Yeah. Were you already at that point, you know, as you're coming to this decision, like very, how do I want to say this? Like business-minded from a problem-solving perspective of you had seen so much of what goes into having effective warfare that you're, You're like, you know what, I could do something for that? Or did that come later? No, no, no, no.

Starting point is 01:33:10 It was, I'll say it's like, look, I've, I think, sometimes I think long term, right? It's like I wanted to be a Navy SEAL since I was 10 years old. Right. At the same time, I really tried to drown myself in the moment of like where I am and what I'm doing. And like, very, like, focused on that. And so, like, I had, it wasn't until. I had decided to leave and got accepted into business school that I was like, all right, let me think about what I can do next.

Starting point is 01:33:43 Like never had a, and like that was the whole, you know, six month journey of like reflection, excuse me, uh, itself. So you didn't have really any idea what you wanted to do. You were just, you were like this, this era of my life. I've done what I need to do. So let me figure out what's next completely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 01:34:00 Yeah. Where'd you go to business school? Uh, Harvard. Huh. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I don't know. There's not an easy way or good way to say it. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. What was Harvard like? You go from the Navy Shields to Harvard. It was the business school, right? I just want to like there's a difference like between the undergraduate and the business. The business school was a lot of fun. And it's like very, it was cool. It was awesome. And I think you have to go in with the right mentality. Like you can't be like, oh, like, you know, so there's some like immaturity, right? It's a bunch of people who.

Starting point is 01:34:35 who are 26, 27, 28, 29 years old, varying life experiences. I knew that not everybody was a, you know, a Navy SEAL or had a military experience there. And so you're just going to see things a little differently than those people. But I thought it was a ton of fun. Yeah. And you meet incredible friends. It's very international. And so it's awesome in like that sense.

Starting point is 01:34:58 It sounds like from what you described earlier coming off your first deployment, describing this, like you never really had a problem acclimating back. civilian life. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. Non-war theater life, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:11 And look, that's just been in mindset. I try to be very optimistic open about everything and not be condescending or like look at things in a, you know, negative light. And so, yeah, business school was, it was great. Yeah. And at what point did you start to foundationalize, if I could make up a word there? Yeah. The idea for what became Shield AI. So I was deployed to Guam as a seal.

Starting point is 01:35:39 And in December of 2014, I found out I got accepted into business school. And then that's when I started to say, okay, what do I do next with my life with this, what do I want to do. Am I going to do, you know, work at a company? Am I going to do, you know, all the sexy words that you hear about at business school, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, banking, eye banking, you know, you're like, oh, this is, world's my oyster. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Management consulting. But no, I was, again, I was inspired by entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 01:36:15 And so probably spent a month thing about what I wanted to do, decided I wanted to do something entrepreneurial, call this March of 2015. It's like, all right, I'm going to do something entrepreneurial. And then it was, what do I want to do? Between April, 2000, May 2015, decided it was, sorry, April, 2015 decide it was going to be AI and autonomy and then decide like, all right, I'm going to solve military problems, this problem of warfare.

Starting point is 01:36:42 Okay. Before we get to the military part, that's a really early time when you look at the timeline now of someone, especially like who's just coming into something new, like you're coming into the business world now. You've been in a totally different world. That's a really early time for someone who have made such a strong bet on like, I'm going into AI. What made you, because like now, obviously AI is everywhere.

Starting point is 01:37:06 And we see this is like, you know, the thing. But what all the way back in 2015 made you say, boom, that's where I'm going? Yeah. So one, credit to my older brother, who's my other co-founder, he was an entrepreneur. When I was trying to figure out what to do next, he's like, Brandon, you should read books on AI, right? It was like, AI is going to be this really cool thing. And he's an electrical engineer. I'm a mechanical engineer.

Starting point is 01:37:29 And read. So it's like, I was just reading. as much as possible in my free time on this deployment. Super Intelligence was the book. And it was like, yeah, yeah. And so, because that's what Elon's like. Elon must like read superintelligence. Like everybody's talking about it.

Starting point is 01:37:46 That book changed my life. Yeah. And so that was kind of like an aha moment for me. And also just reading a lot, you know, about what people were talking about. These are the deep mind. It was Musk, Bezos, all these guys just talking about this thing. And so I was just reading as much as I could on this stuff. And I'd say the aha moment for me was like, okay, for the first time in human history, like the computers are powerful enough.

Starting point is 01:38:12 The sensors are cheap enough. We are going to have autonomous systems that can perceive their world, think about their world, and take action in the world. I was like, holy crap. And again, this is probably like March April 2015. I was like, the world is going to be full of robots. And I actually like 100% believe like I believe that in, you know, April of 2015. There, I think actually 100% autonomous systems will outnumber human beings on the planet. Like if you look at every autonomous system that will be built in the next, you know, 25, 50 years.

Starting point is 01:38:50 Is that scary? I think it's cool. I'm an optimist about it. You read superintelligence. Yeah. There are some things that I worry about. mainly about like purpose and work and what like you know that's actually probably the thing that I worry most about because I do think people need purpose they need work um but you know like in a

Starting point is 01:39:16 world where robots do everything for you know yeah perhaps like what I think could be scary is like we all end up like the fat people on Wally right but yeah no no really it's stuff like that I guess we have Ozempic so it's like all right yeah right after you right yeah yeah so you know and and just on a broad scale though looking at AI as you and I were talking a little bit before camera it's a lot to me like the internet in so many ways because it's the next main foundational change in how human beings interact with technology but it also has some of the same patterns where it will have the the valleys to go with the peaks and what I mean by that is with the internet you had the dot-com bubble

Starting point is 01:39:59 because everyone got in on the buzzword the internet and they didn't even think about what value they were adding. And so with AI, it finally like seemed to come into the public site guys in 2023 after years of like guys like you and me had read super intelligence and we're like, where the fuck? Why are people not talking about this? But then it does. And now it feels like everyone just slaps the name AI on something. Yeah. And we'll probably have some sort of similar bubble because there's a lot of places that aren't necessarily using it for the real. intended purposes.

Starting point is 01:40:31 Yeah. The one thing that I would say that I think is different. We're smarter just as like human beings now than we were back in 1994, 94, 95. In terms of like how humans think about technology, I'm not saying we're like, you know, twice as smart, but like as investors and capital allocators think about resources, I think there's small, let me say there's a lot of dumb capital allocators in the world. But like, you know, there's some smart money still that, like, yeah, is allocating it. And yeah, I think there is, look, I don't think about it is, it's not going to be like the dot-com bubble.

Starting point is 01:41:11 It's like, I'm not saying that like some things and some companies and some investors might overinflate things. But I think, like, I'm super bullish on the space. The one thing, like I'll say, it was pretty cool. I recently asked Grock four because you were just comparing it to the internet. I said, hey, estimate the economic value that the internet generated, you know, as it relates to global, cumulative global GDP from 2000 to 2025. Oh, that's a good question. What do you think it is?

Starting point is 01:41:43 A lot. You're saying all 25 years put together? All 25 years. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't even guess. Yeah, it estimated $150 trillion. Yeah. I then asked that, okay, 25 years, 2025 to 2050, estimate the economic impact that AI,

Starting point is 01:41:59 and autonomy is going to have on the world, you know, as it relates to cumulative GDP. I told you what the internet was. What do you think AI and autonomy? It's estimate for AI and autonomy. Times 10? Times 30. So, four and a half quadrillion dollar economic impact. Like, and I actually, I do believe that, and it is crazy.

Starting point is 01:42:22 Now, what was GROC, to the best of your knowledge? I don't even know how you find this out, but what was it basing that on? I don't know, the world's knowledge base. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Everything in the world, yeah, as it thinks about that stuff. It's a weird infinity loop because AI currently relies on it. It is a little biased in that it is an AI telling me how much value it's going to generate. They're not sentient yet that we know of.

Starting point is 01:42:48 And they're basing all information based on man-made input information and man is still certain to fall. Yeah, but it like those systems, the grocs, the clothes, the clothes, the, Claude of the world, the chat GPTs of the world, they are able to extract that information and make predictions and forecasts. And like, yes, they're basing it on all the data that is available in the world. And then they're saying, okay, let me make an estimate. So it's like, you know, we'll see. But I, again, I think it's, you know, if we think about what the internet has done for

Starting point is 01:43:20 the world and like, you're like, oh, this is actually going to be 30 times bigger. Heck, if it's 10 times bigger, like, it's fucking crazy. So, and I just wanted to be a part of that. It was like how I thought about it back in 2015. Early, that's what I'm saying. Like, you were thinking about it early. That's the first time I was really thinking about AI was like 2018. I thought that was ahead of the curve.

Starting point is 01:43:40 Clearly not. But, you know. You were. Maybe a little. But like 2015 is pretty crazy because, I mean, I would say Internet 2.0 was still kind of trying to mature at that point. It had not reached maturity. Yeah, yeah. Then they had like, yeah, was it Internet 2.0 or Internet 3.0?

Starting point is 01:43:59 Well, now it's supposed to be like 3.0, but people don't really say that. They're referring to the AI age. I think. I don't know. People can help me on the comments. But like, what do you think AI is? And here's what I mean by that, because that's kind of a loaded question. It's like, here we have this thing in the palm of our hands where we're creating an intelligence that is designed to read all of our intelligence to eventually be able to think for itself to the point that it's very hard to even conceive this. But you could end up making something that, is, I don't know if this is the right way to say it, but like consciously sentient at some point. And the question for me becomes, does that mean that like we are the bootloaders to AI itself? And AI is like the next frontier of humanity itself? Or is it strictly a technological tool that we need to learn how to control? It's a good question. So one, I think it's like it can be both. one, I think it is a technological tool that we need to adapt, work with, and use.

Starting point is 01:45:08 It is, you know, if we were to extrapolate, like, what an AGI becomes and then when artificial superintelligence becomes, then it gets a little, you know, you want to be able to work with it and use it as a tool for good. When you asked, like, what I think, what AI is, for me, it's a system's ability to perceive the world, think about, think and learn about the world, and then act upon the world. And that AI, like chat GPT, GROC4, it's perceiving what you write. It's thinking about it. And then it's spitting out a response and it's learning from all the different inputs that are, it's perceiving in the world. For a self-driving car, it's perceiving in the world.

Starting point is 01:45:50 It is thinking about what to do in that world and then taking action in the world. Same thing for our unmanned systems, our drones that we're building. They perceive the world. They think about it. and then they take action, which is no different than your eye. We perceive the world, think about the world, take action in the world. What about when it starts to think it's smarter than other people? And I am thinking of some stereotypical examples in my head, but they're worth bringing up. We know the famous one with, I believe it was Facebook back in maybe 2015, 2016, check me on that people, where they quietly invented these two AI systems.

Starting point is 01:46:27 And immediately the AIs, they realized invented their own. own language to communicate with each other that no one else could understand and the Facebook engineers looked at each other like, oh, fuck, and just leaned over and unplugged it and just walked away real slowly? Yeah. What about in the future where you can unplug something like that? Is that a concern? Look, I think you have to safeguard.

Starting point is 01:46:46 Yeah. To the extent possible, you got to build safeguards into it. How do we do that? Like, to the point, like, there, it's hard to do something, hard to do it with something where it is an incredibly smart system. And I wouldn't actually, I'll tell you, like, you know, on military systems, so the way to do it, like, as you engineer, like, as we think about a military system, is like you can use deterministic methods to basically say on off on, you know, whatever this is going to be. And so that's like, like, I'm, I don't know if these LLM companies like, you know, the GROC fours or the chat GPTs have safeguards that can be deterministic and engineered. around it. But that's how like you would do it at a simplistic level. I do think it's like,

Starting point is 01:47:38 look, you know, the electrical engineering in this building is, you know, it's sophisticated enough, but there's an on-off switch at the end of the day. And so it's like there can be an on-off switch for, you know, our power grid, our power plants. Those are complex systems. Not saying they're thinking systems, but it's like they're complex systems. And so you figure out how to turn on those on-off switches. That's what scared me, though, about Bostrom's book, because for people that haven't read that, it's a heavy read. It's not like a fun read. I'd read like a chapter and pace my house and think about the meaning of life. But, you know, he would paint out very matter-factly and almost like just problem-solvingistically, if you will, these problems would be like, well, if you invented a

Starting point is 01:48:26 paperclip and the paperclip only did this and then it invented a bunch of other paperclips and then everyone destroyed each other in paper clips because you didn't solve for this paperclip, you're suddenly like, wait a second, if I miss, it was essentially a million decision trees and you're like, if I account for 99 out of 1,000 decision trees, just missing the last one could mean the end of humanity, hypothetically. So when you, that's what I'm saying, though. When you talk about these on-off switch, I understand a power grid, and this isn't taking to account cyber warfare, by the way, so that's a big asterisk there, with a power grid, Z on off, right?

Starting point is 01:49:02 But if you need on off for AI across 1,000 variables, 10,000 variables, 100,000 variables, million variables, at some point, like man made mistakes come in and the machine that'll make that mistake. The other thing, like, you know, I just thought of this live, the other thing that you could do is like, you want to align it to humanity's interests. And basically you just say, hey, can you come up with safeguards, you know, as you, develop yourself, right? And, you know, basically you'd have an AI come up with the safeguards to protect against itself. So to the point where I think like artificial general intelligence, artificial super intelligence, it will solve problems that we don't know how to solve. This could

Starting point is 01:49:46 be one of those problems that it's also that you would want to actually, I would actually claim you'd want to start it early, you know, in terms of the history of AI to say, hey, figure out how to solve this problem and safeguard humanity from the negative. consequences that could happen from an artificial superintelligence that would also require sane morally well-intentioned people always being in the seat to make those decisions and I have to say you and I are talking during the time where we're seeing all these Epstein files come out and we see that there is a class of people which includes a lot of technocrats unfortunately who speak with a nonchalance and disdain and moral ethical and even though they have none of these things and complete

Starting point is 01:50:29 innovation level superiority about all other human beings and feel they speak in a way when you read these emails where it's like they clearly feel completely infallible yeah and that is a perfect recipe for disaster because it is so important who has their hands on the levers they're not all going to be you know brandon sangs who are like well-intentioned and and and trying to do the right things you were going to have people that actually the worst thing is they actually think they're the good guy and they're not and that's what keeps me up at night because those are the people who could have the final decision i'll put a name on it i don't trust fucking sam altman as far as i can throw that guy i mean he definitely had it out of the dude in my opinion this there's something going on with

Starting point is 01:51:16 with that guy that died you know i i don't know if that was sam or whatever i'm not saying that but you know the way that he talks about the world and then he's building a fucking bill billionaire bunker while he's doing it. And he has a go bag everywhere he goes. That's, that frightens me a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I, look, I, I agree that there are some morally questionable people in life that you wish had different experiences in life. And so, yeah, it matters who builds these technologies and who is at the helm of these technologies. And I think that it's like, look, yeah, that is like, like, and I think, like, it, and I think, You look at like, I don't know, yeah, I'm not trying to get, like, Twitter before Elon Musk to go there.

Starting point is 01:52:03 And it's like, oh, you just saw a company that was like turning people off. Yep. Scary. Yeah. It's like, yeah. So if we think that, I think it's a fair call out to say humanity is not like better than having, you know, we will have bad apples. Yes. And it's, you know, yeah.

Starting point is 01:52:23 And that's the thing. It's a fair concern. Is it enough for, we've always progressed. as humanity goes over time. Good wins. It's happened over and over. But in the pathway of good winning, it's not like this. There's moments where evil really wins in a big way and then good rises up. And that's the meaning of life in a way. The situations I worry about and perhaps AI is one of them is where evil gets a moment to win and then good never gets a chance to stand on the court again because the court got blown up. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's a concern for me.

Starting point is 01:52:55 I can understand the concern. I'm an optimist. Me too, but I have to ask these questions, you know? Yeah. No, look, and I believe that good will win at the end of the day also. So, yeah. But like I said, fair concern. Yeah, and I do agree. And some people call me naive to do that, but I won't apologize for being an optimist because we've done so many amazing things as humanity. And I'd like to think that with all the things we know now, there's enough of us out there that can help guide these things. in the right direction. But who did you, I forgot to ask you this earlier,

Starting point is 01:53:28 but it's kind of relevant to the topic we're talking about. Like when you were growing up outside of like the Navy SEALs themselves and like that idea, who were your heroes? Who did you look up to? Yeah. Look, my dad. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:53:42 I mean, looked up to like, you know, my older brother, my older sister, just as like someone, you know, would. What made your dad your hero? And again, I don't think, I like actively thought about it at the time. But like, you know, it was the coolest person I knew, right? He was in charge of the household. He was providing for the family. He, you know, and like when I reflect back on it, he's still a hero of mine to this day. He was a, you know, first generation immigrant. He was born in Taiwan. My grandparents, my grandmother, my grandfather, they fled China when the

Starting point is 01:54:19 communist took over. He, my grandfather, served as a diplomat for the, the Taiwanese government, the nationalist government in South America. So my dad grew up in South America. And he immigrated to the states for college. And, you know, for him, he's just lived the American dream. And, like, he worked hard to do that. What do you do?

Starting point is 01:54:44 So he was, one, he was an electrical engineer, worked for Beckett. largest construction company in the world, met my mom there. They got married. And when I say like the American, like then, you know, worked for another company called OHM, then became CEO of a small company called Foss Maritime. I don't even know if these companies exist anymore. Then decided to buy a small business at the age of 50,

Starting point is 01:55:12 small engineering construction business out of Orlando, Florida, right? And it's he, he's got four, you know, four kids, you know, happily married, has a, you know, nice small business in Orlando that has provided for the family. And it's not like, it's, you know, when I say small business, I mean small. Like, but he did the damn thing. Yeah, he did the damn thing. Exactly. And so it's like, look, in what he would always tell us, what my aunts would always tell us to like, Brandon, you have no idea how, like, you are to have been born in the United States. You have won the lottery by being born in the

Starting point is 01:55:51 United States. Like the world is your oyster, right? And these are my parents, my grandparent, or my dad, and my aunts and my grandparents, they had seen the worst of the world, right? They had seen communist take over all of their property, all of their belongings. They had had to flee a war zone, right? They had then, you know, grew up in, you know, South America, a foreign place, and then came to the United States with quite literally nothing. And, you know, to see what, you know, I'll say like, you know, great credit to like my grandfather, but it's like, yeah, I was always like, hey, the next generation should do better than the current generation. And I think that, that to me is like the American dream.

Starting point is 01:56:33 Like, I want my kids to, you know, do better than me and just live a fulfilled life and live the American dream. That's awesome. Yeah. You know what, this is actually, I don't know if I've ever had a chance to ask someone this before. I've never really even thought about this, but you made me think about it based on the story of your dad as it relates to China. Does your dad consider himself Chinese or Taiwanese? I think for a long time, he's like it was Chinese. And then like he probably maybe like a decade ago.

Starting point is 01:57:02 He's like, he's like, ah, screw. Like, he's like, I'm Taiwanese. And then actually it's like, look, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of cool. Yeah. You know, it's... You have to be transracial. There you go.

Starting point is 01:57:15 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he's, you know, and look, I used to also probably like growing up, right? It was like, oh, my dad's Chinese-American. I'm half-Chinese, half-American. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to want. Yeah, I was just, I'm half Taiwanese, half-American. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:57:34 What do you think of that? I mean, it's been like the, in some ways, like, not to be morbid here, but the guillotine hanging over, you know? is China going to come in and invade Taiwan and completely take away their any autonomy they have? Is that something you're concerned about right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I'm concerned about it. China is a technological industrial powerhouse.

Starting point is 01:57:56 Chairman Xi has said that he is going to reunify Taiwan. I think it's a – and look, this is the other thing. I don't know what the probabilities are. But at the end of the day, it's existential for that. that country. And so it's like you take existential things very seriously, you know, existential threats very seriously. And I've had the opportunity to work closely because, again, Shield AI, our mission protect service members and civilians with artificially intelligent systems. Like we exist to help deter conflict. I've been to war. I never want to see my kids go to war. I never, you know, it's a really

Starting point is 01:58:37 awful thing. Our tagline at Shield AI is the greatest victory requires no war. And so we've been working really closely with the Taiwanese because, you know, my objective is to help deter a conflict. You want to buy diplomacy another day. So, yeah. That's interesting, though, too. We touched on this earlier, but it's so fascinating that when you become a Navy SEAL and stuff like that or anyone in the military, you get in, you train so hard, you are training for war, and then you want to be there when it happens.

Starting point is 01:59:09 But then you're out and you're like, I definitely don't want my kids ever going. and we're going to try to avoid, which I agree with, by the way. But that's an interesting, like, psychological jump. It is, it is interesting. Like, my grandfather fought for the nationalist army against the Japanese in World War II. And, like, my dad's like, I want to be a fighter pilot. And my grandfather's like, hell no, you're not, you know, and like, you're, it's like, and he saw atrocities, right? My grandfather saw the rape of Nanking.

Starting point is 01:59:35 And so, uh, he saw that. Yeah, yeah, like, and he's not alive today, but like, yeah, he saw that. He fought a long, long, that was a hard war against the Japanese. Can you pull that up, deep? That's that. This is history that gets forgotten. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

Starting point is 01:59:51 A lot of history gets forgotten. So he would tell you about that as a kid, though. Actually, great book, recommendation. Last Boat out of Shanghai is a phenomenal book. It's like a feel, a grateful book. Like, you'll feel grateful about any, yeah. It's going to say. Yeah, the Nanking messenger.

Starting point is 02:00:08 Is it pronounced Nanking or Nanjing? I suck at Mandarin. Yeah, it says formally romanticizes Nanking's and that's why. The Nanking massacre was the mass rape and murder of Chinese civilians, noncombatants, and prisoners of war by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanking, the capital of the Republic of China. It took place immediately after the battle in Nanking and retreat of the National Revolutionary Army during the second Sino-Japanese War. After the outbreak of the war in July 1937, the Japanese had pushed quickly through China

Starting point is 02:00:36 after capturing Shanghai in November. As the Japanese marched on Nanking, they committed violent atrocity. and a terror campaign, including killing contests and massacres of entire village. How did your grandfather survive this? A lot of people survive. Like a lot of people, obviously lots of people were killed, but like lots of people, you know, survived. Yeah, they were built different in all the wrong ways, the Japanese. So, but yeah.

Starting point is 02:00:59 So anyway, like, again, my dad wanted, and so my grandfather forbid him from serving in the military. Yeah. But like, and look, I would, if my kids want to say, hey, I want to join the military, I'd be super supportive of it. I'm going to support them no matter what they do. But yeah, I don't know. I've seen how awful war is, how destructive it is.

Starting point is 02:01:18 And like, I don't want them to, you know, have to go through that. Like as a parent. And then, you know, to your point, even it's like, you know, growing up, loved war movies, right? Love Black Hawk down. Love saving private Ryan. I can't watch it. And I just like not interested in watching that stuff anymore. Oh, you won't watch it.

Starting point is 02:01:38 Yeah. It's like, yeah, I have to like sit down and like, all right. like I'm gonna yeah again it's crazy to me it's like I love those movies growing up why is that you do because you don't struggle again you just connect with it in a in a deeply personal level and so yeah just don't want to you know see that yeah yeah now we're talking about China though as it relates to this technology underground warfare that's going on which is certainly top of mind and something I look at a lot did you ever read AI Superpowers by Kai Fu Lee?

Starting point is 02:02:12 I have not read it. Someone has delivered that book to me. Yeah. Now it's like 7, 8 years old, but it's still extremely relevant, really well written. You'll definitely like that a lot. But that would open my eyes a lot because it's essentially about the AI technology race

Starting point is 02:02:28 between China and the U.S. And we know China has stolen massive IP from us, particularly since the year 2000, but even dating before that. We know that there's been a one-way street in and no way street out. when it comes to our companies versus theirs. We know that their companies, even if they are economically free to make a lot of money,

Starting point is 02:02:46 they are directly tied to the government and have to share everything. And we know that if a government like that, which, you know, I got my own complaints about my government, of which they're very valid, you know, that one's really bad over there. We know that if people like that who are that power hungry in that way got a hold of, I don't know, sentient AI or something like that first, that they may not put guardrails or on it like maybe, maybe some of our, I don't want to say for sure, but some of our people would. Is that something that keeps you up at night a lot as someone in the space? The old saying is like, I try to keep other people up at night.

Starting point is 02:03:23 And the other one, as is Navy SEAL, you're like, I own the fucking night. I am the one here. Yeah. Yeah. But look, look, I think it's a challenge. I think it's one of the challenges like of our time. And I think it's very consequential in terms of the United States needs to leave. and win. I think we are winning, but it's like, it's, I think it's very arrogant to say,

Starting point is 02:03:46 because you're winning, you will continue to win. Right. Which I actually think, you know, yeah, the U.S. fell into that trap, right? After the fall of the Soviet Union, we said, nothing can touch us. I agree. And, you know, we got very, yeah, relaxed versus hungry and competitive. And so, at like the national level, obviously, you have, you know, we're still, economic powerhouse. No, I know what you're saying. You're right. You got to win at every facet.

Starting point is 02:04:14 That's right. You know. So, yeah. It's also like people are complacent in the sense that we, you know, we've had some horrible terrorist attacks on soil. We had 9-11 right over here. We had Pearl Harbor 80 years ago and stuff. But it's like, looking since the war of 1812 when it comes to full-scale invasions,

Starting point is 02:04:31 like we've never been invaded and it shows. And other countries around the world, no. Yeah. Them borders. That's that, you know, it's funny. And again, I appreciate. that you reference history. It's like people forget that it was only, I don't know,

Starting point is 02:04:46 80, 85 years ago that a madman tried to take over the world, right? Before that, Napoleon, you know, had ambitions of taking over the world. You know, before that, Genghis Khan had ambitions of, you know, the British Empire was, you know, took over the world. Before that, like, Genghis Khan, before that, Alexander the Great. Like, I don't think it's, to your point, there's, like, there's a handful of human beings who have ego and who are not good people who hold the same values that you and I do, who are, you know, they have a negative sense of ambition.

Starting point is 02:05:23 Like, you know, put, you know, the Putin's and cheese of the world into that camp, right? If they thought they could take over the world, I wouldn't doubt that they would try to take over the world. So, yeah. I agree. You got to, you can never underestimate your. geopolitical enemy but you also have to know what they're capable of and you got to think of it as you know you got to think of the worst case scenarios yeah but anyway so you you get out of harvard business school

Starting point is 02:05:52 did you open up shield right away so i started before business school yeah so i did business school in the company at the same time okay and what was the what was i i want you to explain like what your product is or what it started as maybe if that's more relevant and what was kind of to like putting the square peg in a square hole from a warfare perspective that led you to that idea. Yeah. Can we take a restroom break? Oh yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:19 We'll be right back. All right. So we're back. Shield AI. Where the idea come from? The idea for Shield AI. One. So I wanted to be part of, you know, I was asking myself in 2015, what was going to be the next internet, right?

Starting point is 02:06:39 I grew up in the age of the internet. I was thinking, and again, this was after like, this was not while I was actively operating in the SEAL teams. It's like, but you have this period of reflection. And it's like, oh, it would have been an amazing thing to have been a part of Netscape, AOL.com, Yahoo.com, Amazon.com, like, and like get to build those companies. What is going to be the next internet, right? Decided it was going to be AI and autonomy.

Starting point is 02:07:06 at the same time, typical entrepreneurs problem like, hey, what problems can I solve? The other thing, and I think I told you before we started, like, looked up to Elon Musk. He was talking about this at the time. He was like, I'd work on three problems that he thought were the greatest problems for humanity, space travel, sustainable energy. And at the time, it was the Internet, right? Which was like PayPal, Tesla, Solar City, and SpaceX. And I was like, what the hell is Elon not working at that I can go work on? And it was, oh, you know, it's a big problem that's plagued humanity for 4,000, 5,000 years.

Starting point is 02:07:45 It's warfare, right? And you and I were talking about it's like, look, there's like these we do well. And then there's like a, you know, a bump. I caught a bump, right? But like, it's always set humans back for, you know, whenever our war kicks off. And so one said, hey, like, I'm uniquely suited. I've got a professional warrior as a seal, studied warfare as a seal. That's like the other thing people might not appreciate.

Starting point is 02:08:16 It's like, yeah, you do all the cool training, but like I was, I was a professional warrior. I was reading Klausowitz, reading Sun Tsu. Yeah, is that you on your own time or they were teaching that too? Well, both. Like, you get issued the books, you read the books, other small unit tactics handbook. Like, you're reading. Like, again, it was. As a seal, you want to be the best seal that you can be.

Starting point is 02:08:38 And you're saying, how can I become a better seal every single day? And so this was another source of professional development is like, all right, educate yourself, reading spec ops by McCraven. By the way, you're in New Jersey. We pronounce it's sun to zoo here. Okay. I got to get the dialogue down for it. Like I said, my Mandarin's crap. Well, that's good.

Starting point is 02:08:59 You were reading them. I mean, he had some bars for sure. Yeah. So, um, so was he, you, uniquely, I was like, hey, I can actually go, I can do AI and autonomy to work on the problem of warfare, right? And it's like, and again, I think it's our tagline at ShieldAI, the greatest victory requires no war. It's this idea of deterrence, this idea, right? I'm big believer. I've lived it, peace through strength. And, you know, aspirationally would love to end war, right? I don't think

Starting point is 02:09:29 that, like, Shield AI is not going to do that on its own. Like, I'm not that arrogant or ignorant. It's like there's going to require advances in diplomacy, economics, you know, human rights, like all these other things have to happen for us to live in a world without war. And obviously, you know, but that's like that's the aim. That's the big audacious goal at the end of the day. And again, I don't think that necessarily happens in my generation. It might not happen in the next generation, but in the same way, right? Elon wants to colonize Mars, I'd love to see a world without war. And I think it's a problem that's worth pursuing.

Starting point is 02:10:08 I agree. And I think, you know, for me, Shield AI is a way of contributing towards that mission, towards that goal. So what is the product? Yeah. All right. So Shield AI, our missions to protect service members, civilians with artificially intelligent systems. In pursuit of that mission, we are building the world's best AI pilot and next generation aircraft. Okay.

Starting point is 02:10:29 Easiest way to think about an AI pilot is self-driving technology. for unmanned systems. What Tesla is doing with self-driving cars, what Waymo is doing with self-driving cars, we are taking the same technical approaches and applying it to military systems. That enables military systems to operate while GPS and communications are jammed,

Starting point is 02:10:49 which is like now everywhere on the battlefield. It enables the execution of missions completely autonomously at superhuman performance, and it enables the concept of swarming or teeming. And so, and then on the next generation aircraft side, we're building, we build two different aircraft. We start off with a quadcopter, AI pilot on a quadcopter, go inside buildings, tunnel systems. Really cool product. No longer work on that.

Starting point is 02:11:18 Just the bigger problems we can solve, bigger markets with by working on some more consequential systems. But I do say like that, like I love the quadcopter because there's a mission set that I was very familiar with. And maybe one day I'll build a fourth generation quadcopter. But the aircraft that we build, we build something called the V-bat, which is 100- The V-Bat. The V-Bat. Yeah, if you want to pull it up.

Starting point is 02:11:44 Yeah, to give people a sense of this. That sounds like a fucking superhero movie. Yeah. Yeah. D. Okay. Yeah, there you go. There's the V-Bat.

Starting point is 02:11:57 So I want to say it's about 160 pounds. I want to say it's also nine feet tall. But the easiest way to think about this aircraft, it's a miniature predator drone, miniature Reaper drone. So those drones cost $40 million. VAT roughly a million bucks does the exact same mission as predator drones, Reaper drones, which is the mission's mission of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting. Last year, boom, boom. So you're basically flying around looking for targets for long duration.

Starting point is 02:12:27 I didn't know if the last one when you were saying targeting meant you actually drop in the payload. Yeah, sorry. like, yes, you're dropping ordinance on it. In some cases, like in Ukraine, we're dropping ordinance. When I say, I'll talk a bit about that when I say we. Like the VBAT has dropped ordinance before, most of the fires are coming off board, not exactly on board. And so last year, we interdicted 100,000 pounds of narcotics in the Caribbean Sea.

Starting point is 02:12:55 We destroyed about half a billion dollars worth of Russian assets in Russia-Ukraine conflict. All right, wait, let's start with the, with the drug stuff. Yeah, yeah. First of all, so you're working with the United States government to do that? Yeah. On the contract? We work the Navy and the Navy Marine Corps and U.S. Coast Guard.

Starting point is 02:13:15 What does that look like, like when you're saying you're going after these boats? So, look, so V-Battlefly for 12 plus hours. We will launch it from a Coast Guard ship. It'll start. You do personally. Yeah, me, no. No, no, I mean, no, I mean like the. company like you guys handle. Oh yeah, yeah. For that contract, we deploy personnel on board

Starting point is 02:13:38 right. The actual. That's what that's what I'm trying. It's called contractor own contractor operated. It's it's a type of contracting that the U.S. military does. In the ideal world, and there's reasons why they do that one. There's like won't get into the details of that because it's not that exciting. So our people will launch a VBAT. They will, go search what we would call an area of interest in A-O-I, and these are large geographic areas. You know, it can be 50 miles by 50 miles, 100 miles, 100 miles. They're very, very large areas. And they're looking for targets.

Starting point is 02:14:16 How fast does it move? It's flying at about 55 knots. It's slow, right? This is, again, you think predators not very fast either. This thing is designed, and we'll talk about fast with the expat. But this thing is designed to stay up in the... sky for a long time and look for targets. Once it finds a target, like in the U.S. Coast Guard instance, the Coast Guard will launch

Starting point is 02:14:39 a helicopter because a helicopter, so V-BATs flying for 12 hours, helicopter can only fly for two hours. They'll launch a helicopter with a sniper. Sorry, I have to call, the Coast Guard's trained me to call them Marksmen. The Coast Guard doesn't have snipers. They have Marksmen. Tomato tomato. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:14:58 And that marksman will shoot out the engine. on one of these drug running vessels. One of the cool things. Shoot out the engine. Yeah. We actually have the engine covers. We have a bunch of Yamaha engine covers with bullet holes in them that the Coast Guard gives us. So you just leave the drug guy stranded.

Starting point is 02:15:13 Yeah. Yeah. No. So then, yeah, there's the next part. Then the Coast Guard ship shows up after some period of time. And they'll send a boarding party to, you know, take all the drugs off, take, I think I have to call them detainees. I think I use the word prisoners. And I'm not allowed to call them prison.

Starting point is 02:15:30 You can't, I mean, this is kind of good. Like, it is what it is. Yeah, yeah. And then they burn the ship. Which is cool. Yeah. No, yeah, yeah. So that's what we are doing with the U.S. Coast Guard in Ukraine.

Starting point is 02:15:46 Again, not that different. It's, we're looking for targets. Every operation, GPS and communications is jammed. And then what they'll do is they'll use a lot of drugs. a lot of drones against said target. So, or a lot, like, we'll fire high Mars missiles, like, that are off board. They'll fire one-way attack drones. We'll do, like, we've seen everything.

Starting point is 02:16:12 Unmanned surface vessels. If you actually Google, Black Sea oil rig, Ukraine in, you know, November of 2025, VBAT was the intelligence surveillance for constant targeting asset for that operation. That's like, you know, that was a, that was a public. level-sized operation. But we're operating. Like I just check my phone. They did an operation just, you know, that we completed while we were doing this podcast.

Starting point is 02:16:38 Yeah, yeah. So. Yeah, Ukraine's basically like total drone warfare. Yeah. In a way, like the skies are just ruled by it's yeah, it's so strange. You won't see it under if you go Google V-Bat. But if you do just unmet, you just do Black Sea oil rig Ukraine.

Starting point is 02:16:53 Black Sea oil, drone on the end? Yeah, just Black Sea oil rig Ukraine and go to like Google News. let's see what happens Ukrainian drone All right let's hit that two days ago It was the one back November

Starting point is 02:17:05 Ukrainian Yeah All right Let's grab that Ukrainian robot boats Hit Russian Black Sea Oil Terminal It was a follow-up strike

Starting point is 02:17:14 To a damaging attack Hitting Twaps 10 days ago There are unconfirmed reports Ukraine also launch Its big Flamingo cruise missile At the port That's a nice name Okay so armed forces of Ukraine

Starting point is 02:17:27 overnight Sunday to Monday launched amphibious and airborne kamikaze drone. Yeah. So the drones are sacrificing their lives. Basically, we're doing all the intelligence, battlefield damage assessment, reconnaissance on these targets. And again, because V-BAT can't carry drone boats and we can't carry, you know, 20 of these one-way attack drones. They're just coming from off-board. But in the same way that, you know, Predator would target or we would use other aircraft to target. these sites, like that's what VBET's doing.

Starting point is 02:18:00 It's finding these things. Now, it's using AI, though. Yeah. Yeah. So the AI pilot, again, oh, sorry. The AI pilot enables it to navigate while GPS and communications are jammed. That's what we're doing in Russia, Ukraine. And that is singular.

Starting point is 02:18:17 There are not other long endurance, ISR and targeting platforms operating there. There's actually, I don't think there are other companies in the world that are operating while the GPS and communications are jammed. The way that, you know, the Ukrainians, they'll put fiber optics on their one-way attack drones, like fiber, sorry, fiber cables, right? But like those, you can't, they're not, they don't have fiber cables that are like 10 kilometers long. And so we're operating at distances over 150 kilometers away. We're operating at very far distances.

Starting point is 02:18:48 But the jamming problem is very, very real in Russia, Ukraine. So right now, as we well know, even without this, there's real. There's real wars happening in the world and like they're ongoing and it kind of is what it is. The goal of your company is to help prevent wars and stuff. Right now, you have to support them though effectively. Yeah, to be clear, it's like, look, if Ukraine had put up a thousand V-bats on their border before Putin invaded, it would have forced the Russians to rethink their calculus, right? Why do you say that? Because they would basically say, okay, we know every single one of these aircraft is.

Starting point is 02:19:25 tied back to a weapon system. They would try to jam them. They wouldn't be able to get jammed. And basically you're saying, ah, do I really, is today the day that we invade, right? Because they're able to target, you know, our systems. We're not able to jam them. It's super expensive, you know, to shoot these things down if they can even find them. And that's what I mean when it's like, that is just the idea of peace through strength. When you show yourself as a hard target, again, not that different than like when I was, we were worried about green on blue in Afghanistan. And like, I would go into a meeting with our Afghan partners, but I'd have, I would be a hard target because I showed up with three Navy SEALs fully armed.

Starting point is 02:20:03 People don't attack. And so that's what we're trying to do. Yeah. Okay. So right now, though, it's targeting and finding so that something else can come in and do anything if it has to. Obviously, there's a lot of drones that are main that do come in and do that. And then we have manpower, like helicopters or actual people in the army who's job at

Starting point is 02:20:24 500-pound bombs on things the V-BAT has seen. Right, that the V-BAT sees. Are you developing anything that would also drop the payload, too? V-BAT has dropped munitions, but it's not a commercialized capability. Okay. But again, even, and I try to steer customers towards this, I'm like, look, you know, point to this operation that, like, you had 20 different types of munitions being used on it, a flamingo missile.

Starting point is 02:20:49 First I actually heard of that. Unmanned surface vessels. It's like the number of offboard munitions are numerous that you in like it didn't make sense for you know, for us to try and build a system that could carry all these things just because they're widely available. And what, you know, one of the things that General McChrystal in Afghanistan would used to talk about, he's like, intelligence drives operations. He would be like, look, we have enough munitions, but we need targeting packages to actually

Starting point is 02:21:19 know what to hit with these munitions. And so, and that's again, something, you know, harkableness. talking back to my time in the SEAL teams, it was like, all right, Intel is driving the operations. Every single one of our missions, like there was the amount of effort that went into a mission, there was 10 times the amount of effort developing said target package. In the SEAL teams, we played a, you know, our key component in helping develop those target packages. But like, yeah, it was build the target package. Target package could be an individual, could be a village, could be a strategic target.

Starting point is 02:21:47 And then it's like, could be a campaign. And like, you want intelligence to be able to drive that operation. So this is also like a true, I mean, is it kept an obvious statement, but it's a next-gen form of warfare that also affects intel in the sense that jobs that used to have to be done with human intelligence, trying to do whatever methods they could to gather information about a target or a place to go can now effectively be done by drones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, sorry, that's one of our aircraft.

Starting point is 02:22:20 The other aircraft, you want to bring up. Yeah, this one's sick. I think it's the coolest thing in the world. Like, look, we launched this thing publicly October of last year. We've been working on it since like... The design's sick. Yeah, since probably November of 23, maybe September of 2020. No, sorry, 2024.

Starting point is 02:22:43 How big is this thing? So this is basically the size of an F-18. Whoa. Yeah, maybe it's like 70. percent of the size of an F-18. That wasn't that shit that was flying around Jersey. No, no, no. You would tell me that, right?

Starting point is 02:22:58 I would tell you that, yeah. I got a bat out there. We'll find out. But this thing is the first ever AI piloted vertical takeoff, launch and land fighter jet. It is designed primarily for, you know, air to ground strikes, air to surface strikes, but can do air-to-air missions, can do electronic attack missions. Wait, air-to-air missions? Shooting down other fighter jets. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:26 Now does it make its own decisions to do that? So there will be, so a human is in the loop, on the loop for every single moral decision about use of lethal force. In the loop, like they have final say? Yeah, and the same way to be like, the same way that I had to sometimes call back to higher headquarters around dropping a certain piece of ordinance, these things basically have to request permission around, you know, dropping up. We're not going to let that rabbit out the hat, aren't? No, to your point, right? That's the, that's the light switch. That's what you don't want to ever, you know, say, here you go. Right. And sorry, as like, as a seal who has had to make the moral decision about use of lethal force

Starting point is 02:24:08 on the battlefield, I fundamentally believe that that decision should only ever be made by human beings. Agreed. That is my policy, that's shield AI policy. That's U.S. policy, that's NATO policy. And so it's, you know, a lot of people like to talk about it, but it's a pretty black and white issue. Well, we talked about guard rails earlier. Is there a possibility that the AI you build says, fuck you and just start shooting? Nope.

Starting point is 02:24:31 No, no. Again, these are well-engineered systems. I don't want that played back five years from now. It's the, it's the light switch, right? Access. You can, you can separate, you know, the decision-making. You can separate the use of these weapon systems. Who designed that, by the way?

Starting point is 02:24:50 Great question. Yeah, I will take zero credit for coming up with the expat. Armour Harris on our team, and he is amazing. At some point, you should have a conversation with him. Armour Harris? Armour Harris. Yeah, actually, yeah, we got Gary Steele as our new CEO. Armour Harris.

Starting point is 02:25:08 What is this like fucking porn hub, Ray Eye? No, yeah. Gary Steele, Armor Harris. Yeah, shield, well, shield AI, you know? It's like you have an armor working at a show. Shield. So the armor led Starlink efforts reporting directly to Elon Musk from zero to 3,500 satellites. And then he led Star Shield efforts, which is the U.S. government-owned version of Starlink. And before that, he worked on Falcon 9 launch and land. And before that, he worked on the Merlin 1D engine at SpaceX. But, and actually, fun facts. He, he, he, he helped build the submarine for, in Thailand, you know, for the rescue.

Starting point is 02:25:55 For the rescue operation. Yeah. He's like, didn't get to get used. Yeah. It's, yeah, yeah. He's, he is an incredible, like, very fortunate, lucky, lucky to call my teammate, very happy that he's on our team, the Shield AI team. But he came up with expat, which was basically like, how can you solve the number

Starting point is 02:26:17 one problem in for the Indo-Pacific commander, which is like one, how do you deter China? One of the ways that you like the most important way to deter China is distributed volume of long range fires. And so basically that's where we said, all right, if we can offer something that provides distributed long range fires, what does that mean in English? You're, you want to be able to punch your adversary many from a very far distance. from many different places. And by them knowing that you can do that, they say, I'm not going to invade Taiwan today.

Starting point is 02:26:59 Okay. Can you give an example of this right now in the field, like how that might actually work like you might be doing it? So, well, so expat is, we're in development with this product, just to be clear. So it's not flying around yet. We go to first flight later this year. Okay. Let's say we do first flight,

Starting point is 02:27:17 the U.S. government signs a contract. We're not at war with China. What are you doing? Yeah. So basically they're distributing these things all over the Pacific. And because they are mobile, right? They're on these what we call the launch recovery vehicle. You can move them.

Starting point is 02:27:32 Why is that important? Like right now, our runways, they're static. Like, sorry, the vast majority of runways in the world are static. And then you have aircraft carriers, which are actually really easy to see and easy to find. And there's only 11 aircraft carriers that we have. And so our runway, like our air power is how we deter adversaries, actually. Like whenever we want to keep an adversary in check, what do we do? We park an aircraft carrier strike group off their coast.

Starting point is 02:27:59 And obviously, right, in with Iran, what did we do? We parked aircraft carrier strike groups in the Arabian Gulf. And so in practice, what does this look like? They want to put expats all over the Pacific theater. Because mobile, flying around, again, it's about creating dilemmas for your adversary where they don't actually know what you are doing, what you are capable of doing. They just know that they are in check the entire time. And so if you're always in check, then you can't actually go on the offensive because it's like, hey, look, you don't know how the United States is going to respond, right? You don't know where our assets are.

Starting point is 02:28:41 You don't know where the air power is coming from. You do not have a counter to this air power because it is always moving. That is, you know, the idea behind X-Bad. And like the other thing I tell people, because there's two problems that's solving. One is a cost problem. But the second thing is like our fifth, sixth-generation fighter jets are extremely expensive. Our ability to deliver long-range munitions is extremely expensive today. You know, our fifth-generation, six-generation fighter jets.

Starting point is 02:29:12 When you look at the all-in cost of capability, it's probably, probably about $200 million per aircraft. Amazing capability. Like, I go on record, like very thankful that those exist. It's just super expensive. On the runway side of things, runways are really easy targets. And so when we went into Venezuela, what did we do? The very first thing we did was blow up their six or seven fighter jets on their runways.

Starting point is 02:29:41 Iran, I'm sure we took out whatever air power that they had. India, Pakistan, when they were fighting their air war last year in May, I think, what does India do? They go after Pakistani air runways. Russia, Ukraine, like obviously a number of Ukrainian strikes have targeted Russian air power from on their runways, and Russia has targeted Ukrainian runways. When Biden allowed the use of attack of missiles into Russia, this was at the end of his presidency, the first thing that the Ukrainians went after were Russian runways. Iran Israel, what does Iran go after? They go after the F-35s that are sitting on the runways in Israel. And so, again, it's a massive problem.

Starting point is 02:30:27 And just to be clear, like the number one thing that you want to do in a conflict in warfare is you want to own the high ground. That's a principle of warfare. Always own the high ground. And the reason that you want to own the high ground, it's like you have more obvious. observation space and in like in the aspect of air warfare like you have more maneuver space. And if you can if you can maneuver easier, if you're able to see more, you're going to do better at the end of the day. And this is again, same thing as a seal. Why I could like I felt comfortable with I could have taken on 5,000 Taliban fighters if I had to with 100, you know, with 100 Afghans and 20 Navy SEALs because I had all this air power with me. And so having air dominance is a massive force multiplier. But if all your runways are destroyed and because they are easy targets for something like China,

Starting point is 02:31:23 where they're like, all right, we know where your runways are and we have missiles. China quite literally saw where all the runways were, saw how far our airplanes could go and built missiles that were able to hit those runways so that they could take out that air power because they know that the United States is. most conventional deterrence mechanism is our air power. You know, that's why they built them. And so they would, you know, that's what they were countering.

Starting point is 02:31:50 And so this is, expat is designed to basically, uh, keep American air dominance as the, you know, uh, maintain American air dominance. It's also,

Starting point is 02:32:01 it seems like it's also the insurance. Yeah. If, if your runways get taken out, we have a backup plan that could just launch off this cool looking thing. Yeah. I mean, it looks like a futuristic movie.

Starting point is 02:32:10 So, yeah. The last, the thing that I will point out, because people will see, there's a lot of different unmanned jet aircraft that are being built. They're called collaborative combat aircraft. Besides ours being the only vertical takeoff launch and land one, and you wouldn't know this unless you're like an aviation nut and like an engine enthusiast. We are the only aircraft that uses a military grade fighter jet engine. So we use the GEF110. This engine is used in the F-15 and the F-16.

Starting point is 02:32:43 And so we are able to generate eight times more thrust than any of the other collaborative combat aircraft that are being made. And that is important because it enables us to do vertical takeoff launch land, but it also enables us to carry more payload, more weapons. It enables us to fly higher. So our sensors actually see further than everything in air combat. Seeing everything is super important. And when you're flying at that at a higher altitude, your weapons actually go further because the air is less dense. And then we're able to run electronic warfare payloads

Starting point is 02:33:25 that would otherwise be reserved for something like the F-18 growler. And so at the end of the day, expat, it's more closely reserved. resembles an F-35 than it does, you know, some of these other unmanned fighter jets that are fighter jets that are being built. They are using business jet engines. So the expat, though, you said you want to go into commission, what was it, towards the end of this year? Yeah, so we're flying this thing at the end of this year, but we're going to production in 2029. Okay. Yeah. And how, you said that you compared it to size earlier. I think it's like 70%

Starting point is 02:34:00 the size of an F-18. That's insane. And again, it's standing on its. tail. The thing is menacing when you look at this thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's, let's do a hypothetical here as best you can. Yeah. This, let's say this thing's in commission a year from now. And China has not taken Taiwan. Yeah. But we have intelligence that says they're about to do it. How does this thing, what would you do to be like, all right, we got 24 hours. These things are going to help make sure that doesn't happen. Um, look, and again, I think, think that you would do same thing that we do with our aircraft carriers now. And we couldn't do it in China because, again, there's 4,000 people on an aircraft carrier. You put them at risk if China's

Starting point is 02:34:45 about to do something. You do a show of force where you just launch hundreds of these things. And again, in the same way where it was like, look, we had, we had, you know, a thousand V-bats on the Ukrainian border that weren't able to be jammed. All of a sudden, you're like, and you know that every single one of those V-bats is tied into a high-marz rocket. You're like, you're like, yeah, maybe not today, right? You do a show of force where you're putting up this air power and you're like, ah, maybe, maybe not today, right? You know?

Starting point is 02:35:16 It's like, I don't know. Say like, like, you know, and I don't know. You got a, you're at a bar. You got a friend who's really small. And then like someone like goes up to them and it's like trying to pick a fight with them. And then like you're really fucking big friends like, yo, we got a problem. And they're like, no. No, sir.

Starting point is 02:35:37 Yeah, it is no different than that, right? So, yeah. Okay. Peace through strength. Yeah. I like that aspect of it. And you're telling me, obviously, you guys, you have your engineers or pilots, I should say, like, on the ground who are controlling these things, whether it be Coast Guard that's launching it. You're going to have your guys there doing it.

Starting point is 02:35:55 So they're controlling the drone. This is the part of, I'm like a little hazy on. So they're commanding. They're commanding it. It's like, it's like, hey, the difference between. you know, being at a stick and like saying, no, go go and do this. Go execute this mission. So the AI comes in with, I'm just thinking about this very literally, because that's the best way for me to do it from the outside because I'm not an expert on this at all. But the AI comes in in the sense that I, the commander on the ground who puts this thing up in the air, instead of having to use the remote and look all myself and find everything and move it around, I put it up there and I basically say, okay, I'm watching this on camera now.

Starting point is 02:36:31 I need you, expat, to look for variables, A, B, and C within a regional... Right. And then it goes and executes the mission. Yeah, and look, we trained a quad-cocter to execute the mission of close quarters combat, going inside buildings, mapping out all the threats, reeling that information out. We trained our AI pilot to Dogfight F-16s, right? In one-weave-one and two V-2. And so we are training these drones on any mission that is in like the U.S. military handbooks. And there are a lot of different missions, right?

Starting point is 02:37:12 They can be escort missions. They could be decoy missions. They can be air-to-air missions. They can be air-to-ground missions. It is any mission that the military wants to accomplish. You can now train an AI, an AI pilot to accomplish said mission. And to be clear, I didn't talk about. HiveMine, which is the AI pilot, which is piloting the V-BAT.

Starting point is 02:37:32 It's piloting the X-Bat. HiveMind. Yep. And there's two aspects of HiveMind, really. There is one, there's the AI pilot that's actually enabling all this. And then there's, we ship a piece of enterprise software. You can think of it as Claude Code for AI pilot development. It makes it really easy and really fast to build it and then integrate it onto these unmanned systems.

Starting point is 02:37:56 That's what HiveMind is doing at the end of the day. Because that's, yeah, the customer, right, the warfighter, they want the AI pilot for swarming, for GPS jam, communications jammed operations, jammed operations. They want it for autonomous mission execution. So you're, you're currently working effectively, like as a defense contractor as this, as a shield. Yeah. going to places like the Pentagon and saying, here's what we can do. Yep. What do you want? Yeah. 100%.

Starting point is 02:38:21 How's that been? Because like you're seeing it from the inside, like the military industrial complex. And my relationship on this, by the way, is once again, like equilibrium. I love the idea of us having a military with the biggest, baddest toys to make sure that something fucking happened. Yeah. We're good. I just don't like when it gets used to incentivize like, you know what?

Starting point is 02:38:39 We're going to go to war for the economy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what's it like been dealing with that from your end? Um, it's been like really interesting. Like, look, when I started the company in 2015, um, actually like the, the fun story,

Starting point is 02:38:54 Andresen Horowitz is an investor of ours. Oh, wow. Big venture capital firm. Oh, yeah. Peter Levine is on our board of directors. He's been on the Midas list for, for many times over. Um, when I was at Harvard, he was, he's also a Stanford professor. He was given an lecture at Harvard.

Starting point is 02:39:08 He, uh, I didn't have the chance to go to it, but a bunch of my friends. I said, how was it? It was like, like, oh, Peter just. said he invests in dumb ideas and he just invested in the dumbest idea yet, which was shielded yeah. There's like a week after he had invested in the shield. Yeah. It's like, and I know Peter's very, you know, good-hearted, like good spirit. I was like, Peter, like, why do you call it that? Yeah. I was like, Peter, you know, I heard you just invest in dumb ideas and you just invest in the dumbest idea yet. He's like, yeah, I said that. He's like, it's this idea of contrary to investing.

Starting point is 02:39:38 He's like, look, it's a dumb idea to get into a car with a stranger. Like everybody knows when you're, you know, five years old, your mom's saying stay away, you know, never get into a car with a stranger. He's like, that's what Uber is. He's like, it's a dumb idea to stay at a stranger's house, right? He's like, that's Airbnb. He's like, your dumb idea is to build a technology company in defense. He's like, now he's like two things will happen.

Starting point is 02:40:01 Like one of two things will happen. Either one, it will truly end up being a dumb idea and will fail. He's like, or two, like, you guys will be successful and everybody will say, ah, defense technology is this really amazing thing. And people will think it was a really clever investment on my part, you know, years later. And so we have lived that journey where, God, like, you know, in 2015, 30 for 30 knows from investors. In 2016, one of 30 investors says yes. In 2017, two of 30 investors say yes.

Starting point is 02:40:35 And now we're at the point where it's like, ah, defense tech is its own asset class that venture capitalists like to invest behind. So I feel like, you know, it's like nice to see. Yeah. But that was, you know, not only like have lived this cycle on the government side, on the Pentagon side, they didn't want anything to do with like defense contractors or sorry, startups in 2015 and 2016. And then like, right, you had Google saying like, we're not going to support the military, right?

Starting point is 02:41:06 And you had this whole exodus of defense, you know, of tech companies saying, no, never touch the military. I'd reach out to candidates. I'd be like, hey, are you interested in like every, you know, these are like software engineers at the Googles of the world, at the Facebook's of the world. And they like some, you know, some you get like a nice reply. I'd say like some you get like a snarky like, oh, I would never work on, you know, the defense mission.

Starting point is 02:41:29 Like you're like, you know, you're like almost call me like a baby killer, right? Type thing. You're like, all right, you just wrong. Sorry. You just said, no, thank you. But that has shifted. And the, and the Pentagon has shifted too, because I think they, realize like these types of capabilities, AI and autonomy, the best software engineers in the world,

Starting point is 02:41:50 you know, when you graduate from Stanford, from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon University, you weren't saying, hey, I want to go work at Lockheed Martin. You're saying, hey, I'm going to go work at Google. I'm going to go work at Amazon. I'm going to go work at Tesla. I'm going to go work at a Silicon Valley venture-back company. And so what Shield AI has been able to do is bring on a lot of these software engineers. And they're needed because the products and the services that the military wants and needs are now software-defined more than hardware-defined. Yeah. And this is where this is another place. It gets scary, though, with the AI. I'm sure you followed this anthropic story a little bit. So, and again, what you're doing is more, and I mean this like as a compliment,

Starting point is 02:42:33 What you're doing is a more one-dimensional use of AI. And we've talked about guard rails a lot today. And I believe you. And that sounds good because that's always one I'm worried about. Obviously, Anthropic had this huge contract with the Pentagon to do all kinds of shit using their AI products to support warfare. And the Pentagon just kick them out as they were about to use them an hour later to fucking fire rockets on Iran. on and my issue was, and again, I don't know what I don't know here behind the scenes, but when Dario, the CEO of Anthropic came out, what he was explaining is that the Pentagon wanted in the

Starting point is 02:43:16 interest of national security basically full boat for domestic surveillance and all these different things and that harkened to some 1984 type stuff and it's AI being used. And if that is, in fact, what the narrative is here, I have to, I need to see all sides of the story. But then I would agree with Anthropics CEO that that's a hard line stopping point because you don't know what happens when that gets out of the bag. Because what's the old Ben Franklin quote? It's like those who want to trade security for liberty and freedom deserve neither or something like that. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. There was a lot.

Starting point is 02:43:53 I probably fucked that up, but people get the point. There was a lot of that thought going through my head. like, wait a minute, wait a minute. You know, why, I understand the Pentagon wants to utilize AI and have full boat to be able to use it in war. Okay. But when you're starting to then use that for other cases that you then put under that big veil of national security, I mean, look, I was a little kid, but I know the history of the Patriot Act and things like this. You give things up, you lose them forever. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:44:21 Look, and I'm not as I'm not read into every single detail in the same way that you said like, you know, look, I haven't seen. sides of the story in depth and you have one company providing a narrative and it's like like sometimes the Pentagon will respond to narrative sometimes they don't and sometimes they just don't want to deal with it and it's really hard to understand what the facts are at the end of the day I again and I'm biased having served in the armed forces but when you look at the technology and the power that the United States wields I think way above average but like the U.S. military has been a good steward of the biggest, baddest technology that has ever existed, right? Look at, it's like nuclear weapons. It's like, okay, 1945. And it's like, all right,

Starting point is 02:45:11 yep, we at any, like, who did we entrust with those weapon systems? It's like our military, nuclear power plants on submarines, on aircraft carriers, our aircraft carriers, our air power. It is incredible, incredibly powerful technology. I have been with the generals. I've been in these, rooms, I have never seen an organization more responsible with power than the U.S. military, right? We could find terrorists. And I promise, like, this is Afghanistan. I know this has continued. The number of times that we actually say, like, we would call off strikes because we were

Starting point is 02:45:46 concerned about collateral damage. And that could have been destruction of a building, but also like, right, civilian life. it is, we called off strikes probably 10 times more than we actually conducted strikes. Like you had to have so many checks and balances. And then this, look, again, if you've never been inside of one of these operations centers, you wouldn't know, right? The military is not saying like, hey, we have to actually go through. We have geospatial intelligence analysts who are measuring the, you know, impact of a weapon system.

Starting point is 02:46:17 Literally, like, as the targets, you know, they're looking at this target package and seeing. And then they're like, oh, wait, we don't know. who's inside that building. We don't know there could be civilians in that building. All right, call off the strike. Like, you know, unless you had near certainty of zero collateral damage, zero loss of civilian life, like you weren't calling in these strikes. Now, again, and I highlight this just to say, they're incredibly responsible with power. Yes. Have there been like, you know, mistakes in the history of the U.S. military, absolutely, but their track record is, this is like pretty fucking good as they wield this power and this responsibility that they've been given. So, um, and again, and I use that as an example to say, it's like, look, I don't know every detail of what's happening with every single thing, uh, every company working with the military. I think there are narratives that happen in the media that it's hard to say like, like, sure, what's accurate. I've seen these narratives. It's just like, you know, so, yeah. Yeah, you got to, you got a, you got to, you got to, you got a lot. let things play out as well. Yeah. I do agree with that. What is, you know,

Starting point is 02:47:23 warfare obviously develops so much over time. I mean, you can go back down since the beginning of human existence. You just see all the different ways, the errors it's gone through. And I would argue it's moving at the fastest rate of exponential development to a new type of style, maybe more than ever right now. You know, what is, if we're looking out crystal ball 10 years from now, what does the next generation of like a kinetic war look like? Yeah. Look, so you're right. Warfare evolves.

Starting point is 02:47:54 It changes. But again, I'm just a first principles guy, being an engineer. And there are principles of warfare that have remained the same for all of human, for all of history, right? And there's just been. And so if you look at those principles, I think it's fair to make predictions about, like, what warfare is going to look like 10 years from now. like some fundamental principles of warfare, the principle of mass, right?

Starting point is 02:48:18 The more things you have, like for thousands of years, if you had more troops, you were going to defeat your enemy on the battlefield. Then the principle of maneuver. Like, if you were able to effectively maneuver that mass, then you are going to be able to defeat your adversary on the battlefield. A principle of intelligence, right? If you had more intelligence, if you knew what the enemy was going to do, then you could better maneuver your mass, and you were likely to win on the battlefield.

Starting point is 02:48:47 And so, and then speed, right? Speed became something. Again, that was part of maneuver. It's like, okay, if you maneuver faster, not just like, yeah, if you could move maneuver faster, you would be able to win on the battlefield. And so I think for me, what you're going to see 10 years from now is unprecedented mass, maneuver, speed, and intelligence all happening at the same time. And so it's like, there's no, I think you will start to see every, every military in the world will start to have a metric where they're saying, hey, we're going to build a million drone army, a 10 million drone army, right?

Starting point is 02:49:23 And that drone army is going to be powered by AI autonomy so that you can maneuver it on the battlefield quicker so that you can collect more intelligence on the battlefield or in preparation of the battlefield. It's going to be done at unprecedented speed and scale. So the robots fight the wars while the men stay back on the ships and in the command centers just watching it happen? Maybe at some point. Obviously people are still like 10 years from now, the answer is no. But you're going to see like it evolve, right? Even like when we look at the war in Afghanistan in Iraq, and I'm not saying this is right. But if you look at World War II, 90% of our forces were operational frontline forces, right?

Starting point is 02:50:15 It was like, you know, 10% support in logistics. And like that has flipped in a war in Afghanistan and Iraq flipped on its head, where it was 10% were people like myself going out, leaving the operating base and conducting operations. And 90% was in support of, you know, the. these forces. And again, I'm not saying, like, I actually think, like, we probably should have been at, like, 30% of people. I'm a big proponent of getting people off bases and actually occupying terrain, which is another principle of warfare. But so it's like, yeah, you'll trend down to less, less human, human, quote-unquote fighting forces. And you'll find different methods of employment, but there's still going to be, you know, our special operations guys, they'll still have,

Starting point is 02:51:06 They'll be actively employed. Skill sets can change. I mean, even like our guys, we're learning to fly drones. Yeah, I'm thinking more from like less to special forces. There's always, at least for the foreseeable future, there's going to be a need for like the tip of the spear to go do some crazy missions for sure. Thinking Navy SEALs, Delta, stuff like that. But when you're thinking like conventional military, like the army, the infantry, you know,

Starting point is 02:51:33 the sailors, it's like. how much are those jobs really going to change what they do in a kinetic situation? And certainly could, it seems like it's changing in real time in a lot of ways. But right now, obviously, they're still very, very much like, yeah, we're going to get boots on the ground when there's a war situation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, we'll see how the force structure changes. But I think it's fair to say, like, yeah, if you had 10 million drones, you're the number of the way that you deploy,

Starting point is 02:52:06 personnel and employee personnel is going to be very different than it is today. Right. So, yeah. Now, how would you, how would you handle the situation like in Mexico right now where we have terror groups, designated terror organizations with the cartels, but it's a neighboring country, our biggest trade partner, and to this point, we haven't taken any action there. Is there a way like you envision utilizing expats and V-bats to maybe curtail that? Just my dream deployment was, hey, deploy out of San Diego and do helicopter self-force operations into Tijuana and come back and sleep. It's a fucking two-minute flight.

Starting point is 02:52:45 Yeah, in San Diego. Eat a California burrito, you know. Look, I, our national security strategy, if you read it, and it was published a couple months ago, it is a refocus on our hemisphere. And an acknowledgement that, like, for one that we can't be everywhere in the world, And we can't do everything in the world. And like what actually is going to impact our national security a lot is what happens in the Americas, right?

Starting point is 02:53:18 North America, South America. I, I agree. Like, I think the cartels are a massive problem. There are a massive problem for stability. They're a massive problem for the health of American citizens. I, like, I'm all about figuring out how to deal with that problem. And so again, like I said, it would have been a dream deployment for me to go after the cartels. And look, I think you said like, hey, we're not, we are doing some stuff.

Starting point is 02:53:51 And I say we, I'm saying the United States of America is we're working with the Mexican government on some of this stuff. And so, you know, I can't speak to like what detail and what level of support they have. But I think, you know, you find, like we find ourselves, again, this administration. has said, no, we're focusing on our hemisphere in a big way. And I take the president at his word when he says, like, yeah, I'm sick and tired of drugs coming into our country and killing Americans. So I, like, what I would worry about as my kids grow older is, you know, drug use, you know, heaven forbid, they try something that laced with fentanyl or whatever it is. It's like, yeah. It's very, very scary. Yeah, and this isn't the United States government fault, actually,

Starting point is 02:54:37 but I always worry about that with working with the Mexican government because it is so infiltrated at every level. Yeah. Yeah. That's 100%. That's a challenge. I recently have my friend Katarina Schultz here who's a journalist down in Mexico covering the cartels and she was at El Mancho's compound like a day after he got whacked.

Starting point is 02:54:55 Oh, wow. And she took video and everything and it was staged. Yeah. Like she was in one of the houses where it happened. It's not she thinks he's dead. Yeah. And I believe that as well. But something's very off there.

Starting point is 02:55:09 Yeah. Because she went through and she went through it all on that podcast. But yeah. She went through the scene and there's no bullet holes in the houses. There's no bullet holes in the cars. There's random bullet casings like on the ground. And you realize like, you know, this was supposed to be like a joint U.S. working with their intelligence to get to the Mexican government and take care of something. And it's like, what else happened on the other end of that?

Starting point is 02:55:35 that we're missing. Yeah. So that's, and again, that's not the U.S. government's problem or fault. It's just like, it's a problem for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And look, again, I, I just think it's, you want to talk about a righteous use of our military? And that's, that's, again, when I was like, I was like, you know, why were we in Iraq or Afghanistan in, in 2013, 14, you know, all the way, it's like when we got some serious problems, just south of our border. And so, yeah, I think absolutely. Could this help with Border Patrol, by the way? The expat? I mean, like, the answer is like, yes, it can. But as we think about like border security and the threats that we face immediately south of the border, VBAT's like a better asset. Okay. It's like, you know, you can, it's like taking

Starting point is 02:56:21 a bazooka to a knife fight if you wanted to just like, yeah, yeah, but yeah, but I love to actually do. But I'm saying like one of your products at least could be have a very good use case on patrol. Yeah, again, we, I mean, we're setting up land-based sites with the U.S. Coast Guard to monitor the border. So, yeah, we're actively involved. Yeah, with the V-BAT. So awesome. Ex-bat, you know. I like that.

Starting point is 02:56:46 Yeah. I like that. Now, you've been doing, you've had the company for 11 years? 11 years now. It's amazing. Awful, painful. I think, suffering. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:56:55 Yeah. You know, yeah. You're working your balls off. Yeah. I see that. You know, I just love that mentality you talked about earlier when you were saying you first got denied from the Navy SEALs your first time around and you just went in and you're like I'm just no no I'm not going to be top 26 I'm not going to get in yeah however I got to get in and

Starting point is 02:57:14 qualify I'm going to be the fucking greatest yep everything I do now you've been running you obviously ended up having a successful career as a Navy SEAL you get out you go to Harvard business school top of the class that like that kind of deal like you're going to the top of education right there you start your own company you've had it for 11 years you have ups and downs I mean that's how it works in any business. Yeah. Obviously, your mentality is to dominate and be a winner. That kind of Jordan mentality, which I love.

Starting point is 02:57:40 Yeah. How do you deal? How have you dealt with those moments when I'm sure everything was going wrong or the things you needed to happen weren't and he had to find a way to survive? Yeah. It's a fantastic question. Look, you, when you start a company, and you know this again, having done your own thing, it's, there's pain, they're suffering, there are setbacks, numerous setbacks, right?

Starting point is 02:58:03 And like, look, for us, it's like product doesn't work as design. We mess up on something. There's a bag engagement with a customer. Whatever it is, right? Contract doesn't get signed. Contract, you know, program gets canceled. There are so many things that can go wrong in a business, which is why, you know, 99% of businesses fail. What I, like, a couple things.

Starting point is 02:58:29 I tell myself, like, whenever something bad happens, you get a day to feel. Same thing. You get a day to feel sorry for yourself. And again, there have been so many days that they're like, I'm like, all right, I go home, tell my wife, I'm like, hey, I'm going to go up to my computer. I still play Starcraft sometimes. I'm like, I'm going to pour myself a scotch and play some Starcraft. I was like, I'm sorry. I can't be a useful parent right now. Take care of use. But, like, yeah, I'm just like, you know, I'm feeling sorry for myself. And my wife's like, quit feeling sorry for yourself because we joke around.

Starting point is 02:59:07 And she's like, well, you better be fine tomorrow. And so then, but the next day, it's like, yeah, mentality is, okay, like, what are we, what are the problems? How are we going to fix this? It is, it's that, that's what it's about. It's like, okay, you take it one step at a time. And again, I think this mentality came from the SEAL teams with me. The other thing that's super important is to have like great teammates. Yes.

Starting point is 02:59:31 because great teammates, great values, great mission. Because at the end of the day, and I tell every new hire this at ShieldEI, do mission values onboarding. I'm like, look, one, like we're trying to do things that have never been done before. You think it's going to be easy? It's not going to be fucking easy. And what I mean by it's not going to be easy is like, we are going to get punched in the stomach. You're going to get brought to your knees and you're going to say, why the fuck am I here doing this? and you're going to fall back on, you know, three things.

Starting point is 03:00:03 I was like, one, you're going to fall back on the mission. You're like, I'm here for the mission, right? Protect service. It's a noble mission. Protect service member, civilians, deter war. Two, you're going to fall back on your values. You're like, what kind of person am I? Am I the one that gives up?

Starting point is 03:00:18 Am I the one that, like, no, I pursue excellence. I do what honor dictates. You know, for us live as a servant leader. I'm going to keep moving forward. And then three, you're going to look to the left of you and the right of you and there's going to be incredible teammates who are there in the shit with you and they're going to help pick you up. And so that is that I'm blessed to have all three of those things at Shield AI and have had to lean on every single one of them, our mission, our values,

Starting point is 03:00:47 my teammates, whenever crap happens. So, and again, it's kind of, it's really powerful. I go back to, there's just some moments. Like, I go back to that hell week when I was like, I was feeling sorry for myself, right? I said, hey, Joe, is this the worst that's ever going to be? And he's like, he's like, hey, brother, you got this. Keep moving forward. Right. And like, I'm not one for like motivational speeches, but the power of like a handful of words, when you are at your Dow moments, I cannot like express like the impact that they can have, like on an individual. Like my brother, you know, who's, you know, our CEO and co-founder for a long, long time. He's like, he's like, we're going to be fine. We're going to keep moving forward.

Starting point is 03:01:30 I've had to tell it to him, right? It's incredible, like, it's just like those words of assurance, like, matter a ton in this. And also when you take, especially I could see it in you, like, as a competitor and someone who wants to be the greatest. Yeah. You know, when you take your slights or people overlook you or they're underestimated and what you can do, turning that around to be like, bitch, I'm going to show you. Yeah. Yeah. That has the same type of effect for sure.

Starting point is 03:01:56 And I think anyone who runs a really important business for a long time and find success, especially like on the innovation side, whatever that may be, they have to have that in them. Truth is I'm not competitive. No, I'm just kidding. I'm fucking with you. I was going to say, you just fuck with the whole three hours. Oh, I'm just kidding. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:14 Yeah. Yeah. Like to win. Yeah. I'm not afraid of losing. Losing sucks. But like, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:23 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To the point, like, you know, I do think I hate. losing more than like I enjoy winning. 100% yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:29 I'm with you. Yeah. What's the next steps with you guys? Obviously you're getting this launch at the end of the year. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Look. A couple things.

Starting point is 03:02:37 One, we just want to accomplish our mission at more scale. Like, we're 1,300 people now. Wow. 1300. Yeah, there's valuations floating around. I can't confirm them, but like around $12 billion. Throw me a little stock. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:52 The, uh, throw beef some too. Just because we're in the middle of stuff. stuff. The like the revenue it's growing, that stuff doesn't fire me up. Like the stuff that fires me up is like when we get reports about how our stuff has made an impact for the customer. Like that's what I live for. That still is like what makes the hair stand up on my arms. So that's the stuff like when I say accomplish the mission at greater scale. That's what I mean. Like I just want more and more and more. The customer success stories are like addicting when you hear them. And then like, Cool stuff that we're doing. We're integrating the AI pilot on so many different platforms now. We have done unmanned surface vessels made by Huntington Ingalls industry, which is the largest shipbuilder in America. Our AI pilot flew Andrels Fury drone, which is an unmanned, you know, smaller unmanned fighter jet two weeks ago. And we're part of this program where they bifurcated the hardware and the software side of things.

Starting point is 03:03:50 And we're doing the AI pilot for it, right? And you got Androl General Atomics building the hardware side of things for it. we're doing AI pilots for, and call them AI astronauts for satellites. And so unmanned surface underwater vehicles. And so we're no company in the world is faster or better at developing AI pilots and integrating them onto platforms than Shield AI. And so, yeah, that's, you know, that's the exciting stuff outside of like getting to do really cool shit, like interdict. drugs help, you know, help find targets in these, these conflict zones, build the expat.

Starting point is 03:04:31 Yeah, it's, I mean, like, it's, again, it's, it's a, I can't think of, like, sexier things to work on it. And sometimes, like, I have to tell myself that when, like, again, you're feeling sorry for your stuff. You're like, yeah, I get to work on, like, AI autonomy, like, at the intersection of national security, global stability, well, while building an unmanned fighter jet. Like, that's, you know, that's fine. Yeah, I just think it's like, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's rewarding so do you i mean you're moving all the time and you got big goals and i i understand what that's like but do you ever have you ever had like a few moments where you're like damn we got a valuation at 12 billion that's the answer's actually like no i and this is uh you know

Starting point is 03:05:14 i tell you like the competitor environment um like i love this clip from cobi bryant like i think i was like you know you've seen it i'm sure it's like came you just won game four, you're up three one, like, yeah, can't, can't crack a smile, Kobe? And it's like, what's there to be happy about? Job finished? Job's not finished. That's my mentality to the point, like I joke,

Starting point is 03:05:39 like, you know, maybe there's a world, if we go public, I'm gonna like not smile. You know, New York Stock Exchange, be like, job finished, jobs not finished. So that, you know, my wife says I need to celebrate more, but true in like, look, I think I'm proud of what we have built, but yeah, is the job finished? No. And sorry, the last thing, and I forgot, like, what I, I think there's a unique opportunity to deter China. And so you talk about a focus in this year, like in the next

Starting point is 03:06:09 12 months. We're working very closely with Taiwan. I was there six times last year. I was there in January on Sunday. I'm going to Taiwan. I've met with the vice president three times, met with a lot of senior leaders met with the president once that to me is a noble mission because it's a very real and present threat and i you know you want to talk about like yeah what i want to what i want to do i want to accomplish our mission at scale what is that it's like look we could be a part and again it's not just shield a i'm not so arrogant to say like ah shield a i deterred the war on china but i would love to help be a part of the solution um that deters china uh for from any type of invasion.

Starting point is 03:06:55 That's pretty cool, man. And that's also very personal with your family history too. Yeah, yeah, that's cool. This amazing stuff, man. I'm rooting for you. Don't let that AI out of the fucking Pandora's box. Yeah, yeah, we're watching out. Yeah, yeah, I got it.

Starting point is 03:07:07 Also, by the way, I don't know if, like, again, I got you a hat. Thank you so much. That's very cool. I think I've seen you wear a hat a couple times. A few times. Yeah, I used to wear it all time. Yeah, yeah, expat hat. Thank you very much, man.

Starting point is 03:07:18 Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. That's awesome. Get this up on the camera here. So we'll put the link to the company down below. And any other links you want us to put in there, we'll do that as well. But thank you so much for going through all this today.

Starting point is 03:07:28 I appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Julian. Great. Great. You know, I'm rooting for you too. Thank you. It's really cool what you've built.

Starting point is 03:07:35 Like, you're a pro. I appreciate that. It's awesome, man. Yeah. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it to like it back to me. Peace.

Starting point is 03:07:42 That was an awesome podcast. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you.

Julian Dorey Podcast - #409 - “KILL Chain!” - Navy SEAL Drone Expert on $4.5 Quadrillion Op, Anthropic & Pentagon | Brandon Tseng

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